The book of Martha E-Book

Mrs. Dowdall

• Herausgeber: Bu Classics Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

Martha is a woman of strong opinions and even stronger willpower, navigating the domestic and social challenges of her era with unflinching resolve. Through her eyes, we see a world of rigid expectations and the subtle ways a clever woman can reclaim her agency. The narrative is rich with character detail and a quiet, subversive humor that challenges the status-coated norms of the time. This is a sophisticated character study that celebrates the intellect and resilience of a woman who refuses to be overlooked.

Leseprobe

CHAPTER I: MARTHA

This book ought by rights to have borne Ruth’s name on the cover instead of mine. Of the fifty years I have lived the first twenty were scattered and lost. The remaining thirty were gathered as they came, and threaded on a wire which formed them into a serviceable chain; that wire was Ruth. She has now broken off and formed other ties, therefore the years that remain will probably be scattered like the first, for there can be no second Ruth. It may be, even, that I shall be driven to spend my declining days in an hotel. Meantime I have a record of experiences common to many Marthas.

When I decided on the title it happened to be Ruth’s day out. I had intended, as a matter of course, to submit the name to her, and then, suddenly, a wave of mutiny swept over me.

“The book at least shall be mine,” I said to myself. “Ruth has taken possession of my house, my tradespeople, my children, and, what was dearer still, my leisure. What little freedom I have enjoyed has been procured by a wearisome amount of guile, but my pen is still my own and shall remain in my possession.”

It is true that David would never have burst into immortal song had it not been for his persecutors who goaded him to lament yet his works are published under his name and not under that of the Bulls of Bashan. Therefore I call this the Book of Martha and not of Ruth.

When I married, thirty years ago, I desired to lead a simpler life than is led by most people. So many women seem to me like parasites living on the combined labour of husband and servants. My friend Elizabeth Tique, with whom I often stayed, kept a cook, three maids, and an odd man, and these wretches somehow contrived to fill every inch of the small house and garden. It was almost impossible to go into any room without finding some one aggravatingly dressed in spotted cotton, rustling along with either a damp cloth or a carpet-sweeper or a tray laden with food. On one occasion, I remember, I went to my bedroom to write letters, having left one of the cotton-backs clearing away the breakfast, and the other, she of the damp cloth, in possession of the drawing-room. By some marvellous sleight of foot they both contrived to reach my room before me, and were busily engaged there when I arrived.

“Don’t go away,” I said pleasantly, and gathering up my blotting-pad and papers I returned to the drawing-room to write. I was in the full swing of inspiration when the door was burst open by a third skirmisher in the hated uniform. She made her offence far worse by pretending that her visit was only one of wanton light-heartedness.

“It’s all right, Miss,” she said, “I can come back by and by; it was only to do the grate.”

I swallowed the word that rose to my lips—Elizabeth says it doesn’t do for the servants to know we say these things—and took my papers to the garden; but my letter was no longer witty. It was full of short disjointed sentences and tedious information. In a few minutes I was startled by a terrific rumbling on the gravel. The odd man was approaching to mow the lawn.

“Sorry to disturb you, Miss; I shan’t be above ’alf an hour,” was the way he put it. There are many possible variations of the same crime.

“Elizabeth,” I said as politely as I could when she came out on her way to the shops, “have you a wine-cellar?”

“Yes, a beauty. Why?”

“Do you mind telling me—is this the day for cleaning it out?”

“What nonsense; we don’t clean it out.”

“Then may I sit in it?”

Elizabeth was busy with the fish, but she told me where the key was, and I went down with a candle. It was cool and quiet and cobwebby, and I got on nicely. I was just getting my second wind and had refilled my fountain pen when I heard a voice—that of my enemy with the cloth—outside the door.

“This is the cellar, Mr. Brown. I think master wished the port put in the second bin from the left. I’ll just give it a wipe out if you’ll excuse me.”

I tried the coach-house, but it happened to be George’s day for swilling it after he had finished the grass, and when I found a place in the greenhouse away from the drip he came and put manure on the tomatoes.

I was engaged to be married to a man with the usual professional income, and I began to see very clearly that if I was to be happy in a small house the number of people living in it must be reduced as much as possible. That night when the servants were all in bed I took up my letters again and explained this theory to James. He agreed with me.

We were married early in January, and went into our house a week later. I had engaged two maids, both of whom had been recommended to me as thoroughly capable, and likely to bring light into the dark places of my inexperience. They did indeed; I saw all its weak points very clearly in the lurid glare of their bright ideas. But that was later. On our first day at home I went down to the kitchen as soon as my husband had gone out. I picked my way through the cinders, crumbs, bacon-rind, and unclassified fluff upon the floor, and stood for a moment blistering before the range where a blast-furnace raged behind the bars. The remains of breakfast, which suggested the snatched meal of a burglar, prepared in haste and darkness, were on the table, from which Clara, the housemaid, rose and made a slippery exit after the manner of a mouse.

I murmured something polite about being too soon, to which the cook replied that they were a bit late on account of the range, and the curtain rose on a farce which will run as long as I keep a cook.

The bell at the back door then fell into the first of a long and distressing series of convulsions, and Ruth went to its assistance.

“Pleas’m, the butcher,” she reported.

There are many ways of saying “Pleas’m, the butcher,” and Ruth’s was most discouraging. I knew at a glance that she had not properly masticated her breakfast, and that the arrival of the butcher was not unlike that of twins at the end of a numerous and undesired family. She looked as though her morning had been made up of a series of unwelcome events and this were the last straw.

“Tell him to call again,” I said hastily; “this is an absurd time to come.” I was going to retire when a second convulsion shook the house to its foundations.

“Do you wish fish’m?” said Ruth, just as if I had sent the fish. I hedged and tried to shift the blame on her.

“Do we want fish?”

“Just as you wish’m,” she said, standing still in front of me.

She made no attempt to suggest anything.

“I’ll come,” said I, “and see him myself.”

I found a pert-looking male child writing his name on the pantry window-sill and whistling.

“What fish have you got?” I asked.

“Plaiceakecoddensole,” he replied, eyeing me up and down.

I ordered something—anything to convey the idea that I spoke with knowledge and deliberation. The greengrocer behaved like an uncle, and told me that, whatever else I went without, a nice cauliflower was a thing I should never regret buying. I expected him to add that it would last a lifetime and clean again as good as new.

During this time Ruth had disappeared into the back kitchen, whence she brought what at first I took to be a bucket of castor-oil and a dead rabbit. With the rabbit (which turned out to be her favourite dishcloth) she then deluged the table from the contents of the bucket, and the kitchen was filled with a warm smell of wet onions. When she had “cleaned up” as she called it—which meant that after her septic operation on the table she swept the etceteras on the floor into a heap and drew the fender over them—we discussed the question of food.

One of the trials of my life is the necessity for devising three relays of food immediately after a good breakfast. It makes me feel as though I were the owner of a yard full of turkeys, whom it is my painful duty to prepare for a daily Christmas. James enjoys his breakfast and forgets about it, returning after a hard day’s work to a dinner as unpremeditated as that which the ravens brought to Elijah; not so mine, which brings with it haunting memories of yesterday’s sorrows. I cannot share his enthusiasm for a vol-au-vent which I have so often met before in less happy circumstances; I feel about it as an undertaker might who should meet his clients masquerading in a ballroom. James came home at one o’clock, and we went indoors at once, as he has only a short time to spare in the middle of the day. The table was not laid.

“Clara,” I said, “do you know the time? We must have luncheon at once.”

“I think Ruth’s just sending it up now, m’m,” she answered. “The meat only came ten minutes ago.”

James spilled a good deal in his haste, but what little he was able to eat in eight minutes he was extremely good tempered about, and praised warmly. A great many men would have behaved in a manner that might have made me live and die a bad housekeeper. If he had been sulky, or violent, or sarcastic, or resigned, or dignified, I should have taken no steps whatever. My mind would have settled upon a touching picture of the sorrows of women, and how their life is one long martyrdom to the habits of men and the want of habits of domestic servants, and I should have shrugged my shoulders and acquired tastes of my own. Then this book would never have been written. As it was, my husband’s smiling farewell and his pathetic symptoms of indigestion bravely borne gave me pain that vented itself in anger against its original cause—Ruth—and behind her again the butcher. I flew into the study and poured out my wrath on a sheet of the best note-paper.

“Mr. Jones, “Dear Sir,

“Mrs. Molyneux is simply furious because Mr. Jones’s wretched beef did not turn up till ten minutes to one. If Mr. Jones finds himself unable to keep a clock, Mrs. Molyneux will be delighted to deal with a butcher who can.”

I licked the envelope and the stamp viciously and rang the bell. “Post this at once, please, Clara,” I said, “and when Jones’s boy calls in the morning for orders, tell him that a thousand years are not as one day to me, and that he may take his detestable tray of entrails to—” I stopped just in time—“back to the shop,” I added. “Yes’m,” said Clara, looking surprised and, I thought, frightened. “Would you like a cup of tea, m’m?”

If one is what these people call “upset” they always suggest tea. Tea as a remedy for the butcher’s non-appearance struck me as absurd.

“No, Clara,” I replied, “what I want is not tea but punctuality. All the same I will have a cup.”

Of course it was impossible to say anything to Ruth that afternoon. It would have been making too much fuss over what probably was not her fault.

CHAPTER II: THE COOK

A lady who has kept house with marked success for fifty years once said to me: “My dear, there are only three things of any importance in a house. First the husband, then the nurse, then the cook, and after that it doesn’t matter.”

At the time this collected wisdom slid through my head almost without recognition. I thought my husband perfect, and took it for granted that I knew all about him. I did not then require a nurse, and in my limitless ignorance I supposed a cook to be a person who cooks things, and whom, if she does not cook things well, one replaces by another cook who does. How, indeed, should I know more of the nature and habits of cooks than the general public knows of the physiology of the animals which it sees behind bars at the Zoo? At home I knew that there was a certain fat striped creature in the kitchen, whom my mother was obliged to propitiate before we could get scones for breakfast, and to whom I vaguely believed my father said prayers night and morning. But meals came up and went down, in winter and summer, autumn and spring, and that was all that I really knew about them.

How should an outsider such as I was know that the personality of a cook is as pervasive in a small house as that of a mellow cheese; that she is as powerful as a dog in a hen-house, as moody as a gipsy, as amenable to flattery as an old gentleman, and as inured to dirt as a pig? So far as I had thought at all, I had always imagined that there was a household formula called “giving orders to the cook.” I had not been married a year before I knew that this is a term invented by novelists, and which has no resemblance at all to the fact it is intended to describe. It is a recognised fallacy like the Cambridge May week, which is not in May, but every one knows what is meant. Giving orders to the cook really means a very elaborate process of mental suggestion. We learn by painful initiation what are the things she is capable of cooking, and we try, so far as is possible, to direct her choice of what she is willing to cook within the limits of her capacity. By the same process of mental suggestion we add to her repertoire of dishes, and according to the strength of our will and the receptivity of her mind, she elects by and by to cook more or less what we want. It is the art of mental suggestion, not the art of ordering, that makes a mistress the real keeper of a cook.

For instance, when I first knew Ruth I used to make mistakes like this: “You might make a curry of the mutton, Ruth, and give us some stewed pears for lunch. We will have fried fillets of fish to-night, with cutlets from the end of the neck that you have left, and a batter pudding with jam sauce.” And Ruth would reply, “Yes’m.”

When the luncheon came up there would be haricot and apple tart, and for dinner fillets of fish done in a wonderful wine sauce, cutlets, it is true, and a sweet omelette.

“Ruth,” I said next morning, “you did not cook what I ordered yesterday.”

“Didn’t I, m’m?” she replied, with the candid look of a company promoter accused of fraud. “I’m sure I don’t know how that happened. I quite thought you said I was to do up the mutton.”

“Look at the slate.” I pointed out where curry was ordained in large letters.

“Why, so it was, m’m; I am sorry. I remember now, I hadn’t any chutney by me, and I knew master wouldn’t fancy curry without a bit o’ chutney so I just made a nice haricot instead.”

“And what about the fried fish?” I asked. “And the pudding?”

“Ah,” said Ruth, “yes’m, we shall want a nice frying-pan. The one I have isn’t near large enough to do a nice bit of fish and it’s not the right shape. A nice enamel one the next time you are going into town if you can be troubled to remember.”

Now in these days if I wanted the meals I have described I should begin:

“How about the mutton, Ruth? What are you going to do with that?”

“Well, I think, m’m, a haricot would be as nice as anything.”

“Quite so. And I suppose we shall be obliged to have fish for dinner.”

“Yes’m—fried fish I suppose?” (Ruth’s strong point is frying.)

“Some nice little fillets I think master likes, m’m.”

“Yes, Ruth, fish, cutlets, and a pudding. I suppose a batter pudding would take too many eggs?”

“Oh, no, m’m, not at all. I could manage with two nicely.”

“Very well then; that will do beautifully. We always like your batter puddings so much better than those they have at Buckingham Palace; they are so much lighter, and that jam sauce you make is a dream. And, by the way” (this is just as I am leaving the kitchen), “we must have another curry some day; Admiral Tobasco said he had never met one to touch yours that night.”

“Would you care to have the mutton curried to-day, m’m, as a change from the haricot?”

“Oh, yes, Ruth, that would be delightful. What a good idea.”

But it takes years to learn.

New dishes are acquired in the same way. This is what the novice does:

“Ruth, I want you to try this beef à la Soudanese, it is quite simple.”

“Beef what, m’m?”

“Beef à la Soudanese. You see it is done in this way.”

I read the recipe, while Ruth turns away in silence and begins sweeping up the hearth.

“Well, Ruth, what do you think of it?”

“Oh, just as you please’m, of course.”

“It is quite easy, isn’t it?”

There is a sudden convulsion amongst the fire-irons, and Ruth turns round wiping her eyes.

“Of course, it must be as you like, m’m. It’s your place to give orders, I know, but I’m afraid I shall never give satisfaction the way I am. My mother’d tell you—and indeed I’d sooner she came and spoke to you herself—that I never had no training in fancy dishes, and all you asked for was a good plain cook, which I am, as her ladyship said herself when I left. Of course, you’d very likely not know, being a young lady and having no experience in such things, that we poor girls have to make our own way, and to be respectable is as much as we can hope for, and that I always have been, and I’d sooner starve than take a place where I couldn’t do my duty, and I think it would be better if you were to get some one more experienced; I haven’t been feeling at all settled lately, the way things have been”—and so on.

If by chance your mind’s ribs are made of steel and your sympathies of spun granite, as some women’s are, this network of unintelligible wrath will have no power to ensnare you, but the average woman takes years to unwind herself from the thraldom of female hysteria—and then she wriggles out of it by guile.

“Ruth,” I say now, “we had a lovely dish at the club last night. They made a great fuss about it, and said only an expert could cook it, but I believe that your clever brain could find out what it is made of. It looked like—” and then I describe it.

Ruth makes a wild conjecture and says it sounds very like the à la Marengo that master likes so much.

“I don’t know whether it is quite that,” I say thoughtfully, “but we might look in one of the cookery books and see whether there is anything like it to start on.”

Then I turn up the recipe for the dish and suggest that we should try that, and see how it turns out; perhaps, I add, that she need not trouble to make scones that afternoon and that the cold tart will do for dinner.

As regards their pervasiveness and their power, it is a remarkable fact that although most of the inmates of a house know what the master wants, and a few know what the mistress wants, and nobody knows what the housemaid wants, yet every one knows what the cook wants. If the cook is satisfied the whole house works smoothly; if not, an atmosphere of awe and discomfort pervades everywhere, meals are partaken of in silence or in a sort of nervous bravado, no bells are rung, people fetch their own boots, and are courteous to one another about the toast sooner than ask for more. And this omnipotent creature in the stripes and a collar that will not fasten before ten in the morning is, as I have said, moody and capricious to the last degree. She says it is the range, but it is not really. Left to myself, as I have been sometimes, I can spend weeks without having a word with the range. In fact, his commonplace obedience to rules has often bored me sadly, and I have wished that he would, just for once, heat up on his own initiative and never mind the flues, or even that he would get in a temper and smoke when all was well and the dampers regulated to perfection.

But sometimes he and cook cannot hit it off. I may go down, for instance, at the proper time, neither too early nor too late, and be met by a smell that even a very old skunk would find trying.

“My dear Ruth,” I say, “is it the milk again or what?”

“It boiled over,” says Ruth, looking outraged and insulted, “although I only left it for a minute. I never saw such heat in my life.”

“How extremely tiresome,” I say, frowning at the range. Really he might have been more tactful on this day when I wanted a special soufflé for luncheon. “I wonder whether the man did anything to it the last time he was here?” I say very loudly and distinctly; and then becoming innocent and diffident I suggest, “You don’t think shutting down that damper a little might help, do you?”

Ruth pushes in the damper, muttering something about “must have hot water for washing up,” although the water is already bubbling and roaring in the cylinder—but there, she is a good girl, and you can’t have everything. Only, I do wish sometimes that the range had rather more tact and less common sense.

Talking of ranges reminds me that there are days when she says it is impossible to keep the range clean. Those are the days when she boils everything at full gallop so that it slops over with a horrid frittering noise and the smell gets even into my hair-brushes. I suppose that there are cooks who have a sense of smell, but they probably die very young and leave only those who cook from memory. One question often puzzles me. Does a good chef ever go near the scullery? Can real art survive within fifty yards of that thing which feels like seaweed and looks like a tennis net? or that tangle of greasy grey wire that speeds the departing and welcomes the coming occupant of a saucepan? Can nightingales’ tongues be prepared at a zinc table where pink and grey rabbit-skins, potato peelings, white of egg, and the clammy skeletons of fish are gathered together in reckless confusion?

See a cook’s cupboard and die! It is very like Naples. There are fifty small tins all exactly alike, except that some are sticky, some greasy, and some black with coal dust; their lids are bent into fantastic shapes which prevent them from being opened without a struggle. There are pepper-pots whose holes are stopped up with fat and rust; glass jars containing different sizes of corrugated white bullets; nameless brown powders at the bottom of blue paper bags, screwed up at the neck, and with a currant sticking to the bottom; copies of last year’s Times stained with paraffin; a cashmere boot, much worn at the heel; fire-lighters smeared with glue and sawdust; a spoon with a piece of cold bacon in it, and one of your best plates from upstairs—chipped.

I suppose Ruth thinks that because we are but dust she had better go on building us up.

CHAPTER III: THE HOUSEMAID

The worst thing about housemaids is their restlessness. Their passion for traveling about from one room to another becomes at last a sort of nervous disease. I have already described my discomfort in the constant traffic of Elizabeth Tique’s small house, and the excellent plans I made to ensure solitude and peace in my own. But does anyone suppose for a moment that one single-handed mistress can check the migratory instincts of a full-grown housemaid, any more than she could impede the perpetual silent passage of a tortoise from the artichoke bed to the hot-house and round by the rhododendrons?

I worked hard at the problem for some years. When we are young and hopeful it is quite easy to imagine that we are altering the facts of Nature. We talk glibly about our schemes for reforming drunkards, of the likelihood of the British working man becoming interested in art, and so on. In the same way I saw no difficulty then in the idea of persuading a housemaid to finish one room at a time. I spoke very nicely about it at first. I said:

“Clara, I wish that you would begin one room at a time and then finish it, instead of going about doing little bits of things in each. It makes you so ubiquitous.”

“I beg pardon, m’m?”

“So here, there, and everywhere,” I explained. “Of course it is very nice to have you so active, but now, for instance, why couldn’t you finish my sitting-room or my bedroom? I don’t mind which, so long as I could have somewhere to write. You chased me about this morning as if I were a hen that wanted to sit at the wrong time. You know I hate having my legs dusted.”

“I was going to do the windows, m’m, as soon as you went out.”

“But, Clara, you know quite well that if I went out I should find you in the first shop I went to, polishing the grocer’s nose or something—”

“Beg pardon, m’m?”