Mrs. Perkins's boy, who lived with Mrs. Perkins in the house next door to Elsie's old home in Riceyman Square, and who had a chivalric regard for Elsie, fortunately happened to be out in the Square. In the darkness he was engaged in amorous dialectic with a girl of his own age—fourteen or fifteen—and they were both imperfectly sheltering under the eve of an outhouse (church property) at the north-east corner of the churchyard. Their voices were raised from time to time, and Elsie recognized his as she approached the house. Mrs. Perkins's boy wore over his head a sack which he had irregularly borrowed for the night from the express parcel company in the tails of whose vans he spent about twelve hours a day hanging on to a piece of string suspended from the van roof. That he had energy left in the evening to practise savagely-delicate sentimental backchat in the rain was proof enough of a somewhat remarkable quality of "brightness."
Elsie had chosen him for her mission because he was hardened to the world and thoroughly accustomed to the enterprise of affronting entrance-halls and claiming the attention of the guardians thereof. She now called to him across the roadway in an assured, commanding tone which indicated that she knew him to be her slave and that, in spite of her advanced years, she could more than hold her own with him against any chit in the Square. There was an aspect of Elsie's individuality which no living person knew except Mrs. Perkins's boy. He went hurrying to her.
"I want you to run down to the hospital with thisletter and be sure to tell the porter it is to be given to Mrs. Earlforward to-night. She's in there. And here's sixpence for you, and I'll lend you my umbrella and I'll get it again from your mammy to-morrow morning; but you must just walk to the Steps with me first because I don't want to get wet."
"Right-o, Elsie!" he agreed in his rough, breaking voice, and louder: "So long, Nell!"
"Put it in your pocket now," Elsie said, handing him the letter. "No; don't take the keys." She was still carrying Mr. Earlforward's bunch of keys.
The boy insisted on taking the umbrella, which gave him almost as much happiness as the sixpence. Never before had he had the opportunity to show off with an umbrella. He wished that he could get rid of the sack, which did not at all match the umbrella's glory.
"Here, hold on!" He stopped her and threw the sack over the railings into his mother's area. They walked together towards the Steps.
"Your Joe's been asking for you to-night," he said suddenly.
"My Joe!" She stood still, then leaned against the railings.
"Here! Comeon!" he adjured her, nervously sniggering in a cheeky way to hide the emotion in him caused by hers.
Elsie obeyed.
"How do you know?"
"Nell just told me. It's all about."
"Where d'e call?"
"Hocketts's."
"What'd they tell him?"
"Told him where you was living, I suppose."
"D'you know when he was inquiring?"
"Oh, some time to-night, I s'pose."
"Now you hurry with that letter, Jerry," she said at the shop-door. Mrs. Perkins's boy sailed round the corner into King's Cross Road with the umbrella on high.
Elsie had the feeling that she had not herself spokento Jerry at all, but that she had heard someone else speaking to him with her voice. And she was quite giddy between the influences of fear and of happiness. Her hands and feet were very cold. All kinds of memories and hopes which she had murdered in cold blood and buried deep came rushing and thronging out of their graves, intensely alive, and overwhelmed her mind. The anarchy within her was such that she had to think painfully before she could even command her fingers to open the shop-door.
Entering from the street, you had to cross the full length of the shop to the wall between it and the office in order to turn on the electric light. As Elsie passed gropingly between the bays of shelves she thought that she heard a sound of movement, and then the question struck and shook her: "Was the door latched or unlatched when I opened it?" She could not be sure, so uncertain and clumsy had been her hands. She dared not, for a moment, light the shop lest she should see something sinister or something that she wanted too much to see.
Turning the switch at last, she looked and explored with apprehensive eyes all of the shop that could be seen from the office doorway. Nothing! But the recesses of the bays nearest the front of the shop were hidden from her. She listened. Not a sound within the shop, and outside only the customary sounds which she never noticed unless attentively listening. She would go upstairs. She would extinguish the light and go upstairs. No! She could not, anyhow, leave the shop. She must wait. She must open the door and look forth at short intervals to see if Joe was coming. She must even leave the door ajar for him. He was bound to come sooner or later. He knew where she was, and it was impossible that he should not come. She heard a very faint noise, which sounded through the shop and in her ears like the discharge of a gun or the herald of an earthquake. Then a silence equally terrifying! The faint noise appeared to come from the bay at the end of which was the window giving on King's Cross Road. She could see about half,perhaps more, of this bay, but not all. She must go and look. Her skin crept and tingled. The shop was now for her peopled with invisible menaces. Mr. Earlforward was so forgotten that he might have been dead a hundred years. She must go and look. She did go and look. Her heart faltered horribly. There was indeed a heap of something lying under the side-window.
"Joe!" she cried, but in a whisper, lest by some infernal magic Mr. Earlforward up in his bedroom should overhear.
Joe was a lump of feeble life enveloped in loose, wet garments. His hat had fallen on the floor and was wetting it. He had grown a thin beard. Elsie knelt down by him and took his head in her arms and kissed his pale face; her rich lips found his dry and shrivelled up. He recognized her without apparently looking at her. She knew this by the responsiveness of his lips.
"I'm very thirsty," he murmured in his deep voice, which to hear again thrilled her. (Strange that, wet to the skin, he should be thirsty!)
Though she knew that he was ill, and perhaps very ill, she felt happier in that moment than she had ever felt. Happiness, exultant and ecstatic, rushed over her, into her, permeating and surrounding her. She cared for nothing save that she had him. She had no curiosity as to what he had been doing, what sufferings he had experienced, how his illness had come about, what his illness was. She lived exclusively in the moment. She did not even trouble about his thirst. Then gradually a poignant yet sweet remorse grew in her because, a year ago, before his vanishing, she had treated him harshly. She had acted for the best in the interests of his welfare, but was it right to be implacable, as she had been implacable, towards a victim such as he unquestionably was? Would it not have been better to ruin and kill him with kindness and surrender? For Elsie kindness had a quality which justified it for its own sake, whatever the consequences of it might be. And then she began to regret keenly that she had destroyed his letter; she wouldhave liked to be able to show it to him to prove her constancy. Supposing he were to ask her if she had received it, what she had done with it. Could she endure the shame of answering: "I burnt it"?
"I'm so thirsty," he repeated. He was a man of one idea.
"Stay there," she whispered softly, squeezing him, and damping her dress and cheeks before loosing him.
She ran noiselessly upstairs and came back with a small jug of cold water from the kitchen. As seemingly he could not clasp the handle, she held the jug to his lips. He swallowed the water in large, eager gulps.
"Wait a bit now," she said, when he had drunk half of it, and pulled the jug away from him. After twenty or thirty seconds he drank the rest and sighed.
"Can you walk, Joe? Can you stand?"
He shook his head slowly.
"I dropped down giddy.... Door was unlatched. I came in out of the rain and dropped down giddy."
She ran upstairs again, lit her candle, and set it on the floor by her bedroom door. When she had descended once more she saw that the candle threw a very faint light all the way down the two flights of stairs to the back of the shop. She seized Joe in her arms—she was very strong from continual hard manual labour, and he was very thin—and carried him up to her room, and, because he was wet, put him on the floor there. Breathless for a minute, she brought in the candle and closed and locked the door. (She locked it against nobody, but she locked it.)
She was nurse now, and he her patient. She began to undress him, and then stopped and hurried down to the bathroom, where Mr. Earlforward's weekly clean grey flannel shirt lay newly ironed. She stole the shirt. Then, having secured her door again, she finished undressing the patient, taking every stitch off him, and rubbing him dry with her towel, and rubbed the ends of his hair nearly dry, and got the shirt over his shoulders, and turned down the bed, and lifted him into her bed, and covered him up, andthrew on the bedclothes the very garments which in the early morning she had used for Mrs. Earlforward's comforting. There he lay in her bed, and nobody on earth except those two knew that he was in her room with the door locked to keep out the whole world. It was a wondrous, palpitating secret, the most wonderful secret that any woman had ever enjoyed in the history of love. She knelt by the bed and kissed him again and again. He smiled; then a spasm of pain passed over his face.
"What's the matter with you, Joe, darling? What is it you've got?" she asked gently, made blissful by his smile and alarmed by his evident discomfort.
"I ache—all over me. I'm cold." His voice was extremely weak.
She ran over various diseases in her mind and thought of rheumatic fever. She had not the least idea what rheumatic fever was, but she had always understood that it was exceedingly serious.
"I shall light a fire," she said, announcing this terrific decision as though it was quite an everyday matter for a servant, having put a "follower" in her own room, to light a fire for him and burn up her employer's precious coal.
On the way downstairs to steal a bucket of coal she thought: "I'd better just make sure of the old gentleman," and went into the principal bedroom and turned on the light. Mr. Earlforward seemed to be neither worse nor better. She was reassured as to him. He looked at her intently, but could not see through her body the glowing secret in her heart.
"You all right, sir?" she asked.
He nodded.
"Going to bed?"
"Oh, no! Not yet!" she smiled easily. "Not for a long time."
"What's all that wet on your apron, Elsie?"
She was not a bit disconcerted.
"Oh, that's nothing, sir," she said, and turned out the light before departing.
"Here! I say, Elsie!"
"Can't stop now, sir. I'm that busy with things." She spoke to him negligently, as a stronger power to a weaker—it was very queer!—and went out and shut the door with a smart click.
The grate and flue in her room were utterly unaccustomed to fires; it is conceivable that they had never before felt a fire. But they performed their functions with the ardour of neophytes, and very soon Mr. Earlforward's coal was blazing furiously in the hearth and the room stiflingly, exquisitely hot—while Mr. Earlforward, all unconscious of the infamy above, kept himself warm by bedclothes and the pride of economy alone. And a little later Elsie was administering to Joe her master's invalid food. The tale of her thefts was lengthening hour by hour.
Towards four o'clock in the morning Joe woke up from a short sleep and suddenly put questions to Elsie about his safety in that strange house, and also he inquired whose bed he was in.
"You're in my bed, Joe," she answered, kneeling again by the bedside, so as to have her face close to his and to whisper more intimately; and she told him the situation of the household and how her mistress had been carried to the hospital for an operation, and how her master was laid up with an unascertained disease, and how she alone had effective power in the house.
Then Joe began excitedly to talk of his adventures in the past twelve months, and she perceived that a change for the worse had come over him and that he was very ill. Both his voice and his glance indicated some development of the malady.
"Don't tell me now, Joe dear," she stopped him. "I want to hear it all, but you must rest now. To-morrow, after you've had another good sleep. I must just go and look at Mr. Earlforward for a minute."
She offered him a drink of water and left him, less to look at Mr. Earlforward than in order to give him an opportunity to calm himself, if that was possible. She knew that in certain moods solitude was best for him, ill or well. And she went down the dark stairs to the other bedroom, which was nearly as cold as the ice-cold stairs.
Mr. Earlforward also was worse. He seemed to be in a fever, yet looked like a corpse. Her arrival clearly gave him deep relief; he upbraided her for neglecting him; but somewhat timidly and cautiously, as one who feelshimself liable to reprisals which could not be resisted. Elsie stayed with him and tended him for a quarter of an hour, and then went to the kitchen, which the extravagant gas-ring was gently keeping warm, while it warmed water and tried to dry Joe's miserable clothes.
Elsie had to think. Both men under her charge were seriously ill, and she knew not what was the matter with either of them. Supposing that one of them died on her hands before the morning, or that both of them died! All her bliss at the reappearance of Joe had vanished. She had horrible thoughts, thoughts of which she was ashamed but which she could not dismiss. If anyone was to die she wanted it to be Mr. Earlforward. More, she could not help wishing that Mr. Earlforward would in any case die. She had solemnly promised Mr. Earlforward never to desert him, and a promise was a promise. If he lived, and "anything happened" to Mrs. Earlforward, she was a prisoner for life. And if Joe lived Mr. Earlforward would never agree to her marrying him and having him in the house with her, as would assuredly be necessary, having regard to Joe's health. Whereas with Mr. Earlforward out of the way she would be her own mistress and could easily assume full charge of Joe. Strange that so angelically kind and unselfish a creature could think so murderously; but think thus she did.
Further, the double responsibility which impulsively she had assumed weighed upon her with a crushing weight. Never had that always anxious brow been so puckered up with anxiety and hesitancy as now. Ought the doctor to be instantly summoned? But she could not fetch him herself; she dared not even leave her patients long enough to let her run over to the Square and rouse one of her friends there. And, moreover, she had a curious compunction about disturbing the doctor two nights in succession, and this compunction somehow counted in the balance against even men's lives! She simply did not know what to do. She desperately needed counsel, and could not get it. On the whole she considered that the doctor should be sent for. Many scores,perhaps hundreds, of people were sleeping within a hundred yards of her. Was there not one among them to whom she could appeal? She returned to Joe. He was talking in his sleep. She went to the window, opened it, and gazed out.
A lengthy perspective of the back yards of the houses in King's Cross Road stretched out before her; a pattern of dark walls—wall, yard, wall, yard, wall, yard—and the joint masonries of every pair of dwellings jutting out at regular intervals in back-rooms additional to the oblongs of the houses. The sky was clear, a full moon had dimmed the stars; and fine weather, which would have been a boon to the day, was being wasted on the unconscious night. The moonlight glinted here and there on window-glass. Every upper window marked a bedroom. And in every bedroom were souls awake or asleep. Not a window lit, except one at the end of the vista. Perhaps behind that window somebody was suffering and somebody watching. Or it might be only that somebody was rising to an interminable, laborious day. The heavy night of the town oppressed Elsie dreadfully. She had noticed that a little dog kennelled in the yard of the very next house to T. T. Riceyman's was fitfully moaning and yapping. Then a light flickered into a steady gleam behind a window of this same house, less than a dozen feet away, with an uncanny effect upon Elsie. The light waned to nothing, and shortly afterwards the back-door opened, and the figure of a young woman in a loose gown, with unbound hair, was silhouetted against the radiance of a candle within the house. Across the tiny backyard of T. T.'s Elsie could plainly see the woman, whose appearance was totally unfamiliar to her. A soul living close to her perhaps for months and years, and she did not know her from Eve! Elsie wanted to call out to her, but dared not. A pretty face, the woman had, only it was hard, exasperated, angry. The woman advanced menacingly upon the young, chained dog, and the next moment there was one sharp yell, followed by a diminuendo succession of yells. "That'll learn ye to keeppeople awake all night," Elsie heard a thin, inimical voice say. The woman returned to the house. The dog began again to yap and moan. The woman ran out in a fury, picked up the animal and flung it savagely into the kennel. Elsie could hear the thud of its soft body against the wood. She shrank back, feeling sick. The woman retired from her victory; the door was locked; the light showed once more at the bedroom window, and went out; the infant dog, as cold and solitary as ever, and not in the least comprehending the intention of the treatment which it had received, issued from the kennel and resumed its yapping and moaning.
"Poor little thing!" murmured the ingenuous Elsie, and shut the window.
No! She could not send anybody at all for the doctor. Common sense came to her aid. She must wait till morning. A few hours, and it would be full day. And the risk of a disaster in those few hours was exceedingly small. She must not be a silly, frightened little fool. Joe was still talking in his restless sleep. She quickly made up the fire, and then revisited Mr. Earlforward, who also was asleep and talking. After a moment she fetched a comb and went to the kitchen, washed her face and hands in warm water, took down her blue-black hair, combed it and did it up. And she put on a clean apron. She had to look nice and fresh for her patients when the next day should start. For her night and day were now the same; her existence had become continuous—no break in consciousness—it ran on and on and on. She did not feel tired. On the contrary, she felt intensely alive and energetic and observant, and had no desire for sleep. And her greed seemed to have left her.
She was running up the Steps (not as early as she hoped, owing to a quick succession of requisitions from her two patients at the last moment) to find a messenger in the Square to dispatch for the doctor, when a sharp "Hai! Hai!" from behind caused her to turn. The summons came from Dr. Raste, who had appeared round the corner from King's Cross Road. Elsie ran back and unlocked the shop-door. The ink of her scrawled notice of closure to the public had been weeping freely in the weather of the last twenty-four hours.
"You were leaving your patient, Elsie," said the doctor, in a prim, impartial voice, expressing neither disapproval nor approval nor anything, but just holding up the mere fact for her consideration.
She explained.
"He's worse, of course," the doctor remarked, his tone not asking for confirmation—almost forbidding it.
He was impenetrable; or, as Elsie thought: "You couldn't make anything out of him." He might be tired; he might not be tired. He might have been roused from his bed at 2A.M.; he might have slept excellently in perfect tranquillity. You didn't know; you never would know. The secrets of the night were locked up in that trimly dressed bosom. He was the doctor, exclusively. But one thing showed him human; he had once again disturbed the sequence of his daily programme in order to visit T. T. Riceyman's.
They passed through the shop, on whose floor more letters were lying. At the door of Mr. Earlforward's bedroom, the doctor paused and murmured:
"I'd better hear what you've got to say before I go in."
She took him to the dining-room, where he sat down on a dusty chair. To Elsie's mind the dining-room was in a disgraceful state, and indeed, though the shop and office had not yet seriously deteriorated from last night's terrific cleansing, the only presentable rooms in the house were the two bedrooms. All the rest was as neglected and forlorn as a pet animal forgotten in the stress of a great and prolonged crisis. Elsie, standing, gave her report, which the doctor received like a magistrate. She wanted to ask about Mrs. Earlforward, but it was not proper for her to ask questions. Nor could she frame any formula of words in which to broach to the steely little doctor the immense fact of Joe's presence in the building.
"Been to bed?" he inquired coldly.
"Oh no, sir!"
"Had any sleep?"
"Oh no, sir!"
"Not for two nights, eh?"
"No, sir—well, nothing to mention."
When at length they passed into the bedroom, Elsie was shocked at the condition of the sick-bed. She had left it unimpeachably smooth, tidy and rectangular; it was now tossed and deranged into a horrible confusion, as though it had not been made for days, as though for days the patient had been carrying on in it a continuous battle with some powerful enemy. And in the midst of it lay Mr. Earlforward (whom also she had just "put to rights," and who after her tending had somehow not seemed to be very ill), unkempt, hot, wild-eyed, parchment-skinned, emaciated, desiccated, creased, anxious, at bay, nearly desperate, mumbling to himself. Yet the moment he caught sight of the doctor he altered his demeanour, becoming calm, still, and even a little sprightly. The change was pathetic in its failure to deceive; and it was also heroic.
"Well, my friend," the doctor greeted him, staccato, with his characteristic faint, nervous snigger at the end of a phrase.
"You're here very early, doctor," said Mr. Earlforward composedly. "At least it seems to me early." He did not know the time; nor Elsie either; not a timepiece in the house was going, and the church-clock bell was too familiar to be noticed unless listened for.
"Thought you might like to know something about your wife," said Dr. Raste, raising his voice. He made no reference at all to Henry's exasperating refusal to go to the hospital on the previous day. "They tell me at the hospital that a fibroid growth is her trouble. I suspected it."
"Where?"
"Matrix." The doctor glanced at Elsie as if to say: "You don't know what that word means." She didn't, but she divined well enough Mrs. Earlforward's trouble. "Change of life. No children," the doctor went on tersely, and nodded several times. Mr. Earlforward merely gazed at him with his little burning eyes. "There'll be an operation this morning. Hope it'll be all right. It ought to be. An otherwise healthy subject. Yes. Hold this in your mouth, will you?"
He inserted a clinical thermometer between Mr. Earlforward's white, crinkled lips, took hold of the patient's wrist and pulled out his watch.
"Appears you can't retain your food," he said, after he had put the watch back. "Comes up exactly as it goes down. Mechanical. You're very strong." He withdrew the thermometer, held it up to the light, washed it, restored it to its case. "Well, we know what's the matter with your wife, butIshouldn't like to say what's the matter with you—yet. I'm not a specialist." He uttered the phrase with a peculiar intonation, not entirely condemning specialists, but putting them in their place, regarding them very critically and rather condescendingly, as befitting one whose field of work and knowledge was the whole boundless realm of human pathology. "You'llhave to be put under observation, watched for a bit, and X-rayed. You can't possibly be nursed properly here, though I'm sure Elsie's doing her best. And there's another great advantage of your being in hospital. You'll know how Mrs. Earlforward's going on. You can't expect 'em to be sending up here every ten minutes to tell you. Nor telegraph either. Something else to do, hospitals have!" Another faint snigger. "If you'll come now, I mean in half an hour or so, I've arranged to get you there in comfort. It's all fixed." (He did not say how.) "I hear you can walk about, and you made your bed yesterday. Now, Elsie, you must——"
"I won't go to the hospital," Mr. Earlforward coldly interrupted him. "I don't mind having a private nurse here. But I won't go to the hospital."
The doctor laughed easily.
"Oh, but you must! And one nurse wouldn't be enough. You'll need two. And even then it would be absolutely no good. You can't be X-rayed here, for instance. It's no use me telling you how ill you are, because you know as well as I do how ill you are."
The battle was joined. Dr. Raste, in addition to being exasperated, had been piqued by the reports of his patient's singular obstinacy; he had now positively determined to get him into the hospital, and it was this resolve that had prompted him to give special attention to Mr. Earlforward's case, disorganizing all his general work in favour of it. He could not allow himself to be beaten by the inexplicable caprice of a patient who in all other respects had struck him as a man of more than ordinary sound sagacity, though of a somewhat miserly disposition; and the caprice was the more enigmatic in that to enter the hospital would be by far the cheapest way of treating the illness.
Mr. Earlforward's obstinacy, on the other hand, was exasperated and strengthened by the disdainful reception given to his marvellous, his perfectly reckless suggestion about having a private nurse. These people were ridiculously concerned about his health. They had their ownideas. He had his. He had offered an extremely generous compromise—a compromise which would cost him a pot of money—and it had not even been discussed; the wonder of it had in no way been recognized. Well, on the whole he was glad that the suggestion had not been approved. He withdrew it. He had only made it because he felt—doubtless in undue apprehension—that he was not yet beginning to progress towards recovery. He admitted to himself, for example, that whereas on the previous day he had been interested in his business, to-day his business was a matter of indifference to him. That, he knew, was not a good sign. But, then, to-morrow would certainly show some improvement. Indigestion—and he was suffering from nothing but acute indigestion—invariably did yield to a policy of starvation. As for hospitals, he had always had a horror of hospitals since once, in his insurance days, he had paid a visit to a fellow-clerk confined in a fever-ward. The vision of the huge, long, bare room, with its rows of beds and serried pain and distress, the draughts through the open windows, the rise and fall of the thunder of traffic outside, the semi-military bearing of the nurses, the wholesaleness of the affair, the absence of privacy, the complete subjection of the helpless patients, the inelasticity of regulations, the crushing of individuality: this dreadful vision had ineffaceably impressed itself on his imagination—the imagination of an extreme individualist with a passion for living his own life free of the obligation to justify it or explain it. He had recalled the vision hundreds of times—and never mentioned it to a soul. He did not intend to die of his illness; he knew that he would not die of it, but he convinced himself that he would prefer anything, even death, to incarceration in a great hospital. Were he wrenched by force out of his bed, he would kick and struggle to the very last, and his captors should be stricken with the fear of killing him while trying in their misguided zeal to save him. He read correctly the pertinacity in the doctor's face. But he had never encountered a pertinacity stronger than his own, and illness hadnot weakened it, rather the reverse; his pertinacity had become morbid.
"I don't think I'll go into a hospital, doctor," he said quietly, turning his face away. The words were mild, the resolution invincible. The doctor crossed over to look him in the face. Their eyes met in fierce hostility. The doctor was beaten.
"Very well," said he, with bitter calm. "If you won't, you won't. There is nothing else for me to do here. I must ask you to be good enough to get another adviser. And"—he transfixed Elsie with a censorious gaze, as though Elsie was to blame—"and, please remember that if the worst comes to the worst, I shall certainly refuse to give a certificate."
"A certificate, sir?" Elsie faltered.
"Yes. A certificate of the cause of death. There would have to be an inquest," he explained, with implacable and calculated cruelty.
But Mr. Earlforward only laughed—a short, dry, sardonic laugh. The sun shone into the silent room and upon the tumbled bed and the sick, triumphant man, and made them more terrible than midnight could have made them. The doctor, with the pompous solemnity of a little man conscious of rectitude, slowly picked up his hat from the chest of drawers.
"But what am I to do?" Elsie appealed.
"My good woman, I don't know. I wish I did. All I know is, I've done what I could; and I can't take the private affairs of all Clerkenwell on my shoulders. I've other urgent cases to attend to." A faint snigger, which his will was too late to suppress!
"Elsie'll be all right," muttered Mr. Earlforward. "Elsie'll never desert me, Elsie won't. She promised me."
The doctor walked majestically out of the room, followed by Elsie.
"I suppose I must just do the best I can, sir," said Elsie on the landing outside the bedroom. She smiled timidly, cheerfully and benevolently.
The doctor looked at her, startled. It seemed to him that in some magic way she had vanquished the difficulties of a most formidable situation by merely accepting and facing them. She did not argue about them, complain about them, nor expatiate upon their enormity. She was ready to go on living and working without any fuss from one almost impossible moment to the next. During his career in Clerkenwell Dr. Raste had become a connoisseur of choice examples of practical philosophy, and none better than he could appreciate Elsie's attitude. That it should have startled him was a genuine tribute to her.
"Yes, that's about it," he said nonchalantly, with the cunning of an expert who has seen an undervalued unique piece in an antique shop. "Well, good morning, Elsie. Good morning."
He was in a hurry; he had half a hundred urgent matters on his professional conscience. What could he do but leave Elsie alone with her ordeal? He could not help her, and she did not need help in this particular work, which was, after all, part of her job at twenty pounds a year and food given and stolen. She was beginning to see the top of his hat as he descended the stairs. The stupid, plump, practical philosopher wanted to call him back for an affair of the very highest importance, and could not open her mouth, because Mr. Earlforward's desperate plight somehow inhibited her from doing so.
"Doctor!" she exclaimed with a strange shrillness as soon as he had passed from her sight into the shop.
"What now?" demanded Dr. Raste sharply, afraid that his connoisseurship should have been mistaken and she would stampede.
She ran down after him. His gaze indicated danger. He did not mean to have any nonsense.
"I suppose you couldn't just see Joe for a minute?" she stammered, with a blush. This now faltering creature had a moment earlier been calmly ready to do the best she could in circumstances which would scarcely bear looking at.
"Joe? What Joe?"
"Your old Joe. He's here, sir. Upstairs. Came last night, sir. He's very ill. I'm looking after him too. Master doesn't know."
"What in God's name are you talking about, my girl?" said the doctor, moved out of his impassibility.
She told him the facts, as though confessing a mortal sin for which she could not expect absolution.
"I really haven't a minute to spare," said he, and went upstairs with her to the second-floor.
By the time they got there Elsie had resumed her self-possession.
The doctor, for all his detached and frigid poses, was on occasion capable, like nearly every man, of being as irrational as a woman. On this occasion he was guilty of a perfectly indefensible prejudice against both Elsie and Joe. He had a prejudice against Elsie because he was convinced that had it not been for her affair with Joe, Joe would still have been in his service. And he was prejudiced against Joe because he had suffered much from a whole series of Joe's successors. For the moment he was quite without a Joe. Also he resented Elsie having a secret sick man in the house—and that man Joe—and demanding so unexpectedly his attention when he was in a hurry and over-fatigued by the ills of the people of Clerkenwell. He would have justly contemned such prejudices in another, and especially in, for example, hiswife; and it must be admitted he was not the god-like little being he thought he was. Fortunately Joe was in a state which made all equal before him.
"Oh, dear! I do so ache, and I'm thirsty," the second patient groaned desperately, showing no emotion—surprise, awe or shame—at sight of the doctor and employer whom he had so cruelly wronged by leaving him in the lurch for inadequate reasons originating in mere sentiment. He had been solitary for half an hour and could not bear it. He wanted, and wanted ravenously, something from everybody he saw. The world existed solely to succour him. And certainly he looked very ill, forlorn, and wistfully savage in the miserable bed in the miserable bedroom of the ex-charwoman. He looked quite as ill as Mr. Earlforward, and to Elsie even worse.
"It's malaria," said the doctor in a casual tone, after he had gone through the routine of examination. "Temperature, of course. He'll be better in a few days. I've no doubt he had it in France first, but he never told me. When they brought back troops to France from the East, malaria came with them. All the north of France is covered with mosquitoes, and they carry the disease. I'll send down some quinine. You must feed him on liquids—milk, barley-water, beef-tea, milk-and-soda. Hot water to drink, not cold. And you ought to sponge him down twice a day."
Elsie, listening intently to this mixture of advice and information, could not believe that Joe's case was not more serious than the doctor's manner implied. Well implanted in her lay the not groundless conviction that doctors were apt to be much more summary with the sick poor than with the sick rich. And she was revisited by her old sense of this doctor's harsh indifference. He had not even greeted his former servant, had regarded him simply as he would regard any ordinary number in a panel.
"You won't have a great deal to do downstairs. In fact, scarcely anything," the doctor added, who apparently saw nothing excessive in leaving two patients in charge ofone unaided woman, she being also housekeeper, shopkeeper, and domestic servant.
"Of course you can send him to the hospital if you care to," said the doctor lightly. "I dare say they'd take him in." He was, in fact, not anxious to insist on Joe's removal, thinking that he had already sufficiently worried the hospital authorities about the dwellers in Riceyman Steps.
To send Joe to the hospital would have relieved Elsie of the terrific responsibility which she had incurred by bringing him unpermitted into the house. But she did not want to surrender him. She hated to part with him. And privately, when it came to the point, she shared Mr. Earlforward's objection to hospitals. Joe might be neglected, she feared, in the hospital; he might be victimized by some rule. She had no confidence in the nursing of anybody except herself. She was persuaded that if she could watch him she might save him.
"I think I can manage him here, sir," she smiled. But it was a reserved smile, which said: "I have my own ideas about this matter and I don't swallow all I hear."
Dr. Raste began to put on his gloves; in the servant's room he had not taken off his hat, much less his overcoat. She escorted him downstairs. At the shop-door he suddenly said:
"If hedoeswant another doctor there's Mr. Adhams—other side of Myddelton Square." His features relaxed. This remark was his repentance to Elsie, induced in him by her cheerful and unshrinking attitude towards destiny.
"You mean for master, sir?"
"Yes.Hemay be able to do something with him. You never know."
"I'm sure I'm very much obliged, sir," said Elsie eagerly, her kindliness springing up afresh and rushing out to meet the doctor's spark of feeling. He nodded. He had not said whether or not he would call again to see Joe, and she had not dared to suggest it. She shut the door and locked herself in the house with the two men.
Mr. Earlforward woke up after what seemed to him a very long sleep, feeling appreciably better. He had less pain; at moments he had no pain. And his mind, he thought, was surprisingly clear and vigorous. He had ideas on all sorts of things. Most invalids got their perspective awry—he knew that—but his own perspective had remained absolutely true. Rising out of bed for a moment he found that he could stand without difficulty, which was yet another proof of his theory that people ate a vast deal too much. The doctor had been utterly wrong about him. The doctor had made a mystery about ordinary chronic indigestion. The present attack was passing, as the sufferer had always been convinced it would. A nice old mess of a complication they would have made of it at the hospital! Or more probably he would have been bundled out of the place with contumely as a malingering fraud! He straightened the bed a little, and then, slipping back into it with a certain eagerness, he began to concert plans, to reorganize and resume his existence.
The day was darkening. Four o'clock, perhaps. Elsie? Where was that girl? She ought to be coming. Had she got a bit above herself? Thought she was the boss of the whole place, no doubt, and could do as she chose! An excellent creature, trustworthy, devoted.... And yet—in some things they were all alike. Give them an inch and they'd take an ell. He must be after her. Now what was it he had noticed, or thought he had noticed, when he was last awake? Oh, yes! That was it. His keys. He had missed them from the top of the chest of drawers. He peered in the gloom. They were there right enough.Perhaps hidden before by something else. The room had been tidied, dusted, while he slept. He didn't quite care for that, but he supposed it couldn't be helped. Anyhow, it showed that she was not being utterly idle. Of course the girl was not going to bed properly, but she had ample opportunity to sleep. With the shop closed she had practically nothing to do....
"Fibroid growth." Fibroid—like fibre, of course. He scarcely understood how a growth could be like fibre; but it was a name, a definition, and therefore reassuring. Much better than "cancerous," at the worst! An entirely different thing from cancer! But he was dreadfully concerned, frightened, for Violet. If she died—not that it was conceivable—butifshe died, what a blank! Sickening! No! He could not contemplate it. Yet simultaneously in his mind was a little elusive thought: as a widower, freed from the necessity of adapting himself to another, and of revealing to another to some extent his ideas, intentions, schemes—what freedom! The old freedom! And he would plunge into it as into an exquisite, warm bath, voluptuously. He would be more secretive, more self-centred, more prudent, more fixed in habit than ever! A great practical philosopher, yes! In no matter what event he would discover compensations. And there were still deeper depths in the fathomless pit of his busy mind, depths into which he himself would do no more than glance—rather scared.
Elsie came in and saw a sinister sick man, pale as the dying, shrunk by starvation, with glittering, suspicious little eyes.
"Oh! So you've come, miss!" He wished that he had not said "miss." It was a tiny pleasantry of reproof, but too familiar. Another inch, another ell!
"Why! You've been making your bed again!" she exclaimed.
But she exclaimed so nicely, so benevolently, that he could not take offence. And yet—might she not be condescending to him? Withal, he enjoyed her presence in the bedroom. Her youth, her reliability, her prettiness (hethought she was growing prettier and prettier every day—such dark eyes, such dark hair, such a curve of the lips), and her physical power and health! Her mere health seemed miraculous to him. Oh! She was a god-send. ... She had said nothing about Violet. Well, if she had had news she would have told him. He hesitated to mention Violet. He could wait till she began.
"I'll run and make you some food," she said.
"Here! Not so fast! Not so fast!" he stopped her.
He was about to give an order when, for the second time, he noticed that her apron was wet in several places.
"Why is your apron all wet?" he demanded sharply.
"Is it?" she faltered, looking down at it. "So it is! I've been doing things." (She appeared to have dropped the "sir" completely.)
The fact was that she had been sponging Joe.
Mr. Earlforward became suspicious. He suspected that she was wasting warm water.
"Why are you always running upstairs?" he asked in a curious tone.
"Running upstairs, sir?"
(Ha! "Sir." He was recovering his grip on her.)
She blushed red. She had something to hide. Hordes of suspicions thronged through his mind.
"Well, sir, I have to go to the kitchen."
"I don't hear you so often in thekitchen," said he drily.
It was true. And all footsteps in the kitchen could be heard overhead in the bedroom. He suspected that she was carrying on conversations from her own bedroom window with new-made friends in the yard of the next house or the next house but one, and giving away the secrets of the house. But he did not utter the suspicion; he kept it to himself for the present. Yes, they were all alike.
"You haven't inquired, Elsie, but I'm much better," he said.
"Oh! I canseeyou are, sir!" she responded brightly.
But whether she really thought so, or whether she was just humouring him, he could not tell.
"Yes. And I'm going to get up."
"Not to-day you aren't, sir," she burst out.
He said placidly:
"No. To-morrow morning. And I think I shall put on one of my new suits and a new shirt. I think it's about time. I don't want to get shabby. Just show them to me."
Elsie was evidently amazed at the suggestion. And he himself did not know why he had made it. But, at any rate, it was not a bad idea. He fancied that he might feel better in a brand new suit. He indicated the right drawers to her, and one by one she had to display on the bed the carefully preserved garments which he had bought for a song years ago and never persuaded himself into the extravagance of wearing. The bed was covered with new merchandise. He thought that he would have to wear the clothes some time, and might as well begin at once. It would be uneconomic to waste them, and worn or unworn they would go for far less than a song after his death. He must be sensible; he must keep his perspective in order. He regarded this decision to have out a new suit as a truly great feat of considered sagacity on the part of a sick man.
Elsie with extreme care restored all the virgin clothes to their drawers except one suit and one shirt, which for convenience she put separately into Mrs. Earlforward's wardrobe. As all the suits were the same and all the shirts were the same, it did not matter which suit and which shirt were selected. But this did not prevent him from choosing, and hesitating in his choice.
Elsie seemed to be alarmed by the scene—he could not understand why.
"Of course," he said, "being new they'll hang a bit looser on me than my old suit; that's all wrinkled up. I'm not quite so stout as I was, am I?"
Elsie turned round to him from the wardrobe with anervous movement, and then quickly back again. The fading light glinted for a second on a tear-drop that ran down her cheek. This tear-drop annoyed Mr. Earlforward; he resented it, and was not in the least touched by it. He had not perceived the extraordinary pathos in the phrase "not quite so stout," coming from a man who had never been stout (or slim either), and who was now a stick, a skeleton; he thought she was merely crying because he had lost flesh. As if people weren't always either putting on flesh or losing it! As a fact, Elsie had not felt the pathos of the phrase either, and her tears had no connexion whatever with Mr. Earlforward's wasting away. Nor had they sprung from the still more tragic pathos of his caprice about a new suit. In depositing the chosen suit in Mrs. Earlforward's wardrobe Elsie had caught sight of the satin shoe which on the bridal night she had tied to the very bedstead whereon the husband was now lying alone. She thought of the husband lying alone and desperately ill and desperately determined not to be ill, and the wife far off in the hospital, and of her own helplessness, and she simply could not bear to look at the shabby old shoe—which some unknown girl had once worn in flashing pride. All the enigma of the universe was in that shoe, with its curved high heel perched lifeless on a mahogany tray of the everlasting wardrobe. Elsie had never heard of the enigma of the universe, but it was present with her in many hours of her existence.
Mr. Earlforward said suddenly:
"Was the operation going to be done this morning or this afternoon?" He knew that the operation had been fixed for the morning, but he had to account to Elsie for his apparent lack of curiosity.
"This morning, sir."
"We ought to be getting some news soon, then."
"Well, sir. That's just what I was wondering. I don't hardly think as they'll send up—not unless it was urgent. So I suppose it's gone off all right." A pause. "But we ought to know for certain, sir. I was thinking I could run out and get someone to go down andfind out—I mean someone whowouldfind out and tell us all about it—not a child. I dare say a shilling or two——"
With her experience Elsie ought not to have mentioned money, but she was rather distraught. The patient reacted instantly. It was evident to him that Elsie had old friends in the Square, or near by, upon whom she wanted to confer benefits through the medium of her employer's misfortunes. They were always bent on lining their pockets, those people were. He was not going to let them pick up shillings and florins as easily as all that. His shop was perforce closed; his business was decaying; his customers would transfer their custom to other shops; not a penny was coming in; communism was rife; the political and trade outlook was menacing in the extreme; there was no clear hope anywhere; he saw himself as an old man begging his bread. And the girl proposed gaily to scatter shillings over Riceyman Square for a perfectly unnecessary object! She had not reflected at all. They never did. They were always eager to spend other people's money. Not their own! Oh, no! He alone had kept a true perspective, and he would act according to his true perspective. He was as anxious as anybody for news of the result of the operation and Violet's condition; but he did not see the need to engage an army of special messengers for the collecting of news. An hour sooner or an hour later—what difference could it make? He would know soon enough, too soon if it was to be bad news; and if it was to be good news a little delay would only increase joy.... And, moreover, you would have thought that even the poorest and most rapacious persons would not expect money for services rendered in a great crisis to the sick and the bedridden.
"I see no reason for doing that," he said placidly and firmly. "Let me think now——"
"Shall I run down there myself? It won't take me long."
She was ready in the emergency, and in deference to his astounding whims, to take the fearful risks of leavingthe two men alone together in the house. Suppose Joe should rise up violent? Suppose Mr. Earlforward should begin in his weakness to explore the house? He was already suspecting something; and she knew him for the most inquisitive being ever born. She trembled. Still, she was ready to go, and to run all the way there and all the way back.
"Oh, no!" he forbade positively. "That won't do at all." He was afraid to lose her. He, so seriously ill (he was now seriously ill again!), to be left by himself in the house! It was unthinkable. "Look here. Step across to Belrose's" (Belrose—the man who had purchased Violet's confectionery business). "I hear he's got the telephone now. Ask him to telephone for us to the hospital. Then we shall know at once."
"We don't do much with them," Elsie objected, diffident. The truth was that the Earlforward household bought practically nothing at Belrose's, Belrose's not being quite Violet's "sort of shop" under its new ownership.
Mr. Earlforward almost sat up in his protest against the horrible suggestion contained in Elsie's remark. What! Would Belrose say: "'No, you don't deal with me, and therefore I won't oblige you by telephoning to the hospital to find out whether Mrs. Earlforward is alive or dead"? A monstrous notion!
"Don't be silly," he chid her gravely. "Do as I tell you and run down at once."
"And would you like me to ask them to telephone for another doctor for you while I'm about it? There's Dr. Adhams, he's in Myddelton Square too. They do say he's very good."
"When I want another doctor I'll let you know, Elsie," said Mr. Earlforward with frigid calm. "There's a great deal too many doctors. What has Raste done for me, I should like to know?"
"You wouldn'tlethim do anything," said Elsie sharply.
He had never heard her speak with less benevolence.Of course he was entitled to give her a good dressing-down, and it might even be his duty to do so. But he lacked confidence in himself. Strange, but he was now in the last resort afraid of Elsie! She was like an amiable and tractable animal which astonishingly shows its teeth and growls.
"Leave the door open," he muttered.
As Elsie descended to the shop there was a peremptory and loud rat-tat, and then a tattoo on the glass of the shop door. It frightened her. She thought naturally of the possibility of bad news by special messenger or telegraph from the hospital. But Mrs. Perkins's boy Jerry was at the door. He wore his uniform, of which the distinguishing characteristics were a cap with brass letters on the peak and a leathern apron initialled in black. In King's Cross Road an enormous motor-lorry throbbed impatiently in attendance upon the gnome.
"Here's yer umbrella, Elsie," said Jerry proudly. "I thought you might be wanting of it."
He made no inquiry as to sick persons. He was only interested in the romantic fact that he had used the vast resources of his company to restore the umbrella to his queen, carrying it all day through all manner of streets in his long round, and finally persuading that important personage the motor-driver to stop at Riceyman Steps on no business of the company's. Elsie took the umbrella from his dirty little hands, which were, however, no dirtier than his grinning face, and he ran off almost before she could thank him.
"Jerry!" she summoned him back, and he came, risking the wrath of the driver. "Come along to-night, will yer, after ye've done? Rap quiet on the door. I might want yer."
"Right O, Elsie!" He was gone. The lorry was gone.
Elsie went upstairs again with the umbrella, not because the umbrella would not have been safe in the shop, but because she felt that she must give another glance at Joe before she left the premises. It was anunconsidered movement. She had forgotten that Mr. Earlforward's bedroom door was open.
"Elsie," he called out, as she passed on the landing, "who was that?"
Her tired and exasperated brain worked with extraordinary swiftness. She decided that she could not enter into a long explanation concerning the umbrella and Jerry. Why should she? "He" was already suspicious.
"Postman," she answered, without the slightest hesitation, lying as glibly and lightly as a born, lifelong liar, and continued her way upstairs. She was somehow vaguely, indirectly, defending the secrecy of Joe.
In her room she put the umbrella in its paper again under her bed, gazing at Joe as she did so. Joe was very ill. She had given him two doses of quinine (which Dr. Raste, making Elsie ashamed of her uncharitable judgments on him, had had sent direct from a chemist's within an hour and a half of his departure), and she was disturbed that the medicine had not produced an immediate and marked effect on the patient.
Joe had got one arm through the ironwork at the head of the bed, and was tearing off little slips of the peeling wallpaper in the corner. She took hold of his hot hand, and silently guided it back through the ironwork on to the bed.
"Shall I give you another dose?" she suggested tentatively, with brow creased.
He nodded. He knew malaria and he knew quinine; and, fortified by his expert approval, she gave him another dose. Both of them had the belief that if five grains of a medicine did you ten per cent. of "good," ten grains would assuredly do you twenty per cent. of good, and so on in proportion.
"I'm coming in again in a minute or two. I've just got to go across the Steps on an errand," she said, and kissed him. Both of them had also the belief that her kisses did him good; and this conviction was better founded than the other one. She had said nothing to him about Mrs. Earlforward's operation. He had learntonly that Elsie was mistress because Mrs. Earlforward was in hospital; the full story might have aggravated his mental distress.
"Elsie!" It was Mr. Earlforward's summons as she crossed the landing on her way down.
She put no more than her face—a rather mettlesome face—into the room.
"What do you keep on going upstairs for?"
Yes. He suspected. With strange presence of mind she replied promptly:
"I've just been up for the key of the shop, sir. I left it up in my room. I can't go out and leave the shop door on the latch, can I?"
"Well, bring me all the letters."
"Oh, very well. Very well!" She was hostile again.
This time she shut the bedroom door, ignoring his protest. Then she went upstairs once more and locked her own door on the outside and carried off the key. At any rate, if in some impossible caprice he should take it into his head to prowl about the house in her absence, he should not pry into her room. He had no right to do so. And she was absolutely determined to defend her possession of Joe. A moment later she bounced into Mr. Earlforward's bedroom, and carelessly dropped all the letters on to the bed—a regular shower of envelopes and packets.
"There!" she exclaimed, on a hard and inimical note, as if saying: "You asked for them. You've got them. And I wash my hands of it all."
Mr. Earlforward saw that he must walk warily. She was a changing Elsie, a disagreeably astonishing Elsie. He did not quite know where he was with her.
As she emerged from the shop into the Steps a young woman with a young dog, stopping suddenly, addressed her in soft, apprehensive, commiserating accents:
"How is Mr. Earlforward this evening?"
"He seems to think as he's a bit better, 'm, thank you,in himself," Elsie answered brightly. She was uplifted by the mere concern in the voice, and at once felt more kindly towards her master, was indeed rather ashamed of her recent harshness to him.
Dusk had now fallen, and she could not see very clearly, but the next instant she had recognized both the woman and the dog". Quite a lady! A sort of a seal-skin coat! Gloves! Utterly different from the savage creature of the previous night. The dog, too, was different. A dog lacking yet in experience of the world, and apt to forget that a dog's business is to keep an eye on its guardian if it sets any store on a quiet and safe existence; but still well disposed towards its guardian, and apparently in no fear of her. More remorse for Elsie.
"Oh! I'msoglad!... And Mrs. Earlforward?"
"Oh, 'm! We haven't heard. We're expecting news."
"I do hope everything'll be all right. Operation—internal trouble, isn't it?"
"Yes, 'm."
"Yes. So I heard. Well, thank you. Good night. Skip—Skip!"
Skip was the disturber of repose, and he responded, leaping. The two disappeared round the corner.
It was wonderful to Elsie how everybody knew, and how kind everybody was. She was touched. The woman had given her the illusion that the whole of Clerkenwell was filled with anxiety for the welfare of her master and her mistress. Her sense of responsibility was intensified. If the whole of Clerkenwell knew that she was secretly harbouring her young man in her bedroom!... She went hot. The complexity of her situation frightened her afresh.
Belrose's was at its old royal game of expending vast quantities of electric current. The place had just been lighted up, and had the air of a popular resort; it warmed and vitalized all the Steps by its radiance, which seemed to increase from month to month. What neither Mr. Earlforward nor anybody else of the old Clerkenwell tradition had ever been able to understand or approvewas the continual illumination of the upper storeys. And yet the solution of the mystery was simple, and lay in a fact with which most of the district was familiar. Belrose had "gone in for wholesale." Elsie entered the shop very timidly, for she regarded her errand as "presuming," and in the midst of all her anxieties she had diffidence enough to be a little ashamed of it.
The shop was most pleasantly warm; its warmth was a greeting which would have overpowered some folk; and there was a fine rich odour of cheese and humanity. Also the shop was full. You could scarcely move in it. The stock was plenteous, and the character of the stock had changed. Advertised brands of comestibles of universal consumption were far less prominent than under previous régimes, and there was a great deal more individuality. The travellers and the collectors of advertised brands now called at the establishment with a demeanour different from of old; they had to leave their hard-faced, bullying manner on the doorstep. Two enormous and smiling young, mature women stood behind the counter. Their magnificently rounded façades were covered with something that was only white on Saturdays and Wednesdays, and certainly was not white to-night. Like the shop itself the servers were neither tidy nor clean; but they were hearty, gay and active, and they had authority, for one of them was Mr. Belrose's sister, and the other Mrs. Belrose's sister; nevertheless, they looked like sisters; they both had golden, rough hair and ruddy complexions, and the same experienced, comprehending, jolly expression, and fat, greasy hands.
There were four customers in the shop, of course all women, and the six women seemed to be all chatting together. The interior was the interior of a shop in full swing, but it showed in addition the better qualities of a bar parlour whose landlord knows how to combine respectability with freedom of style. Miss Belrose, who was nearest the door, smiled benignantly at Elsie on her entrance, as if saying: "You are one of us, and we are yours."
When two outgoing customers squeezed themselves between Elsie and a pile of cheeses, and her turn came to be served, Elsie suddenly discovered that she could not straight away execute Mr. Earlforward's command. She had a feeling that shops did not exist in order to supply telephone accommodation gratis to non-customers, and she was simply unable to articulate the request; nor did the extreme seriousness of the case inspire her to boldness. She asked for a quarter of a pound of cheese, and was immediately requested to name any cheese that she might fancy, the implication being that no matter what her fancy it could and would be satisfied on the most advantageous terms.
Now Elsie did not want any cheese; she wanted nothing at all. Mrs. Earlforward, before vanishing into the hospital, had bought for the master a generous supply of invalid foods, which, for the most part refused by the obstinate master, would suffice Joe for several days, and of all such eatables as Belrose's sold Elsie had in hand enough also for several days.
She said "Cheddar," reacting quite mechanically to the question put; and then she was confronted with another problem. She had no money, not a penny. It would be necessary for her to say, "I must run back for some money," and having said that to return and somehow manœuvre Mr. Earlforward's keys off the chest of drawers and rifle the safe once more. And already he was suspicious! How could she do it? She could not do it. But she must do it. She saw the cheese weighed and slipped into a piece of paper. The moment of trial was upon her.
Then the back door of the shop opened—she recognized the old peculiar, familiar sound of the latch—and a third enormous, white-clad, golden-haired, jolly, youngish woman appeared in the doorway. This was Mrs. Belrose herself, and you at once saw, and even felt, that her authority exceeded the authority of her sister and her sister-in-law. Mrs. Belrose was a ruler. As soon as she saw Elsie her gigantic face softened into a very gentlesmile of compassion, a smile that conveyed nothing but compassion, excluding all jollity. She raised a stout finger and without a word beckoned Elsie into the back-room and shut the door. The ancient kitchen-parlour was greatly changed. It was less clean than Elsie had left it, but it glittered with light. More cheeses! And in the corner by the mantelpiece was the telephone. And through the window Elsie saw an oldish, thin little man moving about in the yard with a lantern against a newly erected shed. Still more cheeses—seemingly as many cheeses as Mr. Earlforward possessed books! The oldish man was Mr. Belrose, guardian and overlord of the three women, and original instigator of this singular wholesale trade in cheeses which he had caused to prosper despite the perfect unsuitability of his premises and other difficulties. Individuality and initiative had triumphed. People asked one another how the Belroses had contrived to build up such a strange success, but they had only to look at the mien and gestures of the Belroses to find the answer to the question.
"How are you getting on, my dear?" demanded Mrs. Belrose, who had scarcely spoken to Elsie in her life before.
"Master wished me to ask you if you'd mind telephoning to the hospital, 'm," said Elsie, after she had given some details.
"Of course I will. With the greatest pleasure."
Mrs. Belrose grabbed at the tattered telephone-book, and whetting her greasy thumb whipped over the pages rapidly.
"Where's them Saints now? Oh! 'Saintsbury's.' 'Saint.' 'St. Bartholomew's Football and Cricket Ground.' I expect that's for the doctors and students. 'St. Bartholomew's Hospital.' This is it. Here we are. City 510.... Oh, dear! oh, dear! 'No telephone information given respecting patients.' Oh, dear, oh, dear!" She looked at Elsie. "Never mind," she went on brightly. "We can get over that, I should think."
She obtained the number and got into communication with the reception office of the hospital.
"I want you to be kind enough to give a message to Mrs. Violet Earlforward from her husband. She's in your hospital for an operation.... Oh, but you must, please. He's very ill. But he's a bit better, and it will do Mrs. Earlforward ever so much good to know.... Oh,please! Yes, I know, but they can't send anyone down. Oh, you don't count rules when it's urgent. It might be life and death. But you can telephone up to the ward. You're starred, so you must have a private exchange. Oh, yes. Tooblige. Yes, Earlforward, Violet. And you might just ask how she is while you're about it. Youaregood."
She held the line and waited, sitting down on a chair to rest herself. And to Elsie:
"They're very nice, really, at those hospitals, once you get on the right side of them. I supposeyou've got about all you can do?"
"Well, there isn't much nursing, and the shop's closed."
"Oh, yes, and the Steps do look so queer with it closed. Somehow it makes it look like Sunday. Doctor has been to-day, I suppose?"
"Yes, 'm. This morning," said Elsie, and stopped there, not caring to divulge the secret of Mr. Earlforward's insane obstinacy.
"Yes. I'm here. I'm listening. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! She's—— Oh, dear! Owing to what? 'Under-nourishment'?... He's rung off."
Mrs. Belrose sniffed as she hung up the receiver.
"Oh, Elsie! Your poor mistress has died under it. She died about half an hour ago. According to whattheysay, she might have pulled through, but she hadn't strength to rally owing to—under-nourishment.... Well, I'm that cut up!" Mrs. Belrose cried feebly.
Elsie stared at her and did not weep.
"Ought I totellhim, 'm?"
"Oh, yes, you must tell him. There's no sense inhiding them things—especially as he's a little better. He'sgotto know. And he'd be very angry, and quite rightly, if he wasn't told,andat once."
"I'll go and tell him."
"Would you like me to come with you?"
"You're very kind, 'm," said Elsie, cunning even in disaster. "I can manage. He's very peculiar, but I know how to manage him. There won't be nothing to be done till to-morrow, anyway."