Our Housekeepers

OUR finding our Chambers was the merest chance. One day on the way to the Underground, J. and I saw the notice, “To Let,” in windows above the Embankment Gardens by the River, and knew at a glance that we should be glad to spend the rest of our lives looking out of them. But something depended on what we looked out from, and as the notice also said, “Apply to the Housekeeper,” we went at once to ask her to show us what was behind them.

The house was all that we could have hoped: as simple in architecture, with bricks as time-stained, as the courts of the Temple or Gray’s Inn. The front door opened into a hall twisted with age, its sloping roof supported by carved corbels, the upper part of the door at the far end filled with bull’seye glass, and no housekeeper could have been more in place than the little old white-haired woman who answered our ring. She was scrupulously neat in her dress, and her manner had just the right touch of dignity and deference, until we explained our errand, when she flew into a rage and told us in a tone that challenged us to dispute it, “You know, no coal is to be carried upstairs after ten o’clock in the morning.” Coal was as yet so remote that we would have agreed to anything in our impatience to look out of the windows, and, reassured by us, she became the obsequious housekeeper again, getting the keys, toiling with us up three flights of stairs, unlocking the double door, — for there was an “oak ” to sport, — ushering us into Chambers that Adam mantelpieces and decorations made worthy of the windows, dropping the correct “Sir” and “Madam” into her talk, accepting without a tremor the shilling it embarrassed us to slip into her venerable hand, and realizing so entirely our idea of what a housekeeper in London Chambers ought to be, that her outbreak over the coal we had not ordered, and might never order, was the more perplexing.

I understood it before we were settled in our Chambers — for, of course, we took them. But they were not really ours until after a long delay over the legal formalities with which the English love to entangle their simplest transactions at somebody’s else expense; a longer one in proving our personal and financial qualifications, the landlord being disturbed by a suspicion that, like the Housekeeper’s daughter, we were in the profession and spent most of our time “resting”; and the longest of all over the British Workman, who, once he got in, threatened never to get out. In the meanwhile we saw the Housekeeper almost every day. We did not have to see her often to discover that she was born a housekeeper, that she had but one thought in life, and that this was the house under her charge. I am sure she believed that she came into the world to take care of it, unless indeed it was built to be taken care of by her. She belonged to a generation in England who had not yet been taught the folly of interest in their work, and she was old-fashioned enough to feel the importance of the post she filled. She would have lost her self-respect had she failed in the slightest detail of her duty to the house. From the first the spotless marvel she made of it divided our admiration with our windows. The hall and front steps were immaculate, the white stone stairs shone, there was not a speck of dust anywhere, and I appreciated the work this meant in an old London building, where the dirt not only filters through doors and windows, but oozes out of the walls and comes up through the floors. She did not pretend to hide her despair when our painters and paperers tramped and blundered in and out; she fretted herself ill when our furniture was brought up the three flights of her shining stairs. Painters and paperers and the bringing up of furniture were rare incidents in the life of a tenant and had to be endured. But coal, with its trail of dust, was an endless necessity, and at least could be regulated. This was why, after her daily cleaning was done, she refused to let it pass.

Once we were established, we saw her less often. The daily masterpiece was finished in the morning before we were up, and at all times she effaced herself with the respect she owed to tenants of a house in which she was the servant. If we did meet her she acknowledged our greeting with ostentatious humility, for she clung with as little shame to servility as to cleanliness; servility was also a part of the business of a housekeeper, just as elegance was the mark of the profession which her daughter graced, and the shame would have been not to be as servile as the position demanded.

This daughter was in every way an elegant person, dressing with a deference to fashion I could not hope to emulate, and with the help of a fashionable dressmaker I could not afford to pay. She was “resting” from the time we came into the house until her mother left it, but if in the profession it is a misfortune to be out of work, it is a crime to look it, and her appearance and manner gave no hint of unemployment. In an emergency, she would bring us up a message or a letter, but her civility had none of her mother’s obsequiousness; it was a condescension, and she made us feel the honor she conferred upon the house by living in it.

The Housekeeper, for all her deference to the tenants, was a despot, and none of us dared to rebel against her rule and disturb the order she maintained. To anybody coming in from the not too respectable little street the respectability of the house was overwhelming, and I often noticed that strangers, on entering, lowered their voices and stepped more softly. The hush of repose hung heavy on the public hall and stairs, whatever was going on behind the two doors that faced each other on every landing. We all emulated her in the quiet and decorum of our movements. We allowed ourselves so seldom to be seen that after three months I still knew little of the others except their names on their doors, the professions of those who had offices and hung up their signs, and the frequency with which the Church League on the First Floor drank afternoon tea. On certain days, when I went out towards five o’clock, I had to push my way through a procession of bishops in aprons and gaiters, deans and ordinary parsons who were legion, of dowagers and duchesses who were as sands on the stairs. I may be wrong, but I fancy that the Housekeeper would have found a way to rout this weekly invasion if, in the aprons and gaiters, she had not seen symbols of the respectability which was her pride.

What I did not find out about the tenants for myself, there was no learning from her. She disdained the gossip which was the breath of life to the other housekeepers in the street, where, in the early mornings when the fronts were being done, or in the cool of summer evenings when the day’s work was over, I would see them chattering at their doors. She never joined in the talk, holding herself aloof, as if her house were on a loftier plane than theirs, and as if the number of her years in it raised her to a higher caste. Exactly how many these years had been she never presumed to say, but she looked as ancient and venerable, and had she told me she remembered Bacon and Pepys, each in his day a tenant, or Peter the Great who lived across the street, I should have believed her. She did not, however, claim to go further back than Etty, the Royal Academician, who spent over a quarter of a century in our Chambers and one of whose sitters she once brought up to see us: — a melancholy old man who could only shake his head, first over the changes in the house since Etty painted there those wonderful Victorian nudes, so demure that Bob Stevenson insisted that Etty’s maiden aunts must have sat for them, and then over the changes in the River, which also, it seemed, had seen better days. Really, he was so very dismal a survival of an older generation that we were glad she brought no more of her contemporaries to see us.

For so despotic a character, the Housekeeper had a surprisingly feminine capacity for hysterics. I thought she would never recover from the disreputable performance of ’Enrietter, my first servant, who was old in vice as she was young in years; though, after all, if there were to be hysterics, I had much the better right to them. From the fire, which occurred one hot July night in the third month of our tenancy, she never recovered at all. The Fire of London was not so epochmaking. Afterwards the tenants used to speak of the days “ Before the Fire,” as we still talk at home of the days “ Before the War.” J. was in France, where I was to join him, and I had replaced ’Enrietter for the time by a charwoman, who arrived at seven o’clock in the morning and left on the stroke of eight in the evening, so that at night I was alone. I do not recall the period with pride, for it proved me more of a coward than I cared to acknowledge. When the trains on the near railroad bridge awoke me, I lay trembling, certain they were burglars or ghosts, forgetting that visitors of that kind are usually shyer in announcing themselves. Then I began to be ashamed, and there was a night when, though the noises sounded strangely like voices immediately outside my window, I managed to turn over and try to go asleep again. This time the danger was real, and, the next thing I knew, somebody was ringing the front door-bell and knocking without stopping, and before I had time to be afraid I was out of bed and at the door. It was the young man from across the hall, who had come to give me the cheerful intelligence that his Chambers were on fire, and to advise me to dress as fast as I knew how and get downstairs before the firemen and the hose arrived, or I might not get down at all.

I flung myself into my clothes, although, as I am pleased to recall, I had the sense to select my most useful gown in case but one was left me in the morning, and the curiosity to step for a second on to the leads where the flames were leaping from the young man’s windows. As it was too late to help himself, he was waiting, with his servant, to help me. A pile of J.’s drawings lay on a chair in the hall — I thrust them into the young man’s outstretched arms. For some unknown reason J. ’s huge schube was on another chair — I threw it into the arms of the young man’s servant, who staggered under its unexpected weight. I rushed to my desk to secure the money I was unwilling to leave behind, when a bull’seye lantern flashed upon me and a policeman ordered me out. Firemen — for London firemen do eventually arrive if the fire burns long enough — were dragging up a hose as I flew downstairs and the policeman had scarcely pushed me into the Housekeeper’s room, the young man had just deposited the drawings at my feet, and the servant the schube, when the stairs became a raging torrent.

I had not thought of the Housekeeper till then; after that there was no thinking of anything else. My dread of never again seeing our Chambers was nothing to her sense of the outrage to her house. Niobe weeping for her children was not so tragic a spectacle as she lamenting over the ruin of plaster and paint that did not belong to her. She was half dressed, propped up against cushions on a couch, sniffing the salts and sipping the water administered by her daughter, who had taken the time to dress carefully and elegantly for the scene. “Oh, what shall I do! Oh, what shall I do! ” the Housekeeper wailed as she saw me, wringing her hands with an abandonment that would have made her daughter’s fortune on the stage.

Her sitting-room had been appropriated as a refuge for the tenants, and this sudden reunion was my introduction to them. As the room was small my first impression was of a crowd, though in actual numbers we were not many. The young man whose distinction was that the fire originated in his Chambers, and myself, represented the Third Floor, Front and Back. The architect and his clerks of the Second Floor Front were at home in their beds, unconscious of the deluge pouring into their office; the Second Floor Back had gone away on a holiday. The Church League of the First Floor Front, haunted by bishops and deans, duchesses and dowagers, was of course closed, and we were deprived of whatever spiritual consolation their presence might have provided. But the First Floor Back filled the little room with her loud voice and portly presence. She had attired herself for the occasion in a black skirt and a red jacket, that, for all her efforts, would not meet over the vast expanse of gray Jaeger vest beneath, and her thin wisps of gray hair were drawn up under a green felt hat of the pattern I wore for bicycling. I looked at it regretfully; mine, which I forgot, would have completed my costume. I complimented her on her forethought, but “ What could I do? ” she said, “they flurried me so I could n’t find my false front anywhere, and I had to cover my head with something.” It was extraordinary how a common danger broke down the barrier of reserve we had hitherto so carefully cultivated. She had her own salts which she shared with us all, when she did not need them for the Housekeeper, whom she kept calling “ Poor dear! ” and who, after every “ Poor dear! ” went off into a new attack of hysterics.

The Ground Floor Front, a thin, spry, old gentleman, hovered about us, bobbing in and out like the little man in the weather house. He was in the insurance business, I was immediately informed, and it seemed a comfort to us all to know it, though I cannot for the life of me imagine why it should have been to me, not one stick or stitch up there in our Chambers being insured. The Ground Floor Back was at his club, and his wife and two children had not been disturbed, as in their Chambers the risk was not immediate, and, anyway, they could easily walk out should it become so. He had been promptly sent for, and when a message came back that he was playing whist and would hurry to the rescue of his family as soon as his rubber was finished, the indignation in the Housekeeper’s little room was intense. “ Brute! ” the Housekeeper said, and after that, through the rest of the night, she would ask every few minutes if he had returned, and the answer in the negative was fresh fuel to her wrath.

She was, if anything, more severe with the young man whose Chambers were blazing, and who confessed he had gone out toward midnight leaving a burning candle in one of his rooms. Pie treated the fire as a jest, which she could not forgive; and when at dawn, after boasting that account-books committed to his care were now no doubt in ashes, he wished us good-morning and good-bye, she did not hesitate to see in the fire his method of disposing of records it was convenient to be rid of.

Indignation served better than salts to rouse the Housekeeper from her hysterics, and without this distraction she could not long have remained unconscious of another evil that I look back to as the deadliest of all. For, gradually through her room, by this time close to suffocation, there crept the most terrible smell. It took hold of me, choked me, sickened me. The Housekeeper’s daughter and the First Floor Back blanched under it, the Housekeeper turned from white to green. I have often marveled since that they never referred to it, but I know why I did not. For it was I who sent that smell downstairs when I threw the Russian schube into the arms of the Third Floor Front’s servant. Odors, they say, are the best jogs to memory, and the smell of the schube is for me so inextricably associated with the fire, that I can never think of one without remembering the other.

It was the chief treasure among the fantastic costumes it is J.’s joy to collect on his travels. His Hungarian sheepskins, French hooded capes, Swiss blouses, Spanish bérets, Scotch Tam o’ Shanters, Dalmatian caps, Roumanian embroidered shirts, and the rest, I can dispose of by packing them out of sight and dosing them with camphor. But no trunk was big enough to hold the Russian schube, and its abominable smell, even when reinforced by tons of camphor and pepper, could not frighten away the moths. It was picturesque, so much I admit in its favor, and Whistler’s lithograph of J. draped in it is a princely reward for my trouble. But that trouble lasted for eighteen years, during which time J. wore the schube just twice, — once to pose for the lithograph and once on a winter night in London, when its weight was a far more serious discomfort than the cold. Occasionally, he exhibited it to select audiences. At all other times it hung in a colossal linen bag made especially to hold it. The eighteenth summer, when the bag was opened for the periodical airing and brushing, no schube was there: not a shred of fur remained, the cloth was riddled with holes; it had fallen before its hereditary foe: the moths had devoured it. For this had I toiled over it; for this had I rescued it on the night of the fire as if it were my crowning jewel; for this had I braved the displeasure of the Housekeeper, from which indeed I escaped only because, at the critical moment, the policeman who had ordered me downstairs appeared to say that the lady from the Third Floor Back could go up again if she chose.

The stairs were a waterfall under which I ascended. The two doors of our Chambers were wide open, with huge gaps where panels had been, the young man’s servant having carefully shut them after me in our flight, thinking, I suppose, that the firemen would stand upon ceremony and ask for the key before venturing in. A river was drying up in our hall, and the strip of matting down the centre was sodden. Empty soda-water bottles rolled on t he floor, though it speaks well for London firemen that nothing stronger was touched. Candles were stuck upside down in our hanging Dutch lamp, and all available candlesticks, curtains, and blinds were pulled about, chairs were upset, the marks of muddy feet were everywhere. I ought to have been grateful, and I was, that the damage was so small, all the more when I went again on to the leads and saw the blackened heap to which the night had reduced the young man’s Chambers. But the place was inexpressibly cheerless and dilapidated in the dawning light. It was too late to go to bed, too early to go to work. I was hungry, and the baker had not come, nor the charwoman. I was faint, the smell of the schube was strong in my nostrils, though the schube itself was now safely locked up in a remote cupboard. I wandered disconsolately from room to room, when, of a sudden, there appeared at my still open front door a gorgeous vision — a large and stately lady, fresh and neat, arrayed in flowing red draperies, with a white lace fichu carelessly thrown over a mass of luxuriant golden hair. I stared, speechless with amazement. It was not until she spoke that I recognized the First Floor Back, who had had time to lay her hands not only on a false front, but on a whole wig, and who had had the enterprise to make tea which she invited me to drink with her in Pepys’s Chambers, where the Housekeeper, who had hitherto discouraged familiarity in the tenants, now joined us as a friend.

After the first excitement, after the house had resumed as well as it could its usual habits, the Housekeeper remained absorbed in her grief. Hitherto her particular habit was to work, and she had been able, unaided, to keep the house up to her immaculate standard of perfection. But now to restore it to order was the affair of builders, of plasterers and painters and paperers. There was nothing for her to do save to sit with hands folded and watch the sacrilege. Her occupation was gone, and all was wrong with the world.

I was busy during the days immediately after the fire. I had to insure our belongings, which, of course, being insured, have never run such a risk again. I had to prepare and pack for the journey to France, now many days overdue, and, what with one thing or another, I neglected the Housekeeper. When at last I was ready to shut up our Chambers and start, and I called at her rooms, it seemed to me she had visibly shrunk and wilted, though she had preserved enough of the proper spirit to pocket the substantial tip I slipped into her hand with the keys. She was no less equal to accepting a second when, after a couple of months, I returned and could not resist this expression of my sympathy on finding the hall still stained and defaced, the stairs still with their blackened groove, the workmen still going and coming, and her despair at the spectacle blacker than ever.

The next day she came up to our Chambers. She wore her best black gown and no apron, and from these signs I concluded it was a visit of state. I was right: it was to announce her departure. The house, partially rebuilt and very much patched up, would never be the same. She was too old for hope, and without the courage to pick up the broken bits of her masterpiece and put them together again. She was more ill at ease as visitor than as housekeeper. The conversation languished, although I fancied she had something particular to say, slight as was her success in saying it. We had both been silent for an awkward minute when she blurted out abruptly that she had never neglected her duty, no matter what it might or might not have pleased the tenants to give her. I applauded the sentiment as admirable, and I said good-bye; and never once then, and not until several days after she left us, did it dawn upon me that she was waiting to accept graciously the fee it was her right in leaving to expect from me. The fact of my having only just tipped her liberally had nothing to do with it. A housekeeper’s departure was an occasion for money to pass from the tenants’ hand into hers, and she had too much respect for her duty as housekeeper not to afford me the opportunity of doing mine as tenant. It was absurd, but I was humiliated in my own eyes when I thought of the figure I must cut in hers, and I could only hope she would make allowance for me as an ignorant American.

It takes years for a housekeeper of her type, like certain wines, to mature; and I knew that in the best sense of the word she could never be replaced, though the knowledge did not prepare me for her successor. Mrs. Haines was a younger and apparently stronger woman, but she was so casual in her dress, and so eager to emulate the lilies of the field, as to convince me that it was not in her, under any conditions, to mature into a housekeeper at all. It expressed much, I thought, that while the old housekeeper had always been “the Housekeeper,” we never knew Mrs. Haines by any name but her own. The fact that she had a husband was her recommendation to the landlord, who had been alarmed by the fire, and the hysterics into which it threw “the Housekeeper,” and now insisted upon a man in the family as an indispensable qualification for the post. The advantage might have been more obvious had Mr. Haines not spent most of his time in dodging the tenants, and helping them to forget his presence in the house. He was not an ill-looking nor ill-mannered man, and shyness was the only explanation that occurred to me for his perseverance in avoiding us. Work could not force him from his retirement. Mrs. Haines said that he was a carpenter by trade, but the only ability I ever knew him to display was in evading whatever job I was hopeful enough to offer him. Besides, though it might be hard to say what I think a carpenter ought to look like, I was certain he did not look like one, and others shared my doubts.

The rumor spread through our street — where everybody rejoices in the knowledge of everything about everybody else who lives in it — that he had once been in the Civil Service, but had married beneath him , and come down in the world. How the rumor originated I never asked, or never was told if I did ask; but it was so evident that he shrank from the practice of the carpenter’s trade that once we sent him with a letter to Mr. Fisher Unwin — who shares our love of the neighborhood to the point, not only of living in it, but of publishing from it — asking if some sort of a place could not be found for him in the office. It was found, I am afraid to his disappointment, for he never made any effort to fill it, and was more diligent than ever in keeping out of our way. As the months went on, he was never caught cleaning anything or doing anything in the shape of work, except sometimes, furtively as if afraid of being detected in the act, shutting the front door when the clocks of the neighborhood struck eleven. He was far less of a safeguard to us than I often fancied he thought we were to him.

Mrs. Haines was sufficiently unlike him to account for one part of the rumor. She was coarse in appearance and disagreeable in manner, always on the defensive, always on the verge of flying into a temper. She had no objection to showing herself: on the contrary, she was perpetually about, hunting for faults to find; but she did object to showing herself with a broom or a duster, a pail or a scrubbing-brush, in her hands. I shuddered sometimes at the thought of the shock to the old housekeeper if she were to see her hall and stairs. We could bring up coal now at any hour, or all day long. And yet Mrs. Haines tyrannized over us in her own fashion, and her tyranny was the more unbearable because it had no end except to spare herself trouble. Her one thought was to do nothing and get paid for it. She resented extra exertion without extra compensation. We never had been so bullied about coal under the old régime as we were under hers about a drain-pipe with a trick of overflowing. It might have drowned us in our Chambers, and she would not have stirred to save us; but its outlet was in a little paved court back of her kitchen, which it was one of her duties to keep in order, and she considered every overflow a rank injustice. She held the tenants in turn responsible, and would descend upon us like a Fury upbraiding us for our carelessness. It would never have surprised me had she ordered us down to clean up the court for her.

I must in fairness add that when extra exertion meant extra money she did not shirk it. Nor was she without accomplishments. She was an excellent needlewoman: she altered and renovated more than one gown for me, she made me chair-covers, she mended my carpets. During the first year she was in the house she never refused any needlework and often she asked me for more. She would come up and wait for me at table on the shortest notice. In an emergency she would even cook me a dinner which, in its colorless English way, was admirable. There is no denying that she could be useful, but her usefulness had a special tariff.

It was also in her favor that she was a lover of cats, and their regard for her was as good as a certificate. I came to be on the best of terms with hers, Bogie by name, a tall ungainly tabby, very much the worse for wear. He spent a large part of his time on the street; and often, as I came or went, he would be returning home, and would ask me, in a way not to be resisted, to ring her door-bell for him. Sometimes I waited to exchange a few remarks with him, for, though his voice was husky and not one of his attractions, he always had plenty to say. On these occasions I was a witness of his pleasure in seeing his mistress again, though his absence might have been short, and of her enthusiasm in receiving him. Unquestionably they understood each other, and cats are animals of discrimination.

She extended her affection to cats that did not belong to her, and ours came in for many of her attentions. Our Jimmie, who had the freedom of the streets, often paid her a visit on his way out or in, as I knew he would not have done if she had not made the time pass agreeably; for if he, like all cats, disliked to be bored, he knew better than most how to avoid the possibility. One of his favorite haunts was the near Strand, probably because he was sure to meet his friends there. It was a joy to him, if we had been out late in the evening, to run across us as we returned. With a fervent “mow” of greeting, he was at our side; and then, his tail high in the air and singing a song of rapture, he would come with us to our front door, linger until he had seen us open it, when, his mind at rest for our safety, he would hurry back to his revels. We considered this a privilege, and our respect for Mrs. Haines was increased when he let her share it even in the daytime. He was known to join her in the Strand, not far from Charing Cross, walk with her to Wellington Street, cross over, wait politely while she bought tickets at the Lyceum for one of the tenants, cross again and walk back with her. He was also known to sit. down in the middle of the Strand, and divert the traffic better than a “Bobby,” until Mrs. Haines, when everybody else had failed, enticed him away. He deserved the tribute of her tears, and she shed many, when the “Vet” kindly released him from the physical ruin to which exposure and a life of dissipation reduced him.

William Penn showed her the same friendliness, but from him it was not so marked, for he was a cat of democratic tastes and, next to his family, preferred the people who worked for them. He had not as much opportunity for his civilities as Jimmie, never being allowed to leave our Chambers. But when Mrs. Haines was busy in our kitchen he occupied more than a fair portion of her time, for which she made no reduction in the bill. William’s charms were so apt to distract me from my work that I could say nothing, and her last kindness of all when he died — in his case of too luxuriant living and too little exercise, the “Vet” said" would make me forgive her much worse. According to my friend, Miss Repplier, a cat “considers dying a strictly private affair.” But William Penn’s deathbed was a public affair, at least for Augustine and myself, who sat up with him through the night of his agony. We were both exhausted by morning, unfit to cope with the problem of his funeral. Chambers are without any convenient corner to serve as cemetery, and I could not entrust the most important member of the family to the dust-man for burial. I do not know what I should have done but for Mrs. Haines. It was she who arranged, by a bribe I would willingly have doubled, that during the dinner hour, when the head-gardener was out of the way, William should be laid to rest in the garden below our windows. She was the only mourner with Augustine and myself,—J. was abroad,—when, from above, we watched the assistant gardener lower him into his little grave under the tree where the wood-pigeons have their nest.

If I try now to make the best of what was good in her, at the time she did not give me much chance. Grumbling was such a habit with her that even had the Socialists’ Millennium come she would have kept on, if only because it removed all other reason for her grumbles. Her prejudice against work of any kind did not lessen her displeasure with everybody who did not provide her with work of some kind to do. She treated me as if I imposed on her when I asked her to sew or to wait or to cook, and she abused the other tenants because they did not ask her to. She paid me innumerable visits, the object of which never varied. It was to borrow, which she did without shame or apology. She never hesitated in her demands, she never cringed. She ran short because the other tenants were not doing the fair and square thing by her, and she did not see why she should not draw upon me for help. One inexhaustible debt was the monthly bill for her furniture, bought on the installment system and forfeited if any one installment were not met. I do not remember how many pounds I advanced, but enough to suggest that she had furnished her rooms, of which she never gave me as much as a glimpse, in a style far beyond her means. I could afford to be amiable, for I knew I could make her pay me back in work, though my continual loans did so little to improve her financial affairs that after a while my patience gave out, and I refused to advance another penny.

It was not until the illness of her husband, after they had been in the house some two years, that I realized the true condition of things behind the door they kept so carefully closed. The illness was sudden, so far as I knew. I had not seen Mr. Haines for long, but I was accustomed to not seeing him, and curiously, when Mrs. Haines’s need was greatest, she showed some reluctance in asking to be helped out of it. Her husband was dying before she appealed to anybody, and then it was not to me, but to my old charwoman, who was so poor that I had always fancied that to be poorer still meant to live in the streets or on the rates. But Mrs. Haines was so much worse off, that the old charwoman, in telling me about it, thanked Our Lord — she was a devout Catholic — that she had never fallen so low. It was cold winter and there was no fire, no coal, no wood behind the closed door. The furniture for which I had advanced so many pounds consisted, I now found out, of two or three rickety chairs and a square of tattered carpet in the front room, a few pots and pans in the kitchen. In the dark bedroom between, the dying man lay on a hard board stretched on the top of a packing-box, shivering under his threadbare overcoat, so pitiful in his misery and suffering that the old charwoman was moved to compassion and hurried home to fetch him the blankets from her own bed and buy him a pennyworth of milk on the way. When the tenants knew how it was with Mrs. Haines and her husband, as now they could not help knowing, they remembered only that he was ill, and they sent for the doctor and paid for medicine, and did what they could to lighten the gloom of the two or three days left to him. And they arranged for a decent burial, feeling, I think, that a man who — as it was remembered — had been in the Civil Service should not lie in a pauper’s grave. For a week or so we wondered again who he was, why he kept so persistently out of sight; after that we thought as little of him as when he had skulked, a shadow, between his rooms and the street door on the stroke of eleven.

Everybody was kind to Mrs. Haines now she was alone in the world. The landlord overlooked his announced decision “ to sack the pair,” and retained her as Housekeeper, though in losing her husband she had lost her principal recommendation. The tenants raised a fund to enable her to buy the mourning which is often a consolation in widowhood. Work was offered to her in Chambers which she had never entered before, and I doubled the tasks in ours. The housekeepers in the street with families to support must have envied her.

Mrs. Haines, however, did not see her position in that light. She had complained when work was not offered to her, she complained more bitterly when it was. Perhaps her husband had had some restraining influence upon her. I cannot say; but certainly once he was gone, she gave up all pretence of controlling her temper. She would sweep like a hurricane through the house, raging and raving, on the slightest provocation. She led us a worse life than ever over the drain-pipe. She left the house more and more to take care of itself, dust lying thick wherever dust could lie, the stairs turned to a dingy gray, the walls blackened with London smoke and grime. Once in a while she hired a forlorn ragged old woman to wash the stairs and brush the front-door mat, for in London more than anywhere else, “poverty is a comparative thing,” and every degree has one below to “soothe” it. No matter how hard up Mrs. Haines was, she managed to scrape together a few pennies to pay to have the work done for her rather than do it herself. She became as neglectful of herself as of the house: her one dress grew shabbier and shabbier, her apron was discarded, no detail of her toilet was attended to except the frizzing of her coarse black hair. All this came about not at once, but step by step, and things were very bad before J. and I admitted, even to each other, that she was a disgrace to the house. We would admit it to nobody else, and to my surprise the other tenants were as forbearing. I suppose it was because they understood as well as we did, that at a word to the landlord she would be adrift in London, where for one vacant post of housekeeper there are a hundred applications. To banish her from our own Chambers, however, was not to drive her to the workhouse, and I called for her services less and less often.

There was another reason for my not employing her, —to which I have not so far referred, — the reason really of her slovenliness and bad temper and gradual deterioration. I shut my eyes as long as I could. But I was prepared for the whispers that began to be heard, not only in our house but up and down our street. What started them I do not know, but the morning and evening gatherings of the housekeepers at their doors were not held for nothing, and presently it got about that Mrs. Haines had been seen stealing in and out of a public house, and that this public house was just beyond the border-line of what we call our quarter, which looked as if she were endeavoring to escape the vigilant eyes of our gossips. Then, as invariably happens, the whispers grew louder, the evidence against her circumstantial, and everybody was saying quite openly where her money disappeared and why she became shabbier, her rooms barer, and the house more disreputable. It leaked out that her husband also had been seen flitting from public house to public house; and, the game of concealment by this time being up, it was bluntly said that drink had killed him, as it would Mrs. Haines if she went on as she was going.

I had kept my suspicions to myself, but she had never come to our Chambers at the hour of lunch or dinner that there was not an unusual drain upon our modest wine-cellar. I could not fancy that it was merely a coincidence, that friends dining with us were invariably thirstier when she waited or cooked; but her appearance had been the invariable signal for the disappearance of our wine at a rate that made my employment of her a costly luxury. I never saw her when I could declare she had been drinking, but drink she did, and there was no use my beating about the bush and calling it by another name. It would have been less hopeless had she occasionally betrayed herself — had her speech thickened and her walk become unsteady. But hers was the deadliest form of the evil, because it gave no sign. There was nothing to check it except every now and then a mysterious attack of illness,—which she said defied the doctor though it defied nobody in the house,—or the want of money; but a housekeeper must be far gone if she cannot pick up a shilling here and a half-crown there. I was the last of the old tenants to employ her, but after I abandoned her she still had another chance with a newcomer who took the Chambers below ours, and, finding them too small to keep more than one servant, engaged her for a liberal amount of work. She bought aprons and a new black blouse and skirt, and she was so spruce and neat in them that I was encouraged to hope. But before the end of the first week, she was met on the stairs coming down from his room to hers with a bottle under her apron; at the end of the second she was dismissed.

I hardly dare think how she lived after this. With every Christmas there was a short period of prosperity, though it dwindled as the tenants began to realize where their money went. For a time J. and I got her to keep our bicycles, other people in the house followed suit, and during several months she was paid rent for as many as six, keeping them in the empty sitting-room from which even the rickety chairs had disappeared, and where the floor now was thick with grease and stained with oil. If we had trunks to store or boxes to unpack, she would let us the same room for as long as we wanted, and so she managed, one way or the other, by hook or by crook. But it was a makeshift existence, all the more so when her habits began to tell on her physically. She was ill half the time, and by the end of her fourth year in the house I do not believe she could have sewed or waited or cooked, had she had the chance. She had no friends, no companions, save her cat. They were a grim pair, she with hungry, shifty eyes glowing like fires in the pallor of her face, he more gaunt and ungainly than ever — for a witch and her familiar they would have been burnt not so many hundred years ago. Then we heard that she was taking in lodgers, — women with the look of hunted creatures, who stole into her rooms at strange hours of the night. Some said they were waifs and strays from the “ Halls,” others that, they were wanderers from the Strand; all agreed that, whoever they were, they must be as desperately poor as she, to seek shelter where the only bed was the floor. Much had been passed over, but I knew that such lodgers were more than landlord and tenants could endure, and I had not to be a prophet to foresee that the end was approaching.

It came more speedily than I thought, though the manner of it was not left to landlord and tenants. Christmas — her fifth in the house— had filled her purse again. Tenants were less liberal, it is true, but she must have had at least five or six pounds, to which a turkey and plum pudding had been added by our neighbor across the hall, who was of a generous turn. She had therefore the essentials of what passes for a merry Christmas, but how much merriment there was in hers I had no way of telling. On holidays in London I keep indoors if I can, not caring to face the sadness of the streets, or the dreariness of house-parties, and I did not go downstairs on Christmas Day, nor on Boxing Day, which is the day after. Mrs. Haines, if she came up, did not present herself at our Chambers. I trust she was gay because, as it turned out, it was her last chance for gayety at this or any other season. In the middle of the night following Boxing Day she was seized with one of her mysterious attacks. A lodger was with her, but, from fright or stupidity, or perhaps worse, called no one till dawn, when she rang up the Housekeeper next door and vanished. The Housekeeper next door went at once for the doctor who attends to us all in our quarter. It was too late: Mrs. Haines was dead when he reached the house.

Death was merciful, freeing her from the worse fate that threatened, for she was at the end of everything. She went out of the world as naked as she came into it. Her rooms were empty, there was not so much as a crust of bread in her kitchen, in her purse were two farthings. Her only clothes were those she laid just taken off and the few rags wrapped about her for the night. Destitution could not be more complete, and the horror was to find it, not round the corner, not at the door, but in the very house.

The day after, her sister appeared, from where, summoned by whom, I do not know. She was a decent, serious woman who attended to everything, and when the funeral was over called on all the tenants. She wanted, she told me, to thank us for all our kindness to her sister, whom kindness had so little helped. She volunteered no explanation, she only sighed her regrets — she could not understand, she said.

Nor could I. No doubt, daily in the slums, many women die as destitute. But they never had their chance. Mrs. Haines had hers, and a fair one as these things go. When I remember her tragedy, my confidence is shaken in the reformers to-day who would work the miracle, and, with equal chances for all men, transform this sad world of ours into Utopia.