MARY JANE EXPLAINS.
It is no use my trying to stop myself. I’m sure I’ve tried hard enough. When I changed my name from Mary Jane Buffham to Mary Jane Beckett by marrying Harry, my sailor sweetheart (God bless him!), I said to myself—Now, Mary Jane, my girl, no more pens and ink. You’ve written a book and had it published, and the newspaper gentlemen have been most kind in what they said about it. You’d better be satisfied with that, and do your duty in that state of life unto which you have been called, that state being mistress of a sweet little hotel—inn, some people will call it, but it’s quite as much right to be called an hotel as lots of places that have “Hotel” up in big letters all over them—in a pretty village not very far from London. Of course I have enough to do, though Harry takes a good deal off my shoulders; but there are so many things that a landlady can do to make a house comfortable that a landlord can’t, and I take a great pride in my dear little home, and everybody says it’s a picture, and so it is. Harry says it’s my training as a thorough servant that makes me such a good mistress, and I dare say it is. Our house is called “The Stretford Arms,” and we put “Hotel” on the signboard underneath it soon after we had it, and made it pretty and comfortable, so that people—nice people—came to stay at it.
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But, oh dear me, before we got it what a lot of trouble we had! If you have read my “Memoirs” you know all about me and Harry, and how I left service to marry him, and he made up his mind—having a bit of money saved, and some come to him from a relative—to take a nice little inn in the country; not a public-house, but something better, with plenty of garden to it for us to have flowers, and fruit, and fowls, and all that sort of thing; and we made up our minds we’d have one with a porch and trellis-work, and roses growing over it, and lattice windows, like we’d seen in a play before we were married.
We hadn’t gone into business when my book came out in a volume. When the publisher sent me a copy, I thought, “Oh, how proud I shall be when I show this to Harry!” I declare I could have cried with rage when I took the brown paper off and saw the cover. It was most wicked, and upset me awfully. There on the cover was a picture of me sitting in my kitchen with a horrid, grinning policeman, with his arm round my waist. I threw the book on the floor, the tears streaming down my face. It was such a bitter disappointment.
Harry came in while I was crying, and he said, “Why, my lass, what’s the matter with you?” And I sobbed out, pointing to the book, “Look at that, Harry!” Harry picked the book up, and when he saw the cover his face went crimson under the sunburn.
He said, “Did this ever happen, Mary Jane?” and I said, “No, Harry. Do you think I would ever have demeaned myself like that?”
He looked at the grinning idiot of a policeman for a minute, and then he brought his fist down hard right on his nose (the policeman’s). Then he said, “Put it out of my sight, and never let me see it again.” But presently he said, “There must be something about you and a policeman in the book, or they wouldn’t have put him hugging you on the cover. Which chapter is it? I’ll read it and see what the truth of this business is.”
I recollected then that there was something about a policeman, so I said, “No, Harry, dear, don’t read it now; you’re not in a fit state of mind. But whatever there is, I swear he didn’t sit in my kitchen with his arm round
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my waist; and he—he—he wasn’t—a grinning idiot like that.”
I took the book away from Harry, and wouldn’t let him see it then. But he kept on about it all the evening, and I could see it had made him jealous as well as savage; and it was very hard—all through that horrid picture the pleasure I had looked forward to was quite spoilt. But so it is in this world; and how often it happens that what we have been longing for to be a pleasure to us, when it comes is only a disappointment and a misery!
Harry said to me that evening that he would go to London and see the publishers, and have it out with them about the picture. He said it was a libel on my character, and he wasn’t going to have his wife stuck about on all the bookstalls in a policeman’s arms. But, I said to him, the publishers didn’t mean any harm, and it was no good being cross with them, or making a disturbance at their office.
But some time afterwards I wrote a little note to Messrs. Chatto and Windus about it, and Mr. Chatto wrote back that he was very sorry the picture had caused words between me and my husband, and, in the next editions, it should be altered, and soon after that he sent me a proof of the new cover, and it was Harry with his arm round my waist instead of the policeman, which makes all the difference.
There were many things that I shouldn’t have written, perhaps, if I’d been quite sure that they would be published, and my husband would read them; but, after all, there was no harm, and I only wrote the truth. I wrote what I saw, and it was because it was the real experience of a real servant that people read it, and, as I have reason to know, liked it. And now, after I have been landlady of a village hotel, doing a nice trade both in the bar and in the coffee-room (why coffee-room, I don’t know, for there is less coffee drunk in it than anything), I find myself putting down what I have seen and heard on paper, just as I did in my “Memoirs.”
People say to me sometimes, “Law, now, fancy your noticing that!—I never did;” and that’s the secret of my being an authoress, I suppose. I keep my eyes open, and
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my ears too; and if I see a character, I like to watch it, and find out all about it.
I’ve seen some strange characters in our inn, I can tell you; and as to the people in the village, why, when you come to know their stories, you find out that every place is a little world in itself, with its own dramas being played out in people’s lives just the same as in big towns. Yes, there are village tragedies and village comedies, and the village inn is the place to hear all about them. I haven’t got an imagination, so I can’t invent things, and I think it’s a good thing for me, because I might be tempted to make up stories, which are never so good as those that really happen. I thought when I came to this village I should have nothing to write about, but I hadn’t been in it long before I found my mistake. I hear a lot, of course, in the bar-parlour, because it’s like a club, and all the chatty people come there of an evening and talk their neighbours over, and I hear lots more in the house from the market women and from our cook and the people about the place, and I can promise you that I have learnt some real romances of real life—rich and poor, too—since I became the landlady of the ‘Stretford Arms.’
We didn’t get into the place all at once. Oh dear me, what an anxious time it was till we found what we wanted! and the way we were tried to be “done,” as Harry calls it, was something dreadful. Harry said he supposed, being a sailor, people thought he didn’t know anything; but when we came to compare notes with other people who had started in the business, we found our experiences of trying to become licensed victuallers was quite a common one.
We had a beautiful honeymoon first; but I’m not going to write anything about that, except that we were very happy—so happy that when I thanked God for my dear, kind husband and my happy life, the tears used to come into my eyes. But all that time is sacred. It is something between two people, and not to put into print. I don’t think a honeymoon would come out well in print. It is only people who are having honeymoons who would understand it.
After we had had a nice long honeymoon, Harry began
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to think it was time we looked out for something; so he said, “Now, little woman, this is all very nice and lazy and lovely, but we must begin to think about the future. The sooner we look for a place the better.”
So every day we read the advertisements in the papers of public-houses and inns and hotels in the country which were for sale.
Whenever we saw “nice home,” or “lovely garden,” or “comfortable home just suited to a young married couple,” we wrote at once for full particulars. When we wrote to the agents about the best ones, I found that it was very like the paragon servants advertised—they had just been disposed of, but the agent had several others equally nice on hand if we would call.
It was very annoying to find all the “lovely gardens” and “charming homes,” which were so cheap, just gone, and to get instead of them particulars of a horrid place at the corner of a dirty lane, with only a back yard to it, or something of that sort.
We went to see some of the places the agents or brokers sent us, and they were very much nicer in the advertisements than they were in themselves.
One house we went to look at we thought would do, though the situation seemed lonely. We wrote we would come to see it on a certain day, and when we got there, certainly there was no mistake about its doing a good trade. They asked a lot of money for it, but the bar was full, and in the coffee-room were men who looked like farmers having dinner and ordering wine, and smoking fourpenny cigars quite fast. And while we were having dinner with the landlord in his room, the servant kept coming in and saying, “Gentleman wants a room, sir,” till presently all the rooms were gone, and people had to be turned away.
“It’s like that now nearly always,” said the landlord. “If it wasn’t that I must go out to Australia, to my brother, who is dying, and going to leave me a fortune made at the diggings, I wouldn’t part with the house for anything.”
“Where do the people all come from?” said Harry. “The station’s two miles off.
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”
“Oh,” said the landlord, “there’s something against the Railway Hotel—it’s haunted, I believe, and this last month everybody comes on here. If you like to start the fly business as well, you’ll make a lot of money at that. Flys to meet the trains would fill you up every day.”
We went away from the house quite convinced that it was a great bargain, and Harry said he thought we might as well settle with the agents, for we couldn’t do better.
But when we got to the station we had just missed a train, and had an hour to wait, so we went to the Railway Hotel. I sat down in a little room, and had some tea, while Harry went into the smoke-room to hear the talk, and see if he could find out about the place being haunted, and if it was likely to be haunted long.
In half an hour he came back looking very queer. “Mary Jane,” he said, “that swab ought to be prosecuted”—meaning the landlord of the inn we had been after.
Then he told me what he’d found out in the smoke-room, hearing a man talk, who, of course, didn’t know who Harry was. He was making quite a joke about what he called the landlord’s “artful dodge,” and he let it all out.
It seems the place we had been after had been going down for months, and the landlord had made up his mind to get out of it before he lost all his capital. So to get a good price he had been getting a lot of loafers and fellows about the village to come in and have drinks with him and fill up the place, and the day we came nobody paid for anything, and the farmers in the coffee-room were all his friends, and it was one man who kept taking all the bedrooms that the servant came in about when we were there.
Wasn’t it wicked? But it opened our eyes, and showed us that there are tricks in every trade, and that we should have to be very careful how we took a place by its appearance.
But, cautious as we were after that, we had one or two narrow escapes, and I may as well tell you something about them as a warning to young people going into business. Of course we laughed at the tricks tried to be played on us, because we escaped being taken in, but if we had invested our money and lost it all in a worthless concern, we shouldn’t have been able to laugh. Perhaps
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Harry would have had to get another ship, and I should have had to get another situation, and be a servant again. And a nice thing that would have been with my ba——
But I must not anticipate events. I know more about writing now than I did when I put my “Memoirs” together, and I’m going to see if I can’t write a book about our inn, and our village, and all that happened in them, without troubling the gentleman who was so kind to me over my first book. I wish he had seen to the outside as well as the inside, and prevented that nasty, impertinent, grinning policeman behaving so disgracefully in my kitchen on the cover.
I say we can afford to laugh now; and there are many things in life to laugh at when we are on the safe side that we might cry at if we weren’t. I know that I always laugh when people say about me not having changed my initials, but being Mary Jane Beckett instead of Mary Jane Buffham, and they quote the old proverb:
“Change your name and not the letter,
Change for the worse and not the better.”
