Читать книгу Flower-Patch Neighbours - Flora Klickmann - Страница 3

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When Aaron Glummick dumped outside my cottage back door the sack of potatoes which I had ordered from a neighbouring farmer, he had no more exciting prospect in the near future (so far as I knew) than the handling of the shilling which he expected for his services.

But it happened that the day was warm; and as a bottle of lemonade always stands on the kitchen dresser for the refreshment of the weary wayfarer (deserving characters preferred), Abigail asked if he would like a glass.

After shoving his cap over his left ear, and scratching his head over his right ear, Aaron replied that he didn’t know as how he minded if he did. He was therefore invited into the kitchen out of the sun, where he sat for a few minutes discoursing in a sociable way on the most important events of the day, such as the universal shortage of black currants, the death of Sarah Ann Perkins’ cow, and a wedding which was due next day—Saturday. We all referred to it as “the wedding,” and you will see its importance when you hear details.

The bride-elect had been walking out, only a few months before, with a young man who looked steady and kind-hearted, but whose looks, alas! had belied him. At any rate, he had married some one else. Abigail said it served her right; and she could never make out what he had seen in her. Still, we were all very sorry for the girl’s disappointment.

A couple of days after the news of her lover’s perfidy reached her, she went to a field adjoining a farm, where there was a pond—only a very shallow one—and placing her hat, handkerchief, moiré-silk bag, and best gloves conspicuously on the bank, she laid herself down carefully in the water (with her head well out of it, however), and all this in full view of another steady-looking, kind-hearted young man, who was at the opposite end of the field mending a gate.

Naturally he took some notice of the occurrence, and, according to the girl’s statement, he promptly risked his life to rescue her and save her from “drownding.”

His own version, later, when he was interviewed as a hero by all and sundry, was that, though there wasn’t much water, being July and droughtish, it was a damp spot for a girl to take a nap in; and he felt he was justified in knocking off work for a bit in order to tell her it wasn’t over-dry just there.

Well—that was how it began: and to-morrow they were to be married. Naturally, such a romantic wedding was not to be missed, and the whole countryside intended to be present. The butcher’s young man delivered my Sunday joint at 9 a.m. on Friday morning. When Abigail inquired Why? he replied: “You see, miss, I’m going to the wedding.”

And when the washing failed to materialise on Saturday, as it is wont, this was also due to the wedding.

At all hours of the day children knocked at the back door with the request: “Please will you give me some flowers for the wedding?” And one aged patriarch hobbled to our house to ask if the master would mind a-loaning of him one of them thur Onion Jacks as we put up on Empire day and the King’s birthday, as the wedding would be passing his place, and he’d like to show ’em a flag.

It was even rumoured that the bride had an “At Home” day, printed in silver, on her wedding cards.

So, of course, we were anxious about the weather, since the only reception-room at the bride’s home, a kitchen twelve feet by sixteen, would scarcely provide adequate accommodation, should it rain, for the eighty-seven guests who had been formally invited, and no one could foretell how many additional children each woman would bring with her!

Aaron said we might take it from him that there would be bad weather before night, because the Windcliff had worn its nightcap till near noon. (According to local lore, when that dark green giant opposite us has a cloud resting on its summit which doesn’t disperse before breakfast, rain is probable.)

But Abigail felt superior to all such signs and tokens. “There’ll be no thunderstorm to-day,” she said, with the brisk finality of one who is in close touch with the Fountain of Information; “we’ve got wireless now” (it was in the early days of this wonderment, and ours was the first aerial to be displayed on our particular hillside), “and the weather forecast said that an anti-cyclone is moving rapidly eastward from the Atlantic—that’s us, you know—and the inference is fine dry weather for the next few days.”

Abigail reeled it off like the most practised announcer.

Aaron finished his lemonade with a surprised gulp, and asked what it all meant? And we weren’t the Atlantic, anyhow, so far as he knew the district, having lived in it all his life, and how could a wire know more about it than he did?

Abigail started to explain that we were situated eastward of the Atlantic; hence the anti-cyclone was moving in our direction, and——

But I had seen Aaron pass the window, and being anxious that every one who possibly could should be induced to instal wireless—and only those who live in the remotest wilds of the countryside are able to appreciate its blessings to the full—I went into the kitchen and asked the caller if he had ever listened-in?

Aaron said he had heared tell of ‘un. His brother-in-law from Cardiff had told him some rare lies; but he, Aaron, was not the one to believe that a wire stuck a-top of a broom-handle were a-going to talk to you like a Christian! Why, it was agin nature!

On being invited to experiment with his own ears, Aaron placed his cap respectfully under the kitchen table (we didn’t find the remnants till the following week, when the dog’s box was turned out!) and followed me cautiously into the living-room.

I demonstrated.

He eyed the machine suspiciously, sat on the extreme edge of the chair, and held the ‘phones timidly to his ears, his whole bulk keyed-up nervously, and ready to fly from the room should the mysterious creature “go off” in any unexpected manner.

Now it chanced that an ex-Prime Minister, whose Party had been swept out of the House of Commons holus-bolus at the previous election, was speaking at some meeting that afternoon; and while Aaron listened, he was explaining what a millennium we should have been experiencing, if only he and his Party had been returned to office; and what a disgraceful thing it was that the present Government should be permitted to do what they were doing, and not doing what they weren’t doing; and why didn’t some one do something about it?

Aaron held the same political views as the ex-Premier who was speaking; also, he had once heard him address a meeting in Cardiff, and had lived on the event ever since, till at last he had almost grown to fancy himself related to the ex-Premier. Hence, when he heard his voice once more, he clutched the ‘phones closer and closer to his ears, leaning over more and more towards the instrument, till his head nearly touched it, and was soon completely lost to his surroundings. He even said, “Hear, hear!” at appropriate places, as lustily as any of the audience.

When it was over, and we gently removed the ‘phones from his extended hands, he got up in a daze, merely ejaculating, “Well, I’ll be gingered! I’ll be gingered!”; and groping his way out, he shuffled off like a man in a dream, forgetting both his hat and his shilling——

But not for long!

Aaron was nothing if not “careful”—or, as some people described it, “near.” He was hard-working and industrious as his employer always said; but he couldn’t bear to part with a penny. Neighbours darkly hinted that he must have put by something in the best china teapot; but his wife knew that the teapot was empty; and talk how she would, her husband only gave her insufficient for the barest necessities. If it hadn’t been for her egg money, and the days she went out to work——

So we were not surprised when Aaron returned next day for his shilling. His hat we hadn’t missed—though he had! However, he was quite pleased with a second-best velour, from the large and unique collection of head-gear hoarded by the Head of Affairs, Abigail assuring him that she hadn’t taken his hat, indeed! What should she have done with it if she had?

We weren’t surprised that he returned for his money; but we wondered why he seemed so reluctant to leave us, even after I had presented him with a second hat; and why he shuffled first on one foot and then on the other, while he remained on the doorstep. I concluded it was his method of expressing gratitude.

But at last he blurted out: “We shall be a-histin’ a hair-rail ter-morrer. I’ve bin into Monmouth this morning, and they’re a-sending out a man with all the contraptions and fixin’s; and I thought you’d like to know.”

In other words, Aaron had ordered a wireless set to be installed straight away and quite regardless! No wonder that his wife occupied all her legitimate waking-hours, and many when she should have slept, reminding him that the roof leaked and needed retiling; that the pigsty needed rebuilding; that his shirts wouldn’t stand another patch; while she herself craved a wringer more than anything else on earth. And where had he got the money from which he was fooling away on a wire that wasn’t even any use as a clothes-line at that height?

Aaron took no notice.

Yet, in spite of the precipitous haste of its ordering, the machine didn’t by any means assemble itself properly at first. Misfortunes began with a damaged valve, for which no one seemed able to account. That necessitated a few days’ delay, while they sent for a new one. Mrs. Glummick meanwhile treated the instrument as though it were a keg of gunpowder with a light near by.

When the new valve arrived, it was found that some other important detail had gone astray en route. Further delay, while the instrument was returned to the makers.

And still more delay because the new machine, which should have been addressed to Tintern station, was obligingly sent to Taunton station in error, where it enjoyed a period of repose in the goods-shed.

But the crowning misfortune was the fact that Aaron never actually used his “wireless,” for he lost his life quite suddenly in an accident, just as the installation was completed, and the instrument he had counted upon so much was left untouched on the side table in the kitchen, where he had planned to sit and listen-in when his day’s work was done. It really was a pathetic sight to see it there.

Personally, I wondered how the wireless set stood in regard to his estate. Had he procured it on the hire system, and would it now have to be returned?

To my surprise, I heard that not only had he paid for it outright, but so careful had he been with his savings, that his amazed wife now found herself inheriting something like ten shillings a week, as well as the cottage she lived in; and this in addition to the old-age pension, which she had claimed only a short while before, though there was considerable argument among her acquaintances as to whether she wasn’t really a year younger than she had said. But no birth certificate being forthcoming, and everything else being in order, she had drawn the pension for some weeks, and even before her husband’s accident had grown to regard herself as one of the new-rich.

Now, since his death, she loomed large as a lady of independent means, which was only her due, seeing the way she had worked without wages for most of her three-score years and ten.

Of course, we expected her to mourn. But we did not anticipate her taking to her bed, and remaining there for months, refusing to take an interest in anything but her meals.

Each day she said she was weaker, though the doctor said there was nothing fundamentally wrong with her. “It’s her nerves” seemed to be the general verdict.

We all knew she had one secret trouble; her only surviving child—William Gladstone Glummick (otherwise known as Bill)—had taken himself off, years before, after a row with his father; and though it was reported from time to time that he had been seen in various parts of the country, he had never come back, nor communicated with his people. The last news was that some one said he had been killed in the war, and some one else vowed they had seen him in Sheffield.

We knew that Amelia Glummick watched and waited for her missing son—what mother wouldn’t under the circumstances?—but we had never known her to give way to any outward show of grief. She wasn’t that type. Life had been too hard a grind for her to have time to spare for many tears. Yet now she just lay with her eyes closed, and every indication of a rapid breaking-up.

A married niece, who lived near, saw that she wanted for nothing. However much we may object to “capitalists” on principle (and the niece’s husband always had a good deal to say on the subject of capitalists, and all of it “objection,” when discoursing at “The Spotted Cow”), we cherish one if we chance to have it in the family! And the niece took good care to make herself indispensable to the invalid, sparing no trouble in sending along her children to let me know when jelly, or beef-tea, or barley-water, or bottled chicken was running short.

She herself watched over her aunt’s possessions devotedly, borrowing all the saucepans in turn, lest moth should get at them.

“She needs rousing,” said the doctor. Yet nothing seemed to rouse her. Even when her niece, armed with a picture from a newspaper advertisement, tried to interest her in wringers by pointing out that she could now afford the latest and most complicated model, she merely flickered her eyelids and inquired what she should want with a wringer now? Thank goodness, the clothes in Heaven would be whiter than snow, so she needn’t take one with her—though how they would ever get Aaron’s that colour she couldn’t imagine! But in any case, could a lady who had all that a week be expected to do washing?

The niece related the conversation to me with real feeling; she was quite as keen as her aunt had been to have a wringer in the family.

I myself am inclined to think that the poor body took to her bed, in the first place, out of sheer relief at finding she could have a rest for once, with no one to object. And when she got there, she found it so comfortable, and such a pleasant change to be waited upon, that she decided to stay there. At any rate, stay there she did; and no persuasion on my part, nor orders from the doctor, induced her to budge. She seemed fixed there for the rest of her days. And when the niece borrowed, without asking, her carving-knife, she told me, with tears in her voice, that she guessed her aunt had cut up her last bit of pig-meat.

The niece’s husband said hopefully that it was evident she wasn’t long for this world, therefore they had better do the best they could for her, being her next o’ kin. Why not bring her bed downstairs? It would be livelier for her, and handier, too, for people to pop in and out and see how she was getting on.

Amelia agreed to the move—if they would carry her down; walk she could not. So they carried her between them, and laid her out in her best nightgown on the bed, which was placed by the kitchen window, and hung a crochet antimacassar over the foot.

She flatly refused, however, to wear the stylish boudoir cap, sent by another niece (who was a tea-shop waitress in London, and who desired to be in the running when her wealthy relative made her will), said she didn’t hold with these new-fangled ideas of going about so that people couldn’t tell whether it was meant for your chemise or your best frock; nor all this wearing of your legs in public, to say nothing of women who were old enough to be grandmothers. And before she’d be seen with one of those ridiculous fly-aways on her head she’d as soon think of putting on pyjamas, and going on the stage as the Fairy Queen!

So the lacy confection, with its heliotrope ribbons and blue rosebuds, surmounted one of the bed-posts instead. I assured her it was often displayed thus in the highest circles.

They had just finished “settling her,” when I arrived; and the niece, who was taking away some aprons as unostentatiously as possible, via the back door, explained to me that she thought it better, since her aunt was so frail, for her to see nothing which might remind her of work. Therefore she was going to keep the aprons “up to our place,” also the best table-cloth and the roller towel.

“She won’t need them to be laid out in,” she said; “and you never know who might get in when she’s lying there all alone.”

“And of course we’re the next o’ kin,” the husband added.

“I’m the next o’ kin,” the niece corrected him—she didn’t intend there to be any confusion on that point.

I left them to settle the matter between themselves, and went into the cottage.

As I looked round for a small table to place by the invalid’s bedside for the mutton broth I had brought her, my eyes fell on poor Aaron’s wireless set. What a boon it would be to the desolate woman! She must certainly be induced to use it.

I had to work circumspectly; but at length, after the mutton broth (which was her favourite dinner, having no teeth, and did Abigail ever put marigold petals in it? her mother always did), I got her sufficiently cheerful to allow me to mention it.

I started by explaining to her how interesting it would be for her to hear the news. She merely had to have the ‘phones to her ears at half-past six and she would hear about everything that had happened that day.

But she only asked me what need there was for Aaron to have paid all that for those black round things to get the news, when you could go to the doctor for a bottle of medicine any day, and sit waiting for hours in his surgery with every one else, and hear all the news and everything that happened to anybody for weeks past, and he only charged a shilling, no matter how long you sat there, and it was such a nice change and rest, and gave you a chance to see your friends, too, and after that, you had the bottle of medicine to go on taking.

This gave me the opportunity. I pointed out how terribly cut off from all social dissipation she was, now that she was no longer able to walk the three-and-a-half miles to take part in the joyful re-unions in the doctor’s surgery. And what an advantage it was, under the distressing circumstances, to be able to lie in bed, and just listen to everything without so much as walking a single step!

Eventually the wireless won the day, and she consented to experiment.

I switched on the current, and also listened, hoping there would be something likely to interest the invalid. We happened, however, to have struck one of those interludes which will occasionally occur even in the best regulated programmes, when the last item ends a little too soon, and the next performer is not quite due. Whereupon that obliging pianist who seems to live in the B.B.C. studio, and sleep under the piano, straightway sat down to the instrument and started to fill in the gap, playing Doddervinski’s famous Nocturne in B sharp major, the one entitled “Camel Masticating its Driver.”

If you don’t happen to know this inspiring work, I would explain that it is one of those wonderful musical compositions which are all “atmosphere,” and have neither beginning nor end, nor indeed any middle that one can ever get hold of. So far, I’ve not been able to discover whether the noises produced are supposed to be the driver’s very reasonable though somewhat raucous protests, or merely the camel’s aftermath of indigestion. But be that as it may, I feared the solo was a trifle too modern for Mrs. Glummick’s untutored ears, and I was about to suggest that we should wait a few minutes longer for the next item, when her eyes suddenly brightened, a smile lit up her face, and she exclaimed—

“Oh, ain’t it just lovely to hear that agen!”

I was surprised that she should know it, as it was one of Doddervinski’s latest effusions, and I asked when she had heard it before?

But like all wireless enthusiasts, she continued her own monologue, without even hearing my interpolated question.

“Yes, they’re a-dusting the pianner keys, right enough,” she murmured. “I can hear it that plain; they’re a-dusting ’em like as I used to be let do it when I was a gel, and helping with the spring-cleaning at the Manor House. Yes—they be a-polishing atween the black uns at the top now, they allus gets dusty, and want extry polishing there. They’re doing of it very thorough, too, like as I had to. Well I never thought to hear that agen!” And her face radiated beatific rapture.

It was pleasant to reflect that, after all, Doddervinski had not lived in vain.

Without having reached anything that even distantly suggested a finale, or giving any hint as to the key in which he was supposed to be playing, the pianist suddenly ceased. And we concluded that was the end, no other conclusion being forthcoming.

Then a lady started a talk on “Right Feeding for Infants.” I felt this was quite a safe and interesting topic for Mrs. Glummick. We both listened—a little stolidly, perhaps—while the lady gave the chemical constituents of milk and their action under acids; and when she branched off into the horticultural properties of fermentation, we showed signs of being bored.

But presently she got down to solid earth, and began to descant on feeding-bottles. What she had to say under this heading was doubtless very useful, but unfortunately we didn’t hear much of it, for she began this section by telling us that on no account should the baby be given its milk in an old-fashioned feeding-bottle. Here was a detail of the subject which Mrs. Glummick could understand. She felt she was competent to pass an opinion on it too. Dropping the ear-’phones, she said to me, “Does that ghostess who’s talking expect you to take the baby down to the cow? Why, it’s worse than the heathen the missionary told us about!”

I tried to explain in simple language the science of hygiene as applied to baby’s feeding apparatus. But Amelia Glummick only looked pityingly at me. She had fed eight babies. I hadn’t.

Fortunately, Auntie Somebody kindly sang just then, and I switched the invalid on to her.

The main item for congratulation, however, was the fact that Amelia had been induced to listen-in. The rest I knew would be quite straightforward. She would never be able to resist its allurements, with the ‘phones lying on the table beside her.

It was that same evening that the niece hurriedly came round to see me.

“Aunt’s going!” she said, with a certain amount of pleasurable excitement, but in low tones, as though her normal speaking voice would have been indecorous under the circumstances. “You told me to let you know if there seemed any change in her, and there is. She says she’s heard his voice, and he’s a-calling of her! I expect it’s the warning that the end’s near! You do hear such things! I remember when old Mrs. Bundle was near took——”

But I didn’t encourage her reminiscences, knowing that if she once got well under way with talk, it would be uncertain whether we should be in time even for the funeral! So I told her to hurry back to her aunt, and I would come along soon.

I found the cottage moderately full, the niece, her husband and family being supplemented by all the nearest neighbours.

“She’s heard his voice; he’s a-calling of her!” the niece told me once again in a stage whisper—the others nodding acquiescence.

“She’ll be passing soon. It’s a sure sign,” one woman confided to me.

“I’m afraid she will if she doesn’t get more air,” I said. “We mustn’t crowd round her like this.” I opened the door wide, the odour of the badly-trimmed paraffin lamp was enough to make any one ill, to say nothing of the aroma of the niece’s husband’s bad tobacco. The company took the hint and reluctantly withdrew.

Meanwhile Amelia, with eyes closed, but the ‘phones to her ears, lay without a movement. I sat down beside her.

“Are you listening to the music?” I asked.

She opened her eyes, and brightened when she saw me.

“No, ma’am; I’m listening for our Bill,” she replied.

“Bill??!!”

“Yes; I’ve heard our Bill. He don’t talk all the time, but he’s bin talking. I rekernised his voice the minute he spoke, though I haven’t heard it for fifteen years come next Saturday. There!”—with sudden animation—“he’s talking agin. Why, I’d know it was him anywhere.”

I picked up the other ‘phones, and what I heard was that special announcer whose voice we all know is one of the most beautiful and most cultured, probably, in the world. He was just starting the second news bulletin.

“But that isn’t Bill,” I said, remembering Bill, who as a young man was a rough hooligan of the first water, with no grammar and the accent of an uneducated Welsh labourer.

Whether she was wandering in her head, or merely deluding herself, I didn’t want her to be nursing false hopes. So I told her the announcer’s name, who he was and where he lived, and assured her he was not her long-lost son. Yet it seemed hard to convince her.

“It do sound like our Bill,” she kept on reiterating; “I could have swored it was him talking.”

Whether the announcer would have been flattered could he have heard our Bill is another matter.

I have known more than one mother of a decidedly plain girl who has told me that her daughter was considered to be the very image of some celebrated beauty; and I have known more than one mother of a distinctly dull girl who has enlarged to me on the remarkable brilliance of her daughter’s brain. But it was the first time I had heard such a voice as Bill’s likened to that of the leading wireless announcer.

The niece was undecided whether to be pleased or disappointed at the turn in events. If that wasn’t Bill calling, then perhaps the end wasn’t quite so near after all. However, she kept up her own spirits with the aid of her aunt’s colander, assuring every one that it couldn’t be long now.

And indeed, when I went in a few days later, the aunt looked so feeble that I began to think she was really fading away.

“I’m borrowing the rolling-pin,” the niece had explained, with a mournful shake of the head, when I ran into it in the lane. “Pastry would kill her now, it would sit so heavy on her stomach. It would only make her sad-like to see it, knowing as how she’ll never need a pie again—not in this world, at any rate. And a bottle isn’t near so convenient.”

“Have you been listening-in to-day?” I asked.

To my surprise, Mrs. Glummick burst out with a certain amount of able-bodied vehemence: “What’s the use of saying we’re all equal, like some folks says, and every one’s as good as t’other? We ain’t! If I was rich and a lady they’d talk about me on this ‘ere thing; but as I’m only a poor old woman (or, at least, I used to be poor), they don’t bother nothing about me.”

“Why, what could they say about you?” I inquired in surprise.

“They might say I was a-dying, and ask Bill to hurry home, same as they tell all about other people being awful bad, and please come at once. It’s dreadfully interesting to hear what a lot of ill women want to get hold of their husbands and sons, and can’t find ’em nowhere. It beats me, though, how they manage to lose their husbands and forget where they put ’em! Sons is different, of course.”

That gave me an idea. Not that I had any hope of reaching Bill; but I felt I could at least give a little pleasure to a poor sick woman.

Next night I sat with the invalid when she was listening-in, and watched her as the following message, recited twice, with the announcer’s customary clear articulation, penetrated her comprehension—

“Will William Gladstone Glummick, who left home fifteen years ago, and was last seen in Sheffield, return at once to Greenacres, Monmouthshire, where his aged widowed mother lies dangerously ill?”

Amelia’s amazement can be imagined. Also her delight. I was prepared for these manifestations. But what I had not anticipated was that she there and then demanded her clothes and announced that she must give the house a thorough spring-cleaning as the only suitable reception for Bill. We persuaded her to stay in bed for the night and promised plenty of assistance on the morrow.

Next morning the niece’s daughter, who slept at the cottage, was wakened at five o’clock (summer time) by her great-aunt, up and dressed, asking where the coal-hammer had got to?

The girl, who never missed reading an account of a criminal case that came her way, promptly associated a coal-hammer, a lonely house, a beautiful girl, and a wild-looking old woman with Tragedy! And, in a flash, saw the report (with photographs) in the papers, and the final ending “while of unsound mind.” She was therefore thankful to be able to say: “Mother borrowed it last week for father to open the tin of salmon; but I’ll soon make the fire.”

“Well, you’d better hurry; for Bill is certain to come by the night train, and he’ll be in by the 8.20.”

Then began a day of stirring events—so far as house-cleaning could help. Other people beside Mr. Glummick had by now installed wireless, and a constant stream of callers came round to discuss the S.O.S. with the widow and ask if Bill had turned up. Ideas seemed mixed as to what the announcement really was. I was told (1) That the Queen had sent to ask after Amelia. (2) That Bill was coming home to be married, and they were putting up the banns on the wireless. (3) That poor old ‘Melia was that bad, they were already inviting people to the funeral by wireless. (4) That Bill was coming home, and had sent his mother a telegrampt by wireless to tell her so.

But the sum total of it all was the Rousing of Amelia. Not only was she up, but she was also doing, although she was shaky from lying so long in bed. What she wasn’t equal to doing herself kind neighbourly hands came in and did for her. A wealth of practical Christianity can be found among country folk.

When I went round at noon, I met the next-o’-kin, harassed-looking and jaded, bringing back a large stewpan. She told a woeful tale of her aunt’s goings-on.

“Wants to boil a piece of bacon in readiness; started making pastry before we wus hardly up. And if you believe me, I’ve simply been trapesing to and fro, backwards and forwards, the whole morning!”

I could quite believe it! But I didn’t see why she need blame me for it.

The S.O.S. was picked up, and passed on to Bill by a fellow-workman in Glasgow. Even if he had desired to evade the summons, it would not have been easy, as the men in his shift not only drank his health, by way of farewell, at the nearest house of refreshment, but had generously made a whip-round “for the old lady.” They all basked in a certain amount of reflected glory, through their personal acquaintance with an individual who had been singled out so conspicuously for national notice.

If any of them had doubts as to the money ever reaching her, they were justified, for Bill found the journey from Glasgow to Greenacres so thirst-provoking, and he himself needed to be fortified so often, that he had precious little in his pocket by the time he reached home. And a shadier-looking object we hope never to see in our village. Indeed, I’m not sure that I’m regarded as a local benefactor in having unearthed him and reimposed him upon an otherwise respectable community.

But in his mother’s eyes he was as an angel from Heaven. Wonderful mother-love! that can see gold in the most disreputable dross, and can forgive even more than the seventy times seven!

Not that she told him any of this. Certainly not. When he slouched in sheepishly through the back kitchen, her first words of welcome were, “For pity’s sake do go and wipe your feet on the mat, and don’t come in tracking mud all over the clean place! Can’t you see that the floor’s just been scrubbed?”

To Bill, however, this was quite in order; it wouldn’t have seemed like coming home if he hadn’t heard it.

By way of introducing the boiled gammon, cooked beetroot, spring onions, black-currant tart, carraway-seed cake and rhubarb jam, eagerly awaiting him in the pantry, she said casually, later on, “I suppose you could do with a snack now? I’ll see if I have a bit of anything in the cupboard. I’d have got something in if I’d known you was coming. But since your father was took, I’ve only enjoyed poor health.”

Rightly, one ought to end here, with a close-up showing Amelia Glummick at one side of a well-spread kitchen table (wondering, volubly, whatever could have become of the carving-knife!), and William Gladstone opposite her, steadily working his way through the best meal he had eaten for many a day.

But there was a further little incident, very slight, but bearing on the case.

Having got into the limelight and attracted more public attention in one single week than had fallen to her lot in the whole of her previous existence, it was only to be expected that some of Amelia’s acquaintances showed restive signs of jealousy.

The niece was anything but gratified by the return of the prodigal, especially as—to this day—Mrs. Glummick is still inquiring for missing oddments. Other women felt dimly that they had been defrauded of something, and had wasted sympathy on an undeserving object. Moreover, the airs Amelia developed with her sudden prosperity were an added grievance.

I was not altogether surprised, therefore, when she came to see me one morning, clad in her best widow’s outfit, with the news that she had been insulted. Never had she been called such names in her life before, and in her own home, too; and she intended to claim compensation (a popular word, with which, like the word dole, every one is familiar nowadays!).

She was on her way to her solicitor (she had acquired him at the settling-up of her husband’s estate; and his name had added to her pomp and circumstance ever since); and would I kindly give her the name and address of the young man who had said it—the young man whose voice was like Bill’s—and she could bring witnesses.

It was a little while before I could disentangle her grievance from a rich and rampant overgrowth of totally irrelevant matter. But at length, when stripped of accessories, it amounted to this: “That Jane Price” had been spreading about the news that she, Amelia, had been called an “aged” woman on the wireless—and for all the world to hear, too! And Jane Price had said that no one would call her aged, she’d take good care of that, without having to pay for it.

After many variations, mostly in a minor key, on the same theme, I gathered that it was Amelia’s intention to instruct her solicitor to write to the wireless announcer and claim compensation for the insult. Jane Price had said she should make him apologise in wireless too, but Amelia didn’t mind about the apology, so long as she got compensation. (Love of money was evidently going to her head!)

What did I advise?

I considered for a moment, wondering exactly where I came in, having supplied the announcement!

“Of course you can claim compensation,” I told her. “But whether you get anything will depend on facts. And the first thing you will be called upon to provide will be the proof of your age. How can we set to work to find out exactly what your age is? I remember that came up when you applied for the old-age pension. I’m sure this is the first question the magistrate will ask you. If you are not over seventy, no one ought to insult you by calling you aged, and we must deal with the insulter; but if you have already reached old age, so as to be entitled to the pension, well——”

“Of course, I don’t want to get any one into trouble,” said Amelia hurriedly. “I’m a bit hasty myself at times; and I daresay I’ve called Aaron names, when it’s been washing-day, that weren’t exactly out of the Bible. But that Jane Price has been egging of me on. You can tell that young man to keep his compensation. I’ll overlook what he said, and let bygones be bygones. I’m sure I’m the last one to bear a grudge against any one.” And she got up to go.

“Oh, don’t decide too quickly,” I said. “Probably we can find proof of your real age. Think it over.”

“Yes, I will,” she said.

She is still thinking!

When I recounted the interview to the Head of Affairs, he continued to smoke placidly and turn the pages of the Spectator, merely remarking: “Blessed are they who expect no thanks, especially after they have butted in where no one asked them to!”