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The Card

Arnold Bennett

THE CARD

A Story of Adventure in the Five Towns

Contents

1. The Dance

2. The Widow Hullins’s House

3. The Pantechnicon

4. Wrecking of a Life

5. The Mercantile Marine

6. His Burglary

7. The Rescuer of Dames

8. Raising a Wigwam

9. The Great Newspaper War

10. His Infamy

11. In the Alps

12. The Supreme Honour

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THE CARD

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was one of the most versatile, ambitious and successful British novelists of the early twentieth century. His novels and short stories both celebrate and deplore a rapidly changing Britain. Much of his greatest work is set where he grew up, in the Potteries of the West Midlands. Inspired by Zola and Maupassant, he realized that this world of brutal industrial work and rapid social change, religious severity and material temptation, was the perfect backdrop for everything from comedy to tragedy. His novels include Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), The Card (1911) and Riceyman Steps (1923). He died of typhoid.

1

The Dance

I

Edward Henry Machin first saw the smoke on the 27th May 1867, in Brougham Street, Bursley, the most ancient of the Five Towns. Brougham Street runs down from St Luke’s Square straight into the Shropshire Union Canal, and consists partly of buildings known as ‘potbanks’ (until they come to be sold by auction, when auctioneers describe them as ‘extensive earthenware manufactories’) and partly of cottages whose highest rent is four-and-six a week. In such surroundings was an extraordinary man born. He was the only anxiety of a widowed mother, who gained her livelihood and his by making up ‘ladies’ own materials’ in ladies’ own houses. Mrs Machin, however, had a speciality apart from her vocation: she could wash flannel with less shrinking than any other woman in the district, and she could wash fine lace without ruining it; thus often she came to sew and remained to wash. A somewhat gloomy woman; thin, with a tongue! But I liked her. She saved a certain amount of time every day by addressing her son as Denry, instead of Edward Henry.

Not intellectual, not industrious, Denry would have maintained the average dignity of labour on a potbank had he not at the age of twelve won a scholarship from the Board School to the Endowed School. He owed his triumph to audacity rather than learning, and to chance rather than design. On the second day of examination he happened to arrive in the examination-room ten minutes too soon for the afternoon sitting. He wandered about the place exercising his curiosity, and reached the master’s desk. On the desk was a tabulated form with names of candidates and the number of marks achieved by each in each subject of the previous day. He had done badly in geography, and saw seven marks against his name in the geographical column, out of a possible thirty. The figures had been written in pencil. The very pencil lay on the desk. He picked it up, glanced at the door and at the rows of empty desks, and wrote a neat ‘2’ in front of the 7; then he strolled innocently forth and came back late. His trick ought to have been found out – the odds were against him – but it was not found out.