England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction; Uncles -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
A man in shirt sleeves, interrupted at the second or third of his forty
Sabbath winks, leaned out of an upper window and asked Jasmine what she
thought she was doing jibbering and jabbering on his garden wall; before
she had time to explain, he perceived the young man in the garden, and
asked him what he thought he was doing havering and hovering about among
his flowers.
"I was looking for the bell."
"Bell! You long-legged fool! What d'you think I should keep a bell in my
back garden for, when the children won't let the bells in front have a
moment's peace?" Then he made a noise like a dog shut in a door. "Ough!
Take your great feet out of my petunias, can't you! If I want my flowers
trampled on, I can get a steam-roller to do it. I don't want your help."
"This lady dropped something in your garden," the young man explained,
and the owner smiled bitterly.
"Aye," he went on, "that's what they all say. Please, mister, our Amy's
dropped her damned doll in your garden, can she come round and fetch it
back? It's like living in a dustbin. A scandal, that's what I say it is.
A public scandal."
Then began one of those long arguments in which people roused from sleep
seem to delight, provided always that they have been sufficiently roused
to feel that it is not worth while going to sleep again. What occurred
to lead up to the trespass was swept away as having occurred while the
owner was still asleep; no amount of explanation as to why the young man
was in his back garden was of any avail; no suggestions as to how he was
to get out of it had any effect; and the argument might have continued
until the 4.42 train from York to Spaborough had left the station, if in
some inner room a child's voice had not begun to sing to the
accompaniment of a harmonium:
_There is a green hill far away_
_Without a city wall_
"Aye, you silly little fool, that's right! Sing that now! It's a pity
your dad doesn't live on a green hill without a city wall, and not in
York."
The young man, who by this time had been rendered as argumentative as
the owner, remarked that 'without' meant 'outside.'
"What's it matter what it means, if there wasn't a city wall?" retorted
the owner, and vanished from the window before the young man could
reply. From inside one of the rooms there was a fresh murmur of
argument, which lasted until a noise between a moan and a thud was
followed by a silence faintly broken by sobs. The slamming down of the
lid of the harmonium had evidently relieved the feelings of the man in
shirt sleeves, for when presently he came out into the garden and found
himself at close quarters with the intruder, he became genial and
talkative, and began to point out the superiority of his dahlias.
"I reckon they're grand, I do," he said. "Like cauliflowers. Only, of
course, cauliflowers wouldn't have the colour, would they?"
"Not if they were fresh," the young man agreed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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