Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (32 page)

‘All through a glass of port.’ Fantastic as the notion was, she believed it reflected, in an amusing way, one aspect of the whole truth. And her mind fled back (while she still humoured him and saw Paddington and their destination for the night approach) to the now barely imaginable days when, greenly innocent of drink and all else, she partook of that single glass.

What follows is the story of that glass of port, and those days.

I

T
HE
T
REASURE

I
T SEEMS THAT
the tragic predicament of the aged is that, having no further desire for their bodies, they have little left to do in life but concentrate upon the exacting and meaningless problem of living in them. Paradoxically, at no time of life is existence so intensely physical as in old age. Youth, in the careless working of its bodily perfection, may well attend to things of the spirit and mind: but senility, whose every corporal faculty is decaying and working arbitrarily, awaits on the body as all in all. Incessant organic events and misadventures, occupying the vigilant mind to the exclusion of all else, are observed, prophesied, and medicinally forestalled and mitigated. In the majority of cases it is not with beauty and seemly abstractions, but with pills and digestive expedients, that the superannuated await release in death.

In a middle-sized residence in the suburb of Chiswick, five or six years ago, there lived three people in this intensely physical state. There were two old ladies – Miss Chingford and Mrs. Rodgers, who were sisters and both over seventy – and their brother Dr. Chingford, who was eighty-three.

The three were figures in the neighbourhood, with which they had very few dealings. Sometimes the old man was taken for a walk, and the old ladies went shopping together pretty regularly every morning.

These two were not particularly welcome or liked abroad. Tradesmen, as they served them, winked or glanced meaningly at the next customer, and the latter could barely resist returning the same kind of glance as they shuffled out of the shop. They really were so old, and ugly, and silly to look at.

Tradesmen and others, of course, were unable to divine that they were not being old and ugly and silly on purpose. They were seen as hideous old women without past or future, and it was imagined that they were this because they had somehow decided to be so. For all that was thought about it,
they might have been born hideous old women. At any rate they had now taken a resolute and unrepentant stand upon it, and people resented such a peculiar taste.

Nothing actually was further from their minds. But, being totally unaware that they were the victims of this injustice, they did nothing to remedy the matter. Indeed, as you saw them coming down the street – the tall, parrot-like, red-eyed, fussy, fatuously hatted Miss Chingford – the small, thinlipped, anaemic, bowed, wrinkled Mrs. Rodgers, with her enlarging pince-nez stuck with slight but maddening lopsidedness on her little nose – as they came down the street they had about them, in their old legs and person, a kind of formidable, bull-dog like waddle which well might make you think they were being positively arrogant about themselves. Also, being old, and having lost their nerve, and not being able to see or think quickly and properly, they were always getting into panics, and talking too loud, and peering at things too long, and holding people up, and waving umbrellas at bus-drivers, and fiddling in their bags, and obstinately refusing to be ‘done,’ in a manner which was really exasperating even to those who were wise enough to perceive that they were afflicted rather than contumacious.

They differed from each other in that the elder, Miss Chingford, was practically a full-blown eccentric and useless everywhere, whereas Mrs. Rodgers, by comparison and within the limits of age and illness, was tolerably complacent, and ran the house at Chiswick.

From Dr. Chingford, whose wife had died some thirty years ago, they both greatly differed. He, when he went abroad, caused no resentment in the neighbourhood. This was because he made no fuss, and was not ugly. On the contrary he was an extraordinarily tall and handsome man, wearing a white beard, and he was incapable of making any fuss, owing to his deafness, which removed him from common affairs. Only by shouting wildly at him, for some time, could you produce any imitation of responding language from him and then you had miserably to translate whatever sounds had emerged as well as you could. For this reason he was
practically an unknown quantity in life, through which he appeared to float like little more than an apparition. All the same, with regard to him, people made the same error as they made with his sisters – that of assuming that he had adopted extreme old age and deafness as a career.

It happened that these three old people, who were far from well off as regards money, required a new servant. For the last six months they had been making do with a woman called Mrs. Brackett, whose business it was to come in daily. The arrival of Mrs. Brackett’s little boy, with a meagre and illiterate note explaining Mrs. Brackett’s inability to appear herself was, however, a constant occurrence, and the daily suspense endured by Miss Chingford and Mrs. Rodgers round about eight o’clock was fast growing unendurable. It might, though, have been endured a great deal longer had not Mrs. Rodgers one afternoon been visited by a servant once in her employ, who came for a reference.

This girl, whose name was Kate and who had left Mrs. Rodgers two years ago to get married, still sometimes came in to help, and was on very friendly terms with her old ‘mistress.’ Mrs. Rodgers gave her a cup of tea on this occasion, and afterwards they had a chat. In the course of their conversation Kate asked Mrs. Rodgers whether she ‘happened’ to require a new servant. She knew, she said, of the very thing if she did.

A young girl, a vague connection of hers by marriage, was in need of employment. She had not actually been in service before, but was perfectly trained in domestic usage, an excellent plain cook, and extremely willing. She desired, if possible, to ‘sleep in,’ though she would not exact this.

Mrs. Rodgers was taken with the idea, and, unknown to Mrs. Brackett, the girl was given an interview. This took place in the drawing-room. Only Mrs. Rodgers saw her, and she came out in two minds.

She pronounced the girl neat, capable-looking, and respectful. She could, in fact, in view of Kate’s recommendation, actually furnish no excuse for rejecting her, save perhaps that of her age, which was only eighteen. The sum of years accumulated by the three upon whom she would minister
amounting to over two hundred and twenty-five, the arrangement seemed ill-balanced. But Miss Chingford, an avid optimist and restless enthusiast for change, perceived no disadvantage in this, and after sleeping on the matter her sister came round to the same point of view.

There was, all the same, just one dim objection and foreboding at the back of Mrs. Rodgers’ mind, which she could not define clearly either to her sister or herself. It arose from the extraordinary prettiness of the girl.

From what she had seen at the time, and as far as she could remember now, the girl was not ordinarily, but extraordinarily pretty. During the brief interview this perfectly inconsequent and unacknowledgeable little matter had impinged itself upon the consciousness, it seemed of both, in a meek but peculiarly nettling way.

A second interview took place, and this time Mrs. Rodgers decided, but not with an entirely clean conscience, that perhaps she was not so pretty after all. She engaged her. She was to begin work on Thursday, coming in to work on that evening, and for the day on Friday, and then she was to bring her ‘box’ (a purely mythical and traditional container) on Saturday, when she would take up residence in her own room at the top of the house.

Her name was Jane Taylor. During this interview Mrs. Rodgers learned that she had once worked in a factory. This, in combination with her prettiness, again worked a minute disturbance in the heart of Mrs. Rodgers. Was it conceivable that she was about to lodge in her house not a new servant, but a pretty factory girl? She could have swallowed an ordinary factory girl converted to domestic service, but was not a pretty factory girl (however deeply rooted her change of heart) a little too much of a good thing?

She confessed her trepidations to her sister. But Miss Chingford, who had still not seen the girl but was dead set on her, knew no fear of factories in her soul. Her faith infected Mrs. Rodgers, and the next afternoon Kate and the newcomer both came round for an hour or so to go over the house – the former expounding in detail to the latter the domestic
geography, traditions, drawers, cupboards and utensils in relation to each other. This went off very well, with gaiety indeed, and that evening both Mrs. Rodgers and Miss Chingford were highly pleased with themselves.

At this juncture a curious thing occurred. Mrs. Brackett, now to be dismissed, underwent a horrible metamorphosis. From a respectable though rather trying and inconsistent ‘daily,’ she was converted, overnight, into a black monster of every evil. It seemed that they had never in their hearts liked her, but not until now, at the rising of a new dawn, did they apprehend how dark their household night had been. Filth, unpunctuality, insolence, cunning, scandal-mongering, smashing, lying – all these qualities in Mrs. Brackett stood out clear in the illumination of the coming change. Thieving, in fact, was the sole misdemeanour not positively attributable to Mrs. Brackett, but even here shrewd and exultant suspicions enlivened the mind. Mrs. Brackett was given no knowledge of this lightning plunge from grace, and departed peacefully with presents.

* * *

Dr. Chingford, Mrs. Rodgers, and Miss Chingford, who were known respectively within their own precincts as Robert, Marion, and Bella, took a large lunch in the middle of the day. Afterwards they all felt dazed and rather ill. Robert then retired to his ‘study,’ wherein he studied exclusively slumber, with whose every department he was majestically acquainted: Marion went to her bedroom; and Bella stayed down in an armchair before the fire.

The two ladies generally read for some time, finally letting fall both their literature and their lower jaws, and swimming off into a fuddled coma until tea time. Then Marion took the initiative, came quietly down the creaking stairs, and in a tense zero period put on the kettle for tea.

A cup was taken up to Robert, and spirits slowly revived. Then the two ladies generally went out for a walk. After this it commonly occurred that one or both of them suffered from some slight indisposition or other – a headache, giddiness,
indigestion or mere fatigue – and they again parted to recuperate alone.

It therefore chanced, on Thursday evening at six o’clock, when the new girl arrived, that Bella was alone downstairs in the dining-room armchair, while Marion was up in her bedroom.

Though it was a sunny evening, a bright fire burned in the grate, and Bella had fallen into another doze. The girl’s single knock – the timid and barely audible knock of her class – startled Bella extremely, and threw her into a mental state bordering upon panic. All door-opening was left to Marion, Bella being unused and constitutionally unsuited to the task.

She therefore sprang up, took a hurried glimpse through the window curtain, confirmed her worst fears, went out into the hall, and, standing to listen, prayed in her craven soul that Marion had heard.

Marion had not heard. Instead, a sepulchral silence reigned upstairs and all over the house. On one side of the front door the new maid diffidently awaited promised admission, on the other an old lady stood disconcerted.

But at last, taking her courage into both hands, Bella went to the door and opened it.

‘Ah! . . . You’re . . .’

Bella did not describe, but smiled and nodded a welcoming comprehension of what the young person was.

‘Yes, madam,’ said the girl shyly, and smiled, and came in.

Bella went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Marion!’ she cried. Marion shouted something from a distance, and Bella, smiling sweetly once more, went into the dining-room, leaving the door open.

Marion made no further sign, and oceans of silence descended again upon the house. The girl remained standing in the hall; Bella remained standing in the dining-room. Each was agonizingly aware of the other’s creaking proximity, and the moment was charged with awkwardness and ulterior significance. They were both in their hearts conscious of the near, one might say intimate nature of the relationship about to come into being between them, and yet were dismayed by
each other’s strangeness. They had never set eyes on each other before, and yet out of the blue they were in the same house and about to participate closely in the same personal things – from the cooking and eating of food down to the handling of personal linen.

Marion coming downstairs made things a great deal easier. She greeted the girl apparently without introspection or misgiving of any sort, and conducted her to the kitchen.

The kitchen was on the ground floor, and communicable with the dining-room by means of a sliding hatch situate in a dark passage between the two. If the bell remained unheard you thrust your head out of the hatch and shouted to the kitchen. The hatch, also, was a reputed means to the end of the eavesdropper, and was often winked and nodded at when the ladies thought they were speaking too loudly.

Marion now stayed for some time in the kitchen talking to the newcomer, and returning, every now and again, to the dining-room. On each occasion she returned she found her sister, for no obvious reason, standing up. Nothing was said, but Marion was irritated by this symptom and confession of restlessness over what she desired to regard as a perfectly commonplace event – the installation of a new maid.

Finally Marion went upstairs again, and five minutes later the girl knocked on the door and entered. Bella, now in an armchair, peered over her newspaper and her spectacles and smirked affably again. The girl smiled back, and at once proceeded primly and methodically to lay the table.

Bella began slyly to take stock of her, and her first reflex was one of alarm. She now saw the girl for the first time without her hat, and was staggered by her prettiness. The fact that Marion had said she was very pretty was in an instant submerged and lost to the mind for ever in the overwhelming phenomenon of her actual prettiness. Bella, in fact, strongly suspected that she was lovely. Her very fair hair – her rather full mouth – her clear wide blue eyes – her slim figure and white arms – who was this that had come to share her privacy in her old age? She was so pretty that, with her quiet erect
gait, she gave a mischievous impression of playing, like a theatrical doll, at laying the table.