Part + 

I + 

I + 

Riceyman Steps + 

On an autumn afternoon of 1919 a hatless man with a slight limp might have been observed ascending the gentle, broad acclivity of Riceyman Steps, which lead from King’s Cross Road up to Riceyman Square, in the great metropolitan industrial district of Clerkenwell. He was rather less than stout and rather more than slim. His thin hair had begun to turn from black to grey, but his complexion was still fairly good, and the rich, very red lips, under a small greyish moustache and over a short, pointed beard, were quite remarkable in their suggestion of vitality. The brown eyes seemed a little small; they peered at near objects. As to his age, an experienced and cautious observer of mankind, without previous knowledge of this man, would have said no more than that he must be past forty. The man himself was certainly entitled to say that he was in the prime of life. He wore a neat dark-grey suit, which must have been carefully folded at nights, a low, white, starched collar, and a “made” black tie that completely hid the shirtfront; the shirt-cuffs could not be seen. He was shod in old, black leather slippers, well polished. He gave an appearance of quiet, intelligent, refined and kindly prosperity; and in his little eyes shone the varying lights of emotional sensitiveness. + 

Riceyman Steps, twenty in number, are divided by a half-landing into two series of ten. The man stopped on the half-landing and swung round with a casual air of purposelessness which, however, concealed, imperfectly, a definite design. The suspicious and cynical, slyly watching his movements, would have thought: “What’s that fellow after?” + 

A man interested in a strange woman acquires one equine attribute⁠—he can look in two directions at once. This man could, and did, look in two directions at once. + 

Below him and straight in front he saw a cobbled section of King’s Cross Road⁠—a hell of noise and dust and dirt, with the County of London tramcars, and motor-lorries and heavy horse-drawn vans sweeping north and south in a vast clangour of iron thudding and grating on iron and granite, beneath the bedroom windows of a defenceless populace. On the far side of the road were, conspicuous to the right, the huge, red Nell Gwynn Tavern, set on the site of Nell’s still huger palace, and displaying printed exhortations to buy fruity Portuguese wines and to attend meetings of workers; and, conspicuous to the left, red Rowton House, surpassing in immensity even Nell’s vanished palace, divided into hundreds and hundreds of clean cubicles for the accommodation of the defeated and the futile at a few coppers a night, and displaying on its iron façade a newspaper promise to divulge the names of the winners of horse-races. Nearer to the man who could look two ways lay the tiny open space (not open to vehicular traffic) which was officially included in the title “Riceyman Steps.” At the south corner of this was a secondhand bookseller’s shop, and at the north an abandoned and decaying mission-hall; both these abutted on King’s Cross Road. Then, on either hand, farther from the thoroughfare and nearer the steps, came a few private houses with carefully curtained windows, and one other shop⁠—a confectioner’s. And next, also on either hand, two business “yards” full of lorries, goods, gear, and the hum of hidden machinery. And the earth itself faintly throbbed; for, to the vibrations of traffic and manufacture, the Underground Railway, running beneath Riceyman Steps, added the muffled uproar of its subterranean electric trains. + 

While gazing full at the spectacle of King’s Cross Road the man on the steps peered downwards on his right at the confectioner’s shop, which held the woman who had begun to inflame him. He failed to descry her, but his thoughts pleasantly held her image, and she held his thoughts. He dreamed that one day he would share with her sympathetic soul his own vision of this wonderful Clerkenwell in which he lived and she now lived. He would explain to her eager ear that once Clerkenwell was a murmuring green land of medicinal springs, wells, streams with mills on their banks, nunneries, aristocrats, and holy clerks who presented mystery-plays. Yes, he would tell her about the drama of Adam and Eve being performed in the costume of Adam and Eve to a simple and unshocked people. (Why not? She was a widow and no longer young.) And he would point out to her how the brown backs of the houses which fronted on King’s Cross Road resembled the buttressed walls of a mighty fortress, and how the grim, ochreish, unwindowed backs of the houses of Riceyman Square (behind him) looked just like lofty, medieval keeps. And he would relate to her the story of the palace of Nell Gwynn, contemporary of Louise de la Vallière, and dividing with Louise the honour of being the first and most ingenuous of modern vampires. Never before had he had the idea of unfolding his mind on these enthralling subjects to a woman. + 

Rain began to fall. It fell on the bargain-books exposed in a stand outside the bookseller’s shop. The man did not move. Then a swift gentlemanly person stepped suddenly out of King’s Cross Road into the approach to the steps, and after a moment’s hesitation entered the shop. The man on the steps quietly limped down and followed the potential customer into the shop, which was his own. + 

II + 

The Customer + 

The shop had one window in King’s Cross Road, but the entrance, with another window, was in Riceyman Steps. The King’s Cross Road window held only cheap editions, in their paper jackets, of popular modern novels, such as those of Ethel M. Dell, Charles Garvice, Zane Grey, Florence Barclay, Nat Gould, and Gene Stratton Porter. The side window was set out with old books, first editions, illustrated editions, and complete library editions in calf or morocco of renowned and serious writers, whose works, indispensable to the collections of self-respecting book-gentlemen (as distinguished from bookmen), have passed through decades of criticism into the impregnable paradise of eternal esteem. The side window was bound to attract the attention of collectors and bibliomaniacs. It seemed strangely, even fatally, out of place in that dingy and sordid neighbourhood where existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter, where the familiar and beloved landmarks were public-houses, and where the immense majority of the population read nothing but sporting prognostications and results, and, on Sunday mornings, accounts of bloody crimes and juicy sexual irregularities. + 

Nevertheless, the shop was, in fact, well placed in Riceyman Steps. It had a picturesque air, and Riceyman Steps also had a picturesque air, with all its outworn shabbiness, grime and decay. The steps leading up to Riceyman Square, the glimpse of the Square at the top, with its church bearing a massive cross on the west front, the curious perpendicular effects of the tall, blind, ochreish houses⁠—all these touched the imagination of every man who had in his composition any unusually strong admixture of the universal human passion⁠—love of the past. The shop reinforced the appeal of its environment. The shop was in its right appropriate place. To the secret race of collectors always ravenously desiring to get something for much less than its real value, the window in Riceyman Steps was irresistible. And all manner of people, including book-collectors, passed along King’s Cross Road in the course of a day. And all the collectors upon catching sight of the shop exclaimed in their hearts: “What a queer spot for a bookshop! Bargains!⁠ ⁠…” Moreover, the business was of old date and therefore had firmly established connections quite extra-local. Scores of knowing persons knew about it, and were proud of their knowledge. “What!” they would say with affected surprise to acquaintances of their own tastes. “You don’t know Riceyman Steps, King’s Cross Road? Best hunting-ground in London!” The name “Riceyman” on a signboard, whose paint had been flaking off for twenty years, also enhanced the prestige of the shop, for it proved ancient local associations. Riceyman must be of the true ancient blood of Clerkenwell. + 

The customer, with his hands behind him and his legs somewhat apart, was staring at a case of calf-bindings. A short, carefully dressed man, dapper and alert, he had the air neither of a bookman nor of a member of the upper-middle class. + 

“Sorry to keep you waiting. I just had to slip out, and I’ve nobody else here,” said the bookseller quietly and courteously, but with no trace of obsequiousness. + 

“Not at all!” replied the customer. “I was very interested in the books here.” + 

The bookseller, like many shopkeepers a fairly sure judge of people, perceived instantly that the customer must have acquired deportment from somewhere after adolescence, together with the art of dressing. There was abruptness in his voice, and the fact was that he had learnt manners above his original station in a strange place⁠—Palestine, under Allenby. + 

“I suppose you haven’t got such a thing as a Shakespeare in stock; I mean a pretty good one?” + 

“What sort of a Shakespeare? I’ve got a number of Shakespeares.” + 

“Well, I don’t quite know.⁠ ⁠… I’ve been thinking for a long time I ought to have a Shakespeare.” + 

“Illustrated?” asked the bookseller, who had now accurately summed up his client as one who might know something of the world, but who was a simpleton in regard to books. + 

“I really haven’t thought.” The customer gave a slight good-humoured snigger. “I suppose it would be nice to have pictures to look at.” + 

“I have a good clean Boydell, and a Dalziel. But perhaps they’d be rather big.” + 

“Um!” + 

“You can’t hold them, except on a desk or on your knee.” + 

“Ah! That wouldn’t do! Oh, not at all!” The customer, who was nonplussed by the names mentioned, snatched at the opportunity given to decline them. + 

“I’ve got a nice little edition in eight volumes, very handy, with outline drawings by Flaxman, and nicely printed. You don’t often see it. Not like any other Shakespeare I know of. Quite cheap too.” + 

“Um!” + 

“I’ll see if I can put my hand on it.” + 

The shop was full of bays formed by bookshelves protruding at right-angles from the walls. The first bay was well lighted and tidy; but the others, as they receded into the gloomy backward of the shop, were darker and darker and untidier and untidier. The effect was of mysterious and vast populations of books imprisoned forever in everlasting shade, chained, deprived of air and sun and movement, hopeless, resigned, martyrized. The bookseller stepped over piles of cast books into the farthest bay, which was carpeted a foot thick with a disorder of volumes, and lighted a candle. + 

“You don’t use the electric light in that corner,” said the client, briskly following. He pointed to a dust-covered lamp in the grimy ceiling. + 

“Fuse gone. They do go,” the bookseller answered blandly; and the blandness was not in the least impaired by his private thought that the customer’s remark came near to impudence. Searching, he went on: “We’re not quite straight here yet. The truth is, we haven’t been straight since 1914.” + 

“Dear me! Five years!” + 

Another piece of good-humoured cheek. + 

“I suppose you couldn’t step in tomorrow?” the bookseller suggested, after considerable groping and spilling of tallow. + 

“Afraid not,” said the customer with polite reluctance. “Very busy⁠ ⁠… I was just passing and it struck me.” + 

“The Globe edition is very good, you know⁠ ⁠… Standard text. Macmillans. Nothing better of the sort. I could sell you that for three-and-six.” + 

“Sounds promising,” said the customer brightly. + 

The bookseller blew out the candle and dusted one hand with the other. + 

“Of course it’s not illustrated.” + 

“Oh, well, after all, a Shakespeare’s for reading, isn’t it?” said the customer, for whom Shakespeare was a volume, not a man. + 

While the bookseller was wrapping up the green Globe Shakespeare in a creased bit of brown paper with an addressed label on it⁠—he put the label inside⁠—the customer cleared his throat and said with a nervous laugh: + 

“I think you employ here a young charwoman, don’t you?” + 

The bookseller looked up in mild surprise, peering. He was startled and alarmed, but his feelings seldom appeared on his face. + 

“I do.” He thought: “What is this inquisitive fellow getting at? It’s not what I call manners, anyhow.” + 

“Her name’s Elsie, I think. I don’t know her surname.” + 

The bookseller went on with his packing and said naught. + 

“As I’m here I thought I might as well ask you,” the customer continued with a fresh nervous laugh. “I ought to explain that my name’s Raste, Dr. Raste, of Myddelton Square. Dare say you’ve heard of me. From your name your family belongs to the district?” + 

“Yes,” agreed the bookseller. “I do.” + 

He was very proud of the name Riceyman, and he did not explain that it was the name only of his deceased uncle, and that his own name was Earlforward. + 

“I’ve got a lad in my service,” the doctor continued. “Shell-shock case. He’s improving, but I find he’s running after this girl Elsie. Quite OK, of course. Most respectable. Only it’s putting him off his work, and I just thought as I happened to be in here you wouldn’t mind me asking you about her. Is she a good girl? I’d like him to marry⁠—if it’s the right sort. Might do him a lot of good.” + 

“She’s right enough,” answered the bookseller calmly and indifferently. “I’ve nothing against her.” + 

“Had her long?” + 

“Oh, some time.” + 

The bookseller said no more. Beneath his impassive and courteous exterior he hid a sudden spasm of profound agitation. The next minute Dr. Raste departed, but immediately returned. + 

“Afraid your books outside are getting a bit wet,” he cried from the doorway. + 

“Thank you. Thank you,” said the bookseller mildly and unperturbed, thinking: “He must be a managing and interfering kind of man. Can’t I run my own business?” + 

Some booksellers kept waterproof covers for their outside display, but this one did not. He had found in practice that a few drops of rain did no harm to low-priced volumes. + 

III + 

The Bookseller at Home + 

At the back of the rather spacious and sombre shop (which by reason of the bays of bookshelves seemed larger than it really was) came a small room, with a doorway, but no door, into the shop. This was the proprietor’s den. Seated at his desk therein he could see through a sort of irregular lane of books to the bright oblong of the main entrance, which was seldom closed. There were more books to the cubic foot in the private room even than in the shop. They rose in tiers to the ceiling and they lay in mounds on the floor; they also covered most of the flat desk and all the windowsill; some were perched on the silent grandfather’s clock, the sole piece of furniture except the desk, a safe, and two chairs, and a stepladder for reaching the higher shelves. + 

The bookseller retired to this room, as to a retreat, upon the departure of Dr. Raste, and looked about, fingering one thing or another in a mild, amicable manner, and disclosing not the least annoyance, ill-humour, worry, or pressure of work. He sat down to a cumbrous old typewriter on the desk, and after looking at some correspondence, inserted a sheet of cheap letter-paper into the machine. The printed letterhead on the sheet was “T. T. Riceyman,” but in fulfilment of the new law the name of the actual proprietor “Henry Earlforward,” had been added (in violet, with an india rubber stamp, and crookedly). + 

Mr. Earlforward began to tap, placidly and very deliberately, as one who had the whole of eternity before him for the accomplishment of his task. A little bell rang; the machine dated from the age when typewriters had this contrivance for informing the operator that the end of a line would be reached in two or three more taps. Then a great clatter occurred at the window, and the room became dark. The blue-black blind had slipped down, discharging thick clouds of dust. + 

“Dear, dear!” murmured Mr. Earlforward, groping towards the window. He failed to raise the blind again; the cord was broken. As he coughed gently in the dust, he could not recall that the blind had been once drawn since the end of the war. + 

“I must have that seen to,” he murmured, and turned on the electric light over the desk. + 

The porcelain shade of the lamp wore a heavy layer of dust, which, however, had not arrived from the direction of the blind, being the product of slow, secular accumulation. Mr. Earlforward regretted to be compelled to use electric current⁠—and rightly, considering the price!⁠—but the occasion was quite special. He could not see to tap by a candle. Many a time on winter evenings he had gently told an unimportant customer in that room that a fuse had gone⁠—and lighted a candle. + 

He was a solitary man, and content in his solitude; at any rate, he had been content until the sight of the newly-come lady across the way began to disturb the calm deep of his mind. He was a man of routine, and happy in routine. Dr. Raste’s remarks about his charwoman were seriously upsetting him. He foresaw the possibility, if the charwoman should respond to the alleged passion of her suitor, of a complete derangement of his existence. But he was not a man to go out to meet trouble. He had faith in time, which for him was endless and inexhaustible, and even in this grave matter of his domesticity he could calmly reflect that if the lady across the way (whom he had not yet spoken to) should favour him, he might be in a position to ignore the vagaries of all charwomen. He was, in fact, a very great practical philosopher, tenacious⁠—it is true⁠—in his ideas, but, nevertheless, profoundly aware of the wisdom of compromising with destiny. + 

Twenty-one years earlier he had been a placid and happy clerk in an insurance office, anticipating an existence devoted wholly to fire-risks. Destiny had sent him one evening to his uncle, T. T. Riceyman, in Riceyman Steps, and into the very room where he was now tapping. Riceyman took to him, seeing in the young man a resemblance to himself. Riceyman began to talk about his well-loved Clerkenwell, and especially about what was for him the marvellous outstanding event in the Clerkenwell history⁠—namely, the construction of the Underground Railway from Clerkenwell to Euston Square. Henry had never forgotten the old man’s almost melodramatic recital, so full of astonishing and quaint incidents. + 

The old man swore that exactly one thousand lawyers had signed a petition in favour of the line, and exactly one thousand butchers had signed another similar petition. All Clerkenwell was mad for the line. But when the construction began all Clerkenwell trembled. The earth opened in the most unexpected and undesirable places. Streets had to be barred to horse traffic; pavements resembled switchbacks. Hundreds of houses had to be propped, and along the line of the tunnel itself scores of houses were suddenly vacated lest they should bury their occupants. The sacred workhouse came near to dissolution, and was only saved by inconceivable timberings. The still more sacred Cobham’s Head public-house was first shaken and torn with cracks and then inundated by the bursting of the New River main, and the landlady died of shock. The thousand lawyers and the thousand butchers wished they had never humbly prayed for the accursed line. And all this was as naught compared to the culminating catastrophe. There was a vast excavation at the mouth of the tunnel near Clerkenwell Green. It was supported by enormous brick piers and by scaffoldings erected upon the most prodigious beams that the wood trade could produce. One night⁠—a spring Sunday in 1862, the year of the Second Great Exhibition⁠—the adjacent earth was observed to be gently sinking, and then some cellars filled with foul water. Alarm was raised. Railway officials and metropolitan officers rushed together, and for three days and three nights laboured to avert a supreme calamity. Huge dams were built to strengthen the subterranean masonry; nothing was left undone. Vain effort! On the Wednesday the pavements sank definitely. The earth quaked. The entire populace fled to survey the scene of horror from safety. The terrific scaffolding and beams were flung like firewood into the air and fell with awful crashes. The populace screamed at the thought of workmen entombed and massacred. A silence! Then the great brick piers, fifty feet in height, moved bodily. The whole bottom of the excavation moved in one mass. A dark and fetid liquid appeared, oozing, rolling, surging, smashing everything in its resistless track, and rushed into the mouth of the new tunnel. The crown of the arch of the mighty Fleet sewer had broken. Men wept at the enormity and completeness of the disaster.⁠ ⁠… But the Underground Railway was begun afresh and finished and grandly inaugurated, and at first the public fought for seats in its trains, and then could not be persuaded to enter its trains because they were uninhabitable, and so on and so on.⁠ ⁠… + 

Old fat Riceyman told his tale with such force and fire that he had a stroke. In foolishly trying to lift the man Henry had slipped and hurt his knee. The next morning Riceyman was dead. Henry inherited. A strange episode, but not stranger than thousands of episodes in the lives of plain people. Henry knew nothing of bookselling. He learnt. His philosophic placidity helped him. He had assistants, one after another, but liked none of them. When the last one went to the Great War, Henry gave him no successor. He “managed”⁠—and in addition did earnest, sleep-denying work as a limping special constable. And now, in 1919, here he was, an institution. + 

He heard a footstep, and in the gloom of his shop made out the surprising apparition of his charwoman. And he was afraid, and lost his philosophy. He felt that she had arrived specially⁠—as she would, being a quaint and conscientious young woman⁠—to warn him with proper solemnity that she would soon belong to another. Undoubtedly the breezy and interfering Dr. Raste had come in, not to buy a Shakespeare, but to inquire about Elsie. Shakespeare was merely the excuse for Elsie.⁠ ⁠… By the way, that mislaid Flaxman illustrated edition ought to be hunted up soon⁠—tomorrow if possible. + 

IV + 

Elsie + 

“Now, now, Elsie, my girl. What’s this? What is it?” + 

Mr. Earlforward spoke benevolently but, for him, rather quickly and abruptly. And Elsie was intimidated. She worked for Mr. Earlforward only in the mornings, and to be in the shop in the darkening afternoon made her feel quite queer and apologetic. It was almost as if she had never been in the shop before and had no right there. + 

As the two approached each other the habitual heavenly kindness in the girl’s gaze seemed to tranquillize Mr. Earlforward, who knew intimately her expression and her disposition. And though he was still disturbed by apprehension he found, as usual, a mysterious comfort in her presence; and this influence of hers exercised itself even upon his fear of losing her forever. A strange, exciting emotional equilibrium became established in the twilight of the shop. + 

Elsie was a strongly-built wench, plump, fairly tall, with the striking free, powerful carriage of one bred to various and hard manual labour. Her arms and bust were superb. She had blue-black hair and dark blue eyes, and a pretty curve of the lips. The face was square but soft. From the constant drawing together of the eyebrows into a pucker of the forehead, and the dropping of the corners of the large mouth, it could be deduced that she was, if anything, over-conscientious, with a tendency to worry about the right performance of her duty; but this warping of her features was too slight to be unpleasant; it was, indeed, a reassurance. She was twenty-three years of age; solitude, adversity and deprivation made her look older. For four years she had been a widow, childless, after two nights of marriage and romance with a youth who went to the East in 1915 to die of dysentery. Her clothes were cheap, dirty, slatternly and dilapidated. Over a soiled white apron she wore a terribly coarse apron of sacking. This apron was an offence; it was an outrage. But not to her; she regarded it as part of a uniform, and such an apron was, in fact, part of the regular uniform of thousands of women in Clerkenwell. If Elsie was slatternly, dirty, and without any grace of adornment, the reason was that she had absolutely no inducement or example to be otherwise. It was her natural, respectable state to be so. + 

“It’s for Mrs. Arb, sir,” Elsie began. + 

“Mrs. Arb?” questioned Mr. Earlforward, puzzled for an instant by the unfamiliar name. “Yes, yes, I know. Well? What have you got to do with Mrs. Arb?” + 

“I work for her in my afternoons, sir.” + 

“But I never knew this!” + 

“I only began today, sir. She sent me across, seeing as I’m engaged here, to see if you’d got a good, cheap, secondhand cookery-book.” + 

Mr. Earlforward’s demeanour reflected no change in his mood, but Elsie had raised him into heaven. It was not to give him notice that she had come! She would stay with him! She would stay forever, or until he had no need of her. And she would make a link with Mrs. Arb, the new proprietress of the confectioner’s shop across the way. Of course the name of the new proprietress was Arb. He had not thought of her name. He had thought only of herself. Even now he had no notion of her Christian name. + 

“Oh! So she wants a cookery-book, does she? What sort of a cookery-book?” + 

“She said she’s thinking of going in for sandwiches, sir, and things, she said, and having a sign put up for it. Snacks, like.” + 

The word “snacks” gave Mr. Earlforward an idea. He walked across to what he called the “modern side” of the shop. In the course of the war, when food-rationed stay-at-homes really had to stay at home, and, having nothing else to do while waiting for air-raids, took to literature in desperation, he had done a very large trade in cheap editions of novels, and quite a good trade in cheap cookery-books that professed to teach rationed housewives how to make substance out of shadow. Gently rubbing his little beard, he stood and gazed rather absently at a shelf of small paper-protected volumes, while Elsie waited with submission. + 

Silence within, but the dulled and still hard rumble of ceaseless motion beyond the book-screened windows! A spell! An enchantment upon these two human beings, both commonplace and both marvellous, bound together and yet incurious each of the other and incurious of the mysteries in which they and all their fellows lived! Mr. Earlforward never asked the meaning of life, for he had a lifelong ruling passion. Elsie never asked the meaning of life, for she was dominated and obsessed by a tremendous instinct to serve. Mr. Earlforward, though a kindly man, had persuaded himself that Elsie would go on charing until she died, without any romantic recompense from fate for her early tragedy, and he was well satisfied that this should be so. Because the result would inconvenience him, he desired that she should not fall in love again and marry; he preferred that she should spend her strength and youth and should grow old for him in sterile celibacy. He had absolutely no eye for the exciting effect of the white and the brown apron-strings crossing and recrossing round her magnificent waist. And Elsie knew only that Mr. Earlforward had material wants, which she satisfied as well as she could. She did not guess, nor come within a hundred miles of guessing, that he was subject to dreams and ideals and longings. That the universe was enigmatic had not even occurred to her, nor to him; they were too busy with their share in working it out. + 

“Now here’s a book that ought to suit Mrs. Arb,” said Mr. Earlforward, picking a volume from the shelf and moving towards the entrance, where the clear daylight was. “Snacks and Titbits. Let me see. Sandwiches.” He turned over leaves. “Sandwiches. There’s nearly seven pages about sandwiches.” + 

“How much would it be, sir?” + 

“One shilling.” + 

“Oh! She said she couldn’t pay more than sixpence, sir, she said.” + 

Mr. Earlforward looked up with a fresh interest. He was exhilarated, even inspired, by the conception of a woman who, wishing to brighten her business with a new line of goods, was not prepared to spend more than sixpence on the indispensable basis of the enterprise. The conception powerfully appealed to him, and his regard for Mrs. Arb increased. + 

“See here, Elsie. Take this over for Mrs. Arb to look at. And tell her, with my compliments, that you can’t get cookery-books⁠—not any that are any good⁠—for sixpence in these days.” + 

“Yes, sir.” + 

Elsie put the book under her aprons and hurried off. + 

“She sends you her compliments, and she says she can’t pay more than sixpence, sir. I’m that sorry, sir,” Elsie announced, returning. + 

Mr. Earlforward blandly replaced the book on its shelf, and Elsie waited in vain for any comment, then left. + 

“I say, Elsie,” he recalled her. “It’s not raining much, but it might soon. As you’re here, you’d better help me in with the stand. That’ll save me taking the books out before it’s moved, and it’ll save you trouble in the morning.” + 

“Yes, sir,” Elsie eagerly agreed. + 

One at either end of it, they lugged within the heavy bookstand that stretched along the length of the window on the flagstones outside the shop. The books showed scarcely a trace of the drizzle. + 

“Thank you, Elsie.” + 

“Don’t mention it, sir.” + 

Mr. Earlforward switched on one electric light in the middle of the shop, switched off the light in his den, and lit a candle there. Then he took a thermos flask, a cup, and two slices of bread on a plate from the interior of the grandfather’s clock, poured steaming tea into the cup, and enjoyed his evening meal. When the bell of St. Andrew’s jangled six, he shut and darkened the shop. The war habit of closing early suited him very well for several reasons. Then, blowing out the candle, he began again to burn electricity in the den, and tapped slowly and moved to and fro with deliberation, examining book-titles, tapping out lists, tapping out addresses on envelopes, licking stamps, and performing other pleasant little tasks of routine. And all the time he dwelt with exquisite pleasure on the bodily appearance and astonishing moral characteristics of Mrs. Arb. What a woman! He had been right about that woman from the first glance. She was a woman in a million. + 

At a quarter to seven he put his boots on and collected his letters for the post. But before leaving to go to the post he suddenly thought of a ten-shilling Treasury note received from Dr. Raste, and took it from his waistcoat pocket. It was a beautiful new note, a delicate object, carefully folded by someone who understood that new notes deserve good treatment. He put it, with other less brilliant cash, into the safe. As he departed from the shop for the post office at Mount Pleasant, he picked out Snacks and Titbits from its shelf again, and slipped it into his side-pocket. + 

The rain had ceased. He inhaled the fresh, damp air with an innocent and genuine delight. Mrs. Arb’s shop was the sole building illuminated in Riceyman Steps; it looked warm and feminine; it attracted. The church rose darkly, a formidable mass, in the opening at the top of the steps. The little group of dwelling-houses next to his own establishment showed not a sign of life; they seldom did; he knew nothing of their tenants, and felt absolutely no curiosity concerning them. His little yard abutted on the yard of the nearest house, but the wall between them was seven feet high; no sound ever came over it. + 

He turned into the main road. Although he might have dropped his correspondence into the pillar-box close by, he preferred to go to the mighty Mount Pleasant organism, with its terrific night-movement of vans and flung mailbags, because it seemed surer, safer, for his letters. + 

Like many people who live alone, he had a habit of talking to himself in the street. His thoughts would from time to time suddenly burst almost with violence into a phrase. Then he would smile to himself. “Me at my age!”⁠ ⁠… “Yes, and of course there’s that!”⁠ ⁠… “Want some getting used to!”⁠ ⁠… He would laugh rather sheepishly. + 

The vanquished were already beginning to creep into the mazes of Rowton House. They clicked through a turnstile⁠—that was all he knew about existence in Rowton House, except that there were plants with large green leaves in the windows of the common-room. Some of the vanquished entered with boldness, but the majority walked furtively. Just opposite Rowton House the wisdom and enterprise of two railway companies had filled a blank wall with a large poster exhibiting the question: “Why not take a winter holiday where sunshine reigns?” etc. Beneath this blank wall a newsman displayed the posters of the evening papers, together with stocks of the papers. Mr. Earlforward always read the placards for news. There was nothing much tonight. “Death of a well-known statesman.” Mr. Earlforward, as an expert in interpretation, was aware that “well-known” on a newspaper placard meant exactly the opposite of what it meant in any other place; it meant not well-known. The placards always divided dead celebrities, genuine and false, into three categories. If Blank was a supreme personage the placards said: “Blank dead.” Two most impressive words. If Blank was a real personage, but not quite supreme, the placards said: “Death of Blank.” Three words, not so impressive. All others nameless were in the third category of “well-knowns.” Nevertheless, Mr. Earlforward walked briskly back as far as the Free Library to glance at a paper⁠—perhaps not because he was disturbed about the identity of a well-known statesman, but because he hesitated to carry out his resolution to enter Mrs. Arb’s shop. + 

V + 

The Gift + 

Mrs. Arb was listening to a customer and giving change. + 

“ ‘And when you’ve got children of your own,’ she said, ‘and when you’ve got children of your own,’ that was her remark,” the customer, an insecurely fat woman, was saying. + 

“Just so,” Mrs. Arb agreed, handing the change and pushing a little parcel across the counter. She ignored Mr. Earlforward completely. He stood near the door, while the fat customer repeated once more what some third person had remarked upon a certain occasion. The customer’s accent was noticeably vulgar in contrast with Mrs. Arb’s. Mrs. Arb was indeed very “well spoken.” And she contrasted not merely with the customer but with the shop. + 

There were dozens of such little shops in and near King’s Cross Road. The stock, and also the ornamentation, of the shop came chiefly from the wholesalers of advertised goods made up into universally recognizable packets. Several kinds of tea in large quantities, and picturesque, bright tea-signs all around the shop. Several kinds of chocolate, in several kinds of fancy polished-wood glazed stands. (But the chocolate of one maker was in the stand of another.) All manner of patent foods, liquid and solid, each guaranteed to give strength. Two competitors in margarine. Scores of paper bags of flour. Some loaves; two hams, cut into. A milk-churn in the middle of the shop. Tinned fruits. Tinned fish. Tinned meats. And in the linoleum-lined window the cakes and bonbons which entitled the shop to style itself “confectioner’s.” Dirty ceiling; uneven dark wood floor; frowsy, mysterious corners; a shabby counter covered with linoleum in black-and-white check, like the bottom of the window. One chair; one small, round, iron table. No cash-desk. No writing apparatus of any sort. A smell of bread, ham and biscuits. A poor little shop, showing no individuality, no enterprise, no imagination, no potentiality of reasonable profits. A shop which saved the shopkeeper from the trouble of thinking for himself. The inevitable result of big advertising, and kept up to the average mark by the constant visitation of hurried commercial travellers and collectors who had the magic to extract money out of empty tills. + 

And Mrs. Arb, thin, bright, cheerful, with scintillating eyes; in a neat check dress and a fairly clean white apron! Yes, she was bright, she was cheerful, she had a keen face. Perhaps that was what had attracted Mr. Earlforward, who was used to neither cheerfulness nor brightness. Yet he thought: “It would have been just about the same if she’d been a gloomy woman.” Perhaps he had been attracted because she had life, energy, downrightness, masterfulness. + 

“Good evening, Mr. Earlforward. And what can I do for you?” She greeted him suddenly, vivaciously, as the fat customer departed. + 

She knew him, then! She knew his real name. She knew that his name did not accord with the sign over his shop. Her welcoming smile inspired him, as alcohol would have inspired him had he ever tasted it. He was uplifted to a higher plane of existence. And also, secretly, he was a little bit flurried; but his demeanour did not betray this. A clock struck rapidly in some room behind the shop, and at the sound Mrs. Arb sprang from behind the counter, shut and locked the shop door, and drew down its blind for a sign to the world that business was over for the day. She had a fine movement with her. In getting out of her way Mr. Earlforward strove to conceal his limp as much as possible. + 

“I thought I’d just look in about that cookery-book you wanted,” said he. + 

“It’s very kind of you I’m sure,” said she. “But I really don’t think I shall need it.” + 

“Oh!” + 

“No! I think I shall get rid of this business. There’s no doing anything with it.” + 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Mr. Earlforward. And he was. + 

“It isn’t as if I didn’t enjoy it⁠—at first. Quite a pleasant change for me to take something in hand. My husband died two years ago and left me nicely off, and I’ve been withering up ever since, till this came along. It’s no life, being a widow at my age. But I couldn’t stand this either, for long. There’s no bounce to this business, if you understand what I mean. It’s like hitting a cushion.” + 

“You’ve soon decided.” + 

“I haven’t decided. But I’m thinking about it.⁠ ⁠… You see, it’s a queer neighbourhood.” + 

“Queer?” He was shocked, perhaps a little hurt, but his calm tone disclosed nothing of that. He had a desire to explain to Mrs. Arb at great length that the neighbourhood was one of almost unique interest. + 

“Well, you know what I mean. You see, I come from Fulham⁠—Chelsea you might call it. I’m not saying that when I lived in this shop before⁠—eighteen years ago, is it?⁠—I’m not saying I thought it was a queer neighbourhood then. I didn’t⁠—and I was here for over a year, too. But I do now.” + 

“I must confess it hasn’t struck me as queer.” + 

“You know this King’s Cross Road?” Mrs. Arb proceeded with increased ardour. “You know it? You’ve walked all along it?” + 

“Yes.” + 

“So have I. Oh! I’ve looked about me. Is there a single theatre in it? Is there one music-hall? Is there one dance-hall? Is there one picture theatre? Is there one nice little restaurant? Or a teashop where a nice person could go if she’d a mind?⁠ ⁠… And yet it’s a very important street; it’s full of people all day. And you can walk for miles round here and see nothing. And the dirt and untidiness! Well, I thought Fulham was dirty. Now look at this Riceyman Square place, up behind those funny steps! I walked through there. And I lay there isn’t one house in it⁠—not one⁠—without a broken window! The fact is, the people about here don’t want things nice and kept.⁠ ⁠… I’m not meaning you⁠—certainly not! But people in general. And they don’t want anything fresh, either. They only want all the nasty old things they’ve always had, same as pigs. And yet I must say I admire pigs, in a way. Oh, dear!” She laughed, as if at herself, a tinkling laugh, and looked down, with her steady agreeable hand still on the door. + 

Twice before she had looked down. It was more than coyness, better than coyness, more genuinely exciting. When she laughed her face crinkled up very pleasantly. She had energy. All the time her body made little movements. Her glance varied, scintillating, darkling. Her tone ceaselessly varied. And she had authority. She was a masterful woman, but masterful in a broad-minded, genial manner. She was experienced, and had learnt from experience. She must be over forty.⁠ ⁠… And still, somehow girlish! Best of all, she was original; she had a point of view. She could see. Mr. Earlforward hated Clerkenwell to be damned. Yet he liked her to damn it.⁠ ⁠… And how natural she was, dignified, but not ceremonious, willing to be friends at once! He repeated to himself that from the first sight of her he had known her to be a highly remarkable creature. + 

“I brought the book along,” he said, prudently avoiding argument. She took it amiably from him, and out of politeness inspected it again. + 

“You shall have it for ninepence. And you might be needing it after all, you know.” + 

With her face still bent towards Snacks and Titbits she raised her eyes to his eyes⁠—it seemed roguishly. + 

“I might! I might!” She shut the book with a smart snap. “But I won’t go beyond sixpence, thank you all the same. And not as I don’t think it’s very kind of you to bring it over.” + 

What a woman! What a woman! She was rapidly becoming the most brilliant, attractive, competent, and comfortable woman on earth; and Mr. Earlforward was rapidly becoming a hero, a knight, a madman capable of sublime deeds. He felt an heroical impulse such as he had never felt. He fought it, and was beaten. + 

“See here,” he said quietly, and with unconscious grandeur. “We’re neighbours. I’ll make you a present of the book.” + 

Did she say, as a silly little creature would have said: “Oh, no! I couldn’t possibly. I really couldn’t”? Not a bit. She said simply: + 

“It’s most kind of you, Mr. Earlforward. It really is. Of course I accept it with pleasure. Thank you.” + 

And she looked down, like a girl who has received a necklace and clasped it on her neck. Yes, she looked down. The moment was marvellous to Mr. Earlforward. + 

“But I do think you’re a little hard on Riceyman Square,” he said, as she unlocked the door for his departure. + 

She replied gaily and firmly: “Not one house without a broken pane!” She insisted and held out her hand. + 

“Well, we must see one day,” said he. + 

She nodded. + 

“And if there is,” she said, “I shall pay you a shilling for the book. That’s fair.” + 

She shook hands. Mr. Earlforward crossed the space between her shop and his with perfect calmness, and as he approached his door he took from his pocket with the mechanical movement of regular habit a shining key. + 

VI + 

Mrs. Arb’s Case + 

You would have thought, while Mrs. Arb was talking to Mr. Earlforward, that the enigma of the universe could not exist in her presence. Yet as soon as she was alone it was there, pervading the closed little shop. By letting Mr. Earlforward out she had let the enigma in; she had relocked the door too late. She stood forlorn, apprehensive, and pathetically undecided in the middle of the shop, and gazed round at the miserable contents of the shop with a dismayed disillusion. Brightness had fallen from her. Impossible to see in her now the woman whose abundant attractive vitality had vitalized Mr. Earlforward into a new and exalted frame of mind! + 

She had married, raising herself somewhat, in her middle twenties, a clerk of works, popular not only with architects, but with contractors. Mr. Arb had been clerk of works to some of the very biggest erections of the century. His vocation carried him here and there⁠—wherever a large building was being put up; it might be a provincial town hall, or a block of offices in London, or a huge hydro on some rural countryside, or an explosives factory in the middle of pasture land. And Mr. Arb’s jobs might last any length of time, from six months to three or four years. Consequently he had had no fixed residence. As there were no children his wife would always go about with him, and they would live in furnished rooms. This arrangement was cheaper than keeping a permanent home in London, and much more cheerful and stimulating. For Mr. Arb it had the advantages (with the disadvantages) of living with a wife whose sole genuine interest, hobby, and solicitude was her husband; all Mrs. Arb’s other social relations were bound to be transitory and lukewarm. When Mr. Arb died he left a sum of money surprisingly large in view of the fact that clerks of works do not receive high salaries. Architects, hearing of the nice comfortable fortune, were more surprised than contractors. A clerk of works has great power. A clerk of works may be human. + 

Mrs. Arb found herself with an income but no home, no habit of home life, and no masculine guidance or protection. She was heart-stricken, and⁠—what was worse⁠—she was thoroughly disorganized. Her immense vitality had no outlet. Time helped her, but she lived in suspense, undecided what to do and not quite confident in her own unaided wisdom. An incredible letter from a solicitor announcing that she had inherited the confectioner’s business and premises and some money in Riceyman Steps shook and roused her. These pleasant and promising things had belonged to her grandmother’s much younger half-sister, whom she had once helped by prolonged personal service in a great emergency. The two had not met for many years, owing to Mrs. Arb’s nomadic existence; but they had come together at the funeral of Mr. Arb, and had quarrelled magnificently, because of Mrs. Arb’s expressed opinion that the old lady’s clothes showed insufficient respect for the angelic dead. The next event was the solicitor’s letter; the old lady had made a deathbed repentance for the funeral costume. Mrs. Arb abandoned the furnished rooms in Fulham, where she had been desiccating for two years, and flew to Clerkenwell in an eager mood of adventure. She did not like Clerkenwell, nor the look of the business, and she was beginning to be disappointed, but at worst she was far happier and more alive than she had ever been since Mr. Arb’s death. + 

She had, nevertheless, a cancer⁠—not a physical one: the secret abiding terror lest despite all her outward assurance she might be incapable of managing her possessions. The more she inherited, the more she feared. She had a vision of the business going wrong, of her investments going wrong, and of herself in poverty and solitude. This dread was absurd, but not less real for that. It grew. She tried to counter it by the practice of severe economy. + 

The demeanour of Mr. Earlforward, and his gift, had suddenly lightened her horizon. But the moment he departed she began saying to herself that she was utterly silly to indulge in such thoughts as she had been thinking, that men were not “like that,” that men knew what they were about and what they wanted⁠—and she looked gloomily in the fancy mirror provided by a firm of cocoa manufacturers and adorned with their name at the top and their address at the bottom. + 

She put pieces of gauze over the confectionery in the window and over the two bony remnants of ham, placed the chair seat downwards on the counter, and tilted the little table against the counter; then extinguished the oil-lamp, which alone lit the shop, and went into the back room, lighted by another similar oil-lamp. In this room, which was a parlour-kitchen, and whose principal table had just been scrubbed, Elsie, a helot withdrawn from the world and dedicated to secret toil, was untying her sack apron preparatory to the great freedom of the night. + 

“Oh, Elsie⁠—you did say your name was Elsie, didn’t you?” + 

“Yes’m.” + 

“I should take it very kindly if you could stay a bit longer this evening.” + 

Elsie was dashed; she paused on the knot of the apron-string. + 

“It’s a quarter of an hour past my time now, ’m,” she said apologetically and humbly. + 

“It is? So it is. Well, not quite.” + 

“I had an engagement, ’m.” + 

“Couldn’t you put it off for this once? You see, I’m very anxious to get straight after all this mess I’ve been in. I’m one that can’t stand a mess. I’ll give you your supper⁠—I’ll give you a slice of ham⁠—and sixpence extra.” + 

“I’m sure it’s very kind of you, ’m, but⁠—” + 

Mrs. Arb coaxed, and she could coax very effectively. + 

“Well, ’m, I always like to oblige.” Elsie yielded, not grudgingly nor with the air of conferring a favour, but rather with a mild and pure kindliness. She added, coaxing in her turn: “But I must just run out half a minute, if you’ll let me.” + 

“Oh, of course. But don’t be long, will you? Look, here’s your half-day and the extra sixpence. Take it now. And while you’re out I’ll be cutting the ham for you. It’s a pity I’ve turned out the shop lamp, but I dare say I can see if I leave this door open.” She gave the girl some silver. + 

“I’m sure it’s very kind of you, ’m.” + 

Mrs. Arb cut an exceedingly thin slice of ham quite happily. She had two reasons for keeping Elsie; she wanted to talk to somebody, and she felt that, whether she talked or not, she could not bear to be alone in the place till bedtime. Her good spirits returned. + 

VII + 

Under an Umbrella + 

The entrance-gates to the yard of Daphut, the builder and stonemason, which lay between Mrs. Arb’s shop and the steps proper, were set back a little from the general frontage of the north side of Riceyman Steps, so that there was a corner at that point sheltered from east and northeast winds. In this corner stood a young man under an old umbrella; his clothes were such as would have entitled him to the newspaper reporter’s description, “respectably dressed”⁠—no better. His back was against the blind wall of Mrs. Arb’s. It was raining again, with a squally wind, but the wind being in the northeast the young man was only getting spotted with rain. A young woman ran out of Mrs. Arb’s and joined him. She placed herself close to him, touching him, breast to breast; it was the natural and rational thing to do, and also she had to receive as much protection as possible from the umbrella. The girl was wearing all Elsie’s clothes. Elsie’s sack-apron covered her head and shoulders like a bridal veil. But she was not Mrs. Arb’s Elsie nor Mr. Earlforward’s! She was not the drudge. She had suddenly become a celestial visitant. The attributes of such an unearthly being were in her shining face and in the solace of her little bodily movements; and her extraordinary mean and ugly apparel could not impair them in the least. The man, slowly, hesitatingly, put one arm round her waist⁠—the other was occupied with the umbrella. She yielded her waist to him, and looked up at the man, and he looked down at her. Not a word. Then he said in a deep voice: + 

“Where’s your hat⁠—and things?” + 

He said this as one who apprehended calamity. + 

“I haven’t finished yet,” she answered gently. “I’m that sorry.” + 

“How long shall you be?” + 

“I don’t know, Joe. She’s all by herself, and she begged and prayed me to stop on and help her. She’s all by herself, and strange to it. And I couldn’t find it in my heart to refuse. You have to do what’s right, haven’t you?” + 

The man’s chin fell in a sort of sulky and despairing gloom; but he said nothing; he was not a facile talker, even on his best days. She took the umbrella from him without altering its position. + 

“Put both arms round me, and hold me tight,” she murmured. + 

He obeyed, reluctantly, tardily, but in the end fiercely. After a long pause he said: + 

“And my birthday and all!” + 

“I know! I know!” she cried. “Oh, Joe! It can’t be helped!” + 

He had many arguments, and good ones, against her decision; but he could not utter them. He never could argue. She just gazed up at him softly. Tears began to run down his cheeks. + 

“Now, now!” she soothed him. With her free hand she worked up the tail of her apron between them, and, while still fast in his clutch, wiped his eyes delicately. She kissed him, keeping her lips on his. She kissed him until she knew from the feel of his muscles everywhere that the warm soft contact with her had begun to dissolve his resentment. Then she withdrew her lips and kissed him again, differently. They stood motionless in the dark corner under the umbrella, and the rain pattered dully on the umbrella and dropped off the umbrella and round them, and pattered with a brighter sound on the flagstones of Riceyman Steps. A few people passed at intervals up and down the steps. But the clasped pair ignored them; and the wayfarers did not look twice, nor even smile at the lovers, who, in fact, were making love as honest love is made by lovers whose sole drawing rooms and sofas are the street. + 

“Look here, Joe,” Elsie whispered. “I want you to go home now. But you must call at Smithson’s on yer way⁠—they don’t close till nine o’clock⁠—and get them braces as I’m giving you for a birthday present. I see ’em still in the window this morning. I should have slipped in and bought ’em then, but I was on an errand for Mr. Earlforward, and, besides, I didn’t like to, somehow, without you, and me with my apron on too. But you must buy ’em tonight so as you can wear ’em tomorrow. I want to say to myself tomorrow morning, ‘He’s wearing them braces.’ I’ve brought you the money.” She loosed one of his hands from her waist, got at the silver in her pocket, and inserted it into his breast pocket. “You promise me, Joe? It’s a fair and square promise?” + 

He made no reply. + 

“You promise me, darling Joe?” she insisted. + 

He nodded; he could not speak in his desolation and in his servitude to her. She smiled her lovely thanks for his obedience. + 

“Now let me see ye start off,” she cajoled him. “I know ye. I know what you’ll do if I don’t see you start with me own eyes.” + 

“Then it’s tomorrow night?” he said gruffly. + 

She nodded. They kissed again. Elsie pushed him away, and then stood watching until he had vanished round the corner of the disused Mission Hall into King’s Cross Road. She stood watching, indeed, for some moments after that. She was crying. + 

“My word!” said Mrs. Arb vivaciously. “I was beginning to wonder if you meant to come back, after all. You’ve been that long your tea’ll be cold. Here’s the ham, and very nice it is too.” + 

VIII + 

The Carving-Knife + 

The two women were working together in a living room over the shop. An oil-lamp had been hung on a hook which would have held a curtain loop had there been any curtains. The lamp, tilted slightly forward, had a round sheltered reflector behind it. Thus a portion of the lower part of the room was brilliantly lighted and all the rest of the room in shadow. Elsie was scrubbing the floor in the full glare of the reflector. She scrubbed placidly and honestly, with no eagerness, but with no sign of fatigue. Mrs. Arb sat in the fireplace with her feet upraised out of the damp on the rail of a chair, and cleaned the mantelpiece. She had worked side by side with Elsie through the evening, silent sometimes, vivaciously chatty sometimes⁠—desirous generally of collecting useful pieces of local information. Inevitably a sort of community had established itself between the two women. Mrs. Arb would talk freely and yet give nothing but comment. Elsie talked little and yet gave many interesting facts. + 

“Let me see,” said Mrs. Arb with a casual air. “It’s that Mr. Earlforward you say you work for in the mornings, isn’t it?” + 

“But I told you I did when you sent me in about the book, ’m. And I told you before that, too,” Elsie answered, surprised at such forgetfulness. + 

“Oh, of course you did. Well, does he live all alone?” + 

“Oh, yes, ’m.” + 

“And what sort of a gentleman is he?” + 

Elsie, instinctively loyal, grew cautious. + 

“He’s a very nice gentleman, ’m.” + 

“Treats you well, does he?” + 

“Well, of course, ’m, he has his ways. But he’s always very nice.” + 

“Nice and polite, eh?” + 

“Yes, ’m. And I’ll say this, too: he never tries to take any liberties. No, that he doesn’t!” + 

“And so he has his ways. Is he eccentric?” + 

“Oh, no, ’m! At least, I don’t know what you mean, ’m, I’m sure I don’t. He’s very particular in some things; but, then, in plenty of things he takes no notice of you, and you can do it or leave it as you choose.” Elsie suspected and mildly resented a mere inquisitiveness on the part of Mrs. Arb, and added quickly: “I think this floor’s about done.” + 

She wrung a cloth out in the pail at her right hand. The clock below struck its quick, wiry, reverberating note. It kept on striking. + 

“That’s never eleven o’clock!” Mrs. Arb exclaimed, completely aware that it was eleven o’clock. “How time flies when you’re hard at it, doesn’t it?” + 

Elsie silently disagreed with this proposition. In her experience of toil she had found that time lagged. + 

“Well, Elsie, I’m sure I’m much obliged to you. I can finish myself. Don’t you stay a minute longer.” + 

“No, ’m,” said Elsie, who had exchanged three hours’ overtime for sixpence and a slice of ham. + 

At this moment, and before Elsie had raised her damp knees from the damp floor, a very sharp and imperious tapping was heard. + 

“My gracious! Who’s that?” + 

“It’s the shop door,” said Elsie. + 

“I’ll go.” Mrs. Arb decided the procedure quite cheerfully. She was cheerful because the living room, with other rooms, was done, and in a condition fit to be seen by possible purchasers of her premises and business; she had no intention to live in the living room herself. And also she was cheerful because of a wild and silly, and yet not wholly silly, idea that the rapping at the shop door came from Mr. Earlforward, who had made for himself some absurd manlike excuse for calling again that night. She had, even thus early, her notions about Mr. Earlforward. The undying girl in her ran downstairs with a candle and unlocked the shop door. As she opened it a man pushed forward roughly into the shop⁠—not Mr. Earlforward; a young man with a dangerous look in his burning eyes, and gestures indicating dark excitement. + 

“What do you want?” she demanded, trying to control the situation firmly and not succeeding. + 

The young man glanced at her. She perceived that he carried a torn umbrella and that his clothes were very wet. She heard the heavy rain outside. + 

“You can’t come in here at this time of night,” she added. “The shop’s closed.” + 

She gave a sign for him to depart. She actually began to force him out; mere temerity on her part. She thought: + 

“Why am I doing this? He might attack me.” + 

Instead of departing the young man dropped his umbrella and sprang for the big carving-knife which she had left on the counter after cutting the slice of ham for Elsie. In that instant Mrs. Arb decided absolutely and without any further vacillation that she would sell the place, sell it at once, and for what it would fetch. Already she had been a little alarmed by the sinister aspect of several of her customers. She remembered the great Clerkenwell murder. She saw how foolish she had been ever to come to Clerkenwell at all. The man waved the carving-knife over his head and hers. + 

“Where’s Elsie?” he growled savagely, murderously. + 

Mrs. Arb began dimly to understand. + 

“This comes of taking charwomen you don’t know,” she said pathetically to herself. “And yet I could have sworn by that girl.” + 

Then a strong light shone in the doorway leading to the back room. Elsie stood there holding the wall-lamp in her hand. As soon as he caught sight of her the man, still brandishing the knife, ran desperately towards her. She hesitated and then retreated a little. The man plunged into the room and banged the door. + 

After that Mrs. Arb heard not a sound. She was nonplussed, helpless and panic-stricken. Ah! If the late Mr. Arb had been alive, how he would have handled the affair! Not by force, for he had never been physically strong. But by skill, by adroitness, by rapid chicane. Only she could not imagine precisely what the late Mr. Arb would have done in his unique and powerful sagacity. She was overwhelmed by a sudden and final sense of the folly, the tragedy, of solitary existence for a woman like her. She had wisdom, energy, initiative, moral strength, but there were things that women could do and things that women could not do; and a woman who was used to a man needed a man for all sorts of purposes, and she resolved passionately that she would not live alone another day longer than she could help. + 

This resolve, however, did not mitigate her loneliness in the candle-lit shop with the shut door in front of her hiding dreadful matters and the rain pelting on the flagstones of Riceyman Steps. She looked timidly forth; a policeman might by Heaven’s mercy be passing. If not, she must run in the wet, as she was, to the police-station. She then noticed a faint light in Mr. Earlforward’s shop, and dashed across. Through the window she could see Mr. Earlforward walking in his shop with a candle in his hand. She tattooed wildly on the window. A tramcar thundered down King’s Cross Road, tremendously heedless of murders. After a brief, terrible interval the lock of Mr. Earlforward’s portal grated, and Mr. Earlforward appeared blandly in the doorway holding the candle. + 

“Oh, Mr. Earlforward!” she cried, and stepped within, and clutched his sleeve and told him what had occurred. And as she poured out the words, and Mr. Earlforward kept apparently all his self-possession and bland calm, an exquisite and intense feeling of relief filled her whole being. + 

“I’ll come over,” said Mr. Earlforward. “Rather wet, isn’t it?” + 

He cut a fine figure in the eyes of Mrs. Arb. He owed his prestige at that moment, however, not to any real ability to decide immediately and courageously upon the right, effective course to follow, but to the simple fact that his reactions were very slow. Mr. Earlforward was always afraid after the event. He limped vigorously into the dangers of Mrs. Arb’s dwelling with his placidity undisturbed by the realization of those dangers. And he had no conception of what he should do. Mrs. Arb followed timorously. + 

The door into Mrs. Arb’s back room was now wide open; the lamp near the carving-knife burnt on the white table there. Also the candle was still burning in the shop, but the umbrella had vanished from the shop floor. The back room was empty. No symptom of murder, nor even of a struggle! Only the brief, faint rumble of an Underground train could be heard and felt in the silence. + 

“Perhaps he’s chased her upstairs.” + 

“I’ll go and see. Anyhow, he’s left the knife behind him.” Mr. Earlforward picked up the carving-knife, and thereby further impressed Mrs. Arb. + 

“Take the lamp,” said Mrs. Arb. + 

“Nobody up here!” he called from the first floor. Mrs. Arb ascended. Together they looked into each room. + 

“She’s taken her jacket!” exclaimed Mrs. Arb, noticing the empty peg behind the door when they came down again to the back room. + 

“Ah! That’s better,” Mr. Earlforward commented, expelling breath. + 

“I’ve left my candle lighted,” he said a moment later. “I’ll go and blow it out.” + 

“But⁠—” + 

“Oh! I’m coming back. I’m coming back.” + 

While he was gone Mrs. Arb had a momentary lapse into terror. Suppose⁠—! She glimpsed again the savage and primeval passion half-disclosed in the gestures and the glance of the young man, hints of forces uncontrollable, terrific and fatal. + 

“I expect he’s that young fellow that’s running after her,” said Mr. Earlforward when he returned. “Seems he’s had shell-shock! So I heard. She’ll have to leave him alone⁠—that’s clear!” He was glad to think that he had found a new argument to help him to persuade Elsie not to desert him. + 

“She seemed to be so respectable!” observed Mrs. Arb. + 

“Well, she is!” + 

“Poor girl!” sighed Mrs. Arb; she felt a genuine, perturbing compassion for Elsie. “Ought I to go and tell the police, Mr. Earlforward?” + 

“If I were you I shouldn’t have the police meddling. It’s all right.” + 

“Well, anyhow, I can’t pass the night here by myself. No, I can’t. And that’s flat!” She smiled almost comically. + 

“You go off to bed,” said Mr. Earlforward, with a magnificent wave of the hand. “I’ll make myself comfortable in this rocking-chair. I’ll stop till daylight.” + 

Mrs. Arb said that she couldn’t think of such a thing, and that he was too kind. He mastered her. Then she said she would put a bit of coal on the fire. + 

“You needn’t.” He stopped her. “I’ll go across and get my overcoat and a quilt, and lock up there. It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.” + 

He reappeared with his overcoat on and the quilt a little rain-spotted. Mrs. Arb was wearing a long thick mantle. + 

“What’s this?” he asked. “What’s the meaning of this?” + 

“I couldn’t leave you to sit up by yourself. I couldn’t, really. I’m going to sit up too.” + 

IX + 

Sunday Morning + 

“She never came to you this morning?” questioned Mr. Earlforward with eager and cheerful interest. + 

“No. Did she to you?” + 

Mr. Earlforward shook his head, smiling. + 

“You seem to be quite the philosopher about it,” said Mrs. Arb. “But it must be most inconvenient for a man.” + 

“Oh, no! I can always manage, I can.” + 

“Well, it’s very wonderful of you⁠—that’s all I say.” + 

This was Sunday morning, the third day after the episode of the carving-knife. + 

“What’s so funny,” said Mrs. Arb, “is that she should come yesterday and Friday, just as if nothing had happened, and yet she doesn’t come today! And yet it was settled plainly enough she was to come⁠—early, an hour to you and an hour to me, wasn’t it now? I do think she might have sent round a message or something⁠—even if she is ill.” + 

“Yes, but you see it never strikes them the inconvenience they’re causing. Not that she’s a bad girl. She’s a very good girl.” + 

“They always work better for gentlemen,” remarked Mrs. Arb with an air vivacious and enigmatic. + 

Mr. Earlforward, strolling towards the steps, had chanced⁠—if in this world there is such a thing as chance⁠—to see Mrs. Arb, all dressed, presumably, for church⁠—standing in her shop and regarding the same with the owner’s critical, appreciative eye. Mr. Earlforward had a good view of her, as anybody else might have had, because only the blue blind of the door was down, this being the recognized sufficient sign to the public of a shut shop. The two small windows had blinds, but they were seldom drawn, except to protect butter against sunshine. The pair had exchanged smiles, Mrs. Arb had hospitably unlocked, and Mr. Earlforward had entered. To him she presented a finely satisfactory appearance, dressed in black, with vermilion flowers in her hat, good shoes on her feet, and good uncreased gloves held in her ringed hand. She was slim⁠—Mr. Earlforward thought of her as petite⁠—but she was imposing, with all her keen restlessness of slight movements and her changing glance. No matter how her glance changed it was always the glance of authority and of intelligence. + 

On her part, Mrs. Arb beheld Mr. Earlforward with favour. His pointed short beard, so well trimmed, seemed to give him the status of a pillar of society. She still liked his full red lips and his fresh complexion. And he was exceedingly neat. True, he wore the same black, shirt-hiding tie as on weekdays, and his wristbands were still invisible; his hat and overcoat were not distinguished! But he had on a distinguished new blue suit; she was quite sure that he was inaugurating it that day. His slight limp pleased and touched her. His unshakable calmness impressed her. Oh! He was a man with reserves, both of character and of goods. Secure in these reserves he could front the universe. He was self-reliant without being self-confident. He was grave, but his little eyes had occasionally a humorous gleam. She had noticed the gleam even when he picked up the carving-knife on Thursday night. His demeanour in that dreadful crisis had been perfect. In brief, Mr. Earlforward, considered as an entity, was nearly faultless. + 

Mr. Earlforward, on the other hand, was still secretly trembling as he realized more and more clearly the dangers which he had narrowly escaped in the Thursday night affair; and he had not begun to tremble until Friday morning! + 

“Rather early, isn’t it, if you’re going to church?” he suggested. + 

“I always like to be early if it’s a strange church, and I’ve not been in there at all yet.” + 

“St. Andrew’s?” + 

“I don’t know what its name is. The one up the steps in the middle of the Square.” + 

“Yes. St. Andrew’s, that is.” + 

Without another word they then by a common impulse both moved out of the shop, which Mrs. Arb smartly locked up. In spite of the upset caused by Elsie’s defection, and the prospect of future trouble and annoyance in this connection, they were very happy, and they had quite overlooked the fact that their combined years amounted to ninety, or thereabouts. The sun was feebly shining on the Sabbath scene. The bells of St. Andrew’s were jangling. + 

“I see you have some plant-pots on your top windowsill,” observed Mrs. Arb. “Do you ever water them?” + 

An implied criticism! Mr. Earlforward enjoyed it, for it proved that they were getting intimate, as, indeed, became two people who had slept (well) opposite one another in two chairs through the better part of a coldish night. + 

“I do not,” said Mr. Earlforward, waggishly, stoutly. + 

The truth was that for years he had seen the plant-pots without noticing them. They were never moved, never touched. The unconquerable force of nature was illustrated in the simple fact that one or two of the plants still sturdily lived, displaying a grimy green. + 

“I love plants,” said Mrs. Arb. + 

They passed up the steps, Mr. Earlforward a foot or so behind his heroine. + 

“Now what I don’t understand,” said she, turning upon him and stopping, “is why the Square should be so much higher than the road. It means that all the carts and things, even the milk-carts, have to go all the way round by Gilbert Street to get into the Square from the side. Why couldn’t they have had it all on the same level?” + 

Exquisitely feminine, he thought! “Why couldn’t they have had it all on the same level?” Absurd! Delicious! He adored the delicious, girlish absurdity. + 

“Well,” he said. “It’s like this. You see, in the old days they used to make tiles in Clerkenwell, and they scooped out the clay for the tiles in large quantities⁠—and this is the result.” + 

With a certain eagerness he amplified the explanation. + 

“I should never have thought of that,” said Mrs. Arb ingenuously but archly. “What sort of church is St. Andrew’s?” + 

“Oh! It was built in the ’thirties and cost £4,541. Cheap! I doubt if you’d build it today for twenty thousand. Supposed to hold eleven hundred people.” + 

“Really! But I mean, is it High or Low, or Broad?” + 

“I haven’t the least idea,” answered Mr. Earlforward. “I did go in one day to look at the reredos to oblige a customer, but I’ve never been to a service.” He spoke jauntily. + 

“D’you know why I go to church⁠—when I do go?” said she. “Because it makes me feel nice. It’s a great comfort, especially when it’s a foggy day and you can’t see very well, and there’s not too many people. I don’t mean I like sermons. No. But what I say is, if you enjoy part of the service the least you can do is to stay it out. Don’t you agree?” She looked up at him, as it were appealing for approval. + 

Wonderful moments for Mr. Earlforward, and for Mrs. Arb too! + 

He thought to himself: + 

“She has a vigorous mind. Not one woman in a hundred would have said that. And so petite and smart too. It doesn’t really matter about her being only a confectioner.” + 

X + 

Riceyman Square + 

St. Andrew’s Church, of yellow bricks with freestone dressings, a blue slate roof, and a red coping, was designed and erected in the brilliant reign of William IV, whose Government, under Lord Grey, had a pious habit, since lost by governments, of building additional churches in populous parishes at its own expense. Unfortunately its taste in architecture was less laudable than its practical interest in the inculcation among the lowly of the Christian doctrine about the wisdom and propriety of turning the other cheek. St. Andrew’s, of a considerably mixed Gothic character, had architecturally nothing whatever to recommend it. Its general proportions, its arched windows, its mullions, its finials, its crosses, its spire, and its buttresses, were all and in every detail utterly silly and offensive. The eye could not rest anywhere upon its surface without pain. And time, which is supposed to soften and dignify all things, had been content in malice to cover St. Andrew’s with filth and ridicule. Out of the heights of the ignoble temple came persistent, monotonous, loud sounds, fantastic and nerve-racking, to match its architecture. The churchyard was a garden flanked by iron rails and by plane trees, upon which brutal, terrifying surgical operations had been performed. In the garden were to be seen the withering and melancholy but still beautiful blossoms of asters and tulips, a quantity of cultivated vegetables, dishevelled grass, some heaps of rubble, and patches of unproductive brown earth. Nobody might walk in the garden, whose gates were most securely padlocked. + 

Riceyman Square had been built round St. Andrew’s in the hungry ’forties. It had been built all at once, according to plan; it had form. The three-story houses (with areas and basements) were all alike, and were grouped together in sections by triangular pediments with ornamentations thereon in a degenerate Regency style. These pediments and the window-facings, and the whole walls up to the beginning of the first floor were stuccoed and painted. In many places the paint was peeling off and the stucco crumbling. The fronts of the doorsteps were green with vegetable growth. Some of the front doors and window-frames could not have been painted for fifteen or twenty years. All the horizontal lines in the architecture had become curved. Long cracks showed in the brickwork where two dwellings met. The fanlights and some of the iron work feebly recalled the traditions of the eighteenth century. The areas, except one or two, were obscene. The Square had once been genteel; it ought now to have been picturesque, but was not. It was merely decrepit, foul and slatternly. It had no attractiveness of any sort. Evolution had swirled round it, missed it, and left it. Neither electricity nor telephones had ever invaded it, and scores of windows still had Venetian blinds. All men except its inhabitants and the tax-collector, the rate-collector, and the school attendance officer had forgotten Riceyman Square. + 

It lay now frowsily supine in a needed Sunday indolence after the week’s hard labour. All the upper windows were shut and curtained, and most of the ground-floor windows. The rare glimpses of forlorn interiors were desolating. Not a child played in the roadways. But here and there a housewife had hung her doormats and canaries on the railings to take the holy Sabbath air; and newspapers, fresh as newly gathered fruit, waited folded on doorsteps for students of crime and passion to awake from their beds in darkened and stifling rooms. Also little milk-cans with tarnished brass handles had been suspended in clusters on the railings. Cats only, in their elegance and their detached disdain, rose superior to the terrific environment. The determined church bells ceaselessly jangled. + 

“The church is rather nice,” said Mrs. Arb. “But what did I tell you about the Square?” + 

“Wait a moment! Wait a moment,” replied Mr. Earlforward. “Let us walk round, shall we?” + 

They began to walk round. Presently Mr. Earlforward stopped in front of a house which had just been painted, to remind the spectator of the original gentility of the hungry ’forties. + 

“No broken panes there, I think,” he remarked triumphantly. + 

Mrs. Arb’s glance searched the façade for even a cracked pane, and found none. She owed him a shilling. + 

“Well,” she said, somewhat dashed, but still briskly. “Of course there was bound to be one house that was all right. Don’t they say it’s the exception proves the rule?” + 

He understood that he would not receive his shilling, and he admired her the more for her genial feminine unscrupulousness. + 

At the corner of Gilbert Street Mrs. Arb suddenly burst out laughing. + 

“I hadn’t noticed we had any Savoys up here!” she said. + 

Painted over the door of the corner house were the words “Percy’s Hotel.” + 

The house differed in no other detail from the rest of the Square. + 

“I wonder if they have any self-contained suites?” + 

Mr. Earlforward was about to furnish the history of this singular historic survival, when they both, almost simultaneously, through a large interstice of the curtains, noticed Elsie sitting and rocking gently by the ground-floor window of a house near to Percy’s Hotel. Her pale face was half turned within the room, and its details obscure in the twilight of the curtained interior; but there could be no mistake about her identity. + 

“Is it here she lives?” said Mrs. Arb. + 

“I suppose so. I know she lives somewhere in the Square, but I never knew the number.” + 

The front door of the house opened and Dr. Raste emerged, fresh, dapper, prim, correct, busy, speeding without haste, the incarnation of the professional. You felt that he would have emerged from Buckingham Palace in just the same manner. To mark the Sabbath, which his ceaseless duties forbade him to honour otherwise, he wore a silk hat. This hat he raised on perceiving Mr. Earlforward and a lady; and he raised also, though scarcely perceptibly, his eyebrows. + 

“You been to see my charwoman, doctor?” Mr. Earlforward urbanely stopped him. + 

Dr. Raste hesitated a moment. + 

“Your charwoman? Ah, yes. I did happen to see her. Yes.” + 

“Ah! Then she is unwell. Nothing serious, I hope?” + 

“No, no!” said the doctor, his voice rather higher than usual. “She’ll be all right tomorrow. A mere nothing. An excellent constitution, I should imagine.” + 

A strictly formal reply, if very courteous. Probably nobody in Clerkenwell, except perhaps his man Joe, knew how Dr. Raste talked and looked when he was not talking and looking professionally. Dr. Raste would sometimes say with a dry, brief laugh, “we medicoes,” thereby proclaiming a caste, an order, a clan, separated by awful, invisible, impregnable barriers from the common remainder of mankind; and he never stepped beyond the barriers into humanity. In his case the secret life of the brain was indeed secret, and the mask of the face, tongue and demeanour made an everlasting privacy. He cleared his throat. + 

“Yes, yes.⁠ ⁠… By the way, I’ve been reading that Shakespeare. Very fine, very fine. I shall read it all one of these days. Good morning.” He raised his hat again and departed. + 

“I shall go in and see her, poor thing!” said Mrs. Arb with compassion. + 

“Shall you?” + 

“Well, I’m here. I think it would be nice if I did, don’t you?” + 

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Earlforward admiringly agreed. + 

XI + 

Elsie’s Home + 

The house which Mrs. Arb decided to enter had a full, but not an extraordinary, share of experience of human life. There were three floors of it. On the ground floor lived a meat-salesman, his wife and three children, the eldest of whom was five years of age. Three rooms and some minute appurtenances on this floor. The meat-salesman shouted and bawled cheap bits of meat in an open-fronted shop in Exmouth Street during a sixty-hour week which ended at midnight on Saturday. He possessed enormous vocal power. All the children out of naughtiness had rickets. On the first floor lived a french-polisher, his wife and two children, the eldest of whom was three years of age. One child less than the ground-floor family, but the first floor was about to get level in numbers. Three rooms and some minute appurtenances on this floor. The french-polisher worked only forty-four hours a week. His fingers wore always the colour of rosewood, and he emitted an odour which often competed not unsuccessfully with the characteristic house odour of stale soapsuds. Out of ill-will for mankind he had an everlasting cough. On the second floor lived a middle-aged dressmaker, alone. Three rooms and some minute appurtenances on this floor. Nobody but an occasional customer was ever allowed access to the second floor. + 

Elsie was a friend of the french-polisher’s wife, and she slept in the infinitesimal back room of the first floor with the elder child of the family. She paid three shillings a week for this accommodation, and also helped with the charing and the laundry work of the floor⁠—in her spare time. + 

Except Elsie, the adult inhabitants of the house were always unhappy save when drinking alcohol or making love. Although they had studied Holy Scripture in youth, and there were at least three Bibles in the house, they had failed to cultivate the virtue of Christian resignation. They permitted trifles to annoy them. On the previous day the wife of the meat-salesman had been upset because her “copper” leaked, and because she could never for a moment be free of her own children, and because it was rather difficult to turn her perambulator through the kitchen doorway into an entrance-hall three feet wide, and because she had to take all three children with her to market, and because the eldest child, cleanly clad, had fallen into a puddle and done as much damage to her clothes as would take a whole day to put right, and because another child, teething, would persistently cry, and because the landlord of the house was too poor to do necessary repairs, and because she could not buy a shilling’s worth of goods with sixpence, and because her payments to the Provident Club were in arrear, and because the sunshine made her hat look shabby, and for many other equally inadequate reasons. + 

As for the french-polisher’s wife, she moped and grew neurotic because only three years ago she had been a pretty girl earning an independent income, and because she was now about to bear another pledge of the french-polisher’s affection, and because she felt sick and frequently was sick, and because she had no money for approaching needs, and because she hated cooking and washing, and because her husband spent his evenings and the purchase-money of his children’s and his wife’s food at a political club whose aim was to overthrow the structure of society, and because she hated her husband’s cough and his affection, and because she could see no end to her misery, and because she had prophetic visions of herself as a hag with five hundred insatiable children everlastingly in tears for something impossible to obtain for them. + 

The spinster on the second floor was profoundly and bitterly dissatisfied for the mere reason that she was a spinster; whereas the other two women would have sold their souls to be spinsters. + 

The centre of irritation in the house was the entrance-hall, or lobby, which the first floor and ground floor had to keep clean in alternate weekly spells. On the previous day one of the first-floor children had dragged treacly fingers along the dark yellowish-brown wall. Further, the first-floor perambulator had been brought in with muddy wheels, and the marks had dried on the linoleum, which was already a palimpsest of various unclean deposits. This perambulator was the origin of most of the lobby trouble. The ground floor resented its presence there, and the second floor purposely knocked it about at every passage through the lobby; but the mistress of the first floor obstinately objected to carrying it up and down stairs once or twice a day. + 

A great three-corner quarrel had arisen on the Saturday morning around the first-floor perambulator and the entrance-hall, and when the french-polisher arrived home for his dinner shortly after one o’clock he had found no dinner, but a wife-helpmeet-cook-housekeeper-maidservant in hysterics. Very foolishly he had immediately gone forth again with all his wages. At eleven-thirty p.m. he had returned intoxicated and acutely dyspeptic. At a quarter to twelve he had tried to fight Elsie. At twelve-thirty the meat-salesman had come home to sleep, and had had to listen to a loud sermon on the manners of the first-floor and his own wife’s manners delivered from the top of the second-floor stairs. Subsequently he had had to listen to moans from the mistress of the first floor and the eternal coughing of the master of the first floor.⁠ ⁠… And all about nothing! Yet every one of the adults was well acquainted with the admirable text which exhorted Christians to bear one another’s burdens. A strange houseful! But there were some scores of such housefuls in Riceyman Square, and a £4,500 church in the midst. + 

Sunday morning always saw the adults of Elsie’s household in a paradisaical coma. Elsie alone was afoot. On this particular Sunday morning she kept an eye on the two elder children, who were playing quietly in the murky autumnal darkness of the walled backyard. Elsie had herself summarily dressed them. The other three children had been doped⁠—or, as the advertisements phrased it, “soothed”⁠—so that while remaining in their beds they should not disturb the adults. The adults slept. They embraced sleep passionately, voraciously, voluptuously. Their sole desire in those hours was to find perfect unconsciousness and rest. If they turned over they snatched again with terrible greed at sleep. They wanted it more than love and more than beer. They would have committed crimes for it. Even the prospective mother slept, in a confusion of strange dreams. + 

There was a loud, heavy knocking on the warped and shabby door of the house of repose. It shook the house. The children in the yard, thunderstruck by the outrage, stopped playing. Elsie ran in alarm through the back passage and the lobby and opened the front door. Joe stood there, the worried, mad look, which Elsie knew so well, on his homely face. She was frightened, but held herself together, and shook her head sadly and decisively. As a result of the episode of the carving-knife she had banished him from her presence for one week, which had yet by no means expired. It seemed odd that Elsie, everybody’s slave, should exercise an autocratic dominion over Joe; but she did. She knew her power and divined that she must use it, if Joe was ever to get well of his mysterious mental malady. And now, though she wished that she had sentenced him to only three days’ banishment instead of seven, she would not yield and correct her error, for she felt that to do so would impair her authority. + 

Moreover, Joe had no right to molest her at home. She had her reputation to think of, and her reputation, in her loyal and ingenuous mind, was his reputation also. Therefore, with woe in her heart she began to close the door on Joe. Joe, rendered savage by a misery which he could not define, put his foot in the aperture and then forced the door backwards and lunged his desecrating body inside the sacred Sunday morning temple of sleep. (A repetition of his procedure of the previous Thursday night.) The two stood close together. He could not meet her fixed gaze. His eyes glanced restlessly and wildly round, at the foul walls, the gritty and soiled floor. + 

“Get out of this, my boy.” + 

“Let me kiss you,” he demanded harshly. + 

“Get out of it.” + 

Losing what little remained of his self-control, he hit Elsie a strong blow on the shoulder. She was not ready for it. In the idiom of the ring her “footwork” was bad, and she lost her balance, falling against the french-polisher’s perambulator, which crashed violently into the stairs like an engine into a stationary buffer. Elsie’s head caught the wheel of the perambulator. A great shrill scream arose; the children had followed Elsie out of the yard and witnessed the fall of their beloved slave. Joe, appalled at the consequences of his passion, ran off, banging the door behind him with a concussion which shook the house afresh and still more awakeningly. Two mothers recognized the howls of their children. The spinster on the second floor saw a magnificent opportunity for preaching from a point of vantage her views on the state of modern society. Two fathers, desperate with exasperation, but drawn by the mighty attraction of a good row, jumped murderous from their warm and fetid beds. Two half-clad figures appeared in the doorways of the ground-floor rooms and three on the stairs. + 

Elsie sat up, dazed, and then stood up, then sank limply down again. One mother smacked her child and a child which was not hers. The other mother protested furiously from the stairs. The paradise of Sunday morning lay shattered. The meat-salesman had sense, heart, and initiative. He took charge of Elsie. The hellish din died down. A few minutes later Elsie was seated in the rocking-chair by the window in his front room. She wept apologetically. Little was said, but all understood that Elsie’s fantastic sweetheart had behaved disgracefully, and all indicated their settled opinion that if she kept on with him he would murder her one of these days. Three-quarters of an hour later Dr. Raste calmly arrived. Joe had run to the surgery and shouted at him: “I’ve killed her, sir.” The meat-salesman, having himself lighted a bit of a fire, left the room while the doctor examined the victim. The doctor could find nothing but one bruise on the front of Elsie’s left shoulder. With a splendid gesture of devotion the meat-salesman’s wife gave her second child’s warm milk to the reluctant Elsie. There happened to be no other stimulant in the house. Peace was reestablished, and even slumber resumed. + 

XII + 

The Benefactress + 

The front door was opened to Mrs. Arb’s quiet knock by the oldest child in the house, an obstreperous boy of five, who was suddenly struck sheepish and mute by the impressive lady on the doorstep. He said nothing at all in reply to Mrs. Arb’s request to see Elsie, but sidled backwards along the lobby and opened a door, looking up at her with the most crude curiosity. As soon as she had gone into the room and the inhibition was lifted, he ran off to the yard raising his heels high and laughing boisterously. + 

The room in which Elsie had been installed was crowded and overcrowded with the possessions of the meat-salesman and his wife. The walls were covered from cornice to near the floor with coloured supplements from Christmas numbers, either in maple-wood frames or unframed; a wonderful exhibition of kindly sentiment: the innocence of children, the purity of lovers, the cohesion of families, the benevolence of old age, immense meals served in interiors of old oak, landscapes where snow lay in eternal whiteness on church steeples, angels, monks, blacksmiths, coach-drivers, souls awakening: indeed, a vast and successful effort to convince the inhabitants of Riceyman Square that Riceyman Square was not the only place on earth. The display undoubtedly unbent, diverted, and cheered the mind. In between the chromatic prints were grey, realistic photographs of people who really existed or had existed. The mantelpiece was laden with ornaments miscalled “china,” standing on bits of embroidery. The floor was covered with oddments of carpet. There were many chairs, unassorted; there was a sofa; there was a cradle; there was a sewing-machine; there was a clotheshorse, on which a man’s blue apron with horizontal white stripes was spread out. There were several tables, including a small walnut octagonal table, once a lady’s worktable, which stood in the window and upon which a number of cloth-bound volumes of Once a Week were piled carefully, corkscrew-wise. And there was a wardrobe, also a number of kitchen utensils. The place was encumbered with goods, all grimy as the walls and ceilings, many of them cracked and worn like the woodwork and paint, but proving triumphantly that the meat-salesman had no commerce with pawnbrokers. + 

“I thought I should like to come round and see how you are, Elsie,” said Mrs. Arb kindly and forgivingly. “No, don’t get up. I can see you aren’t well. I’ll sit here.” + 

Elsie blushed deeply. + 

“I’ve had a bit of trouble, ’m,” she apologetically murmured. + 

Elsie’s trouble was entirely due to Mrs. Arb’s demand for overtime from her on Thursday night. Mrs. Arb had not considered the convenience nor the private life of this young woman whose services made daily existence tolerable for her and for Mr. Earlforward. The young woman had consequently found herself in a situation of the gravest difficulty and of some danger. Hence the young woman was apologetic and Mrs. Arb forgiving. Elsie admitted to herself a clear failure of duty with its sequel of domestic embarrassment for her employers, and she dismissed as negligible the excuses which she might have offered. Nor did she dream of criticizing Mrs. Arb. She never consciously criticized anyone but Elsie. And yet somewhere in the unexplored arcana of her mind lay hidden a very just estimate of Mrs. Arb. Strange! No, not strange! A quite common phenomenon in the minds of the humble and conscientious! + 

“Was the trouble over that young man?” asked Mrs. Arb. “Not that I want to be inquisitive!” + 

Elsie began to cry. She nodded, unable for the moment to speak. The sound of a snore came through the wall from the next room. There were muffled noises overhead. Mrs. Arb grew aware that a child had peeped in upon her and Elsie. The church bells, after a few single notes, ceased to ring. + 

“I suppose you couldn’t have sent somebody across to tell me you weren’t coming?” Mrs. Arb suggested. Elsie shook her head. “Shall you come tomorrow?” + 

“Oh, yes, ’m. I shall come tomorrow⁠—and punctual.” + 

“Well, Elsie, don’t think I’m interfering, but don’t you think you’d better give him up? Two upsets in three days, you know.” (Four days Mrs. Arb ought to have said; but in these details she took the licence of an artist.) “I haven’t said a word to you about Thursday night, have I? I didn’t want to worry you. I knew you’d had worry enough. But I don’t mind telling you now that I was very much upset and frightened, as who wouldn’t be!⁠ ⁠… What do you want with men? They’ll never be any good to you⁠—that is, if you value a quiet life and a good name. I’m telling you for your own sake. I like you, and I’d like you to be happy and respectable.” Mrs. Arb seemed to have forgotten that she was addressing a widow and not a young girl. + 

“Oh, ’m. I’m giving him up. I’ll never have anything to do with him again. Never!” Elsie burst out, with intense tragedy in her soul. + 

“That’s right! I’m glad to hear it,” said Mrs. Arb with placidity. “And if you really mean it the people that employ you will be able to trust and rely on you again. It’s the only way.” + 

“Oh, I’m so ashamed, ’m!” said Elsie, with the puckered brow of conscientiousness. “ ’Specially seeing I couldn’t let you know. Nor Mr. Earlforward, either! But it won’t occur again, ’m, and I hope you’ll forgive me.” + 

“Please, please!” Mrs. Arb exclaimed magnanimously, protesting against this excess of remorse and penitence. “I only thought I’d call to inquire.” After Mrs. Arb had gone out to dally with a man and to reassure him with the news that everything would be all right and they had nothing to fear, the boy crept into the front room with a piece of bread and jam in his sticky hand. He silently offered the morsel to Elsie, who leaned forward as he held it up to her and bit off a corner to please him. She smiled at him; then broke into a sob, and choked and clutched him violently, bread and jam and all, and there was a dreadful mess. + 

XIII + 

The Passion + 

“I think I’ve put her straight,” said Mrs. Arb very cheerfully to Mr. Earlforward, out in the Square, and gave him an account of the interview. + 

Mr. Earlforward’s mind was much relieved. He admired Mrs. Arb greatly in that moment. He himself could never have put Elsie straight. There were things that a woman, especially a capable and forceful woman, could do which no man could possibly do. “Forceful”! Perhaps a sinister adjective to attach to a woman. Yes. But the curious point about this woman was that she was also feminine. Forceful, she could yet (speaking metaphorically) cling and look up. And also she could look down in a most enchanting and disturbing way. She had done it a number of times to Mr. Earlforward. Now Mr. Earlforward, from the plenitude of his inexperience of women, knew them deeply. He knew their characteristic defects and shortcomings. And it seemed to him that Mrs. Arb was remarkably free from such. It seemed to him, as it has seemed to millions of men, that he had had the luck to encounter a woman who miraculously combined the qualities of two sexes, and the talent to recognize the miracle on sight. He would not go so far as to assert that Mrs. Arb was unique (though he strongly suspected that she must be), but there could not be many Mrs. Arbs on earth. He was very happy in youthful dreams of a new and idyllic existence. His sole immediate fear was that he would be compelled to go to church with her. He knew them; they were queer on religious observances. Of course it was because, as she had half admitted, they liked to feel devotional. But you could do nothing with a woman in church. And he could not leave her to go to church alone.⁠ ⁠… He was unhappy. + 

“I’m afraid that service of yours has begun,” said he. “I saw quite a number of people going in while you were talking to Elsie.” + 

“I’m afraid it has,” she replied. He saw a glint of hope. + 

“It’s a nice fresh morning,” said he daringly. “And what people like you and me need is fresh air. I suppose you wouldn’t care for me to show you some bits of Clerkenwell?” + 

“I think I should,” said she. “I could go to service tonight, couldn’t I?” + 

Triumph! Undoubtedly she was unique. + 

Both quite forgetting once more that they would never again see forty, they set off with the innocent ardour of youth. + 

“You know,” said Mrs. Arb, returning to the great subject, “I told her plainly she’d be much better off if she kept off men. And so she will!” + 

“They never know when they are well off,” said Mr. Earlforward. + 

“No⁠ ⁠… I expect this Square used to belong to your family,” Mrs. Arb remarked with deference. + 

“Oh! I shouldn’t say that,” answered Mr. Earlforward modestly. “But it was named after my grandfather’s brother.” + 

“It must have been very nice when it was new,” said Mrs. Arb, tactfully adopting towards the Square a more respectful attitude than aforetime. Clearly she desired to please. Clearly she had a kind heart. “But when the working-class get a hold on a place, what are you to do?” + 

“You’d scarcely think it,” said Mr. Earlforward with grim resignation, “but this district was very fashionable once. There used to be an archery ground where our steps are.” (He enjoyed saying “our steps,” the phrase united him to her.) + 

“Really!” + 

“Yes. And at one time the Duke of Newcastle lived just close by. Look here. I’ll show you something. It’s quite near.” + 

In a few minutes they were at the corner of a vast square⁠—you could have put four Riceymans into it⁠—of lofty reddish houses, sombre and shabby, with a great railed garden and great trees in the middle, and a wide roadway round. With all its solidity, in that neighbourhood it seemed to have the unreal quality of a vision, a creation of some djinn, formed in an instant and destined as quickly to dissolve; it seemed to have no business where it was. + 

“Look at that!” said Mr. Earlforward eagerly, pointing to the sign, “Wilmington Square.” “Ever heard of it before?” + 

Mrs. Arb shook her astonished head. + 

“No. And nobody has. But it’s here. That’s London, that is! Practically every house has been divided up into tenements. Used to be very well-to-do people here, you know!” + 

Mrs. Arb gazed at him sadly. + 

“It’s tragic!” she said sympathetically, her bright face troubled. + 

“She understands!” he thought. + 

“Now I’ll show you another sort of a square,” he went on aloud. “But it’s over on the other side of Farringdon Road. Not far! Not far! No distances here!” + 

He limped quickly along. + 

Coldbath Square easily surpassed even Riceyman Square in squalor and foulness; and it was far more picturesque and deeper sunk in antiquity, save for the huge, awful block of tenements in the middle. The glimpses of interiors were appalling. At the corners stood sinister groups of young men, mysteriously well dressed, doing nothing whatever, and in certain doorways honest-faced old men with mufflers round their necks and wearing ancient pea-jackets. + 

“I don’t like this at all,” said Mrs. Arb, as it were sensitively shrinking. + 

“No! This is a bit too much, isn’t it? Let’s go on to the Priory Church.” + 

“Yes. That will be better,” Mrs. Arb agreed with relief at the prospect of a Priory Church. + 

“Oh! There’s a News of the World!” she exclaimed. “Now I wonder⁠—” + 

They were passing through a narrow, very short alley of small houses which closed the vista of one of the towering congeries of modern tenement-blocks abounding in the region. The alley, christened a hundred years earlier, “Model Cottages,” was silent and deserted, in strange contrast to the gigantic though half-hidden swarming of the granite tenements. The front doors abutted on the alley without even the transition of a raised step. The News of the World lay at one of the front doors. It must have been there for hours, waiting for its subscriber to awake, and secure in the marvellous integrity of the London public. + 

“I did want just to look at a News of the World,” said Mrs. Arb, stopping. + 

They had seen various newsvendors in the streets; in fact, newspapers were apparently the only articles of commerce at that hour of the Sunday morning; but she had no desire to buy a paper. Glancing round fearfully at windows, she stooped and picked up the folded News of the World. Mr. Earlforward admired her, but was apprehensive. + 

“Yes. Here it is!” she said, having rapidly opened the paper. Over her shoulder Mr. Earlforward nervously read: “Provisions. Confec. Busy W.C. district. £25 wkly. Six rooms. Rent £90. £200 everything. Long lease, or will sell premises. Delay dangerous. Chance lifetime. 7, Riceyman Steps, W.C.1.” + 

“Then you’ve decided!” murmured Mr. Earlforward, suddenly gloomy. + 

“Oh! Quite! I told you,” said Mrs. Arb, dropping back the newspaper furtively like a shameful accusing parcel, and walking on with a wonderful air of innocence. + 

“I wasn’t altogether sure if you’d decided finally.” + 

“You see,” Mrs. Arb continued. “Supposing the business failed. Supposing I lost my money. I’ve got to think of my future. No risks for me, I say! I only want a little, but I want it certain. And I’ve got a little.” + 

“It’s a very clever advertisement.” + 

“I didn’t know how to put it. Of course it’s called a confectioner’s. But it isn’t really, seeing I buy all the cakes from Snowman’s. The whole stock in the shop isn’t worth £25, but you see, I count the rest of the price asked as premium for the house. That’s how I look at it⁠—and it’s quite fair, don’t you think?” + 

“Perfectly.” + 

They stood talking in front of a shut secondhand shop, where old blades of aeroplane propellers were offered at 3s. 6d. each. Mr. Earlforward said feebly “Yes” and “No” and “Hm” and “Ha.” His brain was occupied with the thought: “Is she going to slip through my fingers? Suppose she went to live in the country?” His knee began to ache. His body and his mind were always reacting upon one another. “Why should my knee ache because I’m bothered?” he thought, and could give no answer. But in secret he was rather proud of these mysterious inconvenient reactions; they gave him distinction in his own eyes. In another environment he would have been known among his acquaintances as “highly strung” and “highly nervously organized.” And yet outwardly so calm, so serene, so even-tempered! + 

They got to the quarter of the great churches. + 

“Would you care to go in?” he asked her in front of St. James’s. For he desired beyond almost anything to sit down. + 

“I think it’s really too late now,” she replied. “It wouldn’t be quite nice to go in just at the end of the sermon, would it? Too conspicuous.” + 

There were seats in the churchyard, but all were occupied, despite the chilliness of the morning, by persons who, for private reasons, had untimely left their beds. Moreover, he felt that Mrs. Arb, whose niceties he much admired, would not like to sit in a churchyard with service proceeding in the church. He had begun to understand her. There were no seats round about St. John’s. Mr. Earlforward stood on one leg while Mrs. Arb deciphered the tablet on the west front: + 

“ ‘The Priory Church of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, consecrated by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, 10th March, 1185.’ Fancy that, now! It doesn’t look quite that old. Fancy them knowing the day of the month too!” + 

He was too preoccupied and tortured to instruct her. He would have led her home then; but she saw in the distance at the other side of St. John’s Square a view of St. John’s Gate, the majestic relic of the Priory. Quite properly she said that she must see it close. Quite properly she thanked him for a most interesting promenade, most interesting. + 

“And me living in London off and on all my life! They do say you can’t see the wood for the trees, don’t they?” + 

But the journey across the huge irregular Square cut in two by a great avenue was endless to Mr. Earlforward. Then she must needs go under the gateway into a street that seemed to fascinate her. For there was an enormous twilit shoeing-forge next door to the Chancery of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and though it was Sunday morning the air rang with the hammering of a blacksmith who held a horse’s hind leg between his knees. Then she caught the hum of unseen machinery and inquired about it. Then the signs over the places of business attracted her; she became charmingly girlish. + 

“ ‘Rouge. Wholesale only.’ ‘Glass matchers to the trade.’ ‘I want five million moleskins and ten million rabbitskins. Do not desert your old friend. Cash on the nail.’ And painted too, on a board! Not just written! ‘Gorgonzola cheese manufacturers.’ Oh! The mere thought of it! No, I shall never touch Gorgonzola again after this! I couldn’t! But, of course, I see there must be places like these in a place like London. Only it’s too funny seeing them all together. ‘Barclay’s Bank.’ Well, it would be! Those banks are everywhere in these days. I do believe there are more banks than A.B.C. shops and Lyonses. You look at any nice corner site, and before you can say knife there’s a bank on it. I mistrust those banks. They do what they like. When I go into my bank somehow they make me feel as if I’d done something wrong, or at least, I’d better mind what I was about; and they look at you superior as if you were asking a favour. Oh, very polite! But so condescending.” + 

A shrewd woman! A woman certainly not without ideas! And he perceived, dimly through the veil of his physical pain, that their intimacy was developing on the right lines. He would have been joyous but for the apprehension of her selling the business and vanishing from him, and but for the pain. The latter was now the worst affliction. Riceyman Steps seemed a thousand miles off, through a Sabbath-enchanted desert of stone and asphalt. + 

When they returned into St. John’s Square a taxicab with its flag up stood terribly inviting. Paradise, surcease from agony, for one shilling and perhaps a twopenny tip! But he would not look at it. He could not. He preferred the hell in which he was. The grand passion which had rendered all his career magnificent, and every hour of all his days interesting and beautiful, demanded and received an intense, devotional loyalty; it recompensed him for every ordeal, mortification, martyrdom. He proudly passed the taxicab with death in his very stomach. Nowhere was there a chance of rest! Not a seat! Not a rail! Mrs. Arb had inveighed against the lack of amenities in the parish and district. No cinemas, no theatre, no music-halls, no cafés! But Mr. Earlforward realized the ruthless, stony, total inhospitality of the district far more fully than Mrs. Arb could ever have done. He was like a weakening bird out of sight of land above the surface of the ocean. + 

He led Mrs. Arb down towards the nearest point of Farringdon Road, though this was not the shortest way home. The tramcars stopped at the corner. Every one of them would deposit him at his own door. Paradise for one penny! No, twopence; because he would have to pay for Mrs. Arb! He had thought to defeat his passion at this corner. He was mistaken. He could not. He had, after all his experience, misjudged the power of his passion. He was as helpless as the creatures who were beginning to gather at the iron-barred doors of the public-houses, soon to open for a couple of too short hours; and also he had the secret ecstasy which they had. He could scarcely talk now, and each tram that passed him in his slow and endless march gave him a spasm of mingled bitterness and triumph. His fear now was lest his grand passion should on this occasion be overcome by bodily weakness. He did not desire it to be overcome. He desired it to conquer even if it should kill him. + 

“I’m afraid I’ve walked you too far,” said Mrs. Arb. + 

“Why?” + 

“I thought you were limping a bit.” + 

“Oh no! I always limp a bit. Accident. Long time ago.” And he smartened his gait. + 

They reached Riceyman Steps in silence. He had done it! His passion had forced him to do it! His passion had won! There were two Mr. Earlforwards: one splendidly uplifted, the other ready to faint from pain and fatigue. The friends disappeared, each into the solitude of his own establishment. In the afternoon Mr. Earlforward heard a sharp knock on his front door; it was repeated before he could get downstairs; and when he opened the door he opened it to nobody; but Mrs. Arb was just entering her shop. He called out, and she returned. + 

“I was a bit anxious about your leg,” she said, so brightly and kindly, “so I thought I’d step across and inquire.” + 

“Quite all right again now, thank you.” (An exaggeration.) + 

How delightful of her! How feminine! He could hardly believe it! He was tremendously flattered. She could not after all slip through his fingers, whatever happened! They chatted for a few moments, and then each disappeared a second time into the recondite, inviolate solitude of his own establishment. + 

XIV + 

A Man’s Private Life + 

One morning in November, at a little past eight o’clock, Mrs. Arb, watching from behind the door of her yet unopened shop, saw Mr. Earlforward help Elsie to carry out the empty bookstand and set it down in front of the window, and then, with overcoat, muffler and umbrella, depart from Riceyman Steps on business. Mrs. Arb immediately unlocked her door, went out just as she was⁠—hatless, coatless, gloveless, wearing a white apron⁠—locked her door, and walked across to Mr. Earlforward’s. Elsie had already begun to fill the bookstand with books which overnight had been conveniently piled near the entrance of the shop. + 

“Good morning, Elsie. Dull morning, isn’t it? Is master up yet?” said Mrs. Arb vivaciously, rubbing her hands in the chilly, murky dawn, and brightening the dawn. + 

“Oh, ’m! He’s gone out. I don’t expect him back till eleven. It’s one of his buying mornings, ye see.” + 

“Oh, dear, dear!” Mrs. Arb exclaimed, with cheerful resignation. “And I’ve only got ten minutes. Well, I haven’t really got that. Shop ought to be open now. But I thought I’d let ’em wait a bit this morning.” + 

She glanced anxiously at her own establishment to see whether any customer had come down the steps from the square. But, in truth, as she had now sold the business, and the premises, and was to give possession in a few weeks, she was not genuinely concerned about the possible loss of profit on an ounce or two ounces of tea. She wandered with apparent aimlessness into Mr. Earlforward’s shop. + 

“Did you want to see him particular, ’m?” + 

“I won’t say so particular as all that. So you look after the shop when Mr. Earlforward is out, Elsie?” + 

“It’s like this, ’m. All the books is marked inside, and some outside. If anybody comes in that looks respectable, I ask ’em to look round for themselves, and if they take a book they pay me, and I ask ’em to write down the name of it on a bit of paper.” She pointed to some small memorandum sheets prepared from old unassorted envelopes which had been cut open and laid flat, with pencil close by. “If it’s some regular customer like, that must see Mr. Earlforward himself, I ask ’em to write their names down. And if I don’t like the look of anybody, I tell ’em I don’t know anything, and out they go.” + 

“What a good arrangement!” said Mrs. Arb approvingly. “But if you have to attend to the shop, how can you do the cleaning and so on?” + 

Elsie’s ingenuous, kind face showed distress; her dark-blue eyes softened in solicitude. + 

“Ah, ’m! There you’ve got me. I can’t. I can only clean the shop these mornings, and not much of that neither, because I must keep my hands dry for customers.” + 

Mrs. Arb, vaguely smiling to herself, trotted to and fro in the gloomy shop, which had the air of a crypt, except that in these days crypts are usually lighted by electricity, and the shop was lighted by nature alone on this dark morning. She peered, bending forward, into the dark spaces between the bays, and descried the heaps of books on the floor. The dirt and the immense disorder almost frightened her. She had not examined the inside of the shop before⁠—had, indeed, previously entered it only once, when she was in no condition to observe. Mr. Earlforward had never seized an occasion to invite her within. + 

“This will want some putting straight,” she said, “if ever it is put straight.” + 

“And well you may say it, ’m,” Elsie replied compassionately. “He’s always trying to get straight, ’specially lately, ’m. We did get one room straight upstairs, but it meant letting all the others go. Between you and me, he’ll never get straight. But he has hopes, and it’s no use saying anything to him.” + 

“I suppose you can do this room, too, on his buying mornings,” said Mrs. Arb, peeping into Mr. Earlforward’s private back room from which the shop and the shop-door could be kept under observation. + 

“Oh, ’m! He wouldn’t let me. He won’t have anything touched in that room.” + 

“Then who does it?” + 

“He does it himself, ’m⁠—when it is done.” + 

“Does he!” murmured Mrs. Arb in a peculiar tone. + 

The bookshelves went up to the ceiling on every side. The floor was thickly strewn with books, the table also. Chairs also. The blind lay crumpled on the book-covered windowsill. The window was obscured by dirt. The ceiling was a blackish-grey. A heavy deposit of black dust covered all things. The dreadful den expressed intolerably to Mrs. Arb the pathos of the existence of a man who is determined to look after himself. It convicted a whole sex of being feckless, foolish, helpless, infantile, absurd. Mrs. Arb and Elsie exchanged glances. Elsie blushed. + 

“Yes. I’m that ashamed of it, ’m!” said Elsie. “But you know what they are!” + 

Mrs. Arb gave two short nods. She moved her hand as if to plumb the layer of dust with one feminine finger, but refrained; she dared not. + 

“And do you do his cooking, too?” she asked. + 

“Well, ’m. He gets his own breakfast, and he makes his own bed⁠—it’s always done before I come of a morning⁠—and he cleans his own boots. I begin his dinner, but, seeing as I go at twelve, he finishes it. He gets his own tea. I must say he isn’t what you call a big eater.” + 

“Seems to me it’s all very cleverly organized.” + 

“Oh, it is, ’m! There’s not many gentlemen could manage as he does. But it’s a dreadful pity. Makes me fair cry sometimes. And him so clean and neat himself, too.” + 

“Yes,” said Mrs. Arb, agreeing that the contrast between the master and his home was miraculous, awful, and tragic. + 

“I suppose I’d better not go upstairs as he isn’t here, Elsie?” + 

The two women exchanged more glances. Elsie perfectly comprehended the case of Mrs. Arb, and sympathized with her. Mrs. Arb was being courted. Mrs. Arb had come to no decision. Mrs. Arb desired as much information as possible before coming to a decision. Women had the right to look after themselves against no matter what man. Women were women, and men were men. The Arb-Earlforward affair was crucial for both parties. + 

“Oh! I think you might, ’m. But I can’t go with you.” Sex-loyalty had triumphed over a too-strict interpretation of the duty of the employed to the employer. A conspiracy had been set up. + 

Mrs. Arb had to step over hummocks of books in order to reach the foot of the stairs. The left-hand half of every step of the stairs was stacked with books⁠—cheap editions of novels in paper jackets, under titles such as Just a Girl, Not Like Other Girls, A Girl Alone. Weak but righteous and victorious girls crowded the stairs from top to bottom, so that Mrs. Arb could scarcely get up. The landing also was full of girls. The front room on the first floor was, from the evidence of its furniture, a dining room, though not used as such. The massive mahogany table was piled up with books, as also the big sideboard, the mantelpiece, various chairs. The floor was carpeted with books. Less dust than in the den below, but still a great deal. The Victorian furniture was “good”; it was furniture meant to survive revolutions and conflagrations and generations; it was everlasting furniture; it would command respect through any thickness of dust. + 

The back room, with quite as large a number of books as the front room, but even less dust, was a bedroom. The very wide bed had been neatly made. Mrs. Arb turned down the corner of the coverlet; a fairly clean pillow-slip, no sheets, only blankets! She drew open drawers in a great mahogany chest. Two of them were full of blue suits, absolutely new. In another drawer were at least a dozen quite new grey flannel shirts. A wardrobe was stuffed with books. + 

Coming out of the bedroom, she perceived between it and the stairs a long, narrow room. Impossible to enter this room because of books; but Mrs. Arb did the impossible, and after some excavation with her foot disclosed a bath, which was full to the brim and overflowing with books. Now Mrs. Arb was pretty well accustomed to baths; she was not aware of the extreme rarity of baths in Clerkenwell, and hence she could not adequately appreciate the heroism of a hero who, possessing such a treasure, had subdued it to the uses of mere business. Nevertheless, her astonishment and amaze were sufficiently noticeable, and she felt, disturbingly and delightfully, the thrill of surprising clandestinely the secrets of a man’s intimate personal existence. + 

Then she caught the sound of dropping water; it was on the second-floor, in a room shaped like the bathroom, a room with two shelves, a gas-ring, and a sink. The water was dropping with a queer reverberation on to the sink from a tap above. There were a few plates, cups, saucers, jugs, saucepans, dishes; half a loaf of bread, a slice of cooked bacon; there was no milk, no butter. His kitchen and larder! One gas-ring! No fireplace! Mrs. Arb was impressed. + 

The other rooms on the second-floor were full of majestic furniture, books and dust. One of them had recently been cleaned and tidied, but dozens of books still lay on the floor. She picked up a book, a large, thick volume, for no other reason than that the cover bore a representation of a bird. It was a heavy book, with many coloured pictures of birds. She thought it was quite a pretty thing to look at. By accident she noticed the price pencilled inside the front cover. £40. She was not astonished nor amazed⁠—she was staggered. Mrs. Arb had probably not read ten books since girlhood. To her, reading was a refuge from either idleness or life. She was never idle, and she loved life. Thus she condescended towards books. That any book, least of all a picture-book of birds, could be worth £40 had not occurred to her mind. (And this one lying on the floor!) Instantly, in spite of her common sense, she thought for a brief space of all the books in the establishment as worth £40 apiece! Before returning down the book-encumbered stairs, she paused on the top landing. Her throat was coated with the dust which she had displaced in her passage through the house. Her hands were very dirty and very cold⁠—they shone with cold. No fire could have burnt in any of those rooms for years. She dared not touch the handrail of the staircase, even with her fingers all dirty. She paused because she was disconcerted and wanted to arrange the perplexing confusion of her thoughts. The more she reflected the better she realized how strange and powerful and ruthless a person was Mr. Earlforward. She admired, comprehended, sympathized, and yet was intimidated. The character of the man was displayed beyond any misunderstanding by the house with its revelations of his daily life; but there was no clue to it in his appearance and deportment. She was more than intimidated⁠—she was frightened. Withal, the terror⁠—for it amounted to terror⁠—fascinated her. She went down gingerly, hesitating at every step.⁠ ⁠… At the bottom of the lower flight she heard, with new alarm, the bland voice of Mr. Earlforward himself. He was talking with a customer in his den. + 

“I’ll slip out,” she very faintly whispered to Elsie, who was sweeping near the stairs. Elsie nodded⁠—like a conspirator. But at the same moment Mr. Earlforward and his customer emerged from the back room, and Mrs. Arb was trapped. + 

“I didn’t notice you come in,” said the bookseller most amiably. “What can I do for you?” + 

“Oh, thank you, but I only stepped across to speak to Elsie about something.” + 

The lie, invented on the instant, succeeded perfectly. And Elsie, the honestest soul in Clerkenwell, gave it the support of her silence in the great cause of women against men. + 

“I’m glad to see you in here,” said Mr. Earlforward gently, having dismissed the customer. “It’s a bit of luck. I’d gone off for Houndsditch, but I happened to meet someone on the road, and nothing would do but I must come back with him. Come in here.” + 

He drew her by the attraction of his small eyes into the back room. Books had been tipped off one of the chairs on to the floor. She sat down. Surely Mr. Earlforward was the most normal being in the world, the mildest, the quietest, the easiest! But the bath, the kitchen, the blankets, the filth, the food, the £40 book, and all those new suits and new shirts! She had never even conceived such an inside of a house! She could hardly credit her senses. + 

“I’ve wanted to see you in here, in this room,” said Mr. Earlforward in a warm voice. And then no more. + 

She could not withstand his melting glance. She knew that their intimacy, having developed gradually through weeks, was startlingly on the point of bursting into a new phase. The sense of danger with her, as with nearly all women, was intermittent. The man was in love with her. He was in her hands. What could she not do with him? Could she not accomplish marvels? Could she not tame monsters? And she understood his instincts; she shared them. And he was a rock of defence, shelter, safety!⁠ ⁠… The alternative: solitude, celibacy, spinsterishness, eternal self-defence, eternal misgivings about her security; horrible! + 

“I must be opening my shop,” she said nervously. + 

“And I must be getting away again, too,” he said, and put on his hat and began to button his overcoat. Nothing more. But at the door he added: “Maybe I’ll come across and see you tonight, if it isn’t intruding.” + 

“You’ll be very welcome, I’m sure,” she answered, modestly smiling. + 

She was no better than a girl, then. She knew she had uttered the deciding word of her fate. She trembled with apprehension and felicity. He was a wonderful man and an enigma. He inspired love and dread. As the day passed her feeling for him became intense. At closing time her ecstatic heart was liquid with acquiescence. And she had, too, a bright, adventurous valour, but shot through with forebodings. + 