BEYOND THE GRAY GATE.POORNat Chaytor had this set once. It is very inconvenient—just two rooms and a nest of cupboards called a kitchen. You never saw such cupboards, such idiotic waste of space! Probably not. Every set is different. The old fellows who designed the place were freakish. It is small and inconvenient, but the best I can afford. I’m three quarters in arrears with the rent, as it is. Some day I shall have to shoot the moon and get the boys in the other sets to help me do it. We all hang together in adversity.When Chaytor took it he was a clerk in the City at one hundred and eighty pounds a year. On one hundred and eighty pounds a year he married Minnie, who was the lady typewriting clerk in the same office. They lived here—just for a bit, as he always explained—until their ship came home. He was a most hopeful fellow. They pegged on prettycomfortably for a time. Minnie smartened up the rooms—that plush bracket on the wall above your head was hers. She turned up her nose pretty considerably at other ladies in the Inn. She routed Chaytor’s laundress. The poor old soul came and poured out her woes to me. She had everything her own way so long as Chaytor was a bachelor. I remember that he came home from the City one day in his lunch hour—which he usually stretched into two—and found her asleep on his bed. She had not even troubled to take off her battered black bonnet or the sacking apron whose narrow string kept her together at the waist. But Minnie, as she rather snappishly said, was not going to “put up with such ways. She would rather do the work herself.” So Mrs. Percival got a week’s notice.“I’ve done for dozens of gentlemen in the Inn, as you knows, sir,” she said pathetically to me; “and then to be sacked by a hussy like her. An’ me the widow of a solicitor myself, and a lady by birth.”Things went on well enough with the Chaytors for a few months. We did not see much of Nat; Minnie had a freezing, fine-lady manner with oldbachelor friends, and liked her husband to go to bed when she did—punctually at eleven. Things went on well enough until he got discharged from his berth in the City. It was the usual story—business bad, reducing the staff, and so on. But I rather fancy that Nat’s easy hours had something to do with it. He always turned up half an hour late in the morning, took two hours for his lunch, another hour for afternoon tea, and went off at six every night, very often leaving the members of the firm at their desks. He had that fierce, sick hatred of City life which so many fellows have—nearly all the fellows who are good for anything. The dozens that I have seen chuck the accursed City! Some of these go up and some go under. But whichever way it is, they live—or die—free men.He lost his berth. He was rather relieved than otherwise. He had been expecting it for a long time. A City clerk’s is a grim calling. He is never safe, and he knows that once out of a situation the chances are ten to one against his getting another. It is like losing your footing in a crowd—there is small chance of getting up again. Orion knew that;it egged him on to murder the old woman in Great Ormond Street.No doubt Nat had a hot time with Minnie when he told her the news. She was one of those small, sharp-featured, rasping-voiced girls, with an ineffaceable sneer on her lips. Her creed was getting on in the world. She had been hoping that Nat would have a rise—two hundred a year, so that they might have a house all to themselves in the suburbs, and a little maidservant with a cap and apron. She said that the Inn wasn’t a fit place for a respectable young woman, and very likely she was right.But Chaytor, as usual, put a good face on the affair. I think he was genuinely glad. The City fogs hurt his chest, he said; and was a man a slave or a schoolboy, that he should mount the same confounded office stool every morning, year in and year out!“They only give us a fortnight’s holiday,” he added, “and then it is always wet. Find me the City clerk who has ever had a fine fortnight for his annual holiday!”Minnie cried out savagely, “Stuff and nonsense!”She asked him where he expected to find thirty-five pounds a year rent and a pound a week housekeeping, to say nothing of extras such as clothes.“Easily enough,” Chaytor cried airily. “I’m going in for journalism.”And then it began—the long, heart-breaking struggle—with a shrew at his elbow thrown in. He used to sit at the window and wait for the last post every evening. He watched the postman cross the square and fumble at his bag.“That article is sure to be accepted,” he would call into the room to Minnie. “Here is the check coming upstairs. We’ll go down to your home for a little holiday.”But the check never came. It was always a long envelope addressed in his own handwriting and containing his “copy” and the diabolically polite regrets of the editor. Poor old Chaytor!Minnie carefully cleaned and oiled her typewriter and put an advertisement in a literary paper forcopying work—quoting a penny a thousand less than the other advertisers.The quick clinkety-clank of the typewriter tortured Chaytor; he hated machinery. He said mournfully that the world was rapidly becoming machine-made. Of course Minnie asked acidly, “where would he be if it were not for machines?”Sometimes he got ten shillings, once a guinea, for an article, but it was the copying work that kept them. I remember the day when he got the guinea. He went out and spent two shillings on a plant in a pot for Minnie. You should have seen the look on her face when he presented it! I happened to be there. She went on clanking furiously, just spitting out through the din of her keys:“The baker came while you were out. I had to shut the oak and keep as still as a mouse. We owehimten shillings. I don’t know where you think it is coming from.”I suppose she was right, but one couldn’t help being sorry for Chaytor. He wasn’t really fit for this work-a-day world. I often had a queer feeling that he did not mean to stop in it long.One morning in early April he burst out laughing. He was sitting at a table near the window polishing up one of his articles, and Minnie was typing at another table in the middle of the room.“What is the matter?” she asked sharply.He looked at her across the machine in a dazed way.“Oh, nothing!” he muttered, confused by her clear, business-like glance. “I was only wondering why I am here—that’s all. It seemed odd.”“I wish you were not here,” she returned practically. “Go and hunt round for a berth! There must be plenty. Why, if you began at £80 it would be better than nothing.”Then she got up, saying it was time to get something for dinner. She came in with her hat and cape on to ask what he would like. The shabbiness of that hat and cape struck his heart, although he had not quite got rid of the dazed, unreal feeling which had come over him so suddenly. He noticed too, that Minnie’s cheeks, so pink once, had deepened to mottled purple, that her shallow eyes were hard and her cheek-bones sharp. He worried himselfby wondering where her old self had gone. The girl he had courted under City gas lamps had left him and put a shrewish woman in her place. But she must have gone somewhere, that delicately tinted, coquettish girl. What became of cast-off selves?“Well?” she said crisply, investigating the contents of her purse.“Chops?”“At thirteen pence a pound! No, thank you. A bit of beefsteak and a spring cabbage. I shan’t be long. I shall just run down Red Lion Street.”She whisked off with her worn purse and her string bag. Chaytor began to dream of the country, which he knew very well, although he had never been more than ten miles from London since his childhood. But Minnie was a Somersetshire girl. She was always scattering careless word pictures. He knew just when you might find the first primroses, in sheltered spots, what cherry blossom was like, how they carted home hay. He knew the earliest date for the cuckoo, and how persistently the wryneck called through April and May; knew thatthe first notes of the nightingales were unsteady, that ladies’ smocks and king-cups only grew in damp spots.He laughed. He felt that the country was his own rich inheritance. It really was ridiculous! A grim, rare, ripe joke that he—with such a kingdom of earth and sky—should be going through this farce. Why was he here? Why had he come? Why was he strangling himself slowly with thick London smoke? Why was he driving himself half mad to make both ends meet, to turn off articles suited to the popular taste—the debased popular taste which he scorned! It was queer. He laughed again.Then he thought he would go out. Minnie would be annoyed when he came home and said that he had only been for a walk and not for a berth; but when you are playing at life, just masquerading, a woman’s anger does not matter very much. He went across the square. I saw him go. It was such a spring-like morning—in the Inn—that I almost called out of the window to say that I would come too. Instead of that, I watched him from behindthe curtain and noticed, for the first time, how slowly he went, how hunched his shoulders were.He went across to the Holborn Town Hall, where the trams start. He went by one to Stamford Hill and got down and went crawling along a row of new houses. They were villas of the sort that Minnie had been ambitious for when there was some chance of his screw being raised to two hundred pounds. They were semi-detached; between each pair was a narrow passage, convenient for the carting of coal and refuse. He stopped at one of these shoots; the passage was barred by a gate, an unpainted gate of gray oak.He pushed it open, shut it softly, gave a last look back, and then went down the narrow entry. New walls of cheap brick rose on each side; the April wind hooted softly after him. At the end of the passage was another gate, which he went through. Beyond it was open common.There had been rain. He saw stretches of dim brown and bleached yellow, broken here and there by the bright mustard tint of fully blown broom and patched with little pools on which the sun shone,turning them into irregular plates of turquoise. There was a tethered goat with a little kid by her side. Haughty geese, with their newly hatched families behind them, strutted proudly. There were ever so many young things; humpy, clumsy calves, ducklings trying to swim in the pools with all the dignity and address of their elders; a colt, set on long, stick-like, squarely placed legs—like a toy wooden horse—and with a funny tail like a hearth brush. Chaytor laughed heartily with recollection of this colt when he was telling us his experiences.The heather sprang up after his feet had crushed it. Everything was whole and sweet. He sniffed at a delicious, intangible smell. He sat down, the ground yielded to his body like a pillow. He gave his aching lungs, clogged with so many years of smoke and fog, their fill. There was no house in sight, no, not one. No chimney speared the sky. The sky! He looked up, and the blue and yellow blinded him. He looked down and saw only wide clean common, patched by broom and gorse, spread with withered heather. A bird flew up singing, as if its throat would burst. Across the commoncame a jerky, regular call. Something tight came up in his neck and his eyes grew hot and dry. He had heard the lark. He had heard the cuckoo. He had ceased to masquerade, to play the fool. He had come to his own. He jumped up with a tremendous feeling of strength and exhilaration and went on. He swung his shoulders with a grand free swing. He looked about him, intently, critically, as a man looks at his inheritance.The common seemed to be garnering itself and the face of the country was changing. He was approaching a pastoral district. He crossed a bridge; on one side was an iron railing, on the other a low coping of stone. He climbed over a stile. It had easy steps and a broad top—a good stile to linger on. It led into a little copse; merely a copse fringed with hazel, with a thick carpet of rotting leaves, with primroses and oxlips holding up their starry heads, with bluebells making a powdery haze.There were lovers in the copse. They stared at him furtively, then scuttled into the shadow like timid birds. But he saw both the man and the girl grin sheepishly.Beyond the copse was luscious, elastic pasture land. He went lightly along, noticing everything with microscopic fidelity. Women in the distance were bent double as they rooted out the flaming charlock from a field of barley.Presently he saw an empty cottage, with broken windows and dropping roof of thatch. He wandered round it, looking in at rooms which were low-pitched and floored with flagstones, and which had yawning hearths for a wood fire. He stood in the orchard, where a red cow who had come in through a gap in the hedge was munching rank grass. The apple trees, with lichened, twisted trunks, were beginning to bloom. He walked round each tree slowly, as if he were some ancient priest intent on sacred rites. Then he wondered idly if there were any Quarranden apples. Minnie’s mother, the Somersetshire wife, had sent her daughter up a basket of those once. They were like Minnie’s own cheeks, and the red tinge went faintly through. When you took a big, rough bite, you saw pink bubbles of juice. It was like biting human flesh. He never forgot that basket of apples. Their arrivalset a white stone in his life. They brought him into actual touch with his kingdom.After a while he came out on a dusty road. Two boys, tow-headed and in picturesque rags, were looking after two lean cows who grazed by the waste. These children grinned at him broadly, as the lovers in the copse had done—though, like the lovers, they made no sound. It was a very silent world, except for the sing and cry of birds and animals. The boys grinned, evidently finding him much more diverting than the scarecrow three fields off, which was hanging its limp head and waving its fantastic arms. Chaytor felt uncomfortable; he was always a sensitive chap.“They are laughing at my top hat and black coat,” he said to himself. “One ought to have a tweed suit for the country. That article on ‘Why Wear a White Shirt?’ is certainly in the popular style and will be taken. I’ll turn off two or three more in the same vein and then get some tweeds. Minnie and I can come here often. It won’t cost much. We can always run to the tram fare.”The country echoed with weak bleats; it was themonth when young lambs are dropped. He went on. The sky kept changing. Sometimes it was reminiscent of towns. He dreaded to see some foul gust of smoke break over the misty hills which belted him. Then it was dappled, then clear blue. It sloped to the horizon in streaks, as if swept by a broad-lipped brush. The earth changed too; it was green, purple, spice-colored, or hot red. Clumps of elms rose here and there, usually marking a homestead. Their black branches waved like the straggling feathers in Minnie’s Sunday hat. There was no sound—but the sound of the cuckoo and of sheep. He seemed to actually hear the silence. He was away from machines at last; not even the shriek of a railway engine disturbed him. He was away from the clack of praiseworthy Minnie’s typewriter. He let it flood his ears—this stillness. These were the restful, silent moments he had often longed for. Everything was stationary. There was no fierce struggle to get on, to grab more than your neighbor.He drank in all the wonder of the hedgerows; the tight, shy fronds of the male fern—all the marvelous secrecy of the curved bank. He saw primroses, thedapple of pale lilac where milkmaid bloomed. Dandelions, like dropped guineas, rose from the grass.He came to another house, and stared at the long wasteful slope of the red roof, at narrow windows lurking under heavy eaves, at the tracery of oak beams across greenish-white plaster walls. A tremendous pear tree just in bloom shaded the house door. A patch of kitchen garden had been turned up roughly in autumn; there were black heaps of manure, the size and shape of haycocks, on the ridged earth. Clothes hung on a line—dim colors, patched garments of outlandish shape. The bloom of the pear tree was falling; it was gray on the stone path.A young woman came out to the gate and stared at him curiously. He asked her for a drink of water. She led the way into the dairy, never saying a word. He thought the silence of country people very strange. He had become accustomed to the restless loquacity of the eager Cockney.She was a fresh-faced young woman and seemed fragrant, just as everything else was. A robust woman! Her arms beneath her rolled-up sleeveswere quite brawny—rosy, round arms, dented at the elbows and a deeper red. He watched her dip the milk. The dairy was cool; he thought of a sweet, intensely still grave. There were shallow bowls full of cream. There was a slab of slate on which was butter in firm pounds, all marked with the same mark. She gave him the milk and shook her head when he offered to pay. Their hands touched round the mug, which was striped blue and white. Hers was strong and dry and very cold.When he went away he looked back once. She was at the gate, watching him with a slow, speculative glance in which he fancied he detected a touch of fear. He took away a vivid impression of her. She was a ruddy-faced young woman in a lilac cotton gown. It was short-waisted, and her linen apron was tied very high, almost under her arms. She seemed oddly shaped—a creature with a minimum of body; all curly head, round, big bust, and long limbs.*****He sidled out at the oak gate stealthily. He was so afraid that he would be seen, that someone elsewould find that walk; someone tainted with the horrible modern idea of Progress; someone who would build and bring machinery. He took the first tram home. The people who also rode on it had never seemed more cadaverous, more fusty. They exhaled an odor of wardrobe shops.I met him in the square almost at his own doorway. The deep hollows in his face were filled with red. His long hands were quivering with excitement.“Come up to my rooms,” he said hastily. “I’ve something to tell you, I’ve had a most wonderful experience.”We went up. He opened the door with his key. Minnie was cooking the dinner, her bit of beefsteak fizzled and sputtered savagely in the pan. Her pretty little pinched face was like a thundercloud.“Never mind the dinner,” Chaytor said, going up to the fire and kissing her effusively. “My darling! I’ve had such a find. We might go and live there; rent would be next to nothing. My articles would keep the pot boiling. I should insist on your selling your typewriter—no cursed machinery there!I should have to be careful going in and out of the gray gate—that is all. If anyone else spotted it we should be ruined.”He sat down in the first chair, panting a little. Minnie said impatiently:“What on earth does he mean?”She dished up her steak and pressed me none too graciously to have some with them. So we three sat round the little table, and Chaytor told us all he had seen. He told it so vividly—I have repeated it to you almost word for word—that he really flung a glamour over this mean little London room. He sat just there, with his back to the cupboard where they kept their bundles of wood—where I still keep mine. Poor Chaytor! The smell of the country seemed to blow over us all. Even Minnie grew faintly excited.“But it is impossible,” she said. “Why, I know Stamford Hill; an aunt of mine lived there once. She had a house standing in its own grounds.” She glanced at me to see if this fact impressed me. “But there is no country there. I’m certain of it. I used to spend my Sundays with Aunt Jane. Thelast old house was pulled down years ago. Six streets of villas stand on the site. I’ve seen them.”But Chaytor babbled on of his lilac woman.“It’s all nonsense,” Minnie said more clinchingly. “You dreamt it—I believe you’re asleep more than half your time. And even if you weren’t asleep, everyone knows that consumptives have queer fancies. It’s no good wriggling on your chair like that when you know very well that the doctor told you ever so long ago that you had only one lung.”“It was real,” he insisted, flinching a little at her candor. “So real that I seemed to have been there before.”“I know,” I said soothingly. “We all have that feeling sometimes. Bloater paste serves me like that; makes me think of a red-haired fellow in a punt. These things are odd. Murphy used to feel the same over ripe plums—onlyhiswas an empty barn and a thunderstorm.”I’ve always tried hard to be practical, you know. I’m convinced that money is the secret of all happiness—though I’ve never had the peculiar quality thatmakes it. For once I thought that I’d be business-like.“If you should be right,” I said to Chaytor, “there is a fortune in it. I think I know a man who would finance us. By what you say the land is ripe for development; we could cut it up into estates—plant shrubs and rows of horse chestnuts—you know the sort of thing. We’d call it the Marlowe estate, after the Inn.”Chaytor flinched; then he said with a droll smile:“If I thought you meant that I would cut my throat rather than take you there. But you never were a money-grubber, old fellow. Come and see for yourself. Everything will be as I have told you—the bridge, the empty house, the little wood. And the woman at the dairy—we’ll get her to give us some milk.”Minnie was staring at him with round, cold eyes. Her elbows were on the table.He touched her hand.“Come on,” he said tenderly.She got up, looked at her machine, hesitated, and then said, “It’s a fine afternoon and a blow will dome good. I’ve finished that MS. We may as well.”She put on her best blouse and a pair of new gloves. It was a beautiful afternoon, and we were all gay as we trundled along on the roof of the tram.Chaytor led us to the row of semi-detached villas. Minnie eyed them admiringly.“That is the sort of house I should like,” she said with a sigh. “There is every convenience.”Chaytor was going along very slowly, looking intently at the mouth of every passage. He went to the very end of the row. We followed, feeling half excited and half foolish. I said with sudden suspicion to Minnie:“It isn’t the first of April, is it?”She returned with dangerous brevity:“No. The sixth.”She was eying Chaytor with a look that boded a row. He suddenly wheeled round sharply; even she was startled, I think, by the change in his face—it was gray, like the gate of which he talked.“It isn’t here,” he said in a quavering voice. “It’s gone—the gray gate. Gone!”He looked at us with panic-stricken eyes. Then he started eagerly back, peering into every passage. When he reached the last he turned again.“It’s gone,” he repeated. “Oh, my God! it’s gone. I’ve lost it!”He let his head drop, and leaned helplessly against the railings of the next house. Minnie glanced at me eloquently, raising her nose and brows and shoulders.“Let’s get him home,” she said in an agony for appearances. “There is a tram at the corner. Hurry up. Don’t be such a fool, Nat. I never was so ashamed in my life. There was nothing—I never expected there would be. Just see how that woman across the way is staring. Well she may! I knew there would not be anything. How could there be? You can see the back-garden palings and the dust hole at the end of every one.”We had reached the tram. She bundled Chaytor up the steps and followed him, not seeming to care whether I came or not.He was never the same afterward. He never wrote an article. He talked of nothing but the graygate. He used to beg Minnie piteously for his tram fare. Sometimes she gave the coppers just to be rid of him.“He’s going ‘dotty,’”she said fiercely to me, beating the inanimate type with her quick fingers.Sometimes he would wake up in the morning and sing as he dressed—putting on his clothes with feverish, jerking hands, she used to come and tell me. He said he had made a mistake in the row—those cursed villas were so much alike. Would she come too? He was sure of finding it this time. He wouldn’t bother her for any more tram fares. He was very sorry.When he walked he used to put out his hand like a blind man and grope with his long fingers—as if he hoped to feel something that he was not permitted to see. He was feeling for wood—for the gray gate. I met him once and took his arm and carried him off to have a drink.He said to me quite seriously, as we stood at the bar:“These bricks are killing me. Why the devilcan’t people keep still? It is nothing but pulling down houses and putting up taller ones all over Bloomsbury. I tell you frankly, old fellow, I can’t breathe. My throat burns—as if they were stuffing their lime down it. Every scaffold pole knocks at my heart. It’s killing me. You haven’t any coppers about you, I suppose? The tram fare isn’t much. I could get down to Stamford Hill and back again before dusk.”One night I saw Minnie run bareheaded across the square toward my door. I had the second floor at No. 7 in those days. She looked a little wild and frightened, but she was self-possessed enough to throw a look of stone at Sophia Dominy, who was going toward Kinsman’s set.Presently I heard her on my stairs and went out.“Come over to Nat,” she panted. “I think he is dying. The doctor told me that bit of lung he had would last for years, but it isn’t going to.”He was lying in the bed. It stood under the window then. Near to his hand was a pile of those hateful long envelopes. The editorial regrets thathad helped to break his heart peeped out from the open ends.“I’ve been looking over some of these things,” he panted, touching the articles and smiling at me in the old droll, half-scornful way. “Some of them were bad and vulgar enough—Heaven knows. Yet they did not get accepted. ‘Does Cold Mutton Cause Gumboil?’—I thought that would be sure to go. ‘The Woman with the White Shoe Strings’—it is a most sensational detective story—and yet, one after the other, they threw my stuff back at me. I’ve written the title pages afresh ever so many times, so that the MS. should not look as if it had been hawked about.”It was a very hot July night, the windows were open top and bottom. Jimmy, across the way, was singing the latest song from the “halls” in his feeble voice.Poor Nat was quiet for a little. Then he turned his head suddenly and looked at Minnie. I’ve seen him look like that at her when they were courting. No doubt she remembered, for she bent down and softly shook up his pillows.“It’s no good your going for the doctor,” she whispered huskily back in answer to my question. “He was here this morning. He told me he could do nothing. I can’t afford to throw away money for nothing, can I?”There were tears in her eyes, like shining splinters of glass. We heard footsteps on the pavement below, and men’s voices came up to the open window. The fellows had come home from the City. Nat did not seem to hear; he was devouring Minnie’s face line by line, looking at her in a dazed, silly way.“It is good of you to come,” he said at last, very simply and gratefully. “How did you find it? So few people—country people, you know—have heard of the Inn. It must seem a noisy, dirty place to you—there are blacks all down your nice white apron. But we won’t stay. You will show me the way back. It was very curious about that gate.”*****Minnie looked very well in widows’ weeds—those fair, neat little women generally do. I always tried very hard to like Minnie. I admired her practicalspirit. Practicality means money, and money means ease. She came knocking at my door three days after the funeral, and said beseechingly:“Come down with me on the tram to Stamford Hill.”We went. The trams were crowded, it was Saturday afternoon. We walked slowly along the row of villas in the blazing sun—the row where Nat had sworn he found the gray gate.“Poor old chap,” I said. “He wasn’t fit for this world. But what a gold mine there would have been in it!”“It was at this house he seemed to stop most,” she said. “I remember the India-rubber plant in the front window.”We stopped. There was an old, palsied sort of fellow tidying up the rockery. I spoke to him—don’t know why.“I suppose you remember this neighborhood before it was built on?”“When it was a one-eyed country place,” elaborated Minnie.He straightened his body on his spade, and lookedat us, cunningly, like old people often do. An eager light came into his bleared eyes. It seemed to me the light of youth breaking uncannily through the crust of seventy years. He remembered—sure he did. He became suddenly voluble—talking more to himself than to us.“It’s a good many year since this ’ere part was open country. Ah! there was a gate on the common—hereabouts, as near as I can mind. A bit on was a bridge, stone one side and iron t’other. A man had to keep a sharp lookout if he come home full o’ liquor nights. The rail runs there now—they built a new ’un. There was a copse—Shannonses copse, I think they called it, but my memory aint what it was. You went over a stile. That was a rare place for coortin’”—he grinned, showing a toothless cavern, and he spluttered with merry memories as he rocked on the spade.“There was a cottage near by—my father had it. I jest call to mindhisfather plantin’ the orchard—a very old man as couldn’t expect to see the fruit. A fine orchard it wur—Blenum orringe trees and Tom Spuds and all sorts. Dickson’s tannery standsthere now. If you went on, through the fields and across the road, you come to Hillyar’s farm—that’s Stern & Carson’s brewery. Hillyar’s pears was wonderful for keepin’. I mind Loo Hillyar—sich arms;” he leered at Minnie, whose face was chalky under her black bonnet. “You don’t see young women like that these times. Sich a hand at butter-making. It must be fifty—forty year ago or more since me an’ her drove geese over the common. It couldn’t ha’ been so fur from where we stands, neither. Here, as you may say, or thereabouts—but the face of the earth do change so.”He spat on his hands and bent his back to the weary task of tidying the melancholy mound of clinkers and starved ferns. I gave him sixpence and I gave Minnie my arm. She clutched it wildly. There was a shadow on her pretty, common face—the shadow of the unexplainable.What did it mean? I don’t pretend to say. Odd, wasn’t it? But then the world is odd. We just skim it and fancy we have proved all.Minnie? She went back to a City office as typist, and she married the principal in less than a year.She was always the sort of girl to do well for herself—her marriage with Chaytor was an aberration. She lives in a very swagger house at East Croydon, wears rather loud dresses, and talks persistently of “my cook.”
POORNat Chaytor had this set once. It is very inconvenient—just two rooms and a nest of cupboards called a kitchen. You never saw such cupboards, such idiotic waste of space! Probably not. Every set is different. The old fellows who designed the place were freakish. It is small and inconvenient, but the best I can afford. I’m three quarters in arrears with the rent, as it is. Some day I shall have to shoot the moon and get the boys in the other sets to help me do it. We all hang together in adversity.
When Chaytor took it he was a clerk in the City at one hundred and eighty pounds a year. On one hundred and eighty pounds a year he married Minnie, who was the lady typewriting clerk in the same office. They lived here—just for a bit, as he always explained—until their ship came home. He was a most hopeful fellow. They pegged on prettycomfortably for a time. Minnie smartened up the rooms—that plush bracket on the wall above your head was hers. She turned up her nose pretty considerably at other ladies in the Inn. She routed Chaytor’s laundress. The poor old soul came and poured out her woes to me. She had everything her own way so long as Chaytor was a bachelor. I remember that he came home from the City one day in his lunch hour—which he usually stretched into two—and found her asleep on his bed. She had not even troubled to take off her battered black bonnet or the sacking apron whose narrow string kept her together at the waist. But Minnie, as she rather snappishly said, was not going to “put up with such ways. She would rather do the work herself.” So Mrs. Percival got a week’s notice.
“I’ve done for dozens of gentlemen in the Inn, as you knows, sir,” she said pathetically to me; “and then to be sacked by a hussy like her. An’ me the widow of a solicitor myself, and a lady by birth.”
Things went on well enough with the Chaytors for a few months. We did not see much of Nat; Minnie had a freezing, fine-lady manner with oldbachelor friends, and liked her husband to go to bed when she did—punctually at eleven. Things went on well enough until he got discharged from his berth in the City. It was the usual story—business bad, reducing the staff, and so on. But I rather fancy that Nat’s easy hours had something to do with it. He always turned up half an hour late in the morning, took two hours for his lunch, another hour for afternoon tea, and went off at six every night, very often leaving the members of the firm at their desks. He had that fierce, sick hatred of City life which so many fellows have—nearly all the fellows who are good for anything. The dozens that I have seen chuck the accursed City! Some of these go up and some go under. But whichever way it is, they live—or die—free men.
He lost his berth. He was rather relieved than otherwise. He had been expecting it for a long time. A City clerk’s is a grim calling. He is never safe, and he knows that once out of a situation the chances are ten to one against his getting another. It is like losing your footing in a crowd—there is small chance of getting up again. Orion knew that;it egged him on to murder the old woman in Great Ormond Street.
No doubt Nat had a hot time with Minnie when he told her the news. She was one of those small, sharp-featured, rasping-voiced girls, with an ineffaceable sneer on her lips. Her creed was getting on in the world. She had been hoping that Nat would have a rise—two hundred a year, so that they might have a house all to themselves in the suburbs, and a little maidservant with a cap and apron. She said that the Inn wasn’t a fit place for a respectable young woman, and very likely she was right.
But Chaytor, as usual, put a good face on the affair. I think he was genuinely glad. The City fogs hurt his chest, he said; and was a man a slave or a schoolboy, that he should mount the same confounded office stool every morning, year in and year out!
“They only give us a fortnight’s holiday,” he added, “and then it is always wet. Find me the City clerk who has ever had a fine fortnight for his annual holiday!”
Minnie cried out savagely, “Stuff and nonsense!”
She asked him where he expected to find thirty-five pounds a year rent and a pound a week housekeeping, to say nothing of extras such as clothes.
“Easily enough,” Chaytor cried airily. “I’m going in for journalism.”
And then it began—the long, heart-breaking struggle—with a shrew at his elbow thrown in. He used to sit at the window and wait for the last post every evening. He watched the postman cross the square and fumble at his bag.
“That article is sure to be accepted,” he would call into the room to Minnie. “Here is the check coming upstairs. We’ll go down to your home for a little holiday.”
But the check never came. It was always a long envelope addressed in his own handwriting and containing his “copy” and the diabolically polite regrets of the editor. Poor old Chaytor!
Minnie carefully cleaned and oiled her typewriter and put an advertisement in a literary paper forcopying work—quoting a penny a thousand less than the other advertisers.
The quick clinkety-clank of the typewriter tortured Chaytor; he hated machinery. He said mournfully that the world was rapidly becoming machine-made. Of course Minnie asked acidly, “where would he be if it were not for machines?”
Sometimes he got ten shillings, once a guinea, for an article, but it was the copying work that kept them. I remember the day when he got the guinea. He went out and spent two shillings on a plant in a pot for Minnie. You should have seen the look on her face when he presented it! I happened to be there. She went on clanking furiously, just spitting out through the din of her keys:
“The baker came while you were out. I had to shut the oak and keep as still as a mouse. We owehimten shillings. I don’t know where you think it is coming from.”
I suppose she was right, but one couldn’t help being sorry for Chaytor. He wasn’t really fit for this work-a-day world. I often had a queer feeling that he did not mean to stop in it long.
One morning in early April he burst out laughing. He was sitting at a table near the window polishing up one of his articles, and Minnie was typing at another table in the middle of the room.
“What is the matter?” she asked sharply.
He looked at her across the machine in a dazed way.
“Oh, nothing!” he muttered, confused by her clear, business-like glance. “I was only wondering why I am here—that’s all. It seemed odd.”
“I wish you were not here,” she returned practically. “Go and hunt round for a berth! There must be plenty. Why, if you began at £80 it would be better than nothing.”
Then she got up, saying it was time to get something for dinner. She came in with her hat and cape on to ask what he would like. The shabbiness of that hat and cape struck his heart, although he had not quite got rid of the dazed, unreal feeling which had come over him so suddenly. He noticed too, that Minnie’s cheeks, so pink once, had deepened to mottled purple, that her shallow eyes were hard and her cheek-bones sharp. He worried himselfby wondering where her old self had gone. The girl he had courted under City gas lamps had left him and put a shrewish woman in her place. But she must have gone somewhere, that delicately tinted, coquettish girl. What became of cast-off selves?
“Well?” she said crisply, investigating the contents of her purse.
“Chops?”
“At thirteen pence a pound! No, thank you. A bit of beefsteak and a spring cabbage. I shan’t be long. I shall just run down Red Lion Street.”
She whisked off with her worn purse and her string bag. Chaytor began to dream of the country, which he knew very well, although he had never been more than ten miles from London since his childhood. But Minnie was a Somersetshire girl. She was always scattering careless word pictures. He knew just when you might find the first primroses, in sheltered spots, what cherry blossom was like, how they carted home hay. He knew the earliest date for the cuckoo, and how persistently the wryneck called through April and May; knew thatthe first notes of the nightingales were unsteady, that ladies’ smocks and king-cups only grew in damp spots.
He laughed. He felt that the country was his own rich inheritance. It really was ridiculous! A grim, rare, ripe joke that he—with such a kingdom of earth and sky—should be going through this farce. Why was he here? Why had he come? Why was he strangling himself slowly with thick London smoke? Why was he driving himself half mad to make both ends meet, to turn off articles suited to the popular taste—the debased popular taste which he scorned! It was queer. He laughed again.
Then he thought he would go out. Minnie would be annoyed when he came home and said that he had only been for a walk and not for a berth; but when you are playing at life, just masquerading, a woman’s anger does not matter very much. He went across the square. I saw him go. It was such a spring-like morning—in the Inn—that I almost called out of the window to say that I would come too. Instead of that, I watched him from behindthe curtain and noticed, for the first time, how slowly he went, how hunched his shoulders were.
He went across to the Holborn Town Hall, where the trams start. He went by one to Stamford Hill and got down and went crawling along a row of new houses. They were villas of the sort that Minnie had been ambitious for when there was some chance of his screw being raised to two hundred pounds. They were semi-detached; between each pair was a narrow passage, convenient for the carting of coal and refuse. He stopped at one of these shoots; the passage was barred by a gate, an unpainted gate of gray oak.
He pushed it open, shut it softly, gave a last look back, and then went down the narrow entry. New walls of cheap brick rose on each side; the April wind hooted softly after him. At the end of the passage was another gate, which he went through. Beyond it was open common.
There had been rain. He saw stretches of dim brown and bleached yellow, broken here and there by the bright mustard tint of fully blown broom and patched with little pools on which the sun shone,turning them into irregular plates of turquoise. There was a tethered goat with a little kid by her side. Haughty geese, with their newly hatched families behind them, strutted proudly. There were ever so many young things; humpy, clumsy calves, ducklings trying to swim in the pools with all the dignity and address of their elders; a colt, set on long, stick-like, squarely placed legs—like a toy wooden horse—and with a funny tail like a hearth brush. Chaytor laughed heartily with recollection of this colt when he was telling us his experiences.
The heather sprang up after his feet had crushed it. Everything was whole and sweet. He sniffed at a delicious, intangible smell. He sat down, the ground yielded to his body like a pillow. He gave his aching lungs, clogged with so many years of smoke and fog, their fill. There was no house in sight, no, not one. No chimney speared the sky. The sky! He looked up, and the blue and yellow blinded him. He looked down and saw only wide clean common, patched by broom and gorse, spread with withered heather. A bird flew up singing, as if its throat would burst. Across the commoncame a jerky, regular call. Something tight came up in his neck and his eyes grew hot and dry. He had heard the lark. He had heard the cuckoo. He had ceased to masquerade, to play the fool. He had come to his own. He jumped up with a tremendous feeling of strength and exhilaration and went on. He swung his shoulders with a grand free swing. He looked about him, intently, critically, as a man looks at his inheritance.
The common seemed to be garnering itself and the face of the country was changing. He was approaching a pastoral district. He crossed a bridge; on one side was an iron railing, on the other a low coping of stone. He climbed over a stile. It had easy steps and a broad top—a good stile to linger on. It led into a little copse; merely a copse fringed with hazel, with a thick carpet of rotting leaves, with primroses and oxlips holding up their starry heads, with bluebells making a powdery haze.
There were lovers in the copse. They stared at him furtively, then scuttled into the shadow like timid birds. But he saw both the man and the girl grin sheepishly.
Beyond the copse was luscious, elastic pasture land. He went lightly along, noticing everything with microscopic fidelity. Women in the distance were bent double as they rooted out the flaming charlock from a field of barley.
Presently he saw an empty cottage, with broken windows and dropping roof of thatch. He wandered round it, looking in at rooms which were low-pitched and floored with flagstones, and which had yawning hearths for a wood fire. He stood in the orchard, where a red cow who had come in through a gap in the hedge was munching rank grass. The apple trees, with lichened, twisted trunks, were beginning to bloom. He walked round each tree slowly, as if he were some ancient priest intent on sacred rites. Then he wondered idly if there were any Quarranden apples. Minnie’s mother, the Somersetshire wife, had sent her daughter up a basket of those once. They were like Minnie’s own cheeks, and the red tinge went faintly through. When you took a big, rough bite, you saw pink bubbles of juice. It was like biting human flesh. He never forgot that basket of apples. Their arrivalset a white stone in his life. They brought him into actual touch with his kingdom.
After a while he came out on a dusty road. Two boys, tow-headed and in picturesque rags, were looking after two lean cows who grazed by the waste. These children grinned at him broadly, as the lovers in the copse had done—though, like the lovers, they made no sound. It was a very silent world, except for the sing and cry of birds and animals. The boys grinned, evidently finding him much more diverting than the scarecrow three fields off, which was hanging its limp head and waving its fantastic arms. Chaytor felt uncomfortable; he was always a sensitive chap.
“They are laughing at my top hat and black coat,” he said to himself. “One ought to have a tweed suit for the country. That article on ‘Why Wear a White Shirt?’ is certainly in the popular style and will be taken. I’ll turn off two or three more in the same vein and then get some tweeds. Minnie and I can come here often. It won’t cost much. We can always run to the tram fare.”
The country echoed with weak bleats; it was themonth when young lambs are dropped. He went on. The sky kept changing. Sometimes it was reminiscent of towns. He dreaded to see some foul gust of smoke break over the misty hills which belted him. Then it was dappled, then clear blue. It sloped to the horizon in streaks, as if swept by a broad-lipped brush. The earth changed too; it was green, purple, spice-colored, or hot red. Clumps of elms rose here and there, usually marking a homestead. Their black branches waved like the straggling feathers in Minnie’s Sunday hat. There was no sound—but the sound of the cuckoo and of sheep. He seemed to actually hear the silence. He was away from machines at last; not even the shriek of a railway engine disturbed him. He was away from the clack of praiseworthy Minnie’s typewriter. He let it flood his ears—this stillness. These were the restful, silent moments he had often longed for. Everything was stationary. There was no fierce struggle to get on, to grab more than your neighbor.
He drank in all the wonder of the hedgerows; the tight, shy fronds of the male fern—all the marvelous secrecy of the curved bank. He saw primroses, thedapple of pale lilac where milkmaid bloomed. Dandelions, like dropped guineas, rose from the grass.
He came to another house, and stared at the long wasteful slope of the red roof, at narrow windows lurking under heavy eaves, at the tracery of oak beams across greenish-white plaster walls. A tremendous pear tree just in bloom shaded the house door. A patch of kitchen garden had been turned up roughly in autumn; there were black heaps of manure, the size and shape of haycocks, on the ridged earth. Clothes hung on a line—dim colors, patched garments of outlandish shape. The bloom of the pear tree was falling; it was gray on the stone path.
A young woman came out to the gate and stared at him curiously. He asked her for a drink of water. She led the way into the dairy, never saying a word. He thought the silence of country people very strange. He had become accustomed to the restless loquacity of the eager Cockney.
She was a fresh-faced young woman and seemed fragrant, just as everything else was. A robust woman! Her arms beneath her rolled-up sleeveswere quite brawny—rosy, round arms, dented at the elbows and a deeper red. He watched her dip the milk. The dairy was cool; he thought of a sweet, intensely still grave. There were shallow bowls full of cream. There was a slab of slate on which was butter in firm pounds, all marked with the same mark. She gave him the milk and shook her head when he offered to pay. Their hands touched round the mug, which was striped blue and white. Hers was strong and dry and very cold.
When he went away he looked back once. She was at the gate, watching him with a slow, speculative glance in which he fancied he detected a touch of fear. He took away a vivid impression of her. She was a ruddy-faced young woman in a lilac cotton gown. It was short-waisted, and her linen apron was tied very high, almost under her arms. She seemed oddly shaped—a creature with a minimum of body; all curly head, round, big bust, and long limbs.
*****
He sidled out at the oak gate stealthily. He was so afraid that he would be seen, that someone elsewould find that walk; someone tainted with the horrible modern idea of Progress; someone who would build and bring machinery. He took the first tram home. The people who also rode on it had never seemed more cadaverous, more fusty. They exhaled an odor of wardrobe shops.
I met him in the square almost at his own doorway. The deep hollows in his face were filled with red. His long hands were quivering with excitement.
“Come up to my rooms,” he said hastily. “I’ve something to tell you, I’ve had a most wonderful experience.”
We went up. He opened the door with his key. Minnie was cooking the dinner, her bit of beefsteak fizzled and sputtered savagely in the pan. Her pretty little pinched face was like a thundercloud.
“Never mind the dinner,” Chaytor said, going up to the fire and kissing her effusively. “My darling! I’ve had such a find. We might go and live there; rent would be next to nothing. My articles would keep the pot boiling. I should insist on your selling your typewriter—no cursed machinery there!I should have to be careful going in and out of the gray gate—that is all. If anyone else spotted it we should be ruined.”
He sat down in the first chair, panting a little. Minnie said impatiently:
“What on earth does he mean?”
She dished up her steak and pressed me none too graciously to have some with them. So we three sat round the little table, and Chaytor told us all he had seen. He told it so vividly—I have repeated it to you almost word for word—that he really flung a glamour over this mean little London room. He sat just there, with his back to the cupboard where they kept their bundles of wood—where I still keep mine. Poor Chaytor! The smell of the country seemed to blow over us all. Even Minnie grew faintly excited.
“But it is impossible,” she said. “Why, I know Stamford Hill; an aunt of mine lived there once. She had a house standing in its own grounds.” She glanced at me to see if this fact impressed me. “But there is no country there. I’m certain of it. I used to spend my Sundays with Aunt Jane. Thelast old house was pulled down years ago. Six streets of villas stand on the site. I’ve seen them.”
But Chaytor babbled on of his lilac woman.
“It’s all nonsense,” Minnie said more clinchingly. “You dreamt it—I believe you’re asleep more than half your time. And even if you weren’t asleep, everyone knows that consumptives have queer fancies. It’s no good wriggling on your chair like that when you know very well that the doctor told you ever so long ago that you had only one lung.”
“It was real,” he insisted, flinching a little at her candor. “So real that I seemed to have been there before.”
“I know,” I said soothingly. “We all have that feeling sometimes. Bloater paste serves me like that; makes me think of a red-haired fellow in a punt. These things are odd. Murphy used to feel the same over ripe plums—onlyhiswas an empty barn and a thunderstorm.”
I’ve always tried hard to be practical, you know. I’m convinced that money is the secret of all happiness—though I’ve never had the peculiar quality thatmakes it. For once I thought that I’d be business-like.
“If you should be right,” I said to Chaytor, “there is a fortune in it. I think I know a man who would finance us. By what you say the land is ripe for development; we could cut it up into estates—plant shrubs and rows of horse chestnuts—you know the sort of thing. We’d call it the Marlowe estate, after the Inn.”
Chaytor flinched; then he said with a droll smile:
“If I thought you meant that I would cut my throat rather than take you there. But you never were a money-grubber, old fellow. Come and see for yourself. Everything will be as I have told you—the bridge, the empty house, the little wood. And the woman at the dairy—we’ll get her to give us some milk.”
Minnie was staring at him with round, cold eyes. Her elbows were on the table.
He touched her hand.
“Come on,” he said tenderly.
She got up, looked at her machine, hesitated, and then said, “It’s a fine afternoon and a blow will dome good. I’ve finished that MS. We may as well.”
She put on her best blouse and a pair of new gloves. It was a beautiful afternoon, and we were all gay as we trundled along on the roof of the tram.
Chaytor led us to the row of semi-detached villas. Minnie eyed them admiringly.
“That is the sort of house I should like,” she said with a sigh. “There is every convenience.”
Chaytor was going along very slowly, looking intently at the mouth of every passage. He went to the very end of the row. We followed, feeling half excited and half foolish. I said with sudden suspicion to Minnie:
“It isn’t the first of April, is it?”
She returned with dangerous brevity:
“No. The sixth.”
She was eying Chaytor with a look that boded a row. He suddenly wheeled round sharply; even she was startled, I think, by the change in his face—it was gray, like the gate of which he talked.
“It isn’t here,” he said in a quavering voice. “It’s gone—the gray gate. Gone!”
He looked at us with panic-stricken eyes. Then he started eagerly back, peering into every passage. When he reached the last he turned again.
“It’s gone,” he repeated. “Oh, my God! it’s gone. I’ve lost it!”
He let his head drop, and leaned helplessly against the railings of the next house. Minnie glanced at me eloquently, raising her nose and brows and shoulders.
“Let’s get him home,” she said in an agony for appearances. “There is a tram at the corner. Hurry up. Don’t be such a fool, Nat. I never was so ashamed in my life. There was nothing—I never expected there would be. Just see how that woman across the way is staring. Well she may! I knew there would not be anything. How could there be? You can see the back-garden palings and the dust hole at the end of every one.”
We had reached the tram. She bundled Chaytor up the steps and followed him, not seeming to care whether I came or not.
He was never the same afterward. He never wrote an article. He talked of nothing but the graygate. He used to beg Minnie piteously for his tram fare. Sometimes she gave the coppers just to be rid of him.
“He’s going ‘dotty,’”she said fiercely to me, beating the inanimate type with her quick fingers.
Sometimes he would wake up in the morning and sing as he dressed—putting on his clothes with feverish, jerking hands, she used to come and tell me. He said he had made a mistake in the row—those cursed villas were so much alike. Would she come too? He was sure of finding it this time. He wouldn’t bother her for any more tram fares. He was very sorry.
When he walked he used to put out his hand like a blind man and grope with his long fingers—as if he hoped to feel something that he was not permitted to see. He was feeling for wood—for the gray gate. I met him once and took his arm and carried him off to have a drink.
He said to me quite seriously, as we stood at the bar:
“These bricks are killing me. Why the devilcan’t people keep still? It is nothing but pulling down houses and putting up taller ones all over Bloomsbury. I tell you frankly, old fellow, I can’t breathe. My throat burns—as if they were stuffing their lime down it. Every scaffold pole knocks at my heart. It’s killing me. You haven’t any coppers about you, I suppose? The tram fare isn’t much. I could get down to Stamford Hill and back again before dusk.”
One night I saw Minnie run bareheaded across the square toward my door. I had the second floor at No. 7 in those days. She looked a little wild and frightened, but she was self-possessed enough to throw a look of stone at Sophia Dominy, who was going toward Kinsman’s set.
Presently I heard her on my stairs and went out.
“Come over to Nat,” she panted. “I think he is dying. The doctor told me that bit of lung he had would last for years, but it isn’t going to.”
He was lying in the bed. It stood under the window then. Near to his hand was a pile of those hateful long envelopes. The editorial regrets thathad helped to break his heart peeped out from the open ends.
“I’ve been looking over some of these things,” he panted, touching the articles and smiling at me in the old droll, half-scornful way. “Some of them were bad and vulgar enough—Heaven knows. Yet they did not get accepted. ‘Does Cold Mutton Cause Gumboil?’—I thought that would be sure to go. ‘The Woman with the White Shoe Strings’—it is a most sensational detective story—and yet, one after the other, they threw my stuff back at me. I’ve written the title pages afresh ever so many times, so that the MS. should not look as if it had been hawked about.”
It was a very hot July night, the windows were open top and bottom. Jimmy, across the way, was singing the latest song from the “halls” in his feeble voice.
Poor Nat was quiet for a little. Then he turned his head suddenly and looked at Minnie. I’ve seen him look like that at her when they were courting. No doubt she remembered, for she bent down and softly shook up his pillows.
“It’s no good your going for the doctor,” she whispered huskily back in answer to my question. “He was here this morning. He told me he could do nothing. I can’t afford to throw away money for nothing, can I?”
There were tears in her eyes, like shining splinters of glass. We heard footsteps on the pavement below, and men’s voices came up to the open window. The fellows had come home from the City. Nat did not seem to hear; he was devouring Minnie’s face line by line, looking at her in a dazed, silly way.
“It is good of you to come,” he said at last, very simply and gratefully. “How did you find it? So few people—country people, you know—have heard of the Inn. It must seem a noisy, dirty place to you—there are blacks all down your nice white apron. But we won’t stay. You will show me the way back. It was very curious about that gate.”
*****
Minnie looked very well in widows’ weeds—those fair, neat little women generally do. I always tried very hard to like Minnie. I admired her practicalspirit. Practicality means money, and money means ease. She came knocking at my door three days after the funeral, and said beseechingly:
“Come down with me on the tram to Stamford Hill.”
We went. The trams were crowded, it was Saturday afternoon. We walked slowly along the row of villas in the blazing sun—the row where Nat had sworn he found the gray gate.
“Poor old chap,” I said. “He wasn’t fit for this world. But what a gold mine there would have been in it!”
“It was at this house he seemed to stop most,” she said. “I remember the India-rubber plant in the front window.”
We stopped. There was an old, palsied sort of fellow tidying up the rockery. I spoke to him—don’t know why.
“I suppose you remember this neighborhood before it was built on?”
“When it was a one-eyed country place,” elaborated Minnie.
He straightened his body on his spade, and lookedat us, cunningly, like old people often do. An eager light came into his bleared eyes. It seemed to me the light of youth breaking uncannily through the crust of seventy years. He remembered—sure he did. He became suddenly voluble—talking more to himself than to us.
“It’s a good many year since this ’ere part was open country. Ah! there was a gate on the common—hereabouts, as near as I can mind. A bit on was a bridge, stone one side and iron t’other. A man had to keep a sharp lookout if he come home full o’ liquor nights. The rail runs there now—they built a new ’un. There was a copse—Shannonses copse, I think they called it, but my memory aint what it was. You went over a stile. That was a rare place for coortin’”—he grinned, showing a toothless cavern, and he spluttered with merry memories as he rocked on the spade.
“There was a cottage near by—my father had it. I jest call to mindhisfather plantin’ the orchard—a very old man as couldn’t expect to see the fruit. A fine orchard it wur—Blenum orringe trees and Tom Spuds and all sorts. Dickson’s tannery standsthere now. If you went on, through the fields and across the road, you come to Hillyar’s farm—that’s Stern & Carson’s brewery. Hillyar’s pears was wonderful for keepin’. I mind Loo Hillyar—sich arms;” he leered at Minnie, whose face was chalky under her black bonnet. “You don’t see young women like that these times. Sich a hand at butter-making. It must be fifty—forty year ago or more since me an’ her drove geese over the common. It couldn’t ha’ been so fur from where we stands, neither. Here, as you may say, or thereabouts—but the face of the earth do change so.”
He spat on his hands and bent his back to the weary task of tidying the melancholy mound of clinkers and starved ferns. I gave him sixpence and I gave Minnie my arm. She clutched it wildly. There was a shadow on her pretty, common face—the shadow of the unexplainable.
What did it mean? I don’t pretend to say. Odd, wasn’t it? But then the world is odd. We just skim it and fancy we have proved all.
Minnie? She went back to a City office as typist, and she married the principal in less than a year.She was always the sort of girl to do well for herself—her marriage with Chaytor was an aberration. She lives in a very swagger house at East Croydon, wears rather loud dresses, and talks persistently of “my cook.”