________________________________________________
_ I returned to London that evening, my work done, and the
muncipality 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!'
'Well,' I said, We shall see--in fifty years.'
'That's just what we shan't,' said he. 'We shall be where Simon
Fuge is--dead! However, perhaps we are proud of him. But you don't
expect us to show it, do you? That's not our style.'
He performed the quasi-winking phenomenon with his eyes. It was
his final exhibition of it to me.
'A strange place!' I reflected, as I ate my dinner in the dining-
car, with the pressure of Mr Brindley's steely clasp still
affecting my right hand, and the rich, honest cordiality of his au
revoir in my heart. 'A place that is passing strange!'
And I thought further: He may have been a boaster, and a
chatterer, and a man who suffered from cold feet at the wrong
moments! And the Five Towns may have got the better of him, now.
But that portrait of the little girl in the Wedgwood Institution
is waiting there, right in the middle of the Five Towns. And one
day the Five Towns will have to 'give it best'. They can say what
they like! ... What eyes the fellow had, when he was in the right
company! _
Read next: PART XIII - IN A NEW BOTTLE: CHAPTER I
Read previous: PART XII - THE DEATH OF SIMON FUGE: CHAPTER VIII
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