Moreover, Joe had no right to molest her at home. She had her reputation to think of, and her reputation, in her loyal and ingenuous mind, was his reputation also. Therefore, with woe in her heart she began to close the door on Joe. Joe, rendered savage by a misery which he could not define, put his foot in the aperture and then forced the door backwards and lunged his desecrating body inside the sacred Sunday morning temple of sleep. (A repetition of his procedure of the previous Thursday night.) The two stood close together. He could not meet her fixed gaze. His eyes glanced restlessly and wildly round, at the foul walls, the gritty and soiled floor.
“Get out of this, my boy.”
“Let me kiss you,” he demanded harshly.
“Get out of it.”
Losing what little remained of his self-control, he hit Elsie a strong blow on the shoulder. She was not ready for it. In the idiom of the ring her “footwork” was bad, and she lost her balance, falling against the french-polisher’s perambulator, which crashed violently into the stairs like an engine into a stationary buffer. Elsie’s head caught the wheel of the perambulator. A great shrill scream arose; the children had followed Elsie out of the yard and witnessed the fall of their beloved slave. Joe, appalled at the consequences of his passion, ran off, banging the door behind him with a concussion which shook the house afresh and still more awakeningly. Two mothers recognized the howls of their children. The spinster on the second floor saw a magnificent opportunity for preaching from a point of vantage her views on the state of modern society. Two fathers, desperate with exasperation, but drawn by the mighty attraction of a good row, jumped murderous from their warm and fetid beds. Two half-clad figures appeared in the doorways of the ground-floor rooms and three on the stairs.
Elsie sat up, dazed, and then stood up, then sank limply down again. One mother smacked her child and a child which was not hers. The other mother protested furiously from the stairs. The paradise of Sunday morning lay shattered. The meat-salesman had sense, heart, and initiative. He took charge of Elsie. The hellish din died down. A few minutes later Elsie was seated in the rocking-chair by the window in his front room. She wept apologetically. Little was said, but all understood that Elsie’s fantastic sweetheart had behaved disgracefully, and all indicated their settled opinion that if she kept on with him he would murder her one of these days. Three-quarters of an hour later Dr. Raste calmly arrived. Joe had run to the surgery and shouted at him: “I’ve killed her, sir.” The meat-salesman, having himself lighted a bit of a fire, left the room while the doctor examined the victim. The doctor could find nothing but one bruise on the front of Elsie’s left shoulder. With a splendid gesture of devotion the meat-salesman’s wife gave her second child’s warm milk to the reluctant Elsie. There happened to be no other stimulant in the house. Peace was reestablished, and even slumber resumed.
XII
The Benefactress
The front door was opened to Mrs. Arb’s quiet knock by the oldest child in the house, an obstreperous boy of five, who was suddenly struck sheepish and mute by the impressive lady on the doorstep. He said nothing at all in reply to Mrs. Arb’s request to see Elsie, but sidled backwards along the lobby and opened a door, looking up at her with the most crude curiosity. As soon as she had gone into the room and the inhibition was lifted, he ran off to the yard raising his heels high and laughing boisterously.
The room in which Elsie had been installed was crowded and overcrowded with the possessions of the meat-salesman and his wife. The walls were covered from cornice to near the floor with coloured supplements from Christmas numbers, either in maple-wood frames or unframed; a wonderful exhibition of kindly sentiment: the innocence of children, the purity of lovers, the cohesion of families, the benevolence of old age, immense meals served in interiors of old oak, landscapes where snow lay in eternal whiteness on church steeples, angels, monks, blacksmiths, coach-drivers, souls awakening: indeed, a vast and successful effort to convince the inhabitants of Riceyman Square that Riceyman Square was not the only place on earth. The display undoubtedly unbent, diverted, and cheered the mind. In between the chromatic prints were grey, realistic photographs of people who really existed or had existed. The mantelpiece was laden with ornaments miscalled “china,” standing on bits of embroidery. The floor was covered with oddments of carpet. There were many chairs, unassorted; there was a sofa; there was a cradle; there was a sewing-machine; there was a clotheshorse, on which a man’s blue apron with horizontal white stripes was spread out. There were several tables, including a small walnut octagonal table, once a lady’s worktable, which stood in the window and upon which a number of cloth-bound volumes of Once a Week were piled carefully, corkscrew-wise. And there was a wardrobe, also a number of kitchen utensils. The place was encumbered with goods, all grimy as the walls and ceilings, many of them cracked and worn like the woodwork and paint, but proving triumphantly that the meat-salesman had no commerce with pawnbrokers.
“I thought I should like to come round and see how you are, Elsie,” said Mrs. Arb kindly and forgivingly. “No, don’t get up. I can see you aren’t well. I’ll sit here.”
Elsie blushed deeply.
“I’ve had a bit of trouble, ’m,” she apologetically murmured.
Elsie’s trouble was entirely due to Mrs. Arb’s demand
