Chapter 1

Produced by Al Haines

The Privet Hedge

By

J. E. BUCKROSE

[Transcriber's note: J. E. Buckrose is the pseudonym for Annie Edith Jameson.]

By the Same Author

THE HOUSE WITH THE GOLDEN WINDOWS YOUNG HEARTS THE GIRL IN FANCY DRESS MARRIAGE WHILE YOU WAIT THE GOSSIP SHOP THE SILENT LEGION THE TALE OF MR. TUBBS THE MATCHMAKERS THE ROUND-ABOUT DOWN OUR STREET A LITTLE GREEN WORLD BECAUSE OF JANE LOVE IN A LITTLE TOWN THE GREY SHEPHERD

Hodder and Stoughton Limited

London

1921

Contents

CHAP.

I THE COTTAGE II CAROLINE III THE PROMENADE IV THE THREE MEN V THE DANCE ON THE PROMENADE VI MORNING CALLS VII SEA-ROKE VIII THE HEIGHT OF THE SEASON IX WEDDING CLOTHES X SUNDAY NIGHT XI THE GALA XII THE END OF THE GALA XIII NEXT MORNING XIV THE CLIFF TOP XV THE CINEMA XVI NEW-COMERS XVII THE BENEFIT CONCERT XVIII UPROOTING XIX A WINDY MORNING XX LEVELLING XXI ST. MARTIN'S SUMMER XXII MORNING XXIII ON THE SHORE

_Chapter I_

_The Cottage_

At the far end of Thorhaven towards the north was a little square house surrounded by a privet hedge. It had a green door under a sort of wooden canopy with two flat windows on either side, and seemed to stand there defying the rows and rows of terraces, avenues and meanish semi-detached villas which were creeping up to it. Behind lay the flat fields under a wide sky just as they had lain for centuries, with the gulls screaming across them inland from the mud cliffs, and so the cottage formed a sort of outpost, facing alone the hordes of jerry-built houses which threatened to sweep on and surround it.

The ladies who lived at the Cottage had once been nicknamed the Misses Canute--which showed how plainly all this could be seen, as a sort of symbol, by anyone in the least imaginative; though it was a rather unsatisfactory curate from Manchester who actually gave them the name. No one felt surprised when he afterwards offended his bishop and went into the motor business, for he suffered from that constitutional ability to take people as seriously as they wished to be taken, which is so bad for any career.

Thus the curate departed, but his irreverence lived on after him for quite a long time, because many people like a mild joke which every one must see at once--which is ready-made--and for which they cannot be held responsible. So this became for a little while the family jest of Thorhaven, in no way spoiled by the fact that one sister had married a man called Bradford and was now a widow, while the other retained the paternal Wilson.

The two ladies were walking together on this twenty-sixth of March, by the side of the privet hedge which divided their garden from the large field beyond and hid from them everything which they did not care to see.

Miss Ethel's name was entirely unsuited to her, but she had received it at a period when Ethels were as thick as blackberries in every girls' school of any pretensions; and she was not in the very least like any Miss Amelia out of a book, though she possessed an elder sister and had reached fifty-five without getting married. On the contrary, she carried her head with great assurance on her spare shoulders, put her hair in curling pins each night as punctually as she said her prayers, and wore a well-cut, shortish tweed skirt with sensible shoes. Her face was thin and she had a delicately-shaped, rather long nose, together with a charmingly-shaped mouth that had grown compressed and lost its sweetness. A mole over her right eyebrow accentuated her habit of twitching that side of her face a little when she was nervous or excited.

But she was calm now, walking there with her sister, enjoying the keen air warmed with sunshine which makes life on such a day in Thorhaven sparkle with possibilities.

"I'm glad," she said, "that we decided not to clip the hedge. It has grown up until it hides that odious Emerald Avenue entirely from the garden."

"I can still see it from my bedroom window all the same," said Mrs. Bradford.

"Don't look out of your window, then!" retorted Miss Ethel sharply.

"You take care of that," said Mrs. Bradford. "You have made the short blinds so high that I can scarcely see over them."

"Do you want the people in those awful little houses to see you undressing?" demanded Miss Ethel.

"They couldn't--not unless they used a telescope or opera glasses," said Mrs. Bradford. And she managed to convey, by some subtle inflexion of voice and expression--though she was a dull woman--that if you had been married, you were not so pernickitty about such things; and, finally, that if Emerald Avenue cared to go to that trouble it was welcome, because she remained always invested with the mantle of Hymen.

As a matter of fact, she had--in a way--spent her life for some years in echoing that romantic declaration of the lady in the play: "I have lived and loved." Only she had never said anything so vivid as that--she simply sat down on the fact for the rest of her life in a sort of comatose triumph.

Her husband had been a short, weasely man of bilious temperament; still, he sufficed; and his death at the end of two years from whooping-cough only added to Mrs. Bradford's complacency. She came back home again to the Cottage, feeling as immeasurably superior to her unmarried sister as only a woman of that generation could feel, who had found a husband while most of her female relatives remained spinsters. She at once caused the late Mr. Bradford's photograph to be enlarged--the one in profile where the eyebrows had been strengthened, and the slight squint was of course invisible--and she referred to him in conversation as "such a fine intellectual-looking man." After a while, she began to believe her own words more and more thoroughly, so that at the end of ten years she would not have recognized him at all had he appeared in the flesh.

"At any rate," she remarked, "our field won't be built over."

"No, thank goodness!" assented Miss Ethel emphatically, her left eyebrow twitching a little. "The Warringborns will never sell their land, whatever other people do. I remember grandfather telling us how he was ordered out of the room by old Squire Warringborn when he once went to suggest buying this field. Oh, no; the Warringborns won't sell. Not the least fear of that."

But she only talked in this way because she was afraid--trying to keep her heart up, as she saw in her mind's eye that oncoming horde of yellowish-red houses.

Before Mrs. Bradford could reply about the Warringborns, there came a sound of voices in the great field which stretched park-like beyond the privet hedge. "Butcher Walker putting some sheep in, I expect," said Mrs. Bradford. "He has the lease of it now."

But even as she spoke, her heavy jaw dropped and she stood staring. Miss Ethel swerved quickly round in the same direction, and her pale eyes focused. Neither of them uttered a sound as they looked at the square board which rose slowly above the privet hedge. They could not see the pole on which it was supported from that position in the garden, and so it appeared to them like a banner upheld by unseen hands.

"Well," said Mrs. Bradford at last, "we mustn't clip the hedge this year, that's all. Then----"

"Hedge!" cried Miss Ethel. "What's the use of talking about the hedge when our home is spoilt? Look! Read!" She pointed to that square object which flaunted now in all its glaring black and white newness--a blot against the grey sky.

FOR SALE

FOR THE ERECTION OF VILLAS AND BUNGALOWS

APPLY MESSRS. GLATT & WILSON

Miss Ethel could not have felt deeper dismay if the square notice board on the pole had been indeed held aloft by the very Spirit of Change itself, with streaming hair still all aflame from rushing too closely past a bursting sun. Only those who hate change as she did could ever understand her dismay.

"We shall be driven out of our house. We shall have to leave," she said, very pale. "After all these years, we shall have to go. We _can't_ stand all their nasty little back ways!"

"Where are we to go to?" said Mrs. Bradford. She paused a moment. "It's the same everywhere. Besides, the houses are not built yet."

There was nothing for them to do but to turn their backs on the board and walk quietly away, filled with that aching home-sickness for the quiet past which thousands of middle-aged people were feeling at that moment all over Europe. Everything was so different, and the knowledge of it gave to Miss Ethel a constant sense of exasperated discomfort, like the ache of an internal disease which she could not forget for a moment.

"I expect," she said after a while, "that Mrs. Graham will once more tell us to let ourselves go with the tide and not worry. Thank God, I never was a supine jelly-fish, and I can't start being one now."

"She was talking about servants," said Mrs. Bradford, who was troubled, but not so troubled, because she took things differently. "I expect she only meant we should never get another like Ellen; but we can't expect to do so after having her for eleven years."

"No. We are lucky to have Ellen's niece coming. But I wish she were a little older," said Miss Ethel. "Nineteen is very young."

"Yes," replied Mrs. Bradford, letting the conversation drop, for she was not very fond of talking. And in the silence they looked back; and to both of them nineteen seemed a rather ridiculous and foolish age--even for a servant, who is supposed to be rather young.

Then Miss Ethel began again--talking on to try and banish the insistent vision in her mind's eye of that square board over the privet hedge, which she knew herself foolish to dwell upon. "I wish Caroline had not lived with Ellen's sister and gone out as a day-girl to that little grocer's shop in the Avenue. I'm afraid that may have spoilt her. But it is Caroline or nobody. We may want a sensible middle-aged maid, but in these days it isn't what you want--it's what you can get."

Mrs. Bradford nodded; and again they felt all over them that resentful home-sickness for the past.

"One thing--we must begin as we mean to go on," said Miss Ethel. "If mistresses were only firmer there would never be such ridiculous proceedings as one hears about; but they are so afraid of losing maids that they put up with anything. No wonder the girls find this out and cease to have any respect for them. Look at Mrs. Graham! A latch-key allowed, and no caps or aprons. That's swimming with the tide, with a vengeance."

"There's no fear of Caroline wanting anything of that sort," said Mrs. Bradford. "Ellen's sister, Mrs. Creddle, is as steady as Ellen."

"She'd need to be, with four children on her hands, and a husband like one of those coco-nuts at Hull fair that have the husk partly left on," said Miss Ethel. "I never could understand how a nice-looking girl, such as Mrs. Creddle was then, came to marry such a man."

Mrs. Bradford looked down at her fat hands and smiled a little, seeming to see things in the matrimonial philosophy that no spinster was likely to understand. Then after opening the door they both turned again, from force of long habit, to look across the garden, and saw the square board more plainly now than they had done when close under the hedge. It stood there in the midst of the grass field--as if it were leading on--while in the distance the wind from the east was blowing the smoke like flags from the long row of chimney-tops in Emerald Avenue.

At last Miss Ethel said with a sort of doubtful hopefulness, as if keeping her courage up before those advancing hordes: "Perhaps nobody will want to buy the land there. Always heard it was boggy."

Mrs. Bradford shook her head silently and went in, followed by her sister: in a world where all things were now odiously possible, one had to take what came and make the best of it.

But Miss Ethel already experienced the faint beginning of a state of suspense which was never to cease, day or night, though at times she was not conscious of it. She fancied that every person who crossed the field was an intending buyer, and woke with a start when the old wardrobe gave the sudden "pop!" in the night to which she had been long accustomed, thinking for the moment that she heard the first stroke of a workman's hammer. In truth she was run down with doing most of the work of the house since Ellen's departure to look after an invalid mother, besides suffering from several severe colds during the winter, so that the possibility of new houses being built close at hand had got on her nerves, and gained an almost ridiculous importance.

She and her sister had thought, like so many others, that they could escape change by living in one place, but it had followed them, as it always inexorably does. Shut their eyes as they might, they had to see neighbours leaving, neighbours dying. And even those who remained did not continue the same. One day Miss Ethel was obliged to notice how grey little Mrs. Baker at the newspaper shop was going--and that brought to mind that she had been married thirty years come Christmas. Thirty years! It seemed incredible that so much of life had slipped almost imperceptibly away.

All the same, she _ached_ to stand still. She simply could not realize that perhaps some other generation would look back on hers as she did on the past. One Saturday the following lines in the local corner of the _Thorhaven and County Weekly Budget_--between an advertisement of a new poultry food and a notice of a fine goat for sale--did express a little of her state of mind, though they were written by a retired schoolmistress in the detested Emerald Avenue--

The world is full of hurry and change, And everything seems so new and strange; But it's stranger still that one of these days They'll call what _we're_ doing, "the dear old ways."

It remained incredible, whatever reason might tell her, that anything more iconoclastic could be hidden in the womb of time than the Warringborns selling their land and Mrs. Graham letting her maid go to dances on the promenade, with a powdered face and a latch-key.

_Chapter II_

_Caroline_

The promenade at Thorhaven was reached by a short, wide street where a wind blew always, even on the stillest days, and the hall in which the young people of the little town danced weekly stood straight in front of the approaching visitor, entirely blocking out the view and the sea. Some people thought this must have happened by accident, but others felt sure that some subtle brain on the Urban District Council had correctly gauged what the cherished Visitor--the Council naturally thought of him or her with a capital letter--really considered a most important feature of an up-to-date seaside resort.

The hall itself was a glass erection, and it was in design so like those miniature forcing-houses placed over cherished plants in a garden border that no one with any imagination could avoid feeling momentarily that it must have been placed there by some good-natured giant--well disposed towards Thorhaven--for the express purpose of making the Visitor "come on" during the seaside holiday.

At the entrance gate stood a sort of sentry-box where two girls sat in turn from ten to ten. These girls were chosen by an optimistic Committee who hoped they would possess amiability, endurance, and particularly a gift for remembering faces: because the inhabitants of Thorhaven felt that their promenade was first of all _theirs_--and that no assistant employed at the gate had a right _not_ to know them by sight when they entered the precincts for which their own rates and taxes had paid. Therefore--though this led to occasional abuse--it was found necessary to municipal harmony to let inhabitants in "on the nod."

Two young ladies of blameless reputation who were supposed to possess the required gifts had already been engaged for the season. One had filled the post before, and another was new to the job but promising. But time and love wait on the convenience of none--not even so important a body as the Thorhaven Amusements Committee--and girl number one unexpectedly ran away with a ship's engineer, while girl number two developed bronchial tendencies which made the pay-box unsuitable. So there were none.

On this bleak, bright day at the end of March, the pay-box with the wind howling round it did indeed look a bracing place to spend the day in, nor was it by any means an object which any would be likely to watch for five minutes at a stretch in a strong north-easter. But that was exactly what a palish girl with freckles on her nose had been doing for that length of time, and so intent was she on her own thoughts that she held a loose strand of hair in her hand instead of tucking it under her cap while she stood there with eyes fixed intently on the little ticket-window.

Her eyes were light--a greenish-grey flecked with gold--but they were very bright with dark lashes and themselves appeared quite dark when she was moved or excited. Nobody ever seemed to know what colour they were, not even the young fellow with whom she had been "going" ever since she left school, and she was generally considered in Thorhaven to have brown eyes.

After some time she withdrew that eager gaze, swerved round as if on a pivot, and started at a tremendous pace up the short, windy street that led to the main road. "I'll do it!" she said to herself--young lips tightly pressed, and nails biting into her palms even through her gloves. "I don't care what aunt says. It's my life, not hers. It's nobody's business but my own."

At the corner she stood a moment, searching the long grey road that led to the church. After a while she saw a cart in the distance laden with parcels and boxes, and she began to run after it, calling as she went: "Hi! Mr. Willis! Mr. Willis! Please stop! I want my box back. I don't want it taken to Miss Wilson's."

Mr. Willis pulled up and looked back over his shoulder. He had a weather-beaten, humorous face and was very slow in his habit of speech. "Quarrelled with Miss Ethel before you get there?" he said. "That's a bit quicker work than usual. Servant lasses generally let me get their boxes over the doorstep before they want to come away, even nowadays."

"Well, I don't mean to live servant with anybody," said Caroline, frowning. "I've changed my mind all of a sudden because I only heard of another opening this morning. I never wanted to go to the Cottage; it was all Aunt Creddle. She always promised I should, when I got to be nineteen, and I didn't seem as if I could get out of it."

"Well!" He jerked the reins. "Appears to me you might have spread some of your thinking over the last four years instead of doing it all since breakfast this morning." And he added over his shoulder: "I'm to leave your box at Mrs. Creddle's, as I come back, then?"

"Yes, please," said Caroline, fumbling with her purse.

Mr. Willis's face wrinkled up into many little lines and bosses as he looked down at her running beside the cart, with her coppers held out. "No, no. Put it in your pocket. You told me to take your box to Miss Wilson's. I don't want money for work I haven't done." Then he whipped up the horse so that she could not keep pace with it.

She paused to take breath and stood looking after him, thinking it was no wonder Dan Willis had never got on in the world; but she did not know how many things in the world he enjoyed which people who must hunt the last farthing all the time are obliged to miss. He was indeed a happy bachelor, lodging over a little bread shop in the old part of the village, and his sixty years sat lightly on him because he had always found so much to see and to admire in the streets of Thorhaven.

But as Caroline turned to hurry down Emerald Avenue she immediately forgot all about him, for in nearly every house some acquaintance was making ready for the advent of the Visitor--either hanging curtains or washing covers or standing furniture outside to beat--and she could have written a most valuable book entitled "Hint to Lodging Seekers." She possessed recondite, first-hand information, such as no outsider can know; as, for instance, the more white mats, spotless covers and antimacassars in April, the more stains and flies towards the end of August. But fortunately for the few slatterns in Thorhaven, she did not use her power.

Now she was racing in a whirl of emotion down Emerald Avenue and round the next turn into Pearl Terrace, where her aunt Mrs. Creddle lived. Strangers wondered to see the newer streets in Thorhaven all named after precious stones, but the reason was simple enough. A member of the Council had been inspired one warm June evening after three bottles of ginger-beer to name the first of these red rows of houses Cornelian Crescent. But that bold flight of fancy exhausted the afflatus, and it seemed easier to go on to Sapphire Road than to think of anything fresh. Now--after a lapse of years--Thorhaven's city fathers had begun to be proud of this street nomenclature, and to believe they had meant it from the very first.

Number 10 Pearl Terrace was a house on the north side of the road, and Caroline had been "day-girl" with the wife of a small grocer just round the corner from the age of fifteen and a half to the present time. Before she went there at eight and after her return at six, she had helped Mrs. Creddle during the crises constantly recurring in a family of four little girls under twelve years old. Indeed, as her aunt said, she formed another example of good coming out of evil--for evil it seemed, when the Creddles had been obliged to take in Caroline among their increasing brood after the death of her father and mother.

Not that there had ever been any question about it. "You couldn't let the poor little lass go to the workhouse," said Mrs. Creddle when anyone spoke to her on the subject. "Bless you, we've never missed the bit she used to eat before she began to make aught, and she's earned her keep with us over and over again since then."

Mr. Creddle also expressed the same meaning, though in different terms, when pals ventured with a smile to hint that he had lasses enough under his roof without getting in any from outside. "That's my business," he would say. "I don't see as anybody has a right to pass a remark. I'd rather have four lasses than a red nose, anyway."

If the person addressed happened to possess the outward and visible signs of alcoholic excess, so much the worse for him--Mr. Creddle was touchy on the subject of his family and did not wish to please. His own nose was slightly rubicund, but it was solely owing to the east winds which constantly blew across it as he worked for the Council on the long roads near the sea; for he was a sober man, and when he did have a glass of beer on a Saturday night, he brought it home in a jug to share with his wife.

For years, indeed, when the babies were arriving, that was their only little festival from week's end to week's end. They would stand the jug on the table, and Mrs. Creddle would bring out some freshly baked "pie"; with thick crust above and below, and apples or currants and sugar, or gooseberries inside; and with the house all clean for Sunday, they would take their hour of ease late on Saturday night.

So Caroline had been brought up in an atmosphere of kindness, though Mr. Creddle had once threatened to strap her if she ran about with the lads again after dark. He had caught her racing with streaming hair round some half-built houses in Emerald Avenue, among a party of boys who ought to have been in bed, and his brief comments as he escorted her home were Elizabethan and to the point. Oddly enough, they burnt deeper into her mind than the whole of Mrs. Creddle's cautious advice.