So it was at this most favourable of times that Cleaver's boy's kitchen-maid approached her master with her request. It was just at the critical moment when the Bailie was laying aside the Convener and host, and donning the Morrison Street plumber, with the garden coat which carried so strong an atmosphere of the idyllic Bogie roll.
"If ye please, sir, there's a young man——," the voice of the kitchen-maid broke upon his dreams.
"Ah, Janet," said the Convener, getting helped into the garden coat, for he was not now so slim as once he had been, "there always is a young man! And that's how the world goes on!"
[144]
"But," said Janet, the kitchen-maid, "this is a very nice young man. You may have seen him, sir. He comes here twice every day from Mr. Cleaver's, the butcher's, sir."
"No, Janet," replied the Bailie, amicably, "I do not know that I have observed him. You see, my duties do not compel me to be cleaning the kitchen steps when nice young men come from Cleaver's!"
"Sir," said Janet, with a little privileged indignation, "James Annan, sir, is a most respectable young man."
"And he asked you to speak to me?"
"Oh no, sir! Indeed, no, sir! But I thought, sir, that in your department you might have need of a steady young man."
"I have, indeed, Janet. You are as right as ever you will be in your life," said the Convener of Cleaning and Lighting, thinking of the ravages which the traditional hospitality of the department sometimes made among his steadiest young men.
"What are his desires, Janet?" said the Bailie; "does he want a chief inspectorship, or will he be content to handle a broom?"
"Oh, not an inspectorship—at first, sir. And he can handle anything, indeed, sir," said Janet, breathlessly, for the Convener had endued himself with his coat and showed signs of moving gardenwards.
"Including your chin, my dear," said the Bailie, touching (it is very regrettable to have to state) one of Janet's plump dimples with the action which used fifty years ago to go by the name of "chucking." He had dined, his wife was safely up stairs out of harm's way, and Bogie roll glowed cloudily before him. Let these be his excuses.
"James Annan, nor no one else, has more to do with [145]my chin than I like to let them, sir," said Janet, who came from Inverness, and had a very clear idea of business.
The Bailie laughed and went out.
"I will bear it in mind, Janet," said he, for he felt that he was wasting time. He did not mean Janet's dimpled chin.
"Better put it down in your notebook—I'll fetch it, sir!" And Janet promptly fetched a black leather case, round-shouldered with importance and bulgy with business.
So the Bailie stood in the half-light which came from the kitchen window, and wetted the stub of a lead-pencil, which Janet had carried for years in the pocket of her working-dresses without ever needing it. He hesitated what to write.
"The young man's name, sir, is James Annan, and you can send the letter in care of me, sir," said Janet, with a subtle suggestiveness. She tiptoed round till she touched his sleeve, so as to look over at what he was writing.
"Thank you, Janet; anything else?" asked the Bailie.
"No, sir," said Janet, hesitating with her finger at her lip, "unless, sir, you could think to put him on this district."
So it happened that in due time Mr. Cleaver lost the services of Cleaver's boy. These valuable assets were simultaneously gained by the city corporation in the department of Cleaning and Lighting. This has been the immemorial method in which subordinate positions have been filled, according to the best traditions of the municipal service. The great thing is, of course, to catch your convener, as it were, between dinner and Bogie roll.
[146]
James Annan was placed on the southern district, and his duty was to mark in a notebook, less important but a good deal cleaner than the Bailie's, the names of the streets which were attended to in their order, and also the exact moment when each final ash-backet was heaped upon the cart.
What precise benefit trim Janet of Inverness got from the arrangement is not clear. For, being occupied during the night, Cleaver's boy could no more come for the orders early in the morning, nor yet trot whistling down the area steps an hour later with the laden basket upon his arm. So that Janet, supposing the matter interested her at all, seemed definitely to be the loser.
Yet one never knows. For the ways of girls from Inverness are deep as the sea is deep in the unplumbed places in the middle, which are painted the deepest indigo on the atlases. James Annan continued to be called Cleaver's boy, in spite of the fact that a successor at six shillings a week had been appointed, who now wore Cleaver's boy's discarded blue aprons. In other ways he would have been glad to succeed to the perquisites of Cleaver's boy. But he was a sallow-faced youth with straight hair, who used his tobacco without the aid of a pipe. So Janet did not deign to bandy a single word with the new boy. He was no more than a penny-in-the-slot machine, wound up to deliver so many pounds of steak every day. The kitchen steps were now always cleaned in the early dawn, and Janet went about in her old wrapper all the morning and most of the afternoon.
She had taken a saving turn, she said, as if it had been the measles. It was all very well for the table-maid always to wear a black frock.
But though she saw less of Cleaver's boy (the original and only genuine article), it is possible, and indeed likely, [147]that Janet of Inverness knew more of the romance of Susy and Sal than Cleaver's boy gave her credit for. Let those who try to run three or four love affairs abreast, like horses in a circus ring, take warning. Janet of Inverness had never heard of either Sal or Susy from the lips of Cleaver's boy. Nevertheless, there was not much of importance to her schemes which was not familiar to the wise little head set upon the plumply demure shoulders of Janet of Inverness.