Part 3

Cook comes rushing up. “Sorry to have kept you, m’m,” she says, “but I had to chop a few sticks for the kettle; the fire had gone that low. Now, master, come to me and we’ll ride-a-cock-horse.”

There is nothing for it. Tommy’s interest is on one side, a long life of seclusion in the asylum on the other. Tommy must go to the wall.

“I think I wouldn’t move him about, Jane,” you say. “If you will read to him and give him his tea he will be quite happy.” Then you escape with a heart of lead and ears of granite, and lay you down once more. You get hot and cold alternately as occasional faint screams reach you from the nursery. The coals fall, one by one, lower in the grate. The fire is nearly out. You see the cold, grey trees waving outside the window. The hot-bottle got chilled while you were in the nursery. The only warm thing in the room is your pillow which is boiling----

Pop-op-op-op-bang!

That is how Maggie always announces her presence. She staggers into the cold twilight, bearing an immense tray with tea sufficient for a school feast, and all the other items on her long menu are stale and tasteless. The butter is so shivering with cold that it is only able to clutch a few crumbs out of the bread, and these lie petrified on its chilly flakes. The sandwiches are too small, dry besides, and the jam inside them is an old enemy. The cake is last week’s: one of Jane’s failures, which, as she says, “seems to hang on a long time.” Maggie sweeps your book, your lamp, and everything you are likely to want off the table, and plants her horrid collection of uneatables in their place, lights a flaring gas immediately in front of your eyes and prepares to depart. “Maggie,” you say (how hatefully irksome it is to ask for the obvious when one is ill), “would you please draw the blinds, and make up the fire, and put out that gas, and bring me back my lamp and books.”

Oh, why did you ever let her go near the grate? It would have been chilly work making up the fire yourself, but next time--a thousand times Yes.

* * * * *

Banger, banger, banger, racker, racker, racker, PONG! racker, racker, racker, rack, rack, rack, PONG! PONG!! PONG!!! Your spinal cord splits in sympathy with the brave lump of coal which has held out so long against Maggie’s invincible poker, and which now retreats in a million fragments to the other end of the room. Shovel, ovel, ovel, ovel--shovel, ovel, ov---- “Surely that is enough, Maggie; you will make it so black,” you venture at last.

Down come the blinds with a sickening rattle, and you are left to take what comfort you can from the cold, strong tea (she has forgotten the hot water and the bell is at the other end of the room), the shivering butter, and the stern, unpopular cake. These sit on like unwelcome guests, hour after hour. There is no room for anything else on the table, and there they remain; that horrible cake staring into the fire, just like the kind of person who sits on and on after tea, and breaks your marked silence by asking, “Have you heard anything from Annie lately?” and futilities of that sort. The butter, perhaps, is prepared to leave, and says, “Well, we ought to be getting home, I suppose; we’ve paid you quite a visitation.” But the cake takes no notice whatever, and the sandwiches stand about on the tray, fingering things and asking, “That’s new, isn’t it? Who gave it you?” and so on. If Maggie had had the intuition of a louse she would have announced their cab--I mean she would have carried them away--ages and ages ago.

It is impossible to read with the cake looking like that. You doze--a feverish, thirsty doze. Dinner will have to be very tactfully presented. You wonder whether Jane will have thought of sweetbread or what. The bed is very crumby. Can that odious cake having been leaning over us to see whether we were asleep, whispering, perhaps, “Well, good-bye then, I won’t disturb you?” Probably the sandwiches giggled and said, “Don’t get up, we can let ourselves out.” The sandwiches’ names are Catherine and Agnes, and one is thirty-seven and the other thirty-one; both are unmarried and very fond of us.

* * * * *

Hang the cake! Why couldn’t it go when it saw we were asleep, without spilling those wretched crumbs. One is just in the small of our back and another is under our left leg. How hot the bed is!

* * * * *

Pop-op-op-bang! Crash!

The door-handle all but went through the looking-glass that time. Maggie pushes the door gently after her with her leg as she comes in.

“Shall I put it on the bed, m’m?”

You start up in a fright. The cake has not gone after all; it is still there, looking very hard and seedy and disapproving. And there are those silly sandwiches looking with disdain on the new tray with the new batch of arrivals. But their disdain is nothing to your disgust. Sweetbread, did you say? “It’s stewed steak, m’m,” says Maggie, “won’t you have any?”

Stewed steak! Grey, heavy, steaming, thick, nutritious, and garnished with two potatoes, very blue about the lips, and an ample supply of cabbage! “Take it away at once, please,” you say in trembling tones, “and that horrible tea too. I don’t want anything,” you add, deeply injured.

“There’s roly-poly pudding, m’m, and macaroni cheese,” says Maggie; “will you have both?”

You are very hot by the time she quite understands. The crumbs in the bed are like living coals, and Maggie was in such a hurry to get away that she did not notice the fire. You get up and remake the bed, fetch hot water, wash, and return to bed shivering. Then a kind and anxious husband, with a peculiarly pungent cigar, comes up and reports that the macaroni cheese is excellent, won’t you have some?

You drop into a sound sleep at about ten, which is the hour Maggie selects to “do” the washstand and tidy the room. If any one has not the experience or the imagination to supply details of the subdued clatter of soap-dishes and glasses, varied by heavy falls of coal and hair-brushes, or of the piercing squeak of each drawer as it opens and shuts, neither will they realize the significance of a basin-cloth left on the floor just where it catches the eye. At about eleven you probably rise, seize its clammy edge between your finger and thumb, and fling it into the passage. After this you return to the cold bottle and the hot crumbs that were not all brushed out when you remade the bed.

Morning dawns brightly with the prospect of a pleasant day of peace and leisure. You make your own bed, and perform an elaborate toilet between early tea and breakfast, so that by eight o’clock you are sitting up, good and happy, waiting for a lightly boiled egg. At eight-fifteen an agitated husband enters, looking at his watch, and says he will just go down and hurry them up. Punctuality is your especial fad, and unpunctuality is Maggie’s, so by eight-thirty you are already warm with the heat of battle. You rehearse your displeasure beforehand. Biting sarcasms, haunting home truths, pungent, pathetic appeals to humanity and reason are prepared by your active brain, already aglow with the necessity for being “after” every dratted person in the house if any hanged thing is to get done.

At half-past eight the door is flung open with the inevitable crash, and reason and eloquence give place to the stronger spirits of fear and gratitude. You mentally apologize to Maggie for all the things you were going to say. Your heart is wrung when you see her staggering under a load of silver jugs and entrée dishes, two loaves, a ham, and five plates with knives and forks to match.

“I am sorry the master was obliged to complain about breakfast being late, m’m,” says Maggie, looking like a thunderstorm with heart disease. She disposes the feast all over your room, plates on the top of your clothes, two entrée dishes at your feet (just where you can’t reach them without spilling the tea), and the ham on the washstand. “I had to get the extra dishes out of the plate chest,” pursues Maggie reproachfully, “and they were all to polish before I could take them down to the kitchen.”

To explain just then the ideal breakfast in bed would involve “suiting yourself” in a month, or, more probably, recantation, explanations, tears, emotions, and all sorts of luxuries in which you are unwilling to indulge Maggie at the moment, so you decide to wait for more settled weather. At ten o’clock the entrée dishes are still weighing heavily on your toes, you have heard tradesmen’s boys come and go (repeated falls of plaster from the ceiling and sudden shocks to your frame have betrayed their several applications to the bell), but cook has had no orders and it is certain that she will not act without them. This means that nothing will arrive in time for anything throughout the day, and the master will consult his watch, and your temperature will rise from nervous apprehension before every meal. Also, you would like your room tidied. Where have all those miserable women gone? They seem to disappear like worms into the sand and all is silent as the grave. You tumble out of bed again and go to the bell. If the tradesmen’s boys can raise the dead and restore the deaf to hearing, shall our efforts not be equally blessed? At last you get hold of the cook. She had not come up for fear of disturbing you. She has no ideas at all about food. “Would you fancy some stewed steak for lunch? There doesn’t seem to be much else to have, without you have the hot-pot--oh yes, of course there is the fish if you care for that; would it be substantial enough for the master? Oh, beg pardon, she understood for lunch and dinner both--quite so. Would master fancy roly-poly pudding and macaroni cheese? Yes, he had them last night, but she thought he liked them better than anything else--and there didn’t seem to be much else at this time of year, without you went to the expense of fruit----”

“Now I suppose,” you reflect afterwards, “that that ass of a doctor would say, why don’t I order what I like for myself. Could Cleopatra have had the energy to order anything but an asp for herself after she had ‘seen about’ the figs for the rest of the household?”

Clara has now been up and dusted under the bed. Does any happy, hearty, healthy person know what this means? If not, let him take the next time when he is tired and in a temper, and let him lie on two chairs and get a child to joggle all the legs of them in turn.

* * * * *

You doze.

* * * * *

Pop-op-op-op-BANG!

“If you please’m, Mrs. Jameson has rung up to say, could you lunch with her to-day at one-thirty?”

“I suppose you didn’t think of telling her I was in bed?” you suggest.

“No, m’m, I thought you might wish to speak to her yourself.”

* * * * *

You doze.

* * * * *

Pop----pop (very gently). Jane enters.

“Please’m, did you telephone for the fish?”

Any amateur can supply the answer to this question.

* * * * *

You sleep.

* * * * *

Pop-op-op-op-BANG!

You were so sound asleep that you could only catch the concluding words of Maggie’s sentence: “... and she thought, m’m, perhaps you’d like to look at the pipe where it’s burst.”

(A few minutes later) “... nor you don’t wish to see the man?”

“I think not, thank you. I could draw him with my eyes shut.”

“Would you wish me to telephone or will you?”

“!!!!--and while you are about it, Maggie, you might bring some coal.”

She brings it in three-quarters of an hour, when you have got nicely off to sleep again, and before a fresh piece of coal can be put on the fire the grate has to be raked completely to pieces and resolved into its original elements of several bars and some other pieces of very resonant iron.

Naturally lunch was late. You knew it would be, and Jane was very sorry but she had forgotten to order the cream. After lunch there was an awful row with the baby. He was left alone while nurse went down to get some drinking water, and he fell off his chair--there has to be some one always on the spot with children. You can’t turn your back a minute, etc.

Probably the doctor called at tea-time and asked why you were up, and it is improbable in the extreme that he took in one word of your lucid explanation of the facts. He would tell you, if you asked him, that women make difficulties, and that he himself once had a week in bed and that everything went on just as usual. But then doctors don’t mind the room not being “done,” and their daily work doesn’t behave like a sucking-kid after its mother. It stays where it is until its master comes to fetch it, and if it isn’t done, well then, it just isn’t, and that’s all about it.

_CHAPTER VI_: THE “WHAT THE DEVIL?” CLUB

“It wouldn’t be a bad plan, dear,” Mrs. Henry once said sarcastically to her husband, “if you were to start a ‘What the devil?’ club; you use the expression so frequently.” The club was never founded, of course, but it wouldn’t have been at all a bad plan. It would tend to clear the mind. For instance, say that at breakfast the eggs were a little underdone. If instead of exclaiming, “What the devil has cook been about?” you reflect, “What the devil does it matter whether these eggs stick together in the shell or pour over the edge? The fact that the eggs are there, and are more or less edible is enough for me,” just think of the different complexion it would put on the whole affair. But in fact it wouldn’t do, because different people have such different ideas about what they describe as “the things that matter.” The last time I called on Mrs. Henry she seemed very pleased about having had this idea of the club, and was quite excited at having used the word “devil.” She had a brother staying with her at the time, and I think it was partly his robust influence that made her break out and be so racy.

“Henry’s perfectly right, Maria, though he doesn’t know it,” said this brother. “There must be at least fifty occasions a day for saying ‘What the devil?’ in your house.”

“Whatever do you mean, William?” said Mrs. Henry indulgently. He is her favourite brother.

“I’ll show you as we go along,” he answered, “I dare say the opportunities will turn up.”

“I can’t believe that France will go to war,” observed Mrs. Henry a little later.

“What the devil does that matter?” replied William. “I beg your pardon, Maria, but it was your own idea. You see it is really of no consequence whether you believe it or not; it won’t alter the fact.”

“Oh, of course, if you look at it like that, William,” said Mrs. Henry a little huffily, “it doesn’t matter what you believe. You might apply your theory to anything.”

William said calmly, “It doesn’t matter, except that your beliefs affect your character; they don’t affect facts.”

“In that case, I suppose you wouldn’t have sided with Mr. Sprigger who used to be curate here. He left the Church of England because he couldn’t bring himself to believe the story of John the Baptist and the locusts. He had had a medical training to begin with, as he thought of being a doctor, and he was convinced that some particular part of the locust--I forget which it was exactly--would have been absolutely impossible to digest.”

“There you are!” said William. “Either John digested those locusts or he didn’t. You can’t possibly alter the fact anyhow, and thinking about them was bad for Mr. Sprigger, because it got him into the habit of taking a lawyer’s view of life; arguing for the argument’s sake.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Mrs. Henry coldly.

“Well, a lawyer will argue that a man is guilty or not guilty, whichever way he is paid to, won’t he?” said William. “He doesn’t want to get at the facts; indeed, he refuses to be told sometimes for fear the knowledge should bias his mind. Now Sprigger can’t get at his facts, which is the same as if he wouldn’t, and so he can only be arguing for argument’s sake, and he will never develop his soul in that way.”

“Mr. William,” I was moved to suggest later, “if I put my foot through that picture you have been working at this morning, would you say, ‘what the devil did it matter?’”

“No, certainly not, because it would matter.”

“Of course it would be very annoying,” said Mrs. Henry, “but I can’t see, myself, that it would matter more than that Mr. Sprigger’s beliefs should be undermined. You talk about facts, but Henry said only the other day, that your pictures were misrepresentations of fact.”

“Did he?” said William. “I’ll have to talk that over with him when he comes in. Anyhow, I don’t see what the devil it matters what Henry or anybody else thinks about my pictures so long as they don’t put their feet through them. They are definite creations--facts.”

“Henry says not,” she insisted. Henry came in just then and they began all over again.

“Well, now, about babies----” William was still pursuing his argument when we went in to dinner.

“Dear me, William,” said Mrs. Henry tightly. William waved her aside with his knife. “Now I think, for my part,” he said in loud, burly tones, “that it doesn’t matter who the father is----”

“You needn’t wait, Janet, we’ll ring,” said Mrs. Henry.

William paid the girl the graceful compliment of waiting until the door closed behind her, and then added, “So long as the thing is a fact, it doesn’t matter a hang how it became so. The question is, there’s a baby; that’s all that is of interest to us, isn’t it, so long as it is strong and well?”

“Henry, dear, do you care for more beetroot?” said his wife, and then there was silence.

“Then there’s another silly thing you women do to confound issues and obscure points,” continued William. “When some one comes to the place--some poor girl newly married--and you are asked to call on her, the first thing you ask is, ‘And--er--who _was_ she?’ Now what the devil does it matter who she was? Who _is_ she? you might perhaps ask if you want to know, though it is not of much importance. All you want to find out, to my thinking, is just this: _is_ she, or is she _not_?”

“Is she, or is she not _what_, William?” his sister asked almost impatiently. “I don’t follow you.”

“Good Lord! is she _what_! That’s just it. Is she _anything_, my dear girl; is she anything with human blood, and bones, and a presentable face in front of it, or is she simply a mass of slowly decaying matter, endowed with the gift of moving from one chair to another? That’s the very thing I want to know.”

“What girl in particular were you speaking of, William?” said Mrs. Henry with forced patience. “If I know to whom you refer, perhaps I shall be able to tell you whether she is--what did you say? decaying? or not. Cheese, Henry?”

We were destined to see a good deal of William. He was trying to run some scheme or other in the neighbourhood, and he went into rooms for a time. He was asked out a good deal at first, but not so much later on. To me he became a sort of Eulenspiegel, and I delighted to hear of his progress in the town. But I believe that was not the light in which he regarded himself; he quite intended to be a serious reformer. One good thing he did; he stimulated industry in the neighbourhood. Ladies almost invariably took up a piece of knitting or work of some kind when he came near them, and men would go off to their studies, saying, “I’ll leave you to have a chat with my wife while I just finish a bit of work.” It interested him more than anything to find out what were the various landmarks in their past lives to which other people attached importance. There were some, he discovered, who thought that what they called “sound principles” were of importance, and when he pressed them to describe by what process a principle became sound, they nearly always said that it was sound if the best men held it. It took him many an hour’s hard work running the old ladies of Millport to ground on the point who the best men were. They dodged and doubled, burrowed and soared, fluttering, on to fences, which gave way under them when they sat for a moment to take breath. They took sanctuary in all sorts of funny little temples, which they had built, from time to time, of precepts gathered here and there. I remember seeing Mrs. Beehive flee, breathless, into one of these, and remain for a long time, while William stood, so to speak, baying at the door. It was the temple of “Woman being a good influence over man.”

“Now, seriously,” I heard William say, “do you think that you are a good influence for your husband to have about him? Remember, he is a very shrewd man, and knows what he is about.”

Mrs. Beehive for the moment completely filled the temple, she swelled so much as she replied, “I hope, indeed, that I am, Mr.--er--”

“Why? in what way?” demanded deep-throated William.

“It is not for me to describe in what way,” answered Mrs. Beehive, “but there are many ways. Perhaps you will find out some day for yourself when you are married!” she added, artfully drawing another bolt across the door.

He went round to the back of the temple and shouted through the window, “Isn’t it more likely that the influence of the Almighty keeps your husband friendly with you, rather than that your influence keeps him friendly with the Almighty? Not of course that it matters either way; the result is the same. He is a good honest man. But it is worth getting at the facts.”

“Wait till you are married,” repeated Mrs. Beehive shrilly, and I have no doubt that soon he had her fluttering before him once more, but I was obliged to leave them.

“What the devil do these people think they are doing, leading the moral tone of the town?” he once said to Mrs. Henry. “Women who don’t understand the rudiments of morality.”

“Well, I am sure the men are no better, William,” said poor Mrs. Henry, who, as I have said, really admires her brother, and would like her sex to stand well with him.

“They are better in this way,” observed William, “that they treat their own morals as what they are, manners suitable and appropriate to the society in which they live; they don’t take them seriously as you do, as if they were ordained by Divine inspiration.”

“Do you mean to say that Henry, for instance, is not in earnest in the things which he believes to be right?” said Mrs. Henry, indignant at last. “Really, William, I can’t make you out at all.”

“Henry’s all right,” said William, “leave him out of it. What I mean is that when I see that woman, Beehive, for instance----”

“Oh, William, do be careful. I feel sure they can hear in the pantry----”

“That woman, Beehive, I repeat,” pursued William, “walking about and pretending that she knows for certain that it is wrong for other people to keep later hours and to use more varied language than she herself cares to do, I feel that I must somehow compel her to look at the facts, and to justify the high moral position she has usurped, before I can allow her to remain seated there unchallenged.”

William’s progress through the town was as easily marked as that of a tornado. I could always track him by a glance at the faces of people in the streets. Where he had passed there would inevitably be one or more injured-looking persons, readjusting their expressions and muttering indignantly to themselves. Sometimes a knot of women would be seen gibbering at a street corner, their individual disorders gathering them together by a natural process like that which goes to form an abscess. And when Mrs. Beehive was so far off as to be scarcely visible to the naked eye, I could tell by the angle at which she rolled whether or no she had fallen in with William.