The Head of the House of Coombe

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The square—out of which the right street branches—and the “Gardens” in the middle of the square to which only privileged persons were admitted by private key, the basement kitchen and Servants’ Hall, and the two top floor nurseries represented the world to the child Robin for some years. When she was old enough to walk in the street she was led by the hand over the ground she had travelled daily in her baby carriage. Her first memory of things was a memory of standing on the gravel path in the Square Gardens and watching some sparrows quarrel while Andrews, her nurse, sat on a bench with another nurse and talked in low tones. They were talking in a way Robin always connected with servants and which she naturally accepted as being the method of expression of their species—much as she accepted the mewing of cats and the barking of dogs. As she grew older, she reached the stage of knowing that they were generally saying things they did not wish her to hear.

She liked watching the sparrows in the Gardens because she liked watching sparrows at all times. They were the only friends she had ever known, though she was not old enough to call them friends, or to know what friends meant. Andrews had taught her, by means of a system of her own, to know better than to cry or to make any protesting noise when she was left alone in her ugly small nursery. Andrews’ idea of her duties did not involve boring herself to death by sitting in a room on the top floor when livelier entertainment awaited her in the basement where the cook was a woman of wide experience, the housemaid a young person who had lived in gay country houses, and the footman at once a young man of spirit and humour. So Robin spent many hours of the day—taking them altogether—quite by herself. She might have more potently resented her isolations if she had ever known any other condition than that of a child in whom no one was in the least interested and in whom “being good” could only mean being passive under neglect and calling no one’s attention to the fact that she wanted anything from anybody. As a bird born in captivity lives in its cage and perhaps believes it to be the world, Robin lived in her nursery and knew every square inch of it with a deadly if unconscious sense of distaste and fatigue. She was put to bed and taken up, she was fed and dressed in it, and once a day—twice perhaps if Andrews chose—she was taken out of it downstairs and into the street. That was all. And that was why she liked the sparrows so much.

And sparrows are worth watching if you live in a nursery where nothing ever happens and where, when you look out, you are so high up that it is not easy to see the people in the world below, in addition to which it seems nearly always raining. Robin used to watch them hopping about on the slate roofs of the homes on the other side of the street. They fluttered their wings, they picked up straws and carried them away. She thought they must have houses of their own among the chimneys—in places she could not see. She fancied it would be nice to hop about on the top of a roof oneself if one were not at all afraid of falling. She liked the chippering and chirping sounds the birds made became it sounded like talking and laughing—like the talking and laughing she sometimes wakened out of her sleep to lie and listen to when the Lady Downstairs had a party. She often wondered what the people were doing because it sounded as if they liked doing it very much.

Sometimes when it had rained two or three days she had a feeling which made her begin to cry to herself—but not aloud. She had once had a little black and blue mark on her arm for a week where Andrews had pinched her because she had cried loud enough to be heard. It had seemed to her that Andrews twisted and pinched the bit of flesh for five minutes without letting it go and she had held her large hand over her mouth as she did it.

“Now you keep that in your mind,” she had said when she had finished and Robin had almost choked in her awful little struggle to keep back all sound.

The one thing Andrews was surest of was that nobody would come upstairs to the Nursery to inquire the meaning of any cries which were not unearthly enough to disturb the household. So it was easy to regulate the existence of her charge in such a manner as best suited herself.

“Just give her food enough and keep her from making silly noises when she wants what she doesn’t get,” said Andrews to her companions below stairs. “That one in the drawing-room isn’t going to interfere with the Nursery. Not her! I know my business and I know how to manage her kind. I go to her politely now and then and ask her permission to buy things from Best’s or Liberty’s or some other good place. She always stares a minute when I begin, as if she scarcely understood what I was talking about and then she says ‘Oh, yes, I suppose she must have them.’ And I go and get them. I keep her as well dressed as any child in Mayfair. And she’s been a beauty since she was a year old so she looks first rate when I wheel her up and down the street, so the people can see she’s well taken care of and not kept hidden away. No one can complain of her looks and nobody is bothered with her. That’s all that’s wanted of me. I get good wages and I get them regular. I don’t turn up my nose at a place like this, whatever the outside talk is. Who cares in these days anyway? Fashionable people’s broader minded than they used to be. In Queen Victoria’s young days they tell me servants were no class that didn’t live in families where they kept the commandments.”

“Fat lot the commandments give any one trouble in these times,” said Jennings, the footman, who was a wit. “There’s one of ’em I could mention that’s been broken till there’s no bits of it left to keep. If I smashed that plate until it was powder it’d have to be swept into the dust din. That’s what happened to one or two commandments in particular.”

“Well,” remarked Mrs. Blayne, the cook, “she don’t interfere and he pays the bills prompt. That’ll do me instead of commandments. If you’ll believe me, my mother told me that in them Queen Victoria days ladies used to inquire about cold meat and ask what was done with the dripping. Civilisation’s gone beyond that—commandments or no commandments.”

“He’s precious particular about bills being paid,” volunteered Jennings, with the air of a man of the world. “I heard him having a row with her one day about some bills she hadn’t paid. She’d spent the money for some nonsense and he was pretty stiff in that queer way of his. Quite right he was too. I’d have been the same myself,” pulling up his collar and stretching his neck in a manner indicating exact knowledge of the natural sentiments of a Marquis when justly annoyed. “What he intimated was that if them bills was not paid with the money that was meant to pay them, the money wouldn’t be forthcoming the next time.” Jennings was rather pleased by the word “forthcoming” and therefore he repeated it with emphasis, “It wouldn’t be forthcoming.”