THE NEW COOK
Ten minutes later Mr. James Ollerenshaw stood alone in his
kitchen-sitting-room. And he gazed at the door between the
kitchen-sitting-room and the scullery. This door was shut; that is to
say, it was nearly shut. He had been turned out of the scullery; not
with violence--or, rather, with a sort of sweet violence that he liked,
and that had never before been administered to him by any human soul. An
afternoon highly adventurous--an afternoon on which he had permitted
himself to be insulted, with worse than impunity to the insulter, by the
childish daughter of that chit Susan--an afternoon on which he had
raised his hat to Mrs. Prockter--a Saturday afternoon on which he had
foregone, on account of a woman, his customary match at bowls--this
afternoon was drawing to a close in a manner which piled thrilling event
on thrilling event.
Mrs. Butt had departed. For unnumbered years Mrs. Butt had miscooked his
meals. The little house was almost inconceivable without Mrs. Butt. And
Mrs. Butt had departed. Already he missed her as one misses an ancient
and supersensitive corn--if the simile may be permitted to one; it is a
simile not quite nice, but, then, Mrs. Butt was not quite nice either.
The fault was not hers; she was born so.
The dropping of the kidney with a _plop_, by Mrs. Butt, on the hard,
unsympathetic floor of the scullery, had constituted an extremely
dramatic moment in three lives. Certainly Mrs. Butt possessed a wondrous
instinct for theatrical effect. Helen, on the contrary, seemed to
possess none. She had advanced nonchalantly towards the kidney, and
delicately picked it up between finger and thumb, and turned it over,
and then put it on a plate.
"That's a veal kidney," she had observed.
"Art sure it isn't a sheep's kidney, lass?" James had asked, carefully
imitating Helen's nonchalance.
"Yes," she had said. "I gather you are not passionately fond of kidneys,
great-stepuncle?" she had asked.
"I was once. What art going to do, lass?"
"I'm going to get our tea," she had said.
At the words, _our_ tea, the antique James Ollerenshaw, who had never
thought to have such a sensation again, was most distinctly conscious of
an agreeable, somewhat disturbing sensation of being tickled in the
small of his back.
"Well," he had asked her, "what can I do?"
"You can go out," she had replied. "Wouldn't it be a good thing for you
to go out for a walk? Tea will be ready at half-past four."
"I go for no walk," he said, positively....
"Yes, that's all right," she had murmured, but not in response to his
flat refusal to obey her. She had been opening the double cupboard and
the five drawers which constituted the receptacles of the
scullery-larders; she had been spying out the riches and the poverty of
the establishment. Then she had turned to him, and, instead of engaging
him in battle, she had just smiled at him, and said: "Very well. As you
wish. But do go into the front room, at any rate."
And there he was in the middle room, the kitchen, listening to her
movements behind the door. He heard the running of water, and then the
mild explosion of lighting the second ring of the gas-stove; the first
had been lighted by Mrs. Butt. Then he heard nothing whatever for years,
and when he looked at the clock it was fourteen minutes past four. In
the act of looking at the clock, his eye had to traverse the region of
the sofa. On the sofa were one parasol and two gloves. Astonishing,
singular, disconcerting, how those articles--which, after all, bore no
kind of resemblance to any style of furniture or hangings--seemed,
nevertheless, to refurnish the room, to give the room an air of being
thickly inhabited which it never had before!
Then she burst into the kitchen unexpectedly, with a swish of silk that
was like the retreat of waves down the shingle of some Atlantic shore.
"My dear uncle," she protested, "please do make yourself scarce. You are
in my way, and I'm very busy."
She went to the cupboard and snatched at some plates, two of which she
dropped on the table, and three of which she took into the kitchen.
"Have ye got all as ye want?" he questioned her politely, anxious to be
of assistance.
"Everything!" she answered, positively, and with just the least hint of
an intention to crush him.
"Have ye indeed!"
He did not utter this exclamation aloud; but with it he applied balm to
his secret breast. For he still remembered, being an old man, her
crushing him in the park, and the peril of another crushing roused the
male in him. And it was with a sardonic and cruel satisfaction that he
applied such balm to his secret breast. The truth was, he knew that she
had not got all she wanted. He knew that, despite her extraordinary
capableness (of which she was rather vain), despite her ability to
calculate mentally the interest on eighty-nine pounds for six months at
four-and-a-half per cent., she could not possibly prepare the tea
without coming to him and confessing to him that she had been mistaken,
and that she had _not_ got everything she wanted. She would be compelled
to humble herself before him--were it ever so little. He was a hard old
man, and the prospect of this humbling gave him pleasure (I regret to
say).
You cannot have tea without tea-leaves; and James Ollerenshaw kept the
tea-leaves in a tea-caddy, locked, in his front room. He had an
extravagant taste in tea. He fancied China tea; and he fancied China tea
that cost five shillings a pound. He was the last person to leave China
tea at five shillings a pound to the economic prudence of a Mrs. Butt.
Every day Mrs. Butt brought to him the teapot (warmed) and a teaspoon,
and he unlocked the tea-caddy, dispensed the right quantity of tea, and
relocked the tea-caddy.
There was no other tea in the house. So with a merry heart the callous
fellow (shamefully delighting in the imminent downfall of a
fellow-creature--and that a woman!) went into the front room as he had
been bidden. On one of the family of chairs, in a corner, was a black
octagonal case. He opened this case, which was not locked, and drew from
it a concertina, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Then he went to the
desk, and from under a pile of rent books he extracted several pieces
of music, and selected one. This selected piece he reared up on the
mantelpiece against two brass candlesticks. It was obvious, from the
certainty and ease of his movements, that he had the habit of lodging
pieces of music against those two brass candlesticks. The music bore the
illustrious name of George Frederick Handel.
Then he put on a pair of spectacles which were lying on the mantelpiece,
and balanced them on the end of his nose. Finally he adjusted his little
hands to the straps of the concertina. You might imagine that he would
instantly dissolve into melody. Not at all. He glanced at the page of
music first through his spectacles, and then, bending forward his head,
_over_ his spectacles. Then he put down the concertina, gingerly, on a
chair, and moved the music half-an-inch (perhaps five-eighths) to the
left. He resumed the concertina, and was on the very point of song, when
he put down the concertina for the second time, and moved the tassel of
his Turkish cap from the neighbourhood of his left ear to the
neighbourhood of his right ear. Then, with a cough, he resumed the
concertina once more, and embarked upon the interpretation of Handel.
It was the Hallelujah Chorus.
Any surprise which the musical reader may feel on hearing that James
Ollerenshaw was equal to performing the Hallelujah Chorus on a
concertina (even one inlaid with mother-of-pearl) argues on the part of
that reader an imperfect acquaintance with the Five Towns. In the Five
Towns there are (among piano scorners) two musical instruments, the
concertina and the cornet. And the Five Towns would like to see the
composer clever enough to compose a piece of music that cannot be
arranged for either of these instruments. It is conceivable that
Beethoven imagined, when he wrote the last movement of the C Minor
Symphony, that he had produced a work which it would be impossible to
arrange for cornet solo. But if he did he imagined a vain thing. In the
Five Towns, where the taste for classical music is highly developed, the
C Minor Symphony on a single cornet is as common as "Robin Adair" on a
full brass band.
James Ollerenshaw played the Hallelujah Chorus with much feeling and
expression. He understood the Hallelujah Chorus to its profoundest
depths; which was not surprising in view of the fact that he had been
playing it regularly since before Helen was born. (The unfading charm of
classical music is that you never tire of it.)
Nevertheless, the grandeur of his interpretation of the Hallelujah
Chorus appeared to produce no effect whatever in the scullery; neither
alarm nor ecstasy! And presently, in the midst of a brief pianissimo
passage, James's sensitive ear caught the distant sound of chopping,
which quite marred the soft tenderness at which he had been aiming. He
stopped abruptly. The sound of chopping intrigued his curiosity. What
could she be chopping? He advanced cautiously to the doorway; he had
left the door open. The other door--between the kitchen and the
scullery--which had previously been closed, was now open, so that he
could see from the front room into the scullery. His eager, inquisitive
glance noted a plate of beautiful bread and butter on the tea-table in
the kitchen.
She was chopping the kidney. Utterly absorbed in her task, she had no
suspicion that she was being overlooked. After the chopping of the
kidney, James witnessed a series of operations the key to whose
significance he could not find.
She put a flat pan over the gas, and then took it off again. Then she
picked up an egg, broke it into a coffee-cup, and instantly poured it
out of the coffee-cup into a basin. She did the same to another egg, and
yet another. Four eggs! The entire household stock of eggs! It was
terrible! Four eggs and a kidney among two people! He could not divine
what she was at.
Then she got some butter on the end of a knife and dropped it into the
saucepan, and put the saucepan over the gas; and then poured the
plateful of kidney-shreds into the saucepan. Then she began furiously
to beat the four eggs with a fork, glancing into the saucepan
frequently, and coaxing it with little touches. Then the kidney-shreds
raised a sound of frizzling, and bang into the saucepan went the
contents of the basin. All the time she had held her hands and her
implements and utensils away from her as much as possible, doubtless out
of consideration for her frock; not an inch of apron was she wearing.
Now she leant over the gas-stove, fork in hand, and made baffling
motions inside the saucepan with the fork; and while doing so she
stretched forth her left hand, obtained some salt, and sprinkled the
saucepan therewith. The business seemed to be exquisitely delicate and
breathless. Her face was sternly set, as though the fate of continents
depended on her nerve and audacity in this tremendous crisis. But what
she was doing to the interior of the saucepan James Ollerenshaw could
not comprehend. She stroked it with a long gesture; she tickled it, she
stroked it in a different direction; she lifted it and folded it on
itself.
Anyhow, he knew it was not scrambled eggs, because you have to stir
scrambled eggs without ceasing.
Then she stopped and stood quite still, regarding the saucepan.
"You've watched me quite long enough," she said, without moving her
head. She must have known all the time that he was there.
So he shuffled away, and glanced out of the window at the stir and
traffic of Trafalgar-road.
"Tea's ready," she said.
He went into the kitchen, smiling, enchanted, but disturbed. She had not
come to him and confessed that she could not make tea without
tea-leaves. Yet there was the teapot steaming and puffing on the table!