“Simon’ll be bothered about my eyes,” she said presently, as they turned towards the shops. “It’s a deal worse having to tell him than to put up wi’ it myself.”
“Happen you’d like me to tell him for you?” May suggested, but Sarah shook her head.
“Nay, you’d do it right enough, I’m sure,” she said kindly, “but it’d come best from me. You’ve enough o’ your own to fash you, wi’out that. Married folk mun do their own telling over things like yon. …”
V
But though Sarah had held to the telling of Simon, she seemed in no hurry to break the dismal news. All morning she clung to May, as if they drew together as a matter of course, and May was glad to have her, not only because she was old and needed help, but because of the tie between them which had never been loosed. It was true that they had seen little of each other of late years, but it had only needed the talk in the doctor’s house to draw them together again. The dwelling upon a lost hope may sometimes make the impossible possible and the dead live, if only for a space. The two of them had recreated Geordie in the quiet room, so that his mother had seen him plain before her darkened eyes, and his sweetheart had felt his kisses on her lips.
So all morning they stayed together, even though they did not speak of him again, because while they were together the glamour persisted and the dream remained. Just as one name had robbed them that day, though they did not know it, so another name sweetened everything for them, and for a little space made them rich. Things might so easily have been as they wished that it seemed as if even now just a little determination might twist them into shape. In the ordinary course of events, and with ever such an ordinary share of luck, Geordie and May should have been married long ago, with a home of their own to offer the old folk at the last. Even now, so it seemed, Geordie might be somewhere in the street, in the midst of that crowd of healthy youth, sturdy manhood and wiry age. Instinctively, as they came out of each shop, they looked to find him the centre of some chaffing group, the laughing, handsome, witty centre, as he had always been. He would break away when he saw them to ask his old mother how she did, and suddenly the greatest and best of all happenings would have happened, and they would have heard the miracle of his speech. …
This was the spell they wove for each other, making the day brighter and the world kinder, and helping them to laugh at things which otherwise would have been too light to stir their hearts. Sarah’s shopping was dull and soon finished, but May had an exciting list, and seemed constantly in need of help. The old woman actually enjoyed herself as she peered at stockings and linen buttons, and nipped longcloth and serge between her finger and thumb. It might have been wedding-gear they were after, she told May, with a grim chuckle, and May laughed and sighed, thinking of a bottom drawer at home that had been locked for many years. The salesman laughed, too, and asked Sarah which of them it was that was thinking of getting wed, and Sarah, with all her arduous married life behind her, was yet as pleased as a young girl. She was a shrewd marketer, even now, in spite of her sight, especially in the food-shops, where one nose can often be quite as useful as a pair of eyes; while, as for pots and pans, she knew them as a hen knows her chickens and a shepherd his sheep.
They had many a chat over a counter, making and receiving enquiries about friends, opening their mouths at any lively piece of news, and pursing them sympathetically when there was trouble around the door. In the low shops with the new windows in their old walls and new slates on their bowed roofs, little, low doorways stooping for their heads, little, worn doorsteps watching for their feet, they heard many a hint of the romance of evolving or changing trade, many a precious historic touch that would never find its way into print. You cannot put your ear to the past anywhere but in the old places where men are born to their trades, where they know the customer’s pedigree as the customer knows theirs, and where everybody has time for the human as well as the commercial exchange. Only there can you learn in the space of an hour wonderful things about drapery and furniture and hardware and tea, and feel the glamour of the whole budding and fruit-bearing earth come into the florist’s, and the atmosphere of old posting-inns into the pot-shop with the clink of glass. And no man who is born to his trade is ever a cobbler who may not look beyond his last. The potman will tell you where to order a stylish suit of clothes, and the florist instruct you how to smoke a ham. And every one of them will tell you, with or without their knowing it, what they have learned of human nature and the hope of eternity in their quiet little town, and with what eyes they have looked abroad upon the world.
All that morning the tides of life swept against Sarah and her friend as they went about the streets—tides of humanity and sympathy, memory and custom—all the currents that move in the air and the blood and the brain when a hand is shaken or a friendly voice is heard. It was life at its fullest as it is known to the northern farmer and his kind, the public recognition in a given place of the great and intimate system of
