II
It is later in the evening of the same day, and this is such a street as harbours London’s poor. The windows are so close to us that we could tap on the only one which shows a light. It is on the ground floor, and makes a gallant attempt to shroud this light with articles of apparel suspended within. Seen as shadows through the blind, these are somehow very like Miss Thing, and almost suggest that she has been hanging herself in several places in one of her bouts of energy. The street is in darkness, save for the meagre glow from a street lamp, whose glass is painted red in obedience to war regulations. It is winter time, and there is a sprinkling of snow on the ground.
Our POLICEMAN appears in the street, not perhaps for the first time this evening, and flashes his lantern on the suspect’s window, whose signboard (boards again!) we now see bears this odd device,
Celeste et Cie.
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The Penny Friend.
Not perhaps for the first time this evening he scratches his head at it. Then he pounds off in pursuit of some client who has just emerged with a pennyworth. We may imagine the two of them in conversation in the next street, the law putting leading questions. Meanwhile the ‘fourth’ wall of the establishment of Celeste dissolves, but otherwise the street is as it was, and we are now in the position of privileged persons looking in at her window. It is a tiny room in which you could just swing a cat, and here CINDERELLA swings cats all and every evening. The chief pieces of furniture are a table and a bench, both of which have a suspicious appearance of having been made out of boards by some handy character. There is a penny in the slot fireplace which has evidently been lately fed, there is a piece of carpet that has been beaten into nothingness, but is still a carpet, there is a hearth rug of brilliant rags that is probably gratified when your toes catch in it and you are hurled against the wall. Two pictures—one of them partly framed—strike a patriotic note, but they may be there purposely to deceive. The room is lit by a lamp, and at first sight presents no sinister aspect unless it comes from four boxes nailed against the walls some five or six feet from the floor. In appearance they are not dissimilar to large grocery boxes, but it is disquieting to note that one of them has been mended with the board we saw lately in MR. BODIE’S studio. When our POLICEMAN comes, as come we may be sure he will, the test of his acumen will be his box action.
The persons in the room at present have either no acumen or are familiar with the boxes. There are four of them, besides CINDERELLA, whom we catch in the act of adding to her means of livelihood. Celeste et Cie., a name that has caught her delicate fancy while she dashed through fashionable quarters, is the Penny Friend because here everything is dispensed for that romantic coin. It is evident that the fame of the emporium has spread. Three would be customers sit on the bench awaiting their turn listlessly and as genteelly unconscious of each other as society in a dentist’s dining-room, while in the centre is CINDERELLA fitting an elderly gentleman with a new coat. There are pins in her mouth and white threads in the coat, suggesting that this is not her first struggle with it, and one of the difficulties with which she has to contend is that it has already evidently been the coat of a larger man. CINDERELLA is far too astute a performer to let it be seen that she has difficulties, however. She twists and twirls her patron with careless aptitude, kneads him if need be, and has him in a condition of pulp while she mutters for her own encouragement and his intimidation the cryptic remarks employed by tailors, as to the exact meaning of which she has already probed MR. BODIE.
CINDERELLA (wandering over her client with a tape). 35—14. (She consults a paper on the table.) Yes, it’s 35—14.
(She pulls him out, contracts him and takes his elbows measure.)
28—7; 41—12; 15—19. (There is something wrong, and she has to justify her handiwork.) You was longer when you came on Monday.