Hathelsborough

“ There were a few—a very few—progressive folk in Hathelsborough who regarded Spizey and his semitheatrical attire as an anachronism, and openly derided both; but so far nobody had dared to advocate the abolition of him and his livery. He was part and parcel of the high tradition, a reminder of the fact that Hathelsborough possessed a charter of incorporation centuries before its neighbor boroughs, now more populous and important, gained theirs. ”

“ He was going to regenerate the old town of Hathelsborough.
“And that you'll never do!” affirmed Queenie. “You might as well try to blow up the castle keep with a halfpenny cracker. Hathelsborough people are like the man in the Bible—they're joined to their idols. You can try and try, and you'll only break your heart, or your back, in the effort, just as Wallingford would have done. If Wallingford had been a wise man, he'd have let Hathelsborough go to the devil in its own way. Then he'd have been alive now!”
“Well, I'm going to try,” declared Brent. ”

“ Hathelsborough folk, sir, are, in my opinion, the queerest lot in all England. If you want to see Alderman Crood, go to the end of the Market Place, turn down Barley Market, and drop a hundred yards or so down the hill at the end. Then you'll smell Crood's tanyard, even if you don't see it. His is the big, solid-looking house at the side—you can't miss it.”
The editor-reporter shot up an alley at his left, at the head of which was a lighted window with black lettering that announced the building as the office of the local newspaper. Brent went on his way to seek the deputy mayor. ”

“ Hathelsborough folk have a fixed standard—do what you like, as long as you don't get found out. Understand, sir?”
“But in this case the thing seems to have been found out,” remarked Brent.
“That, in the Hathelsborough mental economy, is the only mistake in it,” replied Epplewhite dryly. “It's the only thing that Mallett will be blamed for. Lord bless you, do you think he's the only man in the place who has had such an affair? Hathelsborough people—men and women—are past masters and mistresses at secrecy and deception. ”

“ V When Brent came again to the center of the town, he found that Hathelsborough, instead of sinking to sleep within an hour of curfew, according to long established custom, had awakened to new life. There were groups at every corner, and little knots of folk at doors, and men in twos and threes on the sidewalks; and it needed no particular stretching of his ears to inform Brent that everybody was talking of the murder of his cousin. ”

“ Why do you suppose men went into the town council? To represent the taxpayers, the townspeople? No, but to look after their own interests; to safeguard themselves; to get what they could out of it. The whole policy of the old councils was one of—there's only one word for it, Mr. Brent, and that's only just becoming Anglicized—graft! A municipal government is supposed to exist for the good, the welfare, the protection of a town, but the whole idea of these Hathelsborough men, in the past, has been to use their powers and privileges for their own ends. ”

“ It wouldn't do to have you on the council, Brent! You're too much of an innovator. Now this town—the real town—doesn't want innovation. Innovation in an ancient borough like this is unsettling and uncomfortable—see?”
“This world doesn't stand still,” retorted Brent. “I'm going ahead!”
But he reflected, as he left the lawyer's office, that much of what Tansley had said was true. There was something baffling in the very atmosphere of Hathelsborough, and he felt like a man who fights the wind. ”

“ During the progress of the Local Government Board inquiry he had learned something—that men like Tansley and Epplewhite knew a lot more about Hathelsborough and Hathelsborough folk than he knew, or than Wallingford had known, despite the murdered man's longer experience of town and people. Reform was not going to be carried out in a day in that timeworn borough, nor were its ancient customs, rotten and corrupt as they were, to be uprooted by newspaper articles. So far, Simon Crood and his gang had won all along the line. ”

“ Brent?" "Why Support a Stranger?" "Who Wants a Carpet-Bagger?" "Vote for the Home-Made Article." "Hathelsborough Men for Hathelsborough Matters." "Stand by the True and Tried!" These appeals to the free and enlightened burgesses whose suffrages he solicited met Brent on every side, and especially on the day of the election. ”

“ Hathelswide's tower, a man might safely wager his all that only modern artillery could force an entrance to its dark and gloomy interior.
On a certain April evening, the time being within an hour of curfew—which, to be exact, is rung in Hathelsborough every night, all the year round, sixty minutes after sunset, despite the fact that it is nowadays but a meaningless ceremony—Bunning, caretaker and custodian of the Moot Hall, stood outside of its gates, smoking his pipe and looking around him. ”

“ Peppermore nudged his companion's arm. Brent leaned nearer to him.
"Not get any change out of him!" whispered Peppermore. "Cool old customer, isn't he? Sub judice, eh? Good! And yet—if there's a man in all Hathelsborough that's likely to know what straws are sailing on the undercurrent, Mr. Brent, Krevin Crood's the man! But you'll come across him before you're here long—nobody can be long in Hathelsborough without knowing Krevin!" ”

“ Brent glanced at the superintendent, who was exchanging whispers with the coroner's officer, and from him to the crowded seats that ran around three sides of the court. All the notabilities of Hathelsborough were there again, in full force—Simon Crood, in a seat of honor, as befitted his new dignity of mayor; Mallett; Coppinger; anybody and everybody of consequence. There, too, were Krevin Crood and Queenie, and, just behind Mrs. Saumarez, Dr. Wellesley, looking distinctly bored, and his assistant, Dr. Carstairs, a young Scotsman. Near them was another medical man, Dr. Barber ”

“ There were the old gabled houses, quaintly roofed and timbered; there was the lacelike masonry of High Cross; there were the slender proportions of Low Cross; there was the mighty bulk of the parish church, built over the very spot whereon the virgin saint suffered martyrdom. Finally, towering above the gables on the north side, there was the well preserved masonry of the massive Norman on of Hathelsborough Castle.
To Bunning's right and left, going away from the eastern corner of the Market Place, lay two narrow streets, called respectively River Gate and Meadow Gate. ”

“ In plain words, there are about a hundred men in Hathelsborough who have used the seven or eight thousand other people as a means to their own ends. The town has been a helpless, defenseless thing, from which these harpies have picked whatever they could lay their talons on!”
“That's the conclusion he'd come to, eh?” asked Brent.
“He couldn't come to any other after many years of patient investigation,” declared Mrs. Saumarez. “He was the sort of man who had an inborn hatred of abuses and shams and hypocrisy. ”

“ First, next to Copper Alley, which ran out of Meadow Gate, came the big house long used as a bank. Then came the Moot Hall itself. Next, between the Moot Hall and Piper's Passage, which was a narrow entry between River Gate and St. Lawrence Lane, stood Dr. Wellesley's house. Until comparatively recent times Dr. Wellesley's house had been the official residence of the Mayor of Hathelsborough. And between it and the Moot Hall there was a definite means of communication: in short, a private door. ”

“ Peppermore drew Brent into a vacant alcove and gave him a significant glance.
“I guess there isn't a man in this room, Mr. Brent, that hasn't got his own theory about what happened last night,” he said in a low voice. “I don't suppose any of 'em know you. They're not the sort of men you'd meet when you were here before. These are chiefly tradesmen, betting men, sportsmen, and so on; and, as I say, if you want the gossip of the town, here's the place! There never was a rumor in Hathelsborough but it was known and canvassed and debated and improved upon in Bull's, within an hour. ”

“ He was a man of simple nature, and the picture of Hathelsborough without Spizey and his livery appalled him.
“Bless me!” he exclaimed.
“To be sure!” said Spizey. “It's beyond comprehension! To abolish me, what, in a manner of speaking, has existed I don't know how long! I ain't a man—I'm an office! Who'd cry things that was lost, at that there cross? Who'd pull the big bell on great occasions, and carry round the little un when there was proclamations to be made? Who'd walk in front of the mayor's procession, with the mace, what was give to this here town by King Henry VII his very self? ”

“ Let Hawthwaite do his own work—he would give the police no help.
He foresaw his own future work. Wallingford, dead though he was, had won his victory, and in his death had slain the old wicked system. Now there was building and reconstruction to be done, and it was Brent's job to do it.
He saw far ahead as he trod the sunlit streets of the old town. He would marry Queenie, and they would settle into the slow-moving life of Hathelsborough. He and men who thought with him would slowly build up a new healthy state of things on the ruins of the old. ”

“ The thing is the three votes that neither party can count on. We must get at those three men to-day. If we don't carry our point to-morrow, we shall have Sam Epplewhite or Dr. Wellesley as mayor, and things 'll be as bad as they were under Wallingford.”
This conversation referred to an extraordinary meeting of the town council which had been convened for the next day, in order to elect a new mayor of Hathelsborough in succession to John Wallingford, deceased. Brent heard of it that afternoon from Queenie Crood, in the Castle grounds. ”

“ We were all—”
The coroner held up his hand.
“Let us have a clear understanding,” he said. “I am gathering—officially, of course—from what you are saying that in Hathelsborough town council there are two parties, opposed to each other—a party that is pledged to reform, and another that is opposed to reform. Is that so, Mr. Epplewhite?”
“Precisely so,” answered the witness. “And of the reform party the late mayor was the leader. This is well known in the town—it's a matter of common gossip. It is also well known to members of the town council that Mr. ”

“ Long before the magistrates had filed on to the bench, the whole place was packed, and Hawthwaite, passing him, whispered that there were [Pg 243] hundreds of people in the market square who could not get in. Everybody of any note in Hathelsborough was present; Brent particularly observed the presence of Mrs. Mallett who, heavily veiled, sat just beneath him. He looked in vain, however, for Mrs. Saumarez; she was not there. But in a corner near one of the exits he saw her companion, Mrs. Elstrick, the woman whom Hawthwaite had seen in secret conversation with Krevin Crood in Farthing Lane. ”

“ However, Coppinger says you'll not get in.”
“Coppinger is a bad prophet,” said Brent. “I'll be town councilor in a fortnight. Lay anybody ten to one!”
“Well, they'll do everything they possibly can to keep you out,” declared Queenie. “You've got to fight an awful lot of opposition.”
“Let 'em all come!” retorted Brent. “I'll represent the Castle Ward, and, now that I'm a burgess of Hathelsborough, I'll be mayor some old time!”
“Not yet, though,” said Queenie. “They're going to elect a new mayor to-morrow—in place of your cousin, of course.” ”

“ From the market-place itself there is but one entrance to it; an arched doorway opening upon a low-roofed stone hall; in place of a door there are heavy gates of iron, with a smaller wicket-gate set in their midst; from the stone hall a stone stair leads to the various chambers above; in the outer walls the windows are high and narrow; each is filled with old painted glass. A strong, grim building, this; and when the iron gates are locked, as they are every night when the curfew bell—an ancient institution jealously kept up in Hathelsborough—rings from St. ”

“ Royal reviews and grand hospitalities were common in the Metropolitan district, such as the Grand Review in Hyde Park, but perhaps the most memorable in which the Hertfordshire Volunteers took a part was the Grand Review of the Militia, Yeomanry, and Volunteers in Hatfield Park, on the 14th June, 1800, in the presence of the King and Queen and other members of the Royal Family, Cabinet Ministers, and a host of distinguished people, whom the Marquis of Salisbury entertained at Hatfield House with such splendid hospitality that the entertainment cost L3,000. ”

“ And now, for ever and a day, those who use the road between Potter’s Bar and Hatfield village must go an extra half mile. This is indeed a free and happy country.
Hatfield village touches the extremity of wretchedness, just as Hatfield House marks the apogee of late feudal splendour. And yet, amid its tumbledown hovels there are quaintly beautiful old-gabled cottages with bowed and broken-backed red-tiled roofs, delightful to the artistic eye, if from the builder’s and decorator’s point of view sadly out of repair. Motor repair-shops and garages, with their squalid p. ”

“ It does not take a great deal to fill Lord Hetherington's soul with rapture. Down in Norfolk villages, in the neighbourhood of his ancestral home, and far away in scattered cottages on the side of green Welsh mountains, where the cross-tree rears its inopportune head in the midst of the lovely landscape, and where smoke and coal-dust permeate the soft delicious air, his lordship, as landlord and mine-holder, is spoken of with bated breath by tenants and workmen, and regarded as one of the hardest-headed, tightest-fisted men of business by stewards and agents. ”