Our House Part 2

"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 embarra.s.sment, "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 ill.u.s.trations 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 pa.s.sed our articles round the family circle,--a compliment hardly more astonis.h.i.+ng 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 ap.r.o.ns 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 a.s.sure 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 pa.s.sed, 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 a.s.sure 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 s.h.i.+llings, was free to begin life again.

I pa.s.s quickly over the next weeks,--I wish I could have pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 bra.s.s handles,--worse, there would be no plumes for the horses and the hea.r.s.e.

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 c.r.a.pe?

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 bra.s.s handles, for plumes and c.r.a.pe. 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 c.r.a.pe. 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 n.o.body save ourselves to-day has as much as a thought for her. But, if self-sacrifice counts for anything, if martyrdom is a pa.s.sport to heaven, then Trimmer should take her place up there by the side of St. Francis of a.s.sisi, 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_

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 a 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.

"Provencale?" I asked.

"Yes, from Ma.r.s.eilles," she answered, and I showed her instead into my room.

I had often been "down there" where the sun s.h.i.+nes and skies are blue, and her Provencal 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 s.h.i.+ning white villages,--M. Bernard's at Martigues, and his dining-room, and the Ma.r.s.eillais who crowded it on a Sunday morning, and the gaiety and the laughter, and Desire in his white ap.r.o.n, 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! _Te--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 Provencal 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.