The door of No. 10 was opened by a rather uncomely woman of perhaps
thirty years of age, with a weak face and watery eyes.
This was Mrs. Oliver, and it occurred to me even at that first sight
that she had the frightened and evasive look of a wife who lives under
the intimidation of a tyrannical husband.
She welcomed me, however, with a warmth that partly dispelled my
depression and I followed her into the kitchen.
It was the only room on the ground floor of her house (except a
scullery) and it seemed sweet and clean and comfortable, having a table
in the middle of the floor, a sofa under the window, a rocking-chair on
one side of the fireplace, a swinging baby's cot on the other side, and
nothing about it that was not homelike and reassuring, except two large
photographs over the mantelpiece of men stripped to the waist and
sparring.
"We've been looking for you all day, ma'am, and had nearly give you up,"
she said.
Then she took baby out of my arms, removed her bonnet and pelisse,
lifted her barrow-coat to examine her limbs, asked her age, kissed her
on the arms, the neck and the legs, and praised her without measure.
"And what's her name, ma'am?"
"Mary Isabel, but I wish her to be called Isabel."
"Isabel! A beautiful name too! Fit for a angel, ma'am. And she _is_ a
little angel, bless her! Such rosy cheeks! Such a ducky little mouth!
Such blue eyes--blue as the bluebells in the cemet'ry. She's as pretty
as a waxwork, she really is, and any woman in the world might be proud
to nurse her."
A young mother is such a weakling that praise of her child (however
crude) acts like a charm on her, and in spite of myself I was beginning
to feel more at ease, when Mrs. Oliver's husband came downstairs.
He was a short, thick-set man of about thirty-five, with a square chin,
a very thick neck and a close-cropped red bullet head, and he was in his
stocking feet and shirt-sleeves as if he had been dressing to go out for
the evening.
I remember that it flashed upon me--I don't know why--that he had seen
me from the window of the room upstairs, driving up in the old man's
four-wheeler, and had drawn from that innocent circumstance certain
deductions about my character and my capacity to pay.
I must have been right, for as soon as our introduction was over and I
had interrupted Mrs. Oliver's praises of my baby's beauty by speaking
about material matters, saying the terms were to be four shillings, the
man, who had seated himself on the sofa to put on his boots said, in a
voice that was like a shot out of a blunderbus:
"Five."
"How'd you mean, Ted?" said Mrs. Oliver, timidly. "Didn't we say four?"
"Five," said the man again, with a still louder volume of voice.
I could see that the poor woman was trembling, but assuming the sweet
air of persons who live in a constant state of fear, she said:
"Oh yes. It _was_ five, now I remember."
I reminded her that her letter had said four, but she insisted that I
must be mistaken, and when I told her I had the letter with me and she
could see it if she wished, she said:
"Then it must have been a slip of the pen in a manner of speaking,
ma'am. We allus talked of five. Didn't we, Ted?"
"Certainly," said her husband, who was still busy with his boots.
I saw what was going on, and I felt hot and angry, but there seemed to
be nothing to do except submit.
"Very well, we'll say five then," I said.
"Paid in advance," said the man, and when I answered that that would
suit me very well, he added:
"A month in advance, you know."
By this time I felt myself trembling with indignation, as well as
quivering with fear, for while I looked upon all the money I possessed
as belonging to baby, to part with almost the whole of it in one moment
would reduce me to utter helplessness, so I said, turning to Mrs.
Oliver:
"Is that usual?"
It did not escape me that the unhappy woman was constantly studying her
husband's face, and when he glanced up at her with a meaning look she
answered, hurriedly:
"Oh yes, ma'am, quite usual. All the women in the Row has it. Number
five, she has twins and gets a month in hand with both of them. But
we'll take four weeks and I can't say no fairer than that, can I?"
"But why?" I asked.
"Well, you see, ma'am, you're . . . you're a stranger to us, and if baby
was left on our hands . . . Not as we think you'd leave her chargeable
as the saying is, but if you were ever ill, and got a bit back with your
payments . . . we being only pore people. . . ."
While the poor woman was floundering on in this way my blood was boiling
and I was beginning to ask her if she supposed for one moment that I
meant to desert my child, when the man, who had finished the lacing of
his boots, rose to his feet, and said:
"You don't want yer baiby to be give over to the Guardians for the sake
of a week or two, do you?"
That settled everything. I took out my purse and with a trembling hand
laid my last precious sovereign on the table.
A moment or two after this Mr. Oliver, who had put on his coat and a
cloth cap, made for the door.
"Evenin', ma'am," he said, and with what grace I could muster I bade him
good-bye.
"You aren't a-going to the 'Sun' to-night, are you, Ted?" asked Mrs.
Oliver.
"Club," said the man, and the door clashed behind him.
I breathed more freely when he was gone, and his wife (from whose face
the look of fear vanished instantly) was like another woman.
"Goodness gracious," she cried, with a kind of haggard hilarity,
"where's my head? Me never offering you a cup of tea, and you looking so
white after your journey."
I took baby back into my arms while she put on the kettle, set a black
tea-pot on the hob to warm, laid a piece of tablecloth and a thick cup
and saucer on the end of the table, and then knelt on the fender to
toast a little bread, talking meantime (half apologetically and half
proudly) about her husband.
He was a bricklayer by trade, and sometimes worked at the cemetery which
I could see at the other side of the road (behind the long railings and
the tall trees), but was more generally engaged as a sort of fighting
lieutenant to a Labour leader whose business it was to get up strikes.
Before they were married he had been the "Light Weight Champion of
Whitechapel," and those were photos of his fights which I could see over
the mantelpiece, but "he never did no knocking of people about now,"
being "quiet and matrimonual."
In spite of myself my heart warmed to the woman. I wonder it did not
occur to me there and then that, living in constant dread of her
tyrannical husband, she would always be guilty of the dissimulation I
had seen an example of already and that the effect of it would be
reflected upon my child.
It did not. I only told myself that she was clearly fond of children and
would be a kind nurse to my baby. It even pleased me, in my foolish
motherly selfishness, that she was a plain-featured person, whom baby
could never come to love as she would, I was sure, love me.
I felt better after I had taken tea, and as it was then seven o'clock,
and the sun was setting horizontally through the cypresses of the
cemetery, I knew it was time to go.
I could not do that, though, without undressing baby and singing her to
sleep. And even then I sat for a while with an aching heart, and Isabel
on my knee, thinking of how I should have to go to bed that night, for
the first time, without her.
Mrs. Oliver, in the meantime, examining the surplus linen which I had
brought in my parcel, was bursting into whispered cries of delight over
it, and, being told I had made the clothes myself, was saying:
"What a wonderful seamstress you might be if you liked, ma'am."
At length the time came to leave baby, and no woman knows the pain of
that experience who has not gone through it.
Though I really believed my darling would be loved and cared for, and
knew she would never miss me, or yet know that I was gone (there was a
pang even in that thought, and in every other kind of comforting), I
could not help it, that, as I was putting my cherub into her cot, my
tears rained down on her little face and awakened her, so that I had to
kneel by her side and rock her to sleep again.
"You'll be good to my child, won't you, Mrs. Oliver?" I said.
"'Deed I will, ma'am," the woman replied.
"You'll bath her every day, will you not?"
"Night and morning. I allus does, ma'am."
"And rinse out her bottle and see that she has nice new milk fresh from
the cow?"
"Sure as sure, ma'am. But don't you fret no more about the child, ma'am.
I've been a mother myself, ma'am, and I'll be as good to your little
angel as if she was my own come back to me."
"God bless you," I said in a burst of anguish, and after remaining a
moment longer on my knees by the cot (speaking with all my heart and
soul, though neither to nurse nor to baby) I rose to my feet, dashed the
tears from my eyes, and ran out of the house.