Complete Novels of E Nesbit, page 303
In our first home — the Bandbox, the little nest that had held us at our first mating — Chloe had struggled to reproduce, and had reproduced, on a microscopic scale, and with the aid of a woman servant more or less tractable, the habits and methods learned in her mother’s house in Bedford. There were rules, and she followed them. I for my part had met the new rules as part of a new and delightful comedy, wherein my wife was heroine. At the same time I had felt no urgent need for altering the habits of years spent in chambers, at the mercy of an uncomplaining and systematically dishonest laundress. But when the Bandbox — I paid it the tribute of a perfunctory sigh, even in my railway-carriage solitude — when the dear Bandbox was left behind, and we entered the Red House, we entered, too, on a new life — a primitive existence where law was not. The rules Chloe had learned in Bedford as to the duties of servants and the routine of domestic life were now inapplicable, since we had no servant, and consequently no recognized routine. We were in the position of folk cast upon a desert island (I mean an uninhabited one, but the phraseology, as the instinct, of boyhood survives). And here we had suddenly changed parts. The chart of custom by which Chloe had steered in Bandbox days had been reft from her. She had nothing left but delightful, genuine impulses towards beauty — the arrangement of flowers, the fixing of shelves, and the deep, eternal instinct to satisfy the cravings of hunger in herself and hers — me. I, on the other hand, being face to face with a new problem, met it, man fashion, with a new solution. I perceived that order alone could make our life in the Red House possible. As the train steamed over the bridge one practical conclusion came as the result of my meditations. Chloe must have a servant.
I saw several editors, received a commission to write a series of articles on foreign politics, and a short story of strong domestic interest. Then I stood at the corner by the Mansion House in a meditation so deep as to provoke the amused and contemptuous scrutiny of my fellows, and at last, just as a small boy was murmuring at my elbow, “Makin’ up your mind whether you’ll be prime-minister or not? Well, take your time, sir; it’s worth thinkin’ over,” I hailed a ‘bus and was borne away by it. I went straight to Mrs. May’s registry-office in Tottenham Court Road. The ladies who attended to my needs seemed to me to have the most perfect manners in the world. So well did they act for me that in half an hour I had engaged an amiable general servant, who was to come on the next Monday “as ever was.”
“Now look here,” I said to her, “you mustn’t expect our house to be like any one else’s. We’re not in the least like any one else. We live in a very large house” — her plump face fell—”but we only use a few rooms. Your mistress will help you a bit, and you can go out one evening a week and every Sunday, and you can have your friends to see you any evening” — her face brightened—”but no young men, unless they come by twos — see? My wife and I will both help you, and if you help us we shall all be perfectly jolly. What do you think? Would you like to try?”
I could see the smile Mrs. May was trying to conceal, and I felt a tremor of doubt. Perhaps, after all, it did not do to treat servants as though they were of the same flesh and blood as one’s self.
The girl hesitated, looked doubtfully at me, I smiled at her in my best manner, and she smiled back heartily, and as it seemed to me without mental reservations.
“Well, sir,” she said, “we can but try.”
So that was settled. I felt the warm point of triumph which punctuates the career of the born organizer.
“Monday, then,” said I; “and send your box by Carter Paterson.” And with that I left well alone, and went back to Cannon Street via the Twopenny Tube.
I had to wait half an hour for a train. On the platform was the usual dingy, mixed crowd of clerks, type-writing girls, art students, and City men, and among them, her red hair shining at me down the length of the gloomy platform, a woman’s figure that I knew. Her dainty dress of muslin, sown with little bunches of violets, her charming hat, her perfect gloves and shoes — these alone might not have thrust her identity on me. Thank Heaven, more than one Englishwoman wears pretty muslin gowns and picture-hats, and has gloves and shoes that fit her. It was the set of her shoulders, the poise of her head, the modest, graceful self-possession of her attitude that made me bold to step behind her, and, without even a sight of her face, to murmur over her shoulder and into the prettiest ear — almost — in the world, “Yolande!”
She turned in a flash, and her face came to me in that dull place like a gleam of sunlight in a cloudy day.
“How unexpected you are,” I said, “and how very, very like the most beautiful kind of French fashion-plate.”
“I was going down to see Chloe — and you. I have got a bag somewhere,” she said. “I am pretty, aren’t I? I got this gown in Paris.”
“That’s what I like about you!”
“The only thing?”
“The chief, just now. You don’t think old clothes rhyme necessarily with old friends. There’s just time for a cup of tea — come. And then for the Red House. We shall find Chloe in rags, clearing out the scullery. You don’t know — or rather you do, perfectly well — what a sight for sore eyes you’ll be to her.”
My prophecy was fulfilled. My wife opened the door to us.
“Yolande!” she cried, “I didn’t know you were back!”
“No more did I, till yesterday,” said Yolande.
“Chloe!” I cried, with proper severity, “have you done that drawing of the footman and the duchess? Your face is extremely dirty!”
She looked at me with that disarming blink of soft lashes for the sake of which the harshest of recording angels would risk his situation.
“I’ve been cleaning out the kitchen,” she said—”it’s lovely now. Yolande, come and take your things off. He’ll make the tea and set the table. He’s quite domestic now — aren’t you, Benedick?”
“Yes, Beatrice,” I said; “and there’s a large black on your respectable ear — the right one.”
“The better to hear with, my dear.”
“And why are your hands so extremely grimy?” I returned, capping the quotation.
“The better to slap you with!” she cried, the action rhyming with the word, and fled.
She came down to tea all white muslin and lace and pink ribbons. “It’s Yolande’s fault,” she said. deprecatingly. “I hate being smart myself. It’s so unsuitable to our position. Don’t look at me like that!”
Throughout tea I could look at nothing else. Yolande is a witch. How else could she have known that in these weeks of happy, hard work I had vaguely missed something, somehow, and had never guessed till now that it was my wife’s beauty, so unadorned, and still so dear, that had fretted me with the unconscious desire to see it once more fitly clothed?
The evening was a festival. Yolande played Chopin to us in the dim, empty drawing-room, and if I did hold my wife’s hand the while, Yolande did not mind, for she was used to us. Chloe showed us the duchess and footman drawing, and indeed the duchess’s arm was hopelessly wrong, and the footman’s legs things to weep over. We drank ginger-ale, always with us the outward expression of hilarity, and, as the evening waned, sang comic songs. When Yolande had gone to bed, in the room got ready for the servants who never came, I caught my wife by both hands.
“Madam,” said I, “why did you never tell me how pretty you looked in pink ribbons?”
“I didn’t think you cared for ribbons,” she said; “besides, it’s all Yolande’s fault.”
“To-morrow morning,” said I, “I shall kiss Yolande for this.”
Chloe looked at me. “You may,” she said. “I don’t think she’d like it, but you may. Only don’t do it while I’m there, because it might make me jealous.”
“What, Chloe in pink ribbons jealous of Yolande in violet muslin? I might as well be jealous of the crossing-sweeper when you smile at him and give him pennies.”
“And aren’t you?” said she. “You would be, if you were a really nice husband. But I’ll tell Yolande you said she was like a crossing-sweeper. And she wouldn’t let you kiss her, anyway!”
“What do you bet?”
“If she did it would only be to please me! And if you did it would only be to tease me. No, you can’t tease me!” She paused, then—”And, Len,” she said, “Yolande’s too dear to have silly jokes made about her, even by you and only to me, or even to you and only by me.”
“And you’re too dear,” I said, with my face against the pink ribbons, “to be teased, even if I could compass it. Besides, madam, I have been guilty of a crime — worse, an error in taste. I might be a hair-dresser’s apprentice chaffing his sweetheart of the drapery department. Forgive me — I am a little mad to-night.”
She pushed me away till she could look in my eyes.
“Len,” she said, “how awful it would have been if I had married any one else. There is no one else who understands everything. But why did you? You never made jokes about kissing other people before!”
“It is detestable,” I said, “and it’s no excuse to repeat that it was only because I am so happy. And yet it’s true. Am I forgiven?”
Now what made me talk that nonsense? And suppose Chloe had laughed at it or, on the other hand, had taken it seriously, where should we have been? Now, Heaven be praised for the gift of understanding. If Chloe had done, had looked, anything but what she did do and look — But Chloe is Chloe, and, thank God, mine.
Yolande stayed with us three days. The rainbow delights of our new house seemed newly dyed when we displayed them to her appreciative eyes. And I felt a new impulse to work, now that Chloe had some one to bear her company as she gathered flowers, rearranged furniture, or struggled, face all aglow, against the fiendish arts of the kitchen range.
I wrote half my “story of strong domestic interest,” and then stuck fast. There was a scene where the hero, on the point of marriage with a respectable and admired heiress, the friend of childhood’s hour, sees, as he walks up the church to his bridal, the face of his old love, whom he had thought dead. This scene wanted something besides smartness. It wanted fire, passion, delicacy of handling, strength of grasp. And these qualities, strange to say, eluded me. I told my woes, and received from Chloe and Yolande sympathy, but no aid.
On that third moonlight evening, when we sat out on the grass, round the sun-dial, and Yolande sang Spanish and Pyrenean songs to the tinkle of Chloe’s guitar, I almost seemed to surprise in myself the force to grapple with that scene and get the better of it; but when they had gone to bed and I sat face to face with my type-writer, the force shrivelled to a very agony of conscious incompetence. I wrote three abject sentences, and went to bed hopeless.
Next morning I took Yolande to a cricket match, and in the evening she left us.
“I’ll come again in a fortnight if you’ll have me,” she said, “but now I must put on my soberest frock and a hat that would make you weep, and interview parents who want to provide their girls with a complete outfit of up-to-date culture, cheap.”
We went up to the little country station, bareheaded, ungloved, to the scandal of the porters and the station-master, and waved our farewells as the train bore her away. Chloe’s clean handkerchief had a great hole in it, which she never noticed till too late, and then we went back, she to house-work, and I to my story. I had left it at page thirty-one; it stood now at page fifty-nine.
The story was finished. I read the pages rapidly. The story was good, very good. All the fire and passion and force I had longed for and had known to be necessary were here. The story began tamely, and ended in vivid and triumphant drama.
“Chloe!” I called.
She came, a dish-cloth in her hand and apron round her waist.
“Some one has finished the story. Read it.”
She read it slowly.
“Is it good?” she asked.
“Of course it is. But did you — Who did it?”
“Didn’t you?”
“No, of course not!”
“It must have been the ghost,” she said. Then she blinked at me with long lashes, and laughed.
I laughed too.
“The ghost be it!” I said, but I read in her laughing eyes the word that sprang to my own lips—”Yolande!”
IV. OUR NEW TENANT
OF course we have our own little stereotyped code of honor and morality, laid by on the shelf, ready for use, and in it we read vaguely that one may not put one’s name to another’s work, or make money by another’s success. Had any one offered to finish for me the story to which I should put my name, I had refused, though the offer had been made by Rudyard Kipling himself. But when a ghost finishes your story, what’s to be done? As Chloe said, “What else did the ghost do it for?” She added that of course I must send it in. And indeed it seemed to me that the matter was at least arguable. Yet I could not bring myself to sign my name to the thing.
Chloe made horseshoes in her forehead, and professed herself unable to understand my hesitation.
“If the ghost chose to finish your silly old story,” she said, “you may be sure it wants to see itself in print.”
“Over my signature?”
“Perhaps the ghost is modest, and would rather not venture to face the public over its own signature till it’s more sure of its talents. Yes — that must be it. It’s a mutual benefit. The ghost wants to see itself printed. You wanted your story finished. There’s no obligation either way.”
I bit the end of my fountain-pen till it cracked.
“Suppose we ask Yolande?” said I. Chloe laughed. And I wrote to Yolande that evening. Chloe wrote, too — about a pattern for a fichu, I believe — and we posted the letters in the village. When we came home we found an unattractive working-man slouching by our gate. As we approached, he touched his hat with a grudging gesture.
“You the governor?” he inquired.
I ventured a modest assent.
“About these ‘ere cottages of yourn, now,” said he, “was you thinkin’ of lettin’ e’er a one of ‘em?”
“Well, no,” said I, truthful in defiance of Chloe’s finger-pressure on my arm.
“Because if you was,” said my visitor, rubbing a stubbly chin reflectively, “you and me might hit on a bargain betwixt us. My missus an’ me we’re a-lookin’ out for a bit of a cottage, so I don’t deceive you, governor.”
My tenant-aspirant inspired me with little admiration and less confidence, but Chloe pinched my arm again, and said,
“Can you do gardening?”
“I’m a bricklayer’s laborer by trade, miss,” said he.
“But if we let you have the cottage we should expect you to keep the cottage garden tidy.”
“Gardening’s all I care for, out of workin’-hours,” said the man, eagerly, “and my missus, she’s the same. Dotes on flowers, lilies, and roses, and toolips, so she do.”
“I’ll think of it,” said I, severely non-committal, and feigning insensibility as Chloe’s fingers tightened almost painfully on my arm.
“What rent do you want to pay?” she asked.
At the word “want” a shadow of a grin passed under the reflective hand that stroked the stubble.
“Two shillings a week was about what we thought an honest rent,” was the answer.
“That wouldn’t do at all,” said my wife. “Why, the smallest cottage has four rooms. We couldn’t let it under four shillings.”
“Say three and six, lady. And that’s a lot to a working-man.”
This alacritous acceptance of the raised figure should have warned us — I, indeed, did perceive that the man wanted the cottage enough to pay the four shillings for it. But Chloe said:
“Very well. Three and six a week — that’s nine pounds two a year. When do you want to come in?”
“Our time’s up next Saturday, miss,” said the man, “and we could get our bits of sticks moved then. It’s a stiffish rent, miss, is nine pun two a year, but there’s the garden. I am dead nuts on a bit of garden.”
“On Saturday, then,” said Chloe, and our new tenant left us. I was full of doubts and distrusts, which I turned to impart to Chloe; but as our gate slammed behind us she threw her arms round my neck in a transport of avaricious enthusiasm.
“Oh, Len! How splendid! Didn’t I do the arithmetic beautifully? Why did we never think of letting the cottages before? We’ll let all the others — three and sixpence each — and the big ones — ought to fetch more. Why, it’s fourteen shillings a week. What a heap of money!”
“What do you propose to buy with it, Mrs. Midas?”
“Time!” she answered, promptly. “Now I sha’n’t feel so wicked if I waste a whole day on pottering. Why don’t you write an ode or a sonnet or something, about pottering? It’s the most glorious thing in the world. And this man is going to pay me to potter while he lays bricks. Noble, splendid creature!”
“This man,” I said, “exactly; we don’t even know his name, we haven’t a hint of his address. And who are we — land-owners, truly, but born potterers, and lacking the education accorded to those born to the purple of landlordism — who are we that we should ask a bricklayer’s laborer for references?”
“Oh, dear!” said she. “I never thought of that! Never mind — we can ask him for them on Saturday.”
But on Saturday it was too late. We learned, indeed, during the course of the day, our tenant’s name, and it was Prosser, than which no surname claims a larger share of my personal abhorrence; but where was the use of asking for references when the moving had been effected during the hours immediately following the dawn, when our after-breakfast expedition to the cottage showed us the “bits of sticks” already dumped down on the cottage-garden flower-beds, and a slatternly drab of a woman carrying them slowly in? The furniture looked very dirty.
“Not, I fear, the most desirable of tenants,” I murmured, as we delicately withdrew. “The furniture looks as if it had come out of the dustbin, and so does the lady.”
