Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

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?"