We had a few hundred yards to walk down the silent, wide street, where the gas-lamps were burning with the strange, endless patience that gas-lamps have. The stillness of a provincial town at night is quite different from that of London; we might have been the only persons alive in England.
Except for a feeling of unreality, a feeling that the natural order of things had been disturbed by some necromancer, I was perfectly well the same morning at breakfast, as the doctor had predicted I should be. When I expressed to Mr Brindley my stupefaction at this happy sequel, he showed a polite but careless inability to follow my line of thought. It appeared that he was always well at breakfast, even when he did stay up ‘a little later than usual’. It appeared further that he always breakfasted at a quarter to nine, and read the Manchester Guardian during the meal, to which his wife did or did not descend—according to the moods of the nursery; and that he reached his office at a quarter to ten. That morning the mood of the nursery was apparently unpropitious. He and I were alone. I begged him not to pretermit his GUARDIAN, but to examine it and give me the news. He agreed, scarcely unwilling.
‘There’s a paragraph in the London correspondence about Fuge,’ he announced from behind the paper.
‘What do they say about him?’
‘Nothing particular.’
‘Now I want to ask you something,’ I said.
I had been thinking a good deal about the sisters and Simon Fuge. And in spite of everything that I had heard—in spite even of the facts that the lake had been dug by a railway company, and that the excursion to the lake had been an excursion of Sunday-school teachers and their friends—I was still haunted by certain notions concerning Simon Fuge and Annie Brett. Annie Brett’s flush, her unshed tears; and the self-consciousness shown by Mrs Colclough when I had pointedly mentioned her sister’s name in connection with Simon Fuge’s: these were surely indications! And then the doctor’s recitals of manners in the immediate neighbourhood of Bursley went to support my theory that even in Staffordshire life was very much life.
‘What?’ demanded Mr Brindley.
‘Was Miss Brett ever Simon Fuge’s mistress?’
At that moment Mrs Brindley, miraculously fresh and smiling, entered the room.
‘Wife,’ said Mr Brindley, without giving her time to greet me, ‘what do you think he’s just asked me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He’s just asked me if Annie Brett was ever Simon Fuge’s mistress.’
She sank into a chair.
‘Annie BRETT?’ She began to laugh gently. ‘Oh! Mr Loring, you really are too funny!’ She yielded to her emotions. It may be said that she laughed as they can laugh in the Five Towns. She cried. She had to wipe away the tears of laughter.
‘What on earth made you think so?’ she inquired, after recovery.
‘I—had an idea,’ I said lamely. ‘He always made out that one of those two sisters was so much to him, and I knew it couldn’t be Mrs Colclough.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘ask anybody down here, ANYbody! And see what they’ll say.’
‘No,’ Mr Brindley put in, ‘don’t go about asking ANYbody. You might get yourself disliked. But you may take it it isn’t true.’
‘Most certainly,’ his wife concurred with seriousness.
‘We reckon to know something about Simon Fuge down here,’ Mr Brindley added. ‘Also about the famous Annie.’
‘He must have flirted with her a good bit, anyhow,’ I said.
‘Oh, FLIRT!’ ejaculated Mr Brindley.
I had a sudden dazzling vision of the great truth that the people of the Five Towns have no particular use for half-measures in any department of life. So I accepted the final judgement with meekness.
IX
I returned to London that evening, my work done, and the municipality happily flattered by my judgement of the slip-decorated dishes. Mr Brindley had found time to meet me at the midday meal, and he had left his office earlier than usual in order to help me to drink his wife’s afternoon tea. About an hour later he picked up my little bag, and said that he should accompany me to the little station in the midst of the desert of cinders and broken crockery, and even see me as far as Knype, where I had to take the London express. No, there are no half-measures in the Five Towns. Mrs Brindley stood on her doorstep, with her eldest infant on her shoulders, and waved us off. The infant cried, expressing his own and his mother’s grief at losing a guest. It seems as if people are born hospitable in the Five Towns.
We had not walked more than a hundred yards up the road when a motor-car thundered down upon us from the opposite direction. It was Mr Colclough’s, and Mr Colclough was driving it. Mr Brindley stopped his friend with the authoritative gesture of a policeman.
‘Where are you going, Ol?’
‘Home, lad. Sorry you’re leaving us so soon, Mr Loring.’
‘You’re mistaken, my boy,’ said Mr Brindley. ‘You’re just going to run us down to Knype station, first.’
‘I must look slippy, then,’ said Mr Colclough.
‘You can look as slippy as you like,’ said Mr Brindley.
In another fifteen seconds we were in the car, and it had turned round, and was speeding towards Knype. A feverish journey! We passed electric cars every minute, and for three miles were continually twisting round the tails of ponderous, creaking, and excessively deliberate carts that dropped a trail of small coal, or huge barrels on wheels that dripped something like the finest Devonshire cream, or brewer’s drays that left nothing behind them save a luscious odour of malt. It was a breathless slither over unctuous black mud through a long winding canon of brown-red houses and shops, with a glimpse here and there of a grey-green park, a canal, or a football field.
‘I daredn’t hurry,’ said Mr Colclough, setting us down at the station. ‘I was afraid of a skid.’ He had not spoken during the transit.
‘Don’t put on side, Ol,’ said Mr Brindley. ‘What time did you get up this morning?’
‘Eight o’clock, lad. I was at th’ works at nine.’
He flew off to escape my thanks, and Mr Brindley and I went into the station. Owing to the celerity of the automobile we had half-an-hour to wait. We spent it chiefly at the bookstall. While we were there the extra-special edition of the STAFFORDSHIRE SIGNAL, affectionately termed ‘the local rag’ by its readers, arrived, and we watched a newsboy affix its poster to a board. The poster ran thus—
HANBRIDGE RATES LIVELY MEETING
—
KNYPE F.C. NEW CENTRE—FORWARD
—
ALL—WINNERS AND S.P.
Now, close by this poster was the poster of the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and among the items offered by the DAILY TELEGRAPH was: ‘Death of Simon Fuge’. I could not forbear pointing out to Mr Brindley the difference between the two posters. A conversation ensued; and amid the rumbling of trains and the rough stir of the platform we got back again to Simon Fuge, and Mr Brindley’s tone gradually grew, if not acrid, a little impatient.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘rates are rates, especially in Hanbridge. And let me tell you that last season Knype Football Club jolly nearly got thrown out of the First League. The constitution of the team for this next season—why, damn it, it’s a question of national importance! You don’t understand these things. If Knype Football Club was put into the League Second Division, ten thousand homes would go into mourning. Who the devil was Simon Fuge?’
They joke with such extraordinary seriousness in the Five Towns that one is somehow bound to pretend that they are not joking. So I replied—
‘He was a great artist. And this is his native district. Surely you ought to be proud of him!’
‘He may have been a great artist,’ said Mr Brindley, ‘or he may not. But for us he was simply a man who came of a family that had a bad reputation for talking too much and acting the goat!’