Little Charlie gazed up at him sadly, plaintively, for what seemed a long while.

“It’s good-bye to th’ First League, then, for Knype!” he tragically muttered, at length.

VIII

Dr Stirling drove the car very slowly back to Bursley.  We glided gently down into the populous valleys.  All the stunted trees were coated with rime, which made the sharpest contrast with their black branches and the black mud under us.  The high chimneys sent forth their black smoke calmly and tirelessly into the fresh blue sky.  Sunday had descended on the vast landscape like a physical influence.  We saw a snake of children winding out of a dark brown Sunday school into a dark brown chapel.  And up from the valleys came all the bells of all the temples of all the different gods of the Five Towns, chiming, clanging, ringing, each insisting that it alone invited to the altar of the one God.  And priests and acolytes of the various cults hurried occasionally along, in silk hats and bright neckties, and smooth coats with folded handkerchiefs sticking out of the pockets, busy, happy and self-important, the convinced heralds of eternal salvation:  no doubt nor hesitation as to any fundamental truth had ever entered their minds.  We passed through a long, straight street of new red houses with blue slate roofs, all gated and gardened.  Here and there a girl with her hair in pins and a rough brown apron over a gaudy frock was stoning a front step.  And half-way down the street a man in a scarlet jersey, supported by two women in blue bonnets, was beating a drum and crying aloud:  “My friends, you may die to-night.  Where, I ask you, where—?” But he had no friends; not even a boy heeded him.  The drum continued to bang in our rear.

I enjoyed all this.  All this seemed to me to be fine, seemed to throw off the true, fine, romantic savour of life.  I would have altered nothing in it.  Mean, harsh, ugly, squalid, crude, barbaric—­yes, but what an intoxicating sense in it of the organized vitality of a vast community unconscious of itself!  I would have altered nothing even in the events of the night.  I thought of the rooms at the top of the staircase of the Foaming Quart—­mysterious rooms which I had not seen and never should see, recondite rooms from which a soul had slipped away and into which two had come, scenes of anguish and of frustrated effort!  Historical rooms, surely!  And yet not a house in the hundreds of houses past which we slid but possessed rooms ennobled and made august by happenings exactly as impressive in their tremendous inexplicableness.

The natural humanity of Jos Myatt and Charlie, their fashion of comporting themselves in a sudden stress, pleased me.  How else should they have behaved?  I could understand Charlie’s prophetic dirge over the ruin of the Knype Football Club.  It was not that he did not feel the tragedy in the house.  He had felt it, and because he had felt it he had uttered at random, foolishly, the first clear thought that ran into his head.