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A FEUD

When Clive Timmis paused at the side-door of Ezra Brunt’s great shop in Machin Street, and the door was opened to him by Ezra Brunt’s daughter before he had had time to pull the bell, not only all Machin Street knew it within the hour, but also most persons of consequence left in Hanbridge on a Thursday afternoon—­Thursday being early-closing day.  For Hanbridge, though it counts sixty thousand inhabitants, and is the chief of the Five Towns—­that vast, huddled congeries of boroughs devoted to the manufacture of earthenware—­is a place where the art of attending to other people’s business still flourishes in rustic perfection.

Ezra Brunt’s drapery establishment was the foremost retail house, in any branch of trade, of the Five Towns.  It had no rival nearer than Manchester, thirty-six miles off; and even Manchester could exhibit nothing conspicuously superior to it.  The most acutely critical shoppers of the Five Towns—­women who were in the habit of going to London every year for the January sales—­spoke of Brunt’s as a ’right-down good shop.’  And the husbands of these ladies, manufacturers who employed from two hundred to a thousand men, regarded Ezra Brunt as a commercial magnate of equal importance with themselves.  Brunt, who had served his apprenticeship at Birmingham, started business in Machin Street in 1862, when Hanbridge was half its present size and all the best shops of the district were in Oldcastle, an ancient burg contiguous with, but holding itself proudly aloof from, the industrial Five Towns.  He paid eighty pounds a year rent, and lived over the shop, and in the summer quarter his gas bill was always under a sovereign.  For ten years success tarried, but in 1872 his daughter Eva was born and his wife died, and from that moment the sun of his prosperity climbed higher and higher into heaven.  He had been profoundly attached to his wife, and, having lost her he abandoned himself to the mercantile struggle with that morose and terrible ferocity which was the root of his character.  Of rude, gaunt aspect, gruffly taciturn by nature, and variable in temper, he yet had the precious instinct for soothing customers.  To this day he can surpass his own shop-walkers in the admirable and tender solicitude with which, forsaking dialect, he drops into a lady’s ear his famous stereotyped phrase:  ‘Are you receiving proper attention, madam?’ From the first he eschewed the facile trickeries and ostentations which allure the populace.  He sought a high-class trade, and by waiting he found it.  He would never advertise on hoardings; for many years he had no signboard over his shop-front; and whereas the name of ‘Bostocks,’ the huge cheap drapers lower down Machin Street, on the opposite side, attacks you at every railway-station and in every tramcar, the name of ‘E.  Brunt’ is to be seen only in a modest regular advertisement