Tales of the Five Towns — 05 - A Feud

A FEUD

When Clive Timmis paused at the side-door of Ezra Brunt's great shop in Machin Street, and the door was opened to him by Ezra Brunt's daughter before he had had time to pull the bell, not only all Machin Street knew it within the hour, but also most persons of consequence left in Hanbridge on a Thursday afternoon--Thursday being early-closing day.

For Hanbridge, though it counts sixty thousand inhabitants, and is the chief of the Five Towns--that vast, huddled congeries of boroughs devoted to the manufacture of earthenware--is a place where the art of attending to other people's business still flourishes in rustic perfection.

Ezra Brunt's drapery establishment was the foremost retail house, in any branch of trade, of the Five Towns.

It had no rival nearer than Manchester, thirty-six miles off; and even Manchester could exhibit nothing conspicuously superior to it.

The most acutely critical shoppers of the Five Towns--women who were in the habit of going to London every year for the January sales--spoke of Brunt's as a 'right-down good shop.'

And the husbands of these ladies, manufacturers who employed from two hundred to a thousand men, regarded Ezra Brunt as a commercial magnate of equal importance with themselves.

Brunt, who had served his apprenticeship at Birmingham, started business in Machin Street in 1862, when Hanbridge was half its present size and all the best shops of the district were in Oldcastle, an ancient burg contiguous with, but holding itself proudly aloof from, the industrial Five Towns.

He paid eighty pounds a year rent, and lived over the shop, and in the summer quarter his gas bill was always under a sovereign.

For ten years success tarried, but in 1872 his daughter Eva was born and his wife died, and from that moment the sun of his prosperity climbed higher and higher into heaven.

He had been profoundly attached to his wife, and, having lost her he abandoned himself to the mercantile struggle with that morose and terrible ferocity which was the root of his character.

Of rude, gaunt aspect, gruffly taciturn by nature, and variable in temper, he yet had the precious instinct for soothing customers.

To this day he can surpass his own shop-walkers in the admirable and tender solicitude with which, forsaking dialect, he drops into a lady's ear his famous stereotyped phrase: 'Are you receiving proper attention, madam?'

From the first he eschewed the facile trickeries and ostentations which allure the populace.

He sought a high-class trade, and by waiting he found it.

He would never advertise on hoardings; for many years he had no signboard over his shop-front; and whereas the name of 'Bostocks,' the huge cheap drapers lower down Machin Street, on the opposite side, attacks you at every railway-station and in every tramcar, the name of 'E. Brunt' is to be seen only in a modest regular advertisement on the front page of the _Staffordshire Signal_.

Repose, reticence, respectability--it was these attributes which he decided his shop should possess, and by means of which he succeeded.

To enter Brunt's, with its silently swinging doors, its broad, easy staircases, its long floors covered with warm, red linoleum, its partitioned walls, its smooth mahogany counters, its unobtrusive mirrors, its rows of youths and virgins in black, and its pervading atmosphere of quietude and discretion, was like entering a temple before the act of oblation has commenced.

You were conscious of some supreme administrative influence everywhere imposing itself.

That influence was Ezra Brunt.

And yet the man differed utterly from the thing he had created.

His was one of those dark and passionate souls which smoulder in this harsh Midland district as slag-heaps smoulder on the pit-banks, revealing their strange fires only in the darkness.

In 1899 Brunt's establishment occupied four shops, Nos.

52, 56, 58, and 60, in Machin Street.

He had bought the freeholds at a price which timid people regarded as exorbitant, but the solicitors of Hanbridge secretly applauded his enterprise and shrewdness in anticipating the enormous rise in ground-values which has now been in rapid, steady progress there for more than a decade.

He had thrown the interiors together and rebuilt the frontages in handsome freestone.

He had also purchased several shops opposite, and rumour said that it was his intention to offer these latter to the Town Council at a low figure if the Council would cut a new street leading from his premises to the Market Square.

Such a scheme would have met with general approval.

But there was one serious hiatus in the plans of Ezra Brunt--to wit, No. 54, Machin Street.

No. 54, separating 52 and 56, was a chemist's shop, shabby but sedate as to appearance, owned and occupied by George Christopher Timmis, a mild and venerable citizen, and a local preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion.

For nearly thirty years Brunt had coveted Mr. Timmis's shop;

more than twenty years have elapsed since he first opened negotiations for it.

Mr. Timmis was by no means eager to sell--indeed, his attitude was distinctly a repellent one--but a bargain would undoubtedly have been concluded had not a report reached the ears of Mr. Timmis to the effect that Ezra Brunt had remarked at the Turk's Head that 'th' old leech was only sticking out for every brass farthing he could get.'

The report was untrue, but Mr. Timmis believed it, and from that moment Ezra Brunt's chances of obtaining the chemist's shop vanished completely.

His lawyer expended diplomacy in vain, raising the offer week by week till the incredible sum of three thousand pounds was reached.

Then Ezra Brunt himself saw Mr. Timmis, and without a word of prelude said: 'Will ye take three thousand guineas for this bit o' property?'

'Not thirty thousand guineas,' said Mr. Timmis quietly; the stern pride of the benevolent old local preacher had been aroused.

'Then be damned to you!'

said Ezra Brunt, who had never been known to swear before.

Thenceforth a feud existed, not less bitter because it was a feud in which nothing was said and nothing done--a silent and implacable mutual resistance.

The sole outward sign of it was the dirty and stumpy brown-brick shop-front of Mr. Timmis, squeezed in between those massive luxurious façades of stone which Ezra Brunt soon afterwards erected.

The pharmaceutical business of Mr. Timmis was not a very large one, and, fiscally, Ezra Brunt could have swallowed him at a meal and suffered no inconvenience; but in that the aged chemist had lived on just half his small income for some fifty years past, his position was impregnable.

Hanbridge smiled cynically at this _impasse_ produced by an idle word, and, recognising the equality of the antagonists, leaned neither to one side nor to the other.

At intervals, however, the legend of the feud was embroidered with new and effective detail in the mouth of some inventive gossip, and by degrees it took high place among those piquant social histories which illustrate the real life of a town, and which parents recount to their children with such zest in moods of reminiscence.

When George Christopher Timmis buried his wife, Ezra Brunt, as a near neighbour, was asked to the funeral.

'The cortège will move at 1. 30,' ran the printed invitation, and at 1. 15 Brunt's carriage was decorously in place behind the hearse and the two mourning-coaches.

The demeanour of the chemist and the draper towards each other was a sublime answer to the demands of the occasion; some people even said that the breach had been healed, but these were not of the discerning.

The most active person at the funeral was the chemist's only nephew, Clive Timmis, partner in a small but prosperous firm of majolica manufacturers at Bursley.

Clive, who was seldom seen in Hanbridge, made a favourable impression on everyone by his pleasing, unaffected manner and his air of discretion and success.

He was a bachelor of thirty-two, and lived in lodgings at Bursley.

On the return of the funeral-party from the cemetery, Clive Timmis found Brunt's daughter Eva in his uncle's house.

Uninvited, she had left her place in the private room at her father's shop in order to assist Timmis's servant Sarah in the preparation of that solid and solemn repast which must inevitably follow every proper interment in the Five Towns.

Without false modesty, she introduced herself to one or two of the men who had surprised her at her work, and then quietly departed just as they were sitting down to table and Sarah had brought in the hot tea-cakes.

Clive Timmis saw her only for a moment, but from that moment she was his one thought.

During the evening, which he spent alone with his uncle, he behaved in every particular as a nephew should, yet he was acting a part; his real self roved after Ezra Brunt's daughter, wherever she might be.

Clive had never fallen in love, though several times in his life he had tried hard to do so.

He had long wished to marry--wished ardently; he had even got into the way of regarding every woman he met--and he met many--in the light of a possible partner.

'Can it be _she_?

he had asked himself a thousand times, and then answered half sadly, 'No.' Not one woman had touched his imagination, coincided with his dream.

It is strange that after seeing Eva Brunt he forgot thus to interrogate himself.

For a fortnight, while he went his ways as usual, her image occupied his heart, throwing that once orderly chamber into the wildest confusion;

and he let it remain, dimly aware of some delicious danger.

He inspected the image every night before he slept, and every morning when he awoke, and made no effort to define its distracting charm; he knew only that Eva Brunt was absolutely and in every detail unlike all other women.

On the second Sunday he murmured during the sermon: 'But I only saw her for a minute.'

A few days afterwards he took the tram to Hanbridge.

'Uncle,' he said, 'how should you like me to come and live here with you?

I've been thinking things out a bit, and I thought perhaps you'd like it.

I expect you must feel rather lonely now.'

The neat, fragrant shop was empty, and the two men stood behind the big glass-fronted case of Burroughs and Wellcome's preparations.

Clive's venerable uncle happened to be looking into a drawer marked 'Gentianæ Rad.

Pulv.'

He closed the drawer with slow hesitation, and then, stroking his long white beard, replied in that deliberate voice which seemed always to tremble with religious fervour: 'The hand of the Lord is in this thing, Clive.

I have wished that you might come to live here with me.

But I was afraid it would be too far from the works.'

'Pooh!

that's nothing,' said Clive.

As he lingered at the shop door for the Bursley car to pass the end of Machin Street, Eva Brunt went by.

He raised his hat with diffidence, and she smiled.

It was a marvellous chance.

His heart leapt into a throb which was half agony and half delight.

'I am in love,' he said gravely.

He had just discovered the fact, and the discovery filled him with exquisite apprehension.

If he had waited till the age of thirty-two for that springtime of the soul which we call love, Clive had not waited for nothing.

Eva was a woman to enravish the heart of a man whose imagination could pierce the agitating secrets immured in that calm and silent bosom.

Slender and scarcely tall, she belonged to the order of spare, slight-made women, who hide within their slim frames an endowment of profound passion far exceeding that of their more voluptuously-formed sisters, who never coarsen into stoutness, and who at forty are as disturbing as at twenty.

At this date Eva was twenty-six.

She had a rather small, white face, which was a mask to the casual observer, and the very mirror of her feelings to anyone with eyes to read its signs.

'I tell you what you are like,' said Clive to her once: 'you are like a fine racehorse, always on the quiver.'

Yet many people considered her cold and impassive.

Her walk and bearing showed a sensitive independence, and when she spoke it was usually in tones of command.

The girls in the shop, where she was a power second only to Ezra Brunt, were a little afraid of her, chiefly because she poured terrible scorn on their small affectations, jealousies, and vendettas.

But they liked her because, in their own phrase, 'there was no nonsense about' this redoubtable woman.

She hated shams and make-believes with a bitter and ruthless hatred.

She was the heiress to at least five thousand a year, and knew it well, but she never encouraged her father to complicate their simple mode of life with the pomps of wealth.

They lived in a house with a large garden at Pireford, which is on the summit of the steep ridge between the Five Towns and Oldcastle, and they kept two servants and a coachman, who was also gardener.

Eva paid the servants good wages, and took care to get good value therefor.

'It's not often I have any bother with my servants,' she would say, 'for they know that if there is any trouble I would just as soon clear them out and put on an apron and do the work myself.'

She was an accomplished house-mistress, and could bake her own bread: in towns not one woman in a thousand can bake.

With the coachman she had little to do, for she could not rid herself of a sentimental objection to the carriage--it savoured of 'airs'; when she used it she used it as she might use a tramcar.

It was her custom, every day except Saturday, to walk to the shop about eleven o'clock, after her house had been set in order.

She had been thoroughly trained in the business, and had spent a year at a first-rate shop in High Street, Kensington.

Millinery was her speciality, and she still watched over that department with a particular attention; but for some time past she had risen beyond the limitations of departments, and assisted her father in the general management of the vast concern.

In commercial aptitude she resembled the typical Frenchwoman.

Although he was her father, Ezra Brunt had the wit to recognise her talents, and he always listened to her suggestions, which, however, sometimes startled him.

One of them was that he should import into the Five Towns a modiste from Paris, offering a salary of two hundred a year.

The old provincial stood aghast.

He had the idea that all Parisian women were stage-dancers.

And to pay four pounds a week to a female!

Nevertheless, Mademoiselle Bertot--styled in the shop 'Madame'--now presides over Ezra Brunt's dressmakers, draws her four pounds a week (of which she saves two), and by mere nationality has given a unique distinction and success to her branch of the business.

Eva occupied a small room opening off the principal showroom, and during hours of work she issued thence but seldom.

Only customers of the highest importance might speak with her.

She was a power felt rather than seen.

Employés who knocked at her door always did so with a certain awe of what awaited them on the other side, and a consciousness that the moment was unsuitable for levity.

'If you please, Miss Eva----'.

Here she gave audience to the 'buyers' and window-dressers, listened to complaints and excuses, and occasionally had a secret orgy of afternoon tea with one or two of her friends.

None but these few girls--mostly younger than herself, and remarkable only in that their dislike of the snobbery of the Five Towns, though less fiercely displayed, agreed with her own--really knew Eva.

To them alone did she unveil herself, and by them she was idolized.

'She is simply splendid when you know her--such a jolly girl!'

they would say to other people; but other people, especially other women, could not believe it.

They fearfully respected her because she was very well dressed and had quantities of money.

But they called her 'a curious creature'; it was inconceivable to them that she should choose to work in a shop; and her tongue had a causticity which was sometimes exceedingly disconcerting and mortifying.

As for men, she was shy of them, and, moreover, she loathed the elaborate and insincere ritual of deference which the average man practises towards women unrelated to him, particularly when they are young and rich.

Her father she adored, without knowing it; for he often angered her, and humiliated her in private.

As for the rest, she was, after all, only six-and-twenty.

'If you don't mind, I should like to walk along with you,' Clive Timmis said to her one Sunday evening in the porch of the Bethesda Chapel.

'I shall be glad,' she answered at once; 'father isn't here, and I'm all alone.'

Ezra Brunt was indeed seldom there, counting in the matter of attendance at chapel among what were called 'the weaker brethren.'

'I am going over to Oldcastle,' Clive explained calmly.

So began the formal courtship--more than a month after Clive had settled in Machin Street, for he was far too discreet to engender by precipitancy any suspicion in the haunts of scandal that his true reason for establishing himself in his uncle's household was a certain rich young woman who was to be found every day next door.

Guided as much by instinct as by tact, Clive approached Eva with an almost savage simplicity and naturalness of manner, ignoring not only her father's wealth, but all the feigned punctilio of a wooer.

His face said: 'Let there be no beating about the bush--I like you.'

Hers answered: 'Good!

we will see.'

From the first he pleased her, and not least in treating her exactly as she would have wished to be treated--namely, as a quite plain person of that part of the middle class which is neither upper nor lower.

Few men in the Five Towns would have been capable of forgetting Ezra Brunt's income in talking to Ezra Brunt's daughter.

Fortunately, Timmis had a proud, confident spirit--the spirit of one who, unaided, has wrested success from the world's deathlike clutch.

Had Eva the reversion of fifty thousand a year instead of five, he, Clive, was still a prosperous plain man, well able to support a wife in the position to which God had called him.

Their walks together grew more and more frequent, and they became intimate, exchanging ideas and rejoicing openly at the similarity of those ideas.

Although there was no concealment in these encounters, still, there was a circumspection which resembled the clandestine.

By a silent understanding Clive did not enter the house at Pireford; to have done so would have excited remark, for this house, unlike some, had never been the rendezvous of young men; much less, therefore, did he invade the shop.

No!

The chief part of their love-making (for such it was, though the term would have roused Eva's contemptuous anger) occurred in the streets; in this they did but follow the traditions of their class.

Thus, the idyll, so matter-of-fact upon the surface, but within which glowed secret and adorable fires, progressed towards its culmination.

Eva, the artless fool--oh, how simple are the wisest at times!

--thought that the affair was hid from the shop.

But was it possible?

Was it possible that in those tiny bedrooms on the third floor, where the heavy evening hours were ever lightened with breathless interminable recitals of what some 'he' had said and some 'she' had replied, such an enthralling episode should escape discovery?

The dormitories knew of Eva's 'attachment' before Eva herself.

Yet none knew how it was known.

The whisper arose like Venus from a sea of trivial gossip, miraculously, exquisitely.

On the night when the first rumour of it traversed the passages there was scarcely any sleep at Brunt's, while Eva up at Pireford slumbered as a young girl.

On the Thursday afternoon with which we began, Brunt's was deserted save for the housekeeper and Eva, who was writing letters in her room.

'I saw you from my window, coming up the street,' she said to Clive, 'and so I ran down to open the door.

Will you come into father's room?

He is in Manchester for the day, buying.

'I knew that,' said Timmis.

'How did you know?'

She observed that his manner was somewhat nervous and constrained.

'You yourself told me last night--don't you remember?'

'So I did.'

'That's why I sent the note round this morning to say I'd call this afternoon.

You got it, I suppose?'

She nodded thoughtfully.

'Well, what is this business you want to talk about?'

It was spoken with a brave carelessness, but he caught the tremor in her voice, and saw her little hand shake as it lay on the table amid her father's papers.

Without knowing why he should do so, he stepped hastily forward and seized that hand.

Her emotion unmanned him.

He thought he was going to cry; he could not account for himself.

'Eva,' he said thickly, 'you know what the business is; you know, don't you?'

She smiled.

That smile, the softness of her hand, the sparkle in her eye, the heave of her small bosom ...

it was the divinest miracle!

Clive, manufacturer of majolica, went hot and then cold, and then his wits were suddenly his own again.

'That's all right,' he murmured, and sighed, and placed on Eva's lips the first kiss that had ever lain there.

'Dear boy,' she said later, 'you should have come up to Pireford, not here, and when father was there.'

'Should I?'

he answered happily.

'It just occurred to me all of a sudden this morning that you would be here, and that I couldn't wait.'

'You will come up to-night and see father?'

'I had meant to.'

'You had better go home now.'

'Had I?'

She nodded, putting her lips tightly together--a trick of hers.

'Come up about half-past eight.'

'Good!

I will let myself out.'

He left her, and she gazed dreamily at the window, which looked on to a whitewashed yard.

The next moment someone else entered the room with heavy footsteps.

She turned round a little startled.

It was her father.

'Why!

You _are_ back early, father!

How----' She stopped.

Something in the old man's glance gave her a premonition of disaster.

To this day she does not know what accident brought him from Manchester two hours sooner than usual, and to Machin Street instead of Pireford.

'Has young Timmis been here?'

he inquired curtly.

'Yes.'

'Ha!'

with subdued, sinister satisfaction, 'I saw him going out.

He didna see me.'

Ezra Brunt deposited his hat and sat down.

Intimate with all her father's various moods, she saw instantly and with terrible certainty that a series of chances had fatally combined themselves against her.

If only she had not happened to tell Clive that her father would be at Manchester this day!

If only her father had adhered to his customary hour of return!

If only Clive had had the sense to make his proposal openly at Pireford some evening!

If only he had left a little earlier!

If only her father had not caught him going out by the side-door on a Thursday afternoon when the place was empty!

Here, she guessed, was the suggestion of furtiveness which had raised her father's unreasoning anger, often fierce, and always incalculable.

'Clive Timmis has asked me to marry him, father.'

'Has he!'

'Surely you must have known, father, that he and I were seeing each other a great deal.'

'Not from your lips, my girl.'

'Well, father----' Again she stopped, this strong and capable woman, gifted with a fine brain to organize and a powerful will to command.

She quailed, robbed of speech, before the causeless, vindictive, and infantile wrath of an old man who happened to be in a bad temper.

She actually felt like a naughty schoolgirl before him.

Such is the tremendous influence of lifelong habit, the irresistible power of the _patria potestas_ when it has never been relaxed.

Ezra Brunt saw in front of him only a cowering child.

'Clive is coming up to see you to-night,' she went on timidly, clearing her throat.

'Humph!

Is he?'

The rosy and tender dream of five minutes ago lay in fragments at Eva's feet.

She brooded with stricken apprehension upon the forms of obstruction which his despotism might choose.

* * * * * The next morning Clive and his uncle breakfasted together as usual in the parlour behind, the chemist's shop.

'Uncle,' said Clive brusquely, when the meal was nearly finished, 'I'd better tell you that I've proposed to Eva Brunt.'

Old George Timmis lowered the _Manchester Guardian_ and gazed at Clive over his steel-rimmed spectacles.

'She is a good girl,' he remarked; 'she will make you a good wife.

Have you spoken to her father?'

'That's the point.

I saw him last night, and I'll tell you what he said.

These were his words: "You can marry my daughter, Mr. Timmis, when your uncle agrees to part with his shop!"

' 'That I shall never do, nephew,' said the aged patriarch quietly and deliberately.

'Of course you won't, uncle.

I shouldn't think of suggesting it.

I'm merely telling you what he said.'

Clive laughed harshly.

'Why,' he added, 'the man must be mad!'

'What did the young woman say to that?'

his uncle inquired.

Clive frowned.

'I didn't see her last night,' he said.

'I didn't ask to see her.

I was too angry.'

Just then the post arrived, and there was a letter for Clive, which he read and put carefully in his waistcoat pocket.

'Eva writes asking me to go to Pireford to-night,' he said, after a pause.

'I'll soon settle it, depend on that.

If Ezra Brunt refuses his consent, so much the worse for him.

I wonder whether he actually imagines that a grown man and a grown woman are to be....

Ah well, I can't talk about it!

It's too silly.

I'll be off to the works.'

When Clive reached Pireford that night, Eva herself opened the door to him.

She was wearing a gray frock, and over it a large white apron, perfectly plain.

'My girls are both out to-night,' she said, 'and I was making some puffs for the sewing-meeting tea.

Come into the breakfast-room....

This way,' she added, guiding him.

He had entered the house on the previous night for the first time.

She spoke hurriedly, and, instead of stopping in the breakfast-room, wandered uncertainly through it into the greenhouse, to which it gave access by means of a French window.

In the dark, confined space, amid the close-packed blossoms, they stood together.

She bent down to smell at a musk-plant.

He took her hand and drew her soft and yielding form towards him and kissed her warm face.

'Oh, Clive!'

she said.

'Whatever are we to do?'

'Do?'

he replied, enchanted by her instinctive feminine surrender and reliance upon him, which seemed the more precious in that creature so proud and reserved to all others.

'Do!

Where is your father?'

'Reading the _Signal_ in the dining-room.'

Every business man in the Five Towns reads the _Staffordshire Signal_ from beginning to end every night.

'I will see him.

Of course he is your father; but I will just tell him--as decently as I can--that neither you nor I will stand this nonsense.'

'You mustn't--you mustn't see him.'

'Why not?'

'It will only lead to unpleasantness.'

'That can't be helped.'

'He never, never changes when once he has _said_ a thing.

I know him.'

Clive was arrested by something in her tone, something new to him, that in its poignant finality seemed to have caught up and expressed in a single instant that bitterness of a lifetime's renunciation which falls to the lot of most women.

'Will you come outside?'

he asked in a different voice.

Without replying, she led the way down the long garden, which ended in an ivy-grown brick wall and a panorama of the immense valley of industries below.

It was a warm, cloudy evening.

The last silver tinge of an August twilight lay on the shoulder of the hill to the left.

There was no moon, but the splendid watch-fires of labour flamed from ore-heap and furnace across the whole expanse, performing their nightly miracle of beauty.

Trains crept with noiseless mystery along the middle distance, under their canopies of yellow steam.

Further off the far-extending streets of Hanbridge made a map of starry lines on the blackness.

To the south-east stared the cold, blue electric lights of Knype railway-station.

All was silent, save for a distant thunderous roar, the giant breathing of the forge at Cauldon Bar Ironworks.

Eva leaned both elbows on the wall and looked forth.

'Do you mean to say,' said Clive, 'that Mr. Brunt will actually stick by what he has said?'

'Like grim death,' said Eva.

'But what's his idea?'

'Oh!

how can I tell you?'

she burst out passionately.

'Perhaps I did wrong.

Perhaps I ought to have warned him earlier--said to him, "Father, Clive Timmis is courting me!"

Ugh!

He cannot bear to be surprised about anything.