CUTTING IT FINE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2628, 9 October 1909, Page 1 (Supplement)

CUTTING IT FINE.

(By HICHAM) WHITEIXCJ, Autlio of “NO. 5 John Street,” etc.)

He ought to have been happy, lie was going to meet a girl, for the very first time in all his life. Yet he. was not, for the most cogent reasons. He did not know whether the money in his pocket would run to a first treat.

He was a young clerk in the apprenticeship stage, a stage marked by low pay and the necessity of living at home to make ends mec-t. And the worst of it was the home had nothing to spare > for an emergency of this sort. In the first place, you could hardly mention such a thing to father, or even to mother. A girl was a pure luxury to a lad (J eighteen, not able to pay full rates for his own board. And luxuries were not to be thought of in that family. Father had never been guilty of such a thing since his first escapade of marriage; and his life and the life of his gentle partner had been one long penance for that mistake. It was not a penance of wanting or waning love—that had even been theirs on both sides. But it was a penance of circumstances, all the keener, perhaps, because of the ardour of the love. For it had thwarted every desire to offer the little material ministrations which even love does not disdain. Presents on birthdays, when they went beyond tbe strictly useful, and*appealed to the sense of superfluity, as presents should, were wholly out of the question. On the wife’s side, they rarely went beyond the offer of a new necktie, which, after all, was but utility masquerading in the garb of display ; j on the husband’s of a new pie-dish when the old one was gone beyond repair. The girls generally got nothing beyond a blessing and a kiss, and —though they put up with it in their hearts, as in their acknowledgements—there were j moments when they could hardly repress 1 a wish that the golden affection might sometimes admit of the alloy of a new : blouse. It-was therefore a household of unsatisfied longings, innocent enough in themselves. Their only sense of luxury was a quiet disinterested feast of the eye. Now and then they walked to the West End—a ’bus would have been out of the question—and feasted on the sight of the equipages of fashion, and the glories of its shops. It was “My!” and “Oh!” all the way irom Marble Arch to Piccadilly Circus, and back again on the other side. Thousands of honey bees of tlieir kind clustered thick before the blossoms of the shop windows. without even daring to settle on the smallest of them for a taste. The oldest, who wis given to literature, buzzed aimlessly about the bookshops; the next who , had exhibited a pretty taste for drawing at- the Board School, . lingered over the print-shops, and wondered whether she would ever be able to cany it further at the Slade. Once, father, bless him, by means of retrenchments on the tobacco which was his sole dissipation, had treated them to an exhibition of the Royal Academy, which seemed destined to be the memory of a lifetime for all throe. Nor had this been without its effort of privation, for sheer gratitude had prompted the offer of a now pipe and tobacco pouch at Christmas, and these articles, in tlieir wanton extravagance of calabash and embroidered initials, had wrought havoc with a whole scheme of domestic economy for more than a , month. And now, here was Jim, the only brother, “maslied,” and under the sovereign obligation natural to the circumstances of occasionally doing the thing in style. Only one of the girls knew of his plight, the youngest, who, as also the giddiest in domestic repute, way not generally trusted with confessions, yet invariably found out all that she wanted to know. Jim had offered himself for trial before her, as one under the compulsion of fatal enchantments, and had put in a photograph by way of throwing himself on the mercy of the court.

He certainly obtained a stay of judgment. “Old Jim boy in love! Did you ever? Waiter—larks for two.” But her thoughtless gibe had cut to the root of all his anxieties. .Love was the state of being that involved orders to waiters—and how was he to stand treat? “Hope to get a rise next Christmas,” he pleaded in answer to his nursings rather than hers. “That’s in December, isn’t it? 1 believe we’re in July now.”

J “I’ve got to go on with it,” he said d.'.ggedly. "Of course you have. Well, how do you manage when you’re out with one of us. Fine days you an’ me, have had [ together all the same.” I “Oh, you’re different.” ’ “Thank you for the compliment.” “ here ain’t another gal in the world like you.” ■“Thank you, for her sake. I’ll let her know.” “Do be serious. It’ll have to run to a play sometimes—eight hob for orders, bang! You must hook.” “What about the pit?” “You must book, J tell you: it’s the look of the thing.” “Think she’d mind, Jim If you do, is it worth while going on with it at all?” “I can’t start with confessions; wait till I’ve made her like me a bit more’.’ Oh, Jim! what a cut for your sisters.” “What do you mean?” “They ought to have brought you up better than that.” “I see; you think I haven’t get the pluck of a chicken. Well, here goes!” ‘What for? Something silly, I’ll be bound.” “Owning it up to her, and giving it up” , “I thought so.” “I’m wrong again,” he said in a huff. “That’s me.’ “Of course, it is. Love her and let her love you, and leave all the rest to luck. Lock here, see what the iuc-k saves you straight off. I’m going to lend you eighteenpence till next Saturday week.” He kissed her—“ Dear old Sue.” So they went for their first walk, and Jim had four bright shillings in his pocket, and that was all. It was a good deal in the circumstances, and he had piled up the balance of the capital sum by heroic retrenchments on the dinner bills of three consecutive days. , They met at a gate of Kensington Gardens. This of course lc-d t-o tbe Albert Memorial, in one way of locking at it, and in another to Aready. As a matter of course the pair took tbe Arcadian turning.

They roamed among old trees planted hv tin whim of the breeze in old days, and, in that respect, survivals of the primeval forest, with London hut a clearing in its centre, with which our civilisation began. They could not- have taken any other turning, if you come to think of it—the boy and the girl. She was in her simple finery, as adjunct to a glory of shyness and fathomless eyes; he exhibited traces of the dash and courage of the male that feels himself preferred. If the flowers were not exactly innocent- culture, they were verv good make-believes in Paradisical effects: and seme of the occasional benches had once, at least, been fragments of fallen trunks. The pond even was a good suggestion of the limitless ocean

covered with argosies that neither had ever seen. The birds* were quite unconditioned, being of time eternal in their freedom of flight and song, nay even in tlieir freedom from the fear of man. The last may once have been Rules and Regulations on the black board but the careless things easily mistook it for a tradition of a Golden Age.

It took them two hours to feel that it was tea time, and they might never have known that but for the white naperied tables of the open-air restaurant-. bland with luminous shade, and with only a pattern of bright gold here and there on its carpet of green to show that the Dog days were still running their course above.

Jim ordered Tea with a capital letter. and trusted to his star. “Plain?” asked the functionary.

"I said Tea,” returned the youth, with something of the implacable bad quarter of an hour torment. Ho keptturning the money in his pocket: and that kind of stock-taking notoriously brings luck. If it had vanished, he would still have had his hour of perfect bliss, as lie watched her nibbling her modest ration, and sharing As fragments with the birds. And when it was all over he told her the whole truth about himself and liis prospects, and asked her if she could care for him still. She looked, at him in simple wonder, and asked him in return if Sunday would suit him as well as Saturday next time. He saw her into her tube station. Then he walked all the way home to his suburb to save t-lie fare, paid Sue at once with a kiss for interest-, and felt saved in more senses than one.