relief, according to her because of some misunderstanding between the
parish church and hers, for, being Irish, she was a devout Roman
Catholic. I do not know how she lived, though perhaps they could have
told me in her slum, nobody, they say, being as good to the poor as the
poor themselves. But it was part of her delicacy to take herself off
our hands and conscience within less than a year of her leaving us, and
to die in her room peacefully of pneumonia, when she might have made us
uncomfortable by dying of starvation, or lingering on in the workhouse.
Mr. Pooley, the sweep, brought this news too. She was buried decent, he
volunteered; she had taken care of that, though as poor as you want to
see. A good old woman, he added, and it was all the obituary she had. He
was right. She was of the best, but then she was only one "of the
millions of bubbles" poured into existence to-day to vanish out of it
to-morrow, of whom the world is too busy to keep count.
After Mrs. Burden, I went to the _Quartier_--the French Quarter in
Soho--for a charwoman. Had I been tempted, as I never was, to believe in
the _entente cordiale_, of which England was just then beginning to make
great capital, affairs in my own kitchen would have convinced me of the
folly of it. Things there had come to a pass when any pretence of
cordiality, except the cordial dislike which France and England have
always cherished for each other and always will, had been given up, and
if I hoped to escape threats of police and perpetual squabbles on the
subject of cleanliness, there was nothing for it but to adopt a
single-race policy. When it came to deciding which that race should be,
I did not hesitate, having found out for myself that the French are as
clean as the English believe themselves to be. The _Quartier_ could not
be more French if it were in the heart of France. There is nothing
French that is not to be had in it, from snails and _boudin_ to the
_Petit Journal_ and the latest thing in _aperitifs_. The one language
heard is French, when it is not Italian, and the people met there have
an animation that is not a characteristic of Kensington or Bayswater.
The only trouble is that if the snails are of the freshest and the
_aperitifs_ bear the best mark, the quality of the people imported into
the _Quartier_ is more doubtful. Many have left their country for their
country's good. When I made my mission known, caution was recommended to
me by _Madame_ who presides _chez le patissier_, and _Monsieur le Gros_,
as he is familiarly known, who provides me with groceries, and M.
Edmond from whom I buy my vegetables and salads at the _Quatre Saisons_.
England, in the mistaken name of liberty, then opened her door to the
riff-raff of all nations, and French prisons were the emptier for the
indiscriminate hospitality of Soho, or so I was assured by the decent
French who feel the dishonour the _Quartier_ is to France.
Caution served me well in the first instance, for I began my experience
in French charwomen with Marie, a little Bretonne, young, cheerful, and
if, like a true Bretonne, not over clean by nature, so willing to be
bullied into it that she got to scrub floors and polish brasses as if
she liked it. She never sulked, never minded a scolding from Augustine
who scolds us all when we need it, did not care how long she stayed over
time, had a laugh that put one in good humour to hear it, and such a
healthy appetite that she doubled my weekly bill at the baker's. Even
Augustine found no fault. But one fault there was. She was married. In
the course of time a small son arrived who made her laugh more gaily
than ever, though he added a third to the family of a not too brilliant
young man with an income of a pound a week, and I was again without a
charwoman.
Marie helped me to forget caution, and I put down the stories heard in
the _Quartier_ to libel. But I had my awakening. She was succeeded by
another Bretonne, a wild, frightened-looking creature, who, on her
second day with me, when I went into the kitchen to speak to her, sat
down abruptly in the fireplace, the fire by good luck still unlit, and I
did not have to ask an explanation, for it was given me by the empty
bottle on the dresser. Her dull, sottish face haunted me for days
afterwards, and I was oppressed, as I am sure she never was, by the
thought of the blundering fate that had driven her from the windswept
shores of her own Brittany to the foul slums of London.
But I could not take over the mysteries and miseries of Soho with its
charwomen; it was about as much as I could do to keep up with the
procession that followed her. There was no variety of _femme de menage_
in the _Quartier_ that I did not sample, nor one who was not the heroine
of a tragedy or romance, too often not in retrospection or
anticipation, but at its most psychological moment. I remember another
Marie, good-looking, but undeniably elderly, whose thoughts were never
with the floor she was scrubbing or the range she was black-leading,
because they were absorbed in the impecunious youth, half her age, with
whom she had fallen in love in the fashion of to-day, and for whom she
had given up a life of comparative ease with her husband, a well-paid
_chef_. I remember a Marthe, old and withered, whose tales of want were
so heartrending that Augustine lavished upon her all the old clothes of
the establishment and all the "cold pieces" in the kitchen, but who, we
learned afterwards, had a neat little bank-account at the _Credit
Lyonnais_ and a stocking stuffed to overflowing in the bare garret where
she shivered and starved. I remember a trim Julie, whose debts left
behind in France kept her nose to the grindstone, but who found it some
compensation to work for J.: she felt a peculiar sympathy for all
artists, she said, for the good reason, which seemed to us a trifle
remote, that her husband's mother had been foster-mother to _le grand
maitre, M. Detaille_. And there was a Blanche, abandoned by her husband,
and left with three small children to feed, clothe, and bring up
somehow. And there were I have forgotten how many more, each with a
story tragic or pitiful, until it came to Clementine, and her story was
so sordid that when I parted with her I shook the dust of Soho from off
my feet, and imported from the Pas-de-Calais a little girl whose
adventures I hoped were still in the future which, if I could manage it,
would be postponed indefinitely. It may be true that every woman has one
good novel in her life, but I did not see why I should keep on engaging
charwomen to prove it.
_Clementine_
[Illustration: "WHEN THERE IS A SUN ON A WINTER MORNING"]
V
CLEMENTINE
She drifted in from the _Quartier_, but the slovenliness and shabby
finery of her dress made it hard to believe she was French. It was
harder to believe she was grown up when she began to talk, for her voice
was that of a child, a high shrill treble, with a babyish lisp, losing
itself in giggles. And she was so short, so small, that she might easily
have passed herself off as a little girl, but for the marks experience
had left upon her face. I suppose she was not much under thirty when she
first came to me.
How cruel this experience had been she took immediate care to explain.
With her first few words she confided to me that she was hungry, and, in
my embarrassment on hearing it, I engaged her before it occurred to me
to ask for references. Hunger does not exactly qualify a woman, however
willing, for the rough work that must be done in a house, and that it
is so surprising anybody ever should be willing to do. I engaged her to
scrub the floors, black the shoes, clean the fireplaces, polish the
brasses,--to pass every morning, except Sunday, from seven to two, in
fighting the London dirt for me, and struggling through all those
disagreeable and tiresome tasks that not any amount of money would
induce me to struggle through for myself.
As her duties were of a kind usually kept in the domestic background,
and as she brought to them an energy her hunger had not prepared me for,
an occasional _bon jour_ when we met might have been the extent of my
personal relations with her, had it not been for my foolish anxiety as
to the state of her appetite. I had kept house long enough to understand
the mistake of meddling with the affairs of my servants, but Clementine,
with her absurd little voice and giggle, seemed much less a servant than
a child making believe to be one. Besides, I found that, though I can
hear of unknown thousands starving in London without feeling called upon
to interfere, it is another matter to come face to face with a hungry
individual under my own roof.
Augustine, who was then, as she is now, the prop and mainstay of our
life, reassured me; Clementine, it seemed, from the moment of her
arrival, had been eating as voraciously as if she were bent not only on
satisfying the present, but on making up for the past and providing
against the future. She could not pass the interval between eight
o'clock coffee and the noonday lunch without _un petit gouter_ to
sustain her. At all hours she kept munching bits of crust, and after the
heartiest meal she would fall, famished, upon our plates as they came
from the dining-room, devouring any odd scraps left on them, feasting on
cheese-rinds and apple-parings, or, though I regret to have to record
it, licking up the gravy and grease, if there was nothing better.
Indeed, her condition was one of such chronic hunger that Augustine grew
alarmed and thought a doctor should be consulted. I put it down to the
long succession of her lean years, and before the facts convinced me
that Clementine was "all stomach and no soul," her appetite was a great
deal on my mind, and made me far more preoccupied with her than was
wise.
My inquiries into the state of Clementine's appetite were the reason for
many conversations. I have no doubt that at first I encouraged her
confidence, so unfailing was my delight in the lisping prattle,
interrupted by giggles, with which they were made. Even J., who as a
rule is glad to leave all domestic matters to me, would stop and speak
to her for the sake of hearing her talk. And she was a child in so many
other ways. She had the vanity as well as the voice of a little girl.
She was pretty after a fashion, but it always amazed me that anybody who
was so hungry could be so vain. When I am hungry I am too demoralized to
care how I look. But Clementine's respect for her appearance was, if
anything, stronger than her craving for food. She would have gone
without a meal rather than have appeared out of the fashion set by her
London slum. Her hair might be half combed,--that was a question of
personal taste,--but she could not show herself abroad unless it was
brought down over her forehead in the low wave required by the mode of
the moment, and hidden at the back under a flat, overgrown jockey-cap
fastened on with long pins. Her skirt might be--or rather was--frayed at
the bottom, and her jacket worn to shreds, but she could never neglect
to tie round her neck a bit of white tulle or ribbon, however soiled or
faded. Nor could she be persuaded to run the shortest errand before this
tulle or ribbon, taken off for work, had been tied on again, the low
wave of hair patted well in place, and the jockey-cap stuck at the
correct angle.
It was useless to try and hurry her. She did not care how urgent the
errand was to us, her concern was entirely for what people in the street
might think of her if any one detail of her toilet was neglected.
Augustine, who for herself was disdainful of the opinion of _ces sales
Anglais_ and ran her errands _en cheveux_ as if she were still in
France, would scold and thunder and represent to Clementine that people
in the street had something better to do than to think of her at all.
When Augustine scolds, I am always, to be honest, a little afraid. But
Clementine would listen giggling, and refuse to budge an inch until the
last touch had been given to her hair and to her dress. After working
time she could not start for home until she had spent half an hour and
more before the glass in the kitchen arranging her rags. In her own
country her vanity would have been satisfied only by the extreme
neatness and simplicity of her dress. In England she had borrowed the
untidiness and tawdriness that degrade the English poor. But if the
educated French, who ought to know that they are the most civilized
people in the world, grow more English than the English when they become
Anglicized at all, I could scarcely blame Clementine for her weakness.
To one form of her untidiness, however, I objected though, had I known
what was to come of my objection, I would have borne with worse in
silence. She never wore an apron, and, in her stained and tattered
dress, her appearance was disreputable even for a charwoman. She might
be as slovenly as she chose in the street, that was her affair; but it
was mine once she carried her slovenliness inside my four walls,
especially as in chambers servants at work are more apt to be stumbled
across than in a house, and as it was her duty at times to open the
front door. I spoke to her on the subject, suggesting the value of
aprons, if only as defences. The words were scarcely out of my mouth
than I would have given worlds to take them back again. For when
Clementine began to talk the difficulty was to stop her, and long before
she finished explaining why she wore no aprons, I had learned a great
deal more about her than I bargained for: among other things, that her
previous places had been chiefly _chez les femmes_; that she wanted to
give up working for them; that, after leaving her last place, she could
get nothing to do in any _maison bourgeoise_; that she had no money and
was very hungry,--what Clementine's hunger meant she did not have to
tell me; that her little Ernest was also hungry, and also _la vieille
grandmere_; that her little Ernest was her son,--"_Oui, Madame, je
serais franche, j'ai un fils mais pas un mari_"; that _la vieille
grandmere_ was an old woman she had taken in, partly to look after him,
partly out of sheer shiftlessness; that they could not starve; and
that--well--all her aprons were _au clou_.
This sudden introduction of her little Ernest was a trifle
disconcerting, but it was none of my business how many people depended
on Clementine, nor how many of her belongings were in pawn. I had vowed
never again to give sympathy, much less help, to anybody who worked for
me, since I knew to my cost the domestic disaster to which benevolence
of this sort may lead. I gave her advice instead. I recommended greater
thrift, and insisted that she must save from her wages enough to get her
aprons out of pawn immediately, though I left it to a more accomplished
political economist than I to show how, with three to provide for, she
could save out of what barely provided for one. However, she agreed. She
said, "_Oui, Madame, Madame a raison_"; and for the next week or two I
did my best to shut my eyes to the fact that she still went apronless.
At this juncture, her little Ernest fell ill; now that I had heard of
him, he took good care that I should not forget him. For three days
there was no sign of Clementine; I had no word from her. At the end of
the first day, I imagined a horrid tragedy of starvation; by the second,
I was reproaching myself as an accessory; by the evening of the third, I
could stand it no longer, and Augustine was despatched to find out what
was wrong. The child's illness was not very serious, but, incidentally,
Augustine found out a good deal besides. Clementine's room, in an
unlovely Workmen's Building, was unexpectedly clean, but to keep it
clean was the easier because it was so bare. Her bed, which she shared
with her little Ernest, was a mattress on the floor in one corner, with
not a sheet or a blanket to cover it; _la vieille grandmere_ slept in a
nest of newspapers in another corner, with a roll of rags for a pillow.
Bedsteads, sheets, covers, had gone the way of the aprons,--they, too,
were _au clou_. The thrift I had advised scarcely met so acute a case of
poverty. I was not at all anxious to burden myself with Clementine's
destitution in addition to her hunger, and to get it out of my mind, I
tried, with my usual generosity, to hand over the difficulty to J. I
cannot say that he accepted it as unconditionally as I could have
wished, for if he was positive that something must be done at once, he
had as little doubt that it was for me to discover the way of doing it.
What I did was simple, though I dare say contrary to every scientific
principle of charity. I told her to bring me her pawn-tickets and I
would go over them with her. She brought them, a pocketful, the next
day, throwing them down on the table before me and sorting them as if
for a game of cards, with many giggles, and occasional cries of
"_Tiens!_ this is my old blue apron"; or, "_Mon Dieu!_ this is my nice
warm grey blanket." Her delight could not have been greater had it been
the apron or the blanket itself. All told, her debts amounted to no very
ruinous sum, and I arranged to pay them off and give her a fresh start
if, on her side, she was prepared to work harder and practise stricter
economy. I pointed out that as I did not need her in the afternoon, she
had a half day to dispose of, and that she should hunt for something to
fill it. She promised everything I asked, and more, and I hoped that
this was the last of my sharing her burdens.
It might have been, but for her little Ernest. I do believe that child
was born for no other end than my special annoyance. His illness was
only the beginning. When he was well, she brought him to see me one
afternoon, nominally that he might thank me, but really, I fear, in hope
of an extra sixpence or shilling. He was five years old and fairly large
and well developed for his age, but there could never have been, there
never could be, a less attractive child. His face had none of the
prettiness of his mother's, though all the shrewdness: in knowledge of
the gutter he looked fifty. Then and afterwards, ashamed as I was of it,
I instinctively shrank from him. Anywhere, except in the comic ballad, a
"horribly fast little cad" of a baby is as tragic a figure as I care to
encounter, and to me the little Ernest was all the more so because of
the repugnance with which he inspired me. Clementine made a great
pretence of adoring him. She carried a sadly battered photograph of him
in her pocket, and would pull it out at intervals when anybody was
looking, and kiss it rapturously. Otherwise her admiration took the form
of submitting to his tyranny. She could do far less with him than he
with her, and _la vieille grandmere_ was as wax in his rough little
hands. His mornings, while his mother was at work, were spent in the
grimy London courts and streets, where children swarm like vermin and
babies grow old in vice. In the afternoon, after she left our chambers,
he dragged her through the _Quartier_, from shop to shop, she with her
giggling "_Bon jour, M. Edmond_" or "_Comment ca va, Madame
Pierre_"--for though we live in London we are not of it, but of
France,--he with his hand held out for the cakes and oranges and pennies
he knew would drop into it: a pair of the most accomplished beggars in
London.
As time went on, and Clementine did not find the extra work for her
afternoons that she had promised to find, I realized that she would keep
on wasting her free half day, and that he would go from bad to worse if
he were not got away from her and out of the streets. I should have
known better than to occupy myself with him, but his old shrewd face
haunted me until I remonstrated with Clementine, and represented to her
the future she was preparing for him. If she could not take care of him,
she should send him to school where there were responsible people who
could. I suggested a charitable institution of some kind in France where
he would be brought up among her people. But this she fought against
with a determination I could not understand, until it came out that she
had profited by the English law which forces a father to contribute to
his illegitimate child's support, and from Ernest's she received weekly
three shillings and sixpence. She much preferred to risk her little
Ernest's morals than an income that came of itself, and she feared she
could no longer claim it if he were beyond the reach of the English
courts. She was as doubtful of the result if he were got into a charity
school in England, for if he cost her nothing the father might not be
compelled to pay. She could be obstinate on occasions, and I was in
despair. But by some fortunate chance, a convent at Hampstead was heard
of where the weekly charge would just be covered by the father's
allowance, and as Clementine could find no argument against it, she had
to give in.
I breathed freely again, but I was not to be let off so easily. It was
simpler to get mixed up in Clementine's affairs than to escape from
them. At the convent, the nuns had learned wisdom, and they demanded to
be paid weekly in advance. I must have waited until Judgment Day if I
had depended upon Clementine to be in advance with anything, and in
self-defence I offered to pay the first month. But this settled, at once
there was another obstacle to dispose of. A trousseau was required with
the little Ernest, and he had no clothes except those on his back. I
provided the trousseau. Then the little Ernest rebelled and refused to
hear of school unless he was supplied with a top, a mechanical boat, a
balloon, and I scarcely remember what besides. I supplied them.
Clementine, on her side, began to look harassed and careworn, and I
never ventured to ask what conditions he exacted of her, but it was a
relief to everybody when, after much shopping and innumerable coaxings
and bribes and scenes, at last she got her little Ernest off her hands.
But if he was off hers, she was more than ever on mine. He gave her a
perpetual subject of conversation. There were days when I seemed to hear
her prattling in the kitchen from the moment she came until the moment
she left, and to a good deal of her prattle I had to listen. She made it
her duty to report his progress to me, and the trouble was that she
could never get through without confiding far more about her own, in the
past as in the present. She might begin innocently with the fit of his
new clothes, but as likely as not she would end with revelations of
unspeakable horror. At least I could not find fault with Clementine's
confidences for their mildness or monotony. In her high, shrill, lisping
treble, as if she were reciting a lesson, and with the air of a naughty
girl trying to keep back her giggles, she would tell me the most
appalling details of her life.
I had not dreamed that out of Zola or Defoe a woman could go through
such adventures, or that, if she could, it would be possible for her to
emerge a harmless charwoman doing the commonplace work of a household
which I flatter myself is respectable, for a few shillings a week. Of
poverty, of evil, of shame, of disgrace, there was nothing she had not
known; and yet as I saw her busy and happy over her scrubbing and
washing and polishing in our chambers, I could have believed she had
never done anything less guileless in all her thirty years. She had a
curiously impersonal way of relating these adventures, as if they were
no concern of hers whatever. The most dramatic situations seemed to have
touched her as little as the every-day events in her sordid struggle for
bread, though she was not without some pride in the variety of her
experience. When Augustine warned her that her idleness was preparing
for her a bed on the Embankment and daily food in a soup-kitchen, "_Eh
bien?_ why not?" she giggled; "I have been on the streets, I have been
in prison, I have been in the workhouse, I have seen everything--_j'ai
tout vu, moi!_ Why not that too?"
With her, there was no shrinking from the workhouse, as with the
respectable poor, "_Ce n'est pas fait pour les chiens_," she reasoned,
and looked upon it as an asylum held in reserve.
Her boast that she had seen everything was no exaggeration, her
everything meaning the hideous side of life which those who see only the
other try so hard to shut their eyes to. "What would you have?" she
asked me more than once, "I was a bastard and a foundling"; as if with
such a beginning, it would have been an inconsistency on her part to
turn out any better than she was. That she had started life as a little
lost package of humanity, left at the door of a house for _les enfants
trouves_ not far from Boulogne, never caused her shame and regret. From
a visit paid by her mother to the Institution during her infancy, there
could remain no doubt of her illegitimacy, but it was a source of
pleasure to her, and also of much agreeable speculation.
"How can I be sure," she said to me, "that, though my mother was a cook,
my father might not have been a _prefet_, or even a prince?"