I breathed more freely when he was gone, and his wife (from whose face
the look of fear vanished instantly) was like another woman.
"Goodness gracious," she cried, with a kind of haggard hilarity,
"where's my head? Me never offering you a cup of tea, and you looking so
white after your journey."
I took baby back into my arms while she put on the kettle, set a black
tea-pot on the hob to warm, laid a piece of tablecloth and a thick cup
and saucer on the end of the table, and then knelt on the fender to
toast a little bread, talking meantime (half apologetically and half
proudly) about her husband.
He was a bricklayer by trade, and sometimes worked at the cemetery which
I could see at the other side of the road (behind the long railings and
the tall trees), but was more generally engaged as a sort of fighting
lieutenant to a Labour leader whose business it was to get up strikes.
Before they were married he had been the "Light Weight Champion of
Whitechapel," and those were photos of his fights which I could see over
the mantelpiece, but "he never did no knocking of people about now,"
being "quiet and matrimonual.
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