PART XII - THE DEATH OF SIMON FUGE - CHAPTER VIII

________________________________________________
_ Soon afterwards, for me, the night began to grow fantastic; it
took on the colour of a gigantic adventure. I do not suppose that
either Mr Brindley or Mr Colclough, or the other person who
presently arrived, regarded it as anything but a pleasant
conviviality, but to a man of my constitution and habits it was an
almost incredible occurrence. The other person was the book-
collecting doctor. He arrived with a discreet tap on the window at
midnight, to spend the evening. Mrs Brindley had gone home and Mrs
Colclough had gone to bed. The book-collecting doctor refused
champagne; he was, in fact, very rude to champagne in general. He
had whisky. And those astonishing individuals, Messieurs Brindley
and Colclough, secretly convinced of the justice of the attack on
champagne, had whisky too. And that still most astonishing
individual, Loring of the B.M., joined them. It was the hour of
limericks. Limericks were demanded for the diversion of the
doctor, and I furnished them. We then listened to the tale of the
doctor's experiences that day amid the sturdy, natural-minded
population of a muling village not far from Bursley. Seldom have I
had such a bath in the pure fluid of human nature. All sense of
time was lost. I lived in an eternity. I could not suggest to my
host that we should depart. I could, however, decline more whisky.
And I could, given the chance, discourse with gay despair
concerning the miserable wreck that I should be on the morrow in
consequence of this high living. I asked them how I could be
expected, in such a state, to judge delicate points of expertise
in earthenware. I gave them a brief sketch of my customary
evening, and left them to compare it with that evening. The doctor
perceived that I was serious. He gazed at me with pity, as if to
say: 'Poor frail southern organism! It ought to be in bed, with
nothing inside it but tea!' What he did actually say was: 'You
come round to my place, I'll soon put you right!' 'Can you stop me
from having a headache tomorrow?' I eagerly asked. 'I think so,'
he said with calm northern confidence.

At some later hour Mr Brindley and I 'went round'. Mr Colclough
would not come. He bade me good-bye, as his wife had done, with
the most extraordinary kindness, the most genuine sorrow at
quitting me, the most genuine pleasure in the hope of seeing me
again.

'There are three thousand books in this room!' I said to myself,
as I stood in the doctor's electrically lit library.

'What price this for a dog?' Mr Brindley drew my attention to an
aristocratic fox-terrier that lay on the hearth. 'Well, Titus! Is
it sleepy? Well, well! How many firsts has he won, doctor?'

'Six,' said the doctor. 'I'll just fix you up, to begin with,' he
turned to me.

After I had been duly fixed up ('This'll help you to sleep, and
THIS'll placate your "god",' said the doctor), I saw to my intense
surprise that another 'evening' was to be instantly superimposed
on the 'evening' at Mr Colclough's. The doctor and Mr Brindley
carefully and deliberately lighted long cigars, and sank deeply
into immense arm-chairs; and so I imitated them as well as I could
in my feeble southern way. We talked books. We just simply
enumerated books without end, praising or damning them, and
arranged authors in neat pews, like cattle in classes at an
agricultural show. No pastime is more agreeable to people who have
the book disease, and none more quickly fleets the hours, and none
is more delightfully futile.

Ages elapsed, and suddenly, like a gun discharging, Mr Brindley
said--

'We must go!'

Of all things that happened this was the most astonishing.

We did go.

'By the way, doc.,' said Mr Brindley, in the doctor's wide porch,
'I forgot to tell you that Simon Fuge is dead.'

'Is he?' said the doctor.

'Yes. You've got a couple of his etchings, haven't you?'

'No,' said the doctor. 'I had. But I sold them several months
ago.'

'Oh!' said Mr Brindley negligently; 'I didn't know. Well, so
long!'

We had a few hundred yards to walk down the silent, wide street,
where the gas-lamps were burning with the strange, endless
patience that gas-lamps have. The stillness of a provincial town
at night is quite different from that of London; we might have
been the only persons alive in England.

Except for a feeling of unreality, a feeling that the natural
order of things had been disturbed by some necromancer, I was
perfectly well the same morning at breakfast, as the doctor had
predicted I should be. When I expressed to Mr Brindley my
stupefaction at this happy sequel, he showed a polite but careless
inability to follow my line of thought. It appeared that he was
always well at breakfast, even when he did stay up 'a little later
than usual'. It appeared further that he always breakfasted at a
quarter to nine, and read the Manchester Guardian during the meal,
to which his wife did or did not descend--according to the moods
of the nursery; and that he reached his office at a quarter to
ten. That morning the mood of the nursery was apparently
unpropitious. He and I were alone. I begged him not to pretermit
his GUARDIAN, but to examine it and give me the news. He agreed,
scarcely unwilling.

'There's a paragraph in the London correspondence about Fuge,' he
announced from behind the paper.

'What do they say about him?'

'Nothing particular.'

'Now I want to ask you something,' I said.

I had been thinking a good deal about the sisters and Simon Fuge.
And in spite of everything that I had heard--in spite even of the
facts that the lake had been dug by a railway company, and that
the excursion to the lake had been an excursion of Sunday-school
teachers and their friends--I was still haunted by certain notions
concerning Simon Fuge and Annie Brett. Annie Brett's flush, her
unshed tears; and the self-consciousness shown by Mrs Colclough
when I had pointedly mentioned her sister's name in connection
with Simon Fuge's: these were surely indications! And then the
doctor's recitals of manners in the immediate neighbourhood of
Bursley went to support my theory that even in Staffordshire life
was very much life.

'What?' demanded Mr Brindley.

'Was Miss Brett ever Simon Fuge's mistress?'

At that moment Mrs Brindley, miraculously fresh and smiling,
entered the room.

'Wife,' said Mr Brindley, without giving her time to greet me,
'what do you think he's just asked me?'

'_I_ don't know.'

'He's just asked me if Annie Brett was ever Simon Fuge's
mistress.'

She sank into a chair.

'Annie BRETT?' She began to laugh gently. 'Oh! Mr Loring, you
really are too funny!' She yielded to her emotions. It may be said
that she laughed as they can laugh in the Five Towns. She cried.
She had to wipe away the tears of laughter.

'What on earth made you think so?' she inquired, after recovery.

'I--had an idea,' I said lamely. 'He always made out that one of
those two sisters was so much to him, and I knew it couldn't be
Mrs Colclough.'

'Well,' she said, 'ask anybody down here, ANY-body! And see what
they'll say.'

'No,' Mr Brindley put in, 'don't go about asking ANY-body. 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. _

Read next: PART XII - THE DEATH OF SIMON FUGE: CHAPTER IX

Read previous: PART XII - THE DEATH OF SIMON FUGE: CHAPTER VII

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