My knowledge of industrial districts amounted to nothing. Born in
Devonshire, educated at Cambridge, and fulfilling my destiny as curator
of a certain department of antiquities at the British Museum, I had
never been brought into contact with the vast constructive material
activities of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Staffordshire. I had but
passed through them occasionally on my way to Scotland, scorning their
necessary grime with the perhaps too facile disdain of the clean-faced
southerner, who is apt to forget that coal cannot walk up unaided out
of the mine, and that the basin in which he washes his beautiful purity
can only be manufactured amid conditions highly repellent. Well, my
impressions of the platform of Knype station were unfavourable. There
was dirt in the air; I could feel it at once on my skin. And the scene
was shabby, undignified, and rude. I use the word 'rude' in all its
senses. What I saw was a pushing, exclamatory, ill-dressed, determined
crowd, each member of which was bent on the realization of his own
desires by the least ceremonious means. If an item of this throng
wished to get past me, he made me instantly aware of his wish by
abruptly changing my position in infinite space; it was not possible to
misconstrue his meaning. So much crude force and naked will-to-live I
had not before set eyes on. In truth, I felt myself to be a very
brittle, delicate bit of intellectual machinery in the midst of all
these physical manifestations. Yet I am a tallish man, and these
potters appeared to me to be undersized, and somewhat thin too! But
what elbows! What glaring egoistic eyes! What terrible decisiveness in
action!
'Now then, get in if ye're going!' said a red-haired porter to me
curtly.
'I'm not going. I've just got out,' I replied.
'Well, then, why dunna' ye stand out o' th' wee and let them get in as
wants to?'
Unable to offer a coherent answer to this crushing demand, I stood out
of the way. In the light of further knowledge I now surmise that that
porter was a very friendly and sociable porter. But at the moment I
really believed that, taking me for the least admirable and necessary
of God's creatures, he meant to convey his opinion to me for my own
good. I glanced up at the lighted windows of the train, and saw the
composed, careless faces of haughty persons who were going direct from
London to Manchester, and to whom the Five Towns was nothing but a
delay. I envied them. I wanted to return to the shelter of the train.
When it left, I fancied that my last link with civilization was broken.
Then another train puffed in, and it was simply taken by assault in a
fraction of time, to an incomprehensible bawling of friendly sociable
porters. Season-ticket holders at Finsbury Park think they know how to
possess themselves of a train; they are deceived. So this is where
Simon Fuge came from (I reflected)! The devil it is (I reflected)! I
tried to conceive what the invaders of the train would exclaim if
confronted by one of Simon Fuge's pictures. I could imagine only one
word, and that a monosyllable, that would meet the case of their
sentiments. And his dalliance, his tangential nocturnal deviations in
gondolas with exquisite twin odalisques! There did not seem to be much
room for amorous elegance in the lives of these invaders. And his
death! What would they say of his death? Upon my soul, as I stood on
that dirty platform, in a milieu of advertisements of soap, boots, and
aperients, I began to believe that Simon Fuge never had lived, that he
was a mere illusion of his friends and his small public. All that I saw
around me was a violent negation of Simon Fuge, that entity of rare,
fine, exotic sensibilities, that perfectly mad gourmet of sensations,
that exotic seer of beauty.
I caught sight of my acquaintance and host, Mr Robert Brindley, coming
towards me on the platform. Hitherto I had only met him in London,
when, as chairman of the committee of management of the Wedgwood
Institution and School of Art at Bursley, he had called on me at the
British Museum for advice as to loan exhibits. He was then dressed like
a self-respecting tourist. Now, although an architect by profession, he
appeared to be anxious to be mistaken for a sporting squire. He wore
very baggy knickerbockers, and leggings, and a cap. This raiment was
apparently the agreed uniform of the easy classes in the Five Towns;
for in the crowd I had noticed several such consciously superior
figures among the artisans. Mr Brindley, like most of the people in the
station, had a slightly pinched and chilled air, as though that morning
he had by inadvertence omitted to don those garments which are not
seen. He also, like most of the people there, but not to the same
extent, had a somewhat suspicious and narrowly shrewd regard, as who
should say: 'If any person thinks he can get the better of me by a
trick, let him try--that's all.' But the moment his eye encountered
mine, this expression vanished from his face, and he gave me a candid
smile.
'I hope you're well,' he said gravely, squeezing my hand in a sort of
vice that he carried at the end of his right arm.