“I have decided finally to take charge of Rose, as her father wished,” I wrote to Mrs. Stratton before she left for her own home.
My first duty now was to secure Hannah Banks; because it would be necessary for Rose to have a nurse and steady companion, and I had never cared greatly for the one in Allinson’s employ.
Hannah Banks, who years before had been my own nurse, was now in retirement at Lowestoft, living with a married niece on the annuity that my father had left her; but she expressed her willingness to re-enter service, and a day or so later her motherly old face beamed once more upon me.
“To think of you,” said Hannah, “bringing up a child—and a little girl at that—without anyone to help! The idea! Of course I came. I’m not as strong as I used to be, but thank God, I’m tough.”
Rose took to her instantly, and they established themselves in a wing of the house, which, for too long much too big for me, was now becoming human again. Hannah was vigilant but not fussy: her especial qualities were a kind heart and an unsleeping thoughtfulness. She could hardly write her own name, and her reading was confined to the simplest words; but what are reading and writing compared with the conduct of life? What I wanted from Hannah was wholesome solicitude and old English simplicity; I could supply the rest myself, and later on there would be some regular lessons.
The fact that Hannah had stood in the relation of nurse also to me made her a little contemptuous of my present parental airs. You can’t bring up a boy from the cradle to boarding-school without detecting lapses from the god, and these can be remembered even when he is adult and your employer. Nor, after bringing up a boy like that, can you ever quite lose the feeling that he is still something of an infant. Since, to nice women, all men are still something of infants (and, if sensible, willing to be so), this does not ordinarily matter; but the attitude may lead to embarrassing results when one is endeavouring to cut a figure of authority, with a child of one’s own or in one’s own charge. How can a lecture on hygiene be effective when in the middle of it an officious old lady crosses the lawn with a pair of goloshes in her hands, and says: “Now, Master Julius, put these on directly. The grass is wringing wet!” For I was still Master Julius to Hannah.
There was, besides Hannah, Suzanne. It was one of my peculiarities—and how the countryside came to forgive it I never understood—to employ a French cook. I had found her on a walking tour with Theodore Allinson in Normandy in 1880; she was keeping a wayside inn near Lillebonne, and her husband having just died, and there being no children, she longed to get away to a totally new environment. She was then about thirty-two. Since she made wonderful soups out of nothing and could set a perfect omelette before you almost before the order was given, I suggested that she might like to try England and take service with me; and she jumped at the idea; and with me she remained, capable, quick and amusing.
Her French was far from the French of Paris, but she had the rapid Parisian gift of commentary, with a homely provincial sagacity added. The acquirement of English she disdained, but just as sailors go round the world on the one word “savvy,” so did she, with a similar economy, contrive to make herself understood in the house and the village. Indeed, she went farther than to refuse to acquire English, she forced French on us, so that, for example, we entirely gave up “going to bed”: we used instead to “alley coshy.”
Rose was devoted to Suzanne and she assimilated a large number of her phrases—all of which, I knew only too well, would have to be unlearned when she came under the control of a real Mademoiselle. But for the present it was more important that the child should be happy with this broad-bosomed kindly Norman, and whatever bad pronunciation she was getting was more than compensated for by the attainment of certain secrets of the cuisine. Suzanne could not read a word, but the last atom of flavour was conserved in every dish that she sent to table; and what is literature compared with cooking? One is shadow and the other is substance. She had no culture. In vain for her had her fellow Norman, Gustave Flaubert (whose statue she had no doubt seen in Rouen), toiled all his life after the elusive epithet; but her apple-jelly was more than novels and her salads were works of art. I used to look at her, serene among her pots and pans or gathering lettuces in the garden, and reflect again how little education has to do with the real progress of the world or the happiness of mankind.
Naturally enough, Hannah did not appreciate Suzanne. Like a good rural Englishwoman, she mistrusted all foreigners in general, and in the present case the feeling was aggravated by jealousy, and by pique that her own darling Rose could understand the foreigner’s gibberish where she herself could not. But the house was so managed that the two women seldom met. Hannah ate in her and Rose’s own rooms, while Suzanne rarely left the kitchen.