"Those are bonny potatoes, missis!"
"Ay!" The stout woman, the upper part of whose shabby dress seemed to be
subjected to considerable strains, looked at Jock carelessly, and then,
attracted perhaps by his eager face, smiled with a certain facile
amiability.
"But by th' time they're cooked your supper'll be late, I'm reckoning."
"Them potatoes have naught to do with our supper," said Mrs Clowes.
"They're for to-morrow's dinner. There'll be no time for peeling
potatoes to-morrow. Kezia!" She shrilled the name.
A slim little girl showed herself between the heavy curtains of the main
tent of Mrs Clowes's caravanserai.
"Bring Sapphira, too!"
"Those yours?" asked Jock.
"They're mine," said Mrs Clowes. "And I've six more, not counting
grandchildren and sons-in-law like."
"No wonder you want a pailful of potatoes!" said Jock.
Kezia and Sapphira appeared in the gloom. They might have counted
sixteen years together. They were dirty, tousled, graceful and lovely.
"Twins," Jock suggested.
Mrs Clowes nodded. "Off with this pail, now! And mind you don't spill
the water. Here, Kezia! Take the knife. And bring me the other pail."
The children bore away the heavy pail, staggering, eagerly obedient. Mrs
Clowes lifted her mighty form from the stool, shook peelings from the
secret places of her endless apron, and calmly sat down again.
"Ye rule 'em with a rod of iron, missis," said Jock.
She smiled good-humouredly and shrugged her vast shoulders--no mean
physical feat.
"I keep 'em lively," she said. "There's twelve of 'em in my lot, without
th' two babbies. Someone's got to be after 'em all the time."
"And you not thirty-five, I swear!"
"Nay! Ye're wrong."
Sapphira brought the other pail, swinging it. She put it down with a
clatter of the falling handle and scurried off.
"Am I now?" Jock murmured, interested; and, as it were out of sheer
absent-mindedness, he turned the pail wrong side up, and seated himself
on it with a calm that equalled the calm of Mrs Clowes.
It was now nearly dark. The flares of the showmen were answering each
other across the Fair-ground; and presently a young man came and hung
one out above the railed platform of Mrs Clowes's booth; and Mrs Clowes
blinked. From behind the booth floated the sounds of the confused
chatter of men, girls and youngsters, together with the complaint of an
infant. A few yards away from Mrs Clowes was a truss of hay; a pony
sidled from somewhere with false innocence up to this truss, nosed it
cautiously, and then began to bite wisps from it. Occasionally a loud
but mysterious cry swept across the ground. The sky was full of mystery.
Against the sky to the west stood black and clear the silhouette of the
new Town Hall spire, a wondrous erection; and sticking out from it at
one side was the form of a gigantic angel. It was the gold angel which,
from the summit of the spire, has now watched over Bursley for half a
century, but which on that particular Friday had been lifted only
two-thirds of the way to its final home.
Jock-at-a-Venture felt deeply all the influences of the scene and of the
woman. He was one of your romantic creatures; and for him the woman was
magnificent. Her magnificence thrilled.
"And what are you going to say?" she quizzed him. "Sitting on my pail!"
Now to quiz Jock was to challenge him.
"Sitting on your pail, missis," he replied, "I'm going for to say that
you're much too handsome a woman to go down to hell in eternal
damnation."
She was taken aback, but her profession had taught her the art of quick
recovery.
"You belong to that Methody lot," she mildly sneered. "I thought I seed
you talking to them white-chokers."
"I do," said Jock.
"And I make no doubt you think yourself very clever."
"Well," he vouchsafed, "I can splice a rope, shave a head, cure a wart
or a boil, and tell a fine woman with any man in this town. Not to
mention boxing, as I've given up on account of my religion."
"I _was_ handsome once," said Mrs Clowes, with apparent, but not real,
inconsequence. "But I'm all run to fat, like. I've played Portia in my
time. But now it's as much as I can do to get through with Maria Martin
or Belladonna."
"Fat!" Jock protested. "Fat! I wouldn't have an ounce taken off ye for
fifty guineas."
He was so enthusiastic that Mrs Clowes blushed.
"What's this about hell-fire?" she questioned. "I often think of it--I'm
a lonely woman, and I often think of it."
"You lonely!" Jock protested again. "With all them childer?"
"Ay!"
There was a silence.
"See thee here, missis!" he exploded, jumping up from the pail. "Ye must
come to th' Bethesda down yon, on Sunday morning, and hear the word o'
God. It'll be the making on ye."
Mrs Clowes shook her head.
"Nay!"
"And bring yer children," he persisted.
"If it was you as was going to preach like!" she said, looking away.
"It is me as is going to preach," he answered loudly and proudly. "And
I'll preach agen any man in this town for a dollar!"
Jock was forgetting himself: an accident which often happened to him.
V
The Bethesda was crowded on Sunday morning; partly because it was
Martinmas Sunday, and partly because the preacher was Jock-at-a-Venture.
That Jock should have been appointed on the "plan" [rota of preachers]
to discourse in the principal local chapel of the Connexion at such an
important feast showed what extraordinary progress he had already made
in the appreciation of that small public of experts which aided the
parson in drawing up the quarterly plan. At the hands of the larger
public his reception was sure. Some sixteen hundred of the larger public
had crammed themselves into the chapel, and there was not an empty place
either on the ground floor or in the galleries. Even the "orchestra" (as
the "singing-seat" was then called) had visitors in addition to the
choir and the double-bass players. And not a window was open. At that
date it had not occurred to people that fresh air was not a menace to
existence. The whole congregation was sweltering, and rather enjoying
it; for in some strangely subtle manner perspiration seemed to be a help
to religious emotion. Scores of women were fanning themselves; and among
these was a very stout peony-faced woman of about forty in a gorgeous
yellow dress and a red-and-black bonnet, with a large boy and a small
girl under one arm, and a large boy and a small girl under the other
arm. The splendour of the group appeared somewhat at odds with the
penury of the "Free Seats," whither it had been conducted by a steward.
In the pulpit, dominating all, was Jock-at-a-Venture, who sweated like
the rest. He presented a rather noble aspect in his broadcloth, so
different from his careless, shabby week-day attire. His eye was
lighted; his arm raised in a compelling gesture. Pausing effectively, he
lifted a glass with his left hand and sipped. It was the signal that he
had arrived at his peroration. His perorations were famous. And this
morning everybody felt, and he himself knew, that all previous
perorations were to be surpassed. His subject was the wrath to come, and
the transient quality of human life on earth. "Yea," he announced, in
gradually-increasing thunder, "all shall go. And loike the baseless
fabric o' a vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the
solemn temples, the great globe itself--Yea, I say, all which it inherit
shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial payjent faded, leave not a
rack behind."
His voice had fallen for the last words. After a dramatic silence, he
finished, in a whisper almost, and with eyebrows raised and staring gaze
directed straight at the vast woman in yellow: "We are such stuff as
drames are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. May God
have mercy on us. Hymn 442."
The effect was terrific. Men sighed and women wept, in relief that the
strain was past. Jock was an orator; he wielded the orator's dominion.
Well he knew, and well they all knew, that not a professional preacher
in the Five Towns could play on a congregation as he did. For when Jock
was roused you could nigh see the waves of emotion sweeping across the
upturned faces of his hearers like waves across a wheatfield on a windy
day.
And this morning he had been roused.