Riceyman Steps(Including 'Elsie and the Child') by Arnold Bennett

Author:Arnold Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141958804
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

* * *

1

At the Window

Elsie was cleaning the upper windows of T. T. Riceyman’s, and she had arrived at the second-floor spare-room, which had two windows, one on King’s Cross Road and the other on Riceyman Steps. (A third window, on Riceyman Steps, had been bricked up, like two first-floor windows on King’s Cross Road, in the prehistoric ages of the house.) Two-thirds of her body was dangerously projected over King’s Cross Road, above the thunder of the trams and the motor-lorries and the iron trotting of cart-horses; the inferior third dangled within the room. She clung with one powerful arm to woodwork or brickwork, while with the other she wiped and rubbed the panes; the window-sill was the depository of a tin can, a leather, and a cloth, each of which had to be manipulated with care, lest by falling any of them should baptize or injure the preoccupied passers-by whose varied top-knots and shoulders Elsie glimpsed when she happened to look down. The windows of the house were all sashed; to clean the upper half was fairly easy, but the lower half could only be done by lifting it bit by bit into the place of the upper half and pulling the latter down on to Elsie’s legs. A difficult operation, this cleaning, in addition to being risky to limb or even to life. Elsie performed it with the exactest conscientiousness in the dusty and cold north wind that swept through the canyon of King’s Cross Road.

She could see everything within the room. The orderly piles of books ranged on the floor, and the array of provisional shelves which she and her mistress had built upon odd volumes (still unsold) of The Illustrated London News. The top or covering plank had disappeared, having been secretly removed, during the master’s absence, and sawn and chopped up for firewood in the cellar; for the master had decisively discountenanced the purchase of more firewood, holding that somehow or other the women could ‘manage’; they had managed. Elsie saw the door open and her mistress enter with a plant-pot in either hand. Violet, all aproned and wearing a renovated check frock, gave a start at the sight of Elsie’s legs.

‘So here you are!’ Elsie heard her voice coming weakly through the glass into the uproar of the street. ‘And I’ve been looking for you everywhere!’

That Elsie had been engaged upon the windows for quite three-quarters of an hour was proof that a servant might go her own ways without attracting the attention even of an employer who flattered herself on missing nothing. Elsie wormed her body back within the room.

‘Didn’t you see me cleaning the outside of the shop windows, ’m?’ she asked, sedately benevolent. (She could clean the inside of the shop windows only by special arrangement with the proprietor.)

‘No, I did not. It’s true I’ve had other matters to think about this morning. Yes, it is! And why must you choose this morning for your windows? You know it’s your afternoon out, and there’s a lot to do.

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