Back Aa

Riceyman Steps

Close

<hr />[Pg 43] <h2>X</h2> <h3>RICEYMAN SQUARE</h3> St. Andrew's Church, of yellow bricks with freestone dressings, a blue slate roof, and a red coping, was designed and erected in the brilliant reign of William IV, whose Government, under Lord Grey, had a pious habit, since lost by governments, of building additional churches in populous parishes at its own expense. Unfortunately its taste in architecture was less laudable than its practical interest in the inculcation among the lowly of the Christian doctrine about the wisdom and propriety of turning the other cheek. St. Andrew's, of a considerably mixed Gothic character, had architecturally nothing whatever to recommend it. Its general proportions, its arched windows, its mullions, its finials, its crosses, its spire, and its buttresses, were all and in every detail utterly silly and offensive. The eye could not rest anywhere upon its surface without pain. And time, which is supposed to soften and dignify all things, had been content in malice to cover St. Andrew's with filth and ridicule. Out of the heights of the ignoble temple came persistent, monotonous, loud sounds, fantastic and nerve-racking, to match its architecture. The churchyard was a garden flanked by iron rails and by plane trees, upon which brutal, terrifying surgical operations had been performed. In the garden were to be seen the withering and melancholy but still beautiful blossoms of asters and tulips, a quantity of cultivated vegetables, dishevelled grass, some heaps of rubble, and patches of unproductive brown earth. Nobody might walk in the garden, whose gates were most securely padlocked. Riceyman Square had been built round St. Andrew's in[Pg 44] the hungry 'forties. It had been built all at once, according to plan; it had form. The three-story houses (with areas and basements) were all alike, and were grouped together in sections by triangular pediments with ornamentations thereon in a degenerate Regency style. These pediments and the window-facings, and the whole walls up to the beginning of the first floor were stuccoed and painted. In many places the paint was peeling off and the stucco crumbling. The fronts of the doorsteps were green with vegetable growth. Some of the front-doors and window-frames could not have been painted for fifteen or twenty years. All the horizontal lines in the architecture had become curved. Long cracks showed in the brickwork where two dwellings met. The fanlights and some of the iron work feebly recalled the traditions of the eighteenth century. The areas, except one or two, were obscene. The Square had once been genteel; it ought now to have been picturesque, but was not. It was merely decrepit, foul and slatternly. It had no attractiveness of any sort. Evolution had swirled round it, missed it, and left it. Neither electricity nor telephones had ever invaded it, and scores of windows still had Venetian blinds. All men except its inhabitants and the tax-collector, the rate-collector, and the school attendance officer had forgotten Riceyman Square. It lay now frowsily supine in a needed Sunday indolence after the week's hard labour. All the upper windows were shut and curtained, and most of the ground-floor windows. The rare glimpses of forlorn interiors were desolating. Not a child played in the roadways. But here and there a housewife had hung her doormats and canaries on the railings to take the holy Sabbath air; and newspapers, fresh as newly gathered fruit, waited folded on doorsteps for students of crime and passion to awake from their beds in darkened and stifling rooms. Also little milk-cans with tarnished brass handles had been suspended in clusters on the railings. Cats only, in their elegance and their detached disdain, rose superior[Pg 45] to the terrific environment. The determined church bells ceaselessly jangled. "The church is rather nice," said Mrs. Arb. "But what did I tell you about the Square?" "Wait a moment! Wait a moment," replied Mr. Earlforward. "Let us walk round, shall we?" They began to walk round. Presently Mr. Earlforward stopped in front of a house which had just been painted, to remind the spectator of the original gentility of the hungry 'forties. "No broken panes there, I think," he remarked triumphantly. Mrs. Arb's glance searched the façade for even a cracked pane, and found none. She owed him a shilling. "Well," she said, somewhat dashed, but still briskly. "Of course there was bound to be one house that was all right. Don't they say it's the exception proves the rule?" He understood that he would not receive his shilling, and he admired her the more for her genial feminine unscrupulousness. At the corner of Gilbert Street Mrs. Arb suddenly burst out laughing. "I hadn't noticed we had any Savoys up here!" she said. Painted over the door of the corner house were the words "Percy's Hotel." The house differed in no other detail from the rest of the Square. "I wonder if they have any self-contained suites?" Mr. Earlforward was about to furnish the history of this singular historic survival, when they both, almost simultaneously, through a large interstice of the curtains, noticed Elsie sitting and rocking gently by the ground-floor window of a house near to Percy's Hotel. Her pale face was half turned within the room, and its details obscure in the twilight of the curtained interior; but there could be no mistake about her identity.[Pg 46] "Is it here she lives?" said Mrs. Arb. "I suppose so. I know she lives somewhere in the Square, but I never knew the number." The front-door of the house opened and Dr. Raste emerged, fresh, dapper, prim, correct, busy, speeding without haste, the incarnation of the professional. You felt that he would have emerged from Buckingham Palace in just the same manner. To mark the Sabbath, which his ceaseless duties forbade him to honour otherwise, he wore a silk hat. This hat he raised on perceiving Mr. Earlforward and a lady; and he raised also, though scarcely perceptibly, his eyebrows. "You been to see my charwoman, doctor?" Mr. Earlforward urbanely stopped him. Dr. Raste hesitated a moment. "Your charwoman? Ah, yes. I did happen to see her. Yes." "Ah! Then she is unwell. Nothing serious, I hope?" "No, no!" said the doctor, his voice rather higher than usual. "She'll be all right to-morrow. A mere nothing. An excellent constitution, I should imagine." A strictly formal reply, if very courteous. Probably nobody in Clerkenwell, except perhaps his man Joe, knew how Dr. Raste talked and looked when he was not talking and looking professionally. Dr. Raste would sometimes say with a dry, brief laugh, "we medicoes," thereby proclaiming a caste, an order, a clan, separated by awful, invisible, impregnable barriers from the common remainder of mankind; and he never stepped beyond the barriers into humanity. In his case the secret life of the brain was indeed secret, and the mask of the face, tongue and demeanour made an everlasting privacy. He cleared his throat. "Yes, yes.... By the way, I've been reading that Shakspere. Very fine, very fine. I shall read it all one of these days. Good morning." He raised his hat again and departed.[Pg 47] "I shall go in and see her, poor thing!" said Mrs. Arb with compassion. "Shall you?" "Well, I'm here. I think it would be nice if I did, don't you?" "Oh, yes," Mr. Earlforward admiringly agreed. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2