________________________________________________
_ It was on a muddy day in October that the first great battle for
and against Federation was fought in Bursley. Constance was
suffering severely from sciatica. She was also suffering from
disgust with the modern world.
Unimaginable things had happened in the Square. For Constance, the
reputation of the Square was eternally ruined. Charles Critchlow,
by that strange good fortune which always put him in the right
when fairly he ought to have been in the wrong, had let the Baines
shop and his own shop and house to the Midland Clothiers Company,
which was establishing branches throughout Staffordshire,
Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and adjacent counties. He had sold
his own chemist's stock and gone to live in a little house at the
bottom of Kingstreet. It is doubtful whether he would have
consented to retire had not Alderman Holl died earlier in the
year, thus ending a long rivalry between the old men for the
patriarchate of the Square. Charles Critchlow was as free from
sentiment as any man, but no man is quite free from it, and the
ancient was in a position to indulge sentiment had he chosen. His
business was not a source of loss, and he could still trust his
skinny hands and peering eyes to make up a prescription. However,
the offer of the Midland Clothiers Company tempted him, and as the
undisputed 'father' of the Square he left the Square in triumph.
The Midland Clothiers Company had no sense of the proprieties of
trade. Their sole idea was to sell goods. Having possessed
themselves of one of the finest sites in a town which, after all
was said and done, comprised nearly forty thousand inhabitants,
they set about to make the best of that site. They threw the two
shops into one, and they caused to be constructed a sign compared
to which the spacious old 'Baines' sign was a postcard. They
covered the entire frontage with posters of a theatrical
description--coloured posters! They occupied the front page of the
Signal, and from that pulpit they announced that winter was
approaching, and that they meant to sell ten thousand overcoats at
their new shop in Bursley at the price of twelve and sixpence
each. The tailoring of the world was loudly and coarsely defied to
equal the value of those overcoats. On the day of opening they
arranged an orchestra or artillery of phonographs upon the leads
over the window of that part of the shop which had been Mr.
Critchlow's. They also carpeted the Square with handbills, and
flew flags from their upper storeys. The immense shop proved to be
full of overcoats; overcoats were shown in all the three great
windows; in one window an overcoat was disposed as a receptacle
for water, to prove that the Midland twelve-and-sixpenny overcoats
were impermeable by rain. Overcoats flapped in the two doorways.
These devices woke and drew the town, and the town found itself
received by bustling male assistants very energetic and rapid,
instead of by demure anaemic virgins. At moments towards evening
the shop was populous with custom; the number of overcoats sold
was prodigious. On another day the Midland sold trousers in a like
manner, but without the phonographs. Unmistakably the Midland had
shaken the Square and demonstrated that commerce was still
possible to fearless enterprise.
Nevertheless the Square was not pleased. The Square was conscious
of shame, of dignity departed. Constance was divided between pain
and scornful wrath. For her, what the Midland had done was to
desecrate a shrine. She hated those flags, and those flaring,
staring posters on the honest old brick walls, and the enormous
gilded sign, and the windows all filled with a monotonous
repetition of the same article, and the bustling assistants. As
for the phonographs, she regarded them as a grave insult; they had
been within twenty feet of her drawing-room window! Twelve-and-
sixpenny overcoats! It was monstrous, and equally monstrous was
the gullibility of the people. How could an overcoat at twelve and
sixpence be 'good.' She remembered the overcoats made and sold in
the shop in the time of her father and her husband, overcoats of
which the inconvenience was that they would not wear out! The
Midland, for Constance, was not a trading concern, but something
between a cheap-jack and a circus. She could scarcely bear to walk
down the Square, to such a degree did the ignoble frontage of the
Midland offend her eye and outrage her ancestral pride. She even
said that she would give up her house.
But when, on the twenty-ninth of September, she received six
months' notice, signed in Critchlow's shaky hand, to quit the
house--it was wanted for the Midland's manager, the Midland having
taken the premises on condition that they might eject Constance if
they chose--the blow was an exceedingly severe one. She had sworn
to go--but to be turned out, to be turned out of the house of her
birth and out of her father's home, that was different! Her pride,
injured as it was, had a great deal to support. It became
necessary for her to recollect that she was a Baines. She affected
magnificently not to care. But she could not refrain from telling
all her acquaintances that she was being turned out of her house,
and asking them what they thought of THAT; and when she met
Charles Critchlow in the street she seared him with the heat of
her resentment. The enterprise of finding a new house and moving
into it loomed before her gigantic, terrible, the idea of it was
alone sufficient to make her ill.
Meanwhile, in the matter of Federation, preparations for the
pitched battle had been going forward, especially in the columns
of the Signal, where the scribes of each one of the Five Towns had
proved that all the other towns were in the clutch of unscrupulous
gangs of self-seekers. After months of argument and recrimination,
all the towns except Bursley were either favourable or indifferent
to the prospect of becoming a part of the twelfth largest town in
the United Kingdom. But in Bursley the opposition was strong, and
the twelfth largest town in the United Kingdom could not spring
into existence without the consent of Bursley. The United Kingdom
itself was languidly interested in the possibility of suddenly
being endowed with a new town of a quarter of a million
inhabitants. The Five Towns were frequently mentioned in the
London dailies, and London journalists would write such sentences
as: "The Five Towns, which are of course, as everybody knows,
Hanbridge, Bursley, Knype, Longshaw, and Turnhill ... ." This was
renown at last, for the most maligned district in the country! And
then a Cabinet Minister had visited the Five Towns, and assisted
at an official inquiry, and stated in his hammering style that he
meant personally to do everything possible to accomplish the
Federation of the Five Towns: an incautious remark, which
infuriated, while it flattered, the opponents of Federation in
Bursley. Constance, with many other sensitive persons, asked
angrily what right a Cabinet Minister had to take sides in a
purely local affair. But the partiality of the official world grew
flagrant. The Mayor of Bursley openly proclaimed himself a
Federationist, though there was a majority on the Council against
him. Even ministers of religion permitted themselves to think and
to express opinions. Well might the indignant Old Guard imagine
that the end of public decency had come! The Federationists were
very ingenious individuals. They contrived to enrol in their ranks
a vast number of leading men. Then they hired the Covered Market,
and put a platform in it, and put all these leading men on the
platform, and made them all speak eloquently on the advantages of
moving with the times. The meeting was crowded and enthusiastic,
and readers of the Signal next day could not but see that the
battle was won in advance, and that anti-Federation was dead. In
the following week, however, the anti-Federationists held in the
Covered Market an exactly similar meeting (except that the display
of leading men was less brilliant), and demanded of a floor of
serried heads whether the old Mother of the Five Towns was
prepared to put herself into the hands of a crew of highly-paid
bureaucrats at Hanbridge, and was answered by a wild defiant "No,"
that could be heard on Duck Bank. Readers of the Signal next day
were fain to see that the battle had not been won in advance.
Bursley was lukewarm on the topics of education, slums, water,
gas, electricity. But it meant to fight for that mysterious thing,
its identity. Was the name of Bursley to be lost to the world? To
ask the question was to give the answer.
Then dawned the day of battle, the day of the Poll, when the
burgesses were to indicate plainly by means of a cross on a voting
paper whether or not they wanted Federation. And on this day
Constance was almost incapacitated by sciatica. It was a heroic
day. The walls of the town were covered with literature, and the
streets dotted with motor-cars and other vehicles at the service
of the voters. The greater number of these vehicles bore large
cards with the words, "Federation this time." And hundreds of men
walked briskly about with circular cards tied to their lapels, as
though Bursley had been a race-course, and these cards too had the
words, "Federation this time." (The reference was to a light poll
which had been taken several years before, when no interest had
been aroused and the immature project yet defeated by a six to one
majority.) All partisans of Federation sported a red ribbon; all
Anti-Federationists sported a blue ribbon. The schools were closed
and the Federationists displayed their characteristic lack of
scruple in appropriating the children. The Federationists, with
devilish skill, had hired the Bursley Town Silver Prize Band, an
organization of terrific respectability, and had set it to march
playing through the town followed by wagonettes crammed with
children, who sang:
Vote, vote, vote for Federation, Don't be stupid, old and slow, We
are sure that it will be Good for the communitie, So vote, vote,
vote, and make it go.
How this performance could affect the decision of grave burgesses
at the polls was not apparent; but the Anti-Federationists feared
that it might, and before noon was come they had engaged two bands
and had composed in committee, the following lyric in reply to the
first one:
Down, down, down, with Federation, As we are we'd rather stay;
When the vote on Saturday's read Federation will be dead, Good old
Bursley's sure to win the day.
They had also composed another song, entitled "Dear old Bursley,"
which, however, they made the fatal error of setting to the music
of "Auld Lang Syne." The effect was that of a dirge, and it
perhaps influenced many voters in favour of the more cheerful
party. The Anti-Federationists, indeed, never regained the mean
advantage filched by unscrupulous Federationists with the help of
the Silver Prize Band and a few hundred infants. The odds were
against the Anti-Federationists. The mayor had actually issued a
letter to the inhabitants accusing the Anti-Federationists of
unfair methods! This was really too much! The impudence of it
knocked the breath out of its victims, and breath is very
necessary in a polling contest. The Federationists, as one of
their prominent opponents admitted, 'had it all their own way,'
dominating both the streets and the walls. And when, early in the
afternoon, Mr. Dick Povey sailed over the town in a balloon that
was plainly decorated with the crimson of Federation, it was felt
that the cause of Bursley's separate identity was for ever lost.
Still, Bursley, with the willing aid of the public-houses,
maintained its gaiety. _
Read next: BOOK IV WHAT LIFE IS: CHAPTER V - END OF CONSTANCE: PART IV
Read previous: BOOK IV WHAT LIFE IS: CHAPTER V - END OF CONSTANCE: PART II
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