Chapter II: Part 2

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.

But to return to my boast. I reviewed these achievements with my mind’s eye. I was proud, and there was an end of it. Within a few months I no longer knew the meaning of leisure, and I had become a parasite, living on the habits of my son Tom and his nurse. All the other people in the house preserved their independence. When it became a question who should make the barley-water, it was my time, not Ruth’s nor Clara’s nor the nurse’s, that was wasted. Ruth, without taking her eyes off the range, said it would be better for anything of the sort to be made in the nursery for fear there should be any mistake. Nurse, without interrupting her work, wanted to know who was to watch the pan while she was folding the things in the night-nursery. It cost me a valuable summer’s morning to find a place in the domestic machinery where that pan might sit and boil without disorganising the day’s work.

Suppose a railway company, having completed all their arrangements and got everything into working order, were to be suddenly informed that the Government had decided to run a picture palace in the middle of their head office! I thought of this, and decided that the difficulties of such a situation would be a mere _Tit-Bits_ problem compared to my task of fitting in a nursery amongst Ruth, Clara, and Mullins.

I awoke regularly at three in the morning, to find my brain already up and about, sorting and rejecting answers to such questions as these: “Who is to wash the kitchen tea-things while Clara is amusing the baby when some one calls on nurse’s day out?” or “What about methylated spirits for boiling in the nursery? One cannot be always running to and fro from the kitchen.”

All day long I was pursued by this ceaseless boiling. “What about boiling the milk?” “The milk has boiled over.” “How shall we manage about boiling the clothes?” “I couldn’t get the water to boil.” “You couldn’t boil vegetables in that pan.” “It has to be brought to the boil before you can do anything.” “Boiled beef would come less in the long run.” When Ruth made this statement I suggested that beef could hardly come less than Jones’s mutton did, as that always made a point of never coming at all whenever it could, and if there was going to be a longer run than usual before we got it we had better order something else at once. She replied that in that case a nice piece of boiled fish would be as nice as anything, at which, being a little over-wrought, I wept, and Ruth was extremely kind, and said she would just pop the kettle on to boil. And all this time Tom lay like a log and did nothing. I was dependent upon him for everything. My engagements and my peace of mind hung upon how he felt, and what his Dr. Boswell of a nurse alleged that he thought. The first thing he did was to put an end to my letter-writing, the second was to break up my quiet evenings with games, his third enterprise, his masterpiece of iniquity, was to affiance Ruth to Mullins. At first I had been dense enough not to trace his hand in this calamity, but by and by it dawned upon me, and I questioned Ruth.

“Yes, m’m,” she replied, “things is not the same where there is children. You don’t seem to have the place to yourself in the same way as where there is only a lady.”

“I beg your pardon, Ruth,” I interrupted, “I didn’t quite catch what you said just then. Did you mean that master Tom takes too much upon himself? I don’t leave much to him, really.”

“Oh, no, m’m,” said Ruth, “not at all. It wasn’t that. But where there is children there is so much that has _got_ to be done.”

“Yes,” I said thoughtfully, “I see your point. The same thing has occurred to me. He gives orders, doesn’t he? Is rather emphatic--is that what you meant?”

“Oh, well, m’m,” she replied, “of course you would give the orders just the same in the nursery as elsewhere. It’s your place, and I like to have you do it. I’m sure I should be the last to wish to direct. Indeed, I shouldn’t care to take any responsibility. But where there is children you can’t pick and choose what is to be done in the same way as where there is only a lady, can you, m’m? They have to be considered, don’t they?”

“Yes, Ruth,” I said, “I quite see your idea, and I think you are right to marry, you will feel much freer.”

But I had not the least intention that she should marry yet. Before the month was up she had decided that Mullins could hardly give her, as yet, the comforts to which she was accustomed, therefore the marriage was postponed. Still, I was conscious henceforth of the sword over my head, and it was all Tom’s fault.

He had already annoyed us all by not being born on the day originally fixed. He seemed preoccupied and in a hurry when he arrived, and of course the house was all upset. He made the best of things, waiting patiently on the sofa as if we had made the muddle, whereas, in fact, he was entirely to blame. Anne, two years later, behaved quite differently. She entered the date in her pocket-book, stopped glory-trailing when the clock struck, and came down buttoning on a pink skin several sizes too large.

I was sorry for Tom from the bottom of my heart. He had some natural dignity, which he needed in the presence of the women who preyed upon his person and searched mercilessly for his soul. They commented upon his personal appearance, his habits, and his human weaknesses, until I blushed for them and for him. They made him look absurd in the street, dressed in a shawl pinned tightly round him in the shape of a Virginia Ham, and a drunken-looking bonnet that lay cocked over one eye, leaving a draughty space at the back of the neck. When he laughed they either attributed it to a defective digestion, or put feeble jokes in his mouth.

“I’m a bad boy,” he says, Nurse Boswell interpreted, “and I’m going to kick my little heels, I am, and splash the soapy water in their faces!”

When he broke down and wept from sheer despair of ever making them understand, they took him to the blinding glare of a sunny window and threw him about until he was obliged to feign indisposition in order to make them put him down. He came to me about it sometimes, and I said: “All right, just lie down quietly, and I will say you are resting if they come.”

Just as he was comfortably settled a cheerful voice and clapping of hands was heard at the door, and in came nurse.

“Well, I never,” she exclaimed, “the idea! Who took him up? Now then, master, you just come with me and get dressed, and we’ll go off and get a mouthful of fresh air,” and out would come the rickety bonnet with the draught, and the Virginia Ham shawl, and off they went to harden themselves in a biting east wind. Tom told me afterwards that they met half a dozen women, all of whom went into the grossest personal details about his anatomy, his weight, and what he ate. The men tactfully avoided him, for which he thanked them. Those who had sons of their own knew about the bonnet and were sorry, whilst those who had not just saw him as a sort of egg, and put off his acquaintance until he should be in a fit state to be recognised.

Anne was quite different even as a baby. She humped her back and made faces at the ladies. Soon she and I combined to protect Tom in his encounters with the female sex. We exposed their folly and duplicity in a shameless way for fear lest they should take possession of his heart with their forged certificates of high-mindedness. That our claims to integrity were no better was not to the point. We, at least, loved him and should only mislead him for his good.

Tom, like the rest of his sex, was disposed to respect the authority against which he battled so long as he believed in it. He often said, “Yes, nurse,” quite respectfully, until Anne came. She soon settled that.

“You go and ask nurse if she loves you,” she said, “it’s all rot her saying the sweets are eaten up, they’re in her drawer.”

Of course Tom came back with a handful of chocolates to divide between himself and Anne, having left another illusion behind him.

We had great difficulty at first with nurses. Personally I cannot bear the popsy-wopsy nurse who is so popular with good mothers. When I was interviewing nurses for Tom, I brought him into the room and left him to decide. He soon weeded out the sheep from the goats. If the woman exclaimed “Bless him! where is he?” I caught Tom’s eye, and we said we were so sorry but we were already in treaty with some one whom we thought would be suitable. We dismissed dozens in that way for the same fault. I have been in other people’s nurseries, and seen children huddled and poked and blessed and poppeted into their clothes, marched off giggling, and brought back pouncing, their words overridden by ejaculations and clatter. Their upbringing reminds me of the comic pudding in the pantomime that is tossed up and beaten down, rolled in a dish with the cat, and thrown at the policeman, all to the accompaniment of a blaring orchestra and incessant conversation. I chose my present nurse on account of her opening remark to Tom. “Come here, boy,” she said, and Tom went, and has remained ever since.

There were a great number of things she “didn’t hold with,” but they were not matters I was tenacious about myself, neither was Tom, so we let them drop. Later on I found that a certain amount of compromise was effected, such as a pair of dried ears exchanged for a short story before the fire, or some real tea offered for a quiet afternoon with a scrap-book; that was on days when Tom had Satan in one pocket and an Angel of Goodness in the other. He was a simple creature, and but for Anne would have kept his illusions much longer than he did. He thought that when he gave up his time to help in laying the nursery tea, things got on quicker than they would otherwise have done; that it saved nurse trouble to hand the spoons to him one by one and put them straight afterwards. Anne found for herself an occupation that she preferred.

One of nurse’s articles of faith was that children should have their own place in the household and keep to it. There was a place for every one in her picture. The servants in the kitchen, the children in the nursery, the master in his study, and the mistress in the drawing-room, also pervading the whole house as, in a landscape, the sun and the blizzard pervade fields, lakes, woods, and mountains alike. To have the children the centre of general attention or running about the house would have seemed to her as revolutionary as trees planted on a dinner-table or poultry at large on a cricket-field. Tom’s instincts led him to fall very easily into his place in the domestic world. He was always a mere nut in a vast mechanism whose existence he dimly apprehended; he was of importance inasmuch as the great machinery might go out of gear for want of the trustworthy service of the least of its parts. Anne thought of herself--so far as she thought at all--as a spark from a divine fire, sent to illumine the musty darkness in which parents, domestic servants, visitors, and tradesmen had hitherto lived. This divine spark must be kept alive. She encouraged us all to blow, and herself pirouetted helpfully in the draught of our exertions. Nurse never devised things for the children to do, any more than the nervous system of the body devises occupations for the other parts. I understand that it allows some activities to pass unnoticed, inhibits others, and encourages some, but it does not suggest much. We all had our work to do, and when nurse was out of order, whether through ill-health or disapproval, strange distempers appeared in our conduct. Tom and Anne quarrelled. Ruth took to sending up twice a week “that sloppy hotpot which I can’t think is good for the children.” Clara left the clean things from the wash downstairs, “getting in all the way of the dust, and I with the stockings yet to darn.” Even the fish surpassed itself in evil-doing. Of course it “never came,” we were used to that; but on these fatal occasions it was full of bones when it did come, and “had nothing on it.”

The children never got on with the efficient female, Tom the least of the two, owing to his illusions. Not that he disliked her, he was always patient with women, and prepared to think they were doing their best (until Anne explained to him just what they were doing), but the efficient female got in his way, and made him hot. She brought him occupations when he was already busy with string. They were always in boxes labelled “The Young So-and-so” (none of them people whom he liked to be). He never wanted to be a young designer or penman or weaver. If she had brought materials for the young plumber--a pound of lead for instance, or that delightful gas thing on a stick that makes a flame when you blow--it would not have been so bad; he could have mended the hole in nurse’s boot, or stopped up the place under the coal-scuttle where the mouse came. The efficient female believed in Madame Montessori’s Kindergarten apparatus in the same spirit as the poor believe in the efficacy of a “bottle from the doctor’s.” She brought us puzzles over which we all tore our hair in the evenings. Matching colours became an obsession, and James began to button and unbutton his waistcoat at dinner until I had to speak to him on account of Clara. Finally nurse came to the rescue, as usual, and inhibited our desire to cultivate our senses. She complained that Tom had awakened her by trying to fit each of his fingers successively into her open mouth, and that he was quite feverish because none of them fitted exactly. The efficient female told me what a great success the system had been with her children; but the truth is that I do not like her children. They have their hair tied in an unbecoming way, they can tell you the names of all the flowers in the garden--even the flowering shrubs which no decent person ever remembers--they know what makes the hen lay eggs, and why their own tears are salt. When I was young, we knew less about ourselves and more about other people. We ranged over the whole field of history, picking out gems of character here and there. Quintus Curtius, Noah, Henry the Eighth and his six wives, Napoleon in the retreat from Moscow (there was a picture of it in the nursery, with snow, and vultures, and corpses lying across broken cannon), Marius amongst the ruins of Carthage, the Queen of Sheba, King Alfred, Livingstone, Cardinal Wolsey. We remembered none of their dates, neither was their history correlated with other subjects, but we shall have to mix them up in heaven. So why not now? One has friends of various ages, yet it never occurs to me to mention: “Of course you were born before the death of Gladstone, were you not? I want to introduce Mrs. Ingram, born 1856, contemporary with Mrs. Maybrick, the famous poisoner; in politics, Churchill, Chamberlain, and Balfour; science, Marconi and the close of the reign of Lister; saw the dawn of motor-cars, and remembers the introduction of the telephone.” Or, “Miss Black, born shortly before the accession of Lloyd George, witnessed the ascent of the first aeroplane, and took a prominent part in the famous raid by Suffragettes on the House of Commons.” A correlated introduction would, I imagine, be made like this: “Miss Black, a descendant of the Black Prince, has crossed the Black Sea twice, wears black stockings, and is interested in nigger minstrelsy.”

My whole sympathy is with that little boy who, having learned the anatomy of the snowdrop, washed-in the snowdrop in bold outline, modelled the snowdrop, sung a song about the snowdrop, found on the map the different countries where it grew, and learned the best of those passages in literature where it is mentioned, at last flung the detestable little flower to the ground, exclaiming heartily, “Damn the snowdrop!”

_CHAPTER IX_: THE SCHOOLROOM

When Tom was seven and Anne nine, I decided to engage a governess. I had never lost the feeling of--shall we call it respect--that I had felt for my own governess; one does not lose a feeling like respect in ten years. Therefore, when I found myself interviewing a governess for some one else, I felt rather like a sheep engaging a butcher. You can picture the scene. A small office adjoining the shambles. The sheep, arrayed in all the panoply of its natural wool unshorn for many years, the place where the branded mark had been covered with a self-possessed growth, seated at a small table writing. The pen a fancy article in the humorous disguise of a knife.

“Well, Mr. Jones,” says the trembling, bleating voice. “Do you kill yourself, or do you purchase the--er--the carcasses? You were in your last shop how many years? Precisely--very painful--thank you. You left on account of an outbreak of anthrax amongst the lambs--quite so. Yes, you would have the dip to yourself after ten o’clock. The slaughter-house is next door to your room, and there is a convenient tannery within ten minutes’ walk kept by an excellent ogre with moderate charges; we are devoted to him. I will send the cart to the station for you on Tuesday, and you will be able to begin your rounds at once.”

I lost this feeling after I had been to one or two agencies, and I felt instead like the man with a whip, who took over the plantation from the kind master in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Innocent old ladies with white wool on their heads and Bibles in their pockets came to offer their services as educational drudges, prepared to expose their pathetic cashmere backs to the lash of childish criticism and motherly arrogance. I wanted to engage them all just to ensure their being out of reach of some women I knew. I would then leave them my house, and fly with Tom and Anne to some desert island where we never need employ anyone or improve our minds again.

But it was impossible to engage them all, so I tossed up in the end between two; “heads,” Miss Mathers, “tails,” Miss Cook, and Miss Mathers had it. Miss Cook was young and modern, very pretty and charming, with all the drawbacks of a boy and a few of his advantages. I knew the children would get on with her, but I had a secret fear that she would think me “quaint,” and perhaps develop an enthusiasm for my vices, which would have bothered me. Miss Mathers was above all things a gentlewoman, which I thought would be good for Anne because I was not. She liked refinement and regular hours, and, especially, her attitude towards “gentlemen” was such a delight to me.

“Have you ever had brothers, Miss Mathers?” I asked her once, to which she replied: “Oh, yes, I have a brother I am extremely fond of; he is a most delightful man, so honest, generous, and witty. We have been the greatest of friends ever since our childhood.”

“But, then, surely, you must have seen him in his shirt-sleeves sometimes,” I suggested, “you know he is a human being and not a strange animal. Didn’t you ever sit on his knee?”

“No, Mrs. Molyneux,” she said after some thought, “I don’t remember ever doing so; I doubt whether he would have cared for it. But, of course, if anything of the kind had been necessary I should not have hesitated.”

I found great tonic properties in Miss Mathers’ conversation, for I had never seen men and women separated in the way she did it. It made exquisitely amusing so much in our social life that had been dull before. To her mind, so far as I understand, a man’s position in the scheme of creation is like that of the architect when a house is to be built. The only person who really matters is the lady who lives in the house when it is complete. The architect (it is disagreeable of course to have to employ one) merely sees that it is there. He is the man who does all the necessary and unpleasant part, what Miss Mathers called in every branch of art “the mechanical part.” I have heard her say of a picture that the “mechanical part was very nicely done.” I think her opinion of James was high, inasmuch as she considered his share in the establishment--the mechanical part--was very nicely done. That is, there was enough money to live on, the servants were well looked after, his children healthy, affectionate, and not too numerous.

But, while I was looked upon as a fellow-creature, James was to her a thing as utterly remote as the driver of a train in which she might be travelling, or, as I said, the architect of our house or the Archbishop of Canterbury. No, I think that is wrong. The Archbishop would be thought more human being a clergyman, because clergymen are almost like ladies they are so sensible--we will say, rather, the Pope, because being a Roman Catholic he was, of course, not a clergyman, though no doubt an excellent man according to his lights.

Miss Mathers was full of pleasant surprises. I found that she enjoyed music-halls, approved of divorce (which she called a capital arrangement if two people could not agree), and disliked the idea of Women’s Suffrage. I pointed out that she was inconsistent in approving of divorce notwithstanding her religious principles, and she explained her reasons over some hot buttered toast before retiring to bed.

“My brother divorced his wife,” she said, “for reasons which are warranted by Scripture, and I hold him to be in the right. It was far better than if he had compelled her to live with him under false pretences of affection.”

“But if she ran away,” I suggested.

“In that case,” said Miss Mathers, “she would have continued to bear his name, and would therefore have been living in open sin. My brother, by taking the course he did, gave her the opportunity to retrieve her character by becoming respectably married. The Church is perfectly right in refusing to sanction divorce, because persons who place themselves in such a position ought to be outside the pale of religion, but I think the law acts wisely in providing for legitimate separation.”

On another buttered toast night I asked her why she disliked Women’s Suffrage. If I had had any knowledge of character I might have guessed her reason, but Miss Mathers was not like anyone I had met before.

“My dear Mrs. Molyneux,” she said, “the poet Byron has most truly observed that

‘_Man’s love is of his life a thing apart;
’Tis woman’s whole existence._’

It is true that it does not fall to the lot of all of us to love in that sense, but the possibility can never be lost sight of. What could you conceive more ludicrous and unsuitable than that the whole existence of one of our rulers should be merged in passionate feelings for a fellow-creature? Public life demands whole-hearted devotion to the State.”

“But great statesmen often fall dreadfully in love,” I said.

“A thing apart, Mrs. Molyneux, believe me,” the romantic creature said with assurance. “When my brother’s nose is in his books or his inkpot or wherever else it may happen to be, it is _there_; temporarily perhaps, but he gives his whole mind to it. When he emerges he may be the slave of any woman, only not at the time. But I assure you I have seen women attempt to transact the business of an office, when they were in love, with deplorable results. I do not say they are incapable of renouncing their private passions for the sake of what they apprehend to be their duty, but I maintain that their services to that duty will not be worth a pin so long as the renouncement is in progress. And the public service cannot wait while they recover.”

“A great many people will disagree with you, Miss Mathers,” I said.

“A great many people have not loved,” she replied. “I speak from observation only.”

Tom and Anne were as devoted as I was to Miss Mathers. Of course Anne never became a gentlewoman, but she learned to sew, and to write without inking her fingers, not to come into a room head first and feet last nor to trail a vanishing hand across the door before she shut it; not to giggle, not to finger the spoons and forks before the next dish came in, not to sit still when she ought to stand up, not to frown and show her teeth in the sun, not to fall into habits of speech, and--most valuable and delightful accomplishment--not to argue about anything that had to be done. Tom said Miss Mathers was very restful because she saved them so much trouble. He explained that so long as there was any chance of altering an order by discussion it would be unsporting not to have a shot at it, but the argument was, on the whole, more fatiguing than it was worth, even to gain a slight concession.

I do not know whether she returned our affection, but when she left because Anne grew up, she said she did not intend to teach any more. It was very up-hill work in the present state of affairs. Parents of breeding were dying out, and modern education appeared to become daily more medical and less moral. She could never acquire the requisite knowledge for turning out a child’s stomach to examine its character. She should, therefore, retire and live with her brother, who really needed a lady to look after him.

_CHAPTER X_: THE CHARWOMAN

Two-and-sixpence a day is what it costs me to have the pleasure of Mrs. Muff’s society. She came at half-past eight and began at once on a bit of breakfast.

“I beg pardon, m’m,” said Ruth, when Mrs. Muff had been with us for a week (she came on Mondays and Tuesdays and did the rough washing), “but do I understand that Mrs. Muff is to have anything special ordered in for her breakfast?”

“It depends,” I said. “Is a charwoman fed on special food like a gold-fish? Won’t she thrive unless we give her ant’s eggs or boiled Indian meal?”

“I couldn’t say, I’m sure, m’m.” Ruth glanced angrily in the direction of the washhouse where Mrs. Muff was urging us in quavering tones to abide with her. “She had an egg this morning like the rest of us, but she said she wouldn’t be responsible if it happened again, as they always disagreed with her.”

“Ah, but these are fresh ones,” I said. “Did you explain it to her? Perhaps she had never tried them before; it makes all the difference.”

Ruth suggested that I had better speak to her myself, so I gathered up my skirts and “webbed it,” as an elegant friend of mine puts it, over the wet floor to Mrs. Muff and touched her on the shoulder.

“Good morning, Mrs. Muff,” I shouted. The song ceased. An amiable little cherry face with a sharp nose, vegetable eyes, and four teeth, by no means whole, whisked round upon me out of the steam.

“I can only abide with you for a minute, dear Mrs. Muff,” I bawled, “but I came to ask whether you had everything you wanted.”

“Oh, yes, thank you, m’m, indeed--unless it were that you could see your way to a new wash-tub; this one leaks something awful. If you thought of getting a man in to see to it he would tell you.”

“I know what he would tell me,” I replied, “I say--I know what he would tell me. I have heard it before.”

“And what was that, m’m?” Mrs. Muff inquired intelligently with one dripping hand behind her ear.

“I can’t explain,” I shouted, “it would take too long, but it made him whistle a great deal, and I don’t think the whistling did the tub any good, so we got a new one, and that is the one you are using--it is quite new--I can’t get another just yet.”