TWO GIRLS IN A KITCHEN
LITTLE Million, looking very cheery and trim in her black gown and her
white apron, and the neat little cap perched upon her glossy black hair,
smiled welcomingly upon me as I came into the kitchen.
I like Million's nice smile and her Cockney chatter about the Soldiers'
Orphanage where she was brought up and trained for domestic service, and
about her places before she came here. Aunt Anastasia considers that it
is so demoralising to gossip with the lower orders. But Millions is the
only girl of my own age in London with whom I have the chance of
gossiping!
She likes me, too. She considers that Miss Beatrice treats her as if she
were a human being instead of a machine. She tossed the paper-covered
Celandine Novelette that she had been reading into the drawer of
the kitchen-table among the lead spoons and the skewers and the
cooking-forks, and then she spread the table with a clean tea-cloth, and
brought out the colander with the lettuce and the cucumber and the cress
that I was going to cut up into salad; doing everything as if she liked
helping me.
"There, now! What a mercy I left the kitchen window open. Now I haven't
seen the new moon through the glass!" she exclaimed, as she put all
ready before me--the hard-boiled egg, the mustard, sugar, pepper, salt,
oil, and vinegar--for me to make the salad-dressing. "Miss Beatrice,
look at it through the open window--there, just to the right of that
little pink cloud--turn your money, and you'll get a wish."
I peeped out of the window, and caught sight of that slender festoon of
silver swung in the sky above the roses of the garden trellis.
"I've no money to turn," I smiled ruefully, "never have."
"Turn some o' mine, Miss," said Million. "I've got four-and-six here
that I'm going to put into the Post Office Savings Bank to-morrow."
Million is extraordinarily thrifty. "There you are. Wished your wish,
Miss Beatrice?"
"Oh, yes, I've wished it," I said. "Always the same wish with me, you
know, Million. Always a perfectly hopeless one. It's always, always that
some millionaire may leave me a fortune one day, and that I shall be
very rich, rolling in money."
"D'you think so much of money, then, Miss Beatrice?" said Million,
bustling over the black-and-white chequered linoleum to the range, and
setting the lid on to her saucepan full of potatoes. "Rich people aren't
always happy----"
"That's their own fault for not knowing how to spend the money!"
"Ah, but I was readin' a sweetly pretty tale all about that just now.
'Love or Money,' that was the name of it," said Million, nodding at the
kitchen-table drawer in which she keeps her novelettes, "and it said
these very words: 'Money doesn't buy everythin'.'"
"H'm! It would buy most of the things I want!" I declared as I sliced
away at my cucumber. "The lovely country house where I'd have crowds of
people, all kinds of paralysingly interesting people to stay with me!
The heavenly times in London, going everywhere and seeing everything!
The motors! And, oh, Million"--I heard my voice shake with yearning as I
pronounced the magic name of what every woman thinks of when she thinks
of having money--"oh, Million, the clothes I'd get! If I had decent
clothes I'd be decent-looking. I know I should."
"Why, Miss Beatrice, I've always thought you was a very nice-looking
young lady, anyhow," said our little maid staunchly. "And to-night
you're really pretty; I was just passing the remark to myself when you
came in. Look at yourself in my little glass----"
I looked at myself in the mirror from the sixpence-ha'penny bazaar. I
saw a small, pink, heart-shaped face with large brown eyes, eyes set
wide apart and full of impatience and eagerness for life. I saw a
quantity of bright chestnut hair, done rather "anyhow." I saw a long,
slender, white throat--just the throat of Lady Anastasia--sloping down
into shoulders that are really rather shapely. Only how can anything on
earth look shapely under the sort of blouse that Aunt Anastasia gets for
me? Or the sort of serge skirt? Or the shoes?
I glanced down at those four-and-elevenpenny canvas abominations that
were still sopping from the gardening hose, and I said with fervour: "If
I had money, I'd have three pairs of new shoes for every day in the
week. And each pair should cost as much as all my clothes have cost this
year!"
"Fancy that, now. That's not the kind of thing as I'd care for myself.
Extravagant--that's a thing I couldn't be," declared Million, in her
cheerful, matter-of-fact little voice, sweeping up the hearth as she
spoke. "Legacies and rolling in money--and a maid to myself, and bein'
called 'Miss Million,' and all that. That 'ud never be my wish!"
"What was your wish, then?" I asked, beginning to tear up the crisp
leaves of the lettuce into the glass salad-bowl. "I've told you mine,
Million. Tell me yours."
"Sure, you won't let on to any one if I do?" returned our little maid,
putting her black, white-capped head on one side like a little bird.
"Sure you won't go and make game of me afterwards to your Aunt
Nasturtium--oh, lor'. Hark at me, now!--to Miss Lovelace, I mean? If
there's one thing that does make me feel queer it's thinking folks are
making game of me."
"I promise I won't. Tell me the wish!"
Million laughed again, coloured, twiddled her apron. Then, leaning over
the deal table towards me, she murmured unexpectedly and bashfully: "I
always wish that I could marry a gentleman!"
"A gentleman?" I echoed, rather taken aback.
"Of course, I know," explained Million, "that a young girl in my walk of
life has plenty of chances of getting married. Not like a young lady in
yours, Miss. Without a young lady like you has plenty of money there's a
very poor choice of husbands!"
"There is, indeed," I sighed.
The little maid went on: "So I could have some sort of young man any
day, Miss Beatrice. There's the postman here--very inclined to be
friendly--not to mention the policeman. And the young man who used to
come round to attend to the gas at the Orphanage when I was there. He
writes to me still."
"And do you write back to him?"
"Picture postcards of Richmond Park. That's all he's ever had from me.
He's not the sort of young man I'd like. You see, Miss, I've seen other
sorts," said Million. "Where I was before I came here there was three
sons of the house, and seein' so much of them gave me a sort of
cri--terion, like. One was in the Navy. Oh, Miss, he was nice. Oh, the
way he talked. It was better than 'The Flag Lieutenant.' It's a fact,
I'd rather listen to his voice than any one's on the stage, d'you know.
"The two others were at Oxford College. And oh, their lovely ties, and
the jolly, laughing sort of ways they had, and how they used to open the
door for their mother, and to sing in the bathroom of a morning. Well! I
dunno what it was, quite. Different," said little Million vaguely, with
her wistfully ambitious grey eyes straying out of the kitchen window
again. "I did like it. And that's the sort of gentleman I'd like to
marry."
She turned to the oven again, and moved the gooseberry tart to the high
shelf.
I said, smiling at her: "Million, any 'gentleman' ought to be glad to
marry you for your pastry alone."
"Oh, lor', Miss, I'm not building on it," said Million brightly. "A
sergeant's daughter? A girl in service? Why, what toff would ever think
of her? 'Tisn't as if I was on the stage, where it doesn't seem to
matter what you've been. Or as if I was 'a lovely mill-hand,' like in
those tales where they always marry the son of the owner of the works.
So what's the good of me thinking? Not but what I make up dreams in my
head, sometimes," admitted Million, "of what I'd do and say--if 'He' did
and said!"
"All girls have those dreams, Million," I told her, "whether they're
maids or mistresses."
"Think so, Miss Beatrice?" said our little maid. "Well, I suppose I'm as
likely to get my wish of marrying a gentleman as you are of coming in
for a fortune. Talking of gentlemen, have you noticed the tall, fair one
who's come to live at No. 44? Him that plays the pianoler of an evening?
In a City office he is, their girl told me. Wanted to get into the Army,
but there wasn't enough money. Well, he's one of the sort I'd a-liked. A
real gentleman, I call him."
And Auntie calls him an insufferable young bounder!
Funny, funny world where people give such different names to the same
thing!
I can see it's going to take Aunt Anastasia a week before she forgives
me the incident of the young man next door!
Supper this evening was deathly silent; except for the scrunching over
my salad, just like footsteps on the gravel. After supper we sat
speechless in the drawing-room. I darned my holey tan cashmere
stockings.
Auntie read her last book from the library, "Rambles in Japan." She's
always reading books of travel--"Our Trip to Turkey," "A Cycle in
Cathay," "Round the World in a Motor-boat," and so on. Poor dear! She
would so adore travelling! And she'll never get the chance except in
print. Once I begged her to sell the Gainsborough portrait of Lady
Anastasia, and take out the money in having a few really ripping tours.
I thought she would have withered me with her look.
She'll never do anything so desperately disrespectful to our family.
She'll never do anything, in fact. Nothing will ever happen. Life will
just go on and on, and we shall go on too, getting older, and shabbier,
and more "select," and duller. They say that fortune knocks once in a
lifetime at every one's door. But I'm sure there'll never be a knock at
the door of No. 45 Laburnum Grove, except----
"Tot--Tot!"
Ah! the postman. Then Million's quick step into the hall. Then nothing
further. No letters for us? The letter must have been for our little
maid. Perhaps from the young man who attended to the Orphanage gas?
Happy Million, to have even an unwanted young man to write to her!