Perched in her chair, out of reach of these white billows, Ruth watched this activity disapprovingly. “I don’t like this at all,” she said.
“And do you think I do? If there’s anything I loathe it’s making this nasty little needle hop along the hems. It’s like a one-legged man running a race. I hate to make him go so fast, yet I can’t bear to let him go slowly, and I know the cotton in the spindle will give out before I get to the end, and I detest the noise, and I hope you’ll all be very uncomfortable when you’re lying on these seams. I’m not taking any particular care to get them flat.”
“Well, I suppose it won’t last.”
“No, nothing lasts. That’s why I’m doing it.”
“You mean—to save the sheets from wearing out?”
Hannah stopped her turning of the handle and let the one-legged man have a few moments rest. “Exactly,” she said. It had been on the tip of her tongue to say that in saving the sheets from wearing out, she was trying to wear out her emotions, but that was not an answer for Ruth, and she knew Ruth’s questions often had more purpose than a desire for direct information. Nevertheless, she supplied the information. “When sheets get thin in the middle, the careful housewife turns the middles to the sides. Unsightly, sometimes uncomfortable, but economical.”
“But the cupboards were not getting thin in the middle, or the books.”
“Most of the books were thin all through,” Hannah said with a chuckle. “I had a good look at them. Dusting books is one of the lesser evils, and cooking’s another. You can pause for refreshment on the way.”
“And it seems to me,” Ruth went on, “that you’re either worried about something, or—” her voice changed its note, “you’re putting everything in order, in a hurry. Rather like making a will and paying your debts when you think you’re going to die. It isn’t that, is it?”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” Hannah said with a great effect of frankness. “I’m bad tempered.”
“Oh! Not worried? Not worried about Ethel?”
“Ethel? Why?”
“You’ve been so busy, I suppose you haven’t noticed, but she’s been very pleasant for the last few days. And after that row with Father! I expected she’d be awful.”
“It must have done her good,” Hannah said.
“I’d rather she wasn’t quite so nice, though, and I wish you wouldn’t be so busy about things that don’t really matter. You see, I’m afraid you’ll miss something important.”
“Well, if I do, you won’t. Don’t be so fussy. I’ll tell you what we’ll do tomorrow. We’ll have our walk.”
“But the spring isn’t here.”
“Then I’ll have it alone.”
“No. I didn’t mean that, but it’s rather like the cupboards and the books, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see the resemblance,” Hannah said, turning the handle of the sewing machine again, but Ruth had found the right reason for Hannah’s suggestion. They must have their walk while they could and if they were together when spring came, well, then they could have another.
Ethel was amiably ready to look after Doris and the house. Not a single gleam of her eyes betrayed any jealousy that Miss Mole and Ruth were going off together with sandwiches in their pockets and no expectation of returning before dark; she showed no further anxiety for the moral welfare of her young sister, and Hannah and Ruth both silently came to the conclusion that their absence suited her. This was unfair to Ethel who had her own consolations and who was doing her best to be pleasant to Miss Mole, preferring her, in the capacity of housekeeper in spite of her dark past, to the possibility of Miss Patsy Withers as a stepmother, and Ethel knew no more than they did that this was the day Mr. Pilgrim had chosen for ingratiating himself with her father, obeying the instinct which recommends a piece of scandal shared for the sound knitting of a bond.
Unconscious of this danger in the rear, Ruth and Hannah started, and if the trees had been in bud they could have fancied it was April. There was a lovely mildness in the air and it was a day on which something delightful ought to happen as, indeed, it did, for instead of going through Albert Square and reaching the bridge by way of The Green, Hannah dived into a narrow, twisting lane, with mysteriously untidy gardens on one side of it and the backs of houses on the other, and, twisting and turning in their descent, they came into a square where dirty children played on the steps of Georgian houses, and when they had passed through this and a narrow street, they were on the road running parallel with the docks. These were places which Ruth, living all her life in Upper Radstowe, had not seen before, nor had she crossed the docks by the footbridges Hannah knew, some of them, to an adventurous imagination, hardly wider than a plank, with a handrail on one side only.
“Bad places on a dark night,” Hannah said solemnly.
“And very exciting now,” Ruth replied appreciatively.
It took them some time to get across the docks and stand in another county, for everywhere there were ships; big ones moored alongside warehouses and loading or unloading; sailing ships piloted by tugs and looking, Hannah said, like sad widows in their pathetic dignity under their bare masts and yards, and the tugs were like the undertakers, in a fuss about the funeral. There were dredgers with endless chains of buckets, picking up the river mud, and there were rowing boats and men shouting and locks being opened and shut. The sky was blue and bluer when the gulls struck across it and on the right, high up, the suspension bridge was like a thread, and the carts crossing it were the toys of midgets.
“We might stay all day,” Ruth said.
“We might, but we’re not going to.
