“This is the cellar, Mr. Brown. I think master wished the port put in the second bin from the left. I’ll just give it a wipe out if you’ll excuse me.”
I tried the coach-house, but it happened to be George’s day for swilling it after he had finished the grass, and when I found a place in the greenhouse away from the drip he came and put manure on the tomatoes.
I was engaged to be married to a man with the usual professional income, and I began to see very clearly that if I was to be happy in a small house the number of people living in it must be reduced as much as possible. That night when the servants were all in bed I took up my letters again and explained this theory to James. He agreed with me.
We were married early in January, and went into our house a week later. I had engaged two maids, both of whom had been recommended to me as thoroughly capable, and likely to bring light into the dark places of my inexperience. They did indeed; I saw all its weak points very clearly in the lurid glare of their bright ideas. But that was later. On our first day at home I went down to the kitchen as soon as my husband had gone out. I picked my way through the cinders, crumbs, bacon-rind, and unclassified fluff upon the floor, and stood for a moment blistering before the range where a blast-furnace raged behind the bars. The remains of breakfast, which suggested the snatched meal of a burglar, prepared in haste and darkness, were on the table, from which Clara, the housemaid, rose and made a slippery exit after the manner of a mouse.
I murmured something polite about being too soon, to which the cook replied that they were a bit late on account of the range, and the curtain rose on a farce which will run as long as I keep a cook.
The bell at the back door then fell into the first of a long and distressing series of convulsions, and Ruth went to its assistance.
“Pleas’m, the butcher,” she reported.
There are many ways of saying “Pleas’m, the butcher,” and Ruth’s was most discouraging. I knew at a glance that she had not properly masticated her breakfast, and that the arrival of the butcher was not unlike that of twins at the end of a numerous and undesired family. She looked as though her morning had been made up of a series of unwelcome events and this were the last straw.
“Tell him to call again,” I said hastily; “this is an absurd time to come.” I was going to retire when a second convulsion shook the house to its foundations.
“Do you wish fish’m?” said Ruth, just as if I had sent the fish. I hedged and tried to shift the blame on her.