The Way Home Read Free Page B

been laid up, Mary -- for which I hold myself mainly responsible, my dear, running you off your legs as I did at first . . ."
    "Still we can say, Richard, can't we, we've seen all there is to be seen?" threw in Mary with a kind of cheerful inattention. Risen meanwhile from the breakfast-table, she had opened the door of the chiffonier; and her thoughts were now divided between Richard's words and the fresh depredations in her store of provisions that had taken place overnight.
    Mahony snorted. "A fiftieth part of it would be nearer the mark! -- Well, as I was saying . . . if you'll do me the kindness to listen . . . this last week or so, since I've been mooning about by myself -- Gad! to think how I once looked forward to treading these dingy old streets again -- half silly with the noise of the traffic . . . upon my word, wife, that begins to get on my nerves, too: it goes on like a wave that never breaks; I find myself eternally waiting for a crash that doesn't come. Well, as I say, when I push my way through all these hard, pale, dirty London faces -- yes, my dear, even the best of 'em look as though they needed a thorough scrub with soap and water . . . as for me, if I wash my hands once, I wash 'em twenty times a day; I defy any one to keep clean in such an atmosphere. All strange faces, too; never one you recognise in the whole bunch; while out there, of course, the problem was, to meet a person you did not know. Well, there come times, if you'll believe me, when I've caught myself feeling I'd hail with pleasure even a sight of old What-was-his-name? -- you know, Mary, that vulgar old jackanapes on board who was for ever buttonholing me . . . my particular bête noire -- yes, or even sundry other specimens of the omnium gatherum we were blessed with."
    "Well, I never! And me who thought you were only too glad to ged rid of them."
    "Faith and wasn't I? . . . at the time. Indeed, yes." And Mahony smiled; for at Mary's words a picture rose before him of his fellow-passengers as he had last seen them, standing huddled together like frightened sheep on the platform of the great railway terminus: an outlandish, countrified, colonial-looking set if ever there was one, with their over-bushy hair and whiskers, their overloud shepherds'-plaids and massy watch-chains, the ladies' bonnets (yes, Mary's too!) seeming somehow all wrong. Even the most cocksure of the party had been stunned into a momentary silence by the murk of fog and steam that filled the space under the lofty roofing; by the racket of whistling, snorting, blowing engines; the hoarse shouts of cabbies and porters. But the first shock over, spirits had risen in such crescendo that with a hasty: "Come, love, let us get out of this!" he had torn Mary from voluminous embraces, bundled her into a four-wheeler and bidden the driver whip up. A parting glance through the peep-hole showed the group still gesticulating, still vociferating, while crowns and half-crowns rained on grinning porters, who bandied jokes about the givers with expectant Jehus and a growing ring of onlookers. Their very luggage, rough, makeshift, colonial, formed a butt for ridicule.
    Lost in such recollections -- they included the whole dirty, cold, cheerless reality of arrival; included the first breath drawn of an air that smells and tastes like no other in the world; the drive in a musty old growler reeking of damp straw, and pulled by something "God might once have meant for a horse!" to an hotel, the address of which he had kept to himself: "Or we should have the whole lot of 'em trapesing after us!" -- sunk in these memories, Mahony let a further remark of Mary's pass unheeded. But when, with a raucous cry, a butcher's boy stumped down the area steps, bearing in his wooden tray the very meat, red and raw, that was to be dished up on their table later on, he swung abruptly round, turning his back on a sight he could not learn to tolerate. "Was there ever such a place for keeping the material needs