I was just going into my tailor’s in Sackville Street, when who should
be coming out of the same establishment but Mrs Ellis! I was startled,
as any man might well have been, to see a lady emerging from my
tailor’s. Of course a lady might have been to a tailor’s to order a
tailor-made costume. Such an excursion would be perfectly legal and not
at all shocking. But then my tailor did not “make” for ladies. And
moreover, Mrs Ellis was not what I should call a tailor-made woman. She
belonged to the other variety–the fluffy, lacy, flowing variety. I had
made her acquaintance on one of my visits to the Five Towns. She was
indubitably elegant, but in rather a Midland manner. She was a fine
specimen of the provincial woman, and that was one of the reasons why I
liked her. Her husband was a successful earthenware manufacturer.
Occasionally he had to make long journeys–to Canada, to Australia and
New Zealand–in the interests of his business; so that she was sometimes
a grass-widow, with plenty of money to spend. Her age was about
thirty-five; bright, agreeable, shrewd, downright, energetic; a little
short and a little plump. Wherever she was, she was a centre of
interest! In default of children of her own she amused herself with the
children of her husband’s sister, Mrs Carter. Mr Carter was another
successful earthenware manufacturer. Her favourite among nephews and
nieces was young Ellis Carter, a considerable local dandy and “dog.”
Such was Mrs Ellis.

“Are you a widow just now?” I asked her, after we had shaken hands.

“Yes,” she said. “But my husband touched at Port Said yesterday, thank
Heaven.”

“Are you ordering clothes for him to wear on his arrival?” I adopted a
teasing tone.

“Can you picture Henry in a Sackville Street suit?” she laughed.

I could not. Henry’s clothes usually had the appearance of having been
picked up at a Jew’s.

“Then what are you doing here?” I insisted.

“I came here because I remembered you saying once that this was your
tailor’s,” she said, “so I thought it would be a pretty good place.”

Now I would not class my tailor with the half-dozen great tailors of the
world, but all the same he is indeed a, pretty good tailor.

“That’s immensely flattering,” I said. “But what have you been doing
with him?”

“Business,” said she. “And if you want to satisfy your extraordinary
inquisitiveness any further, don’t you think you’d better come right
away now and offer me some tea somewhere?”

“Splendid,” I said. “Where?”

“Oh! The Hanover, of course!” she answered.

“Where’s that?” I inquired.

“Don’t you know the Hanover Tea-rooms in Regent Street?” she exclaimed,
staggered.

I have often noticed that metropolitan resorts which are regarded by
provincials as the very latest word of London style, are perfectly
unknown to Londoners themselves. She led me along Vigo Street to the
Hanover. It was a huge white place, with a number of little alcoves and
a large band. We installed ourselves in one of the alcoves, with
supplies of China tea and multitudinous cakes, and grew piquantly
intimate, and then she explained her visit to my tailor’s. I propose to
give it here as nearly in her own words as I can.

I

I wouldn’t tell you anything about it (she said) if I didn’t know from
the way you talk sometimes that you are interested in people. I mean
any people, anywhere. Human nature! Everybody that I come across is
frightfully interesting to me. Perhaps that’s why I’ve got so many
friends–and enemies. I have, you know. I just like watching people to
see what they do, and then what they’ll do next. I don’t seem to mind so
much whether they’re good or naughty–with me it’s their interestingness
that comes first. Now I suppose you don’t know very much about my
nephew, Ellis Carter. Just met him once, I think, and that’s all. Don’t
you think he’s handsome? Oh! I do. I think he’s very handsome. But then
a man and a woman never do agree about what being handsome is in a man.
Ellis is only twenty, too. He has such nice curly hair, and his
eyes–haven’t you noticed his eyes? His father says he’s idle. But all
fathers say that of their sons. I suppose you’ll admit anyhow that he’s
one of the best-dressed youths in the Five Towns. Anyone might think he
got his clothes in London, but he doesn’t. It seems there’s a simply
marvellous tailor in Bursley, and Ellis and all his friends go to him.
His father is always grumbling at the bills, so his mother told me.
Well, when I was at their house in July, there happened to come for
Ellis one of those fiat boxes that men’s tailors always pack suits in,
and so I thought I might as well show a great deal of curiosity about
it, and I did. And Ellis undid it in the breakfast-room (his father
wasn’t there) and showed me a lovely blue suit. I asked him to go
upstairs and put it on. He wouldn’t at first, but his sisters and I
worried him till he gave way.

He came downstairs again like Solomon in all his glory. It really was a
lovely suit. No–seriously, I’m not joking. It was a dream. He was very
shy in it. I must say men are funny. Even when they really like
having new clothes and cutting a figure, they simply hate putting them
on for the first time. Ellis is that way. I don’t know how many suits
that boy hasn’t got–sheer dandyism!–and yet he’ll keep a new suit in
the house a couple of months before wearing it! Now that’s the sort of
thing that I call “interesting.” So curious, isn’t it? Ellis wouldn’t
keep that suit on. No; as soon as we’d done admiring it he disappeared
and changed it.

Now I’d gone that day to ask Ellis to escort me to Llandudno the week
after. He likes going about with his auntie, and his auntie likes to
have him. And of course she sees that it doesn’t cost him anything.
But his father has to be placated first. There’s another funny thing!
His father is always grumbling that Ellis is absolutely no good at all
at the works, but the moment there’s any question of Ellis going away
for a holiday–even if it’s only a week-end–then his father turns right
round and wants to make out that Ellis is absolutely indispensable.
Well, I got over his father. I always do, naturally. And it was settled
that Ellis and I should go on the next Saturday.

I said to Ellis:

“You must be sure to bring that suit with you.”

And then–will you believe me?–he stuck to it he wouldn’t! Truly I was
under the impression that I could argue either Ellis or his father into
any mortal thing. But no! I couldn’t argue Ellis into agreeing to bring
that suit with him to Llandudno. He said he should wear whites. He said
it was a September suit. He said that everybody wore blue at Llandudno,
and he didn’t want to be mistaken for a schoolmaster! Imagine him being
mistaken for a schoolmaster! He even said there were some things I
didn’t understand! I told him there was a very particular reason why I
wanted him to take that suit. And there was. He said:

“What is the reason?”

But I wouldn’t tell him that. I wasn’t going to knuckle down to him
altogether. So it ended that we didn’t either of us budge. However, I
didn’t mean to be beaten by a mere curly-headed boy. I can do what I
please with his mother, though she is my eldest sister-in-law. And
before he started in the dogcart to meet me at the station on our way to
Llandudno she gave Ellis a bonnet-box to hand to me, and told him to
take great care of it. He handed it over to me, and I also told him to
take great care of it. Of course he became very curious to know what was
in it. I said to him:

“You may see it on the pier on Monday. In fact, I believe you will.”

He said: “It’s heavy for a hat.”

So I informed him that hats were both heavy and large this summer.

He said, “Well, I pity you, auntie!”

Naturally it was his blue suit that was in the box. His mother had
burgled it after he’d done his packing, while he was having lunch.

I was determined he should wear that suit. And I felt pretty sure that
when he saw my reason for asking him to bring it he’d be glad at the
bottom of his heart that I’d brought it in spite of him. There is one
good thing about Ellis–he can see a joke against himself…. Have
another cake. Well, I will, then…. Yes, I’m coming to the reason.

II

A girl, you say? Well, of course. But you mustn’t look so proud of
yourself. A body needn’t be anything like so clever as you are to be
able to guess that there’s a girl in it. Do you suppose I should have
imagined for a moment that it would interest you if there hadn’t been a
girl in it? Not exactly! Well, it’s a girl from Winnipeg. Came to
England in June with her parents. Or rather, perhaps, her parents came
with her. I’d never seen any of the three before–didn’t know them
from Adam and Eve. But my husband had made friends with them out there
last year–great friends. And they wanted to make the acquaintance of my
husband’s wife. I’d gathered from Harry that they were quite my sort….
What is my sort? You know perfectly well what my sort is. There are
only two sorts of people–the decent sort and the other sort. Well, they
were doing England–you know, like Colonial people do–seriously,
leaving nothing out. By the way, their name was only “Smith,” without
even a “y” in it or an “e” at the end. They wished to try a good seaside
place, so I wrote to them and suggested Llandudno as a fair specimen,
and it was arranged that we should meet there and spend at least a week
together, and afterwards they were to come to the Five Towns. I
suggested we should all stay at Hawthornden’s … Hawthornden’s? Don’t
you know–it’s easily the best private hotel in Llandudno. Lift and a
French chef and all kinds of things; but surely you must have seen all
about it in the papers!

Now that was why I took Ellis with me. I hate travelling about alone,
especially when my husband’s away. And it was particularly on account of
the girl that I stole the blue suit. But I didn’t tell Ellis a word
about the girl, and I only just mentioned the father and mother–and not
even that until we were safely in the train. These young dandies are
really very nervous and timid at bottom, you know, in spite of their
airs. Ellis would walk ten miles sooner than have to meet a stranger of
the older generation. And he’s just as shy about girls too. I believe
most men are, if you ask me.

The great encounter occurred in the hall, just before dinner. They were
late, and so were we. I tell you, we were completely outshone. I tell
you, we were not in it, not anywhere near being in it! For one thing,
they were in evening-dress. Now at Hawthornden’s you never dress for
dinner. There isn’t a place in Llandudno where it’s the exception not to
dress for dinner. They seemed rather surprised; not put out, not ashamed
of themselves for being too swagger, but just mildly disappointed with
Hawthornden’s. The fact is, they didn’t think much of Hawthornden’s. I
learnt all manner of things during dinner. They’d been in Scotland when
I corresponded with them, but before that they’d stayed at the Ritz in
London, and at the Hotel St Regis in New York, and the something else–I
forget the name–at Chicago. I was expecting to meet “Colonials,” but it
was Ellis and I who were “colonial.” I could have borne it better if
they hadn’t been so polite, and so anxious to hide their opinion of
Hawthornden’s. The girl–oh! the girl…. Her name is Nellie. Really
very pretty. Only about eighteen, but as self-possessed as twenty-eight.
Evidently she had always been used to treating her parents as equals;
she talked quite half the time, and contradicted her mother as flatly as
Ellis contradicts me. Mr Smith didn’t talk much. And Ellis didn’t at
first–he was too timid and awkward–really not at all like himself.
However, Miss Nellie soon made him talk, and they got quite friendly and
curt with each other. Curious thing–Ellis never notices women’s
clothes; very interested in his own, and in other men’s, but not in
women’s! So I expect Nellie’s didn’t make much impression on him. But
truly they were stylish. Much too gorgeous for a young girl–oh! you’ve
no idea!–but not vulgar. They’d been bought in London, in Dover Street.
Better than mine, and better than her mother’s. I will say this for
her–she wore them without any self-consciousness, though she came in
for a good deal of staring. Heaven knows what they cost! I’d be afraid
to guess. But then you see the Smiths had come to England to spend
money, and–well–they were spending it. All their ideas were larger
than ours.

When dinner was over Nellie wanted to know what we could do to amuse
ourselves. Well, it was a showery night, and of course there was
nothing. Then Ellis said, in his patronizing way:

“Suppose we go and knock the balls about a bit?”

And Nellie said, “Knock the balls about a bit?”

“Yes,” said Master Ellis, “billiards–you know.”

All four of us went to the billiard-room. And Ellis began to knock the
balls about a bit. His father installed a billiard-table in his own
house a few years ago. The idea was to “keep the boy at home.” It
didn’t, of course, not a bit. Ellis is a pretty good player, but he did
nearly all his practising at his club. I’ve often heard his mother
regret the eighty pounds odd that that billiard-table cost…. I play
a bit, you know. Nellie Smith would not try at first, and Papa Smith was
smoking a cigar and he said he couldn’t do justice to a cigar and a cue
at the same time. So Ellis and I had a twenty-five up. He gave me ten
and I beat him–probably because he would keep on smoking cigarettes,
just to show Papa Smith how well he could keep the smoke out of his
eyes. Then he asked Nellie if she’d “try.” She said she would if her pa
would. And she and her pa put themselves against Ellis and me.

Well, I’ll cut it short. That girl, with her pink-and-white
complexion–she began right off with a break of twenty-eight. You should
have seen Ellis’s face. It was the funniest thing I ever saw in my life.
I can’t remember anything that ever struck me as half so funny. It seems
that they have plenty of time for billiards out in Winnipeg, and a very
high-class table. After a while Ellis saw the funniness of it too. He
made a miss and then he said:

“Will someone kindly take me out and bury me?”

That kind of speech is supposed to be very smart at his club. And the
Smiths thought it was very smart too. Nellie and her pa beat us hollow,
and then Nellie began to take her pa to task for showing off with too
much screw instead of using the natural angle!

Ellis went to bed. He was very struck by Nellie’s talents. But he went
to bed. Probably he wanted to think things over, and consider how he
could be impressive with her. I should like to have broken it to him
about his blue suit, because it was Sunday the next day, and Nellie was
bound to be gorgeous for chapel and the pier, and I felt sure he’d be
really glad to have that suit–whatever he might say to me. And I
wanted him to wear it too. But there was no chance for me to tell him.
He went off to bed like a streak of lightning. And usually, you know, he
simply will not go to bed. Nothing will induce him to go to bed, just as
nothing will induce him to get up. I said to myself I would send the
suit into his room early in the morning with a note. I did want him to
look his best.

And then of course there was the fire. The fire was that very night.
What?…

III

Do you actually mean to sit there and tell me you never heard about the
fire at Hawthornden’s Hotel last July? Why, it was the sensation of the
season. There was over a column about it in the Manchester Guardian.
Everybody talked of it for weeks…. And no one ever told you that we
were in it? Half the annexe was burnt down. We were in the annexe, all
four of us. I fancy the Smiths had chosen it because the rooms in the
annexe are larger. Have you ever been in a fire?… Well, thank your
stars! We were wakened up at three o’clock. It was getting light, even.
Somehow that made it worse. The confusion–you can’t imagine it. We got
out all right. Oh! there was no special danger to life and limb. But
after all we only did get out just in time. And with practically
nothing but our dressing-gowns–some not even that! It’s queer, in a
fire, how at first you try to save things, and keep calm, and pretend
you are calm, until the thing gets hold of you. I actually began to
shovel clothes into my trunks. Somebody said we should have time for
that. Well–we hadn’t. And it was a very good thing there wasn’t a lift
in the annexe. It seems a lift well acts like a chimney, and half of us
might have been burnt alive.

I must say the fire-brigade was pretty good. They got the fire out very
well–very quickly in fact. We women, or most of us, had been bundled
into private parlours and things in the main part of the hotel, which
wasn’t threatened, and when we knew that the fire was out we naturally
wanted to go back and see whether any of our things could be saved out
of the wreck.

Oh! what a sight it was! What a sight it was! You’d never believe that
so much damage could be done in an hour or so. Chiefly by water, of
course. All the ground floor was swimming in water. In fact there was a
river of it running across the promenade into the sea. About five-sixths
of Llandudno, dressed nohow, was on the promenade. However, policemen
kept the people outside the gates.

The firemen began bringing trunks down the stairs; they wouldn’t let us
go up at first. It really was a wonderful scene, at the foot of the
stairs, lots of us paddling about in that lake, and perfectly lost to
all sense of–what shall I say?–well, correctness. I do believe most of
us had forgotten all about civilization. We wanted our things. We wanted
our things so badly that we even lost our interest in the origin of the
fire and in the question whether we should get anything out of the
insurance company. By the way, I mustn’t omit to tell you that we never
saw the proprietors after the fire was out; the proprietors could only
be seen by appointment. The German and Swiss waiters had to bear the
brunt of us.

I was very lucky. I received both my trunks nearly at once. They came
sliding on a plank down those stairs. And most of my things were in them
too. I was determined to be energetic then, and to get out of all that
crowd. Do you know what I did? I simply called two men in out of the
street, and told them to shoulder my trunks into the main building of
the hotel. I defied policemen and the superintendent of the
fire-brigade. And in the main building I demanded a bedroom, and I was
told that everything would be done to accommodate me as quickly as
possible. So I went straight upstairs and told the men to follow me, and
I began knocking at every door till I found a room that wasn’t occupied,
and I took possession of it, and gave the men a shilling a piece. They
seemed to expect half-a-crown, because I’d been in a fire, I suppose!
Curious ideas odd job men have! Then I dressed myself out of what was
left of my belongings and went down again.

All the people said how lucky I was, and what presence of mind I had,
and how calm and practical I was, and so on and so on. But they didn’t
know that I’d been stupid enough not to give a thought to Ellis’s blue
suit. One can’t think of everything, and I didn’t think of that. I
believe if I had thought of it, at the start, I should have taken the
bonnet-box with me at any cost.

I came across Ellis; smoking a cigarette, of course, just to show, I
suppose, that a fire was a most ordinary event to him. He was completely
dressed, like me. He had saved the whole of his belongings. He said the
Smiths were fixing themselves up in private rooms somewhere, and would
be down soon. So we moved along into the dining-room and had breakfast.
The place was full and noisy. Ellis was exceedingly facetious. He said:

“Well, auntie, did you have a pretty good night?”

Also:

“A fire is a very clumsy way of waking you up in the morning. A bell
would be much simpler, and cost less,” etcetera, etcetera. And then he
said:

“A nice thing, auntie, if I’d followed your advice and brought my
beauteous new suit! It would have been bound to be burnt to a cinder.
One’s best suit always is in a fire.”

I ought to have told him then the trick I’d played on him, but I didn’t.
I merely agreed with him in a lame sort of way that it would have been
a nice thing if he’d brought his beauteous suit. I hoped that I might be
able later on to invent some good excuse, something really plausible,
for having brought along with me his newest suit unknown to him. But the
more I reflected the more I couldn’t think of anything clever enough.

Then the three Smiths came in. There was some queer attire in that
dining-room, but I think that Mrs Smith won the gold medal for
queerness. All her “colonialness” had come suddenly out. They evidently
hadn’t been very fortunate. But they didn’t seem to mind much. They
hadn’t thought very highly of the hotel before, and they accepted the
fire good-humouredly as one of the necessary drawbacks of a hotel that
wasn’t quite up to their Winnipeg form. Nellie Smith was delightful. I
must say she was delightful, and she looked delightful. She was wearing
a blue-and-red striped petticoat, rather short, and a white jersey, and
over that a man’s blue jacket, which fitted her pretty well. She looked
indescribably pert and charming, though the jacket was dirty and
stained.

I noticed Ellis staring and staring at that jacket….

I needn’t tell you. You can see a mile off what had happened.

Ellis said in his casual way:

“Hello! Where did you pick up that affair, Miss Smith?” Meaning the
jacket.

She said she had picked it up on one of the landings, and that there was
a pair of continuations lying in a broken bonnet-box just close to it,
and that the continuations were ruined by too much water.

I could feel myself blushing redder and redder.

“In a bonnet-box, eh?” said Master Ellis.

Then he said: “Would you mind letting me look at the right-hand
breast-pocket of that jacket?”

She didn’t mind in the least. He looked at the strip of white linen that
your men’s tailors always stitch into that pocket with your name and
address and date, and age and weight, and I don’t know what.

He said, “Thank you.”

And she asked him if the jacket was his.

“Yes,” he said, “but I hope you’ll keep it.”

Everybody said what a very curious coincidence! Ellis avoided my eyes,
and I avoided his…. Will you believe me that when we “had it out”
afterwards, he and I, that boy was seriously angry. He suspected me of a
plan “to make the best of him” during the stay with the Smiths, and he
very strongly objected to being “made the best of.” His notion
apparently was that even his worst was easily good enough for my
Colonial friends, although, as he’d have said, they had “simply wiped
the floor with him” in the billiard-room. Anyhow, he was furious. He
actually used the word “unwarrantable,” and it was rather a long word
for a mere stripling of a nephew to use to an auntie who was paying all
his expenses. However, he’s a nice enough boy at the bottom, and soon
got down off his high horse. I must tell you that Nellie Smith wore that
jacket all day, quite without any concern. These Colonials don’t really
seem to mind what they wear. At any rate she didn’t. She was just as
much at ease in that jacket as she had been in her gorgeousness the
evening before. And she and Ellis were walking about together all day.
The next day of course we all left. We couldn’t stay, seeing the state
we were in…. Now, don’t you think it’s a very curious story?

Thus spake Mrs Ellis across the tea-table in an alcove at the Hanover.

“But you’ve not finished the story!” I explained.

“Yes, I have,” she said.

“You haven’t explained what you were doing at my tailor’s in Sackville
Street.”

“Oh!” she cried, “I was forgetting that. Well, I promised Ellis a new
suit. And as I wanted to show him that after all I had larger ideas
about tailoring than he had, I told him I knew a very good tailor’s in
Sackville Street–a real West End tailor–and that if he liked he could
have his presentation suit made there. He pooh-poohed the offer at
first, and pretended that his Bursley tailor was just as good as any of
your West End tailors. But at last he accepted. You see–it meant an
authorized visit to London…. I’d been into the tailor’s just now to
pay the bill. That’s all.”

“But even now,” I said, “you haven’t finished the story.”

“Yes, I have,” she replied again.

“What about Nellie Smith?” I demanded. “A story about a handsome girl
named Nellie, who could make a break of twenty-eight at billiards, and a
handsome dog like Ellis Carter, and a fire, and the girl wearing the
youth’s jacket–it can’t break off like that.”

“Look here,” she said, leaning a little across the table. “Did you
expect them to fall in love with each other on the spot and be engaged?
What a sentimental old thing you are, after all!”

“But haven’t they seen each other since?”

“Oh yes! In London, and in Bursley too.”

“And haven’t they–”

“Not yet…. They may or they mayn’t. You must remember this isn’t the
reign of Queen Victoria…. If they do, I’ll let you know.”

I

The secret history of the Ebag marriage is now printed for the first
time. The Ebag family, who prefer their name to be accented on the first
syllable, once almost ruled Oldcastle, which is a clean and conceited
borough, with long historical traditions, on the very edge of the
industrial, democratic and unclean Five Towns. The Ebag family still
lives in the grateful memory of Oldcastle, for no family ever did more
to preserve the celebrated Oldcastilian superiority in social, moral and
religious matters over the vulgar Five Towns. The episodes leading to
the Ebag marriage could only have happened in Oldcastle. By which I mean
merely that they could not have happened in any of the Five Towns. In
the Five Towns that sort of thing does not occur. I don’t know why, but
it doesn’t. The people are too deeply interested in football, starting
prices, rates, public parks, sliding scales, excursions to Blackpool,
and municipal shindies, to concern themselves with organists as such. In
the Five Towns an organist may be a sanitary inspector or an auctioneer
on Mondays. In Oldcastle an organist is an organist, recognized as such
in the streets. No one ever heard of an organist in the Five Towns being
taken up and petted by a couple of old ladies. But this may occur at
Oldcastle. It, in fact, did.

The scandalous circumstances which led to the disappearance from the
Oldcastle scene of Mr Skerritt, the original organist of St Placid, have
no relation to the present narrative, which opens when the ladies Ebag
began to seek for a new organist. The new church of St Placid owed its
magnificent existence to the Ebag family. The apse had been given
entirely by old Caiaphas Ebag (ex-M.P., now a paralytic sufferer) at a
cost of twelve thousand pounds; and his was the original idea of
building the church. When, owing to the decline of the working man’s
interest in beer, and one or two other things, Caiaphas lost nearly the
whole of his fortune, which had been gained by honest labour in mighty
speculations, he rather regretted the church; he would have preferred
twelve thousand in cash to a view of the apse from his bedroom window;
but he was man enough never to complain. He lived, after his
misfortunes, in a comparatively small house with his two daughters, Mrs
Ebag and Miss Ebag. These two ladies are the heroines of the tale.

Mrs Ebag had married her cousin, who had died. She possessed about six
hundred a year of her own. She was two years older than her sister, Miss
Ebag, a spinster. Miss Ebag was two years younger than Mrs Ebag. No
further information as to their respective ages ever leaked out. Miss
Ebag had a little money of her own from her deceased mother, and
Caiaphas had the wreck of his riches. The total income of the household
was not far short of a thousand a year, but of this quite two hundred a
year was absorbed by young Edith Ebag, Mrs Ebag’s step-daughter (for Mrs
Ebag had been her husband’s second choice). Edith, who was notorious as
a silly chit and spent most of her time in London and other absurd
places, formed no part of the household, though she visited it
occasionally. The household consisted of old Caiaphas, bedridden, and
his two daughters and Goldie. Goldie was the tomcat, so termed by reason
of his splendid tawniness. Goldie had more to do with the Ebag marriage
than anyone or anything, except the weathercock on the top of the
house. This may sound queer, but is as naught to the queerness about to
be unfolded.

II

It cannot be considered unnatural that Mrs and Miss Ebag, with the
assistance of the vicar, should have managed the affairs of the church.
People nicknamed them “the churchwardens,” which was not quite nice,
having regard to the fact that their sole aim was the truest welfare of
the church. They and the vicar, in a friendly and effusive way, hated
each other. Sometimes they got the better of the vicar, and, less often,
he got the better of them. In the choice of a new organist they won.
Their candidate was Mr Carl Ullman, the artistic orphan.

Mr Carl Ullman is the hero of the tale. The son of one of those German
designers of earthenware who at intervals come and settle in the Five
Towns for the purpose of explaining fully to the inhabitants how
inferior England is to Germany, he had an English mother, and he himself
was violently English. He spoke English like an Englishman and German
like an Englishman. He could paint, model in clay, and play three
musical instruments, including the organ. His one failing was that he
could never earn enough to live on. It seemed as if he was always being
drawn by an invisible string towards the workhouse door. Now and then he
made half a sovereign extra by deputizing on the organ. In such manner
had he been introduced to the Ebag ladies. His romantic and gloomy
appearance had attracted them, with the result that they had asked him
to lunch after the service, and he had remained with them till the
evening service. During the visit they had learnt that his grandfather
had been Court Councillor in the Kingdom of Saxony. Afterwards they
often said to each other how ideal it would be if only Mr Skerritt
might be removed and Carl Ullman take his place. And when Mr Skerritt
actually was removed, by his own wickedness, they regarded it as almost
an answer to prayer, and successfully employed their powerful interest
on behalf of Carl. The salary was a hundred a year. Not once in his life
had Carl earned a hundred pounds in a single year. For him the situation
meant opulence. He accepted it, but calmly, gloomily. Romantic gloom was
his joy in life. He said with deep melancholy that he was sure he could
not find a convenient lodging in Oldcastle. And the ladies Ebag then
said that he must really come and spend a few days with them and Goldie
and papa until he was “suited.” He said that he hated to plant himself
on people, and yielded to the request. The ladies Ebag fussed around his
dark-eyed and tranquil pessimism, and both of them instantly grew
younger–a curious but authentic phenomenon. They adored his playing,
and they were enchanted to discover that his notions about hymn tunes
agreed with theirs, and by consequence disagreed with the vicar’s. In
the first week or two they scored off the vicar five times, and the
advantage of having your organist in your own house grew very apparent.
They were also greatly impressed by his gentleness with Goldie and by
his intelligent interest in serious questions.

One day Miss Ebag said timidly to her sister: “It’s just six months
to-day.”

“What do you mean, sister?” asked Mrs Ebag, self-consciously.

“Since Mr Ullman came.”

“So it is!” said Mrs Ebag, who was just as well aware of the date as the
spinster was aware of it.

They said no more. The position was the least bit delicate. Carl had
found no lodging. He did not offer to go. They did not want him to go.
He did not offer to pay. And really he cost them nothing except
laundry, whisky and fussing. How could they suggest that he should pay?
He lived amidst them like a beautiful mystery, and all were seemingly
content. Carl was probably saving the whole of his salary, for he never
bought clothes and he did not smoke. The ladies Ebag simply did what
they liked about hymn-tunes.

III

You would have thought that no outsider would find a word to say, and
you would have been mistaken. The fact that Mrs Ebag was two years older
than Miss and Miss two years younger than Mrs Ebag; the fact that old
Caiaphas was, for strong reasons, always in the house; the fact that the
ladies were notorious cat-idolaters; the fact that the reputation of the
Ebag family was and had ever been spotless; the fact that the Ebag
family had given the apse and practically created the entire church; all
these facts added together did not prevent the outsider from finding a
word to say.

At first words were not said; but looks were looked, and coughs were
coughed. Then someone, strolling into the church of a morning while Carl
Ullman was practising, saw Miss Ebag sitting in silent ecstasy in a
corner. And a few mornings later the same someone, whose curiosity had
been excited, veritably saw Mrs Ebag in the organ-loft with Carl Ullman,
but no sign of Miss Ebag. It was at this juncture that words began to be
said.

Words! Not complete sentences! The sentences were never finished. “Of
course, it’s no affair of mine, but–” “I wonder that people like the
Ebags should–” “Not that I should ever dream of hinting that–” “First
one and then the other–well!” “I’m sure that if either Mrs or Miss
Ebag had the slightest idea they’d at once–” And so on. Intangible
gossamer criticism, floating in the air!

IV

One evening–it was precisely the first of June–when a thunderstorm was
blowing up from the south-west, and scattering the smoke of the Five
Towns to the four corners of the world, and making the weathercock of
the house of the Ebags creak, the ladies Ebag and Carl Ullman sat
together as usual in the drawing-room. The French window was open, but
banged to at intervals. Carl Ullman had played the piano and the ladies
Ebag–Mrs Ebag, somewhat comfortably stout and Miss Ebag spare–were
talking very well and sensibly about the influence of music on
character. They invariably chose such subjects for conversation. Carl
was chiefly silent, but now and then, after a sip of whisky, he would
say “Yes” with impressiveness and stare gloomily out of the darkening
window. The ladies Ebag had a remarkable example of the influence of
music on character in the person of Edith Ebag. It appeared that Edith
would never play anything but waltzes–Waldteufel’s for choice–and that
the foolish frivolity of her flyaway character was a direct consequence
of this habit. Carl felt sadly glad, after hearing the description of
Edith’s carryings-on, that Edith had chosen to live far away.

And then the conversation languished and died with the daylight, and a
certain self-consciousness obscured the social atmosphere. For a vague
rumour of the chatter of the town had penetrated the house, and the
ladies Ebag, though they scorned chatter, were affected by it; Carl
Ullman, too. It had the customary effect of such chatter; it fixed the
thoughts of those chatted about on matters which perhaps would not
otherwise have occupied their attention.

The ladies Ebag said to themselves: “We are no longer aged nineteen. We
are moreover living with our father. If he is bedridden, what then? This
gossip connecting our names with that of Mr Ullman is worse than
baseless; it is preposterous. We assert positively that we have no
designs of any kind on Mr Ullman.”

Nevertheless, by dint of thinking about that gossip, the naked idea of a
marriage with Mr Ullman soon ceased to shock them. They could gaze at it
without going into hysterics.

As for Carl, he often meditated upon his own age, which might have been
anything between thirty and forty-five, and upon the mysterious ages of
the ladies, and upon their goodness, their charm, their seriousness,
their intelligence and their sympathy with himself.

Hence the self-consciousness in the gloaming.

To create a diversion Miss Ebag walked primly to the window and cried:

“Goldie! Goldie!”

It was Goldie’s bedtime. In summer he always strolled into the garden
after dinner, and he nearly always sensibly responded to the call when
his bed-hour sounded. No one would have dreamed of retiring until Goldie
was safely ensconced in his large basket under the stairs.

“Naughty Goldie!” Miss Ebag said, comprehensively, to the garden.

She went into the garden to search, and Mrs Ebag followed her, and Carl
Ullman followed Mrs Ebag. And they searched without result, until it was
black night and the threatening storm at last fell. The vision of Goldie
out in that storm desolated the ladies, and Carl Ullman displayed the
nicest feeling. At length the rain drove them in and they stood in the
drawing-room with anxious faces, while two servants, under directions
from Carl, searched the house for Goldie.

“If you please’m,” stammered the housemaid, rushing rather
unconventionally into the drawing-room, “cook says she thinks Goldie
must be on the roof, in the vane.”

“On the roof in the vane?” exclaimed Mrs Ebag, pale. “In the vane?”

“Yes’m.”

“Whatever do you mean, Sarah?” asked Miss Ebag, even paler.

The ladies Ebag were utterly convinced that Goldie was not like other
cats, that he never went on the roof, that he never had any wish to do
anything that was not in the strictest sense gentlemanly and correct.
And if by chance he did go on the roof, it was merely to examine the
roof itself, or to enjoy the view therefrom out of gentlemanly
curiosity. So that this reference to the roof shocked them. The night
did not favour the theory of view-gazing.

“Cook says she heard the weather-vane creaking ever since she went
upstairs after dinner, and now it’s stopped; and she can hear Goldie
a-myowling like anything.”

“Is cook in her attic?” asked Mrs Ebag.

“Yes’m.”

“Ask her to come out. Mr Ullman, will you be so very good as to come
upstairs and investigate?”

Cook, enveloped in a cloak, stood out on the second landing, while Mr
Ullman and the ladies invaded her chamber. The noise of myowling was
terrible. Mr Ullman opened the dormer window, and the rain burst in,
together with a fury of myowling. But he did not care. It lightened and
thundered. But he did not care. He procured a chair of cook’s and put it
under the window and stood on it, with his back to the window, and
twisted forth his body so that he could spy up the roof. The ladies
protested that he would be wet through, but he paid no heed to them.

Then his head, dripping, returned into the room. “I’ve just seen by a
flash of lightning,” he said in a voice of emotion. “The poor animal has
got his tail fast in the socket of the weather-vane. He must have been
whisking it about up there, and the vane turned and caught it. The vane
is jammed.”

“How dreadful!” said Mrs Ebag. “Whatever can be done?”

“He’ll be dead before morning,” sobbed Miss Ebag.

“I shall climb up the roof and release him,” said Carl Ullman, gravely.

They forbade him to do so. Then they implored him to refrain. But he was
adamant. And in their supplications there was a note of insincerity, for
their hearts bled for Goldie, and, further, they were not altogether
unwilling that Carl should prove himself a hero. And so, amid
apprehensive feminine cries of the acuteness of his danger, Carl crawled
out of the window and faced the thunder, the lightning, the rain, the
slippery roof, and the maddened cat. A group of three servants were
huddled outside the attic door.

In the attic the ladies could hear his movements on the roof, moving
higher and higher. The suspense was extreme. Then there was silence;
even the myowling had ceased. Then a clap of thunder; and then, after
that, a terrific clatter on the roof, a bounding downwards as of a great
stone, a curse, a horrid pause, and finally a terrific smashing of
foliage and cracking of wood.

Mrs Ebag sprang to the window.

“It’s all right,” came a calm, gloomy voice from below. “I fell into the
rhododendrons, and Goldie followed me. I’m not hurt, thank goodness!
Just my luck!”

A bell rang imperiously. It was the paralytic’s bell. He had been
disturbed by these unaccustomed phenomena.

“Sister, do go to father at once,” said Mrs Ebag, as they both hastened
downstairs in a state of emotion, assuredly unique in their lives.

V

Mrs Ebag met Carl and the cat as they dripped into the gas-lit
drawing-room. They presented a surprising spectacle, and they were doing
damage to the Persian carpet at the rate of about five shillings a
second; but that Carl, and the beloved creature for whom he had dared so
much, were equally unhurt appeared to be indubitable. Of course, it was
a miracle. It could not be regarded as other than a miracle. Mrs Ebag
gave vent to an exclamation in which were mingled pity, pride,
admiration and solicitude, and then remained, as it were, spellbound.
The cat escaped from those protecting arms and fled away. Instead of
following Goldie, Mrs Ebag continued to gaze at the hero.

“How can I thank you!” she whispered.

“What for?” asked Carl, with laconic gloom.

“For having saved my darling!” said Mrs Ebag. And there was passion in
her voice.

“Oh!” said Carl. “It was nothing!”

“Nothing?” Mrs Ebag repeated after him, with melting eyes, as if to
imply that, instead of being nothing, it was everything; as if to imply
that his deed must rank hereafter with the most splendid deeds of
antiquity; as if to imply that the whole affair was beyond words to
utter or gratitude to repay.

And in fact Carl himself was moved. You cannot fall from the roof of a
two-story house into a very high-class rhododendron bush, carrying a
prize cat in your arms, without being a bit shaken. And Carl was a bit
shaken, not merely physically, but morally and spiritually. He could not
deny to himself that he had after all done something rather wondrous,
which ought to be celebrated in sounding verse. He felt that he was in
an atmosphere far removed from the commonplace.

He dripped steadily on to the carpet.

“You know how dear my cat was to me,” proceeded Mrs Ebag. “And you
risked your life to spare me the pain of his suffering, perhaps his
death. How thankful I am that I insisted on having those rhododendrons
planted just where they are–fifteen years ago! I never anticipated–”

She stopped. Tears came into her dowager eyes. It was obvious that she
worshipped him. She was so absorbed in his heroism that she had no
thought even for his dampness. As Carl’s eyes met hers she seemed to him
to grow younger. And there came into his mind all the rumour that had
vaguely reached him coupling their names together; and also his early
dreams of love and passion and a marriage that would be one long
honeymoon. And he saw how absurd had been those early dreams. He saw
that the best chance of a felicitous marriage lay in a union of mature
and serious persons, animated by grave interests and lofty ideals. Yes,
she was older than he. But not much, not much! Not more than–how many
years? And he remembered surprising her rapt glance that very evening as
she watched him playing the piano. What had romance to do with age?
Romance could occur at any age. It was occurring now. Her soft eyes, her
portly form, exuded romance. And had not the renowned Beaconsfield
espoused a lady appreciably older than himself, and did not those
espousals achieve the ideal of bliss? In the act of saving the cat he
had not been definitely aware that it was so particularly the cat of the
household. But now, influenced by her attitude and her shining
reverence, he actually did begin to persuade himself that an
uncontrollable instinctive desire to please her and win her for his own
had moved him to undertake the perilous passage of the sloping roof.

In short, the idle chatter of the town was about to be justified. In
another moment he might have dripped into her generous arms … had not
Miss Ebag swept into the drawing-room!

“Gracious!” gasped Miss Ebag. “The poor dear thing will have pneumonia.
Sister, you know his chest is not strong. Dear Mr Ullman, please,
please, do go and–er–change.”

He did the discreet thing and went to bed, hot whisky following him on a
tray carried by the housemaid.

VI

The next morning the slightly unusual happened. It was the custom for
Carl Ullman to breakfast alone, while reading The Staffordshire
Signal. The ladies Ebag breakfasted mysteriously in bed. But on this
morning Carl found Miss Ebag before him in the breakfast-room. She
prosecuted minute inquiries as to his health and nerves. She went out
with him to regard the rhododendron bushes, and shuddered at the sight
of the ruin which had saved him. She said, following famous
philosophers, that Chance was merely the name we give to the effect of
laws which we cannot understand. And, upon this high level of
conversation, she poured forth his coffee and passed his toast.

It was a lovely morning after the tempest.

Goldie, all newly combed, and looking as though he had never seen a
roof, strolled pompously into the room with tail unfurled. Miss Ebag
picked the animal up and kissed it passionately.

“Darling!” she murmured, not exactly to Mr Ullman, nor yet exactly to
the cat. Then she glanced effulgently at Carl and said, “When I think
that you risked your precious life, in that awful storm, to save my poor
Goldie?… You must have guessed how dear he was to me?… No, really,
Mr Ullman, I cannot thank you properly! I can’t express my–”

Her eyes were moist.

Although not young, she was two years younger. Her age was two years
less. The touch of man had never profaned her. No masculine kiss had
ever rested on that cheek, that mouth. And Carl felt that he might be
the first to cull the flower that had so long waited. He did not see,
just then, the hollow beneath her chin, the two lines of sinew that,
bounding a depression, disappeared beneath her collarette. He saw only
her soul. He guessed that she would be more malleable than the widow,
and he was sure that she was not in a position, as the widow was, to
make comparisons between husbands. Certainly there appeared to be some
confusion as to the proprietorship of this cat. Certainly he could not
have saved the cat’s life for love of two different persons. But that
was beside the point. The essential thing was that he began to be glad
that he had decided nothing definite about the widow on the previous
evening.

“Darling!” said she again, with a new access of passion, kissing Goldie,
but darting a glance at Carl.

He might have put to her the momentous question, between two bites of
buttered toast, had not Mrs Ebag, at the precise instant, swum amply
into the room.

“Sister! You up!” exclaimed Miss Ebag.

“And you, sister!” retorted Mrs Ebag.

VII

It is impossible to divine what might have occurred for the delectation
of the very ancient borough of Oldcastle if that frivolous piece of
goods, Edith, had not taken it into her head to run down from London for
a few days, on the plea that London was too ridiculously hot. She was a
pretty girl, with fluffy honey-coloured hair and about thirty white
frocks. And she seemed to be quite as silly as her staid stepmother and
her prim step-aunt had said. She transformed the careful order of the
house into a wild disorder, and left a novel or so lying on the
drawing-room table between her stepmother’s Contemporary Review and
her step-aunt’s History of European Morals. Her taste in music was
candidly and brazenly bad. It was a fact, as her elders had stated, that
she played nothing but waltzes. What was worse, she compelled Carl
Ullman to perform waltzes. And one day she burst into the drawing-room
when Carl was alone there, with a roll under her luscious arm, and said:

“What do you think I’ve found at Barrowfoot’s?”

“I don’t know,” said Carl, gloomily smiling, and then smiling without
gloom.

“Waldteufel’s waltzes arranged for four hands. You must play them with
me at once.”

And he did. It was a sad spectacle to see the organist of St Placid’s
galloping through a series of dances with the empty-headed Edith.

The worst was, he liked it. He knew that he ought to prefer the high
intellectual plane, the severe artistic tastes, of the elderly sisters.
But he did not. He was amazed to discover that frivolity appealed more
powerfully to his secret soul. He was also amazed to discover that his
gloom was leaving him. This vanishing of gloom gave him strange
sensations, akin to the sensations of a man who, after having worn
gaiters into middle-age, abandons them.

After the Waldteufel she began to tell him all about herself; how she
went slumming in the East End, and how jolly it was. And how she helped
in the Bloomsbury Settlement, and how jolly that was. And, later, she
said:

“You must have thought it very odd of me, Mr Ullman, not thanking you
for so bravely rescuing my poor cat; but the truth is I never heard of
it till to-day. I can’t say how grateful I am. I should have loved to
see you doing it.”

“Is Goldie your cat?” he feebly inquired.

“Why, of course?” she said. “Didn’t you know? Of course you did! Goldie
always belonged to me. Grandpa bought him for me. But I couldn’t do with
him in London, so I always leave him here for them to take care of. He
adores me. He never forgets me. He’ll come to me before anyone. You must
have noticed that. I can’t say how grateful I am! It was perfectly
marvellous of you! I can’t help laughing, though, whenever I think what
a state mother and auntie must have been in that night!”

Strictly speaking, they hadn’t a cent between them, except his hundred a
year. But he married her hair and she married his melancholy eyes; and
she was content to settle in Oldcastle, where there are almost no slums.
And her stepmother was forced by Edith to make the hundred up to four
hundred. This was rather hard on Mrs Ebag. Thus it fell out that Mrs
Ebag remained a widow, and that Miss Ebag continues a flower uncalled.
However, gossip was stifled.

In his appointed time, and in the fulness of years, Goldie died, and was
mourned. And by none was he more sincerely mourned than by the aged
bedridden Caiaphas.

“I miss my cat, I can tell ye!” said old Caiaphas pettishly to Carl, who
was sitting by his couch. “He knew his master, Goldie did! Edith did her
best to steal him from me when you married and set up house. A nice
thing considering I bought him and he never belonged to anybody but me!
Ay! I shall never have another cat like that cat.”

And this is the whole truth of the affair.

I

Arthur Cotterill awoke. It was not exactly with a start that he awoke,
but rather with a swift premonition of woe and disaster. The strong,
bright glare from the patent incandescent street lamp outside, which the
lavish Corporation of Bursley kept burning at the full till long after
dawn in winter, illuminated the room (through the green blind) almost as
well as it illuminated Trafalgar Road. He clearly distinguished every
line of the form of his brother Simeon, fast and double-locked in sleep
in the next bed. He saw also the open trunk by the dressing-table in
front of the window. Then he looked at the clock on the mantelpiece, the
silent witness of the hours. And a pair of pincers seemed to clutch his
heart, and an anvil to drop on his stomach and rest heavily there,
producing an awful nausea. Why had he not looked at the clock before?
Was it possible that he had been awake even five seconds without looking
at the clock–the clock upon which it seemed that his very life, more
than his life, depended? The clock showed ten minutes to seven, and the
train went at ten minutes past. And it was quite ten minutes’ walk to
the station, and he had to dress, and button those new boots, and finish
packing–and the porter from the station was late in coming for the
trunk! But perhaps the porter had already been; perhaps he had rung and
rung, and gone away in despair of making himself heard (for Mrs Hopkins
slept at the back of the house).

Something had to be done. Yet what could he do with those hard pincers
pinching his soft, yielding heart, and that terrible anvil pressing on
his stomach? He might even now, by omitting all but the stern
necessities of his toilet, and by abandoning the trunk and his brother,
just catch the train, the indispensable train. But somehow he could not
move. Yet he was indubitably awake.

“Simeon!” he cried at length, and sat up.

The younger Cotterill did not stir.

“Sim!” he cried again, and, leaning over, shook the bed.

“What’s up?” Simeon demanded, broad awake in a second, and, as usual,
calm, imperturbable.

“We’ve missed the train! It’s ten–eight–minutes to seven,” said
Arthur, in a voice which combined reproach and terror. And he sprang out
of bed and began with hysteric fury to sort out his garments.

Simeon turned slowly on his side and drew a watch from under his pillow.
Putting it close to his face, Simeon could just read the dial.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Still, you’d better get up. It’s eight
minutes to six. We’ve got an hour and eighteen minutes.”

“What do you mean? That clock was right last night.”

“Yes. But I altered it.”

“When?”

“After you got into bed.”

“I never saw you.”

“No. But I altered it.”

“Why?”

“To be on the safe side.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“If I’d told you, I might just as well have not altered it. The man who
puts a clock on and then goes gabbling all over the house about what he
has done is an ass; in fact, to call him an ass is to flatter him.”

Arthur tried to be angry.

“That’s all very well–” he began to grumble.

But he could not be angry. The pincers and the anvil had suddenly ceased
their torment. He was free. He was not a disgraced man. He would catch
the train easily. All would be well. All would be as the practical
Simeon had arranged that it should be. And in advancing the clock Simeon
had acted for the best. Of course, it was safer to be on the safe
side! In an affair such as that in which he was engaged, he felt, and he
honestly admitted to himself, that he would have been nowhere without
Simeon.

“Light the stove first, man,” Simeon enjoined him. “There’s been a
change in the weather, I bet. It’s as cold as the very deuce.”

Yes, it was very cold. Arthur now noticed the cold. Strange–or rather
not strange–that he had not noticed it before! He lit the gas stove,
which exploded with its usual disconcerting plop, and a marvellously
agreeable warmth began to charm his senses. He continued his dressing as
near as possible to the source of this exquisite warmth. Then Simeon, in
his leisurely manner, arose out of bed without a word, put his feet into
slippers and lit the gas.

“I never thought of that,” said Arthur, laughing nervously.

“Shows what a state you’re in,” said Simeon.

Simeon went to the window and peeped out into the silence of Trafalgar
Road.

“Slight mist,” he observed.

Arthur felt a faint return of the pincers and anvil.

“But it will clear off,” Simeon added.

Then Simeon put on a dressing-gown and padded out of the room, and
Arthur heard him knock at another door and call:

“Mrs Hopkins, Mrs Hopkins!” And then the sound of a door opening.

“She was dressed and just going downstairs,” said Simeon when he
returned to their bedroom. “Breakfast ready in ten minutes. She set the
table last night. I told her to.”

“Good!” Arthur murmured.

At sixteen minutes past six they were both dressed, and Simeon was
showing Arthur that Simeon alone knew how to pack a trunk. At twenty
minutes past six the trunk was packed, locked and strapped.

“What about getting the confounded thing downstairs?” Arthur asked.

“When the porter comes,” said Simeon, “he and I will do that. It’s too
heavy for you to handle.”

At six twenty-one they were having breakfast in the little dining-room,
by the heat of another gas-stove. And Arthur felt that all was well, and
that in postponing their departure till that morning in order not to
upset the immemorial Christmas dinner of their Aunt Sarah, they had done
rightly. At half-past six they had, between them, drunk five cups of tea
and eaten four eggs, four slices of bacon, and about a pound and a half
of bread. Simeon, with what was surely an exaggeration of
imperturbability, charged his pipe, and began to smoke. They had forty
minutes in which to catch the Loop-Line train, even if it was prompt.
There would then be forty minutes to wait at Knype for the London
express, which arrived at Euston considerably before noon. After which
there would be a clear ninety minutes before the business itself–and
less than a quarter of a mile to walk! Yes, there was a rich and
generous margin for all conceivable delays and accidents.

“The porter ought to be coming,” said Simeon. It was twenty minutes to
seven, and he was brushing his hat.

Now such a remark from that personification of calm, that living denial
of worry, Simeon, was decidedly unsettling to Arthur. By chance, Mrs
Hopkins came into the room just then to assure herself that the young
men whose house she kept desired nothing.

“Mrs Hopkins,” Simeon asked, “you didn’t forget to call at the station
last night?”

“Oh no, Mr Simeon,” said she; “I saw the second porter, Merrith. He
knows me. At least, I know his mother–known her forty year–and he
promised me he wouldn’t forget. Besides, he never has forgot, has he? I
told him particular to bring his barrow.”

It was true the porter never had forgotten! And many times had he
transported Simeon’s luggage to Bleakridge Station. Simeon did a good
deal of commercial travelling for the firm of A. & S. Cotterill, teapot
makers, Bursley. In many commercial hotels he was familiarly known as
Teapot Cotterill.

The brothers were reassured by Mrs Hopkins. There was half an hour to
the time of the train–and the station only ten minutes off. Then the
chiming clock in the hall struck the third quarter.

“That clock right?” Arthur nervously inquired, assuming his overcoat.

“It’s a minute late,” said Simeon, assuming his overcoat.

And at that word “late,” the pincers and the anvil revisited Arthur.
Even the confidence of Mrs Hopkins in the porter was shaken. Arthur
looked at Simeon, depending on him. It was imperative that they should
catch the train, and it was imperative that the trunk should catch the
train. Everything depended on a porter. Arthur felt that all his future
career, his happiness, his honour, his life depended on a porter. And,
after all, even porters at a pound a week are human. Therefore, Arthur
looked at Simeon.

Simeon walked through the kitchen into the backyard. In a shed there an
old barrow was lying. He drew out the barrow, and ticklishly wheeled it
into the house, as far as the foot of the stairs.

“Mrs Hopkins,” he called. “And you too!” he glanced at Arthur.

“What are you going to do?” Arthur demanded.

“Wheel the trunk to the station myself, of course,” Simeon replied. “If
we meet the porter on the way, so much the better for us … and so much
the worse for him!” he added.

II

It was just as dark as though it had been midnight–dark and excessively
cold; not a ray of hope in the sky; not a sign of life in the street.
All Bursley, and, indeed, all the Five Towns, were sleeping off the
various consequences of Christmas on the human frame. Trafalgar Road,
with its double row of lamps, each exactly like that one in front of the
house of the Cotterills, stretched downwards into the dead heart of
Bursley, and upwards over the brow of the hill into space. And although
Arthur Cotterill knew Trafalgar Road as well as Mrs Hopkins knew the
hundred and twenty-first Psalm, the effect of the scene on him was most
uncanny. He watched Simeon persuade the loaded barrow down the step into
the tiny front garden, not daring to help him, because Simeon did not
like to be helped by clumsy people in delicate operations. Mrs Hopkins
was rapidly pouring all the goodness of her soul into his ear, when
Simeon and the barrow reached the pavement, and Simeon staggered and
recovered himself.

“Look out, Arthur,” Simeon cried. “The road’s like glass. It’s rained in
the night, and now it’s freezing. Come along.”

Arthur bade adieu to Mrs Hopkins.

“Eh, Mr Arthur,” said she. “Things’ll be different when ye come back,
this time a month.”

He said nothing. The pincers and the anvil were at him again. He thought
of falls, torn garments, broken legs.

Simeon lifted the arms of the barrow, and then dropped them.

“Have you got it?” he demanded of Arthur.

“Got what?”

“It.”

“Yes,” said Arthur, comprehending.

“Are you sure? Show it me. Better give it me. It will be safer with me.”

Arthur unbuttoned his overcoat, took off his left glove, and drew from
one of his pockets a small, bright object, which shone under the street
lamp. Simeon took it silently. Then he definitely seized the arms of the
barrow, and the procession started up the street.

No time had been lost, for Simeon had an extraordinary gift of celerity.
It was eleven minutes to seven. Nevertheless, Arthur felt the pincers,
and the feel of the pincers made him look at his watch.

“See here,” said Simeon, briefly. “You needn’t worry. We shall catch
that train. We’ve got twenty minutes, and we shall get to the station
in nine.” The exertion of wheeling the barrow over what was practically
a sheet of rough ice made him speak in short gasps.

Impossible for the pincers and the anvil to remain in face of that
assured, almost god-like tone!

“Good!” murmured Arthur. “By Jove, but it’s cold though!”

“I’ve never been hotter in my life,” said Simeon, puffing. “Except in my
hands.”

“Can’t I take it for a bit?”

“No, you can’t,” said Simeon. At the robust finality of the refusal
Arthur laughed. Then Simeon laughed. The party became gay. The pincers
and the anvil were gone for ever. Simeon turned gingerly into Pollard
Street-half-way to the station. They had but to descend Pollard Street
and climb the path across the cinder-heaps beyond, and they would be, as
it were, in harbour. In Pollard Street Simeon had the happy idea of
taking to the roadway. It was rougher, and, therefore, less dangerous,
than the pavement. At intervals he shoved the wheel of the barrow by
main force over a stone.

“Put my hat straight, will you?” he asked of Arthur, and Arthur obeyed.
It was becoming a task under the winter stars.

Then Arthur happened to notice the wheel of the barrow–its sole wheel.

“I say,” he said, “what’s up with that wheel?”

“It’s rocky, that’s what that wheel is,” replied Simeon. “I hope it will
hold out.”

Instead of pushing the barrow he was now holding it back, down the slant
of Pollard Street. The mist had cleared. And Arthur could see the red
gleam of a signal in the neighbourhood of the station. But now the
pincers and the anvil were at him again, for Simeon’s tone was alarming.
It indicated that the wobbling wheel of the barrow might not hold out.

The catastrophe happened when they were climbing the cinder-slope and
within two hundred yards of the little station. Simeon was propelling
with all his might, and he propelled the wheel against half a brick. The
wheel collapsed. There was a splintering even of the main timbers of the
vehicle as the immense weight of the trunk crashed to the solid earth.

Simeon fell, and rose with difficulty, standing on one leg, and terribly
grimacing.

He said nothing, but consulted his watch by the aid of a fusee.

“We must carry it,” Arthur suggested wildly.

“We can’t carry it up here. It’s much too heavy.”

Arthur remembered the tremendous weight of even his share of it as they
had slid it down the stairs.

No. It could not be carried.

“Besides,” said Simeon, “I’ve sprained my ankle, I fear.” And he sat
down on the trunk.

“What are we to do?” Arthur asked tragically.

“Do? Why, it’s perfectly simple! You must go without me. Anyhow, run to
the station, and try to get the porter down here with another barrow.”

Man of infinite calm, of infinite resource. Though the pincers and the
anvil were horribly torturing him at that moment, Arthur could not but
admire his younger brother’s astounding sangfroid.

And he set off.

“Here!” Simeon called him peremptorily. “Take this–in case you don’t
come back.”

And he handed him the small bright object.

“But I must come back. I can’t possibly go without the trunk. All my
things are in it.”

“I know that, man. But perhaps you’ll have to go without it. Hurry!”

Arthur ran. He encountered the senior porter at the gate of the station.

“Where’s Merrith?” he began. “He was to have–”

“Merrith’s mother is dead–died at five o’clock,” said the senior
porter. “And I’m here all alone.”

Arthur stopped as if shot.

“Well,” he recovered himself. “Lend me a barrow.”

“I shall lend ye no barrow. It’s against the rules. Since they
transferred our stationmaster to Clegg there’s been an inspector down
here welly [well nigh] every day.”

“But I must have a barrow.”

“I shall lend ye no barrow,” said the senior porter, a brute.

A signal close to the signal-box clattered down from red to green.

“Her’s signalled,” said the senior porter. “Are ye travelling by her?”

Arthur had to decide in a moment. Must he or must he not abandon Simeon
and the trunk? The train, a procession of lights, could be seen in the
distance under the black sky. He gave one glance in the direction of
Simeon and the trunk, and then entered the station.

Simeon had been right. He did catch the train.

It was fortunate that there was a wide margin between the advertised
time of arrival of the Loop-Line train at Knype and the departure
therefrom of the London express. For, beyond Hanbridge, the Loop-Line
train came to a standstill, and obstinately remained at a standstill for
near upon forty minutes. Dawn began and completed itself while that
train reposed there. Things got to such a point that, despite the
intense cold, the few passengers stuck their heads out of the windows
and kept them there. Arthur suffered unspeakably. He imparted his awful
anxiety to an old man in the same compartment. And the old man said:

“They always keep the express waiting for the Loop. Moreover, you’ve
plenty o’ time yet.”

He knew that the Loop was supposed to catch the express, and that in
actual practice it did catch it. He knew that there was yet enough time.
Still, he continued to suffer. He continued to believe, at the bottom of
his heart, that on this morning, of all mornings, the Loop would not
catch the express.

However, he was wrong. The Loop caught the express, though it was a
nearish thing. He dashed down into the subterranean passage at Knype
Station, reappeared on the up-platform, ran to the fore-part of the
express, which was in and waiting, and jumped; a porter banged the door,
a guard inspired the driver by a tune on a whistle, and off went the
express. Arthur was now safe. Nothing ever happened to a North-Western
express. He was safe. He was shorn of his luggage (almost, but not
quite, indispensable) and of Simeon; but he was safe. He could not be
disgraced in the world’s eye. He thought of poor, gallant,
imperturbable, sprained Simeon freezing on the trunk in the middle of
the cinder-waste.

III

The train stopped momentarily at a station which he thought to be
Lichfield. Then (out of his waking dreams) it seemed to him that
Lichfield Station had strangely grown in length, and just as the train
was drawing out he saw the word “Stafford” in immense white enamelled
letters on a blue ground. There was nobody else in the compartment. His
heart and stomach in a state of frightful torture, he sprang out of
it–not on to the line, but into the corridor (for it was a corridor
train) and into the next compartment, where were seated two men.

“Is this the London train?” he demanded, not concealing his terror.

“No, it isn’t. It’s the Birmingham train,” said one of the men
fiercely–a sort of a Levite.

“Great heavens!” ejaculated Arthur Cotterill.

“You ought to inquire before you get into a train,” said the Levite.

“The fact is,” said the other man, who was perhaps a cousin of a Good
Samaritan, “the express from Manchester is split up at Knype–one part
for London, and the other part for Birmingham.”

“I know that,” said Arthur Cotterill.

“Ever since I can remember the London part has gone off first.”

“Of course,” said Arthur; “I’ve travelled by it lots of times.”

“But they altered it only last week.”

“I only just caught the train,” Arthur breathed.

“Seems to me you didn’t catch it,” said the Levite.

“I must be in London before two o’clock,” said Arthur, and he said it
so solemnly, he said it with so much of his immortal soul, that even the
Levite was startled out of his callous indifference.

“There are expresses from Birmingham to London that do the journey in
two hours,” said he.

“Let us see,” said the cousin of a Good Samaritan, kindly, opening a bag
and producing Bradshaw.

And he explained to Arthur that the train reached New Street,
Birmingham, at 10.45, and that, by a singular good fortune, a very fast
express left New Street at 11.40, and arrived at Euston at 1.45.

Arthur thanked him and retired with his pincers and anvil to his own
compartment.

He was a ruined man, a disgraced man. The loss of his trunk was now
nothing. At the best he would be over half an hour late, and it was
quite probable that he would be too late altogether. He pictured the
other people waiting, waiting for him anxiously, as minute after minute
passed, until the fatal hour struck. The whole affair was unthinkable.
Simeon’s fault, of course. Simeon had convinced him that to go up to
London on Christmas Day would be absurd, whereas it was now evident that
to go up to London on Christmas Day was obviously the only prudent thing
to do. Awful!

The train to Birmingham was in an ironical mood, for it ran into New
Street to the very minute of the time-table. Thus Arthur had fifty-five
futile minutes to pass. At another time New Street, as the largest
single station in the British Empire, might have interested him. But now
it was no more interesting than Purgatory when you know where you are
ultimately going to. He sought out the telegraph-office, and
telegraphed to London–despairing, yet a manly telegram. Then he sought
out the refreshment-room, and ordered a whisky. He was just putting the
whisky to his lips when he remembered that if, after all, he did arrive
in time, the whisky would amount to a serious breach of manners. So he
put the glass down untasted, and the barmaid justifiably felt herself to
have been insulted.

He watched the slow formation of the Birmingham-London express. He also
watched the various clocks. For whole hours the fingers of the clocks
never budged, and even then they would show an advance of only a minute
or two.

“Is this the train for London?” he asked an inspector at 11.35.

“Can’t you see?” said the inspector, brightly. As a fact, “Euston” was
written all over the train. But Arthur wanted to be sure this time.

The express departed from Birmingham with the nicest exactitude, and
covered itself with glory as far as Watford, when it ran into a mist,
and lost more than a quarter of an hour, besides ruining Arthur’s
career.

Arthur arrived in London at one minute past two. He got out of the train
with no plan. The one feasible enterprise seemed to be that of suicide.

“Come on, now,” said a voice–a voice that staggered Arthur. It was a
man with a crutch who spoke. It was Simeon. “Come on, quick, and don’t
talk too much! To the hotel first.” Simeon hobbled forward rapidly, and
somehow (he could not explain how) the anvil and pincers had left
Arthur.

“I got hold of a milk-cart with a sharpened horse, and drove to Knype.
Horse fell once, but he picked himself up again. Cost me a sovereign.
Only just caught the train. Shouldn’t have caught it if they hadn’t sent
off the Birmingham part before the London part. I was astonished, I can
tell you, not to find you at Euston. Went to the hotel. Found ‘em all
waiting, of course, and practically weeping over a telegram from you.
However, I soon arranged things. Had to buy a crutch…. Here, boy,
lift!” They were in the hotel.

On a bed all Arthur’s finest clothes were laid out. The famous trunk was
at the foot of the bed.

“Quick!”

“But look here!” Arthur remonstrated. “It’s after two now.”

“Well, if it is? We’ve got till three. I’ve arranged with the mandarin
chap for a quarter to three.”

“I thought these things couldn’t occur after two o’clock–by law.”

“That’s what’s the matter with you,” said Simeon; “you think too much.
The two o’clock law was altered years ago. Had anything to eat?” He was
helping Arthur with buttons.

“No.”

“I expected not. Here! Swallow this whisky.”

“Not I!” Arthur protested in a startled tone.

“Why not?”

“Because I shall have to kiss her after the ceremony.”

“Bosh!” said Simeon. “Drink it. Besides, there’s no kissing in a
Registry Office. You’re thinking of a church. I wish you wouldn’t think
so much. Here! Now the necktie, you cuckoo!”

In three minutes they were driving rapidly through the London mist
towards the other sex, and in a quarter of an hour there was one
bachelor the less in this vale of tears.

I

The prologue to this somewhat dramatic history was of the simplest. The
affair came to a climax, if one may speak metaphorically, in fire and
sword and high passion, but it began like the month of March. Mr Bostock
(a younger brother of the senior partner in the famous firm of Bostocks,
drapers, at Hanbridge) was lounging about the tennis-court attached to
his house at Hillport. Hillport has long been known as the fashionable
suburb of Bursley, and indeed as the most aristocratic quarter strictly
within the Five Towns; there certainly are richer neighbourhoods not far
off, but such neighbourhoods cannot boast that they form part of the
Five Towns–no more than Hatfield can boast that it is part of London. A
man who lives in a detached house at Hillport, with a tennis-court, may
be said to have succeeded in life. And Mr Bostock had succeeded. A
consulting engineer of marked talent, he had always worked extremely
hard and extremely long, and thus he had arrived at luxuries. The chief
of his luxuries was his daughter Florence, aged twenty-three, height
five feet exactly, as pretty and as neat as a new doll, of expensive and
obstinate habits. It was Florence who was the cause of the episode, and
I mention her father only to show where Florence stood in the world. She
ruled her father during perhaps eleven months of the year. In the
twelfth month (which was usually January–after the Christmas bills)
there would be an insurrection, conducted by the father with much spirit
for a time, but ultimately yielding to the forces of the government.
Florence had many admirers; a pretty woman, who habitually rules a rich
father, is bound to have many admirers. But she had two in particular;
her cousin, Ralph Martin, who had been apprenticed to her father, and
Adam Tellwright, a tile manufacturer at Turnhill.

These four–the father and daughter and the rivals–had been playing
tennis that Saturday afternoon. Mr Bostock, though touching on fifty,
retained a youthful athleticism; he looked and talked younger than his
years, and he loved the society of young people. If he wandered solitary
and moody about the tennis-court now, it was because he had a great deal
on his mind besides business. He had his daughter’s future on his mind.

A servant with apron-strings waving like flags in the breeze came from
the house with a large loaded tea-tray, and deposited it on a wicker
table on the small lawn at the end of the ash court. The rivals were
reclining in deck chairs close to the table; the Object of Desire, all
in starched white, stood over the table and with quick delicious
movements dropped sugar and poured milk into tinkling porcelain.

“Now, father,” she called briefly, without looking up, as she seized the
teapot.

He approached, gazing thoughtfully at the group. Yes, he was worried.
And everyone was secretly worried. The situation was exceedingly
delicate, fragile, breakable. Mr Bostock looked uneasily first at Adam
Tellwright, tall, spick and span, self-confident, clever, shining, with
his indubitable virtues mainly on the outside. If ever any man of
thirty-two in all this world was eligible, Adam Tellwright was.
Decidedly he had a reputation for preternaturally keen smartness in
trade, but in trade that cannot be called a defect; on the contrary, if
a man has virtues, you cannot precisely quarrel with him because they
happen to be on the outside; the principal thing is to have virtues. And
then Mr Bostock looked uneasily at Ralph Martin, heavy, short, dark,
lowering, untidy, often incomprehensible, and more often rude; with
virtues concealed as if they were secret shames. Ralph was capricious.
At moments he showed extraordinary talent as an engineer; at others he
behaved like a nincompoop. He would be rich one day; but he had a
formidable temper. The principal thing in favour of Ralph Martin was
that he and Florence had always been “something to each other.” Indeed
of late years it had been begun to be understood that the match was “as
good as arranged.” It was taken for granted. Then Adam Tellwright had
dropped like a bomb into the Bostock circle. He had fallen heavily and
disastrously in love with the slight Florence (whom he could have
crushed and eaten). At the start his case was regarded as hopeless, and
Ralph Martin had scorned him. But Adam Tellwright soon caused gossip to
sing a different tune, and Ralph Martin soon ceased to scorn him. Adam
undoubtedly made a profound impression on Florence Bostock. He began by
dazzling her, and then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the glare, he
gradually showed her his good qualities. Everything that skill and tact
could do Tellwright did. The same could not be said of Ralph Martin.
Most people had a vague feeling that Ralph had not been treated fairly.
Mr Bostock had this feeling. Yet why? Nothing had been settled.
Florence’s heart was evidently still open to competition, and Adam
Tellwright had a perfect right to compete. Still, most people
sympathized with Ralph. But Florence did not. Young girls are like that.

Now the rivals stood about equal. No one knew how the battle would go.
Adam did not know. Ralph did not know. Florence assuredly did not know.
Mr Bostock was quite certain, of a night, that Adam would win, but the
next morning he was quite certain that his nephew would win.

No wonder that the tea-party, every member of it tremendously
preoccupied by the great battle, was not distinguished by light and
natural gaiety. Great battles cannot be talked about till they are over
and the last shot fired. And it is not to be expected that people should
be bright when each knows the others to be deeply preoccupied by a
matter which must not even be mentioned. The tea-party was
self-conscious, highly. Therefore, it ate too many cakes and chocolate,
and forgot to count its cups of tea. The conversation nearly died of
inanition several times, and at last it actually did die, and the
quartette gazed in painful silence at its corpse. Anyone who has
assisted at this kind of a tea-party will appreciate the situation. Why,
Adam Tellwright himself was out of countenance. To his honour, it was he
who first revived the corpse. A copy of the previous evening’s Signal
was lying on an empty deck-chair. It had been out all night, and was
dampish. Tellwright picked it up, having finished his tea, and threw a
careless eye over it. He was determined to talk about something.

“By Jove!” he said. “That Balsamo johnny is coming to Hanbridge!”

“Yes, didn’t you know?” said Florence, agreeably bent on resuscitating
the corpse.

“What! The palmistry man?” asked Mr Bostock, with a laugh.

“Yes.” And Adam Tellwright read: “‘Balsamo, the famous palmist and
reader of the future, begs to announce that he is making a tour through
the principal towns, and will visit Hanbridge on the 22nd inst.,
remaining three days. Balsamo has thousands of testimonials to the
accuracy of his predictions, and he absolutely guarantees not only to
read the past correctly, but to foretell the future. Address: 22 Machin
Street, Hanbridge. 10 to 10. Appointment advisable in order to avoid
delay.’ There! He’ll find himself in prison one day, that gentleman
will!”

“It’s astounding what fools people are!” observed Mr Bostock.

“Yes, isn’t it!” said Adam Tellwright.

“If he’d been a gipsy,” said Ralph Martin, savagely, “the police would
have had him long ago.” And he spoke with such grimness that he might
have been talking of Adam Tellwright.

“They say his uncle and his grandfather before him were both
thought-readers, or whatever you call it,” said Florence.

“Do they?” exclaimed Mr Bostock, in a different tone.

“Oh!” exclaimed Adam, also in a different tone.

“I wonder whether that’s true!” said Ralph Martin.

The rumour that Balsamo’s uncle and grandfather had been readers of the
past and of the future produced of course quite an impression on the
party. But each recognized how foolish it was to allow oneself to be so
impressed in such an illogical manner. And therefore all the men burst
into violent depreciation of Balsamo and of the gulls who consulted him.
And by the time they had done with Balsamo there was very little left of
him. Anyhow, Adam Tellwright’s discovery in the Signal had saved the
tea-party from utter fiasco.

II

No. 22 Machin Street, Hanbridge, was next door to Bostock’s vast
emporium, and exactly opposite the more exclusive, but still mighty,
establishment of Ephraim Brunt, the greatest draper in the Five Towns.
It was, therefore, in the very heart and centre of retail commerce. No
woman who respected herself could buy even a sheet of pins without
going past No. 22 Machin Street. The ground-floor was a confectioner’s
shop, with a back room where tea and Berlin pancakes were served to the
elite who had caught from London the fashion of drinking tea in public
places. By the side of the confectioner’s was an open door and a
staircase, which led to the first floor and the other floors. A card
hung by a cord to a nail indicated that Balsamo had pitched his moving
tent for a few days on the first floor, in a suite of offices lately
occupied by a solicitor. Considering that the people who visit a palmist
are just as anxious to publish their doings as the people who visit a
pawnbroker–and no more–it might be thought that Balsamo had ill-chosen
his site. But this was not so. Balsamo, a deep student of certain sorts
of human nature, was perfectly aware that, just as necessity will force
a person to visit a pawnbroker, so will inherited superstition force a
person to visit a palmist, no matter what the inconveniences. If he had
erected a wigwam in the middle of Crown Square and people had had to
decide between not seeing him at all and running the gauntlet of a
crowd’s jeering curiosity, he would still have had many clients.

Of course when you are in love you are in love. Anything may happen to
you then. Most things do happen. For example, Adam Tellwright found
himself ascending the stairs of No. 22 Machin Street at an early hour
one morning. He was, I need not say, mounting to the third floor to give
an order to the potter’s modeller, who had a studio up there. Still he
stopped at the first floor, knocked at a door labelled “Balsamo,”
hesitated, and went in. I need not say that this was only fun on his
part. I need not say that he had no belief whatever in palmistry, and
was not in the least superstitious. A young man was seated at a desk, a
stylish young man. Adam Tellwright smiled, as one who expected the
stylish young man to join in the joke. But the young man did not smile.
So Adam Tellwright suddenly ceased to smile.

“Are you Mr Balsamo?” Adam inquired.

“No. I’m his secretary.”

His secretary! Strange how the fact that Balsamo was guarded by a
secretary, and so stylish a secretary, affected the sagacious and
hard-headed Adam!

“You wish to see him?” the secretary demanded coldly.

“I suppose I may as well,” said Adam, sheepishly.

“He is disengaged, I think. But I will make sure. Kindly sit down.”

Down sat Adam, playing nervously with his hat, and intensely hoping that
no other client would come in and trap him.

“Mr Balsamo will see you,” said the secretary, emerging through a double
black portiere. “The fee is a guinea.”

He resumed his chair and drew towards him a book of receipt forms.

A guinea!

However, Adam paid it. The receipt form said: “Received from Mr —- the
sum of one guinea for professional assistance.–Per Balsamo, J.H.K.,”
and a long flourish. The words “one guinea” were written. Idle to deny
that this receipt form was impressive. As Adam meekly followed “J.H.K.”
in to the Presence, he felt exactly as if he was being ushered into a
dentist’s cabinet. He felt as though he had been caught in the wheels of
an unstoppable machine and was in vague but serious danger.

The Presence was a bold man, with a flowing light brown moustache, blue
eyes, and a vast forehead. He wore a black velvet coat, and sat at a
small table on which was a small black velvet cushion. There were two
doors to the rooms, each screened by double black portieres, and beyond
a second chair and a large transparent ball, such as dentists use,
there was no other furniture.

“Better give me your hat,” said the secretary, and took it from Adam,
who parted from it reluctantly, as if from his last reliable friend.
Then the portieres swished together, and Adam was alone with Balsamo.

Balsamo stared at him; did not even ask him to sit down.

“Why do you come to me? You don’t believe in me,” said Balsamo, curtly.
“Why waste your money?”

“How can I tell whether I believe in you or not,” protested Adam
Tellwright, the shrewd man of business, very lamely. “I’ve come to see
what you can do.”

Balsamo snapped his fingers.

“Sit down then,” said he, “and put your hands on this cushion.
No!–palms up!”

Balsamo gaped at them a long time, rubbing his chin. Then he rose,
adjusted the transparent glass ball so that the light came through it on
to Adam’s hands, sat down again and resumed his stare.

“Do you want to know everything?” he asked.

“Yes–of course.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.” A trace of weakness in this affirmative.

“Well, you mustn’t expect to live much after fifty-two. Look at the line
of life there.” He spoke in such a casual, even antipathetic tone that
Adam was startled.

“You’ve had success. You will have it continuously. But you won’t live
long.”

“What have I to avoid?” Adam demanded.

“Can’t avoid your fate. You asked me to tell you everything.”

“Tell me about my past,” said Adam, feebly, the final remnant of
shrewdness in him urging him to get the true measure of Balsamo before
matters grew worse.

“Your past?” Balsamo murmured. “Keep your left hand quite still,
please. You aren’t married. You’re in business. You’ve never thought of
marriage–till lately. It’s not often I see a hand like yours. Your
slate is clean. Till lately you never thought of marriage.”

“How lately?”

“Who can say when the idea of marriage first came to you? You couldn’t
say yourself. Perhaps about three months ago. Yes–three months. I see
water–you have crossed the sea. Is all this true?”

“Yes,” admitted Adam.

“You’re in love, of course. Did you know you have a rival?”

“Yes.” Once more Adam was startled.

“Is he fair? No, he’s not fair. He’s dark. Isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Ah! The woman. Uncertain, uncertain. Mind you I never undertake to
foretell anything; all I guarantee is that what I do foretell will
happen. Now, you will be married in a year or eighteen months.” Balsamo
stuck his chin out with the gesture of one who imparts grave news; then
paused reflectively.

“Whom to?”

“Ah! There are two women. One fair, one dark. Which one do you prefer?”

“The dark one,” Adam replied in spite of himself.

“Perhaps the fair one has not yet come into your life? No. But she will
do.”

“But which shall I marry?”

“Look at that line. No, here! See how indistinct and confused it is.
Your destiny is not yet settled. Frankly, I cannot tell you with
certainty. No one can go in advance of destiny. Ah! Young man, I
sympathize with you.”

“Then, really you can’t tell me.”

“Listen! I might help you. Yes, I might help you.”

“How?”

“The others will come to me.”

“What others?”

“Your rival. And the woman you love.”

“And then?”

“What is not marked on your hand may be very clearly marked on theirs.
Come to me again.”

“How do you know they will come? They both said they should not.”

“You said you would not. But you are here. Rely on me. They will come. I
might do a great deal for you. Of course it will cost you more. One
lives in a world of money, and I sell my powers, like the rest of
mankind. I am proud to do so.”

“How much will it cost?”

“Five pounds. You are free to take it or leave it, naturally.”

Adam Tellwright put his hand in his pocket.

“Have the goodness to pay my secretary,” Balsamo stopped him icily.

“I beg pardon,” said Adam, out of countenance.

“Of course if they do not come the money will be returned. Now, before
you go, you might tell me all you know about him, and about her. All.
Omit nothing. It is not essential, but it might help me. There is a
chance that it might make things clearer than they otherwise could be.
The true palmist never refuses any aid.”

And Adam thereupon went into an elaborate account of Florence Bostock
and Ralph Martin. He left out nothing, not even that Ralph had a wart on
his chin, and had once broken a leg; nor that Florence had once been
nearly drowned in a swimming-bath in London.

III

It was the same afternoon.

Balsamo stared calmly at a young dark-browed man who had entered his
sanctuary with much the same air as a village bumpkin assumes when he is
about to be shown the three-card trick on a race-course. Balsamo did not
even ask him to sit down.

“Why do you come to me? You don’t believe in me,” said Balsamo, curtly.
“Why waste your half-sovereign?”

Ralph Martin, not being talkative, said nothing.

“However!” Balsamo proceeded. “Sit down, please. Let me look at your
hands. Ah! yes! Do you want to know anything?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Everything?”

“Certainly.”

“Let me advise you, then, to give up all thoughts of that woman.”

“What woman?”

“You know what woman. She is a very little woman. Once she was nearly
drowned–far from here. You’ve loved her for a long time. You thought it
was a certainty. And upon my soul you were justified in thinking
so–almost! Look at that line. But it isn’t a certainty. Look at that
line!”

Balsamo gazed at him coldly, and Ralph Martin knew not what to do or to
say. He was astounded; he was frightened; he was desolated. He perceived
at once that palmistry was after all a terrible reality.

“Tell me some more,” he murmured.

And so Balsamo told him a great deal more, including full details of a
woman far finer than Florence Bostock, whom he was destined to meet in
the following year. But Ralph Martin would have none of this new woman.
Then Balsamo said suddenly:

“She is coming. I see her coming.”

“Who?”

“The little woman. She is dressed in white, with a gold-and-white
sunshade, and yellow gloves and boots, and she has a gold reticule in
her hand. Is that she?”

Ralph Martin admitted that it was she. On the other hand, Balsamo did
not admit that he had seen her an hour earlier and had made an
appointment with her.

There was a quiet knock on the door. Ralph started.

“You hear,” said Balsamo, quietly, “I fear you will never win her.”

“You said just now positively that I shouldn’t,” Ralph exclaimed.

“I did not,” said Balsamo. “I would like to help you. I am very sorry
for you. It is not often I see a hand like yours. I might be able to
help you; the destiny is not yet settled.”

“I’ll give you anything to help me,” said Ralph.

“It will be a couple of guineas,” said Balsamo.

“But what guarantee have I?” Ralph asked rudely, when he had paid the
money–to Balsamo, not to the secretary. Such changes of humour were
characteristic of him.

“None!” said Balsamo, with dignity, putting the sovereigns on the table.
“But I am sorry for you. I will tell you what you can do. You can go
behind those curtains there”–he pointed to the inner door–”and listen
to all that I say.”

A proposal open to moral objections! But when you are in the state that
Ralph Martin was in, and have experienced what he had just experienced,
your out-look upon morals is apt to be disturbed.

IV

“Young lady,” Balsamo was saying. “Rest assured that I have not taken
five shillings from you for nothing. Your lover has a wart on his chin.”

Daintiness itself sat in front of him, with her little porcelain hands
lying on the black cushion. And daintiness was astonished into
withdrawing those hands.

“Please keep your hands still,” said Balsamo, firmly, and proceeded:
“But you have another lover, older, who has recently come into your
life. Fair, tall. A successful man who will always be successful. Is it
not so?”

“Yes,” a little voice muttered.

“You can’t make up your mind between them? Answer me.”

“No.”

“And you wish to learn the future. I will tell you–you will marry the
fair man. That is your destiny. And you will be very happy. You will
soon perceive the bad qualities of the one with the wart. He is a wicked
man. I need not urge you to avoid him. You will do so.”

“A bad man!”

“A bad man. You see there are two sovereigns lying here. That man has
actually tried to bribe me to influence you in his favour?”

“Ralph?”

“Since you mention his Christian name, I will mention his surname. It is
written here. Martin.”

“He can’t have–possibly–”

Balsamo strode with offended pride to the portiere, and pulled it away,
revealing Mr Ralph Martin, who for the second time that afternoon knew
not what to say or to do.

“I tell you–” Ralph began, as red as fire.

“Silence, sir! Let this teach you not to try to corrupt an honest
professional man! Surely I had amply convinced you of my powers! Take
your miserable money!” He offered the miserable money to Ralph, who
stuck his hands in his pockets, whereupon Balsamo flung the miserable
money violently on to the floor.

A deplorable scene followed, in which the presence of Balsamo did not
prevent Florence Bostock from conveying clearly to Ralph what she
thought of him. They spoke before Balsamo quite freely, as two people
will discuss maladies before a doctor. Ralph departed first; then
Florence. Then Balsamo gathered up the sovereigns. He had honestly
earned Adam’s fiver, and since Ralph had refused the two pounds–”I have
seen their hands,” said Balsamo the next day to Adam Tellwright. “All is
clear. In a month you will be engaged to her.”

“A month?”

“A month. I regret that I had a painful scene with your rival. But of
course professional etiquette prevents me from speaking of that. Let me
repeat, in a month you will be engaged to her.”

This prophecy came true. Adam Tellwright, however, did not marry
Florence Bostock. One evening, in a secluded corner at a dance, Ralph
Martin, without warning, threw his arms angrily, brutally, instinctively
round Florence’s neck and kissed her. It was wrong of him. But he
conquered her. Love is like that. It hides for years, and then pops out,
and won’t be denied. Florence’s engagement to Adam was broken. She
married Ralph. She knew she was marrying a strange, dark-minded man of
uncertain temper, but she married him.

As for the unimpeachable Adam, he was left with nothing but the uneasy
fear that he was doomed to die at fifty-two. His wife (for he got one,
and a good one) soon cured him of that.

I

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

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

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

II

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

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

Then I thought: “I’m dead! This is being dead! I’ve died!”

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

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

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

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

The servant said:

“I’d better run for the doctor, ma’am.” And she lifted off the glass.

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

The servant said:

“Yes, mum.. But I’d better run for him. That’s what doctors is for.”

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

III

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

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

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

She whispered: “Is that you, Mary?”

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

My wife said, with sad indifference: “It doesn’t matter now. I’ll let
you in.”

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

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

“Aren’t you going to put the pennies on his eyes, mum?” the servant
asked.

“Ought I?” said my wife. “I don’t know much about these things.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

V

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

The scene was the up-platform of Knype railway station on a summer
afternoon, and, more particularly, that part of the platform round about
the bookstall. There were three persons in the neighbourhood of the
bookstall. The first was the principal bookstall clerk, who was folding
with extraordinary rapidity copies of the special edition of the
Staffordshire Signal; the second was Mr Sandbach, an earthenware
manufacturer, famous throughout the Five Towns for his ingenious
invention of teapots that will pour the tea into the cup instead of all
over the table; and a very shabby man, whom Mr Sandbach did not know.
This very shabby man was quite close to the bookstall, while Mr Sandbach
stood quite ten yards away. Mr Sandbach gazed steadily at the man, but
the man, ignoring Mr Sandbach, allowed dreamy and abstracted eyes to
rest on the far distance, where a locomotive or so was impatiently
pushing and pulling waggons as an excitable mother will drag and shove
an inoffensive child. The platform as a whole was sparsely peopled; the
London train had recently departed, and the station was suffering from
the usual reaction; only a local train was signalled.

Mr Gale, a friend of Mr Sandbach’s, came briskly on to the platform from
the booking-office, caught sight of Mr Sandbach, and accosted him.

“Hello, Sandbach!”

“How do, Gale?”

To a slight extent they were rivals in the field of invention. But both
had succeeded in life, and both had the alert and prosperous air of
success. Born about the same time, they stood nearly equal after forty
years of earthly endeavour.

“What are you doing here?” asked Gale, casually.

“I’ve come to meet someone off the Crewe train.”

“And I’m going by it–to Derby,” said Mr Gale. “They say it’s thirteen
minutes late.”

“Look here,” said Mr Sandbach, taking no notice of this remark, “you see
that man there?”

“Which one–by the bookstall?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what about him?”

“I bet you you can’t make him move from where he is–no physical force,
of course.”

Mr Gale hesitated an instant, and then his eye glistened with response
to the challenge, and he replied:

“I bet you I can.”

“Well, try,” said Mr Sandbach.

Mr Sandbach and Mr Gale frequently threw down the glove to each other in
this agreeable way. Either they asked conundrums, or they set test
questions, or they suggested feats. When Mr Sandbach discovered at a
Christmas party that you cannot stand with your left side close against
a wall and then lift your right leg, his first impulse was to confront
Mr Gale with the trick. When Mr Gale read in a facetious paper an
article on the lack of accurate observation in the average man,
entitled, “Do ‘bus horses wear blinkers?” his opening remark to Mr
Sandbach at their next meeting was: “I say, Sandbach, do ‘bus horses
wear blinkers? Answer quick!” And a phrase constantly in their mouths
was, “I’ll try that on Gale;” or, “I wonder whether Sandbach knows
that?” All that was required to make their relations artistically
complete was an official referee for counting the scores. Such a basis
of friendship may seem bizarre, but it is by no means uncommon in the
Five Towns, and perhaps elsewhere.

So that when Mr Sandbach defied Mr Gale to induce the shabby man to
move from where he stood, the nostrils of the combatants twitched with
the scent of battle.

Mr Gale conceived his tactics instantly and put them into execution. He
walked along the platform some little distance, then turned, and taking
a handful of silver from his pocket, began to count it. He passed slowly
by the shabby man, almost brushing his shoulder; and, just as he passed,
he left fall half-a-crown. The half-crown rolled round in a circle and
lay down within a yard and a half of the shabby man. The shabby man
calmly glanced at the half-crown and then at Mr Gale, who, strolling on,
magnificently pretended to be unaware of his loss; and then the shabby
man resumed his dreamy stare into the distance.

“Hi!” cried Mr Sandbach after Mr Gale. “You’ve dropped something.”

It was a great triumph for Mr Sandbach.

“I told you you wouldn’t get him to move!” said Mr Sandbach, proudly,
having rejoined his friend at another part of the platform.

“What’s the game?” demanded Mr Gale, frankly acknowledging by tone and
gesture that he was defeated.

“Perfectly simple,” answered Mr Sandbach, condescendingly, “when you
know. I’ll tell you–it’s really very funny. Just as everyone was
rushing to get into the London express I heard a coin drop on the
platform, and I saw it rolling. It was half-a-sovereign. I couldn’t be
sure who dropped it, but I think it was a lady. Anyhow, no one claimed
it. I was just going to pick it up when that chap came by. He saw it,
and he put his foot on it as quick as lightning, and stood still. He
didn’t notice that I was after it too. So I drew back. I thought I’d
wait and see what happens.”

“He looks as if he could do with half-a-sovereign,” said Mr Gale.

“Yes; he’s only a station loafer.”

“Then why doesn’t he pick up his half-sovereign and hook it?”

“Can’t you see why?” said Mr Sandbach, patronizingly. “He’s afraid of
the bookstall clerk catching him at it. He’s afraid it’s the bookstall
clerk that has dropped that half-sovereign. You wait till the bookstall
clerk finishes those papers and goes inside, and you’ll see.”

At this point Mr Gale made the happy involuntary movement of a man who
has suddenly thought of something really brilliant.

“Look here,” said he. “You said you’d bet. But you didn’t bet. I’ll bet
you a level half-crown I get him to shift this time.”

“But you mustn’t say anything to him.”

“No–of course not.”

“Very well, I’ll bet you.”

Mr Gale walked straight up to the shabby man, drew half-a-sovereign from
his waistcoat pocket, and held it out. At the same time he pointed to
the shabby man’s boots, and then in the most unmistakable way he pointed
to the exit of the platform. He said nothing, but his gestures were
expressive, and what they clearly expressed was: “I know you’ve got a
half-sovereign under your foot; here’s another half-sovereign for you to
clear off and ask no questions.”

Meanwhile the ingenious offerer of the half-sovereign was meditating
thus: “I give half-a-sovereign, but I shall gather up the other
half-sovereign, and I shall also win my bet. Net result: Half-a-crown to
the good.”

The shabby man, who could not have been a fool, comprehended at once,
accepted the half-sovereign, and moved leisurely away–not, however,
without glancing at the ground which his feet had covered. The result
of the scrutiny evidently much surprised him, as it surprised, in a
degree equally violent, both Mr Gale and Mr Sandbach. For there was no
sign of half-a-sovereign under the feet of the shabby man. There was not
even nine and elevenpence there.

Mr Gale looked up very angry and Mr Sandbach looked very foolish.

“This is all very well,” Mr Gale exploded in tones low and fierce. “But
I call it a swindle.” And he walked, with an undecided, longing,
shrinking air, in the wake of the shabby man who had pocketed his
half-sovereign.

“I’m sure I saw him put his foot on it,” said Mr Sandbach in defence of
himself (meaning, of course, the other half-sovereign), “and I’ve never
taken my eyes off him.”

“Well, then, how do you explain it?”

“I don’t explain it,” said Mr Sandbach.

“I think some explanation is due to me,” said Mr Gale, with a peculiar
and dangerous intonation. “If this is your notion of a practical joke.”

“There was no practical joke about it at all,” Mr Sandbach protested.
“If the half-sovereign has disappeared it’s not my fault. I made a bet
with you, and I’ve lost it. Here’s your half-crown.”

He produced two-and-six, which Mr Gale accepted, though he had a strange
impulse to decline it with an air of offended pride.

“I’m still seven-and-six out,” said Mr Gale.

“And if you are!” snapped Mr Sandbach, “you thought you’d do me down by
a trick. Offering the man ten shillings to go wasn’t at all a fair way
of winning the bet, and you knew it, my boy. However, I’ve paid up; so
that’s all right.”

“All I say is,” Mr Gale obstinately repeated, “if this is your notion of
a practical joke–”

“Didn’t I tell you–” Mr Sandbach became icily furious.

The friendship hitherto existing between these two excellent
individuals might have been ruined and annihilated for a comparative
trifle, had not a surprising and indeed almost miraculous thing
happened, by some kind of freak of destiny, in the nick of time. Mr
Sandbach was sticking close to Mr Gale, and Mr Gale was following in the
leisurely footsteps of the very shabby man, possibly debating within
himself whether he should boldly demand the return of his
half-sovereign, when lo! a golden coin seemed to slip from the boot of
the very shabby man. It took the stone-flags of the platform with
scarcely a sound, and Mr Sandbach and Mr Gale made a simultaneous,
superb and undignified rush for it. Mr Sandbach got it. The very shabby
man passed on, passed eternally out of the lives of the other two. It
may be said that he was of too oblivious and dreamy a nature for this
world. But one must not forget that he had made a solid gain of ten
shillings.

“The soles of the fellow’s boots must have been all cracks, and it must
have got lodged in one of them,” cheerfully explained Mr Sandbach as he
gazed with pleasure at the coin. “I hope you believe me now. You thought
it was a plant. I hope you believe me now.”

Mr Gale made no response to this remark. What Mr Gale said was:

“Don’t you think that in fairness that half-sovereign belongs to me?”

“Why?” asked Mr Sandbach, bluntly.

“Well,” Mr Gale began, searching about for a reason.

“You didn’t find it,” Mr Sandbach proceeded firmly. “You didn’t see it
first. You didn’t pick it up. Where do you come in?”

“I’m seven and sixpence out,” said Mr Gale.

“And if I give you the coin, which I certainly shall not do, I should be
half-a-crown out.”

Friendship was again jeopardized, when a second interference of fate
occurred, in the shape of a young and pretty woman who was coming from
the opposite direction and who astonished both men considerably by
stepping in front of them and barring their progress.

“Excuse me,” said she, in a charming voice, but with a severe air. “But
may I ask if you have just picked up that coin?”

Mr Sandbach, after looking vaguely, as if for inspiration, at Mr Gale,
was obliged to admit that he had.

“Well,” said the young lady, “if it’s dated 1898, and if there’s an ‘A’
scratched on it, it’s mine. I’ve lost it off my watch-chain.” Mr
Sandbach examined the coin, and then handed it to her, raising his hat.
Mr Gale also raised his hat. The young lady’s grateful smile was
enchanting. Both men were bachelors and invariably ready to be
interested.

“It was the first money my husband ever earned,” the young lady
explained, with her thanks.

The interest of the bachelors evaporated.

“Not a profitable afternoon,” said Mr Sandbach, as the train came in and
they parted.

“I think we ought to share the loss equally,” said Mr Gale.

“Do you?” said Mr Sandbach. “That’s like you.”

I

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

“No.”

“He’s a tram-conductor now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

There was not a soul in the car.

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

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

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

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

Then three men of no particular quality mounted the car.

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

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

“Now then, hurry up, please!” he said coldly.

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

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

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

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

“Ah!” he remarked, jerking his elbow in the direction of Mrs Clayton
Vernon and pointedly addressing his three Federationist passengers,
“she’s a lady, she is! She won’t travel with anybody, she won’t! She
chooses her company–and quite right too, I say!”

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

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

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

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

“All I say is,” persisted the singular conductor–”all I say is–she’s a
lady, she is–a regular real lady! She chooses her company–and quite
right too! That I do say, and nobody’s going to stop my mouth.” His
manner was the least in the world heated.

“What’s that?” asked Paul Ford, with a sudden start, not inquiring what
Thomas Chadwick’s mouth was, but pointing to an object which was lying
on the seat in the corner which Mrs Clayton Vernon had too briefly
occupied.

He rose and picked up the object, which had the glitter of gold.

“Give it here,” said Thomas Chadwick, commandingly. “It’s none of your
business to touch findings in my car;” and he snatched the object from
Paul Ford’s hands.

It was so brilliant and so obviously costly, however, that he was
somehow obliged to share the wonder of it with his passengers. The find
levelled all distinctions between them. A purse of gold chain-work, it
indiscreetly revealed that it was gorged with riches. When you shook it
the rustle of banknotes was heard, and the chink of sovereigns, and
through the meshes of the purse could be seen the white of valuable
paper and the tawny orange discs for which mankind is so ready to commit
all sorts of sin. Thomas Chadwick could not forbear to open the
contrivance, and having opened it he could not forbear to count its
contents. There were, in that purse, seven five-pound notes, fifteen
sovereigns, and half a sovereign, and the purse itself was probably
worth twelve or fifteen pounds as mere gold.

“There’s some that would leave their heads behind ‘em if they could!”
observed Paul Ford.

Thomas Chadwick glowered at him, as if to warn him that in the presence
of Thomas Chadwick noble dames could not be insulted with impunity.

“Didn’t I say she was a lady?” said Chadwick, holding up the purse as
proof. “It’s lucky it’s me as has laid hands on it!” he added, plainly
implying that the other occupants of the car were thieves whenever they
had the chance.

“Well,” said Paul Ford, “no doubt you’ll get your reward all right!”

“It’s not–” Chadwick began; but at that moment the driver stopped the
car with a jerk, in obedience to a waving umbrella. The conductor, who
had not yet got what would have been his sea-legs if he had been captain
of an Atlantic liner, lurched forward, and then went out on to the
platform to greet a new fare, and his sentence was never finished.

III

That day happened to be the day of Thomas Chadwick’s afternoon off; at
least, of what the tram company called an afternoon off. That is to say,
instead of ceasing work at eleven-thirty p.m. he finished at six-thirty
p.m. In the ordinary way the company housed its last Moorthorne car at
eleven-thirty (Moorthorne not being a very nocturnal village), and gave
the conductors the rest of the evening to spend exactly as they liked;
but once a week, in turn, it generously allowed them a complete
afternoon beginning at six-thirty.

Now on this afternoon, instead of going home for tea, Thomas Chadwick,
having delivered over his insignia and takings to the inspector in
Bursley market-place, rushed away towards a car bound for Hillport. A
policeman called out to him:

“Hi! Chadwick!”

“What’s up?” asked Chadwick, unwillingly stopping.

“Mrs Clayton Vernon’s been to the station an hour ago or hardly, about a
purse as she says she thinks she must have left in your car. I was just
coming across to tell your inspector.”

“Tell him, then, my lad,” said Chadwick, curtly, and hurried on towards
the Hillport car. His manner to policemen always mingled the veteran
with the comrade, and most of them indeed regarded him as an initiate of
the craft. Still, his behaviour on this occasion did somewhat surprise
the young policeman who had accosted him. And undoubtedly Thomas
Chadwick was scarcely acting according to the letter of the law. His
proper duty was to hand over all articles found in his car instantly to
the police–certainly not to keep them concealed on his person with a
view to restoring them with his own hands to their owners. But Thomas
Chadwick felt that, having once been a policeman, he was at liberty to
interpret the law to suit his own convenience. He caught the Hillport
car, and nodded the professional nod to its conductor, asking him a
technical question, and generally showing to the other passengers on the
platform that he was not as they, and that he had important official
privileges. Of course, he travelled free; and of course he stopped the
car when, its conductor being inside, two ladies signalled to it at the
bottom of Oldcastle Street. He had meant to say nothing whatever about
his treasure and his errand to the other conductor; but somehow, when
fares had been duly collected, and these two stood chatting on the
platform, the gold purse got itself into the conversation, and presently
the other conductor knew the entire history, and had even had a glimpse
of the purse itself.

Opposite the entrance to Mrs Clayton Vernon’s grounds at Hillport Thomas
Chadwick slipped neatly, for all his vast bulk, off the swiftly-gliding
car. (A conductor on a car but not on duty would sooner perish by a
heavy fall than have a car stopped in order that he might descend from
it.) And Thomas Chadwick heavily crunched the gravel of the drive
leading up to Mrs Clayton Vernon’s house, and imperiously rang the bell.

“Mrs Clayton Vernon in?” he officially asked the responding servant.

“She’s in,” said the servant. Had Thomas Chadwick been wearing his
broadcloth she would probably have added “sir.”

“Well, will you please tell her that Mr Chadwick–Thomas Chadwick–wants
to speak to her?”

“Is it about the purse?” the servant questioned, suddenly brightening
into eager curiosity.

“Never you mind what it’s about, miss,” said Thomas Chadwick, sternly.

At the same moment Mrs Clayton Vernon’s grey-curled head appeared behind
the white cap of the servant. Probably she had happened to catch some
echo of Thomas Chadwick’s great rolling voice. The servant retired.

“Good-evening, m’m,” said Thomas Chadwick, raising his hat airily.
“Good-evening.” He beamed.

“So you did find it?” said Mrs Vernon, calmly smiling. “I felt sure it
would be all right.”

“Oh, yes, m’m.” He tried to persuade himself that this sublime
confidence was characteristic of great ladies, and a laudable symptom
of aristocracy. But he would have preferred her to be a little less
confident. After all, in the hands of a conductor less honourable than
himself, of a common conductor, the purse might not have been so “all
right” as all that! He would have preferred to witness the change on Mrs
Vernon’s features from desperate anxiety to glad relief. After all, L50,
10s. was money, however rich you were!

“Have you got it with you?” asked Mrs Vernon.

“Yes’m,” said he. “I thought I’d just step up with it myself, so as to
be sure.”

“It’s very good of you!”

“Not at all,” said he; and he produced the purse. “I think you’ll find
it as it should be.”

Mrs Vernon gave him a courtly smile as she thanked him.

“I’d like ye to count it, ma’am,” said Chadwick, as she showed no
intention of even opening the purse.

“If you wish it,” said she, and counted her wealth and restored it to
the purse. “Quite right–quite right! Fifty pounds and ten
shillings,” she said pleasantly. “I’m very much obliged to you,
Chadwick.”

“Not at all, m’m!” He was still standing in the sheltered porch.

An idea seemed to strike Mrs Clayton Vernon.

“Would you like something to drink?” she asked.

“Well, thank ye, m’m,” said Thomas.

“Maria,” said Mrs Vernon, calling to someone within the house, “bring
this man a glass of beer.” And she turned again to Chadwick, smitten
with another idea. “Let me see. Your eldest daughter has two little
boys, hasn’t she?”

“Yes’m,” said Thomas–”twins.”

“I thought so. Her husband is my cook’s cousin. Well, here’s two
threepenny bits–one for each of them.” With some trouble she extracted
the coins from a rather shabby leather purse–evidently her household
purse. She bestowed them upon the honest conductor with another grateful
and condescending smile. “I hope you don’t mind taking them for the
chicks,” she said. “I do like giving things to children. It’s so much
nicer, isn’t it?”

“Certainly, m’m.”

Then the servant brought the glass of beer, and Mrs Vernon, with yet
another winning smile, and yet more thanks, left him to toss it off on
the mat, while the servant waited for the empty glass.

IV

On the following Friday afternoon young Paul Ford was again on the
Moorthorne car, and subject to the official ministrations of Thomas
Chadwick. Paul Ford was a man who never bore malice when the bearing of
malice might interfere with the gratification of his sense of humour.
Many men–perhaps most men–after being so grossly insulted by a
tram-conductor as Paul Ford had been insulted by Chadwick, would at the
next meeting have either knocked the insulter down or coldly ignored
him. But Paul Ford did neither. (In any case, Thomas Chadwick would have
wanted a deal of knocking down.) For some reason, everything that Thomas
Chadwick said gave immense amusement to Paul Ford. So the young man
commenced the conversation in the usual way:

“How do, Tommy?”

The car on this occasion was coming down from Moorthorne into Bursley,
with its usual bump and rattle of windows. As Thomas Chadwick made no
reply, Paul Ford continued:

“How much did she give you–the perfect lady, I mean?”

Paul Ford was sitting near the open door. Thomas Chadwick gazed
absently at the Town Park, with its terra-cotta fountains and terraces,
and beyond the Park, at the smoke rising from the distant furnaces of
Red Cow. He might have been lost in deep meditation upon the meanings of
life; he might have been prevented from hearing Paul Ford’s question by
the tremendous noise of the car. He made no sign. Then all of a sudden
he turned almost fiercely on Paul Ford and glared at him.

“Ye want to know how much she gave me, do ye?” he demanded hotly.

“Yes,” said Paul Ford.

“How much she gave me for taking her that there purse?” Tommy Chadwick
temporized.

He was obliged to temporize, because he could not quite resolve to seize
the situation and deal with it once for all in a manner favourable to
his dignity and to the ideals which he cherished.

“Yes,” said Paul Ford.

“Well, I’ll tell ye,” said Thomas Chadwick–”though I don’t know as it’s
any business of yours. But, as you’re so curious!… She didn’t give me
anything. She asked me to have a little refreshment, like the lady she
is. But she knew better than to offer Thomas Chadwick any pecooniary
reward for giving her back something as she’d happened to drop. She’s a
lady, she is!”

“Oh!” said Paul Ford. “It don’t cost much, being a lady!”

“But I’ll tell ye what she did do,” Thomas Chadwick went on, anxious,
now that he had begun so well, to bring the matter to an artistic
conclusion–”I’ll tell ye what she did do. She give me a sovereign
apiece for my grandsons–my eldest daughter’s twins.” Then, after an
effective pause: “Ye can put that in your pipe and smoke it!… A
sovereign apiece!”

“And have you handed it over?” Paul Ford inquired mildly, after a
period of soft whistling.

“I’ve started two post-office savings bank accounts for ‘em,” said
Thomas Chadwick, with ferocity.

The talk stopped, and nothing whatever occurred until the car halted at
the railway station to take up passengers. The heart of Thomas Chadwick
gave a curious little jump when he saw Mrs Clayton Vernon coming out of
the station and towards his car. (Her horses must have been still lame
or her coachman still laid aside.) She boarded the car, smiling with a
quite particular effulgence upon Thomas Chadwick, and he greeted her
with what he imagined to be the true antique chivalry. And she sat down
in the corner opposite to Paul Ford, beaming.

When Thomas Chadwick came, with great respect, to demand her fare, she
said:

“By the way, Chadwick, it’s such a short distance from the station to
the town, I think I should have walked and saved a penny. But I wanted
to speak to you. I wasn’t aware, last Tuesday, that your other daughter
got married last year and now has a dear little baby. I gave you
threepenny bits each for those dear little twins. Here’s another one for
the other baby, I think I ought to treat all your grandchildren
alike–otherwise your daughters might be jealous of each other”–she
smiled archly, to indicate that this passage was humorous–”and there’s
no knowing what might happen!”

Mrs Clayton Vernon always enunciated her remarks in a loud and clear
voice, so that Paul Ford could not have failed to hear every word. A
faint but beatific smile concealed itself roguishly about Paul Ford’s
mouth, and he looked with a rapt expression on an advertisement above
Mrs Clayton Vernon’s head, which assured him that, with a certain soap,
washing-day became a pleasure.

Thomas Chadwick might have flung the threepenny bit into the road. He
might have gone off into language unseemly in a tram-conductor and a
grandfather. He might have snatched Mrs Clayton Vernon’s bonnet off and
stamped on it. He might have killed Paul Ford (for it was certainly Paul
Ford with whom he was the most angry). But he did none of these things.
He said, in his best unctuous voice:

“Thank you, m’m, I’m sure!”

And, at the journey’s end, when the passengers descended, he stared a
harsh stare, without winking, full in the face of Paul Ford, and he
courteously came to the aid of Mrs Clayton Vernon. He had proclaimed Mrs
Clayton Vernon to be his ideal of a true lady, and he was heroically
loyal to his ideal, a martyr to the cause he had espoused. Such a man
was not fitted to be a tram-conductor, and the Five Towns Electric
Traction Company soon discovered his unfitness–so that he was again
thrown upon the world.

I

It was considered by certain people to be a dramatic moment in the
history of musical enterprise in the Five Towns when Mrs Swann opened
the front door of her house at Bleakridge, in the early darkness of a
November evening, and let forth her son Gilbert. Gilbert’s age was
nineteen, and he was wearing evening dress, a form of raiment that had
not hitherto happened to him. Over the elegant suit was his winter
overcoat, making him bulky, and round what may be called the rim of the
overcoat was a white woollen scarf, and the sleeves of the overcoat were
finished off with white woollen gloves. Under one arm he carried a vast
inanimate form whose extremity just escaped the ground. This form was
his violoncello, fragile as a pretty woman, ungainly as a navvy, and
precious as honour. Mrs Swann looked down the street, which ended to the
east in darkness and a marl pit, and up the street, which ended to the
west in Trafalgar Road and electric cars; and she shivered, though she
had a shawl over her independent little shoulders. In the Five Towns,
and probably elsewhere, when a woman puts her head out of her front
door, she always looks first to right and then to left, like a scouting
Iroquois, and if the air nips she shivers–not because she is cold, but
merely to express herself.

“For goodness sake, keep your hands warm,” Mrs Swann enjoined her son.

“Oh!” said Gilbert, with scornful lightness, as though his playing had
never suffered from cold hands, “it’s quite warm to-night!” Which it was
not.

“And mind what you eat!” added his mother. “There! I can hear the car.”

He hurried up the street. The electric tram slid in thunder down
Trafalgar Road, and stopped for him with a jar, and he gingerly climbed
into it, practising all precautions on behalf of his violoncello. The
car slid away again towards Bursley, making blue sparks. Mrs Swann
stared mechanically at the flickering gas in her lobby, and then closed
her front door. He was gone! The boy was gone!

Now, the people who considered the boy’s departure to be a dramatic
moment in the history of musical enterprise in the Five Towns were Mrs
Swann, chiefly, and the boy, secondarily.

II

And more than the moment–the day, nay, the whole week–was dramatic in
the history of local musical enterprise.

It had occurred to somebody in Hanbridge, about a year before, that
since York, Norwich, Hereford, Gloucester, Birmingham, and even
Blackpool had their musical festivals, the Five Towns, too, ought to
have its musical festival. The Five Towns possessed a larger population
than any of these centres save Birmingham, and it was notorious for its
love of music. Choirs from the Five Towns had gone to all sorts of
places–such as Brecknock, Aberystwyth, the Crystal Palace, and even a
place called Hull–and had come back with first prizes–cups and
banners–for the singing of choruses and part-songs. There were three
(or at least two and a half) rival choirs in Hanbridge alone. Then also
the brass band contests were famously attended. In the Five Towns the
number of cornet players is scarcely exceeded by the number of
public-houses. Hence the feeling, born and fanned into lustiness at
Hanbridge, that the Five Towns owed it to its self-respect to have a
Musical Festival like the rest of the world! Men who had never heard of
Wagner, men who could not have told the difference between a sonata and
a sonnet to save their souls, men who spent all their lives in
manufacturing tea-cups or china door-knobs, were invited to guarantee
five pounds a-piece against possible loss on the festival; and they
bravely and blindly did so. The conductor of the largest Hanbridge
choir, being appointed to conduct the preliminary rehearsals of the
Festival Chorus, had an acute attack of self-importance, which, by the
way, almost ended fatally a year later.

Double-crown posters appeared magically on all the hoardings announcing
that a Festival consisting of three evening and two morning concerts
would be held in the Alexandra Hall, at Hanbridge, on the 6th, 7th and
8th November, and that the box-plan could be consulted at the principal
stationers. The Alexandra Hall contained no boxes whatever, but
“box-plan” was the phrase sacred to the occasion, and had to be used.
And the Festival more and more impregnated the air, and took the lion’s
share of the columns of the Staffordshire Signal. Every few days the
Signal reported progress, even to intimate biographical details of the
singers engaged, and of the composers to be performed, together with
analyses of the latter’s works. And at last the week itself had dawned
in exhilaration and excitement. And early on the day before the opening
day John Merazzi, the renowned conductor, and Herbert Millwain, the
renowned leader of the orchestra, and the renowned orchestra itself, all
arrived from London. And finally sundry musical critics arrived from
the offices of sundry London dailies. The presence of these latter
convinced an awed population that its Festival was a real Festival, and
not a local make-believe. And it also tranquillized in some degree the
exasperating and disconcerting effect of a telegram from the capricious
Countess of Chell (who had taken six balcony seats and was the official
advertised high patroness of the Festival) announcing at the last moment
that she could not attend.

III

Mrs Swann’s justification for considering (as she in fact did consider)
that her son was either the base or the apex of the splendid pyramid of
the Festival lay in the following facts:–

From earliest infancy Gilbert had been a musical prodigy, and the circle
of his fame had constantly been extending. He could play the piano with
his hands before his legs were long enough for him to play it with his
feet. That is to say, before he could use the pedals. A spectacle
formerly familiar to the delighted friends of the Swanns was Gilbert, in
a pinafore and curls, seated on a high chair topped with a large Bible
and a bound volume of the Graphic, playing “Home Sweet Home” with
Thalberg’s variations, while his mother, standing by his side on her
right foot, put the loud pedal on or off with her left foot according to
the infant’s whispered orders. He had been allowed to play from
ear–playing from ear being deemed especially marvellous–until some
expert told Mrs Swann that playing solely from ear was a practice to be
avoided if she wished her son to fulfil the promise of his babyhood.
Then he had lessons at Knype, until he began to teach his teacher. Then
he said he would learn the fiddle, and he did learn the fiddle; also
the viola. He did not pretend to play the flute, though he could. And at
school the other boys would bring him their penny or even sixpenny
whistles so that he might show them of what wonderful feats a common tin
whistle is capable.

Mr Swann was secretary for the Toft End Brickworks and Colliery Company
(Limited). Mr Swann had passed the whole of his career in the offices of
the prosperous Toft End Company, and his imagination did not move freely
beyond the company’s premises. He had certainly intended that Gilbert
should follow in his steps; perhaps he meant to establish a dynasty of
Swanns, in which the secretaryship of the twenty per cent. paying
company should descend for ever from father to son. But Gilbert’s
astounding facility in music had shaken even this resolve, and Gilbert
had been allowed at the age of fifteen to enter, as assistant, the shop
of Mr James Otkinson, the piano and musical instrument dealer and
musicseller, in Crown Square, Hanbridge. Here, of course, he found
himself in a musical atmosphere. Here he had at once established a
reputation for showing off the merits of a piano, a song, or a waltz, to
customers male and female. Here he had thirty pianos, seven harmoniums,
and all the new and a lot of classical music to experiment with. He
would play any “piece” at sight for the benefit of any lady in search of
a nice easy waltz or reverie. Unfortunately ladies would complain that
the pieces proved much more difficult at home than they had seemed under
the fingers of Gilbert in the shop. Here, too, he began to give lessons
on the piano. And here he satisfied his secret ambition to learn the
violoncello, Mr Otkinson having in stock a violoncello that had never
found a proper customer. His progress with the ‘cello had been such that
the theatre people offered him an engagement, which his father and his
own sense of the enormous respectability of the Swanns compelled him to
refuse. But he always played in the band of the Five Towns Amateur
Operatic Society, and was beloved by its conductor as being utterly
reliable. His connection with choirs started through his merits as a
rehearsal accompanist who could keep time and make his bass chords heard
against a hundred and fifty voices. He had been appointed (nem. con.)
rehearsal accompanist to the Festival Chorus. He knew the entire
Festival music backwards and upside down. And his modestly-expressed
desire to add his ‘cello as one of the local reinforcements of the
London orchestra had been almost eagerly complied with by the Advisory
Committee.

Nor was this all. He had been invited to dinner by Mrs Clayton Vernon,
the social leader of Bursley. In the affair of the Festival Mrs Clayton
Vernon loomed larger than even she really was. And this was due to an
accident, to a sheer bit of luck on her part. She happened to be a
cousin of Mr Herbert Millwain, the leader of the orchestra down from
London. Mrs Clayton Vernon knew no more about music than she knew about
the North Pole, and cared no more. But she was Mr Millwain’s cousin, and
Mr Millwain had naturally to stay at her house. And she came in her
carriage to fetch him from the band rehearsals; and, in short, anyone
might have thought from her self-satisfied demeanour (though she was a
decent sort of woman at heart) that she had at least composed “Judas
Maccabeus.” It was at a band rehearsal that she had graciously commanded
Gilbert Swann to come and dine with her and Mr Millwain between the
final rehearsal and the opening concert. This invitation was, as it
were, the overflowing drop in Mrs Swann’s cup. It was proof, to her,
that Mr Millwain had instantly pronounced Gilbert to be the equal of
London ‘cellists, and perhaps their superior. It was proof, to her, that
Mr Millwain relied on him particularly to maintain the honour of the
band in the Festival.

Gilbert had dashed home from the final rehearsal, and his mother had
helped him with the unfamiliarities of evening dress, while he gave her
a list of all the places in the music where, as he said, the band was
“rocky,” and especially the ‘cellos, and a further list of all the smart
musical things that the players from London had said to him and he had
said to them. He simply knew everything from the inside. And not even
the great Merazzi, the conductor, was more familiar with the music than
he. And the ineffable Mrs Clayton Vernon had asked him to dinner with Mr
Millwain! It was indubitable to Mrs Swann that all the Festival rested
on her son’s shoulders.

IV

“It’s freezing, I think,” said Mr Swann, when he came home at six
o’clock from his day’s majestic work at Toft End. This was in the
bedroom. Mrs Swann, a comely little thing of thirty-nine, was making
herself resplendent for the inaugural solemnity of the Festival, which
began at eight. The news of the frost disturbed her.

“How annoying!” she said.

“Annoying?” he questioned blandly. “Why?”

“Now you needn’t put on any of your airs, John!” she snapped. She had a
curt way with her at critical times. “You know as well as I do that I’m
thinking of Gilbert’s hands…. No! you must wear your frock-coat, of
course!… All that drive from the other end of the town right to
Hanbridge in a carriage! Perhaps outside the carriage, because of the
‘cello! There’ll never be room for two of them and the ‘cello and Mrs
Clayton Vernon in her carriage! And he can’t keep his hands in his
pockets because of holding the ‘cello. And he’s bound to pretend he
isn’t cold. He’s so silly. And yet he knows perfectly well he won’t do
himself justice if his hands are cold. Don’t you remember last year at
the Town Hall?”

“Well,” said Mr Swann, “we can’t do anything; anyway, we must hope for
the best.”

“That’s all very well,” said Mrs Swann. And it was.

Shortly afterwards, perfect in most details of her black silk, she left
the bedroom, requesting her husband to be quick, as tea was ready. And
she came into the little dining-room where the youthful servant was
poking up the fire.

“Jane,” she said, “put two medium-sized potatoes in the oven to bake.”

“Potatoes, mum?”

“Yes, potatoes,” said Mrs Swann, tartly.

It was an idea of pure genius that had suddenly struck her; the genius
of common sense.

She somewhat hurried the tea; then rang.

“Jane,” she inquired, “are those potatoes ready?”

“Potatoes?” exclaimed Mr Swann.

“Yes, hot potatoes,” said Mrs Swann, tartly. “I’m going to run up with
them by car to Mrs Vernon’s. I can slip them quietly over to Gil. They
keep your hands warm better than anything. Don’t I remember when I was a
child! I shall leave Mrs Vernon’s immediately, of course, but perhaps
you’d better give me my ticket and I will meet you at the hall. Don’t
you think it’s the best plan, John?”

“As you like,” said Mr Swann, with the force of habit.

He was supreme in most things, but in the practical details of their
son’s life and comfort she was supreme. Her decision in such matters had
never been questioned. Mr Swann had a profound belief in his wife as a
uniquely capable and energetic woman. He was tremendously loyal to her,
and he sternly inculcated the same loyalty to her in Gilbert.

V

Just as the car had stopped at the end of the street for Gilbert and his
violoncello, so–more than an hour later–it stopped for Mrs Swann and
her hot potatoes.

They were hot potatoes–nay, very hot potatoes–of a medium size,
because Mrs Swann’s recollections of youth had informed her that if a
potato is too large one cannot get one’s fingers well around it, and if
it is too small it cools somewhat rapidly. She had taken two, not in the
hope that Gilbert would be able to use two at once, for one cannot
properly nurse either a baby or a ‘cello with two hands full of
potatoes, but rather to provide against accident. Besides, the inventive
boy might after all find a way of using both simultaneously, which would
be all the better for his playing at the concert, and hence all the
better for the success of the Musical Festival.

It never occurred to Mrs Swann that she was doing anything in the least
unusual. There she was, in her best boots, and her best dress, and her
best hat, and her sealskin mantle (not easily to be surpassed in the
town), and her muff to match (nearly), and concealed in the muff were
the two very hot potatoes. And it did not strike her that women of
fashion like herself, wives of secretaries of flourishing companies, do
not commonly go about with hot potatoes concealed on their persons. For
she was a self-confident woman, and after a decision she did not
reflect, nor did she heed minor consequences. She was always sure that
what she was doing was the right and the only thing to do. And, to give
her justice, it was; for her direct, abrupt common sense was indeed
remarkable. The act of climbing up into the car warned her that she must
be skilful in the control of these potatoes; one of them nearly fell out
of the right end of her muff as she grasped the car rail with her right
hand. She had to let go and save the potato, and begin again, while the
car waited. The conductor took her for one of those hesitating,
hysterical women who are the bane of car conductors. “Now, missis!” he
said. “Up with ye!” But she did not care what manner of woman the
conductor took her for.

The car was nearly full of people going home from their work, of people
actually going in a direction contrary to the direction of the Musical
Festival. She sat down among them, shocked by this indifference to the
Musical Festival. At the back of her head had been an idea that all the
cars for Hanbridge would be crammed to the step, and all the cars from
Hanbridge forlorn and empty. She had vaguely imagined that the thoughts
of a quarter of a million of people would that evening be centred on the
unique Musical Festival. And she was shocked also by the
conversation–not that it was in the slightest degree improper–but
because it displayed no interest whatever in the Musical Festival. And
yet there were several Festival advertisements adhering to the roof of
the car. Travellers were discussing football, soap, the weather, rates,
trade; travellers were dozing; travellers were reading about starting
prices; but not one seemed to be occupied with the Musical Festival.
“Nevertheless,” she reflected with consoling pride, “if they knew that
our Gilbert was playing ‘cello in the orchestra and dining at this very
moment with Mr Millwain, some of them would be fine and surprised, that
they would!” No one would ever have suspected, from her calm, careless,
proud face, that such vain and two-penny thoughts were passing through
her head. But the thoughts that do pass through the heads of even the
most common-sensed philosophers, men and women, are truly astonishing.

In four minutes she was at Bursley Town Hall, where she changed into
another car–full of people equally indifferent to the Musical
Festival–for the suburb of Hillport, where Mrs Clayton Vernon lived.

“Put me out opposite Mrs Clayton Vernon’s, will you?” she said to the
conductor, and added, “you know the house?”

He nodded as if to say disdainfully in response to such a needless
question: “Do I know the house? Do I know my pocket?”

As she left the car she did catch two men discussing the Festival, but
they appeared to have no intention of attending it. They were
earthenware manufacturers. One of them raised his hat to her. And she
said to herself: “He at any rate knows how important my Gilbert is in
the Festival!”

It was at the instant she pushed open Mrs Clayton Vernon’s long and
heavy garden gate, and crunched in the frosty darkness up the short
winding drive, that the notion of the peculiarity of her errand first
presented itself to her. Mrs Clayton Vernon was a relatively great lady,
living in a relatively great house; one of the few exalted or peculiar
ones who did not dine in the middle of the day like other folk. Mrs
Clayton Vernon had the grand manner. Mrs Clayton Vernon instinctively
and successfully patronized everybody. Mrs Clayton Vernon was a
personage with whom people did not joke. And lo! Mrs Swann was about to
invade her courtly and luxurious house, uninvited, unauthorized, with a
couple of hot potatoes in her muff. What would Mrs Clayton Vernon think
of hot potatoes in a muff? Of course, the Swanns were “as good as
anybody.” The Swanns knelt before nobody. The Swanns were of the cream
of the town, combining commerce with art, and why should not Mrs Swann
take practical measures to keep her son’s hands warm in Mrs Clayton
Vernon’s cold carriage? Still, there was only one Mrs Clayton Vernon in
Bursley, and it was impossible to deny that she inspired awe, even in
the independent soul of Mrs Swann.

Mrs Swann rang the bell, reassuring herself. The next instant an
electric light miraculously came into existence outside the door,
illuminating her from head to foot. This startled her. But she said to
herself that it must be the latest dodge, and that, at any rate, it was
a very good dodge, and she began again the process of reassuring
herself. The door opened, and a prim creature stiffly starched stood
before Mrs Swann. “My word!” reflected Mrs Swann, “she must cost her
mistress a pretty penny for getting up aprons!” And she said aloud
curtly:

“Will you please tell Mr Gilbert Swann that someone wants to speak to
him a minute at the door?”

“Yes,” said the servant, with pert civility. “Will you please step in?”

She had not meant to step in. She had decidedly meant not to step in,
for she had no wish to encounter Mrs Clayton Vernon; indeed, the
reverse. But she immediately perceived that in asking to speak to a
guest at the door she had socially erred. At Mrs Clayton Vernon’s
refined people did not speak to refined people at the door. So she
stepped in, and the door was closed, prisoning her and her potatoes in
the imposing hall.

“I only want to see Mr Gilbert Swann,” she insisted.

“Yes,” said the servant. “Will you please step into the breakfast-room?
There’s no one there. I will tell Mr Swann.”

VI

As Mrs Swann was being led like a sheep out of the hall into an
apartment on the right, which the servant styled the breakfast-room,
another door opened, further up the hall, and Mrs Clayton Vernon
appeared. Magnificent though Mrs Swann was, the ample Mrs Clayton
Vernon, discreetly decolletee, was even more magnificent. Dressed as
she meant to show herself at the concert, Mrs Clayton Vernon made a
resplendent figure worthy to be the cousin of the leader of the
orchestra–and worthy even to take the place of the missing Countess of
Chell. Mrs Clayton Vernon had a lorgnon at the end of a shaft of
tortoise-shell; otherwise, a pair of eye-glasses on a stick. She had the
habit of the lorgnon; the lorgnon seldom left her, and whenever she was
in any doubt or difficulty she would raise the lorgnon to her eyes and
stare patronizingly. It was a gesture tremendously effective. She
employed it now on Mrs Swann, as who should say, “Who is this
insignificant and scarcely visible creature that has got into my noble
hall?” Mrs Swann stopped, struck into immobility by the basilisk glance.
A courageous and even a defiant woman, Mrs Swann was taken aback. She
could not possibly tell Mrs Clayton Vernon that she was the bearer of
hot potatoes to her son. She scarcely knew Mrs Clayton Vernon, had only
met her once at a bazaar! With a convulsive unconscious movement her
right hand clenched nervously within her muff and crushed the rich mealy
potato it held until the flesh of the potato was forced between the
fingers of her glove. A horrible sticky mess! That is the worst of a
high-class potato, cooked, as the Five Towns phrase it, “in its jacket.”
It will burst on the least provocation. There stood Mrs Swann, her right
hand glued up with escaped potato, in the sober grandeur of Mrs Clayton
Vernon’s hall, and Mrs Clayton Vernon bearing down upon her like a
Dreadnought.

Steam actually began to emerge from her muff.

“Ah!” said Mrs Clayton Vernon, inspecting Mrs Swann. “It’s Mrs Swann!
How do you do, Mrs Swann?”

She seemed politely astonished, as well she might be. By a happy chance
she did not perceive the wisp of steam. She was not looking for steam.
People do not expect steam from the interior of a visitor’s muff.

“Oh!” said Mrs Swann, who was really in a pitiable state. “I’m sorry to
trouble you, Mrs Clayton Vernon. But I want to speak to Gilbert for one
moment.”

She then saw that Mrs Clayton Vernon’s hand was graciously extended.
She could not take it with her right hand, which was fully engaged with
the extremely heated sultriness of the ruined potato. She could not
refuse it, or ignore it. She therefore offered her left hand, which Mrs
Clayton Vernon pressed with a well-bred pretence that people always
offered her their left hands.

“Nothing wrong, I do hope!” said she, gravely.

“Oh no,” said Mrs Swann. “Only just a little matter which had been
forgotten. Only half a minute. I must hurry off at once as I have to
meet my husband. If I could just see Gilbert–”

“Certainly,” said Mrs Clayton Vernon. “Do come into the breakfast-room,
will you? We’ve just finished dinner. We had it very early, of course,
for the concert. Mr Millwain–my cousin–hates to be hurried. Maria, be
good enough to ask Mr Swann to come here. Tell him that his mother
wishes to speak to him.”

In the breakfast-room Mrs Swann was invited, nay commanded by Mrs
Clayton Vernon, to loosen her mantle. But she could not loosen her
mantle. She could do nothing. In clutching the potato to prevent bits of
it from falling out of the muff, she of course effected the precise
opposite of her purpose, and bits of the luscious and perfect potato
began to descend the front of her mantle. The clock struck seven, and
ages elapsed, during which Mrs Swann could not think of anything
whatever to say, but the finger of the clock somehow stuck motionless at
seven, though the pendulum plainly wagged.

“I’m not too warm,” she said at length, feebly but obstinately resisting
Mrs Clayton Vernon’s command. This, to speak bluntly, was an untruth.
She was too warm.

“Are you sure that nothing is the matter?” urged Mrs Clayton Vernon,
justifiably alarmed by the expression of her visitor’s features. “I beg
you to confide in me if–”

“Not at all,” said Mrs Swann, trying to laugh. “I’m only sorry to
disturb you. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“What on earth is that?” cried Mrs Clayton Vernon.

The other potato, escaping Mrs Swann’s vigilance, had run out of the
muff and come to the carpet with a dull thud. It rolled half under Mrs
Swann’s dress. Almost hysterically she put her foot on it, thus making
pulp of the second potato.

“What?” she inquired innocently.

“Didn’t you hear anything? I trust it isn’t a mouse! We have had them
once.”

Mrs Clayton Vernon thought how brave Mrs Swann was, not to be frightened
by the word “mouse.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” said Mrs Swann. Another untruth.

“If you aren’t too warm, won’t you come a little nearer the fire?”

But not for a thousand pounds would Mrs Swann have exposed the mush of
potato on the carpet under her feet. She could not conceive in what
ignominy the dreadful affair would end, but she was the kind of woman
that nails her colours to the mast.

“Dear me!” Mrs Clayton Vernon murmured. “How delicious those potatoes do
smell! I can smell them all over the house.”

This was the most staggering remark that Mrs Swann had ever heard.

“Potatoes? very weakly.

“Yes,” said Mrs Clayton Vernon, smiling. “I must tell you that Mr
Millwain is very nervous about getting his hands cold in driving to
Hanbridge. And he has asked me to have hot potatoes prepared. Isn’t it
amusing? It seems hot potatoes are constantly used for this purpose in
winter by the pupils of the Royal College of Music, and even by the
professors. My cousin says that even a slight chilliness of the hands
interferes with his playing. So I am having potatoes done for your son
too. A delightful boy he is!”

“Really!” said Mrs Swann. “How queer! But what a good idea!”

She might have confessed then. But you do not know her if you think she
did. Gilbert came in, anxious and alarmed. Mrs Clayton Vernon left them
together. The mother explained matters to the son, and in an instant of
time the ruin of two magnificent potatoes was at the back of the fire.
Then, without saluting Mrs Clayton Vernon, Mrs Swann fled.

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr Smith!” one parson stiffly inclined.

“Mr Smith!” from the second.

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

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

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

“Jock-at-a-Venture! Jock-at-a-Venture!”

II

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

“A strange doctrine, Brother Smith!” said Jock’s own pastor.

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

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

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

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

“I think, my friend–” began the second remaining minister.

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

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

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

“The more reason,” said he, obstinately, “for saving her!… And all
hers!”

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

“And what would you do to save her, brother?” Jock’s pastor inquired
coldly.

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

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

IV

“Those are bonny potatoes, missis!”

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

“But by th’ time they’re cooked your supper’ll be late, I’m reckoning.”

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

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

“Bring Sapphira, too!”

“Those yours?” asked Jock.

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

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

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

“Twins,” Jock suggested.

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

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

“Ye rule ‘em with a rod of iron, missis,” said Jock.

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

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

“And you not thirty-five, I swear!”

“Nay! Ye’re wrong.”

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

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

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

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

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

Now to quiz Jock was to challenge him.

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

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

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

“I do,” said Jock.

“And I make no doubt you think yourself very clever.”

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

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

“Fat!” Jock protested. “Fat! I wouldn’t have an ounce taken off ye for
fifty guineas.”

He was so enthusiastic that Mrs Clowes blushed.

“What’s this about hell-fire?” she questioned. “I often think of it–I’m
a lonely woman, and I often think of it.”

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

“Ay!”

There was a silence.

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

Mrs Clowes shook her head.

“Nay!”

“And bring yer children,” he persisted.

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

And this morning he had been roused.

VI

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

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

“Ask!” said Jock.

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

“And I answer ye civilly, they were,” replied Jock.

“Because I have here,” said Jabez Hanks, maliciously, “Dod’s Beauties
o’ Shakspere, where I find them very same words, taken from a
stage-play called The Tempest.”

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

“They may be Shakspere’s words too,” said Jock, lightly.

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

“Suspected what?”

“Suspected ye o’ quoting Shakspere in our pulpits.”

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

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

“Wunna it?” Jock put in defiantly.

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

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

Jabez took breath. “Now ye bring yer fancy women into the House o’ God!
You–a servant o’ Christ, you–”

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

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

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

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

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

“Here’s preacher, mother!” Kezia whispered, blushing, to Mrs Clowes.

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

“And give me a pint,” said Jock, desperately.

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

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

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

“Nay, nay!” Mrs Clowes deprecated.

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

“I won’t say as ye haven’t,” said Mrs Clowes, lowering her eyes.

VII

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

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

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

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

“Missis!”

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

“I’m going your way, missis,” said Jock.

“Seemingly,” agreed Mrs Clowes, with due caution.

“Canst gi’ us a lift?” he asked.

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

“Nay, ye needna’ stop!” shouted Jock.

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

“That’s a hat–to travel in!” observed Mrs Clowes.

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

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

Mrs Clowes heaved her enormous breast and shook the reins.

“I’ve had my share of trouble,” she remarked mysteriously.

“Tell me about it, missis!”

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

“And I’m so fat!” she said, “and yet I’m not forty, and shan’t be for
two year–and me a grandmother!”

“I knowed it!” Jock exclaimed.

“If I wasn’t such a heap o’ flesh–”

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

VIII

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

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

“Is it thou, Jock?” cried the collier, astounded.

“Ay, lad!” said Jock, briefly.

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

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

Mrs Clowes wept.

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

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

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

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

“How far are ye going? Axe?”

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

“But that business o’ yours at Bursley?”

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

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

I

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

“Dear Cloud,–This is to say good-bye, finally–”

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

The secretary entered.

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

“Yes, sir. Shall I take your overcoat?”

“No, no.”

A discreet closing of the door.

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

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

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

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

“–it is so. You’ve been living your life. But what about me? In
five more years I shall be old, and I haven’t begun to live. I can’t
stand it any longer. I can’t stand this awful Five Towns district–”

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

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

He flinched. She had stung him.

“I sting you–”

No! And he straightened himself, biting his lips!

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

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

“–this morning’s scene, I decided not to ‘interrupt’ you any more–”

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

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

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

He was dizzy, nearly stunned; his head rang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s there?” she cried, in a startled voice. “Is that you, Cloud?”

“Yes,” he breathed.

“But you’re home very early!” Her voice shook.

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

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

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

He nodded weakly.

“We’ll go away for a holiday,” he said, later, as she bathed his
forehead.

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

II

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

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

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

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

Sir Cloud smiled sadly.

“Well, you see, I’m supposed to be ill–at least, to be not well.”

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

“But my work here?”

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

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

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

“Suppose I do? Suppose I try? I must tell her!”

“Tell her what?”

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

Lord Bargrave sprang up.

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

III

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

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

There was a pause.

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

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

“Well, go on,” Lady Bargrave encouraged her.

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

“Why, Gertrude, you’re crying, dearest!”

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

“Gertrude!” It was Sir Cloud’s voice, gentle and tender, outside the
door.

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

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