CHAPTER XV.
A MASCULINE STANDPOINT.
“You needn’t go into raptures of gratitude till you hear all about my suggestion, my love,” said Mrs. Bray; “it’s not all advantage. In fact the person concerned has been rather on my mind, because I wasn’t at all sure it would be easy to find her a situation in what she calls ‘this Babylon.’”
“Please tell me about her,” pleaded Lucy.
“To begin with, she is nearly forty years old.”
Lucy at once thought of “Mrs. Morison,” but what she said was, “I think that is an advantage with me if she has been a good woman and—is sober.”
“A good woman? My love, she’s one of the unco’ guid! And she’s a total abstainer—always has been. But she is not what one can call a trained servant. She has not been in a situation for about twenty years.”
“What has she been doing?” Lucy asked.
“Keeping her father’s house and looking after him,” answered Mrs. Bray, “and now he’s dead. He had a little farm—a croft, I think they call it—over the hills and far away, somewhere in a Highland place, which, because it is not an island, is called the Black Isle.”
The quick, sympathetic old lady caught and understood an expression which flitted over Lucy’s face.
“Oh, this is all quite genuine,” she said; “that is its one clear advantage. She’s a friend of my poor Rachel’s—at least, Rachel has known all about her and ‘her folks’ for years and years. Her brother was piper in the same regiment with Rachel’s lover. And when Rachel went North to see that lover’s mother, after he had gone to India, she was in this woman’s house, and Rachel says that it was most beautifully kept, and that there were no people in the place more respected than these Gillespies.”
“One wonders why she left her native place and came so far away,” observed Lucy.
The old lady shook her head knowingly, and replied, “As poor Rachel says, ‘there are wheels within wheels.’ It seems there is a married brother with his wife living near the ‘croft,’ and I understand there was no love lost between this woman and her sister-in-law. There was some sort of love-affair mixed up in their animosity. Rachel put me to sleep one afternoon telling me about it, so you won’t expect me to remember details. And when the father died, the home had to be broken up anyhow, for the daughter had nothing to live on. I fancy she didn’t care to go to service within the range of the sister-in-law, ‘mistress in her own house.’ There’s a deal of human nature in man, my dear, and especially in woman. Rachel says her friend doesn’t want to go back, but if she doesn’t get a place soon, she’s getting so low spirited that she thinks she will,” continued Mrs. Bray. “You see she has, after all, only a servant’s recommendation—Rachel’s—and that wouldn’t mean much to many, but it may to you, who have known Rachel in my house for so many years, and who understand how faithful and good she is, poor, silly, sentimental thing.”
Lucy looked up quickly into her old friend’s face. “I would take your Rachel’s recommendation quite as soon as a ‘character’ from any mistress,” she said.
“I think you would be wise to do so,” replied Mrs. Bray. “This woman will be clean and honest, certainly not likely to attract any troublesome flirtations. She’s got the soft Highland voice with a pretty little whine in it.”
“Oh, call it a wail!” said Lucy, laughing.
“She’s terribly solemn to look at, and she ends her speeches with a sigh,” went on Mrs. Bray. “But she’s not bad-looking, and is of quite superior appearance. Her name is rather a mouthful—Clementina Gillespie—and she’s not a person whom one could reasonably shorten into Clem or Tina. No—it wouldn’t do. You might as well call Robert the Bruce—Bob!”
“Will you send her to see me?” asked Lucy.
“Yes, I will,” said the old lady. “That ridiculous Rachel will be so pleased! It seems a comfort to her to think of having her dead lover’s dead old friend’s sister to live near her. To me it seems a far-off cry of consolation! But everyone to their taste. And now, at last, we’ll dismiss the kitchen, and you must tell me all about Mr. Challoner.”
Lucy had not only her good news to relate, but she actually had something to show. The Slains Castle had stayed for a few days at a certain port, and Charlie had sat for a photograph, which he sent home in his letter. It might not be much as a work of art or science, for the posing was all wrong and the chemicals were manifestly bad. Yet next to Hugh himself it was the very dearest thing in Lucy’s present possession, so satisfactory was its assurance of the beloved wanderer’s renewed strength and energy. Where were the wasted form and the wan countenance which had hitherto haunted Lucy’s memories of her husband? They had vanished, and thus the poor little photograph had cheered Lucy as not even Charlie’s letters had done. For in those he might have been trying “to make the best of things”—to dwell on every trifling improvement, so as to cheer and uphold her in her loneliness. That fear had often haunted her, basing itself on her own silence concerning Pollie’s defection, which silence she had kept intact, “for fear of worrying him.” The shock which Mrs. Morison’s breakdown had given her, when on the eve of revelation, had restrained her from any further attempt at confidence on this matter. This reticence and its motive naturally made her dread some corresponding reticence on her husband’s part. The little portrait set that suspicion at rest. So it had its place in the centre of the dining-room mantelshelf, and was provided with a dainty little frame—the only “article of luxury” which Lucy had bought since Charlie’s departure.
Mrs. Bray went off gratified and elate. She loved to play the part of fairy godmother, though when she was defeated in that—as when the death of Rachel’s lover prevented her from overwhelming her maid with marriage gifts—she was apt to turn unsympathetic and cynical. She prolonged her visit to the little house with the verandah and had to give up two or three other calls she had arranged in the same neighbourhood. She drove off saying to herself with a full consciousness of the humour of the reflection—
“Now I feel good; I could be always good if I was in a world of good people and was able to straighten out every tangle I saw.”
Lucy had another visitor that evening, Tom Black, who had never failed to put in his appearance from time to time ever since that memorable Christmas Day. Tom’s visits were generally of a most cheerful not to say hilarious description, beginning with games of romps with Hugh and ending in all sorts of little services to Lucy herself. Thanks to his aid, she had really given all her books their spring dusting and had got them correctly restored to their proper places—a thing which could not have been done by Jane, who though perfectly able to read, would have stood them upside down, and scattered “sets” most recklessly. Tom always asked whether there was “anything going on that he could do?” and Lucy answered him frankly and candidly. She wondered sometimes whether the inquiry came from humility or pride—from an unnecessarily humble feeling that his presence might be less than pleasure unless it was useful, or from a proud masculine consciousness that a feminine household may often stand in need of a strong arm and a steady hand.
But this evening Tom was in such doleful dumps that Lucy was quite glad that her own spirits had been somewhat cheered by Mrs. Bray’s visit.
Tom had got to leave his lodgings. He had been placed, on his first arrival in London, with the elderly widow of a clerk in Mr. Challoner’s firm. She had a neat little seven-roomed house somewhere in Barnsbury, and she let two of her bedrooms and one parlour to Tom Black and another young man. It was a quiet and comfortable though unpretentious home, wherein a youth who was inclined to good habits found every influence to help his perseverance therein. Youths who were not inclined to good habits were not allowed to linger there. In her earlier and more vigorous days the worthy landlady had wrestled hard with sundry ill-doers, and not without a certain sort of success, though she herself was more inclined to regard the results with cynicism and suspicion than with self-satisfaction. When neighbours would say to her how proud she must be that So-and-so had profited by her warnings, disciplines, and encouragements, she was wont to say “that he was different from what he once was, but she wasn’t so sure that he was any better.” Being a Scots woman herself she would tell the story of the Scots minister who was of the opinion that the sight of one’s “converts” was generally calculated “to keep one humble.”
Of late years, however, she had ceased to struggle with those who inclined to do evil, and had reserved herself for the upholding of those who meant to do well.
“I’ve had my time of keeping a reformatory,” she had said in her quaint way, “now somebody else must take a turn!”
“Mrs. Mott is giving up housekeeping altogether now, Mrs. Challoner,” Tom explained with a rueful countenance. “She’s got a tenant for the whole house, and she’s going to live in the country in some little place which she can manage alone. She says she is ‘weary of her life because of those daughters of Heth’—meaning the servant girls. You know the way she speaks, Mrs. Challoner.”
Lucy laughed. She knew Mrs. Mott very well, and she was beginning to realise the difficulties which must beset such a person.
“I sympathise with her,” she said. “But surely many of her servants must have been models! I thought the house always looked so bright and pleasant.”
“She says that’s because she put herself into it,” explained Tom. “Just whatever they left undone, she says, she did, and she did it all, when they ran away or gave her notice and went off before she had got another. Now she says she can’t do so any more; she’s near sixty, and her feet are weak, and she can’t manage the stairs, and she won’t keep people in her house if it can’t be kept as it should be. I’m sure she might let her place go very different from what it is, and yet it would be a palace of neatness compared with the houses which I’ve seen since I’ve been looking for lodgings,” added poor Tom ruefully.
“Has she had any special trouble lately?” asked Lucy.
“She says that for the last three years she has only had one girl who was respectable and willing to learn, and she attended some class or guild where the ladies told her she was ‘too good for domestic service’ and took her off to be trained as a hospital nurse,” answered Tom.
“Oh, dear, dear!” said Lucy, “as if the work of prevention is not far better and more honourable than that of mere cure. And it ought to be more honoured!”
“We have had some very queer customers lately, I must say,” Tom went on in his blunt boyish way. “Young Hinton—that’s the other fellow who stays at Mrs. Mott’s—happened to have a good deal of note-paper and some hundreds of envelopes marked with a handsome H. Well, he never could understand how that paper went off so quickly. He would take out a packet, and write a few letters, and then the next time he went to write he would find the packet almost empty. He used to say it was bewitched! Well, Mrs. Mott caught that servant in the act of stealing something—I think it was taking out coal in the big basket she carried to fetch potatoes. When Mrs. Mott counted over her other things she found some towels missing. So she told the girl she had better open her box and show what else she had, and there, along with the towels, were heaps of Hinton’s paper and envelopes, and what was funniest of all, an old album of his with a lot of half-faded photos of his aunts and cousins. Now what could she have wanted with that? The paper, of course, she meant to use, because her name was Hannah—an H, you see.”
“The stolen photographs make the story look like a genuine case of kleptomania,” observed Lucy; “yet it may have had some object which does not readily occur to us. She may have wished to lay claim to relationship with some nice respectable-looking people, such as Mr. Hinton’s friends doubtless were.”
“That was what Hinton said,” Tom returned. “He found out Hannah had been a workhouse child, and didn’t know of anybody belonging to her. It did seem pathetic in a way. Hinton thought so. He wrote to his grandmother in the country and got her to take the girl and give her another chance. But she soon ran away. Some gipsy show-people had been in the town, and the police said she went off with them. They had seen her among them.”
“Ah,” thought Lucy, “and who knows what thread of hereditary lawlessness and vagabondage had been in this poor girl, whose childhood nobody had been at pains to understand and to discipline? And yet how impossible it is that such a one could be harboured in a house like Mrs. Mott’s—nay, it would be wrong, for nobody must voluntarily assume responsibilities which clash with duties.”
“What decided Mrs. Mott, though,” Tom went on, “was when her last girl calmly took a candle to see where the gas was escaping. Mrs. Mott just stepped out of the parlour in time to see her coming with it, alight, out of the pantry. The gas escape was in the kitchen, and she was on her way downstairs. If Mrs. Mott had stayed in the parlour, we should have been all blown up together, for I was in the room overhead. Mrs. Mott was dreadfully upset; she set open every door and window and then called me. I turned off the gas, and soon found the leakage. Mrs. Mott was quite ill with the shock of knowing what might have happened. She said to me, at once, that she couldn’t stand it any more, she could not bear the responsibilities that the irresponsible might bring down on her head at any moment. I thought the feeling might pass off with the fright; but she’s stuck to it—more’s the pity for me.”
“One wonders at city girls not having yet learned the truth about gas,” said Lucy. “Certainly I have heard curious stories about country people coming into town and ‘blowing out’ the light, and wondering much at the ‘nasty smell’ which ensued, compelling them to open the window, though there might be frost and snow outside. Did this girl come from the country?”
“Not she,” said Tom; “she belongs to a mews quite close to our place. And what is more, on our kitchen wall there is a printed placard giving full instructions about such household matters as breaking pipes, escaping gas, or street doors left ajar.”
“Everybody can read nowadays,” observed Lucy, “but every now and then one comes across a person who does not seem to read with any ease or facility; perhaps she was one of these.”
Tom shook his head. “No,” he said. “Mrs. Mott told me that till that day she had never had much fault to find with her (she’d only been with us for about three weeks), but that she had been sorry to see that she spent all her leisure in reading penny papers, with stories and pictures of men in evening dress and women with trailing robes, all dukes and viscountesses, and pretty girls in shops. She must have spent threepence or fourpence a week on these, Mrs. Mott says, and when she had read them, she tore them up or burnt them. Mrs. Mott had told her she ought to settle to one good magazine and collect a nice stock for bound volumes.
“I don’t wonder Mrs. Mott is rather sick of it,” Tom went on, “only I wish she didn’t give up out of feeling so responsible for us. All that we shall gain, as it seems to me, is, most likely, girls quite as irresponsible, and a landlady equally so. Mrs. Mott’s charges have been very moderate—I did not realise how moderate—till I have gone about and seen what is offered for the same money.”
“Then you have begun to make inquiries,” said Lucy.
“Ay,” answered Tom, rather bitterly, “and I don’t know when I shall leave off or where I shall find myself. I mustn’t go one bit further from the office than Mrs. Mott’s house is. Indeed, that’s rather too far, except that I was there from the first, and knew when I was comfortable. I’ve spoilt two Saturday afternoons going round and asking questions at every house where I saw ‘Furnished Apartments.’ And oh, Mrs. Challoner!”—Tom broke off with an indescribably comic expression of dismay on his good-humoured face.
“Did you have some funny experiences?” Lucy questioned.
“Didn’t I?” echoed Tom. “The very first place to which I went was in a good street not very far from the office, and the house looked nice on the outside. The door was opened by such a girl!—I don’t know whether she belonged to the family, or was a servant—I should think the former. But she might have been a Fuzzy Wuzzy straight from the Soudan by the look of her hair. It stood straight up all round her head. You couldn’t believe it unless you saw it! And her gown might have been made of dirty dishcloths. The passage looked like a black cavern. I didn’t want to go in, but I didn’t know how to get away. So I asked some questions. I said I wanted a bedroom-sitting-room, and the use of a parlour for meals. She said, ‘There wasn’t no parlour; their gentlemen mostly took their meals out.’ That gave me excuse to say it wouldn’t suit, and I got away.”
“Surely that must be a very extravagant arrangement for the gentlemen,” said Lucy.
“Mustn’t it?” rejoined Tom. “I should be stone-broke in a month! But I found that was the cry at all of them. The best—the most decent-looking—would give you your breakfast and ‘something at night, if you wanted it.’ That last was quite a concession. But they all turned up their noses at the thought of dinners! ‘There were plenty of restaurants,’ they said, ‘and they were cheap enough.’
“And the rooms!” continued Tom, with his disgusted voice. “Those which I could have for my price were always at the back, with a brick wall within an arm’s length from the window. And, ugh! there was a feeling about them as if one could smell and taste all the fellows who had ever used them! Lots of the bedrooms had nailed-down carpets, whose very pattern had disappeared. And the curtains and chair-covers looked as if they had not been washed since they were made.”
“I daresay they were not washable,” explained Lucy. “Cretonnes have replaced dimities and chintz, and none but the very best cretonnes will bear washing. This is so much the case that I hear the trade of the ‘calenderer’ who used to make chintz as good as new, has gone almost out of existence.”
“Most of them told me that all my washing would be ‘put out,’ and I should get my own bill from the laundry,” said Tom, who seemed considerably puzzled by all these domestic ins and outs, but not without some sound conviction that they tended neither to his comfort nor his prosperity.
“I did not find one house where they were willing to give me dinner daily,” Tom went on, “except boarding houses with a lot of people in them. I don’t like the idea of those at all. It is very tiring and worrying to sit down every evening at a dining-table packed with strangers, most of whom will be replaced in a week or two by another set of strangers. And the very lowest fee of these, for a top back room, so small, and with a roof so sloping, that I could not use my Indian clubs without upsetting the furniture, is as much as I gave Mrs. Mott for all my peace and comfort—and then it doesn’t include the washing! Yet I expect I’ll have to come to this,” added Tom ruefully.
“I suppose the lodging-house keepers can’t cook themselves, and can’t get servants who can,” said Lucy. “And oh, Mr. Black, many of the old style lodging-house servants were terribly overworked and underpaid and ill-treated. I once went to get lessons from a lady who had apartments in one of these houses. She told me that there was only one servant—an undersized creature who had opened the door to me. There were four sets of apartments in that house, apart from her mistress’s family of four people, and the girl got no help, except a little in the cooking, from the mistress’s aged mother. The washing was done at home there, and the servant did it all! My teacher told me that the girl was on her feet and hard at work from six o’clock in the morning till after ten o’clock at night, and ‘the worst of it was,’ she added, ‘the girl was learning nothing, and getting so used to scamped and slovenly work, that she could never rise to anything better than the same drudgery.’ She had very low wages. A week’s illness would mean the hospital. Her life’s sole resting-place would be the workhouse. We can’t be sorry for any changes which end such a state of things, can we, Mr. Black?”
“Well, no, certainly not,” he said, “but are they ending? By the look of the servants I saw in the big boarding-houses, I shouldn’t think their lives are much easier or better. They may have higher wages. Mrs. Mott’s girls certainly had a better time. They were comfortable and happy when they chose to be so. She paid them a very fair wage, considering that she taught them housework thoroughly. She says that some of the girls she had long ago went from her place to the very best situations. One of them afterwards married a young farmer, and when she visits London she always comes to see Mrs. Mott.”
“As for getting meals at restaurants,” pursued poor Tom, “I can’t do it. I can’t afford it. I know they are very cheap; but somehow there doesn’t seem much ‘bite’ in their platefuls. And there’s such a noise, and such a hurry, and such a horrid smell of food. If fellows really have to come to that, I don’t wonder they take to drinking and smoking. There’s something unreasonable about the whole thing. Here are girls nowadays ready to do men’s work for half men’s wages, so that fellows can scarcely get work at all. When I was in the City the other day I saw a great crowd of men round an office. They were pushing right up the stairway and half across the road. I thought there must have been a murder. I said to a commissionaire who was standing by, ‘What’s up?’ ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘these people are applying for a clerk’s place that’s advertised.’ ‘Anything specially good?’ I asked. ‘No, sir, only a pound a week,’ he answered. And I know it’s always so. Yet our ways of living are all getting dearer, and no woman is ready to be well paid for doing what we can’t do for ourselves. It’s inconsistent! It’s abominable!”
Lucy could not help laughing. “Don’t say ‘Women won’t do what men can’t do,’” she answered. “Don’t you know it is a favourite masculine reflection on feminine inferiority that all the great cooks are men! If that be so, then men are also likely to be the best average cooks. If they are so hard pressed for work, why do not some of them turn towards work which is crying for workers, and in which we always hear they could excel? A cook with a wage of eighteen or twenty pounds a year, and a thoroughly good home provided, is far better off than the earner of a weekly wage of a pound.”
“Oh, well,” said Tom, “I can well believe that. But why can’t women stick to cooking themselves? It’s women’s work.”
“Not if they can’t do it so well as we hear men can,” persisted Lucy.
“Well, you see, it would seem a come-down for a man,” Tom candidly confessed. “A clerkship—domestic service; they have a different sound.”
“Just so,” said Lucy, “and that being the man’s standpoint, the girls have naturally adopted it too. What reason is there in such a standpoint? On the face of it, which work is the more honourable—securing and maintaining the comfort of homes, or entering figures in a ledger and addressing envelopes? Which sphere gives the more scope for individual talent and character? And until this perverted standpoint is changed, all our present miseries will continue and increase. I have got my share, and you are finding yours. What is your housemate, Mr. Hinton, going to do?”
“He’s one of the lucky ones!” said Tom. “His married sister and her husband are coming into London, and they mean to let him have their spare room.”
A sudden idea flashed upon Lucy’s mind.
(To be continued.)