CHAPTER XVI
BLACKBOY PASSAGE
As Nancy had anticipated, Miss Fewkes was more than doubtful about her ability to keep an eye on Letizia while her mother was haunting the offices of theatrical agents.
“I’m not really at all used to children,” she sniffed angrily. “Supposing if she was to take it into her silly little head to go and jump out of the window? There’s no knowing what some children won’t do next. Then of course you’d blameme. I’ve always been very nervous of children. I could have been married half-a-dozen times if I hadn’t have dreaded the idea of having children of my own, knowing how nervous they’d be sure to make me.”
“I wondered if perhaps Louisa might be glad to keep an eye on her, that is, of course, if you’d let me give her a little present. It probably won’t be for more than a week.” It certainly wouldn’t, Nancy thought, at the rate her money was going, for she could not imagine herself owing a halfpenny to Miss Fewkes. And even that little present to Louisa, the maid-of-all-work, would necessitate a first visit to the nearest pawnbroker.
“Louisa has quite enough to do to keep her busy without looking after the children of my lodgers,” the landlady snapped.
Poor Louisa certainly had, Nancy admitted to herself guiltily, at the mental vision of the overworked maid toiling up and downstairs all day at Miss Fewkes’s behest.
“I don’t see why you don’t take her out with you,” said the landlady acidly.
“Oh, Miss Fewkes, surely you know something of theatrical agents!” Nancy exclaimed. “How could I possibly drag Letizia round with me? No, I’ll just leave her in my room. She’ll be perfectly good, I’m sure. And while we are on the subject of room, Miss Fewkes, will you let me know how much you will charge me for the bedroom only, as I shan’t be wanting the sitting-room after this week.”
“Oh, but I don’t particularly care to let the bedroom by itself,” Miss Fewkes objected. “I haven’t another bedroom vacant, and what use would the sitting-room be to anybody by itself? Perhaps you’d prefer to give up both rooms?”
Nancy hesitated. Then she plunged.
“Certainly, Miss Fewkes. I really wanted to give them up some time ago. They’re very expensive and very uncomfortable, and not overclean.”
“Well, I shan’t argue about it, Miss O’Finn,” said Miss Fewkes haughtily. “Because I wouldn’t soil my lips by saying what I think of a person who behaves like you do. But I do know a little about the prerfession, having been in it myself, and if youarewhat you pretend to be, which I don’t think, all I can say is the prerfession has changed for the worse since my day.”
With this she snapped out of the room, as a little wooden cuckoo snaps back into his clock.
Nancy sat down and wrote to Mrs. Pottage.
5 Blackboy Passage,Soho.Friday.Dear Mrs. Pottage,I’m rather worried what to do with Letizia while I am looking for work. I wonder if you’d look after her for a week or two? I have a very unpleasant landlady here who hates children, and so I must get a new room until I find an engagement. Don’t ask me to come to Greenwich too, because, dearest Mrs. Pottage, I simply couldn’t. But Letizia’s different, and if you wouldn’t mind having her withyou for a little while it would be such a weight off my mind. You must please charge me whatever you think is fair. I haven’t the least idea, so I must leave that to you. I leave here on Monday, and if you will let me know by then what time will suit you I will bring Letizia to Greenwich station, if you’d be kind enough to meet us. I haven’t told Letizia herself that she may be going to stay with you, because I don’t want to disappoint her if you can’t manage it, and of course I will perfectly understand if you can’t.Yours affectionately,Nancy O’Finn.
5 Blackboy Passage,Soho.Friday.
5 Blackboy Passage,Soho.Friday.
5 Blackboy Passage,
Soho.
Friday.
Dear Mrs. Pottage,
I’m rather worried what to do with Letizia while I am looking for work. I wonder if you’d look after her for a week or two? I have a very unpleasant landlady here who hates children, and so I must get a new room until I find an engagement. Don’t ask me to come to Greenwich too, because, dearest Mrs. Pottage, I simply couldn’t. But Letizia’s different, and if you wouldn’t mind having her withyou for a little while it would be such a weight off my mind. You must please charge me whatever you think is fair. I haven’t the least idea, so I must leave that to you. I leave here on Monday, and if you will let me know by then what time will suit you I will bring Letizia to Greenwich station, if you’d be kind enough to meet us. I haven’t told Letizia herself that she may be going to stay with you, because I don’t want to disappoint her if you can’t manage it, and of course I will perfectly understand if you can’t.
Yours affectionately,Nancy O’Finn.
Nancy felt more cheerful when she had posted this letter.
Early on Sunday morning the Kinos left Blackboy Passage.
“You won’t change your mind at the last minute and let us take the kid?” Mr. Kino asked.
Nancy shook her head.
“It would be a weight off your shoulders, wouldn’t it?” he pleaded.
“Yes, but it would be a terrible weight on my mind,” said Nancy. “Dear Mr. Kino, I couldn’t let her be adopted, I couldn’t really.”
Yet when the Kinos had gone, and Nancy was sitting by the window, listening to the church bells and to the occasional footsteps of people clinking along the frozen Sabbath streets and to the emptiness of Soho without the distant roar of traffic, she began to wonder if she ought not to have accepted the Kinos’ offer. She tried to make up her mind to put on her things and take Letizia to the late Mass in the Soho Square church; but the dejection reacted on her energy, and she felt incapable of getting up from her seat, of doing anything except stare out of the window at the grey March sky or look with a listless resentment at Miss Fewkes’s pictures of girls in sunbonnets cuddling donkeys over gates or of girls in furs feeding robins in the snow. She even lacked the energy, when the morning had passed and it was nearly two o’clock, to ring and ask when Miss Fewkesproposed to serve dinner. And when dinner did arrive, with everything cooked so badly as to make it nearly inedible, she did not feel that she could be bothered to protest.
“Muvver,” said Letizia, “why has my gravy got spots of soap in it?”
“Because it’s getting cold, my dear. So eat it up quickly before it gets any colder.”
“But, muvver, when I put it into my mouf, it all sticks to the top of it and won’t come off.”
“Don’t go on grumbling, there’s a good little girl. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it.”
“Well, I won’t,” said Letizia decidedly.
A rice-pudding, which tasted like a dry sponge wrapped up in old leaves, caused Letizia many sighs before she could swallow even a mouthful, and some bananas which looked as if the greengrocer had tried to reshape them after they had been driven over by the traffic of Covent Garden all day, did nothing to help matters. As for the coffee, it might have been smeared on a boy’s fingers to stop him from biting his nails, but it was never meant to be drunk.
One of the reasons for Miss Fewkes’s perpetual bad temper was an inclination on the part of visitors to the lower basement of the house to ring Miss Fewkes’s bell and so fetch her downstairs unnecessarily to open the front door. This being the second Sunday of the month, Louisa had been allowed to go out, and Miss Fewkes was in her tiny little bedroom in the roof of the house when her bell rang twice. The idea of going all the way downstairs only to find that a visitor had arrived for the people in the basement did not appeal to the little woman. So she opened the bedroom window and, peering out over the sill, perceived upon the steps below an exceedingly bright cerise bonnet belonging to what was apparently a respectable middle-aged woman.
“Who are you ringing for?” Miss Fewkes called down in her rasping voice.
The cerise bonnet bobbed about for a while until atlast it discovered from what window it was being addressed, when it looked up and shouted back:
“What’s it got to do with you who I’m ringing for? If you’re the servant here, just you come down and open the door the same as what I would if anybody rung my front bell.”
“Do you want Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit?” Miss Fewkes called down. “Because if you do, it’s the broken bell by the area gate and kindly ring that.”
“Do I want who?” the cerise bonnet shouted back.
“Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit!”
“No, I don’t, you saucy old outandabout! What next are you going to ask? You just come down and open the door the same as I should myself.”
Miss Fewkes slammed her window down and left the cerise bonnet on the steps. After ringing about a dozen times, it went down the steps again and standing in the middle of the pavement shouted “Hi!” several times in rapid succession. A small boy blowing a mouth-organ stared at the cerise bonnet for a moment, stopped his tune, and asked it if it had lost anything.
“What ’ud I be staring up at the top story of a house for, you saucy little image, if I’d have lost anything—unless I’d dropped my umbrella out of a balloon, and which I haven’t?... Hi!”
On hearing the cerise bonnet begin to shout again, the small boy put the mouth-organ in his pocket and looking up in the air shouted “Hi!” too. Two little girls dragging behind them a child of doubtful sex smeared with barley sugar stopped to gaze, and then three more small boys arrived on the scene and proceeded to augment the duet of “Hi!”
A policeman, who had been lured from Dean Street into Blackboy Passage by the noise, inquired of the cerise bonnet what its need was.
“Can’t you get into your house, mum?”
“No, I can’t. I want to visit a lady friend of mine who lives at 5 Blackboy Passage, and when I rung thebell a female like a potted shrimp poked her head out of a top-floor window and asked me if I wanted Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit.”
“Mr. Blanchit lives at number five,” one of the small boys volunteered. “Down in the basement, he lives.”
“Well, what’s that got to do with you, you pushing little eel? I don’t want the man. I want to see my lady friend.”
“Perhaps you’ve got the wrong number,” the policeman suggested.
“Wrong number be ... well, I won’t say what I was thinking, because it doesn’t always do.”
It was at this moment that Letizia, who had been trying vainly for an hour after dinner to make her mother play with the gilded antelopes, decided to look out of the window.
“Muvver! Muvver!” she shouted, clapping joyful hands. “I can see Mrs. Porridge in the street, and she’s talking to a policeman.”
Nancy jumped up, and ran to the window.
“Why, so it is! Dear, dear Mrs. Pottage! I’ll go down and open the door.”
“There you are!” Mrs. Pottage exclaimed triumphantly to the policeman after she had embraced Nancy. “Didn’t I tell you my lady friend lived here?”
The policeman strode off with a good-natured smile: the small boy took the mouth-organ out of his pocket and, after watching the policeman safely through the archway of the Tavern, resumed his interrupted tune. The two little girls, without looking to see if the sugar-smeared neutral was ready to be dragged on again, moved forward on their way. The three other small boys discovered a new method of wearing out boots and set off to practise it. Mrs. Pottage and Nancy retired into Number Five. Blackboy Passage was once more abandoned to its Sabbath emptiness and silence.
“Well, you do live in a Punch and Judy show and no mistake,” Mrs. Pottage declared, as she followed Nancyup the stairs, the jet bugles of her best bonnet tinkling and lisping as she moved.
“My landlady doesn’t like being called down to open the door; and the girl’s out,” Nancy explained.
“Landlady you call her? Skylady I should call her. That is if I called her a lady at all, and which I most certainly never shouldn’t not if I lived to be as old as Methussalem.”
Letizia was waiting at the head of the stairs to welcome Mrs. Pottage, into whose outspread arms she flung herself in a rapture of welcome.
“Mrs. Porridge! Mrs. Porridge!”
“My heart’s jool!”
“Oh, Mrs. Porridge, where have you been? I didn’t know where you could be, and I went to a circus and touched an ephelant on his trunk and it was all hot and I saw a little friend who the baby Jesus liked and I saw my big grannie and the wolf didn’t eat her at all and I saw two aunts and they smelt all funny like the inside of a dirty-cloves basket and we had rice-pudding for dinner and it sticked my teef togevver, and I’ve got two golden auntylopes and they eat apples made of soap.”
“My good gracious, if you haven’t been going it,” Mrs. Pottage declared, with a critical glance round the sitting-room of the lodgings. “Poky! Very poky! And not at all clean. Why, that grate don’t look as if it had been swept since the fire of London, and, oh, dear, oh, dear, just look at the dust on those pictures! If a water pipe burst in this house you’d have weeds growing on the frames. Well, I suppose I haven’t got to tell you who I’ve come to fetch?”
Nancy smiled.
“I knew you wouldn’t fail me.”
“Yes, but wait a minute. I didn’t at all like the tone of that letter you wrote me.”
Nancy looked worried.
“Not at all I didn’t like it. Yes, I see myself sending in a bill for that blessed infant’s keep. Why, you mightas well ask me to charge you for the sun shining in at your windows.”
Nancy saw that she had genuinely hurt the good soul by mentioning money in connection with Letizia’s visit.
“Dear Mrs. Pottage, you could hardly expect me to plant her down on you without at least offering to pay, but I won’t offend you by arguing further. You know exactly how I feel about your kindness, my dear soul.”
“Kindness be ... oh, dear, now that’s twice in the last half hour I’ve nearly said that word. It comes of keeping company with Mr. Currie. Let me see, you won’t have heard of him, because he’s only been courting me since I gave the go-by to Watcher and Hopkins. He’s a very hasty-tempered man, and his language is a bit of a coloured supplement. Mrs. Bugbird passed the remark to me I’d really have to mind my p’s and q’s, and I said it wasn’t my p’s and q’s I had to look out for, it was my b’s and d’s. Of course, Mrs. Bugbird herself didn’t mind. Oh, no, she’s a very broad-minded woman. In fact her father, so she’s often told me, used to preach regularly at street corners against any kind of religion at all. But I shan’t keep this Currie hanging around much longer. No, he gets me into bad habits, and the next time he proposes marriage will be the last. Besides, even if I likedhim, I don’t like his business which is fried fish. Fancy me in a fried-fish shop for the rest of my life! Why, I’d sooner marry an engine driver and live in a railway station. Well, an engine driver did propose to me once. But I saw he had the habit of driving too much, and that would never have suited me. Why, even of a Sunday afternoon he wasn’t happy if he couldn’t walk me round Greenwich Park at sixty miles an hour. I remember once just for a joke I started whistling the same as an engine might, and everybody stopped and begun staring, and which made him a bit annoyed. In fact he thought I was touched in my head, and that Sunday was his last. Well, he’s the only one of all my many who didn’t wait for me to say ‘no’ definite,but went and hooked it himself. And going back to the subject of my language this last month, it wouldn’t do at all if Letichia’s coming home with me, so I think I’ll drop him a p.c. and not wait for the third time of asking.”
“Am I coming home with you, Mrs. Porridge?” Letizia asked, clapping her hands.
“You’re coming home with me this blessed afternoon just as soon as your dear ma’s packed up your tiddlies. Your friend Mrs. Bugbird will be popping in, and we’ll have a sprat tea together. And dear Aggie Wilkinson’s dancing about on her pore crutches, because you’re coming home to your Mrs. Porridge.” She took Nancy aside, and continued in a lower voice. “I read between the lines of your letter, dearie, and I knew you didn’t want to come near Greenwich. So I just skipped into my Sunday best and come along to fetch her. She can stay as long as you like. I’d say she could stay for ever. Only she wants a better bringing-up than what a woman like me could give her.”
“Oh, but I’m sure to get an engagement very soon, Mrs. Pottage, and then of course she’ll go on tour again with me. I wouldn’t have bothered you now, if I hadn’t thought you’d be glad to have her for a while, and if I hadn’t wanted to leave these rooms as soon as possible.”
“And I don’t blame you. I’d sooner live in a dustbin. But where are you going when you leave here?”
“Oh, I shall find somewhere to-morrow. I’m so glad you did come to-day for Letizia. It will make it ever so much easier for me. The only thing I’m worrying about is the luggage.”
“Well, why don’t you let me take what luggage you don’t want down to Greenwich, and then when I bring you Letichia, I can bring you your luggage at the same time. There’s no sense in travelling a lot of luggage round with you like a peacock’s tail. We can just pop what you don’t want into a four-wheeler and take it to London Bridge.”
Nancy hesitated. She was wondering if she had enough money left to pay the cab now, and Miss Fewkes’s bill to-morrow morning. However, if she hadn’t, she could visit the pawnbroker early and pledge some odds and ends, so she decided to accept Mrs. Pottage’s offer.
“Now who’s going to fetch the four-wheeler?” Mrs. Pottage wanted to know when the packing was finished. “Shall I give a holler to Her Landladyship upstairs?”
“Ask Miss Fewkes to fetch a cab?” Nancy exclaimed. “Why, she’d....” Words failed her to express what Miss Fewkes would do.
“But what is this Miss Fewkes?” demanded Mrs. Pottage indignantly. “Three ha’porth of nothing from what I could make out of her. Still, rather than create a row on a Sunday afternoon I’ll go and fetch the four-wheeler myself. I’ll stand in Shaftesbury Avenue till one comes along. There’s one thing, the police won’t be so likely to take me for a kerbstone fairy as what they would Lady Fewkes. Oh, dear, oh, dear! Well, I’m bothered if some people nowadays don’t give theirselves as much airs as if they was Margate, Ramsgate, and Brighton all rolled into one.”
In about ten minutes Mrs. Pottage returned, followed by a burly old cab-driver in a dark blue beaver coat with treble capes and a shiny bowler hat.
“I’ve brought a most obliging driver along with me,” she proclaimed. “The first cab I got, the fellow wouldn’t leave his horse at the corner to come and help down with the luggage. Afraid of his horse, he said. ‘I suppose you’re afraid it’ll fall down and never stand up again if you left go of the reins?’ I said. ‘Never heard of a horse running away, I suppose,’ he answers back very sarcastic. ‘What?’ said I, ‘that pore skelington run away? Why, it couldn’t walk away. It might fade away, yes. And if it didn’t run away of itself, I’m sure nobody wouldn’t ever run awaywithit. Not even a cats meat man, and they’ll run away with anything as looks a little bit like flesh and blood. But that horse of yours don’t.That horse of yours looks more like a clothes-horse than a real animal. Only I’d be very afraid to hang a towel on its back for fear it might break in half under the weight.’ And with that I walked on and found this driver who’s been most obliging, I’m sure.”
The cabman touched his hat in acknowledgment of the flattery, and asked which piece they wanted down first.
But now a greater obstacle to the departure of the luggage than an unwilling cab-driver presented itself, for Miss Fewkes appeared, her tow-coloured hair elaborately done as it always was on a Sunday afternoon to resemble a brand-new yacht’s fender from which state it gradually wore away during the stress of the week.
“And what is the meaning of this?” she demanded, folding her arms.
Nancy explained why her luggage was going away this afternoon.
“Then perhaps you’ll pay my weekly bill, Miss O’Finn, before you remove your boxes?” said Miss Fewkes.
“My bill will be paid to-morrow morning before I leave.”
“Yes, but I’m not in the habit of permitting my lodgers to remove their luggage until their bills are paid,” Miss Fewkes insisted.
Mrs. Pottage gasped.
“Well, of all the impudence I ever did hear! Well, I passed the remark to the policeman that you looked like a potted shrimp, but shrimp sauce is more what you ought to be called.”
“It’s easy to see whatyouare,” Miss Fewkes spat out venomously. “The sort of womanyouare is plain to any one who’s sharp and has eyes.”
At this point, the burly cab-driver, who was evidently afraid of being involved in this feminine dispute, retired downstairs until the matter was settled.
“It is easy to see what I am,” Mrs. Pottage agreed. “Because I’m a decent-made woman. But it’s far fromeasy to see what you are, let me tell you, very far from easy, because you aren’t as big as a second helping of underdone mutton at an eating-house. Youmayhave eyes. So’s a needle. Youmaybe sharp. So’s a needle. And I wouldn’t care to look for you in a haystack any more than what I would a needle, and that’s the solid truth I’m telling you. You asked for it, ma’am, and now you’ve had it, and if you’ll kindly stand on one side you won’t get carried out with the luggage like a speck of dust off of your own dusty banisters.”
“This luggage don’t leave my house before my account’s been settled,” Miss Fewkes shrilled. “Not if I have to fetch in a policeman to you.”
“Fetch a policeman?” Mrs. Pottage jeered. “Well, for a woman who looks like last night’s buttonhole or a sucked sweet as a kid’s spat out on the pavement, you’ve got a tidy nerve.”
Nancy thought that it was time to interfere, because she did not want Letizia to be frightened by the quarrel.
“I’m quite willing to pay your bill, Miss Fewkes, if you suspect that I’m trying to give you the slip,” she said.
“Not at all,” Mrs. Pottage interposed. “It’s beyond reason giving in to such as she. Let her call this policeman we’ve heard so much about, and it’s my opinion he’ll laugh in her face, that is if he could tell itwasher face, which I don’t think.”
“You vulgar, impertinent woman,” Miss Fewkes ejaculated.
“Yes, thank goodness Iama woman,” Mrs. Pottage retorted. “And thank goodness you can reckonise me as such, which is more than what I could reckonise you, not if I was looking at you with two telescopes at once. Why, if I was you I’d be afraid to go out alone in case I got took by a showman for a performing flea. It’s a nine days’ wonder you never got pecked up by a sparrow; but there, I suppose even a sparrow knows what isn’t good for him.”
To what heights of invective Mrs. Pottage might haverisen was never to be known, because Nancy insisted on paying Miss Fewkes her bill, which enabled her to retreat to her own room and cease to oppose the departure of the luggage.
“But there, perhaps it’s as well,” conceded Mrs. Pottage. “Or Imighthave been tempted to say something a bit rude.”
With the aid of the good-natured cabman the luggage was put on the four-wheeler; and an hour later Nancy waved farewell to Letizia and her hostess at London Bridge Station.