“My principal,” said the young man with an air of strict integrity, “wouldn’t do such a thing as that either, miss. But it’s always considered more satisfactory ”
“Tell me at once,” I said. “Is it a custom of the country? If it is a custom of the country I have no desire to dispute it.”
“It is, miss. Then shall I begin here?”
“Certainly,” I replied. I was not going to have Graham say anything more about the good taste of not objecting to the customs of the country, whatever you may think of them; but I made up my mind that if this young man was so anxious to check the inventory, it was probably his business; and he could do it himself. So he began.
“Drawin’-room,” he announced formally. “Brass handle to door, ditto lock.”
“Well, of course,” I couldn’t help saying. “It wouldn’t open without one. You needn’t put that down.”
“Mr. Mott has put it down, miss, on the other party’s behalf. Is it in good order?”
“You might just look.”
“It would be more satisfactory ”
“If I looked? Then it is in good order. No, it isn’t—there’s a screw out.”
“Ah!” said the young man reflectively. “One screw out,” and he put it down. “White lace curtains. Right. Spring roller blind. Does it work?”
“Try it,” I said from the sofa; and it did.
“In perfect working order,” he said, and wrote it down. “Cushions?”
“Nine,” I counted.
“Nine. Six large, three small—one slightly soiled.”
“I wouldn’t call it soiled,” I said. “Would you? A little gone in the colour.”
“It’s what we call soiled,” he replied firmly, and put something down.
“Carpet on floor,” he went on. “Three skins, various. Any holes in the carpet? Worn places?”
“I could only find that out by living with it,” I said, “but it looks a pretty good carpet.”
The young man walked abstractedly over it.
“In perfect order,” he said, “except possibly under the sofa where you are sitting, miss, which I can’t see. Perhaps ”
“You must excuse me,” I said. “I’m tired.”
“Electric light fixtures,” he tapped the globes with his pencil. “Cornice—chipped anywhere? Paper and paint?”
“If you look to the left of the mantelpiece,” I said, closing my eyes, “immediately behind the scuttle, you will find a tear in the paper as big as a shilling. And I didn’t do it.”
“Quite right, miss; it’s there. It’s more satisfactory if you notice what you can.” He seemed really relieved. “Gentleman’s arm chair, lady’s ditto.”
“Not calendered,” I said, remembering that we had settled it that way, but the young man put nothing down.
“Wouldn’t you call them fairly fresh?” he asked, and I said:
“Oh, yes, fairly fresh.”
“Forty-two mantel ornaments,” he proceeded.
“Thirty in the closet!” I told him.
“Oh, she has locked them up this time!” the young man remarked. “On your behalf, miss, I should say a very good thing, too.”
“I made her,” I replied, with dignity. “All the animals but that pair of yellow cats which I thought looked cheerful.’
“But she has put forty-two down,” he informed me gravely.
“Never mind. Write ‘in the closet,’” I said.
“Claimed in the closet,” repeated the young man, writing, but he looked doubtful. “It would be more satisfactory ”
“No,” I said, “we can’t count them. She took the key, and she is in the South of France—I hope.”
The young man looked at me with as much of a twinkle as his profession of young man from the agent would let him.
“She is a peculiar lady, miss,” he admitted, “in some respects,” and went hastily on to the furniture and fire-irons. He was very patient and persistent; and whenever I wanted him to look for himself he told me it would be more satisfactory; and whenever I wanted to skip or take things for granted he reminded me that he was there on my behalf. I can’t say I gave him much help; but gradually he seemed to get interested; and it was he who got the blankets out from between the mattresses,—he would count them, and Towse was having her tea,—and he who found out that there were only five odd plates in the kitchen instead of six, and something funny about the carving fork. I left him at last; but from my own room where I had gone to lie down I heard him rustling in the linen closet; and he knocked at the door before he went, to say he hoped I would excuse him disturbing me, but I was “short” of one pillowslip and a duster. He thought—as he was there on my behalf—it would be more satisfactory. Then he pushed the list under my door for me to sign, and I signed it; and then he went away, and never was I more thankful.
All the same, I thought it was quite an experience, and I related it to Graham, word for word; but he wasn’t as amused as I thought he would be.
“You shouldn’t go signing things,” he said.
“Not when it’s the custom of the country?” I asked, scoring off him badly, and left him to get my hat.
We had moved in, but Towse was the only person who had any provisions; which she must have inherited from Miss Game. So we went out to buy things, went out to meet the delightful necessities attached to being householders in London. It sounds a simple thing to be, but it was really complicated with emotion and excitement in a way I don’t know whether I can describe. We went out into the general streets to take our share of the common supply of the wonderful city, to establish ourselves among the fundamentals of life in the very citadel of the imagination, to buy butter in Mecca. There is a housekeeping relish in life anywhere, but when you add to it the joys of the faithful who approach from Minnebiac !
Our first essential was a grocer, and we naturally chose one with a post office. Not all grocers have post offices in London, but nearly all post offices have grocers, so much so that I shall always associate the catching of the American mail with a smell of cheese and coffee. It gives the stranger a false idea of grocery custom. What he thinks is the grocer doing business is nine times out of ten only the King doing stamps or issuing money orders, or taking parcels at the very last minute for the country post. I don’t know how the grocer’s nerves stand it, never knowing whether he has a customer or whether she is only after post cards or the directory; but I suppose he is supported by British phlegm. When I think of Jim Jex, where we always deal at home—Jim would be out of his mind.
I am not able to say whether it is the grocery that takes in the post office or the post office that takes in the grocery, whether they go shares, on the understanding that they recommend each other, or whether the Government simply pre-empts the left side going in of any clean, respectable-looking grocery, and says: “Out with your sugar barrels; I am coming here!” in which case the right would probably date from Queen Elizabeth, and might apply to the city as a whole or, say, to the parish of Marylebone only. It is the sort of thing one would expect, somehow, in the parish of Marylebone only. Very few people would start in groceries on our side under those conditions; but in England I noticed they give in dreadfully to the Government; I suppose they always have. Why it is so generally a grocery is another thing I might have found out. One would think a book-shop more suitable for partnership with a post office; but no doubt there are not enough of them, and bakeries are here to-day and to-morrow cast into the oven; and public-houses of course they couldn’t; and dry-goods would be unfair to gentlemen, especially during sales. But no district, however humble, could do without a grocery. Both men and women enter them freely, and the British constitution being founded upon bacon, and the world what it is as to condiments, they never vanish in the night. I think these are quite likely reasons, but anybody who wants to know definitely has only to ask at the counter.
There is nothing so obliging as a young man in a grocery shop in England, especially if you have newly come to li
ve in the neighbourhood, no matter how little you want at a time. Graham and I ordered hardly more than half a pound of anything. Having heard so much of the corruption of British groceries we thought it better not to commit ourselves too far. But we were never so obliged in our lives as by that young man with his hair parted in the middle, all in his acceptance of the small favours that fell from us, for which he thanked us so unremittingly that we didn’t know where to look. Whenever we spoke he said “Thank you,” and whenever we paused. “Thank you” gladly when we said we would take it, and “Thank you” sadly when we said we wouldn’t. His politeness was really beyond all bearing. He leaned toward us on the counter like one receiving a sacred trust; and before I could say whether the bottle I wanted was of oil or of vinegar he was out with his thank-you, and his pencil had it down. He offered us a choice of brands in everything with a deference one might have expected to be kept for the Royal Family. He hung upon our preference with a golden smile, and when we could think of nothing more and he had to take our address, he looked up insinuatingly and said: “And what name would you like, miss?” as if he had a selection to offer me there too. When I thought of Jim Jex—
“Fresh-ground, Miss Mary? Why, sure. Not quite so good as last time? You don’t say so! Well now, that’s too bad. I know the best ain’t any too good for you—can’t have you complainin’. I’ll see it’s all right this time. An’ how’s the folks?”
Thinking of Jim, I regularly despised the young man in Church Street, Kensington.
The behaviour of the fishmonger’s assistant was much more independent. He let us wander about among his cod and crab for some time before he took any notice of us, and then his manner was rather short. It may have been because we asked the names of too many of the species he displayed—there may be a subtle affront to a fishmonger in this—or it may have been as Graham said, because of being obliged to repeat daily that his whole stock had come up from Grimsby that morning, as he told us. That, Graham thought, might have a bad effect upon the best disposition, and it may be so. But he seemed so ruffled when I asked him what a lemon-sole was and why it was so called—he said it was just the lemon kind of sole and generally so referred to because it came cheaper—that I thought I ought to explain.
“You see,” I said, “we are from the other side of the Atlantic where there is a difference in fish. Nothing like this ever comes out of Lake Ontario.”
His manner changed at once. People will always forgive you for mere ignorance.
“Would that be salt water or fresh?” he asked, a very intelligent question in the connection; and when I explained to him further that in Minnebiac, lake salmon came round with a bell in a wheelbarrow, and you got it for ten cents a pound, he smiled outright and said it must be a very desirable neighbourhood, though he could not have meant for himself. The great thing in England is to confess your deficiencies and divergences. They just love being kind to you then; and the fishmonger’s assistant at once told us the names of almost everything that was lying down or hanging up about us, including ptarmigan and Bordeaux pigeons, which were, strictly speaking, beyond the bounds of our enquiry. In the end we bought the Bordeaux pigeons because they looked so neat and comfortable in a box with paper edging, and he said they were considered beautiful for lunch, and for breakfast chose plaice, under his prompting.
“I can’t advise you better than plaice,” said the fishmonger’s assistant. “It eats very refined, plaice does.”
Language in England is a great joy. The people themselves take pleasure in using it. I mean real language, like the fishmonger’s, not mere words, such as are current with us. Graham says it is the result of Board Schools. If that is the case, Board Schools have diffused a great deal of happiness. It makes one feel as if one’s own opportunities had been poor; but Graham says not to mind, we are a young country, making vigorous progress in every direction; and in the end we may talk, too, to some purpose.
We shopped up and down Church Street and up and down the High, we ordered our milk and our butter and our daily paper; and it was all as good as a play and better, because we were playing too. We were sorry Miss Game had left out so much; there were brooms and brushes I simply longed to buy; and to be obliged to pass a tinsmith’s with indifference filled us with regret. They make small purchases very interesting for you in England by the importance they attach to them. In comparison our retail trade is about as interesting as a market report in a newspaper. Graham, who must find the moral of a thing if he dies for it, says the Kensington way is right; and that all the primitive transactions of life have the old forgotten sweetness of function yet, if one just has the luck to stumble on it as we did in Church Street. He is still enjoying his indignation at being asked fourpence for an apple. We carried our chrysanthemums with us from their corner shop because we wanted to go on smelling them, and finally we came in out of the rain because that also in the end is what you always have to do over there. We found the flat full of the comfort of the Bordeaux pigeons, which Towse had interpreted for supper, and a good fire which made us remember we had forgotten Miss Game’s “Home Glow”; but it was not till the brown-paper parcels began to come tumbling up over one another in the lift that the delightful fact fully came home to me.
“Oh, Graham!” I exclaimed from the bottom of my heart as the boy arrived with the little bundles of kindling from the grocer’s; “we are part of it!”
CHAPTER IV
I AM longing to get to the really important things that happened, but I am afraid if I do not mention Towse now she may not come in at all. She never would come in without knocking—I mean at the drawing-room or the dining-room door, because she began young as a scullery-maid and could not get over the modesty that belongs to that rank in life. It made one feel like a conspirator receiving friendly warning; and I was glad to find that it wasn’t a custom of the country and that I could ask her not to. But I might ask and ask, she would do it, entering with a smile of stolid apology which suggested, nevertheless, that she was only doing her duty, and conveyed at the same time the hopelessness, the perfect hopelessness, of trying to change Towses when they have once made up their minds what is the proper way for them to behave. Then she would cautiously back out, manoeuvring a little to find the door, like a liner leaving the dock, though there was really plenty of space to turn in, except perhaps in the dining-room. And I must treat of Towse, because I have been told by several people who saw her that there are very few of her kind left, even in England. Everything that is almost extinct must be taken seriously for that reason alone, and preserved if possible; and, as far as I can, I will.
Towse lived out. There was a small division of the flat that would have enabled her to live in, but she had a husband as well as daughters by her first, and she felt it her duty to give him his bite in the morning. I don’t remember her exact address, but it was rooms somewhere off the Earl’s Court Road, wonderfully near and convenient to the early morning ’bus which passed the corner at exactly the right time to let her get her fire up. He worked at the London Docks—both the daughters by the first were married—and had to go by the Underground, starting ten minutes earlier; and often I used to wake when there was nothing in the room but the drab window-curtain, lighter and colder at the edges, of the London dawn, and think, “Now Towse is giving him his bite. Now he is getting off for his train. He doesn’t kiss her, but she says: ‘Don’t forget your baccy,’ which comes to the same thing. Now she is tying on her bonnet and locking up. Now I wonder if she has caught that ’bus!” And in exactly twenty minutes I would hear the latch-key in the door, and then I could sleep again in security if I liked, knowing that Towse was in possession.
Above all things you had that feeling with Towse, that when she was in the kitchen you were perfectly safe. I would defy any undesirable person to get past her if she answered the door. She was a solid wall of defence, impregnable, immovable; the only chance would have been to blow her up. Errandboys she held in aversion, with stray cats and organgrinder
s and other irregularities of life; she would be curtly just to them, but she looked at them with a suspicious eye, especially if they delivered newspapers, and always had some advice ready for them beginning with “Mind.” Telegraph messengers, or anything in uniform, stood a better chance with her; but she was very brief with them all, and I was thankful sometimes that Graham was grown up. She was delightful to him, fearfully respectful and self-obliterating and inclined to curtsey; but if he had been ten years younger she would have had quite a different eye on him. And no boy ever answered Towse back, or did anything but take good heed and warning and use the mat soberly, not even whistling, as a rule, before he was well out of hearing of her. The conviction that sparkled in each of her faithful eyes that a boy was a worthless, useless, troublesome, necessary piece of human furniture made a moral force of her, when she looked at him, that no boy could fail to recognise, or ever did. She knew how to put them in their place. Our Eliza, in Minnebiac, could not even keep her proper distance with them.
Towse had no great idea of men either; I never could find out why, for both her married lives seemed to have been quite satisfactory. She would talk with a good deal of proper pride about her second, and about her first very freely too. I always thought that a first husband was buried beyond reference, but Towse taught me better. She told me a great many of his opinions, especially about the bringing up of children, and them Irish; and I knew that tomatoes was a thing he could not abide. He was an under-gardener, and he often took more than was good for him; but he would go to bed as quiet as a lamb when it was in him, and never did anybody any harm but himself. He was humble under anything that might be said to him for his good, and he died as peaceable as a baby. I know Towse thought a great deal of him, because one day when I was opening a box of Nephitos roses that came by post from the country, I turned round and found her wiping her eyes with her apron, and she explained that that was the way her first always packed white roses to go by post for the family; and it did take her back so. She was extremely true to them both, but her fidelity to her first had a sentiment and a sorrow which her second had, of course, no right to share, at all events, for the present.
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