61
Taking an empty plate from the table to put it on the sideboard, he said: “I ’ope madam is chyngin’ ’er mind about leavin’ us.”
Letty glanced up shyly in spite of being somewhat reassured. “What’ud be the good of my changin’ my mind when—when I’m not fit to stay?”
“Madam means not fit in the sense that––”
“I’m not a lady.”
Resting one hand on the table, he looked down into her eyes with an expression such as Letty had never before seen in a human face.
“I could myke a lydy of madam.”
At the sound of these quiet words, so confidently spoken, something passed through Letty’s frame to be described only by the hard-worked word, a thrill. It was a double current of vibration, partly of upleaping hope, partly of the desperate sense of her own limitations. A hundred points of gold dust were aflame in her irises as she said:
“You mean that you’d put me wise? Oh, but I’d never learn!”
“On the contrary, I think madam would pick up very quick.”
“And I’d never be able to talk the right––”
“I could learn madam to talk just as good as me.”
It seemed too much. She clasped her hands. It was the nearest point she had ever reached to ecstasy. “Oh, do you think you could? You talk somethin’ beautiful, you do!”
He smiled modestly. “I’ve always lived with the best people, and I suppose I ketch their wyes. I know62what a gentleman is—and a lydy. I know all a lydy’s little ’abits, and before two or three months was over madam ’ud ’ave them as natural as natural, if she wouldn’t think me overbold.”
“When ’ud you begin?”
The bright spot deepened in each cheek. “I’ve begun already, if madam won’t think me steppin’ out o’ my plyce to sye so, in showin’ madam the spoons and forks for the different––”
Letty colored, too. “Yes, I saw that. I take it as very kind. But—” she looked at him with a puzzled knitting of the brows—“but what makes you take all this trouble for me?”
“I’ve two reasons, madam, but I’ll only tell you one of ’em just now. The other’ll keep. I’ll myke it known to you if—if all goes as I ’ope.” He straightened himself up. “I don’t often speak o’ this,” he continued, “because among us butlers and valets it wouldn’t be understood. Most of us is what’s known as conservative, all for the big families and the old wyes. Well, so am I—to a point. But––”
He moved a number of objects on the table before he could go on. “I wasn’t born to the plyce I ’old now,” he explained after getting his material at command. “I wasn’t born to nothink. I was what they calls in England a foundlin’—a byby what’s found—what ’is parents ’ave thrown awye. I don’t know who my father and mother was, or what was my real nyme. ’Enery Steptoe is just a nyme they give me at the Horphanage. But I won’t go into that. I’m just tryin’ to tell madam that my life was a ’ard one, quite a ’ard one, till I come to New York as footman for63Mr. Allerton’s father, and afterward worked up to be ’is valet and butler.”
He cleared his throat. Expressing ideals was not easy. “I ’ope madam will forgive me if I sye that what it learned me was a fellow-feelin’ with my own sort—with the poor. I’ve often wished as I could go out among the poor and ryse them up. I ain’t a socialist—a little bit of a anarchist perhaps, but nothink extreme—and yet—Well, if Mr. Rashleigh had married a rich girl, I would ’a tyken it as natural and done my best for ’im, but since ’e ’asn’t—Oh, can’t madam see? It’s—it’s a kind o’ pride with me to find some one like—like what I was when I was ’er age—out in the cold like—and bring ’er in—and ’elp ’er to tryne ’erself—so—so as—some day—to beat the best—them as ’as ’ad all the chances––”
He was interrupted by the tinkle of the telephone. It was a relief. He had said all he needed to say, all he knew how to say. Whether madam understood it or not he couldn’t tell, since she didn’t seize ideas quickly.
“If madam will excuse me now, I’ll go and answer that call.”
But Letty sprang up in alarm. “Oh, don’t leave me. Some of them women will blow in––”
“None of them women willcome—” he threw a delicate emphasis on the word—“if madam’ll just sit down. They don’t mean to come. I’ll explyne that to madam when I come back, if she’ll only not leave this room.”
64Chapter VI
“Good morning, Steptoe. Will you ask Mr. Allerton if he’ll speak to Miss Walbrook?”
“Mr. Allerton ’as gone to the New Netherlands club for ’is breakfast, miss.”
“Oh, thanks. I’ll call him up there.”
She didn’t want to call him up there, at a club, where a man must like to feel safe from feminine intrusion, but the matter was too pressing to permit of hesitation. Since the previous afternoon she had gone through much searching of heart. She was accustomed to strong reactions from tempestuousness to penitence, but not of the violence of this one.
Summoned to the telephone, Allerton felt as if summoned to the bar of judgment. He divined who it was, and he divined the reason for the call.
“Good morning, Rash!”
His voice was absolutely dead. “Good morning, Barbara!”
“I know you’re cross with me for calling you at the club.”
“Oh, no! Not at all!”
“But I couldn’t wait any longer. I wanted you to know—I’ve got it on again, Rash—never to come off any more.”
He was dumb. Thirty seconds at least went by, and he had made no response.
65
“Aren’t you glad?”
“I—I could have been glad—if—if I’d known you were going to do it.”
“And now you know that it’s done.”
He repeated in his lifeless voice, “Yes, now I know that it’s done.”
“Well?”
Again he was silent. Two or three times he tried to find words, producing nothing but a stammering of incoherent syllables. “I—I can’t talk about it here, Barbe,” he managed to articulate at last. “You must let me come round and see you.”
It was her voice now that was dead. “When will you come, Rash?”
“Now—at once—if you can see me.”
“Then come.”
She put up the receiver without saying more. He knew that she knew. She knew at least that something had happened which was fatal to them both.
She received him not in the drawing-room, but in a little den on the right of the front door which was also alive with Miss Walbrook’s modern personality. A gold-colored portière from Albert Herter’s looms screened them from the hall, and the chairs were covered with bits of Herter tapestry representing fruits. A cabinet of old white Bennington faience stood against a wall, which was further adorned with three or four etchings of Sears Gallagher’s. Barbara wore a lacy thing in hydrangea-colored crêpe de chine, loosely girt with a jade-green ribbon tasselled in gold, the whole bringing out the faintly Egyptian note in her personality.
66
They dispensed with a greeting, because she spoke the minute he crossed the threshold of the room.
“Rash, what is it? Why couldn’t you tell me on the telephone?”
He wished now that he had. It would have saved this explanation face to face. “Because I couldn’t. Because—because I’ve been too much of an idiot to—to tell you about it—either on the telephone or in any other way.”
“How?” He thought she must understand, but she seemed purposely dense. “Sit down. Tell me about it. It can’t be so terrible—all of a sudden like this.”
He couldn’t sit down. He could only turn away from her and gulp in his dry throat. “You remember what I said—what I said—yesterday—about—about the—the Gissing fellow?”
She nodded fiercely. “Yes. Go on. Get it out.”
“Well—well—I’ve—I’ve done that.”
She threw out her arms. She threw back her head till the little nut-brown throat was taut. The cry rent her. It rent him.
“You—fool!”
He stood with head hanging. He longed to run away, and yet he longed also to throw himself at her feet. If he could have done exactly as he felt impelled, he would have laid his head on her breast and wept like a child.
She swung away from him, pacing the small room like a frenzied animal. Her breath came in short, hard pantings that were nearly sobs. Suddenly she stopped in front of him with a sort of calm.
67
“What made you?”
He barely lifted his agonized black eyes. “You,”
She was in revolt again. “I? What did I do?”
“You—you threw away my ring. You said it was all—all over.”
“Well? Couldn’t I say that without driving you to act the madman? No one but a madman would have gone out of this house and—” She clasped her forehead in her hands with a dramatic lifting of the arms. “Oh! It’s too much! I don’t care about myself. But to have it on your conscience that a man has thrown his life away––”
He asked meekly, “What good was it to me when you wouldn’t have it?”
She stamped her foot. “Rash, you’ll drive me insane. Your life might be no good to you at all, and yet you might give it a chance for twenty-four hours—that isn’t much, is it?—before you—” She caught herself up. “Tell me. You don’t mean to say that you’remarried?”
He nodded.
“To whom?”
“Her first name is Letty. I’ve forgotten the second name.”
“Where did you find her?”
“Over there in the Park.”
“And she went and married you—like that?”
“She was all alone—chucked out by a stepfather––”
She burst into a hard laugh. “Oh, you baby! You believed that? The kind of story that’s told by nine of the––”
BY THE TIME HE HAD FINISHED, HIS HEART WAS A LITTLE EASED AND SOME OF HER TENDERNESS BEGAN TO FLOW TOWARD HIM
BY THE TIME HE HAD FINISHED, HIS HEART WAS A LITTLE EASED AND SOME OF HER TENDERNESS BEGAN TO FLOW TOWARD HIM
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He interrupted quickly. “Don’t call her anything, Barbe—I mean any kind of a bad name. She’s all right as far as that goes. There’s a kind that couldn’t take you in.”
“There’snokind that couldn’t takeyouin!”
“Perhaps not, but it’s the one thing in—in this whole idiotic business that’s on the level—I mean she is. I’d give my right hand to put her back where I found her yesterday—just as she was—but she’s straight.”
She dropped into a chair. The first wild tumult of rage having more or less spent its force, she began, with a kind of heart-broken curiosity, to ask for the facts. She spoke nervously, beating a palm with a gold tassel of her girdle. “Begin at the beginning. Tell me all about it.”
He leaned on the mantelpiece, of which the only ornaments were a child’s head in white and blue terra cotta by Paul Manship, balanced by a pair of old American glass candlesticks, and told the tale as consecutively as he could. He recounted everything, even to the bringing her home, the putting her in the little, back spare-room, and her adoption by Beppo, the red cocker spaniel. By the time he had finished, his heart was a little eased, and some of her tenderness toward him was beginning to flow forth. She was like that, all wrath at one minute, all gentleness the next. Springing to her feet, she caught him by the arm, pressing herself against him.
“All right, Rash. You’ve done it. That’s settled. But it can be undone again.”
He pressed her head back from him, resting the69knot of her hair in the hollow of his palm and looking down into her eyes.
“How can it be undone?”
“Oh, there must be ways. A man can’t be allowed to ruin his life—to ruin two lives—for a prank. We’ll just have to think. If you made it worth while for her to take you, you can make it worth while for her to let you go. She’ll do it.”
“She’d do it, of course. She doesn’t care. I’m nothing to her, not any more than she to me. I shan’t see her any more than I can help. I suppose she must stay at the house till—I told Steptoe to look after her.”
She took a position at one end of the mantelpiece, while he faced her from the other. She gave him wise counsel. He was to see his lawyers at once and tell them the whole story. Lawyers always saw the way out of things. There was the Bellington boy who married a show-girl. She had been bought off, and the lawyers had managed it. Now the Bellington boy was happily married to one of the Plantagenet Jones girls and lived at Marillo Park. Then there was the Silliman boy who had married the notorious Kate Cookesley. The lawyers had found the way out of that, too, and now the Silliman boy was a secretary of the American Embassy in Rome. Accidents such as had happened to Rash were regrettable of course, but it would be folly to think that a perfectly good life must be done for just because it had got a crack in it.
“We’ll play the game, of course,” she wound up. “But it’s a game, and the stronger side must win.70What should you say of my going to see her—she needn’t know who I am further than that I’m a friend of yours—and finding out for myself?”
“Finding out what?”
“Finding out her price, silly. What do you suppose? A woman can often see things like that where a man would be blind.”
He didn’t know. He thought it might be worth while. He would leave it to her. “I’m not worth the trouble, Barbe,” he said humbly.
With this she agreed. “I know you’re not. I can’t think for a minute why I take it or why I should like you. But I do. That’s straight.”
“And I adore you, Barbe.”
She shrugged her shoulders with a little, comic grimace. “Oh, well! I suppose every one has his own way of showing adoration, but I must say that yours is original.”
“If it’s original to be desperate when the woman you worship drives you to despair––”
There was another little comic grimace, though less comic than the first time. “Oh, yes, I know. It’s always the woman whom a man worships that’s in the wrong. I’ve noticed that. Men are never impossible—all of their own accord.”
“I could be as tame as a cat if––”
“If it wasn’t for me. Thank you, Rash. I said just now I was fond of you, and I should have to be to—to stand for all the––”
“I’m not blaming you, Barbe. I’m only––”
“Thanks again. The day you’re not blaming me is certainly one to be marked with a white stone, as the71Romans used to say. But if it comes to blaming any one, Rash, after what happened yesterday––”
“What happened yesterday wasn’t begun by me. It would never have entered my mind to do the crazy thing I did, if you hadn’t positively and finally—as I thought—flung me down. I think you must do me that justice, Barbe—that justice, at the least.”
“Oh, I do you justice enough. I don’t see that you can complain of that. It seems to me too that I temper justice with mercy to a degree that—that most people find ridiculous.”
“By most people I suppose you mean your aunt.”
“Oh, do leave Aunt Marion out of it. You can’t forgive the poor thing for not liking you. Well, she doesn’t, and I can’t help it. She thinks you’re a––”
“A fool—as you were polite enough to say just now.”
She spread her hands apart in an attitude of protestation. “Well, if I did, Rash, surely you must admit that I had provocation.”
“Oh, of course. The wonder is that with the provocation you can––”
“Forgive you, and try to patch it up again after this frightful gash in the agreement. Well, itisa wonder. I don’t believe that many girls––”
“I only want you to understand, Barbe, that the gash in the agreement was made, not by what I did, but what you did. If you hadn’t sent me to the devil, I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to go there.”
She was off. “Yes, there you are again. Always me! I’m the one! You may be the gunpowder, the perfectly harmless gunpowder, but it would never72blow up if I didn’t come as the match.Imake all the explosions.Iset you crazy.Isend you to the devil.Imake you go and marry a girl you never laid eyes on in your life before.”
So it was the same old scene all over again, till both were exhausted, and she had flung herself into a chair to cover her face with her hands and burst into tears. Instantly he was on his knees beside her.
“Barbe! Barbe! My beloved Barbe! Don’t cry. I’m a brute. I’m a fool. I’m not satisfied with breaking my own heart, but I must go to work and break yours. Oh, Barbe, forgive me. I’m all to pieces. Forgive me and let me go away and shoot myself. What’s the good of a poor, wrecked creature like me hanging on and making such a mess of things? Let me kill myself before I kill you––”
“Oh, hush!”
Seizing his head, she pressed it against her bosom convulsively. By the shaking of his shoulders, she felt him sob. Hewasa poor creature. She was saying so to herself. But just because he was, something in her yearned over him. Hecouldbe different; he could be stronger and of value in the world if there was only some one to handle him rightly. She could do it—if she could only learn to handle herself. Shewouldlearn to handle herself—for his sake. He was worth saving. He had fine qualities, and a good heart most of all. It was his very fineness which put him out of place in a world like that of New York. He was a delicate, brittle, highly-wrought thing which should be touched only with the greatest care, and all his life he had been pushed and hurtled about as if73he were a football player or a business man. With the soul of a poet or a painter or a seer, he had been treated like the typical rough-and-ready American lad, till the sensitive nature had been brutalized, maimed, and frenzied.
She knew that. It was why she cared for him. Even when they were children she had seen that he wasn’t getting fair treatment, either at home or in school or among the boys and girls with whom they both grew up. He was the exception, and American life allowed only for the rule. If you couldn’t conform to the rule, you were guyed and tormented and ejected. Among all his associates she alone knew what he suffered, and because she knew it a vast pity made her cling to him. He had forced himself into the life of clubs, into the life of society, into the life of other men as other men lived their lives, and the effect on him had been so nearly ruinous that it was no wonder if he was always on the edge of nervous explosion. His very wealth which might have been a protection was, under the uniform pressure of American social habit, an incitement to him to follow the wrong way. She knew it, and she alone. She could save him, and she alone. She could save him, if she could first of all save herself.
With his head pressed against her she made the vow as she had made it fifty times already. She would be gentle with him; she would be patient; she would let him work off on her the agony of his suffering nerves, and smile at him through it all. She would help him out of the idiotic situation in which he found himself. The other girl was only an incident, as the74show-girl had been to the Bellington boy, and could be disposed of. She attached to that only a secondary importance in comparison with the whole thing—her saving him. She would save him, even if it meant rooting out every instinct in her soul.
But as he made his way blindly back to the club, his own conclusions were different. He must go to the devil. He must go to the devil now, whatever else he did. Going to the devil would set her free from him. It was the only thing that would. It would set him free from the other woman, set him free from life itself. Life tortured him. He was a misfit in it. He should never have been born. He had always understood that his parents hadn’t wanted children and that his coming had been resented. You couldn’t be born like that and find it natural to be in the world. He had never found it natural. He couldn’t remember the time when he hadn’t been out of his element in life, and now he must recognize the fact courageously.
It would be easy enough. He had worked up an artificial appetite for all that went under the head of debauchery. It had meant difficult schooling at first, because his natural tastes were averse to that kind of thing, but he had been schooled. Schooled was the word, since his training had begun under the very roof where his father had sent him to get religion and discipline. There had been no let-up in this educational course, except when he himself had stolen away, generally in solitude, for a little holiday.
But as he put it to himself, he knew all the roads and by-paths and cross-country leaps that would take him to the gutter, and to the gutter he would go.
75Chapter VII
And all this while Letty was in the dining-room, learning certain lessons from her new-found friend.
For some little time she had been alone. Steptoe finished his conversation with Miss Walbrook on the telephone, but did not come back. She sat at the table feeding Beppo with bread and milk, but wondering if, after all, she hadn’t better make a bolt for it. She had had her breakfast, which was an asset to the good, and nothing worse could happen to her out in the open world than she feared in this great dim, gloomy house. She had once crept in to look at the cathedral and, overwhelmed by its height, immensity, and mystery, had crept out again. Its emotional suggestions had been more than she could bear. She felt now as if her bed had been made and her food laid out in that cathedral—as if, as long as she remained, she must eat and sleep in this vast, pillared solemnity.
And that was only one thing. There were small practical considerations even more terrible to confront. If Nettie were to appear again ...
But it was as to this that Steptoe was making his appeal. “I sye, girls, don’t you go to mykin’ a fuss and spoilin’ your lives, when you’ve got a chanst as’ll never come again.”
Mrs. Courage answered for them all. To sacrifice76decency to self-interest wasn’t in them, nor never would be. Some there might be, like ’Enery Steptoe, who would sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, but Mary Ann Courage was not of that company, nor any other woman upon whom she could use her influence. If a hussy had been put to reign over them, reigned over by a hussy none of them would be. All they asked was to see her once, to deliver the ultimatum of giving notice.
“It’s a strynge thing to me,” Steptoe reasoned, “that when one poor person gets a lift, every other poor person comes down on ’em.”
“And might we arsk who you means by poor persons?”
“Who should I mean, Mrs. Courage, but people like us? If we don’t ’ang by each other, whowill’ang by us, I should like to know? ’Ere’s one of us plyced in a ’igh position, and instead o’ bein’ proud of it, and givin’ ’er a lift to carry ’er along, you’re all for mykin’ it as ’ard for ’er as you can. Do you call that sensible?”
“I call it sensible for everyone to stye in their proper spere.”
“So that if a man’s poor, you must keep ’im poor, no matter ’ow ’e tries to better ’imself. That’s what your proper speres would come to.”
But argument being of no use, Steptoe could only make up his mind to revolution in the house. “The poor’s very good to the poor when one of ’em’s in trouble,” was his summing up, “but let one of ’em ’ave an extry stroke of luck, and all the rest’ll jaw against ’im like so many magpies.” As a parting shot77he declared on leaving the kitchen, “The trouble with you girls is that you ain’t got no class spunk, and that’s why, in sperrit, you’ll never be nothink but menials.”
This lack ofesprit de corpswas something he couldn’t understand, but what he understood less was the need of the heart to touch occasionally the high points of experience. Mrs. Courage and Jane, to say nothing of Nettie, after thirty years of domestic routine had reached the place where something in the way of drama had become imperative. The range and the pantry produce inhibitions as surely as the desk or the drawing-room. On both natures inhibitions had been packed like feathers on a seabird, till the soul cried out to be released from some of them. It might mean going out from the home that had sheltered them for years, and breaking with all their traditions, but now that the chance was there, neither could refuse it. To a virtuous woman, starched and stiffened in her virtue, steeped in it, dyed in it, permeated by it through and through, nothing so stirs the dramatic, so quickens the imagination, so calls the spirit to the purple emotional heights, as contact with the sister she knows to be a hussy. For Jane Cakebread and Mary Ann Courage the opportunity was unique.
“Then I’ll go. I’ll go straight now.”
As Steptoe brought the information that the three women of the household were coming to announce the resignation of their posts, Letty sprang to her feet.
“May I arsk madam to sit down again and let me explyne?”
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Taking this as an order, she sank back into her chair again. He stood confronting her as before, one hand resting lightly on the table.
“Nothink so good won’t ’ave ’appened in this ’ouse since old Mrs. Allerton went to work and died.”
Letty’s eyes shone with their tiny fires, not in pleasure but in wonder.
“When old servants is good, they’re good, but even when they’re good, there’s times when you can’t ’elp wishin’ as ’ow the Lord ’ud be pleased to tyke them to ’Imself.”
He allowed this to sink in before going further.
“The men’s all right, for the most part. Indoor work comes natural to ’em, and they’ll swing it without no complynts. But with the women it’s kick, kick, kick, and when they’re worn theirselves out with kickin’, they’ll begin to kick again. What’s plye for a man, for them ain’t nothink but slyvery.”
Letty listened as one receiving revelations from another world.
“I ain’t what they call a woman-’ater.Ibelieve as God made woman for a purpose. Only I can’t bring myself to think as the human race ’as rightly found out yet what that purpose is. God’s wyes is always dark, and when it comes to women, they’re darker nor they are elsewheres. One thing I do know, and we’ll be a lot more comfortable when more of us finds it out—that God never made women for the ’ome.”
In spite of her awe of him, Letty found this doctrine difficult to accept.
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“If God didn’t make ’em for the home, mister, where on earth would you put ’em?”
The wintry color came out again on the old man’s cheeks. “If madam would call me Steptoe,” he said ceremoniously, “I think she’d find it easier. I mean,” he went on, reverting to the original theme, “that ’E didn’t make ’em to be cooks and ’ousemaids and parlormaids, and all that. That’s men’s work. Men’ll do it as easy as a bird’ll sing. I never see the woman yet as didn’t fret ’erself over it, like a wild animal’ll fret itself in a circus cage. It spiles women to put ’em to ’ousework, like it always spiles people to put ’em to jobs for which the Lord didn’t give ’em no haptitude.”
Letty was puzzled, but followed partially.
“I’ve watched ’em and watched ’em, and it’s always the syme tyle. They’ll go into service young and joyous like, but it won’t be two or three years before they’ll have growed cat-nasty like this ’ere Jyne Cykebread and Mary Ann Courage. Madam ’ud never believe what sweet young things they was when I first picked ’em out—Mrs. Courage a young widow, and Jynie as nice a girl as madam ’ud wish to see, only with the features what Mrs. Allerton used to call a little hover-haccentuated. And now—!” He allowed the conditions to speak for themselves without criticizing further.
“It’s keepin’ ’em in a ’ome what’s done it. They knows it theirselves—and yet they don’t. Inside they’ve got the sperrits of young colts that wants to kick up their ’eels in the pasture. They don’t mean no worse nor that, only when people comes to Jynie’s age80and Mrs. Courage’s they ’ave to kick up their ’eels in their own wye. If madam’ll remember that, and be pytient with them like–––”
Letty cried in alarm, “But it’s got nothin’ to do with me!”
“If madam’ll excuse me, it’s got everything to do with ’er. She’s the missus of this ’ouse.”
“Oh, no, I ain’t. Mr. Allerton just brung me here––”
Once more there was the delicate emphasis with which he had corrected other slips. “Mr. Allertonbroughtmadam, and told me to see that she was put in ’er proper plyce. If madam’ll let me steer the thing, I’ll myke it as easy for ’er as easy.”
He reflected as to how to make the situation clear to her. “I’ve been readin’ about the time when our lyte Queen Victoria come to the throne as quite a young girl. She didn’t know nothin’ about politics or presidin’ at councils or nothin’. But she had a prime minister—a kind of hupper servant, you might sye—’er servant was what ’e always called ’imself—and whatever ’e told ’er to do, she done. Walked through it all, you might sye, till she got the ’ang of it, but once she did get the ’ang of it—well, there wasn’t no big-bug in the world that our most grycious sovereign lydy couldn’t put it all hover on.”
Once more he allowed her time to assimilate this parable.
“Now if madam would only think of ’erself as called in youth to reign hover this ’ouse––”
“Oh, but I couldn’t!”
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“And yet it’s madam’s duty, now that she’s married to its ’ead––”
“Yes, but he didn’t marry me like that. He married me—all queer like. This was the way.”
She poured out the story, while Steptoe listened quietly. There being no elements in it of the kind he called “shydy,” he found it romantic. No one had ever suspected the longings for romance which had filled his heart and imagination when he was a poor little scullion boy; but the memory of them, with some of the reality, was still fresh in his hidden inner self. Now it seemed as if remotely and vicariously romance might be coming to him after all, through the boy he adored.
On her tale his only comment was to say: “I’ve been readin’—I’m a great reader,” he threw in parenthetically, “wonderful exercise for the mind, and learns you things which you wouldn’t be likely to ’ear tell of—but I’ve been readin’ about a king—I’ll show you ’is nyme in the book—what fell in love with a beggar myde––”
“Oh, but Mr. Allerton didn’t fall in love with me.”
“That remynes to be seen.”
She lifted her hands in awed amazement. “Mister—I mean, Steptoe—you—you don’t think––?”
The subway dream of love at first sight was as tenacious in her soul as the craving for romance in his.
He nodded. “I’ve known strynger things to ’appen.”
“But—but—he couldn’t—” it was beyond her power of expression, though Steptoe knew what she meant—“nothim!”
He answered judicially. “’E may come to it. It’ll82be a tough job to bring ’im—but if madam’ll be guided by me–––”
Letty collapsed. Her spirit grew faint as the spirit of Christian when he descried far off the walls of the Celestial City, with the Dark River rolling between him and it. Letty knew the Dark River must be there, but if beyond it there lay the slightest chance of the Celestial City....
She came back to herself, as it were, on hearing Steptoe say that the procession from the kitchen would presently begin to form itself.
“Now if madam’ll be guided by me she’ll meet this situytion fyce to fyce.”
“Oh, but I’d never know what to say.”
“Madam won’t need to say nothink. She won’t ’ave to speak. ’Ere they’ll troop in—” a gesture described Mrs. Courage leading the advance through the doorway—“and ’ere they’ll stand. Madam’ll sit just where she’s sittin’—a little further back from the tyble—lookin’ over the mornin’ pyper like—” he placed the paper in her hand—“and as heach gives notice, madam’ll just bow ’er ’ead. See?”
Madam saw, but not exactly.
“Now if she’ll just move ’er chair––”
The chair was moved in such a way as to make it seem that the occupant, having finished her breakfast, was giving herself a little more space.
“And if madam would remove ’er ’at and jacket, she’d—she’d seem more like the lydy of the ’ouse at ’ome.”
Letty took off these articles of apparel, which Steptoe whisked out of sight.
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“Now I’ll be Mrs. Courage comin’ to sye, ‘Madam, I wish to give notice.’ Madam’ll lower the pyper just enough to show ’er inclinin’ of ’er ’ead, assentin’ to Mrs. Courage leavin’ ’er. Mrs. Courage will be all for ’avin’ words—she’s a great ’and for words, Mrs. Courage is—but if madam won’t sye nothin’ at all, the wind’ll be out o’ Mrs. Courage’s syles like. Now, will madam be so good––?”
Having passed out into the hall, he entered with Mrs. Courage’s majestic gait, pausing some three feet from the table to say:
“Madam, things bein’ as they are, and me not wishin’ to stye no longer in the ’ouse where I’ve served so many years, I beg to give notice that I’m a givin’ of notice and mean to quit right off.”
Letty lowered the paper from before her eyes, jerking her head briskly.
“Ye-es,” Steptoe commended doubtfully, “a lettle too—well, too habrupt, as you might sye. Most lydies—real ’igh lydies, like the lyte Mrs. Allerton—inclines their ’ead slow and gryceful like. First, they throws it back a bit, so as to get a purchase on it, and then they brings it forward calm like, lowerin’ it stytely—Perhaps if madam’ud be me for a bit—that ’ud be Mrs. Courage—and let me sit there and be ’er, I could show ’er––”
The places were reversed. It was Letty who came in as Mrs. Courage, while Steptoe, seated in the chair, lowered the paper to the degree which he thought dignified. Letty mumbled something like the words the hypothetical Mrs. Courage was presumed to use, while Steptoe slowly threw back his head for84the purchase, bringing it forward in condescending grace. Language could not have given Mrs. Courage so effective a retort courteous.
Letty was enchanted. “Oh, Steptoe, let me have another try. I believe I could swing the cat.”
Again the places were reversed. Steptoe having repeated the rôle of Mrs. Courage, Letty imitated him as best she could in getting the purchase for her bow and catching his air of high-bred condescension.
“Better,” he approved, “if madam wouldn’t lower ’er ’eadquiteso far back’ard. You see, madam, a lydy don’tknowshe’s throwin’ back ’er ’ead so as to get a grip on it. She does it unconscious like, because bein’ of a ’aughty sperrit she ’olds it ’igh natural. If madam’ll only stiffen ’er neck like, as if sperrit ’ad made ’er about two inches taller than she is––”
Having seized this idea, Letty tried again, with such success that Mrs. Courage was disposed of. Jane Cakebread followed next, with Nettie last of all. Unaware of his possession of histrionic ability, Steptoe gave to each character its outstanding traits, fluttering like Jane, and giggling like Nettie, not in zeal for a newly discovered interpretative art, but in order that Letty might be nowhere caught at a disadvantage. He was delighted with her quickness in imitation.
“Couldn’t ’ave done that better myself,” he declared after Nettie had been dismissed for the third or fourth time. “When it comes to the inclinin’ of the ’ead I should sye as madam was about letter-perfect, as they sye on the styge. If Mr. Rash was to see it, ’e’d swear as ’is ma ’ad come back again.”
A muffled sound proceeded from the back part of85the hallway, with some whispering and once or twice Nettie’s stifled cackle of a laugh.
“’Ere they are,” he warned her. “Madam must be firm and control ’erself. There’s nothink for ’er to be afryde of. Just let ’er think of the lyte Queen Victoria, called to the throne when younger even than madam is––”
A shuffling developed into one lone step, heavy, stately, and funereal. Doing her best to emulate the historic example held up to her, Letty lengthened her neck and stiffened it. A haughty spirit seemed to rise in her by the mere process of the elongation. She was so nervous that the paper shook in her hand, but she knew that if the Celestial City was to be won, she could shrink from no tests which might lead her on to victory.
Steptoe had relapsed into the major-domo’s office, announcing from the doorway, “Mrs. Courage to see madam, if madam will be pleased to receive ’er.”
Madam indicated that she was so pleased, scrambling after the standard of the maiden sovereign of Windsor Castle giving audience to princes and ambassadors.
86Chapter VIII
“I’m ’ere.”
Letty couldn’t know, of course, that this announcement, made in a menacing female bass, was due to the fact that three swaying bodies had been endeavoring so to get round the deployed paper wings as to see what was hidden there, and had found their efforts vain. All she could recognize was the summons to the bar of social judgment. To the bar of social judgment she would have gone obediently, had it not been for that rebelliousness against being “looked down upon” which had lately mastered her. As it was, she lengthened her neck by another half inch, receiving from the exercise a new degree of self-strengthening.
“Mrs. Courage is ’ere, madam,” Steptoe seconded, “and begs to sye as she’s givin’ notice to quit madam’s service––”
The explosion came as if Mrs. Courage was strangling.
“When I wants words took out of my mouth by ’Enery Steptoe or anybody else I’ll sye so. If them as I’ve come into this room to speak to don’t feel theirselves aible to fyce me––”
“Madam’ll excuse an old servant who’s outlived ’er time,” Steptoe intervened, “and not tyke no notice. They always abuses the kindness that’s been showed ’em, and tykes liberties which––”
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But not for nothing had Mrs. Courage been born to the grand manner.
“When ’Enery Steptoe talks of old servants out-livin’ their time and tykin’ liberties ’e speaks of what ’e knows all about from personal experience. ’E was an old man when I was a little thing notsohigh.”
The appeal was to the curiosity of the girl behind the screen. To judge of how high Mrs. Courage had not been at a time when Steptoe was already an old man she might be enticed from her fortifications. But the pause only offered Steptoe a new opportunity.
“And so, if madam can dispense with ’er services, which I understand madam can, Mrs. Courage will be a-leavin’ of us this morning, with all our good wishes, I’m sure. Good-dye to you, Mary Ann, and God bless you after all the years you’ve been with us. Madam’s givin’ you your dismissal.”
Obedient to her cue Letty lowered her guard just enough to incline her head with the grace Steptoe had already pronounced “letter perfect.” The shock to Mrs. Courage can best be narrated in her own terms to Mrs. Walter Wildgoose later in the day.
“Airs! No one couldn’t imagine it, Bessie, what ’adn’t seen it for theirselves—what them baggages’ll do—smokin’—and wearin’ pearl necklaces—and ’avin’ their own limousines—all that I’ve seen and ’ad got used to—but not the President’s wife—not Mary Queen of England—could ’a myde you feel as if you was dirt hunder their feet like what this one—and ’er with one of them marked down sixty-nine cent blouses that ’adn’t seen the wash since—and as for88looks—why, she didn’t ’ave a look to bless ’erself—and a-’oldin’ of ’erself like what a empress might—and bowin’ ’er ’ead, and goin’ back to ’er pyper, as if I’d disturbed ’er at ’er readin’—and the dead and spitten image of ’Enery Steptoe ’imself she is—and you know ’ow many times we’ve all wondered as to why ’e didn’t marry—and ’im with syvings put by—Jynie thinks as ’e’s worth as much as—and you know what a ’and Jynie is for ferritin’ out what’s none of ’er business—why, if Jynie Cykebread could ’a myde ’erself Jynie Steptoe—but that’s somethink wild ’orses wouldn’t myke poor Jynie see—that no man wouldn’t look at ’er the second time if it wasn’t for to laugh—pitiful, I call it, at ’er aige—and me always givin’ the old rip to know as it was no use ’is ’angin’ round where I was—as if I’d marry agyne, and me a widda, as you might sye, from my crydle—and if I did, it wouldn’t ’a been a wicked old varlet what I always suspected ’e was leadin’ a double life—and now to see them two fyces together—why, I says, ’ere’s the explanytion as plyne as plyne can make it....”
All of which might have been true in rhetoric, but not in fact. For what had really given Mrs. Courage thecoup de gracewe must go back to the scene of the morning.
Ignoring both Letty’s inclination of the head and Steptoe’s benediction she had shown herself hurt where she was tenderest.
“Now that there’s no one to ryse their voice agynst the disgryce brought on this family but me––”
“Speak right up, Jynie. Don’t be afryde. Madam89won’t eat you. She knows that you’ve come to give notice––”
Mrs. Courage struggled on. “No one ain’t goin’ to bow me out of the ’ouse I’ve been cook-’ousekeeper in these twenty-seven year––”
“Sorry as madam’ll be to lose you, Jynie, she won’t stand in the wye of your gettin’ a better plyce––”
Mrs. Courage’s roar being that of the wounded lioness she was, the paper shook till it rattled in Letty’s hand.
“Iwillbe listened to. I’ve a right to be ’eard. My ’eart’s been as much in this ’ouse and family as ’Enery Steptoe’s ’eart; and to see shyme and ruin come upon it––”
Steptoe’s interruption was in a tone of pleased surprise.
“Why, you still ’ere, Mary Ann? We thought you’d tyken leave of us. Madam didn’t know you was speakin’. She won’t detyne you, madam won’t. You and Jynie and Nettie’ll all find cheques for your wyges pyde up to a month a ’ead, as I know Mr. Rashleigh’d want me to do....”
Shame and ruin! Letty couldn’t follow the further unfoldings of Steptoe’s diplomacy because of these two words. They summed up what she brought—what she had been married to bring—to a house of which even she could see the traditions were of honor. Vaguely aware of voices which she attributed to Jane and Nettie, her spirit was in revolt against the rôle for which her rashness of yesterday had let her in, and which Steptoe was forcing upon her.
Jane was still whimpering and sniffling: