Munsey's Magazine/Volume 94/Issue 1/Annie Maude from London Town

by J. S. Fletcher

Annie Maude
from London Town

THE ROMANCE OF A COCKNEY GIRL WHO ENCOUNTERED SURPRISES IN
THE REGION WHERE APPLES GROW ON THE TREES AND
FLOWERS BLOOM IN THE GARDENS

By J. S. Fletcher

It was three o'clock on an early autumn morning when Joseph Crawley reluctantly rose from his bed to set off with his market cart for Covent Garden. The cart had been packed overnight, but it was twelve miles to London, and Joe had to light the fire, prepare his breakfast, harness old Betsy, and pick a bouquet for Annie Maude, before he could set out.

He had never forgotten to bring Annie Maude her posy every morning since the day, three months ago, when she had first bought from him for her barrow; and Joe was not going to disappoint her now, even if he had to pay for it with indigestion. He hurried into the garden, his cheek full of bread and bacon, thinking of Annie Maude's unvarying look and words when he presented her with the posy, and the same little speech.

"An' I ain't forgot you, neither, miss, if you'll accept a posy from our garden at 'ome."

Annie Maude's eyebrows, which were extremely thick and dark, went up every morning in the same coy surprise, and her hand went out with a hesitating pleasure, as she said:

"Well, now, Mr. Crawley, ain't yer good to me?"

Joe had had three months in which to fire off his salutation; but instead of finding it monotonous, it would have been almost a painful shock to him if Annie Maude had varied her remark.

The first roosters had begun to answer one another in tones that seemed audacious to such a gray and unawakened world, when Joe stood among the rows of cabbage, heavily beaded with dew, and reached across them to a dahlia hedge beyond. Red dahlias, petunias, a branch or two of his mother's hoarded fuchsias, a sprig of heliotrope, a bit of mint—because he had no other sweet smelling plant to make the bouquet fragrant—a few geranium blossoms, a close-cropped lingering head of hollyhock, and then the posy was bound up and stowed safely in the cart.

By the time he reached Covent Garden a resolve had begun to crystallize in Joe. Annie Maude should have her bouquet when she came, and then he would have something else to say!

From his position underneath the big clock in the market he watched for the best part of an hour the corner of Tavistock Street, around which she used to come, pushing the barrow before her. So many girls wore black sailor hats and had red cheeks and—

There she was at last!

Joe Crawley was extremely busy, bargaining with a man whom he supplied with cabbages, when Annie Maude came up to him.

"The usual pears and apples, I suppose, miss?" were his first words.

After that no further speech occurred to him. She watched him counting out her supply of apples, and then she said:

"Seems like a dream, Mr. Crawley, to say that all them apples comes off the trees in your own garding!"

He looked up quickly. Her thoughts seemed almost born of his own.

"Seems like a dream to me, I tell you," he answered, "when I comes up to Covent Garden."

"And—and do you pick 'em off the trees," she pursued, "or do they just fall down theirselves? Declare I never thought of it, but what makes apples, Mr. Crawley? What do they come from, eh?"

Joe Crawley looked at the pile of apples that he was making on her barrow.

"You don't know what an apple's like," he told her, half shyly, "till you taste it off the tree."

"Dessay," said Annie Maude.

"Annie Maude," said Joe, calling her by her name for the first time, "would you come down to the country and pick 'em off the trees yourself?"

He looked up at her. Annie Maude seemed shy and silent for the first time since he had known her.

"You could fill your apron with what falls down from the trees," he went on.

"My!" she said, with her eyes round.

"Yes," he repeated, almost stubbornly. "If some one don't pick 'em up as fast as the wind shakes 'em down, the slugs 'll have them apples, Annie Maude."

There was a pause. Joe did not know how to go on. Suddenly he remembered the posy.

"Nearly forgot your posy from the garden at 'ome," he exclaimed, presenting it.

He watched her black brows go up and her hand creep out. He fancied that she had never looked so much pleased with the bouquet before.

"Well, now, Mr. Crawley, ain't yer good to me?" she exclaimed. "There's dahlies and geranies, an' a sprig o' mint, an' what's this?"

"Heliotrope they calls it," he replied. A new idea had taken his brain by storm. "Wouldn't you like to see 'em all a growin' and a blowin'—so they calls it—in the country, Annie Maude?"

"Country!" replied Annie Maude. "Never been down there, Mr. Crawley. Seems funny, but I ain't."

"What? Never been down to the country?" he cried. "Why, then, you don't know what life is! There's birds and flowers, Annie Maude. You could pick flowers same as those yourself. You could wander in the garden at night, if you fancied, with the wind just movin' of the trees, an' the stars lookin' out through the leaves, an' the flowers all smellin' around you in the dark."

"Wouldn't I like to come?" she said. "Not 'arf!"

"They'd all be rare and pleased to see you at my place," said Joe. "Just say you'll come, and we'll fix it, Annie Maude."

"Well—" she began, and so they fixed it.

II

They met at Paddington at ten o'clock the next Sunday morning. Annie Maude was wearing the velvet jacket, the huge earrings, the purple skirt and feathered hat of the London coster girl upon high days and holidays.

"What yer think o' this?" she asked him, smoothing the new velvet jacket with one hand. "I want to be a credit to you as your friend from London, Joe. Thought yer people 'd like to see a bit o' style. Don't see much style down there, do they—country folks?"

"N-not much," he answered loyally.

"Simple folks," she continued cheerfully, "ain't they, takin' 'em for all in all? Don't go with the times. Don't know what's what. Well"—she drew a breath and winked a friendly eye at Joe—"they'll see a bit of all right when they sets eyes on me!"

At Slowburn old Mr. Crawley met them with the market cart. Delighted with her welcome, Annie Maude's high spirits increased with every fresh turn of the road that brought new beauties of the country to her view. Her tongue went as fast as the wheels of old Betsy's cart.

When they arrived at Joe's home, she leaped from the cart till her earrings jangled again.

"Mean to say you lives 'ere?" she said. "Go on—you're teasin'! Why, our house ain't 'alf the size!"

"Come in," said Joe.

He led her through the hall and pushed open the door of the sitting room. The table was laid elegantly for six people, and decorated with flowers. On one side of the fireplace sat a stately old lady in a black silk dress with a gold chain round her neck. Opposite her was a young lady, like Joe to look at, with her hair arranged in modern fashion, and wearing a dress distinguished by the very latest sleeves.

"Here, mother, is my young lady friend from London, Miss Annie Maude Wheeler," said Joe, presenting her. "My mother, and my sister, Lucy, Annie Maude, and I'm sure I hope you'll all be friends."

Mrs. Crawley rose, Miss Lucy Crawley rose, too, after a prolonged stare of complete amazement at the velvet jacket, the feathered hat, and the purple skirt of Joe's young lady friend.

Joe's sister had a low, refined voice, like the ladies whom one passed in Regent Street, thought Annie Maude. Her manner was self-possessed and quiet, her hands were white. As she moved to the fireplace to take the joint from the oven, it seemed a marvel to Annie Maude, from London, that such a cultivated lady should know how to set a leg of mutton on a dish.

In the meantime Mrs. Crawley, putting a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on her nose, looked the girl all over and asked her in her kind and quiet voice if the journey had not tired her.

It was as much as Annie Maude could do to answer. Her flow of wit and conversation had dried up in her; she felt as if she dared not speak in her own voice, and was constrained in all the gestures that were natural to her. What would be expected of her when she sat down to a table decked with plate and flowers? Could this be the country—the proper country? Were these the simple country people whose eyes she was prepared to open with a bit of London style? She wanted to throw open the velvet jacket, but felt uncertain as to how Miss Lucy might receive this expression of the sense of stifling that she felt.

"Now, mother," Joe said, as they sat down to dinner, and another of Joe's sisters, more genteel than the first, had come tip on the scene, "you look right well after Miss Wheeler, and Annie Maude, you mind you make yourself at 'ome."

"At home, with those sleeves rubbing against my velvet jacket!" said Annie Maude to herself. "Not me! He oughter told me. Joe oughter prepared me for a set o' nobs like these!"

In turn they all addressed polite remarks to her.

"I expect you'll find this place very quiet after the noise of the streets," said Mrs. Crawley.

"I don't think!" Annie Maude got out in a choked voice.

"Which do you prefer as a place of residence, Miss Wheeler—the country or the town?" inquired Joe's eldest sister.

"Town for me," replied Annie Maude, almost in a low growl, because of the gathering lump in her throat.

"Have you any sympathy with this suffragette movement that is going on?" inquired the youngest sister.

"When I hears o' their chuckin' brickbats," replied Annie Maude, with hoarse seriousness, clutching the hem of the tablecloth, which rested on her lap.

The meal seemed of a solemnity and awfulness which she had never known; and when she heard old Mr. Crawley declare that she should not leave them till the last train at night, her vague despair gathered itself to an ominous head.

With relief that amounted to an inward pæan of thanksgiving she received the suggestion that while the women washed up the dinner things, she might like to see the garden where the apples grew upon the trees.

"Father takes a nap after dinner on Sunday," Mrs. Crawley explained, "and there's a few jobs for our Joe to do about the place. He got up so early this morning to meet his young lady friend"—she smiled at Annie Maude with a suggestive kindliness—"that he's had to put 'em off till now. You'll be all right for half an hour or so among the flowers and apples, won't you?"

Out in the garden Annie Maude seemed scarcely to take notice of the glowing dahlias "all a growin' and a blowin'," as Joe said. She wandered to the far end of the garden, where, they told her, she would find the apple trees.

"He oughter told me!" she said to herself. "He oughter told me!"

III

Three-quarters of an hour later, when Joe came from the yard in the workaday clothes to which he had changed to save his Sunday suit, he looked around the kitchen for Annie Maude from London.

"Now then, mother!" he called to the old lady. "Where've you put her?"

"She's in the garden, Joe."

"She ain't," he answered. "I've just been there."

"Not there?" said Mrs. Crawley. "Why, that's queer!"

The young man's whole face changed.

"Not been sayin' anything to her, 'ave you?" he asked.

"Sayin', lad?" his mother answered. "Why, what should I say, d'you think? You've not been 'avin a difference, dear?"

"Me—difference—with Annie Maude?" he said quickly. "What makes you think—"

"Nothing, lad—nothing," she replied "but a mother sees, and she didn't seem happy in her mind, to my thinking. A little look, and a word or two—it's quite enough."

"That's enough, mother," he said. Joe clapped on his hat at the words. "Wherever she is, I'll find her."

Joe set off down the station road. He felt sure that something had been done, or said, or looked, to Annie Maude, and she had set off home.

Two miles of the road had gone, and still he had not found her. She must have run, he said to himself, to have got so far already. He stepped out quickly, using his eyes and ears on all sides. Then he became aware of a movement in the hedge to the right of him as he swung downhill, and he turned and cried out:

"Annie Maude!"

She was hanging over a gate, the arms of the velvet jacket resting on the topmost bar, and she was sobbing bitterly, with the feathered hat all on one side.

"You—you—you've got to let me go along back home! It ain't no use your stoppin' me," she sobbed. "You—you never told me that they'd be like that!"

"What 'd they do to you?" he cried. "Like what, like what, Annie Maude?"

"You was humbuggin' me," she cried passionately, "when you said they was countrified! I ain't got sleeves like that, nor fine pocket han'kerchers. It ain't no use—I'll never be like them!"

"Why, Annie Maude," he said, "d'you think I want yer changed? Do you think I want yer anything but what yer are?"

With a sudden movement she tore off the feathered hat and cast it over the gate into the field beyond.

"There yer go," she cried, "'ole bird o' paradise!"

Without a word he climbed over the gate and fetched it back to her.

"There, put it on," he said. "You'll 'urt me if you 'urt that 'at."

"I'm goin' back 'ome," she declared. "That's what I'm goin' to do."

"That's right—you're goin' 'ome," he agreed, "and there'll be no more posies from Joe Crawley!"

Her tears began to fall again.

"Ain't yer said enough," she sobbed, "without sayin' that?"

"No, I ain't said enough," he answered. "What I want to say is this—I want yer to go back 'ome an' pick 'em every morning for yourself!"