But I am anticipating again.
I was writing about the houses we went to look at before we fixed on the ‘Stretford Arms.’ There was one not quite in the country, but out in a suburb of London—a new sort of a suburb: rather melancholy, like new suburbs are when some of the houses are only skeletons, and the fields are half field and half brickyard, and old iron and broken china lie scattered about, with a dead cat in a pond that’s been nearly used up and just shows the cat’s head; and a bit of rotten plank above the inch or so of clay-coloured water. And there’s generally a little boy standing on the plank, and making it squeeze down into the water and jump up again, and smothering himself up to the eyes in squirts of the dirty, filthy water, which seems to be quite a favourite amusement with little suburban boys and girls. I suppose it’s through so much building always going on.
We went to look at a nice house, that certainly was very cheap and nicely fitted up, in this new suburb; and there was a fair garden and a bit of a field at the back. It stood on the high-road, or what would be the high-road when the suburb was finished, and we were told it would one day be a fine property, as houses were letting fast, and all being built in the new pretty way; you know what I mean—a lot of coloured glass and corners to them, and wood railings dotted about here and there, something like the Swiss Cottage, where the omnibuses stop—Queen Anne, I think they call them.
We wanted to be more out of town, but we heard such glowing accounts from the broker about this place, we hesitated to let it go. The landlord, we were told, was giving up the business because he had to go to a warmer climate for the winter, being in bad health, and, having lost his wife, he had nobody to leave behind to look after the place. If ever you try to take a business, dear reader, I dare say you will find, as we did, that the people who are going to sell it to you never give up because things aren’t good, but always because they’ve made so much money they don’t want any more, or because they have to go and live a long way off. I suppose it wouldn’t do to be quite truthful in advertising a business for sale, any more than in giving a servant a character. If the whole truth and nothing but the truth was told in these cases, I fancy very few businesses would change hands and very few servants get places.
We had only seen this house in the new suburb once on a very fine day in the autumn, and it looked very nice, as I told you; but, as luck would have it, we made up our minds to go down without saying we were coming, one wet Saturday afternoon. “Let’s see how it looks in bad weather,” said Harry. So I put on my thick boots and my waterproof, and off we went.
Certainly that new suburb didn’t look lively in the rain. The mud was up to your ankles in the new roads, and the unfinished houses looked soaked to the skin, and seemed to steam with the damp.
When we got to the house we went in and asked for the landlord. “He’s very ill in bed,” said the barmaid, who had her face tied up with a handkerchief.
“What’s the matter with him?” said Harry.
“Rheumatics,” said the barmaid. “He’s regular bent double, and twisted into knots with it.”
The barmaid didn’t know us or our business, so Harry gave me a look not to say anything, and then he got the girl on to talk about the house.