"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, t.i.tus! 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 "G.o.d"," 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 d.a.m.ning them, and arranged authors in neat pews, like cattle in cla.s.ses 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!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 munic.i.p.ality 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 pa.s.sed 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 ca.n.a.l, or a football field.
"I daredn"t hurry," said Mr Colclough, setting us down at the station.