He gets the good chair, and the best cup and plate, and a knife and a fork, and everybody watches how he uses them, on a pie. No one dares talk, so he has to do the talking himself, though he leans on Mary for help, there being so much in what he says that’s hard to get. He tells us many things, gossip most of it, about the foremen in the mill and their romances, and the practical jokes he likes to play on Mr. Ermen. And a whole other heap, too, about growing up in Germany among the Calvins, and hating it because the Calvins credit that all time is God’s time and wasting a minute is a sin, and life isn’t meant for enjoying but for working only.
As for working, he hates his situation at the mill. He hates the position it puts him in, up there on a pillar, for he’s happier down here with us lot. But he judges it good for himself also. “Because Germans of my particular caste know too little of the real world. It’s an education of sorts, and will do me good.”
What he’s learnt so far—and he swears to learn more before he leaves for Germany again in a year’s time—is that the workers are more human in daily life, less grasping, than the philistines who employ them, and that the philistines are interested only in money and how much it can buy them. The least grasping of all, he thinks, are the Irish. And, as far as he can see, they work just as good as the English.
Says he: “It’s true that to become something skilled like a mechanic, the Irishman would have to take on English customs, and become more English, which would be a formidable task, for he’s grown up without civilization, and is close to the Negro in this regard. But for simpler work which asks for more strength than skill, the Irishman is just as good.”
All this sort of science, he talks, and more besides, but what’s stayed with me—what my mind lingers on oftenest—is what he says about the way we talk. At this stage, we’ve all imbibed a fair amount, and most of the neighbors are already sleeping: Seamus is on the ground away from his straw, the children are in their different spots, only the wife, Nan, is still with us. It’s late, and I’m trying to signal to Mary to put an end to it. We all have work to get us up in the morning. But she’ll not break in on him, not in his stride, and what he’s saying is interesting to her, or so it seems from the way she has her chin in her hands and is staring at him, tranced.
What he’s talking about is the old language. He says he has heard it spoken in the thickest of the slums, as if this is something to wonder at. From there, he gets to talking about the English as it sounds in the Irish gob.
“I can read and understand twenty-five languages,” he says. “But I admit to being tested by the English spoken by you and your people.”
Then he gets us to say a few things, and he laughs and repeats what we say, and then we laugh.
“Grand this and grand that,” he says. “Everything is always so splendid for you! Through it all, you manage to stay so cheery and optimistic!”
At this, Nan near on falls off her stool for the laughing. “I’ll tell you something for naught, girls,” she says. “These foreigners are shocking queer!”
Then we all roll around, and Frederick does too, though he’s only allowing himself to be taken along, for he doesn’t really know what we’re laughing at.
Mary takes it on herself to let him in. “For the Irish,” she says, “grand doesn’t mean more than middling.”
Nan sees Frederick’s muddled arrangement. “We’ll need something strong to get us through this,” she says, and goes to get the bottle she keeps safe for the priest.
Meantime, Mary goes over and sits down on his lap—right there in plain sight—and scratches his whiskers and plucks his cheek. “Listen now, Foreign Man. If a thing is grand, it’s holding together. If a situation is grand, it’s tolerable good. If a body is grand, she’s alive and likely to do. No more and no less than that.”
Nan can barely get the spirit into the glasses for all her snorting and shaking. I’m just mortified and want the pageant to end so I can face the mill tomorrow with some of my honor intact. Frederick, for his part, takes to pondering what he’s been told, and when he’s over with that, he looks about our little room.
“And a house?” he says, being the type who wants to know the in-and-out of things precise. “If a house is grand?”
Mary stops smiling then, and puts down playing with his necktie, and turns to us, and takes us in—stunned-like—as if remembering us from a distant past. And then she says, “If a house is grand, my love, it comes with a rent that will leave you enough to go on.”
Now, awake, Frederick gets up and dodders about for his clothes. He’s having another cock-stand. I watch him muffle it into his breeches. In his room he keeps a tin, lozenges meant for sustaining your piss and vinegar, though I can’t see the use of them myself, it being a fine and thirsty animal God’s made of him.
“Are you well, Lizzie?”
“Well enough.”
He puts on his shirt, leaves it tucked out to hang over the stubborn article. “I’ve missed the morning. Why didn’t you wake me? I’ll have to skip my walk and work late to make up. Can you bring my meals up?” He picks up his shoes and puts his coat over his arm. “Lizzie, did you hear me?”
I nod. I heard you.
I put onto my side, haul the covers up. “Frederick?”
“Ya?”
“Jenny thinks it’s a good idea to get another maid.”
“There’s one coming on Sunday.”
“Another one, I mean, over and above her.”
“Oh? Jenny thinks so? And what do you think?”
“I think it’d be a good way to get Pumps out of Manchester.”
“Pumps?”
“My niece. Half-niece. Thomas’s eldest.”
“Oh, him.”
“Aye, him. He has her in a bad way. When she’s not locked at home looking after her nine brothers, she’s on a corner selling bloaters till all hours. It’s only a matter of time before she gets into trouble. She could come down and help me here. It’d be a chance for her.”
“Let me think about it.” He goes for the door.
“Oh, and, Frederick?”
“What now?”
“Can you open the curtain before you go?”
He looks at me like I’ve just asked to be fanned.
VI. Capital
Not shy of the curtsies. Round-boned. Clean-cuffed. Plainness of a good human sort. Frederick sits her in the morning room and reads us through her character.
“It says here that you can read and write. That will be helpful. And you can milk a cow. Interesting. And make butter. A country girl?”
“Devon, sir.”
“Oh, and look, how about that! You can do the scales on the piano.”
Aye, with her feet. Blindfolded.
“Listen here now, Miss Barton,” I says. “Do you know anything?”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?”
“About keeping a house?”
“Well, as it says there—”
“I don’t care a whit for what it says on that bit of paper. I want you to