“She’ll have a fit if she hears me calling down to her,” he said to Michael. “You see, just lately I’ve been very anxious to avoid meeting her.”
He jingled with satisfaction the sovereigns in his pocket.
They descended into the gloom that smelt of damp cloths and the stale soapiness of a sink. They peeped into the front room, as they went by: here a man in shirt-sleeves was lying under the scattered sheets of a Sunday paper upon a bed that gave an effect of almost oriental luxury, so much was it overloaded with mattresses and coverlets. Indeed; the whole room seemed clogged with woolly stuffs, and the partial twilight of its subterranean position added to the impression of airlessness. It was as if these quilted chairs and heavy hairy curtains had suffocated everything else.
“That’s Cleghorne,” said Barnes. “I reckon he’d sleep Rip van Winkle barmy.”
“What’s he do?” whispered Michael, as they turned down the passage.
“He snores for a living, he does,” said Barnes.
They entered the kitchen, and through the dim light Michael saw the landlady with her arms plunged into a steaming cauldron. Outside, two trains roared past in contrary directions; the utensils shivered and chinked; the ceiling was obscured by pendulous garments which exhaled a moist odorousness; on the table a chine of bacon striated by the carving-knife was black with heavy-winged flies.
“I’ve brought a new lodger, Mrs. Cleghorne,” said Barnes.
“Have you brought your five weeks’ rent owing?” she asked sourly.
He laid two pounds on the table, and Mrs. Cleghorne immediately cheered up, if so positive an expression could be applied to a woman whose angularities seemed to forbid any display of good-will. Michael thought she looked rather like one of the withered nettles that overhung the wall of the sunken yard outside the kitchen window.