Beggar’s Choice Read Free

“Eat More Fruit and Encourage the Empire.”
    I threw the paper down again and retraced my steps. There was a second handbill lying on the pavement a yard or two from where I had seen the man give one to the girl with the bare arms. I couldn’t swear that it was the paper she had taken and then dropped, but there it lay, quite clean, and therefore newly dropped by some one; and, like the one I had picked up round the corner, it bore a typed exhortation to “Eat More Fruit and Encourage the Empire.”
    I stood with the thing in my hand, and then after a bit I came back here and tried to think what it might mean. You see, it’s odd—whatever way you look at it, it’s odd. Here’s a fellow distributing handbills about Eating More Fruit and Encouraging the Empire, and right in the middle of these blameless tracts he’s got a newspaper cutting stuck on a blank sheet, and he shoves it off on me. Why me? That’s what I want to know. Is it because it’s me, or just because the thing was there by accident and some one was bound to get it? And if me—why? Of course you may say it’s obvious that I could do with £500. Why, a fiver would be a godsend.

II
    Isobel Tarrant stood quite still. She looked after Car Fairfax, but she didn’t see him, because her eyes were full of hot, blinding tears. She had met him again after three years, and he was going—going, and in a moment he would be gone, and it might be three years, or it might be thirty, before she saw him again. Or never. The word knocked hard upon her heart—never, never, never, never . Never to know where he was, or what he was doing, or whether he was ill or well, or whether any one cared for him or looked after him, or even whether he was in the same world at all.
    â€œI can’t bear it,” she said under her breath. “Oh, I can’t!”
    And then, like a horrible echo, something said, “You’ve got to.”
    With every bit of her strength Isobel said, “I won’t !” She shook away two tears, and saw Car turn the corner with his old swing of the shoulders. The next moment she was beckoning a taxi.
    â€œI want you to go round that corner slowly. I want you to follow a gentleman who has just gone round it—in a blue serge suit—a tall gentleman. I want you to follow him—but don’t let him know.”
    Isobel was rather breathless, and her cheeks burned. She sat back in the corner and wondered what the man must think. She didn’t care, but she couldn’t help wondering.
    They turned the corner. She could see Car striding along with his head up. She leaned out of the window and said, “There—there!” and the man said, “All right, miss.”
    She was late for lunch. Not that that mattered, as Aunt Willy was later still. Miss Williamina Tarrant had never been in time for anything in her life. In her own house meals occurred when she was hungry. At the moment, she and Isobel were on a visit to Aunt Carrie. Though Carrie Lester and Willy Tarrant had been sisters for sixty odd years, time never staled the infinite number of ways in which they annoyed one another.
    Mrs. Lester was in the hall when Isobel came in. She had been drifting in and out of it for the last ten minutes like a small reproachful ghost, her pretty lined features quite puckered up with fretful disapproval.
    â€œI’m so sorry, Aunt Carrie.”
    â€œMy dear,” said Mrs. Lester, “it’s no use your being sorry, or my being sorry, or any one else being sorry. Your Aunt Willy gets more and more unpunctual, and why she can’t be in to meals like other people I shall never understand. And Eliza is in one of her tempers—and I’m sure I don’t wonder, because if I was a cook and had everything dished up and then had to put it all back again and go on keeping it hot—and then in the end your Aunt Willy will either not come home at all,