The ostler raised his reddish eyebrows to Big James. Big James jerked his head to one side, indicating apparently the entire Dragon, and simultaneously conveying a query. The ostler paused immobile an instant and then shook his insignificant turnip-pate. Big James turned away. No word had been spoken; nevertheless, the men had exchanged a dialogue which might be thus put into words –
‘I wasn’t thinking to see ye so soon,’ from the ostler.
‘Then nobody of any importance has yet gone into the assembly room?’ from Big James.
‘Nobody worth speaking of, and won’t, for a while,’ from the other.
‘Then I’ll take a turn,’ from Big James.
The latter now looked down at Edwin, and addressed him in words –
‘Seemingly we’re too soon, Mr Edwin. What do you say to a turn round the town – playground way? I doubted we should be too soon.’
Edwin showed alacrity. As a schoolboy it had been definitely forbidden to him to go out at night; and unless sent on a special and hurried errand, he had scarcely seen the physiognomy of the streets after eight o’clock. He had never seen the playground in the evening. And this evening the town did not seem like the same town; it had become a new and mysterious town of adventure. And yet Edwin was not fifty yards away from his own bedroom.
They ascended Duck Bank together, Edwin proud to be with a celebrity of the calibre of Big James, and Big James calmly satisfied to show himself thus formally with his master’s son. It appeared almost incredible that those two immortals, so diverse, had issued from the womb practically alike; that a few brief years on the earth had given Big James such a tremendous physical advantage. Several hours’ daily submission to the exact regularities of lines of type and to the unvarying demands of minutely adjusted machines in motion had stamped Big James’s body and mind with the delicate and quasi-finicking preciseness which characterizes all compositors and printers; and the continual monotonous performance of similar tasks that employed his faculties while never absorbing or straining them, had soothed and dulled the fever of life in him to a beneficent calm, a calm refined and beautified by the pleasurable exercise of song. Big James had seldom known a violent emotion. He had craved nothing, sought for nothing, and lost nothing.
Edwin, like Big James in progress from everlasting to everlasting, was all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and wistfully audacious. By taking the boy’s hand, Big James might have poetically symbolized their relation.
III
‘Are you going to sing tonight at the Dragon, Mr Yarlett?’ asked Edwin. He lengthened his step to Big James’s, controlled his ardent body, and tried to remember that he was a man with a man.
‘I am, young sir,’ said Big James. ‘There is a party of us.’
‘Is it the Male Glee Party?’ Edwin pursued.
‘Yes, Mr Edwin.’
‘Then Mr Smallrice will be there?’
‘He will, Mr Edwin.’
‘Why can Mr Smallrice sing such high notes?’
Big James slowly shook his head, as Edwin looked up at him. ‘I tell you what it is, young sir. It’s a gift, that’s what it is, same as I can sing low.’
‘But Mr Smallrice is very old, isn’t he?’
‘There’s a parrot in a cage over at the Duck, there, as is eighty-five years old and that’s proved by record kept, young sir.’
‘No!’ protested Edwin’s incredulity politely.
‘By record kept,’ said Big James.
‘Do you often sing at the Dragon, Mr Yarlett?’
‘Time was,’ said Big James, ‘when some of us used to sing there every night, Sundays excepted, and concerts and what not excepted. Aye! For hours and hours every night. And still do sometimes.’
‘After your work?’
‘After our work. Aye! And often till dawn in summer. One o’clock, two o’clock, half-past two o’clock, every night. But now they say that this new Licensing Act will close every public-house in this town at eleven o’clock, and a straight-up eleven at that! …’
‘But what do you do it for?’
‘What do we do it for? We do it to pass the time and the glass, young sir. Not as I should like you to think as I ever drank, Mr Edwin. One quart of ale I take every night, and have ever done; no more, no less.’
‘But’ – Edwin’s rapid, breaking voice interrupted eagerly the deep majestic tones –’ aren’t you tired the next day? I should be!’
‘Never,’ said Big James. ‘I get up from my bed as fresh as a daisy at six sharp. And I’ve known the nights when my bed ne’er saw me.’
‘You must be strong, Mr Yarlett, my word!’ Edwin exclaimed. These revelations of the habits and prowess of Big James astounded him. He had never suspected that such things went on in the town.
‘Aye! Middling!’
‘I suppose it’s a free-and-easy at the Dragon, tonight, Mr Yarlett?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Big James.
‘I wish I could stay for it.’
‘And why not?’ Big James suggested, and looked down at Edwin with half-humorous incertitude.
Edwin shrugged his shoulders superiorly, indicating by instinct, in spite of himself, that possibly Big James was trespassing over the social line that divided them. And yet Big James’s father would have condescended to Edwin’s grandfather. Only, Edwin now belonged to the employing class, whilst Big James belonged to the employed. Already Edwin, whose father had been thrashed by workmen whom a compositor would hesitate to call skilled – already Edwin had the mien natural to a ruler, and Big James, with dignified deference, would submit unresentingly to his attitude. It was the subtlest thing. It was not that Edwin obscurely objected to the suggestion of his being present at the free-and-easy; it was that he objected (but nicely, and with good nature) to any assumption of Big James’s right to influence him towards an act that his father would not approve. Instead of saying, ‘Why not?’ Big James ought to have said: ‘Nobody but you can decide that, as your father’s away.’ James ought to have been strictly impartial.
IV
‘Well,’ said Big James, when they arrived at the playground, which lay north of the covered Meat Market or Shambles, ‘it looks as if they hadn’t been able to make a start yet at the Blood Tub.’ His tone was marked by a calm, grand disdain, as of one entertainer talking about another.
The Blood Tub, otherwise known as Snaggs’s, was the centre of nocturnal pleasure in Bursley. It stood almost on the very spot where the jawbone of a whale had once lain, as a supreme natural curiosity. It represented the softened manners which had developed out of the old mediaevalism of the century. It had supplanted the bear-pit and the cock-pit. It corresponded somewhat with the ideals symbolized by the new Town Hall. In the tiny odorous beer-houses of all the undulating, twisting, reddish streets that surrounded the contiguous open spaces of Duck Bank, the playground, the market-place, and St Luke’s Square, the folk no longer discussed eagerly what chance on Sunday morning the municipal bear would have against five dogs. They had progressed as far as a free library, boxing-gloves, rabbit-coursing, and the Blood Tub.
This last was a theatre with wooden sides and a canvas roof, and it would hold quite a crowd of people. In front of it was a platform, and an orchestra, lighted by oil flares that, as Big James and Edwin approached, were gaining strength in the twilight. Leaning against the platform was a blackboard on which was chalked the announcement of two plays: ‘The Forty Thieves’ (author unstated) and Cruikshank’s ‘The Bottle.’ The orchestra, after terrific concussions, fell silent, and then a troupe of players in costume, cramped on the narrow trestle boards, performed a sample scene from ‘The Forty Thieves,’ just to give the crowd in front an idea of the wonders of this powerful work. And four thieves passed and repassed behind the screen hiding the doors, and reappeared nine times as four fresh thieves until the tale of forty was complete. And then old Hammerad, the beloved clo
wn who played the drum (and whose wife kept a barber’s shop in Buck Row and shaved for a penny), left his drum and did two minutes’ stiff clowning, and then the orchestra burst forth again, and the brazen voice of old Snaggs (in his moleskin waistcoat) easily rode the storm, adjuring the folk to walk up and walk up: which some of the folk did do. And lastly the band played ‘God Save the Queen,’ and the players, followed by old Snaggs, processionally entered the booth.
‘I lay they come out again,’ said Big James, with grim blandness.
‘Why?’asked Edwin. He was absolutely new to the scene.
‘I lay they haven’t got twenty couple inside,’ said Big James.
And in less than a minute the troupe did indeed emerge, and old Snaggs expostulated with a dilatory public, respectfully but firmly. It had been a queer year for Mr Snaggs. Rain had ruined the Wakes; rain had ruined everything; rain had nearly ruined him. July was obviously not a month in which a self-respecting theatre ought to be open, but Mr Snaggs had got to the point of catching at straws. He stated that in order to prove his absolute bona fides the troupe would now give a scene from that world-renowed and unique drama, ‘The Bottle,’ after which the performance really would commence, since he could not as a gentleman keep his kind patrons within waiting any longer. His habit, which emphasized itself as he grew older, was to treat the staring crowd in front of his booth like a family of nephews and nieces. The device was quite useless, for the public’s stolidity was impregnable. It touched the heroic. No more granitic and crass stolidity could have been discovered in England. The crowd stood; it exercised no other function of existence. It just stood, and there it would stand until convinced that the gratis part of the spectacle was positively at an end.
V
With a ceremonious gesture signifying that he assumed the young sir’s consent, Big James turned away. He had displayed to Edwin the poverty and the futility of the Blood Tub. Edwin would perhaps have liked to stay. The scenes enacted on the outer platform were certainly tinged with the ridiculous, but they were the first histrionics that he had ever witnessed; and he could not help thinking, hoping, in spite of his common sense, that within the booth all was different, miraculously transformed into the grand and the impressive. Left to himself, he would surely have preferred an evening at the Blood Tub to a business interview with Mr Enoch Peake at the Dragon. But naturally he had to scorn the Blood Tub with a scorn equal to the massive and silent scorn of Big James. And on the whole he considered that he was behaving as a man with another man rather well. He sought by depreciatory remarks to keep the conversation at its proper adult level.
Big James led him through the market-place, where a few vegetable, tripe, and gingerbread stalls – relics of the day’s market – were still attracting customers in the twilight. These slatternly and picturesque groups, beneath their flickering yellow flares, were encamped at the gigantic foot of the Town Hall porch as at the foot of a precipice. The monstrous black walls of the Town Hall rose and were merged in gloom; and the spire of the Town Hall, on whose summit stood a gold angel holding a gold crown, rose right into the heavens and was there lost. It was marvellous that this town, by adding stone to stone, had upreared this monument which, in expressing the secret nobility of its ideals, dwarfed the town. On every side of it the beer-houses, full of a dulled, savage ecstasy of life, gleamed brighter than the shops. Big James led Edwin down through the mysteries of the Cock Yard and up along Bugg’s Gutter, and so back to the Dragon.
10
Free and Easy
I
WHEN EDWIN, SHYLY, followed Big James into the assembly room of the Dragon, it already held a fair sprinkling of men, and new-comers continued to drop in. They were soberly and respectably clothed, though a few had knotted handkerchiefs round their necks instead of collars and ties. The occasion was a jollity of the Bursley Mutual Burial Club. This Club, a singular example of that dogged private co-operative enterprise which so sharply distinguishes English corporate life from the corporate life of other European countries, had lustily survived from a period when men were far less sure of a decent burial than they were then, in the very prosperous early seventies. It had helped to maintain the barbaric fashion of ostentatiously expensive funerals, out of which undertakers and beer-sellers made vast sums; but it had also provided a basis of common endeavour and of fellowship. And its respectability was intense, and at the same time broad-minded. To be an established subscriber to the Burial Club was evidence of good character and of social spirit. The periodic jollities of this company of men whose professed aim was to bury each other, had a high reputation for excellence. Up till a year previously they had always been held at the Duck, in Duck Square, opposite; but Mr Enoch Peake, Chairman of the Club, had by persistent and relentless chicane, triumphing over immense influences, changed their venue to the Dragon, whose landlady, Mrs Louisa Loggerheads, he was then courting. (It must be stated that Mrs Louisa’s name contained no slur of cantankerousness; it is merely the local word for a harmless plant, the knapweed.) He had now won Mrs Loggerheads, after being a widower thrice, and with her the second best ‘house’ in the town.
There were long benches down the room, with forms on either side of them. Big James, not without pomp, escorted a blushing Edwin to the end of one of these tables, near a small raised platform that occupied the extremity of the room. Over this platform was printed a legend: ‘As a bird is known by its note—’; and over the legend was a full-rigged ship in a glass case, and a pair of antlers. The walls of the room were dark brown, the ceiling grey with soot of various sorts, and the floor tiled red-and-black and sanded. Smoke rose in spirals from about a score of churchwarden pipes and as many cutties, which were charged from tin pouches, and lighted by spills of newspaper from the three double gas-jets that hung down over the benches. Two middle-aged women, one in black and the other checked, served beer, porter, and stout in mugs, and gin in glasses, passing in and out through a side door. The company talked little, and it had not yet begun seriously to drink; but, sprawled about in attitudes of restful abeyance, it was smoking religiously, and the flat noise of solemn expectorations punctuated the minutes. Edwin was easily the youngest person present – the average age appeared to be about fifty – but nobody’s curiosity seemed to be much stirred by his odd arrival, and he ceased gradually to blush. When, however, one of the women paused before him in silent question, and he had to explain that he required no drink because he had only called for a moment about a matter of business, he blushed again vigorously.
II
Then Mr Enoch Peake appeared. He was a short, stout old man, with fat hands, a red, minutely wrinkled face, and very small eyes. Greeted with the respect due to the owner of Cocknage Gardens, a sporting resort where all the best foot-racing and rabbit-coursing took place, he accepted it in somnolent indifference, and immediately took off his coat and sat down in cotton shirt-sleeves. Then he pulled out a red handkerchief and his tobacco-box, and set them on the table. Big James motioned to Edwin.
‘Evening, Mr Peake,’ said Big James, crossing the floor, ‘and here’s a young gent wishful for two words with you.’
Mr Peake stared vacantly.
‘Young Mr Clayhanger,’ explained Big James.
‘It’s about this card,’ Edwin began, in a whisper, drawing the wedding-card sheepishly from his pocket. ‘Father had to go to Manchester,’ he added, when he had finished.
Mr Enoch Peake seized the card in both hands, and examined it; and Edwin could hear his heavy breathing.
Mrs Louisa Loggerheads, a comfortable, smiling, administrative woman of fifty, showed herself at the service-door, and nodded with dignity to a few of the habitués.
‘Missis is at door,’ said Big James to Mr Peake.
‘Is her?’ muttered Mr Peake, not interrupting his examination of the card.
One of the serving-women, having removed Mr Peake’s coat, brought a new churchwarden, filled it, and carefully directed the tip towards his tight little mouth: the lip
s closed on it. Then she lighted a spill and applied it to the distant bowl, and the mouth puffed; and then the woman deposited the bowl cautiously on the bench. Lastly, she came with a small glass of sloe gin. Mr Peake did not move.
At length Mr Peake withdrew the pipe from his mouth, and after an interval said –
‘Aye!’
He continued to stare at the card, now held in one hand.
‘And is it to be printed in silver?’ Edwin asked.
Mr Peake took a few more puffs.
‘Aye!’
When he had stared further for a long time at the card, his hand moved slowly with it towards Edwin, and Edwin resumed possession of it.
Mrs Louisa Loggerheads had now vanished.
‘Missis has gone,’ said Big James.
‘Has her?’ muttered Mr Peake.
Edwin rose to leave, though unwillingly; but Big James asked him in polite reproach whether he should not stay for the first song. He nodded, encouraged; and sat down. He did not know that the uppermost idea in Big James’s mind for an hour past had been that Edwin would hear him sing.
Mr Peake lifted his glass, held it from him, approached his lips towards it, and emptied it at a draught. He then glanced round and said thickly –
‘Gentlemen all, Mester Smallrice, Mester Harracles, Mester Rampick, and Mester Yarlett will now oblige with one o’ th’ ould favourites.’
There was some applause, a few coats were removed, and Mr Peake fixed himself in a contemplative attitude.
III
Messrs. Arthur Smallrice, Abraham Harracles, Jos Rawnpike, and James Yarlett rose, stepped heavily on to the little platform, and stood in a line with their hands in their pockets. ‘As a bird is known by its note—’ was hidden by the rampart of their shoulders. They had no music. They knew the music; they had sung it a thousand times. They knew precisely the effects which they wished to produce, and the means of production. They worked together like an inspired machine. Mr Arthur Smallrice gave a rapid glance into a corner, and from that corner a concertina spoke – one short note. Then began, with no hesitating, shuffling preliminaries nor mute consultations, the singing of that classic quartet, justly celebrated from Hull to Wigan and from Northallerton to Lichfield, ‘Loud Ocean’s Roar.’ The thing was performed with absolute assurance and perfection. Mr Arthur Smallrice did the yapping of the short waves on the foam-veiled rocks, and Big James in fullest grandeur did the long and mighty rolling of the deep. It was majestic, terrific, and overwhelming. Many bars before the close Edwin was thrilled, as by an exquisite and vast revelation. He tingled from head to foot. He had never heard any singing like it, or any singing in any way comparable to it. He had never guessed that song held such possibilities of emotion. The pure and fine essential qualities of the voices, the dizzying harmonies, the fugal calls and responses, the strange relief of the unisons, and above all the free, natural mien of the singers, proudly aware that they were producing something beautiful that could not be produced more beautifully, conscious of unchallenged supremacy – all this enfevered him to an unprecedented and self-astonished enthusiasm.