MARY ELLEN heard with trepidation that there was a Mrs. Butterworth on
the premises; she was old enough to know that it was one thing to “get
round” two men, and another to cozen a woman.
Her cozening had not been much more culpable than that of any one who
sees a chance and determines not to fritter it away by understatement.
It was not quite true, it was a propagandist gloss upon the truth,
to say that she slept out on the brickfields, implying that she was
homeless when she had sleeping rights in the fourth part of a bed in
Jackman’s Buildings. But there had been no dissembling, no thought to
please Tom Bradshaw, when she said she hated the Hepplestalls. She hated
them because she hated the misery in which she lived and because they
were the cause of her living in misery. That was her implicit belief
and the guile had not been in stating it but in denying it when Tom
commanded her denial.
The guile had succeeded, too. Tom Bradshaw was not a strong man of his
faction without knowing that there is a cant of the underdog as of the
upper, and he had suspected her of “beggar’s cunning.” Then she had won
him round; he had remembered that she was of his clan, he had felt that
there, but for the grace of God and the difference of age and sex, went
Tom Bradshaw, and he had gone partners with Walter in her future.
She had conquered males, but she feared Mrs. Butterworth and drew closer
to the fire lest the woman should detect her as not so unsophisticated
as she seemed nor so young as she looked.
She did not know Mrs. Butterworth nor the strength of Mrs. Butterworth’s
affection for Walter. Mrs. Butterworth was, in nominal office, his
housekeeper; actually she was slave, without knowing she was slave, to
a man who did not know he had enslaved her. Stoically she took whatever
came from Walter, and things like lost kittens and broken-legged
puppies came habitually. This time, making unprecedently a call upon
her tolerance, a girl came and Mrs. Butterworth might have been provoked
into defining the duties of a housekeeper to a bachelor. Instead, she
listened to instructions, put on an overall, got out her disinfectants
and prepared to clean Mary Ellen and to burn her clothes with a placid
competence which asserted that she was not to be overcome by any freak
of Walter’s, no matter how eccentric.
“If she’s to go into the spare bed,” she said, “she’ll go clean.”
No need to dwell on happenings in the bathroom; they were there for a
long time, and when Mary Ellen came out, wrapped in a night-dress of
Mrs. Butterworth’s, she felt raw from head to foot. But she had two
satisfactions which sent her very happily to sleep in spite of her
rawness. One was bread and milk in quantity, the other was the assurance
she derived from the looking-glass that if her parents saw her, they
would not recognize her. Her voice had been an asset to her parents who
had been therefore not so indifferent to the existence of their Mary
Ellen as her story had suggested.
Mrs. Butterworth returned to the sitting room. “She’s in bed,” she
reported.
“Thank you,” said Walter and then, by way of explanation, added, “She
can sing.”
“I thought it would be that,” she said.
“Yes, yes, it is quite extraordinarily that. Did I make it clear to you
that she will live here?”
“I’ll keep her clean,” said Mrs. Butterworth, shouldering the burden.
“And she had better be described as my niece, from, let us say, Oldham.
You will buy her clothes to-morrow. Her name is Mary. We will call her
Mary Pate.”
“It’s a good name to take risks with,” she warned him.
“Wait till I’ve taught her how to sing.”
“Oh, aye,” she said, with seeming skepticism; but she was not skeptical.
She accepted Mary, she believed in her because Walter believed in her
and because his belief was so strong that he bestowed on her the name of
Pate. That settled, for Mrs. Butterworth, that Mary was remarkable.
Walter himself was doubtful if he was justified in sharing his name with
her. It was an honored name in Staith-ley, but when Mary Ellen soared
she would cast luster on the name she bore, and he questioned if he were
not highhandedly appropriating that luster to his name. But on other
grounds, of convenience, of propriety (a singing master had to be
circumspect), of cover from the possible quest of bereft parents, he
decided she had better be Pate.
Why, it Italianized into Patti! He hadn’t thought of that before, but it
seemed a good omen and before he went to bed that night he had planned
in full his scheme for the education of a pupil who did not merely
come to him for lessons while spending the rest of her time out of his
control, but of one who from her uprising to her retiring should be
ordered by him to the single end that she should be a great singer.
No one but a bachelor, and a Mrs. Butterworth-spoiled bachelor at that,
would have imagined that a system so drastic, and so monastic, would
prove workable, but at first Mary Ellen was docile. She had gone without
creature comforts for too long not to appreciate them when she had them,
and she was docile through her fear of losing them, of being sent back
to Jackman’s Buildings or of being dragged back by her parents. Their
beat, certainly, was not her beat now, and the almost suburban street in
which she had been singing when Walter heard her was well away from the
Staithley Beggar’s Mile. But there were always off-chances (such as her
own coming there), and perhaps she knew or perhaps she did not know that
she was one of those people who can be seen across a wide road by
the short-sighted: a quality she had of which there is no particular
explanation except that it is one of the Almighty’s conjuring tricks,
performed for the ugly as compensation for their ugliness and for the
beautiful because to them that hath shall be given.
At any rate, so long as she feared the clutch of her past she subdued
her rebelliousness to the discipline of study, and all too soon he was
treating her companionably, he was letting her into the secret of
the ambition he had for her, he was assuming that because he knew the
necessity of a long, arduous training, she would reasonably submit to
it.
But her submissiveness to his regimen passed with the passing of her
fears. She trusted the disguise of clothes, of the manner she acquired
and of speech, which was no longer that of Jackman’s Buildings,
to confound the Bradshaws even if she met them face to face and as
confidence grew her motive for acquiescence in much that his system
implied was weakened. It implied, especially, the secreting of her
talent until he deemed it ripe for exhibition, and Mary Ellen grew
impatient.
Perhaps he had not clearly stated his ambition or perhaps she had not
clearly understood, but while he expected her to be a pupil long after
her Staithley days were past, she was not looking beyond Staithley, she
was not seeing why work should be continuous now that it had ceased to
be a new sensation. She was avid of results and grew sullen at her labor
which seemed to lead nowhere but to more labor.
He consulted Mrs. Butterworth: was Mary Ellen ill? “I’ll? She’s got
horse-strength, but you can overdrive a horse. All work and no play is
good for nobody.”
“She goes to concerts,” he protested.
“That’s part of her work, and part of her trouble, too. Going and
hearing others sing and you telling her to watch them and to learn what
to avoid, and she fancying she’s better than they are, an’ all.”
“She is better.”
“Then it doesn’t help her to know it and to know they sing in public and
she doesn’t.”
“She shan’t sing yet. What am I to do?”
“Take her mind off it. It’s always concerts. There are theaters.”
There were. There was one in Staithley (there was even, depth below the
deep, a music-hall), but the feeling existed that if playgoing was done
at all it should be done furtively and though Walter would not have
dreamed of putting music and drama in two categories the one labeled
respectable and the other disreputable, he had to defer to the
prejudices of those who did. He lived by teaching music and singing to
the offspring of Staithley’s upper ten, and there might be tolerance
amongst them, but he had to be on the safe side and to take the view
that the theater was a detrimental place. This was self-protective habit
which recently had crystallized into something approaching conviction
through the action of one Chown. The crime of Mr. Chown, and to Walter
it was no less than crime, was to translate the Staithley Hand Bell
Ringers to the music-halls, where they had made much money by (Walter
held) debasing their musical standards. But the music-hall was not the
theater and he had to admit, on reflection, that there was really no
connection between Mr. Chown’s vulgarization of the musical taste of the
Staithley Hand Bell Ringers and Mary Ellen’s going to the play. There
was Shakespeare and if it was prudent for him not to go with her
himself, there was Mrs. Butterworth, who stood awaiting his decision
with a notable and not disinterested anxiety.
It was not disinterested because the slave had her relaxation, her
weekly “night out” when she threw the shackles off and forgot in the pit
of the Theater Royal that she was housekeeper, valet, nurse and mother
to Walter Pate. Not his to ask nor his to tell what delicious freedom
she found in those emancipated hours, but hers the hope to add to them
when she cunningly prescribed the theater as a cure for Mary Ellen’s
restiveness.
“Would you go with her?” he asked shyly, his tone implying that now, if
never before, he was her petitioner.
“If you wish it,” she said, exulting secretly. “I’m sure she needs a
change.”
So, Shakespeare conveniently arriving at Staithley in the hands of a
troupe of actors of heroic good intentions, Mary Ellen went to fairyland
with Mrs. Butterworth who proved, however, when she had grown used to
sitting on a plush chair in the circle instead of on a hard bench in the
pit, an unromantic guide. Mary was lost with Rosalind in Arden and Mrs.
Butterworth took advantage of the interval to parade her knowledge of
the private concerns of the actors. It was, for the most part, a recital
of the sycophantic slush handed by the advance agent to the office of
the _Staithley Evening Reporter_, and printed each Friday unedited. She
knew how Jacques and Phoebe, though they only met when this tour began,
had been married last week at. Huddersfield, and what difficulties had
been overcome to secure legal marriage for a pair of strolling players
who only stayed in a town for a week. And she knew where Rosalind lodged
in Staithley. Mary did not find this disenchanting: for her it linked
fairyland with Staithley. Rosalind was not a dream, mysterious,
impalpably detached from life, but a real woman lodging in a street
which Mary Ellen knew: she walked the pavements in skirts when she
wasn’t ruffling it in doublet and hose, bewitching young Orlando in a
glamorous wood, and if Rosalind why not, some magical day, Mary Ellen?
She gasped at her audacity, at the egregious fantasy of leaping
thought. She was earth-bound by Staithley, and these were the fetterless
imaginings of a freer world.
She couldn’t and she didn’t look beyond Staithley, and the stage seemed
something so remotely beyond her reach that she bid her thought, even
from herself. She had the trick, when chocolate came her way, of
getting on a chair and of putting the packet on the top of her wardrobe,
hoarding it not too long but long enough to make her feel nobly
conscious of severe self-restraint. So with this thought of the stage:
she put it, wrapped in silver paper, at the top of her mental wardrobe,
not wholly inaccessible, but difficult of access, not forgotten but
put where it was not easy to remember it. But it had all the same its
reactions and the chief of these operated in a manner precisely contrary
to Walter’s intentions when he allowed her to go to the play. “She
shan’t sing yet,” (in public, that is) he had said decidedly to Mrs.
Butter-worth, and Mary Ellen, if she admitted doublet and hose to be,
for her, the fabric of a dream, was spurred by that impossible to demand
her possible, to demand her right to wear an evening dress and in it to
appear upon a platform and to sing in public.
“Not yet,” he said. “Not for a long while yet.”
“Oh, Daddy Pate, I can’t wait for ever.”
“Nobody’s asking you to. But you’ll wait till you’re ready.”
“How long?”
“Some time. Years.”
“Years? But you told Mr. Bradshaw I was to sing in the ‘Messiah.’ I’ve
been learning it.”
“You heard that? That night you came? Well, it was a foolish boast
of mine. You practiced it as you have practiced other things, for the
groundwork on which you’ll build.”
“You mean I’m not good enough. Then why have you told me I’m good?”
“You’re too good to spoil.”
“But I’m spoiling now.”
“No: you’re learning.”
She cried piteously and when, surprisingly, that did not move him, she
sulked and refused to eat and managed to make herself so unwell
that work was out of the question and Mrs. Butterworth was guilty of
disloyalty to Walter.
“She’ll fret herself into a decline,” she said. “You’d best give way to
her.”
“She’ll damage her voice if this goes on,” he had to admit. “Can’t
you talk sense to her?” and Mrs. Butter-worth, swinging back to her
allegiance, promised she would try, but her talking was to ears that
were deaf. Mary Ellen, appealed to in the name of gratitude she owed
Walter, was stubbornly unmoved. “I was better off in the streets,” she
said. “I sang. People heard me.”
Mrs. Butterworth held up her hands in scandalized protest. “Oh, dearie!”
she said, incapable of more.
“Why am I kept down like this?” demanded Mary Ellen. “Mr. Pate knows
best.”
“He knows he’s got me in prison. He thinks he can amuse himself by
trying his experiments on me. His perfect system that has never been
tried before! No, because nobody would stand it, so he picked me off
the street to have me to try it on because he thought I was helpless.
He doesn’t care about me. I’m not a girl. I’m not human flesh and blood.
I’m a thing with a voice that he’s testing a system on, and he thinks
I’ll let him go on testing till he’s tired of it. Years, he said. Years
in a prison! Years, while he bribes me to stand it by making lying
promises--”
“Oh! he never!” said Mrs. Butterworth, stung to defend Walter, though
secretly in sympathy with much of her passionate distortion of his
motives.
“He did! He said I was to sing solo in the ‘Messiah’ and now he says I
shan’t. He isn’t tired of his experiments yet.”
“I’m sure he means it for your good.”
“Yes. Father’s licked me saying that and loving me I’m being kept
down for his pleasure and I’m tired if he isn’t. I’m going back to the
streets.”
“That’s foolish talk, Mary.”
“I’m going to sing somewhere. That may be foolish, but it’s fact.”
“Well, I’ll tell him. Now eat your breakfast.”
“No,” said Mary Ellen, hunger-striker, and Mrs. Butterworth reported
a total failure in guarded misquotation of the rebel. “I can put bacon
before her, but I cannot make her eat. And she’ll run away. She will, as
sure as eggs are eggs, and you’ll lose her then. We can’t lock her up.”
“No.” Walter mused upon the authority of a foster-father, clamping his
anger down, recognizing the weakness of his position. He was not her
guardian; he had no reason to suppose that her parents were alive or
that any one had better right than he had to command her, but he had
assumed possession of Mary Ellen as if she were a kitten and a girl was
not a kitten. He could only rule by the consent of the ruled, and he
thought he had earned her consent. He had given her so much--even,
treating her as of discreet age, his confidence--and he had thought she
had responded, he had thought she had reasonably understood what he was
doing and why. But if she put it that he was simply a tyrant, there was
nothing to do but to humor her till, in time, she saw indisputably that
he was right. To let her go, to lose what had been so well begun, was
unthinkable.
Mrs. Butterworth, sensitive to Walter’s suffering, broke in upon his
thoughts. “I’d like to whip the thankless brat,” she said viciously,
and if she was hinting at a policy it might have been a sound one.
But Walter was not thinking whether Mary Ellen was or was not still of
whipable age, he was going back, whimsically, to his beginnings with
her, he was thinking how he had said to Tom, “If she goes on to where
I’m seeing her, she’ll wipe her boots on me.” The boot-wiping had begun
before he looked for it; that was all except that it was his system on
which she wiped her boots, his system off which she rubbed the bloom.
He went to Mary, still staring at her uneaten meal, with a compromise.
“I think you might sing this season with the Choral Society, Mary,”
he said, “attending their practices and appearing in public when they
appear.”
“Daddy Pate,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be a nuisance, but I had to
make you see it. The Choral Society? That means just in the chorus.”
“Well, for this season, Mary.”
“But the ‘Messiah’? You promised me.”
“Oh, hardly. But we shall see, Mary. We shall see.” And knowing that she
had got him, so to speak, with his foot on the butter-side, she kissed
him very sweetly and then, to show him what a practical, commonsensical
person she really was, she sat down to breakfast. “And I don’t mind,”
she said, “if the bacon is cold,” and ate, magnanimously.