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Title: The book of Martha

Author: Mrs. Dowdall

Illustrator: Augustus John

Release date: July 15, 2023 [eBook #71196]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Duckworth & Co, 1913

Credits: Carla Foust and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF MARTHA ***

THE BOOK OF MARTHA

BY THE

HON. MRS. DOWDALL

WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY

AUGUSTUS JOHN

LONDON

DUCKWORTH & CO.

HENRIETTA ST. COVENT GARDEN

1913

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

|  |  | Page
CHAPTER | I. | MARTHA | 1
| II. | THE COOK | 13
| III. | THE HOUSEMAID | 25
| IV. | TRADESMEN | 36
| V. | THE DINNER PARTY | 43
| VI. | THE JOB GARDENER | 52
| VII. | THE DOCTOR | 61
| VIII. | CHILDREN | 74
| IX. | THE SCHOOLROOM | 92
| X. | THE CHARWOMAN | 102
| XI. | HUSBANDS | 111
| XII. | CHRISTMAS | 127
| XIII. | THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR | 140
| XIV. | HOUSE-MOVING | 150
| XV. | SHOPPING IN LONDON | 164
| XVI. | THE COUNTRY HOUSE | 174
| XVII. | THE BUTLER | 183
| XVIII. | THE DRESSMAKER | 193
| XIX. | THE LADY’S MAID | 205
| XX. | RELATIONS-IN-LAW | 214
| XXI. | GENIUS | 225
| XXII. | CHARITY | 235
| XXIII. | FOREIGN TRAVEL | 248

CHAPTER I: MARTHA

This book ought by rights to have borne Ruth’s name on the cover instead of mine. Of the fifty years I have lived the first twenty were scattered and lost. The remaining thirty were gathered as they came, and threaded on a wire which formed them into a serviceable chain; that wire was Ruth. She has now broken off and formed other ties, therefore the years that remain will probably be scattered like the first, for there can be no second Ruth. It may be, even, that I shall be driven to spend my declining days in an hotel. Meantime I have a record of experiences common to many Marthas.

When I decided on the title it happened to be Ruth’s day out. I had intended, as a matter of course, to submit the name to her, and then, suddenly, a wave of mutiny swept over me.

“The book at least shall be mine,” I said to myself. “Ruth has taken possession of my house, my tradespeople, my children, and, what was dearer still, my leisure. What little freedom I have enjoyed has been procured by a wearisome amount of guile, but my pen is still my own and shall remain in my possession.”

It is true that David would never have burst into immortal song had it not been for his persecutors who goaded him to lament yet his works are published under his name and not under that of the Bulls of Bashan. Therefore I call this the Book of Martha and not of Ruth.

When I married, thirty years ago, I desired to lead a simpler life than is led by most people. So many women seem to me like parasites living on the combined labour of husband and servants. My friend Elizabeth Tique, with whom I often stayed, kept a cook, three maids, and an odd man, and these wretches somehow contrived to fill every inch of the small house and garden. It was almost impossible to go into any room without finding some one aggravatingly dressed in spotted cotton, rustling along with either a damp cloth or a carpet-sweeper or a tray laden with food. On one occasion, I remember, I went to my bedroom to write letters, having left one of the cotton-backs clearing away the breakfast, and the other, she of the damp cloth, in possession of the drawing-room. By some marvellous sleight of foot they both contrived to reach my room before me, and were busily engaged there when I arrived.

“Don’t go away,” I said pleasantly, and gathering up my blotting-pad and papers I returned to the drawing-room to write. I was in the full swing of inspiration when the door was burst open by a third skirmisher in the hated uniform. She made her offence far worse by pretending that her visit was only one of wanton light-heartedness.

“It’s all right, Miss,” she said, “I can come back by and by; it was only to do the grate.”

I swallowed the word that rose to my lips—Elizabeth says it doesn’t do for the servants to know we say these things—and took my papers to the garden; but my letter was no longer witty. It was full of short disjointed sentences and tedious information. In a few minutes I was startled by a terrific rumbling on the gravel. The odd man was approaching to mow the lawn.

“Sorry to disturb you, Miss; I shan’t be above ’alf an hour,” was the way he put it. There are many possible variations of the same crime.

“Elizabeth,” I said as politely as I could when she came out on her way to the shops, “have you a wine-cellar?”

“Yes, a beauty. Why?”

“Do you mind telling me—is this the day for cleaning it out?”

“What nonsense; we don’t clean it out.”

“Then may I sit in it?”

Elizabeth was busy with the fish, but she told me where the key was, and I went down with a candle. It was cool and quiet and cobwebby, and I got on nicely. I was just getting my second wind and had refilled my fountain pen when I heard a voice—that of my enemy with the cloth—outside the door.

“This is the cellar, Mr. Brown. I think master wished the port put in the second bin from the left. I’ll just give it a wipe out if you’ll excuse me.”

I tried the coach-house, but it happened to be George’s day for swilling it after he had finished the grass, and when I found a place in the greenhouse away from the drip he came and put manure on the tomatoes.

I was engaged to be married to a man with the usual professional income, and I began to see very clearly that if I was to be happy in a small house the number of people living in it must be reduced as much as possible. That night when the servants were all in bed I took up my letters again and explained this theory to James. He agreed with me.

We were married early in January, and went into our house a week later. I had engaged two maids, both of whom had been recommended to me as thoroughly capable, and likely to bring light into the dark places of my inexperience. They did indeed; I saw all its weak points very clearly in the lurid glare of their bright ideas. But that was later. On our first day at home I went down to the kitchen as soon as my husband had gone out. I picked my way through the cinders, crumbs, bacon-rind, and unclassified fluff upon the floor, and stood for a moment blistering before the range where a blast-furnace raged behind the bars. The remains of breakfast, which suggested the snatched meal of a burglar, prepared in haste and darkness, were on the table, from which Clara, the housemaid, rose and made a slippery exit after the manner of a mouse.

I murmured something polite about being too soon, to which the cook replied that they were a bit late on account of the range, and the curtain rose on a farce which will run as long as I keep a cook.

The bell at the back door then fell into the first of a long and distressing series of convulsions, and Ruth went to its assistance.

“Pleas’m, the butcher,” she reported.

There are many ways of saying “Pleas’m, the butcher,” and Ruth’s was most discouraging. I knew at a glance that she had not properly masticated her breakfast, and that the arrival of the butcher was not unlike that of twins at the end of a numerous and undesired family. She looked as though her morning had been made up of a series of unwelcome events and this were the last straw.

“Tell him to call again,” I said hastily; “this is an absurd time to come.” I was going to retire when a second convulsion shook the house to its foundations.

“Do you wish fish’m?” said Ruth, just as if I had sent the fish. I hedged and tried to shift the blame on her.

“Do we want fish?”

“Just as you wish’m,” she said, standing still in front of me.

She made no attempt to suggest anything.

“I’ll come,” said I, “and see him myself.”

I found a pert-looking male child writing his name on the pantry window-sill and whistling.

“What fish have you got?” I asked.

“Plaiceakecoddensole,” he replied, eyeing me up and down.

I ordered something—anything to convey the idea that I spoke with knowledge and deliberation. The greengrocer behaved like an uncle, and told me that, whatever else I went without, a nice cauliflower was a thing I should never regret buying. I expected him to add that it would last a lifetime and clean again as good as new.

During this time Ruth had disappeared into the back kitchen, whence she brought what at first I took to be a bucket of castor-oil and a dead rabbit. With the rabbit (which turned out to be her favourite dishcloth) she then deluged the table from the contents of the bucket, and the kitchen was filled with a warm smell of wet onions. When she had “cleaned up” as she called it—which meant that after her septic operation on the table she swept the etceteras on the floor into a heap and drew the fender over them—we discussed the question of food.

One of the trials of my life is the necessity for devising three relays of food immediately after a good breakfast. It makes me feel as though I were the owner of a yard full of turkeys, whom it is my painful duty to prepare for a daily Christmas. James enjoys his breakfast and forgets about it, returning after a hard day’s work to a dinner as unpremeditated as that which the ravens brought to Elijah; not so mine, which brings with it haunting memories of yesterday’s sorrows. I cannot share his enthusiasm for a vol-au-vent which I have so often met before in less happy circumstances; I feel about it as an undertaker might who should meet his clients masquerading in a ballroom. James came home at one o’clock, and we went indoors at once, as he has only a short time to spare in the middle of the day. The table was not laid.

“Clara,” I said, “do you know the time? We must have luncheon at once.”

“I think Ruth’s just sending it up now, m’m,” she answered. “The meat only came ten minutes ago.”

James spilled a good deal in his haste, but what little he was able to eat in eight minutes he was extremely good tempered about, and praised warmly. A great many men would have behaved in a manner that might have made me live and die a bad housekeeper. If he had been sulky, or violent, or sarcastic, or resigned, or dignified, I should have taken no steps whatever. My mind would have settled upon a touching picture of the sorrows of women, and how their life is one long martyrdom to the habits of men and the want of habits of domestic servants, and I should have shrugged my shoulders and acquired tastes of my own. Then this book would never have been written. As it was, my husband’s smiling farewell and his pathetic symptoms of indigestion bravely borne gave me pain that vented itself in anger against its original cause—Ruth—and behind her again the butcher. I flew into the study and poured out my wrath on a sheet of the best note-paper.

“Mr. Jones,

“Dear Sir,

“Mrs. Molyneux is simply furious because Mr. Jones’s wretched beef did not turn up till ten minutes to one. If Mr. Jones finds himself unable to keep a clock, Mrs. Molyneux will be delighted to deal with a butcher who can.”

I licked the envelope and the stamp viciously and rang the bell. “Post this at once, please, Clara,” I said, “and when Jones’s boy calls in the morning for orders, tell him that a thousand years are not as one day to me, and that he may take his detestable tray of entrails to—” I stopped just in time—“back to the shop,” I added. “Yes’m,” said Clara, looking surprised and, I thought, frightened. “Would you like a cup of tea, m’m?”

If one is what these people call “upset” they always suggest tea. Tea as a remedy for the butcher’s non-appearance struck me as absurd.

“No, Clara,” I replied, “what I want is not tea but punctuality. All the same I will have a cup.”

Of course it was impossible to say anything to Ruth that afternoon. It would have been making too much fuss over what probably was not her fault.

CHAPTER II: THE COOK

A lady who has kept house with marked success for fifty years once said to me: “My dear, there are only three things of any importance in a house. First the husband, then the nurse, then the cook, and after that it doesn’t matter.”

At the time this collected wisdom slid through my head almost without recognition. I thought my husband perfect, and took it for granted that I knew all about him. I did not then require a nurse, and in my limitless ignorance I supposed a cook to be a person who cooks things, and whom, if she does not cook things well, one replaces by another cook who does. How, indeed, should I know more of the nature and habits of cooks than the general public knows of the physiology of the animals which it sees behind bars at the Zoo? At home I knew that there was a certain fat striped creature in the kitchen, whom my mother was obliged to propitiate before we could get scones for breakfast, and to whom I vaguely believed my father said prayers night and morning. But meals came up and went down, in winter and summer, autumn and spring, and that was all that I really knew about them.

How should an outsider such as I was know that the personality of a cook is as pervasive in a small house as that of a mellow cheese; that she is as powerful as a dog in a hen-house, as moody as a gipsy, as amenable to flattery as an old gentleman, and as inured to dirt as a pig? So far as I had thought at all, I had always imagined that there was a household formula called “giving orders to the cook.” I had not been married a year before I knew that this is a term invented by novelists, and which has no resemblance at all to the fact it is intended to describe. It is a recognised fallacy like the Cambridge May week, which is not in May, but every one knows what is meant. Giving orders to the cook really means a very elaborate process of mental suggestion. We learn by painful initiation what are the things she is capable of cooking, and we try, so far as is possible, to direct her choice of what she is willing to cook within the limits of her capacity. By the same process of mental suggestion we add to her repertoire of dishes, and according to the strength of our will and the receptivity of her mind, she elects by and by to cook more or less what we want. It is the art of mental suggestion, not the art of ordering, that makes a mistress the real keeper of a cook.

For instance, when I first knew Ruth I used to make mistakes like this: “You might make a curry of the mutton, Ruth, and give us some stewed pears for lunch. We will have fried fillets of fish to-night, with cutlets from the end of the neck that you have left, and a batter pudding with jam sauce.” And Ruth would reply, “Yes’m.”

When the luncheon came up there would be haricot and apple tart, and for dinner fillets of fish done in a wonderful wine sauce, cutlets, it is true, and a sweet omelette.

“Ruth,” I said next morning, “you did not cook what I ordered yesterday.”

“Didn’t I, m’m?” she replied, with the candid look of a company promoter accused of fraud. “I’m sure I don’t know how that happened. I quite thought you said I was to do up the mutton.”

“Look at the slate.” I pointed out where curry was ordained in large letters.

“Why, so it was, m’m; I am sorry. I remember now, I hadn’t any chutney by me, and I knew master wouldn’t fancy curry without a bit o’ chutney so I just made a nice haricot instead.”

“And what about the fried fish?” I asked. “And the pudding?”

“Ah,” said Ruth, “yes’m, we shall want a nice frying-pan. The one I have isn’t near large enough to do a nice bit of fish and it’s not the right shape. A nice enamel one the next time you are going into town if you can be troubled to remember.”

Now in these days if I wanted the meals I have described I should begin:

“How about the mutton, Ruth? What are you going to do with that?”

“Well, I think, m’m, a haricot would be as nice as anything.”

“Quite so. And I suppose we shall be obliged to have fish for dinner.”

“Yes’m—fried fish I suppose?” (Ruth’s strong point is frying.)

“Some nice little fillets I think master likes, m’m.”

“Yes, Ruth, fish, cutlets, and a pudding. I suppose a batter pudding would take too many eggs?”

“Oh, no, m’m, not at all. I could manage with two nicely.”

“Very well then; that will do beautifully. We always like your batter puddings so much better than those they have at Buckingham Palace; they are so much lighter, and that jam sauce you make is a dream. And, by the way” (this is just as I am leaving the kitchen), “we must have another curry some day; Admiral Tobasco said he had never met one to touch yours that night.”

“Would you care to have the mutton curried to-day, m’m, as a change from the haricot?”

“Oh, yes, Ruth, that would be delightful. What a good idea.”

But it takes years to learn.

New dishes are acquired in the same way. This is what the novice does:

“Ruth, I want you to try this beef à la Soudanese, it is quite simple.”

“Beef what, m’m?”

“Beef à la Soudanese. You see it is done in this way.”

I read the recipe, while Ruth turns away in silence and begins sweeping up the hearth.

“Well, Ruth, what do you think of it?”

“Oh, just as you please’m, of course.”

“It is quite easy, isn’t it?”

There is a sudden convulsion amongst the fire-irons, and Ruth turns round wiping her eyes.

“Of course, it must be as you like, m’m. It’s your place to give orders, I know, but I’m afraid I shall never give satisfaction the way I am. My mother’d tell you—and indeed I’d sooner she came and spoke to you herself—that I never had no training in fancy dishes, and all you asked for was a good plain cook, which I am, as her ladyship said herself when I left. Of course, you’d very likely not know, being a young lady and having no experience in such things, that we poor girls have to make our own way, and to be respectable is as much as we can hope for, and that I always have been, and I’d sooner starve than take a place where I couldn’t do my duty, and I think it would be better if you were to get some one more experienced; I haven’t been feeling at all settled lately, the way things have been”—and so on.

If by chance your mind’s ribs are made of steel and your sympathies of spun granite, as some women’s are, this network of unintelligible wrath will have no power to ensnare you, but the average woman takes years to unwind herself from the thraldom of female hysteria—and then she wriggles out of it by guile.

“Ruth,” I say now, “we had a lovely dish at the club last night. They made a great fuss about it, and said only an expert could cook it, but I believe that your clever brain could find out what it is made of. It looked like—” and then I describe it.

Ruth makes a wild conjecture and says it sounds very like the à la Marengo that master likes so much.

“I don’t know whether it is quite that,” I say thoughtfully, “but we might look in one of the cookery books and see whether there is anything like it to start on.”

Then I turn up the recipe for the dish and suggest that we should try that, and see how it turns out; perhaps, I add, that she need not trouble to make scones that afternoon and that the cold tart will do for dinner.

As regards their pervasiveness and their power, it is a remarkable fact that although most of the inmates of a house know what the master wants, and a few know what the mistress wants, and nobody knows what the housemaid wants, yet every one knows what the cook wants. If the cook is satisfied the whole house works smoothly; if not, an atmosphere of awe and discomfort pervades everywhere, meals are partaken of in silence or in a sort of nervous bravado, no bells are rung, people fetch their own boots, and are courteous to one another about the toast sooner than ask for more. And this omnipotent creature in the stripes and a collar that will not fasten before ten in the morning is, as I have said, moody and capricious to the last degree. She says it is the range, but it is not really. Left to myself, as I have been sometimes, I can spend weeks without having a word with the range. In fact, his commonplace obedience to rules has often bored me sadly, and I have wished that he would, just for once, heat up on his own initiative and never mind the flues, or even that he would get in a temper and smoke when all was well and the dampers regulated to perfection.

But sometimes he and cook cannot hit it off. I may go down, for instance, at the proper time, neither too early nor too late, and be met by a smell that even a very old skunk would find trying.

“My dear Ruth,” I say, “is it the milk again or what?”

“It boiled over,” says Ruth, looking outraged and insulted, “although I only left it for a minute. I never saw such heat in my life.”

“How extremely tiresome,” I say, frowning at the range. Really he might have been more tactful on this day when I wanted a special soufflé for luncheon. “I wonder whether the man did anything to it the last time he was here?” I say very loudly and distinctly; and then becoming innocent and diffident I suggest, “You don’t think shutting down that damper a little might help, do you?”

Ruth pushes in the damper, muttering something about “must have hot water for washing up,” although the water is already bubbling and roaring in the cylinder—but there, she is a good girl, and you can’t have everything. Only, I do wish sometimes that the range had rather more tact and less common sense.

Talking of ranges reminds me that there are days when she says it is impossible to keep the range clean. Those are the days when she boils everything at full gallop so that it slops over with a horrid frittering noise and the smell gets even into my hair-brushes. I suppose that there are cooks who have a sense of smell, but they probably die very young and leave only those who cook from memory. One question often puzzles me. Does a good chef ever go near the scullery? Can real art survive within fifty yards of that thing which feels like seaweed and looks like a tennis net? or that tangle of greasy grey wire that speeds the departing and welcomes the coming occupant of a saucepan? Can nightingales’ tongues be prepared at a zinc table where pink and grey rabbit-skins, potato peelings, white of egg, and the clammy skeletons of fish are gathered together in reckless confusion?

See a cook’s cupboard and die! It is very like Naples. There are fifty small tins all exactly alike, except that some are sticky, some greasy, and some black with coal dust; their lids are bent into fantastic shapes which prevent them from being opened without a struggle. There are pepper-pots whose holes are stopped up with fat and rust; glass jars containing different sizes of corrugated white bullets; nameless brown powders at the bottom of blue paper bags, screwed up at the neck, and with a currant sticking to the bottom; copies of last year’s Times stained with paraffin; a cashmere boot, much worn at the heel; fire-lighters smeared with glue and sawdust; a spoon with a piece of cold bacon in it, and one of your best plates from upstairs—chipped.

I suppose Ruth thinks that because we are but dust she had better go on building us up.

CHAPTER III: THE HOUSEMAID

The worst thing about housemaids is their restlessness. Their passion for traveling about from one room to another becomes at last a sort of nervous disease. I have already described my discomfort in the constant traffic of Elizabeth Tique’s small house, and the excellent plans I made to ensure solitude and peace in my own. But does anyone suppose for a moment that one single-handed mistress can check the migratory instincts of a full-grown housemaid, any more than she could impede the perpetual silent passage of a tortoise from the artichoke bed to the hot-house and round by the rhododendrons?

I worked hard at the problem for some years. When we are young and hopeful it is quite easy to imagine that we are altering the facts of Nature. We talk glibly about our schemes for reforming drunkards, of the likelihood of the British working man becoming interested in art, and so on. In the same way I saw no difficulty then in the idea of persuading a housemaid to finish one room at a time. I spoke very nicely about it at first. I said:

“Clara, I wish that you would begin one room at a time and then finish it, instead of going about doing little bits of things in each. It makes you so ubiquitous.”

“I beg pardon, m’m?”

“So here, there, and everywhere,” I explained. “Of course it is very nice to have you so active, but now, for instance, why couldn’t you finish my sitting-room or my bedroom? I don’t mind which, so long as I could have somewhere to write. You chased me about this morning as if I were a hen that wanted to sit at the wrong time. You know I hate having my legs dusted.”

“I was going to do the windows, m’m, as soon as you went out.”

“But, Clara, you know quite well that if I went out I should find you in the first shop I went to, polishing the grocer’s nose or something—”

“Beg pardon, m’m?”

It was useless to explain further. I made a schedule of work for Clara in which each portion of her day was mapped out in such a way that she would be continuously in one place for at least an hour at a time. I might as well have made a time-table for the weather. I have heard that there are mistresses who make schedules for their servants and get them followed: but whether these people achieve their results by hypnotism or force I do not know. I have been able now and again to arrest the disease in Clara for a short time, but I do not believe that there is any permanent cure for ubiquity in housemaids.

Another infirmity to which all of them are subject is morning blindness. When I go to bed at night my sitting-room is often far from tidy. I leave, perhaps, a thimble, scissors, a cherished pen, sheets of manuscript, some books, and a parcel or two on the table. By the time Clara has made her mouse-like exit next morning my table is as clear as a baby’s conscience. I hunt about muttering bad words for some minutes and then ring the bell. But no, Clara has seen nothing. She never puts anything away: perhaps master has had them——

“Yes, Clara,” I reply sarcastically, “I have no doubt that your master is at this moment playing ‘hunt the thimble’ in his office and cutting out paper boats with my scissors and manuscript. As for my book, probably the cat has taken it back to the library to be changed.”

Clara becomes huffy, and says she “hasn’t an idea, ’m sure.”

“I know you haven’t,” say I, “I don’t want you to have ideas. I want you to have eyesight, and a memory, and a little self-control. Why cannot you leave things where they are? Or, if you must put something away, why not those crumbs under the table or those empty envelopes or the mouldy paste that I used last week?”

I have heard of kittens being blind for some days after birth, but it is my own discovery that housemaids are blind for some hours after they get up.

I do not know how it is, but I get more tired of my own face and the housemaid’s than of anything else on earth. Probably no criminal feels more imprisoned with his warder than a woman can feel shut up in her own house with one or two servants; and she is so much the worse off that there is no free future to look forward to. A very unusual touch of sympathy occurs in a modern play where the writer makes his heroine retire to an empty room to have a bad headache in peace. Before she has had time to crumble into a comfortable ruin on the sofa, there is a knock at the door and in comes a housemaid armed with a tin and some little fidgety bits of rag to “polish the taps in Miss Iris’s bathroom.”

The public would surely be touched if they realised the fact that there is often no spot in her own house where the daughter of woman may lay a tear unobserved. Some women do not want to cry; they have nothing to fear from Sarah Ann. But to those who do, this constant espionage becomes a positive torture.

There are few things that I envy men so much as their leisure for getting on with their work. They have offices, studies, studios, in which they spend weary hours in a nerve-racking pursuit of guineas, or the appropriate word, or an elusive idea, but they are generally doing one thing at a time. They are not harassed by incessant irruptions from other workers bursting with irrelevant information about their underclothing or the state of the weather, nor are they pestered with foolish conundrums about weights and measures and the kind of subjects that “Old Moore’s Almanac” deals with so willingly. It is always possible to slam one’s door and lock it, but who really feels comfortable under the stigma of peculiarity? The comment which follows unusual conduct is in itself a violation of privacy, and so far from being alone, the offender is merely isolated the better to be observed.

I do not mind ordering things—it isn’t that; nor do I mind thinking about them—thinking quite hard. It is “seeing about” them that turns my blood to vitriol and my heart to dynamite.

Is a general in command of forces expected to see that his subalterns put on their clothes right side out? When he orders a charge does he find his men seated facing their horses’ tails? Does the captain of a ship put out to sea only to be told when he has crossed the Bar that “the wheel has come off in the mate’s ’and,” and that there is no more grease for the engines? And yet I believe that is the kind of thing that would happen if a mistress and her servants started out to discover America.

It is rarely that a servant in a small house considers herself responsible for anything. It is thought discreditable to the mistress alone if the house is dirty and the meals badly served; and yet she has seldom the skill or the leisure to give point to her criticisms by setting a working example to those under her orders.

And the poor creature must learn so many trades. It is not enough that I strain my brains to bursting-point in order to think out new forms of nourishment for James, but I must learn the anatomy and the personal habits of the creatures he devours, conduct post-mortem examinations to discover whether they died too soon or not soon enough, whether they had eaten too much or not eaten enough, taken too much exercise or led too sedentary a life. I must be perpetually on the look-out to circumvent the countless ruses which Satan suggests to half a dozen intelligent tradesmen. I must know exactly in what combination the things I have bought will best amalgamate in James’s inside, and I must then somehow convey my knowledge through the tough skull of my cook. When at last I have got both food and ideas safely lodged in her keeping I must find the dish on which she is to serve it, and, worst of all, besiege her incessantly with alarm clocks and gongs to ensure its appearance at the right time.

When the meal is sent up only half of my work is done. I have to keep an eye on the tools with which James is to eat it, otherwise they are liable to be blunt, sticky, or placed crookedly on the table. After this James eats his dinner in peace, whilst I make a mental note of Clara’s personal habits, her flowers to praise, or her weeds to blame, and either or both to loathe; her elaborate elegancies of manner, or the fact that she always forgets to hand the sauce before she goes back to stand on one leg by the sideboard and listen to our conversation. I have stopped that now and told her not to wait, which means that she goes off to the bedrooms between the courses and does not hear the bell.

I can hear the efficient female say scornfully that I should get servants who know their business; but she forgets that if she or I do not have to train our striped geese in the sweat of our brows it means that some other mother of a family has done it—or perished in the attempt—and that Sarah Ann has left to “better herself.” Also one of the most efficient characteristics of the efficient female is her powerful fascination for servants of the clockwork-mouse type whom I abhor. Their machinery has been made by people with different tastes from my own, and when I have found the key and wound them up they begin folding table-napkins into wine-glasses with horrid dexterity, or they play a sort of suburban Halma called “ladies first” when they hand the courses.

Clara’s migratory instincts, her ubiquitousness, and her morning blindness were a constant annoyance to me, yet I look lovingly back upon them now over the heads of a succession of young persons, all of whom had occupied positions of trust in the houses of the semi-educated. When Clara left me in order to marry a traveller in sewing machines I acquired a wonderful insight into the habits of the public dignitaries in our neighbourhood. I learned that the Mayoress of Pond never grudged the expense of paper mats under the fruit and preferred her sandwiches tied with pink ribbon. That Lady Knight believed in putting out Sir Donald’s clothes herself in the evening, and that it was not customary in the houses of the commercially great to clean the silver more than once a week “unless there was company.”

I once asked one of these Belles Brummells whether it was better form not to wash before dinner unless for a party of eight, and she replied gravely that it was a matter of taste, and did I wish hot water; she had no objection to bringing it.

Note.—I read this part aloud to the efficient female and she says that was not what she meant.

CHAPTER IV: TRADESMEN

The story of Mr. Jones’s sin, and how he failed to send the meat in time for luncheon, has been told. But it must not be supposed that this was the one sin of a lifetime, standing out clear and black against a white background of habitual punctuality. Nor was he a lonely serpent in an otherwise spotless Eden of tradesmen who walked with God. They were all Sons of Belial. If I could turn the whole lot of them into pillars of salt, and cheese, and mutton, and cabbage, and all the other dilatory and perverse ingredients of my daily life I would do it, and they might go on “never coming” as much as they liked. They might stay there all day making apologies and it would not matter to me. I should simply come and hack off the pieces I wanted and not listen to a word they said.

Of course, in one way, a shop answers the same purpose. But there is not the same pleasure in asking for a thing as there would be in hewing it off the person of one’s enemy. And, besides, the shops are always full of women who want to look at everything they buy.

Sometimes I have waited quite a long time while some silly creature with a long upper lip and a badly balanced hat fiddles about with two tins of mustard and explains why neither will do. When it comes to my turn and the shopman says: “Pepper, m’m; yes, m’m; I’ll just show it you,” and rushes off before I can catch him, it makes me so angry that I forget all the other things I wanted. I know all that there is to be said on the other side about the advantages of shopping oneself. It is not for nothing that I have encountered the efficient female on our own ground. But if I have been flattered she has had exercise, that is one thing! Some are born housekeepers, some achieve housekeeping, and some have the horrid thing thrust upon them.

They say seeing is believing, but somehow I find it impossible to believe in a tradesman even after I have seen him, and the few things I do believe about him I don’t like. The ego of the fishmonger, as well as that of his representative imp who scribbles his name daily on every available wall-space near the back door, is to me wholly uncongenial, and I dislike the exaggerated value he puts on the creatures whom he conjures from the deep.

“Nice plaice,” he says, handing me a thing all face, like a certain type of person who frequents concerts and goes on deputations and boards. It has a deep frill of some scaly substance round its small body, and at one end the frill becomes a regular flounce. “Eightpence a pound. I’ll fillet it nicely for you, m’m.”

By the time he has filleted away the face, and the frill, and the flounce, and half a square foot of backbone I am left with four elusive little rags that no amount of heavy breadcrumbing on Ruth’s part will make into a serviceable dish for a hungry man.

“I don’t think you are right in calling plaice a nice fish,” I said the first time this happened. “Haven’t you got anything with a little more body to it?”

He offered me turbot at two shillings a pound. There was certainly more of it, but it looked thoroughly wet through and uncomfortable, and he told me that the oily skin was the best part! There are all the smaller fish of course, but I cannot help watching James when he has anything with bones, it makes me as nervous as if I saw him eating a wet handkerchief full of pins.

And there is nothing like fish for “never coming.” If my own grandfather were a fishmonger and I saw him being chased up the street by a mad bull I should refuse to believe that he would “be there as soon as I was.” With butchers, too, I find that we pay for more than we either ask or desire. A leg of mutton with a hairy cloven hoof on the end (I still live in the hope of Mr. Jones lacing a neat boot on it some day when he thinks I am not looking and then saying it is a mistake he cannot account for) is an insult both to the living and to the dead. And there are tongues with a ton of salt in them. Mr. Jones weighs the tongue as it comes soaking from the tub and charges me for the heavy dripping mass of salt. He sends it to the house by the hands of a little boy who is fond of marbles, a keen spectator of football, and popular with his young associates. By the time Ruth gets the tongue on to her weighing machine it differs by several pounds from the little blood-stained hieroglyphic pinned to it. Mr. Jones explains this by the theory that it has “shrunk on the way from the shop.”

If I might bear a few of Mr. Jones’s misdeeds to the Judgment Seat they should lose none of their full weight by my loitering on the errand!

I think Ananias the greengrocer became prosperous and has such a nice large clean shop because he is so resourceful. I have never asked him any question which he could not answer satisfactorily, and the matter I speak of always seems to be one which he has already gone into very carefully on his own account. I asked him once why his potatoes were dark purple and full of holes, and he said that it was the time of year. But I was prepared for that and brought in a neat rejoinder.

“Yes,” I said, “that is the proper answer, I know, but how is it that I can get excellent ones in the shops lower down?”

“Ah, yes, m’m, those,” he replied; “of course we can get you that sort of potato if you wish it, but I hardly think, if you knew the sort of places they come from, you’d fancy them. A very nice, cheap potato for the price, and has a nice appearance, but——”

He shook his head with an expression of such dark mystery that I let the potatoes alone. In fact, I had a moment’s vague wonder whether the other kind were grown in the hospitals or whether white slaves with maimed hands dug unceasingly for them in a distant rubber plantation.

Another day I asked him why his lettuces were a penny more than anyone else’s and whether he charged for the caterpillars sandwiched in them. He said that it was quite a mistake my having had the one with the caterpillar. He had noticed it at once when they were brought in, and had particularly told the young lady to destroy the lot. He was very glad I had mentioned it, and he could give me the best lettuces in the market for a penny halfpenny if I did not object to their having no hearts. He always sent those with hearts unless he was specially told otherwise by ladies who were obliged to consider trifles.

CHAPTER V: THE DINNER PARTY

For some weeks after I began housekeeping I had a feeling that all was not right with Ruth. She would not talk about food when I went to the kitchen, but somehow or other she always managed to bring in some remark about the people in the houses near us.

“Underdone, m’m? Yes, m’m, I quite understand,” she said one day in answer to a criticism of mine. “Speaking of which, m’m, do you happen to be acquainted with Raws, in Windermere Place?”

“Do you mean Colonel and Mrs. Raw?” I asked.

“Yes, m’m; the young person who lives with them as cook is sister to my young man, and I just happened to mention who you were, m’m, and how I was living with you. She was very pleased to think I was so well off, and asked if we were very busy just now.”

She made two or three more references to the great and good on whose cast-off legs of mutton we lived so happily (they had the loins and the shoulders, and we had the necks and legs, and, I regret to say, the tripe). At last she became more explicit.

“Hardly seems worth while making these fancy dishes just for you and master, does it, m’m?” she said despondingly. “It would be different if you were having company and we wanted to show what we could do.”

It dawned on me then that Ruth was craving for morbid excitement. She longed to be at her wits’ end—that land of the leal where every true domestic servant loves to wallow and bemoan her lot. It was not long before she had her heart’s desire. People began to call, and when they began there was no stopping them. They came in barouches and in motors, on foot and in four-wheeled flys, from which the chaste kid boots of the elderly and the Parisian shoes of the rejuvenated descended in rich profusion. Clara found it more and more difficult to be dressed in time; in fact, when Mrs. Ajax and Mrs. Beehive took me first on their rounds and arrived at a quarter to three, it was Ruth, smutty and indignant, who opened the door.

I spoke severely to Clara afterwards, and found that it was her migratory instinct which had betrayed her again. She had been upstairs to get dressed, and had wandered off to the washhouse in the middle of her toilet to fetch a clean apron.

“Which reminds me, Clara,” I said. “Why does it take you so long to get tea when people call? You were three-quarters of an hour yesterday after I rang.”

“The kettle wouldn’t boil, m’m,” Clara replied.

She gave me the impression of having at last lost patience with her former accomplice, the kettle, and decided to “tell on him.”

“Oh,” I said, “you don’t think we had better have a man in to see about it, do you?”

Clara wavered for a moment between professional scorn of this suggestion and the irresistible bait I had thrown out. She hesitated and compromised.

“Well, m’m, it ought to boil quicker; but perhaps next time Mr. Whistle is in the house we might get him to have a look at it; it may be too heavy a make.”

I regard this as Clara’s masterpiece.

But Ruth’s prayers were answered. The “neighbourhood” called, we dined out, and by and by we had to feed others in return.

James and I decided against the professional cook and “hired help,” so it remained to break the news to Ruth and Clara. I told them separately, on a bright morning in June when the little juicy lambs were hanging in clusters in the shops, and expectant peas burst through their pods in every market garden of our hospitable suburb. Ruth bore up wonderfully; in fact, after the first sob of terrified ecstasy I had very little trouble with her. But Clara cried a good deal, and was afraid that her waiting would not do justice either to herself or to me.

However, I told her how Napoleon had risen from quite a little chap to what he afterwards became, entirely by his own efforts; and I also reminded her of a famous judge in my own family who had once been an office boy. And then we all three began to “see about” one thing and another. I felt like an ophthalmic fly by the time we had done, with all its numerous eyes in a state of acute inflammation. I saw the stock for the soup. I saw the fish, and the paper it came in (which means a lot), I saw the sweetbreads, and wondered how James can be so fond of them. I saw the potatoes and the peas; that was nothing, really—half an eye did it, and the other half-eye caught the salad, just to be sure it was fresh. The tournedos of beef took an immense lot of seeing, and when they came up James saw them all over again, and they were not good. The efficient female has since explained to me why theirs are always perfect, but in my soul I believe that there is hanky-panky, if not plain swank about her fillets. Anyhow, some evil planet always shines on mine, so I have made up my mind now that Providence does not wish me to have fillets, and that He knows best, so we have saddle of mutton instead.

There was more brain-work and less inspection required for the pudding. When Ruth asked me if I would like to see the eggs, I said no, that was a question for the hen’s conscience, and one must leave something to somebody. Neither would I waste precious eyesight on the butter. I knew it was a lot, and the less seen about it the better. If I could have seen an ice-machine amongst our kitchen properties I should have felt less irritable. I know that the efficient female makes hers in something very simple—a biscuit tin or a boot, I forget which—but we were all too amateurish for these conjuring tricks. We have to get our rabbits out of shops like other people, and I would not trust an omelette made in James’s hat. We bought a machine at great expense, and when at last, wet to the knee and chilled to the bone, I hurried upstairs to dress, I saw with my last eye a vision of two alternatives—one, successive platefuls of congealed cream; the other, a petrified mass, bounding at the first touch of the spoon from end to end of our parquet floor. Which would it be?

I once read in the “Book of the Home” that the cook should lie down for a couple of hours before beginning the serious work of a dinner party. According to the author of the book all preparations should be made the day before; then, when the generalissima is roused from her bed at 5 p.m., there is practically nothing to do except to put the heavy guns in the oven and pass a salamander over the light infantry. The key to the situation, the brainy part, the staff office, whatever you like to call it, lies in the sauce-boats, and the gods alone decide what goes on there.

As a matter of fact, everything turned out quite differently. Ruth prepared nothing the day before; she rose late on the morning of the engagement, and omitted to clean the flues. We had a terrific fire going all day, and she ran about the kitchen at top speed, purple in the face, trembling and uncomplimentary. Far from the two hours of peaceful sleep anticipated by the “Book of the Home,” she had not even time to wash up after luncheon, and, as it was, dinner was more than ten minutes late. It is sad, but remarkable, that nothing ever happens to me in the way that books and efficient people claim as a certainty; but I am sure that Ruth enjoyed the dinner more than Mrs. Beeton ever enjoyed anything. You lose half the fun of a dish if you know beforehand what it is going to look like. The range, with his unfailing common sense and utter lack of artistic feeling, behaved strictly in accordance with his flues, slightly undercooking some things and burning others just a trifle: but the ice was perfect. I have often made ices in the same way, and they have turned out failures, which just proves what I have always said, that cookery books are written in the same spirit as “The Home Conjurer,” “Every Man His Own Chauffeur,” “How to Become a Golf Champion by Post,” and so on. The people who write them do not want us to know how they do the things, so they keep us harmlessly employed with a few simple rules while they themselves go on cooking and conjuring and get paid for it.

Ruth, Clara, the charwoman, and a borrowed housemaid sat up until twelve washing dishes, breaking a few, and filling the air with hilarity born of tea, fatigue, and insufficient food. But Ruth was happy. We had had company and she had been at her wits’ end.

CHAPTER VI: THE JOB GARDENER

After all I had suffered at the hands of Elizabeth Tique’s gardener I determined not to keep one at all. That is the kind of resolution one makes, judging a whole class from a single specimen, and then buying experience. But it seemed to me that just as a cook is too pervasive in a small house, so a gardener occupies too much space in a small garden. I remembered the mowing machine, and the manure, and one thing and another, and thought how much enjoyment I should get from doing the garden myself, with the help of an occasional man. I did not know that in our neighbourhood that particular breed of garden pest is called a Saturday scratcher. If I had heard the term sooner I might have guessed what he would be like, but I engaged one in my innocence, and bought experience like other people. I engaged him on the recommendation of an enemy, and he tramped over the flower-beds to my door early one morning. He was just the sort of working man who gets caricatured on the music-hall stage: infinitely ugly and full of inane conversation. His opening remark annoyed me.

“Pretty little bit o’ garden you’ve got ’ere mum.”

“That’s a liar,” I thought, considering the weeds and the seedy laurel bushes, but I resolved not to give way to prejudice.

“There is a good deal to be done, Mr. Mullins,” I said vaguely. The fact was, I knew what I wanted the garden to look like when it was done, but my ideas began and ended there. I was as ignorant as Mullins himself; the difference between us was that I was not nearly so stupid. That is why we could not get on; if his wits had been equal to mine we should have devised something between us in spite of our ignorance—I was going to say, with the help of our ignorance—because we should have done something entirely original. Being unhampered by foregone conclusions born of knowledge, we should not have had our inspirations blighted, as so many people have who understand the possibilities of an art. And we might have revolutionised the laws of Nature; one never knows! But Mullins was a fool; he did not understand when I said that I wanted the garden to look as if the things grew there by themselves.

“You’ll want some nice beddin’-out plants, mum, if that’s so,” he observed.

“But, Mullins,” I said feverishly, “surely—do pull yourself together—isn’t bedding out that horrid thing you do with a plumb-line?”

“No, mum, no,” he replied, “pardon me, I don’t think you quite understand. Beddin’ out is nice young ’ardy plants that comes to their prime durin’ the summer months; gives far more effect they do than anything else.”

I remained doubtful, but weakened; he smiled in such a kindly, authoritative way.

“I used to be gardener with your ’usband’s pa, mum,” he ventured, just at the critical moment. “What a nice gentleman ’e was! and what a fine garden they always ’ad! We used to commence beddin’ out just about now, mum.”

I fell headlong into the gin. Mullins was utterly stupid and never took a point, but he made them sometimes and scored.

“He must know,” I thought, “why James’s father had acres and acres of hot-houses!” Then I remembered something; I clutched at a memory of my mother walking round the gardens at home. “The herbaceous border is getting rather thin, Ptarmigan,” I seemed to hear her say; “there won’t be enough flowers for the house. I can’t bear your stiff hot-house things.”

“Ah, yes, Mullins,” I said, upon this dim vision, “but I must have a good herbaceous border, or else we shall not have enough flowers for the house.”

“Make you a nice ’erbaceous border along that ’ere wall, mum,” he replied obligingly.

So we set to work. I bought catalogues and books of instructions; I also took in the Amateur Gardener. But this is the kind of way one gets let in. The book says:

“Pyrox gypsomanica (poor man’s rose). A very free flowering perennial; deep bright purple, standard growth; May to October; suits any soil.”

“Mopincosa juicyflorum. (English hibiscus); orange, scarlet, and blue; very prolific; suitable for damp waste places where soil occurs rarely; flowers all the year round.”

All this is just the cookery-book trick in another form. The people who write these books evidently form a ring, like oil magnates and deceivers of that sort; they monopolise the cooking and gardening that is done, and then they send out misleading literature telling us how simple it all is and getting us to buy their wares. I bought what the seedsmen’s lists called “strong hardy plants” of all sorts of beautiful things that were guaranteed to flower freely in damp waste places. Mullins and I planted them, and that was the last we heard of them. The places we chose were quite damp enough; I am sure about that. Of course Mullins made it a point of honour to disapprove of everything I planted—one must expect that of any gardener—but in fact his were not any more successful than mine, and they cost more to buy. My private opinion is that on the night after I sowed any seeds Mullins came out with a small lantern, collected the soil, sifted it, and made Quaker oats for his breakfast next morning out of my godetia and poppy. I have read that mandragora or poppy is a powerful drug, and I suspect that is partly what is the matter with Mullins.

We put in bulbs, too, which no doubt he stuffs with some savoury compound and finds an excellent substitute for onions, and more digestible; either that, or else the entire gardening trade is riddled with the direct descendants of Ananias, and that seems almost too sweeping a statement to be credible. I prefer the Mullins’ meals hypothesis.

At present I have quite a bright little garden, and this is the plan on which I have achieved it. I have a border of stuffed cats down one side; they are of various sizes, and their glass eyes make a bright spot of colour amongst the misty duns and greys of their outer coatings; they are perennial, and not easily dashed by rain. Down the other side I have spread a wide border of coarse red flannel, and on this I contrive to raise quite a number of little evergreens. In the round beds (where the efficient female tells me there is nothing to prevent my having a capital show of roses) I have planted a nice lot of aspidistras. James has a friend who owned an aspidistra which he sent to a cold-storage place with a van-load of furniture when he went abroad for five years. The aspidistra was not valuable, and he did not much care if he never saw it again. But it was all right when he came back, and had put out a number of green shoots.

My third contrivance in the greenhouse where I have some plants is to put up wire netting to keep off Mullins. He used to go in there two or three times a day “just to give a look round,” as he called it, and after his visits it was impossible to keep anything alive except large families of green fly, which he seemed to bring with him. I had quite a promising collection there one week—some geraniums, a fuchsia or two, a hardy palm, and the remains of a good rose: it was nothing like dead when I left it that morning at ten o’clock. At twelve Mullins humped up the iron stair which leads to the greenhouse, spat once on the floor, exclaimed “Hum! ha! ho!” in a loud voice, and sent a message by Clara asking me for four-and-sixpence. By the afternoon there was not a living plant in the place, and the air was thick with green fly.

I once counted the number of pests (exclusive of Mullins) which I collected from the greenhouse and garden. I used to scrape balls of animated grey fluff off the staging and bottle different specimens of the attenuated orange and black works of the Almighty which I caught skating in and out of the soil, either on their stomachs, or with a pianola-like flexibility of touch on an unnecessary number of legs. I sent all these specimens to a friend at the University, and some of them turned out to be very rare and quite unusually destructive. There were forms of fungus, too, in the greenhouse that were quite pretty but very infectious, and were really animals—at least I think that was what he said—and I am absolutely certain that they were all brought by Mullins. He still comes, and I still pay him four-and-sixpence a week, because he keeps out other Mullinses. And I have learned now, as I said, to stop him from doing any active harm; I let him trundle the mowing machine when I am out, and talk to the cook, and at Christmas-time he dirties the house with large bunches of sooty holly, but it all makes for what the servants call “nice feeling.”

CHAPTER VII: THE DOCTOR

James had often said that we must get to know of a good doctor whom we could call in if either of us was ill; but neither of us was ill, and we put off our inquiries until it was too late. Mrs. Beehive called one day, boasting that she had just recovered from influenza and really had no business to be out. Within forty-eight hours I wished she had never been born, and James brought a captive gentleman in spectacles to my bedside.

He held counsel with my inner works through the usual formulæ and then rang for hot water. While Clara was bringing it he adjusted his spectacles, put his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the mantelpiece.

“Fond of Alpine climbing?” he asked.

“No,” I gasped, coughing.

“Ah, it’s a grand sport!” he said. “Does your husband climb?”

I shook my head.

“What a wonderful woman his aunt, Miss Molyneux, is! I remember meeting her at a whist-drive ten years ago, and she must be now—let me see—what is her age?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered, weary after his pommelling and longing for sleep.

“Pardon?”

I felt myself growing hot. “Ninety-eight,” I said hoarsely, at a venture. I did not know how old James’s aunt was, nor whether she climbed.

“Ah, is she so much?” he reflected, swaying on his toes. “That’s a nice little fellow” (pointing to a photograph on the mantelpiece). “Puts me in mind of Prince Olaf. It has a great look of him; don’t you think so? What?”

I nodded and shook my head at the same time, and kicked the bedclothes. My temperature was rising rapidly.

“Ah, thank you,” he said, as Clara came in with the hot water, and then he began washing his hands. I never knew a man use so much soap; it was my special kind at two-and-sixpence a tablet, and he left it in the water while he lathered and messed and went on with the Alpine business. He told me the names of all the mountains he had been up, and the routes by which he had unfortunately come down. He described how splendidly fit one felt tearing down the snow slopes on a toboggan (“I wish you would slide downstairs on what is left of my soap, and have done with it,” I thought). He said that he used to have a touch of bronchitis himself every winter, but it completely left him after a week at Mürren. After we had been all round Switzerland with the soap we came back to one of my favourite towels, which he reduced to something like a bread poultice during a ten minutes’ inquiry as to how many Wagner operas I had heard in my life, and whether my grandmother was the wife of a famous fisherman.

I lay panting and exhausted on the bed, feeling as one does after a long afternoon spent with a garrulous and deaf old lady. Finally the wretch came back to me, fiddled with the books at my side, criticised them all, gave me a list of those he had read during the past forty years, and then got as far as the door.

“Now keep quiet,” he remarked, looking down his nose at me with a judicial air, “don’t have people in here chattering.”

Ill as I was, I could not take this lying down. I sat up and croaked, “What about you?”

“Oh, I’ll come round to-morrow morning,” he replied, unscathed by my sarcasm.

When James came home I said I was a little better and would get up. “What did you think of Smithson?” he asked. “I am told he is a clever chap.”

“He’s a first-rate musician,” I said.

“What?”

“And Alpine climber.”

“How the deuce do you know?” asked James.

“He has been up the Markhorn, the Rotterham, the Bungleberg, the Sloshwald, all over Borenpest range; then in Wales, the Greater and smaller Bosh, the Gwaddear, the——”

James felt my pulse and passed his hand over my forehead.

“I wonder if I had better ask him to come round this evening?” he suggested.

“No,” I said, “don’t do that; in fact I was going to ask you to ring up and say I am so much better, that I think he had better not call to-morrow. He is fearfully busy, and if I am as well as this I want to go into town and get some soap—and a hatchet——”

James thought me extremely silly, and said the man was a deuced clever chap. I bided my time and had my reward later.

James got a bad chill, and I sent at once for Dr. Smithson. I provided him with a bag of the ordinary Castile soap, four thick towels, and my clinical thermometer, and left the room.

From the study downstairs I could hear the gentle monotonous flow of sound, and the hands of the clock moved peacefully on. Presently the stream of sound became fuller as it was joined by another and more familiar current. There was a prolonged duet. I thought of the Zonophone Opera Company in the last part of “Home to our Mountains”; the clock struck another hour, and I heard the door open. The first single stream of sound flowed down the stairs alone, and died away as the front door banged. I left James five minutes to get his breath, and then I went up.

“Well, dear,” I said, “I hope he is going to do you good. I suppose he does not want you to have many visitors, no talking——”

“The man’s a damn fool!” said James. “I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

“Did he take your temperature?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied James. “I wanted to put the thing under my arm—it’s the proper way to take a temperature—but he stuck it in my mouth and left it there an hour while he talked.”

“Did he? Then how did you manage to tell him what the treatment ought to be?”

“I told him what he didn’t seem to know—that in cases of inflammation what you want to do is——”

“To set up counter-irritation. I know. And so you each talked one against——”

“I want some soup,” interrupted James.

“Did you say soup or soap?” I asked.

“Soup, and as hot as possible.”

“Did he say you were to have hot things?”

“No; but it is obviously the thing to do.”

I turned, just as I was leaving the room, to say: “By the way, that’s a nice little water-colour sketch; do you——”

A leather slipper whizzed past my head and struck the door.

We have been in many parts of the world since then, and I have come across a great number of doctors. Many of them are amongst the dearest creatures on earth, but, like all our other loved ones, they have their little ways. Clara was ill once, and Dr. Smithson’s partner came. He explained everything to me with the greatest care.

“What I should get, Mrs. Molyneux, if I were you,” he said with great emphasis, “is a piece of bread. Get your cook to give you some nice bread, not new you know, stale—stale bread a couple of days old—and steep it in a little milk. Heat the milk (you have a saucepan I expect? that’s capital!)—get a nice saucepan, then, and I should wash it first—get it washed for you—your maid can do that—get it well washed with soap and hot water, that’s right, wash it, and then pour the milk in. You have the milk, say, in a jug—a china jug—quite so—no doubt it stands in the larder, precisely—well, you get your cook to give you that jug of milk, and pour a little into the saucepan and heat it; I shouldn’t boil it—no, I shouldn’t indeed. I should heat it and pour it very gently on the bread. Cut the bread, you know—get a knife and cut it; don’t crumb it—that would be too small—cut it into nice pieces and pour the milk over it—you’ll find the girl will do capitally on it.”

We all hear from doctors about the tendency of women to be faddy about their health. The truth of the matter is that every one likes to feel that something about them is of importance to some one, and not only to some one in their own family, but to the outside world. I used to feel that James was an interesting personality to many people; he expounded his views to them, his remarks were received with sympathy, and he got a great deal of patting on the back. I didn’t. Clara and Ruth thought me an eccentric, amiable creature of another breed from themselves, a sort of finish to the house in a way, an ultimate cat on whom to lay responsibility for failure and domestic sin; but they were not interested in me. My women friends were more interested in my habits than in my personal psychology; James was mainly interested in my interest in him. It was sometimes a sore temptation to have a disease, something that would make at least three men shake their heads and wonder what I was doing. They would find out then what an exceptional character I had—what courage, what wit under trying circumstances, what intelligence in household management (the vacant chair, the cold bacon, that would bring it all home to them). James would hurry home in the evening and read letters to me from people who were all interested; he would chat—not quite so long as I wanted, so that I could have the pleasant qualm of missing him—then he would be dispatched downstairs to horrid discomfort where his darling was not, and I should not have to change into a cold evening dress. At last I should fall asleep, comfortable, warm, and washed, knowing that I need not get up next morning and slave and worry in unrecognised monotony. Can anyone wonder that we do it?

But anyone will do as well as a doctor; a clergyman or a lover if they will take an interest in one’s soul. I believe that a chiropodist who was really concerned for one’s toes would fill a long-felt want. It is a curious fact that no one goes to a lawyer for sympathy, and yet why we suppose that abnormalities in our liver will make us interesting in the eyes of a doctor to whom livers are no treat, while we neglect our lawyers who will investigate disorders in our conduct for the moderate sum of six-and-eightpence, must remain a mystery.

Suppose that one of us went to a solicitor’s office and said: “Do you know, such a queer thing has happened to me! I went and burgled a poor old gentleman the other day—stole his watch and a lot of valuable plate—and outside I met a policeman, whom I drugged with chloroform on a handkerchief.” One imagines the solicitor gravely investigating the matter, finding no old gentleman, no watch, no stolen plate, and no policeman. He charges the usual fee, puts a pair of handcuffs on the lady, and tells her to come back in a fortnight and have them altered.

A doctor whom I love very much once made this startling remark to me: “You lead a very nice life for a lady.”

The words brought to my mind such pictures as I have never forgotten. Such vistas of flat, dull landscape stretched before me; such dead seas of sensible conversation; such mountains made of interminable molehills; such continents of golf links and tennis lawns. All the shores were strewn with correctly balanced account books and the débris of tea parties; the trees were hung with carefully selected and well-boiled legs of mutton; first-rate parlourmaids with slight moustaches who understood the telephone peeped from behind every bush, and family butchers mated on St. Valentine’s Day in the place of nightingales. The sky was made of chill-proof Jaeger, and the stars were all turned so that their light fell from behind and on the left side of the book. My thoughts took the form of a parody on Lear’s poem about the Jumblies:

Far from new, far from new, is the land where the ladies live;

Their tongues are long, and their thoughts are few, and their morals are like a sieve.

The last line will not bear analysis, but I think that the word “ladies” as he used it gave me an impression of something that lets the juice of life escape and retains only a few husks and skins. A very nice life for a lady seemed to me little more than a very nice tissue of habits, but then, no words mean quite the same thing to any two people.

CHAPTER VIII: CHILDREN

To anyone who has read the foregoing pages it will be evident that in starting housekeeping I was obsessed by two main ideas: one, that I was not to be a parasite; two, that I was to have the house to myself during certain portions of the day. Towards the end of my second year of marriage I began to pat myself on the back. But alas! It is this harmless exercise that seems to be more irritating to the gods than a thousand crimes.

Congratulate yourself upon anything, from the affection of a millionaire uncle down to a recent immunity from colds, and you are lost. I had won a position of—I won’t say mistress, but comparative director of my cook; the fish came at my call. Clara never finished one room at a time, though we had established as one rule of the game that, if I got to my sitting-room first, she could not begin dusting until she found all the things I had lost during the past twenty-four hours. While she did this I sat in another room and got on with my work, which had such an exasperating effect upon her nerves that after a time she forbore to follow me, however slowly and aggressively I walked upstairs.

As regards Mullins, the job gardener, I had got him into the habit of keeping entirely off the beds. He remained almost exclusively in the kitchen, where he did very little harm except to Ruth’s window-boxes, but she always said it was not much trouble to plant them again. She also said he was very useful in giving a hand with the knives, and in cleaning up. Asking Mullins to clean up anything seemed to me like inviting a baboon to tidy one’s wardrobe. In fact, the efficient female has scarcely spoken to me since she heard I allowed it. But then her life is a perpetual warfare. Leisure, self-indulgence, expense, moral latitude, wilfulness, tact, all these bright spirits, which are the making of any reasonable person’s day, fly before her as butterflies before a bird with a hungry family; it is a pretty sight.

But to return to my boast. I reviewed these achievements with my mind’s eye. I was proud, and there was an end of it. Within a few months I no longer knew the meaning of leisure, and I had become a parasite, living on the habits of my son Tom and his nurse. All the other people in the house preserved their independence. When it became a question who should make the barley-water, it was my time, not Ruth’s nor Clara’s nor the nurse’s, that was wasted. Ruth, without taking her eyes off the range, said it would be better for anything of the sort to be made in the nursery for fear there should be any mistake. Nurse, without interrupting her work, wanted to know who was to watch the pan while she was folding the things in the night-nursery. It cost me a valuable summer’s morning to find a place in the domestic machinery where that pan might sit and boil without disorganising the day’s work.

Suppose a railway company, having completed all their arrangements and got everything into working order, were to be suddenly informed that the Government had decided to run a picture palace in the middle of their head office! I thought of this, and decided that the difficulties of such a situation would be a mere Tit-Bits problem compared to my task of fitting in a nursery amongst Ruth, Clara, and Mullins.

I awoke regularly at three in the morning, to find my brain already up and about, sorting and rejecting answers to such questions as these: “Who is to wash the kitchen tea-things while Clara is amusing the baby when some one calls on nurse’s day out?” or “What about methylated spirits for boiling in the nursery? One cannot be always running to and fro from the kitchen.”

All day long I was pursued by this ceaseless boiling. “What about boiling the milk?” “The milk has boiled over.” “How shall we manage about boiling the clothes?” “I couldn’t get the water to boil.” “You couldn’t boil vegetables in that pan.” “It has to be brought to the boil before you can do anything.” “Boiled beef would come less in the long run.” When Ruth made this statement I suggested that beef could hardly come less than Jones’s mutton did, as that always made a point of never coming at all whenever it could, and if there was going to be a longer run than usual before we got it we had better order something else at once. She replied that in that case a nice piece of boiled fish would be as nice as anything, at which, being a little over-wrought, I wept, and Ruth was extremely kind, and said she would just pop the kettle on to boil. And all this time Tom lay like a log and did nothing. I was dependent upon him for everything. My engagements and my peace of mind hung upon how he felt, and what his Dr. Boswell of a nurse alleged that he thought. The first thing he did was to put an end to my letter-writing, the second was to break up my quiet evenings with games, his third enterprise, his masterpiece of iniquity, was to affiance Ruth to Mullins. At first I had been dense enough not to trace his hand in this calamity, but by and by it dawned upon me, and I questioned Ruth.

“Yes, m’m,” she replied, “things is not the same where there is children. You don’t seem to have the place to yourself in the same way as where there is only a lady.”

“I beg your pardon, Ruth,” I interrupted, “I didn’t quite catch what you said just then. Did you mean that master Tom takes too much upon himself? I don’t leave much to him, really.”

“Oh, no, m’m,” said Ruth, “not at all. It wasn’t that. But where there is children there is so much that has got to be done.”

“Yes,” I said thoughtfully, “I see your point. The same thing has occurred to me. He gives orders, doesn’t he? Is rather emphatic—is that what you meant?”

“Oh, well, m’m,” she replied, “of course you would give the orders just the same in the nursery as elsewhere. It’s your place, and I like to have you do it. I’m sure I should be the last to wish to direct. Indeed, I shouldn’t care to take any responsibility. But where there is children you can’t pick and choose what is to be done in the same way as where there is only a lady, can you, m’m? They have to be considered, don’t they?”

“Yes, Ruth,” I said, “I quite see your idea, and I think you are right to marry, you will feel much freer.”

But I had not the least intention that she should marry yet. Before the month was up she had decided that Mullins could hardly give her, as yet, the comforts to which she was accustomed, therefore the marriage was postponed. Still, I was conscious henceforth of the sword over my head, and it was all Tom’s fault.

He had already annoyed us all by not being born on the day originally fixed. He seemed preoccupied and in a hurry when he arrived, and of course the house was all upset. He made the best of things, waiting patiently on the sofa as if we had made the muddle, whereas, in fact, he was entirely to blame. Anne, two years later, behaved quite differently. She entered the date in her pocket-book, stopped glory-trailing when the clock struck, and came down buttoning on a pink skin several sizes too large.

I was sorry for Tom from the bottom of my heart. He had some natural dignity, which he needed in the presence of the women who preyed upon his person and searched mercilessly for his soul. They commented upon his personal appearance, his habits, and his human weaknesses, until I blushed for them and for him. They made him look absurd in the street, dressed in a shawl pinned tightly round him in the shape of a Virginia Ham, and a drunken-looking bonnet that lay cocked over one eye, leaving a draughty space at the back of the neck. When he laughed they either attributed it to a defective digestion, or put feeble jokes in his mouth.

“I’m a bad boy,” he says, Nurse Boswell interpreted, “and I’m going to kick my little heels, I am, and splash the soapy water in their faces!”

When he broke down and wept from sheer despair of ever making them understand, they took him to the blinding glare of a sunny window and threw him about until he was obliged to feign indisposition in order to make them put him down. He came to me about it sometimes, and I said: “All right, just lie down quietly, and I will say you are resting if they come.”

Just as he was comfortably settled a cheerful voice and clapping of hands was heard at the door, and in came nurse.

“Well, I never,” she exclaimed, “the idea! Who took him up? Now then, master, you just come with me and get dressed, and we’ll go off and get a mouthful of fresh air,” and out would come the rickety bonnet with the draught, and the Virginia Ham shawl, and off they went to harden themselves in a biting east wind. Tom told me afterwards that they met half a dozen women, all of whom went into the grossest personal details about his anatomy, his weight, and what he ate. The men tactfully avoided him, for which he thanked them. Those who had sons of their own knew about the bonnet and were sorry, whilst those who had not just saw him as a sort of egg, and put off his acquaintance until he should be in a fit state to be recognised.

Anne was quite different even as a baby. She humped her back and made faces at the ladies. Soon she and I combined to protect Tom in his encounters with the female sex. We exposed their folly and duplicity in a shameless way for fear lest they should take possession of his heart with their forged certificates of high-mindedness. That our claims to integrity were no better was not to the point. We, at least, loved him and should only mislead him for his good.

Tom, like the rest of his sex, was disposed to respect the authority against which he battled so long as he believed in it. He often said, “Yes, nurse,” quite respectfully, until Anne came. She soon settled that.

“You go and ask nurse if she loves you,” she said, “it’s all rot her saying the sweets are eaten up, they’re in her drawer.”

Of course Tom came back with a handful of chocolates to divide between himself and Anne, having left another illusion behind him.

We had great difficulty at first with nurses. Personally I cannot bear the popsy-wopsy nurse who is so popular with good mothers. When I was interviewing nurses for Tom, I brought him into the room and left him to decide. He soon weeded out the sheep from the goats. If the woman exclaimed “Bless him! where is he?” I caught Tom’s eye, and we said we were so sorry but we were already in treaty with some one whom we thought would be suitable. We dismissed dozens in that way for the same fault. I have been in other people’s nurseries, and seen children huddled and poked and blessed and poppeted into their clothes, marched off giggling, and brought back pouncing, their words overridden by ejaculations and clatter. Their upbringing reminds me of the comic pudding in the pantomime that is tossed up and beaten down, rolled in a dish with the cat, and thrown at the policeman, all to the accompaniment of a blaring orchestra and incessant conversation. I chose my present nurse on account of her opening remark to Tom. “Come here, boy,” she said, and Tom went, and has remained ever since.

There were a great number of things she “didn’t hold with,” but they were not matters I was tenacious about myself, neither was Tom, so we let them drop. Later on I found that a certain amount of compromise was effected, such as a pair of dried ears exchanged for a short story before the fire, or some real tea offered for a quiet afternoon with a scrap-book; that was on days when Tom had Satan in one pocket and an Angel of Goodness in the other. He was a simple creature, and but for Anne would have kept his illusions much longer than he did. He thought that when he gave up his time to help in laying the nursery tea, things got on quicker than they would otherwise have done; that it saved nurse trouble to hand the spoons to him one by one and put them straight afterwards. Anne found for herself an occupation that she preferred.

One of nurse’s articles of faith was that children should have their own place in the household and keep to it. There was a place for every one in her picture. The servants in the kitchen, the children in the nursery, the master in his study, and the mistress in the drawing-room, also pervading the whole house as, in a landscape, the sun and the blizzard pervade fields, lakes, woods, and mountains alike. To have the children the centre of general attention or running about the house would have seemed to her as revolutionary as trees planted on a dinner-table or poultry at large on a cricket-field. Tom’s instincts led him to fall very easily into his place in the domestic world. He was always a mere nut in a vast mechanism whose existence he dimly apprehended; he was of importance inasmuch as the great machinery might go out of gear for want of the trustworthy service of the least of its parts. Anne thought of herself—so far as she thought at all—as a spark from a divine fire, sent to illumine the musty darkness in which parents, domestic servants, visitors, and tradesmen had hitherto lived. This divine spark must be kept alive. She encouraged us all to blow, and herself pirouetted helpfully in the draught of our exertions. Nurse never devised things for the children to do, any more than the nervous system of the body devises occupations for the other parts. I understand that it allows some activities to pass unnoticed, inhibits others, and encourages some, but it does not suggest much. We all had our work to do, and when nurse was out of order, whether through ill-health or disapproval, strange distempers appeared in our conduct. Tom and Anne quarrelled. Ruth took to sending up twice a week “that sloppy hotpot which I can’t think is good for the children.” Clara left the clean things from the wash downstairs, “getting in all the way of the dust, and I with the stockings yet to darn.” Even the fish surpassed itself in evil-doing. Of course it “never came,” we were used to that; but on these fatal occasions it was full of bones when it did come, and “had nothing on it.”

The children never got on with the efficient female, Tom the least of the two, owing to his illusions. Not that he disliked her, he was always patient with women, and prepared to think they were doing their best (until Anne explained to him just what they were doing), but the efficient female got in his way, and made him hot. She brought him occupations when he was already busy with string. They were always in boxes labelled “The Young So-and-so” (none of them people whom he liked to be). He never wanted to be a young designer or penman or weaver. If she had brought materials for the young plumber—a pound of lead for instance, or that delightful gas thing on a stick that makes a flame when you blow—it would not have been so bad; he could have mended the hole in nurse’s boot, or stopped up the place under the coal-scuttle where the mouse came. The efficient female believed in Madame Montessori’s Kindergarten apparatus in the same spirit as the poor believe in the efficacy of a “bottle from the doctor’s.” She brought us puzzles over which we all tore our hair in the evenings. Matching colours became an obsession, and James began to button and unbutton his waistcoat at dinner until I had to speak to him on account of Clara. Finally nurse came to the rescue, as usual, and inhibited our desire to cultivate our senses. She complained that Tom had awakened her by trying to fit each of his fingers successively into her open mouth, and that he was quite feverish because none of them fitted exactly. The efficient female told me what a great success the system had been with her children; but the truth is that I do not like her children. They have their hair tied in an unbecoming way, they can tell you the names of all the flowers in the garden—even the flowering shrubs which no decent person ever remembers—they know what makes the hen lay eggs, and why their own tears are salt. When I was young, we knew less about ourselves and more about other people. We ranged over the whole field of history, picking out gems of character here and there. Quintus Curtius, Noah, Henry the Eighth and his six wives, Napoleon in the retreat from Moscow (there was a picture of it in the nursery, with snow, and vultures, and corpses lying across broken cannon), Marius amongst the ruins of Carthage, the Queen of Sheba, King Alfred, Livingstone, Cardinal Wolsey. We remembered none of their dates, neither was their history correlated with other subjects, but we shall have to mix them up in heaven. So why not now? One has friends of various ages, yet it never occurs to me to mention: “Of course you were born before the death of Gladstone, were you not? I want to introduce Mrs. Ingram, born 1856, contemporary with Mrs. Maybrick, the famous poisoner; in politics, Churchill, Chamberlain, and Balfour; science, Marconi and the close of the reign of Lister; saw the dawn of motor-cars, and remembers the introduction of the telephone.” Or, “Miss Black, born shortly before the accession of Lloyd George, witnessed the ascent of the first aeroplane, and took a prominent part in the famous raid by Suffragettes on the House of Commons.” A correlated introduction would, I imagine, be made like this: “Miss Black, a descendant of the Black Prince, has crossed the Black Sea twice, wears black stockings, and is interested in nigger minstrelsy.”

My whole sympathy is with that little boy who, having learned the anatomy of the snowdrop, washed-in the snowdrop in bold outline, modelled the snowdrop, sung a song about the snowdrop, found on the map the different countries where it grew, and learned the best of those passages in literature where it is mentioned, at last flung the detestable little flower to the ground, exclaiming heartily, “Damn the snowdrop!”

CHAPTER IX: THE SCHOOLROOM

When Tom was seven and Anne nine, I decided to engage a governess. I had never lost the feeling of—shall we call it respect—that I had felt for my own governess; one does not lose a feeling like respect in ten years. Therefore, when I found myself interviewing a governess for some one else, I felt rather like a sheep engaging a butcher. You can picture the scene. A small office adjoining the shambles. The sheep, arrayed in all the panoply of its natural wool unshorn for many years, the place where the branded mark had been covered with a self-possessed growth, seated at a small table writing. The pen a fancy article in the humorous disguise of a knife.

“Well, Mr. Jones,” says the trembling, bleating voice. “Do you kill yourself, or do you purchase the—er—the carcasses? You were in your last shop how many years? Precisely—very painful—thank you. You left on account of an outbreak of anthrax amongst the lambs—quite so. Yes, you would have the dip to yourself after ten o’clock. The slaughter-house is next door to your room, and there is a convenient tannery within ten minutes’ walk kept by an excellent ogre with moderate charges; we are devoted to him. I will send the cart to the station for you on Tuesday, and you will be able to begin your rounds at once.”

I lost this feeling after I had been to one or two agencies, and I felt instead like the man with a whip, who took over the plantation from the kind master in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Innocent old ladies with white wool on their heads and Bibles in their pockets came to offer their services as educational drudges, prepared to expose their pathetic cashmere backs to the lash of childish criticism and motherly arrogance. I wanted to engage them all just to ensure their being out of reach of some women I knew. I would then leave them my house, and fly with Tom and Anne to some desert island where we never need employ anyone or improve our minds again.

But it was impossible to engage them all, so I tossed up in the end between two; “heads,” Miss Mathers, “tails,” Miss Cook, and Miss Mathers had it. Miss Cook was young and modern, very pretty and charming, with all the drawbacks of a boy and a few of his advantages. I knew the children would get on with her, but I had a secret fear that she would think me “quaint,” and perhaps develop an enthusiasm for my vices, which would have bothered me. Miss Mathers was above all things a gentlewoman, which I thought would be good for Anne because I was not. She liked refinement and regular hours, and, especially, her attitude towards “gentlemen” was such a delight to me.

“Have you ever had brothers, Miss Mathers?” I asked her once, to which she replied: “Oh, yes, I have a brother I am extremely fond of; he is a most delightful man, so honest, generous, and witty. We have been the greatest of friends ever since our childhood.”

“But, then, surely, you must have seen him in his shirt-sleeves sometimes,” I suggested, “you know he is a human being and not a strange animal. Didn’t you ever sit on his knee?”

“No, Mrs. Molyneux,” she said after some thought, “I don’t remember ever doing so; I doubt whether he would have cared for it. But, of course, if anything of the kind had been necessary I should not have hesitated.”

I found great tonic properties in Miss Mathers’ conversation, for I had never seen men and women separated in the way she did it. It made exquisitely amusing so much in our social life that had been dull before. To her mind, so far as I understand, a man’s position in the scheme of creation is like that of the architect when a house is to be built. The only person who really matters is the lady who lives in the house when it is complete. The architect (it is disagreeable of course to have to employ one) merely sees that it is there. He is the man who does all the necessary and unpleasant part, what Miss Mathers called in every branch of art “the mechanical part.” I have heard her say of a picture that the “mechanical part was very nicely done.” I think her opinion of James was high, inasmuch as she considered his share in the establishment—the mechanical part—was very nicely done. That is, there was enough money to live on, the servants were well looked after, his children healthy, affectionate, and not too numerous.

But, while I was looked upon as a fellow-creature, James was to her a thing as utterly remote as the driver of a train in which she might be travelling, or, as I said, the architect of our house or the Archbishop of Canterbury. No, I think that is wrong. The Archbishop would be thought more human being a clergyman, because clergymen are almost like ladies they are so sensible—we will say, rather, the Pope, because being a Roman Catholic he was, of course, not a clergyman, though no doubt an excellent man according to his lights.

Miss Mathers was full of pleasant surprises. I found that she enjoyed music-halls, approved of divorce (which she called a capital arrangement if two people could not agree), and disliked the idea of Women’s Suffrage. I pointed out that she was inconsistent in approving of divorce notwithstanding her religious principles, and she explained her reasons over some hot buttered toast before retiring to bed.

“My brother divorced his wife,” she said, “for reasons which are warranted by Scripture, and I hold him to be in the right. It was far better than if he had compelled her to live with him under false pretences of affection.”

“But if she ran away,” I suggested.

“In that case,” said Miss Mathers, “she would have continued to bear his name, and would therefore have been living in open sin. My brother, by taking the course he did, gave her the opportunity to retrieve her character by becoming respectably married. The Church is perfectly right in refusing to sanction divorce, because persons who place themselves in such a position ought to be outside the pale of religion, but I think the law acts wisely in providing for legitimate separation.”

On another buttered toast night I asked her why she disliked Women’s Suffrage. If I had had any knowledge of character I might have guessed her reason, but Miss Mathers was not like anyone I had met before.

“My dear Mrs. Molyneux,” she said, “the poet Byron has most truly observed that

‘Man’s love is of his life a thing apart;

’Tis woman’s whole existence.’

It is true that it does not fall to the lot of all of us to love in that sense, but the possibility can never be lost sight of. What could you conceive more ludicrous and unsuitable than that the whole existence of one of our rulers should be merged in passionate feelings for a fellow-creature? Public life demands whole-hearted devotion to the State.”

“But great statesmen often fall dreadfully in love,” I said.

“A thing apart, Mrs. Molyneux, believe me,” the romantic creature said with assurance. “When my brother’s nose is in his books or his inkpot or wherever else it may happen to be, it is there; temporarily perhaps, but he gives his whole mind to it. When he emerges he may be the slave of any woman, only not at the time. But I assure you I have seen women attempt to transact the business of an office, when they were in love, with deplorable results. I do not say they are incapable of renouncing their private passions for the sake of what they apprehend to be their duty, but I maintain that their services to that duty will not be worth a pin so long as the renouncement is in progress. And the public service cannot wait while they recover.”

“A great many people will disagree with you, Miss Mathers,” I said.

“A great many people have not loved,” she replied. “I speak from observation only.”

Tom and Anne were as devoted as I was to Miss Mathers. Of course Anne never became a gentlewoman, but she learned to sew, and to write without inking her fingers, not to come into a room head first and feet last nor to trail a vanishing hand across the door before she shut it; not to giggle, not to finger the spoons and forks before the next dish came in, not to sit still when she ought to stand up, not to frown and show her teeth in the sun, not to fall into habits of speech, and—most valuable and delightful accomplishment—not to argue about anything that had to be done. Tom said Miss Mathers was very restful because she saved them so much trouble. He explained that so long as there was any chance of altering an order by discussion it would be unsporting not to have a shot at it, but the argument was, on the whole, more fatiguing than it was worth, even to gain a slight concession.

I do not know whether she returned our affection, but when she left because Anne grew up, she said she did not intend to teach any more. It was very up-hill work in the present state of affairs. Parents of breeding were dying out, and modern education appeared to become daily more medical and less moral. She could never acquire the requisite knowledge for turning out a child’s stomach to examine its character. She should, therefore, retire and live with her brother, who really needed a lady to look after him.

CHAPTER X: THE CHARWOMAN

Two-and-sixpence a day is what it costs me to have the pleasure of Mrs. Muff’s society. She came at half-past eight and began at once on a bit of breakfast.

“I beg pardon, m’m,” said Ruth, when Mrs. Muff had been with us for a week (she came on Mondays and Tuesdays and did the rough washing), “but do I understand that Mrs. Muff is to have anything special ordered in for her breakfast?”

“It depends,” I said. “Is a charwoman fed on special food like a gold-fish? Won’t she thrive unless we give her ant’s eggs or boiled Indian meal?”

“I couldn’t say, I’m sure, m’m.” Ruth glanced angrily in the direction of the washhouse where Mrs. Muff was urging us in quavering tones to abide with her. “She had an egg this morning like the rest of us, but she said she wouldn’t be responsible if it happened again, as they always disagreed with her.”

“Ah, but these are fresh ones,” I said. “Did you explain it to her? Perhaps she had never tried them before; it makes all the difference.”

Ruth suggested that I had better speak to her myself, so I gathered up my skirts and “webbed it,” as an elegant friend of mine puts it, over the wet floor to Mrs. Muff and touched her on the shoulder.

“Good morning, Mrs. Muff,” I shouted. The song ceased. An amiable little cherry face with a sharp nose, vegetable eyes, and four teeth, by no means whole, whisked round upon me out of the steam.

“I can only abide with you for a minute, dear Mrs. Muff,” I bawled, “but I came to ask whether you had everything you wanted.”

“Oh, yes, thank you, m’m, indeed—unless it were that you could see your way to a new wash-tub; this one leaks something awful. If you thought of getting a man in to see to it he would tell you.”

“I know what he would tell me,” I replied, “I say—I know what he would tell me. I have heard it before.”

“And what was that, m’m?” Mrs. Muff inquired intelligently with one dripping hand behind her ear.

“I can’t explain,” I shouted, “it would take too long, but it made him whistle a great deal, and I don’t think the whistling did the tub any good, so we got a new one, and that is the one you are using—it is quite new—I can’t get another just yet.”

“Oh, quite so, m’m, quite so, I only thought I would mention it. I can manage splendidly, but this soap don’t seem to get up much of a lather. Where I was in my last place I did all the master’s shirts, and the table-cloths, and the sheets, and the pillow-cases. I made a splendid job of it; got a fine lather we did, and all with Cross and Blackwell’s soap, nothing else; I never put nothing to it, no soda nor chemicals; I don’t hold with them. Just the plain soap. Now I’ll just show you this soap if you can be troubled—beg pardon, it’s me left ear—if you’ll excuse me I’ll turn round—now then, what was it, m’m?”

“By and by,” I screamed, “but what about your breakfast?”

“Oh, don’t you trouble about that, m’m,” she assured me, “anything will do for me. Just what you are having yourselves, m’m. A bit of bread is all I need. I always say so long as we ’ave bread we’ve no need to complain. It’s a pity you don’t ’appen to have a better drying ground, isn’t it, m’m? You could do with a nice field. Always seems to make the things sweeter to my mind with plenty o’ fresh air; but, bless you, I can manage. I’ll give them an extra rub and they’ll look every bit as well. I’m accustomed to make things do as best I can, with me ’usband being an invalid. I was a splendid cook at one time, used to cook every bit of what ’e ’ad, I did indeed, and wash too—washed everything for the children—and in me last place we ’ad everything to do, the table-cloths, and the sheets, and the——”

The washhouse was full of steam, so she did not notice my escape. Through the open window I could hear that she supposed me to be still with her. Presently there was an abrupt pause and the hymn began again.

I told Ruth next morning that I thought she had misjudged Mrs. Muff; she seemed a good-natured old lady, and used to putting up with things. I was informed that she had carried on something dreadful that morning, wanting three courses for breakfast, besides jam and coffee; said tea wasn’t fit stuff to begin the day on, there was nothing strengthening about it. “And she’s calling the soap for everything,” Ruth added; “says she can’t wash with it, and there is no place to dry the clothes—perhaps you wouldn’t mind speaking to her.”

She was out on the back lawn this time hanging out the clothes. Some eccentric flannel garments flaunted defiance, with one leg in the air, and Mrs. Muff sang:

“At the sign of triumph

Satan’s host doth flee——”

“Certainly it does,” I said to myself, and turning up my sleeves I walked out.

“Mrs. Muff,” I began, “what is all this again about breakfast and soap?”

Mrs. Muff in tears was worse than anything I had imagined to be possible. The only thought that enabled me to proceed was that Ruth in tears would be less harrowing but far more terrible. As usual, pity was conquered by fear, and I saw myself as an egg-thirsty tyrant standing (with Ruth behind me) belabouring the prostrate body of poor musical Mrs. Muff with a bar of Gossage’s Tallow Crown. Neither “Primrose Glory” (I think that was the name of her soap) nor fried fish were ever mentioned between us again. Ruth generously added half a cold pie to the peace contract, and I contributed a blue serge suit dear to James’s heart. It is always satisfactory to work in minor interests with great ones and to combine generosity with one’s own advantage.

Imagination is sometimes thought to belong to a high order of intelligence. I believe it often depends upon absence of education. A great mind may so use its education that it only provides a wider field for the imagination, just as the marvellous digestion of a goat can adapt all sorts of inedible stuff to a useful end, but it is difficult to improve on the brilliant fancy of quite ordinary children and illiterate old ladies. If Mrs. Muff had had a normally adult intelligence or the least smattering of science, she would never have expected me to believe that the numerous handkerchiefs that got lost in the wash had gone down the grid. We lost six in one week and ten in the next, and still the water flowed peacefully away, nor ever tarried for a moment round Mrs. Muff’s ill-protected roots. I gave orders that if she would make such a mess she must stand on a foot-stool, which she reluctantly did; but if her explanation about the grid had contained a tenth part of fact she would have been standing knee-deep in a lake in no time. If Mrs. Muff had not been so deaf I should have told her some of the explanations that I have heard children give for natural phenomena, and asked whether they seemed to her at all remarkable. A nice child of my acquaintance, who invariably comes to dinner with dirty finger-nails, has given me quite a lot of imaginative pleasure. Once (she was reproved and sent back each time) it was the cold weather that had made them black; another day—the next, I believe—it was the thunder; the last time I went there to lunch it was because she had been hanging down her hands, and her mother commented upon the curious fact that the week before it had been because she was reaching up to do her hair. I myself have been told that the plates were sooty because the plumber was in the house, that the fresh eggs were bad because of the time of year, and I have waited to complete my collection of “facts that every housewife ought to know,” until I am assured that the cat has had an unusual number of kittens on account of the range.

CHAPTER XI: HUSBANDS

To those about to marry a husband often seems not only a subject for affection and admiration but also for respect such as is given to an older and more experienced being. The young bride sees herself in imagination the possessor of a husband and children; she classifies them as belonging to separate orders of being. This I have found to be a mistake, but many of us drift so gently into a knowledge of the fact that we never notice how far we have wandered from our original conception. I realised the position quite suddenly one day. There was no falling apple nor boiling tea-kettle nor anything of that sort to start the theory in my head; it was not even as if I had been cutting down James’s trousers to fit Tom. I had been sitting with my hands in my lap, twiddling my thumbs, when all of a sudden this occurred to me. “James is to the other children what the thumb is to the other fingers. I have five fingers, the most powerful and useful of which stands apart from the others and is called the thumb. I have five children of which the first, the most powerful and useful, is called the husband. I have been deceived by instinct, by tradition, and by my parents, and it does not matter in the least; things are exactly as they were before. I will brush my husband’s hat and think no more about it.” But I did think more about it. I began also to notice other ladies in the same predicament, and marked how unconscious they were of their true position. I watched them feed and dress and exercise their first-born husbands, observing how they advised and reproved and deceived them for their good, how they encouraged them to work and were surprised when the work was recognised and paid for by the world. Mrs. Beehive’s husband was rather celebrated. He had built a great many public buildings, she once told me with pride and in just the same way as she described how baby had begun to take notice at an exceptionally early age. I could hear her, in imagination, say, “Yes, dear, very nice indeed,” while Mr. Beehive toiled and built like the dearest and humblest of beavers that he is, occasionally reviving his hopeful efforts to explain the nature of creation to the passive, mutton-headed creature who has, so to speak, swallowed him up and borne him anew for herself against his will. Another thing I discovered was that Ruth knew what a husband is and never told me. Servants are much sharper than their mistresses about these things. I suppose it is because they are not distracted by love and marriage. In their minds the master and the children are lumped together with other troublesome and necessary facts which girls have to put up with. (Whether they are “Mother’s” husband and children or the mistress’s makes very little difference.) They want a great deal more cooking than anyone would do for themselves, they tear their clothes, and are unpunctual and passionate. Sometimes they come home drunk and use up the money that is wanted for the house, or they speculate and gamble with it—silly fellows—instead of laying it out sensibly on bargains and outings. The only excuse they might have for doing the things they do—littering up the place with books and papers and musical instruments, screaming at one another without their hats in the street, or sitting in poky rooms in their shirt-sleeves—the only excuse they might have for all this folly would be to get well paid for it, so that they might spend at least part of the day sensibly in dancing and holiday-making. But not at all. They come home either as surly as bears or else perfectly limp and useless for conversation, they want more cooking done, and probably have less money on them than they took out. That is Ruth’s view I know, and it is that, secretly or avowed, of all the experienced women of good repute whom I know; those who think otherwise are not wives at heart, they are on a par with, if they are not actually, concubines. Soon after the day when I had twiddled my fingers and thought of these things, I began to notice all sorts of little contributory facts which fitted in with my newly formed theory. What Ruth said was nothing new, but I had never understood it before. I went into the kitchen, as usual, to go through the ceremony which Tom calls “seeing the beef.” I had been out alone the evening before, and had left a chop for James’s dinner.

“There is very little of the cold grouse left, m’m,” said Ruth, “the master’s been at it.”

“But I left a chop for him, didn’t I?” I asked.

“Yes’m, but he’s been at the grouse all the same. He would have it. You can see for yourself.”

Yes, I thought, if things were not as I now see they are, Ruth would have spoken differently. She would have said: “I am sorry, m’m, I can’t let you have the grouse to-day, but it was required for the master.” As it is, the very servants can evidently see no difference between the master wanting cold grouse and the boys raiding the pantry for tarts. Where is my husband? It appears that I have not got one. There is no such thing.

I then remembered with painful feelings of disillusionment something that Clara had said a few days before. “The master’s vests, m’m, they are all out at the elbows, with him yawning like that. He pulls them to pieces every time he raises his arms. I wonder could you speak to him about it?”

“He only yawns like that when he is doing very difficult work, Clara,” I said at the time. “We can’t help it; it wouldn’t do to interrupt him.”

“No, m’m, but if you could just mention it to him—you see it takes me all the evening to mend them when I ought to be getting on with the new curtains.” It was just as if she had said: “Of course, it is a pity he shouldn’t enjoy himself, and I would be the last to wish to stop it, but we can’t let his play stand in the way of what has to be done.”

The idea of a wife being the mother of her husband is an old one, but it has been too ambiguously put before the public, therefore girls still marry under a misapprehension. The misapprehension is of no consequence and hurts no one, but I cannot help thinking it would save disappointment if instead of nursing a delusion we could idealise a fact. If children were not made unnecessarily ridiculous the supposed husband would not be missed from the family group. If Mrs. Beehive gave to her younger children some of the dignity which she has, by reason of her nature, stripped from Mr. Beehive it would be a great deal better than throwing it away, and Mr. Beehive would suffer less from being placed in the same pigeon-hole with his own baby. Why should the mother of the family be the only one who is allowed any dignity or private life? She denies this, of course, and draws you a beautiful fancy picture of papa, the head of the house. She dresses him up for your benefit in all his war-paint of waistcoat and whiskers, but she does it in just the same spirit as she dresses up her son as a postman to please him while she gets on with her work. And the cruel thing is that she has so long ago stripped him of his natural fur and feathers that when she says “that is enough,” and folds away the waistcoat and whiskers in a drawer, he is exposed to the neighbours in a defenceless and absurd condition.

What is it that binds Mr. and Mrs. Beehive together? The problem has fidgeted me for years. It has disturbed me in my work, and sometimes even caused me to overlook Mr. Jones’s iniquities until it was too late to do anything. I once asked Ruth why it is that married people remain with one another, and she said she supposed it was the evenings.

“What about the evenings?” I asked.

“Well, you see, m’m,” she said, “as you know yourself, there is not very much for unmarried girls as is anyways respectable to do in the evenings.”

“Yes, but the men, Ruth,” I said,“—mind the milk—it is boiling—thank you—why do they stay to be treated like children?”

“Well, m’m, I suppose it is because they are what you might call childish. Of course, you may say they do bring in the money, and some of them are very knowledgeable—such as master—but you’ll find they haven’t much idea of spending an evening profitably without they are married.”

It wouldn’t do to let them know, is a great phrase in every peaceful household. And it is quite true; it would never do at all. Husbands want reasons for everything and we know what that means! It is impossible to make them understand why some perfectly ordinary things cannot be done. We say, perhaps, light-heartedly enough, “I have such a headache, I wish I hadn’t to go out!” and he says, “Well, why do you go out?” Of course we reply that there is the fish to be got—it never came—and then it is his turn to say, “Why not send Ruth?” We explain that Ruth has to cook the dinner.

“But she can’t cook the fish before it comes.”

“But there are the other things?”

“Oh, never mind them, your head is the only thing that matters. Let Ruth go.”

We end by a detailed description of the cook’s afternoon and the havoc this slight disorganisation of the traffic would cause, knowing, of course, perfectly well that there is no reason why Ruth should not go except that she just can’t. Cooks don’t go for fish unless they offer to, and then they are not experienced enough. What we really want the man to do is to say he will go, but we don’t say this because it would end in his sending Ruth and thinking himself very clever. He would report that she was delighted to go and made no fuss whatever. Next day we should be made to feel that the unwritten law had been broken through our fault. We had taken a mean refuge behind the master, whose orders she could not refuse to obey. Things would be very uncomfortable for some time and she would very likely ask whether the master were going to undertake the housekeeping, because if so—etc. But it is impossible to explain all that at the time, so we are either cross because of the headache and conceal the cause, or else we are rude at once when he begins his suggestions, and then he says women are unreasonable and ought to take more exercise.

I seem always to be exploding fallacies in this book, but there is one more which must be mentioned because it is connected with the husband fallacy. It is part of Mrs. Beehive’s whisker make-up. This is the fallacy of the Experienced Man. I have never yet seen a man who gave me the impression of being in the least experienced in anything more important than the details of his own business. In matters of life and death he is as hopeful at eighty as he was at eight. James still says to me: “What a good plan it would be to share a house for the summer with the Van Diemans. You see, they would not be in our way in the least; they would have rooms to themselves, we needn’t see them unless we want to. He would be there to fish and play golf with me, and you would be left with her. She would probably do the housekeeping for you.”

The last time he mentioned this I said: “Do you ever go to stay with anyone without hiding at the top of the house and pretending you are dead for nine-tenths of the day?” He said no, but that was different—when you had rooms of your own. I replied: “Do you know what you would do? You would open the door of our sitting-room as you came upstairs and say: ‘Why not come in and have a chat and a smoke?’ The poor deluded dears would come in, you would be as pleased as Punch for ten minutes and then begin to fidget.”

“Oh, but then they would go,” said James, “and besides I like it for much longer than that.”

“You don’t, ten minutes is the outside limit. I have timed you often when the Van Diemans have been here: in ten minutes you begin to wind up your watch and ask where they are going to spend Christmas.”

“Oh, do I?” said James.

“Yes, and another thing, you don’t like fishing. It is the idea of fishing that you like. When it comes to the point you go because Van Dieman is such a good chap, but you hate the wet grass, and the flies, and not catching anything.”

“What a sordid mind for detail you have,” he said; “there is no imagination about you.”

“An ounce of experience is worth two pounds of imagination,” I answered.

We took our holiday in an altogether different way, and James was appalled when the Van Diemans told him how they had spent their time. He said it was inconceivable how people could enjoy that sort of thing. When I pointed out that it was entirely owing to my foresight and intelligence that we had not been there, he said shamelessly that it would have been quite different if we had gone; it was just an accident that they had behaved in accordance with their temperaments and their invariable habit.

Women, on the other hand, are so experienced that I have begun to think they remember not only their childhood but also their previous incarnations. From what I know of both sexes it seems probable that Adam spat out his piece of apple behind the nearest fig-tree, while Eve munched hers conscientiously to the end and got some good out of it. I used to consult Mrs. Beehive in the early days about all sorts of domestic matters, but finally I gave it up because she was so depressing. She said so often: “It’s no good, dear. It’s a nice idea, I know, but you will find it will rot with the sun,” and it always did, in spite of Mr. Beehive saying that it was sure to do beautifully, and that the reason why theirs had been a failure was the unusual dampness of the year; it was not likely to occur again.

Husbands seldom learn by experience to recognise the object of their instinctive desire. Just as a baby screams and reaches towards the plant in the middle of the table when it really needs to go into the kitchen and ask cook for milk with a little water in it—not too hot—so a man says to his wife: “I dislike your clothes intensely. I wish you would go and buy a sort of shawl arrangement and drape it round you like the figures you see on a Greek vase. That is the way women ought to dress.” The poor fish-faced lady with the innocent expression and wispy hair goes obediently to Derry and Toms’s and buys an expensive silk shawl which she arranges round her ill-balanced form in exact imitation of the lady on the vase in Edward’s room, and comes down to dinner. Then the real tragedy begins, and all about a shawl! What he really had before his mind was no more a shawl than it was an Inverness cape or a Moujik’s jacket. It was a confection which he had seen on a lady in the Park with a beautiful figure, and if his innocent old dear had bought the same model and put it on he would have called her shameless and abandoned. If he had more experience and fewer childish dreams he would address her as follows: “My dear, I wish that you would not dress in parti-coloured scraps that don’t fit. I cannot myself think what you would look nice in, but first stand up straight and do your hair, and then try on clothes until you find something that I tell you is right.”

It is the folly of either side trying to explain anything to the other that leads to bloodshed.

CHAPTER XII: CHRISTMAS

When I asked Ruth what about Christmas, she said that it was always a pleasant season and she hoped none of us would break down; it meant so much to do for all. So of course I asked whether it would be any help to have in Mrs. Muff to wash up while Ruth made the puddings. She agreed that would probably be the best plan, as it would be a pity if we were not able to enjoy ourselves when it came to the point. She herself was usually at her wits’ end about Christmas-time.

“But you love that, Ruth!” I said candidly, forgetting myself for the moment.

“I beg pardon, m’m?”

“It is your wits’ beginning that bothers you, isn’t it?” I explained. “I mean” (seeing her face darken) “it is a nuisance thinking of things, I know, I feel it myself. We shall be able to give our minds to it if Mrs. Muff is here.”

I then passed hastily on to other things: the puddings, for instance, which took complete possession of my kitchen for a time. I do not think they became as personal to Ruth as to me. For my taste they were made too much of; they and the mince-pies crowded out the place and I was thankful to get rid of them. Long before Christmas I looked forward to the day when they all would be dead—“Arthur, Henry, Claud, Stanley, Gordon, Livingstone, Howard, Percy, George, Gerald, Trafford, and Herbert,” I counted along the shelf, “and all the little Thompsons. Arthur and Henry we shall want for ourselves and the kitchen on Christmas Day, you might give Claud to Mrs. Muff, and let Mullins have Stanley. Gordon and Livingstone are smaller and will do for New Year’s Day, so that leaves six to kill before Easter——” I caught sight of Ruth’s face, pale and agitated. “I am so sorry,” I apologised. “You know they seem almost like children, we have taken such an interest in them.”

“Would you care for a cup of tea, m’m?” Ruth asked anxiously.

“By and by,” I said. “I don’t really care very much for food just now. What about the turkey?”

“Well, m’m,” said Ruth, “a good-sized one that would stuff nicely ought to do us over Boxing Day, with a bit of beef, and there will be all the sausages.”

I already began to feel fat and over-fed; what with Claud and the others, and my enemy the beef with all his sausages, besides the stuffing, all arriving to lunch on the same day. It was like a lot of fat people driving over for tea and to spend the afternoon; a thing I have always detested.

“Ruth,” I pleaded, “you don’t think we might tell the tradespeople that of course one makes allowances at Christmas when every one is busy, so I should not be too exacting if one or two things—the sausages for instance—never came?”

“Oh, no, m’m,” she said proudly, “they’d never disappoint us at Christmas!”

“Ruth, I have hit upon a profound truth!” I exclaimed. “There is nothing the matter with sin in itself. The only thing that makes the Devil a bad man is that he misbehaves at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Think of the praiseworthy murders that might be committed on the right people, the thefts of horrible objects from the home that would reform humanity; arson if committed on the right kind of shops——” Ruth was running the taps for the washing-up and did not hear a word I said, so I left her and went upstairs to elaborate my theory of sin and write to Mrs. Muff. I allowed Ruth to arrange what food she liked during the next few days, as the kitchen was uninhabitable. They were giving the place a good clean down, she said. The open door disclosed Mrs. Muff singing hymns on a cork island in the middle of a flood, and an army of evicted beetles trying to settle their families into new quarters before Christmas, while Ruth and the range (clasped in one another’s arms, like the victims of Pompeii) breathed mutual forgiveness in a volcanic darkness of dust and ashes. I went out and met the efficient female coming back from town.

“I suppose you have done all your Christmas shopping?” she observed. “I always like to get mine done before the rush begins.”

“I am waiting for the London catalogues,” I said. “It is such a good way to shop.”

She told, as she had done before, how far more satisfactory it is to shop in person. “They put you off with anything if you leave it to them,” etc. I pointed out that with things like soap, and scent, and foie gras, and postage stamps, which are what I generally give people, there is not a wide field for the discretion of the shopman. She was so genuinely grieved at my idea of presents, and I know that she is such a good woman, understanding the public taste, and so on (besides, the catalogues had not come), that I thought it might be fun to try her way and see what it was like.

I turned into the principal street where the windows were full of suggestions: “Christmas novelties,” “Serviceable Xmas presents,” “What about the boys? Boots’ marvellous cash sponge always in request.” I bought some things marked “three-eleven-three,” and thought I was doing very well to secure them, as there were only a few. A little farther down the street I saw a great many more of the same things, only they were marked “one-eleven-three,” and looked in better condition. I went home and rearranged my list of people so as to use up some of the inferior “three-eleven-threes.” “I will take away Cousin Jemima’s soup-bowl,” I thought, “and give her one of the spare three-eleven-threes, then Pauline can have the soup-bowl and I will give her pencil-case to Jimmy Duncan, because his mother has taken me out so often.”

Next day I came upon a shop in a back street—it was in the Chinese quarter of the town. There were the most beautiful blue and yellow fruit plates and dishes, enough to make a thousand homes happy. They were so pretty that I danced with rage upon the pavement. I bought all I wanted and rearranged my list for the third time. It was getting dreadfully expensive. Cousin Jemima’s “three-eleven-three” had left her now, and she had been reduced to a pin-cushion at ninepence-halfpenny. Pauline’s soup-bowl was exchanged for a set of fruit-dishes which were much nicer, and then I remembered that she wanted one of my new photographs. I had ordered a dozen and they must be disposed of. I went home and rearranged my list again, which left me with two glass powder-boxes over.

When James came in and said, “Have you thought at all about Christmas presents?” I could scarcely answer coherently. He asked whether I could spare him any, and I told him that there were two powder-boxes he could have with pleasure. But that was no good, as none of his relations use powder. It was early-closing day, so we could not get anything else. He told me he had six boxes of cigarettes that I might have for my people if I could let him have something more suitable for his grandmother and the vicar’s children, so I gave him Pauline’s children’s sweets, and Cousin Jemima’s pin-cushion, and some of the Chinese dishes, and began all over again. This time there were three powder-boxes left, and my godson and James’s uncle were unprovided for. (James’s uncle was in a nursing home, so it was particularly important that he should have a cheery Christmas.) I suggested that we should tell him I was sending a photograph, but that James had spilt ink on it and I had ordered another specially, which would come in a few days. Meantime we were sending a powder-box to each of his nurses. “He will have a much gayer time like that than with ordinary presents,” I added hopefully. Clara came in then and said that Mullins had finished putting up the holly, and was there any message.

“I believe that the orthodox Christmas message is Peace and Goodwill,” I said. “Tell Mullins that I wish him peace and shall be glad of some myself.” Clara withdrew with the message, but came back to say that Mullins wished us both the compliments of the season, and was there anything else? I had only two halfpennies left, so I told Clara to tell him that if he were as wise as he pretended to be it was his part to bring gold at Christmas, not to ask for it, but that there was a small bottle of myrrh in the bathroom——However, James said I was not to be silly, so we borrowed a message from Ruth and promised to pay her back in the morning if she would get rid of Mullins. And then we did up our parcels, all but the powder-boxes. It was too late when I remembered that I might have given one to Mullins; he could have made himself look quite freshened up for Christmas with it.

There was an extraordinary demand for messages next day; even the lamplighter and the dustman longed to hear what I had to say. Some of them even sent books in which to record the messages, and that did it. “Mr. Jones’s book—and is there any message, please?”

I forgot what I had said to Ruth about forgiving Mr. Jones if he omitted to bring the sausages and the stuffing. His record for the past year was blacker than any recording angel would have put up with. I tore James’s fountain-pen from his pocket and wrote:

“When Jones’s villain asks to-day

A Christmas message, thou shalt say,

‘Here is a shilling in my name.’

Unfortunately it never came!”

On Christmas Eve parcels began to arrive. Some were from people to whom, I remembered with a pang, nothing had been sent. The hopeless muddle of my scratched list had resulted in some names passing through my head without any definite settlement. But there was still time. “Come to the book-shop, quick!” I said to James.

We took a taxi and rattled to the book-shop; but there—as the most unreasoning person I know often says—“I lost my reason.” James gave it the first flick by saying three times, “Won’t they have read that?” I was so irritated over the whole thing that I said, unless he could manage to hurry up the Day of Judgment before to-morrow, I couldn’t possibly tell, after which he, very properly, refused to help me. The counter was full of books of a kind I never read, and detest to look at: but I suppose some one reads them or they would not be there. “Reminiscences of a Conchologist,” “Historic Moments with the Queens of Saxony” (this might be amusing, but it wasn’t, because public characters have a way of keeping their best historic moments out of the press), “Leaves from my Asparagus Bed,” by a lady gardener, “Ad Nauseam” (this was bound in mauve leather, cost eighteen pence and was of a suitable size for packing, but I knew I could not write a letter with it that would carry conviction). James was fidgeting about the shop all this time. “Do please find something for Caroline,” I said to him.

“Just wait till I get this for the vicar,” he answered, hunting in his pocket. I asked what it was and he held it up.

“But you can’t have that!” I said, “I want it. It is the very thing for Caroline; and the vicar won’t read it. Here! this is much better for him.” I took up a book with a beautiful picture on the cover. A masked bishop digging up a corpse from the hearthstone, under the very nose of an expiring cook.

“The vicar is such a darling,” I said, “you must give him something nice. He loves excitement, and told me himself that the lending libraries are so stupid; they send him nothing but shop, and he does not know what to ask for.”

James gave in, and, as it turned out, made the success of the year with his present. Caroline wrote me the warmest letter of thanks for the book from which I had rescued the vicar. It was a serious, blue cloth work called “In Tune with the Indefinite.” She is a thoroughly bad woman, as worldly as Lot’s wife, and without a spark of generosity in her composition. She said she simply loved mysticism, and had been wanting this particular book ever since it came out.

I forgave Mr. Jones on Christmas Day and tried to think well of Mullins and the others. I also gave the boy half a crown on the second of January, explaining that I was sorry for the delay; there had been a slight mistake as to the time for which it was ordered. I hoped he would not be inconvenienced by receiving it in the following year instead.

CHAPTER XIII: THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

If I had been clairvoyant enough to foresee the arrival of the Buttons in the house next door, I should have looked for another dumping-ground for my domestic burdens, and, quite likely, have found myself side by side with other and worse Buttons; so I dare say it was for the best—or the least bad anyhow. When we took our house the adjoining Bijou was empty. I had forgotten (being, as the efficient female says, a little excitable) that it might some day be filled.

We were very happy for two years; then Satan began to find occupation for our landlord, at whose bidding the Buttons sprang up like fungus on the lawn of the empty house. I came home after a short holiday to find them thriving upon their evil juices. There were then two parent Buttons and three young ones. Six years later there were eight young ones, “and all by the same father,” as a friend who was staying with us remarked with surprise. In the mission field, where I understand that human life is often fostered for table purposes, the Buttons would be invaluable, but for a civilised country there were too many of them, added to which (as it they wanted adding to!) they kept animals and birds and every kind of creature with a voice whom they could lay hands on.

What deaf idiot can have floated the idea of there being dumb animals in the world to claim our affection and respect? When I find a dumb animal I shall love it with all my heart and soul. As for those animals that already exist, it would be as reasonable to speak with tears in our eyes about dumb foreigners because they make life intolerable with vociferations we do not understand.

I used to read books about the Great African Silence, dreaming about it as a Mussulman dreams of Paradise. If there is a certain hour known as cock-crow why may not other hours be apportioned in the same way and devoted to a particular animal? If this were done I could arrange my day. I would not go to bed until after cock-crow, I would do my shopping at dog-bark, and arrange to dine with a friend during caterwaul. As it is there is no method about the nuisance; it is all adrift and mixed up. And in the case of the Buttons there were the children, who welded single aggravations into one vast outrage.

They used to disperse themselves for conversation, when reasonable people approach one another. They planted one in the turret at the top of the house, another at the bottom of the garden, a third and fourth, within quarrelable distance, at the drawing-room window, while the fifth remained in a distant potting-shed, and then they began; the dumb animals acting as chorus.

“Ron——ald?” (From the turret.)

“Ye——s?”

“What are you doing?”

“Wh——at?”

“Wha——t—are—you—do——ing?”

“Mending my boat.”

“Wha——t?”

“Men——ding—my—boa——t.”

“Mend——ing—your—wha——t?”

“My bo——at.”

“Your—co——at?”

“Bo——o——at.” (“Bow—bow—bow!——Bow—bow—bow!——Bouff!”)

“Down, Spot——Spot! Spot! Spot!” (Whistling) “Peow, weow, weow——”

“Jimmy——”

“Wh——at?”

“Mother says, do you want your hammer?”

“Wh——at?”

“Mother says—do—you—want—your—hammer?”

(It would not be right to say what I did with that hammer in my mind, because a sin thought of is a sin committed in the eye of Goodness.)

“I ca——n’—t he——a—r.”

“Kwakee—scrwaak.” (From the parrot.)

“Bow—bow—bow!——bow!——Bow—bow—bow!——bow!”

“Cock—a—doodle—do!”

“Co—rr——a—warra—corrawarra.” (From the hen.)

Dog-bark and child-call lasted nearly until cock-crow came round again, because the Buttons, like the poor, keep their little ones up rather late. They trundled rattly things along the gravel, and joked loudly with papa after he came home, until half-past ten at night. We only needed cries of “Salt!” “Herrings!” and “Murder!” to give us the flavour of life at its fullest.

By way of side-shows there were the gramophone, and the pianola, and the annual baby (who never slept very well), and Mrs. Button’s singing, and the flirtations of the cook’s cat.

We enjoyed occasional precious lulls when Mrs. Button had a baby or the children were down with some disease. Even then there were always a few who had recovered first or who had not yet developed it; and as the animals did not get infectious diseases, and their confinements in no way interfered with their usual routine, the “Corrawarraing” and “Cockadoodling” and “Bowing” went on all the year round. It never took Mrs. Button more than a fortnight to have a baby, and during that time the monthly nurse sang almost as loudly in the garden as Mrs. Button used to do in the drawing-room, so, altogether, the lulls did not amount to very much. We always stayed at home during the Buttons’ summer holiday for the pleasure of being without them; besides which, we got an extra month’s peace by going away ourselves as soon as they came back.

I never could see any point in the Button family; they seemed to serve no useful end. They fed, and moved about, and multiplied exceedingly, yet never ate each other up, nor burrowed, nor became destructive in their neighbours’ gardens. But they were neither grateful to the eye nor could they be used for sport or for the table.

Mr. Button went every day to some mysterious place of business, where persons gave him good money to do for them what they could equally well have done for themselves; it was probably dull work, and Mr. Button did not mind doing it. It suited both parties that the work should go on, because the money they gave him made it possible for him to go on being Mr. Button, which was what he liked. Mrs. Button also liked him to go on being what he was, and they were so contented that they continued to make more and more young Buttons, just because it seemed a pity not to. I am quite certain that was the only reason that moved them to such an important step.

I have never seen children who so clearly as the young Buttons showed that it did not matter in the least whose children they were, any more than it matters which particular couple of rabbits own the young ones nibbling on the lawn. They were just the young Buttons. If their parents had happened to be the Duttons, or the Scruttons, or the Muttons, it would have suited them quite as well—so long as cook didn’t leave. That really would have mattered after she had got into their ways.

I have known the Button family now for some years, and never have I heard or seen them do anything that could not have been equally well said or done in a different way. “It will do as well as any other” is a favourite saying with all of them. Once, when the Buttons were away, their life’s history shaped itself in my thoughts, falling more or less into rhyme because they are so monotonous. There had been a new baby lately, and the butcher’s cart was at the door again:

Archibald Button carved the mutton

Upon a Sunday morning,

His family beside him see!

The dining-room adorning.

The pudding’s placed before his wife,

Who shares his uneventful life.

He chose her on the oddest ground,

Because her views were all so sound.

Their family consists of these—

Two pairs of twins, one set of threes,

Besides two others later on

Who followed quickly one by one.

’Twas James and Wilhelmina who

First broke on his enraptured view;

Tom, Kate, and Anne succeeded soon

And twins again the following June.

When these arrived you might have thought

They had as many as they ought,

But no, they only said, “How nice,”

And called them Gus and Beatrice.

Two years elapsed till some one said,

“Poor Mrs. Button is in bed.”

She rose again and with her came

An infant girl without a name.

They called her Mary as Papa

Desired it after Grandmama.

And then when Alice came next year

They named her from an aunt so dear.

When little Herbert’s birth was past

These parents brave had done at last.

No more the task before them lay

What names they at the font should say.

From parents such as I describe

Young children can no sin imbibe.

Behold them, therefore, meek and good,

All sitting waiting for their food.

Sound common sense and upright deeds

Will furnish all their daily needs.

Temptation cannot make them stray;

They much prefer the narrow way.

A lively tongue perhaps inquires

To what a Button’s mind aspires,

And why on mutton should subsist,

Or why indeed it should exist.

I cannot say, but this is known

That when the world is upside down,

Amidst the wreck of all that’s stable

The Buttons will be found at table.

CHAPTER XIV: HOUSE-MOVING

I have heard Mrs. Beehive say of one of our most prosperous neighbours that they had “struggled up from the Palmerston Road.” They were certainly a little battered and jaded when they got there: “there” being a handsome residential mansion on the edge of the Park. It has a tennis lawn, a vegetable garden, a garage, four entertaining rooms, ten bedrooms, butler’s pantry, electric light, ground-floor kitchens, and every modern convenience—altogether about as much material for annoyance and waste of time as can well be imagined. By the time Tom was sixteen and Anne fourteen, our doom was drawing near. In spite of my resistance, James and I were about to struggle up from the Palmerston Road; I saw it coming. Our pleasant little house was falling to bits over our heads. We were eight where we had been but four, and (this settled it) Ruth was getting angry. She wanted help in the kitchen, and there was nowhere to put any help at night. James, too, was bothered by the gramophone; Tom and Anne wanted a tennis lawn; nurse wanted a room where the dressmaker could sew (she made the nursery floor so bitty). Nurse even spoke of the bandboxes containing the winter hats as if they had recently broken out like a plague. When every one had displayed their grievances, I remembered that I wanted another room myself in which to escape from them—the aggrieved parties—a question-proof room if possible with only one door. I had thought of an underground suite of apartments like that of the Duke of Portland, with a glass roof. It would have been such a pleasure to watch the numerous legs of my tormentors as they ran about looking for me. I told the efficient female that we thought of moving, and she said: “Ah, I knew you would have to sooner or later.” I assured her that it was quite undecided, and that if we did move it would be into a smaller house. The odious creature smiled falsely, and said, of course that was the ideal life. They themselves never knew what peace was until they moved into a small house, and one really well-trained servant could run everything for eight people quite easily. That is all very well for her. She has given up making ices in boots and omelettes in hats, and now eats nothing but nuts. She is so vilely efficient that she secured from her harassed Maker the only sample he had of a patient husband who can and will digest anything. She kept the pattern and made a little outfit of children of the same convenient kind. Then, I suppose, no more were stocked, as, on the whole, there is no great demand for docile nut-eating men. They do not provide enough incident for the average household.

When James was thoroughly fired with the struggling-up idea, he set his mind towards the topmost pinnacle of ambition. A house near the Park was not enough for him, we must move into the country. “Where does the country end and the county begin?” I asked. “The county, I understand, is the thing to aim at.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I always thought it was the whole caboodle, town and country and all.”

“But, then, where do the county families come from?” I asked.

“The large provincial towns, I believe,” James replied without looking up from his book.

“Can you live right in town and be a county family?” (Silence.)

“What county families do we know?”

“Oh, the Higginbottams and the Crackers and the Fitzmullets—do go away.”

“But they all live in the town except the Fitzmullets, who are seven miles from a railway station.”

“If you don’t go away at once,” said James, “I will see that the whole county, wherever we are, calls on you, and you will die of a slow, insidious poison. They will poison your mind and your dress and your language. Do you see?”

I left the subject then. We shall come back to it later, because the struggling up of a species from one vantage-point to another is a fascinating study for those who love Nature, and I have not half got to the bottom of this county business yet; it is so involved. In the meantime there was the move itself.

Of all the experiences most calculated to humble the mighty a house move is the most humiliating. One’s household possessions lose all reticence, decency and moral sense. They flaunt themselves and cry aloud to the passers-by for attention. They behave more like Neapolitan beggars than anything else—maimed beggars on the spree. I have seen antics performed by my own furniture that made me long to burn down every city of the Empire and be numbered amongst the beasts of the field. An undertaker’s work seems wholesome and cheerful compared to that of the furniture-remover. He gets an ingrained sense of squalor that corrupts his senses and his memory until ugliness is to him not only inevitable but appropriate. I met the foreman packer staggering up our garden path with a wardrobe on his head. In one hand he flourished a picture (with the glass broken) representing the Duke of Wellington standing with drawn sword on the top of a mountain; in the other a fire-screen that was once intended for a jumble sale, but had been mislaid for years behind the plate-chest.

“For the drawing-room, I suppose,” he observed, and passed on. I ran after him, protesting that both were marked “not to go”; but when I reached the house I found them in the middle of the drawing-room floor with seven unspeakable cushions marked “cook’s bedroom,” a warming-pan (unearthed from heaven knows where), James’s large and particularly ugly writing-table, and the dining-room carpet neatly tacked down.

The efficient female tells me it is the easiest thing in the world to move. You just mark everything with the number of the room where it is to go. But she forgets that a wombat with its brain amputated could tell at a glance to which room her things belong, and she takes everything with her. There is a place for every horror and every horror is in its place. The hat-rack, the dining-room chairs and curtains, the assorted oddments for the spare bedroom, and the only comfortable furniture (rather specially dusty velvet with bob fringe) for the smoking-room. You cannot even mistake the pictures, for all those belonging to the drawing-room are water-colours with yellow frames, the dining-room has the “portraits in oils,” those for the bedrooms are photogravures representing the emotions (and it does not matter how they are distributed), historical pictures go in the passage, the agricultural and sporting in the smoking-room, and in the bathroom go the family groups and churches. So the foreman easily makes a nice job of it. It is a painful experience to find how easily some one else can fit us with a suit of circumstances which do not belong to us, just by expecting them to be ours. They pop a whole environment to which they are accustomed over our heads and button it round the neck before we have time to escape. It took me a whole week to free myself from a certain Mrs. Simpson, into whose form I was buttoned by the foreman packer with his preconceived notion of what a lady moving house ought to be like. He had such firm faith in Mrs. Simpson, and expected so confidently to find her in my house, that his faith removed the mountain of my individuality, and I became his ideal. His mind was so steeped in Mrs. Simpson, he was so incapable of recognising the existence of any married woman but Mrs. Simpson, that he was obliged to fish Mrs. Simpson out of his pocket and clap her over my head before he could adjust his mind to understand what I wanted. When he first came to see me about the arrangements, he looked me up and down and metaphorically said: “Excuse me, I will just fetch Mrs. Simpson, and then we shall know where we are.” As he fixed me with his eye, I felt myself becoming like the lady in an advertisement for tea. I could feel the chocolate-like richness of the fluid I should pour out for my lace-begarbed friends who sat amiably smiling round the mixed biscuits and the cruet. I knew that I had on a speckled blouse with a wired collar, and a short tweed skirt, and that I looked just thirty-seven, and was extremely sensible and good-natured. My own house that I loved so much disappeared under the petrifying expectation of that foreman, and at the sight of his notebook there sprang up dishevelled pink paper lamp-shades, photograph frames in the form of banjos and sunflowers, rickety overmantels, and everything that Mrs. Simpson always had. All Mrs. Simpson’s past surged into my veins. I remembered how I had gone with Mr. Simpson (who was rather a darling in those days) to buy our furniture, and how I, sighing after a heavy day amongst the suites, had said: “I think we have done everything now except the ornaments for the drawing-room mantelpiece.”

“Yes,” I said dreamily to the foreman, “everything is to go please—the drawing-room ornaments—and the overmantel—and the cosy corner—and the what-not.”

“I beg pardon, m’m,” he interrupted, “they’ll be in the drawing-room, I suppose. I don’t see what you’re describing here.”

“I am sorry,” said I. “It was your friend, Mrs. Simpson, who put me out for the moment.”

“I think there must be some slight mistake, m’m,” he said, “I don’t seem to remember a Mrs. Simpson.”

“No, no,” I answered, making a great effort to possess myself again, “of course there is no such person; I know that. But now we really must get on.”

“You leave everything to me, mum,” he assured me, “and we’ll move everything, just as it is now.”

“But, please,” I begged, “I don’t want everything moved. You know I said that a few minutes ago. There is a lot of rubbish in the house that is not to go at all. You will be very careful, won’t you, not to take what is marked “not to go”?

He promised, with tears of enthusiasm in his eyes, and he took everything, without exception. I found an old potato, that Ruth had left in the sink, sprouting under the spare room bed a fortnight after we moved in; it had a large white label round its neck with “not to go” printed on it. I was so worked up by this discovery that I wrote to the foreman about it, and he replied that he was very sorry; it had been a misunderstanding. He understood that No. 2 bedroom was the servants’ apartment, it seemed so bare.

I had really had a good dose of Mrs. Simpson before the foreman assaulted me with her. She was a great friend of the house-agent. He had acted for her for years, and I had a sickening day in her shape when we were looking for houses. The first agent I went to brought her with him to the door of a residential mansion he wished to dispose of. He attired me in her garments while we were waiting for the caretaker.

“I expect you manage to get your own way pretty well in the matter of decorations, don’t you?” he began. “I notice the ladies generally do.”

I became Mrs. Simpson at once. “Oh yes,” I said, “my husband is much too busy to take notice of these things. It wouldn’t do to trouble the gentlemen with them, would it?” Then I threw Mrs. Simpson to the ground and trampled on her.

“I am sorry, I don’t like this house,” I said quite firmly, but he took no notice and told me to wait till I had seen round a bit. That revived her. When Mrs. Simpson is at her worst I see advertisements in the way I am told drunken men see spiders. I became Mrs. Simpson in an advertisement for somebody’s lemonade. I ran about over a tennis lawn; young men with Arrow collars and Viyella shirts lay on the grass beside a picnic basket; some one else, in a punt, poured out a new brand of lime-juice cordial. There was a high wall round our garden, and up the wall crept monstrous roses grown under the influence of pills for plants. My grandfather was there too in a smoking-cap, rolling the lawn with a special kind of roller.

“Look here,” I said, “I am so sorry, but I cannot bear this. I don’t like the shape of the lady who lived here.”

“What do you mean?” asked the agent, looking at me over some horrid eyeglasses (I think they were some new patent ones that boasted of being practically indistinguishable from the real eye). “It was an old gentleman that lived here with three daughters. Who told you there was a lady?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I persisted. “An old man with daughters is just as bad—I mean, I don’t think the house is healthy. If you will send me your list I will go round by myself.” I went to three or four other agents until at last I found one who did not know Mrs. Simpson, and I took the first house he offered me. Coleridge, or some one of that sort, had lived there, but he had been ousted by some rich Americans who are so volatile that they do not stick like the Mrs. Simpsons, so I very soon had the place to myself. When we go I shall scrape the walls and remove all the fittings and the tragic little bits of linoleum and empty bottles. The deadest mutton is never so dead as objects that have been called into temporary life by human ownership. I would rather find fifteen naked corpses in a house than one old pair of trousers. I should like to take that house agent to Pompeii and show him the petrified bodies and their belongings and ask him which made his flesh creep most. It might make him abandon his gruesome trade and be the end of Mrs. Simpson. But if there were no houses to let, where would all the poor ladies of England lay their eggs? It is not practicable.

CHAPTER XV: SHOPPING IN LONDON

When we moved into our new house there were many things to be bought. I spent a happy day with lists as fat as encyclopædias, but that seemed such an expensive way to shop that I finally went to London instead. Lists are so attractive. Everything looks desirable, and one remembers so much that one would otherwise forget that it seems wiser to go to the shop itself. One gets disillusioned there in no time before the actual things. It becomes delightful not to have them in one’s own house. Above all, one gets so weary of going “straight through on the left.” Nothing seems worth while at the cost of going straight through on the left. I went straight through on the left for hours at a time, and at last came to a large window looking out on to a fire-escape.

“Are you quite sure the poker department is straight through on the left?” I asked the shopwalker.

“Quite sure, Madam,” he replied.

“Then,” I said, “if you will hold my parasol and my hat and wait until I take off my skirt, I will go there. I see it is down the fire-escape.”

“Oh, no. Madam,” he said, “this way, please.”

It was not anywhere near the left: it was to the right, and down some stairs, and round two corners, and past the drapery. I bought the poker and tongs and then asked for a shovel. The man directed me to the ironmongery department.

“No, Madam,” I was told, “this is the furnishing. Kitchen department is in the ironmongery.”

“Thank you,” I said, “I know it is straight through on the left, but could you tell me, do you think, in other words, where that is?”

“Straight through on the left, Madam.”

“Very well,” I said. “I understand that I climb over these wardrobes, cut my way through the carpets, and proceed straight through the wall.”

“Past the hosiery, Madam, straight through on——”

I took the young man’s arm and asked if he would mind coming with me. “Now, tell me,” I said confidentially, as we threaded our way to the right, and up and down the stairs, round the gallery and home by the gent.’s outfitting. “Just stop a moment and try to follow what I am saying. You see this ribbon counter on my right?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“And the silk remnants in front of me?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“And the stationery at the back?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“Very well then, how can all these points of the compass be straight through on the left?”

“It all depends which way you are standing, Madam.”

“I see; then when I want anything that is on the ground floor and you tell me to go straight through on the left, the best thing I can do is to lie down on my left side and try to remember which way you are facing?”

We were divided here by a stream of dishevelled women passing in different directions.

“Ribbons, forward!” said the young man, and he disappeared—I suppose straight through on the left.

Shop assistants are so invariably prepared to give advice on matters of dress and domestic management that I suppose there are people who go to shops not to buy but to have a heart-to-heart talk about what they shall buy. They must be the same amiable creatures who conduct their love affairs under “Aunt Lena’s” superintendence in the penny magazines. I refuse to believe that the shop assistant really cares for what purpose I want a quarter of a yard of green velvet cut on the cross.

“What is it for?” the girl asks wearily as she reaches up for the box. “Is it for a hat?”

If you are just silly you tell her, perhaps, that it is for a pair of boots, in which case she is as kind as before and replies, “Fancy dress, I suppose. In that case you had better bring the dress it is to go with and I’ll see you get it matched. What is the name of the character you are going as? because we have some special brocades for characters from Shakespeare. You will find them in the theatrical department, straight through on the left.” If you are polite and tell her that in fact you want it for the collar of your coat that Uncle Sam gave you at Christmas, because it got spoilt with the cork of the freckle lotion having come out in your box, she tells you that it is a pity to buy velvet at all: there is so little velvet worn now. The embroidered collars are far newer and, with your complexion, would be less trying than the velvet. “You’ve rather a high colour, haven’t you?” she adds (looking herself like an anæmic gooseberry). She probably aims this dart at you on a sultry day, when you have been apoplectically following the straight path on the left for two hours in search of white cotton and a tooth-brush.

If I want pale green cotton flecked with ruby and just a soupçon of chenille mixed with the thread, I can get it at the first attempt. Every counter of every shop in the street will stock it in abundance; but things like white cotton and tape and safety-pins are not stocked within the four-mile radius. You have to spend an hour in the tube, with frequent changes, before you reach the suburbs where are the little post office linendrapers that keep the daily necessaries of every woman’s existence. “Pins! Oh, no, Madam, not pins like that we don’t keep. We have the fancy-headed ones, twelve inches long, and a very nice two-inch glass pin at two-three the pair. I fancy you might get the sort you want out in Bayswater. I couldn’t name any particular shop just for the moment, but I fancy you would find some there. If not, you will get them at some of the small establishments by the Crystal Palace.”

Another thing which adds to the burden of a day’s shopping is the difficulty of describing what you want in the jargon that will lead you to the right counter. What properly brought up person knows whether stockings are “drapery” or “outfitting”? It all depends on how you want to wear them, one would suppose. In fact, I believe they are “hosiery.” And yet, if I could force myself to say “hosiery” to the liftman, I should probably find that in addition to the hosiery being straight through on the left, and therefore in the next street but two, it meant gent.’s up-to-date footwear only, and that ladies’ stockings were in the haberdashery, second turning on the right and across the road as you leave Shaftesbury Avenue. I sometimes wonder whether there are people who in private life call their garments by the names used in shops, and if not, where is the use of annoying harmless decent people by these words? I asked James what a “singlet” was and he said he did not know.

“Well then,” I said, “do you suppose that the shopman who sold me these vests for you says to his wife: ‘My dear, why have you allowed the cat to sleep on my singlet?’ and if so, does she know what he means? and how can she bear to live with him?”

“If she really cared for him,” James answered, “she would not mind if he called it an antimacassar. The only thing that mattered would be that she should remove the cat and feel heartily ashamed of herself.”

“Do you know, it cost me an hour’s argument to get those vests for you because I refused to buy them as singlets and the man wouldn’t sell them as vests. I won in the end because he was getting tired and there were so many people waiting. I think he saw I was serious. But it wasted a fearful lot of time. And now, again, what do you call these?”

“Draws,” said James in one syllable.

“Quite so, that is how I was brought up; but do you realise that the young lady in the shop would not give me anything but ‘knickers’? It made me feel so tweedy, and golfish, and detestable, that I would not buy any.”

“Very silly,” he commented. “Besides, no one plays golf in knickers. It is an impossible word. It sounds like ready-made Fauntleroys for young gentlemen.”

“Thank you a thousand times,” I said, “that is just the word I was looking for. I shall always call them Fauntleroys in future. And now about skirts.”

“What about skirts?” he asked.

“Do you call a skirt a thing that you put on over or under?”

“I call the top one a skirt and the under one a petticoat,” said James, after reflection.

“If you knew anything about haberdashery or outfitting or singlets, or going straight through on the left, you wouldn’t have any petticoats,” I explained. “You would have a skirt—unless you were dressed in tricot or gold-beaters’ skin, which, I believe, is newer—and the thing you wore on the top would be a ‘robe’ or a ‘blouse suit,’ or a ‘costume’ or a ‘trotteuse’ or a ‘cache-corset’ or—oh dear! I am out of breath. I can’t disentangle terms any more.”

“I am afraid your shopping has gone to your head,” said James. “Did you buy anything useful? Did you remember the library carpet and the lawn-mower?”

“I am sorry,” I said; “they were straight through on the left and that brought me out at Covent Garden, so I bought some peaches for you, and when I began again it was too late—the shop was shutting.”

“Very well,” he said, “I will go to-morrow myself. It will do just as well and, I dare say, cost less in extras.”

He came home at seven and would answer no questions, but shut himself up with Harrods’ list. When he had written for what he wanted, I met him in the hall and opened the door with a polite bow.

“Pillar-box, straight through on the left,” I said.

CHAPTER XVI: THE COUNTRY HOUSE

I have said that we should come back to the question of county families, for I find it is a subject that I cannot keep off. I remember twenty years ago there was a well-known lady who used to ramp through the streets of the second or third city of the Empire dressed in a tailor-made suit like a riding-habit. On her head was a hard felt hat shaped like a paper boat and ornamented with some remains of a grouse. Round her neck was the dirtiest of white silk handkerchiefs loosely knotted. In fact, her whole appearance was arranged to convey the impression that her relations kept ferrets. In those days the effect was more marked, as the county was then a little island of the blest where no towns except capitals were mentioned. But it is all different now. No suburban residence is complete without its pheasant, and you absolutely must walk so that we all understand how difficult you find it to manage these pavements after the freedom of Papa’s moors. It is wonderful what the imagination will do! But these are not the real provincial county families; they are a subdivision who live just outside the town and who make a point of the “glass” rather than the pheasants.

No, the real county families live farther afield. Papa could motor in to business if he liked, but he is a little blasé about motoring and also economical. The petrol and wear and tear cost more than the railway journey. Besides, the train is quicker, and if he is not used to smuts and smells by this time then he ought to be! It is no longer in good taste to conceal the whereabouts of Papa from the idle rich who are able to luxuriate all day amongst the sheep and the ox, and the beagle and the fox, and the bird in the greenwood tree. So many of the best people are in business that it does not matter as it used if we speak about it. The only thing that can make anyone really impossible is to know too many people. You may be silly, malicious, greedy, untruthful, parsimonious or lewd, but you will be a tremendous county dog-fox if you will only assert yourself and be rude enough. But you must be really rude—no half measures—say really smart things about your friends that they won’t like. You will need to take infinite precautions or the wrong people will want to know you, so be very very careful, because it is so dreadfully important that they shouldn’t. It would put an end to everything.

Unfortunately for any amusement I might have got out of our new life, James and I were turned over to the county before we arrived. Some indiscreet friend had written to one of the leading authorities on position and told her who James’s uncle was. That was enough; try as I would they were never sincere with me. They sometimes went so far as to say that the things I did were a pity, but that was nothing. What I should have liked would have been to learn their abracadabras and beat them at their own game or else to lose and bob up again somewhere else. To have the victory given into one’s hands is no fun. Still, I learned something by the gasping and choking it cost the poor things to swallow some of my friends, and by their unwilling acceptance of the fact that I did not play games and could not afford to hunt. They told me I should find croquet such a resource.

“But I am not resourceful,” I argued with Mrs. Van Dieman. “It gives me so much more pleasure to see you run about and enjoy yourself.”

“You don’t need to run at croquet,” she protested, “surely you know better than that, and bridge is a nice quiet game if you are not fond of exercise.”

“It is not that I don’t like exercise,” I explained. “I have played leap-frog often and enjoyed it, and I love riding. Escaping from people who ask questions is splendid exercise too; one needs a lot of resource for that!”

“Well, come to my party next Thursday,” she said. “You need not play any games; you can sit on the verandah and eat peaches and get as fat as you like.”

“Will you promise that your butler won’t come and tell me that the peaches have ‘never come’?” I asked.

She promised, and, after an hour’s scuffle hunting for the right gloves and finding that it was too windy for the hat I wanted to wear, I arrived at the Van Diemans’. It was rather late and I had had all the exercise I wanted coming along the dusty road. There were about fifteen people there, all running about after balls of different sizes and textures. I do not think that I am at heart a perfect lady, because I always see social festivities from the point of view of the servants. It was through the butler’s eyes that I saw his master and mistress and their guests employing their leisure: in my mind’s eye I carried the trays full of nourishment to help them prolong their activities and get the balls over nets and through hoops and into holes. Their ankles appeared to me absurdly thin, their bodies absurdly fat, their pleasure absurdly inadequate to the trouble they were taking. The sprawling creatures who played football on Saturday outside the village were just as grotesque in appearance, but their game had a little more of the pleasure of battle and a little less of kindergarten occupation than this. In an illustrated catalogue of parlour games there is one picture which shows an athletic footman putting away a jig-saw puzzle in a special cabinet, so designed that the pieces may remain undisturbed until the next fit of vacuity takes the fat lady in the low dress and her beautifully clean-shaven partner who, according to another picture, have been spending enraptured hours over a desiccated post card. There was some of this fatuousness in the Van Dieman games.

“Look here,” said Mrs. Van Dieman when I had finished my fourth peach and was getting really happy and contented, thinking, indeed, that there was some point after all in being a bloated aristocrat, “if you won’t play at anything will you walk round the garden? You must do something; it isn’t good for you to sit still so long, and Mrs. Fortescue hasn’t seen the roses.”

“Well,” I answered sleepily, “tell the fourth butler to bring them here and we will look at them.”

“Nonsense,” said my determined hostess. “Get up and take her round; she says she is getting a chill.”

There was no good in making a fuss, so I went and we strolled up and down the narrow path in the baking sun, jogging into each other in order to avoid treading on the border of pinks.

“How perfectly wonderful!” Mrs. Fortescue said from time to time. “Did you ever see such a monster?” She is a dear old lady and I did my very best. I said that they were graceful, wonderful, exquisite, that they added so much to my interest in the country that I did not know what I should do without them. I picked her lace mantle off the bushes when it got caught, I made way for her round the corners, and dodged about, and knocked into her, and trod on her toes when she first stood aside for me and then decided to proceed just as I slipped by to save trouble. I disentangled her parasol from my veil eight times and said that it did not matter a bit, it was torn already; I admired the gooseberry bushes and the artichokes and wondered how many gardeners they needed to keep the herbaceous border so tidy; I pointed out several particularly rich colours entirely on my own initiative and was really brilliant about the thinning out of something—I forget what—it was just a fluke anyhow. When we got back and Mrs. Fortescue kindly offered to drive me home because she said I looked absolutely worn out with the heat, I jumped at her suggestion. But, first, I took Mrs. Van Dieman aside. “Very well, Minnie,” I said, “I shall send you a book of fables which I want you to read carefully. There is one about an elephant who was ill-treated by his keeper. Years and years afterwards he met the man at a public gathering or somewhere, and squirted a pail of dirty water over him. This will show you how tenacious a thing is memory. The second story I want you to notice is of a stork who invited a fox to lunch. You shall lunch with me next Tuesday and I will ask three Russian anarchists and the clown from Hengler’s Circus to meet you and you shall play ‘consequences’ with them.”

“By the time you have been here six months,” she assured me, “you will have made far nicer friends; there are some quite delightful people near here.”

“But if they are all so delightful,” I said, “why have none of them a good word to say for one another? At every turn one is brought up by the word ‘impossible.’ It starts up like a policeman with a gloved hand.”

“My dear,” she remonstrated, “you ought not to complain, you seem to do whatever you like.”

“Then look here,” I persisted, “excuse me, Mrs. Fortescue is waiting, I must fly—why cannot the others do as they like—all your delightful people?”

“Oh, that is different,” Mrs. Van Dieman answered loftily. “They are quite impossible; it would never do.”

CHAPTER XVII: THE BUTLER

We had at last struggled up to such heights above the sorrows of the Palmerston Road that we were able to buy a butler. The main reason for this important social advance was that Clara had married a traveller in sewing machines and, like a lady with a pet canary, I could never, never care for another; a bullfinch perhaps, but not a canary. With a butler I should have a new and therefore possibly interesting set of vices to contend with, but to bring out again my old quack remedies for morning blindness and ubiquity would be beyond my strength. I could not face the explanations about table-napkins, and “ladies first,” and unpunctual tea-kettles, nor, above all, the black cloud of displeasure which would be sure to billow from under the pantry door and pervade the house after my ruthless destruction of lifelong habits. A good manservant never mentions what he has been accustomed to. If you differ from him he puts up with you if he can, and if not, he says that he finds the air is not so healthy as that of Herefordshire and, sorry though he is to leave you, he prefers to make a change and try gravel soil.

Perrin liked me, I am glad to say. He thought that I was inexperienced, but shaped well to become a good mistress if I would be a little more particular in some things; he relied on himself to teach me his ways in time. He told me rather pointedly, within the first days of our acquaintance, that he had been obliged to leave his last place because there was too much freedom. The master had been on a ranch all his life and come suddenly into the property and, as was to be expected, hardly understood his position. “It was very awkward for me,” he added, “as you will understand, being obliged to mention what was expected.”

“And what was expected?” I asked.

“Well, of course, ma’am, it is difficult to say exactly, but there were many little things. His late lordship was always very particular that at least three of us should sit up for him when he came home late.” I blushed nervously as I remembered how James and I had always let ourselves in with a latch-key and had eaten our sandwiches and heated our soup on the gas-ring. It was just possible this had reached Perrin’s ears through Ruth and he was deliberately warning me not to go too far.

“That is what one would expect, of course,” I said. “Mr. Molyneux gives a great deal of trouble and is most fanciful and inconsiderate. You will have to be very careful.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he answered. (How soothing that is after the female “yes’m,” I thought.) “How many shall I bring tea for?”

“Oh, about forty,” I said airily.

“Very good, ma’am. In the woods, I suppose?” Clara used barely to answer when I asked for tea on the lawn, and she always brought it all on one tray, with the cakes piled on the top of the bread and butter and scones; moreover, she staggered and panted to impress me with its weight, and held up her dress and suffered for the rest of the week from sore throat, “owing to wetting me feet on the grass.”

The woods were at least a quarter of an hour’s walk from the house and across a ditch.

“Certainly, in the woods,” I said, “and if by any chance I should be alone for tea after all, you can come round a longer way. That will give you almost as much trouble.”

I wondered at first how I should explain my way of living to Perrin, and whether he would make me give up much that I held dear. Would he allow many of what Clara called the “goings on” of my house? But, to my surprise, he did not mind at all; in fact, I understood that he preferred many of the people whom Mrs. Van Dieman so much disliked to Mrs. Van Dieman herself. I could see that he thought most of the stars of the neighbourhood a poor lot. “His late lordship never thought much of them he let his place to each year,” he told me. I should have liked to hear about these objectionable tenants, but I saw that Perrin’s gems must be gathered when and where they fell; he gave nothing of value for the asking. However, with patience and care, I learned by and by some of the reasons why the usurpers had failed to please. He told me once, in a fit of irritation, that a young commercial gentleman from Sheffield, who took his late lordship’s place one year, seemed to have very little idea of how things should be. He seemed, for instance, to think that the place belonged to him. This seemed to me rather hard when I remembered how little James and I heeded the ownership of the frowsy creature to whom we paid rent for our delightful house in Palmerston Road. If it had not been for James’s uncle, I should not have dared to put forward this view. As it was, I said timidly: “But, after all, I suppose they were owners for the time being, Perrin.” He was not offended, on the contrary he gave the idea his indulgent consideration, but it would not do.

“We hardly regard the town builders, ma’am, as on a par with the families as have owned the property for generations.”

I probed delicately for more horrible details.

“He spoke of the Master of the Hounds, ma’am, as the Captain of the Dogs.”

There was a solemn silence. I could do nothing but murmur expressions of sympathy and disgust; but my thoughts took suddenly a fantastic turn and I mentally christened our present leader of county society the “Mistress of the Cats,” hunting impossible birds to a well-deserved social death. I awoke from my dream of delight and waited. “Mr. Huggins” (that was the name of the commercial gentleman) “went so far as to request me to bring the gramophone on to the lawn on Sunday afternoon. Fortunately, I had disabled my arm at the time and the doctor considered it inadvisable for me to attempt weights of any kind, so the second footman obliged them; otherwise I should have been in great difficulty.”

I still think that Perrin did the poor things injustice, and that if his late lordship had ordered a barouche full of gramophones to be brought on to the lawn, my friend would have adjusted his prejudices and his arm to meet the case. His dislike was due to a primitive suspicion of an alien tribe whose size and shape and smell offended him. Just as I feel about Mrs. Simpson—I am not running her down in any way.

There was an awful moment of anxiety when it occurred to me that Perrin might want me to play games, but, on thinking it over, I decided that he would not wish it unless I played very well indeed, and that I knew was an impossibility. I could not face the idea of tennis while he was bringing out the tea or announcing visitors. My legs would be sure to get entangled in his eye and then all would be over between us. We were obliged to get a victoria and a pair of horses soon after he arrived, as he disliked my coming in tired and dusty from paying visits. Of course, that meant a footman too, as I hate a victoria with one horse, and nothing would induce me to drive behind two horses and one man—if there is only one man to two horses the man’s hat gets fluffy at once, also it is impossible to make one man’s coat fit properly; so long as there are two horses, it is always loose behind the shoulders and his white collar behaves like the setting sun. So there we were, involved in endless expense and all because of Perrin. But oh! the relief of it! The mere fact that he did not wear cuffs that came off, and rattled, and were left about on tables, gave me much peace of mind, and, best of all, I basked in the certainty that although he might direct my actions, he would never interfere with my thoughts as Clara did. I could hear her thinking and having feelings all over the house; but Perrin did all his thinking in the pantry, never permitting himself to indulge his brain in my presence. I knew that when Clara said she “hadn’t an idea,” it meant that her mind was so seething with folly that it was likely to burst forth into reproach at any moment. When I asked Perrin where my thimble and scissors were, he said that he would ascertain, which meant that he withdrew respectfully to the pantry and there brought his mind to bear on all the places where an addle-headed female was most likely to have left such things, and then he looked until he found them. He helped me a great deal in the training of young George, the footman. I told George one day that he must not gather his coat-tails round him and leap from the box as if it were a burning building. “Thank you, ma’am,” he replied shyly, “Mr. Perrin has already mentioned it. I was not going to do it after to-day.” But even then it was not quite right, and I had to appeal for help to Perrin. “George’s descent from the box is not quite right yet, Perrin, and I don’t know how to explain. Only, I am not sure whether he reminds me most of a chimpanzee or a sailor.”

“Quite so, ma’am. I will see that he practises from the shelves of the pantry cupboard,” said Perrin; and in a week it was impossible to detect how George reached the ground. Once, Perrin was ill, and we all moped like sick canaries. George lost his head and forgot the coffee spoons, the silver and glass lost their sparkle and sat about all anyhow on the table. But behind the scenes the gloom was lightened, although the meals were irregular and bad owing to Ruth preparing soup and jelly for Perrin which she carried to him herself. The housemaids stole into the garden for flowers for the invalid’s room, and, one day, delighted cackles announced the fact that Mr. Perrin felt well enough to shave himself, and that Ruth and Lizzie held the glass while Mr. George prepared the soap. I sent him books and papers of a masculine kind, such as I thought he looked as if he would read. He sent his duty and found them most enjoyable, but I believe now that in the kingdom downstairs where Perrin reigns the habits of the Court are less Victorian than I supposed, and the sceptre is garlanded with flowers.

CHAPTER XVIII: THE DRESSMAKER

I can never think of Miss McGregor without adding the adjective “bitty” to her name: Bitty Miss McGregor or Miss Bitty McGregor. She sat always in such a snowstorm of bits, that by the end of the day I felt it must be necessary to dig her out before she could leave her work. Praise of Miss McGregor (which was given freely, for we all love her) was qualified by comments on her “bittiness,” but even that was not so bad as the pins. The mouthfuls of them which she threw out all over the floor! Nurse reckoned, after reading an article in the Strand Magazine, that if all the pins that Miss McGregor disgorged during the day were collected and fastened together, they would form a chain as long as the cable between America and England. She never ate anything but pieces of cheese, with some cold strong tea, so I conclude that if claret and tannin make ink, as I once read they do, cheese and tannin, mixed, make pins, that is if they are eaten by a dressmaker; just as a cow makes different things out of grass to what Nebuchadnezzar did. I certainly do not remember buying pins.

What I did complain of was the “slipping-on.” She glided into the kitchen when I was wrestling with the beef, and asked me to slip on an evening bodice. There are, undoubtedly, people who can give their minds to an evening bodice on the top of a large breakfast and attend to the beef at the same time. Mrs. Simpson[A] could, I am sure, for one sees the effect of the beef on her bodices, which sometimes have such a sensible, dead look about them.

The bodices do not affect the beef in any way or lighten its weight, because nothing makes any difference to beef. It knows just what and where it intends to be, and no one can divert it from its purpose.

During my early married life I foolishly attempted to keep the beef out of the house on Sunday, because I detest habit, and that any food or person should acquire the habit of coming at one particular time makes its company less of a pleasure than if it took its chance and dropped in.

I gave the order that no beef “in any shape or form” was to come into my house on Sunday. The butcher repeated my order in the shop, whereupon the beef turned purple and indignant.

“What!” it said, puffing and blowing, “I am not to come? There must be some mistake. They cannot have Sunday without me; I am part of the day itself. If I am not present at the table there will be no Sabbath, and then where shall we all be? Here’s a pretty kettle of fish! I insist on going—stop that mutton—it must not leave the shop.”

The butcher wrung his hands in protest, and said he knew he should get into trouble, but the beef replied: “Not a word, Sir, not a word.” It bustled out of the shop into the basket and arrived at my door, where it insisted on being delivered by the boy. But Ruth had her orders and was firm.

“Just you go back,” she insisted.

“But what about my wife,” blustered the beef, “my wife the rhubarb tart? If I am not to take my place upon the board neither shall my wife attend; she shall not be served without me.”

“Just keep quiet, please,” said Ruth. “We’re not having tart; we’re having soufflé and mutton cutlets, so now be off with you.”

There was a frightful scene, but I persevered for three weeks. Then I went away for a fortnight, and, while I was gone, the beef came back and curried favour with Ruth. He poisoned her mind about the busy day Monday was, with the washerwoman and all, and how convenient he was to eat cold; no mess, no second vegetable, just salad out of the garden, and so on. I was powerless against the pair of them; but now I always cut him with a blunt knife. Sometimes I cook him on Saturday night, and he has to appear cold in the middle of the day on Sunday, which he dislikes as much as being tarred and feathered with strange sauces and trimmings.

But to return to Miss McGregor.

“No,” I said, “I won’t. You can slip it on the beef if you like, he hates being garnished, and perhaps it will keep him in his place. Put a whole mouthful of pins in him if you like, and then snip him into shreds.”

Miss McGregor took no more notice than if I had been reciting poetry to myself. “If you wouldn’t mind just slipping it on now,” she said, with gentle persistence; “I won’t keep you a minute—unless you have anything else you could give me to do. You said something about altering a skirt.”

The back door bell rang.

“I think it’s Jones’s boy,” said Ruth. “Have you decided what you will have for dinner?”

“If you please, ma’am,” said Louise, appearing at the kitchen door, “is there a parcel to go back to Huggins’s?”

“It will be the buttons for your coat,” said Miss McGregor, “did you decide——”

I heard my daughter’s voice on the stairs: “Mother!” she called. “Mother! Miss Mathers wants to know if it is going to rain, because, if so, shall I wear my old coat? She says it isn’t fit to go out in, but it is too cold for the other, unless you would like me to put on a woolly, and I haven’t got one, so shall I——”

I dashed up the kitchen stairs. They got Miss McGregor out of the flour-bin afterwards, less damaged than I could have wished. Anne picked herself up, and decided to chance the weather as offering the least risk of the two. Jones’s boy, and Huggins’s boy, and Ruth, and the beef, and Louise came to some decision amongst themselves about the buttons and the curry.

When I came back from a pleasant morning in the woods, I heard that Miss McGregor was looking for me to slip on a bodice, and the efficient female had called.

“Has Mrs. Simpson been?” I asked.

“I beg pardon, ma’am,” said Perrin, “who did you say?”

“Oh, it was nothing,” I replied. “I half expected a Mrs. Simpson; in fact I thought I saw her in the drive. She would have attended to Miss McGregor at once.”

The efficient female said I looked tired, and was anything the matter?

“No,” I said, “nothing particular; but do you always slip on things when you are asked—that is, when there is a dressmaker in the house?”

“Oh, never,” she assured me. “I have a stand made to exactly my own shape, and they never need to trouble me at all.”

“But can you judge how a thing will look with a great red twill bust and a stump sticking out of it?”

“Oh, perfectly; it only needs a little imagination.”

When she had gone, I went to Miss McGregor. “Look here,” I said, “you slip the things on the housemaid and pretend she is me. It only needs a little imagination.”

Miss McGregor was sitting in a shower of bits. She took no notice of my suggestion.

“I have got on as best I could,” she said, dispersing her last mouthful of pins all over her tiny chest. I was feeling a good deal better, and said I would slip on the garment. The picture she was to copy showed a slim and graceful creature with a long piece of soft material wound simply under one shoulder and over the other, caught in at the waist with a buckle, and falling in folds across the side of a very clinging underskirt. What I saw in the glass was a rain-water tub (surmounted by my head) covered with a closely gathered frill which was neatly sewn along the edge of the lid. The lid itself had some folds of the material arranged with geometrical precision round the place where the head came out.

My breath forsook me.

“Dear Miss McGregor,” I murmured, “you have not snipped all the stuff into small bits, have you? If you look at the picture you will see it is made all in one. Just folded round quite simply, beginning from one corner—so——”

“I couldn’t quite understand how you would get it on and off the other way, Mrs. Molyneux,” she said, after a minute’s thoughtful silence, “and the effect is just the same. I have arranged the folds so that they hide the join.”

I stood entranced by my reflection; I even began to take a morbid interest in it, as I saw how we depend for our personal attraction on clothes; it opened such a world of speculation amongst my friends. The knowledge was comforting to this extent: that there is more hope in a petition to one’s dressmaker to take back the dress she gave and change it than there would be in a request to one’s parents for a different face.

With as little show of alteration as I could manage, I unripped the gathers, and taking a corner of the stuff I wrapped it round my form in the way I wanted, and stuck in a hat-pin to secure the last bit. “There,” I said triumphantly, “that is the way I want it to go.”

Miss McGregor observed me with patient scepticism.

“I don’t quite see how I am to arrange that,” she remarked.

“You must not arrange it on any account,” I said. “It is to stay just like that.”

“But how are you going to get out of it?”

“Like this,” I replied, slipping the whole thing off my shoulders like a skin. “How I get back again next time is your concern; you are a dressmaker. Dresses like these are worn every day in Paris.”

“Well, I don’t understand how they do it,” replied the forbearing creature.

“You remind me,” I told her, “of a plumber we had here last spring. Mr. Molyneux gave him an order, and the man asked how he was to do it. ‘I don’t know,’ Mr. Molyneux said, ‘I am not a plumber.’ The silly man replied: ‘Well, I am a plumber and I don’t know.’ Now please don’t be like the plumber; we had quite enough of that sort of thing with him.”

Miss McGregor poised herself upon one leg, cocked her head on one side, and said it wasn’t the way of the stuff.

I know her ways by this time, so I said I was going out to tea.

It was certain that nothing would induce her to spend an idle afternoon, and she would therefore be driven to exercise her brain on the problem. I threatened her with every sort of violent and painful death, including a famine of pins, if she altered a single fold, and when I came home in the evening the dress was skilfully arranged. Miss McGregor is quite sure that if I would slip the things on fourteen times a day between meals she would understand better what I wanted, but I know for a fact she is wrong.

An industrious clerk might as well say to a poet: “If you tell me what you want to say in your poem I will write it for you and you can run your eye over it every ten minutes to see if it is right.”

James says that, so far as he can understand my criticism of Miss McGregor, that is just about what I expect her to do, otherwise why can’t I make the dress myself like the poet makes his poem.

But it is well known that only unreasonable people achieve miracles.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] See chapter xiv.

CHAPTER XIX: THE LADY’S MAID

Louise was a treasure: more than that, she is a treasure, for I have her still, and love her the more since it became a certainty that she would not marry Perrin. I forget whose fault it was that I got a maid for myself. Probably Perrin was at the bottom of it; in fact, now I come to think of it, I remember that I began to find it increasingly difficult to get the upper housemaid to fold up my clothes after I had dressed for dinner. That undoubtedly was owing to Perrin’s influence. Before he came there was always plenty of amusement for the housemaid in my room. She added finishing-touches to her hair in front of my big looking-glass, she experimented with the pots and pans on the toilet table, she tried on my hats—I came unexpectedly into my room one day and noticed that she was putting away three hats which I had not worn for a week. I remarked how annoying it was the way hats would hop about a room, and apologised for the trouble they were giving her. She covered me with moral dust and ashes by the pleasant smile with which she answered, as she straightened her hair, that it was no trouble, she enjoyed handling pretty things, so I was obliged to give her one of the hats to show my repentance. After that I vowed that never again would I trifle with sacred feminine instincts. She was so pretty I am not surprised that Perrin sent for her in the evenings to talk to him while he made George wash up, but it was very inconvenient for me. I nearly asked him to let me have her for half an hour, and I would tell the under housemaid to turn down the beds a little earlier, so that she could sit with him until Lizzie was ready, and then I thought that perhaps he might not like it, and I had better engage a maid of my own. Besides, a maid would save having that bitty dressmaker in the house; so Louise came. Why Perrin never took to her I did not at first understand, though I accepted the fact with secret gratitude. Louise is rather a horsy person and, I think, preferred walks with the coachman to sitting in a stuffy room, even with Perrin’s wit to lighten the atmosphere. Like all horsy people she has a quick, kindly nature, and none of that touchy indigestion that spoils so many indoor servants. She is an excellent dressmaker. The only times when I am not well dressed are on the days preceding any race-meeting of importance; then she loses her head and behaves like a feverish bird about to lay a nest-egg.

“Mr. Jenkins’s Hardup seems to be a likely winner for to-morrow, ma’am,” she says excitedly, brushing my hair with such energy that I feel I ought to stand up and straighten my legs while she gets up a good gloss.

“How much have you got on him, Louise?” I ask, setting my teeth.

“Well, ma’am, from what Mr. Pierce tells me of the way he is shaping, according to to-day’s paper, I think I shall have a bit both ways; not very much, of course; half a crown, I dare say.”

“You didn’t pick the winner for me last Newmarket as I told you. There, I am sure that will do beautifully,” I say, trying to escape before her state of mind leads her to throw a blanket over my hind quarters. Some day she will do it, and I shall find it difficult to hit exactly the right note in what I say. On the actual day of the race I can get nothing done, from the time when she brings my tea in the morning and forgets the hot water until the evening when she sends me, by the altogether disapproving Perrin, a paper (with the day’s results marked in a trembling hand) which she and Pierce have walked three miles to buy. She begs to be excused, of course, and would I care to glance at the news.

That is one side of Louise’s character. The other side is very feminine: loves clothes, and scent, and money, and love-making. She will never make what is called a good servant because I cannot teach her not to enjoy her life, and I am bound to say I have not tried. There is only one serious flaw in her so far as I am concerned, and that is her passion for dogs. She began by throwing out hints that I should keep a dog and, when these failed to take effect, she frankly besought me to keep one. I said: “Louise, I have your master and the two children. That is quite as much as I care to undertake.”

“Lord love you, ma’am,” she replied, “poor little darlings! you could keep both, and I would look after him, indeed I would.”

“You can keep an entire pack if you like,” I said, “so long as you chain them to your bed, and don’t let them dribble and roll over me.” The poor thing was in ecstasies, and I learned that Mr. Pierce knew of a splendid bull pup that was wanting a home.

“Remember,” I cautioned her, “if he goes within a mile of the sewing-room he leaves the world, or at any rate this house, within the hour.” She promised faithfully and, I believe, spent a sleepless night planning how he should whittle away his noisy and disorderly days. She asked me to suggest a name for him, and I said that it would be a certain comfort and distraction to me if she called him Rose, but she would not have that, because, in the first place, Rose was a lady’s name, and he was nothing if not a real gentleman, and the smell would soon wear off—she had not noticed it, in fact. I then suggested “Gobble,” “Slop,” “Skid” (because I hated the way he slithered and skated on the polished floors), “Nebuchadnezzar” (because his nails were so long and dirty, and he was always choking over bits of grass), “Keating” (because he appeared to be troubled with them), but she rejected all these and called him Sam, because there was something in his bloodshot eyes that reminded her of a favourite cousin who had died.

“That’s a good idea,” I agreed, “let us hope there is something in a name after all. Did your cousin die of eating too much Limerick lace?”

“Oh, no, ma’am,” she said proudly, “he died of whooping-cough.” (I have often thought that may be the matter with Sam, was my private reflection.) “And as for the lace, I do hope, ma’am, you will overlook that; it was quite a mistake of the poor boy’s. He was after a rabbit just when I happened to have my work outside, and he was so excited he never stopped to think.”

“Well, he will have all eternity to study Natural History in next time he does it,” I remarked, and we changed the subject. I got to tolerate Sam after a time, because he finished up James’s cigar ends. An ash-tray full of horrors vanished in a moment before his all-embracing slobber—but enough—the dinner-gong will sound in vain for me if I allow my mind to dwell on Sam’s habits. The only dog I have ever loved is dear to me because he is less like a dog than anything else. He is known to his friends as the “occasional table,” because that is what he is like. He has a highly polished oblong surface, and stands on Chippendale legs, and people trip over him, which always amuses me. There is no high-class amusement like this to be got out of Sam; he merely barges into people like a drunken hippopotamus, which is not in the least funny. But the “occasional table” is the only dog I know who appears to possess a pocket-handkerchief and use it, and I have never seen him eat in public. Dearest quality of all, he knows that burglars are not announced in the drawing-room, even that they do not ring the front door bell. What a truly blessed thing life would be if he could spread these glad tidings amongst the rest of his shrieking brotherhood! This seems to be a chapter on race-meetings and dogs rather than on Louise, my maid; but there is very little Louise apart from horses, dogs, good temper and lace, and all these points have been touched upon. I now understand better why Perrin does not like her. As one of the young ladies she would have done well enough; he would have tucked her up in her high dog-cart with a certain admiration, and been pleased with her successes at the Agricultural and Kennel Club shows. But for his own after-dinner conversation he prefers something of a fluffier and less independent nature; something of the tea-making, “Lord, Mr. Perrin, be off with you!” sort.

Louise has excellent taste in clothes. She steers through yards of drapery with the delicate assurance of a surgeon finding his way amongst the cobweb creations of the human body, and she does it all in the same impersonal way. The Claras of this world suggest lumps of animated matter rolling about, spluttering, and disturbing things that would do very well as they are; the Louises seem to be furthering the end of some pleasant universal desire and disentangling the prejudices that cumber its path.

CHAPTER XX: RELATIONS-IN-LAW

Since I have had a son and daughter-in-law, I have begun to think that it is absurd to reflect on the nature of this or that class of individual, because members of the same class are of opposite sexes. I often thought I had found a theory about such and such a class of people, such as servants, cousins, relations-in-law, &c., until one day, when I was being quite truthful with myself, I understood that a great many of my theories were reversible according to sex. This was most strikingly apparent with regard to my children-in-law. I decided that it is very objectionable for strange people to marry into a family and then idealise the being they have married, without reference to the lifelong knowledge of that being’s character possessed by the other members of the family. It seemed to me that my son-in-law made himself ridiculous about Anne; he really sickened me sometimes. He said that she was so delicate and sensitive he was sometimes afraid of crushing her with his blundering, thoughtless criticisms when she appeared to differ from him. That was nonsense, and I told him to go ahead fearlessly, and say what he thought; even if she was my own daughter, I was not blind to her faults. Therefore, logically, according to this theory, my daughter-in-law, Constance, would be not only wise in pointing out his faults to Tom, but she would be neglecting a duty were she not to speak out. Then I saw the reversible nature of my feeling. To be blinded by love is undoubtedly a fault, but in the case of married people both are not equally to blame. As in this diagram, taking A as the mother-in-law, those with a cross representing children of the male sex. The children-in-law are D and E.

Criticism that is right in my child-in-law D (male) is reprehensible and altogether out of the question in my other child-in-law E (female). The blame for idiotic partiality is transferred from my child-in-law D to C (one of the family). In fact, to put it still more simply, I don’t mind my son-in-law criticising my daughter up to a certain point, but if my daughter-in-law begins to criticise my son, I shall probably wring her neck. Constance has no idea how sensitive Tom is, and the way he idealises her is ridiculous. He told me how impossible it was to get her to spare herself at all, she was always thinking of others. Just what Robert said about Anne, but I had different methods of dealing with them. “Stuff and nonsense,” I said to my son-in-law, “Anne is not so delicate as you think, she won’t mind what you say in the least; it is not shrinking that makes her silent, it is because she has not made up her mind what she intends to do. If you do not want to go to the South of France while your partner is ill, don’t go. Anne travelled about alone for three years before you knew her.” I did not mind if he thought me a heartless pig; he was not mine to lose, and Anne, of course, belonged to herself as she always had. But Tom was mine and Constance’s, and the only way in which I could keep my share in him was to make her also mine. We could not pull him in two, and she would pull strongest, so I must change my metaphor and regard her as a growth upon Tom. I could not operate on her, so she must just come with him. Therefore, when he made the same remark about her as Robert made about Anne, I assured him that all really good women worked too hard, and that I had been thinking perhaps a little motor would save her running about so much; would she like one as a Christmas present? Of course, Constance felt that Tom could be safely trusted for week-ends with such a parent. Besides, I never asked him questions about her (to be truthful I wasn’t interested), and I always sent back fowls, and asparagus, and hats, and other useful articles, according to the length of time she let me have him.

I know that Robert would have liked me to show a little more nice feeling about Anne; indeed, once, I was obliged to be quite frank about it. “Anne and I understand each other very well,” I told him, “and you cannot have everything. If I showed nice feeling she would not like it, and although you would be the gainer by her annoyance——”

“I don’t see that,” he interrupted. “How could I be the gainer by Anne’s annoyance?”

“Because you would be the dearer by contrast. You would say, ‘Never mind, darling, you have me.’ But please let me go on. I was going to dwell on your mercies which you do not seem to be counting. Suppose, now, that I sat about in your drawing-room with fancy-work and asked how you were going to manage about the spring cleaning. That would mean telling you at great length how I always did it and how excellent my dear husband thought the arrangement. I should add that, of course, it was for you and Anne to decide.”

“Well, I suppose it would be, wouldn’t it?” he asked foolishly.

“Not if I said it was for you to decide. That would mean that unless you allowed me to arrange it in my own way I should say that no doubt you were right; everything was so altered since my day that I could not attempt to judge. And then I should be ill for a fortnight in your house and have all my meals carried upstairs, and the servants would give notice.”

“Good Lord!” remarked Robert.

“Exactly, then do not complain about my not showing nice feeling, because I don’t make myself a nuisance to Anne.”

Another day I told him just to look, for instance, at Constance’s mother. He said he thought she seemed a very nice old lady. “All right,” I said, “Tom is outside, and he is likely to be open with us to-day, because his mother-in-law is staying for the week-end with Constance—come along.” I dragged him out under the trees where Tom was lying in a hammock, reading. When we had got chairs and explained that we had ordered tea outside to save him the trouble of coming in, I said: “I suppose you can’t stay to dinner if Constance’s mother is with you?”

“Poor girl!” said Tom, “I suppose I had better go and give her a hand.”

“But she is a very nice old lady, isn’t she?” I asked.

“Oh, very,” he agreed flabbily. Then he saw my face, and noticed also Robert’s intelligent, inquiring expression. “What’s the matter with you two?” he asked.

“The fact is, darling,” I explained, “that Robert was a little dissatisfied with me because he thinks I do not take enough part in his household arrangements, so we came out, less to save you the trouble of coming to tea than that you should save me the trouble of explaining to him.”

Tom flung down his book. “I will tell you all about it from beginning to end,” he promised us. “People talk about the mind being a storehouse, but hers is the bottomless pit. And the only things that will go into it are details; if you give her the sort of things that are in most people’s minds they lie about outside the pit and make her uncomfortable. But I get so done up filling her with the stuff, and so does Con. She wants to know every detail of our lives, from the kind of shaving soap I use to whether I put the lights out myself or leave it to the servants. Constance has to tell all hers too. The old lady starves if she doesn’t get it, and no amount of it seems to satisfy her.”

“But, surely, she must know your day pretty well by now,” suggested Robert, taking my hand affectionately.

“You would think so,” said Tom, “but you see you are wrong, because there is just a shade of difference sometimes in what I do every day. For instance, when I go home to-night I shall have to tell her where we all sat this afternoon, and when you came out, and why.” (He tore his hair.) “And what the devil shall I say when she asks what we talked about? I get so giddy with it, you know, that I just keep the scene in my mind and give it her all faithfully. I dare not invent or I should contradict myself.”

Robert apologised to me, and, of course, I said it was nothing; there was no pleasure like setting matters of opinion right. But I returned to Tom for confirmation of my theories of sex.

“What about your father-in-law? He asks a good many questions, too, so far as I remember.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Tom, “his are quite harmless questions. I like telling him what he wants to know; it is generally quite interesting, about my job and things of that sort.”

I turned to Robert and asked: “You never thought my husband wanting in nice feeling towards Anne did you?”

“Oh dear, no,” he said, “of course not. One doesn’t expect a man to take much interest in a house.”

There are two great rocks on which relationships by marriage often split. The first, which is also the chief source of danger to blood-relationships, is the presumption that because we are relations we must love one another; the second is the presumption that because we are relations-in-law we must loathe one another. The only safe line is to avoid any mention of the connection, even to oneself. If, in spite of this absence of prejudice, there is still great natural antipathy, it is possible to think of ourselves as fellow-guests at a boarding-house, obliged to meet pretty constantly at the same table. For the sake of the mistress of the house, who so rashly brought us together, we may as well try to find some redeeming interest in each other’s vices. I never suggested to Constance that we should learn to love one another. It was impossible for me to love anyone because she was Tom’s wife, I could only loathe her for it; so I shut my eyes tight and said the alphabet backwards to myself when the idea of our relationship came into my head. Instead, I thought—or tried to: “This is a person whom Tom has brought with him to the house. I expect she will stay a long time. She must enjoy her visit, and it is horrid to stay in a house where one is entertained. She shall have the best we can give her; we will try not to be rude or dull, and she shall do as she likes.” When she returned my hospitality, I tried to be a good guest and not leave my umbrella and sponge behind me when I went away, and I always remembered her birthday. So we got on all right. I behaved to Robert in the same way. If I allowed myself a little more freedom in advising him about his colds, and so on, that is because any man staying in the house likes to be given ammoniated quinine when he needs it. But I never kissed him unless I wanted to, nor allowed myself to dwell on the involuntary tie between us.

CHAPTER XXI: GENIUS

When Mrs. Van Dieman was describing the neighbourhood to me she mentioned, among other people, a Mr. Figgins who wrote books. She said that she would like to get to know him better, but she did not think he liked her, as she was not clever enough.

“He probably thinks you do not like him because he is not rich enough,” I said.

“Oh, but what utter nonsense,” she protested. “When a man has an intellect like that he can’t suppose one considers his money.”

“There you are,” I replied, “that is exactly what I have been saying. He probably says to himself, ‘When a woman has a purse like that she can’t suppose one considers her brains.’ He must dislike you on other grounds if he does at all; perhaps it is your politics, or the fact that your house faces north.”

“You see, he is so interesting,” pursued Mrs. Van Dieman. “I should love to know him better, but I don’t know what to talk about, I read so little.”

“So does Mr. Figgins, probably,” I said. “But, anyhow, if you are interested in him, talk about that; he will like it far better than anything else—unless you talk about yourself. If you were as candid with him as you are with me, he would think about nothing else for weeks, you would open his eyes such a lot.”

“Anyhow,” I began again presently, “when you meet your baker out at dinner do you read up ‘Bread’ in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ first?”

“We certainly do seem to get on the subject of bread whenever we meet,” she said. “Perhaps that is why I am not interested in him.”

“According to you, the baker’s friends, when they ask him to their houses, would think it complimentary to powder their hair, and embroider their dresses with currants. As for your Mr. Figgins, how could the poor man write books if there were nothing but books to write about?”

By and by, when Mrs. Van Dieman had plucked up courage and invited most of us to an embarrassing tea-party to meet the man of letters, I found that Mrs. Figgins was a friend of my childhood, and we took up our relation to one another just where we had left it. It matured rapidly, and I became very fond of both of them. Their house was often full of people whom Mrs. Van Dieman classified according to the nature of their public life. This habit of classification, which is the county method of making a social order out of the chaos of individual taste, is very infectious. I began to look at geniuses as a class, and to think I noticed certain stripes and spots in their characters which marked them as belonging to one family, however much they differed in other ways. I presented an ode on the subject to the Figginses, and watched them as they read it in turn:

“My Agnes! Did I hear you say

You will not stop to hear us play

The trio I composed to-day?

What! Let Maria come and dust!

I’d sooner starve—yet, Love, I trust

You’ll pardon me, for say I must

That’s not the way to treat a genius!

“Here’s something good by Malloray,

I’ll read it if you’ll only stay.

(Damnation! Take that child away!)

Say I will dine at six to-night,

Something both nourishing and light.

No, dear—my pocket’s empty quite.

That’s not the way to treat a genius!

“Ask me not, Agnes dear, to think

Of anything but pen and ink

(Unless its something new to drink).

There is no need, my love, for you

To live at all, I’ll live for two.

In tears! My darling, that won’t do!

That’s not the way to treat a genius!”

Mrs. Figgins was delighted. “There, Harry,” she exclaimed, “she’s absolutely right, she has seen you through and through; I’ve always told you you were the most selfish beast on earth. It doesn’t matter what happens to me or the children so long as you get your wretched stuff out of your head on to paper. And that about the reading aloud is so good—and the dusting—and yet you complain the house is dirty! Oh dear.”

Mr. Figgins rose, picked his wife out of her comfortable chair, and transferred her to his own, which he said was more her size, then he sat down and read the ode again.

“My dear Jane,” he said, “I have looked this over very carefully, and you are absolutely wrong; it is you she means. Look at that about the children being all over the house, and a beastly housemaid pottering about his study, and no money in the house. He even has to order his own dinner or she gives him indigestible stuff he can’t work on. He does his best to amuse and entertain her, and then she bursts into tears and says she wants to live; it seems to me to be an admirable picture of the sort of thing I go through, only you haven’t the wit to see it.”

I took a stroll round the garden for a quarter of an hour and when I came back they were still disputing.

“Do I or do I not have to sit on the mat for hours at a time listening to you talking? And if so, how can I be ordering dinner at the same time?”

“You could order it the night before and tell them that, whatever happens, I must have it at a certain time.”

“The certain time being anything between ten in the morning and three in the afternoon.”

“Malloray’s wife gets her husband the most excellent food all ready in five minutes, at any moment he may happen to come in.”

“Mr. Malloray gets paid for his dreary stuff and you don’t, so he can afford to have sixteen parlourmaids all sitting about with nothing else to do. And that about your living for two is so good. What life do I have sitting round when you are there, and then working like a galley-slave when you are not to make up for the lost time and clear up the mess?”

“No man except a farm labourer ought to marry,” I heard Mr. Figgins say as I went off again. “What I want is a dear old toothless, very efficient housekeeper, and a mistress exquisitely beautiful, talented, sympathetic——”

We had a great discussion that night at dinner. Several geniuses and their wives were there, and civil war broke out. The geniuses’ complaints were trivial, but apparently rankled deeply. They all said nearly the same thing: that their wives wanted too much, and prevented them from getting on with their work, to which the wives retorted that they also wanted to get on with their work, but it was not possible, because they were always being called off to listen to something, or to pack bags, or remove a spider from the ceiling. Then if they stayed for a few minutes’ chat, they were accused of being in the way, and why wasn’t lunch ready? and why couldn’t they see that the doors didn’t bang upstairs? If they asked for love they were given a manuscript as indigestible as a stone, but, on the other hand, when inspiration had run out and love was required (they being busy at the time doing something else) they were told that women were practical animals and had no ideals; that polygamy was the only feasible arrangement in domestic life, and would they kindly put on more coal, and make that cheque last for six months. The geniuses maintained that we all live much too elaborately. A simple, well-cooked fowl, done to a turn at any minute of the day, was quite enough for anyone; a perfectly proportioned room ascetically bare, save for a few necessary objects of priceless value, was enough to content them. A village girl with a graceful figure and sun-kissed complexion should maintain the room in that spotless order which is essential to a quiet mind. The wife should direct everything, do nothing, be always occupied, always at hand and scarcely ever present. The children should have perfect freedom, intelligence, health, education, no lessons, be full of gaiety and make no noise, be one with their parents at heart, never present (like the wife) for more than a few minutes at a time, occupied in useful and beautiful handicrafts, and make no litter about the house. This is what I gathered from notes made at the time. From what I understand of the allegations brought against geniuses by their wives, there was less detailed complaint and more profound disappointment. To begin with, the work did not pay; the world did not appreciate it, or if it did, it appreciated the wrong bits—the ones that George himself cared least about. Secondly, they worked too hard, and then got so dreadfully depressed; they never seemed able to throw down their work and come out for a little bit of fun in the middle of a sentence. And when something really serious, like the bailiffs, happened, one could not get them to attend. Mrs. Malloray told us that her husband got so interested in talking to the men about Australia that he never noticed until they had gone that all the wrong things had been taken to pay the debt; instead of getting rid of a lot of rubbish, as they had hoped, some of the nicest bits of furniture in the house had gone, although she kept telling him all the time.

We all agreed that a genius should not take his wife about with him. She is there to fulfil ends which are of no interest to society, and if she is the right wife for him she will be as unsocial as a lake by moonlight. If she is the wrong kind she will make him fidgety and spoil the party, so she should amuse herself in other circles, except in houses where she can bring her knitting without exciting compassion. I am told that the Figginses still fight over the spirit of that harmless piece of doggerel, and both find it healing to their wounds. It is nice to think of, isn’t it?

CHAPTER XXII: CHARITY

A few years after she left the cradle, Anne came to the decision that, whatever else she did, she would not be charitable. I found that this meant, more explicitly, that she would not wear a bonnet, nor gloves that were too long in the fingers.

I wonder what it feels like to be one of the poor, and realise that one’s only callers are sure to be people who wear gloves that are too long in the fingers. I am never at home to that kind of visitor myself, but for those who have to answer the door in person there can be no escape. Also, how distressing it must be when the visitor sits down and remarks how clever we have been to make this poky room so nice, and are those our husband’s socks? How many does he get through in the week? I tried it on Mrs. Van Dieman one day, because I know she has a district. My entrance was rather spoilt by the butler being obliged to show me in, but after he had shut the door I tripped up to Mrs. Van Dieman with my most sympathetic smile and said: “What a sweet outlook you have. It must be such a comfort in your sordid life to be able to grow flowers.” I explained that I was district-visiting, and she happened to be first on my list to-day. “I hope your poor husband has been keeping less intoxicated lately?” I added.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said coldly.

“Well, well, we must take the good with the bad, I suppose, and be thankful if he has his health,” I said, shaking my head gloomily, “but you must tell him from me that I hope that he is going to try to keep straight now. And you, dear Mrs. Van Dieman, must try to be less extravagant; they tell me you spend a great deal on dress, you know. I am sure you gave as much for that little thing you have on as I am able to spend in the whole year on my clothes—though it is very pretty, of course.”

Mrs. Van Dieman did not seem to understand about my district, and when I explained again she said it was quite different with that sort of people; they had no one to advise them, and it made a break in the day having some one to take an interest. All the same, I thought I would persevere. There ought not to be one law for the rich and another for the poor, so I said I would continue my visits, and hoped to find her in a better frame of mind next time I called.

I then went to the rector’s house and was shown into his study. He was busy doing accounts.

“Ah, good morning, rector,” I said, “glad to see you at work. I just called round to have a chat with you. Now tell me, do you find yourself well and satisfactorily shepherded here?”

“Pardon me, I think there must be some mistake,” said my dear Mr. Tracy.

“No, indeed,” I said, “no mistake. I only wanted to be a help, if possible. You are in my district, you know, and it is my duty to find out if your spiritual welfare is being attended to. I should be sorry if you suffered from neglect of anything I could do to help or advise.”

“It is very good of you, Mrs. Molyneux,” he replied, though he seemed rather embarrassed. “Of course, I am only too grateful for any assistance, but, indeed, I hardly understand——”

“Well, then,” I said, “let us sit down and talk it over. Do you find you get enough mental stimulus in the town?”

“Do you mean that there is a lack of culture?” he asked. “Because if so you have put your finger on the weakest point in our society. I find an extraordinary lack of enthusiasm for anything really great in literature or painting or music. It is quite deplorable; it has evidently struck you——”

“It has, indeed.” (This was the most successful visit I had paid.) “I should be so glad if there were anything in that direction that I could throw light upon for you.”

“I didn’t know that you were an authority on these things, Mrs. Molyneux,” he said, greatly impressed.

“I am not,” I answered. “I don’t know anything about any of them, but you are in my district, so I was bound to come and take an interest in you, wasn’t I?”

The dear thing was so nice about it, and talked so charmingly about the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Saturday Review, and the ungracefulness of crinolines, that I felt there was no room in him for improvement, so I would go to some more deserving case. I called next upon Mr. Figgins who writes books. I found him writing in his study.

“Good afternoon, Figgins, hard at work as usual,” I began.

He was very nice to me, and pretended he was not at all busy, so I sat down on the edge of my chair, and looked about.

“This is my day for the district,” I said, “and I knew I should find you at home just now. I suppose you are beginning to make plenty of money with your books? I hope you are putting some of it by.”

Mr. Figgins looked at me rather curiously, and said he would order tea.

“No, no, by and by, Figgins,” I said, stopping him on his way to the bell; “by and by, when we have had our little chat. You know money is a great responsibility, and I sometimes think that you do not quite realise this with regard to your dear wife; you know, when the husband makes money just in order to gamble it away it means that he and his self-respect are rapidly going down the hill together. It is quite time you began to think about your old age, and what would happen to the boys if the bread-winner were called away.”

“I wish you would tell me what it is,” said Mr. Figgins. “If you are rehearsing a play I will help you, but I must have the book and know all about it—you can’t go on like this.”

“But I have told you,” I insisted. “I am district-visiting and you are in my parish, so I have to take you on a certain day and you have to sit and listen to me. I am going to poke all round your room presently and leave some literature.”

That really angered him, and he became dreadfully polite. At last we compromised, he agreeing to take me home in his motor if I would stop and have tea first, but I was pledged to leave his income and his habits alone.

Mrs. Figgins came in while we were having tea. We explained what I had come about. She said it was a thing that ought to be done more, that she was right down glad I had spoke straight to Figgins, and she hoped now that he would begin and make a change for the better.

“But, my dear,” she said, “what we want here is a mothers’ meeting. It is all very well to tell one lot of mothers not to give a new-born baby stewed rhubarb, but it is equally necessary to tell mothers like Mrs. Van Dieman not to give their infants raw theory. I have to hold the next meeting of the Parents’ Guild in my house. Will you come and do a little district-visiting there?”

I promised her that although James would not wish me to initiate any form of outrage, I would back her up in any she liked to commit. The meeting was held during the next week. I arrived early, and we awaited events together. Presently the door-bell rang. We peeped vulgarly through the window. There was a terrible thing upon the door-step—all face, like my enemy the fish before it is filleted—it had the same lifeless eye, and a flat hat balanced on the top like a sheet of note-paper. It was looking round in a dreadful vacant manner waiting for admission. I remembered a story heard in my infancy about some children who had a stepmother with a glass eye and a wooden tail. We were told how their flesh used to creep with horror when they heard her coming upstairs. In another minute she would be in the room. We darted to our places and listened with beating hearts to the pat-pat on the stairs.

“Mrs. Flockson,” said the maid.

“Quite a large membership now, have we not?” said Mrs. Flockson, sitting down in an attitude of faded gloom that infected us both like a disease. I began to be conscious of my back, and my legs, and petticoats and things that I was usually unaware of. “I shall be so interested to hear what Miss Jamieson has to say about children’s toys. It is so important, is it not?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Figgins crisply. “I don’t think it is at all important, but they would have it. I had much rather they had spoken about children’s manners; they are dreadful in this neighbourhood.”

“Yes, of course, some are very bad,” sighed Mrs. Flockson, “but it is so difficult, isn’t it, to know just where to draw the line without being too severe. They say now it is so important that the character should be developed along its natural lines. It is so difficult not to impose one’s own individuality too much, and yet to preserve the idea of everything that is sweet and gracious.”

Now, if I had been alone I could have managed her perfectly. I could have kept Mrs. Flockson happy without doing her an atom of harm, but Mrs. Figgins is so abrupt.

“I can’t stop to think about individuality when a child is gobbling and talking nonsense at the same time,” she said. “I tell it at once, ‘Don’t eat like a pig,’ and then it doesn’t. I don’t care whether I am imposing my individuality or that of any other self-respecting person who wishes to eat with Christians.”

Several more people came in then. They were mostly badly dressed, and evidently put all their money on expression so far as charm was concerned; but then when people are very much in earnest about things that are of no consequence, and have as much consciousness as rabbits, and are not very healthy, it is difficult to make them look nice.

Miss Jamieson, a capable pink lady in a well-made dress with irrelevant trimming, spoke for half an hour on the question of children’s toys. She told us what toys ought to mean, and the qualities they ought to foster in the child. How, if his taste were trained in this manner, he would more easily distinguish the good from the bad later on. I asked whether a good taste in dolls acquired in the nursery would help my son not to fall in love with the wrong kind of minx. I did not put it in just those words, but Miss Jamieson did not give me much comfort. She smiled kindly, and said my question hardly came within the scope of her paper, but she was sure a taste in dolls would help very much, only boys did not play much with dolls, did they?

Then some one got up and said there was just one question she would like to ask, and that was, when Miss Jamieson recommended us to get those beautifully modelled animals for the nursery—she would ask presently for the address where they could be got—was there any one particular animal more than another that she recommended? And was it better to begin with the tame animals, as being less alarming, and work gradually up to the jungle animals, or would that be giving the child a wrong idea of evolution, as, of course, the wild animals did come first, didn’t they?

Miss Jamieson disposed of this lady by saying that, so long as they were animals of noble instinct, she did not think it mattered in what order they came, but she thought that unpleasant animals, such as the glutton or the sloth, should be kept for more advanced study.

Other inquiries, such as whether a Noah’s Ark were bad in case it biased the mind towards the dogmatic side of religion, instead of dwelling on the larger and more comprehensive issues, and whether playing at soldiers ever resulted in the child becoming brutalised, were dealt with in their turn, and then a vote of thanks to Miss Jamieson was proposed, seconded, and carried, and we had tea.

On the way home I passed a house where a young friend of mine lives with his barbarous parents. I felt it my duty to ask how his father was.

“We ain’t seen ’im for three days,” said Jimmy. “He’s been on the drunk and pawned everything in the ’ouse—’e’s a fat-’ead, ’e is.”

I thought, as I walked home, that Mrs. Flockson perhaps exaggerated the difficulty that parents may have in preserving all that is sweet and gracious without imposing their own individuality too much upon their children.

CHAPTER XXIII: FOREIGN TRAVEL

A superfluity of efficient females and inefficient Mrs. Muffs, combined with the slow poison of County Society, may disagree with anyone in time. I explained this to our country doctor, who is of a different variety to Dr. Smithson. He wants everything boiled, and is a great believer in the emotions.

Anyhow, we went abroad just to be out of the way of the fish, and the best people, and all the other things that annoyed me.

Packing up was a nightmare. I used to let Louise pack for me, but then I arrived at the end of my journey with a complete outfit of clothes none of which I wanted; besides such trifling mistakes as three combs—just because they happened to be on the dressing-table—and no Aspirin nor water-softener.

No one can pack for another without asking questions; neither can those who have not Mrs. Simpson’s strong head remember what they want to take so long as they are being asked. When I was thinking whether I could get my gloves cleaned by sending them in at once, and whether I had better take them myself or let Pierce leave them with a message when he called for the fish, Louise would say: “You will take your grey whipcord coat, I suppose.”

I said “No,” because it is inevitable to say “No” when anyone supposes we shall do so-and-so. Of course, when I arrived I wanted the coat, and could not remember having said anything about it.

How does Mrs. Simpson meet such a question as “How many evening dresses will you take?” Especially as they always ask just at the moment when one’s whole soul is with a missing pair of silk stockings. I undertook to pack for myself with even more disastrous results.

I could think of nothing I wanted to take until the last moment. I said to myself: “Dresses?—I must put them in last. Underclothes?—they will not be back from the wash until to-morrow. Shoes?—yes, they go in first.” I wedged my dressing-table pots and pans between my shoes and boots and then I remembered that I should want to wash next morning, so I took the pots and pans out again and wandered round the room looking for more things to pack. I collected note-paper and books, stamps and a pen-knife, and put them on a remote table while I went to write a note about stopping the newspaper. While I was doing this, Ruth asked me to come and look at something, and, by the time that was done, I felt I had broken the back of the packing business. There were only the clean clothes from the laundry to put in; and my dresses; there did not seem to be anything else.

How different from the morning of departure! Then every table in every room swarmed with things which had to go, and my box was already full of boots! By the time all the fat three-cornered things had gone in, the box shut comfortably; but there were no dresses in it and no underclothes.

I asked James very gently whether he could take a few small things. “Oh, easily,” he said, “anything you like.” (He now adds “within reason,” when he undertakes to help me.)

So I took him just a few small things, such as my writing-case. He said it had an utterly unmanageable figure, but that was because I was taking a lot of unanswered letters to do while we were away. That was all except a tin of biscuits, a bottle of bath salts—I had to get a good-sized one, as we were to be away for some time—a case of tools and my work-basket. Really nothing to what I had managed to fit into my own box; besides, I offered to take some of his shirts in exchange.

The carriage was at the door when I ran upstairs to get a pin for my veil, and there, on the dressing-table, I found all the writing things I had collected two days before, my hair-pins, brush and comb, and powder-box. James said they could not all go in his pocket, so I carried them under my arm, intending to repack my dressing-case in the train.

James’s account of our journey contains much that is unfair and exaggerated. He says, for instance, that during the long night journey from Calais to Rome I showed want of consideration for the comfort of our fellow-passengers. The train was very crowded; we could not have a sleeping compartment to ourselves, so it was arranged that Louise and I and a strange lady should be huddled together in one dog’s-hole of a place, and James would join a man’s party in the next.

The lady who dangled a pair of fat, booted ankles above my head possessed an over-anxious husband; therefore, I suppose, she had a surname, but I never discovered it. To me she was, and always will be, “Georgie.” We had settled down for the night in considerable irritability, and the atmosphere of hell, when the door was pushed gently open.

“Georgie, my dear, are you all right?” inquired a timid little voice.

Georgie, who was determined to enjoy everything and look on the bright side, said, “Yes, thank you, dear,” in a crisp voice, and composed herself to sleep. Presently there was a knock at the door.

“Georgie, my dear, would you care for a little chocolate?”

Dear, good-natured Georgie had already begun to sleep; I heard her quite distinctly. But she awoke—out of that first blissful state, just imagine! and with all the discomfort of sleeping in her stockings and everything—and gratefully accepted the chocolate.

Next time there was a knock I nearly choked myself in efforts for politeness. I longed to say, “Go away. I will give Georgie a pocket-handkerchief, and the nut-crackers, and some Balsam of Peru when she wakes.” Fortunately, Georgie was breathing so loudly that even he understood that for the moment all the husbands in Christendom could not improve her condition, and, therefore, retired for some hours. The crisis was next morning. Anyone who has travelled knows how easy it is to mislay anything, however large, in a sleeping berth. If you put a hippopotamus under your pillow at night, it will be gone in the morning. My hair-pins, side-combs, hat, waistband, and shoes were all rescued from different parts of the train by Louise, but my jewellery I was determined not to part with. I put my watch, rings, and ear-rings into my purse, and put the purse into a travelling-case which I strapped to the rack by my side. It was there in the morning when I awoke, and remained there while I dressed. I then unfastened the strap, and laid the case on the bed for a moment, while I pinned my hat. I looked round and it was gone. I threw the bedclothes into the passage and shook them; I took off the mattress and turned it; Louise and I took her bed to pieces and threw it also into the passage. My condition was desperate. In a quarter of an hour we should be at the end of our journey, and the train would disappear into an everlasting nowhere, carrying the beloved companions of my life embedded in its ugly, screaming, joggling anatomy. Some shameless, painted, French official’s wife would eventually wear my darlings on her fingers, and dangling from her ears. I could never get any more, because they were James’s wedding presents. Life and happiness were blotted from my imagination.

“Georgie, my dear,” said the little voice at that moment, “can you come down?”

A small step-ladder scraped gently across my shins. “Pardon me, one moment,” I was requested, and there was Georgie’s plump little kid leg dangling in front of my nose once more. That was the crisis!

“Oh, damn Georgie,” I cried. “Go away, I’ve lost my bag.”

The little kid leg drew up hurriedly into its place, and dear, kind, shocked Georgie peered down upon me from above. Her over-anxious husband had fled, and was, I suppose, sipping a little cold water in the lavatory in order to pull himself together after “such an exhibition.”

“If I stay in this beastly train for a thousand years and pick it to pieces myself with a pair of nail-scissors, I will find that thing,” I said.

“My dear, don’t upset yourself,” urged Georgie. “Shall I not call your husband?”

The venturesome little boot was longing to get down, for the train was nearly at its destination, but, in my agitation, I forgot that I had overturned its only means of escape.

When James came in and picked up the bag from behind the hold-all, I felt inclined to take Georgie in my arms and lift her down, but there was so little room in the compartment that I decided to smile at her instead, and say I “had found my bag, thank you,” leaving her where she was. I tactfully withdrew to the corridor and made no sign, even when I heard the pattering feet and consolatory “Georgie, my dear,” close behind the door of our den.

James has a passion for sight-seeing, which I do not share. As soon as I know that there is anything to be seen I no longer want to see it. To have an alert, smiling man come up and say, “You want spik English; you come with me,” gives me another sort of Mrs. Simpson. She is a lively, early-breakfast Mrs. Simpson, full of exclamation points. She replies at once: “Ach! you spik English! that is capital! Rosbif! Goddam! I come vis you,” and off they go in ecstasies.

An English guide who takes one over a ruin has a certain dreary charm. One can go to sleep and dream happily while he grinds away: “This portion of the Castle was erected in 1647. Notice the remains of moat and transept with traces of fine oriel window in memory of the seventh Lord. During the encounter with the rebellious forces Oliver Cromwell took possession of the east wing, when the enemy was repulsed with great loss. The marks on the bastion show remains of staircase leading to the old ’all which was reserved for the use of the ladies of the family during time of siege. In the museum will be seen famous portrait of wife of the tenth Earl, destroyed by fire in the year 1754—come along there, please, and mind your heads.”

But, in Rome, if you escape from one voluble tormentor you fall into the hands of a dozen worse, and there are the reverent, industrious sight-seers with red books, mixed up among the irreverent ones with walking-sticks.

“On the right hand, and a little to the left, are the famous baths of Caracalla,” may be heard from behind one pillar. “Note the exquisite workmanship of the masonry, and the height of the columns leading to the Peplon or outer court of the Vestal Virgins.”

From the other side of the same pillar comes a voice like a saw cutting through wood.

“Here, you, Sparghetti, Antonio, what’s your name? Was there any charge, can you tell me, for mixed bathing in those days? Bagno melange, Caracalla’s time, how much, eh?”

James understands pictures, and enjoys them. I tested my own taste in these matters, but did not force the experiment in any way. As soon as I became quite certain that I did not like pictures, I waited for him outside, dabbling my fingers in the water (it was in Venice that I definitely made up my mind), and enjoying the smells. Perhaps it was indigestion from eating too much Italian food, but the Tintorettos got on my nerves from their invariable suggestion of vermicelli. There were acres of canvas representing nude figures falling in hundreds from great heights. Some of them may have been climbing up, but the places were so dark that it was not easy to see the difference; anyhow, vermicelli being thrown into the air or vermicelli falling into a pan look pretty much alike. So I stayed outside and forgot all about the Day of Judgment.

The longer I live, the more I believe in Adam and Eve. Good gains nothing by comparison with evil. There is no pleasure like ignorance in fine weather, and the most illuminating conversation is no gain to those who are able to “go into a field and make a noise like a turnip.”

I know few people with whom I can go abroad without bringing on an attack of Mrs. Simpson. From the guides with their “You want spik English, you come with me,” and the waiters who seek favour with promises of “Rosbif” or “Nice hammonekks,” to our kind foreign friends who ask us whether we are not missing the fog and would we like brandy in our tea?—it is evident that Mrs. Simpson has set her mark upon every continent. Mrs. Simpson abroad is different from the furniture-remover’s goddess. She is timid to the verge of idiocy, and bold where reticence would be more graceful; she is always unmarried, except in such cases where she has a male creature attached to her by such a tie as unites a pair of frogs. She is fabulously rich, and so devoid of discrimination in what she buys that it would be ill-bred in shopkeepers to practise deception on her were it not that she does not believe in God; and, therefore, it is right that good persons should have her money before she is removed to hell.

People of other countries, who have lived or stayed in England or have made English friends abroad, know nothing of this Mrs. Simpson; she is a product of the foreign railways and hotels, like the American whom we all know by sight and hearsay but who is unrecognised by his own countrymen. All the same, it was a long time before I could enjoy myself anywhere out of England without feeling the spell cast upon my spirit by the dreary, woebegone, helpless mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, who wandered away to their bedrooms in single file between meals, were always blocking up the bureau, asking questions about baths and the English services, and who stared at one another in the lifts, and talked in undertones at their little tables. There was one couple, in an hotel in Rome, who made conversation to each other for a week on what I judged from their faces to be such subjects as mausoleums, dentists, cold cream, and muffins. At last the husband said something really amusing—I heard it with great pleasure—to which his wife made a grimace and said: “Really, dear, you are quite beyond me altogether.”

Henry—I remember that was his name—ought not to have stood it, but he did. He ought to have slapped her, and kicked over the table and left the room for ever. I should have rejoiced, more than I can say, on account of the blow that it would have given, in every town in Baedeker, to the continental Mrs. Simpson.

I paid dearly for my rashness in leaving the shores of England. When I returned the sword had fallen.

Mullins had been saving steadily during the past years, and Ruth had undertaken to marry him in the spring. Much as she disliked being interfered with, she disliked still more being left to herself; but whether marriage forms any solution to this dilemma, it will be for her to decide. I shall encourage the young Mullinses if there are any, remembering always that a wife and mother cannot give notice.

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Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. The following Printer errors have been changed.

=CHANGED= | =FROM= | =TO=
Page 2: | “fo his persecutors who” | “for his persecutors who”
Page 11: | “of the best notepaper” | “of the best note-paper”
Page 25: | “bed to the hothouse” | “bed to the hot-house”
Page 28: | “I dont want you” | “I don’t want you”
Page 66: | “my arm—its the” | “my arm—it’s the”
Page 87: | “nurse was out order” | “nurse was out of order”
Page 209: | “Louisa, I have your master” | “Louise, I have your master”
Page 221: | “her s is the bottomless” | “hers is the bottomless”
Page 254: | “bed-clothes into the” | “bedclothes into the”
Page 275: | “Drama. By Eden Phillpots.” | “Drama. By Eden Phillpotts.”
Page 275: | “Plays. By Eden Phillpots” | “Plays. By Eden Phillpotts”
Page 275: | “Raisers. By Eden Phillpots” | “Raisers. By Eden Phillpotts”
Page 276: | “Plays. By Anton Tchekoff” | “Plays. By Anton Tchekhoff”
Page 277: | “R. B. Cunninghame Grahame” | “R. B. Cunninghame Graham.”

All other inconsistencies are as in the original.

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