Our House and London out of Our Windows
by Elizabeth Robins Pennell · English · Gutenberg #38749 · 396,409 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Our House and London out of Our Windows
Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
Release date: February 2, 2012 [eBook #38749]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38749
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR HOUSE AND LONDON OUT OF OUR WINDOWS ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
[Illustration: "LINES OF BLACK BARGES" (WATERLOO BRIDGE)]
Our House
And London out of Our Windows
BY Elizabeth Robins Pennell
_With Illustrations by
Joseph Pennell_
[Illustration: WATERLOO BRIDGE]
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY JOSEPH PENNELL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1912_
[Illustration: THE BIG, LOW, HEAVY ENGLISH CLOUDS"]
_To
Augustine_
[Illustration: DOWN TO ST. PAUL'S]
[Illustration: "THERE IS MOVEMENT AND LIFE" (THE UNDERGROUND
STATION AND CHARING-CROSS BRIDGE)]
Contents
INTRODUCTION xi
I. 'ENRIETTER 1
II. TRIMMER 33
III. LOUISE 79
IV. OUR CHARWOMEN 119
V. CLEMENTINE 153
VI. THE OLD HOUSEKEEPER 201
VII. THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER 227
VIII. OUR BEGGARS 251
IX. THE TENANTS 289
X. THE QUARTER 339
[Illustration: "AT NIGHT MYRIADS OF LIGHTS COME OUT"]
List of Illustrations
"LINES OF BLACK BARGES" (WATERLOO BRIDGE) _BASTARD TITLE_
DOWN TO ST. PAUL'S _FRONTISPIECE_
WATERLOO BRIDGE _TITLE-PAGE_
"THE BIG, LOW, HEAVY ENGLISH CLOUDS" _DEDICATION_
"THERE IS MOVEMENT AND LIFE" (THE UNDERGROUND
STATION AND CHARING-CROSS BRIDGE) _CONTENTS_
"AT NIGHT MYRIADS OF LIGHTS COME OUT" _LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS_
"IN WINTER THE GREAT WHITE FLIGHTS OF GULLS" 1
"AND THE WONDER GROWS WITH THE NIGHT" 33
"TUMBLED, WEATHER-WORN, RED-TILED ROOFS" 79
"UP TO WESTMINSTER" 119
"WHEN THERE IS A SUN ON A WINTER MORNING" 153
"A WILDERNESS OF CHIMNEY-POTS" 201
THE SPIRE OF ST. MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS 227
CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE FROM OUR WINDOWS 251
THE LION BREWERY 289
OPPOSITE TO SURREY 339
Introduction
Our finding Our House was the merest chance. J. and I had been hunting
for it during weeks and months, from Chelsea to Blackfriars, when one
day, on the way to take a train on the Underground, we saw the notice
"To Let" in windows just where they ought to have been,--high above the
Embankment and the River,--and we knew at a glance that we should be
glad to spend the rest of our lives looking out of them. But something
depended on the house we looked out from, and, while our train went
without us, we hurried to discover it. We were in luck. It was all that
we could have asked: as simple in architecture, its bricks as
time-stained, as the courts of the Temple or Gray's Inn. The front door
opened into a hall twisted with age, the roof supported by carved
corbels, the upper part of another door at its far end filled with
bull's-eye glass, while three flights of time-worn, white stone stairs
led to the windows with, behind them, a flat called Chambers, as if we
were really in the Temple, and decorated by Adam, as if to bring Our
House into harmony with the younger houses around it. For Our House it
became on that very day, now years ago. Our House it has been ever
since, and I hope we are only at the beginning of our adventures in it.
Of some of the adventures that have already fallen to our share within
Our House, I now venture to make the record, for no better reason
perhaps than because at the time I found them both engrossing and
amusing. The adventures out of Our Windows--adventures of cloud and
smoke and sunshine and fog--J. has been from the beginning, and is
still, recording, because certainly he finds them the most wonderful of
all. If my text shows the price we pay for the beauty, the reproductions
of his paintings, all made from Our Windows, show how well that beauty
is worth the price.
'Enrietter
[Illustration: "IN WINTER THE GREAT WHITE FLIGHTS OF GULLS"]
Our House
And London out of Our Windows
I
'ENRIETTER
Since my experience with 'Enrietter, the pages of Zola and the De
Goncourts have seemed a much more comfortable place for "human
documents" and "realism" than the family circle. Her adventures in our
London chambers make a thrilling story, but I could have dispensed with
the privilege of enjoying the thrill. When your own house becomes the
scene of the story you cannot help taking a part in it yourself, and the
story of 'Enrietter was not precisely one in which I should have wanted
to figure had it been a question of choice.
It all came of believing that I could live as I pleased in England, and
not pay the penalty. An Englishman's house is his castle only when it
is run on the approved lines, and the foreigner in the country need not
hope for the freedom denied to the native. I had set out to engage the
wrong sort of servant in the wrong sort of way, and the result
was--'Enrietter. I had never engaged any sort of servant anywhere
before, I did not much like the prospect at the start, and my first
attempts in Registry Offices, those bulwarks of British conservatism,
made me like it still less. That was why, when the landlady of the
little Craven Street hotel, where we waited while the British Workman
took his ease in our chambers, offered me 'Enrietter, I was prepared to
accept her on the spot, had not the landlady, in self-defence,
stipulated for the customary formalities of an interview and references.
The interview, in the dingy back parlour of the hotel, was not half so
unpleasant an ordeal as I had expected. Naturally, I do not insist upon
good looks in a servant, but I like her none the less for having them,
and a costume in the fashion of Whitechapel could not disguise the fact
that 'Enrietter was an uncommonly good-looking young woman; not in the
buxom, red-cheeked way that my old reading of Miss Mitford made me
believe as inseparable from an English maid as a pigtail from a
Chinaman, nor yet in the anaemic way I have since learned for myself to
be characteristic of the type. She was pale, but her pallor was of the
kind more often found south of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Her eyes were
large and blue, and she had a pretty trick of dropping them under her
long lashes; her hair was black and crisp; her smile was a
recommendation. And, apparently, she had all the practical virtues that
could make up for her abominable cockney accent and for the name of
'Enrietter, by which she introduced herself. She did not mind at all
coming to me as "general," though she had answered the landlady's
advertisement for parlour maid. She was not eager to make any bargain as
to what her work was, and was not, to be. Indeed, her whole attitude
would have been nothing short of a scandal to the right sort of servant.
And she was willing with a servility that would have offended my
American notions had it been a shade less useful.
As for her references, it was in keeping with everything else that she
should have made the getting them so easy. She sent me no farther than
to another little private hotel in another little street leading from
the Strand to the river, within ten minutes' walk. It was kept by two
elderly maiden ladies who received me with the usual incivility of the
British hotel-keeper, until they discovered that I had come not for
lodging and food, which they would have looked upon as an insult, but
merely for a servant's character. They unbent still further at
'Enrietter's name, and were roused to an actual show of interest. They
praised her cooking, her coffee, her quickness, her talent for hard
work. But--and then they hesitated and I was lost, for nothing
embarrasses me more than the Englishwoman's embarrassed silence. They
did manage to blurt out that 'Enrietter was not tidy, which I regretted.
I am not tidy myself, neither is J., and I have always thought it
important that at least one person in a household should have some sense
of order. But then they also told me that 'Enrietter had frequently been
called upon to cook eighteen or twenty breakfasts of a morning, and
lunches and dinners in proportion, and it struck me there might not have
been much time left for her to be tidy in. After this, there was a fresh
access of embarrassment so prolonged that I could not in decency sit it
out, though I would have liked to make sure that it was due to their own
difficulty with speech, and not to unspeakable depravity in 'Enrietter.
However, it saves trouble to believe the best, when to believe the worst
is to add to one's anxieties, and as soon as I got home I wrote and
engaged 'Enrietter and cheerfully left the rest to Fate.
There was nothing to regret for a fortnight. Fate seemed on my side, and
during two blissful weeks 'Enrietter proved herself a paragon among
"generals." She was prettier in her little white cap than in her big
feathered hat, and her smile was never soured by the friction of daily
life. Her powers as a cook had not been over-estimated; the excellence
of her coffee had been undervalued; for her quickness and readiness to
work, the elderly maiden ladies had found too feeble a word. There
wasn't anything troublesome she wouldn't and didn't do, even to
providing me with ideas when I hadn't any and the butcher's, or
green-grocer's, boy waited. And it was the more to her credit because
our chambers were in a chaotic condition that would have frightened away
a whole staff of the right sort of servants. We had just moved in, and
the place was but half furnished. The British Workman still lingered, as
I began to believe he always would,--there were times, indeed, when I
was half persuaded we had taken our chambers solely to provide him a
shelter in the daytime. My kitchen utensils were of the fewest. My china
was still in the factory in France where they made it, and I was eating
off borrowed plates and drinking out of borrowed cups. I had as yet next
to no house-linen to speak of. But 'Enrietter did not mind. She worked
marvels with what pots and pans there were, she was tidy enough not to
mislay the borrowed plates and cups, she knew just where to take
tablecloths and napkins and have them washed in a hurry when friends
were misguided enough to accept my invitation to a makeshift meal. If
they were still more misguided and took me by surprise, she would run
out for extra cutlets, or a salad, or fruit, and be back again serving
an excellent little lunch or dinner before I knew she had gone. This was
the greater comfort because I had just then no time to make things
better. I was deep, beyond my habit, in journalism. A sister I had not
seen for ten years and a brother-in-law recovering from nervous
prostration were in town. Poor man! What he saw in our chambers was
enough to send him home with his nerves seven times worse than when he
came. J., fortunately for him, was in the South of France, drawing
cathedrals. That was my one gleam of comfort. He at least was spared the
tragedy of our first domestic venture.
Upon the pleasure of that fortnight there fell only a single shadow, but
it ought to have proved a warning, if, at the moment, I had not been
foolish enough to find it amusing. I had gone out one morning directly
after breakfast, and when I came home, long after lunch-time, the
British Workman, to my surprise, was kicking his heels at my front
door, though his rule was to get comfortably on the other side of it
once his business at the public house round the corner was settled. He
was more surprised than I, and also rather hurt. He had been ringing for
the last ten minutes, he said reproachfully, and nobody would let him
in. After I had rung in my turn for ten minutes and nobody had let me
in, I was not hurt, but alarmed.
It was then that, for the first and last time in my knowledge of him,
the British Workman had an inspiration: Why shouldn't he climb the
ladder behind our outer front door,--we can "sport our oak" if we
like,--get through the trap-door at the top to the leads, and so enter
our little upper story, which looks for all the world like a ship's
cabin drifted by mistake on to a London roof.
I was to remember afterwards, as they say in novels, how, as I watched
him climb, it struck me that the burglar or the house-breaker had the
way made straight for him if our chambers ever seemed worth burgling or
breaking into. The British Workman's step is neither soft nor swift,
but he carried through his plan and opened the door for me without any
one being aroused by his irregular proceedings, which added considerably
to my alarm. But the flat is small, and my suspense was short.
'Enrietter was in her bedroom, on her bed, sleeping like a child. I
called her: she never stirred. I shook her: I might as well have tried
to wake the Seven Sleepers, the Sleeping Beauty, Barbarossa in the
Kyfhaueser, and all the sleepers who have slept through centuries of myth
and legend rolled into one. I had never seen anything like it. I had
never heard of anything like it except the trance which leads to
canonization, or the catalepsy that baffles science. To have a
cataleptic "general" to set off against the rapping nurse-maid of an
acquaintance, who wanted me to take her in and watch her in the cause of
Psychology, would be a triumph no doubt, but for all domestic purposes
it was likely to prove a more disturbing drawback than untidiness.
However, 'Enrietter, when she appeared at the end of an hour, did not
call her midday sleep by any name so fine. She had been scrubbing very
hard--she suddenly had a faintness--she felt dazed, and, indeed, she
looked it still--the heat, she thought, she hardly knew--she threw
herself on her bed--she fell asleep. What could be simpler? And her
smile had never been prettier, her blue eyes never cast down more
demurely. I spoke of this little incident later to a friend, and was
rash enough to talk some nonsense about catalepsy. One should never go
to one's friends for sympathy. "More likely drink," was the only answer.
Of course it was drink, and I ought to have known it without waiting for
'Enrietter herself to destroy my illusions, which she did at the end of
the first fortnight. The revelation came with her "Sunday out." To
simplify matters, I had made it mine too. 'Enrietter, according to my
domestic regulations, was to be back by ten o'clock, but to myself
greater latitude was allowed, and I did not return until after eleven. I
was annoyed to see the kitchen door wide open and the kitchen gas
flaring,--the worst of chambers is, you can't help seeing everything,
whether you want to or not. 'Enrietter had been told not to wait up for
me, and excess of devotion can be as trying as excess of neglect. If
only that had been my most serious reason for annoyance! For when I went
into the kitchen I found 'Enrietter sitting by the table, her arms
crossed on it, her head resting on her arms, fast asleep; and what makes
you laugh at noon may by midnight become a bore. I couldn't wake her. I
couldn't move her. Again, she slept like a log. In the end I lost my
temper, which was the best thing I could have done, for I shook her with
such violence that, at last, she stirred in her sleep. I shook harder.
She lifted her head. She smiled.
"Thash a'right, mum," she said, and down went her head again.
Furious, I shook her up on to her unsteady feet. "Go to bed," I said
with a dignity altogether lost upon her. "Go at once, and in the dark.
In your disgusting condition you are not fit to be trusted with a
candle."
'Enrietter smiled. "Thash a'right, mum," she murmured reassuringly as
she reeled up the stairs before me.
I must say for her that drink made her neither disagreeable nor
difficult. She carried it off light-heartedly and with the most perfect
politeness.
I had her in for a talk the next morning. I admit now that this was
another folly. I ought to have sent her off bag and baggage then and
there. But it was my first experience of the kind; I didn't see what was
to become of me if she did go; and, as I am glad to remember, I had the
heart to be sorry for her. She was so young, so pretty, so capable. The
indiscretion of her Sunday out meant for me, at the worst, temporary
discomfort; for her, it might be the beginning of a life's tragedy. Her
explanation was ready,--she was as quick at explaining as at everything
else. I needn't tell her what I thought of her, it seemed; it was
nothing to what she thought of herself. There was no excuse. She was as
disgusted as I could be. It was all her sister's fault. Her sister would
make her drink a drop of brandy just before she left her home at
Richmond. It was very wrong of her sister, who knew she wasn't used to
brandy and couldn't stand it.
The story would not have taken in a child, but as it suited me to give
her another trial, it was easier to make-believe to believe. Before the
interview was over I ventured a little good advice. I had seen too often
the draggled, filthy, sexless creatures drink makes of women in London,
and 'Enrietter was worth a better end. She listened with admirable
patience for one who was already, as I was only too quickly to learn, so
far on the way to the London gutter that there was no hope of holding
her back, as much as an inch, by words or kindness.
The next Sunday 'Enrietter stayed in and went to bed sober. It was the
day after--a memorable Monday--that put an end to all compromise and
make-believe. I had promised to go down to Cambridge, to a lunch at one
of the colleges. At the English Universities time enters so little into
the scheme of existence that one loses all count of it, and I was pretty
sure I should be late in getting home. I said, however, that I should be
back early in the afternoon, and I took every latch-key with me,--as if
the want of a latch-key could make a prison for so accomplished a young
woman as 'Enrietter! The day was delightful, the weather as beautiful as
it can be in an English June, and the lunch gay. And afterwards there
was the stroll along the "Backs," and, in the golden hour before sunset,
afternoon tea in the garden, and I need not say that I missed my train.
It was close upon ten o'clock when I turned the key in my front door.
The flat was in darkness, except for the light that always shines into
our front windows at night from the lamps on the Embankment and Charing
Cross Bridge. There was no sign of 'Enrietter, and no sound of her until
I had pulled my bell three or four times, and shouted for her in the
manner I was taught as a child to consider the worst sort of form, not
to say vulgar. But it had its effect. A faint voice answered from the
ship's cabin upstairs, "Coming, mum."
"Light the gas and the lamp," I said when I heard her in the hall.
The situation called for all the light I could get. From the methodical
way she set about lighting the hall gas I knew that, at least, she
could not be reeling. Then she came in and lit the lamp, and I saw her.
It was a thousand times worse than reeling, and my breath was taken away
with the horror of it. For there she stood, in a flashy pink
dressing-gown that was a disgrace in itself, her face ghastly as death,
and all across her forehead, low down over one of the blue eyes, a
great, wide, red gash.
Before I had time to pull myself together 'Enrietter had told her
story,--so poor a story it showed how desperate now was her case. She
had been quiet all morning--no one had come--she had got through the
extra work I left with her. About three the milkman rang. A high wind
was blowing. The door, when she opened it, banged in her face and cut
her head open. And it had bled! She had only just succeeded in stopping
it. One part of her story, anyway, was true beyond dispute. That
terrible, gaping wound spoke for itself.
I did not know what to do. I was new in the neighbourhood, and my
acquaintance with doctors anywhere is slight. But I could not turn her
into the street, I could not even leave her under my own roof all
night, like that. Something had to be done, and I ran downstairs to
consult the old Housekeeper, who, after her half century in the Quarter,
might be expected to know how to meet any emergency.
More horrors awaited me in her room,--like Macbeth, I was supping full
with horrors,--for she had another story to tell, and, as I listened,
the ghastly face upstairs, with the gaping red wound, became a mere item
in an orgy more appropriate to the annals of the Rougon-Macquarts than,
I devoutly trust, to ours. I cannot tell the story as the Housekeeper
told it. She had a trick of going into hysterics at moments of
excitement, and as in all the years she had been in charge she had never
seen such goings on, it followed that in all those years, she had never
been so hysterical. She gasped and sobbed out her tale of horrors, and,
all the while, her daughter, who was in _the_ profession, sat apart,
and, in the exasperating fashion of the chorus of a Greek play, kept up
a running commentary emphasizing the points too emphatic to need
emphasis.
To tell the story in my own way: I was hardly out of the house when
'Enrietter had a visit from a "gentleman,"--that was the Housekeeper's
description of him, and, as things go in England, he was a gentleman,
which makes my story the more sordid. How 'Enrietter had sent him word
the coast was clear I do not pretend to say, though I believe the London
milkman has a reputation as the Cupid's Postman of the kitchen, and I
recalled afterwards two or three notes 'Enrietter had received from her
sister by district messenger,--the same sister, no doubt, who gave her
the drop of brandy. Towards noon 'Enrietter and her gentleman were seen
to come downstairs and go out together. Where they went, what they did
during the three hours of their absence, no one knew,--no one will ever
know. Sometimes, in looking back, the greatest horrors to me are the
unknown chapters in the story of that day's doings. They were seen to
return, about three, in a hansom. The gentleman got out, unsteadily.
'Enrietter followed and collapsed in a little heap on the pavement. He
lifted her, and staggered with her in by the door and up the three long
flights of stairs to our chambers.
And then--I confess, at this point even now my anger gets the better of
me. Every key for my front door was in my pocket,--women were still
allowed pockets in those days. There was no possible way in which they
could have got in again, had not that gentleman climbed the ladder up
which I had watched the British Workman not so many days before, and,
technically, broken into my place, and then come down the little
stairway and let 'Enrietter in. A burglar would have seemed clean and
honest compared to the gentleman housebreaking on such an errand. My
front door was heard to bang upon them both, and I wish to Heaven it had
been the last sound heard from our chambers that day. For a time all was
still. Then, of a sudden, piercing screams rang through the house and
out through the open windows into the scandalized Quarter. There was a
noise of heavy things falling or thrown violently down, curses filled
the air; as the Housekeeper told it to me, it was like something out of
Morrison's "Mean Streets" or the "Police-Court Gazette," and the
dreadful part of it was that, no doubt, I was being held responsible for
it! At last, loud above everything else, came blood-curdling cries of
"Murder! Murder! Help! Murder!" There was not a window of the many
over-looking my back rooms that was not filled with terrified
neighbours. The lady in the chambers on the floor below mine set up a
cry of her own for the police. The clerks from the Church League and
from the Architect's office were gathered on the stairs. A nice
reputation I must be getting in the house before my first month in it
was up!
The Housekeeper, with a new attack of hysterics, protested that she had
not dared to interfere, though she had a key, nor could she give it to a
policeman without my authority--she knew her duty. The Greek Chorus
repeated, without hysterics but with careful elocution, that the
Housekeeper could not go in nor fetch the police without my
authority--she knew her duty. And so, the deeds that were done within my
four walls on that beautiful June afternoon must remain a mystery. The
only record is the mark 'Enrietter will carry on her forehead with her
to the grave.
The noise gradually ceased. The neighbours, one by one, left the
windows, the lady below disappeared into her flat. The clerks went back
to work. And the Housekeeper crept into her rooms for the cup of tea
that saves every situation for the Englishwoman. She had not finished
when there came a knock at the door. She opened it, and there stood a
gentleman--_the_ gentleman--anyone could see he was a gentleman by his
hat--and he told her his story: the third version of the affair. He was
a medical student, he said. He happened to be passing along the Strand
when, just in front of Charing Cross, a cab knocked over a young lady.
She was badly hurt, but, as a medical student, he knew what to do. He
put her into another cab and brought her home; he saw to her injuries;
but now he could stay no longer. She seemed to be quite alone up there.
Her condition was serious; she should not be left alone. And he lifted
his hat and was gone. But the Housekeeper daren't intrude, even then;
she knew her place and her duty. She knew her place and her duty, the
Greek Chorus echoed, and the end of her story brought me to just where I
was at the beginning. Upon one point the gentleman was right, and that
was the condition of the "young lady" as long as that great wide gash
still gaped open. The Housekeeper, practical for all her hysterics,
sobbed out "The Hospital." "The Hospital!" echoed the Greek Chorus, and
I mounted the three flights of stairs for 'Enrietter.
I tied up her head. I made her exchange the shameless pink dressing-gown
for her usual clothes. I helped her on with her hat, though I thought
she would faint before she was dressed. I led her down the three flights
of stairs into the street, across the Strand, to the hospital. By this
time it was well past eleven.
So far I hadn't had a chance to think of appearances. But one glance
from the night-surgeon at the hospital, and it was hard to think of
anything else. He did not say a word more than the case demanded, but
his behaviour to me was abominable all the same. And I cannot blame him.
There was I, decently dressed I hope, for I had put on my very best for
Cambridge, in charge of a young woman dressed anyhow and with a broken
head. It was getting on toward midnight. The Strand was a stone's throw
away. Still, in his place, I hope I should have been less brutal.
As for 'Enrietter, she had plenty of pluck, if she had no morals. She
bore the grisly business of having her head sewn up with the nerve of a
martyr. She never flinched, she never moaned; she was heroic. When it
was over, the night-surgeon told her--he never addressed himself to me
if he could help it--that it was a nasty cut and must be seen to again
the next day. The right eye had escaped by miracle, it might yet be
affected. What was most important at this stage was perfect quiet,
perfect repose. It was essential that she should sleep,--she must take
something to make her sleep. When I asked him meekly to give me an
opiate for her, he answered curtly that that was not his affair. There
was a chemist close by, I could get opium pills there, and he turned on
his heel.
I took 'Enrietter home. I saw her up the three long flights of stairs
to our chambers, the one little stairway to her bedroom, and into her
bed. I walked down the little stairway and the three long flights. I
went out into the night. I hurried to the chemist's. It was past
midnight, an hour when decent women are not expected to wander alone in
the Strand, and now I was conscious that things might look queer to
others. I skulked in the darkest shadows like a criminal. I bought the
pills. I came home. For the fourth time I toiled up the three long
flights of stairs and the one little stairway. I gave 'Enrietter her
pills. I put out her light. I shut her in her room.
And then? Why, then, I hadn't taken an opium pill. I wasn't sleepy. I
didn't want to sleep. I wanted to find out. I did what I have always
thought no self-respecting person would do. But to be mixed up in
'Enrietter's affairs was not calculated to strengthen one's
self-respect. And without a scruple I went into the kitchen and opened
every drawer, cupboard, and box, and read every letter, every scrap of
paper, I could lay my hands on. There wasn't much all told, but it was
enough. For I found out that the medical student, the gentleman, was a
clerk in the Bank of England,--I should like him to read this and to
know that I know his name and have his reputation in my hands. I found
out that 'Enrietter was his "old woman," and a great many other things
she ought not to have been. I found out that I had not dined once with
my friends that he had not spent the evening with her. I found out that
he had kept count of my every engagement with greater care than I had
myself. I found out that he had spent so many hours in my kitchen that
the question was what time he had left for the Bank of England. And I
found such an assortment of flasks and bottles that I could only marvel
how 'Enrietter had managed to be sober for one minute during the three
weeks of her stay with me.
I sent for a charwoman the next morning. She was of the type now rapidly
dying out in London, and more respectable, if possible, than the
Housekeeper. Her manner went far to restore my self-respect, and this
was the only service I could ask of her, her time being occupied
chiefly in waiting upon 'Enrietter. In fairness, I ought to add that
'Enrietter was game to the last. She got up and downstairs somehow, she
cooked the lunch, she would have waited on the table, bandaged head and
all, had I let her. But the less I saw of her, the greater her chance
for the repose prescribed by the night-surgeon. Besides, she and her
bandaged head were due at the hospital. This time she went in charge of
the charwoman, whose neat shabby shawl and bonnet, as symbols of
respectability, were more than sufficient to keep all the night or day
surgeons of London in their place. They returned with the cheerful
intelligence that matters were much worse than was at first thought,
that 'Enrietter's eye was in serious danger, and absolute quiet in a
darkened room was essential, that lotions must be applied and medicines
administered at regular intervals,--in a word, that our chambers, as
long as she remained in them, must be turned into a nursing home, with
myself as chief nurse, which was certainly not what I had engaged her
for.
I went upstairs, when she was in bed again, and told her so. She must
send for some one, I did not care whom, to come and take her off my
hands at once. My temper was at boiling-point, but not for the world
would I have shown it or done anything to destroy 'Enrietter's repose
and so make matters worse, and not be able to get rid of her at all. As
usual, her resources did not fail her; she was really wonderful all
through. There was an old friend of her father's, she said, who was in
the Bank of England--I knew that friend; he could admit her into a
hospital of which he was a patron--Heaven help that hospital! But I held
my peace. I even wrote her letter and sent it to the post by the
charwoman. 'Enrietter's morals were beyond me, but my own comfort was
not.
I do not know whether the most astonishing thing in all the astonishing
episode was not the reappearance of the old friend of her father's in
his other role of medical student. I suppose he did not realize how
grave 'Enrietter's condition was. I am sure he did not expect anything
less than that I should open the door for him. But this was what
happened. His visit was late, the charwoman had gone for the night, and
I was left to do all 'Enrietter's work myself. He did not need to tell
me who he was,--his face did that for him,--but he stammered out the
wretched fable of the medical student, the young lady, and the cab. She
was quite alone when he left her, he added, and he was worried, and,
being in the neighbourhood, he called in passing to enquire if the young
lady were better, and if there were now some one to take care of her.
His self-confidence came back as he talked.
"Your story is extremely interesting," I told him, "and I am especially
glad to hear it, because my cook"--with a vindictive emphasis on the
cook--"has told me quite a different one as to how she came by her
broken head. Now--"
He was gone. He threw all pretence to the winds and ran downstairs as if
the police were at his heels, as I wished they were. I could not run
after him without making a second scandal in the house; and if I had
caught him, if I had given him in custody for trespass, as I was told
afterwards I might have done, how would I have liked figuring in the
Police Courts?
Curiously, he did have influence with the hospital, which shall be
nameless. He did get a bed there for 'Enrietter the next morning. It may
be that he had learned by experience the convenience to himself of
having a hospital, as it were, in his pocket. But the arrangements were
by letter; he did not risk a second meeting, and I asked 'Enrietter no
questions. For my own satisfaction, I went with her to the hospital: a
long, melancholy drive in a four-wheeler, 'Enrietter with ghastly face,
more dead than alive. I delivered her into the hands of the nurses. I
left her there, a bandaged wreck of the pretty 'Enrietter who had been
such an ornament to our chambers. And that was the last I saw of her,
though not the last I heard.
A day or two later her sister came to pack up her belongings,--a young
woman with a vacant smile, a roving eye, and a baby in her arms. I had
only to look at her to know that she wasn't the sort of sister to force
anything on anybody, much less on 'Enrietter. And yet I went to the
trouble of reading her a little lecture. 'Enrietter's morals were beyond
me, but I am not entirely without a conscience. The sister kept on
simpering vacantly, while her eyes roved from print to print on the
walls of the dining-room where the lecture was delivered, and the baby
stared at me with portentous solemnity.
Then, about three weeks after the sister's visit, I heard from
'Enrietter herself. She wrote with her accustomed politeness. She begged
my pardon for troubling me. She had left the hospital. She was at home
in Richmond, and she had just unpacked the trunk the sister had packed
for her. Only one thing was missing. She would be deeply obliged if I
would look in the left-hand drawer of the kitchen dresser and send her
the package of cigarettes I would find there. And she was mine, "Very
respectfully."
This is the story of 'Enrietter's adventures in our chambers, and I
think whoever reads it will not wonder that I fought shy afterwards of
the English servant who was not well on the wrong side of forty and
whose thirst could not be quenched with tea. The real wonder is that I
had the courage to risk another maid of any kind. Women have been
reproached with their love of gossiping about servants since time
immemorial, and I do not know for how long before that. But when I
remember 'Enrietter, I do not understand how we have the heart ever to
gossip about anything else. What became of her, who can say? Sometimes,
when I think of her pretty face and all that was good in her, I can only
hope that the next orgy led to still worse things than a broken head,
and that Death saved her from the London streets.
_Trimmer_
[Illustration: "AND THE WONDER GROWS WITH THE NIGHT"]
II
TRIMMER
Until I began my search for an elderly woman who never drank anything
stronger than tea, I had supposed it was the old who could find nobody
to give them work. But my trouble was to find somebody old enough to
give mine to. The "superior domestics" at the Registry Offices were much
too well trained to confess even to middle age, and probably I should be
looking for my elderly woman to this day, had not chance led Trimmer one
afternoon to an office which I had left without hope in the morning. As
her years could supply no possible demand save mine, she was sent at
once to our chambers.
To tell the truth, as soon as I saw her, I began to doubt my own wisdom.
I had never imagined anybody quite so respectable. In her neat but rusty
black dress and cape, her hair parted and brought carefully down over
her ears, her bonnet tied under her chin, her reticule hanging on her
arm, she was the incarnation of British respectability; "the very type,"
the "old Master Rembrandt van Rijn, with three Baedeker stars," I could
almost hear Mr. Henry James describing her; and all she wanted was to
belong "beautifully" to me. But then she looked as old as she looked
respectable,--so much older than I meant her to look,--old to the point
of fragility. She admitted to fifty-five, and when mentally I added four
or five years more, I am sure I was not over generous. Her face was
filled with wrinkles, her skin was curiously delicate, and she had the
pallor that comes from a steady diet of tea and bread and sometimes
butter. The hands through the large, carefully mended black gloves
showed twisted and stiff, and it was not easy to fancy them making our
beds and our fires, cooking our dinners, dusting our rooms, opening our
front door. We needed some one to take care of us, and it was plain that
she was far more in need of some one to take care of her,--all the
plainer because of her anxiety to prove her capacity for work. There
was nothing she could not do, nothing she would not do if I were but to
name it. "I can cut about, mum, you'll see. Oh, I'm bonny!" And the
longer she talked, the better I knew that during weeks, and perhaps
months, she had been hunting for a place, which at the best is wearier
work than hunting for a servant, and at the worst leads straight to the
workhouse, the one resource left for the honest poor who cannot get a
chance to earn their living, and who, by the irony of things, dread it
worse than death.
With my first doubt I ought to have sent her away. But I kept putting
off the uncomfortable duty by asking her questions, only to find that
she was irreproachable on the subject of alcohol, that she preferred
"beer-money" to beer, that there was no excuse not to take her except
her age, and this, in the face of her eagerness to remain, I had not the
pluck to make. My hesitation cost me the proverbial price. Before the
interview was over I had engaged her on the condition that her
references were good, as of course they were, though she sent me for
them to the most unexpected place in the world, a corset and petticoat
shop not far from Leicester Square. Through the quarter to which all
that is disreputable in Europe drifts, where any sort of virtue is
exposed to damage beyond repair, she had carried her respectability and
emerged more respectable than ever.
She came to us with so little delay that I knew better than ever how
urgent was her case. Except for the providentially short interval with
'Enrietter, this was my first experience of the British servant, and it
was enough to make me tremble. It was impossible to conceive of anything
more British. Her print dress, changed for a black one in the afternoon,
her white apron and white cap, became in my eyes symbolic. I seemed, in
her, to face the entire caste of British servants who are so determined
never to be slaves that they would rather fight for their freedom to be
as slavish as they always have been. She knew her place, and what is
more, she knew ours, and meant to keep us in it, no matter whether we
liked or did not like to be kept there. I was the Mistress and J. was
the Master, and if, with our American notions, we forgot it, she never
did, but on our slightest forgetfulness brought us up with a round turn.
So correct, indeed, was her conduct, and so respectable and venerable
was her appearance, that she produced the effect in our chambers of an
old family retainer. Friends would have had us train her to address me
as "Miss Elizabeth," or J. as "Master J.," and pass her off for the
faithful old nurse who is now so seldom met out of fiction.
For all her deference, however, she clung obstinately to her prejudices.
We might be as American in our ways as we pleased, she would not let us
off one little British bit in hers. She never presumed unbidden upon an
observation and if I forced one from her she invariably begged my pardon
for the liberty. She thanked us for everything, for what we wanted as
gratefully as for what we did not want. She saw that we had hot water
for our hands at the appointed hours. She compelled us to eat Yorkshire
pudding with our sirloin of beef, and bread-sauce with our fowl,--in
this connection how can I bring myself to say chicken? She could never
quite forgive us for our indifference to "sweets"; and for the daily
bread-and-butter puddings and tarts we would not have, she made up by an
orgy of tipsy cakes and creams when anybody came to dine. How she was
reconciled to our persistent refusal of afternoon tea, I always
wondered; though I sometimes thought that, by the stately function she
made of it in the kitchen, she hoped to atone for this worst of our
American heresies.
Whatever she might be as a type, there was no denying that as a servant
she had all the qualities. She was an excellent cook, despite her
flamboyant and florid taste in sweets; she was sober, she was obliging,
she had by no means exaggerated her talent for "cutting about," and I
never ceased to be astonished at the amount she accomplished. The fire
was always burning when we got down in the morning, breakfast always
ready. Beds were made, lunch served, the front door opened, dinner
punctual. I do not know how she did it all, and I now remember with
thankfulness our scruples when we saw her doing it, and the early date
at which we supplied her with an assistant in the shape of a snuffy,
frowzy old charwoman. The revelation of how much too much remained for
her even then came only when we lost her, and I was obliged to look
below the surface. While she was with us, the necessity of looking below
never occurred to me; and as our chambers had been done up from top to
bottom just before she moved into them, they stood her method on the
surface admirably.
This method perhaps struck me as the more complete because it left her
the leisure for a frantic attempt to anticipate our every wish. She
tried to help us with a perseverance that was exasperating, and as her
training had taught her the supremacy of the master in the house, it was
upon J. that her efforts were chiefly spent. I could see him writhe
under her devotion, until there were times when I dreaded to think what
might come of it, all the more because my sympathies were so entirely
with him. If he opened his door, she rushed to ask what he wanted. A spy
could not have spied more diligently; and as in our small chambers the
kitchen door was almost opposite his, he never went or came that she did
not know it. He might be as short with her as he could, and in British
fashion order her never to come into the studio, but it was no use; she
could not keep out of it. Each new visitor, or letter, or message, was
an excuse for her to flounder in among the portfolios on the floor and
the bottles of acid in the corner, at the risk of his temper and her
life. On the whole, he bore it with admirable patience. But there was
one awful morning when he hurried into my room, slammed the door after
him, and in a whisper said,--he who would not hurt a fly,--"If you don't
keep that woman out of my room, I'll wring her neck for her!"
I might have spared myself any anxiety. Had J. offered to her face to
wring her neck, she would have smiled and said, "That's all right, sir!
Thank you, sir!" For, with Trimmer, to be "bonny" meant to be cheerful
under any and all conditions. So long as her cherished traditions were
not imperilled, she had a smile for every emergency. It was
characteristic of her to allow me to christen her anew the first day she
was with us, and not once to protest. We could not bring ourselves to
call her Lily, her Christian name, so inappropriate was it to her
venerable appearance. Her surname was even more impossible, for
she was the widow of a Mr. Trim. She herself--helpful from the
beginning--suggested "cook." But she was a number of things besides, and
though I did not mind my friends knowing that she was as many persons in
one as the cook of the Nancy Bell, it would have been superfluous to
remind them of it on every occasion. When, at my wits' end, I added a
few letters and turned the impossible Trim into Trimmer, she could not
have been more pleased had I made her a present, and from that moment
she answered to the new name as if born to it.
The same philosophy carried her through every trial and tribulation. It
was sure to be all right if, before my eyes and driving me to tears, she
broke the plates I could not replace without a journey to Central
France, or if in the morning the kitchen was a wreck after the night
Jimmy, our unspeakable black cat, had been making of it. Fortunately he
went out as a rule for his sprees, realizing that our establishment
could not stand the wear and tear. When he chanced to stay at home, I
have come down to the kitchen in the morning to find the clock ticking
upside down on the floor, oranges and apples rolling about, spoons and
forks under the table, cups and saucers in pieces, and Jimmy on the
table washing his face. But Trimmer would meet me with a radiant smile
and would put things to rights, while Jimmy purred at her heels, as if
both were rather proud of the exploit, certain that no other cat in the
world could, "all by his lone" and in one night, work such ruin.
After all, it was a good deal Trimmer's fault if we got into the habit
of shifting disagreeable domestic details on to her shoulders, she had
such a way of offering them for the purpose. It was she who, when
Jimmy's orgies had at last undermined his health and the "vet"
prescribed a dose of chloroform as the one remedy, went to see it
administered, coming back to tell us of the "beautiful corpse" he had
made. It was she who took our complaints to the Housekeeper downstairs,
and met those the other tenants brought against us. It was she who
bullied stupid tradesmen and stirred up idle workmen. It was she, in a
word, who served as domestic scapegoat. And she never remonstrated. I am
convinced that if I had said, "Trimmer, there's a lion roaring at the
door," she would have answered, "That's all right, mum! thank you, mum!"
and rushed to say that we were not at home to him. As it happens, I know
how she would have faced a burglar, for late one evening when I was
alone in our chambers, I heard some one softly trying to turn the knob
of the door of the box-room. What I did was to shut and bolt the door at
the foot of our little narrow stairway, thankful that there was a door
there that could be bolted. What Trimmer did, when she came home ten
minutes later and I told her, "There's a burglar in the box-room," was
to say, "Oh, is there, mum? thank you, mum. That's all right. I'll just
run up and see"; and she lit her candle and walked right up to the
box-room and unlocked and opened the door. Out flew William Penn,
furious with us because he had let himself be shut in where nobody had
seen him go, and where he had no business to have gone. He was only the
cat, I admit. But he might have been the burglar for all Trimmer knew,
and--what then?
As I look back and think of these things, I am afraid we imposed upon
her. At the time, we had twinges of conscience, especially when we
caught her "cutting about" with more than her usual zeal. She was not
designed by nature to "cut about" at all. To grow old with her meant "to
lose the glory of the form." She was short, she had an immense breadth
of hip, and she waddled rather than walked. When, in her haste, her cap
would get tilted to one side, and she would give a smudge to her nose or
her cheek, she was really a grotesque little figure, and the twinges
became acute. To see her "cutting about" so unbecomingly for us at an
age when she should have been allowed, unburdened, to crawl towards
death, was to shift the heaviest responsibility to our shoulders and to
make us the one barrier between her and the workhouse. We could not
watch the tragedy of old age in our own household without playing a more
important part in it than we liked.
Her cheerfulness was the greater marvel when I learned how little reason
life had given her for it. In her rare outbursts of confidence, with
excuses for the liberty, she told me that she was London born and bred,
that she had gone into service young, and that she had married before
she was twenty. I fancy she must have been pretty as a girl. I know she
was "bonny," and "a fine one" for work, and I am not surprised that Trim
wanted to marry her. He was a skilled plasterer by trade, got good
wages, and was seldom out of a job. They had a little house in some
far-away mean street, and though the children who would have been
welcome never came, there was little else to complain of.
Trim was good to her, that is, unless he was in liquor, which I gathered
he mostly was. He was fond of his glass, sociable-like, and with his
week's wages in his pocket, could not keep away from his pals in the
public. Trimmer's objection to beer was accounted for when I discovered
that Trim's fondness for it often kept the little house without bread
and filled it with curses. There were never blows. Trim was good, she
reminded me, and the liquor never made him wicked,--only made him leave
his wife to starve, and then curse her for starving. She was tearful
with gratitude when she remembered his goodness in not beating her; but
when her story reached the day of his tumbling off a high ladder--the
beer was in his legs--and being brought back to her dead, it seemed to
me a matter of rejoicing. Not to her, however, for she had to give up
the little house and go into service again, and she missed Trim and his
curses. She did not complain. She always found good places, and she
adopted a little boy, a sweet little fellow, like a son to her, whom she
sent to school and started in life, and had never seen since. But young
men will be young men, and she loved him. She was very happy at the
corset and petticoat shop, where she lived while he was with her. After
business hours she was free, for apparently the responsibility of being
alone in a big house all night was as simple for her as braving a
burglar in our chambers. The young ladies were pleasant, she was well
paid. Then her older brother's wife died and left him with six children.
What could she do but go and look after them when he asked her?
He was well-to-do, and his house and firing and lighting were given him
in addition to high wages. He did not pay her anything, of course,--she
was his sister. But it was a comfortable home, the children were fond of
her,--and also of her cakes and puddings,--and she looked forward to
spending the rest of her days there. But at the end of two years he
married again, and when the new wife came, the old sister went. This was
how it came about that, without a penny in her pocket, and with nothing
save her old twisted hands to keep her out of the workhouse, she was
adrift again at an age which made her undesirable to everybody except
foolish people like ourselves, fresh from the horrors of our experience
with 'Enrietter. It never occurred to Trimmer that there was anything to
complain of. For her, all had always been for the best in the best of
all possible worlds. That she had now chanced upon chambers and two
people and one dissipated cat to take care of, and more to do than ought
to have been asked of her, was but another stroke of her invariable good
luck.
She had an amazing faculty of turning all her little molehills into
mountains of pleasure. I have never known anything like the joy she got
from her family, though I never could quite make out why. She was
inordinately proud of the brother who had been so ready to get rid of
her; the sister-in-law who had replaced her was a paragon of virtue; the
nieces were so many infant phenomena, and one Sunday when, with the
South London world of fashion, they were walking in the Embankment
Gardens, she presumed so far as to bring them up to our chambers to show
them off to me, and the affectionate glances she cast upon their
expansive lace collars explained that she still had her uses in the
family. There was also a cousin whom, to Trimmer's embarrassment, I
often found in our kitchen; but much worse than frequent visits could
be forgiven her, since it was she who, after Jimmy's inglorious end,
brought us William Penn, a pussy then small enough to go into her
coat-pocket, but already gay enough to dance his way straight into our
hearts.
Trimmer's pride reached high-water mark when it came to a younger
brother who travelled in "notions" for a city firm. His proprietor was
the personage the rich Jew always is in the city of London, and was made
Alderman and Lord Mayor, and knighted and baroneted, during the years
Trimmer spent with us. She took enormous satisfaction in the splendour
of this success, counting it another piece of her good luck to be
connected, however remotely, with anybody so distinguished. She had
almost an air of proprietorship on the 9th of November, when from our
windows she watched his Show passing along the Embankment; she could not
have been happier if she herself had been seated in the gorgeous
Cinderella coach, with the coachman in wig and cocked hat, and the
powdered footmen perched up behind; and when J. went to the Lord
Mayor's dinner that same evening at the Guildhall, it became for her
quite a family affair. I often fancied that she thought it reflected
glory on us all to have the sister of a man who travelled in "notions"
for a knight and a Lord Mayor, living in our chambers; though she would
never have taken the liberty of showing it.
Trimmer's joy was only less in our friends than in her family, which was
for long a puzzle to me. They added considerably to her already heavy
task, and in her place, I should have hated them for it. It might amuse
us to have them drop in to lunch or to dinner at any time, and to gather
them together once a week, on Thursday evening. But it could hardly
amuse Trimmer, to whose share fell the problem of how to make a meal
prepared for two go round among four or six, or how to get to the front
door and dispose of hats and wraps in chambers so small that the weekly
gathering filled even our little hall to overflowing. There was always
some one to help her on Thursdays, and she had not much to do in the way
of catering. "Plain living and high talking" was the principle upon
which our evenings were run, and whoever wanted more than a sandwich or
so could go elsewhere. But whatever had to be done, Trimmer insisted on
doing, and, moreover, on doing it until the last pipe was out and the
last word spoken; and as everybody almost was an artist or a writer, and
as there is no subject so inexhaustible as "shop," I do not like to
remember how late that often was. It made no difference. She refused to
go to bed, and in her white cap and apron, with her air of old retainer
or family nurse, she would waddle about through clouds of tobacco-smoke,
offering a box of cigarettes here, a plate of sandwiches there, radiant,
benevolent, more often than not in the way, toward the end looking as if
she would drop, but apparently enjoying herself more than anybody, until
it seemed as if the unkindness would be not to let her stay up in it.
More puzzling to me than her interest in all our friends was her choice
of a few for her special favour. I could not see the reason for her
choice, unless I had suspected her of a sudden passion for literature
and art. Certainly her chief attentions were lavished on the most
distinguished among our friends, who were the very people most apt to
put her devotion to the test. She adored Whistler, though when he was in
London he had a way not only of dropping in to dinner, but sometimes of
dropping in so late that it had to be cooked all over again. She was so
far from minding that, at the familiar sound of his knock and ring, her
face was wreathed in smiles, she seemed to look upon the extra work as a
privilege, and I have known her, without a word, trot off to the
butcher's or the green-grocer's, or even to the tobacconist's in the
Strand for the little Algerian cigarettes he loved. She went so far as
to abandon certain of her prejudices for his benefit, and I realized
what a conquest he had made when she resigned herself to cooking a fowl
in a casserole and serving it without bread-sauce. She discovered the
daintiness of his appetite, and it was delightful to see her hovering
over him at table and pointing out the choice bits in every dish she
passed. She was forever finding an excuse to come into any room where
he might be. Altogether, it was as complete a case of fascination as if
she had known him to be the great master he was; and she was his slave
long before he gave her the ten shillings, which was valued
sentimentally as I really believe a tip never was before or since by a
British servant.
Henley was hardly second in her esteem, and this was the more
inexplicable because he provided her with so many more chances to prove
it. Whistler then lived in Paris, and appeared only now and then. Henley
lived in London half the week, and rarely missed a Thursday. For it was
on that evening that the "National Observer," which he was editing, went
to press, and the printers in Covent Garden were conveniently near to
our chambers. His work done, the paper put to bed, about ten or eleven
he and the train of young men then in attendance upon him would come
round; and to them, in the comfortable consciousness that the rest of
the week was their own, time was of no consideration. Henley exulted in
talk: if he had the right audience he would talk all night; and the
right audience was willing to listen so long as he talked in our
chambers. But Trimmer, in the kitchen, or handing round sandwiches,
could not listen, and yet she lingered as long as anybody. It might be
almost dawn before he got up to go, but she was there to fetch him his
crutch and his big black hat, and to shut the door after him. Whatever
the indiscretion of the hour one Thursday, she welcomed him as cordially
the next, or any day in between when inclination led him to toil up the
three long flights of stairs to our dinner-table.
Phil May was no less in her good graces, and his hours, if anything,
were worse than Henley's, since the length of his stay did not depend on
his talk. I never knew a man of less conversation. "Have a drink," was
its extent with many who thought themselves in his intimacy. This was a
remark which he could scarcely offer to Trimmer at the front door, where
Whistler and Henley never failed to exchange with her a friendly
greeting. But all the same, she seemed to feel the charm which his
admirers liked to attribute to him, and to find his smile, when he
balanced himself on the back of a chair, more than a substitute for
conversation, however animated. The flaw in my enjoyment of his company
on our Thursdays was the certainty of the length of time he would be
pleased to bestow it upon us. Trimmer must have shared this certainty,
but to her it never mattered. She never failed to return his smile,
though when he got down to go, she might be nodding, and barely able to
drag one tired old foot after the other.
She made as much of "Bob" Stevenson, whose hours were worse than
anybody's. We would perhaps run across him at a press view of pictures
in the morning and bring him back to lunch, he protesting that he must
leave immediately after to get home to Kew and write his article before
six o'clock. And then he would begin to talk, weaving a romance of any
subject that came up,--the subject was nothing, it was always what he
made of it,--and he would go on talking until Trimmer, overjoyed at the
chance, came in with afternoon tea; and he would go on talking until
she announced dinner; and he would go on talking until all hours the
next morning, long after his last train and any possibility of his
article getting into yesterday afternoon's "Pall Mall." But early as he
might appear, late as he might stay, he was never too early or too late
for Trimmer.
These were her favourites, though she was ready to "mother" Beardsley,
who, she seemed to think, had just escaped from the schoolroom and ought
to be sent back to it; though she had a protecting eye also for George
Steevens, just up from Oxford, evidently mistaking the silence which was
then his habit for shyness; though, indeed, she overflowed with kindness
for everybody who came. It was astonishing how, at her age, she managed
to adapt herself to people and ways so unlike any she could ever have
known, without relaxing in the least from her own code of conduct.
Only twice can I remember seeing her really ruffled. Once was when Felix
Buhot, who, during a long winter he spent in London, was often with us
on Thursdays, went into the kitchen to teach her to make coffee. The
inference that she could not make it hurt her feelings; but her real
distress was to have him in the kitchen, which "ladies and gentlemen"
should not enter. Between her desire to get him back to the dining-room
and her fear lest he should discover it, she was terribly embarrassed.
It was funny to watch them: Buhot, unconscious of wrong and of English,
intent upon measuring the coffee and pouring out the boiling water;
Trimmer fluttering about him with flushed and anxious face, talking very
loud and with great deliberation, in the not uncommon conviction that
the foreigner's ignorance of English is only a form of deafness.
On the other occasion she lost her temper, the only time in my
experience. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Whistler, appearing while she
was out and staying on to supper, got Constant, his man, to add an onion
soup and an omelet to the cold meats she had prepared, for he would
never reconcile himself to the English supper. She was furious when she
got back and found that her pots and pans had been meddled with, and her
larder raided. She looked upon it as a reproach; as if she couldn't
serve Mr. Whistler as well as any foreign servant,--she had no use for
foreign servants anyhow,--she would not have them making their foreign
messes in any kitchen of hers! It took days and careful diplomacy to
convince her that she had not been insulted.
I was the more impressed by this outbreak of temper because, as a rule,
she gave no sign of seeing, or hearing, or understanding anything that
went on in our chambers. She treated me as I believe royalty should be
treated, leaving it to me to open the talk, or to originate a topic. I
remember once, when we were involved in a rumpus which had been
discussed over our dinner-table for months beforehand, and which at the
time filled the newspapers and was such public property that everybody
in the Quarter--the milkman, the florist at the Temple of Pomona in the
Strand, the Housekeeper downstairs, the postman--congratulated us on our
victory, Trimmer alone held her peace. I could not believe that she
really did not know, and at last I asked her:--
"I suppose you have heard, Trimmer, what has been going on these days?"
"What, mum?" was her answer.
Then, exasperated, I explained.
"Why yes, mum," she said. "I beg your pardon, mum, I really couldn't
'elp it. I 'ave been reading the pipers, and the 'ousekeeper she was
a-talking to me about it before you come in, and the postman too, and I
was sayin' as 'ow glad I was. I 'ope you and the Master won't think it a
liberty, mum. Thank you, mum!"
I remember another time, when some of our friends took to running away
with other friends' wives, and things became so complicated for
everybody that our Thursday evenings were brought to a sudden end,
Trimmer kept the same stolid countenance throughout, until, partly to
prevent awkwardness, partly out of curiosity, I asked her if she had
seen the papers.
"Oh, I beg your pardon, mum," she hesitated, "thank you, mum, I'm sure.
I know it's a liberty, but you know, mum, they've all been 'ere so often
I couldn't help noticing there was somethink. And I'm very sorry, mum,
if you'll excuse the liberty, they all was such lidies and gentlemen,
mum."
And so, I should never have known there was another reason, besides the
natural kindness of her heart, for her interest in our friends and her
acceptance of their ways, if, before this, I had not happened to say to
her one Friday morning,--
"You seem, Trimmer, to have a very great admiration for Mr. Phil May."
"I 'ope you and Master won't think it a liberty, mum," she answered, in
an agony of embarrassment, "but I do like to see 'im, and they allus so
like to 'ear about 'im at 'ome. They're allus asking me when I 'ave last
seen 'im or Mr. Whistler."
Then it came out. Chance had bestowed upon her father and one of the
great American magazines the same name, with the result that the
magazine was looked upon by her brothers and herself as belonging
somehow to the family. The well-to-do brother subscribed to it, the
other came to his house to see each new number. Through the
illustrations and articles they had become as familiar with artists and
authors as most people in England are with the "winners," and their
education had reached at least the point of discovery that news does not
begin and end in sport. Judging from Trimmer, I doubt if at first their
patronage of art and literature went much further, but this was far
enough for them to know, and to feel flattered by the knowledge, that
she was living among people who figured in the columns of art and
literary gossip as prominently as "all the winners" in the columns of
the Sporting Prophets, though they would have been still more flattered
had her lot been cast among the Prophets. In a few cases, their interest
soon became more personal.
It was their habit--why, I do not suppose they could have said
themselves--to read any letter Whistler might write to the papers at a
moment when he was given to writing, though what they made of the letter
when read was more than Trimmer was able to explain; they also looked
out for Phil May's drawings in "Punch"; they passed our articles round
the family circle,--a compliment hardly more astonishing to Trimmer
than to us. As time went on they began to follow the career of several
of our other friends to whom Trimmer introduced them; and it was a
gratification to them all, as well as a triumph for her, when on Sunday
afternoon she could say, "Mr. Crockett or Mr. 'Arold Frederic was at
Master's last Thursday." Thus, through us, she became for the first time
a person of importance in her brother's house, and I suspect also quite
an authority in Brixton on all questions of art and literature. Indeed,
she may, for all I know, have started another Carnegie Library in South
London.
It is a comfort now to think that her stay with us was pleasant to her;
wages alone could not have paid our debt for the trouble she spared us
during her five years in our chambers. I have an idea that, in every
way, it was the most prosperous period of her life. When she came, she
was not only without a penny in her pocket, but she owed pounds for her
outfit of aprons and caps and dresses. Before she left, she was saving
money. She opened a book at the Post Office Savings Bank; she
subscribed to one of those societies which would assure her a
respectable funeral, for she had the ambition of all the self-respecting
poor to be put away decent, after having, by honest work, kept off the
parish to the end. Her future provided for, she could make the most of
whatever pleasures the present might throw in her way,--the pantomime at
Christmas, a good seat for the Queen's Jubilee procession; above all,
the two weeks' summer holiday. No journey was ever so full of adventure
as hers to Margate, or Yarmouth, or Hastings, from the first preparation
to the moment of return, when she would appear laden with presents of
Yarmouth bloaters or Margate shrimps, to be divided between the old
charwoman and ourselves.
If she had no desire to leave us, we had none to have her go; and as the
years passed, we did not see why she should. She was old, but she bore
her age with vigour. She was hardly ever ill, and never with anything
worse than a cold or an indigestion, though she had an inconvenient
talent for accidents. The way she managed to cut her fingers was little
short of genius. One or two were always wrapped in rags. But no matter
how deep the gash, she was as cheerful as if it were an accomplishment.
With the blood pouring from the wound, she would beam upon me: "You 'ave
no idea, mum, what wonderful flesh I 'as fur 'ealin'." Her success in
falling down our little narrow stairway was scarcely less remarkable.
But the worst tumble of all was the one which J. had so long expected.
He had just moved his portfolios to an unaccustomed place one morning,
when a letter, or a message, or something, sent her stumbling into the
studio with her usual impetuosity, and over she tripped. It was so bad
that we had to have the doctor, her arm was so seriously strained that
he made her carry it in a sling for weeks. We were alarmed, but not
Trimmer.
"You know, mum, it _is_ lucky; it might 'ave been the right harm, and
that would 'ave been bad!"
She really thought it another piece of her extraordinary good luck.
Poor Trimmer! It needed so little to make her happy, and within five
years of her coming to us that little was taken from her. All she asked
of life was work, and a worse infirmity than age put a stop to her
working for us, or for anybody else, ever again. At the beginning of her
trouble, she would not admit to us, nor I fancy to herself, that
anything was wrong, and she was "bonny," though she went "cutting about"
at a snail's pace and her cheerful old face grew haggard. Presently,
there were days when she could not keep up the pretence, and then she
said her head ached and she begged my pardon for the liberty. I
consulted a doctor. He thought it might be neuralgia and dosed her for
it; she thought it her teeth, and had almost all the few still left to
her pulled out. And the pain was worse than ever. Then, as we were on
the point of leaving town for some weeks, we handed over our chambers to
the frowzy old charwoman, and sent Trimmer down to the sea at Hastings.
She was waiting to receive us when we returned, but she gave us only the
ghost of her old smile in greeting, and her face was more haggard and
drawn than ever. For a day she tottered about from one room to another,
cooking, dusting, making beds, and looking all the while as if she were
on the rack. She was a melancholy wreck of the old cheerful, bustling,
exasperating Trimmer; and it was more than we could stand. I told her
so. She forgot to beg my pardon for the liberty in her hurry to assure
me that nothing was wrong, that she could work, that she wanted to work,
that she was not happy when she did not work.
"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny!" she kept saying over and over again.
Her despair at the thought of stopping work was more cruel to see than
her physical torture, and I knew, without her telling me, that her fear
of the pain she might have still to suffer was nothing compared to her
fear of the workhouse she had toiled all her life to keep out of. She
had just seven pounds and fifteen shillings for her fortune; her family,
being working people, would have no use for her once she was of no use
to them; our chambers were her home only so long as she could do in them
what she had agreed to do; there was no Workmen's Compensation Act in
those days, no old-age pensions, even if she had been old enough to get
one. What was left for a poor woman, full of years and pain, save the
one refuge which, all her life, she had been taught to look upon as
scarcely less shameful than the prison or the scaffold?
Well, Trimmer had done her best for us; now we did our best for her,
and, as it turned out, the best that could be done. Through a friend, we
got her into St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Her case was hopeless from the
first. A malignant growth so close to the brain that at her age an
operation was too serious a risk, and without it she might linger in
agony for months,--this was what life had been holding in store for
Trimmer during those long years of incessant toil, and self-sacrifice,
and obstinate belief that a drunken husband, a selfish brother, an empty
purse, were all for the best in our best of all possible worlds.
She did not know how ill she was, and her first weeks at the hospital
were happy. The violence of the pain was relieved, the poor tired old
body was the better for the rest and the cool and the quiet; she who had
spent her strength waiting on others enjoyed the novel experience of
being waited on herself. There were the visits of her family on visiting
days, and mine in between, to look forward to; some of our friends, who
had grown as fond of her as we, sent her fruit and flowers, and she
liked the consequence all this gave her in the ward. Then, the hospital
gossip was a distraction, perhaps because in talking about the
sufferings of others she could forget her own. My objection was that she
would spare me not a single detail. But in some curious way I could not
fathom, it seemed a help to Trimmer, and I had not the heart to cut her
stories short.
After a month or so, the reaction came. Her head was no better, and what
was the hospital good for if they couldn't cure her? She grew
suspicious, hinting dark things to me about the doctors. They were
keeping her there to try experiments on her, and she was a respectable
woman, and always had been, and she did not like to be stared at in her
bed by a lot of young fellows. The nurses were as bad. But once out of
their clutches she would be "bonny" again, she knew. Probably the
doctors and nurses knew too, for the same suspicion is more often than
not their reward; and indeed it was so unlike Trimmer that she must have
picked it up in the ward. Anyway, in their kindness they had kept her
far longer than is usual in such cases, and when they saw her grow
restless and unhappy, it seemed best to let her go. At the end of four
months, and to her infinite joy, Trimmer, five years older than when she
came to us, in the advanced stage of an incurable disease, with a
capital of seven pounds and fifteen shillings, was free to begin life
again.
I pass quickly over the next weeks,--I wish I could have passed over
them as quickly at the time. My visits were now to a drab quarter on the
outskirts of Camden Town, where Trimmer had set up as a capitalist. She
boarded with her cousin, many shillings of her little store going to pay
the weekly bill; she found a wonderful doctor who promised to cure her
in no time, and into his pockets the rest of her savings flowed. There
was no persuading her that he could not succeed where the doctors at the
hospital had failed, and so long as she went to him, to help her would
only have meant more shillings for an unscrupulous quack who traded on
the ignorance and credulity of the poor. Week by week I saw her grow
feebler, week by week I knew her little capital was dribbling fast away.
She seemed haunted by the dread that her place would be taken in our
chambers, and that, once cured, she would have to hunt for another. That
she was "bonny" was the beginning and end of all she had to say. One
morning, to prove it, she managed to drag herself down to see us,
arriving with just strength enough to stagger into my room, her arms
outstretched to feel her way, for the disease, by this time, was
affecting both eyes and brain. Nothing would satisfy her until she had
gone into the studio, stumbling about among the portfolios, I on one
side, on the other J., with no desire to wring her neck for it was grim
tragedy we were guiding between us,--tragedy in rusty black with a
reticule hanging from one arm,--five years nearer the end than when
first the curtain rose upon it in our chambers. We bundled her off as
fast as we could, in a cab, with the cousin who had brought her. She
stopped in the doorway.
"Oh, I'm bonny, mum. I can cut about, you'll see!" And she would have
fallen, had not the cousin caught and steadied her.
After that, she had not the strength to drag herself anywhere, not even
to see the quack. A week later she took to her bed, almost blind, her
poor old wits scattered beyond recovery. I was glad of that: it spared
her the weary waiting and watching for death while the shadow of the
grim building she feared still more drew ever nearer. I hesitated to go
and see her, for my mere presence stirred her into consciousness, and
reminded her of her need to work and her danger if she could not. Then
there was a day when she did not seem to know I was there, and she paid
no attention to me, never spoke until just as I was going, when of a
sudden she sat bolt upright:--
"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny. You'll see!" she wailed, and sank back
on her pillows.
These were Trimmer's last words to me, and I left her at death's door,
still crying for work, as if in the next world, as in this, it was her
only salvation. Very soon, the cousin came to tell me that the little
capital had dribbled entirely away, and that she could not keep Trimmer
without being paid for it. Could I blame her? She had her own fight
against the shadow hanging all too close now over Trimmer. Her 'usband
worked 'ard, she said, and they could just live respectable, and
Trimmer's brothers, they was for sending Trimmer to the workus. They
might have sent her, and I doubt if she would have been the wiser. But
could we see her go? For our own comfort, for our own peace of mind, we
interfered and arranged that Trimmer should board with her cousin until
a bed was found in another hospital. It was found, mercifully, almost at
once, but, before I had time to go there, the Great Release had come for
her; and we heard with thankfulness that the old head was free from
suffering, that the twisted hands were still, that fear of the workhouse
could trouble her no more. Life's one gift to Trimmer had been toil,
pain her one reward, and it was good to know that she was at rest.
The cousin brought us the news. But I had a visit the same day from the
sister-in-law, the paragon of virtue, a thin, sharp-faced woman of
middle age. I said what I could in sympathy, telling her how much we
missed Trimmer, how well we should always remember her. But this was not
what she had come to hear. She let me get through. She drew the sigh
appropriate for the occasion. Then she settled down to business. When
did I propose to pay back the money Trimmer had spent on the doctor in
Camden Town? I didn't propose to at all, I told her: he was a miserable
quack and I had done my best to keep Trimmer from going to him; besides,
fortunately for her, she was beyond the reach of money that was not
owing to her. The sister-in-law was indignant. The family always
understood I had promised, a promise was a promise, and now they
depended on me for the funeral. I reminded her of the society to which
Trimmer had subscribed solely to meet that expense. But she quickly let
me know that the funeral the society proposed to provide fell far short
of the family's standard. To them it appeared scarcely better than a
pauper's. The coffin would be plain, there would be no oak and brass
handles,--worse, there would be no plumes for the horses and the hearse.
To send their sister to her grave without plumes would disgrace them
before their neighbours. Nor would there be a penny over for the family
mourning,--could I allow them, the chief mourners, to mourn without
crape?
I remembered their willingness to let Trimmer die as a pauper in the
workhouse. After all, she would have the funeral she had provided for.
She would lie no easier in her grave for oak and brass handles, for
plumes and crape. Her family had made use of her all her life; I did not
see why I should help them to make use of her after her death, that
their grief might be trumpeted in Brixton and Camden Town. I brought the
interview to an end. But sometimes I wonder if Trimmer would not have
liked it better if I had helped them, if plumes had waved from the heads
of the horses that drew her to her grave, if her family had followed
swathed in crape. She would have looked upon it as another piece of her
extraordinary good luck if, by dying, she had been of service to
anybody.
I do not know where they buried her. Probably nobody save ourselves
to-day has as much as a thought for her. But, if self-sacrifice counts
for anything, if martyrdom is a passport to heaven, then Trimmer should
take her place up there by the side of St. Francis of Assisi, and Joan
of Arc, and St. Vincent de Paul, and all those other blessed men and
women whose lives were given for others, and who thought it was
"bonny."
_Louise_
[Illustration: "TUMBLED, WEATHER-WORN, RED-TILED ROOFS"]
III
LOUISE
For the third time since we had taken our chambers, I was servantless,
and I could not summon up courage to face for the third time the scorn
which the simple request for a "general" meets in the English Registry
Office. That was what sent me to try my luck at a French _Bureau_ in
Soho, where, I was given to understand, it was possible to inquire for,
and actually obtain, a good _bonne a tout faire_ and escape without
insult.
Louise was announced one dull November morning, a few days later. I
found her waiting for me in our little hall,--a woman of about forty,
short, plump, with black eyes, blacker hair, and an enchanting smile.
But the powder on her face and the sham diamonds in her ears seemed to
hang out danger signals, and my first impulse was to show her the door.
It was something familiar in the face under the powder, above all in
the voice when she spoke, that made me hesitate.
"Provencale?" I asked.
"Yes, from Marseilles," she answered, and I showed her instead into my
room.
I had often been "down there" where the sun shines and skies are blue,
and her Provencal accent came like a breath from the south through the
gloom of the London fog, bringing it all back to me,--the blinding white
roads, the gray hills sweet with thyme and lavender, the towns with
their "antiquities," the little shining white villages,--M. Bernard's at
Martigues, and his dining-room, and the Marseillais who crowded it on a
Sunday morning, and the gaiety and the laughter, and Desire in his white
apron, and the great bowls of _bouillabaisse_....
It was she who recalled me to the business of the moment. Her name was
Louise Sorel, she said; she could clean, wash, play the lady's maid,
sew, market, cook--but cook! _Te--au mouins_, she would show _Madame_;
and, as she said it, she smiled. I have never seen such perfect teeth in
woman or child; you knew at a glance that she must have been a radiant
beauty in her youth. A Provencal accent, an enchanting smile, and the
remains of beauty, however, are not precisely what you engage a servant
for; and, with a sudden access of common sense, I asked for references.
Surely, _Madame_ would not ask the impossible, she said reproachfully.
She had but arrived in London, she had never gone as _bonne_ anywhere;
how, then, could she give references? She needed the work and was
willing to do it: was not that sufficient? I got out of it meanly by
telling her I would think it over. At that she smiled again,--really,
her smile on a November day almost warranted the risk. I meant to take
her; she knew; _Madame_ was kind.
I did think it over,--while I interviewed slovenly English "generals"
and stray Italian children, dropped upon me from Heaven knows where,
while I darned the family stockings, while I ate the charwoman's chops.
I thought it over indeed, far more than I wanted to, until, in despair,
I returned to the Soho _Bureau_ to complain that I was still without a
servant of any kind. The first person I saw was Louise, disconsolate, on
a chair in the corner. She sprang up when she recognized me. Had she not
said _Madame_ was kind? she cried. _Madame_ had come for her. I had done
nothing of the sort. But there she was, this charming creature from the
South; at home was the charwoman, dingy and dreary as the November
skies. To look back now is to wonder why I did not jump at the chance of
having her. As it was, I did take her,--no references, powder, sham
diamonds, and all. But I compromised. It was to be for a week. After
that, we should see. An hour later she was in my kitchen.
A wonderful week followed. From the start we could not resist her charm,
though to be on such terms with one's servant as to know that she has
charm, is no doubt the worst possible kind of bad form. Even William
Penn, the fastidious, was her slave at first sight,--and it would have
been rank ingratitude if he had not been, for, from the ordinary London
tabby average people saw in him, he was at once transformed into the
most superb, the most magnificent of cats! And we were all superb, we
were all magnificent, down to the snuffy, tattered old Irish charwoman
who came to make us untidy three times a week, and whom we had not the
heart to turn out, because we knew that if we did, there could be no one
else foolish enough to take her in again.
And Louise, though her southern imagination did such great things for
us, had not overrated herself. She might be always laughing at
everything, as they always do laugh "down there,"--at the English she
couldn't understand, at _Mize Boum_, the nearest she came to the
charwoman's name, at the fog she must have hated, at the dirt left for
her to clean. But she worked harder than any servant I have ever had,
and to better purpose. She adored the cleanliness and the order, it
seemed, and was appalled at the dirt and slovenliness of the English, as
every Frenchwoman is when she comes to the land that has not ceased to
brag of its cleanliness since its own astonished discovery of the
morning tub. Before Louise, the London blacks disappeared as if by
magic. Our wardrobes were overhauled and set to rights. The linen was
mended and put in place. And she could cook! Such _risotto_!--she had
been in Italy--Such _macaroni_! Such _bouillabaisse_! Throughout that
wonderful week, our chambers smelt as strong of _ail_ as a Provencal
kitchen.
In the face of all this, I do not see how I brought myself to find any
fault. To do myself justice, I never did when it was a question of the
usual domestic conventions. Louise was better than all the
conventions--all the prim English maids in prim white caps--in the
world. Just to hear her talk, just to have her call that disreputable
old _Mize Boum ma belle_, just to have her announce as _La Dame de la
bouillabaisse_ a friend of ours who had been to Provence and had come to
feast on her masterpiece and praised her for it,--just each and every
one of her charming southern ways made up for the worst domestic crime
she could have committed, I admit to a spasm of dismay when, for the
first meal she served, she appeared in her petticoat, a dish-cloth for
apron, and her sleeves rolled up above her elbows. But I forgot it with
her delightful laugh at herself when I explained that, absurdly it might
be, we preferred a skirt, an apron, and sleeves fastened at the wrists.
It seemed she adored the economy too, and she had wished to protect her
dress and even her apron.
These things would horrify the model housewife; but then, I am not a
model housewife, and they amused me, especially as she was so quick to
meet me, not only half, but the whole way. When, however, she took to
running out at intervals on mysterious errands, I felt that I must
object. Her first excuse was _les affaires_; her next, a friend; and,
when neither of these would serve, she owned up to a husband who,
apparently, spent his time waiting for her at the street corner; he was
so lonely, _le pauvre_! I suggested that he should come and see her in
the kitchen. She laughed outright. Why, he was of a shyness _Madame_
could not figure to herself. He never would dare to mount the stairs and
ring the front door-bell.
In the course of this wonderful week, there was sent to me, from the
Soho _Bureau_, a Swiss girl with as many references as a Colonial Dame
has grandfathers. Even so, and despite the inconvenient husband, I might
not have dismissed Louise,--it was so pleasant to live in an atmosphere
of superlatives and _ail_. It was she who settled the matter with some
vague story of a partnership in a restaurant and work waiting for her
there. Perhaps we should have parted with an affectation of indifference
had not J. unexpectedly interfered. Husbands have a trick of pretending
superiority to details of housekeeping until you have had all the
bother, and then upsetting everything by their interference. She had
given us the sort of time we hadn't had since the old days in Provence,
he argued; her smile alone was worth double the money agreed upon;
therefore, double the money was the least I could in decency offer her.
His logic was irreproachable, but housekeeping on such principles would
end in domestic bankruptcy. However, Louise got the money, and my reward
was her face when she thanked me--she made giving sheer
self-indulgence--and the _risotto_ which, in the shock of gratitude,
she insisted upon coming the next day to cook for us.
But, in the end, J.'s indiscretion cost me dear. As Louise was
determined to magnify all our geese, not merely into swans, but into the
most superb, the most magnificent swans, the few extra shillings had
multiplied so miraculously by the time their fame reached the
_Quartier_, that _Madame_ of the _Bureau_ saw in me a special Providence
appointed to relieve her financial difficulties, and hurried to claim an
immediate loan. Then, her claim being disregarded, she wrote to call my
attention to the passing of the days and the miserable pettiness of the
sum demanded, and to assure me of her consideration the most perfect.
She got to be an intolerable nuisance before I heard the last of her.
We had not realized the delight of having Louise to take care of us,
until she was replaced by the Swiss girl, who was industrious, sober,
well-trained, with all the stolidity and surliness of her people, and as
colourless as a self-respecting servant ought to be. I was immensely
relieved when, after a fortnight, she found the work too much for her.
It was just as she was on the point of going that Louise reappeared, her
face still white with powder, the sham diamonds still glittering in her
ears, but somehow changed, I could not quite make out how. She had come,
she explained to present me with a ring of pearls and opals and of
surpassing beauty, at the moment pawned for a mere trifle,--here was the
ticket; I had but to pay, add a smaller trifle for interest and
commission, and it was mine. As I never have worn rings I did not care
to begin the habit by gambling in pawn tickets, much though I should
have liked to oblige Louise. Her emotion when I refused seemed so out of
proportion, and yet was so unmistakably genuine, that it bewildered me.
But she pulled herself together almost at once and began to talk of the
restaurant which, I learned, was marching in a simply marvellous manner.
It was only when, in answer to her question, I told her that the
_Demoiselle Suisse_ was marching not at all and was about to leave me,
that the truth came out. There was no restaurant, there never had
been,--except in the country of Tartarin's lions; it was her invention
to spare me any self-reproach I might have felt for turning her adrift
at the end of her week's engagement. She had found no work since. She
and her husband had pawned everything. _Tiens_, and she emptied before
me a pocketful of pawn tickets. They were without a sou. They had had
nothing to eat for twenty-four hours. That was the change. I began to
understand. She was starving, literally starving, in the cold and gloom
and damp of the London winter, she who was used to the warmth and
sunshine, to the clear blue skies of Provence. If the aliens who drift
to England, as to the Promised Land, could but know what awaited them!
Of course I took her back. She might have added rouge to the powder, she
might have glittered all over with diamonds, sham or real, and I would
not have minded. J. welcomed her with joy. William Penn hung rapturously
at her heels. We had a _risotto_, golden as the sun of the _Midi_,
fragrant as its kitchens, for our dinner.
There was no question of a week now, no question of time at all. It did
not seem as if we ever could manage again, as if we ever could have
managed, without Louise. And she, on her side, took possession of our
chambers, and, for a ridiculously small sum a week, worked her miracles
for us. We positively shone with cleanliness; London grime no longer
lurked, the skeleton in our cupboards. We never ate dinners and
breakfasts more to our liking, never had I been so free from
housekeeping, never had my weekly bills been so small. Eventually, she
charged herself with the marketing, though she could not, and never
could, learn to speak a word of English; but not even the London
tradesman was proof against her smile. She kept the weekly accounts,
though she could neither read nor write: in her intelligence, an
eloquent witness to the folly of general education. She was, in a word,
the most capable and intelligent woman I have ever met, so that it was
the more astounding that she should also be the most charming.
Most astounding of all was the way, entirely, typically Provencale as
she was, she could adapt herself to London and its life and people.
Though she wore in the street an ordinary felt hat, and in the house the
English apron, you could see that her hair was made for the pretty
Provencal ribbon, and her broad shoulders for the Provencal fichu. _Te_,
_ve_, and _au mouins_ were as constantly in her mouth as in Tartarin's.
Provencal proverbs forever hovered on her lips. She sang Provencal songs
at her work. She had ready a Provencal story for every occasion. Her
very adjectives were Mistral's, her very exaggerations Daudet's. And yet
she did everything as if she had been a "general" in London chambers all
her life. Nothing came amiss to her. After her first startling
appearance as waitress, it was no time before she was serving at table
as if she had been born to it, and with such a grace of her own that
every dish she offered seemed a personal tribute. People who had never
seen her before would smile back involuntarily as they helped
themselves. It was the same no matter what she did. She was always gay,
however heavy her task. To her even London, with its fogs, was a
_galejado_, as they say "down there." And she was so appreciative. We
would make excuses to give her things for the pleasure of watching the
warm glow spread over her face and the light leap to her eyes. We would
send her to the theatre for the delight of having her come back and tell
us about it. All the world, on and off the stage, was exalted and
transfigured as she saw it.
But frank as she was in her admiration of all the world, she remained
curiously reticent about herself. "My poor grandmother used to say, you
must turn your tongue seven times in your mouth before speaking," she
said to me once; and I used to fancy she gave hers a few extra twists
when it came to talking of her own affairs. Some few facts I gathered:
that she had been at one time an _ouvreuse_ in a Marseilles theatre; at
another, a tailoress,--how accomplished, the smart appearance of her
husband in J.'s old coats and trousers was to show us; and that, always,
off and on, she had made a business of buying at the periodical sales of
the _Mont de Piete_ and selling at private sales of her own. I gathered
also that they all knew her in Marseilles; it was Louise here, Louise
there, as she passed through the market, and everybody must have a word
and a laugh with her. No wonder! You couldn't have a word and a laugh
once with Louise and not long to repeat the experience. But to her life
when the hours of work were over, she offered next to no clue.
Only one or two figures flitted, pale shadows, through her rare
reminiscences. One was the old grandmother, whose sayings were full of
wisdom, but who seemed to have done little for her save give her,
fortunately, no schooling at all, and a religious education that bore
the most surprising fruit. Louise had made her first communion, she had
walked in procession on feast days. _J'adorais ca_, she would tell me,
as she recalled her long white veil and the taper in her hand. But she
adored every bit as much going to the Salvation Army meetings,--the
lassies would invite her in, and lend her a hymn-book, and she would
sing as hard as ever she could, was her account. Her ideas on the
subject of the Scriptures and the relations of the Holy Family left me
gasping. But her creed had the merit of simplicity. The _Boun Diou_ was
intelligent, she maintained; _il aime les gens honnetes_. He would not
ask her to hurry off to church and leave all in disorder at home, and
waste her time. If she needed to pray, she knelt down where and as she
was, and the _Boun Diou_ was as well pleased. He was a man like us,
wasn't He? Well then, He understood.
There was also a sister. She occupied a modest apartment in Marseilles
when she first dawned upon our horizon, but so rapidly did it expand
into a palatial house in town and a palatial villa by the sea, both with
cellars of rare and exquisite vintages and stables full of horses and
carriages, that we looked confidently to the fast-approaching day when
we should find her installed in the Elysee at Paris. Only in one respect
did she never vary by a hair's breadth: this was her hatred of Louise's
husband.
Here, at all events, was a member of the family about whom we learned
more than we cared to know. For if he did not show himself at first,
that did not mean his willingness to let us ignore him. He persisted in
wanting Louise to meet him at the corner, sometimes just when I most
wanted her in the kitchen. He would have her come back to him at night;
and to see her, after her day's hard work, start out in the black sodden
streets, seldom earlier than ten, often as late as midnight; to realize
that she must start back long before the sun would have thought of
coming up, if the sun ever did come up on a London winter morning, made
us wretchedly uncomfortable. The husband, however, was not to be moved
by any messages I might send him. He was too shy to grant the interview
I asked. But he gave me to understand through her that he wouldn't do
without her, he would rather starve, he couldn't get along without her.
We did not blame him: we couldn't, either. That was why, after several
weeks of discomfort to all concerned, it occurred to us that we might
invite him to make our home his; and we were charmed by his
condescension when, at last conquering his shyness, he accepted our
invitation. The threatened deadlock was thus settled, and M. Auguste,
as he introduced himself, came to us as a guest for as long as he chose
to stay. There were friends--there always are--to warn us that what we
were doing was sheer madness. What did we know about him, anyway?
Precious little, it was a fact: that he was the husband of Louise,
neither more nor less. We did not even know that, it was hinted. But if
Louise had not asked for our marriage certificate, could we insist upon
her producing hers?
It may have been mad, but it worked excellently. M. Auguste as a guest
was the pattern of discretion. I had never had so much as a glimpse of
him until he came to visit us. Then I found him a good-looking man,
evidently a few years younger than Louise, well-built, rather taller
than the average Frenchman. Beyond this, it was weeks before I knew
anything of him except the astonishing adroitness with which he kept out
of our way. He quickly learned our hours and arranged his accordingly.
After we had begun work in the morning, he would saunter down to the
kitchen and have his coffee, the one person of leisure in the
establishment. After that, and again in the afternoon, he would stroll
out to attend to what I take were the not too arduous duties of a
horse-dealer with neither horses nor capital,--for as a horse-dealer he
described himself when he had got so far as to describe himself at all.
At noon and at dinner-time, he would return from Tattersall's, or
wherever his not too exhausting business had called him, with a small
paper parcel supposed to contain his breakfast or his dinner, our
agreement being that he was to supply his own food. The evenings he
spent with Louise. I could discover no vice in him except the, to us,
disturbing excess of his devotion to her. You read of this sort of
devotion in French novels and do not believe in it. But M. Auguste, in
his exacting dependence on Louise, left the French novel far behind. As
for Louise, though she was no longer young and beauty fades early in the
South, I have never met, in or out of books, a woman who made me
understand so well the reason of the selfishness some men call love.
M. Auguste's manners to us were irreproachable. We could only admire
the consideration he showed in so persistently effacing himself. J.
never would have seen him, if on feast days--Christmas, New Year's, the
14th of July--M. Auguste had not, with great ceremony, entered the
dining-room at the hour of morning coffee to shake hands and wish J. the
compliments of the season. With me his relations grew less formal, for
he was not slow to discover that we had one pleasant weakness in common.
Though the modest proportions of that brown-paper parcel might not
suggest it, M. Auguste knew and liked what was good to eat; so did I.
Almost before I realized it, he had fallen into the habit of preparing
some special dish for me, or of making my coffee, when I chanced to be
alone for lunch or for dinner. I can still see the gleam in his eyes as
he brought me in my cup, and assured me that he, not Louise, was the
artist, and that it was something of extra--but of extra!--as it always
was. Nor was it long before he was installed _chef_ in our kitchen on
the occasion of any little breakfast or dinner we might be giving. The
first time I caught him in shirt-sleeves, with Louise's apron flapping
about his legs and the bib drawn over his waistcoat, he was inclined to
be apologetic. But he soon gave up apology. It was evident there were
few things he enjoyed more than cooking a good dinner,--unless it was
eating it,--and his apron was put on early in the day. In the end, I
never asked any one to breakfast or dinner without consulting him, and
his _menus_ strengthened the friendliness of our relations.
After a while he ran my errands and helped Louise to market. I found
that he spoke and wrote very good English, and was a man of some
education. I have preserved his daily accounts, written in an unusually
neat handwriting, always beginning "Mussy: 1 penny"; and this reminds me
that not least in his favour was his success in ingratiating himself
with William Penn,--or "Mussy" in Louise's one heroic attempt to cope
with the English. M. Auguste, moreover, was quiet and reserved to a
degree that would not have discredited the traditional Englishman. Only
now and then did the _Midi_ show itself in him: in the gleam of his eye
over his gastronomic masterpieces; in his pose as horse-dealer and the
scale on which the business he never did was schemed,--_Mademoiselle_,
the French dressmaker from Versailles, who counted in tens and thought
herself rich, was dazzled by the way M. Auguste reckoned by thousands;
and once, luckily only once, in a frenzied outbreak of passion.
He was called to Paris, I never understood why. When the day came, he
was seized with such despair as I had never seen before, as I trust I
may never have to see again. He could not leave Louise, he would not.
No! No! No! He raved, he swore, he wept. I was terrified, but Louise,
when I called her aside to consult her, shrugged her shoulders. "We play
the comedy in the kitchen," she laughed, but I noticed that her laughter
was low. I fancy when you played the comedy with M. Auguste, tragedy was
only just round the corner. With the help of _Mademoiselle_ she got him
to the station; he had wanted to throw himself from the train as it
started, was her report. And in three days, not a penny the richer for
the journey, he had returned to his life of ease in our chambers.
Thus we came to know M. Auguste's virtues and something of his temper,
but never M. Auguste himself. The months passed, and we were still
conscious of mystery. I did not inspire him with the healthy fear he
entertained for J., but I cannot say he ever took me into his
confidence. What he was when not in our chambers; what he had been
before he moved into them; what turn of fate had stranded him,
penniless, in London with Louise, to make us the richer for his coming;
why he, a man of education, was married to a woman of none; why he was
M. Auguste while Louise was Louise Sorel--I knew as little the day he
left us as the day he arrived. J. instinctively distrusted him,
convinced that he had committed some monstrous crime and was in hiding.
This was also the opinion of the French Quarter, as I learned
afterwards. It seems the _Quartier_ held its breath when it heard he was
our guest, and waited for the worst, only uncertain what form that worst
would take,--whether we should be assassinated in our beds, or a
bonfire made of our chambers. M. Auguste, however, spared us and
disappointed the _Quartier_. His crime, to the end, remained as baffling
as the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, or the secret of Kaspar
Hauser.
That he was honest, I would wager my own reputation for honesty, even if
it was curious the way his fingers gradually covered themselves with
rings, a watch-chain dangled from his waistcoat pocket, a pin was stuck
jauntily in his necktie. Her last purchases at the _Mont de Piete_,
pawned during those first weeks of starving in London and gradually
redeemed, was Louise's explanation; and why should we have suspected M.
Auguste of coming by them unlawfully when he never attempted to rob us,
though we gave him every opportunity? He knew where I kept my money and
my keys. He was alone with Louise in our chambers, not only many a day
and evening, but once for a long summer.
We had to cycle down into Italy and William Penn could not be left to
care for himself, nor could we board him out without risking the
individuality of a cat who had never seen the world except from the top
of a four-story house. Louise and M. Auguste, therefore, were retained
to look after him, which, I should add, they did in a manner as
satisfactory to William as to ourselves. Every week I received a report
of his health and appetite from M. Auguste, in whom I discovered a new
and delightful talent as correspondent. "_Depuis votre depart_," said
the first, "_cette pauvre bete a miaule apres vous tous les jours, et il
est constamment a la porte pour voir si vous ne venez pas. Il ne
commence vraiment a en prendre son parti que depuis hier. Mais tous ces
soucis de chat_ [for that charming phrase what would one not have
forgiven M. Auguste?], _mais tous ces soucis de chat ne l'empechent pas
de bien boire son lait le matin et manger sa viande deux fois par
jour._" Nor was it all colour of rose to be in charge of William.
"_Figurez-vous_," the next report ran, "_que Mussy a devore et abime
completement une paire de bas tout neufs que Louise s'est achetee hier.
C'est un vrai petit diable, mais il est si gentil qu'on ne peut vraiment
pas le gronder pour cela._" It was consoling to hear eventually that
William had returned to normal pursuits. "_Mussy est bien sage, il a
attrape une souris hier dans la cuisine--je crois bien que Madame ne
trouvera jamais un aussi gentil Mussy._" And so the journal of William's
movements was continued throughout our absence. When, leaving J. in
Italy, I returned to London,--met at midnight at the station by M.
Auguste with flattering enthusiasm,--Mussy's condition and behaviour
corroborated the weekly bulletins. And not only this. Our chambers were
as clean as the proverbial new pin: everything was in its place; not so
much as a scrap of paper was missing. The only thing that had
disappeared was the sprinkling of gray in Louise's hair, and for this M.
Auguste volubly prepared me during our walk from the station; she had
dyed it with almost unforeseen success, he told me, so triumphantly that
I put down the bottle of dye to his extravagance.
If I know M. Auguste was not a thief, I do not think he was a murderer.
How could I see blood on the hands of the man who presided so joyously
over my pots and pans? If he were a forger, my trust in him never led
to abuse of my cheque book; if a deserter, how came he to be possessed
of his _livret militaire_ duly signed, as my own eyes are the witness?
how could he venture back to France, as I know he did for I received
from him letters with the Paris postmark? An anarchist, J. was inclined
to believe. But I could not imagine him dabbling in bombs and fuses. To
be a horse-dealer, without horses or money, was much more in his line.
Only of one thing were we sure: however hideous or horrible the evil, M.
Auguste had worked "down there," under the hot sun of Provence, Louise
had no part in it. She knew--it was the reason of her curious
reticences, of her sacrifice of herself to him. That he loved her was
inevitable. Who could help loving her? She was so intelligent, so
graceful, so gay. But that she should love M. Auguste would have been
incomprehensible, were it not in the nature of woman to love the man who
is most selfish in his dependence upon her. She did all the work, and he
had all the pleasure of it. He was always decently dressed, there was
always money in his pocket, though she, who earned it, never had a penny
to spend on herself. No matter how busy and hurried she might be, she
had always the leisure to talk to him, to amuse him when he came in,
always the courage to laugh, like the little Fleurance in the story.
What would you? She was made like that. She had always laughed, when she
was sad as when she was gay. And while she was making life delightful
for him, she was doing for us what three Englishwomen combined could not
have done so well, and with a charm that all the Englishwomen in the
world could not have mustered among them.
She had been with us about a year when I began to notice that, at
moments, her face was clouded and her smile less ready. At first, I put
it down to her endless comedy with M. Auguste. But, after a bit, it
looked as if the trouble were more serious even than his histrionics. It
was nothing, she laughed when I spoke to her; it would pass. And she
went on amusing and providing for M. Auguste and working for us. But by
the time the dark days of November set in, we were more worried about
her than ever. The crisis came with Christmas.
On Christmas Day, friends were to dine with us, and we invited
_Mademoiselle_, the French dressmaker, to eat her Christmas dinner with
Louise and M. Auguste. We were very staid in the dining-room,--it turned
out rather a dull affair. But in the kitchen it was an uproarious feast.
Though she lived some distance away, though on Christmas night London
omnibuses are few and far between, _Mademoiselle_ could hardly be
persuaded to go home, so much was she enjoying herself. Louise was all
laughter. "You have been amused?" I asked, when _Mademoiselle_, finally
and reluctantly, had been bundled off by J. in a hansom.
"_Mais oui, mais oui_," M. Auguste cried, pleasure in his voice. "_Cette
pauvre Mademoiselle!_ Her life, it is so sad, she is so alone. It is
good for her to be amused. We have told her many stories,--_et des
histoires un tout petit peu salees, n'est-ce pas? pour egayer cette
pauvre Mademoiselle?_"
It was the day after the feast that Louise had to give in. She confessed
she had been in torture while she served our dinner and _Mademoiselle_
was there. She could hardly eat or drink. But why make it sad for all
the world because she was in pain? and she had laughed, she had laughed!
We scolded her first. Then we sent her to a good doctor. It was worse
than we feared. The trouble was grave, there must be an operation
without delay. The big tears rolled down her cheeks as she said it. She
looked old and broken. Why, she moaned, should this sorrow come to her?
She had never done any harm to any one: why should she have to suffer?
Why, indeed? Her mistake had been to do too little harm, too much good,
to others, to think too little of herself. Now, she had to pay for it as
one almost always does pay for one's good deeds. She worried far less
over the pain she must bear than over the inconvenience to M. Auguste
when she could no longer earn money for him.
We wanted her to go into one of the London hospitals. We offered to take
a room for her where she could stay after the operation until she got
back her strength. But we must not think her ungrateful, the mere idea
of a hospital made her desperate. And what would she do in a room _avec
un homme comme ca_. Besides, there was the sister in Marseilles, and, in
the hour of her distress, her sister's horses and carriages multiplied
like the miraculous loaves and fishes, the vintages in the cellar
doubled in age and strength. And she was going to die; it was queer, but
one knew those things; and she longed to die _la-bas_, where there was a
sun and the sky was blue, where she was at home. We knew she had not a
penny for the journey. M. Auguste had seen to that. Naturally, J. gave
her the money. He would not have had a moment's comfort if he had
not,--the drain upon your own emotions is part of the penalty you pay
for having a human being and not a machine to work for you,--and he
added a little more to keep her from want on her arrival in Marseilles,
in case the sister had vanished or the sister's fortunes had dwindled to
their original proportions. He exacted but one condition: M. Auguste
was not to know there was more than enough for the journey.
Louise's last days with us were passed in tears,--poor Louise! who until
now had laughed at fate. It was at this juncture that M. Auguste came
out strong. I could not have believed he had it in him. He no longer
spent his time dodging J. and dealing in visionary horses. He took
Louise's place boldly. He made the beds, cooked all our meals, waited on
us, dusted, opened the door, while Louise sat, melancholy and forlorn,
in front of the kitchen fire. On the last day of all--she was not to
start until the afternoon Continental train--she drew me mysteriously
into the dining-room, she shut the door with every precaution, she
showed me where she had sewed the extra sovereigns in her stays. M.
Auguste should never know. "_Je pars pour mon long voyage_," she
repeated. "_J'ai mes pressentiments._" And she was going to ask them to
let her wear a black skirt I had given her, and an old coat of J.'s she
had turned into a bodice, when the time came to lay her in her coffin.
Thus something of ours would go with her on the long journey. How could
she forget us? How could we forget her? she might better have asked. I
made a thousand excuses to leave her; Louise playing "the comedy" had
never been so tragic as Louise in tears. But she would have me back
again, and again, and again, to tell me how happy she had been with us.
"Why, I was at home," she said, her surprise not yet outworn. "_J'etais
chez moi, et j'etais si tranquille._ I went. I came. _Monsieur_ entered.
He called me. '_Louise._'--'_Oui, Monsieur._'--'_Voulez-vous faire ceci
ou cela?_'--'_Mais oui, Monsieur, de suite._' And I would do it and
_Monsieur_ would say, '_Merci, Louise_,' and he would go. And me, I
would run quick to the kitchen or upstairs to finish my work. _J'etais
si tranquille!_"
The simplicity of the memories she treasured made her story of them
pitiful as I listened. How little peace had fallen to her lot, that she
should prize the quiet and homeliness of her duties in our chambers!
At last it was time to go. She kissed me on both cheeks. She gave J. one
look, then she flung herself into his arms and kissed him too on both
cheeks. She almost strangled William Penn. She sobbed so, she couldn't
speak. She clutched and kissed us again. She ran out of the door and we
heard her sobbing down the three flights of stairs into the street. J.
hurried into his workroom. I went back to my desk. I don't think we
could have spoken either.
Two days afterwards, a letter from M. Auguste came to our chambers, so
empty and forlorn without Louise. They were in Paris. They had had a
dreadful crossing,--he hardly thought Louise would arrive at Boulogne
alive. She was better, but must rest a day or two before starting for
the _Midi_. She begged us to see that Mussy ate his meals _bien
regulierement_, and that he "made the dead" from time to time, as she
had taught him; and, would we write? The address was Mr. Auguste,
Horse-Dealer, Hotel du Cheval Blanc, Rue Chat-qui-peche-a-la-ligne,
Paris.
Horse-dealer! Louise might be at death's door, but M. Auguste had his
position to maintain. Then, after ten long days, came a post-card, also
from Paris: Louise was in Marseilles, he was on the point of going, once
there he would write. Then--nothing. Had he gone? Could he go?
If I were writing a romance it would, with dramatic fitness, end here.
But if I keep to facts, I must add that, in about eight months, Louise
and M. Auguste reappeared; that both were in the best of health and
spirits, M. Auguste a mass of jewelry; that all the sunshine of Provence
seemed let loose in the warmth of their greeting; that horse-dealing for
the moment prospered too splendidly for Louise to want to return to
us,--or was this a new invention, I have always wondered, because she
found in her place another Frenchwoman who wept at the prospect of being
dismissed to make room for her?
Well, anyway, for a while, things, according to Louise, continued to
prosper. She would pay me friendly visits and ask for sewing,--her
afternoons were so long,--and tell me of M. Auguste's success, and of
Provence, though there were the old reticences. By degrees, a shadow
fell over the gaiety. I fancied that "the comedy" was being played
faster than ever in the Soho lodgings. And, of a sudden, the fabric of
prosperity collapsed like a house of cards. She was ill again, and again
an operation was necessary. There was not a penny in her pockets nor in
M. Auguste's. What happened? Louise had only to smile, and we were her
slaves. But this time, for us at least, the end had really come. We
heard nothing more from either of them. No letters reached us from
Paris, no post-cards. Did she use the money to go back to Marseilles?
Did she ever leave London? Did M. Auguste's fate overtake him when they
crossed the Channel? Were the Soho lodgings the scene of some tremendous
_crime passionel_? For weeks I searched the police reports in my morning
paper. But neither then nor to this day have I had a trace of the woman
who, for over a year, gave to life in our chambers the comfort and the
charm of her presence. She vanished.
I am certain, though, that wherever she may be, she is mothering M.
Auguste, squandering upon him all the wealth of her industry, her
gaiety, her unselfishness. She couldn't help herself, she was made that
way. And the worst, the real tragedy of it, is that she would rather
endure every possible wrong with M. Auguste than, without him, enjoy all
the rights women not made that way would give her if they could. She has
convinced me of the truth I already more than suspected: it is upon the
M. Augustes of this world that the Woman Question will eventually be
wrecked.
_Our Charwomen_
[Illustration: "UP TO WESTMINSTER"]
IV
OUR CHARWOMAN
I took over the charwoman with our chambers, and a great piece of luck I
thought it; for charwomen never advertise, and are unheard of in
Registry Offices. It was certain I could not get into the chambers
without one, and at that early stage of my housekeeping in London I
should not have known where in the world to look for her.
Mrs. Maxfielde was the highly respectable name of the woman who had
"done" for the previous tenant, and had she heard of Mr. Shandy's theory
of names she could not have been more successful in adapting her person
and her manner to her own. She was well over sixty, and thin and gaunt
as if she had never had enough to eat; but age and hunger had not
lessened her hold upon the decencies of life. Worthiness oozed from her.
Victorian was stamped all over her,--it was in her black shawl and
bonnet, in the meekness of her pose, in the little curtsy she bobbed
when she spoke. I remember Harold Frederic seeing her once and, with the
intuition of the novelist, placing her: "Who is your old Queen
Victoria?" he asked. Her presence lost nothing when she took off her
shawl and bonnet. In the house and at work she wore a black dress and a
white apron, surprisingly clean considering the dirt she exposed it to,
and her grey hair was drawn tight back and rolled into a little hard
knob, the scant supply and "the parting all too wide" painfully exposed
to view. I longed for something to cover the old grey head that looked
so grandmotherly and out of keeping as it bent over scrubbing-brushes
and dustpans and the kitchen range, but it would have been against all
the conventions for a charwoman to appear in a servant's cap. There is a
rigid line in these English matters, and to attempt to step across is to
face the contempt of those who draw it. The British charwoman must go
capless, such is the unwritten law; also, she must remain "Miss" or
"Mrs.," though the Empire would totter were the British servant called
by anything but her name; and while the servant would "forget her place"
were she to know how to do any work outside her own, the charwoman is
expected to meet every emergency, and this was in days when housekeeping
for me was little more than a long succession of emergencies.
Mrs. Maxfielde was equal to all. She saw me triumphantly through one
domestic crisis after another. She was the most accomplished of her
accomplished class, and the most willing. She was never discouraged by
the magnitude of the tasks I set her, nor did she ever take advantage of
my dependence upon her. On the contrary, she let me take advantage of
her willingness. She cleaned up after the British Workman had been in
possession for a couple of months, and one of the few things the British
Workman can do successfully is to leave dirt to be cleaned up. She
helped me move in and settle down. She supported me through my trying
episode with 'Enrietter. And after 'Enrietter's disappearance she saved
me from domestic chaos, though the work and the hours involved would
have daunted a woman half her age and outraged every trade-union in the
country. She arrived at seven in the morning, and I quickly handed over
to her the key of the front door, that I might indulge in the extra hour
of sleep of which she was so much more in need; she stayed until eight
in the evening, or, at my request, until nine or later; and in between
she "did" for me in the fullest sense of that expressive word. There
were times when it meant "doing" also for my friends whom I was
inconsiderate enough to invite to come and see me in my domestic
upheaval, putting their friendship to the test still further by inducing
them to share the luncheons and dinners of Mrs. Maxfielde's cooking.
Many as were her good points, I cannot in conscience say that cooking
was among them. Hers might have been the vegetables of which Heine wrote
that they were brought to the table just as God made them, hers the
gravies against which he prayed Heaven to keep every Christian. But I
thought it much to be thankful for that she could cook at all when, to
judge from the amount she ate, she could have had so little practice in
cooking for herself. She did not need to go through any "fast cure,"
having done nothing but fast all her life. She had got out of the way of
eating and into the way of starving; the choicest dish would not have
tempted her. The one thing she showed the least appetite for was her
"'arf pint" at noon, and that she would not do without though she had to
fetch it from the "public" round the corner. I cannot say with greater
truth that Mrs. Maxfielde's talent lay in waiting, but she never allowed
anything or anybody to hurry her, and she was noiseless in her
movements, both excellent things in a waitress. I cannot even say that
in her own line of scrubbing she was above suspicion, but she handled
her brushes and brooms and dusters with a calm and dignity which, in my
troubles, I found very soothing. Her repose may have been less a virtue
than the result of want of proper food, but in any case it was a great
help in the midst of the confusion she was called to struggle with.
There was only one drawback. It had a way of deserting her just when I
was most in need of it.
We are all human, and Mrs. Maxfielde was not without her weakness: she
was afflicted with nerves. In looking back I can see how in character
her sensibility was. It belonged to the old shawl and the demure bonnet,
to the meekness of pose, to the bobbing of curtsies,--it was Victorian.
But at the time I was more struck by its inconvenience. A late milkman
or a faithless butcher would bring her to the verge of collapse. She
would jump at the over-boiling of the kettle. Her hand went to her heart
on the slightest provocation, and stayed there with a persistency that
made me suspect her of seeking her dissipation in disaster. On the
morning after our fire, though she had been at home in her own bed
through all the danger of it, she was in such a flutter that I should
have had to revive her with salts had not a dozen firemen, policemen,
and salvage men been waiting for her to refresh them with tea. It was
only when one of the firemen took the kettle from her helpless hand,
saying he was a family man himself, and when I stood sternly over her
that, like an elderly Charlotte, she fell to cutting bread and butter,
and regained the calm and dignity becoming to her. But I never saw her
so agitated as the day she met a rat in the cellar. I had supposed it
was only in comic papers and old-fashioned novels that a rat or a mouse
could drive a sensible woman into hysterics. But Mrs. Maxfielde showed
me my mistake. From that innocent encounter in the cellar she bounded up
the four flights of stairs, burst into my room, and, breathless, livid,
both hands on her heart, sank into a chair: a liberty which at any other
time she would have regarded as a breach of all the proprieties. "Oh,
mum!" she gasped, "in the cellar!--a rat!" And she was not herself again
until the next morning.
After her day's work and her excitement in the course of it, it seemed
as if Mrs. Maxfielde could have neither time nor energy for a life of
her own outside our chambers. But she had, and a very full life it was,
and with the details as she confided them to me, I got to know a great
deal about "how the poor live," which I should have preferred to learn
from a novel or a Blue Book. She had a husband, much older, who had
been paralyzed for years. Before she came to me in the morning she had
to get him up for the day, give him his breakfast, and leave everything
in order for him, and as she lived half an hour's walk from our chambers
and never failed to reach them by seven, there was no need to ask how
early she had to get herself up. For a few pence a friendly neighbour
looked in and attended to him during the day. After Mrs. Maxfielde left
me, at eight or nine or ten in the evening, and after her half hour's
walk back, she had to prepare his supper and put him to bed; and again I
did not have to ask how late she put her own weary self there too. Old
age was once said to begin at forty-six; we are more strenuous now; but
according to the kindest computations, it had well overtaken her. And
yet she was working harder than she probably ever had in her youth, with
less rest and with the pleasing certainty that she would go on working
day in and day out and never succeed in securing the mere necessities of
life. She might have all the virtues, sobriety, industry, economy,--and
she had,--and the best she could hope was just to keep soul and body
together for her husband and herself, and a little corner they could
call their own. She did not tell me how the husband earned a living
before paralysis kept him from earning anything at all, but he too must
have been worthy of his name, for now he was helpless, the parish
allowed him "outdoor relief" to the extent of three shillings and
sixpence, or about eighty cents a week; it was before old-age pensions
had been invented by a vote-touting Government. This munificent sum,
paid for a room somewhere in a "Building," one of those gloomy barracks
with the outside iron stairway in common, where clothes are forever
drying in the thick, soot-laden London air, and children are forever
howling and shrieking. For everything else Mrs. Maxfielde had to
provide. If she worked every day except Sunday, her earnings amounted to
fifteen shillings, or a little less than four dollars, a week. But there
were weeks when she could obtain only one day's work, weeks when she
could obtain none, and she and her husband had still to live, had still
to eat something, well as they had trained themselves, as so many must,
in the habit of not eating enough. Here was an economic problem
calculated to bewilder more youthful and brilliant brains than hers. But
she never complained, she never grumbled, she never got discouraged. She
might fly before a rat, but in the face of the hopeless horrors of life
she retained her beautiful placidity, though I, when I realized the full
weight of the burden she had to bear, began to wonder less how, than
why, the poor live.
Mrs. Maxfielde came in the early spring. By the time winter, with its
fogs, set in, age had so far overtaken her that she could not manage to
attend to her husband and his wants and then drag her old body to our
chambers by seven o'clock in the morning. It was she who gave notice; I
never should have had the courage. We parted friends, and she was so
amiable as not to deprive me of her problems with her services. When she
could not work for me, she visited me, making it her rule to call on
Monday afternoon; a rule she observed with such regularity that I
fancied Monday must be her day for collecting the husband's income from
the parish and her own from private sources. She rarely allowed a week
to pass without presenting herself, always appearing in the same
Victorian costume and carrying off the interview with the same Victorian
manner. She never stooped to beg, but her hand was ready for the coin
which I slipped into it with the embarrassment of the giver, but which
she received with enviable calmness and a little curtsy. The hour of her
visit was so timed that, when her talk with me was over, she could
adjourn to the kitchen for dinner and, under Augustine's rule, a glass
of wine, which, though beer would have been more to her taste, she drank
as a concession to the poor foreigner who did not know any better.
Before a second winter had passed, Mrs. Maxfielde was forced to admit
that she was too old for anybody to want her, or to accept a post if
anybody did. But, all the same, the paralytic clung to his shadow of
life with the obstinate tenacity of the human derelict, and she clung to
her idea of home, and they starved on in the room the parish paid for
until it was a positive relief to me when, after more years of
starvation than I cared to count, she came to announce his death. It was
no relief to her. She was full of grief, and permitted nothing to
distract her from the luxury she made of it. The coin which passed from
my hand to hers on the occasion of this visit, doubled in token of
condolence, was invested in an elaborate crape bonnet, and she left it
to me to worry about her future. I might have afforded to accept her
trust with a greater show of enthusiasm, for, at once and with
unlooked-for intelligence, the parish decided to allow her the same
weekly sum her husband had received, and Mrs. Maxfielde, endowed with
this large and princely income, became a parent so worthy of filial
devotion that a daughter I had never heard of materialized, and
expressed a desire to share her home with her mother.
The daughter was married, her husband was an unskilled labourer, and
they had a large and increasing family. It is likely that Mrs. Maxfielde
paid in more than money for the shelter, and that her own
flesh-and-blood was less chary than strangers would have been in
employing her services, and less mindful of the now more than seventy
years she had toiled to live. Perhaps her visits at this period were a
little more frequent, perhaps her dinners were eaten and her wine drunk
with a little more eagerness. But she refrained from any pose, she
indulged in no heroics, she entertained me with no whinings, no railings
against the ingratitude sharper than a serpent's tooth. However she got
her ease, it was not in weeping, and what she had to bear from her
daughter she bore in silence. Her Victorian sense of propriety would
have been offended by a display of feeling. She became so pitiful a
figure that I shrank from her visits. But she was content, she found no
fault with life, and wealth being a matter of comparison, I am sure she
was, in her turn, moved to pity for the more unfortunate who had not
kept themselves out of the workhouse. Had she had her way, she would
have been willing to slave indefinitely for her daughter and her
daughter's children. But Death was wiser and brought her the rest she
deserved so well and so little craved.
A couple of years or so after the loss of her husband, and after she had
failed to appear, much to my surprise, on three or four Mondays in
succession, a letter came from her daughter to tell me that never again
would Monday bring Mrs. Maxfielde to my chambers. There had been no
special illness. She had just worn out, that was all. Her time had come
after long and cruel days of toil and her passing was unnoted, for hers
was a place easily filled,--that was the grisly thing about it. J. and I
sent a wreath of flowers for the funeral, knowing that she would have
welcomed it as propriety's crown of propriety, and it was my last
communication with the Maxfielde family. I had never met the daughter,
and I was the more reluctant to go abroad in search of objects of
charity because they had such an inconsiderate way of seeking me out in
my own kitchen. I was already "suited" with another old woman in Mrs.
Maxfielde's place. I was already visited by one or two others. In fact,
I was so surrounded by old women that Augustine, when she first came to
the rescue, used to laugh with the insolence of youth at _les vieilles
femmes de Madame_.
My new old woman was Mrs. Burden. Had I hunted all London over, I could
not have found a more complete contrast to Mrs. Maxfielde. She was
Irish, with no respect for Victorian proprieties, but as disreputable
looking an old charwoman as you would care to see; large and floppy in
figure, elephantine in movement, her face rough and dug deep by the
trenches of more than fifty winters, her hair frowzy, her dress ragged,
with the bodice always open at the neck and the sleeves always rolled up
above the elbows, her apron an old calico rag, and her person and her
clothes profusely sprinkled with snuff. In the street she wrapped
herself in a horrible grey blanket-shawl, and on top of her disorderly
old head set a little battered bonnet with two wisps of strings dangling
about. When I knew her better I discovered that she owned a black shawl
with fringe, and a bonnet that could tie under the chin, and in these
made a very fine appearance. But they were reserved for such ceremonial
occasions as Mass on Sunday or the funeral of a friend, and at other
times she kept to the costume that so shamefully maligned her. For, if
she looked like one of the terrible harpies who hang about the public
house in every London slum, she was really the most sober creature in
the world and never touched a drop, Mr. Burden, who drank himself into
an early grave, having drunk enough for two.
I cannot remember now where Mrs. Burden came from, or why, when I had
seen her once, I ever consented to see her again. But she quickly grew
into a fixture in our chambers, and it was some eight or nine years
before I was rid of her. In the beginning she was engaged for three
mornings, later on for every morning, in the week. Her hours were from
seven to twelve, during which time my chief object was to keep her
safely shut up in the kitchen, for no degree of pretending on my part
could make me believe in her as an ornament or a credit to our house. It
mortified me to have her show her snuffy old face at the front door, and
I should never have dared to send her on the many messages she ran for
me had she not been known to everybody in the Quarter; but once Mrs.
Burden was known it was all right, for she was as good as she was sober.
Hers, however, was the goodness of the man in the Italian proverb who
was so good that he was good for nothing. She was willing to do
anything, but there was nothing she could do well, and most things she
could not do at all. She made no pretence to cook, and if she had I
could not have eaten anything of her cooking, for I knew snuff must
flavour everything she touched. To have seen her big person and frowzy
head in the dining-room would have been fatal to appetite had I ever had
the folly, under any circumstances, to ask her to wait. Nor did she
excel in scrubbing and dusting. She was successful chiefly in leaving
things dirtier than she found them, and Augustine, whose ideal is high
in these matters, insisted that Mrs. Burden spent the morning making the
dirt she had to spend the afternoon cleaning up. There were times when
they almost came to blows, for the temper of both was hot, and more than
once I heard Mrs. Burden threaten to call in the police. But the old
woman had her uses. She was honesty itself, and could be trusted with no
matter what,--from the key of our chambers, when they were left empty,
to the care of William Penn, when no other companion could be secured
for him; she could be relied upon to pay bills, post letters, fetch
parcels; and she was as punctual as Big Ben at Westminster. I do not
think she missed a day in all the years she was with me. I became
accustomed, too, to seeing her about, and there was the dread--or
conviction would be nearer the truth--that if I let her go nobody else
in their senses would take her in.
Mrs. Burden did not improve with time. She never condescended to borrow
qualities that did not belong to her. She grew more unwieldy and larger
and floppier, a misfortune she attributed to some mysterious malady
which she never named, but gloated over with the pride the poor have in
their diseases. And she grew dirtier and more disorderly, continuing to
scorn my objection to her opening the front door with the shoe she was
blacking still on her hand, or to her bringing me a letter wrapped in
an apron grimier than her grimy fingers. Nothing would induce her not to
call me "Missis," which displeased me more, if for other reasons, than
the "Master" she as invariably bestowed upon J. She bobbed no curtsies.
When, on Saturdays, coins passed from my hand to hers, she spat on them
before she put them in her pocket, to what purpose I have not to this
day divined. Her best friend could not have accused her of any charm of
manner, but, being Irish, she escaped the vulgarity bred in the London
slums. In fact, I often fancied I caught gleams of what has been called
the Celtic Temperament shining through her. She had the warmth of
devotion, the exaggeration of loyalty, the power of idealizing, peculiar
to her race. She was almost lyrical in her praise of J., who stood
highest in her esteem, and "Master good! Master good!" was her constant
refrain when she conversed with Augustine in the language fitted for
children and rich in gesture, which was her well-meant substitute for
French. She saw him glorified, as the poets of her country see their
heroes, and in her eyes he loomed a splendid Rothschild. "Master, plenty
money, plenty money!" she would assure Augustine, and, holding up her
apron by the two corners, and well out from her so as to represent a
capacious bag, add, "apron full, full, full!"
She had also the Celtic lavishness of hospitality. I remember Whistler's
delight one morning when, after an absence from London, he received at
our front door a welcome from Mrs. Burden, whom he had never seen before
and now saw at her grimiest: "Shure, Mr. Whistler, sir, an it's quite a
stranger ye are. It's glad I am to see ye back, sir, and looking so
well!" Her hospitality was extended to her own friends when she had the
chance. She who drank nothing could not allow Mr. Pooley, the sweep, who
was her neighbour and cleaned our chimneys, to leave our chambers after
his professional services without a drop of whiskey to hearten him on
his sooty way. And, though you would still less have suspected it,
romance had kept its bloom fresh in her heart. The summer the Duke of
York was married I could not understand her interest in the wedding, as
until then she had not specially concerned herself with the affairs of
royalty. But on the wedding-day this interest reached a point when she
had to share it with somebody. "Shure, Missis, and I knows how it is
meself. Wasn't I after marrying Burden's brother and he older than
Burden, and didn't he go and die, God bless him! and leave me to Burden.
And shure thin it's me that knows how the poor Princess May, Lord love
her! is feeling this blessed day!"
Not only the memory, but her pride in it, had survived the years which
never brought romance to her again. The one decent thing Burden did was
to die and rid the world of him before Mrs. Burden had presented him and
society with more than one child, a boy. He was a good son, she said,
which meant that he spent his boyhood picking up odd jobs and, with
them, odd pence to help his mother along, so that at the age when he
should have been able to do something, he knew how to do nothing, and
had not even the physical strength to fit him for the more profitable
kinds of unskilled labour. He thought himself lucky when, in his
twentieth year, he fell into a place as "washer-up" in a cheap
restaurant which paid eighteen shillings a week; and he was so dazzled
by his wealth that he promptly married. His wife's story is short: she
drank. Mercifully, like Burden, she did the one thing she could do with
all her might and drank herself to death with commendable swiftness,
leaving no children to carry on the family tradition. Mrs. Burden was
once more alone with her son. Between them they earned twenty-eight
shillings a week and felt themselves millionaires. Augustine, for some
reason, went at this period once or twice to her room, over the dingy
shop of a cheap undertaker, and reported it fairly clean and provided
with so much comfort as is represented by blankets on the bed and a
kettle on the hob. But after a bit the son died, the cause, as far as I
could make out, a drunken father and years of semi-starvation; and Mrs.
Burden had to face, as cheerfully as she could, an old age to be lived
out in loneliness and in the vain endeavour to make both ends meet on
eight shillings a week, or less if she lost her job with me.
She did lose it, poor soul. But what could I do? She really got to be
intolerably dirty. Not that I blamed her. I probably should have been
much dirtier under the same circumstances. But a time came when it
seemed as if we must give up either Mrs. Burden or our chambers, and to
give our chambers up when we had not the least desire to, would have
been a desperate remedy. She had one other piece of regular work; when I
spoke to her about going, she assured me that her neighbours had been
waiting for years to get her to do their washing, and she would be glad
to oblige them; and, on my pressing invitation, she promised to run in
and see me often. At this new stage in our relations she showed a rare
delicacy of feeling. Mrs. Maxfielde, no longer in my service, was eager
to pay me visits, and her hand, if not held out to beg, was open to
receive. Mrs. Burden did not keep her promise to come, she gave me no
opportunity to know whether her hand was open in need or shut on plenty.
She was of the kind that would rather starve than publish their
destitution. I might have preserved an easy conscience in her regard but
for Mr. Pooley, the sweep. The first time he returned in his
professional capacity after her departure and found himself deprived of
the usual refreshment, he was indignant, and, in consequence, he was
very gruff and short with me when I inquired after Mrs. Burden. She
hadn't any work, not she, and he supposed, he did, that she might starve
for all some people cared.
I could scarcely ignore so broad a hint, and I had her round that same
morning, for her slum was close by. I learned from her that Mr. Pooley,
if gruff, was truthful. She had no work, had not had any for weeks. She
was in arrears to her landlord, her shawl with the fringe and her
blankets were in pawn, she hadn't a farthing in her pocket. J., to whom
I refer all such matters, and who was in her debt for the splendour of
wealth with which she had endowed him, said "it was all nonsense,"--by
"it" I suppose he meant this sorry scheme of things,--and he would not
let her go without the money to pay her landlord, not only for arrears,
but in advance, and also to redeem her possessions. I do not think she
was the less grateful if, instead of bobbing humbly, she spat upon the
coins before her first "Shure and may God bless ye, Master." Nor was J.
comfortable until provisions had followed her in such quantities that he
would not have to be bothered by the thought of her starving to death,
at any rate for some days. Even after that, she scrupulously kept away.
Not Christmas, that in London brings everybody with or without excuse
begging at one's door, could induce her to present herself. It was we
who had to send for her, and, in a land where begging comes so easily,
we respected her for her independence.
I doubt if she ever got more work to do. She never received outdoor
relief, according to her because of some misunderstanding between the
parish church and hers, for, being Irish, she was a devout Roman
Catholic. I do not know how she lived, though perhaps they could have
told me in her slum, nobody, they say, being as good to the poor as the
poor themselves. But it was part of her delicacy to take herself off
our hands and conscience within less than a year of her leaving us, and
to die in her room peacefully of pneumonia, when she might have made us
uncomfortable by dying of starvation, or lingering on in the workhouse.
Mr. Pooley, the sweep, brought this news too. She was buried decent, he
volunteered; she had taken care of that, though as poor as you want to
see. A good old woman, he added, and it was all the obituary she had. He
was right. She was of the best, but then she was only one "of the
millions of bubbles" poured into existence to-day to vanish out of it
to-morrow, of whom the world is too busy to keep count.
After Mrs. Burden, I went to the _Quartier_--the French Quarter in
Soho--for a charwoman. Had I been tempted, as I never was, to believe in
the _entente cordiale_, of which England was just then beginning to make
great capital, affairs in my own kitchen would have convinced me of the
folly of it. Things there had come to a pass when any pretence of
cordiality, except the cordial dislike which France and England have
always cherished for each other and always will, had been given up, and
if I hoped to escape threats of police and perpetual squabbles on the
subject of cleanliness, there was nothing for it but to adopt a
single-race policy. When it came to deciding which that race should be,
I did not hesitate, having found out for myself that the French are as
clean as the English believe themselves to be. The _Quartier_ could not
be more French if it were in the heart of France. There is nothing
French that is not to be had in it, from snails and _boudin_ to the
_Petit Journal_ and the latest thing in _aperitifs_. The one language
heard is French, when it is not Italian, and the people met there have
an animation that is not a characteristic of Kensington or Bayswater.
The only trouble is that if the snails are of the freshest and the
_aperitifs_ bear the best mark, the quality of the people imported into
the _Quartier_ is more doubtful. Many have left their country for their
country's good. When I made my mission known, caution was recommended to
me by _Madame_ who presides _chez le patissier_, and _Monsieur le Gros_,
as he is familiarly known, who provides me with groceries, and M.
Edmond from whom I buy my vegetables and salads at the _Quatre Saisons_.
England, in the mistaken name of liberty, then opened her door to the
riff-raff of all nations, and French prisons were the emptier for the
indiscriminate hospitality of Soho, or so I was assured by the decent
French who feel the dishonour the _Quartier_ is to France.
Caution served me well in the first instance, for I began my experience
in French charwomen with Marie, a little Bretonne, young, cheerful, and
if, like a true Bretonne, not over clean by nature, so willing to be
bullied into it that she got to scrub floors and polish brasses as if
she liked it. She never sulked, never minded a scolding from Augustine
who scolds us all when we need it, did not care how long she stayed over
time, had a laugh that put one in good humour to hear it, and such a
healthy appetite that she doubled my weekly bill at the baker's. Even
Augustine found no fault. But one fault there was. She was married. In
the course of time a small son arrived who made her laugh more gaily
than ever, though he added a third to the family of a not too brilliant
young man with an income of a pound a week, and I was again without a
charwoman.
Marie helped me to forget caution, and I put down the stories heard in
the _Quartier_ to libel. But I had my awakening. She was succeeded by
another Bretonne, a wild, frightened-looking creature, who, on her
second day with me, when I went into the kitchen to speak to her, sat
down abruptly in the fireplace, the fire by good luck still unlit, and I
did not have to ask an explanation, for it was given me by the empty
bottle on the dresser. Her dull, sottish face haunted me for days
afterwards, and I was oppressed, as I am sure she never was, by the
thought of the blundering fate that had driven her from the windswept
shores of her own Brittany to the foul slums of London.
But I could not take over the mysteries and miseries of Soho with its
charwomen; it was about as much as I could do to keep up with the
procession that followed her. There was no variety of _femme de menage_
in the _Quartier_ that I did not sample, nor one who was not the heroine
of a tragedy or romance, too often not in retrospection or
anticipation, but at its most psychological moment. I remember another
Marie, good-looking, but undeniably elderly, whose thoughts were never
with the floor she was scrubbing or the range she was black-leading,
because they were absorbed in the impecunious youth, half her age, with
whom she had fallen in love in the fashion of to-day, and for whom she
had given up a life of comparative ease with her husband, a well-paid
_chef_. I remember a Marthe, old and withered, whose tales of want were
so heartrending that Augustine lavished upon her all the old clothes of
the establishment and all the "cold pieces" in the kitchen, but who, we
learned afterwards, had a neat little bank-account at the _Credit
Lyonnais_ and a stocking stuffed to overflowing in the bare garret where
she shivered and starved. I remember a trim Julie, whose debts left
behind in France kept her nose to the grindstone, but who found it some
compensation to work for J.: she felt a peculiar sympathy for all
artists, she said, for the good reason, which seemed to us a trifle
remote, that her husband's mother had been foster-mother to _le grand
maitre, M. Detaille_. And there was a Blanche, abandoned by her husband,
and left with three small children to feed, clothe, and bring up
somehow. And there were I have forgotten how many more, each with a
story tragic or pitiful, until it came to Clementine, and her story was
so sordid that when I parted with her I shook the dust of Soho from off
my feet, and imported from the Pas-de-Calais a little girl whose
adventures I hoped were still in the future which, if I could manage it,
would be postponed indefinitely. It may be true that every woman has one
good novel in her life, but I did not see why I should keep on engaging
charwomen to prove it.
_Clementine_
[Illustration: "WHEN THERE IS A SUN ON A WINTER MORNING"]
V
CLEMENTINE
She drifted in from the _Quartier_, but the slovenliness and shabby
finery of her dress made it hard to believe she was French. It was
harder to believe she was grown up when she began to talk, for her voice
was that of a child, a high shrill treble, with a babyish lisp, losing
itself in giggles. And she was so short, so small, that she might easily
have passed herself off as a little girl, but for the marks experience
had left upon her face. I suppose she was not much under thirty when she
first came to me.
How cruel this experience had been she took immediate care to explain.
With her first few words she confided to me that she was hungry, and, in
my embarrassment on hearing it, I engaged her before it occurred to me
to ask for references. Hunger does not exactly qualify a woman, however
willing, for the rough work that must be done in a house, and that it
is so surprising anybody ever should be willing to do. I engaged her to
scrub the floors, black the shoes, clean the fireplaces, polish the
brasses,--to pass every morning, except Sunday, from seven to two, in
fighting the London dirt for me, and struggling through all those
disagreeable and tiresome tasks that not any amount of money would
induce me to struggle through for myself.
As her duties were of a kind usually kept in the domestic background,
and as she brought to them an energy her hunger had not prepared me for,
an occasional _bon jour_ when we met might have been the extent of my
personal relations with her, had it not been for my foolish anxiety as
to the state of her appetite. I had kept house long enough to understand
the mistake of meddling with the affairs of my servants, but Clementine,
with her absurd little voice and giggle, seemed much less a servant than
a child making believe to be one. Besides, I found that, though I can
hear of unknown thousands starving in London without feeling called upon
to interfere, it is another matter to come face to face with a hungry
individual under my own roof.
Augustine, who was then, as she is now, the prop and mainstay of our
life, reassured me; Clementine, it seemed, from the moment of her
arrival, had been eating as voraciously as if she were bent not only on
satisfying the present, but on making up for the past and providing
against the future. She could not pass the interval between eight
o'clock coffee and the noonday lunch without _un petit gouter_ to
sustain her. At all hours she kept munching bits of crust, and after the
heartiest meal she would fall, famished, upon our plates as they came
from the dining-room, devouring any odd scraps left on them, feasting on
cheese-rinds and apple-parings, or, though I regret to have to record
it, licking up the gravy and grease, if there was nothing better.
Indeed, her condition was one of such chronic hunger that Augustine grew
alarmed and thought a doctor should be consulted. I put it down to the
long succession of her lean years, and before the facts convinced me
that Clementine was "all stomach and no soul," her appetite was a great
deal on my mind, and made me far more preoccupied with her than was
wise.
My inquiries into the state of Clementine's appetite were the reason for
many conversations. I have no doubt that at first I encouraged her
confidence, so unfailing was my delight in the lisping prattle,
interrupted by giggles, with which they were made. Even J., who as a
rule is glad to leave all domestic matters to me, would stop and speak
to her for the sake of hearing her talk. And she was a child in so many
other ways. She had the vanity as well as the voice of a little girl.
She was pretty after a fashion, but it always amazed me that anybody who
was so hungry could be so vain. When I am hungry I am too demoralized to
care how I look. But Clementine's respect for her appearance was, if
anything, stronger than her craving for food. She would have gone
without a meal rather than have appeared out of the fashion set by her
London slum. Her hair might be half combed,--that was a question of
personal taste,--but she could not show herself abroad unless it was
brought down over her forehead in the low wave required by the mode of
the moment, and hidden at the back under a flat, overgrown jockey-cap
fastened on with long pins. Her skirt might be--or rather was--frayed at
the bottom, and her jacket worn to shreds, but she could never neglect
to tie round her neck a bit of white tulle or ribbon, however soiled or
faded. Nor could she be persuaded to run the shortest errand before this
tulle or ribbon, taken off for work, had been tied on again, the low
wave of hair patted well in place, and the jockey-cap stuck at the
correct angle.
It was useless to try and hurry her. She did not care how urgent the
errand was to us, her concern was entirely for what people in the street
might think of her if any one detail of her toilet was neglected.
Augustine, who for herself was disdainful of the opinion of _ces sales
Anglais_ and ran her errands _en cheveux_ as if she were still in
France, would scold and thunder and represent to Clementine that people
in the street had something better to do than to think of her at all.
When Augustine scolds, I am always, to be honest, a little afraid. But
Clementine would listen giggling, and refuse to budge an inch until the
last touch had been given to her hair and to her dress. After working
time she could not start for home until she had spent half an hour and
more before the glass in the kitchen arranging her rags. In her own
country her vanity would have been satisfied only by the extreme
neatness and simplicity of her dress. In England she had borrowed the
untidiness and tawdriness that degrade the English poor. But if the
educated French, who ought to know that they are the most civilized
people in the world, grow more English than the English when they become
Anglicized at all, I could scarcely blame Clementine for her weakness.
To one form of her untidiness, however, I objected though, had I known
what was to come of my objection, I would have borne with worse in
silence. She never wore an apron, and, in her stained and tattered
dress, her appearance was disreputable even for a charwoman. She might
be as slovenly as she chose in the street, that was her affair; but it
was mine once she carried her slovenliness inside my four walls,
especially as in chambers servants at work are more apt to be stumbled
across than in a house, and as it was her duty at times to open the
front door. I spoke to her on the subject, suggesting the value of
aprons, if only as defences. The words were scarcely out of my mouth
than I would have given worlds to take them back again. For when
Clementine began to talk the difficulty was to stop her, and long before
she finished explaining why she wore no aprons, I had learned a great
deal more about her than I bargained for: among other things, that her
previous places had been chiefly _chez les femmes_; that she wanted to
give up working for them; that, after leaving her last place, she could
get nothing to do in any _maison bourgeoise_; that she had no money and
was very hungry,--what Clementine's hunger meant she did not have to
tell me; that her little Ernest was also hungry, and also _la vieille
grandmere_; that her little Ernest was her son,--"_Oui, Madame, je
serais franche, j'ai un fils mais pas un mari_"; that _la vieille
grandmere_ was an old woman she had taken in, partly to look after him,
partly out of sheer shiftlessness; that they could not starve; and
that--well--all her aprons were _au clou_.
This sudden introduction of her little Ernest was a trifle
disconcerting, but it was none of my business how many people depended
on Clementine, nor how many of her belongings were in pawn. I had vowed
never again to give sympathy, much less help, to anybody who worked for
me, since I knew to my cost the domestic disaster to which benevolence
of this sort may lead. I gave her advice instead. I recommended greater
thrift, and insisted that she must save from her wages enough to get her
aprons out of pawn immediately, though I left it to a more accomplished
political economist than I to show how, with three to provide for, she
could save out of what barely provided for one. However, she agreed. She
said, "_Oui, Madame, Madame a raison_"; and for the next week or two I
did my best to shut my eyes to the fact that she still went apronless.
At this juncture, her little Ernest fell ill; now that I had heard of
him, he took good care that I should not forget him. For three days
there was no sign of Clementine; I had no word from her. At the end of
the first day, I imagined a horrid tragedy of starvation; by the second,
I was reproaching myself as an accessory; by the evening of the third, I
could stand it no longer, and Augustine was despatched to find out what
was wrong. The child's illness was not very serious, but, incidentally,
Augustine found out a good deal besides. Clementine's room, in an
unlovely Workmen's Building, was unexpectedly clean, but to keep it
clean was the easier because it was so bare. Her bed, which she shared
with her little Ernest, was a mattress on the floor in one corner, with
not a sheet or a blanket to cover it; _la vieille grandmere_ slept in a
nest of newspapers in another corner, with a roll of rags for a pillow.
Bedsteads, sheets, covers, had gone the way of the aprons,--they, too,
were _au clou_. The thrift I had advised scarcely met so acute a case of
poverty. I was not at all anxious to burden myself with Clementine's
destitution in addition to her hunger, and to get it out of my mind, I
tried, with my usual generosity, to hand over the difficulty to J. I
cannot say that he accepted it as unconditionally as I could have
wished, for if he was positive that something must be done at once, he
had as little doubt that it was for me to discover the way of doing it.
What I did was simple, though I dare say contrary to every scientific
principle of charity. I told her to bring me her pawn-tickets and I
would go over them with her. She brought them, a pocketful, the next
day, throwing them down on the table before me and sorting them as if
for a game of cards, with many giggles, and occasional cries of
"_Tiens!_ this is my old blue apron"; or, "_Mon Dieu!_ this is my nice
warm grey blanket." Her delight could not have been greater had it been
the apron or the blanket itself. All told, her debts amounted to no very
ruinous sum, and I arranged to pay them off and give her a fresh start
if, on her side, she was prepared to work harder and practise stricter
economy. I pointed out that as I did not need her in the afternoon, she
had a half day to dispose of, and that she should hunt for something to
fill it. She promised everything I asked, and more, and I hoped that
this was the last of my sharing her burdens.
It might have been, but for her little Ernest. I do believe that child
was born for no other end than my special annoyance. His illness was
only the beginning. When he was well, she brought him to see me one
afternoon, nominally that he might thank me, but really, I fear, in hope
of an extra sixpence or shilling. He was five years old and fairly large
and well developed for his age, but there could never have been, there
never could be, a less attractive child. His face had none of the
prettiness of his mother's, though all the shrewdness: in knowledge of
the gutter he looked fifty. Then and afterwards, ashamed as I was of it,
I instinctively shrank from him. Anywhere, except in the comic ballad, a
"horribly fast little cad" of a baby is as tragic a figure as I care to
encounter, and to me the little Ernest was all the more so because of
the repugnance with which he inspired me. Clementine made a great
pretence of adoring him. She carried a sadly battered photograph of him
in her pocket, and would pull it out at intervals when anybody was
looking, and kiss it rapturously. Otherwise her admiration took the form
of submitting to his tyranny. She could do far less with him than he
with her, and _la vieille grandmere_ was as wax in his rough little
hands. His mornings, while his mother was at work, were spent in the
grimy London courts and streets, where children swarm like vermin and
babies grow old in vice. In the afternoon, after she left our chambers,
he dragged her through the _Quartier_, from shop to shop, she with her
giggling "_Bon jour, M. Edmond_" or "_Comment ca va, Madame
Pierre_"--for though we live in London we are not of it, but of
France,--he with his hand held out for the cakes and oranges and pennies
he knew would drop into it: a pair of the most accomplished beggars in
London.
As time went on, and Clementine did not find the extra work for her
afternoons that she had promised to find, I realized that she would keep
on wasting her free half day, and that he would go from bad to worse if
he were not got away from her and out of the streets. I should have
known better than to occupy myself with him, but his old shrewd face
haunted me until I remonstrated with Clementine, and represented to her
the future she was preparing for him. If she could not take care of him,
she should send him to school where there were responsible people who
could. I suggested a charitable institution of some kind in France where
he would be brought up among her people. But this she fought against
with a determination I could not understand, until it came out that she
had profited by the English law which forces a father to contribute to
his illegitimate child's support, and from Ernest's she received weekly
three shillings and sixpence. She much preferred to risk her little
Ernest's morals than an income that came of itself, and she feared she
could no longer claim it if he were beyond the reach of the English
courts. She was as doubtful of the result if he were got into a charity
school in England, for if he cost her nothing the father might not be
compelled to pay. She could be obstinate on occasions, and I was in
despair. But by some fortunate chance, a convent at Hampstead was heard
of where the weekly charge would just be covered by the father's
allowance, and as Clementine could find no argument against it, she had
to give in.
I breathed freely again, but I was not to be let off so easily. It was
simpler to get mixed up in Clementine's affairs than to escape from
them. At the convent, the nuns had learned wisdom, and they demanded to
be paid weekly in advance. I must have waited until Judgment Day if I
had depended upon Clementine to be in advance with anything, and in
self-defence I offered to pay the first month. But this settled, at once
there was another obstacle to dispose of. A trousseau was required with
the little Ernest, and he had no clothes except those on his back. I
provided the trousseau. Then the little Ernest rebelled and refused to
hear of school unless he was supplied with a top, a mechanical boat, a
balloon, and I scarcely remember what besides. I supplied them.
Clementine, on her side, began to look harassed and careworn, and I
never ventured to ask what conditions he exacted of her, but it was a
relief to everybody when, after much shopping and innumerable coaxings
and bribes and scenes, at last she got her little Ernest off her hands.
But if he was off hers, she was more than ever on mine. He gave her a
perpetual subject of conversation. There were days when I seemed to hear
her prattling in the kitchen from the moment she came until the moment
she left, and to a good deal of her prattle I had to listen. She made it
her duty to report his progress to me, and the trouble was that she
could never get through without confiding far more about her own, in the
past as in the present. She might begin innocently with the fit of his
new clothes, but as likely as not she would end with revelations of
unspeakable horror. At least I could not find fault with Clementine's
confidences for their mildness or monotony. In her high, shrill, lisping
treble, as if she were reciting a lesson, and with the air of a naughty
girl trying to keep back her giggles, she would tell me the most
appalling details of her life.
I had not dreamed that out of Zola or Defoe a woman could go through
such adventures, or that, if she could, it would be possible for her to
emerge a harmless charwoman doing the commonplace work of a household
which I flatter myself is respectable, for a few shillings a week. Of
poverty, of evil, of shame, of disgrace, there was nothing she had not
known; and yet as I saw her busy and happy over her scrubbing and
washing and polishing in our chambers, I could have believed she had
never done anything less guileless in all her thirty years. She had a
curiously impersonal way of relating these adventures, as if they were
no concern of hers whatever. The most dramatic situations seemed to have
touched her as little as the every-day events in her sordid struggle for
bread, though she was not without some pride in the variety of her
experience. When Augustine warned her that her idleness was preparing
for her a bed on the Embankment and daily food in a soup-kitchen, "_Eh
bien?_ why not?" she giggled; "I have been on the streets, I have been
in prison, I have been in the workhouse, I have seen everything--_j'ai
tout vu, moi!_ Why not that too?"
With her, there was no shrinking from the workhouse, as with the
respectable poor, "_Ce n'est pas fait pour les chiens_," she reasoned,
and looked upon it as an asylum held in reserve.
Her boast that she had seen everything was no exaggeration, her
everything meaning the hideous side of life which those who see only the
other try so hard to shut their eyes to. "What would you have?" she
asked me more than once, "I was a bastard and a foundling"; as if with
such a beginning, it would have been an inconsistency on her part to
turn out any better than she was. That she had started life as a little
lost package of humanity, left at the door of a house for _les enfants
trouves_ not far from Boulogne, never caused her shame and regret. From
a visit paid by her mother to the Institution during her infancy, there
could remain no doubt of her illegitimacy, but it was a source of
pleasure to her, and also of much agreeable speculation.
"How can I be sure," she said to me, "that, though my mother was a cook,
my father might not have been a _prefet_, or even a prince?"
For practical purposes she knew no parents save the peasants who brought
her up. The State in France, thrifty as the people, makes the children
abandoned to it a source of profit to the hard-working poor. Clementine
was put out to nurse. The one spark of genuine affection she ever showed
was for the woman to whose care she fell, and of whom she always spoke
as _ma mere_, with a tenderness very different from her giggling
adoration of the little Ernest. Incessant labour was the rule in _ma
mere's_ house, and food was not too abundant, but of what there was
Clementine had her share, though I fancy the scarcity then was the
origin of the terrible hunger that consumed her throughout her life.
About this hunger her story revolved, so that, while she talked of the
past, I could seldom get far away from it. She recalled little else of
the places the Institution found for her as servant. The State in France
is as wise as it is thrifty, and does not demoralize its foundlings by
free gifts, but, when the time comes, makes them work, appropriating
their wages until it has been paid back the money they have cost it.
Clementine went into service young. She also went into it hungry, and
life became a never-ending struggle for food. In one place she was
reduced to such straits that she devoured a dish of poisoned meat
prepared for the stray cats of the neighbourhood, and, though it brought
her almost to death's door, she could still recall it as a feast. In
another, a small country grocery store, she would steal down in the
night, trembling with fear, to hunt for bits of candy and crackers, and,
safe in bed again, would have to fight for them with the rats that
shared her garret. And her tale of this period grew more miserable and
squalid with every new stage, until she reached the dreadful climax
when, still a child herself, she brought a little girl into the world to
share her hunger. She had the courage to laugh when she told me of her
wandering, half-starved, back to _la bonne mere_, who took her in when
her time came, and kept the baby. She could laugh, too, when she
recalled the wrath of _M. le Directeur_ at the Institution, who sent for
her, and scolded her, giving her a few sharp raps with his cane.
If to Clementine her tragedy was a laughing matter, it was not for me to
weep over it. But I was glad when she got through with this period and
came to the next, which had in it more of pure comedy than enlivened
most of her confidences. For once she was of age, and her debt to the
Institution settled in full, she was free not only to work for herself,
but to claim a percentage of the money she had been making during the
long years of apprenticeship; and this percentage amounting to five
hundred francs, and Clementine never having seen so much money before,
her imagination was stirred by the vastness of her wealth, and she
insisted on being paid in five-franc pieces. She had to get a basket to
hold them all, and with it on her arm she started off in search of
adventure. This, I think, was the supreme moment in her life.
Her adventures began in the third-class carriage of a train for
Boulogne, which might seem a mild beginning to most people, but was full
of excitement for Clementine. She dipped her hands into the silver, and
jingled it, and displayed it to everybody, with the vanity of a child
showing off its new frock. The only wonder was that any of the
five-franc pieces were still in the basket when she got to Boulogne.
There they drew to her a group of young men and women who were bound for
England to make their fortunes, and who persuaded her to join them. Her
head was not completely turned by her wealth, for she crossed with them
on the _bateau aux lapins_, which she explained as the cheapest boat
upon which anything but beasts and vegetables could find passage. At
Folkestone, where they landed, she had no difficulty in getting a place
as scullery maid. But washing up was as dull in England as in France, a
poor resource for anybody with a basketful of five-franc pieces. One of
the young men who had crossed with her agreed that it was a waste of
time to work when there was money to spend, and they decided for a life
of leisure together. The question of marriage apparently did not enter
into the arrangement. They were content to remain _des unis_, in M.
Rod's phrase, and their union was celebrated by a few weeks of riotous
living. The chicken their own Henry IV wished for all his subjects
filled the daily pot, beer flowed like water, they could have paid for
cake had bread failed; for the first time in her life Clementine forgot
what it was to be hungry.
It was delightful while it lasted, and I do not believe that she ever
regretted having had her fling when the chance came. But the basket grew
lighter and lighter, and all too soon barely enough five-franc pieces
were left in it to carry them up to London. There, naturally, they found
their way to the _Quartier_. The man picked up an odd job or two,
Clementine scrubbed, washed, waited, did any and everything by which a
few pence could be earned. The pot was now empty, beer ceased to flow,
bread sometimes was beyond their means, and she was hungrier than ever.
In the course of the year her little Ernest was added to the family, and
there was no _bonne mere_ in London to relieve her of the new burden.
For a while Clementine could not work; when she could, there was no work
to be had. Nor could the man get any more jobs, though I fancy his hunt
for them was not too strenuous. Life became a stern, bread-hunting sort
of business, and I think at moments Clementine almost wished herself
back in the garret with the rats, or in the garden where dishes of
poisoned meat were sometimes to be stolen. The landlord threatened,
starvation stared them in the face. Hunger is ever the incentive to
enterprise, and Ernest's father turned Clementine on the streets.
I must do her the justice to say that, of all her adventures, this was
the one least to her liking. That she had fallen so low did not shock
her; she looked upon it as part of the inevitable scheme of things: but
left to herself, she would have preferred another mode of earning her
living. After I had been told of this period of horrors, I could never
hear Clementine's high, shrill treble and giggle without a shudder, for
they were then part of her stock-in-trade, and she went on the streets
in short skirts with her hair down her back. For months she wallowed in
the gutter, at the mercy of the lowest and the most degraded, insulted,
robbed, despised, and if she attempted to rebel, bullied back to her
shameful trade by a man who had no thought save for the few pitiful
pence she could bring to him out of it. The only part of the affair that
pleased her was the ending--in prison after a disgraceful street brawl.
She was really at heart an adventuress, and the opportunity to see for
the first time the inside of the _panier a salade_, as she called the
prison van, was welcomed by her in the light of a new and exciting
adventure. Then, in prison itself, the dress with the arrows could be
adjusted becomingly, warders and fellow prisoners could be made to laugh
by her antics, and if she could have wished for more to eat, it was a
great thing not to have to find the means to pay for what she got.
She was hardly out of prison when Ernest's father chanced upon a woman
who could provide for him more liberally, and Clementine was again a
free agent. The streets knew her no more, though for an interval the
workhouse did. This was the crisis when, with the shrewdness acquired in
the London slums, she learned something of the English law to her own
advantage, and through the courts compelled the father to contribute to
the support of his son. The weekly three shillings and sixpence paid for
a room. For food she had to work. With prison behind her, she was afraid
to ask for a place in respectable houses, and I should not care to
record the sinks of iniquity and squalid dens where her shrill treble
and little girl's giggle were heard. Ernest was dumped down of a morning
upon any friendly neighbour who would keep an eye on him, until, somehow
or other, _la vieille grandmere_ appeared upon the scene and Clementine
once more had two to feed and the daily problem of her own hunger to
face.
Her responsibilities never drove her to work harder than was absolutely
necessary. "We must all toil or steal," Carlyle says. But Clementine
knew better. She could have suggested a third alternative, for she had
reduced begging to a fine art. Her scent was as keen for charitable
associations as a pig's for truffles, and she could tell to a minute the
appointed time of their alms-giving, and to a penny the value of their
alms. She would, no matter when, drop regular work at the risk of losing
it, to rush off after a possible charity. There was a _Societe_--I never
knew it by any other name--that, while she was with me, drew her from my
kitchen floor or my luncheon dishes as surely as Thursday came round,
and the clock struck one. Why it existed she never made quite clear to
me,--I doubt if she had an idea why, herself. It was enough for her that
the poor French in London were under its special charge, and that, when
luck was with her, she might come away with a loaf of bread, or an order
for coals, or, if she played the beggar well, as much as a shilling.
She kept up a brisk correspondence with "_Madame la Baronne de
Rothschild_," whose sole mission in life she apparently believed was to
see her out of her difficulties. _La Baronne_, on one occasion, gave her
a sovereign, Heaven knows why, unless as a desperate measure to close
the correspondence; but a good part of it went in postage for letters
representing why the bestowal of sovereigns upon Clementine should
become habitual. Stray agents, presumably from _la Baronne_, would pay
me mysterious visits, to ask if Clementine were a deserving object of
benevolence, and I was exposed to repeated cross-examination in her
regard. She made a point of learning the hours when the _chefs_ left the
kitchens of the big hotels and restaurants near the _Quartier_, and
also of finding out who among them might be looked to for a few odd
pence for the sake of Ernest's father, at one time a washer of dishes,
or who, after a _coup de vin_ or an _absinthe_, grew generous with their
money. She had gauged the depth of every tender heart in the _Quartier_
and the possibility of scraps and broken meats at every shop and
eating-place. And no one understood better how to beg, how to turn on
the limelight and bring out in melodramatic relief the enormity of her
need and destitution. The lisping treble, the giggle, the tattered
clothes, _la vieille grandmere_, the desertion of the little Ernest's
father, the little Ernest himself, were so many valuable assets. Indeed,
she appreciated the value of the little Ernest so well that once she
would have had me multiply him by twelve when she asked me to vouch for
her poverty before some new society disposed to be friendly. If luck
went against her, and nothing came of her begging, she was not
discouraged. Begging was a game of chance with her,--her Monte Carlo or
Little Horses,--and she never murmured over her failures, but with her
faculty for making the best of all things, she got amusement out of
them as well as out of her successes.
In the face of these facts, I cannot deny that Clementine's "character"
was not exactly the sort most people expect when they engage a servant.
But I would not turn adrift a mangy dog or a lost cat whom I had once
taken in. And she did her work very well, with a thoroughness the
English charwoman would have despised, never minding what that work was,
so long as she had plenty to eat and could prepare by an elaborate
toilet for every errand she ran. Her morals could do us small harm, and
for a while I was foolish enough to hope ours might do her some good. I
realize now that nothing could have improved Clementine; she was not
made that way; but at the time she was too wholly unlike any woman I had
ever come in contact with, for me to see that the difference lay in her
having no morals to help. She was not immoral, but unmoral. Right and
wrong were without meaning for her. Her standards, if she could be said
to have any, were comfort and discomfort. Virtue and vice were the same
to her, so long as she was not unpleasantly interfered with. This was
the explanation of her past, as of her frankness in disclosing it, and
she was too much occupied in avoiding present pain to bother about the
future by cultivating economy, or ambition, or prudence. An animal would
take more thought for the morrow than Clementine. Of all the people I
have ever come across, she had the most reason to be weary-laden, but
instead of "tears in her eyes," there was always a giggle on her lips.
"_La colere, c'est la folie_," she assured me, and it was a folly she
avoided with marked success. Perhaps she was wise, undoubtedly she was
the happier for it.
Unfortunately for me, I had not her callousness or philosophy,--I am not
yet quite sure which it was,--and if she would not think for herself, I
was the more disturbed by the necessity of thinking for her. It was an
absurd position. There I was, positively growing grey in my endeavours
to drag her up out of the abyss of poverty into which she had sunk, and
there she was, cheerful and happy, if she could only continue to enjoy
_la bonne cuisine de Madame_. I never knew her to make the slightest
attempt to profit by what I, or anyone else, would do for her. I
remember, when _Madame la Baronne_ sent her the sovereign, she stayed at
home a week, and then wrote to me as her excuse, "_J'ai ete rentiere
toute la semaine. Maintenant je n'ai plus un penny, il faut m'occuper du
travail._" I had not taken her things out of pawn before they were
pawned again, and the cast-off clothes she begged from me followed as
promptly. Her little Ernest, after all my trouble, stayed at the convent
six weeks,--the month I paid for and two weeks that Clementine somehow
wheedled out of the sisters,--and then he was back as of old, picking up
his education in the London streets. I presented her once with a good
bed I had no more use for, and, to make space for it, she went into debt
and moved from her one room near Tottenham Court Road to two rooms and a
higher rent near the Lower Marsh, and was robbed on the way by the man
she hired to move her. When she broke anything, and she frequently did,
she was never perturbed: "_Madame est forte pour payer_," or "_l'argent
est fait pour rouler_," was her usual answer to my reproaches. To try
to show her the road to economy was to plunge her into fresh
extravagance.
Nor did I advance matters by talking to her seriously. I recall one
special effort to impress upon her the great misery she was preparing
for herself by her shiftlessness. I had given her a pair of shoes,
though I had vowed a hundred times to give her nothing more, and I used
the occasion for a lecture. She seemed eager to interrupt once or twice,
and I flattered myself my words were having their effect. And now what
had she to say? I asked when my eloquence was exhausted. She giggled:
"Would _Madame_ look at her feet in _Madame's_ shoes? _Jamais je ne me
suis vue si bien chaussee_," and she was going straight to the
_Quartier_ "_pour eblouir le monde_," she said. When Augustine took her
in hand, though Augustine's eloquence had a vigour mine could not boast
of, the result was, if anything, more discouraging. Clementine, made
bold by custom, would turn a hand-spring or dance a jig, or go through
the other accomplishments she had picked up in the slums.
If I could discover any weak spot by which I could reach her, I used to
think something might be gained, and I lost much time in studying how to
work upon her emotions. But her emotions were as far to seek as her
morals. Even family ties, usually so strong in France, had no hold upon
her. If she adored her little Ernest, it was because he brought her in
three shillings and sixpence a week. There was no adoration for her
little girl who occasionally wrote from the Pas-de-Calais and asked her
for money. I saw one of the child's letters in which she implored
Clementine to pay for a white veil and white shoes; she was going to
make her first communion, and the good adopted mother could pay for no
more than the gown. The First Communion is the greatest event in the
French child's life; there could be no deeper disgrace than not to be
dressed for it, and the appeal must have moved every mother who read it,
except Clementine. To her it was comic, and she disposed of it with
giggles: "_C'est drole quand meme, d'avoir une fille de cet age_," and
funnier that she could be expected to pay for anything for anybody.
But if her family awoke in her no sentiment, her "home" did, though it
was of the kind that Lamb would have classed with the "no homes." The
tenacity with which she clung to it was her nearest approach to strong
feeling. I suppose it was because she had so long climbed the stairs of
others that she took such complete satisfaction in the two shabby little
rooms to which she gave the name. I had a glimpse of them, never to be
forgotten, once when she failed to come for two days, and I went to look
her up. The street reeked with the smell of fried fish and onions; it
was filled with barrows of kippers and haddocks and whelks; it was lined
with old-clothes shops; it was crowded with frowzy women and horribly
dirty children. And the halls and stairs of the tenement where she lived
were black with London smoke and greasy with London dirt. I did not feel
clean afterwards until I had had a bath, and it was never again as easy
to reconcile myself to Clementine's daily reappearance in our midst. But
to her the rooms were home, and for that reason she would have stayed on
in a grimier and more malodorous neighbourhood, if such a thing could
be, in preference to living in the cleanest and freshest London
workhouse at the rate-payers' expense. Her objection to going into
service except as a charwoman was that she would have to stay the night.
"_Je ne serais pas chez moi_"; and much as she prized her comfort, it
was not worth the sacrifice. On the contrary, she was prepared to
sacrifice her comfort, dear as it was to her, that she might retain her
home. She actually went to the length of taking in as companion an
Italian workman she met by accident, not because he offered to marry
her, which he did not, but because, according to his representations, he
was making twenty-five shillings a week and would help to pay the rent.
"_Je serais chez moi_," was now her argument, and for food she could
continue to work or beg. He would be a convenience, _voila tout_. The
Italian stayed a week. He lounged in bed all morning while she was at
work, he smoked all afternoon. At the end of the week Clementine sent
him flying. "_Je suis bete et je mourrais bete_," was her explanation to
me; but she was not _bete_ to the point of adding an idle fourth to her
burden, and, as a result, being turned out of the home she had taken him
in to preserve.
Clementine had been with us more than two years when the incident of the
Italian occurred, and by this time I had become so accustomed to her and
to her adventures that I was not as shocked as perhaps I should have
been. It was not a way out of difficulties I could approve, but
Clementine was not to be judged by my standards, and I saw no reason to
express my disapproval by getting rid of her just when she most needed
to stay. In her continually increasing need to stay, I endured so much
besides that, at the end of her third year in our chambers, I was
convinced that she would go on doing my rough work as long as I had
rough work to be done. More than once I came to the end of my patience
and dismissed her. But it was no use. In the course of a couple of
weeks, or at the most three, she was back scrubbing my floors and
polishing my brasses.
The first time she lost her place with me, I sympathized to such an
extent that I was at some pains to arrange a scheme to send her to
France. But Clementine, clinging to the pleasures of life in the Lower
Marsh, agreed to everything I proposed, and was careful to put every
hindrance in the way of carrying out my plans. Twice I went to the
length of engaging another woman, but either the other woman did not
suit or else she did not stay, and I had to ask Clementine to return. On
her side, she made various efforts to leave me, bored, I fancy, by the
monotony of regular work, but they were as unsuccessful as mine to turn
her off. After one disappearance of three weeks, she owned up frankly to
having been again _chez les femmes_ whose pay was better; after a
second, she said she had been ill in the workhouse which I doubted;
after all, she was as frank in admitting that nowhere else did she enjoy
_la bonne cuisine de Madame_, and that this was the attraction to which
I was indebted for her fidelity.
It may have been kindness, it may have been weakness, it may have been
simply necessity, that made me so lenient on these occasions; I do not
attempt to decide. But I cannot blame Clementine for thinking it was
because she was indispensable. I noticed that gradually in small ways
she began to take advantage of our good-nature. For one thing there was
now no limit to her conversation. I did not spend my time in the kitchen
and could turn a deaf ear to it, but I sometimes wondered if Augustine
would not be the next to disappear. She would also often relieve the
tedium of her several tasks by turning the handsprings in which she was
so accomplished, or dancing the jig popular in the Lower Marsh, or by
other performances equally reprehensible in the kitchen of _une maison
bourgeoise_, as she was pleased to describe our chambers. She never lost
a chance of rushing to the door if tradespeople rang, or talking with
the British Workmen we were obliged, for our sins, to employ. Their
bewilderment, stolid Britons as they were, would have been funny, had
not her manner of exciting it been so discreditable. She was even
caught--I was spared the knowledge until much later--turning her
handsprings for a select company of plasterers and painters. Then I
could see that she accepted anything we might bestow upon her as her
due, and was becoming critical of the value and quality of the gift. I
can never forget on one occasion when J. was going away, and he gave her
a few shillings, the expression with which she looked first at the money
and then at him as though insulted by the paltriness of the amount. More
unbearable was the unfair use she made of her little Ernest.
_La vieille grandmere_, who had wandered by chance into her life,
wandered out of it as casually, or so Clementine said as an argument to
induce me to receive that odious little boy into my kitchen during her
hours of work; she had nobody to take care of him, she could not leave
him alone. Here, happily for myself, I had the strength to draw the
line. But when this argument failed, she found another far more
harrowing. She took the opportunity of my stumbling across her in our
little hall one day at noon to tell me that, as I would not let her
bring him with her, she left him every day, carefully locked up out of
harm's way, alone in her rooms. A child of seven, as he was then, locked
up to get into any mischief he could invent, and, moreover, a child with
a talent for mischief! that was too much, and I sent her flying home
without giving her time to eat her lunch or linger before the glass, and
I was haunted for the rest of the day with the thought of all the
terrible things that might have happened to him. Naturally nothing did
happen, nothing ever does happen to children like the little Ernest, and
Clementine, dismayed by the loss of her lunch and the interference with
her toilet, never ventured upon this argument a second time. But she
found another almost as bad, for she informed me that, thanks to my
interference, she was compelled to leave him again to run the streets as
he would, and she hinted only too plainly that for whatever evil might
befall him, I was responsible. Our relations were at this pleasant
stage, and her little Ernest was fast developing into a monstrous
Frankenstein wholly of my own raising, when one day she arrived with a
new air of importance and announced her approaching marriage.
I was enchanted. I had not permitted myself to feel the full weight of
the burden Clementine was heaping upon my shoulders until now it seemed
on the point of slipping from them, and never were congratulations more
sincere than mine. As she spared me none of her confidence, every detail
of her courtship and her prospects was soon at my disposal. In the
course of her regular round of the kitchen doors of the _Quartier_ she
had picked up an Englishman who washed dishes in a restaurant. He was
not much over twenty, he earned no less than eighteen shillings a week,
and he had asked her to marry him. She accepted him, as she had accepted
the Italian, because he would pay the rent; the only difference was that
her new admirer proposed the form of companionship which is not lightly
broken. "_Cette fois je crois que cela sera vrai--que l'affaire ne
tombera pas dans l'eau_," she said, remembering the deep waters which,
in her recent affair, had gone over her head. "_Mon petit Anglais_"--her
name for him--figured in her account as a model of propriety. He had a
strict regard for morals. He objected to her working _chez les femmes_,
and expressed his desire that she should remain in our service, despite
the loss to their income. He c
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