My tone was so firm that it startled them. They glanced at each other with alarmed eyes, like simple people confronted by an inexplicable phenomenon. ‘But look here, mister!’ said Mr Colclough, pained, ‘we’ve got this out specially for you. You don’t suppose this is our usual tipple, do you?’
I yielded. I could do no less than sacrifice myself to their enchanting instinctive kindness of heart. ‘I shall be dead tomorrow,’ I said to myself; ‘but I shall have lived tonight.’ They were relieved, but I saw that I had given them a shock from which they could not instantaneously recover. Therefore I began with a long pull, to reassure them.
‘Mrs Brindley has been telling me that Simon Fuge is dead,’ said Mrs Colclough brightly, as though Mrs Brindley had been telling her that the price of mutton had gone down.
I perceived that those two had been talking over Simon Fuge, after their fashion.
‘Oh yes,’ I responded.
‘Have you got that newspaper in your pocket, Mr Loring?’ asked Mrs Brindley.
I had.
‘No,’ I said, feeling in my pockets; ‘I must have left it at your house.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s strange. I looked for it to show it to Mrs Colclough, but I couldn’t see it.’
This was not surprising. I did not want Mrs Colclough to read the journalistic obituary until she had given me her own obituary of Fuge.
‘It must be somewhere about,’ I said; and to Mrs Colclough: ‘I suppose you knew him pretty well?’
‘Oh, bless you, no! I only met him once.’
‘At Ilam?’
‘Yes. What are you going to do, Oliver?’
Her husband was opening the piano.
‘Bob and I are just going to have another smack at that Brahms.’
‘You don’t expect us to listen, do you?’
‘I expect you to do what pleases you, missis,’ said he. ‘I should be a bigger fool than I am if I expected anything else.’ Then he smiled at me. ‘No! Just go on talking. Ol and I’ll drown you easy enough. Quite short! Back in five minutes.’
The two men placed each his wine-glass on the space on the piano designed for a candlestick, lighted cigars, and sat down to play.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Colclough resumed, in a lower, more confidential tone, to the accompaniment of the music. ‘You see, there was a whole party of us there, and Mr Fuge was staying at the hotel, and of course he knew several of us.’
‘And he took you out in a boat?’
‘Me and Annie? Yes. Just as it was getting dusk he came up to us and asked us if we’d go for a row. Eh, I can hear him asking us now! I asked him if he could row, and he was quite angry. So we went, to quieten him.’ She paused, and then laughed.
‘Sally!’ Mrs Brindley protested. ‘You know he’s dead!’
‘Yes.’ She admitted the rightness of the protest. ‘But I can’t help it. I was just thinking how he got his feet wet in pushing the boat off.’ She laughed again. ‘When we were safely off, someone came down to the shore and shouted to Mr Fuge to bring the boat back. You know his quick way of talking.’ (Here she began to imitate Fuge.) ‘“I’ve quarrelled with the man this boat belongs to. Awful feud! Fact is, I’m in a hostile country here!” And a lot more like that. It seemed he had quarrelled with everybody in Ilam. He wasn’t sure if the landlord of the hotel would let him sleep there again. He told us all about all his quarrels, until he dropped one of the oars. I shall never forget how funny he looked in the moonlight when he dropped the oar. “There, that’s your fault!” he said. “You make me talk too much about myself, and I get excited.” He kept striking matches to look for the oar, and turning the boat round and round with the other oar. “Last match!” he said. “We shall never see land tonight.” Then he found the oar again. He considered we were saved. Then he began to tell us about his aunt. “You know I’d no business to be here. I came down from London for my aunt’s funeral, and here I am in a boat at night with two pretty girls!” He said the funeral had taught him one thing, and that was that black neckties were the only possible sort of necktie. He said the greatest worry of his life had always been neckties; but he wouldn’t have to worry any more, and so his aunt hadn’t died for nothing. I assure you he kept on talking about neckties. I assure you, Mr Loring, I went to sleep—at least I dozed—and when I woke up he was still talking about neckties. But then his feet began to get cold. I suppose it was because they were wet. The way he grumbled about his feet being cold! I remember he turned his coat collar up. He wanted to get on shore and walk, but he’d taken us a long way up the lake by that time, and he saw we were absolutely lost. So he put the oars in the boat and stood up and stamped his feet. It might have upset the boat.’
‘How did it end?’ I inquired.
‘Well, Annie and I caught the train, but only just. You see it was a special train, so they kept it for us, otherwise we should have been in a nice fix.’
‘So you have special trains in these parts?’
‘Why, of course! It was the annual outing of the teachers of St Luke’s Sunday School and their friends, you see. So we had a special train.’
At this point the duettists came to the end of a movement, and Mr Brindley leaned over to us from his stool, glass in hand.
‘The railway company practically owns Ilam,’ he explained, ‘and so they run it for all they’re worth. They made the lake, to feed the canals, when they bought the canals from the canal company. It’s an artificial lake, and the railway runs alongside it. A very good scheme of the company’s. They started out to make Ilam a popular resort, and they’ve made it a popular resort, what with special trains and things. But try to get a special train to any other place on their rotten system, and you’ll soon see!’
‘How big is the lake?’ I asked.
‘How long is it, Ol?’ he demanded of Colclough. ‘A couple of miles?’
‘Not it! About a mile. Adagio!’
They proceeded with Brahms.
‘He ran with you all the way to the station, didn’t he?’ Mrs Brindley suggested to Mrs Colclough.
‘I should just say he did!’ Mrs Colclough concurred. ‘He wanted to get warm, and then he was awfully afraid lest we should miss it.’
‘I thought you were on the lake practically all night!’ I exclaimed.
‘All night! Well, I don’t know what you call all night. But I was back in Bursley before eleven o’clock, I’m sure.’
I then contrived to discover the Gazette in an unsearched pocket, and I gave it to Mrs Colclough to read. Mrs Brindley looked over her shoulder.
There was no slightest movement of depreciation on Mrs Colclough’s part. She amiably smiled as she perused the GAZETTE’S version of Fuge’s version of the lake episode. Here was the attitude of the woman whose soul is like crystal. It seems to me that most women would have blushed, or dissented, or simulated anger, or failed to conceal vanity. But Mrs Coclough might have been reading a fairy tale, for any emotion she displayed.
‘Yes,’ she said blandly; ‘from the things Annie used to tell me about him sometimes, I should say that was just how he WOULD talk. They seem to have thought quite a lot of him in London, then?’
‘Oh, rather!’ I said. ‘I suppose your sister knew him pretty well?’
‘Annie? I don’t know. She knew him.’
I distinctly observed a certain self-consciousness in Mrs Colclough as she made this reply. Mrs Brindley had risen and with wifely attentiveness was turning over the music page for her husband.
VIII
Soon afterwards, for me, the night began to grow fantastic; it took on the colour of a gigantic adventure. I do not suppose that either Mr Brindley or Mr Colclough, or the other person who presently arrived, regarded it as anything but a pleasant conviviality, but to a man of my constitution and habits it was an almost incredible occurrence. The other person was the book-collecting doctor. He arrived with a discreet tap on the window at midnight, to spend the evening. Mrs Brindley had gone home and Mrs Colclough had go
ne to bed. The book-collecting doctor refused champagne; he was, in fact, very rude to champagne in general. He had whisky. And those astonishing individuals, Messieurs Brindley and Colclough, secretly convinced of the justice of the attack on champagne, had whisky too. And that still most astonishing individual, Loring of the B.M., joined them. It was the hour of limericks. Limericks were demanded for the diversion of the doctor, and I furnished them. We then listened to the tale of the doctor’s experiences that day amid the sturdy, natural-minded population of a muling village not far from Bursley. Seldom have I had such a bath in the pure fluid of human nature. All sense of time was lost. I lived in an eternity. I could not suggest to my host that we should depart. I could, however, decline more whisky. And I could, given the chance, discourse with gay despair concerning the miserable wreck that I should be on the morrow in consequence of this high living. I asked them how I could be expected, in such a state, to judge delicate points of expertise in earthenware. I gave them a brief sketch of my customary evening, and left them to compare it with that evening. The doctor perceived that I was serious. He gazed at me with pity, as if to say: ‘Poor frail southern organism! It ought to be in bed, with nothing inside it but tea!’ What he did actually say was: ‘You come round to my place, I’ll soon put you right!’ ‘Can you stop me from having a headache tomorrow?’ I eagerly asked. ‘I think so,’ he said with calm northern confidence.
At some later hour Mr Brindley and I ‘went round’. Mr Colclough would not come. He bade me goodbye, as his wife had done, with the most extraordinary kindness, the most genuine sorrow at quitting me, the most genuine pleasure in the hope of seeing me again.
‘There are three thousand books in this room!’ I said to myself, as I stood in the doctor’s electrically lit library.
‘What price this for a dog?’ Mr Brindley drew my attention to an aristocratic fox-terrier that lay on the hearth. ‘Well, Titus! Is it sleepy? Well, well! How many firsts has he won, doctor?’
‘Six,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll just fix you up, to begin with,’ he turned to me.
After I had been duly fixed up (‘This’ll help you to sleep, and THIS’ll placate your “god”,’ said the doctor), I saw to my intense surprise that another ‘evening’ was to be instantly superimposed on the ‘evening’ at Mr Colclough’s. The doctor and Mr Brindley carefully and deliberately lighted long cigars, and sank deeply into immense armchairs; and so I imitated them as well as I could in my feeble southern way. We talked books. We just simply enumerated books without end, praising or damning them, and arranged authors in neat pews, like cattle in classes at an agricultural show. No pastime is more agreeable to people who have the book disease, and none more quickly fleets the hours, and none is more delightfully futile.
Ages elapsed, and suddenly, like a gun discharging, Mr Brindley said—
‘We must go!’
Of all things that happened this was the most astonishing.
We did go.
‘By the way, doc.,’ said Mr Brindley, in the doctor’s wide porch, ‘I forgot to tell you that Simon Fuge is dead.’
‘Is he?’ said the doctor.
‘Yes. You’ve got a couple of his etchings, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ said the doctor. ‘I had. But I sold them several months ago.’
‘Oh!’ said Mr Brindley negligently; ‘I didn’t know. Well, so long!’
We had a few hundred yards to walk down the silent, wide street, where the gas-lamps were burning with the strange, endless patience that gas-lamps have. The stillness of a provincial town at night is quite different from that of London; we might have been the only persons alive in England.
Except for a feeling of unreality, a feeling that the natural order of things had been disturbed by some necromancer, I was perfectly well the same morning at breakfast, as the doctor had predicted I should be. When I expressed to Mr Brindley my stupefaction at this happy sequel, he showed a polite but careless inability to follow my line of thought. It appeared that he was always well at breakfast, even when he did stay up ‘a little later than usual’. It appeared further that he always breakfasted at a quarter to nine, and read the Manchester Guardian during the meal, to which his wife did or did not descend—according to the moods of the nursery; and that he reached his office at a quarter to ten. That morning the mood of the nursery was apparently unpropitious. He and I were alone. I begged him not to pretermit his GUARDIAN, but to examine it and give me the news. He agreed, scarcely unwilling.
‘There’s a paragraph in the London correspondence about Fuge,’ he announced from behind the paper.
‘What do they say about him?’
‘Nothing particular.’
‘Now I want to ask you something,’ I said.
I had been thinking a good deal about the sisters and Simon Fuge. And in spite of everything that I had heard—in spite even of the facts that the lake had been dug by a railway company, and that the excursion to the lake had been an excursion of Sunday-school teachers and their friends—I was still haunted by certain notions concerning Simon Fuge and Annie Brett. Annie Brett’s flush, her unshed tears; and the self-consciousness shown by Mrs Colclough when I had pointedly mentioned her sister’s name in connection with Simon Fuge’s: these were surely indications! And then the doctor’s recitals of manners in the immediate neighbourhood of Bursley went to support my theory that even in Staffordshire life was very much life.
‘What?’ demanded Mr Brindley.
‘Was Miss Brett ever Simon Fuge’s mistress?’
At that moment Mrs Brindley, miraculously fresh and smiling, entered the room.
‘Wife,’ said Mr Brindley, without giving her time to greet me, ‘what do you think he’s just asked me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He’s just asked me if Annie Brett was ever Simon Fuge’s mistress.’
She sank into a chair.
‘Annie BRETT?’ She began to laugh gently. ‘Oh! Mr Loring, you really are too funny!’ She yielded to her emotions. It may be said that she laughed as they can laugh in the Five Towns. She cried. She had to wipe away the tears of laughter.
‘What on earth made you think so?’ she inquired, after recovery.
‘I—had an idea,’ I said lamely. ‘He always made out that one of those two sisters was so much to him, and I knew it couldn’t be Mrs Colclough.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘ask anybody down here, ANYbody! And see what they’ll say.’
‘No,’ Mr Brindley put in, ‘don’t go about asking ANYbody. You might get yourself disliked. But you may take it it isn’t true.’
‘Most certainly,’ his wife concurred with seriousness.
‘We reckon to know something about Simon Fuge down here,’ Mr Brindley added. ‘Also about the famous Annie.’
‘He must have flirted with her a good bit, anyhow,’ I said.
‘Oh, FLIRT!’ ejaculated Mr Brindley.
I had a sudden dazzling vision of the great truth that the people of the Five Towns have no particular use for half-measures in any department of life. So I accepted the final judgement with meekness.
IX
I returned to London that evening, my work done, and the municipality happily flattered by my judgement of the slip-decorated dishes. Mr Brindley had found time to meet me at the midday meal, and he had left his office earlier than usual in order to help me to drink his wife’s afternoon tea. About an hour later he picked up my little bag, and said that he should accompany me to the little station in the midst of the desert of cinders and broken crockery, and even see me as far as Knype, where I had to take the London express. No, there are no half-measures in the Five Towns. Mrs Brindley stood on her doorstep, with her eldest infant on her shoulders, and waved us off. The infant cried, expressing his own and his mother’s grief at losing a guest. It seems as if people are born hospitable in the Five Towns.
We had not walked more than a hundred yards up the road when a motor-car thundered down upon us from the opposite directio
n. It was Mr Colclough’s, and Mr Colclough was driving it. Mr Brindley stopped his friend with the authoritative gesture of a policeman.
‘Where are you going, Ol?’
‘Home, lad. Sorry you’re leaving us so soon, Mr Loring.’
‘You’re mistaken, my boy,’ said Mr Brindley. ‘You’re just going to run us down to Knype station, first.’
‘I must look slippy, then,’ said Mr Colclough.
‘You can look as slippy as you like,’ said Mr Brindley.
In another fifteen seconds we were in the car, and it had turned round, and was speeding towards Knype. A feverish journey! We passed electric cars every minute, and for three miles were continually twisting round the tails of ponderous, creaking, and excessively deliberate carts that dropped a trail of small coal, or huge barrels on wheels that dripped something like the finest Devonshire cream, or brewer’s drays that left nothing behind them save a luscious odour of malt. It was a breathless slither over unctuous black mud through a long winding canon of brown-red houses and shops, with a glimpse here and there of a grey-green park, a canal, or a football field.
‘I daredn’t hurry,’ said Mr Colclough, setting us down at the station. ‘I was afraid of a skid.’ He had not spoken during the transit.
‘Don’t put on side, Ol,’ said Mr Brindley. ‘What time did you get up this morning?’
‘Eight o’clock, lad. I was at th’ works at nine.’
He flew off to escape my thanks, and Mr Brindley and I went into the station. Owing to the celerity of the automobile we had half-an-hour to wait. We spent it chiefly at the bookstall. While we were there the extra-special edition of the STAFFORDSHIRE SIGNAL, affectionately termed ‘the local rag’ by its readers, arrived, and we watched a newsboy affix its poster to a board. The poster ran thus—
HANBRIDGE RATES LIVELY MEETING
—
KNYPE F.C. NEW CENTRE—FORWARD
—
ALL—WINNERS AND S.P.
Now, close by this poster was the poster of the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and among the items offered by the DAILY TELEGRAPH was: ‘Death of Simon Fuge’. I could not forbear pointing out to Mr Brindley the difference between the two posters. A conversation ensued; and amid the rumbling of trains and the rough stir of the platform we got back again to Simon Fuge, and Mr Brindley’s tone gradually grew, if not acrid, a little impatient.
The Grim Smile of the Five Towns Page 19