She sturdily entered the shop, which, Charles Belrose and his company of renovators having left, was empty save for one or two pieces of furniture waiting their proper niches in the pantechnicon. A man was pulling down the shelves and thus destroying the bays. Dead planks which had once been living, burden-bearing shelves, were stacked in a pile along one wall. She had to wait at the foot of the stairs while a section of Violet’s wardrobe awkwardly descended in the hairy arms of two Samsons. Then she went up, and on the first floor peeped into all the rooms one after another; they were scenes of confusion, dirt, dust, higgledy-piggledyness; difficult to believe that they had ever made part of a home, been regularly cleaned, watched over like helpless children incapable of taking care of themselves. She lugged the grip-bag up the second flight, and went into the spare-room, which was quite empty, stripped to the soiled and damaged walls—even the plant-pots were gone from the windowsills; and she went into the kitchen, where the tap kept guard with its eternal drip-drip over perfect desolation.
At last she went into her bedroom, which by a magic ukase from on high in the Thackeray Hotel had been preserved from the sack. A fire was cheerfully burning; all was as usual to the casual glance, but the shut drawers were empty, and Elsie’s box and umbrella had gone back to Riceyman Square, where she had been sleeping since the funeral. Joe was sufficiently recovered to sleep alone in the house, and had had no objection to doing so. Joe, fully dressed for the grand exodus, sat waiting on the sole chair. He smiled. Dropping the bag, she smiled. They kissed. With his limited but imaginative intelligence Joe did not see that Elsie was merely Elsie. He saw within the ill-fitting mourning a saviour, a powerful protectress, a bright angel, a being different from, and superior to, any other being. They were dumb and happy in the island of homeliness around which swirled the tide of dissolution and change. Elsie picked up a piece of bread-and-butter from a plate and began to eat it.
“Didn’t yer get any dinner?” Joe asked anxiously. She nodded, and the nod was a lie.
“I got your bag and all your things in it,” she said. “There’s a clean collar. Ye’d better put it on.”
Munching, she unfastened the bag.
“And I’ve got the licence from the Registry Office,” she said. He scrutinized the licence, which by its complexity and incomprehensibility intimidated him. He was much relieved and very grateful that he had not had to go forth and get the licence himself. The clean collar, which Elsie affixed, made a wonderful improvement in Joe’s frayed and dilapidated appearance.
“Has the doctor been to look at ye?” Elsie asked. Joe shook his head. “Well, ye can’t go till he’s been to look at ye.”
The doctor had re-engaged Joe, who was to migrate direct to Myddelton Square that afternoon and would take up his duties gradually, as health permitted. He had already been tentatively out in the morning, but only to the other side of King’s Cross Road to get a shave. Perhaps it was to be regretted that Joe was going off in one of Mr. Earlforward’s grey flannel shirts. Elsie, had she been strictly honest, would have washed this shirt and returned it to the wardrobe, but she thought that Joe needed it, and her honesty fell short of the ideal.
There was a step on the stair. The doctor came into the island. And he himself was an island, detached, self-contained, impregnable as ever. He entered the room as though it was a room and not the emptying theatre of heroic and unforgettable drama, and as though nothing worth mentioning had happened of late in Riceyman Steps.
“Has my daughter called here for me?” he asked abruptly, deposing his prim hat on the little yellow chest of drawers.
“No, sir.”
“Ah! She was to meet me here,” he said in a casual, even tone. And yet there was something in his voice plainly indicating to the observant that deep down in his recondite mind burned a passionate pride in his daughter.
“I think you’ll do, Joe,” he decided, after some examination of the malaria patient. “I see you’ve had a shave.”
“Elsie said I’d better, sir.”
“Yes. Makes you feel brighter, doesn’t it? Well, you can be getting along. By the way, Elsie”—he coughed. “We’ve been wondering at home whether you’d care to go and have a chat with Mrs. Raste?”
“Yes, sir. But what about, sir? Joe?”
“Well, the fact is, we thought perhaps you’d like”—he gave a short, nervous laugh—“to join the staff. I don’t know what they call it. Cook-general. No. Not quite that, because there’d be Joe. There’d be you and Joe, you see.”
Elsie drew back, alarmed—so alarmed that she did not even say “Thank you.”
“Oh! I couldn’t do that, sir! I couldn’t cook—for you, sir. I couldn’t undertake it, sir. I’m really only a charwoman, sir. I couldn’t face it, sir.”
“But I thought you’d been learning some cookery from—er—Mrs. Earlforward?”
“Oh, no, sir. Not as you might say. Only gas-ring, sir.”
This was the once ambitious girl who had dreamed of acquiring the skill to wait at table in just such a grand house as the doctor’s. Extreme diffidence was not the only factor in her decision, which she made instantly and positively as a strong-minded, sensible, masterful woman without any reference to the views of her protected, fragile idol, Joe—for a quality of independence, hardness, had begun to appear in Elsie Sprickett. The fact was that she wanted a separate home as a refuge for Joe in case of need, and she was arranging to rent a room in the basement of her
