CLeMENTINE
She drifted in from the _Quartier_, but the slovenliness and shabby finery of her dress made it hard to believe she was French. It was harder to believe she was grown up when she began to talk, for her voice was that of a child, a high shrill treble, with a babyish lisp, losing itself in giggles. And she was so short, so small, that she might easily have pa.s.sed herself off as a little girl, but for the marks experience had left upon her face. I suppose she was not much under thirty when she first came to me.
How cruel this experience had been she took immediate care to explain.
With her first few words she confided to me that she was hungry, and, in my embarra.s.sment on hearing it, I engaged her before it occurred to me to ask for references. Hunger does not exactly qualify a woman, however willing, for the rough work that must be done in a house, and that it is so surprising anybody ever should be willing to do. I engaged her to scrub the floors, black the shoes, clean the fireplaces, polish the bra.s.ses,--to pa.s.s every morning, except Sunday, from seven to two, in fighting the London dirt for me, and struggling through all those disagreeable and tiresome tasks that not any amount of money would induce me to struggle through for myself.
As her duties were of a kind usually kept in the domestic background, and as she brought to them an energy her hunger had not prepared me for, an occasional _bon jour_ when we met might have been the extent of my personal relations with her, had it not been for my foolish anxiety as to the state of her appet.i.te. I had kept house long enough to understand the mistake of meddling with the affairs of my servants, but Clementine, with her absurd little voice and giggle, seemed much less a servant than a child making believe to be one. Besides, I found that, though I can hear of unknown thousands starving in London without feeling called upon to interfere, it is another matter to come face to face with a hungry individual under my own roof.
Augustine, who was then, as she is now, the prop and mainstay of our life, rea.s.sured me; Clementine, it seemed, from the moment of her arrival, had been eating as voraciously as if she were bent not only on satisfying the present, but on making up for the past and providing against the future. She could not pa.s.s the interval between eight o"clock coffee and the noonday lunch without _un pet.i.t gouter_ to sustain her. At all hours she kept munching bits of crust, and after the heartiest meal she would fall, famished, upon our plates as they came from the dining-room, devouring any odd sc.r.a.ps left on them, feasting on cheese-rinds and apple-parings, or, though I regret to have to record it, licking up the gravy and grease, if there was nothing better.
Indeed, her condition was one of such chronic hunger that Augustine grew alarmed and thought a doctor should be consulted. I put it down to the long succession of her lean years, and before the facts convinced me that Clementine was "all stomach and no soul," her appet.i.te was a great deal on my mind, and made me far more preoccupied with her than was wise.
My inquiries into the state of Clementine"s appet.i.te were the reason for many conversations. I have no doubt that at first I encouraged her confidence, so unfailing was my delight in the lisping prattle, interrupted by giggles, with which they were made. Even J., who as a rule is glad to leave all domestic matters to me, would stop and speak to her for the sake of hearing her talk. And she was a child in so many other ways. She had the vanity as well as the voice of a little girl.
She was pretty after a fashion, but it always amazed me that anybody who was so hungry could be so vain. When I am hungry I am too demoralized to care how I look. But Clementine"s respect for her appearance was, if anything, stronger than her craving for food. She would have gone without a meal rather than have appeared out of the fashion set by her London slum. Her hair might be half combed,--that was a question of personal taste,--but she could not show herself abroad unless it was brought down over her forehead in the low wave required by the mode of the moment, and hidden at the back under a flat, overgrown jockey-cap fastened on with long pins. Her skirt might be--or rather was--frayed at the bottom, and her jacket worn to shreds, but she could never neglect to tie round her neck a bit of white tulle or ribbon, however soiled or faded. Nor could she be persuaded to run the shortest errand before this tulle or ribbon, taken off for work, had been tied on again, the low wave of hair patted well in place, and the jockey-cap stuck at the correct angle.
It was useless to try and hurry her. She did not care how urgent the errand was to us, her concern was entirely for what people in the street might think of her if any one detail of her toilet was neglected.
Augustine, who for herself was disdainful of the opinion of _ces sales Anglais_ and ran her errands _en cheveux_ as if she were still in France, would scold and thunder and represent to Clementine that people in the street had something better to do than to think of her at all.
When Augustine scolds, I am always, to be honest, a little afraid. But Clementine would listen giggling, and refuse to budge an inch until the last touch had been given to her hair and to her dress. After working time she could not start for home until she had spent half an hour and more before the gla.s.s in the kitchen arranging her rags. In her own country her vanity would have been satisfied only by the extreme neatness and simplicity of her dress. In England she had borrowed the untidiness and tawdriness that degrade the English poor. But if the educated French, who ought to know that they are the most civilized people in the world, grow more English than the English when they become Anglicized at all, I could scarcely blame Clementine for her weakness.
To one form of her untidiness, however, I objected though, had I known what was to come of my objection, I would have borne with worse in silence. She never wore an ap.r.o.n, and, in her stained and tattered dress, her appearance was disreputable even for a charwoman. She might be as slovenly as she chose in the street, that was her affair; but it was mine once she carried her slovenliness inside my four walls, especially as in chambers servants at work are more apt to be stumbled across than in a house, and as it was her duty at times to open the front door. I spoke to her on the subject, suggesting the value of ap.r.o.ns, if only as defences. The words were scarcely out of my mouth than I would have given worlds to take them back again. For when Clementine began to talk the difficulty was to stop her, and long before she finished explaining why she wore no ap.r.o.ns, I had learned a great deal more about her than I bargained for: among other things, that her previous places had been chiefly _chez les femmes_; that she wanted to give up working for them; that, after leaving her last place, she could get nothing to do in any _maison bourgeoise_; that she had no money and was very hungry,--what Clementine"s hunger meant she did not have to tell me; that her little Ernest was also hungry, and also _la vieille grandmere_; that her little Ernest was her son,--"_Oui, Madame, je serais franche, j"ai un fils mais pas un mari_"; that _la vieille grandmere_ was an old woman she had taken in, partly to look after him, partly out of sheer shiftlessness; that they could not starve; and that--well--all her ap.r.o.ns were _au clou_.
This sudden introduction of her little Ernest was a trifle disconcerting, but it was none of my business how many people depended on Clementine, nor how many of her belongings were in p.a.w.n. I had vowed never again to give sympathy, much less help, to anybody who worked for me, since I knew to my cost the domestic disaster to which benevolence of this sort may lead. I gave her advice instead. I recommended greater thrift, and insisted that she must save from her wages enough to get her ap.r.o.ns out of p.a.w.n immediately, though I left it to a more accomplished political economist than I to show how, with three to provide for, she could save out of what barely provided for one. However, she agreed. She said, "_Oui, Madame, Madame a raison_"; and for the next week or two I did my best to shut my eyes to the fact that she still went ap.r.o.nless.
At this juncture, her little Ernest fell ill; now that I had heard of him, he took good care that I should not forget him. For three days there was no sign of Clementine; I had no word from her. At the end of the first day, I imagined a horrid tragedy of starvation; by the second, I was reproaching myself as an accessory; by the evening of the third, I could stand it no longer, and Augustine was despatched to find out what was wrong. The child"s illness was not very serious, but, incidentally, Augustine found out a good deal besides. Clementine"s room, in an unlovely Workmen"s Building, was unexpectedly clean, but to keep it clean was the easier because it was so bare. Her bed, which she shared with her little Ernest, was a mattress on the floor in one corner, with not a sheet or a blanket to cover it; _la vieille grandmere_ slept in a nest of newspapers in another corner, with a roll of rags for a pillow.
Bedsteads, sheets, covers, had gone the way of the ap.r.o.ns,--they, too, were _au clou_. The thrift I had advised scarcely met so acute a case of poverty. I was not at all anxious to burden myself with Clementine"s dest.i.tution in addition to her hunger, and to get it out of my mind, I tried, with my usual generosity, to hand over the difficulty to J. I cannot say that he accepted it as unconditionally as I could have wished, for if he was positive that something must be done at once, he had as little doubt that it was for me to discover the way of doing it.
What I did was simple, though I dare say contrary to every scientific principle of charity. I told her to bring me her p.a.w.n-tickets and I would go over them with her. She brought them, a pocketful, the next day, throwing them down on the table before me and sorting them as if for a game of cards, with many giggles, and occasional cries of "_Tiens!_ this is my old blue ap.r.o.n"; or, "_Mon Dieu!_ this is my nice warm grey blanket." Her delight could not have been greater had it been the ap.r.o.n or the blanket itself. All told, her debts amounted to no very ruinous sum, and I arranged to pay them off and give her a fresh start if, on her side, she was prepared to work harder and practise stricter economy. I pointed out that as I did not need her in the afternoon, she had a half day to dispose of, and that she should hunt for something to fill it. She promised everything I asked, and more, and I hoped that this was the last of my sharing her burdens.
It might have been, but for her little Ernest. I do believe that child was born for no other end than my special annoyance. His illness was only the beginning. When he was well, she brought him to see me one afternoon, nominally that he might thank me, but really, I fear, in hope of an extra sixpence or shilling. He was five years old and fairly large and well developed for his age, but there could never have been, there never could be, a less attractive child. His face had none of the prettiness of his mother"s, though all the shrewdness: in knowledge of the gutter he looked fifty. Then and afterwards, ashamed as I was of it, I instinctively shrank from him. Anywhere, except in the comic ballad, a "horribly fast little cad" of a baby is as tragic a figure as I care to encounter, and to me the little Ernest was all the more so because of the repugnance with which he inspired me. Clementine made a great pretence of adoring him. She carried a sadly battered photograph of him in her pocket, and would pull it out at intervals when anybody was looking, and kiss it rapturously. Otherwise her admiration took the form of submitting to his tyranny. She could do far less with him than he with her, and _la vieille grandmere_ was as wax in his rough little hands. His mornings, while his mother was at work, were spent in the grimy London courts and streets, where children swarm like vermin and babies grow old in vice. In the afternoon, after she left our chambers, he dragged her through the _Quartier_, from shop to shop, she with her giggling "_Bon jour, M. Edmond_" or "_Comment ca va, Madame Pierre_"--for though we live in London we are not of it, but of France,--he with his hand held out for the cakes and oranges and pennies he knew would drop into it: a pair of the most accomplished beggars in London.
As time went on, and Clementine did not find the extra work for her afternoons that she had promised to find, I realized that she would keep on wasting her free half day, and that he would go from bad to worse if he were not got away from her and out of the streets. I should have known better than to occupy myself with him, but his old shrewd face haunted me until I remonstrated with Clementine, and represented to her the future she was preparing for him. If she could not take care of him, she should send him to school where there were responsible people who could. I suggested a charitable inst.i.tution of some kind in France where he would be brought up among her people. But this she fought against with a determination I could not understand, until it came out that she had profited by the English law which forces a father to contribute to his illegitimate child"s support, and from Ernest"s she received weekly three shillings and sixpence. She much preferred to risk her little Ernest"s morals than an income that came of itself, and she feared she could no longer claim it if he were beyond the reach of the English courts. She was as doubtful of the result if he were got into a charity school in England, for if he cost her nothing the father might not be compelled to pay. She could be obstinate on occasions, and I was in despair. But by some fortunate chance, a convent at Hampstead was heard of where the weekly charge would just be covered by the father"s allowance, and as Clementine could find no argument against it, she had to give in.
I breathed freely again, but I was not to be let off so easily. It was simpler to get mixed up in Clementine"s affairs than to escape from them. At the convent, the nuns had learned wisdom, and they demanded to be paid weekly in advance. I must have waited until Judgment Day if I had depended upon Clementine to be in advance with anything, and in self-defence I offered to pay the first month. But this settled, at once there was another obstacle to dispose of. A trousseau was required with the little Ernest, and he had no clothes except those on his back. I provided the trousseau. Then the little Ernest rebelled and refused to hear of school unless he was supplied with a top, a mechanical boat, a balloon, and I scarcely remember what besides. I supplied them.
Clementine, on her side, began to look hara.s.sed and careworn, and I never ventured to ask what conditions he exacted of her, but it was a relief to everybody when, after much shopping and innumerable coaxings and bribes and scenes, at last she got her little Ernest off her hands.
But if he was off hers, she was more than ever on mine. He gave her a perpetual subject of conversation. There were days when I seemed to hear her prattling in the kitchen from the moment she came until the moment she left, and to a good deal of her prattle I had to listen. She made it her duty to report his progress to me, and the trouble was that she could never get through without confiding far more about her own, in the past as in the present. She might begin innocently with the fit of his new clothes, but as likely as not she would end with revelations of unspeakable horror. At least I could not find fault with Clementine"s confidences for their mildness or monotony. In her high, shrill, lisping treble, as if she were reciting a lesson, and with the air of a naughty girl trying to keep back her giggles, she would tell me the most appalling details of her life.
I had not dreamed that out of Zola or Defoe a woman could go through such adventures, or that, if she could, it would be possible for her to emerge a harmless charwoman doing the commonplace work of a household which I flatter myself is respectable, for a few shillings a week. Of poverty, of evil, of shame, of disgrace, there was nothing she had not known; and yet as I saw her busy and happy over her scrubbing and washing and polishing in our chambers, I could have believed she had never done anything less guileless in all her thirty years. She had a curiously impersonal way of relating these adventures, as if they were no concern of hers whatever. The most dramatic situations seemed to have touched her as little as the every-day events in her sordid struggle for bread, though she was not without some pride in the variety of her experience. When Augustine warned her that her idleness was preparing for her a bed on the Embankment and daily food in a soup-kitchen, "_Eh bien?_ why not?" she giggled; "I have been on the streets, I have been in prison, I have been in the workhouse, I have seen everything--_j"ai tout vu, moi!_ Why not that too?"
With her, there was no shrinking from the workhouse, as with the respectable poor, "_Ce n"est pas fait pour les chiens_," she reasoned, and looked upon it as an asylum held in reserve.
Her boast that she had seen everything was no exaggeration, her everything meaning the hideous side of life which those who see only the other try so hard to shut their eyes to. "What would you have?" she asked me more than once, "I was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d and a foundling"; as if with such a beginning, it would have been an inconsistency on her part to turn out any better than she was. That she had started life as a little lost package of humanity, left at the door of a house for _les enfants trouves_ not far from Boulogne, never caused her shame and regret. From a visit paid by her mother to the Inst.i.tution during her infancy, there could remain no doubt of her illegitimacy, but it was a source of pleasure to her, and also of much agreeable speculation.
"How can I be sure," she said to me, "that, though my mother was a cook, my father might not have been a _prefet_, or even a prince?"
For practical purposes she knew no parents save the peasants who brought her up. The State in France, thrifty as the people, makes the children abandoned to it a source of profit to the hard-working poor. Clementine was put out to nurse. The one spark of genuine affection she ever showed was for the woman to whose care she fell, and of whom she always spoke as _ma mere_, with a tenderness very different from her giggling adoration of the little Ernest. Incessant labour was the rule in _ma mere"s_ house, and food was not too abundant, but of what there was Clementine had her share, though I fancy the scarcity then was the origin of the terrible hunger that consumed her throughout her life.
About this hunger her story revolved, so that, while she talked of the past, I could seldom get far away from it. She recalled little else of the places the Inst.i.tution found for her as servant. The State in France is as wise as it is thrifty, and does not demoralize its foundlings by free gifts, but, when the time comes, makes them work, appropriating their wages until it has been paid back the money they have cost it.
Clementine went into service young. She also went into it hungry, and life became a never-ending struggle for food. In one place she was reduced to such straits that she devoured a dish of poisoned meat prepared for the stray cats of the neighbourhood, and, though it brought her almost to death"s door, she could still recall it as a feast. In another, a small country grocery store, she would steal down in the night, trembling with fear, to hunt for bits of candy and crackers, and, safe in bed again, would have to fight for them with the rats that shared her garret. And her tale of this period grew more miserable and squalid with every new stage, until she reached the dreadful climax when, still a child herself, she brought a little girl into the world to share her hunger. She had the courage to laugh when she told me of her wandering, half-starved, back to _la bonne mere_, who took her in when her time came, and kept the baby. She could laugh, too, when she recalled the wrath of _M. le Directeur_ at the Inst.i.tution, who sent for her, and scolded her, giving her a few sharp raps with his cane.
If to Clementine her tragedy was a laughing matter, it was not for me to weep over it. But I was glad when she got through with this period and came to the next, which had in it more of pure comedy than enlivened most of her confidences. For once she was of age, and her debt to the Inst.i.tution settled in full, she was free not only to work for herself, but to claim a percentage of the money she had been making during the long years of apprenticeship; and this percentage amounting to five hundred francs, and Clementine never having seen so much money before, her imagination was stirred by the vastness of her wealth, and she insisted on being paid in five-franc pieces. She had to get a basket to hold them all, and with it on her arm she started off in search of adventure. This, I think, was the supreme moment in her life.
Her adventures began in the third-cla.s.s carriage of a train for Boulogne, which might seem a mild beginning to most people, but was full of excitement for Clementine. She dipped her hands into the silver, and jingled it, and displayed it to everybody, with the vanity of a child showing off its new frock. The only wonder was that any of the five-franc pieces were still in the basket when she got to Boulogne.
There they drew to her a group of young men and women who were bound for England to make their fortunes, and who persuaded her to join them. Her head was not completely turned by her wealth, for she crossed with them on the _bateau aux lapins_, which she explained as the cheapest boat upon which anything but beasts and vegetables could find pa.s.sage. At Folkestone, where they landed, she had no difficulty in getting a place as scullery maid. But washing up was as dull in England as in France, a poor resource for anybody with a basketful of five-franc pieces. One of the young men who had crossed with her agreed that it was a waste of time to work when there was money to spend, and they decided for a life of leisure together. The question of marriage apparently did not enter into the arrangement. They were content to remain _des unis_, in M.
Rod"s phrase, and their union was celebrated by a few weeks of riotous living. The chicken their own Henry IV wished for all his subjects filled the daily pot, beer flowed like water, they could have paid for cake had bread failed; for the first time in her life Clementine forgot what it was to be hungry.
It was delightful while it lasted, and I do not believe that she ever regretted having had her fling when the chance came. But the basket grew lighter and lighter, and all too soon barely enough five-franc pieces were left in it to carry them up to London. There, naturally, they found their way to the _Quartier_. The man picked up an odd job or two, Clementine scrubbed, washed, waited, did any and everything by which a few pence could be earned. The pot was now empty, beer ceased to flow, bread sometimes was beyond their means, and she was hungrier than ever.
In the course of the year her little Ernest was added to the family, and there was no _bonne mere_ in London to relieve her of the new burden.
For a while Clementine could not work; when she could, there was no work to be had. Nor could the man get any more jobs, though I fancy his hunt for them was not too strenuous. Life became a stern, bread-hunting sort of business, and I think at moments Clementine almost wished herself back in the garret with the rats, or in the garden where dishes of poisoned meat were sometimes to be stolen. The landlord threatened, starvation stared them in the face. Hunger is ever the incentive to enterprise, and Ernest"s father turned Clementine on the streets.
I must do her the justice to say that, of all her adventures, this was the one least to her liking. That she had fallen so low did not shock her; she looked upon it as part of the inevitable scheme of things: but left to herself, she would have preferred another mode of earning her living. After I had been told of this period of horrors, I could never hear Clementine"s high, shrill treble and giggle without a shudder, for they were then part of her stock-in-trade, and she went on the streets in short skirts with her hair down her back. For months she wallowed in the gutter, at the mercy of the lowest and the most degraded, insulted, robbed, despised, and if she attempted to rebel, bullied back to her shameful trade by a man who had no thought save for the few pitiful pence she could bring to him out of it. The only part of the affair that pleased her was the ending--in prison after a disgraceful street brawl.
She was really at heart an adventuress, and the opportunity to see for the first time the inside of the _panier a salade_, as she called the prison van, was welcomed by her in the light of a new and exciting adventure. Then, in prison itself, the dress with the arrows could be adjusted becomingly, warders and fellow prisoners could be made to laugh by her antics, and if she could have wished for more to eat, it was a great thing not to have to find the means to pay for what she got.
She was hardly out of prison when Ernest"s father chanced upon a woman who could provide for him more liberally, and Clementine was again a free agent. The streets knew her no more, though for an interval the workhouse did. This was the crisis when, with the shrewdness acquired in the London slums, she learned something of the English law to her own advantage, and through the courts compelled the father to contribute to the support of his son. The weekly three shillings and sixpence paid for a room. For food she had to work. With prison behind her, she was afraid to ask for a place in respectable houses, and I should not care to record the sinks of iniquity and squalid dens where her shrill treble and little girl"s giggle were heard. Ernest was dumped down of a morning upon any friendly neighbour who would keep an eye on him, until, somehow or other, _la vieille grandmere_ appeared upon the scene and Clementine once more had two to feed and the daily problem of her own hunger to face.
Her responsibilities never drove her to work harder than was absolutely necessary. "We must all toil or steal," Carlyle says. But Clementine knew better. She could have suggested a third alternative, for she had reduced begging to a fine art. Her scent was as keen for charitable a.s.sociations as a pig"s for truffles, and she could tell to a minute the appointed time of their alms-giving, and to a penny the value of their alms. She would, no matter when, drop regular work at the risk of losing it, to rush off after a possible charity. There was a _Societe_--I never knew it by any other name--that, while she was with me, drew her from my kitchen floor or my luncheon dishes as surely as Thursday came round, and the clock struck one. Why it existed she never made quite clear to me,--I doubt if she had an idea why, herself. It was enough for her that the poor French in London were under its special charge, and that, when luck was with her, she might come away with a loaf of bread, or an order for coals, or, if she played the beggar well, as much as a shilling.
She kept up a brisk correspondence with "_Madame la Baronne de Rothschild_," whose sole mission in life she apparently believed was to see her out of her difficulties. _La Baronne_, on one occasion, gave her a sovereign, Heaven knows why, unless as a desperate measure to close the correspondence; but a good part of it went in postage for letters representing why the bestowal of sovereigns upon Clementine should become habitual. Stray agents, presumably from _la Baronne_, would pay me mysterious visits, to ask if Clementine were a deserving object of benevolence, and I was exposed to repeated cross-examination in her regard. She made a point of learning the hours when the _chefs_ left the kitchens of the big hotels and restaurants near the _Quartier_, and also of finding out who among them might be looked to for a few odd pence for the sake of Ernest"s father, at one time a washer of dishes, or who, after a _coup de vin_ or an _absinthe_, grew generous with their money. She had gauged the depth of every tender heart in the _Quartier_ and the possibility of sc.r.a.ps and broken meats at every shop and eating-place. And no one understood better how to beg, how to turn on the limelight and bring out in melodramatic relief the enormity of her need and dest.i.tution. The lisping treble, the giggle, the tattered clothes, _la vieille grandmere_, the desertion of the little Ernest"s father, the little Ernest himself, were so many valuable a.s.sets. Indeed, she appreciated the value of the little Ernest so well that once she would have had me multiply him by twelve when she asked me to vouch for her poverty before some new society disposed to be friendly. If luck went against her, and nothing came of her begging, she was not discouraged. Begging was a game of chance with her,--her Monte Carlo or Little Horses,--and she never murmured over her failures, but with her faculty for making the best of all things, she got amus.e.m.e.nt out of them as well as out of her successes.
In the face of these facts, I cannot deny that Clementine"s "character"
was not exactly the sort most people expect when they engage a servant.
But I would not turn adrift a mangy dog or a lost cat whom I had once taken in. And she did her work very well, with a thoroughness the English charwoman would have despised, never minding what that work was, so long as she had plenty to eat and could prepare by an elaborate toilet for every errand she ran. Her morals could do us small harm, and for a while I was foolish enough to hope ours might do her some good. I realize now that nothing could have improved Clementine; she was not made that way; but at the time she was too wholly unlike any woman I had ever come in contact with, for me to see that the difference lay in her having no morals to help. She was not immoral, but unmoral. Right and wrong were without meaning for her. Her standards, if she could be said to have any, were comfort and discomfort. Virtue and vice were the same to her, so long as she was not unpleasantly interfered with. This was the explanation of her past, as of her frankness in disclosing it, and she was too much occupied in avoiding present pain to bother about the future by cultivating economy, or ambition, or prudence. An animal would take more thought for the morrow than Clementine. Of all the people I have ever come across, she had the most reason to be weary-laden, but instead of "tears in her eyes," there was always a giggle on her lips.
"_La colere, c"est la folie_," she a.s.sured me, and it was a folly she avoided with marked success. Perhaps she was wise, undoubtedly she was the happier for it.
Unfortunately for me, I had not her callousness or philosophy,--I am not yet quite sure which it was,--and if she would not think for herself, I was the more disturbed by the necessity of thinking for her. It was an absurd position. There I was, positively growing grey in my endeavours to drag her up out of the abyss of poverty into which she had sunk, and there she was, cheerful and happy, if she could only continue to enjoy _la bonne cuisine de Madame_. I never knew her to make the slightest attempt to profit by what I, or anyone else, would do for her. I remember, when _Madame la Baronne_ sent her the sovereign, she stayed at home a week, and then wrote to me as her excuse, "_J"ai ete rentiere toute la semaine. Maintenant je n"ai plus un penny, il faut m"occuper du travail._" I had not taken her things out of p.a.w.n before they were p.a.w.ned again, and the cast-off clothes she begged from me followed as promptly. Her little Ernest, after all my trouble, stayed at the convent six weeks,--the month I paid for and two weeks that Clementine somehow wheedled out of the sisters,--and then he was back as of old, picking up his education in the London streets. I presented her once with a good bed I had no more use for, and, to make s.p.a.ce for it, she went into debt and moved from her one room near Tottenham Court Road to two rooms and a higher rent near the Lower Marsh, and was robbed on the way by the man she hired to move her. When she broke anything, and she frequently did, she was never perturbed: "_Madame est forte pour payer_," or "_l"argent est fait pour rouler_," was her usual answer to my reproaches. To try to show her the road to economy was to plunge her into fresh extravagance.
Nor did I advance matters by talking to her seriously. I recall one special effort to impress upon her the great misery she was preparing for herself by her shiftlessness. I had given her a pair of shoes, though I had vowed a hundred times to give her nothing more, and I used the occasion for a lecture. She seemed eager to interrupt once or twice, and I flattered myself my words were having their effect. And now what had she to say? I asked when my eloquence was exhausted. She giggled: "Would _Madame_ look at her feet in _Madame"s_ shoes? _Jamais je ne me suis vue si bien chaussee_," and she was going straight to the _Quartier_ "_pour eblouir le monde_," she said. When Augustine took her in hand, though Augustine"s eloquence had a vigour mine could not boast of, the result was, if anything, more discouraging. Clementine, made bold by custom, would turn a hand-spring or dance a jig, or go through the other accomplishments she had picked up in the slums.
If I could discover any weak spot by which I could reach her, I used to think something might be gained, and I lost much time in studying how to work upon her emotions. But her emotions were as far to seek as her morals. Even family ties, usually so strong in France, had no hold upon her. If she adored her little Ernest, it was because he brought her in three shillings and sixpence a week. There was no adoration for her little girl who occasionally wrote from the Pas-de-Calais and asked her for money. I saw one of the child"s letters in which she implored Clementine to pay for a white veil and white shoes; she was going to make her first communion, and the good adopted mother could pay for no more than the gown. The First Communion is the greatest event in the French child"s life; there could be no deeper disgrace than not to be dressed for it, and the appeal must have moved every mother who read it, except Clementine. To her it was comic, and she disposed of it with giggles: "_C"est drole quand meme, d"avoir une fille de cet age_," and funnier that she could be expected to pay for anything for anybody.
But if her family awoke in her no sentiment, her "home" did, though it was of the kind that Lamb would have cla.s.sed with the "no homes." The tenacity with which she clung to it was her nearest approach to strong feeling. I suppose it was because she had so long climbed the stairs of others that she took such complete satisfaction in the two shabby little rooms to which she gave the name. I had a glimpse of them, never to be forgotten, once when she failed to come for two days, and I went to look her up. The street reeked with the smell of fried fish and onions; it was filled with barrows of kippers and haddocks and whelks; it was lined with old-clothes shops; it was crowded with frowzy women and horribly dirty children. And the halls and stairs of the tenement where she lived were black with London smoke and greasy with London dirt. I did not feel clean afterwards until I had had a bath, and it was never again as easy to reconcile myself to Clementine"s daily reappearance in our midst. But to her the rooms were home, and for that reason she would have stayed on in a grimier and more malodorous neighbourhood, if such a thing could be, in preference to living in the cleanest and freshest London workhouse at the rate-payers" expense. Her objection to going into service except as a charwoman was that she would have to stay the night.
"_Je ne serais pas chez moi_"; and much as she prized her comfort, it was not worth the sacrifice. On the contrary, she was prepared to sacrifice her comfort, dear as it was to her, that she might retain her home. She actually went to the length of taking in as companion an Italian workman she met by accident, not because he offered to marry her, which he did not, but because, according to his representations, he was making twenty-five shillings a week and would help to pay the rent.
"_Je serais chez moi_," was now her argument, and for food she could continue to work or beg. He would be a convenience, _voila tout_. The Italian stayed a week. He lounged in bed all morning while she was at work, he smoked all afternoon. At the end of the week Clementine sent him flying. "_Je suis bete et je mourrais bete_," was her explanation to me; but she was not _bete_ to the point of adding an idle fourth to her burden, and, as a result, being turned out of the home she had taken him in to preserve.
Clementine had been with us more than two years when the incident of the Italian occurred, and by this time I had become so accustomed to her and to her adventures that I was not as shocked as perhaps I should have been. It was not a way out of difficulties I could approve, but Clementine was not to be judged by my standards, and I saw no reason to express my disapproval by getting rid of her just when she most needed to stay. In her continually increasing need to stay, I endured so much besides that, at the end of her third year in our chambers, I was convinced that she would go on doing my rough work as long as I had rough work to be done. More than once I came to the end of my patience and dismissed her. But it was no use. In the course of a couple of weeks, or at the most three, she was back scrubbing my floors and polishing my bra.s.ses.
The first time she lost her place with me, I sympathized to such an extent that I was at some pains to arrange a scheme to send her to France. But Clementine, clinging to the pleasures of life in the Lower Marsh, agreed to everything I proposed, and was careful to put every hindrance in the way of carrying out my plans. Twice I went to the length of engaging another woman, but either the other woman did not suit or else she did not stay, and I had to ask Clementine to return. On her side, she made various efforts to leave me, bored, I fancy, by the monotony of regular work, but they were as unsuccessful as mine to turn her off. After one disappearance of three weeks, she owned up frankly to having been again _chez les femmes_ whose pay was better; after a second, she said she had been ill in the workhouse which I doubted; after all, she was as frank in admitting that nowhere else did she enjoy _la bonne cuisine de Madame_, and that this was the attraction to which I was indebted for her fidelity.
It may have been kindness, it may have been weakness, it may have been simply necessity, that made me so lenient on these occasions; I do not attempt to decide. But I cannot blame Clementine for thinking it was because she was indispensable. I noticed that gradually in small ways she began to take advantage of our good-nature. For one thing there was now no limit to her conversation. I did not spend my time in the kitchen and could turn a deaf ear to it, but I sometimes wondered if Augustine would not be the next to disappear. She would also often relieve the tedium of her several tasks by turning the handsprings in which she was so accomplished, or dancing the jig popular in the Lower Marsh, or by other performances equally reprehensible in the kitchen of _une maison bourgeoise_, as she was pleased to describe our chambers. She never lost a chance of rushing to the door if tradespeople rang, or talking with the British Workmen we were obliged, for our sins, to employ. Their bewilderment, stolid Britons as they were, would have been funny, had not her manner of exciting it been so discreditable. She was even caught--I was spared the knowledge until much later--turning her handsprings for a select company of plasterers and painters. Then I could see that she accepted anything we might bestow upon her as her due, and was becoming critical of the value and quality of the gift. I can never forget on one occasion when J. was going away, and he gave her a few shillings, the expression with which she looked first at the money and then at him as though insulted by the paltriness of the amount. More unbearable was the unfair use she made of her little Ernest.
_La vieille grandmere_, who had wandered by chance into her life, wandered out of it as casually, or so Clementine said as an argument to induce me to receive that odious little boy into my kitchen during her hours of work; she had n.o.body to take care of him, she could not leave him alone. Here, happily for myself, I had the strength to draw the line. But when this argument failed, she found another far more harrowing. She took the opportunity of my stumbling across her in our little hall one day at noon to tell me that, as I would not let her bring him with her, she left him every day, carefully locked up out of harm"s way, alone in her rooms. A child of seven, as he was then, locked up to get into any mischief he could invent, and, moreover, a child with a talent for mischief! that was too much, and I sent her flying home without giving her time to eat her lunch or linger before the gla.s.s, and I was haunted for the rest of the day with the thought of all the terrible things that might have happened to him. Naturally nothing did happen, nothing ever does happen to children like the little Ernest, and Clementine, dismayed by the loss of her lunch and the interference with her toilet, never ventured upon this argument a second time. But she found another almost as bad, for she informed me that, thanks to my interference, she was compelled to leave him again to run the streets as he would, and she hinted only too plainly that for whatever evil might befall him, I was responsible. Our relations were at this pleasant stage, and her little Ernest was fast developing into a monstrous Frankenstein wholly of my own raising, when one day she arrived with a new air of importance and announced her approaching marriage.
I was enchanted. I had not permitted myself to feel the full weight of the burden Clementine was heaping upon my shoulders until now it seemed on the point of slipping from them, and never were congratulations more sincere than mine. As she spared me none of her confidence, every detail of her courtship and her prospects was soon at my disposal. In the course of her regular round of the kitchen doors of the _Quartier_ she had picked up an Englishman who washed dishes in a restaurant. He was not much over twenty, he earned no less than eighteen shillings a week, and he had asked her to marry him. She accepted him, as she had accepted the Italian, because he would pay the rent; the only difference was that her new admirer proposed the form of companionship which is not lightly broken. "_Cette fois je crois que cela sera vrai--que l"affaire ne tombera pas dans l"eau_," she said, remembering the deep waters which, in her recent affair, had gone over her head. "_Mon pet.i.t Anglais_"--her name for him--figured in her account as a model of propriety. He had a strict regard for morals. He objected to her working _chez les femmes_, and expressed his desire that she should remain in our service, despite the loss to their income. He condoned her previous indiscretions, and was prepared to play a father"s part to her little Ernest.
Altogether the situation was fast growing idyllic, and with Clementine in her new role of _fiancee_, we thought that peace for us all was in sight. She set about her preparations at once, and did not hesitate to let me know that an agreeable wedding present would be house linen, however old and ragged, and a new hat for the wedding. I had looked for some preliminary begging as a matter of course, and I was already going through my linen closet to see what I could spare, when I caught Clementine collecting wedding presents from me for which I had not been asked.
Until then I believed that, whatever crimes and vices might be laid at her door, dishonesty was not to be counted among them. I even boasted of her honesty as an excuse for my keeping her, nuisance as she was. I think I should have doubted her guilt if the report of it only had reached me. But I could not doubt the testimony of my own eyes when there was discovered, carefully packed in the capacious bag she always carried, one of my best napkins, a brand-new tea-cloth, and a few kitchen knives and forks that could not have strayed there of themselves. I could see in the articles selected her tender concern for the comfort of her _pet.i.t Anglais_ and her practical wish to prepare her establishment for his coming, and probably it showed her consideration for me that she had been content with such simple preparations. But the value of the things themselves and her object in appropriating them had nothing to do with the main fact that, after all we had done and endured, she was stealing from us. "We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: grat.i.tude and charity," Stevenson once wrote. Clementine wiped out the one so successfully that she left me with no use for the other. I told her she must go, and this time I was in good earnest.