When Edwin, shyly, followed Big James into the assembly room of the
Dragon, it already held a fair sprinkling of men, and newcomers
continued to drop in. They were soberly and respectably clothed, though
a few had knotted handkerchiefs round their necks instead of collars and
ties. The occasion was a jollity of the Bursley Mutual Burial Club.
This Club, a singular example of that dogged private co-operative
enterprise which so sharply distinguishes English corporate life from
the corporate life of other European countries, had lustily survived
from a period when men were far less sure of a decent burial than they
were then, in the very prosperous early seventies. It had helped to
maintain the barbaric fashion of ostentatiously expensive funerals, out
of which undertakers and beer-sellers made vast sums; but it had also
provided a basis of common endeavour and of fellowship. And its
respectability was intense, and at the same time broad-minded. To be an
established subscriber to the Burial Club was evidence of good character
and of social spirit. The periodic jollities of this company of men
whose professed aim was to bury each other, had a high reputation for
excellence. Up till a year previously they had always been held at the
Duck, in Duck Square, opposite; but Mr Enoch Peake, Chairman of the
Club, had by persistent and relentless chicane, triumphing over immense
influences, changed their venue to the Dragon, whose landlady, Mrs
Louisa Loggerheads, he was then courting. (It must be stated that Mrs
Louisa's name contained no slur of cantankerousness; it is merely the
local word for a harmless plant, the knapweed.) He had now won Mrs
Loggerheads, after being a widower thrice, and with her the second best
`house' in the town.
There were long benches down the room, with forms on either side of
them. Big James, not without pomp, escorted a blushing Edwin to the end
of one of these tables, near a small raised platform that occupied the
extremity of the room. Over this platform was printed a legend: "As a
bird is known by its note--"; and over the legend was a full-rigged ship
in a glass case, and a pair of antlers. The walls of the room were dark
brown, the ceiling grey with soot of various sorts, and the floor tiled
red-and-black and sanded. Smoke rose in spirals from about a score of
churchwarden pipes and as many cutties, which were charged from tin
pouches, and lighted by spills of newspaper from the three double
gas-jets that hung down over the benches. Two middle-aged women, one in
black and the other checked, served beer, porter, and stout in mugs, and
gin in glasses, passing in and out through a side door. The company
talked little, and it had not yet begun seriously to drink; but,
sprawled about in attitudes of restful abeyance, it was smoking
religiously, and the flat noise of solemn expectorations punctuated the
minutes. Edwin was easily the youngest person present--the average age
appeared to be about fifty--but nobody's curiosity seemed to be much
stirred by his odd arrival, and he ceased gradually to blush. When,
however, one of the women paused before him in silent question, and he
had to explain that he required no drink because he had only called for
a moment about a matter of business, he blushed again vigorously.
------------------------------------------------------------------------