CHAPTER XVIII: THE DRESSMAKER
I can never think of Miss McGregor without adding the adjective “bitty” to her name: Bitty Miss McGregor or Miss Bitty McGregor. She sat always in such a snowstorm of bits, that by the end of the day I felt it must be necessary to dig her out before she could leave her work. Praise of Miss McGregor (which was given freely, for we all love her) was qualified by comments on her “bittiness,” but even that was not so bad as the pins. The mouthfuls of them which she threw out all over the floor! Nurse reckoned, after reading an article in theStrand Magazine, that if all the pins that Miss McGregor disgorged during the day were collected and fastened together, they would form a chain as long as the cable between America and England. She never ate anything but pieces of cheese, with some cold strong tea, so I conclude that if claretand tannin make ink, as I once read they do, cheese and tannin, mixed, make pins, that is if they are eaten by a dressmaker; just as a cow makes different things out of grass to what Nebuchadnezzar did. I certainly do not remember buying pins.
What I did complain of was the “slipping-on.” She glided into the kitchen when I was wrestling with the beef, and asked me to slip on an evening bodice. There are, undoubtedly, people who can give their minds to an evening bodice on the top of a large breakfast and attend to the beef at the same time. Mrs. Simpson[A]could, I am sure, for one sees the effect of the beef on her bodices, which sometimes have such a sensible, dead look about them.
The bodices do not affect the beef in any way or lighten its weight, because nothing makes any difference to beef. It knows just what and where it intends to be, and no one can divert it from its purpose.
During my early married life I foolishlyattempted to keep the beef out of the house on Sunday, because I detest habit, and that any food or person should acquire the habit of coming at one particular time makes its company less of a pleasure than if it took its chance and dropped in.
I gave the order that no beef “in any shape or form” was to come into my house on Sunday. The butcher repeated my order in the shop, whereupon the beef turned purple and indignant.
“What!” it said, puffing and blowing, “I am not to come? There must be some mistake. They cannot have Sunday without me; I am part of the day itself. If I am not present at the table there will be no Sabbath, and then where shall we all be? Here’s a pretty kettle of fish! I insist on going—stop that mutton—it must not leave the shop.”
The butcher wrung his hands in protest, and said he knew he should get into trouble, but the beef replied: “Not a word, Sir, not a word.” It bustled out of the shop into thebasket and arrived at my door, where it insisted on being delivered by the boy. But Ruth had her orders and was firm.
“Just you go back,” she insisted.
“But what about my wife,” blustered the beef, “my wife the rhubarb tart? If I am not to take my place upon the board neither shall my wife attend; she shall not be served without me.”
“Just keep quiet, please,” said Ruth. “We’re not having tart; we’re having soufflé and mutton cutlets, so now be off with you.”
There was a frightful scene, but I persevered for three weeks. Then I went away for a fortnight, and, while I was gone, the beef came back and curried favour with Ruth. He poisoned her mind about the busy day Monday was, with the washerwoman and all, and how convenient he was to eat cold; no mess, no second vegetable, just salad out of the garden, and so on. I was powerless against the pair of them; but now I always cut him with a blunt knife.Sometimes I cook him on Saturday night, and he has to appear cold in the middle of the day on Sunday, which he dislikes as much as being tarred and feathered with strange sauces and trimmings.
But to return to Miss McGregor.
“No,” I said, “I won’t. You can slip it on the beef if you like, he hates being garnished, and perhaps it will keep him in his place. Put a whole mouthful of pins in him if you like, and then snip him into shreds.”
Miss McGregor took no more notice than if I had been reciting poetry to myself. “If you wouldn’t mind just slipping it on now,” she said, with gentle persistence; “I won’t keep you a minute—unless you have anything else you could give me to do. You said something about altering a skirt.”
The back door bell rang.
“I think it’s Jones’s boy,” said Ruth. “Have you decided what you will have for dinner?”
“If you please, ma’am,” said Louise, appearing at the kitchen door, “is there a parcel to go back to Huggins’s?”
“It will be the buttons for your coat,” said Miss McGregor, “did you decide——”
I heard my daughter’s voice on the stairs: “Mother!” she called. “Mother! Miss Mathers wants to know if it is going to rain, because, if so, shall I wear my old coat? She says it isn’t fit to go out in, but it is too cold for the other, unless you would like me to put on a woolly, and I haven’t got one, so shall I——”
I dashed up the kitchen stairs. They got Miss McGregor out of the flour-bin afterwards, less damaged than I could have wished. Anne picked herself up, and decided to chance the weather as offering the least risk of the two. Jones’s boy, and Huggins’s boy, and Ruth, and the beef, and Louise came to some decision amongst themselves about the buttons and the curry.
When I came back from a pleasant morning in the woods, I heard that Miss McGregor was looking for me to slip on a bodice, and the efficient female had called.
“Has Mrs. Simpson been?” I asked.
“I beg pardon, ma’am,” said Perrin, “who did you say?”
“Oh, it was nothing,” I replied. “I half expected a Mrs. Simpson; in fact I thought I saw her in the drive. She would have attended to Miss McGregor at once.”
The efficient female said I looked tired, and was anything the matter?
“No,” I said, “nothing particular; but do you always slip on things when you are asked—that is, when there is a dressmaker in the house?”
“Oh, never,” she assured me. “I have a stand made to exactly my own shape, and they never need to trouble me at all.”
“But can you judge how a thing will look with a great red twill bust and a stump sticking out of it?”
“Oh, perfectly; it only needs a little imagination.”
When she had gone, I went to Miss McGregor. “Look here,” I said, “you slip the things on the housemaid and pretend she is me. It only needs a little imagination.”
Miss McGregor was sitting in a shower of bits. She took no notice of my suggestion.
“I have got on as best I could,” she said, dispersing her last mouthful of pins all over her tiny chest. I was feeling a good deal better, and said I would slip on the garment. The picture she was to copy showed a slim and graceful creature with a long piece of soft material wound simply under one shoulder and over the other, caught in at the waist with a buckle, and falling in folds across the side of a very clinging underskirt. What I saw in the glass was a rain-water tub (surmounted by my head) covered with a closely gathered frill which was neatly sewn along the edge of the lid. The lid itself had some folds of the material arranged with geometrical precision round the place where the head came out.
My breath forsook me.
“Dear Miss McGregor,” I murmured, “you have not snipped all the stuff into small bits, have you? If you look at the picture you will see it is made all in one.Just folded round quite simply, beginning from one corner—so——”
“I couldn’t quite understand how you would get it on and off the other way, Mrs. Molyneux,” she said, after a minute’s thoughtful silence, “and the effect is just the same. I have arranged the folds so that they hide the join.”
I stood entranced by my reflection; I even began to take a morbid interest in it, as I saw how we depend for our personal attraction on clothes; it opened such a world of speculation amongst my friends. The knowledge was comforting to this extent: that there is more hope in a petition to one’s dressmaker to take back the dress she gave and change it than there would be in a request to one’s parents for a different face.
With as little show of alteration as I could manage, I unripped the gathers, and taking a corner of the stuff I wrapped it round my form in the way I wanted, and stuck in a hat-pin to secure the last bit.“There,” I said triumphantly, “that is the way I want it to go.”
Miss McGregor observed me with patient scepticism.
“I don’t quite see how I am to arrange that,” she remarked.
“You must not arrange it on any account,” I said. “It is to stay just like that.”
“But how are you going to get out of it?”
“Like this,” I replied, slipping the whole thing off my shoulders like a skin. “How I get back again next time is your concern; you are a dressmaker. Dresses like these are worn every day in Paris.”
“Well, I don’t understand how they do it,” replied the forbearing creature.
“You remind me,” I told her, “of a plumber we had here last spring. Mr. Molyneux gave him an order, and the man asked how he was to do it. ‘I don’t know,’ Mr. Molyneux said, ‘I am not a plumber.’ The silly man replied: ‘Well, I am a plumber and I don’t know.’ Now pleasedon’t be like the plumber; we had quite enough of that sort of thing with him.”
Miss McGregor poised herself upon one leg, cocked her head on one side, and said it wasn’t the way of the stuff.
I know her ways by this time, so I said I was going out to tea.
It was certain that nothing would induce her to spend an idle afternoon, and she would therefore be driven to exercise her brain on the problem. I threatened her with every sort of violent and painful death, including a famine of pins, if she altered a single fold, and when I came home in the evening the dress was skilfully arranged. Miss McGregor is quite sure that if I would slip the things on fourteen times a day between meals she would understand better what I wanted, but I know for a fact she is wrong.
An industrious clerk might as well say to a poet: “If you tell me what you want to say in your poem I will write it for you and you can run your eye over it every ten minutes to see if it is right.”
James says that, so far as he can understand my criticism of Miss McGregor, that is just about what I expect her to do, otherwise why can’t I make the dress myself like the poet makes his poem.
But it is well known that only unreasonable people achieve miracles.
FOOTNOTES:[A]See chapterxiv.
[A]See chapterxiv.
[A]See chapterxiv.