The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories Part 18

"Suspected what?"

"Suspected ye o' quoting Shakspere in our pulpits."

"And cannot a man quote in a sermon? Why, Jabez Hanks, I've heard ye quote Matthew Henry by the fathom."

"Ye've never heard me quote a stage-play in a pulpit, Brother Smith,"

said Jabez Hanks, majestically. "And as long as I'm chapel-steward it wunna' be tolerated in this chapel."

"Wunna it?" Jock put in defiantly.

"It's a defiling of the Lord's temple; that's what it is!" Jabez Hanks continued. "Ye make out as ye're against stage-plays at the Fair, and yet ye come here and mouth 'em in a Christian pulpit. _You_ agen stage-plays! Weren't ye seen talking by the hour to one o' them trulls, Friday night--? And weren't ye seen peeping through th' canvas last night? And now--"

"Now what?" Jock inquired, approaching Jabez on his springy toes, and looking up at Jabez's great height.

Jabez took breath. "Now ye bring yer fancy women into the House o' G.o.d!

You--a servant o' Christ, you--"

Jock-at-a-Venture interrupted the sentence with his daring fist, which seemed to lift Jabez from the ground by his chin, and then to let him fall in a heap, as though his clothes had been a sack containing loose bones.

"A good-day to ye, Brother Brett," said Jock, reaching for his hat, and departing with a slam of the vestry door.

He emerged at the back of the chapel and got by "back-entries" into Aboukir Street, up which he strolled with a fine show of tranquillity, as far as the corner of Trafalgar Road, where stood and stands the great Dragon Hotel. The congregations of several chapels were dispersing slowly round about this famous corner, and Jock had to salute several of his own audience. Then suddenly he saw Mrs Clowes and her four children enter the tap-room door of the Dragon.

He hesitated one second and followed the variegated flotilla and its convoy.

The tap-room was fairly full of both s.e.xes. But among them Jock and Mrs Clowes and her children were the only persons who had been to church or chapel.

"Here's preacher, mother!" Kezia whispered, blushing, to Mrs Clowes.

"Eh," said Mrs Clowes, turning very amiably. "It's never you, mester! It was that hot in that chapel we're all on us dying of thirst.... Four gills and a pint, please!" (This to the tapster.)

"And give me a pint," said Jock, desperately.

They all sat down familiarly. That a mother should take her children into a public-house and give them beer, and on a Sunday of all days, and immediately after a sermon! That a local preacher should go direct from the vestry to the gin-palace and there drink ale with a strolling player! These phenomena were simply and totally inconceivable! And yet Jock was in presence of them, a.s.sisting at them, positively acting in them! And in spite of her enormities, Mrs Clowes still struck him as a most agreeable, decent, kindly, motherly woman--quite apart from her handsomeness. And her offspring, each hidden to the eyes behind a mug, were a very well-behaved lot of children.

"It does me good," said Mrs Clowes, quaffing. "And ye need summat to keep ye up in these days! We did _Belphegor_ and _The Witch_ and a harlequinade last night. And not one of these children got to bed before half after midnight. But I was determined to have 'em at chapel this morning. And not sorry I am I went! Eh, mester, what a Virginius you'd ha' made! I never heard preaching like it--not as I've heard much!"

"And you'll never hear anything like it again, missis," said Jock, "for I've preached my last sermon."

"Nay, nay!" Mrs Clowes deprecated.

"I've preached my last sermon," said Jock again. "And if I've saved a soul wi' it, missis...!" He looked at her steadily and then drank.

"I won't say as ye haven't," said Mrs Clowes, lowering her eyes.

VII

Rather less than a week later, on a darkening night, a van left the town of Bursley by the Moorthorne Road on its way to Axe-in-the-Moors, which is the metropolis of the wild wastes that cut off northern Staffordshire from Derbyshire. This van was the last of Mrs Clowes's caravanserai, and almost the last to leave the Fair. Owing to popular interest in the events of Jock-at-a-Venture's public career, in whose meshes Mrs Clowes had somehow got caught, the booth of Mrs Clowes had succeeded beyond any other booth, and had kept open longer and burned more naphtha and taken far more money. The other vans of the stout lady's enterprise (there were three in all) had gone forward in advance, with all her elder children and her children-in-law and her grandchildren, and the heavy wood and canvas of the booth. Mrs Clowes, transacting her own business herself, from habit, invariably brought up the rear of her procession out of a town; and sometimes her leisurely manner of settling with the town authorities for water, ground-s.p.a.ce and other necessary com-modities, left her several miles behind her tribe.

The mistress's van, though it would not compare with the glorious vehicles that showmen put upon the road in these days, was a roomy and dignified specimen, and about as good as money could then buy. The front portion consisted of a parlour and kitchen combined, and at the back was a dormitory. In the dormitory Kezia, Sapphira and the youngest of their brothers were sleeping hard. In the parlour and kitchen sat Mrs Clowes, warmly enveloped, holding the reins with her right hand and a shabby, paper-covered book in her left hand. The book was the celebrated play, _The Gamester_, and Mrs Clowes was studying therein the role of Dulcibel. Not a role for which Mrs Clowes was physically fitted; but her prolific daughter, Hephzibah, to whom it appertained by prescription, could not possibly play it any longer, and would, indeed, be incapacitated from any role whatever for at least a month. And the season was not yet over; for folk were hardier in those days.

The reins stretched out from the careless hand of Mrs Clowes and vanished through a slit between the double doors, which had been fixed slightly open. Mrs Clowes's gaze, penetrating now and then the slit, could see the gleam of her lamp's ray on a horse's flank. The only sounds were the hoof-falls of the horse, the crunching of the wheels on the wet road, the occasional rattle of a vessel in the racks when the van happened to descend violently into a rut, and the steady murmur of Mrs Clowes's voice rehearsing the grandiloquence of the part of Dulcibel.

And then there was another sound, which Mrs Clowes did not notice until it had been repeated several times; the cry of a human voice out on the road:

"Missis!"

She opened wide the doors of the van and looked prudently forth.

Naturally, inevitably, Jock-at-a-Venture was trudging alongside, level with the horse's tail! He stepped nimbly--he was a fine walker--but none the less his breath came short and quick, for he had been making haste up a steepish hill in order to overtake the van. And he carried a bundle and a stick in his hands, and on his head a superb but heavy beaver hat.

"I'm going your way, missis," said Jock.

"Seemingly," agreed Mrs Clowes, with due caution.

"Canst gi' us a lift?" he asked.

"And welcome," she said, her face changing like a flash to suit the words.

"Nay, ye needna' stop!" shouted Jock.

In an instant he had leapt easily up into the van, and was seated by her side therein on the children's stool.

"That's a hat--to travel in!" observed Mrs Clowes.

Jock removed the hat, examined it lovingly and replaced it.

"I couldn't ha' left it behind," said he, with a sigh, and continued rapidly in another voice: "Missis, we'n seen a pretty good lot o' each other this wik, and yet ye slips off o'this'n, without saying good-bye, nor a word about yer soul!"

Mrs Clowes heaved her enormous breast and shook the reins.

"I've had my share of trouble," she remarked mysteriously.

"Tell me about it, missis!"

And lo! in a moment, lured on by his smile, she was telling him quite familiarly about the ailments of her younger children, the escapades of her unmarried daughter aged fifteen, the surliness of one of her sons-in-law, the budding dishonesty of the other, the perils of infant life, and the need of repainting the big van and getting new pictures for the front of the booth. Indeed, all the worries of a queen of the road!

"And I'm so fat!" she said, "and yet I'm not forty, and shan't be for two year--and me a grandmother!"

"I knowed it!" Jock exclaimed.

"If I wasn't such a heap o' flesh--"

"Ye're the grandest heap o' flesh as I ever set eyes on, and I'm telling ye!" Jock interrupted her.

VIII