THE BOOK OF MARTHA

BY THE

HON. MRS. DOWDALL

WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY

AUGUSTUS JOHN

LONDON

DUCKWORTH & CO.

HENRIETTA ST. COVENT GARDEN

1913

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I: MARTHA

This book ought by rights to have borne Ruth’s name on the cover instead of mine. Of the fifty years I have lived the first twenty were scattered and lost. The remaining thirty were gathered as they came, and threaded on a wire which formed them into a serviceable chain; that wire was Ruth. She has now broken off and formed other ties, therefore the years that remain will probably be scattered like the first, for there can be no second Ruth. It may be, even, that I shall be driven to spend my declining days in an hotel. Meantime I have a record of experiences common to many Marthas.

When I decided on the title it happened to be Ruth’s day out. I had intended, as a matter of course, to submit the name to her, and then, suddenly, a wave of mutiny swept over me.

“The book at least shall be mine,” I said to myself. “Ruth has taken possession of my house, my tradespeople, my children, and, what was dearer still, my leisure. What little freedom I have enjoyed has been procured by a wearisome amount of guile, but my pen is still my own and shall remain in my possession.”

It is true that David would never have burst into immortal song had it not been for his persecutors who goaded him to lament yet his works are published under his name and not under that of the Bulls of Bashan. Therefore I call this the Book of Martha and not of Ruth.

When I married, thirty years ago, I desired to lead a simpler life than is led by most people. So many women seem to me like parasites living on the combined labour of husband and servants. My friend Elizabeth Tique, with whom I often stayed, kept a cook, three maids, and an odd man, and these wretches somehow contrived to fill every inch of the small house and garden. It was almost impossible to go into any room without finding some one aggravatingly dressed in spotted cotton, rustling along with either a damp cloth or a carpet-sweeper or a tray laden with food. On one occasion, I remember, I went to my bedroom to write letters, having left one of the cotton-backs clearing away the breakfast, and the other, she of the damp cloth, in possession of the drawing-room. By some marvellous sleight of foot they both contrived to reach my room before me, and were busily engaged there when I arrived.

“Don’t go away,” I said pleasantly, and gathering up my blotting-pad and papers I returned to the drawing-room to write. I was in the full swing of inspiration when the door was burst open by a third skirmisher in the hated uniform. She made her offence far worse by pretending that her visit was only one of wanton light-heartedness.

“It’s all right, Miss,” she said, “I can come back by and by; it was only to do the grate.”

I swallowed the word that rose to my lips—Elizabeth says it doesn’t do for the servants to know we say these things—and took my papers to the garden; but my letter was no longer witty. It was full of short disjointed sentences and tedious information. In a few minutes I was startled by a terrific rumbling on the gravel. The odd man was approaching to mow the lawn.

“Sorry to disturb you, Miss; I shan’t be above ’alf an hour,” was the way he put it. There are many possible variations of the same crime.

“Elizabeth,” I said as politely as I could when she came out on her way to the shops, “have you a wine-cellar?”

“Yes, a beauty. Why?”

“Do you mind telling me—is this the day for cleaning it out?”

“What nonsense; we don’t clean it out.”

“Then may I sit in it?”

Elizabeth was busy with the fish, but she told me where the key was, and I went down with a candle. It was cool and quiet and cobwebby, and I got on nicely. I was just getting my second wind and had refilled my fountain pen when I heard a voice—that of my enemy with the cloth—outside the door.

“This is the cellar, Mr. Brown. I think master wished the port put in the second bin from the left. I’ll just give it a wipe out if you’ll excuse me.”

I tried the coach-house, but it happened to be George’s day for swilling it after he had finished the grass, and when I found a place in the greenhouse away from the drip he came and put manure on the tomatoes.

I was engaged to be married to a man with the usual professional income, and I began to see very clearly that if I was to be happy in a small house the number of people living in it must be reduced as much as possible. That night when the servants were all in bed I took up my letters again and explained this theory to James. He agreed with me.

We were married early in January, and went into our house a week later. I had engaged two maids, both of whom had been recommended to me as thoroughly capable, and likely to bring light into the dark places of my inexperience. They did indeed; I saw all its weak points very clearly in the lurid glare of their bright ideas. But that was later. On our first day at home I went down to the kitchen as soon as my husband had gone out. I picked my way through the cinders, crumbs, bacon-rind, and unclassified fluff upon the floor, and stood for a moment blistering before the range where a blast-furnace raged behind the bars. The remains of breakfast, which suggested the snatched meal of a burglar, prepared in haste and darkness, were on the table, from which Clara, the housemaid, rose and made a slippery exit after the manner of a mouse.

I murmured something polite about being too soon, to which the cook replied that they were a bit late on account of the range, and the curtain rose on a farce which will run as long as I keep a cook.

The bell at the back door then fell into the first of a long and distressing series of convulsions, and Ruth went to its assistance.

“Pleas’m, the butcher,” she reported.

There are many ways of saying “Pleas’m, the butcher,” and Ruth’s was most discouraging. I knew at a glance that she had not properly masticated her breakfast, and that the arrival of the butcher was not unlike that of twins at the end of a numerous and undesired family. She looked as though her morning had been made up of a series of unwelcome events and this were the last straw.

“Tell him to call again,” I said hastily; “this is an absurd time to come.” I was going to retire when a second convulsion shook the house to its foundations.

“Do you wish fish’m?” said Ruth, just as if I had sent the fish. I hedged and tried to shift the blame on her.

“Do we want fish?”

“Just as you wish’m,” she said, standing still in front of me.

She made no attempt to suggest anything.

“I’ll come,” said I, “and see him myself.”

I found a pert-looking male child writing his name on the pantry window-sill and whistling.

“What fish have you got?” I asked.

“Plaiceakecoddensole,” he replied, eyeing me up and down.

I ordered something—anything to convey the idea that I spoke with knowledge and deliberation. The greengrocer behaved like an uncle, and told me that, whatever else I went without, a nice cauliflower was a thing I should never regret buying. I expected him to add that it would last a lifetime and clean again as good as new.

During this time Ruth had disappeared into the back kitchen, whence she brought what at first I took to be a bucket of castor-oil and a dead rabbit. With the rabbit (which turned out to be her favourite dishcloth) she then deluged the table from the contents of the bucket, and the kitchen was filled with a warm smell of wet onions. When she had “cleaned up” as she called it—which meant that after her septic operation on the table she swept the etceteras on the floor into a heap and drew the fender over them—we discussed the question of food.

One of the trials of my life is the necessity for devising three relays of food immediately after a good breakfast. It makes me feel as though I were the owner of a yard full of turkeys, whom it is my painful duty to prepare for a daily Christmas. James enjoys his breakfast and forgets about it, returning after a hard day’s work to a dinner as unpremeditated as that which the ravens brought to Elijah; not so mine, which brings with it haunting memories of yesterday’s sorrows. I cannot share his enthusiasm for a vol-au-vent which I have so often met before in less happy circumstances; I feel about it as an undertaker might who should meet his clients masquerading in a ballroom. James came home at one o’clock, and we went indoors at once, as he has only a short time to spare in the middle of the day. The table was not laid.

“Clara,” I said, “do you know the time? We must have luncheon at once.”

“I think Ruth’s just sending it up now, m’m,” she answered. “The meat only came ten minutes ago.”

James spilled a good deal in his haste, but what little he was able to eat in eight minutes he was extremely good tempered about, and praised warmly. A great many men would have behaved in a manner that might have made me live and die a bad housekeeper. If he had been sulky, or violent, or sarcastic, or resigned, or dignified, I should have taken no steps whatever. My mind would have settled upon a touching picture of the sorrows of women, and how their life is one long martyrdom to the habits of men and the want of habits of domestic servants, and I should have shrugged my shoulders and acquired tastes of my own. Then this book would never have been written. As it was, my husband’s smiling farewell and his pathetic symptoms of indigestion bravely borne gave me pain that vented itself in anger against its original cause—Ruth—and behind her again the butcher. I flew into the study and poured out my wrath on a sheet of the best note-paper.

“Mr. Jones,
“Dear Sir,

“Mrs. Molyneux is simply furious because Mr. Jones’s wretched beef did not turn up till ten minutes to one. If Mr. Jones finds himself unable to keep a clock, Mrs. Molyneux will be delighted to deal with a butcher who can.”

I licked the envelope and the stamp viciously and rang the bell. “Post this at once, please, Clara,” I said, “and when Jones’s boy calls in the morning for orders, tell him that a thousand years are not as one day to me, and that he may take his detestable tray of entrails to—” I stopped just in time—“back to the shop,” I added. “Yes’m,” said Clara, looking surprised and, I thought, frightened. “Would you like a cup of tea, m’m?”

If one is what these people call “upset” they always suggest tea. Tea as a remedy for the butcher’s non-appearance struck me as absurd.

“No, Clara,” I replied, “what I want is not tea but punctuality. All the same I will have a cup.”

Of course it was impossible to say anything to Ruth that afternoon. It would have been making too much fuss over what probably was not her fault.

CHAPTER II: THE COOK

A lady who has kept house with marked success for fifty years once said to me: “My dear, there are only three things of any importance in a house. First the husband, then the nurse, then the cook, and after that it doesn’t matter.”

At the time this collected wisdom slid through my head almost without recognition. I thought my husband perfect, and took it for granted that I knew all about him. I did not then require a nurse, and in my limitless ignorance I supposed a cook to be a person who cooks things, and whom, if she does not cook things well, one replaces by another cook who does. How, indeed, should I know more of the nature and habits of cooks than the general public knows of the physiology of the animals which it sees behind bars at the Zoo? At home I knew that there was a certain fat striped creature in the kitchen, whom my mother was obliged to propitiate before we could get scones for breakfast, and to whom I vaguely believed my father said prayers night and morning. But meals came up and went down, in winter and summer, autumn and spring, and that was all that I really knew about them.

How should an outsider such as I was know that the personality of a cook is as pervasive in a small house as that of a mellow cheese; that she is as powerful as a dog in a hen-house, as moody as a gipsy, as amenable to flattery as an old gentleman, and as inured to dirt as a pig? So far as I had thought at all, I had always imagined that there was a household formula called “giving orders to the cook.” I had not been married a year before I knew that this is a term invented by novelists, and which has no resemblance at all to the fact it is intended to describe. It is a recognised fallacy like the Cambridge May week, which is not in May, but every one knows what is meant. Giving orders to the cook really means a very elaborate process of mental suggestion. We learn by painful initiation what are the things she is capable of cooking, and we try, so far as is possible, to direct her choice of what she is willing to cook within the limits of her capacity. By the same process of mental suggestion we add to her repertoire of dishes, and according to the strength of our will and the receptivity of her mind, she elects by and by to cook more or less what we want. It is the art of mental suggestion, not the art of ordering, that makes a mistress the real keeper of a cook.

For instance, when I first knew Ruth I used to make mistakes like this: “You might make a curry of the mutton, Ruth, and give us some stewed pears for lunch. We will have fried fillets of fish to-night, with cutlets from the end of the neck that you have left, and a batter pudding with jam sauce.” And Ruth would reply, “Yes’m.”

When the luncheon came up there would be haricot and apple tart, and for dinner fillets of fish done in a wonderful wine sauce, cutlets, it is true, and a sweet omelette.

“Ruth,” I said next morning, “you did not cook what I ordered yesterday.”

“Didn’t I, m’m?” she replied, with the candid look of a company promoter accused of fraud. “I’m sure I don’t know how that happened. I quite thought you said I was to do up the mutton.”

“Look at the slate.” I pointed out where curry was ordained in large letters.

“Why, so it was, m’m; I am sorry. I remember now, I hadn’t any chutney by me, and I knew master wouldn’t fancy curry without a bit o’ chutney so I just made a nice haricot instead.”

“And what about the fried fish?” I asked. “And the pudding?”

“Ah,” said Ruth, “yes’m, we shall want a nice frying-pan. The one I have isn’t near large enough to do a nice bit of fish and it’s not the right shape. A nice enamel one the next time you are going into town if you can be troubled to remember.”

Now in these days if I wanted the meals I have described I should begin:

“How about the mutton, Ruth? What are you going to do with that?”

“Well, I think, m’m, a haricot would be as nice as anything.”

“Quite so. And I suppose we shall be obliged to have fish for dinner.”

“Yes’m—fried fish I suppose?” (Ruth’s strong point is frying.)

“Some nice little fillets I think master likes, m’m.”

“Yes, Ruth, fish, cutlets, and a pudding. I suppose a batter pudding would take too many eggs?”

“Oh, no, m’m, not at all. I could manage with two nicely.”

“Very well then; that will do beautifully. We always like your batter puddings so much better than those they have at Buckingham Palace; they are so much lighter, and that jam sauce you make is a dream. And, by the way” (this is just as I am leaving the kitchen), “we must have another curry some day; Admiral Tobasco said he had never met one to touch yours that night.”

“Would you care to have the mutton curried to-day, m’m, as a change from the haricot?”

“Oh, yes, Ruth, that would be delightful. What a good idea.”

But it takes years to learn.

New dishes are acquired in the same way. This is what the novice does:

“Ruth, I want you to try this beef à la Soudanese, it is quite simple.”

“Beef what, m’m?”

“Beef à la Soudanese. You see it is done in this way.”

I read the recipe, while Ruth turns away in silence and begins sweeping up the hearth.

“Well, Ruth, what do you think of it?”

“Oh, just as you please’m, of course.”

“It is quite easy, isn’t it?”

There is a sudden convulsion amongst the fire-irons, and Ruth turns round wiping her eyes.

“Of course, it must be as you like, m’m. It’s your place to give orders, I know, but I’m afraid I shall never give satisfaction the way I am. My mother’d tell you—and indeed I’d sooner she came and spoke to you herself—that I never had no training in fancy dishes, and all you asked for was a good plain cook, which I am, as her ladyship said herself when I left. Of course, you’d very likely not know, being a young lady and having no experience in such things, that we poor girls have to make our own way, and to be respectable is as much as we can hope for, and that I always have been, and I’d sooner starve than take a place where I couldn’t do my duty, and I think it would be better if you were to get some one more experienced; I haven’t been feeling at all settled lately, the way things have been”—and so on.

If by chance your mind’s ribs are made of steel and your sympathies of spun granite, as some women’s are, this network of unintelligible wrath will have no power to ensnare you, but the average woman takes years to unwind herself from the thraldom of female hysteria—and then she wriggles out of it by guile.

“Ruth,” I say now, “we had a lovely dish at the club last night. They made a great fuss about it, and said only an expert could cook it, but I believe that your clever brain could find out what it is made of. It looked like—” and then I describe it.

Ruth makes a wild conjecture and says it sounds very like the à la Marengo that master likes so much.

“I don’t know whether it is quite that,” I say thoughtfully, “but we might look in one of the cookery books and see whether there is anything like it to start on.”

Then I turn up the recipe for the dish and suggest that we should try that, and see how it turns out; perhaps, I add, that she need not trouble to make scones that afternoon and that the cold tart will do for dinner.

As regards their pervasiveness and their power, it is a remarkable fact that although most of the inmates of a house know what the master wants, and a few know what the mistress wants, and nobody knows what the housemaid wants, yet every one knows what the cook wants. If the cook is satisfied the whole house works smoothly; if not, an atmosphere of awe and discomfort pervades everywhere, meals are partaken of in silence or in a sort of nervous bravado, no bells are rung, people fetch their own boots, and are courteous to one another about the toast sooner than ask for more. And this omnipotent creature in the stripes and a collar that will not fasten before ten in the morning is, as I have said, moody and capricious to the last degree. She says it is the range, but it is not really. Left to myself, as I have been sometimes, I can spend weeks without having a word with the range. In fact, his commonplace obedience to rules has often bored me sadly, and I have wished that he would, just for once, heat up on his own initiative and never mind the flues, or even that he would get in a temper and smoke when all was well and the dampers regulated to perfection.

But sometimes he and cook cannot hit it off. I may go down, for instance, at the proper time, neither too early nor too late, and be met by a smell that even a very old skunk would find trying.

“My dear Ruth,” I say, “is it the milk again or what?”

“It boiled over,” says Ruth, looking outraged and insulted, “although I only left it for a minute. I never saw such heat in my life.”

“How extremely tiresome,” I say, frowning at the range. Really he might have been more tactful on this day when I wanted a special soufflé for luncheon. “I wonder whether the man did anything to it the last time he was here?” I say very loudly and distinctly; and then becoming innocent and diffident I suggest, “You don’t think shutting down that damper a little might help, do you?”

Ruth pushes in the damper, muttering something about “must have hot water for washing up,” although the water is already bubbling and roaring in the cylinder—but there, she is a good girl, and you can’t have everything. Only, I do wish sometimes that the range had rather more tact and less common sense.

Talking of ranges reminds me that there are days when she says it is impossible to keep the range clean. Those are the days when she boils everything at full gallop so that it slops over with a horrid frittering noise and the smell gets even into my hair-brushes. I suppose that there are cooks who have a sense of smell, but they probably die very young and leave only those who cook from memory. One question often puzzles me. Does a good chef ever go near the scullery? Can real art survive within fifty yards of that thing which feels like seaweed and looks like a tennis net? or that tangle of greasy grey wire that speeds the departing and welcomes the coming occupant of a saucepan? Can nightingales’ tongues be prepared at a zinc table where pink and grey rabbit-skins, potato peelings, white of egg, and the clammy skeletons of fish are gathered together in reckless confusion?

See a cook’s cupboard and die! It is very like Naples. There are fifty small tins all exactly alike, except that some are sticky, some greasy, and some black with coal dust; their lids are bent into fantastic shapes which prevent them from being opened without a struggle. There are pepper-pots whose holes are stopped up with fat and rust; glass jars containing different sizes of corrugated white bullets; nameless brown powders at the bottom of blue paper bags, screwed up at the neck, and with a currant sticking to the bottom; copies of last year’s Times stained with paraffin; a cashmere boot, much worn at the heel; fire-lighters smeared with glue and sawdust; a spoon with a piece of cold bacon in it, and one of your best plates from upstairs—chipped.

I suppose Ruth thinks that because we are but dust she had better go on building us up.

CHAPTER III: THE HOUSEMAID

The worst thing about housemaids is their restlessness. Their passion for traveling about from one room to another becomes at last a sort of nervous disease. I have already described my discomfort in the constant traffic of Elizabeth Tique’s small house, and the excellent plans I made to ensure solitude and peace in my own. But does anyone suppose for a moment that one single-handed mistress can check the migratory instincts of a full-grown housemaid, any more than she could impede the perpetual silent passage of a tortoise from the artichoke bed to the hot-house and round by the rhododendrons?

I worked hard at the problem for some years. When we are young and hopeful it is quite easy to imagine that we are altering the facts of Nature. We talk glibly about our schemes for reforming drunkards, of the likelihood of the British working man becoming interested in art, and so on. In the same way I saw no difficulty then in the idea of persuading a housemaid to finish one room at a time. I spoke very nicely about it at first. I said:

“Clara, I wish that you would begin one room at a time and then finish it, instead of going about doing little bits of things in each. It makes you so ubiquitous.”

“I beg pardon, m’m?”

“So here, there, and everywhere,” I explained. “Of course it is very nice to have you so active, but now, for instance, why couldn’t you finish my sitting-room or my bedroom? I don’t mind which, so long as I could have somewhere to write. You chased me about this morning as if I were a hen that wanted to sit at the wrong time. You know I hate having my legs dusted.”

“I was going to do the windows, m’m, as soon as you went out.”

“But, Clara, you know quite well that if I went out I should find you in the first shop I went to, polishing the grocer’s nose or something—”

“Beg pardon, m’m?”

It was useless to explain further. I made a schedule of work for Clara in which each portion of her day was mapped out in such a way that she would be continuously in one place for at least an hour at a time. I might as well have made a time-table for the weather. I have heard that there are mistresses who make schedules for their servants and get them followed: but whether these people achieve their results by hypnotism or force I do not know. I have been able now and again to arrest the disease in Clara for a short time, but I do not believe that there is any permanent cure for ubiquity in housemaids.

Another infirmity to which all of them are subject is morning blindness. When I go to bed at night my sitting-room is often far from tidy. I leave, perhaps, a thimble, scissors, a cherished pen, sheets of manuscript, some books, and a parcel or two on the table. By the time Clara has made her mouse-like exit next morning my table is as clear as a baby’s conscience. I hunt about muttering bad words for some minutes and then ring the bell. But no, Clara has seen nothing. She never puts anything away: perhaps master has had them——

“Yes, Clara,” I reply sarcastically, “I have no doubt that your master is at this moment playing ‘hunt the thimble’ in his office and cutting out paper boats with my scissors and manuscript. As for my book, probably the cat has taken it back to the library to be changed.”

Clara becomes huffy, and says she “hasn’t an idea, ’m sure.”

“I know you haven’t,” say I, “I don’t want you to have ideas. I want you to have eyesight, and a memory, and a little self-control. Why cannot you leave things where they are? Or, if you must put something away, why not those crumbs under the table or those empty envelopes or the mouldy paste that I used last week?”

I have heard of kittens being blind for some days after birth, but it is my own discovery that housemaids are blind for some hours after they get up.

I do not know how it is, but I get more tired of my own face and the housemaid’s than of anything else on earth. Probably no criminal feels more imprisoned with his warder than a woman can feel shut up in her own house with one or two servants; and she is so much the worse off that there is no free future to look forward to. A very unusual touch of sympathy occurs in a modern play where the writer makes his heroine retire to an empty room to have a bad headache in peace. Before she has had time to crumble into a comfortable ruin on the sofa, there is a knock at the door and in comes a housemaid armed with a tin and some little fidgety bits of rag to “polish the taps in Miss Iris’s bathroom.”

The public would surely be touched if they realised the fact that there is often no spot in her own house where the daughter of woman may lay a tear unobserved. Some women do not want to cry; they have nothing to fear from Sarah Ann. But to those who do, this constant espionage becomes a positive torture.

There are few things that I envy men so much as their leisure for getting on with their work. They have offices, studies, studios, in which they spend weary hours in a nerve-racking pursuit of guineas, or the appropriate word, or an elusive idea, but they are generally doing one thing at a time. They are not harassed by incessant irruptions from other workers bursting with irrelevant information about their underclothing or the state of the weather, nor are they pestered with foolish conundrums about weights and measures and the kind of subjects that “Old Moore’s Almanac” deals with so willingly. It is always possible to slam one’s door and lock it, but who really feels comfortable under the stigma of peculiarity? The comment which follows unusual conduct is in itself a violation of privacy, and so far from being alone, the offender is merely isolated the better to be observed.

I do not mind ordering things—it isn’t that; nor do I mind thinking about them—thinking quite hard. It is “seeing about” them that turns my blood to vitriol and my heart to dynamite.

Is a general in command of forces expected to see that his subalterns put on their clothes right side out? When he orders a charge does he find his men seated facing their horses’ tails? Does the captain of a ship put out to sea only to be told when he has crossed the Bar that “the wheel has come off in the mate’s ’and,” and that there is no more grease for the engines? And yet I believe that is the kind of thing that would happen if a mistress and her servants started out to discover America.

It is rarely that a servant in a small house considers herself responsible for anything. It is thought discreditable to the mistress alone if the house is dirty and the meals badly served; and yet she has seldom the skill or the leisure to give point to her criticisms by setting a working example to those under her orders.

And the poor creature must learn so many trades. It is not enough that I strain my brains to bursting-point in order to think out new forms of nourishment for James, but I must learn the anatomy and the personal habits of the creatures he devours, conduct post-mortem examinations to discover whether they died too soon or not soon enough, whether they had eaten too much or not eaten enough, taken too much exercise or led too sedentary a life. I must be perpetually on the look-out to circumvent the countless ruses which Satan suggests to half a dozen intelligent tradesmen. I must know exactly in what combination the things I have bought will best amalgamate in James’s inside, and I must then somehow convey my knowledge through the tough skull of my cook. When at last I have got both food and ideas safely lodged in her keeping I must find the dish on which she is to serve it, and, worst of all, besiege her incessantly with alarm clocks and gongs to ensure its appearance at the right time.

When the meal is sent up only half of my work is done. I have to keep an eye on the tools with which James is to eat it, otherwise they are liable to be blunt, sticky, or placed crookedly on the table. After this James eats his dinner in peace, whilst I make a mental note of Clara’s personal habits, her flowers to praise, or her weeds to blame, and either or both to loathe; her elaborate elegancies of manner, or the fact that she always forgets to hand the sauce before she goes back to stand on one leg by the sideboard and listen to our conversation. I have stopped that now and told her not to wait, which means that she goes off to the bedrooms between the courses and does not hear the bell.

I can hear the efficient female say scornfully that I should get servants who know their business; but she forgets that if she or I do not have to train our striped geese in the sweat of our brows it means that some other mother of a family has done it—or perished in the attempt—and that Sarah Ann has left to “better herself.” Also one of the most efficient characteristics of the efficient female is her powerful fascination for servants of the clockwork-mouse type whom I abhor. Their machinery has been made by people with different tastes from my own, and when I have found the key and wound them up they begin folding table-napkins into wine-glasses with horrid dexterity, or they play a sort of suburban Halma called “ladies first” when they hand the courses.

Clara’s migratory instincts, her ubiquitousness, and her morning blindness were a constant annoyance to me, yet I look lovingly back upon them now over the heads of a succession of young persons, all of whom had occupied positions of trust in the houses of the semi-educated. When Clara left me in order to marry a traveller in sewing machines I acquired a wonderful insight into the habits of the public dignitaries in our neighbourhood. I learned that the Mayoress of Pond never grudged the expense of paper mats under the fruit and preferred her sandwiches tied with pink ribbon. That Lady Knight believed in putting out Sir Donald’s clothes herself in the evening, and that it was not customary in the houses of the commercially great to clean the silver more than once a week “unless there was company.”

I once asked one of these Belles Brummells whether it was better form not to wash before dinner unless for a party of eight, and she replied gravely that it was a matter of taste, and did I wish hot water; she had no objection to bringing it.

Note.—I read this part aloud to the efficient female and she says that was not what she meant.

CHAPTER IV: TRADESMEN

The story of Mr. Jones’s sin, and how he failed to send the meat in time for luncheon, has been told. But it must not be supposed that this was the one sin of a lifetime, standing out clear and black against a white background of habitual punctuality. Nor was he a lonely serpent in an otherwise spotless Eden of tradesmen who walked with God. They were all Sons of Belial. If I could turn the whole lot of them into pillars of salt, and cheese, and mutton, and cabbage, and all the other dilatory and perverse ingredients of my daily life I would do it, and they might go on “never coming” as much as they liked. They might stay there all day making apologies and it would not matter to me. I should simply come and hack off the pieces I wanted and not listen to a word they said.

Of course, in one way, a shop answers the same purpose. But there is not the same pleasure in asking for a thing as there would be in hewing it off the person of one’s enemy. And, besides, the shops are always full of women who want to look at everything they buy.

Sometimes I have waited quite a long time while some silly creature with a long upper lip and a badly balanced hat fiddles about with two tins of mustard and explains why neither will do. When it comes to my turn and the shopman says: “Pepper, m’m; yes, m’m; I’ll just show it you,” and rushes off before I can catch him, it makes me so angry that I forget all the other things I wanted. I know all that there is to be said on the other side about the advantages of shopping oneself. It is not for nothing that I have encountered the efficient female on our own ground. But if I have been flattered she has had exercise, that is one thing! Some are born housekeepers, some achieve housekeeping, and some have the horrid thing thrust upon them.

They say seeing is believing, but somehow I find it impossible to believe in a tradesman even after I have seen him, and the few things I do believe about him I don’t like. The ego of the fishmonger, as well as that of his representative imp who scribbles his name daily on every available wall-space near the back door, is to me wholly uncongenial, and I dislike the exaggerated value he puts on the creatures whom he conjures from the deep.

“Nice plaice,” he says, handing me a thing all face, like a certain type of person who frequents concerts and goes on deputations and boards. It has a deep frill of some scaly substance round its small body, and at one end the frill becomes a regular flounce. “Eightpence a pound. I’ll fillet it nicely for you, m’m.”

By the time he has filleted away the face, and the frill, and the flounce, and half a square foot of backbone I am left with four elusive little rags that no amount of heavy breadcrumbing on Ruth’s part will make into a serviceable dish for a hungry man.

“I don’t think you are right in calling plaice a nice fish,” I said the first time this happened. “Haven’t you got anything with a little more body to it?”

He offered me turbot at two shillings a pound. There was certainly more of it, but it looked thoroughly wet through and uncomfortable, and he told me that the oily skin was the best part! There are all the smaller fish of course, but I cannot help watching James when he has anything with bones, it makes me as nervous as if I saw him eating a wet handkerchief full of pins.

And there is nothing like fish for “never coming.” If my own grandfather were a fishmonger and I saw him being chased up the street by a mad bull I should refuse to believe that he would “be there as soon as I was.” With butchers, too, I find that we pay for more than we either ask or desire. A leg of mutton with a hairy cloven hoof on the end (I still live in the hope of Mr. Jones lacing a neat boot on it some day when he thinks I am not looking and then saying it is a mistake he cannot account for) is an insult both to the living and to the dead. And there are tongues with a ton of salt in them. Mr. Jones weighs the tongue as it comes soaking from the tub and charges me for the heavy dripping mass of salt. He sends it to the house by the hands of a little boy who is fond of marbles, a keen spectator of football, and popular with his young associates. By the time Ruth gets the tongue on to her weighing machine it differs by several pounds from the little blood-stained hieroglyphic pinned to it. Mr. Jones explains this by the theory that it has “shrunk on the way from the shop.”

If I might bear a few of Mr. Jones’s misdeeds to the Judgment Seat they should lose none of their full weight by my loitering on the errand!

I think Ananias the greengrocer became prosperous and has such a nice large clean shop because he is so resourceful. I have never asked him any question which he could not answer satisfactorily, and the matter I speak of always seems to be one which he has already gone into very carefully on his own account. I asked him once why his potatoes were dark purple and full of holes, and he said that it was the time of year. But I was prepared for that and brought in a neat rejoinder.

“Yes,” I said, “that is the proper answer, I know, but how is it that I can get excellent ones in the shops lower down?”

“Ah, yes, m’m, those,” he replied; “of course we can get you that sort of potato if you wish it, but I hardly think, if you knew the sort of places they come from, you’d fancy them. A very nice, cheap potato for the price, and has a nice appearance, but——”

He shook his head with an expression of such dark mystery that I let the potatoes alone. In fact, I had a moment’s vague wonder whether the other kind were grown in the hospitals or whether white slaves with maimed hands dug unceasingly for them in a distant rubber plantation.

Another day I asked him why his lettuces were a penny more than anyone else’s and whether he charged for the caterpillars sandwiched in them. He said that it was quite a mistake my having had the one with the caterpillar. He had noticed it at once when they were brought in, and had particularly told the young lady to destroy the lot. He was very glad I had mentioned it, and he could give me the best lettuces in the market for a penny halfpenny if I did not object to their having no hearts. He always sent those with hearts unless he was specially told otherwise by ladies who were obliged to consider trifles.

CHAPTER V: THE DINNER PARTY

For some weeks after I began housekeeping I had a feeling that all was not right with Ruth. She would not talk about food when I went to the kitchen, but somehow or other she always managed to bring in some remark about the people in the houses near us.

“Underdone, m’m? Yes, m’m, I quite understand,” she said one day in answer to a criticism of mine. “Speaking of which, m’m, do you happen to be acquainted with Raws, in Windermere Place?”

“Do you mean Colonel and Mrs. Raw?” I asked.

“Yes, m’m; the young person who lives with them as cook is sister to my young man, and I just happened to mention who you were, m’m, and how I was living with you. She was very pleased to think I was so well off, and asked if we were very busy just now.”

She made two or three more references to the great and good on whose cast-off legs of mutton we lived so happily (they had the loins and the shoulders, and we had the necks and legs, and, I regret to say, the tripe). At last she became more explicit.

“Hardly seems worth while making these fancy dishes just for you and master, does it, m’m?” she said despondingly. “It would be different if you were having company and we wanted to show what we could do.”

It dawned on me then that Ruth was craving for morbid excitement. She longed to be at her wits’ end—that land of the leal where every true domestic servant loves to wallow and bemoan her lot. It was not long before she had her heart’s desire. People began to call, and when they began there was no stopping them. They came in barouches and in motors, on foot and in four-wheeled flys, from which the chaste kid boots of the elderly and the Parisian shoes of the rejuvenated descended in rich profusion. Clara found it more and more difficult to be dressed in time; in fact, when Mrs. Ajax and Mrs. Beehive took me first on their rounds and arrived at a quarter to three, it was Ruth, smutty and indignant, who opened the door.

I spoke severely to Clara afterwards, and found that it was her migratory instinct which had betrayed her again. She had been upstairs to get dressed, and had wandered off to the washhouse in the middle of her toilet to fetch a clean apron.

“Which reminds me, Clara,” I said. “Why does it take you so long to get tea when people call? You were three-quarters of an hour yesterday after I rang.”

“The kettle wouldn’t boil, m’m,” Clara replied.

She gave me the impression of having at last lost patience with her former accomplice, the kettle, and decided to “tell on him.”

“Oh,” I said, “you don’t think we had better have a man in to see about it, do you?”

Clara wavered for a moment between professional scorn of this suggestion and the irresistible bait I had thrown out. She hesitated and compromised.

“Well, m’m, it ought to boil quicker; but perhaps next time Mr. Whistle is in the house we might get him to have a look at it; it may be too heavy a make.”

I regard this as Clara’s masterpiece.

But Ruth’s prayers were answered. The “neighbourhood” called, we dined out, and by and by we had to feed others in return.

James and I decided against the professional cook and “hired help,” so it remained to break the news to Ruth and Clara. I told them separately, on a bright morning in June when the little juicy lambs were hanging in clusters in the shops, and expectant peas burst through their pods in every market garden of our hospitable suburb. Ruth bore up wonderfully; in fact, after the first sob of terrified ecstasy I had very little trouble with her. But Clara cried a good deal, and was afraid that her waiting would not do justice either to herself or to me.

However, I told her how Napoleon had risen from quite a little chap to what he afterwards became, entirely by his own efforts; and I also reminded her of a famous judge in my own family who had once been an office boy. And then we all three began to “see about” one thing and another. I felt like an ophthalmic fly by the time we had done, with all its numerous eyes in a state of acute inflammation. I saw the stock for the soup. I saw the fish, and the paper it came in (which means a lot), I saw the sweetbreads, and wondered how James can be so fond of them. I saw the potatoes and the peas; that was nothing, really—half an eye did it, and the other half-eye caught the salad, just to be sure it was fresh. The tournedos of beef took an immense lot of seeing, and when they came up James saw them all over again, and they were not good. The efficient female has since explained to me why theirs are always perfect, but in my soul I believe that there is hanky-panky, if not plain swank about her fillets. Anyhow, some evil planet always shines on mine, so I have made up my mind now that Providence does not wish me to have fillets, and that He knows best, so we have saddle of mutton instead.

There was more brain-work and less inspection required for the pudding. When Ruth asked me if I would like to see the eggs, I said no, that was a question for the hen’s conscience, and one must leave something to somebody. Neither would I waste precious eyesight on the butter. I knew it was a lot, and the less seen about it the better. If I could have seen an ice-machine amongst our kitchen properties I should have felt less irritable. I know that the efficient female makes hers in something very simple—a biscuit tin or a boot, I forget which—but we were all too amateurish for these conjuring tricks. We have to get our rabbits out of shops like other people, and I would not trust an omelette made in James’s hat. We bought a machine at great expense, and when at last, wet to the knee and chilled to the bone, I hurried upstairs to dress, I saw with my last eye a vision of two alternatives—one, successive platefuls of congealed cream; the other, a petrified mass, bounding at the first touch of the spoon from end to end of our parquet floor. Which would it be?

I once read in the “Book of the Home” that the cook should lie down for a couple of hours before beginning the serious work of a dinner party. According to the author of the book all preparations should be made the day before; then, when the generalissima is roused from her bed at 5 p.m., there is practically nothing to do except to put the heavy guns in the oven and pass a salamander over the light infantry. The key to the situation, the brainy part, the staff office, whatever you like to call it, lies in the sauce-boats, and the gods alone decide what goes on there.

As a matter of fact, everything turned out quite differently. Ruth prepared nothing the day before; she rose late on the morning of the engagement, and omitted to clean the flues. We had a terrific fire going all day, and she ran about the kitchen at top speed, purple in the face, trembling and uncomplimentary. Far from the two hours of peaceful sleep anticipated by the “Book of the Home,” she had not even time to wash up after luncheon, and, as it was, dinner was more than ten minutes late. It is sad, but remarkable, that nothing ever happens to me in the way that books and efficient people claim as a certainty; but I am sure that Ruth enjoyed the dinner more than Mrs. Beeton ever enjoyed anything. You lose half the fun of a dish if you know beforehand what it is going to look like. The range, with his unfailing common sense and utter lack of artistic feeling, behaved strictly in accordance with his flues, slightly undercooking some things and burning others just a trifle: but the ice was perfect. I have often made ices in the same way, and they have turned out failures, which just proves what I have always said, that cookery books are written in the same spirit as “The Home Conjurer,” “Every Man His Own Chauffeur,” “How to Become a Golf Champion by Post,” and so on. The people who write them do not want us to know how they do the things, so they keep us harmlessly employed with a few simple rules while they themselves go on cooking and conjuring and get paid for it.

Ruth, Clara, the charwoman, and a borrowed housemaid sat up until twelve washing dishes, breaking a few, and filling the air with hilarity born of tea, fatigue, and insufficient food. But Ruth was happy. We had had company and she had been at her wits’ end.

CHAPTER VI: THE JOB GARDENER

After all I had suffered at the hands of Elizabeth Tique’s gardener I determined not to keep one at all. That is the kind of resolution one makes, judging a whole class from a single specimen, and then buying experience. But it seemed to me that just as a cook is too pervasive in a small house, so a gardener occupies too much space in a small garden. I remembered the mowing machine, and the manure, and one thing and another, and thought how much enjoyment I should get from doing the garden myself, with the help of an occasional man. I did not know that in our neighbourhood that particular breed of garden pest is called a Saturday scratcher. If I had heard the term sooner I might have guessed what he would be like, but I engaged one in my innocence, and bought experience like other people. I engaged him on the recommendation of an enemy, and he tramped over the flower-beds to my door early one morning. He was just the sort of working man who gets caricatured on the music-hall stage: infinitely ugly and full of inane conversation. His opening remark annoyed me.

“Pretty little bit o’ garden you’ve got ’ere mum.”

“That’s a liar,” I thought, considering the weeds and the seedy laurel bushes, but I resolved not to give way to prejudice.

“There is a good deal to be done, Mr. Mullins,” I said vaguely. The fact was, I knew what I wanted the garden to look like when it was done, but my ideas began and ended there. I was as ignorant as Mullins himself; the difference between us was that I was not nearly so stupid. That is why we could not get on; if his wits had been equal to mine we should have devised something between us in spite of our ignorance—I was going to say, with the help of our ignorance—because we should have done something entirely original. Being unhampered by foregone conclusions born of knowledge, we should not have had our inspirations blighted, as so many people have who understand the possibilities of an art. And we might have revolutionised the laws of Nature; one never knows! But Mullins was a fool; he did not understand when I said that I wanted the garden to look as if the things grew there by themselves.

“You’ll want some nice beddin’-out plants, mum, if that’s so,” he observed.

“But, Mullins,” I said feverishly, “surely—do pull yourself together—isn’t bedding out that horrid thing you do with a plumb-line?”

“No, mum, no,” he replied, “pardon me, I don’t think you quite understand. Beddin’ out is nice young ’ardy plants that comes to their prime durin’ the summer months; gives far more effect they do than anything else.”

I remained doubtful, but weakened; he smiled in such a kindly, authoritative way.

“I used to be gardener with your ’usband’s pa, mum,” he ventured, just at the critical moment. “What a nice gentleman ’e was! and what a fine garden they always ’ad! We used to commence beddin’ out just about now, mum.”

I fell headlong into the gin. Mullins was utterly stupid and never took a point, but he made them sometimes and scored.

“He must know,” I thought, “why James’s father had acres and acres of hot-houses!” Then I remembered something; I clutched at a memory of my mother walking round the gardens at home. “The herbaceous border is getting rather thin, Ptarmigan,” I seemed to hear her say; “there won’t be enough flowers for the house. I can’t bear your stiff hot-house things.”

“Ah, yes, Mullins,” I said, upon this dim vision, “but I must have a good herbaceous border, or else we shall not have enough flowers for the house.”

“Make you a nice ’erbaceous border along that ’ere wall, mum,” he replied obligingly.

So we set to work. I bought catalogues and books of instructions; I also took in the Amateur Gardener. But this is the kind of way one gets let in. The book says:

“Pyrox gypsomanica (poor man’s rose). A very free flowering perennial; deep bright purple, standard growth; May to October; suits any soil.”

“Mopincosa juicyflorum. (English hibiscus); orange, scarlet, and blue; very prolific; suitable for damp waste places where soil occurs rarely; flowers all the year round.”

All this is just the cookery-book trick in another form. The people who write these books evidently form a ring, like oil magnates and deceivers of that sort; they monopolise the cooking and gardening that is done, and then they send out misleading literature telling us how simple it all is and getting us to buy their wares. I bought what the seedsmen’s lists called “strong hardy plants” of all sorts of beautiful things that were guaranteed to flower freely in damp waste places. Mullins and I planted them, and that was the last we heard of them. The places we chose were quite damp enough; I am sure about that. Of course Mullins made it a point of honour to disapprove of everything I planted—one must expect that of any gardener—but in fact his were not any more successful than mine, and they cost more to buy. My private opinion is that on the night after I sowed any seeds Mullins came out with a small lantern, collected the soil, sifted it, and made Quaker oats for his breakfast next morning out of my godetia and poppy. I have read that mandragora or poppy is a powerful drug, and I suspect that is partly what is the matter with Mullins.

We put in bulbs, too, which no doubt he stuffs with some savoury compound and finds an excellent substitute for onions, and more digestible; either that, or else the entire gardening trade is riddled with the direct descendants of Ananias, and that seems almost too sweeping a statement to be credible. I prefer the Mullins’ meals hypothesis.

At present I have quite a bright little garden, and this is the plan on which I have achieved it. I have a border of stuffed cats down one side; they are of various sizes, and their glass eyes make a bright spot of colour amongst the misty duns and greys of their outer coatings; they are perennial, and not easily dashed by rain. Down the other side I have spread a wide border of coarse red flannel, and on this I contrive to raise quite a number of little evergreens. In the round beds (where the efficient female tells me there is nothing to prevent my having a capital show of roses) I have planted a nice lot of aspidistras. James has a friend who owned an aspidistra which he sent to a cold-storage place with a van-load of furniture when he went abroad for five years. The aspidistra was not valuable, and he did not much care if he never saw it again. But it was all right when he came back, and had put out a number of green shoots.

My third contrivance in the greenhouse where I have some plants is to put up wire netting to keep off Mullins. He used to go in there two or three times a day “just to give a look round,” as he called it, and after his visits it was impossible to keep anything alive except large families of green fly, which he seemed to bring with him. I had quite a promising collection there one week—some geraniums, a fuchsia or two, a hardy palm, and the remains of a good rose: it was nothing like dead when I left it that morning at ten o’clock. At twelve Mullins humped up the iron stair which leads to the greenhouse, spat once on the floor, exclaimed “Hum! ha! ho!” in a loud voice, and sent a message by Clara asking me for four-and-sixpence. By the afternoon there was not a living plant in the place, and the air was thick with green fly.

I once counted the number of pests (exclusive of Mullins) which I collected from the greenhouse and garden. I used to scrape balls of animated grey fluff off the staging and bottle different specimens of the attenuated orange and black works of the Almighty which I caught skating in and out of the soil, either on their stomachs, or with a pianola-like flexibility of touch on an unnecessary number of legs. I sent all these specimens to a friend at the University, and some of them turned out to be very rare and quite unusually destructive. There were forms of fungus, too, in the greenhouse that were quite pretty but very infectious, and were really animals—at least I think that was what he said—and I am absolutely certain that they were all brought by Mullins. He still comes, and I still pay him four-and-sixpence a week, because he keeps out other Mullinses. And I have learned now, as I said, to stop him from doing any active harm; I let him trundle the mowing machine when I am out, and talk to the cook, and at Christmas-time he dirties the house with large bunches of sooty holly, but it all makes for what the servants call “nice feeling.”

CHAPTER VII: THE DOCTOR

James had often said that we must get to know of a good doctor whom we could call in if either of us was ill; but neither of us was ill, and we put off our inquiries until it was too late. Mrs. Beehive called one day, boasting that she had just recovered from influenza and really had no business to be out. Within forty-eight hours I wished she had never been born, and James brought a captive gentleman in spectacles to my bedside.

He held counsel with my inner works through the usual formulæ and then rang for hot water. While Clara was bringing it he adjusted his spectacles, put his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the mantelpiece.

“Fond of Alpine climbing?” he asked.

“No,” I gasped, coughing.

“Ah, it’s a grand sport!” he said. “Does your husband climb?”

I shook my head.

“What a wonderful woman his aunt, Miss Molyneux, is! I remember meeting her at a whist-drive ten years ago, and she must be now—let me see—what is her age?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered, weary after his pommelling and longing for sleep.

“Pardon?”

I felt myself growing hot. “Ninety-eight,” I said hoarsely, at a venture. I did not know how old James’s aunt was, nor whether she climbed.

“Ah, is she so much?” he reflected, swaying on his toes. “That’s a nice little fellow” (pointing to a photograph on the mantelpiece). “Puts me in mind of Prince Olaf. It has a great look of him; don’t you think so? What?”

I nodded and shook my head at the same time, and kicked the bedclothes. My temperature was rising rapidly.

“Ah, thank you,” he said, as Clara came in with the hot water, and then he began washing his hands. I never knew a man use so much soap; it was my special kind at two-and-sixpence a tablet, and he left it in the water while he lathered and messed and went on with the Alpine business. He told me the names of all the mountains he had been up, and the routes by which he had unfortunately come down. He described how splendidly fit one felt tearing down the snow slopes on a toboggan (“I wish you would slide downstairs on what is left of my soap, and have done with it,” I thought). He said that he used to have a touch of bronchitis himself every winter, but it completely left him after a week at Mürren. After we had been all round Switzerland with the soap we came back to one of my favourite towels, which he reduced to something like a bread poultice during a ten minutes’ inquiry as to how many Wagner operas I had heard in my life, and whether my grandmother was the wife of a famous fisherman.

I lay panting and exhausted on the bed, feeling as one does after a long afternoon spent with a garrulous and deaf old lady. Finally the wretch came back to me, fiddled with the books at my side, criticised them all, gave me a list of those he had read during the past forty years, and then got as far as the door.

“Now keep quiet,” he remarked, looking down his nose at me with a judicial air, “don’t have people in here chattering.”

Ill as I was, I could not take this lying down. I sat up and croaked, “What about you?”

“Oh, I’ll come round to-morrow morning,” he replied, unscathed by my sarcasm.

When James came home I said I was a little better and would get up. “What did you think of Smithson?” he asked. “I am told he is a clever chap.”

“He’s a first-rate musician,” I said.

“What?”

“And Alpine climber.”

“How the deuce do you know?” asked James.

“He has been up the Markhorn, the Rotterham, the Bungleberg, the Sloshwald, all over Borenpest range; then in Wales, the Greater and smaller Bosh, the Gwaddear, the——”

James felt my pulse and passed his hand over my forehead.

“I wonder if I had better ask him to come round this evening?” he suggested.

“No,” I said, “don’t do that; in fact I was going to ask you to ring up and say I am so much better, that I think he had better not call to-morrow. He is fearfully busy, and if I am as well as this I want to go into town and get some soap—and a hatchet——”

James thought me extremely silly, and said the man was a deuced clever chap. I bided my time and had my reward later.

James got a bad chill, and I sent at once for Dr. Smithson. I provided him with a bag of the ordinary Castile soap, four thick towels, and my clinical thermometer, and left the room.

From the study downstairs I could hear the gentle monotonous flow of sound, and the hands of the clock moved peacefully on. Presently the stream of sound became fuller as it was joined by another and more familiar current. There was a prolonged duet. I thought of the Zonophone Opera Company in the last part of “Home to our Mountains”; the clock struck another hour, and I heard the door open. The first single stream of sound flowed down the stairs alone, and died away as the front door banged. I left James five minutes to get his breath, and then I went up.

“Well, dear,” I said, “I hope he is going to do you good. I suppose he does not want you to have many visitors, no talking——”

“The man’s a damn fool!” said James. “I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

“Did he take your temperature?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied James. “I wanted to put the thing under my arm—it’s the proper way to take a temperature—but he stuck it in my mouth and left it there an hour while he talked.”

“Did he? Then how did you manage to tell him what the treatment ought to be?”

“I told him what he didn’t seem to know—that in cases of inflammation what you want to do is——”

“To set up counter-irritation. I know. And so you each talked one against——”

“I want some soup,” interrupted James.

“Did you say soup or soap?” I asked.

“Soup, and as hot as possible.”

“Did he say you were to have hot things?”

“No; but it is obviously the thing to do.”

I turned, just as I was leaving the room, to say: “By the way, that’s a nice little water-colour sketch; do you——”

A leather slipper whizzed past my head and struck the door.

We have been in many parts of the world since then, and I have come across a great number of doctors. Many of them are amongst the dearest creatures on earth, but, like all our other loved ones, they have their little ways. Clara was ill once, and Dr. Smithson’s partner came. He explained everything to me with the greatest care.

“What I should get, Mrs. Molyneux, if I were you,” he said with great emphasis, “is a piece of bread. Get your cook to give you some nice bread, not new you know, stale—stale bread a couple of days old—and steep it in a little milk. Heat the milk (you have a saucepan I expect? that’s capital!)—get a nice saucepan, then, and I should wash it first—get it washed for you—your maid can do that—get it well washed with soap and hot water, that’s right, wash it, and then pour the milk in. You have the milk, say, in a jug—a china jug—quite so—no doubt it stands in the larder, precisely—well, you get your cook to give you that jug of milk, and pour a little into the saucepan and heat it; I shouldn’t boil it—no, I shouldn’t indeed. I should heat it and pour it very gently on the bread. Cut the bread, you know—get a knife and cut it; don’t crumb it—that would be too small—cut it into nice pieces and pour the milk over it—you’ll find the girl will do capitally on it.”

We all hear from doctors about the tendency of women to be faddy about their health. The truth of the matter is that every one likes to feel that something about them is of importance to some one, and not only to some one in their own family, but to the outside world. I used to feel that James was an interesting personality to many people; he expounded his views to them, his remarks were received with sympathy, and he got a great deal of patting on the back. I didn’t. Clara and Ruth thought me an eccentric, amiable creature of another breed from themselves, a sort of finish to the house in a way, an ultimate cat on whom to lay responsibility for failure and domestic sin; but they were not interested in me. My women friends were more interested in my habits than in my personal psychology; James was mainly interested in my interest in him. It was sometimes a sore temptation to have a disease, something that would make at least three men shake their heads and wonder what I was doing. They would find out then what an exceptional character I had—what courage, what wit under trying circumstances, what intelligence in household management (the vacant chair, the cold bacon, that would bring it all home to them). James would hurry home in the evening and read letters to me from people who were all interested; he would chat—not quite so long as I wanted, so that I could have the pleasant qualm of missing him—then he would be dispatched downstairs to horrid discomfort where his darling was not, and I should not have to change into a cold evening dress. At last I should fall asleep, comfortable, warm, and washed, knowing that I need not get up next morning and slave and worry in unrecognised monotony. Can anyone wonder that we do it?

But anyone will do as well as a doctor; a clergyman or a lover if they will take an interest in one’s soul. I believe that a chiropodist who was really concerned for one’s toes would fill a long-felt want. It is a curious fact that no one goes to a lawyer for sympathy, and yet why we suppose that abnormalities in our liver will make us interesting in the eyes of a doctor to whom livers are no treat, while we neglect our lawyers who will investigate disorders in our conduct for the moderate sum of six-and-eightpence, must remain a mystery.

Suppose that one of us went to a solicitor’s office and said: “Do you know, such a queer thing has happened to me! I went and burgled a poor old gentleman the other day—stole his watch and a lot of valuable plate—and outside I met a policeman, whom I drugged with chloroform on a handkerchief.” One imagines the solicitor gravely investigating the matter, finding no old gentleman, no watch, no stolen plate, and no policeman. He charges the usual fee, puts a pair of handcuffs on the lady, and tells her to come back in a fortnight and have them altered.

A doctor whom I love very much once made this startling remark to me: “You lead a very nice life for a lady.”

The words brought to my mind such pictures as I have never forgotten. Such vistas of flat, dull landscape stretched before me; such dead seas of sensible conversation; such mountains made of interminable molehills; such continents of golf links and tennis lawns. All the shores were strewn with correctly balanced account books and the débris of tea parties; the trees were hung with carefully selected and well-boiled legs of mutton; first-rate parlourmaids with slight moustaches who understood the telephone peeped from behind every bush, and family butchers mated on St. Valentine’s Day in the place of nightingales. The sky was made of chill-proof Jaeger, and the stars were all turned so that their light fell from behind and on the left side of the book. My thoughts took the form of a parody on Lear’s poem about the Jumblies:

Far from new, far from new, is the land where the ladies live;

Their tongues are long, and their thoughts are few, and their morals are like a sieve.

The last line will not bear analysis, but I think that the word “ladies” as he used it gave me an impression of something that lets the juice of life escape and retains only a few husks and skins. A very nice life for a lady seemed to me little more than a very nice tissue of habits, but then, no words mean quite the same thing to any two people.

CHAPTER VIII: CHILDREN

To anyone who has read the foregoing pages it will be evident that in starting housekeeping I was obsessed by two main ideas: one, that I was not to be a parasite; two, that I was to have the house to myself during certain portions of the day. Towards the end of my second year of marriage I began to pat myself on the back. But alas! It is this harmless exercise that seems to be more irritating to the gods than a thousand crimes.

Congratulate yourself upon anything, from the affection of a millionaire uncle down to a recent immunity from colds, and you are lost. I had won a position of—I won’t say mistress, but comparative director of my cook; the fish came at my call. Clara never finished one room at a time, though we had established as one rule of the game that, if I got to my sitting-room first, she could not begin dusting until she found all the things I had lost during the past twenty-four hours. While she did this I sat in another room and got on with my work, which had such an exasperating effect upon her nerves that after a time she forbore to follow me, however slowly and aggressively I walked upstairs.

As regards Mullins, the job gardener, I had got him into the habit of keeping entirely off the beds. He remained almost exclusively in the kitchen, where he did very little harm except to Ruth’s window-boxes, but she always said it was not much trouble to plant them again. She also said he was very useful in giving a hand with the knives, and in cleaning up. Asking Mullins to clean up anything seemed to me like inviting a baboon to tidy one’s wardrobe. In fact, the efficient female has scarcely spoken to me since she heard I allowed it. But then her life is a perpetual warfare. Leisure, self-indulgence, expense, moral latitude, wilfulness, tact, all these bright spirits, which are the making of any reasonable person’s day, fly before her as butterflies before a bird with a hungry family; it is a pretty sight.

But to return to my boast. I reviewed these achievements with my mind’s eye. I was proud, and there was an end of it. Within a few months I no longer knew the meaning of leisure, and I had become a parasite, living on the habits of my son Tom and his nurse. All the other people in the house preserved their independence. When it became a question who should make the barley-water, it was my time, not Ruth’s nor Clara’s nor the nurse’s, that was wasted. Ruth, without taking her eyes off the range, said it would be better for anything of the sort to be made in the nursery for fear there should be any mistake. Nurse, without interrupting her work, wanted to know who was to watch the pan while she was folding the things in the night-nursery. It cost me a valuable summer’s morning to find a place in the domestic machinery where that pan might sit and boil without disorganising the day’s work.

Suppose a railway company, having completed all their arrangements and got everything into working order, were to be suddenly informed that the Government had decided to run a picture palace in the middle of their head office! I thought of this, and decided that the difficulties of such a situation would be a mere Tit-Bits problem compared to my task of fitting in a nursery amongst Ruth, Clara, and Mullins.

I awoke regularly at three in the morning, to find my brain already up and about, sorting and rejecting answers to such questions as these: “Who is to wash the kitchen tea-things while Clara is amusing the baby when some one calls on nurse’s day out?” or “What about methylated spirits for boiling in the nursery? One cannot be always running to and fro from the kitchen.”

All day long I was pursued by this ceaseless boiling. “What about boiling the milk?” “The milk has boiled over.” “How shall we manage about boiling the clothes?” “I couldn’t get the water to boil.” “You couldn’t boil vegetables in that pan.” “It has to be brought to the boil before you can do anything.” “Boiled beef would come less in the long run.” When Ruth made this statement I suggested that beef could hardly come less than Jones’s mutton did, as that always made a point of never coming at all whenever it could, and if there was going to be a longer run than usual before we got it we had better order something else at once. She replied that in that case a nice piece of boiled fish would be as nice as anything, at which, being a little over-wrought, I wept, and Ruth was extremely kind, and said she would just pop the kettle on to boil. And all this time Tom lay like a log and did nothing. I was dependent upon him for everything. My engagements and my peace of mind hung upon how he felt, and what his Dr. Boswell of a nurse alleged that he thought. The first thing he did was to put an end to my letter-writing, the second was to break up my quiet evenings with games, his third enterprise, his masterpiece of iniquity, was to affiance Ruth to Mullins. At first I had been dense enough not to trace his hand in this calamity, but by and by it dawned upon me, and I questioned Ruth.

“Yes, m’m,” she replied, “things is not the same where there is children. You don’t seem to have the place to yourself in the same way as where there is only a lady.”

“I beg your pardon, Ruth,” I interrupted, “I didn’t quite catch what you said just then. Did you mean that master Tom takes too much upon himself? I don’t leave much to him, really.”

“Oh, no, m’m,” said Ruth, “not at all. It wasn’t that. But where there is children there is so much that has got to be done.”

“Yes,” I said thoughtfully, “I see your point. The same thing has occurred to me. He gives orders, doesn’t he? Is rather emphatic—is that what you meant?”

“Oh, well, m’m,” she replied, “of course you would give the orders just the same in the nursery as elsewhere. It’s your place, and I like to have you do it. I’m sure I should be the last to wish to direct. Indeed, I shouldn’t care to take any responsibility. But where there is children you can’t pick and choose what is to be done in the same way as where there is only a lady, can you, m’m? They have to be considered, don’t they?”

“Yes, Ruth,” I said, “I quite see your idea, and I think you are right to marry, you will feel much freer.”

But I had not the least intention that she should marry yet. Before the month was up she had decided that Mullins could hardly give her, as yet, the comforts to which she was accustomed, therefore the marriage was postponed. Still, I was conscious henceforth of the sword over my head, and it was all Tom’s fault.

He had already annoyed us all by not being born on the day originally fixed. He seemed preoccupied and in a hurry when he arrived, and of course the house was all upset. He made the best of things, waiting patiently on the sofa as if we had made the muddle, whereas, in fact, he was entirely to blame. Anne, two years later, behaved quite differently. She entered the date in her pocket-book, stopped glory-trailing when the clock struck, and came down buttoning on a pink skin several sizes too large.

I was sorry for Tom from the bottom of my heart. He had some natural dignity, which he needed in the presence of the women who preyed upon his person and searched mercilessly for his soul. They commented upon his personal appearance, his habits, and his human weaknesses, until I blushed for them and for him. They made him look absurd in the street, dressed in a shawl pinned tightly round him in the shape of a Virginia Ham, and a drunken-looking bonnet that lay cocked over one eye, leaving a draughty space at the back of the neck. When he laughed they either attributed it to a defective digestion, or put feeble jokes in his mouth.

“I’m a bad boy,” he says, Nurse Boswell interpreted, “and I’m going to kick my little heels, I am, and splash the soapy water in their faces!”

When he broke down and wept from sheer despair of ever making them understand, they took him to the blinding glare of a sunny window and threw him about until he was obliged to feign indisposition in order to make them put him down. He came to me about it sometimes, and I said: “All right, just lie down quietly, and I will say you are resting if they come.”

Just as he was comfortably settled a cheerful voice and clapping of hands was heard at the door, and in came nurse.

“Well, I never,” she exclaimed, “the idea! Who took him up? Now then, master, you just come with me and get dressed, and we’ll go off and get a mouthful of fresh air,” and out would come the rickety bonnet with the draught, and the Virginia Ham shawl, and off they went to harden themselves in a biting east wind. Tom told me afterwards that they met half a dozen women, all of whom went into the grossest personal details about his anatomy, his weight, and what he ate. The men tactfully avoided him, for which he thanked them. Those who had sons of their own knew about the bonnet and were sorry, whilst those who had not just saw him as a sort of egg, and put off his acquaintance until he should be in a fit state to be recognised.

Anne was quite different even as a baby. She humped her back and made faces at the ladies. Soon she and I combined to protect Tom in his encounters with the female sex. We exposed their folly and duplicity in a shameless way for fear lest they should take possession of his heart with their forged certificates of high-mindedness. That our claims to integrity were no better was not to the point. We, at least, loved him and should only mislead him for his good.

Tom, like the rest of his sex, was disposed to respect the authority against which he battled so long as he believed in it. He often said, “Yes, nurse,” quite respectfully, until Anne came. She soon settled that.

“You go and ask nurse if she loves you,” she said, “it’s all rot her saying the sweets are eaten up, they’re in her drawer.”

Of course Tom came back with a handful of chocolates to divide between himself and Anne, having left another illusion behind him.

We had great difficulty at first with nurses. Personally I cannot bear the popsy-wopsy nurse who is so popular with good mothers. When I was interviewing nurses for Tom, I brought him into the room and left him to decide. He soon weeded out the sheep from the goats. If the woman exclaimed “Bless him! where is he?” I caught Tom’s eye, and we said we were so sorry but we were already in treaty with some one whom we thought would be suitable. We dismissed dozens in that way for the same fault. I have been in other people’s nurseries, and seen children huddled and poked and blessed and poppeted into their clothes, marched off giggling, and brought back pouncing, their words overridden by ejaculations and clatter. Their upbringing reminds me of the comic pudding in the pantomime that is tossed up and beaten down, rolled in a dish with the cat, and thrown at the policeman, all to the accompaniment of a blaring orchestra and incessant conversation. I chose my present nurse on account of her opening remark to Tom. “Come here, boy,” she said, and Tom went, and has remained ever since.

There were a great number of things she “didn’t hold with,” but they were not matters I was tenacious about myself, neither was Tom, so we let them drop. Later on I found that a certain amount of compromise was effected, such as a pair of dried ears exchanged for a short story before the fire, or some real tea offered for a quiet afternoon with a scrap-book; that was on days when Tom had Satan in one pocket and an Angel of Goodness in the other. He was a simple creature, and but for Anne would have kept his illusions much longer than he did. He thought that when he gave up his time to help in laying the nursery tea, things got on quicker than they would otherwise have done; that it saved nurse trouble to hand the spoons to him one by one and put them straight afterwards. Anne found for herself an occupation that she preferred.

One of nurse’s articles of faith was that children should have their own place in the household and keep to it. There was a place for every one in her picture. The servants in the kitchen, the children in the nursery, the master in his study, and the mistress in the drawing-room, also pervading the whole house as, in a landscape, the sun and the blizzard pervade fields, lakes, woods, and mountains alike. To have the children the centre of general attention or running about the house would have seemed to her as revolutionary as trees planted on a dinner-table or poultry at large on a cricket-field. Tom’s instincts led him to fall very easily into his place in the domestic world. He was always a mere nut in a vast mechanism whose existence he dimly apprehended; he was of importance inasmuch as the great machinery might go out of gear for want of the trustworthy service of the least of its parts. Anne thought of herself—so far as she thought at all—as a spark from a divine fire, sent to illumine the musty darkness in which parents, domestic servants, visitors, and tradesmen had hitherto lived. This divine spark must be kept alive. She encouraged us all to blow, and herself pirouetted helpfully in the draught of our exertions. Nurse never devised things for the children to do, any more than the nervous system of the body devises occupations for the other parts. I understand that it allows some activities to pass unnoticed, inhibits others, and encourages some, but it does not suggest much. We all had our work to do, and when nurse was out of order, whether through ill-health or disapproval, strange distempers appeared in our conduct. Tom and Anne quarrelled. Ruth took to sending up twice a week “that sloppy hotpot which I can’t think is good for the children.” Clara left the clean things from the wash downstairs, “getting in all the way of the dust, and I with the stockings yet to darn.” Even the fish surpassed itself in evil-doing. Of course it “never came,” we were used to that; but on these fatal occasions it was full of bones when it did come, and “had nothing on it.”

The children never got on with the efficient female, Tom the least of the two, owing to his illusions. Not that he disliked her, he was always patient with women, and prepared to think they were doing their best (until Anne explained to him just what they were doing), but the efficient female got in his way, and made him hot. She brought him occupations when he was already busy with string. They were always in boxes labelled “The Young So-and-so” (none of them people whom he liked to be). He never wanted to be a young designer or penman or weaver. If she had brought materials for the young plumber—a pound of lead for instance, or that delightful gas thing on a stick that makes a flame when you blow—it would not have been so bad; he could have mended the hole in nurse’s boot, or stopped up the place under the coal-scuttle where the mouse came. The efficient female believed in Madame Montessori’s Kindergarten apparatus in the same spirit as the poor believe in the efficacy of a “bottle from the doctor’s.” She brought us puzzles over which we all tore our hair in the evenings. Matching colours became an obsession, and James began to button and unbutton his waistcoat at dinner until I had to speak to him on account of Clara. Finally nurse came to the rescue, as usual, and inhibited our desire to cultivate our senses. She complained that Tom had awakened her by trying to fit each of his fingers successively into her open mouth, and that he was quite feverish because none of them fitted exactly. The efficient female told me what a great success the system had been with her children; but the truth is that I do not like her children. They have their hair tied in an unbecoming way, they can tell you the names of all the flowers in the garden—even the flowering shrubs which no decent person ever remembers—they know what makes the hen lay eggs, and why their own tears are salt. When I was young, we knew less about ourselves and more about other people. We ranged over the whole field of history, picking out gems of character here and there. Quintus Curtius, Noah, Henry the Eighth and his six wives, Napoleon in the retreat from Moscow (there was a picture of it in the nursery, with snow, and vultures, and corpses lying across broken cannon), Marius amongst the ruins of Carthage, the Queen of Sheba, King Alfred, Livingstone, Cardinal Wolsey. We remembered none of their dates, neither was their history correlated with other subjects, but we shall have to mix them up in heaven. So why not now? One has friends of various ages, yet it never occurs to me to mention: “Of course you were born before the death of Gladstone, were you not? I want to introduce Mrs. Ingram, born 1856, contemporary with Mrs. Maybrick, the famous poisoner; in politics, Churchill, Chamberlain, and Balfour; science, Marconi and the close of the reign of Lister; saw the dawn of motor-cars, and remembers the introduction of the telephone.” Or, “Miss Black, born shortly before the accession of Lloyd George, witnessed the ascent of the first aeroplane, and took a prominent part in the famous raid by Suffragettes on the House of Commons.” A correlated introduction would, I imagine, be made like this: “Miss Black, a descendant of the Black Prince, has crossed the Black Sea twice, wears black stockings, and is interested in nigger minstrelsy.”

My whole sympathy is with that little boy who, having learned the anatomy of the snowdrop, washed-in the snowdrop in bold outline, modelled the snowdrop, sung a song about the snowdrop, found on the map the different countries where it grew, and learned the best of those passages in literature where it is mentioned, at last flung the detestable little flower to the ground, exclaiming heartily, “Damn the snowdrop!”

CHAPTER IX: THE SCHOOLROOM

When Tom was seven and Anne nine, I decided to engage a governess. I had never lost the feeling of—shall we call it respect—that I had felt for my own governess; one does not lose a feeling like respect in ten years. Therefore, when I found myself interviewing a governess for some one else, I felt rather like a sheep engaging a butcher. You can picture the scene. A small office adjoining the shambles. The sheep, arrayed in all the panoply of its natural wool unshorn for many years, the place where the branded mark had been covered with a self-possessed growth, seated at a small table writing. The pen a fancy article in the humorous disguise of a knife.

“Well, Mr. Jones,” says the trembling, bleating voice. “Do you kill yourself, or do you purchase the—er—the carcasses? You were in your last shop how many years? Precisely—very painful—thank you. You left on account of an outbreak of anthrax amongst the lambs—quite so. Yes, you would have the dip to yourself after ten o’clock. The slaughter-house is next door to your room, and there is a convenient tannery within ten minutes’ walk kept by an excellent ogre with moderate charges; we are devoted to him. I will send the cart to the station for you on Tuesday, and you will be able to begin your rounds at once.”

I lost this feeling after I had been to one or two agencies, and I felt instead like the man with a whip, who took over the plantation from the kind master in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Innocent old ladies with white wool on their heads and Bibles in their pockets came to offer their services as educational drudges, prepared to expose their pathetic cashmere backs to the lash of childish criticism and motherly arrogance. I wanted to engage them all just to ensure their being out of reach of some women I knew. I would then leave them my house, and fly with Tom and Anne to some desert island where we never need employ anyone or improve our minds again.

But it was impossible to engage them all, so I tossed up in the end between two; “heads,” Miss Mathers, “tails,” Miss Cook, and Miss Mathers had it. Miss Cook was young and modern, very pretty and charming, with all the drawbacks of a boy and a few of his advantages. I knew the children would get on with her, but I had a secret fear that she would think me “quaint,” and perhaps develop an enthusiasm for my vices, which would have bothered me. Miss Mathers was above all things a gentlewoman, which I thought would be good for Anne because I was not. She liked refinement and regular hours, and, especially, her attitude towards “gentlemen” was such a delight to me.

“Have you ever had brothers, Miss Mathers?” I asked her once, to which she replied: “Oh, yes, I have a brother I am extremely fond of; he is a most delightful man, so honest, generous, and witty. We have been the greatest of friends ever since our childhood.”

“But, then, surely, you must have seen him in his shirt-sleeves sometimes,” I suggested, “you know he is a human being and not a strange animal. Didn’t you ever sit on his knee?”

“No, Mrs. Molyneux,” she said after some thought, “I don’t remember ever doing so; I doubt whether he would have cared for it. But, of course, if anything of the kind had been necessary I should not have hesitated.”

I found great tonic properties in Miss Mathers’ conversation, for I had never seen men and women separated in the way she did it. It made exquisitely amusing so much in our social life that had been dull before. To her mind, so far as I understand, a man’s position in the scheme of creation is like that of the architect when a house is to be built. The only person who really matters is the lady who lives in the house when it is complete. The architect (it is disagreeable of course to have to employ one) merely sees that it is there. He is the man who does all the necessary and unpleasant part, what Miss Mathers called in every branch of art “the mechanical part.” I have heard her say of a picture that the “mechanical part was very nicely done.” I think her opinion of James was high, inasmuch as she considered his share in the establishment—the mechanical part—was very nicely done. That is, there was enough money to live on, the servants were well looked after, his children healthy, affectionate, and not too numerous.

But, while I was looked upon as a fellow-creature, James was to her a thing as utterly remote as the driver of a train in which she might be travelling, or, as I said, the architect of our house or the Archbishop of Canterbury. No, I think that is wrong. The Archbishop would be thought more human being a clergyman, because clergymen are almost like ladies they are so sensible—we will say, rather, the Pope, because being a Roman Catholic he was, of course, not a clergyman, though no doubt an excellent man according to his lights.

Miss Mathers was full of pleasant surprises. I found that she enjoyed music-halls, approved of divorce (which she called a capital arrangement if two people could not agree), and disliked the idea of Women’s Suffrage. I pointed out that she was inconsistent in approving of divorce notwithstanding her religious principles, and she explained her reasons over some hot buttered toast before retiring to bed.

“My brother divorced his wife,” she said, “for reasons which are warranted by Scripture, and I hold him to be in the right. It was far better than if he had compelled her to live with him under false pretences of affection.”

“But if she ran away,” I suggested.

“In that case,” said Miss Mathers, “she would have continued to bear his name, and would therefore have been living in open sin. My brother, by taking the course he did, gave her the opportunity to retrieve her character by becoming respectably married. The Church is perfectly right in refusing to sanction divorce, because persons who place themselves in such a position ought to be outside the pale of religion, but I think the law acts wisely in providing for legitimate separation.”

On another buttered toast night I asked her why she disliked Women’s Suffrage. If I had had any knowledge of character I might have guessed her reason, but Miss Mathers was not like anyone I had met before.

“My dear Mrs. Molyneux,” she said, “the poet Byron has most truly observed that

‘Man’s love is of his life a thing apart;

’Tis woman’s whole existence.’

It is true that it does not fall to the lot of all of us to love in that sense, but the possibility can never be lost sight of. What could you conceive more ludicrous and unsuitable than that the whole existence of one of our rulers should be merged in passionate feelings for a fellow-creature? Public life demands whole-hearted devotion to the State.”

“But great statesmen often fall dreadfully in love,” I said.