Arnold Bennett

The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories Arnold Bennett

The doctor and I resembled each other in this: that there was no offensive affability about either ofus. Though abounding in good-nature, we could not become intimate by a sudden act of volition. Our conversation was difficult, unnatural, and by gusts falsely familiar. He displayed to me hisbachelor house, his etchings, a few specimens of modern rouge flambé ware made at Knype, hiswhisky, his celebrated prize-winning fox-terrier Titus, the largest collection of books in the FiveTowns, and photographs of Marischal College, Aberdeen. Then we fell flat, socially prone. Sitting inhis study, with Titus between us on the hearthrug, we knew no more what to say or do. I regrettedthat Brindley's wife's grandmother should have been born on a fifteenth of February. Brindley was avivacious talker, he could be trusted to talk. I, too, am a good talker-with another good talker. With a bad talker I am just a little worse than he is. The doctor said abruptly after a nerve-tryingsilence that he had forgotten a most important call at Hanbridge, and would I care to go with him inthe car? I was and still am convinced that he was simply inventing. He wanted to break the sinisterspell by getting out of the house, and he had not the face to suggest a sortie into the streets of theFive Towns as a promenade of pleasure. So we went forth, splashing warily through the rich mud and the dank mist of Trafalgar Road, pastall those strange little Indian-red houses, and ragged empty spaces, and poster-hoardings, androunded kilns, and high, smoking chimneys, up hill, down hill, and up hill again, encountering andovertaking many electric trams that dipped and rose like ships at sea, into Crown Square, the centreof Hanbridge, the metropolis of the Five Towns. And while the doctor paid his mysterious call Istared around me at the large shops and the banks and the gilded hotels. Down the radiating streetvistas I could make out the façades of halls, theatres, chapels. Trams rumbled continually in and outof the square. They seemed to enter casually, to hesitate a few moments as if at a loss, and then todecide with a nonchalant clang of bells that they might as well go off somewhere else in search ofsomething more interesting. They were rather like human beings who are condemned to live forever in a place of which they are sick beyond the expressiveness of words.