Our House
And London out of Our Windows

"Lines of black barges" (Waterloo Bridge)

Down to St. Paul's

Our House
And London out of Our
Windows

BY
Elizabeth Robins Pennell

With Illustrations by
Joseph Pennell

Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1912

Waterloo Bridge

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY JOSEPH PENNELL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

To
Augustine

"The big, low, heavy English clouds"

"There is movement and life" (The underground station and Charing-cross Bridge)

Contents

"At night myriads of lights come out"

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Our finding Our House was the merest chance. J. and I had been hunting for it during weeks and months, from Chelsea to Blackfriars, when one day, on the way to take a train on the Underground, we saw the notice "To Let" in windows just where they ought to have been,—high above the Embankment and the River,—and we knew at a glance that we should be glad to spend the rest of our lives looking out of them. But something depended on the house we looked out from, and, while our train went without us, we hurried to discover it. We were in luck. It was all that we could have asked: as simple in architecture, its bricks as time-stained, as the courts of the Temple or Gray's Inn. The front door opened into a hall twisted with age, the roof supported by carved corbels, the upper part of another door at its far end filled with bull's-eye glass, while three flights of time-worn, white stone stairs led to the windows with, behind them, a flat called Chambers, as if we were really in the Temple, and decorated by Adam, as if to bring Our House into harmony with the younger houses around it. For Our House it became on that very day, now years ago. Our House it has been ever since, and I hope we are only at the beginning of our adventures in it. Of some of the adventures that have already fallen to our share within Our House, I now venture to make the record, for no better reason perhaps than because at the time I found them both engrossing and amusing. The adventures out of Our Windows—adventures of cloud and smoke and sunshine and fog—J. has been from the beginning, and is still, recording, because certainly he finds them the most wonderful of all. If my text shows the price we pay for the beauty, the reproductions of his paintings, all made from Our Windows, show how well that beauty is worth the price.

'Enrietter

"IN WINTER THE GREAT WHITE FLIGHTS OF GULLS"

Our House
And London out of Our Windows

I

'ENRIETTER

Since my experience with 'Enrietter, the pages of Zola and the De Goncourts have seemed a much more comfortable place for "human documents" and "realism" than the family circle. Her adventures in our London chambers make a thrilling story, but I could have dispensed with the privilege of enjoying the thrill. When your own house becomes the scene of the story you cannot help taking a part in it yourself, and the story of 'Enrietter was not precisely one in which I should have wanted to figure had it been a question of choice.

It all came of believing that I could live as I pleased in England, and not pay the penalty. An Englishman's house is his castle only when it is run on the approved lines, and the foreigner in the country need not hope for the freedom denied to the native. I had set out to engage the wrong sort of servant in the wrong sort of way, and the result was—'Enrietter. I had never engaged any sort of servant anywhere before, I did not much like the prospect at the start, and my first attempts in Registry Offices, those bulwarks of British conservatism, made me like it still less. That was why, when the landlady of the little Craven Street hotel, where we waited while the British Workman took his ease in our chambers, offered me 'Enrietter, I was prepared to accept her on the spot, had not the landlady, in self-defence, stipulated for the customary formalities of an interview and references.

The interview, in the dingy back parlour of the hotel, was not half so unpleasant an ordeal as I had expected. Naturally, I do not insist upon good looks in a servant, but I like her none the less for having them, and a costume in the fashion of Whitechapel could not disguise the fact that 'Enrietter was an uncommonly good-looking young woman; not in the buxom, red-cheeked way that my old reading of Miss Mitford made me believe as inseparable from an English maid as a pigtail from a Chinaman, nor yet in the anæmic way I have since learned for myself to be characteristic of the type. She was pale, but her pallor was of the kind more often found south of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Her eyes were large and blue, and she had a pretty trick of dropping them under her long lashes; her hair was black and crisp; her smile was a recommendation. And, apparently, she had all the practical virtues that could make up for her abominable cockney accent and for the name of 'Enrietter, by which she introduced herself. She did not mind at all coming to me as "general," though she had answered the landlady's advertisement for parlour maid. She was not eager to make any bargain as to what her work was, and was not, to be. Indeed, her whole attitude would have been nothing short of a scandal to the right sort of servant. And she was willing with a servility that would have offended my American notions had it been a shade less useful.

As for her references, it was in keeping with everything else that she should have made the getting them so easy. She sent me no farther than to another little private hotel in another little street leading from the Strand to the river, within ten minutes' walk. It was kept by two elderly maiden ladies who received me with the usual incivility of the British hotel-keeper, until they discovered that I had come not for lodging and food, which they would have looked upon as an insult, but merely for a servant's character. They unbent still further at 'Enrietter's name, and were roused to an actual show of interest. They praised her cooking, her coffee, her quickness, her talent for hard work. But—and then they hesitated and I was lost, for nothing embarrasses me more than the Englishwoman's embarrassed silence. They did manage to blurt out that 'Enrietter was not tidy, which I regretted. I am not tidy myself, neither is J., and I have always thought it important that at least one person in a household should have some sense of order. But then they also told me that 'Enrietter had frequently been called upon to cook eighteen or twenty breakfasts of a morning, and lunches and dinners in proportion, and it struck me there might not have been much time left for her to be tidy in. After this, there was a fresh access of embarrassment so prolonged that I could not in decency sit it out, though I would have liked to make sure that it was due to their own difficulty with speech, and not to unspeakable depravity in 'Enrietter. However, it saves trouble to believe the best, when to believe the worst is to add to one's anxieties, and as soon as I got home I wrote and engaged 'Enrietter and cheerfully left the rest to Fate.

There was nothing to regret for a fortnight. Fate seemed on my side, and during two blissful weeks 'Enrietter proved herself a paragon among "generals." She was prettier in her little white cap than in her big feathered hat, and her smile was never soured by the friction of daily life. Her powers as a cook had not been over-estimated; the excellence of her coffee had been undervalued; for her quickness and readiness to work, the elderly maiden ladies had found too feeble a word. There wasn't anything troublesome she wouldn't and didn't do, even to providing me with ideas when I hadn't any and the butcher's, or green-grocer's, boy waited. And it was the more to her credit because our chambers were in a chaotic condition that would have frightened away a whole staff of the right sort of servants. We had just moved in, and the place was but half furnished. The British Workman still lingered, as I began to believe he always would,—there were times, indeed, when I was half persuaded we had taken our chambers solely to provide him a shelter in the daytime. My kitchen utensils were of the fewest. My china was still in the factory in France where they made it, and I was eating off borrowed plates and drinking out of borrowed cups. I had as yet next to no house-linen to speak of. But 'Enrietter did not mind. She worked marvels with what pots and pans there were, she was tidy enough not to mislay the borrowed plates and cups, she knew just where to take tablecloths and napkins and have them washed in a hurry when friends were misguided enough to accept my invitation to a makeshift meal. If they were still more misguided and took me by surprise, she would run out for extra cutlets, or a salad, or fruit, and be back again serving an excellent little lunch or dinner before I knew she had gone. This was the greater comfort because I had just then no time to make things better. I was deep, beyond my habit, in journalism. A sister I had not seen for ten years and a brother-in-law recovering from nervous prostration were in town. Poor man! What he saw in our chambers was enough to send him home with his nerves seven times worse than when he came. J., fortunately for him, was in the South of France, drawing cathedrals. That was my one gleam of comfort. He at least was spared the tragedy of our first domestic venture.

Upon the pleasure of that fortnight there fell only a single shadow, but it ought to have proved a warning, if, at the moment, I had not been foolish enough to find it amusing. I had gone out one morning directly after breakfast, and when I came home, long after lunch-time, the British Workman, to my surprise, was kicking his heels at my front door, though his rule was to get comfortably on the other side of it once his business at the public house round the corner was settled. He was more surprised than I, and also rather hurt. He had been ringing for the last ten minutes, he said reproachfully, and nobody would let him in. After I had rung in my turn for ten minutes and nobody had let me in, I was not hurt, but alarmed.

It was then that, for the first and last time in my knowledge of him, the British Workman had an inspiration: Why shouldn't he climb the ladder behind our outer front door,—we can "sport our oak" if we like,—get through the trap-door at the top to the leads, and so enter our little upper story, which looks for all the world like a ship's cabin drifted by mistake on to a London roof.

I was to remember afterwards, as they say in novels, how, as I watched him climb, it struck me that the burglar or the house-breaker had the way made straight for him if our chambers ever seemed worth burgling or breaking into. The British Workman's step is neither soft nor swift, but he carried through his plan and opened the door for me without any one being aroused by his irregular proceedings, which added considerably to my alarm. But the flat is small, and my suspense was short. 'Enrietter was in her bedroom, on her bed, sleeping like a child. I called her: she never stirred. I shook her: I might as well have tried to wake the Seven Sleepers, the Sleeping Beauty, Barbarossa in the Kyfhaüser, and all the sleepers who have slept through centuries of myth and legend rolled into one. I had never seen anything like it. I had never heard of anything like it except the trance which leads to canonization, or the catalepsy that baffles science. To have a cataleptic "general" to set off against the rapping nurse-maid of an acquaintance, who wanted me to take her in and watch her in the cause of Psychology, would be a triumph no doubt, but for all domestic purposes it was likely to prove a more disturbing drawback than untidiness.

However, 'Enrietter, when she appeared at the end of an hour, did not call her midday sleep by any name so fine. She had been scrubbing very hard—she suddenly had a faintness—she felt dazed, and, indeed, she looked it still—the heat, she thought, she hardly knew—she threw herself on her bed—she fell asleep. What could be simpler? And her smile had never been prettier, her blue eyes never cast down more demurely. I spoke of this little incident later to a friend, and was rash enough to talk some nonsense about catalepsy. One should never go to one's friends for sympathy. "More likely drink," was the only answer.

Of course it was drink, and I ought to have known it without waiting for 'Enrietter herself to destroy my illusions, which she did at the end of the first fortnight. The revelation came with her "Sunday out." To simplify matters, I had made it mine too. 'Enrietter, according to my domestic regulations, was to be back by ten o'clock, but to myself greater latitude was allowed, and I did not return until after eleven. I was annoyed to see the kitchen door wide open and the kitchen gas flaring,—the worst of chambers is, you can't help seeing everything, whether you want to or not. 'Enrietter had been told not to wait up for me, and excess of devotion can be as trying as excess of neglect. If only that had been my most serious reason for annoyance! For when I went into the kitchen I found 'Enrietter sitting by the table, her arms crossed on it, her head resting on her arms, fast asleep; and what makes you laugh at noon may by midnight become a bore. I couldn't wake her. I couldn't move her. Again, she slept like a log. In the end I lost my temper, which was the best thing I could have done, for I shook her with such violence that, at last, she stirred in her sleep. I shook harder. She lifted her head. She smiled.

"Thash a'right, mum," she said, and down went her head again.

Furious, I shook her up on to her unsteady feet. "Go to bed," I said with a dignity altogether lost upon her. "Go at once, and in the dark. In your disgusting condition you are not fit to be trusted with a candle."

'Enrietter smiled. "Thash a'right, mum," she murmured reassuringly as she reeled up the stairs before me.

I must say for her that drink made her neither disagreeable nor difficult. She carried it off light-heartedly and with the most perfect politeness.

I had her in for a talk the next morning. I admit now that this was another folly. I ought to have sent her off bag and baggage then and there. But it was my first experience of the kind; I didn't see what was to become of me if she did go; and, as I am glad to remember, I had the heart to be sorry for her. She was so young, so pretty, so capable. The indiscretion of her Sunday out meant for me, at the worst, temporary discomfort; for her, it might be the beginning of a life's tragedy. Her explanation was ready,—she was as quick at explaining as at everything else. I needn't tell her what I thought of her, it seemed; it was nothing to what she thought of herself. There was no excuse. She was as disgusted as I could be. It was all her sister's fault. Her sister would make her drink a drop of brandy just before she left her home at Richmond. It was very wrong of her sister, who knew she wasn't used to brandy and couldn't stand it.

The story would not have taken in a child, but as it suited me to give her another trial, it was easier to make-believe to believe. Before the interview was over I ventured a little good advice. I had seen too often the draggled, filthy, sexless creatures drink makes of women in London, and 'Enrietter was worth a better end. She listened with admirable patience for one who was already, as I was only too quickly to learn, so far on the way to the London gutter that there was no hope of holding her back, as much as an inch, by words or kindness.

The next Sunday 'Enrietter stayed in and went to bed sober. It was the day after—a memorable Monday—that put an end to all compromise and make-believe. I had promised to go down to Cambridge, to a lunch at one of the colleges. At the English Universities time enters so little into the scheme of existence that one loses all count of it, and I was pretty sure I should be late in getting home. I said, however, that I should be back early in the afternoon, and I took every latch-key with me,—as if the want of a latch-key could make a prison for so accomplished a young woman as 'Enrietter! The day was delightful, the weather as beautiful as it can be in an English June, and the lunch gay. And afterwards there was the stroll along the "Backs," and, in the golden hour before sunset, afternoon tea in the garden, and I need not say that I missed my train. It was close upon ten o'clock when I turned the key in my front door. The flat was in darkness, except for the light that always shines into our front windows at night from the lamps on the Embankment and Charing Cross Bridge. There was no sign of 'Enrietter, and no sound of her until I had pulled my bell three or four times, and shouted for her in the manner I was taught as a child to consider the worst sort of form, not to say vulgar. But it had its effect. A faint voice answered from the ship's cabin upstairs, "Coming, mum."

"Light the gas and the lamp," I said when I heard her in the hall.

The situation called for all the light I could get. From the methodical way she set about lighting the hall gas I knew that, at least, she could not be reeling. Then she came in and lit the lamp, and I saw her.

It was a thousand times worse than reeling, and my breath was taken away with the horror of it. For there she stood, in a flashy pink dressing-gown that was a disgrace in itself, her face ghastly as death, and all across her forehead, low down over one of the blue eyes, a great, wide, red gash.

Before I had time to pull myself together 'Enrietter had told her story,—so poor a story it showed how desperate now was her case. She had been quiet all morning—no one had come—she had got through the extra work I left with her. About three the milkman rang. A high wind was blowing. The door, when she opened it, banged in her face and cut her head open. And it had bled! She had only just succeeded in stopping it. One part of her story, anyway, was true beyond dispute. That terrible, gaping wound spoke for itself.

I did not know what to do. I was new in the neighbourhood, and my acquaintance with doctors anywhere is slight. But I could not turn her into the street, I could not even leave her under my own roof all night, like that. Something had to be done, and I ran downstairs to consult the old Housekeeper, who, after her half century in the Quarter, might be expected to know how to meet any emergency.

More horrors awaited me in her room,—like Macbeth, I was supping full with horrors,—for she had another story to tell, and, as I listened, the ghastly face upstairs, with the gaping red wound, became a mere item in an orgy more appropriate to the annals of the Rougon-Macquarts than, I devoutly trust, to ours. I cannot tell the story as the Housekeeper told it. She had a trick of going into hysterics at moments of excitement, and as in all the years she had been in charge she had never seen such goings on, it followed that in all those years, she had never been so hysterical. She gasped and sobbed out her tale of horrors, and, all the while, her daughter, who was in the profession, sat apart, and, in the exasperating fashion of the chorus of a Greek play, kept up a running commentary emphasizing the points too emphatic to need emphasis.

To tell the story in my own way: I was hardly out of the house when 'Enrietter had a visit from a "gentleman,"—that was the Housekeeper's description of him, and, as things go in England, he was a gentleman, which makes my story the more sordid. How 'Enrietter had sent him word the coast was clear I do not pretend to say, though I believe the London milkman has a reputation as the Cupid's Postman of the kitchen, and I recalled afterwards two or three notes 'Enrietter had received from her sister by district messenger,—the same sister, no doubt, who gave her the drop of brandy. Towards noon 'Enrietter and her gentleman were seen to come downstairs and go out together. Where they went, what they did during the three hours of their absence, no one knew,—no one will ever know. Sometimes, in looking back, the greatest horrors to me are the unknown chapters in the story of that day's doings. They were seen to return, about three, in a hansom. The gentleman got out, unsteadily. 'Enrietter followed and collapsed in a little heap on the pavement. He lifted her, and staggered with her in by the door and up the three long flights of stairs to our chambers.

And then—I confess, at this point even now my anger gets the better of me. Every key for my front door was in my pocket,—women were still allowed pockets in those days. There was no possible way in which they could have got in again, had not that gentleman climbed the ladder up which I had watched the British Workman not so many days before, and, technically, broken into my place, and then come down the little stairway and let 'Enrietter in. A burglar would have seemed clean and honest compared to the gentleman housebreaking on such an errand. My front door was heard to bang upon them both, and I wish to Heaven it had been the last sound heard from our chambers that day. For a time all was still. Then, of a sudden, piercing screams rang through the house and out through the open windows into the scandalized Quarter. There was a noise of heavy things falling or thrown violently down, curses filled the air; as the Housekeeper told it to me, it was like something out of Morrison's "Mean Streets" or the "Police-Court Gazette," and the dreadful part of it was that, no doubt, I was being held responsible for it! At last, loud above everything else, came blood-curdling cries of "Murder! Murder! Help! Murder!" There was not a window of the many over-looking my back rooms that was not filled with terrified neighbours. The lady in the chambers on the floor below mine set up a cry of her own for the police. The clerks from the Church League and from the Architect's office were gathered on the stairs. A nice reputation I must be getting in the house before my first month in it was up!

The Housekeeper, with a new attack of hysterics, protested that she had not dared to interfere, though she had a key, nor could she give it to a policeman without my authority—she knew her duty. The Greek Chorus repeated, without hysterics but with careful elocution, that the Housekeeper could not go in nor fetch the police without my authority—she knew her duty. And so, the deeds that were done within my four walls on that beautiful June afternoon must remain a mystery. The only record is the mark 'Enrietter will carry on her forehead with her to the grave.

The noise gradually ceased. The neighbours, one by one, left the windows, the lady below disappeared into her flat. The clerks went back to work. And the Housekeeper crept into her rooms for the cup of tea that saves every situation for the Englishwoman. She had not finished when there came a knock at the door. She opened it, and there stood a gentleman—the gentleman—anyone could see he was a gentleman by his hat—and he told her his story: the third version of the affair. He was a medical student, he said. He happened to be passing along the Strand when, just in front of Charing Cross, a cab knocked over a young lady. She was badly hurt, but, as a medical student, he knew what to do. He put her into another cab and brought her home; he saw to her injuries; but now he could stay no longer. She seemed to be quite alone up there. Her condition was serious; she should not be left alone. And he lifted his hat and was gone. But the Housekeeper daren't intrude, even then; she knew her place and her duty. She knew her place and her duty, the Greek Chorus echoed, and the end of her story brought me to just where I was at the beginning. Upon one point the gentleman was right, and that was the condition of the "young lady" as long as that great wide gash still gaped open. The Housekeeper, practical for all her hysterics, sobbed out "The Hospital." "The Hospital!" echoed the Greek Chorus, and I mounted the three flights of stairs for 'Enrietter.

I tied up her head. I made her exchange the shameless pink dressing-gown for her usual clothes. I helped her on with her hat, though I thought she would faint before she was dressed. I led her down the three flights of stairs into the street, across the Strand, to the hospital. By this time it was well past eleven.

So far I hadn't had a chance to think of appearances. But one glance from the night-surgeon at the hospital, and it was hard to think of anything else. He did not say a word more than the case demanded, but his behaviour to me was abominable all the same. And I cannot blame him. There was I, decently dressed I hope, for I had put on my very best for Cambridge, in charge of a young woman dressed anyhow and with a broken head. It was getting on toward midnight. The Strand was a stone's throw away. Still, in his place, I hope I should have been less brutal.

As for 'Enrietter, she had plenty of pluck, if she had no morals. She bore the grisly business of having her head sewn up with the nerve of a martyr. She never flinched, she never moaned; she was heroic. When it was over, the night-surgeon told her—he never addressed himself to me if he could help it—that it was a nasty cut and must be seen to again the next day. The right eye had escaped by miracle, it might yet be affected. What was most important at this stage was perfect quiet, perfect repose. It was essential that she should sleep,—she must take something to make her sleep. When I asked him meekly to give me an opiate for her, he answered curtly that that was not his affair. There was a chemist close by, I could get opium pills there, and he turned on his heel.

I took 'Enrietter home. I saw her up the three long flights of stairs to our chambers, the one little stairway to her bedroom, and into her bed. I walked down the little stairway and the three long flights. I went out into the night. I hurried to the chemist's. It was past midnight, an hour when decent women are not expected to wander alone in the Strand, and now I was conscious that things might look queer to others. I skulked in the darkest shadows like a criminal. I bought the pills. I came home. For the fourth time I toiled up the three long flights of stairs and the one little stairway. I gave 'Enrietter her pills. I put out her light. I shut her in her room.

And then? Why, then, I hadn't taken an opium pill. I wasn't sleepy. I didn't want to sleep. I wanted to find out. I did what I have always thought no self-respecting person would do. But to be mixed up in 'Enrietter's affairs was not calculated to strengthen one's self-respect. And without a scruple I went into the kitchen and opened every drawer, cupboard, and box, and read every letter, every scrap of paper, I could lay my hands on. There wasn't much all told, but it was enough. For I found out that the medical student, the gentleman, was a clerk in the Bank of England,—I should like him to read this and to know that I know his name and have his reputation in my hands. I found out that 'Enrietter was his "old woman," and a great many other things she ought not to have been. I found out that I had not dined once with my friends that he had not spent the evening with her. I found out that he had kept count of my every engagement with greater care than I had myself. I found out that he had spent so many hours in my kitchen that the question was what time he had left for the Bank of England. And I found such an assortment of flasks and bottles that I could only marvel how 'Enrietter had managed to be sober for one minute during the three weeks of her stay with me.

I sent for a charwoman the next morning. She was of the type now rapidly dying out in London, and more respectable, if possible, than the Housekeeper. Her manner went far to restore my self-respect, and this was the only service I could ask of her, her time being occupied chiefly in waiting upon 'Enrietter. In fairness, I ought to add that 'Enrietter was game to the last. She got up and downstairs somehow, she cooked the lunch, she would have waited on the table, bandaged head and all, had I let her. But the less I saw of her, the greater her chance for the repose prescribed by the night-surgeon. Besides, she and her bandaged head were due at the hospital. This time she went in charge of the charwoman, whose neat shabby shawl and bonnet, as symbols of respectability, were more than sufficient to keep all the night or day surgeons of London in their place. They returned with the cheerful intelligence that matters were much worse than was at first thought, that 'Enrietter's eye was in serious danger, and absolute quiet in a darkened room was essential, that lotions must be applied and medicines administered at regular intervals,—in a word, that our chambers, as long as she remained in them, must be turned into a nursing home, with myself as chief nurse, which was certainly not what I had engaged her for.

I went upstairs, when she was in bed again, and told her so. She must send for some one, I did not care whom, to come and take her off my hands at once. My temper was at boiling-point, but not for the world would I have shown it or done anything to destroy 'Enrietter's repose and so make matters worse, and not be able to get rid of her at all. As usual, her resources did not fail her; she was really wonderful all through. There was an old friend of her father's, she said, who was in the Bank of England—I knew that friend; he could admit her into a hospital of which he was a patron—Heaven help that hospital! But I held my peace. I even wrote her letter and sent it to the post by the charwoman. 'Enrietter's morals were beyond me, but my own comfort was not.

I do not know whether the most astonishing thing in all the astonishing episode was not the reappearance of the old friend of her father's in his other rôle of medical student. I suppose he did not realize how grave 'Enrietter's condition was. I am sure he did not expect anything less than that I should open the door for him. But this was what happened. His visit was late, the charwoman had gone for the night, and I was left to do all 'Enrietter's work myself. He did not need to tell me who he was,—his face did that for him,—but he stammered out the wretched fable of the medical student, the young lady, and the cab. She was quite alone when he left her, he added, and he was worried, and, being in the neighbourhood, he called in passing to enquire if the young lady were better, and if there were now some one to take care of her. His self-confidence came back as he talked.

"Your story is extremely interesting," I told him, "and I am especially glad to hear it, because my cook"—with a vindictive emphasis on the cook—"has told me quite a different one as to how she came by her broken head. Now—"

He was gone. He threw all pretence to the winds and ran downstairs as if the police were at his heels, as I wished they were. I could not run after him without making a second scandal in the house; and if I had caught him, if I had given him in custody for trespass, as I was told afterwards I might have done, how would I have liked figuring in the Police Courts?

Curiously, he did have influence with the hospital, which shall be nameless. He did get a bed there for 'Enrietter the next morning. It may be that he had learned by experience the convenience to himself of having a hospital, as it were, in his pocket. But the arrangements were by letter; he did not risk a second meeting, and I asked 'Enrietter no questions. For my own satisfaction, I went with her to the hospital: a long, melancholy drive in a four-wheeler, 'Enrietter with ghastly face, more dead than alive. I delivered her into the hands of the nurses. I left her there, a bandaged wreck of the pretty 'Enrietter who had been such an ornament to our chambers. And that was the last I saw of her, though not the last I heard.

A day or two later her sister came to pack up her belongings,—a young woman with a vacant smile, a roving eye, and a baby in her arms. I had only to look at her to know that she wasn't the sort of sister to force anything on anybody, much less on 'Enrietter. And yet I went to the trouble of reading her a little lecture. 'Enrietter's morals were beyond me, but I am not entirely without a conscience. The sister kept on simpering vacantly, while her eyes roved from print to print on the walls of the dining-room where the lecture was delivered, and the baby stared at me with portentous solemnity.

Then, about three weeks after the sister's visit, I heard from 'Enrietter herself. She wrote with her accustomed politeness. She begged my pardon for troubling me. She had left the hospital. She was at home in Richmond, and she had just unpacked the trunk the sister had packed for her. Only one thing was missing. She would be deeply obliged if I would look in the left-hand drawer of the kitchen dresser and send her the package of cigarettes I would find there. And she was mine, "Very respectfully."

This is the story of 'Enrietter's adventures in our chambers, and I think whoever reads it will not wonder that I fought shy afterwards of the English servant who was not well on the wrong side of forty and whose thirst could not be quenched with tea. The real wonder is that I had the courage to risk another maid of any kind. Women have been reproached with their love of gossiping about servants since time immemorial, and I do not know for how long before that. But when I remember 'Enrietter, I do not understand how we have the heart ever to gossip about anything else. What became of her, who can say? Sometimes, when I think of her pretty face and all that was good in her, I can only hope that the next orgy led to still worse things than a broken head, and that Death saved her from the London streets.

Trimmer

"AND THE WONDER GROWS WITH THE NIGHT"

II

TRIMMER

Until I began my search for an elderly woman who never drank anything stronger than tea, I had supposed it was the old who could find nobody to give them work. But my trouble was to find somebody old enough to give mine to. The "superior domestics" at the Registry Offices were much too well trained to confess even to middle age, and probably I should be looking for my elderly woman to this day, had not chance led Trimmer one afternoon to an office which I had left without hope in the morning. As her years could supply no possible demand save mine, she was sent at once to our chambers.

To tell the truth, as soon as I saw her, I began to doubt my own wisdom. I had never imagined anybody quite so respectable. In her neat but rusty black dress and cape, her hair parted and brought carefully down over her ears, her bonnet tied under her chin, her reticule hanging on her arm, she was the incarnation of British respectability; "the very type," the "old Master Rembrandt van Rijn, with three Baedeker stars," I could almost hear Mr. Henry James describing her; and all she wanted was to belong "beautifully" to me. But then she looked as old as she looked respectable,—so much older than I meant her to look,—old to the point of fragility. She admitted to fifty-five, and when mentally I added four or five years more, I am sure I was not over generous. Her face was filled with wrinkles, her skin was curiously delicate, and she had the pallor that comes from a steady diet of tea and bread and sometimes butter. The hands through the large, carefully mended black gloves showed twisted and stiff, and it was not easy to fancy them making our beds and our fires, cooking our dinners, dusting our rooms, opening our front door. We needed some one to take care of us, and it was plain that she was far more in need of some one to take care of her,—all the plainer because of her anxiety to prove her capacity for work. There was nothing she could not do, nothing she would not do if I were but to name it. "I can cut about, mum, you'll see. Oh, I'm bonny!" And the longer she talked, the better I knew that during weeks, and perhaps months, she had been hunting for a place, which at the best is wearier work than hunting for a servant, and at the worst leads straight to the workhouse, the one resource left for the honest poor who cannot get a chance to earn their living, and who, by the irony of things, dread it worse than death.

With my first doubt I ought to have sent her away. But I kept putting off the uncomfortable duty by asking her questions, only to find that she was irreproachable on the subject of alcohol, that she preferred "beer-money" to beer, that there was no excuse not to take her except her age, and this, in the face of her eagerness to remain, I had not the pluck to make. My hesitation cost me the proverbial price. Before the interview was over I had engaged her on the condition that her references were good, as of course they were, though she sent me for them to the most unexpected place in the world, a corset and petticoat shop not far from Leicester Square. Through the quarter to which all that is disreputable in Europe drifts, where any sort of virtue is exposed to damage beyond repair, she had carried her respectability and emerged more respectable than ever.

She came to us with so little delay that I knew better than ever how urgent was her case. Except for the providentially short interval with 'Enrietter, this was my first experience of the British servant, and it was enough to make me tremble. It was impossible to conceive of anything more British. Her print dress, changed for a black one in the afternoon, her white apron and white cap, became in my eyes symbolic. I seemed, in her, to face the entire caste of British servants who are so determined never to be slaves that they would rather fight for their freedom to be as slavish as they always have been. She knew her place, and what is more, she knew ours, and meant to keep us in it, no matter whether we liked or did not like to be kept there. I was the Mistress and J. was the Master, and if, with our American notions, we forgot it, she never did, but on our slightest forgetfulness brought us up with a round turn. So correct, indeed, was her conduct, and so respectable and venerable was her appearance, that she produced the effect in our chambers of an old family retainer. Friends would have had us train her to address me as "Miss Elizabeth," or J. as "Master J.," and pass her off for the faithful old nurse who is now so seldom met out of fiction.

For all her deference, however, she clung obstinately to her prejudices. We might be as American in our ways as we pleased, she would not let us off one little British bit in hers. She never presumed unbidden upon an observation and if I forced one from her she invariably begged my pardon for the liberty. She thanked us for everything, for what we wanted as gratefully as for what we did not want. She saw that we had hot water for our hands at the appointed hours. She compelled us to eat Yorkshire pudding with our sirloin of beef, and bread-sauce with our fowl,—in this connection how can I bring myself to say chicken? She could never quite forgive us for our indifference to "sweets"; and for the daily bread-and-butter puddings and tarts we would not have, she made up by an orgy of tipsy cakes and creams when anybody came to dine. How she was reconciled to our persistent refusal of afternoon tea, I always wondered; though I sometimes thought that, by the stately function she made of it in the kitchen, she hoped to atone for this worst of our American heresies.

Whatever she might be as a type, there was no denying that as a servant she had all the qualities. She was an excellent cook, despite her flamboyant and florid taste in sweets; she was sober, she was obliging, she had by no means exaggerated her talent for "cutting about," and I never ceased to be astonished at the amount she accomplished. The fire was always burning when we got down in the morning, breakfast always ready. Beds were made, lunch served, the front door opened, dinner punctual. I do not know how she did it all, and I now remember with thankfulness our scruples when we saw her doing it, and the early date at which we supplied her with an assistant in the shape of a snuffy, frowzy old charwoman. The revelation of how much too much remained for her even then came only when we lost her, and I was obliged to look below the surface. While she was with us, the necessity of looking below never occurred to me; and as our chambers had been done up from top to bottom just before she moved into them, they stood her method on the surface admirably.

This method perhaps struck me as the more complete because it left her the leisure for a frantic attempt to anticipate our every wish. She tried to help us with a perseverance that was exasperating, and as her training had taught her the supremacy of the master in the house, it was upon J. that her efforts were chiefly spent. I could see him writhe under her devotion, until there were times when I dreaded to think what might come of it, all the more because my sympathies were so entirely with him. If he opened his door, she rushed to ask what he wanted. A spy could not have spied more diligently; and as in our small chambers the kitchen door was almost opposite his, he never went or came that she did not know it. He might be as short with her as he could, and in British fashion order her never to come into the studio, but it was no use; she could not keep out of it. Each new visitor, or letter, or message, was an excuse for her to flounder in among the portfolios on the floor and the bottles of acid in the corner, at the risk of his temper and her life. On the whole, he bore it with admirable patience. But there was one awful morning when he hurried into my room, slammed the door after him, and in a whisper said,—he who would not hurt a fly,—"If you don't keep that woman out of my room, I'll wring her neck for her!"

I might have spared myself any anxiety. Had J. offered to her face to wring her neck, she would have smiled and said, "That's all right, sir! Thank you, sir!" For, with Trimmer, to be "bonny" meant to be cheerful under any and all conditions. So long as her cherished traditions were not imperilled, she had a smile for every emergency. It was characteristic of her to allow me to christen her anew the first day she was with us, and not once to protest. We could not bring ourselves to call her Lily, her Christian name, so inappropriate was it to her venerable appearance. Her surname was even more impossible, for she was the widow of a Mr. Trim. She herself—helpful from the beginning—suggested "cook." But she was a number of things besides, and though I did not mind my friends knowing that she was as many persons in one as the cook of the Nancy Bell, it would have been superfluous to remind them of it on every occasion. When, at my wits' end, I added a few letters and turned the impossible Trim into Trimmer, she could not have been more pleased had I made her a present, and from that moment she answered to the new name as if born to it.

The same philosophy carried her through every trial and tribulation. It was sure to be all right if, before my eyes and driving me to tears, she broke the plates I could not replace without a journey to Central France, or if in the morning the kitchen was a wreck after the night Jimmy, our unspeakable black cat, had been making of it. Fortunately he went out as a rule for his sprees, realizing that our establishment could not stand the wear and tear. When he chanced to stay at home, I have come down to the kitchen in the morning to find the clock ticking upside down on the floor, oranges and apples rolling about, spoons and forks under the table, cups and saucers in pieces, and Jimmy on the table washing his face. But Trimmer would meet me with a radiant smile and would put things to rights, while Jimmy purred at her heels, as if both were rather proud of the exploit, certain that no other cat in the world could, "all by his lone" and in one night, work such ruin.

After all, it was a good deal Trimmer's fault if we got into the habit of shifting disagreeable domestic details on to her shoulders, she had such a way of offering them for the purpose. It was she who, when Jimmy's orgies had at last undermined his health and the "vet" prescribed a dose of chloroform as the one remedy, went to see it administered, coming back to tell us of the "beautiful corpse" he had made. It was she who took our complaints to the Housekeeper downstairs, and met those the other tenants brought against us. It was she who bullied stupid tradesmen and stirred up idle workmen. It was she, in a word, who served as domestic scapegoat. And she never remonstrated. I am convinced that if I had said, "Trimmer, there's a lion roaring at the door," she would have answered, "That's all right, mum! thank you, mum!" and rushed to say that we were not at home to him. As it happens, I know how she would have faced a burglar, for late one evening when I was alone in our chambers, I heard some one softly trying to turn the knob of the door of the box-room. What I did was to shut and bolt the door at the foot of our little narrow stairway, thankful that there was a door there that could be bolted. What Trimmer did, when she came home ten minutes later and I told her, "There's a burglar in the box-room," was to say, "Oh, is there, mum? thank you, mum. That's all right. I'll just run up and see"; and she lit her candle and walked right up to the box-room and unlocked and opened the door. Out flew William Penn, furious with us because he had let himself be shut in where nobody had seen him go, and where he had no business to have gone. He was only the cat, I admit. But he might have been the burglar for all Trimmer knew, and—what then?

As I look back and think of these things, I am afraid we imposed upon her. At the time, we had twinges of conscience, especially when we caught her "cutting about" with more than her usual zeal. She was not designed by nature to "cut about" at all. To grow old with her meant "to lose the glory of the form." She was short, she had an immense breadth of hip, and she waddled rather than walked. When, in her haste, her cap would get tilted to one side, and she would give a smudge to her nose or her cheek, she was really a grotesque little figure, and the twinges became acute. To see her "cutting about" so unbecomingly for us at an age when she should have been allowed, unburdened, to crawl towards death, was to shift the heaviest responsibility to our shoulders and to make us the one barrier between her and the workhouse. We could not watch the tragedy of old age in our own household without playing a more important part in it than we liked.

Her cheerfulness was the greater marvel when I learned how little reason life had given her for it. In her rare outbursts of confidence, with excuses for the liberty, she told me that she was London born and bred, that she had gone into service young, and that she had married before she was twenty. I fancy she must have been pretty as a girl. I know she was "bonny," and "a fine one" for work, and I am not surprised that Trim wanted to marry her. He was a skilled plasterer by trade, got good wages, and was seldom out of a job. They had a little house in some far-away mean street, and though the children who would have been welcome never came, there was little else to complain of.

Trim was good to her, that is, unless he was in liquor, which I gathered he mostly was. He was fond of his glass, sociable-like, and with his week's wages in his pocket, could not keep away from his pals in the public. Trimmer's objection to beer was accounted for when I discovered that Trim's fondness for it often kept the little house without bread and filled it with curses. There were never blows. Trim was good, she reminded me, and the liquor never made him wicked,—only made him leave his wife to starve, and then curse her for starving. She was tearful with gratitude when she remembered his goodness in not beating her; but when her story reached the day of his tumbling off a high ladder—the beer was in his legs—and being brought back to her dead, it seemed to me a matter of rejoicing. Not to her, however, for she had to give up the little house and go into service again, and she missed Trim and his curses. She did not complain. She always found good places, and she adopted a little boy, a sweet little fellow, like a son to her, whom she sent to school and started in life, and had never seen since. But young men will be young men, and she loved him. She was very happy at the corset and petticoat shop, where she lived while he was with her. After business hours she was free, for apparently the responsibility of being alone in a big house all night was as simple for her as braving a burglar in our chambers. The young ladies were pleasant, she was well paid. Then her older brother's wife died and left him with six children. What could she do but go and look after them when he asked her?

He was well-to-do, and his house and firing and lighting were given him in addition to high wages. He did not pay her anything, of course,—she was his sister. But it was a comfortable home, the children were fond of her,—and also of her cakes and puddings,—and she looked forward to spending the rest of her days there. But at the end of two years he married again, and when the new wife came, the old sister went. This was how it came about that, without a penny in her pocket, and with nothing save her old twisted hands to keep her out of the workhouse, she was adrift again at an age which made her undesirable to everybody except foolish people like ourselves, fresh from the horrors of our experience with 'Enrietter. It never occurred to Trimmer that there was anything to complain of. For her, all had always been for the best in the best of all possible worlds. That she had now chanced upon chambers and two people and one dissipated cat to take care of, and more to do than ought to have been asked of her, was but another stroke of her invariable good luck.

She had an amazing faculty of turning all her little molehills into mountains of pleasure. I have never known anything like the joy she got from her family, though I never could quite make out why. She was inordinately proud of the brother who had been so ready to get rid of her; the sister-in-law who had replaced her was a paragon of virtue; the nieces were so many infant phenomena, and one Sunday when, with the South London world of fashion, they were walking in the Embankment Gardens, she presumed so far as to bring them up to our chambers to show them off to me, and the affectionate glances she cast upon their expansive lace collars explained that she still had her uses in the family. There was also a cousin whom, to Trimmer's embarrassment, I often found in our kitchen; but much worse than frequent visits could be forgiven her, since it was she who, after Jimmy's inglorious end, brought us William Penn, a pussy then small enough to go into her coat-pocket, but already gay enough to dance his way straight into our hearts.

Trimmer's pride reached high-water mark when it came to a younger brother who travelled in "notions" for a city firm. His proprietor was the personage the rich Jew always is in the city of London, and was made Alderman and Lord Mayor, and knighted and baroneted, during the years Trimmer spent with us. She took enormous satisfaction in the splendour of this success, counting it another piece of her good luck to be connected, however remotely, with anybody so distinguished. She had almost an air of proprietorship on the 9th of November, when from our windows she watched his Show passing along the Embankment; she could not have been happier if she herself had been seated in the gorgeous Cinderella coach, with the coachman in wig and cocked hat, and the powdered footmen perched up behind; and when J. went to the Lord Mayor's dinner that same evening at the Guildhall, it became for her quite a family affair. I often fancied that she thought it reflected glory on us all to have the sister of a man who travelled in "notions" for a knight and a Lord Mayor, living in our chambers; though she would never have taken the liberty of showing it.

Trimmer's joy was only less in our friends than in her family, which was for long a puzzle to me. They added considerably to her already heavy task, and in her place, I should have hated them for it. It might amuse us to have them drop in to lunch or to dinner at any time, and to gather them together once a week, on Thursday evening. But it could hardly amuse Trimmer, to whose share fell the problem of how to make a meal prepared for two go round among four or six, or how to get to the front door and dispose of hats and wraps in chambers so small that the weekly gathering filled even our little hall to overflowing. There was always some one to help her on Thursdays, and she had not much to do in the way of catering. "Plain living and high talking" was the principle upon which our evenings were run, and whoever wanted more than a sandwich or so could go elsewhere. But whatever had to be done, Trimmer insisted on doing, and, moreover, on doing it until the last pipe was out and the last word spoken; and as everybody almost was an artist or a writer, and as there is no subject so inexhaustible as "shop," I do not like to remember how late that often was. It made no difference. She refused to go to bed, and in her white cap and apron, with her air of old retainer or family nurse, she would waddle about through clouds of tobacco-smoke, offering a box of cigarettes here, a plate of sandwiches there, radiant, benevolent, more often than not in the way, toward the end looking as if she would drop, but apparently enjoying herself more than anybody, until it seemed as if the unkindness would be not to let her stay up in it.

More puzzling to me than her interest in all our friends was her choice of a few for her special favour. I could not see the reason for her choice, unless I had suspected her of a sudden passion for literature and art. Certainly her chief attentions were lavished on the most distinguished among our friends, who were the very people most apt to put her devotion to the test. She adored Whistler, though when he was in London he had a way not only of dropping in to dinner, but sometimes of dropping in so late that it had to be cooked all over again. She was so far from minding that, at the familiar sound of his knock and ring, her face was wreathed in smiles, she seemed to look upon the extra work as a privilege, and I have known her, without a word, trot off to the butcher's or the green-grocer's, or even to the tobacconist's in the Strand for the little Algerian cigarettes he loved. She went so far as to abandon certain of her prejudices for his benefit, and I realized what a conquest he had made when she resigned herself to cooking a fowl in a casserole and serving it without bread-sauce. She discovered the daintiness of his appetite, and it was delightful to see her hovering over him at table and pointing out the choice bits in every dish she passed. She was forever finding an excuse to come into any room where he might be. Altogether, it was as complete a case of fascination as if she had known him to be the great master he was; and she was his slave long before he gave her the ten shillings, which was valued sentimentally as I really believe a tip never was before or since by a British servant.

Henley was hardly second in her esteem, and this was the more inexplicable because he provided her with so many more chances to prove it. Whistler then lived in Paris, and appeared only now and then. Henley lived in London half the week, and rarely missed a Thursday. For it was on that evening that the "National Observer," which he was editing, went to press, and the printers in Covent Garden were conveniently near to our chambers. His work done, the paper put to bed, about ten or eleven he and the train of young men then in attendance upon him would come round; and to them, in the comfortable consciousness that the rest of the week was their own, time was of no consideration. Henley exulted in talk: if he had the right audience he would talk all night; and the right audience was willing to listen so long as he talked in our chambers. But Trimmer, in the kitchen, or handing round sandwiches, could not listen, and yet she lingered as long as anybody. It might be almost dawn before he got up to go, but she was there to fetch him his crutch and his big black hat, and to shut the door after him. Whatever the indiscretion of the hour one Thursday, she welcomed him as cordially the next, or any day in between when inclination led him to toil up the three long flights of stairs to our dinner-table.

Phil May was no less in her good graces, and his hours, if anything, were worse than Henley's, since the length of his stay did not depend on his talk. I never knew a man of less conversation. "Have a drink," was its extent with many who thought themselves in his intimacy. This was a remark which he could scarcely offer to Trimmer at the front door, where Whistler and Henley never failed to exchange with her a friendly greeting. But all the same, she seemed to feel the charm which his admirers liked to attribute to him, and to find his smile, when he balanced himself on the back of a chair, more than a substitute for conversation, however animated. The flaw in my enjoyment of his company on our Thursdays was the certainty of the length of time he would be pleased to bestow it upon us. Trimmer must have shared this certainty, but to her it never mattered. She never failed to return his smile, though when he got down to go, she might be nodding, and barely able to drag one tired old foot after the other.

She made as much of "Bob" Stevenson, whose hours were worse than anybody's. We would perhaps run across him at a press view of pictures in the morning and bring him back to lunch, he protesting that he must leave immediately after to get home to Kew and write his article before six o'clock. And then he would begin to talk, weaving a romance of any subject that came up,—the subject was nothing, it was always what he made of it,—and he would go on talking until Trimmer, overjoyed at the chance, came in with afternoon tea; and he would go on talking until she announced dinner; and he would go on talking until all hours the next morning, long after his last train and any possibility of his article getting into yesterday afternoon's "Pall Mall." But early as he might appear, late as he might stay, he was never too early or too late for Trimmer.

These were her favourites, though she was ready to "mother" Beardsley, who, she seemed to think, had just escaped from the schoolroom and ought to be sent back to it; though she had a protecting eye also for George Steevens, just up from Oxford, evidently mistaking the silence which was then his habit for shyness; though, indeed, she overflowed with kindness for everybody who came. It was astonishing how, at her age, she managed to adapt herself to people and ways so unlike any she could ever have known, without relaxing in the least from her own code of conduct.

Only twice can I remember seeing her really ruffled. Once was when Felix Buhot, who, during a long winter he spent in London, was often with us on Thursdays, went into the kitchen to teach her to make coffee. The inference that she could not make it hurt her feelings; but her real distress was to have him in the kitchen, which "ladies and gentlemen" should not enter. Between her desire to get him back to the dining-room and her fear lest he should discover it, she was terribly embarrassed. It was funny to watch them: Buhot, unconscious of wrong and of English, intent upon measuring the coffee and pouring out the boiling water; Trimmer fluttering about him with flushed and anxious face, talking very loud and with great deliberation, in the not uncommon conviction that the foreigner's ignorance of English is only a form of deafness.

On the other occasion she lost her temper, the only time in my experience. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Whistler, appearing while she was out and staying on to supper, got Constant, his man, to add an onion soup and an omelet to the cold meats she had prepared, for he would never reconcile himself to the English supper. She was furious when she got back and found that her pots and pans had been meddled with, and her larder raided. She looked upon it as a reproach; as if she couldn't serve Mr. Whistler as well as any foreign servant,—she had no use for foreign servants anyhow,—she would not have them making their foreign messes in any kitchen of hers! It took days and careful diplomacy to convince her that she had not been insulted.

I was the more impressed by this outbreak of temper because, as a rule, she gave no sign of seeing, or hearing, or understanding anything that went on in our chambers. She treated me as I believe royalty should be treated, leaving it to me to open the talk, or to originate a topic. I remember once, when we were involved in a rumpus which had been discussed over our dinner-table for months beforehand, and which at the time filled the newspapers and was such public property that everybody in the Quarter—the milkman, the florist at the Temple of Pomona in the Strand, the Housekeeper downstairs, the postman—congratulated us on our victory, Trimmer alone held her peace. I could not believe that she really did not know, and at last I asked her:—

"I suppose you have heard, Trimmer, what has been going on these days?"

"What, mum?" was her answer.

Then, exasperated, I explained.

"Why yes, mum," she said. "I beg your pardon, mum, I really couldn't 'elp it. I 'ave been reading the pipers, and the 'ousekeeper she was a-talking to me about it before you come in, and the postman too, and I was sayin' as 'ow glad I was. I 'ope you and the Master won't think it a liberty, mum. Thank you, mum!"

I remember another time, when some of our friends took to running away with other friends' wives, and things became so complicated for everybody that our Thursday evenings were brought to a sudden end, Trimmer kept the same stolid countenance throughout, until, partly to prevent awkwardness, partly out of curiosity, I asked her if she had seen the papers.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, mum," she hesitated, "thank you, mum, I'm sure. I know it's a liberty, but you know, mum, they've all been 'ere so often I couldn't help noticing there was somethink. And I'm very sorry, mum, if you'll excuse the liberty, they all was such lidies and gentlemen, mum."

And so, I should never have known there was another reason, besides the natural kindness of her heart, for her interest in our friends and her acceptance of their ways, if, before this, I had not happened to say to her one Friday morning,—

"You seem, Trimmer, to have a very great admiration for Mr. Phil May."

"I 'ope you and Master won't think it a liberty, mum," she answered, in an agony of embarrassment, "but I do like to see 'im, and they allus so like to 'ear about 'im at 'ome. They're allus asking me when I 'ave last seen 'im or Mr. Whistler."

Then it came out. Chance had bestowed upon her father and one of the great American magazines the same name, with the result that the magazine was looked upon by her brothers and herself as belonging somehow to the family. The well-to-do brother subscribed to it, the other came to his house to see each new number. Through the illustrations and articles they had become as familiar with artists and authors as most people in England are with the "winners," and their education had reached at least the point of discovery that news does not begin and end in sport. Judging from Trimmer, I doubt if at first their patronage of art and literature went much further, but this was far enough for them to know, and to feel flattered by the knowledge, that she was living among people who figured in the columns of art and literary gossip as prominently as "all the winners" in the columns of the Sporting Prophets, though they would have been still more flattered had her lot been cast among the Prophets. In a few cases, their interest soon became more personal.

It was their habit—why, I do not suppose they could have said themselves—to read any letter Whistler might write to the papers at a moment when he was given to writing, though what they made of the letter when read was more than Trimmer was able to explain; they also looked out for Phil May's drawings in "Punch"; they passed our articles round the family circle,—a compliment hardly more astonishing to Trimmer than to us. As time went on they began to follow the career of several of our other friends to whom Trimmer introduced them; and it was a gratification to them all, as well as a triumph for her, when on Sunday afternoon she could say, "Mr. Crockett or Mr. 'Arold Frederic was at Master's last Thursday." Thus, through us, she became for the first time a person of importance in her brother's house, and I suspect also quite an authority in Brixton on all questions of art and literature. Indeed, she may, for all I know, have started another Carnegie Library in South London.

It is a comfort now to think that her stay with us was pleasant to her; wages alone could not have paid our debt for the trouble she spared us during her five years in our chambers. I have an idea that, in every way, it was the most prosperous period of her life. When she came, she was not only without a penny in her pocket, but she owed pounds for her outfit of aprons and caps and dresses. Before she left, she was saving money. She opened a book at the Post Office Savings Bank; she subscribed to one of those societies which would assure her a respectable funeral, for she had the ambition of all the self-respecting poor to be put away decent, after having, by honest work, kept off the parish to the end. Her future provided for, she could make the most of whatever pleasures the present might throw in her way,—the pantomime at Christmas, a good seat for the Queen's Jubilee procession; above all, the two weeks' summer holiday. No journey was ever so full of adventure as hers to Margate, or Yarmouth, or Hastings, from the first preparation to the moment of return, when she would appear laden with presents of Yarmouth bloaters or Margate shrimps, to be divided between the old charwoman and ourselves.

If she had no desire to leave us, we had none to have her go; and as the years passed, we did not see why she should. She was old, but she bore her age with vigour. She was hardly ever ill, and never with anything worse than a cold or an indigestion, though she had an inconvenient talent for accidents. The way she managed to cut her fingers was little short of genius. One or two were always wrapped in rags. But no matter how deep the gash, she was as cheerful as if it were an accomplishment. With the blood pouring from the wound, she would beam upon me: "You 'ave no idea, mum, what wonderful flesh I 'as fur 'ealin'." Her success in falling down our little narrow stairway was scarcely less remarkable. But the worst tumble of all was the one which J. had so long expected. He had just moved his portfolios to an unaccustomed place one morning, when a letter, or a message, or something, sent her stumbling into the studio with her usual impetuosity, and over she tripped. It was so bad that we had to have the doctor, her arm was so seriously strained that he made her carry it in a sling for weeks. We were alarmed, but not Trimmer.

"You know, mum, it is lucky; it might 'ave been the right harm, and that would 'ave been bad!"

She really thought it another piece of her extraordinary good luck.

Poor Trimmer! It needed so little to make her happy, and within five years of her coming to us that little was taken from her. All she asked of life was work, and a worse infirmity than age put a stop to her working for us, or for anybody else, ever again. At the beginning of her trouble, she would not admit to us, nor I fancy to herself, that anything was wrong, and she was "bonny," though she went "cutting about" at a snail's pace and her cheerful old face grew haggard. Presently, there were days when she could not keep up the pretence, and then she said her head ached and she begged my pardon for the liberty. I consulted a doctor. He thought it might be neuralgia and dosed her for it; she thought it her teeth, and had almost all the few still left to her pulled out. And the pain was worse than ever. Then, as we were on the point of leaving town for some weeks, we handed over our chambers to the frowzy old charwoman, and sent Trimmer down to the sea at Hastings. She was waiting to receive us when we returned, but she gave us only the ghost of her old smile in greeting, and her face was more haggard and drawn than ever. For a day she tottered about from one room to another, cooking, dusting, making beds, and looking all the while as if she were on the rack. She was a melancholy wreck of the old cheerful, bustling, exasperating Trimmer; and it was more than we could stand. I told her so. She forgot to beg my pardon for the liberty in her hurry to assure me that nothing was wrong, that she could work, that she wanted to work, that she was not happy when she did not work.

"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny!" she kept saying over and over again.

Her despair at the thought of stopping work was more cruel to see than her physical torture, and I knew, without her telling me, that her fear of the pain she might have still to suffer was nothing compared to her fear of the workhouse she had toiled all her life to keep out of. She had just seven pounds and fifteen shillings for her fortune; her family, being working people, would have no use for her once she was of no use to them; our chambers were her home only so long as she could do in them what she had agreed to do; there was no Workmen's Compensation Act in those days, no old-age pensions, even if she had been old enough to get one. What was left for a poor woman, full of years and pain, save the one refuge which, all her life, she had been taught to look upon as scarcely less shameful than the prison or the scaffold?

Well, Trimmer had done her best for us; now we did our best for her, and, as it turned out, the best that could be done. Through a friend, we got her into St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Her case was hopeless from the first. A malignant growth so close to the brain that at her age an operation was too serious a risk, and without it she might linger in agony for months,—this was what life had been holding in store for Trimmer during those long years of incessant toil, and self-sacrifice, and obstinate belief that a drunken husband, a selfish brother, an empty purse, were all for the best in our best of all possible worlds.

She did not know how ill she was, and her first weeks at the hospital were happy. The violence of the pain was relieved, the poor tired old body was the better for the rest and the cool and the quiet; she who had spent her strength waiting on others enjoyed the novel experience of being waited on herself. There were the visits of her family on visiting days, and mine in between, to look forward to; some of our friends, who had grown as fond of her as we, sent her fruit and flowers, and she liked the consequence all this gave her in the ward. Then, the hospital gossip was a distraction, perhaps because in talking about the sufferings of others she could forget her own. My objection was that she would spare me not a single detail. But in some curious way I could not fathom, it seemed a help to Trimmer, and I had not the heart to cut her stories short.

After a month or so, the reaction came. Her head was no better, and what was the hospital good for if they couldn't cure her? She grew suspicious, hinting dark things to me about the doctors. They were keeping her there to try experiments on her, and she was a respectable woman, and always had been, and she did not like to be stared at in her bed by a lot of young fellows. The nurses were as bad. But once out of their clutches she would be "bonny" again, she knew. Probably the doctors and nurses knew too, for the same suspicion is more often than not their reward; and indeed it was so unlike Trimmer that she must have picked it up in the ward. Anyway, in their kindness they had kept her far longer than is usual in such cases, and when they saw her grow restless and unhappy, it seemed best to let her go. At the end of four months, and to her infinite joy, Trimmer, five years older than when she came to us, in the advanced stage of an incurable disease, with a capital of seven pounds and fifteen shillings, was free to begin life again.

I pass quickly over the next weeks,—I wish I could have passed over them as quickly at the time. My visits were now to a drab quarter on the outskirts of Camden Town, where Trimmer had set up as a capitalist. She boarded with her cousin, many shillings of her little store going to pay the weekly bill; she found a wonderful doctor who promised to cure her in no time, and into his pockets the rest of her savings flowed. There was no persuading her that he could not succeed where the doctors at the hospital had failed, and so long as she went to him, to help her would only have meant more shillings for an unscrupulous quack who traded on the ignorance and credulity of the poor. Week by week I saw her grow feebler, week by week I knew her little capital was dribbling fast away. She seemed haunted by the dread that her place would be taken in our chambers, and that, once cured, she would have to hunt for another. That she was "bonny" was the beginning and end of all she had to say. One morning, to prove it, she managed to drag herself down to see us, arriving with just strength enough to stagger into my room, her arms outstretched to feel her way, for the disease, by this time, was affecting both eyes and brain. Nothing would satisfy her until she had gone into the studio, stumbling about among the portfolios, I on one side, on the other J., with no desire to wring her neck for it was grim tragedy we were guiding between us,—tragedy in rusty black with a reticule hanging from one arm,—five years nearer the end than when first the curtain rose upon it in our chambers. We bundled her off as fast as we could, in a cab, with the cousin who had brought her. She stopped in the doorway.

"Oh, I'm bonny, mum. I can cut about, you'll see!" And she would have fallen, had not the cousin caught and steadied her.

After that, she had not the strength to drag herself anywhere, not even to see the quack. A week later she took to her bed, almost blind, her poor old wits scattered beyond recovery. I was glad of that: it spared her the weary waiting and watching for death while the shadow of the grim building she feared still more drew ever nearer. I hesitated to go and see her, for my mere presence stirred her into consciousness, and reminded her of her need to work and her danger if she could not. Then there was a day when she did not seem to know I was there, and she paid no attention to me, never spoke until just as I was going, when of a sudden she sat bolt upright:—

"Oh, I'm bonny, mum, I'm bonny. You'll see!" she wailed, and sank back on her pillows.

These were Trimmer's last words to me, and I left her at death's door, still crying for work, as if in the next world, as in this, it was her only salvation. Very soon, the cousin came to tell me that the little capital had dribbled entirely away, and that she could not keep Trimmer without being paid for it. Could I blame her? She had her own fight against the shadow hanging all too close now over Trimmer. Her 'usband worked 'ard, she said, and they could just live respectable, and Trimmer's brothers, they was for sending Trimmer to the workus. They might have sent her, and I doubt if she would have been the wiser. But could we see her go? For our own comfort, for our own peace of mind, we interfered and arranged that Trimmer should board with her cousin until a bed was found in another hospital. It was found, mercifully, almost at once, but, before I had time to go there, the Great Release had come for her; and we heard with thankfulness that the old head was free from suffering, that the twisted hands were still, that fear of the workhouse could trouble her no more. Life's one gift to Trimmer had been toil, pain her one reward, and it was good to know that she was at rest.

The cousin brought us the news. But I had a visit the same day from the sister-in-law, the paragon of virtue, a thin, sharp-faced woman of middle age. I said what I could in sympathy, telling her how much we missed Trimmer, how well we should always remember her. But this was not what she had come to hear. She let me get through. She drew the sigh appropriate for the occasion. Then she settled down to business. When did I propose to pay back the money Trimmer had spent on the doctor in Camden Town? I didn't propose to at all, I told her: he was a miserable quack and I had done my best to keep Trimmer from going to him; besides, fortunately for her, she was beyond the reach of money that was not owing to her. The sister-in-law was indignant. The family always understood I had promised, a promise was a promise, and now they depended on me for the funeral. I reminded her of the society to which Trimmer had subscribed solely to meet that expense. But she quickly let me know that the funeral the society proposed to provide fell far short of the family's standard. To them it appeared scarcely better than a pauper's. The coffin would be plain, there would be no oak and brass handles,—worse, there would be no plumes for the horses and the hearse. To send their sister to her grave without plumes would disgrace them before their neighbours. Nor would there be a penny over for the family mourning,—could I allow them, the chief mourners, to mourn without crape?

I remembered their willingness to let Trimmer die as a pauper in the workhouse. After all, she would have the funeral she had provided for. She would lie no easier in her grave for oak and brass handles, for plumes and crape. Her family had made use of her all her life; I did not see why I should help them to make use of her after her death, that their grief might be trumpeted in Brixton and Camden Town. I brought the interview to an end. But sometimes I wonder if Trimmer would not have liked it better if I had helped them, if plumes had waved from the heads of the horses that drew her to her grave, if her family had followed swathed in crape. She would have looked upon it as another piece of her extraordinary good luck if, by dying, she had been of service to anybody.

I do not know where they buried her. Probably nobody save ourselves to-day has as much as a thought for her. But, if self-sacrifice counts for anything, if martyrdom is a passport to heaven, then Trimmer should take her place up there by the side of St. Francis of Assisi, and Joan of Arc, and St. Vincent de Paul, and all those other blessed men and women whose lives were given for others, and who thought it was "bonny."

Louise

"TUMBLED, WEATHER-WORN, RED-TILED ROOFS"

III

LOUISE

For the third time since we had taken our chambers, I was servantless, and I could not summon up courage to face for the third time the scorn which the simple request for a "general" meets in the English Registry Office. That was what sent me to try my luck at a French Bureau in Soho, where, I was given to understand, it was possible to inquire for, and actually obtain, a good bonne à tout faire and escape without insult.

Louise was announced one dull November morning, a few days later. I found her waiting for me in our little hall,—a woman of about forty, short, plump, with black eyes, blacker hair, and an enchanting smile. But the powder on her face and the sham diamonds in her ears seemed to hang out danger signals, and my first impulse was to show her the door. It was something familiar in the face under the powder, above all in the voice when she spoke, that made me hesitate.

"Provençale?" I asked.

"Yes, from Marseilles," she answered, and I showed her instead into my room.

I had often been "down there" where the sun shines and skies are blue, and her Provençal accent came like a breath from the south through the gloom of the London fog, bringing it all back to me,—the blinding white roads, the gray hills sweet with thyme and lavender, the towns with their "antiquities," the little shining white villages,—M. Bernard's at Martigues, and his dining-room, and the Marseillais who crowded it on a Sunday morning, and the gaiety and the laughter, and Désiré in his white apron, and the great bowls of bouillabaisse....

It was she who recalled me to the business of the moment. Her name was Louise Sorel, she said; she could clean, wash, play the lady's maid, sew, market, cook—but cook! Té—au mouins, she would show Madame; and, as she said it, she smiled. I have never seen such perfect teeth in woman or child; you knew at a glance that she must have been a radiant beauty in her youth. A Provençal accent, an enchanting smile, and the remains of beauty, however, are not precisely what you engage a servant for; and, with a sudden access of common sense, I asked for references. Surely, Madame would not ask the impossible, she said reproachfully. She had but arrived in London, she had never gone as bonne anywhere; how, then, could she give references? She needed the work and was willing to do it: was not that sufficient? I got out of it meanly by telling her I would think it over. At that she smiled again,—really, her smile on a November day almost warranted the risk. I meant to take her; she knew; Madame was kind.

I did think it over,—while I interviewed slovenly English "generals" and stray Italian children, dropped upon me from Heaven knows where, while I darned the family stockings, while I ate the charwoman's chops. I thought it over indeed, far more than I wanted to, until, in despair, I returned to the Soho Bureau to complain that I was still without a servant of any kind. The first person I saw was Louise, disconsolate, on a chair in the corner. She sprang up when she recognized me. Had she not said Madame was kind? she cried. Madame had come for her. I had done nothing of the sort. But there she was, this charming creature from the South; at home was the charwoman, dingy and dreary as the November skies. To look back now is to wonder why I did not jump at the chance of having her. As it was, I did take her,—no references, powder, sham diamonds, and all. But I compromised. It was to be for a week. After that, we should see. An hour later she was in my kitchen.

A wonderful week followed. From the start we could not resist her charm, though to be on such terms with one's servant as to know that she has charm, is no doubt the worst possible kind of bad form. Even William Penn, the fastidious, was her slave at first sight,—and it would have been rank ingratitude if he had not been, for, from the ordinary London tabby average people saw in him, he was at once transformed into the most superb, the most magnificent of cats! And we were all superb, we were all magnificent, down to the snuffy, tattered old Irish charwoman who came to make us untidy three times a week, and whom we had not the heart to turn out, because we knew that if we did, there could be no one else foolish enough to take her in again.

And Louise, though her southern imagination did such great things for us, had not overrated herself. She might be always laughing at everything, as they always do laugh "down there,"—at the English she couldn't understand, at Mizé Boum, the nearest she came to the charwoman's name, at the fog she must have hated, at the dirt left for her to clean. But she worked harder than any servant I have ever had, and to better purpose. She adored the cleanliness and the order, it seemed, and was appalled at the dirt and slovenliness of the English, as every Frenchwoman is when she comes to the land that has not ceased to brag of its cleanliness since its own astonished discovery of the morning tub. Before Louise, the London blacks disappeared as if by magic. Our wardrobes were overhauled and set to rights. The linen was mended and put in place. And she could cook! Such risotto!—she had been in Italy—Such macaroni! Such bouillabaisse! Throughout that wonderful week, our chambers smelt as strong of ail as a Provençal kitchen.

In the face of all this, I do not see how I brought myself to find any fault. To do myself justice, I never did when it was a question of the usual domestic conventions. Louise was better than all the conventions—all the prim English maids in prim white caps—in the world. Just to hear her talk, just to have her call that disreputable old Mizé Boum ma belle, just to have her announce as La Dame de la bouillabaisse a friend of ours who had been to Provence and had come to feast on her masterpiece and praised her for it,—just each and every one of her charming southern ways made up for the worst domestic crime she could have committed, I admit to a spasm of dismay when, for the first meal she served, she appeared in her petticoat, a dish-cloth for apron, and her sleeves rolled up above her elbows. But I forgot it with her delightful laugh at herself when I explained that, absurdly it might be, we preferred a skirt, an apron, and sleeves fastened at the wrists. It seemed she adored the economy too, and she had wished to protect her dress and even her apron.

These things would horrify the model housewife; but then, I am not a model housewife, and they amused me, especially as she was so quick to meet me, not only half, but the whole way. When, however, she took to running out at intervals on mysterious errands, I felt that I must object. Her first excuse was les affaires; her next, a friend; and, when neither of these would serve, she owned up to a husband who, apparently, spent his time waiting for her at the street corner; he was so lonely, le pauvre! I suggested that he should come and see her in the kitchen. She laughed outright. Why, he was of a shyness Madame could not figure to herself. He never would dare to mount the stairs and ring the front door-bell.

In the course of this wonderful week, there was sent to me, from the Soho Bureau, a Swiss girl with as many references as a Colonial Dame has grandfathers. Even so, and despite the inconvenient husband, I might not have dismissed Louise,—it was so pleasant to live in an atmosphere of superlatives and ail. It was she who settled the matter with some vague story of a partnership in a restaurant and work waiting for her there. Perhaps we should have parted with an affectation of indifference had not J. unexpectedly interfered. Husbands have a trick of pretending superiority to details of housekeeping until you have had all the bother, and then upsetting everything by their interference. She had given us the sort of time we hadn't had since the old days in Provence, he argued; her smile alone was worth double the money agreed upon; therefore, double the money was the least I could in decency offer her. His logic was irreproachable, but housekeeping on such principles would end in domestic bankruptcy. However, Louise got the money, and my reward was her face when she thanked me—she made giving sheer self-indulgence—and the risotto which, in the shock of gratitude, she insisted upon coming the next day to cook for us.

But, in the end, J.'s indiscretion cost me dear. As Louise was determined to magnify all our geese, not merely into swans, but into the most superb, the most magnificent swans, the few extra shillings had multiplied so miraculously by the time their fame reached the Quartier, that Madame of the Bureau saw in me a special Providence appointed to relieve her financial difficulties, and hurried to claim an immediate loan. Then, her claim being disregarded, she wrote to call my attention to the passing of the days and the miserable pettiness of the sum demanded, and to assure me of her consideration the most perfect. She got to be an intolerable nuisance before I heard the last of her.

We had not realized the delight of having Louise to take care of us, until she was replaced by the Swiss girl, who was industrious, sober, well-trained, with all the stolidity and surliness of her people, and as colourless as a self-respecting servant ought to be. I was immensely relieved when, after a fortnight, she found the work too much for her. It was just as she was on the point of going that Louise reappeared, her face still white with powder, the sham diamonds still glittering in her ears, but somehow changed, I could not quite make out how. She had come, she explained to present me with a ring of pearls and opals and of surpassing beauty, at the moment pawned for a mere trifle,—here was the ticket; I had but to pay, add a smaller trifle for interest and commission, and it was mine. As I never have worn rings I did not care to begin the habit by gambling in pawn tickets, much though I should have liked to oblige Louise. Her emotion when I refused seemed so out of proportion, and yet was so unmistakably genuine, that it bewildered me.

But she pulled herself together almost at once and began to talk of the restaurant which, I learned, was marching in a simply marvellous manner. It was only when, in answer to her question, I told her that the Demoiselle Suisse was marching not at all and was about to leave me, that the truth came out. There was no restaurant, there never had been,—except in the country of Tartarin's lions; it was her invention to spare me any self-reproach I might have felt for turning her adrift at the end of her week's engagement. She had found no work since. She and her husband had pawned everything. Tiens, and she emptied before me a pocketful of pawn tickets. They were without a sou. They had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours. That was the change. I began to understand. She was starving, literally starving, in the cold and gloom and damp of the London winter, she who was used to the warmth and sunshine, to the clear blue skies of Provence. If the aliens who drift to England, as to the Promised Land, could but know what awaited them!

Of course I took her back. She might have added rouge to the powder, she might have glittered all over with diamonds, sham or real, and I would not have minded. J. welcomed her with joy. William Penn hung rapturously at her heels. We had a risotto, golden as the sun of the Midi, fragrant as its kitchens, for our dinner.

There was no question of a week now, no question of time at all. It did not seem as if we ever could manage again, as if we ever could have managed, without Louise. And she, on her side, took possession of our chambers, and, for a ridiculously small sum a week, worked her miracles for us. We positively shone with cleanliness; London grime no longer lurked, the skeleton in our cupboards. We never ate dinners and breakfasts more to our liking, never had I been so free from housekeeping, never had my weekly bills been so small. Eventually, she charged herself with the marketing, though she could not, and never could, learn to speak a word of English; but not even the London tradesman was proof against her smile. She kept the weekly accounts, though she could neither read nor write: in her intelligence, an eloquent witness to the folly of general education. She was, in a word, the most capable and intelligent woman I have ever met, so that it was the more astounding that she should also be the most charming.

Most astounding of all was the way, entirely, typically Provençale as she was, she could adapt herself to London and its life and people. Though she wore in the street an ordinary felt hat, and in the house the English apron, you could see that her hair was made for the pretty Provençal ribbon, and her broad shoulders for the Provençal fichu. Té, vé, and au mouins were as constantly in her mouth as in Tartarin's. Provençal proverbs forever hovered on her lips. She sang Provençal songs at her work. She had ready a Provençal story for every occasion. Her very adjectives were Mistral's, her very exaggerations Daudet's. And yet she did everything as if she had been a "general" in London chambers all her life. Nothing came amiss to her. After her first startling appearance as waitress, it was no time before she was serving at table as if she had been born to it, and with such a grace of her own that every dish she offered seemed a personal tribute. People who had never seen her before would smile back involuntarily as they helped themselves. It was the same no matter what she did. She was always gay, however heavy her task. To her even London, with its fogs, was a galéjado, as they say "down there." And she was so appreciative. We would make excuses to give her things for the pleasure of watching the warm glow spread over her face and the light leap to her eyes. We would send her to the theatre for the delight of having her come back and tell us about it. All the world, on and off the stage, was exalted and transfigured as she saw it.

But frank as she was in her admiration of all the world, she remained curiously reticent about herself. "My poor grandmother used to say, you must turn your tongue seven times in your mouth before speaking," she said to me once; and I used to fancy she gave hers a few extra twists when it came to talking of her own affairs. Some few facts I gathered: that she had been at one time an ouvreuse in a Marseilles theatre; at another, a tailoress,—how accomplished, the smart appearance of her husband in J.'s old coats and trousers was to show us; and that, always, off and on, she had made a business of buying at the periodical sales of the Mont de Piété and selling at private sales of her own. I gathered also that they all knew her in Marseilles; it was Louise here, Louise there, as she passed through the market, and everybody must have a word and a laugh with her. No wonder! You couldn't have a word and a laugh once with Louise and not long to repeat the experience. But to her life when the hours of work were over, she offered next to no clue.

Only one or two figures flitted, pale shadows, through her rare reminiscences. One was the old grandmother, whose sayings were full of wisdom, but who seemed to have done little for her save give her, fortunately, no schooling at all, and a religious education that bore the most surprising fruit. Louise had made her first communion, she had walked in procession on feast days. J'adorais ça, she would tell me, as she recalled her long white veil and the taper in her hand. But she adored every bit as much going to the Salvation Army meetings,—the lassies would invite her in, and lend her a hymn-book, and she would sing as hard as ever she could, was her account. Her ideas on the subject of the Scriptures and the relations of the Holy Family left me gasping. But her creed had the merit of simplicity. The Boun Diou was intelligent, she maintained; il aime les gens honnêtes. He would not ask her to hurry off to church and leave all in disorder at home, and waste her time. If she needed to pray, she knelt down where and as she was, and the Boun Diou was as well pleased. He was a man like us, wasn't He? Well then, He understood.

There was also a sister. She occupied a modest apartment in Marseilles when she first dawned upon our horizon, but so rapidly did it expand into a palatial house in town and a palatial villa by the sea, both with cellars of rare and exquisite vintages and stables full of horses and carriages, that we looked confidently to the fast-approaching day when we should find her installed in the Elysée at Paris. Only in one respect did she never vary by a hair's breadth: this was her hatred of Louise's husband.

Here, at all events, was a member of the family about whom we learned more than we cared to know. For if he did not show himself at first, that did not mean his willingness to let us ignore him. He persisted in wanting Louise to meet him at the corner, sometimes just when I most wanted her in the kitchen. He would have her come back to him at night; and to see her, after her day's hard work, start out in the black sodden streets, seldom earlier than ten, often as late as midnight; to realize that she must start back long before the sun would have thought of coming up, if the sun ever did come up on a London winter morning, made us wretchedly uncomfortable. The husband, however, was not to be moved by any messages I might send him. He was too shy to grant the interview I asked. But he gave me to understand through her that he wouldn't do without her, he would rather starve, he couldn't get along without her. We did not blame him: we couldn't, either. That was why, after several weeks of discomfort to all concerned, it occurred to us that we might invite him to make our home his; and we were charmed by his condescension when, at last conquering his shyness, he accepted our invitation. The threatened deadlock was thus settled, and M. Auguste, as he introduced himself, came to us as a guest for as long as he chose to stay. There were friends—there always are—to warn us that what we were doing was sheer madness. What did we know about him, anyway? Precious little, it was a fact: that he was the husband of Louise, neither more nor less. We did not even know that, it was hinted. But if Louise had not asked for our marriage certificate, could we insist upon her producing hers?

It may have been mad, but it worked excellently. M. Auguste as a guest was the pattern of discretion. I had never had so much as a glimpse of him until he came to visit us. Then I found him a good-looking man, evidently a few years younger than Louise, well-built, rather taller than the average Frenchman. Beyond this, it was weeks before I knew anything of him except the astonishing adroitness with which he kept out of our way. He quickly learned our hours and arranged his accordingly. After we had begun work in the morning, he would saunter down to the kitchen and have his coffee, the one person of leisure in the establishment. After that, and again in the afternoon, he would stroll out to attend to what I take were the not too arduous duties of a horse-dealer with neither horses nor capital,—for as a horse-dealer he described himself when he had got so far as to describe himself at all. At noon and at dinner-time, he would return from Tattersall's, or wherever his not too exhausting business had called him, with a small paper parcel supposed to contain his breakfast or his dinner, our agreement being that he was to supply his own food. The evenings he spent with Louise. I could discover no vice in him except the, to us, disturbing excess of his devotion to her. You read of this sort of devotion in French novels and do not believe in it. But M. Auguste, in his exacting dependence on Louise, left the French novel far behind. As for Louise, though she was no longer young and beauty fades early in the South, I have never met, in or out of books, a woman who made me understand so well the reason of the selfishness some men call love.

M. Auguste's manners to us were irreproachable. We could only admire the consideration he showed in so persistently effacing himself. J. never would have seen him, if on feast days—Christmas, New Year's, the 14th of July—M. Auguste had not, with great ceremony, entered the dining-room at the hour of morning coffee to shake hands and wish J. the compliments of the season. With me his relations grew less formal, for he was not slow to discover that we had one pleasant weakness in common. Though the modest proportions of that brown-paper parcel might not suggest it, M. Auguste knew and liked what was good to eat; so did I. Almost before I realized it, he had fallen into the habit of preparing some special dish for me, or of making my coffee, when I chanced to be alone for lunch or for dinner. I can still see the gleam in his eyes as he brought me in my cup, and assured me that he, not Louise, was the artist, and that it was something of extra—but of extra!—as it always was. Nor was it long before he was installed chef in our kitchen on the occasion of any little breakfast or dinner we might be giving. The first time I caught him in shirt-sleeves, with Louise's apron flapping about his legs and the bib drawn over his waistcoat, he was inclined to be apologetic. But he soon gave up apology. It was evident there were few things he enjoyed more than cooking a good dinner,—unless it was eating it,—and his apron was put on early in the day. In the end, I never asked any one to breakfast or dinner without consulting him, and his menus strengthened the friendliness of our relations.

After a while he ran my errands and helped Louise to market. I found that he spoke and wrote very good English, and was a man of some education. I have preserved his daily accounts, written in an unusually neat handwriting, always beginning "Mussy: 1 penny"; and this reminds me that not least in his favour was his success in ingratiating himself with William Penn,—or "Mussy" in Louise's one heroic attempt to cope with the English. M. Auguste, moreover, was quiet and reserved to a degree that would not have discredited the traditional Englishman. Only now and then did the Midi show itself in him: in the gleam of his eye over his gastronomic masterpieces; in his pose as horse-dealer and the scale on which the business he never did was schemed,—Mademoiselle, the French dressmaker from Versailles, who counted in tens and thought herself rich, was dazzled by the way M. Auguste reckoned by thousands; and once, luckily only once, in a frenzied outbreak of passion.

He was called to Paris, I never understood why. When the day came, he was seized with such despair as I had never seen before, as I trust I may never have to see again. He could not leave Louise, he would not. No! No! No! He raved, he swore, he wept. I was terrified, but Louise, when I called her aside to consult her, shrugged her shoulders. "We play the comedy in the kitchen," she laughed, but I noticed that her laughter was low. I fancy when you played the comedy with M. Auguste, tragedy was only just round the corner. With the help of Mademoiselle she got him to the station; he had wanted to throw himself from the train as it started, was her report. And in three days, not a penny the richer for the journey, he had returned to his life of ease in our chambers.

Thus we came to know M. Auguste's virtues and something of his temper, but never M. Auguste himself. The months passed, and we were still conscious of mystery. I did not inspire him with the healthy fear he entertained for J., but I cannot say he ever took me into his confidence. What he was when not in our chambers; what he had been before he moved into them; what turn of fate had stranded him, penniless, in London with Louise, to make us the richer for his coming; why he, a man of education, was married to a woman of none; why he was M. Auguste while Louise was Louise Sorel—I knew as little the day he left us as the day he arrived. J. instinctively distrusted him, convinced that he had committed some monstrous crime and was in hiding. This was also the opinion of the French Quarter, as I learned afterwards. It seems the Quartier held its breath when it heard he was our guest, and waited for the worst, only uncertain what form that worst would take,—whether we should be assassinated in our beds, or a bonfire made of our chambers. M. Auguste, however, spared us and disappointed the Quartier. His crime, to the end, remained as baffling as the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, or the secret of Kaspar Hauser.

That he was honest, I would wager my own reputation for honesty, even if it was curious the way his fingers gradually covered themselves with rings, a watch-chain dangled from his waistcoat pocket, a pin was stuck jauntily in his necktie. Her last purchases at the Mont de Piété, pawned during those first weeks of starving in London and gradually redeemed, was Louise's explanation; and why should we have suspected M. Auguste of coming by them unlawfully when he never attempted to rob us, though we gave him every opportunity? He knew where I kept my money and my keys. He was alone with Louise in our chambers, not only many a day and evening, but once for a long summer.

We had to cycle down into Italy and William Penn could not be left to care for himself, nor could we board him out without risking the individuality of a cat who had never seen the world except from the top of a four-story house. Louise and M. Auguste, therefore, were retained to look after him, which, I should add, they did in a manner as satisfactory to William as to ourselves. Every week I received a report of his health and appetite from M. Auguste, in whom I discovered a new and delightful talent as correspondent. "Depuis votre départ," said the first, "cette pauvre bête a miaulé après vous tous les jours, et il est constamment à la porte pour voir si vous ne venez pas. Il ne commence vraiment à en prendre son parti que depuis hier. Mais tous ces soucis de chat [for that charming phrase what would one not have forgiven M. Auguste?], mais tous ces soucis de chat ne l'empêchent pas de bien boire son lait le matin et manger sa viande deux fois par jour." Nor was it all colour of rose to be in charge of William. "Figurez-vous," the next report ran, "que Mussy a dévoré et abîmé complêtement une paire de bas tout neufs que Louise s'est achetée hier. C'est un vrai petit diable, mais il est si gentil qu'on ne peut vraiment pas le gronder pour cela." It was consoling to hear eventually that William had returned to normal pursuits. "Mussy est bien sage, il a attrapé une souris hier dans la cuisine—je crois bien que Madame ne trouvera jamais un aussi gentil Mussy." And so the journal of William's movements was continued throughout our absence. When, leaving J. in Italy, I returned to London,—met at midnight at the station by M. Auguste with flattering enthusiasm,—Mussy's condition and behaviour corroborated the weekly bulletins. And not only this. Our chambers were as clean as the proverbial new pin: everything was in its place; not so much as a scrap of paper was missing. The only thing that had disappeared was the sprinkling of gray in Louise's hair, and for this M. Auguste volubly prepared me during our walk from the station; she had dyed it with almost unforeseen success, he told me, so triumphantly that I put down the bottle of dye to his extravagance.

If I know M. Auguste was not a thief, I do not think he was a murderer. How could I see blood on the hands of the man who presided so joyously over my pots and pans? If he were a forger, my trust in him never led to abuse of my cheque book; if a deserter, how came he to be possessed of his livret militaire duly signed, as my own eyes are the witness? how could he venture back to France, as I know he did for I received from him letters with the Paris postmark? An anarchist, J. was inclined to believe. But I could not imagine him dabbling in bombs and fuses. To be a horse-dealer, without horses or money, was much more in his line.

Only of one thing were we sure: however hideous or horrible the evil, M. Auguste had worked "down there," under the hot sun of Provence, Louise had no part in it. She knew—it was the reason of her curious reticences, of her sacrifice of herself to him. That he loved her was inevitable. Who could help loving her? She was so intelligent, so graceful, so gay. But that she should love M. Auguste would have been incomprehensible, were it not in the nature of woman to love the man who is most selfish in his dependence upon her. She did all the work, and he had all the pleasure of it. He was always decently dressed, there was always money in his pocket, though she, who earned it, never had a penny to spend on herself. No matter how busy and hurried she might be, she had always the leisure to talk to him, to amuse him when he came in, always the courage to laugh, like the little Fleurance in the story. What would you? She was made like that. She had always laughed, when she was sad as when she was gay. And while she was making life delightful for him, she was doing for us what three Englishwomen combined could not have done so well, and with a charm that all the Englishwomen in the world could not have mustered among them.

She had been with us about a year when I began to notice that, at moments, her face was clouded and her smile less ready. At first, I put it down to her endless comedy with M. Auguste. But, after a bit, it looked as if the trouble were more serious even than his histrionics. It was nothing, she laughed when I spoke to her; it would pass. And she went on amusing and providing for M. Auguste and working for us. But by the time the dark days of November set in, we were more worried about her than ever. The crisis came with Christmas.

On Christmas Day, friends were to dine with us, and we invited Mademoiselle, the French dressmaker, to eat her Christmas dinner with Louise and M. Auguste. We were very staid in the dining-room,—it turned out rather a dull affair. But in the kitchen it was an uproarious feast. Though she lived some distance away, though on Christmas night London omnibuses are few and far between, Mademoiselle could hardly be persuaded to go home, so much was she enjoying herself. Louise was all laughter. "You have been amused?" I asked, when Mademoiselle, finally and reluctantly, had been bundled off by J. in a hansom.

"Mais oui, mais oui," M. Auguste cried, pleasure in his voice. "Cette pauvre Mademoiselle! Her life, it is so sad, she is so alone. It is good for her to be amused. We have told her many stories,—et des histoires un tout petit peu salées, n'est-ce pas? pour égayer cette pauvre Mademoiselle?"

It was the day after the feast that Louise had to give in. She confessed she had been in torture while she served our dinner and Mademoiselle was there. She could hardly eat or drink. But why make it sad for all the world because she was in pain? and she had laughed, she had laughed!

We scolded her first. Then we sent her to a good doctor. It was worse than we feared. The trouble was grave, there must be an operation without delay. The big tears rolled down her cheeks as she said it. She looked old and broken. Why, she moaned, should this sorrow come to her? She had never done any harm to any one: why should she have to suffer? Why, indeed? Her mistake had been to do too little harm, too much good, to others, to think too little of herself. Now, she had to pay for it as one almost always does pay for one's good deeds. She worried far less over the pain she must bear than over the inconvenience to M. Auguste when she could no longer earn money for him.

We wanted her to go into one of the London hospitals. We offered to take a room for her where she could stay after the operation until she got back her strength. But we must not think her ungrateful, the mere idea of a hospital made her desperate. And what would she do in a room avec un homme comme ça. Besides, there was the sister in Marseilles, and, in the hour of her distress, her sister's horses and carriages multiplied like the miraculous loaves and fishes, the vintages in the cellar doubled in age and strength. And she was going to die; it was queer, but one knew those things; and she longed to die là-bas, where there was a sun and the sky was blue, where she was at home. We knew she had not a penny for the journey. M. Auguste had seen to that. Naturally, J. gave her the money. He would not have had a moment's comfort if he had not,—the drain upon your own emotions is part of the penalty you pay for having a human being and not a machine to work for you,—and he added a little more to keep her from want on her arrival in Marseilles, in case the sister had vanished or the sister's fortunes had dwindled to their original proportions. He exacted but one condition: M. Auguste was not to know there was more than enough for the journey.

Louise's last days with us were passed in tears,—poor Louise! who until now had laughed at fate. It was at this juncture that M. Auguste came out strong. I could not have believed he had it in him. He no longer spent his time dodging J. and dealing in visionary horses. He took Louise's place boldly. He made the beds, cooked all our meals, waited on us, dusted, opened the door, while Louise sat, melancholy and forlorn, in front of the kitchen fire. On the last day of all—she was not to start until the afternoon Continental train—she drew me mysteriously into the dining-room, she shut the door with every precaution, she showed me where she had sewed the extra sovereigns in her stays. M. Auguste should never know. "Je pars pour mon long voyage," she repeated. "J'ai mes pressentiments." And she was going to ask them to let her wear a black skirt I had given her, and an old coat of J.'s she had turned into a bodice, when the time came to lay her in her coffin. Thus something of ours would go with her on the long journey. How could she forget us? How could we forget her? she might better have asked. I made a thousand excuses to leave her; Louise playing "the comedy" had never been so tragic as Louise in tears. But she would have me back again, and again, and again, to tell me how happy she had been with us.

"Why, I was at home," she said, her surprise not yet outworn. "J'étais chez moi, et j'étais si tranquille. I went. I came. Monsieur entered. He called me. 'Louise.'—'Oui, Monsieur.'—'Voulez-vous faire ceci ou cela?'—'Mais oui, Monsieur, de suite.' And I would do it and Monsieur would say, 'Merci, Louise,' and he would go. And me, I would run quick to the kitchen or upstairs to finish my work. J'étais si tranquille!"

The simplicity of the memories she treasured made her story of them pitiful as I listened. How little peace had fallen to her lot, that she should prize the quiet and homeliness of her duties in our chambers!

At last it was time to go. She kissed me on both cheeks. She gave J. one look, then she flung herself into his arms and kissed him too on both cheeks. She almost strangled William Penn. She sobbed so, she couldn't speak. She clutched and kissed us again. She ran out of the door and we heard her sobbing down the three flights of stairs into the street. J. hurried into his workroom. I went back to my desk. I don't think we could have spoken either.

Two days afterwards, a letter from M. Auguste came to our chambers, so empty and forlorn without Louise. They were in Paris. They had had a dreadful crossing,—he hardly thought Louise would arrive at Boulogne alive. She was better, but must rest a day or two before starting for the Midi. She begged us to see that Mussy ate his meals bien régulièrement, and that he "made the dead" from time to time, as she had taught him; and, would we write? The address was Mr. Auguste, Horse-Dealer, Hotel du Cheval Blanc, Rue Chat-qui-pèche-â-la-ligne, Paris.

Horse-dealer! Louise might be at death's door, but M. Auguste had his position to maintain. Then, after ten long days, came a post-card, also from Paris: Louise was in Marseilles, he was on the point of going, once there he would write. Then—nothing. Had he gone? Could he go?

If I were writing a romance it would, with dramatic fitness, end here. But if I keep to facts, I must add that, in about eight months, Louise and M. Auguste reappeared; that both were in the best of health and spirits, M. Auguste a mass of jewelry; that all the sunshine of Provence seemed let loose in the warmth of their greeting; that horse-dealing for the moment prospered too splendidly for Louise to want to return to us,—or was this a new invention, I have always wondered, because she found in her place another Frenchwoman who wept at the prospect of being dismissed to make room for her?

Well, anyway, for a while, things, according to Louise, continued to prosper. She would pay me friendly visits and ask for sewing,—her afternoons were so long,—and tell me of M. Auguste's success, and of Provence, though there were the old reticences. By degrees, a shadow fell over the gaiety. I fancied that "the comedy" was being played faster than ever in the Soho lodgings. And, of a sudden, the fabric of prosperity collapsed like a house of cards. She was ill again, and again an operation was necessary. There was not a penny in her pockets nor in M. Auguste's. What happened? Louise had only to smile, and we were her slaves. But this time, for us at least, the end had really come. We heard nothing more from either of them. No letters reached us from Paris, no post-cards. Did she use the money to go back to Marseilles? Did she ever leave London? Did M. Auguste's fate overtake him when they crossed the Channel? Were the Soho lodgings the scene of some tremendous crime passionel? For weeks I searched the police reports in my morning paper. But neither then nor to this day have I had a trace of the woman who, for over a year, gave to life in our chambers the comfort and the charm of her presence. She vanished.

I am certain, though, that wherever she may be, she is mothering M. Auguste, squandering upon him all the wealth of her industry, her gaiety, her unselfishness. She couldn't help herself, she was made that way. And the worst, the real tragedy of it, is that she would rather endure every possible wrong with M. Auguste than, without him, enjoy all the rights women not made that way would give her if they could. She has convinced me of the truth I already more than suspected: it is upon the M. Augustes of this world that the Woman Question will eventually be wrecked.

Our Charwomen

"UP TO WESTMINSTER"

IV

OUR CHARWOMAN

I took over the charwoman with our chambers, and a great piece of luck I thought it; for charwomen never advertise, and are unheard of in Registry Offices. It was certain I could not get into the chambers without one, and at that early stage of my housekeeping in London I should not have known where in the world to look for her.

Mrs. Maxfielde was the highly respectable name of the woman who had "done" for the previous tenant, and had she heard of Mr. Shandy's theory of names she could not have been more successful in adapting her person and her manner to her own. She was well over sixty, and thin and gaunt as if she had never had enough to eat; but age and hunger had not lessened her hold upon the decencies of life. Worthiness oozed from her. Victorian was stamped all over her,—it was in her black shawl and bonnet, in the meekness of her pose, in the little curtsy she bobbed when she spoke. I remember Harold Frederic seeing her once and, with the intuition of the novelist, placing her: "Who is your old Queen Victoria?" he asked. Her presence lost nothing when she took off her shawl and bonnet. In the house and at work she wore a black dress and a white apron, surprisingly clean considering the dirt she exposed it to, and her grey hair was drawn tight back and rolled into a little hard knob, the scant supply and "the parting all too wide" painfully exposed to view. I longed for something to cover the old grey head that looked so grandmotherly and out of keeping as it bent over scrubbing-brushes and dustpans and the kitchen range, but it would have been against all the conventions for a charwoman to appear in a servant's cap. There is a rigid line in these English matters, and to attempt to step across is to face the contempt of those who draw it. The British charwoman must go capless, such is the unwritten law; also, she must remain "Miss" or "Mrs.," though the Empire would totter were the British servant called by anything but her name; and while the servant would "forget her place" were she to know how to do any work outside her own, the charwoman is expected to meet every emergency, and this was in days when housekeeping for me was little more than a long succession of emergencies.

Mrs. Maxfielde was equal to all. She saw me triumphantly through one domestic crisis after another. She was the most accomplished of her accomplished class, and the most willing. She was never discouraged by the magnitude of the tasks I set her, nor did she ever take advantage of my dependence upon her. On the contrary, she let me take advantage of her willingness. She cleaned up after the British Workman had been in possession for a couple of months, and one of the few things the British Workman can do successfully is to leave dirt to be cleaned up. She helped me move in and settle down. She supported me through my trying episode with 'Enrietter. And after 'Enrietter's disappearance she saved me from domestic chaos, though the work and the hours involved would have daunted a woman half her age and outraged every trade-union in the country. She arrived at seven in the morning, and I quickly handed over to her the key of the front door, that I might indulge in the extra hour of sleep of which she was so much more in need; she stayed until eight in the evening, or, at my request, until nine or later; and in between she "did" for me in the fullest sense of that expressive word. There were times when it meant "doing" also for my friends whom I was inconsiderate enough to invite to come and see me in my domestic upheaval, putting their friendship to the test still further by inducing them to share the luncheons and dinners of Mrs. Maxfielde's cooking. Many as were her good points, I cannot in conscience say that cooking was among them. Hers might have been the vegetables of which Heine wrote that they were brought to the table just as God made them, hers the gravies against which he prayed Heaven to keep every Christian. But I thought it much to be thankful for that she could cook at all when, to judge from the amount she ate, she could have had so little practice in cooking for herself. She did not need to go through any "fast cure," having done nothing but fast all her life. She had got out of the way of eating and into the way of starving; the choicest dish would not have tempted her. The one thing she showed the least appetite for was her "'arf pint" at noon, and that she would not do without though she had to fetch it from the "public" round the corner. I cannot say with greater truth that Mrs. Maxfielde's talent lay in waiting, but she never allowed anything or anybody to hurry her, and she was noiseless in her movements, both excellent things in a waitress. I cannot even say that in her own line of scrubbing she was above suspicion, but she handled her brushes and brooms and dusters with a calm and dignity which, in my troubles, I found very soothing. Her repose may have been less a virtue than the result of want of proper food, but in any case it was a great help in the midst of the confusion she was called to struggle with. There was only one drawback. It had a way of deserting her just when I was most in need of it.

We are all human, and Mrs. Maxfielde was not without her weakness: she was afflicted with nerves. In looking back I can see how in character her sensibility was. It belonged to the old shawl and the demure bonnet, to the meekness of pose, to the bobbing of curtsies,—it was Victorian. But at the time I was more struck by its inconvenience. A late milkman or a faithless butcher would bring her to the verge of collapse. She would jump at the over-boiling of the kettle. Her hand went to her heart on the slightest provocation, and stayed there with a persistency that made me suspect her of seeking her dissipation in disaster. On the morning after our fire, though she had been at home in her own bed through all the danger of it, she was in such a flutter that I should have had to revive her with salts had not a dozen firemen, policemen, and salvage men been waiting for her to refresh them with tea. It was only when one of the firemen took the kettle from her helpless hand, saying he was a family man himself, and when I stood sternly over her that, like an elderly Charlotte, she fell to cutting bread and butter, and regained the calm and dignity becoming to her. But I never saw her so agitated as the day she met a rat in the cellar. I had supposed it was only in comic papers and old-fashioned novels that a rat or a mouse could drive a sensible woman into hysterics. But Mrs. Maxfielde showed me my mistake. From that innocent encounter in the cellar she bounded up the four flights of stairs, burst into my room, and, breathless, livid, both hands on her heart, sank into a chair: a liberty which at any other time she would have regarded as a breach of all the proprieties. "Oh, mum!" she gasped, "in the cellar!—a rat!" And she was not herself again until the next morning.

After her day's work and her excitement in the course of it, it seemed as if Mrs. Maxfielde could have neither time nor energy for a life of her own outside our chambers. But she had, and a very full life it was, and with the details as she confided them to me, I got to know a great deal about "how the poor live," which I should have preferred to learn from a novel or a Blue Book. She had a husband, much older, who had been paralyzed for years. Before she came to me in the morning she had to get him up for the day, give him his breakfast, and leave everything in order for him, and as she lived half an hour's walk from our chambers and never failed to reach them by seven, there was no need to ask how early she had to get herself up. For a few pence a friendly neighbour looked in and attended to him during the day. After Mrs. Maxfielde left me, at eight or nine or ten in the evening, and after her half hour's walk back, she had to prepare his supper and put him to bed; and again I did not have to ask how late she put her own weary self there too. Old age was once said to begin at forty-six; we are more strenuous now; but according to the kindest computations, it had well overtaken her. And yet she was working harder than she probably ever had in her youth, with less rest and with the pleasing certainty that she would go on working day in and day out and never succeed in securing the mere necessities of life. She might have all the virtues, sobriety, industry, economy,—and she had,—and the best she could hope was just to keep soul and body together for her husband and herself, and a little corner they could call their own. She did not tell me how the husband earned a living before paralysis kept him from earning anything at all, but he too must have been worthy of his name, for now he was helpless, the parish allowed him "outdoor relief" to the extent of three shillings and sixpence, or about eighty cents a week; it was before old-age pensions had been invented by a vote-touting Government. This munificent sum, paid for a room somewhere in a "Building," one of those gloomy barracks with the outside iron stairway in common, where clothes are forever drying in the thick, soot-laden London air, and children are forever howling and shrieking. For everything else Mrs. Maxfielde had to provide. If she worked every day except Sunday, her earnings amounted to fifteen shillings, or a little less than four dollars, a week. But there were weeks when she could obtain only one day's work, weeks when she could obtain none, and she and her husband had still to live, had still to eat something, well as they had trained themselves, as so many must, in the habit of not eating enough. Here was an economic problem calculated to bewilder more youthful and brilliant brains than hers. But she never complained, she never grumbled, she never got discouraged. She might fly before a rat, but in the face of the hopeless horrors of life she retained her beautiful placidity, though I, when I realized the full weight of the burden she had to bear, began to wonder less how, than why, the poor live.

Mrs. Maxfielde came in the early spring. By the time winter, with its fogs, set in, age had so far overtaken her that she could not manage to attend to her husband and his wants and then drag her old body to our chambers by seven o'clock in the morning. It was she who gave notice; I never should have had the courage. We parted friends, and she was so amiable as not to deprive me of her problems with her services. When she could not work for me, she visited me, making it her rule to call on Monday afternoon; a rule she observed with such regularity that I fancied Monday must be her day for collecting the husband's income from the parish and her own from private sources. She rarely allowed a week to pass without presenting herself, always appearing in the same Victorian costume and carrying off the interview with the same Victorian manner. She never stooped to beg, but her hand was ready for the coin which I slipped into it with the embarrassment of the giver, but which she received with enviable calmness and a little curtsy. The hour of her visit was so timed that, when her talk with me was over, she could adjourn to the kitchen for dinner and, under Augustine's rule, a glass of wine, which, though beer would have been more to her taste, she drank as a concession to the poor foreigner who did not know any better.

Before a second winter had passed, Mrs. Maxfielde was forced to admit that she was too old for anybody to want her, or to accept a post if anybody did. But, all the same, the paralytic clung to his shadow of life with the obstinate tenacity of the human derelict, and she clung to her idea of home, and they starved on in the room the parish paid for until it was a positive relief to me when, after more years of starvation than I cared to count, she came to announce his death. It was no relief to her. She was full of grief, and permitted nothing to distract her from the luxury she made of it. The coin which passed from my hand to hers on the occasion of this visit, doubled in token of condolence, was invested in an elaborate crape bonnet, and she left it to me to worry about her future. I might have afforded to accept her trust with a greater show of enthusiasm, for, at once and with unlooked-for intelligence, the parish decided to allow her the same weekly sum her husband had received, and Mrs. Maxfielde, endowed with this large and princely income, became a parent so worthy of filial devotion that a daughter I had never heard of materialized, and expressed a desire to share her home with her mother.

The daughter was married, her husband was an unskilled labourer, and they had a large and increasing family. It is likely that Mrs. Maxfielde paid in more than money for the shelter, and that her own flesh-and-blood was less chary than strangers would have been in employing her services, and less mindful of the now more than seventy years she had toiled to live. Perhaps her visits at this period were a little more frequent, perhaps her dinners were eaten and her wine drunk with a little more eagerness. But she refrained from any pose, she indulged in no heroics, she entertained me with no whinings, no railings against the ingratitude sharper than a serpent's tooth. However she got her ease, it was not in weeping, and what she had to bear from her daughter she bore in silence. Her Victorian sense of propriety would have been offended by a display of feeling. She became so pitiful a figure that I shrank from her visits. But she was content, she found no fault with life, and wealth being a matter of comparison, I am sure she was, in her turn, moved to pity for the more unfortunate who had not kept themselves out of the workhouse. Had she had her way, she would have been willing to slave indefinitely for her daughter and her daughter's children. But Death was wiser and brought her the rest she deserved so well and so little craved.

A couple of years or so after the loss of her husband, and after she had failed to appear, much to my surprise, on three or four Mondays in succession, a letter came from her daughter to tell me that never again would Monday bring Mrs. Maxfielde to my chambers. There had been no special illness. She had just worn out, that was all. Her time had come after long and cruel days of toil and her passing was unnoted, for hers was a place easily filled,—that was the grisly thing about it. J. and I sent a wreath of flowers for the funeral, knowing that she would have welcomed it as propriety's crown of propriety, and it was my last communication with the Maxfielde family. I had never met the daughter, and I was the more reluctant to go abroad in search of objects of charity because they had such an inconsiderate way of seeking me out in my own kitchen. I was already "suited" with another old woman in Mrs. Maxfielde's place. I was already visited by one or two others. In fact, I was so surrounded by old women that Augustine, when she first came to the rescue, used to laugh with the insolence of youth at les vieilles femmes de Madame.

My new old woman was Mrs. Burden. Had I hunted all London over, I could not have found a more complete contrast to Mrs. Maxfielde. She was Irish, with no respect for Victorian proprieties, but as disreputable looking an old charwoman as you would care to see; large and floppy in figure, elephantine in movement, her face rough and dug deep by the trenches of more than fifty winters, her hair frowzy, her dress ragged, with the bodice always open at the neck and the sleeves always rolled up above the elbows, her apron an old calico rag, and her person and her clothes profusely sprinkled with snuff. In the street she wrapped herself in a horrible grey blanket-shawl, and on top of her disorderly old head set a little battered bonnet with two wisps of strings dangling about. When I knew her better I discovered that she owned a black shawl with fringe, and a bonnet that could tie under the chin, and in these made a very fine appearance. But they were reserved for such ceremonial occasions as Mass on Sunday or the funeral of a friend, and at other times she kept to the costume that so shamefully maligned her. For, if she looked like one of the terrible harpies who hang about the public house in every London slum, she was really the most sober creature in the world and never touched a drop, Mr. Burden, who drank himself into an early grave, having drunk enough for two.

I cannot remember now where Mrs. Burden came from, or why, when I had seen her once, I ever consented to see her again. But she quickly grew into a fixture in our chambers, and it was some eight or nine years before I was rid of her. In the beginning she was engaged for three mornings, later on for every morning, in the week. Her hours were from seven to twelve, during which time my chief object was to keep her safely shut up in the kitchen, for no degree of pretending on my part could make me believe in her as an ornament or a credit to our house. It mortified me to have her show her snuffy old face at the front door, and I should never have dared to send her on the many messages she ran for me had she not been known to everybody in the Quarter; but once Mrs. Burden was known it was all right, for she was as good as she was sober. Hers, however, was the goodness of the man in the Italian proverb who was so good that he was good for nothing. She was willing to do anything, but there was nothing she could do well, and most things she could not do at all. She made no pretence to cook, and if she had I could not have eaten anything of her cooking, for I knew snuff must flavour everything she touched. To have seen her big person and frowzy head in the dining-room would have been fatal to appetite had I ever had the folly, under any circumstances, to ask her to wait. Nor did she excel in scrubbing and dusting. She was successful chiefly in leaving things dirtier than she found them, and Augustine, whose ideal is high in these matters, insisted that Mrs. Burden spent the morning making the dirt she had to spend the afternoon cleaning up. There were times when they almost came to blows, for the temper of both was hot, and more than once I heard Mrs. Burden threaten to call in the police. But the old woman had her uses. She was honesty itself, and could be trusted with no matter what,—from the key of our chambers, when they were left empty, to the care of William Penn, when no other companion could be secured for him; she could be relied upon to pay bills, post letters, fetch parcels; and she was as punctual as Big Ben at Westminster. I do not think she missed a day in all the years she was with me. I became accustomed, too, to seeing her about, and there was the dread—or conviction would be nearer the truth—that if I let her go nobody else in their senses would take her in.

Mrs. Burden did not improve with time. She never condescended to borrow qualities that did not belong to her. She grew more unwieldy and larger and floppier, a misfortune she attributed to some mysterious malady which she never named, but gloated over with the pride the poor have in their diseases. And she grew dirtier and more disorderly, continuing to scorn my objection to her opening the front door with the shoe she was blacking still on her hand, or to her bringing me a letter wrapped in an apron grimier than her grimy fingers. Nothing would induce her not to call me "Missis," which displeased me more, if for other reasons, than the "Master" she as invariably bestowed upon J. She bobbed no curtsies. When, on Saturdays, coins passed from my hand to hers, she spat on them before she put them in her pocket, to what purpose I have not to this day divined. Her best friend could not have accused her of any charm of manner, but, being Irish, she escaped the vulgarity bred in the London slums. In fact, I often fancied I caught gleams of what has been called the Celtic Temperament shining through her. She had the warmth of devotion, the exaggeration of loyalty, the power of idealizing, peculiar to her race. She was almost lyrical in her praise of J., who stood highest in her esteem, and "Master good! Master good!" was her constant refrain when she conversed with Augustine in the language fitted for children and rich in gesture, which was her well-meant substitute for French. She saw him glorified, as the poets of her country see their heroes, and in her eyes he loomed a splendid Rothschild. "Master, plenty money, plenty money!" she would assure Augustine, and, holding up her apron by the two corners, and well out from her so as to represent a capacious bag, add, "apron full, full, full!"

She had also the Celtic lavishness of hospitality. I remember Whistler's delight one morning when, after an absence from London, he received at our front door a welcome from Mrs. Burden, whom he had never seen before and now saw at her grimiest: "Shure, Mr. Whistler, sir, an it's quite a stranger ye are. It's glad I am to see ye back, sir, and looking so well!" Her hospitality was extended to her own friends when she had the chance. She who drank nothing could not allow Mr. Pooley, the sweep, who was her neighbour and cleaned our chimneys, to leave our chambers after his professional services without a drop of whiskey to hearten him on his sooty way. And, though you would still less have suspected it, romance had kept its bloom fresh in her heart. The summer the Duke of York was married I could not understand her interest in the wedding, as until then she had not specially concerned herself with the affairs of royalty. But on the wedding-day this interest reached a point when she had to share it with somebody. "Shure, Missis, and I knows how it is meself. Wasn't I after marrying Burden's brother and he older than Burden, and didn't he go and die, God bless him! and leave me to Burden. And shure thin it's me that knows how the poor Princess May, Lord love her! is feeling this blessed day!"

Not only the memory, but her pride in it, had survived the years which never brought romance to her again. The one decent thing Burden did was to die and rid the world of him before Mrs. Burden had presented him and society with more than one child, a boy. He was a good son, she said, which meant that he spent his boyhood picking up odd jobs and, with them, odd pence to help his mother along, so that at the age when he should have been able to do something, he knew how to do nothing, and had not even the physical strength to fit him for the more profitable kinds of unskilled labour. He thought himself lucky when, in his twentieth year, he fell into a place as "washer-up" in a cheap restaurant which paid eighteen shillings a week; and he was so dazzled by his wealth that he promptly married. His wife's story is short: she drank. Mercifully, like Burden, she did the one thing she could do with all her might and drank herself to death with commendable swiftness, leaving no children to carry on the family tradition. Mrs. Burden was once more alone with her son. Between them they earned twenty-eight shillings a week and felt themselves millionaires. Augustine, for some reason, went at this period once or twice to her room, over the dingy shop of a cheap undertaker, and reported it fairly clean and provided with so much comfort as is represented by blankets on the bed and a kettle on the hob. But after a bit the son died, the cause, as far as I could make out, a drunken father and years of semi-starvation; and Mrs. Burden had to face, as cheerfully as she could, an old age to be lived out in loneliness and in the vain endeavour to make both ends meet on eight shillings a week, or less if she lost her job with me.

She did lose it, poor soul. But what could I do? She really got to be intolerably dirty. Not that I blamed her. I probably should have been much dirtier under the same circumstances. But a time came when it seemed as if we must give up either Mrs. Burden or our chambers, and to give our chambers up when we had not the least desire to, would have been a desperate remedy. She had one other piece of regular work; when I spoke to her about going, she assured me that her neighbours had been waiting for years to get her to do their washing, and she would be glad to oblige them; and, on my pressing invitation, she promised to run in and see me often. At this new stage in our relations she showed a rare delicacy of feeling. Mrs. Maxfielde, no longer in my service, was eager to pay me visits, and her hand, if not held out to beg, was open to receive. Mrs. Burden did not keep her promise to come, she gave me no opportunity to know whether her hand was open in need or shut on plenty. She was of the kind that would rather starve than publish their destitution. I might have preserved an easy conscience in her regard but for Mr. Pooley, the sweep. The first time he returned in his professional capacity after her departure and found himself deprived of the usual refreshment, he was indignant, and, in consequence, he was very gruff and short with me when I inquired after Mrs. Burden. She hadn't any work, not she, and he supposed, he did, that she might starve for all some people cared.

I could scarcely ignore so broad a hint, and I had her round that same morning, for her slum was close by. I learned from her that Mr. Pooley, if gruff, was truthful. She had no work, had not had any for weeks. She was in arrears to her landlord, her shawl with the fringe and her blankets were in pawn, she hadn't a farthing in her pocket. J., to whom I refer all such matters, and who was in her debt for the splendour of wealth with which she had endowed him, said "it was all nonsense,"—by "it" I suppose he meant this sorry scheme of things,—and he would not let her go without the money to pay her landlord, not only for arrears, but in advance, and also to redeem her possessions. I do not think she was the less grateful if, instead of bobbing humbly, she spat upon the coins before her first "Shure and may God bless ye, Master." Nor was J. comfortable until provisions had followed her in such quantities that he would not have to be bothered by the thought of her starving to death, at any rate for some days. Even after that, she scrupulously kept away. Not Christmas, that in London brings everybody with or without excuse begging at one's door, could induce her to present herself. It was we who had to send for her, and, in a land where begging comes so easily, we respected her for her independence.

I doubt if she ever got more work to do. She never received outdoor relief, according to her because of some misunderstanding between the parish church and hers, for, being Irish, she was a devout Roman Catholic. I do not know how she lived, though perhaps they could have told me in her slum, nobody, they say, being as good to the poor as the poor themselves. But it was part of her delicacy to take herself off our hands and conscience within less than a year of her leaving us, and to die in her room peacefully of pneumonia, when she might have made us uncomfortable by dying of starvation, or lingering on in the workhouse. Mr. Pooley, the sweep, brought this news too. She was buried decent, he volunteered; she had taken care of that, though as poor as you want to see. A good old woman, he added, and it was all the obituary she had. He was right. She was of the best, but then she was only one "of the millions of bubbles" poured into existence to-day to vanish out of it to-morrow, of whom the world is too busy to keep count.

After Mrs. Burden, I went to the Quartier—the French Quarter in Soho—for a charwoman. Had I been tempted, as I never was, to believe in the entente cordiale, of which England was just then beginning to make great capital, affairs in my own kitchen would have convinced me of the folly of it. Things there had come to a pass when any pretence of cordiality, except the cordial dislike which France and England have always cherished for each other and always will, had been given up, and if I hoped to escape threats of police and perpetual squabbles on the subject of cleanliness, there was nothing for it but to adopt a single-race policy. When it came to deciding which that race should be, I did not hesitate, having found out for myself that the French are as clean as the English believe themselves to be. The Quartier could not be more French if it were in the heart of France. There is nothing French that is not to be had in it, from snails and boudin to the Petit Journal and the latest thing in apéritifs. The one language heard is French, when it is not Italian, and the people met there have an animation that is not a characteristic of Kensington or Bayswater. The only trouble is that if the snails are of the freshest and the apéritifs bear the best mark, the quality of the people imported into the Quartier is more doubtful. Many have left their country for their country's good. When I made my mission known, caution was recommended to me by Madame who presides chez le patissier, and Monsieur le Gros, as he is familiarly known, who provides me with groceries, and M. Edmond from whom I buy my vegetables and salads at the Quatre Saisons. England, in the mistaken name of liberty, then opened her door to the riff-raff of all nations, and French prisons were the emptier for the indiscriminate hospitality of Soho, or so I was assured by the decent French who feel the dishonour the Quartier is to France.

Caution served me well in the first instance, for I began my experience in French charwomen with Marie, a little Bretonne, young, cheerful, and if, like a true Bretonne, not over clean by nature, so willing to be bullied into it that she got to scrub floors and polish brasses as if she liked it. She never sulked, never minded a scolding from Augustine who scolds us all when we need it, did not care how long she stayed over time, had a laugh that put one in good humour to hear it, and such a healthy appetite that she doubled my weekly bill at the baker's. Even Augustine found no fault. But one fault there was. She was married. In the course of time a small son arrived who made her laugh more gaily than ever, though he added a third to the family of a not too brilliant young man with an income of a pound a week, and I was again without a charwoman.

Marie helped me to forget caution, and I put down the stories heard in the Quartier to libel. But I had my awakening. She was succeeded by another Bretonne, a wild, frightened-looking creature, who, on her second day with me, when I went into the kitchen to speak to her, sat down abruptly in the fireplace, the fire by good luck still unlit, and I did not have to ask an explanation, for it was given me by the empty bottle on the dresser. Her dull, sottish face haunted me for days afterwards, and I was oppressed, as I am sure she never was, by the thought of the blundering fate that had driven her from the windswept shores of her own Brittany to the foul slums of London.

But I could not take over the mysteries and miseries of Soho with its charwomen; it was about as much as I could do to keep up with the procession that followed her. There was no variety of femme de ménage in the Quartier that I did not sample, nor one who was not the heroine of a tragedy or romance, too often not in retrospection or anticipation, but at its most psychological moment. I remember another Marie, good-looking, but undeniably elderly, whose thoughts were never with the floor she was scrubbing or the range she was black-leading, because they were absorbed in the impecunious youth, half her age, with whom she had fallen in love in the fashion of to-day, and for whom she had given up a life of comparative ease with her husband, a well-paid chef. I remember a Marthe, old and withered, whose tales of want were so heartrending that Augustine lavished upon her all the old clothes of the establishment and all the "cold pieces" in the kitchen, but who, we learned afterwards, had a neat little bank-account at the Crédit Lyonnais and a stocking stuffed to overflowing in the bare garret where she shivered and starved. I remember a trim Julie, whose debts left behind in France kept her nose to the grindstone, but who found it some compensation to work for J.: she felt a peculiar sympathy for all artists, she said, for the good reason, which seemed to us a trifle remote, that her husband's mother had been foster-mother to le grand maître, M. Detaille. And there was a Blanche, abandoned by her husband, and left with three small children to feed, clothe, and bring up somehow. And there were I have forgotten how many more, each with a story tragic or pitiful, until it came to Clémentine, and her story was so sordid that when I parted with her I shook the dust of Soho from off my feet, and imported from the Pas-de-Calais a little girl whose adventures I hoped were still in the future which, if I could manage it, would be postponed indefinitely. It may be true that every woman has one good novel in her life, but I did not see why I should keep on engaging charwomen to prove it.

Clémentine

"WHEN THERE IS A SUN ON A WINTER MORNING"

V

CLÉMENTINE

She drifted in from the Quartier, but the slovenliness and shabby finery of her dress made it hard to believe she was French. It was harder to believe she was grown up when she began to talk, for her voice was that of a child, a high shrill treble, with a babyish lisp, losing itself in giggles. And she was so short, so small, that she might easily have passed herself off as a little girl, but for the marks experience had left upon her face. I suppose she was not much under thirty when she first came to me.

How cruel this experience had been she took immediate care to explain. With her first few words she confided to me that she was hungry, and, in my embarrassment on hearing it, I engaged her before it occurred to me to ask for references. Hunger does not exactly qualify a woman, however willing, for the rough work that must be done in a house, and that it is so surprising anybody ever should be willing to do. I engaged her to scrub the floors, black the shoes, clean the fireplaces, polish the brasses,—to pass every morning, except Sunday, from seven to two, in fighting the London dirt for me, and struggling through all those disagreeable and tiresome tasks that not any amount of money would induce me to struggle through for myself.

As her duties were of a kind usually kept in the domestic background, and as she brought to them an energy her hunger had not prepared me for, an occasional bon jour when we met might have been the extent of my personal relations with her, had it not been for my foolish anxiety as to the state of her appetite. I had kept house long enough to understand the mistake of meddling with the affairs of my servants, but Clémentine, with her absurd little voice and giggle, seemed much less a servant than a child making believe to be one. Besides, I found that, though I can hear of unknown thousands starving in London without feeling called upon to interfere, it is another matter to come face to face with a hungry individual under my own roof.

Augustine, who was then, as she is now, the prop and mainstay of our life, reassured me; Clémentine, it seemed, from the moment of her arrival, had been eating as voraciously as if she were bent not only on satisfying the present, but on making up for the past and providing against the future. She could not pass the interval between eight o'clock coffee and the noonday lunch without un petit goûter to sustain her. At all hours she kept munching bits of crust, and after the heartiest meal she would fall, famished, upon our plates as they came from the dining-room, devouring any odd scraps left on them, feasting on cheese-rinds and apple-parings, or, though I regret to have to record it, licking up the gravy and grease, if there was nothing better. Indeed, her condition was one of such chronic hunger that Augustine grew alarmed and thought a doctor should be consulted. I put it down to the long succession of her lean years, and before the facts convinced me that Clémentine was "all stomach and no soul," her appetite was a great deal on my mind, and made me far more preoccupied with her than was wise.

My inquiries into the state of Clémentine's appetite were the reason for many conversations. I have no doubt that at first I encouraged her confidence, so unfailing was my delight in the lisping prattle, interrupted by giggles, with which they were made. Even J., who as a rule is glad to leave all domestic matters to me, would stop and speak to her for the sake of hearing her talk. And she was a child in so many other ways. She had the vanity as well as the voice of a little girl. She was pretty after a fashion, but it always amazed me that anybody who was so hungry could be so vain. When I am hungry I am too demoralized to care how I look. But Clémentine's respect for her appearance was, if anything, stronger than her craving for food. She would have gone without a meal rather than have appeared out of the fashion set by her London slum. Her hair might be half combed,—that was a question of personal taste,—but she could not show herself abroad unless it was brought down over her forehead in the low wave required by the mode of the moment, and hidden at the back under a flat, overgrown jockey-cap fastened on with long pins. Her skirt might be—or rather was—frayed at the bottom, and her jacket worn to shreds, but she could never neglect to tie round her neck a bit of white tulle or ribbon, however soiled or faded. Nor could she be persuaded to run the shortest errand before this tulle or ribbon, taken off for work, had been tied on again, the low wave of hair patted well in place, and the jockey-cap stuck at the correct angle.

It was useless to try and hurry her. She did not care how urgent the errand was to us, her concern was entirely for what people in the street might think of her if any one detail of her toilet was neglected. Augustine, who for herself was disdainful of the opinion of ces sales Anglais and ran her errands en cheveux as if she were still in France, would scold and thunder and represent to Clémentine that people in the street had something better to do than to think of her at all. When Augustine scolds, I am always, to be honest, a little afraid. But Clémentine would listen giggling, and refuse to budge an inch until the last touch had been given to her hair and to her dress. After working time she could not start for home until she had spent half an hour and more before the glass in the kitchen arranging her rags. In her own country her vanity would have been satisfied only by the extreme neatness and simplicity of her dress. In England she had borrowed the untidiness and tawdriness that degrade the English poor. But if the educated French, who ought to know that they are the most civilized people in the world, grow more English than the English when they become Anglicized at all, I could scarcely blame Clémentine for her weakness.

To one form of her untidiness, however, I objected though, had I known what was to come of my objection, I would have borne with worse in silence. She never wore an apron, and, in her stained and tattered dress, her appearance was disreputable even for a charwoman. She might be as slovenly as she chose in the street, that was her affair; but it was mine once she carried her slovenliness inside my four walls, especially as in chambers servants at work are more apt to be stumbled across than in a house, and as it was her duty at times to open the front door. I spoke to her on the subject, suggesting the value of aprons, if only as defences. The words were scarcely out of my mouth than I would have given worlds to take them back again. For when Clémentine began to talk the difficulty was to stop her, and long before she finished explaining why she wore no aprons, I had learned a great deal more about her than I bargained for: among other things, that her previous places had been chiefly chez les femmes; that she wanted to give up working for them; that, after leaving her last place, she could get nothing to do in any maison bourgeoise; that she had no money and was very hungry,—what Clémentine's hunger meant she did not have to tell me; that her little Ernest was also hungry, and also la vieille grandmère; that her little Ernest was her son,—"Oui, Madame, je serais franche, j'ai un fils mais pas un mari"; that la vieille grandmère was an old woman she had taken in, partly to look after him, partly out of sheer shiftlessness; that they could not starve; and that—well—all her aprons were au clou.

This sudden introduction of her little Ernest was a trifle disconcerting, but it was none of my business how many people depended on Clémentine, nor how many of her belongings were in pawn. I had vowed never again to give sympathy, much less help, to anybody who worked for me, since I knew to my cost the domestic disaster to which benevolence of this sort may lead. I gave her advice instead. I recommended greater thrift, and insisted that she must save from her wages enough to get her aprons out of pawn immediately, though I left it to a more accomplished political economist than I to show how, with three to provide for, she could save out of what barely provided for one. However, she agreed. She said, "Oui, Madame, Madame a raison"; and for the next week or two I did my best to shut my eyes to the fact that she still went apronless.

At this juncture, her little Ernest fell ill; now that I had heard of him, he took good care that I should not forget him. For three days there was no sign of Clémentine; I had no word from her. At the end of the first day, I imagined a horrid tragedy of starvation; by the second, I was reproaching myself as an accessory; by the evening of the third, I could stand it no longer, and Augustine was despatched to find out what was wrong. The child's illness was not very serious, but, incidentally, Augustine found out a good deal besides. Clémentine's room, in an unlovely Workmen's Building, was unexpectedly clean, but to keep it clean was the easier because it was so bare. Her bed, which she shared with her little Ernest, was a mattress on the floor in one corner, with not a sheet or a blanket to cover it; la vieille grandmère slept in a nest of newspapers in another corner, with a roll of rags for a pillow. Bedsteads, sheets, covers, had gone the way of the aprons,—they, too, were au clou. The thrift I had advised scarcely met so acute a case of poverty. I was not at all anxious to burden myself with Clémentine's destitution in addition to her hunger, and to get it out of my mind, I tried, with my usual generosity, to hand over the difficulty to J. I cannot say that he accepted it as unconditionally as I could have wished, for if he was positive that something must be done at once, he had as little doubt that it was for me to discover the way of doing it.

What I did was simple, though I dare say contrary to every scientific principle of charity. I told her to bring me her pawn-tickets and I would go over them with her. She brought them, a pocketful, the next day, throwing them down on the table before me and sorting them as if for a game of cards, with many giggles, and occasional cries of "Tiens! this is my old blue apron"; or, "Mon Dieu! this is my nice warm grey blanket." Her delight could not have been greater had it been the apron or the blanket itself. All told, her debts amounted to no very ruinous sum, and I arranged to pay them off and give her a fresh start if, on her side, she was prepared to work harder and practise stricter economy. I pointed out that as I did not need her in the afternoon, she had a half day to dispose of, and that she should hunt for something to fill it. She promised everything I asked, and more, and I hoped that this was the last of my sharing her burdens.

It might have been, but for her little Ernest. I do believe that child was born for no other end than my special annoyance. His illness was only the beginning. When he was well, she brought him to see me one afternoon, nominally that he might thank me, but really, I fear, in hope of an extra sixpence or shilling. He was five years old and fairly large and well developed for his age, but there could never have been, there never could be, a less attractive child. His face had none of the prettiness of his mother's, though all the shrewdness: in knowledge of the gutter he looked fifty. Then and afterwards, ashamed as I was of it, I instinctively shrank from him. Anywhere, except in the comic ballad, a "horribly fast little cad" of a baby is as tragic a figure as I care to encounter, and to me the little Ernest was all the more so because of the repugnance with which he inspired me. Clémentine made a great pretence of adoring him. She carried a sadly battered photograph of him in her pocket, and would pull it out at intervals when anybody was looking, and kiss it rapturously. Otherwise her admiration took the form of submitting to his tyranny. She could do far less with him than he with her, and la vieille grandmère was as wax in his rough little hands. His mornings, while his mother was at work, were spent in the grimy London courts and streets, where children swarm like vermin and babies grow old in vice. In the afternoon, after she left our chambers, he dragged her through the Quartier, from shop to shop, she with her giggling "Bon jour, M. Edmond" or "Comment ça va, Madame Pierre"—for though we live in London we are not of it, but of France,—he with his hand held out for the cakes and oranges and pennies he knew would drop into it: a pair of the most accomplished beggars in London.

As time went on, and Clémentine did not find the extra work for her afternoons that she had promised to find, I realized that she would keep on wasting her free half day, and that he would go from bad to worse if he were not got away from her and out of the streets. I should have known better than to occupy myself with him, but his old shrewd face haunted me until I remonstrated with Clémentine, and represented to her the future she was preparing for him. If she could not take care of him, she should send him to school where there were responsible people who could. I suggested a charitable institution of some kind in France where he would be brought up among her people. But this she fought against with a determination I could not understand, until it came out that she had profited by the English law which forces a father to contribute to his illegitimate child's support, and from Ernest's she received weekly three shillings and sixpence. She much preferred to risk her little Ernest's morals than an income that came of itself, and she feared she could no longer claim it if he were beyond the reach of the English courts. She was as doubtful of the result if he were got into a charity school in England, for if he cost her nothing the father might not be compelled to pay. She could be obstinate on occasions, and I was in despair. But by some fortunate chance, a convent at Hampstead was heard of where the weekly charge would just be covered by the father's allowance, and as Clémentine could find no argument against it, she had to give in.

I breathed freely again, but I was not to be let off so easily. It was simpler to get mixed up in Clémentine's affairs than to escape from them. At the convent, the nuns had learned wisdom, and they demanded to be paid weekly in advance. I must have waited until Judgment Day if I had depended upon Clémentine to be in advance with anything, and in self-defence I offered to pay the first month. But this settled, at once there was another obstacle to dispose of. A trousseau was required with the little Ernest, and he had no clothes except those on his back. I provided the trousseau. Then the little Ernest rebelled and refused to hear of school unless he was supplied with a top, a mechanical boat, a balloon, and I scarcely remember what besides. I supplied them. Clémentine, on her side, began to look harassed and careworn, and I never ventured to ask what conditions he exacted of her, but it was a relief to everybody when, after much shopping and innumerable coaxings and bribes and scenes, at last she got her little Ernest off her hands.

But if he was off hers, she was more than ever on mine. He gave her a perpetual subject of conversation. There were days when I seemed to hear her prattling in the kitchen from the moment she came until the moment she left, and to a good deal of her prattle I had to listen. She made it her duty to report his progress to me, and the trouble was that she could never get through without confiding far more about her own, in the past as in the present. She might begin innocently with the fit of his new clothes, but as likely as not she would end with revelations of unspeakable horror. At least I could not find fault with Clémentine's confidences for their mildness or monotony. In her high, shrill, lisping treble, as if she were reciting a lesson, and with the air of a naughty girl trying to keep back her giggles, she would tell me the most appalling details of her life.

I had not dreamed that out of Zola or Defoe a woman could go through such adventures, or that, if she could, it would be possible for her to emerge a harmless charwoman doing the commonplace work of a household which I flatter myself is respectable, for a few shillings a week. Of poverty, of evil, of shame, of disgrace, there was nothing she had not known; and yet as I saw her busy and happy over her scrubbing and washing and polishing in our chambers, I could have believed she had never done anything less guileless in all her thirty years. She had a curiously impersonal way of relating these adventures, as if they were no concern of hers whatever. The most dramatic situations seemed to have touched her as little as the every-day events in her sordid struggle for bread, though she was not without some pride in the variety of her experience. When Augustine warned her that her idleness was preparing for her a bed on the Embankment and daily food in a soup-kitchen, "Eh bien? why not?" she giggled; "I have been on the streets, I have been in prison, I have been in the workhouse, I have seen everything—j'ai tout vu, moi! Why not that too?"

With her, there was no shrinking from the workhouse, as with the respectable poor, "Ce n'est pas fait pour les chiens," she reasoned, and looked upon it as an asylum held in reserve.

Her boast that she had seen everything was no exaggeration, her everything meaning the hideous side of life which those who see only the other try so hard to shut their eyes to. "What would you have?" she asked me more than once, "I was a bastard and a foundling"; as if with such a beginning, it would have been an inconsistency on her part to turn out any better than she was. That she had started life as a little lost package of humanity, left at the door of a house for les enfants trouvés not far from Boulogne, never caused her shame and regret. From a visit paid by her mother to the Institution during her infancy, there could remain no doubt of her illegitimacy, but it was a source of pleasure to her, and also of much agreeable speculation.

"How can I be sure," she said to me, "that, though my mother was a cook, my father might not have been a préfet, or even a prince?"

For practical purposes she knew no parents save the peasants who brought her up. The State in France, thrifty as the people, makes the children abandoned to it a source of profit to the hard-working poor. Clémentine was put out to nurse. The one spark of genuine affection she ever showed was for the woman to whose care she fell, and of whom she always spoke as ma mère, with a tenderness very different from her giggling adoration of the little Ernest. Incessant labour was the rule in ma mère's house, and food was not too abundant, but of what there was Clémentine had her share, though I fancy the scarcity then was the origin of the terrible hunger that consumed her throughout her life. About this hunger her story revolved, so that, while she talked of the past, I could seldom get far away from it. She recalled little else of the places the Institution found for her as servant. The State in France is as wise as it is thrifty, and does not demoralize its foundlings by free gifts, but, when the time comes, makes them work, appropriating their wages until it has been paid back the money they have cost it.

Clémentine went into service young. She also went into it hungry, and life became a never-ending struggle for food. In one place she was reduced to such straits that she devoured a dish of poisoned meat prepared for the stray cats of the neighbourhood, and, though it brought her almost to death's door, she could still recall it as a feast. In another, a small country grocery store, she would steal down in the night, trembling with fear, to hunt for bits of candy and crackers, and, safe in bed again, would have to fight for them with the rats that shared her garret. And her tale of this period grew more miserable and squalid with every new stage, until she reached the dreadful climax when, still a child herself, she brought a little girl into the world to share her hunger. She had the courage to laugh when she told me of her wandering, half-starved, back to la bonne mère, who took her in when her time came, and kept the baby. She could laugh, too, when she recalled the wrath of M. le Directeur at the Institution, who sent for her, and scolded her, giving her a few sharp raps with his cane.

If to Clémentine her tragedy was a laughing matter, it was not for me to weep over it. But I was glad when she got through with this period and came to the next, which had in it more of pure comedy than enlivened most of her confidences. For once she was of age, and her debt to the Institution settled in full, she was free not only to work for herself, but to claim a percentage of the money she had been making during the long years of apprenticeship; and this percentage amounting to five hundred francs, and Clémentine never having seen so much money before, her imagination was stirred by the vastness of her wealth, and she insisted on being paid in five-franc pieces. She had to get a basket to hold them all, and with it on her arm she started off in search of adventure. This, I think, was the supreme moment in her life.

Her adventures began in the third-class carriage of a train for Boulogne, which might seem a mild beginning to most people, but was full of excitement for Clémentine. She dipped her hands into the silver, and jingled it, and displayed it to everybody, with the vanity of a child showing off its new frock. The only wonder was that any of the five-franc pieces were still in the basket when she got to Boulogne. There they drew to her a group of young men and women who were bound for England to make their fortunes, and who persuaded her to join them. Her head was not completely turned by her wealth, for she crossed with them on the bâteau aux lapins, which she explained as the cheapest boat upon which anything but beasts and vegetables could find passage. At Folkestone, where they landed, she had no difficulty in getting a place as scullery maid. But washing up was as dull in England as in France, a poor resource for anybody with a basketful of five-franc pieces. One of the young men who had crossed with her agreed that it was a waste of time to work when there was money to spend, and they decided for a life of leisure together. The question of marriage apparently did not enter into the arrangement. They were content to remain des unis, in M. Rod's phrase, and their union was celebrated by a few weeks of riotous living. The chicken their own Henry IV wished for all his subjects filled the daily pot, beer flowed like water, they could have paid for cake had bread failed; for the first time in her life Clémentine forgot what it was to be hungry.

It was delightful while it lasted, and I do not believe that she ever regretted having had her fling when the chance came. But the basket grew lighter and lighter, and all too soon barely enough five-franc pieces were left in it to carry them up to London. There, naturally, they found their way to the Quartier. The man picked up an odd job or two, Clémentine scrubbed, washed, waited, did any and everything by which a few pence could be earned. The pot was now empty, beer ceased to flow, bread sometimes was beyond their means, and she was hungrier than ever. In the course of the year her little Ernest was added to the family, and there was no bonne mère in London to relieve her of the new burden. For a while Clémentine could not work; when she could, there was no work to be had. Nor could the man get any more jobs, though I fancy his hunt for them was not too strenuous. Life became a stern, bread-hunting sort of business, and I think at moments Clémentine almost wished herself back in the garret with the rats, or in the garden where dishes of poisoned meat were sometimes to be stolen. The landlord threatened, starvation stared them in the face. Hunger is ever the incentive to enterprise, and Ernest's father turned Clémentine on the streets.

I must do her the justice to say that, of all her adventures, this was the one least to her liking. That she had fallen so low did not shock her; she looked upon it as part of the inevitable scheme of things: but left to herself, she would have preferred another mode of earning her living. After I had been told of this period of horrors, I could never hear Clémentine's high, shrill treble and giggle without a shudder, for they were then part of her stock-in-trade, and she went on the streets in short skirts with her hair down her back. For months she wallowed in the gutter, at the mercy of the lowest and the most degraded, insulted, robbed, despised, and if she attempted to rebel, bullied back to her shameful trade by a man who had no thought save for the few pitiful pence she could bring to him out of it. The only part of the affair that pleased her was the ending—in prison after a disgraceful street brawl. She was really at heart an adventuress, and the opportunity to see for the first time the inside of the panier à salade, as she called the prison van, was welcomed by her in the light of a new and exciting adventure. Then, in prison itself, the dress with the arrows could be adjusted becomingly, warders and fellow prisoners could be made to laugh by her antics, and if she could have wished for more to eat, it was a great thing not to have to find the means to pay for what she got.

She was hardly out of prison when Ernest's father chanced upon a woman who could provide for him more liberally, and Clémentine was again a free agent. The streets knew her no more, though for an interval the workhouse did. This was the crisis when, with the shrewdness acquired in the London slums, she learned something of the English law to her own advantage, and through the courts compelled the father to contribute to the support of his son. The weekly three shillings and sixpence paid for a room. For food she had to work. With prison behind her, she was afraid to ask for a place in respectable houses, and I should not care to record the sinks of iniquity and squalid dens where her shrill treble and little girl's giggle were heard. Ernest was dumped down of a morning upon any friendly neighbour who would keep an eye on him, until, somehow or other, la vieille grandmère appeared upon the scene and Clémentine once more had two to feed and the daily problem of her own hunger to face.

Her responsibilities never drove her to work harder than was absolutely necessary. "We must all toil or steal," Carlyle says. But Clémentine knew better. She could have suggested a third alternative, for she had reduced begging to a fine art. Her scent was as keen for charitable associations as a pig's for truffles, and she could tell to a minute the appointed time of their alms-giving, and to a penny the value of their alms. She would, no matter when, drop regular work at the risk of losing it, to rush off after a possible charity. There was a Société—I never knew it by any other name—that, while she was with me, drew her from my kitchen floor or my luncheon dishes as surely as Thursday came round, and the clock struck one. Why it existed she never made quite clear to me,—I doubt if she had an idea why, herself. It was enough for her that the poor French in London were under its special charge, and that, when luck was with her, she might come away with a loaf of bread, or an order for coals, or, if she played the beggar well, as much as a shilling.

She kept up a brisk correspondence with "Madame la Baronne de Rothschild," whose sole mission in life she apparently believed was to see her out of her difficulties. La Baronne, on one occasion, gave her a sovereign, Heaven knows why, unless as a desperate measure to close the correspondence; but a good part of it went in postage for letters representing why the bestowal of sovereigns upon Clémentine should become habitual. Stray agents, presumably from la Baronne, would pay me mysterious visits, to ask if Clémentine were a deserving object of benevolence, and I was exposed to repeated cross-examination in her regard. She made a point of learning the hours when the chefs left the kitchens of the big hotels and restaurants near the Quartier, and also of finding out who among them might be looked to for a few odd pence for the sake of Ernest's father, at one time a washer of dishes, or who, after a coup de vin or an absinthe, grew generous with their money. She had gauged the depth of every tender heart in the Quartier and the possibility of scraps and broken meats at every shop and eating-place. And no one understood better how to beg, how to turn on the limelight and bring out in melodramatic relief the enormity of her need and destitution. The lisping treble, the giggle, the tattered clothes, la vieille grandmère, the desertion of the little Ernest's father, the little Ernest himself, were so many valuable assets. Indeed, she appreciated the value of the little Ernest so well that once she would have had me multiply him by twelve when she asked me to vouch for her poverty before some new society disposed to be friendly. If luck went against her, and nothing came of her begging, she was not discouraged. Begging was a game of chance with her,—her Monte Carlo or Little Horses,—and she never murmured over her failures, but with her faculty for making the best of all things, she got amusement out of them as well as out of her successes.

In the face of these facts, I cannot deny that Clémentine's "character" was not exactly the sort most people expect when they engage a servant. But I would not turn adrift a mangy dog or a lost cat whom I had once taken in. And she did her work very well, with a thoroughness the English charwoman would have despised, never minding what that work was, so long as she had plenty to eat and could prepare by an elaborate toilet for every errand she ran. Her morals could do us small harm, and for a while I was foolish enough to hope ours might do her some good. I realize now that nothing could have improved Clémentine; she was not made that way; but at the time she was too wholly unlike any woman I had ever come in contact with, for me to see that the difference lay in her having no morals to help. She was not immoral, but unmoral. Right and wrong were without meaning for her. Her standards, if she could be said to have any, were comfort and discomfort. Virtue and vice were the same to her, so long as she was not unpleasantly interfered with. This was the explanation of her past, as of her frankness in disclosing it, and she was too much occupied in avoiding present pain to bother about the future by cultivating economy, or ambition, or prudence. An animal would take more thought for the morrow than Clémentine. Of all the people I have ever come across, she had the most reason to be weary-laden, but instead of "tears in her eyes," there was always a giggle on her lips. "La colère, c'est la folie," she assured me, and it was a folly she avoided with marked success. Perhaps she was wise, undoubtedly she was the happier for it.

Unfortunately for me, I had not her callousness or philosophy,—I am not yet quite sure which it was,—and if she would not think for herself, I was the more disturbed by the necessity of thinking for her. It was an absurd position. There I was, positively growing grey in my endeavours to drag her up out of the abyss of poverty into which she had sunk, and there she was, cheerful and happy, if she could only continue to enjoy la bonne cuisine de Madame. I never knew her to make the slightest attempt to profit by what I, or anyone else, would do for her. I remember, when Madame la Baronne sent her the sovereign, she stayed at home a week, and then wrote to me as her excuse, "J'ai été rentière toute la semaine. Maintenant je n'ai plus un penny, il faut m'occuper du travail." I had not taken her things out of pawn before they were pawned again, and the cast-off clothes she begged from me followed as promptly. Her little Ernest, after all my trouble, stayed at the convent six weeks,—the month I paid for and two weeks that Clémentine somehow wheedled out of the sisters,—and then he was back as of old, picking up his education in the London streets. I presented her once with a good bed I had no more use for, and, to make space for it, she went into debt and moved from her one room near Tottenham Court Road to two rooms and a higher rent near the Lower Marsh, and was robbed on the way by the man she hired to move her. When she broke anything, and she frequently did, she was never perturbed: "Madame est forte pour payer," or "l'argent est fait pour rouler," was her usual answer to my reproaches. To try to show her the road to economy was to plunge her into fresh extravagance.

Nor did I advance matters by talking to her seriously. I recall one special effort to impress upon her the great misery she was preparing for herself by her shiftlessness. I had given her a pair of shoes, though I had vowed a hundred times to give her nothing more, and I used the occasion for a lecture. She seemed eager to interrupt once or twice, and I flattered myself my words were having their effect. And now what had she to say? I asked when my eloquence was exhausted. She giggled: "Would Madame look at her feet in Madame's shoes? Jamais je ne me suis vue si bien chaussée," and she was going straight to the Quartier "pour éblouir le monde," she said. When Augustine took her in hand, though Augustine's eloquence had a vigour mine could not boast of, the result was, if anything, more discouraging. Clémentine, made bold by custom, would turn a hand-spring or dance a jig, or go through the other accomplishments she had picked up in the slums.

If I could discover any weak spot by which I could reach her, I used to think something might be gained, and I lost much time in studying how to work upon her emotions. But her emotions were as far to seek as her morals. Even family ties, usually so strong in France, had no hold upon her. If she adored her little Ernest, it was because he brought her in three shillings and sixpence a week. There was no adoration for her little girl who occasionally wrote from the Pas-de-Calais and asked her for money. I saw one of the child's letters in which she implored Clémentine to pay for a white veil and white shoes; she was going to make her first communion, and the good adopted mother could pay for no more than the gown. The First Communion is the greatest event in the French child's life; there could be no deeper disgrace than not to be dressed for it, and the appeal must have moved every mother who read it, except Clémentine. To her it was comic, and she disposed of it with giggles: "C'est drôle quand même, d'avoir une fille de cet âge," and funnier that she could be expected to pay for anything for anybody.

But if her family awoke in her no sentiment, her "home" did, though it was of the kind that Lamb would have classed with the "no homes." The tenacity with which she clung to it was her nearest approach to strong feeling. I suppose it was because she had so long climbed the stairs of others that she took such complete satisfaction in the two shabby little rooms to which she gave the name. I had a glimpse of them, never to be forgotten, once when she failed to come for two days, and I went to look her up. The street reeked with the smell of fried fish and onions; it was filled with barrows of kippers and haddocks and whelks; it was lined with old-clothes shops; it was crowded with frowzy women and horribly dirty children. And the halls and stairs of the tenement where she lived were black with London smoke and greasy with London dirt. I did not feel clean afterwards until I had had a bath, and it was never again as easy to reconcile myself to Clémentine's daily reappearance in our midst. But to her the rooms were home, and for that reason she would have stayed on in a grimier and more malodorous neighbourhood, if such a thing could be, in preference to living in the cleanest and freshest London workhouse at the rate-payers' expense. Her objection to going into service except as a charwoman was that she would have to stay the night. "Je ne serais pas chez moi"; and much as she prized her comfort, it was not worth the sacrifice. On the contrary, she was prepared to sacrifice her comfort, dear as it was to her, that she might retain her home. She actually went to the length of taking in as companion an Italian workman she met by accident, not because he offered to marry her, which he did not, but because, according to his representations, he was making twenty-five shillings a week and would help to pay the rent. "Je serais chez moi," was now her argument, and for food she could continue to work or beg. He would be a convenience, voilà tout. The Italian stayed a week. He lounged in bed all morning while she was at work, he smoked all afternoon. At the end of the week Clémentine sent him flying. "Je suis bête et je mourrais bête," was her explanation to me; but she was not bête to the point of adding an idle fourth to her burden, and, as a result, being turned out of the home she had taken him in to preserve.

Clémentine had been with us more than two years when the incident of the Italian occurred, and by this time I had become so accustomed to her and to her adventures that I was not as shocked as perhaps I should have been. It was not a way out of difficulties I could approve, but Clémentine was not to be judged by my standards, and I saw no reason to express my disapproval by getting rid of her just when she most needed to stay. In her continually increasing need to stay, I endured so much besides that, at the end of her third year in our chambers, I was convinced that she would go on doing my rough work as long as I had rough work to be done. More than once I came to the end of my patience and dismissed her. But it was no use. In the course of a couple of weeks, or at the most three, she was back scrubbing my floors and polishing my brasses.

The first time she lost her place with me, I sympathized to such an extent that I was at some pains to arrange a scheme to send her to France. But Clémentine, clinging to the pleasures of life in the Lower Marsh, agreed to everything I proposed, and was careful to put every hindrance in the way of carrying out my plans. Twice I went to the length of engaging another woman, but either the other woman did not suit or else she did not stay, and I had to ask Clémentine to return. On her side, she made various efforts to leave me, bored, I fancy, by the monotony of regular work, but they were as unsuccessful as mine to turn her off. After one disappearance of three weeks, she owned up frankly to having been again chez les femmes whose pay was better; after a second, she said she had been ill in the workhouse which I doubted; after all, she was as frank in admitting that nowhere else did she enjoy la bonne cuisine de Madame, and that this was the attraction to which I was indebted for her fidelity.

It may have been kindness, it may have been weakness, it may have been simply necessity, that made me so lenient on these occasions; I do not attempt to decide. But I cannot blame Clémentine for thinking it was because she was indispensable. I noticed that gradually in small ways she began to take advantage of our good-nature. For one thing there was now no limit to her conversation. I did not spend my time in the kitchen and could turn a deaf ear to it, but I sometimes wondered if Augustine would not be the next to disappear. She would also often relieve the tedium of her several tasks by turning the handsprings in which she was so accomplished, or dancing the jig popular in the Lower Marsh, or by other performances equally reprehensible in the kitchen of une maison bourgeoise, as she was pleased to describe our chambers. She never lost a chance of rushing to the door if tradespeople rang, or talking with the British Workmen we were obliged, for our sins, to employ. Their bewilderment, stolid Britons as they were, would have been funny, had not her manner of exciting it been so discreditable. She was even caught—I was spared the knowledge until much later—turning her handsprings for a select company of plasterers and painters. Then I could see that she accepted anything we might bestow upon her as her due, and was becoming critical of the value and quality of the gift. I can never forget on one occasion when J. was going away, and he gave her a few shillings, the expression with which she looked first at the money and then at him as though insulted by the paltriness of the amount. More unbearable was the unfair use she made of her little Ernest.