Part 8

All men, I imagine, have an interest of some kind in the locality in which they live. My interest in Smeary Street is entirely associated with my daily meals, which are publicly paraded all day long on the pavement. In explanation of this rather original course of proceeding, I must mention that I am ordered to eat "little and often," and must add, that I cannot obey the direction if the food is cooked on the premises in which I live, because I have had the misfortune to look down certain underground stairs and to discover that in the lowest depth of dirt, which I take to be the stairs themselves, there is a lower deep still, which is the kitchen at the bottom of them. Under these peculiar circumstances, I am reduced to appeal for nourishment and cleanliness in combination, to the tender mercies (and kitchen) of the friends in my neighbourhood, to whom I have alluded at the outset of this narrative. They commiserate and help me with the readiest kindness. Devoted messengers, laden with light food, pass and repass all day long between their house and my bedroom. The dulness of Smeary Street is enlivened by perpetual snacks carried in public procession. The eyes of my opposite neighbours, staring out of window, and not looking as if they cared about my being ill, are regaled from morning to night by passing dishes and basins, which go westward full and steaming, and return eastward eloquently empty. My neighbourhood knows when I dine, and can smell out, if it pleases, what I have for dinner. The early housemaid kneeling on the doorstep, can stay her scrubbing hand and turn her pensive head and scan my simple breakfast, before I know what it will be myself. The mid-day idler, lounging along Smeary Street, is often sweetly reminded of his own luncheon by meeting mine. Friends who knock at my door may smell my dinner behind them, and know how I am keeping up my stamina, before they have had time to inquire after my health. My supper makes the outer darkness savoury as the evening closes in; and my empty dishes startle the gathering silence with convivial clatter as they wend on their homeward way the last thing at night.

Is there no dark side to this bright picture? Is there never any hitch in these friendly arrangements for feeding me in the cleanest way, on the most appetising diet? Yes--there is a hitch. Will you give it a name? I will. Its name is Mrs. Glutch.

It is, I am well aware, only to be expected that my landlady should resent the tacit condemnation of her cleanliness and cookery implied in the dietary arrangements which I have made with my friends. If she would only express her sense of offence by sulking or flying into a passion, I should not complain; for in the first case supposed, I might get the better of her by noticing nothing, and, in the second, I might hope, in course of time, to smooth her down by soft answers and polite prevarications. But the means she actually takes of punishing me for my too acute sense of the dirtiness of her kitchen, are of such a diabolically ingenious nature, and involve such a continuous series of small persecutions, that I am rendered, from first to last, quite powerless to oppose her. Shall I describe her plan of annoyance? I _must_ describe it--I must return to my one prohibited topic (as I foreboded I should) in spite of myself.

Mrs. Glutch, then, instead of visiting her wrath on me, or my food, or my friends, or my friends' messengers, avenges herself entirely on their tray-cloths and dishes. She does not tear the first nor break the second--for that would be only a simple and primitive system of persecution--but she smuggles them, one by one, out of my room, and merges them inextricably with her own property, in the grimy regions of the kitchen. She has a power of invisibly secreting the largest pie-dishes, and the most voluminous cloths, under my very eyes, which I can compare to nothing but sleight of hand. Every morning I see table utensils which my friends lend me, ranged ready to go back, in my own room. Every evening, when they are wanted, I find that some of them are missing, and that my landlady is even more surprised by that circumstance than I am myself. If my friends' servant ventures to say, in her presence, that the cook wants her yesterday's tray-cloth, and if I refer him to Mrs. Glutch, the immoveable woman only sniffs, tosses her head, and "wonders how the young man can have demeaned himself by bringing her such a peremptory message." If I try on my own sole responsibility to recover the missing property, she lets me see, by her manner at the outset, that she thinks I suspect her of stealing it. If I take no notice of this manœuvre, and innocently persist in asking additional questions about the missing object, the following is a sample of the kind of dialogue that is sure to pass between us:--

"I think, Mrs. Glutch"----

"Yes, sir!"

"I think one of my friends' large pudding-basins has gone down-stairs."

"Really, now, sir? A large pudding-basin? No: I think not."

"But I can't find it up here, and it is wanted back."

"Naturally, sir."

"I put it on the drawers, Mrs. Glutch, ready to go back, last night."

"Did you, indeed, sir?"

"Perhaps the servant took it down-stairs to clean it?"

"Not at all likely, sir. If you will please to remember, you told her last Monday evening--or, no, I beg pardon--last Tuesday morning, that your friends cleaned up their own dishes, and that their things was not to be touched."

"Perhaps you took it down-stairs then yourself, Mrs. Glutch, by mistake?"

"I, sir! I didn't. I couldn't. Why should I? I think you said a large pudding-basin, sir?"

"Yes, I did say so."

"I have ten large pudding-basins of my own, sir."

"I am very glad to hear it. Will you be so good as to look among them, and see if my friends' basin has not got mixed up with your crockery?"

Mrs. Glutch turns very red in the face, slowly scratches her muscular arms, as if she felt a sense of pugilistic irritation in them, looks at me steadily with a pair of glaring eyes, and leaves the room at the slowest possible pace. I wait and ring--wait and ring--wait and ring. After the third waiting and the third ringing, she reappears, redder of face and slower of march than before, with the missing article of property held out before her at arm's length.

"I beg pardon, sir," she says, "but is this anything like your friends' large pudding-basin?"

"That is the basin itself, Mrs. Glutch."

"Really, now, sir? Well, as you seem so positive, it isn't for me to contradict you. But I hope I shall give no offence if I mention that I had ten large pudding-basins of my own, and that I miss one of them."

With that last dexterous turn of speech, she gives up the basin with the air of a high-minded woman, who will resign her own property rather than expose herself to the injurious doubts of a morbidly suspicious man. When I add that the little scene just described takes place between us nearly every day, the reader will admit that, although Mrs. Glutch cannot prevent me from enjoying on her dirty premises the contraband luxury of a clean dinner, she can at least go great lengths towards accomplishing the secondary annoyance of preventing me from digesting it.

I have hinted at a third personage in the shape of a servant, in my report of the foregoing dialogue; and I have previously alluded to myself (in paving the way for the introduction of my landlady), as extending my studies of human character, in my London lodging, to those forlorn members of the population called maids-of-all-work. The maids--I use the plural number advisedly--present themselves to me to be studied, as apprentices to the hard business of service, under the matronly superintendence of Mrs. Glutch. The succession of them is brisk enough to keep all the attention I can withdraw from my landlady constantly employed in investigating their peculiarities. By the time I have been three weeks in Smeary Street, I have had three maids-of-all-work, to study--a new servant for each week! In reviewing the three individually before the reader, I must be allowed to distinguish them by numbers instead of names. Mrs. Glutch screams at them all indiscriminately by the name of Mary, just as she would scream at a succession of cats by the name of Puss. Now, although I am always writing about Mrs. Glutch, I have still spirit enough left to vindicate my own individuality, by abstaining from following her example. In obedience, therefore, to these last relics of independent sentiment, permit me the freedom of numbering my maids-of-all-work, as I introduce them to public notice in these pages.

Number One is amazed by the spectacle of my illness, and always stares at me. If I fell ill one evening, went to a dispensary, asked for a bottle of physic, and got well on it the next morning; or, if I presented myself before her at the last gasp, and died forthwith in Smeary Street, she would, in either case, be able to understand me. But an illness on which medicine produces no immediate effect, and which does not keep the patient always groaning in bed, is beyond her comprehension. Personally, she is very short and sturdy, and is always covered from head to foot with powdered black, which seems to lie especially thick on her in the morning. How does she accumulate it? Does she wash herself with the ordinary liquid used for ablutions; or does she take a plunge-bath every morning under the kitchen-grate? I am afraid to ask this question of her; but I contrive to make her talk to me about other things. She looks very much surprised, poor creature, when I first let her see that I have other words to utter in addressing her, besides the word of command; and seems to think me the most eccentric of mankind, when she finds that I have a decent anxiety to spare her all useless trouble in waiting on me. Young as she is, she has drudged so long over the wickedest ways of this world, without one leisure moment to look up from the everlasting dirt on the road at the green landscape around, and the pure sky above, that she has become hardened to the saddest, surely, of human lots before she is yet a woman grown. Life means dirty work, small wages, hard words, no holidays, no social station, no future, according to her experience of it. No human being ever was created for this. No state of society which composedly accepts this, in the cases of thousands, as one of the necessary conditions of its selfish comforts, can pass itself off as civilised, except under the most audacious of all false pretences. These thoughts rise in me often, when I ring the bell, and the maid-of-all-work answers it wearily. I cannot communicate them to her: I can only encourage her to talk to me now and then on something like equal terms. Just as I am succeeding in the attainment of this object, Number One scatters all my plans and purposes to the winds, by telling me that she is going away.

I ask Why? and am told that she cannot bear being a-railed at and a-hunted about by Mrs. Glutch any longer. The oppressively polite woman who cannot address me without begging my pardon, can find no hard words in the vocabulary hard enough for the maid-of-all-work. "I am frightened of my life," says Number One, apologizing to me for leaving the place. "I am so little and she's so big. She heaves things at my head, she does. Work as hard as you may, you can't work hard enough for her. I must go, if you please, sir. Whatever do you think she done this morning? She up, and druv the creases at me." With these words (which I find mean in genteel English, that Mrs. Glutch has enforced her last orders to the servant by throwing a bunch of water-cresses at her head), Number One curtseys and says "Good-bye!" and goes out resignedly once again into the hard world. I follow her a little while, in imagination, with no very cheering effect on my spirits--for what do I see awaiting her at each stage of her career? Alas, for Number One, it is always a figure in the likeness of Mrs. Glutch.

Number Two fairly baffles me. I see her grin perpetually at me, and imagine, at first, that I am regarded by her in the light of a new kind of impostor, who shams illness as a way of amusing himself. But I soon discover that she grins at everything--at the fire that she lights, at the cloth she lays for dinner, at the medicine-bottles she brings upstairs, at the furibund visage of Mrs. Glutch, ready to drive whole baskets full of creases at her head every morning. Looking at her with the eye of an artist, I am obliged to admit that Number Two is, as the painters say, out of drawing. The longest things about her are her arms; the thickest thing about her is her waist. It is impossible to believe that she has any legs, and it is not easy to find out the substitute which, in the absence of a neck, is used to keep her big head from rolling off her round shoulders. I try to make her talk, but only succeed in encouraging her to grin at me. Have ceaseless foul words, and ceaseless dirty work clouded over all the little light that has ever been let in on her mind? I suspect that it is so, but I have no time to acquire any positive information on the subject. At the end of Number Two's first week of service, Mrs. Glutch discovers, to her horror and indignation, that the new maid-of-all-work possesses nothing in the shape of wearing-apparel, except the worn-out garments actually on her back; and, to make matters worse, a lady-lodger in the parlour misses one of a pair of lace-cuffs, and feels sure that the servant has taken it. There is not a particle of evidence to support this view of the case; but Number Two being destitute, is consequently condemned without a trial, and dismissed without a character. She too wanders off forlorn into a world that has no haven of rest or voice of welcome for her--wanders off, without so much as a dirty bundle in her hand--wanders off, voiceless, with the unchanging grin on the smut-covered face. How shocked we should all be, if we opened a book about a savage country, and saw a portrait of Number Two in the frontispiece as a specimen of the female population!

Number Three comes to us all the way from Wales; arrives late one evening, and is found at seven the next morning, crying as if she would break her heart, on the door-step. It is the first time she has been away from home. She has not got used yet to being a forlorn castaway among strangers. She misses the cows of a morning, the blessed fields with the blush of sunrise on them, the familiar faces, the familiar sounds, the familiar cleanliness of her country home. There is not the faintest echo of mother's voice, or of father's sturdy footfall here. Sweetheart John Jones is hundreds of miles away; and little brother Joe toddles up door-steps far from these to clamour for the breakfast which he shall get this morning from other than his sister's hands. Is there nothing to cry for in this? Absolutely nothing, as Mrs. Glutch thinks. What does this Welsh barbarian mean by clinging to my area-railings when she ought to be lighting the fire; by sobbing in full view of the public of Smeary Street when the lodgers' bells are ringing angrily for breakfast? Will nothing get the girl in-doors? Yes, a few kind words from the woman who passes by her with my breakfast will. She knows that the Welsh girl is hungry as well as home-sick, questions her, finds out that she has had no supper after her long journey, and that she has been used to breakfast with the sunrise at the farm in Wales. A few merciful words lure her away from the railings, and a little food inaugurates the process of breaking her in to London service. She has but a few days allowed her, however, to practise the virtue of dogged resignation in her first place. Before she has given me many opportunities of studying her character, before she has done knitting her brows with the desperate mental effort of trying to comprehend the mystery of my illness, before the smut has fairly settled on her rosy cheeks, before the London dirt has dimmed the pattern on her neat print gown, she, too, is cast adrift into the world. She has not suited Mrs. Glutch (being, as I imagine, too offensively clean to form an appropriate part of the kitchen furniture)--a friendly maid-of-all-work, in service near us, has heard of a place for her--and she is forthwith sent away to be dirtied and deadened down to her proper social level in another Lodging-house.

With her, my studies of character among maids-of-all-work come to an end. I hear vague rumours of the arrival of Number Four. But before she appears, I have got the doctor's leave to move into the country, and have terminated my experience of London lodgings, by making my escape with all convenient speed from the perpetual presence and persecutions of Mrs. Glutch. I have witnessed some sad sights during my stay in Smeary Street, which have taught me to feel for my poor and forlorn fellow-creatures as I do not think I ever felt for them before, and which have inclined me to doubt for the first time whether worse calamities might not have overtaken me than the hardship of falling ill.

SKETCHES OF CHARACTER.--II.

A SHOCKINGLY RUDE ARTICLE.

[Communicated by A Charming Woman.]

Before I begin to write, I know that this will be an unpopular composition in certain select quarters. I mean to proceed with it, however, in spite of that conviction, because when I have got something on my mind, I must positively speak. Is it necessary, after that, to confess that I am a woman? If it is, I make the confession--to my sorrow. I would much rather be a man.

I hope nobody will be misled by my beginning in this way, into thinking that I am an advocate of the rights of women. Ridiculous creatures! they have too many rights already; and if they don't hold their chattering tongues, one of these days the poor dear deluded men will find them out.

The poor dear men! Mentioning them reminds me of what I have got to say. I have been staying at the seaside, and reading an immense quantity of novels and periodicals, and all that sort of thing, lately; and my idea is, that the men-writers (the only writers worth reading) are in the habit of using each other very unfairly in books and articles, and so on. Look where I may, I find, for instance, that the large proportion of the bad characters in their otherwise very charming stories, are always men. As if women were not a great deal worse! Then, again, most of the amusing fools in their books are, strangely and unaccountably, of their own sex, in spite of its being perfectly apparent that the vast majority of that sort of character is to be found in ours. On the other hand, while they make out their own half of humanity (as I have distinctly proved) a great deal too bad, they go to the contrary extreme the other way, and make out our half a great deal too good. What in the world do they mean by representing us as so much better, and so much prettier, than we really are? Upon my word, when I see what angels the dear nice good men make of their heroines, and when I think of myself, and of the whole circle of my female friends besides, I feel quite disgusted,--I do, indeed.

I should very much like to go into the whole of this subject at once, and speak my sentiments on it at the fullest length. But I will spare the reader, and try to be satisfied with going into a part of the subject instead; for, considering that I am a woman, and making immense allowances for me on that account, I am really not altogether unreasonable. Give me a page or two, and I will show in one particular, and, what is more, from real life, how absurdly partial the men-writers are to our sex, and how scandalously unjust they are to their own.

Bores.--What I propose is, that we take for our present example characters of Bores alone. If we were only to read men's novels, articles, and so forth, I don't hesitate to say we should assume that all the Bores in the human creation were of the male sex. It is generally, if not always, a man, in men's books, who tells the long-winded story, and turns up at the wrong time, and makes himself altogether odious and intolerable to everybody he comes in contact with, without being in the least aware of it himself. How very unjust, and, I must be allowed to add, how extremely untrue! Women are quite as bad, or worse. Do, good gentlemen, look about you impartially, for once in a way, and own the truth. Good gracious! is not society full of Lady-Bores? Why not give them a turn when you write next?

Two instances: I will quote only two instances out of hundreds I could produce from my own acquaintance. Only two: because, as I said before, I am reasonable about not taking up room. I can put things into a very small space when I write, as well as when I travel. I should like the literary gentleman who kindly prints this (I would not allow a woman to print it for any sum of money that could be offered me) to see how very little luggage I travel with. At any rate, he shall see how little room I can cheerfully put up with in these pages.

My first Lady-Bore--see how quickly I get to the matter in hand, without wasting so much as a single line in prefatory phrases!--my first Lady-Bore is Miss Sticker. I don't in the least mind mentioning her name; because I know, if she got the chance, she would do just the same by me. It is of no use disguising the fact, so I may as well confess at once that Miss Sticker is a fright. Far be it from me to give pain where the thing can by any means be avoided; but if I were to say that Miss Sticker would ever see forty again, I should be guilty of an unwarrantable deception on the public. I have the strongest imaginable objection to mentioning the word petticoats; but if that is the only possible description of Miss Sticker's figure which conveys a true notion of its nature and composition, what am I to do? Perhaps I had better give up describing the poor thing's personal appearance. I shall get into deeper and deeper difficulties, if I attempt to go on. The very last time I was in her company, we were strolling about Regent Street, with my sister's husband for escort. As we passed a hairdresser's shop, the dear simple man looked in, and asked me what those long tails of hair were for, that he saw hanging up in the windows. Miss Sticker, poor soul, was on his arm, and heard him put the question. I thought I should have dropped.

This is, I believe, what you call a digression. I shall let it stop in, however, because it will probably explain to the judicious reader why I carefully avoid the subject--the meagre subject, an ill-natured person might say--of Miss Sticker's hair. Suppose I pass on to what is more importantly connected with the object of these pages--suppose I describe Miss Sticker's character next.