Tales of the Five Towns

MP3 Audio CD. Tales of the Five Towns

PART I

AT HOME


HIS WORSHIP THE GOOSEDRIVER


I

It was an amiable but deceitful afternoon in the third week of December.
Snow fell heavily in the windows of confectioners' shops, and Father
Christmas smiled in Keats's Bazaar the fawning smile of a myth who knows
himself to be exploded; but beyond these and similar efforts to remedy
the forgetfulness of a careless climate, there was no sign anywhere in
the Five Towns, and especially in Bursley, of the immediate approach of
the season of peace, goodwill, and gluttony on earth.

At the Tiger, next door to Keats's in the market-place, Mr. Josiah
Topham Curtenty had put down his glass (the port was kept specially for
him), and told his boon companion, Mr. Gordon, that he must be going.
These two men had one powerful sentiment in common: they loved the same
woman. Mr. Curtenty, aged twenty-six in heart, thirty-six in mind, and
forty-six in looks, was fifty-six only in years. He was a rich man; he
had made money as an earthenware manufacturer in the good old times
before Satan was ingenious enough to invent German competition, American
tariffs, and the price of coal; he was still making money with the aid
of his son Harry, who now managed the works, but he never admitted that
he was making it. No one has yet succeeded, and no one ever will
succeed, in catching an earthenware manufacturer in the act of making
money; he may confess with a sigh that he has performed the feat in the
past, he may give utterance to a vague, preposterous hope that he will
perform it again in the remote future, but as for surprising him in the
very act, you would as easily surprise a hen laying an egg. Nowadays Mr.
Curtenty, commercially secure, spent most of his energy in helping to
shape an