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 dæmonic 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 window-sill. 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 sick-room, 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. Naïvely 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 to-morrow 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 to-morrow 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 TO 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--stand-offish, 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 to-morrow 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 to-day, 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.--Your loving Husband, H.
EARLFORWARD.'"
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 to-night!" 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 north-east corner of the
churchyard. Their voices were raised from time to time, and Elsie
recognized his as she approached the house. Mrs. Perkins's boy wore over
his head a sack which he had irregularly borrowed for the night from the
express parcel company in the tails of whose vans he spent about twelve
hours a day hanging on to a piece of string suspended from the van roof.
That he had energy left in the evening to practise savagely-delicate
sentimental backchat in the rain was proof enough of a somewhat
remarkable quality of "brightness."
Elsie had chosen him for her mission because he was hardened to the
world and thoroughly accustomed to the enterprise of affronting
entrance-halls and claiming the attention of the guardians thereof. She
now called to him across the roadway in an assured, commanding tone
which indicated that she knew him to be her slave and that, in spite of
her advanced years, she could more than hold her own with him against
any chit in the Square. There was an aspect of Elsie's individuality
which no living person knew except Mrs. Perkins's boy. He went hurrying
to her.
"I want you to run down to the hospital with this letter and be sure to
tell the porter it is to be given to Mrs. Earlforward to-night. She's in
there. And here's sixpence for you, and I'll lend you my umbrella and
I'll get it again from your mammy to-morrow morning; but you must just
walk to the Steps with me first because I don't want to get wet."
"Right-o, Elsie!" he agreed in his rough, breaking voice, and louder:
"So long, Nell!"
"Put it in your pocket now," Elsie said, handing him the letter. "No;
don't take the keys." She was still carrying Mr. Earlforward's bunch of
keys.
The boy insisted on taking the umbrella, which gave him almost as much
happiness as the sixpence. Never before had he had the opportunity to
show off with an umbrella. He wished that he could get rid of the sack,
which did not at all match the umbrella's glory.
"Here, hold on!" He stopped her and threw the sack over the railings
into his mother's area. They walked together towards the Steps.
"Your Joe's been asking for you to-night," he said suddenly.
"My Joe!" She stood still, then leaned against the railings.
"Here! 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 to-night, I s'pose."
"Now you hurry with that letter, Jerry," she said at the shop-door. Mrs.
Perkins's boy sailed round the corner into King's Cross Road with the
umbrella on high.
Elsie had the feeling that she had not herself 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. To-morrow, after you've had another good sleep. I
must just go and look at Mr. Earlforward for a minute."
She offered him a drink of water and left him, less to look at Mr.
Earlforward than in order to give him an opportunity to calm himself, if
that was possible. She knew that in certain moods solitude was best for
him, ill or well. And she went down the dark stairs to the other
bedroom, which was nearly as cold as the ice-cold stairs.
Mr. Earlforward also was worse. He seemed to be in a fever, yet looked
like a corpse. Her arrival clearly gave him deep relief; he upbraided
her for neglecting him; but somewhat timidly and cautiously, as one who
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 back yards of the houses in King's Cross
Road stretched out before her; a pattern of dark walls--wall, yard,
wall, yard, wall, yard--and the joint masonries of every pair of
dwellings jutting out at regular intervals in back-rooms additional to
the oblongs of the houses. The sky was clear, a full moon had dimmed the
stars; and fine weather, which would have been a boon to the day, was
being wasted on the unconscious night. The moonlight glinted here and
there on window-glass. Every upper window marked a bedroom. And in every
bedroom were souls awake or asleep. Not a window lit, except one at the
end of the vista. Perhaps behind that window somebody was suffering and
somebody watching. Or it might be only that somebody was rising to an
interminable, laborious day. The heavy night of the town oppressed Elsie
dreadfully. She had noticed that a little dog kennelled in the yard of
the very next house to T. T. Riceyman's was fitfully moaning and
yapping. Then a light flickered into a steady gleam behind a window of
this same house, less than a dozen feet away, with an uncanny effect
upon Elsie. The light waned to nothing, and shortly afterwards the
back-door opened, and the figure of a young woman in a loose gown, with
unbound hair, was silhouetted against the radiance of a candle within
the house. Across the tiny backyard of T. T.'s Elsie could plainly see
the woman, whose appearance was totally unfamiliar to her. A soul living
close to her perhaps for months and years, and she did not know her from
Eve! Elsie wanted to call out to her, but dared not. A pretty face, the
woman had, only it was hard, exasperated, angry. The woman advanced
menacingly upon the young, chained dog, and the next moment there was
one sharp yell, followed by a diminuendo succession of yells. "That'll
learn ye to 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 sick-bed. She had left it unimpeachably smooth, tidy
and rectangular; it was now tossed and deranged into a horrible
confusion, as though it had not been made for days, as though for days
the patient had been carrying on in it a continuous battle with some
powerful enemy. And in the midst of it lay Mr. Earlforward (whom also
she had just "put to rights," and who after her tending had somehow not
seemed to be very ill), unkempt, hot, wild-eyed, parchment-skinned,
emaciated, desiccated, creased, anxious, at bay, nearly desperate,
mumbling to himself. Yet the moment he caught sight of the doctor he
altered his demeanour, becoming calm, still, and even a little
sprightly. The change was pathetic in its failure to deceive; and it was
also heroic.
"Well, my friend," the doctor greeted him, staccato, with his
characteristic faint, nervous snigger at the end of a phrase.
"You're here very early, doctor," said Mr. Earlforward composedly. "At
least it seems to me early." He did not know the time; nor Elsie either;
not a timepiece in the house was going, and the church-clock bell was
too familiar to be noticed unless listened for.
"Thought you might like to know something about your wife," said Dr.
Raste, raising his voice. He made no reference at all to Henry's
exasperating refusal to go to the hospital on the previous day. "They
tell me at the hospital that a fibroid growth is her trouble. I
suspected it."
"Where?"
"Matrix." The doctor glanced at Elsie as if to say: "You don't know what
that word means." She didn't, but she divined well enough Mrs.
Earlforward's trouble. "Change of life. No children," the doctor went on
tersely, and nodded several times. Mr. Earlforward merely gazed at him
with his little burning eyes. "There'll be an operation this morning.
Hope it'll be all right. It ought to be. An otherwise healthy subject.
Yes. Hold this in your mouth, will you?"
He inserted a clinical thermometer between Mr. Earlforward's white,
crinkled lips, took hold of the patient's wrist and pulled out his
watch.
"Appears you can't retain your food," he said, after he had put the
watch back. "Comes up exactly as it goes down. Mechanical. You're very
strong." He withdrew the thermometer, held it up to the light, washed
it, restored it to its case. "Well, we know what's the matter with your
wife, 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, to-day his business
was a matter of indifference to him. That, he knew, was not a good sign.
But, then, to-morrow would certainly show some improvement.
Indigestion--and he was suffering from nothing but acute
indigestion--invariably did yield to a policy of starvation. As for
hospitals, he had always had a horror of hospitals since once, in his
insurance days, he had paid a visit to a fellow-clerk confined in a
fever-ward. The vision of the huge, long, bare room, with its rows of
beds and serried pain and distress, the draughts through the open
windows, the rise and fall of the thunder of traffic outside, the
semi-military bearing of the nurses, the wholesaleness of the affair,
the absence of privacy, the complete subjection of the helpless
patients, the inelasticity of regulations, the crushing of
individuality: this dreadful vision had ineffaceably impressed itself on
his imagination--the imagination of an extreme individualist with a
passion for living his own life free of the obligation to justify it or
explain it. He had recalled the vision hundreds of times--and never
mentioned it to a soul. He did not intend to die of his illness; he knew
that he would not die of it, but he convinced himself that he would
prefer anything, even death, to incarceration in a great hospital. Were
he wrenched by force out of his bed, he would kick and struggle to the
very last, and his captors should be stricken with the fear of killing
him while trying in their misguided zeal to save him. He read correctly
the pertinacity in the doctor's face. But he had never encountered a
pertinacity stronger than his own, and illness 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 over-fatigued 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 god-like little being he thought
he was. Fortunately Joe was in a state which made all equal before him.
"Oh, dear! I do so ache, and I'm thirsty," the second patient groaned
desperately, showing no emotion--surprise, awe or shame--at sight of the
doctor and employer whom he had so cruelly wronged by leaving him in the
lurch for inadequate reasons originating in mere sentiment. He had been
solitary for half an hour and could not bear it. He wanted, and wanted
ravenously, something from everybody he saw. The world existed solely to
succour him. And certainly he looked very ill, forlorn, and wistfully
savage in the miserable bed in the miserable bedroom of the
ex-charwoman. He looked quite as ill as Mr. Earlforward, and to Elsie
even worse.
"It's malaria," said the doctor in a casual tone, after he had gone
through the routine of examination. "Temperature, of course. He'll be
better in a few days. I've no doubt he had it in France first, but he
never told me. When they brought back troops to France from the East,
malaria came with them. All the north of France is covered with
mosquitoes, and they carry the disease. I'll send down some quinine. You
must feed him on liquids--milk, barley-water, beef-tea, milk-and-soda.
Hot water to drink, not cold. And you ought to sponge him down twice a
day."
Elsie, listening intently to this mixture of advice and information,
could not believe that Joe's case was not more serious than the doctor's
manner implied. Well implanted in her lay the not groundless conviction
that doctors were apt to be much more summary with the sick poor than
with the sick rich. And she was revisited by her old sense of this
doctor's harsh indifference. He had not even greeted his former servant,
had regarded him simply as he would regard any ordinary number in a
panel.
"You won't have a great deal to do downstairs. In fact, scarcely
anything," the doctor added, who apparently saw nothing excessive in
leaving two patients in charge 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 god-send. ... She had said nothing about Violet. Well, if she
had had news she would have told him. He hesitated to mention Violet. He
could wait till she began.
"I'll run and make you some food," she said.
"Here! Not so fast! Not so fast!" he stopped her.
He was about to give an order when, for the second time, he noticed that
her apron was wet in several places.
"Why is your apron all wet?" he demanded sharply.
"Is it?" she faltered, looking down at it. "So it is! I've been doing
things." (She appeared to have dropped the "sir" completely.)
The fact was that she had been sponging Joe.
Mr. Earlforward became suspicious. He suspected that she was wasting
warm water.
"Why are you always running upstairs?" he asked in a curious tone.
"Running upstairs, sir?"
(Ha! "Sir." He was recovering his grip on her.)
She blushed red. She had something to hide. Hordes of suspicions
thronged through his mind.
"Well, sir, I have to go to the kitchen."