It is a gray evening turning into night. Already the two gaslamps on the pavement opposite have been pulled to brightness by the lamplighter’s long pole and illumine the raw brick of the warehouse walls. There are several lights on in the rooms of the hotel; brighter on the ground floor, softer above, since as in so many Victorian houses the gaspipes had been considered too expensive to be allowed upstairs, and there oil lamps are still in use. Through one ground-floor window, by the main door, Mrs. Endicott herself can be seen at a table by a small coal fire, poring over her Bible—that is, her accounts ledger; and if we traverse diagonally up from that window to another in the endmost house to the right, a darkened top-floor window, whose murrey curtains are still not drawn, we can just see a good example of a twelve-and-sixer—though here I mean the room, not the guest.
It is really two rooms, a small sitting room and an even smaller bedroom, both made out of one decent-sized Georgian room. The walls are papered in an indeterminate pattern of minute bistre flowers. There is a worn carpet, a round-topped tripod table covered by a dark green rep cloth, on the corners of which someone had once attempted—evidently the very first attempt—to teach herself embroidery; two awkward armchairs, overcarved wood garnished by a tired puce velvet, a dark-brown mahogany chest of drawers. On the wall, a foxed print of Charles Wesley, and a very bad watercolor of Exeter Cathedral—received in reluctant part payment, some years before, from a lady in reduced circumstances.
Apart from a small clatter of appliances beneath the tiny barred fire, now a sleeping ruby, that was the inventory of the room. Only one small detail saved it: the white marble surround of the fireplace, which was Georgian, and showed above graceful nymphs with cornucopias of flowers. Perhaps they had always had a faint air of surprise about their classical faces; they certainly seemed to have it now, to see what awful changes a mere hundred years could work in a nation’s culture. They had been born into a pleasant pine-paneled room; now they found themselves in a dingy cell.
They must surely, if they had been capable, have breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened and the hitherto absent occupant stood silhouetted in the doorway. That strange-cut coat, that black bonnet, that indigo dress with its small white collar… but Sarah came briskly, almost eagerly in.
This was not her arrival at the Endicott Family. How she had come there—several days before—was simple. The name of the hotel had been a sort of joke at the academy where she studied as a girl in Exeter; the adjective was taken as a noun, and it was supposed that the Endicotts were so multiplied that they required a whole hotel to themselves.
Sarah had found herself standing at the Ship, where the Dorchester omnibuses ended their run. Her box was waiting; had arrived the previous day. A porter asked her where she was to go. She had a moment of panic. No ready name came to her mind except that dim remembered joke. A something about the porter’s face when he heard her destination must have told her she had not chosen the most distinguished place to stay in Exeter. But he humped her box without argument and she followed him down through the town to the quarter I have already mentioned. She was not taken by the appearance of the place—in her memory (but she had only seen it once) it was homelier, more dignified, more open… however, beggars cannot be choosers. It relieved her somewhat that her solitary situation evoked no comment. She paid over a week’s room money in advance, and that was evidently sufficient recommendation. She had intended to take the cheapest room, but when she found that only one room was offered for ten shillings but one and a half for the extra half-crown, she had changed her mind.
She came swiftly inside the room and shut the door. A match was struck and applied to the wick of the lamp, whose milk-glass diffuser, once the “chimney” was replaced, gently repelled the night. Then she tore off her bonnet and shook her hair loose in her characteristic way. She lifted the canvas bag she was carrying onto the table, evidently too anxious to unpack it to be bothered to take off her coat. Slowly and carefully she lifted out one after the other a row of wrapped objects and placed them on the green cloth. Then she put the basket on the floor, and started to unwrap her purchases.
She began with a Staffordshire teapot with a pretty colored transfer of a cottage by a stream and a pair of lovers (she looked closely at the lovers); and then a Toby jug, not one of those garish-colored monstrosities of Victorian manufacture, but a delicate little thing in pale mauve and primrose-yellow, the jolly man’s features charmingly lacquered by a soft blue glaze (ceramic experts may recognize a Ralph Wood). Those two purchases had cost Sarah ninepence in an old china shop; the Toby was cracked, and was to be recracked in the course of time, as I can testify, having bought it myself a year or two ago for a good deal more than the three pennies Sarah was charged. But unlike her, I fell for the Ralph Wood part of it. She fell for the smile.
Sarah had, though we have never seen it exercised, an aesthetic sense; or perhaps it was an emotional sense—a reaction against the dreadful decor in which she found herself. She did not have the least idea of the age of her little Toby. But she had a dim feeling that it had been much used, had passed through many hands… and was now hers. Was now hers—she set it on the mantelpiece and, still in her coat, stared at it with a childlike absorption, as if not to lose any atom of this first faint taste of ownership.
Her reverie was broken by footsteps in the passage outside. She threw a brief but intense look at the door. The footsteps passed on. Now Sarah took off her coat and poked the fire into life; then set a blackened kettle on the hob. She turned again to her other purchases: a twisted paper of tea, another of sugar, a small metal can of milk she set beside the teapot. Then she took the remaining three parcels and went into the bedroom: a bed, a marble washstand, a small mirror, a sad scrap of carpet, and that was all.
But she had eyes only for her parcels. The first contained a nightgown. She did not try it against herself, but laid it on the bed; and then unwrapped her next parcel. It was a dark-green shawl, merino fringed with emerald-green silk. This she held in a strange sort of trance—no doubt at its sheer expense, for it cost a good deal more than all her other purchases put together. At last she pensively raised and touched its fine soft material against her cheek, staring down at the nightgown; and then in the first truly feminine gesture I have permitted her, moved a tress of her brown-auburn hair forward to lie on the green cloth; a moment later she shook the scarf out—it was wide, more than a yard across, and twisted it round her shoulders. More staring, this time into the mirror; and then she returned to the bed and arranged the scarf round the shoulders of the laid-out nightgown.
She unwrapped the third and smallest parcel; but this was merely a roll of bandage, which, stopping a moment to stare back at the green-and-white arrangement on the bed, she carried back into the other room and put in a drawer of the mahogany chest, just as the kettle lid began to rattle.
Charles’s purse had contained ten sovereigns, and this alone—never mind what else may have been involved—was enough to transform Sarah’s approach to the external world. Each night since she had first counted those ten golden coins, she had counted them again. Not like a miser, but as one who goes to see some film again and again—out of an irresistible pleasure in the story, in certain images…
For days, when she first arrived in Exeter, she spent nothing, only the barest amounts, and then from her own pitiful savings, on sustenance; but stared at shops: at dresses, at chairs, tables, groceries, wines, a hundred things that had come to seem hostile to her, taunters, mockers, so many two-faced citizens of Lyme, avoiding her eyes when she passed before them and grinning when she had passed behind. This was why she had taken so long to buy a teapot. You can make do with a kettle; and her poverty had inured her to not having, had so profoundly removed from her the appetite to buy that, like some sailor who has subsisted for weeks on half a biscuit a day, she could not eat all the food that was now hers for the asking. Which does not mean she was unhappy; very far from it. She was simply enjoying the first holiday of her adult life.