The Chequer Board Read Online Free PDF

at him. “Told you not to?”
    “That’s right. Not till I get rid of these giddy fits I been getting.”
    “How long have you not got to drive for, then?”
    “I dunno,” he said. “Till I get rid of them, I suppose.”
    She said no more about it, and presently they went out in the car. He sat smoking cigarette after cigarette beside her, watching the arterial road slide past. He was feeling stale and tired and upset by the slight combat with his wife; so little time was left that it was bitter that it should be marred with quarrels. He sat moody by her side, trying not to flinch each time she cut in between two vehicles; he would have to get accustomed to that if he went on motoring, he thought.
    She turned presently from the main road and went on through the byways; they knew the country within a radius of thirty miles from Watford very well from afternoon joyriding. She drew up presently beside a water-splash in a small lane; there was a maytree in red bloom not far away beside the stream.
    “Be nice to have a bit of that,” she said. “It’d look lovely in the drawing-room vase.”
    They got out of the car and walked across the field to the tree. He had a very blunt penknife that he knew for a bad tool, but he had no means of sharpening it at home, and if he had the means he would not have had the time. One day, when he had achieved leisure, he would like to have a proper little workshop with a grinder and some hand tools, in a shed in the back garden, perhaps. But that meant time, and when you were out late most evenings there was hardly time to think about a thing like that let alone do it.
    With his blunt penknife they hacked off a few twigs of the maytree; the bright clusters of the flowers were thin on the twigs, but Mollie was pleased with them. She gave them to him to carry, and they walked along the hedge for a little time while she looked for cowslips and for violets; he was frankly bored, and presently she agreed that he should sit upon a gate and wait for her.
    He sat upon the gate, may blooms in hand, and lit a cigarette. It was quiet and pleasant in the sun, now that he had not got to walk around like a dolt, looking for flowers. It was still, and the sky was blue, down to the riot of colour of the hawthorn and may along the hedge. His eye fell on the tiny flowers on the twigs that he was holding; they were delicate and perfect, and most beautiful. He realised dimly that there was some sense in what his wife was doing. If you had absolutely nothing else to do it might be possible to get great pleasure out of flowers, though that had never been his line.
    Mollie came back presently with foxgloves and daisiesand violets and forget-me-nots. He said, “You been buying up the shop?”
    She disregarded that. “I think they’re ever so lovely,” she said. She passed him up the little bunch of violets. “Don’t these smell sweet?”
    He put his nose to them. “Like that place in Piccadilly,” he said. “Coty, or some name like that.”
    “That’s right,” she said. “They make scent out of violets. Other flowers, too. I don’t think they get it right, though.” She buried her face in the flowers again. “Not like these.”
    “Give yourself hay fever if you go on like that,” he said. “What about getting along to the Barley Mow?”
    A shadow crossed her face. “If we’ve got to. But I’m not going to stay there all night.”
    “They shut at ten,” he said briefly. “It’ll be quarter-past nine by the time we get there. That long won’t kill you.”
    They drove for half an hour, and drew up at the pub. The Barley Mow is a large modern public house strategically placed at the junction of two arterial roads; it stands on the corner in two acres of grounds, one-and-a-half acres of which is car park. Inside, the saloon bar is a discreet mixture of imitation Tudor oak and real chromium plate; it is warm in winter and cool in the summer, and the place is split up into little corners and