Portrait of Elmbury Read Online Free PDF Page B

whole cavalcade tittuped past on its way to the first draw, dappled flop-eared hounds, shining horses, shining leather, shining top-hats. In the summer there was sometimes a meet of the otterhounds, but this was less of an entertainment because there were no horses and no pink coats; instead the participants wore a blue uniform with scarlet stockings which even to us seemed rather odd. I remember chiefly some ferocious-looking women, thus garbed, carrying long poles with which, I imagined, they must surely beat the poor otter over the head. I remember also a man like an elderly gnome who wore a faded green Norfolk jacket and knee-breeches, with a deerstalker hat of astonishing shape to match. These clothes, and something indescribable in the air with which he wore them, marked him without doubt as a man of the forest and the field. He caught my imagination at once, as some sort of older edition of Robin Hood. His face was red and his nose was a brighter red; he had a badger-grizzled walrus moustache and little twinkling blue eyes. We were told he was “the Colonel”; we never asked what colonel, and it was years before I discovered his name. Then, as you will read, I got to know him well; and I learned from him morethan I ever learned from any schoolmaster. But I never forgot my first sight of him, when I watched the meet through the window (as usual, I had a cold). He arrived on a motor-bicycle, which he was unable to control. Skidding to avoid the hounds, he fell off. He picked himself up, grunted angrily, promptly produced a silver flask out of his pocket, and examined it carefully to make sure that it was unbroken. Then he shook it, holding it up to his ear, to make certain that its contents were undiminished. Then, to make doubly sure, he put it to his lips and swigged the lot. As he wiped his moustache he happened to look towards our window; and seeing my face there he suddenly grinned. His ribston-pippin cheeks all wrinkles, he looked like a kelpie. I was enchanted and I grinned back, but it was too late; the hounds were moving off and the Colonel with them, hobbling along on bowed legs and with bent back, as crooked as a hobgoblin.
Faces at the Window
    He was not the only acquaintance we made through the day-nursery window—which was on the ground floor, so we could communicate with people who passed by. One wet winter night, when the gas-lamps made blurred yellow pools on the pavement and our breaths condensed on the window-pane, there came out of the shadows suddenly a white-faced little boy, who pressed his nose against the glass and put out his tongue at us. In a moment he was gone; but we had a notion that he was still hanging about close by, so we tapped on the window. Nothing stirred. We tapped again. Then suddenly he poked his head round the corner, pressed his face against the pane, and shouted cheekily—we could just hear him—“
Who be thee a-tabberin’ at?”
Communication was established, and we began to talk, sometimes by shouting and sometimes by signs. Next day he came back, and the next, and after that every night for many months. His name was Alfie, and he told us everything we wanted to know about the lives of the Hooks and Nobbler Price and Black Sal;it seemed to us that he had his being in a wide and immensely exciting world, and greatly we envied him. Greatly he envied us, no doubt, as he stood out in the cold and looked through the window at our toys and our bright hearth. There is still something terrible to me in the thought of the two small white faces pressed against the dividing glass, and the two pairs of eyes each looking out upon an alien and utterly desirable world.
    In the spring he suddenly ceased to visit us. It may be he was taken to hospital—he looked pale and frail enough; it may be simply that he preferred bird’s-nesting to our company. But for weeks our sense of loss was deep and sharp indeed; we felt like beleaguered citizens must feel,