of getting his teeth knocked down his throat here is the ingenious person who started the celebrated legend of the man-and-dog fight at Hanbridge. It’s a long time ago, a very long time ago; but his grey hairs won’t save him from horrible tortures if we catch him. We don’t mind being called immoral, we’re above a bit flattered when London newspapers come out with shocking details of debauchery in the Five Towns, but we pride ourselves on our manners. I say, Aked!’ His voice rose commandingly, threateningly, to an old bent, spectacled man who was ascending a broad white staircase in front of us.
‘Sir!’ The man turned.
‘Don’t turn the lights out yet in the museum.’
‘No, sir! Are you coming up?’ The accents were slow and tremulous.
‘Yes. I have a gentleman here from the British Museum who wants to look round.’
The oldish man came deliberately down the steps, and approached us. Then his gaze, beginning at my waist, gradually rose to my hat.
‘From the British Museum?’ he drawled. ‘I’m sure I’m very glad to meet you, sir. I’m sure it’s a very great honour.’
He held out a wrinkled hand, which I shook.
‘Mr Aked,’ said Mr Brindley, by way of introduction. ‘Been caretaker here for pretty near forty years.’
‘Ever since it opened, sir,’ said Aked.
We went up the white stone stairway, rather a grandiose construction for a little industrial town. It divided itself into doubling curving flights at the first landing, and its walls were covered with pictures and designs. The museum itself, a series of three communicating rooms, was about as large as a pocket-handkerchief.
‘Quite small,’ I said.
I gave my impression candidly, because I had already judged Mr Brindley to be the rare and precious individual who is worthy of the high honour of frankness.
‘Do you think so?’ he demanded quickly. I had shocked him, that was clear. His tone was unmistakable; it indicated an instinctive, involuntary protest. But he recovered himself in a flash. ‘That’s jealousy,’ he laughed. ‘All you British Museum people are the same.’ Then he added, with an unsuccessful attempt to convince me that he meant what he was saying: ‘Of course it is small. It’s nothing, simply nothing.’
Yes, I had unwittingly found the joint in the armour of this extraordinary Midland personage. With all his irony, with all his violent humour, with all his just and unprejudiced perceptions, he had a tenderness for the Institution of which he was the dictator. He loved it. He could laugh like a god at everything in the Five Towns except this one thing. He would try to force himself to regard even this with the same lofty detachment, but he could not do it naturally.
I stopped at a case of Wedgwood ware, marked ‘Perkins Collection.’
‘By Jove!’ I exclaimed, pointing to a vase. ‘What a body!’
He was enchanted by my enthusiasm.
‘Funny you should have hit on that,’ said he. ‘Old Daddy Perkins always called it his ewe-lamb.’
Thus spoken, the name of the greatest authority on Wedgwood ware that Europe has ever known curiously impressed me.
‘I suppose you knew him?’ I questioned.
‘Considering that I was one of the pall-bearers at his funeral, and caught the champion cold of my life!’
‘What sort of a man was he?’
‘Outside Wedgwood ware he wasn’t any sort of a man. He was that scourge of society, a philanthropist,’ said Mr Brindley. ‘He was an upright citizen, and two thousand people followed him to his grave. I’m an upright citizen, but I have no hope that two thousand people will follow me to my grave.’
‘You never know what may happen,’ I observed, smiling.
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘If you undermine the moral character of your fellow-citizens by a long course of unbridled miscellaneous philanthropy, you can have a funeral procession as long as you like, at the rate of about forty shillings a foot. But you’ll never touch the great heart of the enlightened public of these boroughs in any other way. Do you imagine anyone cared a twopenny damn for Perkins’s Wedgwood ware?’
‘It’s like that everywhere,’ I said.
‘I suppose it is,’ he assented unwillingly.
Who can tell what was passing in the breast of Mr Brindley? I could not. At least I could not tell with any precision. I could only gather, vaguely, that what he considered the wrong-headedness, the blindness, the lack of true perception, of his public was beginning to produce in his individuality a faint trace of permanent soreness. I regretted it. And I showed my sympathy with him by asking questions about the design and construction of the museum (a late addition to the Institution), of which I happened to know that he had been the architect.
He at once became interested and interesting. Although he perhaps insisted a little too much on the difficulties which occur when original talent encounters stupidity, he did, as he walked me up and down, contrive to convey to me a notion of the creative processes of the architect in a way that was in my experience entirely novel. He was impressing me anew, and I was wondering whether he was unique of his kind or whether there existed regiments of him in this strange parcel of England.
‘Now, you see this girder,’ he said, looking upwards.
That’s surely something of Fuge’s, isn’t it?’ I asked, indicating a small picture in a corner, after he had finished his explanation of the functions of the girder.
As on the walls of the staircase and corridors, so on the walls here, there were many paintings, drawings, and engravings. And of course the best were here in the museum. The least uninteresting items of the collection were, speaking generally, reproductions in monotint of celebrated works, and a few second—or third-rate loan pictures
