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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our House, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Our House
+       And London out of Our Windows
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
+
+Release Date: February 2, 2012 [EBook #38749]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR HOUSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[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. CLÉMENTINE                                 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 anæmic 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
+Kyfhaüser, 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 rôle 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.
+
+Trim was good to her, that is, unless he was in liquor, which I gathered
+he mostly was. He was fond of his glass, sociable-like, and with his
+week's wages in his pocket, could not keep away from his pals in the
+public. Trimmer's objection to beer was accounted for when I discovered
+that Trim's fondness for it often kept the little house without bread
+and filled it with curses. There were never blows. Trim was good, she
+reminded me, and the liquor never made him wicked,--only made him leave
+his wife to starve, and then curse her for starving. She was tearful
+with gratitude when she remembered his goodness in not beating her; but
+when her story reached the day of his tumbling off a high ladder--the
+beer was in his legs--and being brought back to her dead, it seemed to
+me a matter of rejoicing. Not to her, however, for she had to give up
+the little house and go into service again, and she missed Trim and his
+curses. She did not complain. She always found good places, and she
+adopted a little boy, a sweet little fellow, like a son to her, whom she
+sent to school and started in life, and had never seen since. But young
+men will be young men, and she loved him. She was very happy at the
+corset and petticoat shop, where she lived while he was with her. After
+business hours she was free, for apparently the responsibility of being
+alone in a big house all night was as simple for her as braving a
+burglar in our chambers. The young ladies were pleasant, she was well
+paid. Then her older brother's wife died and left him with six children.
+What could she do but go and look after them when he asked her?
+
+He was well-to-do, and his house and firing and lighting were given him
+in addition to high wages. He did not pay her anything, of course,--she
+was his sister. But it was a comfortable home, the children were fond of
+her,--and also of her cakes and puddings,--and she looked forward to
+spending the rest of her days there. But at the end of two years he
+married again, and when the new wife came, the old sister went. This was
+how it came about that, without a penny in her pocket, and with nothing
+save her old twisted hands to keep her out of the workhouse, she was
+adrift again at an age which made her undesirable to everybody except
+foolish people like ourselves, fresh from the horrors of our experience
+with 'Enrietter. It never occurred to Trimmer that there was anything to
+complain of. For her, all had always been for the best in the best of
+all possible worlds. That she had now chanced upon chambers and two
+people and one dissipated cat to take care of, and more to do than ought
+to have been asked of her, was but another stroke of her invariable good
+luck.
+
+She had an amazing faculty of turning all her little molehills into
+mountains of pleasure. I have never known anything like the joy she got
+from her family, though I never could quite make out why. She was
+inordinately proud of the brother who had been so ready to get rid of
+her; the sister-in-law who had replaced her was a paragon of virtue; the
+nieces were so many infant phenomena, and one Sunday when, with the
+South London world of fashion, they were walking in the Embankment
+Gardens, she presumed so far as to bring them up to our chambers to show
+them off to me, and the affectionate glances she cast upon their
+expansive lace collars explained that she still had her uses in the
+family. There was also a cousin whom, to Trimmer's embarrassment, I
+often found in our kitchen; but much worse than frequent visits could
+be forgiven her, since it was she who, after Jimmy's inglorious end,
+brought us William Penn, a pussy then small enough to go into her
+coat-pocket, but already gay enough to dance his way straight into our
+hearts.
+
+Trimmer's pride reached high-water mark when it came to a younger
+brother who travelled in "notions" for a city firm. His proprietor was
+the personage the rich Jew always is in the city of London, and was made
+Alderman and Lord Mayor, and knighted and baroneted, during the years
+Trimmer spent with us. She took enormous satisfaction in the splendour
+of this success, counting it another piece of her good luck to be
+connected, however remotely, with anybody so distinguished. She had
+almost an air of proprietorship on the 9th of November, when from our
+windows she watched his Show passing along the Embankment; she could not
+have been happier if she herself had been seated in the gorgeous
+Cinderella coach, with the coachman in wig and cocked hat, and the
+powdered footmen perched up behind; and when J. went to the Lord
+Mayor's dinner that same evening at the Guildhall, it became for her
+quite a family affair. I often fancied that she thought it reflected
+glory on us all to have the sister of a man who travelled in "notions"
+for a knight and a Lord Mayor, living in our chambers; though she would
+never have taken the liberty of showing it.
+
+Trimmer's joy was only less in our friends than in her family, which was
+for long a puzzle to me. They added considerably to her already heavy
+task, and in her place, I should have hated them for it. It might amuse
+us to have them drop in to lunch or to dinner at any time, and to gather
+them together once a week, on Thursday evening. But it could hardly
+amuse Trimmer, to whose share fell the problem of how to make a meal
+prepared for two go round among four or six, or how to get to the front
+door and dispose of hats and wraps in chambers so small that the weekly
+gathering filled even our little hall to overflowing. There was always
+some one to help her on Thursdays, and she had not much to do in the way
+of catering. "Plain living and high talking" was the principle upon
+which our evenings were run, and whoever wanted more than a sandwich or
+so could go elsewhere. But whatever had to be done, Trimmer insisted on
+doing, and, moreover, on doing it until the last pipe was out and the
+last word spoken; and as everybody almost was an artist or a writer, and
+as there is no subject so inexhaustible as "shop," I do not like to
+remember how late that often was. It made no difference. She refused to
+go to bed, and in her white cap and apron, with her air of old retainer
+or family nurse, she would waddle about through clouds of tobacco-smoke,
+offering a box of cigarettes here, a plate of sandwiches there, radiant,
+benevolent, more often than not in the way, toward the end looking as if
+she would drop, but apparently enjoying herself more than anybody, until
+it seemed as if the unkindness would be not to let her stay up in it.
+
+More puzzling to me than her interest in all our friends was her choice
+of a few for her special favour. I could not see the reason for her
+choice, unless I had suspected her of a sudden passion for literature
+and art. Certainly her chief attentions were lavished on the most
+distinguished among our friends, who were the very people most apt to
+put her devotion to the test. She adored Whistler, though when he was in
+London he had a way not only of dropping in to dinner, but sometimes of
+dropping in so late that it had to be cooked all over again. She was so
+far from minding that, at the familiar sound of his knock and ring, her
+face was wreathed in smiles, she seemed to look upon the extra work as a
+privilege, and I have known her, without a word, trot off to the
+butcher's or the green-grocer's, or even to the tobacconist's in the
+Strand for the little Algerian cigarettes he loved. She went so far as
+to abandon certain of her prejudices for his benefit, and I realized
+what a conquest he had made when she resigned herself to cooking a fowl
+in a casserole and serving it without bread-sauce. She discovered the
+daintiness of his appetite, and it was delightful to see her hovering
+over him at table and pointing out the choice bits in every dish she
+passed. She was forever finding an excuse to come into any room where
+he might be. Altogether, it was as complete a case of fascination as if
+she had known him to be the great master he was; and she was his slave
+long before he gave her the ten shillings, which was valued
+sentimentally as I really believe a tip never was before or since by a
+British servant.
+
+Henley was hardly second in her esteem, and this was the more
+inexplicable because he provided her with so many more chances to prove
+it. Whistler then lived in Paris, and appeared only now and then. Henley
+lived in London half the week, and rarely missed a Thursday. For it was
+on that evening that the "National Observer," which he was editing, went
+to press, and the printers in Covent Garden were conveniently near to
+our chambers. His work done, the paper put to bed, about ten or eleven
+he and the train of young men then in attendance upon him would come
+round; and to them, in the comfortable consciousness that the rest of
+the week was their own, time was of no consideration. Henley exulted in
+talk: if he had the right audience he would talk all night; and the
+right audience was willing to listen so long as he talked in our
+chambers. But Trimmer, in the kitchen, or handing round sandwiches,
+could not listen, and yet she lingered as long as anybody. It might be
+almost dawn before he got up to go, but she was there to fetch him his
+crutch and his big black hat, and to shut the door after him. Whatever
+the indiscretion of the hour one Thursday, she welcomed him as cordially
+the next, or any day in between when inclination led him to toil up the
+three long flights of stairs to our dinner-table.
+
+Phil May was no less in her good graces, and his hours, if anything,
+were worse than Henley's, since the length of his stay did not depend on
+his talk. I never knew a man of less conversation. "Have a drink," was
+its extent with many who thought themselves in his intimacy. This was a
+remark which he could scarcely offer to Trimmer at the front door, where
+Whistler and Henley never failed to exchange with her a friendly
+greeting. But all the same, she seemed to feel the charm which his
+admirers liked to attribute to him, and to find his smile, when he
+balanced himself on the back of a chair, more than a substitute for
+conversation, however animated. The flaw in my enjoyment of his company
+on our Thursdays was the certainty of the length of time he would be
+pleased to bestow it upon us. Trimmer must have shared this certainty,
+but to her it never mattered. She never failed to return his smile,
+though when he got down to go, she might be nodding, and barely able to
+drag one tired old foot after the other.
+
+She made as much of "Bob" Stevenson, whose hours were worse than
+anybody's. We would perhaps run across him at a press view of pictures
+in the morning and bring him back to lunch, he protesting that he must
+leave immediately after to get home to Kew and write his article before
+six o'clock. And then he would begin to talk, weaving a romance of any
+subject that came up,--the subject was nothing, it was always what he
+made of it,--and he would go on talking until Trimmer, overjoyed at the
+chance, came in with afternoon tea; and he would go on talking until
+she announced dinner; and he would go on talking until all hours the
+next morning, long after his last train and any possibility of his
+article getting into yesterday afternoon's "Pall Mall." But early as he
+might appear, late as he might stay, he was never too early or too late
+for Trimmer.
+
+These were her favourites, though she was ready to "mother" Beardsley,
+who, she seemed to think, had just escaped from the schoolroom and ought
+to be sent back to it; though she had a protecting eye also for George
+Steevens, just up from Oxford, evidently mistaking the silence which was
+then his habit for shyness; though, indeed, she overflowed with kindness
+for everybody who came. It was astonishing how, at her age, she managed
+to adapt herself to people and ways so unlike any she could ever have
+known, without relaxing in the least from her own code of conduct.
+
+Only twice can I remember seeing her really ruffled. Once was when Felix
+Buhot, who, during a long winter he spent in London, was often with us
+on Thursdays, went into the kitchen to teach her to make coffee. The
+inference that she could not make it hurt her feelings; but her real
+distress was to have him in the kitchen, which "ladies and gentlemen"
+should not enter. Between her desire to get him back to the dining-room
+and her fear lest he should discover it, she was terribly embarrassed.
+It was funny to watch them: Buhot, unconscious of wrong and of English,
+intent upon measuring the coffee and pouring out the boiling water;
+Trimmer fluttering about him with flushed and anxious face, talking very
+loud and with great deliberation, in the not uncommon conviction that
+the foreigner's ignorance of English is only a form of deafness.
+
+On the other occasion she lost her temper, the only time in my
+experience. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Whistler, appearing while she
+was out and staying on to supper, got Constant, his man, to add an onion
+soup and an omelet to the cold meats she had prepared, for he would
+never reconcile himself to the English supper. She was furious when she
+got back and found that her pots and pans had been meddled with, and her
+larder raided. She looked upon it as a reproach; as if she couldn't
+serve Mr. Whistler as well as any foreign servant,--she had no use for
+foreign servants anyhow,--she would not have them making their foreign
+messes in any kitchen of hers! It took days and careful diplomacy to
+convince her that she had not been insulted.
+
+I was the more impressed by this outbreak of temper because, as a rule,
+she gave no sign of seeing, or hearing, or understanding anything that
+went on in our chambers. She treated me as I believe royalty should be
+treated, leaving it to me to open the talk, or to originate a topic. I
+remember once, when we were involved in a rumpus which had been
+discussed over our dinner-table for months beforehand, and which at the
+time filled the newspapers and was such public property that everybody
+in the Quarter--the milkman, the florist at the Temple of Pomona in the
+Strand, the Housekeeper downstairs, the postman--congratulated us on our
+victory, Trimmer alone held her peace. I could not believe that she
+really did not know, and at last I asked her:--
+
+"I suppose you have heard, Trimmer, what has been going on these days?"
+
+"What, mum?" was her answer.
+
+Then, exasperated, I explained.
+
+"Why yes, mum," she said. "I beg your pardon, mum, I really couldn't
+'elp it. I 'ave been reading the pipers, and the 'ousekeeper she was
+a-talking to me about it before you come in, and the postman too, and I
+was sayin' as 'ow glad I was. I 'ope you and the Master won't think it a
+liberty, mum. Thank you, mum!"
+
+I remember another time, when some of our friends took to running away
+with other friends' wives, and things became so complicated for
+everybody that our Thursday evenings were brought to a sudden end,
+Trimmer kept the same stolid countenance throughout, until, partly to
+prevent awkwardness, partly out of curiosity, I asked her if she had
+seen the papers.
+
+"Oh, I beg your pardon, mum," she hesitated, "thank you, mum, I'm sure.
+I know it's a liberty, but you know, mum, they've all been 'ere so often
+I couldn't help noticing there was somethink. And I'm very sorry, mum,
+if you'll excuse the liberty, they all was such lidies and gentlemen,
+mum."
+
+And so, I should never have known there was another reason, besides the
+natural kindness of her heart, for her interest in our friends and her
+acceptance of their ways, if, before this, I had not happened to say to
+her one Friday morning,--
+
+"You seem, Trimmer, to have a very great admiration for Mr. Phil May."
+
+"I 'ope you and Master won't think it a liberty, mum," she answered, in
+an agony of embarrassment, "but I do like to see 'im, and they allus so
+like to 'ear about 'im at 'ome. They're allus asking me when I 'ave last
+seen 'im or Mr. Whistler."
+
+Then it came out. Chance had bestowed upon her father and one of the
+great American magazines the same name, with the result that the
+magazine was looked upon by her brothers and herself as belonging
+somehow to the family. The well-to-do brother subscribed to it, the
+other came to his house to see each new number. Through the
+illustrations and articles they had become as familiar with artists and
+authors as most people in England are with the "winners," and their
+education had reached at least the point of discovery that news does not
+begin and end in sport. Judging from Trimmer, I doubt if at first their
+patronage of art and literature went much further, but this was far
+enough for them to know, and to feel flattered by the knowledge, that
+she was living among people who figured in the columns of art and
+literary gossip as prominently as "all the winners" in the columns of
+the Sporting Prophets, though they would have been still more flattered
+had her lot been cast among the Prophets. In a few cases, their interest
+soon became more personal.
+
+It was their habit--why, I do not suppose they could have said
+themselves--to read any letter Whistler might write to the papers at a
+moment when he was given to writing, though what they made of the letter
+when read was more than Trimmer was able to explain; they also looked
+out for Phil May's drawings in "Punch"; they passed our articles round
+the family circle,--a compliment hardly more astonishing to Trimmer
+than to us. As time went on they began to follow the career of several
+of our other friends to whom Trimmer introduced them; and it was a
+gratification to them all, as well as a triumph for her, when on Sunday
+afternoon she could say, "Mr. Crockett or Mr. 'Arold Frederic was at
+Master's last Thursday." Thus, through us, she became for the first time
+a person of importance in her brother's house, and I suspect also quite
+an authority in Brixton on all questions of art and literature. Indeed,
+she may, for all I know, have started another Carnegie Library in South
+London.
+
+It is a comfort now to think that her stay with us was pleasant to her;
+wages alone could not have paid our debt for the trouble she spared us
+during her five years in our chambers. I have an idea that, in every
+way, it was the most prosperous period of her life. When she came, she
+was not only without a penny in her pocket, but she owed pounds for her
+outfit of aprons and caps and dresses. Before she left, she was saving
+money. She opened a book at the Post Office Savings Bank; she
+subscribed to one of those societies which would assure her a
+respectable funeral, for she had the ambition of all the self-respecting
+poor to be put away decent, after having, by honest work, kept off the
+parish to the end. Her future provided for, she could make the most of
+whatever pleasures the present might throw in her way,--the pantomime at
+Christmas, a good seat for the Queen's Jubilee procession; above all,
+the two weeks' summer holiday. No journey was ever so full of adventure
+as hers to Margate, or Yarmouth, or Hastings, from the first preparation
+to the moment of return, when she would appear laden with presents of
+Yarmouth bloaters or Margate shrimps, to be divided between the old
+charwoman and ourselves.
+
+If she had no desire to leave us, we had none to have her go; and as the
+years passed, we did not see why she should. She was old, but she bore
+her age with vigour. She was hardly ever ill, and never with anything
+worse than a cold or an indigestion, though she had an inconvenient
+talent for accidents. The way she managed to cut her fingers was little
+short of genius. One or two were always wrapped in rags. But no matter
+how deep the gash, she was as cheerful as if it were an accomplishment.
+With the blood pouring from the wound, she would beam upon me: "You 'ave
+no idea, mum, what wonderful flesh I 'as fur 'ealin'." Her success in
+falling down our little narrow stairway was scarcely less remarkable.
+But the worst tumble of all was the one which J. had so long expected.
+He had just moved his portfolios to an unaccustomed place one morning,
+when a letter, or a message, or something, sent her stumbling into the
+studio with her usual impetuosity, and over she tripped. It was so bad
+that we had to have the doctor, her arm was so seriously strained that
+he made her carry it in a sling for weeks. We were alarmed, but not
+Trimmer.
+
+"You know, mum, it _is_ lucky; it might 'ave been the right harm, and
+that would 'ave been bad!"
+
+She really thought it another piece of her extraordinary good luck.
+
+Poor Trimmer! It needed so little to make her happy, and within five
+years of her coming to us that little was taken from her. All she asked
+of life was work, and a worse infirmity than age put a stop to her
+working for us, or for anybody else, ever again. At the beginning of her
+trouble, she would not admit to us, nor I fancy to herself, that
+anything was wrong, and she was "bonny," though she went "cutting about"
+at a snail's pace and her cheerful old face grew haggard. Presently,
+there were days when she could not keep up the pretence, and then she
+said her head ached and she begged my pardon for the liberty. I
+consulted a doctor. He thought it might be neuralgia and dosed her for
+it; she thought it her teeth, and had almost all the few still left to
+her pulled out. And the pain was worse than ever. Then, as we were on
+the point of leaving town for some weeks, we handed over our chambers to
+the frowzy old charwoman, and sent Trimmer down to the sea at Hastings.
+She was waiting to receive us when we returned, but she gave us only the
+ghost of her old smile in greeting, and her face was more haggard and
+drawn than ever. For a day she tottered about from one room to another,
+cooking, dusting, making beds, and looking all the while as if she were
+on the rack. She was a melancholy wreck of the old cheerful, bustling,
+exasperating Trimmer; and it was more than we could stand. I told her
+so. She forgot to beg my pardon for the liberty in her hurry to assure
+me that nothing was wrong, that she could work, that she wanted to work,
+that she was not happy when she did not work.
+
+"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny!" she kept saying over and over again.
+
+Her despair at the thought of stopping work was more cruel to see than
+her physical torture, and I knew, without her telling me, that her fear
+of the pain she might have still to suffer was nothing compared to her
+fear of the workhouse she had toiled all her life to keep out of. She
+had just seven pounds and fifteen shillings for her fortune; her family,
+being working people, would have no use for her once she was of no use
+to them; our chambers were her home only so long as she could do in them
+what she had agreed to do; there was no Workmen's Compensation Act in
+those days, no old-age pensions, even if she had been old enough to get
+one. What was left for a poor woman, full of years and pain, save the
+one refuge which, all her life, she had been taught to look upon as
+scarcely less shameful than the prison or the scaffold?
+
+Well, Trimmer had done her best for us; now we did our best for her,
+and, as it turned out, the best that could be done. Through a friend, we
+got her into St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Her case was hopeless from the
+first. A malignant growth so close to the brain that at her age an
+operation was too serious a risk, and without it she might linger in
+agony for months,--this was what life had been holding in store for
+Trimmer during those long years of incessant toil, and self-sacrifice,
+and obstinate belief that a drunken husband, a selfish brother, an empty
+purse, were all for the best in our best of all possible worlds.
+
+She did not know how ill she was, and her first weeks at the hospital
+were happy. The violence of the pain was relieved, the poor tired old
+body was the better for the rest and the cool and the quiet; she who had
+spent her strength waiting on others enjoyed the novel experience of
+being waited on herself. There were the visits of her family on visiting
+days, and mine in between, to look forward to; some of our friends, who
+had grown as fond of her as we, sent her fruit and flowers, and she
+liked the consequence all this gave her in the ward. Then, the hospital
+gossip was a distraction, perhaps because in talking about the
+sufferings of others she could forget her own. My objection was that she
+would spare me not a single detail. But in some curious way I could not
+fathom, it seemed a help to Trimmer, and I had not the heart to cut her
+stories short.
+
+After a month or so, the reaction came. Her head was no better, and what
+was the hospital good for if they couldn't cure her? She grew
+suspicious, hinting dark things to me about the doctors. They were
+keeping her there to try experiments on her, and she was a respectable
+woman, and always had been, and she did not like to be stared at in her
+bed by a lot of young fellows. The nurses were as bad. But once out of
+their clutches she would be "bonny" again, she knew. Probably the
+doctors and nurses knew too, for the same suspicion is more often than
+not their reward; and indeed it was so unlike Trimmer that she must have
+picked it up in the ward. Anyway, in their kindness they had kept her
+far longer than is usual in such cases, and when they saw her grow
+restless and unhappy, it seemed best to let her go. At the end of four
+months, and to her infinite joy, Trimmer, five years older than when she
+came to us, in the advanced stage of an incurable disease, with a
+capital of seven pounds and fifteen shillings, was free to begin life
+again.
+
+I pass quickly over the next weeks,--I wish I could have passed over
+them as quickly at the time. My visits were now to a drab quarter on the
+outskirts of Camden Town, where Trimmer had set up as a capitalist. She
+boarded with her cousin, many shillings of her little store going to pay
+the weekly bill; she found a wonderful doctor who promised to cure her
+in no time, and into his pockets the rest of her savings flowed. There
+was no persuading her that he could not succeed where the doctors at the
+hospital had failed, and so long as she went to him, to help her would
+only have meant more shillings for an unscrupulous quack who traded on
+the ignorance and credulity of the poor. Week by week I saw her grow
+feebler, week by week I knew her little capital was dribbling fast away.
+She seemed haunted by the dread that her place would be taken in our
+chambers, and that, once cured, she would have to hunt for another. That
+she was "bonny" was the beginning and end of all she had to say. One
+morning, to prove it, she managed to drag herself down to see us,
+arriving with just strength enough to stagger into my room, her arms
+outstretched to feel her way, for the disease, by this time, was
+affecting both eyes and brain. Nothing would satisfy her until she had
+gone into the studio, stumbling about among the portfolios, I on one
+side, on the other J., with no desire to wring her neck for it was grim
+tragedy we were guiding between us,--tragedy in rusty black with a
+reticule hanging from one arm,--five years nearer the end than when
+first the curtain rose upon it in our chambers. We bundled her off as
+fast as we could, in a cab, with the cousin who had brought her. She
+stopped in the doorway.
+
+"Oh, I'm bonny, mum. I can cut about, you'll see!" And she would have
+fallen, had not the cousin caught and steadied her.
+
+After that, she had not the strength to drag herself anywhere, not even
+to see the quack. A week later she took to her bed, almost blind, her
+poor old wits scattered beyond recovery. I was glad of that: it spared
+her the weary waiting and watching for death while the shadow of the
+grim building she feared still more drew ever nearer. I hesitated to go
+and see her, for my mere presence stirred her into consciousness, and
+reminded her of her need to work and her danger if she could not. Then
+there was a day when she did not seem to know I was there, and she paid
+no attention to me, never spoke until just as I was going, when of a
+sudden she sat bolt upright:--
+
+"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny. You'll see!" she wailed, and sank back
+on her pillows.
+
+These were Trimmer's last words to me, and I left her at death's door,
+still crying for work, as if in the next world, as in this, it was her
+only salvation. Very soon, the cousin came to tell me that the little
+capital had dribbled entirely away, and that she could not keep Trimmer
+without being paid for it. Could I blame her? She had her own fight
+against the shadow hanging all too close now over Trimmer. Her 'usband
+worked 'ard, she said, and they could just live respectable, and
+Trimmer's brothers, they was for sending Trimmer to the workus. They
+might have sent her, and I doubt if she would have been the wiser. But
+could we see her go? For our own comfort, for our own peace of mind, we
+interfered and arranged that Trimmer should board with her cousin until
+a bed was found in another hospital. It was found, mercifully, almost at
+once, but, before I had time to go there, the Great Release had come for
+her; and we heard with thankfulness that the old head was free from
+suffering, that the twisted hands were still, that fear of the workhouse
+could trouble her no more. Life's one gift to Trimmer had been toil,
+pain her one reward, and it was good to know that she was at rest.
+
+The cousin brought us the news. But I had a visit the same day from the
+sister-in-law, the paragon of virtue, a thin, sharp-faced woman of
+middle age. I said what I could in sympathy, telling her how much we
+missed Trimmer, how well we should always remember her. But this was not
+what she had come to hear. She let me get through. She drew the sigh
+appropriate for the occasion. Then she settled down to business. When
+did I propose to pay back the money Trimmer had spent on the doctor in
+Camden Town? I didn't propose to at all, I told her: he was a miserable
+quack and I had done my best to keep Trimmer from going to him; besides,
+fortunately for her, she was beyond the reach of money that was not
+owing to her. The sister-in-law was indignant. The family always
+understood I had promised, a promise was a promise, and now they
+depended on me for the funeral. I reminded her of the society to which
+Trimmer had subscribed solely to meet that expense. But she quickly let
+me know that the funeral the society proposed to provide fell far short
+of the family's standard. To them it appeared scarcely better than a
+pauper's. The coffin would be plain, there would be no oak and brass
+handles,--worse, there would be no plumes for the horses and the hearse.
+To send their sister to her grave without plumes would disgrace them
+before their neighbours. Nor would there be a penny over for the family
+mourning,--could I allow them, the chief mourners, to mourn without
+crape?
+
+I remembered their willingness to let Trimmer die as a pauper in the
+workhouse. After all, she would have the funeral she had provided for.
+She would lie no easier in her grave for oak and brass handles, for
+plumes and crape. Her family had made use of her all her life; I did not
+see why I should help them to make use of her after her death, that
+their grief might be trumpeted in Brixton and Camden Town. I brought the
+interview to an end. But sometimes I wonder if Trimmer would not have
+liked it better if I had helped them, if plumes had waved from the heads
+of the horses that drew her to her grave, if her family had followed
+swathed in crape. She would have looked upon it as another piece of her
+extraordinary good luck if, by dying, she had been of service to
+anybody.
+
+I do not know where they buried her. Probably nobody save ourselves
+to-day has as much as a thought for her. But, if self-sacrifice counts
+for anything, if martyrdom is a passport to heaven, then Trimmer should
+take her place up there by the side of St. Francis of Assisi, and Joan
+of Arc, and St. Vincent de Paul, and all those other blessed men and
+women whose lives were given for others, and who thought it was
+"bonny."
+
+
+
+
+_Louise_
+
+[Illustration: "TUMBLED, WEATHER-WORN, RED-TILED ROOFS"]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+LOUISE
+
+
+For the third time since we had taken our chambers, I was servantless,
+and I could not summon up courage to face for the third time the scorn
+which the simple request for a "general" meets in the English Registry
+Office. That was what sent me to try my luck at a French _Bureau_ in
+Soho, where, I was given to understand, it was possible to inquire for,
+and actually obtain, a good _bonne à tout faire_ and escape without
+insult.
+
+Louise was announced one dull November morning, a few days later. I
+found her waiting for me in our little hall,--a woman of about forty,
+short, plump, with black eyes, blacker hair, and an enchanting smile.
+But the powder on her face and the sham diamonds in her ears seemed to
+hang out danger signals, and my first impulse was to show her the door.
+It was something familiar in the face under the powder, above all in
+the voice when she spoke, that made me hesitate.
+
+"Provençale?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, from Marseilles," she answered, and I showed her instead into my
+room.
+
+I had often been "down there" where the sun shines and skies are blue,
+and her Provençal accent came like a breath from the south through the
+gloom of the London fog, bringing it all back to me,--the blinding white
+roads, the gray hills sweet with thyme and lavender, the towns with
+their "antiquities," the little shining white villages,--M. Bernard's at
+Martigues, and his dining-room, and the Marseillais who crowded it on a
+Sunday morning, and the gaiety and the laughter, and Désiré in his white
+apron, and the great bowls of _bouillabaisse_....
+
+It was she who recalled me to the business of the moment. Her name was
+Louise Sorel, she said; she could clean, wash, play the lady's maid,
+sew, market, cook--but cook! _Té--au mouins_, she would show _Madame_;
+and, as she said it, she smiled. I have never seen such perfect teeth in
+woman or child; you knew at a glance that she must have been a radiant
+beauty in her youth. A Provençal accent, an enchanting smile, and the
+remains of beauty, however, are not precisely what you engage a servant
+for; and, with a sudden access of common sense, I asked for references.
+Surely, _Madame_ would not ask the impossible, she said reproachfully.
+She had but arrived in London, she had never gone as _bonne_ anywhere;
+how, then, could she give references? She needed the work and was
+willing to do it: was not that sufficient? I got out of it meanly by
+telling her I would think it over. At that she smiled again,--really,
+her smile on a November day almost warranted the risk. I meant to take
+her; she knew; _Madame_ was kind.
+
+I did think it over,--while I interviewed slovenly English "generals"
+and stray Italian children, dropped upon me from Heaven knows where,
+while I darned the family stockings, while I ate the charwoman's chops.
+I thought it over indeed, far more than I wanted to, until, in despair,
+I returned to the Soho _Bureau_ to complain that I was still without a
+servant of any kind. The first person I saw was Louise, disconsolate, on
+a chair in the corner. She sprang up when she recognized me. Had she not
+said _Madame_ was kind? she cried. _Madame_ had come for her. I had done
+nothing of the sort. But there she was, this charming creature from the
+South; at home was the charwoman, dingy and dreary as the November
+skies. To look back now is to wonder why I did not jump at the chance of
+having her. As it was, I did take her,--no references, powder, sham
+diamonds, and all. But I compromised. It was to be for a week. After
+that, we should see. An hour later she was in my kitchen.
+
+A wonderful week followed. From the start we could not resist her charm,
+though to be on such terms with one's servant as to know that she has
+charm, is no doubt the worst possible kind of bad form. Even William
+Penn, the fastidious, was her slave at first sight,--and it would have
+been rank ingratitude if he had not been, for, from the ordinary London
+tabby average people saw in him, he was at once transformed into the
+most superb, the most magnificent of cats! And we were all superb, we
+were all magnificent, down to the snuffy, tattered old Irish charwoman
+who came to make us untidy three times a week, and whom we had not the
+heart to turn out, because we knew that if we did, there could be no one
+else foolish enough to take her in again.
+
+And Louise, though her southern imagination did such great things for
+us, had not overrated herself. She might be always laughing at
+everything, as they always do laugh "down there,"--at the English she
+couldn't understand, at _Mizé Boum_, the nearest she came to the
+charwoman's name, at the fog she must have hated, at the dirt left for
+her to clean. But she worked harder than any servant I have ever had,
+and to better purpose. She adored the cleanliness and the order, it
+seemed, and was appalled at the dirt and slovenliness of the English, as
+every Frenchwoman is when she comes to the land that has not ceased to
+brag of its cleanliness since its own astonished discovery of the
+morning tub. Before Louise, the London blacks disappeared as if by
+magic. Our wardrobes were overhauled and set to rights. The linen was
+mended and put in place. And she could cook! Such _risotto_!--she had
+been in Italy--Such _macaroni_! Such _bouillabaisse_! Throughout that
+wonderful week, our chambers smelt as strong of _ail_ as a Provençal
+kitchen.
+
+In the face of all this, I do not see how I brought myself to find any
+fault. To do myself justice, I never did when it was a question of the
+usual domestic conventions. Louise was better than all the
+conventions--all the prim English maids in prim white caps--in the
+world. Just to hear her talk, just to have her call that disreputable
+old _Mizé Boum ma belle_, just to have her announce as _La Dame de la
+bouillabaisse_ a friend of ours who had been to Provence and had come to
+feast on her masterpiece and praised her for it,--just each and every
+one of her charming southern ways made up for the worst domestic crime
+she could have committed, I admit to a spasm of dismay when, for the
+first meal she served, she appeared in her petticoat, a dish-cloth for
+apron, and her sleeves rolled up above her elbows. But I forgot it with
+her delightful laugh at herself when I explained that, absurdly it might
+be, we preferred a skirt, an apron, and sleeves fastened at the wrists.
+It seemed she adored the economy too, and she had wished to protect her
+dress and even her apron.
+
+These things would horrify the model housewife; but then, I am not a
+model housewife, and they amused me, especially as she was so quick to
+meet me, not only half, but the whole way. When, however, she took to
+running out at intervals on mysterious errands, I felt that I must
+object. Her first excuse was _les affaires_; her next, a friend; and,
+when neither of these would serve, she owned up to a husband who,
+apparently, spent his time waiting for her at the street corner; he was
+so lonely, _le pauvre_! I suggested that he should come and see her in
+the kitchen. She laughed outright. Why, he was of a shyness _Madame_
+could not figure to herself. He never would dare to mount the stairs and
+ring the front door-bell.
+
+In the course of this wonderful week, there was sent to me, from the
+Soho _Bureau_, a Swiss girl with as many references as a Colonial Dame
+has grandfathers. Even so, and despite the inconvenient husband, I might
+not have dismissed Louise,--it was so pleasant to live in an atmosphere
+of superlatives and _ail_. It was she who settled the matter with some
+vague story of a partnership in a restaurant and work waiting for her
+there. Perhaps we should have parted with an affectation of indifference
+had not J. unexpectedly interfered. Husbands have a trick of pretending
+superiority to details of housekeeping until you have had all the
+bother, and then upsetting everything by their interference. She had
+given us the sort of time we hadn't had since the old days in Provence,
+he argued; her smile alone was worth double the money agreed upon;
+therefore, double the money was the least I could in decency offer her.
+His logic was irreproachable, but housekeeping on such principles would
+end in domestic bankruptcy. However, Louise got the money, and my reward
+was her face when she thanked me--she made giving sheer
+self-indulgence--and the _risotto_ which, in the shock of gratitude,
+she insisted upon coming the next day to cook for us.
+
+But, in the end, J.'s indiscretion cost me dear. As Louise was
+determined to magnify all our geese, not merely into swans, but into the
+most superb, the most magnificent swans, the few extra shillings had
+multiplied so miraculously by the time their fame reached the
+_Quartier_, that _Madame_ of the _Bureau_ saw in me a special Providence
+appointed to relieve her financial difficulties, and hurried to claim an
+immediate loan. Then, her claim being disregarded, she wrote to call my
+attention to the passing of the days and the miserable pettiness of the
+sum demanded, and to assure me of her consideration the most perfect.
+She got to be an intolerable nuisance before I heard the last of her.
+
+We had not realized the delight of having Louise to take care of us,
+until she was replaced by the Swiss girl, who was industrious, sober,
+well-trained, with all the stolidity and surliness of her people, and as
+colourless as a self-respecting servant ought to be. I was immensely
+relieved when, after a fortnight, she found the work too much for her.
+It was just as she was on the point of going that Louise reappeared, her
+face still white with powder, the sham diamonds still glittering in her
+ears, but somehow changed, I could not quite make out how. She had come,
+she explained to present me with a ring of pearls and opals and of
+surpassing beauty, at the moment pawned for a mere trifle,--here was the
+ticket; I had but to pay, add a smaller trifle for interest and
+commission, and it was mine. As I never have worn rings I did not care
+to begin the habit by gambling in pawn tickets, much though I should
+have liked to oblige Louise. Her emotion when I refused seemed so out of
+proportion, and yet was so unmistakably genuine, that it bewildered me.
+
+But she pulled herself together almost at once and began to talk of the
+restaurant which, I learned, was marching in a simply marvellous manner.
+It was only when, in answer to her question, I told her that the
+_Demoiselle Suisse_ was marching not at all and was about to leave me,
+that the truth came out. There was no restaurant, there never had
+been,--except in the country of Tartarin's lions; it was her invention
+to spare me any self-reproach I might have felt for turning her adrift
+at the end of her week's engagement. She had found no work since. She
+and her husband had pawned everything. _Tiens_, and she emptied before
+me a pocketful of pawn tickets. They were without a sou. They had had
+nothing to eat for twenty-four hours. That was the change. I began to
+understand. She was starving, literally starving, in the cold and gloom
+and damp of the London winter, she who was used to the warmth and
+sunshine, to the clear blue skies of Provence. If the aliens who drift
+to England, as to the Promised Land, could but know what awaited them!
+
+Of course I took her back. She might have added rouge to the powder, she
+might have glittered all over with diamonds, sham or real, and I would
+not have minded. J. welcomed her with joy. William Penn hung rapturously
+at her heels. We had a _risotto_, golden as the sun of the _Midi_,
+fragrant as its kitchens, for our dinner.
+
+There was no question of a week now, no question of time at all. It did
+not seem as if we ever could manage again, as if we ever could have
+managed, without Louise. And she, on her side, took possession of our
+chambers, and, for a ridiculously small sum a week, worked her miracles
+for us. We positively shone with cleanliness; London grime no longer
+lurked, the skeleton in our cupboards. We never ate dinners and
+breakfasts more to our liking, never had I been so free from
+housekeeping, never had my weekly bills been so small. Eventually, she
+charged herself with the marketing, though she could not, and never
+could, learn to speak a word of English; but not even the London
+tradesman was proof against her smile. She kept the weekly accounts,
+though she could neither read nor write: in her intelligence, an
+eloquent witness to the folly of general education. She was, in a word,
+the most capable and intelligent woman I have ever met, so that it was
+the more astounding that she should also be the most charming.
+
+Most astounding of all was the way, entirely, typically Provençale as
+she was, she could adapt herself to London and its life and people.
+Though she wore in the street an ordinary felt hat, and in the house the
+English apron, you could see that her hair was made for the pretty
+Provençal ribbon, and her broad shoulders for the Provençal fichu. _Té_,
+_vé_, and _au mouins_ were as constantly in her mouth as in Tartarin's.
+Provençal proverbs forever hovered on her lips. She sang Provençal songs
+at her work. She had ready a Provençal story for every occasion. Her
+very adjectives were Mistral's, her very exaggerations Daudet's. And yet
+she did everything as if she had been a "general" in London chambers all
+her life. Nothing came amiss to her. After her first startling
+appearance as waitress, it was no time before she was serving at table
+as if she had been born to it, and with such a grace of her own that
+every dish she offered seemed a personal tribute. People who had never
+seen her before would smile back involuntarily as they helped
+themselves. It was the same no matter what she did. She was always gay,
+however heavy her task. To her even London, with its fogs, was a
+_galéjado_, as they say "down there." And she was so appreciative. We
+would make excuses to give her things for the pleasure of watching the
+warm glow spread over her face and the light leap to her eyes. We would
+send her to the theatre for the delight of having her come back and tell
+us about it. All the world, on and off the stage, was exalted and
+transfigured as she saw it.
+
+But frank as she was in her admiration of all the world, she remained
+curiously reticent about herself. "My poor grandmother used to say, you
+must turn your tongue seven times in your mouth before speaking," she
+said to me once; and I used to fancy she gave hers a few extra twists
+when it came to talking of her own affairs. Some few facts I gathered:
+that she had been at one time an _ouvreuse_ in a Marseilles theatre; at
+another, a tailoress,--how accomplished, the smart appearance of her
+husband in J.'s old coats and trousers was to show us; and that, always,
+off and on, she had made a business of buying at the periodical sales of
+the _Mont de Piété_ and selling at private sales of her own. I gathered
+also that they all knew her in Marseilles; it was Louise here, Louise
+there, as she passed through the market, and everybody must have a word
+and a laugh with her. No wonder! You couldn't have a word and a laugh
+once with Louise and not long to repeat the experience. But to her life
+when the hours of work were over, she offered next to no clue.
+
+Only one or two figures flitted, pale shadows, through her rare
+reminiscences. One was the old grandmother, whose sayings were full of
+wisdom, but who seemed to have done little for her save give her,
+fortunately, no schooling at all, and a religious education that bore
+the most surprising fruit. Louise had made her first communion, she had
+walked in procession on feast days. _J'adorais ça_, she would tell me,
+as she recalled her long white veil and the taper in her hand. But she
+adored every bit as much going to the Salvation Army meetings,--the
+lassies would invite her in, and lend her a hymn-book, and she would
+sing as hard as ever she could, was her account. Her ideas on the
+subject of the Scriptures and the relations of the Holy Family left me
+gasping. But her creed had the merit of simplicity. The _Boun Diou_ was
+intelligent, she maintained; _il aime les gens honnêtes_. He would not
+ask her to hurry off to church and leave all in disorder at home, and
+waste her time. If she needed to pray, she knelt down where and as she
+was, and the _Boun Diou_ was as well pleased. He was a man like us,
+wasn't He? Well then, He understood.
+
+There was also a sister. She occupied a modest apartment in Marseilles
+when she first dawned upon our horizon, but so rapidly did it expand
+into a palatial house in town and a palatial villa by the sea, both with
+cellars of rare and exquisite vintages and stables full of horses and
+carriages, that we looked confidently to the fast-approaching day when
+we should find her installed in the Elysée at Paris. Only in one respect
+did she never vary by a hair's breadth: this was her hatred of Louise's
+husband.
+
+Here, at all events, was a member of the family about whom we learned
+more than we cared to know. For if he did not show himself at first,
+that did not mean his willingness to let us ignore him. He persisted in
+wanting Louise to meet him at the corner, sometimes just when I most
+wanted her in the kitchen. He would have her come back to him at night;
+and to see her, after her day's hard work, start out in the black sodden
+streets, seldom earlier than ten, often as late as midnight; to realize
+that she must start back long before the sun would have thought of
+coming up, if the sun ever did come up on a London winter morning, made
+us wretchedly uncomfortable. The husband, however, was not to be moved
+by any messages I might send him. He was too shy to grant the interview
+I asked. But he gave me to understand through her that he wouldn't do
+without her, he would rather starve, he couldn't get along without her.
+We did not blame him: we couldn't, either. That was why, after several
+weeks of discomfort to all concerned, it occurred to us that we might
+invite him to make our home his; and we were charmed by his
+condescension when, at last conquering his shyness, he accepted our
+invitation. The threatened deadlock was thus settled, and M. Auguste,
+as he introduced himself, came to us as a guest for as long as he chose
+to stay. There were friends--there always are--to warn us that what we
+were doing was sheer madness. What did we know about him, anyway?
+Precious little, it was a fact: that he was the husband of Louise,
+neither more nor less. We did not even know that, it was hinted. But if
+Louise had not asked for our marriage certificate, could we insist upon
+her producing hers?
+
+It may have been mad, but it worked excellently. M. Auguste as a guest
+was the pattern of discretion. I had never had so much as a glimpse of
+him until he came to visit us. Then I found him a good-looking man,
+evidently a few years younger than Louise, well-built, rather taller
+than the average Frenchman. Beyond this, it was weeks before I knew
+anything of him except the astonishing adroitness with which he kept out
+of our way. He quickly learned our hours and arranged his accordingly.
+After we had begun work in the morning, he would saunter down to the
+kitchen and have his coffee, the one person of leisure in the
+establishment. After that, and again in the afternoon, he would stroll
+out to attend to what I take were the not too arduous duties of a
+horse-dealer with neither horses nor capital,--for as a horse-dealer he
+described himself when he had got so far as to describe himself at all.
+At noon and at dinner-time, he would return from Tattersall's, or
+wherever his not too exhausting business had called him, with a small
+paper parcel supposed to contain his breakfast or his dinner, our
+agreement being that he was to supply his own food. The evenings he
+spent with Louise. I could discover no vice in him except the, to us,
+disturbing excess of his devotion to her. You read of this sort of
+devotion in French novels and do not believe in it. But M. Auguste, in
+his exacting dependence on Louise, left the French novel far behind. As
+for Louise, though she was no longer young and beauty fades early in the
+South, I have never met, in or out of books, a woman who made me
+understand so well the reason of the selfishness some men call love.
+
+M. Auguste's manners to us were irreproachable. We could only admire
+the consideration he showed in so persistently effacing himself. J.
+never would have seen him, if on feast days--Christmas, New Year's, the
+14th of July--M. Auguste had not, with great ceremony, entered the
+dining-room at the hour of morning coffee to shake hands and wish J. the
+compliments of the season. With me his relations grew less formal, for
+he was not slow to discover that we had one pleasant weakness in common.
+Though the modest proportions of that brown-paper parcel might not
+suggest it, M. Auguste knew and liked what was good to eat; so did I.
+Almost before I realized it, he had fallen into the habit of preparing
+some special dish for me, or of making my coffee, when I chanced to be
+alone for lunch or for dinner. I can still see the gleam in his eyes as
+he brought me in my cup, and assured me that he, not Louise, was the
+artist, and that it was something of extra--but of extra!--as it always
+was. Nor was it long before he was installed _chef_ in our kitchen on
+the occasion of any little breakfast or dinner we might be giving. The
+first time I caught him in shirt-sleeves, with Louise's apron flapping
+about his legs and the bib drawn over his waistcoat, he was inclined to
+be apologetic. But he soon gave up apology. It was evident there were
+few things he enjoyed more than cooking a good dinner,--unless it was
+eating it,--and his apron was put on early in the day. In the end, I
+never asked any one to breakfast or dinner without consulting him, and
+his _menus_ strengthened the friendliness of our relations.
+
+After a while he ran my errands and helped Louise to market. I found
+that he spoke and wrote very good English, and was a man of some
+education. I have preserved his daily accounts, written in an unusually
+neat handwriting, always beginning "Mussy: 1 penny"; and this reminds me
+that not least in his favour was his success in ingratiating himself
+with William Penn,--or "Mussy" in Louise's one heroic attempt to cope
+with the English. M. Auguste, moreover, was quiet and reserved to a
+degree that would not have discredited the traditional Englishman. Only
+now and then did the _Midi_ show itself in him: in the gleam of his eye
+over his gastronomic masterpieces; in his pose as horse-dealer and the
+scale on which the business he never did was schemed,--_Mademoiselle_,
+the French dressmaker from Versailles, who counted in tens and thought
+herself rich, was dazzled by the way M. Auguste reckoned by thousands;
+and once, luckily only once, in a frenzied outbreak of passion.
+
+He was called to Paris, I never understood why. When the day came, he
+was seized with such despair as I had never seen before, as I trust I
+may never have to see again. He could not leave Louise, he would not.
+No! No! No! He raved, he swore, he wept. I was terrified, but Louise,
+when I called her aside to consult her, shrugged her shoulders. "We play
+the comedy in the kitchen," she laughed, but I noticed that her laughter
+was low. I fancy when you played the comedy with M. Auguste, tragedy was
+only just round the corner. With the help of _Mademoiselle_ she got him
+to the station; he had wanted to throw himself from the train as it
+started, was her report. And in three days, not a penny the richer for
+the journey, he had returned to his life of ease in our chambers.
+
+Thus we came to know M. Auguste's virtues and something of his temper,
+but never M. Auguste himself. The months passed, and we were still
+conscious of mystery. I did not inspire him with the healthy fear he
+entertained for J., but I cannot say he ever took me into his
+confidence. What he was when not in our chambers; what he had been
+before he moved into them; what turn of fate had stranded him,
+penniless, in London with Louise, to make us the richer for his coming;
+why he, a man of education, was married to a woman of none; why he was
+M. Auguste while Louise was Louise Sorel--I knew as little the day he
+left us as the day he arrived. J. instinctively distrusted him,
+convinced that he had committed some monstrous crime and was in hiding.
+This was also the opinion of the French Quarter, as I learned
+afterwards. It seems the _Quartier_ held its breath when it heard he was
+our guest, and waited for the worst, only uncertain what form that worst
+would take,--whether we should be assassinated in our beds, or a
+bonfire made of our chambers. M. Auguste, however, spared us and
+disappointed the _Quartier_. His crime, to the end, remained as baffling
+as the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, or the secret of Kaspar
+Hauser.
+
+That he was honest, I would wager my own reputation for honesty, even if
+it was curious the way his fingers gradually covered themselves with
+rings, a watch-chain dangled from his waistcoat pocket, a pin was stuck
+jauntily in his necktie. Her last purchases at the _Mont de Piété_,
+pawned during those first weeks of starving in London and gradually
+redeemed, was Louise's explanation; and why should we have suspected M.
+Auguste of coming by them unlawfully when he never attempted to rob us,
+though we gave him every opportunity? He knew where I kept my money and
+my keys. He was alone with Louise in our chambers, not only many a day
+and evening, but once for a long summer.
+
+We had to cycle down into Italy and William Penn could not be left to
+care for himself, nor could we board him out without risking the
+individuality of a cat who had never seen the world except from the top
+of a four-story house. Louise and M. Auguste, therefore, were retained
+to look after him, which, I should add, they did in a manner as
+satisfactory to William as to ourselves. Every week I received a report
+of his health and appetite from M. Auguste, in whom I discovered a new
+and delightful talent as correspondent. "_Depuis votre départ_," said
+the first, "_cette pauvre bête a miaulé après vous tous les jours, et il
+est constamment à la porte pour voir si vous ne venez pas. Il ne
+commence vraiment à en prendre son parti que depuis hier. Mais tous ces
+soucis de chat_ [for that charming phrase what would one not have
+forgiven M. Auguste?], _mais tous ces soucis de chat ne l'empêchent pas
+de bien boire son lait le matin et manger sa viande deux fois par
+jour._" Nor was it all colour of rose to be in charge of William.
+"_Figurez-vous_," the next report ran, "_que Mussy a dévoré et abîmé
+complêtement une paire de bas tout neufs que Louise s'est achetée hier.
+C'est un vrai petit diable, mais il est si gentil qu'on ne peut vraiment
+pas le gronder pour cela._" It was consoling to hear eventually that
+William had returned to normal pursuits. "_Mussy est bien sage, il a
+attrapé une souris hier dans la cuisine--je crois bien que Madame ne
+trouvera jamais un aussi gentil Mussy._" And so the journal of William's
+movements was continued throughout our absence. When, leaving J. in
+Italy, I returned to London,--met at midnight at the station by M.
+Auguste with flattering enthusiasm,--Mussy's condition and behaviour
+corroborated the weekly bulletins. And not only this. Our chambers were
+as clean as the proverbial new pin: everything was in its place; not so
+much as a scrap of paper was missing. The only thing that had
+disappeared was the sprinkling of gray in Louise's hair, and for this M.
+Auguste volubly prepared me during our walk from the station; she had
+dyed it with almost unforeseen success, he told me, so triumphantly that
+I put down the bottle of dye to his extravagance.
+
+If I know M. Auguste was not a thief, I do not think he was a murderer.
+How could I see blood on the hands of the man who presided so joyously
+over my pots and pans? If he were a forger, my trust in him never led
+to abuse of my cheque book; if a deserter, how came he to be possessed
+of his _livret militaire_ duly signed, as my own eyes are the witness?
+how could he venture back to France, as I know he did for I received
+from him letters with the Paris postmark? An anarchist, J. was inclined
+to believe. But I could not imagine him dabbling in bombs and fuses. To
+be a horse-dealer, without horses or money, was much more in his line.
+
+Only of one thing were we sure: however hideous or horrible the evil, M.
+Auguste had worked "down there," under the hot sun of Provence, Louise
+had no part in it. She knew--it was the reason of her curious
+reticences, of her sacrifice of herself to him. That he loved her was
+inevitable. Who could help loving her? She was so intelligent, so
+graceful, so gay. But that she should love M. Auguste would have been
+incomprehensible, were it not in the nature of woman to love the man who
+is most selfish in his dependence upon her. She did all the work, and he
+had all the pleasure of it. He was always decently dressed, there was
+always money in his pocket, though she, who earned it, never had a penny
+to spend on herself. No matter how busy and hurried she might be, she
+had always the leisure to talk to him, to amuse him when he came in,
+always the courage to laugh, like the little Fleurance in the story.
+What would you? She was made like that. She had always laughed, when she
+was sad as when she was gay. And while she was making life delightful
+for him, she was doing for us what three Englishwomen combined could not
+have done so well, and with a charm that all the Englishwomen in the
+world could not have mustered among them.
+
+She had been with us about a year when I began to notice that, at
+moments, her face was clouded and her smile less ready. At first, I put
+it down to her endless comedy with M. Auguste. But, after a bit, it
+looked as if the trouble were more serious even than his histrionics. It
+was nothing, she laughed when I spoke to her; it would pass. And she
+went on amusing and providing for M. Auguste and working for us. But by
+the time the dark days of November set in, we were more worried about
+her than ever. The crisis came with Christmas.
+
+On Christmas Day, friends were to dine with us, and we invited
+_Mademoiselle_, the French dressmaker, to eat her Christmas dinner with
+Louise and M. Auguste. We were very staid in the dining-room,--it turned
+out rather a dull affair. But in the kitchen it was an uproarious feast.
+Though she lived some distance away, though on Christmas night London
+omnibuses are few and far between, _Mademoiselle_ could hardly be
+persuaded to go home, so much was she enjoying herself. Louise was all
+laughter. "You have been amused?" I asked, when _Mademoiselle_, finally
+and reluctantly, had been bundled off by J. in a hansom.
+
+"_Mais oui, mais oui_," M. Auguste cried, pleasure in his voice. "_Cette
+pauvre Mademoiselle!_ Her life, it is so sad, she is so alone. It is
+good for her to be amused. We have told her many stories,--_et des
+histoires un tout petit peu salées, n'est-ce pas? pour égayer cette
+pauvre Mademoiselle?_"
+
+It was the day after the feast that Louise had to give in. She confessed
+she had been in torture while she served our dinner and _Mademoiselle_
+was there. She could hardly eat or drink. But why make it sad for all
+the world because she was in pain? and she had laughed, she had laughed!
+
+We scolded her first. Then we sent her to a good doctor. It was worse
+than we feared. The trouble was grave, there must be an operation
+without delay. The big tears rolled down her cheeks as she said it. She
+looked old and broken. Why, she moaned, should this sorrow come to her?
+She had never done any harm to any one: why should she have to suffer?
+Why, indeed? Her mistake had been to do too little harm, too much good,
+to others, to think too little of herself. Now, she had to pay for it as
+one almost always does pay for one's good deeds. She worried far less
+over the pain she must bear than over the inconvenience to M. Auguste
+when she could no longer earn money for him.
+
+We wanted her to go into one of the London hospitals. We offered to take
+a room for her where she could stay after the operation until she got
+back her strength. But we must not think her ungrateful, the mere idea
+of a hospital made her desperate. And what would she do in a room _avec
+un homme comme ça_. Besides, there was the sister in Marseilles, and, in
+the hour of her distress, her sister's horses and carriages multiplied
+like the miraculous loaves and fishes, the vintages in the cellar
+doubled in age and strength. And she was going to die; it was queer, but
+one knew those things; and she longed to die _là-bas_, where there was a
+sun and the sky was blue, where she was at home. We knew she had not a
+penny for the journey. M. Auguste had seen to that. Naturally, J. gave
+her the money. He would not have had a moment's comfort if he had
+not,--the drain upon your own emotions is part of the penalty you pay
+for having a human being and not a machine to work for you,--and he
+added a little more to keep her from want on her arrival in Marseilles,
+in case the sister had vanished or the sister's fortunes had dwindled to
+their original proportions. He exacted but one condition: M. Auguste
+was not to know there was more than enough for the journey.
+
+Louise's last days with us were passed in tears,--poor Louise! who until
+now had laughed at fate. It was at this juncture that M. Auguste came
+out strong. I could not have believed he had it in him. He no longer
+spent his time dodging J. and dealing in visionary horses. He took
+Louise's place boldly. He made the beds, cooked all our meals, waited on
+us, dusted, opened the door, while Louise sat, melancholy and forlorn,
+in front of the kitchen fire. On the last day of all--she was not to
+start until the afternoon Continental train--she drew me mysteriously
+into the dining-room, she shut the door with every precaution, she
+showed me where she had sewed the extra sovereigns in her stays. M.
+Auguste should never know. "_Je pars pour mon long voyage_," she
+repeated. "_J'ai mes pressentiments._" And she was going to ask them to
+let her wear a black skirt I had given her, and an old coat of J.'s she
+had turned into a bodice, when the time came to lay her in her coffin.
+Thus something of ours would go with her on the long journey. How could
+she forget us? How could we forget her? she might better have asked. I
+made a thousand excuses to leave her; Louise playing "the comedy" had
+never been so tragic as Louise in tears. But she would have me back
+again, and again, and again, to tell me how happy she had been with us.
+
+"Why, I was at home," she said, her surprise not yet outworn. "_J'étais
+chez moi, et j'étais si tranquille._ I went. I came. _Monsieur_ entered.
+He called me. '_Louise._'--'_Oui, Monsieur._'--'_Voulez-vous faire ceci
+ou cela?_'--'_Mais oui, Monsieur, de suite._' And I would do it and
+_Monsieur_ would say, '_Merci, Louise_,' and he would go. And me, I
+would run quick to the kitchen or upstairs to finish my work. _J'étais
+si tranquille!_"
+
+The simplicity of the memories she treasured made her story of them
+pitiful as I listened. How little peace had fallen to her lot, that she
+should prize the quiet and homeliness of her duties in our chambers!
+
+At last it was time to go. She kissed me on both cheeks. She gave J. one
+look, then she flung herself into his arms and kissed him too on both
+cheeks. She almost strangled William Penn. She sobbed so, she couldn't
+speak. She clutched and kissed us again. She ran out of the door and we
+heard her sobbing down the three flights of stairs into the street. J.
+hurried into his workroom. I went back to my desk. I don't think we
+could have spoken either.
+
+Two days afterwards, a letter from M. Auguste came to our chambers, so
+empty and forlorn without Louise. They were in Paris. They had had a
+dreadful crossing,--he hardly thought Louise would arrive at Boulogne
+alive. She was better, but must rest a day or two before starting for
+the _Midi_. She begged us to see that Mussy ate his meals _bien
+régulièrement_, and that he "made the dead" from time to time, as she
+had taught him; and, would we write? The address was Mr. Auguste,
+Horse-Dealer, Hotel du Cheval Blanc, Rue Chat-qui-pèche-â-la-ligne,
+Paris.
+
+Horse-dealer! Louise might be at death's door, but M. Auguste had his
+position to maintain. Then, after ten long days, came a post-card, also
+from Paris: Louise was in Marseilles, he was on the point of going, once
+there he would write. Then--nothing. Had he gone? Could he go?
+
+If I were writing a romance it would, with dramatic fitness, end here.
+But if I keep to facts, I must add that, in about eight months, Louise
+and M. Auguste reappeared; that both were in the best of health and
+spirits, M. Auguste a mass of jewelry; that all the sunshine of Provence
+seemed let loose in the warmth of their greeting; that horse-dealing for
+the moment prospered too splendidly for Louise to want to return to
+us,--or was this a new invention, I have always wondered, because she
+found in her place another Frenchwoman who wept at the prospect of being
+dismissed to make room for her?
+
+Well, anyway, for a while, things, according to Louise, continued to
+prosper. She would pay me friendly visits and ask for sewing,--her
+afternoons were so long,--and tell me of M. Auguste's success, and of
+Provence, though there were the old reticences. By degrees, a shadow
+fell over the gaiety. I fancied that "the comedy" was being played
+faster than ever in the Soho lodgings. And, of a sudden, the fabric of
+prosperity collapsed like a house of cards. She was ill again, and again
+an operation was necessary. There was not a penny in her pockets nor in
+M. Auguste's. What happened? Louise had only to smile, and we were her
+slaves. But this time, for us at least, the end had really come. We
+heard nothing more from either of them. No letters reached us from
+Paris, no post-cards. Did she use the money to go back to Marseilles?
+Did she ever leave London? Did M. Auguste's fate overtake him when they
+crossed the Channel? Were the Soho lodgings the scene of some tremendous
+_crime passionel_? For weeks I searched the police reports in my morning
+paper. But neither then nor to this day have I had a trace of the woman
+who, for over a year, gave to life in our chambers the comfort and the
+charm of her presence. She vanished.
+
+I am certain, though, that wherever she may be, she is mothering M.
+Auguste, squandering upon him all the wealth of her industry, her
+gaiety, her unselfishness. She couldn't help herself, she was made that
+way. And the worst, the real tragedy of it, is that she would rather
+endure every possible wrong with M. Auguste than, without him, enjoy all
+the rights women not made that way would give her if they could. She has
+convinced me of the truth I already more than suspected: it is upon the
+M. Augustes of this world that the Woman Question will eventually be
+wrecked.
+
+
+
+
+_Our Charwomen_
+
+[Illustration: "UP TO WESTMINSTER"]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+OUR CHARWOMAN
+
+
+I took over the charwoman with our chambers, and a great piece of luck I
+thought it; for charwomen never advertise, and are unheard of in
+Registry Offices. It was certain I could not get into the chambers
+without one, and at that early stage of my housekeeping in London I
+should not have known where in the world to look for her.
+
+Mrs. Maxfielde was the highly respectable name of the woman who had
+"done" for the previous tenant, and had she heard of Mr. Shandy's theory
+of names she could not have been more successful in adapting her person
+and her manner to her own. She was well over sixty, and thin and gaunt
+as if she had never had enough to eat; but age and hunger had not
+lessened her hold upon the decencies of life. Worthiness oozed from her.
+Victorian was stamped all over her,--it was in her black shawl and
+bonnet, in the meekness of her pose, in the little curtsy she bobbed
+when she spoke. I remember Harold Frederic seeing her once and, with the
+intuition of the novelist, placing her: "Who is your old Queen
+Victoria?" he asked. Her presence lost nothing when she took off her
+shawl and bonnet. In the house and at work she wore a black dress and a
+white apron, surprisingly clean considering the dirt she exposed it to,
+and her grey hair was drawn tight back and rolled into a little hard
+knob, the scant supply and "the parting all too wide" painfully exposed
+to view. I longed for something to cover the old grey head that looked
+so grandmotherly and out of keeping as it bent over scrubbing-brushes
+and dustpans and the kitchen range, but it would have been against all
+the conventions for a charwoman to appear in a servant's cap. There is a
+rigid line in these English matters, and to attempt to step across is to
+face the contempt of those who draw it. The British charwoman must go
+capless, such is the unwritten law; also, she must remain "Miss" or
+"Mrs.," though the Empire would totter were the British servant called
+by anything but her name; and while the servant would "forget her place"
+were she to know how to do any work outside her own, the charwoman is
+expected to meet every emergency, and this was in days when housekeeping
+for me was little more than a long succession of emergencies.
+
+Mrs. Maxfielde was equal to all. She saw me triumphantly through one
+domestic crisis after another. She was the most accomplished of her
+accomplished class, and the most willing. She was never discouraged by
+the magnitude of the tasks I set her, nor did she ever take advantage of
+my dependence upon her. On the contrary, she let me take advantage of
+her willingness. She cleaned up after the British Workman had been in
+possession for a couple of months, and one of the few things the British
+Workman can do successfully is to leave dirt to be cleaned up. She
+helped me move in and settle down. She supported me through my trying
+episode with 'Enrietter. And after 'Enrietter's disappearance she saved
+me from domestic chaos, though the work and the hours involved would
+have daunted a woman half her age and outraged every trade-union in the
+country. She arrived at seven in the morning, and I quickly handed over
+to her the key of the front door, that I might indulge in the extra hour
+of sleep of which she was so much more in need; she stayed until eight
+in the evening, or, at my request, until nine or later; and in between
+she "did" for me in the fullest sense of that expressive word. There
+were times when it meant "doing" also for my friends whom I was
+inconsiderate enough to invite to come and see me in my domestic
+upheaval, putting their friendship to the test still further by inducing
+them to share the luncheons and dinners of Mrs. Maxfielde's cooking.
+Many as were her good points, I cannot in conscience say that cooking
+was among them. Hers might have been the vegetables of which Heine wrote
+that they were brought to the table just as God made them, hers the
+gravies against which he prayed Heaven to keep every Christian. But I
+thought it much to be thankful for that she could cook at all when, to
+judge from the amount she ate, she could have had so little practice in
+cooking for herself. She did not need to go through any "fast cure,"
+having done nothing but fast all her life. She had got out of the way of
+eating and into the way of starving; the choicest dish would not have
+tempted her. The one thing she showed the least appetite for was her
+"'arf pint" at noon, and that she would not do without though she had to
+fetch it from the "public" round the corner. I cannot say with greater
+truth that Mrs. Maxfielde's talent lay in waiting, but she never allowed
+anything or anybody to hurry her, and she was noiseless in her
+movements, both excellent things in a waitress. I cannot even say that
+in her own line of scrubbing she was above suspicion, but she handled
+her brushes and brooms and dusters with a calm and dignity which, in my
+troubles, I found very soothing. Her repose may have been less a virtue
+than the result of want of proper food, but in any case it was a great
+help in the midst of the confusion she was called to struggle with.
+There was only one drawback. It had a way of deserting her just when I
+was most in need of it.
+
+We are all human, and Mrs. Maxfielde was not without her weakness: she
+was afflicted with nerves. In looking back I can see how in character
+her sensibility was. It belonged to the old shawl and the demure bonnet,
+to the meekness of pose, to the bobbing of curtsies,--it was Victorian.
+But at the time I was more struck by its inconvenience. A late milkman
+or a faithless butcher would bring her to the verge of collapse. She
+would jump at the over-boiling of the kettle. Her hand went to her heart
+on the slightest provocation, and stayed there with a persistency that
+made me suspect her of seeking her dissipation in disaster. On the
+morning after our fire, though she had been at home in her own bed
+through all the danger of it, she was in such a flutter that I should
+have had to revive her with salts had not a dozen firemen, policemen,
+and salvage men been waiting for her to refresh them with tea. It was
+only when one of the firemen took the kettle from her helpless hand,
+saying he was a family man himself, and when I stood sternly over her
+that, like an elderly Charlotte, she fell to cutting bread and butter,
+and regained the calm and dignity becoming to her. But I never saw her
+so agitated as the day she met a rat in the cellar. I had supposed it
+was only in comic papers and old-fashioned novels that a rat or a mouse
+could drive a sensible woman into hysterics. But Mrs. Maxfielde showed
+me my mistake. From that innocent encounter in the cellar she bounded up
+the four flights of stairs, burst into my room, and, breathless, livid,
+both hands on her heart, sank into a chair: a liberty which at any other
+time she would have regarded as a breach of all the proprieties. "Oh,
+mum!" she gasped, "in the cellar!--a rat!" And she was not herself again
+until the next morning.
+
+After her day's work and her excitement in the course of it, it seemed
+as if Mrs. Maxfielde could have neither time nor energy for a life of
+her own outside our chambers. But she had, and a very full life it was,
+and with the details as she confided them to me, I got to know a great
+deal about "how the poor live," which I should have preferred to learn
+from a novel or a Blue Book. She had a husband, much older, who had
+been paralyzed for years. Before she came to me in the morning she had
+to get him up for the day, give him his breakfast, and leave everything
+in order for him, and as she lived half an hour's walk from our chambers
+and never failed to reach them by seven, there was no need to ask how
+early she had to get herself up. For a few pence a friendly neighbour
+looked in and attended to him during the day. After Mrs. Maxfielde left
+me, at eight or nine or ten in the evening, and after her half hour's
+walk back, she had to prepare his supper and put him to bed; and again I
+did not have to ask how late she put her own weary self there too. Old
+age was once said to begin at forty-six; we are more strenuous now; but
+according to the kindest computations, it had well overtaken her. And
+yet she was working harder than she probably ever had in her youth, with
+less rest and with the pleasing certainty that she would go on working
+day in and day out and never succeed in securing the mere necessities of
+life. She might have all the virtues, sobriety, industry, economy,--and
+she had,--and the best she could hope was just to keep soul and body
+together for her husband and herself, and a little corner they could
+call their own. She did not tell me how the husband earned a living
+before paralysis kept him from earning anything at all, but he too must
+have been worthy of his name, for now he was helpless, the parish
+allowed him "outdoor relief" to the extent of three shillings and
+sixpence, or about eighty cents a week; it was before old-age pensions
+had been invented by a vote-touting Government. This munificent sum,
+paid for a room somewhere in a "Building," one of those gloomy barracks
+with the outside iron stairway in common, where clothes are forever
+drying in the thick, soot-laden London air, and children are forever
+howling and shrieking. For everything else Mrs. Maxfielde had to
+provide. If she worked every day except Sunday, her earnings amounted to
+fifteen shillings, or a little less than four dollars, a week. But there
+were weeks when she could obtain only one day's work, weeks when she
+could obtain none, and she and her husband had still to live, had still
+to eat something, well as they had trained themselves, as so many must,
+in the habit of not eating enough. Here was an economic problem
+calculated to bewilder more youthful and brilliant brains than hers. But
+she never complained, she never grumbled, she never got discouraged. She
+might fly before a rat, but in the face of the hopeless horrors of life
+she retained her beautiful placidity, though I, when I realized the full
+weight of the burden she had to bear, began to wonder less how, than
+why, the poor live.
+
+Mrs. Maxfielde came in the early spring. By the time winter, with its
+fogs, set in, age had so far overtaken her that she could not manage to
+attend to her husband and his wants and then drag her old body to our
+chambers by seven o'clock in the morning. It was she who gave notice; I
+never should have had the courage. We parted friends, and she was so
+amiable as not to deprive me of her problems with her services. When she
+could not work for me, she visited me, making it her rule to call on
+Monday afternoon; a rule she observed with such regularity that I
+fancied Monday must be her day for collecting the husband's income from
+the parish and her own from private sources. She rarely allowed a week
+to pass without presenting herself, always appearing in the same
+Victorian costume and carrying off the interview with the same Victorian
+manner. She never stooped to beg, but her hand was ready for the coin
+which I slipped into it with the embarrassment of the giver, but which
+she received with enviable calmness and a little curtsy. The hour of her
+visit was so timed that, when her talk with me was over, she could
+adjourn to the kitchen for dinner and, under Augustine's rule, a glass
+of wine, which, though beer would have been more to her taste, she drank
+as a concession to the poor foreigner who did not know any better.
+
+Before a second winter had passed, Mrs. Maxfielde was forced to admit
+that she was too old for anybody to want her, or to accept a post if
+anybody did. But, all the same, the paralytic clung to his shadow of
+life with the obstinate tenacity of the human derelict, and she clung to
+her idea of home, and they starved on in the room the parish paid for
+until it was a positive relief to me when, after more years of
+starvation than I cared to count, she came to announce his death. It was
+no relief to her. She was full of grief, and permitted nothing to
+distract her from the luxury she made of it. The coin which passed from
+my hand to hers on the occasion of this visit, doubled in token of
+condolence, was invested in an elaborate crape bonnet, and she left it
+to me to worry about her future. I might have afforded to accept her
+trust with a greater show of enthusiasm, for, at once and with
+unlooked-for intelligence, the parish decided to allow her the same
+weekly sum her husband had received, and Mrs. Maxfielde, endowed with
+this large and princely income, became a parent so worthy of filial
+devotion that a daughter I had never heard of materialized, and
+expressed a desire to share her home with her mother.
+
+The daughter was married, her husband was an unskilled labourer, and
+they had a large and increasing family. It is likely that Mrs. Maxfielde
+paid in more than money for the shelter, and that her own
+flesh-and-blood was less chary than strangers would have been in
+employing her services, and less mindful of the now more than seventy
+years she had toiled to live. Perhaps her visits at this period were a
+little more frequent, perhaps her dinners were eaten and her wine drunk
+with a little more eagerness. But she refrained from any pose, she
+indulged in no heroics, she entertained me with no whinings, no railings
+against the ingratitude sharper than a serpent's tooth. However she got
+her ease, it was not in weeping, and what she had to bear from her
+daughter she bore in silence. Her Victorian sense of propriety would
+have been offended by a display of feeling. She became so pitiful a
+figure that I shrank from her visits. But she was content, she found no
+fault with life, and wealth being a matter of comparison, I am sure she
+was, in her turn, moved to pity for the more unfortunate who had not
+kept themselves out of the workhouse. Had she had her way, she would
+have been willing to slave indefinitely for her daughter and her
+daughter's children. But Death was wiser and brought her the rest she
+deserved so well and so little craved.
+
+A couple of years or so after the loss of her husband, and after she had
+failed to appear, much to my surprise, on three or four Mondays in
+succession, a letter came from her daughter to tell me that never again
+would Monday bring Mrs. Maxfielde to my chambers. There had been no
+special illness. She had just worn out, that was all. Her time had come
+after long and cruel days of toil and her passing was unnoted, for hers
+was a place easily filled,--that was the grisly thing about it. J. and I
+sent a wreath of flowers for the funeral, knowing that she would have
+welcomed it as propriety's crown of propriety, and it was my last
+communication with the Maxfielde family. I had never met the daughter,
+and I was the more reluctant to go abroad in search of objects of
+charity because they had such an inconsiderate way of seeking me out in
+my own kitchen. I was already "suited" with another old woman in Mrs.
+Maxfielde's place. I was already visited by one or two others. In fact,
+I was so surrounded by old women that Augustine, when she first came to
+the rescue, used to laugh with the insolence of youth at _les vieilles
+femmes de Madame_.
+
+My new old woman was Mrs. Burden. Had I hunted all London over, I could
+not have found a more complete contrast to Mrs. Maxfielde. She was
+Irish, with no respect for Victorian proprieties, but as disreputable
+looking an old charwoman as you would care to see; large and floppy in
+figure, elephantine in movement, her face rough and dug deep by the
+trenches of more than fifty winters, her hair frowzy, her dress ragged,
+with the bodice always open at the neck and the sleeves always rolled up
+above the elbows, her apron an old calico rag, and her person and her
+clothes profusely sprinkled with snuff. In the street she wrapped
+herself in a horrible grey blanket-shawl, and on top of her disorderly
+old head set a little battered bonnet with two wisps of strings dangling
+about. When I knew her better I discovered that she owned a black shawl
+with fringe, and a bonnet that could tie under the chin, and in these
+made a very fine appearance. But they were reserved for such ceremonial
+occasions as Mass on Sunday or the funeral of a friend, and at other
+times she kept to the costume that so shamefully maligned her. For, if
+she looked like one of the terrible harpies who hang about the public
+house in every London slum, she was really the most sober creature in
+the world and never touched a drop, Mr. Burden, who drank himself into
+an early grave, having drunk enough for two.
+
+I cannot remember now where Mrs. Burden came from, or why, when I had
+seen her once, I ever consented to see her again. But she quickly grew
+into a fixture in our chambers, and it was some eight or nine years
+before I was rid of her. In the beginning she was engaged for three
+mornings, later on for every morning, in the week. Her hours were from
+seven to twelve, during which time my chief object was to keep her
+safely shut up in the kitchen, for no degree of pretending on my part
+could make me believe in her as an ornament or a credit to our house. It
+mortified me to have her show her snuffy old face at the front door, and
+I should never have dared to send her on the many messages she ran for
+me had she not been known to everybody in the Quarter; but once Mrs.
+Burden was known it was all right, for she was as good as she was sober.
+Hers, however, was the goodness of the man in the Italian proverb who
+was so good that he was good for nothing. She was willing to do
+anything, but there was nothing she could do well, and most things she
+could not do at all. She made no pretence to cook, and if she had I
+could not have eaten anything of her cooking, for I knew snuff must
+flavour everything she touched. To have seen her big person and frowzy
+head in the dining-room would have been fatal to appetite had I ever had
+the folly, under any circumstances, to ask her to wait. Nor did she
+excel in scrubbing and dusting. She was successful chiefly in leaving
+things dirtier than she found them, and Augustine, whose ideal is high
+in these matters, insisted that Mrs. Burden spent the morning making the
+dirt she had to spend the afternoon cleaning up. There were times when
+they almost came to blows, for the temper of both was hot, and more than
+once I heard Mrs. Burden threaten to call in the police. But the old
+woman had her uses. She was honesty itself, and could be trusted with no
+matter what,--from the key of our chambers, when they were left empty,
+to the care of William Penn, when no other companion could be secured
+for him; she could be relied upon to pay bills, post letters, fetch
+parcels; and she was as punctual as Big Ben at Westminster. I do not
+think she missed a day in all the years she was with me. I became
+accustomed, too, to seeing her about, and there was the dread--or
+conviction would be nearer the truth--that if I let her go nobody else
+in their senses would take her in.
+
+Mrs. Burden did not improve with time. She never condescended to borrow
+qualities that did not belong to her. She grew more unwieldy and larger
+and floppier, a misfortune she attributed to some mysterious malady
+which she never named, but gloated over with the pride the poor have in
+their diseases. And she grew dirtier and more disorderly, continuing to
+scorn my objection to her opening the front door with the shoe she was
+blacking still on her hand, or to her bringing me a letter wrapped in
+an apron grimier than her grimy fingers. Nothing would induce her not to
+call me "Missis," which displeased me more, if for other reasons, than
+the "Master" she as invariably bestowed upon J. She bobbed no curtsies.
+When, on Saturdays, coins passed from my hand to hers, she spat on them
+before she put them in her pocket, to what purpose I have not to this
+day divined. Her best friend could not have accused her of any charm of
+manner, but, being Irish, she escaped the vulgarity bred in the London
+slums. In fact, I often fancied I caught gleams of what has been called
+the Celtic Temperament shining through her. She had the warmth of
+devotion, the exaggeration of loyalty, the power of idealizing, peculiar
+to her race. She was almost lyrical in her praise of J., who stood
+highest in her esteem, and "Master good! Master good!" was her constant
+refrain when she conversed with Augustine in the language fitted for
+children and rich in gesture, which was her well-meant substitute for
+French. She saw him glorified, as the poets of her country see their
+heroes, and in her eyes he loomed a splendid Rothschild. "Master, plenty
+money, plenty money!" she would assure Augustine, and, holding up her
+apron by the two corners, and well out from her so as to represent a
+capacious bag, add, "apron full, full, full!"
+
+She had also the Celtic lavishness of hospitality. I remember Whistler's
+delight one morning when, after an absence from London, he received at
+our front door a welcome from Mrs. Burden, whom he had never seen before
+and now saw at her grimiest: "Shure, Mr. Whistler, sir, an it's quite a
+stranger ye are. It's glad I am to see ye back, sir, and looking so
+well!" Her hospitality was extended to her own friends when she had the
+chance. She who drank nothing could not allow Mr. Pooley, the sweep, who
+was her neighbour and cleaned our chimneys, to leave our chambers after
+his professional services without a drop of whiskey to hearten him on
+his sooty way. And, though you would still less have suspected it,
+romance had kept its bloom fresh in her heart. The summer the Duke of
+York was married I could not understand her interest in the wedding, as
+until then she had not specially concerned herself with the affairs of
+royalty. But on the wedding-day this interest reached a point when she
+had to share it with somebody. "Shure, Missis, and I knows how it is
+meself. Wasn't I after marrying Burden's brother and he older than
+Burden, and didn't he go and die, God bless him! and leave me to Burden.
+And shure thin it's me that knows how the poor Princess May, Lord love
+her! is feeling this blessed day!"
+
+Not only the memory, but her pride in it, had survived the years which
+never brought romance to her again. The one decent thing Burden did was
+to die and rid the world of him before Mrs. Burden had presented him and
+society with more than one child, a boy. He was a good son, she said,
+which meant that he spent his boyhood picking up odd jobs and, with
+them, odd pence to help his mother along, so that at the age when he
+should have been able to do something, he knew how to do nothing, and
+had not even the physical strength to fit him for the more profitable
+kinds of unskilled labour. He thought himself lucky when, in his
+twentieth year, he fell into a place as "washer-up" in a cheap
+restaurant which paid eighteen shillings a week; and he was so dazzled
+by his wealth that he promptly married. His wife's story is short: she
+drank. Mercifully, like Burden, she did the one thing she could do with
+all her might and drank herself to death with commendable swiftness,
+leaving no children to carry on the family tradition. Mrs. Burden was
+once more alone with her son. Between them they earned twenty-eight
+shillings a week and felt themselves millionaires. Augustine, for some
+reason, went at this period once or twice to her room, over the dingy
+shop of a cheap undertaker, and reported it fairly clean and provided
+with so much comfort as is represented by blankets on the bed and a
+kettle on the hob. But after a bit the son died, the cause, as far as I
+could make out, a drunken father and years of semi-starvation; and Mrs.
+Burden had to face, as cheerfully as she could, an old age to be lived
+out in loneliness and in the vain endeavour to make both ends meet on
+eight shillings a week, or less if she lost her job with me.
+
+She did lose it, poor soul. But what could I do? She really got to be
+intolerably dirty. Not that I blamed her. I probably should have been
+much dirtier under the same circumstances. But a time came when it
+seemed as if we must give up either Mrs. Burden or our chambers, and to
+give our chambers up when we had not the least desire to, would have
+been a desperate remedy. She had one other piece of regular work; when I
+spoke to her about going, she assured me that her neighbours had been
+waiting for years to get her to do their washing, and she would be glad
+to oblige them; and, on my pressing invitation, she promised to run in
+and see me often. At this new stage in our relations she showed a rare
+delicacy of feeling. Mrs. Maxfielde, no longer in my service, was eager
+to pay me visits, and her hand, if not held out to beg, was open to
+receive. Mrs. Burden did not keep her promise to come, she gave me no
+opportunity to know whether her hand was open in need or shut on plenty.
+She was of the kind that would rather starve than publish their
+destitution. I might have preserved an easy conscience in her regard but
+for Mr. Pooley, the sweep. The first time he returned in his
+professional capacity after her departure and found himself deprived of
+the usual refreshment, he was indignant, and, in consequence, he was
+very gruff and short with me when I inquired after Mrs. Burden. She
+hadn't any work, not she, and he supposed, he did, that she might starve
+for all some people cared.
+
+I could scarcely ignore so broad a hint, and I had her round that same
+morning, for her slum was close by. I learned from her that Mr. Pooley,
+if gruff, was truthful. She had no work, had not had any for weeks. She
+was in arrears to her landlord, her shawl with the fringe and her
+blankets were in pawn, she hadn't a farthing in her pocket. J., to whom
+I refer all such matters, and who was in her debt for the splendour of
+wealth with which she had endowed him, said "it was all nonsense,"--by
+"it" I suppose he meant this sorry scheme of things,--and he would not
+let her go without the money to pay her landlord, not only for arrears,
+but in advance, and also to redeem her possessions. I do not think she
+was the less grateful if, instead of bobbing humbly, she spat upon the
+coins before her first "Shure and may God bless ye, Master." Nor was J.
+comfortable until provisions had followed her in such quantities that he
+would not have to be bothered by the thought of her starving to death,
+at any rate for some days. Even after that, she scrupulously kept away.
+Not Christmas, that in London brings everybody with or without excuse
+begging at one's door, could induce her to present herself. It was we
+who had to send for her, and, in a land where begging comes so easily,
+we respected her for her independence.
+
+I doubt if she ever got more work to do. She never received outdoor
+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 _apéritifs_. 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
+_apéritifs_ 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 ménage_
+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 _Crédit
+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
+maître, 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 Clémentine, 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.
+
+
+
+
+_Clémentine_
+
+[Illustration: "WHEN THERE IS A SUN ON A WINTER MORNING"]
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+CLÉMENTINE
+
+
+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 Clémentine,
+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; Clémentine, 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 goûter_ 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 Clémentine 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 Clémentine'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 Clémentine'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 Clémentine 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
+Clémentine 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 Clémentine 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
+Clémentine 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 Clémentine's hunger meant she did not have to
+tell me; that her little Ernest was also hungry, and also _la vieille
+grandmère_; that her little Ernest was her son,--"_Oui, Madame, je
+serais franche, j'ai un fils mais pas un mari_"; that _la vieille
+grandmère_ 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 Clémentine, 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 Clémentine; 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. Clémentine'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 grandmère_ 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 Clémentine'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. Clémentine 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 grandmère_ 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 ça 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 Clémentine 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 Clémentine, 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 Clémentine 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 Clémentine'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 Clémentine 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.
+Clémentine, 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 Clémentine'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
+trouvés_ 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 _préfet_, or even a prince?"
+
+For practical purposes she knew no parents save the peasants who brought
+her up. The State in France, thrifty as the people, makes the children
+abandoned to it a source of profit to the hard-working poor. Clémentine
+was put out to nurse. The one spark of genuine affection she ever showed
+was for the woman to whose care she fell, and of whom she always spoke
+as _ma mère_, with a tenderness very different from her giggling
+adoration of the little Ernest. Incessant labour was the rule in _ma
+mère's_ house, and food was not too abundant, but of what there was
+Clémentine had her share, though I fancy the scarcity then was the
+origin of the terrible hunger that consumed her throughout her life.
+About this hunger her story revolved, so that, while she talked of the
+past, I could seldom get far away from it. She recalled little else of
+the places the Institution found for her as servant. The State in France
+is as wise as it is thrifty, and does not demoralize its foundlings by
+free gifts, but, when the time comes, makes them work, appropriating
+their wages until it has been paid back the money they have cost it.
+
+Clémentine went into service young. She also went into it hungry, and
+life became a never-ending struggle for food. In one place she was
+reduced to such straits that she devoured a dish of poisoned meat
+prepared for the stray cats of the neighbourhood, and, though it brought
+her almost to death's door, she could still recall it as a feast. In
+another, a small country grocery store, she would steal down in the
+night, trembling with fear, to hunt for bits of candy and crackers, and,
+safe in bed again, would have to fight for them with the rats that
+shared her garret. And her tale of this period grew more miserable and
+squalid with every new stage, until she reached the dreadful climax
+when, still a child herself, she brought a little girl into the world to
+share her hunger. She had the courage to laugh when she told me of her
+wandering, half-starved, back to _la bonne mère_, who took her in when
+her time came, and kept the baby. She could laugh, too, when she
+recalled the wrath of _M. le Directeur_ at the Institution, who sent for
+her, and scolded her, giving her a few sharp raps with his cane.
+
+If to Clémentine her tragedy was a laughing matter, it was not for me to
+weep over it. But I was glad when she got through with this period and
+came to the next, which had in it more of pure comedy than enlivened
+most of her confidences. For once she was of age, and her debt to the
+Institution settled in full, she was free not only to work for herself,
+but to claim a percentage of the money she had been making during the
+long years of apprenticeship; and this percentage amounting to five
+hundred francs, and Clémentine never having seen so much money before,
+her imagination was stirred by the vastness of her wealth, and she
+insisted on being paid in five-franc pieces. She had to get a basket to
+hold them all, and with it on her arm she started off in search of
+adventure. This, I think, was the supreme moment in her life.
+
+Her adventures began in the third-class carriage of a train for
+Boulogne, which might seem a mild beginning to most people, but was full
+of excitement for Clémentine. She dipped her hands into the silver, and
+jingled it, and displayed it to everybody, with the vanity of a child
+showing off its new frock. The only wonder was that any of the
+five-franc pieces were still in the basket when she got to Boulogne.
+There they drew to her a group of young men and women who were bound for
+England to make their fortunes, and who persuaded her to join them. Her
+head was not completely turned by her wealth, for she crossed with them
+on the _bâteau aux lapins_, which she explained as the cheapest boat
+upon which anything but beasts and vegetables could find passage. At
+Folkestone, where they landed, she had no difficulty in getting a place
+as scullery maid. But washing up was as dull in England as in France, a
+poor resource for anybody with a basketful of five-franc pieces. One of
+the young men who had crossed with her agreed that it was a waste of
+time to work when there was money to spend, and they decided for a life
+of leisure together. The question of marriage apparently did not enter
+into the arrangement. They were content to remain _des unis_, in M.
+Rod's phrase, and their union was celebrated by a few weeks of riotous
+living. The chicken their own Henry IV wished for all his subjects
+filled the daily pot, beer flowed like water, they could have paid for
+cake had bread failed; for the first time in her life Clémentine forgot
+what it was to be hungry.
+
+It was delightful while it lasted, and I do not believe that she ever
+regretted having had her fling when the chance came. But the basket grew
+lighter and lighter, and all too soon barely enough five-franc pieces
+were left in it to carry them up to London. There, naturally, they found
+their way to the _Quartier_. The man picked up an odd job or two,
+Clémentine scrubbed, washed, waited, did any and everything by which a
+few pence could be earned. The pot was now empty, beer ceased to flow,
+bread sometimes was beyond their means, and she was hungrier than ever.
+In the course of the year her little Ernest was added to the family, and
+there was no _bonne mère_ in London to relieve her of the new burden.
+For a while Clémentine could not work; when she could, there was no work
+to be had. Nor could the man get any more jobs, though I fancy his hunt
+for them was not too strenuous. Life became a stern, bread-hunting sort
+of business, and I think at moments Clémentine almost wished herself
+back in the garret with the rats, or in the garden where dishes of
+poisoned meat were sometimes to be stolen. The landlord threatened,
+starvation stared them in the face. Hunger is ever the incentive to
+enterprise, and Ernest's father turned Clémentine on the streets.
+
+I must do her the justice to say that, of all her adventures, this was
+the one least to her liking. That she had fallen so low did not shock
+her; she looked upon it as part of the inevitable scheme of things: but
+left to herself, she would have preferred another mode of earning her
+living. After I had been told of this period of horrors, I could never
+hear Clémentine's high, shrill treble and giggle without a shudder, for
+they were then part of her stock-in-trade, and she went on the streets
+in short skirts with her hair down her back. For months she wallowed in
+the gutter, at the mercy of the lowest and the most degraded, insulted,
+robbed, despised, and if she attempted to rebel, bullied back to her
+shameful trade by a man who had no thought save for the few pitiful
+pence she could bring to him out of it. The only part of the affair that
+pleased her was the ending--in prison after a disgraceful street brawl.
+She was really at heart an adventuress, and the opportunity to see for
+the first time the inside of the _panier à salade_, as she called the
+prison van, was welcomed by her in the light of a new and exciting
+adventure. Then, in prison itself, the dress with the arrows could be
+adjusted becomingly, warders and fellow prisoners could be made to laugh
+by her antics, and if she could have wished for more to eat, it was a
+great thing not to have to find the means to pay for what she got.
+
+She was hardly out of prison when Ernest's father chanced upon a woman
+who could provide for him more liberally, and Clémentine was again a
+free agent. The streets knew her no more, though for an interval the
+workhouse did. This was the crisis when, with the shrewdness acquired in
+the London slums, she learned something of the English law to her own
+advantage, and through the courts compelled the father to contribute to
+the support of his son. The weekly three shillings and sixpence paid for
+a room. For food she had to work. With prison behind her, she was afraid
+to ask for a place in respectable houses, and I should not care to
+record the sinks of iniquity and squalid dens where her shrill treble
+and little girl's giggle were heard. Ernest was dumped down of a morning
+upon any friendly neighbour who would keep an eye on him, until, somehow
+or other, _la vieille grandmère_ appeared upon the scene and Clémentine
+once more had two to feed and the daily problem of her own hunger to
+face.
+
+Her responsibilities never drove her to work harder than was absolutely
+necessary. "We must all toil or steal," Carlyle says. But Clémentine
+knew better. She could have suggested a third alternative, for she had
+reduced begging to a fine art. Her scent was as keen for charitable
+associations as a pig's for truffles, and she could tell to a minute the
+appointed time of their alms-giving, and to a penny the value of their
+alms. She would, no matter when, drop regular work at the risk of losing
+it, to rush off after a possible charity. There was a _Société_--I never
+knew it by any other name--that, while she was with me, drew her from my
+kitchen floor or my luncheon dishes as surely as Thursday came round,
+and the clock struck one. Why it existed she never made quite clear to
+me,--I doubt if she had an idea why, herself. It was enough for her that
+the poor French in London were under its special charge, and that, when
+luck was with her, she might come away with a loaf of bread, or an order
+for coals, or, if she played the beggar well, as much as a shilling.
+
+She kept up a brisk correspondence with "_Madame la Baronne de
+Rothschild_," whose sole mission in life she apparently believed was to
+see her out of her difficulties. _La Baronne_, on one occasion, gave her
+a sovereign, Heaven knows why, unless as a desperate measure to close
+the correspondence; but a good part of it went in postage for letters
+representing why the bestowal of sovereigns upon Clémentine should
+become habitual. Stray agents, presumably from _la Baronne_, would pay
+me mysterious visits, to ask if Clémentine were a deserving object of
+benevolence, and I was exposed to repeated cross-examination in her
+regard. She made a point of learning the hours when the _chefs_ left the
+kitchens of the big hotels and restaurants near the _Quartier_, and
+also of finding out who among them might be looked to for a few odd
+pence for the sake of Ernest's father, at one time a washer of dishes,
+or who, after a _coup de vin_ or an _absinthe_, grew generous with their
+money. She had gauged the depth of every tender heart in the _Quartier_
+and the possibility of scraps and broken meats at every shop and
+eating-place. And no one understood better how to beg, how to turn on
+the limelight and bring out in melodramatic relief the enormity of her
+need and destitution. The lisping treble, the giggle, the tattered
+clothes, _la vieille grandmère_, the desertion of the little Ernest's
+father, the little Ernest himself, were so many valuable assets. Indeed,
+she appreciated the value of the little Ernest so well that once she
+would have had me multiply him by twelve when she asked me to vouch for
+her poverty before some new society disposed to be friendly. If luck
+went against her, and nothing came of her begging, she was not
+discouraged. Begging was a game of chance with her,--her Monte Carlo or
+Little Horses,--and she never murmured over her failures, but with her
+faculty for making the best of all things, she got amusement out of
+them as well as out of her successes.
+
+In the face of these facts, I cannot deny that Clémentine's "character"
+was not exactly the sort most people expect when they engage a servant.
+But I would not turn adrift a mangy dog or a lost cat whom I had once
+taken in. And she did her work very well, with a thoroughness the
+English charwoman would have despised, never minding what that work was,
+so long as she had plenty to eat and could prepare by an elaborate
+toilet for every errand she ran. Her morals could do us small harm, and
+for a while I was foolish enough to hope ours might do her some good. I
+realize now that nothing could have improved Clémentine; she was not
+made that way; but at the time she was too wholly unlike any woman I had
+ever come in contact with, for me to see that the difference lay in her
+having no morals to help. She was not immoral, but unmoral. Right and
+wrong were without meaning for her. Her standards, if she could be said
+to have any, were comfort and discomfort. Virtue and vice were the same
+to her, so long as she was not unpleasantly interfered with. This was
+the explanation of her past, as of her frankness in disclosing it, and
+she was too much occupied in avoiding present pain to bother about the
+future by cultivating economy, or ambition, or prudence. An animal would
+take more thought for the morrow than Clémentine. Of all the people I
+have ever come across, she had the most reason to be weary-laden, but
+instead of "tears in her eyes," there was always a giggle on her lips.
+"_La colère, c'est la folie_," she assured me, and it was a folly she
+avoided with marked success. Perhaps she was wise, undoubtedly she was
+the happier for it.
+
+Unfortunately for me, I had not her callousness or philosophy,--I am not
+yet quite sure which it was,--and if she would not think for herself, I
+was the more disturbed by the necessity of thinking for her. It was an
+absurd position. There I was, positively growing grey in my endeavours
+to drag her up out of the abyss of poverty into which she had sunk, and
+there she was, cheerful and happy, if she could only continue to enjoy
+_la bonne cuisine de Madame_. I never knew her to make the slightest
+attempt to profit by what I, or anyone else, would do for her. I
+remember, when _Madame la Baronne_ sent her the sovereign, she stayed at
+home a week, and then wrote to me as her excuse, "_J'ai été rentière
+toute la semaine. Maintenant je n'ai plus un penny, il faut m'occuper du
+travail._" I had not taken her things out of pawn before they were
+pawned again, and the cast-off clothes she begged from me followed as
+promptly. Her little Ernest, after all my trouble, stayed at the convent
+six weeks,--the month I paid for and two weeks that Clémentine somehow
+wheedled out of the sisters,--and then he was back as of old, picking up
+his education in the London streets. I presented her once with a good
+bed I had no more use for, and, to make space for it, she went into debt
+and moved from her one room near Tottenham Court Road to two rooms and a
+higher rent near the Lower Marsh, and was robbed on the way by the man
+she hired to move her. When she broke anything, and she frequently did,
+she was never perturbed: "_Madame est forte pour payer_," or "_l'argent
+est fait pour rouler_," was her usual answer to my reproaches. To try
+to show her the road to economy was to plunge her into fresh
+extravagance.
+
+Nor did I advance matters by talking to her seriously. I recall one
+special effort to impress upon her the great misery she was preparing
+for herself by her shiftlessness. I had given her a pair of shoes,
+though I had vowed a hundred times to give her nothing more, and I used
+the occasion for a lecture. She seemed eager to interrupt once or twice,
+and I flattered myself my words were having their effect. And now what
+had she to say? I asked when my eloquence was exhausted. She giggled:
+"Would _Madame_ look at her feet in _Madame's_ shoes? _Jamais je ne me
+suis vue si bien chaussée_," and she was going straight to the
+_Quartier_ "_pour éblouir le monde_," she said. When Augustine took her
+in hand, though Augustine's eloquence had a vigour mine could not boast
+of, the result was, if anything, more discouraging. Clémentine, made
+bold by custom, would turn a hand-spring or dance a jig, or go through
+the other accomplishments she had picked up in the slums.
+
+If I could discover any weak spot by which I could reach her, I used to
+think something might be gained, and I lost much time in studying how to
+work upon her emotions. But her emotions were as far to seek as her
+morals. Even family ties, usually so strong in France, had no hold upon
+her. If she adored her little Ernest, it was because he brought her in
+three shillings and sixpence a week. There was no adoration for her
+little girl who occasionally wrote from the Pas-de-Calais and asked her
+for money. I saw one of the child's letters in which she implored
+Clémentine to pay for a white veil and white shoes; she was going to
+make her first communion, and the good adopted mother could pay for no
+more than the gown. The First Communion is the greatest event in the
+French child's life; there could be no deeper disgrace than not to be
+dressed for it, and the appeal must have moved every mother who read it,
+except Clémentine. To her it was comic, and she disposed of it with
+giggles: "_C'est drôle quand même, d'avoir une fille de cet âge_," and
+funnier that she could be expected to pay for anything for anybody.
+
+But if her family awoke in her no sentiment, her "home" did, though it
+was of the kind that Lamb would have classed with the "no homes." The
+tenacity with which she clung to it was her nearest approach to strong
+feeling. I suppose it was because she had so long climbed the stairs of
+others that she took such complete satisfaction in the two shabby little
+rooms to which she gave the name. I had a glimpse of them, never to be
+forgotten, once when she failed to come for two days, and I went to look
+her up. The street reeked with the smell of fried fish and onions; it
+was filled with barrows of kippers and haddocks and whelks; it was lined
+with old-clothes shops; it was crowded with frowzy women and horribly
+dirty children. And the halls and stairs of the tenement where she lived
+were black with London smoke and greasy with London dirt. I did not feel
+clean afterwards until I had had a bath, and it was never again as easy
+to reconcile myself to Clémentine's daily reappearance in our midst. But
+to her the rooms were home, and for that reason she would have stayed on
+in a grimier and more malodorous neighbourhood, if such a thing could
+be, in preference to living in the cleanest and freshest London
+workhouse at the rate-payers' expense. Her objection to going into
+service except as a charwoman was that she would have to stay the night.
+"_Je ne serais pas chez moi_"; and much as she prized her comfort, it
+was not worth the sacrifice. On the contrary, she was prepared to
+sacrifice her comfort, dear as it was to her, that she might retain her
+home. She actually went to the length of taking in as companion an
+Italian workman she met by accident, not because he offered to marry
+her, which he did not, but because, according to his representations, he
+was making twenty-five shillings a week and would help to pay the rent.
+"_Je serais chez moi_," was now her argument, and for food she could
+continue to work or beg. He would be a convenience, _voilà tout_. The
+Italian stayed a week. He lounged in bed all morning while she was at
+work, he smoked all afternoon. At the end of the week Clémentine sent
+him flying. "_Je suis bête et je mourrais bête_," was her explanation to
+me; but she was not _bête_ to the point of adding an idle fourth to her
+burden, and, as a result, being turned out of the home she had taken him
+in to preserve.
+
+Clémentine had been with us more than two years when the incident of the
+Italian occurred, and by this time I had become so accustomed to her and
+to her adventures that I was not as shocked as perhaps I should have
+been. It was not a way out of difficulties I could approve, but
+Clémentine was not to be judged by my standards, and I saw no reason to
+express my disapproval by getting rid of her just when she most needed
+to stay. In her continually increasing need to stay, I endured so much
+besides that, at the end of her third year in our chambers, I was
+convinced that she would go on doing my rough work as long as I had
+rough work to be done. More than once I came to the end of my patience
+and dismissed her. But it was no use. In the course of a couple of
+weeks, or at the most three, she was back scrubbing my floors and
+polishing my brasses.
+
+The first time she lost her place with me, I sympathized to such an
+extent that I was at some pains to arrange a scheme to send her to
+France. But Clémentine, clinging to the pleasures of life in the Lower
+Marsh, agreed to everything I proposed, and was careful to put every
+hindrance in the way of carrying out my plans. Twice I went to the
+length of engaging another woman, but either the other woman did not
+suit or else she did not stay, and I had to ask Clémentine to return. On
+her side, she made various efforts to leave me, bored, I fancy, by the
+monotony of regular work, but they were as unsuccessful as mine to turn
+her off. After one disappearance of three weeks, she owned up frankly to
+having been again _chez les femmes_ whose pay was better; after a
+second, she said she had been ill in the workhouse which I doubted;
+after all, she was as frank in admitting that nowhere else did she enjoy
+_la bonne cuisine de Madame_, and that this was the attraction to which
+I was indebted for her fidelity.
+
+It may have been kindness, it may have been weakness, it may have been
+simply necessity, that made me so lenient on these occasions; I do not
+attempt to decide. But I cannot blame Clémentine for thinking it was
+because she was indispensable. I noticed that gradually in small ways
+she began to take advantage of our good-nature. For one thing there was
+now no limit to her conversation. I did not spend my time in the kitchen
+and could turn a deaf ear to it, but I sometimes wondered if Augustine
+would not be the next to disappear. She would also often relieve the
+tedium of her several tasks by turning the handsprings in which she was
+so accomplished, or dancing the jig popular in the Lower Marsh, or by
+other performances equally reprehensible in the kitchen of _une maison
+bourgeoise_, as she was pleased to describe our chambers. She never lost
+a chance of rushing to the door if tradespeople rang, or talking with
+the British Workmen we were obliged, for our sins, to employ. Their
+bewilderment, stolid Britons as they were, would have been funny, had
+not her manner of exciting it been so discreditable. She was even
+caught--I was spared the knowledge until much later--turning her
+handsprings for a select company of plasterers and painters. Then I
+could see that she accepted anything we might bestow upon her as her
+due, and was becoming critical of the value and quality of the gift. I
+can never forget on one occasion when J. was going away, and he gave her
+a few shillings, the expression with which she looked first at the money
+and then at him as though insulted by the paltriness of the amount. More
+unbearable was the unfair use she made of her little Ernest.
+
+_La vieille grandmère_, who had wandered by chance into her life,
+wandered out of it as casually, or so Clémentine said as an argument to
+induce me to receive that odious little boy into my kitchen during her
+hours of work; she had nobody to take care of him, she could not leave
+him alone. Here, happily for myself, I had the strength to draw the
+line. But when this argument failed, she found another far more
+harrowing. She took the opportunity of my stumbling across her in our
+little hall one day at noon to tell me that, as I would not let her
+bring him with her, she left him every day, carefully locked up out of
+harm's way, alone in her rooms. A child of seven, as he was then, locked
+up to get into any mischief he could invent, and, moreover, a child with
+a talent for mischief! that was too much, and I sent her flying home
+without giving her time to eat her lunch or linger before the glass, and
+I was haunted for the rest of the day with the thought of all the
+terrible things that might have happened to him. Naturally nothing did
+happen, nothing ever does happen to children like the little Ernest, and
+Clémentine, dismayed by the loss of her lunch and the interference with
+her toilet, never ventured upon this argument a second time. But she
+found another almost as bad, for she informed me that, thanks to my
+interference, she was compelled to leave him again to run the streets as
+he would, and she hinted only too plainly that for whatever evil might
+befall him, I was responsible. Our relations were at this pleasant
+stage, and her little Ernest was fast developing into a monstrous
+Frankenstein wholly of my own raising, when one day she arrived with a
+new air of importance and announced her approaching marriage.
+
+I was enchanted. I had not permitted myself to feel the full weight of
+the burden Clémentine 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 Clémentine
+in her new rôle of _fiancée_, 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
+Clémentine 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. Clémentine
+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 Clémentine, 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 "Bêtisse"_--the spelling is
+hers--and adding: "_avoir âgit ainsi avec des maîtres aussi bons, ce
+n'est pas pardonable. Je vous assure que si un jour je devien riche, ou
+peut être plus pauvre, que dans ma richesse, comme dans ma plus grande
+misère, je ne pourrais jamais oublier les bons maîtres Monsieur et
+Madame, car jamais dans ma vie d'orpheline, je n'aie jamais rencontré
+d'aussi bons maîtres._" 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'âme 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 tâche d'oublier, mais en
+attendant je m'en mordrais peut être les poings plus d'une fois._" I was
+unmoved. I had spent too much emotion already upon Clémentine; 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 Clémentine, 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 Clémentine, 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 berêts, 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.
+
+The stairs were a waterfall under which I ascended. The two doors of our
+chambers were wide open, with huge gaps where panels had been, the young
+man's servant having carefully shut them after me in our flight,
+thinking, I suppose, that the firemen would stand upon ceremony and ask
+for the key before venturing in. A river was drying up in our hall, and
+the strip of matting down the centre was sodden. Empty soda-water
+bottles rolled on the floor, though it speaks well for London firemen
+that nothing stronger was touched. Candles were stuck upside down in our
+hanging Dutch lamp and all available candlesticks, curtains and blinds
+were pulled about, chairs were upset, the marks of muddy feet were
+everywhere. I ought to have been grateful, and I was, that the damage
+was so small, all the more when I went again on to the leads and saw the
+blackened heap to which the night had reduced the young man's chambers.
+But the place was inexpressibly cheerless and dilapidated in the dawning
+light.
+
+It was too late to go to bed, too early to go to work. I was hungry, and
+the baker had not come, nor the charwoman. I was faint, the smell of the
+_schube_ was strong in my nostrils, though the _schube_ itself was now
+safely locked up in a remote cupboard. I wandered disconsolately from
+room to room, when, of a sudden, there appeared at my still open front
+door a gorgeous vision,--a large and stately lady, fresh and neat,
+arrayed in flowing red draperies, with a white lace fichu thrown over a
+mass of luxuriant golden hair. I stared, speechless with amazement. It
+was not until she spoke that I recognized the First Floor Back, who had
+had time to lay her hands not only on a false front, but on a whole wig,
+and who had had the enterprise to make tea which she invited me to
+drink with her in Pepys's chambers.
+
+The Housekeeper and the Housekeeper's daughter were already in her
+dining-room, the Housekeeper huddled up in a big armchair, pillows at
+her back, a stool at her feet. Like her house she was a wreck, and her
+demoralization was sad to see. All her life, until a few short hours
+ago, she had been the model of neatness; now she did not care how she
+looked; her white hair was untidy, her dress half-buttoned, her apron
+forgotten; and she, who had hitherto discouraged familiarity in the
+tenants, joined us as a friend. She was too exhausted for hysterics, but
+she moaned over her tea and abandoned herself to her grief. She could
+not rally, and, what is more, she did not want to. She had no life apart
+from her house, and in its ruin she saw her own. Her immaculate hall was
+defaced and stained, a blackened groove was worn in her shining stairs,
+the water pouring through the chambers in the front, down to her own
+little apartment, had turned them all into a damp and depressing mess.
+Her moans were the ceaseless accompaniment to our talk of the night's
+disaster. Always she had waited for the fire, she said, she had dreaded
+it, and at last it had come, and there was no sorrow like unto hers.
+
+After the first excitement, after the house had resumed, as well as it
+could, its usual habits, the Housekeeper remained absorbed in her grief.
+Hitherto her particular habit was to work, and she had been able,
+unaided, to keep the house up to her immaculate standard of perfection.
+But now to restore it to order was the affair of builders, of plasterers
+and painters and paperers. There was nothing for her to do save to sit
+with hands folded and watch the sacrilege. Her occupation was gone, and
+all was wrong with her world.
+
+I was busy during the days immediately "after the fire." I had to insure
+our belongings, which, of course, being insured, have never run such a
+risk again. I had to prepare and pack for a journey to France, now many
+days overdue, and, what with one thing or another, I neglected the
+Housekeeper. When at last I was ready to shut up our chambers and start
+and I called at her rooms, it seemed to me she had visibly shrunk and
+wilted, though she had preserved enough of the proper spirit to pocket
+the substantial tip I handed over to her with my keys. She was no less
+equal to accepting a second when, after a couple of months I returned
+and could not resist this expression of my sympathy on finding the hall
+still stained and defaced, the stairs still with their blackened groove,
+the workmen still going and coming, and her despair at the spectacle
+blacker than ever.
+
+The next day she came up to our chambers. She wore her best black gown
+and no apron, and from these signs I concluded it was a visit of state.
+I was right: it was to announce her departure. The house, partially
+rebuilt and very much patched up, would never be the same. She was too
+old for hope, and without the courage to pick up the broken bits of her
+masterpiece and put them together again. She was more ill at ease as
+visitor than as housekeeper. The conversation languished, although I
+fancied she had something particular to say, slight as was her success
+in saying it. We had both been silent for an awkward minute when she
+blurted out abruptly that she had never neglected her duty, no matter
+what it might or might not have pleased the tenants to give her. I
+applauded the sentiment as admirable, and I said good-by; and never once
+then, and not until several days after she left us, did it dawn upon me
+that she was waiting to accept graciously the fee it was her right in
+leaving to expect from me. The fact of my having only just tipped her
+liberally had nothing to do with it. A housekeeper's departure was an
+occasion for money to pass from the tenant's hand into hers, and she had
+too much respect for her duty as housekeeper not to afford me the
+opportunity of doing mine as tenant. It was absurd, but I was humiliated
+in my own eyes when I thought of the figure I must cut in hers, and I
+could only hope she would make allowance for me as an ignorant American.
+
+How deep I sunk in her esteem, there was no means of knowing. I do not
+think she could endure to come to her house as a stranger, for she
+never returned. Neither did any news of her reach us. I cannot believe
+she enjoyed the inactive existence with her daughter to which she had
+retired, and I should be astonished if she bore it long. In losing her
+house she had lost her interest in life. Her work in the world was
+done.
+
+
+
+
+_The New Housekeeper_
+
+[Illustration: THE SPIRE OF ST. MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS]
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER
+
+
+It had taken years for the Old Housekeeper to mature, and I knew that in
+the best sense of the word she could never be replaced. But the
+knowledge did not prepare me for the New Housekeeper.
+
+Mrs. Haines was a younger and apparently stronger woman, but she was so
+casual in her dress, and so eager to emulate the lilies of the field, as
+to convince me that it was not in her, under any conditions, to mature
+into a housekeeper at all. It expressed much, I thought, that while the
+Old Housekeeper had always been "the Housekeeper," we never knew Mrs.
+Haines by any name but her own. The fact that she had a husband was her
+recommendation to the landlord, who had been alarmed by the fire and the
+hysterics into which it threw the Old Housekeeper, and now insisted upon
+a man in the family as an indispensable qualification for the post. The
+advantage might have been more obvious had Mr. Haines not spent most of
+his time in dodging the tenants and helping them to forget his presence
+in the house. He was not an ill-looking nor ill-mannered man, and
+shyness was the only explanation that occurred to me for his
+perseverance in avoiding us. Work could not force him from his
+retirement. Mrs. Haines said that he was a carpenter by trade, but the
+only ability I ever knew him to display was in evading whatever job I
+was hopeful enough to offer him. Besides, though it might be hard to say
+what I think a carpenter ought to look like, I was certain he did not
+look like one, and others shared my doubts.
+
+The rumour spread through our street--where everybody rejoices in the
+knowledge of everything about everybody else who lives in it--that he
+had once been in the Civil Service, but had married beneath him and come
+down in the world. How the rumour originated I never asked, or never was
+told if I did ask; but it was so evident that he shrank from the
+practice of the carpenter's trade that once we sent him with a letter
+to the Publisher--who shares our love of the neighbourhood to the point,
+not only of publishing from it, but of living in it--asking if some sort
+of place could not be found for him in the office. It was found, I am
+afraid to his disappointment, for he never made any effort to fill it,
+and was more diligent than ever in keeping out of our way. If he saw us
+coming, on the rare occasions when he stood at the front door, or the
+rarer when he cleaned the gas-bracket above it, he would run if there
+was time, or, if there was not, turn his head and stare fixedly in the
+other direction that he might escape speaking to us. As the months went
+on, he was never caught cleaning anything or doing anything in the shape
+of work, except sometimes, furtively, as if afraid of being detected in
+the act, shutting the front door when the clocks of the neighbourhood
+struck eleven. He was far less of a safeguard to us than I often fancied
+he thought we were to him.
+
+Mrs. Haines was sufficiently unlike him to account for one part of the
+rumour. She was coarse in appearance and disagreeable in manner, always
+on the defensive, always on the verge of flying into a temper. She had
+no objection to showing herself; on the contrary, she was perpetually
+about, hunting for faults to find; but she did object to showing herself
+with a broom or a duster, a pail or a scrubbing-brush in her hands. I
+shuddered sometimes at the thought of the shock to the Old Housekeeper
+if she were to see her hall and stairs. We could bring up coal now at
+any hour or all day long. And yet Mrs. Haines tyrannized over us in her
+own fashion, and her tyranny was the more unbearable because it had no
+end except to spare herself trouble. Her one thought was to do nothing
+and get paid for it. She resented extra exertion without extra
+compensation. We never had been so bullied about coal under the old
+régime as we were under hers about a drain-pipe with a trick of
+overflowing. It might have drowned us in our chambers and she would not
+have stirred to save us; but its outlet was in a little paved court back
+of her kitchen, which it was one of her duties to keep in order, and she
+considered every overflow a rank injustice. She held the tenants in
+turn responsible, and would descend upon us like a Fury upbraiding us
+for our carelessness. It would never have surprised me had she ordered
+us down to clean up the court for her.
+
+I must in fairness add that when extra exertion meant extra money she
+did not shirk it. Nor was she without accomplishments. She was an
+excellent needlewoman: she altered and renovated more than one gown for
+me, she made me chair-covers, she mended my carpets. During the first
+years she was in the house she never refused any needlework, and often
+she asked me for more. She would come up and wait for me at table on the
+shortest notice. In an emergency she would even cook me a dinner which,
+in its colourless English way, was admirable. There is no denying that
+she could be useful, but her usefulness had a special tariff.
+
+It was also in her favour that she was a lover of cats, and their regard
+for her was as good as a certificate. I came to be on the best of terms
+with hers, Bogie by name, a tall ungainly tabby, very much the worse for
+wear. He spent a large part of his time on the street, and often, as I
+came or went, he would be returning home and would ask me, in a way not
+to be resisted, to ring her door-bell for him. Sometimes I waited to
+exchange a few remarks with him, for, though his voice was husky and not
+one of his attractions, he had always plenty to say. On these occasions
+I was a witness of his pleasure in seeing his mistress again, though his
+absence might have been short, and of her enthusiasm in receiving him.
+Unquestionably they understood each other, and cats are animals of
+discrimination.
+
+She extended her affection to cats that did not belong to her, and ours
+came in for many of her attentions. Our Jimmy, who had the freedom of
+the streets, often paid her a visit on his way out or in, as I knew he
+would not have done if she had not made the time pass agreeably; for if
+he, like all cats, disliked to be bored, he knew better than most how to
+avoid the possibility. One of his favourite haunts was the near Strand,
+probably because he was sure to meet his friends there. It was a joy to
+him, if we had been out late in the evening, to run across us as we
+returned. With a fervent "mow" of greeting, he was at our side; and
+then, his tail high in the air, and singing a song of rapture, he would
+come with us to our front door, linger until he had seen us open it,
+when, his mind at rest for our safety, he would hurry back to his
+revels. We considered this a privilege, and our respect for Mrs. Haines
+was increased when he let her share it, even in the daytime. He was
+known to join her in the Strand, not far from Charing Cross, walk with
+her to Wellington Street, cross over, wait politely while she bought
+tickets at the Lyceum for one of the tenants, cross again, and walk back
+with her. He was also known to sit down in the middle of the Strand, and
+divert the traffic better than a "Bobby," until Mrs. Haines, when
+everybody else had failed, enticed him away. He deserved the tribute of
+her tears, and she shed many, when the Vet kindly released him from the
+physical ruin to which exposure and a life of dissipation had reduced
+him.
+
+William Penn showed her the same friendliness, but from him it was not
+so marked, for he was a cat of democratic tastes and, next to his
+family, preferred the people who worked for them. He had not as much
+opportunity for his civilities as Jimmy, never being allowed to leave
+our chambers. But when Mrs. Haines was busy in our kitchen, he occupied
+more than a fair portion of her time, for which she made no reduction in
+the bill. William's charms were so apt to distract me from my work that
+I could say nothing, and her last kindness of all when he died--in his
+case of too luxuriant living and too little exercise, the Vet
+said--would make me forgive her much worse. According to my friend, Miss
+Repplier, a cat "considers dying a strictly private affair." But William
+Penn's death-bed was a public affair, at least for Augustine and myself,
+who sat up with him through the night of his agony. We were both
+exhausted by morning, unfit to cope with the problem of his funeral.
+Chambers are without any convenient corner to serve as cemetery, and I
+could not trust the most important member of the family to the dust-man
+for burial. I do not know what I should have done but for Mrs. Haines.
+It was she who arranged, by a bribe I would willingly have doubled,
+that during the dinner-hour, when the head-gardener was out of the way,
+William should be laid to rest in the garden below our windows. She was
+the only mourner with Augustine and myself,--J. was abroad,--when, from
+above, we watched the assistant gardener lower him into his little grave
+under the tree where the wood-pigeons have their nest.
+
+If I try now to make the best of what was good in Mrs. Haines, at the
+time she did not give me much chance. Grumbling was such a habit with
+her that, even had the Socialists' Millennium come, she would have kept
+on, if only because it removed all other reason for her grumbles. Her
+prejudice against work of any kind did not lessen her displeasure with
+everybody who did not provide her with work of some kind to do. She
+treated me as if I imposed on her when I asked her to sew or to mend or
+to cook, and she abused the other tenants because they did not ask her.
+This indeed was her principal grievance. She could not see why they were
+in the house if it were not to increase her income, and she hated the
+landlord for having led her to believe they would. She paid me
+innumerable visits, the object of which never varied. It was to borrow,
+which she did without shame or apology. She never hesitated in her
+demands, she never cringed. She ran short because the other tenants were
+not doing the fair and square thing by her, and she did not see why she
+should not draw upon me for help. One inexhaustible debt was the monthly
+bill for her furniture, bought on the instalment system and forfeited if
+any one instalment were not met. I do not remember how many pounds I
+advanced, but enough to suggest that she had furnished her rooms, of
+which she never gave me as much as a glimpse, in a style far beyond her
+means. I could afford to be amiable, for I knew I could make her pay me
+back in work, though my continual loans did so little to improve her
+financial affairs that after a while my patience gave out, and I refused
+to advance another penny.
+
+It was not until the illness of her husband, after they had been in the
+house for some two years, that I realized the true condition of things
+behind the door they kept so carefully closed. The illness was sudden,
+so far as I knew. I had not seen Mr. Haines for long, but I was
+accustomed to not seeing him, and curiously, when Mrs. Haines's need was
+greatest, she showed some reluctance in asking to be helped out of it.
+Her husband was dying before she appealed to anybody, and then it was
+not to me, but to Mrs. Burden, my old charwoman, who was so poor that I
+had always fancied that to be poorer still meant to live in the streets
+or on the rates. But Mrs. Haines was so much worse off, that Mrs.
+Burden, in telling me about it, thanked Our Lady that she had never
+fallen so low. It was cold winter and there was no fire, no coal, no
+wood, behind the closed door. The furniture for which I had advanced so
+many pounds consisted, I now found out, of two or three rickety chairs
+and a square of tattered carpet in the front room, a few pots and pans
+in the kitchen. In the dark bedroom between, the dying man lay on a hard
+board stretched on the top of a packing-box, shivering under his
+threadbare overcoat, so pitiful in his misery and suffering that Mrs.
+Burden was moved to compassion and hurried home to fetch him the
+blankets from her own bed and buy him a pennyworth of milk on the way.
+
+When the tenants knew how it was with Mrs. Haines and her husband, as
+now they could not help knowing, they remembered only that he was ill,
+and they sent for the doctor and paid for medicine, and did what they
+could to lighten the gloom of the two or three days left to him. And
+they arranged for a decent burial, feeling, I think, that a man who had
+been in the Civil Service should not lie in a pauper's grave. For a week
+or so we wondered again who he was, why he kept so persistently out of
+sight; after that we thought as little of him as when he had skulked, a
+shadow, between his rooms and the street door on the stroke of eleven.
+
+Hitherto everybody had been patient with Mrs. Haines, for the London
+housekeeper, though she has not got the tenants as completely in her
+power as the Paris _concierge_, can, if she wants, make things very
+disagreeable for them. Now that she was alone in the world, everybody
+was kind to her. The landlord overlooked his announced decision "to
+sack the pair," and retained her as housekeeper, though in losing her
+husband she had lost her principal recommendation. The tenants raised a
+fund to enable her to buy the mourning which is often a consolation in
+widowhood. Work was offered to her in chambers which she had never
+entered before, and I added to the tasks in ours. The housekeepers in
+the street with families to support must have envied her. She had her
+rooms rent free, wages from the landlord, plenty of extra work, and
+though this might not seem affluence to people who do not measure their
+income by pence or scramble for the odd shilling, it was wealth in
+housekeeping circles.
+
+Mrs. Haines, however, did not see her position in that light. She had
+complained when work was not offered to her, she complained more
+bitterly when it was. Perhaps her husband had had some restraining
+influence upon her. I cannot say; but certainly once he was gone, she
+gave up all pretence of controlling her temper. She would sweep like a
+hurricane through the house, raging and raving, on the slightest
+provocation. She led us a worse life than ever over the drain-pipe. She
+left the house more and more to take care of itself, dust lying thick
+wherever dust could lie, the stairs turned to a dingy grey, the walls
+blackened with London smoke and grime. Once in a while she hired a
+forlorn, ragged old woman to wash the stairs and brush the front-door
+mat, for in London, more than anywhere else, "poverty is a comparative
+thing," and every degree has one below to "soothe" it. No matter how
+hard up Mrs. Haines was, she managed to scrape together a few pennies to
+pay to have the work done for her rather than do it herself. The greater
+part of her leisure she spent out of the house, and when I passed her
+door I would see pinned up on it a bit of paper stating in neat, even
+elegant, writing, "Apply on the First Floor for the Housekeeper," or
+"Gone out. Back in ten minutes"; and hours, sometimes days, later the
+same notice would still be there. She became as neglectful of herself as
+of the house: her one dress grew shabbier and shabbier, her apron was
+discarded, no detail of her toilet was attended to except the frizzing
+of her coarse black hair. All this came about not at once, but step by
+step, and things were very bad before J. and I admitted, even to each
+other, that she was a disgrace to the house. We would admit it to nobody
+else, and to my surprise the other tenants were as forbearing. I suppose
+it was because they understood, as well as we did, that at a word to the
+landlord she would be adrift in London, where for one vacant post of
+housekeeper there are a hundred applications. To banish her from our own
+chambers, however, was not to drive her to the workhouse, and I called
+for her services less and less often.
+
+There was another reason for my not employing her to which I have not so
+far referred, the reason really of her slovenliness and bad temper and
+gradual deterioration. I shut my eyes as long as I could. But I was
+prepared for the whispers that began to be heard, not only in our house,
+but up and down our street. What started them I do not know, but the
+morning and evening gatherings of the housekeepers at their doors were
+not held for nothing, and presently it got about that Mrs. Haines had
+been seen stealing in and out of a public-house, and that this
+public-house was just beyond the border-line of the Quarter, which
+looked as if she were endeavouring to escape the vigilant eyes of our
+gossips. Then, as invariably happens, the whispers grew louder, the
+evidence against her circumstantial, and everybody was saying quite
+openly where her money disappeared and why she became shabbier, her
+rooms barer, and the house more disreputable. It leaked out that her
+husband also had been seen flitting from public-house to public-house;
+and, the game of concealment by this time being up, it was bluntly said
+that drink had killed him, as it would Mrs. Haines if she went on as she
+was going.
+
+I had kept my suspicions to myself, but she had never come to our
+chambers at the hour of lunch or dinner that there was not an unusual
+drain upon our modest wine-cellar. I could not fancy that it was merely
+a coincidence, that friends dining with us were invariably thirstier
+when she waited or cooked; but her appearance had been the invariable
+signal for the disappearance of our wine at a rate that made my
+employment of her a costly luxury. I never saw her when I could declare
+she had been drinking, but drink she did, and there was no use my
+beating about the bush and calling it by another name. It would have
+been less hopeless had she occasionally betrayed herself, had her speech
+thickened and her walk become unsteady. But hers was the deadliest form
+of the evil, because it gave no sign. There was nothing to check it
+except every now and then a mysterious attack of illness,--which she
+said defied the doctor though it defied nobody in the house,--or the
+want of money; but a housekeeper must be far gone if she cannot pick up
+a shilling here and a half-crown there. I was the last of the old
+tenants to employ her, but after I abandoned her she still had another
+chance with a newcomer who took the chambers below ours, and, finding
+them too small to keep more than one servant, engaged her for a liberal
+amount of work. She bought aprons and a new black blouse and skirt, and
+she was so spruce and neat in them that I was encouraged to hope. But
+before the end of the first week, she was met on the stairs coming down
+from his room to hers with a bottle under her apron; at the end of the
+second she was dismissed.
+
+I hardly dare think how she lived after this. With every Christmas there
+was a short period of prosperity, though it dwindled as the tenants
+began to realize where their money went. For a time J. and I got her to
+keep our bicycles, other people in the house followed suit, and during
+several months she was paid rent for as many as six, keeping them in the
+empty sitting-room from which even the rickety chairs had disappeared,
+and where the floor now was thick with grease and stained with oil. If
+we had trunks to store or boxes to unpack, she would let us the same
+room for as long as we wanted, and so she managed, one way or the other,
+by hook or by crook. But it was a makeshift existence, all the more so
+when her habits began to tell on her physically. She was ill half the
+time, and by the end of her fourth year in the house, I do not believe
+she could have sewed or waited or cooked, had she had the chance. She
+had no friends, no companions, save her cat. They were a grim pair, she
+with hungry, shifty eyes glowing like fires in the pallor of her face,
+he more gaunt and ungainly than ever: for a witch and her familiar they
+would have been burnt not so many hundred years ago.
+
+Then we heard that she was taking in lodgers, that women with the look
+of hunted creatures stole into her rooms at strange hours of the night.
+Some said they were waifs and strays from the "Halls," others that they
+were wanderers from the Strand; all agreed that, whoever they were, they
+must be as desperately poor as she, to seek shelter where the only bed
+was the floor. Much had been passed over, but I knew that such lodgers
+were more than landlord and tenants could endure, and I had not to be a
+prophet to foresee that the end was approaching.
+
+It came more speedily than I thought, though the manner of it was not
+left to landlord and tenants. Christmas, her fifth in the house, had
+filled her purse again. Tenants were less liberal, it is true, but she
+must have had at least five or six pounds, to which a turkey and plum
+pudding had been added by our neighbour across the hall, who was of a
+generous turn. She had therefore the essentials of what passes for a
+merry Christmas, but how much merriment there was in hers I had no way
+of telling. On holidays in London I keep indoors if I can, not caring to
+face the sadness of the streets or the dreariness of house-parties, and
+I did not go downstairs on Christmas Day, nor on Boxing Day which is the
+day after. Mrs. Haines, if she came up, did not present herself at our
+chambers. I trust she was gay because, as it turned out, it was her last
+chance for gaiety at this or any other season. In the middle of the
+night following Boxing Day she was seized with one of her mysterious
+attacks. A lodger was with her, but, from fright, or stupidity, or
+perhaps worse, called no one till dawn, when she rang up the housekeeper
+next door and vanished. The housekeeper next door went at once for the
+doctor who attends to us all in the Quarter. It was too late. Mrs.
+Haines was dead when he reached the house.
+
+Death was merciful, freeing her from the evil fate that threatened, for
+she was at the end of everything. She went out of the world as naked as
+she came into it. Her rooms were empty, there was not so much as a crust
+of bread in her kitchen, in her purse were two farthings. Her only
+clothes were those she had just taken off and the few rags wrapped about
+her for the night. Destitution could not be more complete, and the
+horror was to find it, not round the corner, not at the door, but in the
+very house, and, worse, to know that it deserved no pity. As she had
+sown, so had she reaped, and the grave was the kindliest shelter for the
+harvest.
+
+The day after, her sister appeared, from where, summoned by whom, I do
+not know. She was a decent, serious woman, who attended to everything,
+and when the funeral was over, called on all the tenants. She wanted,
+she told me, to thank us for all our kindness to her sister, whom
+kindness had so little helped. She volunteered no explanation, she only
+sighed her regrets. She could not understand, she said.
+
+Nor could I. No doubt, daily in the slums, many women die as destitute.
+But they never had their chance. Mrs. Haines had hers, and a fair one
+as these things go. Her tragedy has shaken my confidence in the
+reformers to-day who would work the miracle, and, with equal chances for
+all men, transform this sad world of ours into Utopia.
+
+
+
+
+_Our Beggars_
+
+[Illustration: CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE FROM OUR WINDOWS]
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+OUR BEGGARS
+
+
+I know our Beggars by their ring. When the front door-bell is pulled
+with insolent violence, "That," I say to myself, "is a Beggar," and I am
+usually right.
+
+Ours are not the Beggars of whose decay Elia complained; though he could
+not have believed that the art of begging was in any more danger of
+being lost than the art of lying. His sort have still their place at the
+crowded crossing, at the corners of streets and turnings of alleys--they
+are always with us. I rarely go out that I do not meet the cripple who
+swings himself along on his crutches through the throngs at Charing
+Cross, or the blind man who taps his way down the Strand, or the
+paralytic in her little cart close to St. Martin's, and I too should
+complain were they to disappear. These are Beggars I do not mind. They
+have their picturesque uses. They carry on an old tradition. They are
+licensed to molest me, and their demands, with their thanks when I give
+and their curses when I do not, are the methods of a venerable and
+honoured calling. Besides, I can escape them if I choose. I can cross
+the street at the approach of the cripple, I can dodge the blind man, I
+can look away as I pass the paralytic, and so avoid the irritation of
+giving when I do not want to or the discomfort of hearing their opinion
+of me when I refuse. But to our Beggars I do object, and from them there
+is no escape. They belong to a new species, and have abandoned the
+earlier methods as crude and primitive. They make a profession neither
+of disease nor of deformity, but of having come down in the world. They
+scorn to stoop to "rags and the wallet," which they have exchanged for a
+top hat and frock coat. They take out no license, for they never beg in
+the streets; instead, they assault us at our door, where they do not ask
+for alms but claim the gift, they call a loan, as their right. They are
+bullies, brigands, who would thrust the virtue of charity upon us, and
+if, as the philosopher thinks, it is a test of manners to receive, they
+come out of it with dignity, for their fiction of a loan saves them, and
+us, from the professional profuseness of the Beggar's thanks.
+
+It was only when I moved into chambers in the Quarter that they began to
+come to see me. Hitherto, my life in London had been spent in lodgings,
+where, if I was never free from Beggars in the form of those intimate
+friends who are always short of ten pounds to pay their rent or ten
+shillings to buy a hat, it was the landlady's affair when the Beggars
+who were strangers called.
+
+Chambers, however, gave me a front door at which they could ring and an
+address in the Directory in which they could find out where the door
+was; and had my object been to make a study of them and their manners, I
+could not have hit upon a better place to collect my material.
+
+Not that Beggars are encouraged in the Quarter, where more than one
+society devoted to their scientific suppression has, or has had, an
+office, and where the lady opposite does not wait for science, but sends
+them flying the minute she catches them in our streets. The man who
+loafs in front of our club, and who opens cab-doors for members, and as
+many more as he can capture, might be mistaken for a Beggar by anybody
+who did not know the Quarter, but we who do know it understand that he
+is loafing by special appointment. The small boy who has lately taken to
+selling his single box of matches on our Terrace does so officially, as
+the brass label on his arm explains. And nothing could be more
+exceptional than the cheerful person who the other day reeled after the
+Publisher and myself into one of our houses where there is an
+elevator--for to elevators we have come in the Quarter--the thin end of
+the modern wedge that threatens its destruction--and addressed the
+Publisher so affectionately as "Colonel" that we both retreated into the
+elevator and pressed the button for the top floor.
+
+But the Beggars we keep off our streets, we cannot keep from our front
+doors. J. and I had hardly settled in chambers before we were besieged.
+People were immediately in need of our help who up till then had managed
+without it, and to our annoyance they have been in need of it ever
+since. They present themselves in so many different guises, by so many
+different methods, that it is impossible to be on our guard against them
+all. Some sneak in with the post, and our correspondence has doubled in
+bulk. Dukes, Earls, Marquises, Baronets, favour us with lithographed
+letters, signing their names at the bottom, writing ours at the top, and
+demanding our contribution to charities they approve, as the price of so
+amazing a condescension. Ladies of rank cannot give their benevolent
+balls and banquets unless we buy tickets, nor can they conceive of our
+dismissing their personal appeal. Clergymen start missions that we may
+finance them, bazaars are opened that we may fill the stalls with the
+free offering of the work by which we make our living, and albums are
+raffled that we may grace them with our autographs. We might think that
+the post was invented for the benefit of people whose idea of charity is
+to do the begging and get us to do the giving. Many of our Beggars like
+better to beg in person: sometimes as nurses with tickets to sell for a
+concert, or as Little Sisters of the Poor--whom I welcome, having
+preserved a sentiment for any variety of cap and veil since my own
+convent days; sometimes as people with things to sell at the biggest
+price, that we would not want at the lowest, or with patent inventions
+that we would not take as a gift, and who are indignant if we decline to
+be taxed for the privilege of not buying or subscribing. But the most
+numerous of our Beggars, the most persistent, the most liberal in their
+expectations, are the men, and more occasionally the women, who, having
+come down in the world, look to us to set them up again, and would be
+the first to resent it if our generosity ran to any such extravagant
+lengths.
+
+Their patronage of the Quarter is doubtless due, partly to its being
+close to the Strand, which is an excellent centre for their line of
+business; partly to a convenient custom with us of leaving all street
+doors hospitably open and inscribing the names of tenants in big gilt
+letters on the wall just inside; partly to the fact that we are not five
+minutes from a Free Library, where they can agreeably fill their hours
+of leisure by the study of "Who's Who," "The Year's Art," and other
+books in which publishers obligingly supply the information about us
+which to them is as valuable an asset as a crutch to the cripple or a
+staff to the blind. Provided by the Directory with our address, they may
+already know where to look us up and how to establish an acquaintance by
+asking for us by name at our door; but it is this cramming in the facts
+of our life that enables them to talk to us familiarly about our work
+until acquaintance has ripened into intimacy and the business of begging
+is put on a personal and friendly footing. Great as is the good which
+Mr. Carnegie must have hoped to accomplish by his Free Libraries, even
+he could have had no idea of the boon they might prove to Beggars and
+the healthy stimulus to the art of begging which they develop.
+
+In the beginning our Beggars had no great fault to find with us. Their
+frock coats and top hats, signs of real British respectability, carried
+them past the British porter and the British servant. When they crossed
+our threshold, some remnant of the barbarous instinct of hospitality
+compelled us to receive them with civility, if not with cordiality. We
+never went so far as, with the Spaniard, to offer them our house and all
+that is in it, another instinct warning us how little they would mind
+taking us at our word; nor did hospitality push us to the extreme of
+being hoodwinked by their tales. But in those days we seldom let them go
+without something, which was always more than they deserved since they
+deserved nothing. If there is such a thing as a Beggar's Bædeker, I am
+sure our chambers were specially recommended in earlier editions. In
+justice, I must confess that they gave us entertainment for our money,
+and that the very tricks of the trade were amusing--that is, while the
+novelty lasted. We liked the splendid assurance of their manner; the
+pretended carelessness with which a foot was quickly thrust through the
+opening of the door so they could be shut out only by force; the
+important air with which they asked for a few minutes' talk; the
+insinuating smile with which they presumed that we remembered them;
+their cool assumption that their burden was ours, and that the kindness
+was all on their side for permitting us the privilege of bearing it. And
+we liked no less their infinite trouble in inventing romances about
+themselves that Munchausen could not have beaten, their dramatic use of
+foggy nights and wild storms, their ingenuity in discovering a bond
+between us, and their plausibility in proving why it obliged us to meet
+their temporary difficulties which were never of course of their own
+making. Nor could we but admire their superiority to mere charity, their
+belief in the equal division of wealth, their indifference as to who did
+the work to create the wealth so long as they did not do it themselves,
+and their trust in the obligation imposed by a craft in common. Had they
+bestowed half the pains in practising this craft that they squandered in
+wheedling a few shillings from us on the strength of it, they must long
+since have been acknowledged its masters.
+
+The first of our Beggars, whom I probably remember the better because he
+was the first, flattered me by introducing himself as a fellow author
+at a time when I had published but one book and had won by it neither
+fame nor fortune. What he had published himself he did not think it
+worth while to mention, but the powers of imagination he revealed in his
+talk should have secured his reputation in print. I have rarely listened
+to anybody so fluent, I could not have got a word in had I wanted to. It
+never seemed to occur to him that I might not be as bent upon listening
+to his story as he upon telling it. He made it quite a personal matter
+between us. I would understand, he said, and the inference was that
+nobody else could, the bitterness of his awakening when the talented
+woman whom he had revered as the kindliest of her sex betrayed herself
+to him as the most cruel. For long, in her Florentine villa, he had been
+Secretary to Ouida, whom he found so charming and considerate that he
+could only marvel at all the gossip about her whims and fancies. Then,
+one morning, he was writing a letter at her dictation and by oversight
+he spelt disappointment with one p, a trifling error which, as I knew,
+any gentleman or scholar was liable to. She flew into a rage, she
+turned him out of the villa without hearing a word, she pursued him into
+the garden, she set her dogs--colossal staghounds--on him, he had to run
+for his life, had even to vault over the garden gate, I could picture to
+myself with what disastrous consequences to his coat and trousers. And
+she was so vindictive that she would neither send him his clothes nor
+pay him a penny she owed him. He had too fine a sense of gallantry to go
+to law with a lady, he dared not remain in Florence where the report was
+that he went in danger of his life. There was nothing to do but to
+return to England, and--well--here he was, with a new outfit to buy
+before he could accept the admirable position offered to him, for he had
+not to assure me that a man of his competency was everywhere in demand;
+it was very awkward, and--in short--he looked to me as a fellow author
+to tide him over the awkwardness. I can laugh now at my absurd
+embarrassment when finally he came to a full stop. I did not have to
+wait for his exposure in the next number of "The Author" to realize that
+he was "an unscrupulous impostor." But I was too shy to call him one to
+his face, and I actually murmured polite concern and "advanced" I have
+forgotten what, to be rid of him.
+
+Out of compliment to J., our Beggars pose as artists no less frequently
+than as authors. If the artist himself, when accident or bad luck has
+got him into a tight place, likes best to come to his fellow artist to
+get him out of it, he is the first to pay his debts and the first debt
+he pays is to the artist who saw him through. But this has nothing to do
+with our Beggars who have chosen art as an unemployment and with whom
+accident or bad luck is deliberately chronic. They look upon art as a
+gilt-edged investment that should bring them in a dividend, however
+remote their connection with it. According to them, an artist entitles
+all his family, even to the second and third generation, to a share in
+J.'s modest income, though J. himself is not at all of their manner of
+thinking. Grandsons of famous wood-engravers, nephews of editors of
+illustrated papers, cousins of publishers of popular magazines, fathers
+of painters, brothers, sons, and uncles of every sort of artist, even
+sisters, daughters, and aunts who take advantage of their talent for
+pathos and "crocodile wisdom of shedding tears when they should
+devour,"--all have sought to impress upon him that the sole reason for
+their existence is to live at his expense. He may suggest meekly that he
+subscribes to benevolent institutions and societies founded for the
+relief of artists and artists' families in just their difficulties. They
+are glib in excuses for making their application to him instead, and
+they evidently think he ought to be grateful to them for putting him in
+the way of enjoying the blessing promised to those who give.
+
+The most ambitious reckon their needs on a princely scale, as if
+determined to beg, when they have to, with all their might. One artist,
+distinguished in his youth, writes to J., from the Café Royal where, in
+his old age, he makes a habit of dining and finding himself towards
+midnight ridiculously without a penny in his pocket, an emergency in
+which a five-pound note by return of messenger will oblige. Another,
+whose business hours are as late, comes in person for a "fiver," his
+last train to his suburban home being on the point of starting and he as
+ridiculously penniless, except for a cheque for a hundred pounds just
+received from a publisher, which he cannot change at that time of night.
+The more humble have so much less lavish a standard that half a crown
+will meet their liabilities, or else a sum left to the generosity of the
+giver. A youth, frequent in his visits, never aspires above the fare of
+a hansom waiting below, while a painter of mature years appears only on
+occasions of public rejoicing or mourning when there is no telling to
+what extent emotion may loosen the purse strings. Some bring their
+pictures as security, or the pictures of famous ancestors who have
+become bewilderingly prolific since their death; some plead for their
+work to be taken out of pawn; some want to pose in a few days, and these
+J. recommends to the Keeper of the Royal Academy; and some are so subtle
+in their argument that we fail to follow it. We are still wondering what
+could have been the motive of the excited little man who burst in upon
+J. a few days ago with a breathless inquiry as to how much he charged
+for painting polo ponies for officers, and who bolted as precipitately
+when J. said that he knew nothing about polo, and had never painted a
+pony in his life. But for sheer irrelevance none has surpassed the
+American whom, in J.'s absence, I was called upon to interview, and who
+assured me that, having begun life as an artist and later turned model,
+he had tramped all the way from New Orleans to New York and then worked
+his way over on a cattleship to London with no other object in view than
+to sit to J. If I regret that my countrymen in England borrow the trick
+of begging from the native, it is some satisfaction to have them excel
+in it. When I represented to the model from New Orleans that J., as far
+as I could see, would have no use for him, he was quite ready to take a
+shilling in place of the sitting, and when I would not give him a
+shilling, he declared himself repaid by his pleasant chat with a
+compatriot. He must have thought better of it afterwards and decided
+that something more substantial was owing to him, for three weeks later
+his visit was followed by a letter:--
+
+     MADAM,--I know how sorry you will be to hear that since my little
+     talk with you I have been dangerously sick in a hospital. The
+     doctors have now discharged me, but they say I must do no work of
+     any kind for ten days, though an artist is waiting for me to sit to
+     him for an important picture. They advise me to strengthen myself
+     with nourishing food in the meanwhile. Will you therefore please
+     send me
+
+     3 dozen new-laid eggs
+     1 lb. of fresh butter
+     1 lb. of coffee
+     1 lb. of tea
+     2 lbs. of sugar
+     1 dozen of oranges.
+
+     Thanking you in advance,
+     I am, Madam,
+     Gratefully yours.
+
+There are periods when I am convinced that not art, not literature, but
+journalism is the most impecunious of the professions, and that all
+Fleet Street, to which the Quarter is fairly convenient, must be out of
+work. It is astonishing how often it depends upon our financial backing
+to get into work again, though dependence could not be more misplaced,
+for a certain little transaction with a guileless youth whose future
+hung on a journey to Russia has given us all the experience of the kind,
+or a great deal more than we want. As astonishing is the number of
+journalists who cherish as their happiest recollections the years they
+were with us on the staff of London, New York, or Philadelphia papers
+for which we never wrote a line. One even grew sentimental over the
+"good old days" on the Philadelphia "Public Ledger" with J.'s father
+who, to our knowledge, passed his life without as much as seeing the
+inside of a newspaper office. But the journalist persisted until J.
+vowed that he never had a father, that he never was in Philadelphia,
+that he never heard of the "Ledger": then the poor man fled.
+Astonishing, too, is the count they keep of the seasons. Disaster is
+most apt to overtake them at those holiday times when Dickens has taught
+that hearts are tender and purses overflow. For them Christmas spells
+catastrophe, and it has ceased to be a surprise to hear their ring on
+Christmas Eve. As a rule, a shilling will avert the catastrophe and
+enable them to exchange the cold streets for a warm fireside, hunger for
+feasting, though I recall a reporter for whom it could not be done under
+a ticket to Paris. The Paris edition of the "New York Herald" had
+engaged him on condition that he was in the office not later than
+Christmas morning. He was ready to start, but--there was the ticket,
+and, for no particular reason except that it was Christmas Eve, J. was
+to have the pleasure of paying for it.
+
+"Why not apply to the 'New York Herald' office here?" J. asked.
+
+The reporter beamed: "My dear sir, the very thing, the very thing. Why
+didn't I think of it before? I will go at once. Thank you, sir, thank
+you!"
+
+He was back in an hour, radiant, the ticket in his hand, but held tight,
+so that just one end showed, as if he was afraid of losing it. "You see,
+sir, it was the right tip, but I must have some coffee at Dieppe, and I
+haven't one penny over. I can manage with a shilling, sir, and if you
+would be so kind a couple more for a cab in Paris."
+
+He did not know his man. J. would go, or rather he has gone, without
+breakfast or dinner and any distance on foot when work was at stake. But
+the reporter was so startled by the suggestion of such hardships for
+himself that he dropped the ticket on the floor, and before he could
+snatch it up again J. had seen that it was good not for Paris, but for a
+'bus in the Strand.
+
+I wish I had been half as stern with the assistant editor from
+Philadelphia. I knew him for what he was the minute he came into the
+room. He was decently, even jauntily dressed, but there hung about him
+the smell of stale cigars and whiskey, which always hangs about those of
+our Beggars who do not fill our chambers with the sicklier smell of
+drugs. Nor did I think much of his story. He related it at length with
+elegance of manner and speech, but it was a poor one, inviting doubt.
+The card he played was the one he sent in with a well-known Philadelphia
+name on it, and he strengthened the effect by his talk of the artist
+with whom he once shared rooms at Eleventh and Spruce streets. That
+"fetched me." For Eleventh and Spruce streets must ever mean for me the
+red brick house with the white marble steps and green shutters, the
+pleasant garden opposite full of trees green and shady on hot summer
+days, the leisurely horse-cars jingling slowly by,--the house that is so
+big in all the memories of my childhood and youth. If I can help it,
+nobody shall ever know what his having lived in its neighbourhood cost
+me. I was foolish, no doubt, but I gave with my eyes open: sentiment
+sometimes is not too dearly bought at the price of a little folly.
+
+Were Covent Garden not within such easy reach of the Quarter I could
+scarcely account for the trust which the needy musician places in us.
+Certainly it is because of no effort or encouragement on our side. We
+have small connection with the musical world, and whether because of the
+size of the singers or the commercial atmosphere at Baireuth, J. since
+we heard "Parsifal" there will not be induced to go to the opera
+anywhere, or to venture upon a concert. Under the circumstances, the
+most imaginative musician could not make believe in a professional bond
+between us, though there is nothing to shake his faith in the kinship of
+all the arts and, therefore, in our readiness to support the stray tenor
+or violinist who cannot support himself. But imagination, anyway, is not
+his strong point. He seldom displays the richness of fancy of our other
+Beggars, and I can recall only one, a pianist who had grasped the
+possibilities of "Who's Who." His use of it, however, went far to atone
+for the neglect of the rest. With its aid he had discovered not only
+that we were Philadelphians, but that Mr. David Bispham was also, and he
+had to let off his enthusiasm over Philadelphia and "dear old Dave
+Bispham" before he got down to business. There his originality
+gave out. His was the same old story of a run of misfortunes and
+disappointments--"it could never have happened if dear old Dave Bispham
+had been in town"--and the climax was the dying wife for whom our
+sympathy has been asked too often for a particle to be left. The only
+difference was that she took rather longer in dying than usual, and the
+pianist returned to report her removal from the shelter of a friend's
+house to the hospital, from the hospital to lodgings, and from the
+lodgings he threatened us with the spectacle of her drawing her last
+breath in the gutter if we did not, then and there, pay his landlady and
+his doctor and his friend to whom he was deeply in debt. We were spared
+her death, probably because by that time the pianist saw the wisdom of
+carrying the story of her sufferings to more responsive ears, though it
+is not likely that he met with much success anywhere. He was too well
+dressed for the part. With his brand-new frock coat and immaculate silk
+hat, with his gold-mounted cane and Suède gloves, he was better equipped
+for the _jeune premier_ warbling of love, than for the grief-stricken
+husband watching in penniless desolation by the bedside of a dying wife.
+
+The Quarter is also within an easy stroll for actors who, when their
+hard times come, show an unwarranted confidence in us, though J., if
+anything, disdains the theatre more than the opera. They take advantage
+of their training and bring the artist's zeal to the rôle of Beggars,
+but I have known them to be shocked back suddenly into their natural
+selves by J.'s blunt refusal to hear them out. One, giving the
+aristocratic name of Mr. Vivian Stewart and further describing himself
+on his card as "Lead Character late of the Lyceum," was so dismayed when
+J. cut his lines short with a shilling that he lost his cue entirely and
+whined, "Don't you think, sir, you could make it eighteenpence?" The
+most accomplished in the rôle was a young actor from York. He had the
+intelligence to suspect that _the_ profession does not monopolize the
+interest of all the world and to pretend that it did not monopolize his
+own. He therefore appeared in the double part of cyclist and actor. He
+reminded J. of a cycling dinner at York several winters before at which
+both were present. J. remembered the dinner, but not the cyclist, who
+was not a bit put out but declaimed upon "the freemasonry of the wheel,"
+and anticipated J.'s joy as fellow sportsman in hearing of the new
+engagement just offered to him. It would be the making of him and his
+reputation, but--no bad luck has ever yet robbed our Beggars of that
+useful preposition--_but_, it depended upon his leaving London within
+an hour, and the usual events over which our Beggars never have control,
+found him with ten shillings less than his railway fare. A loan at this
+critical point would save his career, and to-morrow the money would be
+returned. His visit dates back to the early period, when our hospitality
+had not out-grown the barbarous stage, and his career was saved,
+temporarily. After six months' silence, the actor reappeared. With his
+first word of greeting he took a half sovereign from his waistcoat
+pocket and regretted his delay in paying it back. _But_, in the mean
+while, much had happened. He had lost his promising engagement; he had
+found a wife and was on the point of losing her, for she was another of
+the many wives at death's door; he had found a more promising engagement
+and was on the point of losing that too, for if he did not settle his
+landlady's bill before the afternoon had passed she would seize his
+possessions, stage properties and all, and again events beyond his
+control had emptied his pockets. He would return the ten shillings,
+_but_ we must now lend him a sovereign. And he was not merely surprised
+but deeply hurt because we would not, and he stayed to argue it out that
+if his wife died, and his landlady kept his possessions, and the
+engagement was broken, and his career was at an end, the guilt would be
+ours,--it was in our power to make him or to mar him. He was really
+rather good at denunciation. On this occasion it was wasted. He did not
+get the sovereign, but then neither did we get the half sovereign which
+went back into his waistcoat pocket at the end of his visit and
+disappeared with him, this time apparently forever.
+
+We are scarcely in as great favour as we were with our Beggars. Their
+courage now is apt to ooze from them at our door, which is no longer
+held by a British servant, but by Augustine, whom tradition has not
+taught to respect the top hat and frock coat, and before whom even the
+prosperous quail. She recognizes the Beggar at a glance, for that glance
+goes at once to his shoes, she having found out, unaided by Thackeray,
+that poverty, beginning to take possession of a man, attacks his
+extremities first. She has never been mistaken except when, in the dusk
+of a winter evening, she shut one of our old friends out on the stairs
+because she had looked at his hat instead of his shoes and mistrusted
+the angle at which it was pulled down over his eyes. This blunder, for
+an interval, weakened her reliance upon her own judgment, but she has
+gradually recovered her confidence, and only the Beggars whose courage
+is screwed to the sticking-point, and who sharpen their wits, succeed in
+the skirmish to get past her. When they do get past it is not of much
+use. The entertainment they gave us is of a kind that palls with
+repetition. An inclination to listen to their stories, to save their
+careers, to set them up on their feet, could survive their persecutions
+in none but the epicure in charity, which we are not. The obligation of
+politeness to Beggars under my roof weighs more lightly on my shoulders
+with their every visit, while J., as the result of long experience and
+to save bother, has reduced his treatment of them to a system and gives
+a shilling indiscriminately to each and all who call to beg--when he
+happens to have one himself. In vain I assure him that if his system has
+the merit of simplicity, it is shocking bad political economy, and that
+every shilling given is a shilling thrown away. In vain I remind him
+that Augustine, shadowing our Beggars from our chambers, saw the man who
+came to us solely because of the "good old days" in Philadelphia stop
+and beg at every other door in the house; that she detected one of the
+numerous heart-broken husbands hurrying back to his dying wife by way of
+the first pub round the corner; that she caught the innocent defendant
+in a lawsuit, whose solicitor was waiting downstairs, pounced upon by
+two women instead and well scolded for the poor bargain he had made. In
+vain I point out that a shilling to one is an invitation to every Beggar
+on our beat, for by some wireless telegraphy of their own our Beggars
+always manage to spread the news when shillings are in season at our
+chambers. But J. is not to be moved. He has an argument as simple as his
+system with which to answer mine. If, he says, the Beggar is a humbug, a
+shilling can do no great harm; if the Beggar is genuine, it may pay for
+a night's bed or for the day's bread; and he does not care if it is
+right or wrong according to political economy, for he knows for himself
+that the Beggar's story is sometimes true. The visits of Beggars who
+once came to us as friends are vivid in his memory.
+
+They are, I admit, visits not soon forgotten. The chance Beggar in the
+street is impersonal in his appeal, and yet he makes us uncomfortable by
+his mere presence, symbol as he is of the huge and pitiless waste of
+life. Our laugh for the bare-faced impostor at our door has a sigh in
+it, for proficiency in his trade is gained only through suffering and
+degradation. But the laugh is lost in the sigh, the discomfort becomes
+acute when the man who begs a few pence is one at whose table we once
+sat, whom we once knew in positions of authority. He cannot be reduced
+to a symbol nor disposed of by generalizations. Giving is always an
+embarrassing business, but under these conditions it fills us with
+shame, nor can we help it though oftener than not we see that the shame
+is all ours. I am miserable during my interviews with the journalist
+whom we met when he was at the top of the ladder of success, and who
+slipped to the bottom after his promotion to an important editorship and
+his carelessness in allowing himself to be found, on the first night of
+his installation, asleep with his head and an empty bottle in the
+wastepaper basket; but he seems to be quite enjoying himself, which
+makes it the more tragic, as, with hand upraised, he assures me solemnly
+that J. is a gentleman, this proud distinction accorded by him in return
+for the practical working of J.'s system in his behalf. It is a trial to
+receive the popular author who won his popularity by persevering in the
+"'abits of a clerk," so he says, when he left the high office stool for
+the comfortable chair in his own study, and whose face explains too well
+what he has made of it; but it is evidently a pleasure to him, and
+therefore the more pitiful to me, when he interrupts my mornings to
+expose the critics and their iniquity in compelling him to come to me
+for the bread they take out of his mouth. Worst of all were the visits
+of the business man,--I am glad I can speak of them in the
+past,--though he himself never seemed conscious of the ghastly figure he
+made, for when his visible business vanished he had still his wonderful
+schemes.
+
+He was a man of wonderful schemes, but originally they led to results as
+wonderful. When we first knew him he ruled in an office in Bond Street,
+he had partners, he had clerks, he had a porter in livery at the door.
+He embarked upon daring adventures and brought them off. He gave
+interesting commissions, and he paid for them too, as we learned to our
+profit. He had large ideas and a wide horizon; he shrank from the cheap
+and popular, from what the people like. He was not above taking the
+advice of others upon subjects of which he was broad-minded enough to
+understand and to acknowledge his own ignorance, for he spared himself
+no pains in his determination to secure the best. And he was full of go;
+that was why we liked him. I look back to evenings when he came to
+dinner to talk over some new scheme, and when he would sit on and talk
+on after his last train--his home was in the suburbs--had long gone and,
+as he told us afterwards, he would have to wait in one of the little
+restaurants near Fleet Street that are open all night for journalists
+until it was time to catch the earliest newspaper train. He would drop
+in at any odd hour to discuss his latest enterprise. We were always
+seeing him, and we were always delighted to see him, enthusiasm not
+being so common a virtue in the Briton that we can afford not to make
+the most of it when it happens. We found him, as a consequence, a
+stimulating companion. I cannot say exactly when the change came; why it
+came remains a mystery to us to this day. Probably it began long before
+we realized it. The first symptoms were a trick of borrowing: at the
+outset such trivial things as a daily paper to which he should have
+subscribed, or books which he should have bought for himself. Then it
+was a half crown here and a half crown there, because he had not time to
+go back to the office before rushing to the station, or because he had
+not a cab fare with him, or because of half a dozen other accidents as
+plausible. We might not have given a second thought to all this but for
+the rapidity with which the half crowns developed into five shillings,
+and the five into ten, and the ten into a sovereign on evenings when the
+cab, for which we had to take his word, had been waiting during the
+hours of his stay. We could not help our suspicions, the more so because
+that indefinable but rank odour of drugs, by which our Beggars too
+frequently announce themselves, grew stronger as the amount of which he
+was in need increased. And very soon he was confiding to us the details
+of a quarrel which deprived him of his partners and their capital. Then
+the Bond Street office was given up and his business was done in some
+vague rooms, the whereabouts of which he never disclosed; only too soon
+it seemed to be done entirely in the street. We would meet him at night
+slinking along the Strand, one of the miserable shadows of humanity whom
+the darkness lures out of the nameless holes and corners where they hide
+during the day. At last came a period when he kept away from our
+chambers altogether, sending his wife to us instead. Her visits were
+after dark, usually towards midnight. She called for all sorts of
+things,--a week's rent, medicine from the druggist in the Strand,
+Sunday's dinner, her 'bus fare home, once I remember for an umbrella.
+She was never without an excuse for the emergency that forced her to
+disturb us, and she was no less fine than he in keeping up the fiction
+that it was an emergency, and that business prospered though removed
+from Bond Street into the Unknown. I think it was after this loan of an
+umbrella that he again came himself, nominally to return it and
+incidentally to borrow something else. I had not seen him for several
+months. It might have been years judging from his appearance, and I
+wished, as I still wish, I had not seen him then. In the Bond Street
+days he had the air of a man who lived well, and he was correct in
+dress, "well groomed" as they say. And now? His face was as colourless
+and emaciated as the faces from which I shrink in the "hunger line" on
+the Embankment; he wore a brown tweed suit, torn and mended and torn
+again, with a horrible patch of another colour on one knee that drew my
+eyes irresistibly to it; his straw hat was as burned and battered as
+days of tramping in the sun and nights of sleeping in the rain could
+make it. He was the least embarrassed of the two. In fact, he was not
+embarrassed at all, but sat in the chair where so often he had faced me
+in irreproachable frock coat and spotless trousers, and explained as in
+the old days his wonderful schemes, expressing again the hope that we
+would second him and, with him, again achieve success. He might have
+been a prince promising his patronage. And all the while I did not know
+which way to look, so terrible was his face pinched and drawn with
+hunger, so eloquent that staring patch on his knee. That was several
+years ago, and it was the last visit either he or his wife ever made us.
+I cannot imagine that anything was left to them except greater misery,
+deeper degradation, and--the merciful end, which I hope came swiftly.
+
+It is when I remember the business man and our other friends,
+fortunately few, who have followed in the same path that I am unable to
+deny the force of the argument by which J. defends his system. It may be
+that all our Beggars began life with schemes as wonderful and ideas as
+large, that their stories are as true, that the line between Tragedy and
+Farce was never so fine drawn as when, stepping across it, they plunged
+into the profession of having come down in the world.
+
+
+
+
+_The Tenants_
+
+[Illustration: THE LION BREWERY]
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE TENANTS
+
+
+It is impossible to live in chambers without knowing something of the
+other tenants in the house. I know much even of several who were
+centuries or generations before my time, and I could not help it if I
+wanted to, for the London County Council has lately set up a plaque to
+their memory on our front wall. Not that I want to help it. I take as
+much pride in my direct descent from Pepys and Etty as others may in an
+ancestor on the Mayflower or with the Conqueror, while if it had not
+been for J. and his interest in the matter we might not yet boast the
+plaque that gives us distinction in our shabby old street, though, to do
+us full justice, its list of names should be lengthened by at least one,
+perhaps the most distinguished.
+
+I have never understood why Bacon was left out. Only the pedant would
+disown so desirable a tenant for the poor reason that the house has
+been rebuilt since his day. As it is, Pepys heads the list, and we do
+not pretend to claim that the house is exactly as it was when he lived
+in it. He never saw our Adam ceilings and fireplaces, we never saw his
+row of gables along the River front except in Canaletto's drawing of the
+old Watergate which our windows still overlook. However, except for the
+loss of the gables, the outside has changed little, and if the inside
+has been remodelled beyond recognition, we make all we can of the
+Sixteenth-Century drain-pipe discovered when the London County Council,
+in the early throes of reform, ordered our plumbing to be overhauled.
+Their certified plumber made so much of it, feeling obliged to celebrate
+his discovery with beer and in his hurry forgetting to blow out the bit
+of candle he left amid the laths and plaster, that if J. had not arrived
+just in time there would be no house now for the plaque to decorate.
+Pepys, I regret to say, waited to move in until after the Diary ended,
+so that we do not figure in its pages. Nor, during his tenancy, does he
+figure anywhere except in the parish accounts, which is more to his
+credit than our entertainment.
+
+Etty was considerate and left a record of his "peace and happiness" in
+our chambers, but I have no proof that he appreciated their beauty. If
+he liked to walk on our leads in the evening and watch the sun set
+behind Westminster, he turned his back on the River at the loveliest
+hour of all. It was his habit as Academician to work like a student at
+night in the Royal Academy Schools, then in Trafalgar Square,--an
+admirable habit, but one that took him away just when he should have
+stayed. For when evening transformed the Thames and its banks into
+Whistler's "Fairyland" he, like Paul Revere, hung out a lantern from his
+studio window as a signal for the porter, with a big stick, to come and
+fetch him and protect him from the robbers of the Quarter, which had not
+then the best of reputations. Three generations of artists climbed our
+stairs to drink tea and eat muffins with Etty, but they showed the same
+ignorance of the Thames, all except Turner, who thought there was no
+finer scenery on any river in Italy, and who wanted to capture our
+windows from Etty and make them his own, but who, possibly because he
+could not get them, never painted the Thames as it was and is. One other
+painter did actually capture the windows on the first floor, and, in the
+chambers that are now the Professor's, Stanfield manufactured his
+marines, and there too, they say, Humphry Davy made his safety lamp.
+
+We do not depend solely upon the past for our famous tenants. Some of
+the names which in my time have been gorgeously gilded inside our
+vestibule, later generations may find in the list we make a parade of on
+our outer wall. For a while, in the chambers just below ours, we had the
+pleasure of knowing that Mr. Edmund Gosse was carrying on for us the
+traditions of Bacon and Pepys. Then we have had a Novelist or two, whose
+greatness I shrink from putting to the test by reading their novels, and
+also one or more Actors, but fame fades from the mummer on the wrong
+side of the footlights. We still have the Architect who, if the tenants
+were taken at his valuation, would, I fancy, head our new list.
+
+He is not only an architect but, like Etty,--like J. for that
+matter,--an Academician. He carries off the dignity with great
+stateliness, conscious of the vast gulf fixed between him and tenants
+with no initials after their name. Moreover, he belongs to that
+extraordinary generation of now elderly Academicians who were apparently
+chosen for their good looks, as Frederick's soldiers were for their
+size. The stoop that has come to his shoulder with years but adds to the
+impressiveness of his carriage. His air of superiority is a continual
+reminder of his condescension in having his office under our modest
+roof. His "Aoh, good-mornin'," as he passes, is a kindness, a few words
+from him a favour rarely granted, and there is no insolent familiar in
+the house who would dare approach him. Royalty, Archbishops, University
+dignitaries are his clients, and it would seem presumption for the mere
+untitled to approach him with a commission. His office is run on
+dignified lines in keeping with the exalted sphere in which he
+practises. A parson of the Church of England is his chief assistant. A
+notice on his front door warns the unwary that "No Commercial
+Travellers need Apply," and implies that others had better not.
+
+William Penn is probably the only creature in the house who ever had the
+courage to enter the Academic precincts unbidden. William was a cat of
+infinite humour, and one of his favourite jests was to dash out of our
+chambers and down the stairs whenever he had a chance; not because he
+wanted to escape,--he did not, for he loved his family as he
+should,--but because he knew that one or all of us would dash after him.
+If he was not caught in time he added to the jest by pushing through the
+Academician's open door and hiding somewhere under the Academic nose,
+and I am certain that nobody had a keener sense of the audacity of it
+than William himself. More than once a young assistant, trying to
+repress a grin and to look as serious as if he were handing us a design
+for a Deanery, restored William to his family; and once, on a famous
+occasion when, already late, we were starting for the Law Courts and the
+Witness-box, the Architect relaxed so far as to pull William out from
+among the Academic drawing-boards and to smile as he presented him to
+J. who was following in pursuit. Even Jove sometimes unbends, but when
+Jove is a near neighbour it is wiser not to presume upon his unbending,
+and we have never given the Architect reason to regret his moment of
+weakness.
+
+Whatever the Architect thinks of himself, the other tenants think more
+of Mr. Square, whose front door faces ours on the Third Floor. Mr.
+Square is under no necessity of assuming an air of superiority, so
+patent to everybody in the house is his right to it. If anything, he
+shrinks from asserting himself. He had been in his chambers a year,
+coming a few months "after the fire," before I knew him by sight, though
+by reputation he is known to everybody from one end of the country to
+the other. Not only is there excitement in our house when the police
+officer appears on our staircase with a warrant for his arrest for
+murder, but the United Kingdom thrills and waits with us for the
+afternoon's Police Report. In the neighbourhood I am treated with almost
+as much respect as when I played a leading part in the Law Courts
+myself. The milkman and the postman stop me in the street, the little
+fruiterer round the corner and the young ladies at the Temple of Pomona
+in the Strand detain me in giving me my change as if I were an accessory
+to the crime. What if the murder is only technical, Mr. Square's arrest
+a matter of form, his discharge immediate? The glory is in his position
+which makes the technical murder an achievement to be envied by every
+true-born Briton. For he is Referee at the Imperial Boxing Club, and
+therefore the most important person in the Empire, except, perhaps, the
+winning jockey at the Derby or the Captain of the winning Football Team.
+The Prime Minister, Royalty itself, would not shed a brighter lustre on
+our ancient house, and there could be no event of greater interest than
+the fatal "accident" in the ring for which Mr. Square has been so many
+times held technically responsible.
+
+In his private capacity Mr. Square strikes me as in no way remarkable.
+He is a medium-sized man with sandy hair and moustache, as like as two
+peas to the other men of medium height with sandy hair and moustache
+who are met by the thousand in the Strand. He shares his chambers with
+Mr. Savage, who is something in the Bankruptcy Court. Both are retiring
+and modest, they never obtrude themselves, and either their domestic
+life is quiet beyond reproach, or else the old builders had the secret
+of soundless walls, for no sound from their chambers disturbs us. With
+them we have not so much as the undesirable intimacy that comes from
+mutual complaint, and such is their amiability that William, in his most
+outrageous intrusions, never roused from them a remonstrance.
+
+I am forced to admit that William was at times ill-advised in the hours
+and places he chose for his adventures. He often beguiled me at midnight
+upon the leads that he might enjoy my vain endeavours to entice him home
+with the furry monkey tied to the end of a string, which during the day
+never failed to bring him captive to my feet. By his mysterious
+disappearances he often drove J., whose heart is tender and who adored
+him, out of his bed at unseemly hours and down into the street where, in
+pyjamas and slippers, and the door banged to behind him, he became an
+object of suspicion. On one of these occasions, a policeman
+materializing suddenly from nowhere and turning a bull's-eye on him,--
+
+"Have you seen a cat about?" J. asked.
+
+"Seen a cat? Oi've seen millions on 'em," said the policeman. "Wot sort
+o' cat?" he added.
+
+"A common tabby cat," said J.
+
+"Look 'ere," said the policeman, "where do you live any'ow?"
+
+"Here," said J., who had retained his presence of mind with his
+latch-key.
+
+"Aoh, Oi begs your parding, sir," said the policeman. "Oi didn't see
+you, sir, in the dim light, sir, but you know, sir, there's billions o'
+tabby cats about 'ere of a night, sir. But if Oi find yours, sir, Oi'll
+fetch 'im 'ome to you, sir. S'noight, sir. Thank e' sir."
+
+When the kitchen door was opened the next morning, William was
+discovered innocently curled up in his blanket. And yet, when he again
+disappeared at bedtime a week or two later, J. was again up before
+daybreak, sure that he was on the doorstep breaking his heart because
+he could not get in. This time I followed into our little hall, and
+Augustine after me. She was not then as used to our ways as she is now,
+and I still remember her sleepy bewilderment when she looked at J., who
+had varied his costume for the search by putting on knickerbockers and
+long stockings, and her appeal to me: "_Mais pourquoi en bicyclette?_"
+Why indeed? But there was no time for explanation. We were interrupted
+by an angry but welcome wail from behind the opposite door, and we
+understood that William was holding us responsible for having got
+himself locked up in Mr. Square's chambers. We had to wake up Mr.
+Square's old servant before he could be released, but it was not until
+the next morning that the full extent of his iniquity was revealed. A
+brand-new, pale-pink silk quilt on Mr. Square's bed having appealed to
+him as more luxurious than his own blanket, he had profited by Mr.
+Square's absence to spend half the night on it, leaving behind him a
+faint impression of his dear grimy little body. Even then, Mr. Square
+remained as magnanimously silent as if he shared our love for William
+and pride in his performances.
+
+All we know of Mr. Square and Mr. Savage, in addition to their fame and
+modesty, we have learned from their old man, Tom. He is a sailor by
+profession, and for long steward on Mr. Savage's yacht. He clings to his
+uniform in town, and when we see him pottering about in his blue reefer
+and brass buttons, Mr. Savage's little top floor that adjoins ours and
+opens out on the leads we share between us looks more than ever like a
+ship's quarter-deck. He is sociable by nature, and overflows with
+kindliness for everybody. He is always smiling, whatever he may be doing
+or wherever I may meet him, and he has a child's fondness for sweet
+things. He is never without a lemon-drop in his mouth, and he keeps his
+pockets full of candy. As often as the opportunity presents itself, he
+presses handfuls upon Augustine, whom he and his wife ceremoniously call
+"Madam," and to whom he confides the secrets of the household.
+
+It is through him, by way of Augustine, that we follow the movements of
+the yacht, and know what "his gentlemen" have for dinner and how many
+people come to see them. At times I have feared that his confidences to
+Augustine and the tenderness of his attentions were too marked, and that
+his old wife, who is less liberal with her smiles, disapproved. Over the
+_grille_ that separates our leads from his, he gossips by the hour with
+Augustine, when she lets him, and once or twice, meeting her in the
+street, he has gallantly invited her into a near public to "'ave a
+drink," an invitation which she, with French scorn for the British
+substitute of the café, would disdain to accept. To other tributes of
+his affection, however, she does not object. On summer evenings he
+sometimes lays a plate of salad or stewed fruit at our door, rings,
+runs, and then from out a porthole of a window by his front door,
+watches the effect when she finds it, and is horribly embarrassed if I
+find it by mistake. In winter his offering takes the shape of a British
+mince-pie or a slice of plum pudding, and, on a foggy morning when she
+comes home from market, he will bring her a glass of port from Mr.
+Square's cellar. He is always ready to lend her a little oil, or milk,
+or sugar, in an emergency. Often he is useful in a more urgent crisis.
+In a sudden thunder-storm he will leap over the _grille_, shut our door
+on the leads, and make everything ship-shape almost before I know it is
+raining. He has even broken in for me when I have come home late without
+a key, and by my knocking and ringing have roused up everybody in the
+whole house except Augustine. Mrs. Tom, much as she may disapprove, is
+as kindly in her own fashion; she is quite learned in medicine, and
+knows an old-fashioned remedy for every ailment. She has seen Augustine
+triumphantly through an accident, she has cured Marcel, Augustine's
+husband, of a quinsy, and she rather likes to be called upon for advice.
+She is full of little amiabilities. She never gets a supply of eggs
+fresh from the country at a reasonable price without giving me a chance
+to secure a dozen or so, and when her son, a fisherman, comes up to
+London, she always reserves a portion of his present of fish for me. I
+could not ask for kindlier neighbours, and they are the only friends I
+have made in the house.
+
+I was very near having friendship thrust upon me, however, by the First
+Floor Back, Mrs. Eliza Short. She is an elderly lady of generous
+proportions and flamboyant tastes, "gowned" elaborately by Jay and as
+elaborately "wigged" by Truefitt. The latest fashions and golden hair
+cannot conceal the ravages of time, and, as a result of her labours, she
+looks tragically like the unwilling wreck of a Lydia Thompson Blonde. I
+may be wrong; she may never have trod the boards, and yet I know of
+nothing save the theatre that could account for her appearance. The most
+assiduous of her visitors, as I meet them on the stairs, is an old
+gentleman as carefully made up in his way, an amazing little dandy, whom
+I fancy as somebody in the front row applauding rapturously when Mrs.
+Eliza Short, in tights and golden locks, came pirouetting down the
+stage. I should have been inclined to weave a pretty romance about them
+as the modern edition of Philemon and Baucis if, knowing Mrs. Short, it
+did not become impossible to associate romance of any kind with her.
+
+Our acquaintance was begun by my drinking tea in her chambers the
+morning "after the fire," of which she profited unfairly by putting me
+on her visiting-list. She was not at all of Montaigne's opinion that
+"incuriosity" is a soft and sound pillow to rest a well-composed head
+upon. On the contrary, it was evident that for hers to rest in comfort
+she must first see every room in our chambers and examine into all my
+domestic arrangements. I have never been exposed to such a battery of
+questions. I must say for her that she was more than ready to pay me in
+kind. Between her questions she gave me a vast amount of information for
+which I had no possible use. She told me the exact amount of her income
+and the manner of its investment. She explained her objection to
+servants and her preference for having "somebody in" to do the rough
+work. She confided to me that she dealt at the Stores where she could
+always get a cold chicken and a bit of ham at a pinch, and the "pinch"
+at once presented itself to my mind as an occasion when the old dandy
+was to be her guest. She edified me by her habit of going to bed with
+the lambs, and getting up with the larks to do her own dusting. The one
+ray of hope she allowed me was the fact that her winters were spent at
+Monte Carlo. She could not pass me on the stairs, or in the hall, or on
+the street, where much of her time was lost, without buttonholing me to
+ask on what amount of rent I was rated, or how much milk I took in of a
+morning, or if the butcher sent me tough meat, or other things that were
+as little her business. I positively dreaded to go out or to come home,
+and the situation was already strained when Jimmy rushed to the rescue.
+Elia regretted the agreeable intimacies broken off by the dogs whom he
+loved less than their owners, but I found it useful to have a cat Mrs.
+Short could not endure, to break off my intimacy with her, and he did it
+so effectually that I could never believe it was not done on purpose.
+One day, when she had been out since ten o'clock in the morning, she
+returned to find Jimmy locked up in her chambers alone with her bird.
+That the bird was still hopping about its cage was to me the most
+mysterious feature in the whole affair, for Jimmy was a splendid
+sportsman. After his prowls in the garden he only too often left behind
+him a trail of feathers and blood-stains all the way up the three
+flights of our stairs. But if the bird had not escaped, Mrs. Short could
+hardly have been more furious. She demanded Jimmy's life, and when it
+was refused, insisted on his banishment. She threatened him with poison
+and me with exposure to the Landlord. For days the Housekeeper was sent
+flying backwards and forwards between Mrs. Short's chambers and ours,
+bearing threats and defiances. Jimmy, who knew as well as I did what was
+going on, rejoiced, and from then until his untimely death never ran
+downstairs or up--and he was always running down or up--without stopping
+in front of her door, giving one unearthly howl, and then flying; and
+never by chance did he pay the same little attention to any one of the
+other tenants.
+
+Mrs. Short does not allow me to forget her. As her voice is deep and
+harsh and thunders through the house when she buttonholes somebody else,
+or says good-bye to a friend at her door, I hear her far more
+frequently than I care to; as she has a passion for strong scent, I
+often smell her when I do not see her at all; and as in the Quarter we
+all patronize the same tradesmen, I am apt to run into her not only on
+our stairs, but in the dairy, or the Temple of Pomona, or further afield
+at the Post Office. Then, however, we both stare stonily into vacancy,
+failing to see each other, and during the sixteen years since that first
+burst of confidence, we have exchanged not a word, not as much as a
+glance: an admirable arrangement which I owe wholly to Jimmy.
+
+With her neighbours on the other side of the hall, Mrs. Short has
+nothing in common except permanency as tenant. Her name and the sign of
+the Church League faced each other on the First Floor when we came to
+our chambers; they face each other still. Her golden wig is not oftener
+seen on our stairs than the gaiters and aprons of the Bishops who rely
+upon the League for a periodical cup of tea; her voice is not oftener
+heard than the discreet whispers of the ladies who attend the Bishops in
+adoring crowds. But Jimmy's intervention was not required to maintain
+the impersonality of my relations with the League. It has never shown an
+interest in my affairs nor a desire to confide its own to me. Save for
+one encounter we have kept between us the distance which it should be
+the object of all tenants to cultivate, and I might never have looked
+upon it as more than a name had I not witnessed its power to attract
+some of the clergy and to enrage others. Nothing has happened in our
+house to astound me more than the angry passions it kindled in two of
+our friends who are clergymen. One vows that he will never come to see
+us again so long as to reach our chambers he must pass the League's
+door; the second reproaches us for having invited him, his mere presence
+in the same house being sufficient to ruin his clerical reputation. As
+the League is diligently working for the Church of which both my friends
+are distinguished lights, I feel that in these matters there are fine
+shades beyond my unorthodox intelligence. It is also astounding that the
+League should inflame laymen of no religious tendencies whatever to
+more violent antagonism. Friends altogether without the pale have taken
+offence at what they call the League's arrogance in hanging up its signs
+not only at its front door, but downstairs in the vestibule, and again
+on the railings without, and they destroyed promptly the poster it once
+ventured to put upon the stairs, assuring us that theirs was righteous
+wrath, and then, in the manner of friends, leaving us to face the
+consequences.
+
+For myself I bear no ill-will to the League. I may object to the success
+with which it fills our stairs on the days of its meetings and
+tea-parties, but I cannot turn this into a pretext for quarrelling,
+while I can only admire the spirit of progress that has made it the
+first in the house to do its spring-cleaning by a vacuum cleaner and to
+set up a private letter-box. I can only congratulate it on the
+prosperity that has caused the overflow of its offices into the next
+house, and so led indirectly to the one personal encounter I have
+referred to. A few of the rooms were to let, and J.'s proposal to set up
+his printing-press in one of them involved us in a correspondence with
+the Secretary. Then I called, as by letter we were unable to agree upon
+details. The League, with a display of hospitality that should put the
+Architect to shame, bids everybody enter without knocking. But when I
+accepted this Christian invitation, I was confronted by a tall,
+solemn-faced young man, who informed me that the Secretary was "engaged
+in prayer," and I got no further than the inner hall. As I failed to
+catch the Secretary in his less professional moments, and as his
+devotions did not soften his heart to the extent of meeting us halfway,
+we quickly resumed the usual impersonality of our relations.
+
+I cannot imagine our house without the Church League and Mrs. Eliza
+Short, the Architect and Mr. Square. Were their names to vanish from the
+doors where I have seen them for the last sixteen years, it would give
+me the same sense of insecurity as if I suddenly looked out of my window
+to a Thames run dry, or to a domeless city in the distance. With this
+older group of tenants, who show their respect for a house of venerable
+age and traditions by staying in it, I think we are to be included and
+also the Solicitor of the Ground Floor Front. He has been with us a
+short time, it is true, but he succeeded our old Insurance Agent whom
+nothing save death could have removed, and for years before he lived no
+further away than Peter the Great's house across the street, where he
+would be still, had it not been torn down over his head to make way for
+the gaudy, new, grey stone building which foretells the beginning of the
+end of our ancient street. The Solicitor cloisters himself in his
+chambers more successfully even than the Architect or the Church League,
+and I have never yet laid eyes on him or detected a client at his door.
+
+I wish the same could be said of our other newcomers who, with rare
+exceptions, exhibit a restlessness singularly unbecoming in a house that
+has stood for centuries. In the Ground Floor Back change for long was
+continued. It was the home of a Theatrical Agent and his family, and
+babyish prattle filled our once silent halls; it was the office of a
+Music Hall Syndicate, and strange noises from stranger instruments came
+floating out and up our stairs, and blonde young ladies in towering
+hats blocked the door. Then a Newspaper Correspondent drifted in and
+drifted out again; and next a publisher piled his books in the windows,
+and made it look so like the shop which is against the rules of the
+house that his disappearance seemed his just reward.
+
+After this a Steamship Company took possession, bringing suggestions of
+sunshine and spice with the exotic names of its vessels and the far-away
+Southern ports for which they sailed,--bringing, too, the spirit of
+youth, for it employed many young men and women whom I would meet in
+couples whispering on the stairs or going home at dusk hand in hand.
+Tender little idyls sprang up in our sober midst. But the staff of young
+lovers hit upon the roof as trysting-place at the luncheon hour, running
+races and playing tag up there, and almost tumbling through our
+skylight. Cupid, sporting overhead with wings exchanged for hob-nailed
+boots, was unendurable, and I had to call in the Landlord's Agent. He is
+the unfortunate go-between in all the tenants' differences and
+difficulties: a kind, weary, sympathetic man, designed by Nature for
+amiable, good-natured communication with his fellow men, and decreed by
+Fate and his calling to communicate with them constantly in their most
+disagreeable moods and phases. Half my fury evaporated at sight of his
+troubled face, and I might have endured the races and games of tag could
+I have foreseen that, almost as soon as he put a stop to them, the
+Steamship Company would take its departure.
+
+The Professor who then came in is so exemplary a tenant that I hope
+there will be no more changes in the Ground Floor Back. He is a tall,
+ruddy, well-built man of the type supposed to be essentially British by
+those who have never seen the other type far more general in the
+provincial town or, nearer still, in the East of London. He is of
+middle-age and should therefore have out-grown the idyllic stage, and
+his position as Professor at the University is a guarantee of sobriety
+and decorum. I do not know what he professes, but I can answer for his
+conscientiousness in professing it by the regularity with which, from
+our windows, I see him of a morning crossing the garden below on his
+way to his classes. His household is a model of British propriety. He is
+cared for by a motherly housekeeper, an eminently correct man-servant,
+and a large hound of dignified demeanour and a sense of duty that leads
+him to suspect an enemy in everybody who passes his master's door. His
+violence in protesting against unobjectionable tenants like ourselves
+reconciles me to dispensing with a dog, especially as it ends with his
+bark. It was in his master's chambers that our only burglar was
+discovered,--a forlorn makeshift of a burglar who got away with nothing,
+and was in such an agony of fright when, in the small hours of the
+morning, he was pulled out from under the dining-room table, that the
+Professor let him go as he might have set free a fly found straying in
+his jam-pot.
+
+The Professor, as is to be expected of anybody so unmistakably British,
+cultivates a love for sport. I suspect him of making his amusements his
+chief business in life, as it is said a man should and as the Briton
+certainly does. He hunts in the season, and, as he motors down to the
+meet, he is apt to put on his red coat and white breeches before he
+starts, and they give the last touch of respectability to our
+respectable house. He is an ardent automobilist, and his big motor at
+our door suggests wealth as well as respectability. This would have
+brought us into close acquaintance had he had his way. Sport is supposed
+to make brothers of all men who believe in it, but from this category I
+must except J. at those anxious moments which sport does not spare its
+followers. He was preparing to start somewhere on his fiery motor
+bicycle, and the Professor, who had never seen one before, wanted to
+know all about it. J., deeper than he cared to be in carburettors and
+other mysterious matters, was not disposed to be instructive, and I
+think the Professor was ashamed of having been beaten in the game of
+reserve by an American, for he has made no further advances. His most
+ambitious achievement is ballooning, to which he owes a fame in the
+Quarter only less than Mr. Square's. We all watch eagerly, with a
+feeling of proprietorship, for the balloons on the afternoons when
+balloon races and trials start from the Crystal Palace or Ranelagh. I
+have caught our little fruiterer in the act of pointing out the
+Professor's windows to chance customers; and on those days I am absorbed
+in the sporting columns of the afternoon paper, which, at other times, I
+pass over unread. He has now but to fly to complete his triumph and the
+pride of our house in him.
+
+Restlessness also prevails in the Second Floor Back, and as we are
+immediately above, we suffer the more. Hardly a tenant has remained
+there over a year, or a couple of years at most, and all in succession
+have developed a talent for interfering with our comfort. First, an
+Honourable occupied the chambers. His title was an unfailing
+satisfaction to Mrs. Haines, the Housekeeper, who dwelt upon it
+unctuously every time she mentioned him. I am not learned in Debrett and
+Burke and may not have appreciated its value, but he might have been
+Honourable ten times over and it would not have reconciled me to him as
+neighbour. He was quite sure, if I was not, that he was a great deal
+better than anybody else, and he had the Briton's independent way of
+asserting it. He slammed behind him every door he opened, and when the
+stairs were barricaded by himself, his friends, or his parcels, and we
+wanted to pass, he failed to see us as completely as if we had been Mr.
+Wells's Invisible Man. He went to the City in the morning and was away
+all day, even an Honourable being sometimes compelled to pretend to
+work. But this was no relief. During his absence his servants availed
+themselves of the opportunity to assert their independence, which they
+did with much vigour. When they were not slamming doors they were
+singing hymns, until Mrs. Eliza Short from her chambers below and we
+from ours above, in accord the first and only time for years, joined in
+protest, and drove Mrs. Haines to the unpleasant task of remonstrating
+with an Honourable.
+
+The Honourable who had come down from the aristocracy was followed by a
+_Maître d'Hôtel_ who was rapidly rising in rank, and was therefore under
+as urgent necessity to impress us with his importance. Adolf was an
+Anglicized German, with moustaches like the Kaiser's, and the swagger
+of a drum-major. He treated our house as if it was the dining-room under
+his command, locking and unlocking the street door, turning on and out
+the lights on the stairs at any hour that suited him, however
+inconvenient to the rest of us. He littered up the hall with his
+children and his children's perambulators and hobby-horses, just where
+we all had to stumble over them to get in or out. Nobody's taxi tooted
+so loud as his, not even the Honourable's door had shut with such a
+bang. Augustine's husband being also something in the same profession,
+they both despised the Adolfs for putting on airs though no better than
+themselves, while the Adolfs despised them for not having attained the
+same splendid heights, and the shaking of my rugs out of the back
+windows was seized upon as the excuse for open warfare. Augustine said
+it was there they should be shaken according to the law in Paris, which
+she thought good enough for London. Mrs. Adolf protested that the
+shaking sent all the dust into her rooms. Augustine, whose English is
+small and what there is of it not beyond reproach, called Mrs. Adolf
+"silly fou," which must have been annoying, or harangued her in French
+when Mrs. Adolf, who could not understand, suspected an offence in every
+word.
+
+Mrs. Adolf wrote to the Agent, to the Landlord, to me; she declared she
+would summons me to the County Court. Between letters she watched at her
+window for the rugs, and there both her servant and her charwoman made
+faces at Augustine, who has a nice sense of justice and a temper that
+does not permit her, with Elizabeth Bennet's father, to be satisfied by
+laughing in her turn at those who have made sport of her. I trembled for
+the consequences. But at the critical moment, Adolf was promoted to the
+more splendid height of Manager and a larger salary; the taxi was
+replaced by a motor-car of his own; Mrs. Adolf arrayed herself in muslin
+and lace for the washtub, in nothing less elegant than velvet for the
+street, and they left our old-fashioned chambers for the marble halls
+and gilded gorgeousness of the modern mansion.
+
+Of the several tenants after the Adolfs, I seem to remember little save
+the complaints we interchanged. I tried my best to do as I would be done
+by and to keep out of their way, but accident was always throwing us
+together to our mutual indignation. There was the Bachelor whose
+atrocious cook filled our chambers with the rank odours of smoked
+herring and burnt meat, and whose deserted ladylove filled the stairs
+with lamentations. There was the young Married Couple into whose bathtub
+ours overflowed. There was the Accidental Actress whose loud voice and
+heavy boots were the terror not only of our house, but of the street,
+whose telephone rang from morning till night, whose dog howled all
+evening when he was left alone as he usually was, and whose rehearsals
+in her rooms interrupted the work in ours with ear-piercing yells of
+"Murder" and "Villain."
+
+I cannot recall them all, so rapidly did they come and go. We began to
+fear that the life of the tenant was, as Tristram Shandy described the
+life of man, a shifting from sorrow to sorrow. We lived in an atmosphere
+of fault-finding, though when there was serious cause for complaint,
+not a murmur could be wrung from the tenant below or, for that matter,
+from a tenant in the house. All, like true Britons, refused to admit the
+possibility of interests in common, and would not stir a hand, however
+pressing the danger, so long as they were not disturbed. If our chambers
+reeked with smoke and the smell of burning wood, they accepted the
+information with calm indifference because theirs did not. Nor did it
+serve as a useful precedent if, as it happened, smoke and smell were
+traced again to a fire, smouldering as it had been for nobody knew how
+long, in the cellar of the adjoining house, separated from ours only by
+the "party wall" belonging to both: that ingenious contrivance of the
+builder for creating ill-will between next-door neighbours. They
+declined to feel the bannisters loose under their grasp, or to see the
+wide gap opened in the same party wall after the fall of the roof of
+Charing Cross Station had shaken the Quarter to its foundations and made
+us believe for a moment that London was emulating Messina or San
+Francisco. And I must add, so characteristic was it, that the Agent
+dismissed our fears as idle, and that the Surveyor, sent at our request
+by the County Council, laughed us to scorn. But we laughed best, for we
+laughed last. A second Surveyor ordered the wall to be pulled down as
+unsafe and rebuilt, and the Agent in the end found it prudent to support
+the bannisters with iron braces.
+
+When, after these trials and tribulations, Mr. Allan took the Second
+Floor Back we thought the Millennium had come. He was a quiet man,
+employed in the morning, so we were told, in writing a life of Chopin,
+and in the evening, as we heard for ourselves, in playing Chopin
+divinely. The piano is an instrument calculated to convert an otherwise
+harmless neighbour into a nuisance, but of him it made a delight. He was
+waited upon by a man as quiet, whose consideration for the tenants went
+to the length of felt slippers in the house, who never slammed doors nor
+sang, who never even whistled at his work. An eternity of peace seemed
+to open out before us, but, as they say in novels, it was not to be. Our
+confidence in Mr. Allan was first shaken by what I still think an
+unjustified exhibition of nerves. One night, or rather one early
+morning, a ring at our door-bell startled us at an hour when, in my
+experience, it means either a fire or an American cablegram. It was
+therefore the more exasperating, on opening the door, to be faced by an
+irate little man in pyjamas and smoking jacket who wanted to know when
+we proposed to go to bed. Only after J.'s answer "when we are ready,"
+did we know it was Mr. Allan by his explanation that his bed was under
+the room where we were walking about, that the floor was thin, and that
+he could not sleep. J. would not enter into an argument. He said the
+hour was not the most appropriate for a criticism of the construction of
+the house which, besides, was at all hours the Landlord's and not his
+affair, and Mr. Allan had the grace to carry his complaint no further.
+It may have occurred to him on reflection that it was not our fault if
+he had chosen a room to sleep in just below the room we used to sit and
+see our friends in.
+
+Had I borne malice, I should not have had to wait long for my revenge,
+nor to plan it myself. Not many days later, Mr. Allan's servant,
+watering the flowers on the open balcony at Mr. Allan's window, watered
+by mistake the new Paris bonnet of the lady of the Ground Floor Back who
+was coming home at that very minute. Under the circumstances few women
+would not have lost their temper, but few would have been so prompt in
+action. She walked straight upstairs to Mr. Allan's chambers, the wreck
+in her hand. The servant opened to her knock, but she insisted upon
+seeing the master.
+
+"I have come, Allan, to tell you what I think of the conduct of your
+servant," she said, when the master appeared. "Yes, I call you Allan,
+for I mean to talk to you as man to man," which she proceeded to do.
+
+I did not hear the talk, but it was almost a week before I heard the
+piano again. Poor Mr. Allan! And this proved a trifle to the worse
+humiliation he was soon to endure.
+
+As I sat with a book by my lamp one evening before dinner, shrieks from
+his chambers and a crash of crockery sent me rushing to the door and out
+upon the landing, with Augustine at my heels. Old Tom and his wife
+arrived there simultaneously, and, looking cautiously over the
+bannisters, I saw an anxious crowd looking up as cautiously from the
+hall on the Ground Floor. The shrieks developed into curses intermingled
+with more riotous crashing of china. The Housekeeper, urged by the crowd
+below, crept all unwilling to Mr. Allan's door and knocked. The door was
+flung open, and, before she ventured to "beg pardon but the noise
+disturbed the other tenants," Mr. Allan's hitherto well-behaved servant
+greeted her with a volley of blood-curdling epithets and the smash of
+every pane of glass in the upper panel of the door, and down she fled
+again. He bolted out after her, but looking up and catching a glimpse of
+Tom, peacefully sucking a lemon-drop, he became so personal that Tom and
+his wife retreated hastily, and for the first time the smile faded from
+the old man's face. In a moment's lull I heard Mr. Allan's voice, low
+and entreating, then more curses, more crashes. I should not have
+thought there was so much glass and crockery to be broken in the whole
+house.
+
+Presently a policeman appeared, and then a second. The door was open,
+but the servant was busy finishing up the crockery. Mr. Allan spoke to
+them, and then, like a flash, the servant was there too.
+
+"I dare you to let them come in!" he yelled, so loud he could be heard
+from the top to the bottom of the house. "I dare you to let them come
+in! I dare you to give me in charge! I dare you! I dare you!"
+
+And Mr. Allan did not dare, that was the astonishing part of it. And he
+never lost his temper. He argued with the policemen, he plead with the
+servant, while one group on our landing and another on the Ground Floor
+waited anxiously. The policemen did not desert us but stood guard on the
+Second Floor, which was a reassurance, until gradually the yells were
+lowered, the crashes came at longer intervals, and at last, I suppose in
+sheer exhaustion, the servant relapsed into his usual calm, Mr. Allan
+"sported his oak," and I learned how truly an Englishman's home is his
+castle.
+
+The Housekeeper spent the evening on the stairs gossiping at every
+door. There was not much to learn from her. A mystery was hinted--many
+mysteries were hinted. The truth I do not know to this moment. I only
+know that before the seven days of our wonder were over, the Agent, more
+careworn than ever if that were possible, made a round of visits in the
+house, giving to each tenant an ample and abject apology written by Mr.
+Allan. At the end of the quarter, the Second Floor Back was again to
+let.
+
+We should have parted with Mr. Allan less light-heartedly could we have
+anticipated what was in store for us. He was no sooner gone than the
+Suffragettes came in.
+
+I have no quarrel on political grounds with the Suffragettes.
+Theoretically, I believe that women of property and position should have
+their vote and that men without should not, but I think it a lesser evil
+for women to be denied the vote than for the suffrage to become as
+universal for women as for men, and to grant it on any other conditions
+would be an indignity. I state the fact to explain that I am without
+prejudice. I do not argue, for, to tell the truth, shocking as it may
+be, I am not keen one way or the other. Life for me has grown crowded
+enough without politics, and years have lessened the ardour for abstract
+justice that was mine when, in my youth, I wrote the "Life of Mary
+Wollstonecraft," and militant Suffragettes as yet were not. Ours are of
+the most militant variety, and it is not their fault if the world by
+this time does not know what this means. Even so, on general principles,
+I should have no grievance against them. Every woman is free to make
+herself ridiculous, and it is none of my business if my neighbours
+choose to make a public spectacle of themselves by struggling in the
+arms of policemen, or going into hysterics at meetings where nobody
+wants them; if they like to emulate bad boys by throwing stones and
+breaking windows, or if it amuses them to slap and whip unfortunate
+statesmen who, physically, could easily convince them of their
+inferiority. But when they make themselves a nuisance to me personally I
+draw the line. And they are a nuisance to me.
+
+They have brought pandemonium into the Quarter where once all was
+pleasantness and peace. Of old, if the postman, the milkman, a messenger
+boy, and one or two stray dogs and children lingered in our street, we
+thought it a crowd; since the coming of the Suffragettes, I have seen
+the same street packed solid with a horde of the most degenerate
+creatures in London summoned by them "to rush the House of Commons."
+They have ground their hurdy-gurdies at our door, Heaven knows to what
+end; vans covered with their posters have obstructed our crossing;
+motor-cars adorned with their flags have missed fire and exploded in our
+street; and they have had themselves photographed as sandwiches on our
+Terrace. Our house is in a turmoil from morning till night with women
+charging in like a mob, or stealing out like conspirators. Their badges,
+their sandwich boards, their banners lie about in our hall, so much in
+everybody's way that I sympathized with the infuriated tenant whom I
+caught one night kicking the whole collection into the cellar. They talk
+so hard on the stairs that often they pass their own door and come on to
+ours, bringing Augustine from her work and disturbing me at mine, for
+she can never open to them without poking her head into my room to tell
+me, "_Encore une sale Suffragette!_" In their chambers they never stop
+chattering, and their high shrill treble penetrates through the floor
+and reaches us up above. The climax came with their invasion of our
+roof.
+
+This roof, built "after the fire," is a modern invention, designed for
+the torture of whoever lives underneath. It is flat, with a beautiful
+view to be had among the chimney-pots and telephone wires; it is so thin
+that a pigeon could not waddle across without being heard by us; and as
+it is covered with gravel, every sound is accompanied by a scrunching
+warranted to set the strongest nerves in a quiver. We had already been
+obliged to represent to the Agent that it was not intended for the
+Housekeeper's afternoon parties or young people's games of tag, that
+there were other, more suitable places where postmen could take a rest,
+or our actress recite her lines, or lovers do their courting amid the
+smuts. Our patience, indeed, had been so tried in one way or another
+that at the first sound from above, at any hour of the day or night, J.
+was giving chase to the trespassers, and they were retreating before the
+eloquence of his attack. It was in a corner of this roof, just above the
+studio and in among wood-enclosed cisterns, that the Suffragettes
+elected to send off fire-balloons, which, in some way best known to
+themselves, were to impress mankind with the necessity of giving them
+the vote. The first balloon floated above the chimney-tops, a sheet of
+flame, and was dropping, happily into the Thames, when J., straight from
+his printing-press, in blouse, sleeves rolled up, arms and hands black
+with ink, a cap set sideways, was on the roof, and the Secretary of the
+Militants and a young man in the brown suit and red tie that denote the
+Socialist, in their hands matches and spirits of wine, were flying
+downstairs. I was puzzled to account for their meekness unless it was
+that never before had they seen anybody so inky, never before listened
+to language so picturesque and American. J., without giving them time to
+take breath, called in the Landlord's Agent, supported by the
+Landlord's Solicitor, and they were convinced of the policy of
+promising not to do it again. And of course they did.
+
+A week later the Prime Minister was unveiling a statue, or performing
+some equally innocent function in the garden below our windows, when the
+Suffragettes, from the roofs of near woodsheds, demanded him through a
+megaphone to give Votes to Women. We followed the movement with such
+small zest that when we were first aware something out of the common was
+going on in the Quarter, the two heroines were already in the arms of
+policemen, where of late so much of the Englishwoman's time has been
+spent, and heads were at every window up and down our street,
+housekeepers at every door, butchers' and bakers' boys grouped on the
+sidewalk, one or two tradesmen's carts drawn up in the gutter,
+battalions of police round the corner. The women no doubt to-day boast
+of the performance as a bold strike for freedom, and recall with pride
+the sensation it created.
+
+At this point I lost sight of the conflict on the roof below, for, from
+the roof above, a balloon shot upwards, so high that only the angels
+could have read the message it bore. The familiar scrunching, though
+strangely muffled, was heard, and J., again in blouse and ink, was up
+and away on a little campaign of his own. This time he found six women,
+each with a pair of shoes at her side and her feet drawn up under her,
+squatting in a ring behind the cisterns, bending over a can of spirits
+of wine, and whispering and giggling like school-girls.
+
+"It won't go off," they giggled, and the next minute all chance of its
+ever going off was gone, for J. had seized the balloon and torn it to
+tatters.
+
+"You have destroyed our property," shrieked a venerable little old lady,
+thin and withered, with many wrinkles and straggling grey hair.
+
+He told her that was what he had intended to do.
+
+"But it cost ten shillings," she squeaked in a tremor of rage, and with
+an attempt at dignity, but it is as hard to be dignified, as Corporal
+Trim found it to be respectful, when one is sitting squat upon the
+ground.
+
+A younger woman, golden-haired, in big hat and feathers, whom the
+others called Duchess, demanded "Who are you anyhow?" And when I
+consider his costume and his inkiness I wonder he had not been asked it
+long before.
+
+"You can go downstairs and find out," he said, "but down you go!"
+
+There was a moment's visible embarrassment, and they drew their stocking
+feet closer up under them. J., in whom they had left some few shreds of
+the politeness which he, as a true American, believes is woman's due,
+considerately looked the other way. As soon as they were able to rise up
+in their shoes, they altogether lost their heads. The Housekeeper and
+the Agent, summoned in the mean time, were waiting as they began to
+crawl down the straight precipitous ladder from the roof. In an agony of
+apprehension, the women clutched their skirts tight about them,
+protesting and scolding the while. The little old lady tried to escape
+into our chambers, one or two stood at the top of the stairs, cutting
+off all approach, the others would not budge from our narrow landing. A
+telegraph boy and a man with a parcel endeavoured to get past them and
+up to us, but they would not give way an inch. Finally in despair, J.
+gently collected them and pushed them down the stairs towards their own
+door.
+
+"We will have you arrested for assault!" the little old lady shrieked.
+
+"We charge you with assault and battery," the golden-haired lady
+re-echoed from below.
+
+And we heard no more, for at last, with a sigh of relief, J. could get
+to our door and shut out the still ascending uproar.
+
+But that was not the end of it. If you can believe it, they were on the
+roof again within an hour, getting themselves and their megaphone
+photographed, for the fight for freedom would not be half so sweet
+without the publicity of portraits in the press. And we were besieged
+with letters. One Suffragette wrote that an apology was due,--yes, J.
+replied, due to him. A second lectured him on the offence given to her
+"dear friend, the Duchess," for to become a Suffragette is not to cease
+to be a snob, and warned him that the Duchess--who was the golden-haired
+lady and may have had the bluest blood of England in her veins, but who
+looked more like one of the Gaiety girls, from whom the stock of the
+British nobility has been so largely replenished--and the Duke intended
+to consult their Solicitor if regret were not expressed. And the
+Landlord's Agent called, and the Landlord's Solicitor followed, and a
+Police Inspector was sent from Scotland Yard for facts,--and he
+reprimanded J. for one mistake, for not having locked the door on the
+inside when they were out,--and the insurance people wanted to know
+about the fire-balloons, and everybody with any possible excuse came
+down upon us, except the police officer with the warrant to arrest J.
+for assault and battery.
+
+It is all over now. If the Suffragettes still hatch their plots under
+our roof, they are denied the use of it for carrying them out. They
+leave us in peace for the moment, the quiet which is the charm of an old
+house like ours has returned to it, and outwardly the tenants cultivate
+the repose and dignity incumbent upon them as the descendants of Bacon
+and Pepys and the inheritors of a great past.
+
+
+
+
+_The Quarter_
+
+[Illustration: OPPOSITE TO SURREY]
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE QUARTER
+
+
+My windows command the Quarter, and what they do not overlook, Augustine
+does.
+
+Some people might think there could not be much to overlook, for the
+Quarter is as quiet and secluded as the Inns of Court. J. is forever
+boasting that if he is in London he is not of it, and that he lives the
+simple life, with Charing Cross just round the corner. The "full tide of
+existence" sweeps by, seldom overflowing into the Quarter, which is one
+of the most difficult places in all the town to find for those who do
+not know the way. Only two streets lead directly into it from anywhere,
+and they lead directly nowhere out of it again; nor do the crowds in the
+near Strand as much as see the dirty courts and dark alleys which are my
+short cuts, much less the underground passages which serve the same
+purpose,--the mysterious labyrinth of carpenters-shops and warehouses
+and vast wine-cellars, grim and fantastic and unbelievable as Ali Baba
+and the whole Arabian Nights, burrowed under the Quarter and approached
+by tunnels, so picturesque that Géricault made a lithograph of one when
+he was in London, so murderous that to this day they are infested with
+police who turn a flashing bull's-eye upon you as you pass. Altogether,
+the Quarter is a "shy place" full of traps for the unwary. I have had
+friends, coming to see me for the first time, lose themselves in our
+underground maze; I have known the crowd, pouring from the Strand on
+Lord Mayor's Day, get hopelessly entangled in our network; as a rule,
+nobody penetrates into it except on business or by chance.
+
+But for all that, there is a good deal to see, and the Quarter, quiet
+though it may be, is never dull as I watch it from my high windows. To
+the front I look out on the Thames: down to St. Paul's, up to
+Westminster, opposite to Surrey, and, on a clear day as far as the
+hills. Trains rumble across the bridges, trams screech and clang along
+the Embankment, tugs, pulling their line of black barges, whistle and
+snort on the river. The tide brings with it the smell of the sea and, in
+winter, the great white flights of gulls. At night myriads of lights
+come out, and always, at all hours and all seasons, there is movement
+and life,--always I seem to feel the pulse of London even as I have its
+roar in my ears.
+
+To the east I look down to streets of houses black with London grime,
+still stately in their old-fashioned shabbiness, as old as the
+Eighteenth Century, which I have read somewhere means the beginning of
+the world for an American like myself.
+
+To the west I tower over a wilderness of chimney-pots, for our house is
+built on the edge of a hill, not very high though the London horse
+mistakes it for an Alpine pass, but high enough to lift our walls, on
+this side sheer and cliff-like, above an amazing collection of tumbled,
+weather-worn, red-tiled roofs, and crooked gables sticking out at
+unexpected angles, that date back I am not to be bullied by facts into
+saying how far, and that stretch away, range upon range, to loftier
+houses beyond, they in their turn over-shadowed by the hotels and clubs
+on the horizon, and in among them, an open space with the spire of St.
+Martin-in-the-Fields springing up out of it, dark by day, a white shadow
+by night,--our ghost, we call it.
+
+And most wonderful of all is the expanse of sky above and around us,
+instead of the tiny strip framed in by the narrow street which is the
+usual share of the Londoner. We could see the sun rise every morning
+behind St. Paul's, if we were up in time, and of course if there was a
+sun every morning in London to rise. Over the river, when fog and mist
+do not envelop it as in a shroud, the clouds--the big, low, heavy
+English clouds--float and drift and scurry and whirl and pile themselves
+into mountains with a splendour that might have inspired Ruskin to I do
+not know how many more chapters in "Modern Painters" had he lived in the
+Quarter. Behind our collection of tumbled roofs and gables awry, the
+sun--always provided there is a sun--sets with a dramatic gorgeousness
+that, if it were only in any remote part of the world, the Londoner
+would spare himself no time nor trouble to see, but that, because it is
+in London, remains a spectacle for us to enjoy by ourselves. And the
+wonder grows with the night,--the river, with its vague distances and
+romantic glooms and starlike lights, losing itself in mystery, and
+mystery lurking in the little old streets with their dark spectral mass
+of houses, broken by one or two spaces of flat white wall, and always in
+the distance the clubs and hotels, now castles and cathedrals, and the
+white tapering ghost pointing heavenward. With so stupendous a spectacle
+arranged for my benefit, is it any marvel that much of my time is spent
+at my windows? And how can I help it if, when I am there, I see many
+things besides the beauty that lured us to the Quarter and keeps us in
+it?
+
+Hundreds of windows look over into mine: some so far off that they are
+mere glittering spots on a rampart of high walls in the day-light, mere
+dots of light at dusk; some as carefully curtained as if the "Drawn
+Blinds" or "Green Shutters" of romance had not stranger things to hide
+from the curious. But others are too near and too unveiled for what
+goes on behind them to escape the most discreet. In what does go on
+there is infinite variety, for the Quarter, like the Inns of Court, is
+let out in offices and chambers, and the house that shelters but one
+tenant is the exception, if indeed it exists.
+
+All these windows and the people I see through them have become as much
+a part of my view as the trains and the trams, the taxis and the tugs. I
+should think the last days of the Quarter were at hand if, the first
+thing in the morning, I did not find the printer hard at work at his
+window under one of the little gables below; or if, the last thing at
+night, I missed from the attic next door to him the lamp of the artist,
+who never gets up until everybody else is going to bed; or if, at any
+hour I looked over, people were not playing cards in the first-floor
+windows of the house painted white, or frowzy women were not leaning out
+of the little garret windows above, or the type-writer was not clicking
+hard in the window with the white muslin curtains and the pot of
+flowers, or the manicurist not receiving her clients behind the window
+with the staring, new yellow blinds. I should regret even the fiery,
+hot-tempered, little woman who jumps up out of the attic window
+immediately below us, like a Jack-in-the-box, and shakes her fist at us
+every time Augustine shakes those unfortunate rugs which are perpetually
+getting us into trouble with our neighbours. I should think the picture
+incomplete if, of an evening, the diners out were to disappear from
+behind the windows of the big hotel, though nothing makes me more
+uncomfortably conscious of the "strangely mingled monster" that London
+is, than the contrast between them lingering over the day's fourth
+banquet, and the long black "hunger line" forming of a winter morning
+just beside Cleopatra's Needle and waiting in dreary patience for the
+daily dole of bread and soup.
+
+I cannot imagine the Quarter without actors and actresses in possession
+of dozens of its windows, the attraction to them less the associations
+with Garrick than the convenient proximity to the principal theatres; or
+without the Societies, Institutes, Leagues, Bureaus, Companies,
+Associations, and I know not what else, that undertake the charge of
+everything under the sun, from ancient buildings to women's freedom; or
+without the clubs, where long-haired men and Liberty-gowned women meet
+to drink tea and dabble in anarchy; where more serious citizens propose
+to refashion the world and mankind, and, incidentally, British politics;
+where, in a word, philanthropists of every pattern fill the very air of
+the Quarter with reform, until my escape from degenerating into a
+reformer despite myself seems a daily miracle, and the sham Bohemianism
+of the one club willing to let the rest of the world take care of itself
+becomes almost a virtue.
+
+It is probably the seclusion, the cloistral repose, of the Quarter that
+attracts the student and the scholar. Up at my windows, the busy bee
+would be given points in the art of improving each shining hour. In
+every direction I turn I am so edified by the example of hard work that
+I long for the luxury of being shocked by idleness.
+
+Behind the window I look down into at right angles from the studio, the
+Scientist in white apron, surrounded by bottles and retorts and
+microscopes, industriously examines germs from morning till midnight,
+oblivious to everything outside, which for too long meant, among other
+things, showers of soft white ashes and evil greasy smoke and noxious
+odours sent by the germs up through his chimneys into our studio; nor
+could the polite representations of our Agent that he was a public
+nuisance rouse him from his indifference, since he knew that the smoke
+was not black enough to make him one technically. It was only when J.
+protested, with an American energy effective in England, that the germs
+ceased to trouble us and I could bear unmoved the sight of the
+white-aproned Scientist behind his window.
+
+In the new house with the flat roof the Inventor has his office, and I
+am sure it is the great man himself I so often see walking gravely up
+and down among the chimney-pots, evolving and planning new wireless
+wonders; and I am as sure that the solemn St. Bernard who walks there
+too is his, and, in some way it is not for me to explain, part of the
+mysterious machinery connecting the Quarter with the rest of the world.
+
+Plainly visible in more rooms than one, bending over high drawing-tables
+not only through the day but on into the night, are many Architects,
+with whom the Quarter has ever been in favour since the masters who
+designed it years ago made their headquarters in our street, until
+yesterday, when the young man who is building the Town Hall for the
+County Council moved into it, though, had the County Council had its
+way, there would be no Quarter now for an Architect to have his office
+in. Architectural distinction, or picturesqueness, awakes in the London
+official such a desire to be rid of it that, but for the turning of the
+worm who pays the rates, our old streets and Adam houses would have been
+pulled down to make place for the brand-new municipal building which, as
+it is, has been banished out of harm's way to the other side of the
+river.
+
+Busier still than the Architects are the old men who live in the two
+ancient houses opposite mine, where the yellow brick just shows here
+and there through the centuries' grime, and where windows as
+grimy--though a clause in the leases of the Quarter demands that windows
+should be washed at least once a month--open upon little ironwork
+balconies and are draped with draggled lace-curtains, originally white
+but now black. I have no idea who the old men are, or what is the task
+that absorbs them. They look as ancient as the houses and so alike that
+I could not believe there were three of them if, every time I go to my
+dining-room window, I did not see them all three in their chambers, two
+on the third floor, to the left and right of me, one on the floor below
+about halfway between,--making, J. says, an amusing kind of pattern.
+Each lives alone, each has a little table drawn up to his window, and
+there they sit all day long, one on an easy leather chair, one on a
+stiff cane-bottomed chair, one on a hard wooden stool,--that is the only
+difference. There they are perpetually sorting and sifting papers from
+which nothing tears them away; there they have their midday chop and
+tankard of bitter served to them as they work, and there they snatch a
+few hasty minutes afterwards to read the day's news. They never go out
+unless it is furtively, after dark, and I have never failed to find them
+at their post except occasionally on Sunday morning, when the chairs by
+the tables are filled by their clothes instead of themselves, because, I
+fancy, the London housekeeper, who leaves her bed reluctantly every day
+in the week but who on that morning is not to be routed out of it at
+all, refuses to wake them or to bring them their breakfast. They may be
+solicitors, but I do not think so; they may be literary men, but I do
+not think that either; and, really, I should just as lief not be told
+who and what they are, so much more in keeping is mystery with the grimy
+old houses where their old days are spent in endless toiling over
+endless tasks.
+
+If the three old men are not authors, plenty of my other neighbours are,
+as they should be out of compliment to Bacon and Pepys, to Garrick and
+Topham Beauclerk, to Dr. Johnson and Boswell, to Rousseau and David
+Copperfield, and to any number besides who, in their different days,
+belonged to or haunted the Quarter and made it a world of memories for
+all who came after. I have authors on every side of me: not Chattertons
+undiscovered in their garrets, but celebrities wallowing in success,
+some of whom might be the better for neglect. Many a young enthusiast
+comes begging for the privilege of gazing from my windows into theirs. I
+have been assured that the walls of the Quarter will not hold the
+memorial tablets which we of the present generation are preparing for
+their decoration. The "best sellers" are issued, and the Repertory
+Theatre nourished, from our midst.
+
+The clean-shaven man of legal aspect who arrives at his office over the
+way as regularly as the clock strikes ten, who leaves it as regularly at
+one for his lunch, and as regularly in the late afternoon closes up for
+the day, is the Novelist whose novels are on every bookstall and whose
+greatness is measured by the thousands and hundreds of thousands into
+which they run. He does not do us the honour of living in the Quarter,
+but comes to it simply in office hours, and is as scrupulously punctual
+as if his business were with briefs rather than with dainty trifles
+lighter than the lightest froth. No clerk could be more exact in his
+habits. Anthony Trollope was not more methodical. This admirable
+precision might cost him the illusions of his admirers, but to me it is
+invaluable. For when the wind is in the wrong direction and I cannot
+hear Big Ben, or the fog falls and I cannot see St. Martin's spire, I
+have only to watch for him to know the hour, and in a household where no
+two clocks or watches agree as to time, the convenience is not to be
+exaggerated.
+
+My neighbour from the house on the river-front, next to Peter the
+Great's, who often drops in for a talk and whom Augustine announces as
+_le Monsieur du Quartier_, is the American Dramatist, author of the play
+that was the most popular of the season last year in New York. I should
+explain, perhaps, that Augustine has her own names for my friends, and
+that usually her announcements require interpretation. For instance, few
+people would recognize my distinguished countryman, the Painter, in _le
+Monsieur de la Dame qui ne monte jamais les escaliers_, or the
+delightful Lady Novelist in _la Demoiselle aux chats_, or--it is wiser
+not to say whom in _le Monsieur qui se gobe_. But I have come to
+understand even her fine shades, and when she announces _les Gens du
+Quartier_, then I know it is not the American Dramatist, but the British
+Publicist and his wife who live in Garrick's house, and who add to their
+distinction by dining in the room where Garrick died.
+
+The red curtains a little further down the street belong to the
+enterprising Pole, who, from his chambers in the Quarter, edits the
+Polish Punch, a feat which I cannot help thinking, though I have never
+seen the paper, must be the most comic thing about it. In the house on
+one side, the author who is England's most distinguished Man of Letters
+to-day, and who has become great as a novelist, began life as an
+architect. From the house on the other side, the Poet-Patriot-Novelist
+of the Empire fired, or tried to fire, the Little Englanders with his
+own blustering, knock-you-down Imperialism, and bullied and flattered
+them, amused and abused them, called them names they would not have
+forgiven from any other man living and could not easily swallow from
+him, and was all the while himself so simple and unassuming that next to
+nobody knew he was in the Quarter until he left it. The British
+Dramatist close by, who conquers the heart of the sentimental British
+public by sentiment, is just as unassuming. He is rarely without a play
+on the London stage, rarely without several on tour. He could probably
+buy out everybody in the Quarter, except perhaps the Socialist, and he
+can lose a little matter of sixteen thousand pounds or so and never miss
+it. But so seldom is he seen that you might think he was afraid to show
+himself. "You'd never know 'e was in the 'ouse, 'e's that quiet like.
+Why, 'e never gives no trouble to nobody," the Housekeeper has confided
+to me. He shrinks from putting his name on his front door, though by
+this time he must be used to its staring at him in huge letters from
+posters and playbills all over the world. Perhaps it is to give himself
+courage that he keeps a dog who is as forward as his master is retiring,
+and who is my terror. I am on speaking terms with most of the dogs of
+the Quarter, but with the Dramatist's I have never ventured to exchange
+a greeting. I happened to mention my instinctive distrust, one day, to a
+friend who has made the dog's personal acquaintance.
+
+"He eats kids!" was my friend's comment. Then he added: "You have seen
+dozens of children go up to the Dramatist's room, haven't you?"
+
+"Yes," I answered, for it was a fact.
+
+"Well, and have you ever seen one come down again?" And if you will
+believe it, I never have.
+
+A door or so from the Dramatist, but on the opposite side of the street,
+the Socialist's windows face mine. I cannot, with any respect for truth,
+call him unassuming; modesty is not his vice. It is not his ambition to
+hide his light under a bushel,--or rather a hogshead; on the contrary,
+as he would be the first to admit, it could not flare on too many
+housetops to please him. When I first met him, years before we again met
+in the Quarter, the world had not heard of him, but he was quite frank
+in his determination that it should, though to make it hear, he would
+have to play a continuous solo on his own cornet, until he impressed
+somebody else with the necessity of blowing it for him. Besides, he has
+probably never found other people as entertaining as himself, which is
+an excellent reason why he should not keep himself out of his talk and
+his writing,--and he is talking and writing all the time. His is a
+familiar voice among the Fabians, on public platforms, and at private
+meetings, and for a very little while it was listened to by bewildered
+Borough Councillors. He has as many plays to his credit as the British
+Dramatist, as many books as the Novelist, and I recall no other writer
+who can equal him in the number and length of his letters to the press.
+As he courts, rather than evades, notice, I doubt if he would be
+embarrassed to learn how repeatedly I see him doing his hair and beard
+in the morning and putting out his lights at night, or how entirely I am
+in his confidence as to the frequency of his luncheon parties and the
+number of his guests. Were I not the soul of discretion I could publish
+his daily _menu_ to the world, for his kitchen opens itself so
+aggressively to my view that I see into it as often as into my own.
+
+For that matter, I have under my inspection half the kitchens in the
+Quarter, and the things I witness in them might surprise or horrify more
+than one woman who imagines herself mistress in her own house. I have
+assisted at the reception of guests she never invited; I understand, if
+she does not, why her gas and electric-light bills reach such fabulous
+figures; I could tell her what happens when her motor-car disappears
+round the corner,--for, seedy and down-at-heel as the Quarter may
+appear, the private motor is by no means the exception among the
+natives. Only the other day, when the literary family, who are as
+unsuspicious as they are fond of speed, started in their motor for the
+week-end, they could have got no further than the suburbs before the
+cloth was laid in their dining-room, their best china, silver, and glass
+brought out, flowers, bottles, and siphons in place, and their cook at
+the head of their table "entertaining her friends to luncheon." The
+party were lingering over the fruit when suddenly a motor-horn was heard
+in the street. There was a look of horror on all their faces, one short
+second of hesitation, and then a wild leap from the table, and, in a
+flash, flowers, bottles, and siphons, china, glass, and silver were
+spirited away, the cloth whisked off, chairs set against the wall. As
+the dining-room door closed on the flying skirt of the last guest, the
+cook looked out of the window, the horn sounded again, and the motor was
+round the corner in the next street, for it was somebody else's, and the
+literary family did not return until Monday.
+
+The Socialist, who deals in paradox and the inconsequent, also has his
+own car. Now that Socialism is knocking at our doors, the car tooting at
+his, come to fetch him from his town house to his country house or off
+to the uttermost ends of the earth, toots reassurance into our hearts.
+Under such conditions we should not mind being Socialists ourselves.
+However, he does make one protest against Individualism in which I
+should not care to join him, for he goes shares in his personality and
+has perpetrated a double in the Quarter,--a long lean man, with grizzled
+red hair and beard, who is clothed in brown Jaegers, whose face has the
+pallor of the vegetarian, and who warns us of the manner of equality we
+may expect under the Socialist's régime. I dread to think of the
+complications there might be were the double not so considerate as to
+carry a black bag and wear knee-breeches. A glance at hands and legs
+enables us to distinguish one from the other and to spare both the
+inconvenience of a mistaken identity. The double, like the old men
+opposite, remains one of the mysteries of the Quarter. Nobody can
+explain his presence in our midst, nobody has ever spoken to him, nobody
+can say where he comes from with his black bag in the morning, where he
+goes with it in the evening, or even where he stops in the Quarter. I
+doubt if the Socialist has yet, like the lovers in Rossetti's picture,
+met himself, for surely no amount of Socialism could bear the shock of
+the revelation that must come with the meeting.
+
+If many books are written in the Quarter, more are published from it,
+and the number increases at a rate that is fast turning it into a new
+Paternoster Row. I am surrounded by publishers: publishers who are
+unknown outside our precincts, and publishers who are unknown in them
+save for the names on their signs; publishers who issue limited editions
+for the few, and publishers who apparently publish for nobody but
+themselves; and, just where I can keep an eye on his front door, _the_
+Publisher, my friend, who makes the Quarter a centre of travel and a
+household word wherever books are read, and uses his house as a
+training-school for young genius. More than one lion now roaring in
+London served an apprenticeship there; even Mr. Chatteron passed through
+it; and I am always encountering minor poets or budding philosophers
+going in or coming out, ostensibly on the Publisher's affairs, but
+really busy carrying on the Quarter's traditions and preparing more
+memorial tablets for its overladen walls. The Publisher and his wife
+live a few doors away, where they are generously accumulating fresh
+associations and memories for our successors in the Quarter. To keep
+open house for the literary men and women of the time is a fashion among
+publishers that did not go out with the Dillys and the Dodsleys, and an
+occasional Boswell would find a note-book handy behind the windows that
+open upon the river from the Publisher's chambers.
+
+Associations are being accumulated also by the New York Publisher, who,
+accompanied by his son, the Young Publisher, and by his birds, arrives
+every year with the first breath of spring. It is chiefly to artists
+that his house is open, though he gives the literary hallmark to the
+legacy of memories he will leave to the Quarter. I cannot understand why
+the artist, to whom our streets and our houses make a more eloquent
+appeal than to the author, has seldom been attracted to them since the
+days when Barry designed his decorations in the "grand manner" for our
+oldest Society's lecture-hall, and Angelica Kauffmann painted the
+ceiling in Peter the Great's house, or since the later days when Etty
+and Stanfield lived in our house. Now and then I come across somebody
+sketching our old Watergate or our shabby little shops and corners, but
+only the youth in the attic below has followed the example given by J.,
+whose studio continues the exception in the Quarter: the show-place it
+ought to be for the beauty of river and sky framed in by the windows.
+
+But to make up for this neglect, as long a succession of artists as used
+to climb to Etty's chambers visit the New York Publisher in the quiet
+rooms with the prints on the walls and the windows that, for greater
+quiet, look away from our quiet streets and out upon our quieter backs
+and gables. Much good talk is heard there, and many good stories, and by
+no means the least good from the New York Publisher himself. It is
+strange that, loving quiet as he does, he should, after the British
+Dramatist, have contributed more to my disquiet than anybody in the
+Quarter: a confession for which I know he will think I merit his scorn.
+But the birds it is his fancy to travel with are monsters compared to
+the sparrows and pigeons who build their nests in the peaceful trees of
+the Quarter, and I am never at ease in their company. I still tremble
+when I recall the cold critical eye and threatening beak of his
+favourite magpie, nor can I think calmly of his raven whom, in an access
+of mistaken hospitality, I once invited to call with him upon William
+Penn. William had never seen a live bird so near him in his all too
+short life, and what with his surprise and curiosity, his terror and
+sporting instincts, he was so wrought up and his nerves in such a state
+that, although the raven was shut up safe in a cage, I was half afraid
+he would not survive the visit. I have heard the New York Publisher say
+of William, in his less nervous and more normal moments, that he was not
+a cat but a demon; the raven, in my opinion, was not exactly an angel.
+But thanks to the quality of our friendship, it also survived the visit
+and, in spite of monstrous birds, strengthens with the years.
+
+It is not solely from my windows that I have got to know the Quarter.
+Into my Camelot I can not only look, but come down, without webs flying
+out and mirrors cracking, and better still, I might never stir beyond
+its limits, and my daily life and domestic arrangements would suffer no
+inconvenience. The Quarter is as "self-contained" as the flats
+advertised by our zealous Agent who manages it. Every necessity and
+many luxuries into the bargain are to be had within its boundaries. It
+may resemble the Inns of Court in other ways, but it does not, as they
+do, encourage snobbishness by placing a taboo upon the tradesman. We
+have our own dairy, our own green-grocer, our own butcher, though out of
+sympathy with Augustine I do my marketing in Soho. At one corner our
+tobacconist keeps his shop, at another our tailor. If my drains go wrong
+I call in the local plumber; when I want a shelf put up or something
+mended I send for the local carpenter; I could summon the local builder
+were I inclined to make a present of alterations or additions to the
+local landlord. I but step across the street if I am in need of a
+Commissioner of Oaths. I go no further to get my type-writing done. Were
+my daily paper to fail me, the local gossip of the Quarter would allow
+me no excuse to complain of dearth of news; the benevolent would exult
+in the opportunity provided for benevolence by our slums where the
+flower-girls live; the energetic could walk off their energy in our
+garden where the County Council's band plays on summer evenings. There
+is a public for our loungers, and for our friends a hotel,--the house
+below the hill with the dingy yellow walls that are so shiny-white as I
+see them by night, kept from time immemorial by Miss Brown, where the
+lodger still lights himself to bed by a candle and still eats his meals
+in a Coffee Room, and where Labour Members of Parliament, and South
+Kensington officials, and people never to be suspected of having
+discovered the Quarter, are the most frequent guests.
+
+The Quarter has also its own population, so distinct from other
+Londoners that I am struck by the difference no further away than the
+other side of the Strand. Our housekeepers are a species apart, so are
+our milkmen behind their little carts. Our types are a local growth.
+Nowhere else in London could I meet anybody in the slightest like the
+pink-eyed, white-haired, dried-up little old man, with a jug in his
+hand, whom I see daily on his way to or from our public-house; or like
+the middle-aged dandy who stares me out of countenance as he saunters
+homeward in the afternoon, a lily or chrysanthemum, according to the
+season, in one hand and a brown paper bag of buns in the other; or like
+the splendid old man of military bearing, with well-waxed moustache and
+well-pointed beard, whose Panama hat in summer and fur-lined cloak in
+winter have become as much fixtures in the Quarter as our Adam houses or
+our view of the river, and who spends his days patrolling the Terrace in
+front of our frivolous club or going into it with members he happens to
+overtake at the front door,--where his nights are spent no native of the
+Quarter can say. Nor is any other crowd like our crowd that collects
+every Sunday evening as St. Martin's bells begin to ring for evening
+service, that grows larger and larger until streets usually empty are
+packed solid, and that melts away again before ten. It is made up mostly
+of youths to whom the cap is as indispensable a symbol of class as the
+silk hat further west, and young girls who run to elaborate hair and
+feathers. They have their conventions, which are strictly observed. One
+is to walk with arms linked; a second, to fill the roadway as well as
+the pavement, to the despair of taxicabs and cycles endeavouring to
+toot and ring a passage through; a third, to follow the streets that
+bound the Quarter on three sides and never to trespass into others. How
+the custom originated, I leave it to the historian to decide. It may go
+back to the Britons who painted themselves blue, it may be no older than
+the Romans. All I know with certainty is that the Sunday evening walk is
+a ceremony of no less obligation for the Quarter than the Sunday morning
+parade in the Row is for Mayfair.
+
+We are of accord in the Quarter on the subject of its charm and the
+advantage of preserving it,--though on all others we may and do disagree
+absolutely and continually fight. I have heard even our postman brag of
+the beauty of its architecture and the fame of the architects who built
+it more than a century and a half ago, and I do not believe as a rule
+that London postmen could say who built the houses where they deliver
+their letters, or that it would occur to them to pose as judges of
+architecture. Because we love the Quarter we watch over it with
+unceasing vigilance. We are always on the look-out for nuisances and
+alert to suppress them. In fact, if not in name, we constitute a sort of
+League for the Prevention of Dirt and Disorder in the Quarter. There is
+a distinct understanding that, in an emergency, we may rely upon one
+another for mutual support, which is the easier as we all have the same
+Landlord and can make the same Agent's life a martyrdom until the evil
+is remedied. The one thing we guard most zealously is the quiet, the
+calm, conducive to work. We wage war to the death against street noises
+of every kind. No "German Band" would invade our silent precincts. The
+hurdy-gurdy is anathema,--I have always thought the Suffragettes'
+attempt to play it through our streets their bravest deed. If we endure
+the bell of the muffin man on Sunday and the song of the man who wants
+us to buy his blooming lavender, it is because both have the sanction of
+age. We make no other concession, and our severity extends to the native
+no less than to the alien. When, in the strip of green and gravel below
+my windows, the members of our frivolous Club took to shooting
+themselves with blank cartridges in the intervals of fencing, though the
+noise was on the miniature scale of their pistols, we overwhelmed the
+unfortunate Agent with letters until a stop was put to it. When our
+Territorials, in their first ardour, chose our catacombs for their
+evening bugle-practice, we rose as one against them. Beggars, unless
+they ring boldly at our front doors and pretend to be something else,
+must give up hope when they enter the Quarter. For if the philosopher
+thinks angels and men are in no danger from charity, we do not, and
+least of all the lady opposite, to whom alms-giving in our street is as
+intolerable as donkeys on the green were to Betsy Trotwood. One of my
+friends has never dared to come to see me, except by stealth, since the
+day she pounced upon him to ask him what he meant by such an exhibition
+of immorality, when all he had done was to drop a penny into the hand of
+a small boy at his cab-door, and all he had meant was a kindly fellow
+feeling, having once been a small boy himself.
+
+We defend the beauty of the Quarter with equal zeal. We do what we can
+to preserve the superannuated look which to us is a large part of its
+charm, and we cry out against every new house that threatens discord in
+our ancient harmony. Excitement never raged so high among us as when the
+opposite river banks were desecrated by the advertiser, and from shores
+hitherto but a shadow in the shadowy night, there flamed forth a horrid
+tout for Tea. We had endured much from a sign of Whiskey further down
+the river,--Whiskey and Tea are Britain's bulwarks,--but this was worse,
+for it flared and glared right into our faces, and the vile letters
+which were red and green one second and yellow the next ran in a long
+line from top to bottom of the high shot-tower. In this crude light, our
+breweries ceased to be palaces in the night, our _campanili_ again
+became chimneys. Gone was our Fairyland, gone our River of Dreams. The
+falling twilight gave a hideous jog to our memory, and would not let us
+forget that we lived in a nation of shopkeepers. The Socialist, part of
+whose stock-in-trade is perversity, liked it, or said he did,--and I
+really believe he did,--but the other tenants were outraged, and an
+indignation meeting was called. Four attended, together with the
+Solicitor and the Agent of the estate, and the Publisher, who took the
+chair. It was of no use. We learned that our joy in the miracle of night
+might be destroyed forever, but if we could prove no physical harm,
+legal redress would be denied to us, and our defiance of the Vandal must
+be in vain. And so there the disgraceful advertisement remains, flaring
+and glaring defiance at us across the river. When the Socialist gets
+tired of it, he goes off to his country place in his forty-horse-power
+motor-car, but we, in our weariness, can escape only to bed.
+
+
+    The Riverside Press
+    CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
+    U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Our House, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our House, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Our House
+       And London out of Our Windows
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
+
+Release Date: February 2, 2012 [EBook #38749]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR HOUSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figleft">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""/>
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+
+<div class="figright">
+<img src="images/tp.jpg" alt=""/>
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+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>  <i>Our House <br />
+And London out of Our Windows</i></h1>
+
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+<a name="illus1" id="illus1"></a>
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+</div>
+
+<h3>"<span class="smcap">Lines of black barges</span>" (<span class="smcap">Waterloo Bridge</span>)</h3>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus2" id="illus2"></a>
+<img src="images/illus2.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Down to St. Paul's</span></h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>Our House<br />
+And London out of Our<br />
+Windows</h1>
+
+
+<h2>BY<br />
+Elizabeth Robins Pennell</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><i>With Illustrations by<br />
+Joseph Pennell</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">Boston and New York<br />
+Houghton Mifflin Company<br />
+The Riverside Press Cambridge<br />
+1912</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus3" id="illus3"></a>
+<img src="images/illus3.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Waterloo Bridge</span></h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL<br />
+COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY JOSEPH PENNELL<br />
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p class="center"><i>To<br />
+Augustine</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus4" id="illus4"></a>
+<img src="images/illus4.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"<span class="smcap">The big, low, heavy English clouds</span>"</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus5" id="illus5"></a>
+<img src="images/illus5.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"<span class="smcap">There is movement and life</span>" (<span class="smcap">The underground station and Charing-cross
+Bridge</span>)</h3>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table width="50%">
+<tr><td align="right"></td><td><a href="#O"><span class="smcap">Introduction</span> </a></td><td align="right">xi</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">I. </td><td><a href="#I"><span class="smcap">'Enrietter</span> </a></td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">II. </td><td><a href="#II"><span class="smcap">Trimmer</span> </a></td><td align="right">33</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">III. </td><td><a href="#III"><span class="smcap">Louise</span> </a></td><td align="right">79</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IV. </td><td><a href="#IV"><span class="smcap">Our Charwomen</span> </a></td><td align="right">119</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">V. </td><td><a href="#V"><span class="smcap">Clémentine</span> </a></td><td align="right">153</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VI. </td><td><a href="#VI"><span class="smcap">The Old Housekeeper</span> </a></td><td align="right">201</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VII. </td><td><a href="#VII"><span class="smcap">The New Housekeeper</span> </a></td><td align="right">227</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VIII. </td><td><a href="#VIII"><span class="smcap">Our Beggars</span> </a></td><td align="right">251</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IX. </td><td><a href="#IX"><span class="smcap">The Tenants</span> </a></td><td align="right">289</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">X. </td><td><a href="#X"><span class="smcap">The Quarter</span> </a></td><td align="right">339</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus6" id="illus6"></a>
+<img src="images/illus6.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"<span class="smcap">At night myriads of lights come out</span>"</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>List of Illustrations</h2>
+
+
+
+<table>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus1">"<span class="smcap">Lines of black barges</span>" (<span class="smcap">Waterloo Bridge</span>) </a></td><td align="right"><i>Bastard Title</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus2"><span class="smcap">Down to St. Paul's</span> </a></td><td align="right"><i>Frontispiece</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus3"><span class="smcap">Waterloo Bridge</span> </a></td><td align="right"><i>Title-Page</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus4">"<span class="smcap">The big, low, heavy English clouds</span>" </a></td><td align="right"><i>Dedication</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus5">"<span class="smcap">There is movement and life</span>" (<span class="smcap">The underground station and Charing-cross
+Bridge</span>) </a></td><td align="right"><i>Contents</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus6">"<span class="smcap">At night myriads of lights come out</span>" </a></td><td align="right"><i>List of Illustrations</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus7">"<span class="smcap">In winter the great white flights of gulls</span>" </a></td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus8">"<span class="smcap">And the wonder grows with the night</span>" </a></td><td align="right">33</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus9">"<span class="smcap">Tumbled, weather-worn, red-tiled roofs</span>" </a></td><td align="right">79</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus10">"<span class="smcap">Up to Westminster</span>" </a></td><td align="right">119</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus11">"<span class="smcap">When there is a sun on a winter morning</span>" </a></td><td align="right">153</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus12">"<span class="smcap">A wilderness of chimney-pots</span>" </a></td><td align="right">201</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus13"><span class="smcap">The spire of St. Martin-in-the-Fields</span> </a></td><td align="right">227</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus14"><span class="smcap">Cleopatra's Needle from our windows</span> </a></td><td align="right">251</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus15"><span class="smcap">The Lion Brewery</span> </a></td><td align="right">289</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus16"><span class="smcap">Opposite to Surrey</span> </a></td><td align="right">339</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="O" id="O"></a>Introduction</h2>
+
+
+<p>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,&mdash;high above the
+Embankment and the River,&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span> 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&mdash;adventures of cloud and
+smoke and sunshine and fog&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>'Enrietter</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus7" id="illus7"></a>
+<img src="images/illus7.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"IN WINTER THE GREAT WHITE FLIGHTS OF GULLS"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>Our House<br />
+And London out of Our Windows</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<h3>'ENRIETTER</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It all came of believing that I could live as I pleased in England, and
+not pay the penalty.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> 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&mdash;'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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> 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 anæmic 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;we can "sport our oak" if we
+like,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> 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
+Kyfhaüser, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> very
+hard&mdash;she suddenly had a faintness&mdash;she felt dazed, and, indeed, she
+looked it still&mdash;the heat, she thought, she hardly knew&mdash;she threw
+herself on her bed&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the worst of chambers is, you can't help seeing everything,
+whether you want to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Thash a'right, mum," she said, and down went her head again.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>'Enrietter smiled. "Thash a'right, mum," she murmured reassuringly as
+she reeled up the stairs before me.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The next Sunday 'Enrietter stayed in and went to bed sober. It was the
+day after&mdash;a memorable Monday&mdash;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,&mdash;as if
+the want of a latch-key could make a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>"Light the gas and the lamp," I said when I heard her in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+could not be reeling. Then she came in and lit the lamp, and I saw her.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Before I had time to pull myself together 'Enrietter had told her
+story,&mdash;so poor a story it showed how desperate now was her case. She
+had been quiet all morning&mdash;no one had come&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>More horrors awaited me in her room,&mdash;like Macbeth, I was supping full
+with horrors,&mdash;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 <i>the</i> 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To tell the story in my own way: I was hardly out of the house when
+'Enrietter had a visit from a "gentleman,"&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> her in by the door and up the three long
+flights of stairs to our chambers.</p>
+
+<p>And then&mdash;I confess, at this point even now my anger gets the better of
+me. Every key for my front door was in my pocket,&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> 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!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;she knew her duty. And so, the deeds that were done within my
+four walls on that beautiful June afternoon must remain a mystery.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> The
+only record is the mark 'Enrietter will carry on her forehead with her
+to the grave.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;<i>the</i> gentleman&mdash;anyone could see he was a gentleman by his
+hat&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;he never addressed himself to me
+if he could help it&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I took 'Enrietter home. I saw her up the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;I knew that friend; he could admit her into a
+hospital of which he was a patron&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 rôle 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> 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,&mdash;his face did that for him,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Your story is extremely interesting," I told him, "and I am especially
+glad to hear it, because my cook"&mdash;with a vindictive emphasis on the
+cook&mdash;"has told me quite a different one as to how she came by her
+broken head. Now&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> trespass, as I was told
+afterwards I might have done, how would I have liked figuring in the
+Police Courts?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A day or two later her sister came to pack up her belongings,&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a><i>Trimmer</i></h2>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus8" id="illus8"></a>
+<img src="images/illus8.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"AND THE WONDER GROWS WITH THE NIGHT"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<h3>TRIMMER</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> 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,&mdash;so much older than I meant her to look,&mdash;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,&mdash;all the
+plainer because of her anxiety to prove her capacity for work.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;in
+this connection how can I bring myself to say<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> 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,&mdash;he who would not hurt a fly,&mdash;"If you don't
+keep that woman out of my room, I'll wring her neck for her!"</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+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&mdash;helpful from the
+beginning&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> 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&mdash;what then?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Trim was good to her, that is, unless he was in liquor, which I gathered
+he mostly was. He was fond of his glass, sociable-like, and with his
+week's wages in his pocket, could not keep away from his pals in the
+public.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> Trimmer's objection to beer was accounted for when I discovered
+that Trim's fondness for it often kept the little house without bread
+and filled it with curses. There were never blows. Trim was good, she
+reminded me, and the liquor never made him wicked,&mdash;only made him leave
+his wife to starve, and then curse her for starving. She was tearful
+with gratitude when she remembered his goodness in not beating her; but
+when her story reached the day of his tumbling off a high ladder&mdash;the
+beer was in his legs&mdash;and being brought back to her dead, it seemed to
+me a matter of rejoicing. Not to her, however, for she had to give up
+the little house and go into service again, and she missed Trim and his
+curses. She did not complain. She always found good places, and she
+adopted a little boy, a sweet little fellow, like a son to her, whom she
+sent to school and started in life, and had never seen since. But young
+men will be young men, and she loved him. She was very happy at the
+corset and petticoat shop, where she lived while he was with her. After
+business hours she was free, for apparently the responsibility<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> of being
+alone in a big house all night was as simple for her as braving a
+burglar in our chambers. The young ladies were pleasant, she was well
+paid. Then her older brother's wife died and left him with six children.
+What could she do but go and look after them when he asked her?</p>
+
+<p>He was well-to-do, and his house and firing and lighting were given him
+in addition to high wages. He did not pay her anything, of course,&mdash;she
+was his sister. But it was a comfortable home, the children were fond of
+her,&mdash;and also of her cakes and puddings,&mdash;and she looked forward to
+spending the rest of her days there. But at the end of two years he
+married again, and when the new wife came, the old sister went. This was
+how it came about that, without a penny in her pocket, and with nothing
+save her old twisted hands to keep her out of the workhouse, she was
+adrift again at an age which made her undesirable to everybody except
+foolish people like ourselves, fresh from the horrors of our experience
+with 'Enrietter. It never occurred to Trimmer that there was anything to
+complain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> of. For her, all had always been for the best in the best of
+all possible worlds. That she had now chanced upon chambers and two
+people and one dissipated cat to take care of, and more to do than ought
+to have been asked of her, was but another stroke of her invariable good
+luck.</p>
+
+<p>She had an amazing faculty of turning all her little molehills into
+mountains of pleasure. I have never known anything like the joy she got
+from her family, though I never could quite make out why. She was
+inordinately proud of the brother who had been so ready to get rid of
+her; the sister-in-law who had replaced her was a paragon of virtue; the
+nieces were so many infant phenomena, and one Sunday when, with the
+South London world of fashion, they were walking in the Embankment
+Gardens, she presumed so far as to bring them up to our chambers to show
+them off to me, and the affectionate glances she cast upon their
+expansive lace collars explained that she still had her uses in the
+family. There was also a cousin whom, to Trimmer's embarrassment, I
+often found in our kitchen; but much<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> worse than frequent visits could
+be forgiven her, since it was she who, after Jimmy's inglorious end,
+brought us William Penn, a pussy then small enough to go into her
+coat-pocket, but already gay enough to dance his way straight into our
+hearts.</p>
+
+<p>Trimmer's pride reached high-water mark when it came to a younger
+brother who travelled in "notions" for a city firm. His proprietor was
+the personage the rich Jew always is in the city of London, and was made
+Alderman and Lord Mayor, and knighted and baroneted, during the years
+Trimmer spent with us. She took enormous satisfaction in the splendour
+of this success, counting it another piece of her good luck to be
+connected, however remotely, with anybody so distinguished. She had
+almost an air of proprietorship on the 9th of November, when from our
+windows she watched his Show passing along the Embankment; she could not
+have been happier if she herself had been seated in the gorgeous
+Cinderella coach, with the coachman in wig and cocked hat, and the
+powdered footmen perched up behind; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> when J. went to the Lord
+Mayor's dinner that same evening at the Guildhall, it became for her
+quite a family affair. I often fancied that she thought it reflected
+glory on us all to have the sister of a man who travelled in "notions"
+for a knight and a Lord Mayor, living in our chambers; though she would
+never have taken the liberty of showing it.</p>
+
+<p>Trimmer's joy was only less in our friends than in her family, which was
+for long a puzzle to me. They added considerably to her already heavy
+task, and in her place, I should have hated them for it. It might amuse
+us to have them drop in to lunch or to dinner at any time, and to gather
+them together once a week, on Thursday evening. But it could hardly
+amuse Trimmer, to whose share fell the problem of how to make a meal
+prepared for two go round among four or six, or how to get to the front
+door and dispose of hats and wraps in chambers so small that the weekly
+gathering filled even our little hall to overflowing. There was always
+some one to help her on Thursdays, and she had not much to do in the way
+of catering. "Plain living and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> high talking" was the principle upon
+which our evenings were run, and whoever wanted more than a sandwich or
+so could go elsewhere. But whatever had to be done, Trimmer insisted on
+doing, and, moreover, on doing it until the last pipe was out and the
+last word spoken; and as everybody almost was an artist or a writer, and
+as there is no subject so inexhaustible as "shop," I do not like to
+remember how late that often was. It made no difference. She refused to
+go to bed, and in her white cap and apron, with her air of old retainer
+or family nurse, she would waddle about through clouds of tobacco-smoke,
+offering a box of cigarettes here, a plate of sandwiches there, radiant,
+benevolent, more often than not in the way, toward the end looking as if
+she would drop, but apparently enjoying herself more than anybody, until
+it seemed as if the unkindness would be not to let her stay up in it.</p>
+
+<p>More puzzling to me than her interest in all our friends was her choice
+of a few for her special favour. I could not see the reason for her
+choice, unless I had suspected her of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> sudden passion for literature
+and art. Certainly her chief attentions were lavished on the most
+distinguished among our friends, who were the very people most apt to
+put her devotion to the test. She adored Whistler, though when he was in
+London he had a way not only of dropping in to dinner, but sometimes of
+dropping in so late that it had to be cooked all over again. She was so
+far from minding that, at the familiar sound of his knock and ring, her
+face was wreathed in smiles, she seemed to look upon the extra work as a
+privilege, and I have known her, without a word, trot off to the
+butcher's or the green-grocer's, or even to the tobacconist's in the
+Strand for the little Algerian cigarettes he loved. She went so far as
+to abandon certain of her prejudices for his benefit, and I realized
+what a conquest he had made when she resigned herself to cooking a fowl
+in a casserole and serving it without bread-sauce. She discovered the
+daintiness of his appetite, and it was delightful to see her hovering
+over him at table and pointing out the choice bits in every dish she
+passed. She was forever finding an excuse to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> come into any room where
+he might be. Altogether, it was as complete a case of fascination as if
+she had known him to be the great master he was; and she was his slave
+long before he gave her the ten shillings, which was valued
+sentimentally as I really believe a tip never was before or since by a
+British servant.</p>
+
+<p>Henley was hardly second in her esteem, and this was the more
+inexplicable because he provided her with so many more chances to prove
+it. Whistler then lived in Paris, and appeared only now and then. Henley
+lived in London half the week, and rarely missed a Thursday. For it was
+on that evening that the "National Observer," which he was editing, went
+to press, and the printers in Covent Garden were conveniently near to
+our chambers. His work done, the paper put to bed, about ten or eleven
+he and the train of young men then in attendance upon him would come
+round; and to them, in the comfortable consciousness that the rest of
+the week was their own, time was of no consideration. Henley exulted in
+talk: if he had the right audience<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> he would talk all night; and the
+right audience was willing to listen so long as he talked in our
+chambers. But Trimmer, in the kitchen, or handing round sandwiches,
+could not listen, and yet she lingered as long as anybody. It might be
+almost dawn before he got up to go, but she was there to fetch him his
+crutch and his big black hat, and to shut the door after him. Whatever
+the indiscretion of the hour one Thursday, she welcomed him as cordially
+the next, or any day in between when inclination led him to toil up the
+three long flights of stairs to our dinner-table.</p>
+
+<p>Phil May was no less in her good graces, and his hours, if anything,
+were worse than Henley's, since the length of his stay did not depend on
+his talk. I never knew a man of less conversation. "Have a drink," was
+its extent with many who thought themselves in his intimacy. This was a
+remark which he could scarcely offer to Trimmer at the front door, where
+Whistler and Henley never failed to exchange with her a friendly
+greeting. But all the same, she seemed to feel the charm which his
+admirers liked to attribute to him,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> and to find his smile, when he
+balanced himself on the back of a chair, more than a substitute for
+conversation, however animated. The flaw in my enjoyment of his company
+on our Thursdays was the certainty of the length of time he would be
+pleased to bestow it upon us. Trimmer must have shared this certainty,
+but to her it never mattered. She never failed to return his smile,
+though when he got down to go, she might be nodding, and barely able to
+drag one tired old foot after the other.</p>
+
+<p>She made as much of "Bob" Stevenson, whose hours were worse than
+anybody's. We would perhaps run across him at a press view of pictures
+in the morning and bring him back to lunch, he protesting that he must
+leave immediately after to get home to Kew and write his article before
+six o'clock. And then he would begin to talk, weaving a romance of any
+subject that came up,&mdash;the subject was nothing, it was always what he
+made of it,&mdash;and he would go on talking until Trimmer, overjoyed at the
+chance, came in with afternoon tea; and he would go on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> talking until
+she announced dinner; and he would go on talking until all hours the
+next morning, long after his last train and any possibility of his
+article getting into yesterday afternoon's "Pall Mall." But early as he
+might appear, late as he might stay, he was never too early or too late
+for Trimmer.</p>
+
+<p>These were her favourites, though she was ready to "mother" Beardsley,
+who, she seemed to think, had just escaped from the schoolroom and ought
+to be sent back to it; though she had a protecting eye also for George
+Steevens, just up from Oxford, evidently mistaking the silence which was
+then his habit for shyness; though, indeed, she overflowed with kindness
+for everybody who came. It was astonishing how, at her age, she managed
+to adapt herself to people and ways so unlike any she could ever have
+known, without relaxing in the least from her own code of conduct.</p>
+
+<p>Only twice can I remember seeing her really ruffled. Once was when Felix
+Buhot, who, during a long winter he spent in London, was often with us
+on Thursdays, went into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> kitchen to teach her to make coffee. The
+inference that she could not make it hurt her feelings; but her real
+distress was to have him in the kitchen, which "ladies and gentlemen"
+should not enter. Between her desire to get him back to the dining-room
+and her fear lest he should discover it, she was terribly embarrassed.
+It was funny to watch them: Buhot, unconscious of wrong and of English,
+intent upon measuring the coffee and pouring out the boiling water;
+Trimmer fluttering about him with flushed and anxious face, talking very
+loud and with great deliberation, in the not uncommon conviction that
+the foreigner's ignorance of English is only a form of deafness.</p>
+
+<p>On the other occasion she lost her temper, the only time in my
+experience. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Whistler, appearing while she
+was out and staying on to supper, got Constant, his man, to add an onion
+soup and an omelet to the cold meats she had prepared, for he would
+never reconcile himself to the English supper. She was furious when she
+got back and found that her pots and pans had been meddled with, and her
+larder raided.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> She looked upon it as a reproach; as if she couldn't
+serve Mr. Whistler as well as any foreign servant,&mdash;she had no use for
+foreign servants anyhow,&mdash;she would not have them making their foreign
+messes in any kitchen of hers! It took days and careful diplomacy to
+convince her that she had not been insulted.</p>
+
+<p>I was the more impressed by this outbreak of temper because, as a rule,
+she gave no sign of seeing, or hearing, or understanding anything that
+went on in our chambers. She treated me as I believe royalty should be
+treated, leaving it to me to open the talk, or to originate a topic. I
+remember once, when we were involved in a rumpus which had been
+discussed over our dinner-table for months beforehand, and which at the
+time filled the newspapers and was such public property that everybody
+in the Quarter&mdash;the milkman, the florist at the Temple of Pomona in the
+Strand, the Housekeeper downstairs, the postman&mdash;congratulated us on our
+victory, Trimmer alone held her peace. I could not believe that she
+really did not know, and at last I asked her:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you have heard, Trimmer, what has been going on these days?"</p>
+
+<p>"What, mum?" was her answer.</p>
+
+<p>Then, exasperated, I explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Why yes, mum," she said. "I beg your pardon, mum, I really couldn't
+'elp it. I 'ave been reading the pipers, and the 'ousekeeper she was
+a-talking to me about it before you come in, and the postman too, and I
+was sayin' as 'ow glad I was. I 'ope you and the Master won't think it a
+liberty, mum. Thank you, mum!"</p>
+
+<p>I remember another time, when some of our friends took to running away
+with other friends' wives, and things became so complicated for
+everybody that our Thursday evenings were brought to a sudden end,
+Trimmer kept the same stolid countenance throughout, until, partly to
+prevent awkwardness, partly out of curiosity, I asked her if she had
+seen the papers.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I beg your pardon, mum," she hesitated, "thank you, mum, I'm sure.
+I know it's a liberty, but you know, mum, they've all been 'ere so often
+I couldn't help noticing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> there was somethink. And I'm very sorry, mum,
+if you'll excuse the liberty, they all was such lidies and gentlemen,
+mum."</p>
+
+<p>And so, I should never have known there was another reason, besides the
+natural kindness of her heart, for her interest in our friends and her
+acceptance of their ways, if, before this, I had not happened to say to
+her one Friday morning,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You seem, Trimmer, to have a very great admiration for Mr. Phil May."</p>
+
+<p>"I 'ope you and Master won't think it a liberty, mum," she answered, in
+an agony of embarrassment, "but I do like to see 'im, and they allus so
+like to 'ear about 'im at 'ome. They're allus asking me when I 'ave last
+seen 'im or Mr. Whistler."</p>
+
+<p>Then it came out. Chance had bestowed upon her father and one of the
+great American magazines the same name, with the result that the
+magazine was looked upon by her brothers and herself as belonging
+somehow to the family. The well-to-do brother subscribed to it, the
+other came to his house to see each new number. Through the
+illustrations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> and articles they had become as familiar with artists and
+authors as most people in England are with the "winners," and their
+education had reached at least the point of discovery that news does not
+begin and end in sport. Judging from Trimmer, I doubt if at first their
+patronage of art and literature went much further, but this was far
+enough for them to know, and to feel flattered by the knowledge, that
+she was living among people who figured in the columns of art and
+literary gossip as prominently as "all the winners" in the columns of
+the Sporting Prophets, though they would have been still more flattered
+had her lot been cast among the Prophets. In a few cases, their interest
+soon became more personal.</p>
+
+<p>It was their habit&mdash;why, I do not suppose they could have said
+themselves&mdash;to read any letter Whistler might write to the papers at a
+moment when he was given to writing, though what they made of the letter
+when read was more than Trimmer was able to explain; they also looked
+out for Phil May's drawings in "Punch"; they passed our articles round
+the family circle,&mdash;a compliment hardly more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> astonishing to Trimmer
+than to us. As time went on they began to follow the career of several
+of our other friends to whom Trimmer introduced them; and it was a
+gratification to them all, as well as a triumph for her, when on Sunday
+afternoon she could say, "Mr. Crockett or Mr. 'Arold Frederic was at
+Master's last Thursday." Thus, through us, she became for the first time
+a person of importance in her brother's house, and I suspect also quite
+an authority in Brixton on all questions of art and literature. Indeed,
+she may, for all I know, have started another Carnegie Library in South
+London.</p>
+
+<p>It is a comfort now to think that her stay with us was pleasant to her;
+wages alone could not have paid our debt for the trouble she spared us
+during her five years in our chambers. I have an idea that, in every
+way, it was the most prosperous period of her life. When she came, she
+was not only without a penny in her pocket, but she owed pounds for her
+outfit of aprons and caps and dresses. Before she left, she was saving
+money. She opened a book at the Post Office Savings Bank; she
+subscribed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> to one of those societies which would assure her a
+respectable funeral, for she had the ambition of all the self-respecting
+poor to be put away decent, after having, by honest work, kept off the
+parish to the end. Her future provided for, she could make the most of
+whatever pleasures the present might throw in her way,&mdash;the pantomime at
+Christmas, a good seat for the Queen's Jubilee procession; above all,
+the two weeks' summer holiday. No journey was ever so full of adventure
+as hers to Margate, or Yarmouth, or Hastings, from the first preparation
+to the moment of return, when she would appear laden with presents of
+Yarmouth bloaters or Margate shrimps, to be divided between the old
+charwoman and ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>If she had no desire to leave us, we had none to have her go; and as the
+years passed, we did not see why she should. She was old, but she bore
+her age with vigour. She was hardly ever ill, and never with anything
+worse than a cold or an indigestion, though she had an inconvenient
+talent for accidents. The way she managed to cut her fingers was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> little
+short of genius. One or two were always wrapped in rags. But no matter
+how deep the gash, she was as cheerful as if it were an accomplishment.
+With the blood pouring from the wound, she would beam upon me: "You 'ave
+no idea, mum, what wonderful flesh I 'as fur 'ealin'." Her success in
+falling down our little narrow stairway was scarcely less remarkable.
+But the worst tumble of all was the one which J. had so long expected.
+He had just moved his portfolios to an unaccustomed place one morning,
+when a letter, or a message, or something, sent her stumbling into the
+studio with her usual impetuosity, and over she tripped. It was so bad
+that we had to have the doctor, her arm was so seriously strained that
+he made her carry it in a sling for weeks. We were alarmed, but not
+Trimmer.</p>
+
+<p>"You know, mum, it <i>is</i> lucky; it might 'ave been the right harm, and
+that would 'ave been bad!"</p>
+
+<p>She really thought it another piece of her extraordinary good luck.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Trimmer! It needed so little to make her happy, and within five
+years of her coming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> to us that little was taken from her. All she asked
+of life was work, and a worse infirmity than age put a stop to her
+working for us, or for anybody else, ever again. At the beginning of her
+trouble, she would not admit to us, nor I fancy to herself, that
+anything was wrong, and she was "bonny," though she went "cutting about"
+at a snail's pace and her cheerful old face grew haggard. Presently,
+there were days when she could not keep up the pretence, and then she
+said her head ached and she begged my pardon for the liberty. I
+consulted a doctor. He thought it might be neuralgia and dosed her for
+it; she thought it her teeth, and had almost all the few still left to
+her pulled out. And the pain was worse than ever. Then, as we were on
+the point of leaving town for some weeks, we handed over our chambers to
+the frowzy old charwoman, and sent Trimmer down to the sea at Hastings.
+She was waiting to receive us when we returned, but she gave us only the
+ghost of her old smile in greeting, and her face was more haggard and
+drawn than ever. For a day she tottered about from one room to another,
+cooking, dusting,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> making beds, and looking all the while as if she were
+on the rack. She was a melancholy wreck of the old cheerful, bustling,
+exasperating Trimmer; and it was more than we could stand. I told her
+so. She forgot to beg my pardon for the liberty in her hurry to assure
+me that nothing was wrong, that she could work, that she wanted to work,
+that she was not happy when she did not work.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny!" she kept saying over and over again.</p>
+
+<p>Her despair at the thought of stopping work was more cruel to see than
+her physical torture, and I knew, without her telling me, that her fear
+of the pain she might have still to suffer was nothing compared to her
+fear of the workhouse she had toiled all her life to keep out of. She
+had just seven pounds and fifteen shillings for her fortune; her family,
+being working people, would have no use for her once she was of no use
+to them; our chambers were her home only so long as she could do in them
+what she had agreed to do; there was no Workmen's Compensation Act in
+those days, no old-age pensions, even if she had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> old enough to get
+one. What was left for a poor woman, full of years and pain, save the
+one refuge which, all her life, she had been taught to look upon as
+scarcely less shameful than the prison or the scaffold?</p>
+
+<p>Well, Trimmer had done her best for us; now we did our best for her,
+and, as it turned out, the best that could be done. Through a friend, we
+got her into St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Her case was hopeless from the
+first. A malignant growth so close to the brain that at her age an
+operation was too serious a risk, and without it she might linger in
+agony for months,&mdash;this was what life had been holding in store for
+Trimmer during those long years of incessant toil, and self-sacrifice,
+and obstinate belief that a drunken husband, a selfish brother, an empty
+purse, were all for the best in our best of all possible worlds.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know how ill she was, and her first weeks at the hospital
+were happy. The violence of the pain was relieved, the poor tired old
+body was the better for the rest and the cool and the quiet; she who had
+spent her strength waiting on others enjoyed the novel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> experience of
+being waited on herself. There were the visits of her family on visiting
+days, and mine in between, to look forward to; some of our friends, who
+had grown as fond of her as we, sent her fruit and flowers, and she
+liked the consequence all this gave her in the ward. Then, the hospital
+gossip was a distraction, perhaps because in talking about the
+sufferings of others she could forget her own. My objection was that she
+would spare me not a single detail. But in some curious way I could not
+fathom, it seemed a help to Trimmer, and I had not the heart to cut her
+stories short.</p>
+
+<p>After a month or so, the reaction came. Her head was no better, and what
+was the hospital good for if they couldn't cure her? She grew
+suspicious, hinting dark things to me about the doctors. They were
+keeping her there to try experiments on her, and she was a respectable
+woman, and always had been, and she did not like to be stared at in her
+bed by a lot of young fellows. The nurses were as bad. But once out of
+their clutches she would be "bonny" again, she knew. Probably the
+doctors and nurses knew too, for the same suspicion is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> more often than
+not their reward; and indeed it was so unlike Trimmer that she must have
+picked it up in the ward. Anyway, in their kindness they had kept her
+far longer than is usual in such cases, and when they saw her grow
+restless and unhappy, it seemed best to let her go. At the end of four
+months, and to her infinite joy, Trimmer, five years older than when she
+came to us, in the advanced stage of an incurable disease, with a
+capital of seven pounds and fifteen shillings, was free to begin life
+again.</p>
+
+<p>I pass quickly over the next weeks,&mdash;I wish I could have passed over
+them as quickly at the time. My visits were now to a drab quarter on the
+outskirts of Camden Town, where Trimmer had set up as a capitalist. She
+boarded with her cousin, many shillings of her little store going to pay
+the weekly bill; she found a wonderful doctor who promised to cure her
+in no time, and into his pockets the rest of her savings flowed. There
+was no persuading her that he could not succeed where the doctors at the
+hospital had failed, and so long as she went to him, to help her would
+only have meant more shillings for an unscrupulous quack who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> traded on
+the ignorance and credulity of the poor. Week by week I saw her grow
+feebler, week by week I knew her little capital was dribbling fast away.
+She seemed haunted by the dread that her place would be taken in our
+chambers, and that, once cured, she would have to hunt for another. That
+she was "bonny" was the beginning and end of all she had to say. One
+morning, to prove it, she managed to drag herself down to see us,
+arriving with just strength enough to stagger into my room, her arms
+outstretched to feel her way, for the disease, by this time, was
+affecting both eyes and brain. Nothing would satisfy her until she had
+gone into the studio, stumbling about among the portfolios, I on one
+side, on the other J., with no desire to wring her neck for it was grim
+tragedy we were guiding between us,&mdash;tragedy in rusty black with a
+reticule hanging from one arm,&mdash;five years nearer the end than when
+first the curtain rose upon it in our chambers. We bundled her off as
+fast as we could, in a cab, with the cousin who had brought her. She
+stopped in the doorway.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm bonny, mum. I can cut about, you'll see!" And she would have
+fallen, had not the cousin caught and steadied her.</p>
+
+<p>After that, she had not the strength to drag herself anywhere, not even
+to see the quack. A week later she took to her bed, almost blind, her
+poor old wits scattered beyond recovery. I was glad of that: it spared
+her the weary waiting and watching for death while the shadow of the
+grim building she feared still more drew ever nearer. I hesitated to go
+and see her, for my mere presence stirred her into consciousness, and
+reminded her of her need to work and her danger if she could not. Then
+there was a day when she did not seem to know I was there, and she paid
+no attention to me, never spoke until just as I was going, when of a
+sudden she sat bolt upright:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny. You'll see!" she wailed, and sank back
+on her pillows.</p>
+
+<p>These were Trimmer's last words to me, and I left her at death's door,
+still crying for work, as if in the next world, as in this, it was her
+only salvation. Very soon, the cousin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> came to tell me that the little
+capital had dribbled entirely away, and that she could not keep Trimmer
+without being paid for it. Could I blame her? She had her own fight
+against the shadow hanging all too close now over Trimmer. Her 'usband
+worked 'ard, she said, and they could just live respectable, and
+Trimmer's brothers, they was for sending Trimmer to the workus. They
+might have sent her, and I doubt if she would have been the wiser. But
+could we see her go? For our own comfort, for our own peace of mind, we
+interfered and arranged that Trimmer should board with her cousin until
+a bed was found in another hospital. It was found, mercifully, almost at
+once, but, before I had time to go there, the Great Release had come for
+her; and we heard with thankfulness that the old head was free from
+suffering, that the twisted hands were still, that fear of the workhouse
+could trouble her no more. Life's one gift to Trimmer had been toil,
+pain her one reward, and it was good to know that she was at rest.</p>
+
+<p>The cousin brought us the news. But I had a visit the same day from the
+sister-in-law, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> paragon of virtue, a thin, sharp-faced woman of
+middle age. I said what I could in sympathy, telling her how much we
+missed Trimmer, how well we should always remember her. But this was not
+what she had come to hear. She let me get through. She drew the sigh
+appropriate for the occasion. Then she settled down to business. When
+did I propose to pay back the money Trimmer had spent on the doctor in
+Camden Town? I didn't propose to at all, I told her: he was a miserable
+quack and I had done my best to keep Trimmer from going to him; besides,
+fortunately for her, she was beyond the reach of money that was not
+owing to her. The sister-in-law was indignant. The family always
+understood I had promised, a promise was a promise, and now they
+depended on me for the funeral. I reminded her of the society to which
+Trimmer had subscribed solely to meet that expense. But she quickly let
+me know that the funeral the society proposed to provide fell far short
+of the family's standard. To them it appeared scarcely better than a
+pauper's. The coffin would be plain, there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> would be no oak and brass
+handles,&mdash;worse, there would be no plumes for the horses and the hearse.
+To send their sister to her grave without plumes would disgrace them
+before their neighbours. Nor would there be a penny over for the family
+mourning,&mdash;could I allow them, the chief mourners, to mourn without
+crape?</p>
+
+<p>I remembered their willingness to let Trimmer die as a pauper in the
+workhouse. After all, she would have the funeral she had provided for.
+She would lie no easier in her grave for oak and brass handles, for
+plumes and crape. Her family had made use of her all her life; I did not
+see why I should help them to make use of her after her death, that
+their grief might be trumpeted in Brixton and Camden Town. I brought the
+interview to an end. But sometimes I wonder if Trimmer would not have
+liked it better if I had helped them, if plumes had waved from the heads
+of the horses that drew her to her grave, if her family had followed
+swathed in crape. She would have looked upon it as another piece of her
+extraordinary good luck if, by dying, she had been of service to
+anybody.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I do not know where they buried her. Probably nobody save ourselves
+to-day has as much as a thought for her. But, if self-sacrifice counts
+for anything, if martyrdom is a passport to heaven, then Trimmer should
+take her place up there by the side of St. Francis of Assisi, and Joan
+of Arc, and St. Vincent de Paul, and all those other blessed men and
+women whose lives were given for others, and who thought it was
+"bonny."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a><i>Louise</i></h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus9" id="illus9"></a>
+<img src="images/illus9.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"TUMBLED, WEATHER-WORN, RED-TILED ROOFS"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+<h2>III</h2>
+
+<h3>LOUISE</h3>
+
+
+<p>For the third time since we had taken our chambers, I was servantless,
+and I could not summon up courage to face for the third time the scorn
+which the simple request for a "general" meets in the English Registry
+Office. That was what sent me to try my luck at a French <i>Bureau</i> in
+Soho, where, I was given to understand, it was possible to inquire for,
+and actually obtain, a good <i>bonne à tout faire</i> and escape without
+insult.</p>
+
+<p>Louise was announced one dull November morning, a few days later. I
+found her waiting for me in our little hall,&mdash;a woman of about forty,
+short, plump, with black eyes, blacker hair, and an enchanting smile.
+But the powder on her face and the sham diamonds in her ears seemed to
+hang out danger signals, and my first impulse was to show her the door.
+It was something familiar in the face under<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> the powder, above all in
+the voice when she spoke, that made me hesitate.</p>
+
+<p>"Provençale?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, from Marseilles," she answered, and I showed her instead into my
+room.</p>
+
+<p>I had often been "down there" where the sun shines and skies are blue,
+and her Provençal accent came like a breath from the south through the
+gloom of the London fog, bringing it all back to me,&mdash;the blinding white
+roads, the gray hills sweet with thyme and lavender, the towns with
+their "antiquities," the little shining white villages,&mdash;M. Bernard's at
+Martigues, and his dining-room, and the Marseillais who crowded it on a
+Sunday morning, and the gaiety and the laughter, and Désiré in his white
+apron, and the great bowls of <i>bouillabaisse</i>....</p>
+
+<p>It was she who recalled me to the business of the moment. Her name was
+Louise Sorel, she said; she could clean, wash, play the lady's maid,
+sew, market, cook&mdash;but cook! <i>Té&mdash;au mouins</i>, she would show <i>Madame</i>;
+and, as she said it, she smiled. I have never seen such perfect teeth in
+woman or child; you knew<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> at a glance that she must have been a radiant
+beauty in her youth. A Provençal accent, an enchanting smile, and the
+remains of beauty, however, are not precisely what you engage a servant
+for; and, with a sudden access of common sense, I asked for references.
+Surely, <i>Madame</i> would not ask the impossible, she said reproachfully.
+She had but arrived in London, she had never gone as <i>bonne</i> anywhere;
+how, then, could she give references? She needed the work and was
+willing to do it: was not that sufficient? I got out of it meanly by
+telling her I would think it over. At that she smiled again,&mdash;really,
+her smile on a November day almost warranted the risk. I meant to take
+her; she knew; <i>Madame</i> was kind.</p>
+
+<p>I did think it over,&mdash;while I interviewed slovenly English "generals"
+and stray Italian children, dropped upon me from Heaven knows where,
+while I darned the family stockings, while I ate the charwoman's chops.
+I thought it over indeed, far more than I wanted to, until, in despair,
+I returned to the Soho <i>Bureau</i> to complain that I was still without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> a
+servant of any kind. The first person I saw was Louise, disconsolate, on
+a chair in the corner. She sprang up when she recognized me. Had she not
+said <i>Madame</i> was kind? she cried. <i>Madame</i> had come for her. I had done
+nothing of the sort. But there she was, this charming creature from the
+South; at home was the charwoman, dingy and dreary as the November
+skies. To look back now is to wonder why I did not jump at the chance of
+having her. As it was, I did take her,&mdash;no references, powder, sham
+diamonds, and all. But I compromised. It was to be for a week. After
+that, we should see. An hour later she was in my kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>A wonderful week followed. From the start we could not resist her charm,
+though to be on such terms with one's servant as to know that she has
+charm, is no doubt the worst possible kind of bad form. Even William
+Penn, the fastidious, was her slave at first sight,&mdash;and it would have
+been rank ingratitude if he had not been, for, from the ordinary London
+tabby average people saw in him, he was at once transformed into the
+most superb,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> the most magnificent of cats! And we were all superb, we
+were all magnificent, down to the snuffy, tattered old Irish charwoman
+who came to make us untidy three times a week, and whom we had not the
+heart to turn out, because we knew that if we did, there could be no one
+else foolish enough to take her in again.</p>
+
+<p>And Louise, though her southern imagination did such great things for
+us, had not overrated herself. She might be always laughing at
+everything, as they always do laugh "down there,"&mdash;at the English she
+couldn't understand, at <i>Mizé Boum</i>, the nearest she came to the
+charwoman's name, at the fog she must have hated, at the dirt left for
+her to clean. But she worked harder than any servant I have ever had,
+and to better purpose. She adored the cleanliness and the order, it
+seemed, and was appalled at the dirt and slovenliness of the English, as
+every Frenchwoman is when she comes to the land that has not ceased to
+brag of its cleanliness since its own astonished discovery of the
+morning tub. Before Louise, the London blacks disappeared as if by
+magic.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> Our wardrobes were overhauled and set to rights. The linen was
+mended and put in place. And she could cook! Such <i>risotto</i>!&mdash;she had
+been in Italy&mdash;Such <i>macaroni</i>! Such <i>bouillabaisse</i>! Throughout that
+wonderful week, our chambers smelt as strong of <i>ail</i> as a Provençal
+kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>In the face of all this, I do not see how I brought myself to find any
+fault. To do myself justice, I never did when it was a question of the
+usual domestic conventions. Louise was better than all the
+conventions&mdash;all the prim English maids in prim white caps&mdash;in the
+world. Just to hear her talk, just to have her call that disreputable
+old <i>Mizé Boum ma belle</i>, just to have her announce as <i>La Dame de la
+bouillabaisse</i> a friend of ours who had been to Provence and had come to
+feast on her masterpiece and praised her for it,&mdash;just each and every
+one of her charming southern ways made up for the worst domestic crime
+she could have committed, I admit to a spasm of dismay when, for the
+first meal she served, she appeared in her petticoat, a dish-cloth for
+apron, and her sleeves rolled up above her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> elbows. But I forgot it with
+her delightful laugh at herself when I explained that, absurdly it might
+be, we preferred a skirt, an apron, and sleeves fastened at the wrists.
+It seemed she adored the economy too, and she had wished to protect her
+dress and even her apron.</p>
+
+<p>These things would horrify the model housewife; but then, I am not a
+model housewife, and they amused me, especially as she was so quick to
+meet me, not only half, but the whole way. When, however, she took to
+running out at intervals on mysterious errands, I felt that I must
+object. Her first excuse was <i>les affaires</i>; her next, a friend; and,
+when neither of these would serve, she owned up to a husband who,
+apparently, spent his time waiting for her at the street corner; he was
+so lonely, <i>le pauvre</i>! I suggested that he should come and see her in
+the kitchen. She laughed outright. Why, he was of a shyness <i>Madame</i>
+could not figure to herself. He never would dare to mount the stairs and
+ring the front door-bell.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of this wonderful week, there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> was sent to me, from the
+Soho <i>Bureau</i>, a Swiss girl with as many references as a Colonial Dame
+has grandfathers. Even so, and despite the inconvenient husband, I might
+not have dismissed Louise,&mdash;it was so pleasant to live in an atmosphere
+of superlatives and <i>ail</i>. It was she who settled the matter with some
+vague story of a partnership in a restaurant and work waiting for her
+there. Perhaps we should have parted with an affectation of indifference
+had not J. unexpectedly interfered. Husbands have a trick of pretending
+superiority to details of housekeeping until you have had all the
+bother, and then upsetting everything by their interference. She had
+given us the sort of time we hadn't had since the old days in Provence,
+he argued; her smile alone was worth double the money agreed upon;
+therefore, double the money was the least I could in decency offer her.
+His logic was irreproachable, but housekeeping on such principles would
+end in domestic bankruptcy. However, Louise got the money, and my reward
+was her face when she thanked me&mdash;she made giving sheer
+self-indulgence&mdash;and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> the <i>risotto</i> which, in the shock of gratitude,
+she insisted upon coming the next day to cook for us.</p>
+
+<p>But, in the end, J.'s indiscretion cost me dear. As Louise was
+determined to magnify all our geese, not merely into swans, but into the
+most superb, the most magnificent swans, the few extra shillings had
+multiplied so miraculously by the time their fame reached the
+<i>Quartier</i>, that <i>Madame</i> of the <i>Bureau</i> saw in me a special Providence
+appointed to relieve her financial difficulties, and hurried to claim an
+immediate loan. Then, her claim being disregarded, she wrote to call my
+attention to the passing of the days and the miserable pettiness of the
+sum demanded, and to assure me of her consideration the most perfect.
+She got to be an intolerable nuisance before I heard the last of her.</p>
+
+<p>We had not realized the delight of having Louise to take care of us,
+until she was replaced by the Swiss girl, who was industrious, sober,
+well-trained, with all the stolidity and surliness of her people, and as
+colourless as a self-respecting servant ought to be. I was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> immensely
+relieved when, after a fortnight, she found the work too much for her.
+It was just as she was on the point of going that Louise reappeared, her
+face still white with powder, the sham diamonds still glittering in her
+ears, but somehow changed, I could not quite make out how. She had come,
+she explained to present me with a ring of pearls and opals and of
+surpassing beauty, at the moment pawned for a mere trifle,&mdash;here was the
+ticket; I had but to pay, add a smaller trifle for interest and
+commission, and it was mine. As I never have worn rings I did not care
+to begin the habit by gambling in pawn tickets, much though I should
+have liked to oblige Louise. Her emotion when I refused seemed so out of
+proportion, and yet was so unmistakably genuine, that it bewildered me.</p>
+
+<p>But she pulled herself together almost at once and began to talk of the
+restaurant which, I learned, was marching in a simply marvellous manner.
+It was only when, in answer to her question, I told her that the
+<i>Demoiselle Suisse</i> was marching not at all and was about to leave me,
+that the truth came out. There was no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> restaurant, there never had
+been,&mdash;except in the country of Tartarin's lions; it was her invention
+to spare me any self-reproach I might have felt for turning her adrift
+at the end of her week's engagement. She had found no work since. She
+and her husband had pawned everything. <i>Tiens</i>, and she emptied before
+me a pocketful of pawn tickets. They were without a sou. They had had
+nothing to eat for twenty-four hours. That was the change. I began to
+understand. She was starving, literally starving, in the cold and gloom
+and damp of the London winter, she who was used to the warmth and
+sunshine, to the clear blue skies of Provence. If the aliens who drift
+to England, as to the Promised Land, could but know what awaited them!</p>
+
+<p>Of course I took her back. She might have added rouge to the powder, she
+might have glittered all over with diamonds, sham or real, and I would
+not have minded. J. welcomed her with joy. William Penn hung rapturously
+at her heels. We had a <i>risotto</i>, golden as the sun of the <i>Midi</i>,
+fragrant as its kitchens, for our dinner.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was no question of a week now, no question of time at all. It did
+not seem as if we ever could manage again, as if we ever could have
+managed, without Louise. And she, on her side, took possession of our
+chambers, and, for a ridiculously small sum a week, worked her miracles
+for us. We positively shone with cleanliness; London grime no longer
+lurked, the skeleton in our cupboards. We never ate dinners and
+breakfasts more to our liking, never had I been so free from
+housekeeping, never had my weekly bills been so small. Eventually, she
+charged herself with the marketing, though she could not, and never
+could, learn to speak a word of English; but not even the London
+tradesman was proof against her smile. She kept the weekly accounts,
+though she could neither read nor write: in her intelligence, an
+eloquent witness to the folly of general education. She was, in a word,
+the most capable and intelligent woman I have ever met, so that it was
+the more astounding that she should also be the most charming.</p>
+
+<p>Most astounding of all was the way,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> entirely, typically Provençale as
+she was, she could adapt herself to London and its life and people.
+Though she wore in the street an ordinary felt hat, and in the house the
+English apron, you could see that her hair was made for the pretty
+Provençal ribbon, and her broad shoulders for the Provençal fichu. <i>Té</i>,
+<i>vé</i>, and <i>au mouins</i> were as constantly in her mouth as in Tartarin's.
+Provençal proverbs forever hovered on her lips. She sang Provençal songs
+at her work. She had ready a Provençal story for every occasion. Her
+very adjectives were Mistral's, her very exaggerations Daudet's. And yet
+she did everything as if she had been a "general" in London chambers all
+her life. Nothing came amiss to her. After her first startling
+appearance as waitress, it was no time before she was serving at table
+as if she had been born to it, and with such a grace of her own that
+every dish she offered seemed a personal tribute. People who had never
+seen her before would smile back involuntarily as they helped
+themselves. It was the same no matter what she did. She was always gay,
+however heavy her task.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> To her even London, with its fogs, was a
+<i>galéjado</i>, as they say "down there." And she was so appreciative. We
+would make excuses to give her things for the pleasure of watching the
+warm glow spread over her face and the light leap to her eyes. We would
+send her to the theatre for the delight of having her come back and tell
+us about it. All the world, on and off the stage, was exalted and
+transfigured as she saw it.</p>
+
+<p>But frank as she was in her admiration of all the world, she remained
+curiously reticent about herself. "My poor grandmother used to say, you
+must turn your tongue seven times in your mouth before speaking," she
+said to me once; and I used to fancy she gave hers a few extra twists
+when it came to talking of her own affairs. Some few facts I gathered:
+that she had been at one time an <i>ouvreuse</i> in a Marseilles theatre; at
+another, a tailoress,&mdash;how accomplished, the smart appearance of her
+husband in J.'s old coats and trousers was to show us; and that, always,
+off and on, she had made a business of buying at the periodical sales of
+the <i>Mont de Piété</i> and selling at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> private sales of her own. I gathered
+also that they all knew her in Marseilles; it was Louise here, Louise
+there, as she passed through the market, and everybody must have a word
+and a laugh with her. No wonder! You couldn't have a word and a laugh
+once with Louise and not long to repeat the experience. But to her life
+when the hours of work were over, she offered next to no clue.</p>
+
+<p>Only one or two figures flitted, pale shadows, through her rare
+reminiscences. One was the old grandmother, whose sayings were full of
+wisdom, but who seemed to have done little for her save give her,
+fortunately, no schooling at all, and a religious education that bore
+the most surprising fruit. Louise had made her first communion, she had
+walked in procession on feast days. <i>J'adorais ça</i>, she would tell me,
+as she recalled her long white veil and the taper in her hand. But she
+adored every bit as much going to the Salvation Army meetings,&mdash;the
+lassies would invite her in, and lend her a hymn-book, and she would
+sing as hard as ever she could, was her account. Her ideas on the
+subject of the Scriptures and the relations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> of the Holy Family left me
+gasping. But her creed had the merit of simplicity. The <i>Boun Diou</i> was
+intelligent, she maintained; <i>il aime les gens honnêtes</i>. He would not
+ask her to hurry off to church and leave all in disorder at home, and
+waste her time. If she needed to pray, she knelt down where and as she
+was, and the <i>Boun Diou</i> was as well pleased. He was a man like us,
+wasn't He? Well then, He understood.</p>
+
+<p>There was also a sister. She occupied a modest apartment in Marseilles
+when she first dawned upon our horizon, but so rapidly did it expand
+into a palatial house in town and a palatial villa by the sea, both with
+cellars of rare and exquisite vintages and stables full of horses and
+carriages, that we looked confidently to the fast-approaching day when
+we should find her installed in the Elysée at Paris. Only in one respect
+did she never vary by a hair's breadth: this was her hatred of Louise's
+husband.</p>
+
+<p>Here, at all events, was a member of the family about whom we learned
+more than we cared to know. For if he did not show himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> at first,
+that did not mean his willingness to let us ignore him. He persisted in
+wanting Louise to meet him at the corner, sometimes just when I most
+wanted her in the kitchen. He would have her come back to him at night;
+and to see her, after her day's hard work, start out in the black sodden
+streets, seldom earlier than ten, often as late as midnight; to realize
+that she must start back long before the sun would have thought of
+coming up, if the sun ever did come up on a London winter morning, made
+us wretchedly uncomfortable. The husband, however, was not to be moved
+by any messages I might send him. He was too shy to grant the interview
+I asked. But he gave me to understand through her that he wouldn't do
+without her, he would rather starve, he couldn't get along without her.
+We did not blame him: we couldn't, either. That was why, after several
+weeks of discomfort to all concerned, it occurred to us that we might
+invite him to make our home his; and we were charmed by his
+condescension when, at last conquering his shyness, he accepted our
+invitation. The threatened deadlock was thus<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> settled, and M. Auguste,
+as he introduced himself, came to us as a guest for as long as he chose
+to stay. There were friends&mdash;there always are&mdash;to warn us that what we
+were doing was sheer madness. What did we know about him, anyway?
+Precious little, it was a fact: that he was the husband of Louise,
+neither more nor less. We did not even know that, it was hinted. But if
+Louise had not asked for our marriage certificate, could we insist upon
+her producing hers?</p>
+
+<p>It may have been mad, but it worked excellently. M. Auguste as a guest
+was the pattern of discretion. I had never had so much as a glimpse of
+him until he came to visit us. Then I found him a good-looking man,
+evidently a few years younger than Louise, well-built, rather taller
+than the average Frenchman. Beyond this, it was weeks before I knew
+anything of him except the astonishing adroitness with which he kept out
+of our way. He quickly learned our hours and arranged his accordingly.
+After we had begun work in the morning, he would saunter down to the
+kitchen and have his coffee, the one person of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> leisure in the
+establishment. After that, and again in the afternoon, he would stroll
+out to attend to what I take were the not too arduous duties of a
+horse-dealer with neither horses nor capital,&mdash;for as a horse-dealer he
+described himself when he had got so far as to describe himself at all.
+At noon and at dinner-time, he would return from Tattersall's, or
+wherever his not too exhausting business had called him, with a small
+paper parcel supposed to contain his breakfast or his dinner, our
+agreement being that he was to supply his own food. The evenings he
+spent with Louise. I could discover no vice in him except the, to us,
+disturbing excess of his devotion to her. You read of this sort of
+devotion in French novels and do not believe in it. But M. Auguste, in
+his exacting dependence on Louise, left the French novel far behind. As
+for Louise, though she was no longer young and beauty fades early in the
+South, I have never met, in or out of books, a woman who made me
+understand so well the reason of the selfishness some men call love.</p>
+
+<p>M. Auguste's manners to us were irreproachable.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> We could only admire
+the consideration he showed in so persistently effacing himself. J.
+never would have seen him, if on feast days&mdash;Christmas, New Year's, the
+14th of July&mdash;M. Auguste had not, with great ceremony, entered the
+dining-room at the hour of morning coffee to shake hands and wish J. the
+compliments of the season. With me his relations grew less formal, for
+he was not slow to discover that we had one pleasant weakness in common.
+Though the modest proportions of that brown-paper parcel might not
+suggest it, M. Auguste knew and liked what was good to eat; so did I.
+Almost before I realized it, he had fallen into the habit of preparing
+some special dish for me, or of making my coffee, when I chanced to be
+alone for lunch or for dinner. I can still see the gleam in his eyes as
+he brought me in my cup, and assured me that he, not Louise, was the
+artist, and that it was something of extra&mdash;but of extra!&mdash;as it always
+was. Nor was it long before he was installed <i>chef</i> in our kitchen on
+the occasion of any little breakfast or dinner we might be giving. The
+first time I caught him in shirt-sleeves,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> with Louise's apron flapping
+about his legs and the bib drawn over his waistcoat, he was inclined to
+be apologetic. But he soon gave up apology. It was evident there were
+few things he enjoyed more than cooking a good dinner,&mdash;unless it was
+eating it,&mdash;and his apron was put on early in the day. In the end, I
+never asked any one to breakfast or dinner without consulting him, and
+his <i>menus</i> strengthened the friendliness of our relations.</p>
+
+<p>After a while he ran my errands and helped Louise to market. I found
+that he spoke and wrote very good English, and was a man of some
+education. I have preserved his daily accounts, written in an unusually
+neat handwriting, always beginning "Mussy: 1 penny"; and this reminds me
+that not least in his favour was his success in ingratiating himself
+with William Penn,&mdash;or "Mussy" in Louise's one heroic attempt to cope
+with the English. M. Auguste, moreover, was quiet and reserved to a
+degree that would not have discredited the traditional Englishman. Only
+now and then did the <i>Midi</i> show itself in him: in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> gleam of his eye
+over his gastronomic masterpieces; in his pose as horse-dealer and the
+scale on which the business he never did was schemed,&mdash;<i>Mademoiselle</i>,
+the French dressmaker from Versailles, who counted in tens and thought
+herself rich, was dazzled by the way M. Auguste reckoned by thousands;
+and once, luckily only once, in a frenzied outbreak of passion.</p>
+
+<p>He was called to Paris, I never understood why. When the day came, he
+was seized with such despair as I had never seen before, as I trust I
+may never have to see again. He could not leave Louise, he would not.
+No! No! No! He raved, he swore, he wept. I was terrified, but Louise,
+when I called her aside to consult her, shrugged her shoulders. "We play
+the comedy in the kitchen," she laughed, but I noticed that her laughter
+was low. I fancy when you played the comedy with M. Auguste, tragedy was
+only just round the corner. With the help of <i>Mademoiselle</i> she got him
+to the station; he had wanted to throw himself from the train as it
+started, was her report. And in three days, not a penny the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> richer for
+the journey, he had returned to his life of ease in our chambers.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we came to know M. Auguste's virtues and something of his temper,
+but never M. Auguste himself. The months passed, and we were still
+conscious of mystery. I did not inspire him with the healthy fear he
+entertained for J., but I cannot say he ever took me into his
+confidence. What he was when not in our chambers; what he had been
+before he moved into them; what turn of fate had stranded him,
+penniless, in London with Louise, to make us the richer for his coming;
+why he, a man of education, was married to a woman of none; why he was
+M. Auguste while Louise was Louise Sorel&mdash;I knew as little the day he
+left us as the day he arrived. J. instinctively distrusted him,
+convinced that he had committed some monstrous crime and was in hiding.
+This was also the opinion of the French Quarter, as I learned
+afterwards. It seems the <i>Quartier</i> held its breath when it heard he was
+our guest, and waited for the worst, only uncertain what form that worst
+would take,&mdash;whether we should be assassinated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> in our beds, or a
+bonfire made of our chambers. M. Auguste, however, spared us and
+disappointed the <i>Quartier</i>. His crime, to the end, remained as baffling
+as the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, or the secret of Kaspar
+Hauser.</p>
+
+<p>That he was honest, I would wager my own reputation for honesty, even if
+it was curious the way his fingers gradually covered themselves with
+rings, a watch-chain dangled from his waistcoat pocket, a pin was stuck
+jauntily in his necktie. Her last purchases at the <i>Mont de Piété</i>,
+pawned during those first weeks of starving in London and gradually
+redeemed, was Louise's explanation; and why should we have suspected M.
+Auguste of coming by them unlawfully when he never attempted to rob us,
+though we gave him every opportunity? He knew where I kept my money and
+my keys. He was alone with Louise in our chambers, not only many a day
+and evening, but once for a long summer.</p>
+
+<p>We had to cycle down into Italy and William Penn could not be left to
+care for himself, nor could we board him out without risking the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+individuality of a cat who had never seen the world except from the top
+of a four-story house. Louise and M. Auguste, therefore, were retained
+to look after him, which, I should add, they did in a manner as
+satisfactory to William as to ourselves. Every week I received a report
+of his health and appetite from M. Auguste, in whom I discovered a new
+and delightful talent as correspondent. "<i>Depuis votre départ</i>," said
+the first, "<i>cette pauvre bête a miaulé après vous tous les jours, et il
+est constamment à la porte pour voir si vous ne venez pas. Il ne
+commence vraiment à en prendre son parti que depuis hier. Mais tous ces
+soucis de chat</i> [for that charming phrase what would one not have
+forgiven M. Auguste?], <i>mais tous ces soucis de chat ne l'empêchent pas
+de bien boire son lait le matin et manger sa viande deux fois par
+jour.</i>" Nor was it all colour of rose to be in charge of William.
+"<i>Figurez-vous</i>," the next report ran, "<i>que Mussy a dévoré et abîmé
+complêtement une paire de bas tout neufs que Louise s'est achetée hier.
+C'est un vrai petit diable, mais il est si gentil qu'on ne peut vraiment
+pas le gronder pour cela.</i>" It was consoling to hear<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> eventually that
+William had returned to normal pursuits. "<i>Mussy est bien sage, il a
+attrapé une souris hier dans la cuisine&mdash;je crois bien que Madame ne
+trouvera jamais un aussi gentil Mussy.</i>" And so the journal of William's
+movements was continued throughout our absence. When, leaving J. in
+Italy, I returned to London,&mdash;met at midnight at the station by M.
+Auguste with flattering enthusiasm,&mdash;Mussy's condition and behaviour
+corroborated the weekly bulletins. And not only this. Our chambers were
+as clean as the proverbial new pin: everything was in its place; not so
+much as a scrap of paper was missing. The only thing that had
+disappeared was the sprinkling of gray in Louise's hair, and for this M.
+Auguste volubly prepared me during our walk from the station; she had
+dyed it with almost unforeseen success, he told me, so triumphantly that
+I put down the bottle of dye to his extravagance.</p>
+
+<p>If I know M. Auguste was not a thief, I do not think he was a murderer.
+How could I see blood on the hands of the man who presided so joyously
+over my pots and pans?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> If he were a forger, my trust in him never led
+to abuse of my cheque book; if a deserter, how came he to be possessed
+of his <i>livret militaire</i> duly signed, as my own eyes are the witness?
+how could he venture back to France, as I know he did for I received
+from him letters with the Paris postmark? An anarchist, J. was inclined
+to believe. But I could not imagine him dabbling in bombs and fuses. To
+be a horse-dealer, without horses or money, was much more in his line.</p>
+
+<p>Only of one thing were we sure: however hideous or horrible the evil, M.
+Auguste had worked "down there," under the hot sun of Provence, Louise
+had no part in it. She knew&mdash;it was the reason of her curious
+reticences, of her sacrifice of herself to him. That he loved her was
+inevitable. Who could help loving her? She was so intelligent, so
+graceful, so gay. But that she should love M. Auguste would have been
+incomprehensible, were it not in the nature of woman to love the man who
+is most selfish in his dependence upon her. She did all the work, and he
+had all the pleasure of it. He was always decently dressed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> there was
+always money in his pocket, though she, who earned it, never had a penny
+to spend on herself. No matter how busy and hurried she might be, she
+had always the leisure to talk to him, to amuse him when he came in,
+always the courage to laugh, like the little Fleurance in the story.
+What would you? She was made like that. She had always laughed, when she
+was sad as when she was gay. And while she was making life delightful
+for him, she was doing for us what three Englishwomen combined could not
+have done so well, and with a charm that all the Englishwomen in the
+world could not have mustered among them.</p>
+
+<p>She had been with us about a year when I began to notice that, at
+moments, her face was clouded and her smile less ready. At first, I put
+it down to her endless comedy with M. Auguste. But, after a bit, it
+looked as if the trouble were more serious even than his histrionics. It
+was nothing, she laughed when I spoke to her; it would pass. And she
+went on amusing and providing for M. Auguste and working for us. But by
+the time the dark days<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> of November set in, we were more worried about
+her than ever. The crisis came with Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>On Christmas Day, friends were to dine with us, and we invited
+<i>Mademoiselle</i>, the French dressmaker, to eat her Christmas dinner with
+Louise and M. Auguste. We were very staid in the dining-room,&mdash;it turned
+out rather a dull affair. But in the kitchen it was an uproarious feast.
+Though she lived some distance away, though on Christmas night London
+omnibuses are few and far between, <i>Mademoiselle</i> could hardly be
+persuaded to go home, so much was she enjoying herself. Louise was all
+laughter. "You have been amused?" I asked, when <i>Mademoiselle</i>, finally
+and reluctantly, had been bundled off by J. in a hansom.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Mais oui, mais oui</i>," M. Auguste cried, pleasure in his voice. "<i>Cette
+pauvre Mademoiselle!</i> Her life, it is so sad, she is so alone. It is
+good for her to be amused. We have told her many stories,&mdash;<i>et des
+histoires un tout petit peu salées, n'est-ce pas? pour égayer cette
+pauvre Mademoiselle?</i>"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was the day after the feast that Louise had to give in. She confessed
+she had been in torture while she served our dinner and <i>Mademoiselle</i>
+was there. She could hardly eat or drink. But why make it sad for all
+the world because she was in pain? and she had laughed, she had laughed!</p>
+
+<p>We scolded her first. Then we sent her to a good doctor. It was worse
+than we feared. The trouble was grave, there must be an operation
+without delay. The big tears rolled down her cheeks as she said it. She
+looked old and broken. Why, she moaned, should this sorrow come to her?
+She had never done any harm to any one: why should she have to suffer?
+Why, indeed? Her mistake had been to do too little harm, too much good,
+to others, to think too little of herself. Now, she had to pay for it as
+one almost always does pay for one's good deeds. She worried far less
+over the pain she must bear than over the inconvenience to M. Auguste
+when she could no longer earn money for him.</p>
+
+<p>We wanted her to go into one of the London hospitals. We offered to take
+a room for her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> where she could stay after the operation until she got
+back her strength. But we must not think her ungrateful, the mere idea
+of a hospital made her desperate. And what would she do in a room <i>avec
+un homme comme ça</i>. Besides, there was the sister in Marseilles, and, in
+the hour of her distress, her sister's horses and carriages multiplied
+like the miraculous loaves and fishes, the vintages in the cellar
+doubled in age and strength. And she was going to die; it was queer, but
+one knew those things; and she longed to die <i>là-bas</i>, where there was a
+sun and the sky was blue, where she was at home. We knew she had not a
+penny for the journey. M. Auguste had seen to that. Naturally, J. gave
+her the money. He would not have had a moment's comfort if he had
+not,&mdash;the drain upon your own emotions is part of the penalty you pay
+for having a human being and not a machine to work for you,&mdash;and he
+added a little more to keep her from want on her arrival in Marseilles,
+in case the sister had vanished or the sister's fortunes had dwindled to
+their original proportions. He exacted but one condition:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> M. Auguste
+was not to know there was more than enough for the journey.</p>
+
+<p>Louise's last days with us were passed in tears,&mdash;poor Louise! who until
+now had laughed at fate. It was at this juncture that M. Auguste came
+out strong. I could not have believed he had it in him. He no longer
+spent his time dodging J. and dealing in visionary horses. He took
+Louise's place boldly. He made the beds, cooked all our meals, waited on
+us, dusted, opened the door, while Louise sat, melancholy and forlorn,
+in front of the kitchen fire. On the last day of all&mdash;she was not to
+start until the afternoon Continental train&mdash;she drew me mysteriously
+into the dining-room, she shut the door with every precaution, she
+showed me where she had sewed the extra sovereigns in her stays. M.
+Auguste should never know. "<i>Je pars pour mon long voyage</i>," she
+repeated. "<i>J'ai mes pressentiments.</i>" And she was going to ask them to
+let her wear a black skirt I had given her, and an old coat of J.'s she
+had turned into a bodice, when the time came to lay her in her coffin.
+Thus something of ours<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> would go with her on the long journey. How could
+she forget us? How could we forget her? she might better have asked. I
+made a thousand excuses to leave her; Louise playing "the comedy" had
+never been so tragic as Louise in tears. But she would have me back
+again, and again, and again, to tell me how happy she had been with us.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I was at home," she said, her surprise not yet outworn. "<i>J'étais
+chez moi, et j'étais si tranquille.</i> I went. I came. <i>Monsieur</i> entered.
+He called me. '<i>Louise.</i>'&mdash;'<i>Oui, Monsieur.</i>'&mdash;'<i>Voulez-vous faire ceci
+ou cela?</i>'&mdash;'<i>Mais oui, Monsieur, de suite.</i>' And I would do it and
+<i>Monsieur</i> would say, '<i>Merci, Louise</i>,' and he would go. And me, I
+would run quick to the kitchen or upstairs to finish my work. <i>J'étais
+si tranquille!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The simplicity of the memories she treasured made her story of them
+pitiful as I listened. How little peace had fallen to her lot, that she
+should prize the quiet and homeliness of her duties in our chambers!</p>
+
+<p>At last it was time to go. She kissed me on both cheeks. She gave J. one
+look, then she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> flung herself into his arms and kissed him too on both
+cheeks. She almost strangled William Penn. She sobbed so, she couldn't
+speak. She clutched and kissed us again. She ran out of the door and we
+heard her sobbing down the three flights of stairs into the street. J.
+hurried into his workroom. I went back to my desk. I don't think we
+could have spoken either.</p>
+
+<p>Two days afterwards, a letter from M. Auguste came to our chambers, so
+empty and forlorn without Louise. They were in Paris. They had had a
+dreadful crossing,&mdash;he hardly thought Louise would arrive at Boulogne
+alive. She was better, but must rest a day or two before starting for
+the <i>Midi</i>. She begged us to see that Mussy ate his meals <i>bien
+régulièrement</i>, and that he "made the dead" from time to time, as she
+had taught him; and, would we write? The address was Mr. Auguste,
+Horse-Dealer, Hotel du Cheval Blanc, Rue Chat-qui-pèche-â-la-ligne,
+Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Horse-dealer! Louise might be at death's door, but M. Auguste had his
+position to maintain. Then, after ten long days, came a post-card,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> also
+from Paris: Louise was in Marseilles, he was on the point of going, once
+there he would write. Then&mdash;nothing. Had he gone? Could he go?</p>
+
+<p>If I were writing a romance it would, with dramatic fitness, end here.
+But if I keep to facts, I must add that, in about eight months, Louise
+and M. Auguste reappeared; that both were in the best of health and
+spirits, M. Auguste a mass of jewelry; that all the sunshine of Provence
+seemed let loose in the warmth of their greeting; that horse-dealing for
+the moment prospered too splendidly for Louise to want to return to
+us,&mdash;or was this a new invention, I have always wondered, because she
+found in her place another Frenchwoman who wept at the prospect of being
+dismissed to make room for her?</p>
+
+<p>Well, anyway, for a while, things, according to Louise, continued to
+prosper. She would pay me friendly visits and ask for sewing,&mdash;her
+afternoons were so long,&mdash;and tell me of M. Auguste's success, and of
+Provence, though there were the old reticences. By degrees, a shadow
+fell over the gaiety. I fancied that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> "the comedy" was being played
+faster than ever in the Soho lodgings. And, of a sudden, the fabric of
+prosperity collapsed like a house of cards. She was ill again, and again
+an operation was necessary. There was not a penny in her pockets nor in
+M. Auguste's. What happened? Louise had only to smile, and we were her
+slaves. But this time, for us at least, the end had really come. We
+heard nothing more from either of them. No letters reached us from
+Paris, no post-cards. Did she use the money to go back to Marseilles?
+Did she ever leave London? Did M. Auguste's fate overtake him when they
+crossed the Channel? Were the Soho lodgings the scene of some tremendous
+<i>crime passionel</i>? For weeks I searched the police reports in my morning
+paper. But neither then nor to this day have I had a trace of the woman
+who, for over a year, gave to life in our chambers the comfort and the
+charm of her presence. She vanished.</p>
+
+<p>I am certain, though, that wherever she may be, she is mothering M.
+Auguste, squandering upon him all the wealth of her industry,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> her
+gaiety, her unselfishness. She couldn't help herself, she was made that
+way. And the worst, the real tragedy of it, is that she would rather
+endure every possible wrong with M. Auguste than, without him, enjoy all
+the rights women not made that way would give her if they could. She has
+convinced me of the truth I already more than suspected: it is upon the
+M. Augustes of this world that the Woman Question will eventually be
+wrecked.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a><i>Our Charwomen</i></h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus10" id="illus10"></a>
+<img src="images/illus10.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"UP TO WESTMINSTER"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>OUR CHARWOMAN</h3>
+
+
+<p>I took over the charwoman with our chambers, and a great piece of luck I
+thought it; for charwomen never advertise, and are unheard of in
+Registry Offices. It was certain I could not get into the chambers
+without one, and at that early stage of my housekeeping in London I
+should not have known where in the world to look for her.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Maxfielde was the highly respectable name of the woman who had
+"done" for the previous tenant, and had she heard of Mr. Shandy's theory
+of names she could not have been more successful in adapting her person
+and her manner to her own. She was well over sixty, and thin and gaunt
+as if she had never had enough to eat; but age and hunger had not
+lessened her hold upon the decencies of life. Worthiness oozed from her.
+Victorian was stamped all over her,&mdash;it was in her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> black shawl and
+bonnet, in the meekness of her pose, in the little curtsy she bobbed
+when she spoke. I remember Harold Frederic seeing her once and, with the
+intuition of the novelist, placing her: "Who is your old Queen
+Victoria?" he asked. Her presence lost nothing when she took off her
+shawl and bonnet. In the house and at work she wore a black dress and a
+white apron, surprisingly clean considering the dirt she exposed it to,
+and her grey hair was drawn tight back and rolled into a little hard
+knob, the scant supply and "the parting all too wide" painfully exposed
+to view. I longed for something to cover the old grey head that looked
+so grandmotherly and out of keeping as it bent over scrubbing-brushes
+and dustpans and the kitchen range, but it would have been against all
+the conventions for a charwoman to appear in a servant's cap. There is a
+rigid line in these English matters, and to attempt to step across is to
+face the contempt of those who draw it. The British charwoman must go
+capless, such is the unwritten law; also, she must remain "Miss" or
+"Mrs.," though the Empire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> would totter were the British servant called
+by anything but her name; and while the servant would "forget her place"
+were she to know how to do any work outside her own, the charwoman is
+expected to meet every emergency, and this was in days when housekeeping
+for me was little more than a long succession of emergencies.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Maxfielde was equal to all. She saw me triumphantly through one
+domestic crisis after another. She was the most accomplished of her
+accomplished class, and the most willing. She was never discouraged by
+the magnitude of the tasks I set her, nor did she ever take advantage of
+my dependence upon her. On the contrary, she let me take advantage of
+her willingness. She cleaned up after the British Workman had been in
+possession for a couple of months, and one of the few things the British
+Workman can do successfully is to leave dirt to be cleaned up. She
+helped me move in and settle down. She supported me through my trying
+episode with 'Enrietter. And after 'Enrietter's disappearance she saved
+me from domestic chaos, though the work and the hours involved would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+have daunted a woman half her age and outraged every trade-union in the
+country. She arrived at seven in the morning, and I quickly handed over
+to her the key of the front door, that I might indulge in the extra hour
+of sleep of which she was so much more in need; she stayed until eight
+in the evening, or, at my request, until nine or later; and in between
+she "did" for me in the fullest sense of that expressive word. There
+were times when it meant "doing" also for my friends whom I was
+inconsiderate enough to invite to come and see me in my domestic
+upheaval, putting their friendship to the test still further by inducing
+them to share the luncheons and dinners of Mrs. Maxfielde's cooking.
+Many as were her good points, I cannot in conscience say that cooking
+was among them. Hers might have been the vegetables of which Heine wrote
+that they were brought to the table just as God made them, hers the
+gravies against which he prayed Heaven to keep every Christian. But I
+thought it much to be thankful for that she could cook at all when, to
+judge from the amount she ate, she could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> have had so little practice in
+cooking for herself. She did not need to go through any "fast cure,"
+having done nothing but fast all her life. She had got out of the way of
+eating and into the way of starving; the choicest dish would not have
+tempted her. The one thing she showed the least appetite for was her
+"'arf pint" at noon, and that she would not do without though she had to
+fetch it from the "public" round the corner. I cannot say with greater
+truth that Mrs. Maxfielde's talent lay in waiting, but she never allowed
+anything or anybody to hurry her, and she was noiseless in her
+movements, both excellent things in a waitress. I cannot even say that
+in her own line of scrubbing she was above suspicion, but she handled
+her brushes and brooms and dusters with a calm and dignity which, in my
+troubles, I found very soothing. Her repose may have been less a virtue
+than the result of want of proper food, but in any case it was a great
+help in the midst of the confusion she was called to struggle with.
+There was only one drawback. It had a way of deserting her just when I
+was most in need of it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We are all human, and Mrs. Maxfielde was not without her weakness: she
+was afflicted with nerves. In looking back I can see how in character
+her sensibility was. It belonged to the old shawl and the demure bonnet,
+to the meekness of pose, to the bobbing of curtsies,&mdash;it was Victorian.
+But at the time I was more struck by its inconvenience. A late milkman
+or a faithless butcher would bring her to the verge of collapse. She
+would jump at the over-boiling of the kettle. Her hand went to her heart
+on the slightest provocation, and stayed there with a persistency that
+made me suspect her of seeking her dissipation in disaster. On the
+morning after our fire, though she had been at home in her own bed
+through all the danger of it, she was in such a flutter that I should
+have had to revive her with salts had not a dozen firemen, policemen,
+and salvage men been waiting for her to refresh them with tea. It was
+only when one of the firemen took the kettle from her helpless hand,
+saying he was a family man himself, and when I stood sternly over her
+that, like an elderly Charlotte, she fell to cutting bread and butter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+and regained the calm and dignity becoming to her. But I never saw her
+so agitated as the day she met a rat in the cellar. I had supposed it
+was only in comic papers and old-fashioned novels that a rat or a mouse
+could drive a sensible woman into hysterics. But Mrs. Maxfielde showed
+me my mistake. From that innocent encounter in the cellar she bounded up
+the four flights of stairs, burst into my room, and, breathless, livid,
+both hands on her heart, sank into a chair: a liberty which at any other
+time she would have regarded as a breach of all the proprieties. "Oh,
+mum!" she gasped, "in the cellar!&mdash;a rat!" And she was not herself again
+until the next morning.</p>
+
+<p>After her day's work and her excitement in the course of it, it seemed
+as if Mrs. Maxfielde could have neither time nor energy for a life of
+her own outside our chambers. But she had, and a very full life it was,
+and with the details as she confided them to me, I got to know a great
+deal about "how the poor live," which I should have preferred to learn
+from a novel or a Blue Book. She had a husband,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> much older, who had
+been paralyzed for years. Before she came to me in the morning she had
+to get him up for the day, give him his breakfast, and leave everything
+in order for him, and as she lived half an hour's walk from our chambers
+and never failed to reach them by seven, there was no need to ask how
+early she had to get herself up. For a few pence a friendly neighbour
+looked in and attended to him during the day. After Mrs. Maxfielde left
+me, at eight or nine or ten in the evening, and after her half hour's
+walk back, she had to prepare his supper and put him to bed; and again I
+did not have to ask how late she put her own weary self there too. Old
+age was once said to begin at forty-six; we are more strenuous now; but
+according to the kindest computations, it had well overtaken her. And
+yet she was working harder than she probably ever had in her youth, with
+less rest and with the pleasing certainty that she would go on working
+day in and day out and never succeed in securing the mere necessities of
+life. She might have all the virtues, sobriety, industry, economy,&mdash;and
+she had,&mdash;and the best she could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> hope was just to keep soul and body
+together for her husband and herself, and a little corner they could
+call their own. She did not tell me how the husband earned a living
+before paralysis kept him from earning anything at all, but he too must
+have been worthy of his name, for now he was helpless, the parish
+allowed him "outdoor relief" to the extent of three shillings and
+sixpence, or about eighty cents a week; it was before old-age pensions
+had been invented by a vote-touting Government. This munificent sum,
+paid for a room somewhere in a "Building," one of those gloomy barracks
+with the outside iron stairway in common, where clothes are forever
+drying in the thick, soot-laden London air, and children are forever
+howling and shrieking. For everything else Mrs. Maxfielde had to
+provide. If she worked every day except Sunday, her earnings amounted to
+fifteen shillings, or a little less than four dollars, a week. But there
+were weeks when she could obtain only one day's work, weeks when she
+could obtain none, and she and her husband had still to live, had still
+to eat something, well as they had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> trained themselves, as so many must,
+in the habit of not eating enough. Here was an economic problem
+calculated to bewilder more youthful and brilliant brains than hers. But
+she never complained, she never grumbled, she never got discouraged. She
+might fly before a rat, but in the face of the hopeless horrors of life
+she retained her beautiful placidity, though I, when I realized the full
+weight of the burden she had to bear, began to wonder less how, than
+why, the poor live.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Maxfielde came in the early spring. By the time winter, with its
+fogs, set in, age had so far overtaken her that she could not manage to
+attend to her husband and his wants and then drag her old body to our
+chambers by seven o'clock in the morning. It was she who gave notice; I
+never should have had the courage. We parted friends, and she was so
+amiable as not to deprive me of her problems with her services. When she
+could not work for me, she visited me, making it her rule to call on
+Monday afternoon; a rule she observed with such regularity that I
+fancied Monday must be her day for collecting the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> husband's income from
+the parish and her own from private sources. She rarely allowed a week
+to pass without presenting herself, always appearing in the same
+Victorian costume and carrying off the interview with the same Victorian
+manner. She never stooped to beg, but her hand was ready for the coin
+which I slipped into it with the embarrassment of the giver, but which
+she received with enviable calmness and a little curtsy. The hour of her
+visit was so timed that, when her talk with me was over, she could
+adjourn to the kitchen for dinner and, under Augustine's rule, a glass
+of wine, which, though beer would have been more to her taste, she drank
+as a concession to the poor foreigner who did not know any better.</p>
+
+<p>Before a second winter had passed, Mrs. Maxfielde was forced to admit
+that she was too old for anybody to want her, or to accept a post if
+anybody did. But, all the same, the paralytic clung to his shadow of
+life with the obstinate tenacity of the human derelict, and she clung to
+her idea of home, and they starved on in the room the parish paid for
+until it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> a positive relief to me when, after more years of
+starvation than I cared to count, she came to announce his death. It was
+no relief to her. She was full of grief, and permitted nothing to
+distract her from the luxury she made of it. The coin which passed from
+my hand to hers on the occasion of this visit, doubled in token of
+condolence, was invested in an elaborate crape bonnet, and she left it
+to me to worry about her future. I might have afforded to accept her
+trust with a greater show of enthusiasm, for, at once and with
+unlooked-for intelligence, the parish decided to allow her the same
+weekly sum her husband had received, and Mrs. Maxfielde, endowed with
+this large and princely income, became a parent so worthy of filial
+devotion that a daughter I had never heard of materialized, and
+expressed a desire to share her home with her mother.</p>
+
+<p>The daughter was married, her husband was an unskilled labourer, and
+they had a large and increasing family. It is likely that Mrs. Maxfielde
+paid in more than money for the shelter, and that her own
+flesh-and-blood was less chary than strangers would have been in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+employing her services, and less mindful of the now more than seventy
+years she had toiled to live. Perhaps her visits at this period were a
+little more frequent, perhaps her dinners were eaten and her wine drunk
+with a little more eagerness. But she refrained from any pose, she
+indulged in no heroics, she entertained me with no whinings, no railings
+against the ingratitude sharper than a serpent's tooth. However she got
+her ease, it was not in weeping, and what she had to bear from her
+daughter she bore in silence. Her Victorian sense of propriety would
+have been offended by a display of feeling. She became so pitiful a
+figure that I shrank from her visits. But she was content, she found no
+fault with life, and wealth being a matter of comparison, I am sure she
+was, in her turn, moved to pity for the more unfortunate who had not
+kept themselves out of the workhouse. Had she had her way, she would
+have been willing to slave indefinitely for her daughter and her
+daughter's children. But Death was wiser and brought her the rest she
+deserved so well and so little craved.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A couple of years or so after the loss of her husband, and after she had
+failed to appear, much to my surprise, on three or four Mondays in
+succession, a letter came from her daughter to tell me that never again
+would Monday bring Mrs. Maxfielde to my chambers. There had been no
+special illness. She had just worn out, that was all. Her time had come
+after long and cruel days of toil and her passing was unnoted, for hers
+was a place easily filled,&mdash;that was the grisly thing about it. J. and I
+sent a wreath of flowers for the funeral, knowing that she would have
+welcomed it as propriety's crown of propriety, and it was my last
+communication with the Maxfielde family. I had never met the daughter,
+and I was the more reluctant to go abroad in search of objects of
+charity because they had such an inconsiderate way of seeking me out in
+my own kitchen. I was already "suited" with another old woman in Mrs.
+Maxfielde's place. I was already visited by one or two others. In fact,
+I was so surrounded by old women that Augustine, when she first came to
+the rescue, used to laugh with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> insolence of youth at <i>les vieilles
+femmes de Madame</i>.</p>
+
+<p>My new old woman was Mrs. Burden. Had I hunted all London over, I could
+not have found a more complete contrast to Mrs. Maxfielde. She was
+Irish, with no respect for Victorian proprieties, but as disreputable
+looking an old charwoman as you would care to see; large and floppy in
+figure, elephantine in movement, her face rough and dug deep by the
+trenches of more than fifty winters, her hair frowzy, her dress ragged,
+with the bodice always open at the neck and the sleeves always rolled up
+above the elbows, her apron an old calico rag, and her person and her
+clothes profusely sprinkled with snuff. In the street she wrapped
+herself in a horrible grey blanket-shawl, and on top of her disorderly
+old head set a little battered bonnet with two wisps of strings dangling
+about. When I knew her better I discovered that she owned a black shawl
+with fringe, and a bonnet that could tie under the chin, and in these
+made a very fine appearance. But they were reserved for such ceremonial
+occasions as Mass on Sunday<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> or the funeral of a friend, and at other
+times she kept to the costume that so shamefully maligned her. For, if
+she looked like one of the terrible harpies who hang about the public
+house in every London slum, she was really the most sober creature in
+the world and never touched a drop, Mr. Burden, who drank himself into
+an early grave, having drunk enough for two.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot remember now where Mrs. Burden came from, or why, when I had
+seen her once, I ever consented to see her again. But she quickly grew
+into a fixture in our chambers, and it was some eight or nine years
+before I was rid of her. In the beginning she was engaged for three
+mornings, later on for every morning, in the week. Her hours were from
+seven to twelve, during which time my chief object was to keep her
+safely shut up in the kitchen, for no degree of pretending on my part
+could make me believe in her as an ornament or a credit to our house. It
+mortified me to have her show her snuffy old face at the front door, and
+I should never have dared to send her on the many messages she ran for
+me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> had she not been known to everybody in the Quarter; but once Mrs.
+Burden was known it was all right, for she was as good as she was sober.
+Hers, however, was the goodness of the man in the Italian proverb who
+was so good that he was good for nothing. She was willing to do
+anything, but there was nothing she could do well, and most things she
+could not do at all. She made no pretence to cook, and if she had I
+could not have eaten anything of her cooking, for I knew snuff must
+flavour everything she touched. To have seen her big person and frowzy
+head in the dining-room would have been fatal to appetite had I ever had
+the folly, under any circumstances, to ask her to wait. Nor did she
+excel in scrubbing and dusting. She was successful chiefly in leaving
+things dirtier than she found them, and Augustine, whose ideal is high
+in these matters, insisted that Mrs. Burden spent the morning making the
+dirt she had to spend the afternoon cleaning up. There were times when
+they almost came to blows, for the temper of both was hot, and more than
+once I heard Mrs. Burden threaten to call in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> police. But the old
+woman had her uses. She was honesty itself, and could be trusted with no
+matter what,&mdash;from the key of our chambers, when they were left empty,
+to the care of William Penn, when no other companion could be secured
+for him; she could be relied upon to pay bills, post letters, fetch
+parcels; and she was as punctual as Big Ben at Westminster. I do not
+think she missed a day in all the years she was with me. I became
+accustomed, too, to seeing her about, and there was the dread&mdash;or
+conviction would be nearer the truth&mdash;that if I let her go nobody else
+in their senses would take her in.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Burden did not improve with time. She never condescended to borrow
+qualities that did not belong to her. She grew more unwieldy and larger
+and floppier, a misfortune she attributed to some mysterious malady
+which she never named, but gloated over with the pride the poor have in
+their diseases. And she grew dirtier and more disorderly, continuing to
+scorn my objection to her opening the front door with the shoe she was
+blacking still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> on her hand, or to her bringing me a letter wrapped in
+an apron grimier than her grimy fingers. Nothing would induce her not to
+call me "Missis," which displeased me more, if for other reasons, than
+the "Master" she as invariably bestowed upon J. She bobbed no curtsies.
+When, on Saturdays, coins passed from my hand to hers, she spat on them
+before she put them in her pocket, to what purpose I have not to this
+day divined. Her best friend could not have accused her of any charm of
+manner, but, being Irish, she escaped the vulgarity bred in the London
+slums. In fact, I often fancied I caught gleams of what has been called
+the Celtic Temperament shining through her. She had the warmth of
+devotion, the exaggeration of loyalty, the power of idealizing, peculiar
+to her race. She was almost lyrical in her praise of J., who stood
+highest in her esteem, and "Master good! Master good!" was her constant
+refrain when she conversed with Augustine in the language fitted for
+children and rich in gesture, which was her well-meant substitute for
+French. She saw him glorified, as the poets<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> of her country see their
+heroes, and in her eyes he loomed a splendid Rothschild. "Master, plenty
+money, plenty money!" she would assure Augustine, and, holding up her
+apron by the two corners, and well out from her so as to represent a
+capacious bag, add, "apron full, full, full!"</p>
+
+<p>She had also the Celtic lavishness of hospitality. I remember Whistler's
+delight one morning when, after an absence from London, he received at
+our front door a welcome from Mrs. Burden, whom he had never seen before
+and now saw at her grimiest: "Shure, Mr. Whistler, sir, an it's quite a
+stranger ye are. It's glad I am to see ye back, sir, and looking so
+well!" Her hospitality was extended to her own friends when she had the
+chance. She who drank nothing could not allow Mr. Pooley, the sweep, who
+was her neighbour and cleaned our chimneys, to leave our chambers after
+his professional services without a drop of whiskey to hearten him on
+his sooty way. And, though you would still less have suspected it,
+romance had kept its bloom fresh in her heart. The summer the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> Duke of
+York was married I could not understand her interest in the wedding, as
+until then she had not specially concerned herself with the affairs of
+royalty. But on the wedding-day this interest reached a point when she
+had to share it with somebody. "Shure, Missis, and I knows how it is
+meself. Wasn't I after marrying Burden's brother and he older than
+Burden, and didn't he go and die, God bless him! and leave me to Burden.
+And shure thin it's me that knows how the poor Princess May, Lord love
+her! is feeling this blessed day!"</p>
+
+<p>Not only the memory, but her pride in it, had survived the years which
+never brought romance to her again. The one decent thing Burden did was
+to die and rid the world of him before Mrs. Burden had presented him and
+society with more than one child, a boy. He was a good son, she said,
+which meant that he spent his boyhood picking up odd jobs and, with
+them, odd pence to help his mother along, so that at the age when he
+should have been able to do something, he knew how to do nothing, and
+had not even the physical strength to fit him for the more profitable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+kinds of unskilled labour. He thought himself lucky when, in his
+twentieth year, he fell into a place as "washer-up" in a cheap
+restaurant which paid eighteen shillings a week; and he was so dazzled
+by his wealth that he promptly married. His wife's story is short: she
+drank. Mercifully, like Burden, she did the one thing she could do with
+all her might and drank herself to death with commendable swiftness,
+leaving no children to carry on the family tradition. Mrs. Burden was
+once more alone with her son. Between them they earned twenty-eight
+shillings a week and felt themselves millionaires. Augustine, for some
+reason, went at this period once or twice to her room, over the dingy
+shop of a cheap undertaker, and reported it fairly clean and provided
+with so much comfort as is represented by blankets on the bed and a
+kettle on the hob. But after a bit the son died, the cause, as far as I
+could make out, a drunken father and years of semi-starvation; and Mrs.
+Burden had to face, as cheerfully as she could, an old age to be lived
+out in loneliness and in the vain endeavour to make both ends meet on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+eight shillings a week, or less if she lost her job with me.</p>
+
+<p>She did lose it, poor soul. But what could I do? She really got to be
+intolerably dirty. Not that I blamed her. I probably should have been
+much dirtier under the same circumstances. But a time came when it
+seemed as if we must give up either Mrs. Burden or our chambers, and to
+give our chambers up when we had not the least desire to, would have
+been a desperate remedy. She had one other piece of regular work; when I
+spoke to her about going, she assured me that her neighbours had been
+waiting for years to get her to do their washing, and she would be glad
+to oblige them; and, on my pressing invitation, she promised to run in
+and see me often. At this new stage in our relations she showed a rare
+delicacy of feeling. Mrs. Maxfielde, no longer in my service, was eager
+to pay me visits, and her hand, if not held out to beg, was open to
+receive. Mrs. Burden did not keep her promise to come, she gave me no
+opportunity to know whether her hand was open in need or shut on plenty.
+She was of the kind that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> would rather starve than publish their
+destitution. I might have preserved an easy conscience in her regard but
+for Mr. Pooley, the sweep. The first time he returned in his
+professional capacity after her departure and found himself deprived of
+the usual refreshment, he was indignant, and, in consequence, he was
+very gruff and short with me when I inquired after Mrs. Burden. She
+hadn't any work, not she, and he supposed, he did, that she might starve
+for all some people cared.</p>
+
+<p>I could scarcely ignore so broad a hint, and I had her round that same
+morning, for her slum was close by. I learned from her that Mr. Pooley,
+if gruff, was truthful. She had no work, had not had any for weeks. She
+was in arrears to her landlord, her shawl with the fringe and her
+blankets were in pawn, she hadn't a farthing in her pocket. J., to whom
+I refer all such matters, and who was in her debt for the splendour of
+wealth with which she had endowed him, said "it was all nonsense,"&mdash;by
+"it" I suppose he meant this sorry scheme of things,&mdash;and he would not
+let her go without the money to pay her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> landlord, not only for arrears,
+but in advance, and also to redeem her possessions. I do not think she
+was the less grateful if, instead of bobbing humbly, she spat upon the
+coins before her first "Shure and may God bless ye, Master." Nor was J.
+comfortable until provisions had followed her in such quantities that he
+would not have to be bothered by the thought of her starving to death,
+at any rate for some days. Even after that, she scrupulously kept away.
+Not Christmas, that in London brings everybody with or without excuse
+begging at one's door, could induce her to present herself. It was we
+who had to send for her, and, in a land where begging comes so easily,
+we respected her for her independence.</p>
+
+<p>I doubt if she ever got more work to do. She never received outdoor
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>After Mrs. Burden, I went to the <i>Quartier</i>&mdash;the French Quarter in
+Soho&mdash;for a charwoman. Had I been tempted, as I never was, to believe in
+the <i>entente cordiale</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> 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 <i>Quartier</i> 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 <i>boudin</i> to the
+<i>Petit Journal</i> and the latest thing in <i>apéritifs</i>. 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
+<i>apéritifs</i> bear the best mark, the quality of the people imported into
+the <i>Quartier</i> 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 <i>Madame</i> who presides <i>chez le patissier</i>, and <i>Monsieur le Gros</i>,
+as he is familiarly known, who provides me with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> groceries, and M.
+Edmond from whom I buy my vegetables and salads at the <i>Quatre Saisons</i>.
+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 <i>Quartier</i> is to France.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> too brilliant
+young man with an income of a pound a week, and I was again without a
+charwoman.</p>
+
+<p>Marie helped me to forget caution, and I put down the stories heard in
+the <i>Quartier</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>femme de ménage</i>
+in the <i>Quartier</i> that I did not sample, nor one who was not the heroine
+of a tragedy or romance, too often<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> 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
+<i>chef</i>. 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 <i>Crédit
+Lyonnais</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> to <i>le grand
+maître, M. Detaille</i>. 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 Clémentine, 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a><i>Clémentine</i></h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus11" id="illus11"></a>
+<img src="images/illus11.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"WHEN THERE IS A SUN ON A WINTER MORNING"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+<h2>V</h2>
+
+<h3>CLÉMENTINE</h3>
+
+
+<p>She drifted in from the <i>Quartier</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>bon jour</i> 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 Clémentine,
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> another matter to come face to face with a hungry
+individual under my own roof.</p>
+
+<p>Augustine, who was then, as she is now, the prop and mainstay of our
+life, reassured me; Clémentine, 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 <i>un petit goûter</i> 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 Clémentine was "all stomach and no soul," her appetite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> was a great
+deal on my mind, and made me far more preoccupied with her than was
+wise.</p>
+
+<p>My inquiries into the state of Clémentine'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 Clémentine'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,&mdash;that was a question of
+personal taste,&mdash;but she could not show herself abroad unless it was
+brought down over her forehead in the low<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> 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&mdash;or rather was&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>ces sales
+Anglais</i> and ran her errands <i>en cheveux</i> as if she were still in
+France, would scold and thunder and represent to Clémentine 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
+Clémentine would listen giggling, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> 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 Clémentine for her weakness.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> 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
+Clémentine 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 <i>chez les femmes</i>; that she wanted to
+give up working for them; that, after leaving her last place, she could
+get nothing to do in any <i>maison bourgeoise</i>; that she had no money and
+was very hungry,&mdash;what Clémentine's hunger meant she did not have to
+tell me; that her little Ernest was also hungry, and also <i>la vieille
+grandmère</i>; that her little Ernest was her son,&mdash;"<i>Oui, Madame, je
+serais franche, j'ai un fils mais pas un mari</i>"; that <i>la vieille
+grandmère</i> was an old woman she had taken in, partly to look after him,
+partly out of sheer shiftlessness; that they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> could not starve; and
+that&mdash;well&mdash;all her aprons were <i>au clou</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This sudden introduction of her little Ernest was a trifle
+disconcerting, but it was none of my business how many people depended
+on Clémentine, 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, "<i>Oui, Madame, Madame a raison</i>"; and for the next week or two I
+did my best to shut my eyes to the fact that she still went apronless.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+there was no sign of Clémentine; 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. Clémentine'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; <i>la vieille grandmère</i> 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,&mdash;they, too,
+were <i>au clou</i>. The thrift I had advised scarcely met so acute a case of
+poverty. I was not at all anxious to burden myself with Clémentine'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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+"<i>Tiens!</i> this is my old blue apron"; or, "<i>Mon Dieu!</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> more, and I hoped that
+this was the last of my sharing her burdens.</p>
+
+<p>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. Clémentine 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> 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 <i>la vieille grandmère</i> 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 <i>Quartier</i>, from shop to shop, she with her
+giggling "<i>Bon jour, M. Edmond</i>" or "<i>Comment ça va, Madame
+Pierre</i>"&mdash;for though we live in London we are not of it, but of
+France,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>As time went on, and Clémentine 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> with him, but his old shrewd face
+haunted me until I remonstrated with Clémentine, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> charge would just be covered by the father's
+allowance, and as Clémentine could find no argument against it, she had
+to give in.</p>
+
+<p>I breathed freely again, but I was not to be let off so easily. It was
+simpler to get mixed up in Clémentine'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 Clémentine 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.
+Clémentine, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> bribes and scenes, at last she got her little Ernest off her hands.</p>
+
+<p>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 Clémentine'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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> 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, "<i>Eh
+bien?</i> 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&mdash;<i>j'ai
+tout vu, moi!</i> Why not that too?"</p>
+
+<p>With her, there was no shrinking from the workhouse, as with the
+respectable poor, "<i>Ce n'est pas fait pour les chiens</i>," she reasoned,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+and looked upon it as an asylum held in reserve.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>les enfants
+trouvés</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"How can I be sure," she said to me, "that, though my mother was a cook,
+my father might not have been a <i>préfet</i>, or even a prince?"</p>
+
+<p>For practical purposes she knew no parents save the peasants who brought
+her up. The State in France, thrifty as the people, makes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> the children
+abandoned to it a source of profit to the hard-working poor. Clémentine
+was put out to nurse. The one spark of genuine affection she ever showed
+was for the woman to whose care she fell, and of whom she always spoke
+as <i>ma mère</i>, with a tenderness very different from her giggling
+adoration of the little Ernest. Incessant labour was the rule in <i>ma
+mère's</i> house, and food was not too abundant, but of what there was
+Clémentine had her share, though I fancy the scarcity then was the
+origin of the terrible hunger that consumed her throughout her life.
+About this hunger her story revolved, so that, while she talked of the
+past, I could seldom get far away from it. She recalled little else of
+the places the Institution found for her as servant. The State in France
+is as wise as it is thrifty, and does not demoralize its foundlings by
+free gifts, but, when the time comes, makes them work, appropriating
+their wages until it has been paid back the money they have cost it.</p>
+
+<p>Clémentine went into service young. She also went into it hungry, and
+life became a never-ending struggle for food. In one place<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> she was
+reduced to such straits that she devoured a dish of poisoned meat
+prepared for the stray cats of the neighbourhood, and, though it brought
+her almost to death's door, she could still recall it as a feast. In
+another, a small country grocery store, she would steal down in the
+night, trembling with fear, to hunt for bits of candy and crackers, and,
+safe in bed again, would have to fight for them with the rats that
+shared her garret. And her tale of this period grew more miserable and
+squalid with every new stage, until she reached the dreadful climax
+when, still a child herself, she brought a little girl into the world to
+share her hunger. She had the courage to laugh when she told me of her
+wandering, half-starved, back to <i>la bonne mère</i>, who took her in when
+her time came, and kept the baby. She could laugh, too, when she
+recalled the wrath of <i>M. le Directeur</i> at the Institution, who sent for
+her, and scolded her, giving her a few sharp raps with his cane.</p>
+
+<p>If to Clémentine her tragedy was a laughing matter, it was not for me to
+weep over it. But I was glad when she got through with this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> period and
+came to the next, which had in it more of pure comedy than enlivened
+most of her confidences. For once she was of age, and her debt to the
+Institution settled in full, she was free not only to work for herself,
+but to claim a percentage of the money she had been making during the
+long years of apprenticeship; and this percentage amounting to five
+hundred francs, and Clémentine never having seen so much money before,
+her imagination was stirred by the vastness of her wealth, and she
+insisted on being paid in five-franc pieces. She had to get a basket to
+hold them all, and with it on her arm she started off in search of
+adventure. This, I think, was the supreme moment in her life.</p>
+
+<p>Her adventures began in the third-class carriage of a train for
+Boulogne, which might seem a mild beginning to most people, but was full
+of excitement for Clémentine. She dipped her hands into the silver, and
+jingled it, and displayed it to everybody, with the vanity of a child
+showing off its new frock. The only wonder was that any of the
+five-franc pieces were still in the basket when she got to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> Boulogne.
+There they drew to her a group of young men and women who were bound for
+England to make their fortunes, and who persuaded her to join them. Her
+head was not completely turned by her wealth, for she crossed with them
+on the <i>bâteau aux lapins</i>, which she explained as the cheapest boat
+upon which anything but beasts and vegetables could find passage. At
+Folkestone, where they landed, she had no difficulty in getting a place
+as scullery maid. But washing up was as dull in England as in France, a
+poor resource for anybody with a basketful of five-franc pieces. One of
+the young men who had crossed with her agreed that it was a waste of
+time to work when there was money to spend, and they decided for a life
+of leisure together. The question of marriage apparently did not enter
+into the arrangement. They were content to remain <i>des unis</i>, in M.
+Rod's phrase, and their union was celebrated by a few weeks of riotous
+living. The chicken their own Henry IV wished for all his subjects
+filled the daily pot, beer flowed like water, they could have paid for
+cake had bread failed; for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> the first time in her life Clémentine forgot
+what it was to be hungry.</p>
+
+<p>It was delightful while it lasted, and I do not believe that she ever
+regretted having had her fling when the chance came. But the basket grew
+lighter and lighter, and all too soon barely enough five-franc pieces
+were left in it to carry them up to London. There, naturally, they found
+their way to the <i>Quartier</i>. The man picked up an odd job or two,
+Clémentine scrubbed, washed, waited, did any and everything by which a
+few pence could be earned. The pot was now empty, beer ceased to flow,
+bread sometimes was beyond their means, and she was hungrier than ever.
+In the course of the year her little Ernest was added to the family, and
+there was no <i>bonne mère</i> in London to relieve her of the new burden.
+For a while Clémentine could not work; when she could, there was no work
+to be had. Nor could the man get any more jobs, though I fancy his hunt
+for them was not too strenuous. Life became a stern, bread-hunting sort
+of business, and I think at moments Clémentine almost wished herself
+back in the garret with the rats, or in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> the garden where dishes of
+poisoned meat were sometimes to be stolen. The landlord threatened,
+starvation stared them in the face. Hunger is ever the incentive to
+enterprise, and Ernest's father turned Clémentine on the streets.</p>
+
+<p>I must do her the justice to say that, of all her adventures, this was
+the one least to her liking. That she had fallen so low did not shock
+her; she looked upon it as part of the inevitable scheme of things: but
+left to herself, she would have preferred another mode of earning her
+living. After I had been told of this period of horrors, I could never
+hear Clémentine's high, shrill treble and giggle without a shudder, for
+they were then part of her stock-in-trade, and she went on the streets
+in short skirts with her hair down her back. For months she wallowed in
+the gutter, at the mercy of the lowest and the most degraded, insulted,
+robbed, despised, and if she attempted to rebel, bullied back to her
+shameful trade by a man who had no thought save for the few pitiful
+pence she could bring to him out of it. The only part of the affair that
+pleased her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> was the ending&mdash;in prison after a disgraceful street brawl.
+She was really at heart an adventuress, and the opportunity to see for
+the first time the inside of the <i>panier à salade</i>, as she called the
+prison van, was welcomed by her in the light of a new and exciting
+adventure. Then, in prison itself, the dress with the arrows could be
+adjusted becomingly, warders and fellow prisoners could be made to laugh
+by her antics, and if she could have wished for more to eat, it was a
+great thing not to have to find the means to pay for what she got.</p>
+
+<p>She was hardly out of prison when Ernest's father chanced upon a woman
+who could provide for him more liberally, and Clémentine was again a
+free agent. The streets knew her no more, though for an interval the
+workhouse did. This was the crisis when, with the shrewdness acquired in
+the London slums, she learned something of the English law to her own
+advantage, and through the courts compelled the father to contribute to
+the support of his son. The weekly three shillings and sixpence paid for
+a room. For food she had to work. With prison behind her, she was afraid
+to ask for a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> place in respectable houses, and I should not care to
+record the sinks of iniquity and squalid dens where her shrill treble
+and little girl's giggle were heard. Ernest was dumped down of a morning
+upon any friendly neighbour who would keep an eye on him, until, somehow
+or other, <i>la vieille grandmère</i> appeared upon the scene and Clémentine
+once more had two to feed and the daily problem of her own hunger to
+face.</p>
+
+<p>Her responsibilities never drove her to work harder than was absolutely
+necessary. "We must all toil or steal," Carlyle says. But Clémentine
+knew better. She could have suggested a third alternative, for she had
+reduced begging to a fine art. Her scent was as keen for charitable
+associations as a pig's for truffles, and she could tell to a minute the
+appointed time of their alms-giving, and to a penny the value of their
+alms. She would, no matter when, drop regular work at the risk of losing
+it, to rush off after a possible charity. There was a <i>Société</i>&mdash;I never
+knew it by any other name&mdash;that, while she was with me, drew her from my
+kitchen floor or my luncheon dishes as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> surely as Thursday came round,
+and the clock struck one. Why it existed she never made quite clear to
+me,&mdash;I doubt if she had an idea why, herself. It was enough for her that
+the poor French in London were under its special charge, and that, when
+luck was with her, she might come away with a loaf of bread, or an order
+for coals, or, if she played the beggar well, as much as a shilling.</p>
+
+<p>She kept up a brisk correspondence with "<i>Madame la Baronne de
+Rothschild</i>," whose sole mission in life she apparently believed was to
+see her out of her difficulties. <i>La Baronne</i>, on one occasion, gave her
+a sovereign, Heaven knows why, unless as a desperate measure to close
+the correspondence; but a good part of it went in postage for letters
+representing why the bestowal of sovereigns upon Clémentine should
+become habitual. Stray agents, presumably from <i>la Baronne</i>, would pay
+me mysterious visits, to ask if Clémentine were a deserving object of
+benevolence, and I was exposed to repeated cross-examination in her
+regard. She made a point of learning the hours when the <i>chefs</i> left the
+kitchens of the big hotels and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> restaurants near the <i>Quartier</i>, and
+also of finding out who among them might be looked to for a few odd
+pence for the sake of Ernest's father, at one time a washer of dishes,
+or who, after a <i>coup de vin</i> or an <i>absinthe</i>, grew generous with their
+money. She had gauged the depth of every tender heart in the <i>Quartier</i>
+and the possibility of scraps and broken meats at every shop and
+eating-place. And no one understood better how to beg, how to turn on
+the limelight and bring out in melodramatic relief the enormity of her
+need and destitution. The lisping treble, the giggle, the tattered
+clothes, <i>la vieille grandmère</i>, the desertion of the little Ernest's
+father, the little Ernest himself, were so many valuable assets. Indeed,
+she appreciated the value of the little Ernest so well that once she
+would have had me multiply him by twelve when she asked me to vouch for
+her poverty before some new society disposed to be friendly. If luck
+went against her, and nothing came of her begging, she was not
+discouraged. Begging was a game of chance with her,&mdash;her Monte Carlo or
+Little Horses,&mdash;and she never murmured over her failures, but with her
+faculty for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> making the best of all things, she got amusement out of
+them as well as out of her successes.</p>
+
+<p>In the face of these facts, I cannot deny that Clémentine's "character"
+was not exactly the sort most people expect when they engage a servant.
+But I would not turn adrift a mangy dog or a lost cat whom I had once
+taken in. And she did her work very well, with a thoroughness the
+English charwoman would have despised, never minding what that work was,
+so long as she had plenty to eat and could prepare by an elaborate
+toilet for every errand she ran. Her morals could do us small harm, and
+for a while I was foolish enough to hope ours might do her some good. I
+realize now that nothing could have improved Clémentine; she was not
+made that way; but at the time she was too wholly unlike any woman I had
+ever come in contact with, for me to see that the difference lay in her
+having no morals to help. She was not immoral, but unmoral. Right and
+wrong were without meaning for her. Her standards, if she could be said
+to have any, were comfort and discomfort. Virtue and vice were the same
+to her, so long as she was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> unpleasantly interfered with. This was
+the explanation of her past, as of her frankness in disclosing it, and
+she was too much occupied in avoiding present pain to bother about the
+future by cultivating economy, or ambition, or prudence. An animal would
+take more thought for the morrow than Clémentine. Of all the people I
+have ever come across, she had the most reason to be weary-laden, but
+instead of "tears in her eyes," there was always a giggle on her lips.
+"<i>La colère, c'est la folie</i>," she assured me, and it was a folly she
+avoided with marked success. Perhaps she was wise, undoubtedly she was
+the happier for it.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately for me, I had not her callousness or philosophy,&mdash;I am not
+yet quite sure which it was,&mdash;and if she would not think for herself, I
+was the more disturbed by the necessity of thinking for her. It was an
+absurd position. There I was, positively growing grey in my endeavours
+to drag her up out of the abyss of poverty into which she had sunk, and
+there she was, cheerful and happy, if she could only continue to enjoy
+<i>la bonne cuisine de Madame</i>. I never knew her to make the slightest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+attempt to profit by what I, or anyone else, would do for her. I
+remember, when <i>Madame la Baronne</i> sent her the sovereign, she stayed at
+home a week, and then wrote to me as her excuse, "<i>J'ai été rentière
+toute la semaine. Maintenant je n'ai plus un penny, il faut m'occuper du
+travail.</i>" I had not taken her things out of pawn before they were
+pawned again, and the cast-off clothes she begged from me followed as
+promptly. Her little Ernest, after all my trouble, stayed at the convent
+six weeks,&mdash;the month I paid for and two weeks that Clémentine somehow
+wheedled out of the sisters,&mdash;and then he was back as of old, picking up
+his education in the London streets. I presented her once with a good
+bed I had no more use for, and, to make space for it, she went into debt
+and moved from her one room near Tottenham Court Road to two rooms and a
+higher rent near the Lower Marsh, and was robbed on the way by the man
+she hired to move her. When she broke anything, and she frequently did,
+she was never perturbed: "<i>Madame est forte pour payer</i>," or "<i>l'argent
+est fait pour rouler</i>," was her usual answer to my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> reproaches. To try
+to show her the road to economy was to plunge her into fresh
+extravagance.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did I advance matters by talking to her seriously. I recall one
+special effort to impress upon her the great misery she was preparing
+for herself by her shiftlessness. I had given her a pair of shoes,
+though I had vowed a hundred times to give her nothing more, and I used
+the occasion for a lecture. She seemed eager to interrupt once or twice,
+and I flattered myself my words were having their effect. And now what
+had she to say? I asked when my eloquence was exhausted. She giggled:
+"Would <i>Madame</i> look at her feet in <i>Madame's</i> shoes? <i>Jamais je ne me
+suis vue si bien chaussée</i>," and she was going straight to the
+<i>Quartier</i> "<i>pour éblouir le monde</i>," she said. When Augustine took her
+in hand, though Augustine's eloquence had a vigour mine could not boast
+of, the result was, if anything, more discouraging. Clémentine, made
+bold by custom, would turn a hand-spring or dance a jig, or go through
+the other accomplishments she had picked up in the slums.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If I could discover any weak spot by which I could reach her, I used to
+think something might be gained, and I lost much time in studying how to
+work upon her emotions. But her emotions were as far to seek as her
+morals. Even family ties, usually so strong in France, had no hold upon
+her. If she adored her little Ernest, it was because he brought her in
+three shillings and sixpence a week. There was no adoration for her
+little girl who occasionally wrote from the Pas-de-Calais and asked her
+for money. I saw one of the child's letters in which she implored
+Clémentine to pay for a white veil and white shoes; she was going to
+make her first communion, and the good adopted mother could pay for no
+more than the gown. The First Communion is the greatest event in the
+French child's life; there could be no deeper disgrace than not to be
+dressed for it, and the appeal must have moved every mother who read it,
+except Clémentine. To her it was comic, and she disposed of it with
+giggles: "<i>C'est drôle quand même, d'avoir une fille de cet âge</i>," and
+funnier that she could be expected to pay for anything for anybody.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But if her family awoke in her no sentiment, her "home" did, though it
+was of the kind that Lamb would have classed with the "no homes." The
+tenacity with which she clung to it was her nearest approach to strong
+feeling. I suppose it was because she had so long climbed the stairs of
+others that she took such complete satisfaction in the two shabby little
+rooms to which she gave the name. I had a glimpse of them, never to be
+forgotten, once when she failed to come for two days, and I went to look
+her up. The street reeked with the smell of fried fish and onions; it
+was filled with barrows of kippers and haddocks and whelks; it was lined
+with old-clothes shops; it was crowded with frowzy women and horribly
+dirty children. And the halls and stairs of the tenement where she lived
+were black with London smoke and greasy with London dirt. I did not feel
+clean afterwards until I had had a bath, and it was never again as easy
+to reconcile myself to Clémentine's daily reappearance in our midst. But
+to her the rooms were home, and for that reason she would have stayed on
+in a grimier and more malodorous neighbourhood, if such a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> thing could
+be, in preference to living in the cleanest and freshest London
+workhouse at the rate-payers' expense. Her objection to going into
+service except as a charwoman was that she would have to stay the night.
+"<i>Je ne serais pas chez moi</i>"; and much as she prized her comfort, it
+was not worth the sacrifice. On the contrary, she was prepared to
+sacrifice her comfort, dear as it was to her, that she might retain her
+home. She actually went to the length of taking in as companion an
+Italian workman she met by accident, not because he offered to marry
+her, which he did not, but because, according to his representations, he
+was making twenty-five shillings a week and would help to pay the rent.
+"<i>Je serais chez moi</i>," was now her argument, and for food she could
+continue to work or beg. He would be a convenience, <i>voilà tout</i>. The
+Italian stayed a week. He lounged in bed all morning while she was at
+work, he smoked all afternoon. At the end of the week Clémentine sent
+him flying. "<i>Je suis bête et je mourrais bête</i>," was her explanation to
+me; but she was not <i>bête</i> to the point of adding an idle fourth to her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+burden, and, as a result, being turned out of the home she had taken him
+in to preserve.</p>
+
+<p>Clémentine had been with us more than two years when the incident of the
+Italian occurred, and by this time I had become so accustomed to her and
+to her adventures that I was not as shocked as perhaps I should have
+been. It was not a way out of difficulties I could approve, but
+Clémentine was not to be judged by my standards, and I saw no reason to
+express my disapproval by getting rid of her just when she most needed
+to stay. In her continually increasing need to stay, I endured so much
+besides that, at the end of her third year in our chambers, I was
+convinced that she would go on doing my rough work as long as I had
+rough work to be done. More than once I came to the end of my patience
+and dismissed her. But it was no use. In the course of a couple of
+weeks, or at the most three, she was back scrubbing my floors and
+polishing my brasses.</p>
+
+<p>The first time she lost her place with me, I sympathized to such an
+extent that I was at some pains to arrange a scheme to send her to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+France. But Clémentine, clinging to the pleasures of life in the Lower
+Marsh, agreed to everything I proposed, and was careful to put every
+hindrance in the way of carrying out my plans. Twice I went to the
+length of engaging another woman, but either the other woman did not
+suit or else she did not stay, and I had to ask Clémentine to return. On
+her side, she made various efforts to leave me, bored, I fancy, by the
+monotony of regular work, but they were as unsuccessful as mine to turn
+her off. After one disappearance of three weeks, she owned up frankly to
+having been again <i>chez les femmes</i> whose pay was better; after a
+second, she said she had been ill in the workhouse which I doubted;
+after all, she was as frank in admitting that nowhere else did she enjoy
+<i>la bonne cuisine de Madame</i>, and that this was the attraction to which
+I was indebted for her fidelity.</p>
+
+<p>It may have been kindness, it may have been weakness, it may have been
+simply necessity, that made me so lenient on these occasions; I do not
+attempt to decide. But I cannot blame Clémentine for thinking it was
+because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> she was indispensable. I noticed that gradually in small ways
+she began to take advantage of our good-nature. For one thing there was
+now no limit to her conversation. I did not spend my time in the kitchen
+and could turn a deaf ear to it, but I sometimes wondered if Augustine
+would not be the next to disappear. She would also often relieve the
+tedium of her several tasks by turning the handsprings in which she was
+so accomplished, or dancing the jig popular in the Lower Marsh, or by
+other performances equally reprehensible in the kitchen of <i>une maison
+bourgeoise</i>, as she was pleased to describe our chambers. She never lost
+a chance of rushing to the door if tradespeople rang, or talking with
+the British Workmen we were obliged, for our sins, to employ. Their
+bewilderment, stolid Britons as they were, would have been funny, had
+not her manner of exciting it been so discreditable. She was even
+caught&mdash;I was spared the knowledge until much later&mdash;turning her
+handsprings for a select company of plasterers and painters. Then I
+could see that she accepted anything we might bestow upon her as her
+due,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> and was becoming critical of the value and quality of the gift. I
+can never forget on one occasion when J. was going away, and he gave her
+a few shillings, the expression with which she looked first at the money
+and then at him as though insulted by the paltriness of the amount. More
+unbearable was the unfair use she made of her little Ernest.</p>
+
+<p><i>La vieille grandmère</i>, who had wandered by chance into her life,
+wandered out of it as casually, or so Clémentine said as an argument to
+induce me to receive that odious little boy into my kitchen during her
+hours of work; she had nobody to take care of him, she could not leave
+him alone. Here, happily for myself, I had the strength to draw the
+line. But when this argument failed, she found another far more
+harrowing. She took the opportunity of my stumbling across her in our
+little hall one day at noon to tell me that, as I would not let her
+bring him with her, she left him every day, carefully locked up out of
+harm's way, alone in her rooms. A child of seven, as he was then, locked
+up to get into any mischief he could invent, and, moreover, a child with
+a talent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> for mischief! that was too much, and I sent her flying home
+without giving her time to eat her lunch or linger before the glass, and
+I was haunted for the rest of the day with the thought of all the
+terrible things that might have happened to him. Naturally nothing did
+happen, nothing ever does happen to children like the little Ernest, and
+Clémentine, dismayed by the loss of her lunch and the interference with
+her toilet, never ventured upon this argument a second time. But she
+found another almost as bad, for she informed me that, thanks to my
+interference, she was compelled to leave him again to run the streets as
+he would, and she hinted only too plainly that for whatever evil might
+befall him, I was responsible. Our relations were at this pleasant
+stage, and her little Ernest was fast developing into a monstrous
+Frankenstein wholly of my own raising, when one day she arrived with a
+new air of importance and announced her approaching marriage.</p>
+
+<p>I was enchanted. I had not permitted myself to feel the full weight of
+the burden Clémentine was heaping upon my shoulders until<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> 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 <i>Quartier</i> 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. "<i>Cette fois je crois que cela sera vrai&mdash;que l'affaire ne
+tombera pas dans l'eau</i>," she said, remembering the deep waters which,
+in her recent affair, had gone over her head. "<i>Mon petit Anglais</i>"&mdash;her
+name for him&mdash;figured in her account as a model of propriety. He had a
+strict regard for morals. He objected to her working <i>chez les femmes</i>,
+and expressed his desire that she should remain in our service, despite
+the loss to their income. He condoned her previous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> indiscretions, and
+was prepared to play a father's part to her little Ernest.</p>
+
+<p>Altogether the situation was fast growing idyllic, and with Clémentine
+in her new rôle of <i>fiancée</i>, 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
+Clémentine collecting wedding presents from me for which I had not been
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> 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 <i>petit Anglais</i> 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. Clémentine
+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.</p>
+
+<p>To Clémentine, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> 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 <i>petit Anglais</i> in the matter. She affected penitence,
+admitting that she had committed <i>une "Bêtisse"</i>&mdash;the spelling is
+hers&mdash;and adding: "<i>avoir âgit ainsi avec des maîtres aussi bons, ce
+n'est pas pardonable. Je vous assure que si un jour je devien riche, ou
+peut être plus pauvre, que dans ma richesse, comme dans ma plus grande
+misère, je ne pourrais jamais oublier les bons maîtres Monsieur et
+Madame, car jamais dans ma vie d'orpheline, je n'aie jamais rencontré
+d'aussi bons maîtres.</i>" She also reminded me that she lived in the hope
+that <i>Madame</i> 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 <i>petit innocent</i>&mdash;Ernest&mdash;the little innocent whom the
+slums had nothing more to teach. This second letter met the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> fate
+as the first, but her resources were not exhausted. In a third she tried
+the dignity of sorrow: "<i>Ma faute m'a rendu l'âme si triste</i>" and, as
+this had no effect, she used in a fourth the one genuine argument of
+them all, her hunger: "<i>Enfin il faut que je tâche d'oublier, mais en
+attendant je m'en mordrais peut être les poings plus d'une fois.</i>" I was
+unmoved. I had spent too much emotion already upon Clémentine; also a
+neat little French girl had replaced her.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;apronless, her arms akimbo, the wave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> of hair low
+on her forehead&mdash;stood Clémentine, giggling in triumph. A few words
+accompanied this astonishing vision. "<i>Je n'oublierais jamais la bonne
+maison de Madame</i>" and the kind message was signed "Mrs. Johnson."
+Whether the eighteen shillings of her <i>petit Anglais</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>That was the last I ever heard from Clémentine, 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a><i>The Old Housekeeper</i></h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus12" id="illus12"></a>
+<img src="images/illus12.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"A WILDERNESS OF CHIMNEY-POTS"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE OLD HOUSEKEEPER</h3>
+
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;for, as I have
+said, there is an "oak" to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> "sport,"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>the</i> profession and
+spent most of our time "resting," a suspicion confirmed by the escape of
+the last tenant, also in <i>the</i> 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> In the mean
+while we saw the Housekeeper almost every day.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>the</i> profession
+which her daughter graced, and the shame would have been not to be as
+servile as the position demanded.</p>
+
+<p>This daughter was in every way an elegant person, dressing with a
+fidelity to fashion which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> 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 <i>the</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;I thrust them the
+young man's outstretched arms. For some incomprehensible reason J.'s
+huge <i>schube</i> was on another chair,&mdash;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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> when a
+bull's-eye lantern flashed upon me and a policeman ordered me out.
+Firemen&mdash;for London firemen eventually arrive if the fire burns long
+enough&mdash;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 <i>schube</i>,
+when the stairs became a raging torrent.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> would have made her daughter's fortune on the
+stage.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> of disposing
+of records it was convenient to be rid of.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>schube</i> into the arms of the Third Floor Front's servant.
+Odours, they say, are the best jogs to memory, and the smell of the
+<i>schube</i> is for me so inextricably associated with the fire, that I can
+never think of one without remembering the other.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>schube</i> was the chief treasure among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> the fantastic costumes it is
+J.'s joy to collect on his travels. His Hungarian sheepskins, French
+hooded capes, Swiss blouses, Spanish berêts, 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 <i>schube</i>, 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 <i>schube</i> just twice,&mdash;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 <i>schube</i> was there;
+not a shred of fur remained, the cloth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The stairs were a waterfall under which I ascended. The two doors of our
+chambers were wide open, with huge gaps where panels had been, the young
+man's servant having carefully shut them after me in our flight,
+thinking, I suppose, that the firemen would stand upon ceremony and ask
+for the key before venturing in. A river was drying up in our hall, and
+the strip of matting down the centre was sodden. Empty soda-water
+bottles rolled on the floor, though it speaks well for London firemen
+that nothing stronger was touched. Candles were stuck upside down in our
+hanging Dutch lamp and all available candlesticks, curtains<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> and blinds
+were pulled about, chairs were upset, the marks of muddy feet were
+everywhere. I ought to have been grateful, and I was, that the damage
+was so small, all the more when I went again on to the leads and saw the
+blackened heap to which the night had reduced the young man's chambers.
+But the place was inexpressibly cheerless and dilapidated in the dawning
+light.</p>
+
+<p>It was too late to go to bed, too early to go to work. I was hungry, and
+the baker had not come, nor the charwoman. I was faint, the smell of the
+<i>schube</i> was strong in my nostrils, though the <i>schube</i> itself was now
+safely locked up in a remote cupboard. I wandered disconsolately from
+room to room, when, of a sudden, there appeared at my still open front
+door a gorgeous vision,&mdash;a large and stately lady, fresh and neat,
+arrayed in flowing red draperies, with a white lace fichu thrown over a
+mass of luxuriant golden hair. I stared, speechless with amazement. It
+was not until she spoke that I recognized the First Floor Back, who had
+had time to lay her hands not only on a false front, but on a whole wig,
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> who had had the enterprise to make tea which she invited me to
+drink with her in Pepys's chambers.</p>
+
+<p>The Housekeeper and the Housekeeper's daughter were already in her
+dining-room, the Housekeeper huddled up in a big armchair, pillows at
+her back, a stool at her feet. Like her house she was a wreck, and her
+demoralization was sad to see. All her life, until a few short hours
+ago, she had been the model of neatness; now she did not care how she
+looked; her white hair was untidy, her dress half-buttoned, her apron
+forgotten; and she, who had hitherto discouraged familiarity in the
+tenants, joined us as a friend. She was too exhausted for hysterics, but
+she moaned over her tea and abandoned herself to her grief. She could
+not rally, and, what is more, she did not want to. She had no life apart
+from her house, and in its ruin she saw her own. Her immaculate hall was
+defaced and stained, a blackened groove was worn in her shining stairs,
+the water pouring through the chambers in the front, down to her own
+little apartment, had turned them all into a damp<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> and depressing mess.
+Her moans were the ceaseless accompaniment to our talk of the night's
+disaster. Always she had waited for the fire, she said, she had dreaded
+it, and at last it had come, and there was no sorrow like unto hers.</p>
+
+<p>After the first excitement, after the house had resumed, as well as it
+could, its usual habits, the Housekeeper remained absorbed in her grief.
+Hitherto her particular habit was to work, and she had been able,
+unaided, to keep the house up to her immaculate standard of perfection.
+But now to restore it to order was the affair of builders, of plasterers
+and painters and paperers. There was nothing for her to do save to sit
+with hands folded and watch the sacrilege. Her occupation was gone, and
+all was wrong with her world.</p>
+
+<p>I was busy during the days immediately "after the fire." I had to insure
+our belongings, which, of course, being insured, have never run such a
+risk again. I had to prepare and pack for a journey to France, now many
+days overdue, and, what with one thing or another,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> I neglected the
+Housekeeper. When at last I was ready to shut up our chambers and start
+and I called at her rooms, it seemed to me she had visibly shrunk and
+wilted, though she had preserved enough of the proper spirit to pocket
+the substantial tip I handed over to her with my keys. She was no less
+equal to accepting a second when, after a couple of months I returned
+and could not resist this expression of my sympathy on finding the hall
+still stained and defaced, the stairs still with their blackened groove,
+the workmen still going and coming, and her despair at the spectacle
+blacker than ever.</p>
+
+<p>The next day she came up to our chambers. She wore her best black gown
+and no apron, and from these signs I concluded it was a visit of state.
+I was right: it was to announce her departure. The house, partially
+rebuilt and very much patched up, would never be the same. She was too
+old for hope, and without the courage to pick up the broken bits of her
+masterpiece and put them together again. She was more ill at ease as
+visitor than as housekeeper. The conversation languished,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> although I
+fancied she had something particular to say, slight as was her success
+in saying it. We had both been silent for an awkward minute when she
+blurted out abruptly that she had never neglected her duty, no matter
+what it might or might not have pleased the tenants to give her. I
+applauded the sentiment as admirable, and I said good-by; and never once
+then, and not until several days after she left us, did it dawn upon me
+that she was waiting to accept graciously the fee it was her right in
+leaving to expect from me. The fact of my having only just tipped her
+liberally had nothing to do with it. A housekeeper's departure was an
+occasion for money to pass from the tenant's hand into hers, and she had
+too much respect for her duty as housekeeper not to afford me the
+opportunity of doing mine as tenant. It was absurd, but I was humiliated
+in my own eyes when I thought of the figure I must cut in hers, and I
+could only hope she would make allowance for me as an ignorant American.</p>
+
+<p>How deep I sunk in her esteem, there was no means of knowing. I do not
+think she could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> endure to come to her house as a stranger, for she
+never returned. Neither did any news of her reach us. I cannot believe
+she enjoyed the inactive existence with her daughter to which she had
+retired, and I should be astonished if she bore it long. In losing her
+house she had lost her interest in life. Her work in the world was
+done.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a><i>The New Housekeeper</i></h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus13" id="illus13"></a>
+<img src="images/illus13.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>THE SPIRE OF ST. MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER</h3>
+
+
+<p>It had taken years for the Old Housekeeper to mature, and I knew that in
+the best sense of the word she could never be replaced. But the
+knowledge did not prepare me for the New Housekeeper.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Haines was a younger and apparently stronger woman, but she was so
+casual in her dress, and so eager to emulate the lilies of the field, as
+to convince me that it was not in her, under any conditions, to mature
+into a housekeeper at all. It expressed much, I thought, that while the
+Old Housekeeper had always been "the Housekeeper," we never knew Mrs.
+Haines by any name but her own. The fact that she had a husband was her
+recommendation to the landlord, who had been alarmed by the fire and the
+hysterics into which it threw the Old Housekeeper, and now insisted upon
+a man in the family as an indispensable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> qualification for the post. The
+advantage might have been more obvious had Mr. Haines not spent most of
+his time in dodging the tenants and helping them to forget his presence
+in the house. He was not an ill-looking nor ill-mannered man, and
+shyness was the only explanation that occurred to me for his
+perseverance in avoiding us. Work could not force him from his
+retirement. Mrs. Haines said that he was a carpenter by trade, but the
+only ability I ever knew him to display was in evading whatever job I
+was hopeful enough to offer him. Besides, though it might be hard to say
+what I think a carpenter ought to look like, I was certain he did not
+look like one, and others shared my doubts.</p>
+
+<p>The rumour spread through our street&mdash;where everybody rejoices in the
+knowledge of everything about everybody else who lives in it&mdash;that he
+had once been in the Civil Service, but had married beneath him and come
+down in the world. How the rumour originated I never asked, or never was
+told if I did ask; but it was so evident that he shrank from the
+practice of the carpenter's trade that once we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> sent him with a letter
+to the Publisher&mdash;who shares our love of the neighbourhood to the point,
+not only of publishing from it, but of living in it&mdash;asking if some sort
+of place could not be found for him in the office. It was found, I am
+afraid to his disappointment, for he never made any effort to fill it,
+and was more diligent than ever in keeping out of our way. If he saw us
+coming, on the rare occasions when he stood at the front door, or the
+rarer when he cleaned the gas-bracket above it, he would run if there
+was time, or, if there was not, turn his head and stare fixedly in the
+other direction that he might escape speaking to us. As the months went
+on, he was never caught cleaning anything or doing anything in the shape
+of work, except sometimes, furtively, as if afraid of being detected in
+the act, shutting the front door when the clocks of the neighbourhood
+struck eleven. He was far less of a safeguard to us than I often fancied
+he thought we were to him.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Haines was sufficiently unlike him to account for one part of the
+rumour. She was coarse in appearance and disagreeable in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> manner, always
+on the defensive, always on the verge of flying into a temper. She had
+no objection to showing herself; on the contrary, she was perpetually
+about, hunting for faults to find; but she did object to showing herself
+with a broom or a duster, a pail or a scrubbing-brush in her hands. I
+shuddered sometimes at the thought of the shock to the Old Housekeeper
+if she were to see her hall and stairs. We could bring up coal now at
+any hour or all day long. And yet Mrs. Haines tyrannized over us in her
+own fashion, and her tyranny was the more unbearable because it had no
+end except to spare herself trouble. Her one thought was to do nothing
+and get paid for it. She resented extra exertion without extra
+compensation. We never had been so bullied about coal under the old
+régime as we were under hers about a drain-pipe with a trick of
+overflowing. It might have drowned us in our chambers and she would not
+have stirred to save us; but its outlet was in a little paved court back
+of her kitchen, which it was one of her duties to keep in order, and she
+considered every overflow a rank injustice. She held the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> tenants in
+turn responsible, and would descend upon us like a Fury upbraiding us
+for our carelessness. It would never have surprised me had she ordered
+us down to clean up the court for her.</p>
+
+<p>I must in fairness add that when extra exertion meant extra money she
+did not shirk it. Nor was she without accomplishments. She was an
+excellent needlewoman: she altered and renovated more than one gown for
+me, she made me chair-covers, she mended my carpets. During the first
+years she was in the house she never refused any needlework, and often
+she asked me for more. She would come up and wait for me at table on the
+shortest notice. In an emergency she would even cook me a dinner which,
+in its colourless English way, was admirable. There is no denying that
+she could be useful, but her usefulness had a special tariff.</p>
+
+<p>It was also in her favour that she was a lover of cats, and their regard
+for her was as good as a certificate. I came to be on the best of terms
+with hers, Bogie by name, a tall ungainly tabby, very much the worse for
+wear. He spent a large part of his time on the street, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> often, as I
+came or went, he would be returning home and would ask me, in a way not
+to be resisted, to ring her door-bell for him. Sometimes I waited to
+exchange a few remarks with him, for, though his voice was husky and not
+one of his attractions, he had always plenty to say. On these occasions
+I was a witness of his pleasure in seeing his mistress again, though his
+absence might have been short, and of her enthusiasm in receiving him.
+Unquestionably they understood each other, and cats are animals of
+discrimination.</p>
+
+<p>She extended her affection to cats that did not belong to her, and ours
+came in for many of her attentions. Our Jimmy, who had the freedom of
+the streets, often paid her a visit on his way out or in, as I knew he
+would not have done if she had not made the time pass agreeably; for if
+he, like all cats, disliked to be bored, he knew better than most how to
+avoid the possibility. One of his favourite haunts was the near Strand,
+probably because he was sure to meet his friends there. It was a joy to
+him, if we had been out late in the evening, to run across us as we
+returned. With a fervent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> "mow" of greeting, he was at our side; and
+then, his tail high in the air, and singing a song of rapture, he would
+come with us to our front door, linger until he had seen us open it,
+when, his mind at rest for our safety, he would hurry back to his
+revels. We considered this a privilege, and our respect for Mrs. Haines
+was increased when he let her share it, even in the daytime. He was
+known to join her in the Strand, not far from Charing Cross, walk with
+her to Wellington Street, cross over, wait politely while she bought
+tickets at the Lyceum for one of the tenants, cross again, and walk back
+with her. He was also known to sit down in the middle of the Strand, and
+divert the traffic better than a "Bobby," until Mrs. Haines, when
+everybody else had failed, enticed him away. He deserved the tribute of
+her tears, and she shed many, when the Vet kindly released him from the
+physical ruin to which exposure and a life of dissipation had reduced
+him.</p>
+
+<p>William Penn showed her the same friendliness, but from him it was not
+so marked, for he was a cat of democratic tastes and, next to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> his
+family, preferred the people who worked for them. He had not as much
+opportunity for his civilities as Jimmy, never being allowed to leave
+our chambers. But when Mrs. Haines was busy in our kitchen, he occupied
+more than a fair portion of her time, for which she made no reduction in
+the bill. William's charms were so apt to distract me from my work that
+I could say nothing, and her last kindness of all when he died&mdash;in his
+case of too luxuriant living and too little exercise, the Vet
+said&mdash;would make me forgive her much worse. According to my friend, Miss
+Repplier, a cat "considers dying a strictly private affair." But William
+Penn's death-bed was a public affair, at least for Augustine and myself,
+who sat up with him through the night of his agony. We were both
+exhausted by morning, unfit to cope with the problem of his funeral.
+Chambers are without any convenient corner to serve as cemetery, and I
+could not trust the most important member of the family to the dust-man
+for burial. I do not know what I should have done but for Mrs. Haines.
+It was she who arranged, by a bribe I would willingly have doubled,
+that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> during the dinner-hour, when the head-gardener was out of the way,
+William should be laid to rest in the garden below our windows. She was
+the only mourner with Augustine and myself,&mdash;J. was abroad,&mdash;when, from
+above, we watched the assistant gardener lower him into his little grave
+under the tree where the wood-pigeons have their nest.</p>
+
+<p>If I try now to make the best of what was good in Mrs. Haines, at the
+time she did not give me much chance. Grumbling was such a habit with
+her that, even had the Socialists' Millennium come, she would have kept
+on, if only because it removed all other reason for her grumbles. Her
+prejudice against work of any kind did not lessen her displeasure with
+everybody who did not provide her with work of some kind to do. She
+treated me as if I imposed on her when I asked her to sew or to mend or
+to cook, and she abused the other tenants because they did not ask her.
+This indeed was her principal grievance. She could not see why they were
+in the house if it were not to increase her income, and she hated the
+landlord for having led her to believe they would. She paid me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+innumerable visits, the object of which never varied. It was to borrow,
+which she did without shame or apology. She never hesitated in her
+demands, she never cringed. She ran short because the other tenants were
+not doing the fair and square thing by her, and she did not see why she
+should not draw upon me for help. One inexhaustible debt was the monthly
+bill for her furniture, bought on the instalment system and forfeited if
+any one instalment were not met. I do not remember how many pounds I
+advanced, but enough to suggest that she had furnished her rooms, of
+which she never gave me as much as a glimpse, in a style far beyond her
+means. I could afford to be amiable, for I knew I could make her pay me
+back in work, though my continual loans did so little to improve her
+financial affairs that after a while my patience gave out, and I refused
+to advance another penny.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until the illness of her husband, after they had been in the
+house for some two years, that I realized the true condition of things
+behind the door they kept so carefully closed. The illness was sudden,
+so far as I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> knew. I had not seen Mr. Haines for long, but I was
+accustomed to not seeing him, and curiously, when Mrs. Haines's need was
+greatest, she showed some reluctance in asking to be helped out of it.
+Her husband was dying before she appealed to anybody, and then it was
+not to me, but to Mrs. Burden, my old charwoman, who was so poor that I
+had always fancied that to be poorer still meant to live in the streets
+or on the rates. But Mrs. Haines was so much worse off, that Mrs.
+Burden, in telling me about it, thanked Our Lady that she had never
+fallen so low. It was cold winter and there was no fire, no coal, no
+wood, behind the closed door. The furniture for which I had advanced so
+many pounds consisted, I now found out, of two or three rickety chairs
+and a square of tattered carpet in the front room, a few pots and pans
+in the kitchen. In the dark bedroom between, the dying man lay on a hard
+board stretched on the top of a packing-box, shivering under his
+threadbare overcoat, so pitiful in his misery and suffering that Mrs.
+Burden was moved to compassion and hurried home to fetch him the
+blankets from her own bed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> and buy him a pennyworth of milk on the way.</p>
+
+<p>When the tenants knew how it was with Mrs. Haines and her husband, as
+now they could not help knowing, they remembered only that he was ill,
+and they sent for the doctor and paid for medicine, and did what they
+could to lighten the gloom of the two or three days left to him. And
+they arranged for a decent burial, feeling, I think, that a man who had
+been in the Civil Service should not lie in a pauper's grave. For a week
+or so we wondered again who he was, why he kept so persistently out of
+sight; after that we thought as little of him as when he had skulked, a
+shadow, between his rooms and the street door on the stroke of eleven.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto everybody had been patient with Mrs. Haines, for the London
+housekeeper, though she has not got the tenants as completely in her
+power as the Paris <i>concierge</i>, can, if she wants, make things very
+disagreeable for them. Now that she was alone in the world, everybody
+was kind to her. The landlord overlooked his announced decision "to
+sack<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> the pair," and retained her as housekeeper, though in losing her
+husband she had lost her principal recommendation. The tenants raised a
+fund to enable her to buy the mourning which is often a consolation in
+widowhood. Work was offered to her in chambers which she had never
+entered before, and I added to the tasks in ours. The housekeepers in
+the street with families to support must have envied her. She had her
+rooms rent free, wages from the landlord, plenty of extra work, and
+though this might not seem affluence to people who do not measure their
+income by pence or scramble for the odd shilling, it was wealth in
+housekeeping circles.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Haines, however, did not see her position in that light. She had
+complained when work was not offered to her, she complained more
+bitterly when it was. Perhaps her husband had had some restraining
+influence upon her. I cannot say; but certainly once he was gone, she
+gave up all pretence of controlling her temper. She would sweep like a
+hurricane through the house, raging and raving, on the slightest
+provocation. She led us a worse life<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> than ever over the drain-pipe. She
+left the house more and more to take care of itself, dust lying thick
+wherever dust could lie, the stairs turned to a dingy grey, the walls
+blackened with London smoke and grime. Once in a while she hired a
+forlorn, ragged old woman to wash the stairs and brush the front-door
+mat, for in London, more than anywhere else, "poverty is a comparative
+thing," and every degree has one below to "soothe" it. No matter how
+hard up Mrs. Haines was, she managed to scrape together a few pennies to
+pay to have the work done for her rather than do it herself. The greater
+part of her leisure she spent out of the house, and when I passed her
+door I would see pinned up on it a bit of paper stating in neat, even
+elegant, writing, "Apply on the First Floor for the Housekeeper," or
+"Gone out. Back in ten minutes"; and hours, sometimes days, later the
+same notice would still be there. She became as neglectful of herself as
+of the house: her one dress grew shabbier and shabbier, her apron was
+discarded, no detail of her toilet was attended to except the frizzing
+of her coarse black hair. All this came<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> about not at once, but step by
+step, and things were very bad before J. and I admitted, even to each
+other, that she was a disgrace to the house. We would admit it to nobody
+else, and to my surprise the other tenants were as forbearing. I suppose
+it was because they understood, as well as we did, that at a word to the
+landlord she would be adrift in London, where for one vacant post of
+housekeeper there are a hundred applications. To banish her from our own
+chambers, however, was not to drive her to the workhouse, and I called
+for her services less and less often.</p>
+
+<p>There was another reason for my not employing her to which I have not so
+far referred, the reason really of her slovenliness and bad temper and
+gradual deterioration. I shut my eyes as long as I could. But I was
+prepared for the whispers that began to be heard, not only in our house,
+but up and down our street. What started them I do not know, but the
+morning and evening gatherings of the housekeepers at their doors were
+not held for nothing, and presently it got about that Mrs. Haines had
+been seen stealing in and out of a public-house,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> and that this
+public-house was just beyond the border-line of the Quarter, which
+looked as if she were endeavouring to escape the vigilant eyes of our
+gossips. Then, as invariably happens, the whispers grew louder, the
+evidence against her circumstantial, and everybody was saying quite
+openly where her money disappeared and why she became shabbier, her
+rooms barer, and the house more disreputable. It leaked out that her
+husband also had been seen flitting from public-house to public-house;
+and, the game of concealment by this time being up, it was bluntly said
+that drink had killed him, as it would Mrs. Haines if she went on as she
+was going.</p>
+
+<p>I had kept my suspicions to myself, but she had never come to our
+chambers at the hour of lunch or dinner that there was not an unusual
+drain upon our modest wine-cellar. I could not fancy that it was merely
+a coincidence, that friends dining with us were invariably thirstier
+when she waited or cooked; but her appearance had been the invariable
+signal for the disappearance of our wine at a rate that made my
+employment of her a costly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> luxury. I never saw her when I could declare
+she had been drinking, but drink she did, and there was no use my
+beating about the bush and calling it by another name. It would have
+been less hopeless had she occasionally betrayed herself, had her speech
+thickened and her walk become unsteady. But hers was the deadliest form
+of the evil, because it gave no sign. There was nothing to check it
+except every now and then a mysterious attack of illness,&mdash;which she
+said defied the doctor though it defied nobody in the house,&mdash;or the
+want of money; but a housekeeper must be far gone if she cannot pick up
+a shilling here and a half-crown there. I was the last of the old
+tenants to employ her, but after I abandoned her she still had another
+chance with a newcomer who took the chambers below ours, and, finding
+them too small to keep more than one servant, engaged her for a liberal
+amount of work. She bought aprons and a new black blouse and skirt, and
+she was so spruce and neat in them that I was encouraged to hope. But
+before the end of the first week, she was met on the stairs coming down
+from his room<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> to hers with a bottle under her apron; at the end of the
+second she was dismissed.</p>
+
+<p>I hardly dare think how she lived after this. With every Christmas there
+was a short period of prosperity, though it dwindled as the tenants
+began to realize where their money went. For a time J. and I got her to
+keep our bicycles, other people in the house followed suit, and during
+several months she was paid rent for as many as six, keeping them in the
+empty sitting-room from which even the rickety chairs had disappeared,
+and where the floor now was thick with grease and stained with oil. If
+we had trunks to store or boxes to unpack, she would let us the same
+room for as long as we wanted, and so she managed, one way or the other,
+by hook or by crook. But it was a makeshift existence, all the more so
+when her habits began to tell on her physically. She was ill half the
+time, and by the end of her fourth year in the house, I do not believe
+she could have sewed or waited or cooked, had she had the chance. She
+had no friends, no companions, save her cat. They were a grim pair, she
+with hungry, shifty eyes glowing like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> fires in the pallor of her face,
+he more gaunt and ungainly than ever: for a witch and her familiar they
+would have been burnt not so many hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Then we heard that she was taking in lodgers, that women with the look
+of hunted creatures stole into her rooms at strange hours of the night.
+Some said they were waifs and strays from the "Halls," others that they
+were wanderers from the Strand; all agreed that, whoever they were, they
+must be as desperately poor as she, to seek shelter where the only bed
+was the floor. Much had been passed over, but I knew that such lodgers
+were more than landlord and tenants could endure, and I had not to be a
+prophet to foresee that the end was approaching.</p>
+
+<p>It came more speedily than I thought, though the manner of it was not
+left to landlord and tenants. Christmas, her fifth in the house, had
+filled her purse again. Tenants were less liberal, it is true, but she
+must have had at least five or six pounds, to which a turkey and plum
+pudding had been added by our neighbour across the hall, who was of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+generous turn. She had therefore the essentials of what passes for a
+merry Christmas, but how much merriment there was in hers I had no way
+of telling. On holidays in London I keep indoors if I can, not caring to
+face the sadness of the streets or the dreariness of house-parties, and
+I did not go downstairs on Christmas Day, nor on Boxing Day which is the
+day after. Mrs. Haines, if she came up, did not present herself at our
+chambers. I trust she was gay because, as it turned out, it was her last
+chance for gaiety at this or any other season. In the middle of the
+night following Boxing Day she was seized with one of her mysterious
+attacks. A lodger was with her, but, from fright, or stupidity, or
+perhaps worse, called no one till dawn, when she rang up the housekeeper
+next door and vanished. The housekeeper next door went at once for the
+doctor who attends to us all in the Quarter. It was too late. Mrs.
+Haines was dead when he reached the house.</p>
+
+<p>Death was merciful, freeing her from the evil fate that threatened, for
+she was at the end of everything. She went out of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> world as naked as
+she came into it. Her rooms were empty, there was not so much as a crust
+of bread in her kitchen, in her purse were two farthings. Her only
+clothes were those she had just taken off and the few rags wrapped about
+her for the night. Destitution could not be more complete, and the
+horror was to find it, not round the corner, not at the door, but in the
+very house, and, worse, to know that it deserved no pity. As she had
+sown, so had she reaped, and the grave was the kindliest shelter for the
+harvest.</p>
+
+<p>The day after, her sister appeared, from where, summoned by whom, I do
+not know. She was a decent, serious woman, who attended to everything,
+and when the funeral was over, called on all the tenants. She wanted,
+she told me, to thank us for all our kindness to her sister, whom
+kindness had so little helped. She volunteered no explanation, she only
+sighed her regrets. She could not understand, she said.</p>
+
+<p>Nor could I. No doubt, daily in the slums, many women die as destitute.
+But they never had their chance. Mrs. Haines had hers, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> a fair one
+as these things go. Her tragedy has shaken my confidence in the
+reformers to-day who would work the miracle, and, with equal chances for
+all men, transform this sad world of ours into Utopia.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a><i>Our Beggars</i></h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus14" id="illus14"></a>
+<img src="images/illus14.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE FROM OUR WINDOWS</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>OUR BEGGARS</h3>
+
+
+<p>I know our Beggars by their ring. When the front door-bell is pulled
+with insolent violence, "That," I say to myself, "is a Beggar," and I am
+usually right.</p>
+
+<p>Ours are not the Beggars of whose decay Elia complained; though he could
+not have believed that the art of begging was in any more danger of
+being lost than the art of lying. His sort have still their place at the
+crowded crossing, at the corners of streets and turnings of alleys&mdash;they
+are always with us. I rarely go out that I do not meet the cripple who
+swings himself along on his crutches through the throngs at Charing
+Cross, or the blind man who taps his way down the Strand, or the
+paralytic in her little cart close to St. Martin's, and I too should
+complain were they to disappear. These are Beggars I do not mind. They
+have their picturesque uses.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> They carry on an old tradition. They are
+licensed to molest me, and their demands, with their thanks when I give
+and their curses when I do not, are the methods of a venerable and
+honoured calling. Besides, I can escape them if I choose. I can cross
+the street at the approach of the cripple, I can dodge the blind man, I
+can look away as I pass the paralytic, and so avoid the irritation of
+giving when I do not want to or the discomfort of hearing their opinion
+of me when I refuse. But to our Beggars I do object, and from them there
+is no escape. They belong to a new species, and have abandoned the
+earlier methods as crude and primitive. They make a profession neither
+of disease nor of deformity, but of having come down in the world. They
+scorn to stoop to "rags and the wallet," which they have exchanged for a
+top hat and frock coat. They take out no license, for they never beg in
+the streets; instead, they assault us at our door, where they do not ask
+for alms but claim the gift, they call a loan, as their right. They are
+bullies, brigands, who would thrust the virtue of charity upon us, and
+if, as the philosopher<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> thinks, it is a test of manners to receive, they
+come out of it with dignity, for their fiction of a loan saves them, and
+us, from the professional profuseness of the Beggar's thanks.</p>
+
+<p>It was only when I moved into chambers in the Quarter that they began to
+come to see me. Hitherto, my life in London had been spent in lodgings,
+where, if I was never free from Beggars in the form of those intimate
+friends who are always short of ten pounds to pay their rent or ten
+shillings to buy a hat, it was the landlady's affair when the Beggars
+who were strangers called.</p>
+
+<p>Chambers, however, gave me a front door at which they could ring and an
+address in the Directory in which they could find out where the door
+was; and had my object been to make a study of them and their manners, I
+could not have hit upon a better place to collect my material.</p>
+
+<p>Not that Beggars are encouraged in the Quarter, where more than one
+society devoted to their scientific suppression has, or has had, an
+office, and where the lady opposite does not wait for science, but sends
+them flying the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> minute she catches them in our streets. The man who
+loafs in front of our club, and who opens cab-doors for members, and as
+many more as he can capture, might be mistaken for a Beggar by anybody
+who did not know the Quarter, but we who do know it understand that he
+is loafing by special appointment. The small boy who has lately taken to
+selling his single box of matches on our Terrace does so officially, as
+the brass label on his arm explains. And nothing could be more
+exceptional than the cheerful person who the other day reeled after the
+Publisher and myself into one of our houses where there is an
+elevator&mdash;for to elevators we have come in the Quarter&mdash;the thin end of
+the modern wedge that threatens its destruction&mdash;and addressed the
+Publisher so affectionately as "Colonel" that we both retreated into the
+elevator and pressed the button for the top floor.</p>
+
+<p>But the Beggars we keep off our streets, we cannot keep from our front
+doors. J. and I had hardly settled in chambers before we were besieged.
+People were immediately in need of our help who up till then had managed
+without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> it, and to our annoyance they have been in need of it ever
+since. They present themselves in so many different guises, by so many
+different methods, that it is impossible to be on our guard against them
+all. Some sneak in with the post, and our correspondence has doubled in
+bulk. Dukes, Earls, Marquises, Baronets, favour us with lithographed
+letters, signing their names at the bottom, writing ours at the top, and
+demanding our contribution to charities they approve, as the price of so
+amazing a condescension. Ladies of rank cannot give their benevolent
+balls and banquets unless we buy tickets, nor can they conceive of our
+dismissing their personal appeal. Clergymen start missions that we may
+finance them, bazaars are opened that we may fill the stalls with the
+free offering of the work by which we make our living, and albums are
+raffled that we may grace them with our autographs. We might think that
+the post was invented for the benefit of people whose idea of charity is
+to do the begging and get us to do the giving. Many of our Beggars like
+better to beg in person: sometimes as nurses with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> tickets to sell for a
+concert, or as Little Sisters of the Poor&mdash;whom I welcome, having
+preserved a sentiment for any variety of cap and veil since my own
+convent days; sometimes as people with things to sell at the biggest
+price, that we would not want at the lowest, or with patent inventions
+that we would not take as a gift, and who are indignant if we decline to
+be taxed for the privilege of not buying or subscribing. But the most
+numerous of our Beggars, the most persistent, the most liberal in their
+expectations, are the men, and more occasionally the women, who, having
+come down in the world, look to us to set them up again, and would be
+the first to resent it if our generosity ran to any such extravagant
+lengths.</p>
+
+<p>Their patronage of the Quarter is doubtless due, partly to its being
+close to the Strand, which is an excellent centre for their line of
+business; partly to a convenient custom with us of leaving all street
+doors hospitably open and inscribing the names of tenants in big gilt
+letters on the wall just inside; partly to the fact that we are not five
+minutes from a Free<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> Library, where they can agreeably fill their hours
+of leisure by the study of "Who's Who," "The Year's Art," and other
+books in which publishers obligingly supply the information about us
+which to them is as valuable an asset as a crutch to the cripple or a
+staff to the blind. Provided by the Directory with our address, they may
+already know where to look us up and how to establish an acquaintance by
+asking for us by name at our door; but it is this cramming in the facts
+of our life that enables them to talk to us familiarly about our work
+until acquaintance has ripened into intimacy and the business of begging
+is put on a personal and friendly footing. Great as is the good which
+Mr. Carnegie must have hoped to accomplish by his Free Libraries, even
+he could have had no idea of the boon they might prove to Beggars and
+the healthy stimulus to the art of begging which they develop.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning our Beggars had no great fault to find with us. Their
+frock coats and top hats, signs of real British respectability, carried
+them past the British porter and the British servant. When they crossed
+our threshold,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> some remnant of the barbarous instinct of hospitality
+compelled us to receive them with civility, if not with cordiality. We
+never went so far as, with the Spaniard, to offer them our house and all
+that is in it, another instinct warning us how little they would mind
+taking us at our word; nor did hospitality push us to the extreme of
+being hoodwinked by their tales. But in those days we seldom let them go
+without something, which was always more than they deserved since they
+deserved nothing. If there is such a thing as a Beggar's Bædeker, I am
+sure our chambers were specially recommended in earlier editions. In
+justice, I must confess that they gave us entertainment for our money,
+and that the very tricks of the trade were amusing&mdash;that is, while the
+novelty lasted. We liked the splendid assurance of their manner; the
+pretended carelessness with which a foot was quickly thrust through the
+opening of the door so they could be shut out only by force; the
+important air with which they asked for a few minutes' talk; the
+insinuating smile with which they presumed that we remembered them;
+their cool assumption<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> that their burden was ours, and that the kindness
+was all on their side for permitting us the privilege of bearing it. And
+we liked no less their infinite trouble in inventing romances about
+themselves that Munchausen could not have beaten, their dramatic use of
+foggy nights and wild storms, their ingenuity in discovering a bond
+between us, and their plausibility in proving why it obliged us to meet
+their temporary difficulties which were never of course of their own
+making. Nor could we but admire their superiority to mere charity, their
+belief in the equal division of wealth, their indifference as to who did
+the work to create the wealth so long as they did not do it themselves,
+and their trust in the obligation imposed by a craft in common. Had they
+bestowed half the pains in practising this craft that they squandered in
+wheedling a few shillings from us on the strength of it, they must long
+since have been acknowledged its masters.</p>
+
+<p>The first of our Beggars, whom I probably remember the better because he
+was the first, flattered me by introducing himself as a fellow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> author
+at a time when I had published but one book and had won by it neither
+fame nor fortune. What he had published himself he did not think it
+worth while to mention, but the powers of imagination he revealed in his
+talk should have secured his reputation in print. I have rarely listened
+to anybody so fluent, I could not have got a word in had I wanted to. It
+never seemed to occur to him that I might not be as bent upon listening
+to his story as he upon telling it. He made it quite a personal matter
+between us. I would understand, he said, and the inference was that
+nobody else could, the bitterness of his awakening when the talented
+woman whom he had revered as the kindliest of her sex betrayed herself
+to him as the most cruel. For long, in her Florentine villa, he had been
+Secretary to Ouida, whom he found so charming and considerate that he
+could only marvel at all the gossip about her whims and fancies. Then,
+one morning, he was writing a letter at her dictation and by oversight
+he spelt disappointment with one p, a trifling error which, as I knew,
+any gentleman or scholar was liable to. She<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> flew into a rage, she
+turned him out of the villa without hearing a word, she pursued him into
+the garden, she set her dogs&mdash;colossal staghounds&mdash;on him, he had to run
+for his life, had even to vault over the garden gate, I could picture to
+myself with what disastrous consequences to his coat and trousers. And
+she was so vindictive that she would neither send him his clothes nor
+pay him a penny she owed him. He had too fine a sense of gallantry to go
+to law with a lady, he dared not remain in Florence where the report was
+that he went in danger of his life. There was nothing to do but to
+return to England, and&mdash;well&mdash;here he was, with a new outfit to buy
+before he could accept the admirable position offered to him, for he had
+not to assure me that a man of his competency was everywhere in demand;
+it was very awkward, and&mdash;in short&mdash;he looked to me as a fellow author
+to tide him over the awkwardness. I can laugh now at my absurd
+embarrassment when finally he came to a full stop. I did not have to
+wait for his exposure in the next number of "The Author" to realize that
+he was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> "an unscrupulous impostor." But I was too shy to call him one to
+his face, and I actually murmured polite concern and "advanced" I have
+forgotten what, to be rid of him.</p>
+
+<p>Out of compliment to J., our Beggars pose as artists no less frequently
+than as authors. If the artist himself, when accident or bad luck has
+got him into a tight place, likes best to come to his fellow artist to
+get him out of it, he is the first to pay his debts and the first debt
+he pays is to the artist who saw him through. But this has nothing to do
+with our Beggars who have chosen art as an unemployment and with whom
+accident or bad luck is deliberately chronic. They look upon art as a
+gilt-edged investment that should bring them in a dividend, however
+remote their connection with it. According to them, an artist entitles
+all his family, even to the second and third generation, to a share in
+J.'s modest income, though J. himself is not at all of their manner of
+thinking. Grandsons of famous wood-engravers, nephews of editors of
+illustrated papers, cousins of publishers of popular magazines, fathers
+of painters, brothers, sons, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> uncles of every sort of artist, even
+sisters, daughters, and aunts who take advantage of their talent for
+pathos and "crocodile wisdom of shedding tears when they should
+devour,"&mdash;all have sought to impress upon him that the sole reason for
+their existence is to live at his expense. He may suggest meekly that he
+subscribes to benevolent institutions and societies founded for the
+relief of artists and artists' families in just their difficulties. They
+are glib in excuses for making their application to him instead, and
+they evidently think he ought to be grateful to them for putting him in
+the way of enjoying the blessing promised to those who give.</p>
+
+<p>The most ambitious reckon their needs on a princely scale, as if
+determined to beg, when they have to, with all their might. One artist,
+distinguished in his youth, writes to J., from the Café Royal where, in
+his old age, he makes a habit of dining and finding himself towards
+midnight ridiculously without a penny in his pocket, an emergency in
+which a five-pound note by return of messenger will oblige. Another,
+whose business hours are as late, comes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> in person for a "fiver," his
+last train to his suburban home being on the point of starting and he as
+ridiculously penniless, except for a cheque for a hundred pounds just
+received from a publisher, which he cannot change at that time of night.
+The more humble have so much less lavish a standard that half a crown
+will meet their liabilities, or else a sum left to the generosity of the
+giver. A youth, frequent in his visits, never aspires above the fare of
+a hansom waiting below, while a painter of mature years appears only on
+occasions of public rejoicing or mourning when there is no telling to
+what extent emotion may loosen the purse strings. Some bring their
+pictures as security, or the pictures of famous ancestors who have
+become bewilderingly prolific since their death; some plead for their
+work to be taken out of pawn; some want to pose in a few days, and these
+J. recommends to the Keeper of the Royal Academy; and some are so subtle
+in their argument that we fail to follow it. We are still wondering what
+could have been the motive of the excited little man who burst in upon
+J. a few days ago with a breathless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> inquiry as to how much he charged
+for painting polo ponies for officers, and who bolted as precipitately
+when J. said that he knew nothing about polo, and had never painted a
+pony in his life. But for sheer irrelevance none has surpassed the
+American whom, in J.'s absence, I was called upon to interview, and who
+assured me that, having begun life as an artist and later turned model,
+he had tramped all the way from New Orleans to New York and then worked
+his way over on a cattleship to London with no other object in view than
+to sit to J. If I regret that my countrymen in England borrow the trick
+of begging from the native, it is some satisfaction to have them excel
+in it. When I represented to the model from New Orleans that J., as far
+as I could see, would have no use for him, he was quite ready to take a
+shilling in place of the sitting, and when I would not give him a
+shilling, he declared himself repaid by his pleasant chat with a
+compatriot. He must have thought better of it afterwards and decided
+that something more substantial was owing to him, for three weeks later
+his visit was followed by a letter:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><span class="smcap">Madam</span>,&mdash;I know how sorry you will be to hear that since my little
+talk with you I have been dangerously sick in a hospital. The
+doctors have now discharged me, but they say I must do no work of
+any kind for ten days, though an artist is waiting for me to sit to
+him for an important picture. They advise me to strengthen myself
+with nourishing food in the meanwhile. Will you therefore please
+send me</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">3 dozen new-laid eggs<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">1 lb. of fresh butter<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">1 lb. of coffee<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">1 lb. of tea<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">2 lbs. of sugar<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">1 dozen of oranges.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thanking you in advance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I am, Madam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Gratefully yours.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>There are periods when I am convinced that not art, not literature, but
+journalism is the most impecunious of the professions, and that all
+Fleet Street, to which the Quarter is fairly convenient, must be out of
+work. It is astonishing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> how often it depends upon our financial backing
+to get into work again, though dependence could not be more misplaced,
+for a certain little transaction with a guileless youth whose future
+hung on a journey to Russia has given us all the experience of the kind,
+or a great deal more than we want. As astonishing is the number of
+journalists who cherish as their happiest recollections the years they
+were with us on the staff of London, New York, or Philadelphia papers
+for which we never wrote a line. One even grew sentimental over the
+"good old days" on the Philadelphia "Public Ledger" with J.'s father
+who, to our knowledge, passed his life without as much as seeing the
+inside of a newspaper office. But the journalist persisted until J.
+vowed that he never had a father, that he never was in Philadelphia,
+that he never heard of the "Ledger": then the poor man fled.
+Astonishing, too, is the count they keep of the seasons. Disaster is
+most apt to overtake them at those holiday times when Dickens has taught
+that hearts are tender and purses overflow. For them Christmas spells
+catastrophe, and it has ceased<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> to be a surprise to hear their ring on
+Christmas Eve. As a rule, a shilling will avert the catastrophe and
+enable them to exchange the cold streets for a warm fireside, hunger for
+feasting, though I recall a reporter for whom it could not be done under
+a ticket to Paris. The Paris edition of the "New York Herald" had
+engaged him on condition that he was in the office not later than
+Christmas morning. He was ready to start, but&mdash;there was the ticket,
+and, for no particular reason except that it was Christmas Eve, J. was
+to have the pleasure of paying for it.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not apply to the 'New York Herald' office here?" J. asked.</p>
+
+<p>The reporter beamed: "My dear sir, the very thing, the very thing. Why
+didn't I think of it before? I will go at once. Thank you, sir, thank
+you!"</p>
+
+<p>He was back in an hour, radiant, the ticket in his hand, but held tight,
+so that just one end showed, as if he was afraid of losing it. "You see,
+sir, it was the right tip, but I must have some coffee at Dieppe, and I
+haven't one penny over. I can manage with a shilling, sir, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> if you
+would be so kind a couple more for a cab in Paris."</p>
+
+<p>He did not know his man. J. would go, or rather he has gone, without
+breakfast or dinner and any distance on foot when work was at stake. But
+the reporter was so startled by the suggestion of such hardships for
+himself that he dropped the ticket on the floor, and before he could
+snatch it up again J. had seen that it was good not for Paris, but for a
+'bus in the Strand.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I had been half as stern with the assistant editor from
+Philadelphia. I knew him for what he was the minute he came into the
+room. He was decently, even jauntily dressed, but there hung about him
+the smell of stale cigars and whiskey, which always hangs about those of
+our Beggars who do not fill our chambers with the sicklier smell of
+drugs. Nor did I think much of his story. He related it at length with
+elegance of manner and speech, but it was a poor one, inviting doubt.
+The card he played was the one he sent in with a well-known Philadelphia
+name on it, and he strengthened the effect by his talk of the artist
+with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> whom he once shared rooms at Eleventh and Spruce streets. That
+"fetched me." For Eleventh and Spruce streets must ever mean for me the
+red brick house with the white marble steps and green shutters, the
+pleasant garden opposite full of trees green and shady on hot summer
+days, the leisurely horse-cars jingling slowly by,&mdash;the house that is so
+big in all the memories of my childhood and youth. If I can help it,
+nobody shall ever know what his having lived in its neighbourhood cost
+me. I was foolish, no doubt, but I gave with my eyes open: sentiment
+sometimes is not too dearly bought at the price of a little folly.</p>
+
+<p>Were Covent Garden not within such easy reach of the Quarter I could
+scarcely account for the trust which the needy musician places in us.
+Certainly it is because of no effort or encouragement on our side. We
+have small connection with the musical world, and whether because of the
+size of the singers or the commercial atmosphere at Baireuth, J. since
+we heard "Parsifal" there will not be induced to go to the opera
+anywhere, or to venture upon a concert. Under the circumstances,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> the
+most imaginative musician could not make believe in a professional bond
+between us, though there is nothing to shake his faith in the kinship of
+all the arts and, therefore, in our readiness to support the stray tenor
+or violinist who cannot support himself. But imagination, anyway, is not
+his strong point. He seldom displays the richness of fancy of our other
+Beggars, and I can recall only one, a pianist who had grasped the
+possibilities of "Who's Who." His use of it, however, went far to atone
+for the neglect of the rest. With its aid he had discovered not only
+that we were Philadelphians, but that Mr. David Bispham was also, and he
+had to let off his enthusiasm over Philadelphia and "dear old Dave
+Bispham" before he got down to business. There his originality
+gave out. His was the same old story of a run of misfortunes and
+disappointments&mdash;"it could never have happened if dear old Dave Bispham
+had been in town"&mdash;and the climax was the dying wife for whom our
+sympathy has been asked too often for a particle to be left. The only
+difference was that she took rather longer in dying than usual,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> and the
+pianist returned to report her removal from the shelter of a friend's
+house to the hospital, from the hospital to lodgings, and from the
+lodgings he threatened us with the spectacle of her drawing her last
+breath in the gutter if we did not, then and there, pay his landlady and
+his doctor and his friend to whom he was deeply in debt. We were spared
+her death, probably because by that time the pianist saw the wisdom of
+carrying the story of her sufferings to more responsive ears, though it
+is not likely that he met with much success anywhere. He was too well
+dressed for the part. With his brand-new frock coat and immaculate silk
+hat, with his gold-mounted cane and Suède gloves, he was better equipped
+for the <i>jeune premier</i> warbling of love, than for the grief-stricken
+husband watching in penniless desolation by the bedside of a dying wife.</p>
+
+<p>The Quarter is also within an easy stroll for actors who, when their
+hard times come, show an unwarranted confidence in us, though J., if
+anything, disdains the theatre more than the opera. They take advantage
+of their training and bring the artist's zeal to the rôle of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> Beggars,
+but I have known them to be shocked back suddenly into their natural
+selves by J.'s blunt refusal to hear them out. One, giving the
+aristocratic name of Mr. Vivian Stewart and further describing himself
+on his card as "Lead Character late of the Lyceum," was so dismayed when
+J. cut his lines short with a shilling that he lost his cue entirely and
+whined, "Don't you think, sir, you could make it eighteenpence?" The
+most accomplished in the rôle was a young actor from York. He had the
+intelligence to suspect that <i>the</i> profession does not monopolize the
+interest of all the world and to pretend that it did not monopolize his
+own. He therefore appeared in the double part of cyclist and actor. He
+reminded J. of a cycling dinner at York several winters before at which
+both were present. J. remembered the dinner, but not the cyclist, who
+was not a bit put out but declaimed upon "the freemasonry of the wheel,"
+and anticipated J.'s joy as fellow sportsman in hearing of the new
+engagement just offered to him. It would be the making of him and his
+reputation, but&mdash;no bad luck has ever yet robbed our Beggars of that
+useful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> preposition&mdash;<i>but</i>, it depended upon his leaving London within
+an hour, and the usual events over which our Beggars never have control,
+found him with ten shillings less than his railway fare. A loan at this
+critical point would save his career, and to-morrow the money would be
+returned. His visit dates back to the early period, when our hospitality
+had not out-grown the barbarous stage, and his career was saved,
+temporarily. After six months' silence, the actor reappeared. With his
+first word of greeting he took a half sovereign from his waistcoat
+pocket and regretted his delay in paying it back. <i>But</i>, in the mean
+while, much had happened. He had lost his promising engagement; he had
+found a wife and was on the point of losing her, for she was another of
+the many wives at death's door; he had found a more promising engagement
+and was on the point of losing that too, for if he did not settle his
+landlady's bill before the afternoon had passed she would seize his
+possessions, stage properties and all, and again events beyond his
+control had emptied his pockets. He would return the ten shillings,
+<i>but</i> we must now lend<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> him a sovereign. And he was not merely surprised
+but deeply hurt because we would not, and he stayed to argue it out that
+if his wife died, and his landlady kept his possessions, and the
+engagement was broken, and his career was at an end, the guilt would be
+ours,&mdash;it was in our power to make him or to mar him. He was really
+rather good at denunciation. On this occasion it was wasted. He did not
+get the sovereign, but then neither did we get the half sovereign which
+went back into his waistcoat pocket at the end of his visit and
+disappeared with him, this time apparently forever.</p>
+
+<p>We are scarcely in as great favour as we were with our Beggars. Their
+courage now is apt to ooze from them at our door, which is no longer
+held by a British servant, but by Augustine, whom tradition has not
+taught to respect the top hat and frock coat, and before whom even the
+prosperous quail. She recognizes the Beggar at a glance, for that glance
+goes at once to his shoes, she having found out, unaided by Thackeray,
+that poverty, beginning to take possession of a man,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> attacks his
+extremities first. She has never been mistaken except when, in the dusk
+of a winter evening, she shut one of our old friends out on the stairs
+because she had looked at his hat instead of his shoes and mistrusted
+the angle at which it was pulled down over his eyes. This blunder, for
+an interval, weakened her reliance upon her own judgment, but she has
+gradually recovered her confidence, and only the Beggars whose courage
+is screwed to the sticking-point, and who sharpen their wits, succeed in
+the skirmish to get past her. When they do get past it is not of much
+use. The entertainment they gave us is of a kind that palls with
+repetition. An inclination to listen to their stories, to save their
+careers, to set them up on their feet, could survive their persecutions
+in none but the epicure in charity, which we are not. The obligation of
+politeness to Beggars under my roof weighs more lightly on my shoulders
+with their every visit, while J., as the result of long experience and
+to save bother, has reduced his treatment of them to a system and gives
+a shilling indiscriminately to each and all who call to beg&mdash;when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> he
+happens to have one himself. In vain I assure him that if his system has
+the merit of simplicity, it is shocking bad political economy, and that
+every shilling given is a shilling thrown away. In vain I remind him
+that Augustine, shadowing our Beggars from our chambers, saw the man who
+came to us solely because of the "good old days" in Philadelphia stop
+and beg at every other door in the house; that she detected one of the
+numerous heart-broken husbands hurrying back to his dying wife by way of
+the first pub round the corner; that she caught the innocent defendant
+in a lawsuit, whose solicitor was waiting downstairs, pounced upon by
+two women instead and well scolded for the poor bargain he had made. In
+vain I point out that a shilling to one is an invitation to every Beggar
+on our beat, for by some wireless telegraphy of their own our Beggars
+always manage to spread the news when shillings are in season at our
+chambers. But J. is not to be moved. He has an argument as simple as his
+system with which to answer mine. If, he says, the Beggar is a humbug, a
+shilling can do no great harm; if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> the Beggar is genuine, it may pay for
+a night's bed or for the day's bread; and he does not care if it is
+right or wrong according to political economy, for he knows for himself
+that the Beggar's story is sometimes true. The visits of Beggars who
+once came to us as friends are vivid in his memory.</p>
+
+<p>They are, I admit, visits not soon forgotten. The chance Beggar in the
+street is impersonal in his appeal, and yet he makes us uncomfortable by
+his mere presence, symbol as he is of the huge and pitiless waste of
+life. Our laugh for the bare-faced impostor at our door has a sigh in
+it, for proficiency in his trade is gained only through suffering and
+degradation. But the laugh is lost in the sigh, the discomfort becomes
+acute when the man who begs a few pence is one at whose table we once
+sat, whom we once knew in positions of authority. He cannot be reduced
+to a symbol nor disposed of by generalizations. Giving is always an
+embarrassing business, but under these conditions it fills us with
+shame, nor can we help it though oftener than not we see that the shame
+is all ours. I am miserable during<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> my interviews with the journalist
+whom we met when he was at the top of the ladder of success, and who
+slipped to the bottom after his promotion to an important editorship and
+his carelessness in allowing himself to be found, on the first night of
+his installation, asleep with his head and an empty bottle in the
+wastepaper basket; but he seems to be quite enjoying himself, which
+makes it the more tragic, as, with hand upraised, he assures me solemnly
+that J. is a gentleman, this proud distinction accorded by him in return
+for the practical working of J.'s system in his behalf. It is a trial to
+receive the popular author who won his popularity by persevering in the
+"'abits of a clerk," so he says, when he left the high office stool for
+the comfortable chair in his own study, and whose face explains too well
+what he has made of it; but it is evidently a pleasure to him, and
+therefore the more pitiful to me, when he interrupts my mornings to
+expose the critics and their iniquity in compelling him to come to me
+for the bread they take out of his mouth. Worst of all were the visits
+of the business man,&mdash;I am glad I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> can speak of them in the
+past,&mdash;though he himself never seemed conscious of the ghastly figure he
+made, for when his visible business vanished he had still his wonderful
+schemes.</p>
+
+<p>He was a man of wonderful schemes, but originally they led to results as
+wonderful. When we first knew him he ruled in an office in Bond Street,
+he had partners, he had clerks, he had a porter in livery at the door.
+He embarked upon daring adventures and brought them off. He gave
+interesting commissions, and he paid for them too, as we learned to our
+profit. He had large ideas and a wide horizon; he shrank from the cheap
+and popular, from what the people like. He was not above taking the
+advice of others upon subjects of which he was broad-minded enough to
+understand and to acknowledge his own ignorance, for he spared himself
+no pains in his determination to secure the best. And he was full of go;
+that was why we liked him. I look back to evenings when he came to
+dinner to talk over some new scheme, and when he would sit on and talk
+on after his last train&mdash;his home was in the suburbs&mdash;had long gone and,
+as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> he told us afterwards, he would have to wait in one of the little
+restaurants near Fleet Street that are open all night for journalists
+until it was time to catch the earliest newspaper train. He would drop
+in at any odd hour to discuss his latest enterprise. We were always
+seeing him, and we were always delighted to see him, enthusiasm not
+being so common a virtue in the Briton that we can afford not to make
+the most of it when it happens. We found him, as a consequence, a
+stimulating companion. I cannot say exactly when the change came; why it
+came remains a mystery to us to this day. Probably it began long before
+we realized it. The first symptoms were a trick of borrowing: at the
+outset such trivial things as a daily paper to which he should have
+subscribed, or books which he should have bought for himself. Then it
+was a half crown here and a half crown there, because he had not time to
+go back to the office before rushing to the station, or because he had
+not a cab fare with him, or because of half a dozen other accidents as
+plausible. We might not have given a second thought to all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> this but for
+the rapidity with which the half crowns developed into five shillings,
+and the five into ten, and the ten into a sovereign on evenings when the
+cab, for which we had to take his word, had been waiting during the
+hours of his stay. We could not help our suspicions, the more so because
+that indefinable but rank odour of drugs, by which our Beggars too
+frequently announce themselves, grew stronger as the amount of which he
+was in need increased. And very soon he was confiding to us the details
+of a quarrel which deprived him of his partners and their capital. Then
+the Bond Street office was given up and his business was done in some
+vague rooms, the whereabouts of which he never disclosed; only too soon
+it seemed to be done entirely in the street. We would meet him at night
+slinking along the Strand, one of the miserable shadows of humanity whom
+the darkness lures out of the nameless holes and corners where they hide
+during the day. At last came a period when he kept away from our
+chambers altogether, sending his wife to us instead. Her visits were
+after dark, usually towards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> midnight. She called for all sorts of
+things,&mdash;a week's rent, medicine from the druggist in the Strand,
+Sunday's dinner, her 'bus fare home, once I remember for an umbrella.
+She was never without an excuse for the emergency that forced her to
+disturb us, and she was no less fine than he in keeping up the fiction
+that it was an emergency, and that business prospered though removed
+from Bond Street into the Unknown. I think it was after this loan of an
+umbrella that he again came himself, nominally to return it and
+incidentally to borrow something else. I had not seen him for several
+months. It might have been years judging from his appearance, and I
+wished, as I still wish, I had not seen him then. In the Bond Street
+days he had the air of a man who lived well, and he was correct in
+dress, "well groomed" as they say. And now? His face was as colourless
+and emaciated as the faces from which I shrink in the "hunger line" on
+the Embankment; he wore a brown tweed suit, torn and mended and torn
+again, with a horrible patch of another colour on one knee that drew my
+eyes irresistibly to it; his straw hat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> was as burned and battered as
+days of tramping in the sun and nights of sleeping in the rain could
+make it. He was the least embarrassed of the two. In fact, he was not
+embarrassed at all, but sat in the chair where so often he had faced me
+in irreproachable frock coat and spotless trousers, and explained as in
+the old days his wonderful schemes, expressing again the hope that we
+would second him and, with him, again achieve success. He might have
+been a prince promising his patronage. And all the while I did not know
+which way to look, so terrible was his face pinched and drawn with
+hunger, so eloquent that staring patch on his knee. That was several
+years ago, and it was the last visit either he or his wife ever made us.
+I cannot imagine that anything was left to them except greater misery,
+deeper degradation, and&mdash;the merciful end, which I hope came swiftly.</p>
+
+<p>It is when I remember the business man and our other friends,
+fortunately few, who have followed in the same path that I am unable to
+deny the force of the argument by which J. defends his system. It may be
+that all our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> Beggars began life with schemes as wonderful and ideas as
+large, that their stories are as true, that the line between Tragedy and
+Farce was never so fine drawn as when, stepping across it, they plunged
+into the profession of having come down in the world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a><i>The Tenants</i></h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus15" id="illus15"></a>
+<img src="images/illus15.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>THE LION BREWERY</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE TENANTS</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is impossible to live in chambers without knowing something of the
+other tenants in the house. I know much even of several who were
+centuries or generations before my time, and I could not help it if I
+wanted to, for the London County Council has lately set up a plaque to
+their memory on our front wall. Not that I want to help it. I take as
+much pride in my direct descent from Pepys and Etty as others may in an
+ancestor on the Mayflower or with the Conqueror, while if it had not
+been for J. and his interest in the matter we might not yet boast the
+plaque that gives us distinction in our shabby old street, though, to do
+us full justice, its list of names should be lengthened by at least one,
+perhaps the most distinguished.</p>
+
+<p>I have never understood why Bacon was left out. Only the pedant would
+disown so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> desirable a tenant for the poor reason that the house has
+been rebuilt since his day. As it is, Pepys heads the list, and we do
+not pretend to claim that the house is exactly as it was when he lived
+in it. He never saw our Adam ceilings and fireplaces, we never saw his
+row of gables along the River front except in Canaletto's drawing of the
+old Watergate which our windows still overlook. However, except for the
+loss of the gables, the outside has changed little, and if the inside
+has been remodelled beyond recognition, we make all we can of the
+Sixteenth-Century drain-pipe discovered when the London County Council,
+in the early throes of reform, ordered our plumbing to be overhauled.
+Their certified plumber made so much of it, feeling obliged to celebrate
+his discovery with beer and in his hurry forgetting to blow out the bit
+of candle he left amid the laths and plaster, that if J. had not arrived
+just in time there would be no house now for the plaque to decorate.
+Pepys, I regret to say, waited to move in until after the Diary ended,
+so that we do not figure in its pages. Nor, during his tenancy, does he
+figure anywhere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> except in the parish accounts, which is more to his
+credit than our entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>Etty was considerate and left a record of his "peace and happiness" in
+our chambers, but I have no proof that he appreciated their beauty. If
+he liked to walk on our leads in the evening and watch the sun set
+behind Westminster, he turned his back on the River at the loveliest
+hour of all. It was his habit as Academician to work like a student at
+night in the Royal Academy Schools, then in Trafalgar Square,&mdash;an
+admirable habit, but one that took him away just when he should have
+stayed. For when evening transformed the Thames and its banks into
+Whistler's "Fairyland" he, like Paul Revere, hung out a lantern from his
+studio window as a signal for the porter, with a big stick, to come and
+fetch him and protect him from the robbers of the Quarter, which had not
+then the best of reputations. Three generations of artists climbed our
+stairs to drink tea and eat muffins with Etty, but they showed the same
+ignorance of the Thames, all except Turner, who thought there was no
+finer scenery on any river in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> Italy, and who wanted to capture our
+windows from Etty and make them his own, but who, possibly because he
+could not get them, never painted the Thames as it was and is. One other
+painter did actually capture the windows on the first floor, and, in the
+chambers that are now the Professor's, Stanfield manufactured his
+marines, and there too, they say, Humphry Davy made his safety lamp.</p>
+
+<p>We do not depend solely upon the past for our famous tenants. Some of
+the names which in my time have been gorgeously gilded inside our
+vestibule, later generations may find in the list we make a parade of on
+our outer wall. For a while, in the chambers just below ours, we had the
+pleasure of knowing that Mr. Edmund Gosse was carrying on for us the
+traditions of Bacon and Pepys. Then we have had a Novelist or two, whose
+greatness I shrink from putting to the test by reading their novels, and
+also one or more Actors, but fame fades from the mummer on the wrong
+side of the footlights. We still have the Architect who, if the tenants
+were taken at his valuation, would, I fancy, head our new list.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He is not only an architect but, like Etty,&mdash;like J. for that
+matter,&mdash;an Academician. He carries off the dignity with great
+stateliness, conscious of the vast gulf fixed between him and tenants
+with no initials after their name. Moreover, he belongs to that
+extraordinary generation of now elderly Academicians who were apparently
+chosen for their good looks, as Frederick's soldiers were for their
+size. The stoop that has come to his shoulder with years but adds to the
+impressiveness of his carriage. His air of superiority is a continual
+reminder of his condescension in having his office under our modest
+roof. His "Aoh, good-mornin'," as he passes, is a kindness, a few words
+from him a favour rarely granted, and there is no insolent familiar in
+the house who would dare approach him. Royalty, Archbishops, University
+dignitaries are his clients, and it would seem presumption for the mere
+untitled to approach him with a commission. His office is run on
+dignified lines in keeping with the exalted sphere in which he
+practises. A parson of the Church of England is his chief assistant. A
+notice on his front door warns the unwary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> that "No Commercial
+Travellers need Apply," and implies that others had better not.</p>
+
+<p>William Penn is probably the only creature in the house who ever had the
+courage to enter the Academic precincts unbidden. William was a cat of
+infinite humour, and one of his favourite jests was to dash out of our
+chambers and down the stairs whenever he had a chance; not because he
+wanted to escape,&mdash;he did not, for he loved his family as he
+should,&mdash;but because he knew that one or all of us would dash after him.
+If he was not caught in time he added to the jest by pushing through the
+Academician's open door and hiding somewhere under the Academic nose,
+and I am certain that nobody had a keener sense of the audacity of it
+than William himself. More than once a young assistant, trying to
+repress a grin and to look as serious as if he were handing us a design
+for a Deanery, restored William to his family; and once, on a famous
+occasion when, already late, we were starting for the Law Courts and the
+Witness-box, the Architect relaxed so far as to pull William out from
+among the Academic drawing-boards and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> to smile as he presented him to
+J. who was following in pursuit. Even Jove sometimes unbends, but when
+Jove is a near neighbour it is wiser not to presume upon his unbending,
+and we have never given the Architect reason to regret his moment of
+weakness.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the Architect thinks of himself, the other tenants think more
+of Mr. Square, whose front door faces ours on the Third Floor. Mr.
+Square is under no necessity of assuming an air of superiority, so
+patent to everybody in the house is his right to it. If anything, he
+shrinks from asserting himself. He had been in his chambers a year,
+coming a few months "after the fire," before I knew him by sight, though
+by reputation he is known to everybody from one end of the country to
+the other. Not only is there excitement in our house when the police
+officer appears on our staircase with a warrant for his arrest for
+murder, but the United Kingdom thrills and waits with us for the
+afternoon's Police Report. In the neighbourhood I am treated with almost
+as much respect as when I played a leading part in the Law Courts
+myself. The milkman and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> postman stop me in the street, the little
+fruiterer round the corner and the young ladies at the Temple of Pomona
+in the Strand detain me in giving me my change as if I were an accessory
+to the crime. What if the murder is only technical, Mr. Square's arrest
+a matter of form, his discharge immediate? The glory is in his position
+which makes the technical murder an achievement to be envied by every
+true-born Briton. For he is Referee at the Imperial Boxing Club, and
+therefore the most important person in the Empire, except, perhaps, the
+winning jockey at the Derby or the Captain of the winning Football Team.
+The Prime Minister, Royalty itself, would not shed a brighter lustre on
+our ancient house, and there could be no event of greater interest than
+the fatal "accident" in the ring for which Mr. Square has been so many
+times held technically responsible.</p>
+
+<p>In his private capacity Mr. Square strikes me as in no way remarkable.
+He is a medium-sized man with sandy hair and moustache, as like as two
+peas to the other men of medium height with sandy hair and moustache
+who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> are met by the thousand in the Strand. He shares his chambers with
+Mr. Savage, who is something in the Bankruptcy Court. Both are retiring
+and modest, they never obtrude themselves, and either their domestic
+life is quiet beyond reproach, or else the old builders had the secret
+of soundless walls, for no sound from their chambers disturbs us. With
+them we have not so much as the undesirable intimacy that comes from
+mutual complaint, and such is their amiability that William, in his most
+outrageous intrusions, never roused from them a remonstrance.</p>
+
+<p>I am forced to admit that William was at times ill-advised in the hours
+and places he chose for his adventures. He often beguiled me at midnight
+upon the leads that he might enjoy my vain endeavours to entice him home
+with the furry monkey tied to the end of a string, which during the day
+never failed to bring him captive to my feet. By his mysterious
+disappearances he often drove J., whose heart is tender and who adored
+him, out of his bed at unseemly hours and down into the street where, in
+pyjamas and slippers, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> the door banged to behind him, he became an
+object of suspicion. On one of these occasions, a policeman
+materializing suddenly from nowhere and turning a bull's-eye on him,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Have you seen a cat about?" J. asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Seen a cat? Oi've seen millions on 'em," said the policeman. "Wot sort
+o' cat?" he added.</p>
+
+<p>"A common tabby cat," said J.</p>
+
+<p>"Look 'ere," said the policeman, "where do you live any'ow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here," said J., who had retained his presence of mind with his
+latch-key.</p>
+
+<p>"Aoh, Oi begs your parding, sir," said the policeman. "Oi didn't see
+you, sir, in the dim light, sir, but you know, sir, there's billions o'
+tabby cats about 'ere of a night, sir. But if Oi find yours, sir, Oi'll
+fetch 'im 'ome to you, sir. S'noight, sir. Thank e' sir."</p>
+
+<p>When the kitchen door was opened the next morning, William was
+discovered innocently curled up in his blanket. And yet, when he again
+disappeared at bedtime a week or two later, J. was again up before
+daybreak,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> sure that he was on the doorstep breaking his heart because
+he could not get in. This time I followed into our little hall, and
+Augustine after me. She was not then as used to our ways as she is now,
+and I still remember her sleepy bewilderment when she looked at J., who
+had varied his costume for the search by putting on knickerbockers and
+long stockings, and her appeal to me: "<i>Mais pourquoi en bicyclette?</i>"
+Why indeed? But there was no time for explanation. We were interrupted
+by an angry but welcome wail from behind the opposite door, and we
+understood that William was holding us responsible for having got
+himself locked up in Mr. Square's chambers. We had to wake up Mr.
+Square's old servant before he could be released, but it was not until
+the next morning that the full extent of his iniquity was revealed. A
+brand-new, pale-pink silk quilt on Mr. Square's bed having appealed to
+him as more luxurious than his own blanket, he had profited by Mr.
+Square's absence to spend half the night on it, leaving behind him a
+faint impression of his dear grimy little body. Even then, Mr. Square
+remained<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> as magnanimously silent as if he shared our love for William
+and pride in his performances.</p>
+
+<p>All we know of Mr. Square and Mr. Savage, in addition to their fame and
+modesty, we have learned from their old man, Tom. He is a sailor by
+profession, and for long steward on Mr. Savage's yacht. He clings to his
+uniform in town, and when we see him pottering about in his blue reefer
+and brass buttons, Mr. Savage's little top floor that adjoins ours and
+opens out on the leads we share between us looks more than ever like a
+ship's quarter-deck. He is sociable by nature, and overflows with
+kindliness for everybody. He is always smiling, whatever he may be doing
+or wherever I may meet him, and he has a child's fondness for sweet
+things. He is never without a lemon-drop in his mouth, and he keeps his
+pockets full of candy. As often as the opportunity presents itself, he
+presses handfuls upon Augustine, whom he and his wife ceremoniously call
+"Madam," and to whom he confides the secrets of the household.</p>
+
+<p>It is through him, by way of Augustine, that we follow the movements of
+the yacht,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> and know what "his gentlemen" have for dinner and how many
+people come to see them. At times I have feared that his confidences to
+Augustine and the tenderness of his attentions were too marked, and that
+his old wife, who is less liberal with her smiles, disapproved. Over the
+<i>grille</i> that separates our leads from his, he gossips by the hour with
+Augustine, when she lets him, and once or twice, meeting her in the
+street, he has gallantly invited her into a near public to "'ave a
+drink," an invitation which she, with French scorn for the British
+substitute of the café, would disdain to accept. To other tributes of
+his affection, however, she does not object. On summer evenings he
+sometimes lays a plate of salad or stewed fruit at our door, rings,
+runs, and then from out a porthole of a window by his front door,
+watches the effect when she finds it, and is horribly embarrassed if I
+find it by mistake. In winter his offering takes the shape of a British
+mince-pie or a slice of plum pudding, and, on a foggy morning when she
+comes home from market, he will bring her a glass of port from Mr.
+Square's cellar. He is always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> ready to lend her a little oil, or milk,
+or sugar, in an emergency. Often he is useful in a more urgent crisis.
+In a sudden thunder-storm he will leap over the <i>grille</i>, shut our door
+on the leads, and make everything ship-shape almost before I know it is
+raining. He has even broken in for me when I have come home late without
+a key, and by my knocking and ringing have roused up everybody in the
+whole house except Augustine. Mrs. Tom, much as she may disapprove, is
+as kindly in her own fashion; she is quite learned in medicine, and
+knows an old-fashioned remedy for every ailment. She has seen Augustine
+triumphantly through an accident, she has cured Marcel, Augustine's
+husband, of a quinsy, and she rather likes to be called upon for advice.
+She is full of little amiabilities. She never gets a supply of eggs
+fresh from the country at a reasonable price without giving me a chance
+to secure a dozen or so, and when her son, a fisherman, comes up to
+London, she always reserves a portion of his present of fish for me. I
+could not ask for kindlier neighbours, and they are the only friends I
+have made in the house.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I was very near having friendship thrust upon me, however, by the First
+Floor Back, Mrs. Eliza Short. She is an elderly lady of generous
+proportions and flamboyant tastes, "gowned" elaborately by Jay and as
+elaborately "wigged" by Truefitt. The latest fashions and golden hair
+cannot conceal the ravages of time, and, as a result of her labours, she
+looks tragically like the unwilling wreck of a Lydia Thompson Blonde. I
+may be wrong; she may never have trod the boards, and yet I know of
+nothing save the theatre that could account for her appearance. The most
+assiduous of her visitors, as I meet them on the stairs, is an old
+gentleman as carefully made up in his way, an amazing little dandy, whom
+I fancy as somebody in the front row applauding rapturously when Mrs.
+Eliza Short, in tights and golden locks, came pirouetting down the
+stage. I should have been inclined to weave a pretty romance about them
+as the modern edition of Philemon and Baucis if, knowing Mrs. Short, it
+did not become impossible to associate romance of any kind with her.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Our acquaintance was begun by my drinking tea in her chambers the
+morning "after the fire," of which she profited unfairly by putting me
+on her visiting-list. She was not at all of Montaigne's opinion that
+"incuriosity" is a soft and sound pillow to rest a well-composed head
+upon. On the contrary, it was evident that for hers to rest in comfort
+she must first see every room in our chambers and examine into all my
+domestic arrangements. I have never been exposed to such a battery of
+questions. I must say for her that she was more than ready to pay me in
+kind. Between her questions she gave me a vast amount of information for
+which I had no possible use. She told me the exact amount of her income
+and the manner of its investment. She explained her objection to
+servants and her preference for having "somebody in" to do the rough
+work. She confided to me that she dealt at the Stores where she could
+always get a cold chicken and a bit of ham at a pinch, and the "pinch"
+at once presented itself to my mind as an occasion when the old dandy
+was to be her guest. She edified me by her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> habit of going to bed with
+the lambs, and getting up with the larks to do her own dusting. The one
+ray of hope she allowed me was the fact that her winters were spent at
+Monte Carlo. She could not pass me on the stairs, or in the hall, or on
+the street, where much of her time was lost, without buttonholing me to
+ask on what amount of rent I was rated, or how much milk I took in of a
+morning, or if the butcher sent me tough meat, or other things that were
+as little her business. I positively dreaded to go out or to come home,
+and the situation was already strained when Jimmy rushed to the rescue.
+Elia regretted the agreeable intimacies broken off by the dogs whom he
+loved less than their owners, but I found it useful to have a cat Mrs.
+Short could not endure, to break off my intimacy with her, and he did it
+so effectually that I could never believe it was not done on purpose.
+One day, when she had been out since ten o'clock in the morning, she
+returned to find Jimmy locked up in her chambers alone with her bird.
+That the bird was still hopping about its cage was to me the most
+mysterious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> feature in the whole affair, for Jimmy was a splendid
+sportsman. After his prowls in the garden he only too often left behind
+him a trail of feathers and blood-stains all the way up the three
+flights of our stairs. But if the bird had not escaped, Mrs. Short could
+hardly have been more furious. She demanded Jimmy's life, and when it
+was refused, insisted on his banishment. She threatened him with poison
+and me with exposure to the Landlord. For days the Housekeeper was sent
+flying backwards and forwards between Mrs. Short's chambers and ours,
+bearing threats and defiances. Jimmy, who knew as well as I did what was
+going on, rejoiced, and from then until his untimely death never ran
+downstairs or up&mdash;and he was always running down or up&mdash;without stopping
+in front of her door, giving one unearthly howl, and then flying; and
+never by chance did he pay the same little attention to any one of the
+other tenants.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Short does not allow me to forget her. As her voice is deep and
+harsh and thunders through the house when she buttonholes somebody else,
+or says good-bye to a friend at her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> door, I hear her far more
+frequently than I care to; as she has a passion for strong scent, I
+often smell her when I do not see her at all; and as in the Quarter we
+all patronize the same tradesmen, I am apt to run into her not only on
+our stairs, but in the dairy, or the Temple of Pomona, or further afield
+at the Post Office. Then, however, we both stare stonily into vacancy,
+failing to see each other, and during the sixteen years since that first
+burst of confidence, we have exchanged not a word, not as much as a
+glance: an admirable arrangement which I owe wholly to Jimmy.</p>
+
+<p>With her neighbours on the other side of the hall, Mrs. Short has
+nothing in common except permanency as tenant. Her name and the sign of
+the Church League faced each other on the First Floor when we came to
+our chambers; they face each other still. Her golden wig is not oftener
+seen on our stairs than the gaiters and aprons of the Bishops who rely
+upon the League for a periodical cup of tea; her voice is not oftener
+heard than the discreet whispers of the ladies who attend the Bishops in
+adoring crowds. But Jimmy's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> intervention was not required to maintain
+the impersonality of my relations with the League. It has never shown an
+interest in my affairs nor a desire to confide its own to me. Save for
+one encounter we have kept between us the distance which it should be
+the object of all tenants to cultivate, and I might never have looked
+upon it as more than a name had I not witnessed its power to attract
+some of the clergy and to enrage others. Nothing has happened in our
+house to astound me more than the angry passions it kindled in two of
+our friends who are clergymen. One vows that he will never come to see
+us again so long as to reach our chambers he must pass the League's
+door; the second reproaches us for having invited him, his mere presence
+in the same house being sufficient to ruin his clerical reputation. As
+the League is diligently working for the Church of which both my friends
+are distinguished lights, I feel that in these matters there are fine
+shades beyond my unorthodox intelligence. It is also astounding that the
+League should inflame laymen of no religious tendencies whatever to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>
+more violent antagonism. Friends altogether without the pale have taken
+offence at what they call the League's arrogance in hanging up its signs
+not only at its front door, but downstairs in the vestibule, and again
+on the railings without, and they destroyed promptly the poster it once
+ventured to put upon the stairs, assuring us that theirs was righteous
+wrath, and then, in the manner of friends, leaving us to face the
+consequences.</p>
+
+<p>For myself I bear no ill-will to the League. I may object to the success
+with which it fills our stairs on the days of its meetings and
+tea-parties, but I cannot turn this into a pretext for quarrelling,
+while I can only admire the spirit of progress that has made it the
+first in the house to do its spring-cleaning by a vacuum cleaner and to
+set up a private letter-box. I can only congratulate it on the
+prosperity that has caused the overflow of its offices into the next
+house, and so led indirectly to the one personal encounter I have
+referred to. A few of the rooms were to let, and J.'s proposal to set up
+his printing-press in one of them involved us in a correspondence with
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> Secretary. Then I called, as by letter we were unable to agree upon
+details. The League, with a display of hospitality that should put the
+Architect to shame, bids everybody enter without knocking. But when I
+accepted this Christian invitation, I was confronted by a tall,
+solemn-faced young man, who informed me that the Secretary was "engaged
+in prayer," and I got no further than the inner hall. As I failed to
+catch the Secretary in his less professional moments, and as his
+devotions did not soften his heart to the extent of meeting us halfway,
+we quickly resumed the usual impersonality of our relations.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot imagine our house without the Church League and Mrs. Eliza
+Short, the Architect and Mr. Square. Were their names to vanish from the
+doors where I have seen them for the last sixteen years, it would give
+me the same sense of insecurity as if I suddenly looked out of my window
+to a Thames run dry, or to a domeless city in the distance. With this
+older group of tenants, who show their respect for a house of venerable
+age and traditions by staying in it, I think we are to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> included and
+also the Solicitor of the Ground Floor Front. He has been with us a
+short time, it is true, but he succeeded our old Insurance Agent whom
+nothing save death could have removed, and for years before he lived no
+further away than Peter the Great's house across the street, where he
+would be still, had it not been torn down over his head to make way for
+the gaudy, new, grey stone building which foretells the beginning of the
+end of our ancient street. The Solicitor cloisters himself in his
+chambers more successfully even than the Architect or the Church League,
+and I have never yet laid eyes on him or detected a client at his door.</p>
+
+<p>I wish the same could be said of our other newcomers who, with rare
+exceptions, exhibit a restlessness singularly unbecoming in a house that
+has stood for centuries. In the Ground Floor Back change for long was
+continued. It was the home of a Theatrical Agent and his family, and
+babyish prattle filled our once silent halls; it was the office of a
+Music Hall Syndicate, and strange noises from stranger instruments came
+floating out and up our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> stairs, and blonde young ladies in towering
+hats blocked the door. Then a Newspaper Correspondent drifted in and
+drifted out again; and next a publisher piled his books in the windows,
+and made it look so like the shop which is against the rules of the
+house that his disappearance seemed his just reward.</p>
+
+<p>After this a Steamship Company took possession, bringing suggestions of
+sunshine and spice with the exotic names of its vessels and the far-away
+Southern ports for which they sailed,&mdash;bringing, too, the spirit of
+youth, for it employed many young men and women whom I would meet in
+couples whispering on the stairs or going home at dusk hand in hand.
+Tender little idyls sprang up in our sober midst. But the staff of young
+lovers hit upon the roof as trysting-place at the luncheon hour, running
+races and playing tag up there, and almost tumbling through our
+skylight. Cupid, sporting overhead with wings exchanged for hob-nailed
+boots, was unendurable, and I had to call in the Landlord's Agent. He is
+the unfortunate go-between in all the tenants' differences and
+difficulties: a kind, weary, sympathetic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> man, designed by Nature for
+amiable, good-natured communication with his fellow men, and decreed by
+Fate and his calling to communicate with them constantly in their most
+disagreeable moods and phases. Half my fury evaporated at sight of his
+troubled face, and I might have endured the races and games of tag could
+I have foreseen that, almost as soon as he put a stop to them, the
+Steamship Company would take its departure.</p>
+
+<p>The Professor who then came in is so exemplary a tenant that I hope
+there will be no more changes in the Ground Floor Back. He is a tall,
+ruddy, well-built man of the type supposed to be essentially British by
+those who have never seen the other type far more general in the
+provincial town or, nearer still, in the East of London. He is of
+middle-age and should therefore have out-grown the idyllic stage, and
+his position as Professor at the University is a guarantee of sobriety
+and decorum. I do not know what he professes, but I can answer for his
+conscientiousness in professing it by the regularity with which, from
+our windows, I see him of a morning crossing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> the garden below on his
+way to his classes. His household is a model of British propriety. He is
+cared for by a motherly housekeeper, an eminently correct man-servant,
+and a large hound of dignified demeanour and a sense of duty that leads
+him to suspect an enemy in everybody who passes his master's door. His
+violence in protesting against unobjectionable tenants like ourselves
+reconciles me to dispensing with a dog, especially as it ends with his
+bark. It was in his master's chambers that our only burglar was
+discovered,&mdash;a forlorn makeshift of a burglar who got away with nothing,
+and was in such an agony of fright when, in the small hours of the
+morning, he was pulled out from under the dining-room table, that the
+Professor let him go as he might have set free a fly found straying in
+his jam-pot.</p>
+
+<p>The Professor, as is to be expected of anybody so unmistakably British,
+cultivates a love for sport. I suspect him of making his amusements his
+chief business in life, as it is said a man should and as the Briton
+certainly does. He hunts in the season, and, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> he motors down to the
+meet, he is apt to put on his red coat and white breeches before he
+starts, and they give the last touch of respectability to our
+respectable house. He is an ardent automobilist, and his big motor at
+our door suggests wealth as well as respectability. This would have
+brought us into close acquaintance had he had his way. Sport is supposed
+to make brothers of all men who believe in it, but from this category I
+must except J. at those anxious moments which sport does not spare its
+followers. He was preparing to start somewhere on his fiery motor
+bicycle, and the Professor, who had never seen one before, wanted to
+know all about it. J., deeper than he cared to be in carburettors and
+other mysterious matters, was not disposed to be instructive, and I
+think the Professor was ashamed of having been beaten in the game of
+reserve by an American, for he has made no further advances. His most
+ambitious achievement is ballooning, to which he owes a fame in the
+Quarter only less than Mr. Square's. We all watch eagerly, with a
+feeling of proprietorship, for the balloons on the afternoons<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> when
+balloon races and trials start from the Crystal Palace or Ranelagh. I
+have caught our little fruiterer in the act of pointing out the
+Professor's windows to chance customers; and on those days I am absorbed
+in the sporting columns of the afternoon paper, which, at other times, I
+pass over unread. He has now but to fly to complete his triumph and the
+pride of our house in him.</p>
+
+<p>Restlessness also prevails in the Second Floor Back, and as we are
+immediately above, we suffer the more. Hardly a tenant has remained
+there over a year, or a couple of years at most, and all in succession
+have developed a talent for interfering with our comfort. First, an
+Honourable occupied the chambers. His title was an unfailing
+satisfaction to Mrs. Haines, the Housekeeper, who dwelt upon it
+unctuously every time she mentioned him. I am not learned in Debrett and
+Burke and may not have appreciated its value, but he might have been
+Honourable ten times over and it would not have reconciled me to him as
+neighbour. He was quite sure, if I was not, that he was a great deal
+better than anybody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> else, and he had the Briton's independent way of
+asserting it. He slammed behind him every door he opened, and when the
+stairs were barricaded by himself, his friends, or his parcels, and we
+wanted to pass, he failed to see us as completely as if we had been Mr.
+Wells's Invisible Man. He went to the City in the morning and was away
+all day, even an Honourable being sometimes compelled to pretend to
+work. But this was no relief. During his absence his servants availed
+themselves of the opportunity to assert their independence, which they
+did with much vigour. When they were not slamming doors they were
+singing hymns, until Mrs. Eliza Short from her chambers below and we
+from ours above, in accord the first and only time for years, joined in
+protest, and drove Mrs. Haines to the unpleasant task of remonstrating
+with an Honourable.</p>
+
+<p>The Honourable who had come down from the aristocracy was followed by a
+<i>Maître d'Hôtel</i> who was rapidly rising in rank, and was therefore under
+as urgent necessity to impress us with his importance. Adolf was an
+Anglicized German, with moustaches like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> the Kaiser's, and the swagger
+of a drum-major. He treated our house as if it was the dining-room under
+his command, locking and unlocking the street door, turning on and out
+the lights on the stairs at any hour that suited him, however
+inconvenient to the rest of us. He littered up the hall with his
+children and his children's perambulators and hobby-horses, just where
+we all had to stumble over them to get in or out. Nobody's taxi tooted
+so loud as his, not even the Honourable's door had shut with such a
+bang. Augustine's husband being also something in the same profession,
+they both despised the Adolfs for putting on airs though no better than
+themselves, while the Adolfs despised them for not having attained the
+same splendid heights, and the shaking of my rugs out of the back
+windows was seized upon as the excuse for open warfare. Augustine said
+it was there they should be shaken according to the law in Paris, which
+she thought good enough for London. Mrs. Adolf protested that the
+shaking sent all the dust into her rooms. Augustine, whose English is
+small and what there is of it not beyond<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> reproach, called Mrs. Adolf
+"silly fou," which must have been annoying, or harangued her in French
+when Mrs. Adolf, who could not understand, suspected an offence in every
+word.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Adolf wrote to the Agent, to the Landlord, to me; she declared she
+would summons me to the County Court. Between letters she watched at her
+window for the rugs, and there both her servant and her charwoman made
+faces at Augustine, who has a nice sense of justice and a temper that
+does not permit her, with Elizabeth Bennet's father, to be satisfied by
+laughing in her turn at those who have made sport of her. I trembled for
+the consequences. But at the critical moment, Adolf was promoted to the
+more splendid height of Manager and a larger salary; the taxi was
+replaced by a motor-car of his own; Mrs. Adolf arrayed herself in muslin
+and lace for the washtub, in nothing less elegant than velvet for the
+street, and they left our old-fashioned chambers for the marble halls
+and gilded gorgeousness of the modern mansion.</p>
+
+<p>Of the several tenants after the Adolfs, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> seem to remember little save
+the complaints we interchanged. I tried my best to do as I would be done
+by and to keep out of their way, but accident was always throwing us
+together to our mutual indignation. There was the Bachelor whose
+atrocious cook filled our chambers with the rank odours of smoked
+herring and burnt meat, and whose deserted ladylove filled the stairs
+with lamentations. There was the young Married Couple into whose bathtub
+ours overflowed. There was the Accidental Actress whose loud voice and
+heavy boots were the terror not only of our house, but of the street,
+whose telephone rang from morning till night, whose dog howled all
+evening when he was left alone as he usually was, and whose rehearsals
+in her rooms interrupted the work in ours with ear-piercing yells of
+"Murder" and "Villain."</p>
+
+<p>I cannot recall them all, so rapidly did they come and go. We began to
+fear that the life of the tenant was, as Tristram Shandy described the
+life of man, a shifting from sorrow to sorrow. We lived in an atmosphere
+of fault-finding, though when there was serious cause<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> for complaint,
+not a murmur could be wrung from the tenant below or, for that matter,
+from a tenant in the house. All, like true Britons, refused to admit the
+possibility of interests in common, and would not stir a hand, however
+pressing the danger, so long as they were not disturbed. If our chambers
+reeked with smoke and the smell of burning wood, they accepted the
+information with calm indifference because theirs did not. Nor did it
+serve as a useful precedent if, as it happened, smoke and smell were
+traced again to a fire, smouldering as it had been for nobody knew how
+long, in the cellar of the adjoining house, separated from ours only by
+the "party wall" belonging to both: that ingenious contrivance of the
+builder for creating ill-will between next-door neighbours. They
+declined to feel the bannisters loose under their grasp, or to see the
+wide gap opened in the same party wall after the fall of the roof of
+Charing Cross Station had shaken the Quarter to its foundations and made
+us believe for a moment that London was emulating Messina or San
+Francisco. And I must add, so characteristic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> was it, that the Agent
+dismissed our fears as idle, and that the Surveyor, sent at our request
+by the County Council, laughed us to scorn. But we laughed best, for we
+laughed last. A second Surveyor ordered the wall to be pulled down as
+unsafe and rebuilt, and the Agent in the end found it prudent to support
+the bannisters with iron braces.</p>
+
+<p>When, after these trials and tribulations, Mr. Allan took the Second
+Floor Back we thought the Millennium had come. He was a quiet man,
+employed in the morning, so we were told, in writing a life of Chopin,
+and in the evening, as we heard for ourselves, in playing Chopin
+divinely. The piano is an instrument calculated to convert an otherwise
+harmless neighbour into a nuisance, but of him it made a delight. He was
+waited upon by a man as quiet, whose consideration for the tenants went
+to the length of felt slippers in the house, who never slammed doors nor
+sang, who never even whistled at his work. An eternity of peace seemed
+to open out before us, but, as they say in novels, it was not to be. Our
+confidence in Mr. Allan was first shaken by what I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> still think an
+unjustified exhibition of nerves. One night, or rather one early
+morning, a ring at our door-bell startled us at an hour when, in my
+experience, it means either a fire or an American cablegram. It was
+therefore the more exasperating, on opening the door, to be faced by an
+irate little man in pyjamas and smoking jacket who wanted to know when
+we proposed to go to bed. Only after J.'s answer "when we are ready,"
+did we know it was Mr. Allan by his explanation that his bed was under
+the room where we were walking about, that the floor was thin, and that
+he could not sleep. J. would not enter into an argument. He said the
+hour was not the most appropriate for a criticism of the construction of
+the house which, besides, was at all hours the Landlord's and not his
+affair, and Mr. Allan had the grace to carry his complaint no further.
+It may have occurred to him on reflection that it was not our fault if
+he had chosen a room to sleep in just below the room we used to sit and
+see our friends in.</p>
+
+<p>Had I borne malice, I should not have had to wait long for my revenge,
+nor to plan it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> myself. Not many days later, Mr. Allan's servant,
+watering the flowers on the open balcony at Mr. Allan's window, watered
+by mistake the new Paris bonnet of the lady of the Ground Floor Back who
+was coming home at that very minute. Under the circumstances few women
+would not have lost their temper, but few would have been so prompt in
+action. She walked straight upstairs to Mr. Allan's chambers, the wreck
+in her hand. The servant opened to her knock, but she insisted upon
+seeing the master.</p>
+
+<p>"I have come, Allan, to tell you what I think of the conduct of your
+servant," she said, when the master appeared. "Yes, I call you Allan,
+for I mean to talk to you as man to man," which she proceeded to do.</p>
+
+<p>I did not hear the talk, but it was almost a week before I heard the
+piano again. Poor Mr. Allan! And this proved a trifle to the worse
+humiliation he was soon to endure.</p>
+
+<p>As I sat with a book by my lamp one evening before dinner, shrieks from
+his chambers and a crash of crockery sent me rushing to the door and out
+upon the landing, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> Augustine at my heels. Old Tom and his wife
+arrived there simultaneously, and, looking cautiously over the
+bannisters, I saw an anxious crowd looking up as cautiously from the
+hall on the Ground Floor. The shrieks developed into curses intermingled
+with more riotous crashing of china. The Housekeeper, urged by the crowd
+below, crept all unwilling to Mr. Allan's door and knocked. The door was
+flung open, and, before she ventured to "beg pardon but the noise
+disturbed the other tenants," Mr. Allan's hitherto well-behaved servant
+greeted her with a volley of blood-curdling epithets and the smash of
+every pane of glass in the upper panel of the door, and down she fled
+again. He bolted out after her, but looking up and catching a glimpse of
+Tom, peacefully sucking a lemon-drop, he became so personal that Tom and
+his wife retreated hastily, and for the first time the smile faded from
+the old man's face. In a moment's lull I heard Mr. Allan's voice, low
+and entreating, then more curses, more crashes. I should not have
+thought there was so much glass and crockery to be broken in the whole
+house.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Presently a policeman appeared, and then a second. The door was open,
+but the servant was busy finishing up the crockery. Mr. Allan spoke to
+them, and then, like a flash, the servant was there too.</p>
+
+<p>"I dare you to let them come in!" he yelled, so loud he could be heard
+from the top to the bottom of the house. "I dare you to let them come
+in! I dare you to give me in charge! I dare you! I dare you!"</p>
+
+<p>And Mr. Allan did not dare, that was the astonishing part of it. And he
+never lost his temper. He argued with the policemen, he plead with the
+servant, while one group on our landing and another on the Ground Floor
+waited anxiously. The policemen did not desert us but stood guard on the
+Second Floor, which was a reassurance, until gradually the yells were
+lowered, the crashes came at longer intervals, and at last, I suppose in
+sheer exhaustion, the servant relapsed into his usual calm, Mr. Allan
+"sported his oak," and I learned how truly an Englishman's home is his
+castle.</p>
+
+<p>The Housekeeper spent the evening on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> stairs gossiping at every
+door. There was not much to learn from her. A mystery was hinted&mdash;many
+mysteries were hinted. The truth I do not know to this moment. I only
+know that before the seven days of our wonder were over, the Agent, more
+careworn than ever if that were possible, made a round of visits in the
+house, giving to each tenant an ample and abject apology written by Mr.
+Allan. At the end of the quarter, the Second Floor Back was again to
+let.</p>
+
+<p>We should have parted with Mr. Allan less light-heartedly could we have
+anticipated what was in store for us. He was no sooner gone than the
+Suffragettes came in.</p>
+
+<p>I have no quarrel on political grounds with the Suffragettes.
+Theoretically, I believe that women of property and position should have
+their vote and that men without should not, but I think it a lesser evil
+for women to be denied the vote than for the suffrage to become as
+universal for women as for men, and to grant it on any other conditions
+would be an indignity. I state the fact to explain that I am without
+prejudice. I do not argue, for, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> tell the truth, shocking as it may
+be, I am not keen one way or the other. Life for me has grown crowded
+enough without politics, and years have lessened the ardour for abstract
+justice that was mine when, in my youth, I wrote the "Life of Mary
+Wollstonecraft," and militant Suffragettes as yet were not. Ours are of
+the most militant variety, and it is not their fault if the world by
+this time does not know what this means. Even so, on general principles,
+I should have no grievance against them. Every woman is free to make
+herself ridiculous, and it is none of my business if my neighbours
+choose to make a public spectacle of themselves by struggling in the
+arms of policemen, or going into hysterics at meetings where nobody
+wants them; if they like to emulate bad boys by throwing stones and
+breaking windows, or if it amuses them to slap and whip unfortunate
+statesmen who, physically, could easily convince them of their
+inferiority. But when they make themselves a nuisance to me personally I
+draw the line. And they are a nuisance to me.</p>
+
+<p>They have brought pandemonium into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> Quarter where once all was
+pleasantness and peace. Of old, if the postman, the milkman, a messenger
+boy, and one or two stray dogs and children lingered in our street, we
+thought it a crowd; since the coming of the Suffragettes, I have seen
+the same street packed solid with a horde of the most degenerate
+creatures in London summoned by them "to rush the House of Commons."
+They have ground their hurdy-gurdies at our door, Heaven knows to what
+end; vans covered with their posters have obstructed our crossing;
+motor-cars adorned with their flags have missed fire and exploded in our
+street; and they have had themselves photographed as sandwiches on our
+Terrace. Our house is in a turmoil from morning till night with women
+charging in like a mob, or stealing out like conspirators. Their badges,
+their sandwich boards, their banners lie about in our hall, so much in
+everybody's way that I sympathized with the infuriated tenant whom I
+caught one night kicking the whole collection into the cellar. They talk
+so hard on the stairs that often they pass their own door and come on to
+ours, bringing Augustine from her work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> and disturbing me at mine, for
+she can never open to them without poking her head into my room to tell
+me, "<i>Encore une sale Suffragette!</i>" In their chambers they never stop
+chattering, and their high shrill treble penetrates through the floor
+and reaches us up above. The climax came with their invasion of our
+roof.</p>
+
+<p>This roof, built "after the fire," is a modern invention, designed for
+the torture of whoever lives underneath. It is flat, with a beautiful
+view to be had among the chimney-pots and telephone wires; it is so thin
+that a pigeon could not waddle across without being heard by us; and as
+it is covered with gravel, every sound is accompanied by a scrunching
+warranted to set the strongest nerves in a quiver. We had already been
+obliged to represent to the Agent that it was not intended for the
+Housekeeper's afternoon parties or young people's games of tag, that
+there were other, more suitable places where postmen could take a rest,
+or our actress recite her lines, or lovers do their courting amid the
+smuts. Our patience, indeed, had been so tried in one way or another<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>
+that at the first sound from above, at any hour of the day or night, J.
+was giving chase to the trespassers, and they were retreating before the
+eloquence of his attack. It was in a corner of this roof, just above the
+studio and in among wood-enclosed cisterns, that the Suffragettes
+elected to send off fire-balloons, which, in some way best known to
+themselves, were to impress mankind with the necessity of giving them
+the vote. The first balloon floated above the chimney-tops, a sheet of
+flame, and was dropping, happily into the Thames, when J., straight from
+his printing-press, in blouse, sleeves rolled up, arms and hands black
+with ink, a cap set sideways, was on the roof, and the Secretary of the
+Militants and a young man in the brown suit and red tie that denote the
+Socialist, in their hands matches and spirits of wine, were flying
+downstairs. I was puzzled to account for their meekness unless it was
+that never before had they seen anybody so inky, never before listened
+to language so picturesque and American. J., without giving them time to
+take breath, called in the Landlord's Agent, supported by the
+Landlord's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> Solicitor, and they were convinced of the policy of
+promising not to do it again. And of course they did.</p>
+
+<p>A week later the Prime Minister was unveiling a statue, or performing
+some equally innocent function in the garden below our windows, when the
+Suffragettes, from the roofs of near woodsheds, demanded him through a
+megaphone to give Votes to Women. We followed the movement with such
+small zest that when we were first aware something out of the common was
+going on in the Quarter, the two heroines were already in the arms of
+policemen, where of late so much of the Englishwoman's time has been
+spent, and heads were at every window up and down our street,
+housekeepers at every door, butchers' and bakers' boys grouped on the
+sidewalk, one or two tradesmen's carts drawn up in the gutter,
+battalions of police round the corner. The women no doubt to-day boast
+of the performance as a bold strike for freedom, and recall with pride
+the sensation it created.</p>
+
+<p>At this point I lost sight of the conflict on the roof below, for, from
+the roof above, a balloon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> shot upwards, so high that only the angels
+could have read the message it bore. The familiar scrunching, though
+strangely muffled, was heard, and J., again in blouse and ink, was up
+and away on a little campaign of his own. This time he found six women,
+each with a pair of shoes at her side and her feet drawn up under her,
+squatting in a ring behind the cisterns, bending over a can of spirits
+of wine, and whispering and giggling like school-girls.</p>
+
+<p>"It won't go off," they giggled, and the next minute all chance of its
+ever going off was gone, for J. had seized the balloon and torn it to
+tatters.</p>
+
+<p>"You have destroyed our property," shrieked a venerable little old lady,
+thin and withered, with many wrinkles and straggling grey hair.</p>
+
+<p>He told her that was what he had intended to do.</p>
+
+<p>"But it cost ten shillings," she squeaked in a tremor of rage, and with
+an attempt at dignity, but it is as hard to be dignified, as Corporal
+Trim found it to be respectful, when one is sitting squat upon the
+ground.</p>
+
+<p>A younger woman, golden-haired, in big<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> hat and feathers, whom the
+others called Duchess, demanded "Who are you anyhow?" And when I
+consider his costume and his inkiness I wonder he had not been asked it
+long before.</p>
+
+<p>"You can go downstairs and find out," he said, "but down you go!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment's visible embarrassment, and they drew their stocking
+feet closer up under them. J., in whom they had left some few shreds of
+the politeness which he, as a true American, believes is woman's due,
+considerately looked the other way. As soon as they were able to rise up
+in their shoes, they altogether lost their heads. The Housekeeper and
+the Agent, summoned in the mean time, were waiting as they began to
+crawl down the straight precipitous ladder from the roof. In an agony of
+apprehension, the women clutched their skirts tight about them,
+protesting and scolding the while. The little old lady tried to escape
+into our chambers, one or two stood at the top of the stairs, cutting
+off all approach, the others would not budge from our narrow landing. A
+telegraph boy and a man with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> parcel endeavoured to get past them and
+up to us, but they would not give way an inch. Finally in despair, J.
+gently collected them and pushed them down the stairs towards their own
+door.</p>
+
+<p>"We will have you arrested for assault!" the little old lady shrieked.</p>
+
+<p>"We charge you with assault and battery," the golden-haired lady
+re-echoed from below.</p>
+
+<p>And we heard no more, for at last, with a sigh of relief, J. could get
+to our door and shut out the still ascending uproar.</p>
+
+<p>But that was not the end of it. If you can believe it, they were on the
+roof again within an hour, getting themselves and their megaphone
+photographed, for the fight for freedom would not be half so sweet
+without the publicity of portraits in the press. And we were besieged
+with letters. One Suffragette wrote that an apology was due,&mdash;yes, J.
+replied, due to him. A second lectured him on the offence given to her
+"dear friend, the Duchess," for to become a Suffragette is not to cease
+to be a snob, and warned him that the Duchess&mdash;who was the golden-haired
+lady and may have had the bluest blood of England in her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> veins, but who
+looked more like one of the Gaiety girls, from whom the stock of the
+British nobility has been so largely replenished&mdash;and the Duke intended
+to consult their Solicitor if regret were not expressed. And the
+Landlord's Agent called, and the Landlord's Solicitor followed, and a
+Police Inspector was sent from Scotland Yard for facts,&mdash;and he
+reprimanded J. for one mistake, for not having locked the door on the
+inside when they were out,&mdash;and the insurance people wanted to know
+about the fire-balloons, and everybody with any possible excuse came
+down upon us, except the police officer with the warrant to arrest J.
+for assault and battery.</p>
+
+<p>It is all over now. If the Suffragettes still hatch their plots under
+our roof, they are denied the use of it for carrying them out. They
+leave us in peace for the moment, the quiet which is the charm of an old
+house like ours has returned to it, and outwardly the tenants cultivate
+the repose and dignity incumbent upon them as the descendants of Bacon
+and Pepys and the inheritors of a great past.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a><i>The Quarter</i></h2>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus16" id="illus16"></a>
+<img src="images/illus16.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>OPPOSITE TO SURREY</h3>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>X</h2>
+
+<h3>THE QUARTER</h3>
+
+
+<p>My windows command the Quarter, and what they do not overlook, Augustine
+does.</p>
+
+<p>Some people might think there could not be much to overlook, for the
+Quarter is as quiet and secluded as the Inns of Court. J. is forever
+boasting that if he is in London he is not of it, and that he lives the
+simple life, with Charing Cross just round the corner. The "full tide of
+existence" sweeps by, seldom overflowing into the Quarter, which is one
+of the most difficult places in all the town to find for those who do
+not know the way. Only two streets lead directly into it from anywhere,
+and they lead directly nowhere out of it again; nor do the crowds in the
+near Strand as much as see the dirty courts and dark alleys which are my
+short cuts, much less the underground passages which serve the same
+purpose,&mdash;the mysterious labyrinth of carpenters-shops and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> warehouses
+and vast wine-cellars, grim and fantastic and unbelievable as Ali Baba
+and the whole Arabian Nights, burrowed under the Quarter and approached
+by tunnels, so picturesque that Géricault made a lithograph of one when
+he was in London, so murderous that to this day they are infested with
+police who turn a flashing bull's-eye upon you as you pass. Altogether,
+the Quarter is a "shy place" full of traps for the unwary. I have had
+friends, coming to see me for the first time, lose themselves in our
+underground maze; I have known the crowd, pouring from the Strand on
+Lord Mayor's Day, get hopelessly entangled in our network; as a rule,
+nobody penetrates into it except on business or by chance.</p>
+
+<p>But for all that, there is a good deal to see, and the Quarter, quiet
+though it may be, is never dull as I watch it from my high windows. To
+the front I look out on the Thames: down to St. Paul's, up to
+Westminster, opposite to Surrey, and, on a clear day as far as the
+hills. Trains rumble across the bridges, trams screech and clang along
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> Embankment, tugs, pulling their line of black barges, whistle and
+snort on the river. The tide brings with it the smell of the sea and, in
+winter, the great white flights of gulls. At night myriads of lights
+come out, and always, at all hours and all seasons, there is movement
+and life,&mdash;always I seem to feel the pulse of London even as I have its
+roar in my ears.</p>
+
+<p>To the east I look down to streets of houses black with London grime,
+still stately in their old-fashioned shabbiness, as old as the
+Eighteenth Century, which I have read somewhere means the beginning of
+the world for an American like myself.</p>
+
+<p>To the west I tower over a wilderness of chimney-pots, for our house is
+built on the edge of a hill, not very high though the London horse
+mistakes it for an Alpine pass, but high enough to lift our walls, on
+this side sheer and cliff-like, above an amazing collection of tumbled,
+weather-worn, red-tiled roofs, and crooked gables sticking out at
+unexpected angles, that date back I am not to be bullied by facts into
+saying how far, and that stretch away, range upon range, to loftier
+houses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> beyond, they in their turn over-shadowed by the hotels and clubs
+on the horizon, and in among them, an open space with the spire of St.
+Martin-in-the-Fields springing up out of it, dark by day, a white shadow
+by night,&mdash;our ghost, we call it.</p>
+
+<p>And most wonderful of all is the expanse of sky above and around us,
+instead of the tiny strip framed in by the narrow street which is the
+usual share of the Londoner. We could see the sun rise every morning
+behind St. Paul's, if we were up in time, and of course if there was a
+sun every morning in London to rise. Over the river, when fog and mist
+do not envelop it as in a shroud, the clouds&mdash;the big, low, heavy
+English clouds&mdash;float and drift and scurry and whirl and pile themselves
+into mountains with a splendour that might have inspired Ruskin to I do
+not know how many more chapters in "Modern Painters" had he lived in the
+Quarter. Behind our collection of tumbled roofs and gables awry, the
+sun&mdash;always provided there is a sun&mdash;sets with a dramatic gorgeousness
+that, if it were only in any remote part of the world, the Londoner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>
+would spare himself no time nor trouble to see, but that, because it is
+in London, remains a spectacle for us to enjoy by ourselves. And the
+wonder grows with the night,&mdash;the river, with its vague distances and
+romantic glooms and starlike lights, losing itself in mystery, and
+mystery lurking in the little old streets with their dark spectral mass
+of houses, broken by one or two spaces of flat white wall, and always in
+the distance the clubs and hotels, now castles and cathedrals, and the
+white tapering ghost pointing heavenward. With so stupendous a spectacle
+arranged for my benefit, is it any marvel that much of my time is spent
+at my windows? And how can I help it if, when I am there, I see many
+things besides the beauty that lured us to the Quarter and keeps us in
+it?</p>
+
+<p>Hundreds of windows look over into mine: some so far off that they are
+mere glittering spots on a rampart of high walls in the day-light, mere
+dots of light at dusk; some as carefully curtained as if the "Drawn
+Blinds" or "Green Shutters" of romance had not stranger things to hide
+from the curious. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> others are too near and too unveiled for what
+goes on behind them to escape the most discreet. In what does go on
+there is infinite variety, for the Quarter, like the Inns of Court, is
+let out in offices and chambers, and the house that shelters but one
+tenant is the exception, if indeed it exists.</p>
+
+<p>All these windows and the people I see through them have become as much
+a part of my view as the trains and the trams, the taxis and the tugs. I
+should think the last days of the Quarter were at hand if, the first
+thing in the morning, I did not find the printer hard at work at his
+window under one of the little gables below; or if, the last thing at
+night, I missed from the attic next door to him the lamp of the artist,
+who never gets up until everybody else is going to bed; or if, at any
+hour I looked over, people were not playing cards in the first-floor
+windows of the house painted white, or frowzy women were not leaning out
+of the little garret windows above, or the type-writer was not clicking
+hard in the window with the white muslin curtains and the pot of
+flowers, or the manicurist not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> receiving her clients behind the window
+with the staring, new yellow blinds. I should regret even the fiery,
+hot-tempered, little woman who jumps up out of the attic window
+immediately below us, like a Jack-in-the-box, and shakes her fist at us
+every time Augustine shakes those unfortunate rugs which are perpetually
+getting us into trouble with our neighbours. I should think the picture
+incomplete if, of an evening, the diners out were to disappear from
+behind the windows of the big hotel, though nothing makes me more
+uncomfortably conscious of the "strangely mingled monster" that London
+is, than the contrast between them lingering over the day's fourth
+banquet, and the long black "hunger line" forming of a winter morning
+just beside Cleopatra's Needle and waiting in dreary patience for the
+daily dole of bread and soup.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot imagine the Quarter without actors and actresses in possession
+of dozens of its windows, the attraction to them less the associations
+with Garrick than the convenient proximity to the principal theatres; or
+without the Societies, Institutes, Leagues, Bureaus,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> Companies,
+Associations, and I know not what else, that undertake the charge of
+everything under the sun, from ancient buildings to women's freedom; or
+without the clubs, where long-haired men and Liberty-gowned women meet
+to drink tea and dabble in anarchy; where more serious citizens propose
+to refashion the world and mankind, and, incidentally, British politics;
+where, in a word, philanthropists of every pattern fill the very air of
+the Quarter with reform, until my escape from degenerating into a
+reformer despite myself seems a daily miracle, and the sham Bohemianism
+of the one club willing to let the rest of the world take care of itself
+becomes almost a virtue.</p>
+
+<p>It is probably the seclusion, the cloistral repose, of the Quarter that
+attracts the student and the scholar. Up at my windows, the busy bee
+would be given points in the art of improving each shining hour. In
+every direction I turn I am so edified by the example of hard work that
+I long for the luxury of being shocked by idleness.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the window I look down into at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> right angles from the studio, the
+Scientist in white apron, surrounded by bottles and retorts and
+microscopes, industriously examines germs from morning till midnight,
+oblivious to everything outside, which for too long meant, among other
+things, showers of soft white ashes and evil greasy smoke and noxious
+odours sent by the germs up through his chimneys into our studio; nor
+could the polite representations of our Agent that he was a public
+nuisance rouse him from his indifference, since he knew that the smoke
+was not black enough to make him one technically. It was only when J.
+protested, with an American energy effective in England, that the germs
+ceased to trouble us and I could bear unmoved the sight of the
+white-aproned Scientist behind his window.</p>
+
+<p>In the new house with the flat roof the Inventor has his office, and I
+am sure it is the great man himself I so often see walking gravely up
+and down among the chimney-pots, evolving and planning new wireless
+wonders; and I am as sure that the solemn St. Bernard who walks there
+too is his, and, in some way it is not for me to explain, part<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> of the
+mysterious machinery connecting the Quarter with the rest of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Plainly visible in more rooms than one, bending over high drawing-tables
+not only through the day but on into the night, are many Architects,
+with whom the Quarter has ever been in favour since the masters who
+designed it years ago made their headquarters in our street, until
+yesterday, when the young man who is building the Town Hall for the
+County Council moved into it, though, had the County Council had its
+way, there would be no Quarter now for an Architect to have his office
+in. Architectural distinction, or picturesqueness, awakes in the London
+official such a desire to be rid of it that, but for the turning of the
+worm who pays the rates, our old streets and Adam houses would have been
+pulled down to make place for the brand-new municipal building which, as
+it is, has been banished out of harm's way to the other side of the
+river.</p>
+
+<p>Busier still than the Architects are the old men who live in the two
+ancient houses opposite mine, where the yellow brick just shows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> here
+and there through the centuries' grime, and where windows as
+grimy&mdash;though a clause in the leases of the Quarter demands that windows
+should be washed at least once a month&mdash;open upon little ironwork
+balconies and are draped with draggled lace-curtains, originally white
+but now black. I have no idea who the old men are, or what is the task
+that absorbs them. They look as ancient as the houses and so alike that
+I could not believe there were three of them if, every time I go to my
+dining-room window, I did not see them all three in their chambers, two
+on the third floor, to the left and right of me, one on the floor below
+about halfway between,&mdash;making, J. says, an amusing kind of pattern.
+Each lives alone, each has a little table drawn up to his window, and
+there they sit all day long, one on an easy leather chair, one on a
+stiff cane-bottomed chair, one on a hard wooden stool,&mdash;that is the only
+difference. There they are perpetually sorting and sifting papers from
+which nothing tears them away; there they have their midday chop and
+tankard of bitter served to them as they work, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> there they snatch a
+few hasty minutes afterwards to read the day's news. They never go out
+unless it is furtively, after dark, and I have never failed to find them
+at their post except occasionally on Sunday morning, when the chairs by
+the tables are filled by their clothes instead of themselves, because, I
+fancy, the London housekeeper, who leaves her bed reluctantly every day
+in the week but who on that morning is not to be routed out of it at
+all, refuses to wake them or to bring them their breakfast. They may be
+solicitors, but I do not think so; they may be literary men, but I do
+not think that either; and, really, I should just as lief not be told
+who and what they are, so much more in keeping is mystery with the grimy
+old houses where their old days are spent in endless toiling over
+endless tasks.</p>
+
+<p>If the three old men are not authors, plenty of my other neighbours are,
+as they should be out of compliment to Bacon and Pepys, to Garrick and
+Topham Beauclerk, to Dr. Johnson and Boswell, to Rousseau and David
+Copperfield, and to any number besides who, in their different days,
+belonged to or haunted the Quarter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> and made it a world of memories for
+all who came after. I have authors on every side of me: not Chattertons
+undiscovered in their garrets, but celebrities wallowing in success,
+some of whom might be the better for neglect. Many a young enthusiast
+comes begging for the privilege of gazing from my windows into theirs. I
+have been assured that the walls of the Quarter will not hold the
+memorial tablets which we of the present generation are preparing for
+their decoration. The "best sellers" are issued, and the Repertory
+Theatre nourished, from our midst.</p>
+
+<p>The clean-shaven man of legal aspect who arrives at his office over the
+way as regularly as the clock strikes ten, who leaves it as regularly at
+one for his lunch, and as regularly in the late afternoon closes up for
+the day, is the Novelist whose novels are on every bookstall and whose
+greatness is measured by the thousands and hundreds of thousands into
+which they run. He does not do us the honour of living in the Quarter,
+but comes to it simply in office hours, and is as scrupulously punctual
+as if his business were with briefs rather than with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> dainty trifles
+lighter than the lightest froth. No clerk could be more exact in his
+habits. Anthony Trollope was not more methodical. This admirable
+precision might cost him the illusions of his admirers, but to me it is
+invaluable. For when the wind is in the wrong direction and I cannot
+hear Big Ben, or the fog falls and I cannot see St. Martin's spire, I
+have only to watch for him to know the hour, and in a household where no
+two clocks or watches agree as to time, the convenience is not to be
+exaggerated.</p>
+
+<p>My neighbour from the house on the river-front, next to Peter the
+Great's, who often drops in for a talk and whom Augustine announces as
+<i>le Monsieur du Quartier</i>, is the American Dramatist, author of the play
+that was the most popular of the season last year in New York. I should
+explain, perhaps, that Augustine has her own names for my friends, and
+that usually her announcements require interpretation. For instance, few
+people would recognize my distinguished countryman, the Painter, in <i>le
+Monsieur de la Dame qui ne monte jamais les escaliers</i>, or the
+delightful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> Lady Novelist in <i>la Demoiselle aux chats</i>, or&mdash;it is wiser
+not to say whom in <i>le Monsieur qui se gobe</i>. But I have come to
+understand even her fine shades, and when she announces <i>les Gens du
+Quartier</i>, then I know it is not the American Dramatist, but the British
+Publicist and his wife who live in Garrick's house, and who add to their
+distinction by dining in the room where Garrick died.</p>
+
+<p>The red curtains a little further down the street belong to the
+enterprising Pole, who, from his chambers in the Quarter, edits the
+Polish Punch, a feat which I cannot help thinking, though I have never
+seen the paper, must be the most comic thing about it. In the house on
+one side, the author who is England's most distinguished Man of Letters
+to-day, and who has become great as a novelist, began life as an
+architect. From the house on the other side, the Poet-Patriot-Novelist
+of the Empire fired, or tried to fire, the Little Englanders with his
+own blustering, knock-you-down Imperialism, and bullied and flattered
+them, amused and abused them, called them names they would not have
+forgiven from any other man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> living and could not easily swallow from
+him, and was all the while himself so simple and unassuming that next to
+nobody knew he was in the Quarter until he left it. The British
+Dramatist close by, who conquers the heart of the sentimental British
+public by sentiment, is just as unassuming. He is rarely without a play
+on the London stage, rarely without several on tour. He could probably
+buy out everybody in the Quarter, except perhaps the Socialist, and he
+can lose a little matter of sixteen thousand pounds or so and never miss
+it. But so seldom is he seen that you might think he was afraid to show
+himself. "You'd never know 'e was in the 'ouse, 'e's that quiet like.
+Why, 'e never gives no trouble to nobody," the Housekeeper has confided
+to me. He shrinks from putting his name on his front door, though by
+this time he must be used to its staring at him in huge letters from
+posters and playbills all over the world. Perhaps it is to give himself
+courage that he keeps a dog who is as forward as his master is retiring,
+and who is my terror. I am on speaking terms with most of the dogs of
+the Quarter, but with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> Dramatist's I have never ventured to exchange
+a greeting. I happened to mention my instinctive distrust, one day, to a
+friend who has made the dog's personal acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>"He eats kids!" was my friend's comment. Then he added: "You have seen
+dozens of children go up to the Dramatist's room, haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I answered, for it was a fact.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, and have you ever seen one come down again?" And if you will
+believe it, I never have.</p>
+
+<p>A door or so from the Dramatist, but on the opposite side of the street,
+the Socialist's windows face mine. I cannot, with any respect for truth,
+call him unassuming; modesty is not his vice. It is not his ambition to
+hide his light under a bushel,&mdash;or rather a hogshead; on the contrary,
+as he would be the first to admit, it could not flare on too many
+housetops to please him. When I first met him, years before we again met
+in the Quarter, the world had not heard of him, but he was quite frank
+in his determination that it should, though to make it hear, he would
+have to play a continuous solo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> on his own cornet, until he impressed
+somebody else with the necessity of blowing it for him. Besides, he has
+probably never found other people as entertaining as himself, which is
+an excellent reason why he should not keep himself out of his talk and
+his writing,&mdash;and he is talking and writing all the time. His is a
+familiar voice among the Fabians, on public platforms, and at private
+meetings, and for a very little while it was listened to by bewildered
+Borough Councillors. He has as many plays to his credit as the British
+Dramatist, as many books as the Novelist, and I recall no other writer
+who can equal him in the number and length of his letters to the press.
+As he courts, rather than evades, notice, I doubt if he would be
+embarrassed to learn how repeatedly I see him doing his hair and beard
+in the morning and putting out his lights at night, or how entirely I am
+in his confidence as to the frequency of his luncheon parties and the
+number of his guests. Were I not the soul of discretion I could publish
+his daily <i>menu</i> to the world, for his kitchen opens itself so
+aggressively to my view that I see into it as often as into my own.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For that matter, I have under my inspection half the kitchens in the
+Quarter, and the things I witness in them might surprise or horrify more
+than one woman who imagines herself mistress in her own house. I have
+assisted at the reception of guests she never invited; I understand, if
+she does not, why her gas and electric-light bills reach such fabulous
+figures; I could tell her what happens when her motor-car disappears
+round the corner,&mdash;for, seedy and down-at-heel as the Quarter may
+appear, the private motor is by no means the exception among the
+natives. Only the other day, when the literary family, who are as
+unsuspicious as they are fond of speed, started in their motor for the
+week-end, they could have got no further than the suburbs before the
+cloth was laid in their dining-room, their best china, silver, and glass
+brought out, flowers, bottles, and siphons in place, and their cook at
+the head of their table "entertaining her friends to luncheon." The
+party were lingering over the fruit when suddenly a motor-horn was heard
+in the street. There was a look of horror on all their faces, one short
+second<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> of hesitation, and then a wild leap from the table, and, in a
+flash, flowers, bottles, and siphons, china, glass, and silver were
+spirited away, the cloth whisked off, chairs set against the wall. As
+the dining-room door closed on the flying skirt of the last guest, the
+cook looked out of the window, the horn sounded again, and the motor was
+round the corner in the next street, for it was somebody else's, and the
+literary family did not return until Monday.</p>
+
+<p>The Socialist, who deals in paradox and the inconsequent, also has his
+own car. Now that Socialism is knocking at our doors, the car tooting at
+his, come to fetch him from his town house to his country house or off
+to the uttermost ends of the earth, toots reassurance into our hearts.
+Under such conditions we should not mind being Socialists ourselves.
+However, he does make one protest against Individualism in which I
+should not care to join him, for he goes shares in his personality and
+has perpetrated a double in the Quarter,&mdash;a long lean man, with grizzled
+red hair and beard, who is clothed in brown Jaegers, whose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> face has the
+pallor of the vegetarian, and who warns us of the manner of equality we
+may expect under the Socialist's régime. I dread to think of the
+complications there might be were the double not so considerate as to
+carry a black bag and wear knee-breeches. A glance at hands and legs
+enables us to distinguish one from the other and to spare both the
+inconvenience of a mistaken identity. The double, like the old men
+opposite, remains one of the mysteries of the Quarter. Nobody can
+explain his presence in our midst, nobody has ever spoken to him, nobody
+can say where he comes from with his black bag in the morning, where he
+goes with it in the evening, or even where he stops in the Quarter. I
+doubt if the Socialist has yet, like the lovers in Rossetti's picture,
+met himself, for surely no amount of Socialism could bear the shock of
+the revelation that must come with the meeting.</p>
+
+<p>If many books are written in the Quarter, more are published from it,
+and the number increases at a rate that is fast turning it into a new
+Paternoster Row. I am surrounded by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> publishers: publishers who are
+unknown outside our precincts, and publishers who are unknown in them
+save for the names on their signs; publishers who issue limited editions
+for the few, and publishers who apparently publish for nobody but
+themselves; and, just where I can keep an eye on his front door, <i>the</i>
+Publisher, my friend, who makes the Quarter a centre of travel and a
+household word wherever books are read, and uses his house as a
+training-school for young genius. More than one lion now roaring in
+London served an apprenticeship there; even Mr. Chatteron passed through
+it; and I am always encountering minor poets or budding philosophers
+going in or coming out, ostensibly on the Publisher's affairs, but
+really busy carrying on the Quarter's traditions and preparing more
+memorial tablets for its overladen walls. The Publisher and his wife
+live a few doors away, where they are generously accumulating fresh
+associations and memories for our successors in the Quarter. To keep
+open house for the literary men and women of the time is a fashion among
+publishers that did not go<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> out with the Dillys and the Dodsleys, and an
+occasional Boswell would find a note-book handy behind the windows that
+open upon the river from the Publisher's chambers.</p>
+
+<p>Associations are being accumulated also by the New York Publisher, who,
+accompanied by his son, the Young Publisher, and by his birds, arrives
+every year with the first breath of spring. It is chiefly to artists
+that his house is open, though he gives the literary hallmark to the
+legacy of memories he will leave to the Quarter. I cannot understand why
+the artist, to whom our streets and our houses make a more eloquent
+appeal than to the author, has seldom been attracted to them since the
+days when Barry designed his decorations in the "grand manner" for our
+oldest Society's lecture-hall, and Angelica Kauffmann painted the
+ceiling in Peter the Great's house, or since the later days when Etty
+and Stanfield lived in our house. Now and then I come across somebody
+sketching our old Watergate or our shabby little shops and corners, but
+only the youth in the attic below has followed the example given by J.,
+whose studio continues the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> exception in the Quarter: the show-place it
+ought to be for the beauty of river and sky framed in by the windows.</p>
+
+<p>But to make up for this neglect, as long a succession of artists as used
+to climb to Etty's chambers visit the New York Publisher in the quiet
+rooms with the prints on the walls and the windows that, for greater
+quiet, look away from our quiet streets and out upon our quieter backs
+and gables. Much good talk is heard there, and many good stories, and by
+no means the least good from the New York Publisher himself. It is
+strange that, loving quiet as he does, he should, after the British
+Dramatist, have contributed more to my disquiet than anybody in the
+Quarter: a confession for which I know he will think I merit his scorn.
+But the birds it is his fancy to travel with are monsters compared to
+the sparrows and pigeons who build their nests in the peaceful trees of
+the Quarter, and I am never at ease in their company. I still tremble
+when I recall the cold critical eye and threatening beak of his
+favourite magpie, nor can I think calmly of his raven whom, in an access
+of mistaken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> hospitality, I once invited to call with him upon William
+Penn. William had never seen a live bird so near him in his all too
+short life, and what with his surprise and curiosity, his terror and
+sporting instincts, he was so wrought up and his nerves in such a state
+that, although the raven was shut up safe in a cage, I was half afraid
+he would not survive the visit. I have heard the New York Publisher say
+of William, in his less nervous and more normal moments, that he was not
+a cat but a demon; the raven, in my opinion, was not exactly an angel.
+But thanks to the quality of our friendship, it also survived the visit
+and, in spite of monstrous birds, strengthens with the years.</p>
+
+<p>It is not solely from my windows that I have got to know the Quarter.
+Into my Camelot I can not only look, but come down, without webs flying
+out and mirrors cracking, and better still, I might never stir beyond
+its limits, and my daily life and domestic arrangements would suffer no
+inconvenience. The Quarter is as "self-contained" as the flats
+advertised by our zealous Agent who manages it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> Every necessity and
+many luxuries into the bargain are to be had within its boundaries. It
+may resemble the Inns of Court in other ways, but it does not, as they
+do, encourage snobbishness by placing a taboo upon the tradesman. We
+have our own dairy, our own green-grocer, our own butcher, though out of
+sympathy with Augustine I do my marketing in Soho. At one corner our
+tobacconist keeps his shop, at another our tailor. If my drains go wrong
+I call in the local plumber; when I want a shelf put up or something
+mended I send for the local carpenter; I could summon the local builder
+were I inclined to make a present of alterations or additions to the
+local landlord. I but step across the street if I am in need of a
+Commissioner of Oaths. I go no further to get my type-writing done. Were
+my daily paper to fail me, the local gossip of the Quarter would allow
+me no excuse to complain of dearth of news; the benevolent would exult
+in the opportunity provided for benevolence by our slums where the
+flower-girls live; the energetic could walk off their energy in our
+garden where the County Council's band plays<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> on summer evenings. There
+is a public for our loungers, and for our friends a hotel,&mdash;the house
+below the hill with the dingy yellow walls that are so shiny-white as I
+see them by night, kept from time immemorial by Miss Brown, where the
+lodger still lights himself to bed by a candle and still eats his meals
+in a Coffee Room, and where Labour Members of Parliament, and South
+Kensington officials, and people never to be suspected of having
+discovered the Quarter, are the most frequent guests.</p>
+
+<p>The Quarter has also its own population, so distinct from other
+Londoners that I am struck by the difference no further away than the
+other side of the Strand. Our housekeepers are a species apart, so are
+our milkmen behind their little carts. Our types are a local growth.
+Nowhere else in London could I meet anybody in the slightest like the
+pink-eyed, white-haired, dried-up little old man, with a jug in his
+hand, whom I see daily on his way to or from our public-house; or like
+the middle-aged dandy who stares me out of countenance as he saunters
+homeward in the afternoon, a lily or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> chrysanthemum, according to the
+season, in one hand and a brown paper bag of buns in the other; or like
+the splendid old man of military bearing, with well-waxed moustache and
+well-pointed beard, whose Panama hat in summer and fur-lined cloak in
+winter have become as much fixtures in the Quarter as our Adam houses or
+our view of the river, and who spends his days patrolling the Terrace in
+front of our frivolous club or going into it with members he happens to
+overtake at the front door,&mdash;where his nights are spent no native of the
+Quarter can say. Nor is any other crowd like our crowd that collects
+every Sunday evening as St. Martin's bells begin to ring for evening
+service, that grows larger and larger until streets usually empty are
+packed solid, and that melts away again before ten. It is made up mostly
+of youths to whom the cap is as indispensable a symbol of class as the
+silk hat further west, and young girls who run to elaborate hair and
+feathers. They have their conventions, which are strictly observed. One
+is to walk with arms linked; a second, to fill the roadway as well as
+the pavement, to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> despair of taxicabs and cycles endeavouring to
+toot and ring a passage through; a third, to follow the streets that
+bound the Quarter on three sides and never to trespass into others. How
+the custom originated, I leave it to the historian to decide. It may go
+back to the Britons who painted themselves blue, it may be no older than
+the Romans. All I know with certainty is that the Sunday evening walk is
+a ceremony of no less obligation for the Quarter than the Sunday morning
+parade in the Row is for Mayfair.</p>
+
+<p>We are of accord in the Quarter on the subject of its charm and the
+advantage of preserving it,&mdash;though on all others we may and do disagree
+absolutely and continually fight. I have heard even our postman brag of
+the beauty of its architecture and the fame of the architects who built
+it more than a century and a half ago, and I do not believe as a rule
+that London postmen could say who built the houses where they deliver
+their letters, or that it would occur to them to pose as judges of
+architecture. Because we love the Quarter we watch over it with
+unceasing vigilance. We<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> are always on the look-out for nuisances and
+alert to suppress them. In fact, if not in name, we constitute a sort of
+League for the Prevention of Dirt and Disorder in the Quarter. There is
+a distinct understanding that, in an emergency, we may rely upon one
+another for mutual support, which is the easier as we all have the same
+Landlord and can make the same Agent's life a martyrdom until the evil
+is remedied. The one thing we guard most zealously is the quiet, the
+calm, conducive to work. We wage war to the death against street noises
+of every kind. No "German Band" would invade our silent precincts. The
+hurdy-gurdy is anathema,&mdash;I have always thought the Suffragettes'
+attempt to play it through our streets their bravest deed. If we endure
+the bell of the muffin man on Sunday and the song of the man who wants
+us to buy his blooming lavender, it is because both have the sanction of
+age. We make no other concession, and our severity extends to the native
+no less than to the alien. When, in the strip of green and gravel below
+my windows, the members of our frivolous Club took to shooting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span>
+themselves with blank cartridges in the intervals of fencing, though the
+noise was on the miniature scale of their pistols, we overwhelmed the
+unfortunate Agent with letters until a stop was put to it. When our
+Territorials, in their first ardour, chose our catacombs for their
+evening bugle-practice, we rose as one against them. Beggars, unless
+they ring boldly at our front doors and pretend to be something else,
+must give up hope when they enter the Quarter. For if the philosopher
+thinks angels and men are in no danger from charity, we do not, and
+least of all the lady opposite, to whom alms-giving in our street is as
+intolerable as donkeys on the green were to Betsy Trotwood. One of my
+friends has never dared to come to see me, except by stealth, since the
+day she pounced upon him to ask him what he meant by such an exhibition
+of immorality, when all he had done was to drop a penny into the hand of
+a small boy at his cab-door, and all he had meant was a kindly fellow
+feeling, having once been a small boy himself.</p>
+
+<p>We defend the beauty of the Quarter with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> equal zeal. We do what we can
+to preserve the superannuated look which to us is a large part of its
+charm, and we cry out against every new house that threatens discord in
+our ancient harmony. Excitement never raged so high among us as when the
+opposite river banks were desecrated by the advertiser, and from shores
+hitherto but a shadow in the shadowy night, there flamed forth a horrid
+tout for Tea. We had endured much from a sign of Whiskey further down
+the river,&mdash;Whiskey and Tea are Britain's bulwarks,&mdash;but this was worse,
+for it flared and glared right into our faces, and the vile letters
+which were red and green one second and yellow the next ran in a long
+line from top to bottom of the high shot-tower. In this crude light, our
+breweries ceased to be palaces in the night, our <i>campanili</i> again
+became chimneys. Gone was our Fairyland, gone our River of Dreams. The
+falling twilight gave a hideous jog to our memory, and would not let us
+forget that we lived in a nation of shopkeepers. The Socialist, part of
+whose stock-in-trade is perversity, liked it, or said he did,&mdash;and I
+really<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> believe he did,&mdash;but the other tenants were outraged, and an
+indignation meeting was called. Four attended, together with the
+Solicitor and the Agent of the estate, and the Publisher, who took the
+chair. It was of no use. We learned that our joy in the miracle of night
+might be destroyed forever, but if we could prove no physical harm,
+legal redress would be denied to us, and our defiance of the Vandal must
+be in vain. And so there the disgraceful advertisement remains, flaring
+and glaring defiance at us across the river. When the Socialist gets
+tired of it, he goes off to his country place in his forty-horse-power
+motor-car, but we, in our weariness, can escape only to bed.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">The Riverside Press<br />
+CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS<br />
+U. S. A.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Our House, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our House, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Our House
+       And London out of Our Windows
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
+
+Release Date: February 2, 2012 [EBook #38749]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR HOUSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[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.
+
+Trim was good to her, that is, unless he was in liquor, which I gathered
+he mostly was. He was fond of his glass, sociable-like, and with his
+week's wages in his pocket, could not keep away from his pals in the
+public. Trimmer's objection to beer was accounted for when I discovered
+that Trim's fondness for it often kept the little house without bread
+and filled it with curses. There were never blows. Trim was good, she
+reminded me, and the liquor never made him wicked,--only made him leave
+his wife to starve, and then curse her for starving. She was tearful
+with gratitude when she remembered his goodness in not beating her; but
+when her story reached the day of his tumbling off a high ladder--the
+beer was in his legs--and being brought back to her dead, it seemed to
+me a matter of rejoicing. Not to her, however, for she had to give up
+the little house and go into service again, and she missed Trim and his
+curses. She did not complain. She always found good places, and she
+adopted a little boy, a sweet little fellow, like a son to her, whom she
+sent to school and started in life, and had never seen since. But young
+men will be young men, and she loved him. She was very happy at the
+corset and petticoat shop, where she lived while he was with her. After
+business hours she was free, for apparently the responsibility of being
+alone in a big house all night was as simple for her as braving a
+burglar in our chambers. The young ladies were pleasant, she was well
+paid. Then her older brother's wife died and left him with six children.
+What could she do but go and look after them when he asked her?
+
+He was well-to-do, and his house and firing and lighting were given him
+in addition to high wages. He did not pay her anything, of course,--she
+was his sister. But it was a comfortable home, the children were fond of
+her,--and also of her cakes and puddings,--and she looked forward to
+spending the rest of her days there. But at the end of two years he
+married again, and when the new wife came, the old sister went. This was
+how it came about that, without a penny in her pocket, and with nothing
+save her old twisted hands to keep her out of the workhouse, she was
+adrift again at an age which made her undesirable to everybody except
+foolish people like ourselves, fresh from the horrors of our experience
+with 'Enrietter. It never occurred to Trimmer that there was anything to
+complain of. For her, all had always been for the best in the best of
+all possible worlds. That she had now chanced upon chambers and two
+people and one dissipated cat to take care of, and more to do than ought
+to have been asked of her, was but another stroke of her invariable good
+luck.
+
+She had an amazing faculty of turning all her little molehills into
+mountains of pleasure. I have never known anything like the joy she got
+from her family, though I never could quite make out why. She was
+inordinately proud of the brother who had been so ready to get rid of
+her; the sister-in-law who had replaced her was a paragon of virtue; the
+nieces were so many infant phenomena, and one Sunday when, with the
+South London world of fashion, they were walking in the Embankment
+Gardens, she presumed so far as to bring them up to our chambers to show
+them off to me, and the affectionate glances she cast upon their
+expansive lace collars explained that she still had her uses in the
+family. There was also a cousin whom, to Trimmer's embarrassment, I
+often found in our kitchen; but much worse than frequent visits could
+be forgiven her, since it was she who, after Jimmy's inglorious end,
+brought us William Penn, a pussy then small enough to go into her
+coat-pocket, but already gay enough to dance his way straight into our
+hearts.
+
+Trimmer's pride reached high-water mark when it came to a younger
+brother who travelled in "notions" for a city firm. His proprietor was
+the personage the rich Jew always is in the city of London, and was made
+Alderman and Lord Mayor, and knighted and baroneted, during the years
+Trimmer spent with us. She took enormous satisfaction in the splendour
+of this success, counting it another piece of her good luck to be
+connected, however remotely, with anybody so distinguished. She had
+almost an air of proprietorship on the 9th of November, when from our
+windows she watched his Show passing along the Embankment; she could not
+have been happier if she herself had been seated in the gorgeous
+Cinderella coach, with the coachman in wig and cocked hat, and the
+powdered footmen perched up behind; and when J. went to the Lord
+Mayor's dinner that same evening at the Guildhall, it became for her
+quite a family affair. I often fancied that she thought it reflected
+glory on us all to have the sister of a man who travelled in "notions"
+for a knight and a Lord Mayor, living in our chambers; though she would
+never have taken the liberty of showing it.
+
+Trimmer's joy was only less in our friends than in her family, which was
+for long a puzzle to me. They added considerably to her already heavy
+task, and in her place, I should have hated them for it. It might amuse
+us to have them drop in to lunch or to dinner at any time, and to gather
+them together once a week, on Thursday evening. But it could hardly
+amuse Trimmer, to whose share fell the problem of how to make a meal
+prepared for two go round among four or six, or how to get to the front
+door and dispose of hats and wraps in chambers so small that the weekly
+gathering filled even our little hall to overflowing. There was always
+some one to help her on Thursdays, and she had not much to do in the way
+of catering. "Plain living and high talking" was the principle upon
+which our evenings were run, and whoever wanted more than a sandwich or
+so could go elsewhere. But whatever had to be done, Trimmer insisted on
+doing, and, moreover, on doing it until the last pipe was out and the
+last word spoken; and as everybody almost was an artist or a writer, and
+as there is no subject so inexhaustible as "shop," I do not like to
+remember how late that often was. It made no difference. She refused to
+go to bed, and in her white cap and apron, with her air of old retainer
+or family nurse, she would waddle about through clouds of tobacco-smoke,
+offering a box of cigarettes here, a plate of sandwiches there, radiant,
+benevolent, more often than not in the way, toward the end looking as if
+she would drop, but apparently enjoying herself more than anybody, until
+it seemed as if the unkindness would be not to let her stay up in it.
+
+More puzzling to me than her interest in all our friends was her choice
+of a few for her special favour. I could not see the reason for her
+choice, unless I had suspected her of a sudden passion for literature
+and art. Certainly her chief attentions were lavished on the most
+distinguished among our friends, who were the very people most apt to
+put her devotion to the test. She adored Whistler, though when he was in
+London he had a way not only of dropping in to dinner, but sometimes of
+dropping in so late that it had to be cooked all over again. She was so
+far from minding that, at the familiar sound of his knock and ring, her
+face was wreathed in smiles, she seemed to look upon the extra work as a
+privilege, and I have known her, without a word, trot off to the
+butcher's or the green-grocer's, or even to the tobacconist's in the
+Strand for the little Algerian cigarettes he loved. She went so far as
+to abandon certain of her prejudices for his benefit, and I realized
+what a conquest he had made when she resigned herself to cooking a fowl
+in a casserole and serving it without bread-sauce. She discovered the
+daintiness of his appetite, and it was delightful to see her hovering
+over him at table and pointing out the choice bits in every dish she
+passed. She was forever finding an excuse to come into any room where
+he might be. Altogether, it was as complete a case of fascination as if
+she had known him to be the great master he was; and she was his slave
+long before he gave her the ten shillings, which was valued
+sentimentally as I really believe a tip never was before or since by a
+British servant.
+
+Henley was hardly second in her esteem, and this was the more
+inexplicable because he provided her with so many more chances to prove
+it. Whistler then lived in Paris, and appeared only now and then. Henley
+lived in London half the week, and rarely missed a Thursday. For it was
+on that evening that the "National Observer," which he was editing, went
+to press, and the printers in Covent Garden were conveniently near to
+our chambers. His work done, the paper put to bed, about ten or eleven
+he and the train of young men then in attendance upon him would come
+round; and to them, in the comfortable consciousness that the rest of
+the week was their own, time was of no consideration. Henley exulted in
+talk: if he had the right audience he would talk all night; and the
+right audience was willing to listen so long as he talked in our
+chambers. But Trimmer, in the kitchen, or handing round sandwiches,
+could not listen, and yet she lingered as long as anybody. It might be
+almost dawn before he got up to go, but she was there to fetch him his
+crutch and his big black hat, and to shut the door after him. Whatever
+the indiscretion of the hour one Thursday, she welcomed him as cordially
+the next, or any day in between when inclination led him to toil up the
+three long flights of stairs to our dinner-table.
+
+Phil May was no less in her good graces, and his hours, if anything,
+were worse than Henley's, since the length of his stay did not depend on
+his talk. I never knew a man of less conversation. "Have a drink," was
+its extent with many who thought themselves in his intimacy. This was a
+remark which he could scarcely offer to Trimmer at the front door, where
+Whistler and Henley never failed to exchange with her a friendly
+greeting. But all the same, she seemed to feel the charm which his
+admirers liked to attribute to him, and to find his smile, when he
+balanced himself on the back of a chair, more than a substitute for
+conversation, however animated. The flaw in my enjoyment of his company
+on our Thursdays was the certainty of the length of time he would be
+pleased to bestow it upon us. Trimmer must have shared this certainty,
+but to her it never mattered. She never failed to return his smile,
+though when he got down to go, she might be nodding, and barely able to
+drag one tired old foot after the other.
+
+She made as much of "Bob" Stevenson, whose hours were worse than
+anybody's. We would perhaps run across him at a press view of pictures
+in the morning and bring him back to lunch, he protesting that he must
+leave immediately after to get home to Kew and write his article before
+six o'clock. And then he would begin to talk, weaving a romance of any
+subject that came up,--the subject was nothing, it was always what he
+made of it,--and he would go on talking until Trimmer, overjoyed at the
+chance, came in with afternoon tea; and he would go on talking until
+she announced dinner; and he would go on talking until all hours the
+next morning, long after his last train and any possibility of his
+article getting into yesterday afternoon's "Pall Mall." But early as he
+might appear, late as he might stay, he was never too early or too late
+for Trimmer.
+
+These were her favourites, though she was ready to "mother" Beardsley,
+who, she seemed to think, had just escaped from the schoolroom and ought
+to be sent back to it; though she had a protecting eye also for George
+Steevens, just up from Oxford, evidently mistaking the silence which was
+then his habit for shyness; though, indeed, she overflowed with kindness
+for everybody who came. It was astonishing how, at her age, she managed
+to adapt herself to people and ways so unlike any she could ever have
+known, without relaxing in the least from her own code of conduct.
+
+Only twice can I remember seeing her really ruffled. Once was when Felix
+Buhot, who, during a long winter he spent in London, was often with us
+on Thursdays, went into the kitchen to teach her to make coffee. The
+inference that she could not make it hurt her feelings; but her real
+distress was to have him in the kitchen, which "ladies and gentlemen"
+should not enter. Between her desire to get him back to the dining-room
+and her fear lest he should discover it, she was terribly embarrassed.
+It was funny to watch them: Buhot, unconscious of wrong and of English,
+intent upon measuring the coffee and pouring out the boiling water;
+Trimmer fluttering about him with flushed and anxious face, talking very
+loud and with great deliberation, in the not uncommon conviction that
+the foreigner's ignorance of English is only a form of deafness.
+
+On the other occasion she lost her temper, the only time in my
+experience. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Whistler, appearing while she
+was out and staying on to supper, got Constant, his man, to add an onion
+soup and an omelet to the cold meats she had prepared, for he would
+never reconcile himself to the English supper. She was furious when she
+got back and found that her pots and pans had been meddled with, and her
+larder raided. She looked upon it as a reproach; as if she couldn't
+serve Mr. Whistler as well as any foreign servant,--she had no use for
+foreign servants anyhow,--she would not have them making their foreign
+messes in any kitchen of hers! It took days and careful diplomacy to
+convince her that she had not been insulted.
+
+I was the more impressed by this outbreak of temper because, as a rule,
+she gave no sign of seeing, or hearing, or understanding anything that
+went on in our chambers. She treated me as I believe royalty should be
+treated, leaving it to me to open the talk, or to originate a topic. I
+remember once, when we were involved in a rumpus which had been
+discussed over our dinner-table for months beforehand, and which at the
+time filled the newspapers and was such public property that everybody
+in the Quarter--the milkman, the florist at the Temple of Pomona in the
+Strand, the Housekeeper downstairs, the postman--congratulated us on our
+victory, Trimmer alone held her peace. I could not believe that she
+really did not know, and at last I asked her:--
+
+"I suppose you have heard, Trimmer, what has been going on these days?"
+
+"What, mum?" was her answer.
+
+Then, exasperated, I explained.
+
+"Why yes, mum," she said. "I beg your pardon, mum, I really couldn't
+'elp it. I 'ave been reading the pipers, and the 'ousekeeper she was
+a-talking to me about it before you come in, and the postman too, and I
+was sayin' as 'ow glad I was. I 'ope you and the Master won't think it a
+liberty, mum. Thank you, mum!"
+
+I remember another time, when some of our friends took to running away
+with other friends' wives, and things became so complicated for
+everybody that our Thursday evenings were brought to a sudden end,
+Trimmer kept the same stolid countenance throughout, until, partly to
+prevent awkwardness, partly out of curiosity, I asked her if she had
+seen the papers.
+
+"Oh, I beg your pardon, mum," she hesitated, "thank you, mum, I'm sure.
+I know it's a liberty, but you know, mum, they've all been 'ere so often
+I couldn't help noticing there was somethink. And I'm very sorry, mum,
+if you'll excuse the liberty, they all was such lidies and gentlemen,
+mum."
+
+And so, I should never have known there was another reason, besides the
+natural kindness of her heart, for her interest in our friends and her
+acceptance of their ways, if, before this, I had not happened to say to
+her one Friday morning,--
+
+"You seem, Trimmer, to have a very great admiration for Mr. Phil May."
+
+"I 'ope you and Master won't think it a liberty, mum," she answered, in
+an agony of embarrassment, "but I do like to see 'im, and they allus so
+like to 'ear about 'im at 'ome. They're allus asking me when I 'ave last
+seen 'im or Mr. Whistler."
+
+Then it came out. Chance had bestowed upon her father and one of the
+great American magazines the same name, with the result that the
+magazine was looked upon by her brothers and herself as belonging
+somehow to the family. The well-to-do brother subscribed to it, the
+other came to his house to see each new number. Through the
+illustrations and articles they had become as familiar with artists and
+authors as most people in England are with the "winners," and their
+education had reached at least the point of discovery that news does not
+begin and end in sport. Judging from Trimmer, I doubt if at first their
+patronage of art and literature went much further, but this was far
+enough for them to know, and to feel flattered by the knowledge, that
+she was living among people who figured in the columns of art and
+literary gossip as prominently as "all the winners" in the columns of
+the Sporting Prophets, though they would have been still more flattered
+had her lot been cast among the Prophets. In a few cases, their interest
+soon became more personal.
+
+It was their habit--why, I do not suppose they could have said
+themselves--to read any letter Whistler might write to the papers at a
+moment when he was given to writing, though what they made of the letter
+when read was more than Trimmer was able to explain; they also looked
+out for Phil May's drawings in "Punch"; they passed our articles round
+the family circle,--a compliment hardly more astonishing to Trimmer
+than to us. As time went on they began to follow the career of several
+of our other friends to whom Trimmer introduced them; and it was a
+gratification to them all, as well as a triumph for her, when on Sunday
+afternoon she could say, "Mr. Crockett or Mr. 'Arold Frederic was at
+Master's last Thursday." Thus, through us, she became for the first time
+a person of importance in her brother's house, and I suspect also quite
+an authority in Brixton on all questions of art and literature. Indeed,
+she may, for all I know, have started another Carnegie Library in South
+London.
+
+It is a comfort now to think that her stay with us was pleasant to her;
+wages alone could not have paid our debt for the trouble she spared us
+during her five years in our chambers. I have an idea that, in every
+way, it was the most prosperous period of her life. When she came, she
+was not only without a penny in her pocket, but she owed pounds for her
+outfit of aprons and caps and dresses. Before she left, she was saving
+money. She opened a book at the Post Office Savings Bank; she
+subscribed to one of those societies which would assure her a
+respectable funeral, for she had the ambition of all the self-respecting
+poor to be put away decent, after having, by honest work, kept off the
+parish to the end. Her future provided for, she could make the most of
+whatever pleasures the present might throw in her way,--the pantomime at
+Christmas, a good seat for the Queen's Jubilee procession; above all,
+the two weeks' summer holiday. No journey was ever so full of adventure
+as hers to Margate, or Yarmouth, or Hastings, from the first preparation
+to the moment of return, when she would appear laden with presents of
+Yarmouth bloaters or Margate shrimps, to be divided between the old
+charwoman and ourselves.
+
+If she had no desire to leave us, we had none to have her go; and as the
+years passed, we did not see why she should. She was old, but she bore
+her age with vigour. She was hardly ever ill, and never with anything
+worse than a cold or an indigestion, though she had an inconvenient
+talent for accidents. The way she managed to cut her fingers was little
+short of genius. One or two were always wrapped in rags. But no matter
+how deep the gash, she was as cheerful as if it were an accomplishment.
+With the blood pouring from the wound, she would beam upon me: "You 'ave
+no idea, mum, what wonderful flesh I 'as fur 'ealin'." Her success in
+falling down our little narrow stairway was scarcely less remarkable.
+But the worst tumble of all was the one which J. had so long expected.
+He had just moved his portfolios to an unaccustomed place one morning,
+when a letter, or a message, or something, sent her stumbling into the
+studio with her usual impetuosity, and over she tripped. It was so bad
+that we had to have the doctor, her arm was so seriously strained that
+he made her carry it in a sling for weeks. We were alarmed, but not
+Trimmer.
+
+"You know, mum, it _is_ lucky; it might 'ave been the right harm, and
+that would 'ave been bad!"
+
+She really thought it another piece of her extraordinary good luck.
+
+Poor Trimmer! It needed so little to make her happy, and within five
+years of her coming to us that little was taken from her. All she asked
+of life was work, and a worse infirmity than age put a stop to her
+working for us, or for anybody else, ever again. At the beginning of her
+trouble, she would not admit to us, nor I fancy to herself, that
+anything was wrong, and she was "bonny," though she went "cutting about"
+at a snail's pace and her cheerful old face grew haggard. Presently,
+there were days when she could not keep up the pretence, and then she
+said her head ached and she begged my pardon for the liberty. I
+consulted a doctor. He thought it might be neuralgia and dosed her for
+it; she thought it her teeth, and had almost all the few still left to
+her pulled out. And the pain was worse than ever. Then, as we were on
+the point of leaving town for some weeks, we handed over our chambers to
+the frowzy old charwoman, and sent Trimmer down to the sea at Hastings.
+She was waiting to receive us when we returned, but she gave us only the
+ghost of her old smile in greeting, and her face was more haggard and
+drawn than ever. For a day she tottered about from one room to another,
+cooking, dusting, making beds, and looking all the while as if she were
+on the rack. She was a melancholy wreck of the old cheerful, bustling,
+exasperating Trimmer; and it was more than we could stand. I told her
+so. She forgot to beg my pardon for the liberty in her hurry to assure
+me that nothing was wrong, that she could work, that she wanted to work,
+that she was not happy when she did not work.
+
+"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny!" she kept saying over and over again.
+
+Her despair at the thought of stopping work was more cruel to see than
+her physical torture, and I knew, without her telling me, that her fear
+of the pain she might have still to suffer was nothing compared to her
+fear of the workhouse she had toiled all her life to keep out of. She
+had just seven pounds and fifteen shillings for her fortune; her family,
+being working people, would have no use for her once she was of no use
+to them; our chambers were her home only so long as she could do in them
+what she had agreed to do; there was no Workmen's Compensation Act in
+those days, no old-age pensions, even if she had been old enough to get
+one. What was left for a poor woman, full of years and pain, save the
+one refuge which, all her life, she had been taught to look upon as
+scarcely less shameful than the prison or the scaffold?
+
+Well, Trimmer had done her best for us; now we did our best for her,
+and, as it turned out, the best that could be done. Through a friend, we
+got her into St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Her case was hopeless from the
+first. A malignant growth so close to the brain that at her age an
+operation was too serious a risk, and without it she might linger in
+agony for months,--this was what life had been holding in store for
+Trimmer during those long years of incessant toil, and self-sacrifice,
+and obstinate belief that a drunken husband, a selfish brother, an empty
+purse, were all for the best in our best of all possible worlds.
+
+She did not know how ill she was, and her first weeks at the hospital
+were happy. The violence of the pain was relieved, the poor tired old
+body was the better for the rest and the cool and the quiet; she who had
+spent her strength waiting on others enjoyed the novel experience of
+being waited on herself. There were the visits of her family on visiting
+days, and mine in between, to look forward to; some of our friends, who
+had grown as fond of her as we, sent her fruit and flowers, and she
+liked the consequence all this gave her in the ward. Then, the hospital
+gossip was a distraction, perhaps because in talking about the
+sufferings of others she could forget her own. My objection was that she
+would spare me not a single detail. But in some curious way I could not
+fathom, it seemed a help to Trimmer, and I had not the heart to cut her
+stories short.
+
+After a month or so, the reaction came. Her head was no better, and what
+was the hospital good for if they couldn't cure her? She grew
+suspicious, hinting dark things to me about the doctors. They were
+keeping her there to try experiments on her, and she was a respectable
+woman, and always had been, and she did not like to be stared at in her
+bed by a lot of young fellows. The nurses were as bad. But once out of
+their clutches she would be "bonny" again, she knew. Probably the
+doctors and nurses knew too, for the same suspicion is more often than
+not their reward; and indeed it was so unlike Trimmer that she must have
+picked it up in the ward. Anyway, in their kindness they had kept her
+far longer than is usual in such cases, and when they saw her grow
+restless and unhappy, it seemed best to let her go. At the end of four
+months, and to her infinite joy, Trimmer, five years older than when she
+came to us, in the advanced stage of an incurable disease, with a
+capital of seven pounds and fifteen shillings, was free to begin life
+again.
+
+I pass quickly over the next weeks,--I wish I could have passed over
+them as quickly at the time. My visits were now to a drab quarter on the
+outskirts of Camden Town, where Trimmer had set up as a capitalist. She
+boarded with her cousin, many shillings of her little store going to pay
+the weekly bill; she found a wonderful doctor who promised to cure her
+in no time, and into his pockets the rest of her savings flowed. There
+was no persuading her that he could not succeed where the doctors at the
+hospital had failed, and so long as she went to him, to help her would
+only have meant more shillings for an unscrupulous quack who traded on
+the ignorance and credulity of the poor. Week by week I saw her grow
+feebler, week by week I knew her little capital was dribbling fast away.
+She seemed haunted by the dread that her place would be taken in our
+chambers, and that, once cured, she would have to hunt for another. That
+she was "bonny" was the beginning and end of all she had to say. One
+morning, to prove it, she managed to drag herself down to see us,
+arriving with just strength enough to stagger into my room, her arms
+outstretched to feel her way, for the disease, by this time, was
+affecting both eyes and brain. Nothing would satisfy her until she had
+gone into the studio, stumbling about among the portfolios, I on one
+side, on the other J., with no desire to wring her neck for it was grim
+tragedy we were guiding between us,--tragedy in rusty black with a
+reticule hanging from one arm,--five years nearer the end than when
+first the curtain rose upon it in our chambers. We bundled her off as
+fast as we could, in a cab, with the cousin who had brought her. She
+stopped in the doorway.
+
+"Oh, I'm bonny, mum. I can cut about, you'll see!" And she would have
+fallen, had not the cousin caught and steadied her.
+
+After that, she had not the strength to drag herself anywhere, not even
+to see the quack. A week later she took to her bed, almost blind, her
+poor old wits scattered beyond recovery. I was glad of that: it spared
+her the weary waiting and watching for death while the shadow of the
+grim building she feared still more drew ever nearer. I hesitated to go
+and see her, for my mere presence stirred her into consciousness, and
+reminded her of her need to work and her danger if she could not. Then
+there was a day when she did not seem to know I was there, and she paid
+no attention to me, never spoke until just as I was going, when of a
+sudden she sat bolt upright:--
+
+"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny. You'll see!" she wailed, and sank back
+on her pillows.
+
+These were Trimmer's last words to me, and I left her at death's door,
+still crying for work, as if in the next world, as in this, it was her
+only salvation. Very soon, the cousin came to tell me that the little
+capital had dribbled entirely away, and that she could not keep Trimmer
+without being paid for it. Could I blame her? She had her own fight
+against the shadow hanging all too close now over Trimmer. Her 'usband
+worked 'ard, she said, and they could just live respectable, and
+Trimmer's brothers, they was for sending Trimmer to the workus. They
+might have sent her, and I doubt if she would have been the wiser. But
+could we see her go? For our own comfort, for our own peace of mind, we
+interfered and arranged that Trimmer should board with her cousin until
+a bed was found in another hospital. It was found, mercifully, almost at
+once, but, before I had time to go there, the Great Release had come for
+her; and we heard with thankfulness that the old head was free from
+suffering, that the twisted hands were still, that fear of the workhouse
+could trouble her no more. Life's one gift to Trimmer had been toil,
+pain her one reward, and it was good to know that she was at rest.
+
+The cousin brought us the news. But I had a visit the same day from the
+sister-in-law, the paragon of virtue, a thin, sharp-faced woman of
+middle age. I said what I could in sympathy, telling her how much we
+missed Trimmer, how well we should always remember her. But this was not
+what she had come to hear. She let me get through. She drew the sigh
+appropriate for the occasion. Then she settled down to business. When
+did I propose to pay back the money Trimmer had spent on the doctor in
+Camden Town? I didn't propose to at all, I told her: he was a miserable
+quack and I had done my best to keep Trimmer from going to him; besides,
+fortunately for her, she was beyond the reach of money that was not
+owing to her. The sister-in-law was indignant. The family always
+understood I had promised, a promise was a promise, and now they
+depended on me for the funeral. I reminded her of the society to which
+Trimmer had subscribed solely to meet that expense. But she quickly let
+me know that the funeral the society proposed to provide fell far short
+of the family's standard. To them it appeared scarcely better than a
+pauper's. The coffin would be plain, there would be no oak and brass
+handles,--worse, there would be no plumes for the horses and the hearse.
+To send their sister to her grave without plumes would disgrace them
+before their neighbours. Nor would there be a penny over for the family
+mourning,--could I allow them, the chief mourners, to mourn without
+crape?
+
+I remembered their willingness to let Trimmer die as a pauper in the
+workhouse. After all, she would have the funeral she had provided for.
+She would lie no easier in her grave for oak and brass handles, for
+plumes and crape. Her family had made use of her all her life; I did not
+see why I should help them to make use of her after her death, that
+their grief might be trumpeted in Brixton and Camden Town. I brought the
+interview to an end. But sometimes I wonder if Trimmer would not have
+liked it better if I had helped them, if plumes had waved from the heads
+of the horses that drew her to her grave, if her family had followed
+swathed in crape. She would have looked upon it as another piece of her
+extraordinary good luck if, by dying, she had been of service to
+anybody.
+
+I do not know where they buried her. Probably nobody save ourselves
+to-day has as much as a thought for her. But, if self-sacrifice counts
+for anything, if martyrdom is a passport to heaven, then Trimmer should
+take her place up there by the side of St. Francis of Assisi, and Joan
+of Arc, and St. Vincent de Paul, and all those other blessed men and
+women whose lives were given for others, and who thought it was
+"bonny."
+
+
+
+
+_Louise_
+
+[Illustration: "TUMBLED, WEATHER-WORN, RED-TILED ROOFS"]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+LOUISE
+
+
+For the third time since we had taken our chambers, I was servantless,
+and I could not summon up courage to face for the third time the scorn
+which the simple request for a "general" meets in the English Registry
+Office. That was what sent me to try my luck at a French _Bureau_ in
+Soho, where, I was given to understand, it was possible to inquire for,
+and actually obtain, a good _bonne a tout faire_ and escape without
+insult.
+
+Louise was announced one dull November morning, a few days later. I
+found her waiting for me in our little hall,--a woman of about forty,
+short, plump, with black eyes, blacker hair, and an enchanting smile.
+But the powder on her face and the sham diamonds in her ears seemed to
+hang out danger signals, and my first impulse was to show her the door.
+It was something familiar in the face under the powder, above all in
+the voice when she spoke, that made me hesitate.
+
+"Provencale?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, from Marseilles," she answered, and I showed her instead into my
+room.
+
+I had often been "down there" where the sun shines and skies are blue,
+and her Provencal accent came like a breath from the south through the
+gloom of the London fog, bringing it all back to me,--the blinding white
+roads, the gray hills sweet with thyme and lavender, the towns with
+their "antiquities," the little shining white villages,--M. Bernard's at
+Martigues, and his dining-room, and the Marseillais who crowded it on a
+Sunday morning, and the gaiety and the laughter, and Desire in his white
+apron, and the great bowls of _bouillabaisse_....
+
+It was she who recalled me to the business of the moment. Her name was
+Louise Sorel, she said; she could clean, wash, play the lady's maid,
+sew, market, cook--but cook! _Te--au mouins_, she would show _Madame_;
+and, as she said it, she smiled. I have never seen such perfect teeth in
+woman or child; you knew at a glance that she must have been a radiant
+beauty in her youth. A Provencal accent, an enchanting smile, and the
+remains of beauty, however, are not precisely what you engage a servant
+for; and, with a sudden access of common sense, I asked for references.
+Surely, _Madame_ would not ask the impossible, she said reproachfully.
+She had but arrived in London, she had never gone as _bonne_ anywhere;
+how, then, could she give references? She needed the work and was
+willing to do it: was not that sufficient? I got out of it meanly by
+telling her I would think it over. At that she smiled again,--really,
+her smile on a November day almost warranted the risk. I meant to take
+her; she knew; _Madame_ was kind.
+
+I did think it over,--while I interviewed slovenly English "generals"
+and stray Italian children, dropped upon me from Heaven knows where,
+while I darned the family stockings, while I ate the charwoman's chops.
+I thought it over indeed, far more than I wanted to, until, in despair,
+I returned to the Soho _Bureau_ to complain that I was still without a
+servant of any kind. The first person I saw was Louise, disconsolate, on
+a chair in the corner. She sprang up when she recognized me. Had she not
+said _Madame_ was kind? she cried. _Madame_ had come for her. I had done
+nothing of the sort. But there she was, this charming creature from the
+South; at home was the charwoman, dingy and dreary as the November
+skies. To look back now is to wonder why I did not jump at the chance of
+having her. As it was, I did take her,--no references, powder, sham
+diamonds, and all. But I compromised. It was to be for a week. After
+that, we should see. An hour later she was in my kitchen.
+
+A wonderful week followed. From the start we could not resist her charm,
+though to be on such terms with one's servant as to know that she has
+charm, is no doubt the worst possible kind of bad form. Even William
+Penn, the fastidious, was her slave at first sight,--and it would have
+been rank ingratitude if he had not been, for, from the ordinary London
+tabby average people saw in him, he was at once transformed into the
+most superb, the most magnificent of cats! And we were all superb, we
+were all magnificent, down to the snuffy, tattered old Irish charwoman
+who came to make us untidy three times a week, and whom we had not the
+heart to turn out, because we knew that if we did, there could be no one
+else foolish enough to take her in again.
+
+And Louise, though her southern imagination did such great things for
+us, had not overrated herself. She might be always laughing at
+everything, as they always do laugh "down there,"--at the English she
+couldn't understand, at _Mize Boum_, the nearest she came to the
+charwoman's name, at the fog she must have hated, at the dirt left for
+her to clean. But she worked harder than any servant I have ever had,
+and to better purpose. She adored the cleanliness and the order, it
+seemed, and was appalled at the dirt and slovenliness of the English, as
+every Frenchwoman is when she comes to the land that has not ceased to
+brag of its cleanliness since its own astonished discovery of the
+morning tub. Before Louise, the London blacks disappeared as if by
+magic. Our wardrobes were overhauled and set to rights. The linen was
+mended and put in place. And she could cook! Such _risotto_!--she had
+been in Italy--Such _macaroni_! Such _bouillabaisse_! Throughout that
+wonderful week, our chambers smelt as strong of _ail_ as a Provencal
+kitchen.
+
+In the face of all this, I do not see how I brought myself to find any
+fault. To do myself justice, I never did when it was a question of the
+usual domestic conventions. Louise was better than all the
+conventions--all the prim English maids in prim white caps--in the
+world. Just to hear her talk, just to have her call that disreputable
+old _Mize Boum ma belle_, just to have her announce as _La Dame de la
+bouillabaisse_ a friend of ours who had been to Provence and had come to
+feast on her masterpiece and praised her for it,--just each and every
+one of her charming southern ways made up for the worst domestic crime
+she could have committed, I admit to a spasm of dismay when, for the
+first meal she served, she appeared in her petticoat, a dish-cloth for
+apron, and her sleeves rolled up above her elbows. But I forgot it with
+her delightful laugh at herself when I explained that, absurdly it might
+be, we preferred a skirt, an apron, and sleeves fastened at the wrists.
+It seemed she adored the economy too, and she had wished to protect her
+dress and even her apron.
+
+These things would horrify the model housewife; but then, I am not a
+model housewife, and they amused me, especially as she was so quick to
+meet me, not only half, but the whole way. When, however, she took to
+running out at intervals on mysterious errands, I felt that I must
+object. Her first excuse was _les affaires_; her next, a friend; and,
+when neither of these would serve, she owned up to a husband who,
+apparently, spent his time waiting for her at the street corner; he was
+so lonely, _le pauvre_! I suggested that he should come and see her in
+the kitchen. She laughed outright. Why, he was of a shyness _Madame_
+could not figure to herself. He never would dare to mount the stairs and
+ring the front door-bell.
+
+In the course of this wonderful week, there was sent to me, from the
+Soho _Bureau_, a Swiss girl with as many references as a Colonial Dame
+has grandfathers. Even so, and despite the inconvenient husband, I might
+not have dismissed Louise,--it was so pleasant to live in an atmosphere
+of superlatives and _ail_. It was she who settled the matter with some
+vague story of a partnership in a restaurant and work waiting for her
+there. Perhaps we should have parted with an affectation of indifference
+had not J. unexpectedly interfered. Husbands have a trick of pretending
+superiority to details of housekeeping until you have had all the
+bother, and then upsetting everything by their interference. She had
+given us the sort of time we hadn't had since the old days in Provence,
+he argued; her smile alone was worth double the money agreed upon;
+therefore, double the money was the least I could in decency offer her.
+His logic was irreproachable, but housekeeping on such principles would
+end in domestic bankruptcy. However, Louise got the money, and my reward
+was her face when she thanked me--she made giving sheer
+self-indulgence--and the _risotto_ which, in the shock of gratitude,
+she insisted upon coming the next day to cook for us.
+
+But, in the end, J.'s indiscretion cost me dear. As Louise was
+determined to magnify all our geese, not merely into swans, but into the
+most superb, the most magnificent swans, the few extra shillings had
+multiplied so miraculously by the time their fame reached the
+_Quartier_, that _Madame_ of the _Bureau_ saw in me a special Providence
+appointed to relieve her financial difficulties, and hurried to claim an
+immediate loan. Then, her claim being disregarded, she wrote to call my
+attention to the passing of the days and the miserable pettiness of the
+sum demanded, and to assure me of her consideration the most perfect.
+She got to be an intolerable nuisance before I heard the last of her.
+
+We had not realized the delight of having Louise to take care of us,
+until she was replaced by the Swiss girl, who was industrious, sober,
+well-trained, with all the stolidity and surliness of her people, and as
+colourless as a self-respecting servant ought to be. I was immensely
+relieved when, after a fortnight, she found the work too much for her.
+It was just as she was on the point of going that Louise reappeared, her
+face still white with powder, the sham diamonds still glittering in her
+ears, but somehow changed, I could not quite make out how. She had come,
+she explained to present me with a ring of pearls and opals and of
+surpassing beauty, at the moment pawned for a mere trifle,--here was the
+ticket; I had but to pay, add a smaller trifle for interest and
+commission, and it was mine. As I never have worn rings I did not care
+to begin the habit by gambling in pawn tickets, much though I should
+have liked to oblige Louise. Her emotion when I refused seemed so out of
+proportion, and yet was so unmistakably genuine, that it bewildered me.
+
+But she pulled herself together almost at once and began to talk of the
+restaurant which, I learned, was marching in a simply marvellous manner.
+It was only when, in answer to her question, I told her that the
+_Demoiselle Suisse_ was marching not at all and was about to leave me,
+that the truth came out. There was no restaurant, there never had
+been,--except in the country of Tartarin's lions; it was her invention
+to spare me any self-reproach I might have felt for turning her adrift
+at the end of her week's engagement. She had found no work since. She
+and her husband had pawned everything. _Tiens_, and she emptied before
+me a pocketful of pawn tickets. They were without a sou. They had had
+nothing to eat for twenty-four hours. That was the change. I began to
+understand. She was starving, literally starving, in the cold and gloom
+and damp of the London winter, she who was used to the warmth and
+sunshine, to the clear blue skies of Provence. If the aliens who drift
+to England, as to the Promised Land, could but know what awaited them!
+
+Of course I took her back. She might have added rouge to the powder, she
+might have glittered all over with diamonds, sham or real, and I would
+not have minded. J. welcomed her with joy. William Penn hung rapturously
+at her heels. We had a _risotto_, golden as the sun of the _Midi_,
+fragrant as its kitchens, for our dinner.
+
+There was no question of a week now, no question of time at all. It did
+not seem as if we ever could manage again, as if we ever could have
+managed, without Louise. And she, on her side, took possession of our
+chambers, and, for a ridiculously small sum a week, worked her miracles
+for us. We positively shone with cleanliness; London grime no longer
+lurked, the skeleton in our cupboards. We never ate dinners and
+breakfasts more to our liking, never had I been so free from
+housekeeping, never had my weekly bills been so small. Eventually, she
+charged herself with the marketing, though she could not, and never
+could, learn to speak a word of English; but not even the London
+tradesman was proof against her smile. She kept the weekly accounts,
+though she could neither read nor write: in her intelligence, an
+eloquent witness to the folly of general education. She was, in a word,
+the most capable and intelligent woman I have ever met, so that it was
+the more astounding that she should also be the most charming.
+
+Most astounding of all was the way, entirely, typically Provencale as
+she was, she could adapt herself to London and its life and people.
+Though she wore in the street an ordinary felt hat, and in the house the
+English apron, you could see that her hair was made for the pretty
+Provencal ribbon, and her broad shoulders for the Provencal fichu. _Te_,
+_ve_, and _au mouins_ were as constantly in her mouth as in Tartarin's.
+Provencal proverbs forever hovered on her lips. She sang Provencal songs
+at her work. She had ready a Provencal story for every occasion. Her
+very adjectives were Mistral's, her very exaggerations Daudet's. And yet
+she did everything as if she had been a "general" in London chambers all
+her life. Nothing came amiss to her. After her first startling
+appearance as waitress, it was no time before she was serving at table
+as if she had been born to it, and with such a grace of her own that
+every dish she offered seemed a personal tribute. People who had never
+seen her before would smile back involuntarily as they helped
+themselves. It was the same no matter what she did. She was always gay,
+however heavy her task. To her even London, with its fogs, was a
+_galejado_, as they say "down there." And she was so appreciative. We
+would make excuses to give her things for the pleasure of watching the
+warm glow spread over her face and the light leap to her eyes. We would
+send her to the theatre for the delight of having her come back and tell
+us about it. All the world, on and off the stage, was exalted and
+transfigured as she saw it.
+
+But frank as she was in her admiration of all the world, she remained
+curiously reticent about herself. "My poor grandmother used to say, you
+must turn your tongue seven times in your mouth before speaking," she
+said to me once; and I used to fancy she gave hers a few extra twists
+when it came to talking of her own affairs. Some few facts I gathered:
+that she had been at one time an _ouvreuse_ in a Marseilles theatre; at
+another, a tailoress,--how accomplished, the smart appearance of her
+husband in J.'s old coats and trousers was to show us; and that, always,
+off and on, she had made a business of buying at the periodical sales of
+the _Mont de Piete_ and selling at private sales of her own. I gathered
+also that they all knew her in Marseilles; it was Louise here, Louise
+there, as she passed through the market, and everybody must have a word
+and a laugh with her. No wonder! You couldn't have a word and a laugh
+once with Louise and not long to repeat the experience. But to her life
+when the hours of work were over, she offered next to no clue.
+
+Only one or two figures flitted, pale shadows, through her rare
+reminiscences. One was the old grandmother, whose sayings were full of
+wisdom, but who seemed to have done little for her save give her,
+fortunately, no schooling at all, and a religious education that bore
+the most surprising fruit. Louise had made her first communion, she had
+walked in procession on feast days. _J'adorais ca_, she would tell me,
+as she recalled her long white veil and the taper in her hand. But she
+adored every bit as much going to the Salvation Army meetings,--the
+lassies would invite her in, and lend her a hymn-book, and she would
+sing as hard as ever she could, was her account. Her ideas on the
+subject of the Scriptures and the relations of the Holy Family left me
+gasping. But her creed had the merit of simplicity. The _Boun Diou_ was
+intelligent, she maintained; _il aime les gens honnetes_. He would not
+ask her to hurry off to church and leave all in disorder at home, and
+waste her time. If she needed to pray, she knelt down where and as she
+was, and the _Boun Diou_ was as well pleased. He was a man like us,
+wasn't He? Well then, He understood.
+
+There was also a sister. She occupied a modest apartment in Marseilles
+when she first dawned upon our horizon, but so rapidly did it expand
+into a palatial house in town and a palatial villa by the sea, both with
+cellars of rare and exquisite vintages and stables full of horses and
+carriages, that we looked confidently to the fast-approaching day when
+we should find her installed in the Elysee at Paris. Only in one respect
+did she never vary by a hair's breadth: this was her hatred of Louise's
+husband.
+
+Here, at all events, was a member of the family about whom we learned
+more than we cared to know. For if he did not show himself at first,
+that did not mean his willingness to let us ignore him. He persisted in
+wanting Louise to meet him at the corner, sometimes just when I most
+wanted her in the kitchen. He would have her come back to him at night;
+and to see her, after her day's hard work, start out in the black sodden
+streets, seldom earlier than ten, often as late as midnight; to realize
+that she must start back long before the sun would have thought of
+coming up, if the sun ever did come up on a London winter morning, made
+us wretchedly uncomfortable. The husband, however, was not to be moved
+by any messages I might send him. He was too shy to grant the interview
+I asked. But he gave me to understand through her that he wouldn't do
+without her, he would rather starve, he couldn't get along without her.
+We did not blame him: we couldn't, either. That was why, after several
+weeks of discomfort to all concerned, it occurred to us that we might
+invite him to make our home his; and we were charmed by his
+condescension when, at last conquering his shyness, he accepted our
+invitation. The threatened deadlock was thus settled, and M. Auguste,
+as he introduced himself, came to us as a guest for as long as he chose
+to stay. There were friends--there always are--to warn us that what we
+were doing was sheer madness. What did we know about him, anyway?
+Precious little, it was a fact: that he was the husband of Louise,
+neither more nor less. We did not even know that, it was hinted. But if
+Louise had not asked for our marriage certificate, could we insist upon
+her producing hers?
+
+It may have been mad, but it worked excellently. M. Auguste as a guest
+was the pattern of discretion. I had never had so much as a glimpse of
+him until he came to visit us. Then I found him a good-looking man,
+evidently a few years younger than Louise, well-built, rather taller
+than the average Frenchman. Beyond this, it was weeks before I knew
+anything of him except the astonishing adroitness with which he kept out
+of our way. He quickly learned our hours and arranged his accordingly.
+After we had begun work in the morning, he would saunter down to the
+kitchen and have his coffee, the one person of leisure in the
+establishment. After that, and again in the afternoon, he would stroll
+out to attend to what I take were the not too arduous duties of a
+horse-dealer with neither horses nor capital,--for as a horse-dealer he
+described himself when he had got so far as to describe himself at all.
+At noon and at dinner-time, he would return from Tattersall's, or
+wherever his not too exhausting business had called him, with a small
+paper parcel supposed to contain his breakfast or his dinner, our
+agreement being that he was to supply his own food. The evenings he
+spent with Louise. I could discover no vice in him except the, to us,
+disturbing excess of his devotion to her. You read of this sort of
+devotion in French novels and do not believe in it. But M. Auguste, in
+his exacting dependence on Louise, left the French novel far behind. As
+for Louise, though she was no longer young and beauty fades early in the
+South, I have never met, in or out of books, a woman who made me
+understand so well the reason of the selfishness some men call love.
+
+M. Auguste's manners to us were irreproachable. We could only admire
+the consideration he showed in so persistently effacing himself. J.
+never would have seen him, if on feast days--Christmas, New Year's, the
+14th of July--M. Auguste had not, with great ceremony, entered the
+dining-room at the hour of morning coffee to shake hands and wish J. the
+compliments of the season. With me his relations grew less formal, for
+he was not slow to discover that we had one pleasant weakness in common.
+Though the modest proportions of that brown-paper parcel might not
+suggest it, M. Auguste knew and liked what was good to eat; so did I.
+Almost before I realized it, he had fallen into the habit of preparing
+some special dish for me, or of making my coffee, when I chanced to be
+alone for lunch or for dinner. I can still see the gleam in his eyes as
+he brought me in my cup, and assured me that he, not Louise, was the
+artist, and that it was something of extra--but of extra!--as it always
+was. Nor was it long before he was installed _chef_ in our kitchen on
+the occasion of any little breakfast or dinner we might be giving. The
+first time I caught him in shirt-sleeves, with Louise's apron flapping
+about his legs and the bib drawn over his waistcoat, he was inclined to
+be apologetic. But he soon gave up apology. It was evident there were
+few things he enjoyed more than cooking a good dinner,--unless it was
+eating it,--and his apron was put on early in the day. In the end, I
+never asked any one to breakfast or dinner without consulting him, and
+his _menus_ strengthened the friendliness of our relations.
+
+After a while he ran my errands and helped Louise to market. I found
+that he spoke and wrote very good English, and was a man of some
+education. I have preserved his daily accounts, written in an unusually
+neat handwriting, always beginning "Mussy: 1 penny"; and this reminds me
+that not least in his favour was his success in ingratiating himself
+with William Penn,--or "Mussy" in Louise's one heroic attempt to cope
+with the English. M. Auguste, moreover, was quiet and reserved to a
+degree that would not have discredited the traditional Englishman. Only
+now and then did the _Midi_ show itself in him: in the gleam of his eye
+over his gastronomic masterpieces; in his pose as horse-dealer and the
+scale on which the business he never did was schemed,--_Mademoiselle_,
+the French dressmaker from Versailles, who counted in tens and thought
+herself rich, was dazzled by the way M. Auguste reckoned by thousands;
+and once, luckily only once, in a frenzied outbreak of passion.
+
+He was called to Paris, I never understood why. When the day came, he
+was seized with such despair as I had never seen before, as I trust I
+may never have to see again. He could not leave Louise, he would not.
+No! No! No! He raved, he swore, he wept. I was terrified, but Louise,
+when I called her aside to consult her, shrugged her shoulders. "We play
+the comedy in the kitchen," she laughed, but I noticed that her laughter
+was low. I fancy when you played the comedy with M. Auguste, tragedy was
+only just round the corner. With the help of _Mademoiselle_ she got him
+to the station; he had wanted to throw himself from the train as it
+started, was her report. And in three days, not a penny the richer for
+the journey, he had returned to his life of ease in our chambers.
+
+Thus we came to know M. Auguste's virtues and something of his temper,
+but never M. Auguste himself. The months passed, and we were still
+conscious of mystery. I did not inspire him with the healthy fear he
+entertained for J., but I cannot say he ever took me into his
+confidence. What he was when not in our chambers; what he had been
+before he moved into them; what turn of fate had stranded him,
+penniless, in London with Louise, to make us the richer for his coming;
+why he, a man of education, was married to a woman of none; why he was
+M. Auguste while Louise was Louise Sorel--I knew as little the day he
+left us as the day he arrived. J. instinctively distrusted him,
+convinced that he had committed some monstrous crime and was in hiding.
+This was also the opinion of the French Quarter, as I learned
+afterwards. It seems the _Quartier_ held its breath when it heard he was
+our guest, and waited for the worst, only uncertain what form that worst
+would take,--whether we should be assassinated in our beds, or a
+bonfire made of our chambers. M. Auguste, however, spared us and
+disappointed the _Quartier_. His crime, to the end, remained as baffling
+as the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, or the secret of Kaspar
+Hauser.
+
+That he was honest, I would wager my own reputation for honesty, even if
+it was curious the way his fingers gradually covered themselves with
+rings, a watch-chain dangled from his waistcoat pocket, a pin was stuck
+jauntily in his necktie. Her last purchases at the _Mont de Piete_,
+pawned during those first weeks of starving in London and gradually
+redeemed, was Louise's explanation; and why should we have suspected M.
+Auguste of coming by them unlawfully when he never attempted to rob us,
+though we gave him every opportunity? He knew where I kept my money and
+my keys. He was alone with Louise in our chambers, not only many a day
+and evening, but once for a long summer.
+
+We had to cycle down into Italy and William Penn could not be left to
+care for himself, nor could we board him out without risking the
+individuality of a cat who had never seen the world except from the top
+of a four-story house. Louise and M. Auguste, therefore, were retained
+to look after him, which, I should add, they did in a manner as
+satisfactory to William as to ourselves. Every week I received a report
+of his health and appetite from M. Auguste, in whom I discovered a new
+and delightful talent as correspondent. "_Depuis votre depart_," said
+the first, "_cette pauvre bete a miaule apres vous tous les jours, et il
+est constamment a la porte pour voir si vous ne venez pas. Il ne
+commence vraiment a en prendre son parti que depuis hier. Mais tous ces
+soucis de chat_ [for that charming phrase what would one not have
+forgiven M. Auguste?], _mais tous ces soucis de chat ne l'empechent pas
+de bien boire son lait le matin et manger sa viande deux fois par
+jour._" Nor was it all colour of rose to be in charge of William.
+"_Figurez-vous_," the next report ran, "_que Mussy a devore et abime
+completement une paire de bas tout neufs que Louise s'est achetee hier.
+C'est un vrai petit diable, mais il est si gentil qu'on ne peut vraiment
+pas le gronder pour cela._" It was consoling to hear eventually that
+William had returned to normal pursuits. "_Mussy est bien sage, il a
+attrape une souris hier dans la cuisine--je crois bien que Madame ne
+trouvera jamais un aussi gentil Mussy._" And so the journal of William's
+movements was continued throughout our absence. When, leaving J. in
+Italy, I returned to London,--met at midnight at the station by M.
+Auguste with flattering enthusiasm,--Mussy's condition and behaviour
+corroborated the weekly bulletins. And not only this. Our chambers were
+as clean as the proverbial new pin: everything was in its place; not so
+much as a scrap of paper was missing. The only thing that had
+disappeared was the sprinkling of gray in Louise's hair, and for this M.
+Auguste volubly prepared me during our walk from the station; she had
+dyed it with almost unforeseen success, he told me, so triumphantly that
+I put down the bottle of dye to his extravagance.
+
+If I know M. Auguste was not a thief, I do not think he was a murderer.
+How could I see blood on the hands of the man who presided so joyously
+over my pots and pans? If he were a forger, my trust in him never led
+to abuse of my cheque book; if a deserter, how came he to be possessed
+of his _livret militaire_ duly signed, as my own eyes are the witness?
+how could he venture back to France, as I know he did for I received
+from him letters with the Paris postmark? An anarchist, J. was inclined
+to believe. But I could not imagine him dabbling in bombs and fuses. To
+be a horse-dealer, without horses or money, was much more in his line.
+
+Only of one thing were we sure: however hideous or horrible the evil, M.
+Auguste had worked "down there," under the hot sun of Provence, Louise
+had no part in it. She knew--it was the reason of her curious
+reticences, of her sacrifice of herself to him. That he loved her was
+inevitable. Who could help loving her? She was so intelligent, so
+graceful, so gay. But that she should love M. Auguste would have been
+incomprehensible, were it not in the nature of woman to love the man who
+is most selfish in his dependence upon her. She did all the work, and he
+had all the pleasure of it. He was always decently dressed, there was
+always money in his pocket, though she, who earned it, never had a penny
+to spend on herself. No matter how busy and hurried she might be, she
+had always the leisure to talk to him, to amuse him when he came in,
+always the courage to laugh, like the little Fleurance in the story.
+What would you? She was made like that. She had always laughed, when she
+was sad as when she was gay. And while she was making life delightful
+for him, she was doing for us what three Englishwomen combined could not
+have done so well, and with a charm that all the Englishwomen in the
+world could not have mustered among them.
+
+She had been with us about a year when I began to notice that, at
+moments, her face was clouded and her smile less ready. At first, I put
+it down to her endless comedy with M. Auguste. But, after a bit, it
+looked as if the trouble were more serious even than his histrionics. It
+was nothing, she laughed when I spoke to her; it would pass. And she
+went on amusing and providing for M. Auguste and working for us. But by
+the time the dark days of November set in, we were more worried about
+her than ever. The crisis came with Christmas.
+
+On Christmas Day, friends were to dine with us, and we invited
+_Mademoiselle_, the French dressmaker, to eat her Christmas dinner with
+Louise and M. Auguste. We were very staid in the dining-room,--it turned
+out rather a dull affair. But in the kitchen it was an uproarious feast.
+Though she lived some distance away, though on Christmas night London
+omnibuses are few and far between, _Mademoiselle_ could hardly be
+persuaded to go home, so much was she enjoying herself. Louise was all
+laughter. "You have been amused?" I asked, when _Mademoiselle_, finally
+and reluctantly, had been bundled off by J. in a hansom.
+
+"_Mais oui, mais oui_," M. Auguste cried, pleasure in his voice. "_Cette
+pauvre Mademoiselle!_ Her life, it is so sad, she is so alone. It is
+good for her to be amused. We have told her many stories,--_et des
+histoires un tout petit peu salees, n'est-ce pas? pour egayer cette
+pauvre Mademoiselle?_"
+
+It was the day after the feast that Louise had to give in. She confessed
+she had been in torture while she served our dinner and _Mademoiselle_
+was there. She could hardly eat or drink. But why make it sad for all
+the world because she was in pain? and she had laughed, she had laughed!
+
+We scolded her first. Then we sent her to a good doctor. It was worse
+than we feared. The trouble was grave, there must be an operation
+without delay. The big tears rolled down her cheeks as she said it. She
+looked old and broken. Why, she moaned, should this sorrow come to her?
+She had never done any harm to any one: why should she have to suffer?
+Why, indeed? Her mistake had been to do too little harm, too much good,
+to others, to think too little of herself. Now, she had to pay for it as
+one almost always does pay for one's good deeds. She worried far less
+over the pain she must bear than over the inconvenience to M. Auguste
+when she could no longer earn money for him.
+
+We wanted her to go into one of the London hospitals. We offered to take
+a room for her where she could stay after the operation until she got
+back her strength. But we must not think her ungrateful, the mere idea
+of a hospital made her desperate. And what would she do in a room _avec
+un homme comme ca_. Besides, there was the sister in Marseilles, and, in
+the hour of her distress, her sister's horses and carriages multiplied
+like the miraculous loaves and fishes, the vintages in the cellar
+doubled in age and strength. And she was going to die; it was queer, but
+one knew those things; and she longed to die _la-bas_, where there was a
+sun and the sky was blue, where she was at home. We knew she had not a
+penny for the journey. M. Auguste had seen to that. Naturally, J. gave
+her the money. He would not have had a moment's comfort if he had
+not,--the drain upon your own emotions is part of the penalty you pay
+for having a human being and not a machine to work for you,--and he
+added a little more to keep her from want on her arrival in Marseilles,
+in case the sister had vanished or the sister's fortunes had dwindled to
+their original proportions. He exacted but one condition: M. Auguste
+was not to know there was more than enough for the journey.
+
+Louise's last days with us were passed in tears,--poor Louise! who until
+now had laughed at fate. It was at this juncture that M. Auguste came
+out strong. I could not have believed he had it in him. He no longer
+spent his time dodging J. and dealing in visionary horses. He took
+Louise's place boldly. He made the beds, cooked all our meals, waited on
+us, dusted, opened the door, while Louise sat, melancholy and forlorn,
+in front of the kitchen fire. On the last day of all--she was not to
+start until the afternoon Continental train--she drew me mysteriously
+into the dining-room, she shut the door with every precaution, she
+showed me where she had sewed the extra sovereigns in her stays. M.
+Auguste should never know. "_Je pars pour mon long voyage_," she
+repeated. "_J'ai mes pressentiments._" And she was going to ask them to
+let her wear a black skirt I had given her, and an old coat of J.'s she
+had turned into a bodice, when the time came to lay her in her coffin.
+Thus something of ours would go with her on the long journey. How could
+she forget us? How could we forget her? she might better have asked. I
+made a thousand excuses to leave her; Louise playing "the comedy" had
+never been so tragic as Louise in tears. But she would have me back
+again, and again, and again, to tell me how happy she had been with us.
+
+"Why, I was at home," she said, her surprise not yet outworn. "_J'etais
+chez moi, et j'etais si tranquille._ I went. I came. _Monsieur_ entered.
+He called me. '_Louise._'--'_Oui, Monsieur._'--'_Voulez-vous faire ceci
+ou cela?_'--'_Mais oui, Monsieur, de suite._' And I would do it and
+_Monsieur_ would say, '_Merci, Louise_,' and he would go. And me, I
+would run quick to the kitchen or upstairs to finish my work. _J'etais
+si tranquille!_"
+
+The simplicity of the memories she treasured made her story of them
+pitiful as I listened. How little peace had fallen to her lot, that she
+should prize the quiet and homeliness of her duties in our chambers!
+
+At last it was time to go. She kissed me on both cheeks. She gave J. one
+look, then she flung herself into his arms and kissed him too on both
+cheeks. She almost strangled William Penn. She sobbed so, she couldn't
+speak. She clutched and kissed us again. She ran out of the door and we
+heard her sobbing down the three flights of stairs into the street. J.
+hurried into his workroom. I went back to my desk. I don't think we
+could have spoken either.
+
+Two days afterwards, a letter from M. Auguste came to our chambers, so
+empty and forlorn without Louise. They were in Paris. They had had a
+dreadful crossing,--he hardly thought Louise would arrive at Boulogne
+alive. She was better, but must rest a day or two before starting for
+the _Midi_. She begged us to see that Mussy ate his meals _bien
+regulierement_, and that he "made the dead" from time to time, as she
+had taught him; and, would we write? The address was Mr. Auguste,
+Horse-Dealer, Hotel du Cheval Blanc, Rue Chat-qui-peche-a-la-ligne,
+Paris.
+
+Horse-dealer! Louise might be at death's door, but M. Auguste had his
+position to maintain. Then, after ten long days, came a post-card, also
+from Paris: Louise was in Marseilles, he was on the point of going, once
+there he would write. Then--nothing. Had he gone? Could he go?
+
+If I were writing a romance it would, with dramatic fitness, end here.
+But if I keep to facts, I must add that, in about eight months, Louise
+and M. Auguste reappeared; that both were in the best of health and
+spirits, M. Auguste a mass of jewelry; that all the sunshine of Provence
+seemed let loose in the warmth of their greeting; that horse-dealing for
+the moment prospered too splendidly for Louise to want to return to
+us,--or was this a new invention, I have always wondered, because she
+found in her place another Frenchwoman who wept at the prospect of being
+dismissed to make room for her?
+
+Well, anyway, for a while, things, according to Louise, continued to
+prosper. She would pay me friendly visits and ask for sewing,--her
+afternoons were so long,--and tell me of M. Auguste's success, and of
+Provence, though there were the old reticences. By degrees, a shadow
+fell over the gaiety. I fancied that "the comedy" was being played
+faster than ever in the Soho lodgings. And, of a sudden, the fabric of
+prosperity collapsed like a house of cards. She was ill again, and again
+an operation was necessary. There was not a penny in her pockets nor in
+M. Auguste's. What happened? Louise had only to smile, and we were her
+slaves. But this time, for us at least, the end had really come. We
+heard nothing more from either of them. No letters reached us from
+Paris, no post-cards. Did she use the money to go back to Marseilles?
+Did she ever leave London? Did M. Auguste's fate overtake him when they
+crossed the Channel? Were the Soho lodgings the scene of some tremendous
+_crime passionel_? For weeks I searched the police reports in my morning
+paper. But neither then nor to this day have I had a trace of the woman
+who, for over a year, gave to life in our chambers the comfort and the
+charm of her presence. She vanished.
+
+I am certain, though, that wherever she may be, she is mothering M.
+Auguste, squandering upon him all the wealth of her industry, her
+gaiety, her unselfishness. She couldn't help herself, she was made that
+way. And the worst, the real tragedy of it, is that she would rather
+endure every possible wrong with M. Auguste than, without him, enjoy all
+the rights women not made that way would give her if they could. She has
+convinced me of the truth I already more than suspected: it is upon the
+M. Augustes of this world that the Woman Question will eventually be
+wrecked.
+
+
+
+
+_Our Charwomen_
+
+[Illustration: "UP TO WESTMINSTER"]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+OUR CHARWOMAN
+
+
+I took over the charwoman with our chambers, and a great piece of luck I
+thought it; for charwomen never advertise, and are unheard of in
+Registry Offices. It was certain I could not get into the chambers
+without one, and at that early stage of my housekeeping in London I
+should not have known where in the world to look for her.
+
+Mrs. Maxfielde was the highly respectable name of the woman who had
+"done" for the previous tenant, and had she heard of Mr. Shandy's theory
+of names she could not have been more successful in adapting her person
+and her manner to her own. She was well over sixty, and thin and gaunt
+as if she had never had enough to eat; but age and hunger had not
+lessened her hold upon the decencies of life. Worthiness oozed from her.
+Victorian was stamped all over her,--it was in her black shawl and
+bonnet, in the meekness of her pose, in the little curtsy she bobbed
+when she spoke. I remember Harold Frederic seeing her once and, with the
+intuition of the novelist, placing her: "Who is your old Queen
+Victoria?" he asked. Her presence lost nothing when she took off her
+shawl and bonnet. In the house and at work she wore a black dress and a
+white apron, surprisingly clean considering the dirt she exposed it to,
+and her grey hair was drawn tight back and rolled into a little hard
+knob, the scant supply and "the parting all too wide" painfully exposed
+to view. I longed for something to cover the old grey head that looked
+so grandmotherly and out of keeping as it bent over scrubbing-brushes
+and dustpans and the kitchen range, but it would have been against all
+the conventions for a charwoman to appear in a servant's cap. There is a
+rigid line in these English matters, and to attempt to step across is to
+face the contempt of those who draw it. The British charwoman must go
+capless, such is the unwritten law; also, she must remain "Miss" or
+"Mrs.," though the Empire would totter were the British servant called
+by anything but her name; and while the servant would "forget her place"
+were she to know how to do any work outside her own, the charwoman is
+expected to meet every emergency, and this was in days when housekeeping
+for me was little more than a long succession of emergencies.
+
+Mrs. Maxfielde was equal to all. She saw me triumphantly through one
+domestic crisis after another. She was the most accomplished of her
+accomplished class, and the most willing. She was never discouraged by
+the magnitude of the tasks I set her, nor did she ever take advantage of
+my dependence upon her. On the contrary, she let me take advantage of
+her willingness. She cleaned up after the British Workman had been in
+possession for a couple of months, and one of the few things the British
+Workman can do successfully is to leave dirt to be cleaned up. She
+helped me move in and settle down. She supported me through my trying
+episode with 'Enrietter. And after 'Enrietter's disappearance she saved
+me from domestic chaos, though the work and the hours involved would
+have daunted a woman half her age and outraged every trade-union in the
+country. She arrived at seven in the morning, and I quickly handed over
+to her the key of the front door, that I might indulge in the extra hour
+of sleep of which she was so much more in need; she stayed until eight
+in the evening, or, at my request, until nine or later; and in between
+she "did" for me in the fullest sense of that expressive word. There
+were times when it meant "doing" also for my friends whom I was
+inconsiderate enough to invite to come and see me in my domestic
+upheaval, putting their friendship to the test still further by inducing
+them to share the luncheons and dinners of Mrs. Maxfielde's cooking.
+Many as were her good points, I cannot in conscience say that cooking
+was among them. Hers might have been the vegetables of which Heine wrote
+that they were brought to the table just as God made them, hers the
+gravies against which he prayed Heaven to keep every Christian. But I
+thought it much to be thankful for that she could cook at all when, to
+judge from the amount she ate, she could have had so little practice in
+cooking for herself. She did not need to go through any "fast cure,"
+having done nothing but fast all her life. She had got out of the way of
+eating and into the way of starving; the choicest dish would not have
+tempted her. The one thing she showed the least appetite for was her
+"'arf pint" at noon, and that she would not do without though she had to
+fetch it from the "public" round the corner. I cannot say with greater
+truth that Mrs. Maxfielde's talent lay in waiting, but she never allowed
+anything or anybody to hurry her, and she was noiseless in her
+movements, both excellent things in a waitress. I cannot even say that
+in her own line of scrubbing she was above suspicion, but she handled
+her brushes and brooms and dusters with a calm and dignity which, in my
+troubles, I found very soothing. Her repose may have been less a virtue
+than the result of want of proper food, but in any case it was a great
+help in the midst of the confusion she was called to struggle with.
+There was only one drawback. It had a way of deserting her just when I
+was most in need of it.
+
+We are all human, and Mrs. Maxfielde was not without her weakness: she
+was afflicted with nerves. In looking back I can see how in character
+her sensibility was. It belonged to the old shawl and the demure bonnet,
+to the meekness of pose, to the bobbing of curtsies,--it was Victorian.
+But at the time I was more struck by its inconvenience. A late milkman
+or a faithless butcher would bring her to the verge of collapse. She
+would jump at the over-boiling of the kettle. Her hand went to her heart
+on the slightest provocation, and stayed there with a persistency that
+made me suspect her of seeking her dissipation in disaster. On the
+morning after our fire, though she had been at home in her own bed
+through all the danger of it, she was in such a flutter that I should
+have had to revive her with salts had not a dozen firemen, policemen,
+and salvage men been waiting for her to refresh them with tea. It was
+only when one of the firemen took the kettle from her helpless hand,
+saying he was a family man himself, and when I stood sternly over her
+that, like an elderly Charlotte, she fell to cutting bread and butter,
+and regained the calm and dignity becoming to her. But I never saw her
+so agitated as the day she met a rat in the cellar. I had supposed it
+was only in comic papers and old-fashioned novels that a rat or a mouse
+could drive a sensible woman into hysterics. But Mrs. Maxfielde showed
+me my mistake. From that innocent encounter in the cellar she bounded up
+the four flights of stairs, burst into my room, and, breathless, livid,
+both hands on her heart, sank into a chair: a liberty which at any other
+time she would have regarded as a breach of all the proprieties. "Oh,
+mum!" she gasped, "in the cellar!--a rat!" And she was not herself again
+until the next morning.
+
+After her day's work and her excitement in the course of it, it seemed
+as if Mrs. Maxfielde could have neither time nor energy for a life of
+her own outside our chambers. But she had, and a very full life it was,
+and with the details as she confided them to me, I got to know a great
+deal about "how the poor live," which I should have preferred to learn
+from a novel or a Blue Book. She had a husband, much older, who had
+been paralyzed for years. Before she came to me in the morning she had
+to get him up for the day, give him his breakfast, and leave everything
+in order for him, and as she lived half an hour's walk from our chambers
+and never failed to reach them by seven, there was no need to ask how
+early she had to get herself up. For a few pence a friendly neighbour
+looked in and attended to him during the day. After Mrs. Maxfielde left
+me, at eight or nine or ten in the evening, and after her half hour's
+walk back, she had to prepare his supper and put him to bed; and again I
+did not have to ask how late she put her own weary self there too. Old
+age was once said to begin at forty-six; we are more strenuous now; but
+according to the kindest computations, it had well overtaken her. And
+yet she was working harder than she probably ever had in her youth, with
+less rest and with the pleasing certainty that she would go on working
+day in and day out and never succeed in securing the mere necessities of
+life. She might have all the virtues, sobriety, industry, economy,--and
+she had,--and the best she could hope was just to keep soul and body
+together for her husband and herself, and a little corner they could
+call their own. She did not tell me how the husband earned a living
+before paralysis kept him from earning anything at all, but he too must
+have been worthy of his name, for now he was helpless, the parish
+allowed him "outdoor relief" to the extent of three shillings and
+sixpence, or about eighty cents a week; it was before old-age pensions
+had been invented by a vote-touting Government. This munificent sum,
+paid for a room somewhere in a "Building," one of those gloomy barracks
+with the outside iron stairway in common, where clothes are forever
+drying in the thick, soot-laden London air, and children are forever
+howling and shrieking. For everything else Mrs. Maxfielde had to
+provide. If she worked every day except Sunday, her earnings amounted to
+fifteen shillings, or a little less than four dollars, a week. But there
+were weeks when she could obtain only one day's work, weeks when she
+could obtain none, and she and her husband had still to live, had still
+to eat something, well as they had trained themselves, as so many must,
+in the habit of not eating enough. Here was an economic problem
+calculated to bewilder more youthful and brilliant brains than hers. But
+she never complained, she never grumbled, she never got discouraged. She
+might fly before a rat, but in the face of the hopeless horrors of life
+she retained her beautiful placidity, though I, when I realized the full
+weight of the burden she had to bear, began to wonder less how, than
+why, the poor live.
+
+Mrs. Maxfielde came in the early spring. By the time winter, with its
+fogs, set in, age had so far overtaken her that she could not manage to
+attend to her husband and his wants and then drag her old body to our
+chambers by seven o'clock in the morning. It was she who gave notice; I
+never should have had the courage. We parted friends, and she was so
+amiable as not to deprive me of her problems with her services. When she
+could not work for me, she visited me, making it her rule to call on
+Monday afternoon; a rule she observed with such regularity that I
+fancied Monday must be her day for collecting the husband's income from
+the parish and her own from private sources. She rarely allowed a week
+to pass without presenting herself, always appearing in the same
+Victorian costume and carrying off the interview with the same Victorian
+manner. She never stooped to beg, but her hand was ready for the coin
+which I slipped into it with the embarrassment of the giver, but which
+she received with enviable calmness and a little curtsy. The hour of her
+visit was so timed that, when her talk with me was over, she could
+adjourn to the kitchen for dinner and, under Augustine's rule, a glass
+of wine, which, though beer would have been more to her taste, she drank
+as a concession to the poor foreigner who did not know any better.
+
+Before a second winter had passed, Mrs. Maxfielde was forced to admit
+that she was too old for anybody to want her, or to accept a post if
+anybody did. But, all the same, the paralytic clung to his shadow of
+life with the obstinate tenacity of the human derelict, and she clung to
+her idea of home, and they starved on in the room the parish paid for
+until it was a positive relief to me when, after more years of
+starvation than I cared to count, she came to announce his death. It was
+no relief to her. She was full of grief, and permitted nothing to
+distract her from the luxury she made of it. The coin which passed from
+my hand to hers on the occasion of this visit, doubled in token of
+condolence, was invested in an elaborate crape bonnet, and she left it
+to me to worry about her future. I might have afforded to accept her
+trust with a greater show of enthusiasm, for, at once and with
+unlooked-for intelligence, the parish decided to allow her the same
+weekly sum her husband had received, and Mrs. Maxfielde, endowed with
+this large and princely income, became a parent so worthy of filial
+devotion that a daughter I had never heard of materialized, and
+expressed a desire to share her home with her mother.
+
+The daughter was married, her husband was an unskilled labourer, and
+they had a large and increasing family. It is likely that Mrs. Maxfielde
+paid in more than money for the shelter, and that her own
+flesh-and-blood was less chary than strangers would have been in
+employing her services, and less mindful of the now more than seventy
+years she had toiled to live. Perhaps her visits at this period were a
+little more frequent, perhaps her dinners were eaten and her wine drunk
+with a little more eagerness. But she refrained from any pose, she
+indulged in no heroics, she entertained me with no whinings, no railings
+against the ingratitude sharper than a serpent's tooth. However she got
+her ease, it was not in weeping, and what she had to bear from her
+daughter she bore in silence. Her Victorian sense of propriety would
+have been offended by a display of feeling. She became so pitiful a
+figure that I shrank from her visits. But she was content, she found no
+fault with life, and wealth being a matter of comparison, I am sure she
+was, in her turn, moved to pity for the more unfortunate who had not
+kept themselves out of the workhouse. Had she had her way, she would
+have been willing to slave indefinitely for her daughter and her
+daughter's children. But Death was wiser and brought her the rest she
+deserved so well and so little craved.
+
+A couple of years or so after the loss of her husband, and after she had
+failed to appear, much to my surprise, on three or four Mondays in
+succession, a letter came from her daughter to tell me that never again
+would Monday bring Mrs. Maxfielde to my chambers. There had been no
+special illness. She had just worn out, that was all. Her time had come
+after long and cruel days of toil and her passing was unnoted, for hers
+was a place easily filled,--that was the grisly thing about it. J. and I
+sent a wreath of flowers for the funeral, knowing that she would have
+welcomed it as propriety's crown of propriety, and it was my last
+communication with the Maxfielde family. I had never met the daughter,
+and I was the more reluctant to go abroad in search of objects of
+charity because they had such an inconsiderate way of seeking me out in
+my own kitchen. I was already "suited" with another old woman in Mrs.
+Maxfielde's place. I was already visited by one or two others. In fact,
+I was so surrounded by old women that Augustine, when she first came to
+the rescue, used to laugh with the insolence of youth at _les vieilles
+femmes de Madame_.
+
+My new old woman was Mrs. Burden. Had I hunted all London over, I could
+not have found a more complete contrast to Mrs. Maxfielde. She was
+Irish, with no respect for Victorian proprieties, but as disreputable
+looking an old charwoman as you would care to see; large and floppy in
+figure, elephantine in movement, her face rough and dug deep by the
+trenches of more than fifty winters, her hair frowzy, her dress ragged,
+with the bodice always open at the neck and the sleeves always rolled up
+above the elbows, her apron an old calico rag, and her person and her
+clothes profusely sprinkled with snuff. In the street she wrapped
+herself in a horrible grey blanket-shawl, and on top of her disorderly
+old head set a little battered bonnet with two wisps of strings dangling
+about. When I knew her better I discovered that she owned a black shawl
+with fringe, and a bonnet that could tie under the chin, and in these
+made a very fine appearance. But they were reserved for such ceremonial
+occasions as Mass on Sunday or the funeral of a friend, and at other
+times she kept to the costume that so shamefully maligned her. For, if
+she looked like one of the terrible harpies who hang about the public
+house in every London slum, she was really the most sober creature in
+the world and never touched a drop, Mr. Burden, who drank himself into
+an early grave, having drunk enough for two.
+
+I cannot remember now where Mrs. Burden came from, or why, when I had
+seen her once, I ever consented to see her again. But she quickly grew
+into a fixture in our chambers, and it was some eight or nine years
+before I was rid of her. In the beginning she was engaged for three
+mornings, later on for every morning, in the week. Her hours were from
+seven to twelve, during which time my chief object was to keep her
+safely shut up in the kitchen, for no degree of pretending on my part
+could make me believe in her as an ornament or a credit to our house. It
+mortified me to have her show her snuffy old face at the front door, and
+I should never have dared to send her on the many messages she ran for
+me had she not been known to everybody in the Quarter; but once Mrs.
+Burden was known it was all right, for she was as good as she was sober.
+Hers, however, was the goodness of the man in the Italian proverb who
+was so good that he was good for nothing. She was willing to do
+anything, but there was nothing she could do well, and most things she
+could not do at all. She made no pretence to cook, and if she had I
+could not have eaten anything of her cooking, for I knew snuff must
+flavour everything she touched. To have seen her big person and frowzy
+head in the dining-room would have been fatal to appetite had I ever had
+the folly, under any circumstances, to ask her to wait. Nor did she
+excel in scrubbing and dusting. She was successful chiefly in leaving
+things dirtier than she found them, and Augustine, whose ideal is high
+in these matters, insisted that Mrs. Burden spent the morning making the
+dirt she had to spend the afternoon cleaning up. There were times when
+they almost came to blows, for the temper of both was hot, and more than
+once I heard Mrs. Burden threaten to call in the police. But the old
+woman had her uses. She was honesty itself, and could be trusted with no
+matter what,--from the key of our chambers, when they were left empty,
+to the care of William Penn, when no other companion could be secured
+for him; she could be relied upon to pay bills, post letters, fetch
+parcels; and she was as punctual as Big Ben at Westminster. I do not
+think she missed a day in all the years she was with me. I became
+accustomed, too, to seeing her about, and there was the dread--or
+conviction would be nearer the truth--that if I let her go nobody else
+in their senses would take her in.
+
+Mrs. Burden did not improve with time. She never condescended to borrow
+qualities that did not belong to her. She grew more unwieldy and larger
+and floppier, a misfortune she attributed to some mysterious malady
+which she never named, but gloated over with the pride the poor have in
+their diseases. And she grew dirtier and more disorderly, continuing to
+scorn my objection to her opening the front door with the shoe she was
+blacking still on her hand, or to her bringing me a letter wrapped in
+an apron grimier than her grimy fingers. Nothing would induce her not to
+call me "Missis," which displeased me more, if for other reasons, than
+the "Master" she as invariably bestowed upon J. She bobbed no curtsies.
+When, on Saturdays, coins passed from my hand to hers, she spat on them
+before she put them in her pocket, to what purpose I have not to this
+day divined. Her best friend could not have accused her of any charm of
+manner, but, being Irish, she escaped the vulgarity bred in the London
+slums. In fact, I often fancied I caught gleams of what has been called
+the Celtic Temperament shining through her. She had the warmth of
+devotion, the exaggeration of loyalty, the power of idealizing, peculiar
+to her race. She was almost lyrical in her praise of J., who stood
+highest in her esteem, and "Master good! Master good!" was her constant
+refrain when she conversed with Augustine in the language fitted for
+children and rich in gesture, which was her well-meant substitute for
+French. She saw him glorified, as the poets of her country see their
+heroes, and in her eyes he loomed a splendid Rothschild. "Master, plenty
+money, plenty money!" she would assure Augustine, and, holding up her
+apron by the two corners, and well out from her so as to represent a
+capacious bag, add, "apron full, full, full!"
+
+She had also the Celtic lavishness of hospitality. I remember Whistler's
+delight one morning when, after an absence from London, he received at
+our front door a welcome from Mrs. Burden, whom he had never seen before
+and now saw at her grimiest: "Shure, Mr. Whistler, sir, an it's quite a
+stranger ye are. It's glad I am to see ye back, sir, and looking so
+well!" Her hospitality was extended to her own friends when she had the
+chance. She who drank nothing could not allow Mr. Pooley, the sweep, who
+was her neighbour and cleaned our chimneys, to leave our chambers after
+his professional services without a drop of whiskey to hearten him on
+his sooty way. And, though you would still less have suspected it,
+romance had kept its bloom fresh in her heart. The summer the Duke of
+York was married I could not understand her interest in the wedding, as
+until then she had not specially concerned herself with the affairs of
+royalty. But on the wedding-day this interest reached a point when she
+had to share it with somebody. "Shure, Missis, and I knows how it is
+meself. Wasn't I after marrying Burden's brother and he older than
+Burden, and didn't he go and die, God bless him! and leave me to Burden.
+And shure thin it's me that knows how the poor Princess May, Lord love
+her! is feeling this blessed day!"
+
+Not only the memory, but her pride in it, had survived the years which
+never brought romance to her again. The one decent thing Burden did was
+to die and rid the world of him before Mrs. Burden had presented him and
+society with more than one child, a boy. He was a good son, she said,
+which meant that he spent his boyhood picking up odd jobs and, with
+them, odd pence to help his mother along, so that at the age when he
+should have been able to do something, he knew how to do nothing, and
+had not even the physical strength to fit him for the more profitable
+kinds of unskilled labour. He thought himself lucky when, in his
+twentieth year, he fell into a place as "washer-up" in a cheap
+restaurant which paid eighteen shillings a week; and he was so dazzled
+by his wealth that he promptly married. His wife's story is short: she
+drank. Mercifully, like Burden, she did the one thing she could do with
+all her might and drank herself to death with commendable swiftness,
+leaving no children to carry on the family tradition. Mrs. Burden was
+once more alone with her son. Between them they earned twenty-eight
+shillings a week and felt themselves millionaires. Augustine, for some
+reason, went at this period once or twice to her room, over the dingy
+shop of a cheap undertaker, and reported it fairly clean and provided
+with so much comfort as is represented by blankets on the bed and a
+kettle on the hob. But after a bit the son died, the cause, as far as I
+could make out, a drunken father and years of semi-starvation; and Mrs.
+Burden had to face, as cheerfully as she could, an old age to be lived
+out in loneliness and in the vain endeavour to make both ends meet on
+eight shillings a week, or less if she lost her job with me.
+
+She did lose it, poor soul. But what could I do? She really got to be
+intolerably dirty. Not that I blamed her. I probably should have been
+much dirtier under the same circumstances. But a time came when it
+seemed as if we must give up either Mrs. Burden or our chambers, and to
+give our chambers up when we had not the least desire to, would have
+been a desperate remedy. She had one other piece of regular work; when I
+spoke to her about going, she assured me that her neighbours had been
+waiting for years to get her to do their washing, and she would be glad
+to oblige them; and, on my pressing invitation, she promised to run in
+and see me often. At this new stage in our relations she showed a rare
+delicacy of feeling. Mrs. Maxfielde, no longer in my service, was eager
+to pay me visits, and her hand, if not held out to beg, was open to
+receive. Mrs. Burden did not keep her promise to come, she gave me no
+opportunity to know whether her hand was open in need or shut on plenty.
+She was of the kind that would rather starve than publish their
+destitution. I might have preserved an easy conscience in her regard but
+for Mr. Pooley, the sweep. The first time he returned in his
+professional capacity after her departure and found himself deprived of
+the usual refreshment, he was indignant, and, in consequence, he was
+very gruff and short with me when I inquired after Mrs. Burden. She
+hadn't any work, not she, and he supposed, he did, that she might starve
+for all some people cared.
+
+I could scarcely ignore so broad a hint, and I had her round that same
+morning, for her slum was close by. I learned from her that Mr. Pooley,
+if gruff, was truthful. She had no work, had not had any for weeks. She
+was in arrears to her landlord, her shawl with the fringe and her
+blankets were in pawn, she hadn't a farthing in her pocket. J., to whom
+I refer all such matters, and who was in her debt for the splendour of
+wealth with which she had endowed him, said "it was all nonsense,"--by
+"it" I suppose he meant this sorry scheme of things,--and he would not
+let her go without the money to pay her landlord, not only for arrears,
+but in advance, and also to redeem her possessions. I do not think she
+was the less grateful if, instead of bobbing humbly, she spat upon the
+coins before her first "Shure and may God bless ye, Master." Nor was J.
+comfortable until provisions had followed her in such quantities that he
+would not have to be bothered by the thought of her starving to death,
+at any rate for some days. Even after that, she scrupulously kept away.
+Not Christmas, that in London brings everybody with or without excuse
+begging at one's door, could induce her to present herself. It was we
+who had to send for her, and, in a land where begging comes so easily,
+we respected her for her independence.
+
+I doubt if she ever got more work to do. She never received outdoor
+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?"
+
+For practical purposes she knew no parents save the peasants who brought
+her up. The State in France, thrifty as the people, makes the children
+abandoned to it a source of profit to the hard-working poor. Clementine
+was put out to nurse. The one spark of genuine affection she ever showed
+was for the woman to whose care she fell, and of whom she always spoke
+as _ma mere_, with a tenderness very different from her giggling
+adoration of the little Ernest. Incessant labour was the rule in _ma
+mere's_ house, and food was not too abundant, but of what there was
+Clementine had her share, though I fancy the scarcity then was the
+origin of the terrible hunger that consumed her throughout her life.
+About this hunger her story revolved, so that, while she talked of the
+past, I could seldom get far away from it. She recalled little else of
+the places the Institution found for her as servant. The State in France
+is as wise as it is thrifty, and does not demoralize its foundlings by
+free gifts, but, when the time comes, makes them work, appropriating
+their wages until it has been paid back the money they have cost it.
+
+Clementine went into service young. She also went into it hungry, and
+life became a never-ending struggle for food. In one place she was
+reduced to such straits that she devoured a dish of poisoned meat
+prepared for the stray cats of the neighbourhood, and, though it brought
+her almost to death's door, she could still recall it as a feast. In
+another, a small country grocery store, she would steal down in the
+night, trembling with fear, to hunt for bits of candy and crackers, and,
+safe in bed again, would have to fight for them with the rats that
+shared her garret. And her tale of this period grew more miserable and
+squalid with every new stage, until she reached the dreadful climax
+when, still a child herself, she brought a little girl into the world to
+share her hunger. She had the courage to laugh when she told me of her
+wandering, half-starved, back to _la bonne mere_, who took her in when
+her time came, and kept the baby. She could laugh, too, when she
+recalled the wrath of _M. le Directeur_ at the Institution, who sent for
+her, and scolded her, giving her a few sharp raps with his cane.
+
+If to Clementine her tragedy was a laughing matter, it was not for me to
+weep over it. But I was glad when she got through with this period and
+came to the next, which had in it more of pure comedy than enlivened
+most of her confidences. For once she was of age, and her debt to the
+Institution settled in full, she was free not only to work for herself,
+but to claim a percentage of the money she had been making during the
+long years of apprenticeship; and this percentage amounting to five
+hundred francs, and Clementine never having seen so much money before,
+her imagination was stirred by the vastness of her wealth, and she
+insisted on being paid in five-franc pieces. She had to get a basket to
+hold them all, and with it on her arm she started off in search of
+adventure. This, I think, was the supreme moment in her life.
+
+Her adventures began in the third-class carriage of a train for
+Boulogne, which might seem a mild beginning to most people, but was full
+of excitement for Clementine. She dipped her hands into the silver, and
+jingled it, and displayed it to everybody, with the vanity of a child
+showing off its new frock. The only wonder was that any of the
+five-franc pieces were still in the basket when she got to Boulogne.
+There they drew to her a group of young men and women who were bound for
+England to make their fortunes, and who persuaded her to join them. Her
+head was not completely turned by her wealth, for she crossed with them
+on the _bateau aux lapins_, which she explained as the cheapest boat
+upon which anything but beasts and vegetables could find passage. At
+Folkestone, where they landed, she had no difficulty in getting a place
+as scullery maid. But washing up was as dull in England as in France, a
+poor resource for anybody with a basketful of five-franc pieces. One of
+the young men who had crossed with her agreed that it was a waste of
+time to work when there was money to spend, and they decided for a life
+of leisure together. The question of marriage apparently did not enter
+into the arrangement. They were content to remain _des unis_, in M.
+Rod's phrase, and their union was celebrated by a few weeks of riotous
+living. The chicken their own Henry IV wished for all his subjects
+filled the daily pot, beer flowed like water, they could have paid for
+cake had bread failed; for the first time in her life Clementine forgot
+what it was to be hungry.
+
+It was delightful while it lasted, and I do not believe that she ever
+regretted having had her fling when the chance came. But the basket grew
+lighter and lighter, and all too soon barely enough five-franc pieces
+were left in it to carry them up to London. There, naturally, they found
+their way to the _Quartier_. The man picked up an odd job or two,
+Clementine scrubbed, washed, waited, did any and everything by which a
+few pence could be earned. The pot was now empty, beer ceased to flow,
+bread sometimes was beyond their means, and she was hungrier than ever.
+In the course of the year her little Ernest was added to the family, and
+there was no _bonne mere_ in London to relieve her of the new burden.
+For a while Clementine could not work; when she could, there was no work
+to be had. Nor could the man get any more jobs, though I fancy his hunt
+for them was not too strenuous. Life became a stern, bread-hunting sort
+of business, and I think at moments Clementine almost wished herself
+back in the garret with the rats, or in the garden where dishes of
+poisoned meat were sometimes to be stolen. The landlord threatened,
+starvation stared them in the face. Hunger is ever the incentive to
+enterprise, and Ernest's father turned Clementine on the streets.
+
+I must do her the justice to say that, of all her adventures, this was
+the one least to her liking. That she had fallen so low did not shock
+her; she looked upon it as part of the inevitable scheme of things: but
+left to herself, she would have preferred another mode of earning her
+living. After I had been told of this period of horrors, I could never
+hear Clementine's high, shrill treble and giggle without a shudder, for
+they were then part of her stock-in-trade, and she went on the streets
+in short skirts with her hair down her back. For months she wallowed in
+the gutter, at the mercy of the lowest and the most degraded, insulted,
+robbed, despised, and if she attempted to rebel, bullied back to her
+shameful trade by a man who had no thought save for the few pitiful
+pence she could bring to him out of it. The only part of the affair that
+pleased her was the ending--in prison after a disgraceful street brawl.
+She was really at heart an adventuress, and the opportunity to see for
+the first time the inside of the _panier a salade_, as she called the
+prison van, was welcomed by her in the light of a new and exciting
+adventure. Then, in prison itself, the dress with the arrows could be
+adjusted becomingly, warders and fellow prisoners could be made to laugh
+by her antics, and if she could have wished for more to eat, it was a
+great thing not to have to find the means to pay for what she got.
+
+She was hardly out of prison when Ernest's father chanced upon a woman
+who could provide for him more liberally, and Clementine was again a
+free agent. The streets knew her no more, though for an interval the
+workhouse did. This was the crisis when, with the shrewdness acquired in
+the London slums, she learned something of the English law to her own
+advantage, and through the courts compelled the father to contribute to
+the support of his son. The weekly three shillings and sixpence paid for
+a room. For food she had to work. With prison behind her, she was afraid
+to ask for a place in respectable houses, and I should not care to
+record the sinks of iniquity and squalid dens where her shrill treble
+and little girl's giggle were heard. Ernest was dumped down of a morning
+upon any friendly neighbour who would keep an eye on him, until, somehow
+or other, _la vieille grandmere_ appeared upon the scene and Clementine
+once more had two to feed and the daily problem of her own hunger to
+face.
+
+Her responsibilities never drove her to work harder than was absolutely
+necessary. "We must all toil or steal," Carlyle says. But Clementine
+knew better. She could have suggested a third alternative, for she had
+reduced begging to a fine art. Her scent was as keen for charitable
+associations as a pig's for truffles, and she could tell to a minute the
+appointed time of their alms-giving, and to a penny the value of their
+alms. She would, no matter when, drop regular work at the risk of losing
+it, to rush off after a possible charity. There was a _Societe_--I never
+knew it by any other name--that, while she was with me, drew her from my
+kitchen floor or my luncheon dishes as surely as Thursday came round,
+and the clock struck one. Why it existed she never made quite clear to
+me,--I doubt if she had an idea why, herself. It was enough for her that
+the poor French in London were under its special charge, and that, when
+luck was with her, she might come away with a loaf of bread, or an order
+for coals, or, if she played the beggar well, as much as a shilling.
+
+She kept up a brisk correspondence with "_Madame la Baronne de
+Rothschild_," whose sole mission in life she apparently believed was to
+see her out of her difficulties. _La Baronne_, on one occasion, gave her
+a sovereign, Heaven knows why, unless as a desperate measure to close
+the correspondence; but a good part of it went in postage for letters
+representing why the bestowal of sovereigns upon Clementine should
+become habitual. Stray agents, presumably from _la Baronne_, would pay
+me mysterious visits, to ask if Clementine were a deserving object of
+benevolence, and I was exposed to repeated cross-examination in her
+regard. She made a point of learning the hours when the _chefs_ left the
+kitchens of the big hotels and restaurants near the _Quartier_, and
+also of finding out who among them might be looked to for a few odd
+pence for the sake of Ernest's father, at one time a washer of dishes,
+or who, after a _coup de vin_ or an _absinthe_, grew generous with their
+money. She had gauged the depth of every tender heart in the _Quartier_
+and the possibility of scraps and broken meats at every shop and
+eating-place. And no one understood better how to beg, how to turn on
+the limelight and bring out in melodramatic relief the enormity of her
+need and destitution. The lisping treble, the giggle, the tattered
+clothes, _la vieille grandmere_, the desertion of the little Ernest's
+father, the little Ernest himself, were so many valuable assets. Indeed,
+she appreciated the value of the little Ernest so well that once she
+would have had me multiply him by twelve when she asked me to vouch for
+her poverty before some new society disposed to be friendly. If luck
+went against her, and nothing came of her begging, she was not
+discouraged. Begging was a game of chance with her,--her Monte Carlo or
+Little Horses,--and she never murmured over her failures, but with her
+faculty for making the best of all things, she got amusement out of
+them as well as out of her successes.
+
+In the face of these facts, I cannot deny that Clementine's "character"
+was not exactly the sort most people expect when they engage a servant.
+But I would not turn adrift a mangy dog or a lost cat whom I had once
+taken in. And she did her work very well, with a thoroughness the
+English charwoman would have despised, never minding what that work was,
+so long as she had plenty to eat and could prepare by an elaborate
+toilet for every errand she ran. Her morals could do us small harm, and
+for a while I was foolish enough to hope ours might do her some good. I
+realize now that nothing could have improved Clementine; she was not
+made that way; but at the time she was too wholly unlike any woman I had
+ever come in contact with, for me to see that the difference lay in her
+having no morals to help. She was not immoral, but unmoral. Right and
+wrong were without meaning for her. Her standards, if she could be said
+to have any, were comfort and discomfort. Virtue and vice were the same
+to her, so long as she was not unpleasantly interfered with. This was
+the explanation of her past, as of her frankness in disclosing it, and
+she was too much occupied in avoiding present pain to bother about the
+future by cultivating economy, or ambition, or prudence. An animal would
+take more thought for the morrow than Clementine. Of all the people I
+have ever come across, she had the most reason to be weary-laden, but
+instead of "tears in her eyes," there was always a giggle on her lips.
+"_La colere, c'est la folie_," she assured me, and it was a folly she
+avoided with marked success. Perhaps she was wise, undoubtedly she was
+the happier for it.
+
+Unfortunately for me, I had not her callousness or philosophy,--I am not
+yet quite sure which it was,--and if she would not think for herself, I
+was the more disturbed by the necessity of thinking for her. It was an
+absurd position. There I was, positively growing grey in my endeavours
+to drag her up out of the abyss of poverty into which she had sunk, and
+there she was, cheerful and happy, if she could only continue to enjoy
+_la bonne cuisine de Madame_. I never knew her to make the slightest
+attempt to profit by what I, or anyone else, would do for her. I
+remember, when _Madame la Baronne_ sent her the sovereign, she stayed at
+home a week, and then wrote to me as her excuse, "_J'ai ete rentiere
+toute la semaine. Maintenant je n'ai plus un penny, il faut m'occuper du
+travail._" I had not taken her things out of pawn before they were
+pawned again, and the cast-off clothes she begged from me followed as
+promptly. Her little Ernest, after all my trouble, stayed at the convent
+six weeks,--the month I paid for and two weeks that Clementine somehow
+wheedled out of the sisters,--and then he was back as of old, picking up
+his education in the London streets. I presented her once with a good
+bed I had no more use for, and, to make space for it, she went into debt
+and moved from her one room near Tottenham Court Road to two rooms and a
+higher rent near the Lower Marsh, and was robbed on the way by the man
+she hired to move her. When she broke anything, and she frequently did,
+she was never perturbed: "_Madame est forte pour payer_," or "_l'argent
+est fait pour rouler_," was her usual answer to my reproaches. To try
+to show her the road to economy was to plunge her into fresh
+extravagance.
+
+Nor did I advance matters by talking to her seriously. I recall one
+special effort to impress upon her the great misery she was preparing
+for herself by her shiftlessness. I had given her a pair of shoes,
+though I had vowed a hundred times to give her nothing more, and I used
+the occasion for a lecture. She seemed eager to interrupt once or twice,
+and I flattered myself my words were having their effect. And now what
+had she to say? I asked when my eloquence was exhausted. She giggled:
+"Would _Madame_ look at her feet in _Madame's_ shoes? _Jamais je ne me
+suis vue si bien chaussee_," and she was going straight to the
+_Quartier_ "_pour eblouir le monde_," she said. When Augustine took her
+in hand, though Augustine's eloquence had a vigour mine could not boast
+of, the result was, if anything, more discouraging. Clementine, made
+bold by custom, would turn a hand-spring or dance a jig, or go through
+the other accomplishments she had picked up in the slums.
+
+If I could discover any weak spot by which I could reach her, I used to
+think something might be gained, and I lost much time in studying how to
+work upon her emotions. But her emotions were as far to seek as her
+morals. Even family ties, usually so strong in France, had no hold upon
+her. If she adored her little Ernest, it was because he brought her in
+three shillings and sixpence a week. There was no adoration for her
+little girl who occasionally wrote from the Pas-de-Calais and asked her
+for money. I saw one of the child's letters in which she implored
+Clementine to pay for a white veil and white shoes; she was going to
+make her first communion, and the good adopted mother could pay for no
+more than the gown. The First Communion is the greatest event in the
+French child's life; there could be no deeper disgrace than not to be
+dressed for it, and the appeal must have moved every mother who read it,
+except Clementine. To her it was comic, and she disposed of it with
+giggles: "_C'est drole quand meme, d'avoir une fille de cet age_," and
+funnier that she could be expected to pay for anything for anybody.
+
+But if her family awoke in her no sentiment, her "home" did, though it
+was of the kind that Lamb would have classed with the "no homes." The
+tenacity with which she clung to it was her nearest approach to strong
+feeling. I suppose it was because she had so long climbed the stairs of
+others that she took such complete satisfaction in the two shabby little
+rooms to which she gave the name. I had a glimpse of them, never to be
+forgotten, once when she failed to come for two days, and I went to look
+her up. The street reeked with the smell of fried fish and onions; it
+was filled with barrows of kippers and haddocks and whelks; it was lined
+with old-clothes shops; it was crowded with frowzy women and horribly
+dirty children. And the halls and stairs of the tenement where she lived
+were black with London smoke and greasy with London dirt. I did not feel
+clean afterwards until I had had a bath, and it was never again as easy
+to reconcile myself to Clementine's daily reappearance in our midst. But
+to her the rooms were home, and for that reason she would have stayed on
+in a grimier and more malodorous neighbourhood, if such a thing could
+be, in preference to living in the cleanest and freshest London
+workhouse at the rate-payers' expense. Her objection to going into
+service except as a charwoman was that she would have to stay the night.
+"_Je ne serais pas chez moi_"; and much as she prized her comfort, it
+was not worth the sacrifice. On the contrary, she was prepared to
+sacrifice her comfort, dear as it was to her, that she might retain her
+home. She actually went to the length of taking in as companion an
+Italian workman she met by accident, not because he offered to marry
+her, which he did not, but because, according to his representations, he
+was making twenty-five shillings a week and would help to pay the rent.
+"_Je serais chez moi_," was now her argument, and for food she could
+continue to work or beg. He would be a convenience, _voila tout_. The
+Italian stayed a week. He lounged in bed all morning while she was at
+work, he smoked all afternoon. At the end of the week Clementine sent
+him flying. "_Je suis bete et je mourrais bete_," was her explanation to
+me; but she was not _bete_ to the point of adding an idle fourth to her
+burden, and, as a result, being turned out of the home she had taken him
+in to preserve.
+
+Clementine had been with us more than two years when the incident of the
+Italian occurred, and by this time I had become so accustomed to her and
+to her adventures that I was not as shocked as perhaps I should have
+been. It was not a way out of difficulties I could approve, but
+Clementine was not to be judged by my standards, and I saw no reason to
+express my disapproval by getting rid of her just when she most needed
+to stay. In her continually increasing need to stay, I endured so much
+besides that, at the end of her third year in our chambers, I was
+convinced that she would go on doing my rough work as long as I had
+rough work to be done. More than once I came to the end of my patience
+and dismissed her. But it was no use. In the course of a couple of
+weeks, or at the most three, she was back scrubbing my floors and
+polishing my brasses.
+
+The first time she lost her place with me, I sympathized to such an
+extent that I was at some pains to arrange a scheme to send her to
+France. But Clementine, clinging to the pleasures of life in the Lower
+Marsh, agreed to everything I proposed, and was careful to put every
+hindrance in the way of carrying out my plans. Twice I went to the
+length of engaging another woman, but either the other woman did not
+suit or else she did not stay, and I had to ask Clementine to return. On
+her side, she made various efforts to leave me, bored, I fancy, by the
+monotony of regular work, but they were as unsuccessful as mine to turn
+her off. After one disappearance of three weeks, she owned up frankly to
+having been again _chez les femmes_ whose pay was better; after a
+second, she said she had been ill in the workhouse which I doubted;
+after all, she was as frank in admitting that nowhere else did she enjoy
+_la bonne cuisine de Madame_, and that this was the attraction to which
+I was indebted for her fidelity.
+
+It may have been kindness, it may have been weakness, it may have been
+simply necessity, that made me so lenient on these occasions; I do not
+attempt to decide. But I cannot blame Clementine for thinking it was
+because she was indispensable. I noticed that gradually in small ways
+she began to take advantage of our good-nature. For one thing there was
+now no limit to her conversation. I did not spend my time in the kitchen
+and could turn a deaf ear to it, but I sometimes wondered if Augustine
+would not be the next to disappear. She would also often relieve the
+tedium of her several tasks by turning the handsprings in which she was
+so accomplished, or dancing the jig popular in the Lower Marsh, or by
+other performances equally reprehensible in the kitchen of _une maison
+bourgeoise_, as she was pleased to describe our chambers. She never lost
+a chance of rushing to the door if tradespeople rang, or talking with
+the British Workmen we were obliged, for our sins, to employ. Their
+bewilderment, stolid Britons as they were, would have been funny, had
+not her manner of exciting it been so discreditable. She was even
+caught--I was spared the knowledge until much later--turning her
+handsprings for a select company of plasterers and painters. Then I
+could see that she accepted anything we might bestow upon her as her
+due, and was becoming critical of the value and quality of the gift. I
+can never forget on one occasion when J. was going away, and he gave her
+a few shillings, the expression with which she looked first at the money
+and then at him as though insulted by the paltriness of the amount. More
+unbearable was the unfair use she made of her little Ernest.
+
+_La vieille grandmere_, who had wandered by chance into her life,
+wandered out of it as casually, or so Clementine said as an argument to
+induce me to receive that odious little boy into my kitchen during her
+hours of work; she had nobody to take care of him, she could not leave
+him alone. Here, happily for myself, I had the strength to draw the
+line. But when this argument failed, she found another far more
+harrowing. She took the opportunity of my stumbling across her in our
+little hall one day at noon to tell me that, as I would not let her
+bring him with her, she left him every day, carefully locked up out of
+harm's way, alone in her rooms. A child of seven, as he was then, locked
+up to get into any mischief he could invent, and, moreover, a child with
+a talent for mischief! that was too much, and I sent her flying home
+without giving her time to eat her lunch or linger before the glass, and
+I was haunted for the rest of the day with the thought of all the
+terrible things that might have happened to him. Naturally nothing did
+happen, nothing ever does happen to children like the little Ernest, and
+Clementine, dismayed by the loss of her lunch and the interference with
+her toilet, never ventured upon this argument a second time. But she
+found another almost as bad, for she informed me that, thanks to my
+interference, she was compelled to leave him again to run the streets as
+he would, and she hinted only too plainly that for whatever evil might
+befall him, I was responsible. Our relations were at this pleasant
+stage, and her little Ernest was fast developing into a monstrous
+Frankenstein wholly of my own raising, when one day she arrived with a
+new air of importance and announced her approaching marriage.
+
+I was enchanted. I had not permitted myself to feel the full weight of
+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.
+
+The stairs were a waterfall under which I ascended. The two doors of our
+chambers were wide open, with huge gaps where panels had been, the young
+man's servant having carefully shut them after me in our flight,
+thinking, I suppose, that the firemen would stand upon ceremony and ask
+for the key before venturing in. A river was drying up in our hall, and
+the strip of matting down the centre was sodden. Empty soda-water
+bottles rolled on the floor, though it speaks well for London firemen
+that nothing stronger was touched. Candles were stuck upside down in our
+hanging Dutch lamp and all available candlesticks, curtains and blinds
+were pulled about, chairs were upset, the marks of muddy feet were
+everywhere. I ought to have been grateful, and I was, that the damage
+was so small, all the more when I went again on to the leads and saw the
+blackened heap to which the night had reduced the young man's chambers.
+But the place was inexpressibly cheerless and dilapidated in the dawning
+light.
+
+It was too late to go to bed, too early to go to work. I was hungry, and
+the baker had not come, nor the charwoman. I was faint, the smell of the
+_schube_ was strong in my nostrils, though the _schube_ itself was now
+safely locked up in a remote cupboard. I wandered disconsolately from
+room to room, when, of a sudden, there appeared at my still open front
+door a gorgeous vision,--a large and stately lady, fresh and neat,
+arrayed in flowing red draperies, with a white lace fichu thrown over a
+mass of luxuriant golden hair. I stared, speechless with amazement. It
+was not until she spoke that I recognized the First Floor Back, who had
+had time to lay her hands not only on a false front, but on a whole wig,
+and who had had the enterprise to make tea which she invited me to
+drink with her in Pepys's chambers.
+
+The Housekeeper and the Housekeeper's daughter were already in her
+dining-room, the Housekeeper huddled up in a big armchair, pillows at
+her back, a stool at her feet. Like her house she was a wreck, and her
+demoralization was sad to see. All her life, until a few short hours
+ago, she had been the model of neatness; now she did not care how she
+looked; her white hair was untidy, her dress half-buttoned, her apron
+forgotten; and she, who had hitherto discouraged familiarity in the
+tenants, joined us as a friend. She was too exhausted for hysterics, but
+she moaned over her tea and abandoned herself to her grief. She could
+not rally, and, what is more, she did not want to. She had no life apart
+from her house, and in its ruin she saw her own. Her immaculate hall was
+defaced and stained, a blackened groove was worn in her shining stairs,
+the water pouring through the chambers in the front, down to her own
+little apartment, had turned them all into a damp and depressing mess.
+Her moans were the ceaseless accompaniment to our talk of the night's
+disaster. Always she had waited for the fire, she said, she had dreaded
+it, and at last it had come, and there was no sorrow like unto hers.
+
+After the first excitement, after the house had resumed, as well as it
+could, its usual habits, the Housekeeper remained absorbed in her grief.
+Hitherto her particular habit was to work, and she had been able,
+unaided, to keep the house up to her immaculate standard of perfection.
+But now to restore it to order was the affair of builders, of plasterers
+and painters and paperers. There was nothing for her to do save to sit
+with hands folded and watch the sacrilege. Her occupation was gone, and
+all was wrong with her world.
+
+I was busy during the days immediately "after the fire." I had to insure
+our belongings, which, of course, being insured, have never run such a
+risk again. I had to prepare and pack for a journey to France, now many
+days overdue, and, what with one thing or another, I neglected the
+Housekeeper. When at last I was ready to shut up our chambers and start
+and I called at her rooms, it seemed to me she had visibly shrunk and
+wilted, though she had preserved enough of the proper spirit to pocket
+the substantial tip I handed over to her with my keys. She was no less
+equal to accepting a second when, after a couple of months I returned
+and could not resist this expression of my sympathy on finding the hall
+still stained and defaced, the stairs still with their blackened groove,
+the workmen still going and coming, and her despair at the spectacle
+blacker than ever.
+
+The next day she came up to our chambers. She wore her best black gown
+and no apron, and from these signs I concluded it was a visit of state.
+I was right: it was to announce her departure. The house, partially
+rebuilt and very much patched up, would never be the same. She was too
+old for hope, and without the courage to pick up the broken bits of her
+masterpiece and put them together again. She was more ill at ease as
+visitor than as housekeeper. The conversation languished, although I
+fancied she had something particular to say, slight as was her success
+in saying it. We had both been silent for an awkward minute when she
+blurted out abruptly that she had never neglected her duty, no matter
+what it might or might not have pleased the tenants to give her. I
+applauded the sentiment as admirable, and I said good-by; and never once
+then, and not until several days after she left us, did it dawn upon me
+that she was waiting to accept graciously the fee it was her right in
+leaving to expect from me. The fact of my having only just tipped her
+liberally had nothing to do with it. A housekeeper's departure was an
+occasion for money to pass from the tenant's hand into hers, and she had
+too much respect for her duty as housekeeper not to afford me the
+opportunity of doing mine as tenant. It was absurd, but I was humiliated
+in my own eyes when I thought of the figure I must cut in hers, and I
+could only hope she would make allowance for me as an ignorant American.
+
+How deep I sunk in her esteem, there was no means of knowing. I do not
+think she could endure to come to her house as a stranger, for she
+never returned. Neither did any news of her reach us. I cannot believe
+she enjoyed the inactive existence with her daughter to which she had
+retired, and I should be astonished if she bore it long. In losing her
+house she had lost her interest in life. Her work in the world was
+done.
+
+
+
+
+_The New Housekeeper_
+
+[Illustration: THE SPIRE OF ST. MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS]
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER
+
+
+It had taken years for the Old Housekeeper to mature, and I knew that in
+the best sense of the word she could never be replaced. But the
+knowledge did not prepare me for the New Housekeeper.
+
+Mrs. Haines was a younger and apparently stronger woman, but she was so
+casual in her dress, and so eager to emulate the lilies of the field, as
+to convince me that it was not in her, under any conditions, to mature
+into a housekeeper at all. It expressed much, I thought, that while the
+Old Housekeeper had always been "the Housekeeper," we never knew Mrs.
+Haines by any name but her own. The fact that she had a husband was her
+recommendation to the landlord, who had been alarmed by the fire and the
+hysterics into which it threw the Old Housekeeper, and now insisted upon
+a man in the family as an indispensable qualification for the post. The
+advantage might have been more obvious had Mr. Haines not spent most of
+his time in dodging the tenants and helping them to forget his presence
+in the house. He was not an ill-looking nor ill-mannered man, and
+shyness was the only explanation that occurred to me for his
+perseverance in avoiding us. Work could not force him from his
+retirement. Mrs. Haines said that he was a carpenter by trade, but the
+only ability I ever knew him to display was in evading whatever job I
+was hopeful enough to offer him. Besides, though it might be hard to say
+what I think a carpenter ought to look like, I was certain he did not
+look like one, and others shared my doubts.
+
+The rumour spread through our street--where everybody rejoices in the
+knowledge of everything about everybody else who lives in it--that he
+had once been in the Civil Service, but had married beneath him and come
+down in the world. How the rumour originated I never asked, or never was
+told if I did ask; but it was so evident that he shrank from the
+practice of the carpenter's trade that once we sent him with a letter
+to the Publisher--who shares our love of the neighbourhood to the point,
+not only of publishing from it, but of living in it--asking if some sort
+of place could not be found for him in the office. It was found, I am
+afraid to his disappointment, for he never made any effort to fill it,
+and was more diligent than ever in keeping out of our way. If he saw us
+coming, on the rare occasions when he stood at the front door, or the
+rarer when he cleaned the gas-bracket above it, he would run if there
+was time, or, if there was not, turn his head and stare fixedly in the
+other direction that he might escape speaking to us. As the months went
+on, he was never caught cleaning anything or doing anything in the shape
+of work, except sometimes, furtively, as if afraid of being detected in
+the act, shutting the front door when the clocks of the neighbourhood
+struck eleven. He was far less of a safeguard to us than I often fancied
+he thought we were to him.
+
+Mrs. Haines was sufficiently unlike him to account for one part of the
+rumour. She was coarse in appearance and disagreeable in manner, always
+on the defensive, always on the verge of flying into a temper. She had
+no objection to showing herself; on the contrary, she was perpetually
+about, hunting for faults to find; but she did object to showing herself
+with a broom or a duster, a pail or a scrubbing-brush in her hands. I
+shuddered sometimes at the thought of the shock to the Old Housekeeper
+if she were to see her hall and stairs. We could bring up coal now at
+any hour or all day long. And yet Mrs. Haines tyrannized over us in her
+own fashion, and her tyranny was the more unbearable because it had no
+end except to spare herself trouble. Her one thought was to do nothing
+and get paid for it. She resented extra exertion without extra
+compensation. We never had been so bullied about coal under the old
+regime as we were under hers about a drain-pipe with a trick of
+overflowing. It might have drowned us in our chambers and she would not
+have stirred to save us; but its outlet was in a little paved court back
+of her kitchen, which it was one of her duties to keep in order, and she
+considered every overflow a rank injustice. She held the tenants in
+turn responsible, and would descend upon us like a Fury upbraiding us
+for our carelessness. It would never have surprised me had she ordered
+us down to clean up the court for her.
+
+I must in fairness add that when extra exertion meant extra money she
+did not shirk it. Nor was she without accomplishments. She was an
+excellent needlewoman: she altered and renovated more than one gown for
+me, she made me chair-covers, she mended my carpets. During the first
+years she was in the house she never refused any needlework, and often
+she asked me for more. She would come up and wait for me at table on the
+shortest notice. In an emergency she would even cook me a dinner which,
+in its colourless English way, was admirable. There is no denying that
+she could be useful, but her usefulness had a special tariff.
+
+It was also in her favour that she was a lover of cats, and their regard
+for her was as good as a certificate. I came to be on the best of terms
+with hers, Bogie by name, a tall ungainly tabby, very much the worse for
+wear. He spent a large part of his time on the street, and often, as I
+came or went, he would be returning home and would ask me, in a way not
+to be resisted, to ring her door-bell for him. Sometimes I waited to
+exchange a few remarks with him, for, though his voice was husky and not
+one of his attractions, he had always plenty to say. On these occasions
+I was a witness of his pleasure in seeing his mistress again, though his
+absence might have been short, and of her enthusiasm in receiving him.
+Unquestionably they understood each other, and cats are animals of
+discrimination.
+
+She extended her affection to cats that did not belong to her, and ours
+came in for many of her attentions. Our Jimmy, who had the freedom of
+the streets, often paid her a visit on his way out or in, as I knew he
+would not have done if she had not made the time pass agreeably; for if
+he, like all cats, disliked to be bored, he knew better than most how to
+avoid the possibility. One of his favourite haunts was the near Strand,
+probably because he was sure to meet his friends there. It was a joy to
+him, if we had been out late in the evening, to run across us as we
+returned. With a fervent "mow" of greeting, he was at our side; and
+then, his tail high in the air, and singing a song of rapture, he would
+come with us to our front door, linger until he had seen us open it,
+when, his mind at rest for our safety, he would hurry back to his
+revels. We considered this a privilege, and our respect for Mrs. Haines
+was increased when he let her share it, even in the daytime. He was
+known to join her in the Strand, not far from Charing Cross, walk with
+her to Wellington Street, cross over, wait politely while she bought
+tickets at the Lyceum for one of the tenants, cross again, and walk back
+with her. He was also known to sit down in the middle of the Strand, and
+divert the traffic better than a "Bobby," until Mrs. Haines, when
+everybody else had failed, enticed him away. He deserved the tribute of
+her tears, and she shed many, when the Vet kindly released him from the
+physical ruin to which exposure and a life of dissipation had reduced
+him.
+
+William Penn showed her the same friendliness, but from him it was not
+so marked, for he was a cat of democratic tastes and, next to his
+family, preferred the people who worked for them. He had not as much
+opportunity for his civilities as Jimmy, never being allowed to leave
+our chambers. But when Mrs. Haines was busy in our kitchen, he occupied
+more than a fair portion of her time, for which she made no reduction in
+the bill. William's charms were so apt to distract me from my work that
+I could say nothing, and her last kindness of all when he died--in his
+case of too luxuriant living and too little exercise, the Vet
+said--would make me forgive her much worse. According to my friend, Miss
+Repplier, a cat "considers dying a strictly private affair." But William
+Penn's death-bed was a public affair, at least for Augustine and myself,
+who sat up with him through the night of his agony. We were both
+exhausted by morning, unfit to cope with the problem of his funeral.
+Chambers are without any convenient corner to serve as cemetery, and I
+could not trust the most important member of the family to the dust-man
+for burial. I do not know what I should have done but for Mrs. Haines.
+It was she who arranged, by a bribe I would willingly have doubled,
+that during the dinner-hour, when the head-gardener was out of the way,
+William should be laid to rest in the garden below our windows. She was
+the only mourner with Augustine and myself,--J. was abroad,--when, from
+above, we watched the assistant gardener lower him into his little grave
+under the tree where the wood-pigeons have their nest.
+
+If I try now to make the best of what was good in Mrs. Haines, at the
+time she did not give me much chance. Grumbling was such a habit with
+her that, even had the Socialists' Millennium come, she would have kept
+on, if only because it removed all other reason for her grumbles. Her
+prejudice against work of any kind did not lessen her displeasure with
+everybody who did not provide her with work of some kind to do. She
+treated me as if I imposed on her when I asked her to sew or to mend or
+to cook, and she abused the other tenants because they did not ask her.
+This indeed was her principal grievance. She could not see why they were
+in the house if it were not to increase her income, and she hated the
+landlord for having led her to believe they would. She paid me
+innumerable visits, the object of which never varied. It was to borrow,
+which she did without shame or apology. She never hesitated in her
+demands, she never cringed. She ran short because the other tenants were
+not doing the fair and square thing by her, and she did not see why she
+should not draw upon me for help. One inexhaustible debt was the monthly
+bill for her furniture, bought on the instalment system and forfeited if
+any one instalment were not met. I do not remember how many pounds I
+advanced, but enough to suggest that she had furnished her rooms, of
+which she never gave me as much as a glimpse, in a style far beyond her
+means. I could afford to be amiable, for I knew I could make her pay me
+back in work, though my continual loans did so little to improve her
+financial affairs that after a while my patience gave out, and I refused
+to advance another penny.
+
+It was not until the illness of her husband, after they had been in the
+house for some two years, that I realized the true condition of things
+behind the door they kept so carefully closed. The illness was sudden,
+so far as I knew. I had not seen Mr. Haines for long, but I was
+accustomed to not seeing him, and curiously, when Mrs. Haines's need was
+greatest, she showed some reluctance in asking to be helped out of it.
+Her husband was dying before she appealed to anybody, and then it was
+not to me, but to Mrs. Burden, my old charwoman, who was so poor that I
+had always fancied that to be poorer still meant to live in the streets
+or on the rates. But Mrs. Haines was so much worse off, that Mrs.
+Burden, in telling me about it, thanked Our Lady that she had never
+fallen so low. It was cold winter and there was no fire, no coal, no
+wood, behind the closed door. The furniture for which I had advanced so
+many pounds consisted, I now found out, of two or three rickety chairs
+and a square of tattered carpet in the front room, a few pots and pans
+in the kitchen. In the dark bedroom between, the dying man lay on a hard
+board stretched on the top of a packing-box, shivering under his
+threadbare overcoat, so pitiful in his misery and suffering that Mrs.
+Burden was moved to compassion and hurried home to fetch him the
+blankets from her own bed and buy him a pennyworth of milk on the way.
+
+When the tenants knew how it was with Mrs. Haines and her husband, as
+now they could not help knowing, they remembered only that he was ill,
+and they sent for the doctor and paid for medicine, and did what they
+could to lighten the gloom of the two or three days left to him. And
+they arranged for a decent burial, feeling, I think, that a man who had
+been in the Civil Service should not lie in a pauper's grave. For a week
+or so we wondered again who he was, why he kept so persistently out of
+sight; after that we thought as little of him as when he had skulked, a
+shadow, between his rooms and the street door on the stroke of eleven.
+
+Hitherto everybody had been patient with Mrs. Haines, for the London
+housekeeper, though she has not got the tenants as completely in her
+power as the Paris _concierge_, can, if she wants, make things very
+disagreeable for them. Now that she was alone in the world, everybody
+was kind to her. The landlord overlooked his announced decision "to
+sack the pair," and retained her as housekeeper, though in losing her
+husband she had lost her principal recommendation. The tenants raised a
+fund to enable her to buy the mourning which is often a consolation in
+widowhood. Work was offered to her in chambers which she had never
+entered before, and I added to the tasks in ours. The housekeepers in
+the street with families to support must have envied her. She had her
+rooms rent free, wages from the landlord, plenty of extra work, and
+though this might not seem affluence to people who do not measure their
+income by pence or scramble for the odd shilling, it was wealth in
+housekeeping circles.
+
+Mrs. Haines, however, did not see her position in that light. She had
+complained when work was not offered to her, she complained more
+bitterly when it was. Perhaps her husband had had some restraining
+influence upon her. I cannot say; but certainly once he was gone, she
+gave up all pretence of controlling her temper. She would sweep like a
+hurricane through the house, raging and raving, on the slightest
+provocation. She led us a worse life than ever over the drain-pipe. She
+left the house more and more to take care of itself, dust lying thick
+wherever dust could lie, the stairs turned to a dingy grey, the walls
+blackened with London smoke and grime. Once in a while she hired a
+forlorn, ragged old woman to wash the stairs and brush the front-door
+mat, for in London, more than anywhere else, "poverty is a comparative
+thing," and every degree has one below to "soothe" it. No matter how
+hard up Mrs. Haines was, she managed to scrape together a few pennies to
+pay to have the work done for her rather than do it herself. The greater
+part of her leisure she spent out of the house, and when I passed her
+door I would see pinned up on it a bit of paper stating in neat, even
+elegant, writing, "Apply on the First Floor for the Housekeeper," or
+"Gone out. Back in ten minutes"; and hours, sometimes days, later the
+same notice would still be there. She became as neglectful of herself as
+of the house: her one dress grew shabbier and shabbier, her apron was
+discarded, no detail of her toilet was attended to except the frizzing
+of her coarse black hair. All this came about not at once, but step by
+step, and things were very bad before J. and I admitted, even to each
+other, that she was a disgrace to the house. We would admit it to nobody
+else, and to my surprise the other tenants were as forbearing. I suppose
+it was because they understood, as well as we did, that at a word to the
+landlord she would be adrift in London, where for one vacant post of
+housekeeper there are a hundred applications. To banish her from our own
+chambers, however, was not to drive her to the workhouse, and I called
+for her services less and less often.
+
+There was another reason for my not employing her to which I have not so
+far referred, the reason really of her slovenliness and bad temper and
+gradual deterioration. I shut my eyes as long as I could. But I was
+prepared for the whispers that began to be heard, not only in our house,
+but up and down our street. What started them I do not know, but the
+morning and evening gatherings of the housekeepers at their doors were
+not held for nothing, and presently it got about that Mrs. Haines had
+been seen stealing in and out of a public-house, and that this
+public-house was just beyond the border-line of the Quarter, which
+looked as if she were endeavouring to escape the vigilant eyes of our
+gossips. Then, as invariably happens, the whispers grew louder, the
+evidence against her circumstantial, and everybody was saying quite
+openly where her money disappeared and why she became shabbier, her
+rooms barer, and the house more disreputable. It leaked out that her
+husband also had been seen flitting from public-house to public-house;
+and, the game of concealment by this time being up, it was bluntly said
+that drink had killed him, as it would Mrs. Haines if she went on as she
+was going.
+
+I had kept my suspicions to myself, but she had never come to our
+chambers at the hour of lunch or dinner that there was not an unusual
+drain upon our modest wine-cellar. I could not fancy that it was merely
+a coincidence, that friends dining with us were invariably thirstier
+when she waited or cooked; but her appearance had been the invariable
+signal for the disappearance of our wine at a rate that made my
+employment of her a costly luxury. I never saw her when I could declare
+she had been drinking, but drink she did, and there was no use my
+beating about the bush and calling it by another name. It would have
+been less hopeless had she occasionally betrayed herself, had her speech
+thickened and her walk become unsteady. But hers was the deadliest form
+of the evil, because it gave no sign. There was nothing to check it
+except every now and then a mysterious attack of illness,--which she
+said defied the doctor though it defied nobody in the house,--or the
+want of money; but a housekeeper must be far gone if she cannot pick up
+a shilling here and a half-crown there. I was the last of the old
+tenants to employ her, but after I abandoned her she still had another
+chance with a newcomer who took the chambers below ours, and, finding
+them too small to keep more than one servant, engaged her for a liberal
+amount of work. She bought aprons and a new black blouse and skirt, and
+she was so spruce and neat in them that I was encouraged to hope. But
+before the end of the first week, she was met on the stairs coming down
+from his room to hers with a bottle under her apron; at the end of the
+second she was dismissed.
+
+I hardly dare think how she lived after this. With every Christmas there
+was a short period of prosperity, though it dwindled as the tenants
+began to realize where their money went. For a time J. and I got her to
+keep our bicycles, other people in the house followed suit, and during
+several months she was paid rent for as many as six, keeping them in the
+empty sitting-room from which even the rickety chairs had disappeared,
+and where the floor now was thick with grease and stained with oil. If
+we had trunks to store or boxes to unpack, she would let us the same
+room for as long as we wanted, and so she managed, one way or the other,
+by hook or by crook. But it was a makeshift existence, all the more so
+when her habits began to tell on her physically. She was ill half the
+time, and by the end of her fourth year in the house, I do not believe
+she could have sewed or waited or cooked, had she had the chance. She
+had no friends, no companions, save her cat. They were a grim pair, she
+with hungry, shifty eyes glowing like fires in the pallor of her face,
+he more gaunt and ungainly than ever: for a witch and her familiar they
+would have been burnt not so many hundred years ago.
+
+Then we heard that she was taking in lodgers, that women with the look
+of hunted creatures stole into her rooms at strange hours of the night.
+Some said they were waifs and strays from the "Halls," others that they
+were wanderers from the Strand; all agreed that, whoever they were, they
+must be as desperately poor as she, to seek shelter where the only bed
+was the floor. Much had been passed over, but I knew that such lodgers
+were more than landlord and tenants could endure, and I had not to be a
+prophet to foresee that the end was approaching.
+
+It came more speedily than I thought, though the manner of it was not
+left to landlord and tenants. Christmas, her fifth in the house, had
+filled her purse again. Tenants were less liberal, it is true, but she
+must have had at least five or six pounds, to which a turkey and plum
+pudding had been added by our neighbour across the hall, who was of a
+generous turn. She had therefore the essentials of what passes for a
+merry Christmas, but how much merriment there was in hers I had no way
+of telling. On holidays in London I keep indoors if I can, not caring to
+face the sadness of the streets or the dreariness of house-parties, and
+I did not go downstairs on Christmas Day, nor on Boxing Day which is the
+day after. Mrs. Haines, if she came up, did not present herself at our
+chambers. I trust she was gay because, as it turned out, it was her last
+chance for gaiety at this or any other season. In the middle of the
+night following Boxing Day she was seized with one of her mysterious
+attacks. A lodger was with her, but, from fright, or stupidity, or
+perhaps worse, called no one till dawn, when she rang up the housekeeper
+next door and vanished. The housekeeper next door went at once for the
+doctor who attends to us all in the Quarter. It was too late. Mrs.
+Haines was dead when he reached the house.
+
+Death was merciful, freeing her from the evil fate that threatened, for
+she was at the end of everything. She went out of the world as naked as
+she came into it. Her rooms were empty, there was not so much as a crust
+of bread in her kitchen, in her purse were two farthings. Her only
+clothes were those she had just taken off and the few rags wrapped about
+her for the night. Destitution could not be more complete, and the
+horror was to find it, not round the corner, not at the door, but in the
+very house, and, worse, to know that it deserved no pity. As she had
+sown, so had she reaped, and the grave was the kindliest shelter for the
+harvest.
+
+The day after, her sister appeared, from where, summoned by whom, I do
+not know. She was a decent, serious woman, who attended to everything,
+and when the funeral was over, called on all the tenants. She wanted,
+she told me, to thank us for all our kindness to her sister, whom
+kindness had so little helped. She volunteered no explanation, she only
+sighed her regrets. She could not understand, she said.
+
+Nor could I. No doubt, daily in the slums, many women die as destitute.
+But they never had their chance. Mrs. Haines had hers, and a fair one
+as these things go. Her tragedy has shaken my confidence in the
+reformers to-day who would work the miracle, and, with equal chances for
+all men, transform this sad world of ours into Utopia.
+
+
+
+
+_Our Beggars_
+
+[Illustration: CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE FROM OUR WINDOWS]
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+OUR BEGGARS
+
+
+I know our Beggars by their ring. When the front door-bell is pulled
+with insolent violence, "That," I say to myself, "is a Beggar," and I am
+usually right.
+
+Ours are not the Beggars of whose decay Elia complained; though he could
+not have believed that the art of begging was in any more danger of
+being lost than the art of lying. His sort have still their place at the
+crowded crossing, at the corners of streets and turnings of alleys--they
+are always with us. I rarely go out that I do not meet the cripple who
+swings himself along on his crutches through the throngs at Charing
+Cross, or the blind man who taps his way down the Strand, or the
+paralytic in her little cart close to St. Martin's, and I too should
+complain were they to disappear. These are Beggars I do not mind. They
+have their picturesque uses. They carry on an old tradition. They are
+licensed to molest me, and their demands, with their thanks when I give
+and their curses when I do not, are the methods of a venerable and
+honoured calling. Besides, I can escape them if I choose. I can cross
+the street at the approach of the cripple, I can dodge the blind man, I
+can look away as I pass the paralytic, and so avoid the irritation of
+giving when I do not want to or the discomfort of hearing their opinion
+of me when I refuse. But to our Beggars I do object, and from them there
+is no escape. They belong to a new species, and have abandoned the
+earlier methods as crude and primitive. They make a profession neither
+of disease nor of deformity, but of having come down in the world. They
+scorn to stoop to "rags and the wallet," which they have exchanged for a
+top hat and frock coat. They take out no license, for they never beg in
+the streets; instead, they assault us at our door, where they do not ask
+for alms but claim the gift, they call a loan, as their right. They are
+bullies, brigands, who would thrust the virtue of charity upon us, and
+if, as the philosopher thinks, it is a test of manners to receive, they
+come out of it with dignity, for their fiction of a loan saves them, and
+us, from the professional profuseness of the Beggar's thanks.
+
+It was only when I moved into chambers in the Quarter that they began to
+come to see me. Hitherto, my life in London had been spent in lodgings,
+where, if I was never free from Beggars in the form of those intimate
+friends who are always short of ten pounds to pay their rent or ten
+shillings to buy a hat, it was the landlady's affair when the Beggars
+who were strangers called.
+
+Chambers, however, gave me a front door at which they could ring and an
+address in the Directory in which they could find out where the door
+was; and had my object been to make a study of them and their manners, I
+could not have hit upon a better place to collect my material.
+
+Not that Beggars are encouraged in the Quarter, where more than one
+society devoted to their scientific suppression has, or has had, an
+office, and where the lady opposite does not wait for science, but sends
+them flying the minute she catches them in our streets. The man who
+loafs in front of our club, and who opens cab-doors for members, and as
+many more as he can capture, might be mistaken for a Beggar by anybody
+who did not know the Quarter, but we who do know it understand that he
+is loafing by special appointment. The small boy who has lately taken to
+selling his single box of matches on our Terrace does so officially, as
+the brass label on his arm explains. And nothing could be more
+exceptional than the cheerful person who the other day reeled after the
+Publisher and myself into one of our houses where there is an
+elevator--for to elevators we have come in the Quarter--the thin end of
+the modern wedge that threatens its destruction--and addressed the
+Publisher so affectionately as "Colonel" that we both retreated into the
+elevator and pressed the button for the top floor.
+
+But the Beggars we keep off our streets, we cannot keep from our front
+doors. J. and I had hardly settled in chambers before we were besieged.
+People were immediately in need of our help who up till then had managed
+without it, and to our annoyance they have been in need of it ever
+since. They present themselves in so many different guises, by so many
+different methods, that it is impossible to be on our guard against them
+all. Some sneak in with the post, and our correspondence has doubled in
+bulk. Dukes, Earls, Marquises, Baronets, favour us with lithographed
+letters, signing their names at the bottom, writing ours at the top, and
+demanding our contribution to charities they approve, as the price of so
+amazing a condescension. Ladies of rank cannot give their benevolent
+balls and banquets unless we buy tickets, nor can they conceive of our
+dismissing their personal appeal. Clergymen start missions that we may
+finance them, bazaars are opened that we may fill the stalls with the
+free offering of the work by which we make our living, and albums are
+raffled that we may grace them with our autographs. We might think that
+the post was invented for the benefit of people whose idea of charity is
+to do the begging and get us to do the giving. Many of our Beggars like
+better to beg in person: sometimes as nurses with tickets to sell for a
+concert, or as Little Sisters of the Poor--whom I welcome, having
+preserved a sentiment for any variety of cap and veil since my own
+convent days; sometimes as people with things to sell at the biggest
+price, that we would not want at the lowest, or with patent inventions
+that we would not take as a gift, and who are indignant if we decline to
+be taxed for the privilege of not buying or subscribing. But the most
+numerous of our Beggars, the most persistent, the most liberal in their
+expectations, are the men, and more occasionally the women, who, having
+come down in the world, look to us to set them up again, and would be
+the first to resent it if our generosity ran to any such extravagant
+lengths.
+
+Their patronage of the Quarter is doubtless due, partly to its being
+close to the Strand, which is an excellent centre for their line of
+business; partly to a convenient custom with us of leaving all street
+doors hospitably open and inscribing the names of tenants in big gilt
+letters on the wall just inside; partly to the fact that we are not five
+minutes from a Free Library, where they can agreeably fill their hours
+of leisure by the study of "Who's Who," "The Year's Art," and other
+books in which publishers obligingly supply the information about us
+which to them is as valuable an asset as a crutch to the cripple or a
+staff to the blind. Provided by the Directory with our address, they may
+already know where to look us up and how to establish an acquaintance by
+asking for us by name at our door; but it is this cramming in the facts
+of our life that enables them to talk to us familiarly about our work
+until acquaintance has ripened into intimacy and the business of begging
+is put on a personal and friendly footing. Great as is the good which
+Mr. Carnegie must have hoped to accomplish by his Free Libraries, even
+he could have had no idea of the boon they might prove to Beggars and
+the healthy stimulus to the art of begging which they develop.
+
+In the beginning our Beggars had no great fault to find with us. Their
+frock coats and top hats, signs of real British respectability, carried
+them past the British porter and the British servant. When they crossed
+our threshold, some remnant of the barbarous instinct of hospitality
+compelled us to receive them with civility, if not with cordiality. We
+never went so far as, with the Spaniard, to offer them our house and all
+that is in it, another instinct warning us how little they would mind
+taking us at our word; nor did hospitality push us to the extreme of
+being hoodwinked by their tales. But in those days we seldom let them go
+without something, which was always more than they deserved since they
+deserved nothing. If there is such a thing as a Beggar's Baedeker, I am
+sure our chambers were specially recommended in earlier editions. In
+justice, I must confess that they gave us entertainment for our money,
+and that the very tricks of the trade were amusing--that is, while the
+novelty lasted. We liked the splendid assurance of their manner; the
+pretended carelessness with which a foot was quickly thrust through the
+opening of the door so they could be shut out only by force; the
+important air with which they asked for a few minutes' talk; the
+insinuating smile with which they presumed that we remembered them;
+their cool assumption that their burden was ours, and that the kindness
+was all on their side for permitting us the privilege of bearing it. And
+we liked no less their infinite trouble in inventing romances about
+themselves that Munchausen could not have beaten, their dramatic use of
+foggy nights and wild storms, their ingenuity in discovering a bond
+between us, and their plausibility in proving why it obliged us to meet
+their temporary difficulties which were never of course of their own
+making. Nor could we but admire their superiority to mere charity, their
+belief in the equal division of wealth, their indifference as to who did
+the work to create the wealth so long as they did not do it themselves,
+and their trust in the obligation imposed by a craft in common. Had they
+bestowed half the pains in practising this craft that they squandered in
+wheedling a few shillings from us on the strength of it, they must long
+since have been acknowledged its masters.
+
+The first of our Beggars, whom I probably remember the better because he
+was the first, flattered me by introducing himself as a fellow author
+at a time when I had published but one book and had won by it neither
+fame nor fortune. What he had published himself he did not think it
+worth while to mention, but the powers of imagination he revealed in his
+talk should have secured his reputation in print. I have rarely listened
+to anybody so fluent, I could not have got a word in had I wanted to. It
+never seemed to occur to him that I might not be as bent upon listening
+to his story as he upon telling it. He made it quite a personal matter
+between us. I would understand, he said, and the inference was that
+nobody else could, the bitterness of his awakening when the talented
+woman whom he had revered as the kindliest of her sex betrayed herself
+to him as the most cruel. For long, in her Florentine villa, he had been
+Secretary to Ouida, whom he found so charming and considerate that he
+could only marvel at all the gossip about her whims and fancies. Then,
+one morning, he was writing a letter at her dictation and by oversight
+he spelt disappointment with one p, a trifling error which, as I knew,
+any gentleman or scholar was liable to. She flew into a rage, she
+turned him out of the villa without hearing a word, she pursued him into
+the garden, she set her dogs--colossal staghounds--on him, he had to run
+for his life, had even to vault over the garden gate, I could picture to
+myself with what disastrous consequences to his coat and trousers. And
+she was so vindictive that she would neither send him his clothes nor
+pay him a penny she owed him. He had too fine a sense of gallantry to go
+to law with a lady, he dared not remain in Florence where the report was
+that he went in danger of his life. There was nothing to do but to
+return to England, and--well--here he was, with a new outfit to buy
+before he could accept the admirable position offered to him, for he had
+not to assure me that a man of his competency was everywhere in demand;
+it was very awkward, and--in short--he looked to me as a fellow author
+to tide him over the awkwardness. I can laugh now at my absurd
+embarrassment when finally he came to a full stop. I did not have to
+wait for his exposure in the next number of "The Author" to realize that
+he was "an unscrupulous impostor." But I was too shy to call him one to
+his face, and I actually murmured polite concern and "advanced" I have
+forgotten what, to be rid of him.
+
+Out of compliment to J., our Beggars pose as artists no less frequently
+than as authors. If the artist himself, when accident or bad luck has
+got him into a tight place, likes best to come to his fellow artist to
+get him out of it, he is the first to pay his debts and the first debt
+he pays is to the artist who saw him through. But this has nothing to do
+with our Beggars who have chosen art as an unemployment and with whom
+accident or bad luck is deliberately chronic. They look upon art as a
+gilt-edged investment that should bring them in a dividend, however
+remote their connection with it. According to them, an artist entitles
+all his family, even to the second and third generation, to a share in
+J.'s modest income, though J. himself is not at all of their manner of
+thinking. Grandsons of famous wood-engravers, nephews of editors of
+illustrated papers, cousins of publishers of popular magazines, fathers
+of painters, brothers, sons, and uncles of every sort of artist, even
+sisters, daughters, and aunts who take advantage of their talent for
+pathos and "crocodile wisdom of shedding tears when they should
+devour,"--all have sought to impress upon him that the sole reason for
+their existence is to live at his expense. He may suggest meekly that he
+subscribes to benevolent institutions and societies founded for the
+relief of artists and artists' families in just their difficulties. They
+are glib in excuses for making their application to him instead, and
+they evidently think he ought to be grateful to them for putting him in
+the way of enjoying the blessing promised to those who give.
+
+The most ambitious reckon their needs on a princely scale, as if
+determined to beg, when they have to, with all their might. One artist,
+distinguished in his youth, writes to J., from the Cafe Royal where, in
+his old age, he makes a habit of dining and finding himself towards
+midnight ridiculously without a penny in his pocket, an emergency in
+which a five-pound note by return of messenger will oblige. Another,
+whose business hours are as late, comes in person for a "fiver," his
+last train to his suburban home being on the point of starting and he as
+ridiculously penniless, except for a cheque for a hundred pounds just
+received from a publisher, which he cannot change at that time of night.
+The more humble have so much less lavish a standard that half a crown
+will meet their liabilities, or else a sum left to the generosity of the
+giver. A youth, frequent in his visits, never aspires above the fare of
+a hansom waiting below, while a painter of mature years appears only on
+occasions of public rejoicing or mourning when there is no telling to
+what extent emotion may loosen the purse strings. Some bring their
+pictures as security, or the pictures of famous ancestors who have
+become bewilderingly prolific since their death; some plead for their
+work to be taken out of pawn; some want to pose in a few days, and these
+J. recommends to the Keeper of the Royal Academy; and some are so subtle
+in their argument that we fail to follow it. We are still wondering what
+could have been the motive of the excited little man who burst in upon
+J. a few days ago with a breathless inquiry as to how much he charged
+for painting polo ponies for officers, and who bolted as precipitately
+when J. said that he knew nothing about polo, and had never painted a
+pony in his life. But for sheer irrelevance none has surpassed the
+American whom, in J.'s absence, I was called upon to interview, and who
+assured me that, having begun life as an artist and later turned model,
+he had tramped all the way from New Orleans to New York and then worked
+his way over on a cattleship to London with no other object in view than
+to sit to J. If I regret that my countrymen in England borrow the trick
+of begging from the native, it is some satisfaction to have them excel
+in it. When I represented to the model from New Orleans that J., as far
+as I could see, would have no use for him, he was quite ready to take a
+shilling in place of the sitting, and when I would not give him a
+shilling, he declared himself repaid by his pleasant chat with a
+compatriot. He must have thought better of it afterwards and decided
+that something more substantial was owing to him, for three weeks later
+his visit was followed by a letter:--
+
+     MADAM,--I know how sorry you will be to hear that since my little
+     talk with you I have been dangerously sick in a hospital. The
+     doctors have now discharged me, but they say I must do no work of
+     any kind for ten days, though an artist is waiting for me to sit to
+     him for an important picture. They advise me to strengthen myself
+     with nourishing food in the meanwhile. Will you therefore please
+     send me
+
+     3 dozen new-laid eggs
+     1 lb. of fresh butter
+     1 lb. of coffee
+     1 lb. of tea
+     2 lbs. of sugar
+     1 dozen of oranges.
+
+     Thanking you in advance,
+     I am, Madam,
+     Gratefully yours.
+
+There are periods when I am convinced that not art, not literature, but
+journalism is the most impecunious of the professions, and that all
+Fleet Street, to which the Quarter is fairly convenient, must be out of
+work. It is astonishing how often it depends upon our financial backing
+to get into work again, though dependence could not be more misplaced,
+for a certain little transaction with a guileless youth whose future
+hung on a journey to Russia has given us all the experience of the kind,
+or a great deal more than we want. As astonishing is the number of
+journalists who cherish as their happiest recollections the years they
+were with us on the staff of London, New York, or Philadelphia papers
+for which we never wrote a line. One even grew sentimental over the
+"good old days" on the Philadelphia "Public Ledger" with J.'s father
+who, to our knowledge, passed his life without as much as seeing the
+inside of a newspaper office. But the journalist persisted until J.
+vowed that he never had a father, that he never was in Philadelphia,
+that he never heard of the "Ledger": then the poor man fled.
+Astonishing, too, is the count they keep of the seasons. Disaster is
+most apt to overtake them at those holiday times when Dickens has taught
+that hearts are tender and purses overflow. For them Christmas spells
+catastrophe, and it has ceased to be a surprise to hear their ring on
+Christmas Eve. As a rule, a shilling will avert the catastrophe and
+enable them to exchange the cold streets for a warm fireside, hunger for
+feasting, though I recall a reporter for whom it could not be done under
+a ticket to Paris. The Paris edition of the "New York Herald" had
+engaged him on condition that he was in the office not later than
+Christmas morning. He was ready to start, but--there was the ticket,
+and, for no particular reason except that it was Christmas Eve, J. was
+to have the pleasure of paying for it.
+
+"Why not apply to the 'New York Herald' office here?" J. asked.
+
+The reporter beamed: "My dear sir, the very thing, the very thing. Why
+didn't I think of it before? I will go at once. Thank you, sir, thank
+you!"
+
+He was back in an hour, radiant, the ticket in his hand, but held tight,
+so that just one end showed, as if he was afraid of losing it. "You see,
+sir, it was the right tip, but I must have some coffee at Dieppe, and I
+haven't one penny over. I can manage with a shilling, sir, and if you
+would be so kind a couple more for a cab in Paris."
+
+He did not know his man. J. would go, or rather he has gone, without
+breakfast or dinner and any distance on foot when work was at stake. But
+the reporter was so startled by the suggestion of such hardships for
+himself that he dropped the ticket on the floor, and before he could
+snatch it up again J. had seen that it was good not for Paris, but for a
+'bus in the Strand.
+
+I wish I had been half as stern with the assistant editor from
+Philadelphia. I knew him for what he was the minute he came into the
+room. He was decently, even jauntily dressed, but there hung about him
+the smell of stale cigars and whiskey, which always hangs about those of
+our Beggars who do not fill our chambers with the sicklier smell of
+drugs. Nor did I think much of his story. He related it at length with
+elegance of manner and speech, but it was a poor one, inviting doubt.
+The card he played was the one he sent in with a well-known Philadelphia
+name on it, and he strengthened the effect by his talk of the artist
+with whom he once shared rooms at Eleventh and Spruce streets. That
+"fetched me." For Eleventh and Spruce streets must ever mean for me the
+red brick house with the white marble steps and green shutters, the
+pleasant garden opposite full of trees green and shady on hot summer
+days, the leisurely horse-cars jingling slowly by,--the house that is so
+big in all the memories of my childhood and youth. If I can help it,
+nobody shall ever know what his having lived in its neighbourhood cost
+me. I was foolish, no doubt, but I gave with my eyes open: sentiment
+sometimes is not too dearly bought at the price of a little folly.
+
+Were Covent Garden not within such easy reach of the Quarter I could
+scarcely account for the trust which the needy musician places in us.
+Certainly it is because of no effort or encouragement on our side. We
+have small connection with the musical world, and whether because of the
+size of the singers or the commercial atmosphere at Baireuth, J. since
+we heard "Parsifal" there will not be induced to go to the opera
+anywhere, or to venture upon a concert. Under the circumstances, the
+most imaginative musician could not make believe in a professional bond
+between us, though there is nothing to shake his faith in the kinship of
+all the arts and, therefore, in our readiness to support the stray tenor
+or violinist who cannot support himself. But imagination, anyway, is not
+his strong point. He seldom displays the richness of fancy of our other
+Beggars, and I can recall only one, a pianist who had grasped the
+possibilities of "Who's Who." His use of it, however, went far to atone
+for the neglect of the rest. With its aid he had discovered not only
+that we were Philadelphians, but that Mr. David Bispham was also, and he
+had to let off his enthusiasm over Philadelphia and "dear old Dave
+Bispham" before he got down to business. There his originality
+gave out. His was the same old story of a run of misfortunes and
+disappointments--"it could never have happened if dear old Dave Bispham
+had been in town"--and the climax was the dying wife for whom our
+sympathy has been asked too often for a particle to be left. The only
+difference was that she took rather longer in dying than usual, and the
+pianist returned to report her removal from the shelter of a friend's
+house to the hospital, from the hospital to lodgings, and from the
+lodgings he threatened us with the spectacle of her drawing her last
+breath in the gutter if we did not, then and there, pay his landlady and
+his doctor and his friend to whom he was deeply in debt. We were spared
+her death, probably because by that time the pianist saw the wisdom of
+carrying the story of her sufferings to more responsive ears, though it
+is not likely that he met with much success anywhere. He was too well
+dressed for the part. With his brand-new frock coat and immaculate silk
+hat, with his gold-mounted cane and Suede gloves, he was better equipped
+for the _jeune premier_ warbling of love, than for the grief-stricken
+husband watching in penniless desolation by the bedside of a dying wife.
+
+The Quarter is also within an easy stroll for actors who, when their
+hard times come, show an unwarranted confidence in us, though J., if
+anything, disdains the theatre more than the opera. They take advantage
+of their training and bring the artist's zeal to the role of Beggars,
+but I have known them to be shocked back suddenly into their natural
+selves by J.'s blunt refusal to hear them out. One, giving the
+aristocratic name of Mr. Vivian Stewart and further describing himself
+on his card as "Lead Character late of the Lyceum," was so dismayed when
+J. cut his lines short with a shilling that he lost his cue entirely and
+whined, "Don't you think, sir, you could make it eighteenpence?" The
+most accomplished in the role was a young actor from York. He had the
+intelligence to suspect that _the_ profession does not monopolize the
+interest of all the world and to pretend that it did not monopolize his
+own. He therefore appeared in the double part of cyclist and actor. He
+reminded J. of a cycling dinner at York several winters before at which
+both were present. J. remembered the dinner, but not the cyclist, who
+was not a bit put out but declaimed upon "the freemasonry of the wheel,"
+and anticipated J.'s joy as fellow sportsman in hearing of the new
+engagement just offered to him. It would be the making of him and his
+reputation, but--no bad luck has ever yet robbed our Beggars of that
+useful preposition--_but_, it depended upon his leaving London within
+an hour, and the usual events over which our Beggars never have control,
+found him with ten shillings less than his railway fare. A loan at this
+critical point would save his career, and to-morrow the money would be
+returned. His visit dates back to the early period, when our hospitality
+had not out-grown the barbarous stage, and his career was saved,
+temporarily. After six months' silence, the actor reappeared. With his
+first word of greeting he took a half sovereign from his waistcoat
+pocket and regretted his delay in paying it back. _But_, in the mean
+while, much had happened. He had lost his promising engagement; he had
+found a wife and was on the point of losing her, for she was another of
+the many wives at death's door; he had found a more promising engagement
+and was on the point of losing that too, for if he did not settle his
+landlady's bill before the afternoon had passed she would seize his
+possessions, stage properties and all, and again events beyond his
+control had emptied his pockets. He would return the ten shillings,
+_but_ we must now lend him a sovereign. And he was not merely surprised
+but deeply hurt because we would not, and he stayed to argue it out that
+if his wife died, and his landlady kept his possessions, and the
+engagement was broken, and his career was at an end, the guilt would be
+ours,--it was in our power to make him or to mar him. He was really
+rather good at denunciation. On this occasion it was wasted. He did not
+get the sovereign, but then neither did we get the half sovereign which
+went back into his waistcoat pocket at the end of his visit and
+disappeared with him, this time apparently forever.
+
+We are scarcely in as great favour as we were with our Beggars. Their
+courage now is apt to ooze from them at our door, which is no longer
+held by a British servant, but by Augustine, whom tradition has not
+taught to respect the top hat and frock coat, and before whom even the
+prosperous quail. She recognizes the Beggar at a glance, for that glance
+goes at once to his shoes, she having found out, unaided by Thackeray,
+that poverty, beginning to take possession of a man, attacks his
+extremities first. She has never been mistaken except when, in the dusk
+of a winter evening, she shut one of our old friends out on the stairs
+because she had looked at his hat instead of his shoes and mistrusted
+the angle at which it was pulled down over his eyes. This blunder, for
+an interval, weakened her reliance upon her own judgment, but she has
+gradually recovered her confidence, and only the Beggars whose courage
+is screwed to the sticking-point, and who sharpen their wits, succeed in
+the skirmish to get past her. When they do get past it is not of much
+use. The entertainment they gave us is of a kind that palls with
+repetition. An inclination to listen to their stories, to save their
+careers, to set them up on their feet, could survive their persecutions
+in none but the epicure in charity, which we are not. The obligation of
+politeness to Beggars under my roof weighs more lightly on my shoulders
+with their every visit, while J., as the result of long experience and
+to save bother, has reduced his treatment of them to a system and gives
+a shilling indiscriminately to each and all who call to beg--when he
+happens to have one himself. In vain I assure him that if his system has
+the merit of simplicity, it is shocking bad political economy, and that
+every shilling given is a shilling thrown away. In vain I remind him
+that Augustine, shadowing our Beggars from our chambers, saw the man who
+came to us solely because of the "good old days" in Philadelphia stop
+and beg at every other door in the house; that she detected one of the
+numerous heart-broken husbands hurrying back to his dying wife by way of
+the first pub round the corner; that she caught the innocent defendant
+in a lawsuit, whose solicitor was waiting downstairs, pounced upon by
+two women instead and well scolded for the poor bargain he had made. In
+vain I point out that a shilling to one is an invitation to every Beggar
+on our beat, for by some wireless telegraphy of their own our Beggars
+always manage to spread the news when shillings are in season at our
+chambers. But J. is not to be moved. He has an argument as simple as his
+system with which to answer mine. If, he says, the Beggar is a humbug, a
+shilling can do no great harm; if the Beggar is genuine, it may pay for
+a night's bed or for the day's bread; and he does not care if it is
+right or wrong according to political economy, for he knows for himself
+that the Beggar's story is sometimes true. The visits of Beggars who
+once came to us as friends are vivid in his memory.
+
+They are, I admit, visits not soon forgotten. The chance Beggar in the
+street is impersonal in his appeal, and yet he makes us uncomfortable by
+his mere presence, symbol as he is of the huge and pitiless waste of
+life. Our laugh for the bare-faced impostor at our door has a sigh in
+it, for proficiency in his trade is gained only through suffering and
+degradation. But the laugh is lost in the sigh, the discomfort becomes
+acute when the man who begs a few pence is one at whose table we once
+sat, whom we once knew in positions of authority. He cannot be reduced
+to a symbol nor disposed of by generalizations. Giving is always an
+embarrassing business, but under these conditions it fills us with
+shame, nor can we help it though oftener than not we see that the shame
+is all ours. I am miserable during my interviews with the journalist
+whom we met when he was at the top of the ladder of success, and who
+slipped to the bottom after his promotion to an important editorship and
+his carelessness in allowing himself to be found, on the first night of
+his installation, asleep with his head and an empty bottle in the
+wastepaper basket; but he seems to be quite enjoying himself, which
+makes it the more tragic, as, with hand upraised, he assures me solemnly
+that J. is a gentleman, this proud distinction accorded by him in return
+for the practical working of J.'s system in his behalf. It is a trial to
+receive the popular author who won his popularity by persevering in the
+"'abits of a clerk," so he says, when he left the high office stool for
+the comfortable chair in his own study, and whose face explains too well
+what he has made of it; but it is evidently a pleasure to him, and
+therefore the more pitiful to me, when he interrupts my mornings to
+expose the critics and their iniquity in compelling him to come to me
+for the bread they take out of his mouth. Worst of all were the visits
+of the business man,--I am glad I can speak of them in the
+past,--though he himself never seemed conscious of the ghastly figure he
+made, for when his visible business vanished he had still his wonderful
+schemes.
+
+He was a man of wonderful schemes, but originally they led to results as
+wonderful. When we first knew him he ruled in an office in Bond Street,
+he had partners, he had clerks, he had a porter in livery at the door.
+He embarked upon daring adventures and brought them off. He gave
+interesting commissions, and he paid for them too, as we learned to our
+profit. He had large ideas and a wide horizon; he shrank from the cheap
+and popular, from what the people like. He was not above taking the
+advice of others upon subjects of which he was broad-minded enough to
+understand and to acknowledge his own ignorance, for he spared himself
+no pains in his determination to secure the best. And he was full of go;
+that was why we liked him. I look back to evenings when he came to
+dinner to talk over some new scheme, and when he would sit on and talk
+on after his last train--his home was in the suburbs--had long gone and,
+as he told us afterwards, he would have to wait in one of the little
+restaurants near Fleet Street that are open all night for journalists
+until it was time to catch the earliest newspaper train. He would drop
+in at any odd hour to discuss his latest enterprise. We were always
+seeing him, and we were always delighted to see him, enthusiasm not
+being so common a virtue in the Briton that we can afford not to make
+the most of it when it happens. We found him, as a consequence, a
+stimulating companion. I cannot say exactly when the change came; why it
+came remains a mystery to us to this day. Probably it began long before
+we realized it. The first symptoms were a trick of borrowing: at the
+outset such trivial things as a daily paper to which he should have
+subscribed, or books which he should have bought for himself. Then it
+was a half crown here and a half crown there, because he had not time to
+go back to the office before rushing to the station, or because he had
+not a cab fare with him, or because of half a dozen other accidents as
+plausible. We might not have given a second thought to all this but for
+the rapidity with which the half crowns developed into five shillings,
+and the five into ten, and the ten into a sovereign on evenings when the
+cab, for which we had to take his word, had been waiting during the
+hours of his stay. We could not help our suspicions, the more so because
+that indefinable but rank odour of drugs, by which our Beggars too
+frequently announce themselves, grew stronger as the amount of which he
+was in need increased. And very soon he was confiding to us the details
+of a quarrel which deprived him of his partners and their capital. Then
+the Bond Street office was given up and his business was done in some
+vague rooms, the whereabouts of which he never disclosed; only too soon
+it seemed to be done entirely in the street. We would meet him at night
+slinking along the Strand, one of the miserable shadows of humanity whom
+the darkness lures out of the nameless holes and corners where they hide
+during the day. At last came a period when he kept away from our
+chambers altogether, sending his wife to us instead. Her visits were
+after dark, usually towards midnight. She called for all sorts of
+things,--a week's rent, medicine from the druggist in the Strand,
+Sunday's dinner, her 'bus fare home, once I remember for an umbrella.
+She was never without an excuse for the emergency that forced her to
+disturb us, and she was no less fine than he in keeping up the fiction
+that it was an emergency, and that business prospered though removed
+from Bond Street into the Unknown. I think it was after this loan of an
+umbrella that he again came himself, nominally to return it and
+incidentally to borrow something else. I had not seen him for several
+months. It might have been years judging from his appearance, and I
+wished, as I still wish, I had not seen him then. In the Bond Street
+days he had the air of a man who lived well, and he was correct in
+dress, "well groomed" as they say. And now? His face was as colourless
+and emaciated as the faces from which I shrink in the "hunger line" on
+the Embankment; he wore a brown tweed suit, torn and mended and torn
+again, with a horrible patch of another colour on one knee that drew my
+eyes irresistibly to it; his straw hat was as burned and battered as
+days of tramping in the sun and nights of sleeping in the rain could
+make it. He was the least embarrassed of the two. In fact, he was not
+embarrassed at all, but sat in the chair where so often he had faced me
+in irreproachable frock coat and spotless trousers, and explained as in
+the old days his wonderful schemes, expressing again the hope that we
+would second him and, with him, again achieve success. He might have
+been a prince promising his patronage. And all the while I did not know
+which way to look, so terrible was his face pinched and drawn with
+hunger, so eloquent that staring patch on his knee. That was several
+years ago, and it was the last visit either he or his wife ever made us.
+I cannot imagine that anything was left to them except greater misery,
+deeper degradation, and--the merciful end, which I hope came swiftly.
+
+It is when I remember the business man and our other friends,
+fortunately few, who have followed in the same path that I am unable to
+deny the force of the argument by which J. defends his system. It may be
+that all our Beggars began life with schemes as wonderful and ideas as
+large, that their stories are as true, that the line between Tragedy and
+Farce was never so fine drawn as when, stepping across it, they plunged
+into the profession of having come down in the world.
+
+
+
+
+_The Tenants_
+
+[Illustration: THE LION BREWERY]
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE TENANTS
+
+
+It is impossible to live in chambers without knowing something of the
+other tenants in the house. I know much even of several who were
+centuries or generations before my time, and I could not help it if I
+wanted to, for the London County Council has lately set up a plaque to
+their memory on our front wall. Not that I want to help it. I take as
+much pride in my direct descent from Pepys and Etty as others may in an
+ancestor on the Mayflower or with the Conqueror, while if it had not
+been for J. and his interest in the matter we might not yet boast the
+plaque that gives us distinction in our shabby old street, though, to do
+us full justice, its list of names should be lengthened by at least one,
+perhaps the most distinguished.
+
+I have never understood why Bacon was left out. Only the pedant would
+disown so desirable a tenant for the poor reason that the house has
+been rebuilt since his day. As it is, Pepys heads the list, and we do
+not pretend to claim that the house is exactly as it was when he lived
+in it. He never saw our Adam ceilings and fireplaces, we never saw his
+row of gables along the River front except in Canaletto's drawing of the
+old Watergate which our windows still overlook. However, except for the
+loss of the gables, the outside has changed little, and if the inside
+has been remodelled beyond recognition, we make all we can of the
+Sixteenth-Century drain-pipe discovered when the London County Council,
+in the early throes of reform, ordered our plumbing to be overhauled.
+Their certified plumber made so much of it, feeling obliged to celebrate
+his discovery with beer and in his hurry forgetting to blow out the bit
+of candle he left amid the laths and plaster, that if J. had not arrived
+just in time there would be no house now for the plaque to decorate.
+Pepys, I regret to say, waited to move in until after the Diary ended,
+so that we do not figure in its pages. Nor, during his tenancy, does he
+figure anywhere except in the parish accounts, which is more to his
+credit than our entertainment.
+
+Etty was considerate and left a record of his "peace and happiness" in
+our chambers, but I have no proof that he appreciated their beauty. If
+he liked to walk on our leads in the evening and watch the sun set
+behind Westminster, he turned his back on the River at the loveliest
+hour of all. It was his habit as Academician to work like a student at
+night in the Royal Academy Schools, then in Trafalgar Square,--an
+admirable habit, but one that took him away just when he should have
+stayed. For when evening transformed the Thames and its banks into
+Whistler's "Fairyland" he, like Paul Revere, hung out a lantern from his
+studio window as a signal for the porter, with a big stick, to come and
+fetch him and protect him from the robbers of the Quarter, which had not
+then the best of reputations. Three generations of artists climbed our
+stairs to drink tea and eat muffins with Etty, but they showed the same
+ignorance of the Thames, all except Turner, who thought there was no
+finer scenery on any river in Italy, and who wanted to capture our
+windows from Etty and make them his own, but who, possibly because he
+could not get them, never painted the Thames as it was and is. One other
+painter did actually capture the windows on the first floor, and, in the
+chambers that are now the Professor's, Stanfield manufactured his
+marines, and there too, they say, Humphry Davy made his safety lamp.
+
+We do not depend solely upon the past for our famous tenants. Some of
+the names which in my time have been gorgeously gilded inside our
+vestibule, later generations may find in the list we make a parade of on
+our outer wall. For a while, in the chambers just below ours, we had the
+pleasure of knowing that Mr. Edmund Gosse was carrying on for us the
+traditions of Bacon and Pepys. Then we have had a Novelist or two, whose
+greatness I shrink from putting to the test by reading their novels, and
+also one or more Actors, but fame fades from the mummer on the wrong
+side of the footlights. We still have the Architect who, if the tenants
+were taken at his valuation, would, I fancy, head our new list.
+
+He is not only an architect but, like Etty,--like J. for that
+matter,--an Academician. He carries off the dignity with great
+stateliness, conscious of the vast gulf fixed between him and tenants
+with no initials after their name. Moreover, he belongs to that
+extraordinary generation of now elderly Academicians who were apparently
+chosen for their good looks, as Frederick's soldiers were for their
+size. The stoop that has come to his shoulder with years but adds to the
+impressiveness of his carriage. His air of superiority is a continual
+reminder of his condescension in having his office under our modest
+roof. His "Aoh, good-mornin'," as he passes, is a kindness, a few words
+from him a favour rarely granted, and there is no insolent familiar in
+the house who would dare approach him. Royalty, Archbishops, University
+dignitaries are his clients, and it would seem presumption for the mere
+untitled to approach him with a commission. His office is run on
+dignified lines in keeping with the exalted sphere in which he
+practises. A parson of the Church of England is his chief assistant. A
+notice on his front door warns the unwary that "No Commercial
+Travellers need Apply," and implies that others had better not.
+
+William Penn is probably the only creature in the house who ever had the
+courage to enter the Academic precincts unbidden. William was a cat of
+infinite humour, and one of his favourite jests was to dash out of our
+chambers and down the stairs whenever he had a chance; not because he
+wanted to escape,--he did not, for he loved his family as he
+should,--but because he knew that one or all of us would dash after him.
+If he was not caught in time he added to the jest by pushing through the
+Academician's open door and hiding somewhere under the Academic nose,
+and I am certain that nobody had a keener sense of the audacity of it
+than William himself. More than once a young assistant, trying to
+repress a grin and to look as serious as if he were handing us a design
+for a Deanery, restored William to his family; and once, on a famous
+occasion when, already late, we were starting for the Law Courts and the
+Witness-box, the Architect relaxed so far as to pull William out from
+among the Academic drawing-boards and to smile as he presented him to
+J. who was following in pursuit. Even Jove sometimes unbends, but when
+Jove is a near neighbour it is wiser not to presume upon his unbending,
+and we have never given the Architect reason to regret his moment of
+weakness.
+
+Whatever the Architect thinks of himself, the other tenants think more
+of Mr. Square, whose front door faces ours on the Third Floor. Mr.
+Square is under no necessity of assuming an air of superiority, so
+patent to everybody in the house is his right to it. If anything, he
+shrinks from asserting himself. He had been in his chambers a year,
+coming a few months "after the fire," before I knew him by sight, though
+by reputation he is known to everybody from one end of the country to
+the other. Not only is there excitement in our house when the police
+officer appears on our staircase with a warrant for his arrest for
+murder, but the United Kingdom thrills and waits with us for the
+afternoon's Police Report. In the neighbourhood I am treated with almost
+as much respect as when I played a leading part in the Law Courts
+myself. The milkman and the postman stop me in the street, the little
+fruiterer round the corner and the young ladies at the Temple of Pomona
+in the Strand detain me in giving me my change as if I were an accessory
+to the crime. What if the murder is only technical, Mr. Square's arrest
+a matter of form, his discharge immediate? The glory is in his position
+which makes the technical murder an achievement to be envied by every
+true-born Briton. For he is Referee at the Imperial Boxing Club, and
+therefore the most important person in the Empire, except, perhaps, the
+winning jockey at the Derby or the Captain of the winning Football Team.
+The Prime Minister, Royalty itself, would not shed a brighter lustre on
+our ancient house, and there could be no event of greater interest than
+the fatal "accident" in the ring for which Mr. Square has been so many
+times held technically responsible.
+
+In his private capacity Mr. Square strikes me as in no way remarkable.
+He is a medium-sized man with sandy hair and moustache, as like as two
+peas to the other men of medium height with sandy hair and moustache
+who are met by the thousand in the Strand. He shares his chambers with
+Mr. Savage, who is something in the Bankruptcy Court. Both are retiring
+and modest, they never obtrude themselves, and either their domestic
+life is quiet beyond reproach, or else the old builders had the secret
+of soundless walls, for no sound from their chambers disturbs us. With
+them we have not so much as the undesirable intimacy that comes from
+mutual complaint, and such is their amiability that William, in his most
+outrageous intrusions, never roused from them a remonstrance.
+
+I am forced to admit that William was at times ill-advised in the hours
+and places he chose for his adventures. He often beguiled me at midnight
+upon the leads that he might enjoy my vain endeavours to entice him home
+with the furry monkey tied to the end of a string, which during the day
+never failed to bring him captive to my feet. By his mysterious
+disappearances he often drove J., whose heart is tender and who adored
+him, out of his bed at unseemly hours and down into the street where, in
+pyjamas and slippers, and the door banged to behind him, he became an
+object of suspicion. On one of these occasions, a policeman
+materializing suddenly from nowhere and turning a bull's-eye on him,--
+
+"Have you seen a cat about?" J. asked.
+
+"Seen a cat? Oi've seen millions on 'em," said the policeman. "Wot sort
+o' cat?" he added.
+
+"A common tabby cat," said J.
+
+"Look 'ere," said the policeman, "where do you live any'ow?"
+
+"Here," said J., who had retained his presence of mind with his
+latch-key.
+
+"Aoh, Oi begs your parding, sir," said the policeman. "Oi didn't see
+you, sir, in the dim light, sir, but you know, sir, there's billions o'
+tabby cats about 'ere of a night, sir. But if Oi find yours, sir, Oi'll
+fetch 'im 'ome to you, sir. S'noight, sir. Thank e' sir."
+
+When the kitchen door was opened the next morning, William was
+discovered innocently curled up in his blanket. And yet, when he again
+disappeared at bedtime a week or two later, J. was again up before
+daybreak, sure that he was on the doorstep breaking his heart because
+he could not get in. This time I followed into our little hall, and
+Augustine after me. She was not then as used to our ways as she is now,
+and I still remember her sleepy bewilderment when she looked at J., who
+had varied his costume for the search by putting on knickerbockers and
+long stockings, and her appeal to me: "_Mais pourquoi en bicyclette?_"
+Why indeed? But there was no time for explanation. We were interrupted
+by an angry but welcome wail from behind the opposite door, and we
+understood that William was holding us responsible for having got
+himself locked up in Mr. Square's chambers. We had to wake up Mr.
+Square's old servant before he could be released, but it was not until
+the next morning that the full extent of his iniquity was revealed. A
+brand-new, pale-pink silk quilt on Mr. Square's bed having appealed to
+him as more luxurious than his own blanket, he had profited by Mr.
+Square's absence to spend half the night on it, leaving behind him a
+faint impression of his dear grimy little body. Even then, Mr. Square
+remained as magnanimously silent as if he shared our love for William
+and pride in his performances.
+
+All we know of Mr. Square and Mr. Savage, in addition to their fame and
+modesty, we have learned from their old man, Tom. He is a sailor by
+profession, and for long steward on Mr. Savage's yacht. He clings to his
+uniform in town, and when we see him pottering about in his blue reefer
+and brass buttons, Mr. Savage's little top floor that adjoins ours and
+opens out on the leads we share between us looks more than ever like a
+ship's quarter-deck. He is sociable by nature, and overflows with
+kindliness for everybody. He is always smiling, whatever he may be doing
+or wherever I may meet him, and he has a child's fondness for sweet
+things. He is never without a lemon-drop in his mouth, and he keeps his
+pockets full of candy. As often as the opportunity presents itself, he
+presses handfuls upon Augustine, whom he and his wife ceremoniously call
+"Madam," and to whom he confides the secrets of the household.
+
+It is through him, by way of Augustine, that we follow the movements of
+the yacht, and know what "his gentlemen" have for dinner and how many
+people come to see them. At times I have feared that his confidences to
+Augustine and the tenderness of his attentions were too marked, and that
+his old wife, who is less liberal with her smiles, disapproved. Over the
+_grille_ that separates our leads from his, he gossips by the hour with
+Augustine, when she lets him, and once or twice, meeting her in the
+street, he has gallantly invited her into a near public to "'ave a
+drink," an invitation which she, with French scorn for the British
+substitute of the cafe, would disdain to accept. To other tributes of
+his affection, however, she does not object. On summer evenings he
+sometimes lays a plate of salad or stewed fruit at our door, rings,
+runs, and then from out a porthole of a window by his front door,
+watches the effect when she finds it, and is horribly embarrassed if I
+find it by mistake. In winter his offering takes the shape of a British
+mince-pie or a slice of plum pudding, and, on a foggy morning when she
+comes home from market, he will bring her a glass of port from Mr.
+Square's cellar. He is always ready to lend her a little oil, or milk,
+or sugar, in an emergency. Often he is useful in a more urgent crisis.
+In a sudden thunder-storm he will leap over the _grille_, shut our door
+on the leads, and make everything ship-shape almost before I know it is
+raining. He has even broken in for me when I have come home late without
+a key, and by my knocking and ringing have roused up everybody in the
+whole house except Augustine. Mrs. Tom, much as she may disapprove, is
+as kindly in her own fashion; she is quite learned in medicine, and
+knows an old-fashioned remedy for every ailment. She has seen Augustine
+triumphantly through an accident, she has cured Marcel, Augustine's
+husband, of a quinsy, and she rather likes to be called upon for advice.
+She is full of little amiabilities. She never gets a supply of eggs
+fresh from the country at a reasonable price without giving me a chance
+to secure a dozen or so, and when her son, a fisherman, comes up to
+London, she always reserves a portion of his present of fish for me. I
+could not ask for kindlier neighbours, and they are the only friends I
+have made in the house.
+
+I was very near having friendship thrust upon me, however, by the First
+Floor Back, Mrs. Eliza Short. She is an elderly lady of generous
+proportions and flamboyant tastes, "gowned" elaborately by Jay and as
+elaborately "wigged" by Truefitt. The latest fashions and golden hair
+cannot conceal the ravages of time, and, as a result of her labours, she
+looks tragically like the unwilling wreck of a Lydia Thompson Blonde. I
+may be wrong; she may never have trod the boards, and yet I know of
+nothing save the theatre that could account for her appearance. The most
+assiduous of her visitors, as I meet them on the stairs, is an old
+gentleman as carefully made up in his way, an amazing little dandy, whom
+I fancy as somebody in the front row applauding rapturously when Mrs.
+Eliza Short, in tights and golden locks, came pirouetting down the
+stage. I should have been inclined to weave a pretty romance about them
+as the modern edition of Philemon and Baucis if, knowing Mrs. Short, it
+did not become impossible to associate romance of any kind with her.
+
+Our acquaintance was begun by my drinking tea in her chambers the
+morning "after the fire," of which she profited unfairly by putting me
+on her visiting-list. She was not at all of Montaigne's opinion that
+"incuriosity" is a soft and sound pillow to rest a well-composed head
+upon. On the contrary, it was evident that for hers to rest in comfort
+she must first see every room in our chambers and examine into all my
+domestic arrangements. I have never been exposed to such a battery of
+questions. I must say for her that she was more than ready to pay me in
+kind. Between her questions she gave me a vast amount of information for
+which I had no possible use. She told me the exact amount of her income
+and the manner of its investment. She explained her objection to
+servants and her preference for having "somebody in" to do the rough
+work. She confided to me that she dealt at the Stores where she could
+always get a cold chicken and a bit of ham at a pinch, and the "pinch"
+at once presented itself to my mind as an occasion when the old dandy
+was to be her guest. She edified me by her habit of going to bed with
+the lambs, and getting up with the larks to do her own dusting. The one
+ray of hope she allowed me was the fact that her winters were spent at
+Monte Carlo. She could not pass me on the stairs, or in the hall, or on
+the street, where much of her time was lost, without buttonholing me to
+ask on what amount of rent I was rated, or how much milk I took in of a
+morning, or if the butcher sent me tough meat, or other things that were
+as little her business. I positively dreaded to go out or to come home,
+and the situation was already strained when Jimmy rushed to the rescue.
+Elia regretted the agreeable intimacies broken off by the dogs whom he
+loved less than their owners, but I found it useful to have a cat Mrs.
+Short could not endure, to break off my intimacy with her, and he did it
+so effectually that I could never believe it was not done on purpose.
+One day, when she had been out since ten o'clock in the morning, she
+returned to find Jimmy locked up in her chambers alone with her bird.
+That the bird was still hopping about its cage was to me the most
+mysterious feature in the whole affair, for Jimmy was a splendid
+sportsman. After his prowls in the garden he only too often left behind
+him a trail of feathers and blood-stains all the way up the three
+flights of our stairs. But if the bird had not escaped, Mrs. Short could
+hardly have been more furious. She demanded Jimmy's life, and when it
+was refused, insisted on his banishment. She threatened him with poison
+and me with exposure to the Landlord. For days the Housekeeper was sent
+flying backwards and forwards between Mrs. Short's chambers and ours,
+bearing threats and defiances. Jimmy, who knew as well as I did what was
+going on, rejoiced, and from then until his untimely death never ran
+downstairs or up--and he was always running down or up--without stopping
+in front of her door, giving one unearthly howl, and then flying; and
+never by chance did he pay the same little attention to any one of the
+other tenants.
+
+Mrs. Short does not allow me to forget her. As her voice is deep and
+harsh and thunders through the house when she buttonholes somebody else,
+or says good-bye to a friend at her door, I hear her far more
+frequently than I care to; as she has a passion for strong scent, I
+often smell her when I do not see her at all; and as in the Quarter we
+all patronize the same tradesmen, I am apt to run into her not only on
+our stairs, but in the dairy, or the Temple of Pomona, or further afield
+at the Post Office. Then, however, we both stare stonily into vacancy,
+failing to see each other, and during the sixteen years since that first
+burst of confidence, we have exchanged not a word, not as much as a
+glance: an admirable arrangement which I owe wholly to Jimmy.
+
+With her neighbours on the other side of the hall, Mrs. Short has
+nothing in common except permanency as tenant. Her name and the sign of
+the Church League faced each other on the First Floor when we came to
+our chambers; they face each other still. Her golden wig is not oftener
+seen on our stairs than the gaiters and aprons of the Bishops who rely
+upon the League for a periodical cup of tea; her voice is not oftener
+heard than the discreet whispers of the ladies who attend the Bishops in
+adoring crowds. But Jimmy's intervention was not required to maintain
+the impersonality of my relations with the League. It has never shown an
+interest in my affairs nor a desire to confide its own to me. Save for
+one encounter we have kept between us the distance which it should be
+the object of all tenants to cultivate, and I might never have looked
+upon it as more than a name had I not witnessed its power to attract
+some of the clergy and to enrage others. Nothing has happened in our
+house to astound me more than the angry passions it kindled in two of
+our friends who are clergymen. One vows that he will never come to see
+us again so long as to reach our chambers he must pass the League's
+door; the second reproaches us for having invited him, his mere presence
+in the same house being sufficient to ruin his clerical reputation. As
+the League is diligently working for the Church of which both my friends
+are distinguished lights, I feel that in these matters there are fine
+shades beyond my unorthodox intelligence. It is also astounding that the
+League should inflame laymen of no religious tendencies whatever to
+more violent antagonism. Friends altogether without the pale have taken
+offence at what they call the League's arrogance in hanging up its signs
+not only at its front door, but downstairs in the vestibule, and again
+on the railings without, and they destroyed promptly the poster it once
+ventured to put upon the stairs, assuring us that theirs was righteous
+wrath, and then, in the manner of friends, leaving us to face the
+consequences.
+
+For myself I bear no ill-will to the League. I may object to the success
+with which it fills our stairs on the days of its meetings and
+tea-parties, but I cannot turn this into a pretext for quarrelling,
+while I can only admire the spirit of progress that has made it the
+first in the house to do its spring-cleaning by a vacuum cleaner and to
+set up a private letter-box. I can only congratulate it on the
+prosperity that has caused the overflow of its offices into the next
+house, and so led indirectly to the one personal encounter I have
+referred to. A few of the rooms were to let, and J.'s proposal to set up
+his printing-press in one of them involved us in a correspondence with
+the Secretary. Then I called, as by letter we were unable to agree upon
+details. The League, with a display of hospitality that should put the
+Architect to shame, bids everybody enter without knocking. But when I
+accepted this Christian invitation, I was confronted by a tall,
+solemn-faced young man, who informed me that the Secretary was "engaged
+in prayer," and I got no further than the inner hall. As I failed to
+catch the Secretary in his less professional moments, and as his
+devotions did not soften his heart to the extent of meeting us halfway,
+we quickly resumed the usual impersonality of our relations.
+
+I cannot imagine our house without the Church League and Mrs. Eliza
+Short, the Architect and Mr. Square. Were their names to vanish from the
+doors where I have seen them for the last sixteen years, it would give
+me the same sense of insecurity as if I suddenly looked out of my window
+to a Thames run dry, or to a domeless city in the distance. With this
+older group of tenants, who show their respect for a house of venerable
+age and traditions by staying in it, I think we are to be included and
+also the Solicitor of the Ground Floor Front. He has been with us a
+short time, it is true, but he succeeded our old Insurance Agent whom
+nothing save death could have removed, and for years before he lived no
+further away than Peter the Great's house across the street, where he
+would be still, had it not been torn down over his head to make way for
+the gaudy, new, grey stone building which foretells the beginning of the
+end of our ancient street. The Solicitor cloisters himself in his
+chambers more successfully even than the Architect or the Church League,
+and I have never yet laid eyes on him or detected a client at his door.
+
+I wish the same could be said of our other newcomers who, with rare
+exceptions, exhibit a restlessness singularly unbecoming in a house that
+has stood for centuries. In the Ground Floor Back change for long was
+continued. It was the home of a Theatrical Agent and his family, and
+babyish prattle filled our once silent halls; it was the office of a
+Music Hall Syndicate, and strange noises from stranger instruments came
+floating out and up our stairs, and blonde young ladies in towering
+hats blocked the door. Then a Newspaper Correspondent drifted in and
+drifted out again; and next a publisher piled his books in the windows,
+and made it look so like the shop which is against the rules of the
+house that his disappearance seemed his just reward.
+
+After this a Steamship Company took possession, bringing suggestions of
+sunshine and spice with the exotic names of its vessels and the far-away
+Southern ports for which they sailed,--bringing, too, the spirit of
+youth, for it employed many young men and women whom I would meet in
+couples whispering on the stairs or going home at dusk hand in hand.
+Tender little idyls sprang up in our sober midst. But the staff of young
+lovers hit upon the roof as trysting-place at the luncheon hour, running
+races and playing tag up there, and almost tumbling through our
+skylight. Cupid, sporting overhead with wings exchanged for hob-nailed
+boots, was unendurable, and I had to call in the Landlord's Agent. He is
+the unfortunate go-between in all the tenants' differences and
+difficulties: a kind, weary, sympathetic man, designed by Nature for
+amiable, good-natured communication with his fellow men, and decreed by
+Fate and his calling to communicate with them constantly in their most
+disagreeable moods and phases. Half my fury evaporated at sight of his
+troubled face, and I might have endured the races and games of tag could
+I have foreseen that, almost as soon as he put a stop to them, the
+Steamship Company would take its departure.
+
+The Professor who then came in is so exemplary a tenant that I hope
+there will be no more changes in the Ground Floor Back. He is a tall,
+ruddy, well-built man of the type supposed to be essentially British by
+those who have never seen the other type far more general in the
+provincial town or, nearer still, in the East of London. He is of
+middle-age and should therefore have out-grown the idyllic stage, and
+his position as Professor at the University is a guarantee of sobriety
+and decorum. I do not know what he professes, but I can answer for his
+conscientiousness in professing it by the regularity with which, from
+our windows, I see him of a morning crossing the garden below on his
+way to his classes. His household is a model of British propriety. He is
+cared for by a motherly housekeeper, an eminently correct man-servant,
+and a large hound of dignified demeanour and a sense of duty that leads
+him to suspect an enemy in everybody who passes his master's door. His
+violence in protesting against unobjectionable tenants like ourselves
+reconciles me to dispensing with a dog, especially as it ends with his
+bark. It was in his master's chambers that our only burglar was
+discovered,--a forlorn makeshift of a burglar who got away with nothing,
+and was in such an agony of fright when, in the small hours of the
+morning, he was pulled out from under the dining-room table, that the
+Professor let him go as he might have set free a fly found straying in
+his jam-pot.
+
+The Professor, as is to be expected of anybody so unmistakably British,
+cultivates a love for sport. I suspect him of making his amusements his
+chief business in life, as it is said a man should and as the Briton
+certainly does. He hunts in the season, and, as he motors down to the
+meet, he is apt to put on his red coat and white breeches before he
+starts, and they give the last touch of respectability to our
+respectable house. He is an ardent automobilist, and his big motor at
+our door suggests wealth as well as respectability. This would have
+brought us into close acquaintance had he had his way. Sport is supposed
+to make brothers of all men who believe in it, but from this category I
+must except J. at those anxious moments which sport does not spare its
+followers. He was preparing to start somewhere on his fiery motor
+bicycle, and the Professor, who had never seen one before, wanted to
+know all about it. J., deeper than he cared to be in carburettors and
+other mysterious matters, was not disposed to be instructive, and I
+think the Professor was ashamed of having been beaten in the game of
+reserve by an American, for he has made no further advances. His most
+ambitious achievement is ballooning, to which he owes a fame in the
+Quarter only less than Mr. Square's. We all watch eagerly, with a
+feeling of proprietorship, for the balloons on the afternoons when
+balloon races and trials start from the Crystal Palace or Ranelagh. I
+have caught our little fruiterer in the act of pointing out the
+Professor's windows to chance customers; and on those days I am absorbed
+in the sporting columns of the afternoon paper, which, at other times, I
+pass over unread. He has now but to fly to complete his triumph and the
+pride of our house in him.
+
+Restlessness also prevails in the Second Floor Back, and as we are
+immediately above, we suffer the more. Hardly a tenant has remained
+there over a year, or a couple of years at most, and all in succession
+have developed a talent for interfering with our comfort. First, an
+Honourable occupied the chambers. His title was an unfailing
+satisfaction to Mrs. Haines, the Housekeeper, who dwelt upon it
+unctuously every time she mentioned him. I am not learned in Debrett and
+Burke and may not have appreciated its value, but he might have been
+Honourable ten times over and it would not have reconciled me to him as
+neighbour. He was quite sure, if I was not, that he was a great deal
+better than anybody else, and he had the Briton's independent way of
+asserting it. He slammed behind him every door he opened, and when the
+stairs were barricaded by himself, his friends, or his parcels, and we
+wanted to pass, he failed to see us as completely as if we had been Mr.
+Wells's Invisible Man. He went to the City in the morning and was away
+all day, even an Honourable being sometimes compelled to pretend to
+work. But this was no relief. During his absence his servants availed
+themselves of the opportunity to assert their independence, which they
+did with much vigour. When they were not slamming doors they were
+singing hymns, until Mrs. Eliza Short from her chambers below and we
+from ours above, in accord the first and only time for years, joined in
+protest, and drove Mrs. Haines to the unpleasant task of remonstrating
+with an Honourable.
+
+The Honourable who had come down from the aristocracy was followed by a
+_Maitre d'Hotel_ who was rapidly rising in rank, and was therefore under
+as urgent necessity to impress us with his importance. Adolf was an
+Anglicized German, with moustaches like the Kaiser's, and the swagger
+of a drum-major. He treated our house as if it was the dining-room under
+his command, locking and unlocking the street door, turning on and out
+the lights on the stairs at any hour that suited him, however
+inconvenient to the rest of us. He littered up the hall with his
+children and his children's perambulators and hobby-horses, just where
+we all had to stumble over them to get in or out. Nobody's taxi tooted
+so loud as his, not even the Honourable's door had shut with such a
+bang. Augustine's husband being also something in the same profession,
+they both despised the Adolfs for putting on airs though no better than
+themselves, while the Adolfs despised them for not having attained the
+same splendid heights, and the shaking of my rugs out of the back
+windows was seized upon as the excuse for open warfare. Augustine said
+it was there they should be shaken according to the law in Paris, which
+she thought good enough for London. Mrs. Adolf protested that the
+shaking sent all the dust into her rooms. Augustine, whose English is
+small and what there is of it not beyond reproach, called Mrs. Adolf
+"silly fou," which must have been annoying, or harangued her in French
+when Mrs. Adolf, who could not understand, suspected an offence in every
+word.
+
+Mrs. Adolf wrote to the Agent, to the Landlord, to me; she declared she
+would summons me to the County Court. Between letters she watched at her
+window for the rugs, and there both her servant and her charwoman made
+faces at Augustine, who has a nice sense of justice and a temper that
+does not permit her, with Elizabeth Bennet's father, to be satisfied by
+laughing in her turn at those who have made sport of her. I trembled for
+the consequences. But at the critical moment, Adolf was promoted to the
+more splendid height of Manager and a larger salary; the taxi was
+replaced by a motor-car of his own; Mrs. Adolf arrayed herself in muslin
+and lace for the washtub, in nothing less elegant than velvet for the
+street, and they left our old-fashioned chambers for the marble halls
+and gilded gorgeousness of the modern mansion.
+
+Of the several tenants after the Adolfs, I seem to remember little save
+the complaints we interchanged. I tried my best to do as I would be done
+by and to keep out of their way, but accident was always throwing us
+together to our mutual indignation. There was the Bachelor whose
+atrocious cook filled our chambers with the rank odours of smoked
+herring and burnt meat, and whose deserted ladylove filled the stairs
+with lamentations. There was the young Married Couple into whose bathtub
+ours overflowed. There was the Accidental Actress whose loud voice and
+heavy boots were the terror not only of our house, but of the street,
+whose telephone rang from morning till night, whose dog howled all
+evening when he was left alone as he usually was, and whose rehearsals
+in her rooms interrupted the work in ours with ear-piercing yells of
+"Murder" and "Villain."
+
+I cannot recall them all, so rapidly did they come and go. We began to
+fear that the life of the tenant was, as Tristram Shandy described the
+life of man, a shifting from sorrow to sorrow. We lived in an atmosphere
+of fault-finding, though when there was serious cause for complaint,
+not a murmur could be wrung from the tenant below or, for that matter,
+from a tenant in the house. All, like true Britons, refused to admit the
+possibility of interests in common, and would not stir a hand, however
+pressing the danger, so long as they were not disturbed. If our chambers
+reeked with smoke and the smell of burning wood, they accepted the
+information with calm indifference because theirs did not. Nor did it
+serve as a useful precedent if, as it happened, smoke and smell were
+traced again to a fire, smouldering as it had been for nobody knew how
+long, in the cellar of the adjoining house, separated from ours only by
+the "party wall" belonging to both: that ingenious contrivance of the
+builder for creating ill-will between next-door neighbours. They
+declined to feel the bannisters loose under their grasp, or to see the
+wide gap opened in the same party wall after the fall of the roof of
+Charing Cross Station had shaken the Quarter to its foundations and made
+us believe for a moment that London was emulating Messina or San
+Francisco. And I must add, so characteristic was it, that the Agent
+dismissed our fears as idle, and that the Surveyor, sent at our request
+by the County Council, laughed us to scorn. But we laughed best, for we
+laughed last. A second Surveyor ordered the wall to be pulled down as
+unsafe and rebuilt, and the Agent in the end found it prudent to support
+the bannisters with iron braces.
+
+When, after these trials and tribulations, Mr. Allan took the Second
+Floor Back we thought the Millennium had come. He was a quiet man,
+employed in the morning, so we were told, in writing a life of Chopin,
+and in the evening, as we heard for ourselves, in playing Chopin
+divinely. The piano is an instrument calculated to convert an otherwise
+harmless neighbour into a nuisance, but of him it made a delight. He was
+waited upon by a man as quiet, whose consideration for the tenants went
+to the length of felt slippers in the house, who never slammed doors nor
+sang, who never even whistled at his work. An eternity of peace seemed
+to open out before us, but, as they say in novels, it was not to be. Our
+confidence in Mr. Allan was first shaken by what I still think an
+unjustified exhibition of nerves. One night, or rather one early
+morning, a ring at our door-bell startled us at an hour when, in my
+experience, it means either a fire or an American cablegram. It was
+therefore the more exasperating, on opening the door, to be faced by an
+irate little man in pyjamas and smoking jacket who wanted to know when
+we proposed to go to bed. Only after J.'s answer "when we are ready,"
+did we know it was Mr. Allan by his explanation that his bed was under
+the room where we were walking about, that the floor was thin, and that
+he could not sleep. J. would not enter into an argument. He said the
+hour was not the most appropriate for a criticism of the construction of
+the house which, besides, was at all hours the Landlord's and not his
+affair, and Mr. Allan had the grace to carry his complaint no further.
+It may have occurred to him on reflection that it was not our fault if
+he had chosen a room to sleep in just below the room we used to sit and
+see our friends in.
+
+Had I borne malice, I should not have had to wait long for my revenge,
+nor to plan it myself. Not many days later, Mr. Allan's servant,
+watering the flowers on the open balcony at Mr. Allan's window, watered
+by mistake the new Paris bonnet of the lady of the Ground Floor Back who
+was coming home at that very minute. Under the circumstances few women
+would not have lost their temper, but few would have been so prompt in
+action. She walked straight upstairs to Mr. Allan's chambers, the wreck
+in her hand. The servant opened to her knock, but she insisted upon
+seeing the master.
+
+"I have come, Allan, to tell you what I think of the conduct of your
+servant," she said, when the master appeared. "Yes, I call you Allan,
+for I mean to talk to you as man to man," which she proceeded to do.
+
+I did not hear the talk, but it was almost a week before I heard the
+piano again. Poor Mr. Allan! And this proved a trifle to the worse
+humiliation he was soon to endure.
+
+As I sat with a book by my lamp one evening before dinner, shrieks from
+his chambers and a crash of crockery sent me rushing to the door and out
+upon the landing, with Augustine at my heels. Old Tom and his wife
+arrived there simultaneously, and, looking cautiously over the
+bannisters, I saw an anxious crowd looking up as cautiously from the
+hall on the Ground Floor. The shrieks developed into curses intermingled
+with more riotous crashing of china. The Housekeeper, urged by the crowd
+below, crept all unwilling to Mr. Allan's door and knocked. The door was
+flung open, and, before she ventured to "beg pardon but the noise
+disturbed the other tenants," Mr. Allan's hitherto well-behaved servant
+greeted her with a volley of blood-curdling epithets and the smash of
+every pane of glass in the upper panel of the door, and down she fled
+again. He bolted out after her, but looking up and catching a glimpse of
+Tom, peacefully sucking a lemon-drop, he became so personal that Tom and
+his wife retreated hastily, and for the first time the smile faded from
+the old man's face. In a moment's lull I heard Mr. Allan's voice, low
+and entreating, then more curses, more crashes. I should not have
+thought there was so much glass and crockery to be broken in the whole
+house.
+
+Presently a policeman appeared, and then a second. The door was open,
+but the servant was busy finishing up the crockery. Mr. Allan spoke to
+them, and then, like a flash, the servant was there too.
+
+"I dare you to let them come in!" he yelled, so loud he could be heard
+from the top to the bottom of the house. "I dare you to let them come
+in! I dare you to give me in charge! I dare you! I dare you!"
+
+And Mr. Allan did not dare, that was the astonishing part of it. And he
+never lost his temper. He argued with the policemen, he plead with the
+servant, while one group on our landing and another on the Ground Floor
+waited anxiously. The policemen did not desert us but stood guard on the
+Second Floor, which was a reassurance, until gradually the yells were
+lowered, the crashes came at longer intervals, and at last, I suppose in
+sheer exhaustion, the servant relapsed into his usual calm, Mr. Allan
+"sported his oak," and I learned how truly an Englishman's home is his
+castle.
+
+The Housekeeper spent the evening on the stairs gossiping at every
+door. There was not much to learn from her. A mystery was hinted--many
+mysteries were hinted. The truth I do not know to this moment. I only
+know that before the seven days of our wonder were over, the Agent, more
+careworn than ever if that were possible, made a round of visits in the
+house, giving to each tenant an ample and abject apology written by Mr.
+Allan. At the end of the quarter, the Second Floor Back was again to
+let.
+
+We should have parted with Mr. Allan less light-heartedly could we have
+anticipated what was in store for us. He was no sooner gone than the
+Suffragettes came in.
+
+I have no quarrel on political grounds with the Suffragettes.
+Theoretically, I believe that women of property and position should have
+their vote and that men without should not, but I think it a lesser evil
+for women to be denied the vote than for the suffrage to become as
+universal for women as for men, and to grant it on any other conditions
+would be an indignity. I state the fact to explain that I am without
+prejudice. I do not argue, for, to tell the truth, shocking as it may
+be, I am not keen one way or the other. Life for me has grown crowded
+enough without politics, and years have lessened the ardour for abstract
+justice that was mine when, in my youth, I wrote the "Life of Mary
+Wollstonecraft," and militant Suffragettes as yet were not. Ours are of
+the most militant variety, and it is not their fault if the world by
+this time does not know what this means. Even so, on general principles,
+I should have no grievance against them. Every woman is free to make
+herself ridiculous, and it is none of my business if my neighbours
+choose to make a public spectacle of themselves by struggling in the
+arms of policemen, or going into hysterics at meetings where nobody
+wants them; if they like to emulate bad boys by throwing stones and
+breaking windows, or if it amuses them to slap and whip unfortunate
+statesmen who, physically, could easily convince them of their
+inferiority. But when they make themselves a nuisance to me personally I
+draw the line. And they are a nuisance to me.
+
+They have brought pandemonium into the Quarter where once all was
+pleasantness and peace. Of old, if the postman, the milkman, a messenger
+boy, and one or two stray dogs and children lingered in our street, we
+thought it a crowd; since the coming of the Suffragettes, I have seen
+the same street packed solid with a horde of the most degenerate
+creatures in London summoned by them "to rush the House of Commons."
+They have ground their hurdy-gurdies at our door, Heaven knows to what
+end; vans covered with their posters have obstructed our crossing;
+motor-cars adorned with their flags have missed fire and exploded in our
+street; and they have had themselves photographed as sandwiches on our
+Terrace. Our house is in a turmoil from morning till night with women
+charging in like a mob, or stealing out like conspirators. Their badges,
+their sandwich boards, their banners lie about in our hall, so much in
+everybody's way that I sympathized with the infuriated tenant whom I
+caught one night kicking the whole collection into the cellar. They talk
+so hard on the stairs that often they pass their own door and come on to
+ours, bringing Augustine from her work and disturbing me at mine, for
+she can never open to them without poking her head into my room to tell
+me, "_Encore une sale Suffragette!_" In their chambers they never stop
+chattering, and their high shrill treble penetrates through the floor
+and reaches us up above. The climax came with their invasion of our
+roof.
+
+This roof, built "after the fire," is a modern invention, designed for
+the torture of whoever lives underneath. It is flat, with a beautiful
+view to be had among the chimney-pots and telephone wires; it is so thin
+that a pigeon could not waddle across without being heard by us; and as
+it is covered with gravel, every sound is accompanied by a scrunching
+warranted to set the strongest nerves in a quiver. We had already been
+obliged to represent to the Agent that it was not intended for the
+Housekeeper's afternoon parties or young people's games of tag, that
+there were other, more suitable places where postmen could take a rest,
+or our actress recite her lines, or lovers do their courting amid the
+smuts. Our patience, indeed, had been so tried in one way or another
+that at the first sound from above, at any hour of the day or night, J.
+was giving chase to the trespassers, and they were retreating before the
+eloquence of his attack. It was in a corner of this roof, just above the
+studio and in among wood-enclosed cisterns, that the Suffragettes
+elected to send off fire-balloons, which, in some way best known to
+themselves, were to impress mankind with the necessity of giving them
+the vote. The first balloon floated above the chimney-tops, a sheet of
+flame, and was dropping, happily into the Thames, when J., straight from
+his printing-press, in blouse, sleeves rolled up, arms and hands black
+with ink, a cap set sideways, was on the roof, and the Secretary of the
+Militants and a young man in the brown suit and red tie that denote the
+Socialist, in their hands matches and spirits of wine, were flying
+downstairs. I was puzzled to account for their meekness unless it was
+that never before had they seen anybody so inky, never before listened
+to language so picturesque and American. J., without giving them time to
+take breath, called in the Landlord's Agent, supported by the
+Landlord's Solicitor, and they were convinced of the policy of
+promising not to do it again. And of course they did.
+
+A week later the Prime Minister was unveiling a statue, or performing
+some equally innocent function in the garden below our windows, when the
+Suffragettes, from the roofs of near woodsheds, demanded him through a
+megaphone to give Votes to Women. We followed the movement with such
+small zest that when we were first aware something out of the common was
+going on in the Quarter, the two heroines were already in the arms of
+policemen, where of late so much of the Englishwoman's time has been
+spent, and heads were at every window up and down our street,
+housekeepers at every door, butchers' and bakers' boys grouped on the
+sidewalk, one or two tradesmen's carts drawn up in the gutter,
+battalions of police round the corner. The women no doubt to-day boast
+of the performance as a bold strike for freedom, and recall with pride
+the sensation it created.
+
+At this point I lost sight of the conflict on the roof below, for, from
+the roof above, a balloon shot upwards, so high that only the angels
+could have read the message it bore. The familiar scrunching, though
+strangely muffled, was heard, and J., again in blouse and ink, was up
+and away on a little campaign of his own. This time he found six women,
+each with a pair of shoes at her side and her feet drawn up under her,
+squatting in a ring behind the cisterns, bending over a can of spirits
+of wine, and whispering and giggling like school-girls.
+
+"It won't go off," they giggled, and the next minute all chance of its
+ever going off was gone, for J. had seized the balloon and torn it to
+tatters.
+
+"You have destroyed our property," shrieked a venerable little old lady,
+thin and withered, with many wrinkles and straggling grey hair.
+
+He told her that was what he had intended to do.
+
+"But it cost ten shillings," she squeaked in a tremor of rage, and with
+an attempt at dignity, but it is as hard to be dignified, as Corporal
+Trim found it to be respectful, when one is sitting squat upon the
+ground.
+
+A younger woman, golden-haired, in big hat and feathers, whom the
+others called Duchess, demanded "Who are you anyhow?" And when I
+consider his costume and his inkiness I wonder he had not been asked it
+long before.
+
+"You can go downstairs and find out," he said, "but down you go!"
+
+There was a moment's visible embarrassment, and they drew their stocking
+feet closer up under them. J., in whom they had left some few shreds of
+the politeness which he, as a true American, believes is woman's due,
+considerately looked the other way. As soon as they were able to rise up
+in their shoes, they altogether lost their heads. The Housekeeper and
+the Agent, summoned in the mean time, were waiting as they began to
+crawl down the straight precipitous ladder from the roof. In an agony of
+apprehension, the women clutched their skirts tight about them,
+protesting and scolding the while. The little old lady tried to escape
+into our chambers, one or two stood at the top of the stairs, cutting
+off all approach, the others would not budge from our narrow landing. A
+telegraph boy and a man with a parcel endeavoured to get past them and
+up to us, but they would not give way an inch. Finally in despair, J.
+gently collected them and pushed them down the stairs towards their own
+door.
+
+"We will have you arrested for assault!" the little old lady shrieked.
+
+"We charge you with assault and battery," the golden-haired lady
+re-echoed from below.
+
+And we heard no more, for at last, with a sigh of relief, J. could get
+to our door and shut out the still ascending uproar.
+
+But that was not the end of it. If you can believe it, they were on the
+roof again within an hour, getting themselves and their megaphone
+photographed, for the fight for freedom would not be half so sweet
+without the publicity of portraits in the press. And we were besieged
+with letters. One Suffragette wrote that an apology was due,--yes, J.
+replied, due to him. A second lectured him on the offence given to her
+"dear friend, the Duchess," for to become a Suffragette is not to cease
+to be a snob, and warned him that the Duchess--who was the golden-haired
+lady and may have had the bluest blood of England in her veins, but who
+looked more like one of the Gaiety girls, from whom the stock of the
+British nobility has been so largely replenished--and the Duke intended
+to consult their Solicitor if regret were not expressed. And the
+Landlord's Agent called, and the Landlord's Solicitor followed, and a
+Police Inspector was sent from Scotland Yard for facts,--and he
+reprimanded J. for one mistake, for not having locked the door on the
+inside when they were out,--and the insurance people wanted to know
+about the fire-balloons, and everybody with any possible excuse came
+down upon us, except the police officer with the warrant to arrest J.
+for assault and battery.
+
+It is all over now. If the Suffragettes still hatch their plots under
+our roof, they are denied the use of it for carrying them out. They
+leave us in peace for the moment, the quiet which is the charm of an old
+house like ours has returned to it, and outwardly the tenants cultivate
+the repose and dignity incumbent upon them as the descendants of Bacon
+and Pepys and the inheritors of a great past.
+
+
+
+
+_The Quarter_
+
+[Illustration: OPPOSITE TO SURREY]
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE QUARTER
+
+
+My windows command the Quarter, and what they do not overlook, Augustine
+does.
+
+Some people might think there could not be much to overlook, for the
+Quarter is as quiet and secluded as the Inns of Court. J. is forever
+boasting that if he is in London he is not of it, and that he lives the
+simple life, with Charing Cross just round the corner. The "full tide of
+existence" sweeps by, seldom overflowing into the Quarter, which is one
+of the most difficult places in all the town to find for those who do
+not know the way. Only two streets lead directly into it from anywhere,
+and they lead directly nowhere out of it again; nor do the crowds in the
+near Strand as much as see the dirty courts and dark alleys which are my
+short cuts, much less the underground passages which serve the same
+purpose,--the mysterious labyrinth of carpenters-shops and warehouses
+and vast wine-cellars, grim and fantastic and unbelievable as Ali Baba
+and the whole Arabian Nights, burrowed under the Quarter and approached
+by tunnels, so picturesque that Gericault made a lithograph of one when
+he was in London, so murderous that to this day they are infested with
+police who turn a flashing bull's-eye upon you as you pass. Altogether,
+the Quarter is a "shy place" full of traps for the unwary. I have had
+friends, coming to see me for the first time, lose themselves in our
+underground maze; I have known the crowd, pouring from the Strand on
+Lord Mayor's Day, get hopelessly entangled in our network; as a rule,
+nobody penetrates into it except on business or by chance.
+
+But for all that, there is a good deal to see, and the Quarter, quiet
+though it may be, is never dull as I watch it from my high windows. To
+the front I look out on the Thames: down to St. Paul's, up to
+Westminster, opposite to Surrey, and, on a clear day as far as the
+hills. Trains rumble across the bridges, trams screech and clang along
+the Embankment, tugs, pulling their line of black barges, whistle and
+snort on the river. The tide brings with it the smell of the sea and, in
+winter, the great white flights of gulls. At night myriads of lights
+come out, and always, at all hours and all seasons, there is movement
+and life,--always I seem to feel the pulse of London even as I have its
+roar in my ears.
+
+To the east I look down to streets of houses black with London grime,
+still stately in their old-fashioned shabbiness, as old as the
+Eighteenth Century, which I have read somewhere means the beginning of
+the world for an American like myself.
+
+To the west I tower over a wilderness of chimney-pots, for our house is
+built on the edge of a hill, not very high though the London horse
+mistakes it for an Alpine pass, but high enough to lift our walls, on
+this side sheer and cliff-like, above an amazing collection of tumbled,
+weather-worn, red-tiled roofs, and crooked gables sticking out at
+unexpected angles, that date back I am not to be bullied by facts into
+saying how far, and that stretch away, range upon range, to loftier
+houses beyond, they in their turn over-shadowed by the hotels and clubs
+on the horizon, and in among them, an open space with the spire of St.
+Martin-in-the-Fields springing up out of it, dark by day, a white shadow
+by night,--our ghost, we call it.
+
+And most wonderful of all is the expanse of sky above and around us,
+instead of the tiny strip framed in by the narrow street which is the
+usual share of the Londoner. We could see the sun rise every morning
+behind St. Paul's, if we were up in time, and of course if there was a
+sun every morning in London to rise. Over the river, when fog and mist
+do not envelop it as in a shroud, the clouds--the big, low, heavy
+English clouds--float and drift and scurry and whirl and pile themselves
+into mountains with a splendour that might have inspired Ruskin to I do
+not know how many more chapters in "Modern Painters" had he lived in the
+Quarter. Behind our collection of tumbled roofs and gables awry, the
+sun--always provided there is a sun--sets with a dramatic gorgeousness
+that, if it were only in any remote part of the world, the Londoner
+would spare himself no time nor trouble to see, but that, because it is
+in London, remains a spectacle for us to enjoy by ourselves. And the
+wonder grows with the night,--the river, with its vague distances and
+romantic glooms and starlike lights, losing itself in mystery, and
+mystery lurking in the little old streets with their dark spectral mass
+of houses, broken by one or two spaces of flat white wall, and always in
+the distance the clubs and hotels, now castles and cathedrals, and the
+white tapering ghost pointing heavenward. With so stupendous a spectacle
+arranged for my benefit, is it any marvel that much of my time is spent
+at my windows? And how can I help it if, when I am there, I see many
+things besides the beauty that lured us to the Quarter and keeps us in
+it?
+
+Hundreds of windows look over into mine: some so far off that they are
+mere glittering spots on a rampart of high walls in the day-light, mere
+dots of light at dusk; some as carefully curtained as if the "Drawn
+Blinds" or "Green Shutters" of romance had not stranger things to hide
+from the curious. But others are too near and too unveiled for what
+goes on behind them to escape the most discreet. In what does go on
+there is infinite variety, for the Quarter, like the Inns of Court, is
+let out in offices and chambers, and the house that shelters but one
+tenant is the exception, if indeed it exists.
+
+All these windows and the people I see through them have become as much
+a part of my view as the trains and the trams, the taxis and the tugs. I
+should think the last days of the Quarter were at hand if, the first
+thing in the morning, I did not find the printer hard at work at his
+window under one of the little gables below; or if, the last thing at
+night, I missed from the attic next door to him the lamp of the artist,
+who never gets up until everybody else is going to bed; or if, at any
+hour I looked over, people were not playing cards in the first-floor
+windows of the house painted white, or frowzy women were not leaning out
+of the little garret windows above, or the type-writer was not clicking
+hard in the window with the white muslin curtains and the pot of
+flowers, or the manicurist not receiving her clients behind the window
+with the staring, new yellow blinds. I should regret even the fiery,
+hot-tempered, little woman who jumps up out of the attic window
+immediately below us, like a Jack-in-the-box, and shakes her fist at us
+every time Augustine shakes those unfortunate rugs which are perpetually
+getting us into trouble with our neighbours. I should think the picture
+incomplete if, of an evening, the diners out were to disappear from
+behind the windows of the big hotel, though nothing makes me more
+uncomfortably conscious of the "strangely mingled monster" that London
+is, than the contrast between them lingering over the day's fourth
+banquet, and the long black "hunger line" forming of a winter morning
+just beside Cleopatra's Needle and waiting in dreary patience for the
+daily dole of bread and soup.
+
+I cannot imagine the Quarter without actors and actresses in possession
+of dozens of its windows, the attraction to them less the associations
+with Garrick than the convenient proximity to the principal theatres; or
+without the Societies, Institutes, Leagues, Bureaus, Companies,
+Associations, and I know not what else, that undertake the charge of
+everything under the sun, from ancient buildings to women's freedom; or
+without the clubs, where long-haired men and Liberty-gowned women meet
+to drink tea and dabble in anarchy; where more serious citizens propose
+to refashion the world and mankind, and, incidentally, British politics;
+where, in a word, philanthropists of every pattern fill the very air of
+the Quarter with reform, until my escape from degenerating into a
+reformer despite myself seems a daily miracle, and the sham Bohemianism
+of the one club willing to let the rest of the world take care of itself
+becomes almost a virtue.
+
+It is probably the seclusion, the cloistral repose, of the Quarter that
+attracts the student and the scholar. Up at my windows, the busy bee
+would be given points in the art of improving each shining hour. In
+every direction I turn I am so edified by the example of hard work that
+I long for the luxury of being shocked by idleness.
+
+Behind the window I look down into at right angles from the studio, the
+Scientist in white apron, surrounded by bottles and retorts and
+microscopes, industriously examines germs from morning till midnight,
+oblivious to everything outside, which for too long meant, among other
+things, showers of soft white ashes and evil greasy smoke and noxious
+odours sent by the germs up through his chimneys into our studio; nor
+could the polite representations of our Agent that he was a public
+nuisance rouse him from his indifference, since he knew that the smoke
+was not black enough to make him one technically. It was only when J.
+protested, with an American energy effective in England, that the germs
+ceased to trouble us and I could bear unmoved the sight of the
+white-aproned Scientist behind his window.
+
+In the new house with the flat roof the Inventor has his office, and I
+am sure it is the great man himself I so often see walking gravely up
+and down among the chimney-pots, evolving and planning new wireless
+wonders; and I am as sure that the solemn St. Bernard who walks there
+too is his, and, in some way it is not for me to explain, part of the
+mysterious machinery connecting the Quarter with the rest of the world.
+
+Plainly visible in more rooms than one, bending over high drawing-tables
+not only through the day but on into the night, are many Architects,
+with whom the Quarter has ever been in favour since the masters who
+designed it years ago made their headquarters in our street, until
+yesterday, when the young man who is building the Town Hall for the
+County Council moved into it, though, had the County Council had its
+way, there would be no Quarter now for an Architect to have his office
+in. Architectural distinction, or picturesqueness, awakes in the London
+official such a desire to be rid of it that, but for the turning of the
+worm who pays the rates, our old streets and Adam houses would have been
+pulled down to make place for the brand-new municipal building which, as
+it is, has been banished out of harm's way to the other side of the
+river.
+
+Busier still than the Architects are the old men who live in the two
+ancient houses opposite mine, where the yellow brick just shows here
+and there through the centuries' grime, and where windows as
+grimy--though a clause in the leases of the Quarter demands that windows
+should be washed at least once a month--open upon little ironwork
+balconies and are draped with draggled lace-curtains, originally white
+but now black. I have no idea who the old men are, or what is the task
+that absorbs them. They look as ancient as the houses and so alike that
+I could not believe there were three of them if, every time I go to my
+dining-room window, I did not see them all three in their chambers, two
+on the third floor, to the left and right of me, one on the floor below
+about halfway between,--making, J. says, an amusing kind of pattern.
+Each lives alone, each has a little table drawn up to his window, and
+there they sit all day long, one on an easy leather chair, one on a
+stiff cane-bottomed chair, one on a hard wooden stool,--that is the only
+difference. There they are perpetually sorting and sifting papers from
+which nothing tears them away; there they have their midday chop and
+tankard of bitter served to them as they work, and there they snatch a
+few hasty minutes afterwards to read the day's news. They never go out
+unless it is furtively, after dark, and I have never failed to find them
+at their post except occasionally on Sunday morning, when the chairs by
+the tables are filled by their clothes instead of themselves, because, I
+fancy, the London housekeeper, who leaves her bed reluctantly every day
+in the week but who on that morning is not to be routed out of it at
+all, refuses to wake them or to bring them their breakfast. They may be
+solicitors, but I do not think so; they may be literary men, but I do
+not think that either; and, really, I should just as lief not be told
+who and what they are, so much more in keeping is mystery with the grimy
+old houses where their old days are spent in endless toiling over
+endless tasks.
+
+If the three old men are not authors, plenty of my other neighbours are,
+as they should be out of compliment to Bacon and Pepys, to Garrick and
+Topham Beauclerk, to Dr. Johnson and Boswell, to Rousseau and David
+Copperfield, and to any number besides who, in their different days,
+belonged to or haunted the Quarter and made it a world of memories for
+all who came after. I have authors on every side of me: not Chattertons
+undiscovered in their garrets, but celebrities wallowing in success,
+some of whom might be the better for neglect. Many a young enthusiast
+comes begging for the privilege of gazing from my windows into theirs. I
+have been assured that the walls of the Quarter will not hold the
+memorial tablets which we of the present generation are preparing for
+their decoration. The "best sellers" are issued, and the Repertory
+Theatre nourished, from our midst.
+
+The clean-shaven man of legal aspect who arrives at his office over the
+way as regularly as the clock strikes ten, who leaves it as regularly at
+one for his lunch, and as regularly in the late afternoon closes up for
+the day, is the Novelist whose novels are on every bookstall and whose
+greatness is measured by the thousands and hundreds of thousands into
+which they run. He does not do us the honour of living in the Quarter,
+but comes to it simply in office hours, and is as scrupulously punctual
+as if his business were with briefs rather than with dainty trifles
+lighter than the lightest froth. No clerk could be more exact in his
+habits. Anthony Trollope was not more methodical. This admirable
+precision might cost him the illusions of his admirers, but to me it is
+invaluable. For when the wind is in the wrong direction and I cannot
+hear Big Ben, or the fog falls and I cannot see St. Martin's spire, I
+have only to watch for him to know the hour, and in a household where no
+two clocks or watches agree as to time, the convenience is not to be
+exaggerated.
+
+My neighbour from the house on the river-front, next to Peter the
+Great's, who often drops in for a talk and whom Augustine announces as
+_le Monsieur du Quartier_, is the American Dramatist, author of the play
+that was the most popular of the season last year in New York. I should
+explain, perhaps, that Augustine has her own names for my friends, and
+that usually her announcements require interpretation. For instance, few
+people would recognize my distinguished countryman, the Painter, in _le
+Monsieur de la Dame qui ne monte jamais les escaliers_, or the
+delightful Lady Novelist in _la Demoiselle aux chats_, or--it is wiser
+not to say whom in _le Monsieur qui se gobe_. But I have come to
+understand even her fine shades, and when she announces _les Gens du
+Quartier_, then I know it is not the American Dramatist, but the British
+Publicist and his wife who live in Garrick's house, and who add to their
+distinction by dining in the room where Garrick died.
+
+The red curtains a little further down the street belong to the
+enterprising Pole, who, from his chambers in the Quarter, edits the
+Polish Punch, a feat which I cannot help thinking, though I have never
+seen the paper, must be the most comic thing about it. In the house on
+one side, the author who is England's most distinguished Man of Letters
+to-day, and who has become great as a novelist, began life as an
+architect. From the house on the other side, the Poet-Patriot-Novelist
+of the Empire fired, or tried to fire, the Little Englanders with his
+own blustering, knock-you-down Imperialism, and bullied and flattered
+them, amused and abused them, called them names they would not have
+forgiven from any other man living and could not easily swallow from
+him, and was all the while himself so simple and unassuming that next to
+nobody knew he was in the Quarter until he left it. The British
+Dramatist close by, who conquers the heart of the sentimental British
+public by sentiment, is just as unassuming. He is rarely without a play
+on the London stage, rarely without several on tour. He could probably
+buy out everybody in the Quarter, except perhaps the Socialist, and he
+can lose a little matter of sixteen thousand pounds or so and never miss
+it. But so seldom is he seen that you might think he was afraid to show
+himself. "You'd never know 'e was in the 'ouse, 'e's that quiet like.
+Why, 'e never gives no trouble to nobody," the Housekeeper has confided
+to me. He shrinks from putting his name on his front door, though by
+this time he must be used to its staring at him in huge letters from
+posters and playbills all over the world. Perhaps it is to give himself
+courage that he keeps a dog who is as forward as his master is retiring,
+and who is my terror. I am on speaking terms with most of the dogs of
+the Quarter, but with the Dramatist's I have never ventured to exchange
+a greeting. I happened to mention my instinctive distrust, one day, to a
+friend who has made the dog's personal acquaintance.
+
+"He eats kids!" was my friend's comment. Then he added: "You have seen
+dozens of children go up to the Dramatist's room, haven't you?"
+
+"Yes," I answered, for it was a fact.
+
+"Well, and have you ever seen one come down again?" And if you will
+believe it, I never have.
+
+A door or so from the Dramatist, but on the opposite side of the street,
+the Socialist's windows face mine. I cannot, with any respect for truth,
+call him unassuming; modesty is not his vice. It is not his ambition to
+hide his light under a bushel,--or rather a hogshead; on the contrary,
+as he would be the first to admit, it could not flare on too many
+housetops to please him. When I first met him, years before we again met
+in the Quarter, the world had not heard of him, but he was quite frank
+in his determination that it should, though to make it hear, he would
+have to play a continuous solo on his own cornet, until he impressed
+somebody else with the necessity of blowing it for him. Besides, he has
+probably never found other people as entertaining as himself, which is
+an excellent reason why he should not keep himself out of his talk and
+his writing,--and he is talking and writing all the time. His is a
+familiar voice among the Fabians, on public platforms, and at private
+meetings, and for a very little while it was listened to by bewildered
+Borough Councillors. He has as many plays to his credit as the British
+Dramatist, as many books as the Novelist, and I recall no other writer
+who can equal him in the number and length of his letters to the press.
+As he courts, rather than evades, notice, I doubt if he would be
+embarrassed to learn how repeatedly I see him doing his hair and beard
+in the morning and putting out his lights at night, or how entirely I am
+in his confidence as to the frequency of his luncheon parties and the
+number of his guests. Were I not the soul of discretion I could publish
+his daily _menu_ to the world, for his kitchen opens itself so
+aggressively to my view that I see into it as often as into my own.
+
+For that matter, I have under my inspection half the kitchens in the
+Quarter, and the things I witness in them might surprise or horrify more
+than one woman who imagines herself mistress in her own house. I have
+assisted at the reception of guests she never invited; I understand, if
+she does not, why her gas and electric-light bills reach such fabulous
+figures; I could tell her what happens when her motor-car disappears
+round the corner,--for, seedy and down-at-heel as the Quarter may
+appear, the private motor is by no means the exception among the
+natives. Only the other day, when the literary family, who are as
+unsuspicious as they are fond of speed, started in their motor for the
+week-end, they could have got no further than the suburbs before the
+cloth was laid in their dining-room, their best china, silver, and glass
+brought out, flowers, bottles, and siphons in place, and their cook at
+the head of their table "entertaining her friends to luncheon." The
+party were lingering over the fruit when suddenly a motor-horn was heard
+in the street. There was a look of horror on all their faces, one short
+second of hesitation, and then a wild leap from the table, and, in a
+flash, flowers, bottles, and siphons, china, glass, and silver were
+spirited away, the cloth whisked off, chairs set against the wall. As
+the dining-room door closed on the flying skirt of the last guest, the
+cook looked out of the window, the horn sounded again, and the motor was
+round the corner in the next street, for it was somebody else's, and the
+literary family did not return until Monday.
+
+The Socialist, who deals in paradox and the inconsequent, also has his
+own car. Now that Socialism is knocking at our doors, the car tooting at
+his, come to fetch him from his town house to his country house or off
+to the uttermost ends of the earth, toots reassurance into our hearts.
+Under such conditions we should not mind being Socialists ourselves.
+However, he does make one protest against Individualism in which I
+should not care to join him, for he goes shares in his personality and
+has perpetrated a double in the Quarter,--a long lean man, with grizzled
+red hair and beard, who is clothed in brown Jaegers, whose face has the
+pallor of the vegetarian, and who warns us of the manner of equality we
+may expect under the Socialist's regime. I dread to think of the
+complications there might be were the double not so considerate as to
+carry a black bag and wear knee-breeches. A glance at hands and legs
+enables us to distinguish one from the other and to spare both the
+inconvenience of a mistaken identity. The double, like the old men
+opposite, remains one of the mysteries of the Quarter. Nobody can
+explain his presence in our midst, nobody has ever spoken to him, nobody
+can say where he comes from with his black bag in the morning, where he
+goes with it in the evening, or even where he stops in the Quarter. I
+doubt if the Socialist has yet, like the lovers in Rossetti's picture,
+met himself, for surely no amount of Socialism could bear the shock of
+the revelation that must come with the meeting.
+
+If many books are written in the Quarter, more are published from it,
+and the number increases at a rate that is fast turning it into a new
+Paternoster Row. I am surrounded by publishers: publishers who are
+unknown outside our precincts, and publishers who are unknown in them
+save for the names on their signs; publishers who issue limited editions
+for the few, and publishers who apparently publish for nobody but
+themselves; and, just where I can keep an eye on his front door, _the_
+Publisher, my friend, who makes the Quarter a centre of travel and a
+household word wherever books are read, and uses his house as a
+training-school for young genius. More than one lion now roaring in
+London served an apprenticeship there; even Mr. Chatteron passed through
+it; and I am always encountering minor poets or budding philosophers
+going in or coming out, ostensibly on the Publisher's affairs, but
+really busy carrying on the Quarter's traditions and preparing more
+memorial tablets for its overladen walls. The Publisher and his wife
+live a few doors away, where they are generously accumulating fresh
+associations and memories for our successors in the Quarter. To keep
+open house for the literary men and women of the time is a fashion among
+publishers that did not go out with the Dillys and the Dodsleys, and an
+occasional Boswell would find a note-book handy behind the windows that
+open upon the river from the Publisher's chambers.
+
+Associations are being accumulated also by the New York Publisher, who,
+accompanied by his son, the Young Publisher, and by his birds, arrives
+every year with the first breath of spring. It is chiefly to artists
+that his house is open, though he gives the literary hallmark to the
+legacy of memories he will leave to the Quarter. I cannot understand why
+the artist, to whom our streets and our houses make a more eloquent
+appeal than to the author, has seldom been attracted to them since the
+days when Barry designed his decorations in the "grand manner" for our
+oldest Society's lecture-hall, and Angelica Kauffmann painted the
+ceiling in Peter the Great's house, or since the later days when Etty
+and Stanfield lived in our house. Now and then I come across somebody
+sketching our old Watergate or our shabby little shops and corners, but
+only the youth in the attic below has followed the example given by J.,
+whose studio continues the exception in the Quarter: the show-place it
+ought to be for the beauty of river and sky framed in by the windows.
+
+But to make up for this neglect, as long a succession of artists as used
+to climb to Etty's chambers visit the New York Publisher in the quiet
+rooms with the prints on the walls and the windows that, for greater
+quiet, look away from our quiet streets and out upon our quieter backs
+and gables. Much good talk is heard there, and many good stories, and by
+no means the least good from the New York Publisher himself. It is
+strange that, loving quiet as he does, he should, after the British
+Dramatist, have contributed more to my disquiet than anybody in the
+Quarter: a confession for which I know he will think I merit his scorn.
+But the birds it is his fancy to travel with are monsters compared to
+the sparrows and pigeons who build their nests in the peaceful trees of
+the Quarter, and I am never at ease in their company. I still tremble
+when I recall the cold critical eye and threatening beak of his
+favourite magpie, nor can I think calmly of his raven whom, in an access
+of mistaken hospitality, I once invited to call with him upon William
+Penn. William had never seen a live bird so near him in his all too
+short life, and what with his surprise and curiosity, his terror and
+sporting instincts, he was so wrought up and his nerves in such a state
+that, although the raven was shut up safe in a cage, I was half afraid
+he would not survive the visit. I have heard the New York Publisher say
+of William, in his less nervous and more normal moments, that he was not
+a cat but a demon; the raven, in my opinion, was not exactly an angel.
+But thanks to the quality of our friendship, it also survived the visit
+and, in spite of monstrous birds, strengthens with the years.
+
+It is not solely from my windows that I have got to know the Quarter.
+Into my Camelot I can not only look, but come down, without webs flying
+out and mirrors cracking, and better still, I might never stir beyond
+its limits, and my daily life and domestic arrangements would suffer no
+inconvenience. The Quarter is as "self-contained" as the flats
+advertised by our zealous Agent who manages it. Every necessity and
+many luxuries into the bargain are to be had within its boundaries. It
+may resemble the Inns of Court in other ways, but it does not, as they
+do, encourage snobbishness by placing a taboo upon the tradesman. We
+have our own dairy, our own green-grocer, our own butcher, though out of
+sympathy with Augustine I do my marketing in Soho. At one corner our
+tobacconist keeps his shop, at another our tailor. If my drains go wrong
+I call in the local plumber; when I want a shelf put up or something
+mended I send for the local carpenter; I could summon the local builder
+were I inclined to make a present of alterations or additions to the
+local landlord. I but step across the street if I am in need of a
+Commissioner of Oaths. I go no further to get my type-writing done. Were
+my daily paper to fail me, the local gossip of the Quarter would allow
+me no excuse to complain of dearth of news; the benevolent would exult
+in the opportunity provided for benevolence by our slums where the
+flower-girls live; the energetic could walk off their energy in our
+garden where the County Council's band plays on summer evenings. There
+is a public for our loungers, and for our friends a hotel,--the house
+below the hill with the dingy yellow walls that are so shiny-white as I
+see them by night, kept from time immemorial by Miss Brown, where the
+lodger still lights himself to bed by a candle and still eats his meals
+in a Coffee Room, and where Labour Members of Parliament, and South
+Kensington officials, and people never to be suspected of having
+discovered the Quarter, are the most frequent guests.
+
+The Quarter has also its own population, so distinct from other
+Londoners that I am struck by the difference no further away than the
+other side of the Strand. Our housekeepers are a species apart, so are
+our milkmen behind their little carts. Our types are a local growth.
+Nowhere else in London could I meet anybody in the slightest like the
+pink-eyed, white-haired, dried-up little old man, with a jug in his
+hand, whom I see daily on his way to or from our public-house; or like
+the middle-aged dandy who stares me out of countenance as he saunters
+homeward in the afternoon, a lily or chrysanthemum, according to the
+season, in one hand and a brown paper bag of buns in the other; or like
+the splendid old man of military bearing, with well-waxed moustache and
+well-pointed beard, whose Panama hat in summer and fur-lined cloak in
+winter have become as much fixtures in the Quarter as our Adam houses or
+our view of the river, and who spends his days patrolling the Terrace in
+front of our frivolous club or going into it with members he happens to
+overtake at the front door,--where his nights are spent no native of the
+Quarter can say. Nor is any other crowd like our crowd that collects
+every Sunday evening as St. Martin's bells begin to ring for evening
+service, that grows larger and larger until streets usually empty are
+packed solid, and that melts away again before ten. It is made up mostly
+of youths to whom the cap is as indispensable a symbol of class as the
+silk hat further west, and young girls who run to elaborate hair and
+feathers. They have their conventions, which are strictly observed. One
+is to walk with arms linked; a second, to fill the roadway as well as
+the pavement, to the despair of taxicabs and cycles endeavouring to
+toot and ring a passage through; a third, to follow the streets that
+bound the Quarter on three sides and never to trespass into others. How
+the custom originated, I leave it to the historian to decide. It may go
+back to the Britons who painted themselves blue, it may be no older than
+the Romans. All I know with certainty is that the Sunday evening walk is
+a ceremony of no less obligation for the Quarter than the Sunday morning
+parade in the Row is for Mayfair.
+
+We are of accord in the Quarter on the subject of its charm and the
+advantage of preserving it,--though on all others we may and do disagree
+absolutely and continually fight. I have heard even our postman brag of
+the beauty of its architecture and the fame of the architects who built
+it more than a century and a half ago, and I do not believe as a rule
+that London postmen could say who built the houses where they deliver
+their letters, or that it would occur to them to pose as judges of
+architecture. Because we love the Quarter we watch over it with
+unceasing vigilance. We are always on the look-out for nuisances and
+alert to suppress them. In fact, if not in name, we constitute a sort of
+League for the Prevention of Dirt and Disorder in the Quarter. There is
+a distinct understanding that, in an emergency, we may rely upon one
+another for mutual support, which is the easier as we all have the same
+Landlord and can make the same Agent's life a martyrdom until the evil
+is remedied. The one thing we guard most zealously is the quiet, the
+calm, conducive to work. We wage war to the death against street noises
+of every kind. No "German Band" would invade our silent precincts. The
+hurdy-gurdy is anathema,--I have always thought the Suffragettes'
+attempt to play it through our streets their bravest deed. If we endure
+the bell of the muffin man on Sunday and the song of the man who wants
+us to buy his blooming lavender, it is because both have the sanction of
+age. We make no other concession, and our severity extends to the native
+no less than to the alien. When, in the strip of green and gravel below
+my windows, the members of our frivolous Club took to shooting
+themselves with blank cartridges in the intervals of fencing, though the
+noise was on the miniature scale of their pistols, we overwhelmed the
+unfortunate Agent with letters until a stop was put to it. When our
+Territorials, in their first ardour, chose our catacombs for their
+evening bugle-practice, we rose as one against them. Beggars, unless
+they ring boldly at our front doors and pretend to be something else,
+must give up hope when they enter the Quarter. For if the philosopher
+thinks angels and men are in no danger from charity, we do not, and
+least of all the lady opposite, to whom alms-giving in our street is as
+intolerable as donkeys on the green were to Betsy Trotwood. One of my
+friends has never dared to come to see me, except by stealth, since the
+day she pounced upon him to ask him what he meant by such an exhibition
+of immorality, when all he had done was to drop a penny into the hand of
+a small boy at his cab-door, and all he had meant was a kindly fellow
+feeling, having once been a small boy himself.
+
+We defend the beauty of the Quarter with equal zeal. We do what we can
+to preserve the superannuated look which to us is a large part of its
+charm, and we cry out against every new house that threatens discord in
+our ancient harmony. Excitement never raged so high among us as when the
+opposite river banks were desecrated by the advertiser, and from shores
+hitherto but a shadow in the shadowy night, there flamed forth a horrid
+tout for Tea. We had endured much from a sign of Whiskey further down
+the river,--Whiskey and Tea are Britain's bulwarks,--but this was worse,
+for it flared and glared right into our faces, and the vile letters
+which were red and green one second and yellow the next ran in a long
+line from top to bottom of the high shot-tower. In this crude light, our
+breweries ceased to be palaces in the night, our _campanili_ again
+became chimneys. Gone was our Fairyland, gone our River of Dreams. The
+falling twilight gave a hideous jog to our memory, and would not let us
+forget that we lived in a nation of shopkeepers. The Socialist, part of
+whose stock-in-trade is perversity, liked it, or said he did,--and I
+really believe he did,--but the other tenants were outraged, and an
+indignation meeting was called. Four attended, together with the
+Solicitor and the Agent of the estate, and the Publisher, who took the
+chair. It was of no use. We learned that our joy in the miracle of night
+might be destroyed forever, but if we could prove no physical harm,
+legal redress would be denied to us, and our defiance of the Vandal must
+be in vain. And so there the disgraceful advertisement remains, flaring
+and glaring defiance at us across the river. When the Socialist gets
+tired of it, he goes off to his country place in his forty-horse-power
+motor-car, but we, in our weariness, can escape only to bed.
+
+
+    The Riverside Press
+    CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
+    U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Our House, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
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