The Tiger was very conveniently close to the Wedgwood Institution. The
Tiger had a 'yard', one of those long, shapeless expanses of the
planet, partly paved with uneven cobbles and partly unsophisticated
planet, without which no provincial hotel can call itself respectable.
We came into it from the hinterland through a wooden doorway in a brick
wall. Far off I could see one light burning. We were in the centre of
Bursley, the gold angel of its Town Hall rose handsomely over the roof
of the hotel in the diffused moonlight, but we might have been in the
purlieus of some dubious establishment on the confines of a great
seaport, where anything may happen. The yard was so deserted, so
mysterious, so shut in, so silent, that, really, infamous characters
ought to have rushed out at us from the obscurity of shadows, and
felled us to the earth with no other attendant phenomenon than a low
groan. There are places where one seems to feel how thin and brittle is
the crust of law and order. Why one should be conscious of this in the
precincts of such a house as the Tiger, which I was given to understand
is as respectable as the parish church, I do not know. But I have
experienced a similar feeling in the yards of other provincial hotels
that were also as correct as parish churches. We passed a dim fly, with
its shafts slanting forlornly to the ground, and a wheelbarrow. Both
looked as though they had been abandoned for ever. Then we came to the
lamp, which illuminated a door, and on the door was a notice: 'Private
Bar. Billiards.'
I am not a frequenter of convivial haunts. I should not dare to
penetrate alone into a private bar; when I do enter a private bar it is
invariably under the august protection of an habitue, and it is
invariably with the idea that at last I am going to see life. Often has
this illusion been shattered, but each time it perfectly renewed
itself. So I followed the bold Mr Brindley into the private bar of the
Tiger.
It was a small and low room. I instinctively stooped, though there was
no necessity for me to stoop. The bar had no peculiarity. It can be
described in a breath: Three perpendicular planes. Back plane, bottles
arranged exactly like books on bookshelves; middle plane, the upper
halves of two women dressed in tight black; front plane, a counter,
dotted with glasses, and having strange areas of zinc. Reckon all that
as the stage, and the rest of the room as auditorium. But the stage of
a private bar is more mysterious than the stage of a theatre. You are
closer to it, and yet it is far less approachable. The edge of the
counter is more sacred than the footlights. Impossible to imagine
yourself leaping over it. Impossible to imagine yourself in that
cloistered place behind it. Impossible to imagine how the priestesses
got themselves into that place, or that they ever leave it. They are
always there; they are always the same. You may go into a theatre when
it is empty and dark; but did you ever go into a private bar that was
empty and dark? A private bar is as eternal as the hills, as changeless
as the monomania of a madman, as mysterious as sorcery. Always the same
order of bottles, the same tinkling, the same popping, the same
time-tables, and the same realistic pictures of frothing champagne on
the walls, the same advertisements on the same ash-trays on the
counter, the same odour that wipes your face like a towel the instant
you enter; and the same smiles, the same gestures, the same black
fabric stretched to tension over the same impressive mammiferous
phenomena of the same inexplicable creatures who apparently never eat
and never sleep, imprisoned for life in the hallowed and mystic hollow
between the bottles and the zinc.
In a tone almost inaudible in its discretion, Mr Brindley let fall to
me as he went in--