It lay now frowsily supine in a needed Sunday indolence after the week’s hard labour. All the upper windows were shut and curtained, and most of the ground-floor windows. The rare glimpses of forlorn interiors were desolating. Not a child played in the roadways. But here and there a housewife had hung her doormats and canaries on the railings to take the holy Sabbath air; and newspapers, fresh as newly gathered fruit, waited folded on doorsteps for students of crime and passion to awake from their beds in darkened and stifling rooms. Also little milk-cans with tarnished brass handles had been suspended in clusters on the railings. Cats only, in their elegance and their detached disdain, rose superior to the terrific environment. The determined church bells ceaselessly jangled.
“The church is rather nice,” said Mrs. Arb. “But what did I tell you about the Square?”
“Wait a moment! Wait a moment,” replied Mr. Earlforward. “Let us walk round, shall we?”
They began to walk round. Presently Mr. Earlforward stopped in front of a house which had just been painted, to remind the spectator of the original gentility of the hungry ’forties.
“No broken panes there, I think,” he remarked triumphantly.
Mrs. Arb’s glance searched the façade for even a cracked pane, and found none. She owed him a shilling.
“Well,” she said, somewhat dashed, but still briskly. “Of course there was bound to be one house that was all right. Don’t they say it’s the exception proves the rule?”
He understood that he would not receive his shilling, and he admired her the more for her genial feminine unscrupulousness.
At the corner of Gilbert Street Mrs. Arb suddenly burst out laughing.
“I hadn’t noticed we had any Savoys up here!” she said.
Painted over the door of the corner house were the words “Percy’s Hotel.”
The house differed in no other detail from the rest of the Square.
“I wonder if they have any self-contained suites?”
Mr. Earlforward was about to furnish the history of this singular historic survival, when they both, almost simultaneously, through a large interstice of the curtains, noticed Elsie sitting and rocking gently by the ground-floor window of a house near to Percy’s Hotel. Her pale face was half turned within the room, and its details obscure in the twilight of the curtained interior; but there could be no mistake about her identity.
“Is it here she lives?” said Mrs. Arb.
“I suppose so. I know she lives somewhere in the Square, but I never knew the number.”
The front door of the house opened and Dr. Raste emerged, fresh, dapper, prim, correct, busy, speeding without haste, the incarnation of the professional. You felt that he would have emerged from Buckingham Palace in just the same manner. To mark the Sabbath, which his ceaseless duties forbade him to honour otherwise, he wore a silk hat. This hat he raised on perceiving Mr. Earlforward and a lady; and he raised also, though scarcely perceptibly, his eyebrows.
“You been to see my charwoman, doctor?” Mr. Earlforward urbanely stopped him.
Dr. Raste hesitated a moment.
“Your charwoman? Ah, yes. I did happen to see her. Yes.”
“Ah! Then she is unwell. Nothing serious, I hope?”
“No, no!” said the doctor, his voice rather higher than usual. “She’ll be all right tomorrow. A mere nothing. An excellent constitution, I should imagine.”
A strictly formal reply, if very courteous. Probably nobody in Clerkenwell, except perhaps his man Joe, knew how Dr. Raste talked and looked when he was not talking and looking professionally. Dr. Raste would sometimes say with a dry, brief laugh, “we medicoes,” thereby proclaiming a caste, an order, a clan, separated by awful, invisible, impregnable barriers from the common remainder of mankind; and he never stepped beyond the barriers into humanity. In his case the secret life of the brain was indeed secret, and the mask of the face, tongue and demeanour made an everlasting privacy. He cleared his throat.
“Yes, yes. … By the way, I’ve been reading that Shakespeare. Very fine, very fine. I shall read it all one of these days. Good morning.” He raised his hat again and departed.
“I shall go in and see her, poor thing!” said Mrs. Arb with compassion.
“Shall you?”
“Well, I’m here. I think it would be nice if I did, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Earlforward admiringly agreed.
XI
Elsie’s Home
The house which Mrs. Arb decided to enter had a full, but not an extraordinary, share of experience of human life. There were three floors of it. On the ground floor lived a meat-salesman, his wife and three children, the eldest of whom was five years of age. Three rooms and some minute appurtenances on this floor. The meat-salesman shouted and bawled cheap bits of meat in an open-fronted shop in Exmouth Street during a sixty-hour week which ended at midnight on Saturday. He possessed enormous vocal power. All the children out of naughtiness had rickets. On the first floor lived a french-polisher, his wife and two children, the eldest of whom was three years of age. One child less than the ground-floor family, but the first floor was about to get level in numbers. Three rooms and some minute appurtenances on this floor. The french-polisher worked only forty-four hours a week. His fingers wore always the colour of rosewood, and he emitted an odour which often competed not unsuccessfully with the characteristic house odour of stale soapsuds. Out of ill-will for mankind he had an everlasting cough. On the second floor lived a middle-aged dressmaker, alone. Three rooms and some minute appurtenances on this floor. Nobody but an occasional customer was
