the burden Clementine was heaping upon my shoulders until now it seemed
on the point of slipping from them, and never were congratulations more
sincere than mine. As she spared me none of her confidence, every detail
of her courtship and her prospects was soon at my disposal. In the
course of her regular round of the kitchen doors of the _Quartier_ she
had picked up an Englishman who washed dishes in a restaurant. He was
not much over twenty, he earned no less than eighteen shillings a week,
and he had asked her to marry him. She accepted him, as she had accepted
the Italian, because he would pay the rent; the only difference was that
her new admirer proposed the form of companionship which is not lightly
broken. "_Cette fois je crois que cela sera vrai--que l'affaire ne
tombera pas dans l'eau_," she said, remembering the deep waters which,
in her recent affair, had gone over her head. "_Mon petit Anglais_"--her
name for him--figured in her account as a model of propriety. He had a
strict regard for morals. He objected to her working _chez les femmes_,
and expressed his desire that she should remain in our service, despite
the loss to their income. He condoned her previous indiscretions, and
was prepared to play a father's part to her little Ernest.
Altogether the situation was fast growing idyllic, and with Clementine
in her new role of _fiancee_, we thought that peace for us all was in
sight. She set about her preparations at once, and did not hesitate to
let me know that an agreeable wedding present would be house linen,
however old and ragged, and a new hat for the wedding. I had looked for
some preliminary begging as a matter of course, and I was already going
through my linen closet to see what I could spare, when I caught
Clementine collecting wedding presents from me for which I had not been
asked.
Until then I believed that, whatever crimes and vices might be laid at
her door, dishonesty was not to be counted among them. I even boasted of
her honesty as an excuse for my keeping her, nuisance as she was. I
think I should have doubted her guilt if the report of it only had
reached me. But I could not doubt the testimony of my own eyes when
there was discovered, carefully packed in the capacious bag she always
carried, one of my best napkins, a brand-new tea-cloth, and a few
kitchen knives and forks that could not have strayed there of
themselves. I could see in the articles selected her tender concern for
the comfort of her _petit Anglais_ and her practical wish to prepare her
establishment for his coming, and probably it showed her consideration
for me that she had been content with such simple preparations. But the
value of the things themselves and her object in appropriating them had
nothing to do with the main fact that, after all we had done and
endured, she was stealing from us. "We should wipe two words from our
vocabulary: gratitude and charity," Stevenson once wrote. Clementine
wiped out the one so successfully that she left me with no use for the
other. I told her she must go, and this time I was in good earnest.
To Clementine, however, nothing could have seemed less possible. She
could not understand that a petty theft would make her less
indispensable, or that I would strain at a gnat after swallowing so many
camels. Within a week she was knocking at our door and expressing her
willingness to resume her place in our chambers. She was not discouraged
by the refusal to admit her, but a few days later, this time by letter,
she again assured me that she waited to be recalled, and she referred to
the desire of her _petit Anglais_ in the matter. She affected penitence,
admitting that she had committed _une "Betisse"_--the spelling is
hers--and adding: "_avoir agit ainsi avec des maitres aussi bons, ce
n'est pas pardonable. Je vous assure que si un jour je devien riche, ou
peut etre plus pauvre, que dans ma richesse, comme dans ma plus grande
misere, je ne pourrais jamais oublier les bons maitres Monsieur et
Madame, car jamais dans ma vie d'orpheline, je n'aie jamais rencontre
d'aussi bons maitres._" She also reminded me that she lived in the hope
that _Madame_ would not forget the promised present of linen and a hat.
I made no answer. Another letter followed, penitence now exchanged for
reproaches. She expostulated with me for taking the bread out of the
mouth of her _petit innocent_--Ernest--the little innocent whom the
slums had nothing more to teach. This second letter met the same fate
as the first, but her resources were not exhausted. In a third she tried
the dignity of sorrow: "_Ma faute m'a rendu l'ame si triste_" and, as
this had no effect, she used in a fourth the one genuine argument of
them all, her hunger: "_Enfin il faut que je tache d'oublier, mais en
attendant je m'en mordrais peut etre les poings plus d'une fois._" I was
unmoved. I had spent too much emotion already upon Clementine; also a
neat little French girl had replaced her.
She gave up when she found me proof against an argument that had
hitherto always disarmed me. This was the last time she put herself at
my service; though once afterwards she gave me the pleasure of hearing
from her. Not many weeks had passed when I received a pictorial
post-card that almost reconciled me to a fashion I deplore. The picture
that adorned it was a photograph of an ordinary three-storey London
house, the windows draped with lace curtains of a quality and design not
common in the Lower Marsh. But the extraordinary thing about it was that
in the open doorway--apronless, her arms akimbo, the wave of hair low
on her forehead--stood Clementine, giggling in triumph. A few words
accompanied this astonishing vision. "_Je n'oublierais jamais la bonne
maison de Madame_" and the kind message was signed "Mrs. Johnson."
Whether the eighteen shillings of her _petit Anglais_ ran to so imposing
a home, or to what she owed the post-card prominence usually reserved
for the monuments of London, she did not condescend to explain. Probably
she only wanted to show that, though she had achieved this distinction,
she could be magnanimous enough to forget the past and think of us
kindly.
That was the last I ever heard from Clementine, the last I hope I ever
shall hear. The pictorial post-card told me the one thing I cared to
know. She did not leave me for a bed on the Embankment by night and a
round of the soup-kitchens by day. If ever she does see life in this way
and so completes her experience, the responsibility will not be mine for
having driven her to it.
_The Old Housekeeper_
[Illustration: "A WILDERNESS OF CHIMNEY-POTS"]
VI
THE OLD HOUSEKEEPER
No housekeeper could have been more in place than the little old
white-haired woman who answered our ring the day we came to engage our
windows, and, incidentally, the chambers behind them. She was venerable
in appearance and scrupulously neat in her dress, and her manner had
just the right touch of dignity and deference, until we explained our
errand. Then she flew into a rage and told us in a tone that challenged
us to dispute it, "You know, no coal is to be carried upstairs after ten
o'clock in the morning."
Coal was as yet so remote that we would have agreed to anything in our
impatience to look out of the windows, and, reassured by us, she became
the obsequious housekeeper again, getting the keys, toiling with us up
the three flights of stairs, unlocking the double door,--for, as I have
said, there is an "oak" to "sport,"--ushering us into the chambers with
the Adam mantelpieces and decorations and the windows that brought us
there, dropping the correct "Sir" and "Madam" into her talk, accepting
without a tremor the shilling we were ashamed to offer, and realizing so
entirely our idea of what a housekeeper in London chambers ought to be,
that her outbreak over the coal we had not ordered, and might never
order, was the more perplexing.
I understood it before we were settled in our chambers, for they were
not really ours until after a long delay over the legal formalities with
which the English love to entangle their simplest transactions at
somebody else's expense, and a longer one in proving our personal and
financial qualifications, the landlord being disturbed by a suspicion
that, like the Housekeeper's daughter, we were in _the_ profession and
spent most of our time "resting," a suspicion confirmed by the escape of
the last tenant, also in _the_ profession, with a year's rent still to
pay. And then came much the longest delay of all over the British
Workman, who, once he got in, threatened never to get out. In the mean
while we saw the Housekeeper almost every day.
We did not have to see her often to discover that she was born a
housekeeper, that she had but one thought in life, and that this was the
house under her charge. I am sure she believed that she came into the
world to take care of it, unless indeed it was built to be taken care of
by her. She belonged to a generation in England who had not yet been
taught the folly of interest in their work, and she was old-fashioned
enough to feel the importance of the post she filled. She would have
lost her self-respect had she failed in the slightest detail of her duty
to the house. From the first, the spotless marvel she made of it divided
our admiration with our windows. The hall and front steps were
immaculate, the white stone stairs shone, there was not a speck of dust
anywhere, and I appreciated the work this meant in an old London
building, where the dirt not only filters through doors and windows, but
oozes out of the walls and comes up through the floors. She did not
pretend to hide her despair when our painters and paperers tramped and
blundered in and out; she fretted herself ill when our furniture was
brought up the three flights of her shining stairs. Painters and
paperers and the bringing up of furniture were rare incidents in the
life of a tenant and had to be endured. But coal, with its trail of
dust, was an endless necessity, and at least could be regulated. This
was why, after her daily cleaning was done, she refused to let it pass.
Once we were established, we saw her less often. Her daily masterpiece
was finished in the morning before we were up, and at all times she
effaced herself with the respect she owed to tenants of a house in which
she was the servant. If we did meet her she acknowledged our greeting
with ostentatious humility, for she clung with as little shame to
servility as to cleanliness; servility was also a part of the business
of a housekeeper, just as elegance was the mark of _the_ profession
which her daughter graced, and the shame would have been not to be as
servile as the position demanded.
This daughter was in every way an elegant person, dressing with a
fidelity to fashion which I could not hope to emulate, and with the
help of a fashionable dressmaker whom I could not afford to pay. She was
"resting" from the time we came into the house until her mother left it,
but if in _the_ profession it is a misfortune to be out of work, it is a
crime to look it, and her appearance and manner gave no hint of
unemployment. In an emergency she would bring us up a message or a
letter, but her civility had none of her mother's obsequiousness; it was
a condescension, and she made us feel the honor she conferred upon the
house by living in it. She was engaged to be married to a stage manager
who for the moment seemed to be without a stage to manage, for he spent
his evenings with her in the Housekeeper's little sitting-room, where
photographs of actors and actresses, each with its sprawling autograph,
covered the walls, crowded the mantelpiece, and littered the table. I
think the Housekeeper could have asked for nothing better than that they
should both continue to "rest," not so much because it gave her the
pleasure of their society as because it was a protection to the house to
have a man about after dark until the street door was closed at eleven.
Had it come to a question between the house and her daughter, the
daughter would not have had a chance.
The Housekeeper, for all her deference to the tenants, was a despot, and
none of us dared to rebel against her rule and disturb the order she
maintained. To anybody coming in from the not too respectable little
street the respectability of the house was overwhelming, and I often
noticed that strangers, on entering, lowered their voices and stepped
more softly. The hush of repose hung heavy on the public hall and
stairs, whatever might be going on behind the two doors that faced each
other on every landing. We all emulated her in the quiet and decorum of
our movements. We allowed ourselves so seldom to be seen that after
three months I still knew little of the others except their names on
their doors, the professions of those who had offices and hung up their
signs, and the frequency with which the Church League on the First Floor
drank afternoon tea. On certain days, when I went out towards five
o'clock, I had to push my way through a procession of bishops in aprons
and gaiters, deans and ordinary parsons who were legion, dowagers and
duchesses who were as sands on the stairs. I may be wrong, but I fancy
that the Housekeeper would have found a way to rout this weekly invasion
if, in the aprons and gaiters, she had not seen symbols of the
respectability which was her pride.
What I did not find out about the tenants for myself, there was no
learning from her. She disdained the gossip which was the breath of life
to the other housekeepers in the street, where, in the early mornings
when the fronts were being done, or in the cool of summer evenings when
the day's work was over, I would see them chattering at their doors. She
never joined in the talk, holding herself aloof, as if her house were on
a loftier plane than theirs, and as if the number of her years in it
raised her to a higher caste. Exactly how many these years had been she
never presumed to say, but she looked as ancient as the house, and had
she told me she remembered Bacon and Pepys, who were tenants each in
his own day, or Peter the Great, who lived across the street, I should
have believed her. She did not, however, claim to go further back than
Etty, the Royal Academician, who spent over a quarter of a century in
our chambers, and one of whose sitters she once brought up to see us,--a
melancholy old man who could only shake his head, first over the changes
in the house since Etty painted those wonderful Victorian nudes, so
demure that "Bob" Stevenson insisted that Etty's maiden aunts must have
sat for them, and then over the changes in the River, which also, it
seemed, had seen better days. Really, he was so dismal a survivor of an
older generation that we were glad she brought no more of his
contemporaries to see us.
For so despotic a character, the Housekeeper had a surprisingly feminine
capacity for hysterics, of which she made the most the night of the
fire. I admit it was an agitating event for us all. The Fire of London
was not so epoch-making. Afterwards the tenants used to speak of the
days "Before the Fire," as we still talk at home of the days "Before
the War." It happened in July, the third month of our tenancy. J. was
away, and, owing to domestic complications, I was alone in our chambers
at night. I do not recall the period with pride, for it proved me more
of a coward than I cared to acknowledge. If I came home late, it was a
struggle to make up my mind to open my front door and face the Unknown
on the other side. Once or twice there was a second struggle at the
dining-room door, the simple search for biscuits exaggerating itself
into a perilous adventure. As I was not yet accustomed to the noises in
our chambers, fear followed me to my bedroom, and when the trains on the
near railroad bridge awoke me, I lay trembling, certain they were
burglars or ghosts, forgetting that visitors of that kind are usually
shyer in announcing themselves. Then I began to be ashamed, and there
was a night when, though the noises sounded strangely like voices
immediately outside my window, I managed to turn over and try to sleep
again. This time the danger was real, and, the next thing I knew,
somebody was ringing the front door-bell and knocking without stopping,
and before I had time to be afraid I was out of bed and at the door. It
was the young man from across the hall, who had come to give me the
cheerful intelligence that his chambers were on fire, and to advise me
to dress as fast as I knew how and get downstairs before the firemen and
the hose arrived, or I might not get down at all.
I flung myself into my clothes, although, as I am pleased to recall, I
had the sense to select my most useful gown, in case but one was left me
in the morning, and the curiosity to step for a second on to the leads
where the flames were leaping from the young man's windows. As it was
too late to help himself, he was waiting, with his servant, to help me.
A pile of J.'s drawings lay on a chair in the hall,--I thrust them the
young man's outstretched arms. For some incomprehensible reason J.'s
huge _schube_ was on another chair,--I threw it into the arms of the
young man's servant, who staggered under its unexpected weight. I rushed
to my desk to secure the money I was unwilling to leave behind, when a
bull's-eye lantern flashed upon me and a policeman ordered me out.
Firemen--for London firemen eventually arrive if the fire burns long
enough--were dragging up a hose as I flew downstairs, and the policeman
had scarcely pushed me into the Housekeeper's room, the young man had
just deposited the drawings at my feet, and the servant the _schube_,
when the stairs became a raging torrent.
I had not thought of the Housekeeper till then; after that there was no
thinking of anything else. My dread of never again seeing our chambers
was nothing to her sense of the outrage to her house. Niobe weeping for
her children was not so tragic a spectacle as she lamenting the ruin of
plaster and paint that did not belong to her. She was half-dressed,
propped up against cushions on a couch, sniffing the salts and sipping
the water administered by her daughter, who had taken the time to dress
carefully and elegantly for the scene. "Oh, what shall I do! Oh, what
shall I do!" the Housekeeper wailed as she saw me, wringing her hands
with an abandonment that would have made her daughter's fortune on the
stage.
Her sitting-room had been appropriated as a refuge for the tenants, and
this sudden reunion was my introduction to them. As the room was small,
my first impression was of a crowd, though in actual numbers we were not
many. The young man whose distinction was that the fire originated in
his chambers, and myself, represented the Third Floor Front and Back.
The Architect and his clerks of the Second Floor Front were at home in
their beds, unconscious of the deluge pouring into their office; the
Second Floor Back had gone away on a holiday. The Church League of the
First Floor Front, haunted by bishops and deans, duchesses and dowagers,
was of course closed, and we were deprived of whatever spiritual
consolation their presence might have provided. But the First Floor Back
filled the little room with her loud voice and portly presence. She had
attired herself for the occasion in a black skirt and a red jacket,
that, for all her efforts, would not meet over the vast expanse of grey
Jaeger vest beneath, and her thin wisps of grey hair were drawn up
under a green felt hat of the pattern I wore for bicycling. I looked at
it regretfully: a hat of any kind would have completed my costume. I
complimented her on her fore-thought; but "What could I do?" she said,
"they flurried me so I couldn't find my false front anywhere, and I had
to cover my head with something." It was extraordinary how a common
danger broke down the barrier of reserve we had hitherto so carefully
cultivated. She had her own salts which she shared with us all, when she
did not need them for the Housekeeper, whom she kept calling "Poor
dear!" and who, after every "Poor dear!" went off into a new attack of
hysterics.
The Ground Floor Front, a thin, spry old gentleman, hovered about us,
bobbing in and out like the little man in the weather-house. He was in
the insurance business, I was immediately informed, and it seemed a
comfort to us all to know it, though I cannot for the life of me imagine
why it should have been to me, not one stick or stitch up there in our
chambers being insured. The Ground Floor Back was at his club, and his
wife and two children had not been disturbed, as in their chambers the
risk was not immediate, and, anyway, they could easily walk out should
it become so. He had been promptly sent for, and when a message came
back that he was playing whist and would hurry to the rescue of his
family as soon as his rubber was finished, the indignation in the
Housekeeper's room was intense. "Brute!" the Housekeeper said, and after
that, through the rest of the night, she would ask every few minutes if
he had returned, and the answer in the negative was fresh fuel to her
wrath.
She was, if anything, more severe with the young man whose chambers were
blazing, and who confessed he had gone out toward midnight leaving a
burning candle in one of his rooms. He treated the fire as a jest, which
she could not forgive; and when at dawn, he decided that all his
possessions, including account-books committed to his care, were in
ashes, and that it was useless to wait, and he wished us good-morning
and good-by, she hinted darkly that fires might be one way of disposing
of records it was convenient to be rid of.
Indignation served better than salts to rouse the Housekeeper from her
hysterics, and I was glad of the distraction it gave her for another
reason: without it, she could not long have remained unconscious of an
evil that I look back to as the deadliest of all during that night's
vigil. For, gradually through her room, by this time close to
suffocation, there crept the most terrible smell. It took hold of me,
choked me, sickened me. The Housekeeper's daughter and the First Floor
Back blanched under it, the Housekeeper turned from white to green. I
have often marvelled since that they never referred to it, but I know
why I did not. For it was I who sent that smell downstairs when I threw
the Russian _schube_ into the arms of the Third Floor Front's servant.
Odours, they say, are the best jogs to memory, and the smell of the
_schube_ is for me so inextricably associated with the fire, that I can
never think of one without remembering the other.
The _schube_ was the chief treasure among the fantastic costumes it is
J.'s joy to collect on his travels. His Hungarian sheepskins, French
hooded capes, Swiss blouses, Spanish berets, Scotch tam-o'-shanters,
Dalmatian caps, Roumanian embroidered shirts, and the rest, I can
dispose of by packing them out of sight and dosing them with camphor.
But no trunk was big enough to hold the Russian _schube_, and its
abominable smell, even when reinforced by tons of camphor and pepper,
could not frighten away the moths. It was picturesque, so much I admit
in its favor, and Whistler's lithograph of J. draped in it is a princely
reward for my trouble. But that trouble lasted for eighteen years,
during which time J. wore the _schube_ just twice,--once to pose for the
lithograph and once on a winter night in London, when its weight was a
far more serious discomfort than the cold. Occasionally he exhibited it
to select audiences. At all other times it hung in a colossal linen bag
made especially to hold it. The eighteenth summer, when the bag was
opened for the periodical airing and brushing, no _schube_ was there;
not a shred of fur remained, the cloth was riddled with holes; it had
fallen before its hereditary foe and the moths had devoured it. For this
had I toiled over it; for this had I rescued it on the night of the fire
as if it were my crowning jewel; for this had I braved the displeasure
of the Housekeeper, from which indeed I escaped only because, at the
critical moment, the policeman who had ordered me downstairs appeared to
say that the lady from the Third Floor Back could go up again if she
chose.