1 files changed, 6232 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/13293-0.txt b/13293-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2fc3e36
--- /dev/null
+++ b/13293-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6232 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13293 ***
+
+TALES
+
+OF THE FIVE TOWNS
+
+By
+
+ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+First published January 1905
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TO
+
+MARCEL SCHWOB
+
+MY LITERARY GODFATHER IN FRANCE
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+AT HOME
+
+  HIS WORSHIP THE GOOSEDRIVER
+  THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH
+  MARY WITH THE HIGH HAND
+  THE DOG
+  A FEUD
+  PHANTOM
+  TIDDY-FOL-LOL
+  THE IDIOT
+
+
+PART II
+
+ABROAD
+
+  THE HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY
+  THE SISTERS QITA
+  NOCTURNE AT THE MAJESTIC
+  CLARICE OF THE AUTUMN CONCERTS
+  A LETTER HOME
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+AT HOME
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+HIS WORSHIP THE GOOSEDRIVER
+
+
+I
+
+It was an amiable but deceitful afternoon in the third week of December.
+Snow fell heavily in the windows of confectioners' shops, and Father
+Christmas smiled in Keats's Bazaar the fawning smile of a myth who knows
+himself to be exploded; but beyond these and similar efforts to remedy
+the forgetfulness of a careless climate, there was no sign anywhere in
+the Five Towns, and especially in Bursley, of the immediate approach of
+the season of peace, goodwill, and gluttony on earth.
+
+At the Tiger, next door to Keats's in the market-place, Mr. Josiah
+Topham Curtenty had put down his glass (the port was kept specially for
+him), and told his boon companion, Mr. Gordon, that he must be going.
+These two men had one powerful sentiment in common: they loved the same
+woman. Mr. Curtenty, aged twenty-six in heart, thirty-six in mind, and
+forty-six in looks, was fifty-six only in years. He was a rich man; he
+had made money as an earthenware manufacturer in the good old times
+before Satan was ingenious enough to invent German competition, American
+tariffs, and the price of coal; he was still making money with the aid
+of his son Harry, who now managed the works, but he never admitted that
+he was making it. No one has yet succeeded, and no one ever will
+succeed, in catching an earthenware manufacturer in the act of making
+money; he may confess with a sigh that he has performed the feat in the
+past, he may give utterance to a vague, preposterous hope that he will
+perform it again in the remote future, but as for surprising him in the
+very act, you would as easily surprise a hen laying an egg. Nowadays Mr.
+Curtenty, commercially secure, spent most of his energy in helping to
+shape and control the high destinies of the town. He was Deputy-Mayor,
+and Chairman of the General Purposes Committee of the Town Council; he
+was also a Guardian of the Poor, a Justice of the Peace, President of
+the Society for the Prosecution of Felons, a sidesman, an Oddfellow, and
+several other things that meant dining, shrewdness, and good-nature. He
+was a short, stiff, stout, red-faced man, jolly with the jollity that
+springs from a kind heart, a humorous disposition, a perfect digestion,
+and the respectful deference of one's bank-manager. Without being a
+member of the Browning Society, he held firmly to the belief that all's
+right with the world.
+
+Mr. Gordon, who has but a sorry part in the drama, was a younger,
+quieter, less forceful person, rather shy; a municipal mediocrity,
+perhaps a little inflated that day by reason of his having been elected
+to the Chairmanship of the Gas and Lighting Committee.
+
+Both men had sat on their committees at the Town Hall across the way
+that deceitful afternoon, and we see them now, after refreshment well
+earned and consumed, about to separate and sink into private life. But
+as they came out into the portico of the Tiger, the famous Calypso-like
+barmaid of the Tiger a hovering enchantment in the background, it
+occurred that a flock of geese were meditating, as geese will, in the
+middle of the road. The gooseherd, a shabby middle-aged man, looked as
+though he had recently lost the Battle of Marathon, and was asking
+himself whether the path of his retreat might not lie through the
+bar-parlour of the Tiger.
+
+'Business pretty good?' Mr. Curtenty inquired of him cheerfully.
+
+In the Five Towns business takes the place of weather as a topic of
+salutation.
+
+'Business!' echoed the gooseherd.
+
+In that one unassisted noun, scorning the aid of verb, adjective, or
+adverb, the gooseherd, by a masterpiece of profound and subtle emphasis,
+contrived to express the fact that he existed in a world of dead
+illusions, that he had become a convert to Schopenhauer, and that Mr.
+Curtenty's inapposite geniality was a final grievance to him.
+
+'There ain't no business!' he added.
+
+'Ah!' returned Mr. Curtenty, thoughtful: such an assertion of the entire
+absence of business was a reflection upon the town.
+
+'Sithee!' said the gooseherd in ruthless accents, 'I druv these 'ere
+geese into this 'ere town this morning.' (Here he exaggerated the
+number of miles traversed.) 'Twelve geese and two gander--a Brent and a
+Barnacle. And how many is there now? How many?'
+
+'Fourteen,' said Mr. Gordon, having counted; and Mr. Curtenty gazed at
+him in reproach, for that he, a Town Councillor, had thus mathematically
+demonstrated the commercial decadence of Bursley.
+
+'Market overstocked, eh?' Mr. Curtenty suggested, throwing a side-glance
+at Callear the poulterer's close by, which was crammed with everything
+that flew, swam, or waddled.
+
+'Call this a market?' said the gooseherd. 'I'st tak' my lot over to
+Hanbridge, wheer there _is_ a bit doing, by all accounts.'
+
+Now, Mr. Curtenty had not the least intention of buying those geese, but
+nothing could be better calculated to straighten the back of a Bursley
+man than a reference to the mercantile activity of Hanbridge, that
+Chicago of the Five Towns.
+
+'How much for the lot?' he inquired.
+
+In that moment he reflected upon his reputation; he knew that he was a
+cure, a card, a character; he knew that everyone would think it just
+like Jos Curtenty, the renowned Deputy-Mayor of Bursley, to stand on
+the steps of the Tiger and pretend to chaffer with a gooseherd for a
+flock of geese. His imagination caught the sound of an oft-repeated
+inquiry, 'Did ye hear about old Jos's latest--trying to buy them there
+geese?' and the appreciative laughter that would follow.
+
+The gooseherd faced him in silence.
+
+'Well,' said Mr. Curtenty again, his eyes twinkling, 'how much for the
+lot?'
+
+The gooseherd gloomily and suspiciously named a sum.
+
+Mr. Curtenty named a sum startlingly less, ending in sixpence.
+
+'I'll tak' it,' said the gooseherd, in a tone that closed on the bargain
+like a vice.
+
+The Deputy-Mayor perceived himself the owner of twelve geese and two
+ganders--one Brent, one Barnacle. It was a shock, but he sustained it.
+Involuntarily he looked at Mr. Gordon.
+
+'How are you going to get 'em home, Curtenty?' asked Gordon, with coarse
+sarcasm; 'drive 'em?'
+
+Nettled, Mr. Curtenty retorted:
+
+'Now, then, Gas Gordon!'
+
+The barmaid laughed aloud at this sobriquet, which that same evening
+was all over the town, and which has stuck ever since to the Chairman of
+the Gas and Lighting Committee. Mr. Gordon wished, and has never ceased
+to wish, either that he had been elected to some other committee, or
+that his name had begun with some other letter.
+
+The gooseherd received the purchase-money like an affront, but when Mr.
+Curtenty, full of private mirth, said, 'Chuck us your stick in,' he give
+him the stick, and smiled under reservation. Jos Curtenty had no use for
+the geese; he could conceive no purpose which they might be made to
+serve, no smallest corner for them in his universe. Nevertheless, since
+he had rashly stumbled into a ditch, he determined to emerge from it
+grandly, impressively, magnificently. He instantaneously formed a plan
+by which he would snatch victory out of defeat. He would take Gordon's
+suggestion, and himself drive the geese up to his residence in Hillport,
+that lofty and aristocratic suburb. It would be an immense, an
+unparalleled farce; a wonder, a topic for years, the crown of his
+reputation as a card.
+
+He announced his intention with that misleading sobriety and
+ordinariness of tone which it has been the foible of many great
+humorists to assume. Mr. Gordon lifted his head several times very
+quickly, as if to say, 'What next?' and then actually departed, which
+was a clear proof that the man had no imagination and no soul.
+
+The gooseherd winked.
+
+'You be rightly called "Curtenty," mester,' said he, and passed into the
+Tiger.
+
+'That's the best joke I ever heard,' Jos said to himself 'I wonder
+whether he saw it.'
+
+Then the procession of the geese and the Deputy-Mayor commenced. Now, it
+is not to be assumed that Mr. Curtenty was necessarily bound to look
+foolish in the driving of geese. He was no nincompoop. On the contrary,
+he was one of those men who, bringing common-sense and presence of mind
+to every action of their lives, do nothing badly, and always escape the
+ridiculous. He marshalled his geese with notable gumption, adopted
+towards them exactly the correct stress of persuasion, and presently he
+smiled to see them preceding him in the direction of Hillport. He
+looked neither to right nor left, but simply at his geese, and thus the
+quidnuncs of the market-place and the supporters of shop-fronts were
+unable to catch his eye. He tried to feel like a gooseherd; and such was
+his histrionic quality, his instinct for the dramatic, he _was_ a
+gooseherd, despite his blue Melton overcoat, his hard felt hat with the
+flattened top, and that opulent-curving collar which was the secret
+despair of the young dandies of Hillport. He had the most natural air in
+the world. The geese were the victims of this imaginative effort of Mr.
+Curtenty's. They took him seriously as a gooseherd. These fourteen
+intelligences, each with an object in life, each bent on
+self-aggrandisement and the satisfaction of desires, began to follow the
+line of least resistance in regard to the superior intelligence unseen
+but felt behind them, feigning, as geese will, that it suited them so to
+submit, and that in reality they were still quite independent. But in
+the peculiar eye of the Barnacle gander, who was leading, an observer
+with sufficient fancy might have deciphered a mild revolt against this
+triumph of the absurd, the accidental, and the futile; a passive yet
+Promethean spiritual defiance of the supreme powers.
+
+Mr. Curtenty got his fourteen intelligences safely across the top of St.
+Luke's Square, and gently urged them into the steep defile of Oldcastle
+Street. By this time rumour had passed in front of him and run off down
+side-streets like water let into an irrigation system. At every corner
+was a knot of people, at most windows a face. And the Deputy-Mayor never
+spoke nor smiled. The farce was enormous; the memory of it would survive
+revolutions and religions.
+
+Halfway down Oldcastle Street the first disaster happened. Electric
+tramways had not then knitted the Five Towns in a network of steel; but
+the last word of civilization and refinement was about to be uttered,
+and a gang of men were making patterns with wires on the skyscape of
+Oldcastle Street. One of the wires, slipping from its temporary gripper,
+swirled with an extraordinary sound into the roadway, and writhed there
+in spirals. Several of Mr. Curtenty's geese were knocked down, and rose
+obviously annoyed; but the Barnacle gander fell with a clinging circle
+of wire round his muscular, glossy neck, and did not rise again. It was
+a violent, mysterious, agonizing, and sudden death for him, and must
+have confirmed his theories about the arbitrariness of things. The
+thirteen passed pitilessly on. Mr. Curtenty freed the gander from the
+coiling wire, and picked it up, but, finding it far too heavy to carry,
+he handed it to a Corporation road-sweeper.
+
+'I'll send for it,' he said; 'wait here.'
+
+These were the only words uttered by him during a memorable journey.
+
+The second disaster was that the deceitful afternoon turned to
+rain--cold, cruel rain, persistent rain, full of sinister significance.
+Mr. Curtenty ruefully raised the velvet of his Melton. As he did so a
+brougham rolled into Oldcastle Street, a little in front of him, from
+the direction of St. Peter's Church, and vanished towards Hillport. He
+knew the carriage; he had bought it and paid for it. Deep, far down, in
+his mind stirred the thought:
+
+'I'm just the least bit glad she didn't see me.'
+
+He had the suspicion, which recurs even to optimists, that happiness is
+after all a chimera.
+
+The third disaster was that the sun set and darkness descended. Mr.
+Curtenty had, unfortunately, not reckoned with this diurnal phenomenon;
+he had not thought upon the undesirability of being under compulsion to
+drive geese by the sole illumination of gas-lamps lighted by Corporation
+gas.
+
+After this disasters multiplied. Dark and the rain had transformed the
+farce into something else. It was five-thirty when at last he reached
+The Firs, and the garden of The Firs was filled with lamentable
+complainings of a remnant of geese. His man Pond met him with a
+stable-lantern.
+
+'Damp, sir,' said Pond.
+
+'Oh, nowt to speak of,' said Mr. Curtenty, and, taking off his hat, he
+shot the fluid contents of the brim into Pond's face. It was his way of
+dotting the 'i' of irony. 'Missis come in?'
+
+'Yes, sir; I have but just rubbed the horse down.'
+
+So far no reference to the surrounding geese, all forlorn in the heavy
+winter rain.
+
+'I've gotten a two-three geese and one gander here for Christmas,' said
+Mr. Curtenty after a pause. To inferiors he always used the dialect.
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'Turn 'em into th' orchard, as you call it.'
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'They aren't all here. Thou mun put th' horse in the trap and fetch the
+rest thysen.'
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'One's dead. A roadman's takkin' care on it in Oldcastle Street. He'll
+wait for thee. Give him sixpence.'
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'There's another got into th' cut [canal].'
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'There's another strayed on the railway-line--happen it's run over by
+this.'
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'And one's making the best of her way to Oldcastle. I couldna coax her
+in here.'
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'Collect 'em.'
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+Mr. Curtenty walked away towards the house.
+
+'Mester!' Pond called after him, flashing the lantern.
+
+'Well, lad?'
+
+'There's no gander i' this lot.'
+
+'Hast forgotten to count thysen?' Mr. Curtenty answered blithely from
+the shelter of the side-door.
+
+But within himself he was a little crest-fallen to think that the
+surviving gander should have escaped his vigilance, even in the
+darkness. He had set out to drive the geese home, and he had driven them
+home, most of them. He had kept his temper, his dignity, his
+cheerfulness. He had got a bargain in geese. So much was indisputable
+ground for satisfaction. And yet the feeling of an anticlimax would not
+be dismissed. Upon the whole, his transit lacked glory. It had begun in
+splendour, but it had ended in discomfort and almost ignominy.
+Nevertheless, Mr. Curtenty's unconquerable soul asserted itself in a
+quite genuine and tuneful whistle as he entered the house.
+
+The fate of the Brent gander was never ascertained.
+
+
+II
+
+The dining-room of The Firs was a spacious and inviting refectory, which
+owed nothing of its charm to William Morris, Regent Street, or the Arts
+and Crafts Society. Its triple aim, was richness, solidity, and comfort,
+but especially comfort; and this aim was achieved in new oak furniture
+of immovable firmness, in a Turkey carpet which swallowed up the feet
+like a feather bed, and in large oil-paintings, whose darkly-glinting
+frames were a guarantee of their excellence. On a winter's night, as
+now, the room was at its richest, solidest, most comfortable. The blue
+plush curtains were drawn on their stout brass rods across door and
+French window. Finest selected silkstone fizzed and flamed in a patent
+grate which had the extraordinary gift of radiating heat into the
+apartment instead of up the chimney. The shaded Welsbach lights of the
+chandelier cast a dazzling luminance on the tea-table of snow and
+silver, while leaving the pictures in a gloom so discreet that not
+Ruskin himself could have decided whether these were by Whistler or
+Peter Paul Rubens. On either side of the marble mantelpiece were two
+easy-chairs of an immense, incredible capacity, chairs of crimson plush
+for Titans, chairs softer than moss, more pliant than a loving heart,
+more enveloping than a caress. In one of these chairs, that to the left
+of the fireplace, Mr. Curtenty was accustomed to snore every Saturday
+and Sunday afternoon, and almost every evening. The other was usually
+empty, but to-night it was occupied by Mrs. Curtenty, the jewel of the
+casket. In the presence of her husband she always used a small
+rocking-chair of ebonized cane.
+
+To glance at this short, slight, yet plump little creature as she
+reclined crosswise in the vast chair, leaving great spaces of the seat
+unfilled, was to think rapturously to one's self: _This is a woman_. Her
+fluffy head was such a dot against the back of the chair, the curve of
+her chubby ringed hand above the head was so adorable, her black eyes
+were so provocative, her slippered feet so wee--yes, and there was
+something so mysteriously thrilling about the fall of her skirt that you
+knew instantly her name was Clara, her temper both fiery and obstinate,
+and her personality distracting. You knew that she was one of those
+women of frail physique who can endure fatigues that would destroy a
+camel; one of those dæmonic women capable of doing without sleep for ten
+nights in order to nurse you; capable of dying and seeing you die
+rather than give way about the tint of a necktie; capable of laughter
+and tears simultaneously; capable of never being in the wrong except for
+the idle whim of so being. She had a big mouth and very wide nostrils,
+and her years were thirty-five. It was no matter; it would have been no
+matter had she been a hundred and thirty-five. In short....
+
+Clara Curtenty wore tight-fitting black silk, with a long gold chain
+that descended from her neck nearly to her waist, and was looped up in
+the middle to an old-fashioned gold brooch. She was in mourning for a
+distant relative. Black pre-eminently suited her. Consequently her
+distant relatives died at frequent intervals.
+
+The basalt clock on the mantelpiece trembled and burst into the song of
+six. Clara Curtenty rose swiftly from the easy-chair, and took her seat
+in front of the tea-tray. Almost at the same moment a neat
+black-and-white parlourmaid brought in teapot, copper kettle, and a
+silver-covered dish containing hot pikelets; then departed. Clara was
+alone again; not the same Clara now, but a personage demure, prim,
+precise, frightfully upright of back--a sort of impregnable
+stronghold--without doubt a Deputy-Mayoress.
+
+At five past six Josiah Curtenty entered the room, radiant from a hot
+bath, and happy in dry clothes--a fine, if mature, figure of a man. His
+presence filled the whole room.
+
+'Well, my chuck!' he said, and kissed her on the cheek.
+
+She gazed at him with a look that might mean anything. Did she raise her
+cheek to his greeting, or was it fancy that she had endured, rather than
+accepted, his kiss? He was scarcely sure. And if she had endured instead
+of accepting the kiss, was her mood to be attributed to his lateness for
+tea, or to the fact that she was aware of the episode of the geese? He
+could not divine.
+
+'Pikelets! Good!' he exclaimed, taking the cover off the dish.
+
+This strong, successful, and dominant man adored his wife, and went in
+fear of her. She was his first love, but his second spouse. They had
+been married ten years. In those ten years they had quarrelled only five
+times, and she had changed the very colour of his life. Till his second
+marriage he had boasted that he belonged to the people and retained the
+habits of the people. Clara, though she also belonged to the people,
+very soon altered all that. Clara had a passion for the genteel. Like
+many warm-hearted, honest, clever, and otherwise sensible persons, Clara
+was a snob, but a charming little snob. She ordered him to forget that
+he belonged to the people. She refused to listen when he talked in the
+dialect. She made him dress with opulence, and even with tidiness; she
+made him buy a fashionable house and fill it with fine furniture; she
+made him buy a brougham in which her gentility could pay calls and do
+shopping (she shopped in Oldcastle, where a decrepit aristocracy of
+tradesmen sneered at Hanbridge's lack of style); she had her 'day'; she
+taught the servants to enter the reception-rooms without knocking; she
+took tea in bed in the morning, and tea in the afternoon in the
+drawing-room. She would have instituted dinner at seven, but she was a
+wise woman, and realized that too much tyranny often means revolution
+and the crumbling of-thrones; therefore the ancient plebeian custom of
+high tea at six was allowed to persist and continue.
+
+She it was who had compelled Josiah (or bewitched, beguiled, coaxed and
+wheedled him), after a public refusal, to accept the unusual post of
+Deputy-Mayor. In two years' time he might count on being Mayor. Why,
+then, should Clara have been so anxious for this secondary dignity?
+Because, in that year of royal festival, Bursley, in common with many
+other boroughs, had had a fancy to choose a Mayor out of the House of
+Lords. The Earl of Chell, a magnate of the county, had consented to wear
+the mayoral chain and dispense the mayoral hospitalities on condition
+that he was provided with a deputy for daily use.
+
+It was the idea of herself being deputy to the lovely, meddlesome, and
+arrogant Countess of Chell that had appealed to Clara.
+
+The deputy of a Countess at length spoke.
+
+'Will Harry be late at the works again to-night?' she asked in her
+colder, small-talk manner, which committed her to nothing, as Josiah
+well knew.
+
+Her way of saying that word 'Harry' was inimitably significant. She gave
+it an air. She liked Harry, and she liked Harry's name, because it had a
+Kensingtonian sound. Harry, so accomplished in business, was also a
+dandy, and he was a dog. 'My stepson'--she loved to introduce him, so
+tall, manly, distinguished, and dandiacal. Harry, enriched by his own
+mother, belonged to a London club; he ran down to Llandudno for
+week-ends; and it was reported that he had been behind the scenes at the
+Alhambra. Clara felt for the word 'Harry' the unreasoning affection
+which most women lavish on 'George.'
+
+'Like as not,' said Josiah. 'I haven't been to the works this
+afternoon.'
+
+Another silence fell, and then Josiah, feeling himself unable to bear
+any further suspense as to his wife's real mood and temper, suddenly
+determined to tell her all about the geese, and know the worst. And
+precisely at the instant that he opened his mouth, the maid opened the
+door and announced:
+
+'Mr. Duncalf wishes to see you at once, sir. He won't keep you a
+minute.'
+
+'Ask him in here, Mary,' said the Deputy-Mayoress sweetly; 'and bring
+another cup and saucer.'
+
+Mr. Duncalf was the Town Clerk of Bursley: legal, portly, dry, and a
+little shy.
+
+'I won't stop, Curtenty. How d'ye do, Mrs. Curtenty? No, thanks,
+really----' But she, smiling, exquisitely gracious, flattered and
+smoothed him into a chair.
+
+'Any interesting news, Mr. Duncalf?' she said, and added: 'But we're
+glad that _anything_ should have brought you in.'
+
+'Well,' said Duncalf, 'I've just had a letter by the afternoon post from
+Lord Chell.'
+
+'Oh, the Earl! Indeed; how very interesting.'
+
+'What's he after?' inquired Josiah cautiously.
+
+'He says he's just been appointed Governor of East
+Australia--announcement 'll be in to-morrow's papers--and so he must
+regretfully resign the mayoralty. Says he'll pay the fine, but of course
+we shall have to remit that by special resolution of the Council.'
+
+'Well, I'm damned!' Josiah exclaimed.
+
+'Topham!' Mrs. Curtenty remonstrated, but with a delightful acquitting
+dimple. She never would call him Josiah, much less Jos. Topham came more
+easily to her lips, and sometimes Top.
+
+'Your husband,' said Mr. Duncalf impressively to Clara, 'will, of
+course, have to step into the Mayor's shoes, and you'll have to fill
+the place of the Countess.' He paused, and added: 'And very well you'll
+do it, too--very well. Nobody better.'
+
+The Town Clerk frankly admired Clara.
+
+'Mr. Duncalf--Mr. Duncalf!' She raised a finger at him. 'You are the
+most shameless flatterer in the town.'
+
+The flatterer was flattered. Having delivered the weighty news, he had
+leisure to savour his own importance as the bearer of it. He drank a cup
+of tea. Josiah was thoughtful, but Clara brimmed over with a fascinating
+loquacity. Then Mr. Duncalf said that he must really be going, and,
+having arranged with the Mayor-elect to call a special meeting of the
+Council at once, he did go, all the while wishing he had the enterprise
+to stay.
+
+Josiah accompanied him to the front-door. The sky had now cleared.
+
+'Thank ye for calling,' said the host.
+
+'Oh, that's all right. Good-night, Curtenty. Got that goose out of the
+canal?'
+
+So the story was all abroad!
+
+Josiah returned to the dining-room, imperceptibly smiling. At the door
+the sight of his wife halted him. The face of that precious and
+adorable woman flamed out lightning and all menace and offence. Her
+louring eyes showed what a triumph of dissimulation she must have
+achieved in the presence of Mr. Duncalf, but now she could speak her
+mind.
+
+'Yes, Topham!' she exploded, as though finishing an harangue. 'And on
+this day of all days you choose to drive geese in the public road behind
+my carriage!'
+
+Jos was stupefied, annihilated.
+
+'Did you see me, then, Clarry?'
+
+He vainly tried to carry it off.
+
+'Did I see you? Of course I saw you!'
+
+She withered him up with the hot wind of scorn.
+
+'Well,' he said foolishly, 'how was I to know that the Earl would resign
+just to-day?'
+
+'How were you to----?'
+
+Harry came in for his tea. He glanced from one to the other, discreet,
+silent. On the way home he had heard the tale of the geese in seven
+different forms. The Deputy-Mayor, so soon to be Mayor, walked out of
+the room.
+
+'Pond has just come back, father,' said Harry; 'I drove up the hill
+with him.'
+
+And as Josiah hesitated a moment in the hall, he heard Clara exclaim,
+'Oh, Harry!'
+
+'Damn!' he murmured.
+
+
+III
+
+The _Signal_ of the following day contained the announcement which Mr.
+Duncalf had forecast; it also stated, on authority, that Mr. Josiah
+Curtenty would wear the mayoral chain of Bursley immediately, and added
+as its own private opinion that, in default of the Right Honourable the
+Earl of Chell and his Countess, no better 'civic heads' could have been
+found than Mr. Curtenty and his charming wife. So far the tone of the
+_Signal_ was unimpeachable. But underneath all this was a sub-title,
+'Amusing Exploit of the Mayor-elect,' followed by an amusing description
+of the procession of the geese, a description which concluded by
+referring to Mr. Curtenty as His Worship the Goosedriver.
+
+Hanbridge, Knype, Longshaw, and Turnhill laughed heartily, and perhaps a
+little viciously, at this paragraph, but Bursley was annoyed by it. In
+print the affair did not look at all well. Bursley prided itself on
+possessing a unique dignity as the 'Mother of the Five Towns,' and to be
+presided over by a goosedriver, however humorous and hospitable he might
+be, did not consort with that dignity. A certain Mayor of Longshaw,
+years before, had driven a sow to market, and derived a tremendous
+advertisement therefrom, but Bursley had no wish to rival Longshaw in
+any particular. Bursley regarded Longshaw as the Inferno of the Five
+Towns. In Bursley you were bidden to go to Longshaw as you were bidden
+to go to ... Certain acute people in Hillport saw nothing but a
+paralyzing insult in the opinion of the _Signal_ (first and foremost a
+Hanbridge organ), that Bursley could find no better civic head than
+Josiah Curtenty. At least three Aldermen and seven Councillors
+privately, and in the Tiger, disagreed with any such view of Bursley's
+capacity to find heads.
+
+And underneath all this brooding dissatisfaction lurked the thought, as
+the alligator lurks in a muddy river, that 'the Earl wouldn't like
+it'--meaning the geese episode. It was generally felt that the Earl had
+been badly treated by Jos Curtenty. The town could not explain its
+sentiments--could not argue about them. They were not, in fact, capable
+of logical justification; but they were there, they violently existed.
+It would have been useless to point out that if the inimitable Jos had
+not been called to the mayoralty the episode of the geese would have
+passed as a gorgeous joke; that everyone had been vastly amused by it
+until that desolating issue of the _Signal_ announced the Earl's
+retirement; that Jos Curtenty could not possibly have foreseen what was
+about to happen; and that, anyhow, goosedriving was less a crime than a
+social solecism, and less a social solecism than a brilliant
+eccentricity. Bursley was hurt, and logic is no balm for wounds.
+
+Some may ask: If Bursley was offended, why did it not mark its sense of
+Josiah's failure to read the future by electing another Mayor? The
+answer is, that while all were agreed that his antic was inexcusable,
+all were equally agreed to pretend that it was a mere trifle of no
+importance; you cannot deprive a man of his prescriptive right for a
+mere trifle of no importance. Besides, nobody could be so foolish as to
+imagine that goosedriving, though reprehensible in a Mayor about to
+succeed an Earl, is an act of which official notice can be taken.
+
+The most curious thing in the whole imbroglio is that Josiah Curtenty
+secretly agreed with his wife and the town. He was ashamed, overset. His
+procession of geese appeared to him in an entirely new light, and he had
+the strength of mind to admit to himself, 'I've made a fool of myself.'
+
+Harry went to London for a week, and Josiah, under plea of his son's
+absence, spent eight hours a day at the works. The brougham remained in
+the coach-house.
+
+The Town Council duly met in special conclave, and Josiah Topham
+Curtenty became Mayor of Bursley.
+
+Shortly after Christmas it was announced that the Mayor and Mayoress had
+decided to give a New Year's treat to four hundred poor old people in
+the St. Luke's covered market. It was also spread about that this treat
+would eclipse and extinguish all previous treats of a similar nature,
+and that it might be accepted as some slight foretaste of the
+hospitality which the Mayor and Mayoress would dispense in that
+memorable year of royal festival. The treat was to occur on January 9,
+the Mayoress's birthday.
+
+On January 7 Josiah happened to go home early. He was proceeding into
+the drawing-room without enthusiasm to greet his wife, when he heard
+voices within; and one voice was the voice of Gas Gordon.
+
+Jos stood still. It has been mentioned that Gordon and the Mayor were in
+love with the same woman. The Mayor had easily captured her under the
+very guns of his not formidable rival, and he had always thereafter felt
+a kind of benevolent, good-humoured, contemptuous pity for
+Gordon--Gordon, whose life was a tragic blank; Gordon, who lived, a
+melancholy and defeated bachelor, with his mother and two unmarried
+sisters older than himself. That Gordon still worshipped at the shrine
+did not disturb him; on the contrary, it pleased him. Poor Gordon!
+
+'But, really, Mrs. Curtenty,' Gordon was saying--'really, you know
+I--that--is--really--'
+
+'To please me!' Mrs. Curtenty entreated, with a seductive charm that
+Jos felt even outside the door.
+
+Then there was a pause.
+
+'Very well,' said Gordon.
+
+Mr. Curtenty tiptoed away and back into the street. He walked in the
+dark nearly to Oldcastle, and returned about six o'clock. But Clara said
+no word of Gordon's visit. She had scarcely spoken to Topham for three
+weeks.
+
+The next morning, as Harry was departing to the works, Mrs. Curtenty
+followed the handsome youth into the hall.
+
+'Harry,' she whispered, 'bring me two ten-pound notes this afternoon,
+will you, and say nothing to your father.'
+
+
+IV
+
+Gas Gordon was to be on the platform at the poor people's treat. As he
+walked down Trafalgar Road his eye caught a still-exposed fragment of a
+decayed bill on a hoarding. It referred to a meeting of the local branch
+of the Anti-Gambling League a year ago in the lecture-hall of the
+Wesleyan Chapel, and it said that Councillor Gordon would occupy the
+chair on that occasion. Mechanically Councillor Gordon stopped and tore
+the fragment away from the hoarding.
+
+The treat, which took the form of a dinner, was an unqualified success;
+it surpassed all expectations. Even the diners themselves were
+satisfied--a rare thing at such affairs. Goose was a prominent item in
+the menu. After the repast the replete guests were entertained from the
+platform, the Mayor being, of course, in the chair. Harry sang 'In Old
+Madrid,' accompanied by his stepmother, with faultless expression. Mr.
+Duncalf astonished everybody with the famous North-Country recitation,
+'The Patent Hair-brushing Mashane.' There were also a banjo solo, a
+skirt dance of discretion, and a campanological turn. At last, towards
+ten o'clock, Mr. Gordon, who had hitherto done nothing, rose in his
+place, amid good-natured cries of 'Gas!'
+
+'I feel sure you will all agree with me,' he began, 'that this evening
+would not be complete without a vote of thanks--a very hearty vote of
+thanks--to our excellent host and chairman.'
+
+Ear-splitting applause.
+
+'I've got a little story to tell you,' he continued--'a story that up
+to this moment has been a close secret between his Worship the Mayor and
+myself.' His Worship looked up sharply at the speaker. 'You've heard
+about some geese, I reckon. (_Laughter_.) Well, you've not heard all,
+but I'm going to tell you. I can't keep it to myself any longer. You
+think his Worship drove those geese--I hope they're digesting well
+(_loud laughter_)--just for fun. He didn't. I was with him when he
+bought them, and I happened to say that goosedriving was a very
+difficult accomplishment.'
+
+'Depends on the geese!' shouted a voice.
+
+'Yes, it does,' Mr. Gordon admitted. 'Well, his Worship contradicted me,
+and we had a bit of an argument. I don't bet, as you know--at least, not
+often--but I don't mind confessing that I offered to bet him a sovereign
+he couldn't drive his geese half a mile. "Look here, Gordon," he said to
+me: "there's a lot of distress in the town just now--trade bad, and so
+on, and so on. I'll lay you a level ten pounds I drive these geese to
+Hillport myself, the loser to give the money to charity." "Done," I
+said. "Don't say anything about it," he says. "I won't," I says--but I
+am doing. (_Applause_.) I feel it my duty to say something about it.
+(_More applause_.) Well, I lost, as you all know. He drove 'em to
+Hillport. ('_Good old Jos!_') That's not all. The Mayor insisted on
+putting his own ten pounds to mine and making it twenty. Here are the
+two identical notes, his and mine.' Mr. Gordon waved the identical notes
+amid an uproar. 'We've decided that everyone who has dined here to-night
+shall receive a brand-new shilling. I see Mr. Septimus Lovatt from the
+bank there with a bag. He will attend to you as you go out. (_Wild
+outbreak and tumult of rapturous applause_.) And now three cheers for
+your Mayor--and Mayoress!'
+
+It was colossal, the enthusiasm.
+
+'_And_ for Gas Gordon!' called several voices.
+
+The cheers rose again in surging waves.
+
+Everyone remarked that the Mayor, usually so imperturbable, was quite
+overcome--seemed as if he didn't know where to look.
+
+Afterwards, as the occupants of the platform descended, Mr. Gordon
+glanced into the eyes of Mrs. Curtenty, and found there his exceeding
+reward. The mediocrity had blossomed out that evening into something new
+and strange. Liar, deliberate liar and self-accused gambler as he was,
+he felt that he had lived during that speech; he felt that it was the
+supreme moment of his life.
+
+'What a perfectly wonderful man your husband is!' said Mrs. Duncalf to
+Mrs. Curtenty.
+
+Clara turned to her husband with a sublime gesture of satisfaction. In
+the brougham, going home, she bewitched him with wifely endearments. She
+could afford to do so. The stigma of the geese episode was erased.
+
+But the barmaid of the Tiger, as she let down her bright hair that night
+in the attic of the Tiger, said to herself, 'Well, of all the----' Just
+that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH
+
+
+It was Monday afternoon of Bursley Wakes--not our modern rectified
+festival, but the wild and naïve orgy of seventy years ago, the days of
+bear-baiting and of bull-baiting, from which latter phrase, they say,
+the town derives its name. In those times there was a town-bull, a sort
+of civic beast; and a certain notorious character kept a bear in his
+pantry. The 'beating' (baiting) occurred usually on Sunday mornings at
+six o'clock, with formidable hungry dogs; and little boys used to look
+forward eagerly to the day when they would be old enough to be permitted
+to attend. On Sunday afternoons colliers and potters, gathered round the
+jawbone of a whale which then stood as a natural curiosity on the waste
+space near the corn-mill, would discuss the fray, and make bets for next
+Sunday, while the exhausted dogs licked their wounds, or died. During
+the Wakes week bull and bear were baited at frequent intervals,
+according to popular demand, for thousands of sportsmen from
+neighbouring villages seized the opportunity of the fair to witness the
+fine beatings for which Bursley was famous throughout the country of the
+Five Towns. In that week the Wakes took possession of the town, which
+yielded itself with savage abandonment to all the frenzies of license.
+The public-houses remained continuously open night and day, and the
+barmen and barmaids never went to bed; every inn engaged special
+'talent' in order to attract custom, and for a hundred hours the whole
+thronged town drank, drank, until the supply of coin of George IV.,
+converging gradually into the coffers of a few persons, ceased to
+circulate. Towards the end of the Wakes, by way of a last ecstasy, the
+cockfighters would carry their birds, which had already fought and been
+called off, perhaps, half a dozen times, to the town-field (where the
+discreet 40 per cent. brewery now stands), and there match them to a
+finish. It was a spacious age.
+
+On this Monday afternoon in June the less fervid activities of the
+Wakes were proceeding as usual in the market-place, overshadowed by the
+Town Hall--not the present stone structure with its gold angel, but a
+brick edifice built on an ashlar basement. Hobby-horses and revolving
+swing-boats, propelled, with admirable economy to the proprietors, by
+privileged boys who took their pay in an occasional ride, competed
+successfully with the skeleton man, the fat or bearded woman, and Aunt
+Sally. The long toy-tents, artfully roofed with a tinted cloth which
+permitted only a soft, mellow light to illuminate the wares displayed,
+were crowded with jostling youth and full of the sound of whistles,
+'squarkers,' and various pipes; and multitudes surrounded the
+gingerbread, nut, and savoury stalls which lined both sides of the
+roadway as far as Duck Bank. In front of the numerous boxing-booths
+experts of the 'fancy,' obviously out of condition, offered to fight all
+comers, and were not seldom well thrashed by impetuous champions of
+local fame. There were no photographic studios and no cocoanut-shies,
+for these things had not been thought of; and to us moderns the fair,
+despite its uncontrolled exuberance of revelry, would have seemed
+strangely quiet, since neither steam-organ nor hooter nor hurdy-gurdy
+was there to overwhelm the ear with crashing waves of gigantic sound.
+But if the special phenomena of a later day were missing from the
+carnival, others, as astonishing to us as the steam-organ would have
+been to those uncouth roisterers, were certainly present. Chief,
+perhaps, among these was the man who retailed the elixir of youth, the
+veritable _eau de jouvence_, to credulous drinkers at sixpence a bottle.
+This magician, whose dark mysterious face and glittering eyes indicated
+a strain of Romany blood, and whose accent proved that he had at any
+rate lived much in Yorkshire, had a small booth opposite the watch-house
+under the Town Hall. On a banner suspended in front of it was painted
+the legend:
+
+    THE INCA OF PERU'S
+    ELIXER OF YOUTH
+    SOLD HERE.
+    ETERNAL YOUTH FOR ALL.
+    DRINK THIS AND YOU WILL NEVER GROW OLD
+    AS SUPPLIED TO THE NOBILITY & GENTRY
+    SIXPENCE PER BOT.
+    WALK IN, WALK IN, &
+    CONSULT THE INCA OF PERU.
+
+The Inca of Peru, dressed in black velveteens, with a brilliant scarf
+round his neck, stood at the door of his tent, holding an empty glass in
+one jewelled hand, and with the other twirling a long and silken
+moustache. Handsome, graceful, and thoroughly inured to the public gaze,
+he fronted a small circle of gapers like an actor adroit to make the
+best of himself, and his tongue wagged fast enough to wag a man's leg
+off. At a casual glance he might have been taken for thirty, but his age
+was fifty and more--if you could catch him in the morning before he had
+put the paint on.
+
+'Ladies and gentlemen of Bursley, this enlightened and beautiful town
+which I am now visiting for the first time,' he began in a hard,
+metallic voice, employing again with the glib accuracy of a machine the
+exact phrases which he had been using all day, 'look at me--look well at
+me. How old do you think I am? How old do I seem? Twenty, my dear, do
+you say?' and he turned with practised insolence to a pot-girl in a red
+shawl who could not have uttered an audible word to save her soul, but
+who blushed and giggled with pleasure at this mark of attention. 'Ah!
+you flatter, fair maiden! I look more than twenty, but I think I may
+say that I do not look thirty. Does any lady or gentleman think I look
+thirty? No! As a matter of fact, I was twenty-nine years of age when, in
+South America, while exploring the ruins of the most ancient
+civilization of the world--of the world, ladies and gentlemen--I made my
+wonderful discovery, the Elixir of Youth!'
+
+'What art blethering at, Licksy?' a drunken man called from the back of
+the crowd, and the nickname stuck to the great discoverer during the
+rest of the Wakes.
+
+'That, ladies and gentlemen,' the Inca of Peru continued unperturbed,
+'was--seventy-two years ago. I am now a hundred and one years old
+precisely, and as fresh as a kitten, all along of my marvellous elixir.
+Far older, for instance, than this good dame here.'
+
+He pointed to an aged and wrinkled woman, in blue cotton and a white
+mutch, who was placidly smoking a short cutty. This creature, bowed and
+satiate with monotonous years, took the pipe from her indrawn lips, and
+asked in a weary, trembling falsetto:
+
+'How many wives hast had?'
+
+'Seventane,' the Inca retorted quickly, dropping at once into broad
+dialect, 'and now lone and lookin' to wed again. Wilt have me?'
+
+'Nay,' replied the crone. 'I've buried four mysen, and no man o' mine
+shall bury me.'
+
+There was a burst of laughter, amid which the Inca, taking the crowd
+archly into his confidence, remarked:
+
+'I've never administered my elixir to any of my wives, ladies and
+gentlemen. You may blame me, but I freely confess the fact;' and he
+winked.
+
+'Licksy! Licksy!' the drunken man idiotically chanted.
+
+'And now,' the Inca proceeded, coming at length to the practical part of
+his ovation, 'see here!' With the rapidity of a conjurer he whipped from
+his pocket a small bottle, and held it up before the increasing
+audience. It contained a reddish fluid, which shone bright and rich in
+the sunlight. 'See here!' he cried magnificently, but he was destined to
+interruption.
+
+A sudden cry arose of 'Black Jack! Black Jack! 'Tis him! He's caught!'
+And the Inca's crowd, together with all the other crowds filling the
+market-place, surged off eastward in a dense, struggling mass.
+
+The cynosure of every eye was a springless clay-cart, which was being
+slowly driven past the newly-erected 'big house' of Enoch Wood, Esquire,
+towards the Town Hall. In this, cart were two constables, with their
+painted staves drawn, and between the constables sat a man securely
+chained--Black Jack of Moorthorne, the mining village which lies over
+the ridge a mile or so east of Bursley. The captive was a ferocious and
+splendid young Hercules, tall, with enormous limbs and hands and heavy
+black brows. He was dressed in his soiled working attire of a collier,
+the trousers strapped under the knees, and his feet shod in vast clogs.
+With open throat, small head, great jaws, and bold beady eyes, he looked
+what he was, the superb brute--the brute reckless of all save the
+instant satisfaction of his desires. He came of a family of colliers,
+the most debased class in a lawless district. Jack's father had been a
+colliery-serf, legally enslaved to his colliery, legally liable to be
+sold with the colliery as a chattel, and legally bound to bring up all
+his sons as colliers, until the Act of George III. put an end to this
+incredible survival from the customs of the Dark Ages. Black Jack was
+now a hero to the crowd, and knew it, for those vast clogs had kicked a
+woman to death on the previous day. She was a Moorthorne woman, not his
+wife, but his sweetheart, older than he; people said that she nagged
+him, and that he was tired of her. The murderer had hidden for a night,
+and then, defiantly, surrendered to the watch, and the watch were taking
+him to the watch-house in the ashlar basement of the Town Hall. The
+feeble horse between the shafts of the cart moved with difficulty
+through the press, and often the coloured staves of the constables came
+down thwack on the heads of heedless youth. At length the cart reached
+the space between the watch-house and the tent of the Inca of Peru,
+where it stopped while the constables unlocked a massive door; the
+prisoner remained proudly in the cart, accepting, with obvious delight,
+the tribute of cheers and jeers, hoots and shouts, from five thousand
+mouths.
+
+The Inca of Peru stood at the door of his tent and surveyed Black Jack,
+who was not more than a few feet away from him.
+
+'Have a glass of my elixir,' he said to the death-dealer; 'no one in
+this town needs it more than thee, by all accounts. Have a glass, and
+live for ever. Only sixpence.'
+
+The man in the cart laughed aloud.
+
+'I've nowt on me--not a farden,' he answered, in a strong grating voice.
+
+At that moment a girl, half hidden by the cart, sprang forward, offering
+something in her outstretched palm to the Inca; but he, misunderstanding
+her intention, merely glanced with passing interest at her face, and
+returned his gaze to the prisoner.
+
+'I'll give thee a glass, lad,' he said quickly, 'and then thou canst
+defy Jack Ketch.'
+
+The crowd yelled with excitement, and the murderer held forth his great
+hand for the potion. Using every art to enhance the effect of this
+dramatic advertisement, the Inca of Peru raised his bottle on high, and
+said in a loud, impressive tone:
+
+'This precious liquid has the property, possessed by no other liquid on
+earth, of frothing twice. I shall pour it into the glass, and it will
+froth. Black Jack will drink it, and after he has drunk it will froth
+again. Observe!'
+
+He uncorked the bottle and filled the glass with the reddish fluid,
+which after a few seconds duly effervesced, to the vague wonder of the
+populace. The Inca held the glass till the froth had subsided, and then
+solemnly gave it to Black Jack.
+
+'Drink!' commanded the Inca.
+
+Black Jack took the draught at a gulp, and instantly flung the glass at
+the Inca's face. It missed him, however. There were signs of a fracas,
+but the door of the watch-house swung opportunely open, and Jack was
+dragged from the cart and hustled within. The crowd, with a crowd's
+fickleness, turned to other affairs.
+
+That evening the ingenious Inca of Peru did good trade for several
+hours, but towards eleven o'clock the attraction of the public-houses
+and of a grand special combined bull and bear beating by moonlight in
+the large yard of the Cock Inn drew away the circle of his customers
+until there was none left. He retired inside the tent with several
+pounds in his pocket and a god's consciousness of having made immortal
+many of the sons and daughters of Adam.
+
+As he was counting out his gains on the tub of eternal youth by the
+flicker of a dip, someone lifted the flap of the booth and stealthily
+entered. He sprang up, fearing robbery with violence, which was
+sufficiently common during the Wakes; but it was only the young girl who
+had stood behind the cart when he offered to Black Jack his priceless
+boon. The Inca had noticed her with increasing interest several times
+during the evening as she loitered restless near the door of the
+watch-house.
+
+'What do you want?' he asked her, with the ingratiating affability of
+the rake who foresees everything.
+
+'Give me a drink.'
+
+'A drink of what, my dear?'
+
+'Licksy.'
+
+He raised the dip, and by its light examined her face. It was a kind of
+face which carries no provocative signal for nine men out of ten, but
+which will haunt the tenth: a child's face with a passionate woman's
+eyes burning and dying in it--black hair, black eyes, thin pale cheeks,
+equine nostrils, red lips, small ears, and the smallest chin
+conceivable. He smiled at her, pleased.
+
+'Can you pay for it?' he said pleasantly.
+
+The girl evidently belonged to the poorest class. Her shaggy, uncovered
+head, lean frame, torn gown, and bare feet, all spoke of hardship and
+neglect.
+
+'I've a silver groat,' she answered, and closed her small fist tighter.
+
+'A silver groat!' he exclaimed, rather astonished. 'Where did you get
+that from?'
+
+'He give it me for a-fairing yesterday.'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'Him yonder'--she jerked her head back to indicate the
+watch-house--'Black Jack.'
+
+'What for?'
+
+'He kissed me,' she said boldly; 'I'm his sweetheart.'
+
+'Eh!' The Inca paused a moment, startled. 'But he killed his sweetheart
+yesterday.'
+
+'What! Meg!' the girl exclaimed with deep scorn. 'Her weren't his true
+sweetheart. Her druv him to it. Serve her well right! Owd Meg!'
+
+'How old are you, my dear?'
+
+'Don't know. But feyther said last Wakes I was fourtane. I mun keep
+young for Jack. He wunna have me if I'm owd.'
+
+'But he'll be hanged, they say.'
+
+She gave a short, satisfied laugh.
+
+'Not now he's drunk Licksy--hangman won't get him. I heard a man say
+Jack 'd get off wi' twenty year for manslaughter, most like.'
+
+'And you'll wait twenty years for him?'
+
+'Yes,' she said; 'I'll meet him at prison gates. But I mun be young.
+Give me a drink o' Licksy.'
+
+He drew the red draught in silence, and after it had effervesced offered
+it to her.
+
+''Tis raight?' she questioned, taking the glass.
+
+The Inca nodded, and, lifting the vessel, she opened her eager lips and
+became immortal. It was the first time in her life that she had drunk
+out of a glass, and it would be the last.
+
+Struck dumb by the trusting joy in those profound eyes, the Inca took
+the empty glass from her trembling hand. Frail organism and prey of
+love! Passion had surprised her too young. Noon had come before the
+flower could open. She went out of the tent.
+
+'Wench!' the Inca called after her, 'thy groat!'
+
+She paid him and stood aimless for a second, and then started to cross
+the roadway. Simultaneously there was a rush and a roar from the Cock
+yard close by. The raging bull, dragging its ropes, and followed by a
+crowd of alarmed pursuers, dashed out. The girl was plain in the
+moonlight. Many others were abroad, but the bull seemed to see nothing
+but her, and, lowering his huge head, he charged with shut eyes and
+flung her over the Inca's booth.
+
+'Thou's gotten thy wish: thou'rt young for ever!' the Inca of Peru, made
+a poet for an instant by this disaster, murmured to himself as he bent
+with the curious crowd over the corpse.
+
+Black Jack was hanged.
+
+Many years after all this Bursley built itself a new Town Hall (with a
+spire, and a gold angel on the top in the act of crowning the bailiwick
+with a gold crown), and began to think about getting up in the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+MARY WITH THE HIGH HAND
+
+
+In the front-bedroom of Edward Beechinor's small house in Trafalgar Road
+the two primary social forces of action and reaction--those forces which
+under a thousand names and disguises have alternately ruled the world
+since the invention of politics--were pitted against each other in a
+struggle rendered futile by the equality of the combatants. Edward
+Beechinor had his money, his superior age, and the possible advantage of
+being a dying man; Mark Beechinor had his youth and his devotion to an
+ideal. Near the window, aloof and apart, stood the strange, silent girl
+whose aroused individuality was to intervene with such effectiveness on
+behalf of one of the antagonists. It was early dusk on an autumn day.
+
+'Tell me what it is you want, Edward,' said Mark quietly. 'Let us come
+to the point.'
+
+'Ay,' said the sufferer, lifting his pale hand from the counterpane,
+'I'll tell thee.'
+
+He moistened his lips as if in preparation, and pushed back a tuft of
+sparse gray hair, damp with sweat.
+
+The physical and moral contrast between these two brothers was complete.
+Edward was forty-nine, a small, thin, stunted man, with a look of narrow
+cunning, of petty shrewdness working without imagination. He had been
+clerk to Lawyer Ford for thirty-five years, and had also furtively
+practised for himself. During this period his mode of life had never
+varied, save once, and that only a year ago. At the age of fourteen he
+sat in a grimy room with an old man on one side of him, a copying-press
+on the other, and a law-stationer's almanac in front, and he earned half
+a crown a week. At the age of forty-eight he still sat in the same grimy
+room (of which the ceiling had meanwhile been whitened three times),
+with the same copying-press and the almanac of the same law-stationers,
+and he earned thirty shillings a week. But now he, Edward Beechinor, was
+the old man, and the indispensable lad of fourteen, who had once been
+himself, was another lad, perhaps thirtieth of the dynasty of
+office-boys. Throughout this interminable and sterile desert of time he
+had drawn the same deeds, issued the same writs, written the same
+letters, kept the same accounts, lied the same lies, and thought the
+same thoughts. He had learnt nothing except craft, and forgotten nothing
+except happiness. He had never married, never loved, never been a rake,
+nor deviated from respectability. He was a success because he had
+conceived an object, and by sheer persistence attained it. In the eyes
+of Bursley people he was a very decent fellow, a steady fellow, a
+confirmed bachelor, a close un, a knowing customer, a curmudgeon, an
+excellent clerk, a narrow-minded ass, a good Wesleyan, a thrifty
+individual, and an intelligent burgess--according to the point of view.
+The lifelong operation of rigorous habit had sunk him into a groove as
+deep as the canon of some American river. His ideas on every subject
+were eternally and immutably fixed, and, without being altogether aware
+of it, he was part of the solid foundation of England's greatness. In
+1892, when the whole of the Five Towns was agitated by the great probate
+case of Wilbraham _v._ Wilbraham, in which Mr. Ford acted for the
+defendants, Beechinor, then aged forty-eight, was torn from his stool
+and sent out to Rio de Janeiro as part of a commission to take the
+evidence of an important witness who had declined all offers to come
+home.
+
+The old clerk was full of pride and self-importance at being thus
+selected, but secretly he shrank from the journey, the mere idea of
+which filled him with vague apprehension and alarm. His nature had lost
+all its adaptability; he trembled like a young girl at the prospect of
+new experiences. On the return voyage the vessel was quarantined at
+Liverpool for a fortnight, and Beechinor had an attack of low fever.
+Eight months afterwards he was ill again. Beechinor went to bed for the
+last time, cursing Providence, Wilbraham _v._ Wilbraham, and Rio.
+
+Mark Beechinor was thirty, just nineteen years younger than his brother.
+Tall, uncouth, big-boned, he had a rather ferocious and forbidding
+aspect; yet all women seemed to like him, despite the fact that he
+seldom could open his mouth to them. There must have been something in
+his wild and liquid dark eyes which mutely appealed for their protective
+sympathy, something about him of shy and wistful romance that atoned for
+the huge awkwardness of this taciturn elephant. Mark was at present the
+manager of a small china manufactory at Longshaw, the farthest of the
+Five Towns in Staffordshire, and five miles from Bursley. He was an
+exceptionally clever potter, but he never made money. He had the dreamy
+temperament of the inventor. He was a man of ideas, the kind of man who
+is capable of forgetting that he has not had his dinner, and who can
+live apparently content amid the grossest domestic neglect. He had once
+spoilt a hundred and fifty pounds' worth of ware by firing it in a new
+kiln of his own contrivance; it cost him three years of atrocious
+parsimony to pay for the ware and the building of the kiln. He was
+impulsively and recklessly charitable, and his Saturday afternoons and
+Sundays were chiefly devoted to the passionate propagandism of the
+theories of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
+
+'Is it true as thou'rt for marrying Sammy Mellor's daughter over at
+Hanbridge?' Edward Beechinor asked, in the feeble, tremulous voice of
+one agonized by continual pain.
+
+Among relatives and acquaintances he commonly spoke the Five Towns
+dialect, reserving the other English for official use.
+
+Mark stood at the foot of the bed, leaning with his elbows on the brass
+rail. Like most men, he always felt extremely nervous and foolish in a
+sick-room, and the delicacy of this question, so bluntly put, added to
+his embarrassment. He looked round timidly in the direction of the girl
+at the window; her back was towards him.
+
+'It's possible,' he replied. 'I haven't asked her yet.'
+
+'Her'll have no money?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Thou'lt want some brass to set up with. Look thee here, Mark: I made my
+will seven years ago i' thy favour.'
+
+'Thank ye,' said Mark gratefully.
+
+'But that,' the dying man continued with a frown--'that was afore
+thou'dst taken up with these socialistic doctrines o' thine. I've heard
+as thou'rt going to be th' secretary o' the Hanbridge Labour Church, as
+they call it.'
+
+Hanbridge is the metropolis of the Five Towns, and its Labour Church is
+the most audacious and influential of all the local activities, half
+secret, but relentlessly determined, whose aim is to establish the new
+democratic heaven and the new democratic earth by means of a gradual and
+bloodless revolution. Edward Beechinor uttered its abhorred name with a
+bitter and scornful hatred characteristic of the Toryism of a man who,
+having climbed high up out of the crowd, fiercely resents any widening
+or smoothing of the difficult path which he himself has conquered.
+
+'They've asked me to take the post,' Mark answered.
+
+'What's the wages?' the older man asked, with exasperated sarcasm.
+
+'Nothing.'
+
+'Mark, lad,' the other said, softening, 'I'm worth seven hundred pounds
+and this freehold house. What dost think o' that?'
+
+Even in that moment, with the world and its riches slipping away from
+his dying grasp, the contemplation of this great achievement of thrift
+filled Edward Beechinor with a sublime satisfaction. That sum of seven
+hundred pounds, which many men would dissipate in a single night, and
+forget the next morning that they had done so, seemed vast and almost
+incredible to him.
+
+'I know you've always been very careful,' said Mark politely.
+
+'Give up this old Labour Church'--again old Beechinor laid a withering
+emphasis on the phrase--'give up this Labour Church, and its all
+thine--house and all.'
+
+Mark shook his head.
+
+'Think twice,' the sick man ordered angrily. 'I tell thee thou'rt
+standing to lose every shilling.'
+
+'I must manage without it, then.'
+
+A silence fell.
+
+Each brother was absolutely immovable in his decision, and the other
+knew it. Edward might have said: 'I am a dying man: give up this thing
+to oblige me.' And Mark could have pleaded: 'At such a moment I would do
+anything to oblige you--except this, and this I really can't do. Forgive
+me.' Such amenities would possibly have eased the cord which was about
+to snap; but the idea of regarding Edward's condition as a factor in
+the case did not suggest itself favourably to the grim Beechinor stock,
+so stern, harsh, and rude. The sick man wiped from his sunken features
+the sweat which continually gathered there. Then he turned upon his side
+with a grunt.
+
+'Thou must fetch th' lawyer,' he said at length, 'for I'll cut thee
+off.'
+
+It was a strange request--like ordering a condemned man to go out and
+search for his executioner; but Mark answered with perfect naturalness:
+
+'Yes. Mr. Ford, I suppose?'
+
+'Ford? No! Dost think I want _him_ meddling i' my affairs? Go to young
+Baines up th' road. Tell him to come at once. He's sure to be at home,
+as it's Saturday night.'
+
+'Very well.'
+
+Mark turned to leave the room.
+
+'And, young un, I've done with thee. Never pass my door again till thou
+know'st I'm i' my coffin. Understand?'
+
+Mark hesitated a moment, and then went out, quietly closing the door. No
+sooner had he done so than the girl, hitherto so passive at the window,
+flew after him.
+
+There are some women whose calm, enigmatic faces seem always to suggest
+the infinite. It is given to few to know them, so rare as they are, and
+their lives usually so withdrawn; but sometimes they pass in the street,
+or sit like sphinxes in the church or the theatre, and then the memory
+of their features, persistently recurring, troubles us for days. They
+are peculiar to no class, these women: you may find them in a print gown
+or in diamonds. Often they have thin, rather long lips and deep rounded
+chins; but it is the fine upward curve of the nostrils and the fall of
+the eyelids which most surely mark them. Their glances and their faint
+smiles are beneficent, yet with a subtle shade of half-malicious
+superiority. When they look at you from under those apparently fatigued
+eyelids, you feel that they have an inward and concealed existence far
+beyond the ordinary--that they are aware of many things which you can
+never know. It is as though their souls, during former incarnations, had
+trafficked with the secret forces of nature, and so acquired a
+mysterious and nameless quality above all the transient attributes of
+beauty, wit, and talent. They exist: that is enough; that is their
+genius. Whether they control, or are at the mercy of, those secret
+forces; whether they have in fact learnt, but may not speak, the true
+answer to the eternal Why; whether they are not perhaps a riddle even to
+their own simple selves: these are points which can never be decided.
+
+Everyone who knew Mary Beechinor, in her cousin's home, or at chapel, or
+on Titus Price's earthenware manufactory, where she worked, said or
+thought that 'there was something about her ...' and left the phrase
+unachieved. She was twenty-five, and she had lived under the same roof
+with Edward Beechinor for seven years, since the sudden death of her
+parents. The arrangement then made was that Edward should keep her,
+while she conducted his household. She had insisted on permission to
+follow her own occupation, and in order that she might be at liberty to
+do so she personally paid eighteenpence a week to a little girl who came
+in to perform sundry necessary duties every day at noon. Mary Beechinor
+was a paintress by trade. As a class the paintresses of the Five Towns
+are somewhat similar to the more famous mill-girls of Lancashire and
+Yorkshire--fiercely independent by reason of good wages earned, loving
+finery and brilliant colours, loud-tongued and aggressive, perhaps, and
+for the rest neither more nor less kindly, passionate, faithful, than
+any other Saxon women anywhere. The paintresses, however, have some
+slight advantage over the mill-girls in the outward reticences of
+demeanour, due no doubt to the fact that their ancient craft demands a
+higher skill, and is pursued under more humane and tranquil conditions.
+Mary Beechinor worked in the 'band-and-line' department of the
+painting-shop at Price's. You may have observed the geometrical
+exactitude of the broad and thin coloured lines round the edges of a
+common cup and saucer, and speculated upon the means by which it was
+arrived at. A girl drew those lines, a girl with a hand as sure as
+Giotto's, and no better tools than a couple of brushes and a small
+revolving table called a whirler. Forty-eight hours a week Mary
+Beechinor sat before her whirler. Actuating the treadle, she placed a
+piece of ware on the flying disc, and with a single unerring flip of the
+finger pushed it precisely to the centre; then she held the full brush
+firmly against the ware, and in three seconds the band encircled it
+truly; another brush taken up, and the line below the band also stood
+complete. And this process was repeated, with miraculous swiftness, hour
+after hour, week after week, year after year. Mary could decorate over
+thirty dozen cups and saucers in a day, at three halfpence the dozen.
+'Doesn't she ever do anything else?' some visitor might curiously
+inquire, whom Titus Price was showing over his ramshackle manufactory.
+'No, always the same thing,' Titus would answer, made proud for the
+moment of this phenomenon of stupendous monotony. 'I wonder how she can
+stand it--she has a refined face,' the visitor might remark; and Mary
+Beechinor was left alone again. The idea that her work was monotonous
+probably never occurred to the girl. It was her work--as natural as
+sleep, or the knitting which she always did in the dinner-hour. The calm
+and silent regularity of it had become part of her, deepening her
+original quiescence, and setting its seal upon her inmost spirit. She
+was not in the fellowship of the other girls in the painting-shop. She
+seldom joined their more boisterous diversions, nor talked their talk,
+and she never manoeuvred for their men. But they liked her, and their
+attitude showed a certain respect, forced from them by they knew not
+what. The powers in the office spoke of Mary Beechinor as 'a very
+superior girl.'
+
+She ran downstairs after Mark, and he waited in the narrow hall, where
+there was scarcely room for two people to pass. Mark looked at her
+inquiringly. Rather thin, and by no means tall, she seemed the merest
+morsel by his side. She was wearing her second-best crimson merino
+frock, partly to receive the doctor and partly because it was Saturday
+night; over this a plain bibless apron. Her cold gray eyes faintly
+sparkled in anger above the cheeks white with watching, and the dropped
+corners of her mouth showed a contemptuous indignation. Mary Beechinor
+was ominously roused from the accustomed calm of years. Yet Mark at
+first had no suspicion that she was disturbed. To him that pale and
+inviolate face, even while it cast a spell over him, gave no sign of the
+fires within.
+
+She took him by the coat-sleeve and silently directed him into the
+gloomy little parlour crowded with mahogany and horsehair furniture,
+white antimacassars, wax flowers under glass, and ponderous
+gilt-clasped Bibles.
+
+'It's a cruel shame!' she whispered, as though afraid of being overheard
+by the dying man upstairs.
+
+'Do you think I ought to have given way?' he questioned, reddening.
+
+'You mistake me,' she said quickly; and with a sudden movement she went
+up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. The caress, so innocent,
+unpremeditated, and instinctive, ran through him like a voltaic shock.
+These two were almost strangers; they had scarcely met till within the
+past week, Mark being seldom in Bursley. 'You mistake me--it is a shame
+of _him_! I'm fearfully angry.'
+
+'Angry?' he repeated, astonished.
+
+'Yes, angry.' She walked to the window, and, twitching at the
+blind-cord, gazed into the dim street. It was beginning to grow dark.
+'Shall you fetch the lawyer? I shouldn't if I were you. I won't.'
+
+'I must fetch him,' Mark said.
+
+She turned round and admired him. 'What _will_ he do with his precious
+money?' she murmured.
+
+'Leave it to you, probably.'
+
+'Not he. I wouldn't touch it--not now; it's yours by rights. Perhaps you
+don't know that when I came here it was distinctly understood I wasn't
+to expect anything under his will. Besides, I have my own money ... Oh
+dear! If he wasn't in such pain, wouldn't I talk to him--for the first
+and last time in my life!'
+
+'You must please not say a word to him. I don't really want the money.'
+
+'But you ought to have it. If he takes it away from you he's _unjust_.'
+
+'What did the doctor say this afternoon?' asked Mark, wishing to change
+the subject.
+
+'He said the crisis would come on Monday, and when it did Edward would
+be dead all in a minute. He said it would be just like taking prussic
+acid.'
+
+'Not earlier than Monday?'
+
+'He said he thought Monday.'
+
+'Of course I shall take no notice of what Edward said to me--I shall
+call to-morrow morning--and stay. Perhaps he won't mind seeing me. And
+then you can tell me what happens to-night.'
+
+'I'm sure I shall send that lawyer man about his business,' she
+threatened.
+
+'Look here,' said Mark timorously as he was leaving the house, 'I've
+told you I don't want the money--I would give it away to some charity;
+but do you think I ought to pretend to yield, just to humour him, and
+let him die quiet and peaceful? I shouldn't like him to die hating----'
+
+'Never--never!' she exclaimed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'What have you and Mark been talking about?' asked Edward Beechinor
+apprehensively as Mary re-entered the bedroom.
+
+'Nothing,' she replied with a grave and soothing kindliness of tone.
+
+'Because, miss, if you think----'
+
+'You must have your medicine now, Edward.'
+
+But before giving the patient his medicine she peeped through the
+curtain and watched Mark's figure till it disappeared up the hill
+towards Bleakridge. He, on his part, walked with her image always in
+front of him. He thought hers was the strongest, most righteous soul he
+had ever encountered; it seemed as if she had a perfect passion for
+truth and justice. And a week ago he had deemed her a capable girl,
+certainly--but lackadaisical!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The clock had struck ten before Mr. Baines, the solicitor, knocked at
+the door. Mary hesitated, and then took him upstairs in silence while he
+suavely explained to her why he had been unable to come earlier. This
+lawyer was a young Scotsman who had descended upon the town from
+nowhere, bought a small decayed practice, and within two years had
+transformed it into a large and flourishing business by one of those
+feats of energy, audacity, and tact, combined, of which some Scotsmen
+seem to possess the secret.
+
+'Here is Mr. Baines, Edward,' Mary said quietly; and then, having
+rearranged the sick man's pillow, she vanished out of the room and went
+into the kitchen.
+
+The gas-jet there showed only a point of blue, but she did not turn it
+up. Dragging an old oak rush-seated rocking-chair near to the range,
+where a scrap of fire still glowed, she rocked herself gently in the
+darkness.
+
+After about half an hour Mr. Baines's voice sounded at the head of the
+stairs:
+
+'Miss Beechinor, will ye kindly step up? We shall want some
+asseestance.'
+
+She obeyed, but not instantly.
+
+In the bedroom Mr. Baines, a fountain-pen between his fine white teeth,
+was putting some coal on the fire. He stood up as she entered.
+
+'Mr. Beechinor is about to make a new will,' he said, without removing
+the pen from his mouth, 'and ye will kindly witness it.'
+
+The small room appeared to be full of Baines--he was so large and fleshy
+and assertive. The furniture, even the chest of drawers, was dwarfed
+into toy-furniture, and Beechinor, slight and shrunken-up, seemed like a
+cadaverous manikin in the bed.
+
+'Now, Mr. Beechinor.' Dusting his hands, the lawyer took a newly-written
+document from the dressing-table, and, spreading it on the lid of a
+cardboard box, held it before the dying man. 'Here's the pen. There!
+I'll help ye to hold it.'
+
+Beechinor clutched the pen. His wrinkled and yellow face, flushed in
+irregular patches as though the cheeks had been badly rouged, was
+covered with perspiration, and each difficult movement, even to the
+slightest lifting of the head, showed extreme exhaustion. He cast at
+Mary a long sinister glance of mistrust and apprehension.
+
+'What is there in this will?'
+
+Mr. Baines looked sharply up at the girl, who now stood at the side of
+the bed opposite him. Mechanically she smoothed the tumbled bed-clothes.
+
+'That's nowt to do wi' thee, lass,' said Beechinor resentfully.
+
+'It isn't necessary that a witness to a will should be aware of its
+contents,' said Baines. 'In fact, it's quite unusual.'
+
+'I sign nothing in the dark,' she said, smiling. Through their
+half-closed lids her eyes glimmered at Baines.
+
+'Ha! Legal caution acquired from your cousin, I presume.' Baines smiled
+at her. 'But let me assure ye, Miss Beechinor, this is a mere matter of
+form. A will must be signed in the presence of two witnesses, both
+present at the same time; and there's only yeself and me for it.'
+
+Mary looked at the dying man, whose features were writhed in pain, and
+shook her head.
+
+'Tell her,' he murmured with bitter despair, and sank down into the
+pillows, dropping the fountain-pen, which had left a stain of ink on the
+sheet before Baines could pick it up.
+
+'Well, then, Miss Beechinor, if ye must know,' Baines began with
+sarcasm, 'the will is as follows: The testator--that's Mr.
+Beechinor--leaves twenty guineas to his brother Mark to show that he
+bears him no ill-will and forgives him. The rest of his estate is to be
+realized, and the proceeds given to the North Staffordshire Infirmary,
+to found a bed, which is to be called the Beechinor bed. If there is any
+surplus, it is to go to the Law Clerks' Provident Society. That is all.'
+
+'I shall have nothing to do with it,' Mary said coldly.
+
+'Young lady, we don't want ye to have anything to do with it. We only
+desire ye to witness the signature.'
+
+'I won't witness the signature, and I won't see it signed.'
+
+'Damn thee, Mary! thou'rt a wicked wench,' Beechinor whispered in
+hoarse, feeble tones. He saw himself robbed of the legitimate fruit of
+all those interminable years of toilsome thrift. This girl by a trick
+would prevent him from disposing of his own. He, Edward Beechinor,
+shrewd and wealthy, was being treated like a child. He was too weak to
+rave, but from his aggrieved and furious heart he piled silent curses on
+her. 'Go, fetch another witness,' he added to the lawyer.
+
+'Wait a moment,' said Baines. 'Miss Beechinor, do ye mean to say that ye
+will cross the solemn wish of a dying man?'
+
+'I mean to say I won't help a dying man to commit a crime.'
+
+'A crime?'
+
+'Yes,' she answered, 'a crime. Seven years ago Mr. Beechinor willed
+everything to his brother Mark, and Mark ought to have everything. Mark
+is his only brother--his only relation except me. And Edward knows it
+isn't me wants any of his money. North Staffordshire Infirmary indeed!
+It's a crime!... What business have _you_,' she went on to Edward
+Beechinor, 'to punish Mark just because his politics aren't----'
+
+'That's beside the point,' the lawyer interrupted. 'A testator has a
+perfect right to leave his property as he chooses, without giving
+reasons. Now, Miss Beechinor, I must ask ye to be judeecious.'
+
+Mary shut her lips.
+
+'Her'll never do it. I tell thee, fetch another witness.'
+
+The old man sprang up in a sort of frenzy as he uttered the words, and
+then fell back in a brief swoon.
+
+Mary wiped his brow, and pushed away the wet and matted hair. Presently
+he opened his eyes, moaning. Mr. Baines folded up the will, put it in
+his pocket, and left the room with quick steps. Mary heard him open the
+front-door and then return to the foot of the stairs.
+
+'Miss Beechinor,' he called, 'I'll speak with ye a moment.'
+
+She went down.
+
+'Do you mind coming into the kitchen?' she said, preceding him and
+turning up the gas; 'there's no light in the front-room.'
+
+He leaned up against the high mantelpiece; his frock-coat hung to the
+level of the oven-knob. She had one hand on the white deal table.
+Between them a tortoiseshell cat purred on the red-tiled floor.
+
+'Ye're doing a verra serious thing, Miss Beechinor. As Mr. Beechinor's
+solicitor, I should just like to be acquaint with the real reasons for
+this conduct.'
+
+'I've told you.' She had a slightly quizzical look.
+
+'Now, as to Mark,' the lawyer continued blandly, 'Mr. Beechinor
+explained the whole circumstances to me. Mark as good as defied his
+brother.'
+
+'That's nothing to do with it.'
+
+'By the way, it appears that Mark is practically engaged to be married.
+May I ask if the lady is yeself?'
+
+She hesitated.
+
+'If so,' he proceeded, 'I may tell ye informally that I admire the pluck
+of ye. But, nevertheless, that will has got to be executed.'
+
+'The young lady is a Miss Mellor of Hanbridge.'
+
+'I'm going to fetch my clerk,' he said shortly. 'I can see ye're an
+obstinate and unfathomable woman. I'll be back in half an hour.'
+
+When he had departed she bolted the front-door top and bottom, and went
+upstairs to the dying man.
+
+Nearly an hour elapsed before she heard a knock. Mr. Baines had had to
+arouse his clerk from sleep. Instead of going down to the front-door,
+Mary threw up the bedroom window and looked out. It was a mild but
+starless night. Trafalgar Road was silent save for the steam-car, which,
+with its load of revellers returning from Hanbridge--that centre of
+gaiety--slipped rumbling down the hill towards Bursley.
+
+'What do you want--disturbing a respectable house at this time of
+night?' she called in a loud whisper when the car had passed. 'The
+door's bolted, and I can't come down. You must come in the morning.'
+
+'Miss Beechinor, ye will let us in--I charge ye.'
+
+'It's useless, Mr. Baines.'
+
+'I'll break the door down. I'm a strong man, and a determined. Ye are
+carrying things too far.'
+
+In another moment the two men heard the creak of the bolts. Mary stood
+before them, vaguely discernible, but a forbidding figure.
+
+'If you must--come upstairs,' she said coldly.
+
+'Stay here in the passage, Arthur,' said Mr. Baines; 'I'll call ye when
+I want ye;' and he followed Mary up the stairs.
+
+Edward Beechinor lay on his back, and his sunken eyes stared glassily at
+the ceiling. The skin of his emaciated face, stretched tightly over the
+protruding bones, had lost all its crimson, and was green, white,
+yellow. The mouth was wide open. His drawn features wore a terribly
+sardonic look--a purely physical effect of the disease; but it seemed to
+the two spectators that this mean and disappointed slave of a miserly
+habit had by one superb imaginative effort realized the full vanity of
+all human wishes and pretensions.
+
+'Ye can go; I shan't want ye,' said Mr. Baines, returning to the clerk.
+
+The lawyer never spoke of that night's business. Why should he? To what
+end? Mark Beechinor, under the old will, inherited the seven hundred
+pounds and the house. Miss Mellor of Hanbridge is still Miss Mellor, her
+hand not having been formally sought. But Mark, secretary of the Labour
+Church, is married. Miss Mellor, with a quite pardonable air of tolerant
+superiority, refers to his wife as 'a strange, timid little
+creature--she couldn't say Bo to a goose.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE DOG
+
+
+This is a scandalous story. It scandalized the best people in Bursley;
+some of them would wish it forgotten. But since I have begun to tell it
+I may as well finish. Moreover, like most tales whispered behind fans
+and across club-tables, it carries a high and valuable moral. The
+moral--I will let you have it at once--is that those who love in glass
+houses should pull down the blinds.
+
+
+I
+
+He had got his collar on safely; it bore his name--Ellis Carter. Strange
+name for a dog, perhaps; and perhaps it was even more strange that his
+collar should be white. But such dogs are not common dogs. He tied his
+necktie exquisitely; caressed his hair again with two brushes; curved
+his young moustache, and then assumed his waistcoat and his coat; the
+trousers had naturally preceded the collar. He beheld the suit in the
+glass, and saw that it was good. And it was not built in London, either.
+There are tailors in Bursley. And in particular there is the dog's
+tailor. Ask the dog's tailor, as the dog once did, whether he can really
+do as well as London, and he will smile on you with gentle pity; he will
+not stoop to utter the obvious Yes. He may casually inform you that, if
+he is not in London himself, the explanation is that he has reasons for
+preferring Bursley. He is the social equal of all his clients. He
+belongs to the dogs' club. He knows, and everybody knows, that he is a
+first-class tailor with a first-class connection, and no dog would dare
+to condescend to him. He is a great creative artist; the dogs who wear
+his clothes may be said to interpret his creations. Now, Ellis was a
+great interpretative artist, and the tailor recognised the fact. When
+the tailor met Ellis on Duck Bank greatly wearing a new suit, the scene
+was impressive. It was as though Elgar had stopped to hear Paderewski
+play 'Pomp and Circumstance' on the piano.
+
+Ellis descended from his bedroom into the hall, took his straw hat,
+chose a stick, and went out into the portico of the new large house on
+the Hawkins, near Oldcastle. In the neighbourhood of the Five Towns no
+road is more august, more correct, more detached, more umbrageous, than
+the Hawkins. M.P.'s live there. It is the link between the aristocratic
+and antique aloofness of Oldcastle and the solid commercial prosperity
+of the Five Towns. Ellis adorned the portico. Young (a bare twenty-two),
+fair, handsome, smiling, graceful, well-built, perfectly groomed, he was
+an admirable and a characteristic specimen of the race of dogs which,
+with the modern growth of luxury and the Luxurious Spirit, has become so
+marked a phenomenon in the social development of the once barbarous Five
+Towns.
+
+When old Jack Carter (reputed to be the best turner that Bursley ever
+produced) started a little potbank near St. Peter's Church in 1861--he
+was then forty, and had saved two hundred pounds--he little dreamt that
+the supreme and final result after forty years would be the dog. But so
+it was. Old Jack Carter had a son John Carter, who married at
+twenty-five and lived at first on twenty-five shillings a week, and
+enthusiastically continued the erection of the fortune which old Jack
+had begun. At thirty-three, after old Jack's death, John became a Town
+Councillor. At thirty-six he became Mayor and the father of Ellis, and
+the recipient of a silver cradle. Ellis was his wife's maiden name. At
+forty-two he built the finest earthenware manufactory in Bursley, down
+by the canal-side at Shawport. At fifty-two he had been everything that
+a man can be in the Five Towns--from County Councillor to President of
+the Society for the Prosecution of Felons. Then Ellis left school and
+came to the works to carry on the tradition, and his father suddenly
+discovered him. The truth was that John Carter had been so laudably busy
+with the affairs of his town and county that he had nearly forgotten his
+family. Ellis, in the process of achieving doghood, soon taught his
+father a thing or two. And John learnt. John could manage a public
+meeting, but he could not manage Ellis. Besides, there was plenty of
+money; and Ellis was so ingratiating, and had curly hair that somehow
+won sympathy. And, after all, Ellis was not such a duffer as all that at
+the works. John knew other people's sons who were worse. And Ellis could
+keep order in the paintresses' 'shops' as order had never been kept
+there before.
+
+John sometimes wondered what old Jack would have said about Ellis and
+his friends, those handsome dogs, those fine dandies, who taught to the
+Five Towns the virtue of grace and of style and of dash, who went up to
+London--some of them even went to Paris--and brought back civilization
+to the Five Towns, who removed from the Five Towns the reproach of being
+uncouth and behind the times. Was the outcome of two generations of
+unremitting toil merely Ellis? (Ellis had several pretty sisters, but
+they did not count.) John could only guess at what old Jack's attitude
+might have been towards Ellis--Ellis, who had his shirts made to
+measure. He knew exactly what was Ellis's attitude towards the ideals of
+old Jack, old Jack the class-leader, who wore clogs till he was thirty,
+and dined in his shirt-sleeves at one o'clock to the end of his life.
+
+Ellis quitted the portico, ran down the winding garden-path, and jumped
+neatly and fearlessly on to an electric tramcar as it passed at the rate
+of fifteen miles an hour. The car was going to Hanbridge, and it was
+crowded with the joy of life; Ellis had to stand on the step. This was
+the Saturday before the first Monday in August, and therefore the formal
+opening of Knype Wakes, the most carnivalesque of all the carnivals
+which enliven the four seasons in the Five Towns. It is still called
+Knype Wakes, because once Knype overshadowed Hanbridge in importance;
+but its headquarters are now quite properly at Hanbridge, the hub, the
+centre, the Paris of the Five Towns--Hanbridge, the county borough of
+sixty odd thousand inhabitants. It is the festival of the masses that
+old Jack sprang from, and every genteel person who can leaves the Five
+Towns for the seaside at the end of July. Nevertheless, the district is
+never more crammed than at Knype Wakes. And, of course, genteel persons,
+whom circumstances have forced to remain in the Five Towns, sally out in
+the evening to 'do' the Wakes in a spirit of tolerant condescension.
+Ellis was in this case. His parents and sisters were at Llandudno, and
+he had been left in charge of the works and of the new house. He was
+always free; he could always pity the bondage of his sisters; but now he
+was more free than ever--he was absolutely free. Imagine the delicious
+feeling that surged in his heart as he prepared to plunge himself
+doggishly into the wild ocean of the Wakes. By the way, in that heart
+was the image of a girl.
+
+
+II
+
+He stepped off the car on the outskirts of Hanbridge, and strolled
+gently and spectacularly into the joyous town. The streets became more
+and more crowded and noisy as he approached the market-place, and in
+Crown Square tramcars from the four quarters of the earth discharged
+tramloads of humanity at the rate of two a minute, and then glided off
+again empty in search of more humanity. The lower portion of Crown
+Square was devoted to tramlines; in the upper portion the Wakes began,
+and spread into the market-place, and thence by many tentacles into all
+manner of streets.
+
+No Wakes is better than Knype Wakes; that is to say, no Wakes is more
+ear-splitting, more terrific, more dizzying, or more impassable. When
+you go to Knype Wakes you get stuck in the midst of an enormous crowd,
+and you see roundabouts, swings, switchbacks, myrioramas, atrocity
+booths, quack dentists, shooting-galleries, cocoanut-shies, and bazaars,
+all around you. Every establishment is jewelled, gilded, and
+electrically lighted; every establishment has an orchestra, most often
+played by steam and conducted by a stoker; every establishment has a
+steam--whistle, which shrieks at the beginning and at the end of each
+round or performance. You stand fixed in the multitude listening to a
+thousand orchestras and whistles, with the roar of machinery and the
+merry din of car-bells, and the popping of rifles for a background of
+noise. Your eyes are charmed by the whirling of a million lights and the
+mad whirling of millions of beautiful girls and happy youths under the
+lights. For the roundabouts rule the scene; the roundabouts take the
+money. The supreme desire of the revellers is to describe circles,
+either on horseback or in yachts, either simple circles or complex
+circles, either up and down or straight along, but always circles. And
+it is as though inventors had sat up at nights puzzling their brains how
+best to make revellers seasick while keeping them equidistant from a
+steam-orchestra.... Then the crowd solidly lurches, and you find
+yourself up against a dentist, or a firm of wrestlers, or a roundabout,
+or an ice-cream refectory, and you take what comes. You have begun to
+'do' the Wakes. The splendid insanity seizes you. The lights, the
+colours, the explosions, the shrieks, the feathered hats, the pretty
+faces as they fly past, the gilding, the statuary, the August night, and
+the mingling of a thousand melodies in a counterpoint beyond the dreams
+of Wagner--these things have stirred the sap of life in you, have shown
+you how fine it is to be alive, and, careless and free, have caught up
+your spirit into a heaven from which you scornfully survey the year of
+daily toil between one Wakes and another as the eagle scornfully surveys
+the potato-field. Your nostrils dilate--nay, matters reach such a pass
+that, even if you are genteel, you forget to condescend.
+
+
+III
+
+After Ellis had had the correct drink in the private bar up the passage
+at the Turk's Head, and after he had plunged into the crowd and got lost
+in it, and submitted good-humouredly to the frequent ordeal of the penny
+squirt as administered by adorable creatures in bright skirts, he found
+himself cast up by the human ocean on the macadam shore near a
+shooting-gallery. This was no ordinary shooting-gallery. It was one of
+Jenkins's affairs (Jenkins of Manchester), and on either side of it
+Jenkins's Venetian gondalas and Jenkins's Mexican mustangs were whizzing
+round two of Jenkins's orchestras at twopence a time, and taking
+thirty-two pounds an hour. This gallery was very different from the old
+galleries, in which you leaned against a brass bar and shot up a kind of
+a drain. This gallery was a large and brilliant room, with the
+front-wall taken out. It was hung with mirrors and cretonnes, it was
+richly carpeted, and, of course, it was lighted by electricity. Carved
+and gilded tables bore a whole armoury of weapons. You shot at
+tobacco-pipes, twisting and stationary, at balls poised on jets of
+water, and at proper targets. In the corners of the saloon, near the
+open, were large crimson plush lounges, on which you lounged after the
+fatigue of shooting.
+
+A pink-clad girl, young and radiant, had the concern in charge.
+
+She was speeding a party of bankrupt shooters, when she caught sight of
+Ellis. Ellis answered her smile, and strolled up to the booth with a
+countenance that might have meant anything. You can never tell what a
+dog is thinking.
+
+''Ello!' said the girl prettily (or, rather, she shouted prettily,
+having to compete with the two orchestras). 'You here again?'
+
+The truth was that Ellis had been there on the previous night, when the
+Wakes was only half opened, and he had come again to-night expressly in
+order to see her; but he would not have admitted, even to himself, that
+he had come expressly in order to see her; in his mind it was just a
+chance that he might see her. She was a jolly girl. (We are gradually
+approaching the scandalous part.)
+
+'What a jolly frock!' he said, when he had shot five celluloid balls in
+succession off a jet of water.
+
+Smiling, she mechanically took a ball out of the basket and let it roll
+down the conduit to the fountain.
+
+'Do you think so?' she replied, smoothing the fluffy muslin apron with
+her small hands, black from contact with the guns. 'That one I wore last
+night was my second-best. I only wear this on Saturdays and Mondays.'
+
+He nodded like a connoisseur. The sixth ball had sprung up to the top of
+the jet. He removed it with the certainty of a King's Prize winner, and
+she complimented him.
+
+'Ah!' he said, 'you should have seen me before I took to smoking and
+drinking!'
+
+She laughed freely. She was always showing her fine teeth. And she had
+such a frank, jolly countenance, not exactly pretty--better than pretty.
+She was a little short and a little plump, and she wore a necklace round
+her neck, a ring on her dainty, dirty finger, and a watch-bracelet on
+her wrist.
+
+'Why!' she exclaimed. 'How old are you?'
+
+'How old are _you_?' he retorted.
+
+Dogs do not give things away like that.
+
+'I'm nineteen,' she said submissively. 'At least, I shall be come
+Martinmas.'
+
+And she yawned.
+
+'Well,' he said, 'a little girl like you ought to be in bed.'
+
+'Sunday to-morrow,' she observed.
+
+'Aren't you glad you're English?' he remarked. 'If you were in Paris
+you'd have to work Sundays too.'
+
+'Not me!' she said. 'Who told you that? Have you been to Paris?'
+
+'No,' he admitted cautiously; 'but a friend of mine has, and he told me.
+He came back only last week, and he says they keep open Sundays, and all
+night sometimes. Sunday is the great day over there.'
+
+'Well,' said the girl kindly, 'don't you believe it. The police wouldn't
+allow it. I know what the police are.'
+
+More shooters entered the saloon. Ellis had finished his dozen; he sank
+into a lounge, and elegantly lighted a cigarette, and watched her serve
+the other marksmen. She was decidedly charming, and so jolly--with him.
+He noticed with satisfaction that with the other marksmen she showed a
+certain high reserve.
+
+They did not stay long, and when they were gone she came across to the
+lounge and gazed at him provocatively.
+
+'Dashed if she hasn't taken a fancy to me!'
+
+The thought ran through him like lightning.
+
+'Well?' she said.
+
+'What do you do with yourself Sundays?' he asked her.
+
+'Oh, sleep.'
+
+'All day?'
+
+'All morning.'
+
+'What do you do in the afternoon?'
+
+'Oh, nothing.'
+
+She laughed gaily.
+
+'Come out with me, eh?'
+
+'To-morrow? Oh, I should LOVE TO!' she cried.
+
+Her voice expanded into large capitals because by a singular chance both
+the neighbouring orchestras stopped momentarily together, and thus gave
+her shout a fair field. The effect was startling. It startled Ellis. He
+had not for an instant expected that she would consent. Never, dog
+though he was, had he armed a girl out on any afternoon, to say nothing
+of Sunday afternoon, and Knype's Wakes Sunday at that! He had talked
+about girls at the club. He understood the theory. But the practice----
+
+The foundation of England's greatness is that Englishmen hate to look
+fools. The fear of being taken for a ninny will spur an Englishman to
+the most surprising deeds of courage. Ellis said 'Good!' with apparent
+enthusiasm, and arranged to be waiting for her at half-past two at the
+Turk's Head. Then he left the saloon and struck out anew into the ocean.
+He wanted to think it over.
+
+Once, painful to relate, he had thoughts of failing to keep the
+appointment. However, she was so jolly and frank. And what a fancy she
+must have taken to him! No, he would see it through.
+
+
+IV
+
+If anybody had prophesied to Ellis that he would be driving out a Wakes
+girl in a dogcart that Sunday afternoon he would have laughed at the
+prophet; but so it occurred. He arrived at the Turk's Head at two
+twenty-five. She was there before him, dressed all in blue, except the
+white shoes and stockings, weighing herself on the machine in the yard.
+She showed her teeth, told him she weighed nine stone one, and abruptly
+asked him if he could drive. He said he could. She clapped her hands and
+sprang off the machine. Her father had bought a new mare the day before,
+and it was in the Turk's Head stable, and the yardman said it wanted
+exercise, and there was a dogcart and harness idling about, and, in
+short, Ellis should drive her to Sneyd Park, which she had long desired
+to see.
+
+Ellis wished to ask questions, but the moment did not seem auspicious.
+
+In a few minutes the new mare, a high and somewhat frisky bay, with big
+shoulders, was in the shafts of a high, green dogcart. When asked if he
+could drive, Ellis ought to have answered: 'That depends--on the horse.'
+Many men can tool a fifteen-year-old screw down a country lane who would
+hesitate to get up behind a five-year-old animal (in need of exercise)
+for a spin down Broad Street, Hanbridge, on Knype Wakes Sunday. Ellis
+could drive; he could just drive. His father had always steadfastly
+refused to keep horses, but the fathers of other dogs were more
+progressive, and Ellis had had opportunities. He knew how to take the
+reins, and get up, and give the office; indeed, he had read a handbook
+on the subject. So he rook the reins and got up, and the Wakes girl got
+up.
+
+He chirruped. The mare merely backed.
+
+'Give 'er 'er mouth,' said the yardman disgustedly.
+
+'Oh!' said Ellis, and slackened the reins, and the mare pawed forward.
+
+Then he had to turn her in the yard, and get her and the dogcart down
+the passage. He doubted whether he should do it, for the passage seemed
+a size too small. However, he did it, or the mare did it, and the entire
+organism swerved across a portion of the footpath into Broad Street.
+
+For quite a quarter of a mile down Broad Street Ellis blushed, and kept
+his gaze between the mare's ears. However, the mare went beautifully.
+You could have driven her with a silken thread, so it seemed. And then
+the dog, growing accustomed to his prominence up there on the dogcart,
+began to be a bit doggy. He knew the little thing's age and weight,
+but, really, when you take a girl out for a Sunday spin you want more
+information about her than that. Her asked her name, and her name was
+Jenkins--Ada. She was the great Jenkins's daughter.
+
+('Oh,' thought Ellis, 'the deuce you are!')
+
+'Father's gone to Manchester for the day, and aunt's looking after me,'
+said Ada.
+
+'Do they know you've come out--like this?'
+
+'Not much!' She laughed deliciously. 'How lovely it is!'
+
+At Knype they drew up before the Five Towns Hotel and descended. The
+Five Towns Hotel is the greatest hotel in North Staffordshire. It has
+two hundred rooms. It would not entirely disgrace Northumberland Avenue.
+In the Five Towns it is august, imposing, and unique. They had a
+lemonade there, and proceeded. A clock struck; it was a near thing. No
+more refreshments now until they had passed the three-mile limit!
+
+Yes! Not two hundred yards further on she spied an ice-cream shop in
+Fleet Road, and Ellis learnt that she adored ice-cream. The mare waited
+patiently outside in the thronged street.
+
+After that the pilgrimage to Sneyd was punctuated with ice-creams. At
+the Stag at Sneyd (where, among ninety-and-nine dogcarts, Ellis's
+dogcart was the brightest green of them all) Ada had another lemonade,
+and Ellis had something else. They saw the Park, and Ada giggled
+charmingly her appreciation of its beauty. The conversation throughout
+consisted chiefly of Ada's teeth. Ellis said he would return by a
+different route, and he managed to get lost. How anyone driving to
+Hanbridge from Sneyd could arrive at the mining village of Silverton is
+a mystery. But Ellis arrived there, and he ultimately came out at
+Hillport, the aristocratic suburb of Bursley, where he had always lived
+till the last year. He feared recognition there, and his fear was
+justified. Some silly ass, a schoolmate, cried, 'Go it!' as the machine
+bowled along, and the mischief was that the mare, startled, went it. She
+went it down the curving hill, and the vehicle after her, like a kettle
+tied to a dog's tail.
+
+Ellis winked stoutly at Ada when they reached the bottom, and gave the
+mare a piece of his mind, to which she objected. As they crossed the
+railway-bridge a goods-train ran underneath and puffed smoke into the
+mare's eyes. She set her ears back.
+
+'Would you!' cried Ellis authoritatively, and touched her with the whip
+(he had forgotten the handbook).
+
+He scarcely touched her, but you never know where you are with any
+horse. That mare, which had been a mirror of all the virtues all the
+afternoon, was off like a rocket. She overtook an electric car as if it
+had been standing still. Ellis sawed her mouth; he might as well have
+sawed the funnel of a locomotive. He had meant to turn off and traverse
+Bursley by secluded streets, but he perceived that safety lay solely in
+letting her go straight ahead up the very steep slope of Oldcastle
+Street into the middle of the town. It would be an amazing mare that
+galloped to the top of Oldcastle Street! She galloped nearly to the top,
+and then Ellis began to get hold of her a bit.
+
+'Don't be afraid,' he said masculinely to Ada.
+
+And, conscious of victory, he jerked the mare to the left to avoid an
+approaching car....
+
+The next instant they were anchored against the roots of a lamp-post.
+When Ellis saw the upper half of the lamp-post bent down at right
+angles, and pieces of glass covering the pavement, he could not believe
+that he and his dogcart had done that, especially as neither the mare,
+nor the dogcart, nor its freight, was damaged. The machine was merely
+jammed, and the mare, satisfied, stood quiet, breathing rapidly.
+
+But Ada Jenkins was crying.
+
+And the car stopped a moment to observe. And then a number of
+chapel-goers on their way to the Sytch Chapel, which the Carter family
+still faithfully attended, joined the scene; and then a policeman.
+
+Ellis sat like a stuck pig in the dogcart. He knew that speech was
+demanded of him, but he did not know where to begin.
+
+The worst thing of all was the lamp-post, bent, moveless, unnatural,
+atrociously comic, accusing him.
+
+The affair was over the town in a minute; the next morning it reached
+Llandudno. Ellis Carter had been out on the spree with _a Wakes girl_ in
+a dogcart on Sunday afternoon, and had got into such a condition that he
+had driven into a lamp-post at the top of Oldcastle Street just as
+people were going into chapel.
+
+The lamp-post remained bent for three days--a fearful warning to all
+dogs that doggishness has limits.
+
+If it had not been a dogcart, and such a high, green dogcart; if it had
+been, say, a brougham, or even a cab! If it had not been Sunday! And,
+granting Sunday, if it had not been just as people were going into
+chapel! If he had not chosen that particular lamp-post, visible both
+from the market-place and St. Luke's Square! If he had only contrived to
+destroy a less obtrusive lamp-post in some unfrequented street! And if
+it had not been a Wakes girl--if the reprobate had only selected for his
+guilty amours an actress from one of the touring companies, or even a
+star from the Hanbridge Empire--yea, or even a local barmaid! But _a
+Wakes girl_!
+
+Ellis himself saw the enormity of his transgression. He lay awake
+astounded by his own doggishness.
+
+And yet he had seldom felt less doggy than during that trip. It seemed
+to him that doggishness was not the glorious thing he had thought.
+However, he cut a heroic figure at the dogs' club. Every admiring face
+said: 'Well, you _have_ been going the pace! We always knew you were a
+hot un, but, really----'
+
+
+V
+
+On the following Friday evening, when Ellis jumped off the car opposite
+his home on the Hawkins, he saw in the road, halted, a train of vast and
+queer-shaped waggons in charge of two traction-engines. They were
+painted on all sides with the great name of Jenkins. They contained
+Jenkins's roundabouts and shooting-saloons, on their way to rouse the
+joy of life in other towns. And he perceived in front of the portico the
+high, green dogcart and the lamp-post-destroying mare.
+
+He went in. The family had come home that afternoon. Sundry of his
+sisters greeted him with silent horror on their faces in the hall. In
+the breakfast-room, which gave off the drawing-room, was his mother in
+the attitude of an intent listener. She spoke no word.
+
+And Ellis listened, too.
+
+'Yes,' a very powerful and raucous voice was saying in the drawing-room,
+'I reckoned I'd call and tell ye myself, Mister Carter, what I thought
+on it. My gell, a motherless gell, but brought up respectable; sixth
+standard at Whalley Range Board School; and her aunt a strict
+God-fearing woman! And here your son comes along and gets hold of the
+girl while her aunt's at the special service for Wakes folks in Bethesda
+Chapel, and runs off with her in my dogcart with one of my hosses, and
+raises a scandal all o'er the Five Towns. God bless my soul, mister! I
+tell'n ye I hardly liked to open o' Monday afternoon, I was that
+ashamed! And I packed Ada off to Manchester. It seems to me that if the
+upper classes, as they call 'em--the immoral classes _I_ call 'em--'ud
+look after themselves a bit instead o' looking after other people so
+much, things might be a bit better, Mister Carter. I dare say you think
+it's nothing as your son should go about ruining the reputation of any
+decent, respectable girl as he happens to fancy, Mister Carter; but this
+is what I say. I say----'
+
+Mr. Carter was understood to assert, in his most pacific and pained
+public-meeting voice, that he regretted, infinitely regretted----
+
+Mrs. Carter, weeping, ran out of the breakfast-room.
+
+And soon afterwards the traction-engines rumbled off, and the high,
+green dogcart followed them.
+
+Ellis sat spell-bound.
+
+He heard the parlourmaid go into the drawing-room and announce, 'Tea is
+ready, sir!' and then his father's dry cough.
+
+And then the parlourmaid came into the breakfast-room: 'Tea is ready,
+Mr. Ellis!'
+
+Oh, the meal!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A FEUD
+
+
+When Clive Timmis paused at the side-door of Ezra Brunt's great shop in
+Machin Street, and the door was opened to him by Ezra Brunt's daughter
+before he had had time to pull the bell, not only all Machin Street knew
+it within the hour, but also most persons of consequence left in
+Hanbridge on a Thursday afternoon--Thursday being early-closing day. For
+Hanbridge, though it counts sixty thousand inhabitants, and is the chief
+of the Five Towns--that vast, huddled congeries of boroughs devoted to
+the manufacture of earthenware--is a place where the art of attending to
+other people's business still flourishes in rustic perfection.
+
+Ezra Brunt's drapery establishment was the foremost retail house, in any
+branch of trade, of the Five Towns. It had no rival nearer than
+Manchester, thirty-six miles off; and even Manchester could exhibit
+nothing conspicuously superior to it. The most acutely critical shoppers
+of the Five Towns--women who were in the habit of going to London every
+year for the January sales--spoke of Brunt's as a 'right-down good
+shop.' And the husbands of these ladies, manufacturers who employed from
+two hundred to a thousand men, regarded Ezra Brunt as a commercial
+magnate of equal importance with themselves. Brunt, who had served his
+apprenticeship at Birmingham, started business in Machin Street in 1862,
+when Hanbridge was half its present size and all the best shops of the
+district were in Oldcastle, an ancient burg contiguous with, but holding
+itself proudly aloof from, the industrial Five Towns. He paid eighty
+pounds a year rent, and lived over the shop, and in the summer quarter
+his gas bill was always under a sovereign. For ten years success
+tarried, but in 1872 his daughter Eva was born and his wife died, and
+from that moment the sun of his prosperity climbed higher and higher
+into heaven. He had been profoundly attached to his wife, and, having
+lost her he abandoned himself to the mercantile struggle with that
+morose and terrible ferocity which was the root of his character. Of
+rude, gaunt aspect, gruffly taciturn by nature, and variable in temper,
+he yet had the precious instinct for soothing customers. To this day he
+can surpass his own shop-walkers in the admirable and tender solicitude
+with which, forsaking dialect, he drops into a lady's ear his famous
+stereotyped phrase: 'Are you receiving proper attention, madam?' From
+the first he eschewed the facile trickeries and ostentations which
+allure the populace. He sought a high-class trade, and by waiting he
+found it. He would never advertise on hoardings; for many years he had
+no signboard over his shop-front; and whereas the name of 'Bostocks,'
+the huge cheap drapers lower down Machin Street, on the opposite side,
+attacks you at every railway-station and in every tramcar, the name of
+'E. Brunt' is to be seen only in a modest regular advertisement on the
+front page of the _Staffordshire Signal_. Repose, reticence,
+respectability--it was these attributes which he decided his shop should
+possess, and by means of which he succeeded. To enter Brunt's, with its
+silently swinging doors, its broad, easy staircases, its long floors
+covered with warm, red linoleum, its partitioned walls, its smooth
+mahogany counters, its unobtrusive mirrors, its rows of youths and
+virgins in black, and its pervading atmosphere of quietude and
+discretion, was like entering a temple before the act of oblation has
+commenced. You were conscious of some supreme administrative influence
+everywhere imposing itself. That influence was Ezra Brunt. And yet the
+man differed utterly from the thing he had created. His was one of those
+dark and passionate souls which smoulder in this harsh Midland district
+as slag-heaps smoulder on the pit-banks, revealing their strange fires
+only in the darkness.
+
+In 1899 Brunt's establishment occupied four shops, Nos. 52, 56, 58, and
+60, in Machin Street. He had bought the freeholds at a price which timid
+people regarded as exorbitant, but the solicitors of Hanbridge secretly
+applauded his enterprise and shrewdness in anticipating the enormous
+rise in ground-values which has now been in rapid, steady progress there
+for more than a decade. He had thrown the interiors together and rebuilt
+the frontages in handsome freestone. He had also purchased several
+shops opposite, and rumour said that it was his intention to offer these
+latter to the Town Council at a low figure if the Council would cut a
+new street leading from his premises to the Market Square. Such a scheme
+would have met with general approval. But there was one serious hiatus
+in the plans of Ezra Brunt--to wit, No. 54, Machin Street. No. 54,
+separating 52 and 56, was a chemist's shop, shabby but sedate as to
+appearance, owned and occupied by George Christopher Timmis, a mild and
+venerable citizen, and a local preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist
+Connexion. For nearly thirty years Brunt had coveted Mr. Timmis's shop;
+more than twenty years have elapsed since he first opened negotiations
+for it. Mr. Timmis was by no means eager to sell--indeed, his attitude
+was distinctly a repellent one--but a bargain would undoubtedly have
+been concluded had not a report reached the ears of Mr. Timmis to the
+effect that Ezra Brunt had remarked at the Turk's Head that 'th' old
+leech was only sticking out for every brass farthing he could get.' The
+report was untrue, but Mr. Timmis believed it, and from that moment Ezra
+Brunt's chances of obtaining the chemist's shop vanished completely.
+His lawyer expended diplomacy in vain, raising the offer week by week
+till the incredible sum of three thousand pounds was reached. Then Ezra
+Brunt himself saw Mr. Timmis, and without a word of prelude said:
+
+'Will ye take three thousand guineas for this bit o' property?'
+
+'Not thirty thousand guineas,' said Mr. Timmis quietly; the stern pride
+of the benevolent old local preacher had been aroused.
+
+'Then be damned to you!' said Ezra Brunt, who had never been known to
+swear before.
+
+Thenceforth a feud existed, not less bitter because it was a feud in
+which nothing was said and nothing done--a silent and implacable mutual
+resistance. The sole outward sign of it was the dirty and stumpy
+brown-brick shop-front of Mr. Timmis, squeezed in between those massive
+luxurious façades of stone which Ezra Brunt soon afterwards erected. The
+pharmaceutical business of Mr. Timmis was not a very large one, and,
+fiscally, Ezra Brunt could have swallowed him at a meal and suffered no
+inconvenience; but in that the aged chemist had lived on just half his
+small income for some fifty years past, his position was impregnable.
+Hanbridge smiled cynically at this _impasse_ produced by an idle word,
+and, recognising the equality of the antagonists, leaned neither to one
+side nor to the other. At intervals, however, the legend of the feud was
+embroidered with new and effective detail in the mouth of some inventive
+gossip, and by degrees it took high place among those piquant social
+histories which illustrate the real life of a town, and which parents
+recount to their children with such zest in moods of reminiscence.
+
+When George Christopher Timmis buried his wife, Ezra Brunt, as a near
+neighbour, was asked to the funeral. 'The cortège will move at 1.30,'
+ran the printed invitation, and at 1.15 Brunt's carriage was decorously
+in place behind the hearse and the two mourning-coaches. The demeanour
+of the chemist and the draper towards each other was a sublime answer to
+the demands of the occasion; some people even said that the breach had
+been healed, but these were not of the discerning.
+
+The most active person at the funeral was the chemist's only nephew,
+Clive Timmis, partner in a small but prosperous firm of majolica
+manufacturers at Bursley. Clive, who was seldom seen in Hanbridge, made
+a favourable impression on everyone by his pleasing, unaffected manner
+and his air of discretion and success. He was a bachelor of thirty-two,
+and lived in lodgings at Bursley. On the return of the funeral-party
+from the cemetery, Clive Timmis found Brunt's daughter Eva in his
+uncle's house. Uninvited, she had left her place in the private room at
+her father's shop in order to assist Timmis's servant Sarah in the
+preparation of that solid and solemn repast which must inevitably follow
+every proper interment in the Five Towns. Without false modesty, she
+introduced herself to one or two of the men who had surprised her at her
+work, and then quietly departed just as they were sitting down to table
+and Sarah had brought in the hot tea-cakes. Clive Timmis saw her only
+for a moment, but from that moment she was his one thought. During the
+evening, which he spent alone with his uncle, he behaved in every
+particular as a nephew should, yet he was acting a part; his real self
+roved after Ezra Brunt's daughter, wherever she might be. Clive had
+never fallen in love, though several times in his life he had tried hard
+to do so. He had long wished to marry--wished ardently; he had even got
+into the way of regarding every woman he met--and he met many--in the
+light of a possible partner. 'Can it be _she_? he had asked himself a
+thousand times, and then answered half sadly, 'No.' Not one woman had
+touched his imagination, coincided with his dream. It is strange that
+after seeing Eva Brunt he forgot thus to interrogate himself. For a
+fortnight, while he went his ways as usual, her image occupied his
+heart, throwing that once orderly chamber into the wildest confusion;
+and he let it remain, dimly aware of some delicious danger. He inspected
+the image every night before he slept, and every morning when he awoke,
+and made no effort to define its distracting charm; he knew only that
+Eva Brunt was absolutely and in every detail unlike all other women. On
+the second Sunday he murmured during the sermon: 'But I only saw her for
+a minute.' A few days afterwards he took the tram to Hanbridge.
+
+'Uncle,' he said, 'how should you like me to come and live here with
+you? I've been thinking things out a bit, and I thought perhaps you'd
+like it. I expect you must feel rather lonely now.'
+
+The neat, fragrant shop was empty, and the two men stood behind the big
+glass-fronted case of Burroughs and Wellcome's preparations. Clive's
+venerable uncle happened to be looking into a drawer marked 'Gentianæ
+Rad. Pulv.' He closed the drawer with slow hesitation, and then,
+stroking his long white beard, replied in that deliberate voice which
+seemed always to tremble with religious fervour:
+
+'The hand of the Lord is in this thing, Clive. I have wished that you
+might come to live here with me. But I was afraid it would be too far
+from the works.'
+
+'Pooh! that's nothing,' said Clive.
+
+As he lingered at the shop door for the Bursley car to pass the end of
+Machin Street, Eva Brunt went by. He raised his hat with diffidence, and
+she smiled. It was a marvellous chance. His heart leapt into a throb
+which was half agony and half delight.
+
+'I am in love,' he said gravely.
+
+He had just discovered the fact, and the discovery filled him with
+exquisite apprehension.
+
+If he had waited till the age of thirty-two for that springtime of the
+soul which we call love, Clive had not waited for nothing. Eva was a
+woman to enravish the heart of a man whose imagination could pierce the
+agitating secrets immured in that calm and silent bosom. Slender and
+scarcely tall, she belonged to the order of spare, slight-made women,
+who hide within their slim frames an endowment of profound passion far
+exceeding that of their more voluptuously-formed sisters, who never
+coarsen into stoutness, and who at forty are as disturbing as at twenty.
+At this date Eva was twenty-six. She had a rather small, white face,
+which was a mask to the casual observer, and the very mirror of her
+feelings to anyone with eyes to read its signs.
+
+'I tell you what you are like,' said Clive to her once: 'you are like a
+fine racehorse, always on the quiver.'
+
+Yet many people considered her cold and impassive. Her walk and bearing
+showed a sensitive independence, and when she spoke it was usually in
+tones of command. The girls in the shop, where she was a power second
+only to Ezra Brunt, were a little afraid of her, chiefly because she
+poured terrible scorn on their small affectations, jealousies, and
+vendettas. But they liked her because, in their own phrase, 'there was
+no nonsense about' this redoubtable woman. She hated shams and
+make-believes with a bitter and ruthless hatred. She was the heiress to
+at least five thousand a year, and knew it well, but she never
+encouraged her father to complicate their simple mode of life with the
+pomps of wealth. They lived in a house with a large garden at Pireford,
+which is on the summit of the steep ridge between the Five Towns and
+Oldcastle, and they kept two servants and a coachman, who was also
+gardener. Eva paid the servants good wages, and took care to get good
+value therefor.
+
+'It's not often I have any bother with my servants,' she would say, 'for
+they know that if there is any trouble I would just as soon clear them
+out and put on an apron and do the work myself.'
+
+She was an accomplished house-mistress, and could bake her own bread: in
+towns not one woman in a thousand can bake. With the coachman she had
+little to do, for she could not rid herself of a sentimental objection
+to the carriage--it savoured of 'airs'; when she used it she used it as
+she might use a tramcar. It was her custom, every day except Saturday,
+to walk to the shop about eleven o'clock, after her house had been set
+in order. She had been thoroughly trained in the business, and had spent
+a year at a first-rate shop in High Street, Kensington. Millinery was
+her speciality, and she still watched over that department with a
+particular attention; but for some time past she had risen beyond the
+limitations of departments, and assisted her father in the general
+management of the vast concern. In commercial aptitude she resembled the
+typical Frenchwoman.
+
+Although he was her father, Ezra Brunt had the wit to recognise her
+talents, and he always listened to her suggestions, which, however,
+sometimes startled him. One of them was that he should import into the
+Five Towns a modiste from Paris, offering a salary of two hundred a
+year. The old provincial stood aghast. He had the idea that all Parisian
+women were stage-dancers. And to pay four pounds a week to a female!
+
+Nevertheless, Mademoiselle Bertot--styled in the shop 'Madame'--now
+presides over Ezra Brunt's dressmakers, draws her four pounds a week (of
+which she saves two), and by mere nationality has given a unique
+distinction and success to her branch of the business.
+
+Eva occupied a small room opening off the principal showroom, and during
+hours of work she issued thence but seldom. Only customers of the
+highest importance might speak with her. She was a power felt rather
+than seen. Employés who knocked at her door always did so with a certain
+awe of what awaited them on the other side, and a consciousness that the
+moment was unsuitable for levity. 'If you please, Miss Eva----'. Here
+she gave audience to the 'buyers' and window-dressers, listened to
+complaints and excuses, and occasionally had a secret orgy of afternoon
+tea with one or two of her friends. None but these few girls--mostly
+younger than herself, and remarkable only in that their dislike of the
+snobbery of the Five Towns, though less fiercely displayed, agreed with
+her own--really knew Eva. To them alone did she unveil herself, and by
+them she was idolized.
+
+'She is simply splendid when you know her--such a jolly girl!' they
+would say to other people; but other people, especially other women,
+could not believe it. They fearfully respected her because she was very
+well dressed and had quantities of money. But they called her 'a curious
+creature'; it was inconceivable to them that she should choose to work
+in a shop; and her tongue had a causticity which was sometimes
+exceedingly disconcerting and mortifying. As for men, she was shy of
+them, and, moreover, she loathed the elaborate and insincere ritual of
+deference which the average man practises towards women unrelated to
+him, particularly when they are young and rich. Her father she adored,
+without knowing it; for he often angered her, and humiliated her in
+private. As for the rest, she was, after all, only six-and-twenty.
+
+'If you don't mind, I should like to walk along with you,' Clive Timmis
+said to her one Sunday evening in the porch of the Bethesda Chapel.
+
+'I shall be glad,' she answered at once; 'father isn't here, and I'm all
+alone.'
+
+Ezra Brunt was indeed seldom there, counting in the matter of
+attendance at chapel among what were called 'the weaker brethren.'
+
+'I am going over to Oldcastle,' Clive explained calmly.
+
+So began the formal courtship--more than a month after Clive had settled
+in Machin Street, for he was far too discreet to engender by
+precipitancy any suspicion in the haunts of scandal that his true reason
+for establishing himself in his uncle's household was a certain rich
+young woman who was to be found every day next door. Guided as much by
+instinct as by tact, Clive approached Eva with an almost savage
+simplicity and naturalness of manner, ignoring not only her father's
+wealth, but all the feigned punctilio of a wooer. His face said: 'Let
+there be no beating about the bush--I like you.' Hers answered: 'Good!
+we will see.'
+
+From the first he pleased her, and not least in treating her exactly as
+she would have wished to be treated--namely, as a quite plain person of
+that part of the middle class which is neither upper nor lower. Few men
+in the Five Towns would have been capable of forgetting Ezra Brunt's
+income in talking to Ezra Brunt's daughter. Fortunately, Timmis had a
+proud, confident spirit--the spirit of one who, unaided, has wrested
+success from the world's deathlike clutch. Had Eva the reversion of
+fifty thousand a year instead of five, he, Clive, was still a prosperous
+plain man, well able to support a wife in the position to which God had
+called him.
+
+Their walks together grew more and more frequent, and they became
+intimate, exchanging ideas and rejoicing openly at the similarity of
+those ideas. Although there was no concealment in these encounters,
+still, there was a circumspection which resembled the clandestine. By a
+silent understanding Clive did not enter the house at Pireford; to have
+done so would have excited remark, for this house, unlike some, had
+never been the rendezvous of young men; much less, therefore, did he
+invade the shop. No! The chief part of their love-making (for such it
+was, though the term would have roused Eva's contemptuous anger)
+occurred in the streets; in this they did but follow the traditions of
+their class. Thus, the idyll, so matter-of-fact upon the surface, but
+within which glowed secret and adorable fires, progressed towards its
+culmination. Eva, the artless fool--oh, how simple are the wisest at
+times!--thought that the affair was hid from the shop. But was it
+possible? Was it possible that in those tiny bedrooms on the third
+floor, where the heavy evening hours were ever lightened with breathless
+interminable recitals of what some 'he' had said and some 'she' had
+replied, such an enthralling episode should escape discovery? The
+dormitories knew of Eva's 'attachment' before Eva herself. Yet none knew
+how it was known. The whisper arose like Venus from a sea of trivial
+gossip, miraculously, exquisitely. On the night when the first rumour of
+it traversed the passages there was scarcely any sleep at Brunt's, while
+Eva up at Pireford slumbered as a young girl.
+
+On the Thursday afternoon with which we began, Brunt's was deserted save
+for the housekeeper and Eva, who was writing letters in her room.
+
+'I saw you from my window, coming up the street,' she said to Clive,
+'and so I ran down to open the door. Will you come into father's room?
+He is in Manchester for the day, buying.
+
+'I knew that,' said Timmis.
+
+'How did you know?' She observed that his manner was somewhat nervous
+and constrained.
+
+'You yourself told me last night--don't you remember?'
+
+'So I did.'
+
+'That's why I sent the note round this morning to say I'd call this
+afternoon. You got it, I suppose?'
+
+She nodded thoughtfully.
+
+'Well, what is this business you want to talk about?'
+
+It was spoken with a brave carelessness, but he caught the tremor in her
+voice, and saw her little hand shake as it lay on the table amid her
+father's papers. Without knowing why he should do so, he stepped hastily
+forward and seized that hand. Her emotion unmanned him. He thought he
+was going to cry; he could not account for himself.
+
+'Eva,' he said thickly, 'you know what the business is; you know, don't
+you?'
+
+She smiled. That smile, the softness of her hand, the sparkle in her
+eye, the heave of her small bosom ... it was the divinest miracle!
+Clive, manufacturer of majolica, went hot and then cold, and then his
+wits were suddenly his own again.
+
+'That's all right,' he murmured, and sighed, and placed on Eva's lips
+the first kiss that had ever lain there.
+
+'Dear boy,' she said later, 'you should have come up to Pireford, not
+here, and when father was there.'
+
+'Should I?' he answered happily. 'It just occurred to me all of a sudden
+this morning that you would be here, and that I couldn't wait.'
+
+'You will come up to-night and see father?'
+
+'I had meant to.'
+
+'You had better go home now.'
+
+'Had I?'
+
+She nodded, putting her lips tightly together--a trick of hers.
+
+'Come up about half-past eight.'
+
+'Good! I will let myself out.'
+
+He left her, and she gazed dreamily at the window, which looked on to a
+whitewashed yard. The next moment someone else entered the room with
+heavy footsteps. She turned round a little startled.
+
+It was her father.
+
+'Why! You _are_ back early, father! How----' She stopped. Something in
+the old man's glance gave her a premonition of disaster. To this day she
+does not know what accident brought him from Manchester two hours sooner
+than usual, and to Machin Street instead of Pireford.
+
+'Has young Timmis been here?' he inquired curtly.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Ha!' with subdued, sinister satisfaction, 'I saw him going out. He
+didna see me.' Ezra Brunt deposited his hat and sat down.
+
+Intimate with all her father's various moods, she saw instantly and with
+terrible certainty that a series of chances had fatally combined
+themselves against her. If only she had not happened to tell Clive that
+her father would be at Manchester this day! If only her father had
+adhered to his customary hour of return! If only Clive had had the sense
+to make his proposal openly at Pireford some evening! If only he had
+left a little earlier! If only her father had not caught him going out
+by the side-door on a Thursday afternoon when the place was empty!
+Here, she guessed, was the suggestion of furtiveness which had raised
+her father's unreasoning anger, often fierce, and always incalculable.
+
+'Clive Timmis has asked me to marry him, father.'
+
+'Has he!'
+
+'Surely you must have known, father, that he and I were seeing each
+other a great deal.'
+
+'Not from your lips, my girl.'
+
+'Well, father----' Again she stopped, this strong and capable woman,
+gifted with a fine brain to organize and a powerful will to command. She
+quailed, robbed of speech, before the causeless, vindictive, and
+infantile wrath of an old man who happened to be in a bad temper. She
+actually felt like a naughty schoolgirl before him. Such is the
+tremendous influence of lifelong habit, the irresistible power of the
+_patria potestas_ when it has never been relaxed. Ezra Brunt saw in
+front of him only a cowering child. 'Clive is coming up to see you
+to-night,' she went on timidly, clearing her throat.
+
+'Humph! Is he?'
+
+The rosy and tender dream of five minutes ago lay in fragments at Eva's
+feet. She brooded with stricken apprehension upon the forms of
+obstruction which his despotism might choose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning Clive and his uncle breakfasted together as usual in
+the parlour behind, the chemist's shop.
+
+'Uncle,' said Clive brusquely, when the meal was nearly finished, 'I'd
+better tell you that I've proposed to Eva Brunt.'
+
+Old George Timmis lowered the _Manchester Guardian_ and gazed at Clive
+over his steel-rimmed spectacles.
+
+'She is a good girl,' he remarked; 'she will make you a good wife. Have
+you spoken to her father?'
+
+'That's the point. I saw him last night, and I'll tell you what he said.
+These were his words: "You can marry my daughter, Mr. Timmis, when your
+uncle agrees to part with his shop!"'
+
+'That I shall never do, nephew,' said the aged patriarch quietly and
+deliberately.
+
+'Of course you won't, uncle. I shouldn't think of suggesting it. I'm
+merely telling you what he said.' Clive laughed harshly. 'Why,' he
+added, 'the man must be mad!'
+
+'What did the young woman say to that?' his uncle inquired.
+
+Clive frowned.
+
+'I didn't see her last night,' he said. 'I didn't ask to see her. I was
+too angry.'
+
+Just then the post arrived, and there was a letter for Clive, which he
+read and put carefully in his waistcoat pocket.
+
+'Eva writes asking me to go to Pireford to-night,' he said, after a
+pause. 'I'll soon settle it, depend on that. If Ezra Brunt refuses his
+consent, so much the worse for him. I wonder whether he actually
+imagines that a grown man and a grown woman are to be.... Ah well, I
+can't talk about it! It's too silly. I'll be off to the works.'
+
+When Clive reached Pireford that night, Eva herself opened the door to
+him. She was wearing a gray frock, and over it a large white apron,
+perfectly plain.
+
+'My girls are both out to-night,' she said, 'and I was making some puffs
+for the sewing-meeting tea. Come into the breakfast-room.... This way,'
+she added, guiding him. He had entered the house on the previous night
+for the first time. She spoke hurriedly, and, instead of stopping in
+the breakfast-room, wandered uncertainly through it into the greenhouse,
+to which it gave access by means of a French window. In the dark,
+confined space, amid the close-packed blossoms, they stood together. She
+bent down to smell at a musk-plant. He took her hand and drew her soft
+and yielding form towards him and kissed her warm face.
+
+'Oh, Clive!' she said. 'Whatever are we to do?'
+
+'Do?' he replied, enchanted by her instinctive feminine surrender and
+reliance upon him, which seemed the more precious in that creature so
+proud and reserved to all others. 'Do! Where is your father?'
+
+'Reading the _Signal_ in the dining-room.'
+
+Every business man in the Five Towns reads the _Staffordshire Signal_
+from beginning to end every night.
+
+'I will see him. Of course he is your father; but I will just tell
+him--as decently as I can--that neither you nor I will stand this
+nonsense.'
+
+'You mustn't--you mustn't see him.'
+
+'Why not?'
+
+'It will only lead to unpleasantness.'
+
+'That can't be helped.'
+
+'He never, never changes when once he has _said_ a thing. I know him.'
+
+Clive was arrested by something in her tone, something new to him, that
+in its poignant finality seemed to have caught up and expressed in a
+single instant that bitterness of a lifetime's renunciation which falls
+to the lot of most women.
+
+'Will you come outside?' he asked in a different voice.
+
+Without replying, she led the way down the long garden, which ended in
+an ivy-grown brick wall and a panorama of the immense valley of
+industries below. It was a warm, cloudy evening. The last silver tinge
+of an August twilight lay on the shoulder of the hill to the left. There
+was no moon, but the splendid watch-fires of labour flamed from ore-heap
+and furnace across the whole expanse, performing their nightly miracle
+of beauty. Trains crept with noiseless mystery along the middle
+distance, under their canopies of yellow steam. Further off the
+far-extending streets of Hanbridge made a map of starry lines on the
+blackness. To the south-east stared the cold, blue electric lights of
+Knype railway-station. All was silent, save for a distant thunderous
+roar, the giant breathing of the forge at Cauldon Bar Ironworks.
+
+Eva leaned both elbows on the wall and looked forth.
+
+'Do you mean to say,' said Clive, 'that Mr. Brunt will actually stick by
+what he has said?'
+
+'Like grim death,' said Eva.
+
+'But what's his idea?'
+
+'Oh! how can I tell you?' she burst out passionately.
+
+'Perhaps I did wrong. Perhaps I ought to have warned him earlier--said
+to him, "Father, Clive Timmis is courting me!" Ugh! He cannot bear to be
+surprised about anything. But yet he must have known.... It was all an
+accident, Clive--all an accident. He saw you leaving the shop yesterday.
+He would say he _caught_ you leaving the shop--_sneaking_ off like----'
+
+'But, Eva----'
+
+'I know--I know! Don't tell me! But it was that, I am sure. He would
+resent the mere look of things, and then he would think and think, and
+the notion of your uncle's shop would occur to him again, after all
+these years. I can see his thoughts as plain ... My dear, if he had not
+seen you at Machin Street yesterday, or if you had seen him and spoken
+to him, all might have gone right. He would have objected, but he would
+have given way in a day or two. Now he will never give way! I asked you
+just now what was to be done, but I knew all the time that there was
+nothing.'
+
+'There is one thing to be done, Eva, and the sooner the better.'
+
+'Do you mean that old Mr. Timmis must give up his shop to my father?
+Never! never!'
+
+'I mean,' said Clive quietly, 'that we must marry without your father's
+consent.'
+
+She shook her head slowly and sadly, relapsing into calmness.
+
+'You shake your head, Eva, but it must be so.'
+
+'I can't, my dear.'
+
+'Do you mean to say that you will allow your father's childish whim--for
+it's nothing else; he can't find any objection to me as a husband for
+you, and he knows it--that you will allow his childish whim to spoil
+your life and mine? Remember, you are twenty-six and I am thirty-two.'
+
+'I can't do it! I daren't! I'm mad with myself for feeling like this,
+but I daren't! And even if I dared I wouldn't. Clive, you don't know!
+You can't tell how it is!'
+
+Her sorrowful, pathetic firmness daunted him. She was now composed,
+mistress again of herself, and her moral force dominated him.
+
+'Then, you and I are to be unhappy all our lives, Eva?'
+
+The soft influences of the night seemed to direct her voice as, after a
+long pause, she uttered the words: 'No one is ever quite unhappy in all
+this world.' There was another pause, as she gazed steadily down into
+the wonderful valley. 'We must wait.'
+
+'Wait!' echoed Clive with angry grimness. 'He will live for twenty
+years!'
+
+'No one is ever quite unhappy in all this world,' she repeated dreamily,
+as one might turn over a treasure in order to examine it.
+
+Now for the epilogue to the feud. Two years passed, and it happened
+that there was to be a Revival at the Bethesda Chapel. One morning the
+superintendent minister and the revivalist called on Ezra Brunt at his
+shop. When informed of their presence, the great draper had an impulse
+of anger, for, like many stouter chapel-goers than himself, he would
+scarcely tolerate the intrusion of religion into commerce. However, the
+visit had an air of ceremony, and he could not decline to see these
+ambassadors of heaven in his private room. The revivalist, a cheery,
+shrewd man, whose powers of organization were obvious, and who seemed to
+put organization before everything else, pleased Ezra Brunt at once.
+
+'We want a specially good congregation at the opening meeting to-night,'
+said the revivalist. 'Now, the basis of a good congregation must
+necessarily be the regular pillars of the church, and therefore we are
+making a few calls this morning to insure the presence of our chief
+men--the men of influence and position. You will come, Mr. Brunt, and
+you will let it be known among your employés that they will please you
+by coming too?'
+
+Ezra Brunt was by no means a regular pillar of the Bethesda, but he had
+a vague sensation of flattery, and he consented; indeed, there was no
+alternative.
+
+The first hymn was being sung when he reached the chapel. To his
+surprise, he found the place crowded in every part. A man whom he did
+not know led him to a wooden form which had been put in the space
+between the front pews and the Communion-rail. He felt strange there,
+and uneasy, apprehensive.
+
+The usual discreet somnolence of the chapel had been disturbed as by
+some indecorous but formidable awakener; the air was electric; anything
+might occur. Ezra was astounded by the mere volume of the singing; never
+had he heard such singing. At the end of the hymn the congregation sat
+down, hiding their faces in expectation. The revivalist stood erect and
+terrible in the pulpit, no longer a shrewd, cheery man of the world, but
+the very mouthpiece of the wrath and mercy of God. Ezra's
+self-importance dwindled before that gaze, till, from a renowned magnate
+of the Five Towns, he became an item in the multitude of suppliants. He
+profoundly wished he had never come.
+
+'Remember the hymn,' said the revivalist, with austere emphasis:
+
+    '"My richest gain I count but loss,
+    And pour contempt on all my pride."'
+
+The admirable histrionic art with which he intensified the consonants in
+the last line produced a tremendous effect. Not for nothing was this man
+cerebrated throughout Methodism as a saver of souls. When, after a
+pause, he raised his hand and ejaculated, 'Let us pray,' sobs could be
+heard throughout the chapel. The Revival had begun.
+
+At the end of a quarter of an hour Ezra Brunt would have given fifty
+pounds to be outside, but he could not stir; he was magnetized. Soon the
+revivalist came down from the pulpit and stood within the
+Communion-rail, whence he addressed the nearmost part of the people in
+low, soothing tones of persuasion. Apparently he ignored Ezra Brunt, but
+the man was convicted of sin, and felt himself melting like an icicle in
+front of a fire. He recalled the days of his youth, the piety of his
+father and mother, and the long traditions of a stern Dissenting
+family. He had backslidden, slackened in the use of the means of grace,
+run after the things of this world. It is true that none of his chiefest
+iniquities presented themselves to him; he was quite unconscious of them
+even then; but the lesser ones were more than sufficient to overwhelm
+him. Class-leaders were now reasoning with stricken sinners, and Ezra,
+who could not take his eyes off the revivalist, heard the footsteps of
+those who were going to the 'inquiry-room' for more private counsel. In
+vain he argued that he was about to be ridiculous; that the idea of him,
+Ezra Brunt, a professed Wesleyan for half a century, being publicly
+'saved' at the age of fifty-seven was not to be entertained; that the
+town would talk; that his business might suffer if for any reason he
+should be morally bound to apply to it too strictly the principles of
+the New Testament. He was under the spell. The tears coursed down his
+long cheeks, and he forgot to care, but sat entranced by the
+revivalist's marvellous voice. Suddenly, with an awful sob, he bent and
+hid his face in his hands. The spectacle of the old, proud man helpless
+in the grasp of profound emotion was a sight to rend the heart-strings.
+
+'Brother, be of good cheer,' said a tremulous and benign voice above
+him. 'The love of God compasseth all things. Only believe.'
+
+He looked up and saw the venerable face and long white beard of George
+Christopher Timmis.
+
+Ezra Brunt shrank away, embittered and ashamed.
+
+'I cannot,' he murmured with difficulty.
+
+'The love of God is all-powerful.'
+
+'Will it make you part with that bit o' property, think you?' said Ezra
+Brunt, with a kind of despairing ferocity.
+
+'Brother,' replied the aged servant of God, unmoved, 'if my shop is in
+truth a stumbling-block in this solemn hour, you shall have it.'
+
+Ezra Brunt was staggered.
+
+'I believe! I believe!' he cried.
+
+'Praise God!' said the chemist, with majestic joy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three months afterwards Eva Brunt and Clive Timmis were married. It is
+characteristic of the fine sentimentality which underlies the surface
+harshness of the inhabitants of the Five Towns that, though No. 54
+Machin Street was duly transferred to Ezra Brunt, the chemist retiring
+from business, he has never rebuilt it to accord with the rest of his
+premises. In all its shabbiness it stands between the other big dazzling
+shops as a reminding monument.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PHANTOM
+
+
+I
+
+The heart of the Five Towns--that undulating patch of England covered
+with mean streets, and dominated by tall smoking chimneys, whence are
+derived your cups and saucers and plates, some of your coal, and a
+portion of your iron--is Hanbridge, a borough larger and busier than its
+four sisters, and even more grimy and commonplace than they. And the
+heart of Hanbridge is probably the offices of the Five Towns Banking
+Company, where the last trace of magic and romance is beaten out of
+human existence, and the meaning of life is expressed in balances,
+deposits, percentages, and overdrafts--especially overdrafts. In a fine
+suite of rooms on the first floor of the bank building resides Mr.
+Lionel Woolley, the manager, with his wife May and their children. Mrs.
+Woolley is compelled to change her white window-curtains once a week
+because of the smuts. Mr. Woolley, forty-five, rather bald, frigidly
+suave, positive, egotistic, and pontifical, is a specimen of the man of
+business who is nothing else but a man of business. His career has been
+a calculation from which sentiment is entirely omitted; he has no
+instinct for the things which cannot be defined and assessed. Scarcely a
+manufacturer in Hanbridge but who inimically and fearfully regards Mr.
+Woolley as an amazing instance of a creature without a soul; and the
+absence of soul in a fellow-man must be very marked indeed before a
+Hanbridge manufacturer notices it. There are some sixty thousand
+immortal souls in Hanbridge, but they seldom attract attention.
+
+Yet Mr. Woolley was once brought into contact with the things which
+cannot be defined and assessed; once he stood face to face with some
+strange visible resultant of those secret forces that lie beyond the
+human ken. And, moreover, the adventure affected the whole of his
+domestic life. The wonder and the pathos of the story lie in the fact
+that Nature, prodigal though she is known to be, should have wasted the
+rare and beautiful visitation on just Mr. Woolley. Mr. Woolley was
+bathed in romance of the most singular kind, and the precious fluid ran
+off him like water off a duck's back.
+
+
+II
+
+Ten years ago on a Thursday afternoon in July, Lionel Woolley, as he
+walked up through the new park at Bursley to his celibate rooms in Park
+Terrace, was making addition sums out of various items connected with
+the institution of marriage. Bursley is next door to Hanbridge, and
+Lionel happened then to be cashier of the Bursley branch of the bank. He
+had in mind two possible wives, each of whom possessed advantages which
+appealed to him, and he was unable to decide between them by any
+mathematical process. Suddenly, from a glazed shelter near the empty
+bandstand, there emerged in front of him one of the delectable creatures
+who had excited his fancy. May Lawton was twenty-eight, an orphan, and a
+schoolmistress. She, too, had celibate rooms in Park Terrace, and it
+was owing to this coincidence that Lionel had made her acquaintance six
+months previously. She was not pretty, but she was tall, straight, well
+dressed, well educated, and not lacking in experience; and she had a
+little money of her own.
+
+'Well, Mr. Woolley,' she said easily, stopping for him as she raised her
+sunshade, 'how satisfied you look!'
+
+'It's the sight of you,' he replied, without a moment's hesitation.
+
+He had a fine assured way with women (he need not have envied a curate
+accustomed to sewing meetings), and May Lawton belonged to the type of
+girl whose demeanour always challenges the masculine in a man. Gazing at
+her, Lionel was swiftly conscious of several things: the piquancy of her
+snub nose, the brightness of her smile, at once defiant and wistful, the
+lingering softness of her gloved hand, and the extraordinary charm of
+her sunshade, which matched her dress and formed a sort of canopy and
+frame for that intelligent, tantalizing face. He remembered that of late
+he and she had grown very intimate; and it came upon him with a shock,
+as though he had just opened a telegram which said so, that May, and not
+the other girl, was his destined mate. And he thought of her fortune,
+tiny but nevertheless useful, and how clever she was, and how
+inexplicably different from the rest of her sex, and how she would adorn
+his house, and set him off, and help him in his career. He heard himself
+saying negligently to friends: 'My wife speaks French like a native. Of
+course, my wife has travelled a great deal. My wife has thoroughly
+studied the management of children. Now, my wife does understand the art
+of dress. I put my wife's bit of money into so-and-so.' In short, Lionel
+was as near being in love as his character permitted.
+
+And while he walked by May's side past the bowling-greens at the summit
+of the hill, she lightly quizzing the raw newness of the park and its
+appurtenances, he wondered, he honestly wondered, that he could ever
+have hesitated between May Lawton and the other. Her superiority was too
+obvious; she was a woman of the world! She.... In a flash he knew that
+he would propose to her that very afternoon. And when he had suggested
+a stroll towards Moorthorne, and she had deliciously agreed, he was
+conscious of a tumultuous uplifting and splendid carelessness of
+spirits. 'Imagine me bringing it to a climax to-day,' he reflected,
+profoundly pleased with himself. 'Ah well, it will be settled once for
+all!' He admired his own decision; he was quite struck by it. 'I shall
+call her May before I leave her,' he thought, gazing at her, and
+discovering how well the name suited her, with its significances of
+alertness, geniality, and half-mocking coyness.
+
+'So school is closed,' he said, and added humorously: '"Broken up" is
+the technical term, I believe.'
+
+'Yes,' she answered, 'and I had walked out into the park to meditate
+seriously upon the question of my holiday.'
+
+She caught his eye in a net of bright glances, and romance was in the
+air. They had crossed a couple of smoke-soiled fields, and struck into
+the old Hanbridge road just below the abandoned toll-house with its
+broad eaves.
+
+'And whither do your meditations point?' he demanded playfully.
+
+'My meditations point to Switzerland,' she said. 'I have friends in
+Lausanne.'
+
+The reference to foreign climes impressed him.
+
+'Would that I could go to Switzerland too!' he exclaimed; and privately:
+'Now for it! I'm about to begin.'
+
+'Why?' she questioned, with elaborate simplicity.
+
+At the moment, as they were passing the toll-house, the other girl
+appeared surprisingly from round the corner of the toll-house, where the
+lane from Toft End joins the highroad. This second creature was smaller
+than Miss Lawton, less assertive, less intelligent, perhaps, but much
+more beautiful.
+
+Everyone halted and everyone blushed.
+
+'May!' the interrupter at length stammered.
+
+'May!' responded Miss Lawton lamely.
+
+The other girl was named May too--May Deane, child of the well-known
+majolica manufacturer, who lived with his sons and daughter in a
+solitary and ancient house at Toft End.
+
+Lionel Woolley said nothing until they had all shaken hands--his famous
+way with women seemed to have deserted him--and then he actually stated
+that he had forgotten an appointment, and must depart. He had gone
+before the girls could move.
+
+When they were alone, the two Mays fronted each other, confused,
+hostile, almost homicidal.
+
+'I hope I didn't spoil a _tête-à-tête_,' said May Deane, stiffly and
+sharply, in a manner quite foreign to her soft and yielding nature.
+
+The schoolmistress, abandoning herself to an inexplicable but
+overwhelming impulse, took breath for a proud lie.
+
+'No,' she answered; 'but if you had come three minutes earlier----'
+
+She smiled calmly.
+
+'Oh!' murmured May Deane, after a pause.
+
+
+III
+
+That evening May Deane returned home at half-past nine. She had been
+with her two brothers to a lawn-tennis party at Hillport, and she told
+her father, who was reading the _Staffordshire Signal_ in his accustomed
+solitude, that the boys were staying later for cards, but that she had
+declined to stay because she felt tired. She kissed the old widower
+good-night, and said that she should go to bed at once. But before
+retiring she visited the housekeeper in the kitchen in order to discuss
+certain household matters: Jim's early breakfast, the proper method of
+washing Herbert's new flannels (Herbert would be very angry if they were
+shrunk), and the dog-biscuits for Carlo. These questions settled, she
+went to her room, drew the blind, lighted some candles, and sat down
+near the window.
+
+She was twenty-two, and she had about her that strange and charming
+nunlike mystery which often comes to a woman who lives alone and
+unguessed-at among male relatives. Her room was her bower. No one, save
+the servants and herself, ever entered it. Mr. Deane and Jim and Bertie
+might glance carelessly through the open door in passing along the
+corridor, but had they chanced in idle curiosity to enter, the room
+would have struck them as unfamiliar, and they might perhaps have
+exclaimed with momentary interest, 'So this is May's room!' And some
+hint that May was more than a daughter and sister--a woman, withdrawn,
+secret, disturbing, living her own inner life side by side with the
+household life--might have penetrated their obtuse paternal and
+fraternal masculinity. Her beautiful face (the nose and mouth were
+perfect, and at either extremity of the upper lip grew a soft down), her
+dark hair, her quiet voice and her gentle acquiescence (diversified by
+occasional outbursts of sarcasm), appealed to them and won them; but
+they accepted her as something of course, as something which went
+without saying. They adored her, and did not know that they adored her.
+
+May took off her hat, stuck the pins into it again, and threw it on the
+bed, whose white and green counterpane hung down nearly to the floor on
+either side. Then she lay back in the chair, and, pulling away the
+blind, glanced through the window; the moon, rather dim behind the
+furnace lights of Red Cow Ironworks, was rising over Moorthorne. May
+dropped the blind with a wearied gesture, and turned within the room,
+examining its contents as if she had not seen them before: the wardrobe,
+the chest of drawers, which was also a dressing-table, the washstand,
+the dwarf book-case with its store of Edna Lyalls, Elizabeth Gaskells,
+Thackerays, Charlotte Yonges, Charlotte Brontës, a Thomas Hardy or so,
+and some old school-books. She looked at the pictures, including a
+sampler worked by a deceased aunt, at the loud-ticking Swiss clock on
+the mantelpiece, at the higgledy-piggledy photographs there, at the new
+Axminster carpet, the piece of linoleum in front of the washstand, and
+the bad joining of the wallpaper to the left of the door. She missed
+none of the details which she knew so well, with such long monotonous
+intimacy, and sighed.
+
+Then she got up from the chair, and, opening a small drawer in the chest
+of drawers, put her hand familiarly to the back and drew forth a
+photograph. She carried the photograph to the light of the candles on
+the mantelpiece, and gazed at it attentively, puckering her brows. It
+was a portrait of Lionel Woolley. Heaven knows by what subterfuge or
+lucky accident she had obtained it, for Lionel certainly had not given
+it to her. She loved Lionel. She had loved him for five years, with a
+love silent, blind, intense, irrational, and too elemental to be
+concealed. Everyone knew of May's passion. Many women admired her taste;
+a few were shocked and puzzled by it. All the men of her acquaintance
+either pitied or despised her for it. Her father said nothing. Her
+brothers were less cautious, and summed up their opinion of Lionel in
+the curt, scornful assertion that he showed a tendency to cheat at
+tennis. But May would never hear ill of him; he was a god to her, and
+she could not hide her worship. For more than a year, until lately, she
+had been almost sure of him, and then came a faint vague rumour
+concerning Lionel and May Lawton, a rumour which she had refused to take
+seriously. The encounter of that afternoon, and Miss Lawton's triumphant
+remark, had dazed her. For seven hours she had existed in a kind of
+semi-conscious delirium, in which she could perceive nothing but the
+fatal fact, emerging more clearly every moment from the welter of her
+thoughts, that she had lost Lionel. Lionel had proposed to May Lawton,
+and been accepted, just before she surprised them together; and Lionel,
+with a man's excusable cowardice, had left his betrothed to announce
+the engagement.
+
+She tore up the photograph, put the fragments in the grate, and set a
+light to them.
+
+Her father's step sounded on the stairs; he hesitated, and knocked
+sharply at her door.
+
+'What's burning, May?'
+
+'It's all right, father,' she answered calmly, 'I'm only burning some
+papers in the fire-grate.'
+
+'Well, see you don't burn the house down.'
+
+He passed on.
+
+Then she found a sheet of notepaper, and wrote on it in pencil, using
+the mantelpiece for a desk: 'Dear home. Good-night, good-bye.' She
+cogitated, and wrote further: 'Forgive me.--MAY.'
+
+She put the message in an envelope, and wrote on the envelope 'Jim,' and
+placed it prominently in front of the clock. But after she had looked at
+it for a minute, she wrote 'Father' above Jim, and then 'Herbert' below.
+
+There were noises in the hall; the boys had returned earlier than she
+expected. As they went along the corridor and caught a glimpse of her
+light under the door, Jim cried gaily: 'Now then, out with that light! A
+little thing like you ought to be asleep hours since.'
+
+She listened for the bang of their door, and then, very hurriedly, she
+removed her pink frock and put on an old black one, which was rather
+tight in the waist. And she donned her hat, securing it carefully with
+both pins, extinguished the candles, and crept quietly downstairs, and
+so by the back-door into the garden. Carlo, the retriever, came halfway
+out of his kennel and greeted her in the moonlight with a yawn. She
+patted his head and ran stealthily up the garden, through the gate, and
+up the waste green land towards the crown of the hill.
+
+
+IV
+
+The top of Toft End is the highest land in the Five Towns, and from it
+may be clearly seen all the lurid evidences of manufacture which sweep
+across the borders of the sky on north, east, west, and south.
+North-eastwards lie the moorlands, and far off Manifold, the 'metropolis
+of the moorlands,' as it is called. On this night the furnaces of Red
+Cow Ironworks, in the hollow to the east, were in full blast; their
+fluctuating yellow light illuminated queerly the grass of the fields
+above Deane's house, and the regular roar of their breathing reached
+that solitary spot like the distant rumour of some leviathan beast
+angrily fuming. Further away to the south-west the Cauldon Bar Ironworks
+reproduced the same phenomena, and round the whole horizon, near and
+far, except to the north-east, the lesser fires of labour leapt and
+flickered and glinted in their mists of smoke, burning ceaselessly, as
+they burned every night and every day at all seasons of all years. The
+town of Bursley slept in the deep valley to the west, and vast Hanbridge
+in the shallower depression to the south, like two sleepers accustomed
+to rest quietly amid great disturbances; the beacons of their Town Halls
+and churches kept watch, and the whole scene was dominated by the
+placidity of the moon, which had now risen clear of the Red Cow furnace
+clouds, and was passing upwards through tracts of stars.
+
+Into this scene, climbing up from the direction of Manifold, came Lionel
+Woolley, nearly at midnight, having walked some eighteen miles in a
+vain effort to re-establish his self-satisfaction by a process of
+reasoning and ingenious excuses. Lionel felt that in the brief episode
+of the afternoon he had scarcely behaved with dignity. In other words,
+he was fully and painfully aware that he must have looked a fool, a
+coward, an ass, a contemptible and pitiful person, in the eyes of at
+least one girl, if not of two. He did not like this--no man would have
+liked it; and to Lionel the memory of an undignified act was acute
+torture. Why had he bidden the girls adieu and departed? Why had he, in
+fact, run away? What precisely would May Lawton think of him? How could
+he explain his conduct to her--and to himself? And had that worshipping,
+affectionate thing, May Deane, taken note of his confusion--of the
+confusion of him who was never confused, who was equal to every occasion
+and every emergency? These were some of the questions which harried him
+and declined to be settled. He had walked to Manifold, and had tea at
+the Roebuck, and walked back, and still the questions were harrying; and
+as he came over the hill by the field-path, and descried the lone house
+of the Deanes in the light of the Red Cow furnaces and of the moon, the
+worship of May Deane seemed suddenly very precious to him, and he could
+not bear to think that any stupidity of his should have impaired it.
+
+Then he saw May Deane walking slowly across the field, close to an
+abandoned pit-shaft, whose low protecting circular wall of brick was
+crumbling to ruin on the side nearest to him.
+
+She stopped, appeared to gaze at him intently, turned, and began to
+approach him. And he too, moved by a mysterious impulse which he did not
+pause to examine, swerved, and quickened his step in order to lessen the
+distance between them. He did not at first even feel surprise that she
+should be wandering solitary on the hill at that hour. Presently she
+stood still, while he continued to move forward. It was as if she drew
+him; and soon, in the pale moonlight and the wavering light of the
+furnaces, he could decipher all the details of her face, and he saw that
+she was smiling fondly, invitingly, admiringly, lustrously, with the old
+undiminished worship and affection. And he perceived a dark
+discoloration on her right cheek, as though she had suffered a blow,
+but this mark did not long occupy his mind. He thought suddenly of the
+strong probability that her father would leave a nice little bit of
+money to each of his three children; and he thought of her beauty, and
+of her timid fragility in the tight black dress, and of her immense and
+unquestioning love for him, which would survive all accidents and
+mishaps. He seemed to sink luxuriously into this grand passion of hers
+(which he deemed quite natural and proper) as into a soft feather-bed.
+To live secure in an atmosphere of exhaustless worship; to keep a fount
+of balm and admiration for ever in the house, a bubbling spring of
+passionate appreciation which would be continually available for the
+refreshment of his self-esteem! To be always sure of an obedience blind
+and willing, a subservience which no tyranny and no harshness and no
+whim would rouse into revolt; to sit on a throne with so much beauty
+kneeling at his feet!
+
+And the possession of her beauty would be a source of legitimate pride
+to him. People would often refer to the beautiful Mrs. Woolley.
+
+He felt that in sending May Deane to interrupt his highly emotional
+conversation with May Lawton Providence had watched over him and done
+him a good turn. May Lawton had advantages, and striking advantages, but
+he could not be sure of her. The suspicion that if she married him she
+would marry him for her own ends caused him a secret disquiet, and he
+feared that one day, perhaps one morning at breakfast, she might take it
+into her intelligent head to mock him, to exercise upon him her gift of
+irony, and to intimate to him that if he fancied she was his slave he
+was deceived. That she sincerely admired him he never for an instant
+doubted. But----
+
+And, moreover, the unfortunate episode of the afternoon might have
+cooled her ardour to freezing-point.
+
+He stood now in front of his worshipper, and the notion crossed his mind
+that in after-years he could say to his friends: 'I proposed to my wife
+at midnight under the moon. Not many men have done that.'
+
+'Good-evening,' he ventured to the girl; and he added with bravado:
+'We've met before to-day, haven't we?'
+
+She made no reply, but her smile was more affectionate, more inviting,
+than ever.
+
+'I'm glad of this opportunity--very glad,' he proceeded. 'I've been
+wanting to ... You must know, my dear girl, how I feel....'
+
+She gave a gesture, charming in its sweet humility, as if to say: 'Who
+am I that I should dare----'
+
+And then he proposed to her, asked her to share his life, and all that
+sort of thing; and when he had finished he thought, 'It's done now,
+anyway.'
+
+Strange to relate, she offered no immediate reply, but she bent a little
+towards him with shining, happy eyes. He had an impulse to seize her in
+his arms and kiss her, but prudence suggested that he should defer the
+rite. She turned and began to walk slowly and meditatively towards the
+pit-shaft. He followed almost at her side, but a foot or so behind,
+waiting for her to speak. And as he waited, expectant, he looked at her
+profile and reflected how well the name May suited her, with its
+significances of shyness and dreamy hope, and hidden fire and the
+modesty of spring.
+
+And while he was thus savouring her face, and they were still ten yards
+from the pit-shaft, she suddenly disappeared from his vision, as it were
+by a conjuring trick. He had a horrible sensation in his spinal column.
+He was not the man to mistrust the evidence of his senses, and he knew,
+therefore, that he had been proposing to a phantom.
+
+
+V
+
+The next morning--early, because of Jim's early breakfast--when May
+Deane's disappearance became known to the members of the household, Jim
+had the idea of utilizing Carlo in the search for her. The retriever
+went straight, without a fault, to the pit-shaft, and May was discovered
+alive and unscathed, save for a contusion of the face and a sprain in
+the wrist.
+
+Her suicidal plunge had been arrested, at only a few feet from the top
+of the shaft, by a cross-stay of timber, upon which she lay prone. There
+was no reason why the affair should be made public, and it was not. It
+was suppressed into one of those secrets which embed themselves in the
+history of families, and after two or three generations blossom into
+romantic legends full of appropriate circumstantial detail.
+
+Lionel Woolley spent a woeful night at his rooms. He did not know what
+to do, and on the following day May Lawton encountered him again, and
+proved by her demeanour that the episode of the previous afternoon had
+caused no estrangement. Lionel vacillated. The sway of the
+schoolmistress was almost restored, and it would have been restored
+fully had he not been preoccupied by a feverish curiosity--the curiosity
+to know whether or not May Deane was dead. He felt that she must indeed
+be dead, and he lived through the day expectant of the news of her
+sudden decease. Towards night his state of mind was such that he was
+obliged to call at the Deanes'. May heard him, and insisted on seeing
+him; more, she insisted on seeing him alone in the breakfast-room, where
+she reclined, interestingly white, on the sofa. Her father and brothers
+objected strongly to the interview, but they yielded, afraid that a
+refusal might induce hysteria and worse things.
+
+And when Lionel Woolley came into the room, May, steeped in felicity,
+related to him the story of her impulsive crime.
+
+'I was so happy,' she said, 'when I knew that Miss Lawton had deceived
+me.' And before he could inquire what she meant, she continued rapidly:
+'I must have been unconscious, but I felt you were there, and something
+of me went out towards you. And oh! the answer to your question--I heard
+your question; the real _me_ heard it, but that _something_ could not
+speak.'
+
+'My question?'
+
+'You asked a question, didn't you?' she faltered, sitting up.
+
+He hesitated, and then surrendered himself to her immense love and sank
+into it, and forgot May Lawton.
+
+'Yes,' he said.
+
+'The answer is yes. Oh, you must have known the answer would be yes! You
+did know, didn't you?'
+
+He nodded grandly.
+
+She sighed with delicious and overwhelming joy.
+
+In the ecstasy of the achievement of her desire the girl gave little
+thought to the psychic aspect of the possibly unique wooing.
+
+As for Lionel, he refused to dwell on it even in thought. And so that
+strange, magic, yearning effluence of a soul into a visible projection
+and shape was ignored, slurred over, and, after ten years of domesticity
+in the bank premises, is gradually being forgotten.
+
+He is a man of business, and she, with her fading beauty, her ardent,
+continuous worship of the idol, her half-dozen small children, the
+eldest of whom is only eight, and the white window-curtains to change
+every week because of the smuts--do you suppose she has time or
+inclination to ponder upon the theory of the subliminal consciousness
+and kindred mysteries?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TIDDY-FOL-LOL
+
+
+It was the dinner-hour, and a group of ragged and clay-soiled apprentice
+boys were making a great noise in the yard of Henry Mynors and Co.'s
+small, compact earthenware manufactory up at Toft End. Toft End caps the
+ridge to the east of Bursley; and Bursley, which has been the home of
+the potter for ten centuries, is the most ancient of the Five Towns in
+Staffordshire. The boys, dressed for the most part in shirt, trousers,
+and boots, all equally ragged and insecure, were playing at prison-bars.
+
+Soon the game ended abruptly in a clamorous dispute upon a point of law,
+and it was not recommenced. The dispute dying a natural death, the
+tireless energies of the boys needed a fresh outlet. Inspired by a
+common instinct, they began at once to bait one of their number, a
+slight youngster of twelve years, much better clothed than the rest, who
+had adventurously strolled in from a neighbouring manufactory. This
+child answered their jibes in an amiable, silly, drawling tone which
+seemed to justify the epithet 'Loony,' frequently applied to him. Now
+and then he stammered; and then companions laughed loud, and he with
+them. It was known that several years ago he had fallen down a flight of
+stone steps, alighting on the back of his head, and that ever since he
+had been deaf of one ear and under some trifling mental derangement. His
+sublime calmness under their jests baffled them until the terrible
+figure of Mr. Machin, the engine-man, standing at the door of the
+slip-house, caught their attention and suggested a plan full of joyous
+possibilities. They gathered round the lad, and, talking in subdued
+murmurs, unanimously urged him with many persuasions to a certain course
+of action. He declined the scheme, and declined again. Suddenly a boy
+shouted:
+
+'Thee dars' na'!'
+
+'I dare,' was the drawled, smiling answer.
+
+'I tell thee thee dars' na'!'
+
+'I tell thee I dare.' And thereupon he slowly but resolutely set out
+for the slip-house door and Mr. Machin.
+
+Eli Machin was beyond doubt the most considerable employé on Clarke's
+'bank' (manufactory). Even Henry Clarke approached him with a
+subtly-indicated deference, and whenever Silas Emery, the immensely rich
+and miserly sleeping partner in the firm, came up to visit the works,
+these two old men chatted as old friends. In a modern earthenware
+manufactory the engine-room is the source of all activity, for, owing to
+the inventive genius of a famous and venerable son of the Five Towns,
+steam now presides at nearly every stage in the long process of turning
+earth into ware. It moves the pug-mill, the jollies, and the marvellous
+batting machines, dries the unfired clay, heats the printers' stoves,
+and warms the offices where the 'jacket-men' dwell. Coal is a tremendous
+item in the cost of production, and a competent, economical engine-man
+can be sure of good wages and a choice of berths; he is desired like a
+good domestic servant. Eli Machin was the prince of engine-men. His
+engine never went wrong, his coal bills were never extravagant, and
+(supreme virtue!) he was never absent on Mondays. From his post in the
+slip-house he watched over the whole works like a father, stern, gruff,
+forbidding, but to be trusted absolutely. He was sixty years old, and
+had been 'putting by' for nearly half a century. He lived in a tiny
+villa-cottage with his bed-ridden, cheerful wife, and lent small sums on
+mortgage of approved freeholds at 5 per cent.--no more and no less.
+Secure behind this rampart of saved money, he was the equal of the King
+on the throne. Not a magnate in all the Five Towns who would dare to be
+condescending to Eli Machin. He had been a sidesman at the old church. A
+trades-union had once asked him to become a working-man candidate for
+the Bursley Town Council, but he had refused because he did not care for
+the possibility of losing caste by being concerned in a strike. His
+personal respectability was entirely unsullied, and he worshipped this
+abstract quality as he worshipped God.
+
+There was only one blot--but how foul!--on Eli Machin's career, and that
+had been dropped by his daughter Miriam, when, defying his authority,
+she married a scene-shifter at Hanbridge Theatre. The atrocious idea of
+being connected with the theatre had rendered him speechless for a
+time. He could but endure it in the most awful silence that ever hid
+passionate feeling. Then one day he had burst out, 'The wench is no
+better than a tiddy-fol-lol!' Only this solitary phrase--nothing else.
+
+What a tiddy-fol-lol was no one quite knew; but the word, getting about,
+stuck to him, and for some weeks boys used to shout it after him in the
+streets, until he caught one of them, and in thirty seconds put an end
+to the practice. Thenceforth Miriam, with all hers, was dead to him.
+When her husband expired of consumption, Eli Machin saw the avenging arm
+of the Lord in action; and when her boy grew to be a source of painful
+anxiety to her, he said to himself that the wrath of Heaven was not yet
+cooled towards this impious daughter. The passage of fifteen years had
+apparently in no way softened his resentment.
+
+The challenged lad in Mynors' yard slowly approached the slip-house
+door, and halted before Eli Machin, grinning.
+
+'Well, young un,' the old man said absently, 'what dost want?'
+
+'Tiddy-fol-lol, grandfeyther,' the child drawled in his silly,
+irritating voice, and added: 'They said I darena say it to ye.'
+
+Without and instant's hesitation Eli Machin raised his still powerful
+arm, and, catching the boy under the ear, knocked him down. The other
+boys yelled with unaffected pleasure and ran away.
+
+'Get up, and be off wi' ye. Ye dunna belong to this bank,' said Eli
+Machin in cold anger to the lad. But the lad did not stir; the lad's
+eyes were closed, and he lay white on the stones.
+
+Eli Machin bent down, and peered through his spectacles at the prone
+form upon which the mid-day sun was beating.
+
+'It's Miriam's boy!' he ejaculated under his breath, and looked round as
+if in inquiry--the yard was empty. Then with quick decision he picked up
+this limp and inconvenient parcel of humanity and hastened--ran--with it
+out of the yard into the road.
+
+Down the road he ran, turned to the left into Clowes Street, and stopped
+before a row of small brown cottages. At the open door of one of these
+cottages a woman sat sewing. She was rather stout and full-bosomed,
+with a fair, fresh face, full of sense and peace; she looked under
+thirty, but was older.
+
+'Here's thy Tommy, Miriam,' said Eli Machin shortly. 'He give me some of
+his sauce, and I doubt I've done him an injury.'
+
+The woman dropped her sewing.
+
+'Eh, dear!' she cried, 'is that lad o' mine in mischief again? I do hope
+he's no limb brokken.'
+
+'It in'na that,' said the old man, 'but he's dazed-like. Better lay him
+on th' squab.'
+
+She calmly took Tommy and placed him gently down on the check-covered
+sofa under the window. 'Come in, father, do.'
+
+The man obeyed, astonished at the entire friendliness of this daughter,
+whom, though he had frequently seen her, he had never spoken to for more
+than ten years. Her manner, at once filial and quite natural, perfectly
+ignored the long breach, and disclosed no trace of animosity.
+
+Father and daughter examined the unconscious child. Pale, pulseless,
+cold, he lay on the sofa like a corpse except for the short, faint
+breaths which he drew through his blue lips.
+
+'I doubt I've killed him,' said Eli.
+
+'Nay, nay, father!' And her face actually smiled. This supremacy of the
+soul against years of continued misfortune lifted her high above him,
+and he suddenly felt himself an inferior creature.
+
+'I'll go for th' doctor,' he said.
+
+'Nay! I shall need ye.' And she put her head out of the window. 'Mrs.
+Walley, will ye let your Lucy run quick for th' club doctor? my Tommy's
+hurt.'
+
+The whole street awoke instantly from its nap, and in a few moments
+every door was occupied. Miriam closed her own door softly, as though
+she might wake the boy, and spoke in whispers to people through the
+window, finally telling them to go away. When the doctor came, half an
+hour afterwards, she had done all that she knew for Tommy, without the
+slightest apparent result.
+
+'What is it?' asked the doctor curtly, as he lifted the child's thin and
+lifeless hand.
+
+Eli Machin explained that he had boxed the boy's ear.
+
+'Tommy was impudent to his grandfather,' Miriam added hastily.
+
+'Which ear?' the doctor inquired. It was the left. He gazed into it,
+and then raised the boy's right leg and arm. 'There is no paralysis,' he
+said. Then he felt the heart, and then took out his stethoscope and
+applied it, listening intently.
+
+'Canst hear owt?' the old man said.
+
+'I cannot,' he answered.
+
+'Don't say that, doctor--don't say that! said Miriam, with an accent of
+appeal.
+
+'In these cases it is almost impossible to tell whether the patient is
+alive or dead. We must wait. Mrs. Baddeley, make a mustard plaster for
+his feet, and we will put another over the heart.' And so they waited
+one hour, while the clock ticked and the mustard plasters gradually
+cooled. Then Tommy's lips parted.
+
+After another half-hour the doctor said:
+
+'I must go now; I will come again at six. Do nothing but apply fresh
+plasters. Be sure to keep his neck free. He is breathing, but I may as
+well be plain with you--there is a great risk of your child dying in
+this condition.'
+
+Neighbours were again at the window, and Miriam drew the blind, waving
+them away. At six o'clock the doctor reappeared. 'There is no change,'
+he remarked. 'I will call in before I go to bed.'
+
+When he lifted the latch for the third time, at ten o'clock, Eli Machin
+and Miriam still sat by the sofa, and Tommy still lay thereon, moveless,
+a terrible enigma. But the glass lamp was lighted on the mantelpiece,
+and Miriam's sewing, by which she earned a livelihood, had been hidden
+out of sight.
+
+'There is no change,' said the doctor. 'You can do nothing except hope.'
+
+'And pray,' the calm mother added.
+
+Eli neither stirred nor spoke. For nine hours he had absolutely
+forgotten his engine. He knew the boy would die.
+
+The clock struck eleven, twelve, one, two, three, each time fretting the
+nerves of the old man like a rasp. It was the hour of summer dawn. A
+cold gray light fell unkindly across the small figure on the sofa.
+
+'Open th' door a bit, father,' said Miriam. 'This parlour's gettin'
+close; th' lad canna breathe.'
+
+'Nay, lass,' Eli sighed, as he stumbled obediently to the door. 'The
+lad'll breathe no more. I've killed him i' my anger.' He frowned
+heavily, as though someone was annoying him.
+
+'Hist!' she exclaimed, when, after extinguishing the lamp, she returned
+to her boy's side. 'He's reddened--he's reddened! Look thee at his
+cheeks, father!' She seized the child's inert hands and rubbed them
+between her own. The blood was now plain in Tommy's face. His legs
+faintly twitched. His breathing was slower. Miriam moved the coverlet
+and put her head upon his heart. 'It's beating loud, father,' she cried.
+'Bless God!'
+
+Eli stared at the child with the fixity of a statue. Then Tommy opened
+his eyes for an instant. The old man groaned. Tommy looked vacantly
+round, closed his eyes again, and was unmistakably asleep. He slept for
+one minute, and then waked. Eli involuntarily put a hand on the sofa.
+Tommy gazed at him, and, with the most heavenly innocent smile of
+recognition, lightly touched his grandfather's hand. Then he turned over
+on his right side. In the anguish of sudden joy Eli gave a deep, piteous
+sob. That smile burnt into him like a coal of fire.
+
+'Now for the beef-tea,' said Miriam, crying.
+
+'Beef-tea?' the boy repeated after her, mildly questioning.
+
+'Yes, my poppet,' she answered; and then aside, 'Father, he can hear i'
+his left ear. Did ye notice it?'
+
+'It's a miracle--a miracle of God!' said Eli.
+
+In a few hours Tommy was as well as ever--indeed, better; not only was
+his hearing fully restored, but he had ceased to stammer, and the thin,
+almost imperceptible cloud upon his intellect was dissipated. The doctor
+expressed but little surprise at these phenomena, and, in fact, stated
+that similar things had occurred often before, and were duly written
+down in the books of medicine. But Eli Machin's firm, instinctive faith
+that Providence had intervened will never be shaken.
+
+Miriam and Tommy now live in the villa-cottage with the old people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE IDIOT
+
+
+William Froyle, ostler at the Queen's Arms at Moorthorne, took the
+letter, and, with a curt nod which stifled the loquacity of the village
+postman, went at once from the yard into the coach-house. He had
+recognised the hand-writing on the envelope, and the recognition of it
+gave form and quick life to all the vague suspicions that had troubled
+him some months before, and again during the last few days. He felt
+suddenly the near approach of a frightful calamity which had long been
+stealing towards him.
+
+A wire-sheathed lantern, set on a rough oaken table, cast a wavering
+light round the coach-house, and dimly showed the inner stable. Within
+the latter could just be distinguished the mottled-gray flanks of a fat
+cob which dragged its chain occasionally, making the large slow
+movements of a horse comfortably lodged in its stall. The pleasant odour
+of animals and hay filled the wide spaces of the shed, and through the
+half-open door came a fresh thin mist rising from the rain-soaked yard
+in the November evening.
+
+Froyle sat down on the oaken table, his legs dangling, and looked again
+at the envelope before opening it. He was a man about thirty years of
+age, with a serious and thoughtful, rather heavy countenance. He had a
+long light moustache, and his skin was a fresh, rosy salmon colour; his
+straw-tinted hair was cut very short, except over the forehead, where it
+grew full and bushy. Dressed in his rough stable corduroys, his forearms
+bare and white, he had all the appearance of the sturdy Englishman, the
+sort of Englishman that crosses the world in order to find vent for his
+taciturn energy on virgin soils. From the whole village he commanded and
+received respect. He was known for a scholar, and it was his scholarship
+which had obtained for him the proud position of secretary to the
+provident society styled the Queen's Arms Slate Club. His respectability
+and his learning combined had enabled him to win with dignity the hand
+of Susie Trimmer, the grocer's daughter, to whom he had been engaged
+about a year. The village could not make up its mind concerning that
+match; without doubt it was a social victory for Froyle, but everyone
+wondered that so sedate and sagacious a man should have seen in Susie a
+suitable mate.
+
+He tore open the envelope with his huge forefinger, and, bending down
+towards the lantern, began to read the letter. It ran:
+
+    'OLDCASTLE STREET,
+
+    'BURSLEY.
+
+    'DEAR WILL,
+
+    'I asked father to tell you, but he would not. He said I must
+    write. Dear Will, I hope you will never see me again. As you will
+    see by the above address, I am now at Aunt Penrose's at Bursley.
+    She is awful angry, but I was obliged to leave the village because
+    of my shame. I have been a wicked girl. It was in July. You know
+    the man, because you asked me about him one Sunday night. He is no
+    good. He is a villain. Please forget all about me. I want to go to
+    London. So many people know me here, and what with people coming
+    in from the village, too. Please forgive me.
+
+    'S. TRIMMER.'
+
+After reading the letter a second time, Froyle folded it up and put it
+in his pocket. Beyond a slight unaccustomed pallor of the red cheeks, he
+showed no sign of emotion. Before the arrival of the postman he had been
+cleaning his master's bicycle, which stood against the table. To this he
+returned. Kneeling down in some fresh straw, he used his dusters slowly
+and patiently--rubbing, then stopping to examine the result, and then
+rubbing again. When the machine was polished to his satisfaction, he
+wheeled it carefully into the stable, where it occupied a stall next to
+that of the cob. As he passed back again, the animal leisurely turned
+its head and gazed at Froyle with its large liquid eyes. He slapped the
+immense flank. Content, the animal returned to its feed, and the
+weighted chain ran down with a rattle.
+
+The fortnightly meeting of the Slate Club was to take place at eight
+o'clock that evening. Froyle had employed part of the afternoon in
+making ready his books for the event, to him always so solemn and
+ceremonious; and the affairs of the club were now prominent in his mind.
+He was sorry that it would be impossible for him to attend the meeting;
+fortunately, all the usual preliminaries were complete.
+
+He took a piece of notepaper from a little hanging cupboard, and,
+sprawling across the table, began to write under the lantern. The pencil
+seemed a tiny toy in his thick roughened fingers:
+
+    '_To Mr. Andrew McCall, Chairman Queen's Arms Slate Club._
+
+    'DEAR SIR,
+
+    'I regret to inform you that I shall not be at the meeting
+    to-night. You will find the books in order....'
+
+Here he stopped, biting the end of the pencil in thought. He put down
+the pencil and stepped hastily out of the stable, across the yard, and
+into the hotel. In the large room, the room where cyclists sometimes
+took tea and cold meat during the summer season, the long deal table
+and the double line of oaken chairs stood ready for the meeting. A fire
+burnt warmly in the big grate, and the hanging lamp had been lighted. On
+the wall was a large card containing the rules of the club, which had
+been written out in a fair hand by the schoolmaster. It was to this card
+that Froyle went. Passing his thumb down the card, he paused at Rule
+VII.:
+
+    'Each member shall, on the death of another member, pay 1s. for
+    benefit of widow or nominee of deceased, same to be paid within
+    one month after notice given.'
+
+    'Or nominee--nominee,' he murmured reflectively, staring at the
+    card. He mechanically noticed, what he had noticed often before
+    with disdain, that the chairman had signed the rules without the
+    use of capitals.
+
+    He went back to the dusk of the coach-house to finish his letter,
+    still murmuring the word 'nominee,' of whose meaning he was not
+    quite sure:
+
+    'I request that the money due to me from the Slate Club on my death
+    shall be paid to my nominee, Miss Susan Trimmer, now staying with
+    her aunt, Mrs. Penrose, at Bursley.
+
+    'Yours respectfully,
+
+    'WILLIAM FROYLE.'
+
+After further consideration he added:
+
+     'P.S.--My annual salary of sixpence per member would be due at the
+     end of December. If so be the members would pay that, or part of
+     it, should they consider the same due, to Susan Trimmer as well, I
+     should be thankful.--Yours resp, W.F.'
+
+He put the letter in an envelope, and, taking it to the large room, laid
+it carefully at the end of the table opposite the chairman's seat. Once
+more he returned to the coach-house. From the hanging cupboard he now
+produced a piece of rope. Standing on the table he could just reach, by
+leaning forward, a hook in the ceiling, that was sometimes used for the
+slinging of bicycles. With difficulty he made the rope fast to the hook.
+Putting a noose on the other end, he tightened it round his neck. He
+looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor in order to judge whether
+the rope was short enough.
+
+'Good-bye, Susan, and everyone,' he whispered, and then stepped off the
+table.
+
+The tense rope swung him by his neck halfway across the coach-house. He
+swung twice to and fro, but as he passed under the hook for the fifth
+time his toes touched the floor. The rope had stretched. In another
+second he was standing firm on the floor, purple and panting, but
+ignominiously alive.
+
+'Good-even to you, Mr. Froyle. Be you committing suicide?' The tones
+were drawling, uncertain, mildly astonished.
+
+He turned round hastily, his hands busy with the rope, and saw in the
+doorway the figure of Daft Jimmy, the Moorthorne idiot.
+
+He hesitated before speaking, but he was not confused. No one could have
+been confused before Daft Jimmy. Neither man nor woman in the village
+considered his presence more than that of a cat.
+
+'Yes, I am,' he said.
+
+The middle-aged idiot regarded him with a vague, interested smile, and
+came into the coach-house.
+
+'You'n gotten the rope too long, Mr. Froyle. Let me help you.'
+
+Froyle calmly assented. He stood on the table, and the two rearranged
+the noose and made it secure. As they did so the idiot gossiped:
+
+'I was going to Bursley to-night to buy me a pair o' boots, and when I
+was at top o' th' hill I remembered as I'd forgotten the measure o' my
+feet. So I ran back again for it. Then I saw the light in here, and I
+stepped up to bid ye good-evening.'
+
+Someone had told him the ancient story of the fool and his boots, and,
+with the pride of an idiot in his idiocy, he had determined that it
+should be related of himself.
+
+Froyle was silent.
+
+The idiot laughed with a dry cackle.
+
+'Now you go,' said Froyle, when the rope was fixed.
+
+'Let me see ye do it,' the idiot pleaded with pathetic eyes.
+
+'No; out you get!'
+
+Protesting, the idiot went forth, and his irregular clumsy footsteps
+sounded on the pebble-paved yard. When the noise of them ceased in the
+soft roadway, Froyle jumped off the table again. Gradually his body,
+like a stopping pendulum, came to rest under the hook, and hung
+twitching, with strange disconnected movements. The horse in the stable,
+hearing unaccustomed noises, rattled his chain and stamped about in the
+straw of his box.
+
+Furtive steps came down the yard again, and Daft Jimmy peeped into the
+coach-house.
+
+'He done it! he done it!' the idiot cried gleefully. 'Damned if he
+hasna'.' He slapped his leg and almost danced. The body still twitched
+occasionally. 'He done it!'
+
+'Done what, Daft Jimmy? You're making a fine noise there! Done what?'
+
+The idiot ran out of the stable. At the side-entrance to the hotel stood
+the barmaid, the outline of her fine figure distinct against the light
+from within.
+
+The idiot continued to laugh.
+
+'Done what?' the girl repeated, calling out across the dark yard in
+clear, pleasant tones of amused inquiry. 'Done what?'
+
+'What's that to you, Miss Tucker?'
+
+'Now, none of your sauce, Daft Jimmy! Is Willie Froyle in there?'
+
+The idiot roared with laughter.
+
+'Yes, he is, miss.'
+
+'Well, tell him his master wants him. I don't want to cross this mucky,
+messy yard.'
+
+'Yes, miss.'
+
+The girl closed the door.
+
+The idiot went into the coach-house, and, slapping William's body in a
+friendly way so that it trembled on the rope, he spluttered out between
+his laughs:
+
+'Master wants ye, Mr. Froyle.'
+
+Then he walked out into the village street, and stood looking up the
+muddy road, still laughing quietly. It was quite dark, but the moon
+aloft in the clear sky showed the highway with its shining ruts leading
+in a straight line over the hill to Bursley.
+
+'Them shoes!' the idiot ejaculated suddenly. 'Well, I be an idiot, and
+that's true! They can take the measure from my feet, and I never thought
+on it till this minute!'
+
+Laughing again, he set off at a run up the hill.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+ABROAD
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY
+
+
+I
+
+After a honeymoon of five weeks in the shining cities of the
+Mediterranean and in Paris, they re-entered the British Empire by the
+august portals of the Chatham and Dover Railway. They stood impatiently
+waiting, part of a well-dressed, querulous crowd, while a few officials
+performed their daily task of improvising a Custom-house for registered
+luggage on a narrow platform of Victoria Station. John, Mr. Norris's
+man, who had met them, attended behind. Suddenly, with a characteristic
+movement, the husband lifted his head, and then looked down at his wife.
+
+'I say, May!'
+
+'Well?'
+
+She knew that he was about to propose some swift alteration of their
+plans, but she smiled upwards out of her furs at his grave face, and
+the tone of her voice granted all requests in advance.
+
+'I think I'd better go to the office,' he said.
+
+'Now?'
+
+She smiled again, inviting him to do exactly what he chose. She was
+already familiar with his restiveness under enforced delays and
+inaction, and his unfortunate capacity for being actively bored by
+trifles which did not interest him aroused in her a sort of maternal
+sympathy.
+
+'Yes,' he answered. 'I can be there and back in an hour or less. You
+titivate yourself, and we'll dine at the Savoy, or anywhere you please.
+We'll keep the ball rolling to-night. Yes,' he repeated, as if to
+convince himself that he was not a deserter, 'I really must call in at
+the office. You and John can see to the luggage, can't you?'
+
+'Of course,' she replied, with calm good-nature, and also with perfect
+self-confidence. 'But give me the keys of the trunks, and don't be late,
+Ted.'
+
+'Oh, I shan't be late,' he said.
+
+Their fingers touched as she took the keys. He went away enraptured
+anew by her delightful acquiescences, her unique smile, her
+common-sense, her mature charm, and the astonishing elegance of her
+person. The honeymoon was over--and with what finished discretion,
+combining the innocent girl with the woman of the world, she had lived
+through the honeymoon!--another life, more delicious, was commencing.
+
+'What a wife!' he thought triumphantly. 'She does understand a man! And
+fancy leaving any ordinary bride to look after luggage!'
+
+Nevertheless, once in his offices at Winchester House, he managed to
+forget her, and to forget time, for nearly an hour and a half. When at
+last he came to himself from the enchantment of affairs, he jumped into
+a hansom, and told the driver to drive fast to Knightsbridge. He was
+ardent to see her again. In the dark seclusion of the cab he speculated
+upon her toilette, the colour of her shoes. He thought of the last five
+weeks, of the next five years. Dwelling on their mutual love and esteem,
+their health, their self-knowledge and experience and cheerfulness, her
+sense and grace, his talent for getting money first and keeping it
+afterwards, he foresaw nothing but happiness for them. Children? H'm!
+Possibly....
+
+At Piccadilly Circus it began to rain--cold, heavy March rain.
+
+'Window down, sir?' asked the voice of the cabman.
+
+'Yes,' he ordered sardonically. 'Better be suffocated than drowned.'
+
+'You're right, sir,' said the voice.
+
+Soon, through the streaming glass, which made every gas-jet into a
+shooting pillar of flame, Norris discerned vaguely the vast bulk of Hyde
+Park Mansions. 'Good!' he muttered, and at that very moment he was shot
+through the window into the thin, light-reflecting mire of the street.
+Enormous and strange beasts menaced him with pitiless hoofs. Millions of
+people crowded about him. In response to a question that seemed to float
+slowly towards him, he tried to give his address. He realized, by a
+considerable feat of intellect, that the horse must have fallen down;
+and then, with a dim notion that nothing mattered, he went to sleep.
+
+
+II
+
+In the boudoir of the magnificent flat on the first floor, shielded from
+the noise and the inclemency of the world by four silk-hung walls and a
+double window, and surrounded by all the multitudinous and costly luxury
+that a stockbroker with brains and taste can obtain for the wife of his
+love, May was leisurely finishing her toilette. And every detail in the
+long, elaborate process was accomplished with a passionate intention to
+bewitch the man at Winchester House.
+
+These two had first met seven years before, when May, the daughter of a
+successful wholesale draper at Hanbridge, in the Five Towns district of
+Staffordshire, was aged twenty-two. Mr. Scarratt went to Manchester each
+Tuesday to buy, and about once a month he took May with him. One day,
+when they were lunching at the Exchange Restaurant, a young man came up
+whom her father introduced as Mr. Edward Norris, his stockbroker. Mr.
+Norris, whose years were thirty, glanced keenly at May, and accepted Mr.
+Scarratt's invitation to join them. Ever afterwards May vividly
+remembered the wonderful sensation, joyous yet disconcerting, which she
+then experienced--the sensation of having captivated her father's
+handsome and correct stockbroker. The three talked horses with a certain
+freedom, and since May was accustomed to drive the Scarratt dogcart, so
+famous in the Five Towns, she could bring her due share to the
+conversation. The meal over, Mr. Norris discussed business matters with
+his client, and then sedately departed, but not without the obviously
+sincere expression of a desire to meet Miss Scarratt again. The
+wholesale draper praised Edward's financial qualities behind his back,
+and wondered that a man of such aptitude should remain in Manchester
+while London existed. As for May, she decided that she would have a new
+frock before she came to Manchester in the following month.
+
+She had a new frock, but not of the colour intended. By the following
+month her father was enclosed in a coffin, and it happened to his
+estate, as to the estates of many successful men who employ
+stockbrokers, that the liabilities far more than covered the assets. May
+and her mother were left without a penny. The mother did the right
+thing, and died--it was best. May went direct to Brunt's, the largest
+draper in the Five Towns, and asked for a place under 'Madame' in the
+dress-making department. Brunt's daughter, who was about to be married,
+gave her the place instantly. Three years later, when 'Madame' returned
+to Paris, May stepped into the French-woman's shoes.
+
+On Sundays and on Thursday afternoons, and sometimes (but not too often)
+at the theatre, May was the finest walking advertisement that Brunt's
+ever had. Old Brunt would have proposed to her, it was rumoured, had he
+not been scared by her elegance. Sundry sons of prosperous
+manufacturers, unabashed by this elegance, did in fact secretly propose,
+but with what result was known only to themselves.
+
+Later, as May waxed in importance at Brunt's, she was sent to Manchester
+to buy. She lunched at the Exchange Restaurant. The world and Manchester
+are very small. The first man she set eyes on was Edward Norris. Another
+week, Norris said to her with a thrill, and he would have been gone for
+ever to London. Chance is not to be flouted. The sequel was inevitable.
+They loved. And all the select private bars in Hanbridge tinkled to the
+news that May Scarratt had been and hooked a stockbroker!
+
+When the toilette was done, and the maid gone, she wound a thin black
+scarf round her olive neck and shoulders, and sat down negligently on a
+Chippendale settee in the attitude of a portrait by Boldini; her little
+feet were tucked up sideways on the settee; the perforated lace ends of
+the scarf fell over her low corsage to the level of the seat. And she
+waited, still the bride. He was late, but she knew he would be late.
+Sure in the conviction that he was a strong man, a man of imagination
+and of deeds, she could easily excuse this failing in him, as she did
+that other habit of impulsive action in trifles. Nay, more, she found
+keen pleasure in excusing it. 'Dear thing!' she reflected, 'he forgets
+so.' Therefore she waited, content in enjoying the image in the glass of
+her dark face, her small plump person, and her Paris gown--that dream!
+She thought with assuaged grief of her father's tragedy; she would have
+liked him to see her now, the jewel in the case--her father and she had
+understood each other.
+
+All around, and above and below, she felt, without hearing it, the
+activity of the opulent, complex life of the mansions. Her mind dwelt
+with satisfaction on long carpeted corridors noiselessly paraded by
+flunkeys, mahogany lifts continually ascending and descending like the
+angels of the ladder, the great entrance hall with its fire always
+burning and its doors always swinging, the _salle à manger_ sown with
+rose-shaded candles, and all the splendid privacies rising stage upon
+stage to the attics, where the flunkeys philosophized together. She
+confessed the beauty and distinction achieved by this extravagant
+organization for gratifying earthly desires. Often, in the pinching days
+of her servitude, she had murmured against the injustice of things, and
+had called wealth a crime while poverty starved. But now she perceived
+that society was what it was inevitably, and could not be altered. She
+accepted it in profound peace of mind, gaily fraternal towards the
+fortunate, compassionate towards those in adversity.
+
+In the next flat someone began to play very brilliantly a Hungarian
+Rhapsody of Liszt's. And even the faint sound of that riotous torrent of
+melody, so arrogantly gorgeous, intoxicated her soul. She shivered under
+the sudden vision of the splendid joy of being alive. And how she envied
+the player! French she had learned from 'Madame,' but she had no skill
+on the piano; it was her one regret.
+
+She touched the bell.
+
+'Has your master come in yet?' she inquired of the maid.
+
+'No, madam, not yet.'
+
+She knew he had not come in, but she could not resist the impulse to
+ask.
+
+Ten minutes later, when the piano had ceased, she jumped up, and,
+creeping to the front-door of the flat, gazed foolishly across the
+corridor at the grille of the lift. She heard the lift in travail. It
+appeared and passed out of sight above. No, he had not come! Glancing
+aside, she saw the tall slender figure of a girl in a green tea-gown--a
+mere girl: it was the player of the Hungarian Rhapsody. And this girl,
+too, she thought, was expectant and disappointed! They shut their doors
+simultaneously, she and May, who also had her girlish moments. Then the
+rhapsody recommenced.
+
+'Oh, madam!' screamed the maid, almost tumbling into the boudoir.
+
+'What is it?' May demanded with false calm.
+
+The maid lifted the corner of her black apron to her eyes, as though she
+had been a stage soubrette in trouble.
+
+'The master, madam! He's fell out of his cab--just in front of the
+mansions--and they're bringing him in--such blood I never did see!'
+
+The maid finished with hysterics.
+
+
+III
+
+'And them just off their honeymoon!'
+
+The inconsolable tones of the lady's-maid came from the kitchen to the
+open door of the bedroom, where May was giving instructions to the
+elderly cook.
+
+'Send that girl out of the flat this moment!' May said.
+
+'Yes, ma'am.'
+
+'Make the beef-tea in case it's wanted, and let me have some more warm
+water. There's John and the doctor!'
+
+She started at a knock.
+
+'No, it's only the postman, ma'am.'
+
+Some letters danced on the hall floor and on her nerves.
+
+'Oh dear!' May whispered. 'I thought it was the doctor at last.'
+
+'John's bound to be back with one in a minute, ma'am. Do bear up,' urged
+the cook, hurrying to the kitchen.
+
+She could have destroyed the woman for those last words.
+
+With the proud certainty of being equal to the dreadful crisis, she
+turned abruptly into the bedroom, where her husband lay insensible on
+one of the new beds. Assisted by the policemen and the cook, she had
+done everything that could be done: cut away the coats and the
+waistcoat, removed the boots, straightened the limbs, washed the face
+and neck--especially the neck--which had to be sponged continually, and
+scattered messengers, including John, over the vicinity in search of
+medical aid. And now the policemen had gone, the general emotion on the
+staircase had subsided, the front-door of the flat was shut. The great
+ocean of the life of the mansions had closed smoothly upon her little
+episode. She was alone with the shattered organism.
+
+She bent fondly over the bed, and her Paris frock, and the black scarf
+which she had not removed, touched its ruinous burden. Her right hand
+directed the sponge with ineffable tenderness, and then the long thin
+fingers tightened to a frenzied clutch to squeeze it over the basin. The
+whole of her being was absorbed in a deep passion of pity and an
+intolerable hunger for the doctor.
+
+Through the wall came once more the faint sound of the Hungarian
+Rhapsody, astonishingly rapid and brilliant. She set her teeth to endure
+its unconscious message of the vast indifference of life to death.
+
+The organism stirred, and May watched the deathly face for a sign. The
+eyes opened and stared at her in agonized bewilderment. The lips tried
+to speak, and failed.
+
+'It's all right, darling,' she said softly. 'You're in your own bed. The
+doctor will be here directly. Drink this.'
+
+She gave him some brandy-and-water, and they looked at each other. He
+was no longer Edward Norris, the finely regulated intelligence, the
+masterful volition, the conqueror of the world and of a woman; but
+merely the embodiment of a frightened, despairing, flickering,
+hysterical will-to-live, which glanced in terror at the corners of the
+room as though it saw fate there. And beneath her intense solicitude was
+the instinctive feeling, which hurt her, but which she could not
+dismiss, of her measureless, dominating superiority. With what glad
+relief would she have changed places with him!
+
+'I'm dying, May,' he murmured at length, with a sigh. 'Why doesn't the
+doctor come?'
+
+'He is coming,' she replied soothingly. 'You'll be better soon.'
+
+But his effort in speaking obliged her to use the sponge again, and he
+saw it, and drew another sigh, more mortal than the first.
+
+'Oh! I'm dying,' he repeated.
+
+'Not you, Ted!' And her smile cost her an awful pang.
+
+'I am. I know it.' This time he spoke with sad resignation. 'You must
+face it. And--listen.'
+
+'What, dear?'
+
+A physical sensation of sickness came over her. She could not disguise
+from herself the fact that he was dying. The warped and pallid face, the
+panic-struck eyes, the sweat, the wound in the neck, the damp hands
+nervously pulling the hem of the sheet--these indications were not to be
+gainsaid. The truth was too horrible to grasp; she wanted to put it away
+from her. 'This calamity cannot happen to me!' she thought urgently, and
+all the while she knew that it was happening to her.
+
+He collected the feeble remnant of his powers by an immense effort, and
+began to speak, slowly and fragmentarily, and with such weakness that
+she could only catch his words by putting her ear to his mouth. The
+restless hands dropped the sheet and took the end of the black scarf.
+
+'You'll be comfortable--for money,' he said. 'Will made.... It's not
+that. It's ... I must tell you. It's----'
+
+'Yes?' she encouraged him. 'Tell me. I can hear.'
+
+'It's about your father. I didn't treat him quite right ... once....
+Week after I first met you, May.... No, not quite right. He was holding
+Hull and Barnsley shares ... you know, railway ... great gambling stock,
+then, Hull and Barn--Barnsley. Holding them on cover; for the rise....
+They dropped too much--dropped to 23.... He couldn't hold any longer ...
+wired to me to sell and cut the loss. Understand?'
+
+'Yes,' she said, trembling. 'I quite understand.'
+
+'Well ... I wired back, "Sold at 23." ... But some mistake. Shares not
+sold. Clerk's mistake.... Clerk didn't sell.... Next day rise began....
+I didn't wire him shares not sold. Somehow, I couldn't.... Put it
+off.... Rise went on.... I took over shares myself ... you
+see--myself.... Made nearly five thousand clear.... I wanted money
+then.... I think I would have told him, perhaps, later ... made it
+right ... but he died ... sudden ... I wasn't going to let his creditors
+have that five thou.... No, he'd meant to sell ... and, look here, May,
+if those shares had dropped lower ... 'stead of rising ... I should have
+had to stand the racket ... with your father, for my clerk's
+mistake.... See?... He'd meant to sell.... Hard lines on him, but he'd
+meant to sell.... He'd meant----'
+
+'Don't say any more, dear.'
+
+'Must explain this, May. Why didn't I give the money to you ... when he
+was dead?... Because I knew you'd only ... give it ... to creditors....
+I knew you.... That's straight.... I've told you now.'
+
+He lost consciousness again, but for an instant May did not notice it.
+She was crying, and her tears fell on his face.
+
+Then came a doctor, a little dark man, who explained with calm
+politeness that he had been out when the messenger first arrived. He
+took off his coat, hung it up, opened his bag, and proceeded to a minute
+examination of the patient. His movements were so methodical, and he
+gave orders to May in a tone so quiet, casual, and ordinary, that she
+almost lost her sense of the reality of the scene.
+
+'Yes, yes,' he said, from time to time, as if to himself; nothing else;
+not a single enlightening word to May.
+
+'I'm dying,' moaned Edward, opening his eyes.
+
+The doctor glanced round at May and winked. That wink, deliberate and
+humorous, was like an electric shock to her. She could actually feel her
+heart leap in her breast. If she had not been afraid of the doctor, she
+would have fainted.
+
+'You all think you're dying,' the doctor remarked in a low, amused tone
+to the ceiling, as he wiped a pair of scissors, 'when you've been
+knocked silly, especially if there's a lot of blood about.'
+
+The door opened.
+
+'Here's John, ma'am,' said the cook, 'with two more doctors. What am I
+to do?'
+
+May involuntarily turned towards the door.
+
+'Don't you go, Mrs. Norris,' the little dark man commanded. 'I want
+you.' Then he carelessly scrutinized the elderly servant. 'Tell 'em
+they're too late,' he said. 'It's generally like that when there's an
+accident,' he continued after the housekeeper had gone. 'First you can't
+get a doctor anywhere, and then in half an hour or so we come in crowds.
+I've known seven doctors turn up one after another. But in that affair
+the man happened to have been killed outright.'
+
+He smiled grimly. In a little while he was snapping his bag.
+
+'I'll come in the morning, of course,' he said, as he wrote on a piece
+of paper. 'Have this made up, and give it him in the night if he is
+wakeful. Keep him warm. You might put a couple of hot-water bags, one on
+either side of him. You've got beef-tea made, you say? That's right. Let
+him have as much as he wants. Mr. Norris, you'll sleep like a top.'
+
+'But, doctor,' May inquired the next morning in the hall, after Edward
+had smiled at a joke, and been informed that he must run down to
+Bournemouth in a week, 'have we nothing to fear?'
+
+'I think not,' was the measured answer. 'These affairs nearly always
+seem much worse than they are. Of course, the immediate upset is
+tremendous--the disorganization, and all that sort of thing. But
+Nature's pretty wonderful. You'll find your husband will soon get over
+it. I should say he had a good constitution.'
+
+'And there will be no permanent effects?'
+
+'Yes,' said the doctor, with genial cynicism. 'There'll be one
+permanent effect. Nobody will ever persuade him to ride in a hansom
+again. If he can't find a four-wheeler, he'll walk in future.'
+
+She returned to the bedroom. The man on the bed was Edward Norris once
+more, in control of himself, risen out of his humiliation. A feeling of
+thankfulness overwhelmed her for a moment, and she sat down.
+
+'Well, May?' he murmured.
+
+'Well, dear.'
+
+They both realized that what they had been through was a common, daily
+street accident. The smile of each was self-conscious, apprehensive,
+insincere.
+
+'Quite a concert going on next door,' he said with an affectation of
+lightness.
+
+It was the Hungarian Rhapsody, impetuous and brilliant as ever. How she
+hated it now--this symbol of the hurried, unheeding, relentless, hollow
+gaiety of the world! Yet she longed for the magic fingers of the player,
+that she, too, might smother grief in such glittering veils!
+
+
+IV
+
+The marriage which had begun so dramatically fell into placid routine.
+Edward fulfilled the prophecy of the doctor. In a week they were able to
+go to Bournemouth for a few days, and in less than a fortnight he was at
+the office--the strong man again, confident and ambitious.
+
+After days devoted to finance, he came home in the evenings
+high-spirited and determined to enjoy himself. His voice was firm and
+his eye steady when he spoke to his wife; there was no trace of
+self-consciousness in his demeanour. She admired the masculinity of the
+brain that could forget by an effort of will. She felt that he trusted
+her to forget also; that he relied on her common-sense, her
+characteristic sagacity, to extinguish for ever the memory of an awkward
+incident. He loved her. He was intensely proud of her. He treated her
+with every sort of generosity. And in return he expected her to behave
+like a man.
+
+She loved him. She esteemed him as a wife should. She made a profession
+of wifehood. He gave his days to finance and his nights to diversion;
+but her vocation was always with her--she was never off duty. She aimed
+to please him to the uttermost in everything, to be in all respects the
+ideal helpmate of a husband who was at once strenuous, fastidious, and
+wealthy. Elegance and suavity were a religion with her. She was the
+delight of the eye and of the ear, the soother of groans, the refuge of
+distress, the uplifter of the heart.
+
+She made new acquaintances for him, and cemented old friendships. Her
+manner towards his old friends enchanted him; but when they were gone
+she had a way of making him feel that she was only his. She thought that
+she was succeeding in her aim. She thought that all these sweet, endless
+labours--of traffic with dressmakers, milliners, coiffeurs, maids,
+cooks, and furnishers; of paying and receiving calls; of delicious
+surprise journeys to the City to bring home the breadwinner; of giving
+and accepting dinners; of sitting alert and appreciative in theatres and
+music-halls; of supping in golden restaurants; of being serious,
+cautionary, submissive, and seductive; of smiles, laughter, and kisses;
+and of continuous sympathetic responsiveness--she thought that all these
+labours had attained their object: Edward's complete serenity and
+satisfaction. She imagined that love and duty had combined successfully
+to deceive him on one solitary point. She was sure that he was deceived.
+But she was wrong.
+
+One evening they were at the theatre alone together. It was a musical
+comedy, and they had a large stage-box. May sat a little behind. After
+having been darkened for a scenic conjuring trick, the stage was very
+suddenly thrown into brilliant light. Edward turned with equal
+suddenness to share his appreciation of the effect with his wife, and
+the light and his eye caught her unawares. She smiled instantly, but too
+late; he had seen the expression of her features. For a second she felt
+as if the whole fabric which she had been building for the last six
+months had crumbled; but this disturbing idea passed as she recovered
+herself.
+
+'Let's go home, eh?' he said, at the end of the first act.
+
+'Yes,' she agreed. 'It would be nice to be in early, wouldn't it?'
+
+In the brougham they exchanged the amiable banalities of people who are
+thoroughly intimate. When they reached the flat, she poured out his
+whisky-and-potass, and sat on the arm of his particular arm-chair while
+he sipped it; then she whispered that she was going to bed.
+
+'Wait a bit,' he said; 'I want to talk to you seriously.'
+
+'Dear thing!' she murmured, stroking his coat.
+
+She had not the slightest notion of his purpose.
+
+'You've tried your best, May,' he said bluntly, 'but you've failed. I've
+suspected it for a long time.'
+
+She flushed, and retired to a sofa, away from the orange electric lamp.
+
+'What do you mean, Edward?' she asked.
+
+'You know very well what I mean, my dear,' he replied. 'What I told
+you--that night! You've tried to forget it. You've tried to look at me
+as though you had forgotten it. But you can't do it. It's on your mind.
+I've noticed it again and again. I noticed it at the theatre to-night.
+So I said to myself, "I'll have it out with her." And I'm having it
+out.'
+
+'My dear Ted, I assure you----'
+
+'No, you don't,' he stopped her. 'I wish you did. Now you must just
+listen. I know exactly what sort of an idiot I was that night as well as
+you do. But I couldn't help it. I was a fool to tell you. Still, I
+thought I was dying. I simply had a babbling fit. People are like that.
+You thought I was dying, too, didn't you?'
+
+'Yes,' she said quietly, 'for a minute or two.'
+
+'Ah! It was that minute or two that did it. Well, I let it out, the
+rotten little secret. I admit it wasn't on the square, that bit of
+business. But, on the other hand, it wasn't anything really bad--like
+cruelty to animals or ruining a girl. Of course, the chap was your
+father, but, but----. Look here, May, you ought to be able to see that I
+was exactly the same man after I told you as I was before. You ought to
+be able to see that. My character wasn't wrecked because I happened to
+split on myself, like an ass, about that affair. Mind you, I don't blame
+you. You can't help your feelings. But do you suppose there's a single
+man on this blessed earth without a secret? I'm not going to grovel
+before gods or men. I'm not going to pretend I'm so frightfully sorry.
+I'm sorry in a way. But can't you see----'
+
+'Don't say any more, Ted,' she begged him, fingering her sash. 'I know
+all that. I know it all, and everything else you can say. Oh, my darling
+boy! do you think I would look down on you ever so little because
+of--what you told me? Who am I? I wouldn't care twopence even if----'
+
+'But it's between us all the same,' he broke in. 'You can't get over
+it.'
+
+'Get over it!' she repeated lamely.
+
+'Can you? Have you?' He pinned her to a direct answer.
+
+She did not flinch.
+
+'No,' she said.
+
+'I thought you would have done,' he remarked, half to himself. 'I
+thought you would. I thought you were enough a woman of the world for
+that, May. It isn't as if the confounded thing had made any real
+difference to your father. The old man died, and----'
+
+'Ted!' she exclaimed, 'I shall have to tell you, after all. It killed
+him.'
+
+'What killed him? He died of gastritis.'
+
+'He was ill with gastritis, but he died of suicide. It's easy for a
+gastritis patient to commit suicide. And father did.'
+
+'Why?'
+
+'Oh, ruin, despair! He'd been in difficulties for a long time. He said
+that selling those shares just one day too soon was the end of it. When
+he saw them going up day after day, it got on his mind. He said he knew
+he would never, never have any luck. And then ...'
+
+'You kept it quiet.' He was walking about the room.
+
+'Yes, that was pretty easy.'
+
+'And did your mother know?'
+
+He turned and looked at her.
+
+'Yes, mother knew. It finished her. Oh, Ted!' she burst out, 'if you'd
+only telegraphed to him the next morning that the shares weren't sold,
+things might have been quite different.'
+
+'You mean I killed your father--and your mother.'
+
+'No, I don't,' she cried passionately. 'I tell you I don't. You didn't
+know. But I think of it all, sometimes. And that's why--that's why----'
+
+She sat down again.
+
+'By God, May,' he swore, 'I'm frightfully sorry!'
+
+'I never meant to tell you,' she said, composing herself. 'But, there!
+things slip out. Good-night.'
+
+She was gone, but in passing him she had timidly caressed his shoulder.
+
+'It's all up,' he said to himself. 'This will always be between us. No
+one could expect her to forget it.'
+
+
+V
+
+Gradually her characteristic habits deserted her; she seemed to lose
+energy and a part of her interest in those things which had occupied her
+most. She changed her dress less frequently, ignoring dressmakers, and
+she showed no longer the ravishing elegance of the bride. She often lay
+in bed till noon, she who had always entered the dining-room at nine
+o'clock precisely to dispense his coffee and listen to his remarks on
+the contents of the newspaper. She said 'As you please' to the cook, and
+the meals began to lose their piquancy. She paid no calls, but some of
+her women friends continued, nevertheless, to visit her. Lastly, she
+took to sewing. The little dark doctor, who had become an acquaintance,
+smiled at her and told her to do no more than she felt disposed to do.
+She reclined on sofas in shaded rooms, and appeared to meditate. She was
+not depressed, but thoughtful. It was as though she had much to settle
+in her own mind. At intervals the faint sound of the Hungarian Rhapsody
+mingled with her reveries.
+
+As for Edward, his behaviour was immaculate. During the day he made
+money furiously. In the evening he sat with his wife. They did not talk
+much, and he never questioned her. She developed a certain curious
+whimsicality now and then; but for him she could do no wrong.
+
+The past was not mentioned. They both looked apprehensively towards the
+future, towards a crisis which they knew was inexorably approaching.
+They were afraid, while pretending to have no fear.
+
+And one afternoon, precipitately, surprisingly, the crisis came.
+
+'You are the father of a son--a very noisy son,' said the doctor, coming
+into the drawing-room where Edward had sat in torture for three hours.
+
+'And May?'
+
+'Oh, never fear: she's doing excellently.'
+
+'Can I go and see her?' he asked, like a humble petitioner.
+
+'Well--yes,' said the doctor, 'for one minute; not more.'
+
+So he went into the bedroom as into a church, feeling a fool. The nurse,
+miraculously white and starched, stood like a sentinel at the foot of
+the bed of mystery.
+
+'All serene, May?' he questioned. If he had attempted to say another
+word he would have cried.
+
+The pale mother nodded with a fatigued smile, and by a scarcely
+perceptible gesture drew his attention to a bundle. From the next flat
+came a faint, familiar sound, insolently joyous.
+
+'Yes,' he thought, 'but if they had both been lying dead here that tune
+would have been the same.'
+
+Two months later he left the office early, telling his secretary that he
+had a headache. It was a mere fibbing excuse. He suffered from sudden
+fits of anxiety about his wife and child. When he reached the flat, he
+found no one at home but the cook.
+
+'Where's your mistress?' he demanded.
+
+'She's out in the park with baby and nurse, sir.'
+
+'But it's going to rain,' he cried angrily. 'It is raining. They'll get
+wet through.'
+
+He rushed into the corridor, and met the procession--May, the
+perambulator, and the nursemaid.
+
+'Only fancy, Ted!' May exclaimed, 'the perambulator will go into the
+lift, after all. Aren't you glad?'
+
+'Yes,' he said. 'But you're wet, surely?'
+
+'Not a drop. We just got in in time.'
+
+'Sure?'
+
+'Quite.'
+
+The tableau of May, elegant as ever, but her eyes brighter and her body
+more leniently curved, of the hooded perambulator, and of the
+fluffy-white nursemaid behind--it was too much for him. Touching
+clumsily the apron of the perambulator, the stockbroker turned into his
+doorway. Just then the girl from the next flat came out into the
+corridor, dressed for social rites of the afternoon. The perambulator
+was her excuse for stopping.
+
+'What a pretty boy!' she exclaimed in ecstasy, trying to squeeze her
+picture hat under the hood of the perambulator.
+
+'Do you really think so?' said the mother, enchanted.
+
+'Of course! The darling! How I envy you!'
+
+May wanted to reciprocate this politeness.
+
+'I can't tell you,' she said, 'how I envy you your piano-playing.
+There's one piece----'
+
+'Envy me! Why! It's only a pianola we've got!'
+
+'Isn't he the picture of his granddad?' said May to Edward when they
+bent over the cot that night before retiring.
+
+And as she said it there was such candour in her voice, such content in
+her smiling and courageous eyes, that Edward could not fail to
+comprehend her message to him. Down in some very secret part of his soul
+he felt for the first time the real force of the great explanatory truth
+that one generation succeeds another.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE SISTERS QITA
+
+The manuscript ran thus:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I had finished my daily personal examination of the ropes
+and trapezes, I hesitated a moment, and then climbed up again, to the
+roof, where the red and the blue long ropes were fastened. I took my
+sharp scissors from my chatelaine, and gently fretted the blue rope with
+one blade of the scissors until only a single strand was left intact. I
+gazed down at the vast floor a hundred feet below. The afternoon
+varieties were over, and a phrenologist was talking to a small crowd of
+gapers in a corner. The rest of the floor was pretty empty save for the
+chairs and the fancy stalls, and the fatigued stall-girls in their black
+dresses. I too, had once almost been a stall-girl at the Aquarium! I
+descended. Few observed me in my severe street dress. Our secretary,
+Charles, attended me on the stage.
+
+'Everything right, Miss Paquita?' he said, handing me my hat and gloves,
+which I had given him, to hold.
+
+I nodded. I could see that he thought I was in one of my stern, far-away
+moods.
+
+'Miss Mariquita is waiting for you in the carriage,' he said.
+
+We drove away in silence--I with my inborn melancholy too sad, Sally
+(Mariquita) too happy to speak. This daily afternoon drive was really
+part of our 'turn'! A team of four mules driven by a negro will make a
+sensation even in Regent Street. All London looked at us, and contrasted
+our impassive beauty--mine mature (too mature!) and dark, Sally's so
+blonde and youthful, our simple costumes, and the fact that we stayed at
+an exclusive Mayfair hotel, with the stupendous flourish of our turnout.
+The renowned Sisters Qita--Paquita and Mariquita Qita--and the renowned
+mules of the Sisters Qita! Two hundred pounds a week at the Aquarium!
+Twenty-five thousand francs for one month at the Casino de Paris! Twelve
+thousand five hundred dollars for a tour of fifty performances in the
+States! Fifteen hundred pesos a night and a special train _de luxe_ in
+Argentina and Brazil! I could see the loungers and the drivers talking
+and pointing as usual. The gilded loungers in Verrey's café got up and
+watched us through the windows as we passed. This was fame. For nearly
+twenty years I had been intimate with fame, and with the envy of women
+and the foolish homage of men.
+
+We saw dozens of omnibuses bearing the legend 'Qita.' Then we met one
+which said: 'Empire Theatre. Valdès, the matchless juggler,' and Sally
+smiled with pleasure.
+
+'He's coming to see our turn to-night, after his,' she remarked,
+blushing.
+
+'Valdès? Why?' I asked, without turning my head.
+
+'He wants us to sup with him, to celebrate our engagement.'
+
+'When do you mean to get married?' I asked her shortly. I felt quite
+calm.
+
+'I guess you're a Tartar to-day,' said the pretty thing, with a touch of
+her American sauciness. 'We haven't studied it out yet. It was only
+yesterday afternoon he kissed me for the first time.' Then she bent
+towards me with her characteristic plaintive, wistful appeal. 'Say! You
+aren't vexed, Selina, are you, because of this? Of course, he wants me
+to tour with him after we're married, and do a double act. He's got lots
+of dandy ideas for a double act. But I won't, I won't, Selina, unless
+you say the word. Now, don't you go and be cross, Selina.'
+
+I let myself expand generously.
+
+'My darling girl!' I said, glancing at her kindly. 'You ought to know me
+better. Of course I'm not cross. And of course you must tour with
+Valdès. I shall be all right. How do you suppose I managed before I
+invented you?' I smiled like an indulgent mother.
+
+'Oh! I didn't mean that,' she said. 'I know you're frightfully clever.
+I'm nothing----'
+
+'I hope you'll be awfully happy,' I whispered, squeezing her hand. 'And
+don't forget that I introduced him to you--I knew him years before you
+did. I'm the cause of this bliss----Do you remember that cold morning in
+Berlin?'
+
+'Oh! well, I should say!' she exclaimed in ecstasy.
+
+When we reached our rooms in the hotel I kissed her warmly. Women do
+that sort of thing.
+
+Then a card was brought to me. 'George Capey,' it said; and in pencil,
+'Of the Five Towns.'
+
+I shrugged my shoulders. Sally had gone to scribble a note to her
+Valdès. 'Show Mr. Capey in,' I said, and a natty young man entered, half
+nervousness, half audacity.
+
+'How did you know I come from the Five Towns?' I questioned him.
+
+'I am on the _Evening Mail_,' he said, 'where they know everything,
+madam.'
+
+I was annoyed. 'Then they know, on the _Evening Mail_ that Paquita Qita
+has never been interviewed, and never will be,' I said.
+
+'Besides,' he went on, 'I come from the Five Towns myself.'
+
+'Bursley?' I asked mechanically.
+
+'Bursley,' he ejaculated; then added, 'you haven't been near old Bosley
+since----'
+
+It was true.
+
+'No,' I said hastily. 'It is many years since I have been in England,
+even. Do they know down there who Qita is?'
+
+'Not they!' he replied.
+
+I grew reflective. Stars such as I have no place of origin. We shoot up
+out of a void, and sink back into a void. I had forgotten Bursley and
+Bursley folk. Recollections rushed in upon me.... I felt beautifully
+sad. I drew off my gloves, and flung my hat on a chair with a movement
+that would have bewitched a man of the world, but Mr. George Capey was
+unimpressed. I laughed.
+
+'What's the joke?' he inquired. I adored him for his Bursliness.
+
+'I was just thinking, of fat Mrs. Cartledge, who used to keep that
+fishmonger's shop in Oldcastle Street, opposite Bates's. I wonder if
+she's still there?'
+
+'She is,' he said. 'And fatter than ever! She's getting on in years
+now.'
+
+I broke the rule of a lifetime, and let him interview me.
+
+'Tell them I'm thirty-seven,' I said. 'Yes, I mean it. Tell them.'
+
+And then for another tit-bit I explained to him how I had discovered
+Sally at Koster and Bial's, in New York, five years ago, and made her my
+sister for stage purposes because I was lonely, and liked her American
+simplicity and twang. He departed full of tea and satisfaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was our last night at the Aquarium. The place was crammed. The houses
+where I performed were always crammed. Our turn was in three parts, and
+lasted half an hour. The first part was a skirt dance in full afternoon
+dress (_danse de modernité_, I called it); the second was a double
+horizontal bar act; the third was the famous act of the red and the blue
+ropes, in full evening dress. It was 10.45 when we climbed the silk
+ladders for the third part. High up in the roof, separated from each
+other by nearly the length of the great hall, Sally and I stood on two
+little platforms. I held the ends of the red and the blue ropes. I had
+to let the blue rope swing across the hall to her. She would seize it,
+and, clutching it, swoop like the ball of an enormous pendulum from her
+platform to mine. (But would she?) I should then swing on the red rope
+to the platform she had left.
+
+Then the band would stop for the thrilling moment, and the lights would
+be lowered. Each lighting and holding a powerful electric
+hand-light--one red, one blue--we should signal the drummer and plunge
+simultaneously into space, flash past each other in mid-flight,
+exchanging lights as we passed (this was the trick), and soar to
+opposite platforms again, amid frenzied applause. There were no nets.
+
+That was what ought to occur.
+
+I stood bowing to the floor of tiny upturned heads, and jerking the
+ropes a little. Then I let Sally's rope go with a push, and it dropped
+away from me, and in a few seconds she had it safe in her strong hand.
+She was taller than me, with a fuller figure, yet she looked quite small
+on her distant platform. All the evening I had been thinking of fat old
+Mrs. Cartledge messing and slopping among cod and halibut on white
+tiles. I could not get Bursley and my silly infancy out of my head. I
+followed my feverish career from the age of fifteen, when that strange
+Something in me, which makes an artist, had first driven me forth to
+conquer two continents. I thought of all the golden loves I had scorned,
+and my own love, which had been ignored, unnoticed, but which still
+obstinately burned. I glanced downwards and descried Valdès precisely
+where Sally had said he would be. Valdès, what a fool you were! And I
+hated a fool. I am one of those who can love and hate, who can love and
+despise, who can love and loathe the same object in the same moment.
+Then I signalled to Sally to plunge, and my eyes filled with tears. For,
+you see, somehow, in some senseless sentimental way, the thought of fat
+Mrs. Cartledge and my silly infancy had forced me to send Sally the red
+rope, not the blue one. We exchanged ropes on alternate nights, but this
+was her night for the blue one.
+
+She swung over, alighting accurately at my side with that exquisite
+outward curve of the spine which had originally attracted me to her.
+
+'You sent me the red one,' she said to me, after she had acknowledged
+the applause.
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'Never mind; stick to it now you've got it. Here's the
+red light. Have you seen Valdès?'
+
+She nodded.
+
+I took the blue light and clutched the blue rope. Instead of
+murder--suicide, since it must be one or the other. And why not? Indeed,
+I censured myself in that second for having meant to kill Sally. Not
+because I was ashamed of the sin, but because the revenge would have
+been so pitiful and weak. If Valdès the matchless was capable of passing
+me over and kneeling to the pretty thing----
+
+I stood ready. The world was to lose that fineness, that distinction,
+that originality, that disturbing subtlety, which constituted Paquita
+Qita. I plunged.
+
+... I was on the other platform. The rope had held, then: I remembered
+nothing of the flight except that I had passed near the upturned,
+pleasant face of Valdès.
+
+The band stopped. The lights of the hall were lowered. All was dark. I
+switched on my dazzling blue light; Sally switched on her red one. I
+stood ready. The rope could not possibly endure a second strain. I waved
+to Sally and signalled to the conductor. The world was to lose Paquita.
+The drum began its formidable roll. Whirrr! I plunged, and saw the red
+star rushing towards me. I snatched it and soared upwards. The blue rope
+seemed to tremble. As I came near the platform at decreasing speed, it
+seemed to stretch like elastic. It broke! The platform jumped up
+suddenly over my head, but I caught at the silk ladder. I was saved!
+There was a fearful silence, and then the appalling shock of hysterical
+applause from seven thousand throats. I slid down the ladder, ran across
+the stage into my dressing-room for a cloak, out again into the street.
+In two days I was in Buda-Pesth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+NOCTURNE AT THE MAJESTIC
+
+
+I
+
+In the daily strenuous life of a great hotel there are periods during
+which its bewildering activities slacken, and the vast organism seems to
+be under the influence of an opiate. Such a period recurs after dinner
+when the guests are preoccupied by the mysterious processes of digestion
+in the drawing-rooms or smoking-rooms or in the stalls of a theatre. On
+the evening of this nocturne the well-known circular entrance-hall of
+the Majestic, with its tessellated pavement, its malachite pillars, its
+Persian rugs, its lounges, and its renowned stuffed bears at the foot of
+the grand stairway, was for the moment deserted, save by the head
+hall-porter and the head night-porter and the girl in the bureau. It was
+a quarter to nine, and the head hall-porter was abdicating his pagoda
+to the head night-porter, and telling him the necessary secrets of the
+day. These two lords, before whom the motley panorama of human existence
+was continually being enrolled, held a portentous confabulation night
+and morning. They had no illusions; they knew life. Shakespeare himself
+might have listened to them with advantage.
+
+The girl in the bureau, like a beautiful and languishing animal in its
+cage, leaned against her window, and looked between two pillars at the
+magnificent lords. She was too far off to catch their talk, and, indeed,
+she watched them absently in a reverie induced by the sweet melancholy
+of the summer twilight, by the torpidity of the hour, and by the
+prospect of the next day, which was her day off. The liveried
+functionaries ignored her, probably scorned her as a mere pretty little
+morsel. Nevertheless, she was the centre of energy, not they. If money
+were payable, she was the person to receive it; if a customer wanted a
+room, she would choose it; and the lords had to call her 'miss.' The
+immense and splendid hotel pulsed round this simple heart hidden under a
+white blouse. Especially in summer, her presence and the presence of
+her companions in the bureau (but to-night she was alone) ministered to
+the satisfaction of male guests, whose cruel but profoundly human
+instincts found pleasure in the fact that, no matter when they came in
+from their wanderings, the pretty captives were always there in the
+bureau, smiling welcome, puzzling stupid little brains and puckering
+pale brows over enormous ledgers, twittering borrowed facetiousness from
+rosy mouths, and smoothing out seductive toilettes with long thin hands
+that were made for ring and bracelet and rudder-lines, and not a bit for
+the pen and the ruler.
+
+The pretty little thing despised of the functionaries corresponded
+almost exactly in appearance to the typical bureau girl. She was
+moderately tall; she had a good slim figure, all pleasant curves, flaxen
+hair and plenty of it, and a dainty, rather expressionless face; the
+ears and mouth were very small, the eyes large and blue, the nose so-so,
+the cheeks and forehead of an equal ivory pallor, the chin trifling,
+with a crease under the lower lip and a rich convexity springing out
+from below the crease. The extremities of the full lips were nearly
+always drawn up in a smile, mechanical, but infallibly attractive. The
+hair was of an orthodox frizziness. You would have said she was a nice,
+kind, good-natured girl, flirtatious but correct, well adapted to adorn
+a dogcart on Sundays.
+
+This was Nina, foolish Nina, aged twenty-one. In her reverie the entire
+Hôtel Majestic weighed on her; she had a more than adequate sense of her
+own solitary importance in the bureau, and stirring obscurely beneath
+that consciousness were the deep ineradicable longings of a poor pretty
+girl for heaps of money, endless luxury of finery and chocolates, and
+sentimental silken dalliance.
+
+Suddenly a stranger entered the hall. His advent seemed to wake the
+place out of the trance into which it had fallen. The nocturne had
+begun. Nina straightened herself and intensified her eternal smile. The
+two porters became military, and smiled with a special and peculiar
+urbanity. Several lesser but still lordly functionaries appeared among
+the pillars; a page-boy emerged by magic from the region of the
+chimney-piece like Mephistopheles in Faust's study; and some guests of
+both sexes strolled chattering across the tessellated pavement as they
+passed from one wing of the hotel to the other.
+
+'How do, Tom?' said the stranger, grasping the hand of the head
+hall-porter, and nodding to the head night-porter.
+
+His voice showed that he was an American, and his demeanour that he was
+one of those experienced, wealthy, and kindly travellers who know the
+Christian names of all the hall-porters in the world, and have the trick
+of securing their intimacy and fealty. He wore a blue suit and a light
+gray wideawake, and his fine moustache was grizzled. In his left hand he
+carried a brown bag.
+
+'Nicely, thank you, sir,' Tom replied. 'How are you, sir?'
+
+'Oh, about six and six.'
+
+Whereupon both porters laughed heartily.
+
+Tom escorted him to the bureau, and tried to relieve him of his bag.
+Inferior lords escorted Tom.
+
+'I guess I'll keep the grip,' said the stranger. 'Mr. Pank will be
+around with some more baggage pretty soon. We've expressed the rest on
+to the steamer. Well, my dear,' he went on, turning to Nina, 'you're a
+fresh face here.'
+
+He looked her steadily in the eyes.
+
+'Yes, I am,' she said, conquered instantly.
+
+Radiant and triumphant, the man brought good-humour into every face,
+like some wonderful combination of the sun and the sea-breeze.
+
+'Give me two bedrooms and a parlour, please,' he commanded.
+
+'First floor?' asked Nina prettily.
+
+'First floor! Well--I should say! _And_ on the Strand, my dear.'
+
+She bent over her ledgers, blushing.
+
+'Send someone to the 'phone, Tom, and let 'em put me on to the Regency,
+will you?' said the stranger.
+
+'Yes, sir. Samuels, go and ring up the Regency Theatre--quick!'
+
+Swift departure of a lord.
+
+'And ask Alphonse to come up to my bedroom in ten minutes from now,' the
+stranger proceeded to Tom. 'I shall want a dandy supper for fourteen at
+a quarter after eleven.'
+
+'Yes, sir. No dinner, sir?'
+
+'No; we dined on the Pullman. Well, my dear, figured it out yet?'
+
+'Numbers 102, 120, and 107,' said Nina.
+
+'Keys 102, 120, and 107,' said Tom.
+
+Swift departure of another lord to the pagoda.
+
+'How much?' demanded the stranger.
+
+'The bedrooms are twenty-five shillings, and the sitting-room two
+guineas.'
+
+'I guess Mr. Pank won't mind that. Hullo, Pank, you're here! I'm
+through. Your number's 102 or 120, which you fancy. Just going to the
+'phone a minute, and then I'll join you upstairs.'
+
+Mr. Pank was a younger man, possessing a thin, astute, intellectual
+face. He walked into the hall with noticeable deliberation. His
+travelling costume was faultless, but from beneath his straw hat his
+black hair sprouted in a somewhat peculiar fashion over his broad
+forehead. He smiled lazily and shrewdly, and without a word disappeared
+into a lift. Two large portmanteaus accompanied him.
+
+Presently the elder stranger could be heard battling with the obstinate
+idiosyncrasies of a London telephone.
+
+'You haven't registered,' Nina called to him in her tremulous,
+delicate, captivating voice, as he came out of the telephone-box.
+
+He advanced to sign, and, taking a pen and leaning on the front of the
+bureau, wrote in the visitor's book, in a careful, legible hand: 'Lionel
+Belmont, New York.' Having thus written, and still resting on the right
+elbow, he raised his right hand a little and waved the pen like a
+delicious menace at Nina.
+
+'Mr. Pank hasn't registered, either,' he said slowly, with a charming
+affectation of solemnity, as though accusing Mr. Pank of some appalling
+crime.
+
+Nina laughed timidly as she pushed his room-ticket across the page of
+the big book. She thought that Mr. Lionel Belmont was perfectly
+delightful.
+
+'No,' he hasn't,' she said, trying also to be arch; 'but he must.'
+
+At that moment she happened to glance at the right hand of Mr. Belmont.
+In the brilliance of the electric light she could see the fair skin of
+the wrist and forearm within the whiteness of his shirt-sleeve. She
+stared at what she saw, every muscle tense.
+
+'I guess you can round up Mr. Pank yourself, my dear, later on,' said
+Lionel Belmont, and turned quickly away, intent on the next thing.
+
+He did not notice that her large eyes had grown larger and her pale face
+paler. In another moment the hall was deserted again. Mr. Belmont had
+ascended in the lift, Tom had gone to his rest, and the head
+night-porter was concealed in the pagoda. Nina sank down limply on her
+stool, her nostrils twitching; she feared she was about to faint, but
+this final calamity did not occur. She had, nevertheless, experienced
+the greatest shock of her brief life, and the way of it was thus.
+
+
+II
+
+Nina Malpas was born amid the embers of one of those fiery conjugal
+dramas which occur with romantic frequency in the provincial towns of
+the northern Midlands, where industrial conditions are such as to foster
+an independent spirit among women of the lower class generally, and
+where by long tradition 'character' is allowed to exploit itself more
+freely than in the southern parts of our island. Lemuel Malpas was a
+dashing young commercial traveller, with what is known as 'an agreeable
+address,' in Bursley, one of the Five Towns, Staffordshire. On the
+strength of his dash he wooed and married the daughter of an
+hotel-keeper in the neighbouring town of Hanbridge. Six months after the
+wedding--in other words, at the most dangerous period of the connubial
+career--Mrs. Malpas's father died, and Mrs. Malpas became the absolute
+mistress of eight thousand pounds. Lemuel[1] had carefully foreseen this
+windfall, and wished to use the money in enterprises of the earthenware
+trade. Mrs. Malpas, pretty and vivacious, with a self-conceit hardened
+by the adulation of saloon-bars, very decidedly thought otherwise. Her
+motto was, 'What's yours is mine, but what's mine's my own.' The
+difference was accentuated. Long mutual resistances were followed by
+reconciliations, which grew more and more transitory, and at length both
+recognised that the union, not founded on genuine affection, had been a
+mistake.
+
+  [1] This name is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable in
+  the Five Towns.
+
+'Keep your d----d brass!' Lemuel exclaimed one morning, and he went off
+on a journey and forgot to come back. A curious letter dated from
+Liverpool wished his wife happiness, and informed her that, since she
+was well provided for, he had no scruples about leaving her. Mrs. Malpas
+was startled at first, but she soon perceived that what Lemuel had done
+was exactly what the brilliant and enterprising Lemuel might have been
+expected to do. She jerked up her doll's head, and ejaculated, 'So much
+the better!'
+
+A few weeks later she sold the furniture and took rooms in Scarborough,
+where, amid pleasurable surroundings, she determined to lead the joyous
+life of a grass-widow, free of all cares. Then, to her astonishment and
+disgust, Nina was born. She had not bargained for Nina. She found
+herself in the tiresome position of a mother whose explanations of her
+child lack plausibility. One lodging-housekeeper to whom she hazarded
+the statement that Lemuel was in Australia had saucily replied: 'I
+thought maybe it was the North Pole he was gone to!'
+
+This decided Mrs. Malpas. She returned suddenly to the Five Towns,
+where at least her reputation was secure. Only a week previously Lemuel
+had learnt indirectly that she had left their native district. He
+determined thenceforward to forget her completely. Mrs. Malpas's
+prettiness was of the fleeting sort. After Nina's birth she began to get
+stout and coarse, and the nostalgia of the saloon-bar, the coffee-room,
+and the sanded portico overtook her. The Tiger at Bursley was for sale,
+a respectable commercial hotel, the best in the town. She purchased it,
+wines, omnibus connection, and all, and developed into the typical
+landlady in black silk and gold rings.
+
+In the Tiger Nina was brought up. She was a pretty child from her
+earliest years, and received the caresses of all as a matter of course.
+She went to a good school, studied the piano, and learnt dancing, and at
+sixteen did her hair up. She did as she was told without fuss, being
+apparently of a lethargic temperament; she had all the money and all the
+clothes that her heart could desire; she was happy, and in a quiet way
+she deemed herself a rather considerable item in the world. When she was
+eighteen her mother died miserably of cancer, and it was discovered
+that the liabilities of Mrs. Malpas's estate exceeded its assets--and
+the Tiger mortgaged up to its value! The creditors were not angry; they
+attributed the state of affairs to illness and the absence of male
+control, and good-humouredly accepted what they could get. None the
+less, Nina, the child of luxury and sloth, had to start life with
+several hundreds of pounds less than nothing. Of her father all trace
+had been long since lost. A place was found for her, and for over two
+years she saw the world from the office of a famous hotel in Doncaster.
+Her lethargy, and an invaluable gift of adapting herself to
+circumstances, saved her from any acute unhappiness in the Yorkshire
+town. Instinctively she ceased to remember the Tiger and past
+splendours. (Equally, if she had married a Duke instead of becoming a
+book-keeper, she would have ceased to remember the Tiger and past
+humility.) Then by good or ill fortune she had the offer of a situation
+at the Hôtel Majestic, Strand, London. The Majestic and the sights
+thereof woke up the sleeping soul.
+
+Before her death Mrs. Malpas had told Nina many things about the
+vanished Lemuel; among others, the curious detail that he had two small
+moles--one hairless, the other hirsute--close together on the under side
+of his right wrist. Nina had seen precisely such marks of identification
+on the right wrist of Mr. Lionel Belmont.
+
+She was convinced that Lionel Belmont was her father. There could not be
+two men in the world so stamped by nature. She perceived that in
+changing his name he had chosen Lionel because of its similarity to
+Lemuel. She felt certain, too, that she had noticed vestiges of the Five
+Towns accent beneath his Americanisms. But apart from these reasons, she
+knew by a superrational instinct that Lionel Belmont was her father; it
+was not the call of blood, but the positiveness of a woman asserting
+that a thing is so because she is sure it is so.
+
+
+III
+
+Nina was not of an imaginative disposition. The romance of this
+extraordinary encounter made no appeal to her. She was the sort of girl
+that constantly reads novelettes, and yet always, with fatigued scorn,
+refers to them as 'silly.' Stupid little Nina was intensely practical
+at heart, and it was the practical side of her father's reappearance
+that engaged her birdlike mind. She did not stop to reflect that truth
+is stranger than fiction. Her tiny heart was not agitated by any
+ecstatic ponderings upon the wonder and mystery of fate. She did not
+feel strangely drawn towards Lionel Belmont, nor did she feel that he
+supplied a something which had always been wanting to her.
+
+On the other hand, her pride--and Nina was very proud--found much
+satisfaction in the fact that her father, having turned up, was so fine,
+handsome, dashing, good-humoured, and wealthy. It was well, and
+excellently well, and delicious, to have a father like that. The
+possession of such a father opened up vistas of a future so enticing and
+glorious that her present career became instantly loathsome to her.
+
+It suddenly seemed impossible that she could have tolerated the
+existence of a hotel clerk for a single week. Her eyes were opened, and
+she saw, as many women have seen, that luxury was an absolute necessity
+to her. All her ideas soared with the magic swiftness of the
+bean-stalk. And at the same time she was terribly afraid, unaccountably
+afraid, to confront Mr. Belmont and tell him that she was his Nina; he
+was entirely unaware that he had a Nina.
+
+'I'm your daughter! I know by your moles!'
+
+She whispered the words in her tiny heart, and felt sure that she could
+never find courage to say them aloud to that great and important man.
+The announcement would be too monstrous, incredible, and absurd. People
+would laugh. He would laugh. And Nina could stand anything better than
+being laughed at. Even supposing she proved to him his paternity--she
+thought of the horridness of going to lawyers' offices--he might decline
+to recognise her. Or he might throw her fifty pounds a year, as one
+throws sixpence to an importunate crossing-sweeper, to be rid of her.
+The United States existed in her mind chiefly as a country of
+highly-remarkable divorce laws, and she thought that Mr. Belmont might
+have married again. A fashionable and arrogant Mrs. Belmont, and a
+dazzling Miss Belmont, aged possibly eighteen, might arrive, both of
+them steeped in all conceivable luxury, at any moment. Where would Nina
+be then, with her two-and-eleven-pence-halfpenny blouse from Glave's?...
+
+Mr. Belmont, accompanied by Alphonse, the head-waiter in the _salle à
+manger_, descended in the lift and crossed the hall to the portico,
+where he stood talking for a few seconds. Mr. Belmont turned, and, as he
+conversed with Alphonse, gazed absently in the direction of the bureau.
+He looked straight through the pretty captive. After all, despite his
+superficial heartiness, she could be nothing to him--so rich, assertive,
+and truly important. A hansom was called for him, and he departed; she
+observed that he was in evening dress now.
+
+No! Her cause was just; but it was too startling--that was what was the
+matter with it.
+
+Then she told herself she would write to Lionel Belmont. She would write
+a letter that night.
+
+At nine-thirty she was off duty. She went upstairs to her perch in the
+roof, and sat on her bed for over two hours. Then she came down again
+to the bureau with some bluish note-paper and envelopes in her hand,
+and, in response to the surprised question of the pink-frocked colleague
+who had taken her place, she explained that she wanted to write a
+letter.
+
+'You do look that bad, Miss Malpas,' said the other girl, who made a
+speciality of compassion.
+
+'Do I?' said Nina.
+
+'Yes, you do. What have you got _on_, _now_, my poor dear?'
+
+'What's that to you? I'll thank you to mind your own business, Miss
+Bella Perkins.'
+
+Usually Nina was not soon ruffled; but that night all her nerves were
+exasperated and exceedingly sensitive.
+
+'Oh!' said the girl. 'What price the Duchess of Doncaster? And I was
+just going to wish you a nice day to-morrow for your holiday, too.'
+
+Nina seated herself at the table to write the letter. An electric light
+burned directly over her frizzy head. She wrote a weak but legible and
+regular back-hand. She hated writing letters, partly because she was
+dubious about her spelling, and partly because of an obscure but
+irrepressible suspicion that her letters were of necessity silly. She
+pondered for a long time, and then wrote: 'Dear Mr. Belmont,--I
+venture----' She made a new start: 'Dear Sir,--I hope you will not think
+me----' And a third attempt: 'My dear Father----' No! it was
+preposterous. It could no more be written than it could be said.
+
+The situation was too much for simple Nina.
+
+Suddenly the grand circular hall of the Majestic was filled with a
+clamour at once charming and fantastic. There was chattering of musical,
+gay American voices, pattering of elegant feet on the tessellated
+pavement, the unique incomparable sound of the _frou-frou_ of many
+frocks; and above all this the rich tones of Mr. Lionel Belmont. Nina
+looked up and saw her radiant father the centre of a group of girls all
+young, all beautiful, all stylish, all with picture hats, all
+self-possessed, all sparkling, doubtless the recipients of the dandy
+supper.
+
+Oh, how insignificant and homicidal Nina felt!
+
+'Thirteen of you!' exclaimed Lionel Belmont, pulling his superb
+moustache. 'Two to a hansom. I guess I'll want six and a half hansoms,
+boy.'
+
+There was an explosion of delicious laughter, and the page-boy grinned,
+ran off, and began whistling in the portico like a vexed locomotive. The
+thirteen fair, shepherded by Lionel Belmont, passed out into the
+murmurous summer night of the Strand. Cab after cab drove up, and Nina
+saw that her father, after filling each cab, paid each cabman. In three
+minutes the dream-like scene was over. Mr. Belmont re-entered the hotel,
+winked humorously at the occupant of the pagoda, ignored the bureau, and
+departed to his rooms.
+
+Nina ripped her inchoate letters into small pieces, and, with a tart
+good-night to Miss Bella Perkins, who was closing her ledgers, the hour
+being close upon twelve-thirty, she passed sedately, stiffly, as though
+in performance of some vestal's ritual, up the grand staircase. Turning
+to the right at the first landing, she traversed a long corridor which
+was no part of the route to her cubicle on the ninth floor. This
+corridor was lighted by glowing sparks, which hung on yellow cords from
+the central line of the ceiling; underfoot was a heavy but narrow
+crimson patterned carpet with a strip of polished oak parquet on either
+side of it. Exactly along the central line of the carpet Nina tripped,
+languorously, like an automaton, and exactly over her head glittered the
+line of electric sparks. The corridor and the journey seemed to be
+interminable, and Nina on some inscrutable and mystic errand. At length
+she moved aside from the religious line, went into a service cabinet,
+and emerged with a small bunch of pass-keys. No. 107 was Lionel
+Belmont's sitting-room; No. 102, his bedroom, was opposite to 107. No.
+108, another sitting-room, was, as Nina knew, unoccupied. She
+noiselessly let herself into No. 108, closed the door, and stood still.
+After a minute she switched on the light. These two rooms, Nos. 108 and
+107, had once communicated, but, as space grew precious with the growing
+success of the Majestic, they had been finally separated, and the door
+between them locked and masked by furniture. By reason of the door, Nina
+could hear Lionel Belmont moving to and fro in No. 107. She listened a
+long time. Then, involuntarily, she yawned with fatigue.
+
+'How silly of me to be here!' she thought. 'What good will this do me?'
+
+She extinguished the light and opened the door to leave. At the same
+instant the door of No. 107, three feet off, opened. She drew back with
+a start of horror. Suppose she had collided with her father on the
+landing! Timorously she peeped out, and saw Lionel Belmont, in his
+shirt-sleeves, disappear round the corner.
+
+'He is going to talk with his friend Mr. Pank,' Nina thought, knowing
+that No. 120 lay at some little distance round that corner.
+
+Mr. Belmont had left the door of No. 107 slightly ajar. An unseen and
+terrifying force compelled Nina to venture into the corridor, and then
+to push the door of No. 107 wide open. The same force, not at all
+herself, quite beyond herself, seemed to impel her by the shoulders into
+the room. As she stood unmistakably within her father's private
+sitting-room, scared, breathing rapidly, inquisitive, she said to
+herself:
+
+'I shall hear him coming back, and I can run out before he turns the
+corner of the corridor.' And she kept her little pink ears alert.
+
+She looked about the softly brilliant room, such an extravagant triumph
+of luxurious comfort as twenty years ago would have aroused comment even
+in Mayfair; but there were scores of similar rooms in the Majestic. No
+one thought twice of them. Her father's dress-coat was thrown arrogantly
+over a Louis Quatorze chair, and this careless flinging of the expensive
+shining coat across the gilded chair somehow gave Nina a more intimate
+appreciation of her father's grandeur and of the great and glorious life
+he led. She longed to recline indolently in a priceless tea-gown on the
+couch by the fireplace and issue orders.... She approached the
+writing-table, littered with papers, documents, in scores and hundreds.
+To the left was the brown bag. It was locked, and very heavy, she
+thought. To the right was a pile of telegrams. She picked up one, and
+read:
+
+    '_Pank, Grand Hotel, Birmingham. Why not burgle hotel? Simplest
+    most effective plan and solves all difficulties._--BELMONT.'
+
+She read it twice, crunched it in her left hand, and picked up another
+one:
+
+    '_Pank, Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool. Your objection absurd. See safe
+    in bureau at Majestic. Quite easy. Scene with girl second
+    evening_.--BELMONT.'
+
+The thing flashed blindingly upon her. Her father and Mr. Pank belonged
+to the swell mob of which she had heard and seen so much at Doncaster.
+She at once became the excessively knowing and suspicious hotel employé,
+to whom every stranger is a rogue until he has proved the contrary. Had
+she lived through three St. Leger weeks for nothing? At the hotel at
+Doncaster, what they didn't know about thieves and sharpers was not
+knowledge. The landlord kept a loaded revolver in his desk there during
+the week. And she herself had been provided with a whistle which she was
+to blow at the slightest sign of a row; she had blown it once, and seven
+policemen had appeared within thirty seconds. The landlord used to tell
+tales of masterly and huge scoundrelism that would make Charles Peace
+turn in his grave. And the landlord had ever insisted that no one, no
+one at all, could always distinguish with certainty between a real gent
+and a swell-mobsman.
+
+So her father and Mr. Pank had deceived everyone in the hotel except
+herself, and they meant to rob the safe in the bureau to-morrow night.
+Of course Mr. Lionel Belmont was a villain, or he would not have
+deserted her poor dear mother; it was annoying, but indubitable.... Even
+now he was maturing his plans round the corner with that Mr. Pank....
+Burglars always went about in shirt-sleeves.... The brown bag contained
+the tools....
+
+The shock was frightful, disastrous, tragic; but it had solved the
+situation by destroying it. Practically, Nina no longer had a father. He
+had existed for about four hours as a magnificent reality, full of
+possibilities; he now ceased to be recognisable.
+
+She was about to pick up a third telegram when a slight noise caused her
+to turn swiftly; she had forgotten to keep her little pink ears alert.
+Her father stood in the doorway. He was certainly the victim of some
+extraordinary emotion; his face worked; he seemed at a loss what to do
+or say; he seemed pained, confused, even astounded. Simple, foolish Nina
+had upset the balance of his equations.
+
+Then he resumed his self-control and came forward into the room with a
+smile intended to be airy. Meanwhile Nina had not moved. One is inclined
+to pity the artless and defenceless girl in this midnight duel of wits
+with a shrewd, resourceful, and unscrupulous man of the world. But one's
+pity should not be lavished on an undeserving object. Though Nina
+trembled, she was mistress of herself. She knew just where she was, and
+just how to behave. She was as impregnable as Gibraltar.
+
+'Well,' said Mr. Lionel Belmont, genially gazing at her pose, 'you do
+put snap into it, any way.'
+
+'Into what?' she was about to inquire, but prudently she held her
+tongue. Drawing, herself up with the gesture of an offended and
+unapproachable queen, the little thing sailed past him, close past her
+own father, and so out of the room.
+
+'Say!' she heard him remark: 'let's straighten this thing out, eh?'
+
+But she heroically ignored him, thinking the while that, with all his
+sins, he was attractive enough. She still held the first telegram in her
+long, thin fingers.
+
+So ended the nocturne.
+
+
+IV
+
+At five o'clock the next morning Nina's trifling nose was pressed
+against the windowpane of her cubicle. In the enormous slate roof of the
+Majestic are three rows of round windows, like port-holes. Out of the
+highest one, at the extremity of the left wing, Nina looked. From thence
+she could see five other vast hotels, and the yard of Charing Cross
+Station, with three night-cabs drawn up to the kerb, and a red van of
+W.H. Smith and Son disappearing into the station. The Strand was quite
+empty. It was a strange world of sleep and grayness and disillusion.
+Within a couple of hundred yards or so of her thousands of people lay
+asleep, and they would all soon wake into the disillusion, and the
+Strand would wake, and the first omnibus of all the omnibuses would come
+along....
+
+Never had simple Nina felt so sad and weary. She was determined to give
+up her father. She was bound to tell the manager of her discovery, for
+Nina was an honest servant, and she was piqued in her honesty. No one
+should know that Lionel Belmont was her father.... She saw before her
+the task of forgetting him and forgetting the rich dreams of which he
+had been the origin. She was once more a book-keeper with no prospects.
+
+At eight she saw the manager in the managerial room. Mr. Reuben was a
+young Jew, aged about thirty-four, with a cold but indestructibly polite
+manner. He was a great man, and knew it; he had almost invented the
+Majestic.
+
+She told him her news; it was impossible for foolish Nina to conceal her
+righteousness and her sense of her importance.
+
+'Whom did you say, Miss Malpas?' asked Mr. Reuben.
+
+'Mr. Lionel Belmont--at least, that's what he calls himself.'
+
+'Calls himself, Miss Malpas?'
+
+'Here's one of the telegrams.'
+
+Mr. Reuben read it, looked at little Nina, and smiled; he never laughed.
+
+'Is it possible, Miss Malpas,' said he, 'that you don't know who Mr.
+Belmont and Mr. Pank are?' And then, as she shook her head, he continued
+in his impassive, precise way: 'Mr. Belmont is one of the principal
+theatrical managers in the United States. Mr. Pank is one of the
+principal playwrights in the United States. Mr. Pank's melodrama
+'Nebraska' is now being played at the Regency by Mr. Belmont's own
+American company. Another of Mr. Belmont's companies starts shortly for
+a tour in the provinces with the musical comedy 'The Dolmenico Doll.' I
+believe that Mr. Pank and Mr. Belmont are now writing a new melodrama,
+and as they have both been travelling, but not together, I expect that
+these telegrams relate to that melodrama. Did you suppose that
+safe-burglars wire their plans to each other like this?' He waved the
+telegram with a gesture of fatigue.
+
+Silly, ruined Nina made no answer.
+
+'Do you ever read the papers--the _Telegraph_ or the _Mail_, Miss
+Malpas?'
+
+'N-no, sir.'
+
+'You ought to, then you wouldn't be so ignorant and silly. A hotel-clerk
+can't know too much. And, by-the-way, what were you doing in Mr.
+Belmont's room last night, when you found these wonderful telegrams?'
+
+'I went there--I went there--to----'
+
+'Don't cry, please, it won't help you. You must leave here to-day.
+You've been here three weeks, I think. I'll tell Mr. Smith to pay you
+your month's wages. You don't know enough for the Majestic, Miss Malpas.
+Or perhaps you know too much. I'm sorry. I had thought you would suit
+us. Keep straight, that's all I have to say to you. Go back to
+Doncaster, or wherever it is you came from. Leave before five o'clock.
+That will do.'
+
+With a godlike air, Mr. Reuben swung round his office-chair and faced
+his desk. He tried not to perceive that there was a mysterious quality
+about this case which he had not quite understood. Nina tripped
+piteously out.
+
+In the whole of London Nina had one acquaintance, and an hour or so
+later, after drinking some tea, she set forth to visit this
+acquaintance. The weight of her own foolishness, fatuity, silliness, and
+ignorance was heavy upon her. And, moreover, she had been told that Mr.
+Lionel Belmont had already departed back to America, his luggage being
+marked for the American Transport Line.
+
+She was primly walking, the superlative of the miserable, past the
+façade of the hotel, when someone sprang out of a cab and spoke to her.
+And it was Mr. Lionel Belmont.
+
+'Get right into this hansom, Miss Malpas,' he said kindly, 'and I guess
+we'll talk it out.'
+
+'Talk what out?' she thought.
+
+But she got in.
+
+'Marble Arch, and go up Regent Street, and don't hurry,' said Mr.
+Belmont to the cabman.
+
+'How did he know my name?' she asked herself.
+
+'A hansom's the most private place in London,' he said after a pause.
+
+It certainly did seem to her very cosy and private, and her nearness to
+one of the principal theatrical managers in America was almost
+startling. Her white frock, with the black velvet decorations, touched
+his gray suit.
+
+'Now,' he said, 'I do wish you'd tell me why you were in my parlour last
+night. Honest.'
+
+'What for?' she parried, to gain time.
+
+Should she begin to disclose her identity?
+
+'Because--well, because--oh, look here, my girl, I want to be on very
+peculiar terms with you. I want to straighten out everything. You'll be
+sort of struck, but I'll be bound to tell you I'm your father. Now,
+don't faint or anything.'
+
+'Oh, I knew that!' she gasped. 'I saw the moles on your wrist when your
+were registering--mother told me about them. Oh, if I had only known you
+knew!'
+
+They looked at one another.
+
+'It was only the day before yesterday I found out I possessed such a
+thing as a daughter. I had a kind of fancy to go around to the old spot.
+This notion of me having a daughter struck me considerable, and I
+concluded to trace her and size her up at once.' Nina was bound to
+smile. 'So your poor mother's been dead three years?'
+
+'Yes,' said Nina.
+
+'Ah! don't let us talk about that. I feel I can't say just the right
+thing.... And so you knew me by those pips.' He pulled up his right
+sleeve. 'Was that why you came up to my parlour?'
+
+Nina nodded, and Lionel Belmont sighed with relief.
+
+'Why didn't you tell me at once, my dear, who you where?'
+
+'I didn't dare,' she smiled; 'I was afraid. I thought you wouldn't----'
+
+'Listen,' he said; 'I've wanted someone like you for years, years, and
+years. I've got no one to look after----'
+
+'Then why didn't _you_ tell _me_ at once who you were?' she questioned
+with adorable pertness.
+
+'Oh!' he laughed; 'how could I--plump like that? When I saw you first,
+in the bureau, the stricken image of your mother at your age, I was
+nearly down. But I came up all right, didn't I, my dear? I acted it out
+well, didn't I?'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hansom was rolling through Hyde Park, and the sunshiny hour was
+eleven in June. Nina looked forth on the gay and brilliant scene:
+rhododendrons, duchesses, horses, dandies--the incomparable wealth and
+splendour of the capital. She took a long breath, and began to be happy
+for the rest of her life. She felt that, despite her plain frock, she
+was in this picture. Her father had told her that his income was rising
+on a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, and he would thank her
+to spend it. Her father had told her, when she had confessed the scene
+with Mr. Reuben and what led to it, that she had grit, and that the
+mistake was excusable, and that a girl as pretty as she was didn't want
+to be as fly as Mr. Reuben had said. Her father had told her that he was
+proud of her, and he had not been so rude as to laugh at her blunder.
+
+She felt that she was about to enter upon the true and only vocation of
+a dainty little morsel--namely, to spend money earned by other people.
+She thought less homicidally now of the thirteen chorus-girls of the
+previous night.
+
+'Say,' said her father, 'I sail this afternoon for New York, Nina.'
+
+'They said you'd gone, at the hotel.'
+
+'Only my baggage. The _Minnehaha_ clears at five. I guess I want you to
+come along too. On the voyage we'll get acquainted, and tell each other
+things.'
+
+'Suppose I say I won't?'
+
+She spoke despotically, as the pampered darling should.
+
+'Then I'll wait for the next boat. But it'll be awkward.'
+
+'Then I'll come. But I've got no things.'
+
+He pushed up the trap-door.
+
+'Driver, Bond Street. And get on to yourself, for goodness' sake!
+Hurry!'
+
+'You told me not to hurry,' grumbled the cabby.
+
+'And now I tell you to hustle. See?'
+
+'Shall you want me to call myself Belmont?' Nina asked.
+
+'I chose it because it was a fine ten-horse-power name twenty years
+ago,' said her father; and she murmured that she liked the name very
+much.
+
+As Lionel Belmont the Magnificent paid the cabman, and Nina walked
+across the pavement into one of the most famous repositories of
+expensive frippery in the world, she thrilled with the profoundest
+pleasure her tiny soul was capable of. Foolish, simple Nina had achieved
+the _nec plus ultra_ of her languorous dreams.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CLARICE OF THE AUTUMN CONCERTS
+
+
+I
+
+'What did you say your name was?' asked Otto, the famous concert
+manager.
+
+'Clara Toft.'
+
+'That won't do,' he said roughly.
+
+'My real proper name is Clarice,' she added, blushing. 'But----'
+
+'That's better, that's better.' His large, dark face smiled carelessly.
+'Clarice--and stick an "e" on to Toft--Clarice Tofte. Looks like either
+French or German then. I'll send you the date. It'll be the second week
+in September. And you can come round to the theatre and try the
+piano--Bechstein.'
+
+'And what do you think I had better play, Mr. Otto?'
+
+'You must play what you have just played, of course. Tschaikowsky's all
+the rage just now. Your left hand's very weak, especially in the last
+movement. You've got to make more noise--at my concerts. And see here,
+Miss Toft, don't you go and make a fool of me. I believe you have a
+great future, and I'm backing my opinion. Don't you go and make a fool
+of me.'
+
+'I shall play my very best,' she smiled nervously. 'I'm awfully obliged
+to you, Mr. Otto.'
+
+'Well,' he said, 'you ought to be.'
+
+At the age of fifteen her father, an earthenware manufacturer, and the
+flamboyant Alderman of Turnhill, in the Five Towns, had let her depart
+to London to the Royal College of Music. Thence, at nineteen, she had
+proceeded to the Conservatoire of Liége. At twenty-two she could play
+the great concert pieces--Liszt's 'Rhapsodies Hongroises,' Chopin's
+Ballade, Op. 47, Beethoven's Op. 111, etc.--in concert style, and she
+was the wonder of the Five Towns when she visited Turnhill. But in
+London she had obtained neither engagements nor pupils: she had never
+believed in herself. She knew of dozens of pianists whom she deemed
+more brilliant than little, pretty, modest Clara Toft; and after her
+father's death and the not surprising revelation of his true financial
+condition, she settled with her faded, captious mother in Turnhill as a
+teacher of the pianoforte, and did nicely.
+
+Then, when she was twenty-six, and content in provincialism, she had met
+during an August holiday at Llandudno her old fellow pupil, Albert
+Barbellion, who was conducting the Pier concerts. Barbellion had asked
+her to play at a 'soirée musicale' which he gave one night in the
+ball-room of his hotel, and she had performed Tschaikowsky's immense and
+lurid Slavonic Sonata; and the unparalleled Otto, renowned throughout
+the British Empire for Otto's Bohemian Autumn Nightly Concerts at Covent
+Garden Theatre, had happened to hear her and that seldom played sonata
+for the first time. It was a wondrous chance. Otto's large, picturesque,
+extempore way of inviting her to appear at his promenade concerts
+reminded her of her father.
+
+
+II
+
+In the bleak three-cornered artists'-room she could faintly hear the
+descending impetuous velocities of the Ride of the Walkyries. She was
+waiting in her new yellow dress, waiting painfully. Otto rushed in, a
+glass in his hand.
+
+'You all right?' he questioned sharply.
+
+'Oh, yes,' she said, getting up from the cane-chair.
+
+'Let me see you stand on one leg,' he said; and then, because she
+hesitated: 'Go on, quick! Stand on one leg. It's a good test.' So she
+stood on one leg, foolishly smiling. 'Here, drink this,' he ordered, and
+she had to drink brandy-and-soda out of the glass. 'You're better now,'
+he remarked; and decidedly, though her throat tingled and she coughed,
+she felt equal to anything at that moment.
+
+A stout, middle-aged woman, in a rather shabby opera cloak, entered the
+room.
+
+'Ah, Cornelia!' exclaimed Otto grandly.
+
+'My dear Otto!' the woman responded, wrinkling her wonderfully enamelled
+cheeks.
+
+'Miss Toft, let me introduce you to Madame Lopez.' He turned to the
+newcomer. 'Keep her calm for me, bright star, will you?'
+
+Then Otto went, and Clarice was left alone with the world-famous
+operatic soprano, who was advertised to sing that night the Shadow Song
+from 'Dinorah.'
+
+'Where did he pick you up, my dear?' the decayed diva inquired
+maternally.
+
+Clarice briefly explained.
+
+'You aren't paying him anything, are you?'
+
+'Oh, no!' said Clarice, shocked. 'But I get no fee this time----'
+
+'Of course not, my dear,' the Lopez cut her short. 'It's all right so
+long as you aren't paying him anything to let you go on. Now run along.'
+
+Clarice's heart stopped. The call-boy, with his cockney twang, had
+pronounced her name.
+
+She moved forward, and, by dint of following the call-boy, at length
+reached the stage. Applause--good-natured applause--seemed to roll
+towards her from the uttermost parts of the vast auditorium. She
+realized with a start that this applause was exclusively for her. She
+sat down to the piano, and there ensued a death-like silence--a silence
+broken only by the striking of matches and the tinkle of the embowered
+fountain in front of the stage. She had a consciousness, rather than a
+vision, of a floor of thousands of upturned faces below her, and tier
+upon tier of faces rising above her and receding to the illimitable dark
+distances of the gallery. She heard a door bang, and perceived that some
+members of the orchestra were creeping quietly out at the back. Then she
+plunged, dizzy, into the sonata, as into a heaving and profound sea. The
+huge concert piano resounded under the onslaught of her broad hands.
+When she had played ten bars she knew with an absolute conviction that
+she would do justice to her talent. She could see, as it were, the
+entire sonata stretched out in detail before her like a road over which
+she had to travel....
+
+At the end of the first movement the clapping enheartened her; she
+smiled confidently at the conductor, who, unemployed during her number,
+sat on a chair under his desk. Before recommencing she gazed boldly at
+the house, and certain placards--'Smoking permitted,' 'Emergency exit,'
+'Ices,' and 'Fancy Dress Balls'--were fixed for ever on the retina of
+her eye. At the end of the second movement there was more applause, and
+the conductor tapped appreciation with his stick against the pillar of
+his desk; the leader of the listless orchestra also tapped with his
+fiddle-bow and nodded. It seemed to her now that she more and more
+dominated the piano, and that she rendered the great finale with
+masterful and fierce assurance....
+
+She was pleased with herself as she banged the last massive chord. And
+the applause, the clapping, the hammering of sticks, astounded her,
+staggered her. She might have died of happiness while she bowed and
+bowed again. She ran off the stage triumphant, and the applause seemed
+to assail her little figure from all quarters and overwhelm it. As she
+stood waiting, concealed behind a group of palms, it suddenly occurred
+to her that, after all, she had underestimated herself. She saw her rosy
+future as the spoiled darling of continental capitals. The hail of
+clapping persisted, and the apparition of Otto violently waved her to
+return to the stage. She returned, bowed her passionate exultation with
+burning face and trembling knees, and retired. The clapping continued.
+Yes, she would be compelled to grant an encore--to _grant_ one. She
+would grant it like a honeyed but imperious queen.
+
+Suddenly she heard the warning tap of the conductor's baton; the
+applause was hushed as though by a charm, and the orchestra broke into
+the overture to 'Zampa.' She could not understand, she could not think.
+As she tripped tragically to the artists'-room in her new yellow dress
+she said to herself that the conductor must have made some mistake, and
+that----
+
+'Very nice, my dear,' said the Lopez kindly to her. 'You got quite a
+call--quite a call.'
+
+She waited for Otto to come and talk to her.
+
+At length the Lopez was summoned, and Clarice followed to listen to her.
+And when the Lopez had soared with strong practised flight through the
+brilliant intricacy of the Shadow Song, Clarice became aware what real
+applause sounded like from the stage. It shook the stage as the old
+favourite of two generations, wearing her set smile, waddled back to the
+debutante. Scores of voices hoarsely shouted 'Encore!' and 'Last Rose
+of Summer,' and with a proud sigh the Lopez went on again, bowing.
+
+Clarice saw nothing more of Otto, who doubtless had other birds to
+snare. The next day only three daily papers mentioned the concert at
+all. In fact, Otto expected press notices but once a week. All three
+papers praised the matchless Lopez in her Shadow Song. One referred to
+Clarice as talented; another called her well-intentioned; the third
+merely said that she had played. The short dream of artistic ascendancy
+lay in fragments around her. She was a sensible girl, and stamped those
+iridescent fragments into dust.
+
+
+III
+
+The _Staffordshire Signal_ contained the following advertisement: 'Miss
+Clara Toft, solo pianist, of the Otto Autumn Concerts, London, will
+resume lessons on the 1st proximo at Liszt House, Turnhill. Terms on
+application.' At thirty Clarice married James Sillitoe, the pianoforte
+dealer in Market Square, Turnhill, and captious old Mrs. Toft formed
+part of the new household. At thirty-four Clarice possessed a little
+girl and two little boys, twins. Sillitoe was a money-maker, and she no
+longer gave lessons.
+
+Happy? Perhaps not unhappy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER HOME[2]
+
+  [2] Written in 1893.
+
+
+I
+
+Rain was falling--it had fallen steadily through the night--but the sky
+showed promise of fairer weather. As the first streaks of dawn appeared,
+the wind died away, and the young leaves on the trees were almost
+silent. The birds were insistently clamorous, vociferating times without
+number that it was a healthy spring morning and good to be alive.
+
+A little, bedraggled crowd stood before the park gates, awaiting the
+hour named on the notice board when they would be admitted to such
+lodging and shelter as iron seats and overspreading branches might
+afford. A weary, patient-eyed, dogged crowd--a dozen men, a boy of
+thirteen, and a couple of women, both past middle age--which had been
+gathering slowly since five o'clock. The boy appeared to be the least
+uncomfortable. His feet were bare, but he had slept well in an area in
+Grosvenor Place, and was not very damp yet. The women had nodded on many
+doorsteps, and were soaked. They stood apart from the men, who seemed
+unconscious of their existence. The men were exactly such as one would
+have expected to find there--beery and restless as to the eyes, quaintly
+shod, and with nondescript greenish clothes which for the most part bore
+traces of the yoke of the sandwich board. Only one amongst them was
+different.
+
+He was young, and his cap, and manner of wearing it, gave sign of the
+sea. His face showed the rough outlines of his history. Yet it was a
+transparently honest face, very pale, but still boyish and fresh enough
+to make one wonder by what rapid descent he had reached his present
+level. Perhaps the receding chin, the heavy, pouting lower lip, and the
+ceaselessly twitching mouth offered a key to the problem.
+
+'Say, Darkey!' he said.
+
+'Well?'
+
+'How much longer?'
+
+'Can't ye see the clock? It's staring ye in the face.'
+
+'No. Something queer's come over my eyes.'
+
+Darkey was a short, sturdy man, who kept his head down and his hands
+deep in his pockets. The raindrops clinging to the rim of an ancient hat
+fell every now and then into his gray beard, which presented a drowned
+appearance. He was a person of long and varied experiences; he knew that
+queer feeling in the eyes, and his heart softened.
+
+'Come, lean against the pillar,' he said, 'if you don't want to tumble.
+Three of brandy's what you want. There's four minutes to wait yet.'
+
+With body flattened to the masonry, legs apart, and head thrown back,
+Darkey's companion felt more secure, and his mercurial spirits began to
+revive. He took off his cap, and brushing back his light brown curly
+hair with the hand which held it, he looked down at Darkey through
+half-closed eyes, the play of his features divided between a smile and a
+yawn.
+
+He had a lively sense of humour, and the irony of his situation was not
+lost on him. He took a grim, ferocious delight in calling up the
+might-have-beens and the 'fatuous ineffectual yesterdays' of life. There
+is a certain sardonic satisfaction to be gleaned from a frank
+recognition of the fact that you are the architect of your own
+misfortune. He felt that satisfaction, and laughed at Darkey, who was
+one of those who moan about 'ill-luck' and 'victims of circumstance.'
+
+'No doubt,' he would say, 'you're a very deserving fellow, Darkey, who's
+been treated badly. I'm not.'
+
+To have attained such wisdom at twenty-five is not to have lived
+altogether in vain.
+
+A park-keeper presently arrived to unlock the gates, and the band of
+outcasts straggled indolently towards the nearest sheltered seats. Some
+went to sleep at once, in a sitting posture. Darkey produced a clay
+pipe, and, charging it with a few shreds of tobacco laboriously gathered
+from his waistcoat pocket, began to smoke. He was accustomed to this
+sort of thing, and with a pipe in his mouth could contrive to be
+moderately philosophical upon occasion. He looked curiously at his
+companion, who lay stretched at full length on another bench.
+
+'I say, pal,' he remarked, 'I've known ye two days; ye've never told me
+yer name, and I don't ask ye to. But I see ye've not slep' in a park
+before.'
+
+'You hit it, Darkey; but how?'
+
+'Well, if the keeper catches ye lying down, he'll be on to ye. Lying
+down's not allowed.'
+
+The man raised himself on his elbow.
+
+'Really now,' he said; 'that's interesting. But I think I'll give the
+keeper the opportunity of moving me. Why, it's quite fine, the sun's
+coming out, and the sparrows are hopping round--cheeky little devils!
+I'm not sure that I don't feel jolly.'
+
+'I wish I'd got the price of a pint about me,' sighed Darkey, and the
+other man dropped his head and appeared to sleep. Then Darkey dozed a
+little, and heard in his waking sleep the heavy, crunching tread of an
+approaching park-keeper; he started up to warn his companion, but
+thought better of it, and closed his eyes again.
+
+'Now then, there,' the park-keeper shouted to the man with the sailor's
+cap, 'get up! This ain't a fourpenny doss, you know. No lying down.'
+
+A rough shake accompanied the words, and the man sat up.
+
+'All right, my friend.'
+
+The keeper, who was a good-humoured man, passed on without further
+objurgation.
+
+The face of the younger man had grown whiter.
+
+'Look here, Darkey,' he said, 'I believe I'm done for.'
+
+'Never say die.'
+
+'No, just die without speaking.'
+
+His head fell forward and his eyes closed.
+
+'At any rate, this is better than some deaths I've seen,' he began again
+with a strange accession of liveliness. 'Darkey, did I tell you the
+story of the five Japanese girls?'
+
+'What, in Suez Bay?' said Darkey, who had heard many sea-stories during
+the last two days, and recollected them but hazily.
+
+'No, man. This was at Nagasaki. We were taking in a cargo of coal for
+Hong Kong. Hundreds of little Jap girls pass the coal from hand to hand
+over the ship's side in tiny baskets that hold about a plateful. In that
+way you can get three thousand tons aboard in two days.'
+
+'Talking of platefuls reminds me of sausage and mash,' said Darkey.
+
+'Don't interrupt. Well, five of these gay little dolls wanted to go to
+Hong Kong, and they arranged with the Chinese sailors to stow away; I
+believe their friends paid those cold-blooded fiends something to pass
+them down food on the voyage, and give them an airing at nights. We had
+a particularly lively trip, battened everything down tight, and scarcely
+uncovered till we got into port. Then I and another man found those five
+girls among the coal.'
+
+'Dead, eh?'
+
+'They'd simply torn themselves to pieces. Their bits of frock things
+were in strips, and they were scratched deep from top to toe. The
+Chinese had never troubled their heads about them at all, although they
+must have known it meant death. You may bet there was a row. The
+Japanese authorities make you search ship before sailing, now.'
+
+'Well?'
+
+'Well, I shan't die like that. That's all.'
+
+He stretched himself out once more, and for ten minutes neither spoke.
+The park-keeper strolled up again.
+
+'Get up, there!' he said shortly and gruffly.
+
+'Up ye get, mate,' added Darkey, but the man on the bench did not stir.
+One look at his face sufficed to startle the keeper, and presently two
+policemen were wheeling an ambulance cart to the hospital. Darkey
+followed, gave such information as he could, and then went his own ways.
+
+
+II
+
+In the afternoon the patient regained full consciousness. His eyes
+wandered vacantly about the illimitable ward, with its rows of beds
+stretching away on either side of him. A woman with a white cap, a white
+apron, and white wristbands bent over him, and he felt something
+gratefully warm passing down his throat. For just one second he was
+happy. Then his memory returned, and the nurse saw that he was crying.
+When he caught the nurse's eye he ceased, and looked steadily at the
+distant ceiling.
+
+'You're better?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+He tried to speak boldly, decisively, nonchalantly. He was filled with a
+sense of physical shame, the shame which bodily helplessness always
+experiences in the presence of arrogant, patronizing health. He would
+have got up and walked briskly away if he could. He hated to be waited
+on, to be humoured, to be examined and theorized about. This woman would
+be wanting to feel his pulse. She should not; he would turn
+cantankerous. No doubt they had been saying to each other, 'And so
+young, too! How sad!' Confound them!
+
+'Have you any friends that you would like to send for?'
+
+'No, none.'
+
+The girl--she was only a girl--looked at him, and there was that in her
+eye which overcame him.
+
+'None at all?'
+
+'Not that I want to see.'
+
+'Are your parents alive?'
+
+'My mother is, but she lives away in the Five Towns.'
+
+'You've not seen her lately, perhaps?'
+
+He did not reply, and the nurse spoke again, but her voice sounded
+indistinct and far off.
+
+When he awoke it was night. At the other end of the ward was a long
+table covered with a white cloth, and on this table a lamp.
+
+In the ring of light under the lamp was an open book, an inkstand and a
+pen. A nurse--not _his_ nurse--was standing by the table, her fingers
+idly drumming the cloth, and near her a man in evening dress. Perhaps a
+doctor. They were conversing in low tones. In the middle of the ward was
+an open stove, and the restless flames were reflected in all the brass
+knobs of the bedsteads and in some shining metal balls which hung from
+an unlighted chandelier. His part of the ward was almost in darkness. A
+confused, subdued murmur of little coughs, breathings, rustlings, was
+continually audible, and sometimes it rose above the conversation at the
+table. He noticed all these things. He became conscious, too, of a
+strangely familiar smell. What was it? Ah, yes! Acetic acid; his mother
+used it for her rheumatics.
+
+Suddenly, magically, a great longing came over him. He must see his
+mother, or his brothers, or his little sister--someone who knew him,
+someone who _belonged_ to him. He could have cried out in his desire.
+This one thought consumed all his faculties. If his mother could but
+walk in just now through that doorway! If only old Spot even could amble
+up to him, tongue out and tail furiously wagging! He tried to sit up,
+and he could not move! Then despair settled on him, and weighed him
+down. He closed his eyes.
+
+The doctor and the nurse came slowly up the ward, pausing here and
+there. They stopped before his bed, and he held his breath.
+
+'Not roused up again, I suppose?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'H'm! He may flicker on for forty-eight hours. Not more.'
+
+They went on, and with a sigh of relief he opened his eyes again. The
+doctor shook hands with the nurse, who returned to the table and sat
+down.
+
+Death! The end of all this! Yes, it was coming. He felt it. His had been
+one of those wasted lives of which he used to read in books. How
+strange! Almost amusing! He was one of those sons who bring sorrow and
+shame into a family. Again, how strange! What a coincidence that
+he--just _he_ and not the man in the next bed--should be one of those
+rare, legendary good-for-nothings who go recklessly to ruin. And yet, he
+was sure that he was not such a bad fellow after all. Only somehow he
+had been careless. Yes, careless; that was the word ... nothing
+worse.... As to death, he was indifferent. Remembering his father's
+death, he reflected that it was probably less disturbing to die one's
+self than to watch another pass.
+
+He smelt the acetic acid once more, and his thoughts reverted to his
+mother. Poor mother! No, great mother! The grandeur of her life's
+struggle filled him with a sense of awe. Strange that until that moment
+he had never seen the heroic side of her humdrum, commonplace existence!
+He must write to her, now, at once, before it was too late. His letter
+would trouble her, add another wrinkle to her face, but he must write;
+she must know that he had been thinking of her.
+
+'Nurse!' he cried out, in a thin, weak voice.
+
+'Ssh!'
+
+She was by his side directly, but not before he had lost consciousness
+again.
+
+The following morning he managed with infinite labour to scrawl a few
+lines:
+
+    'DEAR MAMMA,
+
+    'You will be surprised but not glad to get this letter. I'm done
+    for, and you will never see me again. I'm sorry for what I've done,
+    and how I've treated you, but it's no use saying anything now. If
+    Pater had only lived he might have kept me in order. But you were
+    too kind, you know. You've had a hard struggle these last six
+    years, and I hope Arthur and Dick will stand by you better than I
+    did, now they are growing up. Give them my love, and kiss little
+    Fannie for me.
+
+    'WILLIE.
+
+    '_Mrs. Hancock_----'
+
+He got no further with the address.
+
+
+III
+
+By some turn of the wheel, Darkey gathered several shillings during the
+next day or two, and, feeling both elated and benevolent, he called one
+afternoon at the hospital, 'just to inquire like.' They told him the man
+was dead.
+
+'By the way, he left a letter without an address. Mrs. Hancock--here it
+is.'
+
+'That'll be his mother; he did tell me about her--lived at Knype,
+Staffordshire, he said. I'll see to it.'
+
+They gave Darkey the letter.
+
+'So his name's Hancock,' he soliloquized, when he got into the street.
+'I knew a girl of that name--once. I'll go and have a pint of
+four-half.'
+
+At nine o'clock that night Darkey was still consuming four-half, and
+relating certain adventures by sea which, he averred, had happened to
+himself. He was very drunk.
+
+'Yes,' he said, 'and them five lil' gals was lying there without a
+stitch on 'em, dead as meat; 's 'true as I'm 'ere. I've seen a thing or
+two in my time, I can tell ye.'
+
+'Talking about these Anarchists--' said a man who appeared anxious to
+change the subject.
+
+'An--kists,' Darkey interrupted. 'I tell ye what I'd do with that muck.'
+
+He stopped to light his pipe, looked in vain for a match, felt in his
+pockets, and pulled out a piece of paper--the letter.
+
+'I tell you what I'd do. I'd--'
+
+He slowly and meditatively tore the letter in two, dropped one piece on
+the floor, thrust the other into a convenient gas-jet, and applied it to
+the tobacco.
+
+'I'd get 'em 'gether in a heap, and I'd--Damn this pipe!'
+
+He picked up the other half of the letter, and relighted the pipe.
+
+'After you, mate,' said a man sitting near, who was just biting the end
+from a cigar.
+
+
+
+
+THE END.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13293 ***