Free Selected Stories (9781440673832) by Mark (EDT) E.; Mitchell Forster

asked.
    â€˜I think your father told me that one of them wrote verses, and was expelled from the University and came to grief in other ways. Still, it was a long time ago. You must ask your father about it. He will say the same as I do, that it was put up as a joke.’
    â€˜So it doesn’t mean anything at all?’
    She sent him upstairs to put on his best things, for the Bonses were coming to tea, and he was to hand the cake-stand.
    It struck him, as he wrenched on his tightening trousers, that he might do worse than ask Mr Bons about the sign-post. His father, though very kind, always laughed at him—shrieked with laughter whenever he or any other child asked a question or spoke. But Mr Bons was serious as well as kind. He had a beautiful house and lent one books, he was a church-warden, and a candidate for the County Council; he had donated to the Free Library enormously, he presided over the Literary Society, and had Members of Parliament to stop with him—in short, he was probably the wisest person alive.
    Yet even Mr Bons could only say that the sign-post was a joke—the joke of a person named Shelley.
    â€˜Of course!’ cried the mother; ‘I told you so, dear. That was the name.’
    â€˜Had you never heard of Shelley?’ asked Mr Bons.
    â€˜No,’ said the boy, and hung his head.
    â€˜But is there no Shelley in the house?’
    â€˜Why, yes!’ exclaimed the lady, in much agitation. ‘Dear Mr Bons, we aren’t such Philistines as that. Two at the least. One a wedding present, and the other, smaller print, in one of the spare rooms.’
    â€˜I believe we have seven Shelleys,’ said Mr Bons, with a slow smile. Then he brushed the cake crumbs off his stomach, and, together with his daughter, rose to go.
    The boy, obeying a wink from his mother, saw them all the way to the garden gate, and when they had gone he did not at once return to the house, but gazed for a little up and down Buckingham Park Road.
    His parents lived at the right end of it. After No. 39 the quality of the houses dropped very suddenly, and 64 had not even a separate servants’ entrance. But at the present moment the whole road looked rather pretty, for the sun had just set in splendour, and the inequalities of rent were drowned in a saffron afterglow. Small birds twittered, and the breadwinners’ train shrieked musically down through the cutting—that wonderful cutting which has drawn to itself the whole beauty out of Surbiton, and clad itself, like any Alpine valley, with the glory of the fir and the silver birch and the primrose. It was this cutting that had first stirred desires within the boy—desires for something just a little different, he knew not what, desires that would return whenever things were sunlit, as they were this evening, running up and down inside him, up and down, up and down, till he would feel quite unusual all over, and as likely as not would want to cry. This evening he was even sillier, for he slipped across the road towards the sign-post and began to run up the blank alley.
    The alley runs between high walls—the walls of the gardens of ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘Belle Vista’ respectively. It smells a little all the way, and is scarcely twenty yards long, including the turn at the end. So not unnaturally the boy soon came to a standstill. ‘I’d like to kick that Shelley,’ he exclaimed, and glanced idly at a piece of paper which was pasted on the wall. Rather an odd piece of paper, and he read it carefully before he turned back. This is what he read:
    Â 
    S. AND C.R.C.C.
Alteration in Service
    Â 
    Owing to lack of patronage the Company are regretfully compelled to suspend the hourly service, and to retain only the which will run as usual. It is to be hoped that the public will patronize an arrangement which is intended for their convenience. As an extra inducement, the Company will, for the first time, now issue