IV
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?"