Rebel women Part 9

Fixed by the gla.s.sy eye of the camera, we were unable to reply to this; so our scornful critic went away, doubtless confirmed in his belief that there is no higher reward for a rebel woman than that of standing in a thin blouse, at a street corner, to be photographed, blown about by a cutting east wind, jostled by yelling children, and exposed to the chance of recognition at any minute by some disapproving friend or relative.

"n.o.body will ever look upon us as real people in business, after that,"

sighed one of our shop a.s.sistants when we regained comparative privacy behind the counter.

"n.o.body," acquiesced our militant member, gloomily. "And only this morning, I was really feeling like a genuine tradesman when I took down the shutters and agreed with the man next door that trade will never improve as long as this Government is in power."

"Our trade certainly won't," agreed a chorus of anti-Government agitators.

The door was suddenly flung open, and a boy came in and flung a sovereign on the counter.

"Could you oblige Mr. Bunting with change, please, miss?" he asked briskly.

That was all. There was no condescension in his tone. There was no impudence in his manner. He did not ask if we wanted our rights now, or if we would sooner wait till we got them. He did not say he had no wish to see women sitting in _his_ Parliament. He just stood there, as shopman to shopman, waiting to effect a trade transaction that raised us, once and for all, beyond the level of amateurs.

Nothing approaching a sovereign's worth of change was in the chocolate-box hopefully described by us as the till; but our militant member, now as ever, knew how to rise to a great occasion. She looked up from the column of figures she had hastily pretended to be adding up when the shop bell tinkled, seemed to take in the boy's request with difficulty, called "Forward, dear, please!" in a languid tone up the spiral staircase, then returned to the column of figures. No lady of business experience in any shop or any post office could have been more exasperatingly irrelevant.

The rest of us looked fearfully at the boy in front of the counter. He was kicking his heels together and whistling tunelessly. Her procedure had, indeed, not erred in a single detail; and he saw nothing aggressive in her behaviour. Henceforth we knew we could count on being treated in the trade as equals.

XI

The Person who cannot Escape

The lady of the manor seemed gently amused when I criticized the architecture of the cottage in which I had taken rooms, on the farther side of the village.

"It is not picturesque, like those that belong to us," she admitted; "and I always think it was a little unwise of Horace to let that piece of land for building purposes without having the plans submitted to us first. Still, the land was no good for anything else, not even for allotments; and if we had stipulated for gables and things of that sort we might have it still on our hands, a prey to taxation."

"I'm not thinking of the outside," I said; "it's the inside that matters when you have to live in a place. Nor am I thinking of myself, being in a position to leave whenever I find it impossible to endure the discomfort another minute----"

"My dear," said the lady of the manor, looking concerned, "is it as bad as that? I told you it was absurd to expect to find rooms in a primitive place like this----"

"I am not thinking of myself," I repeated, "but of poor Mr. and Mrs.

Jim Bunce, who have to live there always because there isn't another cottage in the place, to say nothing of all the little Bunces, three boys and a little----"

"Oh!" she smiled, instantly rea.s.sured; "don't worry about them. They are not writing books, like their lodger. You must remember that the poor do not feel things, as you and I do; otherwise, they would appreciate nice houses when they get them. Only think how disheartened Horace and I were over those sweet gabled cottages we re-fronted for them down by the marsh----"

"Were those the ones you told me on no account to go to?" I interrupted, presuming unkindly on an old friends.h.i.+p.

I was told not to be unreasonable. "Naturally, I advised you to go to a newer place where the sanitation would be better," said my hostess. "I am sorry you don't like the Bunces' house, but that is your own fault for not coming here when you were invited."

"It seems to me rather more the fault of the man who built the Bunces'

house," I represented, still unreasonably, as I gathered from her expression. "Have you seriously studied its front elevation? A child could draw it on a slate:--two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs; two windows upstairs, two windows downstairs; chimneys anywhere you like, but never in direct communication with fireplaces, as the lodger discovers when the fire is lighted in the sitting-room."

"It is no use trying to teach these people anything," murmured the lady of the manor; "of course, damp wood, badly laid----"

"It reminds me," I continued, "of a dolls' house I once had, made out of a packing-case, neatly divided into four compartments, with a staircase jammed against one side of it and brought to an abrupt termination by the doorstep. The staircase is exactly like my dolls' house one, so steep that a false step lands one straight in the front garden with no conscious interval for falling. Mrs. Jim kindly provides against this contingency by leaving the front door always open," I added hastily, in deference to a look of renewed concern.

The lady of the manor agreed that there was something in what I said about the defects of modern architecture. "They do not build as they once did," she observed sententiously; "but then, the peasantry is not what it used to be. If the poor were still thrifty and hard-working, and did their own brewing and baking----"

"How can they?" I interposed. "You should see Mrs. Bunce's daily attempt to cook me a milk-pudding in an oven that never bakes anything equally on both sides, and sometimes refuses to bake at all. Oh! I never know what or why the poor are supposed to brew, but I do know that they cannot bake in the houses they are obliged to live in."

"My dear," was the reply I received to all this, "you have only yourself to blame for seeking impossibilities in a country cottage, when you might have settled down with your typewriter in the blue room over the library, and had your meals regularly. I do not pity you in the least."

"I do not pity myself," I said. "The person to be pitied is the person who cannot escape, never the person who can."

As I walked back to the cottage that was built on the plan of a dolls'

house, I wondered how long it would be before I availed myself of my privilege of escape. When I first became Mrs. Jim Bunce's lodger, a polite fiction existed that I was to dwell apart in the two front rooms, away from the family, a detached and superior position that might have made the writing of books a possibility. Unfortunately, this magnificent isolation had to yield to the force of numbers. There was only a sketchy, ill-fitting door between me and the kitchen, and I shared to some extent in the family joys and sorrows--they were generally sorrows--even when this was closed. More often it gave way before sudden pressure, and burst open to admit a crawling baby, followed by an a.s.sortment of small boys, pigs, chickens, puppies, and anything else that was young and undisciplined, brought up tempestuously at the rear by Mrs. Bunce and a broom. The writing of books did not thrive under these conditions, nor in the more strenuous moments that followed when the baby girl, bored and whimpering, had been carried off and set upon the flagstones under my window with nothing more thrilling to engage her attention than a piece of firewood.

The baby for once was not crying when I arrived back at my rooms, a state of grace that was accounted for when I came upon her mother, who was laying my tea, with the baby tucked under one arm.

"She be that okkard I canna keep her quiet another way," was Mrs. Jim's simple explanation of her feat of skill.

It seemed an opportunity to make friends with the greatest disturber of my peace, and I rashly flirted with the baby until it was converted into the firmest of allies. Nothing, as it turned out, could have been more destructive of my future hopes of accomplis.h.i.+ng work. If it was difficult to write when the baby cried, it became impossible when the baby laughed. I cannot recommend the game of "peep-bo" to any one who seriously wishes to combine business and recreation, though the baby's mother seemed to regard it habitually from this point of view. I have seen her play "peep-bo" while she mixed puddings, fed pigs or boys, washed clothes, scrubbed floors, buried a dead chicken, or parcelled out the weekly income into its amazing weekly budget. Perhaps she led a less chequered existence during the month I stayed with her; for without acquiring her agility in doing housework with the baby under one arm, I became an expert in distracting the baby's attention from an insistent tooth, and found this far harder work than any job I was ever paid for.

I came to the conclusion that one does not know much about hard work until one has lived with somebody whose work is never done and never paid for.

This was particularly impressed upon me one evening, when, having put the children to bed, fed every live thing that clamoured in the thickly populated back yard, cleared away her husband's supper and watched him start for the village club, Mrs. Bunce told me she was going to step across the road to do the week's was.h.i.+ng for a sick neighbour. This little act of humanity, mentioned so casually as to divest it of the slightest taint of charity, kept her at the wash-tub till past midnight; and at five the next morning I heard her go downstairs to get her man's breakfast. After that, one felt it would be an immense relief to hear her grumble. She never did; and there were moments when I began to see points in the comfortable theory held by the lady of the manor with regard to the insensibility of "these people."

There was the day, for instance, when the baby, after crying fretfully for two hours, took to battering a saucepan lid with a tin spoon. I had borne its wails with set teeth, but this new and excruciating din took me into the back room, bent on remonstrance. I was met with a beatific smile from Mrs. Jim, who was peeling potatoes at the sink.

"Bless her heart!" she said placidly. "That be the first time as ever she's been quiet this morning!"

Finally came the day when stolid, undemonstrative Mrs. Bunce upset all theories as to the wonderful patience of the poor. The lady of the manor called with an annual invitation to a mothers' tea. It was Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and the weekly house-cleaning was in full swing. The inopportune visitor, stepping over a heap of small boys whose tangled arms and legs suggested the interior of a fisherman's worm-can, came next upon the baby, who, in her week-end pinafore, was still hopefully sucking a spoon that had once held jam. The jam was distributed impartially over the baby's countenance, and no one could pretend she was looking her best, a criticism that might have been applied with equal truth to her mother, who was engaged in cleaning the kitchen flues. The general effect of Mrs. Bunce's home was certainly not that of the picturesque cottage interior so dear to the imagination of those who live remotely in manor-houses; and it was easy to see that this lady of the manor welcomed such a heaven-sent opportunity of being feudal, as she alluded in a perfectly kind and courteous manner to the disarranged condition of the kitchen stove and the mottled complexion of the baby.

She gave her invitation as a sort of consolation prize at the end, and went away without waiting to hear if it was accepted--as in the good old days, I suppose, when a refusal would have been met with the _oubliette_. I walked up the road with her, and learned how necessary it was to speak out now and then; otherwise these young mothers grew so careless and slovenly. The idea of slovenliness in connection with this particular young mother, who to my knowledge did the work of all the servants in the manor-house, in addition to being a wife and a mother and a dressmaker, left me incapable of speech.

Mrs. Jim Bunce, who had remained silent and immovable while the duty of the rich in speaking plainly to the poor was being fulfilled, sat playing with the baby on her lap when I returned to the house. There was just time to reflect that she had chosen a curious moment at which to suspend her weekly attack upon the flues, before she gave me a further surprise.

"You wouldna think as I didn't never want to have a girl when I had this one, would ye, miss?" she jerked out abruptly.

Still failing to understand that anything unusual was happening, I said something stupid and polite about a personal preference for little girls. She smiled across at me rather queerly as she started suddenly to her feet and caught the baby to her with a quick, pa.s.sionate gesture that made it cry out with astonishment.

"It bain't that," she said roughly. "I didna want to bring another woman into it."

She stood there, looking at me fiercely, and the baby gave another whimper to express its outraged sense of the fitness of things. There was nothing heroic in the woman's figure; I think her hair was coming down, and there was soot about her, and her blouse wore a general air of bulgy disorder. At her feet lay strewn the symbols of inartistic toil, a hairless stove broom, a cracked saucer with a mess of blacklead in it, some indescribable bits of rag. Over it all hung the sickly smell of stale, unventilated air, mingled with the fumes of damp and smouldering wood. It was a.s.suredly not the setting for a great situation. Yet, as we stood there, looking at each other, in the little hush that fell upon us after that outburst of the rebel mother, I found myself wondering if I had ever known how great situations are made.

The baby struggled to escape from an embrace it did not understand; and, of course, the baby was right. Mrs. Jim Bunce recognized the call of convention, and acknowledged it by giving a sound scolding to those portions of her family that happened to be within reach. The flues were attacked afresh with tempestuous energy; the baby was left sobbing and neglected in one corner, the sprawling boys scurried to another. I was told as plainly as looks could tell that my place on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon was not the home.

I decided that this was not the moment to explain to Mrs. Jim Bunce that an age was dawning in which women would be glad instead of afraid "to bring another woman into it."

XII

The Daughter who stays at Home