“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 tomorrow 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 of 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
