Part + 

V + 

I + 

The Promise + 

Elsie was forgetting to fasten the shop door. With a little start at her own negligence she secured both the bolt and the lock. She thought suddenly of the days⁠—only a year away, yet far, far off in the deceiving distances of time⁠—when Mr. Earlforward and she had the place to themselves. Mrs. Earlforward had come, and Mrs. Earlforward had gone, and now Elsie had sole charge⁠—had far more responsibility and more power than ever before. The strangeness of quite simple events awed her. Nor did the chill of the thin brass handle of the milk-can in her hand protect her against the mysterious spell of the enigma of life. + 

She “knew” that the shop would never open again as T. T. Riceyman’s. She “knew” that either Mr. or Mrs. Earlforward would die, and perhaps both; and she was very sad because she felt sorry for them, not because she felt sorry for herself. In the days previous to the amazing advent of Mrs. Earlforward Elsie had had Joe. Joe was definitely vanished from her existence. Nothing else in her own existence greatly mattered to her. She would probably lose a good situation; but she was well aware, beneath her diffidence and modesty, that by virtue of the knowledge which she had acquired from Mrs. Earlforward she could very easily get a fresh situation, and from the material point of view a better one. Professionally she had one secret ambition, to be able to say to a prospective employer that she could “wait at table.” There would be something grand about that, but she saw no chance of learning such an intricate and rare business. She had never seen anybody wait at table. In the little pewed eating-houses to which once or twice Joe had taken her, or she had taken Joe, the landlady or a girl brought the food to you and took your plate away, and whisked crumbs on to the floor and asked you what else you wanted; but she felt sure that that was not waiting at table, nor anything like it.⁠ ⁠… So the ideas ran on in her mind⁠—scores of them following one another in the space of a few seconds, until she shut off the stream with a murmured: “I’m a nice one, I am!” The solitary daemonic figure of Mr. Earlforward, fast in bed, was drawing her upstairs. And the shop was keeping her in the shop. And the plight of Mrs. Earlforward was pulling her away towards St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. And there she stood like a regular hard-faced silly, thinking about waiting at table! She must go to Mr. Earlforward instantly, and tell him what had happened. + 

When she reached the first-floor she said to herself that she might as well take the milk into the kitchen first, and when she reached the kitchen she remembered poor Mrs. Earlforward’s bulbs. The precious bulbs had been neglected. Out of kindness to Mrs. Earlforward she went at once and watered the soil in which they were buried, and put the pots out on the windowsill. It was an act of piety, not of faith, for Elsie had no belief in the future of those bulbs. Indeed, she counted them among the inexplicable caprices of employers. If you wanted a plant, why not buy one that you could see, instead of interring an onion in a lot of dirt? Still, for Mrs. Earlforward’s sake, she took great pains over the supposed welfare of the bulbs. And yet⁠—it must be admitted, however reluctantly⁠—her motive in so meticulously cherishing the bulbs was by no means pure. She was afraid of the imminent interview with Mr. Earlforward, and was delaying it. If she had been sure of herself in regard to Mr. Earlforward, she would not have spent one second on the bulbs; she would have disdained them utterly. + 

Mr. Earlforward was somewhat animated. + 

“I didn’t sleep much the first part of the night,” he said, “but I must have had some good sleeps this morning.” + 

Elsie thought he was a little better, but he still looked very ill indeed. His pallor was terrible, and his eyes confessed that he knew he was very ill. He was forlorn in the disordered and soiled bed; and the untidy room, with its morsel of dying fire, was forlorn. + 

“Well,” said Elsie nervously, in a tone as if she was repeating a fact with which both of them were familiar, “well, so missis has gone to the hospital!” + 

She had told him. She trembled for his exclamation and his questions. He made no sound, no movement. Elsie felt extremely uncomfortable. She would have preferred any reply to this silence. She was bound to continue. + 

“Yes. Missis was that ill that when doctor came for you he took her off instead. I told her I’d see after you properly till you was fetched too, sir.” She gave no further details. “I’m that sorry, sir,” she said. + 

Mr. Earlforward maintained his silence. He did not seem to desire any details. He just lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling. The expression on his hollowed face, now the face of a man of seventy, drew tears to Elsie’s eyes, and she had difficulty in restraining a sob. The aspect of her employer and of the room, the realization of the emptiness of the rest of the house, the thought of Mrs. Earlforward snatched away into the mysterious and formidable interior of the legendary hospital, were intolerable to Elsie, who horribly surmised that “they” must be cutting up the unconscious form of her once lively and impulsive mistress. To relieve the tension which was overpowering her Elsie began to straighten the rumpled eiderdown. + 

“I’ll run and make you some of that arrowroot, sir,” she said. “You must have something, so it’s no use you⁠—” + 

Mr. Earlforward said nothing; then his head dropped on one side, and his eyes met hers. + 

“Elsie,” he murmured plaintively, “you won’t desert me?” + 

“Of course not, sir. But the doctor’s coming for you.” + 

“Never!” Mr. Earlforward insisted, ignoring her last sentence. “You’ll never desert me?” + 

“Of course not, sir.” His weakness gave her strength. + 

In order to continue in activity, she went to mend the fire. + 

“Let it out,” said Mr. Earlforward. “I’m too hot.” + 

She desisted, well knowing that he was not too hot, but that he hated to see good coal consumed in a grate where it had never been consumed before. From pity she must humour him. What did it matter whether the fire was in or out?⁠—the doctor would be coming for him very soon. Then a flicker of thought for herself: after the departure of Mr. Earlforward, would she have to stay and mind the place till something else happened, or would she be told to go, and let the place mind itself? Very probably she would be told to stay. She opened the door. + 

“Where are you going now?” + 

“I was just going to make your arrowroot, sir. That was what missis was giving you. At least, it looks like arrowroot.” + 

“Come here. I want to talk to you. Have you opened the shop?” + 

“No, sir.” + 

A long pause. + 

“Bring me up the letters, and let me have my glasses.” + 

He had accepted, in his practical, compromising philosophy, the impressive fact that the shop had not been and would not be opened. + 

Without saying anything Elsie went downstairs into the shadowy shop. A dozen or so letters lay on the floor. “I’ll give him two or three to quiet him,” she thought, counting him now as a baby. She picked up three envelopes at random. “He’d better not have them all,” she thought. The others she left lying. She had no concern whatever as to the possible business importance of any of the correspondence. Her sole concern, apart from the sickroom, was the condition of the shop. Ought she to clean it, or ought she to “let it go”? She wanted to clean it, because it was obviously fast returning to its original state of filth. On the other hand, while cleaning it she might be neglecting her master. None but herself had the power to decide which course should be taken. She perceived that she was mistress. Naively she enjoyed the strange sensation of authority, but the responsibility of authority dismayed her. + 

“Are these all?” Mr. Earlforward asked indifferently, as she put the three letters into his limp, shiny hand. + 

“Yes, sir,” she said without compunction. + 

He allowed the letters to slip out of his hand on to the eiderdown. She was just a little afraid of being alone with him. + 

II + 

The Refusal + 

In the early dusk of the afternoon, about four o’clock, there was a banging on the shop-door, and the short bark of a dog, who evidently considered himself entitled to help in whatever affair was afoot. Elsie was upstairs. During the morning several persons, incapable of understanding that when a shop is shut it is shut, had banged on the door, and at last Elsie, by means of two tin tacks, had affixed to the door⁠—without a word to her master⁠—a dirty old card on which she had scrawled in large pencilled letters the succinct announcement, “Closed.” This had put an end to banging. But now more banging! + 

“The doctor!” Elsie exclaimed, and ran down. + 

Not the doctor, but a lanky and elegant little girl accompanied by a fox-terrier, stood at the door. As soon as the door opened and she saw Elsie the little girl blushed. The fact was that this was her very first entry into the world of affairs, and she felt both extremely nervous and extremely anxious not to show her nervousness to a servant. The dog, of course, suffered. + 

“Be quiet, sir!” she said very emphatically to the restless creature, addressing him as a gentleman, and the next minute catching him a clout on his hard head. “Papa can’t come, and he told me to say⁠—” + 

“Will you please step inside, Miss Raste?” Elsie suggested. + 

Nobody was about, but Elsie with a servant’s imitativeness had acquired her mistress’s passion for keeping private business private. The little girl, reassured by the respectful formality of her reception, stepped inside with some dignity, and the dog, too tardily following, got himself nipped in the closing door and yelped. + 

“Serves you right!” said Miss Raste; and to apologetic Elsie: “Oh, not at all! It’s all his own fault.⁠ ⁠… Papa says he’s so busy he can’t come himself, but you are to get Mr. Earlforward ready to go to the hospital, and wrap him up well; and while you’re doing that I am to walk towards King’s Cross and get a taxi for you. I may have to go all the way to King’s Cross,” Miss Raste added proudly and eagerly. “But it will be all right. I got a taxi for papa yesterday; it was driving towards our Square, but I stopped it and got in, and told the chauffeur to drive me to our house⁠—not very far, of course. Papa said I should be quite all right, and he’s teaching me to be self-reliant and all that.” Miss Raste gave a little snigger. “Jack! You naughty boy!” + 

Jack was examining in detail the correspondence which Elsie had neglected and told lies about. At his mistress’s protest he ran off into the obscure hinterland of the shop to stake out a claim there. + 

“And after I’ve got you the taxi I am to walk home. Oh, and papa said I was to say you were to tell Mr. Earlforward that Mrs. Earlforward will have an operation tomorrow morning.” + 

Miss Raste was encouraged to be entirely confidential, to withhold nothing even about herself, by the confidence-inspiring and kindly aspect of Elsie’s face. She thought almost ecstatically to herself: “How nice it would be to have her for a servant! She’s heaps nicer than Clara.” But she had some doubt about the correctness of Elsie’s style in aprons. + 

“Oh dear! Oh dear!” Elsie murmured. + 

“And they’ll be expecting Mr. Earlforward at Bart’s. It’s all arranged.” + 

Having impinged momentarily upon a drab tragedy of Clerkenwell and taken a considerable fancy to Elsie, and having imperiously summoned her dog, Miss Raste, who was being educated to leave Clerkenwell one day and disdain it, departed on her mission with a demeanour in which the princess and the filly were mingled. + 

“What’s the matter? What have you turned the light on for?” Mr. Earlforward demanded when Elsie, much agitated, entered the bedroom. “What is the matter?” + 

Elsie tried to compose her face. + 

“How do you feel now, sir?” she asked, serpent-like in spite of her simplicity and nervousness. + 

“I feel decidedly better. In fact, I was almost thinking of getting up.” + 

“Oh! That’s good. Because the doctor’s sending a taxi for you, and I am to take you to the hospital at once. Here’s all your things.” She fingered a loaded chair. “And while you’re putting ’em on I’ll just run upstairs and get my things.” + 

“Is the doctor here?” Henry cautiously inquired. + 

“No, sir. He says he’s too busy. But he’s sent his little girl.” + 

“Well, I’m not going to the hospital. Why should I go to the hospital?” Mr. Earlforward exclaimed with peevish, rather shrill obstinacy. + 

She had “known” he would refuse to go to the hospital. She was beaten from the start. + 

“But you said you would go to the hospital, sir.” + 

“When did I say I would go to the hospital?” + 

“You said so to missis, sir.” + 

“And who told you?” + 

“Missis, sir.” + 

“Yes, but I didn’t know then that your mistress would have to go. The place can’t be left without both of us. You aren’t expecting I should leave this place in your charge. Besides, I’m not really ill. Hospital! I never heard of such a thing. I should like to know what I’ve got⁠—to be packed off to a hospital! I should feel a perfect fool there. I’m not going. And you can tell everybody I’m not going.” He rolled over and hid his face from Elsie, and kept on muttering, feeble-fierce. He had no weapon of defence except his irrational obstinacy; but it was sufficient, and he knew it was sufficient, against the entire organized world. If he had had an infectious disease the authorities would have had the right to carry him off by force; but he had no infectious disease, and therefore was impregnable. + 

“Now, it’s no use you standing there, Elsie. I’m not going. You think because I’m ill you can do what you like, do you? I’ll show you!” + 

Elsie could see the perspiration on his brow. He looked desperate. He was a child, a sick man, a spoilt darling, a martyr to anguish and pain, a tiger hunted and turning ferociously on his pursuers. His mind as much as his body was poisoned. Elsie said quietly: + 

“Missis is to have an operation tomorrow morning, sir.” + 

A silence. Then, savagely: + 

“Is she? Then more fool her!” + 

Elsie extinguished the light, shut the door and descended the stairs, wondering what brilliant people, clever people, people of resource and brains, would have done in her place. + 

When Miss Raste came back with the taxi in the gathering night, having accomplished a marvellous Odyssey and pretending grandly that what she had done was nothing at all, it was Elsie who blushed in confusion. + 

“I can’t get him to go to the hospital, Miss Raste. No, I can’t!” + 

“Oh!” observed Miss Raste uncertainly. “Well, shall I tell papa that?” + 

“Yes, please.⁠ ⁠… Do what I will!” + 

“I’m afraid the taxi will have to be paid. I’ve left Jack in it. He’s so naughty. A shilling I saw on the dial. But, of course, there’s the tip.” + 

Elsie hurried upstairs to her own room and brought down one and twopence of her own money. Another minute and she had locked herself up alone once again with her master. + 

III + 

The Message of Violet + 

“I’m raging in my heart! I’m raging in my heart!” Elsie said to herself. “It makes me gnash my teeth!” And she did gnash her teeth all alone in the steadily darkening shop. “I’m that ashamed!” she said out loud. + 

The origin of her expostulation was Mr. Earlforward’s obstinacy. She was humiliated on his behalf by his stupidity, and on her own behalf by her failure to get him to the hospital. The incident would certainly become common knowledge, and ignominy would fall upon T. T. Riceyman’s. What preoccupied her was less the danger to her employer’s health, and perhaps life, than the moral and social aspects of the matter. She would have liked to give her master a good shaking. She was losing her fear of the dread Mr. Earlforward; she was freely criticizing and condemning him, and, indeed, was almost ready to execute him⁠—she who, under the continuous suggestion of Mrs. Earlforward, had hitherto fatalistically and uncritically accepted his decrees and decisions as the decrees and decisions of Almighty God. He had argued with her; he had defended himself against her; he had shown tiny glimpses of an apprehension that she might somehow be capable of forcing him to go to the hospital against his will. He had lifted her to be nearly equal with him. The relations between them could never be the same again. Elsie had a kind of intoxication. + 

“Well, anyway, something’s got to be done,” she said, with a violent gesture. + 

She rushed for her tools and utensils, she found a rough apron and tied it tightly with a hard, viciously-drawn knot over her white one, and began to clean the shop. If seen by nobody else the shop was seen by her, and she could no longer stand the sight of its filth. She ranged about like a beast of prey. She picked up the letters from the floor and ran with them into the office and dashed them on to the desk. And at that moment a postman outside inconsiderately dropped several more letters through the flap. “Of course you would!” Elsie angrily protested, and picked them up and ran with them into the office and dashed them on to the desk. + 

“Oh! This is no use!” she muttered, after a minute or so of sweeping in the gloom, and she turned on the electric lights. Only two sound lamps were now left in the shop, and one in the office. She turned them all on⁠—the one in the office from sheer naughtiness. “I’ll see about his electric light!” she said to herself. “I’ll burn his electric light for him⁠—see if I don’t!” She was punishing him as she cleaned the shop with an energy and a thoroughness unexampled in the annals of charing. This was the same woman who a short while ago had trembled because she had eaten a bit of raw bacon without authority. And when, having finished the shop, she assaulted the office, she drowned the floor in dust-laying water, and she rubbed his desk and especially his safe with a ferocity calculated to flay them. For there was not only his obstinacy and his stupidity⁠—there was his brutality. “Then more fool her!” he had exclaimed about his wife, soon to be martyrized by an “operation.” And he had said nothing else. + 

Then Elsie began to think of Dr. Raste. Of course, she had been mistaken about Dr. Raste. On the pavement in front of his house he had been very harsh, with his rules about what he ought to do and what he ought not to do. And before that, long before that, when he had given a careless look at her in the house in Riceyman Square upon the occasion of Joe’s attack on her⁠—well, he hadn’t seemed very human. A finicking sort of man⁠—that was what she called him⁠—standoffish, stony. And yet he had got out of bed in the middle of the night for the old miser, and he must have known he could never screw much money out of him. And fancy the doctor coming with a taxi himself to take away the master! Elsie had never heard of such a thing. And him taking the mistress instead! It was wonderful. And still more wonderful was the arrival of his little girl⁠—a little queen she was, and knew her way about. And he’d arranged things at the hospital, too. (Oh! As she reflected, her humiliation at the failure to “manage” Mr. Earlforward was intensified. She could scarcely bear to think of it.) No doubt at all she had been mistaken about Dr. Raste. Joe had always praised Dr. Raste, and she had been putting Joe down for a simpleton, as indeed he was; but in this matter Joe had been right and she wrong. In repentance, or in penance, she extinguished the two lights in the shop, which she was not using; her mind worked in odd ways, but it had practical logic. The cleaning done, she doffed the rough apron. + 

She was somewhat out of breath, and she seated herself in the master’s chair at his desk. An audacious proceeding, but who could say her nay? She looked startlingly out of place in the sacred chair as she gazed absently at the sacred desk. The mere fact that nobody could say her nay filled her with sadness. Tragedy pressed down upon her. Life was incomprehensible, and she saw no relief anywhere in the world. That man upstairs might be dying, probably was dying. And no one knew what was his disease, and no one could help him without his permission. He lay over the shop-ceiling there, and there was nothing to be done. As for mistress, the case of her mistress touched her even more closely. Mistress was a woman, and she was a woman. She had known a dozen such cases. Women fought their invisible enemy for a time. Then they dropped, and they were swept off to a hospital, and the next thing you heard they were dead.⁠ ⁠… Mrs. Earlforward alone in a hospital⁠—all rules and regulations! And her husband very ill in bed at home here! Nobody to say a word to Mrs. Earlforward about home, and she fretting her heart away because of master, and the operation tomorrow morning and all! He was very ill, and people were often queer while they were ill. They weren’t rightly responsible; you couldn’t really blame them, could you? He must be terribly worried about everything. It was a pity he was obstinate, but there you were. Elsie was overwhelmed with affliction, misery, anguish. Her features were most painfully decomposed under the lamp. + 

But when Mr. Earlforward, answering her tap at the bedroom-door, roused himself to make a fresh and more desperate defence against a powerful antagonist who was determined to force him to act contrary to his inclination and his judgment, he saw, as soon as his eyes had recovered from the dazzle of the sudden light, a smiling, kind and acquiescent face. His relief was intense, and it flowered into gratitude. He thought: “She promised she would never desert me, and she won’t.” He was weak from his malady and from lack of nourishment; he was in pain; he had convinced himself that he was better, but he could not deny that he was still very ill⁠—and Elsie was all he had. She could make his existence heaven or hell; he perceived that she meant to make it as nearly heaven as she could. She was not going to bully him. She had no intention of disputing his decision about the hospital business. She had accepted her moral defeat, and accepted it without reserve and without ill will. She was bringing liquid food for him, in an attractive white basin. He had, as usual, little desire for food, but the sight of the basin and the gleaming spoon on the old lacquer tray tempted him, and he reflected that even an abortive attempt at a meal would provide a change in the awful monotony of his day. Moreover, he wanted to oblige her. + 

As, angelically smiling, she walked round the bed to his side and stood close to him, a veil fell from his eyes, and for the first time he saw her, not as a charwoman turned servant, but as a girl charged with energetic life; and her benevolence had rendered her beautiful. He envied her healthy vigour. He relied on it. The moment was delicious in the silent and curst house. + 

“I’ll try,” he said pleasantly, raising his body up and gazing at her. + 

“Why!” she exclaimed. “If you haven’t been making your bed!” + 

No disapproval in her voice. No warning as to the evil consequences of this mad escapade of making his bed. + 

“Any more letters?” he inquired, after he had swallowed a mouthful. + 

“I believe there was one,” she answered vivaciously. “Shall I run and get it for you?” Down she ran and picked up a letter at random off the desk in the office. And she brought back also a sheet of notepaper and an envelope, a millboard portfolio and a pencil. + 

“What’s all that?” he asked mildly, opening the letter. + 

“Well, you want to write to missis, don’t you?” + 

“Um?” he murmured as he read the letter, affecting not to have heard her. He was ashamed and self-conscious because he had not himself had the idea of writing to Violet. + 

“You’ll be sending a note to missis at the hospital. It’ll give her a good lift-up to hear from you.” + 

“Yes,” he said. “I was going to write.” + 

“Here! I’ll take that letter. You can do with some of this food. I shouldn’t like you to let it get cold.” She stayed near him and held a corner of the insecure tray firmly. “You can’t take any more? All right.” + 

She removed the tray, and replaced it by the portfolio which was to serve as a writing-desk on the bed. It was always marvellous to Elsie to see the ease with which her master wrote. She admired. And she was almost happy because she had resolved to smile cheerfully and give in to him and do the best she could for him on his own lines and be an angel. + 

“Shall I read you what I’ve written?” he suggested, with a sudden upward glance. + 

“Oh, sir!” + 

The astounding, the incredible flattery overthrew her completely. He would read to her what he had written to the mistress, doubtless for her approval. She blushed. + 

“ ‘My dear Wife⁠— + 

As you may guess, I am torn with anxiety about you. It was a severe shock when Elsie told me the doctor had taken you off to the hospital without a moment’s delay. However, I know you are very brave and have an excellent constitution, and I feel sure that before a week is out you will be feeling better than you have done for months. And, of course, the hospital is a very good one, one of the best in London, if not the best. It has been established for nearly eight hundred years. If it was only to be under the same roof as you I should have come to the hospital myself today, but I feel so much better that really it is not necessary, and I feel sure that if you were here to see me you would agree with me. There is the business to be thought of. I am glad to say that Elsie is looking after me splendidly, but, of course, that does not surprise me. Now, my dear Violet, you must get better quickly for my sake as well as your own. Be of good courage and do not worry about me. My little illness is nothing. It is your illness that has made me realize that. + 

He read the letter in a calm and even but weak voice, addressed the envelope, and then lay back on the pillows. (He was now⁠—since he had made the bed⁠—using Violet’s pillow as well as his own.) He did not finish his food. He left Elsie to fold the letter, stick it in the envelope, and lick and fasten the envelope. She did these things with a sense of the honour bestowed upon her. It was a wonderful letter, and he had written it right off. No hesitation. And it was so nice and thoughtful; and how it explained everything. She had to believe for a moment that her master really was better. The expressions about herself touched her deeply, and yet somehow she would have preferred them not to be there. What touched her most, however, was the mere thought of the fact that once, and not so long ago either, her master had been a solitary single man, never troubling himself about women and no prospect of such; and here he was wrapped up in one, and everything so respectable and nice.⁠ ⁠… But he was very ill. His lips and cheeks were awful. Elsie recalled vividly the full rich red lips he once had. + 

She had moved away from the bed, taking the basin and putting it on the chest of drawers. The contents of her master’s pockets were on the chest of drawers, where he laid them every night, in order better to fold his carefully creased clothes. + 

“I do fancy I haven’t got any money,” she said diffidently, after a little while. + 

“Why, it isn’t your wages day⁠—you don’t mean?” + 

“Oh, no, sir.” + 

She had deposited nearly all her cash in the Post Office Savings Bank during her afternoon out, and the bit kept in hand had gone to pay for the unused taxi. + 

“Why, Elsie! You must be a rich woman,” said Mr. Earlforward. “What with your wages and your pension!” He spoke without looking at her, in a rather dreamy tone, but certainly interested. + 

“Well, sir,” Elsie replied, “it’s like this. I give my pension to my mother. She’s a widow, same as me, and she can’t fend for herself.” + 

“All of it? Your mother?” + 

“Yes, sir.” + 

“How much is your pension?” + 

“Twenty-eight shillings and elevenpence a week, sir.” + 

“Well, well.” Mr. Earlforward said no more. He had often thought about her war pension, but never about any possible mother or other relative. He had never heard mention of her mother. He thought how odd it was that for years she had been giving away a whole pension and nobody knew about it in Riceyman Steps. + 

“Could you let me have sixpence, sir?” Elsie meekly asked, coming to the point of her remark concerning money. + 

“Sixpence? What do you want sixpence for? You surely aren’t thinking of buying food tonight!” Mr. Earlforward, who had been lying on his right side, turned with a nervous movement on to his back and frowned at Elsie. + 

“I wanted it to give to Mrs. Perkins’s boy in the Square to take your letter down to missis at the hospital.” In spite of herself she felt guilty of a betrayal of Mr. Earlforward’s financial interests. + 

“What next?” he said firmly. “You must run down with it yourself. Won’t take you long. I shall be all right.” + 

“I don’t like leaving you, sir. That’s all.” + 

“You get off with it at once, my girl.” + 

She was reduced to the servant again, she who had just been at the high level of a confidante. The invalid turned again to his right side and pushed his nose into the pillow, shutting his eyes to indicate that he had had enough of words and desired to sleep. His keys were on the chest of drawers and several other things, including three toothpicks, but not money. He seldom went to bed with money in his pockets. + 

Elsie, with a swift gesture, silently picked up the bunch of keys and left the room, a criminal; she had no intention of taking the letter to the hospital herself. She went downstairs quite cheerful; she still felt happier because she had been smiling and benevolent and yielding after her mood of revolt, and because the letter to Mrs. Earlforward was her own idea. In the office she knelt in front of Mr. Earlforward’s safe. No fear accompanied the sense of power which she felt. There was nobody to spy upon her, to order her to do one thing, to forbid her to do another. Her omnipotence outside the bedroom could not be disputed. + 

Although she was handling the bunch of keys for the first time, she knew at once which of the keys was the safe-key and how to open the safe, from having seen Mr. Earlforward open and close it. He would have been extremely startled to learn the extent of her knowledge, not only about the safe, but about many other private matters in the life of the household; for Elsie, like most servants, was full of secret domestic information, unused, but ready at any time for use. She unlocked the safe and swung open the monumental door of it and pulled out a drawer⁠—and drew back, alarmed, almost blinded. The drawer was full of gold coins⁠—full! Her domestic information had not comprised this dazzling hoard. In all her life Elsie had scarcely ever seen a sovereign. Years ago, in the early part of the war, she had seen a half-sovereign now and then. She shut the drawer quickly. Then she looked round, scared of possible spies after all. She thought she could hear creepings on the stairs and stirrings in the black corners of the mysterious shop. Not even when caught in the act of eating stolen raw bacon had she had such a terrifying sense of monstrous guilt. Her impulse was to shut the safe, lock it, double-lock it, treble-lock it, and try to erase the golden vision utterly from her memory. She would not on any account have pulled out another drawer. + 

But, lying on the ledge above the nest of drawers, she saw a canvas bag. This bag was familiar to her; it held silver. She loosened its string and drew forth sixpence. Then she rose, tore the wrapper off a circular among the correspondence on the table, wrote on the inside of the wrapper “6d.,” and put it in the bag. Such was her poor, her one feasible, inadequate precaution against the tremendous wrath to come. She had done a deed unspeakable, and she could perfectly imagine what the consequences of it might be. + 

She was still breathing rapidly when she unlocked the shop-door. Rain was falling⁠—rather heavy rain. Securing the door again, she ran upstairs to get her umbrella, which lay under her bed wrapped in newspaper. She had to grope for it in the dark. Roughly she tore off the newspaper. Downstairs again she could not immediately find the door-key and decided to risk leaving the door unlocked. She would be back from the Square in a minute, and nobody would dream of breaking in. She ran off and up the Steps towards the Square. + 

IV + 

Out of the Rain + 

Mrs. Perkins’s boy, who lived with Mrs. Perkins in the house next door to Elsie’s old home in Riceyman Square, and who had a chivalric regard for Elsie, fortunately happened to be out in the Square. In the darkness he was engaged in amorous dialectic with a girl of his own age⁠—fourteen or fifteen⁠—and they were both imperfectly sheltering under the eve of an outhouse (church property) at the northeast corner of the churchyard. Their voices were raised from time to time, and Elsie recognized his as she approached the house. Mrs. Perkins’s boy wore over his head a sack which he had irregularly borrowed for the night from the express parcel company in the tails of whose vans he spent about twelve hours a day hanging on to a piece of string suspended from the van roof. That he had energy left in the evening to practise savagely-delicate sentimental backchat in the rain was proof enough of a somewhat remarkable quality of “brightness.” + 

Elsie had chosen him for her mission because he was hardened to the world and thoroughly accustomed to the enterprise of affronting entrance-halls and claiming the attention of the guardians thereof. She now called to him across the roadway in an assured, commanding tone which indicated that she knew him to be her slave and that, in spite of her advanced years, she could more than hold her own with him against any chit in the Square. There was an aspect of Elsie’s individuality which no living person knew except Mrs. Perkins’s boy. He went hurrying to her. + 

“I want you to run down to the hospital with this letter and be sure to tell the porter it is to be given to Mrs. Earlforward tonight. She’s in there. And here’s sixpence for you, and I’ll lend you my umbrella and I’ll get it again from your mammy tomorrow morning; but you must just walk to the Steps with me first because I don’t want to get wet.” + 

“Right-o, Elsie!” he agreed in his rough, breaking voice, and louder: “So long, Nell!” + 

“Put it in your pocket now,” Elsie said, handing him the letter. “No; don’t take the keys.” She was still carrying Mr. Earlforward’s bunch of keys. + 

The boy insisted on taking the umbrella, which gave him almost as much happiness as the sixpence. Never before had he had the opportunity to show off with an umbrella. He wished that he could get rid of the sack, which did not at all match the umbrella’s glory. + 

“Here, hold on!” He stopped her and threw the sack over the railings into his mother’s area. They walked together towards the Steps. + 

“Your Joe’s been asking for you tonight,” he said suddenly. + 

“My Joe!” She stood still, then leaned against the railings. + 

“Here! Come on!” he adjured her, nervously sniggering in a cheeky way to hide the emotion in him caused by hers. + 

Elsie obeyed. + 

“How do you know?” + 

“Nell just told me. It’s all about.” + 

“Where d’e call?” + 

“Hocketts’s.” + 

“What’d they tell him?” + 

“Told him where you was living, I suppose.” + 

“D’you know when he was inquiring?” + 

“Oh, some time tonight, I s’pose.” + 

“Now you hurry with that letter, Jerry,” she said at the shop-door. Mrs. Perkins’s boy sailed round the corner into King’s Cross Road with the umbrella on high. + 

Elsie had the feeling that she had not herself spoken to Jerry at all, but that she had heard someone else speaking to him with her voice. And she was quite giddy between the influences of fear and of happiness. Her hands and feet were very cold. All kinds of memories and hopes which she had murdered in cold blood and buried deep came rushing and thronging out of their graves, intensely alive, and overwhelmed her mind. The anarchy within her was such that she had to think painfully before she could even command her fingers to open the shop-door. + 

Entering from the street, you had to cross the full length of the shop to the wall between it and the office in order to turn on the electric light. As Elsie passed gropingly between the bays of shelves she thought that she heard a sound of movement, and then the question struck and shook her: “Was the door latched or unlatched when I opened it?” She could not be sure, so uncertain and clumsy had been her hands. She dared not, for a moment, light the shop lest she should see something sinister or something that she wanted too much to see. + 

Turning the switch at last, she looked and explored with apprehensive eyes all of the shop that could be seen from the office doorway. Nothing! But the recesses of the bays nearest the front of the shop were hidden from her. She listened. Not a sound within the shop, and outside only the customary sounds which she never noticed unless attentively listening. She would go upstairs. She would extinguish the light and go upstairs. No! She could not, anyhow, leave the shop. She must wait. She must open the door and look forth at short intervals to see if Joe was coming. She must even leave the door ajar for him. He was bound to come sooner or later. He knew where she was, and it was impossible that he should not come. She heard a very faint noise, which sounded through the shop and in her ears like the discharge of a gun or the herald of an earthquake. Then a silence equally terrifying! The faint noise appeared to come from the bay at the end of which was the window giving on King’s Cross Road. She could see about half, perhaps more, of this bay, but not all. She must go and look. Her skin crept and tingled. The shop was now for her peopled with invisible menaces. Mr. Earlforward was so forgotten that he might have been dead a hundred years. She must go and look. She did go and look. Her heart faltered horribly. There was indeed a heap of something lying under the side-window. + 

“Joe!” she cried, but in a whisper, lest by some infernal magic Mr. Earlforward up in his bedroom should overhear. + 

Joe was a lump of feeble life enveloped in loose, wet garments. His hat had fallen on the floor and was wetting it. He had grown a thin beard. Elsie knelt down by him and took his head in her arms and kissed his pale face; her rich lips found his dry and shrivelled up. He recognized her without apparently looking at her. She knew this by the responsiveness of his lips. + 

“I’m very thirsty,” he murmured in his deep voice, which to hear again thrilled her. (Strange that, wet to the skin, he should be thirsty!) + 

Though she knew that he was ill, and perhaps very ill, she felt happier in that moment than she had ever felt. Happiness, exultant and ecstatic, rushed over her, into her, permeating and surrounding her. She cared for nothing save that she had him. She had no curiosity as to what he had been doing, what sufferings he had experienced, how his illness had come about, what his illness was. She lived exclusively in the moment. She did not even trouble about his thirst. Then gradually a poignant yet sweet remorse grew in her because, a year ago, before his vanishing, she had treated him harshly. She had acted for the best in the interests of his welfare, but was it right to be implacable, as she had been implacable, towards a victim such as he unquestionably was? Would it not have been better to ruin and kill him with kindness and surrender? For Elsie kindness had a quality which justified it for its own sake, whatever the consequences of it might be. And then she began to regret keenly that she had destroyed his letter; she would have liked to be able to show it to him to prove her constancy. Supposing he were to ask her if she had received it, what she had done with it. Could she endure the shame of answering: “I burnt it”? + 

“I’m so thirsty,” he repeated. He was a man of one idea. + 

“Stay there,” she whispered softly, squeezing him, and damping her dress and cheeks before loosing him. + 

She ran noiselessly upstairs and came back with a small jug of cold water from the kitchen. As seemingly he could not clasp the handle, she held the jug to his lips. He swallowed the water in large, eager gulps. + 

“Wait a bit now,” she said, when he had drunk half of it, and pulled the jug away from him. After twenty or thirty seconds he drank the rest and sighed. + 

“Can you walk, Joe? Can you stand?” + 

He shook his head slowly. + 

“I dropped down giddy.⁠ ⁠… Door was unlatched. I came in out of the rain and dropped down giddy.” + 

She ran upstairs again, lit her candle, and set it on the floor by her bedroom door. When she had descended once more she saw that the candle threw a very faint light all the way down the two flights of stairs to the back of the shop. She seized Joe in her arms⁠—she was very strong from continual hard manual labour, and he was very thin⁠—and carried him up to her room, and, because he was wet, put him on the floor there. Breathless for a minute, she brought in the candle and closed and locked the door. (She locked it against nobody, but she locked it.) + 

She was nurse now, and he her patient. She began to undress him, and then stopped and hurried down to the bathroom, where Mr. Earlforward’s weekly clean grey flannel shirt lay newly ironed. She stole the shirt. Then, having secured her door again, she finished undressing the patient, taking every stitch off him, and rubbing him dry with her towel, and rubbed the ends of his hair nearly dry, and got the shirt over his shoulders, and turned down the bed, and lifted him into her bed, and covered him up, and threw on the bedclothes the very garments which in the early morning she had used for Mrs. Earlforward’s comforting. There he lay in her bed, and nobody on earth except those two knew that he was in her room with the door locked to keep out the whole world. It was a wondrous, palpitating secret, the most wonderful secret that any woman had ever enjoyed in the history of love. She knelt by the bed and kissed him again and again. He smiled; then a spasm of pain passed over his face. + 

“What’s the matter with you, Joe, darling? What is it you’ve got?” she asked gently, made blissful by his smile and alarmed by his evident discomfort. + 

“I ache⁠—all over me. I’m cold.” His voice was extremely weak. + 

She ran over various diseases in her mind and thought of rheumatic fever. She had not the least idea what rheumatic fever was, but she had always understood that it was exceedingly serious. + 

“I shall light a fire,” she said, announcing this terrific decision as though it was quite an everyday matter for a servant, having put a “follower” in her own room, to light a fire for him and burn up her employer’s precious coal. + 

On the way downstairs to steal a bucket of coal she thought: “I’d better just make sure of the old gentleman,” and went into the principal bedroom and turned on the light. Mr. Earlforward seemed to be neither worse nor better. She was reassured as to him. He looked at her intently, but could not see through her body the glowing secret in her heart. + 

“You all right, sir?” she asked. + 

He nodded. + 

“Going to bed?” + 

“Oh, no! Not yet!” she smiled easily. “Not for a long time.” + 

“What’s all that wet on your apron, Elsie?” + 

She was not a bit disconcerted. + 

“Oh, that’s nothing, sir,” she said, and turned out the light before departing. + 

“Here! I say, Elsie!” + 

“Can’t stop now, sir. I’m that busy with things.” She spoke to him negligently, as a stronger power to a weaker⁠—it was very queer!⁠—and went out and shut the door with a smart click. + 

The grate and flue in her room were utterly unaccustomed to fires; it is conceivable that they had never before felt a fire. But they performed their functions with the ardour of neophytes, and very soon Mr. Earlforward’s coal was blazing furiously in the hearth and the room stiflingly, exquisitely hot⁠—while Mr. Earlforward, all unconscious of the infamy above, kept himself warm by bedclothes and the pride of economy alone. And a little later Elsie was administering to Joe her master’s invalid food. The tale of her thefts was lengthening hour by hour. + 

V + 

The Two Patients + 

Towards four o’clock in the morning Joe woke up from a short sleep and suddenly put questions to Elsie about his safety in that strange house, and also he inquired whose bed he was in. + 

“You’re in my bed, Joe,” she answered, kneeling again by the bedside, so as to have her face close to his and to whisper more intimately; and she told him the situation of the household and how her mistress had been carried to the hospital for an operation, and how her master was laid up with an unascertained disease, and how she alone had effective power in the house. + 

Then Joe began excitedly to talk of his adventures in the past twelve months, and she perceived that a change for the worse had come over him and that he was very ill. Both his voice and his glance indicated some development of the malady. + 

“Don’t tell me now, Joe dear,” she stopped him. “I want to hear it all, but you must rest now. Tomorrow, after you’ve had another good sleep. I must just go and look at Mr. Earlforward for a minute.” + 

She offered him a drink of water and left him, less to look at Mr. Earlforward than in order to give him an opportunity to calm himself, if that was possible. She knew that in certain moods solitude was best for him, ill or well. And she went down the dark stairs to the other bedroom, which was nearly as cold as the ice-cold stairs. + 

Mr. Earlforward also was worse. He seemed to be in a fever, yet looked like a corpse. Her arrival clearly gave him deep relief; he upbraided her for neglecting him; but somewhat timidly and cautiously, as one who feels himself liable to reprisals which could not be resisted. Elsie stayed with him and tended him for a quarter of an hour, and then went to the kitchen, which the extravagant gas-ring was gently keeping warm, while it warmed water and tried to dry Joe’s miserable clothes. + 

Elsie had to think. Both men under her charge were seriously ill, and she knew not what was the matter with either of them. Supposing that one of them died on her hands before the morning, or that both of them died! All her bliss at the reappearance of Joe had vanished. She had horrible thoughts, thoughts of which she was ashamed but which she could not dismiss. If anyone was to die she wanted it to be Mr. Earlforward. More, she could not help wishing that Mr. Earlforward would in any case die. She had solemnly promised Mr. Earlforward never to desert him, and a promise was a promise. If he lived, and “anything happened” to Mrs. Earlforward, she was a prisoner for life. And if Joe lived Mr. Earlforward would never agree to her marrying him and having him in the house with her, as would assuredly be necessary, having regard to Joe’s health. Whereas with Mr. Earlforward out of the way she would be her own mistress and could easily assume full charge of Joe. Strange that so angelically kind and unselfish a creature could think so murderously; but think thus she did. + 

Further, the double responsibility which impulsively she had assumed weighed upon her with a crushing weight. Never had that always anxious brow been so puckered up with anxiety and hesitancy as now. Ought the doctor to be instantly summoned? But she could not fetch him herself; she dared not even leave her patients long enough to let her run over to the Square and rouse one of her friends there. And, moreover, she had a curious compunction about disturbing the doctor two nights in succession, and this compunction somehow counted in the balance against even men’s lives! She simply did not know what to do. She desperately needed counsel, and could not get it. On the whole she considered that the doctor should be sent for. Many scores, perhaps hundreds, of people were sleeping within a hundred yards of her. Was there not one among them to whom she could appeal? She returned to Joe. He was talking in his sleep. She went to the window, opened it, and gazed out. + 

A lengthy perspective of the backyards of the houses in King’s Cross Road stretched out before her; a pattern of dark walls⁠—wall, yard, wall, yard, wall, yard⁠—and the joint masonries of every pair of dwellings jutting out at regular intervals in back rooms additional to the oblongs of the houses. The sky was clear, a full moon had dimmed the stars; and fine weather, which would have been a boon to the day, was being wasted on the unconscious night. The moonlight glinted here and there on window-glass. Every upper window marked a bedroom. And in every bedroom were souls awake or asleep. Not a window lit, except one at the end of the vista. Perhaps behind that window somebody was suffering and somebody watching. Or it might be only that somebody was rising to an interminable, laborious day. The heavy night of the town oppressed Elsie dreadfully. She had noticed that a little dog kennelled in the yard of the very next house to T. T. Riceyman’s was fitfully moaning and yapping. Then a light flickered into a steady gleam behind a window of this same house, less than a dozen feet away, with an uncanny effect upon Elsie. The light waned to nothing, and shortly afterwards the back door opened, and the figure of a young woman in a loose gown, with unbound hair, was silhouetted against the radiance of a candle within the house. Across the tiny backyard of T. T.’s Elsie could plainly see the woman, whose appearance was totally unfamiliar to her. A soul living close to her perhaps for months and years, and she did not know her from Eve! Elsie wanted to call out to her, but dared not. A pretty face, the woman had, only it was hard, exasperated, angry. The woman advanced menacingly upon the young, chained dog, and the next moment there was one sharp yell, followed by a diminuendo succession of yells. “That’ll learn ye to keep people awake all night,” Elsie heard a thin, inimical voice say. The woman returned to the house. The dog began again to yap and moan. The woman ran out in a fury, picked up the animal and flung it savagely into the kennel. Elsie could hear the thud of its soft body against the wood. She shrank back, feeling sick. The woman retired from her victory; the door was locked; the light showed once more at the bedroom window, and went out; the infant dog, as cold and solitary as ever, and not in the least comprehending the intention of the treatment which it had received, issued from the kennel and resumed its yapping and moaning. + 

“Poor little thing!” murmured the ingenuous Elsie, and shut the window. + 

No! She could not send anybody at all for the doctor. Common sense came to her aid. She must wait till morning. A few hours, and it would be full day. And the risk of a disaster in those few hours was exceedingly small. She must not be a silly, frightened little fool. Joe was still talking in his restless sleep. She quickly made up the fire, and then revisited Mr. Earlforward, who also was asleep and talking. After a moment she fetched a comb and went to the kitchen, washed her face and hands in warm water, took down her blue-black hair, combed it and did it up. And she put on a clean apron. She had to look nice and fresh for her patients when the next day should start. For her night and day were now the same; her existence had become continuous⁠—no break in consciousness⁠—it ran on and on and on. She did not feel tired. On the contrary, she felt intensely alive and energetic and observant, and had no desire for sleep. And her greed seemed to have left her. + 

VI + 

The Second Refusal + 

She was running up the Steps (not as early as she hoped, owing to a quick succession of requisitions from her two patients at the last moment) to find a messenger in the Square to dispatch for the doctor, when a sharp “Hai! Hai!” from behind caused her to turn. The summons came from Dr. Raste, who had appeared round the corner from King’s Cross Road. Elsie ran back and unlocked the shop-door. The ink of her scrawled notice of closure to the public had been weeping freely in the weather of the last twenty-four hours. + 

“You were leaving your patient, Elsie,” said the doctor, in a prim, impartial voice, expressing neither disapproval nor approval nor anything, but just holding up the mere fact for her consideration. + 

She explained. + 

“He’s worse, of course,” the doctor remarked, his tone not asking for confirmation⁠—almost forbidding it. + 

He was impenetrable; or, as Elsie thought: “You couldn’t make anything out of him.” He might be tired; he might not be tired. He might have been roused from his bed at 2 a.m.; he might have slept excellently in perfect tranquillity. You didn’t know; you never would know. The secrets of the night were locked up in that trimly dressed bosom. He was the doctor, exclusively. But one thing showed him human; he had once again disturbed the sequence of his daily programme in order to visit T. T. Riceyman’s. + 

They passed through the shop, on whose floor more letters were lying. At the door of Mr. Earlforward’s bedroom, the doctor paused and murmured: + 

“I’d better hear what you’ve got to say before I go in.” + 

She took him to the dining room, where he sat down on a dusty chair. To Elsie’s mind the dining room was in a disgraceful state, and indeed, though the shop and office had not yet seriously deteriorated from last night’s terrific cleansing, the only presentable rooms in the house were the two bedrooms. All the rest was as neglected and forlorn as a pet animal forgotten in the stress of a great and prolonged crisis. Elsie, standing, gave her report, which the doctor received like a magistrate. She wanted to ask about Mrs. Earlforward, but it was not proper for her to ask questions. Nor could she frame any formula of words in which to broach to the steely little doctor the immense fact of Joe’s presence in the building. + 

“Been to bed?” he inquired coldly. + 

“Oh no, sir!” + 

“Had any sleep?” + 

“Oh no, sir!” + 

“Not for two nights, eh?” + 

“No, sir⁠—well, nothing to mention.” + 

When at length they passed into the bedroom, Elsie was shocked at the condition of the sickbed. She had left it unimpeachably smooth, tidy and rectangular; it was now tossed and deranged into a horrible confusion, as though it had not been made for days, as though for days the patient had been carrying on in it a continuous battle with some powerful enemy. And in the midst of it lay Mr. Earlforward (whom also she had just “put to rights,” and who after her tending had somehow not seemed to be very ill), unkempt, hot, wild-eyed, parchment-skinned, emaciated, desiccated, creased, anxious, at bay, nearly desperate, mumbling to himself. Yet the moment he caught sight of the doctor he altered his demeanour, becoming calm, still, and even a little sprightly. The change was pathetic in its failure to deceive; and it was also heroic. + 

“Well, my friend,” the doctor greeted him, staccato, with his characteristic faint, nervous snigger at the end of a phrase. + 

“You’re here very early, doctor,” said Mr. Earlforward composedly. “At least it seems to me early.” He did not know the time; nor Elsie either; not a timepiece in the house was going, and the church-clock bell was too familiar to be noticed unless listened for. + 

“Thought you might like to know something about your wife,” said Dr. Raste, raising his voice. He made no reference at all to Henry’s exasperating refusal to go to the hospital on the previous day. “They tell me at the hospital that a fibroid growth is her trouble. I suspected it.” + 

“Where?” + 

“Matrix.” The doctor glanced at Elsie as if to say: “You don’t know what that word means.” She didn’t, but she divined well enough Mrs. Earlforward’s trouble. “Change of life. No children,” the doctor went on tersely, and nodded several times. Mr. Earlforward merely gazed at him with his little burning eyes. “There’ll be an operation this morning. Hope it’ll be all right. It ought to be. An otherwise healthy subject. Yes. Hold this in your mouth, will you?” + 

He inserted a clinical thermometer between Mr. Earlforward’s white, crinkled lips, took hold of the patient’s wrist and pulled out his watch. + 

“Appears you can’t retain your food,” he said, after he had put the watch back. “Comes up exactly as it goes down. Mechanical. You’re very strong.” He withdrew the thermometer, held it up to the light, washed it, restored it to its case. “Well, we know what’s the matter with your wife, but I shouldn’t like to say what’s the matter with you⁠—yet. I’m not a specialist.” He uttered the phrase with a peculiar intonation, not entirely condemning specialists, but putting them in their place, regarding them very critically and rather condescendingly, as befitting one whose field of work and knowledge was the whole boundless realm of human pathology. “You’ll have to be put under observation, watched for a bit, and X-rayed. You can’t possibly be nursed properly here, though I’m sure Elsie’s doing her best. And there’s another great advantage of your being in hospital. You’ll know how Mrs. Earlforward’s going on. You can’t expect ’em to be sending up here every ten minutes to tell you. Nor telegraph either. Something else to do, hospitals have!” Another faint snigger. “If you’ll come now, I mean in half an hour or so, I’ve arranged to get you there in comfort. It’s all fixed.” (He did not say how.) “I hear you can walk about, and you made your bed yesterday. Now, Elsie, you must⁠—” + 

“I won’t go to the hospital,” Mr. Earlforward coldly interrupted him. “I don’t mind having a private nurse here. But I won’t go to the hospital.” + 

The doctor laughed easily. + 

“Oh, but you must! And one nurse wouldn’t be enough. You’ll need two. And even then it would be absolutely no good. You can’t be X-rayed here, for instance. It’s no use me telling you how ill you are, because you know as well as I do how ill you are.” + 

The battle was joined. Dr. Raste, in addition to being exasperated, had been piqued by the reports of his patient’s singular obstinacy; he had now positively determined to get him into the hospital, and it was this resolve that had prompted him to give special attention to Mr. Earlforward’s case, disorganizing all his general work in favour of it. He could not allow himself to be beaten by the inexplicable caprice of a patient who in all other respects had struck him as a man of more than ordinary sound sagacity, though of a somewhat miserly disposition; and the caprice was the more enigmatic in that to enter the hospital would be by far the cheapest way of treating the illness. + 

Mr. Earlforward’s obstinacy, on the other hand, was exasperated and strengthened by the disdainful reception given to his marvellous, his perfectly reckless suggestion about having a private nurse. These people were ridiculously concerned about his health. They had their own ideas. He had his. He had offered an extremely generous compromise⁠—a compromise which would cost him a pot of money⁠—and it had not even been discussed; the wonder of it had in no way been recognized. Well, on the whole he was glad that the suggestion had not been approved. He withdrew it. He had only made it because he felt⁠—doubtless in undue apprehension⁠—that he was not yet beginning to progress towards recovery. He admitted to himself, for example, that whereas on the previous day he had been interested in his business, today his business was a matter of indifference to him. That, he knew, was not a good sign. But, then, tomorrow would certainly show some improvement. Indigestion⁠—and he was suffering from nothing but acute indigestion⁠—invariably did yield to a policy of starvation. As for hospitals, he had always had a horror of hospitals since once, in his insurance days, he had paid a visit to a fellow-clerk confined in a fever-ward. The vision of the huge, long, bare room, with its rows of beds and serried pain and distress, the draughts through the open windows, the rise and fall of the thunder of traffic outside, the semi-military bearing of the nurses, the wholesaleness of the affair, the absence of privacy, the complete subjection of the helpless patients, the inelasticity of regulations, the crushing of individuality: this dreadful vision had ineffaceably impressed itself on his imagination⁠—the imagination of an extreme individualist with a passion for living his own life free of the obligation to justify it or explain it. He had recalled the vision hundreds of times⁠—and never mentioned it to a soul. He did not intend to die of his illness; he knew that he would not die of it, but he convinced himself that he would prefer anything, even death, to incarceration in a great hospital. Were he wrenched by force out of his bed, he would kick and struggle to the very last, and his captors should be stricken with the fear of killing him while trying in their misguided zeal to save him. He read correctly the pertinacity in the doctor’s face. But he had never encountered a pertinacity stronger than his own, and illness had not weakened it, rather the reverse; his pertinacity had become morbid. + 

“I don’t think I’ll go into a hospital, doctor,” he said quietly, turning his face away. The words were mild, the resolution invincible. The doctor crossed over to look him in the face. Their eyes met in fierce hostility. The doctor was beaten. + 

“Very well,” said he, with bitter calm. “If you won’t, you won’t. There is nothing else for me to do here. I must ask you to be good enough to get another adviser. And”⁠—he transfixed Elsie with a censorious gaze, as though Elsie was to blame⁠—“and, please remember that if the worst comes to the worst, I shall certainly refuse to give a certificate.” + 

“A certificate, sir?” Elsie faltered. + 

“Yes. A certificate of the cause of death. There would have to be an inquest,” he explained, with implacable and calculated cruelty. + 

But Mr. Earlforward only laughed⁠—a short, dry, sardonic laugh. The sun shone into the silent room and upon the tumbled bed and the sick, triumphant man, and made them more terrible than midnight could have made them. The doctor, with the pompous solemnity of a little man conscious of rectitude, slowly picked up his hat from the chest of drawers. + 

“But what am I to do?” Elsie appealed. + 

“My good woman, I don’t know. I wish I did. All I know is, I’ve done what I could; and I can’t take the private affairs of all Clerkenwell on my shoulders. I’ve other urgent cases to attend to.” A faint snigger, which his will was too late to suppress! + 

“Elsie’ll be all right,” muttered Mr. Earlforward. “Elsie’ll never desert me, Elsie won’t. She promised me.” + 

The doctor walked majestically out of the room, followed by Elsie. + 

VII + 

Malaria + 

“I suppose I must just do the best I can, sir,” said Elsie on the landing outside the bedroom. She smiled timidly, cheerfully and benevolently. + 

The doctor looked at her, startled. It seemed to him that in some magic way she had vanquished the difficulties of a most formidable situation by merely accepting and facing them. She did not argue about them, complain about them, nor expatiate upon their enormity. She was ready to go on living and working without any fuss from one almost impossible moment to the next. During his career in Clerkenwell Dr. Raste had become a connoisseur of choice examples of practical philosophy, and none better than he could appreciate Elsie’s attitude. That it should have startled him was a genuine tribute to her. + 

“Yes, that’s about it,” he said nonchalantly, with the cunning of an expert who has seen an undervalued unique piece in an antique shop. “Well, good morning, Elsie. Good morning.” + 

He was in a hurry; he had half a hundred urgent matters on his professional conscience. What could he do but leave Elsie alone with her ordeal? He could not help her, and she did not need help in this particular work, which was, after all, part of her job at twenty pounds a year and food given and stolen. She was beginning to see the top of his hat as he descended the stairs. The stupid, plump, practical philosopher wanted to call him back for an affair of the very highest importance, and could not open her mouth, because Mr. Earlforward’s desperate plight somehow inhibited her from doing so. + 

“Doctor!” she exclaimed with a strange shrillness as soon as he had passed from her sight into the shop. + 

“What now?” demanded Dr. Raste sharply, afraid that his connoisseurship should have been mistaken and she would stampede. + 

She ran down after him. His gaze indicated danger. He did not mean to have any nonsense. + 

“I suppose you couldn’t just see Joe for a minute?” she stammered, with a blush. This now faltering creature had a moment earlier been calmly ready to do the best she could in circumstances which would scarcely bear looking at. + 

“Joe? What Joe?” + 

“Your old Joe. He’s here, sir. Upstairs. Came last night, sir. He’s very ill. I’m looking after him too. Master doesn’t know.” + 

“What in God’s name are you talking about, my girl?” said the doctor, moved out of his impassibility. + 

She told him the facts, as though confessing a mortal sin for which she could not expect absolution. + 

“I really haven’t a minute to spare,” said he, and went upstairs with her to the second-floor. + 

By the time they got there Elsie had resumed her self-possession. + 

The doctor, for all his detached and frigid poses, was on occasion capable, like nearly every man, of being as irrational as a woman. On this occasion he was guilty of a perfectly indefensible prejudice against both Elsie and Joe. He had a prejudice against Elsie because he was convinced that had it not been for her affair with Joe, Joe would still have been in his service. And he was prejudiced against Joe because he had suffered much from a whole series of Joe’s successors. For the moment he was quite without a Joe. Also he resented Elsie having a secret sick man in the house⁠—and that man Joe⁠—and demanding so unexpectedly his attention when he was in a hurry and overfatigued by the ills of the people of Clerkenwell. He would have justly contemned such prejudices in another, and especially in, for example, his wife; and it must be admitted he was not the godlike little being he thought he was. Fortunately Joe was in a state which made all equal before him. + 

“Oh, dear! I do so ache, and I’m thirsty,” the second patient groaned desperately, showing no emotion⁠—surprise, awe or shame⁠—at sight of the doctor and employer whom he had so cruelly wronged by leaving him in the lurch for inadequate reasons originating in mere sentiment. He had been solitary for half an hour and could not bear it. He wanted, and wanted ravenously, something from everybody he saw. The world existed solely to succour him. And certainly he looked very ill, forlorn, and wistfully savage in the miserable bed in the miserable bedroom of the ex-charwoman. He looked quite as ill as Mr. Earlforward, and to Elsie even worse. + 

“It’s malaria,” said the doctor in a casual tone, after he had gone through the routine of examination. “Temperature, of course. He’ll be better in a few days. I’ve no doubt he had it in France first, but he never told me. When they brought back troops to France from the East, malaria came with them. All the north of France is covered with mosquitoes, and they carry the disease. I’ll send down some quinine. You must feed him on liquids⁠—milk, barley-water, beef-tea, milk-and-soda. Hot water to drink, not cold. And you ought to sponge him down twice a day.” + 

Elsie, listening intently to this mixture of advice and information, could not believe that Joe’s case was not more serious than the doctor’s manner implied. Well implanted in her lay the not groundless conviction that doctors were apt to be much more summary with the sick poor than with the sick rich. And she was revisited by her old sense of this doctor’s harsh indifference. He had not even greeted his former servant, had regarded him simply as he would regard any ordinary number in a panel. + 

“You won’t have a great deal to do downstairs. In fact, scarcely anything,” the doctor added, who apparently saw nothing excessive in leaving two patients in charge of one unaided woman, she being also housekeeper, shopkeeper, and domestic servant. + 

“Of course you can send him to the hospital if you care to,” said the doctor lightly. “I dare say they’d take him in.” He was, in fact, not anxious to insist on Joe’s removal, thinking that he had already sufficiently worried the hospital authorities about the dwellers in Riceyman Steps. + 

To send Joe to the hospital would have relieved Elsie of the terrific responsibility which she had incurred by bringing him unpermitted into the house. But she did not want to surrender him. She hated to part with him. And privately, when it came to the point, she shared Mr. Earlforward’s objection to hospitals. Joe might be neglected, she feared, in the hospital; he might be victimized by some rule. She had no confidence in the nursing of anybody except herself. She was persuaded that if she could watch him she might save him. + 

“I think I can manage him here, sir,” she smiled. But it was a reserved smile, which said: “I have my own ideas about this matter and I don’t swallow all I hear.” + 

Dr. Raste began to put on his gloves; in the servant’s room he had not taken off his hat, much less his overcoat. She escorted him downstairs. At the shop-door he suddenly said: + 

“If he does want another doctor there’s Mr. Adhams⁠—other side of Myddelton Square.” His features relaxed. This remark was his repentance to Elsie, induced in him by her cheerful and unshrinking attitude towards destiny. + 

“You mean for master, sir?” + 

“Yes. He may be able to do something with him. You never know.” + 

“I’m sure I’m very much obliged, sir,” said Elsie eagerly, her kindliness springing up afresh and rushing out to meet the doctor’s spark of feeling. He nodded. He had not said whether or not he would call again to see Joe, and she had not dared to suggest it. She shut the door and locked herself in the house with the two men. + 

VIII + 

A Climax + 

Mr. Earlforward woke up after what seemed to him a very long sleep, feeling appreciably better. He had less pain; at moments he had no pain. And his mind, he thought, was surprisingly clear and vigorous. He had ideas on all sorts of things. Most invalids got their perspective awry⁠—he knew that⁠—but his own perspective had remained absolutely true. Rising out of bed for a moment he found that he could stand without difficulty, which was yet another proof of his theory that people ate a vast deal too much. The doctor had been utterly wrong about him. The doctor had made a mystery about ordinary chronic indigestion. The present attack was passing, as the sufferer had always been convinced it would. A nice old mess of a complication they would have made of it at the hospital! Or more probably he would have been bundled out of the place with contumely as a malingering fraud! He straightened the bed a little, and then, slipping back into it with a certain eagerness, he began to concert plans, to reorganize and resume his existence. + 

The day was darkening. Four o’clock, perhaps. Elsie? Where was that girl? She ought to be coming. Had she got a bit above herself? Thought she was the boss of the whole place, no doubt, and could do as she chose! An excellent creature, trustworthy, devoted.⁠ ⁠… And yet⁠—in some things they were all alike. Give them an inch and they’d take an ell. He must be after her. Now what was it he had noticed, or thought he had noticed, when he was last awake? Oh, yes! That was it. His keys. He had missed them from the top of the chest of drawers. He peered in the gloom. They were there right enough. Perhaps hidden before by something else. The room had been tidied, dusted, while he slept. He didn’t quite care for that, but he supposed it couldn’t be helped. Anyhow, it showed that she was not being utterly idle. Of course the girl was not going to bed properly, but she had ample opportunity to sleep. With the shop closed she had practically nothing to do.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Fibroid growth.” Fibroid⁠—like fibre, of course. He scarcely understood how a growth could be like fibre; but it was a name, a definition, and therefore reassuring. Much better than “cancerous,” at the worst! An entirely different thing from cancer! But he was dreadfully concerned, frightened, for Violet. If she died⁠—not that it was conceivable⁠—but if she died, what a blank! Sickening! No! He could not contemplate it. Yet simultaneously in his mind was a little elusive thought: as a widower, freed from the necessity of adapting himself to another, and of revealing to another to some extent his ideas, intentions, schemes⁠—what freedom! The old freedom! And he would plunge into it as into an exquisite, warm bath, voluptuously. He would be more secretive, more self-centred, more prudent, more fixed in habit than ever! A great practical philosopher, yes! In no matter what event he would discover compensations. And there were still deeper depths in the fathomless pit of his busy mind, depths into which he himself would do no more than glance⁠—rather scared. + 

Elsie came in and saw a sinister sick man, pale as the dying, shrunk by starvation, with glittering, suspicious little eyes. + 

“Oh! So you’ve come, miss!” He wished that he had not said “miss.” It was a tiny pleasantry of reproof, but too familiar. Another inch, another ell! + 

“Why! You’ve been making your bed again!” she exclaimed. + 

But she exclaimed so nicely, so benevolently, that he could not take offence. And yet⁠—might she not be condescending to him? Withal, he enjoyed her presence in the bedroom. Her youth, her reliability, her prettiness (he thought she was growing prettier and prettier every day⁠—such dark eyes, such dark hair, such a curve of the lips), and her physical power and health! Her mere health seemed miraculous to him. Oh! She was a godsend.⁠ ⁠… She had said nothing about Violet. Well, if she had had news she would have told him. He hesitated to mention Violet. He could wait till she began. + 

“I’ll run and make you some food,” she said. + 

“Here! Not so fast! Not so fast!” he stopped her. + 

He was about to give an order when, for the second time, he noticed that her apron was wet in several places. + 

“Why is your apron all wet?” he demanded sharply. + 

“Is it?” she faltered, looking down at it. “So it is! I’ve been doing things.” (She appeared to have dropped the “sir” completely.) + 

The fact was that she had been sponging Joe. + 

Mr. Earlforward became suspicious. He suspected that she was wasting warm water. + 

“Why are you always running upstairs?” he asked in a curious tone. + 

“Running upstairs, sir?” + 

(Ha! “Sir.” He was recovering his grip on her.) + 

She blushed red. She had something to hide. Hordes of suspicions thronged through his mind. + 

“Well, sir, I have to go to the kitchen.” + 

“I don’t hear you so often in the kitchen,” said he drily. + 

It was true. And all footsteps in the kitchen could be heard overhead in the bedroom. He suspected that she was carrying on conversations from her own bedroom window with new-made friends in the yard of the next house or the next house but one, and giving away the secrets of the house. But he did not utter the suspicion; he kept it to himself for the present. Yes, they were all alike. + 

“You haven’t inquired, Elsie, but I’m much better,” he said. + 

“Oh! I can see you are, sir!” she responded brightly. + 

But whether she really thought so, or whether she was just humouring him, he could not tell. + 

“Yes. And I’m going to get up.” + 

“Not today you aren’t, sir,” she burst out. + 

He said placidly: + 

“No. Tomorrow morning. And I think I shall put on one of my new suits and a new shirt. I think it’s about time. I don’t want to get shabby. Just show them to me.” + 

Elsie was evidently amazed at the suggestion. And he himself did not know why he had made it. But, at any rate, it was not a bad idea. He fancied that he might feel better in a brand new suit. He indicated the right drawers to her, and one by one she had to display on the bed the carefully preserved garments which he had bought for a song years ago and never persuaded himself into the extravagance of wearing. The bed was covered with new merchandise. He thought that he would have to wear the clothes some time, and might as well begin at once. It would be uneconomic to waste them, and worn or unworn they would go for far less than a song after his death. He must be sensible; he must keep his perspective in order. He regarded this decision to have out a new suit as a truly great feat of considered sagacity on the part of a sick man. + 

Elsie with extreme care restored all the virgin clothes to their drawers except one suit and one shirt, which for convenience she put separately into Mrs. Earlforward’s wardrobe. As all the suits were the same and all the shirts were the same, it did not matter which suit and which shirt were selected. But this did not prevent him from choosing, and hesitating in his choice. + 

Elsie seemed to be alarmed by the scene⁠—he could not understand why. + 

“Of course,” he said, “being new they’ll hang a bit looser on me than my old suit; that’s all wrinkled up. I’m not quite so stout as I was, am I?” + 

Elsie turned round to him from the wardrobe with a nervous movement, and then quickly back again. The fading light glinted for a second on a teardrop that ran down her cheek. This teardrop annoyed Mr. Earlforward; he resented it, and was not in the least touched by it. He had not perceived the extraordinary pathos in the phrase “not quite so stout,” coming from a man who had never been stout (or slim either), and who was now a stick, a skeleton; he thought she was merely crying because he had lost flesh. As if people weren’t always either putting on flesh or losing it! As a fact, Elsie had not felt the pathos of the phrase either, and her tears had no connection whatever with Mr. Earlforward’s wasting away. Nor had they sprung from the still more tragic pathos of his caprice about a new suit. In depositing the chosen suit in Mrs. Earlforward’s wardrobe Elsie had caught sight of the satin shoe which on the bridal night she had tied to the very bedstead whereon the husband was now lying alone. She thought of the husband lying alone and desperately ill and desperately determined not to be ill, and the wife far off in the hospital, and of her own helplessness, and she simply could not bear to look at the shabby old shoe⁠—which some unknown girl had once worn in flashing pride. All the enigma of the universe was in that shoe, with its curved high heel perched lifeless on a mahogany tray of the everlasting wardrobe. Elsie had never heard of the enigma of the universe, but it was present with her in many hours of her existence. + 

Mr. Earlforward said suddenly: + 

“Was the operation going to be done this morning or this afternoon?” He knew that the operation had been fixed for the morning, but he had to account to Elsie for his apparent lack of curiosity. + 

“This morning, sir.” + 

“We ought to be getting some news soon, then.” + 

“Well, sir. That’s just what I was wondering. I don’t hardly think as they’ll send up⁠—not unless it was urgent. So I suppose it’s gone off all right.” A pause. “But we ought to know for certain, sir. I was thinking I could run out and get someone to go down and find out⁠—I mean someone who would find out and tell us all about it⁠—not a child. I dare say a shilling or two⁠—” + 

With her experience Elsie ought not to have mentioned money, but she was rather distraught. The patient reacted instantly. It was evident to him that Elsie had old friends in the Square, or near by, upon whom she wanted to confer benefits through the medium of her employer’s misfortunes. They were always bent on lining their pockets, those people were. He was not going to let them pick up shillings and florins as easily as all that. His shop was perforce closed; his business was decaying; his customers would transfer their custom to other shops; not a penny was coming in; communism was rife; the political and trade outlook was menacing in the extreme; there was no clear hope anywhere; he saw himself as an old man begging his bread. And the girl proposed gaily to scatter shillings over Riceyman Square for a perfectly unnecessary object! She had not reflected at all. They never did. They were always eager to spend other people’s money. Not their own! Oh, no! He alone had kept a true perspective, and he would act according to his true perspective. He was as anxious as anybody for news of the result of the operation and Violet’s condition; but he did not see the need to engage an army of special messengers for the collecting of news. An hour sooner or an hour later⁠—what difference could it make? He would know soon enough, too soon if it was to be bad news; and if it was to be good news a little delay would only increase joy.⁠ ⁠… And, moreover, you would have thought that even the poorest and most rapacious persons would not expect money for services rendered in a great crisis to the sick and the bedridden. + 

“I see no reason for doing that,” he said placidly and firmly. “Let me think now⁠—” + 

“Shall I run down there myself? It won’t take me long.” + 

She was ready in the emergency, and in deference to his astounding whims, to take the fearful risks of leaving the two men alone together in the house. Suppose Joe should rise up violent? Suppose Mr. Earlforward should begin in his weakness to explore the house? He was already suspecting something; and she knew him for the most inquisitive being ever born. She trembled. Still, she was ready to go, and to run all the way there and all the way back. + 

“Oh, no!” he forbade positively. “That won’t do at all.” He was afraid to lose her. He, so seriously ill (he was now seriously ill again!), to be left by himself in the house! It was unthinkable. “Look here. Step across to Belrose’s” (Belrose⁠—the man who had purchased Violet’s confectionery business). “I hear he’s got the telephone now. Ask him to telephone for us to the hospital. Then we shall know at once.” + 

“We don’t do much with them,” Elsie objected, diffident. The truth was that the Earlforward household bought practically nothing at Belrose’s, Belrose’s not being quite Violet’s “sort of shop” under its new ownership. + 

Mr. Earlforward almost sat up in his protest against the horrible suggestion contained in Elsie’s remark. What! Would Belrose say: “No, you don’t deal with me, and therefore I won’t oblige you by telephoning to the hospital to find out whether Mrs. Earlforward is alive or dead”? A monstrous notion! + 

“Don’t be silly,” he chid her gravely. “Do as I tell you and run down at once.” + 

“And would you like me to ask them to telephone for another doctor for you while I’m about it? There’s Dr. Adhams, he’s in Myddelton Square too. They do say he’s very good.” + 

“When I want another doctor I’ll let you know, Elsie,” said Mr. Earlforward with frigid calm. “There’s a great deal too many doctors. What has Raste done for me, I should like to know?” + 

“You wouldn’t let him do anything,” said Elsie sharply. + 

He had never heard her speak with less benevolence. Of course he was entitled to give her a good dressing-down, and it might even be his duty to do so. But he lacked confidence in himself. Strange, but he was now in the last resort afraid of Elsie! She was like an amiable and tractable animal which astonishingly shows its teeth and growls. + 

“Leave the door open,” he muttered. + 

As Elsie descended to the shop there was a peremptory and loud rat-tat, and then a tattoo on the glass of the shop door. It frightened her. She thought naturally of the possibility of bad news by special messenger or telegraph from the hospital. But Mrs. Perkins’s boy Jerry was at the door. He wore his uniform, of which the distinguishing characteristics were a cap with brass letters on the peak and a leathern apron initialled in black. In King’s Cross Road an enormous motor-lorry throbbed impatiently in attendance upon the gnome. + 

“Here’s yer umbrella, Elsie,” said Jerry proudly. “I thought you might be wanting of it.” + 

He made no inquiry as to sick persons. He was only interested in the romantic fact that he had used the vast resources of his company to restore the umbrella to his queen, carrying it all day through all manner of streets in his long round, and finally persuading that important personage the motor-driver to stop at Riceyman Steps on no business of the company’s. Elsie took the umbrella from his dirty little hands, which were, however, no dirtier than his grinning face, and he ran off almost before she could thank him. + 

“Jerry!” she summoned him back, and he came, risking the wrath of the driver. “Come along tonight, will yer, after ye’ve done? Rap quiet on the door. I might want yer.” + 

“Right O, Elsie!” He was gone. The lorry was gone. + 

Elsie went upstairs again with the umbrella, not because the umbrella would not have been safe in the shop, but because she felt that she must give another glance at Joe before she left the premises. It was an unconsidered movement. She had forgotten that Mr. Earlforward’s bedroom door was open. + 

“Elsie,” he called out, as she passed on the landing, “who was that?” + 

Her tired and exasperated brain worked with extraordinary swiftness. She decided that she could not enter into a long explanation concerning the umbrella and Jerry. Why should she? “He” was already suspicious. + 

“Postman,” she answered, without the slightest hesitation, lying as glibly and lightly as a born, lifelong liar, and continued her way upstairs. She was somehow vaguely, indirectly, defending the secrecy of Joe. + 

In her room she put the umbrella in its paper again under her bed, gazing at Joe as she did so. Joe was very ill. She had given him two doses of quinine (which Dr. Raste, making Elsie ashamed of her uncharitable judgments on him, had had sent direct from a chemist’s within an hour and a half of his departure), and she was disturbed that the medicine had not produced an immediate and marked effect on the patient. + 

Joe had got one arm through the ironwork at the head of the bed, and was tearing off little slips of the peeling wallpaper in the corner. She took hold of his hot hand, and silently guided it back through the ironwork on to the bed. + 

“Shall I give you another dose?” she suggested tentatively, with brow creased. + 

He nodded. He knew malaria and he knew quinine; and, fortified by his expert approval, she gave him another dose. Both of them had the belief that if five grains of a medicine did you ten percent of “good,” ten grains would assuredly do you twenty percent of good, and so on in proportion. + 

“I’m coming in again in a minute or two. I’ve just got to go across the Steps on an errand,” she said, and kissed him. Both of them had also the belief that her kisses did him good; and this conviction was better founded than the other one. She had said nothing to him about Mrs. Earlforward’s operation. He had learnt only that Elsie was mistress because Mrs. Earlforward was in hospital; the full story might have aggravated his mental distress. + 

“Elsie!” It was Mr. Earlforward’s summons as she crossed the landing on her way down. + 

She put no more than her face⁠—a rather mettlesome face⁠—into the room. + 

“What do you keep on going upstairs for?” + 

Yes. He suspected. With strange presence of mind she replied promptly: + 

“I’ve just been up for the key of the shop, sir. I left it up in my room. I can’t go out and leave the shop door on the latch, can I?” + 

“Well, bring me all the letters.” + 

“Oh, very well. Very well!” She was hostile again. + 

This time she shut the bedroom door, ignoring his protest. Then she went upstairs once more and locked her own door on the outside and carried off the key. At any rate, if in some impossible caprice he should take it into his head to prowl about the house in her absence, he should not pry into her room. He had no right to do so. And she was absolutely determined to defend her possession of Joe. A moment later she bounced into Mr. Earlforward’s bedroom, and carelessly dropped all the letters on to the bed⁠—a regular shower of envelopes and packets. + 

“There!” she exclaimed, on a hard and inimical note, as if saying: “You asked for them. You’ve got them. And I wash my hands of it all.” + 

Mr. Earlforward saw that he must walk warily. She was a changing Elsie, a disagreeably astonishing Elsie. He did not quite know where he was with her. + 

As she emerged from the shop into the Steps a young woman with a young dog, stopping suddenly, addressed her in soft, apprehensive, commiserating accents: + 

“How is Mr. Earlforward this evening?” + 

“He seems to think as he’s a bit better, ’m, thank you, in himself,” Elsie answered brightly. She was uplifted by the mere concern in the voice, and at once felt more kindly towards her master, was indeed rather ashamed of her recent harshness to him. + 

Dusk had now fallen, and she could not see very clearly, but the next instant she had recognized both the woman and the dog. Quite a lady! A sort of a sealskin coat! Gloves! Utterly different from the savage creature of the previous night. The dog, too, was different. A dog lacking yet in experience of the world, and apt to forget that a dog’s business is to keep an eye on its guardian if it sets any store on a quiet and safe existence; but still well disposed towards its guardian, and apparently in no fear of her. More remorse for Elsie. + 

“Oh! I’m so glad!⁠ ⁠… And Mrs. Earlforward?” + 

“Oh, ’m! We haven’t heard. We’re expecting news.” + 

“I do hope everything’ll be all right. Operation⁠—internal trouble, isn’t it?” + 

“Yes, ’m.” + 

“Yes. So I heard. Well, thank you. Good night. Skip⁠—Skip!” + 

Skip was the disturber of repose, and he responded, leaping. The two disappeared round the corner. + 

It was wonderful to Elsie how everybody knew, and how kind everybody was. She was touched. The woman had given her the illusion that the whole of Clerkenwell was filled with anxiety for the welfare of her master and her mistress. Her sense of responsibility was intensified. If the whole of Clerkenwell knew that she was secretly harbouring her young man in her bedroom!⁠ ⁠… She went hot. The complexity of her situation frightened her afresh. + 

Belrose’s was at its old royal game of expending vast quantities of electric current. The place had just been lighted up, and had the air of a popular resort; it warmed and vitalized all the Steps by its radiance, which seemed to increase from month to month. What neither Mr. Earlforward nor anybody else of the old Clerkenwell tradition had ever been able to understand or approve was the continual illumination of the upper storeys. And yet the solution of the mystery was simple, and lay in a fact with which most of the district was familiar. Belrose had “gone in for wholesale.” Elsie entered the shop very timidly, for she regarded her errand as “presuming,” and in the midst of all her anxieties she had diffidence enough to be a little ashamed of it. + 

The shop was most pleasantly warm; its warmth was a greeting which would have overpowered some folk; and there was a fine rich odour of cheese and humanity. Also the shop was full. You could scarcely move in it. The stock was plenteous, and the character of the stock had changed. Advertised brands of comestibles of universal consumption were far less prominent than under previous regimes, and there was a great deal more individuality. The travellers and the collectors of advertised brands now called at the establishment with a demeanour different from of old; they had to leave their hard-faced, bullying manner on the doorstep. Two enormous and smiling young, mature women stood behind the counter. Their magnificently rounded façades were covered with something that was only white on Saturdays and Wednesdays, and certainly was not white tonight. Like the shop itself the servers were neither tidy nor clean; but they were hearty, gay and active, and they had authority, for one of them was Mr. Belrose’s sister, and the other Mrs. Belrose’s sister; nevertheless, they looked like sisters; they both had golden, rough hair and ruddy complexions, and the same experienced, comprehending, jolly expression, and fat, greasy hands. + 

There were four customers in the shop, of course all women, and the six women seemed to be all chatting together. The interior was the interior of a shop in full swing, but it showed in addition the better qualities of a bar parlour whose landlord knows how to combine respectability with freedom of style. Miss Belrose, who was nearest the door, smiled benignantly at Elsie on her entrance, as if saying: “You are one of us, and we are yours.” + 

When two outgoing customers squeezed themselves between Elsie and a pile of cheeses, and her turn came to be served, Elsie suddenly discovered that she could not straight away execute Mr. Earlforward’s command. She had a feeling that shops did not exist in order to supply telephone accommodation gratis to non-customers, and she was simply unable to articulate the request; nor did the extreme seriousness of the case inspire her to boldness. She asked for a quarter of a pound of cheese, and was immediately requested to name any cheese that she might fancy, the implication being that no matter what her fancy it could and would be satisfied on the most advantageous terms. + 

Now Elsie did not want any cheese; she wanted nothing at all. Mrs. Earlforward, before vanishing into the hospital, had bought for the master a generous supply of invalid foods, which, for the most part refused by the obstinate master, would suffice Joe for several days, and of all such eatables as Belrose’s sold Elsie had in hand enough also for several days. + 

She said “Cheddar,” reacting quite mechanically to the question put; and then she was confronted with another problem. She had no money, not a penny. It would be necessary for her to say, “I must run back for some money,” and having said that to return and somehow manoeuvre Mr. Earlforward’s keys off the chest of drawers and rifle the safe once more. And already he was suspicious! How could she do it? She could not do it. But she must do it. She saw the cheese weighed and slipped into a piece of paper. The moment of trial was upon her. + 

Then the back door of the shop opened⁠—she recognized the old peculiar, familiar sound of the latch⁠—and a third enormous, white-clad, golden-haired, jolly, youngish woman appeared in the doorway. This was Mrs. Belrose herself, and you at once saw, and even felt, that her authority exceeded the authority of her sister and her sister-in-law. Mrs. Belrose was a ruler. As soon as she saw Elsie her gigantic face softened into a very gentle smile of compassion, a smile that conveyed nothing but compassion, excluding all jollity. She raised a stout finger and without a word beckoned Elsie into the back room and shut the door. The ancient kitchen-parlour was greatly changed. It was less clean than Elsie had left it, but it glittered with light. More cheeses! And in the corner by the mantelpiece was the telephone. And through the window Elsie saw an oldish, thin little man moving about in the yard with a lantern against a newly erected shed. Still more cheeses⁠—seemingly as many cheeses as Mr. Earlforward possessed books! The oldish man was Mr. Belrose, guardian and overlord of the three women, and original instigator of this singular wholesale trade in cheeses which he had caused to prosper despite the perfect unsuitability of his premises and other difficulties. Individuality and initiative had triumphed. People asked one another how the Belroses had contrived to build up such a strange success, but they had only to look at the mien and gestures of the Belroses to find the answer to the question. + 

“How are you getting on, my dear?” demanded Mrs. Belrose, who had scarcely spoken to Elsie in her life before. + 

“Master wished me to ask you if you’d mind telephoning to the hospital, ’m,” said Elsie, after she had given some details. + 

“Of course I will. With the greatest pleasure.” + 

Mrs. Belrose grabbed at the tattered telephone-book, and whetting her greasy thumb whipped over the pages rapidly. + 

“Where’s them Saints now? Oh! ‘Saintsbury’s.’ ‘Saint.’ ‘St. Bartholomew’s Football and Cricket Ground.’ I expect that’s for the doctors and students. ‘St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.’ This is it. Here we are. City 510.⁠ ⁠… Oh, dear! oh, dear! ‘No telephone information given respecting patients.’ Oh, dear, oh, dear!” She looked at Elsie. “Never mind,” she went on brightly. “We can get over that, I should think.” + 

She obtained the number and got into communication with the reception office of the hospital. + 

“I want you to be kind enough to give a message to Mrs. Violet Earlforward from her husband. She’s in your hospital for an operation.⁠ ⁠… Oh, but you must, please. He’s very ill. But he’s a bit better, and it will do Mrs. Earlforward ever so much good to know.⁠ ⁠… Oh, please! Yes, I know, but they can’t send anyone down. Oh, you don’t count rules when it’s urgent. It might be life and death. But you can telephone up to the ward. You’re starred, so you must have a private exchange. Oh, yes. To oblige. Yes, Earlforward, Violet. And you might just ask how she is while you’re about it. You are good.” + 

She held the line and waited, sitting down on a chair to rest herself. And to Elsie: + 

“They’re very nice, really, at those hospitals, once you get on the right side of them. I suppose you’ve got about all you can do?” + 

“Well, there isn’t much nursing, and the shop’s closed.” + 

“Oh, yes, and the Steps do look so queer with it closed. Somehow it makes it look like Sunday. Doctor has been today, I suppose?” + 

“Yes, ’m. This morning,” said Elsie, and stopped there, not caring to divulge the secret of Mr. Earlforward’s insane obstinacy. + 

“Yes. I’m here. I’m listening. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! She’s⁠—Oh, dear! Owing to what? ‘Under⁠—nourishment’?⁠ ⁠… He’s rung off.” + 

Mrs. Belrose sniffed as she hung up the receiver. + 

“Oh, Elsie! Your poor mistress has died under it. She died about half an hour ago. According to what they say, she might have pulled through, but she hadn’t strength to rally owing to⁠—undernourishment.⁠ ⁠… Well, I’m that cut up!” Mrs. Belrose cried feebly. + 

Elsie stared at her and did not weep. + 

“Ought I to tell him, ’m?” + 

“Oh, yes, you must tell him. There’s no sense in hiding them things⁠—especially as he’s a little better. He’s got to know. And he’d be very angry, and quite rightly, if he wasn’t told, and at once.” + 

“I’ll go and tell him.” + 

“Would you like me to come with you?” + 

“You’re very kind, ’m,” said Elsie, cunning even in disaster. “I can manage. He’s very peculiar, but I know how to manage him. There won’t be nothing to be done till tomorrow, anyway.” + 

She had another and a far more perilous secret to keep, that of Joe. Therefore she dared not admit a stranger to the house. Of course, soon she would have to admit strangers⁠—but not tonight, not tonight! She must postpone evil. + 

Mrs. Belrose lifted her immense bulk and kissed Elsie, and then Elsie cried. Saying not a word more, she turned, opened the door, and passed through the shop, rapt, totally ignoring the servers and the quarter of a pound of cheese. + 

“Tomorrow,” she said to herself, “I shall tell her” (Mrs. Belrose) “all about Joe. She’ll understand.” The mere thought of Mrs. Belrose was a refuge for her. “But missis can’t be dead. It was only yesterday morning⁠—” + 

“Leave me alone. Leave me!” breathed Henry Earlforward in a dismaying murmur when she gave him the news. She obeyed. + 

IX + 

The Kiss + 

That night Elsie sat in the parlour (as she still to herself called the dining room) by the gas-fire which she had lighted on her own responsibility. An act and a situation which a few days earlier, two days earlier, would have been inconceivable to her! But Joe’s clothes had refused to dry in the kitchen; the gas-ring there was incapable of drawing the water out of them in the damp weather. Now they were dry; some of them were folded on a chair; upon these were laid the braces which she had given to him on his birthday, and which evidently he had worn ever since. To Elsie now these soiled and frayed braces had a magic vital quality. They seemed, far more than the clothes, to have derived from him some of his individuality, to be a detached part of him; she was sewing a button on the lifeless old trousers, and she had taken the button, and the thimble, needle, and thread from Mrs. Earlforward’s cardboard sewing-box in the left-hand drawer of the sideboard. She was working with the tools of a dead lady. At moments this irked and frightened her; at other moments she thought that what must be must be, and that, anyhow, the clothes ought to be put in order; and she could not go upstairs and disturb Joe by searching for her own apparatus⁠—which certainly did not comprise trouser buttons. She tried to be natural and not to look ahead. She would not, for instance, dwell upon the apparently insoluble problem of arranging a proper funeral for Mrs. Earlforward. How could she, the servant, do anything towards that? She dared not leave her patients. She knew nothing about the organization of funerals. She had never even been to a funeral. She had no knowledge of possible relatives of the Earlforwards. + 

“Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Not till tomorrow⁠—all that!” she said doggedly. + 

But she failed to push away everything. In the midst of her great grief for the death of Mrs. Earlforward (a perfect woman and a martyr) the selfish thought of her own future haunted her and would not be dismissed. Would Joe ever again wear those clothes which she was mending? He had taken some Bovril (Mr. Earlforward also), but she could not persuade herself that he was really better. She was terror-struck by the varied possibilities attending his death. A dead man secretly in her bed! What a plight for her! She determined afresh to confide the secret of Joe to Mrs. Belrose tomorrow morning. Not that the mere inconveniences of death deeply troubled her. No! In truth they were naught. Or rather, if he died they would have absolutely no importance to her compared with the death itself. Having found Joe, was she to lose him again? She could not face such a prospect.⁠ ⁠… + 

And then Mr. Earlforward. She was beginning to be convinced that the master really was better. He had taken the Bovril. He had opened one or two of his letters. The shock of the news about Mrs. Earlforward, instead of shattering him to pieces, had strengthened him, morally if not physically. He might recover⁠—he was an amazing man! And, of course, she desired him to recover. Could she wish anyone’s death? She could not be so cruel, so wicked! And yet, and yet, if he lived, she was his slave forever; she was a captive with no hope of escape. A slave, either bowed down by sorrow for the death of Joe, or fatally desolated by the eternal reflection that Joe was alive and she could not have him because of her promise to Mr. Earlforward! She saw no hope; she made no reserves in the interpretation of her vow to the master. She could not see that circumstances inevitably, if slowly, alter cases. + 

She yawned heavily in extreme exhaustion. + 

Then her ear caught a faint, cautious tapping below. All trembling she crept downstairs. Jerry was at the shop-door. In the turmoil of distress she had forgotten that she had commanded him to call for orders. She was glad to have someone to talk to for a little while, and she brought him into the office. She saw in front of her, on the opposite side of the desk, a young lad who had most surprisingly and touchingly put on his best clothes for important events. Also he had washed himself. Also he was smoking a cigarette. + 

Jerry, who was thin and pinched in the face, saw in front of him an ample and splendid young woman⁠—not very young to him, for his notion of youthfulness was rather narrow, but much younger than his mother, though much older than Nell, his fancy of the Square, whose years did correspond with his notion of youthfulness. Elsie was slightly taller than himself. He thought she had the nicest, kindest face he had ever seen. He loved her brow when she frowned in doubt or anxiety; for him even her aprons were different from any other woman’s aprons. He was precocious, in love as in other matters, but he did not love Elsie, did not aspire to love her. She was above him, out of his reach; he went in awe of her; he liked to feel that she was his tyrant. She was the most romantic, mysterious, and beautiful of all women and girls. Elsie very well understood his attitude towards her. + 

“I thought I might want yer to run down to the hospital for me, Jerry my boy,” she said. “But I shan’t now. Mrs. Earlforward died this afternoon.” + 

“It’s all over the Square,” said Jerry, spitting negligently into the dark fireplace, and pushing his cap further back on his head. + 

Elsie saw that he did not understand death. + 

“Yes,” said she, “I suppose it is.” She said no more, because of the uselessness of talking about death to a simple-minded youth like Jerry. + 

“It was very nice of you to bring me my umbrella like that,” she said. + 

“Oh!” said he, falsely scornful of himself. “It was easiest for me to bring it along like that.” + 

He had been standing with his legs apart; at this point he sat down familiarly and put his elbows on the desk and his jaw in his hands; the cigarette hung loosely in his very mobile lips. They were silent; Jerry was proud and happy, and had nothing in particular to say about it. Elsie had too much to say to be able to talk. + 

“Then ye haven’t got anything for me to do?” he asked. + 

“No, I haven’t.” + 

“Oo!” He was disappointed. + 

“But I might have tomorrow. You’ll be off at two o’clock tomorrow, won’t yer?” + 

“That’s me.” + 

“Very well then.” She rose. + 

Jerry was extraordinarily uplifted by this brief sojourn alone with Elsie in the private office of T. T. Riceyman’s. He felt that he was more of a grown man than ten thousand cigarettes and oaths and backchat with fragile virgins in the Square could make him. He sprang from the chair. + 

“Give me a kiss, Elsie,” he blurted out audaciously. He was frightened by his own cheek. + 

“Jerry Perkins!” Elsie admonished him. “Aren’t ye ashamed of yerself? Mrs. Earlforward dead! And them two so ill upstairs!” + 

“What two?” Jerry asked, rather to cover his confusion than from curiosity. + 

“I mean Mr. Earlforward,” said Elsie. She was not abashed at her slip. With Jerry she had a grandiose role to play, and no contretemps could spoil her performance. + 

Jerry guessed instantly that she had got Joe hidden in the house, but he never breathed a word of it. He even tried to look stupid and uncomprehending, which was difficult for him. + 

“Aren’t ye ashamed of yerself?” she solemnly repeated. + 

He moved towards the door. Elsie’s glance followed him. She was sorry for him. She wanted to be good to somebody. She could not help Mr. Earlforward. She could do very little for Joe. Mrs. Earlforward was dead, and she could so easily give Jerry delight. + 

“Here!” she said. + 

He turned. She kissed him quietly but fully. There were no reservations in her kiss. Jerry, being too startled by unexpected joy, could not give the kiss back. He lost his nerve and went off so absorbed in his sensations that he forgot even to thank the sweet benefactress. In the Square his behaviour to the attendant Nell was witheringly curt. Nell did not know that she now had to cope with a genuine adult. + 

X + 

The Safe + 

Not a sound in the house; nor outside the house. Not a clock nor a watch going in the house. Mr. Earlforward had listened interminably to get the time from the church, but without success. He knew only from the prolonged silence of the street that the hour must be very late. “Work!” he murmured to himself in the vast airless desert and void created by the death of Violet. “That’s the one thing⁠—the one thing.” His faculty for compromising with destiny aroused itself for a supreme achievement. It was invincible. He would not think himself into hell or madness or inanition by yielding feebly to the frightful grief caused by the snatching away of that unique woman so solicitous about him, so sensible, so vivacious, so agreeable, so energetic, so enterprising, so ready to adopt his ideas⁠—and yet so independent. Her little tantrums⁠—how exquisite, girlish! There had always been a girl in her. The memory of her girlishness desolated him more than anything. + 

“Insufficient nourishment”? No! It could not have been that. Had he ever, on any occasion, in the faintest degree, discouraged her from satisfying her appetite? Or criticized her housekeeping accounts? No! Never had he interfered. Moreover she had plenty of money of her own and the absolutely unfettered use of it. He would give her such a funeral as had not been seen in Clerkenwell for many a year. The cost, of course, might be charged to her estate, but he would not allow that⁠—though, of course, it would all be the same in the end. + 

He could not bear to lie in the bed which she had shared with him. The feel of the empty half of it, when he passed his hand slowly over the lower blanket in the dark, tortured him intolerably, and yet he must somehow keep on passing his hand over it. Futile and sick indulgence! He got out of bed, drew aside the curtains and drew up the blind. He could not see the moon, but it was lighting the roofs opposite, and its light and that of the gas-lamp lit the room sufficiently to reveal all the principal features of it. Animated by the mighty power of his resolution to withstand fate he felt strong⁠—he was strong. His cold legs were quite steady. Yes, though he still had a dull pain, the attack of indigestion was declining. He had successfully taken Bovril. To work, seated at his desk, could not tire him, and ought to do him good. + 

A queer affair, that indigestion! He had never suffered from indigestion until the day after his wedding night, when he had eaten so immoderately of Elsie’s bride-cake. The bride-cake seemed to have been the determining cause, or perhaps it was merely the occasion, of some change in his system. (But naturally he had said nothing of it.) However, he was now better. A little pain in the old spot⁠—no more. + 

He opened the wardrobe to get his new shirt and new suit, and saw in the pale gloom Violet’s garments arranged on their trays. The sight of them shook him terribly. He must assuredly save himself by the labour of reconstituting his existence. It was impossible for him to remain in the bedroom. He dressed himself in the new clothes, putting a muffler round his neck instead of a collar. Then he filled his pockets with his personal belongings from the top of the chest of drawers. None was missing. He picked up the pile of correspondence, which he had laid neatly on the pedestal. He could walk without discomfort. He must work. The grim intention to work was irresistibly monopolizing his mind, and driving all else out of it. He left the bedroom⁠—a deed in itself. + 

On the landing, as he looked upwards, he could see light under Elsie’s bedroom door. The candles that girl must be burning! He would correct her. Should he? Supposing she rebelled! Elsie had changed; he did not quite know where he was with her; and he did not want to lose her. She was his mainstay in the world. Still, it would never do to be afraid of correcting a servant. He would correct her. He would knock at her door and tell her⁠—not for the first time. He mounted two steps, but his legs nearly failed him. He could walk downstairs but not up. Besides, if she knew that he was out of bed there might be trouble, and he wished to avoid trouble. Therefore, he turned and limped downstairs into the shop and lit it. + 

To see the shop was like revisiting after an immense period the land of his youth. He recognized one by one the landmarks. Here was the loaded bookstand, with its pair of castors, which she had devised. The shop was like a mausoleum of trade. His trade had ceased. It had to be brought back to life, galvanized into activity. Could he do it? He must and he would do it. He was capable of the intensest effort. His very sorrow was inspiring him. On the floor at the entrance lay some neglected correspondence which bore footmarks. Servants were astounding. Elsie had been too negligent even to pick the letters up. She probably never would have picked them up. She would have trod and trod them into the dirty boards⁠—demands for books, offers of books, possibly cheques⁠—the stuff itself of trade. He picked them up with difficulty, and padded into the office, which also he lit. Cold! He shivered. + 

“I’m not entirely cured yet,” he thought, and began to doubt himself. The fire was prepared⁠—Violet’s influence again. Fires had never been laid in advance till she came. He put a match to the fire and felt better. Undecided, he stroked his cheek. Stubble! How long was it since he had shaved? His face must look a pretty sight. Happily there was no mirror in either the office or the shop, so that he could not inspect himself. Work! Work! Memories were insinuating themselves anew in his mind. He must repulse them. Fancy her running off like that, without a word of goodbye, to the hospital, and now she was irrevocably gone! It was incredible, monstrous, the most sinister piece of devil’s magic that ever happened.⁠ ⁠… Chloroform. The knife. Fibroid growth.⁠ ⁠… Dead. Vanished. She with her vivacity and her optimism.⁠ ⁠… He was fatigued. The pain had recurred. It was very bad. Perhaps he had been ill-advised to come downstairs, for he could not get upstairs again. He cautiously skirted the desk, holding on to it, and sat in his chair. Work! Work! The reconstruction of his life! + 

He fingered the letters. With one of them was a cheque, and it must go into the safe for the night. He would endorse it tomorrow. Never endorse a cheque till you paid it into the bank, for an endorsed cheque might be the prey of thieves. He bent down sideways to his safe with a certain pleasure. Her safe was upstairs in the bathroom. He would have to obtain her keys and open it and examine its contents. He took his own keys from his pocket, and, not very easily, unlocked his safe, and swung forward its door. The familiar act soothed him. The sublime spectacle of the safe, sole symbol of security in a world of perils, enheartened him. After all⁠ ⁠… + 

Then he noticed that the silver bag was not precisely in its customary spot on the ledge over the nest of drawers. He started in alarm and clutched at the bag. It was not tied with his knot. He unloosed it and felt crumpled paper within it. “6d”! Elsie’s clumsy handwriting, which he knew so well from having seen it now and then on little lists of sales on the backs of envelopes! No! It was not the loss of sixpence that affected him. He could have borne that. What so profoundly, so formidably, shocked him was the fact that Elsie had surreptitiously taken his keys, rifled the safe, and returned the keys⁠—and smiled on him and nursed him! There was no security at all in the world of perils. The foundations of faith had been destroyed. Elsie! + 

But in the agony of the crisis he did not forget his wife. He moaned aloud: + 

“What would Violet have thought? What would my poor Violet have thought of this?” + 

His splendid fortitude, his superhuman courage to recreate his existence over the ruins of it and to defy fate, were broken down. Life was bigger, more cruel, more awful than he had imagined. + 

XI + 

Prison + 

“Joe,” inquired Elsie, “where’s your papers?” + 

She had brought his clothes⁠—dry, folded, and possibly wearable⁠—back into her bedroom. She had found nothing in the pockets of the suit except some cigarette-card portraits of famous footballers, a charred pipe, three French sous, and a broken jackknife. These articles, the raiment, and a pair of battered shoes which she had pushed under the bed and forgotten, seemed to be all that Joe had to show for more than twenty years of strenuous and dangerous life on earth⁠—much less even than Elsie could show. The paucity of his possessions did not trouble her, and scarcely surprised her, for she knew that very many unmarried men, with no incentive to accumulate what they could immediately squander in personal use, had no more reserves than Joe; but the absence of the sacred “papers” disturbed her. Every man in her world could, when it came to the point, produce papers of some sort from somewhere⁠—army-discharge, pension documents, testimonials, birth-certificate, etc., etc. Even the tramps who flitted in and out of Rowton House had their papers to which they rightly attached the greatest importance. No man in Elsie’s world could get far along without papers, unless specially protected by heaven; and, sooner or later⁠—generally sooner than later⁠—heaven grew tired of protecting. + 

All day Elsie had been awaiting an opportunity to speak to Joe about his papers. The opportunity had now come. Mr. Earlforward could be left for an hour or so. Joe was apparently in less pain. The two bedrooms were tidied up. Both men had been fed. Joe had had more quinine. She could not sponge him again till the morrow. She herself had drunk two cups of tea, and eaten the last contents of the larder. She had lighted a new candle⁠—the last candle⁠—in the candlestick. She had brought coal and mended the fire. The next morning she would have a great deal to do and to arrange⁠—getting money, marketing, seeing the doctor and Mrs. Belrose, discussing the funeral with Mr. Earlforward⁠—terrible anxieties⁠—but for the present she was free. + 

Joe made no answer. He seemed to be trying to frame sentences. She encouraged him with a repetition: + 

“Where’s your papers? I can’t find ’em nowhere. You haven’t lost them, have ye?” Her brow contracted in apprehension. + 

“I sold ’em,” said Joe, in his deep, vibrating and yet feeble voice. He looked away. + 

“Sold ’em, Joe? Ye never sold ’em!” + 

“Yes I have, I tell ye. I sold ’em yesterday morning.” + 

“But, Joey⁠—” + 

“I sold ’em yesterday morning to a man as came to meet a man as came out of Pentonville same time as me.” + 

“Pentonville! Joe, d’ye mean ye’ve been to prison?” He nodded. “What a shame!” she exclaimed in protest, not at his having done anything wicked enough to send him to prison, but at the police having been wicked enough to send him to prison. She assumed instinctively and positively that he was an innocent victim of the ruthless blue men whom some people know only as pilots of perambulators across busy streets. + 

“There was no option, ye know, so I had fourteen days.” + 

She dropped on her knees at the bedside, and put her left arm under his neck and threw her right arm over his waist, and with it felt again the familiar shape of his waist through the bedclothes, and gazed into his homely, ugly face upon which soft, dark hair⁠—a beard on the chin⁠—was sprouting. This faith and tenderness made Joe cry. + 

“Tell me,” she murmured, scarcely hoping that he would succeed in any narrative. + 

“Oh, it’s nothin’,” Joe replied gloomily. “Armistice Day, ye know. I had my afternoon, and I went out.” + 

“Were ye in a place, Joe?” + 

“I had a part-time place in Oxford Street⁠—carrying coal upstairs, and cleaning brasses and sweeping and errands. And a bed. Yes, in the basement. Sort of a watchman. Doctor he give me a testimonial. Least, he sent it me when I wrote and asked him.” (No doubt whatever that she had been unjust to that doctor!) “I went down to Piccadilly to see the sights, and when it was about dark I see our old divisional general in a damn big car with two young ladies. There was a block, ye see, in Piccadilly Circus, and he was stopped by the kerb where them flower-girls are, ye know, by the fountain, and I was standing there as close as I am to you, Elsie. We used to call him the Slaughterer. That was how we called him. We never called him nothin’ else. And there he was with his two rows o’ ribbons and his flash women, perhaps they weren’t flash, and I didn’t like the look of his face⁠—hard, ye know. Cruel. We knowed him, we did. And then I thought of the two minutes’ silence, and hats off and stand at ’tention, and the Cenotaph, and it made me laugh. I laughed at him through the glass. And he didn’t like it, he didn’t. I was as close to him as I am to you, ye see. And he lets down the glass and says something about insultin’ behaviour to these ladies, and I put my tongue out to him. That tore it, that did. That fair put the lid on. I felt something coming over me⁠—ye know. Then there was a crowd, and I caught a policeman one on the shoulder. Oh, they marched me off, three of ’em! The doctor at the station said I was drunk, me as hadn’t had a drop for three days! Next morning the beak he said he’d treat me lenient because it was Armistice Day, and I’d had some and I’d fought for the old country, but assaulting an officer of the law, he couldn’t let that pass. No option for that, so he give me fourteen days.” + 

“But yer master, Joe?” + 

“It was an old woman.” + 

“Wouldn’t she⁠—?” + 

“No, she wouldn’t,” said Joe roughly. “And another thing, I didn’t go back there either, afterwards.” + 

“Did ye leave yer things there?” + 

“Yes. A bag and some things. And I shan’t fetch it either.” + 

“I shall!” said Elsie resolutely. “I won’t let ’er have ’em. I shall tell her you was taken ill, and I shall bring ’em away.” + 

Joe offered no remark. + 

“But why did ye sell yer papers, Joe?” + 

“He give me four-and-six for ’em. I was on me uppers; he give me four-and-six, and then we went and had a meal after all that skilly and cocoa and dry bread. No good me going back. I’d left without notice, I had.” + 

“But why didn’t ye come to me straight, Joey?” + 

Joe didn’t answer. After all this inordinate loquacity of his, he had resumed his great silence. + 

Elsie still gazed at him. The candle light went down and up. A burst of heavy traffic shook the bed. And now Elsie had a desire to tell Joe all about her own story, all about Mr. Earlforward and the death of Mrs. Earlforward, and the troubles awaiting her in the morning. She wanted to be confidential, and she wanted to discuss with him a plan for putting him on his feet again after he was better⁠—for she was sure she could restore his self-respect to him, and him to his proper position in the world. But he did not seem interested in anything, not even in herself. He was absorbed in his aches and pains and fever. And she was very tired. So, without moving her arms, she just laid her head on his breast, and was indignant against the whole of mankind on his behalf, and regarded her harsh, pitiless self as the author of all his misfortunes and loved him. + 

XII + 

Asleep + 

Mr. and Mrs. Belrose occupied a small bedroom at the top of their house. As for her sister and his sister, they fitted their amplitudes into some vague “somewhere else,” and those of the curious who in the way of business or otherwise knew how nearly the entire house was devoted to “wholesale,” wondered where the two sisters-in-law did in fact stow themselves. The servant slept out. + 

In the middle of the night Mrs. Belrose raised her magnificent form out of the overburdened bed and went to the window to look forth on the Steps. + 

“Charlie,” said she, coming back to the bed and shaking her husband. He awoke unwillingly and grunted, and muttered that she was taking cold; an absurd suggestion, as he knew well, for she never took cold, and it was inconceivable that she should take cold. + 

“That light’s still burning at T. T.’s⁠—in the shop. I don’t like the look of it.” + 

She lit the room, and the fancies of night seemed to be dispelled by an onrush of realism, dailiness and sagacity. Mr. and Mrs. Belrose considered themselves to be two of the most sagacious and imperturbable persons that ever lived, and they probably were. + 

No circumstances were too much for their sagacity and their presence of mind. Each had complete confidence in the kindly but unsentimental horse sense of the other. Mrs. Belrose, despite her youngishness, was the more impressive. She it was who usually said the final word in shaping a policy; yet in her utterances there was an implication that Charles had a super-wisdom which she alone could inspire, and also that he, being a man, could do certain things that she, being a woman, was ever so slightly incapable of. + 

“I don’t like the look of it at all,” she said. + 

“Well, I don’t see we can do anything till morning,” said Charles. Not that he was allowing his judgment to be warped by the desire to sleep. No; he was being quite impartial. + 

“That girl’s got too much on her hands, looking after that funny old man all by herself, day and night. She isn’t a fool, far from it; but it’s too much for one girl.” + 

“You’d better go over, perhaps, and have a look at things.” + 

“I was thinking you’d go, Charlie.” + 

“But I can’t do anything if I do go. I can’t help the girl.” + 

“I’m afraid,” said the authoritative and sagacious wife simply. + 

“What of?” asked the wizened slip of a husband. + 

“Well, I don’t know; but I am. It’ll be better for you to go⁠—anyway first. I could come afterwards. We can’t leave the girl in the lurch.” + 

Nevertheless Mrs. Belrose did know what she was afraid of and so did Mr. Belrose. She helped him to put on some clothes; it was a gesture of sympathy rather than of aid. And she exhorted him not to waken “those girls,” meaning her sister and his. + 

He went out, shivering. A fine night with a harsh wind moving dust from one part of the Steps to another. Nobody about. The church clock struck three. Mr. Belrose peered through the slit between the edge of the door-blind and the doorframe, but could see nothing except that a light was burning somewhere in the background. He rapped quietly and then loudly on the glass. No response. The explanation of the scene doubtless was that Elsie had come down into the shop on some errand and returned upstairs, having forgotten to extinguish the light. Mr. Belrose was very cold. He was about to leave the place and report to his wife when his hand discovered that the door was not fastened. (Elsie, in the perturbation caused by doing a kindness to the boy Jerry, had forgotten to secure it.) Mr. Belrose entered and saw Mr. Earlforward, wearing a smart new suit, moveless in a peculiar posture in his office-chair. He now knew more surely than before what his wife had been afraid of. But he had a very stout and stolid heart, and he advanced firmly into the office. A faint glow of red showed in the ash-strewn grate. The electric light descended in almost palpable rays on Mr. Earlforward’s grizzled head. The safe was open and there was a bag of money on the floor. Mr. Earlforward’s chair was tilted and had only been saved from toppling over, with Mr. Earlforward in it, by the fact that its left arm had caught under the ledge of the desk. The electric light was patient; so was Mr. Earlforward. He was leaning over the right arm of the chair, his body at half a right angle to the perpendicular, and his face towards the floor. + 

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” thought Mr. Belrose. “This will upset the Steps, this will.” + 

He was afraid. He had what he would have called the “creeps.” Gingerly he touched Mr. Earlforward’s left hand which lay on the desk. It was cold and rather stiff. He bent down in order to look into Mr. Earlforward’s averted face. What a dreadful face! White, blotched, hairy skin drawn tightly over bones and muscles⁠—very tightly. An expression of torment in the tiny, unseeing eyes! None of the proverbial repose of death in that face! + 

“Mustn’t touch it! Mustn’t disturb anything!” thought Mr. Belrose, straightening his knees. + 

He left the office and peered up the dark stairs. No light. No sound. He felt for his matches, but he had come away without them, and he suspected that he was not sufficiently master of himself to look effectively for matches. Still, the house must be searched. Although much averse from returning into the office, he did return, on the chance of finding a box of matches, and the first thing he saw was a box on the mantelpiece. Striking matches, he stumbled up the stairs and came first to the bathroom. Empty. Nothing unusual therein except thick strings stretched across it and an orange box in the bath. A bedroom, well furnished, the bed unmade; a cup and saucer on the night-table; one door of the wardrobe ajar. Everything still, expectant. Then he found the living room similarly still and expectant. He went back to the landing. No sound. The second flight of stairs dreadfully invited him to ascend. As he reached and pushed against the door at the head of those stairs another of his matches died. He struck a fresh one, and when it slowly flamed he stepped into the faintly fire-lit room and was amazed, astounded, thrilled, shocked and very seriously shaken to descry a young man lying on the bed in the corner and a young woman, Elsie, lying in abandonment across him, her head sunk in his breast. And he heard a regular sound of breathing. There was something in the situation of the pair which penetrated right through Mr. Belrose’s horse sense and profoundly touched his heart. Never had he had such a sensation at once painful and ravishing (yes, ravishing to the awed cheesemonger) as he had then. The young man raised his head an inch from the pillow and dropped it again. + 

“She’s asleep,” said the young man in a low, deep, tired voice. “Don’t wake her.” + 

XIII + 

Disappearance of T. T.’s + 

The transience of things human was wonderfully illustrated in the next fortnight. A short and drab account of the nocturnal discoveries of Mr. Belrose at T. T.’s appeared in one morning paper, and within six hours the evening papers, with their sure instinct for the important, had lifted Riceyman Steps to a height far above prizefighting, national economics and the embroiled ruin of Europe. Such trivialities vanished from the contents-bills, which displayed nothing but “Mysterious Death of a Miser in Clerkenwell” (the home of Bolshevism), “Astounding Story of Love and Death,” “Midnight Tragedy in King’s Cross Road,” and similar titles, legends and captions. Riceyman Steps was filled with ferreting special reporters and photographers. The morning papers next following elaborated the tale. The Steps became the cynosure of all England and the subject of cables to America, South Africa and the antipodes. The Steps rose dizzily to unique fame. The coroner’s inquest on the body of Henry Earlforward was packed like a divorce court on an illustrious day and stenographed verbatim. Jurymen who were summoned to it esteemed themselves fortunate. + 

The Reverend Augustus Earlforward, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, home for a holiday from his labours in the West Indies, and brother of the deceased, found himself in a moment extremely famous. He had nearly missed the boat at Kingston, Jamaica, and he saw the hand of Providence in the fact that he had not missed it. He had not met his younger brother for over thirty years, nor heard from him; did not even know his address; had scarcely thought of trying to hunt him up. And then at tea in the Thackeray Hotel, Bloomsbury, his stern eyes had seen the name of Earlforward written large in a newspaper. The affair was the most marvellous event, the most marvellous coincidence, of his long and honourable career. Wisely he flew to a solicitor. He caused himself to be represented at the inquest. He had reached England in a critical mood, for, like many colonials, he suspected that all was not well with the blundering and decadent old country. And the revelations of life in Clerkenwell richly confirmed his suspicions, which did not surprise him, because much commerce with negroes had firmly established in his mind the conviction that he could never be wrong. From the start he had his ideas about Elsie, the servant-girl asleep with a young man in her bedroom. They were not nice ideas, but it is to be remembered that he was taking a holiday from the preaching and practice of Christian charity. His legal representative put strange questions to Elsie at the inquest (during which it was testified, after postmortem, that Henry had died of a cancer at the junction of the gullet and the cardiac end of the stomach), and these questions were reinforced by the natural cynicism and incredulity of the coroner. Elsie was saved from opprobrium by Dr. Raste’s statement that she had called him in to the young man. Elsie indeed was cheered by her inflamed friends as she left the court. She said never a word about the coroner or the missionary afterwards, and, inexcusably, she never forgave either of them. But the missionary forgave Elsie and permitted her and the sick young man to remain in the house. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Earlforward had made a will, and the missionary was put into a good humour by the proof that the wealthy Violet had left no next-of-kin. Thus the whole of her property, in addition to the whole of Henry’s, went to Augustus, whereas if Violet had had next-of-kin Augustus would have got only half of Violet’s property. + 

Clerkenwell expected that the world-glory of the Steps would continue indefinitely; but it withered as quickly as it had flowered, and by the afternoon of the morrow of the inquest it had utterly died. The joint funeral of the Earlforwards did not receive a line in the daily press. Nevertheless it constituted a great spectacle in King’s Cross Road⁠—not by reason of its intrinsic grandeur (for it fell short of Henry’s conception of the obsequies which he would bestow on his wife), but by reason of the vast multitude of sightseers and followers. + 

The Reverend Augustus, heir to a very comfortable competency unwittingly amassed for him by the devices of Mr. Arb the clerk of works, the prudent policy of Mr. Earlforward and the imitativeness of Violet, found himself seriously inconvenienced for ready cash, because before he could touch the heritage he had to fulfil all sorts of expensive and tedious formalities and tiresomely to prove certain facts which he deemed to be self-evident⁠—as, for instance, that he himself was legitimate. He saw no end to the business, and he cabled to the Connectional authorities in Jamaica that he should take extra leave. He did not ask for extra leave; in his quality of a rich man he merely took it, and heavenly propaganda had to be postponed. The phrasing of that cable was one of his compensations in a trying ordeal. + 

He had various other compensations, of which the chief was undoubtedly the status of landlord with unoccupied property at his disposition. Not only all Clerkenwell, but apparently all London, learnt in a few hours that he had this status. Scores of people, rendered desperate by the house-famine, telegraphed to him; many scores of people wrote to him; and some dozens personally called upon him at his hotel, and they all supplicated him to do them the great favour of letting to them the T. T. Riceyman premises on lease at a high rent. A few desired to buy the property. The demand was so intense and widespread as to induce in Augustus the belief that he was a potential benefactor of mankind. Preferring to enjoy the fruits of riches without being troubled by the more irksome responsibilities thereof, he decided to sell and not to let. And he entered into a contract for sale to Mr. Belrose. He chose Mr. Belrose because Mr. Belrose and all his women were Wesleyan Methodists, and also perhaps because Mr. Belrose did not haggle and was ready and anxious to complete the transaction, and, indeed, paid a substantial deposit before the legal formalities of Augustus’ title to the property were finished. + 

Thenceforward event succeeded event with increasing rapidity. The entire stock of books was sold by private treaty to a dealer in Charing Cross Road, who swallowed it up and digested it with gigantic ease. The books went away quietly enough in vans. Then the furniture and the clothes were sold (including Mr. Earlforward’s virgin suits and shirts) to another sort of dealer in Islington. And a pantechnicon came for the furniture, etc., including the safe and the satin shoe, and it obtained permission from the highways authorities to pass over the pavement and stand on the flagstones of the Steps at the shop-door. And furniture was swept into it almost like leaves swept by the wind. And on that afternoon Mr. Belrose arrived from “across” with a group of shop-fitting and decorating contractors, and in the emptying interiors of the home and amid the flight of pieces of furniture Mr. Belrose discussed with the experts what he should do, and at what cost, to annihilate the very memory of T. T. Riceyman’s by means of improvements, fresh dispositions, and paint. + 

Idlers sauntered about watching the gorging of the pantechnicon and the erasing of T. T. Riceyman’s from the Steps. And what occupied their minds was not the disappearance of every trace of the sojourn on earth of Henry and Violet Earlforward, but the conquering progress of that powerful and prosperous personage, Charles Belrose, who was going to have two shops, and who would without doubt make them both pay handsomely. Henry and Violet might never have lived. They were almost equally strangers to the Reverend Augustus, who, moreover, was lying somewhat ill at his hotel⁠—result of the strain of inheriting. Violet had always been regarded as a foreigner by the district; she had had no roots there. And as for Henry, though he was not a foreigner but of the true ancient blood of Clerkenwell, and though the tale of his riches commanded respect, he had never won affection, and was classed sardonically as an oddity, which designation would have puzzled and annoyed him considerably. + 

Violet and Henry did, however, survive in one place, Elsie’s heart. She arrived now in the Steps, dressed in mourning⁠—new black frock, new black hat, the old black coat, and black gloves. She had bought mourning from a sense of duty and propriety. She had not wished to incur the expense, but conscience forced her to incur the expense. She was carrying a shabby grip-bag, which seemed rather heavy for her, and she was rather flushed and breathless from exercise of an unaccustomed sort. A dowdy, over-plump figure, whom nobody would have looked twice at. A simple, heavy face, common except for the eyes and lips; with a harassed look; fatigued also. She had been out nearly all day. She pretended not to notice it, but the sight of the formidable pantechnicon, squatted in the Steps, brought moisture into her eyes. + 

She sturdily entered the shop, which, Charles Belrose and his company of renovators having left, was empty save for one or two pieces of furniture waiting their proper niches in the pantechnicon. A man was pulling down the shelves and thus destroying the bays. Dead planks which had once been living, burden-bearing shelves, were stacked in a pile along one wall. She had to wait at the foot of the stairs while a section of Violet’s wardrobe awkwardly descended in the hairy arms of two Samsons. Then she went up, and on the first floor peeped into all the rooms one after another; they were scenes of confusion, dirt, dust, higgledy-piggledyness; difficult to believe that they had ever made part of a home, been regularly cleaned, watched over like helpless children incapable of taking care of themselves. She lugged the grip-bag up the second flight, and went into the spare-room, which was quite empty, stripped to the soiled and damaged walls⁠—even the plant-pots were gone from the windowsills; and she went into the kitchen, where the tap kept guard with its eternal drip-drip over perfect desolation. + 

At last she went into her bedroom, which by a magic ukase from on high in the Thackeray Hotel had been preserved from the sack. A fire was cheerfully burning; all was as usual to the casual glance, but the shut drawers were empty, and Elsie’s box and umbrella had gone back to Riceyman Square, where she had been sleeping since the funeral. Joe was sufficiently recovered to sleep alone in the house, and had had no objection to doing so. Joe, fully dressed for the grand exodus, sat waiting on the sole chair. He smiled. Dropping the bag, she smiled. They kissed. With his limited but imaginative intelligence Joe did not see that Elsie was merely Elsie. He saw within the ill-fitting mourning a saviour, a powerful protectress, a bright angel, a being different from, and superior to, any other being. They were dumb and happy in the island of homeliness around which swirled the tide of dissolution and change. Elsie picked up a piece of bread-and-butter from a plate and began to eat it. + 

“Didn’t yer get any dinner?” Joe asked anxiously. She nodded, and the nod was a lie. + 

“I got your bag and all your things in it,” she said. “There’s a clean collar. Ye’d better put it on.” + 

Munching, she unfastened the bag. + 

“And I’ve got the licence from the Registry Office,” she said. He scrutinized the licence, which by its complexity and incomprehensibility intimidated him. He was much relieved and very grateful that he had not had to go forth and get the licence himself. The clean collar, which Elsie affixed, made a wonderful improvement in Joe’s frayed and dilapidated appearance. + 

“Has the doctor been to look at ye?” Elsie asked. Joe shook his head. “Well, ye can’t go till he’s been to look at ye.” + 

The doctor had re-engaged Joe, who was to migrate direct to Myddelton Square that afternoon and would take up his duties gradually, as health permitted. He had already been tentatively out in the morning, but only to the other side of King’s Cross Road to get a shave. Perhaps it was to be regretted that Joe was going off in one of Mr. Earlforward’s grey flannel shirts. Elsie, had she been strictly honest, would have washed this shirt and returned it to the wardrobe, but she thought that Joe needed it, and her honesty fell short of the ideal. + 

There was a step on the stair. The doctor came into the island. And he himself was an island, detached, self-contained, impregnable as ever. He entered the room as though it was a room and not the emptying theatre of heroic and unforgettable drama, and as though nothing worth mentioning had happened of late in Riceyman Steps. + 

“Has my daughter called here for me?” he asked abruptly, deposing his prim hat on the little yellow chest of drawers. + 

“No, sir.” + 

“Ah! She was to meet me here,” he said in a casual, even tone. And yet there was something in his voice plainly indicating to the observant that deep down in his recondite mind burned a passionate pride in his daughter. + 

“I think you’ll do, Joe,” he decided, after some examination of the malaria patient. “I see you’ve had a shave.” + 

“Elsie said I’d better, sir.” + 

“Yes. Makes you feel brighter, doesn’t it? Well, you can be getting along. By the way, Elsie”⁠—he coughed. “We’ve been wondering at home whether you’d care to go and have a chat with Mrs. Raste?” + 

“Yes, sir. But what about, sir? Joe?” + 

“Well, the fact is, we thought perhaps you’d like”⁠—he gave a short, nervous laugh⁠—“to join the staff. I don’t know what they call it. Cook-general. No. Not quite that, because there’d be Joe. There’d be you and Joe, you see.” + 

Elsie drew back, alarmed⁠—so alarmed that she did not even say “Thank you.” + 

“Oh! I couldn’t do that, sir! I couldn’t cook⁠—for you, sir. I couldn’t undertake it, sir. I’m really only a charwoman, sir. I couldn’t face it, sir.” + 

“But I thought you’d been learning some cookery from⁠—er⁠—Mrs. Earlforward?” + 

“Oh, no, sir. Not as you might say. Only gas-ring, sir.” + 

This was the once ambitious girl who had dreamed of acquiring the skill to wait at table in just such a grand house as the doctor’s. Extreme diffidence was not the only factor in her decision, which she made instantly and positively as a strong-minded, sensible, masterful woman without any reference to the views of her protected, fragile idol, Joe⁠—for a quality of independence, hardness, had begun to appear in Elsie Sprickett. The fact was that she wanted a separate home as a refuge for Joe in case of need, and she was arranging to rent a room in the basement of her old abode in Riceyman Square. Out of the measureless fortune of £32 which she had accumulated in the Post Office Savings Bank, she intended to furnish her home. It had been agreed with the doctor that after the marriage Joe should have one whole night off per week. She would resume charing, which was laborious but more “free” than a regular situation. If Joe should have a fit of violence it could spend itself on her in the home. She even desired to suffer at his hands as a penance for the harshness of her earlier treatment of him, of her well-meant banishing of the innocent victim deranged by his experiences in the war. With her earnings and his they would have an ample income. The fine sagacious scheme was complete in her brain. And the doctor’s suggestion attacked it in its fundamentals. At Myddelton Square, worried by unaccustomed duties and the presence of others, she might have scenes with Joe and be unable to manage him. No! She must be independent; she must have liberty of action; and this could not be if she was a servant in a grand house. + 

“Oh! Very well, very well,” said the doctor, frigid as usual, but not offended. Joe said no word, knowing that he must not meddle in such high matters of policy. + 

Scatterings, expostulations, reproofs on the stairs. Miss Raste entered, with the excited dog Jack. Her father had told her that if she saw no one familiar below she must mount two flights of stairs and knock at the door facing her at the top; but, in her eagerness, she had forgotten to knock. Miss Raste was growing in stature daily. Her legs were fabulously long, and it was said of her at home that in time she would be in a position to stoop and kiss the crown of her father’s head. To everyone’s surprise she impulsively rushed at Elsie with thin arms outstretched and kissed her. Elsie blushed, as well she might. Miss Raste had spoken to Elsie only once before, but out of the memory of Elsie’s face and that brief meeting she had constructed a lovely fairytale, and a chance word of her mother’s had set her turning it into reality. She had dreamed of having the adorable, fat, comfortable, kind Elsie for a servant in the house, and her parents were going to arrange the matter. For twenty-four hours she had been in a fever about it. + 

“Is she coming, papa?” the child demanded urgently. + 

“No, she can’t. She says she can’t cook, and so she won’t come.” + 

Miss Raste burst into tears. Her lank body shook with sobs. Everybody was grievously constrained. Nobody knew what to do, least of all the doctor. Jack stood still in front of the fire. + 

“Mummy would have taught you to cook,” Miss Raste spluttered, almost inarticulately. “Mummy’s awfully nice.” + 

Elsie’s sagacious scheme for her married life was dissipated in a moment. The scheme became absurd, impossible, inconceivable. Elsie was utterly defeated by the child’s affection, ardour, and sorrow. She felt nearly the same responsibility towards the child as towards Joe. She was the child’s forever. And she had kissed the child. Having kissed the child, could she be a Judas? + 

“Oh, then I’ll go and see Mrs. Raste,” said Elsie, half smiling and half crying. + 

This was indeed a very strange episode, upsetting as it did all optimistic theories about the reasonableness of human nature and the influence of logic over the springs of conduct. No one quite knew where he was. Dr. Raste was intensely delighted and proud, and yet felt that he ought to have a grievance. Joe was delighted, but egotistically. Elsie was both happy and sad, but rather more happy than sad. Miss Raste laughed with glee, while the tears still ran down her delicate cheeks. Jack barked once. + 

Not that Jack had that very mysterious intuitive comprehension of the moods of others which in the popular mind is usually attributed to dogs, children, and women. No! Jack had heard footsteps on the stairs. A tousled, white-sleeved man in a green apron entered. + 

“We’re ready for here now, miss,” he announced to Elsie. + 

And without waiting for permission he began rapidly to roll up the bedclothes in one vast bundle. Next he collected the crockery. The bedroom had ceased to be immune from the general sack. + 

“They didn’t have a lot of luck,” said Mr. Belrose to Elsie and Joe that night in the Steps at the locked door of T. T.’s. It was the decent, wizened little old fellow’s epitaph on Henry Earlforward and Violet. It was his apology for dropping the keys of T. T.’s into his pocket, and for the blaze of electricity from his old shop, and for the forlorn darkness of T. T.’s, and for the fact that he was prospering while others were dead. He did not attribute the fate of the Earlforwards to Henry’s formidable character. He could not think scientifically, and even had he been able to do so good nature would have prevented him. And even if he had attempted to do so he might have thought wrong. The affair, like all affairs of destiny, was excessively complex. + 

Elsie, for her part, laid much less stress than Mr. Belrose on luck. “With a gentleman like he was,” she thought, meaning Henry Earlforward, “something was bound to happen sooner or later.” She held Mr. Earlforward responsible for her mistress’s death, but her notions of the value of evidence were somewhat crude. And, similarly, she held herself responsible for her master’s death. She had noticed that he had never been the same since the orgy of her wedding-cake, and she had a terrible suspicion that immoderate wedding-cake caused cancer. Thus she added one more to the uncounted theories of the origin of cancer, and nobody yet knows enough of the subject to be able to disprove Elsie’s theory. However, that night Elsie, with the sensations of a homicide, the ruin of a home and family behind her, a jailbird on her left arm and his heavy grip-bag on her right, could still be happy as she went up the Steps into Riceyman Square, and called at her old home to make certain dispositions, and passed on in the chill darkness to Myddelton Square. She was apprehensive about future dangers and her own ability to cope with them; but she was always apprehensive. + 

Joe, belonging to the contemplative and passionate variety of mankind, was not at all apprehensive. He knew his soul as intimately as a pretty woman knows the externals of her body. He was conscious of joy in retreading with Elsie the old familiar streets. He had a perfect, worshipping faith in Elsie’s affection and in her powers. His one affliction was to see Elsie lugging the heavy grip-bag; but even this was absurd, for he had not yet the strength to carry it, and he well knew that she would never have permitted him to try. + 

People saw a young, humble, mutually-absorbed couple strolling along and looking at one another. More correctly, people did not see a humble couple, any more than people at a Court ball see a fashionably dressed and self-sure couple. Elsie and Joe were characteristic of the district. They would have had to look much worse than they did in order to be classed as humble in Clerkenwell. Nor were people shocked at the spectacle of the woman lugging a heavy grip-bag while the man carried naught. Such dreadful things were often witnessed in Clerkenwell. + 