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The Grim Smile of the Five Towns

by Arnold Bennett · English · Gutenberg #4734 · 377,167 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Grim Smile of the Five Towns

Author: Arnold Bennett


        
Release date: December 1, 2003 [eBook #4734]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4734

Credits: Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GRIM SMILE OF THE FIVE TOWNS ***




Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.










THE GRIM SMILE OF THE FIVE TOWNS


ARNOLD BENNETT




     To my old and constant friend
             JOSEPH DAWSON
      a student profoundly versed
        in the human nature of
            the Five Towns




CONTENTS

  The Lion's Share
  Baby's Bath
  The Silent Brothers
  The Nineteenth Hat
  Vera's First Christmas Adventure
  The Murder of the Mandarin
  Vera's Second Christmas Adventure
  The Burglary
  News of the Engagement
  Beginning the New Year
  From One Generation to Another
  The Death of Simon Fuge
  In a New Bottle




THE LION'S SHARE

I


In the Five Towns the following history is related by those who know it
as something side-splittingly funny--as one of the best jokes that ever
occurred in a district devoted to jokes. And I, too, have hitherto
regarded it as such. But upon my soul, now that I come to write it
down, it strikes me as being, after all, a pretty grim tragedy.
However, you shall judge, and laugh or cry as you please.

It began in the little house of Mrs Carpole, up at Bleakridge, on the
hill between Bursley and Hanbridge. Mrs Carpole was the second Mrs
Carpole, and her husband was dead. She had a stepson, Horace, and a son
of her own, Sidney. Horace is the hero, or the villain, of the history.
On the day when the unfortunate affair began he was nineteen years old,
and a model youth. Not only was he getting on in business, not only did
he give half his evenings to the study of the chemistry of pottery and
the other half to various secretaryships in connection with the
Wesleyan Methodist Chapel and Sunday-school, not only did he save
money, not only was he a comfort to his stepmother and a sort of uncle
to Sidney, not only was he an early riser, a total abstainer, a
non-smoker, and a good listener; but, in addition to the practice of
these manifold and rare virtues, he found time, even at that tender
age, to pay his tailor's bill promptly and to fold his trousers in the
same crease every night--so that he always looked neat and dignified.
Strange to say, he made no friends. Perhaps he was just a thought too
perfect for a district like the Five Towns; a sin or so might have
endeared him to the entire neighbourhood. Perhaps his loneliness was
due to his imperfect sense of humour, or perhaps to the dull, unsmiling
heaviness of his somewhat flat features.

Sidney was quite a different story. Sidney, to use his mother's phrase,
was a little jockey. His years were then eight. Fair-haired and
blue-eyed, as most little jockeys are, he had a smile and a scowl that
were equally effective in tyrannizing over both his mother and Horace,
and he was beloved by everybody. Women turned to look at him in the
street. Unhappily, his health was not good. He was afflicted by a
slight deafness, which, however, the doctor said he would grow out of;
the doctor predicted for him a lusty manhood. In the meantime, he
caught every disease that happened to be about, and nearly died of each
one. His latest acquisition had been scarlet fever. Now one afternoon,
after he had 'peeled' and his room had been disinfected, and he was
beginning to walk again, Horace came home and decided that Sidney
should be brought downstairs for tea as a treat, to celebrate his
convalescence, and that he, Horace, would carry him downstairs. Mrs
Carpole was delighted with the idea, and Sidney also, except that
Sidney did not want to be carried downstairs--he wanted to walk down.

'I think it will be better for him to walk, Horace dear,' said Mrs
Carpole, in her thin, plaintive voice. 'He can, quite well. And you
know how clumsy you are. Supposing you were to fall!'

Horace, nevertheless, in pursuance of his programme of being uncle to
Sidney, was determined to carry Sidney. And carry Sidney he did,
despite warnings and kickings. At least he carried him as far as the
turn in the steep stairs, at which point he fell, just as his
stepmother had feared, and Sidney with him. The half-brothers arrived
on the ground floor in company, but Horace, with his eleven stone two,
was on top, and the poor suffering little convalescent lay moveless and
insensible.

It took the doctor forty minutes to bring him to, and all the time the
odour of grilled herrings, which formed part of the uneaten tea, made
itself felt through the house like a Satanic comment on the spectacle
of human life. The scene was dreadful at first. The agony then passed.
There were no bruises on the boy, not a mark, and in a couple of hours
he seemed to be perfectly himself. Horace breathed again, and thanked
Heaven it was no worse. His gratitude to Heaven was, however, slightly
premature, for in the black middle of the night poor Sidney was seized
with excruciating pains in the head, and the doctor lost four hours'
sleep. These pains returned at intervals of a few days, and naturally
the child's convalescence was retarded. Then Horace said that Airs
Carpole should take Sidney to Buxton for a fortnight, and he paid all
the expenses of the trip out of his savings. He was desolated, utterly
stricken; he said he should never forgive himself. Sidney improved,
slowly.




II


After several months, during which Horace had given up all his limited
spare time to the superintendence of the child's first steps in
knowledge, Sidney was judged to be sufficiently strong to go to school,
and it was arranged that he should attend the Endowed School at the
Wedgwood Institution. Horace accompanied him thither on the opening day
of the term--it was an inclement morning in January--and left the young
delicate sprig, apparently joyous and content, to the care of his
masters and the mercy of his companions. But Sidney came home for
dinner weeping--weeping in spite of his new mortar-board cap, his new
satchel, his new box of compasses, and his new books. His mother kept
him at home in the afternoon, and by the evening another of those
terrible attacks had supervened. The doctor and Horace and Mrs Carpole
once more lost much precious sleep. The mysterious malady continued.
School was out of the question.

And when Sidney took the air, in charge of his mother, everybody
stopped to sympathize with him and to stroke his curls and call him a
poor dear, and also to commiserate Mrs Carpole. As for Horace, Bursley
tried to feel sorry for Horace, but it only succeeded in showing Horace
that it was hiding a sentiment of indignation against him. Each
friendly face as it passed Horace in the street said, without words,
'There goes the youth who probably ruined his young stepbrother's life.
And through sheer obstinacy too! He dropped the little darling in spite
of warnings and protests, and then fell on the top of him. Of course,
he didn't do it on purpose, but--'

The doctor mentioned Greatorex of Manchester, the celebrated brain
specialist. And Horace took Sidney to Manchester. They had to wait an
hour and a quarter to see Greatorex, his well-known consulting-rooms in
John Dalton Street being crowded with imperfect brains; but their turn
came at last, and they found themselves in Greatorex's presence.
Greatorex was a fat man, with the voice of a thin man, who seemed to
spend the whole of his career in the care of his fingernails.

'Well, my little fellow,' said Greatorex, 'don't cry.' (For Sidney was
already crying.) And then to Horace, in a curt tone: 'What is it?'

And Horace was obliged to humiliate himself and relate the accident in
detail, together with all that had subsequently happened.

'Yes, yes, yes, yes!' Greatorex would punctuate the recital, and when
tired of 'yes' he would say 'Hum, hum, hum, hum!'

When he had said 'hum' seventy-two times he suddenly remarked that his
fee was three guineas, and told Horace to strengthen Sidney all he
could, not to work him too hard, and to bring him back in a year's time.

Horace paid the money, Greatorex emitted a final 'hum', and then the
stepbrothers were whisked out by an expeditious footman. The experience
cost Horace over four pounds and the loss of a day's time. And the
worst was that Sidney had a violent attack that very night.

School being impossible for him, Sidney had intermittent instruction
from professors of both sexes at home. But he learnt practically
nothing except the banjo. Horace had to buy him a banjo: it cost the
best part of a ten-pound note; still, Horace could do no less. Sidney's
stature grew rapidly; his general health certainly improved, yet not
completely; he always had a fragile, interesting air. Moreover, his
deafness did not disappear: there were occasions when it was extremely
pronounced. And he was never quite safe from these attacks in the head.
He spent a month or six weeks each year in the expensive bracing
atmosphere of some seaside resort, and altogether he was decidedly a
heavy drain on Horace's resources. People were aware of this, and they
said that Horace ought to be happy that he was in a position to spend
money freely on his poor brother. Had not the doctor predicted, before
the catastrophe due to Horace's culpable negligence, that Sidney would
grow into a strong man, and that his deafness would leave him? The
truth was, one never knew the end of those accidents in infancy!
Further, was not Sidney's sad condition slowly killing his mother? It
was whispered about that, since the disaster, Sidney had not been QUITE
sound mentally. Was not the mere suspicion of this enough to kill any
mother?

And, as a fact, Mrs Carpole did die. She died of quinsy, doubtless
aggravated by Sidney's sad condition.

Not long afterwards Horace came into a small fortune from his maternal
grandfather. But poor Sidney did not come into any fortune, and people
somehow illogically inferred that Horace had not behaved quite nicely
in coming into a fortune while his suffering invalid brother, whom he
had so deeply harmed, came into nothing. Even Horace had compunctions
due to the visitations of a similar idea. And with part of the fortune
he bought a house with a large garden up at Toft End, the highest hill
of the hilly Five Towns, so that Sidney might have the benefit of the
air. He also engaged a housekeeper and servants. With the remainder of
the fortune he obtained a partnership in the firm of earthenware
manufacturers for whom he had been acting as highly-paid manager.

Sidney reached the age of eighteen, and was most effective to look
upon, his bright hair being still curly, and his eyes a wondrous blue,
and his form elegant; and the question of Sidney's future arose. His
health was steadily on the up grade. The deafness had quite
disappeared. He had inclinations towards art, and had already amused
himself by painting some beautiful vases. So it was settled that he
should enter Horace's works on the art side, with a view to becoming,
ultimately, art director. Horace gave him three pounds a week, in order
that he might feel perfectly independent, and, to the same end, Sidney
paid Horace seven-and-sixpence a week for board and lodging. But the
change of life upset the youth's health again. After only two visits to
the works he had a grave recurrence of the head-attacks, and he was
solemnly exhorted not to apply himself too closely to business. He
therefore took several half-holidays a week, and sometimes a whole one.
And even when he put in one of his full days he would arrive at the
works three hours after Horace, and restore the balance by leaving an
hour earlier. The entire town watched over him as a mother watches over
a son. The notion that he was not QUITE right in the pate gradually
died away, and everybody was thankful for that, though it was feared an
untimely grave might be his portion.




III


She was a nice girl: the nicest girl that Horace had ever met with,
because her charming niceness included a faculty of being really
serious about serious things--and yet she could be deliciously gay. In
short, she was a revelation to Horace. And her name was Ella, and she
had come one year to spend some weeks with Mrs Penkethman, the widowed
headmistress of the Wesleyan Day School, who was her cousin. Mrs
Penkethman and Ella had been holidaying together in France; their
arrival in Bursley naturally coincided with the reopening of the school
in August for the autumn term.

Now at this period Horace was rather lonely in his large house and
garden; for Sidney, in pursuit of health, had gone off on a six weeks'
cruise round Holland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, in one of those
Atlantic liners which, translated like Enoch without dying, become in
their old age 'steam-yachts', with fine names apt to lead to confusion
with the private yacht of the Tsar of Russia. Horace had offered him
the trip, and Horace was also paying his weekly salary as usual.

So Horace, who had always been friendly with Mrs Penkethman, grew now
more than ever friendly with Mrs Penkethman. And Mrs Penkethman and
Ella were inseparable. The few aristocrats left in Bursley in September
remarked that Horace knew what he was about, as it was notorious that
Ella had the most solid expectations. But as a matter of fact Horace
did not know what he was about, and he never once thought of Ella's
expectations. He was simply, as they say in Bursley, knocked silly by
Ella. He honestly imagined her to be the wonderfullest woman on the
earth's surface, with her dark eyes and her expressive sympathetic
gestures, and her alterations of seriousness and gaiety. It astounded
him that a girl of twenty-one could have thought so deeply upon life as
she had. The inexplicable thing was that she looked up to HIM. She
evidently admired HIM. He wanted to tell her that she was quite wrong
about him, much too kind in her estimate of him--that really he was a
very ordinary man indeed. But another instinct prevented him from thus
undeceiving her.

And one Saturday afternoon, the season being late September, Horace
actually got those two women up to tea in his house and garden. He had
not dared to dream of such bliss. He had hesitated long before asking
them to come, and in asking them he had blushed and stammered: the
invitation had seemed to him to savour of audacity. But, bless you!
they had accepted with apparent ecstasy. They gave him to think that
they had genuinely wanted to come. And they came extra-specially
dressed--visions, lilies of the field. And as the day was quite warm,
tea was served in the garden, and everybody admired the view; and there
was no restraint, no awkwardness. In particular Ella talked with an
ease and a distinction that enchanted Horace, and almost made him talk
with ease and distinction too. He said to himself that, seeing he had
only known her a month, he was getting on amazingly. He said to himself
that his good luck passed belief.

Then there was a sound of cab-wheels on the other side of the
garden-wall, and presently Horace heard the housekeeper complimenting
Sidney on his good looks, and Sidney asking the housekeeper to lend him
three shillings to pay the cabman. The golden youth had returned
without the slightest warning from his cruise. The tea trio, at the
lower end of the garden, saw him standing in the porch, tanned, curly,
graceful, and young. Horace half rose, and then sat down again. Ella
stared hard.

'That must be your brother,' she said.

'Yes, that's Sid,' Horace answered; and then, calling out loudly: 'Come
down here, Sid, and tell them to bring another cup and saucer.'

'Right you are, old man,' Sidney shouted. 'You see I'm back. What! Mrs
Penkethman, is that you?' He came down the central path of the garden
like a Narcissus.

'He DOES look delicate,' said Ella under her breath to Horace. Tears
came to her eyes.

Naturally Ella knew all about Sidney. She enjoyed the entire confidence
of Mrs Penkethman, and what Mrs Penkethman didn't know of the private
history of the upper classes in Bursley did not amount to very much.

These were nearly the last words that Ella spoke to Horace that
afternoon. The introduction was made, and Sidney slipped into the party
as comfortably as he slipped into everything, like a candle slipping
into a socket. But nevertheless Ella talked no more. She just stared at
Sidney, and listened to him. Horace was proud that Sidney had made such
an impression on her; he was glad that she showed no aversion to
Sidney, because, in the event of Horace's marriage, where would Sidney
live, if not with Horace and Horace's wife? Still, he could have wished
that Ella would continue to display her conversational powers.

Presently, Sidney lighted a cigarette. He was of those young men whose
delicate mouths seem to have been fashioned for the nice conduct of a
cigarette. And he had a way of blowing out the smoke that secretly
ravished every feminine beholder. Horace still held to his boyhood's
principles; but he envied Sidney a little.

At the conclusion of the festivity these two women naturally could not
be permitted to walk home alone. And, naturally, also, the four could
not walk abreast on the narrow pavements. Horace went first with Mrs
Penkethman. He was mad with anxiety to appropriate Ella, but he dared
not. It would not have been quite correct; it would have been, as they
say in Bursley, too thick. Besides, there was the question of age.
Horace was over thirty, and Mrs Penkethman was also--over thirty;
whereas Sidney was twenty-one, and so was Ella. Hence Sidney walked
behind with Ella, and the procession started in silence. Horace did not
look round too often--that would not have been quite proper--but
whenever he did look round the other couple had lagged farther and
farther behind, and Ella seemed perfectly to have recovered her speech.
At length he looked round, and lo! they had not turned the last corner;
and they arrived at Mrs Penkethman's cottage at Hillport a quarter of
an hour after their elders.




IV


The wedding cost Horace a large sum of money. You see, he could not do
less than behave handsomely by the bride, owing to his notorious
admiration for her; and of course the bridegroom needed setting up.
Horace practically furnished their home for them out of his own pocket;
it was not to be expected that Sidney should have resources. Further,
Sidney as a single man, paying seven-and-six a week for board and
lodging, could no doubt struggle along upon three pounds weekly. But
Sidney as a husband, with the nicest girl in the world to take care of,
and house-rent to pay, could not possibly perform the same feat.
Although he did no more work at the manufactory--Horace could not have
been so unbrotherly as to demand it--Horace paid him eight pounds a
week instead of three.

And the affair cost Horace a good deal besides money. But what could
Horace do? He decidedly would not have wished to wreck the happiness of
two young and beautiful lives, even had he possessed the power to do
so. And he did not possess the power. Those two did not consult Horace
before falling in love. They merely fell in love, and there was an end
of it--and an end of Horace too! Horace had to suffer. He did suffer.

Perhaps it was for his highest welfare that other matters came to
monopolize his mind. One sorrow drives out another. If you sit on a pin
you are apt to forget that you have the toothache. The earthenware
manufactory was not going well. Plenty of business was being done, but
not at the right prices. Crushed between the upper and nether
millstones of the McKinley Tariff and German competition, Horace, in
company with other manufacturers, was breathing out his life's blood in
the shape of capital. The truth was that he had never had enough
capital. He had heavily mortgaged the house at Toft End in order to
purchase his partners' shares in the business and have the whole
undertaking to himself, and he profoundly regretted it. He needed every
penny that he could collect; the strictest economy was necessary if he
meant to survive the struggle. And here he was paying eight pounds a
week to a personage purely ornamental, after having squandered hundreds
in rendering that personage comfortable! The situation was dreadful.

You may ask, Why did he not explain the situation to Sidney? Well,
partly because he was too kind, and partly because he was too proud,
and partly because Sidney would not have understood. Horace fought on,
keeping up a position in the town and hoping that miracles would occur.

Then Ella's expectations were realized. Sidney and she had some twenty
thousand pounds to play with. And they played the most agreeable games.
But not in Bursley. No. They left Horace in Bursley and went to
Llandudno for a spell. Horace envied them, but he saw them off at the
station as an elder brother should, and tipped the porters.

Certainly he was relieved of the formality of paying eight pounds a
week to his brother. But this did not help him much. The sad fact was
that 'things' (by which is meant fate, circumstances, credit, and so
on) had gone too far. It was no longer a question of eight pounds a
week; it was a question of final ruin.

Surely he might have borrowed money from Sidney? Sidney had no money;
the money was Ella's, and Horace could not have brought himself to
borrow money from a woman--from Ella, from a heavenly creature who
always had a soothing sympathetic word for him. That would have been to
take advantage of Ella. No, if you suggest such a thing, you do not
know Horace.

I stated in the beginning that he had no faults. He was therefore
absolutely honest. And he called his creditors together while he could
yet pay them twenty shillings in the pound. It was a noble act, rare
enough in the Five Towns and in other parts of England. But he received
no praise for it. He had only done what every man in his position ought
to do. If Horace had failed for ten times the sum that his debts
actually did amount to, and then paid two shillings in the pound
instead of twenty, he would have made a stir in the world and been
looked up to as no ordinary man of business.

Having settled his affairs in this humdrum, idiotic manner, Horace took
a third-class return to Llandudno. Sidney and Ella were staying at the
hydro with the strange Welsh name, and he found Sidney lolling on the
sunshiny beach in front of the hydro discoursing on the banjo to
himself. When asked where his wife was, Sidney replied that she was
lying down, and was obliged to rest as much as possible.

Horace, ashamed to trouble this domestic idyl, related his misfortunes
as airily as he could.

And Sidney said he was awfully sorry, and had no notion how matters
stood, and could he do anything for Horace? If so, Horace might--

'No,' said Horace. 'I'm all right. I've very fortunately got an
excellent place as manager in a big new manufactory in Germany.' (This
is how we deal with German competition in the Five Towns.)

'Germany?' cried Sidney.

'Yes,' said Horace; 'and I start the day after tomorrow.'

'Well,' said Sidney, 'at any rate you'll stay the night.'

'Thanks,' said Horace, 'you're very kind. I will.'

So they went into the hydro together, Sidney caressing his wonderful
new pearl-inlaid banjo; and Horace talked in low tones to Ella as she
lay on the sofa. He convinced Ella that his departure to Germany was
the one thing he had desired all his life, because it was not good that
Ella should be startled, shocked, or grieved.

They dined well.

But in the night Sidney had a recurrence of his old illness--a bad
attack; and Horace sat up through the dark hours, fetched the doctor,
and bought things at the chemist's. Towards morning Sidney was better.
And Horace, standing near the bed, gazed at his stepbrother and tried
in his stupid way to read the secrets beneath that curly hair. But he
had no success. He caught himself calculating how much Sidney had cost
him, at periods of his career when he could ill spare money; and,
having caught himself, he was angry with himself for such baseness. At
eight o'clock he ventured to knock at Ella's door and explain to her
that Sidney had not been quite well. She had passed a peaceful night,
for he had, of course, refrained from disturbing her.

He was not quite sure whether Sidney had meant him to stay at the hydro
as his guest, so he demanded a bill, paid it, said good-bye, and left
for Bonn-on-the-Rhine. He was very exhausted and sleepy. Happily the
third-class carriages on the London & North-Western are pretty
comfortable. Between Chester and Crewe he had quite a doze, and dreamed
that he had married Ella after all, and that her twenty thousand pounds
had put the earthenware business on a footing of magnificent and
splendid security.




V


A few months later Horace's house and garden at Toft End were put up to
auction by arrangement with his mortgagee and his trade-creditors. And
Sidney was struck with the idea of buying the place. The impression was
that it would go cheap. Sidney said it would be a pity to let the abode
pass out of the family. Ella said that the idea of buying it was a
charming one, because in the garden it was that she had first met her
Sidney. So the place was duly bought, and Sidney and Ella went to live
there.

Several years elapsed.

Then one day little Horace was informed that his uncle Horace, whom he
had never seen, was coming to the house on a visit, and that he must be
a good boy, and polite to his uncle, and all the usual sort of thing.

And in effect Horace the elder did arrive in the afternoon. He found no
one to meet him at the station, or at the garden gate of the pleasaunce
that had once been his, or even at the front door. A pert parlour-maid
told him that her master and mistress were upstairs in the nursery, and
that he was requested to go up. And he went up, and to be sure Sidney
met him at the top of the stairs, banjo in hand, cigarette in mouth,
smiling, easy and elegant as usual--not a trace of physical weakness in
his face or form. And Horace was jocularly ushered into the nursery and
introduced to his nephew. Ella had changed. She was no longer slim, and
no longer gay and serious by turns. She narrowly missed being stout,
and she was continuously gay, like Sidney. The child was also gay.
Everybody was glad to see Horace, but nobody seemed deeply interested
in Horace's affairs. As a fact he had done rather well in Germany, and
had now come back to England in order to assume a working partnership
in a small potting concern at Hanbridge. He was virtually beginning
life afresh. But what concerned Sidney and Ella was themselves and
their offspring. They talked incessantly about the infinitesimal
details of their daily existence, and the alterations which they had
made, or meant to make, in the house and garden. And occasionally
Sidney thrummed a tune on the banjo to amuse the infant. Horace had
expected them to be curious about Germany and his life in Germany. But
not a bit! He might have come in from the next street and left them
only yesterday, for all the curiosity they exhibited.

'Shall we go down to the drawing-room and have tea, eh?' said Ella.

'Yes, let's go and kill the fatted calf,' said Sidney.

And strangely enough, inexplicably enough, Horace did feel like a
prodigal.

Sidney went off with his precious banjo, and Ella picked up sundry
belongings without which she never travelled about the house.

'You carry me down-stairs, unky?' the little nephew suggested, with an
appealing glance at his new uncle. 'No,' said Horace, 'I'm dashed if I
do!'




BABY'S BATH

I


Mrs Blackshaw had a baby. It would be an exaggeration to say that the
baby interested the entire town, Bursley being an ancient, blase sort
of borough of some thirty thousand inhabitants. Babies, in fact,
arrived in Bursley at the rate of more than a thousand every year.
Nevertheless, a few weeks after the advent of Mrs Blackshaw's baby,
when the medical officer of health reported to the Town Council that
the births for the month amounted to ninety-five, and that the
birth-rate of Bursley compared favourably with the birth-rates of the
sister towns, Hanbridge, Knype, Longshaw, and Turnhill--when the
medical officer read these memorable words at the monthly meeting of
the Council, and the Staffordshire Signal reported them, and Mrs
Blackshaw perused them, a blush of pride spread over Mrs Blackshaw's
face, and she picked up the baby's left foot and gave it a little peck
of a kiss. She could not help feeling that the real solid foundation of
that formidable and magnificent output of babies was her baby. She
could not help feeling that she had done something for the town--had
caught the public eye.

As for the baby, except that it was decidedly superior to the average
infant in external appearance and pleasantness of disposition, it was,
in all essential characteristics, a typical baby--that is to say, it
was purely sensuous and it lived the life of the senses. It was utterly
selfish. It never thought of anyone but itself. It honestly imagined
itself to be the centre of the created universe. It was convinced that
the rest of the universe had been brought into existence solely for the
convenience and pleasure of it--the baby. When it wanted anything it
made no secret of the fact, and it was always utterly unscrupulous in
trying to get what it wanted. If it could have obtained the moon it
would have upset all the astronomers of Europe and made Whitaker's
Almanack unsalable without a pang. It had no god but its stomach. It
never bothered its head about higher things. It was a bully and a
coward, and it treated women as beings of a lower order than men. In a
word, it was that ideal creature, sung of the poets, from which we
gradually sink and fall away as we grow older.

At the age of six months it had quite a lot of hair, and a charming
rosy expanse at the back of its neck, caused through lying on its back
in contemplation of its own importance. It didn't know the date of the
Battle of Hastings, but it knew with the certainty of absolute
knowledge that it was master of the house, and that the activity of the
house revolved round it.

Now, the baby loved its bath. In any case its bath would have been an
affair of immense and intricate pomp; but the fact that it loved its
bath raised the interest and significance of the bath to the nth power.
The bath took place at five o'clock in the evening, and it is not too
much to say that the idea of the bath was immanent in the very
atmosphere of the house. When you have an appointment with the dentist
at five o'clock in the afternoon the idea of the appointment is
immanent in your mind from the first moment of your awakening. Conceive
that an appointment with the dentist implies heavenly joy instead of
infernal pain, and you will have a notion of the daily state of Mrs
Blackshaw and Emmie (the nurse) with regard to the baby's bath.

Even at ten in the morning Emmie would be keeping an eye on the kitchen
fire, lest the cook might let it out. And shortly after noon Mrs
Blackshaw would be keeping an eye on the thermometer in the bedroom
where the bath occurred. From four o'clock onwards the clocks in the
house were spied on and overlooked like suspected persons; but they
were used to that, because the baby had his sterilized milk every two
hours. I have at length allowed you to penetrate the secret of his sex.

And so at five o'clock precisely the august and exciting ceremony began
in the best bedroom. A bright fire was burning (the month being
December), and the carefully-shaded electric lights were also burning.
A large bath-towel was spread in a convenient place on the floor, and
on the towel were two chairs facing each other, and a table. On one
chair was the bath, and on the other was Mrs Blackshaw with her sleeves
rolled up, and on Mrs Blackshaw was another towel, and on that towel
was Roger (the baby). On the table were zinc ointment, vaseline,
scentless eau de Cologne, Castile soap, and a powder-puff.

Emmie having pretty nearly filled the bath with a combination of hot
and cold waters, dropped the floating thermometer into it, and then
added more waters until the thermometer indicated the precise
temperature proper for a baby's bath. But you are not to imagine that
Mrs Blackshaw trusted a mere thermometer. No. She put her arm in the
water up to the elbow. She reckoned the sensitive skin near the elbow
was worth forty thermometers.

Emmie was chiefly an audience. Mrs Blackshaw had engaged her as a
nurse, but she could have taught a nigger-boy to do all that she
allowed the nurse to do. During the bath Mrs Blackshaw and Emmie hated
and scorned each other, despite their joy. Emmie was twice Mrs
Blackshaw's age, besides being twice her weight, and she knew twice as
much about babies as Mrs Blackshaw did. However, Mrs Blackshaw had the
terrific advantage of being the mother of that particular infant, and
she could always end an argument when she chose, and in her own favour.
It was unjust, and Emmie felt it to be unjust; but this is not a world
of justice.

Roger, though not at all precocious, was perfectly aware of the
carefully-concealed hostility between his mother and his nurse, and
often, with his usual unscrupulousness, he used it for his own ends. He
was sitting upon his mother's knees toying with the edge of the bath,
already tasting its delights in advance. Mrs Blackshaw undressed the
upper half of him, and then she laid him on the flat of his back and
undressed the lower half of him, but keeping some wisp of a garment
round his equatorial regions. And then she washed his face with a
sponge and the Castile soap, very gently, but not half gently enough
for Emmie, nor half gently enough for Roger, for Roger looked upon this
part of the business as insulting and superfluous. He breathed hard and
kicked his feet nearly off.

'Yes, it's dreadful having our face washed, isn't it?' said Mrs
Blackshaw, with her sleeves up, and her hair by this time down. 'We
don't like it, do we? Yes, yes.'

Emmie grunted, without a sound, and yet Mrs Blackshaw heard her, and
finished that face quickly and turned to the hands.

'Potato-gardens every day,' she said. 'Evzy day-day. Enough of that,
Colonel!' (For, after all, she had plenty of spirit.) 'Fat little
creases! Fat little creases! There! He likes that! There! Feet! Feet!
Feet and legs! Then our back. And then WHUP we shall go into the bath!
That's it. Kick! Kick your mother!'

And she turned him over.

'Incredible bungler!' said the eyes of the nurse. 'Can't she turn him
over neater than that?'

'Harridan!' said the eyes of Mrs Blackshaw. 'I wouldn't let you bath
him for twenty thousand pounds!'

Roger continued to breathe hard, as if his mother were a horse and he
were rubbing her down.

'Now! Zoop! Whup!' cried his mother, and having deprived him of his
final rag, she picked him up and sat him in the bath, and he was
divinely happy, and so were the women. He appeared a gross little
animal in the bath, all the tints of his flesh shimmering under the
electric light. His chest was superb, but the rolled and creased
bigness of his inordinate stomach was simply appalling, not to mention
his great thighs and calves. The truth was, he had grown so that if he
had been only a little bit bigger, he would have burst the bath. He
resembled an old man who had been steadily eating too much for about
forty years.

His two womenfolk now candidly and openly worshipped him, forgetting
sectarian differences.

And he splashed. Oh! he splashed. You see, he had learnt how to splash,
and he had certainly got an inkling that to splash was wicked and
messy. So he splashed--in his mother's face, in Emmie's face, in the
fire. He pretty well splashed the fire out. Ten minutes before, the
bedroom had been tidy, a thing of beauty. It was now naught but a wild
welter of towels, socks, binders--peninsulas of clothes nearly
surrounded by water.

Finally his mother seized him again, and, rearing his little legs up
out of the water, immersed the whole of his inflated torso beneath the
surface.

'Hallo!' she exclaimed. 'Did the water run over his mouf? Did it?'

'Angels and ministers of grace defend us! How clumsy she is!' commented
the eyes of Emmie.

'There! I fink that's about long enough for this kind of wevver,' said
the mother.

'I should think it was! There's almost a crust of ice on the water
now!' the nurse refrained from saying.

And Roger, full of regrets, was wrenched out of the bath. He had ceased
breathing hard while in the water, but he began again immediately he
emerged.

'We don't like our face wiped, do we?' said his mother on his behalf.
'We want to go back into that bath. We like it. It's more fun than
anything that happens all day long! Eh? That old dandruff's coming up
in fine style. It's a-peeling off like anything.'

And all the while she wiped him, patted eau de Cologne into him with
the flat of her hand, and rubbed zinc ointment into him, and massaged
him, and powdered him, and turned him over and over and over, till he
was thoroughly well basted and cooked. And he kept on breathing hard.

Then he sneezed, amid general horror!

'I told you so!' the nurse didn't say, and she rushed to the bed where
all the idol's beautiful, clean, aired things were lying safe from
splashings, and handed a flannel shirt, about two inches in length, to
Mrs Blackshaw. And Mrs Blackshaw rolled the left sleeve of it into a
wad and stuck it over his arm, and his poor little vaccination marks
were hidden from view till next morning. Roger protested.

'We don't like clothes, do we?' said his mother. 'We want to tumble
back into our tub. We aren't much for clothes anyway. We'se a little
Hottentot, aren't we?'

And she gradually covered him with one garment or another until there
was nothing left of him but his head and his hands and feet. And she
sat him up on her knees, so as to fasten his things behind. And then it
might have been observed that he was no longer breathing hard, but
giving vent to a sound between a laugh and a cry, while sucking his
thumb and gazing round the room.

'That's our little affected cry that we start for our milk, isn't it?'
his mother explained to him.

And he agreed that it was.

And before Emmie could fly across the room for the bottle, all ready
and waiting, his mouth, in the shape of a perfect rectangle, had
monopolized five-sixths of his face, and he was scarlet and bellowing
with impatience.

He took the bottle like a tiger his prey, and seized his mother's hand
that held the bottle, and he furiously pumped the milk into that
insatiable gulf of a stomach. But he found time to gaze about the room
too. A tear stood in each roving eye, caused by the effort of feeding.

'Yes, that's it,' said his mother. 'Now look round and see what's
happening. Curiosity! Well, if you WILL bob your head, I can't help it.'

'Of course you can!' the nurse didn't say.

Then he put his finger into his mouth side by side with the bottle, and
gagged himself, and choked, and gave a terrible--excuse the
word--hiccough. After which he seemed to lose interest in the milk, and
the pumping operations slackened and then ceased.

'Goosey!' whispered his mother, 'getting seepy? Is the sandman throwing
sand in your eyes? Old Sandman at it? Sh--' ... He had gone.

Emmie took him. The women spoke in whispers. And Mrs Blackshaw, after a
day spent in being a mother, reconstituted herself a wife, and began to
beautify herself for her husband.




II


Yes, there was a Mr Blackshaw, and with Mr Blackshaw the tragedy of the
bath commences. Mr Blackshaw was a very important young man. Indeed, it
is within the mark to say that, next to his son, he was the most
important young man in Bursley. For Mr Blackshaw was the manager of the
newly opened Municipal Electricity Works. And the Municipal Electricity
had created more excitement and interest than anything since the 1887
Jubilee, when an ox was roasted whole in the market-place and turned
bad in the process. Had Bursley been a Swiss village, or a French
country town, or a hamlet in Arizona, it would have had its electricity
fifteen years ago, but being only a progressive English Borough, with
an annual value of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, it struggled on
with gas till well into the twentieth century. Its great neighbour
Hanbridge had become acquainted with electricity in the nineteenth
century.

All the principal streets and squares, and every decent shop that
Hanbridge competition had left standing, and many private houses, now
lighted themselves by electricity, and the result was splendid and
glaring and coldly yellow. Mr. Blackshaw developed into the hero of the
hour. People looked at him in the street as though he had been the
discoverer and original maker of electricity. And if the manager of the
gasworks had not already committed murder, it was because the manager
of the gasworks had a right sense of what was due to his position as
vicar's churchwarden at St Peter's Church.

But greatness has its penalties. And the chief penalty of Mr
Blackshaw's greatness was that he could not see Roger have his nightly
bath. It was impossible for Mr Blackshaw to quit his arduous and
responsible post before seven o'clock in the evening. Later on, when
things were going more smoothly, he might be able to get away; but
then, later on, his son's bath would not be so amusing and agreeable as
it then, by all reports, was. The baby was, of course, bathed on
Saturday nights, but Sunday afternoon and evening Mr Blackshaw was
obliged to spend with his invalid mother at Longshaw. It was on the
sole condition of his weekly presence thus in her house that she had
consented not to live with the married pair. And so Mr Blackshaw could
not witness Roger's bath. He adored Roger. He understood Roger. He
weighed, nursed, and fed Roger. He was 'up' in all the newest theories
of infant rearing. In short, Roger was his passion, and he knew
everything of Roger except Roger's bath. And when his wife met him at
the front door of a night at seven-thirty and launched instantly into a
description of the wonders, delights, and excitations of Roger's latest
bath, Mr Blackshaw was ready to tear his hair with disappointment and
frustration.

'I suppose you couldn't put it off for a couple of hours one night,
May?' he suggested at supper on the evening of the particular bath
described above.

'Sidney!' protested Mrs Blackshaw, pained.

Mr Blackshaw felt that he had gone too far, and there was a silence.

'Well!' said Mr Blackshaw at length, 'I have just made up my mind. I'm
going to see that Kid's bath, and, what's more, I'm going to see it
tomorrow. I don't care what happens.'

'But how shall you manage to get away, darling?'

'You will telephone me about a quarter of an hour before you're ready
to begin, and I'll pretend it's something very urgent, and scoot off.'

'Well, that will be lovely, darling!' said Mrs Blackshaw. 'I WOULD like
you to see him in the bath, just once! He looks so--'

And so on.

The next day, Mr Blackshaw, that fearsome autocrat of the Municipal
Electricity Works, was saying to himself all day that at five o'clock
he was going to assist at the spectacle of his wonderful son's bath.
The prospect inspired him. So much so that every hand on the place was
doing its utmost in fear and trembling, and the whole affair was
running with the precision and smoothness of a watch.

From four o'clock onwards, Mr Blackshaw, in the solemn, illuminated
privacy of the managerial office, safe behind glass partitions, could
no more contain his excitement. He hovered in front of the telephone,
waiting for it to ring. Then, at a quarter to five, just when he felt
he couldn't stand it any longer, and was about to ring up his wife
instead of waiting for her to ring him up, he saw a burly shadow behind
the glass door, and gave a desolate sigh. That shadow could only be
thrown by one person, and that person was his Worship the Mayor of
Bursley. His Worship entered the private office with mayoral assurance,
pulling in his wake a stout old lady whom he introduced as his aunt
from Wolverhampton. And he calmly proposed that Mr Blackshaw should
show the mayoral aunt over the new Electricity Works!

Mr Blackshaw was sick of showing people over the Works. Moreover, he
naturally despised the Mayor. All permanent officials of municipalities
thoroughly despise their mayors (up their sleeves). A mayor is here
today and gone tomorrow, whereas a permanent official is permanent. A
mayor knows nothing about anything except his chain and the rules of
debate, and he is, further, a tedious and meddlesome person--in the
opinion of permanent officials.

So Mr Blackshaw's fury at the inept appearance of the Mayor and the
mayoral aunt at this critical juncture may be imagined. The worst of it
was, he didn't know how to refuse the Mayor.

Then the telephone-bell rang.

'Excuse me,' said Mr Blackshaw, with admirably simulated politeness,
going to the instrument. 'Are you there? Who is it?'

'It's me, darling,' came the thin voice of his wife far away at
Bleakridge. 'The water's just getting hot. We're nearly ready. Can you
come now?'

'By Jove! Wait a moment!' exclaimed Mr Blackshaw, and then turning to
his visitors, 'Did you hear that?'

'No,' said the Mayor.

'All those three new dynamos that they've got at the Hanbridge
Electricity Works have just broken down. I knew they would. I told them
they would!'

'Dear, dear!' said the Mayor of Bursley, secretly delighted by this
disaster to a disdainful rival. 'Why! They'll have the town in
darkness. What are they going to do?'

'They want me to go over at once. But, of course, I can't. At least, I
must give myself the pleasure of showing you and this lady over our
Works, first.'

'Nothing of the kind, Mr Blackshaw!' said the Mayor. 'Go at once. Go at
once. If Bursley can be of any assistance to Hanbridge in such a
crisis, I shall be only too pleased. We will come tomorrow, won't we,
auntie?'

Mr Blackshaw addressed the telephone.

'The Mayor is here, with a lady, and I was just about to show them over
the Works, but his Worship insists that I come at once.'

'Certainly,' the Mayor put in pompously.

'Wonders will never cease,' came the thin voice of Mrs Blackshaw
through the telephone. 'It's very nice of the old thing! What's his
lady friend like?'

'Not like anything. Unique!' replied Mr Blackshaw.

'Young?' came the voice.

'Dates from the thirties,' said Mr Blackshaw. 'I'm coming.' And rang
off.

'I didn't know there was any electric machinery as old as that,' said
the mayoral aunt.

'We'll just look about us a bit,' the Mayor remarked. 'Don't lose a
moment, Mr Blackshaw.'

And Mr Blackshaw hurried off, wondering vaguely how he should explain
the lie when it was found out, but not caring much. After all, he could
easily ascribe the episode to the trick of some practical joker.




III


He arrived at his commodious and electrically lit residence in the very
nick of time, and full to overflowing with innocent paternal glee. Was
he not about to see Roger's tub? Roger was just ready to be carried
upstairs as Mr Blackshaw's latchkey turned in the door.

'Wait a sec!' cried Mr Blackshaw to his wife, who had the child in her
arms, 'I'll carry him up.'

And he threw away his hat, stick, and overcoat and grabbed ecstatically
at the infant. And he had got perhaps halfway up the stairs, when lo!
the electric light went out. Every electric light in the house went out.

'Great Scott!' breathed Mr Blackshaw, aghast.

He pulled aside the blind of the window at the turn of the stairs, and
peered forth. The street was as black as your hat, or nearly so.

'Great Scott!' he repeated. 'May, get candles.'

Something had evidently gone wrong at the Works. Just his luck! He had
quitted the Works for a quarter of an hour, and the current had failed!

Of course, the entire house was instantly in an uproar, turned upside
down, startled out of its life. But a few candles soon calmed its
transports. And at length Mr Blackshaw gained the bedroom in safety,
with the offspring of his desires comfortable in a shawl.

'Give him to me,' said May shortly. 'I suppose you'll have to go back
to the Works at once?'

Mr Blackshaw paused, and then nerved himself; but while he was pausing,
May, glancing at the two feeble candles, remarked: 'It's very tiresome.
I'm sure I shan't be able to see properly.'

'No!' almost shouted Mr Blackshaw. 'I'll watch this kid have his bath
or I'll die for it! I don't care if all the Five Towns are in darkness.
I don't care if the Mayor's aunt has got caught in a dynamo and is
suffering horrible tortures. I've come to see this bath business, and
dashed if I don't see it!'

'Well, don't stand between the bath and the fire, dearest,' said May
coldly.

Meanwhile, Emmie, having pretty nearly filled the bath with a
combination of hot and cold waters, dropped the floating thermometer
into it, and then added more waters until the thermometer indicated the
precise temperature proper for a baby's bath. But you are not to
imagine that Mrs Blackshaw trusted a thermometer--

She did not, however, thrust her bared arm into the water this time.
No! Roger, who never cried before his bath, was crying, was indubitably
crying. And he cried louder and louder.

'Stand where he can't see you, dearest. He isn't used to you at
bath-time,' said Mrs Blackshaw still coldly. 'Are you, my pet? There!
There!'

Mr Blackshaw effaced himself, feeling a fool. But Roger continued to
cry. He cried himself purple. He cried till the veins stood out on his
forehead and his mouth was like a map of Australia. He cried himself
into a monster of ugliness. Neither mother nor nurse could do anything
with him at all.

'I think you've upset him, dearest,' said Mrs Blackshaw even more
coldly. 'Hadn't you better go?'

'Well--' protested the father.

'I think you had better go,' said Mrs Blackshaw, adding no term of
endearment, and visibly controlling herself with difficulty.

And Mr Blackshaw went. He had to go. He went out into the unelectric
night. He headed for the Works, not because he cared twopence, at that
moment, about the accident at the Works, whatever it was; but simply
because the Works was the only place to go to. And even outside in the
dark street he could hear the rousing accents of his progeny.

People were talking to each other as they groped about in the road, and
either making jokes at the expense of the new Electricity Department,
or frankly cursing it with true Five Towns directness of speech. And as
Mr Blackshaw went down the hill into the town his heart was as black as
the street itself with rage and disappointment. He had made his child
cry!

Someone stopped him.

'Eh, Mester Blackshaw!' said a voice, and under the voice a hand struck
a match to light a pipe. 'What's th' maning o' this eclipse as you'm
treating us to?'

Mr Blackshaw looked right through the inquirer--a way he had when his
brain was working hard. And he suddenly smiled by the light of the
match.

'That child wasn't crying because I was there,' said Mr Blackshaw with
solemn relief. 'Not at all! He was crying because he didn't understand
the candles. He isn't used to candles, and they frightened him.'

And he began to hurry towards the Works.

At the same instant the electric light returned to Bursley. The current
was resumed.

'That's better,' said Mr Blackshaw, sighing.




THE SILENT BROTHERS

I


John and Robert Hessian, brothers, bachelors, and dressed in mourning,
sat together after supper in the parlour of their house at the bottom
of Oldcastle Street, Bursley. Maggie, the middle-aged servant, was
clearing the table.

'Leave the cloth and the coffee,' said John, the elder, 'Mr Liversage
is coming in.'

'Yes, Mr John,' said Maggie.

'Slate, Maggie,' Robert ordered laconically, with a gesture towards the
mantelpiece behind him.

'Yes, Mr Robert,' said Maggie.

She gave him a slate with slate-pencil attached, which hung on a nail
near the mantlepiece.

Robert took the slate and wrote on it: 'What is Liversage coming about?'

And he pushed the slate across the table to John.

Whereupon John wrote on the slate: 'Don't know. He telephoned me he
wanted to see us tonight.'

And he pushed back the slate to Robert.

This singular procedure was not in the least attributable to deafness
on the part of the brothers; they were in the prime of life, aged
forty-two and thirty-nine respectively, and in complete possession of
all their faculties. It was due simply to the fact that they had
quarrelled, and would not speak to each other. The history of their
quarrel would be incredible were it not full of that ridiculous
pathetic quality known as human nature, and did not similar things
happen frequently in the manufacturing Midlands, where the general
temperament is a fearful and strange compound of pride, obstinacy,
unconquerableness, romance, and stupidity. Yes, stupidity.

No single word had passed between the brothers in that house for ten
years. On the morning after the historical quarrel Robert had not
replied when John spoke to him. 'Well,' said John's secret heart--and
John's secret heart ought to have known better, as it was older than
its brother heart--'I'll teach him a lesson. I won't speak until he
does.' And Robert's secret heart had somehow divined this idiotic
resolution, and had said: 'We shall see.' Maggie had been the first to
notice the stubborn silence. Then their friends noticed it, especially
Mr Liversage, the solicitor, their most intimate friend. But you are
not to suppose that anybody protested very strongly. For John and
Robert were not the kind of men with whom liberties may be taken; and,
moreover, Bursley was slightly amused--at the beginning. It assumed the
attitude of a disinterested spectator at a fight. It wondered who would
win. Of course, it called both the brothers fools, yet in a tone
somewhat sympathetic, because such a thing as had occurred to the
Hessians might well occur to any man gifted with the true Bursley
spirit. There is this to be said for a Bursley man: Having made his
bed, he will lie on it, and he will not complain.

The Hessians suffered severely by their self-imposed dumbness, but they
suffered like Stoics. Maggie also suffered, and Maggie would not stand
it. Maggie it was who had invented the slate. Indeed, they had heard
some plain truths from that stout, bustling woman. They had not
yielded, but they had accepted the slate in order to minimize the
inconvenience to Maggie, and afterwards they deigned to make use of it
for their own purposes. As for friends--friends accustomed themselves
to the status quo. There came a time when the spectacle of two men
chattering to everybody else in a company, and not saying a word to
each other, no longer appealed to Bursley's sense of humour. The silent
scenes at which Maggie assisted every day did not, either, appeal to
Maggie's sense of humour, because she had none. So the famous feud grew
into a sort of elemental fact of Nature. It was tolerated as the
weather is tolerated. The brothers acquired pride in it; even Bursley
regarded it as an interesting municipal curiosity. The sole
imperfection in a lovely and otherwise perfect quarrel was that John
and Robert, being both employed at Roycroft's Majolica Manufactory, the
one as works manager and the other as commercial traveller, were
obliged to speak to each other occasionally in the way of business.
Artistically, this was a pity, though they did speak very sternly and
distantly. The partial truce necessitated by Roycroft's was confined
strictly to Roycroft's. And when Robert was not on his journeys, these
two tall, strong, dark, bearded men might often be seen of a night
walking separately and doggedly down Oldcastle Street from the works,
within five yards of each other.

And no one suggested the lunatic asylum. Such is the force of pride, of
rank stupidity, and of habit.

The slate-scratching was scarcely over that evening when Mr Powell
Liversage appeared. He was a golden-haired man, with a jolly face,
lighter and shorter in structure than the two brothers. His friendship
with them dated from school-days, and it had survived even the entrance
of Liversage into a learned profession. Liversage, who, being a
bachelor like the Hessians, had many unoccupied evenings, came to see
the brothers regularly every Saturday night, and one or other of them
dropped in upon him most Wednesdays; but this particular night was a
Thursday.

'How do?' John greeted him succinctly between two puffs of a pipe.

'How do?' replied Liversage.

'How do, Pow?' Robert greeted him in turn, also between two puffs of a
pipe.

And 'How do, little 'un?' replied Liversage.

A chair was indicated to him, and he sat down, and Robert poured out
some coffee into a third cup which Maggie had brought. John pushed away
the extra special of the Staffordshire Signal, which he had been
reading.

'What's up these days?' John demanded.

'Well,' said Liversage, and both brothers noticed that he was rather
ill at ease, instead of being humorous and lightly caustic as usual,
'the will's turned up.'

'The devil it has!' John exclaimed. 'When?'

'This afternoon.'

And then, as there was a pause, Liversage added: 'Yes, my sons, the
will's turned up.'

'But where, you cuckoo, sitting there like that?' asked Robert. 'Where?'

'It was in that registered letter addressed to your sister that the
Post Office people wouldn't hand over until we'd taken out letters of
administration.'

'Well, I'm dashed!' muttered John. 'Who'd have thought of that? You've
got the will, then?'

Liversage nodded.

The Hessians had an elder sister, Mrs Bott, widow of a colour merchant,
and Mrs Bott had died suddenly three months ago, the night after a
journey to Manchester. (Even at the funeral the brothers had
scandalized the town by not speaking to each other.) Mrs Bott had
wealth, wit, and wisdom, together with certain peculiarities, of which
one was an excessive secrecy. It was known that she had made a will,
because she had more than once notified the fact, in a tone suggestive
of highly important issues, but the will had refused to be found. So Mr
Liversage had been instructed to take out letters of administration of
the estate, which, in the continued absence of the will, would be
divided equally between the brothers. And twelve or thirteen thousand
pounds may be compared to a financial beef-steak that cuts up very
handsomely for two persons. The carving-knife was about to descend on
its succulence, when, lo! the will!

'How came the will to be in the post?' asked Robert.

'The handwriting on the envelope was your sister's,' said Liversage.
'And the package was posted in Manchester. Very probably she had taken
the will to Manchester to show it to a lawyer or something of that
sort, and then she was afraid of losing it on the journey back, and so
she sent it to herself by registered post. But before it arrived, of
course, she was dead.'

'That wasn't a bad scheme of poor Mary Ann's!' John commented.

'It was just like her!' said Robert, speaking pointedly to Liversage.
'But what an odd thing!'

Now, both these men were, no doubt excusably, agonized by curiosity to
learn the contents of the will. But would either of them be the first
to express that curiosity? Never in this world! Not for the fortune
itself! To do so would scarcely have been Bursleyish. It would
certainly not have been Hessianlike. So Liversage was obliged at length
to say--

'I reckon I'd better read you the will, eh?'

The brothers nodded.

'Mind you,' said Liversage, 'it's not my will. I've had nothing to do
with it; so kindly keep your hair on. As a matter of fact, she must
have drawn it up herself. It's not drawn properly at all, but it's
witnessed all right, and it'll hold water, just as well as if the
blooming Lord Chancellor had fixed it up for her in person.'

He produced the document and read, awkwardly and self-consciously--

'"This is my will. You are both of you extremely foolish, John and
Robert, and I've often told you so. Nobody has ever understood, and
nobody ever will understand, why you quarrelled like that over Annie
Emery. You are punishing yourselves, but you are punishing her as well,
and it isn't fair her waiting all these years. So I give all my estate,
no matter what it is, to whichever of you marries Annie. And I hope
this will teach you a lesson. You need it more than you need my money.
But you must be married within a year of my death. And if the one that
marries cares to give five thousand pounds or so to the other, of
course there's nothing to prevent him. This is just a hint. And if you
don't either of you marry Annie within a year, then I just leave
everything I have to Miss Annie Emery (spinster), stationer and
fancy-goods dealer, Duck Bank, Bursley. She deserves something for her
disappointment, and she shall have it. Mr Liversage, solicitor, must
kindly be my executor. And I commit my soul to God, hoping for a
blessed resurrection. 20th January, 1896. Signed Mary Ann Bott, widow."
As I told you, the witnessing is in order,' Liversage finished.

'Give it here,' said John shortly, and scanned the sheet of paper.

And Robert actually walked round the table and looked over his
brother's shoulder--ample proof that he was terrifically moved.

'And do you mean to tell me that a will like that is good in law?'
exclaimed John.

'Of course it's good in law!' Liversage replied. 'Legal phraseology is
a useful thing, and it often saves trouble in the end; but it ain't
indispensable, you know.'

'Humph!' was Robert's comment as he resumed his seat and relighted his
pipe.

All three men were nervous. Each was afraid to speak, afraid even to
meet the eyes of the other two. An unmajestic silence followed.

'Well, I'll be off, I think,' Liversage remarked at length with
difficulty.

He rose.

'I say,' Robert stopped him. 'Better not say anything about this to
Miss--to Annie, eh?'

'I will say nothing,' agreed Liversage (infamously and unprofessionally
concealing the fact that he had already said something).

And he departed.

The brothers sat in flustered meditation over the past and the future.

Ten years before, Annie Emery had been an orphan of twenty-three,
bravely starting in business for herself amid the plaudits of the
admiring town; and John had fallen in love with her courage and her
sense and her feminine charm. But alas, as Ovid points out, how
difficult it is for a woman to please only one man! Robert also had
fallen in love with Annie. Each brother had accused the other of
underhand and unbrotherly practices in the pursuit of Annie. Each was
profoundly hurt by the accusations, and each, in the immense fatuity of
his pride, had privately sworn to prove his innocence by having nothing
more to do with Annie. Such is life! Such is man! Such is the terrible
egoism of man! And thus it was that, for the sake of wounded pride,
John and Robert not only did not speak to one another for ten years,
but they spoilt at least one of their lives; and they behaved ignobly
to Annie, who would certainly have married either one or the other of
them.

At two o'clock in the morning John pulled a coin out of his pocket and
made the gesture of tossing.

'Who shall go first!' he explained.

Robert had a queer sensation in his spine as his elder brother spoke to
him for the first time in ten years. He wanted to reply vocally. He had
a most imperious desire to reply vocally. But he could not. Something
stronger even than the desire prevented his tongue from moving.

John tossed the coin--it was a sovereign--and covered it with his hands.

'Tail!' Robert murmured, somewhat hoarsely.

But it was head.

Then they went to bed.




II


The side door of Miss Emery's shop was in Brick Passage, and not in the
main street, so that a man, even a man of commanding stature and
formidable appearance, might by insinuating himself into Brick Street,
off King Street, and then taking the passage from the quieter end,
arrive at it without attracting too much attention. This course was
adopted by John Hessian. From the moment when he quitted his own house
that Friday evening in June he had been subject to the delusion that
the collective eye of Bursley was upon him. As a matter of fact, the
collective eye of Bursley is much too large and important to occupy
itself exclusively with a single individual. Bursley is not a village,
and let no one think it. Nevertheless, John was subject to the delusion.

The shop was shut, as he knew it would be. But the curtained window of
the parlour, between the side-door and the small shuttered side-window
of the shop, gave a strange suggestion of interesting virgin spotless
domesticity within. John cast a fearful eye on the main thoroughfare.
Nobody seemed to be passing. The chapel-keeper of the Wesleyan Chapel
on the opposite side of Trafalgar Road was refreshing the massive
Corinthian portico of that fane, and paying no regard whatever to the
temple of Eros which Miss Emery's shop had suddenly become.

So John knocked.

'I am a fool!' his thought ran as he knocked.

Because he did not know what he was about. He had won the toss, and
with it the right to approach Annie Emery before his brother. But what
then? Well, he did desire to marry her, quite as much for herself as
for his sister's fortune. But what then? How was he going to explain
the tepidity, the desertion, the long sin against love of ten years? In
short, how was he going to explain the inexplicable? He could decidedly
do nothing that evening except make a blundering ass of himself. And
how soon would Robert have the right to come along and say HIS say?
That point had not been settled. Points so extremely delicate cannot be
settled on a slate, and he had not dared to broach it viva voce to his
younger brother. He had been too afraid of a rebuff.

He then hoped that Annie's servant would tell him that Annie was out.

Annie, however, took him at a disadvantage by opening the door herself.

'Well, MR HESSIAN!' she exclaimed, her face bursting into a swift and
welcoming smile.

'I was just passing,' the donkey in him blundered forth. 'And I
thought--'

However, in fifteen seconds he was on the domestic side of the
sitting-room window, and seated in the antimacassared armchair between
the fire-place and the piano, and Annie had taken his hat and told him
that her servant was out for the evening.

'But I'm disturbing your supper, Miss Emery,' he said. Flurried though
he was, he could not fail to notice the white embroidered cloth spread
diagonally on the table, and the cold meat and the pastry and the
glittering cutlery and crystal thereon.

'Not at all,' she replied. 'You haven't had supper yet, I expect?'

'No,' he said, not thinking.

'It will be nice of you to help me to eat mine,' said she.

'Oh! But really--'

But she got plates and things out of the cupboard below the
bookcase--and there he was! She would take no refusal. It was wondrous.

'I'm awfully glad I came now,' his thought ran; I'm managing it rather
well.'

And--

'Poor Bob!'

His sole discomfort was that he could not invent a sufficiently
ingenious explanation of his call. You can't tell a woman you've called
to make love to her, and when your previous call happens to have been
ten years ago, some kind of an explanation does seem to be demanded.
Ultimately, as Annie was so very pleased to see him, so friendly, so
feminine, so equal to the occasion, he decided to let his presence in
her abode that night stand as one of those central facts in existence
that need no explanation. And they went on talking and eating till the
dusk deepened and Annie lit the gas and drew the blind.

He watched her on the sly as she moved about the room. He decided that
she did not appear a day older. There was the same plump, erect figure,
the same neatness, the same fair skin and fair hair, the same little
nose, the same twinkle in the eye--only perhaps the twinkle in the eye
was a trifle less cruel than it used to be. She was not a day older.
(In this he was of course utterly mistaken; she was ten years older,
she was thirty-three, with ten years of successful commercial
experience behind her; she would never be twenty-three again. Still she
was a most desirable woman, and a woman infinitely beyond his deserts.)
Her air of general capability impressed him. And with that there was
mingled a strange softness, a marvellous hint of a concealed wish to
surrender.... Well, she made him feel big and masculine--in brief, a
man.

He regretted the lost ten years. His present way of life seemed
intolerable to him. The new heaven opened its gate and gave glimpses of
paradise. After all, he felt himself well qualified for that paradise.
He felt that he had all along been a woman's man, without knowing it.

'By Jove!' his thought ran. 'At this rate I might propose to her in a
week or two.'

And again--

'Poor old Bobbie!'

A quarter of an hour later, in some miraculous manner, they were more
intimate than they had ever been, much more intimate. He revised his
estimate of the time that must elapse before he might propose to her.
In another five minutes he was fighting hard against a mad impulse to
propose to her on the spot. And then the fight was over, and he had
lost. He proposed to her under the rose-coloured shade of the Welsbach
light.

She drew away, as though shot.

And with the rapidity of lightning, in the silence which followed, he
went back to his original criticism of himself, that he was a fool.
Naturally she would request him to leave. She would accuse him of
effrontery.

Her lips trembled. He prepared to rise.

'It's so sudden!' she said.

Bliss! Glory! Celestial joy! Her words were at least equivalent to an
absolution of his effrontery! She would accept! She would accept! He
jumped up and approached her. But she jumped up too and retreated. He
was not to win his prize so easily.

'Please sit down,' she murmured. 'I must think it over,' she said,
apparently mastering herself. 'Shall you be at chapel next Sunday
morning?'

'Yes,' he answered.

'If I am there, and if I am wearing white roses in my hat, it will
mean--' She dropped her eyes.

'Yes?' he queried.

And she nodded.

'And supposing you aren't there?'

'Then the Sunday after,' she said.

He thanked her in his Hessian style.

'I prefer that way of telling you,' she smiled demurely. 'It will avoid
the necessity for another--so much--you understand?...'

'Quite so, quite so!' he agreed. 'I quite understand.'

'And if I DO see those roses,' he went on, 'I shall take upon myself to
drop in for tea, may I?'

She paused.

'In any case, you mustn't speak to me coming out of chapel, PLEASE.'

As he walked home down Oldcastle Street he said to himself that the age
of miracles was not past; also that, after all, he was not so old as
the tale of his years would mathematically indicate.




III


Her absence from chapel on the next Sunday disagreed with him. However,
Robert was away nearly all the week, and he had the house to himself to
dream in. It frequently happened to him to pass by Miss Emery's shop,
but he caught no glimpse of her, and though he really was in serious
need of writing-paper and envelopes, he dared not enter. Robert
returned on the Friday.

On the morning of the second Sunday, John got up early, in order to
cope with a new necktie that he had purchased in Hanbridge.
Nevertheless he found Robert afoot before him, and Robert, by some
unlucky chance, was wearing not merely a new necktie, but a new suit of
clothes. They breakfasted in their usual august silence, and John
gathered from a remark of Robert's to Maggie when she brought in the
boots that Robert meant to go to chapel. Now, Robert, being a
commercial traveller and therefore a bit of a caution, did not attend
chapel with any remarkable assiduity. And John, in the privacy of his
own mind, blamed him for having been so clumsy as to choose that
particular morning for breaking the habits of a lifetime. Still, the
presence of Robert in the pew could not prejudicially affect John, and
so there was no genuine cause for gloominess.

After a time it became apparent that each was waiting for the other to
go. John began to get annoyed. At last he made the plunge and went.
Turning his head halfway up Oldcastle Street, opposite the mansion
which is called 'Miss Peel's', he perceived Robert fifty yards behind.
It was a glorious June day.

He blushed as he entered chapel. If he was nervous, it may be accorded
to him as excuse that the happiness of his life depended on what he
should see within the next few minutes. However, he felt pretty sure,
though it was exciting all the same.

To reach the Hessian pew he was obliged to pass Miss Emery's. And it
was empty! Robert arrived.

The organist finished the voluntary. The leading tenor of the choir put
up the number of the first hymn. The minister ascended the staircase of
the great mahogany pulpit, and prayed silently, and arranged his papers
in the leaves of the hymn-book, and glanced about to see who was there
and who was presumably still in bed, and coughed; and then Miss Annie
Emery sailed in with that air of false calm which is worn by the
experienced traveller who catches a train by the fifth of a second. The
service commenced.

John looked.

She was wearing white roses. There could be no mistake as to that.
There were about a hundred and fifty-five white roses in the garden of
her hat.

What a thrill ran through John's heart! He had won Annie, and he had
won the fortune. Yes, he would give Robert the odd five thousand
pounds. His state of mind might even lead him to make it guineas. He
heard not a word of the sermon, and throughout the service he rose up
and sat down several instants after the rest of the congregation,
because he was so absent-minded.

After service he waited for everybody else to leave, in order not to
break his promise to the divine Annie. So did Robert. This ill-timed
rudeness on Robert's part somewhat retarded the growth of a young
desire in John's heart to make friends with poor Bob. Then he got up
and left, and Robert followed.

They dined in silence, John deciding that he would begin his overtures
of friendship after he had seen Annie, and could tell Robert that he
was formally engaged. The brothers ate little. They both improved their
minds during their repast--John with the Christian Commonwealth, and
Robert with the Saturday cricket edition of the Signal (I regret it).

Then, after pipes, they both went out for a walk, naturally not in the
same direction. The magnificence of the weather filled them both with
the joy of life. As for John, he went out for a walk simply because he
could not contain himself within the house. He could not wait immovable
till four-thirty, the hour at which he meant to call on Annie for tea
and the betrothal kiss. Therefore he ascended to Hillport and wandered
as far as Oldcastle, all in a silk hat and a frock-coat.

It was precisely half-past four as he turned, unassumingly, from Brick
Street into Brick Passage, and so approached the side door of Annie
Emery's. And his astonishment and anger were immense when he saw
Robert, likewise in silk hat and frock-coat, penetrating into Brick
Passage from the other end.

They met, and their inflamed spirits collided.

'What's the meaning of this?' John demanded, furious; and,
simultaneously, Robert demanded: 'What in Hades are YOU doing here?'

Only Sunday and the fine clothes and the proximity to Annie prevented
actual warfare.

'I'm calling on Annie,' said John.

'So am I,' said Robert.

'Well, you're too late,' said John.

'Oh, I'm too late, am I?' said Robert, with a disdainful laugh. Thanks!'

'I tell you you're too late,' said John. 'You may as well know at once
that I've proposed to Annie and she's accepted me.'

'I like that! I like that!' said Robert.

'Don't shout!' said John.

'I'm not shouting,' said Robert. 'But you may as well know that you're
mistaken, my boy. It's me that's proposed to Annie and been accepted.
You must be off your chump.'

'When did you propose to her?' said John.

'On Friday, if you must know,' said Robert.

'And she accepted you at once?' said John.

'No. She said that if she was wearing white roses in her hat this
morning at chapel, that would mean she accepted,' said Robert.

'Liar!' said John.

'I suppose you'll admit she WAS wearing white roses in her hat?' said
Robert, controlling himself.

'Liar!' said John, and continued breathless: 'That was what she said to
ME. She must have told you that white roses meant a refusal.'

'Oh no, she didn't!' said Robert, quailing secretly, but keeping up a
formidable show of courage. 'You're an old fool!' he added vindictively.

They were both breathing hard, and staring hard at each other.

'Come away,' said John. 'Come away! We can't talk here. She may look
out of the window.'

So they went away. They walked very quickly home, and, once in the
parlour, they began to have it out. And, before they had done, the
reading of cricket news on Sunday was as nothing compared to the
desecrating iniquity which they committed. The scene was not such as
can be decently recounted. But about six o'clock Maggie entered, and,
at considerable personal risk, brought them back to a sense of what was
due to their name, the town, and the day. She then stated that she
would not remain in such a house, and she departed.




IV


'But whatever made you do it, dearest?'

These words were addressed to Annie Emery on the glorious summer
evening which closed that glorious summer day, and they were addressed
to her by no other person than Powell Liversage. The pair were in the
garden of the house in Trafalgar Road occupied by Mr Liversage and his
mother, and they looked westwards over the distant ridge of Hillport,
where the moon was setting.

'Whatever made me do it!' repeated Annie, and the twinkle in her eye
had that charming cruelty which John had missed. 'Did they not deserve
it? Of course, I can talk to you now with perfect freedom, can't I?
Well, what do you THINK of it? Here for ten years neither one nor the
other does more than recognize me in the street, and then all of a
sudden they come down on me like that--simply because there's a
question of money. I couldn't have believed men could be so stupid--no,
I really couldn't! They're friends of yours, Powell, I know,
but--however, that's no matter. But it was too ridiculously easy to
lead them on! They'd swallow any flattery. I just did it to see what
they'd do, and I think I arranged it pretty well. I quite expected they
would call about the same time, and then shouldn't I have given them my
mind! Unfortunately they met outside, and got very hot--I saw them from
the bedroom window--and went away.'

'You mustn't forget, my dear girl,' said Liversage, 'that it was you
they quarrelled about. I don't want to defend 'em for a minute, but it
wasn't altogether the money that sent them to you; it was more that the
money gave them an excuse for coming!'

'It was a very bad excuse, then!' said Annie.

'Agreed!' Liversage murmured.

The moon was extremely lovely and romantic against the distant spire of
Hillport Church, and its effect on the couple was just what might have
been anticipated.

'Perhaps I'm sorry,' Annie admitted at length, with a charming grimace.

'Oh! I don't think there's anything to be SORRY about,' said Liversage.
'But of course they'll think I've had a hand in it. You see, I've never
breathed a word to them about--about my feelings towards you.'

'No?'

'No. It would have been rather a delicate subject, you see, with them.
And I'm sure they'll be staggered when they know that we got engaged
last night. They'll certainly say I've--er--been after you for the--No,
they won't. They're decent chaps, really; very decent.'

'Anyhow, you may be sure, dear,' said Annie stiffly, 'that _I_ shan't
rob them of their vile money! Nothing would induce me to touch it!'

'Of course not, dearest!' said Liversage--or, rather the finer part of
him said it; the baser part somewhat regretted that vile twelve
thousand or so. (I must be truthful.)

He took her hand again.

At the same moment old Mrs Liversage came hastening down the garden,
and Liversage dropped the hand.

'Powell,' she said. 'Here's John Hessian, and he wants to see you!'

'The dickens!' exclaimed Liversage, glancing at Annie.

'I must go,' said Annie. 'I shall go by the fields. Good night, dear
Mrs Liversage.'

'Wait ten seconds,' Liversage pleaded, 'and I'll be with you.' And he
ran off.

John, haggard and undone, was awaiting him in the drawing-room.

'Pow,' said he, 'I've had a fearful row with Bob, and I can't possibly
sleep in our house tonight. Don't talk to me. But let me have one of
the beds in your spare room, will you? There's a good chap.'

'Why, of course, Johnnie,' said Liversage. 'Of course.'

'And I'll go right to bed now,' said John.

An hour later, after Powell Liversage had seen his affianced to her
abode and returned home, and after his mother had gone to bed, there
was a knock at the front door, and Liversage opened to Robert Hessian.

'Look here, Pow,' said Robert, whose condition was deplorable, 'I want
to sleep here tonight. Do you mind? Fact is, I've had a devil of a
shindy with Jack, and Maggie's run off, and, anyhow, I couldn't
possibly stop in the same house with Jack tonight.'

'But what--?'

'See here,' said Robert. 'I can't talk. Just let me have a bed in your
spare room. I'm sure you mother won't mind.'

'Why, certainly,' said Liversage.

He lit a candle, escorted Robert upstairs, opened the door of the spare
room, gave the candle to Robert, pushed him in, said 'Good night,' and
shut the door.

What a night!




THE NINETEENTH HAT


A dramatic moment was about to arrive in the joint career of Stephen
Cheswardine and Vera his wife. The motor-car stood by the side of the
pavement of the Strand, Torquay, that resort of southern wealth and
fashion. The chauffeur, Felix, had gone into the automobile shop to
procure petrol. Mr Cheswardine looking longer than ever in his long
coat, was pacing the busy footpath. Mrs Cheswardine, her beauty
obscured behind a flowing brown veil, was lolling in the tonneau, very
pleased to be in the tonneau, very pleased to be observed by all
Torquay in the tonneau, very satisfied with her husband, and with the
Napier car, and especially with Felix, now buying petrol. Suddenly Mrs
Cheswardine perceived that next door but one to the automobile shop was
a milliner's. She sat up and gazed. According to a card in the window
an 'after-season sale' was in progress that June day at the milliner's.
There were two rows of hats in the window, each hat plainly ticketed.
Mrs Cheswardine descended from the car, crossed the pavement, and gave
to the window the whole of her attention.

She sniffed at most of the hats. But one of them, of green straw, with
a large curving green wing on either side of the crown, and a few odd
bits of fluffiness here and there, pleased her. It was Parisian. She
had been to Paris--once. An 'after-season' sale at a little shop in
Torquay would not, perhaps, seem the most likely place in the world to
obtain a chic hat; it is, moreover, a notorious fact that really chic
hats cannot be got for less than three pounds, and this hat was marked
ten shillings. Nevertheless, hats are most mysterious things. Their
quality of being chic is more often the fruit of chance than of design,
particularly in England. You never know when nor where you may light on
a good hat. Vera considered that she had lighted on one.

'They're probably duck's feathers dyed,' she said to herself. 'But it's
a darling of a hat and it will suit me to a T.'

As for the price, when once you have taken the ticket off a hat the
secret of its price is gone forever. Many a hat less smart than this
hat has been marked in Bond Street at ten guineas instead of ten
shillings. Hats are like oil-paintings--they are worth what people will
give for them.

So Vera approached her husband, and said, with an enchanting, innocent
smile--

'Lend me half-a-sovereign, will you, doggie?'

She called him doggie in those days because he was a sort of dog-man, a
sort of St Bernard, shaggy and big, with faithful eyes; and he enjoyed
being called doggie.

But on this occasion he was not to be bewitched by the enchanting
innocence of the smile nor by the endearing epithet. He refused to
relax his features.

'You aren't going to buy another hat, are you?' he asked sternly,
challengingly.

The smile disappeared from her face, and she pulled her slim young self
together.

'Yes,' she replied harshly.

The battle was definitely engaged. You may inquire why a man
financially capable of hiring a 20-24 h.p. Napier car, with a French
chauffeur named Felix, for a week or more, should grudge his wife ten
shillings for a hat. Well, you are to comprehend that it was not a
question of ten shillings, it was a question of principle. Vera already
had eighteen hats, and it had been clearly understood between them that
no more money should be spent on attire for quite a long time. Vera was
entirely in the wrong. She knew it, and he knew it. But she wanted just
that hat.

And they were on their honeymoon, you know: which enormously
intensified the poignancy of the drama. They had been married only six
days; in three days more they were to return to the Five Towns, where
Stephen was solidly established as an earthenware manufacturer. You who
have been through them are aware what ticklish things honeymoons are,
and how much depends on the tactfulness of the more tactful of the two
parties. Stephen, thirteen years older than Vera, was the more tactful
of the two parties. He had married a beautiful and elegant woman, with
vast unexploited capacities for love in her heart. But he had married a
capricious woman, and he knew it. So far he had yielded to her
caprices, as well became him; but in the depths of his masculine mind
he had his own private notion as to the identity of the person who
should ultimately be master in their house, and he had decided only the
previous night that when the next moment for being firm arrived, firm
he would be.

And now the moment was upon him. It was their eyes that fought,
silently, bitterly. There is a great deal of bitterness in true love.

Stephen perceived the affair broadly, in all its aspects. He was older
and much more experienced than Vera, and therefore he was responsible
for the domestic peace, and for her happiness, and for his own, and for
appearances, and for various other things. He perceived the moral
degradation which would be involved in an open quarrel during the
honeymoon. He perceived the difficulties of a battle in the street, in
such a select and prim street as the Strand, Torquay, where the very
backbone of England's respectability goes shopping. He perceived Vera's
vast ignorance of life. He perceived her charm, and her naughtiness,
and all her defects. And he perceived, further, that, this being the
first conflict of their married existence, it was of the highest
importance that he should emerge from it the victor. To allow Vera to
triumph would gravely menace their future tranquillity and multiply the
difficulties which her adorable capriciousness would surely cause. He
could not afford to let her win. It was his duty, not merely to himself
but to her, to conquer. But, on the other hand, he had never fully
tested her powers of sheer obstinacy, her willingness to sacrifice
everything for the satisfaction of a whim; and he feared these powers.
He had a dim suspicion that Vera was one of that innumerable class of
charming persons who are perfectly delicious and perfectly sweet so
long as they have precisely their own way--and no longer.

Vera perceived only two things. She perceived the hat--although her
back was turned towards it--and she perceived the
half-sovereign--although it was hidden in Stephen's pocket.

'But, my dear,' Stephen protested, 'you know--'

'Will you lend me half-a-sovereign?' Vera repeated, in a glacial tone.
The madness of a desired hat had seized her. She was a changed Vera.
She was not a loving woman, not a duteous young wife, nor a reasoning
creature. She was an embodied instinct for hats.

'It was most distinctly agreed,' Stephen murmured, restraining his
anger.

Just then Felix came out of the shop, followed by a procession of three
men bearing cans of petrol. If Stephen was Napoleon and Vera
Wellington, Felix was the Blucher of this deplorable altercation.
Impossible to have a row--yes, a row--with your wife in the presence of
your chauffeur, with his French ideas of chivalry.

'Will you lend me half-a-sovereign?' Vera reiterated, in the same
glacial tone, not caring twopence for the presence of Felix.

And Stephen, by means of an interminable silver chain, drew his
sovereign-case from the profundity of his hip-pocket; it was like
drawing a bucket out of a well. And he gave Vera half-a-sovereign; and
THAT was like knotting the rope for his own execution.

And while Felix and his three men poured gallons and gallons of petrol
into a hole under the cushions of the tonneau, Stephen swallowed his
wrath on the pavement, and Vera remained hidden in the shop. And the
men were paid and went off, and Felix took his seat ready to start. And
then Vera came out of the hat place, and the new green hat was on her
head, and the old one in a bag in her pretty hands.

'What do you think of my new hat, Felix?' she smiled to the favoured
chauffeur; 'I hope it pleases you.'

Felix said that it did.

In these days, chauffeurs are a great race and a privileged. They have
usurped the position formerly held by military officers. Women fawn on
them, take fancies to them, and spoil them. They can do no wrong in the
eyes of the sex. Vera had taken a fancy to Felix. Perhaps it was
because he had been in a cavalry regiment; perhaps it was merely the
curve of his moustache. Who knows? And Felix treated her as only a
Frenchman can treat a pretty woman, with a sort of daring humility,
with worship--in short, with true Gallic appreciation. Vera much
enjoyed Gallic appreciation. It ravished her to think that she was the
light of poor Felix's existence, an unattainable star for him. Of
course, Stephen didn't mind. That is to say, he didn't really mind.

The car rushed off in the direction of Exeter, homewards.

That day, by means of Felix's expert illegal driving, they got as far
as Bath; and there were no breakdowns. The domestic atmosphere in the
tonneau was slightly disturbed at the beginning of the run, but it soon
improved. Indeed, after lunch Stephen grew positively bright and gay.
At tea, which they took just outside Bristol, he actually went so far
as to praise the hat. He said that it was a very becoming hat, and also
that it was well worth the money. In a word, he signified to Vera that
their first battle had been fought and that Vera had won, and that he
meant to make the best of it and accept the situation.

Vera was naturally charmed, and when she was charmed she was charming.
She said to herself that she had always known that she could manage a
man. The recipe for managing a man was firmness coupled with charm. But
there must be no half measures, no hesitations. She had conquered. She
saw her future life stretching out before her like a beautiful vista.
And Stephen was to be her slave, and she would have nothing to do but
to give rein to her caprices, and charm Stephen when he happened to
deserve it.

But the next morning the hat had vanished out of the bedroom of the
exclusive hotel at Bath. Vera could not believe that it had vanished;
but it had. It was not in the hat-box, nor on the couch, nor under the
couch, nor perched on a knob of the bedstead, nor in any of the spots
where it ought to have been. When she realized that as a fact it had
vanished she was cross, and on inquiring from Stephen what trick he had
played with her hat, she succeeded in conveying to Stephen that she was
cross. Stephen was still in bed, comatose. The tone of his reply
startled her.

'Look here, child,' he said, or rather snapped--he had never been
snappish before--'since you took the confounded thing off last evening
I haven't seen it and I haven't touched it, and I don't know where it
is.'

'But you must--'

'I gave in to you about the hat,' Stephen continued to snap, 'though I
knew I was a fool to do so, and I consider I behaved pretty pleasantly
over it too. But I don't want any more scenes. If you've lost it,
that's not my fault.'

Such speeches took Vera very much aback. And she, too, in her turn, now
saw the dangers of a quarrel, and in this second altercation it was
Stephen who won. He said he would not even mention the disappearance of
the hat to the hotel manager. He was sure it must be in one of Vera's
trunks. And in the end Vera performed that day's trip in another hat.

They reached the Five Towns much earlier than they had
anticipated--before lunch on the ninth day, whereas the new servants in
their new house at Bursley were only expecting them for dinner. So
Stephen had the agreeable idea of stopping the car in front of the new
Hotel Metropole at Hanbridge and lunching there. Precisely opposite
this new and luxurious caravanserai (as they love to call it in the
Five Towns) is the imposing garage and agency where Stephen had hired
the Napier car. Felix said he would lunch hurriedly in order to
transact certain business at the garage before taking them on to
Bursley. After lunch, however, Vera caught him transacting business
with a chambermaid in a corridor. Shocking though the revelation is, it
needs to be said that Felix was kissing the chambermaid. The blow to
Mrs Cheswardine was severe. She had imagined that Felix spent all his
time in gazing up to her as an unattainable star.

She spoke to Stephen about it, in the accents of disillusion. 'What?'
cried Stephen. 'Don't you know? They're engaged to be married. Her name
is Mary Callear. She used to be parlourmaid at Uncle John's at
Oldcastle. But hotels pay higher wages.'

Felix engaged to a parlourmaid! Felix, who had always seemed to Vera a
gentleman in disguise! Yes, it was indeed a blow!

But balm awaited Vera at her new home in Bursley. A parcel, obviously
containing a cardboard box, had arrived for Stephen. He opened it, and
the lost hat was inside it. Stephen read a note, and explained that the
hotel people at Bath had found it and forwarded it. He began to praise
the hat anew. He made Vera put it on instantly, and seemed delighted.
So much so that Vera went out to the porch to say good-bye to Felix in
a most forgiving frame of mind. She forgave Felix for being engaged to
the chambermaid.

And there was the chambermaid walking up the drive, quite calmly!
Felix, also quite calmly, asked Vera to excuse him, and told the
chambermaid to get into the car and sit beside him. He then informed
Vera that he had to go with the car immediately to Oldcastle, and was
taking Miss Callear with him for the run, this being Miss Callear's
weekly afternoon off. Miss Callear had come to Bursley in the electric
tram.

Vera shook with swift anger; not at Felix's information, but the patent
fact that Mary Callear was wearing a hat which was the exact replica of
the hat on Vera's own head. And Mary Callear was seated like a duchess
in the car, while Vera stood on the gravel. And two of Vera's new
servants were there to see that Vera was wearing a hat precisely
equivalent to the hat of a chambermaid!

She went abruptly into the house and sought for Stephen--as with a
sword. But Stephen was not discoverable. She ran to her elegant new
bedroom and shut herself in. She understood the plot. She had plenty of
wit. Stephen had concerted it with Felix. In spite of Stephen's
allegations of innocence, the hat had been sent somewhere--probably to
Brunt's at Hanbridge--to be copied at express speed, and Stephen had
presented the copy to Felix, in order that Felix might present it to
Mary Callear the chambermaid, and the meeting in the front garden had
been deliberately arranged by that odious male, Stephen. Truly, she had
not believed Stephen capable of such duplicity and cruelty.

She removed the hat, gazed at it, and then tore it to pieces and
scattered the pieces on the carpet.

An hour later Stephen crept into the bedroom and beheld the fragments,
and smiled.

'Stephen,' she exclaimed, 'you're a horrid, cruel brute.' 'I know I
am,' said Stephen. 'You ought to have found that out long since.'

'I won't love you any more. It's all over,' she sobbed. But he just
kissed her.




VERA'S FIRST CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE

I


Five days before Christmas, Cheswardine came home to his wife from a
week's sojourn in London on business. Vera, in her quality of the
best-dressed woman in Bursley, met him on the doorstep (or thereabouts)
of their charming but childless home, attired in a teagown that would
have ravished a far less impressionable male than her husband; while
he, in his quality of a prosaic and flourishing earthenware
manufacturer, pretended to take the teagown as a matter of course, and
gave her the sober, solid kiss of a man who has been married six years
and is getting used to it.

Still, the teagown had pleased him, and by certain secret symptoms Vera
knew that it had pleased him. She hoped much from that teagown. She
hoped that he had come home in a more pacific temper than he had shown
when he left her, and that she would carry her point after all.

Now, naturally, when a husband in easy circumstances, the possessor of
a pretty and pampered wife, spends a week in London and returns five
days before Christmas, certain things are rightly and properly to be
expected from him. It would need an astounding courage, an amazing lack
of a sense of the amenity of conjugal existence in such a husband to
enable him to disappoint such reasonable expectations. And Cheswardine,
though capable of pulling the curb very tight on the caprices of his
wife, was a highly decent fellow. He had no intention to disappoint; he
knew his duty.

So that during afternoon tea with the teagown in a cosy corner of the
great Chippendale drawing-room he began to unfasten a small wooden case
which he had brought into the house in his own hand, opened it with
considerable precaution, making a fine mess of packing-stuff on the
carpet, and gradually drew to light a pair of vases of Venetian glass.
He put them on the mantlepiece.

'There!' he said, proudly, and with a virtuous air.

They were obviously costly antique vases, exquisite in form, exquisite
in the graduated tints of their pale blue and rose.

'Seventeenth century!' he said.

'They're very nice,' Vera agreed, with a show of enthusiasm. 'What are
they for?'

'Your Christmas present,' Cheswardine explained, and added 'my dear!'

'Oh, Stephen!' she murmured.

A kiss on these occasions is only just, and Cheswardine had one.

'Duveens told me they were quite unique,' he said, modestly; 'and I
believe 'em.'

You might imagine that a pair of Venetian vases of the seventeenth
century, stated by Duveens to be unique, would have satisfied a woman
who had a generous dress allowance and lacked absolutely nothing that
was essential. But Vera was not satisfied. She was, on the contrary,
profoundly disappointed. For the presence of those vases proved that
she had not carried her point. They deprived her of hope. The
unpleasantness before Cheswardine went to London had been more or less
a propos of a Christmas present. Vera had seen in Bostock's vast
emporium in the neighbouring town of Hanbridge, a music-stool in the
style known as art nouveau, which had enslaved her fancy. She had taken
her husband to see it, and it had not enslaved her husband's fancy in
the slightest degree. It was made in light woods, and the woods were
curved and twisted as though they had recently spent seven years in a
purgatory for sinful trees. Here and there in the design onyx-stones
had been set in the wood. The seat itself was beautifully soft. What
captured Vera was chiefly the fact that it did not open at the top, as
most elaborate music-stools do, but at either side. You pressed a
button (onyx) and the panel fell down displaying your music in little
compartments ready to hand; and the eastern moiety of the music-stool
was for piano pieces, and the western moiety for songs. In short, it
was the last word of music-stools; nothing could possibly be newer.

But Cheswardine did not like it, and did not conceal his opinion. He
argued that it would not 'go' with the Chippendale furniture, and Vera
said that all beautiful things 'went' together, and Cheswardine
admitted that they did, rather dryly. You see, they took the matter
seriously because the house was their hobby; they were always changing
its interior, which was more than they could have done for a child,
even if they had had one; and Cheswardine's finer and soberer taste was
always fighting against Vera's predilection for the novel and the
bizarre. Apart from clothes, Vera had not much more than the taste of a
mouse.

They did not quarrel in Bostock's. Indeed, they did not quarrel
anywhere; but after Vera had suggested that he might at any rate humour
her by giving her the music-stool for a Christmas present (she seemed
to think this would somehow help it to 'go' with the Chippendale), and
Cheswardine had politely but firmly declined, there had been a certain
coolness and quite six tears. Vera had caused it to be understood that
even if Cheswardine was NOT interested in music, even if he did hate
music and did call the Broadwood ebony grand ugly, that was no reason
why she should be deprived of a pretty and original music-stool that
would keep her music tidy and that would be HERS. As for it not going
with the Chippendale, that was simply an excuse ... etc.

Hence it is not surprising that the Venetian vases of the seventeenth
century left Vera cold, and that the domestic prospects for Christmas
were a little cold.

However, Vera, with wifely and submissive tact made the best of things;
and that evening she began to decorate the hall, dining-room, and
drawing-room with holly and mistletoe. Before the pair retired to rest,
the true Christmas feeling, slightly tinged with a tender melancholy,
permeated the house, and the servants were growing excited in advance.
The servants weren't going to have a dinner-party, with crackers and
port and a table-centre unmatched in the Five Towns; the servants
weren't going to invite their friends to an evening's jollity. The
servants were merely going to work somewhat harder and have somewhat
less sleep; but such is the magical effect of holly and mistletoe
twined round picture-cords and hung under chandeliers that the
excitement of the servants was entirely pleasurable.

And as Vera shut the bedroom door, she said, with a delightful,
forgiving smile---

'I saw a lovely cigar-cabinet at Bostock's yesterday.'

'Oh!' said Cheswardine, touched. He had no cigar-cabinet, and he wanted
one, and Vera knew that he wanted one.

And Vera slept in the sweet consciousness of her thoughtful wifeliness.

The next morning, at breakfast, Cheswardine demanded--

'Getting pretty hard up, aren't you, Maria?'

He called her Maria when he wished to be arch.

Well,' she said, 'as a matter of fact, I am. What with the--'

And he gave her a five-pound note.

It happened so every year. He provided her with the money to buy him a
Christmas present. But it is, I hope, unnecessary to say that the
connection between her present to him and the money he furnished was
never crudely mentioned.

She made an opportunity, before he left for the works, to praise the
Venetian vases, and she insisted that he should wrap up well, because
he was showing signs of one of his bad colds.




II


In the early afternoon she went to Bostock's emporium, at Hanbridge, to
buy the cigar-cabinet and a few domestic trifles. Bostock's is a good
shop. I do not say that it has the classic and serene dignity of
Brunt's, over the way, where one orders one's dining-room suites and
one's frocks for the January dances. But it is a good shop, and one of
the chief glories of the Paris of the Five Towns. It has frontages in
three streets, and it might be called the shop of the hundred windows.
You can buy pretty nearly anything at Bostock's, from an art nouveau
music-stool up to the highest cheese--for there is a provision
department. (You can't get cheese at Brunt's.)

Vera made her uninteresting purchases first, in the basement, and then
she went up-stairs to the special Christmas department, which certainly
was wonderful: a blaze and splendour of electric light; a glitter of
gilded iridescent toys and knick-knacks; a smiling, excited, pushing
multitude of faces, young and old; and the cashiers in their cages
gathering in money as fast as they could lay their tired hands on it! A
joyous, brilliant scene, calculated to bring soft tears of satisfaction
to the board of directors that presided over Bostock's. It was a record
Christmas for Bostock's. The electric cars were thundering over the
frozen streets of all the Five Towns to bring customers to Bostock's.
Children dreamt of Bostock's. Fathers went to scoff and remained to
pay. Brunt's was not exactly alarmed, for nothing could alarm Brunt's;
but there was just a sort of suspicion of something in the air at
Brunt's that did not make for odious self-conceit. People seemed to
become intoxicated when they went into Bostock's, to close their heads
in a frenzy of buying.

And there the art nouveau music-stool stood in the corner, where Vera
had originally seen it! She approached it, not thinking of the terrible
danger. The compartments for music lay invitingly open.

'Four pounds, nine and six, Mrs Cheswardine,' said a shop-walker, who
knew her.

She stopped to finger it.

Well, of course everybody is acquainted with that peculiar ecstasy that
undoubtedly does overtake you in good shops, sometimes, especially at
Christmas. I prefer to call it ecstasy rather than intoxication, but I
have heard it called even drunkenness. It is a magnificent and
overwhelming experience, like a good wine. A blind instinct seizes your
reason and throws her out of the window of your soul, and then assumes
entire control of the volitional machinery. You listen to no arguments,
you care for no consequences. You want a thing; you must have it; you
do have it.

Vera was caught unawares by this magnificent and overwhelming
experience, just as she stooped to finger the music-stool. A fig for
the cigar-cabinet! A fig for her husband's objections! After all she
was a grown-up woman (twenty-nine or thirty), and entitled to a certain
freedom. She was not and would not be a slave. It would look perfect in
the drawing-room.

'I'll take it,' she said.

'Yes, Mrs Cheswardine. A unique thing, quite unique. Penkethman!'

And Vera followed Penkethman to a cash desk and received half-a-guinea
out of a five-pound note.

'I want it carefully packed,' said Vera.

'Yes, ma'am. It will be delivered in the morning.'

She was just beginning to realize that she had been under the sinister
influence of the ecstasy, and that she had not bought the
cigar-cabinet, and that she had practically no more money, and that
Stephen's rule against credit was the strictest of all his rules, when
she caught sight of Mr Charles Woodruff buying toys, doubtless for his
nephews and nieces.

Mr Woodruff was the bachelor friend of the family. He had loved Vera
before Stephen loved her, and he was still attached to her. Stephen and
he were chums of the most advanced kind. Why! Stephen and Vera thought
nothing of bickering in front of Mr Woodruff, who rated them both and
sided with neither.

'Hello!' said Woodruff, flushing, and moving his long, clumsy limbs
when she touched him on the shoulder. 'I'm just buying a few toys.'

She helped him to buy toys, and then he asked her to go and have tea
with him at the newly-opened Sub Rosa Tea Rooms, in Machin Street. She
agreed, and, in passing the music-stool, gave a small parcel which she
was carrying to Penkethman, and told him he might as well put it in the
music-stool. She was glad to have tea with Charlie Woodruff. It would
distract her, prevent her from thinking. The ecstasy had almost died
out, and she had a violent desire not to think.




III


A terrible blow fell upon her the next morning. Stephen had one of his
bad colds, one of his worst. The mere cold she could have supported
with fortitude, but he was forced to remain indoors, and his presence
in the house she could not support with fortitude. The music-stool
would be sure to arrive before lunch, and he would be there to see it
arrive. The ecstasy had fully expired now, and she had more leisure to
think than she wanted. She could not imagine what mad instinct had
compelled her to buy the music-stool. (Once out of the shop these
instincts always are difficult to imagine.) She knew that Stephen would
be angry. He might perhaps go to the length of returning the
music-stool whence it came. For, though she was a pretty and pampered
woman, Stephen had a way, in the last resort, of being master of his
own house. And she could not even placate him with the gift of a
cigar-cabinet. She could not buy a five-guinea cigar-cabinet with ten
and six. She had no other money in the world. She never had money, yet
money was always running through her fingers. Stephen treated her
generously, gave her an ample allowance, but he would under no
circumstances permit credit, nor would he pay her allowance in advance.
She had nothing to expect till the New Year.

She attended to his cold, and telephoned to the works for a clerk to
come up, and she refrained from telling Stephen that he must have been
very careless while in London, to catch a cold like that. Her
self-denial in this respect surprised Stephen, but he put it down to
the beneficent influence of Christmas and the Venetian vases.

Bostock's pair-horse van arrived before the garden gate earlier than
her worse fears had anticipated, and Bostock's men were evidently in a
tremendous hurry that morning. In quite an abnormally small number of
seconds the wooden case containing the fragile music-stool was lying in
the inner hall, waiting to be unpacked. Having signed the delivery-book
Vera stood staring at the accusatory package. Stephen was lounging over
the dining-room fire, perhaps dozing. She would have the thing swiftly
transported up-stairs and hidden in an attic for a time.

But just then Stephen popped out of the dining-room. Stephen's
masculine curiosity had been aroused by the advent of Bostock's van. He
had observed the incoming of the package from the window, and he had
ventured to the hall to inspect it. The event had roused him
wonderfully from the heavy torpor which a cold induces. He wore a
dressing-gown, the pockets of which bulged with handkerchiefs.

'You oughtn't to be out here, Stephen,' said his wife.

'Nonsense!' he said. 'Why, upon my soul, this steam heat is warmer than
the dining-room fire.' Vera, silenced by the voice of truth, could not
reply.

Stephen bent his great height to inspect the package. It was an
appetizing Christmas package; straw escaped from between its ribs, and
it had an air of being filled with something at once large and delicate.

'Oh!' observed Stephen, humorously. 'Ah! So this is it, is it? Ah! Oh!
Very good!'

And he walked round it.

How on earth had he learnt that she had bought it? She had not
mentioned the purchase to Mr Woodruff.

'Yes, Stephen,' she said timidly. 'That's it, and I hope--'

'It ought to hold a tidy few cigars, that ought,' remarked Stephen
complacently.

He took it for the cigar-cabinet!

She paused, struck. She had to make up her mind in an instant.

'Oh yes,' she murmured.

'A thousand?'

'Yes, a thousand,' she said.

'I thought so,' murmured Stephen. 'I mustn't kiss you, because I've got
a cold,' said he. 'But, all the same I'm awfully obliged, Vera. Suppose
we have it opened now, eh? Then we could decide where it is to go, and
I could put my cigars in it.'

'Oh no,' she protested. 'Oh no, Stephen! That's not fair! It mustn't be
opened before Christmas morning.'

'But I gave you my vases yesterday.'

'That's different,' she said. 'Christmas is Christmas.' 'Oh, very
well,' he yielded. 'That's all right, my dear.'

Then he began to sniff.

'There's a deuced odd smell from it,' he said.

'Perhaps it's the wood!' she faltered.

'I hope it isn't,' he said. 'I expect it's the straw. A deuced odd
smell. We'll have the thing put in the side hall, next to the clock. It
will be out of the way there. And I can come and gaze at it when I feel
depressed. Eh, Maria?' He was undoubtedly charmed at the prospect of
owning so large and precious a cigar-cabinet.

Considering that the parcel which she had given to Penkethman to put in
the music-stool comprised a half-a-pound of Bostock's very ripest
Gorgonzola cheese, bought at the cook's special request, the smell
which proceeded from the mysterious inwards of the packing-case did not
surprise Vera at all. But it disconcerted her none the less. And she
wondered how she could get the cheese out.

For thirty hours the smell from the unopened packing-case waxed in
vigour and strength. Stephen's cold grew worse and prevented him from
appreciating its full beauty, but he savoured enough of it to induce
him to compare it facetiously to the effluvium of a dead rat, and he
said several times that Bostock's really ought to use better straw. He
was frequently to be seen in the hall, gloating over his cigar-cabinet.
Once he urged Vera to have it opened and so get rid of the straw, but
she refused, and found the nerve to tell him that he was exaggerating
the odour.

She was at a loss what to do. She could not get up in the middle of the
night and unpack the package and hide its guilty secret. Indeed, to
unpack the package would bring about her ruin instantly; for, the
package unpacked, Stephen would naturally expect to see the
cigar-cabinet. And so the hours crept on to Christmas and Vera's
undoing. She gave herself a headache.

It was just thirty hours after the arrival of the package when Mr
Woodruff dropped in for tea. Stephen was asleep in the dining-room,
which apartment he particularly affected during his colds. Woodruff was
shown into the drawing-room, where Vera was having her headache. Vera
brightened. In fact, she suddenly grew very bright. And she gave
Woodruff tea, and took some herself, and Woodruff passed an enjoyable
twenty minutes.

The two Venetian vases were on the mantelpiece. Vera rose into
ecstasies about them, and called upon Charlie Woodruff to rise too. He
got up from his chair to examine the vases, which Vera had placed close
together side by side at the corner of the mantelpiece nearest to him.
Vera and Woodruff also stood close together side by side. And just as
Woodruff was about to handle the vases, Vera knocked his arm; his arm
collided with one vase; that vase collided with the next, and both fell
to earth--to the hard, unfeeling, unyielding tiles of the hearth.




IV


They were smashed to atoms.

Vera screamed. She screamed twice, and ran out of the room.

'Stephen, Stephen!' she cried hysterically. 'Charlie has broken my
vases, both of them. It IS too bad of him. He's really too clumsy!'

There was a terrific pother. Stephen wakened violently, and in a moment
all three were staring ineffectually at the thousand crystal fragments
on the hearth.

'But--' began Charlie Woodruff.

And that was all he did say.

He and Vera and Stephen had been friends since infancy, so she had the
right not to conceal her feelings before him; Stephen had the same
right. They both exercised it.

'But--' began Charlie again.

'Oh, never mind,' Stephen stopped him curtly. 'Accidents can't be
helped.'

'I shall get another pair,' said Woodruff.

'No, you won't,' replied Stephen. 'You can't. There isn't another pair
in the world. See?'

The two men simultaneously perceived that Vera was weeping. She was
very pretty in tears, but that did not prevent the masculine world from
feeling awkward and self-conscious. Charlie had notions about going out
and burying himself.

'Come, Vera, come,' her husband enjoined, blowing his nose with
unnecessary energy, bad as his cold was.

'I--I liked those vases more than anything you've--you've ever given
me,' Vera blubbered, charmingly, patting her eyes.

Stephen glanced at Woodruff, as who should say: 'Well, my boy, you
uncorked those tears, I'll leave you to deal with 'em. You see, I'm an
invalid in a dressing-gown. I leave you.'

And went.

'No-but-look-here-I-say,' Charlie Woodruff expostulated to Vera when he
was alone with her--he often started an expostulation with that
singular phrase. 'I'm awfully sorry. I don't know how it happened. You
must let me give you something else.'

Vera shook her head.

'No,' she said. 'I wanted Stephen awfully to give me that music-stool
that I told you about a fortnight ago. But he gave me the vases
instead, and I liked them ever so much better.'

'I shall give you the music-stool. If you wanted it a fortnight ago,
you want it now. It won't make up for the vases, of course, but--'

'No, no,' said Vera, positively.

'Why not?'

'I do not wish you to give me anything. It wouldn't be quite nice,'
Vera insisted.

'But I give you something every Christmas.'

'Do you?' asked Vera, innocently.

'Yes, and you and Stephen give me something.'

'Besides, Stephen doesn't quite like the music-stool.'

'What's that got to do with it? You like it. I'm giving it to you, not
to him. I shall go over to Bostock's tomorrow morning and get it.'

'I forbid you to.'

'I shall.'

Woodruff departed.

Within five minutes the Cheswardine coachman was driving off in the
dogcart to Hanbridge, with the packing-case in the back of the cart,
and a note. He brought back the cigar-cabinet. Stephen had not stirred
from the dining-room, afraid to encounter a tearful wife. Presently his
wife came into the dining-room bearing the vast load of the
cigar-cabinet in her delicate arms.

'I thought it might amuse you to fill it with your cigars--just to pass
the time,' she said.

Stephen's thought was: 'Well, women take the cake.' It was a thought
that occurs frequently to the husbands of Veras.

There was ripe Gorgonzola at dinner. Stephen met it as one meets a
person whom one fancies one has met somewhere but cannot remember where.

The next afternoon the music-stool came, for the second time, into the
house. Charlie brought it in HIS dogcart. It was unpacked
ostentatiously by the radiant Vera. What could Stephen say in
depreciation of this gift from their oldest and best friend? As a fact
he could and did say a great deal. But he said it when he happened to
be all alone in the drawing-room, and had observed the appalling way in
which the music-stool did not 'go' with the Chippendale.

'Look at the d--thing!' he exclaimed to himself. 'Look at it!'

However, the Christmas dinner-party was a brilliant success, and after
it Vera sat on the art nouveau music-stool and twittered songs, and
what with her being so attractive and birdlike, and what with the
Christmas feeling in the air... well, Stephen resigned himself to the
music-stool.




THE MURDER OF THE MANDARIN

I


'What's that you're saying about murder?' asked Mrs Cheswardine as she
came into the large drawing-room, carrying the supper-tray.

'Put it down here,' said her husband, referring to the supper-tray, and
pointing to a little table which stood two legs off and two legs on the
hearth-rug.

'That apron suits you immensely,' murmured Woodruff, the friend of the
family, as he stretched his long limbs into the fender towards the
fire, farther even than the long limbs of Cheswardine. Each man
occupied an easy-chair on either side of the hearth; each was very
tall, and each was forty.

Mrs Cheswardine, with a whisk infinitely graceful, set the tray on the
table, took a seat behind it on a chair that looked like a toddling
grand-nephew of the arm-chairs, and nervously smoothed out the apron.

As a matter of fact, the apron did suit her immensely. It is
astounding, delicious, adorable, the effect of a natty little domestic
apron suddenly put on over an elaborate and costly frock, especially
when you can hear the rustle of a silk petticoat beneath, and more
especially when the apron is smoothed out by jewelled fingers. Every
man knows this. Every woman knows it. Mrs Cheswardine knew it. In such
matters Mrs Cheswardine knew exactly what she was about. She delighted,
when her husband brought Woodruff in late of a night, as he frequently
did after a turn at the club, to prepare with her own hands--the
servants being in bed--a little snack of supper for them. Tomato
sandwiches, for instance, miraculously thin, together with champagne or
Bass. The men preferred Bass, naturally, but if Mrs Cheswardine had a
fancy for a sip of champagne out of her husband's tumbler, Bass was not
forthcoming.

Tonight it was champagne.

Woodruff opened it, as he always did, and involuntarily poured out a
libation on the hearth, as he almost always did. Good-natured,
ungainly, long-suffering men seldom achieve the art of opening
champagne.

Mrs Cheswardine tapped her pink-slippered foot impatiently.

'You're all nerves tonight,' Woodruff laughed, 'and you've made me
nervous,' And at length he got some of the champagne into a tumbler.

'No, I'm not,' Mrs Cheswardine contradicted him.

'Yes, you are, Vera,' Woodruff insisted calmly.

She smiled. The use of that elegant Christian name, with its faint
suggestion of Russian archduchesses, had a strange effect on her,
particularly from the lips of Woodruff. She was proud of it, and of her
surname too--one of the oldest surnames in the Five Towns. The
syllables of 'Vera' invariably soothed her, like a charm. Woodruff, and
Cheswardine also, had called her Vera during the whole of her life; and
she was thirty. They had all three lived in different houses at the top
end of Trafalgar Road, Bursley. Woodruff fell in love with her first,
when she was eighteen, but with no practical result. He was a
brown-haired man, personable despite his ungainliness, but he failed to
perceive that to worship from afar off is not the best way to capture a
young woman with large eyes and an emotional disposition. Cheswardine,
who had a black beard, simply came along and married the little thing.
She fluttered down on to his shoulders like a pigeon. She adored him,
feared him, cooed to him, worried him, and knew that there were depths
of his mind which she would never plumb. Woodruff, after being best
man, went on loving, meekly and yet philosophically, and found his
chief joy in just these suppers. The arrangement suited Vera; and as
for the husband and the hopeless admirer, they had always been fast
friends.

'I asked you what you were saying about murder,' said Vera sharply,
'but it seems--'

'Oh! did you?' Woodruff apologized. 'I was saying that murder isn't
such an impossible thing as it appears. Anyone might commit a murder.'

'Then you want to defend, Harrisford? Do you hear what he says,
Stephen?'

The notorious and terrible Harrisford murders were agitating the Five
Towns that November. People read, talked, and dreamt murder; for
several weeks they took murder to all their meals.

'He doesn't want to defend Harrisford at all,' said Cheswardine, with a
superior masculine air, 'and of course anyone might commit a murder. I
might.'

'Stephen! How horrid you are!' 'You might, even!' said Woodruff, gazing
at Vera.

'Charlie! Why, the blood alone--'

'There isn't always blood,' said the oracular husband.

'Listen here,' proceeded Woodruff, who read variously and enjoyed
philosophical speculation. 'Supposing that by just taking thought, by
just wishing it, an Englishman could kill a mandarin in China and make
himself rich for life, without anybody knowing anything about it! How
many mandarins do you suppose there would be left in China at the end
of a week!'

'At the end of twenty-four hours, rather,' said Cheswardine grimly.

'Not one,' said Woodruff.

'But that's absurd,' Vera objected, disturbed. When these two men began
their philosophical discussions they always succeeded in disturbing
her. She hated to see life in a queer light. She hated to think.

'It isn't absurd,' Woodruff replied. 'It simply shows that what
prevents wholesale murder is not the wickedness of it, but the fear of
being found out, and the general mess, and seeing the corpse, and so
on.'

Vera shuddered.

'And I'm not sure,' Woodruff proceeded, 'that murder is so very much
more wicked than lots of other things.'

'Usury, for instance,' Cheswardine put in.

'Or bigamy,' said Woodruff.

'But an Englishman COULDN'T kill a mandarin in China by just wishing
it,' said Vera, looking up.

'How do we know?' said Woodruff, in his patient voice. 'How do we know?
You remember what I was telling you about thought-transference last
week. It was in Borderland.'

Vera felt as if there was no more solid ground to stand on, and it
angered her to be plunging about in a bog.

'I think it's simply silly,' she remarked. 'No, thanks.'

She said 'No, thanks' to her husband, when he tendered his glass.

He moved the glass still closer to her lips.

'I said "No, thanks,"' she repeated dryly.

'Just a mouthful,' he urged.

'I'm not thirsty.'

'Then you'd better go to bed,' said he.

He had a habit of sending her to bed abruptly. She did not dislike it.
But she had various ways of going. Tonight it was the way of an
archduchess.




II


Woodruff, in stating that Vera was all nerves that evening, was quite
right. She was. And neither her husband nor Woodruff knew the reason.

The reason had to do most intimately with frocks.

Vera had been married ten years. But no one would have guessed it, to
watch her girlish figure and her birdlike ways. You see, she was the
only child in the house. She often bitterly regretted the absence of
offspring to the name and honour of Cheswardine. She envied other wives
their babies. She doted on babies. She said continually that in her
deliberate opinion the proper mission of women was babies. She was the
sort of woman that regards a cathedral as a place built especially to
sit in and dream soft domestic dreams; the sort of woman that adores
music simply because it makes her dream. And Vera's brown studies,
which were frequent, consisted chiefly of babies. But as babies amused
themselves by coming down the chimneys of all the other houses in
Bursley, and avoiding her house, she sought comfort in frocks. She made
the best of herself. And it was a good best. Her figure was as near
perfect as a woman's can be, and then there were those fine emotional
eyes, and that flutteringness of the pigeon, and an ever-changing charm
of gesture. Vera had become the best-dressed woman in Bursley. And that
is saying something. Her husband was wealthy, with an increasing
income, though, of course, as an earthenware manufacturer, and the son
and grandson of an earthenware manufacturer, he joined heartily in the
general Five Towns lamentation that there was no longer any money to be
made out of 'pots'. He liked to have a well-dressed woman about the
house, and he allowed her an incredible allowance, the amount of which
was breathed with awe among Vera's friends; a hundred a year, in fact.
He paid it to her quarterly, by cheque. Such was his method.

Now a ball was to be given by the members of the Ladies' Hockey Club
(or such of them as had not been maimed for life in the pursuit of this
noble pastime) on the very night after the conversation about murder.
Vera belonged to the Hockey Club (in a purely ornamental sense), and
she had procured a frock for the ball which was calculated to crown her
reputation as a mirror of elegance. The skirt had--but no (see the
columns of the Staffordshire Signal for the 9th November, 1901). The
mischief was that the gown lacked, for its final perfection, one
particular thing, and that particular thing was separated from Vera by
the glass front of Brunt's celebrated shop at Hanbridge. Vera could
have managed without it. The gown would still have been brilliant
without it. But Vera had seen it, and she WANTED it.

Its cost was a guinea. Well, you will say, what is a guinea to a dainty
creature with a hundred a year? Let her go and buy the article. The
point is that she couldn't, because she had only six and sevenpence
left in the wide world. (And six weeks to Christmas!) She had
squandered--oh, soul above money!--twenty-five pounds, and more than
twenty-five pounds, since the 29th of September. Well, you will say,
credit, in other words, tick? No, no, no! The giant Stephen absolutely
and utterly forbade her to procure anything whatever on credit. She was
afraid of him. She knew just how far she could go with Stephen. He was
great and terrible. Well, you will say, why couldn't she blandish and
cajole Stephen for a sovereign or so? Impossible! She had a hundred a
year on the clear understanding that it was never exceeded nor
anticipated. Well, you will discreetly hint, there are certain devices
known to housewives.... Hush! Vera had already employed them. Six and
sevenpence was not merely all that remained to her of her dress
allowance; it was all that remained to her of her household allowance
till the next Monday.

Hence her nerves.

There that poor unfortunate woman lay, with her unconscious tyrant of a
husband snoring beside her, desolately wakeful under the night-light in
the large, luxurious bedroom--three servants sleeping overhead,
champagne in the cellar, furs in the wardrobe, valuable lace round her
neck at that very instant, grand piano in the drawing-room, horses in
the stable, stuffed bear in the hall--and her life was made a blank for
want of fourteen and fivepence! And she had nobody to confide in. How
true it is that the human soul is solitary, that content is the only
true riches, and that to be happy we must be good!

It was at that juncture of despair that she thought of mandarins. Or
rather--I may as well be frank--she had been thinking of mandarins all
the time since retiring to rest. There MIGHT be something in Charlie's
mandarin theory.... According to Charlie, so many queer, inexplicable
things happened in the world. Occult--subliminal--astral--thoughtwaves.
These expressions and many more occurred to her as she recollected
Charlie's disconcerting conversations. There MIGHT.... One never knew.

Suddenly she thought of her husband's pockets, bulging with silver,
with gold, and with bank-notes. Tantalizing vision! No! She could not
steal. Besides, he might wake up.

And she returned to mandarins. She got herself into a very morbid and
two-o'clock-in-the-morning state of mind. Suppose it was a dodge that
DID work. (Of course, she was extremely superstitious; we all are.) She
began to reflect seriously upon China. She remembered having heard that
Chinese mandarins were very corrupt; that they ground the faces of the
poor, and put innocent victims to the torture; in short, that they were
sinful and horrid persons, scoundrels unfit for mercy. Then she
pondered upon the remotest parts of China, regions where Europeans
never could penetrate. No doubt there was some unimportant mandarin,
somewhere in these regions, to whose district his death would be a
decided blessing, to kill whom would indeed be an act of humanity.
Probably a mandarin without wife or family; a bachelor mandarin whom no
relative would regret; or, in the alternative, a mandarin with many
wives, whose disgusting polygamy merited severe punishment! An old
mandarin already pretty nearly dead; or, in the alternative, a young
one just commencing a career of infamy!

'I'm awfully silly,' she whispered to herself. 'But still, if there
SHOULD be anything in it. And I must, I must, I must have that thing
for my dress!'

She looked again at the dim forms of her husband's clothes, pitched
anyhow on an ottoman. No! She could not stoop to theft!

So she murdered a mandarin; lying in bed there; not any particular
mandarin, a vague mandarin, the mandarin most convenient and suitable
under all the circumstances. She deliberately wished him dead, on the
off-chance of acquiring riches, or, more accurately, because she was
short of fourteen and fivepence in order to look perfectly splendid at
a ball.

In the morning when she woke up--her husband had already departed to
the works--she thought how foolish she had been in the night. She did
not feel sorry for having desired the death of a fellow-creature. Not
at all. She felt sorry because she was convinced, in the cold light of
day, that the charm would not work. Charlie's notions were really too
ridiculous, too preposterous. No! She must reconcile herself to wearing
a ball dress which was less than perfection, and all for the want of
fourteen and fivepence. And she had more nerves than ever!

She had nerves to such an extent that when she went to unlock the
drawer of her own private toilet-table, in which her prudent and fussy
husband forced her to lock up her rings and brooches every night, she
attacked the wrong drawer--an empty unfastened drawer that she never
used. And lo! the empty drawer was not empty. There was a sovereign
lying in it!

This gave her a start, connecting the discovery, as naturally at the
first blush she did, with the mandarin.

Surely it couldn't be, after all.

Then she came to her senses. What absurdity! A coincidence, of course,
nothing else? Besides, a mere sovereign! It wasn't enough. Charlie had
said 'rich for life'. The sovereign must have lain there for months and
months, forgotten.

However, it was none the less a sovereign. She picked it up, thanked
Providence, ordered the dog-cart, and drove straight to Brunt's. The
particular thing that she acquired was an exceedingly thin, slim, and
fetching silver belt--a marvel for the money, and the ideal waist
decoration for her wonderful white muslin gown. She bought it, and left
the shop.

And as she came out of the shop, she saw a street urchin holding out
the poster of the early edition of the Signal. And she read on the
poster, in large letters: 'DEATH OF LI HUNG CHANG.' It is no
exaggeration to say that she nearly fainted. Only by the exercise of
that hard self-control, of which women alone are capable, did she
refrain from tumbling against the blue-clad breast of Adams, the
Cheswardine coachman.

She purchased the Signal with well-feigned calm, opened it and read:
'Stop-press news. Pekin. Li Hung Chang, the celebrated Chinese
statesman, died at two o'clock this morning.--Reuter.'




III


Vera reclined on the sofa that afternoon, and the sofa was drawn round
in front of the drawing-room fire. And she wore her fluffiest and
languidest peignoir. And there was a perfume of eau de Cologne in the
apartment. Vera was having a headache; she was having it in her grand,
her official manner. Stephen had had to lunch alone. He had been told
that in all probability his suffering wife would not be well enough to
go to the ball. Whereupon he had grunted. As a fact, Vera's headache
was extremely real, and she was very upset indeed.

The death of Li Hung Chang was heavy on her soul. Occultism was
justified of itself. The affair lay beyond coincidence. She had always
KNOWN that there was something in occultism, supernaturalism, so-called
superstitions, what not. But she had never expected to prove the faith
that was in her by such a homicidal act on her own part. It was
detestable of Charlie to have mentioned the thing at all. He had no
right to play with fire. And as for her husband, words could give but
the merest rough outline of her resentment against Stephen. A pretty
state of things that a woman with a position such as she had to keep up
should be reduced to six and sevenpence! Stephen, no doubt, expected
her to visit the pawnshop. It would serve him right if she did so--and
he met her coming out under the three brass balls! Did she not dress
solely and wholly to please him? Not in the least to please herself!
Personally she had a mind set on higher things, impossible aspirations.
But he liked fine clothes. And it was her duty to satisfy him. She
strove to satisfy him in all matters. She lived for him. She sacrificed
herself to him completely. And what did she get in return? Nothing!
Nothing! Nothing! All men were selfish. And women were their
victims.... Stephen, with his silly bullying rules against credit and
so forth.... The worst of men was that they had no sense.

She put a new dose of eau de Cologne on her forehead, and leaned on one
elbow. On the mantelpiece lay the tissue parcel containing the slim
silver belt, the price of Li's death. She wanted to stick it in the
fire. And only the fact that it would not burn prevented her savagely
doing so. There was something wrong, too, with the occultism. To
receive a paltry sovereign for murdering the greatest statesman of the
Eastern hemisphere was simply grotesque. Moreover, she had most
distinctly not wanted to deprive China of a distinguished man. She had
expressly stipulated for an inferior and insignificant mandarin, one
that could be spared and that was unknown to Reuter. She supposed she
ought to have looked up China at the Wedgwood Institution and selected
a definite mandarin with a definite place of residence. But could she
be expected to go about a murder deliberately like that?

With regard to the gross inadequacy of the fiscal return for her deed,
perhaps that was her own fault. She had not wished for more. Her brain
had been so occupied by the belt that she had wished only for the belt.
But, perhaps, on the other hand, vast wealth was to come. Perhaps
something might occur that very night. That would be better. Yet would
it be better? However rich she might become, Stephen would coolly take
charge of her riches, and dole them out to her, and make rules for her
concerning them. And besides, Charlie would suspect her guilt. Charlie
understood her, and perused her thoughts far better than Stephen did.
She would never be able to conceal the truth from Charlie. The
conversation, the death of Li within two hours, and then a sudden
fortune accruing to her--Charlie would inevitably put two and two
together and divine her shameful secret.

The outlook was thoroughly black anyway.

She then fell asleep.

When she awoke, some considerable time afterwards, Stephen was calling
to her. It was his voice, indeed, that had aroused her. The room was
dark.

'I say, Vera,' he demanded, in a low, slightly inimical tone, 'have you
taken a sovereign out of the empty drawer in your toilet-table?'

'No,' she said quickly, without thinking.

'Ah!' he observed reflectively, 'I knew I was right.' He paused, and
added, coldly, 'If you aren't better you ought to go to bed.'

Then he left her, shutting the door with a noise that showed a certain
lack of sympathy with her headache.

She sprang up. Her first feeling was one of thankfulness that that
brief interview had occurred in darkness. So Stephen was aware of the
existence of the sovereign! The sovereign was not occult. Possibly he
had put it there. And what did he know he was 'right' about?

She lighted the gas, and gazed at herself in the glass, realizing that
she no longer had a headache, and endeavouring to arrange her ideas.

'What's this?' said another voice at the door. She glanced round
hastily, guiltily. It was Charlie.

'Steve telephoned me you were too ill to go to the dance,' explained
Charlie, 'so I thought I'd come and make inquiries. I quite expected to
find you in bed with a nurse and a doctor or two at least. What is it?'
He smiled.

'Nothing,' she replied. 'Only a headache. It's gone now.'

She stood against the mantelpiece, so that he should not see the white
parcel.

'That's good,' said Charlie.

There was a pause.

'Strange, Li Hung Chang dying last night, just after we had been
talking about killing mandarins,' she said. She could not keep off the
subject. It attracted her like a snake, and she approached it in spite
of the fact that she fervently wished not to approach it.

'Yes,' said Charlie. 'But Li wasn't a mandarin, you know. And he didn't
die after we had been talking about mandarins. He died before.'

'Oh! I thought it said in the paper he died at two o'clock this
morning.'

'Two a.m. in Pekin,' Charlie answered. 'You must remember that Pekin
time is many hours earlier than our time. It lies so far eastward.'

'Oh!' she said again.

Stephen hurried in, with a worried air.

'Ah! It's you, Charlie!'

'She isn't absolutely dying, I find,' said Charlie, turning to Vera:
'You are going to the dance after all--aren't you?'

'I say, Vera,' Stephen interrupted, 'either you or I must have a scene
with Martha. I've always suspected that confounded housemaid. So I put
a marked sovereign in a drawer this morning, and it was gone at
lunch-time. She'd better hook it instantly. Of course I shan't
prosecute.'

'Martha!' cried Vera. 'Stephen, what on earth are you thinking of? I
wish you would leave the servants to me. If you think you can manage
this house in your spare time from the works, you are welcome to try.
But don't blame me for the consequences.' Glances of triumph flashed in
her eyes.

'But I tell you--'

'Nonsense,' said Vera. 'I took the sovereign. I saw it there and I took
it, and just to punish you, I've spent it. It's not at all nice to lay
traps for servants like that.'

'Then why did you tell me just now you hadn't taken it?' Stephen
demanded crossly.

'I didn't feel well enough to argue with you then,' Vera replied.

'You've recovered precious quick,' retorted Stephen with grimness.

'Of course, if you want to make a scene before strangers,' Vera
whimpered (poor Charlie a stranger!), 'I'll go to bed.'

Stephen knew when he was beaten.

She went to the Hockey dance, though. She and Stephen and Charlie and
his young sister, aged seventeen, all descended together to the Town
Hall in a brougham. The young girl admired Vera's belt excessively, and
looked forward to the moment when she too should be a bewitching and
captivating wife like Vera, in short, a woman of the world, worshipped
by grave, bearded men. And both the men were under the spell of Vera's
incurable charm, capricious, surprising, exasperating, indefinable,
indispensable to their lives.

'Stupid superstitions!' reflected Vera. 'But of course I never believed
it really.'

And she cast down her eyes to gloat over the belt.




VERA'S SECOND CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE

I


Curious and strange things had a way of happening to Vera--perhaps
because she was an extremely feminine woman. But of all the curious and
strange things that ever did happen to Vera, this was certainly the
strangest and the most curious. It makes a somewhat exasperating
narrative, because the affair ended--or, rather, Vera caused it to
end--on a note of interrogation. The reader may, however, draw
consolation from the fact that, if he is tormented by an unanswerable
query, Vera herself was much more tormented by precisely the same query.

Two days before Christmas, at about three o'clock in the afternoon,
just when it was getting dusk and the distant smokepall of the Five
Towns was merging in the general greyness of the northern sky, Vera was
sitting in the bow-window of the drawing-room of Stephen Cheswardine's
newly-acquired house at Sneyd; Sneyd being the fashionable suburb of
the Five Towns, graced by the near presence of a countess. And as the
slim, thirty-year-old Vera sat there, moody (for reasons which will
soon appear), in her charming teagown, her husband drove up to the door
in the dogcart, and he was not alone. He had with him a man of vigorous
and dashing appearance, fair, far from ugly, and with a masterful face,
keen eyes, and most magnificent furs round about him. At sight of the
visitor Vera's heart did not exactly jump, but it nearly jumped.

Presently, Stephen brought his acquaintance into the drawing-room.

"My wife," said Stephen, rubbing his hands. "Vera, this is Mr
Bittenger, of New York. He will give us the pleasure of spending the
night here."

And now Vera's little heart really did jump.

She behaved with the delicious wayward grace which she could always
command when she chose to command it. No one would have guessed that
she had not spoken to Stephen for a week.

'I'm most happy--most happy,' said Mr Bittenger, with a marked accent
and a fine complimentary air. And obviously he was most happy. Vera had
impressed him. There was nothing surprising in that. She was in the
fullness of her powers in that direction.

It is at this point--at the point of the first jumping of Vera's
heart--that the tale begins to be uncanny and disturbing. Thus runs the
explanation.

During the year Stephen had gradually grown more and more preoccupied
with the subject of his own health. The earthenware business was very
good, although, of course, manufacturers were complaining just as
usual. Trade, indeed, flourished to such an extent that Stephen had
pronounced himself to be suffering from nervous strain and overwork.
The symptoms of his malady were chiefly connected with the assimilation
of food; to be brief, it was dyspepsia. And as Stephen had previously
been one of those favoured people who can eat anything at any hour, and
arise in the best of health the next day, Stephen was troubled. At
last--about August, when he was obliged to give up wine--he had
suddenly decided that the grimy air of the Five Towns was bad for him,
and that the household should be removed to Sneyd. And removed to Sneyd
it accordingly was. The new house was larger and more splendid even
than the Cheswardine abode at Bursley. But Vera did not like the
change. Vera preferred the town. Nevertheless, she could not openly
demur, since Stephen's health was supposed to be at stake.

During the autumn she was tremendously bored at Sneyd. She had
practically no audience for her pretty dresses, and her friends would
not flock over from Bursley because of the difficulty of getting home
at night. Then it was that Vera had the beautiful idea of spending
Christmas in Switzerland. Someone had told her about a certain hotel
called The Bear, where, on Christmas Day, never less than a hundred
well-dressed and wealthy English people sat down to an orthodox
Christmas dinner. The notion enchanted her. She decided, definitely,
that she and Stephen should do their Christmassing at The Bear,
wherever the Bear was. And as she was fully aware of the power of her
capricious charm over Stephen, she regarded the excursion as arranged
before she had broached it to him.

Stephen refused. He remarked bitterly that the very thought of a
mince-tart made him ill; and that he hated 'abroad'.

Vera took her defeat badly.

She pouted. She sulked. She announced that, if she was not to be
allowed to do her Christmassing at The Bear, she would not do it
anywhere. She indicated that she meant to perish miserably of ennui in
the besotted dullness of Sneyd, and that no Christmas-party of any kind
should occur in HER house. She ceased to show interest in Stephen's
health. She would not speak. In fact, she went too far. One day, in
reply to her rude silence, Stephen said: 'Very well, child, if that's
your game, I'll play it with you. Except when other people are present,
not a word do I speak to you until you have first spoken to me.'

She knew he would abide by that. He was a monster. She hated him. She
loathed him (so she said to herself).

That night, in the agony of her distress, she had dreamed a dream. She
dreamed that a stranger came to the house. The details were vague, but
the stranger had travelled many miles over water. She could not see him
distinctly, but she knew that he was quite bald. In spite of his
baldness he inspired her with sympathy. He understood her, praised her
costumes, and treated a woman as a woman ought to be treated. Then,
somehow or other, he was making love to her, the monster Stephen being
absent. She was shocked by his making love to her, and she moved a
little farther off him on the sofa (he had sat down by her on a vague
sort of sofa in a vague sort of room); but still she was thrilled, and
she could not feel as wicked as she felt she ought to feel. Then the
dream became hazy; it became hazy at the interesting point of her
answer to the love-making. A later stage was very clear. Something was
afoot between the monster Stephen and the stranger in the dining-room,
and she was locked out of the dining-room. It was Christmas night. She
knocked frantically at the door, and at last forced it open, and
Stephen was lying in the middle of the floor; the table had been pushed
into a corner. 'I killed him quite by accident,' said the stranger
affably. And then he seized her by the hand and ruthlessly dragged her
away, away, away; and they travelled in trains and ships and trains,
and they came to a very noisy, clanging sort of city--and Vera woke up.
It had been a highly realistic dream, and it made a deep impression on
Vera.

Can one wonder that Vera's heart, being a superstitious little heart,
like all our hearts, should leap when the very next day Stephen turned
up with a completely unexpected stranger from New York? Of course,
dreams are nonsense! Of course! Still--

She did not know whether to rejoice or mourn over the fact that Mr
Bittenger was not bald. He was decidedly unbald; he had a glorious
shock of chestnut hair. That hair of his naturally destroyed any
possible connection with the dream. None the less the coincidence was
bizarre.




II


That evening, before dinner, Vera, busy in her chamber beautifying her
charms for the ravishment of men from New York, waited with secret
anxiety for the arrival of Stephen in his dressing-room. And whereas
she usually closed the door between the bedroom and the dressing-room,
on this occasion she carefully left it wide open. Stephen came at last.
And she waited, listening to his movements in the dressing-room. Not a
word! She made brusque movements in the bedroom to attract his
attention; she even dropped a brush on the floor. Not a word! After a
few moments, she actually ventured into the dressing-room. Stephen was
wiping his face, and he glanced at her momentarily over the towel,
which hid his nose and mouth. Not a word! And how hard was the
monster's glance! She felt that Stephen was one of your absurd literal
persons. He had said that he would not speak to her until she had first
spoken to him--that was to say in private--public performances did not
count. And he would stick to his text, no matter how deliciously she
behaved.

She left the dressing-room in haste. Very well! Very well! If Stephen
wished for war, he should have it. Her grievance against him grew into
something immense. Before, it had been nothing but a kind of two-roomed
cottage. She now erected it into a town hall, with imposing portals,
and many windows and rich statuary, and suite after suite of enormous
rooms, and marble staircases, and lifts that went up and down. She
wished she had never married him. She wished that Mr Bittenger HAD been
bald.

At dinner everything went with admirable smoothness. Mr Bittenger sat
betwixt them. And utmost politeness reigned. In their quality of
well-bred hosts, they both endeavoured to keep Mr Bittenger at his ease
despite their desolating quarrel; and they entirely succeeded. As the
champagne disappeared (and it was not Stephen that drank it), Mr
Bittenger became more than at his ease. He was buyer for an important
firm of earthenware dealers in New York (Vera had suspected as
much--these hospitalities to American buyers are an essential part of
business in the Five Towns), and he related very drolly the series of
chances or mischances that had left him stranded in England at that
season so unseasonable for buying. Vera reflected upon the series of
chances or mischances, and upon her dream of the man from over the long
miles of water. Of course, dreams are nonsense.... But still--

The conversation passed to the topic of Stephen's health, as
conversations in Stephen's house had a habit of doing. Mr Bittenger
listened with grave interest.

'I know, I know!' said Mr Bittenger. 'I used to be exactly the same. I
guess I understand how you feel--SOME! Don't I?'

'And you are cured?' Stephen demanded, eagerly, as he nibbled at dry
toast.

'You bet I'm cured!' said Mr Bittenger.

'You must tell me about that,' said Stephen, and added, 'some time
tonight.' He did not care to discuss the bewildering internal economy
of the human frame at his dinner-table. There were details...and Mr
Bittenger was in a mood that it was no exaggeration to describe as gay.

Shortly afterwards, there arose a discussion as to their respective
ages. They coquetted for a few moments, as men invariably will, each
diffident about giving away the secret, each asserting that the other
was younger than himself.

'Well,' said Mr Bittenger to Vera, at length, 'what age should you give
me?'

'I--I should give you five years less than Stephen,' Vera replied.

'And may I ask just how old you are?' Mr Bittenger put the question at
close range to Stephen, and hit him full in the face with it.

'I'm forty,' said Stephen.

'So am I!' said Mr Bittenger.

'Well, you don't look it,' said Stephen.

'Sure!' Mr Bittenger admitted, pleased.

'My husband's hair is turning grey,' said Vera, 'while yours--'

'Turning grey!' exclaimed Mr Bittender. 'I wish mine was. I'd give five
thousand dollars today if mine was.'

'But why--?' Vera smiled.

'Look here, my dear lady,' said Mr Bittenger, in a peculiar voice,
putting down his glass.

And with a swift movement he lifted a wig of glorious chestnut hair
from his head--just lifted it for an instant, and dropped it. The man
was utterly and completely bald.




III


Vera did nothing foolish. She neither cried, screamed, turned deadly
pale, clenched her fragile hands, bit her lips till the blood came,
smashed a wine-glass, nor fell with a dull thud senseless to the floor.
Nevertheless, she was extremely perturbed by this astounding revelation
of Mr Bittenger's. Of course, dreams are nonsense. But still--The truth
is, one tries to believe that dreams are nonsense, and up to a certain
point one may succeed in believing. But it seemed to Vera that
circumstances had passed that point. She could not but admit, also,
that if the dream went on being fulfilled, within forty-eight hours Mr
Bittenger would have made love to her, and would have killed her
husband.

She was so incensed against Stephen that she really could not decide
whether she wanted the dream to be fulfilled or not. No one would have
imagined that that soft breast could conceal a homicidal thought. Yet
so it was. That pretty and delightful woman, wandering about in the
edifice of her terrific grievance against Stephen, could not say
positively to herself that she would not care to have Stephen killed as
a punishment for his sins.

After dinner, she found an excuse for retiring. She must think the
puzzle out in solitude. Matters were really going too far. She allowed
it to be understood that she was indisposed. Mr Bittenger was full of
sorrow and sympathy. But did Stephen show the slightest concern?
Stephen did not. She went upstairs, and she meditated, stretched on the
sofa at the foot of the bed, a rug over her knees and the fire glinting
on her face. Yes, it was her duty as a Christian, if not as an outraged
wife, to warn Stephen that the shadow of death was creeping up behind
him. He ought at least to be warned. But how could she warn him?
Clearly she could not warn him in the presence of Mr Bittenger, the
prospective murderer. She would, therefore, have to warn him when they
were alone. And that meant that she would have to give way in the great
conjugal sulking match. No, never! It was impossible that she should
give way there! She frowned desperately at the leaping flames, and did
ultimately decide that Stephen's death was preferable to her defeat in
that contest. Of such is human nature.

After all, dreams were nonsense.

Surely Stephen would come upstairs to inquire about her health, her
indisposition? But no! He came not. And, as he continued not to come,
she went downstairs again and proclaimed that she was better.

And then she learned that she had been worrying herself to no purpose
whatever. Mr Bittenger was leaving on the morrow, the morrow being
Christmas Eve. Stephen would drive him to Bursley in the morning. He
would go to the Five Towns Hotel to get his baggage, and catch the
Liverpool express at noon. He had booked a passage on the Saxonia,
which sailed at threethirty o'clock. Thus he would spend his Christmas
at sea; and, spending his Christmas at sea, he could not possibly kill
Stephen in the village of Sneyd on Christmas night.

Relief! And yet a certain vague regret in the superstitious little
heart! The little heart went to bed again. And Stephen and the stranger
stayed up talking very late--doubtless about the famous cure.

The leave-taking the next morning increased the vague regret. Mr
Bittenger was the possessor of an attractive individuality, and Vera
pondered upon its attractiveness far into the afternoon. How nicely Mr
Bittenger had thanked her for her gracious hospitality--with what
meaning he had charged the expression of his deep regret at leaving her!

After all, dreams WERE nonsense.

She was sitting in the bow-window of the drawing-room, precisely as she
had been sitting twenty-four hours previously, when whom should she
see, striding masculinely along the drive towards the house, but Mr
Bittenger?

This time she was much more perturbed even than she had been by the
revelation of Mr Bittenger's baldness.

After all--

She uprose, the blood having rushed to her head, and retreated she knew
not whither, blindly, without a purpose. And found herself in a little
morning-room which was scarcely ever used, at the end of the hall. She
had not shut the door. And Mr Bittenger, having been admitted by a
servant, caught sight of her, and breezily entered her retreat, clad in
his magnificent furs.

And as he doffed the furs, he gaily told her what had happened. Owing
to difficulties with the Cheswardine mare on the frosty, undulating
road between Sneyd and Bursley, and owing to delays with his baggage at
the Five Towns Hotel, he had just missed the Liverpool express, and,
therefore, the steamer also. He had returned to Stephen's manufactory.
Stephen had insisted that he should spend his Christmas with them. And,
in brief, there he was. He had walked from Bursley. Stephen, kept by
business, was coming later, and so was some of the baggage.

Mr Bittenger's face radiated joy. The loss of his twenty-guinea passage
on the Saxonia did not appear to cause him the least regret.

And he sat down by the side of Vera.

And Vera suddenly noticed that they were on a sofa--the sofa of her
dream--and she fancied she recognized the room.

'You know, my dear lady,' said Mr Bittenger, looking her straight in
the eyes, 'I'm just GLAD I missed my steamer. It gives me a chance to
spend a Christmas in England, and in your delightful society--your
delightful society--' He gazed at her, without adding to the sentence.

If this was not love-making on a sofa, what could be?

Mr Bittenger had certainly missed the Liverpool express on purpose. Of
that Vera was convinced. Or, if he had not missed it on purpose, he had
missed it under the dictates of the mysterious power of the dream.
Those people who chose to believe that dreams are nonsense were at
liberty to do so.




IV


So that in spite of Vera's definite proclamation that there should be
no Christmassing in her house that year, Christmassing there
emphatically was. Impossible to deny anything to Mr Bittenger! Mr
Bittenger wanted holly, the gardener supplied it. Mr Bittenger wanted
mistletoe, a bunch of it was brought home by Stephen in the dogcart. Mr
Bittenger could not conceive an English Christmas without turkey,
mince-pies, plum-pudding, and all the usual indigestiveness. Vera,
speaking in a voice which seemed somehow not to be hers, stated that
these necessaries of Christmas life would be produced, and Stephen did
not say that the very thought of a mince-tart made him ill. Even the
English weather, which, it is notorious, has of late shown a sad
disposition to imitate, and even to surpass, in mildness the weather of
the Riviera at Christmas, decided to oblige Mr Bittenger. At nightfall
on Christmas Eve it began to snow gently, but steadily--fine, frozen
snow. And the waits, consisting of boys and girls from the Countess of
Chell's celebrated institute close by, came and sang in the garden in
the falling snow, by the light of a lantern. And Mr Bittenger's heart
was as full as it could hold of English Christmas.

As for Vera's heart, it was full of she knew not what. Mr Bittenger's
attitude towards her grew more and more chivalrous. He contrived to
indicate that he regarded all the years he had spent before making the
acquaintance of Vera as so many years absolutely wasted. And Stephen
did not seem to care.

They retired to rest that evening up a staircase whose banisters the
industrious hands of Mr Bittenger had entwined with holly and paper
festoons, and bade each other a merry Christmas with immense fervour;
but in the conjugal chamber Stephen maintained his policy of implacable
silence. And, naturally, Vera maintained hers. Could it be expected of
her that she should yield? The fault was all Stephen's. He ought to
have taken her to The Bear, Switzerland. Then there would have been no
dream, no Mr Bittenger, and no danger. But as things were, within
twenty-four hours he would be a dead man.

And throughout Christmas Day Vera, beneath the gaiety with which she
met the vivacious sallies of Mr Bittenger, waited in horrible suspense
for the dream to fulfil itself. Stephen alone observed her agitated
condition. Stephen said to himself: 'The quarrel is getting on her
nerves. She'll yield before she's a day older. It will do her good.
Then I'll make it up to her handsomely. But she must yield first.'

He little knew he was standing on the edge of the precipice of death.

The Christmas dinner succeeded admirably; and Stephen, in whom courage
was seldom lacking, ate half a mince-pie. The day was almost over. No
premature decease had so far occurred. And when both the men said that,
if Vera permitted, they would come with her at once to the drawing-room
and smoke there, Vera decided that after all dreams were nonsense. She
entered the drawing-room first, and Mr Bittenger followed her, with
Stephen behind; but just as Stephen was crossing the mat the gardener,
holding a parcel in his hands and looking rather strange there in the
hall, spoke to him. And Stephen stopped and called to Mr Bittenger. And
the drawing-room door was closed upon Vera.

She waited, solitary, for an incredible space of time, and then, having
heard unaccustomed and violent sounds in the distance, she could
contain herself no longer, and she rang the bell.

'Louisa,' she demanded of the parlourmaid, 'where is your master?'

'Oh, ma'am,' replied Louisa, giggling--a little licence was surely
permissible to the girl on Christmas night--'Oh, ma'am, there's such a
to-do! Tinsley has just brought some boxing-gloves, and master and Mr
Bittenger have got their coats off in the dining-room. And they've had
the table pushed up by the door, and you never saw such a set-out in
all your life ma'am.'

Vera dismissed Louisa.

There it was--the dream! They were going to box. Mr Bittenger was
doubtless an expert, and she knew that Stephen was not. A chance blow
by Mr Bittenger in some vital part, and Stephen would be lying
stretched in eternal stillness in the middle of the dining-room floor
where the table ought to be! The life of the monster was at stake! The
life of the brute was in her hands! The dream was fulfilling itself to
the point of tragedy!

She jumped up and rushed to the dining-room door. It would not open.
Again, the dream!

'You can't come in,' cried Stephen, laughing. 'Wait a bit.'

She pushed against the door, working the handle.

She was about to insist upon the door being opened, when the idea of
the danger of such a proceeding occurred to her. In the dream, when she
got the door opened, her husband's death had already happened!

Frantically she ran to the kitchen.

'Louisa,' she ordered. 'Go into the garden and tap at the dining-room
window, and tell your master that I must speak to him at once in the
drawing-room.'

And in a pitiable state of excitation, she returned to the drawing-room.

After another interminable period of suspense, her ear caught the sound
of the opening of doors, and then Stephen came into the drawing-room. A
singular apparition! He was coatless, as Louisa had said, and the
extremities of his long arms were bulged out with cream-coloured
boxing-gloves.

She sprang at him and kissed him.

'Steve,' she said, 'are we friends?'

'I should think we were!' he replied, returning her kiss heartily. He
had won.

'What are you doing?' she asked him.

'Bittenger and I are just going to have a real round with the gloves.
It's part of his cure for my indigestion, you know. He says there's
nothing like it. I've only just been able to get gloves. Tinsley
brought them up just now. And so we sort of thought we'd like to have a
go at once.'

'Why wouldn't you let me into the dining-room?'

'My child, the table was up against the door. And I fancied, perhaps,
you wouldn't be exactly charmed, so I--'

'Stephen,' she said, in her most persuasive voice, 'will you do
something to please me?'

'What is it?'

'Will you?'

A pause.

'Yes, certainly.'

'Don't box tonight.'

'Oh--well! What will Bittenger think?'

Another pause.

'Never mind! You don't want me to box, really?'

'I don't want you to box--not tonight.' 'Agreed, my chuck!' And he
kissed her again. He could well afford to be magnanimous.

Mr Bittenger ploughed the seas alone to New York.

But supposing that Vera had not interfered, what would have happened?
That is the unanswerable query which torments the superstitious little
brain of Vera.




THE BURGLARY

I


Lady Dain said: 'Jee, if that portrait stays there much longer, you'll
just have to take me off to Pirehill one of these fine mornings.'

Pirehill is the seat of the great local hospital; but it is also the
seat of the great local lunatic asylum; and when the inhabitants of the
Five Towns say merely 'Pirehill', they mean the asylum.

'I do declare I can't fancy my food now-a-days,' said Lady Dain, 'and
it's all that portrait!' She stared plaintively up at the immense
oil-painting which faced her as she sat at the breakfast-table in her
spacious and opulent dining-room.

Sir Jehoshaphat made no remark.

Despite Lady Dain's animadversions upon it, despite the undoubted fact
that it was generally disliked in the Five Towns, the portrait had cost
a thousand pounds (some said guineas), and though not yet two years old
it was probably worth at least fifteen hundred in the picture market.
For it was a Cressage; and not only was it a Cressage--it was one of
the finest Cressages in existence.

It marked the summit of Sir Jehoshaphat's career. Sir Jehoshaphat's
career was, perhaps, the most successful and brilliant in the entire
social history of the Five Towns. This famous man was the principal
partner in Dain Brothers. His brother was dead, but two of Sir Jee's
sons were in the firm. Dain Brothers were the largest manufacturers of
cheap earthenware in the district, catering chiefly for the American
and Colonial buyer. They had an extremely bad reputation for cutting
prices. They were hated by every other firm in the Five Towns, and, to
hear rival manufacturers talk, one would gather the impression that Sir
Jee had acquired a tremendous fortune by systematically selling goods
under cost. They were also hated by between eighteen and nineteen
hundred employees. But such hatred, however virulent, had not marred
the progress of Sir Jee's career.

He had meant to make a name and he had made it. The Five Towns might
laugh at his vulgar snobbishness. The Five Towns might sneer at his
calculated philanthropy. But he was, nevertheless, the best-known man
in the Five Towns, and it was precisely his snobbishness and his
philanthropy which had carried him to the top. Moreover, he had been
the first public man in the Five Towns to gain a knighthood. The Five
Towns could not deny that it was very proud indeed of this knighthood.
The means by which he had won this distinction were neither here nor
there--he had won it. And was he not the father of his native borough?
Had he not been three times mayor of his native borough? Was not the
whole northern half of the county dotted and spangled by his
benefactions, his institutions, his endowments?

And it could not be denied that he sometimes tickled the Five Towns as
the Five Towns likes being tickled. There was, for example, the
notorious Sneyd incident. Sneyd Hall, belonging to the Earl of Chell,
lies a few miles south of the Five Towns, and from it the pretty
Countess of Chell exercises that condescending meddlesomeness which so
frequently exasperates the Five Towns. Sir Jee had got his title by the
aid of the Countess-'Interfering Iris', as she is locally dubbed.
Shortly afterwards he had contrived to quarrel with the Countess; and
the quarrel was conducted by Sir Jee as a quarrel between equals, which
delighted the district. Sir Jee's final word in it had been to buy a
sizable tract of land near Sneyd village, just off the Sneyd estate,
and to erect thereon a mansion quite as imposing as Sneyd Hall, and far
more up to date, and to call the mansion Sneyd Castle. A mighty stroke!
Iris was furious; the Earl speechless with fury. But they could do
nothing. Naturally the Five Towns was tickled.

It was apropos of the house-warming of Sneyd Castle, also of the
completion of his third mayoralty, and of the inauguration of the Dain
Technical Institute, that the movement had been started (primarily by a
few toadies) for tendering to Sir Jee a popular gift worthy to express
the profound esteem in which he was officially held in the Five Towns.
It having been generally felt that the gift should take the form of a
portrait, a local dilettante had suggested Cressage, and when the Five
Towns had inquired into Cressage and discovered that that genius from
the United States was celebrated throughout the civilized world, and
regarded as the equal of Velazquez (whoever Velazquez might be), and
that he had painted half the aristocracy, and that his income was
regal, the suggestion was accepted and Cressage was approached.

Cressage haughtily consented to paint Sir Jee's portrait on his usual
conditions; namely, that the sitter should go to the little village in
Bedfordshire where Cressage had his principal studio, and that the
painting should be exhibited at the Royal Academy before being shown
anywhere else. (Cressage was an R.A., but no one thought of putting
R.A. after his name. He was so big, that instead of the Royal Academy
conferring distinction on him, he conferred distinction on the Royal
Academy.)

Sir Jee went to Bedfordshire and was rapidly painted, and he came back
gloomy. The presentation committee went to Bedfordshire later to
inspect the portrait, and they, too, came back gloomy.

Then the Academy Exhibition opened, and the portrait, showing Sir Jee
in his robe and chain and in a chair, was instantly hailed as possibly
the most glorious masterpiece of modern times. All the critics were of
one accord. The committee and Sir Jee were reassured, but only
partially, and Sir Jee rather less so than the committee. For there was
something in the enthusiastic criticism which gravely disturbed him. An
enlightened generation, thoroughly familiar with the dazzling yearly
succession of Cressage's portraits, need not be told what this
something was. One critic wrote that Cressage displayed even more than
his 'customary astounding insight into character....' Another critic
wrote that Cressage's observation was, as usual, 'calmly and coldly
hostile'. Another referred to the 'typical provincial mayor,
immortalized for the diversion of future ages.'

Inhabitants of the Five Towns went to London to see the work for which
they had subscribed, and they saw a mean, little, old man, with thin
lips and a straggling grey beard, and shifty eyes, and pushful snob
written all over him; ridiculous in his gewgaws of office. When you
looked at the picture close to, it was a meaningless mass of coloured
smudges, but when you stood fifteen feet away from it the portrait was
absolutely lifelike, amazing, miraculous. It was so wondrously lifelike
that some of the inhabitants of the Five Towns burst out laughing. Many
people felt sorry--not for Sir Jee--but for Lady Dain. Lady Dain was
beloved and genuinely respected. She was a simple, homely, sincere
woman, her one weakness being that she had never been able to see
through Sir Jee.

Of course, at the presentation ceremony the portrait had been
ecstatically referred to as a possession precious for ever, and the
recipient and his wife pretended to be overflowing with pure joy in the
ownership of it.

It had been hanging in the dining-room of Sneyd Castle about sixteen
months, when Lady Dain told her husband that it would ultimately drive
her into the lunatic asylum.

'Don't be silly, wife,' said Sir Jee. 'I wouldn't part with that
portrait for ten times what it cost.'

This was, to speak bluntly, a downright lie. Sir Jee secretly hated the
portrait more than anyone hated it. He would have been almost ready to
burn down Sneyd Castle in order to get rid of the thing. But it
happened that on the previous evening, in the conversation with the
magistrates' clerk, his receptive brain had been visited by a less
expensive scheme than burning down the castle.

Lady Dain sighed.

'Are you going to town early?' she inquired.

'Yes,' he replied. 'I'm on the rota today.'

He was chairman of the borough Bench of magistrates. As he drove into
town he revolved his scheme and thought it wild and dangerous, but
still feasible.




II


On the Bench that morning Sir Jee shocked Mr Sherratt, the magistrates'
clerk, and he utterly disgusted Mr Bourne, superintendent of the
borough police. (I do not intend to name the name of the
borough--whether Bursley, Hanbridge, Knype, Longshaw, or Turnhill. The
inhabitants of the Five Towns will know without being told; the rest of
the world has no right to know.) There had recently occurred a somewhat
thrilling series of burglaries in the district, and the burglars (a
gang of them was presumed) had escaped the solicitous attentions of the
police. But on the previous afternoon an underling of Mr Bourne's had
caught a man who was generally believed to be wholly or partly
responsible for the burglaries. The Five Towns breathed with relief and
congratulated Mr Bourne; and Mr Bourne was well pleased with himself.
The Staffordshire Signal headed the item of news, 'Smart Capture of a
Supposed Burglar'. The supposed burglar gave his name as William Smith,
and otherwise behaved in an extremely suspicious manner.

Now, Sir Jee, sitting as chief magistrate in the police-court, actually
dismissed the charge against the man! Overruling his sole colleague on
the Bench that morning, Alderman Easton, he dismissed the charge
against William Smith, holding that the evidence for the prosecution
was insufficient to justify even a remand. No wonder that Mr Bourne was
discouraged, not to say angry. No wonder that that pillar of the law,
Mr Sherratt, was pained and shocked. At the conclusion of the case Sir
Jehoshaphat said that he would be glad to speak with William Smith
afterwards in the magistrates' room, indicating that he sympathized
with William Smith, and wished to exercise upon William Smith his
renowned philanthropy.

And so, at about noon, when the Court majestically rose, Sir Jee
retired to the magistrates' room, where the humble Alderman Easton was
discreet enough not to follow him, and awaited William Smith. And
William Smith came, guided thither by a policeman, to whom, in parting
from him, he made a rude, surreptitious gesture.

Sir Jee, seated in the arm-chair which dominates the other chairs round
the elm table in the magistrates' room, emitted a preliminary cough.

'Smith,' he said sternly, leaning his elbows on the table, 'you were
very fortunate this morning, you know.'

And he gazed at Smith.

Smith stood near the door, cap in hand. He did not resemble a burglar,
who surely ought to be big, muscular, and masterful. He resembled an
undersized clerk who has been out of work for a long time, but who has
nevertheless found the means to eat and drink rather plenteously. He
was clothed in a very shabby navy-blue suit, frayed at the wrists and
ankles, and greasy in front. His linen collar was brown with dirt, his
fingers were dirty, his hair was unkempt and long, and a young and
lusty black beard was sprouting on his chin. His boots were not at all
pleasant.

'Yes, governor,' Smith replied, lightly, with a Manchester accent. 'And
what's YOUR game?'

Sir Jee was taken aback. He, the chairman of the borough Bench, and the
leading philanthropist in the country, to be so spoken to! But what
could he do? He himself had legally established Smith's innocence.
Smith was as free as air, and had a perfect right to adopt any tone he
chose to any man he chose. And Sir Jee desired a service from William
Smith.

'I was hoping I might be of use to you,' said Sir Jehoshaphat
diplomatically.

'Well,' said Smith, 'that's all right, that is. But none of your
philanthropic dodges, you know. I don't want to lead a new life, and I
don't want to turn over a new leaf, and I don't want a helpin' hand,
nor none o' those things. And, what's more, I don't want a situation.
I've got all the situation as I need. But I never refuse money, nor
beer neither. Never did, and I'm forty years old next month.'

'I suppose burgling doesn't pay very well, does it?' Sir Jee boldly
ventured.

William Smith laughed coarsely.

'It pays right enough,' said he. 'But I don't put my money on my back,
governor, I put it into a bit of public-house property when I get the
chance.'

'It may pay,' said Sir Jee. 'But it is wrong. It is very anti-social.'

'Is it, indeed?' Smith returned dryly. 'Anti-social, is it? Well, I've
heard it called plenty o' things in my time, but never that. Now, I
should have called it quite sociablelike, sort of making free with
strangers, and so on. However,' he added, 'I come across a cove once as
told me crime was nothing but a disease and ought to be treated as
such. I asked him for a dozen o' port, but he never sent it.'

'Ever been caught before?' Sir Jee inquired.

'Not much!' Smith exclaimed. 'And this'll be a lesson to me, I can tell
you. Now, what are you getting at, governor? Because my time's money,
my time is.'

Sir Jee coughed once more.

'Sit down,' said Sir Jee.

And William Smith sat down opposite to him at the table, and put his
shiny elbows on the table precisely in the manner of Sir Jee's elbows.

'Well?' he cheerfully encouraged Sir Jee.

'How would you like to commit a burglary that was not a crime?' said
Sir Jee, his shifty eyes wandering around the room. 'A perfectly lawful
burglary?'

'What ARE you getting at?' William Smith was genuinely astonished.

'At my residence, Sneyd Castle,' Sir Jee proceeded, 'there's a large
portrait of myself in the dining-room that I want to have stolen. You
understand?'

'Stolen?'

'Yes. I want to get rid of it. And I want--er--people to think that it
has been stolen.'

'Well, why don't you stop up one night and steal it yourself, and then
burn it?' William Smith suggested.

'That would be deceitful,' said Sir Jee, gravely. 'I could not tell my
friends that the portrait had been stolen if it had not been stolen.
The burglary must be entirely genuine.'

'What's the figure?' said Smith curtly.

'Figure?'

'What are you going to give me for the job?'

'GIVE you for doing the job?' Sir Jee repeated, his secret and
ineradicable meanness aroused. 'GIVE you? Why, I'm giving you the
opportunity to honestly steal a picture that's worth over a thousand
pounds--I dare say it would be worth two thousand pounds in
America--and you want to be paid into the bargain! Do you know, my man,
that people come all the way from Manchester, and even London, to see
that portrait?' He told Smith about the painting.

'Then why are you in such a stew to be rid of it?' queried the burglar.

'That's my affair,' said Sir Jee. 'I don't like it. Lady Dain doesn't
like it. But it's a presentation portrait, and so I can't--you see, Mr
Smith?'

'And how am I going to dispose of it when I've got it?' Smith demanded.
'You can't melt a portrait down as if it was silver. By what you say,
governor, it's known all over the blessed world. Seems to me I might
just as well try to sell the Nelson Column.'

'Oh, nonsense!' said Sir Jee. 'Nonsense. You'll sell it in America
quite easily. It'll be a fortune to you. Keep it for a year first, and
then send it to New York.'

William Smith shook his head and drummed his fingers on the table; and
then quite suddenly he brightened and said--

'All right, governor. I'll take it on, just to oblige you.'

'When can you do it?' asked Sir Jee, hardly concealing his joy.
'Tonight?'

'No,' said Smith, mysteriously. 'I'm engaged tonight.'

'Well, tomorrow night?'

'Nor tomorrow. I'm engaged tomorrow too.'

'You seem to be very much engaged, my man,' Sir Jee observed.

'What do you expect?' Smith retorted. 'Business is business. I could do
it the night after tomorrow.'

'But that's Christmas Eve,' Sir Jee protested.

'What if it is Christmas Eve?' said Smith coldly. 'Would you prefer
Christmas Day? I'm engaged on Boxing Day AND the day after.'

'Not in the Five Towns, I trust?' Sir Jee remarked.

'No,' said Smith shortly. 'The Five Towns is about sucked dry.'

The affair was arranged for Christmas Eve.

'Now,' Sir Jee suggested, 'shall I draw you a plan of the castle, so
that you can--'

William Smith's face expressed terrific scorn. 'Do you suppose,' he
said, 'as I haven't had plans o' your castle ever since it was built?
What do you take me for? I'm not a blooming excursionist, I'm not. I'm
a business man--that's what I am.'

Sir Jee was snubbed, and he agreed submissively to all William Smith's
arrangements for the innocent burglary. He perceived that in William
Smith he had stumbled on a professional of the highest class, and this
good fortune pleased him.

'There's only one thing that riles me,' said Smith, in parting, 'and
that is that you'll go and say that after you'd done everything you
could for me I went and burgled your castle. And you'll talk about the
ingratitude of the lower classes. I know you, governor!'




III


On the afternoon of the 24th of December Sir Jehoshaphat drove home to
Sneyd Castle from the principal of the three Dain manufactories, and
found Lady Dain superintending the work of packing up trunks. He and
she were to quit the castle that afternoon in order to spend Christmas
on the other side of the Five Towns, under the roof of their eldest
son, John, who had a new house, a new wife, and a new baby (male). John
was a domineering person, and, being rather proud of his house and all
that was his, he had obstinately decided to have his own Christmas at
his own hearth. Grandpapa and Grandmamma, drawn by the irresistible
attraction of that novelty, a grandson (though Mrs John HAD declined to
have the little thing named Jehoshaphat), had yielded to John's
solicitations, and the family gathering, for the first time in history,
was not to occur round Sir Jee's mahogany.

Sir Jee, very characteristically, said nothing to Lady Dain
immediately. He allowed her to proceed with the packing of the trunks,
and then tea was served, and as the time was approaching for the
carriage to come round to take them to the station, at last he suddenly
remarked--

'I shan't be able to go with you to John's this afternoon.'

'Oh, Jee!' she exclaimed. 'Really, you are tiresome. Why couldn't you
tell me before?'

'I will come over tomorrow morning--perhaps in time for church,' he
proceeded, ignoring her demand for an explanation.

He always did ignore her demand for an explanation. Indeed, she only
asked for explanations in a mechanical and perfunctory manner--she had
long since ceased to expect them. Sir Jee had been born like
that--devious, mysterious, incalculable. And Lady Dain accepted him as
he was. She was somewhat surprised, therefore, when he went on--

'I have some minutes of committee meetings that I really must go
carefully through and send off tonight, and you know as well as I do
that there'll be no chance of doing that at John's. I've telegraphed to
John.'

He was obviously nervous and self-conscious.

'There's no food in the house,' sighed Lady Dain. 'And the servants are
all going away except Callear, and HE can't cook your dinner tonight. I
think I'd better stay myself and look after you.'

'You'll do no such thing,' said Sir Jee, decisively. 'As for my dinner,
anything will do for that. The servants have been promised their
holiday, to start from this evening, and they must have it. I can
manage.'

Here spoke the philanthropist with his unshakable sense of justice.

So Lady Dain departed, anxious and worried, having previously arranged
something cold for Sir Jee in the dining-room, and instructed Callear
about boiling the water for Sir Jee's tea on Christmas morning. Callear
was the under-coachman and a useful odd man. He it was who would drive
Sir Jee to the station on Christmas morning, and then guard the castle
and the stables thereof during the absence of the family and the other
servants. Callear slept over the stables.

And after Sir Jee had consumed his cold repast in the dining-room the
other servants went, and Sir Jee was alone in the castle, facing the
portrait.

He had managed the affair fairly well, he thought. Indeed, he had a
talent for chicane, and none knew it better than himself. It would have
been dangerous if the servants had been left in the castle. They might
have suffered from insomnia, and heard William Smith, and interfered
with the operations of William Smith. On the other hand, Sir Jee had no
intention whatever of leaving the castle uninhabited to the mercies of
William Smith. He felt that he himself must be on the spot to see that
everything went right and that nothing went wrong. Thus, the
previously-arranged scheme for the servants' holiday fitted perfectly
into his plans, and all that he had had to do was to refuse to leave
the castle till the morrow. It was ideal.

Nevertheless, he was a little afraid of what he had done, and of what
he was going to permit William Smith to do. It was certainly
dangerous--certainly rather a wild scheme. However, the die was cast.
And within twelve hours he would be relieved of the intolerable incubus
of the portrait.

And when he thought of the humiliations which that portrait had caused
him; when he remembered the remarks of his sons concerning it,
especially John's remarks; when he recalled phrases about it in London
newspapers, he squirmed, and told himself that no scheme for getting
rid of it could be too wild and perilous. And, after all, the burglary
dodge was the only dodge, absolutely the only conceivable practical
method of disposing of the portrait--except burning down the castle.
And surely it was preferable to a conflagration, to arson! Moreover, in
case of fire at the castle some blundering fool would be sure to cry;
'The portrait! The portrait must be saved!' And the portrait would be
saved.

He gazed at the repulsive, hateful thing. In the centre of the lower
part of the massive gold frame was the legend: 'Presented to Sir
Jehoshaphat Dain, Knight, as a mark of public esteem and gratitude,'
etc. He wondered if William Smith would steal the frame. It was to be
hoped that he would not steal the frame. In fact, William Smith would
find it very difficult to steal that frame unless he had an accomplice
or so.

'This is the last time I shall see YOU!' said Sir Jee to the portrait.

Then he unfastened the catch of one of the windows in the dining-room
(as per contract with William Smith), turned out the electric light,
and went to bed in the deserted castle.

He went to bed, but not to sleep. It was no part of Sir Jee's programme
to sleep. He intended to listen, and he did listen.

And about two o'clock, precisely the hour which William Smith had
indicated, he fancied he heard muffled and discreet noises. Then he was
sure that he heard them. William Smith had kept his word. Then the
noises ceased for a period, and then they recommenced. Sir Jee
restrained his curiosity as long as he could, and when he could
restrain it no more he rose and silently opened his bedroom window and
put his head out into the nipping night air of Christmas. And by good
fortune he saw the vast oblong of the picture, carefully enveloped in
sheets, being passed by a couple of dark figures through the
dining-room window to the garden outside. William Smith had a
colleague, then, and he was taking the frame as well as the canvas. Sir
Jee watched the men disappear down the avenue, and they did not
reappear. Sir Jee returned to bed.

Yes, he felt himself equal to facing it out with his family and
friends. He felt himself equal to pretending that he had no knowledge
of the burglary.

Having slept a few hours, he got up early and, half-dressed, descended
to the dining-room just to see what sort of a mess William Smith had
made.

The canvas of the portrait lay flat on the hearthrug, with the
following words written on it in chalk: 'This is no use to me.' It was
the massive gold frame that had gone.

Further, as was later discovered, all the silver had gone. Not a spoon
was left in the castle.




NEWS OF THE ENGAGEMENT


My mother never came to meet me at Bursley station when I arrived in
the Five Towns from London; much less did she come as far as Knype
station, which is the great traffic centre of the district, the point
at which one changes from the express into the local train. She had
always other things to do; she was 'preparing' for me. So I had the
little journey from Knype to Bursley, and then the walk up Trafalgar
Road, amid the familiar high chimneys and the smoke and the clayey mud
and the football posts and the Midland accent, all by myself. And there
was leisure to consider anew how I should break to my mother the
tremendous news I had for her. I had been considering that question
ever since getting into the train at Euston, where I had said goodbye
to Agnes; but in the atmosphere of the Five Towns it seemed just
slightly more difficult; though, of course, it wasn't difficult, really.

You see, I wrote to my mother regularly every week, telling her most of
my doings. She knew all my friends by name. I dare say she formed in
her mind notions of what sort of people they were. Thus I had
frequently mentioned Agnes and her family in my letters. But you can't
write even to your mother and say in cold blood: 'I think I am
beginning to fall in love with Agnes,' 'I think Agnes likes me,' 'I am
mad on her,' 'I feel certain she likes me,' 'I shall propose to her on
such a day.' You can't do that. At least I couldn't. Hence it had come
about that on the 20th of December I had proposed to Agnes and been
accepted by Agnes, and my mother had no suspicion that my happiness was
so near. And on the 22nd, by a previous and unalterable arrangement, I
had come to spend Christmas with my mother.

I was the only son of a widow; I was all that my mother had. And lo! I
had gone and engaged myself to a girl she had never seen, and I had
kept her in the dark! She would certainly be extremely surprised, and
she might be a little bit hurt--just at first. Anyhow, the situation
was the least in the world delicate.

I walked up the whitened front steps of my mother's little house, just
opposite where the electric cars stop, but before I could put my hand
on the bell my little plump mother, in her black silk and her gold
brooch and her auburn hair, opened to me, having doubtless watched me
down the road from the bay-window, as usual, and she said, as usual
kissing me--

'Well, Philip! How are you?'

And I said--

'Oh! I'm all right, mother. How are you?'

I perceived instantly that she was more excited than my arrival
ordinarily made her. There were tears in her smiling eyes, and she was
as nervous as a young girl. She did indeed look remarkably young for a
woman of forty-five, with twenty-five years of widowhood and a brief
but too tempestuous married life behind her.

The thought flashed across my mind: 'By some means or other she has got
wind of my engagement. But how?'

But I said nothing. I, too, was naturally rather nervous. Mothers are
kittle cattle.

'I'll tell her at supper,' I decided.

And she hovered round me, like a sea-gull round a steamer, as I went
upstairs.

There was a ring at the door. She flew, instead of letting the servant
go. It was a porter with my bag.

Just as I was coming down-stairs again there was another ring at the
door. And my mother appeared magically out of the kitchen, but I was
beforehand with her, and with a laugh I insisted on opening the front
door myself this time. A young woman stood on the step.

'Please, Mrs Dawson wants to know if Mrs Durance can kindly lend her
half-a-dozen knives and forks?'

'Eh, with pleasure,' said my mother, behind me. 'Just wait a minute,
Lucy. Come inside on the mat.'

I followed my mother into the drawing-room, where she kept her silver
in a cabinet.

'That's Mrs Dawson's new servant,' my mother whispered. 'But she
needn't think I'm going to lend her my best, because I'm not.'

'I shouldn't, if I were you,' I supported her.

And she went out with some second-best in tissue paper, and beamed on
Mrs Dawson's servant with an assumed benevolence.

'There!' she exclaimed. 'And the compliments of the season to your
mistress, Lucy.'

After that my mother disappeared into the kitchen to worry an entirely
capable servant. And I roamed about, feeling happily excited, examining
the drawing-room, in which nothing was changed except the incandescent
light and the picture postcards on the mantelpiece. Then I wandered
into the dining-room, a small room at the back of the house, and here
an immense surprise awaited me.

Supper was set for three!

'Well,' I reflected. 'Here's a nice state of affairs! Supper for three,
and she hasn't breathed a word!'

My mother was so clever in social matters, and especially in the
planning of delicious surprises, that I believed her capable even of
miracles. In some way or other she must have discovered the state of my
desires towards Agnes. She had written, or something. She and Agnes had
been plotting together by letter to startle me, and perhaps
telegraphing. Agnes had fibbed in telling me that she could not
possibly come to Bursley for Christmas; she had delightfully fibbed.
And my mother had got her concealed somewhere in the house, or was
momentarily expecting her. That explained the tears, the nervousness,
the rushes to the door.

I crept out of the dining-room, determined not to let my mother know
that I had secretly viewed the supper-table. And as I was crossing the
lobby to the drawing-room there was a third ring at the door, and a
third time my mother rushed out of the kitchen.

'By Jove!' I thought. 'Suppose it's Agnes. What a scene!'

And trembling with expectation I opened the door. It was Mr Nixon.

Now, Mr Nixon was an old friend of the family's, a man of forty-nine or
fifty, with a reputation for shrewdness and increasing wealth. He owned
a hundred and seventy-five cottages in the town, having bought them
gradually in half-dozens, and in rows; he collected the rents himself,
and attended to the repairs himself, and was celebrated as a good
landlord, and as being almost the only man in Bursley who had made
cottage property pay. He lived alone in Commerce Street, and, though
not talkative, was usually jolly, with one or two good stories tucked
away in the corners of his memory. He was my mother's trustee, and had
morally aided her in the troublous times before my father's early death.

'Well, young man,' cried he. 'So you're back in owd Bosley!' It amused
him to speak the dialect a little occasionally.

And he brought his burly, powerful form into the lobby.

I greeted him as jovially as I could, and then he shook hands with my
mother, neither of them speaking.

'Mr Nixon is come for supper, Philip,' said my mother.

I liked Mr Nixon, but I was not too well pleased by this information,
for I wanted to talk confidentially to my mother. I had a task before
me with my mother, and here Mr Nixon was plunging into the supper. I
could not break it gently to my mother that I was engaged to a strange
young woman in the presence of Mr Nixon. Mr Nixon had been in to supper
several times during previous visits of mine, but never on the first
night.

However, I had to make the best of it. And we sat down and began on the
ham, the sausages, the eggs, the crumpets, the toast, the jams, the
mince-tarts, the Stilton, and the celery. But we none of us ate very
much, despite my little plump mother's protestations.

My suspicion was that perhaps something had gone slightly wrong with my
mother's affairs, and that Mr Nixon was taking the first opportunity to
explain things to me. But such a possibility did not interest me, for I
could easily afford to keep my mother and a wife too. I was still
preoccupied in my engagement--and surely there is nothing astonishing
in that--and I began to compose the words in which, immediately on the
departure of Mr Nixon after supper, I would tackle my mother on the
subject.

When we had reached the Stilton and celery, I intimated that I must
walk down to the post-office, as I had to dispatch a letter.

'Won't it do tomorrow, my pet?' asked my mother.

'It will not,' I said.

Imagine leaving Agnes two days without news of my safe arrival and
without assurances of my love! I had started writing the letter in the
train, near Willesden, and I finished it in the drawing-room.

'A lady in the case?' Mr Nixon called out gaily.

'Yes,' I replied with firmness.

I went forth, bought a picture postcard showing St Luke's Square,
Bursley, most untruthfully picturesque, and posted the card and the
letter to my darling Agnes. I hoped that Mr Nixon would have departed
ere my return; he had made no reference at all during supper to my
mother's affairs. But he had not departed. I found him solitary in the
drawing-room, smoking a very fine cigar.

'Where's the mater?' I demanded.

'She's just gone out of the room,' he said. 'Come and sit down. Have a
weed. I want a bit of a chat with you, Philip.'

I obeyed, taking one of the very fine cigars.

'Well, Uncle Nixon,' I encouraged him, wishing to get the chat over
because my mind was full of Agnes. I sometimes called him uncle for fun.

'Well, my boy,' he began. 'It's 

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