The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories

a stout, youngish woman in a white apron, who bore a candle. Jos Myatt, behind, said to me: "Happen you'd better go in there, mester," pointing to a half-open door at the foot of the stairs. I wen

. The dozen chairs suggested an acute bodily discomfort such as would only be tolerated by a sitter all of whose sensory faculties were centred in his palate. On a broken chair in a corner was an insecure pile of books. A smaller table was covered with a chequered cloth on which were a few plates. Along one wall, under the window, ran a pitch-pine sofa upholstered with a stuff slightly dissimilar from that on the table. The mattress of the sofa was uneven and its surface wrinkled, and old

, Johnny Ludlow, the illustrated catalogue of the Exhibition of 1856, Cruden's Concordance, and seven or eight volumes of Knight's Penny Encyclop?dia. While I was poring on these tit

tch ye!" said a woman's distant voice-not crossly,

He was still wearing the cut-away coat with the line of mud up the back. I took out my watch, not for the sake of in

get that," I sa

a tip." And he wound up his wat

tablished a basis of

is going on all r

ye say?"

eated louder, and jerked my head in the direction of t

"Now what'll ye have, mester?" He s

ohol. It was not quite true, but it was

e said shortly,

oo?" I showed a little

orward h

It was precisely as if he had said: "Do you think that anybo

own on

r," he said, pointing

, which smoked for a long time, he went with the lamp to the bookcase. As the key of the bookcase was in his right pocket and the lamp in his right hand he had to change the lamp, cautiously, from h

ese are your

A

uns, his great knees going up and down like treadles amid the plaudits and howls of vast populations. And all that now remained of that

, when I had finger

indeed!" I said,

abolas higher than gasometers, or breaking an occasional leg, surrounded by the violent affection of hearts whose melting-point was the exclamation, "Good old Jos!" I felt that if he must repose his existence ought to have been so contrived that he could repose in impassive and senseless dignity, like a mountain watching the flight of time. The conception of him tracing symbols in a ledger, counting shillings and sixpences, descending to arithmetic, and suffering those humiliations which are the invariable preliminaries to legitimate fatherhood, was shocking to a nice taste for harmonious fitness.... What, this precious and terrific organism, this slave with a specialty-whom distant towns had once been anxious to buy at the prodigious figure of five hundred pounds-obliged to sit in a mean chamber and wait silently while the woman of his choice encountered the supreme peril! And he would "soon be past football!" He was "thirty-four if a day!" It was the verge of senility! He was no longer wo

an who was bringing into the world the hero's child made no cry that reached us below. Once or twice I had heard muffled movements not quite overhead-somewhere above-but naught else. The doctor and Jos's sister seemed to have retired into a sinister and dangerous mystery. I could not dispel from my mind pictures of what they were watching and what they were doing. The vast, cruel, fumbling clumsiness of Nature,

any talk at all, I extended myself on the sofa and averted my face, wondering once again why I had accompanied the doctor to Toft End. T

a voice. "

a sil

As for the quality of majesty-yes, if silver trumpets had announced the advent, instead of a stout, aproned woman, the moment could not have bee

ad?" Jos

voice, but cheerily. "Bring m

arlour, after being again

congratul

Presently I could hear him muttering

from him or sign. I had to submit to the predicament. As a faint chilliness from the window affected my back I drew my overcoat up to my shoulders as a counterpane. Through a