Though, thanks to her mother, everything was fairly (fairly) clean inside, the long and steadfast grip of poverty showed itself everywhere and Ella never came up here without a slight sense of shame at being in such a ‘good place’ and wearing such fine clothes – a sensation from which she got hardly any relief in the fact that out of her weekly salary, which was twenty-two shillings, she kept only twelve, and gave the other ten to her mother.
Ella’s mother was a grey-haired, quiet, ill, puzzled woman of about fifty, with some resemblance to Ella, particularly about the eyes, and between them there existed the profoundest understanding and affection.
As soon as Ella had climbed the dark, airless and uncared-for stairway, and opened the door, and called for her mother, she saw at once that calamity, which carried on its campaign incessantly all along the line, had stricken the household at a fresh and unforeseen point, and by means of a fresh weapon of warfare, – uric acid. In other words, she had only to glance at her mother to see that she was suffering from a frightful stiff Neck. This was swathed round and safety-pinned with a piece of flannel which made Mrs. Prosser look extraordinarily miserable, and also, if the truth was told, not a little silly. ‘It’s all right,’ she said at once, seeing Ella look at her. ‘I’ve got a stiff Neck.’ But why she should say it was all right was not clear, since she was obviously in excruciating agony every time she moved her head, and was thus compelled to move across the room with all the delays and caution of a novice on the tight-rope, and, in turning to look at anything, to move her entire stiffened body round as though she were incarcerated in a block of solid ice. Or, again, it was as though a ghostly surgeon had conveniently arranged to operate upon her while she went about her household tasks, and the operation was still in progress.
Not a very pleasant opening for her visit, but Ella was hardened to such occurrences in this damned abode, and expressing the liveliest sympathy, and after having had a Look at it (as though that was going to do any good) and compelling her mother slowly to transport her stiff neck to the arm-chair in the sitting-room, she herself took over the tasks she had interrupted, and put on the kettle for tea.
Her mother did not remain still for long, but in about twenty minutes’ time tea was ready, and they settled down in the sitting-room for their weekly chat. By now the smoky dusk was thickening in the rain outside; the fire, extravagantly heaped for the occasion, was blazing red and spitting white jets of gas; and in the suitable gloaming impending, there took place, with the clink of tea-cups, a gentle summing-up and discussion of the week’s events. As the dusk grew deeper they saw little more than the shapes of each other, and grew more confiding.
CHAPTER XIV
STRENUOUSLY AS THEY both tried to evade and shirk it, Ella and her mother were never very long able to keep away from the shamefaced topic which actually dominated their thoughts – to wit, Him. Into whatever realms of description they went, however cheerful or absorbed they became, He was lurking there in the conversational background (in fact they both knew He would be back for his tea before very long), and some chance remark would set them going. ‘And then, of course, He’s been very funny all the time,’ her mother would say. ‘Has he?’ said Ella, and after a reluctant pause, the various cats would come out of the bags.
There was, as usual, a long inventory of novel crimes to his name this week. He had been more silent than ever, he had taken to coming in at three o’clock in the morning and cooking himself eggs. He had publicly stormed at the floor above, he had stamped on the floor below, he had taken a resolute and fixed stand against washing himself, he had damned and blasted (and somethinged) the Stiff Neck, he had got speechlessly drunk (even for a speechless person) on Saturday night, and Lain On on Sunday till four in the afternoon. In fact, ‘You wouldn’t think he had had any Education,’ said Ella’s mother, and Ella could have said more.
At last, however, they drifted away from the subject and Ella began to wonder whether she would say anything to her mother about Mr. Eccles. She desperately desired to confide in someone about this strange happening and slight opening (if it was an opening) in her life; and quite apart from her need for advice, she had a sheer childish desire to tell gleefully, and perhaps a little boastfully, to some understanding person, of the extravagant pleasures to which she had been treated, and the staggering wealth which had been calmly expended upon her – for no apparent reason save her beaux yeux. On the other hand she was a little ashamed to speak of her participation in such reckless expenditure before her mother, whose nagging pains in penury would have been eased by a fraction of the bill for that afternoon and evening. And she also doubted whether her mother would Understand. . . . If it came to that, she did not understand herself.
But she swallowed these scruples, and finding her mother listening sympathetically at last let out the whole story with the utmost relief – the entire story, that is to say, minus the ‘Whats’ and climax. They then talked round and round the subject.
‘But what does he want?’ said her mother at last, in her simple, striving, slightly scared, yet direct way.
‘Well,’ said Ella, ‘that’s just what I want to know, really.’ And in the deepening dusk she sensed exactly what her mother was thinking. Her mother was thinking of dalliance and sin: and her mother was thinking of Marriage. Furthermore her mother did not dare risk an observation on either of these themes, and was silent.
‘He’s a Gentleman,’ hazarded Ella, not quite knowing what she meant to convey by this, but half wishing to describe his general quality, and half to reassure her mother under the heading of dalliance.
‘Is he?’ was all her mother could say.
‘Oh yes,’ said Ella. ‘They’re Army People, I believe.’
Ella brought this out with intense self-consciousness, and was ashamed at her duplicity with herself – inasmuch as she had been only too acutely ready to despise Mr. Eccles for ‘dragging in’ this advantage at the time, and here was she, dragging it in just as clumsily, and taking it over and using it as a weapon herself.
‘Is he really?’ said her mother, in a tone of awe which she was no longer able to conceal.
‘Yes,’ said Ella. ‘So I understand.’
It was odd, she reflected, that whenever she was with Mr. Eccles her mind harped incessantly upon his blemishes and absurdities, whereas now she was discussing him with someone else, she was seeing all those blemishes as advantages and sticking up for him – rather swanking about him in fact.
‘Well,’ said her mother, ‘I certainly think you ought to keep in with him.’
‘Yes. I suppose one ought,’ said Ella, and suspected, in the silence that followed, that her mother’s mind had again reverted to that dimly discerned yet irresistible concept of matrimony. Mrs. Prosser’s next remark proved Ella’s suspicion well-founded.
‘Is he Nice Looking,’ she asked, ‘at all?’
‘Oh yes. Quite all right,’ said Ella. ‘He’s Getting On, of course. . . .’
‘Well, that’s sometimes Better, isn’t it?’ said Mrs. Prosser, encouragingly.
What was her mother trying to do? Encouraging her to over-ride her most precious impulses, and calculatingly sell herself to so impressive a bidder? What else? Ella had an instinct to be shocked. She was aware, however, of the peculiar unscrupulousness of the elderly, however deep their love, with regard to the matter of marrying off their daughters, and felt she must allow for this.
‘I mean he really is Getting On,’ she said. . . .
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Prosser, ‘perhaps he’s learnt some sense.’
It was no good. Ella perceived that her white body had no place in her poor mother’s calculations. But again she could not be offended. She understood her mother’s feelings too well; she knew, from the anxious, tentative tone of her voice, how wretchedly, day and night, she yearned for some turn in their fortune, to see Ella ‘settled’ – a passion so selfless and intense that it had come to disregard the very self and emotions of its object. She coul
d not resist throwing her a little scrap of hope.
‘Well,’ she said, almost significantly. ‘He’s certainly been very kind.’
‘He certainly has.’ And Mrs. Prosser, possibly for the first time in weeks, was a cheerful woman.
‘Well, we shall see,’ said Ella, and there was a pause.
‘He hasn’t tried,’ said Mrs. Prosser, in a funny voice, ‘to Carry On at all, I suppose, has he?’
‘Oh no,’ said Ella, ‘None of That. . . .’
She realized that it would not be proper, nor indeed in any way possible to furnish an impression of whatever proportion of Carrying On was implied in the indescribable ‘Whats’ against the railings. And this was a pity, since they constituted, really, the sole crisis of the situation, providing the most suggestive clue from which any vital interpretation of the situation might be made. But there is more often than not a sad curse attached to confidences of this nature between mother and daughter (and friend and friend, if it comes to that), whereby the one confiding is forced to withhold some essential particular, and yet foolishly seeks to obtain relief in the sympathy and opinion of a listener who has been, as it were, betrayed, and is enlarging upon an entirely false and incomplete hypothesis.
So, making the gulf even wider: ‘Oh no,’ Ella repeated, ‘I wouldn’t allow that. . . .’
‘No . . .’ said Mrs. Prosser, in an ambiguous voice, and Ella was not quite certain that she detected the note of relief that she had anticipated. In fact she was not sure that her mother was not a little disappointed. In the shattering lack of principle to which her selfless passion had brought this normally austere woman, it was quite possible that a little Carrying On might have a perfectly decent and suitable place in the picture, as part of the process of Encouragement and general submissiveness to a lord of creation. Ella saw that, near and dear as they were to each other, they were eternally apart, and thought it would be well to change the subject, lest her mother’s innocence of their separation should be destroyed.
She had no need to bother herself, for at this moment mounting footsteps on the wooden stairs outside caused Mrs. Prosser tensely to whisper ‘That’s Him!’ and the sound of the outer door being opened announced beyond question that He had Come Back.
No sooner were these sounds heard than the warmth of their contact and the glow of their confidings were transformed, in an instant, like an asbestos gas fire abruptly turned off at the main, into the ashen pallid coldness of fear and self-defence, and they stiffened their nerves for his entrance.
He spent a few exasperating moments walking and fiddling about in the kitchen, and then threw the door violently open – he had an extraordinary way of even opening a door as though he was slamming it – and seeing Ella, said ‘Oh –’ That, and naught else, was his greeting to her.
‘Good evening, uncle,’ said Ella. (There was a convention originating many years ago whereby she addressed him as ‘Uncle.’) ‘How are you?’
Ever since she had learned to hate him, she always made a point of being scrupulously, even if a little vindictively, polite to him, so that there might be no blot upon the virgin whiteness of her initial advantage in civilized behaviour.
‘I’m all right, thanks,’ he said. ‘Ain’t you got any light in ’ere?’
Mr. Prosser was not the sort of man who could appreciate the subtleties and charms of the gloaming. He made the comment however, in a fairly good-tempered way, and it was clear that he was in some measure controlling, for the moment, his natural spleen out of respect for the visitor to the household.
‘Yes. It’s dark, isn’t it?’ said Ella. ‘I’ll put it on.’ And she got up to do so.
And with the lighting of the gas, the visit, so far as Ella was concerned, was at an end. Mrs. Prosser, who always did her best to be in any room save the one her husband was in, went out at once to get his tea; and Ella, after trying to make some conversation on the weather, went and pretended to help her. She then brought the tea in herself to him, while her mother lit the gas in the kitchen and got on with some ironing. Thus Ella was left in mid-air with only two alternatives, either to stay and talk with her stepfather, which was practically impossible in view of his conversational stone-walling, or to show her favouritism by joining the other camp in the kitchen. She chose the latter. So chilling and disrupting was the influence of this man, who brought misery upon others not by what he said, but by what he did not say, and the bitter way he did not say it.
The door between the sitting-room and kitchen was left slightly ajar, and as her mother worked, and Ella helped her, they carried on a low-toned, semi-conspiratorial conversation, like the timorous gurgling of a feeble brook, in painful earshot and under the uncanny influence of an invisible Mr. Prosser drinking at his tea and gnawing at his bread and butter within. Her mother always dropped her tones to this level in such circumstances, and Ella was forced to imitate her.
But at last this brook-like murmur became too much for Mr. Prosser’s nerves, and getting up from his tea, he pointedly and violently slammed the door which divided them.
‘There!’ whispered Mrs. Prosser, staring at Ella, half in horror and faintness at this new provocation she had unwittingly given the monster, and half to signify to Ella that she had not exaggerated his behaviour.
‘You mustn’t mind,’ said Ella, feeling at any rate a certain relief on her own part at this crude insulting act, in that it wiped out any obligation on her part to see or speak to him again until next week. ‘You must treat him as a joke.’
‘But what have I done?’ asked Mrs. Prosser.
‘You haven’t done anything. You mustn’t mind,’ said Ella, putting her arm round her mother, who took in her breath sharply, and was obviously beginning to cry, while pretending to go on with her ironing.
‘I never do anything,’ she said, and there came another sob.
‘Come along, mother – you mustn’t cry,’ said Ella, hoping against hope that her mother would get control of herself in time. ‘You mustn’t let him see you’re hurt. Things’ll be all right. You mustn’t let him see you.’
But looking round the wretched kitchen, with its snorting green gas illuminating its never-to-be-righted conglomeration of worn-out clothes and utensils; and seeing her mother, with her Stiff Neck, ironing and trying not to cry; and conscious of the savage presence next door, filling the air with its cruelty and discontent; and looking at the clock and seeing that she would be late for her work if she didn’t look out; and realizing that, whereas she, Ella, was already relieved at the thought that she was clearing out in a few minutes, her ill mother had to stay and suffer it all to-night and every day and night – a wave of resentment swept over Ella, and she herself succumbed, clenching her fists and saying ‘Oh how I wish I could get you away!’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Prosser, who had now regained control and was ironing as if nothing had happened. ‘I only wish you could.’ And there was a kind of placid hopelessness and wistfulness about the remark which wrung Ella’s heart.
Always, reflected Ella, when she left her mother it was like this – livid green gas in the window-reflected kitchen, fresh calamity, haste lest she was late for her work, black despair on all sides and nothing decided, nothing advanced, no suggestions or gleam of light for the future.
‘Well, mother,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to go.’ And she started to put on her mackintosh. ‘Things’ll come right, somehow.’
‘Yes, I daresay,’ said Mrs. Prosser, in a more comforted tone, and added, ‘Perhaps you’ll be getting married one of these days.’
Now what exactly, wondered Ella, did she mean to infer by that? Was she harking back, and did she mean that Mr. Eccles might be going to marry her?
‘Yes, perhaps I will,’ she said, doubtfully.
‘You never know,’ pursued her mother. ‘You should certainly be thinking about it.’
Ella saw that this was unmistakable Eccles innuendo, and she took alarm. Was her mother Building? She hoped that she had not said so mu
ch that her mother, when alone, would Build. However, there was no time to correct any impression now, and after prompting her mother with a few stern admonitions as to the proper line of defence with fiends in human shape, she gave her her customary ten-shilling note (which was received with a gloomy shamefaced ‘You shouldn’t,’ but unconcealable evidences of heavenly relief) kissed her brusquely to cover up her embarrassment, and left her.
And that was that. She was out again in the pouring rain, glad, yet ashamed of being glad, of having got away from that appalling atmosphere, and grinding round in her head for some means of attack or solution.
Only when she was in the bus taking her back did she recall Mr. Eccles, and her mother’s innuendoes. She wondered what the gentlemanly Mr. Eccles would think, if he knew he had been described and viewed in the light of prey in a poverty-ridden room down at Pimlico. She was inclined to reprove herself, but reflected that possibly he had discussed her with someone else. It was strange, how quickly two people’s business became public – other people’s business, in fact.
In her gloom and dissatisfaction with life, however, she felt kindly towards Mr. Eccles, remembering his generous entertainment of yesterday. After Pimlico, she could hardly credit that she had ever moved, however briefly, on so riotous a plane. And, indeed, in her loneliness, his apparent affection was not untouching. Putting all personal feeling right aside for a moment – suppose her mother was right and Mr. Eccles was the solution she was seeking? It seemed plausible enough. And if once it was plausible, endless vistas were opened up.