A tramcar thundered up King’s Cross Road, throwing sparks from its heels and generally glowing with electricity. It was crammed and jammed with humanity—exhausted pleasure-seekers returning home northwards from theatre, music-hall, cinema and restaurant. Pathetic creatures; stupid, misguided, deluded, heedless, improvident—sheltered in no strong fortress, they! Violet thought of the magic gold.
“Come. Come to bed,” she said. “It’s very cold here after the office.”
He obeyed.
Part IV
I
At the Window
Elsie was cleaning the upper windows of T. T. Riceyman’s, and she had arrived at the second-floor spare-room, which had two windows, one on King’s Cross Road and the other on Riceyman Steps. (A third window, on Riceyman Steps, had been bricked up, like two first-floor windows on King’s Cross Road, in the prehistoric ages of the house.) Two-thirds of her body was dangerously projected over King’s Cross Road, above the thunder of the trams and the motor-lorries and the iron trotting of carthorses; the inferior third dangled within the room. She clung with one powerful arm to woodwork or brickwork, while with the other she wiped and rubbed the panes; the windowsill was the depository of a tin can, a leather, and a cloth, each of which had to be manipulated with care, lest by falling any of them should baptize or injure the preoccupied passersby whose varied topknots and shoulders Elsie glimpsed when she happened to look down. The windows of the house were all sashed; to clean the upper half was fairly easy, but the lower half could only be done by lifting it bit by bit into the place of the upper half and pulling the latter down on to Elsie’s legs. A difficult operation, this cleaning, in addition to being risky to limb or even to life. Elsie performed it with the exactest conscientiousness in the dusty and cold north wind that swept through the canyon of King’s Cross Road.
She could see everything within the room. The orderly piles of books ranged on the floor, and the array of provisional shelves which she and her mistress had built upon odd volumes (still unsold) of The Illustrated London News. The top or covering plank had disappeared, having been secretly removed, during the master’s absence, and sawn and chopped up for firewood in the cellar; for the master had decisively discountenanced the purchase of more firewood, holding that somehow or other the women could “manage”; they had managed. Elsie saw the door open and her mistress enter with a plant-pot in either hand. Violet, all aproned and wearing a renovated check frock, gave a start at the sight of Elsie’s legs.
“So here you are!” Elsie heard her voice coming weakly through the glass into the uproar of the street. “And I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
That Elsie had been engaged upon the windows for quite three-quarters of an hour was proof that a servant might go her own ways without attracting the attention even of an employer who flattered herself on missing nothing. Elsie wormed her body back within the room.
“Didn’t you see me cleaning the outside of the shop windows, ’m?” she asked, sedately benevolent. (She could clean the inside of the shop windows only by special arrangement with the proprietor.)
“No, I did not. It’s true I’ve had other matters to think about this morning. Yes, it is! And why must you choose this morning for your windows? You know it’s your afternoon out, and there’s a lot to do. But perhaps you aren’t going out, Elsie?”
“Well, ’m, I was thinking of going out,” Elsie answered, bringing in the tin can. “But I thought they looked so dirty.”
Here Elsie was deceitful, or at best she was withholding part of the truth. Mrs. Earlforward would not have guessed in a million guesses Elsie’s real reason for cleaning the windows on just that morning. The real reason was that the vanished Joe had been famous for the super-excellence of his window-cleaning. This day was the anniversary of his disappearance. Elsie had no genuine expectation that he would reappear. The notion of his return after precisely a year was merely silly. She admitted it. And yet he might come back! If he did he would find her in half an hour by inquiry, and if he did find her she could not tolerate that he should find “her” windows dirty. He had an eye for windows, and windows must shine for him. Thus mysteriously, mystically, poetically, passionately did Elsie’s devotion express itself.
“Now don’t shut the window!” Violet admonished her sharply. “You know I want to put these plants out.”
Elsie’s eyes grew moist.
“How touchy the girl is this morning!” thought Violet. “If she had to put up with what I have—”
And perhaps Violet was to be excused. How could she, with all her common sense and experience of mankind, divine that stodgy Elsie’s equanimity was at the mercy of any gust that windy morning? She could not.
She established the plant-pots on the windowsill. She had bought bulbs with the ten shillings so startlingly given to her by her husband, and with his reluctant approval. She had scrubbed the old plant-pots, stirred the soil in them, and embedded the bulbs. She put the pots out in the daytime and brought them in at night; she watered them when necessary in the bathroom. She tended them like a family of children. All unseen, they were the romance of her daily existence, her refuge from trouble, the balm of her anxieties. The sight of the clean, symmetrically arranged pots on the sills might have given the idea that a new era had set in for T. T. Riceyman’s, that the terror of the curse of its vice had been exorcized by the secret workings within those ruddy pots. Violet hoped that it
