Bennett Arnold
These Twain
"What is it, Ada?" she repeated, with restraint, and yet warningly. "And where's your apron and your cap?"
"In the kitchen, m'm."
"Well, go and put them on, and then come and say what you have to say," said Hilda, thinking: "I don't give any importance to her cap and apron, but she does."
"I was thinking I'd better give ye notice, m'm," said Ada, and she said it pertly, ignoring the command.
The two women were alone together in the house. Each felt it; each felt the large dark emptiness of the house behind them, and the solid front and back doors cutting them off from succour; each had to depend entirely upon herself.
Hilda asked quietly:
"What's the matter now?"
She knew that Ada's grievance would prove to be silly. The girl had practically no commonsense. Not one servant girl in a hundred had any appreciable commonsense. And when girls happened to be "upset" – as they were all liable to be, and as Ada by the violent departure of the cook no doubt was-even such minute traces of gumption as they possessed were apt to disappear.
"There's no pleasing you, m'm!" said Ada. "The way you talked to me in the kitchen, saying I was always a-hiding things from ye. I've felt it very much!"
She threw her head back, and the gesture signified: "I'm younger than you, and young men are always running after me. And I can get a new situation any time. And I've not gone back into my kitchen to put my cap and apron on."
"Ada," said Hilda. "Shall I tell you what's wrong with you? You're a little fool. You know you're talking rightdown nonsense. You know that as well as I do. And you know you'll never get a better place than you have here. But you've taken an idea into your head-and there you are! Now do be sensible. You say you think you'd better give notice. Think it over before you do anything ridiculous. Sleep on it. We'll see how you feel in the morning."
"I think I'd better give notice, m'm, especially seeing I'm a fool, and silly," Ada persisted.
Hilda sighed. Her voice hardened slightly:
"So you'd leave me without a maid just at Christmas! And that's all the thanks I get for all I've done for you."
"Well, m'm. We've had such a queer lot of girls here lately, haven't we?" The pertness was intensified. "I don't hardly care to stay. I feel we sh'd both be better for a change like."
It was perhaps Ada's subtly insolent use of the word "we" and "both" that definitely brought about a new phase of the interview. Hilda suddenly lost all desire for an amicable examination of the crisis.
"Very well, Ada," she said, shortly. "But remember I shan't take you back again, whatever happens."
Ada moved away, and then returned.
"Could I leave at once, m'm, same as cook?"
Hilda was astonished and outraged, despite all her experience and its resulting secret sardonic cynicism in regard to servants. The girl was ready to walk out instantly.
"And may I enquire where you'd go to?" asked Hilda with a sneer. "At this time of night you couldn't possibly get home to your parents."
"Oh!" answered Ada brightly. "I could go to me cousin's up at Toft End. And her could send down a lad with a barrow for me box."
The plot, then, had been thought out. "Her cousin's!" thought Hilda, and seemed to be putting her finger on the cause of Ada's disloyalty. "Her cousin's!" It was a light in a dark mystery. "Her cousin's!"
"I suppose you know you're forfeiting the wages due to you the day after to-morrow?"
"I shall ask me cousin about that, m'm," said Ada, as it were menacingly.
"I should!" Hilda sarcastically agreed. "I certainly should." And she thought with bitter resignation: "She'll have to leave anyhow after this. She may as well leave on the spot."
"There's those as'll see as I have me rights," said Ada pugnaciously, with another toss of the head.
Hilda had a mind to retort in anger; but she controlled herself. Already that afternoon she had imperilled her dignity in the altercation with the cook. The cook, however, had not Ada's ready tongue, and, while the mistress had come off best against the cook, she might through impulsiveness find herself worsted by Ada's more youthful impudence, were it once unloosed.
"That will do, then, Ada," she said. "You can go and pack your box first thing."
In less than three quarters of an hour Ada was gone, and her corded trunk lay just within the scullery door, waiting the arrival of the cousin's barrow. She had bumped it down the stairs herself.
All solitary in the house, which had somehow been transformed into a strange and unusual house, Hilda wept. She had only parted with an unfaithful and ungrateful servant, but she wept. She dashed into the kitchen and began to do Ada's work, still weeping, and she was savage against her own tears; yet they continued softly to fall, misting her vision of fire and utensils and earthenware vessels. Ada had left everything in a moment; she had left the kettle on the fire, and the grease in the square tin in which the dinner-joint had been cooked, and the ashes in the fender, and tea-leaves in the kitchen teapot and a cup and saucer unwashed. She had cared naught for the inconvenience she was causing; had shewn not the slightest consideration; had walked off without a pang, smilingly hoity-toity. And all servants were like that. Such conduct might be due as much to want of imagination, to a simple inability to picture to themselves the consequences of certain acts, as to stark ingratitude; but the consequences remained the same; and Hilda held fiercely to the theory of stark ingratitude.
She had made Ada; she had created her. When Hilda engaged her, Ada was little more than an "oat-cake girl," – that is to say, one of those girls who earn a few pence by delivering oat-cakes fresh from the stove at a halfpenny each before breakfast at the houses of gormandising superior artisans and the middle-classes. True, she had been in one situation prior to Hilda's, but it was a situation where she learnt nothing and could have learnt nothing. Nevertheless, she was very quick to learn, and in a month Hilda had done wonders with her. She had taught her not only her duties, but how to respect herself, to make the best of herself, and favourably to impress others. She had enormously increased Ada's value in the universe. And she had taught her some worldly wisdom, and permitted and even encouraged certain coquetries, and in the bed-room during dressings and undressings had occasionally treated her as a soubrette if not as a confidante; had listened to her at length, and had gone so far as to ask her views on this matter or that-the supreme honour for a menial. Also she had very conscientiously nursed her in sickness. She had really liked Ada, and had developed a sentimental weakness for her. She had taken pleasure in her prettiness, in her natural grace, and in her crude youth. She enjoyed seeing Ada arrange a bedroom, or answer the door, or serve a meal. And Ada's stupidity-that half-cunning stupidity of her class, which immovably underlay her superficial aptitudes-had not sufficed to spoil her affection for the girl. She had been indulgent to Ada's stupidity; she had occasionally in some soft moods hoped that it was curable. And she had argued in moments of discouragement that at any rate stupidity could be faithful. In her heart she had counted Ada as a friend, as a true standby in the more or less tragic emergencies of the household. And now Ada had deserted her. Stupidity had proved to be neither faithful nor grateful. Why had Ada been so silly and so base? Impossible to say! A nothing! A whim! Nerves! Fatuity! The whole affair was horribly absurd. These creatures were incalculable. Of course Hilda would have been wiser not to upbraid her so soon after the scene with the cook, and to have spoken more smoothly to the chit in the boudoir. Hilda admitted that. But what then? Was that an excuse for the chit's turpitude? There must be a limit to the mistress's humouring. And probably after all the chit had meant to go… If she had not meant to go she would not have entered the boudoir apronless and capless. Some rankling word, some ridiculous sympathy with the cook, some wild dream of a Christmas holiday-who could tell what might have influenced her? Hilda gave it up-and returned to it a thousand times. One truth emerged-and it was the great truth of housemistresses-namely, that it never, never, never pays to be too kind to servants. "Servants do not understand kindness." You think they do; they themselves think they do; but they don't, – they don't and they don't. Hilda went back into the immensity of her desolating experience as an employer of female domestic servants of all kinds, but chiefly bad-for the landlady of a small boarding house must take what servants she can get-and she raged at the persistence of the proof that kindness never paid. What did pay was severity and inhuman strictness, and the maintenance of an impassable gulf between employer and employed. Not again would she make the mistake which she had made a hundred times. She hardened herself to the consistency of a slave-driver. And all the time it was the woman in her, not the mistress, that the hasty thoughtless Ada had wounded. To the woman the kitchen was not the same place without Ada-Ada on whom she had utterly relied in the dilemma caused by the departure of the cook. As with angrily wet eyes she went about her new work in the kitchen, she could almost see the graceful ghost of Ada tripping to and fro therein.
And all that the world, and the husband, would know or understand was that a cook had been turned out for drunkenness, and that a quite sober parlour-maid had most preposterously walked after her. Hilda was aware that in Edwin she had a severe, though a taciturn, critic of her activities as employer of servants. She had no hope whatever of his sympathy, and so she closed all her gates against him. She waited for him as for an adversary, and all the lustre faded from her conception of their love.
III
When Edwin approached his home that frosty evening, he was disturbed to perceive that there was no light from the hall-gas shining through the panes of the front-door, though some light showed at the dining-room window, the blinds of which had not been drawn. "What next?" he thought crossly. He was tired, and the keenness of the weather, instead of bracing him, merely made him petulant. He was astonished that several women in a house could all forget such an important act as the lighting of the hall-gas at nightfall. Never before had the hall-gas been forgotten, and the negligence appeared to Edwin as absolutely monstrous. The effect of it on the street, the effect on a possible caller, was bad enough (Edwin, while pretending to scorn social opinion, was really very deferential towards it), but what was worse was the revelation of the feminine mentality.
In opening the door with his latchkey he was purposely noisy, partly in order to give expression to his justified annoyance, and partly to warn all peccant women that the male had arrived, threatening.
As his feet fumbled into the interior gloom and he banged the door, he quite expected a rush of at least one apologetic woman with a box of matches. But nobody came. Nevertheless he could hear sharp movements through the half-open door of the kitchen. Assuredly women had the irresponsibility of infants. He glanced for an instant into the dining-room; the white cloth was laid, but the table was actually not set. With unusual righteous care he wiped the half-congealed mud off his boots on the mat; then removed his hat and his overcoat, took a large new piece of indiarubher from his pocket and put it on the hall-table, felt the radiator (which despite all his injunctions and recommendations was almost cold); and lastly he lighted the gas himself. This final act was contrary to his own rule, for he had often told Hilda that half her trouble with servants arose through her impatiently doing herself things which they had omitted, instead of ringing the bell and seeing the things done. But he was not infrequently inconsistent, both in deed and in thought. For another example, he would say superiorly that a woman could never manage women, ignoring that he the all-wise had never been able to manage Hilda.
He turned to go upstairs. At the same moment somebody emerged obscurely from the kitchen. It was Hilda, in a white apron.
"Oh! I'm glad you've lighted it," said she curtly, without the least symptom of apology, but rather affrontingly.
He continued his way.
"Have you seen anything of George?" she asked, and her tone stopped him.
Yet she well knew that he hated to be stopped of an evening on his way to the bathroom. It could not be sufficiently emphasized that to accost him before he had descended from the bathroom was to transgress one of the most solemn rules of his daily life.
"Of course I haven't seen George," he answered. "How should I have seen George?"
"Because he's not back from school yet, and I can't help wondering-"
She was worrying about George as usual.
He grunted and passed on.
"There's no light on the landing, either," he said, over the banisters. "I wish you'd see to those servants of yours."
"As it happens there aren't any servants."
Her tone, getting more peculiar with each phrase, stopped him again.
"Aren't any servants? What d'you mean?"
"Well, I found the attic full of beer bottles, so I sent her off on the spot."
"Sent who off?"
"Eliza."
"And where's Ada?"
"She's gone too," said Hilda defiantly, and as though rebutting an accusation before it could be made.
"Why?"
"She seemed to want to. And she was very impertinent over it."
He snorted and shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, it's your affair," he muttered, too scornful to ask details.
"It is," said she, significantly laconic.
In the bathroom, vexed and gloomy as he brushed his nails and splashed in the wash basin, he mused savagely over the servant problem. The servant problem had been growing acute. He had predicted several times that a crisis would arrive; a crisis had arrived; he was always right; his rightness was positively uncanny. He had liked Ada; he had not disliked the cook. He knew that Hilda was to blame. How should she not be to blame, – losing her entire staff in one afternoon? It was not merely that she lacked the gift of authoritative control, – it was also that she had no feeling for democratic justice as between one human being and another. And yet among his earliest recollections of her was her passionate sympathy with men on strike as against their employers. Totally misleading manifestations! For her a servant was nothing but a "servant." She was convinced that all her servants were pampered and spoilt; and as for Edwin's treatment of his workpeople she considered it to be ridiculously, criminally soft. If she had implied once she had implied a hundred times that the whole lot of them laughed at him behind his back for a sentimental simpleton. Occasionally Edwin was quite outraged by her callousness. The topic of the eight-hours day, of the ten-hours day, and even of the twelve-hours day (the last for tramwaymen) had been lately exciting the district. And Edwin was distressed that in his own house a sixteen-hour day for labour was in vogue and that the employer perceived no shame in it. He did not clearly see how the shame was to be abolished, but he thought that it ought to be admitted. It was not admitted. From six in the morning until ten at night these mysterious light-headed young women were the slaves of a bell. They had no surcease except one long weekday evening each week and a short Sunday evening each fortnight. At one period Hilda had had a fad for getting them out of bed at half-past five, to cure them of laziness. He remembered one cook whose family lived at the village of Brindley Edge, five miles off. This cook on her weekday evening would walk to Brindley Edge, spend three quarters of an hour in her home, and walk back to Bursley, reaching Trafalgar Road just in time to get to bed. Hilda saw nothing very odd in that. She said the girl could always please herself about going to Brindley Edge.
Edwin's democratic sense was gradually growing in force; it disturbed more and more the peace of his inmost mind. He seldom displayed his sympathies (save to Tertius Ingpen who, though a Tory, was in some ways astoundingly open to ideas, which seemed to interest him as a pretty equation would interest him), but they pursued their secret activity in his being, annoying him at his lithographic works, and still more in his home. He would suppress them, and grin, and repeat his ancient consoling truth that what was, was. The relief, however, was not permanent.
In that year the discovery of Rontgen Rays, the practical invention of the incandescent gas-mantle, the abolition of the man with the red flag in front of self-propelled vehicles, and the fact that Consols stood at 113, had combined to produce in innumerable hearts the illusion that civilisation was advancing at a great rate. But Edwin in his soul scarcely thought so. He was worrying not only about Liberal principles, but about the world; in his youth he had never worried about the world. And of his own personal success he would ask and ask: Is it right? He said to himself in the bathroom: "There's a million domestic servants in this blessed country, and not one of them works less than a hundred hours a week, and nobody cares. I don't think I really care myself. But there it is all the same!" And he was darkly resentful against Hilda on account of the entire phenomenon… He foresaw, too, a period of upset and discomfort in his house. Would there, indeed, ever be any real tranquillity in his house, with that strange, primeval cave-woman in charge of it?
As he descended the stairs, Hilda came out of the dining-room with an empty tray.
She said:
"I wish you'd go out and look for George."
Imagine it-going out into the Five Towns to look for one boy!
"Oh! He'll be all right. I suppose you haven't forgotten Ingpen's coming to-night."
"Of course I haven't. But I want you to go out and look for George."
He knew what was in her mind, – namely an absurd vision of George and his new bicycle crushed under a tramcar somewhere between Bleakridge and Hanbridge. In that year everybody with any pretension to youthfulness and modernity rode a bicycle. Both Edwin and Hilda rode occasionally-such was the power of fashion. Maternal apprehensions had not sufficed to keep George from having a bicycle, nor from riding on it unprotected up and down the greasy slopes of Trafalgar Road to and from school. Edwin himself had bought the bicycle, pooh-poohing danger, and asserting that anyhow normal risks must always be accepted with an even mind.
He was about to declare that he would certainly not do anything so silly as to go out and look for George, – and then all of a sudden he had the queer sensation of being alone with Hilda in the house made strange and romantic by a domestic calamity. He gazed at Hilda with her apron, and the calamity had made her strange and romantic also. He was vexed, annoyed, despondent, gloomy, fearful of the immediate future; he had immense grievances; he hated Hilda, he loathed giving way to her. He thought: "What is it binds me to this incomprehensible woman? I will not be bound!" But he felt that he would be compelled (not by her but by something in himself) to commit the folly of going out to look for George. And he felt that though his existence was an exasperating adventure, still it was an adventure.
"Oh! Damn!" he exploded, and reached for a cap.
And then George came into the hall through the kitchen. The boy often preferred to enter by the back, the stalking Indian way.
IV
George wore spectacles. He had grown considerably. He was now between fourteen and fifteen years of age, and he had begun to look his age. His mental outlook and conversation were on the whole in advance of his age. Even when he was younger he had frequently an adult manner of wise talking, but it had appeared unreal, naïve, – it was amusing rather than convincing. Now he imposed himself even on his family as a genuine adolescent, though the idiom he employed was often schoolboyish and his gestures were immaturely rough. The fact was he was not the same boy. Everybody noticed it. His old charm and delicacy seemed to have gone, and his voice was going. He had become harsh, defiant, somewhat brutal, and egotistic if not conceited. He held a very low opinion of all his school-fellows, and did not conceal it. Yet he was not very high in his form (the lower fifth); his reports were mediocre; and he cut no figure in the playfield. In the home he was charged with idleness, selfishness, and irresolution. It was pointed out to him that he was not making the best of his gifts, and that if he only chose to make the best of them he might easily, etc., etc. Apparently he did not care a bit. He had marked facility on the piano, but he had insisted on giving up his piano lessons and would not open the piano for a fortnight at a time. He still maintained his intention of being an architect, but he had ceased to show any interest in architecture. He would, however, still paint in water-colours; and he read a lot, but gluttonously, without taste. Edwin and Hilda, and especially Hilda, did not hide their discontent. Hilda had outbursts against him. In regard to Hilda he was disobedient. Edwin always spoke quietly to him, and was seldom seriously disobeyed. When disobeyed Edwin would show a taciturn resentment against the boy, who would sulk and then melt.
"Oh! He'll grow out of it," Edwin would say to Hilda, yet Edwin, like Hilda, thought that the boy was deliberately naughty, and they held themselves towards him as grieved persons of superior righteousness towards a person of inferior righteousness. Not even Edwin reflected that profound molecular changes might be proceeding in George's brain, for which changes he was in no way responsible. Nevertheless, despite the blighting disappointment of George's evolution, the home was by no means deeply engloomed. No! George had an appealing smile, a mere gawky boyishness, a peculiar way of existing, that somehow made joy in the home. Also he was a centre of intense and continual interest, and of this he was very well aware.
In passing through the kitchen George had of course been struck by the astounding absence of the cook; he had noticed further a fancy apron and a cap lying on the window sill therein. And when he came into the hall, the strange aspect of his mother (in a servant's apron) and his uncle proved to him that something marvellously unusual, exciting, and uplifting was afoot. He was pleased, agog, and he had the additional satisfaction that great events would conveniently divert attention from his lateness. Still he must be discreet, for the adults were evidently at loggerheads, and therefore touchy. He slipped between Edwin and Hilda with a fairly good imitation of innocent casualness, as if saying: "Whatever has occurred, I am guiltless, and going on just as usual."
"Ooh! Bags I!" he exclaimed loudly, at the hall-table, and seized the indiarubber, which Edwin had promised him. His school vocabulary comprised an extraordinary number of words ending in gs. He would never, for example, say "first," but "foggs"; and never "second," but "seggs." That very morning, for example, meeting Hilda on the mat at the foot of the stairs, he had shocked her by saying: "You go up foggs, mother, and I'll go seggs."
"George!" Hilda severely protested. Her anxiety concerning him was now turned into resentment. "Have you had an accident?"
"An accident?" said George, as though at a loss. Yet he knew perfectly that his mother was referring to the bicycle.
Edwin said curtly:
"Now, don't play the fool. Have you fallen off your bike? Look at your overcoat. Don't leave that satchel there, and hang your coat up properly."
The overcoat was in a grievous state. A few days earlier it had been new. Besides money, it had cost an enormous amount of deliberation and discussion, like everything else connected with George. Against his will, Edwin himself had been compelled to conduct George to Shillitoe's, the tailor's, and superintend a third trying-on, for further alterations, after the overcoat was supposed to be finished. And lo, now it had no quality left but warmth! Efforts in regard to George were always thus out of proportion to the trifling results obtained. At George's age Edwin doubtless had an overcoat, but he positively could not remember having one, and he was quite sure that no schoolboy overcoat of his had ever preoccupied a whole household for two minutes, to say nothing of a week.
George's face expressed a sense of injury, and his face hardened.
"Mother made me take my overcoat. You know I can't cycle in my overcoat. I've not been on my bicycle all day. Also my lamp's broken," he said, with gloomy defiance.
His curiosity about wondrous events in the house was quenched.
And Edwin felt angry with Hilda for having quite unjustifiably assumed that George had gone to school on his bicycle. Ought she not to have had the ordinary gumption to assure herself, before worrying, that the lad's bicycle was not in the shed? Incredible thoughtlessness! All these alarms for nothing!
"Then why are you so late?" Hilda demanded, diverting to George her indignation at Edwin's unuttered but yet conveyed criticism of herself.
"Kept in."
"All this time?" Hilda questioned, suspiciously.
George sullenly nodded.
"What for?"
"Latin."
"Homework? Again?" ejaculated Edwin. "Why hadn't you done it properly?"
"I had a headache last night. And I've got one to-day."
"Another of your Latin headaches!" said Edwin sarcastically. There was nothing, except possibly cod liver oil, that George detested more than Edwin's serious sarcasm.
The elders glanced at one another and glanced away. Both had the same fear-the dreadful fear that George might be developing the worse characteristics of his father. Both had vividly in mind the fact that this boy was the son of George Cannon. They never mentioned to each other either the fear or the fact; they dared not. But each knew the thoughts of the other. The boy was undoubtedly crafty; he could conceal subtle designs under a simple exterior; he was also undoubtedly secretive. The recent changes in his disposition had put Edwin and Hilda on their guard, and every time young George displayed cunning, or economised the truth, or lied, the fear visited them. "I hope he'll turn out all right!" Hilda had said once. Edwin had nearly replied: "What are you worrying about? The sons of honest men are often rascals. Why on earth shouldn't the son of a rascal be an honest man?" But he had only said, with good-humoured impatience: "Of course he'll turn out all right!" Not that he himself was convinced.
Edwin now attacked the boy gloomily:
"You didn't seem to have much of a headache when you came in just now."
It was true.
But George suddenly burst into tears. His headaches were absolutely genuine. The emptiness of the kitchen and the general queer look of things in the house had, however, by their promise of adventurous happenings, caused him to forget his headache altogether, and the discovery of the new indiarubber had been like a tonic to a convalescent. The menacing attitude of the elders had now brought about a relapse. The headache established itself as his chief physical sensation. His chief moral sensation was that of a terrible grievance. He did not often cry; he had not indeed cried for about a year. But to-night there was something nervous in the very air, and the sob took him unawares. The first sob having prostrated all resistance, others followed victoriously, and there was no stopping them. He did not quite know why he should have been more liable to cry on this particular occasion than on certain others, and he was rather ashamed; on the other hand it was with an almost malicious satisfaction that he perceived the troubling effect of his tears on the elders. They were obviously in a quandary. Serve them right!
"It's my eyes," he blubbered. "I told you these specs would never suit me. But you wouldn't believe me, and the headmaster won't believe me."
The discovery that George's eyesight was defective, about two months earlier, had led to a desperate but of course hopeless struggle on his part against the wearing of spectacles. It was curious that in the struggle he had never even mentioned his strongest objection to spectacles, – namely, the fact that Bert Benbow wore spectacles.
"Why didn't you tell us?" Edwin demanded.
Between sobs George replied with overwhelming disillusioned disgust:
"What's the good of telling you anything? You only think I'm codding."
And he passed upstairs, apparently the broken victim of fate and parents, but in reality triumphant. His triumph was such that neither Edwin nor Hilda dared even to protest against the use of such an inexcusable word as 'codding.'
Hilda went into the kitchen, and Edwin rather aimlessly followed her. He felt incompetent. He could do nothing except carry trays, and he had no desire to carry trays. Neither spoke. Hilda was bending over the fire, then she arranged the grid in front of the fire to hold a tin, and she greased the tin. He thought she looked very wistful, for all the somewhat bitter sturdiness of her demeanour. Tertius Ingpen was due for the evening; she had no servants-through her own fault; and now a new phase had arrived in the unending responsibility for George's welfare. He knew that she was blaming him on account of George. He knew that she believed in the sincerity of George's outburst; he believed in it himself. The spectacles were wrong; the headache was genuine. And he, Edwin, was guilty of the spectacles because he had forced Hilda, by his calm bantering commonsense, to consult a small local optician of good reputation.
Hilda had wanted to go to Birmingham or Manchester; but Edwin said that such an idea was absurd. The best local optician was good enough for the great majority of the inhabitants of the Five Towns and would be good enough for George. Why not indeed? Why the craze for specialists? There could be nothing uniquely wrong with the boy's eyes, – it was a temporary weakness. And so on and so on, in accordance with Edwin's instinct for denying the existence of a crisis. And the local optician, consulted, had borne him out. The local optician said that every year he dealt with dozens of cases similar to George's. And now both the local optician and Edwin were overthrown by a boy's sobbing tears.