As Canterton walked across to the goods office, he found himself confessing to a bitter and helpless sense of defeat. He had made this woman suffer, and it seemed out of his power now even to humble himself before her. She had fled out of his life, and appealed to him not to follow her—not to try and see her. It was better for them both, she had said, to try and forget, but he knew in his heart of hearts that it would never be forgotten.
PART II
CHAPTER XXII
BOSNIA ROAD
It is a suggestive thought that the characteristic effects of our execrable climate have nowhere shown themselves more forcibly than in the atmosphere of the London suburbs. That these suburbs are in some subtle respects the results of our melancholy grey skies no one can doubt. Even the raw red terraces scattered among the dingier and more chastened rows of depressed houses, betray a futile and rather boisterous attempt to introduce a butcher-boy cheerfulness into a world of smuts and rain. The older, sadder houses have taken the tint of their surroundings. They have been poised all these years between the moil and fog of the city, and a countryside that was never theirs, a countryside that is often pictured as wrapped in eternal June, but which for nine months out of the twelve knows grey gloom, mud, and rain.
Their activities alone must have given the modern English such cheerfulness as they possess, while the climate has made them a nation of grumblers. Perhaps the Industrial Revolution saved us from our weather.
Coal and power came and gave us something to do. For what has been the history of England, but the watering of the blood of those who came to dwell in her. It is not necessary to thank the Roman rule for the decadence of the Britons, when their Saxon conquerors in turn sank into sodden, boorish ignorance. The Normans brought red blood and wine to the grey island, but by the fifteenth century the blend had become coarse, cruel, and poor. With the Elizabethans, half the world rushed into new adventure and romance, and England revived. But once again the grey island damped down the ardour, the enthusiasms and the energies of the people. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the population was stagnant, the country poor, coarse and apathetic. Then King Coal arose, and lit a fire for us, and a few great men were born. We found big things to do, and were renewed, in spite of our climate. Yet the question suggests itself, will these subtle atmospheric influences reassert themselves and damp us down once more in the centuries that are to come?
Eve Carfax had elected to live in a London suburb, and had chosen Highbury, perhaps because of childish recollections of pleasant half holidays spent there with a friend of her mother’s, afternoons when muffins and fancy cakes had made bread and butter superfluous, and a jolly old lady had discovered occasional half-crowns in her purse. Eve had taken two rooms in a little red house in Bosnia Road. Why it should have been called Bosnia Road she could not imagine. Each house had a front door with stained glass and a brass letter box, a tiny strip of front garden faced with a low brick wall topped by an iron railing, an iron gate, and a red tiled path. All the houses looked exactly alike. Most of them had a big china bowl or fern pot on a table or pedestal in the window of the ground floor room. There was no originality either in the texture or the draping of the curtains. None of the houses in Bosnia Road had any of that sense of humour possessed by the houses in a village street. There were no jocular leerings, no rollicking leanings up against a neighbour, no expressive and whimsical faces. They were all decently alike, respectably uniform, staring at each other across the road, and never moved to laughter by the absurd discovery that the architect had unconsciously perpetrated a cynical lampoon upon the suburban middle classes.
When one is fighting for the bare necessities of life, one is not conscious of monotony. For Eve, as an adventuress, it had been a question of gaining a foothold and a grip on a ledge with her fingers, and her energies had been concentrated on hanging to the vantage she had gained. She had had good luck, and the good luck had been due to Kate Duveen.