Happy Pollyooly | Page 5

white, but the room was dustier than ever.
She covered up the bed again, took down the pictures and again made
the room dustier. Then she swept the ceiling and the walls. After doing
so she shook the counterpane again. And the room was still dusty; but
the dust was nearly all on the floor, or on the black face of Pollyooly.
She swept it up. Then she went quietly out into the street with the strips
of carpet and banged them against the railings of the house; this time it
was the street that was dustier than ever; and Pollyooly appeared to
have come from the lower Congo. For the next half-hour, had he not
been absorbed in his work, Hilary Vance might have heard a steady and
sustained rasp of a scrubbing-brush.
Pollyooly came to the laying of the lunch with her angel face deeply
flushed; but she wore a very cheerful air. Also she displayed an
excellent appetite. In the middle of lunch she said in dreamy
reminiscence, apropos of nothing in particular:
"I got this place clean once."
"Isn't it clean now?" said Hilary Vance in a tone of anxious surprise.
"It depends on what you call clean," said Pollyooly politely.

After lunch she brought the drawers from the chest of drawers in the
bedroom into the kitchen and washed them and dried them in the sun.
Then, at last, she unpacked the brown tin box and put away their
clothes.
After that she took the Lump for an hour's walk on the embankment.
She preferred it to the embankment below the Temple; it seemed to her
airier. She returned to tea, and had a little struggle with the teaspoons.
They enjoyed, after the lapse of months, the experience of shining.
After tea Hilary Vance told her regretfully that he would not be able to
come home to supper, but that she would find provisions in the
cupboard, and advising them to go to bed early, bade them an
affectionate good-night and went out in a northeasterly direction to talk
about Art.
When the door closed behind him Pollyooly heaved a faint sigh of
satisfaction and looked round the studio with the light of battle in her
eye. Then she took the canvases, which were set against the wall three
and four deep, into the street and brushed them. The dust in the street
had been a tedious grey; in front of the house of Hilary Vance it
became a warm black.
Then she put the Lump, with the toys she had brought with her, into the
clean bedroom, and fell upon the studio. By the time she had brushed
the pictures and the walls and the ceiling its floor had become very
dusty indeed, and she was once more black. She swept it, and then she
was an hour scrubbing it. When it was done she gave the Lump his
supper and put him to bed. After supper she dealt faithfully with the
windows. The skylight gave her trouble; it was so high. But she tied a
wet cloth round the top of a broom, and by standing on the table
reached it. It made her arms ache, but slowly the panes assumed a
transparency to which they had long been unused. When she had
cleaned them from the inside she considered thoughtfully the
possibility of sitting astride the roof and cleaning their outside surfaces.
But there was no way of getting on to the roof. Then she had a hot bath;
she needed it.
Mrs. Thomas had been apprised of her coming and greeted her amiably.

It is only fair to say that she gave the studio the cleaning it generally
received without observing that anything whatever had happened to it.
Hilary Vance, who was of that rare, but happy, disposition, came to
breakfast in splendid spirits. He also did not observe that anything had
happened to the studio. But when he got to his work he kept looking up
from it with a puzzled air.
At last he said:
"It's odd--very odd. Lately I've been thinking that my sight was
beginning to weaken. But this morning I can see quite clearly. Yet it
isn't a very bright morning."
"Perhaps if you had the skylight cleaned on the outside, too, you'd see
clearer still," said Pollyooly in the tone of one throwing out a careless
suggestion.
Hilary Vance looked round the studio more earnestly:
"By Jove! You've cleaned it again!" he cried. "You are a brick,
Pollyooly. But all the same you're my guest here; and it's not the
function of a guest to clean her host's house. I ought to have
remembered it and had it cleaned before you came."
"But I liked doing it. I did, really," said Pollyooly.
"You are undoubtedly a brick--a