Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1631 page)

Is there no dark side to this bright picture? Is there never any hitch in these friendly arrangements for feeding me in the cleanest way, on the most appetizing diet? Yes, there is a hitch. Will you give it a name? I will. Its name is Mrs. Glutch.

It is, I am well aware, only to be expected that my landlady should resent the tacit condemnation of her cleanliness and cookery implied in the dietary arrangements which I have made with my friends. If she would only express her sense of offense by sulking or flying into a passion, I should not complain; for, in the first case supposed, I might get the better of her by noticing nothing, and, in the second, I might hope in course of time to smooth her down by soft answers and polite prevarications. But the means she actually takes of punishing me for my too acute sense of the dirtiness of her kitchen are of such a diabolically ingenious nature, and involve such a continuous series of small persecutions, that I am rendered, from first to last, quite powerless to oppose her. Shall I describe her plan of annoyance? I must describe it — I must return to my one prohibited topic (as I foreboded I should) in spite of myself.

Mrs. Glutch, then, instead of visiting her wrath on me, or my food, or my friends, or my friends’ messengers, avenges herself entirely on their tray-cloths and dishes. She does not tear the first nor break the second — for that would be only a simple and primitive system of persecution — but she smuggles them, one by one, out of my room, and merges them inextricably with her own property, in the grimy regions of the kitchen. She has a power of invisibly secreting the largest pie-dishes and the most voluminous cloths under my very eyes, which I can compare to nothing but slight of hand. Every morning I see table utensils which my friends lent me, ranged ready to go back, in my own room. Every evening, when they are wanted, I find that some of them are missing, and that my landlady is even more surprised by that circumstance than I am myself. If my friends’ servant ventures to say, in her presence, that the cook wants her yesterday’s tray-cloth, and if I refer him to Mrs. Glutch, the immovable woman only sniffs, tosses her head, and “wonders how the young man can have demeaned himself by bringing her such a peremptory message.” If I try on my own sole responsibility to recover the missing property, she lets me see, by her manner at the outset, that she thinks I suspect her of stealing it. If I take no notice of this maneuver, and innocently persist in asking additional questions about the missing object, the following is a sample of the kind of dialogue that is sure to pass between us:

“I think, Mrs. Glutch — ”

“Yes, sir!”

“I think one of my friends’ large pudding-basins has gone downstairs.”

“Really, now, sir? A large pudding-basin? No, I think not.”

“But I can’t find it up here, and it is wanted back.”

“Naturally, sir.”

“I put it on the drawers, Mrs. Glutch, ready to go back, last night.”

“Did you, indeed, sir?”

“Perhaps the servant took it downstairs to clean it?”

“Not at all likely, sir. If you will please to remember, you told her last Monday evening — or, no, I beg pardon — last Tuesday morning, that your friends cleaned up their own dishes, and that their things was not to be touched.”

“Perhaps you took it downstairs, then, yourself, Mrs. Glutch, by mistake?”

“I, sir! I didn’t. I couldn’t. Why should I? I think you said a large pudding-basin, sir?”

“Yes, I did say so.”

“I have ten large pudding-basins of my own, sir”

“I am very glad to hear it. Will you be so good as to look among them, and see if my friends’ basin has not got mixed up with your crockery?”

Mrs. Glutch turns very red in the face, slowly scratches her muscular arms, as if she felt a sense of pugilistic irritation in them, looks at me steadily with a pair of glaring eyes, and leaves the room at the slowest possible pace. I wait and ring — wait and ring — wait and ring. After the third waiting and the third ringing, she re-appears, redder of face and slower of march than before, with the missing article of property held out before her at arms-length.

“I beg pardon, sir,” she says, “but is this anything like your friends’ large pudding-basin?”

“That is the basin itself, Mrs. Glutch.”

“Really, now, sir? Well, as you seem so positive, it isn’t for me to contradict you. But I hope I shall give no offense if I mention that I had ten large pudding-basins of my own, and that I miss one of them.”

With that last dexterous turn of speech, she gives up the basin with the air of a high-minded woman, who will resign her own property rather than expose herself to the injurious doubts of a morbidly suspicious man. When I add that the little scene just described takes place between us nearly every day, the reader will admit that, although Mrs. Glutch cannot prevent me from enjoying on her dirty premises the contraband luxury of a clean dinner, she can at least go great lengths toward accomplishing the secondary annoyance of preventing me from digesting it.

I have hinted at a third personage in the shape of a servant, in my report of the foregoing dialogue, and I have previously alluded to myself (in paving the way for the introduction of my landlady) as extending my studies of human character, in my London lodging, to those forlorn members of the population called maids of all work. The maids — I use the plural number advisedly — present themselves to me to be studied, as apprentices to the hard business of service, under the matronly superintendence of Mrs. Glutch. The succession of them is brisk enough to keep all the attention I can withdraw from my landlady constantly employed in investigating their peculiarities. By the time I have been three weeks in Smeary Street, I have had three maids of all work to study — a new servant for each week! In reviewing the three individually before the reader, I must be allowed to distinguish them by numbers instead of names. Mrs. Glutch screams at them all indiscriminately by the name of Mary, just as she would scream at a succession of cats by the name of Puss. Now, although I am always writing about Mrs. Glutch, I have still spirit enough left to vindicate my own individuality by abstaining from following her example. In obedience, therefore, to these last relics of independent sentiment, permit me the freedom of numbering my maids of all work as I introduce them to public notice in these pages. Number One is amazed by the spectacle of my illness, and always stares at me. If I fell ill one evening, went to a dispensary, asked for a bottle of physic, and got well on it the next morning; or if I presented myself before her at the last gasp, and died forthwith in Smeary Street, she would, in either case, be able to understand me. But an illness on which medicine produces no immediate effect and which does not keep the patient always groaning in bed, is beyond her comprehension. Personally, she is very short and sturdy, and is always covered from head to foot with powdered black, which seems to lie especially thick on her in the morning. How does she accumulate it? Does she wash herself with the ordinary liquid used for ablutions, or does she take a plunge-bath every morning under the kitchen-grate? I am afraid to ask this question of her, but I contrive to make her talk to me about other things. She looks very much surprised, poor creature, when I first let her see that I have other words to utter, in addressing her, besides the word of command, and seems to think me the most eccentric of mankind when she finds that I have a decent anxiety to spare her all useless trouble in waiting on me. Young as she is, she has drudged so long over the wickedest ways of this world, without one leisure moment to look up from the everlasting dirt on the road at the green landscape around and the pure sky above, that she has become hardened to the saddest, surely, of human lots before she is yet a woman grown. Life means dirty work, small wages, hard words, no holidays, no social station, no future, according to her experience of it. No human being ever was created for this. No state of society which composedly accepts this, in the cases of thousands, as one of the necessary conditions of its selfish comforts, can pass itself off as civilized, except under the most audacious of all false pretenses. These thoughts rise in me often when I ring the bell, and the maid of all work answers it wearily. I cannot communicate them to her; I can only encourage her to talk to me now and then on something like equal terms. Just as I am succeeding in the attainment of this object, Number One scatters all my plans and purposes to the winds by telling me that she is going away.

I ask why; and am told that she cannot bear being a-railed at and a-hunted about by Mrs. Glutch any longer. The oppressively polite woman who cannot address me without begging my pardon can find no hard words in the vocabulary hard enough for the maid of all work. “I am frightened of my life,” says Number One, apologising to me for leaving the place. “I am so little, and she’s so big. She heaves things at my head, she does. Work as hard as you may, you can’t work hard enough for her. I must go, if you please, sir. Whatever do you think she done this morning? She up and druv the creases at me.” With these words (which I find mean in genteel English that Mrs. Glutch has enforced her last orders to the servant by throwing a bunch of water-cresses at her head), Number-One courtesies and says “Good-by!” and goes out resignedly once again into the hard world. I follow her a little while, in imagination, with no very cheering effect on my spirits — for what do I see awaiting her at each stage of her career? Alas for Number One, it is always a figure in the likeness of Mrs. Glutch!

Number Two fairly baffles me. I see her grin perpetually at me, and imagine at first that I am regarded by her in the light of a new kind of impostor, who shams illness as a way of amusing himself. But I soon discover that she grins at everything — at the fire that she lights, at the cloth she lays for dinner, at the medicine-bottles she brings upstairs, at the furibund visage of Mrs. Glutch, ready to drive whole basketfuls of creases at her head every morning. Looking at her with the eye of an artist, I am obliged to admit that Number Two is, as the painters say, out of drawing. The longest things about her are her arms; the thickest thing about her is her waist. It is impossible to believe that she has any legs, and it is not easy to find out the substitute which, in the absence of a neck, is used to keep her big head from rolling off her round shoulders. I try to make her talk, but only succeed in encouraging her to grin at me. Have ceaseless foul words and ceaseless dirty work clouded over all the little light that has ever been let in on her mind? I suspect that it is so, but I have no time to acquire any positive information on the subject. At the end of Number Two’s first week of service, Mrs. Glutch discovers, to her horror and indignation, that the new maid of all work possesses nothing in the shape of wearing-apparel except the worn-out garments actually on her back; and, to make matters worse, a lady-lodger in the parlor misses one of a pair of lace cuffs, and feels sure that the servant has taken it. There is not a particle of evidence to support this view of the case; but Number Two being destitute, is consequently condemned without a trial, and dismissed without a character. She, too, wanders off forlorn into a world that has no haven of rest or voice of welcome for her — wanders off, without so much as a dirty bundle in her hand — wanders off, voiceless, with the unchanging grin on the smut-covered face. How shocked we should all be if we opened a book about a savage country and saw a portrait of Number Two in the frontispiece as a specimen of the female population!

Number Three comes to us all the way from Wales; arrives late one evening, and is found at seven the next morning, crying as if she would break her heart, on the doorstep. It is the first time she has been away from home. She has not got used yet to being a forlorn castaway among strangers. She misses the cows of a morning, the blessed fields with the blush of sunrise on them, the familiar faces, the familiar sounds, the familiar cleanliness of her country home. There is not the faintest echo of mother’s voice, or of father’s sturdy footfall here. Sweetheart John Jones is hundreds of miles away; and little brother Joe toddles up doorsteps far from these to clamor for the breakfast which he shall get this morning from other than his sister’s hands. Is there nothing to cry for in this? Absolutely nothing, as Mrs. Glutch thinks. What does this Welsh barbarian mean by clinging to my area railings when she ought to be lighting the fire; by sobbing in full view of the public of Smeary Street when the lodgers’ bells are ringing angrily for breakfast? Will nothing get the girl indoors? Yes, a few kind words from the woman who passes by her with my breakfast will. She knows that the Welsh girl is hungry as well as homesick, questions her, finds out that she has had no supper after her long journey, and that she has been used to breakfast with the sunrise at the farm in Wales. A few merciful words lure her away from the railings, and a little food inaugurates the process of breaking her in to London service. She has but a few days allowed her, however, to practice the virtue of dogged resignation in her first place. Before she has given me many opportunities of studying her character, before she has done knitting her brows with the desperate mental effort of trying to comprehend the mystery of my illness, before the smut has fairly settled on her rosy cheeks, before the London dirt has dimmed the pattern on her neat print gown, she, too, is cast adrift into the world. She has not suited Mrs. Glutch (being, as I imagine, too offensively clean to form an appropriate part of the kitchen furniture); a friendly maid of all work in service near us has heard of a place for her, and she is forthwith sent away, to be dirtied and deadened down to her proper social level in another lodging-house.