fire of my
interest in the private affairs of the dead painter was the slightly
curious coincidence that on the evening of the news of his death I
should be travelling to the Five Towns--and for the first time in my
life. Here I was at Knype, which, as I had gathered from Bradshaw, and
from my acquaintance Brindley, was the traffic centre of the Five Towns.

II

My knowledge of industrial districts amounted to nothing. Born in
Devonshire, educated at Cambridge, and fulfilling my destiny as curator
of a certain department of antiquities at the British Museum, I had
never been brought into contact with the vast constructive material
activities of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Staffordshire. I had but
passed through them occasionally on my way to Scotland, scorning their
necessary grime with the perhaps too facile disdain of the clean-faced
southerner, who is apt to forget that coal cannot walk up unaided out
of the mine, and that the basin in which he washes his beautiful purity
can only be manufactured amid conditions highly repellent. Well, my
impressions of the platform of Knype station were unfavourable. There
was dirt in the air; I could feel it at once on my skin. And the scene
was shabby, undignified, and rude. I use the word 'rude' in all its
senses. What I saw was a pushing, exclamatory, ill-dressed, determined
crowd, each member of which was bent on the realization of his own
desires by the least ceremonious means. If an item of this throng
wished to get past me, he made me instantly aware of his wish by
abruptly changing my position in infinite space; it was not possible to
misconstrue his meaning. So much crude force and naked will-to-live I
had not before set eyes on. In truth, I felt myself to be a very
brittle, delicate bit of intellectual machinery in the midst of all
these physical manifestations. Yet I am a tallish man, and these
potters appeared to me to be undersized, and somewhat thin too! But
what elbows! What glaring egoistic eyes! What terrible decisiveness in
action!

'Now then, get in if ye're going!' said a red-haired porter to me
curtly.

'I'm not going. I've just got out,' I replied.

'Well, then, why dunna' ye stand out o' th' wee and let them get in as
wants to?'

Unable to offer a coherent answer to this crushing demand, I stood out
of the way. In the light of further knowledge I now surmise that that
porter was a very friendly and sociable porter. But at the moment I
really