Cyprian looked at her with his wondering, dreamy eyes.
‘I didn’t bring a hat,’ he said, ‘because it is such a nuisance when one is shopping; I mean it is so awkward if one meets any one one knows and has to take one’s hat off when one’s hands are full of parcels. If one hasn’t got a hat on one can’t take it off.’
Mrs Chemping sighed with great relief; her worst fear had been laid at rest.
‘It is more orthodox to wear a hat,’ she observed, and then turned her attention briskly to the business in hand.
‘We will go first to the table-linen counter,’ she said, leading the way in that direction; ‘I should like to look at some napkins.’
The wondering look deepened in Cyprian’s eyes as he followed his aunt; he belonged to a generation that is supposed to be overfond of the rôle of mere spectator, but looking at napkins that one did not mean to buy was a pleasure beyond his comprehension. Mrs Chemping held one or two napkins up to the light and stared fixedly at them, as though she half expected to find some revolutionary cypher written on them in scarcely visible ink; then she suddenly broke away in the direction of the glassware department.
‘Millicent asked me to get her a couple of decanters if there were any going really cheap,’ she explained on the way, ‘and I really do want a salad bowl. I can come back to the napkins later on.’
She handled and scrutinised a large number of decanters and a long series of salad bowls, and finally bought seven chrysanthemum vases.
‘No one uses that kind of vase nowadays,’ she informed Cyprian, ‘but they will do for presents next Christmas.’
Two sunshades that were marked down to a price that Mrs Chemping considered absurdly cheap were added to her purchases.
‘One of them will do for Ruth Colson; she is going out to the Malay States, and a sunshade will always be useful there. And I must get her some thin writing paper. It takes up no room in one’s baggage.’
Mrs Chemping bought stacks of writing paper; it was so cheap, and it went so flat in a trunk or portmanteau. She also bought a few envelopes◦– envelopes somehow seemed rather an extravagance compared with notepaper.
‘Do you think Ruth will like blue or grey paper?’ she asked Cyprian.
‘Grey,’ said Cyprian, who had never met the lady in question.
‘Have you any mauve notepaper of this quality?’ Adela asked the assistant.
‘We haven’t any mauve,’ said the assistant, ‘but we’ve two shades of green and a darker shade of grey.’
Mrs Chemping inspected the greens and the darker grey, and chose the blue.
‘Now we can have some lunch,’ she said.
Cyprian behaved in an exemplary fashion in the refreshment department, and cheerfully accepted a fish cake and a mince pie and a small cup of coffee as adequate restoratives after two hours of concentrated shopping. He was adamant, however, in resisting his aunt’s suggestion that a hat should be bought for him at the counter where men’s head-wear was being disposed of at temptingly reduced prices.
‘I’ve got as many hats as I want at home,’ he said, ‘and besides, it rumples one’s hair so, trying them on.’
Perhaps he was going to develop into a Nut after all. It was a disquieting symptom that he left all the parcels in charge of the cloakroom attendant.
‘We shall be getting more parcels presently,’ he said, ‘so we need not collect these till we have finished our shopping.’
His aunt was doubtfully appeased; some of the pleasure and excitement of a shopping expedition seemed to evaporate when one was deprived of immediate personal contact with one’s purchases.
‘I’m going to look at those napkins again,’ she said, as they descended the stairs to the ground floor. ‘You need not come,’ she added, as the dreaming look in the boy’s eyes changed for a moment into one of mute protest, ‘you can meet me afterwards in the cutlery department; I’ve just remembered that I haven’t a corkscrew in the house that can be depended on.’
Cyprian was not to be found in the cutlery department when his aunt in due course arrived there, but in the crush and bustle of anxious shoppers and busy attendants it was an easy matter to miss any one. It was in the leather goods department some quarter of an hour later that Adela Chemping caught sight of her nephew, separated from her by a rampart of suitcases and portmanteaux and hemmed in by the jostling crush of human beings that now invaded every corner of the great shopping emporium. She was just in time to witness a pardonable but rather embarrassing mistake on the part of a lady who had wriggled her way with unstayable determination towards the bareheaded Cyprian, and was now breathlessly demanding the sale price of a handbag which had taken her fancy.
‘There now,’ exclaimed Adela to herself, ‘she takes him for one of the shop assistants because he hasn’t got a hat on. I wonder it hasn’t happened before.’
Perhaps it had. Cyprian, at any rate, seemed neither startled nor embarrassed by the error into which the good lady had fallen. Examining the ticket on the bag, he announced in a clear, dispassionate voice:
‘Black seal, thirty-four shillings marked down to twenty-eight. As a matter of fact, we are clearing them out at a special reduction price of twenty-six shillings. They are going off rather fast.’
‘I’ll take it,’ said the lady, eagerly digging some coins out of her purse.
‘Will you take it as it is?’ asked Cyprian; ‘it will be a matter of a few minutes to get it wrapped up, there is such a crush.’
‘Never mind, I’ll take it as it is,’ said the purchaser, clutching her treasure and counting the money into Cyprian’s palm.
Several kind strangers helped Adela into the open air.
‘It’s the crush and the heat,’ said one sympathiser to another; ‘it’s enough to turn any one giddy.’
When she next came across Cyprian he was standing in the crowd that pushed and jostled around the counters of the book department. The dream look was deeper than ever in his eyes. He had just sold two books of devotion to an elderly Canon.
The Quince Tree
‘I’ve just been to see old Betsy Mullen,’ announced Vera to her aunt, Mrs Bebberly Cumble; ‘she seems in rather a bad way about her rent. She owes about fifteen weeks of it, and says she doesn’t know where any of it is to come from.’
‘Betsy Mullen always is in difficulties with her rent, and the more people help her with it the less she troubles about it,’ said the aunt. ‘I certainly am not going to assist her any more. The fact is, she will have to go into a smaller and cheaper cottage; there are several to be had at the other end of the village for half the rent that she is paying, or supposed to be paying, now. I told her a year ago that she ought to move.’
‘But she wouldn’t get such a nice garden anywhere else,’ protested Vera, ‘and there’s such a jolly quince tree in the corner. I don’t suppose there’s another quince tree in the whole parish. And she never makes any quince jam; I think to have a quince tree and not to make quince jam shows such strength of character. Oh, she can’t possibly move away from that garden.’
‘When one is sixteen,’ said Mrs Bebberly Cumble severely, ‘one talks of things being impossible which are merely uncongenial. It is not only possible but it is desirable that Betsy Mullen should move into smaller quarters; she has scarcely enough furniture to fill that big cottage.’
‘As far as value goes,’ said Vera after a short pause, ‘there is more in Betsy’s cottage than in any other house for miles round.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the aunt; ‘she parted with whatever old chinaware she had long ago.’
‘I’m not talking about anything that belongs to Betsy herself,’ said Vera darkly; ‘but of course, you don’t know what I know, and I don’t suppose I ought to tell you.’