Our House Part 6

To Clementine, however, nothing could have seemed less possible. She could not understand that a petty theft would make her less indispensable, or that I would strain at a gnat after swallowing so many camels. Within a week she was knocking at our door and expressing her willingness to resume her place in our chambers. She was not discouraged by the refusal to admit her, but a few days later, this time by letter, she again a.s.sured me that she waited to be recalled, and she referred to the desire of her _pet.i.t Anglais_ in the matter. She affected penitence, admitting that she had committed _une "Betisse"_--the spelling is hers--and adding: "_avoir agit ainsi avec des maitres aussi bons, ce n'est pas pardonable. Je vous a.s.sure que si un jour je devien riche, ou peut etre plus pauvre, que dans ma richesse, comme dans ma plus grande misere, je ne pourrais jamais...o...b..ier les bons maitres Monsieur et Madame, car jamais dans ma vie d'orpheline, je n'aie jamais rencontre d'aussi bons maitres._" She also reminded me that she lived in the hope that _Madame_ would not forget the promised present of linen and a hat.

I made no answer. Another letter followed, penitence now exchanged for reproaches. She expostulated with me for taking the bread out of the mouth of her _pet.i.t innocent_--Ernest--the little innocent whom the slums had nothing more to teach. This second letter met the same fate as the first, but her resources were not exhausted. In a third she tried the dignity of sorrow: "_Ma faute m'a rendu l'ame si triste_" and, as this had no effect, she used in a fourth the one genuine argument of them all, her hunger: "_Enfin il faut que je tache d'oublier, mais en attendant je m'en mordrais peut etre les poings plus d'une fois._" I was unmoved. I had spent too much emotion already upon Clementine; also a neat little French girl had replaced her.

She gave up when she found me proof against an argument that had hitherto always disarmed me. This was the last time she put herself at my service; though once afterwards she gave me the pleasure of hearing from her. Not many weeks had pa.s.sed when I received a pictorial post-card that almost reconciled me to a fashion I deplore. The picture that adorned it was a photograph of an ordinary three-storey London house, the windows draped with lace curtains of a quality and design not common in the Lower Marsh. But the extraordinary thing about it was that in the open doorway--ap.r.o.nless, her arms akimbo, the wave of hair low on her forehead--stood Clementine, giggling in triumph. A few words accompanied this astonishing vision. "_Je n'oublierais jamais la bonne maison de Madame_" and the kind message was signed "Mrs. Johnson."

Whether the eighteen shillings of her _pet.i.t Anglais_ ran to so imposing a home, or to what she owed the post-card prominence usually reserved for the monuments of London, she did not condescend to explain. Probably she only wanted to show that, though she had achieved this distinction, she could be magnanimous enough to forget the past and think of us kindly.

That was the last I ever heard from Clementine, the last I hope I ever shall hear. The pictorial post-card told me the one thing I cared to know. She did not leave me for a bed on the Embankment by night and a round of the soup-kitchens by day. If ever she does see life in this way and so completes her experience, the responsibility will not be mine for having driven her to it.

_The Old Housekeeper_

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A WILDERNESS OF CHIMNEY-POTS"]

VI

THE OLD HOUSEKEEPER

No housekeeper could have been more in place than the little old white-haired woman who answered our ring the day we came to engage our windows, and, incidentally, the chambers behind them. She was venerable in appearance and scrupulously neat in her dress, and her manner had just the right touch of dignity and deference, until we explained our errand. Then she flew into a rage and told us in a tone that challenged us to dispute it, "You know, no coal is to be carried upstairs after ten o'clock in the morning."

Coal was as yet so remote that we would have agreed to anything in our impatience to look out of the windows, and, rea.s.sured by us, she became the obsequious housekeeper again, getting the keys, toiling with us up the three flights of stairs, unlocking the double door,--for, as I have said, there is an "oak" to "sport,"--ushering us into the chambers with the Adam mantelpieces and decorations and the windows that brought us there, dropping the correct "Sir" and "Madam" into her talk, accepting without a tremor the shilling we were ashamed to offer, and realizing so entirely our idea of what a housekeeper in London chambers ought to be, that her outbreak over the coal we had not ordered, and might never order, was the more perplexing.

I understood it before we were settled in our chambers, for they were not really ours until after a long delay over the legal formalities with which the English love to entangle their simplest transactions at somebody else's expense, and a longer one in proving our personal and financial qualifications, the landlord being disturbed by a suspicion that, like the Housekeeper's daughter, we were in _the_ profession and spent most of our time "resting," a suspicion confirmed by the escape of the last tenant, also in _the_ profession, with a year's rent still to pay. And then came much the longest delay of all over the British Workman, who, once he got in, threatened never to get out. In the mean while we saw the Housekeeper almost every day.

We did not have to see her often to discover that she was born a housekeeper, that she had but one thought in life, and that this was the house under her charge. I am sure she believed that she came into the world to take care of it, unless indeed it was built to be taken care of by her. She belonged to a generation in England who had not yet been taught the folly of interest in their work, and she was old-fashioned enough to feel the importance of the post she filled. She would have lost her self-respect had she failed in the slightest detail of her duty to the house. From the first, the spotless marvel she made of it divided our admiration with our windows. The hall and front steps were immaculate, the white stone stairs shone, there was not a speck of dust anywhere, and I appreciated the work this meant in an old London building, where the dirt not only filters through doors and windows, but oozes out of the walls and comes up through the floors. She did not pretend to hide her despair when our painters and paperers tramped and blundered in and out; she fretted herself ill when our furniture was brought up the three flights of her shining stairs. Painters and paperers and the bringing up of furniture were rare incidents in the life of a tenant and had to be endured. But coal, with its trail of dust, was an endless necessity, and at least could be regulated. This was why, after her daily cleaning was done, she refused to let it pa.s.s.

Once we were established, we saw her less often. Her daily masterpiece was finished in the morning before we were up, and at all times she effaced herself with the respect she owed to tenants of a house in which she was the servant. If we did meet her she acknowledged our greeting with ostentatious humility, for she clung with as little shame to servility as to cleanliness; servility was also a part of the business of a housekeeper, just as elegance was the mark of _the_ profession which her daughter graced, and the shame would have been not to be as servile as the position demanded.

This daughter was in every way an elegant person, dressing with a fidelity to fashion which I could not hope to emulate, and with the help of a fashionable dressmaker whom I could not afford to pay. She was "resting" from the time we came into the house until her mother left it, but if in _the_ profession it is a misfortune to be out of work, it is a crime to look it, and her appearance and manner gave no hint of unemployment. In an emergency she would bring us up a message or a letter, but her civility had none of her mother's obsequiousness; it was a condescension, and she made us feel the honor she conferred upon the house by living in it. She was engaged to be married to a stage manager who for the moment seemed to be without a stage to manage, for he spent his evenings with her in the Housekeeper's little sitting-room, where photographs of actors and actresses, each with its sprawling autograph, covered the walls, crowded the mantelpiece, and littered the table. I think the Housekeeper could have asked for nothing better than that they should both continue to "rest," not so much because it gave her the pleasure of their society as because it was a protection to the house to have a man about after dark until the street door was closed at eleven.

Had it come to a question between the house and her daughter, the daughter would not have had a chance.

The Housekeeper, for all her deference to the tenants, was a despot, and none of us dared to rebel against her rule and disturb the order she maintained. To anybody coming in from the not too respectable little street the respectability of the house was overwhelming, and I often noticed that strangers, on entering, lowered their voices and stepped more softly. The hush of repose hung heavy on the public hall and stairs, whatever might be going on behind the two doors that faced each other on every landing. We all emulated her in the quiet and decorum of our movements. We allowed ourselves so seldom to be seen that after three months I still knew little of the others except their names on their doors, the professions of those who had offices and hung up their signs, and the frequency with which the Church League on the First Floor drank afternoon tea. On certain days, when I went out towards five o'clock, I had to push my way through a procession of bishops in ap.r.o.ns and gaiters, deans and ordinary parsons who were legion, dowagers and d.u.c.h.esses who were as sands on the stairs. I may be wrong, but I fancy that the Housekeeper would have found a way to rout this weekly invasion if, in the ap.r.o.ns and gaiters, she had not seen symbols of the respectability which was her pride.

What I did not find out about the tenants for myself, there was no learning from her. She disdained the gossip which was the breath of life to the other housekeepers in the street, where, in the early mornings when the fronts were being done, or in the cool of summer evenings when the day's work was over, I would see them chattering at their doors. She never joined in the talk, holding herself aloof, as if her house were on a loftier plane than theirs, and as if the number of her years in it raised her to a higher caste. Exactly how many these years had been she never presumed to say, but she looked as ancient as the house, and had she told me she remembered Bacon and Pepys, who were tenants each in his own day, or Peter the Great, who lived across the street, I should have believed her. She did not, however, claim to go further back than Etty, the Royal Academician, who spent over a quarter of a century in our chambers, and one of whose sitters she once brought up to see us,--a melancholy old man who could only shake his head, first over the changes in the house since Etty painted those wonderful Victorian nudes, so demure that "Bob" Stevenson insisted that Etty's maiden aunts must have sat for them, and then over the changes in the River, which also, it seemed, had seen better days. Really, he was so dismal a survivor of an older generation that we were glad she brought no more of his contemporaries to see us.

For so despotic a character, the Housekeeper had a surprisingly feminine capacity for hysterics, of which she made the most the night of the fire. I admit it was an agitating event for us all. The Fire of London was not so epoch-making. Afterwards the tenants used to speak of the days "Before the Fire," as we still talk at home of the days "Before the War." It happened in July, the third month of our tenancy. J. was away, and, owing to domestic complications, I was alone in our chambers at night. I do not recall the period with pride, for it proved me more of a coward than I cared to acknowledge. If I came home late, it was a struggle to make up my mind to open my front door and face the Unknown on the other side. Once or twice there was a second struggle at the dining-room door, the simple search for biscuits exaggerating itself into a perilous adventure. As I was not yet accustomed to the noises in our chambers, fear followed me to my bedroom, and when the trains on the near railroad bridge awoke me, I lay trembling, certain they were burglars or ghosts, forgetting that visitors of that kind are usually shyer in announcing themselves. Then I began to be ashamed, and there was a night when, though the noises sounded strangely like voices immediately outside my window, I managed to turn over and try to sleep again. This time the danger was real, and, the next thing I knew, somebody was ringing the front door-bell and knocking without stopping, and before I had time to be afraid I was out of bed and at the door. It was the young man from across the hall, who had come to give me the cheerful intelligence that his chambers were on fire, and to advise me to dress as fast as I knew how and get downstairs before the firemen and the hose arrived, or I might not get down at all.

I flung myself into my clothes, although, as I am pleased to recall, I had the sense to select my most useful gown, in case but one was left me in the morning, and the curiosity to step for a second on to the leads where the flames were leaping from the young man's windows. As it was too late to help himself, he was waiting, with his servant, to help me.

A pile of J.'s drawings lay on a chair in the hall,--I thrust them the young man's outstretched arms. For some incomprehensible reason J.'s huge _schube_ was on another chair,--I threw it into the arms of the young man's servant, who staggered under its unexpected weight. I rushed to my desk to secure the money I was unwilling to leave behind, when a bull's-eye lantern flashed upon me and a policeman ordered me out.

Firemen--for London firemen eventually arrive if the fire burns long enough--were dragging up a hose as I flew downstairs, and the policeman had scarcely pushed me into the Housekeeper's room, the young man had just deposited the drawings at my feet, and the servant the _schube_, when the stairs became a raging torrent.

I had not thought of the Housekeeper till then; after that there was no thinking of anything else. My dread of never again seeing our chambers was nothing to her sense of the outrage to her house. Niobe weeping for her children was not so tragic a spectacle as she lamenting the ruin of plaster and paint that did not belong to her. She was half-dressed, propped up against cushions on a couch, sniffing the salts and sipping the water administered by her daughter, who had taken the time to dress carefully and elegantly for the scene. "Oh, what shall I do! Oh, what shall I do!" the Housekeeper wailed as she saw me, wringing her hands with an abandonment that would have made her daughter's fortune on the stage.

Her sitting-room had been appropriated as a refuge for the tenants, and this sudden reunion was my introduction to them. As the room was small, my first impression was of a crowd, though in actual numbers we were not many. The young man whose distinction was that the fire originated in his chambers, and myself, represented the Third Floor Front and Back.

The Architect and his clerks of the Second Floor Front were at home in their beds, unconscious of the deluge pouring into their office; the Second Floor Back had gone away on a holiday. The Church League of the First Floor Front, haunted by bishops and deans, d.u.c.h.esses and dowagers, was of course closed, and we were deprived of whatever spiritual consolation their presence might have provided. But the First Floor Back filled the little room with her loud voice and portly presence. She had attired herself for the occasion in a black skirt and a red jacket, that, for all her efforts, would not meet over the vast expanse of grey Jaeger vest beneath, and her thin wisps of grey hair were drawn up under a green felt hat of the pattern I wore for bicycling. I looked at it regretfully: a hat of any kind would have completed my costume. I complimented her on her fore-thought; but "What could I do?" she said, "they flurried me so I couldn't find my false front anywhere, and I had to cover my head with something." It was extraordinary how a common danger broke down the barrier of reserve we had hitherto so carefully cultivated. She had her own salts which she shared with us all, when she did not need them for the Housekeeper, whom she kept calling "Poor dear!" and who, after every "Poor dear!" went off into a new attack of hysterics.

The Ground Floor Front, a thin, spry old gentleman, hovered about us, bobbing in and out like the little man in the weather-house. He was in the insurance business, I was immediately informed, and it seemed a comfort to us all to know it, though I cannot for the life of me imagine why it should have been to me, not one stick or st.i.tch up there in our chambers being insured. The Ground Floor Back was at his club, and his wife and two children had not been disturbed, as in their chambers the risk was not immediate, and, anyway, they could easily walk out should it become so. He had been promptly sent for, and when a message came back that he was playing whist and would hurry to the rescue of his family as soon as his rubber was finished, the indignation in the Housekeeper's room was intense. "Brute!" the Housekeeper said, and after that, through the rest of the night, she would ask every few minutes if he had returned, and the answer in the negative was fresh fuel to her wrath.

She was, if anything, more severe with the young man whose chambers were blazing, and who confessed he had gone out toward midnight leaving a burning candle in one of his rooms. He treated the fire as a jest, which she could not forgive; and when at dawn, he decided that all his possessions, including account-books committed to his care, were in ashes, and that it was useless to wait, and he wished us good-morning and good-by, she hinted darkly that fires might be one way of disposing of records it was convenient to be rid of.

Indignation served better than salts to rouse the Housekeeper from her hysterics, and I was glad of the distraction it gave her for another reason: without it, she could not long have remained unconscious of an evil that I look back to as the deadliest of all during that night's vigil. For, gradually through her room, by this time close to suffocation, there crept the most terrible smell. It took hold of me, choked me, sickened me. The Housekeeper's daughter and the First Floor Back blanched under it, the Housekeeper turned from white to green. I have often marvelled since that they never referred to it, but I know why I did not. For it was I who sent that smell downstairs when I threw the Russian _schube_ into the arms of the Third Floor Front's servant.

Odours, they say, are the best jogs to memory, and the smell of the _schube_ is for me so inextricably a.s.sociated with the fire, that I can never think of one without remembering the other.

The _schube_ was the chief treasure among the fantastic costumes it is J.'s joy to collect on his travels. His Hungarian sheepskins, French hooded capes, Swiss blouses, Spanish berets, Scotch tam-o'-shanters, Dalmatian caps, Roumanian embroidered shirts, and the rest, I can dispose of by packing them out of sight and dosing them with camphor.

But no trunk was big enough to hold the Russian _schube_, and its abominable smell, even when reinforced by tons of camphor and pepper, could not frighten away the moths. It was picturesque, so much I admit in its favor, and Whistler's lithograph of J. draped in it is a princely reward for my trouble. But that trouble lasted for eighteen years, during which time J. wore the _schube_ just twice,--once to pose for the lithograph and once on a winter night in London, when its weight was a far more serious discomfort than the cold. Occasionally he exhibited it to select audiences. At all other times it hung in a colossal linen bag made especially to hold it. The eighteenth summer, when the bag was opened for the periodical airing and brushing, no _schube_ was there; not a shred of fur remained, the cloth was riddled with holes; it had fallen before its hereditary foe and the moths had devoured it. For this had I toiled over it; for this had I rescued it on the night of the fire as if it were my crowning jewel; for this had I braved the displeasure of the Housekeeper, from which indeed I escaped only because, at the critical moment, the policeman who had ordered me downstairs appeared to say that the lady from the Third Floor Back could go up again if she chose.

The stairs were a waterfall under which I ascended. The two doors of our chambers were wide open, with huge gaps where panels had been, the young man's servant having carefully shut them after me in our flight, thinking, I suppose, that the firemen would stand upon ceremony and ask for the key before venturing in. A river was drying up in our hall, and the strip of matting down the centre was sodden. Empty soda-water bottles rolled on the floor, though it speaks well for London firemen that nothing stronger was touched. Candles were stuck upside down in our hanging Dutch lamp and all available candlesticks, curtains and blinds were pulled about, chairs were upset, the marks of muddy feet were everywhere. I ought to have been grateful, and I was, that the damage was so small, all the more when I went again on to the leads and saw the blackened heap to which the night had reduced the young man's chambers.

But the place was inexpressibly cheerless and dilapidated in the dawning light.

It was too late to go to bed, too early to go to work. I was hungry, and the baker had not come, nor the charwoman. I was faint, the smell of the _schube_ was strong in my nostrils, though the _schube_ itself was now safely locked up in a remote cupboard. I wandered disconsolately from room to room, when, of a sudden, there appeared at my still open front door a gorgeous vision,--a large and stately lady, fresh and neat, arrayed in flowing red draperies, with a white lace fichu thrown over a ma.s.s of luxuriant golden hair. I stared, speechless with amazement. It was not until she spoke that I recognized the First Floor Back, who had had time to lay her hands not only on a false front, but on a whole wig, and who had had the enterprise to make tea which she invited me to drink with her in Pepys's chambers.

The Housekeeper and the Housekeeper's daughter were already in her dining-room, the Housekeeper huddled up in a big armchair, pillows at her back, a stool at her feet. Like her house she was a wreck, and her demoralization was sad to see. All her life, until a few short hours ago, she had been the model of neatness; now she did not care how she looked; her white hair was untidy, her dress half-b.u.t.toned, her ap.r.o.n forgotten; and she, who had hitherto discouraged familiarity in the tenants, joined us as a friend. She was too exhausted for hysterics, but she moaned over her tea and abandoned herself to her grief. She could not rally, and, what is more, she did not want to. She had no life apart from her house, and in its ruin she saw her own. Her immaculate hall was defaced and stained, a blackened groove was worn in her shining stairs, the water pouring through the chambers in the front, down to her own little apartment, had turned them all into a damp and depressing mess.

Her moans were the ceaseless accompaniment to our talk of the night's disaster. Always she had waited for the fire, she said, she had dreaded it, and at last it had come, and there was no sorrow like unto hers.

After the first excitement, after the house had resumed, as well as it could, its usual habits, the Housekeeper remained absorbed in her grief.

Hitherto her particular habit was to work, and she had been able, unaided, to keep the house up to her immaculate standard of perfection.

But now to restore it to order was the affair of builders, of plasterers and painters and paperers. There was nothing for her to do save to sit with hands folded and watch the sacrilege. Her occupation was gone, and all was wrong with her world.

I was busy during the days immediately "after the fire." I had to insure our belongings, which, of course, being insured, have never run such a risk again. I had to prepare and pack for a journey to France, now many days overdue, and, what with one thing or another, I neglected the Housekeeper. When at last I was ready to shut up our chambers and start and I called at her rooms, it seemed to me she had visibly shrunk and wilted, though she had preserved enough of the proper spirit to pocket the substantial tip I handed over to her with my keys. She was no less equal to accepting a second when, after a couple of months I returned and could not resist this expression of my sympathy on finding the hall still stained and defaced, the stairs still with their blackened groove, the workmen still going and coming, and her despair at the spectacle blacker than ever.

The next day she came up to our chambers. She wore her best black gown and no ap.r.o.n, and from these signs I concluded it was a visit of state.

I was right: it was to announce her departure. The house, partially rebuilt and very much patched up, would never be the same. She was too old for hope, and without the courage to pick up the broken bits of her masterpiece and put them together again. She was more ill at ease as visitor than as housekeeper. The conversation languished, although I fancied she had something particular to say, slight as was her success in saying it. We had both been silent for an awkward minute when she blurted out abruptly that she had never neglected her duty, no matter what it might or might not have pleased the tenants to give her. I applauded the sentiment as admirable, and I said good-by; and never once then, and not until several days after she left us, did it dawn upon me that she was waiting to accept graciously the fee it was her right in leaving to expect from me. The fact of my having only just tipped her liberally had nothing to do with it. A housekeeper's departure was an occasion for money to pa.s.s from the tenant's hand into hers, and she had too much respect for her duty as housekeeper not to afford me the opportunity of doing mine as tenant. It was absurd, but I was humiliated in my own eyes when I thought of the figure I must cut in hers, and I could only hope she would make allowance for me as an ignorant American.

How deep I sunk in her esteem, there was no means of knowing. I do not think she could endure to come to her house as a stranger, for she never returned. Neither did any news of her reach us. I cannot believe she enjoyed the inactive existence with her daughter to which she had retired, and I should be astonished if she bore it long. In losing her house she had lost her interest in life. Her work in the world was done.

_The New Housekeeper_

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SPIRE OF ST. MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS]

VII

THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER

It had taken years for the Old Housekeeper to mature, and I knew that in the best sense of the word she could never be replaced. But the knowledge did not prepare me for the New Housekeeper.

Mrs. Haines was a younger and apparently stronger woman, but she was so casual in her dress, and so eager to emulate the lilies of the field, as to convince me that it was not in her, under any conditions, to mature into a housekeeper at all. It expressed much, I thought, that while the Old Housekeeper had always been "the Housekeeper," we never knew Mrs.

Haines by any name but her own. The fact that she had a husband was her recommendation to the landlord, who had been alarmed by the fire and the hysterics into which it threw the Old Housekeeper, and now insisted upon a man in the family as an indispensable qualification for the post. The advantage might have been more obvious had Mr. Haines not spent most of his time in dodging the tenants and helping them to forget his presence in the house. He was not an ill-looking nor ill-mannered man, and shyness was the only explanation that occurred to me for his perseverance in avoiding us. Work could not force him from his retirement. Mrs. Haines said that he was a carpenter by trade, but the only ability I ever knew him to display was in evading whatever job I was hopeful enough to offer him. Besides, though it might be hard to say what I think a carpenter ought to look like, I was certain he did not look like one, and others shared my doubts.