“Come inside,” said Eve from the door.
“Hullo, Mirry, what d’you think of the emporium?” Gerald, his old easy manner, his smooth polished gentle voice, his neat, iron handshake across the mean little counter, gave Eve’s enterprise the approval of all the world. “I’ve done up enough screws of tea to last you the whole blessed evening,” he went on from the midst of Miriam’s exclamations “and at least twenty people have been in since you left.” A little door flew open in the wall just behind him and Harriett, in an overall, stood at the top of a short flight of stairs, leaping up and down in the doorway. Miriam ran round behind the counter, freely, Eve’s shop, their shop, behind her. “Hulloh old silly,” beamed Harriett kissing and shaking her “I just rushed down, can’t stay a minute, I’m in the middle of nine dinners, they’re all leaving tomorrow and you’re to come and sleep with us.” She fled down the steps, out through the shop and away up the hill, with a rousing attack on Gerald as she passed him leaning with Eve over the till. Miriam was welcomed. The fact of her visit was more to Harriett than her lodgers. She collected her belongings and carried them up the steps past a small dark flight of stairs into a dark little room. A small fire was burning in a tiny kitchen range; a candle guttered on the mantelpiece in the draught from the shop; there was no window and the air of the room was close with the combined odours of the things crowded into the small space. She went back into the bright familiar shop. Gerald was leaving; see you tomorrow he called from the door with his smile.
“Now; I’ll light the lamp and we’ll be cosy,” said Eve leading the way back into the little room. Miriam waited impatiently for the lamp to make a live centre in the crowded gloom. The little black kitchen fire was intolerable as president of Eve’s leisure. But the dim lamp, standing low on a little table, made the room gloomier and Eve was back in the shop with a customer. Only the dingy little table, a battered tray bearing the remains of a hasty, shabby tea, the fall below it of a faded ugly fringed tablecloth and a patch of threadbare carpet, were clearly visible. … She could not remove her attention from them.
Lying sleepless by Eve’s side late that night, she watched the pictures that crowded the darkness. Her first moments in the little back room were far away. The small dark bedroom was full of the last picture of Eve, in her nightgown, quietly relentless after explaining that she always kept the window shut because plenty of air came in, taking a heavy string of large blue beads out of her top drawer, to put them in readiness with tomorrow’s dress. No; I don’t think that a bit; and if I were a savage, I should hang myself all over with beads and love it. She had spoken with such conviction … Up here, with her things arranged round her as she had had them at home and in her bedroom at the Greens’, she kept her life as it had always been. She was still her unchanged self, but her freedom was giving her the strength to be sure of her opinions. It was as if she had been saying all the evening with long accumulating preparedness, holding her poise throughout the interruptions of customers and down into the details of the story of her adventures, Yes I know your opinions, I have heard them all my life, and now I’m out in the world myself and can meet everybody as an equal, and say what I think, without wondering whether it suits my part as the Greens’ governess. She had got her strength from the things she had done. It was amazing to think of her summoning courage to break again with the Greens and borrowing from them to start in business, Mr. Green “setting his heart” on the success of the little shop and meaning to come down and see how it was getting on. How awful it would be if it did not get on. … But it was getting on. … How terrifying it must have been at first not knowing the price of anything in the shop or what to buy for it … and then, customers telling her the prices of things and where they were kept, and travellers being kind; respectful and friendly and ready to go out of their way to do anything … that was the other side of Maupassant’s “hourrah pour la petite difference” commis voyageurs … and well-to-do people in the neighbourhood rushing in for some little thing, taken aback to find a lady behind the counter, and coming again for all sorts of things. … Eve would become like one of those middle-aged women shopkeepers in books, in the country, with a kind heart and a sarcastic tongue, seeing through everybody and having the same manner for the vicar and a ploughman, or a rather nicer manner for a ploughman. No. Eve was still sentimental. …
Those wonderful letters were a bridge; a promise for the future. … They were the letters of a boy; that was the struggling impression she had not been able to convey. She could start the day well by telling Eve that in the morning. They were the letters of a youth in love for the first time in his life … and he had fifteen grandchildren. “So wonderful when you think of that old, old man” had not expressed it
