Poll hesitated, then followed him: their feud was drowned in beer.
The primrose lived for a week, and held a sort of continuous reception. Bim was as proud as a peacock about it. He got stiff-neck staring over the parapet, straining to hear the compliments and praise. Everybody in the Court paid it a daily visit and undue tributes. The children could hardly be induced to keep their hands from it. Their fingers itched to pluck; but Poll Skinner was a power to be feared. She kept sober in order to be the better sentinel.
Mike suddenly shifted the interest of Paradise Court to his abode by bringing home three flowerpots containing hyacinths--how he obtained them had better not be asked. As at the same time the primrose happened to fade, and its plant had no promise of buds, Poll felt chagrin. The balance of her world was shifted. Mike held the hub of the hemisphere.
She drank herself silly with gin, and beat her children frightfully; but the return of sober sanity brought new ideas. Poll rose to the occasion. She sent her "old man" to a distant churchyard to steal some good new mould; and then bought--actually bought--from the publican's wife, a rose-plant warranted to flower.
Poll bore it home triumphantly, while Paradise Court smiled.
Mike's hyacinths--in comparison with Poll's aristocratic plant--had now to take a second place, very far-behind, in the public interest. And it was no good making reprisals. Neither his wits nor his wealth would enable him to do better than Poll. Moreover, the fashion of flowers was spreading. Three other residents in the colony had put up rough window-boxes, with green things in them; and the children, keen to follow their elders, found tins, jam-pots, pickle-jars, and planted within them anything they could get; grass, if nothing of the flower kind was available.
Bim felt a third of an inch taller; he trod with an airier tread, now that his influence over Paradise Court had become so manifest. He laboured with Salvationist ardour to help the people; supplementing and moderating their energies, and encouraged the flowers to live. For hours he would sit in blest invisibility by one or other of the plants, enjoying the admiring remarks addressed to them, sharing the general satisfaction.
Families came to talk of weedy green things as if they were spreading chestnut-trees; while those members of the community who, having gone "hopping," had actual experience of wild life and woodland facts were regarded as travellers and oracles. Living up to their opportunities, they told vegetable counterparts of certain fish stories. Bim's blessed interference certainly caused some white stealth and a multitude of tarradiddles.
Nor was the indirect influence of the gnome yet at an end.
'Arry Bailey was the instrument of the next progressive step. He had some nasturtiums and was ambitious of getting them to climb in festoons round his window. He used nails, string, language and glue. At last he succeeded. For a time his nasturtiums were the rage. Their blazing colours and rapid growth made them popular. But Bailey, in whom the æsthetic sense must have been recovering after years of hibernation, felt that something was lacking. He smoked three ounces of shag and scratched his chin for hours on end before it dawned on him what it was.