<SPAN name="vol_1_chap_10"></SPAN>
<h3>Volume One--Chapter Ten.</h3>
<h4>Free and Easy.</h4>
<p>When Edwin, shyly, followed Big James into the assembly room of the Dragon, it already
held a fair sprinkling of men, and newcomers 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Two.</h4>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Evening, Mr Peake,” said Big James, crossing the floor, “and
here’s a young gent wishful for two words with you.”</p>
<p>Mr Peake stared vacantly.</p>
<p>“Young Mr Clayhanger,” explained Big James.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>Mr Enoch Peake seized the card in both hands, and examined it; and Edwin could hear his
heavy breathing.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Missis is at door,” said Big James to Mr Peake.</p>
<p>“Is her?” muttered Mr Peake, not interrupting his examination of the
card.</p>
<p>One of the serving-women, having removed Mr Peake’s coat, brought a new church
warden, filled it, and carefully directed the tip towards his tight little mouth: the lips
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.</p>
<p>At length Mr Peake withdrew the pipe from his mouth, and after an interval
said—</p>
<p>“Aye!”</p>
<p>He continued to stare at the card, now held in one hand.</p>
<p>“And is it to be printed in silver?” Edwin asked.</p>
<p>Mr Peake took a few more puffs.</p>
<p>“Aye!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Mrs Louisa Loggerheads had now vanished.</p>
<p>“Missis has gone,” said Big James.</p>
<p>“Has her?” muttered Mr Peake.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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—</p>
<p>“Gentlemen all, Mester Smallrice, Mester Harracles, Mester Rampick, and Mester
Yarlett will now oblige with one o’ th’ ould favourites.”</p>
<p>There was some applause, a few coats were removed, and Mr Peake fixed himself in a
contemplative attitude.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Three.</h4>
<p>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.</p>
<p>He murmured under his breath, as “Loud Ocean’s Roar” died away and
the little voices of the street supervened: “By Gad! By Gad!”</p>
<p>The applause was generous. Edwin stamped and clapped with childlike violence and fury.
Mr Peake slowly and regularly thumped one fist on the bench, puffing the while. Glasses
and mugs could be seen, but not heard, dancing. Mr Arthur Smallrice, Mr Abraham Harracles,
Mr Jos Rawnpike, and Mr James Yarlett, entirely inattentive to the acclamations, stepped
heavily from the platform and sat down. When Edwin caught Big James’s eye he clapped
again, reanimating the general approval, and Big James gazed at him with bland
satisfaction. Mr Enoch Peake was now, save for the rise and fall of his great chest, as
immobile and brooding as an Indian god.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Four.</h4>
<p>Edwin did not depart. He reflected that, even if his father should come home earlier
than the last train and prove curious, it would be impossible for him to know the exact
moment at which his son had been able to have speech with Mr Enoch Peake on the important
matter of business. For aught his father could ever guess he might have been prevented
from obtaining the attention of the chairman of the proceedings until, say, eleven
o’clock. Also, he meant to present his conduct to his father in the light of an
enterprising and fearless action showing a marked aptitude for affairs. Mr Enoch Peake,
whom his father was anxious to flatter, had desired his father’s company at the
Dragon, and, to save the situation, Edwin had courageously gone instead: that was it.</p>
<p>Besides, he would have stayed in any case. His mind was elevated above the fear of
consequences.</p>
<p>There was some concertina-playing, with a realistic imitation of church bells borne on
the wind from a distance; and then the Bursley Prize Handbell Ringers (or Campanologists)
produced a whole family of real bells from under a form, and the ostler and the two women
arranged a special table, and the campanologists fixed their bells on it and themselves
round it, and performed a selection of Scotch and Irish airs, without once deceiving
themselves as to the precise note which a chosen bell would emit when duly shaken.</p>
<p>Singular as was this feat, it was far less so than a young man’s performance of
the ophicleide, a serpentine instrument that coiled round and about its player, and when
breathed into persuasively gave forth prodigious brassy sounds that resembled the
night-noises of beasts of prey. This item roused the Indian god from his umbilical
contemplations, and as the young ophicleide player, somewhat breathless, passed down the
room with his brazen creature in his arms, Mr Enoch Peake pulled him by the
jacket-tail.</p>
<p>“Eh!” said Mr Enoch Peake. “Is that the ophicleide as thy father used
to play at th’ owd church?”</p>
<p>“Yes, Mr Peake,” said the young man, with bright respect.</p>
<p>Mr Peake dropped his eyes again, and when the young man had gone, he murmured, to his
stomach—</p>
<p>“I well knowed it were th’ ophicleide as his father used to play at
th’ owd church!” And suddenly starting up, he continued hoarsely,
“Gentlemen all, Mr James Yarlett will now kindly oblige with ‘The Miller of
the Dee.’” And one of the women relighted his pipe and served him with
beer.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Five.</h4>
<p>Big James’s rendering of “The Miller of the Dee” had been renowned in
the Five Towns since 1852. It was classical, hallowed. It was the only possible rendering
of “The Miller of the Dee.” If the greatest bass in the world had come
incognito to Bursley and sung “The Miller of the Dee,” people would have said,
“Ah! But ye should hear Big James sing it!” It suited Big James. The
sentiments of the song were his sentiments; he expressed them with natural simplicity; but
at the same time they underwent a certain refinement at his hands; for even when he sang
at his loudest Big James was refined, natty, and restrained. His instinctive
gentlemanliness was invincible and all-pervading. And the real beauty and enormous power
of his magnificent voice saved him by its mere distinction from the charge of being
finicking. The simple sound of the voice gave pleasure. And the simple production of that
sound was Big James’s deepest joy. Amid all the expected loud applause the giant
looked naïvely for Edwin’s boyish mad enthusiasm, and felt it; and was
thrilled, and very glad that he had brought Edwin. As for Edwin, Edwin was humbled that he
should have been so blind to what Big James was. He had always regarded Big James as a
dull, decent, somewhat peculiar fellow in a dirty apron, who was his father’s
foreman. He had actually talked once to Big James of the wonderful way in which Maggie and
Clara sang, and Big James had been properly respectful. But the singing of Maggie and
Clara was less than nothing, the crudest amateurism, compared to these public performances
of Big James’s. Even the accompanying concertina was far more cleverly handled than
the Clayhanger piano had ever been handled. Yes, Edwin was humbled. And he had a great
wish to be able to do something brilliantly himself—he knew not what. The
intoxication of the desire for glory was upon him as he sat amid those shirt-sleeved men,
near the brooding Indian god, under a crawling bluish canopy of smoke, gazing absently at
the legend: “As a bird is known by its note—”</p>
<p>After an interval, during which Mr Enoch Peake was roused more than once, a man with a
Lancashire accent recited a poem entitled “The Patent Hairbrushing Machine,”
the rotary hairbrush being at that time an exceedingly piquant novelty that had only been
heard of in the barbers’ shops of the Five Towns, though travellers to Manchester
could boast that they had sat under it. As the principle of the new machine was easily
grasped, and the sensations induced by it easily imagined, the recitation had a success
which was indicated by slappings of thighs and great blowings-off of mirth. But Mr Enoch
Peake preserved his tranquillity throughout it, and immediately it was over he announced
with haste—</p>
<p>“Gentlemen all, Miss Florence Simcox—or shall us say Mrs Offlow, wife of
the gentleman who has just obliged—the champion female clog-dancer of the Midlands,
will now oblige.”</p>
<hr>
<h4>Six.</h4>
<p>These words put every man whom they surprised into a state of unusual animation; and
they surprised most of the company. It may be doubted whether a female clog-dancer had
ever footed it in Bursley. Several public-houses possessed local champions—of a
street, of a village—but these were emphatically not women. Enoch Peake had arranged
this daring item in the course of his afternoon’s business at Cocknage Gardens, Mr
Offlow being an expert in ratting terriers, and Mrs Offlow happening to be on a tour with
her husband through the realms of her championship, a tour which mingled the varying
advantages derivable from terriers, recitations, and clogs. The affair was therefore
respectable beyond cavil.</p>
<p>Nevertheless when Florence shone suddenly at the service-door, the shortness of her
red-and-black velvet skirts, and the undeniable complete visibility of her rounded calves
produced an uneasy and agreeable impression that Enoch Peake, for a chairman of the Mutual
Burial Club, had gone rather far, superbly far, and that his moral ascendancy over Louisa
Loggerheads must indeed be truly astonishing. Louisa now stood gravely behind the dancer,
in the shadow of the doorway, and the contrast between her and Florence was in every way
striking enough to prove what a wonderful and mysterious man Enoch Peake was. Florence was
accustomed to audiences. She was a pretty, doll-like woman, if inclined to amplitude; but
the smile between those shaking golden ringlets had neither the modesty nor the false
modesty nor the docility that Bursley was accustomed to think proper to the face of woman.
It could have stared down any man in the place, except perhaps Mr Peake.</p>
<p>The gestures of Mr Offlow, and her gestures, as he arranged and prepared the surface of
the little square dancing-board that was her throne, showed that he was the husband of
Florence Simcox rather than she the wife of Offlow the reciter and dog-fancier. Further,
it was his rôle to play the concertina to her: he had had to learn the
concertina—possibly a secret humiliation for one whose judgement in terriers was not
excelled in many public-houses.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Seven.</h4>
<p>She danced; and the service-doorway showed a vista of open-mouthed scullions. There was
no sound in the room, save the concertina and the champion clogs. Every eye was fixed on
those clogs; even the little eyes of Mr Peake quitted the button of his waistcoat and
burned like diamond points on those clogs. Florence herself chiefly gazed on those clogs,
but occasionally her nonchalant petulant gaze would wander up and down her bare arms and
across her bosom. At intervals, with her ringed fingers she would lift the short
skirt—a nothing, an imperceptibility, half an inch, with glance downcast; and the
effect was profound, recondite, inexplicable. Her style was not that of a male
clog-dancer, but it was indubitably clog-dancing, full of marvels to the connoisseur, and
to the profane naught but a highly complicated series of wooden noises. Florence’s
face began to perspire. Then the concertina ceased playing, so that an undistracted
attention might be given to the supremely difficult final figures of the dance.</p>
<p>And thus was rendered back to the people in the charming form of beauty that which the
instinct of the artist had taken from the sordid ugliness of the people. The clog, the
very emblem of the servitude and the squalor of brutalised populations, was changed, on
the light feet of this favourite, into the medium of grace. Few of these men but at some
time of their lives had worn the clog, had clattered in it through winter’s slush,
and through the freezing darkness before dawn, to the manufactory and the mill and the
mine, whence after a day of labour under discipline more than military, they had clattered
back to their little candle-lighted homes. One of the slatterns behind the doorway
actually stood in clogs to watch the dancer. The clog meant everything that was harsh,
foul, and desolating; it summoned images of misery and disgust. Yet on those feet that had
never worn it seriously, it became the magic instrument of pleasure, waking dulled wits
and forgotten aspirations, putting upon everybody an enchantment... And then, suddenly,
the dancer threw up one foot as high as her head and brought two clogs down together like
a double mallet on the board, and stood still. It was over.</p>
<p>Mrs Louisa Loggerheads turned nervously away, pushing her servants in front of her. And
when the society of mutual buriers had recovered from the startling shameless insolence of
that last high kick, it gave the rein to its panting excitement, and roared and stamped.
Edwin was staggered. The blood swept into his face, a hot tide. He was ravished, but he
was also staggered. He did not know what to think of Florence, the champion female
clog-dancer. He felt that she was wondrous; he felt that he could have gazed at her all
night; but he felt that she had put him under the necessity of reconsidering some of his
fundamental opinions. For example, he was obliged to admit within himself a lessening of
scorn for the attitude toward each other of Miss Ingamells and her young man. He saw those
things in a new light. And he reflected, dazzled by the unforeseen chances of existence:
“Yesterday I was at school—and to-day I see this!” He was so preoccupied
by his own intimate sensations that the idea of applauding never occurred to him, until he
perceived his conspicuousness in not applauding, whereupon he clapped
self-consciously.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Eight.</h4>
<p>Miss Florence Simcox, somewhat breathless, tripped away, with simulated coyness and
many curtseys. She had done her task, and as a woman she had to go: this was a gathering
of members of the Mutual Burial Club, a masculine company, and not meet for females. The
men pulled themselves together, remembering that their proudest quality was a stoic
callousness that nothing could overthrow. They refilled pipes, ordered more beer, and
resumed the mask of invulnerable solemnity.</p>
<p>“Aye!” muttered Mr Enoch Peake.</p>
<p>Edwin, with a great effort, rose and walked out. He would have liked to say good night
to Big James; he did not deny that he ought to have done so; but he dared not complicate
his exit. On the pavement outside, in the warm damp night, a few loitering listeners stood
doggedly before an open window, hearkening, their hands deep in their pockets, motionless.
And Edwin could hear Mr Enoch Peake: “Gentlemen all, Mester Arthur Smallrice, Mester
Abraham Harracles, Mester Jos Rampick, and Mester James Yarlett—”</p>
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