Few are the ways of the West Central district that have changed less within the last half-century than Nevill's Court, leading from Great New Street into Fetter Lane. Its north side still consists of the same quaint row of small low shops that stood there--doing perhaps a little brisker business--when George the Fourth was King; its southern side of the same three substantial houses each behind a strip of garden, pleasant by contrast with surrounding grimness, built long ago--some say before Queen Anne was dead.
Out of the largest of these, passing through the garden, then well cared for, came one sunny Sunday morning, some fifteen years before the commencement proper of this story, one Solomon Appleyard, pushing in front of him a perambulator. At the brick wall surmounted by wooden railings that divides the garden from the court, Solomon paused, hearing behind him the voice of Mrs.
Appleyard speaking from the doorstep.
"If I don't see you again until dinner-time, I'll try and get on without you, understand. Don't think of nothing but your pipe and forget the child. And be careful of the crossings."
Mrs. Appleyard retired into the darkness. Solomon, steering the perambulator carefully, emerged from Nevill's Court without accident. The quiet streets drew Solomon westward. A vacant seat beneath the shade overlooking the Long Water in Kensington Gardens invited to rest.
"Piper?" suggested a small boy to Solomon. "Sunday Times, 'Server?"
"My boy," said Mr. Appleyard, speaking slowly, "when you've been mewed up with newspapers eighteen hours a day for six days a week, you can do without 'em for a morning. Take 'em away. I want to forget the smell of 'em."
Solomon, having assured himself that the party in the perambulator was still breathing, crossed his legs and lit his pipe.
"Hezekiah!"
The exclamation had been wrung from Solomon Appleyard by the approach of a stout, short man clad in a remarkably ill-fitting broad-cloth suit.
"What, Sol, my boy?"
"It looked like you," said Solomon. "And then I said to myself:
'No; surely it can't be Hezekiah; he'll be at chapel.'"
"You run about," said Hezekiah, addressing a youth of some four summers he had been leading by the hand. "Don't you go out of my sight; and whatever you do, don't you do injury to those new clothes of yours, or you'll wish you'd never been put into them.
The truth is," continued Hezekiah to his friend, his sole surviving son and heir being out of earshot, "the morning tempted me.
'Tain't often I get a bit of fresh air."
"Doing well?"
"The business," replied Hezekiah, "is going up by leaps and bounds--leaps and bounds. But, of course, all that means harder work for me. It's from six in the morning till twelve o'clock at night."
"There's nothing I know of," returned Solomon, who was something of a pessimist, "that's given away free gratis for nothing except misfortune."
"Keeping yourself up to the mark ain't too easy," continued Hezekiah; "and when it comes to other folks! play's all they think of. Talk religion to them--why, they laugh at you! What the world's coming to, I don't know. How's the printing business doing?"
"The printing business," responded the other, removing his pipe and speaking somewhat sadly, "the printing business looks like being a big thing. Capital, of course, is what hampers me--or, rather, the want of it. But Janet, she's careful; she don't waste much, Janet don't."
"Now, with Anne," replied Hezekiah, "it's all the other way--pleasure, gaiety, a day at Rosherville or the Crystal Palace--anything to waste money."
"Ah! she was always fond of her bit of fun," remembered Solomon.
"Fun!" retorted Hezekiah. "I like a bit of fun myself. But not if you've got to pay for it. Where's the fun in that?"
"What I ask myself sometimes," said Solomon, looking straight in front of him, "is what do we do it for?"
"What do we do what for?"
"Work like blessed slaves, depriving ourselves of all enjoyments.
What's the sense of it? What--"
A voice from the perambulator beside him broke the thread of Solomon Appleyard's discourse. The sole surviving son of Hezekiah Grindley, seeking distraction and finding none, had crept back unperceived. A perambulator! A thing his experience told him out of which excitement in some form or another could generally be obtained. You worried it and took your chance. Either it howled, in which case you had to run for your life, followed--and, unfortunately, overtaken nine times out of ten--by a whirlwind of vengeance; or it gurgled: in which case the heavens smiled and halos descended on your head. In either event you escaped the deadly ennui that is the result of continuous virtue. Master Grindley, his star having pointed out to him a peacock's feather lying on the ground, had, with one eye upon his unobservant parent, removed the complicated coverings sheltering Miss Helvetia Appleyard from the world, and anticipating by a quarter of a century the prime enjoyment of British youth, had set to work to tickle that lady on the nose. Miss Helvetia Appleyard awakened, did precisely what the tickled British maiden of to-day may be relied upon to do under corresponding circumstances: she first of all took swift and comprehensive survey of the male thing behind the feather. Had he been displeasing in her eyes, she would, one may rely upon it, have anteceded the behaviour in similar case of her descendant of to-day--that is to say, have expressed resentment in no uncertain terms. Master Nathaniel Grindley proving, however, to her taste, that which might have been considered impertinence became accepted as a fit and proper form of introduction. Miss Appleyard smiled graciously--nay, further, intimated desire for more.
"That your only one?" asked the paternal Grindley.
"She's the only one," replied Solomon, speaking in tones less pessimistic.