Our House Part 1

Our House.

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.

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 gla.s.s, 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.

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 doc.u.ments" 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 anaemic 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 c.o.c.kney 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 att.i.tude 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 embarra.s.ses me more than the Englishwoman's embarra.s.sed 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 embarra.s.sment 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 n.o.body would let him in. After I had rung in my turn for ten minutes and n.o.body 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 Kyfhauser, 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 lat.i.tude 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 rea.s.suringly 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, s.e.xless 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 pa.s.sing 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.