CHAPTER I: MARTHA
This book ought by rights to have borne Ruth’s name on the cover instead of mine. Of the fifty years I have lived the first twenty were scattered and lost. The remaining thirty were gathered as they came, and threaded on a wire which formed them into a serviceable chain; that wire was Ruth. She has now broken off and formed other ties, therefore the years that remain will probably be scattered like the first, for there can be no second Ruth. It may be, even, that I shall be driven to spend my declining days in an hotel. Meantime I have a record of experiences common to many Marthas.
When I decided on the title it happened to be Ruth’s day out. I had intended, as a matter of course, to submit the name to her, and then, suddenly, a wave of mutiny swept over me.
“The book at least shall be mine,” I saidto myself. “Ruth has taken possession of my house, my tradespeople, my children, and, what was dearer still, my leisure. What little freedom I have enjoyed has been procured by a wearisome amount of guile, but my pen is still my own and shall remain in my possession.”
It is true that David would never have burst into immortal song had it not been for his persecutors who goaded him to lament yet his works are published under his name and not under that of the Bulls of Bashan. Therefore I call this the Book of Martha and not of Ruth.
When I married, thirty years ago, I desired to lead a simpler life than is led by most people. So many women seem to me like parasites living on the combined labour of husband and servants. My friend Elizabeth Tique, with whom I often stayed, kept a cook, three maids, and an odd man, and these wretches somehow contrived to fill every inch of the small house and garden. It was almost impossible to go into any roomwithout finding some one aggravatingly dressed in spotted cotton, rustling along with either a damp cloth or a carpet-sweeper or a tray laden with food. On one occasion, I remember, I went to my bedroom to write letters, having left one of the cotton-backs clearing away the breakfast, and the other, she of the damp cloth, in possession of the drawing-room. By some marvellous sleight of foot they both contrived to reach my room before me, and were busily engaged there when I arrived.
“Don’t go away,” I said pleasantly, and gathering up my blotting-pad and papers I returned to the drawing-room to write. I was in the full swing of inspiration when the door was burst open by a third skirmisher in the hated uniform. She made her offence far worse by pretending that her visit was only one of wanton light-heartedness.
“It’s all right, Miss,” she said, “I can come back by and by; it was only to do the grate.”
I swallowed the word that rose to my lips—Elizabethsays it doesn’t do for the servants to know we say these things—and took my papers to the garden; but my letter was no longer witty. It was full of short disjointed sentences and tedious information. In a few minutes I was startled by a terrific rumbling on the gravel. The odd man was approaching to mow the lawn.
“Sorry to disturb you, Miss; I shan’t be above ’alf an hour,” was the way he put it. There are many possible variations of the same crime.
“Elizabeth,” I said as politely as I could when she came out on her way to the shops, “have you a wine-cellar?”
“Yes, a beauty. Why?”
“Do you mind telling me—is this the day for cleaning it out?”
“What nonsense; we don’t clean it out.”
“Then may I sit in it?”
Elizabeth was busy with the fish, but she told me where the key was, and I went down with a candle. It was cool and quiet and cobwebby, and I got on nicely. I wasjust getting my second wind and had refilled my fountain pen when I heard a voice—that of my enemy with the cloth—outside the door.
“This is the cellar, Mr. Brown. I think master wished the port put in the second bin from the left. I’ll just give it a wipe out if you’ll excuse me.”
I tried the coach-house, but it happened to be George’s day for swilling it after he had finished the grass, and when I found a place in the greenhouse away from the drip he came and put manure on the tomatoes.
I was engaged to be married to a man with the usual professional income, and I began to see very clearly that if I was to be happy in a small house the number of people living in it must be reduced as much as possible. That night when the servants were all in bed I took up my letters again and explained this theory to James. He agreed with me.
We were married early in January, and went into our house a week later. I hadengaged two maids, both of whom had been recommended to me as thoroughly capable, and likely to bring light into the dark places of my inexperience. They did indeed; I saw all its weak points very clearly in the lurid glare of their bright ideas. But that was later. On our first day at home I went down to the kitchen as soon as my husband had gone out. I picked my way through the cinders, crumbs, bacon-rind, and unclassified fluff upon the floor, and stood for a moment blistering before the range where a blast-furnace raged behind the bars. The remains of breakfast, which suggested the snatched meal of a burglar, prepared in haste and darkness, were on the table, from which Clara, the housemaid, rose and made a slippery exit after the manner of a mouse.
I murmured something polite about being too soon, to which the cook replied that they were a bit late on account of the range, and the curtain rose on a farce which will run as long as I keep a cook.
The bell at the back door then fell intothe first of a long and distressing series of convulsions, and Ruth went to its assistance.
“Pleas’m, the butcher,” she reported.
There are many ways of saying “Pleas’m, the butcher,” and Ruth’s was most discouraging. I knew at a glance that she had not properly masticated her breakfast, and that the arrival of the butcher was not unlike that of twins at the end of a numerous and undesired family. She looked as though her morning had been made up of a series of unwelcome events and this were the last straw.
“Tell him to call again,” I said hastily; “this is an absurd time to come.” I was going to retire when a second convulsion shook the house to its foundations.
“Do you wish fish’m?” said Ruth, just as if I had sent the fish. I hedged and tried to shift the blame on her.
“Do we want fish?”
“Just as you wish’m,” she said, standing still in front of me.
She made no attempt to suggest anything.
“I’ll come,” said I, “and see him myself.”
I found a pert-looking male child writing his name on the pantry window-sill and whistling.
“What fish have you got?” I asked.
“Plaiceakecoddensole,” he replied, eyeing me up and down.
I ordered something—anything to convey the idea that I spoke with knowledge and deliberation. The greengrocer behaved like an uncle, and told me that, whatever else I went without, a nice cauliflower was a thing I should never regret buying. I expected him to add that it would last a lifetime and clean again as good as new.
During this time Ruth had disappeared into the back kitchen, whence she brought what at first I took to be a bucket of castor-oil and a dead rabbit. With the rabbit (which turned out to be her favourite dishcloth) she then deluged the table from the contents of the bucket, and the kitchen was filled with a warm smell of wet onions. When she had “cleaned up” as she called it—whichmeant that after her septic operation on the table she swept the etceteras on the floor into a heap and drew the fender over them—we discussed the question of food.
One of the trials of my life is the necessity for devising three relays of food immediately after a good breakfast. It makes me feel as though I were the owner of a yard full of turkeys, whom it is my painful duty to prepare for a daily Christmas. James enjoys his breakfast and forgets about it, returning after a hard day’s work to a dinner as unpremeditated as that which the ravens brought to Elijah; not so mine, which brings with it haunting memories of yesterday’s sorrows. I cannot share his enthusiasm for avol-au-ventwhich I have so often met before in less happy circumstances; I feel about it as an undertaker might who should meet his clients masquerading in a ballroom. James came home at one o’clock, and we went indoors at once, as he has only a short time to spare in the middle of the day. The table was not laid.
“Clara,” I said, “do you know the time? We must have luncheon at once.”
“I think Ruth’s just sending it up now, m’m,” she answered. “The meat only came ten minutes ago.”
James spilled a good deal in his haste, but what little he was able to eat in eight minutes he was extremely good tempered about, and praised warmly. A great many men would have behaved in a manner that might have made me live and die a bad housekeeper. If he had been sulky, or violent, or sarcastic, or resigned, or dignified, I should have taken no steps whatever. My mind would have settled upon a touching picture of the sorrows of women, and how their life is one long martyrdom to the habits of men and the want of habits of domestic servants, and I should have shrugged my shoulders and acquired tastes of my own. Then this book would never have been written. As it was, my husband’s smiling farewell and his pathetic symptoms of indigestion bravely borne gave me pain that vented itself inanger against its original cause—Ruth—and behind her again the butcher. I flew into the study and poured out my wrath on a sheet of the best note-paper.
“Mr. Jones,“Dear Sir,“Mrs. Molyneux is simply furious because Mr. Jones’s wretched beef did not turn up till ten minutes to one. If Mr. Jones finds himself unable to keep a clock, Mrs. Molyneux will be delighted to deal with a butcher who can.”
“Mr. Jones,“Dear Sir,
“Mrs. Molyneux is simply furious because Mr. Jones’s wretched beef did not turn up till ten minutes to one. If Mr. Jones finds himself unable to keep a clock, Mrs. Molyneux will be delighted to deal with a butcher who can.”
I licked the envelope and the stamp viciously and rang the bell. “Post this at once, please, Clara,” I said, “and when Jones’s boy calls in the morning for orders, tell him that a thousand years are not as one day to me, and that he may take his detestable tray of entrails to—” I stopped just in time—“back to the shop,” I added. “Yes’m,” said Clara, looking surprised and, I thought, frightened. “Would you like a cup of tea, m’m?”
If one is what these people call “upset” they always suggest tea. Tea as a remedy for the butcher’s non-appearance struck me as absurd.
“No, Clara,” I replied, “what I want is not tea but punctuality. All the same I will have a cup.”
Of course it was impossible to say anything to Ruth that afternoon. It would have been making too much fuss over what probably was not her fault.