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On their first Saturday in No. 3 Paragon Place Keir knocked off work at one, for No. 3 and Sybil needed him. There was a new plate-rack to be fixed in the scullery. Also, the little shed at the end of the garden, taken over at a price from old Santer, was to hold their bicycles, but it had a leaky roof, and Keir had bought six yards of rubberoid to re-cover the roof.

October was still giving the world a little summer, and when Keir went out with the roll of rubberoid, a hammer, and a packet of galvanized nails, he was not the only Adam in that multiple paradise. Mr. Moore was out with a white face and busy with a fork, lifting the last two rows of a potato crop. At No. 6 the lorry-driver was erecting a minute hutch sufficiently large to house a motor-bike.

The garden of No. 4 was empty, and Keir, placing the roll of rubberoid on the roof, went back for a kitchen chair to be used as a stepping-block. He climbed up on the roof of the shed and became busy, and since his back was turned towards the cottages, he did not see the two Block children come out into the next garden. Their ages were ten and eight, their names Sydney and Harold. Both of them had tow hair and little, hard, red faces, blue eyes, and depressed noses.

How it was that these children divined the fact that in Keir they had a victim might be put forward as a problem in elementary psychology. As children they were elementals. Any cat that ventured within a stone’s throw of them had cause to regret it, but if any local cat sighted the two boys, it—if it had been educated—vanished over the nearest fence or disappeared into its own back door.

These children had Keir marked. He was a new animal in the way of a neighbour, and, as such, fair game. Moreover, the Block boys enjoyed a certain immunity by reason of their father, with whom milder men had found it unadvisable to quarrel. The elder of the two, picking up a stone, took aim and hit the closed door of the shed just below Keir’s right foot.

Keir, turning sharply, discovered the two urchins, who, with eyes like blue pebbles, stood to brazen the act out.

“Hallo—which of you two threw that?”

This was the kind of situation which the Block children loved to create.

“Threw what?”

“A stone.”

The elder of the two had modelled himself upon his father.

“Who are you speaking to? I never threw no stone.”

Keir looked at the younger brother.

“Was it you?”

“Me?”

“Yes—you.”

“I never threw no stone.”

“One of you did.”

The elder boy took up the argument.

“ ’Ere, mister, you keep your ’air on. You never saw either on us throw a stone.”

“I heard it.”

“Call us liars. You be careful or I’ll fetch my dad.”

Keir went on with his work. He was sufficiently sensitive to size up a ridiculous situation and to know that such situations are best dealt with by a show of indifference. He ignored the Block children, but for some ten minutes they remained in the back garden, watching Keir at work and making comments. Their remarks were personal and candid. They giggled. Their inspiration was to stir up the man creature until he lost his temper and made some unadvised and tumultuous attack. Then, of course, they would bolt incontinently for the Block back door, shouting loudly for their parents.

“Watch ’im ’it ’is finger, ’arold.”

“Gosh, if ’e ain’t got a ’ole in the seat of ’is trousers.”

“Mister, y’shirt’s showin’.”

Keir continued to ignore them, until Mrs. Block, suddenly appearing with a grievance against life in general and a husband who hadn’t brought the weekly money home, found herself articulate.

“Syd—. ’arold. Come in at once. Leave—the gen’leman—alone.”

The Block children went. They were wise as to this other situation. Dad had not come home, which meant Dad had gone on the booze, and at such times their mother could become a frowsy-headed fury.

Keir completed the re-roofing of the shed, and as his hammer drove home the nails, he found himself supposing that the garden of No. 3 was not a place in which he would ever take his pleasure. It was too elementally situated. It was not a piece of God’s earth upon which you could cultivate peace, potatoes, and philosophy. It was too public, too much like a pen with other cattle-pens crowded up against it. Raw, sour earth, and little cruel faces growing up out of the black soil.

Sybil, who had been busy altering the curtains in the front bedroom, and hanging some pictures in the parlour, knew nothing of Keir’s adventure with the Block children, but at tea he appeared to have something on his mind. He sat and stared at the loaf of bread, but not as though he saw it as bread. His face made Sybil think of someone looking out of a dark window, and in the future she was to come to know this look so well and to fear it, while finding in her fear a strange and elemental pity. The perplexities and secret grievings that were to trouble her love for this intense and smouldering creature who was her husband were to grow at last into an understanding of him, but that was not yet.

“Got a headache, Keir?”

He came out of his dark mood to speak to her.

“No. I was just thinking that the back garden is not going to be much use to us.”

“Oh—why?”

“No decent fences.”

She was a little puzzled. She was not wise as yet to the passionate separatist in Keir, nor did she understand his sensitiveness to people, and especially to ugly people. She was much more a social creature than he was.

“Well—you won’t have much time, Keir.”

Her face brightened.

“I want to grow flowers. I’ll be gardener. I wonder if we could get a few wallflowers to put in. Yes, and some forget-me-nots and red daisies.”

Keir said that at Kingham market all sorts of plants could be bought quite cheaply. The front garden certainly needed dressing, but as it was no larger than a good-sized table-cloth, it could be dealt with at no great expense.

“I’ll raise all my own plants next year, Keir.”

He did not damp her enthusiasm, but he did say that when they moved into a better cottage, the garden of that cottage should have proper defence against too much neighbourliness.

This was their first Saturday night in No. 3 Paragon Place, and Paragon Place was to impress upon them other exhibitions of neighbourliness. The cottages had been built for cheapness, and the dividing walls were only one brick thick. Mr. Jervis next door was a wireless enthusiast, and on Saturday nights he allowed himself a special occasion with the apparatus at full blast. The Santers had both been slightly deaf, and the bellowings and crashings had not worried them. Sybil had lit a fire in the sitting-room, and Keir had got out a book.

Mr. Jervis had put himself in touch with some prize brass band, and his speaker was of the loudest.

Keir, irritated, tried to appear whimsical.

“I say, that fellow next door—”

“It is rather noisy, isn’t it?”

“One might be living next door to a steam roundabout.”

Sybil was reading the domestic notes in a popular weekly paper.

“Oh, I believe he only turns it on like that on Saturdays. He can’t afford it every night.”

“Thank God,” said Keir.

At ten o’clock Mr. Jervis switched off, and No. 3 enjoyed a transient and fallacious peace. Keir and Sybil had locked up and were going to bed when Mr. Block came home after a festive evening and began by kicking his own front door. His remarks were very audible to Sybil and Keir.

“Op’n th’ —— door—you ol’ bitch. Op’n the —— door.”

Apparently there were parleyings between the lady and her husband.

“You’ll stay outside till you’re sober, you drunken swine.”

She was as much a creature of violence as her mate and almost as strong as he was, and when he kicked the door in, she did not wait upon compassion, but attacked. The row could be heard through the flimsy wall, bangings and cursings, and the squeals of the two small boys. It was a savage and a dishevelled show, and Keir, with a face of dark disgust, stood unbuttoning his braces.

“Nice lot of animals next door.”

Sybil was frightened.

“Keir, oughtn’t we to do something? It sounds as though somebody was being murdered.”

“Well, I shouldn’t grieve if there were. People like that—better dead.”

“I can’t turn out the light Keir, till that noise has stopped.”

In bed she lay and clung to him; she was trembling, but presently the savagery next door wore itself out. The lady had clubbed her mate with a rolling-pin, and then thrown a bucket of water over him, and presently Paragon Place slept.