He sat down again on the three-legged stool, folded his arms, with his elbows on his knees, drew a long breath, and blinked at the clay floor for a while; then he twisted the stool round on one leg, until he faced the old-fashioned spired wooden clock (the brass disc of the pendulum moving ghost-like through a scarred and scratched marine scene -- Margate in England -- on the glass that covered the lower half) that stood alone on the slab shelf over the fireplace. The hands indicated half-past two, and Johnny, who had studied that clock and could "hit the time nigh enough by it," after knitting his brows and blinking at the dial for a full minute by its own hand, decided "that it must be getting on toward nine o'clock."
It must have been the heat. Johnny stood up, raking his hair, turned to the door and back again, and then, after an impatient gesture, took up his fiddle and raised it to his shoulder.
Then the queer thing happened. He said afterwards, under conditions favourable to such sentimental confidence, that a cold hand seemed to take hold of the bow, through his, and -- anyway, before he knew what he was about he had played the first bars of "When First I Met Sweet Peggy", a tune he had played often, twenty years before, in his courting days, and had never happened to play since. He sawed it right through (the cold hand left after the first bar or two) standing up; then still stood with fiddle and bow trembling in his hands, with the queer feeling still on him, and a rush of old thoughts going through his head, all of which he set down afterwards to the effect of the heat. He put the fiddle away hastily, damning the bridge of it at the same time in loud but hurried tones, with the idea of covering any eccentricity which the wife might have noticed in his actions. "Must 'a' got a touch o' sun," he muttered to himself.
He sat down, fumbled with knife, pipe, and tobacco, and presently stole a furtive glance over his shoulder at his wife.
The washed-out little woman was still sewing, but stitching blindly, for great tears were rolling down her worn cheeks.
Johnny, white-faced on account of the heat, stood close behind her, one hand on her shoulder and the other clenched on the table; but the clenched hand shook as badly as the loose one.
"Good God! What is the matter, Mary? You're sick!" (They had had little or no experience of illness.) "Tell me, Mary -- come now!
Has the boys been up to anything?"
"No, Johnny; it's not that."
"What is it then? You're taken sick! What have you been doing with yourself?
It might be fever. Hold up a minute. You wait here quiet while I roost out the boys and send 'em for the doctor and someone ----"
"No! no! I'm not sick, John. It's only a turn. I'll be all right in a minute."
He shifted his hand to her head, which she dropped suddenly, with a life-weary sigh, against his side.
"Now then!" cried Johnny, wildly, "don't you faint or go into disterricks, Mary! It'll upset the boys; think of the boys!
It's only the heat -- you're only takin' queer."
"It's not that; you ought to know me better than that. It was -- I -- Johnny, I was only thinking -- we've been married twenty years to-night -- an' -- it's New Year's Night!"
"And I've never thought of it!" said Johnny (in the afterwards).
"Shows what a God-forgotten selection will make of a man.
She'd thought of it all the time, and was waiting for it to strike me.
Why! I'd agreed to go and play at a darnce at Old Pipeclay School-house all night -- that very night -- and leave her at home because she hadn't asked to come; and it never struck me to ask her -- at home by herself in that hole -- for twenty-five bob. And I only stopped at home because I'd got the hump, and knew they'd want me bad at the school."
