The Privet Hedge

by J. E. Buckrose

She paused to take breath and stood looking after him, thinking it was no wonder Dan Willis had never got on in the world; but she did not know how many things in the world he enjoyed which people who must hunt the last farthing all the time are obliged to miss. He was indeed a happy bachelor, lodging over a little bread shop in the old part of the village, and his sixty years sat lightly on him because he had always found so much to see and to admire in the streets of Thorhaven.

But as Caroline turned to hurry down Emerald Avenue she immediately forgot all about him, for in nearly every house some acquaintance was making ready for the advent of the Visitor—either hanging curtains or washing covers or standing furniture outside to beat—and she could have written a most valuable book entitled "Hint to Lodging Seekers." She possessed recondite, first-hand information, such as no outsider can know; as, for instance, the more white mats, spotless covers and antimacassars in April, the more stains and flies towards the end of August. But fortunately for the few slatterns in Thorhaven, she did not use her power.

Now she was racing in a whirl of emotion down Emerald Avenue and round the next turn into Pearl Terrace, where her aunt Mrs. Creddle lived. Strangers wondered to see the newer streets in Thorhaven all named after precious stones, but the reason was simple enough. A member of the Council had been inspired one warm June evening after three bottles of ginger-beer to name the first of these red rows of houses Cornelian Crescent. But that bold flight of fancy exhausted the afflatus, and it seemed easier to go on to Sapphire Road than to think of anything fresh. Now—after a lapse of years—Thorhaven's city fathers had begun to be proud of this street nomenclature, and to believe they had meant it from the very first.

Number 10 Pearl Terrace was a house on the north side of the road, and Caroline had been "day-girl" with the wife of a small grocer just round the corner from the age of fifteen and a half to the present time. Before she went there at eight and after her return at six, she had helped Mrs. Creddle during the crises constantly recurring in a family of four little girls under twelve years old. Indeed, as her aunt said, she formed another example of good coming out of evil—for evil it seemed, when the Creddles had been obliged to take in Caroline among their increasing brood after the death of her father and mother.

Not that there had ever been any question about it. "You couldn't let the poor little lass go to the workhouse," said Mrs. Creddle when anyone spoke to her on the subject. "Bless you, we've never missed the bit she used to eat before she began to make aught, and she's earned her keep with us over and over again since then."

Mr. Creddle also expressed the same meaning, though in different terms, when pals ventured with a smile to hint that he had lasses enough under his roof without getting in any from outside. "That's my business," he would say. "I don't see as anybody has a right to pass a remark. I'd rather have four lasses than a red nose, anyway."

If the person addressed happened to possess the outward and visible signs of alcoholic excess, so much the worse for him—Mr. Creddle was touchy on the subject of his family and did not wish to please. His own nose was slightly rubicund, but it was solely owing to the east winds which constantly blew across it as he worked for the Council on the long roads near the sea; for he was a sober man, and when he did have a glass of beer on a Saturday night, he brought it home in a jug to share with his wife.

For years, indeed, when the babies were arriving, that was their only little festival from week's end to week's end. They would stand the jug on the table, and Mrs. Creddle would bring out some freshly baked "pie"; with thick crust above and below, and apples or currants and sugar, or gooseberries inside; and with the house all clean for Sunday, they would take their hour of ease late on Saturday night.

So Caroline had been brought up in an atmosphere of kindness, though Mr. Creddle had once threatened to strap her if she ran about with the lads again after dark. He had caught her racing with streaming hair round some half-built houses in Emerald Avenue, among a party of boys who ought to have been in bed, and his brief comments as he escorted her home were Elizabethan and to the point. Oddly enough, they burnt deeper into her mind than the whole of Mrs. Creddle's cautious advice.

All that, however, was long ago. Now—demure and slim—Caroline would no more have thought of racing round half-built houses at night than Mrs. Creddle herself. But she flung open the front door of Number 10 with the same certainty of warm interest she had always felt on entering that house, for Mrs. Creddle might be "put out," unhappy, anxious—but never coldly indifferent.