'I fancy the old boy wants to be off to bed,' Mr Brindley
whispered kindly.
So we left the Wedgwood Institution. I began to talk to Mr
Brindley about music. The barbaric attitude of the Five Towns
towards great music was the theme of some very lively
animadversions on his part.
VI
The Tiger was very conveniently close to the Wedgwood Institution.
The Tiger had a 'yard', one of those long, shapeless expanses of
the planet, partly paved with uneven cobbles and partly
unsophisticated planet, without which no provincial hotel can call
itself respectable. We came into it from the hinterland through a
wooden doorway in a brick wall. Far off I could see one light
burning. We were in the centre of Bursley, the gold angel of its
Town Hall rose handsomely over the roof of the hotel in the
diffused moonlight, but we might have been in the purlieus of some
dubious establishment on the confines of a great seaport, where
anything may happen. The yard was so deserted, so mysterious, so
shut in, so silent, that, really, infamous characters ought to
have rushed out at us from the obscurity of shadows, and felled us
to the earth with no other attendant phenomenon than a low groan.
There are places where one seems to feel how thin and brittle is
the crust of law and order.
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