With that he fell to thinking of the student in Dublin and the men of old days, and wondered what might have become of them all and if they had fared better or worse than himself.
[XVI
MRS. FOLYAT DISSECTED]
| If you had married a conscientious Bishop and made him live in a pig-stye—à la bonne heure! | ||
| JOHN RUSKIN |
FROM being a governess with extremely small wages Annette became a servant with no wages at all. A few months after her return to her father’s house, Ada, the cook-general, married (beneath her) and she was replaced by a gnomish child of sixteen who wore short dresses and had her hair done up at the back in a tight little bun. She talked an entirely unintelligible language and delighted the Folyat family on the day after her arrival by saying to Annette, who happened to be in the kitchen:
“Eeh! Annie,”—never a “Miss” from a North-country girl—“Eeh! Annie, will ye whack t’ pots on t’ table while I wash me ’ead?”
Annette obliged, and “whacking the pots on the table” became the family euphemism for getting a meal ready.
Gertrude and Mary had gradually retired from active service—Mary with better excuse than Gertrude—and the whole administration of the household devolved on Annette. Nothing was said to her about it, no arrangement was made; it just happened, and nobody noticed that it had happened. From early morning when she prepared tea for her mother, to late at night when she boiled her chocolate, Annette was cooking, washing up, dusting, making the beds, &c., and her only excursions, except to church or the schools, were to the shops to buy the wherewithal to cook, wash-up, dust, &c. Nobody ever thanked her: for many weeks nobody remarked that she was doing so much, and then Serge found her dragging a heavy coal-scuttle up the stairs to his studio, relieved her of it and questioned her. After that, when he was at home, he did what he could to assist her in the heavy work.
As for Mrs. Folyat, she was a very lily, in that she toiled not neither did she spin. When she thought of it, she resented the decline and fall of her kitchen from cook-housemaid and parlourmaid to the sixteen-year-old hobgoblin, but, resentment being rather an active state of mind, she avoided it by giving no thought to the matter.
If Mrs. James Lawrie could be likened to a garden roller, Mrs. Folyat could most nearly be said to resemble a mill-stone. She was of the great and ignoble army of people who are neither good nor bad, renounce their potentialities in either direction, and drag all those to whom they cling—for cling they must if they are to remain above ground—down to the lowest depths of impotence, than which there is no worse state. She made herself comfortable with fiction and preferred everything to truth. An amazing capacity she had for compelling others to acquiesce in her self-deceptions by tickling their sentimentality so that it rose in them like a flood of treacle and slopped over their imagination and critical faculty. Had it ever occurred to her to exercise this power in print she might have become an enormously successful novelist. She was to all appearances much loved, and all her acquaintances and many of those whom she called her friends always spoke of her as “dear Mrs. Folyat.” She was never unhappy, but, on the other hand, she was never happy. In all material matters she was a furious optimist. She liked eating and sleeping and gossiping and going to the theatre and reading. If she could indulge in all these seemingly harmless pleasures to the extent of her appetite it seemed to her that all was well with the world.