Riders in the Chariot (38 page)

She said, "So this is Ruth. They tell me you have been the most wonderful girl. I hope you will not feel, Ruth, that I am in any way an intruder. I hope we shall be able to--shall we say--share the duties of family life?"

Jessie Newsom was so prudent.

But now she hesitated, because she found she was looking at the girl's forehead, which was all that had been offered of the face, and it was altogether expressionless.

Miss Jessie Newsom made an excellent wife and stepmother, the girl heard, both from those who had been shocked by Ruth Joyner's behaviour, and from her own brothers and sisters, whose letters dwindled as continued distance loosened the relationship.

Shortly after Miss Newsom's advent, the eldest girl had approached her father, and announced, "I have decided to look for work now."

To which the father replied, "If that is how you feel, Ruth. We will try to find you something close by."

"I have decided to emigrate," she said. "Chrissie Watkins's auntie hears Chris is doing well in Sydney. I have got all the information from Mrs Sinnett, and will write about the passage, if you will help me. And with money, too, in the beginning. I will pay the money back, of course, because of all these other children."

The father made noises in his throat. What could he say, he wondered, to console? Instead, he brought out something typical of himself.

"You should learn to forgive, Ruth. That is what we have been taught."

But she did not answer. In her misery, she was afraid she might have fetched up a stone. Nor did she dare touch, for she could have buried herself in her father's chapped lips, and been racked upon the white, unyielding teeth.

So she went. Her father bought her a tin box in which to pack her few things. Her brothers and sisters presented her with a mauve satin handkerchief sachet, on which was embroidered across a corner:
A clean nose is not a luxury
_. She was wretchedly seasick, or unhappy. Other girls, who lit cigarettes, and crossed their legs with professional ease, and knew how to ask for something called a gimlet, did not care for her company. Her skirts were too long, nor did her conversation add anything to their experience of life. So she sat alone, and watched the ocean, the like of which she had never seen, so huge and glassy. And off the Cape an elderly gentleman, who had a business at some place--Gosford, was it?--proposed to her, but it would have been silly, not to say wrong, to let herself accept.

At night, while the other young women were fumbling with temptation on the steerage deck, she said her prayers, and was mysteriously, personally comforted. Released finally from the solid body, her soul was free to accept its mission, but hesitated to trust to its own strength. And hovered, and hovered in the vastness, until recognizing that the rollers were folded into one another, and the stars were fragments of the one light. So she would stir in her sleep, and smile for her conviction, and often one of her cabinmates, as she combed the knots out of her own salty hair in the merciless little flaky mirror, would question the expression of the sleeping girl's face.

On arriving in Sydney, Ruth Joyner discovered that her friend Chrissie Watkins had married, and gone to live in another state. So there was no one. But she found work easy enough, first in some refreshment room, where for a while she carried trays with the thick white cups and the fingers of fruit cake or madeira. She would set the orders carefully down, and return to the urns, which smelled perpetually of dregs.

All was going well, it seemed--customers often smiled, sometimes even read her passages from letters, and once she was asked to examine a varicose vein--when the lady supervisor called Ruth, and said, "Look, love, I will tell you something. You will never make good as a waitress. You are too slow. I am only telling you, mind."

Because, really, the lady supervisor was kind. She had only been standing a long time, and the heat had eaten the seams of her black satin.

Ruth Joyner then turned to domestic service. She took a situation as kitchen-maid in the house of a retired grazier. She would sit cutting the vegetables into shapes. Or, standing at the full sink, she would sing the hymns she remembered from Home. Until the cook objected, who was bringing out her own niece, from Cork, and had never been accustomed to associate with any but Catholic girls.

Ruth had worked in several large houses before she came to that of Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, which was, in fact, her final situation, and which remained with her in memory as the most significant phase of her independent life. Though why, it was difficult to say. Certainly she met her husband. Certainly the house was large, and white, and solid, with a magnolia tree standing at the door. But Mrs Chalmers-Robinson herself was the flimsiest of women, and her servant Ruth Joyner received nothing of material advantage from her mistress, beyond her wages, and a few cast-off dresses she would have been too embarrassed to wear. But the house of the Chalmers-Robinsons (for there was a Mister, too) remained important in Ruth Joyner's mind.

She had been advised by an employment agency to apply for the situation, which was described as that of house-parlourmaid.

"But I have had no experience," the girl suggested.

"It does not matter," said the woman.

Ruth had discovered a great deal did not matter, but at each fresh piece of evidence her brow would grow corrugated, and her eyes wear an expression of distress.

Even Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, who was on her way to a luncheon engagement, and who had just recovered a very pretty sapphire brooch on which she had recently claimed the insurance, did not seem to think it mattered greatly.

"We shall give you a trial," she said, "Ruth--isn't it? How amusing! I have never had a maid called Ruth. I think I shall like you. And I am quite easy. There is a cook, too, and my personal maid. The gardener and chauffeur need not concern you. Both the men live out."

Ruth looked at Mrs Chalmers-Robinson. She had never met anyone quite so dazzling, or so fragmentary.

"Oh, and my husband, I forgot to say, he is in business," the brilliant lady thought to add. "He is away a good deal."

Mrs Chalmers-Robinson looked at Ruth, and decided the face was about as flat as a marble tombstone. But one that was waiting to be inscribed. (She would make an effort to remember that, and work it up as a remark for luncheon.) But she did so hope she had discovered in this girl something truly dependable and solid. (If she contemplated Ruth Joyner literally as some
thing
_, it was because she did long for marble, or some substance that would not give way beneath her weight and needs, like the elastic souls of human beings.)

Then Mrs Chalmers-Robinson got up, in mock haste, protesting mock-hungrily, "Now I must fly to this wretched lunch!"

And gashed her new maid with a smile.

Ruth said, "Yes, madam. I hope you will enjoy yourself."

To the mistress, it sounded quaint. But touching.

"Oh, we shall see!" She laughed. "One never can tell!"

She allowed herself to feel sad for a little in the car, but turned it into an agreeable sensation.

Ruth had soon accustomed herself to life at the Chalmers-Robinsons'. She was quite perfect, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson remarked to her husband--not that perfection does not always have its faults--and it had to be admitted Ruth was slow, that she breathed too hard when handing the vegetables, and preferred not to hear the telephone. Then, sometimes, she would stand at the front door, particularly at evening, as if looking out on a village street. Her mistress intended to mention that, but failed to do so, perhaps even out of delicacy, or affection. So the massive girl continued to stand in the doorway, in the porch, beside the magnolia tree, and as the details of her dress and body, from the points of her starched cap to the toes of her Blancoed shoes, dissolved in evening, she might have been some species of moth, or guardian spirit, poised on magnolia wings before huge, flapping flight.

For one so laborious, she moved very quietly, and succeeded in a way in permeating a house which, until then, had worn rather a deserted air. If the flour which dusts a big yellow cottage loaf had fallen on the marquetry table, where the visiting cards were left in a salver, it would have appeared less unnatural after the new maid's arrival.

Once Mr Chalmers-Robinson, on returning from a club at dusk, had brushed against her in the entrance.

"I beg your pardon, sir," she said. "I was listening to the locusts."

"Oh!" he jerked back. "The what? Yes! Damn pests are enough to burst anybody's eardrums!"

What did one say, he wondered, to maids?

"I am glad you came, sir, tonight. There is something good," she announced. "There is crumb cutlets and diplomatic pudding."

So that he began to feel guilty, and realized he was a stranger in his own house.

Mr Chalmers-Robinson preferred clubs, where he could come and go as he pleased, without becoming involved in intimate relationships, or irritated by insubstantial furniture. He liked men better than women, not as human beings, but in the context of their achievement and public lives. Women were too apt to reduce everything to a personal level, at which his self-importance began to appear dubious. He resented and avoided such a state of affairs, except when the sexual impulse caused him to run the risk. Then the personal did add somewhat to the pleasurable, and he could always write off his better judgment as the victim of feminine dishonesty. He was certainly attractive to women, in his well-cut English suits, smelling of brilliantine and cigars, and he accepted the favours of a few. If he ceased to find his wife attractive after he had bought her, he continued to admire her ability for getting out of tight corners, and eschewed divorce perhaps for that very reason.

E. K. Chalmers-Robinson (Bags to those who claimed to be his friends) was himself an expert at tight corners, though admittedly there had been one or two at which he had failed to make the turn. One such minor crash carried off a yacht, a promising colt, a Sèvres dinner service, and the personal maid, soon after Ruth Joyner appeared.

"My husband is a business genius, but no genius is infallible," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson explained. "And Sèvres, one has to face it, is just a little bit--well, blue."

"I suppose so, madam," Ruth agreed.

She liked genuinely to please, for which, all her life, she remained the friend of children.

Her mistress continued.

"Between ourselves, Washbourne has always been something of a trial. I used to hope it was only gallstones, but was forced gradually to the conclusion that she is a selfish old creature. You, Ruth, I am going to ask to take on a very few of her duties. No doubt it will be amusing for you to lay out my clothes, and hand me one or two things when I dress."

"Of course, madam," Ruth said.

And was soon initiated into mysteries she had never suspected.

Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had reached the stage of social evolution where appearance is not an end, but a martyrdom. Never for a moment must she cease tempering the instrument of her self-torture. She was forever trying on and putting off, patting and smoothing, forcing and easing, peering into mirrors with hope, and retreating in disgust. She would hate herself bitterly, bitterly, at moments, but often at the eleventh hour, when she had worn herself to a frazzle, she would achieve an unexpected triumph by dint of a few slashes and a judicious diamond. Then she would look at herself in the glass, biting her still doubtful mouth--a Minerva in a beige cloche.

She would breathe, "Quickly! Quickly! The side pieces."

And Ruth would hand the little whisks of hair which the goddess used to wire beneath her helmet, for motoring, or luncheon.

But Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was not all on the surface. Not by any means.

Once she confided in her maid, "I am going to let you into a secret, Ruth, because you at least have shown me loyalty and affection. I am thinking of taking up Christian Science. I feel it will be so good for me."

"If it is what a person needs," hesitated the slow maid.

Once her mistress had dispatched her to the bay with a toy bucket to fetch sea-water for her pearls, because that was what the pearls needed.

"Oh, what I
need
_!" Mrs Chalmers-Robinson sighed. "I did at one time seriously consider going over to Rome. Because, as you realize, I have such an insatiable craving for beauty, splendour. But I had to give up all thought of it in the end. Quite frankly, I could not have faced my friends."

"I believe," Ruth began.

But Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had already left to keep an appointment, so she did not hear what her maid believed, and the latter was glad, because her struggling tongue could not have conveyed that infinite simplicity.

Alone in the house--for the cook would retire into livery indolence, and the gardener had a down on somebody, and the chauffeur was almost never there, for driving the mistress about the town--the maid would attempt to express her belief, not in words, nor in the attitudes of orthodox worship, but in the surrender of herself to a state of passive adoration, in which she would allow her substantial body to dissolve into a loveliness of air and light, magnolia scent, and dove psalmody. Or, in the performance of her duties, polishing plate, scrubbing floors, mending the abandoned stockings, gathering the slithery dresses from where they had fallen, searching carpets for silverfish, and furs for moth, she could have been offering up the active essence of her being in unstinted praise. And had some left over for a further expression of faith to which she had not been led. Whenever the doorbell rang, she would search the faces of strangers to discover whether she would be required to testify. Always it seemed that some of her strength would be left over to give, for, willing though she was to sacrifice herself in any way to her mistress, the latter would never emerge from her own distraction to receive.

So the intentions of the maid haunted the house. They lay rejected on the carpets of the empty rooms.

Not always empty, of course. There were the luncheons, and the dinners, but preferably the luncheons, for there the wives were without their husbands, and their minds could move more nimbly divested of the weight: wives who had stupid husbands were in a position to be as clever as they wished, whereas stupid wives might now put their stupidity to its fullest, its most profitable use.