At the next cottage we stopped to inquire after a man who had met with an accident, which necessitated the amputation of one leg below the knee. Having given him all our own “Surgical Aid†letters, and fleeced our friends of theirs, I naturally asked why he wasn’t wearing the artificial limb that had been procured? (it was reposing artistically on the top of the chest of drawers in the kitchen, a stuffed sea-gull under a glass shade on one side, balanced by a wedding-cake-top-ornament under glass on the other). Wasn’t it comfortable? I asked. Didn’t it fit?
“Oh, yes’m, thank you; it fits beautiful. But that’s mybestleg; and the missus likes me to keep it there where she can show it to everyone, and I only uses it for Sundays and Bank ’Ollerdis.â€
Then we looked in on Mrs. Granger, a happy-go-lucky widow who is always passing round thehat. When we knocked at the kitchen door, she was pouring down the sink the liquor in which she had just boiled a piece of bacon. I couldn’t help asking mildly and deferentially: “Have you ever tried using the liquor of boiled bacon for making pea-soup? It’s very nourishing, as well as tasty.â€
Mrs. Granger smiled at me indulgently. “Well, ma’am, seeing that I’ve buried two husbands and three children, no one, I fancy, can givemepoints about feeding a family!â€
At Mrs. Jones’s we made a longer call; we simply had to, as we were wanting milk, and she made no move to get it, but merely stood talking. There was the mirror over the parlour mantelpiece, she particularly wanted us to see that. Arundel Jones (aged eleven) had smashed a hole right through the glass when practising bomb-throwing in there. But would you ever know it, the way Patricia (aged seventeen) had decorated it? And as we couldn’t think what to say, we looked long and earnestly at the bunch of artificial and rather faded roses from Patricia’s hat that had been stuck in the hole, with some green paint daubed around on the glass to represent leaves. Fortunately, Mrs. Jones didn’t wait for our opinion—took it for granted, indeed, since there could only be one opinion about such a masterpiece—and proceeded to ask what I thought could be done with so artistic a girl.
And that reminded her, could I tell her where she could write to in London for some Loop Canvas at a penny a yard? Patricia wanted to make some slippers for a young man friend of hers who was at the front, and sweetly pretty too, with forget-me-nots all over; but it said you must have penny Loop Canvas. She had asked for it in Chepstow, but they had never heard of it, the cheapest they had was 1s.4¾d., and no loops in it at that. But, of course, you could get everything in London.
I had never heard of the canvas myself (and I thought I knew most that was going!), but in any case, she wouldn’t get any canvas at 1d.a yard now, I told her; she had evidently got hold of some very old directions.
No, she hadn’t; it was in last week’sHome Snippets, and she got the periodical out from among an assortment of similar data under the horse-hair sofa squab, to show me.
There, under the heading—
“A Dainty Cosy-Comfort for your Boy in the Trenches,â€
“A Dainty Cosy-Comfort for your Boy in the Trenches,â€
it described how to make a pair of wool-work slippers, commencing with “Get a yard of Penelope canvas.â€
Then Mrs. Jones was uneasy about her step-daughter, Kathleen, who was in service near Chepstow. “The food’s all right; but the ladyisn’t what I call a good wife—never thinks of brushing her husband’s best clothes and putting them away for him of a Monday morning, and yet I’ve never once missed doing that since I married Jones. And I assure you, when I married him, he hadn’t a darned sock to his back. I’m sorry Kathleen hasn’t a better example before her, for she’s inclined to be flighty. She’s got a week’s holiday next month, and nothing will do but she must go and visit her cousin, who is working at munitions in Cardiff. I say to her, ‘Cardiff’s a nasty noisy place; why don’t you go and visit your Aunt Lizzie at Penglyn, she’s so worried she can hardly hold her head up some days, and cries from morning till night; and would be thankful to have someone to talk things over with; or your father’s Cousin Ann at Caerleon, they’ve had a sight of trouble there, and never see a soul nor go out of the house from week end to week end; they’d love to have you.’ But no, it’s Cardiff she wants,†and Mrs. Jones sighed at the unaccountable taste of one-and-twenty!
“Ah, no one knows what an anxiety that girl’s been to me,†went on the buxom, good-natured woman, who in reality never makes a trouble of anything, and has been a real mother to Kathleen. “I sometimes wonder why I married her father! But there, I will say it looks better on your tombstone to have ‘The beloved wife of,’rather than plain Martha Miggins (as I was), all unbelongst to no one, as it were.â€
Don’t imagine for a moment that this implied matrimonial divergence on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, for a more contented couple you couldn’t find in the village. It is merely the polite way we have, locally, of discounting our blessings, lest we should seem to be flaunting our happiness in the face of less fortunate people.
“By the way,†she said, as we were going out of the door, “have you heard who it was walked around your place the other night? Well, now, to think I should have forgotten to mention it, but it was no one, after all, but the policeman! My husband was over to the police-station this morning about that mare we’ve lost, and he mentioned it; and, sure enough, the policeman had got it down in his book that he crossed the hill by our road that night, and had looked over your house.â€
And then I remembered that there was a police-station in the next village, that did duty for a very wide area of miles. And it was usual for the policeman to patrol from one village to another, by various routes, last thing at night, ascertaining if the inhabitants’ doorsen routewere all duly locked. We were much relieved in our minds, and started for home discussing the situation, when Virginia suddenly said—
“Surely that is our dog barking further along the lane?â€
We paused to listen.
“Yes, it is,†I said in surprise. “Whatever can he be doing out here?†and we hurried on; for the dog is a valuable one, and is never let out without an escort. A turn in the lane brought us face to face with a tall, familiar masculine figure.
“Why, wherever have you come from?†I exclaimed.
“I’ve just made my escape from the tame lunatic who seems to be in charge of the cottage,†said the Head of Affairs cheerfully, as he relieved Ursula of the quart of milk. “And I would suggest, my dear, that the next time you propose to turn your house into a sanatorium for ‘Mentally Deficients,’ you might give your family due notice. A shock like that isn’t good for one after climbing such a hill.â€
And he might not have been particularly mollified when, later in the evening, Eileen offered the following apology:—
“I’m very sorry, sir, that I kept you waiting outside all that time in the cold; only how was I to know you were a gentleman, sir, when you looked soexactlylike a burglar?â€
But, fortunately, in the interval he had discovered, in his dressing-room, a new-but-forgotten pair of boots, and a not-at-all-bad-considering-it’s-war-time overcoat; and, naturally, he was inclined to take a roseate view of life.