XI
ELSIE'S HOME
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 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 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.