It was a simple device, consisting of a vacuum between the layers of leather on the bottom of the shoe, and some sort of a suction arrangement whereby you drew up the dust from the carpet (or wherever you walked) just by stepping on it. You would clear as you go, and instead of a person trailing dirt up and down the stairs by walking straight in from the garden and up to the top attic, they would really be giving the stair carpet what would be equal to a good brushing.
Moreover, not only would spring cleaning be banished for ever—when her invention was perfected—but your shoes would never more need mending. The dust collected in the shoe, being subject to so many cubic inches of pressure due to the person standing on top of the shoe, would become so compressed and self-adhesive as to offer a direct resistance to the friction set up between boot and alien matter trodden upon, equal to the inverse ratio of—I haven’t the faintest notion what! But I dare say you can follow her line of argument. She herself says she is always lucid and concise.
At any rate, I remember she said that it was terribly hard to be the mother of a huge family of boys, who not only trailed dust and dirt into the house at all times and seasons, but also wore out innumerable pairs of boots into the bargain. Whereupon I reminded her that neither of us need worry personally about that just yet!
She agreed, but said that did not alter her desire to benefit her day and generation, and to rid the world of “the Burden of the Broom.” And she was meditating on this, and thinking of all the leather we had wasted by letting it wear off the bottoms of our boots, when she saw the fish shop, and though she thought a dozen “oysters,” what she said was a dozen “pairs of soles”—and, of course, I would recognise that the mistake wasn’t her fault; it was entirely due to the psychological action of the subconscious something that connected soles with boots, etc.
Anyhow, the result was that she paid cheerfully for such a collection of fish as I hope I may never see again. And how happy that fishmonger must have been, when the transaction was completed, only those who got a whiff of the fish can estimate.
Virginia admitted that she thought the price seemed a lot for a dozen oysters (soles were two shillings a pound at the time), and the bag seemed heavy. Also, she confessed that it was a trifle more than she had intended to spend on a present for me at that moment, though she, being a real lady, would have been the last to mention it if I hadn’t. No, she hadn’t thought to look at what he put in; she merely told him to pack them up very securely, as she was going on a long railway journey. She didn’t know they were soles till she glanced at the bill in the train. She consoled me with the information that fish has the most wonderful phosphorescent properties, invaluable in the case of brain-fag; and she should see that I ate it all!
After a few miles of the journey the soles grew a little noisy in the rack. You don’t want to look a gift-horse in the mouth—truth to tell, I didn’t want to look at that particular gift at all. But I had to open both windows.
At our first stop, Reading, when the guard came to the door and politely inquired, “Are you ladies all right? Can I get you anything?” I asked him if he would be so good as to take charge of the big rush bag. I suggested that he could tie it on to the back buffer at the very end of the train. I assured him it was nothing that would hurt. But he only smiled, and said he had plenty of room in his own compartment; the basket would be quite safe there, no one would touch it. I could quite believe it!
When he came down the platform at Swindon he looked very pale and out of sorts, I thought. Conscience-stricken, I pressed a shilling into his hand, and begged him to get himself a good cup of tea. He said he would, and certainly seemed to have revived when next he passed.
We got it home, eventually, without Abigail detecting it—I wanted to save Virginia’s face before the handmaiden—as we took the basket, wrapped up in my mackintosh, in the wagonette with us, Abigail following behind in the luggage-cart. She did say later, however, that she wished that pedlar and his awful kippers and bloaters could be suppressed by law. He had evidently just been round, she said, and she could smell his wretched fish all the way as she drove up. We didn’t tell her what we had hidden in the old barn.
We buried them darkly at dead of night. The only soft spot we could find, that admitted of a good-sized trench being dug without much trouble, was the moist earth beside the brook in the lower orchard.
Next morning, at breakfast-time, when the small dog ran in to greet us, his nose and paws showed signs of active service as he joyfully dabbed brown mud on the front of our fresh print frocks, and waggled his tail with the air of a dog who is conscious of heroic achievements. Abigail followed him with the bacon-dish, which, in her excitement, she tried to balance on the top of the coffee-pot.
“You’d never believe what a high tide there has been in the brook!” she began. “A spring tide, I should think. It’s washed up hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of large fish on to the bank. Never saw such a thing in my life before. First I knew of it was slipping on one on the kitchen hearthrug. Dandie had brought one in—wanted me to grill it for his breakfast, I suppose! Then I found he’d carried one up to the mat outside your bedroom door, and just dropped a few others here and there about the house. So I went out to see where he got ’em from. Judging by the smell, they must have lain there for weeks. Wish I’d been here with a net at the time. I’ve never caught a live fish in my life, though I’ve often tried to fish in the pond on Peckham Rye.”
Naturally we expressed great interest, and suggested immediate cremation in the kitchener.
Later on, the handy man was decidedly sceptical. His grandfeyther had once caught a trout in that brook (only he gave long biographical, geographical and historical details, which proved that it wasn’t that brook at all); but he hadn’t a-seed any hisself a-coming down.
Abigail scornfully pointed out that high tides came up, and these fish had been washed up from the river, which is 700 feet below; and she flapped one as evidence before his astonished eyes.
Seeing is believing in our village!
To this day Abigail’s tales, to cook and co. and her friends at home, of how she goes out and catches soles as large as plaice in our own brook, and boils them for supper, equal any fish stories ever told!
But to return to the luggage and ourselves, which I left waiting at our little station.
While the luggage is being stowed into the vehicles, we take stock of the platform, that seems to fancy itself the pivot of the universe! Everybody that is going away scrambles into the train with precipitate haste, as though they were trying to catch a train on the Tube, or a sprinting motor-bus in the Strand! although they know quite well that the peaceful old engine—already twenty-five minutes behind time—won’t think of stirring again until it has had a ten minutes’ nap!
Those who have just arrived seem equally in a hurry to get somewhere else, and they try to squeeze three thick out of the small station gate—only to plant themselves in the path just outside for a long gossip with the first person they see.
There are women with empty baskets returning from market, and women seeing off friends, each carrying a huge “bookey” of flowers, built up in the approved style, from the back: first a big background rhubarb leaf, or something equally green and spacious, then some striped variegated grass—gardeners’ garters, we call it; also some southernwood—better known as Old Man’s Beard; tall flowers like foxgloves, phlox, Japanese anemones, early dahlias and sunflowers follow; the shorter stems of pinks, calceolarias, sweet williams and roses are the next in succession; finishing off with some gorgeous pansies and a very fat cabbage rose with a short stem (that persists in tumbling out), a piece of sweetbriar, and a few silver and gold everlasting flowers down low in the front. If you have a geranium in your window, etiquette demands that you add the best spray—as a special offering—to the bunch, telling your friend all about the way you got that geranium cutting, and the trouble you had to rear it.
You know the sort of complacent well-packed bunches that are the result of this combination. Not artistic, of