“That’s cold water,” said he.
“You ought to have warm water to wash in.”
He laughed grimly. She knew that so long as the gas-meter clicked he would never allow her to heat water on the gas-ring for him. He bent and kissed her, and kept his mouth on hers for ages of eternity. They were happy together; they were bound to be happy together. As for her, she would be happy in yielding her will to his, in adopting all his ideas, and in being even more royalist than the king. Her glance fell. She experienced a sensuous pleasure in the passionate resolution to be his disciple and lieutenant. When Elsie, celestially benevolent, appeared with a tray on the stairs, Violet seized her husband’s arm to lead him to the back room. And as she did so she bridled and slightly swayed her body, and gave a sidelong glance at Elsie as if saying: “I am his slave, but I own him, and he belongs to no woman but me.”
“Elsie,” she said sternly. “You’d better bring that last lot of books down again. Mr. Earlforward thinks they should stay where they were.” The indisputable fiat of the sultan, published by his vizier!
“Yes, ’m.”
She sat him down in his desk-chair, and as she dispensed his tea she fluttered round him like a whole flock of doves.
“Let me see,” said he, with amiable detachment. “Did you give me the account of that one pound you had for spending yesterday?”
Outside, London was bestirring itself from the vast coma of Sunday morning. But inside the sealed house London did not exist. This was the end of the honeymoon; or, if you prefer it, their life was one long honeymoon.
Part III
I
Early Morning
Elsie it always was who every morning breathed the breath of life into the dead nocturnal house, and revived it, and turned it once again from a dark, unresponsive, meaningless and deathlike keep into a human habitation. The dawn helped, but Elsie was the chief agent.
On this morning, which was a Monday, she arose much earlier than in the rest of the week, and even before the dawn. She arose with her sorrow, which left her only when she slept and which was patiently and ruthlessly waiting for her when she awoke. Few people save certain bodily sufferers and certain victims of frustration know the infernal, everlasting perseverance of which pain, physical or mental, is capable. Nevertheless, Elsie’s sorrow was lightening by hope. Nearly a year had passed since Joe’s departure, and she had invented a purely superstitious idea, almost a creed, that he would reappear on the anniversary of his vanishing. This idea was built on nothing whatever; and although it shot her sorrow through with radiance it also terrified her—lest it should prove false. If it proved false her sorrow would close her in like the black grave.
She raised the blind of her window and dressed; she was dressed in three minutes; she propped the window open to the frosty air, lit the candle, and went downstairs to the bathroom, and as she went the house seemed to resume life under her tread. The bathroom contained nothing but Mrs. Earlforward’s safe, under the window, a clotheshorse, a clothesline or two stretched from window to door, and an orange-box and an oval galvanized iron bathtub, both of which were in the bath proper. The week’s wash lay in the orange-box and in the oval bath. It comprised no large articles—no sheets, no tablecloths, only personal linen (including one grey flannel shirt of Henry’s and two collars), a few towels, aprons, cloths, and two pillow-slips. Elsie fearfully lit the ancient explosive geyser, cried “Oh!” and rushed to the window because she had omitted the precaution of opening it, put nearly all the linen into the bath, set the bath on the orange-box in the bath proper, left the bathroom, and returned to it with another “Oh!” to blow out the candle, which she had forgotten. It was twilight now.
In the first-floor front room, which Mrs. Earlforward called the dining room and Elsie the parlour, all objects stood plainly revealed as soon as Elsie had drawn up the two blinds. Half of the large table was piled several feet high with books, and the other half covered with a sheet of glass that was just a little small for its purpose. Elsie dusted this glass first, and she dusted it again after she had cleaned the room; not a long operation, the cleaning; she was “round” the room like an express train. When she opened one of the windows to shake her duster the sun was touching the top of the steeple of St. Andrew’s, Daphut’s yard was unlocked, and trams and lorries were in movement in King’s Cross Road.
A beautiful October morning, thought Elsie as she naughtily lingered for ten seconds at the window instead of getting on with her job. She enjoyed the fresh, chill air blowing through Riceyman Steps. Conscience pricked her; she shut the window. Taking crockery and cutlery from the interior of the sideboard, she rapidly laid breakfast on the glass for two. The parlour was now humanized, despite the unlit gas-fire. With a glance at the clock, which rivalled Greenwich in exactitude, but which had a mysterious and disconcerting habit of hurrying when she wanted it to loiter, Elsie hastened away back to the bathroom and gave a knock on the bedroom door as she passed. The bathroom was beautifully warm. She rolled up her tight sleeves, put on a rough apron, and pushed the oval tub under the thin trickle of steaming water that issued from the burning geyser. She was absorbed utterly in her great lifework, and in the problem of fitting the various parts of it into spaces of time which would scarcely hold them.
