Our House Part 4

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 regulierement_, 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-peche-a-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 Ma.r.s.eilles, 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 ma.s.s of jewelry; that all the suns.h.i.+ne 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 Ma.r.s.eilles?

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 pa.s.sionel_? 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_

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 ap.r.o.n, surprisingly clean considering the dirt she exposed it to, and her grey hair was drawn tight back and rolled into a little hard k.n.o.b, 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 cla.s.s, 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d 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 appet.i.te 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 b.u.t.ter, 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 s.h.i.+llings, 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 pa.s.s 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 embarra.s.sment 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed from my hand to hers on the occasion of this visit, doubled in token of condolence, was invested in an elaborate c.r.a.pe 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 ingrat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sing 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 ap.r.o.n 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 Ma.s.s 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 appet.i.te had I ever had the folly, under any circ.u.mstances, 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 n.o.body 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 ap.r.o.n 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 Sat.u.r.days, coins pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 subst.i.tute 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 a.s.sure Augustine, and, holding up her ap.r.o.n by the two corners, and well out from her so as to represent a capacious bag, add, "ap.r.o.n 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, G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 a.s.sured me that her neighbours had been waiting for years to get her to do their was.h.i.+ng, 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 dest.i.tution. 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 p.a.w.n, 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 G.o.d bless ye, Master." Nor was J.

comfortable until provisions had followed her in such quant.i.ties 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, n.o.body, 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 pa.s.s 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 _Pet.i.t Journal_ and the latest thing in _aperitifs_. 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 _aperitifs_ 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 a.s.sured 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 bra.s.ses 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 appet.i.te 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 sh.o.r.es 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 menage_ 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 antic.i.p.ation, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 _Credit Lyonnais_ and a stocking stuffed to overflowing in the bare garret where she s.h.i.+vered 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 maitre, 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 Clementine, 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.

_Clementine_

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WHEN THERE IS A SUN ON A WINTER MORNING"]

V