When, in the October of 1896, Louie Causton left Mortlake Road, with
half the nurses of the home waving their handkerchiefs after her, she
went to a house near the Parson's Green end of Wandsworth Bridge Road.
As she left that house before Christmas, going to another one near the
Walham Green Town Hall, there is no need to describe it. Neither need
the Walham Green house be described, since from there she went, in
February 1897, to yet another house, in a street off the Bishops Road,
Fulham. These and other removals did not necessitate the use of a
pantechnicon; a four-wheeler sufficed on each occasion. Louie, the boy
and the nurse went inside; the top was quite big enough for her
belongings. She stuck to the south-western district; at no time did
she move farther east than when she took two rooms in Cheyne Walk,
over a bicycle shop near the Chelsea suspension bridge--which rooms,
by the way, she was forced to leave at an hour's notice, her landlord,
a man of straw, being himself ejected and involving his sub-tenant in
his own catastrophe. She kept to this district because of its nearness
to Kingston and the Molyneux Arms. By the time the boy was nine months
old she was living in Tadema Road, not far from where the Chelsea
power-station now stands.
The nurse whom she had engaged was a link--save for Chaff the only
one--with Trant. She was, indeed, her own old French governess, once
Céleste Martin, now Céleste Farnier and a widow. She was a
Provençale, from Arles. On the death of her husband, which had taken
place while Louie had been still at the home in Mortlake Road, she had
sought out Chaff with a sheaf of testimonials, and by-and-by Louie had
engaged her. She paid her ten shillings a week, on the distinct
understanding that she must not hesitate to accept the first decent
post that offered. It was already plain that, even if Céleste could
have brought herself to leave the little girl to whom she had taught
the order of the personal pronouns in French, her affection for Master
Jim would have haled her back again.
Louie changed her abode so frequently for one reason and another. In
perhaps a third of the cases the landladies to whom she offered
herself as a lodger found reasons for asking her to leave when they
saw that her letters were addressed to "Miss Causton." Then, to save
cab fares, Louie began to make her position plain at the outset.
Sometimes this made a difference, sometimes none. On the whole, London
S.W. showed itself charitable or merely indifferent. By May 1897 she
was at another house in Wandsworth Bridge Road.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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