MRS. BUTT'S DEPARTURE
James Ollerenshaw's house was within a few hundred yards of the top of
Trafalgar-road, on the way from Bursley to Hanbridge. I may not indicate
the exact house, but I can scarcely conceal that it lay between Nos. 160
and 180, on the left as you go up. It was one of the oldest houses in
the street, and though bullied into insignificance by sundry detached
and semi-detached villas opposite--palaces occupied by reckless persons
who think nothing of paying sixty or even sixty-five pounds a year for
rent alone--it kept a certain individuality and distinction because it
had been conscientiously built of good brick before English domestic
architecture had lost trace of the Georgian style. First you went up two
white steps (white in theory), through a little gate in a wrought-iron
railing painted the colour of peas after they have been cooked in a bad
restaurant. You then found yourself in a little front yard, twelve feet
in width (the whole width of the house) by six feet in depth. The yard
was paved with large square Indian-red tiles, except a tiny circle in
the midst bordered with black-currant-coloured tiles set endwise with a
scolloped edge. This magical circle contained earth, and in the centre
of it was a rhododendron bush which, having fallen into lazy habits, had
forgotten the art of flowering. Its leaves were a most pessimistic
version of the tint of the railing.
The façade of the house comprised three windows and a door--that is to
say, a window and a door on the ground floor and two windows above. The
brickwork was assuredly admirable; James had it "pointed" every few
years. Over the windows the bricks, of special shapes, were arranged as
in a flat arch, with a keystone that jutted slightly. The panes of the
windows were numerous and small; inside, on the sashes, lay long thin
scarlet sausages of red cloth and sawdust, to keep out the draughts. The
door was divided into eight small panels with elaborate beadings, and
over it was a delicate fanlight--one of about a score in Bursley--to
remind the observer of a lost elegance. Between the fanlight and the
upstairs window exactly above it was a rusty iron plaque, with vestiges
in gilt of the word "Phoenix." It had been put there when fire insurance
had still the fancied charm of novelty. At the extremity of the façade
farthest from the door a spout came down from the blue-slate roof. This
spout began with a bold curve from the projecting horizontal spout under
the eaves, and made another curve at the ground into a hollow
earthenware grid with very tiny holes.
Helen looked delicious in the yard, gazing pensively at the slothful
rhododendron while James Ollerenshaw opened his door. She was seen by
two electric cars-full of people, for although James's latchkey was very
highly polished and the lock well oiled, he never succeeded in opening
his door at the first attempt. It was a capricious door. You could not
be sure of opening it any more than Beau Brummel could be sure of tying
his cravat. It was a muse that had to be wooed.
But when it did open you perceived that there were no half measures
about that door, for it let you straight into the house. To open it was
like taking down part of the wall. No lobby, hall, or vestibule behind
that door! One instant you were in the yard, the next you were in the
middle of the sitting-room, and through a doorway at the back of the
sitting-room you could see the kitchen, and beyond that the scullery,
and beyond that a back yard with a whitewashed wall.
James Ollerenshaw went in first, leaving Helen to follow. He had learnt
much in the previous hour, but there were still one or two odd things
left for him to learn.
"Ah!" he breathed, shut the door, and hung up his hard hat on the inner
face of it. "Sit ye down, lass."
So she sat her down. It must be said that she looked as if she had made
a mistake and got on to the wrong side of Trafalgar-road. The
sitting-room was a crowded and shabby little apartment (though clean).
There was a list carpet over the middle of the floor, which was tiled,
and in the middle of the carpet a small square table with flap-sides. On
this table was a full-rigged ship on a stormy sea in a glass box, some
resin, a large stone bottle of ink, a ready reckoner, Whitaker's
Almanack (paper edition), a foot-rule, and a bright brass candlestick.
Above the table there hung from the ceiling a string with a ball of
fringed paper, designed for the amusement of flies. At the window was a
flat desk, on which were transacted the affairs of Mr. Ollerenshaw. When
he stationed himself at it in the seat of custom and of judgment,
defaulting tenants, twirling caps or twisting aprons, had a fine view of
the left side of his face. He usually talked to them while staring out
of the window. Before this desk was a Windsor chair. There were eight
other Windsor chairs in the room--Helen was sitting on one that had not
been sat upon for years and years--a teeming but idle population of
chairs. A horsehair arm-chair seemed to be the sultan of the seraglio of
chairs. Opposite the window a modern sideboard, which might have cost
two-nineteen-six when new, completed the tale of furniture. The general
impression was one of fulness; the low ceiling, and the immense harvest
of overblown blue roses which climbed luxuriantly up the walls,
intensified this effect. The mantelpiece was crammed with brass
ornaments, and there were two complete sets of brass fire-irons in the
brass fender. Above the mantelpiece a looking-glass, in a wan frame of
bird's-eye maple, with rounded corners, reflected Helen's hat.
Helen abandoned the Windsor chair and tried the arm-chair, and then
stood up.
"Which chair do you recommend?" she asked, nicely.
"Bless ye, child! I never sit here, except at th' desk. I sit in the
kitchen."
A peculiarity of houses in the Five Towns is that rooms are seldom
called by their right names. It is a point of honour, among the
self-respecting and industrious classes, to prepare a room elaborately
for a certain purpose, and then not to use it for that purpose. Thus
James Ollerenshaw's sitting-room, though surely few apartments could
show more facilities than it showed for sitting, was not used as a
sitting-room, but as an office. The kitchen, though it contained a
range, was not used as a kitchen, but as a sitting-room. The scullery,
though it had no range, was filled with a gas cooking-stove and used as
a kitchen. And the back yard was used as a scullery. This arrangement
never struck anybody as singular; it did not strike even Helen as
singular. Her mother's house had exhibited the same oddness until she
reorganised it. If James Ollerenshaw had not needed an office, his
sitting-room would have languished in desuetude. The fact is that the
thrifty inhabitants of the Five Towns save a room as they save money. If
they have an income of six rooms they will live on five, or rather in
five, and thereby take pride to themselves.
Somewhat nervous, James feigned to glance at the rent books on the desk.
Helen's eye swept the room. "I suppose you have a good servant?" she
said.
"I have a woman as comes in," said James. "But her isn't in th' house at
the moment."
This latter statement was a wilful untruth on James's part. He had
distinctly caught a glimpse of Mrs. Butt's figure as he entered.
"Well," said Helen, kindly, "it's quite nice, I'm sure. You must be very
comfortable--for a man. But, of course, one can see at once that no
woman lives here."
"How?" he demanded, naïvely.
"Oh," she answered, "I don't know. But one can."
"Dost mean to say as it isn't clean, lass?"
"The _brasses_ are very clean," said Helen.
Such astonishing virtuosity in the art of innuendo is the privilege of
one sex only.
"Come into th' kitchen, lass," said James, after he had smiled into a
corner of the room, "and take off them gloves and things."
"But, great-stepuncle, I can't stay."
"You'll stop for tea," said he, firmly, "or my name isn't James
Ollerenshaw."
He preceded her into the kitchen. The door between the kitchen and the
scullery was half-closed; in the aperture he again had a momentary, but
distinct, glimpse of the eye of Mrs. Butt.
"I do like this room," said Helen, enthusiastically.
"Uninterrupted view o' th' back yard," said Ollerenshaw. "Sit ye down,
lass."
He indicated an article of furniture which stood in front of the range,
at a distance of perhaps six feet from it, cutting the room in half.
This contrivance may be called a sofa, or it may be called a couch; but
it can only be properly described by the Midland word for it--squab. No
other term is sufficiently expressive. Its seat--five feet by two--was
very broad and very low, and it had a steep, high back and sides. All
its angles were right angles. It was everywhere comfortably padded; it
yielded everywhere to firm pressure; and it was covered with a grey and
green striped stuff. You could not sit on that squab and be in a
draught; yet behind it, lest the impossible should arrive, was a heavy
curtain, hung on an iron rod which crossed the room from wall to wall.
Not much imagination was needed to realise the joy and ecstasy of
losing yourself on that squab on a winter afternoon, with the range fire
roaring in your face, and the curtain drawn abaft.
Helen assumed the mathematical centre of the squab, and began to arrange
her skirts in cascading folds; she had posed her parasol in a corner of
it, as though the squab had been a railway carriage, which, indeed, it
did somewhat resemble.
"By the way, lass, what's that as swishes?" James demanded.
"What's what?"
"What's that as swishes?"
She looked puzzled for an instant, then laughed--a frank, gay laugh,
light and bright as aluminium, such as the kitchen had never before
heard.
"Oh!" she said. "It's my new silk petticoat, I suppose. You mean that?"
She brusquely moved her limbs, reproducing the unique and delicious
rustle of concealed silk.
"Ay!" ejaculated the old man, "I mean that."
"Yes. It's my silk petticoat. Do you like it?"
"I havena' seen it, lass."
She bent down, and lifted the hem of her dress just two inches--the
discreetest, the modestest gesture. He had a transient vision of
something fair--it was gone again.
"I don't know as I dislike it," said he.
He was standing facing her, his back to the range, and his head on a
level with the high narrow mantelpiece, upon which glittered a row of
small tin canisters. Suddenly he turned to the corner to the right of
the range, where, next to an oak cupboard, a velvet Turkish smoking cap
depended from a nail. He put on the cap, of which the long tassel curved
down to his ear. Then he faced her again, putting his hands behind him,
and raising himself at intervals on his small, well-polished toes. She
lifted her two hands simultaneously to her head, and began to draw pins
from her hat, which pins she placed one after another between her lips.
Then she lowered the hat carefully from her head, and transfixed it anew
with the pins.
"Will you mind hanging it on that nail?" she requested.
He took it, as though it had been of glass, and hung it on the nail.
Without her hat she looked as if she lived there, a jewel in a
pipe-case. She appeared to be just as much at home as he was. And they
were so at home together that there was no further necessity to strain
after a continuous conversation. With a vague smile she gazed round and
about, at the warm, cracked, smooth red tiles of the floor; at the
painted green walls, at a Windsor chair near the cupboard--a solitary
chair that had evidently been misunderstood by the large family of
relatives in the other room and sent into exile; at the pair of bellows
that hung on the wall above the chair, and the rich gaudiness of the
grocer's almanac above the bellows; at the tea-table, with its coarse
grey cloth and thick crockery spread beneath the window.
"So you have all your meals here?" she ventured.
"Ay," he said. "I have what I call my meals here."
"Why," she cried, "don't you enjoy them?"
"I eat 'em," he said.
"What time do you have tea?" she inquired.
"Four o'clock," said he. "Sharp!"
"But it's a quarter to, now!" she exclaimed, pointing to a clock with
weights at the end of brass chains and a long pendulum. "And didn't you
say your servant was out?"
"Ay," he mysteriously lied. "Her's out. But her'll come back. Happen
her's gone to get a bit o' fish or something."
"Fish! Do you always have fish for tea?"
"I have what I'm given," he replied. "I fancy a snack for my tea.
Something tasty, ye know."
"Why," she said, "you're just like me. I adore tea. I'd sooner have tea
than any other meal of the day. But I never yet knew a servant who
could get something tasty every day. Of course, it's quite easy if you
know how to do it; but servants don't--that is to say, as a rule--but I
expect you've got a very good one."
"So-so!" James murmured.
"The trouble with servants is that they always think that if you like a
thing one day you'll like the same thing every day for the next three
years."
"Ay," he said, drily. "I used to like a kidney, but it's more than three
years ago." He stuck his lips out, and raised himself higher than ever
on his toes.
He did not laugh. But she laughed, almost boisterously.
"I can't help telling you," she said, "you're perfectly lovely,
great-stepuncle. Are we both going to drink out of the same cup?" In
such manner did the current of her talk gyrate and turn corners.
He approached the cupboard.
"No, no!" She sprang up. "Let me. I'll do that, as the servant is so
long."
And she opened the cupboard. Among a miscellany of crocks therein was a
blue-and-white cup and saucer, and a plate to match underneath it, that
seemed out of place there. She lifted down the pile.
"Steady on!" he counselled her. "Why dun you choose that?"
"Because I like it," she replied, simply.
He was silenced. "That's a bit o' real Spode," he said, as she put it on
the table and dusted the several pieces with a corner of the tablecloth.
"It won't be in any danger," she retorted, "until it comes to be washed
up. So I'll stop afterwards and wash it up myself. There!"
"Now you can't find the teaspoons, miss!" he challenged her.
"I think I can," she said.
She raised the tablecloth at the end, discovered the knob of a drawer,
and opened it. And, surely, there were teaspoons.
"Can't I just take a peep into the scullery?" she begged, with a
bewitching supplication. "I won't stop. It's nearly time your servant
was back, if she's always so dreadfully prompt as you say. I won't touch
anything. Servants are so silly. They always think one wants to
interfere with them."
Without waiting for James's permission, she burst youthfully into the
scullery.
"Oh," she exclaimed, "there's some one here!"
Of course there was. There was Mrs. Butt.
Although the part played by Mrs. Butt in the drama was vehement and
momentous, it was nevertheless so brief that a description of Mrs. Butt
is hardly called for. Suffice it to say that she had so much waist as to
have no waist, and that she possessed both a beard and a moustache.
This curt catalogue of her charms is unfair to her; but Mrs. Butt was
ever the victim of unfairness.
James Ollerenshaw looked audaciously in at the door. "It's Mrs. Butt,"
said he. "Us thought as ye were out."
"Good-afternoon, Mrs. Butt," Helen began, with candid pleasantness.
A pause.
"Good-afternoon, miss."
"And what have you got for uncle's tea to-day? Something tasty?"
"I've got this," said Mrs. Butt, with candid unpleasantness. And she
pointed to an oblate spheroid, the colour of brick, but smoother, which
lay on a plate near the gas-stove. It was a kidney.
"H'm!"--from James.
"It's not cooked yet, I see," Helen observed. "And--"
The clock finished her remark.
"No, miss, it's not cooked," said Mrs. Butt. "To tell ye the honest
truth, miss, I've been learning, 'stead o' cooking this 'ere kidney."
She picked up the kidney in her pudding-like hand and gazed at it. "I'm
glad the brasses is clean, miss, at any rate, though the house _does_
look as though there was no woman about the place, and servants _are_
silly. I'm thankful to Heaven as the brasses is clean. Come into my
scullery, and welcome."
She ceased, still holding up the kidney.
"H'm!"--from Uncle James.
This repeated remark of his seemed to rouse the fury in her. "You may
'h'm,' Mester Ollerenshaw," she glared at him. "You may 'h'm' as much as
yo'n a mind." Then to Helen: "Come in, miss; come in. Don't be afraid of
servants." And finally, with a striking instinct for theatrical effect:
"But I go out!"
She flung the innocent and yielding kidney to the floor, snatched up a
bonnet, cast off her apron, and departed.
"There!" said James Ollerenshaw. "You've done it!"