The greengrocer shouldered the box, Hannah followed him up the asphalt path and rang the bell. There was a glimmer of light in the hall, but no one could be heard stirring in the house.
“Seems as if they’re all out,” the greengrocer said, and whistled under his breath.
Hannah rang the bell more loudly, the greengrocer cocked his head with polite attention, and now they heard the sound of someone running down the stairs.
Half an hour later, when Hannah was kneeling in front of her box, she fancied she could still hear that sound. It had struck her ear, at her first hearing of it, with a strange significance, as though Fate itself were coming to let her in, yet when the door was opened it revealed no more than the figure of a small, thin girl who did not know how to greet a stranger or to apologize for the necessary absence of her elders and the neglect of the servant who should have answered the door.
Hannah made a mental note about that servant and another that this girl, who must be the one who had holes in her stockings, was not at all pleased to see her, and she answered reserve with reserve, but when the greengrocer had struggled upstairs with the trunk and Ruth had found a box of matches and lighted the gas in Miss Mole’s attic bedroom and, doing her best, had gone to the window to pull down the blind, Hannah forgot to be dignified and called out, “Oh, don’t do that! I want to look. It faces nearly south, doesn’t it?”
It was a dormer window, the one she had seen from the road, and she felt like a pigeon peering from a hole in a dovecot. The house was set higher than she had thought and, over the opposite roofs, she could see thousands of twinkling lights and the dim outline of more roofs and chimneys. And this was a view which would be no less lovely in the morning, when the spires and towers of Radstowe’s innumerable churches and the factory chimneys with their pennons of smoke would clear themselves from the widespread huddle of buildings. She turned her head a little to the right and the wind came straight across the hills from the place where her pink cottage stood in its little orchard, and it was characteristic of Hannah to accept the pleasure and ignore the pain of the wind’s reminders, to overpay the greengrocer and to smile as she told Ruth she was going to unpack.
Cheerfully she looked about her when she was left alone and she decided that she liked this narrow room with its sloping walls, and then, with the wariness of an old campaigner, she examined the blankets, which were clean, and the sheets, which were rather coarse, and thumped the mattress critically.
“Lumpy,” she said, frowning a little. But never mind! She had the view from the window, she thought she would be able to hear the ships hooting up and down the river, and not far away there was the real Upper Radstowe with its old streets and crescents, its odd passages and flights of steps, and she unstrapped her box, forgetting she had seen it as a coffin.
The size of the box erroneously suggested that Miss Mole’s wardrobe was extensive. There was still plenty of room in drawers and cupboards when she had laid out and hung up her clothes, and there was still a good deal left in the box, for Miss Mole’s treasures travelled with her and the chief of these was the model of a sailing ship miraculously enclosed in a pale green bottle. She took it from its wrapping of cotton wool and gazed at it tenderly when she had put it on the narrow mantelpiece. She liked to see it sailing all alone, never getting any further and never losing its gallantness, and it brought back memories of her very early childhood when it stood on the parlour mantelpiece, far out of her reach, a mystery in itself and a hint of greater mysteries. It was connected with the few sights, sounds and smells that remained to her of those days; heavy bees buzzing among the pinks on a hot afternoon, a turn in the garden path where danger lurked behind the hedge of box, the crackling of her starched pinafore, the rattling of milk pails and the creaking of her father’s corded breeches.
She had a lot to be thankful for, she thought. It was good to have such clean country memories and it was astonishing how solid a background they made to life. Consciously or unconsciously, they were there, and, however murky and sordid some of her experiences had been, her roots were in wholesome earth and she had sprouted among sweet-smelling things. No one loved streets better than Hannah Mole, but she had a secret satisfaction in her knowledge of matters on which these townspeople depended and which they took for granted, and it gave her a feeling of permanency, of something more real than anything else in her restless flittings about the world and her changing views of what she was or might have been.
She had finished dressing herself for the latest part she had undertaken when a knock came at the door and the thin little girl appeared again, evidently unwilling to be the messenger who
