The Gypsy in the Parlour Page 11

  Clara nodded gravely.

  “I thought he couldn’t be making it all up,” said she. “It sounded, if you know what I mean, too kind of there.” She sighed. “I’d like to see it,” said Clara Blow.

  “I would too,” said I. “Now. It’s where I’d like to be, now.”

  She looked at me curiously.

  “Don’t you live in a fine house here?”

  “I suppose it’s big,” said I. “But not so big as the farm. And not warm, like the farm. It’s not sunny like the farm. There, there’s always so much more sun.”

  “That’s how Charlie sounds,” said Clara Blow. “But if he can’t go back—”

  “Of course he can,” said I. “All Sylvesters, always, can always go home. And Charles especially, because he’s the eldest.”

  “Well, there’s something stopping him,” said Clara flatly. “If we could get a read of his letters we might know what, but I’ve been through his pockets time and time again.” (I don’t know why Clara Blow never shocked me. In my own circle, to read another person’s letters, without permission, was considered unpardonable. Unless of course the person was a child: any adult could read any child’s letter without asking. There was something childlike about Clara Blow: perhaps I unconsciously reversed the law in her favour.) “He just tells me to mind my own business,” continued Clara sombrely, “but if you want to know what I think—”

  She broke off. At that intensely interesting moment, she ceased to speak.—A hand descended on my scruff: Cook had taken us from the rear. She was so furious she didn’t say a word, simply caught me by the collar of my jacket and hauled me round the end of the bench, and marched me away. From the tail of my eye I caught the outraged fling of a feather-boa; but Clara, to my gratitude, equally restrained her tongue. We marched, Cook and I, in strenuous silence all the way home, she breathing trifle as a dragon breathes fire. As we neared our door I did try, nervously, to explain that it was all right: I remember advancing the blanket-defence that I was sure I hadn’t caught anything. Cook cut me short.

  “The impudence of it!” she snorted. “The bare-faced impudence!—The likes of her!”

  Entirely I think from a sense of guilt she gave notice next day. As I say, this turned out all for the best, since I do not believe she would ever have left me alone in the Gardens again; whereas her successor had a close friend attached to Knightsbridge Police station.

  CHAPTER XV

  1

  When in 1905 my brother Frederick’s daughter Cherry was discovered to be spending her Thursday afternoons not at the National Gallery copying Old Masters, but in the embraces of a shipping-agent, I was the only member of the family unsurprised. This was not because I knew Cherry particularly well, but because I remembered my own Wednesdays thirty years earlier. I knew from experience how easy it was for any well-brought-up young person to lead a double life. Certainly Cherry’s behaviour was far worse, she had to marry the shipping-agent almost immediately; but I think my own mother would have been scarcely less horrified than was Marguerite, to know me spending my afternoons with Clara Blow.

  A child hand-in-glove with servants, a child willing to connive, enjoys more liberty than parents suspect.

  I had only one period of freedom—Wednesday afternoon; but it was complete. I didn’t ask Cook where she went, and she didn’t ask me. So long as she found me by the Pond at four, from two-thirty until then I was free as a Pond sea-gull. I had an hour and a half, I had ninety-five minutes, to spend as I, unquestioned, wished; and I spent them in Jackson’s Economical Saloon.

  Clara would never meet me in the Gardens again, on account of her feet. I at first thought her still put out by the rough termination to our conversation there—to apologize for which I hurried back to Brocket Place the first Wednesday after we changed cooks. Later, I found that she truly detested walking as much as any countrywoman. (It was the measure of her anxiety to find me again that she had actually struggled to the Gardens every afternoon for a week.) So though I assured her that Cook was now another one, Clara still refused to come out; and instead gave me a standing invitation to visit Jackson’s as often as I could, and eat whatever I liked.

  I grew very fond of Jackson’s. Jackson’s became my London equivalent of the farm. As the Spring term wore away, and the boring, featureless spring-vacation, I found there, in Clara, something of my aunt’s old joviality. Her loud cheerful voice, her loud easy laughter, reminded me of Charlotte. She was also about the same size. (I always felt people in London too small. My father was distinguished, my mother elegant, but I never admired their looks.) Though I rarely ate more than an occasional bun, the sheer quantity of food about, and Clara’s lavish attitude to it, produced a farm-like sense of plenty,—Whether Clara ever put a halfpenny in the till, or whether we were both indebted to Mr. Isaacs, I didn’t enquire. I looked on the Saloon as Clara’s private property. I never, naturally, in the middle of the afternoon, saw it under its commercial aspect.

  I grew very fond of Jackson’s, and I grew very fond of Clara. I couldn’t grow fond, or fonder than I already was, of my Cousin Charles, because I never saw him.

  He was always asleep. He slept through all the afternoon. (The day I saw him in the Gardens Clara could calculate as the seventh of February, when they had the exterminator in.) But I didn’t miss him so much as might have been expected, because Clara and I had so much to talk about.

  Our theme was the farm.—I cannot express what a luxury it was to have such an audience: no one at home wanted to hear about the farm at all. Clara loved every detail. “Tell again about the linen,” she would say; or, “Tell again about the dairy”—or about the pigs, or the poultry, or baking-day. She had indeed an inherited taste for such matters: though Cockney-born and bred, she nonetheless recalled Norfolk grandparents—had never seen them, but remembered, from extreme youth, Christmas turkeys of such fabulous proportions, infant Blows feasted for days … Thus she saw the country as I did, through glasses perhaps too rosy; acknowledging that my aunts must work for six, added that work hurt no one, so long as you had elbow-room. She had a way, as she said this, (our conversation early fell into a sort of ritual, we were always saying the same things to each other), of opening her big shoulders in a gesture of frustrated power.—She was really strong. She often wiped plates clean in two, and I once saw her twist the back off a bentwood chair, just giving it a polish. I was only surprised there weren’t more breakages, considering the size of Clara Blow, and the size of Jackson’s Economical Saloon.

  No wonder, I thought, she yearned for elbow-room; I thought she would like the farm very much for its spaciousness alone. I thought it would be only fair, after all her kindness to him, if Charles invited her there for a holiday. But when I put this notion to Clara, she received it with a mixture of wistfulness and doubt.

  “Christ, dear, there’s nothing I’d like better,” said she. (I had long ceased to notice Clara’s language. At first she tried to censor it, but the difficulty was that she didn’t notice it either. I should have found it equally hard never to say, ‘Oh.’) “I’d go like a shot,” said Clara, “and let old Isaacs do his worst. But it ain’t up to me, it’s up to Charlie. I couldn’t hardly go without him, could I, now?”

  “But he’s got to go home sometime,” I insisted. “And I’m sure he must want to.”

  “There’s something keeping him away,” repeated Clara darkly.

  This was of course obvious. All I learnt of Charlie’s life in London convinced me that he must at least be very bored there. According to Clara, he spent his mornings, vaguely, in giving her a hand: in the afternoon, as though to scamp up time, he slept: in the evening, when Jackson’s did most of its business, lent Clara a hand again. I understood him naturally wishing to repay her hospitality: but did he actually wait, hand up sausage-and-mash and saveloys, like a waiter, from the kitchen door? I could hardly believe it. I couldn’t imagine a Sylvester so lowering himself. If any one bade Tobias or Matthew or Luke carry plates, only
wreckage, I felt, could ensue … I was extremely relieved, I remember, to find Charlie’s role in fact that of chucker-out. Jackson’s was respectable, so to speak, only ideally; some of its patrons from Notting Hill inclined to the hooligan; and Clara told me that nothing stopped a row quicker than the sudden appearance of my Cousin Charles. “He’s as good as the police,” said Clara. “Better, you might say, ’cause coppers they know have to face a magistrate. Charlie they don’t know what he might do. He did just throw one chap out for me,” said Clara reminiscently, “which a cabby took to hospital on spec. We had a whip-round for the fare, but I don’t think he made much more.…”

  I told Clara I thought Charles had had a quarrel with Tobias, the summer he came back from Australia. I said I was sure he had, because there couldn’t be any other reason for his staying away. And I added that I didn’t think the trouble would last much longer, because there was some one at the farm, my dear Fanny Davis, trying to cure it.

  “I’ve always known there was someone wrote,” agreed Clara, less cheerfully than I expected. “Till you turned up I thought maybe it was his Ma. I’d have thought Miss Davis was too sick to bother.”

  I never could make Clara understand the exact nature of a decline. She had no feeling for the pathos and beauty of invalidism—possibly because she never read novelettes. Her favourite recreation was a good stirring melodrama, she knew Sweeny Tod the Demon Barber of Fleet Street almost by heart; so perhaps naturally declines weren’t eventful enough for her, and she soon grew tired of hearing about Fanny’s. She now inclined to shrug off Fanny’s good offices altogether, saying her letters if anything seemed to put Charlie out, she, Clara, thought he’d sooner be without them. “But he must have written first!” I protested. “Or how would Fanny know his address? He must have written to her through Miss Jones, asking her to help him; and if you knew how Sylvesters hate writing, you’d see how in earnest he is.” Clara, still looking dubious, said he said he’d written for shirts. He’d left his best shirts behind. “Really, Clara, that’s nonsense,” I retorted. “If he’d just wanted his shirts, he’d have written to Charlotte.” “All right, ask him,” said Clara darkly. “What he told me was, letters upset his Ma proper; so he wrote by Miss Jones to Miss Davis to send ’em on.”

  When I considered this, I saw it possible. I didn’t see Charlie believing his mother quite so nerveless as he pretended, but I could see him reluctant, the quarrel with Tobias still unresolved, to admit himself no farther off than London. Sylvesters in argument with their sires went to Australia: a withdrawal of no more than three hundred miles might look like weakness. It was a matter of pride—and so too, I thought, was his anxiety for shirts, they just afforded a face-saving pretext for opening negotiations.…

  “Anyway, they never got here,” added Clara gloomily.

  “Well, of course one sees why that was,” I returned impatiently. “If he wanted everything kept so secret, how could Fanny ask for them? I know where Charlie’s shirts are this minute—in the bottom bureau-drawer in my room.”

  “That’s something,” said Clara.

  “And,” I continued firmly, “though Charlie mayn’t like getting Fanny’s letters, that’s quite obviously because she’s telling him he’s got to apologise. After all, Uncle Tobias is his father, he’ll never apologise first; but all Sylvesters are stubborn as rocks, so it’s taking Charlie a long time to come round.”

  “Maybe,” sighed Clara Blow. “Maybe you’re right … One thing I do know; I wouldn’t let a ‘Sorry, Dad,’ keep me away.”

  “You aren’t a Sylvester,” said I.

  2

  But how readily she might become one!

  When this notion first struck me, it seemed so obvious that I wondered I hadn’t thought of it sooner. (I had been feeling for it: when I suggested a holiday at the farm for her.) Clara was from every point of view a natural Sylvester woman. She was the right size and shape, her handsomeness made exactly the right hit-you-in-the-eye impact, and she had the right temperament. She wasn’t afraid of work, she was sociable, genial and forthright; and she had moreover for nearly two years successfully coped with a Sylvester male.

  “Oh, Clara,” cried I impulsively, “why don’t you and Charlie get married?”

  She didn’t say a word. I at first thought she was too much surprised—we had actually been discussing, when this cry burst up from my subconscious, the ideal menu for a Harvest Festival Sunday dinner. “Would chitterlings be too common?” Clara had just asked, when out I burst.…

  She didn’t say a word. She simply stood, her lips tightly closed against speech, her hands locked before her on Jackson’s counter, while the tears over-filled her eyes and trickled slowly down her cheeks. Because I was a child, I understood. She was crying as I sometimes cried, because I wanted something so badly.

  I had to go, it was time. A child has liberty only within limits. Clara’s eyes, even tear-filled, directed mine towards the clock. I speechlessly nodded to her, and ran out.

  CHAPTER XVI

  1

  I was an officious child, I was an interfering child: also, I hope, an affectionate one. By this time I loved Clara Blow almost as I loved my aunts. All through that summer term I devoted so much thought to her happiness, I came out at the end only seventh instead of first in class.

  I cannot say I didn’t enjoy worrying about Clara. I did. To do so gave me a feeling of adult importance; doubled the interest of my already double life, enlarged my secret rôle of little peacemaker to include that of little match-maker also. Yet what could I do? (I was always eager to do something: about anything. When the kitchen-chimney caught fire I had to be retrieved by Frederick from the local fire-station—Cook having successfully employed a pail of water. We might nonetheless have been burnt to cinders. When a telegram came for my father, and there was no one else at home, I took a cab to his chambers: I happened to interrupt an important conference, and the telegram merely cancelled a dinner-engagement. It might have called him to a parent’s death-bed. I never got credit for my good intentions, but I never learnt.) I never learnt, and I loved Clara Blow; and Wednesday after Wednesday, together we revolved plans.

  We had to leave Charlie out of them—except, of course, at the point when he would essentially be in. For Charlie, in London, was displaying to an exaggerated degree, (almost as though asserting his birth-right), the country-Sylvester characteristic of letting no one know what he thought. We had to deal with him as an X, an unknown quantity.—Here Clara again, though at the same time I couldn’t realise it, showed herself specially fitted for Sylvester-hood. She and Charlie were in fact living man-and-wife, and had done for nearly two years. So far as concerned marriage, she saw this neither for nor against. She didn’t know what Charlie thought. When I hopefully suggested that he must be very fond of her, she said, Well, yes, time to time he was all right; but he wasn’t a chap to put himself out; if anyone ever did get round to putting the banns up, it wouldn’t be Charlie.…

  This observation from experience at least enabled us to clear a good deal of ground. We both agreed that if Charlie was married already, in Australia for instance, whoever landed him must have possessed such extraordinary, fixed resolution, she would have never allowed him to stray back home without her. As Clara rightly observed, catch a fish like Charlie, you didn’t throw him back.

  We therefore presumed him legally free to wed, which was something. But the next, or shot-gun, phase of our planning met a serious obstacle. When I asked Clara, hadn’t she any relations, she shook her head.

  “If you mean any who’d speak for me, and bring Charlie up to scratch—no,” said Clara Blow flatly. “Grandpa who sent us the turkeys I dare say might have; but he’s pushing up the daisies long since. And as to my own Dad and Ma, if living they’re best kept out of it. The reason you see me so decent as I am to-day,” said Clara, without rancour, “is that I skipped from home at thirteen.…”

  I was never shocked by Clara Blow. Perhaps I ought to have been, mys
elf so well brought up. The fact remains that whatever she told me of parental negligence—worse still, of parental ill-usage; and I once saw a deep, belt-buckle scar on her shoulder—I was never shocked by, I always loved Clara Blow.

  Thus it looked as though any relations brought into play would have to be Charlie’s: we should have to start from the other end, from the farm. I should have to start. Clara, obviously, could not.

  Should I write a letter?—and if so, to whom?

  The writing of a letter is to a child a highly important act. Children do not drop notes. I had never, for example, written back to Fanny Davis. I couldn’t because I had too much to tell her. Should I write then to Charlotte? There was the same objection; moreover even my assurance failed before the scheme of baldly proposing to her a daughter-in-law she had never even heard of.

  “’Specially if she don’t know Charlie dead or alive,” added Clara.

  I said she probably thought him alive, only in Australia. Admittedly it made another difficulty. There really was too much to write; good as I was at English composition, I felt here a subject beyond my powers.—For one daft moment I even wondered whether it couldn’t be set as a composition; we were often invited to suggest topics, and if the whole class had to compose—“Letter to a Mother Breaking the News of her Son’s Engagement”—I might garner useful hints. But I saw at once it wouldn’t do. It was too unacademic. Even Marguerite’s one mild attempt at realism—“Letter to a Dressmaker Saying Where It Doesn’t Fit”—had been turned down with contumely. The pattern-subject was “My Pet.”

  In the end we decided—for summer approached as we deliberated—that I should wait till I got back to the farm, and there open the matter by word of mouth: present Clara as a friend of my own, who would very much enjoy a country holiday: and leave the rest to Charlotte. I felt we could do this quite safely. My Aunt Charlotte was hospitable as mother-earth, she would certainly ask Clara immediately; and having once seen her, would I felt sure snap her up just as she snapped up Grace Beer and my Aunt Rachel. Charlie would then have to come home to be married—here my imagination easily jumped an awkward fence or two—and who but I, in pink muslin, should follow the bridal pair?