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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Greatest Works of Arnold Bennett," readers are invited to explore a compilation of the author's most significant literary contributions, reflecting his mastery of both realism and narrative craftsmanship. The anthology encompasses a diverse range of themes such as the intricacies of modern life, the mundanity of existence, and the aspiration for self-improvement, all set against the backdrop of early 20th-century England. Bennett's keen observational skills and meticulous attention to detail draw readers into the lives of his characters, bringing the industrial landscape of the Potteries to life with rich, evocative prose that balances social commentary with psychological depth. Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a prominent figure in the literary world, known for his depictions of everyday life and his role in the rise of the English regional novel. A son of a potter, his own experiences in the working-class milieu of the Midlands profoundly influenced his writing. His eclectic background, including careers in journalism and theater, allowed him to refine a unique narrative voice and gain perspective on societal transformations, which he adeptly addresses in his works. This anthology is an essential read for anyone interested in the evolution of modern literature and the profound insights it offers into human nature. Bennett's ability to illuminate the ordinary and elevate the commonplace invites readers to reflect on their own lives, making "The Greatest Works of Arnold Bennett" a timeless exploration of humanity's complexities. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Greatest Works of Arnold Bennett
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together the author's most accomplished work across the principal modes in which he excelled, offering a single-volume portrait of his range, ambition, and steady craftsmanship. Rather than a mere sampler, it assembles cornerstone novels, the essential cycle of provincial fiction, representative short stories, key stage pieces, and a robust body of essays and reportage. The purpose is twofold: to reveal the coherence of a career often approached piecemeal, and to give readers a continuous experience of a writer who moved confidently between imaginative narrative, theatrical argument, and practical reflection on art, conduct, and the rhythms of modern life.
At its core stand full-length novels and interconnected narratives set in a vividly realized industrial community, balanced by urbane comedies, metropolitan adventures, and intimate domestic studies. Alongside the fiction are short story collections that distill the same world into concentrated episodes. The dramatic works present his themes under the pressure of the stage. The non-fiction ranges from craft lectures and journalism to travel impressions, wartime sketches, and guides addressed to readers and working professionals. Together, these forms encompass realistic storytelling, social comedy, literary criticism, practical handbooks, and reflective essays, mapping an oeuvre that is at once artistic, journalistic, and instructional.
The unifying ground of the fiction is a patient, sympathetic scrutiny of ordinary lives under the pressure of work, money, family duty, and aspiration. His industrial provinces are rendered with exact attention to trades, streets, and social gradations, yet the drama is inward: characters discover limits and possibilities as habits meet chance and ambition. The contrast between provincial steadiness and metropolitan display recurs, not as a simple opposition, but as a spectrum of opportunities and compromises. Time is a palpable actor: it accumulates routines, sudden turns, and the slow revaluation of past choices, so that growth, disappointment, and resilience acquire a quietly epic scale.
His stylistic hallmark is clarity joined to amplitude. Scenes are built from concrete detail (rooms, ledgers, shop fronts, offices) until the social logic of a situation becomes visible. He distrusts ornament for its own sake; the prose proceeds with measured confidence, dry wit, and a humane irony that notices vanity without contempt. Dialogue is practical, revealing character through the business at hand. Above all, he controls pace: lingering where feeling gathers, quickening where fortune breaks. The result is a realism that is not documentary but shaped, a narrative tact that respects workaday experience while granting it the dignity of sustained artistic attention.
A buoyant comic current threads the work, especially in portraits of resourceful figures who turn mishap into opportunity. Social mobility is treated as both exhilarating and risky; success demands ingenuity, and keeping one’s footing amid notoriety, bureaucracy, or fashion requires poise. The plays sharpen these concerns, placing characters before audiences within the fiction as well as in the theatre, and asking how public appetite, publicity, and the marketplace define what is wanted. Ambition, then, is not merely private desire; it is negotiated with institutions and crowds. The humor is affectionate but unsentimental, exposing folly while honoring energy and enterprise.
The non-fiction articulates the same ethic in a different key. Practical treatises on writing, reading, and self-management advocate method, habit, and a democratic confidence that culture belongs to the diligent. Literary journalism takes the temperature of contemporary publishing and theatre with fairness and plain speech, testing fashions against usefulness and form. Travel writing and dispatches extend his observation beyond provincial towns and London to continental capitals, the United States, and the Western Front, registering how other places conduct public life. Across these pieces, counsel and description converge: the life of the mind is daily work, and art is a public service.
Taken together, the works gathered here compose a durable map of modernity as lived from the shop counter to the newsroom and the stage. They remain significant because they fuse curiosity with moral patience, making visible the negotiations by which individuals secure livelihood, affection, and self-respect amidst expanding economies and media. In his pages, the ordinary is not small; it is the medium of character. The breadth of forms ensures that no single vantage dominates: narrative, dialogue, critique, and counsel continually illuminate one another. For newcomers and returning readers alike, this collection offers both delight and a disciplined way of seeing.
Historical Context
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was born in Hanley, Staffordshire, at the heart of the Potteries, a conurbation of six towns federated as Stoke-on-Trent in 1910. The region’s bottle ovens, small workshops, and rising joint-stock firms, together with Nonconformist chapels, friendly societies, and school-board politics after the Education Acts of 1870 and 1902, supplied the social facts of his fiction. He reimagined the towns as Bursley, Hanbridge, Knype, Longshaw, and Turnhill, omitting Fenton, to create the Five Towns. Here he traced shopkeeping, craft skill, and municipal ambition in Tales of the Five Towns, The Grim Smile of the Five Towns, The Matador of the Five Towns, Anna of the Five Towns, Clayhanger, and These Twain.
In 1889 Bennett moved to London, entering a metropolis transformed by the press revolution and the West End’s glitter. Fleet Street under Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe) and W. T. Stead shaped journalism’s tone, while the Savoy (1889) and the Ritz (1906) symbolized cosmopolitan luxury. This world frames A Man from the North (1898), The Grand Babylon Hotel, and the satire of newspaper power in the play What the Public Wants. London’s great thoroughfares and offices animate Teresa of Watling Street, and the migration of provincial talent to West End stages culminates in The Regent: A Five Towns Story of Adventure in London, where theatre management and aggressive publicity become modern careers.
Between 1903 and 1911 Bennett lived in Paris during the Belle Époque, absorbing French naturalism from Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola and the disciplined craft of realist construction. The cosmopolitan cafés and grands boulevards, as well as memories of the Siege of Paris (1870–71), inflect The Old Wives’ Tale (1908). Continental habits, salons, and musical culture inform Sacred and Profane Love and the playful comedy Hugo, while the era’s fascination with spiritualism and Symbolist atmospheres shadows The Ghost: A Modern Fantasy. Paris Nights and Other Impressions of Places and People and the meditative The Feast of St. Friend (1911) register his Francophile humanism amid the Exposition Universelle’s lingering afterglow.
Turn-of-the-century modernity brought mass leisure, electric light, and spectacular consumption, from department stores to amusement parks such as Coney Island’s Dreamland (1904) and London’s Earl’s Court. Bennett turned this new hedonism into satire and fantasia: The City of Pleasure imagines an engineered wonderland; Buried Alive mocks celebrity and the hunger for sensation before becoming the hit play The Great Adventure (1913). The Loot of Cities renders high finance as adventure, while Denry the Audacious, also known as The Card, celebrates entrepreneurial cheek. International mobility and bourgeois escape shape From the Log of the Velsa, a yachting travelogue of pre-war cruising, and the play The Honeymoon, with its comic rites of passage.
Changing gender relations and domestic expectations threaded through Bennett’s career. The New Woman debates of the 1890s, the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882), and the long suffrage campaign culminating in 1918 and 1928 widened women’s economic and civic roles. He examined courtship, marriage, and female agency in Hilda Lessways, Leonora, Helen with the High Hand, and Lilian, and anatomized middle-class conjugal bargaining in The Plain Man and His Wife. A Great Man studies the collisions of sentiment and ambition within the publicity culture of authorship, while the stage offered emblematic heroines in Judith. Across shop, office, and parlour he charted the interplay of love, money, duty, and self-assertion.
World War I reoriented Bennett’s art and public role. He toured the Western Front in 1915, publishing Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front, and in 1918 served in Paris as Director of British propaganda in France for the Ministry of Information. The conflict’s dislocations of class, work, and pleasure reach London in The Pretty Lady and shadow provincial continuities in The Roll-Call. The politics of honours and state power during the Lloyd George era underlie the play The Title. At the same time, Those United States gauged American energy and modernity, while Books and Persons (1908–1911) preserves his pre-war critical battles with publishers, censors, and the economics of literary taste.
The aftermath of war brought taxation, bureaucracy, and volatile markets that pervade Bennett’s later fiction. Mr. Prohack satirizes the civil servant adrift amid sudden wealth and post-war consumer sprees; The Lion’s Share and The Price of Love track capital, credit, and obligation as social forces. New media—cinema, radio, advertising—reshaped aspiration and leisure, echoing earlier premonitions in metropolitan comedies. Industrial unrest culminating in the General Strike of 1926 and the continuing vulnerability of pottery markets reframed the civic optimism of the Edwardian years. Essays such as Things That Have Interested Me register the decade’s shifting fashions, technologies, and anxieties.
Bennett’s manuals and essays arose from the Edwardian cult of efficiency, adult education, and expanding libraries. Journalism for Women (1898), How to Become an Author and The Truth about an Author (1903), Literary Taste (1909), How to Live on 24 Hours a Day and The Human Machine (both c. 1908), Mental Efficiency (1911), The Author’s Craft (1914), Self and Self-Management (1918), The Reasonable Life, and Friendship and Happiness combine pragmatic method with humane counsel. Their milieu includes scientific management debates after Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 book, university extension, and self-improvement clubs. Bennett died in London on 27 March 1931, after contracting typhoid in Paris, his oeuvre spanning late Victorian realism to interwar modern life.
Synopsis (Selection)
A Man from the North
A provincial youth moves to London to test his literary ambitions and social nerve. A crisp portrait of fin-de-siècle metropolitan life seen by an outsider.
The Grand Babylon Hotel
An American millionaire and his daughter take over a luxury hotel and uncover royal intrigue and kidnapping. A swift cosmopolitan thriller set amid gilded opulence.
Anna of the Five Towns
A devout young woman in the Potteries struggles between filial duty to a stern father and the stirrings of love and independence. A classic Five Towns study of conscience and constraint.
Leonora
A married woman of means confronts a crisis of loyalty and desire that forces her to reckon with her past. A subtle portrait of middle-aged awakening and social convention.
A Great Man
A modest novelist is catapulted to celebrity and finds his private life and public image comically at odds. A frolicsome satire of fame, marketing, and domesticity.
Teresa of Watling Street
A capable young woman is swept into London business and romantic entanglements along bustling Watling Street. A light urban comedy of miscommunication and enterprise.
Sacred and Profane Love
A novel in three episodes tracing a gifted woman’s pull between artistic vocation and worldly passion. It weighs the costs of desire, respectability, and self-realization.
Hugo
An impressionable young man is drawn into theatrical and high-society schemes that test his naivety and resolve. A brisk tale of ambition, infatuation, and metropolitan glamour.
The Ghost- A Modern Fantasy
A rational, modern protagonist meets a disquieting ghostly presence that upends an engagement and fashionable certainties. A witty, uncanny romance edged with satire.
The City of Pleasure: A Fantasia on Modern Themes
A speculative entertainment-empire is built to sate mass desire, only to expose the illusions of pleasure and progress. A playful fantasia about spectacle, appetite, and modernity.
Buried Alive
A shy, famous artist is mistakenly declared dead and seizes the chance to live anonymously, with comic and tender consequences. A gently farcical meditation on identity and recognition.
The Old Wives' Tale
Two sisters from the Five Towns follow divergent paths from youth to old age, one staying home and one venturing abroad. A panoramic, humane chronicle of ordinary lives over time.
Clayhanger
Edwin Clayhanger comes of age in a printer’s household, wrestling with duty, thwarted artistic ambitions, and love. A detailed portrait of provincial work, family, and aspiration.
The Card (Denry the Audacious)
The cheeky Denry Machin parlays quick wits and social daring into spectacular local success in the Five Towns. A comic study of enterprise and the making of a civic celebrity.
Helen with the High Hand
A thrifty uncle and a strong-minded niece engage in a domestic duel that turns toward romance and reconciliation. A genial comedy of manners and money.
Hilda Lessways
Told from Hilda’s point of view, this companion to Clayhanger follows a young woman’s bid for independence through work, love, and moral trial. It reveals the private costs of self-determination.
The Plain Man and His Wife
A series of essays offering practical counsel to ordinary couples on money, time, and modern domestic life. Bennett applies his common-sense ethic to marriage and daily routine.
The Regent: A Five Towns Story of Adventure in London
A self-made provincial showman takes over a London music-hall and navigates the risks of theatrical enterprise. A lively sequel of ambition exported to the metropolis.
The Price of Love
A young woman’s sudden wealth entangles her in courtship, family pressures, and the moral arithmetic of money. Bennett probes how fortune alters affection and freedom.
From the log of the Velsa
A yachting journal of cruises through canals and coasts, observing places, people, and the pleasures of leisurely travel. A candid, atmospheric travelogue.
These Twain
The marriage of Edwin Clayhanger and Hilda is traced through work, quarrels, and fragile understandings. A realistic study of married life completing the Clayhanger sequence.
The Pretty Lady
In wartime London, a French courtesan and her admirers confront desire, shame, and the dislocations of the home front. A sober, atmospheric short novel of passion under strain.
The Roll-Call
Following the next generation of the Clayhanger world, a talented young man pursues an architectural career and love on the eve of war. A portrait of ambition tested by duty and time.
The Lion's Share
Family and financial entanglements in London force a determined heroine to decide who will command love, money, and autonomy. A clear-eyed look at power within intimate relations.
Mr. Prohack
A cautious Treasury official inherits a fortune and discovers how sudden wealth unsettles principles and family. A witty comedy about spending, status, and self-knowledge.
Lilian
In postwar society, an older man’s fascination with a younger woman exposes illusions of romance, class, and middle-aged longing. A cool, candid tale of desire and decorum.
Five Towns Short Story Collections (Tales of the Five Towns; The Grim Smile of the Five Towns; The Matador of the Five Towns)
Stories set in the Potteries that blend humor and pathos in portraits of pride, money, courtship, and civic vanity. Across early and later pieces, Bennett refines his sympathetic realism of ordinary lives.
The Loot of Cities
Linked tales of swindles, sensational journalism, and urban intrigue in London and abroad. Fast-moving capers that explore the temptations of modern finance and fame.
What the Public Wants
A press magnate manipulates taste, art, and scandal to suit circulation, raising hard questions about media power. A newsroom satire with bite.
The Honeymoon
Newlyweds discover the realities of money, habit, and expectation after the wedding glow fades. A domestic comedy of adjustment.
The Great Adventure
A stage version of Buried Alive in which a celebrated artist, presumed dead, hides in plain sight with awkward results. A deft farce about identity and reputation.
The Title
A family’s pursuit of an honor exposes the absurdities of class, patriotism, and official recognition. A pointed wartime comedy.
Judith
A dramatic retelling of the Judith and Holofernes story, balancing courage, seduction, and sacrifice. A serious historical play with moral tension.
Journalism For Women
A practical primer encouraging women to enter journalism, with advice on markets, style, and professionalism.
The Truth about an Author
A candid, semi-autobiographical account of the business of authorship and Bennett’s early career. Demystifies the literary marketplace.
How to Become an Author
Plainspoken guidance on writing as a trade—from habits and technique to dealing with editors and income.
The Reasonable Life
Essays advocating a balanced, disciplined approach to modern living. Bennett argues for measured ambitions and steady self-rule.
Literary Taste: How to Form It
A compact guide to building reading habits and a personal canon. Offers lists, methods, and a creed for lifelong literary cultivation.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Time-management counsel for busy people on reclaiming leisure for self-improvement. Advocates small, regular investments in mind and spirit.
The Feast of St. Friend: A Christmas Book
A meditation on friendship as a sustaining, quasi-spiritual practice. Designed as a seasonal tonic rather than a sermon.
Mental Efficiency
Pragmatic essays on attention, fatigue, and habit aimed at improving effectiveness. A companion to Bennett’s time philosophy.
Those United States
Travel impressions of American cities and manners, alert to energy, business, and speech. An outsider’s brisk portrait of a modern nation.
Friendship and Happiness
Short reflections on choosing companions and cultivating contentment. Bennett’s humane common sense applied to everyday joys.
Paris Nights and Other Impressions of Places and People
Sketches of Parisian life and other travels, mixing social observation with personal mood.
The Author's Craft
Lectures and essays on technique, form, and the practicalities of a writing career.
Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front
Journalistic vignettes from visits to the Western Front, attentive to logistics, landscape, and morale.
Books and Persons: Selections from The New Age 1908-1911
Selections from Bennett’s literary column, assessing authors, publishing trends, and cultural quarrels.
Self and Self-Management
Advice on governing temperament, will, and daily conduct in pursuit of efficiency and character.
Things That Have Interested Me
A miscellany of topical and personal essays, wide-ranging in subject but united by curiosity and clarity.
The Human Machine
An early statement of Bennett’s self-help creed, viewing body and mind as a machine to be tuned by habit, attention, and will.
The Greatest Works of Arnold Bennett
Novels
A Man from the North
Chapter I
There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis, and everything that appertains to it, that comes down from it, that goes up into it, has for him an imperious fascination. Long before schooldays are over he learns to take a doleful pleasure in watching the exit of the London train from the railway station. He stands by the hot engine and envies the very stoker. Gazing curiously into the carriages, he wonders that men and women who in a few hours will be treading streets called Piccadilly and the Strand can contemplate the immediate future with so much apparent calmness; some of them even have the audacity to look bored. He finds it difficult to keep from throwing himself in the guard's van as it glides past him; and not until the last coach is a speck upon the distance does he turn away and, nodding absently to the ticket-clerk, who knows him well, go home to nurse a vague ambition and dream of Town.
London is the place where newspapers are issued, books written, and plays performed. And this youth, who now sits in an office, reads all the newspapers. He knows exactly when a new work by a famous author should appear, and awaits the reviews with impatience. He can tell you off-hand the names of the pieces in the bills of the twenty principal West-end theatres, what their quality is, and how long they may be expected to run; and on the production of a new play, the articles of the dramatic critics provide him with sensations almost as vivid as those of the most zealous first-nighter at the performance itself.
Sooner or later, perhaps by painful roads, he reaches the goal of his desire. London accepts him—on probation; and as his strength is, so she demeans herself. Let him be bold and resolute, and she will make an obeisance, but her heel is all too ready to crush the coward and hesitant; and her victims, once underfoot, do not often rise again.
Chapter II
The antique four-wheeler, top-heavy with luggage, swung unsteadily round by Tattersall's and into Raphael Street. Richard thrust down the window with a sharp bang, indicative of a strange new sense of power; but before the cab came to a standstill he had collected himself, and managed to alight with considerable decorum. When the door opened in answer to his second ring, a faint, sour odour escaped from the house, and he remembered the friendly feminine warnings which he had received at Bursley on the subject of London lodgings. The aspect of the landlady, however, reassured him; she was a diminutive old woman in ridiculously short skirts, with a yellow, crinkled face, grey eyes, and a warm, benevolent smile that conquered. As she greeted Richard she blushed like a girl, and made a little old-fashioned curtsey. Richard offered his hand, and, after wiping hers on a clean apron, she took it timidly.
"I hope we shall get on well together, sir," she said, looking straight up into her new lodger's eyes.
"I'm sure we shall," answered Richard, sincerely.
She preceded him up the narrow, frowsy staircase, which was full of surprising turns.
"You'll find these stairs a bit awkward at first," she apologised. "I've often thought of getting a bit of nice carpet on them, but what's the use? It would be done for in a week. Now, here's your room, sir, first floor front, with two nice French windows, you see, and a nice balcony. Now, about tidying it of a morning, sir. If you'll step out for a walk as soon as you get up, my daughter shall make the bed, and dust, and you'll come in and find it all nice and straight for breakfast."
"Very well," assented Richard.
"That's how I generally arrange with my young men. I like them to have their breakfast in a nice tidy room, you see, sir. Now, what will you have for tea, sir? A little nice bread and butter...."
When she was gone Richard formally surveyed his quarters: a long, rather low room, its length cut by the two windows which were Mrs. Rowbotham's particular pride; between the windows a table with a faded green cloth, and a small bed opposite; behind the door an artfully concealed washstand; the mantelpiece, painted mustard yellow, bore divers squat earthenware figures, and was surmounted by an oblong mirror framed in rosewood; over the mirror an illuminated text, "Trust in Jesus," and over the text an oleograph, in collision with the ceiling, entitled, "After the Battle of Culloden." The walls were decorated with a pattern of giant pink roses; and here and there, hiding the roses, were hung photographs of persons in their Sunday clothes, and landscapes hand-painted in oil, depicting bridges, trees, water, and white sails in the distance. But the furnishing of the room caused Richard no uneasiness; in a few moments he had mentally arranged how to make the place habitable, and thenceforth he only saw what should and would be.
Tea was brought in by a girl whose face proclaimed her to be Mrs. Rowbotham's daughter. At the sight of her Richard privately winked; he had read in books about landladies' daughters, but this one gave the lie to books; she was young, she was beautiful, and Richard would have sworn to her innocence. With an accession of boldness which surprised himself, he inquired her name.
"Lily, sir," she said, blushing like her mother.
He cut the new, heavy bread, and poured out a cup of tea with the awkwardness of one unaccustomed to such work, and, having made space on the tray, set the evening paper against the sugar basin, and began to eat and read. Outside were two piano organs, children shouting, and a man uttering some monotonous unintelligible cry. It grew dark; Mrs. Rowbotham came in with a lamp and cleared the table; Richard was looking through the window, and neither spoke. Presently he sat down. That being his first night in London, he had determined to spend it quietly at home. The piano organs and the children were still strident. A peculiar feeling of isolation momentarily overcame him, and the noises of the street seemed to recede. Then he went to the window again, and noticed that the children were dancing quite gracefully; it occurred to him that they might be ballet children. He picked up the paper and examined the theatrical advertisements, at first idly, but afterwards in detail.
With a long sigh, he took his hat and stick, and went very slowly downstairs. Mrs. Rowbotham heard him fumbling with the catch of the front door.
"Are you going out, sir?"
"Only just for a walk," said Richard, nonchalantly.
"Perhaps I'd better give you a latch-key?"
"Thanks."
Another moment and he was in the delicious streets, going east.
Chapter III
Although he had visited London but once before, and then only for a few hours, he was not unfamiliar with the topography of the town, having frequently studied it in maps and an old copy of Kelly's directory.
He walked slowly up Park Side and through Piccadilly, picking out as he passed them the French Embassy, Hyde Park Corner, Apsley House, Park Lane, and Devonshire House. As he drank in the mingled glare and glamour of Piccadilly by night,—the remote stars, the high sombre trees, the vast, dazzling interiors of clubs, the sinuous, flickering lines of traffic, the radiant faces of women framed in hansoms,—he laughed the laugh of luxurious contemplation, acutely happy. At last, at last, he had come into his inheritance. London accepted him. He was hers; she his; and nothing should part them. Starvation in London would itself be bliss. But he had no intention of starving! Filled with great purposes, he straightened his back, and just then a morsel of mud thrown up from a bus-wheel splashed warm and gritty on his cheek. He wiped it off caressingly, with a smile.
Although it was Saturday night, and most of the shops were closed, an establishment where watches and trinkets of "Anglo-Spanish" gold, superb in appearance and pillowed on green plush, were retailed at alluring prices, still threw a brilliant light on the pavement, and Richard crossed the road to inspect its wares. He turned away, but retraced his steps and entered the shop. An assistant politely inquired his wishes.
"I want one of those hunters you have in the window at 29/6," said Richard, with a gruffness which must have been involuntary.
"Yes, sir. Here is one. We guarantee that the works are equal to the finest English lever."
"I'll take it." He put down the money.
"Thank you. Can I show you anything else?"
"Nothing, thanks," still more gruffly.
"We have some excellent chains...."
"Nothing else, thanks." And he walked out, putting his purchase in his pocket. A perfectly reliable gold watch, which he had worn for years, already lay there.
At Piccadilly Circus he loitered, and then crossed over and went along Coventry Street to Leicester Square. The immense façade of the Ottoman Theatre of Varieties, with its rows of illuminated windows and crescent moons set against the sky, rose before him, and the glory of it was intoxicating. It is not too much to say that the Ottoman held a stronger fascination for Richard than any other place in London. The British Museum, Fleet Street, and the Lyceum were magic names, but more magical than either was the name of the Ottoman. The Ottoman, on the rare occasions when it happened to be mentioned in Bursley, was a synonym for all the glittering vices of the metropolis. It stank in the nostrils of the London delegates who came down to speak at the annual meetings of the local Society for the Suppression of Vice. But how often had Richard, somnolent in chapel, mitigated the rigours of a long sermon by dreaming of an Ottoman ballet,—one of those voluptuous spectacles, all legs and white arms, which from time to time were described so ornately in the London daily papers.
The brass-barred swinging doors of the Grand Circle entrance were simultaneously opened for him by two human automata dressed exactly alike in long semi-military coats, a very tall man and a stunted boy. He advanced with what air of custom he could command, and after taking a ticket and traversing a heavily decorated corridor encountered another pair of swinging doors; they opened, and a girl passed out, followed by a man who was talking to her vehemently in French. At the same moment a gust of distant music struck Richard's ear. As he climbed a broad, thick-piled flight of steps, the music became louder, and a clapping of hands could be heard. At the top of the steps hung a curtain of blue velvet; he pushed aside its stiff, heavy folds with difficulty, and entered the auditorium.
The smoke of a thousand cigarettes enveloped the furthest parts of the great interior in a thin bluish haze, which was dissipated as it reached the domed ceiling in the rays of a crystal chandelier. Far in front and a little below the level of the circle lay a line of footlights broken by the silhouette of the conductor's head. A diminutive, solitary figure in red and yellow stood in the centre of the huge stage; it was kissing its hands to the audience with a mincing, operatic gesture; presently it tripped off backwards, stopping at every third step to bow; the applause ceased, and the curtain fell slowly.
The broad, semicircular promenade which flanked the seats of the grand circle was filled with a well-dressed, well-fed crowd. The men talked and laughed, for the most part, in little knots, while in and out, steering their way easily and rapidly among these groups, moved the women: some with rouged cheeks, greasy vermilion lips, and enormous liquid eyes; others whose faces were innocent of cosmetics and showed pale under the electric light; but all with a peculiar, exaggerated swing of the body from the hips, and all surreptitiously regarding themselves in the mirrors which abounded on every glowing wall.
Richard stood aloof against a pillar. Near him were two men in evening dress conversing in tones which just rose above the general murmur of talk and the high, penetrating tinkle of glass from the bar behind the promenade.
"And what did she say then?" one of the pair asked smilingly. Richard strained his ear to listen.
"Well, she told me," the other said, speaking with a dreamy drawl, while fingering his watch-chain absently and gazing down at the large diamond in his shirt,—"she told me that she said she'd do for him if he didn't fork out. But I don't believe her. You know, of course.... There's Lottie...."
The band suddenly began to play, and after a few crashing bars the curtain went up for the ballet. The rich coup d'oeil which presented itself provoked a burst of clapping from the floor of the house and the upper tiers, but to Richard's surprise no one in his proximity seemed to exhibit any interest in the entertainment. The two men still talked with their backs to the stage, the women continued to find a pathway between the groups, and from within the bar came the unabated murmur of voices and tinkle of glass.
Richard never took his dazed eyes from the stage. The moving pageant unrolled itself before him like a vision, rousing new sensations, tremors of strange desires. He was under a spell, and when at last the curtain descended to the monotonous roll of drums, he awoke to the fact that several people were watching him curiously. Blushing slightly, he went to a far corner of the promenade. At one of the little tables a woman sat alone. She held her head at an angle, and her laughing, lustrous eyes gleamed invitingly at Richard. Without quite intending to do so he hesitated in front of her, and she twittered a phrase ending in chéri.
He abruptly turned away. He would have been very glad to remain and say something clever, but his tongue refused its office, and his legs moved of themselves.
At midnight he found himself in Piccadilly Circus, unwilling to go home. He strolled leisurely back to Leicester Square. The front of the Ottoman was in darkness, and the square almost deserted.
Chapter IV
He walked home to Raphael Street. The house was dead, except for a pale light in his own room. At the top of the bare, creaking stairs he fumbled a moment for the handle of his door, and the regular sound of two distinct snores descended from an upper storey. He closed the door softly, locked it, and glanced round the room with some eagerness. The smell of the expiring lamp compelled him to unlatch both windows. He extinguished the lamp, and after lighting a couple of candles on the mantelpiece drew a chair to the fireplace and sat down to munch an apple. The thought occurred to him: "This is my home—for how long?"
And then:
"Why the dickens didn't I say something to that girl?"
Between the candles on the mantelpiece was a photograph of his sister, which he had placed there before going out. He looked at it with a half smile, and murmured audibly several times:
"Why the dickens didn't I say something to that girl, with her chéri?"
The woman of the photograph seemed to be between thirty and forty years of age. She was fair, with a mild, serious face, and much wavy hair. The forehead was broad and smooth and white, the cheek-bones prominent, and the mouth somewhat large. The eyes were a very light grey; they met the gaze of the spectator with a curious timid defiance, as if to say, "I am weak, but I can at least fight till I fall." Underneath the eyes—the portrait was the work of an amateur, and consequently had not been robbed of all texture by retouching—a few crowsfeet could be seen.
As far back as Richard's memory went, he and Mary had lived together and alone in the small Red House which lay half a mile out of Bursley, towards Turnhill, on the Manchester road. At one time it had been rurally situated, creeping plants had clothed its red walls, and the bare patch behind it had been a garden; but the gradual development of a coal-producing district had covered the fields with smooth, mountainous heaps of grey refuse, and stunted or killed every tree in the neighbourhood. The house was undermined, and in spite of iron clamps had lost most of its rectangles, while the rent had dropped to fifteen pounds a year.
Mary was very much older than her brother, and she had always appeared to him exactly the mature woman of the photograph. Of his parents he knew nothing except what Mary had told him, which was little and vague, for she watchfully kept the subject at a distance.
She had supported herself and Richard in comfort by a medley of vocations, teaching the piano, collecting rents, and practising the art of millinery. They had few friends. The social circles of Bursley were centred in its churches and chapels; and though Mary attended the Wesleyan sanctuary with some regularity, she took small interest in prayer-meetings, class-meetings, bazaars, and all the other minor religious activities, thus neglecting opportunities for intercourse which might have proved agreeable. She had sent Richard to the Sunday-school; but when, at the age of fourteen, he protested that Sunday-school was "awful rot," she answered calmly, "Don't go, then;" and from that day his place in class was empty. Soon afterwards the boy cautiously insinuated that chapel belonged to the same category as Sunday-school, but the hint failed of its effect.
The ladies of the town called sometimes, generally upon business, and took afternoon tea. Once the vicar's wife, who wished to obtain musical tuition for her three youngest daughters at a nominal fee, came in and found Richard at a book on the hearthrug.
"Ah!" said she. "Just like his father, is he not, Miss Larch?" Mary made no reply.
The house was full of books. Richard knew them all well by sight, but until he was sixteen he read only a select handful of volumes which had stood the test of years. Often he idly speculated as to the contents of some of the others,—"Horatii Opera," for instance: had that anything to do with theatres?—yet for some curious reason, which when he grew older he sought for in vain, he never troubled himself to look into them. Mary read a good deal, chiefly books and magazines fetched for her by Richard from the Free Library.
When he was about seventeen, a change came. He was aware dimly, and as if by instinct, that his sister's life in the early days had not been without its romance. Certainly there was something hidden between her and William Vernon, the science master at the Institute, for they were invariably at great pains to avoid each other. He sometimes wondered whether Mr. Vernon was connected in any way with the melancholy which was never, even in her brightest moments, wholly absent from Mary's demeanour. One Sunday night—Richard had been keeping house—Mary, coming in late from chapel, threw his arms round his neck as he opened the door, and, dragging down his face to hers, kissed him hysterically again and again.
"Dicky, Dick," she whispered, laughing and crying at the same time, "something's happened. I'm almost an old woman, but something's happened!"
"I know," said Richard, retreating hurriedly from her embrace. "You're going to marry Mr. Vernon."
"But how could you tell?"
"Oh! I just guessed."
"You don't mind, Dick, do you?"
"I! Mind!" Afraid lest his feelings should appear too plainly, he asked abruptly for supper.
Mary gave up her various callings, the wedding took place, and William Vernon came to live with them. It was then that Richard began to read more widely, and to form a definite project of going to London.
He could not fail to respect and like William. The life of the married pair seemed to him idyllic; the tender, furtive manifestations of affection which were constantly passing between Mary and her sedate, middle-aged husband touched him deeply, and at the thought of the fifteen irretrievable years during which some ridiculous misunderstanding had separated this loving couple, his eyes were not quite as dry as a youth could wish. But with it all he was uncomfortable. He felt himself an intruder upon holy privacies; if at meal-times husband and wife clasped hands round the corner of the table, he looked at his plate; if they smiled happily upon no discoverable provocation, he pretended not to notice the fact. They did not need him. Their hearts were full of kindness for every living thing, but unconsciously they stood aloof. He was driven in upon himself, and spent much of his time either in solitary walking or hidden in an apartment called the study.
He ordered magazines whose very names Mr. Holt, the principal bookseller in Bursley, was unfamiliar with, and after the magazines came books of verse and novels enclosed in covers of mystic design, and printed in a style which Mr. Holt, though secretly impressed, set down as eccentric. Mr. Holt's shop performed the functions of a club for the dignitaries of the town; and since he took care that this esoteric literature was well displayed on the counter until called for, the young man's fame as a great reader soon spread, and Richard began to see that he was regarded as a curiosity of which Bursley need not be ashamed. His self-esteem, already fostered into lustiness by a number of facile school successes, became more marked, although he was wise enough to keep a great deal of it to himself.
One evening, after Mary and her husband had been talking quietly some while, Richard came into the sitting-room.
"I don't want any supper," he said, "I'm going for a bit of a walk."
"Shall we tell him?" Mary asked, smiling, after he had left the room.
"Please yourself," said William, also smiling.
"He talks a great deal about going to London. I hope he won't go till—after April; I think it would upset me."
"You need not trouble, I think, my dear," William answered. "He talks about it, but he isn't gone yet."
Mr. Vernon was not quite pleased with Richard. He had obtained for him—being connected with the best people in the town—a position as shorthand and general clerk in a solicitor's office, and had learnt privately that though the youth was smart enough, he was scarcely making that progress which might have been expected. He lacked "application." William attributed this shortcoming to the excessive reading of verse and obscure novels.
April came, and, as Mr. Vernon had foretold, Richard still remained in Bursley. But the older man was now too deeply absorbed in another matter to interest himself at all in Richard's movements,—a matter in which Richard himself exhibited a shy concern. Hour followed anxious hour, and at last was heard the faint, fretful cry of a child in the night. Then stillness. All that Richard ever saw was a coffin, and in it a dead child at a dead woman's feet.
Fifteen months later he was in London.
Chapter V
Mr. Curpet, of the firm of Curpet and Smythe, whose name was painted in black and white on the dark green door, had told him that the office hours were from nine-thirty to six. The clock of the Law Courts was striking a quarter to ten. He hesitated a moment, and then seized the handle; but the door was fast, and he descended the two double flights of iron stairs into the quadrangle.
New Serjeant's Court was a large modern building of very red brick with terra-cotta facings, eight storeys high; but in spite of its faults of colour and its excessive height, ample wall spaces and temperate ornamentation gave it a dignity and comeliness sufficient to distinguish it from other buildings in the locality. In the centre of the court was an oval patch of brown earth, with a few trees whose pale-leaved tops, struggling towards sunlight, reached to the middle of the third storey. Round this plantation ran an immaculate roadway of wooden blocks, flanked by an equally immaculate asphalt footpath. The court possessed its own private lamp-posts, and these were wrought of iron in an antique design.
Men and boys, grave and unconsciously oppressed by the burden of the coming day, were continually appearing out of the gloom of the long tunnelled entrance and vanishing into one or other of the twelve doorways. Presently a carriage and pair drove in, and stopped opposite Richard. A big man of about fifty, with a sagacious red and blue face, jumped alertly out, followed by an attentive clerk carrying a blue sack. It seemed to Richard that he knew the features of the big man from portraits, and, following the pair up the staircase of No. 2, he discovered from the legend on the door through which they disappeared that he had been in the presence of Her Majesty's Attorney-General. Simultaneously with a misgiving as to his ability to reach the standard of clerical ability doubtless required by Messrs. Curpet and Smythe, who did business cheek by jowl with an attorney-general and probably employed him, came an elevation of spirit as he darkly guessed what none can realise completely, that a man's future lies on his own knees, and on the knees of no gods whatsoever.
He continued his way upstairs, but Messrs. Curpet and Smythe's portal was still locked. Looking down the well, he espied a boy crawling reluctantly and laboriously upward, with a key in his hand which he dragged across the bannisters. In course of time the boy reached Messrs. Curpet and Smythe's door, and opening it stepped neatly over a pile of letters which lay immediately within. Richard followed him.
"Oh! My name's Larch," said Richard, as if it had just occurred to him that the boy might be interested in the fact. "Do you know which is my room?"
The boy conducted him along a dark passage with green doors on either side, to a room at the end. It was furnished mainly with two writing-tables and two armchairs; in one corner was a disused copying-press, in another an immense pile of reporters' note-books; on the mantelpiece, a tumbler, a duster, and a broken desk lamp.
"That's your seat," said the boy, pointing to the larger table, and disappeared. Richard disposed of his coat and hat and sat down, trying to feel at ease and not succeeding.
At five minutes past ten a youth entered with the "Times" under his arm. Richard waited for him to speak, but he merely stared and took off his overcoat. Then he said,—
"You've got my hook. If you don't mind I'll put your things on this other one."
"Certainly," assented Richard.
The youth spread his back luxuriously to the empty fireplace and opened the "Times," when another and smaller boy put his head in at the door.
"Jenkins, Mr. Alder wants the 'Times.'"
The youth silently handed over the advertisement pages which were lying on the table. In a minute the boy returned.
"Mr. Alder says he wants the inside of the 'Times.'"
"Tell Mr. Alder to go to hell, with my compliments." The boy hesitated.
"Go on, now," Jenkins insisted. The boy hung on the door-handle, smiling dubiously, and then went out.
"Here, wait a minute!" Jenkins called him back. "Perhaps you'd better give it him. Take the damn thing away."
A sound of hurried footsteps in the next room was succeeded by an imperious call for Jenkins, at which Jenkins slipped nimbly into his chair and untied a bundle of papers.
"Jenkins!" the call came again, with a touch of irritation in it, but Jenkins did not move. The door was thrust open.
"Oh! You are there, Jenkins. Just come in and take a letter down." The tones were quite placid.
"Yes, Mr. Smythe."
"I never take any notice of Smythe's calls," said Jenkins, when he returned. "If he wants me, he must either ring or fetch me. If I once began it, I should be running in and out of his room all day, and I've quite enough to do without that."
"Fidgety, eh?" Richard suggested.
"Fidgety's no word for it, I tell you. Alder—that's the manager, you know—said only yesterday that he has less trouble with forty Chancery actions of Curpet's than with one county-court case of Smythe's. I know I'd a jolly sight sooner write forty of Curpet's letters than ten of Smythe's. I wish I'd got your place, and you'd got mine. I suppose you can write shorthand rather fast."
"Middling," said Richard. "About 120."
"Oh! We had a man once who could do 150, but he'd been a newspaper reporter. I do a bit over a hundred, if I've not had much to drink overnight. Let's see, they're giving you twenty-five bob, aren't they?"
Richard nodded.
"The man before you had thirty-five, and he couldn't spell worth a brass button. I only get fifteen, although I've been here seven years. A damn shame I call it! But Curpet's beastly near. If he'd give some other people less, and me a bit more...."
"Who are 'some other people'?" asked Richard, smiling.
"Well, there's old Aked. He sits in the outer office—you won't have seen him because he doesn't generally come till eleven. They give him a pound a week, just for doing a bit of engrossing when he feels inclined to engross, and for being idle when he feels inclined to be idle. He's a broken-down something or other,—used to be clerk to Curpet's father. He has some dibs of his own, and this just finds him amusement. I bet he doesn't do fifty folios a week. And he's got the devil's own temper."
Jenkins was proceeding to describe other members of the staff when the entry of Mr. Curpet himself put an end to the recital. Mr. Curpet was a small man, with a round face and a neatly trimmed beard.
"Good morning, Larch. If you'll kindly come into my room, I'll dictate my letters. Good morning, Jenkins." He smiled and withdrew, leaving Richard excessively surprised at his suave courtesy.
In his own room Mr. Curpet sat before a pile of letters, and motioned Richard to a side table.
"You will tell me if I go too fast," he said, and began to dictate regularly, with scarcely a pause. The pile of letters gradually disappeared into a basket. Before half a dozen letters were done Richard comprehended that he had become part of a business machine of far greater magnitude than anything to which he had been accustomed in Bursley. This little man with the round face dealt impassively with tens of thousands of pounds; he mortgaged whole streets, bullied railway companies, and wrote familiarly to lords. In the middle of one long letter, a man came panting in, whom Richard at once took for Mr. Alder, the Chancery manager. His rather battered silk hat was at the back of his head, and he looked distressed.
"I'm sorry to say we've lost that summons in Rice v. The L. R. Railway."
"Really!" said Mr. Curpet. "Better appeal, and brief a leader, eh?"
"Can't appeal, Mr. Curpet."
"Well, we must make the best of it. Telegraph to the country. I'll write and keep them calm. It's a pity they were so sure. Rice will have to economise for a year or two. What was my last word, Larch?" The dictation proceeded.
One hour was allowed for lunch, and Richard spent the first moiety of it in viewing the ambrosial exteriors of Strand restaurants. With the exception of the coffee-house at Bursley, he had never been in a restaurant in his life, and he was timid of entering any of those sumptuous establishments whose swinging doors gave glimpses of richly decorated ceilings, gleaming tablecloths, and men in silk hats greedily consuming dishes placed before them by obsequious waiters.
At last, without quite knowing how he got there, he sat in a long, low apartment, papered like an attic bedroom, and odorous of tea and cake. The place was crowded with young men and women indifferently well-dressed, who bent over uncomfortably small oblong marble-topped tables. An increasing clatter of crockery filled the air. Waitresses, with pale, vacant faces, dressed in dingy black with white aprons, moved about with difficulty at varying rates of speed, but none of them seemed to betray an interest in Richard. Behind the counter, on which stood great polished urns emitting clouds of steam, were several women whose superior rank in the restaurant was denoted by a black apron, and after five minutes had elapsed Richard observed one of these damsels pointing out himself to a waitress, who approached and listened condescendingly to his order.
A thin man, rather more than middle-aged, with a grey beard and slightly red nose, entered and sat down opposite to Richard. Without preface he began, speaking rather fast and with an expressive vivacity rarely met with in the ageing,—
"Well, my young friend, how do you like your new place?"
Richard stared at him.
"Are you Mr. Aked?"
"The same. I suppose Master Jenkins has made you acquainted with all my peculiarities of temper and temperament.—Glass of milk, roll, and two pats of butter—and, I say, my girl, try not to keep me waiting as long as you did yesterday." There was a bright smile on his face, which the waitress unwillingly returned.
"Don't you know," he went on, looking at Richard's plate,—"don't you know that tea and ham together are frightfully indigestible?"
"I never have indigestion."
"No matter. You soon will have if you eat tea and ham together. A young man should guard his digestion like his honour. Sounds funny, doesn't it? But it's right. An impaired digestive apparatus has ruined many a career. It ruined mine. You see before you, sir, what might have been an author of repute, but for a wayward stomach."
"You write?" Richard asked, interested at once, but afraid lest Mr. Aked might be cumbrously joking.
"I used to." The old man spoke with proud self-consciousness.
"Have you written a book?"
"Not a book. But I've contributed to all manner of magazines and newspapers."
"What magazines?"
"Well, let me see—it's so long ago. I've written for 'Cornhill.' I wrote for 'Cornhill' when Thackeray edited it. I spoke to Carlyle once."
"You did?"
"Yes. Carlyle said to me—Carlyle said to me—Carlyle said—" Mr. Aked's voice dwindled to an inarticulate murmur, and, suddenly ignoring Richard's presence, he pulled a book from his pocket and began to finger the leaves. It was a French novel, "La Vie de Bohème." His face had lost all its mobile expressiveness.
A little alarmed by such eccentricity, and not quite sure that this associate of Carlyle was perfectly sane, Richard sat silent, waiting for events. Mr. Aked was clearly accustomed to reading while he ate; he could even drink with his eyes on the book. At length he pushed his plates away from him, and closed the novel with a snap.
"I see you're from the country, Larch," he said, as if there had been no lapse in the conversation. "Now, why in God's name did you leave the country? Aren't there enough people in London?"
"Because I wanted to be an author," answered Richard, with more assurance than veracity, though he spoke in good faith. The fact was that his aspirations, hitherto so vague as to elude analysis, seemed within the last few minutes mysteriously to have assumed definite form.
"You're a young fool, then."
"But I've an excellent digestion."
"You won't have it if you begin to write. Take my word, you're a young fool. You don't know what you're going in for, my little friend."
"Was Murger a fool?" Richard said clumsily, determined to exhibit an acquaintance with "La Vie de Bohème."
"Ha! We read French, do we?"
Richard blushed. The old man got up.
"Come along," he said peevishly. "Let's get out of this hole."
At the pay-desk, waiting for change, he spoke to the cashier, a thin girl with reddish-brown hair, who coughed,—
"Did you try those lozenges?"
"Oh! yes, thanks. They taste nice."
"Beautiful day."
"Yes; my word, isn't it!"
They walked back to the office in absolute silence; but just as they were going in, Mr. Aked stopped, and took Richard by the coat.
"Have you anything special to do next Thursday night?"
"No," said Richard.
"Well, I'll take you to a little French restaurant in Soho, and we'll have dinner. Half a crown. Can you afford?"
Richard nodded.
"And, I say, bring along some of your manuscripts, and I'll flay them alive for you."
Chapter VI
An inconstant, unrefreshing breeze, sluggish with accumulated impurity, stirred the curtains, and every urban sound—high-pitched voices of children playing, roll of wheels and rhythmic trot of horses, shouts of newsboys and querulous barking of dogs—came through the open windows touched with a certain languorous quality that suggested a city fatigued, a city yearning for the moist recesses of woods, the disinfectant breath of mountain tops, and the cleansing sea.
On the little table between the windows lay pen, ink, and paper. Richard sat down to be an author. Since his conversation with Mr. Aked of the day before he had lived in the full glow of an impulse to write. He discerned, or thought he discerned, in the fact that he possessed the literary gift, a key to his recent life. It explained, to be particular, the passion for reading which had overtaken him at seventeen, and his desire to come to London, the natural home of the author. Certainly it was strange that hitherto he had devoted very little serious thought to the subject of writing, but happily there were in existence sundry stray verses and prose fragments written at Bursley, and it contented him to recognise in these the first tremulous stirrings of a late-born ambition.
During the previous evening he had busied himself in deciding upon a topic. In a morning paper he had read an article entitled "An Island of Sleep," descriptive of Sark; it occurred to him that a similar essay upon Lichfield, the comatose cathedral city which lay about thirty miles from Bursley, might suit a monthly magazine. He knew Lichfield well; he had been accustomed to visit it from childhood; he loved it. As a theme full of picturesque opportunities it had quickened his imagination, until his brain seemed to surge with vague but beautiful fancies. In the night his sleep had been broken, and several new ideas had suggested themselves. And now, after a day of excited anticipation, the moment for composition had arrived.
As he dipped his pen in the ink a sudden apprehension of failure surprised him. He dismissed it, and wrote in a bold hand, rather carefully,—
MEMORIES OF A CITY OF SLEEP.
That was surely an excellent title. He proceeded:—
On the old stone bridge, beneath which the clear, smooth waters of the river have crept at the same pace for centuries, stands a little child, alone. It is early morning, and the clock of the time-stained cathedral which lifts its noble gothic towers scarce a hundred yards away, strikes five, to the accompaniment of an unseen lark overhead.
