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[Illustration: "LINES OF BLACK BARGES" (WATERLOO BRIDGE)]
Our House
And London out of Our Windows
BY Elizabeth Robins Pennell
_With Illustrations by
Joseph Pennell_
[Illustration: WATERLOO BRIDGE]
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY JOSEPH PENNELL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1912_
[Illustration: THE BIG, LOW, HEAVY ENGLISH CLOUDS"]
_To
Augustine_
[Illustration: DOWN TO ST. PAUL'S]
[Illustration: "THERE IS MOVEMENT AND LIFE" (THE UNDERGROUND
STATION AND CHARING-CROSS BRIDGE)]
Contents
INTRODUCTION xi
I. 'ENRIETTER 1
II. TRIMMER 33
III. LOUISE 79
IV. OUR CHARWOMEN 119
V. CLEMENTINE 153
VI. THE OLD HOUSEKEEPER 201
VII. THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER 227
VIII. OUR BEGGARS 251
IX. THE TENANTS 289
X. THE QUARTER 339
[Illustration: "AT NIGHT MYRIADS OF LIGHTS COME OUT"]
List of Illustrations
"LINES OF BLACK BARGES" (WATERLOO BRIDGE) _BASTARD TITLE_
DOWN TO ST. PAUL'S _FRONTISPIECE_
WATERLOO BRIDGE _TITLE-PAGE_
"THE BIG, LOW, HEAVY ENGLISH CLOUDS" _DEDICATION_
"THERE IS MOVEMENT AND LIFE" (THE UNDERGROUND
STATION AND CHARING-CROSS BRIDGE) _CONTENTS_
"AT NIGHT MYRIADS OF LIGHTS COME OUT" _LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS_
"IN WINTER THE GREAT WHITE FLIGHTS OF GULLS" 1
"AND THE WONDER GROWS WITH THE NIGHT" 33
"TUMBLED, WEATHER-WORN, RED-TILED ROOFS" 79
"UP TO WESTMINSTER" 119
"WHEN THERE IS A SUN ON A WINTER MORNING" 153
"A WILDERNESS OF CHIMNEY-POTS" 201
THE SPIRE OF ST. MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS 227
CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE FROM OUR WINDOWS 251
THE LION BREWERY 289
OPPOSITE TO SURREY 339
Introduction
Our finding Our House was the merest chance. J. and I had been hunting
for it during weeks and months, from Chelsea to Blackfriars, when one
day, on the way to take a train on the Underground, we saw the notice
"To Let" in windows just where they ought to have been,--high above the
Embankment and the River,--and we knew at a glance that we should be
glad to spend the rest of our lives looking out of them. But something
depended on the house we looked out from, and, while our train went
without us, we hurried to discover it. We were in luck. It was all that
we could have asked: as simple in architecture, its bricks as
time-stained, as the courts of the Temple or Gray's Inn. The front door
opened into a hall twisted with age, the roof supported by carved
corbels, the upper part of another door at its far end filled with
bull's-eye glass, while three flights of time-worn, white stone stairs
led to the windows with, behind them, a flat called Chambers, as if we
were really in the Temple, and decorated by Adam, as if to bring Our
House into harmony with the younger houses around it. For Our House it
became on that very day, now years ago. Our House it has been ever
since, and I hope we are only at the beginning of our adventures in it.
Of some of the adventures that have already fallen to our share within
Our House, I now venture to make the record, for no better reason
perhaps than because at the time I found them both engrossing and
amusing. The adventures out of Our Windows--adventures of cloud and
smoke and sunshine and fog--J. has been from the beginning, and is
still, recording, because certainly he finds them the most wonderful of
all. If my text shows the price we pay for the beauty, the reproductions
of his paintings, all made from Our Windows, show how well that beauty
is worth the price.
'Enrietter
[Illustration: "IN WINTER THE GREAT WHITE FLIGHTS OF GULLS"]
Our House
And London out of Our Windows
I
'ENRIETTER
Since my experience with 'Enrietter, the pages of Zola and the De
Goncourts have seemed a much more comfortable place for "human
documents" and "realism" than the family circle. Her adventures in our
London chambers make a thrilling story, but I could have dispensed with
the privilege of enjoying the thrill. When your own house becomes the
scene of the story you cannot help taking a part in it yourself, and the
story of 'Enrietter was not precisely one in which I should have wanted
to figure had it been a question of choice.
It all came of believing that I could live as I pleased in England, and
not pay the penalty. An Englishman's house is his castle only when it
is run on the approved lines, and the foreigner in the country need not
hope for the freedom denied to the native. I had set out to engage the
wrong sort of servant in the wrong sort of way, and the result
was--'Enrietter. I had never engaged any sort of servant anywhere
before, I did not much like the prospect at the start, and my first
attempts in Registry Offices, those bulwarks of British conservatism,
made me like it still less. That was why, when the landlady of the
little Craven Street hotel, where we waited while the British Workman
took his ease in our chambers, offered me 'Enrietter, I was prepared to
accept her on the spot, had not the landlady, in self-defence,
stipulated for the customary formalities of an interview and references.
The interview, in the dingy back parlour of the hotel, was not half so
unpleasant an ordeal as I had expected. Naturally, I do not insist upon
good looks in a servant, but I like her none the less for having them,
and a costume in the fashion of Whitechapel could not disguise the fact
that 'Enrietter was an uncommonly good-looking young woman; not in the
buxom, red-cheeked way that my old reading of Miss Mitford made me
believe as inseparable from an English maid as a pigtail from a
Chinaman, nor yet in the anaemic way I have since learned for myself to
be characteristic of the type. She was pale, but her pallor was of the
kind more often found south of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Her eyes were
large and blue, and she had a pretty trick of dropping them under her
long lashes; her hair was black and crisp; her smile was a
recommendation. And, apparently, she had all the practical virtues that
could make up for her abominable cockney accent and for the name of
'Enrietter, by which she introduced herself. She did not mind at all
coming to me as "general," though she had answered the landlady's
advertisement for parlour maid. She was not eager to make any bargain as
to what her work was, and was not, to be. Indeed, her whole attitude
would have been nothing short of a scandal to the right sort of servant.
And she was willing with a servility that would have offended my
American notions had it been a shade less useful.
As for her references, it was in keeping with everything else that she
should have made the getting them so easy. She sent me no farther than
to another little private hotel in another little street leading from
the Strand to the river, within ten minutes' walk. It was kept by two
elderly maiden ladies who received me with the usual incivility of the
British hotel-keeper, until they discovered that I had come not for
lodging and food, which they would have looked upon as an insult, but
merely for a servant's character. They unbent still further at
'Enrietter's name, and were roused to an actual show of interest. They
praised her cooking, her coffee, her quickness, her talent for hard
work. But--and then they hesitated and I was lost, for nothing
embarrasses me more than the Englishwoman's embarrassed silence. They
did manage to blurt out that 'Enrietter was not tidy, which I regretted.
I am not tidy myself, neither is J., and I have always thought it
important that at least one person in a household should have some sense
of order. But then they also told me that 'Enrietter had frequently been
called upon to cook eighteen or twenty breakfasts of a morning, and
lunches and dinners in proportion, and it struck me there might not have
been much time left for her to be tidy in. After this, there was a fresh
access of embarrassment so prolonged that I could not in decency sit it
out, though I would have liked to make sure that it was due to their own
difficulty with speech, and not to unspeakable depravity in 'Enrietter.
However, it saves trouble to believe the best, when to believe the worst
is to add to one's anxieties, and as soon as I got home I wrote and
engaged 'Enrietter and cheerfully left the rest to Fate.
There was nothing to regret for a fortnight. Fate seemed on my side, and
during two blissful weeks 'Enrietter proved herself a paragon among
"generals." She was prettier in her little white cap than in her big
feathered hat, and her smile was never soured by the friction of daily
life. Her powers as a cook had not been over-estimated; the excellence
of her coffee had been undervalued; for her quickness and readiness to
work, the elderly maiden ladies had found too feeble a word. There
wasn't anything troublesome she wouldn't and didn't do, even to
providing me with ideas when I hadn't any and the butcher's, or
green-grocer's, boy waited. And it was the more to her credit because
our chambers were in a chaotic condition that would have frightened away
a whole staff of the right sort of servants. We had just moved in, and
the place was but half furnished. The British Workman still lingered, as
I began to believe he always would,--there were times, indeed, when I
was half persuaded we had taken our chambers solely to provide him a
shelter in the daytime. My kitchen utensils were of the fewest. My china
was still in the factory in France where they made it, and I was eating
off borrowed plates and drinking out of borrowed cups. I had as yet next
to no house-linen to speak of. But 'Enrietter did not mind. She worked
marvels with what pots and pans there were, she was tidy enough not to
mislay the borrowed plates and cups, she knew just where to take
tablecloths and napkins and have them washed in a hurry when friends
were misguided enough to accept my invitation to a makeshift meal. If
they were still more misguided and took me by surprise, she would run
out for extra cutlets, or a salad, or fruit, and be back again serving
an excellent little lunch or dinner before I knew she had gone. This was
the greater comfort because I had just then no time to make things
better. I was deep, beyond my habit, in journalism. A sister I had not
seen for ten years and a brother-in-law recovering from nervous
prostration were in town. Poor man! What he saw in our chambers was
enough to send him home with his nerves seven times worse than when he
came. J., fortunately for him, was in the South of France, drawing
cathedrals. That was my one gleam of comfort. He at least was spared the
tragedy of our first domestic venture.
Upon the pleasure of that fortnight there fell only a single shadow, but
it ought to have proved a warning, if, at the moment, I had not been
foolish enough to find it amusing. I had gone out one morning directly
after breakfast, and when I came home, long after lunch-time, the
British Workman, to my surprise, was kicking his heels at my front
door, though his rule was to get comfortably on the other side of it
once his business at the public house round the corner was settled. He
was more surprised than I, and also rather hurt. He had been ringing for
the last ten minutes, he said reproachfully, and nobody would let him
in. After I had rung in my turn for ten minutes and nobody had let me
in, I was not hurt, but alarmed.
It was then that, for the first and last time in my knowledge of him,
the British Workman had an inspiration: Why shouldn't he climb the
ladder behind our outer front door,--we can "sport our oak" if we
like,--get through the trap-door at the top to the leads, and so enter
our little upper story, which looks for all the world like a ship's
cabin drifted by mistake on to a London roof.
I was to remember afterwards, as they say in novels, how, as I watched
him climb, it struck me that the burglar or the house-breaker had the
way made straight for him if our chambers ever seemed worth burgling or
breaking into. The British Workman's step is neither soft nor swift,
but he carried through his plan and opened the door for me without any
one being aroused by his irregular proceedings, which added considerably
to my alarm. But the flat is small, and my suspense was short.
'Enrietter was in her bedroom, on her bed, sleeping like a child. I
called her: she never stirred. I shook her: I might as well have tried
to wake the Seven Sleepers, the Sleeping Beauty, Barbarossa in the
Kyfhaueser, and all the sleepers who have slept through centuries of myth
and legend rolled into one. I had never seen anything like it. I had
never heard of anything like it except the trance which leads to
canonization, or the catalepsy that baffles science. To have a
cataleptic "general" to set off against the rapping nurse-maid of an
acquaintance, who wanted me to take her in and watch her in the cause of
Psychology, would be a triumph no doubt, but for all domestic purposes
it was likely to prove a more disturbing drawback than untidiness.
However, 'Enrietter, when she appeared at the end of an hour, did not
call her midday sleep by any name so fine. She had been scrubbing very
hard--she suddenly had a faintness--she felt dazed, and, indeed, she
looked it still--the heat, she thought, she hardly knew--she threw
herself on her bed--she fell asleep. What could be simpler? And her
smile had never been prettier, her blue eyes never cast down more
demurely. I spoke of this little incident later to a friend, and was
rash enough to talk some nonsense about catalepsy. One should never go
to one's friends for sympathy. "More likely drink," was the only answer.
Of course it was drink, and I ought to have known it without waiting for
'Enrietter herself to destroy my illusions, which she did at the end of
the first fortnight. The revelation came with her "Sunday out." To
simplify matters, I had made it mine too. 'Enrietter, according to my
domestic regulations, was to be back by ten o'clock, but to myself
greater latitude was allowed, and I did not return until after eleven. I
was annoyed to see the kitchen door wide open and the kitchen gas
flaring,--the worst of chambers is, you can't help seeing everything,
whether you want to or not. 'Enrietter had been told not to wait up for
me, and excess of devotion can be as trying as excess of neglect. If
only that had been my most serious reason for annoyance! For when I went
into the kitchen I found 'Enrietter sitting by the table, her arms
crossed on it, her head resting on her arms, fast asleep; and what makes
you laugh at noon may by midnight become a bore. I couldn't wake her. I
couldn't move her. Again, she slept like a log. In the end I lost my
temper, which was the best thing I could have done, for I shook her with
such violence that, at last, she stirred in her sleep. I shook harder.
She lifted her head. She smiled.
"Thash a'right, mum," she said, and down went her head again.
Furious, I shook her up on to her unsteady feet. "Go to bed," I said
with a dignity altogether lost upon her. "Go at once, and in the dark.
In your disgusting condition you are not fit to be trusted with a
candle."
'Enrietter smiled. "Thash a'right, mum," she murmured reassuringly as
she reeled up the stairs before me.
I must say for her that drink made her neither disagreeable nor
difficult. She carried it off light-heartedly and with the most perfect
politeness.
I had her in for a talk the next morning. I admit now that this was
another folly. I ought to have sent her off bag and baggage then and
there. But it was my first experience of the kind; I didn't see what was
to become of me if she did go; and, as I am glad to remember, I had the
heart to be sorry for her. She was so young, so pretty, so capable. The
indiscretion of her Sunday out meant for me, at the worst, temporary
discomfort; for her, it might be the beginning of a life's tragedy. Her
explanation was ready,--she was as quick at explaining as at everything
else. I needn't tell her what I thought of her, it seemed; it was
nothing to what she thought of herself. There was no excuse. She was as
disgusted as I could be. It was all her sister's fault. Her sister would
make her drink a drop of brandy just before she left her home at
Richmond. It was very wrong of her sister, who knew she wasn't used to
brandy and couldn't stand it.
The story would not have taken in a child, but as it suited me to give
her another trial, it was easier to make-believe to believe. Before the
interview was over I ventured a little good advice. I had seen too often
the draggled, filthy, sexless creatures drink makes of women in London,
and 'Enrietter was worth a better end. She listened with admirable
patience for one who was already, as I was only too quickly to learn, so
far on the way to the London gutter that there was no hope of holding
her back, as much as an inch, by words or kindness.
The next Sunday 'Enrietter stayed in and went to bed sober. It was the
day after--a memorable Monday--that put an end to all compromise and
make-believe. I had promised to go down to Cambridge, to a lunch at one
of the colleges. At the English Universities time enters so little into
the scheme of existence that one loses all count of it, and I was pretty
sure I should be late in getting home. I said, however, that I should be
back early in the afternoon, and I took every latch-key with me,--as if
the want of a latch-key could make a prison for so accomplished a young
woman as 'Enrietter! The day was delightful, the weather as beautiful as
it can be in an English June, and the lunch gay. And afterwards there
was the stroll along the "Backs," and, in the golden hour before sunset,
afternoon tea in the garden, and I need not say that I missed my train.
It was close upon ten o'clock when I turned the key in my front door.
The flat was in darkness, except for the light that always shines into
our front windows at night from the lamps on the Embankment and Charing
Cross Bridge. There was no sign of 'Enrietter, and no sound of her until
I had pulled my bell three or four times, and shouted for her in the
manner I was taught as a child to consider the worst sort of form, not
to say vulgar. But it had its effect. A faint voice answered from the
ship's cabin upstairs, "Coming, mum."
"Light the gas and the lamp," I said when I heard her in the hall.
The situation called for all the light I could get. From the methodical
way she set about lighting the hall gas I knew that, at least, she
could not be reeling. Then she came in and lit the lamp, and I saw her.
It was a thousand times worse than reeling, and my breath was taken away
with the horror of it. For there she stood, in a flashy pink
dressing-gown that was a disgrace in itself, her face ghastly as death,
and all across her forehead, low down over one of the blue eyes, a
great, wide, red gash.
Before I had time to pull myself together 'Enrietter had told her
story,--so poor a story it showed how desperate now was her case. She
had been quiet all morning--no one had come--she had got through the
extra work I left with her. About three the milkman rang. A high wind
was blowing. The door, when she opened it, banged in her face and cut
her head open. And it had bled! She had only just succeeded in stopping
it. One part of her story, anyway, was true beyond dispute. That
terrible, gaping wound spoke for itself.
I did not know what to do. I was new in the neighbourhood, and my
acquaintance with doctors anywhere is slight. But I could not turn her
into the street, I could not even leave her under my own roof all
night, like that. Something had to be done, and I ran downstairs to
consult the old Housekeeper, who, after her half century in the Quarter,
might be expected to know how to meet any emergency.
More horrors awaited me in her room,--like Macbeth, I was supping full
with horrors,--for she had another story to tell, and, as I listened,
the ghastly face upstairs, with the gaping red wound, became a mere item
in an orgy more appropriate to the annals of the Rougon-Macquarts than,
I devoutly trust, to ours. I cannot tell the story as the Housekeeper
told it. She had a trick of going into hysterics at moments of
excitement, and as in all the years she had been in charge she had never
seen such goings on, it followed that in all those years, she had never
been so hysterical. She gasped and sobbed out her tale of horrors, and,
all the while, her daughter, who was in _the_ profession, sat apart,
and, in the exasperating fashion of the chorus of a Greek play, kept up
a running commentary emphasizing the points too emphatic to need
emphasis.
To tell the story in my own way: I was hardly out of the house when
'Enrietter had a visit from a "gentleman,"--that was the Housekeeper's
description of him, and, as things go in England, he was a gentleman,
which makes my story the more sordid. How 'Enrietter had sent him word
the coast was clear I do not pretend to say, though I believe the London
milkman has a reputation as the Cupid's Postman of the kitchen, and I
recalled afterwards two or three notes 'Enrietter had received from her
sister by district messenger,--the same sister, no doubt, who gave her
the drop of brandy. Towards noon 'Enrietter and her gentleman were seen
to come downstairs and go out together. Where they went, what they did
during the three hours of their absence, no one knew,--no one will ever
know. Sometimes, in looking back, the greatest horrors to me are the
unknown chapters in the story of that day's doings. They were seen to
return, about three, in a hansom. The gentleman got out, unsteadily.
'Enrietter followed and collapsed in a little heap on the pavement. He
lifted her, and staggered with her in by the door and up the three long
flights of stairs to our chambers.
And then--I confess, at this point even now my anger gets the better of
me. Every key for my front door was in my pocket,--women were still
allowed pockets in those days. There was no possible way in which they
could have got in again, had not that gentleman climbed the ladder up
which I had watched the British Workman not so many days before, and,
technically, broken into my place, and then come down the little
stairway and let 'Enrietter in. A burglar would have seemed clean and
honest compared to the gentleman housebreaking on such an errand. My
front door was heard to bang upon them both, and I wish to Heaven it had
been the last sound heard from our chambers that day. For a time all was
still. Then, of a sudden, piercing screams rang through the house and
out through the open windows into the scandalized Quarter. There was a
noise of heavy things falling or thrown violently down, curses filled
the air; as the Housekeeper told it to me, it was like something out of
Morrison's "Mean Streets" or the "Police-Court Gazette," and the
dreadful part of it was that, no doubt, I was being held responsible for
it! At last, loud above everything else, came blood-curdling cries of
"Murder! Murder! Help! Murder!" There was not a window of the many
over-looking my back rooms that was not filled with terrified
neighbours. The lady in the chambers on the floor below mine set up a
cry of her own for the police. The clerks from the Church League and
from the Architect's office were gathered on the stairs. A nice
reputation I must be getting in the house before my first month in it
was up!
The Housekeeper, with a new attack of hysterics, protested that she had
not dared to interfere, though she had a key, nor could she give it to a
policeman without my authority--she knew her duty. The Greek Chorus
repeated, without hysterics but with careful elocution, that the
Housekeeper could not go in nor fetch the police without my
authority--she knew her duty. And so, the deeds that were done within my
four walls on that beautiful June afternoon must remain a mystery. The
only record is the mark 'Enrietter will carry on her forehead with her
to the grave.
The noise gradually ceased. The neighbours, one by one, left the
windows, the lady below disappeared into her flat. The clerks went back
to work. And the Housekeeper crept into her rooms for the cup of tea
that saves every situation for the Englishwoman. She had not finished
when there came a knock at the door. She opened it, and there stood a
gentleman--_the_ gentleman--anyone could see he was a gentleman by his
hat--and he told her his story: the third version of the affair. He was
a medical student, he said. He happened to be passing along the Strand
when, just in front of Charing Cross, a cab knocked over a young lady.
She was badly hurt, but, as a medical student, he knew what to do. He
put her into another cab and brought her home; he saw to her injuries;
but now he could stay no longer. She seemed to be quite alone up there.
Her condition was serious; she should not be left alone. And he lifted
his hat and was gone. But the Housekeeper daren't intrude, even then;
she knew her place and her duty. She knew her place and her duty, the
Greek Chorus echoed, and the end of her story brought me to just where I
was at the beginning. Upon one point the gentleman was right, and that
was the condition of the "young lady" as long as that great wide gash
still gaped open. The Housekeeper, practical for all her hysterics,
sobbed out "The Hospital." "The Hospital!" echoed the Greek Chorus, and
I mounted the three flights of stairs for 'Enrietter.
I tied up her head. I made her exchange the shameless pink dressing-gown
for her usual clothes. I helped her on with her hat, though I thought
she would faint before she was dressed. I led her down the three flights
of stairs into the street, across the Strand, to the hospital. By this
time it was well past eleven.
So far I hadn't had a chance to think of appearances. But one glance
from the night-surgeon at the hospital, and it was hard to think of
anything else. He did not say a word more than the case demanded, but
his behaviour to me was abominable all the same. And I cannot blame him.
There was I, decently dressed I hope, for I had put on my very best for
Cambridge, in charge of a young woman dressed anyhow and with a broken
head. It was getting on toward midnight. The Strand was a stone's throw
away. Still, in his place, I hope I should have been less brutal.
As for 'Enrietter, she had plenty of pluck, if she had no morals. She
bore the grisly business of having her head sewn up with the nerve of a
martyr. She never flinched, she never moaned; she was heroic. When it
was over, the night-surgeon told her--he never addressed himself to me
if he could help it--that it was a nasty cut and must be seen to again
the next day. The right eye had escaped by miracle, it might yet be
affected. What was most important at this stage was perfect quiet,
perfect repose. It was essential that she should sleep,--she must take
something to make her sleep. When I asked him meekly to give me an
opiate for her, he answered curtly that that was not his affair. There
was a chemist close by, I could get opium pills there, and he turned on
his heel.
I took 'Enrietter home. I saw her up the three long flights of stairs
to our chambers, the one little stairway to her bedroom, and into her
bed. I walked down the little stairway and the three long flights. I
went out into the night. I hurried to the chemist's. It was past
midnight, an hour when decent women are not expected to wander alone in
the Strand, and now I was conscious that things might look queer to
others. I skulked in the darkest shadows like a criminal. I bought the
pills. I came home. For the fourth time I toiled up the three long
flights of stairs and the one little stairway. I gave 'Enrietter her
pills. I put out her light. I shut her in her room.
And then? Why, then, I hadn't taken an opium pill. I wasn't sleepy. I
didn't want to sleep. I wanted to find out. I did what I have always
thought no self-respecting person would do. But to be mixed up in
'Enrietter's affairs was not calculated to strengthen one's
self-respect. And without a scruple I went into the kitchen and opened
every drawer, cupboard, and box, and read every letter, every scrap of
paper, I could lay my hands on. There wasn't much all told, but it was
enough. For I found out that the medical student, the gentleman, was a
clerk in the Bank of England,--I should like him to read this and to
know that I know his name and have his reputation in my hands. I found
out that 'Enrietter was his "old woman," and a great many other things
she ought not to have been. I found out that I had not dined once with
my friends that he had not spent the evening with her. I found out that
he had kept count of my every engagement with greater care than I had
myself. I found out that he had spent so many hours in my kitchen that
the question was what time he had left for the Bank of England. And I
found such an assortment of flasks and bottles that I could only marvel
how 'Enrietter had managed to be sober for one minute during the three
weeks of her stay with me.
I sent for a charwoman the next morning. She was of the type now rapidly
dying out in London, and more respectable, if possible, than the
Housekeeper. Her manner went far to restore my self-respect, and this
was the only service I could ask of her, her time being occupied
chiefly in waiting upon 'Enrietter. In fairness, I ought to add that
'Enrietter was game to the last. She got up and downstairs somehow, she
cooked the lunch, she would have waited on the table, bandaged head and
all, had I let her. But the less I saw of her, the greater her chance
for the repose prescribed by the night-surgeon. Besides, she and her
bandaged head were due at the hospital. This time she went in charge of
the charwoman, whose neat shabby shawl and bonnet, as symbols of
respectability, were more than sufficient to keep all the night or day
surgeons of London in their place. They returned with the cheerful
intelligence that matters were much worse than was at first thought,
that 'Enrietter's eye was in serious danger, and absolute quiet in a
darkened room was essential, that lotions must be applied and medicines
administered at regular intervals,--in a word, that our chambers, as
long as she remained in them, must be turned into a nursing home, with
myself as chief nurse, which was certainly not what I had engaged her
for.
I went upstairs, when she was in bed again, and told her so. She must
send for some one, I did not care whom, to come and take her off my
hands at once. My temper was at boiling-point, but not for the world
would I have shown it or done anything to destroy 'Enrietter's repose
and so make matters worse, and not be able to get rid of her at all. As
usual, her resources did not fail her; she was really wonderful all
through. There was an old friend of her father's, she said, who was in
the Bank of England--I knew that friend; he could admit her into a
hospital of which he was a patron--Heaven help that hospital! But I held
my peace. I even wrote her letter and sent it to the post by the
charwoman. 'Enrietter's morals were beyond me, but my own comfort was
not.
I do not know whether the most astonishing thing in all the astonishing
episode was not the reappearance of the old friend of her father's in
his other role of medical student. I suppose he did not realize how
grave 'Enrietter's condition was. I am sure he did not expect anything
less than that I should open the door for him. But this was what
happened. His visit was late, the charwoman had gone for the night, and
I was left to do all 'Enrietter's work myself. He did not need to tell
me who he was,--his face did that for him,--but he stammered out the
wretched fable of the medical student, the young lady, and the cab. She
was quite alone when he left her, he added, and he was worried, and,
being in the neighbourhood, he called in passing to enquire if the young
lady were better, and if there were now some one to take care of her.
His self-confidence came back as he talked.
"Your story is extremely interesting," I told him, "and I am especially
glad to hear it, because my cook"--with a vindictive emphasis on the
cook--"has told me quite a different one as to how she came by her
broken head. Now--"
He was gone. He threw all pretence to the winds and ran downstairs as if
the police were at his heels, as I wished they were. I could not run
after him without making a second scandal in the house; and if I had
caught him, if I had given him in custody for trespass, as I was told
afterwards I might have done, how would I have liked figuring in the
Police Courts?
Curiously, he did have influence with the hospital, which shall be
nameless. He did get a bed there for 'Enrietter the next morning. It may
be that he had learned by experience the convenience to himself of
having a hospital, as it were, in his pocket. But the arrangements were
by letter; he did not risk a second meeting, and I asked 'Enrietter no
questions. For my own satisfaction, I went with her to the hospital: a
long, melancholy drive in a four-wheeler, 'Enrietter with ghastly face,
more dead than alive. I delivered her into the hands of the nurses. I
left her there, a bandaged wreck of the pretty 'Enrietter who had been
such an ornament to our chambers. And that was the last I saw of her,
though not the last I heard.
A day or two later her sister came to pack up her belongings,--a young
woman with a vacant smile, a roving eye, and a baby in her arms. I had
only to look at her to know that she wasn't the sort of sister to force
anything on anybody, much less on 'Enrietter. And yet I went to the
trouble of reading her a little lecture. 'Enrietter's morals were beyond
me, but I am not entirely without a conscience. The sister kept on
simpering vacantly, while her eyes roved from print to print on the
walls of the dining-room where the lecture was delivered, and the baby
stared at me with portentous solemnity.
Then, about three weeks after the sister's visit, I heard from
'Enrietter herself. She wrote with her accustomed politeness. She begged
my pardon for troubling me. She had left the hospital. She was at home
in Richmond, and she had just unpacked the trunk the sister had packed
for her. Only one thing was missing. She would be deeply obliged if I
would look in the left-hand drawer of the kitchen dresser and send her
the package of cigarettes I would find there. And she was mine, "Very
respectfully."
This is the story of 'Enrietter's adventures in our chambers, and I
think whoever reads it will not wonder that I fought shy afterwards of
the English servant who was not well on the wrong side of forty and
whose thirst could not be quenched with tea. The real wonder is that I
had the courage to risk another maid of any kind. Women have been
reproached with their love of gossiping about servants since time
immemorial, and I do not know for how long before that. But when I
remember 'Enrietter, I do not understand how we have the heart ever to
gossip about anything else. What became of her, who can say? Sometimes,
when I think of her pretty face and all that was good in her, I can only
hope that the next orgy led to still worse things than a broken head,
and that Death saved her from the London streets.
_Trimmer_
[Illustration: "AND THE WONDER GROWS WITH THE NIGHT"]
II
TRIMMER
Until I began my search for an elderly woman who never drank anything
stronger than tea, I had supposed it was the old who could find nobody
to give them work. But my trouble was to find somebody old enough to
give mine to. The "superior domestics" at the Registry Offices were much
too well trained to confess even to middle age, and probably I should be
looking for my elderly woman to this day, had not chance led Trimmer one
afternoon to an office which I had left without hope in the morning. As
her years could supply no possible demand save mine, she was sent at
once to our chambers.
To tell the truth, as soon as I saw her, I began to doubt my own wisdom.
I had never imagined anybody quite so respectable. In her neat but rusty
black dress and cape, her hair parted and brought carefully down over
her ears, her bonnet tied under her chin, her reticule hanging on her
arm, she was the incarnation of British respectability; "the very type,"
the "old Master Rembrandt van Rijn, with three Baedeker stars," I could
almost hear Mr. Henry James describing her; and all she wanted was to
belong "beautifully" to me. But then she looked as old as she looked
respectable,--so much older than I meant her to look,--old to the point
of fragility. She admitted to fifty-five, and when mentally I added four
or five years more, I am sure I was not over generous. Her face was
filled with wrinkles, her skin was curiously delicate, and she had the
pallor that comes from a steady diet of tea and bread and sometimes
butter. The hands through the large, carefully mended black gloves
showed twisted and stiff, and it was not easy to fancy them making our
beds and our fires, cooking our dinners, dusting our rooms, opening our
front door. We needed some one to take care of us, and it was plain that
she was far more in need of some one to take care of her,--all the
plainer because of her anxiety to prove her capacity for work. There
was nothing she could not do, nothing she would not do if I were but to
name it. "I can cut about, mum, you'll see. Oh, I'm bonny!" And the
longer she talked, the better I knew that during weeks, and perhaps
months, she had been hunting for a place, which at the best is wearier
work than hunting for a servant, and at the worst leads straight to the
workhouse, the one resource left for the honest poor who cannot get a
chance to earn their living, and who, by the irony of things, dread it
worse than death.
With my first doubt I ought to have sent her away. But I kept putting
off the uncomfortable duty by asking her questions, only to find that
she was irreproachable on the subject of alcohol, that she preferred
"beer-money" to beer, that there was no excuse not to take her except
her age, and this, in the face of her eagerness to remain, I had not the
pluck to make. My hesitation cost me the proverbial price. Before the
interview was over I had engaged her on the condition that her
references were good, as of course they were, though she sent me for
them to the most unexpected place in the world, a corset and petticoat
shop not far from Leicester Square. Through the quarter to which all
that is disreputable in Europe drifts, where any sort of virtue is
exposed to damage beyond repair, she had carried her respectability and
emerged more respectable than ever.
She came to us with so little delay that I knew better than ever how
urgent was her case. Except for the providentially short interval with
'Enrietter, this was my first experience of the British servant, and it
was enough to make me tremble. It was impossible to conceive of anything
more British. Her print dress, changed for a black one in the afternoon,
her white apron and white cap, became in my eyes symbolic. I seemed, in
her, to face the entire caste of British servants who are so determined
never to be slaves that they would rather fight for their freedom to be
as slavish as they always have been. She knew her place, and what is
more, she knew ours, and meant to keep us in it, no matter whether we
liked or did not like to be kept there. I was the Mistress and J. was
the Master, and if, with our American notions, we forgot it, she never
did, but on our slightest forgetfulness brought us up with a round turn.
So correct, indeed, was her conduct, and so respectable and venerable
was her appearance, that she produced the effect in our chambers of an
old family retainer. Friends would have had us train her to address me
as "Miss Elizabeth," or J. as "Master J.," and pass her off for the
faithful old nurse who is now so seldom met out of fiction.
For all her deference, however, she clung obstinately to her prejudices.
We might be as American in our ways as we pleased, she would not let us
off one little British bit in hers. She never presumed unbidden upon an
observation and if I forced one from her she invariably begged my pardon
for the liberty. She thanked us for everything, for what we wanted as
gratefully as for what we did not want. She saw that we had hot water
for our hands at the appointed hours. She compelled us to eat Yorkshire
pudding with our sirloin of beef, and bread-sauce with our fowl,--in
this connection how can I bring myself to say chicken? She could never
quite forgive us for our indifference to "sweets"; and for the daily
bread-and-butter puddings and tarts we would not have, she made up by an
orgy of tipsy cakes and creams when anybody came to dine. How she was
reconciled to our persistent refusal of afternoon tea, I always
wondered; though I sometimes thought that, by the stately function she
made of it in the kitchen, she hoped to atone for this worst of our
American heresies.
Whatever she might be as a type, there was no denying that as a servant
she had all the qualities. She was an excellent cook, despite her
flamboyant and florid taste in sweets; she was sober, she was obliging,
she had by no means exaggerated her talent for "cutting about," and I
never ceased to be astonished at the amount she accomplished. The fire
was always burning when we got down in the morning, breakfast always
ready. Beds were made, lunch served, the front door opened, dinner
punctual. I do not know how she did it all, and I now remember with
thankfulness our scruples when we saw her doing it, and the early date
at which we supplied her with an assistant in the shape of a snuffy,
frowzy old charwoman. The revelation of how much too much remained for
her even then came only when we lost her, and I was obliged to look
below the surface. While she was with us, the necessity of looking below
never occurred to me; and as our chambers had been done up from top to
bottom just before she moved into them, they stood her method on the
surface admirably.
This method perhaps struck me as the more complete because it left her
the leisure for a frantic attempt to anticipate our every wish. She
tried to help us with a perseverance that was exasperating, and as her
training had taught her the supremacy of the master in the house, it was
upon J. that her efforts were chiefly spent. I could see him writhe
under her devotion, until there were times when I dreaded to think what
might come of it, all the more because my sympathies were so entirely
with him. If he opened his door, she rushed to ask what he wanted. A spy
could not have spied more diligently; and as in our small chambers the
kitchen door was almost opposite his, he never went or came that she did
not know it. He might be as short with her as he could, and in British
fashion order her never to come into the studio, but it was no use; she
could not keep out of it. Each new visitor, or letter, or message, was
an excuse for her to flounder in among the portfolios on the floor and
the bottles of acid in the corner, at the risk of his temper and her
life. On the whole, he bore it with admirable patience. But there was
one awful morning when he hurried into my room, slammed the door after
him, and in a whisper said,--he who would not hurt a fly,--"If you don't
keep that woman out of my room, I'll wring her neck for her!"
I might have spared myself any anxiety. Had J. offered to her face to
wring her neck, she would have smiled and said, "That's all right, sir!
Thank you, sir!" For, with Trimmer, to be "bonny" meant to be cheerful
under any and all conditions. So long as her cherished traditions were
not imperilled, she had a smile for every emergency. It was
characteristic of her to allow me to christen her anew the first day she
was with us, and not once to protest. We could not bring ourselves to
call her Lily, her Christian name, so inappropriate was it to her
venerable appearance. Her surname was even more impossible, for
she was the widow of a Mr. Trim. She herself--helpful from the
beginning--suggested "cook." But she was a number of things besides, and
though I did not mind my friends knowing that she was as many persons in
one as the cook of the Nancy Bell, it would have been superfluous to
remind them of it on every occasion. When, at my wits' end, I added a
few letters and turned the impossible Trim into Trimmer, she could not
have been more pleased had I made her a present, and from that moment
she answered to the new name as if born to it.
The same philosophy carried her through every trial and tribulation. It
was sure to be all right if, before my eyes and driving me to tears, she
broke the plates I could not replace without a journey to Central
France, or if in the morning the kitchen was a wreck after the night
Jimmy, our unspeakable black cat, had been making of it. Fortunately he
went out as a rule for his sprees, realizing that our establishment
could not stand the wear and tear. When he chanced to stay at home, I
have come down to the kitchen in the morning to find the clock ticking
upside down on the floor, oranges and apples rolling about, spoons and
forks under the table, cups and saucers in pieces, and Jimmy on the
table washing his face. But Trimmer would meet me with a radiant smile
and would put things to rights, while Jimmy purred at her heels, as if
both were rather proud of the exploit, certain that no other cat in the
world could, "all by his lone" and in one night, work such ruin.
After all, it was a good deal Trimmer's fault if we got into the habit
of shifting disagreeable domestic details on to her shoulders, she had
such a way of offering them for the purpose. It was she who, when
Jimmy's orgies had at last undermined his health and the "vet"
prescribed a dose of chloroform as the one remedy, went to see it
administered, coming back to tell us of the "beautiful corpse" he had
made. It was she who took our complaints to the Housekeeper downstairs,
and met those the other tenants brought against us. It was she who
bullied stupid tradesmen and stirred up idle workmen. It was she, in a
word, who served as domestic scapegoat. And she never remonstrated. I am
convinced that if I had said, "Trimmer, there's a lion roaring at the
door," she would have answered, "That's all right, mum! thank you, mum!"
and rushed to say that we were not at home to him. As it happens, I know
how she would have faced a burglar, for late one evening when I was
alone in our chambers, I heard some one softly trying to turn the knob
of the door of the box-room. What I did was to shut and bolt the door at
the foot of our little narrow stairway, thankful that there was a door
there that could be bolted. What Trimmer did, when she came home ten
minutes later and I told her, "There's a burglar in the box-room," was
to say, "Oh, is there, mum? thank you, mum. That's all right. I'll just
run up and see"; and she lit her candle and walked right up to the
box-room and unlocked and opened the door. Out flew William Penn,
furious with us because he had let himself be shut in where nobody had
seen him go, and where he had no business to have gone. He was only the
cat, I admit. But he might have been the burglar for all Trimmer knew,
and--what then?
As I look back and think of these things, I am afraid we imposed upon
her. At the time, we had twinges of conscience, especially when we
caught her "cutting about" with more than her usual zeal. She was not
designed by nature to "cut about" at all. To grow old with her meant "to
lose the glory of the form." She was short, she had an immense breadth
of hip, and she waddled rather than walked. When, in her haste, her cap
would get tilted to one side, and she would give a smudge to her nose or
her cheek, she was really a grotesque little figure, and the twinges
became acute. To see her "cutting about" so unbecomingly for us at an
age when she should have been allowed, unburdened, to crawl towards
death, was to shift the heaviest responsibility to our shoulders and to
make us the one barrier between her and the workhouse. We could not
watch the tragedy of old age in our own household without playing a more
important part in it than we liked.
Her cheerfulness was the greater marvel when I learned how little reason
life had given her for it. In her rare outbursts of confidence, with
excuses for the liberty, she told me that she was London born and bred,
that she had gone into service young, and that she had married before
she was twenty. I fancy she must have been pretty as a girl. I know she
was "bonny," and "a fine one" for work, and I am not surprised that Trim
wanted to marry her. He was a skilled plasterer by trade, got good
wages, and was seldom out of a job. They had a little house in some
far-away mean street, and though the children who would have been
welcome never came, there was little else to complain of.