Tales of the Five Towns

Tales of the Five Towns, by
Arnold Bennett

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Title: Tales of the Five Towns
Author: Arnold Bennett
Release Date: August 25, 2004 [EBook #13293]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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TALES
OF THE FIVE TOWNS
By

ARNOLD BENNETT
* * * * *
First published January 1905
* * * * *
TO
MARCEL SCHWOB
MY LITERARY GODFATHER IN FRANCE
* * * * *

CONTENTS

PART I
AT HOME
HIS WORSHIP THE GOOSEDRIVER THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH
MARY WITH THE HIGH HAND THE DOG A FEUD PHANTOM
TIDDY-FOL-LOL THE IDIOT

PART II
ABROAD
THE HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY THE SISTERS QITA NOCTURNE
AT THE MAJESTIC CLARICE OF THE AUTUMN CONCERTS A

LETTER HOME
* * * * *


PART I
AT HOME
* * * * *

HIS WORSHIP THE GOOSEDRIVER
I
It was an amiable but deceitful afternoon in the third week of
December. Snow fell heavily in the windows of confectioners' shops,
and Father Christmas smiled in Keats's Bazaar the fawning smile of a
myth who knows himself to be exploded; but beyond these and similar
efforts to remedy the forgetfulness of a careless climate, there was no
sign anywhere in the Five Towns, and especially in Bursley, of the
immediate approach of the season of peace, goodwill, and gluttony on
earth.
At the Tiger, next door to Keats's in the market-place, Mr. Josiah
Topham Curtenty had put down his glass (the port was kept specially
for him), and told his boon companion, Mr. Gordon, that he must be
going. These two men had one powerful sentiment in common: they
loved the same woman. Mr. Curtenty, aged twenty-six in heart,
thirty-six in mind, and forty-six in looks, was fifty-six only in years. He
was a rich man; he had made money as an earthenware manufacturer in
the good old times before Satan was ingenious enough to invent
German competition, American tariffs, and the price of coal; he was
still making money with the aid of his son Harry, who now managed

the works, but he never admitted that he was making it. No one has yet
succeeded, and no one ever will succeed, in catching an earthenware
manufacturer in the act of making money; he may confess with a sigh
that he has performed the feat in the past, he may give utterance to a
vague, preposterous hope that he will perform it again in the remote
future, but as for surprising him in the very act, you would as easily
surprise a hen laying an egg. Nowadays Mr. Curtenty, commercially
secure, spent most of his energy in helping to shape and control the
high destinies of the town. He was Deputy-Mayor, and Chairman of the
General Purposes Committee of the Town Council; he was also a
Guardian of the Poor, a Justice of the Peace, President of the Society
for the Prosecution of Felons, a sidesman, an Oddfellow, and several
other things that meant dining, shrewdness, and good-nature. He was a
short, stiff, stout, red-faced man, jolly with the jollity that springs from
a kind heart, a humorous disposition, a perfect digestion, and the
respectful deference of one's bank-manager. Without being a member
of the Browning Society, he held firmly to the belief that all's right with
the world.
Mr. Gordon, who has but a sorry part in the drama, was a younger,
quieter, less forceful person, rather shy; a municipal mediocrity,
perhaps a little inflated that day by reason of his having been elected to
the Chairmanship of the Gas and Lighting Committee.
Both men had sat on their committees at the Town Hall across the way
that deceitful afternoon, and we see them now, after refreshment well
earned and consumed, about to separate and sink into private life. But
as they came out into the portico of the Tiger, the famous Calypso-like
barmaid of the Tiger a hovering enchantment in the background, it
occurred that a flock of geese were meditating, as geese will, in the
middle of the road. The gooseherd, a shabby middle-aged man, looked
as though he had recently lost the Battle of Marathon, and was asking
himself whether the path of his retreat might not lie through the
bar-parlour of the Tiger.
'Business pretty good?' Mr. Curtenty inquired of him cheerfully.
In the Five Towns business takes the