_ Constance's pride urged her to refuse the offer. But in truth her
sole objection to it was that she had not thought of the scheme
herself. For the scheme really reconciled her wish to remain where
she was with her wish to be free of the shop.
"I shall make him put me in a new window in the parlour--one that
will open!" she said positively to Cyril, who accepted Mr.
Critchlow's idea with fatalistic indifference.
After stipulating for the new window, she closed with the offer.
Then there was the stock-taking, which endured for weeks. And then
a carpenter came and measured for the window. And a builder and a
mason came and inspected doorways, and Constance felt that the end
was upon her. She took up the carpet in the parlour and protected
the furniture by dustsheets. She and Cyril lived between bare
boards and dustsheets for twenty days, and neither carpenter nor
mason reappeared. Then one surprising day the old window was
removed by the carpenter's two journeymen, and late in the
afternoon the carpenter brought the new window, and the three men
worked till ten o'clock at night, fixing it. Cyril wore his cap
and went to bed in his cap, and Constance wore a Paisley shawl. A
painter had bound himself beyond all possibility of failure to
paint the window on the morrow. He was to begin at six a.m.; and
Amy's alarm-clock was altered so that she might be up and dressed
to admit him. He came a week later, administered one coat, and
vanished for another ten days. Then two masons suddenly came with
heavy tools, and were shocked to find that all was not prepared
for them. (After three carpetless weeks Constance had relaid her
floors.) They tore off wall-paper, sent cascades of plaster down
the kitchen steps, withdrew alternate courses of bricks from the
walls, and, sated with destruction, hastened away. After four days
new red bricks began to arrive, carried by a quite guiltless
hodman who had not visited the house before. The hodman met the
full storm of Constance's wrath. It was not a vicious wrath,
rather a good-humoured wrath; but it impressed the hodman. "My
house hasn't been fit to live in for a month," she said in fine.
"If these walls aren't built to-morrow, upstairs AND down--to-
morrow, mind!--don't let any of you dare to show your noses here
again, for I won't have you. Now you've brought your bricks. Off
with you, and tell your master what I say!"
It was effective. The next day subdued and plausible workmen of
all sorts awoke the house with knocking at six-thirty precisely,
and the two doorways were slowly bricked up. The curious thing was
that, when the barrier was already a foot high on the ground-floor
Constance remembered small possessions of her own which she had
omitted to remove from the cutting-out room. Picking up her
skirts, she stepped over into the region that was no more hers,
and stepped back with the goods. She had a bandanna round her head
to keep the thick dust out of her hair. She was very busy, very
preoccupied with nothings. She had no time for sentimentalities.
Yet when the men arrived at the topmost course and were at last
hidden behind their own erection, and she could see only rough
bricks and mortar, she was disconcertingly overtaken by a misty
blindness and could not even see bricks and mortar. Cyril found
her, with her absurd bandanna, weeping in a sheet-covered rocking-
chair in the sacked parlour. He whistled uneasily, remarked: "I
say, mother, what about tea?" and then, hearing the heavy voices
of workmen above, ran with relief upstairs. Tea had been set in
the drawing-room, he was glad to learn that from Amy, who informed
him also that she should 'never get used to them there new walls,'
not as long as she lived.
He went to the School of Art that night. Constance, alone, could
find nothing to do. She had willed that the walls should be built,
and they had been built; but days must elapse before they could be
plastered, and after the plaster still more days before the
papering. Not for another month, perhaps, would her house be free
of workmen and ripe for her own labours. She could only sit in the
dust-drifts and contemplate the havoc of change, and keep her eyes
as dry as she could. The legal transactions were all but complete;
little bills announcing the transfer of the business lay on the
counters in the shop at the disposal of customers. In two days
Charles Critchlow would pay the price of a desire realized. The
sign was painted out and new letters sketched thereon in chalk. In
future she would be compelled, if she wished to enter the shop, to
enter it as a customer and from the front. Yes, she saw that,
though the house remained hers, the root of her life had been
wrenched up.
And the mess! It seemed inconceivable that the material mess could
ever be straightened away!
Yet, ere the fields of the county were first covered with snow
that season, only one sign survived of the devastating revolution,
and that was a loose sheet of wall-paper that had been too soon
pasted on to new plaster and would not stick. Maria Insull was
Maria Critchlow. Constance had been out into the Square and seen
the altered sign, and seen Mrs. Critchlow's taste in window-
curtains, and seen--most impressive sight of all--that the grimy
window of the abandoned room at the top of the abandoned staircase
next to the bedroom of her girlhood, had been cleaned and a table
put in front of it. She knew that the chamber, which she herself
had never entered, was to be employed as a storeroom, but the
visible proof of its conversion so strangely affected her that she
had not felt able to go boldly into the shop, as she had meant to
do, and make a few purchases in the way of friendliness. "I'm a
silly woman!" she muttered. Later, she did venture, timidly
abrupt, into the shop, and was received with fitting state by Mrs.
Critchlow (as desiccated as ever), who insisted on allowing her
the special trade discount. And she carried her little friendly
purchases round to her own door in King Street. Trivial, trivial
event! Constance, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, did both.
She accused herself of developing a hysterical faculty in tears,
and strove sagely against it. _