Riceyman Steps(Including 'Elsie and the Child') Read online

  Mr Earlforward began to tap, placidly and very deliberately, as one who had the whole of eternity before him for the accomplishment of his task. A little bell rang; the machine dated from the age when typewriters had this contrivance for informing the operator that the end of a line would be reached in two or three more taps. Then a great clatter occurred at the window, and the room became dark. The blue-black blind had slipped down, discharging thick clouds of dust.

  ‘Dear, dear!’ murmured Mr Earlforward, groping towards the window. He failed to raise the blind again; the cord was broken. As he coughed gently in the dust, he could not recall that the blind had been once drawn since the end of the war.

  ‘I must have that seen to,’ he murmured, and turned on the electric light over the desk.

  The porcelain shade of the lamp wore a heavy layer of dust, which, however, had not arrived from the direction of the blind, being the product of slow, secular accumulation. Mr Earlforward regretted to be compelled to use electric current – and rightly, considering the price! – but the occasion was quite special. He could not see to tap by a candle. Many a time on winter evenings he had gently told an unimportant customer in that room that a fuse had gone – and lighted a candle.

  He was a solitary man, and content in his solitude; at any rate, he had been content until the sight of the newly come lady across the way began to disturb the calm deep of his mind. He was a man of routine, and happy in routine. Dr Raste’s remarks about his charwoman were seriously upsetting him. He foresaw the possibility, if the charwoman should respond to the alleged passion of her suitor, of a complete derangement of his existence. But he was not a man to go out to meet trouble. He had faith in time, which for him was endless and inexhaustible, and even in this grave matter of his domesticity he could calmly reflect that if the lady across the way (whom he had not yet spoken to) should favour him, he might be in a position to ignore the vagaries of all charwomen. He was, in fact, a very great practical philosopher, tenacious – it is true – in his ideas, but, nevertheless, profoundly aware of the wisdom of compromising with destiny.

  Twenty-one years earlier he had been a placid and happy clerk in an insurance office, anticipating an existence devoted wholly to fire-risks. Destiny had sent him one evening to his uncle, T. T. Riceyman, in Riceyman Steps, and into the very room where he was now tapping. Riceyman took to him, seeing in the young man a resemblance to himself. Riceyman began to talk about his well-loved Clerkenwell, and especially about what was for him the marvellous outstanding event in the Clerkenwell history – namely, the construction of the Underground Railway from Clerkenwell to Euston Square. Henry had never forgotten the old man’s almost melodramatic recital, so full of astonishing and quaint incidents.

  The old man swore that exactly one thousand lawyers had signed a petition in favour of the line, and exactly one thousand butchers had signed another similar petition. All Clerkenwell was mad for the line. But when the construction began all Clerkenwell trembled. The earth opened in the most unexpected and undesirable places. Streets had to be barred to horse traffic; pavements resembled switchbacks. Hundreds of houses had to be propped, and along the line of the tunnel itself scores of houses were suddenly vacated lest they should bury their occupants. The sacred workhouse came near to dissolution, and was only saved by inconceivable timberings. The still more sacred Cobham’s Head public-house was first shaken and torn with cracks and then inundated by the bursting of the New River main, and the landlady died of shock. The thousand lawyers and the thousand butchers wished they had never humbly prayed for the accursed line. And all this was naught compared to the culminating catastrophe. There was a vast excavation at the mouth of the tunnel near Clerkenwell Green. It was supported by enormous brick piers and by scaffoldings erected upon the most prodigious beams that the wood trade could produce. One night – a spring Sunday in 1862, the year of the Second Great Exhibition – the adjacent earth was observed to be gently sinking, and then some cellars filled with foul water. Alarm was raised. Railway officials and metropolitan officers rushed together, and for three days and three nights laboured to avert a supreme calamity. Huge dams were built to strengthen the subterranean masonry; nothing was left undone. Vain effort! On the Wednesday the pavements sank definitely. The earth quaked. The entire populace fled to survey the scene of horror from safety. The terrific scaffolding and beams were flung like firewood into the air and fell with awful crashes. The populace screamed at the thought of workmen entombed and massacred. A silence! Then the great brick piers, fifty feet in height, moved bodily. The whole bottom of the excavation moved in one mass. A dark and fetid liquid appeared, oozing, rolling, surging, smashing everything in its resistless track, and rushed into the mouth of the new tunnel. The crown of the arch of the mighty Fleet sewer had broken. Men wept at the enormity and completeness of the disaster … But the Underground Railway was begun afresh and finished and grandly inaugurated, and at first the public fought for seats in its trains, and then could not be persuaded to enter its trains because they were uninhabitable, and so on and so on …

  Old fat Riceyman told his tale with such force and fire that he had a stroke. In foolishly trying to lift the man Henry had slipped and hurt his knee. The next morning Riceyman was dead. Henry inherited. A strange episode, but not stranger than thousands of episodes in the lives of plain people. Henry knew nothing of bookselling. He learnt. His philosophic placidity helped him. He had assistants, one after another, but liked none of them. When the last one went to the Great War, Henry gave him no successor. He ‘managed’ – and in addition did earnest, sleep-denying work as a limping special constable. And now, in 1919, here he was, an institution.

  He heard a footstep, and in the gloom of his shop made out the surprising apparition of his charwoman. And he was afraid, and lost his philosophy. He felt that she had arrived specially – as she would, being a quaint and conscientious young woman – to warn him with proper solemnity that she would soon belong to another. Undoubtedly the breezy and interfering Dr Raste had come in, not to buy a Shakspere, but to inquire about Elsie. Shakspere was merely the excuse for Elsie … By the way, that mislaid Flaxman illustrated edition ought to be hunted up soon – to-morrow if possible.

  4

  Elsie

  ‘Now, now, Elsie, my girl. What’s this? What is it?’

  Mr Earlforward spoke benevolently but, for him, rather quickly and abruptly. And Elsie was intimidated. She worked for Mr Earlforward only in the mornings, and to be in the shop in the darkening afternoon made her feel quite queer and apologetic. It was almost as if she had never been in the shop before and had no right there.

  As the two approached each other the habitual heavenly kindness in the girl’s gaze seemed to tranquillize Mr Earlforward, who knew intimately her expression and her disposition. And though he was still disturbed by apprehension he found, as usual, a mysterious comfort in her presence; and this influence of hers exercised itself even upon his fear of losing her for ever. A strange, exciting emotional equilibrium became established in the twilight of the shop.

  Elsie was a strongly built wench, plump, fairly tall, with the striking free, powerful carriage of one bred to various and hard manual labour. Her arms and bust were superb. She had blue-black hair and dark blue eyes, and a pretty curve of the lips. The face was square but soft. From the constant drawing together of the eyebrows into a pucker of the forehead, and the dropping of the corners of the large mouth, it could be deduced that she was, if anything, over-conscientious, with a tendency to worry about the right performance of her duty; but this warping of her features was too slight to be unpleasant; it was, indeed, a reassurance. She was twenty-three years of age; solitude, adversity and deprivation made her look older. For four years she had been a widow, childless, after two nights of marriage and romance with a youth who went to the East in 1915 to die of dysentery. Her clothes were cheap, dirty, slatternly and dilapidated. Over a soiled white apron she wore a terribly coarse apron of sacking. This apron was an offence; it was an outrage. But not to her; she regarded it as part of a uniform, and such an apron was, in fact, part of the regular uniform of thousands of women in Clerkenwell. If Elsie was slatternly, dirty, and without any grace of adornment, the reason was that she had absolutely no inducement or example to be otherwise. It was her natural, respectable state to be so.

  ‘It’s for Mrs Arb, sir,’ Elsie began.

  ‘Mrs Arb?’ questioned Mr Earlforward, puzzled for an instant by the unfamiliar name. ‘Yes, yes, I know. Well? What have you got to do with Mrs Arb?’

  ‘I work for her in my afternoons, sir.’

  ‘But I never knew this!’

  ‘I only began to-day, sir. She sent me across, seeing as I’m engaged here, to see if you’d got a good, cheap, second-hand cookery-book.’

  Mr Earlforward’s demeanour reflected no change in his mood, but Elsie had raised him into heaven. It was not to give him notice that she had come! She would stay with him! She would stay for ever, or until he had no need of her. And she would make a link with Mrs Arb, the new proprietress of the confectioner’s shop across the way. Of course the name of the new proprietress was Arb. He had not thought of her name. He had thought only of herself. Even now he had no notion of her Christian name.

  ‘Oh! So she wants a cookery-book, does she? What sort of a cookery-book?’

  ‘She said she’s thinking of going in for sandwiches, sir, and things, she said, and having a sign put up for it. Snacks, like.’

  The word ‘snacks’ gave Mr Earlforward an idea. He walked across to what he called the ‘modern side’ of the shop. In the course of the war, when food-rationed stay-at-homes really had to stay at home, and, having nothing else to do while waiting for air-raids, took to literature in desperation, he had
done a very large trade in cheap editions of novels, and quite a good trade in cheap cookery-books that professed to teach rationed housewives how to make substance out of shadow. Gently rubbing his little beard, he stood and gazed rather absently at a shelf of small paper-protected volumes, while Elsie waited with submission.

  Silence within, but the dulled and still hard rumble of ceaseless motion beyond the book-screened windows! A spell! An enchantment upon these two human beings, both commonplace and both marvellous, bound together and yet incurious each of the other and incurious of the mysteries in which they and all their fellows lived! Mr Earlforward never asked the meaning of life, for he had a lifelong ruling passion. Elsie never asked the meaning of life, for she was dominated and obsessed by a tremendous instinct to serve. Mr Earlforward, though a kindly man, had persuaded himself that Elsie would go on charing until she died, without any romantic recompense from fate for her early tragedy, and he was well satisfied that this should be so. Because the result would inconvenience him, he desired that she should not fall in love again and marry; he preferred that she should spend her strength and youth and should grow old for him in sterile celibacy. He had absolutely no eye for the exciting effect of the white and the brown apron-strings crossing and recrossing round her magnificent waist. And Elsie knew only that Mr Earlforward had material wants, which she satisfied as well as she could. She did not guess, nor come within a hundred miles of guessing, that he was subject to dreams and ideals and longings. That the universe was enigmatic had not even occurred to her, nor to him; they were too busy with their share in working it out.

  ‘Now here’s a book that ought to suit Mrs Arb,’ said Mr Earlforward, picking a volume from the shelf and moving towards the entrance, where the clear daylight was. ‘“Snacks and Titbits.” Let me see. Sandwiches.’ He turned over leaves. ‘Sandwiches. There’s nearly seven pages about sandwiches.’

  ‘How much would it be, sir?’

  ‘One shilling.’

  ‘Oh! She said she couldn’t pay more than sixpence, sir, she said.’

  Mr Earlforward looked up with a fresh interest. He was exhilarated, even inspired, by the conception of a woman who, wishing to brighten her business with a new line of goods, was not prepared to spend more than sixpence on the indispensable basis of the enterprise. The conception powerfully appealed to him, and his regard for Mrs Arb increased.

  ‘See here, Elsie. Take this over for Mrs Arb to look at. And tell her, with my compliments, that you can’t get cookery-books – not any that are any good – for sixpence in these days.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Elsie put the book under her aprons and hurried off.

  ‘She sends you her compliments, and she says she can’t pay more than sixpence, sir. I’m that sorry, sir,’ Elsie announced, returning.

  Mr Earlforward blandly replaced the book on its shelf, and Elsie waited in vain for any comment, then left.

  ‘I say, Elsie,’ he recalled her. ‘It’s not raining much, but it might soon. As you’re here, you’d better help me in with the stand. That’ll save me taking the books out before it’s moved, and it’ll save you trouble in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Elsie eagerly agreed.

  One at either end of it, they lugged within the heavy bookstand that stretched along the length of the window on the flagstones outside the shop. The books showed scarcely a trace of the drizzle.

  ‘Thank you, Elsie.’

  ‘Don’t mention it, sir.’

  Mr Earlforward switched on one electric light in the middle of the shop, switched off the light in his den, and lit a candle there. Then he took a thermos flask, a cup, and two slices of bread on a plate from the interior of the grandfather’s clock, poured steaming tea into the cup, and enjoyed his evening meal. When the bell of St Andrew’s jangled six, he shut and darkened the shop. The war habit of closing early suited him very well for several reasons. Then, blowing out the candle, he began again to burn electricity in the den, and tapped slowly and moved to and fro with deliberation, examining booktitles, tapping out lists, tapping out addresses on envelopes, licking stamps, and performing other pleasant little tasks of routine. And all the time he dwelt with exquisite pleasure on the bodily appearance and astonishing moral characteristics of Mrs Arb. What a woman! He had been right about that woman from the first glance. She was a woman in a million.

  At a quarter to seven he put his boots on and collected his letters for the post. But before leaving to go to the post he suddenly thought of a ten-shilling Treasury note received from Dr Raste, and took it from his waistcoat pocket. It was a beautiful new note, a delicate object, carefully folded by someone who understood that new notes deserve good treatment. He put it, with other less brilliant cash, into the safe. As he departed from the shop for the post office at Mount Pleasant, he picked out ‘Snacks and Titbits’ from its shelf again, and slipped it into his side-pocket.

  The rain had ceased. He inhaled the fresh, damp air with an innocent and genuine delight. Mrs Arb’s shop was the sole building illuminated in Riceyman Steps; it looked warm and feminine; it attracted. The church rose darkly, a formidable mass, in the opening at the top of the steps. The little group of dwelling-houses next to his own establishment showed not a sign of life; they seldom did; he knew nothing of their tenants, and felt absolutely no curiosity concerning them. His little yard abutted on the yard of the nearest house, but the wall between them was seven feet high; no sound ever came over it.

  He turned into the main road. Although he might have dropped his correspondence into the pillar-box close by, he preferred to go to the mighty Mount Pleasant organism, with its terrific night-movement of vans and flung mailbags, because it seemed surer, safer, for his letters.

  Like many people who live alone, he had a habit of talking to himself in the street. His thoughts would from time to time suddenly burst almost with violence into a phrase. Then he would smile to himself. ‘Me at my age!’ … ‘Yes, and of course there’s that!’ … ‘Want some getting used to!’ … He would laugh rather sheepishly.

  The vanquished were already beginning to creep into the mazes of Rowton House. They clicked through a turnstile – that was all he knew about existence in Rowton House, except that there were plants with large green leaves in the windows of the common-room. Some of the vanquished entered with boldness, but the majority walked furtively, as into a house of ill-fame. Just opposite Rowton House the wisdom and enterprise of two railway companies had filled a blank wall with a large poster exhibiting the question: ‘Why not take a winter holiday where sunshine reigns?’ etc. Beneath this blank wall a newsman displayed the posters of the evening papers, together with stocks of the papers. Mr Earlforward always read the placards for news. There was nothing much to-night. ‘Death of a well-known statesman.’ Mr Earlforward, as an expert in interpretation, was aware that ‘well-known’ on a newspaper placard meant exactly the opposite of what it meant in any other place; it meant not well-known. The placards always divided dead celebrities, genuine and false, into three categories. If Blank was a supreme personage the placards said: ‘Blank dead’. Two most impressive words. If Blank was a real personage, but not quite supreme, the placards said: ‘Death of Blank.’ Three words, not so impressive. All others, nameless, were in the third category of ‘well-knowns’. Nevertheless, Mr Earlforward walked briskly back as far as the Free Library to glance at a paper – perhaps not because he was disturbed about the identity of a well-known statesman, but because he hesitated to carry out his resolution to enter Mrs Arb’s shop.

  5

  The Gift

  Mrs Arb was listening to a customer and giving change.

  ‘“And when you’ve got children of your own,” she said, “and when you’ve got children of your own,” that was her remark,’ the customer, an insecurely fat woman, was saying.

  ‘Just so,’ Mrs Arb agreed, handing the change and pushing a little parcel across the counter. She ignored Mr Earlforward completely. He stood near the door, while the fat customer repeated once more what some third person had remarked upon a certain occasion. The customer’s accent was noticeably vulgar in contrast with Mrs Arb’s. Mrs Arb was indeed very ‘well spoken’. And she contrasted not merely with the customer but with the shop.