I
All this happened at a Martinmas Fair in Bursley, long ago in the
fifties, when everybody throughout the Five Towns pronounced Bursley
"Bosley" as a matter of course; in the tedious and tragic old times,
before it had been discovered that hell was a myth, and before the
invention of pleasure or even of half-holidays. Martinmas was in those
days a very important moment in the annual life of the town, for it was
at Martinmas that potters' wages were fixed for twelve months ahead, and
potters hired themselves out for that term at the best rate they could
get. Even to the present day the housewives reckon chronology by
Martinmas. They say, "It'll be seven years come Martinmas that Sal's
babby died o' convulsions." Or, "It was that year as it rained and
hailed all Martinmas." And many of them have no idea why it is
Martinmas, and not Midsummer or Whitsun, that is always on the tips of
their tongues.
The Fair was one of the two great drunken sprees of the year, the other
being the Wakes. And it was meet that it should be so, for intoxication
was a powerful aid to the signing of contracts. A sot would put his name
to anything, gloriously; and when he had signed he had signed. Thus the
beaver-hatted employers smiled at Martinmas drunkenness, and smacked it
familiarly on the back; and little boys swilled themselves into the
gutter with their elders, and felt intensely proud of the feat. These
heroic old times have gone by, never to return.
It was on the Friday before Martinmas, at dusk. In the centre of the
town, on the waste ground to the north of the "Shambles" (as the
stone-built meat market was called), and in the space between the
Shambles and the as yet unfinished new Town Hall, the showmen and the
showgirls and the showboys were titivating their booths, and cooking
their teas, and watering their horses, and polishing the brass rails of
their vans, and brushing their fancy costumes, and hammering fresh
tent-pegs into the hard ground, and lighting the first flares of the
evening, and yarning, and quarrelling, and washing--all under the sombre
purple sky, for the diversion of a small crowd of loafers, big and
little, who stood obstinately with their hands in their pockets or in
their sleeves, missing naught of the promising spectacle.
Now, in the midst of what in less than twenty-four hours would be the
Fair, was to be seen a strange and piquant sight--namely, a group of
three white-tied, broad-brimmed dissenting ministers in earnest converse
with fat Mr Snaggs, the proprietor of Snaggs's--Snaggs's being the town
theatre, a wooden erection, generally called by patrons the "Blood Tub,"
on account of its sanguinary programmes. On this occasion Mr Snaggs and
the dissenting ministers were for once in a way agreed. They all
objected to a certain feature of the Fair. It was not the roundabouts,
so crude that even an infant of to-day would despise them. It was
not the shooting-galleries, nor the cocoanut shies. It was not the
arrangements of the beersellers, which were formidably Bacchic.
It was not the boxing-booths, where adventurous youths could have
teeth knocked out and eyes smashed in free of charge. It was not the
monstrosity-booths, where misshapen and maimed creatures of both sexes
were displayed all alive and nearly nude to anybody with a penny to
spare. What Mr Snaggs and the ministers of religion objected to was the
theatre-booths, in which the mirror, more or less cracked and tarnished,
was held up to nature.
Mr Snaggs's objection was professional. He considered that he alone was
authorized to purvey drama to the town; he considered that among all
purveyors of drama he alone was respectable, the rest being upstarts,
poachers, and lewd fellows. And as the dissenting ministers gazed at Mr
Snaggs's superb moleskin waistcoat, and listened to his positive brazen
voice, they were almost convinced that the hated institution of the
theatre could be made respectable and that Mr Snaggs had so made it. At
any rate, by comparison with these flashy and flimsy booths, the Blood
Tub, rooted in the antiquity of thirty years, had a dignified, even a
reputable air--and did not Mr Snaggs give frequent performances of
Cruickshanks' _The Bottle_, a sermon against intemperance more
impressive than any sermon delivered from a pulpit in a chapel? The
dissenting ministers listened with deference as Mr Snaggs explained to
them exactly what they ought to have done, and what they had failed to
do, in order to ensure the success of their campaign against play-acting
in the Fair; a campaign which now for several years past had been
abortive--largely (it was rumoured) owing to the secret jealousy of the
Church of England.
"If ony on ye had had any gumption," Mr Snaggs was saying fearlessly to
the parsons, "ye'd ha' gone straight to th' Chief Bailiff and ye'd
ha'--Houch!" He made the peculiar exclamatory noise roughly indicated by
the last word, and spat in disgust; and without the slightest ceremony
of adieu walked ponderously away up the slope, leaving his sentence
unfinished.
"It is remarkable how Mr Snaggs flees from before my face," said a neat,
alert, pleasant voice from behind the three parsons. "And yet save that
in my unregenerate day I once knocked him off a stool in front of his
own theayter, I never did him harm nor wished him anything but good....
Gentlemen!"
A rather small, slight man of about forty, with tiny feet and hands,
and "very quick on his pins," saluted the three parsons gravely.
"Mr Smith!" one parson stiffly inclined.
"Mr Smith!" from the second.
"Brother Smith!" from the third, who was Jock Smith's own parson, being
in charge of the Bethesda in Trafalgar Road where Jock Smith worshipped
and where he had recently begun to preach as a local preacher.
Jock Smith, herbalist, shook hands with vivacity but also with
self-consciousness. He was self-conscious because he knew himself to be
one of the chief characters and attractions of the town, because he was
well aware that wherever he went people stared at him and pointed him
out to each other. And he was half proud and half ashamed of his
notoriety.
Even now a little band of ragged children had wandered after him, and,
undeterred by the presence of the parsons, were repeating among
themselves, in a low audacious monotone:
"Jock-at-a-Venture! Jock-at-a-Venture!"