XIV
The Making of Marianna
The Bartletts led a nomadic existence within that radius of Charing Cross that business requirements imposed upon Mr. Bartlett. As a result the Dead Letter Office dealt with no inconsiderable portion of their correspondence and comparatively intimate friends had been known to address them through the "Personal" column of the daily press.
It now being July they had taken up their quarters in a furnished cottage at Sunbury, migrating thither from Hampstead apartments, themselves the successors of a bijou flat in Chelsea, to which they had moved from a Bayswater boarding-house, after spending Christmas at a Brighton hotel.
"The system has its advantages," Mrs. Bartlett would admit to her friends, "but I should not advise you to give up your pretty houses to try it. Why? Oh, well, during the nine years that we have been married I have had the experience of twenty-seven different servants. I was tempted to make a list of them the other day. Twenty-seven, my dears!"
"In any case that is the nuisance nowadays," one of the friends replied. "But what a red-cheeked, pleasant-looking country girl you have now. She did not come to you with the recommendation of County Council School 'accomplishments,' I should imagine?"
"Indeed no," agreed Mrs. Bartlett.
"Norfolk?" suggested the friend.
"No. From a place—a place on the river."
"Not about here, though?" persisted the lady. "One might as well be on Juan Fernandez for any chance of hearing of a girl locally. If they don't go into town their ambition centres on Richmond—the Terrace, you know," with a shrug and a glance.
"No, some distance from here," replied Mrs. Bartlett briefly. "Do you care for croquet?"
It was possible to be discouraging towards the casual friend, but that same evening Mrs. Bartlett's brother, who was staying at the cottage, leaned across the table and with an elaborate affectation of the late visitor's manner, remarked tentatively:
"Let me see: where did you say she came from, dear?"
"I did not say," replied the lady with a laugh. "But it is called Tidal Basin, if you wish to know, Flip."
"Good," remarked Philip with an air of appreciation. "This sister of mine improves since she moved into your family, Tom. 'A place on the river'; 'Some distance from here'—true; but what about the County Council School, She-bee?"
"'Accomplishments,'" corrected Phœbe. "She came with no accomplishments. Surely a week has shown you that."
"Accomplishments!" said Tom, looking up from his book. "Do you know, Philip, we actually saw an advertisement in one of the papers recently, 'General servant would like to meet accomplished Frenchman in evenings for mutual improvement in scientific conversation.'"
"Yes, dear," interposed Phœbe. "Only unfortunately for the instance the advertisement was repeated and the first two words then appeared as 'German savant.'"
"Worse things happen in Fleet Street," said Philip. “But I don't know about your Gwendolin Maud having no accomplishments. She came out into the garden the other day and entertained me for half-an-hour with light and elegant conversation."
Mrs. Bartlett gave that ceiling-ward glance that is symbolic of resignation.
"Her irrepressible friendliness is beyond everything," she declared. "When anyone calls I really come down in a cold terror, always imagining that I may find her sitting in the drawing-room with them. What did she say?"
"She asked me what time I thought it was, and when I was taking out my watch she said quickly, 'Oh no; I know, but I want you to guess.'"
"You only laugh, Tom," exclaimed his wife indignantly, which was true enough, "but it really is quite too frightful."
"I guessed," continued Philip, displaying an obvious sympathy towards Tom's standpoint, "and was some half-hour wrong. 'Yes,' said Euphrosyne brightly, 'I thought that it was about that time too. Isn't it coming dark soon?'"
"She saunters down the garden when Tom is doing anything, and asks him the names of things," said Phœbe dolefully. "He won't tell her to go away, and I—I"
"You won't either," retorted Tom. "You are afraid of hurting her feelings."
"I confess that I don't quite know how to bring her to see matters properly sometimes. You see, Flip, she is not an ordinary trained girl, and I feel that I ought to make allowances and not expect too much at first. She's an Unemployed, and a Problem, and a Submerged Tenth, and so on. But don't let my thoughtless prattle keep you from going to sleep, Flip!"
"Passionately interested," yawned Philip. "Your beautiful, fresh, country air. Do go on."
"Tom, did you ever know him interested in any mortal thing from an entomological specimen to a murder case?"
"Ought to have been a Buddhist monk," murmured Tom.
"It's the privilege of a weak heart," said Philip placidly. "I have to lounge through life, physically and emotionally, by doctors' orders. Yes, you were explaining why your Matilda Grace does her hair differently at least three times a day when she has so little of it to do."
"You have seen that! I never knew that you noticed anything," exclaimed his sister.
"A general delusion: hence my opportunities for noticing," replied Philip.
"I had her through Mrs. Barton," continued Phœbe, ignoring the side issue. "She has a 'Settlement' in the East End, you know, and does a frightful lot of good there among the most extraordinary girls, I should imagine. They encourage them to go into service instead of into mills and workshops. Mrs. Barton heard that we were taking this cottage for a few months and wrote begging me to try one of her girls. She said that she had some quite presentable-looking, and that one by herself in a very small house in the country would have a good chance of doing well. So I went to look at them."
"Like going to the Dogs' Home, your registry offices, aren't they?" said Philip. "They all sit round, don't they, and you go in and have the little animals you fancy brought out and put through their tricks."
"I think it has come to the mistresses being the little animals and sitting round waiting for the servants to come and have them, to hear them talk," suggested Mr. Bartlett.
"Well, I was really quite tired of going to ordinary registry offices, and of having anæmic girls sent up from the country who looked as if they had worked in a Shoreditch cellar all their lives. Mrs. Barton said that hers were mostly rough girls who had had no domestic training and had no clothes. And they all sat round, as Philip says."
"Only even more so than he imagined, it seems," said that gentleman.
"Uncommonly like an Eastern slave market—Royal Academy style," remarked Tom.
"They had no proper clothes," continued Mrs. Bartlett distantly, "so they could not go to registry offices or reply to advertisements. When they get a place the 'Settlement' gives them caps and aprons and a few things, and you find them the rest."
"Good business," commented Tom.
"Out of their wages, of course."
"Poor worms," murmured Philip.
"I really liked Marianna's face from the first, although her get-up was quite frightful. She had very dilapidated boots—her father's, I learned—an old torn straw hat, and all her things like that. Her hair was half-way between long and short and looked—well"
"Quite frightful?" suggested Philip politely.
"Well, like a row of drowned rats' tails. Of course I expected her to refer to 'lydies' and 'blokes,' and to say 'Strike me pink!' and 'Garn!' and I was awfully surprised to find that she spoke quite nicely. When I was talking to her it came out by accident that she had not had anything to eat since breakfast on the day before. In a great state I said, 'Oh, why ever didn't you tell Mrs. Barton?' and off I rushed to find her. Imagine me when she took it quite as a matter of course and said that probably most of the girls had not had anything to eat since breakfast on the day before! I went out there and then and bought Marianna a bagful of buns, and she was awfully elegant about it and wouldn't think of touching them while I was there. She said it would seem strange eating without a plate. And all the time she was the most draggle-tailed, starving little scarecrow imaginable."
"Wish she would have the same scruples about my Golden Pippins," said Mr. Bartlett. "She sits under the tree scrunching them up by the dozen."
"I think that was partly your own fault, dear," said his wife. "If you remember, you asked her if she liked apples. I am sure that she took it as a sort of general invitation."
"She may have taken it as a general invitation, but when I came across her helping herself and said it, I meant it as a sort of specific prohibition."
"Yes," soliloquised Philip, "I have heard that children, savage tribes, the mentally deficient, and most women require their sarcasm underlined with a club to catch the drift properly. Possibly your Marianna comes within one or more of these categories."
"Oh, then she had a reference," exclaimed Mrs. Bartlett, reverting to the East End. "I wondered who on earth could have employed a little ragamuffin like that, but I thought that I had better see her. Marianna showed me the way; it was like going through the Ghetto or the Jago or the Bowery or some of those dreadful places one reads about. The house we went to was in Cement Street—a Mrs. Plack. She told me that Marianna's father and mother and sisters and brothers had all lodged in two of her rooms for a long time till they got so much in debt for their rent that she had to send them away. Then they went into one room somewhere else, and Mrs. Plack let Marianna stay with her because she did not like to go into the one room. She helped with things about the house, and Mrs. Plack said that she was a very nice willing girl, and she would have liked to keep her herself only her husband, who had something to do with ships, had been out of work for six months and was ill in bed with sciatica, so that they could not afford it. She told me all about herself and called her five children in for me to see. They stood in a row and all recited little pieces that they had learned at school, all except one who was deaf and dumb, and he showed me a castle and cliffs that he had made out of bits of broken oyster-shells. It was all most frightfully interesting and I gave them threepenny-bits each, and they seemed so pleased and showed each other their threepenny-bits all round, though of course they were all alike. Mrs. Plack said that Cement Street was a very nice street for those parts, and, although they were rather unfortunate just then, that she was much better off than most of the people around because she had rich relations—a brother, I think, who kept a public-house. Before I left she showed me three electro-plated serviette rings which she kept in a cupboard to be ready when her rich relations came to see her. She had been married fourteen years and they had not been yet, but, she said, it was a satisfaction to have things nice in case they ever did come."
It was some twenty-four hours later that the doings of Marianna again moved Mrs. Bartlett's utterance, but this time in a different key.
"It is perfectly too bad," she exclaimed, coming into the little drawing-room where her husband was reading. "I have just been into Marianna's room to see that she was keeping it tidy, and I find that she has scribbled all over the wall with match-ends and pencils. You know, Tom, it is a pretty, light blue distemper and you can guess what it is like now. And here is a nice book that I lent her to read: she has had the—well, it isn't really impertinence because she simply doesn't know any better, but on a blank page she has actually drawn a drunken sailor trying to dance the hornpipe. That, of all things, in The Pleasures of Life!"
"Another Marianna evening?" said Philip with pleasant resignation, coming in to hear the burden of his sister's woe. "May I see the effort?"
Mr. Bartlett handed him the book without any comment. He was smiling, but on the whole he looked much more puzzled than amused. The drawing was that of a single figure: as Mrs. Bartlett had said, that of a drunken sailor trying to dance a hornpipe, and it produced this simple effect—that as one looked one seemed to see not a drawing but a drunken sailor trying to dance the hornpipe. Philip glanced and looked again. He was smiling when he took the book: he still smiled and laughed quietly at the humour of it, but behind it all, in face and attitude, there seemed to be the arrest of intense surprise. He put down his cigarette somewhere unconsciously—upon the rosewood piano, as it chanced, but people who let their houses furnished are not supposed to mind trifles such as that—with his eyes still fixed upon the page.
"Well?" demanded Mr. Bartlett at length. He seemed to be expecting something.
"Don't you think it is funny, Flip?" asked his sister. "I thought it rather good in its way; but frightfully rough, of course."
"I think that one might safely go to the length of labelling it funny," replied Philip, looking gravely from face to face, "and even admitting it to be rather good—in its way, as you say. Now do you think, Phœbe, that we-might penetrate into the maiden's chaste retreat to see to what extent she has damaged the elegant blue groundwork of her bower?"
"Oh, yes," said Phœbe, leading the way. "But why have you two become so serious all at once? I don't really mind about the book, and I daresay that nothing will be said about the room."
"I doubt it," declared Philip judicially. "I shouldn't wonder if that room doesn't lead to quite a lot of talk before you hear the last of it. As for the book, I don't mind taking it off your hands at the published price myself."
"Well," remarked Mrs. Bartlett somewhat impatiently, when they had returned to the drawing-room, "aren't you going to say something, Flip? You have succeeded in making me curious, and to see you sitting there, smiling at a paper-knife, doesn't convey a great deal."
"My dear child," replied Philip, still playing with the paper-knife, "I am considering the kindest way to break it to you gently. The fact is, that as a maid-servant I fear your Marianna will turn out to be something of a white elephant."
"She is that already, in many things—dusting china, for instance," admitted the lady candidly. "But do you mean to say that the things she does are really good?"
"They are really good," said Philip deliberately. "They are so marvellously, strikingly, incomprehensively good that if I had not to repress any symptoms of enthusiasm by the doctor's orders I should have to get up and walk about the room while I talked of them."
"Does he know anything at all about it, Tom?" demanded Phœbe.
"I have heard him described as one of the best judges of black-and-white work in London," replied Tom.
"I suppose I don't understand it then," she said. "But none of the things seem at all pretty to me, and they are so unfinished."
Philip smiled broadly. "Well, don't complain," he said. "You get plenty of the sort of art you like. Leave us our few Mariannas."
"I don't quite see how it is going to turn out, though," remarked Phœbe thoughtfully. "Of course it is a great honour to have a genius for a general servant, and to have 'discovered' her ought to be frightfully exciting and all that. And I don't mind losing her much, because scrubbing floors is the only work that she can do really well; and who wants to have the floors scrubbed in someone else's house? But—well, you know what she is like. How will she go about it?"
"Oh, for that matter, wasn't Millie Myers fiddling at pit-doors a few years ago, and Ben Corvelli singing as he blacked the boots at a Bournemouth hotel?" interposed Mr. Bartlett.
"But I don't believe that Marianna has a scrap of ambition for anything," declared her mistress. "If you start with the idea of unbounded enthusiasm and heroic purpose on her part you are probably laying up for yourself quite a store of shocks and surprises. Mark my words and remember your poor heart, Flip."
Philip looked at his sister with deep but half-amused interest.
"I am wondering how you will rise to the occasion, She-bee,” he said presently. "You have a fascinating experiment before you. Here is a ragattee little creature with probably the heart of a coster, a mind like a new slate, and inspired fingers. You have the chance of a lifetime—a lifetime! of ten thousand lifetimes, I should say. It's quite the sort of thing you read about."
"I am quite content to let it remain the sort of thing I read about, as far as I am concerned," retorted Mrs. Bartlett. "What have I to do with it?"
"You? You have everything to do with it. You, and you alone, can become Marianna's kind patroness. You —unobtrusively assisted by Tom and myself—can take her firmly and sympathetically in hand and educate her on her weak points."
"Oh, great goodness!" exclaimed the lady, aghast; "spare us, Flip! I know a great deal more about Marianna's weak points than you do, or are ever likely to. Send her to school, or to Paris, or to Rome, if you like, but remember that if you have got a heart I have got nerves."
"Not a bit of good," said Philip inexorably. "You know perfectly well that she could not yet mix with educated people who were strangers. This is probably the one chance of her lifetime also. If she leaves you she is extinguished. You hold the balance of her destiny whether you like it or not."
"I don't like it," she declared. "I am frightfully good-natured, I know, but I do think that it is expecting too much. I once knew a sort of amateur lady artist, and one used to meet droves of long hairy things there who talked about nothing but 'wash,' and 'tone,' and 'value,' and seemed more or less deficient in all three. Why can't Marianna sell her drawings if they are so wonderful and then make a nice home for her father and mother and disappear from our immediate horizon in a burst of splendour?"
"Just because she could not do it," he replied; "any more than you could engineer a 'corner' in Peruvian bark, for instance. Then she ought to study hard for at least two years before she 'comes out,' so to speak. She has had no more experience than a door-knocker. Everything she draws has passed down Cement Street. Now she needs taking out to see other kinds of things."
"I think it would be simpler to adopt her straight off," said Phœbe scornfully.
"I daresay that it would be a paying speculation, and it would certainly immortalise you."
"I should think myself fortunate if it did not imbecilise me. . . . Do you really want me to educate her, Fillipino, dear?"
"I had visions," confessed Philip, "but I would rather that she was walled up in Cement Street for ever than have you worried."
"Don't be bullied into it by that tone of voice," warned her husband. "Sleep on it, at any rate."
"No, I'll play on it,” she declared. "Go into the garden, please."
For half-an-hour "The Girl in the Chocolate Box" and "Hi, there!" fought tinkling melodies in her soul in turn with Weber and Beethoven, while her husband methodically pruned his tomato plants and repeatedly urged his brother-in-law to take up the study of aphides or diptera. Then, in the fading light, Philip suddenly forgot to pace the walks; the hilarious voices of two lovers in the road beyond sank to a whisper, then ceased; Bartlett no longer pruned. . . .
"So!" he exclaimed half-crossly, closing his knife and turning his steps towards the house as the subdued pæan died away. "You have got it your own way again, of course."
Very easy times succeeded for Marianna. Phœbe, who detested "daily women," got in a daily woman and Marianna's duties lightened and imperceptibly changed. It was easy to requisition her services to carry wraps; she was useful to take shopping; it was inevitable that she should wear prettier things. Marianna saw a great deal of the river that season; she witnessed a royal wedding at Windsor, a military funeral at Guildford, and a day's racing at Esher; she put in an appearance at an occasional flower-show and cricket-match, and she began to know something of the landmarks of the West End. To engage her leisure afternoons and evenings a lavish supply of the finest drawing materials waited at her elbow, while it became a general thing that Punch, the art journals, several American magazines and a few English ones were to be found on the kitchen dresser. The daily woman, the recipient of Marianna's confidences, thought it rather remarkable, but reflected that the proceedings ("goings-on," in daily womanese) at furnished cottages here and there during the river season lay outside the reasonable explanation of daily women. To Marianna it did not seem in any way strange; she accepted it as she had accepted semi-starvation and an occasional thrashing in Canning Town, as part of the ordinary routine of the situation; quite dog-like.
"I used to read from Reynold's to my father sometimes on Sundays," she had once told Mrs. Bartlett; "and whenever I came to a word that I didn't understand or couldn't pronounce I had to 'Ahem!' instead." There was a great deal of "Ahem!" taking place in Marianna's experience during this period.
Philip was not altogether satisfied. The ladies and gentlemen of the artist's pencil were not the strong, frank creatures of her earlier efforts. She did not understand them and she could not interpret what she saw. In a time of fatness and ease the vividness of impression was dulled; possibly the emotions, or their expression, were more restrained in her new models. In turning over her earlier sketches Philip had been struck by a wild figure—a Chinaman rushing headlong down a gloomy slum, a drawn knife in his hand and frenzied, murderous passion in his eyes. Marianna explained it. "It was the first time I ever saw one of those," she said. "I was with another girl in the Dock Road when a lot of them came by. 'They're all stone deaf,' said the other girl, 'through firing big guns. That's why they all wear ropes down their backs; you pull it when you want to stop one instead of calling out to him, because that’s no good. You try one and see. Go on; he'll only grin and shake hands with you; they're all like that.' I didn’t know, of course, that it was a sort of game that was going then—to get you to do it—until all the Chinks about the Tidal Basin were nearly bar—I mean were frightfully wild, so I pulled the pigtail of the nearest one pretty hard. The other girl was gone like a flash and when the man jumped round at me with an awful yell I nearly tumbled backwards among the stalls there. I crawled through, but I saw him coming after me, so I flew. I went up one street and down another, and then hearing him getting nearer I dodged into a archway. He thought I was on in front and passed me—like that. I always remembered him.” The simple, vigorous studies which adorned her wall, framed in a maze of futile pencillings and inchoate attempts to realise some half-grasped idea, were generally "like that"—memories sharply stencilled by hunger, pain or fear. As Philip had said, everything she drew had passed along Cement Street. Her women, her grim, slatternly, unpleasant, lippy, wisp-haired, real-looking women, hung round its doorposts; her children rolled in its gutters or swung behind its dust-carts; her men—well, she was not imaginative and so her men were either in the act of working or the act of drinking. Phœbe picked out an exception—a long-stretching queue of dejection marshalled at the foot of a tall blank wall. "That?" replied Marianna. "Oh, that's only the men waiting for work at the docks. My father often stood there all day last winter. I used to take him his dinner—when there happened to be any—so that he should not lose his place. That's him, the third from this end." Phœbe turned away with a slight shudder. The "third from this end" in the grip of a hard winter when work was scarce did not present an attractive face.
Towards the middle of September, in the ordinary routine of their migratory habits, the Bartletts turned their thoughts towards more urban quarters. Marianna would probably be bound to be in the way; possibly very much in the way; in scarcely any contingency useful. Phœbe, however, was pledged to a policy of "frightful good-nature," and as this vapidly-expressed quality covered a sublimer heroism (after the manner of people who in self-defence wear something imitation on their sleeves) than the little slum-hearted gamin could ever rise to the height of conceiving, the immediate future was not a matter for any concern on Marianna's part. Nevertheless, she it was who, at this period, airily and light-heartedly sprang a mine one morning that sent Phœbe flying to the wire in despair, to send a message which involved Philip in no slight perplexity. "Everyone all right," she wailed from Sunbury to Strand West, "but do come if you possibly conveniently can;" and Philip came.
"It's Marianna,” said Phœbe, taking up her wail at closer range. "I knew how frightfully disappointed you would be. She wants to leave."
"Leave!" he exclaimed blankly. "Leave here? Leave?" The possibility had never occurred to him.
"She wants," continued Phœbe, with slow horror, "to—go—into—a—laundry—at Acton!"
"Go into a laundry! God in heaven! she's mad. Marianna," he cried, striding into the kitchen, "why is this?"
Marianna stood by the table, engaged, after the manner of her kind in moments of embarrassment, with a tightly-rolled handkerchief. She looked distinctly mulish, nor, to drive home the comparison, would she speak.
"She won't answer you," interpreted Phœbe. "She has become sullen. She has made friends with a girl whom she met at Hampton Court and she wants to go to the laundry to be with her."
"And the friend's brother?" suggested Philip with intuition. "Is he also to be found at the laundry?"
Marianna shot a rapid glance and licked her lips.
"There is a brother," admitted Phœbe. "Possibly."
"But her art—her future—her career!"
"She does not think that there is anything much in drawing. And in the laundry she will be able to do more as she wants, wear what she likes, and go about the streets with her own friends. You see, she is growing up."
"If she had stayed she would have been making hundreds, if not tens of hundreds, a few years hence."
"She does not understand hundreds and tens of hundreds. They convey nothing to her mind. All she wants is money to buy apples and purple dresses with, from day to day and week to week. . . . And she informs me that she will get better wages there than I am paying her here."
"When does she want to go?"
"To-morrow, she says. Of course she could be kept for a month really, but she knows nothing about giving proper notice."
"Very well," replied Philip dispassionately; "then I should let her go to-morrow."
She went the next day—to the laundry at Acton. She became very sunny and pleasant when she understood that she would be allowed to go, and in return nobody thought it worth while to underline sentiments less amiable. The same day Philip burned a portfolio of sketches. Excellent as they were, he felt that it is necessary to be ordinarily human at times, and at least a generation must elapse before one can entirely dis-associate the art from the artist.
"I should certainly take up aphides, if I were you," remarked Mr. Bartlett on his return.
Hampton Hill, 1905.