Now, close by this poster was the poster of the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and
among the items offered by the DAILY TELEGRAPH was: 'Death of Simon
Fuge'. I could not forbear pointing out to Mr Brindley the difference
between the two posters. A conversation ensued; and amid the rumbling
of trains and the rough stir of the platform we got back again to Simon
Fuge, and Mr Brindley's tone gradually grew, if not acrid, a little
impatient.
'After all,' he said, 'rates are rates, especially in Hanbridge. And
let me tell you that last season Knype Football Club jolly nearly got
thrown out of the First League. The constitution of the team for this
next season--why, damn it, it's a question of national importance! You
don't understand these things. If Knype Football Club was put into the
League Second Division, ten thousand homes would go into mourning. Who
the devil was Simon Fuge?'
They joke with such extraordinary seriousness in the Five Towns that
one is somehow bound to pretend that they are not joking. So I replied--
'He was a great artist. And this is his native district. Surely you
ought to be proud of him!'
'He may have been a great artist,' said Mr Brindley, 'or he may not.
But for us he was simply a man who came of a family that had a bad
reputation for talking too much and acting the goat!'
'Well,' I said, We shall see--in fifty years.'
'That's just what we shan't,' said he. 'We shall be where Simon Fuge
is--dead! However, perhaps we are proud of him. But you don't expect us
to show it, do you? That's not our style.'
He performed the quasi-winking phenomenon with his eyes. It was his
final exhibition of it to me.
'A strange place!' I reflected, as I ate my dinner in the dining-car,
with the pressure of Mr Brindley's steely clasp still affecting my
right hand, and the rich, honest cordiality of his au revoir in my
heart. 'A place that is passing strange!'
And I thought further: He may have been a boaster, and a chatterer, and
a man who suffered from cold feet at the wrong moments! And the Five
Towns may have got the better of him, now. But that portrait of the
little girl in the Wedgwood Institution is waiting there, right in the
middle of the Five Towns. And one day the Five Towns will have to 'give
it best'. They can say what they like! ... What eyes the fellow had,
when he was in the right company!