CHAPTER IX: THE SCHOOLROOM
When Tom was seven and Anne nine, I decided to engage a governess. I had never lost the feeling of—shall we call it respect—that I had felt for my own governess; one does not lose a feeling like respect in ten years. Therefore, when I found myself interviewing a governess for some one else, I felt rather like a sheep engaging a butcher. You can picture the scene. A small office adjoining the shambles. The sheep, arrayed in all the panoply of its natural wool unshorn for many years, the place where the branded mark had been covered with a self-possessed growth, seated at a small table writing. The pen a fancy article in the humorous disguise of a knife.
“Well, Mr. Jones,” says the trembling, bleating voice. “Do you kill yourself, or do you purchase the—er—the carcasses? You were in your last shop how many years? Precisely—very painful—thank you. You left on account of an outbreak of anthrax amongst the lambs—quite so. Yes, you would have the dip to yourself after ten o’clock. The slaughter-house is next door to your room, and there is a convenient tannery within ten minutes’ walk kept by an excellent ogre with moderate charges; we are devoted to him. I will send the cart to the station for you on Tuesday, and you will be able to begin your rounds at once.”
I lost this feeling after I had been to one or two agencies, and I felt instead like the man with a whip, who took over the plantation from the kind master in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Innocent old ladies with white wool on their heads and Bibles in their pockets came to offer their services as educational drudges, prepared to expose their pathetic cashmere backs to the lash of childish criticism and motherly arrogance. I wanted to engage them all just to ensure their being out of reach of some women I knew. I would then leave them my house, and fly with Tom and Anne to some desert island where we never need employ anyone or improve our minds again.
But it was impossible to engage them all, so I tossed up in the end between two; “heads,” Miss Mathers, “tails,” Miss Cook, and Miss Mathers had it. Miss Cook was young and modern, very pretty and charming, with all the drawbacks of a boy and a few of his advantages. I knew the children would get on with her, but I had a secret fear that she would think me “quaint,” and perhaps develop an enthusiasm for my vices, which would have bothered me. Miss Mathers was above all things a gentlewoman, which I thought would be good for Anne because I was not. She liked refinement and regular hours, and, especially, her attitude towards “gentlemen” was such a delight to me.
“Have you ever had brothers, Miss Mathers?” I asked her once, to which she replied: “Oh, yes, I have a brother I am extremely fond of; he is a most delightful man, so honest, generous, and witty. We have been the greatest of friends ever since our childhood.”
“But, then, surely, you must have seen him in his shirt-sleeves sometimes,” I suggested, “you know he is a human being and not a strange animal. Didn’t you ever sit on his knee?”
“No, Mrs. Molyneux,” she said after some thought, “I don’t remember ever doing so; I doubt whether he would have cared for it. But, of course, if anything of the kind had been necessary I should not have hesitated.”
I found great tonic properties in Miss Mathers’ conversation, for I had never seen men and women separated in the way she did it. It made exquisitely amusing so much in our social life that had been dull before. To her mind, so far as I understand, a man’s position in the scheme of creation is like that of the architect when a house is to be built. The only person who really matters is the lady who lives in the house when it is complete. The architect (it is disagreeable of course to have to employ one) merely sees that it is there. He is the man who does all the necessary and unpleasant part, what Miss Mathers called in every branch of art “the mechanical part.” I have heard her say of a picture that the “mechanical part was very nicely done.” I think her opinion of James was high, inasmuch as she considered his share in the establishment—the mechanical part—was very nicely done. That is, there was enough money to live on, the servants were well looked after, his children healthy, affectionate, and not too numerous.
But, while I was looked upon as a fellow-creature, James was to her a thing as utterly remote as the driver of a train in which she might be travelling, or, as I said, the architect of our house or the Archbishop of Canterbury. No, I think that is wrong. The Archbishop would be thought more human being a clergyman, because clergymen are almost like ladies they are so sensible—we will say, rather, the Pope, because being a Roman Catholic he was, of course, not a clergyman, though no doubt an excellent man according to his lights.