by Unknown
“I perceive, ma’am,” said I to the stout maid, “that your master is in affluent circumstances.”
She shook her head emphatically, and said something that I failed to catch.
“You wish to indicate,” I hazarded, “that he married a fortune.”
This time I caught the words. They were “Tinned meats,” and having uttered them she lapsed into gloomy silence.
“Nevertheless,” I said, “this room must have cost a pretty penny.”
“She done it all herself,” replied my new friend, with concentrated scorn.
“But this green floor, so beautifully stained—”
“Boiling oil,” said she, with a flush of honest shame, “and a shillingsworth o’ paint.”
“Those rugs—”
“Remnants,” she sighed, and showed me how artfully they had been pieced together.
“The curtains—”
“Remnants.”
“At all events the sofa—”
She raised its drapery, and I saw that the sofa was built of packing cases.
“The desk—”
I really thought that I was safe this time, for could I not see the drawers with their brass handles, the charming shelf for books, the pigeon-holes with their coverings of silk?
“She made it out of three orange boxes,” said the lady, at last a little awed herself.
I looked around me despairingly, and my eye alighted on the holland covering. “There is a fine chandelier in that holland bag,” I said coaxingly.
She sniffed and was raising an untender hand, when I checked her. “Forbear, ma’am,” I cried with authority, “I prefer to believe in that bag. How much to be pitied, ma’am, are those who have lost faith in everything.” I think all the pretty things that the little nursery governess had made out of nothing squeezed my hand for letting the chandelier off.
“But, good God, ma’am,” said I to madam, “what an exposure.”
She intimated that there were other exposures upstairs.
“So there is a stair,” said I, and then, suspiciously, “did she make it?”
No, but how she had altered it.
The stair led to Mary’s bedroom, and I said I would not look at that, nor at the studio, which was a shed in the garden.
“Did she build the studio with her own hands?”
No, but how she had altered it.
“How she alters everything,” I said. “Do you think you are safe, ma’am?”
She thawed a little under my obvious sympathy and honoured me with some of her views and confidences. The rental paid by Mary and her husband was not, it appeared, one on which any self-respecting domestic could reflect with pride. They got the house very cheap on the understanding that they were to vacate it promptly if anyone bought it for building purposes, and because they paid so little they had to submit to the indignity of the notice-board. Mary A —— detested the words “This space to be sold,” and had been known to shake her fist at them. She was as elated about her house as if it were a real house, and always trembled when any possible purchaser of spaces called.
As I have told you my own aphorism I feel I ought in fairness to record that of this aggrieved servant. It was on the subject of art. “The difficulty,” she said, “is not to paint pictures, but to get frames for them.” A home thrust this.
She could not honestly say that she thought much of her master’s work. Nor, apparently, did any other person. Result, tinned meats.
Yes, one person thought a deal of it, or pretended to do so; was constantly flinging up her hands in delight over it; had even been caught whispering fiercely to a friend, “Praise it, praise it, praise it!” This was when the painter was sunk in gloom. Never, as I could well believe, was such a one as Mary for luring a man back to cheerfulness.
“A dangerous woman,” I said, with a shudder, and fell to examining a painting over the mantelshelf. It was a portrait of a man, and had impressed me favourably because it was framed.
“A friend of hers,” my guide informed me, “but I never seed him.”
I would have turned away from it, had not an inscription on the picture drawn me nearer. It was in a lady’s handwriting, and these were the words: “Fancy portrait of our dear unknown.” Could it be meant for me? I cannot tell you how interested I suddenly became.
It represented a very fine looking fellow, indeed, and not a day more than thirty.
“A friend of hers, ma’am, did you say?” I asked quite shakily. “How do you know that, if you have never seen him?”
“When master was painting of it,” she said, “in the studio, he used to come running in here to say to her such like as, ‘What colour would you make his eyes?’”
“And her reply, ma’am?” I asked eagerly.
“She said, ‘Beautiful blue eyes.’ And he said, ‘You wouldn’t make it a handsome face, would you?’ and she says, ‘A very handsome face.’ And says he, ‘Middle-aged?’ and says she, ‘Twenty-nine.’ And I mind him saying, ‘A little bald on the top?’ and she says, says she, ‘Not at all.’”
The dear, grateful girl, not to make me bald on the top.
“I have seed her kiss her hand to that picture,” said the maid.
Fancy Mary kissing her hand to me! Oh, the pretty love!
Pooh!
I was staring at the picture, cogitating what insulting message I could write on it, when I heard the woman’s voice again. “I think she has known him since she were a babby,” she was saying, “for this here was a present he give her.”
She was on her knees drawing the doll’s house from beneath the sofa, where it had been hidden away; and immediately I thought, “I shall slip the insulting message into this.” But I did not, and I shall tell you why. It was because the engaging toy had been redecorated by loving hands; there were fresh gowns for all the inhabitants, and the paint on the furniture was scarcely dry. The little doll’s house was almost ready for further use.
I looked at the maid, but her face was expressionless. “Put it back,” I said, ashamed to have surprised Mary’s pretty secret, and I left the house dejectedly, with a profound conviction that the little nursery governess had hooked on to me again.
IV. A Night-Piece
There came a night when the husband was alone in that street waiting. He can do nothing for you now, little nursery governess, you must fight it out by yourself; when there are great things to do in the house the man must leave. Oh, man, selfish, indelicate, coarse-grained at the best, thy woman’s hour has come; get thee gone.
He slouches from the house, always her true lover I do believe, chivalrous, brave, a boy until tonight; but was he ever unkind to her? It is the unpardonable sin now; is there the memory of an unkindness to stalk the street with him tonight? And if not an unkindness, still might he not sometimes have been a little kinder?
Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?
Poor youth, she would come to the window if she were able, I am sure, to sign that the one little unkindness is long forgotten, to send you a reassuring smile till you and she meet again; and, if you are not to meet again, still to send you a reassuring, trembling smile.
Ah, no, that was for yesterday; it is too late now. He wanders the streets thinking of her tonight, but she has forgotten him. In her great hour the man is nothing to the woman; their love is trivial now.
He and I were on opposite sides of the street, now become familiar ground to both of us, and divers pictures rose before me in which Mary A —— walked. Here was the morning after my only entry into her house. The agent had promised me to have the obnoxious notice-board removed, but I apprehended that as soon as the letter announcing his intention reached her she would remove it herself, and when I passed by in the morning there she was on a chair and a footstool pounding lustily at it with a hammer. When it fell she gave it such a vicious little kick.
There were the nights when her husband came out to watch for the postma
n. I suppose he was awaiting some letter big with the fate of a picture. He dogged the postman from door to door like an assassin or a guardian angel; never had he the courage to ask if there was a letter for him, but almost as it fell into the box he had it out and tore it open, and then if the door closed despairingly the woman who had been at the window all this time pressed her hand to her heart. But if the news was good they might emerge presently and strut off arm in arm in the direction of the pork emporium.
One last picture. On summer evenings I had caught glimpses of them through the open window, when she sat at the piano singing and playing to him. Or while she played with one hand, she flung out the other for him to grasp. She was so joyously happy, and she had such a romantic mind. I conceived her so sympathetic that she always laughed before he came to the joke, and I am sure she had filmy eyes from the very start of a pathetic story.
And so, laughing and crying, and haunted by whispers, the little nursery governess had gradually become another woman, glorified, mysterious. I suppose a man soon becomes used to the great change, and cannot recall a time when there were no babes sprawling in his Mary’s face.
I am trying to conceive what were the thoughts of the young husband on the other side of the street. “If the barrier is to be crossed tonight may I not go with her? She is not so brave as you think her. When she talked so gaily a few hours ago, O my God, did she deceive even you?”
Plain questions tonight. “Why should it all fall on her? What is the man that he should be flung out into the street in this terrible hour? You have not been fair to the man.”
Poor boy, his wife has quite forgotten him and his trumpery love. If she lives she will come back to him, but if she dies she will die triumphant and serene. Life and death, the child and the mother, are ever meeting as the one draws into harbour and the other sets sail. They exchange a bright “All’s well” and pass on.
But afterward?
The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back. They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their jailers, are in the grip, and whisper, “How is it with you, my child?” but always, lest a strange face should frighten him, they whisper it so low that he may not hear. They bend over him to see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet arm beneath the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many little vests he has. They love to do these things.
What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him, and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate souls, they may even do him an injury. These are the ghosts that go wailing about old houses, and foolish wild stories are invented to explain what is all so pathetic and simple. I know of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early home to pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman’s face appear. She always looked at him very vindictively, and then vanished. Strange things happened in this house. Windows were opened in the night. The curtains of his bed were set fire to. A step on the stair was loosened. The covering of an old well in a corridor where he walked was cunningly removed. And when he fell ill the wrong potion was put in the glass by his bedside, and he died. How could the pretty young mother know that this grizzled interloper was the child of whom she was in search?
All our notions about ghosts are wrong. It is nothing so petty as lost wills or deeds of violence that brings them back, and we are not nearly so afraid of them as they are of us.
One by one the lights of the street went out, but still a lamp burned steadily in the little window across the way. I know not how it happened, whether I had crossed first to him or he to me, but, after being for a long time as the echo of each other’s steps, we were together now. I can have had no desire to deceive him, but some reason was needed to account for my vigil, and I may have said something that he misconstrued, for above my words he was always listening for other sounds. But however it came about he had conceived the idea that I was an outcast for a reason similar to his own, and I let his mistake pass, it seemed to matter so little and to draw us together so naturally. We talked together of many things, such as worldly ambition. For long ambition has been like an ancient memory to me, some glorious day recalled from my springtime, so much a thing of the past that I must make a railway journey to revisit it as to look upon the pleasant fields in which that scene was laid. But he had been ambitious yesterday.
I mentioned worldly ambition. “Good God!” he said with a shudder.
There was a clock hard by that struck the quarters, and one o’clock passed and two. What time is it now? Twenty past two. And now? It is still twenty past two.
I asked him about his relatives, and neither he nor she had any. “We have a friend—” he began and paused, and then rambled into a not very understandable story about a letter and a doll’s house and some unknown man who had bought one of his pictures, or was supposed to have done so, in a curiously clandestine manner. I could not quite follow the story.
“It is she who insists that it is always the same person,” he said. “She thinks he will make himself known to me if anything happens to her.” His voice suddenly went husky. “She told me,” he said, “if she died and I discovered him, to give him her love.”
At this we parted abruptly, as we did at intervals throughout the night, to drift together again presently. He tried to tell me of some things she had asked him to do should she not get over this, but what they were I know not, for they engulfed him at the first step. He would draw back from them as ill-omened things, and next moment he was going over them to himself like a child at lessons. A child! In that short year she had made him entirely dependent on her. It is ever thus with women: their first deliberate act is to make their husband helpless. There are few men happily married who can knock in a nail.
But it was not of this that I was thinking. I was wishing I had not degenerated so much.
Well, as you know, the little nursery governess did not die. At eighteen minutes to four we heard the rustle of David’s wings. He boasts about it to this day, and has the hour to a syllable as if the first thing he ever did was to look at the clock.
An oldish gentleman had opened the door and waved congratulations to my companion, who immediately butted at me, drove me against a wall, hesitated for a second with his head down as if in doubt whether to toss me, and then rushed away. I followed slowly. I shook him by the hand, but by this time he was haw-haw-hawing so abominably that a disgust of him swelled up within me, and with it a passionate desire to jeer once more at Mary A —
“It is little she will care for you now,” I said to the fellow; “I know the sort of woman; her intellectuals (which are all she has to distinguish her from the brutes) are so imperfectly developed that she will be a crazy thing about that boy for the next three years. She has no longer occasion for you, my dear sir; you are like a picture painted out.”
But I question whether he heard me. I returned to my home. Home! As if one alone can build a nest. How often as I have ascended the stairs that lead to my lonely, sumptuous rooms, have I paused to listen to the hilarity of the servants below. That morning I could not rest: I wandered from chamber to chamber, followed by my great dog, and all were alike empty and desolate. I had nearly finished a cigar when I thought I heard a pebble strike the window, and looking out I saw David’s father standing beneath. I had told him that I lived in this street, and I suppose my lights had guided him to my window.
“I could not lie down,” he called up hoarsely, “until I heard your news. Is it all right?”
For a moment I failed to understand him. Then I said sourly: “Yes, all is right.”
“Both doing well?” he inquired.
“Both,” I answered, and all the time I was trying to shut the win
dow. It was undoubtedly a kindly impulse that had brought him out, but I was nevertheless in a passion with him.
“Boy or girl?” persisted the dodderer with ungentlemanlike curiosity.
“Boy,” I said, very furiously.
“Splendid,” he called out, and I think he added something else, but by that time I had closed the window with a slam.
V. The Fight For Timothy
Mary’s poor pretentious babe screamed continually, with a note of exultation in his din, as if he thought he was devoting himself to a life of pleasure, and often the last sound I heard as I got me out of the street was his haw-haw-haw, delivered triumphantly as if it were some entirely new thing, though he must have learned it like a parrot. I had not one tear for the woman, but Poor father, thought I; to know that every time your son is happy you are betrayed. Phew, a nauseous draught.
I have the acquaintance of a deliciously pretty girl, who is always sulky, and the thoughtless beseech her to be bright, not witting wherein lies her heroism. She was born the merriest of maids, but, being a student of her face, learned anon that sulkiness best becomes it, and so she has struggled and prevailed. A woman’s history. Brave Margaret, when night falls and thy hair is down, dost thou return, I wonder, to thy natural state, or, dreading the shadow of indulgence, sleepest thou even sulkily?
But will a male child do as much for his father? This remains to be seen, and so, after waiting several months, I decided to buy David a rocking-horse. My St. Bernard dog accompanied me, though I have always been diffident of taking him to toy-shops, which over-excite him. Hitherto the toys I had bought had always been for him, and as we durst not admit this to the saleswoman we were both horribly selfconscious when in the shop. A score of times I have told him that he had much better not come, I have announced fiercely that he is not to come. He then lets go of his legs, which is how a St. Bernard sits down, making the noise of a sack of coals suddenly deposited, and, laying his head between his front paws, stares at me through the red haws that make his eyes so mournful. He will do this for an hour without blinking, for he knows that in time it will unman me. My dog knows very little, but what little he does know he knows extraordinarily well. One can get out of my chambers by a back way, and I sometimes steal softly — but I can’t help looking back, and there he is, and there are those haws asking sorrowfully, “Is this worthy of you?”