Neighbours on the Green

by Mrs. Oliphant

This happened at the beginning of summer; but all its agitations were over before the long sweet days and endless twilights of the happy season had fully expanded upon us. It seems to me as I grow older that a great deal of the comfort of our lives depends upon summer—upon the weather, let us say, taking it in its most prosaic form. Sometimes indeed to the sorrowful the brightness is oppressive; but to all the masses of ordinary mortals who are neither glad nor sad, it is a wonderful matter not to be chilled to the bone; to be able to do their work without thinking of a fire; without having a sensation of cold always in their lives never to be got rid of. Ellen and her lover enjoyed that summer as people who have been under sentence of banishment enjoy their native country and their home.

You may think there is not much beauty in a London suburb to tempt any one: and there is not for those who can retire to the beautiful fresh country when they will, and surround themselves with waving woods and green lawns, or taste the freshness of the mountains or the saltness of the sea. We, who go away every year in July, pined and longed for the moment of our removal; and my neighbour in the great house which shut out the air from Pleasant Place, panted in her great garden (which she was proud to think was almost unparalleled for growth and shade in London), and declared herself incapable of breathing any longer in such a close and shut up locality. But the dwellers in Pleasant Place were less exacting. They thought the long suburban road very pleasant. Where it streamed off into little dusty houses covered with brown ivy and dismal trellis work, and where every unfortunate flower was thick with dust, they gazed with a touch of envy at the ‘gardens,’ and felt it to be rural. When my pair of lovers went out for their walk they had not time to go further than to the ‘Green Man,’ a little tavern upon the roadside, where one big old elm tree, which had braved the dust and the frost for more years than any one could recollect, stood out at a corner at the junction of two roads, with a bench round it, where the passing carters and cabmen drank their beer, and a trough for the horses, which made it look ‘quite in the country’ to all the inhabitants of our district. Generally they got as far as that, passing the dusty cottages and the little terrace of new houses. A great and prolonged and most entertaining controversy went on between them as they walked, as to the kind of house in which they should eventually settle down. Ellen, who was not without a bit of romance in her, of the only kind practicable with her upbringing, entertained a longing for one of the dusty little cottages. She thought, like all inexperienced persons, that in her hands it would not be dusty. She would find means of keeping the ivy green. She would see that the flowers grew sweet and clean, and set blacks and dust alike at defiance. John, for his part, whose lodging was in one of those little houses, preferred the new terrace. It was very new—very like a row of ginger-bread houses—but it was very clean, and for the moment bright, not as yet penetrated by the dust. Sometimes I was made the confidante of these interminable, always renewed, always delightful discussions. ‘They are not dusty yet,’ Ellen would say, ‘but how long will it be before they are dusty? whereas with the villas’ (they had a great variety of names—Montpellier Villas, Funchal Villas, Mentone Mansions—for the district was supposed to be very mild) ‘one knows what one has to expect; and if one could not keep the dust and the blacks out with the help of brushes and dusters, what would be the good of one? I should sow mignonette and Virginia stock,’ she cried with a firm faith; ‘low-growing flowers would be sure to thrive. It is only roses (poor roses!) and tall plants that come to harm.’ John, for his part, dwelt much upon the fact that in the little front parlours of the terrace houses there were shelves for books fitted into a recess. This weighed quite as much with him as the cleanness of the new places. ‘The villas are too dingy for her,’ he said, looking admiringly at her fresh face. ‘She could never endure the little gray, grimy rooms.’ That was his romance, to think that everything should be shining and bright about her. He was unconscious of the dinginess of the parlour in Ellen’s home. It was all irradiated with her presence to him. These discussions however all ended in a sigh and a laugh from Ellen herself. ‘It is all very fine talking,’ she would say.

And so the summer went on. Alas! and other summers after it. My eldest girl married. My boys went out into the world. Many changes came upon our house. The children began to think it a very undesirable locality. Even Chatty, always the sweetest, sighed for South Kensington, if not for a house in the country and a month in London in the season, which was what the other girls wished for. This common suburban road, far from fashion, far from society—what but their mother’s inveterate old-fashionedness and indifference to appearances could have kept them there so long? The great house opposite with the garden had ceased to be. The high wall was gone from Pleasant Place, and instead of it stood a fresh row of little villakins like the terrace which had once been John Ridgway’s admiration. Alas! Ellen’s forebodings had been fully realized, and the terrace was as dingy as Montpellier Villas by this time. The whole neighbourhood was changing. Half the good houses in the road—the houses, so to speak, of the aristocracy, which to name was to command respect from all the neighbourhood—had been built out and adorned with large fronts of plate glass and made into shops. Omnibuses now rolled along the dusty way. The station where they used to stop had been pushed out beyond the ‘Green Man,’ which once we had felt to be ‘quite in the country.’ Everything was changing; but my pair of lovers did not change. Ellen got other pupils instead of Chatty and her contemporaries who were growing up and beyond her skill, and came out at ten o’clock every morning with as fresh a face as ever, and her little roll of music always in her hand. And every evening, though now he was set down at his lodgings from the omnibus, and no longer passed my window on his way home, John made his pilgrimage of love to Pleasant Place. She kept her youth—the sweet complexion, the dew in her eyes, and the bloom upon her cheek—in a way I could not understand. The long waiting did not seem to try her. She had always his evening visit to look for, and her days were full of occupation. But John, who had naturally a worn look, did not bear the probation so well as Ellen. He grew bald; a general rustiness came over him. He had looked older than he was to begin with: his light locks, his colourless countenance, faded into a look of age. He was very patient—almost more patient than Ellen, who, being of a more vivacious temper, had occasioned little outbursts of petulant despair, of which she was greatly ashamed afterwards; but at the same time this prolonged and hopeless waiting had more effect upon him than upon her. Sometimes he would come to see me by himself for the mere pleasure, it seemed to me, though we rarely spoke on the subject, of being understood.

‘Is this to go on for ever?’ I said. ‘Is it never to come to an end?’

‘It looks like it,’ said John, somewhat drearily. ‘We always talk about our little house. I have got three rises since then. I doubt if I shall ever have any more; but we don’t seem a bit nearer——’ and he ended with a sigh—not of impatience, like those quick sighs mixed up with indignant, abrupt little laughs in which Ellen often gave vent to her feelings—but of weariness and despondency much more hard to bear.

‘And the father,’ I said, ‘seems not a day nearer the end of his trouble. Poor man, I don’t wish him any harm.’

This, I fear, was a hypocritical speech, for in my heart I should not have been at all sorry to hear that his ‘trouble’ was coming to an end.

Then for the first time a gleam of humour lighted in John’s eye. ‘I am beginning to suspect that he is—better,’ he said; ‘stronger at least. I am pretty sure he has no thought of coming to an end.’

‘All the better,’ I said; ‘if he gets well, Ellen will be free.’

‘He will never get well,’ said John, falling back into his dejection, ‘and he will never die.’