and Denry thought that the danger was past.
Now it surged up.
"Who invited you to the Mayor's ball?" demanded Mr. Duncalf like thunder.
Yes, there it was! And a very difficult question!
"I did, sir," he blundered out. Transparent veracity! He simply could not think of a lie.
"Why?"
"I thought you 'd perhaps forgotten to put my name down on the list of invitations, sir."
"Oh!" This, grimly. "And I suppose you thought I 'd also forgotten to put down that tailor chap, Sillitoe?"
So it was all out! Sillitoe must have been chattering. Denry remembered that the classic established tailor of the town, Hatterton, whose trade Sillitoe was filching, was a particular friend of Mr. Duncalf's. He saw the whole thing.
"Well?" persisted Mr. Duncalf, after a judicious silence from Denry.
Denry, sheltered in the castle of his silence, was not to be tempted out.
"I suppose you rather fancy yourself, dancing with your betters?" growled Mr. Duncalf, menacingly.
"Yes," said Denry. "Do you?"
He had not meant to say it. The question slipped out of his mouth. He had recently formed the habit of retorting swiftly upon people who put queries to him: "Yes, are you?" or "No, do you?" The trick of speech had been enormously effective with Sillitoe, for instance, and with the Countess. He was in process of acquiring renown for it. Certainly it was effective now. Mr. Duncalf's dance with the Countess had come to an ignominious conclusion in the middle, Mr. Duncalf preferring to dance on skirts rather than on the floor—and the fact was notorious.
"You can take a week's notice," said Mr. Duncalf pompously.
It was no argument. But employers are so unscrupulous in an altercation.
"Oh, very well!" said Denry; and to himself he said: "Something must turn up, now."
He felt dizzy, at being thus thrown upon the world—he who had been meditating the propriety of getting himself elected to the stylish and newly-established Sports Club at Hillport! He felt enraged, for Mr. Duncalf had only been venting on Denry the annoyance induced on him by Mrs. Codleyn. But it is remarkable that he was not depressed at all. No! he went about with songs and whistling, though he had no prospects except starvation or living on his mother. He traversed the streets in his grand, new manner, and his thoughts ran: "What on earth can I do to live up to my reputation?"
However he possessed intact the five-pound note won from Harold Etches in the matter of the dance.
II
Every life is a series of coincidences. Nothing happens that is not rooted in coincidence. All great changes find their cause in coincidence. Therefore I shall not mince the fact that the next change in Denry's career was due to an enormous and complicated coincidence. On the following morning both Mrs. Codleyn and Denry were late for service at St. Luke's Church—Mrs. Codleyn by accident and obesity, Denry by design. Denry was later than Mrs. Codleyn, whom he discovered waiting in the porch. That Mrs. Codleyn was waiting is an essential part of the coincidence. Now Mrs. Codleyn would not have been waiting if her pew had not been right at the front of the church, near the chancel. 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 was n'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 inch 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 fire-place, "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