CHAPTER XXVIII

THE THIRD FLOOR

But if Ernie was simple, he was not blind. When he was not on the lift, he acted as Boots for the Third Floor; and no man could work there without seeing what he saw.

Mr. Pigott, once meeting his old pupil in Church Street, asked him how he liked his job.

"Not so bad, sir," Ernie answered without enthusiasm. "Some I likes; and some I dislikes; and most I don't mind."

The work indeed, in the slack seasons at all events, was by no means hard, the wages moderate; the tips many, and sometimes extravagant.

Ernie was the only man on the staff who frequented the Third Floor. No waiters ever came there. All the waiting that was done--and there was plenty--was done by the maids.

Most of these were foreign; and the few who were not had adopted foreign names. They were pretty and pert; and they called Ernie--"Ernie Boots." It was the common gossip that the Manageress chose them herself--"with care," the knowing added with a wink.

Madame, as she was familiarly known, was in fact a Bavarian, who must have been beautiful in her day, with an immense bust that concealed a most kind heart, and piles of fair hair, obviously her own, that she amassed in pyramids on the top of her head. There was generally a cigarette between her lips, and she used a lorgnette lavishly. She was in fact an efficient woman of the world, saved from the dreadful vices of the efficient by a genuinely benignant nature. And she avowed openly that it was her mission in life to give people what they wanted--propriety to the proper, and pleasure to the pleasure-seeking.

Ernie had been at the hotel nearly a year when there came to the Third Floor a maid who seemed strangely out of her element.

He noted her advent at once with surprise and a sense of shame. Amid her saucy colleagues she seemed a lily of the valley blowing stately amid artificial flowers. A big young woman and beautiful, she held herself apart, moving among the others, apparently unconscious of them, and ignorant of the meretricious atmosphere, as a Madonna walking through the ballet of a music-hall revue.

Her presence filled him with acute personal discomfort. He did not like the tone of the Third Floor, but he accepted it as he accepted everything with the easy tolerance that was his weakness. This majestic young woman with her aloof and noble air, her accusing innocence, her damning purity, filled him with shame and pity--shame for himself and his weak-kneed benevolence, pity for those others whom she with her unconscious dignity made appear so small and vulgar.

Her name was Ruth, so much Ernie knew, and she was English too, though she scarcely looked it: for she was very dark, her hair black as a horse's mane, with a skin that had a peculiar ruddy warmth, and the large brown eyes full of splendid darkness and mellow lights, that are so rare and therefore so noticeable when found among the working-classes that fringe the North Sea. Her brows, black as her hair and broadly splashed, almost met; but there was nothing of ferocity about her.

Her natural habit, Ernie saw, was that of a great and mysteriously growing tree, its roots deep in the red earth; its massive foliage drinking of the goodness of sunshine and wind and rain; but now there was about her a note of restraint, even of stress. The easy flow of her nature was being dammed. She seemed out of place and dumbly aware of it, like a creature of the wilderness in a strange environment. The profound and quiet joyousness of woman, maturing to ripe perfection, which should have been hers to an unusual degree, was not.

Ernie was desperately shy of her.

He would peep at her as she passed him on her swift way; she never looked at him.

He seldom saw her speak to the other maids. Yet it was clear to him that this isolation was unnatural to her, and that she was made for quiet intercourse and noble mirth. Unlike the other maids she was always busy. She never romped, gossiped, or flirted.

One evening Ernie saw a fat-necked Jew in a sleeping suit, his mouth stuffed with a cigar, his eyes hot and bibulous, standing in the door of his bedroom.

The dark beauty came by.

The Jew chirped at her.

"Pretty tartie!" he called in his luscious voice. "Come inside then. I've got something to show you."

The girl passed on, unheeding.

The Jew followed her with moist eyes that glistened.

A fair chamber-maid emerging from another room winked at Ernie.

"She's white," she said, and jerked her head in the direction of the disappearing girl.

The chamber-maid was a little cockney from Clapham who had taken to herself the name of Céleste.

"None the worse for that, I dare say," said Ernie with unusual acrimony.

Céleste flirted on her way.

"Tra-la-la!--ta-ta-ta!" she taunted with a little mocking flutter of her fingers. "I suppose you're white too, Ernie Boots."

"No," grinned Ernie. "I'm grey."

"Baa-baa, black sheep!" mocked the naughty one. "I'd be one or the other. Grey's a silly sort of tint."

Then the Jew's sodden voice came wheezing down the corridor.

"Here, kid!--You'll do. You're not a bloody iceberg, are you?"

Céleste shook her carefully-coiffed head.

"I'm engaged, Soly. So sorry!--Go back to bed, there's a dear old thing!"

Ernie woke that night in the belief that Ruth was bending over him.

"Ruth!" he answered quietly. "Is that you?" But there was no reply.

Next morning he took the plunge.

"Good morning, Miss," he said as she passed him.

The other's curiously impassive face flashed into life.

"Good morning, Mr. Boots," she answered in a deep and humming voice like the sound of wings.

She said the words quite simply, and he saw she was not chaffing. She honestly believed Boots to be his name.

Céleste, dusting in an adjoining room, looked through an open door.

"She's an innocent," she said discontentedly. "She knows nothing. Ought to go back to her mother. Madame's got no business to put her here."

Ernie went on his way, that deep voice still thrilling in his ears.

Thereafter he sought and found chances of serving the girl.

One day he came on her tugging a heavy basket of washing along the passage. It was clear that she had been too proud to ask another maid for help, preferring to trust her own magnificent physique to accomplish the task alone.

"Let me, Miss," he said.

"You take yon end," she answered. "I'll take this. Then atween us like."

"Ah," said Ernie, gathering courage. "I see what it is. You think you're the only strong one." Deliberately and without an effort he swung the basket on to his shoulder and bore it jauntily to its destination.

Then he slid it down and faced the girl.

"Now then!" he cried.

She dropped her eyelids, and he saw the length and curl of her lashes.

"You are strong," she said, with a dainty irony he found as delightful as it was surprising. "I allow you'll be purty nigh half as strong as I be."

He pointed an accusing finger at her.

"You're Sussex!" he cried, falling into the old broad speech in his turn. "I'd knaw ye anywheres."

Her whole face gladdened slowly as she heard the familiar accent.

"Never!" she said, still faintly ironical, and added more sedately. "I was bred and born in Sussex, and never been outside it."

"And never mean to be," chaffed Ernie. "That's your style. I knaw ye."

"I was borrn in the Brooks at Aldwoldston," she continued, pronouncing the word Auston. "Along under the church by the White Bridge across Parson's Tye. Dad was Squire Caryll's keeper till he was ate up with the rheumatism." Her speech broadened even as she spoke, deliberately, he thought, to meet his own.

He followed suit.

The pair began to ca-a-a away at each other like a couple of old rooks in an elm in May.

"What might be your name then?"

"Ruth Boam, I believe."

Ernie nodded sagaciously.

"'Twould be surely. Boam or Burgess or Ticehurst or Woolgar. Something with a bit o Saxon in it, as dad says." He added hopefully: "I'm Sussex too. I was dragged up in Old Town agin the Rectory there," jerking his head. "Cerdainly I was."

She regarded him mischievously.

"I knew you was no'hun of a foreigner then," she told him.

Ernie feigned surprise.

"How did you knaw that then?"

She chuckled like a cuckoo.

"Hap I aren't the only one," she answered.

Then she was gone; and it struck him suddenly that this grave and stately damsel had been chaffing him.

Ernie stood a moment amazed. Then he nodded his head.

Suddenly he seemed to have crossed a border-line into a new country. Behind him was the stale old past, with its failures, its purposelessness, its dreary hag-tracks; before him was adventure, the New world--and what?

He wasn't sure. But there it was beckoning him and he should follow, true child of Romance that he was.

And it was time he moved on.

He had been a year now at the Hotel and was, as always, tending to grow slack.

Salvation Joe was watching him, waiting his chance, and Ernie knew it.

Now a change stole over him. A nucleus, small at first, but always growing, round which the dissipated forces of his spirit could rally, had been forming in his heart, unknown to him, ever since Ruth's advent to the Third Floor. He was becoming firm of purpose, gathering himself, making good. His eyes, his face, his gait, testified to the change.

Mr. Trupp, the observant, remarked on it to Mr. Pigott.

"He's growing," he said.

"The right way, let's hope," answered the other. "That place you sent him to is a queer kind of forcing house."

"He wants forcing," said Mr. Trupp. "We all do."

"Bah!" growled Mr. Pigott. "You and your Lash."