Part 3

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.