CHAP: II. NEIGHBOURS
The Somers-Callcott acquaintance did not progress very rapidly, after the affair of the dahlias. Mrs Callcott asked Mrs Somers across to look at their cottage, and Mrs Somers went. Then Mrs Somers asked Mrs Callcott back again. But both times Mr Somers managed to be out of the way, and managed to cast an invisible frost over the recontre. He was not going to be dragged in, no, he was not. He very much wanted to borrow a pair of pincers and a chopper for an hour, to pull out a few nails, and to split his little chunks of kindling that the dealer had sent too thick. And the Callcotts were very ready to lend anything, if they were only asked for it. But no, Richard Lovat wasn't going to ask. Neither would he buy a chopper, because the travelling expenses had reduced him to very low water. He preferred to wrestle with the chunks of jarrah every morning.
Mrs Somers and Mrs Callcott continued, however, to have a few friendly words across the fence. Harriet learned that Jack was foreman in a motor-works place, that he had been wounded in the jaw in the war, that the surgeons had not been able to extract the bullet, because there was nothing for it to "back up against"—and so he had carried the chunk of lead in his gizzard for ten months, till suddenly it had rolled into his throat and he had coughed it out. The jeweller had wanted Mrs Callcott to have it mounted in a brooch or a hatpin. It was a round ball of lead, from a shell, as big as a marble, and weighing three or four ounces. Mrs Callcott had recoiled from this suggestion, so an elegant little stand had been made, like a little lamp-post on a polished wood base, and the black little globe of lead dangled by a fine chain like an arc-lamp from the top of the toy lamp-post. It was now a mantelpiece ornament.
All this Harriet related to the indignant Lovat, though she wisely suppressed the fact that Mrs Callcott had suggested that "perhaps Mr Somers might like to have a look at it."
Lovat was growing more used to Australia—or to the
20
