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Riceyman Steps

<hr />[Pg 48] <h2>XI</h2> <h3>ELSIE'S HOME</h3> The house which Mrs. Arb decided to enter had a full, but not an extraordinary, share of experience of human life. There were three floors of it. On the ground floor lived a meat-salesman, his wife and three children, the eldest of whom was five years of age. Three rooms and some minute appurtenances on this floor. The meat-salesman shouted and bawled cheap bits of meat in an open-fronted shop in Exmouth Street during a sixty-hour week which ended at midnight on Saturday. He possessed enormous vocal power. All the children out of naughtiness had rickets. On the first floor lived a french-polisher, his wife and two children, the eldest of whom was three years of age. One child less than the ground-floor family, but the first floor was about to get level in numbers. Three rooms and some minute appurtenances on this floor. The french-polisher worked only forty-four hours a week. His fingers wore always the colour of rosewood, and he emitted an odour which often competed not unsuccessfully with the characteristic house odour of stale soapsuds. Out of ill-will for mankind he had an everlasting cough. On the second floor lived a middle-aged dressmaker, alone. Three rooms and some minute appurtenances on this floor. Nobody but an occasional customer was ever allowed access to the second floor. Elsie was a friend of the french-polisher's wife, and she slept in the infinitesimal back-room of the first floor with the elder child of the family. She paid three shillings a week for this accommodation, and also helped with the charing and the laundry work of the floor—in her spare time. Except Elsie, the adult inhabitants of the house were[Pg 49] always unhappy save when drinking alcohol or making love. Although they had studied Holy Scripture in youth, and there were at least three Bibles in the house, they had failed to cultivate the virtue of Christian resignation. They permitted trifles to annoy them. On the previous day the wife of the meat-salesman had been upset because her "copper" leaked, and because she could never for a moment be free of her own children, and because it was rather difficult to turn her perambulator through the kitchen doorway into an entrance-hall three feet wide, and because she had to take all three children with her to market, and because the eldest child, cleanly clad, had fallen into a puddle and done as much damage to her clothes as would take a whole day to put right, and because another child, teething, would persistently cry, and because the landlord of the house was too poor to do necessary repairs, and because she could not buy a shilling's worth of goods with sixpence, and because her payments to the Provident Club were in arrear, and because the sunshine made her hat look shabby, and for many other equally inadequate reasons. As for the french-polisher's wife, she moped and grew neurotic because only three years ago she had been a pretty girl earning an independent income, and because she was now about to bear another pledge of the french-polisher's affection, and because she felt sick and frequently was sick, and because she had no money for approaching needs, and because she hated cooking and washing, and because her husband spent his evenings and the purchase-money of his children's and his wife's food at a political club whose aim was to overthrow the structure of society, and because she hated her husband's cough and his affection, and because she could see no end to her misery, and because she had prophetic visions of herself as a hag with five hundred insatiable children everlastingly in tears for something impossible to obtain for them. The spinster on the second floor was profoundly and bitterly dissatisfied for the mere reason that she was a[Pg 50] spinster; whereas the other two women would have sold their souls to be spinsters. The centre of irritation in the house was the entrance-hall, or lobby, which the first floor and ground floor had to keep clean in alternate weekly spells. On the previous day one of the first-floor children had dragged treacly fingers along the dark yellowish-brown wall. Further, the first-floor perambulator had been brought in with muddy wheels, and the marks had dried on the linoleum, which was already a palimpsest of various unclean deposits. This perambulator was the origin of most of the lobby trouble. The ground floor resented its presence there, and the second floor purposely knocked it about at every passage through the lobby; but the mistress of the first floor obstinately objected to carrying it up and down stairs once or twice a day. A great three-corner quarrel had arisen on the Saturday morning around the first-floor perambulator and the entrance-hall, and when the french-polisher arrived home for his dinner shortly after one o'clock he had found no dinner, but a wife-helpmeet-cook-housekeeper-maidservant in hysterics. Very foolishly he had immediately gone forth again with all his wages. At eleven-thirty p.m. he had returned intoxicated and acutely dyspeptic. At a quarter to twelve he had tried to fight Elsie. At twelve-thirty the meat-salesman had come home to sleep, and had had to listen to a loud sermon on the manners of the first-floor and his own wife's manners delivered from the top of the second-floor stairs. Subsequently he had had to listen to moans from the mistress of the first floor and the eternal coughing of the master of the first floor.... And all about nothing! Yet every one of the adults was well acquainted with the admirable text which exhorted Christians to bear one another's burdens. A strange houseful! But there were some scores of such housefuls in Riceyman Square, and a £4,500 church in the midst. Sunday morning always saw the adults of Elsie's household in a paradisaical coma. Elsie alone was afoot. On this particular Sunday morning she kept an eye on[Pg 51] the two elder children, who were playing quietly in the murky autumnal darkness of the walled backyard. Elsie had herself summarily dressed them. The other three children had been doped—or, as the advertisements phrased it, "soothed"—so that while remaining in their beds they should not disturb the adults. The adults slept. They embraced sleep passionately, voraciously, voluptuously. Their sole desire in those hours was to find perfect unconsciousness and rest. If they turned over they snatched again with terrible greed at sleep. They wanted it more than love and more than beer. They would have committed crimes for it. Even the prospective mother slept, in a confusion of strange dreams. There was a loud, heavy knocking on the warped and shabby door of the house of repose. It shook the house. The children in the yard, thunderstruck by the outrage, stopped playing. Elsie ran in alarm through the back passage and the lobby and opened the front-door. Joe stood there, the worried, mad look, which Elsie knew so well, on his homely face. She was frightened, but held herself together, and shook her head sadly and decisively. As a result of the episode of the carving-knife she had banished him from her presence for one week, which had yet by no means expired. It seemed odd that Elsie, everybody's slave, should exercise an autocratic dominion over Joe; but she did. She knew her power and divined that she must use it, if Joe was ever to get well of his mysterious mental malady. And now, though she wished that she had sentenced him to only three days' banishment instead of seven, she would not yield and correct her error, for she felt that to do so would impair her authority. Moreover, Joe had no right to molest her at home. She had her reputation to think of, and her reputation, in her loyal and ingenuous mind, was his reputation also. Therefore, with woe in her heart she began to close the door on Joe. Joe, rendered savage by a misery which he could not define, put his foot in the aperture and then forced the door backwards and lunged his desecrating body inside the sacred Sunday morning temple of sleep.[Pg 52] (A repetition of his procedure of the previous Thursday night.) The two stood close together. He could not meet her fixed gaze. His eyes glanced restlessly and wildly round, at the foul walls, the gritty and soiled floor. "Get out of this, my boy." "Let me kiss you," he demanded harshly. "Get out of it." Losing what little remained of his self-control, he hit Elsie a strong blow on the shoulder. She was not ready for it. In the idiom of the ring her "foot-work" was bad, and she lost her balance, falling against the french-polisher's perambulator, which crashed violently into the stairs like an engine into a stationary buffer. Elsie's head caught the wheel of the perambulator. A great shrill scream arose; the children had followed Elsie out of the yard and witnessed the fall of their beloved slave. Joe, appalled at the consequences of his passion, ran off, banging the door behind him with a concussion which shook the house afresh and still more awakeningly. Two mothers recognized the howls of their children. The spinster on the second floor saw a magnificent opportunity for preaching from a point of vantage her views on the state of modern society. Two fathers, desperate with exasperation, but drawn by the mighty attraction of a good row, jumped murderous from their warm and fetid beds. Two half-clad figures appeared in the doorways of the ground-floor rooms and three on the stairs. Elsie sat up, dazed, and then stood up, then sank limply down again. One mother smacked her child and a child which was not hers. The other mother protested furiously from the stairs. The paradise of Sunday morning lay shattered. The meat-salesman had sense, heart, and initiative. He took charge of Elsie. The hellish din died down. A few minutes later Elsie was seated in the rocking-chair by the window in his front room. She wept apologetically. Little was said, but all understood that Elsie's fantastic sweetheart had behaved disgracefully, and all indicated their settled opinion that if she kept on with him he would murder her one of these days. Three-[Pg 53]quarters of an hour later Dr. Raste calmly arrived. Joe had run to the surgery and shouted at him: "I've killed her, sir." The meat-salesman, having himself lighted a bit of a fire, left the room while the doctor examined the victim. The doctor could find nothing but one bruise on the front of Elsie's left shoulder. With a splendid gesture of devotion the meat-salesman's wife gave her second child's warm milk to the reluctant Elsie. There happened to be no other stimulant in the house. Peace was reestablished, and even slumber resumed. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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