Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

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.