2
The road through the wood curved sharply round to the right, and they came suddenly upon a clearing, and saw the house in front of them. It was a long, low house, smothered in roses and creepers, and it stood in a wild garden surrounded by a breast-high wall of red brick. At the edge of the clearing several cows were lying under the shade of the trees, reflectively chewing the cud with slow, deliberate enjoyment, while one, solitary, stood with its head over the garden gate, motionless, save for an occasional petulant whisp of its ropey tail.
“Now, then, what are we going to do?” asked Mrs Gosling.
The procession halted, and the three women regarded the guardian cow with every sign of dismay.
“Shoo!” said Millie feebly, flapping her hands; and Blanche repeated the intimidation with greater force; but the cow merely acknowledged the salutation by an irritable sweep of its tail.
“’Orrid brute!” muttered Mrs Gosling, and flicked her handkerchief in the direction of the brute’s quarters.
“I know,” said Blanche, conceiving a subtle strategy. “We’ll drive it away with the cart.” She turned the trolly round, and the three of them grasping the pole, they advanced slowly and warily to the charge, pushing their siege ram before them. They made a slight detour to achieve a flank attack and allow the enemy a clear way of retreat.
“Oh, dear! what are you doing?” said a voice suddenly, and the three startled Goslings nearly dropped the pole in their alarm—they had been so utterly absorbed in their campaign.
A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, very brown, hot and dishevelled, was regarding them from the other side of the garden wall with a stare of amazement that even as they turned was flickering into laughter.
“It’s that great brute by the gate, my dear,” said Mrs Gosling, “and we’ve just——”
“You don’t mean Alice?” interrupted the young woman. “Oh! you couldn’t go charging poor dear Alice with a great cart like that! Three of you, too!”
“Is its name Alice?” asked Blanche stupidly. She did not feel equal to this curious occasion.
“Its name!” replied the young woman, with scorn. “Her name’s Alice, if that’s what you mean.” She shook back the hair from her eyes and moved down to the gate. The cow acknowledged her presence by an indolent toss of the head.
“Oh! but my sweet Alice!” protested the young woman; “you must move and let these funny people come in. It really isn’t good for you, dear, to stand about in the sun like this, and you’d much better go and lie down in the shade for a bit!” She gently pulled the gate from under the cow’s chin, and then, laying her hands flat on its side, made as if to push it out of the way.
“Well, I never!” declared Mrs Gosling, regarding the performance with much the same awe as she might have vouchsafed to a lion-tamer in a circus. “’Oo’d ’ave thought it’d ’a been that tame?”
The cow, after a moment’s resistance, moved off with a leisurely walk in the direction of the wood.
“Now, you funny people, what do you want?” asked the young woman.
Mrs Gosling began to explain, but Blanche quickly interposed. “Oh! do be quiet, mother; you don’t understand,” she said, and continued, before her mother could remonstrate, “We’ve come from London.”
“Goodness!” commented the young woman.
“And we want——” Blanche hesitated. She was surprised to find that in the light of her wonderful discovery it was not so easy to define precisely what they ought to want. As the broomstick woman had said, they were “beggars.” Fairly confronted with the problem, Blanche saw no alternative but a candid acknowledgment of the fact.
“You want feeding, of course,” put in the young woman. “They all do. You needn’t think you’re the first. We’ve had dozens!”
A solution presented itself to Blanche. “We don’t really want food,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of tinned things left still, only we’re ill with eating tinned things. I thought, perhaps, you might be willing to let us have some milk and eggs and vegetables in exchange?”
“That’s sensible enough,” commented the young woman. “If you only knew the things we have been offered! Money chiefly, of course”—Mrs Gosling opened her mouth, but Blanche frowned and shook her head—“and it does seem as if money’s about as useless as buttons. In fact, I’d sooner have buttons—you can use them. But the other funny things—bits of old furniture, warming-pans, jewellery! You should have heard Mrs Isaacson! She was a Jewess who came from Hampstead a couple of months ago, and she had a lot of jewels she kept in a bag tied round her waist under her skirt; and when Aunt May and I simply had to tell her to go she tried to bribe us with an old brooch and rubbish. She was a terror. But, I say”—she looked at the sun—“I’ve got lots of things to do before sunset.” She paused, and looked at the three Goslings. “Look here,” she went on, “are you all right? You seem all right.”
Again Mrs Gosling began to reply, but Blanche was too quick for her. “Tell me what you mean by ‘all right’?” she asked, raising her voice to drown her mother’s “Well, I never did ’ear such——”
“Well, of course, mother’ll give you any mortal thing you want,” replied the young woman at the gate. “Dear old mater! She simply won’t think of what we’re going to do in the winter; and I mean, if you come in for to-night, say, and we let you have a few odd things, you won’t go and plant yourselves on us like that Mrs Isaacson and one or two others, because if you do, Aunt May and I will have to turn you out, you know.”
“What we ’ave we’ll pay for,” said Mrs Gosling with dignity.
The young woman smiled. “Oh, I dare say!” she said; “pay us with those pretty little yellow counters that aren’t the least good to anyone. You wait here half a jiff. I’ll find Aunt May.”
She ran up the path and entered the house. A moment later they heard her calling “Aunt May! Auntie—Aun-tee!” somewhere out at the back.
“Let’s ’ope ’er Aunt May’ll ’ave more common sense,” remarked Mrs Gosling.
Blanche turned on her almost fiercely. “For goodness sake, mother,” she said, “do try and get it out of your head, if you can, that we can buy things with money. Can’t you see that everything’s different? Can’t you see that money’s no good, that you can’t eat it, or wear it, or light a fire with it, like that other woman said? Can’t you understand, or won’t you?”
Mrs Gosling gaped in amazement. It was incredible that the mind of Blanche should also have been distorted by this terrible heresy. She turned in sympathy to Millie, who had taken her mother’s seat on the pole of the trolly, but Millie frowned and said:
“B.’s right. You can’t buy things with money; not here, anyway. What’d they do with money if they got it?”
Mrs Gosling looked at the trees, at the cows lying at the edge of the wood, at the sunlit fields beyond the house, but she saw nothing which suggested an immediate use for gold coin.
“Lemme sit down, my dear,” she said. “What with the ’eat and all this walkin’——Oh! what wouldn’t I give for a cup o’ tea!”
Millie got up sulkily and leaned against the wall. “I suppose they’ll let us stop here to-night, B.?” she asked.
“If we don’t make fools of ourselves,” replied Blanche, spitefully.
Mrs Gosling drooped. No inspiration had come to her as it had come to her daughter. The older woman had become too specialized. She swayed her head, searching—like some great larva dug up from its refuse heap—confused and feeble in this new strange place of light and air.
And as Blanche had repeated to herself “Everything’s different,” so Mrs Gosling seized a phrase and clung to it as to some explanation of this horrible perplexity. “I can’t understand it,” she said; “I can’t understand it!”