Even worse than the shortage of work was his constant feeling of being an outlaw, on the run from an unseen but powerful organization that sought to crush him. He knew nothing about his fellow window-cleaners; he had never had the opportunity to learn a reliable fact about any kind of manual worker; but he had always gathered that they belonged to sinister societies known as Unions, and that anyone who tried to earn a living with his hands without the blessing of the Union was in a very dangerous position. Whenever he saw in the distance another figure wheeling a cart with a ladder and buckets, he fled in panic down the nearest turning, taking it for granted that any other window-cleaner could feel nothing for him but hatred and resentment. In spite of this it never entered his head to make any move towards joining the Union or regularizing his position; that would have meant official enrolment as a member of the working class, and his aim was to be outside the class structure altogether.

Nevertheless, there were lean weeks when he was very glad of Betty’s ‘allowance’. This was £2 10s. a week, and it seemed never to dry up. It was, he gathered, given to her by an elderly maiden aunt, living about twelve miles away. The old lady must have been decidedly eccentric, for, while the supply never dried up, she always insisted on Betty’s calling to see her once a week, when she handed the money over in cash. On the day this happened, Charles and Froulish usually took any money that remained from the week’s budget and spent it on a drinking bout, so that she returned, at midnight or later, to a penniless household. Her ‘allowance’, though too small to leave a margin and thus unable to prevent difficult situations such as the one Charles had originally found them in, was sufficient to keep them going in the bleak spells when Charles’s weekly earnings came to less than a pound. It was curious to reflect that, but for his meeting with these down-and-outs, he would never have been able to continue in his new life.

And he wanted to continue in it, for he passionately prized it, and honestly thought that no humiliation could overtake him now that he earned his bread at an honest, useful craft that he had taught himself without being helped, and minded his own business, and looked the world in the eyes.

Wherever could he have got hold of such an idea?

III

III

Froulish did not often leave the loft; a week or more might see him go no further than the impromptu wash-house in the yard below. But sometimes he went out for long solitary walks, and on this Saturday afternoon Charles, settling down in the warmest corner for an after-lunch nap, was not surprised to see the novelist struggling into his tattered overcoat.