“I suppose you remember this neighborhood before it was built on?”
“When it was a one-eyed country place,” elaborated Minnie.
He straightened his body on his spade, and looked at us, cunningly, like old people often do. An eager light came into his bleared eyes. It seemed to me the light of youth breaking uncannily through the crust of seventy years. He remembered—sure he did. He became suddenly voluble—talking more to himself than to us.
“It’s a good many year since this ’ere part was open country. Ah! there was a gate on the common—hereabouts, as near as I can mind. A bit on was a bridge, stone one side and iron t’other. A man had to keep a sharp lookout if he come home full o’ liquor nights. The rail runs there now—they built a new ’un. There was a copse—Shannonses copse, I think they called it, but my memory aint what it was. You went over a stile. That was a rare place for coortin’”—he grinned, showing a toothless cavern, and he spluttered with merry memories as he rocked on the spade.
“There was a cottage near by—my father had it. I jest call to mind his father plantin’ the orchard—a very old man as couldn’t expect to see the fruit. A fine orchard it wur—Blenum orringe trees and Tom Spuds and all sorts. Dickson’s tannery stands there now. If you went on, through the fields and across the road, you come to Hillyar’s farm—that’s Stern & Carson’s brewery. Hillyar’s pears was wonderful for keepin’. I mind Loo Hillyar—sich arms;” he leered at Minnie, whose face was chalky under her black bonnet. “You don’t see young women like that these times. Sich a hand at butter-making. It must be fifty—forty year ago or more since me an’ her drove geese over the common. It couldn’t ha’ been so fur from where we stands, neither. Here, as you may say, or thereabouts—but the face of the earth do change so.”
He spat on his hands and bent his back to the weary task of tidying the melancholy mound of clinkers and starved ferns. I gave him sixpence and I gave Minnie my arm. She clutched it wildly. There was a shadow on her pretty, common face—the shadow of the unexplainable.
What did it mean? I don’t pretend to say. Odd, wasn’t it? But then the world is odd. We just skim it and fancy we have proved all.
Minnie? She went back to a City office as typist, and she married the principal in less than a year. She was always the sort of girl to do well for herself—her marriage with Chaytor was an aberration. She lives in a very swagger house at East Croydon, wears rather loud dresses, and talks persistently of “my cook.”