Mrs. Gage
By WALTER TAPLIN No doubt one should be careful about using the word 'saint.' There was certainly nothing obtrusively religious about Mrs. Gage, though some of those she watched over at 99 Gower Street may have known whether she said her prayers or went to church on Sunday. But she was good, she did her work quietly and thoroughly, she was kind and courteous and un- obtrusive and she had an unfailing way of bring- ing calm in what was sometimes a disturbed tea- cup of a world. There was something in her manner, for which I think the right word is com- passion, that just conceivably could be mistaken for sentimentality. But she was not particularly sentimental. Neither is the intention of these notes about her, though it is difficult even to set down the plain facts about Mrs. Gage without running the risk of sounding mawkish. There was nothing mawkish about her. She was practical, earthy, solid. She possessed just those qualities which make it perfectly clear now to anyone who knew the inside of the Spectator office that a saint was walking about there for thirty years or more.
To newcomers to Gower Street she was the old lady who came in on their first morning and set down a cup of excellent coffee. To the oldest hands she was part of the place—the best part. The Spectator has long had the good fortune to be well served by a handful of quiet people who have done the routine pedestrian jobs thoroughly and reliably while the directorial and editorial characters have come and gone, making splashes or striking sparks and getting most of the fun. Among these good servants, who may as well be given the honourable name they have earned, Mrs. Gage was in place, at home. To say that she was 'lowly, and servisable' is certainly not to place her on a level below that of the other people who have been in and out of the Spectator office in her time. Words which were good enough to describe Chaucer's squyer, a gentle- man who also waited at the table, are as appropriate to her.
Now that she is dead, the books have been turned up and those who did not know it have been told that she first came to the paper at its old office at 13 York Street, Covent Garden, in August, 1927, as a waitress. Those were the days of editorial luncheons, when the dining-table was frequently used for its proper purpose as well as for keeping papers off the floor or supporting the elbows of participants in meetings. She became housekeeper and cook, offices for which she was magnificently qualified. She was a late representa- tive of the vanishing race of fully trained servants. She went on for years in the exercise of her arts, until the war swept aside the tablecloth and the silver and the best she could do was to bring round trays of coffee and tea. A few years ago she came back into part of her old element when the Spectator began to give occasional cocktail parties, and Mrs. Gage assembled drinks and managed to give to the food some of the quality of those old literary luncheons.
She worked hard, she grew old, but she always did as much as her failing body allowed. Walking was long an effort to her, she moved more and more slowly, but she always did her work. She observed the occasions and festivals of a small newspaper office with care. She became the centre and mother of the band of juniors who met in her kitchen at lunch time. At the latest of the annual Christmas parties she delighted to be serenaded by fain Hamilton and Brian Inglis with Scottish and Irish songs.
Mrs. Gage came daily from her little house in Chelsea to the Spectator office in Bloomsbury for as long as she could, which was until a week before she died. She was so frail at the end that a member of the staff, an old friend of hers, used to call for her and bring her along in his car. He sometimes tried to persuade her to rest at hone, until, one morning, her sister quietly suggested to him that he must take her to work because that was what she wanted most of all. But two weeks ago it was clear that even this journey was too much, and when she came to say goodnight to a few of her old friends in the office, they knew, as she herself most clearly knew although she did not say so, that this was her last day at 99 Gower Street. She went home, and last week, on September 3, so we have since been told, she carefully washed, did her hair, which, even though she was seventy-five years old, was heavy and difficult to care for, went to bed, and died.
Remember this lady, who took pains to die clean and neat, without fuss.
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