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Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.), a novel by Arnold Bennett |
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Chapter 7. The New Cook |
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_ CHAPTER VII. THE NEW COOK Ten minutes later Mr. James Ollerenshaw stood alone in his kitchen-sitting-room. And he gazed at the door between the kitchen-sitting-room and the scullery. This door was shut; that is to say, it was nearly shut. He had been turned out of the scullery; not with violence--or, rather, with a sort of sweet violence that he liked, and that had never before been administered to him by any human soul. An afternoon highly adventurous--an afternoon on which he had permitted himself to be insulted, with worse than impunity to the insulter, by the childish daughter of that chit Susan--an afternoon on which he had raised his hat to Mrs. Prockter--a Saturday afternoon on which he had foregone, on account of a woman, his customary match at bowls--this afternoon was drawing to a close in a manner which piled thrilling event on thrilling event. Mrs. Butt had departed. For unnumbered years Mrs. Butt had miscooked his meals. The little house was almost inconceivable without Mrs. Butt. And Mrs. Butt had departed. Already he missed her as one misses an ancient and supersensitive corn--if the simile may be permitted to one; it is a simile not quite nice, but, then, Mrs. Butt was not quite nice either. The fault was not hers; she was born so. The dropping of the kidney with a _plop_, by Mrs. Butt, on the hard, unsympathetic floor of the scullery, had constituted an extremely dramatic moment in three lives. Certainly Mrs. Butt possessed a wondrous instinct for theatrical effect. Helen, on the contrary, seemed to possess none. She had advanced nonchalantly towards the kidney, and delicately picked it up between finger and thumb, and turned it over, and then put it on a plate. "That's a veal kidney," she had observed. "Art sure it isn't a sheep's kidney, lass?" James had asked, carefully imitating Helen's nonchalance. "Yes," she had said. "I gather you are not passionately fond of kidneys, great-stepuncle?" she had asked. "I was once. What art going to do, lass?" "I'm going to get our tea," she had said. At the words, _our_ tea, the antique James Ollerenshaw, who had never thought to have such a sensation again, was most distinctly conscious of an agreeable, somewhat disturbing sensation of being tickled in the small of his back. "Well," he had asked her, "what can I do?" "You can go out," she had replied. "Wouldn't it be a good thing for you to go out for a walk? Tea will be ready at half-past four." "I go for no walk," he said, positively.... "Yes, that's all right," she had murmured, but not in response to his flat refusal to obey her. She had been opening the double cupboard and the five drawers which constituted the receptacles of the scullery-larders; she had been spying out the riches and the poverty of the establishment. Then she had turned to him, and, instead of engaging him in battle, she had just smiled at him, and said: "Very well. As you wish. But do go into the front room, at any rate." And there he was in the middle room, the kitchen, listening to her movements behind the door. He heard the running of water, and then the mild explosion of lighting the second ring of the gas-stove; the first had been lighted by Mrs. Butt. Then he heard nothing whatever for years, and when he looked at the clock it was fourteen minutes past four. In the act of looking at the clock, his eye had to traverse the region of the sofa. On the sofa were one parasol and two gloves. Astonishing, singular, disconcerting, how those articles--which, after all, bore no kind of resemblance to any style of furniture or hangings--seemed, nevertheless, to refurnish the room, to give the room an air of being thickly inhabited which it never had before! Then she burst into the kitchen unexpectedly, with a swish of silk that was like the retreat of waves down the shingle of some Atlantic shore. "My dear uncle," she protested, "please do make yourself scarce. You are in my way, and I'm very busy." She went to the cupboard and snatched at some plates, two of which she dropped on the table, and three of which she took into the kitchen. "Have ye got all as ye want?" he questioned her politely, anxious to be of assistance. "Everything!" she answered, positively, and with just the least hint of an intention to crush him. "Have ye indeed!" He did not utter this exclamation aloud; but with it he applied balm to his secret breast. For he still remembered, being an old man, her crushing him in the park, and the peril of another crushing roused the male in him. And it was with a sardonic and cruel satisfaction that he applied such balm to his secret breast. The truth was, he knew that she had not got all she wanted. He knew that, despite her extraordinary capableness (of which she was rather vain), despite her ability to calculate mentally the interest on eighty-nine pounds for six months at four-and-a-half per cent., she could not possibly prepare the tea without coming to him and confessing to him that she had been mistaken, and that she had _not_ got everything she wanted. She would be compelled to humble herself before him--were it ever so little. He was a hard old man, and the prospect of this humbling gave him pleasure (I regret to say). You cannot have tea without tea-leaves; and James Ollerenshaw kept the tea-leaves in a tea-caddy, locked, in his front room. He had an extravagant taste in tea. He fancied China tea; and he fancied China tea that cost five shillings a pound. He was the last person to leave China tea at five shillings a pound to the economic prudence of a Mrs. Butt. Every day Mrs. Butt brought to him the teapot (warmed) and a teaspoon, and he unlocked the tea-caddy, dispensed the right quantity of tea, and relocked the tea-caddy. There was no other tea in the house. So with a merry heart the callous fellow (shamefully delighting in the imminent downfall of a fellow-creature--and that a woman!) went into the front room as he had been bidden. On one of the family of chairs, in a corner, was a black octagonal case. He opened this case, which was not locked, and drew from it a concertina, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Then he went to the desk, and from under a pile of rent books he extracted several pieces of music, and selected one. This selected piece he reared up on the mantelpiece against two brass candlesticks. It was obvious, from the certainty and ease of his movements, that he had the habit of lodging pieces of music against those two brass candlesticks. The music bore the illustrious name of George Frederick Handel. Then he put on a pair of spectacles which were lying on the mantelpiece, and balanced them on the end of his nose. Finally he adjusted his little hands to the straps of the concertina. You might imagine that he would instantly dissolve into melody. Not at all. He glanced at the page of music first through his spectacles, and then, bending forward his head, _over_ his spectacles. Then he put down the concertina, gingerly, on a chair, and moved the music half-an-inch (perhaps five-eighths) to the left. He resumed the concertina, and was on the very point of song, when he put down the concertina for the second time, and moved the tassel of his Turkish cap from the neighbourhood of his left ear to the neighbourhood of his right ear. Then, with a cough, he resumed the concertina once more, and embarked upon the interpretation of Handel. It was the Hallelujah Chorus. Any surprise which the musical reader may feel on hearing that James Ollerenshaw was equal to performing the Hallelujah Chorus on a concertina (even one inlaid with mother-of-pearl) argues on the part of that reader an imperfect acquaintance with the Five Towns. In the Five Towns there are (among piano scorners) two musical instruments, the concertina and the cornet. And the Five Towns would like to see the composer clever enough to compose a piece of music that cannot be arranged for either of these instruments. It is conceivable that Beethoven imagined, when he wrote the last movement of the C Minor Symphony, that he had produced a work which it would be impossible to arrange for cornet solo. But if he did he imagined a vain thing. In the Five Towns, where the taste for classical music is highly developed, the C Minor Symphony on a single cornet is as common as "Robin Adair" on a full brass band. James Ollerenshaw played the Hallelujah Chorus with much feeling and expression. He understood the Hallelujah Chorus to its profoundest depths; which was not surprising in view of the fact that he had been playing it regularly since before Helen was born. (The unfading charm of classical music is that you never tire of it.) Nevertheless, the grandeur of his interpretation of the Hallelujah Chorus appeared to produce no effect whatever in the scullery; neither alarm nor ecstasy! And presently, in the midst of a brief pianissimo passage, James's sensitive ear caught the distant sound of chopping, which quite marred the soft tenderness at which he had been aiming. He stopped abruptly. The sound of chopping intrigued his curiosity. What could she be chopping? He advanced cautiously to the doorway; he had left the door open. The other door--between the kitchen and the scullery--which had previously been closed, was now open, so that he could see from the front room into the scullery. His eager, inquisitive glance noted a plate of beautiful bread and butter on the tea-table in the kitchen. She was chopping the kidney. Utterly absorbed in her task, she had no suspicion that she was being overlooked. After the chopping of the kidney, James witnessed a series of operations the key to whose significance he could not find. She put a flat pan over the gas, and then took it off again. Then she picked up an egg, broke it into a coffee-cup, and instantly poured it out of the coffee-cup into a basin. She did the same to another egg, and yet another. Four eggs! The entire household stock of eggs! It was terrible! Four eggs and a kidney among two people! He could not divine what she was at. Then she got some butter on the end of a knife and dropped it into the saucepan, and put the saucepan over the gas; and then poured the plateful of kidney-shreds into the saucepan. Then she began furiously to beat the four eggs with a fork, glancing into the saucepan frequently, and coaxing it with little touches. Then the kidney-shreds raised a sound of frizzling, and bang into the saucepan went the contents of the basin. All the time she had held her hands and her implements and utensils away from her as much as possible, doubtless out of consideration for her frock; not an inch of apron was she wearing. Now she leant over the gas-stove, fork in hand, and made baffling motions inside the saucepan with the fork; and while doing so she stretched forth her left hand, obtained some salt, and sprinkled the saucepan therewith. The business seemed to be exquisitely delicate and breathless. Her face was sternly set, as though the fate of continents depended on her nerve and audacity in this tremendous crisis. But what she was doing to the interior of the saucepan James Ollerenshaw could not comprehend. She stroked it with a long gesture; she tickled it, she stroked it in a different direction; she lifted it and folded it on itself. Anyhow, he knew it was not scrambled eggs, because you have to stir scrambled eggs without ceasing. Then she stopped and stood quite still, regarding the saucepan. "You've watched me quite long enough," she said, without moving her head. She must have known all the time that he was there. So he shuffled away, and glanced out of the window at the stir and traffic of Trafalgar-road. "Tea's ready," she said. He went into the kitchen, smiling, enchanted, but disturbed. She had not come to him and confessed that she could not make tea without tea-leaves. Yet there was the teapot steaming and puffing on the table! _ |
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