Merely Mary Ann

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"Eessir, sometimes; and I drove back the milk-trunk in the cart, and I
rode down on a pony to the second pasture to count the sheep and the
heifers."

"Then you are a farmer's daughter?"

"Eessir. But my feyther--I mean my father--had only two little fields
when he was alive, but we had a nice garden, with plum trees, and rose
bushes and gillyflowers----"

"Better and better," murmured Lancelot, smiling. And, indeed, the
image of Mary Ann skimming the meads on a pony in the sunshine was more
pleasant to contemplate than that of Mary Ann whitening the wintry
steps. "What a complexion you must have had to start with!" he cried
aloud, surveying the not unenviable remains of it. "Well, and what
else did you do?"

Mary Ann opened her lips. It was delightful to see how the dull veil,
as of London fog, had been lifted from her face; her eyes sparkled.

Then, "Oh, there's the ground-floor bell," she cried, moving
instinctively towards the door.

"Nonsense: I hear no bell," said Lancelot.

"I told you I always _hear_ it," said Mary Ann, hesitating and blushing
delicately before the critical word.

"Oh well, run along then. Stop a moment--I must give you another kiss
for talking so nicely. There! And--stop a moment--bring me up some
coffee, please, when the ground floor is satisfied."

"Eessir--I mean yessir. What must I say?" she added, pausing troubled
on the threshold.

"Say, 'Yes, Lancelot,'" he answered recklessly.

"Yessir," and Mary Ann disappeared.

It was ten endless minutes before she reappeared with the coffee. The
whole of the second five minutes Lancelot paced his room feverishly,
cursing the ground floor, and stamping as if to bring down its ceiling.
He was curious to know more of Mary Ann's history.

But it proved meagre enough. Her mother died when Mary Ann was a
child; her father when she was still a mere girl. His affairs were
found in hopeless confusion, and Mary Ann was considered lucky to be
taken into the house of the well-to-do Mrs. Leadbatter, of London, the
eldest sister of a young woman who had nursed the vicar's wife. Mrs.
Leadbatter had promised the vicar to train up the girl in the way a
domestic should go.

"And when I am old enough she is going to pay me wages as well,"
concluded Mary Ann, with an air of importance.

"Indeed--how old were you when you left the village?"

"Fourteen."

"And how old are you now?"

Mary Ann looked confused. "I don't quite know," she murmured.

"O come," said Lancelot laughingly; "is this your country simplicity?
You're quite young enough to tell how old you are."

The tears came into Mary Ann's eyes.

"I can't, Mr. Lancelot," she protested earnestly; "I forgot to
count--I'll ask missus."

"And whatever she tells you, you'll be," he said, amused at her
unshakable loyalty.

"Yessir," said Mary Ann.

"And so you are quite alone in the world?"

"Yessir--but I've got my canary. They sold everything when my father
died, but the vicar's wife she bought my canary back for me because I
cried so. And I brought it to London and it hangs in my bedroom. And
the vicar, he was so kind to me, he did give me a lot of advice, and
Mrs. Amersham, who kept the chandler's shop, she did give me ninepence,
all in three-penny bits."

"And you never had any brothers or sisters?"

"There was our Sally, but she died before mother."

"Nobody else?"

"There's my big brother Tom--but I mustn't tell you about him."

"Mustn't tell me about him? Why not?"

"He's so wicked."

The answer was so unexpected that Lancelot, could not help laughing,
and Mary Ann flushed to the roots of her hair.

"Why, what has he done?" said Lancelot, composing his mouth to gravity.

"I don't know; I was only six. Father told me it was something very
dreadful, and Tom had to run away to America, and I mustn't mention him
any more. And mother was crying, and I cried because Tom used to give
me tickey-backs and go blackberrying with me and our little Sally; and
everybody else in the village they seemed glad, because they had said
so all along, because Tom would never go to church, even when a little
boy."

"I suppose then _you_ went to church regularly?"

"Yessir. When I was at home, I mean."

"Every Sunday?"

Mary Ann hung her head. "Once I went meechin'," she said in low tones.
"Some boys and girls they wanted me to go nutting, and I wanted to go
too, but I didn't know how to get away, and they told me to cough very
loud when the sermon began, so I did, and coughed on and on till at
last the vicar glowed at father, and father had to send me out of
church."

Lancelot laughed heartily. "Then you didn't like the sermon."

"It wasn't that, sir. The sun was shining that beautiful outside, and
I never minded the sermon, only I did get tired of sitting still. But
I never done it again--our little Sally, she died soon after."

Lancelot checked his laughter. "Poor little fool!" he thought. Then
to brighten her up again he asked cheerily, "And what else did you do
on the farm?"

"Oh, please sir, missus will be wanting me now."

"Bother missus. I want some more milk," he said, emptying the milk-jug
into the slop-basin. "Run down and get some."

Mary Ann was startled by the splendour of the deed. She took the jug
silently and disappeared.

When she returned he said: "Well, you haven't told me half yet. I
suppose you kept bees?"

"Oh yes, and I fed the pigs."

"Hang the pigs! Let's hear something more romantic."

"There was the calves to suckle sometimes, when the mother died or was
sold."

"Calves! H'm! H'm! Well, but how could you do that?"

"Dipped my fingers in milk, and let the calves suck 'em. The silly
creatures thought it was their mothers' teats. Like this."

With a happy inspiration she put her fingers into the slop-basin, and
held them up dripping.

Lancelot groaned. It was not only that his improved Mary Ann was again
sinking to earth, unable to soar in the romantic aether where he would
fain have seen her volant; it was not only that the coarseness of her
nature had power to drag her down, it was the coarseness of her red,
chapped hands that was thrust once again and violently upon his
reluctant consciousness.

Then, like Mary Ann, he had an inspiration.

"How would you like a pair of gloves, Mary Ann?"

He had struck the latent feminine. Her eyes gleamed. "Oh, sir!" was
all she could say. Then a swift shade of disappointment darkened the
eager little face.

"But I never goes out," she cried.

"I never _go_ out," he corrected, shuddering.

"I never _go_ out," said Mary Ann, her lip twitching.

"That doesn't matter. I want you to wear them indoors."

"But there's nobody to see 'em indoors!"

"I shall see them," he reminded her.

"But they'll get dirty."

"No they won't. You shall only wear them when you come to me. If I
buy you a nice pair of gloves, will you promise to put them on every
time I ring for you?"

"But what'll missus say?"

"Missus won't see them. The moment you come in, you'll put them on,
and just before going out--you'll take them off! See!"

"Yessir. Then nobody'll see me looking so grand but you."

"That's it. And wouldn't you rather look grand for me than for anybody
else?"

"Of course I would, sir," said Mary Ann, earnestly, with a grateful
little sigh.

So Lancelot measured her wrist, feeling her pulse beat madly. She
really had a very little hand, though to his sensitive vision the
roughness of the skin seemed to swell it to a size demanding a
boxing-glove. He bought her six pairs of tan kid, in a beautiful
cardboard box. He could ill afford the gift, and made one of his
whimsical grimaces when he got the bill. The young lady who served him
looked infinitely more genteel than Mary Ann. He wondered what she
would think if she knew for whom he was buying these dainty articles.
Perhaps her feelings would be so outraged she would refuse to
participate in the transaction. But the young lady was happily
unconscious; she had her best smile for the handsome, aristocratic
young gentleman, and mentioned his moustache later to her bosom-friend
in the next department.

And thus Mary Ann and Lancelot became the joint owners of a secret, and
co-players in a little comedy. When Mary Ann came into the room, she
would put whatever she was carrying on a chair, gravely extract her
gloves from her pocket, and draw them on, Lancelot pretending not to
know she was in the room, though he had just said, "Come in." After
allowing her a minute he would look up. In the course of a week this
became mechanical, so that he lost the semi-ludicrous sense of secrecy
which he felt at first, as well as the little pathetic emotion inspired
by her absolute unconsciousness that the performance was not intended
for her own gratification. Nevertheless, though he could now endure to
see Mary Ann handling the sugar-tongs, he remained cold to her for some
weeks. He had kissed her again in the flush of her joy at the sight of
the gloves, but after that there was a reaction. He rarely went to the
club now (there was no one with whom he was in correspondence except
music-publishers, and they didn't reply), but he dropped in there once
soon after the glove episode, looked over the papers in the
smoking-room, and chatted with a popular composer and one or two men he
knew. It was while the waiter was holding out the coffee-tray to him
that Mary Ann flashed upon his consciousness. The thought of her
seemed so incongruous with the sober magnificence, the massive
respectability that surrounded him, the cheerful, marble hearth
reddened with leaping flame, the luxurious lounges, the well-groomed
old gentlemen smoking eighteenpenny cheroots, the suave, noiseless
satellites, that Lancelot felt a sudden pang of bewildered shame. Why,
the very waiter who stood bent before him would disdain her. He took
his coffee hastily, with a sense of personal unworthiness. This
feeling soon evaporated, but it left lees of resentment against Mary
Ann which made him inexplicable to her. Fortunately, her habit of
acceptance saved her some tears, though she shed others. And there
remained always the gloves. When she was putting them on she always
felt she was slipping her hands in his.

And then there was yet a further consolation. For the gloves had also
a subtle effect on Lancelot. They gave him a sense of responsibility.
Vaguely resentful as he felt against Mary Ann (in the intervals of his
more definite resentment against publishers), he also felt that he
could not stop at the gloves. He had started refining her, and he must
go on till she was, so to speak, all gloves. He must cover up her
coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands. He owed that to
the gloves; it was the least he could do for them. So, whenever Mary
Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her. He found these grammatical
dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour against
publishers to boot. Very often his verbal corrections sounded
astonishingly like reprimands. Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by
her feeling that she deserved them. She would have been proud had she
known how much Mr. Lancelot was satisfied with her aspirates, which
came quite natural. She had only dropped her "h's" temporarily, as one
drops country friends in coming to London. Curiously enough, Mary Ann
did not regard the new locutions and pronunciations as superseding the
old. They were a new language; she knew two others, her mother-tongue
and her missus's tongue. She would as little have thought of using her
new linguistic acquirements in the kitchen as of wearing her gloves
there. They were for Lancelot's ears only, as her gloves were for his
eyes.

All this time Lancelot was displaying prodigious musical activity, so
much so that the cost of ruled paper became a consideration. There was
no form of composition he did not essay, none by which he made a
shilling. Once he felt himself the prey of a splendid inspiration, and
sat up all night writing at fever pitch, surrounded with celestial
harmonies, audible to him alone; the little room resounded with the
thunder of a mighty orchestra, in which every instrument sang to him
individually--the piccolo, the flute, the oboes, the clarionets,
filling the air with a silver spray of notes; the drums throbbing, the
trumpets shrilling, the four horns pealing with long, stately notes,
the trombones and bassoons vibrating, the violins and violas sobbing in
linked sweetness, the 'cello and the contra-bass moaning their
under-chant. And then, in the morning, when the first rough sketch was
written, the glory faded. He threw down his pen, and called himself an
ass for wasting his time on what nobody would ever look at. Then he
laid his head on the table, overwrought, full of an infinite pity for
himself. A sudden longing seized him for some one to love him, to
caress his hair, to smooth his hot forehead. This mood passed too; he
smoothed the slumbering Beethoven instead. After a while he went into
his bedroom, and sluiced his face and hands in ice-cold water, and rang
the bell for breakfast.

There was a knock at the door in response.

"Come in!" he said gently--his emotions had left him tired to the point
of tenderness. And then he waited a minute while Mary Ann was drawing
on her gloves.

"Did you ring, sir?" said a wheezy voice at last. Mrs. Leadbatter had
got tired of waiting.

Lancelot started violently--Mrs. Leadbatter had latterly left him
entirely to Mary Ann. "It's my hastmer," she had explained to him
apologetically, meeting him casually in the passage. "I can't trollop
up and down stairs as I used to when I fust took this house
five-an'-twenty year ago, and pore Mr. Leadbatter----" and here
followed reminiscences long since in their hundredth edition.

"Yes; let me have some coffee--very hot--please," said Lancelot less
gently. The woman's voice jarred upon him; and her features were not
redeeming.

"Lawd, sir, I 'ope that gas 'asn't been burnin' all night, sir," she
said as she was going out.

"It has," he said shortly.

"You'll hexcoose me, sir, but I didn't bargen for that. I'm only a
pore, honest, 'ard-workin' widder, and I noticed the last gas bill was
'eavier than hever since that black winter that took pore Mr.
Leadbatter to 'is grave. Fair is fair, and I shall 'ave to reckon it a
hextry, with the rate gone up sevenpence a thousand, and my Rosie
leavin' a fine nursemaid's place in Bayswater at the end of the month
to come 'ome and 'elp 'er mother, 'cos my hastmer----"

"Will you please shut the door after you?" interrupted Lancelot, biting
his lip with irritation. And Mrs. Leadbatter, who was standing in the
aperture with no immediate intention of departing, could find no
repartee beyond slamming the door as hard as she could.

This little passage of arms strangely softened Lancelot to Mary Ann.
It made him realise faintly what her life must be.

"I should go mad and smash all the crockery!" he cried aloud. He felt
quite tender again towards the uncomplaining girl.

Presently there was another knock. Lancelot growled, half prepared to
renew the battle, and to give Mrs. Leadbatter a piece of his mind on
the subject. But it was merely Mary Ann.

Shaken in his routine, he looked on steadily while Mary Ann drew on her
gloves; and this in turn confused Mary Ann. Her hand trembled.

"Let me help you," he said.

And there was Lancelot buttoning Mary Ann's glove just as if her name
were Guinevere! And neither saw the absurdity of wasting time upon an
operation which would have to be undone in two minutes. Then Mary Ann,
her eyes full of soft light, went to the sideboard and took out the
prosaic elements of breakfast.

When she returned, to put them back, Lancelot was astonished to see her
carrying a cage--a plain square cage, made of white tin wire.

"What's that?" he gasped.

"Please, Mr. Lancelot, I want to ask you to do me a favour." She
dropped her eyelashes timidly.

"Yes, Mary Ann," he said briskly. "But what have you got there?"

"It's only my canary, sir. Would you--please, sir, would you
mind?"--then desperately: "I want to hang it up here, sir!"

"Here?" he repeated in frank astonishment.

"Why?"

"Please, sir, I--I--it's sunnier here, sir, and I--I think it must be
pining away. It hardly ever sings in my bedroom."

"Well, but," he began--then seeing the tears gathering on her eyelids,
he finished with laughing good-nature--"as long as Mrs. Leadbatter
doesn't reckon it an extra."

"Oh no, sir," said Mary Ann seriously. "I'll tell her. Besides, she
will be glad, because she don't like the canary--she says its singing
disturbs her. Her room is next to mine, you know, Mr. Lancelot."

"But you said it doesn't sing much."

"Please, sir, I--I mean in summer," exclaimed Mary Ann in rosy
confusion; "and--and--it'll soon be summer, sir."

"Sw--e-e-t!" burst forth the canary suddenly, as if encouraged by Mary
Ann's opinion. It was a pretty little bird--one golden yellow from
beak to tail, as though it had been dipped in sunshine.

"You see, sir," she cried eagerly, "it's beginning already."

"Yes," said Lancelot grimly; "but so is Beethoven."

"I'll hang it high up--in the window," said Mary Ann, "where the dog
can't get at it."

"Well, I won't take any responsibilities," murmured Lancelot resignedly.

"No, sir, I'll attend to that," said Mary Ann vaguely.

After the installation of the canary Lancelot found himself slipping
more and more into a continuous matter-of-course flirtation; more and
more forgetting the slavey in the candid young creature who had, at
moments, strange dancing lights in her awakened eyes, strange flashes
of witchery in her ingenuous expression. And yet he made a desultory
struggle against what a secret voice was always whispering was a
degradation. He knew she had no real place in his life; he scarce
thought of her save when she came bodily before his eyes with her
pretty face and her trustful glance.

He felt no temptation to write sonatas on her eyebrow--to borrow
Peter's variation, for the use of musicians, of Shakespeare's "write
sonnets on his mistress's eyebrow"--and, indeed, he knew she could be
no fit mistress for him--this starveling drudge, with passive passions,
meek, accepting, with well-nigh every spark of spontaneity choked out
of her. The women of his dreams were quite other--beautiful,
voluptuous, full of the joy of life, tremulous with poetry and lofty
thought, with dark, amorous orbs that flashed responsive to his magic
melodies. They hovered about him as he wrote and played--Venuses
rising from the seas of his music. And then--with his eyes full of the
divine tears of youth, with his brain a hive of winged dreams--he would
turn and kiss merely Mary Ann! Such is the pitiful breed of mortals.

And after every such fall he thought more contemptuously of Mary Ann.
Idealise her as he might, see all that was best in her as he tried to
do, she remained common and commonplace enough. Her ingenuousness,
while from one point of view it was charming, from another was but a
pleasant synonym for silliness. And it might not be ingenuousness--or
silliness--after all! For was Mary Ann as innocent as she looked? The
guilelessness of the dove might very well cover the wisdom of the
serpent. The instinct--the repugnance that made him sponge off her
first kiss from his lips--was probably a true instinct. How was it
possible a girl of that class should escape the sordid attentions of
street swains? Even when she was in the country she was well-nigh of
woo-able age, the likely cynosure of neighbouring ploughboys' eyes.
And what of the other lodgers?

A finer instinct--that of a gentleman--kept him from putting any
questions to Mary Ann. Indeed, his own delicacy repudiated the images
that strove to find entry in his brain, even as his fastidiousness
shrank from realising the unlovely details of Mary Ann's daily
duties--these things disgusted him more with himself than with her.
And yet he found himself acquiring a new and illogical interest in the
boots he met outside doors. Early one morning he went half-way up the
second flight of stairs--a strange region where his own boots had never
before trod--but came down ashamed and with fluttering heart as if he
had gone up to steal boots instead of to survey them. He might have
asked Mary Ann or her "missus" who the other tenants were, but he
shrank from the topic. Their hours were not his, and he only once
chanced on a fellow-man in the passage, and then he was not sure it was
not the tax-collector. Besides, he was not really interested--it was
only a flicker of idle curiosity as to the actual psychology of Mary
Ann. That he did not really care he proved to himself by kissing her
next time. He accepted her as she was--because she was there. She
brightened his troubled life a little, and he was quite sure he
brightened hers. So he drifted on, not worrying himself to mean any
definite harm to her. He had quite enough worry with those
music-publishers.

The financial outlook was, indeed, becoming terrifying. He was glad
there was nobody to question him, for he did not care to face the
facts. Peter's threat of becoming a regular visitor had been nullified
by his father despatching him to Germany to buy up some more Teutonic
patents. "Wonderful are the ways of Providence!" he had written to
Lancelot. "If I had not flown in the old man's face and picked up a
little German here years ago, I should not be half so useful to him
now. . . . I shall pay a flying visit to Leipsic--not on business."

But at last Peter returned, Mrs. Leadbatter panting to the door to let
him in one afternoon without troubling to ask Lancelot if he was "at
home." He burst upon the musician, and found him in the most
undisguisable dumps.

"Why didn't you answer my letter, you impolite old bear?" Peter asked,
warding off Beethoven with his umbrella.

"I was busy," Lancelot replied pettishly.

"Busy writing rubbish. Haven't you got 'Ops.' enough? I bet you
haven't had anything published yet."

"I'm working at a grand opera," he said in dry, mechanical tones. "I
have hopes of getting it put on. Gasco, the _impresario_, is a member
of my club, and he thinks of running a season in the autumn. I had a
talk with him yesterday."

"I hope I shall live to see it," said Peter sceptically.

"I hope you will," said Lancelot sharply.

"None of my family ever lived beyond ninety," said Peter, shaking his
head dolefully; "and then, my heart is not so good as it might be."

"It certainly isn't!" cried poor Lancelot. "But everybody hits a chap
when he's down."

He turned his head away, striving to swallow the lump that would rise
to his throat. He had a sense of infinite wretchedness and loneliness.

"Oh, poor old chap; is it so bad as all that?" Peter's somewhat
strident voice had grown tender as a woman's. He laid his hand
affectionately on Lancelot's tumbled hair. "You know I believe in you
with all my soul. I never doubted your genius for a moment. Don't I
know too well that's what keeps you back? Come, come, old fellow.
Can't I persuade you to write rot? One must keep the pot boiling, you
know. You turn out a dozen popular ballads, and the coin'll follow
your music as the rats did the pied piper's. Then, if you have any
ambition left, you kick away the ladder by which you mounted, and stand
on the heights of art."

"Never!" cried Lancelot. "It would degrade me in my own eyes. I'd
rather starve; and you can't shake them off--the first impression is
everything; they would always be remembered against me," he added,
after a pause.

"Motives mixed," reflected Peter. "That's a good sign." Aloud he
said, "Well, you think it over. This is a practical world, old man; it
wasn't made for dreamers. And one of the first dreams that you've got
to wake from is the dream that anybody connected with the stage can be
relied on from one day to the next. They gas for the sake of gassing,
or they tell you pleasant lies out of mere goodwill, just as they call
for your drinks. Their promises are beautiful bubbles, on a basis of
soft soap and made to 'bust.'"

"You grow quite eloquent," said Lancelot, with a wan smile.

"Eloquent! There's more in me than you've yet found out. Now, then!
Give us your hand that you'll chuck art, and we'll drink to your
popular ballad--hundredth thousand edition, no drawing-room should be
without it."

Lancelot flushed. "I was just going to have some tea. I think it's
five o'clock," he murmured.

"The very thing I'm dying for," cried Peter energetically; "I'm as
parched as a pea." Inwardly he was shocked to find the stream of
whisky run dry.

So Lancelot rang the bell, and Mary Ann came up with the tea-tray in
the twilight.

"We'll have a light," cried Peter, and struck one of his own with a
shadowy underthought of saving Mary Ann from a possible scolding, in
case Lancelot's matches should be again unapparent. Then he uttered a
comic exclamation of astonishment. Mary Ann was putting on a pair of
gloves! In his surprise he dropped the match.

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