On a recent visit to the Five Towns I was sitting with my old schoolmaster, who, by the way, is much younger than I am after all, in the bow window of a house overlooking that great thoroughfare, Trafalgar Road, Bursley, when a pretty woman of twenty-eight or so passed down the street. Now the Five Towns contains more pretty women to the square mile than any other district in England (and this statement I am prepared to support by either sword or pistol). But do you suppose that the frequency of pretty women in Hanbridge, Bursley, Knype, Longshaw and Turnhill makes them any the less remarked? Not a bit of it. Human nature is such that even if a man should meet forty pretty women in a walk along Trafalgar Road from Bursley to Hanbridge, he will remark them all separately, and feel exactly forty thrills. Consequently my ever-youthful schoolmaster said to me:
Silas stood up in the tub, staggered, furious, sweating. He would have stepped out of the tub and done something to Herbert had not common prudence and the fear of the blanket falling off restrained his passion. There was left to him only one thing to do, and he did it. He sat down again.
“Good-looking woman that, eh, boy? Married three weeks ago,” he added.
“Bless us!” he repeated feebly.
A piece of information which took the keen edge off my interest in her.
“So you see,” said Herbert.
“Really!” I said. “Who is she?”
“And thou’st been living here ever since–alone, wi’ Jane Sarah?”
“Married to a Scotsman named Macintyre, I fancy.”
“Not exactly,” Herbert replied. “With my wife.”
“That tells me nothing,” I said. “Who was she?”
Fully emboldened now, he related to his uncle the whole circumstances of his marriage.
“Daughter of a man named Roden.”
Whereupon, to his surprise, Silas laughed hilariously, hysterically, and gulped down the remainder of the whisky.
“Not Herbert Roden?” I demanded.
“Where is her?” Silas demanded.
“Yes. Art director at Jacksons, Limited.”
“Upstairs.”
“Well, well!” I exclaimed. “So Herbert Roden’s got a daughter married. Well, well! And it seems like a week ago that he and his uncle–you know all about that affair, of course?”
“I’ my bedroom, I lay,” said Silas.
“What affair?”
Herbert nodded. “May be.”
“Why, the Roden affair!”
“And everything upside down!” proceeded Uncle Silas.
“No,” said my schoolmaster.
“No!” said Herbert. “We’ve put all your things in my old room.”
“You don’t mean to say you’ve never–“
“Have ye! Ye’re too obliging, lad!” growled Silas. “And if it isn’t asking too much, where’s that china pig as used to be on the chimney-piece in th’ kitchen there? Her’s smashed it, eh?”
Nothing pleases a wandering native of the Five Towns more than to come back and find that he knows things concerning the Five Towns which another man who has lived there all his life doesn’t know. In ten seconds I was digging out for my schoolmaster one of those family histories which lie embedded in the general grey soil of the past like lumps of quartz veined and streaked with the precious metal of passion and glittering here and there with the crystallizations of scandal.
“No,” said Herbert, mildly. “She’s put it away in a cupboard. She didn’t like it.”
“You could make a story out of that,” he said, when I had done talking and he had done laughing.
“Ah! I was but wondering if ye’d foreclosed on th’ pig too.”
“It is a story,” I replied. “It doesn’t want any making.”
“Possibly a few things are changed,” said Herbert. “But you know when a woman takes into her head–“
And this is just what I told him. I have added on a few explanations and moral reflections–and changed the names.
“Ay, lad! Ay, lad! I know! It was th’ same wi’ my beard. It had for go. Thou’st under the domination of a woman, and I can sympathize wi’ thee.”
I
Herbert gave a long, high whistle.
Silas Roden, commonly called Si Roden–Herbert’s uncle–lived in one of those old houses at Paddock Place, at the bottom of the hill where Hanbridge begins. Their front steps are below the level of the street, and their backyards look out on the Granville Third Pit and the works of the Empire Porcelain Company. 11 was Si’s own house, a regular bachelor’s house, as neat as a pin, and Si was very proud of it and very particular about it. Herbert, being an orphan, lived with his uncle. He would be about twenty-five then, and Si fifty odd. Si had retired from the insurance agency business, and Herbert, after a spell in a lawyer’s office, had taken to art and was in the decorating department at Jackson’s. They had got on together pretty well, had Si and Herbert, in a grim, taciturn, Five Towns way. The historical scandal began when Herbert wanted to marry Alice Oulsnam, an orphan like himself, employed at a dress-maker’s in Crown Square, Hanbridge.
“So that’s it?” he exclaimed. And he suddenly felt as if his uncle was no longer an uncle but a brother.
“Thou’lt marry her if thou’st a mind,” said Si to Herbert, “but I s’ll ne’er speak to thee again.”
“Yes,” said Silas. “That’s it. I’ll tell thee. Pour some more hot water in here. Dost remember when th’ Carl Rosa Opera Company was at Theatre Royal last year? I met her then. Her was one o’ Venus’s maidens i’ th’ fust act o’ Tannhaeuser, and her was a bridesmaid i’ Lohengrin, and Siebel i’ Faust, and a cigarette girl i’ summat else. But it was in Tannhaeuser as I fust saw her on the stage, and her struck me like that.” Silas clapped one damp hand violently on the other. “Miss Elsa Venda was her stage name, but her was a widow, Mrs Parfitt, and had bin for ten years. Seemingly her husband was of good family. Finest woman I ever seed, nephew. And you’ll say so. Her’d ha’ bin a prima donna only for jealousy. Fust time I spoke to her I thought I should ha’ fallen down. Steady with that water. Dost want for skin me alive? Yes, I thought I should ha’ fallen down. They call’n it love. You can call it what ye’n a mind for call it. I nearly fell down.”
“But why, uncle?”
“How did you meet her, uncle?” Herbert interposed, aware that his uncle had not been accustomed to move in theatrical circles.
“That’s why,” said Si.
“How did I meet her? I met her by setting about to meet her. I had for t’ meet her. I got Harry Burisford, th’ manager o’ th’ theatre thou knowst, for t’ introduce us. Then I give a supper, nephew–I give a supper at Turk’s Head, but private like.”
Now if you have been born in the Five Towns and been blessed with the unique Five Towns mixture of sentimentality and solid sense, you don’t flare up and stamp out of the house when a well-to-do and childless uncle shatters your life’s dream. You dissemble. You piece the dream together again while your uncle is looking another way. You feel that you are capable of out-witting your uncle, and you take the earliest opportunity of “talking it over” with Alice. Alice is sagacity itself.
“Was that the time when you were supposed to be at the Ratepayers’ Association every night?” Herbert asked blandly.
Si’s reasons for objecting so politely to the projected marriage were various. In the first place he had persuaded himself that he hated women. In the second place, though in many respects a most worthy man, he was a selfish man, and he didn’t want Herbert to leave him, because he loathed solitude. In the third place–and here is the interesting part–he had once had an affair with Alice’s mother and had been cut out: his one deviation into the realms of romance–and a disastrous one. He ought to have been Alice’s father, and he wasn’t. It angered him, with a cold anger, that Herbert should have chosen just Alice out of the wealth of women in the Five Towns. Herbert was unaware of this reason at the moment.
“It was, nephew,” said Si, with equal blandness.
The youth was being driven to the conclusion that he would be compelled to offend his uncle after all, when Alice came into two thousand two hundred pounds from a deceased relative in Cheshire. The thought of this apt legacy does good to my soul. I love people to come into a bit of stuff unexpected. Herbert instantly advised her to breathe not a word of the legacy to anyone. They were independent now, and he determined that he would teach his uncle a lesson. He had an affection for his uncle, but in the Five Towns you can have an affection for a person, and be extremely and justly savage against that person, and plan cruel revenges on that person, all at the same time.
“Then no doubt those two visits to Manchester, afterwards–“
Herbert felt that the legacy would modify Si’s attitude towards the marriage, if Si knew of it. Legacies, for some obscure and illogical cause, do modify attitudes towards marriages. To keep a penniless dressmaker out of one’s family may be a righteous act. But to keep a level-headed girl with two thousand odd of her own out of one’s family would be the act of an insensate fool. Therefore Herbert settled that Si should not know of the legacy. Si should be defeated without the legacy, or he should be made to suffer the humiliation of yielding after being confronted with the accomplished fact of a secret marriage. Herbert was fairly sure that he would yield, and in any case, with a couple of thousand at his wife’s back, Herbert could afford to take the risks of war.
“Exactly,” said Si. “Th’ company went to Manchester and stopped there a fortnight. I told her fair and square what I meant and what I was worth. There was no beating about the bush wi’ me. All her friends told her she’d be a fool if she wouldn’t have me. She said her’d write me yes or no. Her didn’t. Her telegraphed me from Sunderland for go and see her at once. It was that morning as I left. I thought to be back in a couple o’ days and to tell thee as all was settled. But women! Women! Her had me dangling after her from town to town for a week. I was determined to get her, and get her I did, though it cost me my beard, and the best part o’ that four hundred. I married her i’ Halifax, lad, and it were the best day’s work I ever did. You never seed such a woman. Big and plump–and sing! By
