Tales of the Five Towns | Page 5

took her seat
in front of the tea-tray. Almost at the same moment a neat
black-and-white parlourmaid brought in teapot, copper kettle, and a
silver-covered dish containing hot pikelets; then departed. Clara was
alone again; not the same Clara now, but a personage demure, prim,
precise, frightfully upright of back--a sort of impregnable
stronghold--without doubt a Deputy-Mayoress.
At five past six Josiah Curtenty entered the room, radiant from a hot
bath, and happy in dry clothes--a fine, if mature, figure of a man. His
presence filled the whole room.
'Well, my chuck!' he said, and kissed her on the cheek.
She gazed at him with a look that might mean anything. Did she raise
her cheek to his greeting, or was it fancy that she had endured, rather
than accepted, his kiss? He was scarcely sure. And if she had endured
instead of accepting the kiss, was her mood to be attributed to his
lateness for tea, or to the fact that she was aware of the episode of the
geese? He could not divine.
'Pikelets! Good!' he exclaimed, taking the cover off the dish.
This strong, successful, and dominant man adored his wife, and went in
fear of her. She was his first love, but his second spouse. They had been
married ten years. In those ten years they had quarrelled only five times,
and she had changed the very colour of his life. Till his second
marriage he had boasted that he belonged to the people and retained the
habits of the people. Clara, though she also belonged to the people,
very soon altered all that. Clara had a passion for the genteel. Like
many warm-hearted, honest, clever, and otherwise sensible persons,
Clara was a snob, but a charming little snob. She ordered him to forget
that he belonged to the people. She refused to listen when he talked in
the dialect. She made him dress with opulence, and even with tidiness;
she made him buy a fashionable house and fill it with fine furniture;
she made him buy a brougham in which her gentility could pay calls
and do shopping (she shopped in Oldcastle, where a decrepit
aristocracy of tradesmen sneered at Hanbridge's lack of style); she had

her 'day'; she taught the servants to enter the reception-rooms without
knocking; she took tea in bed in the morning, and tea in the afternoon
in the drawing-room. She would have instituted dinner at seven, but she
was a wise woman, and realized that too much tyranny often means
revolution and the crumbling of-thrones; therefore the ancient plebeian
custom of high tea at six was allowed to persist and continue.
She it was who had compelled Josiah (or bewitched, beguiled, coaxed
and wheedled him), after a public refusal, to accept the unusual post of
Deputy-Mayor. In two years' time he might count on being Mayor.
Why, then, should Clara have been so anxious for this secondary
dignity? Because, in that year of royal festival, Bursley, in common
with many other boroughs, had had a fancy to choose a Mayor out of
the House of Lords. The Earl of Chell, a magnate of the county, had
consented to wear the mayoral chain and dispense the mayoral
hospitalities on condition that he was provided with a deputy for daily
use.
It was the idea of herself being deputy to the lovely, meddlesome, and
arrogant Countess of Chell that had appealed to Clara.
The deputy of a Countess at length spoke.
'Will Harry be late at the works again to-night?' she asked in her colder,
small-talk manner, which committed her to nothing, as Josiah well
knew.
Her way of saying that word 'Harry' was inimitably significant. She
gave it an air. She liked Harry, and she liked Harry's name, because it
had a Kensingtonian sound. Harry, so accomplished in business, was
also a dandy, and he was a dog. 'My stepson'--she loved to introduce
him, so tall, manly, distinguished, and dandiacal. Harry, enriched by his
own mother, belonged to a London club; he ran down to Llandudno for
week-ends; and it was reported that he had been behind the scenes at
the Alhambra. Clara felt for the word 'Harry' the unreasoning affection
which most women lavish on 'George.'
'Like as not,' said Josiah. 'I haven't been to the works this afternoon.'

Another silence fell, and then Josiah, feeling himself unable to bear any
further suspense as to his wife's real mood and temper, suddenly
determined to tell her all about the geese, and know the worst. And
precisely at the instant that he opened his mouth, the maid opened the
door and announced:
'Mr. Duncalf wishes to see you at once, sir. He won't keep you a
minute.'
'Ask him in here, Mary,' said the Deputy-Mayoress sweetly; 'and bring
another cup and saucer.'
Mr.