The Grim Smile of the Five Towns

by Arnold Bennett

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

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

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

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

  And he walked round it.

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

  ‘Yes, Stephen,’ she said timidly. ‘That’s it, and I hope—’

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

  He took it for the cigar-cabinet!

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

  ‘Oh yes,’ she murmured.

  ‘A thousand?’

  ‘Yes, a thousand,’ she said.

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

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

  ‘But I gave you my vases yesterday.’

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

  Then he began to sniff.

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

  ‘Perhaps it’s the wood!’ she faltered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  IV

  They were smashed to atoms.

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

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

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

  ‘But—’ began Charlie Woodruff.

  And that was all he did say.

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

  ‘But—’ began Charlie again.

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

  ‘I shall get another pair,’ said Woodruff.

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

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

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

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

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

  And went.

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

  Vera shook her head.

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

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

  ‘No, no,’ said Vera, positively.

  ‘Why not?’

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

  ‘But I give you something every Christmas.’

  ‘Do you?’ asked Vera, innocently.

  ‘Yes, and you and Stephen give me something.’

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

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

  ‘I forbid you to.’

  ‘I shall.’

  Woodruff departed.

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

  ‘I thought it might amuse you to fill it with your cigars—just to pass the time,’ she said.

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

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

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

  ‘Look at the d—thing!’ he exclaimed to himself. ‘Look at it!’

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

  THE MURDER OF THE MANDARIN

  I

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

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

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

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

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

  Tonight it was champagne.

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

  Mrs Cheswardine tapped her pink-slippered foot impatiently.

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

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Mrs Cheswardine contradicted him.

  ‘Yes, you are, Vera,’ Woodruff insisted calmly.

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

  ‘I asked you what you were saying about murder,’ said Vera sharply, ‘but it seems—’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Charlie! Why, the blood alone—’

  ‘There isn’t always blood,’ said the oracular husband.

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

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

  ‘Not one,’ said Woodruff.

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

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

  Vera shuddered.

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

  ‘Usury, for instance,’ Cheswardine put in.

  ‘Or bigamy,’ said Woodruff.

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

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

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

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

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

  He moved the glass still closer to her lips.

  ‘I said “No, thanks,”’ she repeated dryly.

  ‘Just a mouthful,’ he urged.

  ‘I’m not thirsty.’

  ‘Then you’d better go to bed,’ said he.

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

  II

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

  The reason had to do most intimately with frocks.

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

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

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