Though my wife’s a comely woman still and a good woman into the bargain (if her tongue was a bit shorter), still she’s a hard worker and she means well by all of us, and she has a nice red and white skin and a plump figger as any man might be proud of.
Yet, would you believe it, that sometimes, after all these years, as I’m sitting opposite to her at the table and thinking what a fine, well-kept woman she is, her chestnut hair and her blue eyes and white skin seems all to fade away from me, and I sees instead of them a thin, almost a pinched, little face, with pale cheeks and large, dark eyes, like two stars glowing in the sky at night, and a tangle of black curls falling all about a young gal’s neck.
And when that vision (or whatever you likes to call it) rises before me, I feel as if the food I was eating would choke me, and I’m forced sometimes to make an excuse to rise from the table, in order to sweep the back of my hand across my eyes. And yet it all happened eight and twenty years ago, and she’s a lady now, and rides in her carriage.
Well, well! we mortals are fools at the best, and I suppose I’m not behind my neighbours. But I must tell you the story, and then you can judge for yourself.
Twenty-eight years ago, I was four and twenty years of age, and had not long entered the Force. I believe I was a tolerably good-looking chap, at least the women used to tell me so. I know I was strong and big, measuring forty-eight inches round the chest, and standing six foot two in my stocking feet. But I didn’t think much about women in those days.
People make great mistakes about policemen. The comic papers print so much fun about the cooks and rabbit pies, that the public take it all for gospel. But, that ain’t the ambition of all of us. I can speak for myself that, in the days that I was young, I wouldn’t have looked at a cook as was a cook in the way of sweethearting. Cooking is an art as comes by experience, and though I liked a good dinner as well as any man, I couldn’t have gone to the length of making love to a greasy old woman in order to get it, nor I wouldn’t have accepted, what wasn’t hers to give away, neither.
I was brought up by my sister Margaret (having lost my poor mother, before I could remember her), and the first thing she taught me was never to lie and never to steal, and, thank God, I’ve not forgotten the lesson.
Margaret’s a good woman, the best I’ve ever known, and if I’m found on the right hand, at the last day, it will be all due to her. As soon as father was dead and didn’t want her no more, and she had got me into the Force, she went for a hospital nurse, and at the time I speak of was going on nicely and giving great satisfaction to the doctors. Whenever she could get an hour’s leave I used to try and get leave too, to go and meet her, and if it was impossible she would come down to my beat and stand in one place, maybe for half a day at a time, only to exchange a few words with me as I passed backwards and forwards. And I didn’t loiter on my beat those times, I can tell you!
I loved my sister Margaret as much as she loved me, and her cheery face and words was better for me to see and hear than those of any woman—leastways till I met Nan. And this is how I met her.
In those days my beat lay up Whitechapel way, and a nasty neighbourhood it is, particularly at night time—full of thieves and drunkards, and not fit for a decent woman to pass through.