ONLY A DRESSMAKER.
Harry Goslett returned to the boarding-house that evening, in a mood of
profound dejection; he had spent a few hours with certain cousins, whose
acquaintance he was endeavoring to make. "Hitherto," he said, writing to
Lord Jocelyn, "the soil seems hardly worth cultivating." In this he
spoke hastily, because every man's mind is worth cultivating as soon as
you find out the things best fitted to grow in it. But some minds will
only grow turnips, while others will produce the finest strawberries.
The cousins, for their part, did not as yet take to the new arrival,
whom they found difficult to understand. His speech was strange, his
manner stranger: these peculiarities, they thought in their ignorance,
were due to residence in the United States, where Harry had found it
expedient to place most of his previous years. Conversation was
difficult between two rather jealous workmen and a brother artisan, who
greatly resembled the typical swell--an object of profound dislike and
suspicion to the working-classes.
He had now spent some three weeks among his kinsfolk. He brought with
him some curiosity, but little enthusiasm. At first he was interested
and amused; rapidly he became bored and disgusted; for as yet he saw
only the outside of things. There was an uncle, Mr. Benjamin Bunker,
the study of whom, regarded as anybody else's uncle, would have been
pleasant. Considered as his own connection by marriage--Benjamin and the
late Sergeant Goslett having married sisters--he was too much inclined
to be ashamed of him. The two cousins seemed to him--as yet he knew them
very little--a pair of sulky, ill-bred young men, who had taken two
opposite lines, neither of which was good for social intercourse. The
people of the boarding-house continued to amuse him, partly because they
were in a way afraid of him. As for the place--he looked about him,
standing at the north entrance of Stepney Green--on the left hand, the
Whitechapel Road; behind him, Stepney, Limehouse, St. George's in the
East, Poplar and Shadwell; on the right, the Mile End Road, leading to
Bow and Stratford; before him, Ford, Hackney, Bethnal Green. Mile upon
mile of streets with houses--small, mean, and monotonous houses; the
people living the same mean and monotonous lives, all after the same
model. In his ignorance he pitied and despised those people, not knowing
how rich and full any life may be made, whatever the surroundings, and
even without the gracious influences of art. Under the influence of this
pity and contempt, when he returned in the evening at half-past nine, he
felt himself for the first time in his life run very low down indeed.
The aspect of the room was not calculated to cheer him up. It was lit
with a mean two-jet gas-burner; the dingy curtain wanted looping up, the
furniture looked more common and mean than usual. Yet, as he stood in
the doorway, he became conscious of a change.
The boarders were all sitting there, just as usual, and the supper cloth
was removed; Mr. Maliphant had his long pipe fixed in the corner of his
mouth, but he held it there with an appearance of constraint, and he had
let it go out. Mr. Josephus Coppin sat in the corner in which he always
put himself, so as to be out of everybody's way; also with a pipe in his
hand unlighted. Daniel Fagg had his Hebrew Bible spread out before him,
and his dictionary, and his copy of the Authorized Version--which he
used, as he would carefully explain, not for what schoolboys call a
crib, but for purpose of comparison. This was very grand! A man who can
read Hebrew at all inspires one with confidence; but the fact is the
more important when it is connected with a discovery; and to compare
versions--one's own with the collected wisdom of a royal commission--is
a very grand thing indeed. But to-night he sat with his head in his
hands, and his sandy hair pushed back, looking straight before him; and
Mrs. Bormalack was graced in her best black silk dress, and "the
decanters" were proudly placed upon the table with rum, gin, and brandy
in them, and beside them stood the tumblers, hot water, cold water,
lemons, and spoons, in the most genteel way. The representative of the
Upper House, who did not take spirits and water, sat calmly dignified in
his arm-chair by the fireplace, and in front of him, on the other side,
sat his wife, with black thread mittens drawn tightly over her little
hands and thin arms, bolt upright, and conscious of her rank. All
appeared to be silent, but that was their custom, and all, which was not
their custom, wore an unaccustomed air of company manners which was very
beautiful to see.
Harry, looking about him, perplexed at these phenomena, presently
observed that the eyes of all, except those of Daniel Fagg, were fixed
in one direction; and that the reason why Mr. Maliphant held an
unlighted pipe in his mouth, and Josephus one in his hand, and that
Daniel was not reading, and that his lordship looked so full of dignity,
and that ardent spirits were abroad, was nothing less than the presence
of a young lady.
In such a house, and, in fact, all round Stepney Green, the word "lady"
is generally used in a broad and catholic spirit; but in this case Harry
unconsciously used it in the narrow, prejudiced, one-sided sense
peculiar to Western longitudes. And it was so surprising to think of a
young lady in connection with Bormalack's, that he gasped and caught his
breath. And then Mrs. Bormalack presented him to the new arrival in her
best manner. "Our youngest!" she said, as if he had been a son of the
house--"our youngest and last--the sprightly Mr. Goslett. This is Miss
Kennedy, and I hope--I'm sure--that you two will get to be friendly with
one another, not to speak of keeping company, which is early days yet
for prophecies."
Harry bowed in his most superior style. What on earth, he thought
again, did a young lady want at Stepney Green?
She had the carriage and the manner of a lady; she was quite simply
dressed in a black cashmere; she wore a red ribbon around her white
throat, and had white cuffs. A lady--unmistakably a lady; also young and
beautiful, with great brown eyes, which met his own frankly, and with a
certain look of surprise which seemed an answer to his own.
"Our handsome young cabinet-maker, Miss Kennedy," went on the
landlady--Harry wondered whether it was worse to be described as
sprightly than as handsome, and which adjective was likely to produce
the more unfavorable impression on a young lady--"is wishful to
establish himself in a genteel way of business, like yourself."
"When I was in the dressmaking line," observed her ladyship, "I stayed
at home with mother and Aunt Keziah. It was not thought right in Canaan
City for young women to go about setting up shops by themselves. Not
that I say you are wrong, Miss Kennedy, but London ways are not New
Hampshire ways."
Miss Kennedy murmured something softly, and looked again at the handsome
cabinet-maker, who was still blushing with indignation and shame at Mrs.
Bormalack's adjectives, and ready to blush again on recovery to think
that he was so absurd as to feel any shame about so trifling a matter.
Still, every young man likes to appear in a good light in the presence
of beauty.
The young lady, then, was only a dressmaker. For the moment she dropped
a little in his esteem, which comes of our artificial and conventional
education; because--Why not a dressmaker? Then she rose again,
because--WHAT a dressmaker! Could there be many such in Stepney? If so,
how was it that poets, novelists, painters, and idle young men did not
flock to so richly endowed a district? In this unexpected manner does
nature offer compensations. Harry also observed with satisfaction the
novel presence of a newly arrived piano, which could belong to no other
than the new-comer; and finding that the conversation showed no signs of
brightening, he ventured to ask Miss Kennedy if she would play to them.
Now, when she began to play, a certain magic of the music fell upon
them all, affecting every one differently. Such is the power of music,
and thus diverse is it in its operation. As for his lordship, he sat
nodding his head and twinkling his eyes and smiling sweetly, because he
was in imagination sitting among his peers in the Upper House with a
crown of gold and a robe of fur, and all his friends of Canaan City,
brought across the Atlantic at his own expense for this very purpose,
were watching him with envy and admiration from the gallery. Among them
was Aurelia Tucker, the scoffer and thrower of cold water. And her
ladyship sat beating time with head and hand, thinking how the family
estates would probably be restored, with the title, by the Queen. She
had great ideas on the royal prerogative, and had indeed been accustomed
to think in the old days that Englishmen go about in continual terror
lest her Majesty, in the exercise of this prerogative, should order
their heads to be removed. This gracious vision, due entirely to the
music, showed her in a stately garden entertaining Aurelia Tucker and
other friends, whom she, like her husband, had imported from Canaan City
for the purpose of exhibiting the new greatness. And Aurelia was green
with envy, though she wore her best black silk dress.
The other boarders were differently affected. The melancholy Josephus
leaned his head upon his hand, and saw himself in imagination the
head-brewer, as he might have been, but for the misfortune of his early
youth. Head-brewer to the firm of Messenger, Marsden & Company! What a
position!
Daniel Fagg, for his part, was dreaming of the day when his discovery
was to be received by all and adequately rewarded. He anticipated the
congratulations of his friends in Australia, and stood on deck in port
surrounded by the crowd, who shook his hand and cheered him, in good
Australian fashion, as Daniel the Great, Daniel the Scourge of Scholars,
Daniel the Prophet--a second Daniel. The professor took advantage of
this general rapture or abstraction from earthly things to lay the plans
for a _grand coup_ in legerdemain--a new experiment, which should
astonish everybody. This he afterward carried through with success.
Mrs. Bormalack, for her part, filled and slowly drank a large tumbler
of hot brandy-and-water. When she had finished it she wiped away a tear.
Probably, stimulated by the brandy, which is a sentimental spirit, she
was thinking of her late husband, collector for the brewery, who was
himself romantically fond of brandy-and-water, and came to an early end
in consequence of overrating his powers of consumption.
Mr. Maliphant winked his eyes, rolled his head, rubbed his hands, and
laughed joyously, but in silence. Why, one knows not. When the music
finished, he whispered to Daniel Fagg. "No," he said, "this is the third
time in the year that you have asked leave to bury your mother. Make it
your grandmother, young man." Then he laughed again, and said that he
had been with Walker in Nicaragua. Harry heard this communication, and
the attempt to fill up the story from these two fragments afterward gave
him nightmare.
Miss Kennedy played a gavotte, and then another, and then a sonata.
Perhaps it is the character of this kind of music to call up pleasant
and joyous thoughts; certainly there is much music, loved greatly by
some people, which makes us sad, notably the strains sung at places of
popular resort. They probably become favorites because they sadden so
much. Who would not shed tears on hearing "Tommy Dodd"?
She played without music, gracefully, easily, and with expression. While
she played Harry sat beside the piano, still wondering on the same
theme. She, a Stepney dressmaker! Who, in this region, could have taught
her that touch? She "wistful to establish herself in a genteel way of
business"? Was art, then, permeating downward so rapidly? Were the
people just above the masses, the second or third stratum of the social
pyramid, taught music, and in such a style? Then he left off wondering,
and fell to the blissful contemplation of a beautiful woman playing
beautiful music. This is an occupation always delightful to young
Englishmen, and it does equal credit to their heads and to their hearts
that they never tire of so harmless an amusement. When she finished
playing, everybody descended to earth, so to speak.
The noble pair remembered that their work was still before them--all to
do: one of them thought, with a pang, about the drawing of the case, and
wished he had not gone to sleep in the morning.
The clerk in the brewery awoke to the recollection of his thirty
shillings a week, and reflected that the weather was such as to
necessitate a pair of boots which had soles.
The learned Daniel Fagg bethought him once more of his poverty and the
increasing difficulty of getting subscribers, and the undisguised
contempt with which the head of the Egyptian department had that morning
received him.
Mr. Maliphant left off laughing, and shook his puckered old face with a
little astonishment that he had been so moved.
Said the professor, breaking the silence:
"I like the music to go on, so long as no patter is wanted. They listen
to music if it's lively, and it prevents 'em from looking round and
getting suspicious. You haven't got an egg upon you, Mrs. Bormalack,
have you? Dear me, one in your lap! Actually in a lady's lap! A common
egg, one of our 'selected,' at tenpence the dozen. Ah! In your lap, too!
How very injudicious! You might have dropped it, and broken it. Perhaps,
miss, you wouldn't mind obliging once more with 'Tommy, make room for
your uncle' or 'Over the garden wall,' if you please."
Miss Kennedy did not know either of these airs, but she laughed and said
she would play something lively, while the professor went on with his
trick. First, he drew all eyes to meet his own like a fascinating
constrictor, and then he began to "palm" the egg in the most surprising
manner. After many adventures it was ultimately found in Daniel Fagg's
pocket. Then the professor smiled, bowed, and spread out his hands as if
to show the purity and honesty of his conjuring.
"You play very well," said Harry to Miss Kennedy, when the conjuring was
over and the professor returned to his chair and his nightly occupation
with a pencil, a piece of paper, and a book.
"Can you play?"
"I fiddle a little. If you will allow me, we will try some evening a
duet together."
"I did not know----" she began, but checked herself. "I did not expect
to find a violinist here."
"A good many people of my class play," said Harry, mendaciously, because
the English workman is the least musical of men.
"Few of mine," she returned, rising, and closing the piano, "have the
chance of learning. But I have had opportunities."
She looked at her watch, and remarked that it was nearly ten o'clock,
and that she was going to bed.
"I have spoken to Mr. Bunker about what you want, Miss Kennedy," said
the landlady. "He will be here to-morrow morning about ten on his
rounds."
"Who is Mr. Bunker?" asked Angela.
They all seemed surprised. Had she never, in whatever part of the world
she had lived, heard of Mr. Bunker--Bunker the Great?
"He used to be a sort of factotum to old Mr. Messenger," said Mrs.
Bormalack. "His death was a sad blow to Mr. Bunker. He's a general agent
by trade, and he deals in coal, and he's a house agent, and he knows
everybody round Stepney and up to the Mile End Road as far as Bow. He's
saved money, too, Miss Kennedy, and is greatly respected."
"He ought to be," said Harry; "not only because he was so much with Mr.
Messenger, whose name is revered for the kindred associations of beer
and property, but also because he is my uncle--he ought to be
respected."
"Your uncle?"
"My own--so near, and yet so dear--my uncle Bunker. To be connected with
Messenger, Marsden & Company, even indirectly through such an uncle, is
in itself a distinction. You will learn to know him, and you will learn
to esteem him, Miss Kennedy. You will esteem him all the more if you are
interested in beer."
Miss Kennedy blushed.
"Bunker is great in the company. I believe he used to consider himself a
kind of a partner while the old man lived. He knows all about the big
brewery. As for that, everybody does round Stepney Green."
"The company," said Josephus gloomily, "is nothing but a chit of a
girl." He sighed, thinking how much went to her and how little came to
himself.
"We are steeped in beer," Harry went on. "Our conversation turns for
ever on beer; we live for beer; the houses round us are filled with the
company's servants; we live _by_ beer. For example, Mrs. Bormalack's
late husband----"
"He was a collector for the company," said the landlady, with natural
pride.
"You see, Miss Kennedy, what a responsible and exalted position was held
by Mr. Bormalack." (The widow thought that sometimes it was hard to know
whether this sprightly young man was laughing at people or not, but it
certainly was a very high position, and most respectable.) "He went
round the houses," Harry went on. "Houses, here, mean public-houses; the
company owns half the public-houses in the East End. Then here is my
cousin, the genial Josephus. Hold up your head, Josephus. He, for his
part, is a clerk in the house."
Josephus groaned. "A junior clerk," he murmured.
"The professor is not allowed in the brewery. He might conjure among the
vats, and vats have never been able to take a practical joke; but he
amuses the brewery people. As for Mr. Maliphant, he carves figure-heads
for the ships which carry away the brewery beer; and perhaps when the
brewery wants cabinets made they will come to me."
"It is the biggest brewery in all England," said the landlady. "I can
never remember--because my memory is like a sieve--how much beer they
brew every year; but somebody once made a calculation about it, compared
with Niagara Falls, which even Mr. Bunker said was surprising."
"Think, Miss Kennedy," said Harry, "of an Entire Niagara of Messenger's
Entire."
"But how can this Mr. Bunker be of use to me?" asked the young lady.
"Why!" said Mrs. Bormalack. "There is not a shop or a street nor any
kind of place within miles Mr. Bunker doesn't know, who they are that
live there, how they make their living, what the rent is, and
everything. That's what made him so useful to old Mr. Messenger."
Miss Kennedy for some reason changed color. Then she said that she
thought she would like to see Mr. Bunker.
When she was gone Harry sat down beside his lordship and proceeded to
smoke tobacco in silence, refusing the proffered decanters.
Said the professor softly:
"She'd be a fortune--a gem of the first water--upon the boards. As
pianoforte-player between the feats of magic, marvel, and mystery, or a
medium under the magnetic influence of the operator, or a clairvoyant,
or a thought-reader--or----" Here he relapsed into silence without a
sigh.
"She looks intelligent," said Daniel Fagg. "When she hears about my
discovery she will----" Here he caught the eye of Harry Goslett, who was
shaking a finger of warning, which he rightly interpreted to mean that
dressmakers must not be asked to subscribe to learned books. This
abashed him.
"Considered as a figure-head," began Mr. Maliphant, "I remember----"
"As a dressmaker, now----" interrupted Harry. "Do Stepney dressmakers
often play the piano like--well, like Miss Kennedy? Do they wear gold
watches? Do they talk and move and act so much like real ladies, that no
one could tell the difference? Answer me that, Mrs. Bormalack."
"Well, Mr. Goslett, all I can say is, that she seems a very proper young
lady to have in the house."
"Proper, ma'am? If you were to search the whole of Stepney, I don't
believe you could find such another. What does your ladyship say?"
"I say, Mr. Goslett, that in Canaan City the ladies who are dressmakers
set the fashions to the ladies who are not; I was myself a dressmaker.
And Aurelia Tucker, though she turns up her nose at our elevation, is, I
must say, a lady who would do credit to any circle, even yours, Mrs.
Bormalack. And such remarks about real ladies and dressmakers I do not
understand, and I expected better manners, I must say. Look at his
lordship's manners, Mr. Goslett, and his father was a carpenter, like
you."