The Dust Flower. Basil King
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lessons from her new-found friend.
For some little time she had been alone. Steptoe finished his conversation with Miss Walbrook on the telephone, but did not come back. She sat at the table feeding Beppo with bread and milk, but wondering if, after all, she hadn’t better make a bolt for it. She had had her breakfast, which was an asset to the good, and nothing worse could happen to her out in the open world than she feared in this great dim, gloomy house. She had once crept in to look at the cathedral and, overwhelmed by its height, immensity, and mystery, had crept out again. Its emotional suggestions had been more than she could bear. She felt now as if her bed had been made and her food laid out in that cathedral—as if, as long as she remained, she must eat and sleep in this vast, pillared solemnity.
And that was only one thing. There were small practical considerations even more terrible to confront. If Nettie were to appear again …
But it was as to this that Steptoe was making his appeal. “I sye, girls, don’t you go to mykin’ a fuss and spoilin’ your lives, when you’ve got a chanst as’ll never come again.”
Mrs. Courage answered for them all. To sacrifice 76 decency to self-interest wasn’t in them, nor never would be. Some there might be, like ’Enery Steptoe, who would sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, but Mary Ann Courage was not of that company, nor any other woman upon whom she could use her influence. If a hussy had been put to reign over them, reigned over by a hussy none of them would be. All they asked was to see her once, to deliver the ultimatum of giving notice.
“It’s a strynge thing to me,” Steptoe reasoned, “that when one poor person gets a lift, every other poor person comes down on ’em.”
“And might we arsk who you means by poor persons?”
“Who should I mean, Mrs. Courage, but people like us? If we don’t ’ang by each other, who will ’ang by us, I should like to know? ’Ere’s one of us plyced in a ’igh position, and instead o’ bein’ proud of it, and givin’ ’er a lift to carry ’er along, you’re all for mykin’ it as ’ard for ’er as you can. Do you call that sensible?”
“I call it sensible for everyone to stye in their proper spere.”
“So that if a man’s poor, you must keep ’im poor, no matter ’ow ’e tries to better ’imself. That’s what your proper speres would come to.”
But argument being of no use, Steptoe could only make up his mind to revolution in the house. “The poor’s very good to the poor when one of ’em’s in trouble,” was his summing up, “but let one of ’em ’ave an extry stroke of luck, and all the rest’ll jaw against ’im like so many magpies.” As a parting shot 77 he declared on leaving the kitchen, “The trouble with you girls is that you ain’t got no class spunk, and that’s why, in sperrit, you’ll never be nothink but menials.”
This lack of esprit de corps was something he couldn’t understand, but what he understood less was the need of the heart to touch occasionally the high points of experience. Mrs. Courage and Jane, to say nothing of Nettie, after thirty years of domestic routine had reached the place where something in the way of drama had become imperative. The range and the pantry produce inhibitions as surely as the desk or the drawing-room. On both natures inhibitions had been packed like feathers on a seabird, till the soul cried out to be released from some of them. It might mean going out from the home that had sheltered them for years, and breaking with all their traditions, but now that the chance was there, neither could refuse it. To a virtuous woman, starched and stiffened in her virtue, steeped in it, dyed in it, permeated by it through and through, nothing so stirs the dramatic, so quickens the imagination, so calls the spirit to the purple emotional heights, as contact with the sister she knows to be a hussy. For Jane Cakebread and Mary Ann Courage the opportunity was unique.
“Then I’ll go. I’ll go straight now.”
As Steptoe brought the information that the three women of the household were coming to announce the resignation of their posts, Letty sprang to her feet.
“May I arsk madam to sit down again and let me explyne?”
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