There followed six days of delirium, six days of the largest conceivable
existence. The holiday-makers stopped in a superb boarding-house on the
promenade, one of about a thousand superb boarding-houses. The day's
proceedings began at nine o'clock with a regal breakfast, partaken of at
a very long table which ran into a bow window. At nine o'clock, in all
the thousand boarding-houses, a crowd of hungry and excited men and
women sat down thus to a very long table, and consumed the same dishes,
that is to say, Manx herrings, and bacon and eggs, and jams. Everybody
ate as much as he could. William Henry was never content with less than
two herrings, two eggs, about four ounces of bacon, and as much jam as
would render a whole Board school sticky. And in four hours after that
he was ready for an enormous dinner, and so was she; and in five hours
after that they neither of them had the slightest disinclination for a
truly high and complex tea. Of course, the cost was fabulous.
Thirty-five shillings per week each. Annie would calculate that, with
thirty boarders and extras, the boarding-house was taking in money at
the rate of over forty pounds a week. She would also calculate that
about a hundred thousand herrings and ten million little bones were
swallowed in Douglas each day.
But the cost of the boarding-house was as naught. It was the flowing out
of coins between meals that deprived Annie of breath. They were always
doing something. Sailing in a boat! Rowing in a boat! Bathing! The Pier!
Sand minstrels! Excursions by brake, tram and train to Laxey, Ramsey,
Sulby Glen, Port Erin, Snaefell! Morning shows! Afternoon shows! Evening
shows! Circuses, music-halls, theatres, concerts! And then the public
balls, with those delicious tables in corners, lighted by Chinese
lanterns, where you sat down and drew strange liquids up straws. And it
all meant money. There were even places in Douglas where you couldn't
occupy a common chair for half a minute without paying for it. Each
night Annie went to bed exhausted with joy. On the second night she
counted the money in her bag, and said to William Henry:
"How much money do you think we've spent already? Just--"
"Don't tell me, lass!" he interrupted her curtly. "When I want to know,
I'll ask ye."
And on the fifth evening of this heaven he asked her:
"What'n ye got left?"
She informed him that she had five pounds and twopence left, of which
the boarding-house and tips would absorb four pounds.
"H'm!" he replied. "It's going to be a bit close."
On the seventh day they set sail. The dream was not quite over, but it
was nearly over. On the ship, when the porter had been discharged, she
had two and twopence, and William Henry had the return tickets. Still,
this poverty did not prevent William Henry from sitting down and
ordering a fine lunch for two (the sea being again smooth). Having
ordered it, he calmly told his wife that he had a sovereign in his
waistcoat pocket. A sovereign was endless riches. But it came to an end
during a long wait for the Five Towns train at Crewe. William Henry had
apparently decided to finish the holiday as he had begun it. And the two
and twopence also came to an end, as William Henry, suddenly remembering
the children of his brother, was determined to buy gifts for them on
Crewe platform. At Hanbridge man and wife had sixpence between them. And
the boy with the barrow, who had been summoned by a postcard, was not
visible. However, a cab was visible. William Henry took that cab.
"But, Will--"
"Shut up, lass!" he stopped her.
They plunged into the smoke and squalor of the Five Towns, and reached
Birches Street with pomp, while Annie wondered how William Henry would
contrive to get credit from a cabman. The entire street would certainly
gather round if there should be a scene.
"Just help us in with this trunk, wilt?" said William Henry to the
cabman. This, with sixpence in his pocket!
Then turning to his wife, he whispered:
"Lass, look under th' clock on th' mantelpiece in th' parlour. Ye'll
find six bob."
He explained to her later that prudent members of Going Away Clubs
always left money concealed behind them, as this was the sole way of
providing against a calamitous return. The pair existed on the remainder
of the six shillings and on credit for a week. William Henry became his
hard self again. The prison life was resumed. But Annie did not mind,
for she had lived for a week at the rate of a thousand a year. And in a
fortnight William Henry began grimly to pay his subscriptions to the
next year's Going Away Club.
THREE EPISODES IN THE LIFE OF MR COWLISHAW,
DENTIST
I
They all happened on the same day. And that day was a Saturday, the red
Saturday on which, in the unforgettable football match between Tottenham
Hotspur and the Hanbridge F.C. (formed regardless of expense in the
matter of professionals to take the place of the bankrupt Knype F.C.),
the referee would certainly have been murdered had not a Five Towns
crowd observed its usual miraculous self-restraint.
Mr Cowlishaw--aged twenty-four, a fair-haired bachelor with a weak
moustache--had bought the practice of the retired Mr Rapper, a dentist
of the very old school. He was not a native of the Five Towns. He came
from St Albans, and had done the deal through an advertisement in the
_Dentists' Guardian_, a weekly journal full of exciting interest to
dentists. Save such knowledge as he had gained during two preliminary
visits to the centre of the world's earthenware manufacture, he knew
nothing of the Five Towns; practically, he had everything to learn. And
one may say that the Five Towns is not a subject that can be "got up" in
a day.
His place of business--or whatever high-class dentists choose to call
it--in Crown Square was quite ready for him when he arrived on the
Friday night: specimen "uppers" and "lowers" and odd teeth shining in
their glass case, the new black-and-gold door-plate on the door, and
the electric filing apparatus which he had purchased, in the
operating-room. Nothing lacked there. But his private lodgings were not
ready; at least, they were not what he, with his finicking Albanian
notions, called ready, and, after a brief altercation with his landlady,
he went off with a bag to spend the night at the Turk's Head Hotel. The
Turk's Head is the best hotel in Hanbridge, not excepting the new Hotel
Metropole (Limited, and German-Swiss waiters). The proof of its
excellence is that the proprietor, Mr Simeon Clowes, was then the Mayor
of Hanbridge, and Mrs Clowes one of the acknowledged leaders of
Hanbridge society.
Mr Cowlishaw went to bed. He was a good sleeper; at least, he was what
is deemed a good sleeper in St Albans. He retired about eleven o'clock,
and requested one of the barmaids to instruct the boots to arouse him at
7 a.m. She faithfully promised to do so.
He had not been in bed five minutes before he heard and felt an
earthquake. This earthquake seemed to have been born towards the
north-east, in the direction of Crown Square, and the shock seemed to
pass southwards in the direction of Knype. The bed shook; the basin and
ewer rattled together like imperfect false teeth in the mouth of an
arrant coward; the walls of the hotel shook. Then silence! No cries of
alarm, no cries for help, no lamentations of ruin! Doubtless, though
earthquakes are rare in England, the whole town had been overthrown and
engulfed, and only Mr Cowlishaw's bed left standing. Conquering his
terror, Mr Cowlishaw put his head under the clothes and waited.
He had not been in bed ten minutes before he heard and felt another
earthquake. This earthquake seemed to have been born towards the
north-east, in the direction of Crown Square, and to be travelling
southwards; and Mr Cowlishaw noticed that it was accompanied by a
strange sound of heavy bumping. He sprang courageously out of bed and
rushed to the window. And it so happened that he caught the earthquake
in the very act of flight. It was one of the new cars of the Five Towns
Electric Traction Company, Limited, guaranteed to carry fifty-two
passengers. The bumping was due to the fact that the driver, by a too
violent application of the brake, had changed the form of two of its
wheels from circular to oval. Such accidents do happen, even to the
newest cars, and the inhabitants of the Five Towns laugh when they hear
a bumpy car as they laugh at _Charley's Aunt_. The car shot past,
flashing sparks from its overhead wire and flaming red and green lights
of warning, and vanished down the main thoroughfare. And gradually the
ewer and basin ceased their colloquy. The night being the night of the
29th December, and exceedingly cold, Mr Cowlishaw went back to bed.
"Well," he muttered, "this is a bit thick, this is!" (They use such
language in cathedral towns.) "However, let's hope it's the last."
It was not the last. Exactly, it was the last but twenty-three.
Regularly at intervals of five minutes the Five Towns Electric Traction
Company, Limited, sent one of their dreadful engines down the street,
apparently with the object of disintegrating all the real property in
the neighbourhood into its original bricks. At the seventeenth time Mr
Cowlishaw trembled to hear a renewal of the bump-bump-bump. It was the
oval-wheeled car, which had been to Longshaw and back. He recognized it
as an old friend. He wondered whether he must expect it to pass a third
time. However, it did not pass a third time. After several clocks in and
out of the hotel had more or less agreed on the fact that it was one
o'clock, there was a surcease of earthquakes. Mr Cowlishaw dared not
hope that earthquakes were over. He waited in strained attention during
quite half an hour, expectant of the next earthquake. But it did not
come. Earthquakes were, indeed, done with till the morrow.
It was about two o'clock when his nerves were sufficiently
tranquillized to enable him to envisage the possibility of going to
sleep. And he was just slipping, gliding, floating off when he was
brought back to realities by a terrific explosion of laughter at the
head of the stairs outside his bedroom door. The building rang like the
inside of a piano when you strike a wire directly. The explosion was
followed by low rumblings of laughter and then by a series of jolly,
hearty "Good-nights." He recognized the voices as being those of a
group of commercial travellers and two actors (of the Hanbridge Theatre
Royal's specially selected London Pantomime Company), who had been
pointed out to him with awe and joy by the aforesaid barmaid. They were
telling each other stories in the private bar, and apparently they had
been telling each other stories ever since. And the truth is that the
atmosphere of the Turk's Head, where commercial travellers and actors
forgather every night except perhaps Sundays, contains more good stories
to the cubic inch than any other resort in the county of Staffordshire.
A few seconds after the explosion there was a dropping fusillade--the
commercial travellers and the actors shutting their doors. And about
five minutes later there was another and more complicated dropping
fusillade--the commercial travellers and actors opening their doors,
depositing their boots (two to each soul), and shutting their doors.
Then silence.
And then out of the silence the terrified Mr Cowlishaw heard arising and
arising a vast and fearful breathing, as of some immense prehistoric
monster in pain. At first he thought he was asleep and dreaming. But he
was not. This gigantic sighing continued regularly, and Mr Cowlishaw had
never heard anything like it before. It banished sleep.
After about two hours of its awful uncanniness, Mr Cowlishaw caught the
sound of creeping footsteps in the corridor and fumbling noises. He got
up again. He was determined, though he should have to interrogate
burglars and assassins, to discover the meaning of that horrible
sighing. He courageously pulled his door open, and saw an aproned man
with a candle marking boots with chalk, and putting them into a box.
"I say!" said Mr Cowlishaw.
"Beg yer pardon, sir," the man whispered. "I'm getting forward with my
work so as I can go to th' fut-baw match this afternoon. I hope I didn't
wake ye, sir."
"Look here!" said Mr Cowlishaw. "What's that appalling noise that's
going on all the time?"
"Noise, sir?" whispered the man, astonished.
"Yes," Mr Cowlishaw insisted. "Like something breathing. Can't you hear
it?"
The man cocked his ears attentively. The noise veritably boomed in Mr
Cowlishaw's ears.
"Oh! _That_!" said the man at length. "That's th' blast furnaces at
Cauldon Bar Ironworks. Never heard that afore, sir? Why, it's like that
every night. Now you mention it, I _do_ hear it! It's a good couple o'
miles off, though, that is!"
Mr Cowlishaw closed his door.
At five o'clock, when he had nearly, but not quite, forgotten the
sighing, his lifelong friend, the oval-wheeled electric car, bumped and
quaked through the street, and the ewer and basin chattered together
busily, and the seismic phenomena definitely recommenced. The night was
still black, but the industrial day had dawned in the Five Towns. Long
series of carts without springs began to jolt past under the window of
Mr Cowlishaw, and then there was a regular multitudinous clacking of
clogs and boots on the pavement. A little later the air was rent by
first one steam-whistle, and then another, and then another, in divers
tones announcing that it was six o'clock, or five minutes past, or
half-past, or anything. The periodicity of earthquakes had by this time
quickened to five minutes, as at midnight. A motor-car emerged under
the archway of the hotel, and remained stationary outside with its
engine racing. And amid the earthquakes, the motor-car, the carts, the
clogs and boots, and the steam muezzins calling the faithful to work, Mr
Cowlishaw could still distinguish the tireless, monstrous sighing of the
Cauldon Bar blast furnaces. And, finally, he heard another sound. It
came from the room next to his, and, when he heard it, exhausted though
he was, exasperated though he was, he burst into laughter, so comically
did it strike him.
It was an alarm-clock going off in the next room.
And, further, when he arrived downstairs, the barmaid, sweet,
conscientious little thing, came up to him and said, "I'm so sorry, sir.
I quite forgot to tell the boots to call you!"