________________________________________________
_ My knowledge of industrial districts amounted to nothing. Born in
Devonshire, educated at Cambridge, and fulfilling my destiny as
curator of a certain department of antiquities at the British
Museum, I had never been brought into contact with the vast
constructive material activities of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and
Staffordshire. I had but passed through them occasionally on my
way to Scotland, scorning their necessary grime with the perhaps
too facile disdain of the clean-faced southerner, who is apt to
forget that coal cannot walk up unaided out of the mine, and that
the basin in which he washes his beautiful purity can only be
manufactured amid conditions highly repellent. Well, my
impressions of the platform of Knype station were unfavourable.
There was dirt in the air; I could feel it at once on my skin. And
the scene was shabby, undignified, and rude. I use the word 'rude'
in all its senses. What I saw was a pushing, exclamatory, ill-
dressed, determined crowd, each member of which was bent on the
realization of his own desires by the least ceremonious means. If
an item of this throng wished to get past me, he made me instantly
aware of his wish by abruptly changing my position in infinite
space; it was not possible to misconstrue his meaning. So much
crude force and naked will-to-live I had not before set eyes on.
In truth, I felt myself to be a very brittle, delicate bit of
intellectual machinery in the midst of all these physical
manifestations. Yet I am a tallish man, and these potters appeared
to me to be undersized, and somewhat thin too! But what elbows!
What glaring egoistic eyes! What terrible decisiveness in action!
'Now then, get in if ye're going!' said a red-haired porter to me
curtly.
'I'm not going. I've just got out,' I replied.
'Well, then, why dunna' ye stand out o' th' wee and let them get
in as wants to?'
Unable to offer a coherent answer to this crushing demand, I stood
out of the way. In the light of further knowledge I now surmise
that that porter was a very friendly and sociable porter. But at
the moment I really believed that, taking me for the least
admirable and necessary of God's creatures, he meant to convey his
opinion to me for my own good. I glanced up at the lighted windows
of the train, and saw the composed, careless faces of haughty
persons who were going direct from London to Manchester, and to
whom the Five Towns was nothing but a delay. I envied them. I
wanted to return to the shelter of the train. When it left, I
fancied that my last link with civilization was broken. Then
another train puffed in, and it was simply taken by assault in a
fraction of time, to an incomprehensible bawling of friendly
sociable porters. Season-ticket holders at Finsbury Park think
they know how to possess themselves of a train; they are deceived.
So this is where Simon Fuge came from (I reflected)! The devil it
is (I reflected)! I tried to conceive what the invaders of the
train would exclaim if confronted by one of Simon Fuge's pictures.
I could imagine only one word, and that a monosyllable, that would
meet the case of their sentiments. And his dalliance, his
tangential nocturnal deviations in gondolas with exquisite twin
odalisques! There did not seem to be much room for amorous
elegance in the lives of these invaders. And his death! What would
they say of his death? Upon my soul, as I stood on that dirty
platform, in a milieu of advertisements of soap, boots, and
aperients, I began to believe that Simon Fuge never had lived,
that he was a mere illusion of his friends and his small public.
All that I saw around me was a violent negation of Simon Fuge,
that entity of rare, fine, exotic sensibilities, that perfectly
mad gourmet of sensations, that exotic seer of beauty.
I caught sight of my acquaintance and host, Mr Robert Brindley,
coming towards me on the platform. Hitherto I had only met him in
London, when, as chairman of the committee of management of the
Wedgwood Institution and School of Art at Bursley, he had called
on me at the British Museum for advice as to loan exhibits. He was
then dressed like a self-respecting tourist. Now, although an
architect by profession, he appeared to be anxious to be mistaken
for a sporting squire. He wore very baggy knickerbockers, and
leggings, and a cap. This raiment was apparently the agreed
uniform of the easy classes in the Five Towns; for in the crowd I
had noticed several such consciously superior figures among the
artisans. Mr Brindley, like most of the people in the station, had
a slightly pinched and chilled air, as though that morning he had
by inadvertence omitted to don those garments which are not seen.
He also, like most of the people there, but not to the same
extent, had a somewhat suspicious and narrowly shrewd regard, as
who should say: 'If any person thinks he can get the better of me
by a trick, let him try--that's all.' But the moment his eye
encountered mine, this expression vanished from his face, and he
gave me a candid smile.
'I hope you're well,' he said gravely, squeezing my hand in a sort
of vice that he carried at the end of his right arm.
I reassured him.
'Oh, I'm all right,' he said, in response to the expression of my
hopes.
It was a relief to me to see him. He took charge of me. I felt, as
it were, safe in his arms. I perceived that, unaided and
unprotected, I should never have succeeded in reaching Bursley
from Knype.
A whistle sounded.
'Better get in,' he suggested; and then in a tone of absolute
command: 'Give me your bag.'
I obeyed. He opened the door of a first-class carriage.
'I'm travelling second,' I explained.
'Never mind. Get in.'
In his tones was a kindly exasperation.
I got in; he followed. The train moved.
'Ah!' breathed Mr Brindley, blowing out much air and falling like
a sack of coal into a corner seat. He was a thin man, aged about
thirty, with brown eyes, and a short blonde beard.
Conversation was at first difficult. Personally I am not a
bubbling fount of gay nothings when I find myself alone with a
comparative stranger. My drawbridge goes up as if by magic, my
postern is closed, and I peer cautiously through the narrow slits
of my turret to estimate the chances of peril. Nor was Mr Brindley
offensively affable. However, we struggled into a kind of chatter.
I had come to the Five Towns, on behalf of the British Museum, to
inspect and appraise, with a view to purchase by the nation, some
huge slip-decorated dishes, excessively curious according to
photographs, which had been discovered in the cellars of the
Conservative Club at Bursley. Having shared in the negotiations
for my visit, Mr Brindley had invited me to spend the night at his
house. We were able to talk about all this. And when we had talked
about all this we were able to talk about the singular scenery of
coal dust, potsherds, flame and steam, through which the train
wound its way. It was squalid ugliness, but it was squalid
ugliness on a scale so vast and overpowering that it became
sublime. Great furnaces gleamed red in the twilight, and their
fires were reflected in horrible black canals; processions of
heavy vapour drifted in all directions across the sky, over what
acres of mean and miserable brown architecture! The air was alive
with the most extraordinary, weird, gigantic sounds. I do not
think the Five Towns will ever be described: Dante lived too soon.
As for the erratic and exquisite genius, Simon Fuge, and his
odalisques reclining on silken cushions on the enchanted bosom of
a lake--I could no longer conjure them up even faintly in my mind.
'I suppose you know Simon Fuge is dead?' I remarked, in a pause.
'No! Is he?' said Mr Brindley, with interest. 'Is it in the
paper?'
He did not seem to be quite sure that it would be in the paper.
'Here it is,' said I, and I passed him the Gazette.
'Ha!' he exclaimed explosively. This 'Ha!' was entirely different
from his 'Ah!' Something shot across his eyes, something
incredibly rapid--too rapid for a wink; yet it could only be
called a wink. It was the most subtle transmission of the beyond-
speech that I have ever known any man accomplish, and it endeared
Mr Brindley to me. But I knew not its significance.
'What do they think of Fuge down here?' I asked.
'I don't expect they think of him,' said my host.
He pulled a pouch and a packet of cigarette papers from his
pocket.
'Have one of mine,' I suggested, hastily producing my case.
He did not even glance at its contents.
'No, thanks,' he said curtly.
I named my brand.
'My dear sir,' he said, with a return to his kindly exasperation,
'no cigarette that is not fresh made can be called a cigarette.' I
stood corrected. 'You may pay as much as you like, but you can
never buy cigarettes as good as I can make out of an ounce of
fresh B.D.V. tobacco. Can you roll one?' I had to admit that I
could not, I who in Bloomsbury was accepted as an authority on
cigarettes as well as on porcelain. 'I'll roll you one, and you
shall try it.'
He did so.
I gathered from his solemnity that cigarettes counted in the life
of Mr Brindley. He could not take cigarettes other than seriously.
The worst of it was that he was quite right. The cigarette which
he constructed for me out of his wretched B.D.V. tobacco was
adorable, and I have made my own cigarettes ever since. You will
find B.D.V. tobacco all over the haunts frequented by us of the
Museum now-a-days, solely owing to the expertise of Mr Brindley. A
terribly capable and positive man! He KNEW, and he knew that he
knew.
He said nothing further as to Simon Fuge. Apparently he had
forgotten the decease.
'Do you often see the Gazette?' I asked, perhaps in the hope of
attracting him back to Fuge.
'No,' he said; 'the musical criticism is too rotten.'
Involuntarily I bridled. It was startling, and it was not
agreeable, to have one's favourite organ so abruptly condemned by
a provincial architect in knickerbockers and a cap, in the midst
of all that industrial ugliness. What could the Five Towns know
about art? Yet here was this fellow condemning the Gazette on
artistic grounds. I offered no defence, because he was right--
again. But I did not like it.
'Do you ever see the Manchester Guardian?' he questioned, carrying
the war into my camp.
'No,' I said.
'Pity!' he ejaculated.
'I've often heard that it's a very good paper,' I said politely.
'It isn't a very good paper,' he laid me low. 'It's the best paper
in the world. Try it for a month--it gets to Euston at half-past
eight--and then tell me what you think.'
I saw that I must pull myself together. I had glided into the Five
Towns in a mood of gentle, wise condescension. I saw that it would
be as well, for my own honour and safety, to put on another mood
as quickly as possible, otherwise I might be left for dead on the
field. Certainly the fellow was provincial, curt, even brutal in
his despisal of diplomacy. Certainly he exaggerated the importance
of cigarettes in the great secular scheme of evolution. But he was
a man; he was a very tonic dose. I thought it would be safer to
assume that he knew everything, and that the British Museum knew
very little. Yet at the British Museum he had been quite
different, quite deferential and rather timid. Still, I liked him.
I liked his eyes.
The train stopped at an incredible station situated in the centre
of a rolling desert whose surface consisted of broken pots and
cinders. I expect no one to believe this.
'Here we are,' said he blithely. 'No, give me the bag. Porter!'
His summons to the solitary porter was like a clap of thunder. _
Read next: PART XII - THE DEATH OF SIMON FUGE: CHAPTER III
Read previous: PART XII - THE DEATH OF SIMON FUGE: CHAPTER I
Table of content of Grim Smile of the Five Towns
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
