Nor would she have been waiting if she had been a thin woman and not given to breathing loudly after a hurried walk. She waited partly to get her breath, and partly so that she might take advantage of a hymn or a psalm to gain her seat without attracting attention. If she had not been late, if she had not been stout, if she had not had a seat under the pulpit, if she had not had an objection to making herself conspicuous, she would have been already in the church and Denry would not have had a private colloquy with her.

‘Well, you’re nice people, I must say!’ she observed, as he raised his hat.

She meant Duncalf and all Duncalf’s myrmidons. She was still full of her grievance. The letter which she had received that morning had startled her. And even the shadow of the sacred edifice did not prevent her from referring to an affair that was more suited to Monday than to Sunday morning. A little more, and she would have snorted.

‘Nothing to do with me, you know!’ Denry defended himself.

‘Oh!’ she said, ‘you’re all alike, and I’ll tell you this, Mr Machin, I’d take him at his word if it wasn’t that I don’t know who else I could trust to collect my rents. I’ve heard such tales about rent-collectors … I reckon I shall have to make my peace with him.’

‘Why,’ said Denry, ‘I’ll keep on collecting your rents for you if you like.’

‘You?’

‘I’ve given him notice to leave,’ said Denry. ‘The fact is, Mr Duncalf and I don’t hit it off together.’

Another procrastinator arrived in the porch, and, by a singular simultaneous impulse, Mrs Codleyn and Denry fell into the silence of the overheard and wandered forth together among the graves.

There, among the graves, she eyed him. He was a clerk at eighteen shillings a week, and he looked it. His mother was a sempstress, and he looked it. The idea of neat but shabby Denry and the mighty Duncalf not hitting it off together seemed excessively comic. If only Denry could have worn his dress-suit at church! It vexed him exceedingly that he had only worn that expensive dress-suit once, and saw no faintest hope of ever being able to wear it again.

‘And what’s more,’ Denry pursued, ‘I’ll collect ’em for five per cent instead of seven-and-a-half. Give me a free hand and see if I don’t get better results than he did. And I’ll settle accounts every month, or week if you like, instead of once a quarter, like he does.’

The bright and beautiful idea had smitten Denry like some heavenly arrow. It went through him and pierced Mrs Codleyn with equal success. It was an idea that appealed to the reason, to the pocket, and to the instinct of revenge. Having revengefully settled the hash of Mr Duncalf, they went into church.

No need to continue this part of the narrative. Even the text of the rector’s sermon has no bearing on the issue.

In a week there was a painted board affixed to the door of Denry’s mother:

E. H. MACHIN

Rent Collector and Estate Agent

There was also an advertisement in the Signal, announcing that Denry managed estates large or small.

III

The next crucial event in Denry’s career happened one Monday morning, in a cottage that was very much smaller even than his mother’s. This cottage, part of Mrs Codleyn’s multitudinous property, stood by itself in Chapel Alley, behind the Wesleyan chapel; the majority of the tenements were in Carpenter’s Square, near to. The neighbourhood was not distinguished for its social splendour, but existence in it was picturesque, varied, exciting, full of accidents, as existence is apt to be in residences that cost their occupiers an average of three shillings a week. Some persons referred to the quarter as a slum, and ironically insisted on its adjacency to the Wesleyan chapel, as though that was the Wesleyan chapel’s fault. Such people did not understand life and the joy thereof.

The solitary cottage had a front yard, about as large as a blanket, surrounded by an insecure brick wall and paved with mud. You went up two steps, pushed at a door, and instantly found yourself in the principal reception-room, which no earthly blanket could possibly have covered. Behind this chamber could be seen obscurely an apartment so tiny that an auctioneer would have been justified in terming it ‘bijou’, furnished simply but practically with a slopstone; also the beginnings of a stairway. The furniture of the reception-room comprised two chairs and a table, one or two saucepans, and some antique crockery. What lay at the upper end of the stairway no living person knew, save the old woman who slept there. The old woman sat at the fireplace, ‘all bunched up’, as they say in the Five Towns. The only fire in the room, however, was in the short clay pipe which she smoked; Mrs Hullins was one of the last old women in Bursley to smoke a cutty; and even then the pipe was considered coarse, and cigarettes were coming into fashion – though not in Chapel Alley. Mrs Hullins smoked her pipe, and thought about nothing in particular. Occasionally some vision of the past floated through her drowsy brain. She had lived in that residence for over forty years.