The walls were papered with ordinary brown paper to a ledge of painted wood, above which rose a smoke-grey paper with pale zigzags upon it, making a charming background for a number of water-colour sketches and black-and-white etchings of all the chief theatrical celebrities, from Sir Henry Irving downwards.
There was also a piano—old and wicked, but still a piano, and various odd and quaint bits of furniture. The owners of these things had gone to America for a two-years' tour, and being anxious to come back to their rooms when they returned, had given the landlady instructions to "let furnished," and make what she could out of them. Poppy seized them with joy, glad to have so pleasant a setting for the struggle and fight she knew must ensue.
From the first it was bound to be a handicapped fight, for the king's son behaved like one, and a tyrannical despot at that. It was plain that work would only be achieved by desperate and persistent effort at all sorts of odds and ends of time in the day and night.
Probably things would have been more difficult still, but for the offices of a kindly soul who lived in the lower regions of the house by day, and ascended to somewhere near the stars at night, accompanied by her husband and two children.
She had opened the door to Poppy on the first visit, and having been the medium through which the rooms and tenant were brought together, she thereafter looked upon the tenant as her special protégée. She was a real Cockney, born and bred in Horseferry Road—quite young still, but with the hopelessly middle-aged, slack-waisted, slip-shod look of the English working man's wife who, having achieved a husband and two children, is content to consider her fate fulfilled and herself no more a player, but merely a passée looker-on at the great game of life. However, Mrs. Print did her looking on very good-humouredly. Her teeth were decayed, her hair in strings, but she carried an air of perpetual cheer and a wide smile. Her husband, a spruce, fresh-cheeked young cabman, looked, on the contrary, as though all the cares of the universe lay across his shoulders.
"'E always puts on that look," smiled Mrs. Print to Poppy; "in case I might ask 'im for an hextra sixpence for the 'ousekeeping."
She "charred" for Poppy; did various things, such as lighting the sitting-room fire and keeping the hearth and fire-irons clean. During this last business, which she always managed to prolong to the best part of an hour, she would give Poppy a brief summary of the morning news; an account of what the rest of the people in the house had been doing; what her George had said to her before he went to work; little bits of information about her two children; and advice about the treatment of Poppy's baby—generally sound.
She nearly drove poor Poppy frantic, yet it was impossible to be really angry with her: she was so essentially well-meaning and so unconsciously humorous. Besides, she took the king's son into the garden of the Square for a couple of hours every fine afternoon, carrying him most carefully up and down whilst she conversed in loud, agreeable tones with a dozen and one people who passed by, exchanging chaff and banter, roaring with laughter, scolding her own children—Jimmy and Jack—who were left to amuse themselves by staring at the immaculate plots of arsenically-green grass and the bare branches of the trees. If they did anything else, their mother's tongue would wag and her finger threaten.
"Come off there, Jimmy! Jack, if you do that again, I'll pay you—I'll pay you somethink merciful!" Jack, a stolid, emotionless boy, looked as though he had been badly carved out of a log of wood; but Jimmy was of a more vivid appearance, being afflicted with what his mother called St. Viper's Dance.
In her window Poppy would sit at her table, her eyes occasionally glancing at the figures in the Square, her pen flying over the paper before her. She was writing for money. Thoughts of Fame had slipped away from her. She put her child before Fame now: and wrote no better for that.