And no one suggested the lunatic asylum. Such is the force of pride, of rank stupidity, and of habit.
The slate-scratching was scarcely over that evening when Mr Powell Liversage appeared. He was a golden-haired man, with a jolly face, lighter and shorter in structure than the two brothers. His friendship with them dated from school-days, and it had survived even the entrance of Liversage into a learned profession. Liversage, who, being a bachelor like the Hessians, had many unoccupied evenings, came to see the brothers regularly every Saturday night, and one or other of them dropped in upon him most Wednesdays; but this particular night was a Thursday.
‘How do?’ John greeted him succinctly between two puffs of a pipe.
‘How do?’ replied Liversage.
‘How do, Pow?’ Robert greeted him in turn, also between two puffs of a pipe.
And ‘How do, little ‘un?’ replied Liversage.
A chair was indicated to him, and he sat down, and Robert poured out some coffee into a third cup which Maggie had brought. John pushed away the extra special of the Staffordshire Signal, which he had been reading.
‘What’s up these days?’ John demanded.
‘Well,’ said Liversage, and both brothers noticed that he was rather ill at ease, instead of being humorous and lightly caustic as usual, ‘the will’s turned up.’
‘The devil it has!’ John exclaimed. ‘When?’
‘This afternoon.’
And then, as there was a pause, Liversage added: ‘Yes, my sons, the will’s turned up.’
‘But where, you cuckoo, sitting there like that?’ asked Robert. ‘Where?’
‘It was in that registered letter addressed to your sister that the Post Office people wouldn’t hand over until we’d taken out letters of administration.’
‘Well, I’m dashed!’ muttered John. ‘Who’d have thought of that? You’ve got the will, then?’
Liversage nodded.
The Hessians had an elder sister, Mrs Bott, widow of a colour merchant, and Mrs Bott had died suddenly three months ago, the night after a journey to Manchester. (Even at the funeral the brothers had scandalized the town by not speaking to each other.) Mrs Bott had wealth, wit, and wisdom, together with certain peculiarities, of which one was an excessive secrecy. It was known that she had made a will, because she had more than once notified the fact, in a tone suggestive of highly important issues, but the will had refused to be found. So Mr Liversage had been instructed to take out letters of administration of the estate, which, in the continued absence of the will, would be divided equally between the brothers. And twelve or thirteen thousand pounds may be compared to a financial beef-steak that cuts up very handsomely for two persons. The carving-knife was about to descend on its succulence, when, lo! the will!
‘How came the will to be in the post?’ asked Robert.
‘The handwriting on the envelope was your sister’s,’ said Liversage. ‘And the package was posted in Manchester. Very probably she had taken the will to Manchester to show it to a lawyer or something of that sort, and then she was afraid of losing it on the journey back, and so she sent it to herself by registered post. But before it arrived, of course, she was dead.’
‘That wasn’t a bad scheme of poor Mary Ann’s!’ John commented.
‘It was just like her!’ said Robert, speaking pointedly to Liversage. ‘But what an odd thing!’
Now, both these men were, no doubt excusably, agonized by curiosity to learn the contents of the will. But would either of them be the first to express that curiosity? Never in this world! Not for the fortune itself! To do so would scarcely have been Bursleyish. It would certainly not have been Hessianlike. So Liversage was obliged at length to say—
‘I reckon I’d better read you the will, eh?’
The brothers nodded.
‘Mind you,’ said Liversage, ‘it’s not my will. I’ve had nothing to do with it; so kindly keep your hair on. As a matter of fact, she must have drawn it up herself. It’s not drawn properly at all, but it’s witnessed all right, and it’ll hold water, just as well as if the blooming Lord Chancellor had fixed it up for her in person.’
He produced the document and read, awkwardly and self-consciously—
‘“This is my will. You are both of you extremely foolish, John and Robert, and I’ve often told you so. Nobody has ever understood, and nobody ever will understand, why you quarrelled like that over Annie Emery. You are punishing yourselves, but you are punishing her as well, and it isn’t fair her waiting all these years. So I give all my estate, no matter what it is, to whichever of you marries Annie. And I hope this will teach you a lesson. You need it more than you need my money. But you must be married within a year of my death. And if the one that marries cares to give five thousand pounds or so to the other, of course there’s nothing to prevent him. This is just a hint. And if you don’t either of you marry Annie within a year, then I just leave everything I have to Miss Annie Emery (spinster), stationer and fancy-goods dealer, Duck Bank, Bursley. She deserves something for her disappointment, and she shall have it. Mr Liversage, solicitor, must kindly be my executor. And I commit my soul to God, hoping for a blessed resurrection. 20th January, 1896. Signed Mary Ann Bott, widow.” As I told you, the witnessing is in order,’ Liversage finished.
‘Give it here,’ said John shortly, and scanned the sheet of paper.
And Robert actually walked round the table and looked over his brother’s shoulder—ample proof that he was terrifically moved.
‘And do you mean to tell me that a will like that is good in law?’ exclaimed John.
‘Of course it’s good in law!’ Liversage replied. ‘Legal phraseology is a useful thing, and it often saves trouble in the end; but it ain’t indispensable, you know.’
‘Humph!’ was Robert’s comment as he resumed his seat and relighted his pipe.
All three men were nervous. Each was afraid to speak, afraid even to meet the eyes of the other two. An unmajestic silence followed.
‘Well, I’ll be off, I think,’ Liversage remarked at length with difficulty.
He rose.
‘I say,’ Robert stopped him. ‘Better not say anything about this to Miss—to Annie, eh?’
‘I will say nothing,’ agreed Liversage (infamously and unprofessionally concealing the fact that he had already said something).
And he departed.
The brothers sat in flustered meditation over the past and the future.
Ten years before, Annie Emery had been an orphan of twenty-three, bravely starting in business for herself amid the plaudits of the admiring town; and John had fallen in love with her courage and her sense and her feminine charm. But alas, as Ovid points out, how difficult it is for a woman to please only one man! Robert also had fallen in love with Annie. Each brother had accused the other of underhand and unbrotherly practices in the pursuit of Annie. Each was profoundly hurt by the accusations, and each, in the immense fatuity of his pride, had privately sworn to prove his innocence by having nothing more to do with Annie. Such is life! Such is man! Such is the terrible egoism of man! And thus it was that, for the sake of wounded pride, John and Robert not only did not speak to one another for ten years, but they spoilt at least one of their lives; and they behaved ignobly to Annie, who would certainly have married either one or the other of them.
At two o’clock in the morning John pulled a coin out of his pocket and made the gesture of tossing.
‘Who shall go first!’ he explained.
Robert had a queer sensation in his spine as his elder brother spoke to him for the first time in ten years. He wanted to reply vocally. He had a most imperious desire to reply vocally. But he could not. Something stronger even than the desire prevented his tongue from moving.
John tossed the coin—it was a sovereign—and covered it with his hands.
‘Tail!’ Robert murmured, somewhat hoarsely.
But it was head.
Then they went to bed.
II
&n
bsp; The side door of Miss Emery’s shop was in Brick Passage, and not in the main street, so that a man, even a man of commanding stature and formidable appearance, might by insinuating himself into Brick Street, off King Street, and then taking the passage from the quieter end, arrive at it without attracting too much attention. This course was adopted by John Hessian. From the moment when he quitted his own house that Friday evening in June he had been subject to the delusion that the collective eye of Bursley was upon him. As a matter of fact, the collective eye of Bursley is much too large and important to occupy itself exclusively with a single individual. Bursley is not a village, and let no one think it. Nevertheless, John was subject to the delusion.
The shop was shut, as he knew it would be. But the curtained window of the parlour, between the side-door and the small shuttered side-window of the shop, gave a strange suggestion of interesting virgin spotless domesticity within. John cast a fearful eye on the main thoroughfare. Nobody seemed to be passing. The chapel-keeper of the Wesleyan Chapel on the opposite side of Trafalgar Road was refreshing the massive Corinthian portico of that fane, and paying no regard whatever to the temple of Eros which Miss Emery’s shop had suddenly become.
So John knocked.
‘I am a fool!’ his thought ran as he knocked.
Because he did not know what he was about. He had won the toss, and with it the right to approach Annie Emery before his brother. But what then? Well, he did desire to marry her, quite as much for herself as for his sister’s fortune. But what then? How was he going to explain the tepidity, the desertion, the long sin against love of ten years? In short, how was he going to explain the inexplicable? He could decidedly do nothing that evening except make a blundering ass of himself. And how soon would Robert have the right to come along and say HIS say? That point had not been settled. Points so extremely delicate cannot be settled on a slate, and he had not dared to broach it viva voce to his younger brother. He had been too afraid of a rebuff.
He then hoped that Annie’s servant would tell him that Annie was out.
Annie, however, took him at a disadvantage by opening the door herself.
‘Well, MR HESSIAN!’ she exclaimed, her face bursting into a swift and welcoming smile.
‘I was just passing,’ the donkey in him blundered forth. ‘And I thought—’
However, in fifteen seconds he was on the domestic side of the sitting-room window, and seated in the antimacassared armchair between the fire-place and the piano, and Annie had taken his hat and told him that her servant was out for the evening.
‘But I’m disturbing your supper, Miss Emery,’ he said. Flurried though he was, he could not fail to notice the white embroidered cloth spread diagonally on the table, and the cold meat and the pastry and the glittering cutlery and crystal thereon.
‘Not at all,’ she replied. ‘You haven’t had supper yet, I expect?’
‘No,’ he said, not thinking.
‘It will be nice of you to help me to eat mine,’ said she.
‘Oh! But really—’
But she got plates and things out of the cupboard below the bookcase—and there he was! She would take no refusal. It was wondrous.
‘I’m awfully glad I came now,’ his thought ran; I’m managing it rather well.’
And—
‘Poor Bob!’
His sole discomfort was that he could not invent a sufficiently ingenious explanation of his call. You can’t tell a woman you’ve called to make love to her, and when your previous call happens to have been ten years ago, some kind of an explanation does seem to be demanded. Ultimately, as Annie was so very pleased to see him, so friendly, so feminine, so equal to the occasion, he decided to let his presence in her abode that night stand as one of those central facts in existence that need no explanation. And they went on talking and eating till the dusk deepened and Annie lit the gas and drew the blind.
He watched her on the sly as she moved about the room. He decided that she did not appear a day older. There was the same plump, erect figure, the same neatness, the same fair skin and fair hair, the same little nose, the same twinkle in the eye—only perhaps the twinkle in the eye was a trifle less cruel than it used to be. She was not a day older. (In this he was of course utterly mistaken; she was ten years older, she was thirty-three, with ten years of successful commercial experience behind her; she would never be twenty-three again. Still she was a most desirable woman, and a woman infinitely beyond his deserts.) Her air of general capability impressed him. And with that there was mingled a strange softness, a marvellous hint of a concealed wish to surrender…. Well, she made him feel big and masculine—in brief, a man.
He regretted the lost ten years. His present way of life seemed intolerable to him. The new heaven opened its gate and gave glimpses of paradise. After all, he felt himself well qualified for that paradise. He felt that he had all along been a woman’s man, without knowing it.
‘By Jove!’ his thought ran. ‘At this rate I might propose to her in a week or two.’
And again—
‘Poor old Bobbie!’
A quarter of an hour later, in some miraculous manner, they were more intimate than they had ever been, much more intimate. He revised his estimate of the time that must elapse before he might propose to her. In another five minutes he was fighting hard against a mad impulse to propose to her on the spot. And then the fight was over, and he had lost. He proposed to her under the rose-coloured shade of the Welsbach light.
She drew away, as though shot.
And with the rapidity of lightning, in the silence which followed, he went back to his original criticism of himself, that he was a fool. Naturally she would request him to leave. She would accuse him of effrontery.
Her lips trembled. He prepared to rise.
‘It’s so sudden!’ she said.
Bliss! Glory! Celestial joy! Her words were at least equivalent to an absolution of his effrontery! She would accept! She would accept! He jumped up and approached her. But she jumped up too and retreated. He was not to win his prize so easily.
‘Please sit down,’ she murmured. ‘I must think it over,’ she said, apparently mastering herself. ‘Shall you be at chapel next Sunday morning?’
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘If I am there, and if I am wearing white roses in my hat, it will mean—’ She dropped her eyes.
‘Yes?’ he queried.
And she nodded.
‘And supposing you aren’t there?’
‘Then the Sunday after,’ she said.
He thanked her in his Hessian style.
‘I prefer that way of telling you,’ she smiled demurely. ‘It will avoid the necessity for another—so much—you understand?…’
‘Quite so, quite so!’ he agreed. ‘I quite understand.’
‘And if I DO see those roses,’ he went on, ‘I shall take upon myself to drop in for tea, may I?’
She paused.
‘In any case, you mustn’t speak to me coming out of chapel, PLEASE.’
As he walked home down Oldcastle Street he said to himself that the age of miracles was not past; also that, after all, he was not so old as the tale of his years would mathematically indicate.
III
Her absence from chapel on the next Sunday disagreed with him. However, Robert was away nearly all the week, and he had the house to himself to dream in. It frequently happened to him to pass by Miss Emery’s shop, but he caught no glimpse of her, and though he really was in serious need of writing-paper and envelopes, he dared not enter. Robert returned on the Friday.
On the morning of the second Sunday, John got up early, in order to cope with a new necktie that he had purchased in Hanbridge. Nevertheless he found Robert afoot before him, and Robert, by some unlucky chance, was wearing not merely a new necktie, but a new suit of clothes. They breakfasted in their usual august silence, and John gathered from a remark of Robert’s to Maggie when she brought in the boots that Robert meant to go to chapel. Now
, Robert, being a commercial traveller and therefore a bit of a caution, did not attend chapel with any remarkable assiduity. And John, in the privacy of his own mind, blamed him for having been so clumsy as to choose that particular morning for breaking the habits of a lifetime. Still, the presence of Robert in the pew could not prejudicially affect John, and so there was no genuine cause for gloominess.
After a time it became apparent that each was waiting for the other to go. John began to get annoyed. At last he made the plunge and went. Turning his head halfway up Oldcastle Street, opposite the mansion which is called ‘Miss Peel’s’, he perceived Robert fifty yards behind. It was a glorious June day.
He blushed as he entered chapel. If he was nervous, it may be accorded to him as excuse that the happiness of his life depended on what he should see within the next few minutes. However, he felt pretty sure, though it was exciting all the same.
To reach the Hessian pew he was obliged to pass Miss Emery’s. And it was empty! Robert arrived.
The organist finished the voluntary. The leading tenor of the choir put up the number of the first hymn. The minister ascended the staircase of the great mahogany pulpit, and prayed silently, and arranged his papers in the leaves of the hymn-book, and glanced about to see who was there and who was presumably still in bed, and coughed; and then Miss Annie Emery sailed in with that air of false calm which is worn by the experienced traveller who catches a train by the fifth of a second. The service commenced.
John looked.
She was wearing white roses. There could be no mistake as to that. There were about a hundred and fifty-five white roses in the garden of her hat.
What a thrill ran through John’s heart! He had won Annie, and he had won the fortune. Yes, he would give Robert the odd five thousand pounds. His state of mind might even lead him to make it guineas. He heard not a word of the sermon, and throughout the service he rose up and sat down several instants after the rest of the congregation, because he was so absent-minded.
The Grim Smile of the Five Towns Page 4