Sheila and Others/Our Wash-Ladies
OUR WASH-LADIES
IN endless review they pass before me, as I look back. Fairfaced, young, of gentle mien; or sour, disheveled, anxious, lean, mysterious, fat—all sorts, sizes and conditions, with only this one thing in common, that they were down on their luck. Not all, indeed, were consciously that. Some felt themselves to be securely mounting the first rung of the long ladder of success, and hope shone visibly in their eager faces. But most of them were practically down and out, drifts among the world's human wastage.
At the very top of the list was Mrs. Horton, a Heaven-sent angel. She did our washing between 8.30 and 12.30 of a Tuesday morning, taking time for only one breakfast between. She made no trouble in the kitchen, never gossiped, was careful of the soap and other perishables, with that carefulness bed rocked in character, of which we get so few examples in these troublous times. But then, as I said, Mrs. Horton was by vocation an angel, not a charwoman.
After her departure from our laundry, and I might add hearts, unspeakable things happened. We went through a succession of Shacktown ladies, each of whom appeared to be in more desperate circumstances than the last, and less disposed to repair her fortune by the medium of the washboard.
They began work about 9 a.m. and the day for them drew to a close at 3 p.m., the ardors of their toil being mitigated by an average of four meals between. From varying tinges of blue and yellow, our clothes settled down to a permanent and melancholy gray, coming up decorated with lively memorials of the pegs, which gave assurance, at least, of their having had a bath of fresh air.
One pink and white young person with a really terrific burr in her speech, brought a six-weeks-old infant along to whose interests the clothes-basket was devoted, while the washing was conveyed to and fro in dishpans. This small accessory so captivated the somewhat impressionable heart of Janet, and so many hours were spent in nursing and exchanging confidences over it, that after the second trial I felt obliged to take measures against its reappearance.
Following her came another East-ender who sandwiched us in between the hours devoted to her regular work which was scrubbing in banks. Despair drove me to this arrangement—despair and hope, for I had been promised a sixth share in a highly recommended and highly accomplished English laundress about to confer her services on needy Canadians. So I temporized with the bank lady pending the arrival of the English specialist to whom I looked forward with an ardor fully justified by her subsequent ministrations. There was one drawback. There always is. She was averse to giving general assistance in the house, and as, under her expert management, the washing didn't extend very far into the day, time hung weary upon her hands.
"Of course, Mem, in Hengland, there would be maids for hall," she explained. "An 'ouse like this would 'ave three of them, at the very least. Hit's different hout 'ere—" an observation with which my own more extended experience tallies.
Circumstances began to improve under her able ministrations, and our spirits revived. The complexion of our raiment became several degrees lighter, verging on respectability, when on the eve of her fifth visit, I received a note containing the information that, as she never had a moment to herself any more, she was dropping off some of the work, and she hoped I'd suit myself elsewhere.
It certainly was a blow. I sought in vain for the cause. My treatment of her, in reminiscent candor, seemed to me exemplary. I couldn't improve on it. I had paid well, and inquired into the ages, ailments and even the dispositions of her numerous progeny with interest, not to say enthusiasm. I had presented her with cast-offs for the same and refrained from giving her the good advice that trembled on my tongue. There was nothing I could reproach myself with; I was fain to fall back upon that reflection, the final resort of perplexed well-doers. As for Janet, her frank and dismayed astonishment proved her guiltless of offense. No, it must be even as our specialist had said. She didn't want so much work, and our place being farthest away from her own abode, we were the first to be discharged.
for the cause. My treatment of her in remi-
Next in the long succession came a person of such belligerent aspect that she positively intimidated me.
Her name was Gallegar and she could draw her beetling brows down in a gaze so concentratedly fierce that I quailed under it. I was pleased to find that Janet didn't. She simply remarked nonchalantly that Mrs. Gallegar acted queer-like but meant no harm. I was glad for this assurance. It helped to give me confidence.
The vigor of her ministrations atoned somewhat for the difficulties of our intercourse. I presented her at strategic intervals with superfluous clothing which had a temporarily softening effect. The brows would relax and a less ferocious aspect confront me. Once or twice I caught hint of something that must have been a smile inside, a rusty smile as of long disuse.
But the effect of these offerings was ever shorter and shorter lived, and presently the unwelcome truth became apparent that our star had crossed its meridian so far as Mrs. Gallegar was concerned. She hungered for change and for the chance to do despite which was one of the few pleasures left her. The exercise of power, however limited, and the excitement that goes with it, is necessary for some natures, for most natures, the only one left them for outlet, and revenge for social injustice. Perhaps it is the most ambitious ones (which is but another name for quality) who need outlet most. It is a way of getting back at life. I recognized it as such in Mrs. Gallegar's case, and felt more grief than anger when she suddenly departed, leaving us as badly in the lurch as she could arrange to, with three weeks' accumulation of washing on our hands and no word to say whether it was her distinguished pleasure to ever come again or not. Situations of this sort are always complicated by fear of illness or other conditions of sordid experiences that one must not make harder. So much better is it in a world like this to be offended than to give offense. I thought it over carefully, and decided that Mrs. Gallegar had given herself the pleasure of deliberately deserting us.
Events proved this assumption to be correct, and I began again the weary search for a substitute, denying Mrs. Gallegar the gratification of knowing what extreme inconvenience she had occasioned us. Perhaps I was hard-hearted. It would have been an unalloyed joy to her.
Following this energetic and belligerent lady came her antithesis, delicate, attractive, refined little Mrs. Porter—a deserted young wife with two babies to care for. Her manners were those of the parlor rather than the laundry, her methods above suspicion, her hours and conduct unimpeachable. She couldn't keep the clothes up to her predecessor's standard; it needed a fighting strain foreign to her nature to do that, but she gave of her best. Tears trembled on the curving lashes as she revealed bits of her unhappy story, or referred to the children. The boy was clever with his fingers, already drawing pictures of everything he saw. And the baby! She couldn't get that into words at all. She left them in the solitary rented room—locking the door in the mornings when she came away. They would both be asleep, what else could she do? The breakfast and dinner?—Oh, she left some cold porridge and milk for them—the boy could lift it down, and some bread and butter for their lunch. The lady below stairs had the key and would go and see to them if they made too much noise. The worst was the cold. One dar'n't trust them with fire, and these cold days!
"But the Crèche?" I suggested, really aghast.
"They're in quarantine, just now, three weeks," responded Mrs. Porter wearily. "A lodger's baby had the measles. I used to take them to the Crèche, but it's a long way for me to go early in the morning, and the carfare and all."
The husband, she hinted rather than said outright, hadn't liked the children's noise. It disturbed him, especially when they couldn't afford more than a couple of rooms. He had been gone seven months now and had written only twice. She had had to appeal to the Social Service Department for help and they were tracing him up as they couldn't do much for her so long as she had a husband. "He won't like it," she remarked briefly. "And he will lay the blame on me, but I couldn't help it." The brown lashes fluttered and then looking straight before her she said, "The children must be fed."
She had a glorious crown of golden-brown hair piled high on her shapely head. Her eyes were golden-brown too, with liquid lights and depths in them. Nature had finished her very delicately, very lovingly one might almost say. Softly-tinted, rounded, appealing, she stood before me with the mien and instincts of a lady plainly marked, self-unconscious, asking only the barest terms of existence for herself and the babies in the cold, disordered room she called home. Oh, yes, undoubtedly she had made a mess of her life. She didn't blink the fact.
"I suppose we didn't realize what we were doing, either of us. He was only twenty-one and I was eighteen. That was six years ago. We should have waited, but we didn't know any better. He was impatient."
Again the leaf was turned and Mrs. Porter vanished on the other side of it. Regrets and heart-ache went with her. Regrets don't do much good in this world, but it would be a stony heart that was without them where Laundry Ladies are concerned.
It was some satisfaction to me to know that before Mrs. Porter entirely disappeared from the horizon, others, more influential than I, or more leisured, or both, had espoused her cause in a practical way that eliminated from my consciousness the peace-destroying pictures of two cold, and hungry babes locked in with desolation while their mother did my washing for what had never before seemed so much like a pittance.
Lizzie followed, and her frank satisfaction in "doing" for us was no small item in her favor. She was diminutive, black-robed, seamy, but invincibly cheerful.
"I ain't what you might call a large person, Ma'am," she explained to me, "but I'm that wiry. An' ef I stan' on a box er suthin' I kin reach the tubs real good."
We stood her on a box, and she reached, but all the best efforts of her attenuated arms could not keep the linen at that high-water mark of snowy whiteness Mrs. Gallegar had imparted. They soon settled back to the discouraging tone of gray with which I was only too familiar.
In our first private interview, Lizzie told her story—or a story—which contained lively elements of romance and involved numerous relatives singularly deficient in family feeling. She hailed from Pennsylvania, but was "drove from it" by cruel circumstances in which she figured always as the victim. One wept internally to see the disordered threads of romantic inclination and blind nature and misdirected impulse that were tangled in her narrow experience. She was like a bird, a little, eager beak of a face and tiny claw-hands. She had the cheerful sufficiency of the bird too, whose next meal will somehow be found when the hour for it is due.
"Ef it wasn't for me havin' no hat," she said with as near a look of dejection as I ever saw on the spry little face.
"No hat?" I exclaimed.
"Yaas 'M. Me 'at was blowed off w'en I was comin' to Toronto an' I ain't never got once sense. It takes everythin' I makes to keep me goin'. I ain't made many frens yit, an' doesn't be goin' out as I shud be. Ef yuh hears of any one wantin' a lady to wash mebby ye'd jes tell 'em 'bout me."
"But whatever do you do without a hat, Lizzie?"
"Oh, the lan'-lady she len's me hern w'en I hes far to come. Its mighty good of 'er. I'm goin' to take her to the show w'en I gits enough ahead."
I sorted industriously through sundry boxes of decayed millinery during the intervening week before Lizzie's next appearance, and had a creation evolved which really gratified me very much. It struck me as reserved, eminently suitable and yet not without claim to distinction. I wondered if I had missed my vocation, and plans for home reconstruction of last year's hat began to filter through my mind, instead of letting Madame condemn, consider, attack and triumph at a charge of fifteen or twenty good dollars.
But when Lizzie came the next Monday, behold she was already provided with an obviously new hat—a gigantic structure of mustard-colored felt adorned with a ribbon bow, a gilt butterfly and a mustard-colored feather which waved about in mid-air dejectedly.
I own to having felt some dejection myself. I was done out of an innocent pleasure. Besides rendering my efforts superfluous, it was such a fearful—but to be expected, I kept reminding myself—example of Lizzie's taste in hats. I groaned in spirit when I saw it hanging on the kitchen door, the upper part of which it all but covered, and felt out of sorts for the rest of the day.
When I came to settle up with Lizzie that afternoon at the end of her labors, she presented herself engulfed in her new acquisition, and said with evident pride, "An' 'ow do you like me noo 'at, Ma'am?"
"It's quite a hat, Lizzie," I responded evasively, "I'm glad you were able to get yourself one."
"Yaas, 'M. I got it at the 15-cent store, 'M. Do yuh think its becomin'? Me lan'-lady, she thinks its awful nice."
I certainly was taken aback. Fifteen cents! I perceived that there are resources reserved for downtown economists, quite outside the realms of my personal experience.
Lizzie didn't last long. She departed as blithely as she came. I tried to keep in touch with her for a time, but life presents too huge a surface in its modern aspect for one to follow far the flotsam of its currents. So the little creature drifted from sight and was lost again.
But about two years after I had forgotten her second name, she sprung her greatest surprise and triumph on Catherine and me. She came to see us one fine afternoon with as bonnie and blue-eyed a girl baby on her arm as you would see in a day's march. At first we couldn't take it for real, but Lizzie chirruped to it with the unmistakable hall-marks of genuine ownership, and the round-eyed, pretty thing clung to her as only baby arms cling to mother-necks. Its name was Annabella, and it was fourteen months old and wore a white dress and was undeniably real. Lizzie's face had a proud and happy look save when "he" came into the conversation. Then it clouded. "He" appeared to be a coal-heaver by trade and came home "that dirty there was no doin' anythin' wi' 'im, an' nobuddy couldn't keep the room lookin' tidy-like."
After this surprising eruption of domesticity, Lizzie, like all the rest of the long train, passed on into oblivion. I took her address and sent the baby some things, but heard no more of them.
I like to dwell upon that last picture of Lizzie with her little scrawny neck encircled by dimpled arms, and shy baby eyes peering around it at the strange lady. It was an assuaging interlude in the long list of denials life had dealt out to her, a green and tender blade springing in the bleak garden of her experience.
Then there was Bleason, the elusive, the capable, the inscrutable. She merits a whole chapter to herself. She "did" for us off and on for several years and then mysteriously disappeared without explanation other than that contained in an observation made to me a few weeks previous, to the effect that the paths of destiny might cross and recross, or run alongside for years, and then separate for ever. It was a prophetic remark.
Bleason loved the mysterious, the elusive. She enjoyed, if not the appearance of evil, certainly that dimness under which it best thrives. It supplied a certain need of her suppressed nature to be round-about and indirect. It afforded her the vicarious savor of life. It gave her a fictitious feeling of importance. I never tried to dig her out of her little secrecies, and to this I attribute the fact of her standing by us so long. For it was part of her code to appear and disappear, leaving trails of uncertainty behind. It was her way of achieving variety and self-importance. She would never give me her address. It savored of dark and devious ways not to do so, and it was an immense nuisance. This was probably what she did it for. Sometimes I almost did suspect her of the guilty past she seemed to indicate, but never quite. Her histrionic abilities were too pronounced for her to be anything she tried to make you think she was. She loved big words and used them with the glib mispronunciation of one who reads but doesn't converse. Once, unknown to her, I saw her lean her broom against the lace curtains in the living-room and peer with her short-sighted eyes along the shelves of the book-case. She took one down in a quick, secretive way and ran over the pages. Her sleeves were rolled up and her head swathed in part of a retired sheet. Her spectacles reflected the light like diminutive panes of glass. She moved with the swift, furtive gestures of one self-accused. With a little inner pang I noted the book that had attracted her attention. It was Hardy's "Life's Little Ironies."
Once, just, I caught a glimpse of the real Bleason beneath the camouflage. A very unpleasant incident in our household was reported to me, in which circumstances seemed to implicate Bleason. It became my duty to interrogate her and to drop the tone of friendly casualness which mostly governed our intercourse. I spoke very frankly indeed, not as mistress to maid, but as person to person. Somehow Bleason could be approached on no other terms. When I had made my position clear, Bleason turned to me with her habitual air of furtiveness dropping from her like a cloak and said simply.
"You have asked me a question. Instead of replying, I am going to ask you another. I have been in your employ for nearly five years. Have you ever had reason to mistrust me before, or think me capable of such a thing as this you practically accuse me of?"
Somehow, I acquitted her in my heart, though proof of her innocence I never had. It was not long afterwards that our "paths separated never to cross again." Possibly it was due to my suspicion.
I saw her once after her sudden departure. We were on the same car coming up Spadina. She sat in unmoved silence, neither avoiding nor evading me. She simply looked through me as if I wasn't there. It was admirably done, a clever bit of acting. We got off at Bloor and stood side by side. She was going West, I East. But there was no slightest gleam of recognition and I couldn't but reflect what a fine stage artist had been lost to the world in Bleason.
We are at present in Mrs. 'Enery Hedwards' capable charge. She is energetic in the pursuance of her calling, and interlards it with much general conversation to which fortunately strict attention is not at all essential. She wears a large piece of brown paper pinned across her ample shoulders, bein' as she cheerfully says, her honly weak spot. Her rubicund countenance is a guarantee of wholesomeness and honest labor, not above its task. She is a fine example of the English product at its best, bred to its lot and contented therewith. She is a confirmed optimist. When that most inopportune and unpatriotic shower boomed down upon us at nine o'clock a.m. on October 28th just as the bells were ringing in the Victory Loan Campaign, Mrs. Edwards was gazing through a rain-bedimmed window in our laundry at the drenched regions of the back yard which did not invite to the hanging out of a prospective washing. With a beaming countenance she turned to Catharine and remarked, "This must mean showers o' blessin's on the Victory Loan," a sentiment I could not help repeating in the hearing of the young pessimist of seventeen we are raising who had earlier observed gloomily that Providence seemed always on the wrong side of this war.
Life to Mrs. Edwards is a continuous performance full of color and adventure and unexpectedness, which arrange themselves in entertaining drama. She always has new interests to talk of, new episodes to relate.
"Me son-in-law, 'e's got 'is lawful discharge from the Harmy. Now ain't that good! An' nothin' much wrong wi' 'im neither, jest a bit o' gassin'. E'll come hall right in time. 'E don't talk much habout things hover beyant, and' p'rhaps hits just as well."
"Me youngest daughter—I've jis' the two on 'em—she's ben takin' up with a returned solgier that's lost 'is laig, an' the laig they give 'im don't fit, an' 'e's hordering one for 'imself. Now ain't that jes' too bad!—got to buy 'is own laig. Well, my daughter, she's took up with 'im. W'at dy'ye think o' that? Would ye be lettin' 'er go on with 'im ef you wus me?"
Naturally I seized the opportunity to be patriotic and put in a word for the unknown suitor who was in difficulty; but catching my drift, Mrs. Edwards intercepted me before I had actually committed myself.
"Look 'ere, Gryce, I says to 'er las' night. Don't you be marryin' trouble, I says. Will 'e be hable to provide a good 'ome for yuh? That's w'at yer to be thinkin' habout, says I. 'E's talkin' o' goin' West onto a farm, but w'at c'n a man wi' honly one good laig do wi' the farmin'? says I. 'Ef yuh marry trouble it'll be on yer own 'ead, an' ye can't lay no blame onto me. I've warned ye, now, I says."
Once more I felt the yawning gulf of our different points of view stretch its dark length before us. My shallow optimism could not bridge that abyss. Of course, "the livin'" was the matter of supreme importance. To it, both love and patriotism must bow. I was silent before the flash in Mrs. Edwards' keen eye, as I ever am silenced and heart-smitten by the iron-heeled problems which confront and shape the lives of those who serve.