← catalogue

The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories

by Arnold Bennett · English · Gutenberg #12995 · 562,696 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories

Author: Arnold Bennett


        
Release date: July 22, 2004 [eBook #12995]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12995

Credits: E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Wilelmina Malliere, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS AND OTHER STORIES ***

THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS AND OTHER STORIES

by

ARNOLD BENNETT

1912






BY THE SAME AUTHOR


NOVELS

A MAN FROM THE NORTH
ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
LEONORA
A GREAT MAN
SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
WHOM GOD HATH JOINED
BURIED ALIVE
THE OLD WIVES' TALE
THE GLIMPSE
HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND
CLAYHANGER
HILDA LESSWAYS
THE CARD

FANTASIAS

THE GRAND BABYLON HOTEL
THE GATES OF WRATH
TERESA OF WATLING STREET
THE LOOT OF CITIES
HUGO
THE GHOST
THE CITY OF PLEASURE

SHORT STORIES

TALES OF THE FIVE TOWNS
THE GRIM SMILE OF THE FIVE TOWNS

BELLES-LETTRES

JOURNALISM FOR WOMEN
FAME AND FICTION
HOW TO BECOME AN AUTHOR
THE TRUTH ABOUT AN AUTHOR
THE REASONABLE LIFE
HOW TO LIVE ON TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY
THE HUMAN MACHINE
LITERARY TASTE
THE FEAST OF ST FRIEND

DRAMA

POLITE FARCES
CUPID AND COMMON SENSE
WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS
THE HONEYMOON

(In Collaboration with EDEN PHILLPOTTS)

THE SINEWS OF WAR: A ROMANCE
THE STATUE: A ROMANCE





CONTENTS


TRAGIC

THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS
MIMI
THE SUPREME ILLUSION
THE LETTER AND THE LIE
THE GLIMPSE

FROLIC

JOCK-AT-A-VENTURE
THE HEROISM OF THOMAS CHADWICK
UNDER THE CLOCK
THREE EPISODES IN THE LIFE OF MR COWLISHAW, DENTIST
CATCHING THE TRAIN
THE WIDOW OF THE BALCONY
THE CAT AND CUPID
THE FORTUNE-TELLER
THE LONG-LOST UNCLE
THE TIGHT HAND
WHY THE CLOCK STOPPED
HOT POTATOES
HALF-A-SOVEREIGN
THE BLUE SUIT
THE TIGER AND THE BABY
THE REVOLVER
AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE




THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS




I


Mrs Brindeley looked across the lunch-table at her husband with
glinting, eager eyes, which showed that there was something unusual in
the brain behind them.

"Bob," she said, factitiously calm. "You don't know what I've just
remembered!"

"Well?" said he.

"It's only grandma's birthday to-day!"

My friend Robert Brindley, the architect, struck the table with a
violent fist, making his little boys blink, and then he said quietly:

"_The_ deuce!"

I gathered that grandmamma's birthday had been forgotten and that it was
not a festival that could be neglected with impunity. Both Mr and Mrs
Brindley had evidently a humorous appreciation of crises, contretemps,
and those collisions of circumstances which are usually called
"junctures" for short. I could have imagined either of them saying to
the other: "Here's a funny thing! The house is on fire!" And then
yielding to laughter as they ran for buckets. Mrs Brindley, in
particular, laughed now; she gazed at the table-cloth and laughed almost
silently to herself; though it appeared that their joint forgetfulness
might result in temporary estrangement from a venerable ancestor who was
also, birthdays being duly observed, a continual fount of rich presents
in specie.

Robert Brindley drew a time-table from his breast-pocket with the rapid
gesture of habit. All men of business in the Five Towns seem to carry
that time-table in their breast-pockets. Then he examined his watch
carefully.

"You'll have time to dress up your progeny and catch the 2.5. It makes
the connection at Knype for Axe."

The two little boys, aged perhaps four and six, who had been ladling the
messy contents of specially deep plates on to their bibs, dropped their
spoons and began to babble about grea'-granny, and one of them insisted
several times that he must wear his new gaiters.

"Yes," said Mrs Brindley to her husband, after reflection. "And a fine
old crowd there'll be in the train--with this football match!"

"Can't be helped!... Now, you kids, hook it upstairs to nurse."

"And what about you?" asked Mrs Brindley.

"You must tell the old lady I'm kept by business."

"I told her that last year, and you know what happened."

"Well," said Brindley. "Here Loring's just come. You don't expect me to
leave him, do you? Or have you had the beautiful idea of taking him over
to Axe to pass a pleasant Saturday afternoon with your esteemed
grandmother?"

"No," said Mrs Brindley. "Hardly that!"

"Well, then?"

The boys, having first revolved on their axes, slid down from their high
chairs as though from horses.

"Look here," I said. "You mustn't mind me. I shall be all right."

"Ha-ha!" shouted Brindley. "I seem to see you turned loose alone in this
amusing town on a winter afternoon. I seem to see you!"

"I could stop in and read," I said, eyeing the multitudinous books on
every wall of the dining-room. The house was dadoed throughout with
books.

"Rot!" said Brindley.

This was only my third visit to his home and to the Five Towns, but he
and I had already become curiously intimate. My first two visits had
been occasioned by official pilgrimages as a British Museum expert in
ceramics. The third was for a purely friendly week-end, and had no
pretext. The fact is, I was drawn to the astonishing district and its
astonishing inhabitants. The Five Towns, to me, was like the East to
those who have smelt the East: it "called."

"I'll tell you what we _could_ do," said Mrs Brindley. "We could put him
on to Dr Stirling."

"So we could!" Brindley agreed. "Wife, this is one of your bright,
intelligent days. We'll put you on to the doctor, Loring. I'll impress
on him that he must keep you constantly amused till I get back, which I
fear it won't be early. This is what we call manners, you know--to
invite a fellow-creature to travel a hundred and fifty miles to spend
two days here, and then to turn him out before he's been in the house an
hour. It's _us_, that is! But the truth of the matter is, the birthday
business might be a bit serious. It might easily cost me fifty quid and
no end of diplomacy. If you were a married man you'd know that the ten
plagues of Egypt are simply nothing in comparison with your wife's
relations. And she's over eighty, the old lady."

"_I_'ll give you ten plagues of Egypt!" Mrs Brindley menaced her spouse,
as she wafted the boys from the room. "Mr Loring, do take some more of
that cheese if you fancy it." She vanished.

Within ten minutes Brindley was conducting me to the doctor's, whose
house was on the way to the station. In its spacious porch he explained
the circumstances in six words, depositing me like a parcel. The doctor,
who had once by mysterious medicaments saved my frail organism from the
consequences of one of Brindley's Falstaffian "nights," hospitably
protested his readiness to sacrifice patients to my pleasure.

"It'll be a chance for MacIlroy," said he.

"Who's MacIlroy?" I asked.

"MacIlroy is another Scotchman," growled Brindley. "Extraordinary how
they stick together! When he wanted an assistant, do you suppose he
looked about for some one in the district, some one who understood us
and loved us and could take a hand at bridge? Not he! Off he goes to
Cupar, or somewhere, and comes back with another stage Scotchman, named
MacIlroy. Now listen here, Doc! A charge to keep you have, and mind you
keep it, or I'll never pay your confounded bill. We'll knock on the
window to-night as we come back. In the meantime you can show Loring
your etchings, and pray for me." And to me: "Here's a latchkey." With no
further ceremony he hurried away to join his wife and children at
Bleakridge Station. In such singular manner was I transferred forcibly
from host to host.




II


The doctor and I resembled each other in this: that there was no
offensive affability about either of us. Though abounding in
good-nature, we could not become intimate by a sudden act of volition.
Our conversation was difficult, unnatural, and by gusts falsely
familiar. He displayed to me his bachelor house, his etchings, a few
specimens of modern _rouge flambé_ ware made at Knype, his whisky, his
celebrated prize-winning fox-terrier Titus, the largest collection of
books in the Five Towns, and photographs of Marischal College, Aberdeen.
Then we fell flat, socially prone. Sitting in his study, with Titus
between us on the hearthrug, we knew no more what to say or do. I
regretted that Brindley's wife's grandmother should have been born on a
fifteenth of February. Brindley was a vivacious talker, he could be
trusted to talk. I, too, am a good talker--with another good talker.
With a bad talker I am just a little worse than he is. The doctor said
abruptly after a nerve-trying silence that he had forgotten a most
important call at Hanbridge, and would I care to go with him in the car?
I was and still am convinced that he was simply inventing. He wanted to
break the sinister spell by getting out of the house, and he had not the
face to suggest a sortie into the streets of the Five Towns as a
promenade of pleasure.

So we went forth, splashing warily through the rich mud and the dank
mist of Trafalgar Road, past all those strange little Indian-red houses,
and ragged empty spaces, and poster-hoardings, and rounded kilns, and
high, smoking chimneys, up hill, down hill, and up hill again,
encountering and overtaking many electric trams that dipped and rose
like ships at sea, into Crown Square, the centre of Hanbridge, the
metropolis of the Five Towns. And while the doctor paid his mysterious
call I stared around me at the large shops and the banks and the gilded
hotels. Down the radiating street-vistas I could make out the façades of
halls, theatres, chapels. Trams rumbled continually in and out of the
square. They seemed to enter casually, to hesitate a few moments as if
at a loss, and then to decide with a nonchalant clang of bells that they
might as well go off somewhere else in search of something more
interesting. They were rather like human beings who are condemned to
live for ever in a place of which they are sick beyond the
expressiveness of words.

And indeed the influence of Crown Square, with its large effects of
terra cotta, plate glass, and gold letters, all under a heavy skyscape
of drab smoke, was depressing. A few very seedy men (sharply contrasting
with the fine delicacy of costly things behind plate-glass) stood
doggedly here and there in the mud, immobilized by the gloomy
enchantment of the Square. Two of them turned to look at Stirling's
motor-car and me. They gazed fixedly for a long time, and then one said,
only his lips moving:

"Has Tommy stood thee that there quart o' beer as he promised thee?"

No reply, no response of any sort, for a further long period! Then the
other said, with grim resignation:

"Ay!"

The conversation ceased, having made a little oasis in the dismal desert
of their silent scrutiny of the car. Except for an occasional stamp of
the foot they never moved. They just doggedly and indifferently stood,
blown upon by all the nipping draughts of the square, and as it might be
sinking deeper and deeper into its dejection. As for me, instead of
desolating, the harsh disconsolateness of the scene seemed to uplift me;
I savoured it with joy, as one savours the melancholy of a tragic work
of art.

"We might go down to the _Signal_ offices and worry Buchanan a bit,"
said the doctor, cheerfully, when he came back to the car. This was the
second of his inspirations.

Buchanan, of whom I had heard, was another Scotchman and the editor of
the sole daily organ of the Five Towns, an evening newspaper cried all
day in the streets and read by the entire population. Its green sheet
appeared to be a permanent waving feature of the main thoroughfares. The
offices lay round a corner close by, and as we drew up in front of them
a crowd of tattered urchins interrupted their diversions in the sodden
road to celebrate our glorious arrival by unanimously yelling at the top
of their strident and hoarse voices:

"Hooray! Hoo--bl----dy--ray!"

Abashed, I followed my doctor into the shelter of the building, a new
edifice, capacious and considerable, but horribly faced with terra
cotta, and quite unimposing, lacking in the spectacular effect; like
nearly everything in the Five Towns, carelessly and scornfully ugly! The
mean, swinging double-doors returned to the assault when you pushed
them, and hit you viciously. In a dark, countered room marked
"Enquiries" there was nobody.

"Hi, there!" called the doctor.

A head appeared at a door.

"Mr Buchanan upstairs?"

"Yes," snapped the head, and disappeared.

Up a dark staircase we went, and at the summit were half flung back
again by another self-acting door.

In the room to which we next came an old man and a youngish one were
bent over a large, littered table, scribbling on and arranging pieces of
grey tissue paper and telegrams. Behind the old man stood a boy. Neither
of them looked up.

"Mr Buchanan in his--" the doctor began to question. "Oh! There you
are!"

The editor was standing in hat and muffler at the window, gazing out.
His age was about that of the doctor--forty or so; and like the doctor
he was rather stout and clean-shaven. Their Scotch accents mingled in
greeting, the doctor's being the more marked. Buchanan shook my hand
with a certain courtliness, indicating that he was well accustomed to
receive strangers. As an expert in small talk, however, he shone no
brighter than his visitors, and the three of us stood there by the
window awkwardly in the heaped disorder of the room, while the other two
men scratched and fidgeted with bits of paper at the soiled table.

Suddenly and savagely the old man turned on the boy:

"What the hades are you waiting there for?"

"I thought there was something else, sir."

"Sling your hook."

Buchanan winked at Stirling and me as the boy slouched off and the old
man blandly resumed his writing.

"Perhaps you'd like to look over the place?" Buchanan suggested politely
to me. "I'll come with you. It's all I'm fit for to-day.... 'Flu!" He
glanced at Stirling, and yawned.

"Ye ought to be in bed," said Stirling.

"Yes. I know. I've known it for twelve years. I shall go to bed as soon
as I get a bit of time to myself. Well, will you come? The half-time
results are beginning to come in."

A telephone-bell rang impatiently.

"You might just see what that is, boss," said the old man without
looking up.

Buchanan went to the telephone and replied into it: "Yes? What? Oh!
Myatt? Yes, he's playing.... Of course I'm sure! Good-bye." He turned to
the old man: "It's another of 'em wanting to know if Myatt is playing.
Birmingham, this time."

"Ah!" exclaimed the old man, still writing.

"It's because of the betting," Buchanan glanced at me. "The odds are on
Knype now--three to two."

"If Myatt is playing Knype have got me to thank for it," said the
doctor, surprisingly.

"You?"

"Me! He fetched me to his wife this morning. She's nearing her
confinement. False alarm. I guaranteed him at least another twelve
hours."

"Oh! So that's it, is it?" Buchanan murmured.

Both the sub-editors raised their heads.

"That's it," said the doctor.

"Some people were saying he'd quarrelled with the trainer again and was
shamming," said Buchanan. "But I didn't believe that. There's no
hanky-panky about Jos Myatt, anyhow."

I learnt in answer to my questions that a great and terrible football
match was at that moment in progress at Knype, a couple of miles away,
between the Knype Club and the Manchester Rovers. It was conveyed to me
that the importance of this match was almost national, and that the
entire district was practically holding its breath till the result
should be known. The half-time result was one goal each.

"If Knype lose," said Buchanan, explanatorily, "they'll find themselves
pushed out of the First League at the end of the season. That's a cert
... one of the oldest clubs in England! Semi-finalists for the English
Cup in '78."

"'79," corrected the elder sub-editor.

I gathered that the crisis was grave.

"And Myatt's the captain, I suppose?" said I.

"No. But he's the finest full-back in the League."

I then had a vision of Myatt as a great man. By an effort of the
imagination I perceived that the equivalent of the fate of nations
depended upon him. I recollected, now, large yellow posters on the
hoardings we had passed, with the names of Knype and of Manchester
Rovers in letters a foot high and the legend "League match at Knype"
over all. It seemed to me that the heroic name of Jos Myatt, if truly he
were the finest full-back in the League, if truly his presence or
absence affected the betting as far off as Birmingham, ought also to
have been on the posters, together with possibly his portrait. I saw Jos
Myatt as a matador, with a long ribbon of scarlet necktie down his
breast, and embroidered trousers.

"Why," said Buchanan, "if Knype drop into the Second Division they'll
never pay another dividend! It'll be all up with first-class football in
the Five Towns!"

The interests involved seemed to grow more complicated. And here I had
been in the district nearly four hours without having guessed that the
district was quivering in the tense excitement of gigantic issues! And
here was this Scotch doctor, at whose word the great Myatt would have
declined to play, never saying a syllable about the affair, until a
chance remark from Buchanan loosened his tongue. But all doctors are
strangely secretive. Secretiveness is one of their chief private
pleasures.

"Come and see the pigeons, eh?" said Buchanan.

"Pigeons?" I repeated.

"We give the results of over a hundred matches in our Football Edition,"
said Buchanan, and added: "not counting Rugby."

As we left the room two boys dodged round us into it, bearing telegrams.

In a moment we were, in the most astonishing manner, on a leaden roof of
the _Signal_ offices. High factory chimneys rose over the horizon of
slates on every side, blowing thick smoke into the general murk of the
afternoon sky, and crossing the western crimson with long pennons of
black. And out of the murk there came from afar a blue-and-white pigeon
which circled largely several times over the offices of the _Signal_. At
length it descended, and I could hear the whirr of its strong wings. The
wings ceased to beat and the pigeon slanted downwards in a curve, its
head lower than its wide tail. Then the little head gradually rose and
the tail fell; the curve had changed, the pace slackened; the pigeon was
calculating with all its brain; eyes, wings, tail and feet were being
co-ordinated to the resolution of an intricate mechanical problem. The
pinkish claws seemed to grope--and after an instant of hesitation the
thing was done, the problem solved; the pigeon, with delicious
gracefulness, had established equilibrium on the ridge of a pigeon-cote,
and folded its wings, and was peering about with strange motions of its
extremely movable head. Presently it flew down to the leads, waddled to
and fro with the ungainly gestures of a fat woman of sixty, and
disappeared into the cote. At the same moment the boy who had been
dismissed from the sub-editor's room ran forward and entered the cote by
a wire-screened door.

"Handy things, pigeons!" said the doctor as we approached to examine the
cote. Fifty or sixty pigeons were cooing and strutting in it. There was
a protest of wings as the boy seized the last arriving messenger.

"Give it here!" Buchanan ordered.

The boy handed over a thin tube of paper which he had unfastened from
the bird's leg. Buchanan unrolled it and showed it to me. I read:
"Midland Federation. Axe United, Macclesfield Town. Match abandoned
after half-hour's play owing to fog. Three forty-five."

"Three forty-five," said Buchanan, looking at his watch. "He's done the
ten miles in half an hour, roughly. Not bad. First time we tried pigeons
from as far off as Axe. Here, boy!" And he restored the paper to the
boy, who gave it to another boy, who departed with it.

"Man," said the doctor, eyeing Buchanan. "Ye'd no business out here.
Ye're not precisely a pigeon."

Down we went, one after another, by the ladder, and now we fell into the
composing-room, where Buchanan said he felt warmer. An immense, dirty,
white-washed apartment crowded with linotypes and other machines, in
front of which sat men in white aprons, tapping, tapping--gazing at
documents pinned at the level of their eyes--and tapping, tapping. A
kind of cavernous retreat in which monstrous iron growths rose out of
the floor and were met half-way by electric flowers that had their roots
in the ceiling! In this jungle there was scarcely room for us to walk.
Buchanan explained the linotypes to me. I watched, as though
romantically dreaming, the flashing descent of letter after letter, a
rain of letters into the belly of the machine; then, going round to the
back, I watched the same letters rising again in a close, slow
procession, and sorting themselves by themselves at the top in readiness
to answer again to the tapping, tapping of a man in a once-white apron.
And while I was watching all that I could somehow, by a faculty which we
have, at the same time see pigeons far overhead, arriving and arriving
out of the murk from beyond the verge of chimneys.

"Ingenious, isn't it?" said Stirling.

But I imagine that he had not the faculty by which to see the pigeons.

A reverend, bearded, spectacled man, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up
and an apron stretched over his hemispherical paunch, strolled slowly
along an alley, glancing at a galley-proof with an ingenuous air just as
if he had never seen a galley-proof before.

"It's a stick more than a column already," said he confidentially,
offering the long paper, and then gravely looking at Buchanan, with head
bent forward, not through his spectacles but over them.

The editor negligently accepted the proof, and I read a series of
titles: "Knype _v_. Manchester Rovers. Record Gate. Fifteen thousand
spectators. Two goals in twelve minutes. Myatt in form. Special Report."

Buchanan gave the slip back without a word.

"There you are!" said he to me, as another compositor near us attached a
piece of tissue paper to his machine. It was the very paper that I had
seen come out of the sky, but its contents had been enlarged and amended
by the sub-editorial pen. The man began tapping, tapping, and the
letters began to flash downwards on their way to tell a quarter of a
million people that Axe _v_. Macclesfield had been stopped by fog.

"I suppose that Knype match is over by now?" I said.

"Oh no!" said Buchanan. "The second half has scarcely begun."

"Like to go?" Stirling asked.

"Well," I said, feeling adventurous, "it's a notion, isn't it?"

"You can run Mr Loring down there in five or six minutes," said
Buchanan. "And he's probably never seen anything like it before. You
might call here as you come home and see the paper on the machines."




III


We went on the Grand Stand, which was packed with men whose eyes were
fixed, with an unconscious but intense effort, on a common object. Among
the men were a few women in furs and wraps, equally absorbed. Nobody
took any notice of us as we insinuated our way up a rickety flight of
wooden stairs, but when by misadventure we grazed a human being the
elbow of that being shoved itself automatically and fiercely outwards,
to repel. I had an impression of hats, caps, and woolly overcoats
stretched in long parallel lines, and of grimy raw planks everywhere
presenting possibly dangerous splinters, save where use had worn them
into smooth shininess. Then gradually I became aware of the vast field,
which was more brown than green. Around the field was a wide border of
infinitesimal hats and pale faces, rising in tiers, and beyond this
border fences, hoardings, chimneys, furnaces, gasometers,
telegraph-poles, houses, and dead trees. And here and there, perched in
strange perilous places, even high up towards the sombre sky, were more
human beings clinging. On the field itself, at one end of it, were a
scattered handful of doll-like figures, motionless; some had white
bodies, others red; and three were in black; all were so small and so
far off that they seemed to be mere unimportant casual incidents in
whatever recondite affair it was that was proceeding. Then a whistle
shrieked, and all these figures began simultaneously to move, and then
I saw a ball in the air. An obscure, uneasy murmuring rose from the
immense multitude like an invisible but audible vapour. The next instant
the vapour had condensed into a sudden shout. Now I saw the ball rolling
solitary in the middle of the field, and a single red doll racing
towards it; at one end was a confused group of red and white, and at the
other two white dolls, rather lonely in the expanse. The single red doll
overtook the ball and scudded along with it at his twinkling toes. A
great voice behind me bellowed with an incredible volume of sound:

"Now, Jos!"

And another voice, further away, bellowed:

"Now, Jos!"

And still more distantly the grim warning shot forth from the crowd:

"Now, Jos! Now, Jos!"

The nearer of the white dolls, as the red one approached, sprang
forward. I could see a leg. And the ball was flying back in a
magnificent curve into the skies; it passed out of my sight, and then I
heard a bump on the slates of the roof of the grand stand, and it fell
among the crowd in the stand-enclosure. But almost before the flight of
the ball had commenced, a terrific roar of relief had rolled formidably
round the field, and out of that roar, like rockets out of thick smoke,
burst acutely ecstatic cries of adoration:

"Bravo, Jos!"

"Good old Jos!"

The leg had evidently been Jos's leg. The nearer of these two white
dolls must be Jos, darling of fifteen thousand frenzied people.

Stirling punched a neighbour in the side to attract his attention.

"What's the score?" he demanded of the neighbour, who scowled and then
grinned.

"Two--one--agen uz!" The other growled.

"It'll take our b----s all their time to draw. They're playing a man
short."

"Accident?"

"No! Referee ordered him off for rough play."

Several spectators began to explain, passionately, furiously, that the
referee's action was utterly bereft of common sense and justice; and I
gathered that a less gentlemanly crowd would undoubtedly have lynched
the referee. The explanations died down, and everybody except me resumed
his fierce watch on the field.

I was recalled from the exercise of a vague curiosity upon the set,
anxious faces around me by a crashing, whooping cheer which in volume
and sincerity of joy surpassed all noises in my experience. This massive
cheer reverberated round the field like the echoes of a battleship's
broadside in a fiord. But it was human, and therefore more terrible than
guns. I instinctively thought: "If such are the symptoms of pleasure,
what must be the symptoms of pain or disappointment?" Simultaneously
with the expulsion of the unique noise the expression of the faces
changed. Eyes sparkled; teeth became prominent in enormous, uncontrolled
smiles. Ferocious satisfaction had to find vent in ferocious gestures,
wreaked either upon dead wood or upon the living tissues of
fellow-creatures. The gentle, mannerly sound of hand-clapping was a kind
of light froth on the surface of the billowy sea of heartfelt applause.
The host of the fifteen thousand might have just had their lives saved,
or their children snatched from destruction and their wives from
dishonour; they might have been preserved from bankruptcy, starvation,
prison, torture; they might have been rewarding with their impassioned
worship a band of national heroes. But it was not so. All that had
happened was that the ball had rolled into the net of the Manchester
Rovers' goal. Knype had drawn level. The reputation of the Five Towns
before the jury of expert opinion that could distinguish between
first-class football and second-class was maintained intact. I could
hear specialists around me proving that though Knype had yet five League
matches to play, its situation was safe. They pointed excitedly to a
huge hoarding at one end of the ground on which appeared names of other
clubs with changing figures. These clubs included the clubs which Knype
would have to meet before the end of the season, and the figures
indicated their fortunes on various grounds similar to this ground all
over the country. If a goal was scored in Newcastle, or in Southampton,
the very Peru of first-class football, it was registered on that board
and its possible effect on the destinies of Knype was instantly
assessed. The calculations made were dizzying.

Then a little flock of pigeons flew up and separated, under the illusion
that they were free agents and masters of the air, but really wafted
away to fixed destinations on the stupendous atmospheric waves of
still-continued cheering.

After a minute or two the ball was restarted, and the greater noise had
diminished to the sensitive uneasy murmur which responded like a
delicate instrument to the fluctuations of the game. Each feat and
manoeuvre of Knype drew generous applause in proportion to its intention
or its success, and each sleight of the Manchester Rovers, successful or
not, provoked a holy disgust. The attitude of the host had passed beyond
morality into religion.

Then, again, while my attention had lapsed from the field, a devilish, a
barbaric, and a deafening yell broke from those fifteen thousand
passionate hearts. It thrilled me; it genuinely frightened me. I
involuntarily made the motion of swallowing. After the thunderous crash
of anger from the host came the thin sound of a whistle. The game
stopped. I heard the same word repeated again and again, in divers
tones of exasperated fury:

"Foul!"

I felt that I was hemmed in by potential homicides, whose arms were
lifted in the desire of murder and whose features were changed from the
likeness of man into the corporeal form of some pure and terrible
instinct.

And I saw a long doll rise from the ground and approach a lesser doll
with threatening hands.

"Foul! Foul!"

"Go it, Jos! Knock his neck out! Jos! He tripped thee up!"

There was a prolonged gesticulatory altercation between the three black
dolls in leather leggings and several of the white and the red dolls. At
last one of the mannikins in leggings shrugged his shoulders, made a
definite gesture to the other two, and walked away towards the edge of
the field nearest the stand. It was the unprincipled referee; he had
disallowed the foul. In the protracted duel between the offending
Manchester forward and the great, honest Jos Myatt he had given another
point to the enemy. As soon as the host realized the infamy it yelled
once more in heightened fury. It seemed to surge in masses against the
thick iron railings that alone stood between the referee and death. The
discreet referee was approaching the grand stand as the least unsafe
place. In a second a handful of executioners had somehow got on to the
grass. And in the next second several policemen were in front of them,
not striking nor striving to intimidate, but heavily pushing them into
bounds.

"Get back there!" cried a few abrupt, commanding voices from the stand.

The referee stood with his hands in his pockets and his whistle in his
mouth. I think that in that moment of acutest suspense the whole of his
earthly career must have flashed before him in a phantasmagoria. And
then the crisis was past. The inherent gentlemanliness of the outraged
host had triumphed and the referee was spared.

"Served him right if they'd man-handled him!" said a spectator.

"Ay!" said another, gloomily, "ay! And th' Football Association 'ud ha'
fined us maybe a hundred quid and disqualified th' ground for the rest
o' th' season!"

"D----n th' Football Association!"

"Ay! But you canna'!"

"Now, lads! Play up, Knype! Now, lads! Give 'em hot hell!" Different
voices heartily encouraged the home team as the ball was thrown into
play.

The fouling Manchester forward immediately resumed possession of the
ball. Experience could not teach him. He parted with the ball and got it
again, twice. The devil was in him and in the ball. The devil was
driving him towards Myatt. They met. And then came a sound quite new: a
cracking sound, somewhat like the snapping of a bough, but sharper, more
decisive.

"By Jove!" exclaimed Stirling. "That's his bone!"

And instantly he was off down the staircase and I after him. But he was
not the first doctor on the field. Nothing had been unforeseen in the
wonderful organization of this enterprise. A pigeon sped away and an
official doctor and an official stretcher appeared, miraculously,
simultaneously. It was tremendous. It inspired awe in me.

"He asked for it!" I heard a man say as I hesitated on the shore of the
ocean of mud.

Then I knew that it was Manchester and not Knype that had suffered. The
confusion and hubbub were in a high degree disturbing and puzzling. But
one emotion emerged clear: pleasure. I felt it myself. I was aware of
joy in that the two sides were now levelled to ten men apiece. I was
mystically identified with the Five Towns, absorbed into their life. I
could discern on every face the conviction that a divine providence was
in this affair, that God could not be mocked. I too had this conviction.
I could discern also on every face the fear lest the referee might give
a foul against the hero Myatt, or even order him off the field, though
of course the fracture was a simple accident. I too had this fear. It
was soon dispelled by the news which swept across the entire enclosure
like a sweet smell, that the referee had adopted the theory of a simple
accident. I saw vaguely policemen, a stretcher, streaming crowds, and my
ears heard a monstrous universal babbling. And then the figure of
Stirling detached itself from the moving disorder and came to me.

"Well, Hyatt's calf was harder than the other chap's, that's all," he
said.

"Which _is_ Myatt?" I asked, for the red and the white dolls had all
vanished at close quarters, and were replaced by unrecognizably gigantic
human animals, still clad, however, in dolls' vests and dolls'
knickerbockers.

Stirling warningly jerked his head to indicate a man not ten feet away
from me. This was Myatt, the hero of the host and the darling of
populations. I gazed up at him. His mouth and his left knee were red
with blood, and he was piebald with thick patches of mud from his
tousled crown to his enormous boot. His blue eyes had a heavy, stupid,
honest glance; and of the three qualities stupidity predominated. He
seemed to be all feet, knees, hands and elbows. His head was very
small--the sole remainder of the doll in him.

A little man approached him, conscious--somewhat too obviously
conscious--of his right to approach. Myatt nodded.

"Ye'n settled _him_, seemingly, Jos!" said the little man.

"Well," said Myatt, with slow bitterness. "Hadn't he been blooming well
begging and praying for it, aw afternoon? Hadn't he now?"

The little man nodded. Then he said in a lower tone:

"How's missis, like?"

"Her's altogether yet," said Myatt. "Or I'd none ha' played!"

"I've bet Watty half-a-dollar as it inna' a lad!" said the little man.

Myatt seemed angry.

"Wilt bet me half a _quid_ as it inna' a lad?" he demanded, bending down
and scowling and sticking out his muddy chin.

"Ay!" said the little man, not blenching.

"Evens?"

"Evens."

"I'll take thee, Charlie," said Myatt, resuming his calm.

The whistle sounded. And several orders were given to clear the field.
Eight minutes had been lost over a broken leg, but Stirling said that
the referee would surely deduct them from the official time, so that
after all the game would not be shortened.

"I'll be up yon, to-morra morning," said the little man.

Myatt nodded and departed. Charlie, the little man, turned on his heel
and proudly rejoined the crowd. He had been seen of all in converse with
supreme greatness.

Stirling and I also retired; and though Jos Myatt had not even done his
doctor the honour of seeing him, neither of us, I think, was quite
without a consciousness of glory: I cannot imagine why. The rest of the
game was flat and tame. Nothing occurred. The match ended in a draw.




IV


We were swept from the football ground on a furious flood of
humanity--carried forth and flung down a slope into a large waste space
that separated the ground from the nearest streets of little reddish
houses. At the bottom of the slope, on my suggestion, we halted for a
few moments aside, while the current rushed forward and, spreading out,
inundated the whole space in one marvellous minute. The impression of
the multitude streaming from that gap in the wooden wall was like
nothing more than the impression of a burst main which only the emptying
of the reservoir will assuage. Anybody who wanted to commit suicide
might have stood in front of that gap and had his wish. He would not
have been noticed. The interminable and implacable infantry charge would
have passed unheedingly over him. A silent, preoccupied host, bent on
something else now, and perhaps teased by the inconvenient thought that
after all a draw is not as good as a win! It hurried blindly,
instinctively outwards, knees and chins protruding, hands deep in
pockets, chilled feet stamping. Occasionally someone stopped or
slackened to light a pipe, and on being curtly bunted onward by a blind
force from behind, accepted the hint as an atom accepts the law of
gravity. The fever and ecstasy were over. What fascinated the Southern
in me was the grim taciturnity, the steady stare (vacant or dreaming),
and the heavy, muffled, multitudinous tramp shaking the cindery earth.
The flood continued to rage through the gap.

Our automobile had been left at the Haycock Hotel; we went to get it,
braving the inundation. Nearly opposite the stable-yard the electric
trams started for Hanbridge, Bursley and Turnhill, and for Longshaw.
Here the crowd was less dangerous, but still very formidable--to my
eyes. Each tram as it came up was savagely assaulted, seized, crammed
and possessed, with astounding rapidity. Its steps were the western bank
of a Beresina. At a given moment the inured conductor, brandishing his
leather-shielded arm with a pitiless gesture, thrust aspirants down
into the mud and the tram rolled powerfully away. All this in silence.

After a few minutes a bicyclist swished along through the mud, taking
the far side of the road, which was comparatively free. He wore grey
trousers, heavy boots, and a dark cut-away coat, up the back of which a
line of caked mud had deposited itself. On his head was a bowler hat.

"How do, Jos?" cried a couple of boys, cheekily. And then there were a
few adult greetings of respect.

It was the hero, in haste.

"Out of it, there!" he warned impeders, between his teeth, and plugged
on with bent head.

"He keeps the Foaming Quart up at Toft End," said the doctor. "It's the
highest pub in the Five Towns. He used to be what they call a
pot-hunter, a racing bicyclist, you know. But he's got past that and
he'll soon be past football. He's thirty-four if he's a day. That's one
reason why he's so independent--that and because he's almost the only
genuine native in the team."

"Why?" I asked. "Where do they come from, then?"

"Oh!" said Stirling as he gently started the car. "The club buys 'em, up
and down the country. Four of 'em are Scots. A few years ago an Oldham
club offered Knype £500 for Myatt, a big price--more than he's worth
now! But he wouldn't go, though they guaranteed to put him into a
first-class pub--a free house. He's never cost Knype anything except his
wages and the goodwill of the Foaming Quart."

"What are his wages?"

"Don't know exactly. Not much. The Football Association fix a maximum. I
daresay about four pounds a week _Hi there! Are you deaf_?"

"Thee mind what tha'rt about!" responded a stout loiterer in our path.
"Or I'll take thy ears home for my tea, mester."

Stirling laughed.

In a few minutes we had arrived at Hanbridge, splashing all the way
between two processions that crowded either footpath. And in the middle
of the road was a third procession of trams,--tram following tram, each
gorged with passengers, frothing at the step with passengers; not the
lackadaisical trams that I had seen earlier in the afternoon in Crown
Square; a different race of trams, eager and impetuous velocities. We
reached the _Signal_ offices. No crowd of urchins to salute us this
time!

Under the earth was the machine-room of the _Signal_. It reminded me of
the bowels of a ship, so full was it of machinery. One huge machine
clattered slowly, and a folded green thing dropped strangely on to a
little iron table in front of us. Buchanan opened it, and I saw that the
broken leg was in it at length, together with a statement that in the
_Signal's_ opinion the sympathy of every true sportsman would be with
the disabled player. I began to say something to Buchanan, when suddenly
I could not hear my own voice. The great machine, with another behind
us, was working at a fabulous speed and with a fabulous clatter. All
that my startled senses could clearly disentangle was that the blue
arc-lights above us blinked occasionally, and that folded green papers
were snowing down upon the iron table far faster than the eye could
follow them. Tall lads in aprons elbowed me away and carried off the
green papers in bundles, but not more quickly than the machine shed
them. Buchanan put his lips to my ear. But I could hear nothing. I shook
my head. He smiled, and led us out from the tumult.

"Come and see the boys take them," he said at the foot of the stairs.

In a sort of hall on the ground floor was a long counter, and beyond the
counter a system of steel railings in parallel lines, so arranged that a
person entering at the public door could only reach the counter by
passing up or down each alley in succession. These steel lanes, which
absolutely ensured the triumph of right over might, were packed with
boys--the ragged urchins whom we had seen playing in the street. But not
urchins now; rather young tigers! Perhaps half a dozen had reached the
counter; the rest were massed behind, shouting and quarrelling. Through
a hole in the wall, at the level of the counter, bundles of papers shot
continuously, and were snatched up by servers, who distributed them in
smaller bundles to the hungry boys; who flung down metal discs in
exchange and fled, fled madly as though fiends were after them, through
a third door, out of the pandemonium into the darkling street. And
unceasingly the green papers appeared at the hole in the wall and
unceasingly they were plucked away and borne off by those maddened
children, whose destination was apparently Aix or Ghent, and whose wings
were their tatters.

"What are those discs?" I inquired.

"The lads have to come and buy them earlier in the day," said Buchanan.
"We haven't time to sell this edition for cash, you see."

"Well," I said as we left, "I'm very much obliged."

"What on earth for?" Buchanan asked.

"Everything," I said.

We returned through the squares of Hanbridge and by Trafalgar Road to
Stirling's house at Bleakridge. And everywhere in the deepening twilight
I could see the urchins, often hatless and sometimes scarcely shod,
scudding over the lamp-reflecting mire with sheets of wavy green, and
above the noises of traffic I could hear the shrill outcry: "_Signal_.
Football Edition. Football Edition. _Signal_." The world was being
informed of the might of Jos Myatt, and of the averting of disaster from
Knype, and of the results of over a hundred other matches--not counting
Rugby.




V


During the course of the evening, when Stirling had thoroughly
accustomed himself to the state of being in sole charge of an expert
from the British Museum, London, and the high walls round his more
private soul had yielded to my timid but constant attacks, we grew
fairly intimate. And in particular the doctor proved to me that his
reputation for persuasive raciness with patients was well founded. Yet
up to the time of dessert I might have been justified in supposing that
that much-praised "manner" in a sick-room was nothing but a provincial
legend. Such may be the influence of a quite inoffensive and shy
Londoner in the country. At half-past ten, Titus being already asleep
for the night in an arm-chair, we sat at ease over the fire in the study
telling each other stories. We had dealt with the arts, and with
medicine; now we were dealing with life, in those aspects of it which
cause men to laugh and women uneasily to wonder. Once or twice we had
mentioned the Brindleys. The hour for their arrival was come. But being
deeply comfortable and content where I was, I felt no impatience. Then
there was a tap on the window.

"That's Bobbie!" said Stirling, rising slowly from his chair. "_He_
won't refuse whisky, even if you do. I'd better get another bottle."

The tap was repeated peevishly.

"I'm coming, laddie!" Stirling protested.

He slippered out through the hall and through the surgery to the side
door, I following, and Titus sneezing and snuffing in the rear.

"I say, mester," said a heavy voice as the doctor opened the door. It
was not Brindley, but Jos Myatt. Unable to locate the bell-push in the
dark, he had characteristically attacked the sole illuminated window. He
demanded, or he commanded, very curtly, that the doctor should go up
instantly to the Foaming Quart at Toft End.

Stirling hesitated a moment.

"All right, my man," said he, calmly.

"Now?" the heavy, suspicious voice on the doorstep insisted.

"I'll be there before ye if ye don't sprint, man. I'll run up in the
car." Stirling shut the door. I heard footsteps on the gravel path
outside.

"Ye heard?" said he to me. "And what am I to do with ye?"

"I'll go with you, of course," I answered.

"I may be kept up there a while."

"I don't care," I said roisterously. "It's a pub and I'm a traveller."

Stirling's household was in bed and his assistant gone home. While he
and Titus got out the car I wrote a line for the Brindleys: "Gone with
doctor to see patient at Toft End. Don't wait up.--A.L." This we pushed
under Brindley's front door on our way forth. Very soon we were
vibrating up a steep street on the first speed of the car, and the
yellow reflections of distant furnaces began to shine over house roofs
below us. It was exhilaratingly cold, a clear and frosty night, tonic,
bracing after the enclosed warmth of the study. I was joyous, but
silently. We had quitted the kingdom of the god Pan; we were in Lucina's
realm, its consequence, where there is no laughter. We were on a
mission.

"I didn't expect this," said Stirling.

"No?" I said. "But seeing that he fetched you this morning--"

"Oh! That was only in order to be sure, for himself. His sister was
there, in charge. Seemed very capable. Knew all about everything. Until
ye get to the high social status of a clerk or a draper's assistant
people seem to manage to have their children without professional
assistance."

"Then do you think there's anything wrong?" I asked.

"I'd not be surprised."

He changed to the second speed as the car topped the first bluff. We
said no more. The night and the mission solemnized us. And gradually, as
we rose towards the purple skies, the Five Towns wrote themselves out in
fire on the irregular plain below.

"That's Hanbridge Town Hall," said Stirling, pointing to the right. "And
that's Bursley Town Hall," he said, pointing to the left. And there were
many other beacons, dominating the jewelled street-lines that faded on
the horizon into golden-tinted smoke.

The road was never quite free of houses. After occurring but sparsely
for half a mile, they thickened into a village--the suburb of Bursley
called Toft End. I saw a moving red light in front of us. It was the
reverse of Hyatt's bicycle lantern. The car stopped near the dark façade
of the inn, of which two yellow windows gleamed. Stirling, under Myatt's
shouted guidance, backed into an obscure yard under cover. The engine
ceased to throb.

"Friend of mine," he introduced me to Myatt. "By the way, Loring, pass
me my bag, will you? Mustn't forget that." Then he extinguished the
acetylene lamps, and there was no light in the yard except the ray of
the bicycle lantern which Myatt held in his hand. We groped towards the
house. Strange, every step that I take in the Five Towns seems to have
the genuine quality of an adventure!




VI


In five minutes I was of no account in the scheme of things at Toft End,
and I began to wonder why I had come. Stirling, my sole protector, had
vanished up the dark stairs of the house, following a stout, youngish
woman in a white apron, who bore a candle. Jos Myatt, behind, said to
me: "Happen you'd better go in there, mester," pointing to a half-open
door at the foot of the stairs. I went into a little room at the rear of
the bar-parlour. A good fire burned in a small old-fashioned grate, but
there was no other light. The inn was closed to customers, it being past
eleven o'clock. On a bare table I perceived a candle, and ventured to
put a match to it. I then saw almost exactly such a room as one would
expect to find at the rear of the bar-parlour of an inn on the outskirts
of an industrial town. It appeared to serve the double purpose of a
living-room and of a retreat for favoured customers. The table was
evidently one at which men drank. On a shelf was a row of bottles, more
or less empty, bearing names famous in newspaper advertisements and in
the House of Lords. The dozen chairs suggested an acute bodily
discomfort such as would only be tolerated by a sitter all of whose
sensory faculties were centred in his palate. On a broken chair in a
corner was an insecure pile of books. A smaller table was covered with a
chequered cloth on which were a few plates. Along one wall, under the
window, ran a pitch-pine sofa upholstered with a stuff slightly
dissimilar from that on the table. The mattress of the sofa was uneven
and its surface wrinkled, and old newspapers and pieces of brown paper
had been stowed away between it and the framework. The chief article of
furniture was an effective walnut bookcase, the glass doors of which
were curtained with red cloth. The window, wider than it was high, was
also curtained with red cloth. The walls, papered in a saffron tint,
bore framed advertisements and a few photographs of self-conscious
persons. The ceiling was as obscure as heaven; the floor tiled, with a
list rug in front of the steel fender.

I put my overcoat on the sofa, picked up the candle and glanced at the
books in the corner: Lavater's indestructible work, a paper-covered
_Whitaker_, the _Licensed Victuallers' Almanac, Johnny Ludlow_, the
illustrated catalogue of the Exhibition of 1856, _Cruden's Concordance_,
and seven or eight volumes of _Knight's Penny Encyclopædia_. While I was
poring on these titles I heard movements overhead--previously there had
been no sound whatever--and with guilty haste I restored the candle to
the table and placed myself negligently in front of the fire.

"Now don't let me see ye up here any more till I fetch ye!" said a
woman's distant voice--not crossly, but firmly. And then, crossly: "Be
off with ye now!"

Reluctant boots on the stairs! Jos Myatt entered to me. He did not speak
at first; nor did I. He avoided my glance. He was still wearing the
cut-away coat with the line of mud up the back. I took out my watch, not
for the sake of information, but from mere nervousness, and the sight of
the watch reminded me that it would be prudent to wind it up.

"Better not forget that," I said, winding it.

"Ay!" said he, gloomily. "It's a tip." And he wound up his watch; a
large, thick, golden one.

This watch-winding established a basis of intercourse between us.

"I hope everything is going on all right," I murmured.

"What dun ye say?" he asked.

"I say I hope everything is going on all right," I repeated louder, and
jerked my head in the direction of the stairs, to indicate the place
from which he had come.

"Oh!" he exclaimed, as if surprised. "Now what'll ye have, mester?" He
stood waiting. "It's my call to-night."

I explained to him that I never took alcohol. It was not quite true, but
it was as true as most general propositions are.

"Neither me!" he said shortly, after a pause.

"You're a teetotaller too?" I showed a little involuntary astonishment.

He put forward his chin.

"What do _you_ think?" he said confidentially and scornfully. It was
precisely as if he had said: "Do you think that anybody but a born ass
would _not_ be a teetotaller, in my position?"

I sat down on a chair.

"Take th' squab, mester," he said, pointing to the sofa. I took it.

He picked up the candle; then dropped it, and lighted a lamp which was
on the mantelpiece between his vases of blue glass. His movements were
very slow, hesitating and clumsy. Blowing out the candle, which smoked
for a long time, he went with the lamp to the bookcase. As the key of
the bookcase was in his right pocket and the lamp in his right hand he
had to change the lamp, cautiously, from hand to hand. When he opened
the cupboard I saw a rich gleam of silver from every shelf of it except
the lowest, and I could distinguish the forms of ceremonial cups with
pedestals and immense handles.

"I suppose these are your pots?" I said.

"Ay!"

He displayed to me the fruits of his manifold victories. I could see him
straining along endless cinder-paths and highroads under hot suns, his
great knees going up and down like treadles amid the plaudits and howls
of vast populations. And all that now remained of that glory was these
debased and vicious shapes, magnificently useless, grossly ugly, with
their inscriptions lost in a mess of flourishes.

"Ay!" he said again, when I had fingered the last of them.

"A very fine show indeed!" I said, resuming the sofa.

He took a penny bottle of ink and a pen out of the bookcase, and also,
from the lowest shelf, a bag of money and a long narrow account book.
Then he sat down at the table and commenced accountancy. It was clear
that he regarded his task as formidable and complex. To see him
reckoning the coins, manipulating the pen, splashing the ink, scratching
the page; to hear him whispering consecutive numbers aloud, and
muttering mysterious anathemas against the untamable naughtiness of
figures--all this was painful, and with the painfulness of a simple
exercise rendered difficult by inaptitude and incompetence. I wanted to
jump up and cry to him: "Get out of the way, man, and let me do it for
you! I can do it while you are wiping hairs from your pen on your
sleeve." I was sorry for him because he was ridiculous--and even more
grotesque than ridiculous. I felt, quite acutely, that it was a shame
that he could not be for ever the central figure of a field of mud,
kicking a ball into long and grandiose parabolas higher than gasometers,
or breaking an occasional leg, surrounded by the violent affection of
hearts whose melting-point was the exclamation, "Good old Jos!" I felt
that if he must repose his existence ought to have been so contrived
that he could repose in impassive and senseless dignity, like a mountain
watching the flight of time. The conception of him tracing symbols in a
ledger, counting shillings and sixpences, descending to arithmetic, and
suffering those humiliations which are the invariable preliminaries to
legitimate fatherhood, was shocking to a nice taste for harmonious
fitness.... What, this precious and terrific organism, this slave with a
specialty--whom distant towns had once been anxious to buy at the
prodigious figure of five hundred pounds--obliged to sit in a mean
chamber and wait silently while the woman of his choice encountered the
supreme peril! And he would "soon be past football!" He was "thirty-four
if a day!" It was the verge of senility! He was no longer worth five
hundred pounds. Perhaps even now this jointed merchandise was only worth
two hundred pounds! And "they"--the shadowy directors, who could not
kick a ball fifty feet and who would probably turn sick if they broke a
leg--"they" paid him four pounds a week for being the hero of a quarter
of a million of people! He was the chief magnet to draw fifteen thousand
sixpences and shillings of a Saturday afternoon into a company's cash
box, and here he sat splitting his head over fewer sixpences and
shillings than would fill a half-pint pot! Jos, you ought in justice to
have been José, with a thin red necktie down your breast (instead of a
line of mud up your back), and embroidered breeches on those miraculous
legs, and an income of a quarter of a million pesetas, and the
languishing acquiescence of innumerable mantillas. Every moment you were
getting older and stiffer; every moment was bringing nearer the moment
when young men would reply curtly to their doddering elders: "Jos
Myatt--who was '_e?_"

The putting away of the ledger, the ink, the pen and the money was as
exasperating as their taking out had been. Then Jos, always too large
for the room, crossed the tiled floor and mended the fire. A poker was
more suited to his capacity than a pen. He glanced about him, uncertain
and anxious, and then crept to the door near the foot of the stairs and
listened. There was no sound; and that was curious. The woman who was
bringing into the world the hero's child made no cry that reached us
below. Once or twice I had heard muffled movements not quite
overhead--somewhere above--but naught else. The doctor and Jos's sister
seemed to have retired into a sinister and dangerous mystery. I could
not dispel from my mind pictures of what they were watching and what
they were doing. The vast, cruel, fumbling clumsiness of Nature, her
lack of majesty in crises that ought to be majestic, her incurable
indignity, disgusted me, aroused my disdain, I wanted, as a philosopher
of all the cultures, to feel that the present was indeed a majestic
crisis, to be so esteemed by a superior man. I could not. Though the
crisis possibly intimidated me somewhat, yet, on behalf of Jos Myatt, I
was ashamed of it. This may be reprehensible, but it is true.

He sat down by the fire and looked at the fire. I could not attempt to
carry on a conversation with him, and to avoid the necessity for any
talk at all, I extended myself on the sofa and averted my face,
wondering once again why I had accompanied the doctor to Toft End. The
doctor was now in another, an inaccessible world. I dozed, and from my
doze I was roused by Jos Myatt going to the door on the stairs.

"Jos," said a voice. "It's a girl."

Then a silence.

I admit there was a flutter in my heart. Another soul, another formed
and unchangeable temperament, tumbled into the world! Whence?
Whither?... As for the quality of majesty--yes, if silver trumpets had
announced the advent, instead of a stout, aproned woman, the moment
could not have been more majestic in its sadness. I say "sadness," which
is the inevitable and sole effect of these eternal and banal questions,
"Whence? Whither?"

"Is her bad?" Jos whispered.

"Her's pretty bad," said the voice, but cheerily. "Bring me up another
scuttle o' coal."

When he returned to the parlour, after being again dismissed, I said to
him:

"Well, I congratulate you."

"I thank ye!" he said, and sat down. Presently I could hear him
muttering to himself, mildly: "Hell! Hell! Hell!"

I thought: "Stirling will not be very long now, and we can depart
home." I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to two. But Stirling did
not appear, nor was there any message from him or sign. I had to submit
to the predicament. As a faint chilliness from the window affected my
back I drew my overcoat up to my shoulders as a counterpane. Through a
gap between the red curtains of the window I could see a star blazing.
It passed behind the curtain with disconcerting rapidity. The universe
was swinging and whirling as usual.




VII


Sounds of knocking disturbed me. In the few seconds that elapsed before
I could realize just where I was and why I was there, the summoning
knocks were repeated. The early sun was shining through the red blind. I
sat up and straightened my hair, involuntarily composing my attitude so
that nobody who might enter the room should imagine that I had been
other than patiently wide-awake all night. The second door of the
parlour--that leading to the bar-room of the Foaming Quart--was open,
and I could see the bar itself, with shelves rising behind it and the
upright handles of a beer-engine at one end. Someone whom I could not
see was evidently unbolting and unlocking the principal entrance to the
inn. Then I heard the scraping of a creaky portal on the floor.

"Well, Jos lad!"

It was the voice of the little man, Charlie, who had spoken with Myatt
on the football field.

"Come in quick, Charlie. It's cowd [cold]," said the voice of Jos Myatt,
gloomily.

"Ay! Cowd it is, lad! It's above three mile as I've walked, and thou
knows it, Jos. Give us a quartern o' gin."

The door grated again and a bolt was drawn.

The two men passed together behind the bar, and so within my vision.
Charlie had a grey muffler round his neck; his hands were far in his
pockets and seemed to be at strain, as though trying to prevent his
upper and his lower garments from flying apart. Jos Myatt was extremely
dishevelled. In the little man's demeanour towards the big one there was
now none of the self-conscious pride in the mere fact of acquaintance
that I had noticed on the field. Clearly the two were intimate friends,
perhaps relatives. While Jos was dispensing the gin, Charlie said, in a
low tone:

"Well, what luck, Jos?"

This was the first reference, by either of them, to the crisis.

Jos deliberately finished pouring out the gin. Then he said:

"There's two on 'em, Charlie."

"Two on 'em? What mean'st tha', lad?"

"I mean as it's twins."

Charlie and I were equally startled.

"Thou never says!" he murmured, incredulous.

"Ay! One o' both sorts," said Jos.

"Thou never says!" Charlie repeated, holding his glass of gin steady in
his hand.

"One come at summat after one o'clock, and th' other between five and
six. I had for fetch old woman Eardley to help. It were more than a
handful for Susannah and th' doctor."

Astonishing, that I should have slept through these events!

"How is her?" asked Charlie, quietly, as it were casually. I think this
appearance of casualness was caused by the stoic suppression of the
symptoms of anxiety.

"Her's bad," said Jos, briefly.

"And I am na' surprised," said Charlie. And he lifted the glass.
"Well--here's luck." He sipped the gin, savouring it on his tongue like
a connoisseur, and gradually making up his mind about its quality. Then
he took another sip.

"Hast seen her?"

"I seed her for a minute, but our Susannah wouldna' let me stop i' th'
room. Her was raving like."

"Missis?"

"Ay!"

"And th' babbies--hast seen _them_?"

"Ay! But I can make nowt out of 'em. Mrs Eardley says as her's never
seen no finer."

"Doctor gone?"

"That he has na'! He's bin up there all the blessed night, in his
shirt-sleeves. I give him a stiff glass o' whisky at five o'clock and
that's all as he's had."

Charlie finished his gin. The pair stood silent.

"Well," said Charlie, striking his leg. "Swelp me bob! It fair beats me!
Twins! Who'd ha'thought it? Jos, lad, thou mayst be thankful as it isna'
triplets. Never did I think, as I was footing it up here this morning,
as it was twins I was coming to!"

"Hast got that half quid in thy pocket?"

"What half quid?" said Charlie, defensively.

"Now then. Chuck us it over!" said Jos, suddenly harsh and overbearing.

"I laid thee half quid as it 'ud be a wench," said Charlie, doggedly.

"Thou'rt a liar, Charlie!" said Jos. "Thou laidst half a quid as it
wasna' a boy."

"Nay, nay!" Charlie shook his head.

"And a boy it is!" Jos persisted.

"It being a lad _and_ a wench," said Charlie, with a judicial air, "and
me 'aving laid as it 'ud be a wench, I wins." In his accents and his
gestures I could discern the mean soul, who on principle never paid
until he was absolutely forced to pay. I could see also that Jos Myatt
knew his man.

"Thou laidst me as it wasna' a lad," Jos almost shouted. "And a lad it
is, I tell thee."

"_And_ a wench!" said Charlie; then shook his head.

The wrangle proceeded monotonously, each party repeating over and over
again the phrases of his own argument. I was very glad that Jos did not
know me to be a witness of the making of the bet; otherwise I should
assuredly have been summoned to give judgment.

"Let's call it off, then," Charlie suggested at length. "That'll settle
it. And it being twins--"

"Nay, thou old devil, I'll none call it off. Thou owes me half a quid,
and I'll have it out of thee."

"Look ye here," Charlie said more softly. "I'll tell thee what'll settle
it. Which on 'em come first, th' lad or th'wench?"

"Th' wench come first," Jos Myatt admitted, with resentful reluctance,
dully aware that defeat was awaiting him.

"Well, then! Th' wench is thy eldest child. That's law, that is. And
what was us betting about, Jos lad? Us was betting about thy eldest and
no other. I'll admit as I laid it wasna' a lad, as thou sayst. And it
_wasna'_ a lad. First come is eldest, and us was betting about eldest."

Charlie stared at the father in triumph.

Jos Myatt pushed roughly past him in the narrow space behind the bar,
and came into the parlour. Nodding to me curtly, he unlocked the
bookcase and took two crown pieces from a leathern purse which lay next
to the bag. Then he returned to the bar and banged the coins on the
counter with fury.

"Take thy brass!" he shouted angrily. "Take thy brass! But thou'rt a
damned shark, Charlie, and if anybody 'ud give me a plug o' bacca for
doing it, I'd bash thy face in."

The other sniggered contentedly as he picked up his money.

"A bet's a bet," said Charlie.

He was clearly accustomed to an occasional violence of demeanour from
Jos Myatt, and felt no fear. But he was wrong in feeling no fear. He had
not allowed, in his estimate of the situation, for the exasperated
condition of Jos Hyatt's nerves under the unique experiences of the
night.

Jos's face twisted into a hundred wrinkles and his hand seized Charlie
by the arm whose hand held the coins.

"Drop 'em!" he cried loudly, repenting his naïve honesty. "Drop 'em! Or
I'll--"

The stout woman, her apron all soiled, now came swiftly and scarce heard
into the parlour, and stood at the door leading to the bar-room.

"What's up, Susannah?" Jos demanded in a new voice.

"Well may ye ask what's up!" said the woman. "Shouting and brangling
there, ye sots!"

"What's up?" Jos demanded again, loosing Charlie's arm.

"Her's gone!" the woman feebly whimpered. "Like that!" with a vague
movement of the hand indicating suddenness. Then she burst into wild
sobs and rushed madly back whence she had come, and the sound of her
sobs diminished as she ascended the stairs, and expired altogether in
the distant shutting of a door.

The men looked at each other.

Charlie restored the crown-pieces to the counter and pushed them towards
Jos.

"Here!" he murmured faintly.

Jos flung them savagely to the ground. Another pause followed.

"As God is my witness," he exclaimed solemnly, his voice saturated with
feeling, "as God is my witness," he repeated, "I'll ne'er touch a
footba' again!"

Little Charlie gazed up at him sadly, plaintively, for what seemed a
long while.

"It's good-bye to th' First League, then, for Knype!" he tragically
muttered, at length.




VIII


Dr Stirling drove the car very slowly back to Bursley. We glided gently
down into the populous valleys. All the stunted trees were coated with
rime, which made the sharpest contrast with their black branches and the
black mud under us. The high chimneys sent forth their black smoke
calmly and tirelessly into the fresh blue sky. Sunday had descended on
the vast landscape like a physical influence. We saw a snake of children
winding out of a dark brown Sunday school into a dark brown chapel. And
up from the valleys came all the bells of all the temples of all the
different gods of the Five Towns, chiming, clanging, ringing, each
insisting that it alone invited to the altar of the one God. And priests
and acolytes of the various cults hurried occasionally along, in silk
hats and bright neckties, and smooth coats with folded handkerchiefs
sticking out of the pockets, busy, happy and self-important, the
convinced heralds of eternal salvation: no doubt nor hesitation as to
any fundamental truth had ever entered their minds. We passed through a
long, straight street of new red houses with blue slate roofs, all gated
and gardened. Here and there a girl with her hair in pins and a rough
brown apron over a gaudy frock was stoning a front step. And half-way
down the street a man in a scarlet jersey, supported by two women in
blue bonnets, was beating a drum and crying aloud: "My friends, you may
die to-night. Where, I ask you, where--?" But he had no friends; not
even a boy heeded him. The drum continued to bang in our rear.

I enjoyed all this. All this seemed to me to be fine, seemed to throw
off the true, fine, romantic savour of life. I would have altered
nothing in it. Mean, harsh, ugly, squalid, crude, barbaric--yes, but
what an intoxicating sense in it of the organized vitality of a vast
community unconscious of itself! I would have altered nothing even in
the events of the night. I thought of the rooms at the top of the
staircase of the Foaming Quart--mysterious rooms which I had not seen
and never should see, recondite rooms from which a soul had slipped away
and into which two had come, scenes of anguish and of frustrated effort!
Historical rooms, surely! And yet not a house in the hundreds of houses
past which we slid but possessed rooms ennobled and made august by
happenings exactly as impressive in their tremendous inexplicableness.

The natural humanity of Jos Myatt and Charlie, their fashion of
comporting themselves in a sudden stress, pleased me. How else should
they have behaved? I could understand Charlie's prophetic dirge over the
ruin of the Knype Football Club. It was not that he did not feel the
tragedy in the house. He had felt it, and because he had felt it he had
uttered at random, foolishly, the first clear thought that ran into his
head.

Stirling was quiet. He appeared to be absorbed in steering, and looked
straight in front, yawning now and again. He was much more fatigued than
I was. Indeed, I had slept pretty well. He said, as we swerved into
Trafalgar Road and overtook the aristocracy on its way to chapel and
church:

"Well, ye let yeself in for a night, young man! No mistake!"

He smiled, and I smiled.

"What's going to occur up there?" I asked, indicating Toft End.

"What do you mean?"

"A man like that--left with two babies!"

"Oh!" he said. "They'll manage that all right. His sister's a widow.
She'll go and live with him. She's as fond of those infants already as
if they were her own."

We drew up at his double gates.

"Be sure ye explain to Brindley," he said, as I left him, "that it isn't
my fault ye've had a night out of bed. It was your own doing. I'm going
to get a bit of sleep now. See you this evening, Bob's asked me to
supper."

A servant was sweeping Bob Brindley's porch and the front door was open.
I went in. The sound of the piano guided me to the drawing-room.
Brindley, the morning cigarette between his lips, was playing one of
Maurice Ravel's "L'heure espagnole." He held his head back so as to keep
the smoke out of his eyes. His children in their blue jerseys were
building bricks on the carpet.

Without ceasing to play he addressed me calmly:

"You're a nice chap! Where the devil have you been?"

And one of the little boys, glancing up, said, with roguish, imitative
innocence, in his high, shrill voice:

"Where the del you been?"




MIMI

I


On a Saturday afternoon in late October Edward Coe, a satisfactory
average successful man of thirty-five, was walking slowly along the
King's Road, Brighton. A native and inhabitant of the Five Towns in the
Midlands, he had the brusque and energetic mien of the Midlands. It
could be seen that he was a stranger to the south; and, in fact, he was
now viewing for the first time the vast and glittering spectacle of the
southern pleasure city in the unique glory of her autumn season. A
spectacle to enliven any man by its mere splendour! And yet Edward Coe
was gloomy. One reason for his gloom was that he had just left a
bicycle, with a deflated back tyre, to be repaired at a shop in Preston
Street. Not perhaps an adequate reason for gloom!... Well, that depends.
He had been informed by the blue-clad repairer, after due inspection,
that the trouble was not a common puncture, but a malady of the valve
mysterious.

And the deflation was not the sole cause of his gloom. There was
another. He was on his honeymoon. Understand me--not a honeymoon of
romance, but a real honeymoon. Who that has ever been on a real
honeymoon can look back upon the adventure and faithfully say that it
was an unmixed ecstasy of joy? A honeymoon is in its nature and
consequences so solemn, so dangerous, and so pitted with startling
surprises, that the most irresponsible bridegroom, the most
light-hearted, the least in love, must have moments of grave anxiety.
And Edward Coe was far from irresponsible. Nor was he only a little in
love. Moreover, the circumstances of his marriage were peculiar, and he
had married a dark, brooding, passionate girl.

Mrs Coe was the younger of two sisters named Olive Wardle, well known in
the most desirable circles in the Five Towns. I mean those circles where
intellectual and artistic tastes are united with sound incomes and
excellent food delicately served. It will certainly be asked why two
sisters should be named Olive. The answer is that though Olive One and
Olive Two were treated as sisters, and even treated themselves as
sisters, they were not sisters. They were not even half-sisters. They
had first met at the age of nine. The father of Olive One, a widower,
had married the mother of Olive Two, a widow. Olive One was the elder by
a few months. Olive Two gradually allowed herself to be called Wardle
because it saved trouble. They got on with one another very well indeed,
especially after the death of both parents, when they became joint
mistresses, each with a separate income, of a nice house at Sneyd, the
fashionable residential village on the rim of the Five Towns. Like all
persons who live long together, they grew in many respects alike. Both
were dark, brooding and passionate, and to this deep similarity a
superficial similarity of habits and demeanour was added. Only, whereas
Olive One was rather more inclined to be the woman of the world, Olive
Two was rather more inclined to study and was particularly interested in
the theory of music.

They were sought after, naturally. And yet they had reached the age of
twenty-five before the world perceived that either of them was not
sought after in vain. The fact, obvious enough, that Pierre Emile
Vaillac had become an object of profound human interest to Olive
One--this fact excited the world, and the world would have been still
more excited had it been aware of another fact that was not at all
obvious: namely, that Pierre Emile Vaillac was the cause of a secret and
terrible breach between the two sisters. Vaillac, a widower with two
young children, Mimi and Jean, was a Frenchman, and a great authority on
the decoration of egg-shell china, who had settled in the Five Towns as
expert partner in one of the classic china firms at Longshaw. He was
undoubtedly a very attractive man.

Olive One, when the relations between herself and Vaillac were
developing into something unmistakable, had suddenly, and without
warning, accused Olive Two of poaching. It was a frightful accusation,
and a frightful scene followed it, one of those scenes that are seldom
forgiven and never forgotten. It altered their lives; but as they were
women of considerable common sense and of good breeding, each did her
best to behave afterwards as though nothing had happened.

Olive Two did not convince Olive One of her innocence, because she did
not bring forward the supreme proof of it. She was too proud--in her
brooding and her mystery--to do so. The supreme proof was that at this
time she herself was secretly engaged to be married to Edward Coe, who
had conquered her heart with unimaginable swiftness a few weeks before
she was about to sit for a musical examination at Manchester. "Let us
say nothing till after my exam," she had suggested to her betrothed.
"There will be an enormous fuss, and it will put me off, and I shall
fail, and I don't want to fail, and you don't want me to fail." He
agreed rapturously. Of course she did fail, nevertheless. But being
obstinate she said she would go in again, and they continued to make a
secret of the engagement. They found the secret delicious. Then followed
the devastating episode of Vaillac. Shortly afterwards Olive One and
Vaillac were married, and then Olive Two was alone in the nice house.
The examination was forgotten, and she hated the house. She wanted to be
married; Coe also. But nothing had been said. Difficult to announce her
engagement just then! The world would say that she had married out of
imitation, and her sister would think that she had married out of pique.
Besides, there would be the fuss, which Olive Two hated. Already the
fuss of her sister's marriage, and the effort at the wedding of
pretending that nothing had happened between them, had fatigued the
nerves of Olive Two.

Then Edward Coe had had the brilliant and seductive idea of marrying in
secret. To slip away, and then to return, saying, "We are married.
That's all!" ... Why not? No fuss! No ceremonial! The accomplished fact,
which simplifies everything!

It was, therefore, a secret honeymoon that Edward Coe was on;
delightful--but surreptitious, furtive! His mental condition may be best
described by stating that, though he was conscious of rectitude, he
somehow could not look a policeman in the face. After all, plain people
do not usually run off on secret honeymoons. Had he acted wisely?
Perhaps this question, presenting itself now and then, was the chief
cause of his improper gloom.


II


However, the spectacle of Brighton on a fine Saturday afternoon in
October had its effect on Edward Coe--the effect which it has on
everybody. Little by little it inspired him with the joy of life, and
straightened his back, and put a sparkle into his eyes. And he was
filled with the consciousness of the fact that it is a fine thing to be
well-dressed and to have loose gold in your pocket, and to eat, drink,
and smoke well; and to be among crowds of people who are well-dressed
and have loose gold in their pockets, and eat and drink and smoke well;
and to know that a magnificent woman will be waiting for you at a
certain place at a certain hour, and that upon catching sight of you
her dark orbs will take on an enchanting expression reserved for you
alone, and that she is utterly yours. In a word, he looked on the bright
side of things again. It could not ultimately matter a bilberry whether
his marriage was public or private.

He lit a cigarette gaily. He could not guess that untoward destiny was
waiting for him close by the newspaper kiosque.

A little girl was leaning against the palisade there, and gazing
somewhat restlessly about her. A quite little girl, aged, perhaps,
eleven, dressed in blue serge, with a short frock and long legs, and a
sailor hat (H.M.S. _Formidable_), and long hair down her back, and a
mild, twinkling, trustful glance. Somewhat untidy, but nevertheless the
image of grace.

She saw him first. Otherwise he might have fled. But he was right upon
her before he saw her. Indeed, he heard her before he saw her.

"Good afternoon, Mr Coe."

"Mimi!"

The Vaillacs were in Brighton! He had chosen practically the other end
of the world for his honeymoon, and lo! by some awful clumsiness of fate
the Vaillacs were at the same end! The very people from whom he wished
to conceal his honeymoon until it was over would know all about it at
the very start! Relations between the two Olives would be still more
strained and difficult! In brief, from optimism he swung violently back
to darkest pessimism. What could be worse than to be caught red-handed
in a surreptitious honeymoon?

She noticed his confusion, and he knew that she noticed it. She was a
little girl. But she was also a little woman, a little Frenchwoman, who
spoke English perfectly--and yet with a difference! They had flirted
together, she and Mr Coe. She had a new mother now, but for years she
had been without a mother, and she would receive callers at her
father's house (if he happened to be out) with a delicious imitation of
a practised hostess.

He raised his hat and shook hands and tried to play the game.

"What are you doing here, Mimi?" he asked.

"What are _you_ doing here?" she parried, laughing. And then, perceiving
his increased trouble, and that she was failing in tact, she went on
rapidly, with a screwing up of the childish shoulders and something
between a laugh and a grin: "It's my back. It seems it's not strong. And
so we've taken an ever so jolly little house for the autumn, because of
the air, you know. Didn't you know?"

No, he did not know. That was the worst of strained relations. You were
not informed of events in advance.

"Where?" he asked.

"Oh!" she said, pointing. "That way. On the road to Rottingdean. Near
the big girls' school. We came in on that lovely electric railway--along
the beach. Have you been on it, Mr Coe?"

Terrible! Rottingdean was precisely the scene of his honeymoon. The
hazard of fate was truly appalling. He and his wife might have walked
one day straight into the arms of her sister! He went hot and cold.

"And where are the others?" he asked nervously.

"Mamma"--she coloured as she used this word, so strange on her
lips--"mamma's at home. Father may come to-night. And Ada has brought us
here so that Jean can have his hair cut. He didn't want to come without
me."

"Ada?"

"Ada's a new servant. She's just gone in there again to see how long the
barber will be." Mimi indicated a barber's shop opposite. "And I'm
waiting here," she added.

"Mimi," he said, in a confidential tone, "can you keep a secret?"

She grew solemn. "Yes." She smiled seriously. "What?"

"About meeting me. Don't tell anybody you've met me to-day. See?"

"Not Jean?"

"No, not Jean. But later on you can tell--when I give you the tip. I
don't want anybody to know just now."

It was a shame. He knew it was a shame. He deliberately flattered her by
appealing to her as to a grown woman. He deliberately put a cajoling
tone into his voice. He would not have done it if Mimi had not been
Mimi--if she had been an ordinary sort of English girl. But she was
Mimi. And the temptation was very strong. She promised, gravely. He knew
that he could rely on her.

Hurrying away lest Jean and the servant might emerge from the barber's,
he remembered with compunction that he had omitted to show any curiosity
about Mimi's back.


III


The magnificent woman was to be waiting for him in the lounge of the
Royal York Hotel at a quarter to four. She was coming in to Brighton by
the Rottingdean omnibus, which function, unless the driver changes his
mind, occurs once in every two or three hours. He, being under the
necessity of telephoning to London on urgent business, had hired a
bicycle and ridden in. Despite the accident to this prehistoric machine,
he arrived at the Royal York half a minute before the Rottingdean
omnibus passed through the Old Steine and set down the magnificent woman
his wife. The sight of her stepping off the omnibus really did thrill
him. They entered the hotel together, and, accustomed though the Royal
York is to the reception of magnificent women, Olive made a sensation
therein. As for him, he could not help feeling just as though he had
eloped with her. He could not help fancying that all the brilliant
company in the lounge was murmuring under the strains of the band: "That
johnny there has certainly eloped with that splendid creature!"

"Ed," she asked, fixing her dark eyes upon him, "is anything the
matter?"

They were having tea at a little Moorish table in the huge bay window of
the lounge.

"No," he said. This was the first lie of his career as a husband. But
truly he could not bring himself to give her the awful shock of telling
her that the Vaillacs were close at hand, that their secret was
discovered, and that their peace and security depended entirely upon the
discretion of little Mimi and upon their not meeting other Vaillacs.

"Then it's having that puncture that has upset you," his wife insisted.
You see her feelings towards him were so passionate that she could not
leave him alone. She was utterly preoccupied by him.

"No," he said guiltily.

"I'm afraid you don't very much care for this place," she went on,
because she knew now that he was not telling her the truth, and that
something, indeed, was the matter.

"On the contrary," he replied, "I was informed that the finest tea and
the most perfect toast in Brighton were to be had in this lounge, and
upon my soul I feel as if I could keep on having tea here for ever and
ever amen!"

He was trying to be gay, but not very successfully.

"I don't mean just here," she said. "I mean all this south coast."

"Well--" he began judicially.

"Oh! Ed!" she implored him. "_Do_ say you don't like it!"

"Why!" he exclaimed. "Don't _you_?"

She shook her head. "I much prefer the north," she remarked.

"Well," he said, "let's go. Say Scarborough."

"You're joking," she murmured. "You adore this south coast."

"Never!" he asserted positively.

"Well, darling," she said, "if you hadn't said first that you didn't
care for it, of course I shouldn't have breathed a word--"

"Let's go to-morrow," he suggested.

"Yes." Her eyes shone.

"First train! We should have to leave Rottingdean at six o'clock a.m."

"How lovely!" she exclaimed. She was enchanted by this idea of a
capricious change of programme. It gave such a sense of freedom, of
irresponsibility, of romance!

"More toast, please," he said to the waiter, joyously.

It cost him no effort to be gay now. He could not have been sad. The
world was suddenly transformed into the best of all possible worlds. He
was saved! They were saved! Yes, he could trust Mimi. By no chance would
they be caught. They would stick in their rooms all the evening, and on
the morrow they would be away long before the Vaillacs were up. Papa and
"mamma" Vaillac were terrible for late rising. And when he had got his
magnificent Olive safe in Scarborough, or wherever their noses might
lead them, then he would tell her of the risk they had run.

They both laughed from mere irrational glee, and Edward Coe nearly
forgot to pay the bill. However, he did pay it. They departed from the
Royal York. He put his Olive into the returning Rottingdean omnibus, and
then hurried to get his repaired bicycle. He had momentarily quaked
lest Mimi and company might be in the omnibus. But they were not. They
must have left earlier, fortunately, or walked.


IV


When he was still about a mile away from Rottingdean, and the hour was
dusk, and he was walking up a hill, he caught sight of a girl leaning on
a gate that led by a long path to a house near the cliffs. It was Mimi.
She gave a cry of recognition. He did not care now--he was at ease
now--but really, with that house so close to the road and so close to
Rottingdean, he and his Olive had practically begun their honeymoon on
the summit of a volcano!

Mimi was pensive. He felt remorse at having bound her to secrecy. She
was so pensive, and so wistful, and her eyes were so loyal, that he felt
he owed her a more complete confidence.

"I'm on my honeymoon, Mimi," he said. It gave him pleasure to tell her.

"Yes," she said simply, "I saw Auntie Olive go by in the omnibus."

That was all she said. He was thunderstruck, as much by her calm
simplicity as by anything else. Children were astounding creatures.

"Did Jean see her, or anyone?" he asked.

Mimi shook her head.

Then he told her they were leaving the next morning at six.

"Shall you be in a carriage?" she inquired.

"Yes."

"Oh! Do let me come out and see you go past," she pleaded. "Nobody else
in our house will be up till hours afterwards!... Do!"

He was about to say "No," for it would mean revealing the whole affair
to his wife at once. But after an instant he said "Yes." He would not
refuse that exquisite, appealing gesture. Besides, why keep anything
whatever from Olive, even for a day?

At dinner he told his wife, and was glad to learn that she also thought
highly of Mimi and had confidence in her.




V


Mimi lay in bed in the nursery of the hired house on the way to
Rottingdean, which, considering that it was not "home," was a fairly
comfortable sort of abode. The nursery was immense, though an attic. The
white blinds of the two windows were drawn, and a fire burned in the
grate, lighting it pleasantly and behaving in a very friendly manner. At
the other end of the room, in the deep shadow, was Jean's bed.

The door opened quietly and someone came into the room and pushed the
door to without quite shutting it.

"Is that you, mamma?" Jean demanded in his shrill voice, from the
distance of the bed in the corner. His age was exactly eight.

"Yes, dear," said the new stepmother.

The menial Ada had arranged the children for the night, and now the
stepmother had come up to kiss them and be kind. She was a conscientious
young woman, full of a desire to do right, and she had determined not to
be like the traditional stepmother.

She kissed Jean, who had taken quite a fancy to her, and tickled him
agreeably, and tucked him up anew, and then moved silently across the
room to Mimi. Mimi could see her face in the twilight of the fire. A
handsome, good-natured face; yet very determined, and perhaps a little
too full of common sense. It had a responsible, somewhat grave look.
After all, these two young children were a responsibility, especially
Mimi with her back; and, moreover, Pierre Emile Vaillac had disappointed
both her and her step-children by telegraphing that he could not arrive
that night. Olive One, the bride of three months, had put on fine
raiment for nothing.

"Well, Mimi," she said in her low, vibrating voice, as she stood over
the bed, "I do hope you didn't overtire yourself this afternoon." Then
she kissed Mimi.

"Oh no, mamma!" The little girl smiled.

"It seems you waited outside the barber's while Jeannot was having his
hair cut."

"Yes, mamma. I didn't like to go in."

"Ada didn't stay with you all the time?"

"No, mamma. First of all she took Jeannot in, and then she came out to
me, and then she went in again to see how long he would be."

"I'm sorry she left you alone in the street. She ought not to have done
so, and I've told her.... The King's Road, with all kinds of people
about!"

Mimi said nothing. The new Madame Vaillac moved a little towards the
fire.

"Of course," the latter went on, "I know you're a regular little woman,
and perhaps I needn't tell you but you must never speak to anyone in the
street."

"No, mamma."

"Particularly in Brighton.... You never do, do you?"

"No, mamma."

"Good-night."

The stepmother left the room. Mimi could feel her heart beating. Then
Jean called out:

"Mimi."

She made no reply. The fact was she was too disturbed to be able to
reply.

Jean called again and then got out of bed and thudded across the room to
her bedside.

"I say, Mimi," he screeched in his insistent treble, "who _was_ it you
were talking to?"

Mimi's heart did not beat, it jumped.

"When? Where?"

"This afternoon, when I was having my hair cut."

"How do you know I was talking to anybody?"

"Ada saw you through the window of the barber's."

"When did she tell you?"

"She didn't. I heard her telling mamma."

There was a silence. Then Mimi hid her face, and Jean could hear
sobbing.

"You might tell me!" Jean insisted. He was too absorbed by his own
curiosity, and too upset by the full realization of the fact that she
had kept something from him, to be touched by her tears.

"It's a secret," she muttered into the pillow.

"You might tell me!"

"Go away, Jeannot!" she burst out hysterically.

He gave an angry lunge against the bed.

"I tell you everything; and it's not fair. _C'est pas juste!_" he said
savagely, but there were tears in his voice too. He was a creature at
once sensitive and violent, passionately attached to Mimi.

He thudded back to his bed. But even before he had reached his bed Mimi
could hear him weeping.

She gradually stilled her own sobs, and after a time Jean's ceased. And
then she guessed that Jean had gone to sleep. But Mimi did not go to
sleep. She knew that chance, and Mr Coe, and that odious new servant,
Ada, had combined to ruin her life. She saw the whole affair clearly.
Ada was officious and fussy, also secretive and given to plotting. Ada's
leading idea was that children had to be circumvented. Imagine the
detestable woman spying on her from the window, and then saying nothing
to her, but sneaking off to tell tales to her mamma! Imagine it! Mimi's
strict sense of justice could not blame her mamma. She was sure that
the new stepmother meant well by her. Her mamma had given her every
opportunity to confess, to admit of her own accord that she had been
talking to somebody in the street, and she had not confessed. On the
contrary, she had lied. Her mamma would probably say nothing more on the
matter, for she had a considerable sense of honour with children, and
would not take an unfair advantage. Having tried to obtain a confession
from Mimi by pretending that she knew nothing, and having failed, she
was not the woman to turn round and say, "Now I know all about it. So
just confess at once!" Her mamma would accept the situation, would try
to behave as if nothing had happened, and would probably even say
nothing to her father.

But Mimi knew that she was ruined for ever in her stepmother's esteem.

And she had quarrelled with Jean, which was exceedingly hateful and
exceedingly rare. And there was also the private worry of her mysterious
back. And there was another thing. The mere fact that her friend, Mr
Coe, had gone and married somebody. For long she had had a weakness for
Mr Coe. They had been intimate at times. Once, last year, in the stern
of a large sailing-boat at Morecambe, while her friends were laughing
and shouting at the prow, she and Mr Coe had had a most beautiful quiet
conversation about her thoughts on the world in general; she had stroked
his hand.... No! She had no dream whatever of growing up into a woman
and then marrying Mr Coe! Certainly not. But still, that he should have
gone and married, like that ... it was....

The fire died out into blackness, thus ceasing to be a friend. Still she
did not sleep. Was it likely that she should sleep, with the tragedy and
woe of the entire universe crushing her?




VI


Mr Edward Coe and Olive Two arose from their bed the next morning in
great spirits. Mr Coe had told both his wife and Mimi that the hour of
departure from Rottingdean would be six o'clock. But this was an
exaggeration. So far as his wife was concerned he had already found it
well to exaggerate on such matters. A little judicious exaggeration
lessened the risk of missing trains and other phenomena which cannot be
missed without confusion and disappointment.

As a fact it was already six o'clock when Edward Coe looked forth from
the bedroom window. He was completely dressed. His wife also was
completely dressed. He therefore felt quite safe about the train. The
window, which was fairly high up in the world, gave on the south-east,
so that he had a view, not only of the vast naked downs billowing away
towards Newhaven, but also of the Channel, which was calm, and upon
which little parcels of fog rested. The sky was clear overhead, of a
greenish sapphire colour, and the autumnal air bit and gnawed on the
skin like some friendly domestic animal, and invigorated like an
expensive tonic. On the dying foliage of a tree near the window millions
of precious stones hung. Cocks were boasting. Cows were expressing a
justifiable anxiety. And in the distance a small steamer was making a
great deal of smoke about nothing, as it puffed out of Newhaven harbour.

"Olive," he said.

"What is it?"

She was putting hats into the top of her trunk. She had a special
hat-box, but the hats were too large for it, and she packed minor
trifles in the hat-box, such as skirts. This was one of the details
which first indicated to an astounded Edward Coe that a woman is never
less like a man than when travelling.

"Come here," he commanded her.

She obeyed.

"Look at that," he commanded her, pointing to the scene of which the
window was the frame.

She obeyed. She also looked at him with her dark, passionate, and yet
half-mocking eyes.

"Yes," she said, "and who's going to make that trunk lock?"

She snapped her fingers at the sweet morning influences of Nature, to
which he was peculiarly sensitive. And yet he was delighted. He found it
entirely delicious that she should say, when called upon to admire
Nature: "Who's going to make that trunk lock?"

He stroked her hair.

"It's no use trying to keep your hair decent at the seaside," she
remarked, pouting exquisitely.

He explained that his hand was offering no criticism of her hair. And
then there was a knock at the bedroom door, and Olive Two jumped a
little away from her husband.

"Come in," he cried, pretending to be as bold as a lion.

However, he had forgotten that the door was locked, and he had to go and
open it.

A tray with coffee and milk and sugar and slices of bread-and-butter was
in the doorway, and behind the tray the little parlour-maid of the
little hotel. He greeted the girl and instructed her to carry the
tray to the table by the window.

"You are prompt," said Olive Two, kindly. She had got up so miraculously
early herself that she was startled to see any other woman up quite as
early. And also she was a little surprised that the parlour-maid showed
no surprise at these very unusual hours.

"Yes'm," replied the parlour-maid, wondering why Olive Two was so
excited. The parlour-maid arose at five-thirty every morning of her
life, except on special occasions, when she arose at four-thirty to
assist in pastoral affairs.

"All right, this coffee, eh?" murmured Edward Coe as he put down the
steaming cup after his first sip. They were alone again, seated opposite
each other at the small table by the window.

Olive Two nodded.

It must not be supposed that this was the one unique dreamed-of hotel in
England where the coffee is good of its own accord. No! In the matter of
coffee this hotel was just like all other hotels. Only Olive Two had
taken special precautions about that coffee. She had been into the hotel
kitchen on the previous evening about that coffee.

"By the way," she asked, "where's the sun?"

"The sun doesn't happen to be up yet," said Edward. He looked at his
diary and then at his watch. "Unless something goes wrong, you'll be
seeing it inside of three minutes."

"Do you mean to say we shall see the sun rise?" she exclaimed.

He nodded.

"Well!" cried she, absurdly gleeful, "I never heard of such a thing!"

She watched the sunrise like a child who sees for the first time the
inside of a watch. And when the sun had risen she glanced anxiously
round the disordered room.

"For heaven's sake," she muttered, "don't let's forget these
tooth-brushes!"

"You are so ridiculous," said he, "that I must kiss you."

The truth is that they were no better than two children out on an
adventure.

It was the same when down in the hotel-yard they got into the small and
decrepit victoria which was destined to take them and their luggage to
Brighton. It was the same, but more so. They were both so pleased with
themselves that their joy was bubbling continually out in manifestations
that could only be described as infantile. The mere drive through the
village, with the pony whisking his tail round corners, and the driver
steadying the perilous hat-box with his left hand, was so funny that
somehow they could not help laughing.

Then they had left the village and were climbing the exposed highroad,
with the wavy blue-green downs on the right, and the immense glittering
flat floor of the Channel on the left. And the mere sensation of being
alive almost overwhelmed them.

And further on they passed a house that stood by itself away from the
road towards the cliffs. It had a sloping garden and a small greenhouse.
The gate leading to the road was ajar, but the blinds of all the windows
were drawn, and there was no sign of life anywhere.

"That's the house," said Edward Coe, briefly.

"I might have known it," Olive Two replied. "Olive One is certainly the
worst getter-up that I ever had anything to do with, and I believe
Pierre Emile isn't much better."

"Well," said Edward, "it's no absolute proof of sluggardliness not to be
up and about at six forty-five of a morning, you know."

"I was forgetting how early it was!" said Olive Two, and yawned. The
yawn escaped her before she was aware of it. She pulled herself together
and kissed her hands mockingly, quizzically, to the house. "Good-bye,
house! Good-bye, house!"

They were saved now. They could not be caught now on their surreptitious
honeymoon. And their spirits went even higher.

"I thought you said Mimi would be waiting for us?" Olive Two remarked.

Edward Coe shrugged his shoulders. "Probably overslept herself! Or she
may have got tired of waiting. I told her six o'clock."

On the whole Olive Two was relieved that Mimi was invisible.

"It wouldn't really matter if she _did_ split on us, would it?" said the
bride.

"Not a bit," the bridegroom agreed. Now that they had safely left the
house behind them, they were both very valiant. It was as if they were
both saying: "Who cares?" The bridegroom's mood was entirely different
from his sombre apprehensiveness of the previous evening. And the early
sunshine on the dew-drops was magnificent.

But a couple of hundred yards further on, at a bend of the road, they
saw a little girl shading her eyes with her hand and gazing towards the
sun. She wore a short blue serge frock, and she had long restless legs,
and the word _Formidable_ was on her forehead, and her eyes were all
screwed up in the strong sunshine. And in her hand were flowers.

"There she is, after all!" said Edward, quickly.

Olive Two nodded. Olive Two also blushed, for Mimi was the first person
acquainted with her to see her after her marriage. She blushed because
she was now a married woman.

Mimi, who with much prudence had managed so that the meeting should not
occur exactly in front of the house, came towards the carriage. The pony
was walking up a slope. She bounded forward with her childish grace and
with the awkwardness of her long legs, and her hair loose in the breeze,
and she laughed nervously.

"Good morning, good morning," she cried. "Shall I jump on the step? Then
the horse won't have to stop."

And she jumped lightly on to the step and giggled, still nervously,
looking first at the bridegroom and then at the bride. The bridegroom
held her securely by the shoulder.

"Well, Mimi," said Olive Two, whose shyness vanished in an instant
before the shyness of the child. "This _is_ nice of you."

The two women kissed. But Mimi did not offer her cheek to the
bridegroom. He and she simply shook hands as well as they could with a
due regard for Mimi's firmness on the step.

"And who woke you up, eh?" Edward Coe demanded.

"Nobody," said Mimi; "I got up by myself, and," turning to Olive Two,
"I've made this bouquet for you, auntie. There aren't any flowers in the
fields. But I got the chrysanthemum out of the greenhouse, and put some
bits of ferns and things round it. You must excuse it being tied up with
darning wool."

She offered the bouquet diffidently, and Olive Two accepted it with a
warm smile.

"Well," said Mimi, "I don't think I'd better go any further, had I?"

There was another kiss and hand-shaking, and the next moment Mimi was
standing in the road and waving a little crumpled handkerchief to the
receding victoria, and the bride and bridegroom were cricking their
necks to respond. She waved until the carriage was out of sight, and
then she stood moveless, a blue and white spot on the green landscape,
with the morning sun and the sea behind her.

"Exactly like a little woman, isn't she?" said Edward Coe, enchanted by
the vision.

"Exactly!" Olive Two agreed. "Nice little thing! But how tired and
unwell she looks! They did well to bring her away."

"Oh!" said Edward Coe, "she probably didn't sleep well because she was
afraid of oversleeping herself. She looked perfectly all right
yesterday."




THE SUPREME ILLUSION




I


Perhaps it was because I was in a state of excited annoyance that I did
not recognize him until he came right across the large hall of the hotel
and put his hand on my shoulder.

I had arrived in Paris that afternoon, and driven to that nice,
reasonable little hotel which we all know, and whose name we all give in
confidence to all our friends; and there was no room in that hotel. Nor
in seven other haughtily-managed hotels that I visited! A kind of
archduke, who guarded the last of the seven against possible customers,
deigned to inform me that the season was at its fullest, half London
being as usual in Paris, and that the only central hotels where I had a
chance of reception were those monstrosities the Grand and the Hôtel
Terminus at the Gare St Lazare. I chose the latter, and was accorded
room 973 in the roof.

I thought my exasperations were over. But no! A magnificent porter
within the gate had just consented to get my luggage off the cab, and
was in the act of beginning to do so, when a savagely-dressed, ugly and
ageing woman, followed by a maid, rushed neurotically down the steps and
called him away to hold a parcel. He obeyed! At the same instant the
barbaric and repulsive creature's automobile, about as large as a
railway carriage, drove up and forced my frail cab down the street. I
had to wait, humiliated and helpless, the taximeter of my cab
industriously adding penny to penny, while that offensive hag installed
herself, with the help of the maid, the porter and two page-boys, in her
enormous vehicle. I should not have minded had she been young and
pretty. If she had been young and pretty she would have had the right to
be rude and domineering. But she was neither young nor pretty.
Conceivably she had once been young; pretty she could never have been.
And her eyes were hard--hard.

Hence my state of excited annoyance.

"Hullo! How goes it?" The perfect colloquial English was gently murmured
at me with a French accent as the gentle hand patted my shoulder.

"Why," I said, cast violently out of a disagreeable excitement into an
agreeable one, "I do believe you are Boissy Minor!"

I had not seen him for nearly twenty years, but I recognized in that
soft and melancholy Jewish face, with the soft moustache and the soft
beard, the wistful features of the boy of fifteen who had been my
companion at an "international" school (a clever invention for
inflicting exile upon patriots) with branches at Hastings, Dresden and
Versailles.

Soon I was telling him, not without satisfaction, that, being a dramatic
critic, and attached to a London daily paper which had decided to
flatter its readers by giving special criticisms of the more important
new French plays, I had come to Paris for the production of _Notre Dame
de la Lune_ at the Vaudeville.

And as I told him the idea occurred to me for positively the first time:

"By the way, I suppose you aren't any relation of Octave Boissy?"

I rather hoped he was; for after all, say what you like, there is a
certain pleasure in feeling that you have been to school with even a
relative of so tremendous a European celebrity as Octave Boissy--the man
who made a million and a half francs with his second play, which was
nevertheless quite a good play. All the walls of Paris were shouting his
name.

"I'm the johnny himself," he replied with timidity, naïvely proud of his
Saxon slang.

I did not give an astounded _No_! An astounded _No_! would have been
rude. Still, my fear is that I failed to conceal entirely my amazement.
I had to fight desperately against the natural human tendency to assume
that no boy with whom one has been to school can have developed into a
great man.

"Really!" I remarked, as calmly as I could, and added a shocking lie:
"Well, I'm not surprised!" And at the same time I could hear myself
saying a few days later at the office of my paper: "I met Octave Boissy
in Paris. Went to school with him, you know."

"You'd forgotten my Christian name, probably," he said.

"No, I hadn't," I answered. "Your Christian name was Minor. You never
had any other!" He smiled kindly. "But what on earth are you doing
here?"

Octave Boissy was a very wealthy man. He even looked a very wealthy man.
He was one of the darlings of success and of an absurdly luxurious
civilization. And he seemed singularly out of place in the vast, banal
foyer of the Hôtel Terminus, among the shifting, bustling crowd of
utterly ordinary, bourgeois, moderately well-off tourists and travellers
and needy touts. He ought at least to have been in a very select private
room at the Meurice or the Bristol, if in any hotel at all!

"The fact is, I'm neurasthenic," he said simply, just as if he had been
saying, "The fact is, I've got a wooden leg."

"Oh!" I laughed, determined to treat him as Boissy Minor, and not as
Octave Boissy.

"I have a morbid horror of walking in the open air. And yet I cannot
bear being in a small enclosed space, especially when it's moving. This
is extremely inconvenient. _Mais que veux-tu?... Suis comme ça!_"

"_Je te plains_" I put in, so as to return his familiar and flattering
"thou" immediately.

"I was strongly advised to go and stay in the country," he went on, with
the same serious, wistful simplicity, "and so I ordered a special saloon
carriage on the railway, so as to have as much breathing room as
possible; and I ventured from my house to this station in an auto. I
thought I could surely manage that. But I couldn't! I had a terrible
crisis on arriving at the station, and I had to sit on a luggage-truck
for four hours. I couldn't have persuaded myself to get into the saloon
carriage for a fortune! I couldn't go back home in the auto! I couldn't
walk! So I stepped into the hotel. I've been here ever since."

"But when was this?"

"Three months ago. My doctors say that in another six weeks I shall be
sufficiently recovered to leave. It is a most distressing malady. _Mais
que veux-tu?_ I have a suite in the hotel and my own servants. I walk
out here into the hall because it's so large. The hotel people do the
best they can, but of course--" He threw up his hands. His resigned,
gentle smile was at once comic and tragic to me.

"But do you mean to say you couldn't walk out of that door and go home?"
I questioned.

"Daren't!" he said, with finality. "Come to my rooms, will you, and have
some tea."

II

A little later his own valet served us with tea in a large private
drawing-room on the sixth or seventh floor, to reach which we had
climbed a thousand and one stairs; it was impossible for Octave Boissy
to use the lift, as he was convinced that he would die in it if he took
such a liberty with himself. The room was hung with modern pictures,
such as had certainly never been seen in any hotel before. Many
knick-knacks and embroideries were also obviously foreign to the hotel.

"But how have you managed to attend the rehearsals of the new play?" I
demanded.

"Oh!" said he, languidly, "I never attend any rehearsals of my plays.
Mademoiselle Lemonnier sees to all that."

"She takes the leading part in this play, doesn't she, according to the
posters?"

"She takes the leading part in all my plays," said he.

"A first-class artiste, no doubt? I've never seen her act."

"Neither have I!" said Octave Boissy. And as I now yielded frankly to my
astonishment, he added: "You see, I am not interested in the theatre.
Not only have I never attended a rehearsal, but I have never seen a
performance of any of my plays. Don't you remember that it was
engineering, above all else, that attracted me? I have a truly wonderful
engineering shop in the basement of my house in the Avenue du Bois. I
should very much have liked you to see it; but you comprehend, don't
you, that I'm just as much cut off from the Avenue du Bois as I am from
Timbuctoo. My malady is the most exasperating of all maladies."

"Well, Boissy Minor," I observed, "I suppose it has occurred to you that
your case is calculated to excite wonder in the simple breast of a
brutal Englishman."

He laughed, and I was glad that I had had the courage to reduce him
definitely to the rank of Boissy Minor.

"And not only in the breast of an Englishman!" he said. "_Mais que
veux-tu?_ One must live."

"But I should have thought you could have made a comfortable living out
of engineering. In England consulting engineers are princes."

"Oh yes!"

"And engineering might have cured your neurasthenia, if you had taken it
in sufficiently large quantities."

"It would," he agreed quietly.

"Then why the theatre, seeing that the theatre doesn't interest you?"

"In order to live," he replied. "And when I say 'live,' I mean _live_.
It is not a question of money, it is a question of _living_."

"But as you never go near the theatre--"

"I write solely for Blanche Lemonnier," he said. I was at a loss.
Perceiving this, he continued intimately: "Surely you know of my
admiration for Blanche Lemonnier?"

I shook my head.

"I have never even heard of Blanche Lemonnier, save in connection with
your plays," I said.

"She is only known in connection with my plays," he answered. "When I
met her, a dozen years ago, she was touring the provinces, playing small
parts in third-rate companies. I asked her what was her greatest
ambition, and she said that it was to be applauded as a star on the
Paris stage. I told her that I would satisfy her ambition, and that when
I had done so I hoped she would satisfy mine. That was how I began to
write plays. That was my sole reason. It is the sole reason why I keep
on writing them. If she had desired to be a figure in Society I should
have gone into politics."

"I am getting very anxious to see this lady," I said. "I feel as if I
can scarcely wait till to-night."

"She will probably be here in a few minutes," said he.

"But how did you do it?" I asked. "What was your plan of campaign?"

"After the success of my first play I wrote the second specially for
her, and I imposed her on the management. I made her a condition. The
management kicked, but I was in a position to insist. I insisted."

"It sounds simple." I laughed uneasily.

"If you are a dramatic critic," he said, "you will guess that it was not
at first quite so simple as it sounds. Of course it is simple enough
now. Blanche Lemonnier is now completely identified with my plays. She
is as well known as nearly any actress in Paris. She has the glory she
desired." He smiled curiously. "Her ambition is satisfied--so is mine."
He stopped.

"Well," I said, "I've never been so interested in any play before. And I
shall expect Mademoiselle Lemonnier to be magnificent."

"Don't expect too much," he returned calmly. "Blanche's acting is not
admired by everybody. And I cannot answer for her powers, as I've never
seen her at work."

"It's that that's so extraordinary!"

"Not a bit! I could not bear to see her on the stage. I hate the idea of
her acting in public. But it is her wish. And after all, it is not the
actress that concerns me. It is the woman. It is the woman alone who
makes my life worth living. So long as she exists and is kind to me my
neurasthenia is a matter of indifference, and I do not even trouble
about engineering."

He tried to laugh away the seriousness of his tone, but he did not quite
succeed. Hitherto I had been amused at his singular plight and his
fatalistic acceptance of it. But now I was touched.

"I'm talking very freely to you," he said.

"My dear fellow," I burst out, "do let me see her portrait."

He shook his head.

"Unfortunately her portrait is all over Paris. She likes it so. But I
prefer to have no portrait myself. My feeling is--"

At that moment the valet opened the door and we heard vivacious voices
in the corridor.

"She is here," said Octave Boissy, in a whisper suddenly dramatic. He
stood up; I also. His expression had profoundly changed. He controlled
his gestures and his attitude, but he could not control his eye. And
when I saw that glance I understood what he meant by "living." I
understood that, for him, neither fame nor artistic achievement nor
wealth had any value in his life. His life consisted in one thing only.

"_Eh bien, Blanche!_" he murmured amorously.

Blanche Lemonnier invaded the room with arrogance. She was the odious
creature whose departure in her automobile had so upset my arrival.




THE LETTER AND THE LIE


I

As he hurried from his brougham through the sombre hall to his study,
leaving his secretary far in the rear, he had already composed the first
sentence of his address to the United Chambers of Commerce of the Five
Towns; his mind was full of it; he sat down at once to his vast desk,
impatient to begin dictating. Then it was that he perceived the letter,
lodged prominently against the gold and onyx inkstand given to him on
his marriage by the Prince and Princess of Wales. The envelope was
imperfectly fastened, or not fastened at all, and the flap came apart as
he fingered it nervously.

"Dear Cloud,--This is to say good-bye, finally--"

He stopped. Fear took him at the heart, as though he had been suddenly
told by a physician that he must submit to an operation endangering his
life. And he skipped feverishly over the four pages to the signature,
"Yours sincerely, Gertrude."

The secretary entered.

"I must write one or two private letters first," he said to the
secretary. "Leave me. I'll ring."

"Yes, sir. Shall I take your overcoat?"

"No, no."

A discreet closing of the door.

"--finally. I can't stand it any longer. Cloud, I'm gone to Italy. I
shall use the villa at Florence, and trust you to leave me alone. You
must tell our friends. You can start with the Bargraves to-night. I'm
sure they'll agree with me it's for the best--"

It seemed to him that this letter was very like the sort of letter that
gets read in the Divorce Court and printed in the papers afterwards; and
he felt sick.

"--for the best. Everybody will know in a day or two, and then in
another day or two the affair will be forgotten. It's difficult to write
naturally under the circumstances, so all I'll say is that we aren't
suited to each other, Cloud. Ten years of marriage has amply proved
that, though I knew it six--seven--years ago. You haven't guessed that
you've been killing me all these years; but it is so--"

Killing her! He flushed with anger, with indignation, with innocence,
with guilt--with Heaven knew what!

"--it is so. _You've_ been living _your_ life. But what about me? In
five more years I shall be old, and I haven't begun to live. I can't
_stand_ it any longer. I can't stand this awful Five Towns district--"

Had he not urged her many a time to run up to South Audley Street for a
change, and leave him to continue his work? Nobody wanted her to be
always in Staffordshire!

"--and I can't stand _you_. That's the brutal truth. You've got on my
nerves, my poor boy, with your hurry, and your philanthropy, and your
commerce, and your seriousness. My poor nerves! And you've been too busy
to notice it. You fancied I should be content if you made love to me
absent-mindedly, _en passant_, between a political dinner and a bishop's
breakfast."

He flinched. She had stung him.

"I sting you--"

No! And he straightened himself, biting his lips!

"--I sting you! I'm rude! I'm inexcusable! People don't say these
things, not even hysterical wives to impeccable husbands, eh? I admit
it. But I was bound to tell you. You're a serious person, Cloud, and
I'm not. Still, we were both born as we are, and I've just as much
right to be unserious as you have to be serious. That's what you've
never realized. You aren't better than me; you're only different from
me. It is unfortunate that there are some aspects of the truth that you
are incapable of grasping. However, after this morning's scene--"

Scene? What scene? He remembered no scene, except that he had asked her
not to interrupt him while he was reading his letters, had asked her
quite politely, and she had left the breakfast-table. He thought she had
left because she had finished. He hadn't a notion--what nonsense!

"--this morning's scene, I decided not to 'interrupt' you any more--"

Yes. There was the word he had used--how childish she was!

"--any more in the contemplation of those aspects of the truth which you
_are_ capable of grasping. Good-bye! You're an honest man, and a
straight man, and very conscientious, and very clever, and I expect
you're doing a lot of good in the world. But your responsibilities are
too much for you. I relieve you of one, quite a minor one--your wife.
You don't want a wife. What you want is a doll that you can wind up once
a fortnight to say 'Good-morning, dear,' and 'Good-night, dear.' I think
I can manage without a husband for a very long time. I'm not so bitter
as you might guess from this letter, Cloud. But I want you thoroughly to
comprehend that it's finished between us. You can do what you like.
People can say what they like. I've had enough. I'll pay any price for
freedom. Good luck. Best wishes. I would write this letter afresh if I
thought I could do a better one.--Yours sincerely, Gertrude."

He dropped the letter, picked it up and read it again and then folded it
in his accustomed tidy manner and replaced it in the envelope. He sat
down and propped the letter against the inkstand and stared at the
address in her careless hand: "The Right Honourable Sir Cloud Malpas,
Baronet." She had written the address in full like that as a last stroke
of sarcasm. And she had not even put "Private."

He was dizzy, nearly stunned; his head rang.

Then he rose and went to the window. The high hill on which stood Malpas
Manor--the famous Rat Edge--fell away gradually to the south, and in the
distance below him, miles off, the black smoke of the Five Towns loomed
above the yellow fires of blast-furnaces. He was the demi-god of the
district, a greater landowner than even the Earl of Chell, a model
landlord, a model employer of four thousand men, a model proprietor of
seven pits and two iron foundries, a philanthropist, a religionist, the
ornamental mayor of Knype, chairman of a Board of Guardians, governor of
hospitals, president of Football Association--in short, Sir Cloud, son
of Sir Cloud and grandson of Sir Cloud.

He stared dreamily at his dominion. Scandal, then, was to touch him with
her smirching finger, him the spotless! Gertrude had fled. He had ruined
Gertrude's life! Had he? With his heavy and severe conscientiousness he
asked himself whether he was to blame in her regard. Yes, he thought he
was to blame. It stood to reason that he was to blame. Women, especially
such as Gertrude, proud, passionate, reserved, don't do these things for
nothing.

With a sigh he passed into his dressing-room and dropped on to a sofa.

She would be inflexible--he knew her. His mind dwelt on the beautiful
first days of their marriage, the tenderness and the dream! And now--!

He heard footsteps in the study; the door was opened! It was Gertrude!
He could see her in the dusk. She had returned! Why? She tripped to the
desk, leaned forward and snatched at the letter. Evidently she did not
know that he was in the house and had read it.

The tension was too painful. A sigh broke from him, as it were of
physical torture.

"Who's there?" she cried, in a startled voice. "Is that you, Cloud?"

"Yes," he breathed.

"But you're home very early!" Her voice shook.

"I'm not well, Gertrude," he replied. "I'm tired. I came in here to lie
down. Can't you do something for my head? I must have a holiday."

He heard her crunch up the letter, and then she hastened to him in the
dressing-room.

"My poor Cloud!" she said, bending over him in the mature elegance of
her thirty years. He noticed her travelling costume. "Some eau de
Cologne?"

He nodded weakly.

"We'll go away for a holiday," he said, later, as she bathed his
forehead.

The touch of her hands on his temples reminded him of forgotten
caresses. And he did really feel as though, within a quarter of an hour,
he had been through a long and dreadful illness and was now
convalescent.




II


"Then you think that after starting she thought better of it?" said Lord
Bargrave after dinner that night. "And came back?"

Lord Bargrave was Gertrude's cousin, and he and his wife sometimes came
over from Shropshire for a week-end. He sat with Sir Cloud in the
smoking-room; a man with greying hair and a youngish, equable face.

"Yes, Harry, that was it. You see, I'd just happened to put the letter
exactly where I found it. She's no notion that I've seen it."

"She's a thundering good actress!" observed Lord Bargrave, sipping some
whisky. "I knew something was up at dinner, but I didn't know it from
_her_: I knew it from you."

Sir Cloud smiled sadly.

"Well, you see, I'm supposed to be ill--at least, to be not well."

"You'd best take her away at once," said Lord Bargrave. "And don't do it
clumsily. Say you'll go away for a few days, and then gradually lengthen
it out. She mentioned Italy, you say. Well, let it be Italy. Clear out
for six months."

"But my work here?"

"D--n your work here!" said Lord Bargrave. "Do you suppose you're
indispensable here? Do you suppose the Five Towns can't manage without
you? Our caste is decayed, my boy, and silly fools like you try to
lengthen out the miserable last days of its importance by giving
yourselves airs in industrial districts! Your conscience tells you that
what the demagogues say is true--we _are_ rotters on the face of the
earth, we _are_ mediæval; and you try to drown your conscience in the
noise of philanthropic speeches. There isn't a sensible working-man in
the Five Towns who doesn't, at the bottom of his heart, assess you at
your true value--as nothing but a man with a hobby, and plenty of time
and money to ride it."

"I do not agree with you," Sir Cloud said stiffly.

"Yes, you do," said Lord Bargrave. "At the same time I admire you,
Cloud. I'm not built the same way myself, but I admire you--except in
the matter of Gertrude. There you've been wrong--of course from the
highest motives: which makes it all the worse. A man oughtn't to put
hobbies above the wife of his bosom. And, besides, she's one of _us_.
So take her away and stay away and make love to her."

"Suppose I do? Suppose I try? I must tell her!"

"Tell her what?"

"That I read the letter. I acted a lie to her this afternoon. I can't
let that lie stand between us. It would not be right."

Lord Bargrave sprang up.

"Cloud," he cried. "For heaven's sake, don't be an infernal ass. Here
you've escaped a domestic catastrophe of the first magnitude by a
miracle. You've made a sort of peace with Gertrude. She's come to her
senses. And now you want to mess up the whole show by the act of an
idiot! What if you did act a lie to her this afternoon? A very good
thing! The most sensible thing you've done for years! Let the lie stand
between you. Look at it carefully every morning when you awake. It will
help you to avoid repeating in the future the high-minded errors of the
past. See?"




III


And in Lady Bargrave's dressing-room that night Gertrude was confiding
in Lady Bargrave.

"Yes," she said, "Cloud must have come in within five minutes of my
leaving--two hours earlier than he was expected. Fortunately he went
straight to his dressing-room. Or was it unfortunately? I was half-way
to the station when it occurred to me that I hadn't fastened the
envelope! You see, I was naturally in an awfully nervous state, Minnie.
So I told Collins to turn back. Fuge, our new butler, is of an extremely
curious disposition, and I couldn't bear the idea of him prying about
and perhaps reading that letter before Cloud got it. And just as I was
picking up the letter to fasten it I heard Cloud in the next room. Oh! I
never felt so queer in all my life! The poor boy was quite unwell. I
screwed up the letter and went to him. What else could I do? And really
he was so tired and white--well, it moved me! It moved me. And when he
spoke about going away I suddenly thought: 'Why not try to make a new
start with him?' After all ..."

There was a pause.

"What did you say in the letter?" Lady Bargrave demanded. "How did you
put it?"

"I'll read it to you," said Gertrude, and she took the letter from her
corsage and began to read it. She got as far as "I can't stand this
awful Five Towns district," and then she stopped.

"Well, go on," Lady Bargrave encouraged her.

"No," said Gertrude, and she put the letter in the fire. "The fact is,"
she said, going to Lady Bargrave's chair, "it was too cruel. I hadn't
realized.... I must have been very worked-up.... One does work oneself
up.... Things seem a little different now...." She glanced at her
companion.

"Why, Gertrude, you're crying, dearest!"

"What a chance it was!" murmured Gertrude, in her tears. "What a chance!
Because, you know, if he _had_ once read it I would never have gone back
on it. I'm that sort of woman. But as it is, there's a sort of hope of a
sort of happiness, isn't there?"

"Gertrude!" It was Sir Cloud's voice, gentle and tender, outside the
door.

"Mercy on us!" exclaimed Lady Bargrave. "It's half-past one. Bargrave
will have been asleep long since."

Gertrude kissed her in silence, opened the door, and left her.




THE GLIMPSE[A]

I

When I was dying I had no fear. I was simply indifferent, partly, no
doubt, through exhaustion caused by my long illness. It was a warm
evening in August. We ought to have been at Blackpool, of course, but we
were in my house in Trafalgar Road, and the tramcars between Hanley and
Bursley were shaking the house just as usual. Perhaps not quite as
usual; for during my illness I had noticed that a sort of tiredness, a
soft, nice feeling, seems to come over everything at sunset of a hot
summer's day. This universal change affected even the tramcars, so that
they rolled up and down the hill more gently. Or it may have been merely
my imagination. Through the open windows I could see, dimly, the smoke
of the Cauldon Bar Iron Works slowly crossing the sky in front of the
sunset. Margaret sat in my grandfather's oak chair by the gas-stove.
There was only Margaret, besides the servant, in the house; the nurse
had been obliged to go back to Pirehill Infirmary for the night. I don't
know why. Moreover, it didn't matter.

[Footnote A: Some years ago the editor of _Black and White_ commissioned
me to write a story for his Christmas Number. I wrote this story. He
expressed a deep personal admiration for it, but said positively that he
would not dare to offer it to his readers. I withdrew the story, and
gave him instead a frolic tale about a dentist. (See page 136.)
Afterwards, I was glad that I had withdrawn the story, for I perceived
that its theme could only be treated adequately in a novel, I
accordingly wrote the novel, which was duly published under the same
title.--A.B.]

I began running my extraordinarily white fingers along the edge of the
sheet. I was doing this quite mechanically when I noticed a look of
alarm in Margaret's face, and I vaguely remembered that playing with the
edge of the sheet was supposed to be a trick of the dying. So I stopped,
more for Margaret's sake than for anything else. I could not move my
head much, in fact scarcely at all; hence it was difficult for me to
keep my eyes on objects that were not in my line of vision as I lay
straight on my pillows. Thus my eyes soon left Margaret's. I forgot her.
I thought about nothing. Then she came over to the bed, and looked at
me, and I smiled at her, very feebly. She smiled in return. She appeared
to me to be exceedingly strong and healthy. Six weeks before I had been
the strong and healthy one--I was in my prime, forty, and had a
tremendous appetite for business--and I had always regarded her as
fragile and delicate; and now she could have crushed me without effort!
I had an unreasonable, instinctive feeling of shame at being so weak
compared to her. I knew that I was leaving her badly off; we were both
good spenders, and all my spare profits had gone into the manufactory;
but I did not trouble about that. I was almost quite callous about that.
I thought to myself, in a confused way: "Anyhow, I shan't be here to see
it, and she'll worry through somehow!" Nor did I object to dying. It may
be imagined that I resented death at so early an age, and being cut off
in my career, and prevented from getting the full benefit of the new
china-firing oven that I had patented. Not at all! It may be imagined
that I was preoccupied with a future life, and thinking that possibly we
had given up going to chapel without sufficient reason. No! I just lay
there, submitting like a person without will or desires to the nursing
of my wife, which was all of it accurately timed by the clock.

I just lay there and watched the gradual changing of the sky, and,
faintly, heard clocks striking and the quiet swish of my wife's dress.
Once my ear would have caught the ticking of our black marble clock on
the mantelpiece; but not now--it was lost to me. I watched the gradual
changing of the sky, until the blue of the sky had darkened so that the
blackness of the smoke was merged in it. But to the left there appeared
a faint reddish glare, which showed where the furnaces were; this glare
had been invisible in daylight. I watched all that, and I waited
patiently for the last trace of silver to vanish from a high part of the
sky above where the sunset had been--and it would not. I would shut my
eyes for an age, and then open them again, and the silver was always in
the sky. The cars kept rumbling up the hill and bumping down the hill.
And there was still that soft, languid feeling over everything. And all
the heat of the day remained. Sometimes a waft of hot air moved the
white curtains. Margaret ate something off a plate. The servant stole
in. Margaret gave a gesture as though to indicate that I was asleep. But
I was not asleep. The servant went off. Twice I restrained my thin,
moist hands from playing with the edge of the sheet. Then I closed my
eyes with a kind of definite closing, as if finally admitting that I was
too exhausted to keep them open.

II

Difficult to describe my next conscious sensations, when I found I was
not in the bed! I have never described them before. You will understand
why I've never described them to my wife. I meant never to describe them
to anyone. But as you came all the way from London, Mr Myers, and seem
to understand all this sort of thing, I've made up my mind to tell you
for what it's worth. Yes, what you say about the difficulty of sticking
to the exact truth is quite correct. I feel it. Still, I don't think I
over-flatter myself in saying that I am a more than ordinarily truthful
man.

Well, I was looking at the bed. I was not in the bed. I can't be
precisely sure where I was standing, but I think it was between the two
windows, half behind the crimson curtains. Anyhow, I must have been near
the windows, or I couldn't have seen the foot of the bed and the couch
that is there. I could most distinctly hear Cauldon Church clock, more
than two miles away, strike two. I was cold. Margaret was leaning over
the bed, and staring at a face that lay on the pillows. At first it did
not occur to me that this face on the pillows was my face. I had to
reason out that fact. When I had reasoned it out I tried to speak to
Margaret and tell her that she was making a mistake, gazing at that
thing there on the pillows, and that the real one was standing in the
cold by the windows. I could not speak. Then I tried to attract her
attention in other ways; but I could do nothing. Once she turned
sharply, as if startled, and looked straight at me. I strove more
frantically than ever to make signs to her; but no, I could not.
Seemingly she did not see.

Then I thought: "I'm dead! This is being dead! I've died!"

Margaret ran to the dressing-table and picked up her hand-mirror. She
rubbed it carefully on the counterpane, and then held it to the mouth
and nostrils of that face on the pillows, and then examined it under the
gas. She was very agitated; the whole of her demeanour had changed; I
scarcely recognized her. I could not help thinking that she was mad. She
put down the mirror, glanced at the clock, even glanced out of the
window (she was much closer to me than I am now to you), and then flew
back to the bed. She seized the scissors that were hanging from her
girdle, and cut a hole in the top pillow, and drew from it a flock of
down, which she carefully placed on the lips of that face. The down did
not even tremble. Then she bared the breast of the body on the bed, and
laid her ear upon the region of the heart; I could see her eyes blinking
as she listened intensely. After she had listened some time she raised
her head, with a little sob, and frantically pulled the bell-rope. I
could hear the bell; we could both hear it. There was no response;
nothing but a fearful silence. Margaret, catching her breath, rushed out
of the room. I was sick with the most awful disgust that I could not
force her to see where I was. I had been helpless before, when I lay in
the bed, but I was far more completely helpless now. Talk about the babe
unborn!

She came back with the servant, and the two women stood on either side
of the bed, gazing at that body. The servant whispered:

"They do say that if you put a full glass of water on the chest you can
tell for sure."

Margaret hesitated. However, the servant began to fill a glass of water
on the washstand, and they poised it on the chest of that body. Not the
slightest vibration troubled its surface. I was--not angry; no,
tremendously disgusted is the only term I can use--at all this flummery
with that body on the bed. It was shocking to me that they should
confuse that body with me. I thought them silly, wilfully silly. I
thought their behaviour monstrously blind. There was I, the master of
the house, standing chilled between the windows, and neither Margaret
nor the servant would take the least notice of me!

The servant said:

"I'd better run for the doctor, ma'am." And she lifted off the glass.

"What use can the doctor be?" Margaret asked. "Only spoil the poor man's
night for nothing. And he's had a lot of bad nights lately. He told me
to be--prepared."

The servant said:

"Yes, mum.. But I'd better run for him. That's what doctors is for."

As soon as the front-door banged on the excited servant, my wife fell on
that body with a loud cry, and stroked it passionately, and I could see
her tears dropping on it. She wept without any restraint. She loved me
very much; I knew that. But the fact that she loved me only increased my
horror that she should be caressing that body, which was not me at all,
which had nothing whatever to do with me, which was loathsome, vile, and
as insensible as a log to the expressions of her love. She was not
weeping over me. She was weeping over an abomination. She was all wrong,
all tragically wrong, and I could not set her right. Her woe desolated
me. We had been happy together for sixteen years. Her error desolated
me, as a painful farce. But a slow, horrible change in my own
consciousness made me forget her grief in my own increasing misery.




III


I do not suppose that the feeling which came over me is capable of being
described in human language. It can only be hinted at, not truly
conveyed. If I say that I was utterly overcome by the sensation of being
_cut off from everything_, I shall perhaps not impress you very much
with a notion of my terror. But I do not see how I can better express
myself. No one who has not been through what I have been through--it is
a pretty awful thought that all who die do probably go through it--can
possibly understand the feeling of acute and frightful loneliness that
possessed me as I stood near the windows, that wrapped me up and
enveloped me, as it were, in an icy sheet. A few people in England are
possibly in my case--they have _been_, and they have returned, like me.
They will understand, and only they. I was solitary in the universe. I
was invisible, and I was forgotten. There was my poor wife lavishing her
immense sorrow on that body on the bed, which had ceased to have any
connection with me, which was emphatically not me, and to which I felt
the strongest repugnance. I was even jealous of that lifeless,
unresponsive, decaying mass. You cannot guess how I tried to yell to my
wife to come to me and warm me with her companionship and her
sympathy--and I could accomplish nothing, not the faintest whisper.

I had no home, no shelter, no place in the world, no share in life. I
was cast out. The changeless purposes of nature had ejected me from
humanity. It was as though humanity had been a fortified city and the
gates had been shut on me, and I was wandering round and round the
unscalable smooth walls, and beating against their stone with my hands.
That is a good simile, except that I could not move. Of course if I
could have moved I should have gone to my wife. But I could not move. To
be quite exact, I could move very slightly, perhaps about an inch or two
inches, and in any direction, up or down, to left or right, backwards or
forwards; this by a great straining, fatiguing effort. I was stuck there
on the surface of the world, desolate and undone. It was the most cruel
situation that you can imagine; far worse, I think, than any conceivable
physical torture. I am perfectly sure that I would have exchanged my
state, then, for the state of no matter what human being, the most
agonized martyr, the foulest criminal. I would have given anything, made
any sacrifice, to be once more within the human pale, to feel once more
that human life was not going on without me.

There was a knocking below. My wife left that body on the bed, and came
to the window and put her head out into the nocturnal, gas-lit silence
of Trafalgar Road. She was within a foot of me--and I could do nothing.

She whispered: "Is that you, Mary?"

The voice of the servant came: "Yes, mum. The doctor's been called away
to a case. He's not likely to be back before five o'clock."

My wife said, with sad indifference: "It doesn't matter now. I'll let
you in."

She went from the room. I heard the opening and shutting of the door.
Then both women returned into the room, and talked in low voices.

My wife said: "As soon as it's light you must ..." She stopped and
corrected herself. "No, the nurse will be back at seven o'clock. She
said she would. She will attend to all that. Mary, go and get a little
rest, if you can."

"Aren't you going to put the pennies on his eyes, mum?" the servant
asked.

"Ought I?" said my wife. "I don't know much about these things."

"Oh, yes, mum. And tie his jaw up," the servant said.

_His_ eyes! _His_ jaw! I was terribly angry, in my desolation. But it
was a futile anger, though it raged through me like a storm. Could they
not understand, would they never understand, that they were grotesquely
deceived? How much longer would they continue to fuss over that body on
the bed while I, _I_, the person whom they were supposed to be sorry
for, suffered and trembled in dire need just behind them?

A ridiculous bother over pennies! There was only one penny in the house,
they decided, after searching. I knew the exact whereabouts of two
shillings worth of copper, rolled in paper in my desk in the
dining-room. It had been there for many weeks; I had brought it home
one day from the works. But they did not know. I wanted to tell them, so
as to end the awful exacerbation of my nerves. But of course I could
not. In spite of Mary's superstitious protest, my wife put a penny on
one eye and half-a-crown on the other. Mary seemed to regard this as a
desecration, or at best as unlucky. Then they bound up the jaw of that
body with one of my handkerchiefs. I thought I had never seen anything
more wantonly absurd. Their trouble in straightening the arms--the legs
were quite straight--infuriated me. I wanted to weep in my tragic
vexation. It seemed as though tears would ease me. But I could not weep.

The servant said: "You'd better come away now, mum, and rest on the sofa
in the drawing-room."

Margaret, with red-bordered, glittering eyes, answered, staring all the
while at that body: "No, Mary. It's no use. I can't leave him. I won't
leave him!"

But she wasn't thinking about me at all. There I was, neglected and
shivering, near the windows; and she would not look at me!

After an interminable palaver Margaret induced the servant to leave the
room. And she sat down on the chair nearest the bed, and began to cry
again, not troubling to wipe her eyes. She sobbed, more and more loudly,
and kept touching that body. She seized my gold watch, which hung over
the bed, and which she wound up every night, and kissed it and put it
back. Her sobs continued to increase. Then the door opened quietly, and
the servant, half-undressed, crept in, and without saying a word gently
led Margaret out of the room. Margaret's last glance was at that body.
In a moment the servant returned and extinguished the gas, and departed
again, very carefully closing the door. I was now utterly abandoned.




IV


All that had happened to me up to now was strange; but what followed was
still more strange and still less capable of being described in human
language.

I became aware that I was gradually losing the sensation of being cut
off from intercourse, at any-rate that the sensation was losing its
painfulness. I didn't seem to care, now, whether I was neglected or not.
And to be cast out from humanity grew into a matter of indifference to
me. I became aware, too, of the approach of a mysterious freedom. I was
not free, I could still move only an inch or so in any direction; but I
felt that a process of dissolving of bonds had begun. What manner of
bonds? I don't know. I felt--that was all. My indifference slowly passed
into a sad and deep pity for the world. The world seemed to me so
pathetic, so awry, so obstinate in its honest illusions, so silly in its
dishonest pretences. "Have I been content with _that_?" I thought,
staggered. And I was sorry for what I had been. I perceived that the
ideals of my life were tawdry, that even the best were poor little
things. And I perceived that it was the same with everyone, and that
even the greatest men, those men that I had so profoundly admired as of
another clay than mine, were as like the worst as one sheep was like
another sheep. Weep--because nature had ejected me from that petty
little world, with its ridiculous and conceited wrongness? What an idea!
Why, I said to myself, that world spends nearly the whole of its time in
moving physical things from one place to another. Change the position of
matter--that is all it does, all it thinks of. I remembered a statesman
who had referred to the London and North-Western Railway as being one of
the glories of England! Parcels! Parcels! Parcels, human, brute,
insensate! Nothing but parcel-moving! I smiled. And then I perceived
that I could understand and solve problems which had defied thousands of
years of human philosophy, problems which we on earth called
fundamental. And lo! They were not in the least fundamental, but were
trifles, as simple as Euclid. It was surprising that the solution of
them had not presented itself to me before! I thought: With one word,
one single word, I could enlighten the human race beyond all that it has
ever learned. Feeble-bodied, feeble-minded humanity!

And then I had a glimpse.... I was in the bedroom, near the windows, all
the time, but nevertheless I was nowhere, nowhere in space. I could feel
the roll of the earth as it turned lumberingly on its axis--a faint
shaking which did not affect me. Still, I was in the bedroom, near the
windows. And I had a glimpse.... The heralds of a new vitality swept
trumpeting through me, and a calm, intense, ineffable joy followed in
their train. I had a glimpse.... And my eyes were not dazzled. I yearned
and strained towards what I saw, towards the exceeding brightness of
undreamt companionships, hopes, perceptions, activities, and sorrows.
Yes, sorrows! But what noble sorrows they were that I felt awaited me
there! I strained at my mysterious bonds. It seemed that they were about
to break and that I should be winged away into other dimensions....

And then, I knew that they were tightening again, and the brightness
very slowly faded, and I lost faith in the gift of vision which
momentarily had enabled me to see the illusions and the littleness of
the world. And I was slowly, slowly drawn away from the window.... And
then I felt heavy weights on my eyes, and I could not move my jaw. I
shuddered convulsively, and a coin struck the floor and ran till it fell
flat. And the door swiftly opened....




V


Yes, my whole character is changed, within; though externally it may
seem the same. Externally I may seem to have resumed the affections and
the interests which occupied me before my illness and my remarkable
recovery. Yet I am different. Certainly I have lost again the strange
transcendental knowledge which was mine for a few instants. Certainly I
have descended again to the earthly level. All those magic things have
slipped away, except hope. In a sure hope, in a positive faith, I am
waiting. I am waiting for all that magic to happen to me again. I know
that the pain of loneliness, when again I shall see my own body from the
outside, will be exquisite, but--the reward! The reward! That is what is
always at the back of my mind, the source of the calm joy in which I
wait. Externally I am the successful earthenware manufacturer, happily
married, getting rich on a china-firing oven, employing a couple of
hundred workmen, etcetera, who was once given up for dead. But I am more
than that. I have seen God.




JOCK-AT-A-VENTURE

I


All this happened at a Martinmas Fair in Bursley, long ago in the
fifties, when everybody throughout the Five Towns pronounced Bursley
"Bosley" as a matter of course; in the tedious and tragic old times,
before it had been discovered that hell was a myth, and before the
invention of pleasure or even of half-holidays. Martinmas was in those
days a very important moment in the annual life of the town, for it was
at Martinmas that potters' wages were fixed for twelve months ahead, and
potters hired themselves out for that term at the best rate they could
get. Even to the present day the housewives reckon chronology by
Martinmas. They say, "It'll be seven years come Martinmas that Sal's
babby died o' convulsions." Or, "It was that year as it rained and
hailed all Martinmas." And many of them have no idea why it is
Martinmas, and not Midsummer or Whitsun, that is always on the tips of
their tongues.

The Fair was one of the two great drunken sprees of the year, the other
being the Wakes. And it was meet that it should be so, for intoxication
was a powerful aid to the signing of contracts. A sot would put his name
to anything, gloriously; and when he had signed he had signed. Thus the
beaver-hatted employers smiled at Martinmas drunkenness, and smacked it
familiarly on the back; and little boys swilled themselves into the
gutter with their elders, and felt intensely proud of the feat. These
heroic old times have gone by, never to return.

It was on the Friday before Martinmas, at dusk. In the centre of the
town, on the waste ground to the north of the "Shambles" (as the
stone-built meat market was called), and in the space between the
Shambles and the as yet unfinished new Town Hall, the showmen and the
showgirls and the showboys were titivating their booths, and cooking
their teas, and watering their horses, and polishing the brass rails of
their vans, and brushing their fancy costumes, and hammering fresh
tent-pegs into the hard ground, and lighting the first flares of the
evening, and yarning, and quarrelling, and washing--all under the sombre
purple sky, for the diversion of a small crowd of loafers, big and
little, who stood obstinately with their hands in their pockets or in
their sleeves, missing naught of the promising spectacle.

Now, in the midst of what in less than twenty-four hours would be the
Fair, was to be seen a strange and piquant sight--namely, a group of
three white-tied, broad-brimmed dissenting ministers in earnest converse
with fat Mr Snaggs, the proprietor of Snaggs's--Snaggs's being the town
theatre, a wooden erection, generally called by patrons the "Blood Tub,"
on account of its sanguinary programmes. On this occasion Mr Snaggs and
the dissenting ministers were for once in a way agreed. They all
objected to a certain feature of the Fair. It was not the roundabouts,
so crude that even an infant of to-day would despise them. It was
not the shooting-galleries, nor the cocoanut shies. It was not the
arrangements of the beersellers, which were formidably Bacchic.
It was not the boxing-booths, where adventurous youths could have
teeth knocked out and eyes smashed in free of charge. It was not the
monstrosity-booths, where misshapen and maimed creatures of both sexes
were displayed all alive and nearly nude to anybody with a penny to
spare. What Mr Snaggs and the ministers of religion objected to was the
theatre-booths, in which the mirror, more or less cracked and tarnished,
was held up to nature.

Mr Snaggs's objection was professional. He considered that he alone was
authorized to purvey drama to the town; he considered that among all
purveyors of drama he alone was respectable, the rest being upstarts,
poachers, and lewd fellows. And as the dissenting ministers gazed at Mr
Snaggs's superb moleskin waistcoat, and listened to his positive brazen
voice, they were almost convinced that the hated institution of the
theatre could be made respectable and that Mr Snaggs had so made it. At
any rate, by comparison with these flashy and flimsy booths, the Blood
Tub, rooted in the antiquity of thirty years, had a dignified, even a
reputable air--and did not Mr Snaggs give frequent performances of
Cruickshanks' _The Bottle_, a sermon against intemperance more
impressive than any sermon delivered from a pulpit in a chapel? The
dissenting ministers listened with deference as Mr Snaggs explained to
them exactly what they ought to have done, and what they had failed to
do, in order to ensure the success of their campaign against play-acting
in the Fair; a campaign which now for several years past had been
abortive--largely (it was rumoured) owing to the secret jealousy of the
Church of England.

"If ony on ye had had any gumption," Mr Snaggs was saying fearlessly to
the parsons, "ye'd ha' gone straight to th' Chief Bailiff and ye'd
ha'--Houch!" He made the peculiar exclamatory noise roughly indicated by
the last word, and spat in disgust; and without the slightest ceremony
of adieu walked ponderously away up the slope, leaving his sentence
unfinished.

"It is remarkable how Mr Snaggs flees from before my face," said a neat,
alert, pleasant voice from behind the three parsons. "And yet save that
in my unregenerate day I once knocked him off a stool in front of his
own theayter, I never did him harm nor wished him anything but good....
Gentlemen!"

A rather small, slight man of about forty, with tiny feet and hands,
and "very quick on his pins," saluted the three parsons gravely.

"Mr Smith!" one parson stiffly inclined.

"Mr Smith!" from the second.

"Brother Smith!" from the third, who was Jock Smith's own parson, being
in charge of the Bethesda in Trafalgar Road where Jock Smith worshipped
and where he had recently begun to preach as a local preacher.

Jock Smith, herbalist, shook hands with vivacity but also with
self-consciousness. He was self-conscious because he knew himself to be
one of the chief characters and attractions of the town, because he was
well aware that wherever he went people stared at him and pointed him
out to each other. And he was half proud and half ashamed of his
notoriety.

Even now a little band of ragged children had wandered after him, and,
undeterred by the presence of the parsons, were repeating among
themselves, in a low audacious monotone:

"Jock-at-a-Venture! Jock-at-a-Venture!"


II


He was the youngest of fourteen children, and when he was a month old
his mother took him to church to be christened. The rector was the
celebrated Rappey, sportsman, who (it is said) once pawned the church
Bible in order to get up a bear-baiting. Rappey asked the name of the
child, and was told by the mother that she had come to the end of her
knowledge of names, and would be obliged for a suggestion. Whereupon
Rappey began to cite all the most ludicrous names in the Bible, such as
Aholibamah, Kenaz, Iram, Baalhanan, Abiasaph, Amram, Mushi, Libni,
Nepheg, Abihu. And the mother laughed, shaking her head. And Rappey went
on: Shimi, Carmi, Jochebed. And at Jochebed the mother became
hysterical with laughter. "Jock-at-a-Venture," she had sniggered, and
Rappey, mischievously taking her at her word, christened the infant
Jock-at-a-Venture before she could protest; and the infant was stamped
for ever as peculiar.

He lived up to his name. He ran away twice, and after having been both a
sailor and a soldier, he returned home with the accomplishment of
flourishing a razor, and settled in Bursley as a barber. Immediately he
became the most notorious barber in the Five Towns, on account of his
gab and his fisticuffs. It was he who shaved the left side of the face
of an insulting lieutenant of dragoons (after the great riots of '45,
which two thousand military had not quelled), and then pitched him out
of the shop, soapsuds and all, and fought him to a finish in the Cock
Yard and flung him through the archway into the market-place with just
half a magnificent beard and moustache. It was he who introduced
hair-dyeing into Bursley. Hair-dyeing might have grown popular in the
town if one night, owing to some confusion with red ink, the Chairman of
the Bursley Burial Board had not emerged from Jock-at-a-Venture's with a
vermilion top-knot and been greeted on the pavement by his waiting wife
with the bitter words: "Thou foo!"

A little later Jock-at-a-Venture abandoned barbering and took up music,
for which he had always shown a mighty gift. He was really musical and
performed on both the piano and the cornet, not merely with his hands
and mouth, but with the whole of his agile expressive body. He made a
good living out of public-houses and tea-meetings, for none could play
the piano like Jock, were it hymns or were it jigs. His cornet was
employed in a band at Moorthorne, the mining village to the east of
Bursley, and on his nocturnal journeys to and from Moorthorne with the
beloved instrument he had had many a set-to with the marauding colliers
who made the road dangerous for cowards. One result of this connection
with Moorthorne was that a boxing club had been formed in Bursley, with
Jock as chief, for the upholding of Bursley's honour against visiting
Moorthorne colliers in Bursley's market-place.

Then came Jock's conversion to religion, a blazing affair, and his
abandonment of public-houses. As tea-meetings alone would not keep him,
he had started again in life, for the fifth or sixth time--as a
herbalist now. It was a vocation which suited his delicate hands and his
enthusiasm for humanity. At last, and quite lately, he had risen to be a
local preacher. His first two sermons had impassioned the congregations,
though there were critics to accuse him of theatricality. Accidents
happened to him sometimes. On this very afternoon of the Friday before
Martinmas an accident had happened to him. He had been playing the piano
at the rehearsal of the Grand Annual Evening Concert of the Bursley Male
Glee-Singers. The Bursley Male Glee-Singers, determined to beat records,
had got a soprano with a foreign name down from Manchester. On seeing
the shabby perky little man who was to accompany her songs the soprano
had had a moment of terrible misgiving. But as soon as Jock, with a
careful-careless glance at the music, which he had never seen before,
had played the first chords (with a "How's that for time, missis?"), she
was reassured. At the end of the song her enthusiasm for the musical
gifts of the local artist was such that she had sprung from the platform
and simply but cordially kissed him. She was a stout, feverish lady. He
liked a lady to be stout; and the kiss was pleasant and the compliment
enormous. But what a calamity for a local preacher with a naughty past
to be kissed in full rehearsal by a soprano from Manchester! He knew
that he had to live that kiss down, and to live down also the charge of
theatricality.

Here was a reason, and a very good one, why he deliberately sought the
company of parsons in the middle of the Fair-ground. He had to protect
himself against tongues.


III


"I don't know," said Jock-at-a-Venture to the parsons, gesturing with
his hands and twisting his small, elegant feet, "I don't know as I'm in
favour of stopping these play-acting folk from making a living; stopping
'em by force, that is."

He knew that he had said something shocking, something that when he
joined the group he had not in the least meant to say. He knew that
instead of protecting himself he was exposing himself to danger. But he
did not care. When, as now, he was carried away by an idea, he cared for
naught. And, moreover, he had the consciousness of being cleverer,
acuter, than any of these ministers of religion, than anybody in the
town! His sheer skill and resourcefulness in life had always borne him
safely through every difficulty--from a prize-fight to a soprano's
embrace.

"A strange doctrine, Brother Smith!" said Jock's own pastor.

The other two hummed and hawed, and brought the tips of their fingers
together.

"Nay!" said Jock, persuasively smiling. "'Stead o' bringing 'em to
starvation, bring 'em to the House o' God! Preach the gospel to 'em, and
then when ye've preached the gospel to 'em, happen they'll change their
ways o' their own accord. Or happen they'll put their play-acting to the
service o' God. If there's plays agen drink, why shouldna' there be
plays agen the devil, and _for_ Jesus Christ, our Blessed Redeemer?"

"Good day to you, brethren," said one of the parsons, and departed. Thus
only could he express his horror of Jock's sentiments.

In those days churches and chapels were not so empty that parsons had
to go forth beating up congregations. A pew was a privilege. And those
who did not frequent the means of grace had at any rate the grace to be
ashamed of not doing so. And, further, strolling players, in spite of
John Wesley's exhortations, were not considered salvable. The notion of
trying to rescue them from merited perdition was too fantastic to be
seriously entertained by serious Christians. Finally, the suggested
connection between Jesus Christ and a stage-play was really too
appalling! None but Jock-at-a-Venture would have been capable of such an
idea.

"I think, my friend--" began the second remaining minister.

"Look at that good woman there!" cried Jock-at-a-Venture, interrupting
him with a dramatic out-stretching of the right arm, as he pointed to a
very stout but comely dame, who, seated on a three-legged stool, was
calmly peeling potatoes in front of one of the more resplendent booths.
"Look at that face! Is there no virtue in it? Is there no hope for
salvation in it?"

"None," Jock's pastor replied mournfully. "That woman--her name is
Clowes--is notorious. She has eight children, and she has brought them
all up to her trade. I have made inquiries. The elder daughters are
actresses and married to play-actors, and even the youngest child is
taught to strut on the boards. Her troupe is the largest in the
Midlands."

Jock-at-a-Venture was certainly dashed by this information.

"The more reason," said he, obstinately, "for saving her!... And all
hers!"

The two ministers did not want her to be saved. They liked to think of
the theatre as being beyond the pale. They remembered the time, before
they were ordained, and after, when they had hotly desired to see the
inside of a theatre and to rub shoulders with wickedness. And they took
pleasure in the knowledge that the theatre was always there, and the
wickedness thereof, and the lost souls therein. But Jock-at-a-Venture
genuinely longed, in that ecstasy of his, for the total abolition of all
forms of sin.

"And what would you do to save her, brother?" Jock's pastor inquired
coldly.

"What would I do? I'd go and axe her to come to chapel Sunday, her and
hers. I'd axe her kindly, and I'd crack a joke with her. And I'd get
round her for the Lord's sake."

Both ministers sighed. The same thought was in their hearts, namely,
that brands plucked from the burning (such as Jock) had a disagreeable
tendency to carry piety, as they had carried sin, to the most ridiculous
and inconvenient lengths.


IV


"Those are bonny potatoes, missis!"

"Ay!" The stout woman, the upper part of whose shabby dress seemed to be
subjected to considerable strains, looked at Jock carelessly, and then,
attracted perhaps by his eager face, smiled with a certain facile
amiability.

"But by th' time they're cooked your supper'll be late, I'm reckoning."

"Them potatoes have naught to do with our supper," said Mrs Clowes.
"They're for to-morrow's dinner. There'll be no time for peeling
potatoes to-morrow. Kezia!" She shrilled the name.

A slim little girl showed herself between the heavy curtains of the main
tent of Mrs Clowes's caravanserai.

"Bring Sapphira, too!"

"Those yours?" asked Jock.

"They're mine," said Mrs Clowes. "And I've six more, not counting
grandchildren and sons-in-law like."

"No wonder you want a pailful of potatoes!" said Jock.

Kezia and Sapphira appeared in the gloom. They might have counted
sixteen years together. They were dirty, tousled, graceful and lovely.

"Twins," Jock suggested.

Mrs Clowes nodded. "Off with this pail, now! And mind you don't spill
the water. Here, Kezia! Take the knife. And bring me the other pail."

The children bore away the heavy pail, staggering, eagerly obedient. Mrs
Clowes lifted her mighty form from the stool, shook peelings from the
secret places of her endless apron, and calmly sat down again.

"Ye rule 'em with a rod of iron, missis," said Jock.

She smiled good-humouredly and shrugged her vast shoulders--no mean
physical feat.

"I keep 'em lively," she said. "There's twelve of 'em in my lot, without
th' two babbies. Someone's got to be after 'em all the time."

"And you not thirty-five, I swear!"

"Nay! Ye're wrong."

Sapphira brought the other pail, swinging it. She put it down with a
clatter of the falling handle and scurried off.

"Am I now?" Jock murmured, interested; and, as it were out of sheer
absent-mindedness, he turned the pail wrong side up, and seated himself
on it with a calm that equalled the calm of Mrs Clowes.

It was now nearly dark. The flares of the showmen were answering each
other across the Fair-ground; and presently a young man came and hung
one out above the railed platform of Mrs Clowes's booth; and Mrs Clowes
blinked. From behind the booth floated the sounds of the confused
chatter of men, girls and youngsters, together with the complaint of an
infant. A few yards away from Mrs Clowes was a truss of hay; a pony
sidled from somewhere with false innocence up to this truss, nosed it
cautiously, and then began to bite wisps from it. Occasionally a loud
but mysterious cry swept across the ground. The sky was full of mystery.
Against the sky to the west stood black and clear the silhouette of the
new Town Hall spire, a wondrous erection; and sticking out from it at
one side was the form of a gigantic angel. It was the gold angel which,
from the summit of the spire, has now watched over Bursley for half a
century, but which on that particular Friday had been lifted only
two-thirds of the way to its final home.

Jock-at-a-Venture felt deeply all the influences of the scene and of the
woman. He was one of your romantic creatures; and for him the woman was
magnificent. Her magnificence thrilled.

"And what are you going to say?" she quizzed him. "Sitting on my pail!"

Now to quiz Jock was to challenge him.

"Sitting on your pail, missis," he replied, "I'm going for to say that
you're much too handsome a woman to go down to hell in eternal
damnation."

She was taken aback, but her profession had taught her the art of quick
recovery.

"You belong to that Methody lot," she mildly sneered. "I thought I seed
you talking to them white-chokers."

"I do," said Jock.

"And I make no doubt you think yourself very clever."

"Well," he vouchsafed, "I can splice a rope, shave a head, cure a wart
or a boil, and tell a fine woman with any man in this town. Not to
mention boxing, as I've given up on account of my religion."

"I _was_ handsome once," said Mrs Clowes, with apparent, but not real,
inconsequence. "But I'm all run to fat, like. I've played Portia in my
time. But now it's as much as I can do to get through with Maria Martin
or Belladonna."

"Fat!" Jock protested. "Fat! I wouldn't have an ounce taken off ye for
fifty guineas."

He was so enthusiastic that Mrs Clowes blushed.

"What's this about hell-fire?" she questioned. "I often think of it--I'm
a lonely woman, and I often think of it."

"You lonely!" Jock protested again. "With all them childer?"

"Ay!"

There was a silence.

"See thee here, missis!" he exploded, jumping up from the pail. "Ye must
come to th' Bethesda down yon, on Sunday morning, and hear the word o'
God. It'll be the making on ye."

Mrs Clowes shook her head.

"Nay!"

"And bring yer children," he persisted.

"If it was you as was going to preach like!" she said, looking away.

"It is me as is going to preach," he answered loudly and proudly. "And
I'll preach agen any man in this town for a dollar!"

Jock was forgetting himself: an accident which often happened to him.


V


The Bethesda was crowded on Sunday morning; partly because it was
Martinmas Sunday, and partly because the preacher was Jock-at-a-Venture.
That Jock should have been appointed on the "plan" [rota of preachers]
to discourse in the principal local chapel of the Connexion at such an
important feast showed what extraordinary progress he had already made
in the appreciation of that small public of experts which aided the
parson in drawing up the quarterly plan. At the hands of the larger
public his reception was sure. Some sixteen hundred of the larger public
had crammed themselves into the chapel, and there was not an empty place
either on the ground floor or in the galleries. Even the "orchestra" (as
the "singing-seat" was then called) had visitors in addition to the
choir and the double-bass players. And not a window was open. At that
date it had not occurred to people that fresh air was not a menace to
existence. The whole congregation was sweltering, and rather enjoying
it; for in some strangely subtle manner perspiration seemed to be a help
to religious emotion. Scores of women were fanning themselves; and among
these was a very stout peony-faced woman of about forty in a gorgeous
yellow dress and a red-and-black bonnet, with a large boy and a small
girl under one arm, and a large boy and a small girl under the other
arm. The splendour of the group appeared somewhat at odds with the
penury of the "Free Seats," whither it had been conducted by a steward.

In the pulpit, dominating all, was Jock-at-a-Venture, who sweated like
the rest. He presented a rather noble aspect in his broadcloth, so
different from his careless, shabby week-day attire. His eye was
lighted; his arm raised in a compelling gesture. Pausing effectively, he
lifted a glass with his left hand and sipped. It was the signal that he
had arrived at his peroration. His perorations were famous. And this
morning everybody felt, and he himself knew, that all previous
perorations were to be surpassed. His subject was the wrath to come, and
the transient quality of human life on earth. "Yea," he announced, in
gradually-increasing thunder, "all shall go. And loike the baseless
fabric o' a vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the
solemn temples, the great globe itself--Yea, I say, all which it inherit
shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial payjent faded, leave not a
rack behind."

His voice had fallen for the last words. After a dramatic silence, he
finished, in a whisper almost, and with eyebrows raised and staring gaze
directed straight at the vast woman in yellow: "We are such stuff as
drames are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. May God
have mercy on us. Hymn 442."

The effect was terrific. Men sighed and women wept, in relief that the
strain was past. Jock was an orator; he wielded the orator's dominion.
Well he knew, and well they all knew, that not a professional preacher
in the Five Towns could play on a congregation as he did. For when Jock
was roused you could nigh see the waves of emotion sweeping across the
upturned faces of his hearers like waves across a wheatfield on a windy
day.

And this morning he had been roused.


VI


But in the vestry after the service he met enemies, in the shape and
flesh of the chapel-steward and the circuit-steward, Mr Brett and Mr
Hanks respectively. Both these important officials were local preachers,
but, unfortunately, their godliness did not protect them against the
ravages of jealousy. Neither of them could stir a congregation, nor even
fill a country chapel.

"Brother Smith," said Jabez Hanks, shutting the door of the vestry. He
was a tall man with a long, greyish beard and no moustache. "Brother
Smith, it is borne in upon me and my brother here to ask ye a question."

"Ask!" said Jock.

"Were them yer own words--about cloud-capped towers and baseless
fabrics and the like? I ask ye civilly."

"And I answer ye civilly, they were," replied Jock.

"Because I have here," said Jabez Hanks, maliciously, "Dod's _Beauties
o' Shakspere_, where I find them very same words, taken from a
stage-play called _The Tempest_."

Jock went a little pale as Jabez Hanks opened the book.

"They may be Shakspere's words too," said Jock, lightly.

"A fortnight ago, at Moorthorne Chapel, I suspected it," said Jabez.

"Suspected what?"

"Suspected ye o' quoting Shakspere in our pulpits."

"And cannot a man quote in a sermon? Why, Jabez Hanks, I've heard ye
quote Matthew Henry by the fathom."

"Ye've never heard me quote a stage-play in a pulpit, Brother Smith,"
said Jabez Hanks, majestically. "And as long as I'm chapel-steward it
wunna' be tolerated in this chapel."

"Wunna it?" Jock put in defiantly.

"It's a defiling of the Lord's temple; that's what it is!" Jabez Hanks
continued. "Ye make out as ye're against stage-plays at the Fair, and
yet ye come here and mouth 'em in a Christian pulpit. _You_ agen
stage-plays! Weren't ye seen talking by the hour to one o' them trulls,
Friday night--? And weren't ye seen peeping through th' canvas last
night? And now--"

"Now what?" Jock inquired, approaching Jabez on his springy toes, and
looking up at Jabez's great height.

Jabez took breath. "Now ye bring yer fancy women into the House o' God!
You--a servant o' Christ, you--"

Jock-at-a-Venture interrupted the sentence with his daring fist, which
seemed to lift Jabez from the ground by his chin, and then to let him
fall in a heap, as though his clothes had been a sack containing loose
bones.

"A good-day to ye, Brother Brett," said Jock, reaching for his hat, and
departing with a slam of the vestry door.

He emerged at the back of the chapel and got by "back-entries" into
Aboukir Street, up which he strolled with a fine show of tranquillity,
as far as the corner of Trafalgar Road, where stood and stands the great
Dragon Hotel. The congregations of several chapels were dispersing
slowly round about this famous corner, and Jock had to salute several of
his own audience. Then suddenly he saw Mrs Clowes and her four children
enter the tap-room door of the Dragon.

He hesitated one second and followed the variegated flotilla and its
convoy.

The tap-room was fairly full of both sexes. But among them Jock and Mrs
Clowes and her children were the only persons who had been to church or
chapel.

"Here's preacher, mother!" Kezia whispered, blushing, to Mrs Clowes.

"Eh," said Mrs Clowes, turning very amiably. "It's never you, mester! It
was that hot in that chapel we're all on us dying of thirst.... Four
gills and a pint, please!" (This to the tapster.)

"And give me a pint," said Jock, desperately.

They all sat down familiarly. That a mother should take her children
into a public-house and give them beer, and on a Sunday of all days, and
immediately after a sermon! That a local preacher should go direct from
the vestry to the gin-palace and there drink ale with a strolling
player! These phenomena were simply and totally inconceivable! And yet
Jock was in presence of them, assisting at them, positively acting in
them! And in spite of her enormities, Mrs Clowes still struck him as a
most agreeable, decent, kindly, motherly woman--quite apart from her
handsomeness. And her offspring, each hidden to the eyes behind a mug,
were a very well-behaved lot of children.

"It does me good," said Mrs Clowes, quaffing. "And ye need summat to
keep ye up in these days! We did _Belphegor_ and _The Witch_ and a
harlequinade last night. And not one of these children got to bed before
half after midnight. But I was determined to have 'em at chapel this
morning. And not sorry I am I went! Eh, mester, what a Virginius you'd
ha' made! I never heard preaching like it--not as I've heard much!"

"And you'll never hear anything like it again, missis," said Jock, "for
I've preached my last sermon."

"Nay, nay!" Mrs Clowes deprecated.

"I've preached my last sermon," said Jock again. "And if I've saved a
soul wi' it, missis...!" He looked at her steadily and then drank.

"I won't say as ye haven't," said Mrs Clowes, lowering her eyes.


VII


Rather less than a week later, on a darkening night, a van left the town
of Bursley by the Moorthorne Road on its way to Axe-in-the-Moors, which
is the metropolis of the wild wastes that cut off northern Staffordshire
from Derbyshire. This van was the last of Mrs Clowes's caravanserai, and
almost the last to leave the Fair. Owing to popular interest in the
events of Jock-at-a-Venture's public career, in whose meshes Mrs Clowes
had somehow got caught, the booth of Mrs Clowes had succeeded beyond any
other booth, and had kept open longer and burned more naphtha and taken
far more money. The other vans of the stout lady's enterprise (there
were three in all) had gone forward in advance, with all her elder
children and her children-in-law and her grandchildren, and the heavy
wood and canvas of the booth. Mrs Clowes, transacting her own business
herself, from habit, invariably brought up the rear of her procession
out of a town; and sometimes her leisurely manner of settling with the
town authorities for water, ground-space and other necessary
com-modities, left her several miles behind her tribe.

The mistress's van, though it would not compare with the glorious
vehicles that showmen put upon the road in these days, was a roomy and
dignified specimen, and about as good as money could then buy. The front
portion consisted of a parlour and kitchen combined, and at the back was
a dormitory. In the dormitory Kezia, Sapphira and the youngest of their
brothers were sleeping hard. In the parlour and kitchen sat Mrs Clowes,
warmly enveloped, holding the reins with her right hand and a shabby,
paper-covered book in her left hand. The book was the celebrated play,
_The Gamester_, and Mrs Clowes was studying therein the rôle of
Dulcibel. Not a rôle for which Mrs Clowes was physically fitted; but her
prolific daughter, Hephzibah, to whom it appertained by prescription,
could not possibly play it any longer, and would, indeed, be
incapacitated from any rôle whatever for at least a month. And the
season was not yet over; for folk were hardier in those days.

The reins stretched out from the careless hand of Mrs Clowes and
vanished through a slit between the double doors, which had been fixed
slightly open. Mrs Clowes's gaze, penetrating now and then the slit,
could see the gleam of her lamp's ray on a horse's flank. The only
sounds were the hoof-falls of the horse, the crunching of the wheels on
the wet road, the occasional rattle of a vessel in the racks when the
van happened to descend violently into a rut, and the steady murmur of
Mrs Clowes's voice rehearsing the grandiloquence of the part of
Dulcibel.

And then there was another sound, which Mrs Clowes did not notice until
it had been repeated several times; the cry of a human voice out on the
road:

"Missis!"

She opened wide the doors of the van and looked prudently forth.
Naturally, inevitably, Jock-at-a-Venture was trudging alongside, level
with the horse's tail! He stepped nimbly--he was a fine walker--but none
the less his breath came short and quick, for he had been making haste
up a steepish hill in order to overtake the van. And he carried a bundle
and a stick in his hands, and on his head a superb but heavy beaver hat.

"I'm going your way, missis," said Jock.

"Seemingly," agreed Mrs Clowes, with due caution.

"Canst gi' us a lift?" he asked.

"And welcome," she said, her face changing like a flash to suit the
words.

"Nay, ye needna' stop!" shouted Jock.

In an instant he had leapt easily up into the van, and was seated by her
side therein on the children's stool.

"That's a hat--to travel in!" observed Mrs Clowes.

Jock removed the hat, examined it lovingly and replaced it.

"I couldn't ha' left it behind," said he, with a sigh, and continued
rapidly in another voice: "Missis, we'n seen a pretty good lot o' each
other this wik, and yet ye slips off o'this'n, without saying good-bye,
nor a word about yer soul!"

Mrs Clowes heaved her enormous breast and shook the reins.

"I've had my share of trouble," she remarked mysteriously.

"Tell me about it, missis!"

And lo! in a moment, lured on by his smile, she was telling him quite
familiarly about the ailments of her younger children, the escapades of
her unmarried daughter aged fifteen, the surliness of one of her
sons-in-law, the budding dishonesty of the other, the perils of infant
life, and the need of repainting the big van and getting new pictures
for the front of the booth. Indeed, all the worries of a queen of the
road!

"And I'm so fat!" she said, "and yet I'm not forty, and shan't be for
two year--and me a grandmother!"

"I knowed it!" Jock exclaimed.

"If I wasn't such a heap o' flesh--"

"Ye're the grandest heap o' flesh as I ever set eyes on, and I'm telling
ye!" Jock interrupted her.


VIII


Then there were disconcerting sounds out in the world beyond the van.
The horse stopped. The double doors were forced open from without, and a
black figure, with white eyes in a black face, filled the doorway. The
van had passed through the mining village of Moorthorne, and this was
one of the marauding colliers on the outskirts thereof. When the
colliers had highroad business in the night they did not trouble to wash
their faces after work. The coal-dust was a positive aid to them, for it
gave them a most useful resemblance to the devil.

Jock-at-a-Venture sprang up as though launched from a catapult.

"Is it thou, Jock?" cried the collier, astounded.

"Ay, lad!" said Jock, briefly.

And caught the collier a blow under the chin that sent him flying into
the obscurity of the night. Other voices sounded in the road. Jock
rushed to the doorway, taking a pistol from his pocket. And Mrs Clowes,
all dithering like a jelly, heard shots. The horse started into a
gallop. The reins escaped from the hands of the mistress, but Jock
secured them, and lashed the horse to greater speed with the loose ends
of them.

"I've saved thee, missis!" he said later. "I give him a regular lifter
under the gob, same as I give Jabez, Sunday. But where's the sense of a
lone woman wandering about dark roads of a night wi' a pack of
childer?... Them childer 'ud ha' slept through th' battle o' Trafalgar,"
he added.

Mrs Clowes wept.

"Well may you say it!" she murmured. "And it's not the first time as
I've been set on!"

"Thou'rt nowt but a girl, for all thy flesh and thy grandchilder!" said
Jock. "Dry thy eyes, or I'll dry 'em for thee!"

She smiled in her weeping. It was an invitation to him to carry out his
threat.

And while he was drying her eyes for her, she asked:

"How far are ye going? Axe?"

"Ay! And beyond! Can I act, I ask ye? Can I fight, I ask ye? Can ye do
without me, I ask ye, you a lone woman? And yer soul, as is mine to
save?"

"But that business o' yours at Bursley?"

"Here's my bundle," he said, "and here's my best hat. And I've money and
a pistol in my pocket. The only thing I've clean forgot is my cornet;
but I'll send for it and I'll play it at my wedding. I'm
Jock-at-a-Venture."

And while the van was rumbling in the dark night across the waste and
savage moorland, and while the children were sleeping hard at the back
of the van, and while the crockery was restlessly clinking in the racks
and the lamp swaying, and while he held the reins, the thin, lithe,
greying man contrived to take into his arms the vast and amiable
creature whom he desired. And the van became a vehicle of high romance.




THE HEROISM OF THOMAS CHADWICK

I


"Have you heard about Tommy Chadwick?" one gossip asked another in
Bursley.

"No."

"He's a tram-conductor now."

This information occasioned surprise, as it was meant to do, the
expression on the faces of both gossips indicating a pleasant curiosity
as to what Tommy Chadwick would be doing next.

Thomas Chadwick was a "character" in the Five Towns, and of a somewhat
unusual sort. "Characters" in the Five Towns are generally either very
grim or very jolly, either exceptionally shrewd or exceptionally simple;
and they nearly always, in their outward aspect, depart from the
conventional. Chadwick was not thus. Aged fifty or so, he was a portly
and ceremonious man with an official gait. He had been a policeman in
his youth, and he never afterwards ceased to look like a policeman in
plain clothes. The authoritative mien of the policeman refused to quit
his face. Yet, beneath that mien, few men (of his size) were less
capable of exerting authority than Chadwick. He was, at bottom, a weak
fellow. He knew it himself, and everybody knew it. He had left the
police force because he considered that the strain was beyond his
strength. He had the constitution of a she-ass, and the calm, terrific
appetite of an elephant; but he maintained that night duty in January
was too much for him. He was then twenty-seven, with a wife and two
small girls. He abandoned the uniform with dignity. He did everything
with dignity. He looked for a situation with dignity, saw his wife and
children go hungry with dignity, and even went short himself with
dignity. He continually got fatter, waxing on misfortune. And--another
curious thing--he could always bring out, when advisable, a shining suit
of dark blue broadcloth, a clean collar and a fancy necktie. He was not
a consistent dandy, but he could be a dandy when he liked.

Of course, he had no trade. The manual skill of a policeman is useless
outside the police force. One cannot sell it in other markets. People
said that Chadwick was a fool to leave the police force. He was; but he
was a sublime and dignified fool in his idle folly. What he wanted was a
position of trust, a position where nothing would be required from him
but a display of portliness, majesty and incorruptibility. Such
positions are not easy to discover. Employers had no particular
objection to portliness, majesty and incorruptibility, but as a rule
they demanded something else into the bargain. Chadwick's first
situation after his defection from the police was that of night watchman
in an earthenware manufactory down by the canal at Shawport. He accepted
it regretfully, and he firmly declined to see the irony of fate in
forcing such a post on a man who conscientiously objected to night duty.
He did not maintain this post long, and his reasons for giving it up
were kept a dark secret. Some said that Chadwick's natural tendency to
sleep at night had been taken amiss by his master.

Thenceforward he went through transformation after transformation,
outvying the legendary chameleon. He was a tobacconist, a park-keeper, a
rent collector, a commission agent, a clerk, another clerk, still
another clerk, a sweetstuff seller, a fried fish merchant, a coal
agent, a book agent, a pawnbroker's assistant, a dog-breeder, a
door-keeper, a board-school keeper, a chapel-keeper, a turnstile man at
football matches, a coachman, a carter, a warehouseman, and a
chucker-out at the Empire Music Hall at Hanbridge. But he was nothing
long. The explanations of his changes were invariably vague, unseizable.
And his dignity remained unimpaired, together with his broadcloth. He
not only had dignity for himself, but enough left over to decorate the
calling which he happened for the moment to be practising. He was
dignified in the sale of rock-balls, and especially so in encounters
with his creditors; and his grandeur when out of a place was a model to
all unemployed.

Further, he was ever a pillar and aid of the powers. He worshipped
order, particularly the old order, and wealth and correctness. He was
ever with the strong against the weak, unless the weak happened to be an
ancient institution, in which case he would support it with all the
valour of his convictions. Needless to say, he was a very active
politician. Perhaps the activity of his politics had something to do
with the frequency of his transformations--for he would always be his
somewhat spectacular self; he would always call his soul his own, and he
would quietly accept a snub from no man.

And now he was a tram-conductor. Things had come to that.

In the old days of the steam trams, where there were only about a score
of tram-conductors and eight miles of line in all the Five Towns, the
profession of tram-conductor had still some individuality in it, and a
conductor was something more than a number. But since the British
Electric Traction Company had invaded the Five Towns, and formed a
subsidiary local company, and constructed dozens of miles of new line,
and electrified everything, and raised prices, and abolished season
tickets, and quickened services, and built hundreds of cars and engaged
hundreds of conductors--since then a tram-conductor had been naught but
an unhuman automaton in a vast machine-like organization. And passengers
no longer had their favourite conductors.

Gossips did not precisely see Thomas Chadwick as an unhuman automaton
for the punching of tickets and the ringing of bells and the ejaculation
of street names. He was never meant by nature to be part of a system.
Gossips hoped for the best. That Chadwick, at his age and with his
girth, had been able, in his extremity, to obtain a conductorship was
proof that he could bring influences to bear in high quarters. Moreover,
he was made conductor of one of two cars that ran on a little branch
line between Bursley and Moorthorne, so that to the village of
Moorthorne he was still somebody, and the chances were just one to two
that persons who travelled by car from or to Moorthorne did so under the
majestic wing of Thomas Chadwick. His manner of starting a car was
unique and stupendous. He might have been signalling "full speed ahead"
from the bridge of an Atlantic liner.


II


Chadwick's hours aboard his Atlantic liner were so long as to interfere
seriously, not only with his leisure, but with his political activities.
And this irked him the more for the reason that at that period local
politics in the Five Towns were extremely agitated and interesting.
People became politicians who had never been politicians before. The
question was, whether the Five Towns, being already one town in
practice, should not become one town in theory--indeed, the twelfth
largest town in the United Kingdom! And the district was divided into
Federationists and anti-Federationists. Chadwick was a convinced
anti-Federationist. Chadwick, with many others, pointed to the history
of Bursley, "the mother of the Five Towns," a history which spread over
a thousand years and more; and he asked whether "old Bursley" was to
lose her identity merely because Hanbridge had insolently outgrown her.
A poll was soon to be taken on the subject, and feelings were growing
hotter every day, and rosettes of different colours flowered thicker and
thicker in the streets, until nothing but a strong sense of politeness
prevented members of the opposing parties from breaking each other's
noses in St Luke's Square.

Now on a certain Tuesday afternoon in spring Tommy Chadwick's car stood
waiting, opposite the Conservative Club, to depart to Moorthorne. And
Tommy Chadwick stood in all his portliness on the platform. The driver,
a mere nobody, was of course at the front of the car. The driver held
the power, but he could not use it until Tommy Chadwick gave him
permission; and somehow Tommy's imperial attitude seemed to indicate
this important fact.

There was not a soul in the car.

Then Mrs Clayton Vernon came hurrying up the slope of Duck Bank and
signalled to Chadwick to wait for her. He gave her a wave of the arm,
kindly and yet deferential, as if to say, "Be at ease, noble dame! You
are in the hands of a man of the world, who knows what is due to your
position. This car shall stay here till you reach it, even if Thomas
Chadwick loses his situation for failing to keep time."

And Mrs Clayton Vernon puffed into the car. And Thomas Chadwick gave her
a helping hand, and raised his official cap to her with a dignified
sweep; and his glance seemed to be saying to the world, "There, you see
what happens when _I_ deign to conduct a car! Even Mrs Clayton Vernon
travels by car then." And the whole social level of the electric
tramway system was apparently uplifted, and conductors became fine,
portly court-chamberlains.

For Mrs Clayton Vernon really was a personage in the town--perhaps,
socially, the leading personage. A widow, portly as Tommy himself,
wealthy, with a family tradition behind her, and the true grand manner
in every gesture! Her entertainments at her house at Hillport were
unsurpassed, and those who had been invited to them seldom forgot to
mention the fact. Thomas, a person not easily staggered, was
nevertheless staggered to see her travelling by car to Moorthorne--even
in his car, which to him in some subtle way was not like common
cars--for she was seldom seen abroad apart from her carriage. She kept
two horses. Assuredly both horses must be laid up together, or her
coachman ill. Anyhow, there she was, in Thomas's car, splendidly dressed
in a new spring gown of flowered silk.

"Thank you," she said very sweetly to Chadwick, in acknowledgment of his
assistance.

Then three men of no particular quality mounted the car.

"How do, Tommy?" one of them carelessly greeted the august conductor.
This impertinent youth was Paul Ford, a solicitor's clerk, who often
went to Moorthorne because his employer had a branch office there, open
twice a week.

Tommy did not respond, but rather showed his displeasure. He hated to be
called Tommy, except by a few intimate coevals.

"Now then, hurry up, please!" he said coldly.

"Right oh! your majesty," said another of the men, and they all three
laughed.

What was still worse, they all three wore the Federationist rosette,
which was red to the bull in Thomas Chadwick. It was part of Tommy's
political creed that Federationists were the "rag, tag, and bob-tail" of
the town. But as he was a tram-conductor, though not an ordinary
tram-conductor, his mouth was sealed, and he could not tell his
passengers what he thought of them.

Just as he was about to pull the starting bell, Mrs Clayton Vernon
sprang up with a little "Oh, I was quite forgetting!" and almost darted
out of the car. It was not quite a dart, for she was of full habit, but
the alacrity of her movement was astonishing. She must have forgotten
something very important.

An idea in the nature of a political argument suddenly popped into
Tommy's head, and it was too much for him. He was obliged to let it out.
To the winds with that impartiality which a tram company expects from
its conductors!

"Ah!" he remarked, jerking his elbow in the direction of Mrs Clayton
Vernon and pointedly addressing his three Federationist passengers,
"she's a lady, she is! _She_ won't travel with anybody, she won't! _She
chooses her company_--_and quite right too, I say_!"

And then he started the car. He felt himself richly avenged by this
sally for the "Tommy" and the "your majesty" and the sneering laughter.

Paul Ford winked very visibly at his companions, but made no answering
remark. And Thomas Chadwick entered the interior of the car to collect
fares. In his hands this operation became a rite. His gestures seemed to
say, "No one ever appreciated the importance of the vocation of
tram-conductor until I came. We will do this business solemnly and
meticulously. Mind what money you give me, count your change, and don't
lose, destroy, or deface this indispensable ticket that I hand to you.
Do you hear the ting of my bell? It is a sign of my high office. I am
fully authorized."

When he had taken his toll he stood at the door of the car, which was
now jolting and climbing past the loop-line railway station, and
continued his address to the company about the aristocratic and
exclusive excellences of his friend Mrs Clayton Vernon. He proceeded to
explain the demerits and wickedness of federation, and to descant on the
absurdity of those who publicly wore the rosettes of the Federation
party, thus branding themselves as imbeciles and knaves; in fact, his
tongue was loosed. Although he stooped to accept the wages of a
tram-conductor, he was not going to sacrifice the great political right
of absolutely free speech.

"If I wasn't the most good-natured man on earth, Tommy Chadwick," said
Paul Ford, "I should write to the tram company to-night, and you'd get
the boot to-morrow."

"All I say is," persisted the singular conductor--"all I say is--she's a
lady, she is--a regular real lady! She chooses her company--and qu

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/12995