This was on Tuesday. During the next few days Peake went through a novel
and very disturbing experience. He gradually became conscious of the
power of that mysterious and all-but-irresistible moral force which is
called public opinion. His own public of friends and acquaintances
connected with the chapel seemed to be, for some inexplicable reason,
against him on the question of the organ subscription. They visited him,
even to the Rev. Mr Copinger (whom he heartily admired as having
"nothing of the parson" about him), and argued quietly, rather severely,
and then left him with the assurance that they relied on his sense of
what was proper. He was amazed and secretly indignant at this combined
attack. He thought it cowardly, unscrupulous; it resembled brigandage.
He felt most acutely that no one had any right to demand from him that
hundred pounds, and that they who did so transgressed one of those
unwritten laws which govern social intercourse. Yet these transgressors
were his friends, people who had earned his respect in years long past
and kept it through all the intricate situations arising out of daily
contact. They could defy him to withdraw his respect now; and, without
knowing it, they did. He was left brooding, pained, bewildered. The
explanation was simply this: he had failed to perceive that the
grandiose idea of the ninefold organ fund had seized, fired, and
obsessed the imaginations of the Wesleyan community, and that under the
unwonted poetic stimulus they were capable of acting quite differently
from their ordinary selves.
Peake was perplexed, he felt that he was weakening; but, being a man of
resourceful obstinacy, he was by no means defeated. On Friday morning he
told his wife that he should go to see a customer at Blackpool about a
contract, and probably remain at the seaside for the week-end.
Accustomed to these sudden movements, she packed his bag without
questioning, and he set off for Knype station in the dogcart. Once
behind the horse he felt safe, he could breathe again. The customer at
Blackpool was merely an excuse to enable him to escape from the circle
of undue influence. Ardently desiring to be in the train and on the
other side of Crewe, he pulled up at his little order-office in the
market-place to give some instructions. As he did so his clerk, Vodrey,
came rushing out and saw him.
"I have just telephoned to your house, sir," the clerk said excitedly.
"They told me you were driving to Knype and so I was coming after you in
a cab."
"Why, what's up now?"
"Eardley Brothers have called their creditors together."
"_What_?"
"I've just had a circular-letter from them, sir."
Peake stared at Vodrey, and then took two steps forward, stamping his
feet.
"The devil!" he exclaimed, with passionate ferocity. "The devil!"
Other men of business, besides James Peake, made similar exclamations
that morning; for the collapse of Eardley Brothers, the great
earthenware manufacturers, who were chiefly responsible for the ruinous
cutting of prices in the American and Colonial markets, was no ordinary
trade fiasco. Bursley was staggered, especially when it learnt that the
Bank, the inaccessible and autocratic Bank, was an unsecured creditor
for twelve thousand pounds.
Peake abandoned the Blackpool customer and drove off to consult his
lawyer at Hanbridge; he stood to lose three hundred and fifty pounds, a
matter sufficiently disconcerting. Yet, in another part of his mind, he
felt strangely serene and happy, for he was sure now of winning his bet
of one shilling with Randolph Sneyd. In the first place, the failure of
Eardleys would annihilate the organ scheme, and in the second place no
one would have the audacity to ask him for a subscription of a hundred
pounds when it was known that he would be a heavy sufferer in the
Eardley bankruptcy.
Later in the day he happened to meet one of the Eardleys, and at once
launched into a stream of that hot invective of which he was a master.
And all the while he was conscious of a certain hypocrisy in his
attitude of violence; he could not dismiss the notion that the Eardleys
had put him under an obligation by failing precisely at this juncture.