She had another and a far more perilous secret to keep, that of Joe. Therefore she dared not admit a stranger to the house. Of course, soon she would have to admit strangers—but not to-night, not to-night! She must postpone evil.
Mrs. Belrose lifted her immense bulk and kissed Elsie, and then Elsie cried. Saying not a word more, she turned, opened the door, and passed through the shop, rapt, totally ignoring the servers and the quarter of a pound of cheese.
"To-morrow," she said to herself, "I shall tell her" (Mrs. Belrose) "all about Joe. She'll understand." The mere thought of Mrs. Belrose was a refuge for her. "But missis can't be dead. It was only yesterday morning——"
"Leave me alone. Leave me!" breathed Henry Earlforward in a dismaying murmur when she gave him the news. She obeyed.
That night Elsie sat in the parlour (as she still to herself called the dining-room) by the gas-fire which she had lighted on her own responsibility. An act and a situation which a few days earlier, two days earlier, would have been inconceivable to her! But Joe's clothes had refused to dry in the kitchen; the gas-ring there was incapable of drawing the water out of them in the damp weather. Now they were dry; some of them were folded on a chair; upon these were laid the braces which she had given to him on his birthday, and which evidently he had worn ever since. To Elsie now these soiled and frayed braces had a magic vital quality. They seemed, far more than the clothes, to have derived from him some of his individuality, to be a detached part of him; she was sewing a button on the lifeless old trousers, and she had taken the button, and the thimble, needle, and thread from Mrs. Earlforward's cardboard sewing-box in the left-hand drawer of the sideboard. She was working with the tools of a dead lady. At moments this irked and frightened her; at other moments she thought that what must be must be, and that, anyhow, the clothes ought to be put in order; and she could not go upstairs and disturb Joe by searching for her own apparatus—which certainly did not comprise trouser buttons. She tried to be natural and not to look ahead. She would not, for instance, dwell upon the apparently insoluble problem of arranging a proper funeral for Mrs. Earlforward. How could she, the servant, do anything towards that? She dared not leave her patients. She knew nothing about the organization of funerals. She had never even been to a funeral. Shehad no knowledge of possible relatives of the Earlforwards.
"To-morrow! To-morrow! Not till to-morrow—all that!" she said doggedly.
But she failed to push away everything. In the midst of her great grief for the death of Mrs. Earlforward (a perfect woman and a martyr) the selfish thought of her own future haunted her and would not be dismissed. Would Joe ever again wear those clothes which she was mending? He had taken some Bovril (Mr. Earlforward also), but she could not persuade herself that he was really better. She was terror-struck by the varied possibilities attending his death. A dead man secretly in her bed! What a plight for her! She determined afresh to confide the secret of Joe to Mrs. Belrose to-morrow morning. Not that the mere inconveniences of death deeply troubled her. No! In truth they were naught. Or rather, if he died they would have absolutely no importance to her compared with the death itself. Having found Joe, was she to lose him again? She could not face such a prospect....
And then Mr. Earlforward. She was beginning to be convinced that the master really was better. He had taken the Bovril. He had opened one or two of his letters. The shock of the news about Mrs. Earlforward, instead of shattering him to pieces, had strengthened him, morally if not physically. He might recover—he was an amazing man! And, of course, she desired him to recover. Could she wish anyone's death? She could not be so cruel, so wicked! And yet, and yet, if he lived, she was his slave for ever; she was a captive with no hope of escape. A slave, either bowed down by sorrow for the death of Joe, or fatally desolated by the eternal reflection that Joe was alive and she could not have him because of her promise to Mr. Earlforward! She saw no hope; she made no reserves in the interpretation of her vow to the master. She could not see that circumstances inevitably, if slowly, alter cases.
She yawned heavily in extreme exhaustion.
Then her ear caught a faint, cautious tapping below. All trembling she crept downstairs. Jerry was at the shop-door. In the turmoil of distress she had forgotten that she had commanded him to call for orders. She was glad to have someone to talk to for a little while, and she brought him into the office. She saw in front of her, on the opposite side of the desk, a young lad who had most surprisingly and touchingly put on his best clothes for important events. Also he had washed himself. Also he was smoking a cigarette.
Jerry, who was thin and pinched in the face, saw in front of him an ample and splendid young woman—not very young to him, for his notion of youthfulness was rather narrow, but much younger than his mother, though much older than Nell, his fancy of the Square, whose years did correspond with his notion of youthfulness. Elsie was slightly taller than himself. He thought she had the nicest, kindest face he had ever seen. He loved her brow when she frowned in doubt or anxiety; for him even her aprons were different from any other woman's aprons. He was precocious, in love as in other matters, but he did not love Elsie, did not aspire to love her. She was above him, out of his reach; he went in awe of her; he liked to feel that she was his tyrant. She was the most romantic, mysterious, and beautiful of all women and girls. Elsie very well understood his attitude towards her.
"I thought I might want yer to run down to the hospital for me, Jerry my boy," she said. "But I shan't now. Mrs. Earlforward died this afternoon."
"It's all over the Square," said Jerry, spitting negligently into the dark fireplace, and pushing his cap further back on his head.
Elsie saw that he did not understand death.
"Yes," said she, "I suppose it is." She said no more, because of the uselessness of talking about death to a simple-minded youth like Jerry.
"It was very nice of you to bring me my umbrella like that," she said.
"Oh!" said he, falsely scornful of himself. "It was easiest for me to bring it along like that."
He had been standing with his legs apart; at this point he sat down familiarly and put his elbows on the desk and his jaw in his hands; the cigarette hung loosely in his very mobile lips. They were silent; Jerry was proud and happy, and had nothing in particular to say about it. Elsie had too much to say to be able to talk.
"Then ye haven't got anything for me to do?" he asked.
"No, I haven't."
"Oo!" He was disappointed.
"But I might have to-morrow. You'll be off at two o'clock to-morrow, won't yer?"
"That's me."
"Very well then." She rose.
Jerry was extraordinarily uplifted by this brief sojourn alone with Elsie in the private office of T. T. Riceyman's. He felt that he was more of a grown man than ten thousand cigarettes and oaths and backchat with fragile virgins in the Square could make him. He sprang from the chair.
"Give me a kiss, Elsie," he blurted out audaciously. He was frightened by his own cheek.
"Jerry Perkins!" Elsie admonished him. "Aren't ye ashamed of yerself? Mrs. Earlforward dead! And them two so ill upstairs!"
"What two?" Jerry asked, rather to cover his confusion than from curiosity.
"I mean Mr. Earlforward," said Elsie. She was not abashed at her slip. With Jerry she had a grandiose rôle to play, and no contretemps could spoil her performance.
Jerry guessed instantly that she had got Joe hidden in the house, but he never breathed a word of it. He even tried to look stupid and uncomprehending, which was difficult for him.
"Aren't ye ashamed of yerself?" she solemnly repeated.
He moved towards the door. Elsie's glance followed him. She was sorry for him. She wanted to be good to somebody. She could not help Mr. Earlforward. She could do very little for Joe. Mrs. Earlforward was dead, and she could so easily give Jerry delight.
"Here!" she said.
He turned. She kissed him quietly but fully. There were no reservations in her kiss. Jerry, being too startled by unexpected joy, could not give the kiss back. He lost his nerve and went off so absorbed in his sensations that he forgot even to thank the sweet benefactress. In the Square his behaviour to the attendant Nell was witheringly curt. Nell did not know that she now had to cope with a genuine adult.
Not a sound in the house; nor outside the house. Not a clock nor a watch going in the house. Mr. Earlforward had listened interminably to get the time from the church, but without success. He knew only from the prolonged silence of the street that the hour must be very late. "Work!" he murmured to himself in the vast airless desert and void created by the death of Violet. "That's the one thing—the one thing." His faculty for compromising with destiny aroused itself for a supreme achievement. It was invincible. He would not think himself into hell or madness or inanition by yielding feebly to the frightful grief caused by the snatching away of that unique woman so solicitous about him, so sensible, so vivacious, so agreeable, so energetic, so enterprising, so ready to adopt his ideas—and yet so independent. Her little tantrums—how exquisite, girlish! There had always been a girl in her. The memory of her girlishness desolated him more than anything.
"Insufficient nourishment"? No! It could not have been that. Had he ever, on any occasion, in the faintest degree, discouraged her from satisfying her appetite? Or criticized her housekeeping accounts? No! Never had he interfered. Moreover she had plenty of money of her own and the absolutely unfettered use of it. He would give her such a funeral as had not been seen in Clerkenwell for many a year. The cost, of course, might be charged to her estate, but he would not allow that—though, of course, it would all be the same in the end.
He could not bear to lie in the bed which she hadshared with him. The feel of the empty half of it, when he passed his hand slowly over the lower blanket in the dark, tortured him intolerably, and yet he must somehow keep on passing his hand over it. Futile and sick indulgence! He got out of bed, drew aside the curtains and drew up the blind. He could not see the moon, but it was lighting the roofs opposite, and its light and that of the gas-lamp lit the room sufficiently to reveal all the principal features of it. Animated by the mighty power of his resolution to withstand fate he felt strong—hewasstrong. His cold legs were quite steady. Yes, though he still had a dull pain, the attack of indigestion was declining. He had successfully taken Bovril. To work, seated at his desk, could not tire him, and ought to do him good.
A queer affair, that indigestion! He had never suffered from indigestion until the day after his wedding-night, when he had eaten so immoderately of Elsie's bride-cake. The bride-cake seemed to have been the determining cause, or perhaps it was merely the occasion, of some change in his system. (But naturally he had said nothing of it.) However, he was now better. A little pain in the old spot—no more.
He opened the wardrobe to get his new shirt and new suit, and saw in the pale gloom Violet's garments arranged on their trays. The sight of them shook him terribly. He must assuredly save himself by the labour of reconstituting his existence. It was impossible for him to remain in the bedroom. He dressed himself in the new clothes, putting a muffler round his neck instead of a collar. Then he filled his pockets with his personal belongings from the top of the chest of drawers. None was missing. He picked up the pile of correspondence, which he had laid neatly on the pedestal. He could walk without discomfort. He must work. The grim intention to work was irresistibly monopolizing his mind, and driving all else out of it. He left the bedroom—a deed in itself.
On the landing, as he looked upwards, he could seelight under Elsie's bedroom door. The candles that girl must be burning! He would correct her. Should he? Supposing she rebelled! Elsie had changed; he did not quite know where he was with her; and he did not want to lose her. She was his mainstay in the world. Still, it would never do to be afraid of correcting a servant. He would correct her. He would knock at her door and tell her—not for the first time. He mounted two steps, but his legs nearly failed him. He could walk downstairs but not up. Besides, if she knew that he was out of bed there might be trouble, and he wished to avoid trouble. Therefore, he turned and limped downstairs into the shop and lit it.
To see the shop was like revisiting after an immense period the land of his youth. He recognized one by one the landmarks. Here was the loaded bookstand, with its pair of castors, whichshehad devised. The shop was like a mausoleum of trade. His trade had ceased. It had to be brought back to life, galvanized into activity. Could he do it? He must and he would do it. He was capable of the intensest effort. His very sorrow was inspiring him. On the floor at the entrance lay some neglected correspondence which bore footmarks. Servants were astounding. Elsie had been too negligent even to pick the letters up. She probably never would have picked them up. She would have trod and trod them into the dirty boards—demands for books, offers of books, possibly cheques—the stuff itself of trade. He picked them up with difficulty, and padded into the office, which also he lit. Cold! He shivered.
"I'm not entirely cured yet," he thought, and began to doubt himself. The fire was prepared—Violet's influence again. Fires had never been laid in advance till she came. He put a match to the fire and felt better. Undecided, he stroked his cheek. Stubble! How long was it since he had shaved? His face must look a pretty sight. Happily there was no mirror in either the office or the shop, so that he could not inspect himself. Work! Work! Memories were insinuating themselves anew inhis mind. He must repulse them. Fancy her running off like that, without a word of good-bye, to the hospital, and now she was irrevocably gone! It was incredible, monstrous, the most sinister piece of devil's magic that ever happened.... Chloroform. The knife. Fibroid growth.... Dead. Vanished. She with her vivacity and her optimism.... He was fatigued. The pain had recurred. It was very bad. Perhaps he had been ill-advised to come downstairs, for he could not get upstairs again. He cautiously skirted the desk, holding on to it, and sat in his chair. Work! Work! The reconstruction of his life!
He fingered the letters. With one of them was a cheque, and it must go into the safe for the night. He would endorse it to-morrow. Never endorse a cheque till you paid it into the bank, for an endorsed cheque might be the prey of thieves. He bent down sideways to his safe with a certain pleasure.Hersafe was upstairs in the bathroom. He would have to obtain her keys and open it and examine its contents. He took his own keys from his pocket, and, not very easily, unlocked his safe, and swung forward its door. The familiar act soothed him. The sublime spectacle of the safe, sole symbol of security in a world of perils, enheartened him. After all ...
Then he noticed that the silver bag was not precisely in its customary spot on the ledge over the nest of drawers. He started in alarm and clutched at the bag. It was not tied with his knot. He unloosed it and felt crumpled paper within it. "6d"! Elsie's clumsy hand-writing, which he knew so well from having seen it now and then on little lists of sales on the backs of envelopes! No! It was not the loss of sixpence that affected him. He could have borne that. What so profoundly, so formidably, shocked him was the fact that Elsie had surreptitiously taken his keys, rifled the safe, and returned the keys—and smiled on him and nursed him! There was no security at all in the world of perils. The foundations of faith had been destroyed. Elsie!
But in the agony of the crisis he did not forget his wife. He moaned aloud:
"What would Violet have thought? What would my poor Violet have thought of this?"
His splendid fortitude, his superhuman courage to recreate his existence over the ruins of it and to defy fate, were broken down. Life was bigger, more cruel, more awful than he had imagined.
"Joe," inquired Elsie, "where's your papers?"
She had brought his clothes—dry, folded, and possibly wearable—back into her bedroom. She had found nothing in the pockets of the suit except some cigarette-card portraits of famous footballers, a charred pipe, three French sous, and a broken jack-knife. These articles, the raiment, and a pair of battered shoes which she had pushed under the bed and forgotten, seemed to be all that Joe had to show for more than twenty years of strenuous and dangerous life on earth—much less even than Elsie could show. The paucity of his possessions did not trouble her, and scarcely surprised her, for she knew that very many unmarried men, with no incentive to accumulate what they could immediately squander in personal use, had no more reserves than Joe; but the absence of the sacred "papers" disturbed her. Every man in her world could, when it came to the point, produce papers of some sort from somewhere—army-discharge, pension documents, testimonials, birth-certificate, etc., etc. Even the tramps who flitted in and out of Rowton House had their papers to which they rightly attached the greatest importance. No man in Elsie's world could get far along without papers, unless specially protected by heaven; and, sooner or later—generally sooner than later—heaven grew tired of protecting.
All day Elsie had been awaiting an opportunity to speak to Joe about his papers. The opportunity had now come. Mr. Earlforward could be left for an hour or so. Joe was apparently in less pain. The two bedrooms were tidied up. Both men had been fed. Joe had had morequinine. She could not sponge him again till the morrow. She herself had drunk two cups of tea, and eaten the last contents of the larder. She had lighted a new candle—the last candle—in the candlestick. She had brought coal and mended the fire. The next morning she would have a great deal to do and to arrange—getting money, marketing, seeing the doctor and Mrs. Belrose, discussing the funeral with Mr. Earlforward—terrible anxieties—but for the present she was free.
Joe made no answer. He seemed to be trying to frame sentences. She encouraged him with a repetition:
"Where's your papers? I can't find 'em nowhere. You haven't lost them, have ye?" Her brow contracted in apprehension.
"I sold 'em," said Joe, in his deep, vibrating and yet feeble voice. He looked away.
"Sold 'em, Joe? Ye never sold 'em!"
"Yes I have, I tell ye. I sold 'em yesterday morning."
"But, Joey——"
"I sold 'em yesterday morning to a man as came to meet a man as came out of Pentonville same time as me."
"Pentonville! Joe, d'ye mean ye've been to prison?" He nodded. "What a shame!" she exclaimed in protest, not at his having done anything wicked enough to send him to prison, but at the police having been wicked enough to send him to prison. She assumed instinctively and positively that he was an innocent victim of the ruthless blue men whom some people know only as pilots of perambulators across busy streets.
"There was no option, ye know, so I had fourteen days."
She dropped on her knees at the bedside, and put her left arm under his neck and threw her right arm over his waist, and with it felt again the familiar shape of his waist through the bedclothes, and gazed into his homely, ugly face upon which soft, dark hair—a beard on the chin—was sprouting. This faith and tenderness made Joe cry.
"Tell me," she murmured, scarcely hoping that he would succeed in any narrative.
"Oh, it's nothin'," Joe replied gloomily. "Armistice Day, ye know. I had my afternoon, and I went out."
"Were ye in a place, Joe?"
"I had a part-time place in Oxford Street—carrying coal upstairs, and cleaning brasses and sweeping and errands. And a bed. Yes, in the basement. Sort of a watchman. Doctor he give me a testimonial. Least, he sent it me when I wrote and asked him." (No doubt whatever that she had been unjust to that doctor!) "I went down to Piccadilly to see the sights, and when it was about dark I see our old divisional general in a damn big car with two young ladies. There was a block, ye see, in Piccadilly Circus, and he was stopped by the kerb where them flower-girls are, ye know, by the fountain, and I was standing there as close as I am to you, Elsie. We used to call him the Slaughterer. That was how we called him. We never called him nothin' else. And there he was with his two rows o' ribbons and his flash women, perhaps they weren't flash, and I didn't like the look of his face—hard, ye know. Cruel. We knowed him, we did. And then I thought of the two minutes' silence, and hats off and stand at 'tention, and the Cenotaph, and it made me laugh. I laughed at him through the glass. And he didn't like it, he didn't. I was as close to him as I am to you, ye see. And he lets down the glass and says something about insultin' behaviour to these ladies, and I put my tongue out to him. That tore it, that did. That fair put the lid on. I felt something coming over me—ye know. Then there was a crowd, and I caught a policeman one on the shoulder. Oh, they marched me off, three of 'em! The doctor at the station said I was drunk, me as hadn't had a drop for three days! Next morning the beak he said he'd treat me lenient because it was Armistice Day, and I'd had some and I'd fought for the old country, but assaulting an officer of the law, he couldn't let that pass. No option for that, so he give me fourteen days."
"But yer master, Joe?"
"It was an old woman."
"Wouldn't she——?"
"No, she wouldn't," said Joe roughly. "And another thing, I didn't go back there either, afterwards."
"Did ye leave yer things there?"
"Yes. A bag and some things. And I shan't fetch it either."
"Ishall!" said Elsie resolutely. "I won't let'erhave 'em. I shall tell her you was taken ill, and I shall bring 'em away."
Joe offered no remark.
"But why did ye sell yer papers, Joe?"
"He give me four-and-six for 'em. I was on me uppers; he give me four-and-six, and then we went and had a meal after all that skilly and cocoa and dry bread. No good me going back. I'd left without notice, I had."
"But why didn't ye come to me straight, Joey?"
Joe didn't answer. After all this inordinate loquacity of his, he had resumed his great silence.
Elsie still gazed at him. The candle light went down and up. A burst of heavy traffic shook the bed. And now Elsie had a desire to tell Joe all about her own story, all about Mr. Earlforward and the death of Mrs. Earlforward, and the troubles awaiting her in the morning. She wanted to be confidential, and she wanted to discuss with him a plan for putting him on his feet again after he was better—for she was sure she could restore his self-respect to him, and him to his proper position in the world. But he did not seem interested in anything, not even in herself. He was absorbed in his aches and pains and fever. And she was very tired. So, without moving her arms, she just laid her head on his breast, and was indignant against the whole of mankind on his behalf, and regarded her harsh, pitiless self as the author of all his misfortunes and loved him.
Mr. and Mrs. Belrose occupied a small bedroom at the top of their house. As for her sister and his sister, they fitted their amplitudes into some vague "somewhere else," and those of the curious who in the way of business or otherwise knew how nearly the entire house was devoted to "wholesale," wondered where the two sisters-in-law did in fact stow themselves. The servant slept out.
In the middle of the night Mrs. Belrose raised her magnificent form out of the overburdened bed and went to the window to look forth on the Steps.
"Charlie," said she, coming back to the bed and shaking her husband. He awoke unwillingly and grunted, and muttered that she was taking cold; an absurd suggestion, as he knew well, for she never took cold, and it was inconceivable that she should take cold.
"That light's still burning at T. T.'s—in the shop. I don't like the look of it."
She lit the room, and the fancies of night seemed to be dispelled by an onrush of realism, dailiness and sagacity. Mr. and Mrs. Belrose considered themselves to be two of the most sagacious and imperturbable persons that ever lived, and they probably were.
No circumstances were too much for their sagacity and their presence of mind. Each had complete confidence in the kindly but unsentimental horse-sense of the other. Mrs. Belrose, despite her youngishness, was the more impressive. She it was who usually said the final word in shaping a policy; yet in her utterances there was an implication that Charles had a super-wisdom whichshe alone could inspire, and also that he, being a man, could do certain things that she, being a woman, was ever so slightly incapable of.
"I don't like the look of it at all," she said.
"Well, I don't see we can do anything till morning," said Charles. Not that he was allowing his judgment to be warped by the desire to sleep. No; he was being quite impartial.
"That girl's got too much on her hands, looking after that funny old man all by herself, day and night. She isn't a fool, far from it; but it's too much for one girl."
"You'd better go over, perhaps, and have a look at things."
"I was thinking you'd go, Charlie."
"But I can't do anything if I do go. I can't help the girl."
"I'm afraid," said the authoritative and sagacious wife simply.
"What of?" asked the wizened slip of a husband.
"Well, I don't know; but I am. It'll be better for you to go—anyway first. I could come afterwards. We can't leave the girl in the lurch."
Nevertheless Mrs. Belrose did know what she was afraid of and so did Mr. Belrose. She helped him to put on some clothes; it was a gesture of sympathy rather than of aid. And she exhorted him not to waken "those girls," meaning her sister and his.
He went out, shivering. A fine night with a harsh wind moving dust from one part of the Steps to another. Nobody about. The church clock struck three. Mr. Belrose peered through the slit between the edge of the door-blind and the door-frame, but could see nothing except that a light was burning somewhere in the background. He rapped quietly and then loudly on the glass. No response. The explanation of the scene doubtless was that Elsie had come down into the shop on some errand and returned upstairs, having forgotten to extinguish the light. Mr. Belrose was very cold. He was about to leave the place and report to his wife when his hand discovered that the door was not fastened. (Elsie, in the perturbation caused by doing a kindness to the boy Jerry, had forgotten to secure it.) Mr. Belrose entered and saw Mr. Earlforward, wearing a smart new suit, moveless in a peculiar posture in his office-chair. He now knew more surely than before what his wife had been afraid of. But he had a very stout and stolid heart, and he advanced firmly into the office. A faint glow of red showed in the ash-strewn grate. The electric light descended in almost palpable rays on Mr. Earlforward's grizzled head. The safe was open and there was a bag of money on the floor. Mr. Earlforward's chair was tilted and had only been saved from toppling over, with Mr. Earlforward in it, by the fact that its left arm had caught under the ledge of the desk. The electric light was patient; so was Mr. Earlforward. He was leaning over the right arm of the chair, his body at half a right angle to the perpendicular, and his face towards the floor.
"I've never seen anything like this before," thought Mr. Belrose. "This will upset the Steps, this will."
He was afraid. He had what he would have called the "creeps." Gingerly he touched Mr. Earlforward's left hand which lay on the desk. It was cold and rather stiff. He bent down in order to look into Mr. Earlforward's averted face. What a dreadful face! White, blotched, hairy skin drawn tightly over bones and muscles—very tightly. An expression of torment in the tiny, unseeing eyes! None of the proverbial repose of death in that face!
"Mustn't touch it! Mustn't disturb anything!" thought Mr. Belrose, straightening his knees.
He left the office and peered up the dark stairs. No light. No sound. He felt for his matches, but he had come away without them, and he suspected that he was not sufficiently master of himself to look effectively for matches. Still, the house must be searched. Although much averse from returning into the office, he did return, on the chance of finding a box of matches, and the first thing he saw was a box on the mantelpiece.Striking matches, he stumbled up the stairs and came first to the bathroom. Empty. Nothing unusual therein except thick strings stretched across it and an orange box in the bath. A bedroom, well furnished, the bed unmade; a cup and saucer on the night-table; one door of the wardrobe ajar. Everything still, expectant. Then he found the living-room similarly still and expectant. He went back to the landing. No sound. The second flight of stairs dreadfully invited him to ascend. As he reached and pushed against the door at the head of those stairs another of his matches died. He struck a fresh one, and when it slowly flamed he stepped into the faintly fire-lit room and was amazed, astounded, thrilled, shocked and very seriously shaken to descry a young man lying on the bed in the corner and a young woman, Elsie, lying in abandonment across him, her head sunk in his breast. And he heard a regular sound of breathing. There was something in the situation of the pair which penetrated right through Mr. Belrose's horse-sense and profoundly touched his heart. Never had he had such a sensation at once painful and ravishing (yes, ravishing to the awed cheesemonger) as he had then. The young man raised his head an inch from the pillow and dropped it again.
"She's asleep," said the young man in a low, deep, tired voice. "Don't wake her."
The transience of things human was wonderfully illustrated in the next fortnight. A short and drab account of the nocturnal discoveries of Mr. Belrose at T. T.'s appeared in one morning paper, and within six hours the evening papers, with their sure instinct for the important, had lifted Riceyman Steps to a height far above prize-fighting, national economics and the embroiled ruin of Europe. Such trivialities vanished from the contents-bills, which displayed nothing but "Mysterious Death of a Miser in Clerkenwell" (the home of Bolshevism), "Astounding Story of Love and Death," "Midnight Tragedy in King's Cross Road," and similar titles, legends and captions. Riceyman Steps was filled with ferreting special reporters and photographers. The morning papers next following elaborated the tale. The Steps became the cynosure of all England and the subject of cables to America, South Africa and the antipodes. The Steps rose dizzily to unique fame. The coroner's inquest on the body of Henry Earlforward was packed like a divorce court on an illustrious day and stenographed verbatim. Jurymen who were summoned to it esteemed themselves fortunate.
The Reverend Augustus Earlforward, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, home for a holiday from his labours in the West Indies, and brother of the deceased, found himself in a moment extremely famous. He had nearly missed the boat at Kingston, Jamaica, and he saw the hand of Providence in the fact that he had not missed it. He had not met his younger brother for over thirty years, nor heard from him; did not even know hisaddress; had scarcely thought of trying to hunt him up. And then at tea in the Thackeray Hotel, Bloomsbury, his stern eyes had seen the name of Earlforward written large in a newspaper. The affair was the most marvellous event, the most marvellous coincidence, of his long and honourable career. Wisely he flew to a solicitor. He caused himself to be represented at the inquest. He had reached England in a critical mood, for, like many colonials, he suspected that all was not well with the blundering and decadent old country. And the revelations of life in Clerkenwell richly confirmed his suspicions, which did not surprise him, because much commerce with negroes had firmly established in his mind the conviction that he could never be wrong. From the start he had his ideas about Elsie, the servant-girl asleep with a young man in her bedroom. They were not nice ideas, but it is to be remembered that he was taking a holiday from the preaching and practice of Christian charity. His legal representative put strange questions to Elsie at the inquest (during which it was testified, after post-mortem, that Henry had died of a cancer at the junction of the gullet and the cardiac end of the stomach), and these questions were reinforced by the natural cynicism and incredulity of the coroner. Elsie was saved from opprobrium by Dr. Raste's statement that she had called him in to the young man. Elsie indeed was cheered by her inflamed friends as she left the court. She said never a word about the coroner or the missionary afterwards, and, inexcusably, she never forgave either of them. But the missionary forgave Elsie and permitted her and the sick young man to remain in the house. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Earlforward had made a will, and the missionary was put into a good humour by the proof that the wealthy Violet had left no next-of-kin. Thus the whole of her property, in addition to the whole of Henry's, went to Augustus, whereas if Violet had had next-of-kin Augustus would have got only half of Violet's property.
Clerkenwell expected that the world-glory of theSteps would continue indefinitely; but it withered as quickly as it had flowered, and by the afternoon of the morrow of the inquest it had utterly died. The joint funeral of the Earlforwards did not receive a line in the daily press. Nevertheless it constituted a great spectacle in King's Cross Road—not by reason of its intrinsic grandeur (for it fell short of Henry's conception of the obsequies which he would bestow on his wife), but by reason of the vast multitude of sightseers and followers.
The Reverend Augustus, heir to a very comfortable competency unwittingly amassed for him by the devices of Mr. Arb the clerk of works, the prudent policy of Mr. Earlforward and the imitativeness of Violet, found himself seriously inconvenienced for ready cash, because before he could touch the heritage he had to fulfil all sorts of expensive and tedious formalities and tiresomely to prove certain facts which he deemed to be self-evident—as, for instance, that he himself was legitimate. He saw no end to the business, and he cabled to the Connexional authorities in Jamaica that he should take extra leave. He did not ask for extra leave; in his quality of a rich man he merely took it, and heavenly propaganda had to be postponed. The phrasing of that cable was one of his compensations in a trying ordeal.
He had various other compensations, of which the chief was undoubtedly the status of landlord with unoccupied property at his disposition. Not only all Clerkenwell, but apparently all London, learnt in a few hours that he had this status. Scores of people, rendered desperate by the house-famine, telegraphed to him; many scores of people wrote to him; and some dozens personally called upon him at his hotel, and they all supplicated him to do them the great favour of letting to them the T. T. Riceyman premises on lease at a high rent. A few desired to buy the property. The demand was so intense and widespread as to induce in Augustus the belief that he was a potential benefactor of mankind.Preferring to enjoy the fruits of riches without being troubled by the more irksome responsibilities thereof, he decided to sell and not to let. And he entered into a contract for sale to Mr. Belrose. He chose Mr. Belrose because Mr. Belrose and all his women were Wesleyan Methodists, and also perhaps because Mr. Belrose did not haggle and was ready and anxious to complete the transaction, and, indeed, paid a substantial deposit before the legal formalities of Augustus' title to the property were finished.
Thenceforward event succeeded event with increasing rapidity. The entire stock of books was sold by private treaty to a dealer in Charing Cross Road, who swallowed it up and digested it with gigantic ease. The books went away quietly enough in vans. Then the furniture and the clothes were sold (including Mr. Earlforward's virgin suits and shirts) to another sort of dealer in Islington. And a pantechnicon came for the furniture, etc., including the safe and the satin shoe, and it obtained permission from the highways authorities to pass over the pavement and stand on the flagstones of the Steps at the shop-door. And furniture was swept into it almost like leaves swept by the wind. And on that afternoon Mr. Belrose arrived from "across" with a group of shop-fitting and decorating contractors, and in the emptying interiors of the home and amid the flight of pieces of furniture Mr. Belrose discussed with the experts what he should do, and at what cost, to annihilate the very memory of T. T. Riceyman's by means of improvements, fresh dispositions, and paint.
Idlers sauntered about watching the gorging of the pantechnicon and the erasing of T. T. Riceyman's from the Steps. And what occupied their minds was not the disappearance of every trace of the sojourn on earth of Henry and Violet Earlforward, but the conquering progress of that powerful and prosperous personage, Charles Belrose, who was going to have two shops, and who would without doubt make them both pay handsomely. Henry and Violet might never have lived. They werealmost equally strangers to the Reverend Augustus, who, moreover, was lying somewhat ill at his hotel—result of the strain of inheriting. Violet had always been regarded as a foreigner by the district; she had had no roots there. And as for Henry, though he was not a foreigner but of the true ancient blood of Clerkenwell, and though the tale of his riches commanded respect, he had never won affection, and was classed sardonically as an oddity, which designation would have puzzled and annoyed him considerably.
Violet and Henry did, however, survive in one place, Elsie's heart. She arrived now in the Steps, dressed in mourning—new black frock, new black hat, the old black coat, and black gloves. She had bought mourning from a sense of duty and propriety. She had not wished to incur the expense, but conscience forced her to incur the expense. She was carrying a shabby grip-bag, which seemed rather heavy for her, and she was rather flushed and breathless from exercise of an unaccustomed sort. A dowdy, over-plump figure, whom nobody would have looked twice at. A simple, heavy face, common except for the eyes and lips; with a harassed look; fatigued also. She had been out nearly all day. She pretended not to notice it, but the sight of the formidable pantechnicon, squatted in the Steps, brought moisture into her eyes.
She sturdily entered the shop, which, Charles Belrose and his company of renovators having left, was empty save for one or two pieces of furniture waiting their proper niches in the pantechnicon. A man was pulling down the shelves and thus destroying the bays. Dead planks which had once been living, burden-bearing shelves, were stacked in a pile along one wall. She had to wait at the foot of the stairs while a section of Violet's wardrobe awkwardly descended in the hairy arms of two Samsons. Then she went up, and on the first floor peeped into all the rooms one after another; they were scenes of confusion, dirt, dust, higgle-de-piggledyness; difficult to believe that they had ever made part of a home, beenregularly cleaned, watched over like helpless children incapable of taking care of themselves. She lugged the grip-bag up the second flight, and went into the spare-room, which was quite empty, stripped to the soiled and damaged walls—even the plant-pots were gone from the window-sills; and she went into the kitchen, where the tap kept guard with its eternal drip-drip over perfect desolation.
At last she went into her bedroom, which by a magic ukase from on high in the Thackeray Hotel had been preserved from the sack. A fire was cheerfully burning; all was as usual to the casual glance, but the shut drawers were empty, and Elsie's box and umbrella had gone back to Riceyman Square, where she had been sleeping since the funeral. Joe was sufficiently recovered to sleep alone in the house, and had had no objection to doing so. Joe, fully dressed for the grand exodus, sat waiting on the sole chair. He smiled. Dropping the bag, she smiled. They kissed. With his limited but imaginative intelligence Joe did not see that Elsie was merely Elsie. He saw within the ill-fitting mourning a saviour, a powerful protectress, a bright angel, a being different from, and superior to, any other being. They were dumb and happy in the island of homeliness around which swirled the tide of dissolution and change. Elsie picked up a piece of bread-and-butter from a plate and began to eat it.
"Didn't yer get any dinner?" Joe asked anxiously. She nodded, and the nod was a lie.
"I got your bag and all your things in it," she said. "There's a clean collar. Ye'd better put it on."
Munching, she unfastened the bag.
"And I've got the licence from the Registry Office," she said. He scrutinized the licence, which by its complexity and incomprehensibility intimidated him. He was much relieved and very grateful that he had not had to go forth and get the licence himself. The clean collar, which Elsie affixed, made a wonderful improvement in Joe's frayed and dilapidated appearance.
"Has the doctor been to look at ye?" Elsie asked.Joe shook his head. "Well, ye can't go till he's been to look at ye."
The doctor had re-engaged Joe, who was to migrate direct to Myddelton Square that afternoon and would take up his duties gradually, as health permitted. He had already been tentatively out in the morning, but only to the other side of King's Cross Road to get a shave. Perhaps it was to be regretted that Joe was going off in one of Mr. Earlforward's grey flannel shirts. Elsie, had she been strictly honest, would have washed this shirt and returned it to the wardrobe, but she thought that Joe needed it, and her honesty fell short of the ideal.
There was a step on the stair. The doctor came into the island. And he himself was an island, detached, self-contained, impregnable as ever. He entered the room as though it was a room and not the emptying theatre of heroic and unforgettable drama, and as though nothing worth mentioning had happened of late in Riceyman Steps.
"Has my daughter called here for me?" he asked abruptly, deposing his prim hat on the little yellow chest of drawers.
"No, sir."
"Ah! She was to meet me here," he said in a casual, even tone. And yet there was something in his voice plainly indicating to the observant that deep down in his recondite mind burned a passionate pride in his daughter.
"I think you'll do, Joe," he decided, after some examination of the malaria patient. "I see you've had a shave."
"Elsie said I'd better, sir."
"Yes. Makes you feel brighter, doesn't it? Well, you can be getting along. By the way, Elsie"—he coughed. "We've been wondering at home whether you'd care to go and have a chat with Mrs. Raste?"
"Yes, sir. But what about, sir? Joe?"
"Well, the fact is, we thought perhaps you'd like"—he gave a short, nervous laugh—"to join the staff. Idon't know what they call it. Cook-general. No. Not quite that, because there'd be Joe. There'd be you and Joe, you see."
Elsie drew back, alarmed—so alarmed that she did not even say "Thank you."
"Oh! I couldn't do that, sir! I couldn't cook—for you, sir. I couldn't undertake it, sir. I'm really only a charwoman, sir. I couldn't face it, sir."
"But I thought you'd been learning some cookery from—er—Mrs. Earlforward?"
"Oh, no, sir. Not as you might say. Only gas-ring, sir."
This was the once ambitious girl who had dreamed of acquiring the skill to wait at table in just such a grand house as the doctor's. Extreme diffidence was not the only factor in her decision, which she made instantly and positively as a strong-minded, sensible, masterful woman without any reference to the views of her protected, fragile idol, Joe—for a quality of independence, hardness, had begun to appear in Elsie Sprickett. The fact was that she wanted a separate home as a refuge for Joe in case of need, and she was arranging to rent a room in the basement of her old abode in Riceyman Square. Out of the measureless fortune of £32 which she had accumulated in the Post Office Savings Bank, she intended to furnish her home. It had been agreed with the doctor that after the marriage Joe should have one whole night off per week. She would resume charing, which was laborious but more "free" than a regular situation. If Joe should have a fit of violence it could spend itself on her in the home. She even desired to suffer at his hands as a penance for the harshness of her earlier treatment of him, of her well-meant banishing of the innocent victim deranged by his experiences in the war. With her earnings and his they would have an ample income. The fine sagacious scheme was complete in her brain. And the doctor's suggestion attacked it in its fundamentals. At Myddelton Square, worried by unaccustomed duties and the presence of others, she might have scenes with Joe and be unable tomanage him. No! She must be independent; she must have liberty of action; and this could not be if she was a servant in a grand house.
"Oh! Very well, very well," said the doctor, frigid as usual, but not offended. Joe said no word, knowing that he must not meddle in such high matters of policy.
Scatterings, expostulations, reproofs on the stairs. Miss Raste entered, with the excited dog Jack. Her father had told her that if she saw no one familiar below she must mount two flights of stairs and knock at the door facing her at the top; but, in her eagerness, she had forgotten to knock. Miss Raste was growing in stature daily. Her legs were fabulously long, and it was said of her at home that in time she would be in a position to stoop and kiss the crown of her father's head. To everyone's surprise she impulsively rushed at Elsie with thin arms outstretched and kissed her. Elsie blushed, as well she might. Miss Raste had spoken to Elsie only once before, but out of the memory of Elsie's face and that brief meeting she had constructed a lovely fairy-tale, and a chance word of her mother's had set her turning it into reality. She had dreamed of having the adorable, fat, comfortable, kind Elsie for a servant in the house, and her parents were going to arrange the matter. For twenty-four hours she had been in a fever about it.
"Is she coming, papa?" the child demanded urgently.
"No, she can't. She says she can't cook, and so she won't come."
Miss Raste burst into tears. Her lank body shook with sobs. Everybody was grievously constrained. Nobody knew what to do, least of all the doctor. Jack stood still in front of the fire.
"Mummy would have taught you to cook," Miss Raste spluttered, almost inarticulately. "Mummy's awfully nice."
Elsie's sagacious scheme for her married life was dissipated in a moment. The scheme became absurd, impossible, inconceivable. Elsie was utterly defeated by thechild's affection, ardour, and sorrow. She felt nearly the same responsibility towards the child as towards Joe. She was the child's for ever. And she had kissed the child. Having kissed the child, could she be a Judas?
"Oh, then I'll go and see Mrs. Raste," said Elsie, half smiling and half crying.
This was indeed a very strange episode, upsetting as it did all optimistic theories about the reasonableness of human nature and the influence of logic over the springs of conduct. No one quite knew where he was. Dr. Raste was intensely delighted and proud, and yet felt that he ought to have a grievance. Joe was delighted, but egotistically. Elsie was both happy and sad, but rather more happy than sad. Miss Raste laughed with glee, while the tears still ran down her delicate cheeks. Jack barked once.
Not that Jack had that very mysterious intuitive comprehension of the moods of others which in the popular mind is usually attributed to dogs, children, and women. No! Jack had heard footsteps on the stairs. A tousled, white-sleeved man in a green apron entered.
"We're ready for here now, miss," he announced to Elsie.
And without waiting for permission he began rapidly to roll up the bedclothes in one vast bundle. Next he collected the crockery. The bedroom had ceased to be immune from the general sack.
"They didn't have a lot of luck," said Mr. Belrose to Elsie and Joe that night in the Steps at the locked door of T. T.'s. It was the decent, wizened little old fellow's epitaph on Henry Earlforward and Violet. It was his apology for dropping the keys of T. T.'s into his pocket, and for the blaze of electricity from his old shop, and for the forlorn darkness of T. T.'s, and for the fact that he was prospering while others were dead. He did not attribute the fate of the Earlforwards to Henry's formidable character. He could not think scientifically, and even had he been able to do so good nature would have prevented him. And even if he had attempted to do so he might have thought wrong. The affair, like all affairs of destiny, was excessively complex.
Elsie, for her part, laid much less stress than Mr. Belrose on luck. "With a gentleman like he was," she thought, meaning Henry Earlforward, "something was bound to happen sooner or later." She held Mr. Earlforward responsible for her mistress's death, but her notions of the value of evidence were somewhat crude. And, similarly, she held herself responsible for her master's death. She had noticed that he had never been the same since the orgy of her wedding-cake, and she had a terrible suspicion that immoderate wedding-cake caused cancer. Thus she added one more to the uncounted theories of the origin of cancer, and nobody yet knows enough of the subject to be able to disprove Elsie's theory. However, that night Elsie, with the sensations of a homicide, the ruin of a home and family behind her, a jailbird on her left arm and his heavy grip-bag on her right, could still be happy as she went up the Steps into Riceyman Square, and called at her old home to make certain dispositions, and passed on in the chill darkness to Myddelton Square. She was apprehensive about future dangers and her own ability to cope with them; but she was always apprehensive.
Joe, belonging to the contemplative and passionate variety of mankind, was not at all apprehensive. He knew his soul as intimately as a pretty woman knows the externals of her body. He was conscious of joy in retreading with Elsie the old familiar streets. He had a perfect, worshipping faith in Elsie's affection and in her powers. His one affliction was to see Elsie lugging the heavy grip-bag; but even this was absurd, for he had not yet the strength to carry it, and he well knew that she would never have permitted him to try.
People saw a young, humble, mutually-absorbed couple strolling along and looking at one another. More correctly, people did not see a humble couple, any more than people at a Court ball see a fashionably dressed andself-sure couple. Elsie and Joe were characteristic of the district. They would have had to look much worse than they did in order to be classed as humble in Clerkenwell. Nor were people shocked at the spectacle of the woman lugging a heavy grip-bag while the man carried naught. Such dreadful things were often witnessed in Clerkenwell.
Printed byCassell & Company, Limited, La Belle Sauvage,London, E.C.4.F 120.923