Three Loves by A. J. Cronin

Author:A. J. Cronin [Cronin, A. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter Fourteen

A month later she sat breakfasting in her new house – eating a slice of bread and butter to her cup of tea – by the light of a tongue of gas which whistled upwards noisily from its burner. Not yet eight o’clock, a blanket of fog lay over the city, excluding the faint light of the breaking dawn and pressing darkly against the window of the room wherein she sat.

It was not a prepossessing room, nor from her present look did she so regard it, yet it had at least some features of utility. In front of her, beneath the window, was a chipped sink fed by a tap which, though it dripped incessantly, was none the less a most convenient source of water; to the right was the kitchen range, bearing on its blackleaded surface a small gas-ring linked by a swooping pipe to the bracket above the mantelpiece; on her left, fixed against the wall, stood a battered wooden box, half bunker, half settle, combining the storage of fuel with the advantage of an occasional seat. These were the simple fixtures of the room, and the furniture – the small square table at which she sat, two cane-bottomed chairs, her own fluted rocker, and a small iron bed standing behind her in an alcove – was equally severe. Through the open door of this kitchen-bedroom the remainder of the house was visible – a dark and well-like hall joining on to another bedroom, empty except for a wardrobe and another iron bedstead – and a small cubicle of a bathroom containing a bath encased in its mouldering wooden frame and coated with cracked and blistered yellowish enamel. The walls of these rooms, like the walls of the kitchen, were papered throughout by a brownish varnished paper of undecipherable pattern; and in the foggy light they had an aspect almost melancholy.

This, then, was her new house – that ‘ quiet place’ which she had so eagerly anticipated. Yet she had done her best. For two days she had searched – ‘searched high and low’, as she put it to Miss Tinto – and, even with the discerning assistance of Henderson & Shaw, this ‘one room and kitchen’house, with its so-called bathroom, situated on the top storey in a large block given over to such dwellings, had been the only habitation to fulfil the requirements of her respectability and her purse. And how narrowly it missed evading both! The rent was seven shillings a week, which was as much as she could afford, and the house – indeed, the entire block of houses, which ran the length of the street, euphoniously and inappropriately named Flowers Street – breathed of a drab and seedy indigence.

The building, with its narrow ‘dose’ entrances and dark, ill-lit stone stairways, was not quite a tenement. The street itself was not quite out at elbows, but its elbows had worn suspiciously thin. Something – perhaps a clinging vestige of a more glorious past – saved the building and the street, preserved them from an utter meanness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.