Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

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.