“I don’t know whether you do,” he answered gravely. “I saw you signalling to someone. If you were to fall and damage your back there’d be two lame ducks waddling about in push-chairs. You don’t know how lucky you are: you should take care.”
She thought he sounded like a father. But she was relieved because apparently he hadn’t guessed who her signal had been for.
“I do know,” she protested, looking down on his unnaturally straight legs, experiencing a gush of sympathy. “It must be horrible; I don’t know how you put up with it and keep so . . . well, you don’t really seem to mind.”
“What’s the use?” he asked, smiling slightly, but not in his eyes which she saw acorn brown and still. “I’m lucky, too, in some ways. I’m not forced to work, and I can get about. There’s the lake and . . . well, lots of things.”
“Nothing’s so bad as it can’t be worse, I suppose,” murmured Flo, feeling that it was false; the kind of thing that Mrs. Howell would have said.
“No,” Dick agreed unconvincingly. “The worst is being dependent on other people. Things I can’t do.”
“You mean me again,” Flo accused. “But I
“I’m sure; but everybody isn’t like you.”
An elderly woman poking with a stick stood back against the hedge while he manœuvred past, and Flo had to step into the roadway. They had come to the first houses of Moss. They were villas, half red brick, half grey pebble-dash, and faced one another aloofly across the road, their backs austerely turned on the beautiful views of the valley which even passers-by had a job to see over their shoulders. The intimacy which had been growing between Flo and her companion fell away and she felt that it was time to leave him. Probably he wouldn’t want to be seen with her there, though she could not detect any change in his manner. It was simply their talk that had been stifled by the villas. Then they were between long continuous rows of gritstone, the old cottages that stood unashamed on their own doorsteps up to the road without the least attempt at a garden. Flo liked them at once; they were so much more homely than the villas. As she went past she caught the yellow flickerings in the grates of little kitchens, suggesting welcome. Dick called, “How do?” across the street to a man in a floury cap and jacket and bran-bag apron who was unloading from a horse lorry. “Non so bad. How’s yourself, sirrie?” the man called back, pausing with a sack balanced on his shoulders. The close cottages kept the talk in, almost as if they were in a room.
The road became a street, too narrow for more than one pavement, and this too narrow for the chair. Dick had to go in the roadway and Flo watched alertly for any cars coming. Then, where two pubs faced—The Royal Standard tall and haughty, its sign in a glass case hanging from iron scrollwork, The Bull low and ancient with a stone-cut head minus horns jutting over the door like a sailing ship figurehead—the street opened abruptly on the left into a square. Where Flo and Dick had come to, street and square were level; fifty yards farther on where the square ended and houses began on the left again the street was ten feet lower than the square, and went on descending steeply. The built-up side of the square was walled. Along the top were railings and a row of youngish lime trees. Over the railings leaned five men and a woman, as over a balcony, watching traffic plod uphill or coast easily down. Behind the watchers Flo saw the top of a dark stone cross; “thousands of years old” she thought at once. Two-thirds of the way up the centre piece of the cross a rope was knotted, its other end going to the tilted-up shaft of a flat cart. Over the rope hung a rectangle of dirty grey canvas giving crude shelter to a vegetable stall. To the other shaft was tied a black pony with collar and tracings on, its nose tucked into a sack on an empty orange crate.
“It’s not much, but what there is, it’s there,” said Dick, stopping at the corner below the steps of The Royal Standard.
There were seven other stalls with proper wood frames and canvas awnings, and pots were displayed in a coloured circle twelve feet across without sky protection of any kind.
“My, but it’s diff’rent from our market,” exclaimed Flo, pleased by the number of persons about, more than she had seen together since passing through Manchester.
At the far corner over the stalls, looking down another narrow street of grey houses she saw the square tower of the church; and beyond again were the hills watching as they watched over everything.