Parload?

Could I go and make it up with him, and then borrow?  I weighed the chances of that.  Then I thought of selling or pawning something, but that seemed difficult.  My winter overcoat had not cost a pound when it was new, my watch was not likely to fetch many shillings.  Still, both these things might be factors.  I thought with a certain repugnance of the little store my mother was probably making for the rent.  She was very secretive about that, and it was locked in an old tea-caddy in her bedroom.  I knew it would be almost impossible to get any of that money from her willingly, and though I told myself that in this issue of passion and death no detail mattered, I could not get rid of tormenting scruples whenever I thought of that tea-caddy.  Was there no other course?  Perhaps after every other source had been tapped I might supplement with a few shillings frankly begged from her.  “These others,” I said to myself, thinking without passion for once of the sons of the Secure, “would find it difficult to run their romances on a pawnshop basis.  However, we must manage it.”

I felt the day was passing on, but I did not get excited about that.  “Slow is swiftest,” Parload used to say, and I meant to get everything thought out completely, to take a long aim and then to act as a bullet flies.

I hesitated at a pawnshop on my way home to my midday meal, but I determined not to pledge my watch until I could bring my overcoat also.

I ate silently, revolving plans.

Section 3

After our midday dinner—­it was a potato-pie, mostly potato with some scraps of cabbage and bacon—­I put on my overcoat and got it out of the house while my mother was in the scullery at the back.

A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as ours, a damp, unsavory, mainly subterranean region behind the dark living-room kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty in our case by the fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness, opened, and diffused small crunchable particles about the uneven brick floor.  It was the region of “washing-up,” that greasy, damp function that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape-pipe, and rags of a quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called “dish-clouts,” rise in my memory at the name.  The altar of this place was the “sink,” a tank of stone, revolting to a refined touch, grease-filmed and unpleasant to see, and above this was a tap for cold water, so arranged that when the water descended it splashed and wetted whoever had turned it on.  This tap was our water supply.  And in such a place you must fancy a little old woman, rather incompetent and very gentle, a soul of unselfishness and sacrifice, in dirty clothes, all come from their original colors to a common dusty dark gray, in worn, ill-fitting boots, with hands distorted by ill use, and untidy graying hair—­my mother.  In the winter her hands would be “chapped,” and she would have a cough.  And while she washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and watch in order that I may desert her.