CHAPTER IV

THE END OF AN IDYLL

Tommy never saw Reddy again owing to a fright he got about this time, for which she was really to blame, though a woman who lived in his house was the instrument.

It is, perhaps, idle to attempt a summary of those who lived in that house, as one at least will be off, and another in his place, while we are giving them a line apiece.  They were usually this kind who lived through the wall from Mrs. Sandys, but beneath her were the two rooms of Hankey, the postman, and his lodger, the dreariest of middle-aged clerks except when telling wistfully of his ambition, which was to get out of the tea department into the coffee department, where there is an easier way of counting up the figures.  Shovel and family were also on this floor, and in the rooms under them was a newly married couple.  When the husband was away at his work, his wife would make some change in the furniture, taking the picture from this wall, for instance, and hanging it on that wall, or wheeling the funny chair she had lain in before she could walk without a crutch, to the other side of the fireplace, or putting a skirt of yellow paper round the flower pot, and when he returned he always jumped back in wonder and exclaimed:  “What an immense improvement!” These two were so fond of one another that Tommy asked them the reason, and they gave it by pointing to the chair with the wheels, which seemed to him to be no reason at all.  What was this young husband’s trade Tommy never knew, but he was the only prettily dressed man in the house, and he could be heard roaring in his sleep, “And the next article?” The meanest looking man lived next door to him.  Every morning this man put on a clean white shirt, which sounds like a splendid beginning, but his other clothes were of the seediest, and he came and went shivering, raising his shoulders to his ears and spreading his hands over his chest as if anxious to hide his shirt rather than to display it.  He and the happy husband were nicknamed Before and After, they were so like the pictorial advertisement of Man before and after he has tried Someone’s lozenges.  But it is rash to judge by outsides; Tommy and Shovel one day tracked Before to his place of business, and it proved to be a palatial eating-house, long, narrow, padded with red cushions; through the door they saw the once despised, now in beautiful black clothes, the waistcoat a mere nothing, as if to give his shirt a chance at last, a towel over his arm, and to and fro he darted, saying “Yessirquitesosir” to the toffs on the seats, shouting “Twovegonebeef—­onebeeronetartinahurry” to someone invisible, and pocketing twopences all day long, just like a lord.  On the same floor as Before and After lived the large family of little Pikes, who quarrelled at night for the middle place in the bed, and then chips of ceiling fell into the room below, tenant Jim Ricketts and parents, lodger the young woman we have been trying all these doors for.  Her the police snapped up on a charge; that made Tommy want to hide himself—­child-desertion.