Part 7

I have heard Mrs. Beehive say of one of our most prosperous neighbours that they had “struggled up from the Palmerston Road.” They were certainly a little battered and jaded when they got there: “there” being a handsome residential mansion on the edge of the Park. It has a tennis lawn, a vegetable garden, a garage, four entertaining rooms, ten bedrooms, butler’s pantry, electric light, ground-floor kitchens, and every modern convenience--altogether about as much material for annoyance and waste of time as can well be imagined. By the time Tom was sixteen and Anne fourteen, our doom was drawing near. In spite of my resistance, James and I were about to struggle up from the Palmerston Road; I saw it coming. Our pleasant little house was falling to bits over our heads. We were eight where we had been but four, and (this settled it) Ruth was getting angry. She wanted help in the kitchen, and there was nowhere to put any help at night. James, too, was bothered by the gramophone; Tom and Anne wanted a tennis lawn; nurse wanted a room where the dressmaker could sew (she made the nursery floor so bitty). Nurse even spoke of the bandboxes containing the winter hats as if they had recently broken out like a plague. When every one had displayed their grievances, I remembered that I wanted another room myself in which to escape from them--the aggrieved parties--a question-proof room if possible with only one door. I had thought of an underground suite of apartments like that of the Duke of Portland, with a glass roof. It would have been such a pleasure to watch the numerous legs of my tormentors as they ran about looking for me. I told the efficient female that we thought of moving, and she said: “Ah, I knew you would have to sooner or later.” I assured her that it was quite undecided, and that if we did move it would be into a smaller house. The odious creature smiled falsely, and said, of course that was the ideal life. They themselves never knew what peace was until they moved into a small house, and one really well-trained servant could run everything for eight people quite easily. That is all very well for her. She has given up making ices in boots and omelettes in hats, and now eats nothing but nuts. She is so vilely efficient that she secured from her harassed Maker the only sample he had of a patient husband who can and will digest anything. She kept the pattern and made a little outfit of children of the same convenient kind. Then, I suppose, no more were stocked, as, on the whole, there is no great demand for docile nut-eating men. They do not provide enough incident for the average household.

When James was thoroughly fired with the struggling-up idea, he set his mind towards the topmost pinnacle of ambition. A house near the Park was not enough for him, we must move into the country. “Where does the country end and the county begin?” I asked. “The county, I understand, is the thing to aim at.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I always thought it was the whole caboodle, town and country and all.”

“But, then, where do the county families come from?” I asked.

“The large provincial towns, I believe,” James replied without looking up from his book.

“Can you live right in town and be a county family?” (Silence.)

“What county families do we know?”

“Oh, the Higginbottams and the Crackers and the Fitzmullets--do go away.”

“But they all live in the town except the Fitzmullets, who are seven miles from a railway station.”

“If you don’t go away at once,” said James, “I will see that the whole county, wherever we are, calls on you, and you will die of a slow, insidious poison. They will poison your mind and your dress and your language. Do you see?”

I left the subject then. We shall come back to it later, because the struggling up of a species from one vantage-point to another is a fascinating study for those who love Nature, and I have not half got to the bottom of this county business yet; it is so involved. In the meantime there was the move itself.

Of all the experiences most calculated to humble the mighty a house move is the most humiliating. One’s household possessions lose all reticence, decency and moral sense. They flaunt themselves and cry aloud to the passers-by for attention. They behave more like Neapolitan beggars than anything else--maimed beggars on the spree. I have seen antics performed by my own furniture that made me long to burn down every city of the Empire and be numbered amongst the beasts of the field. An undertaker’s work seems wholesome and cheerful compared to that of the furniture-remover. He gets an ingrained sense of squalor that corrupts his senses and his memory until ugliness is to him not only inevitable but appropriate. I met the foreman packer staggering up our garden path with a wardrobe on his head. In one hand he flourished a picture (with the glass broken) representing the Duke of Wellington standing with drawn sword on the top of a mountain; in the other a fire-screen that was once intended for a jumble sale, but had been mislaid for years behind the plate-chest.

“For the drawing-room, I suppose,” he observed, and passed on. I ran after him, protesting that both were marked “not to go”; but when I reached the house I found them in the middle of the drawing-room floor with seven unspeakable cushions marked “cook’s bedroom,” a warming-pan (unearthed from heaven knows where), James’s large and particularly ugly writing-table, and the dining-room carpet neatly tacked down.

The efficient female tells me it is the easiest thing in the world to move. You just mark everything with the number of the room where it is to go. But she forgets that a wombat with its brain amputated could tell at a glance to which room her things belong, and she takes everything with her. There is a place for every horror and every horror is in its place. The hat-rack, the dining-room chairs and curtains, the assorted oddments for the spare bedroom, and the only comfortable furniture (rather specially dusty velvet with bob fringe) for the smoking-room. You cannot even mistake the pictures, for all those belonging to the drawing-room are water-colours with yellow frames, the dining-room has the “portraits in oils,” those for the bedrooms are photogravures representing the emotions (and it does not matter how they are distributed), historical pictures go in the passage, the agricultural and sporting in the smoking-room, and in the bathroom go the family groups and churches. So the foreman easily makes a nice job of it. It is a painful experience to find how easily some one else can fit us with a suit of circumstances which do not belong to us, just by expecting them to be ours. They pop a whole environment to which they are accustomed over our heads and button it round the neck before we have time to escape. It took me a whole week to free myself from a certain Mrs. Simpson, into whose form I was buttoned by the foreman packer with his preconceived notion of what a lady moving house ought to be like. He had such firm faith in Mrs. Simpson, and expected so confidently to find her in my house, that his faith removed the mountain of my individuality, and I became his ideal. His mind was so steeped in Mrs. Simpson, he was so incapable of recognising the existence of any married woman but Mrs. Simpson, that he was obliged to fish Mrs. Simpson out of his pocket and clap her over my head before he could adjust his mind to understand what I wanted. When he first came to see me about the arrangements, he looked me up and down and metaphorically said: “Excuse me, I will just fetch Mrs. Simpson, and then we shall know where we are.” As he fixed me with his eye, I felt myself becoming like the lady in an advertisement for tea. I could feel the chocolate-like richness of the fluid I should pour out for my lace-begarbed friends who sat amiably smiling round the mixed biscuits and the cruet. I knew that I had on a speckled blouse with a wired collar, and a short tweed skirt, and that I looked just thirty-seven, and was extremely sensible and good-natured. My own house that I loved so much disappeared under the petrifying expectation of that foreman, and at the sight of his notebook there sprang up dishevelled pink paper lamp-shades, photograph frames in the form of banjos and sunflowers, rickety overmantels, and everything that Mrs. Simpson always had. All Mrs. Simpson’s past surged into my veins. I remembered how I had gone with Mr. Simpson (who was rather a darling in those days) to buy our furniture, and how I, sighing after a heavy day amongst the suites, had said: “I think we have done everything now except the ornaments for the drawing-room mantelpiece.”

“Yes,” I said dreamily to the foreman, “everything is to go please--the drawing-room ornaments--and the overmantel--and the cosy corner--and the what-not.”

“I beg pardon, m’m,” he interrupted, “they’ll be in the drawing-room, I suppose. I don’t see what you’re describing here.”

“I am sorry,” said I. “It was your friend, Mrs. Simpson, who put me out for the moment.”

“I think there must be some slight mistake, m’m,” he said, “I don’t seem to remember a Mrs. Simpson.”

“No, no,” I answered, making a great effort to possess myself again, “of course there is no such person; I know that. But now we really must get on.”

“You leave everything to me, mum,” he assured me, “and we’ll move everything, just as it is now.”

“But, please,” I begged, “I don’t want everything moved. You know I said that a few minutes ago. There is a lot of rubbish in the house that is not to go at all. You will be very careful, won’t you, not to take what is marked “not to go”?

He promised, with tears of enthusiasm in his eyes, and he took everything, without exception. I found an old potato, that Ruth had left in the sink, sprouting under the spare room bed a fortnight after we moved in; it had a large white label round its neck with “not to go” printed on it. I was so worked up by this discovery that I wrote to the foreman about it, and he replied that he was very sorry; it had been a misunderstanding. He understood that No. 2 bedroom was the servants’ apartment, it seemed so bare.

I had really had a good dose of Mrs. Simpson before the foreman assaulted me with her. She was a great friend of the house-agent. He had acted for her for years, and I had a sickening day in her shape when we were looking for houses. The first agent I went to brought her with him to the door of a residential mansion he wished to dispose of. He attired me in her garments while we were waiting for the caretaker.

“I expect you manage to get your own way pretty well in the matter of decorations, don’t you?” he began. “I notice the ladies generally do.”

I became Mrs. Simpson at once. “Oh yes,” I said, “my husband is much too busy to take notice of these things. It wouldn’t do to trouble the gentlemen with them, would it?” Then I threw Mrs. Simpson to the ground and trampled on her.

“I am sorry, I don’t like this house,” I said quite firmly, but he took no notice and told me to wait till I had seen round a bit. That revived her. When Mrs. Simpson is at her worst I see advertisements in the way I am told drunken men see spiders. I became Mrs. Simpson in an advertisement for somebody’s lemonade. I ran about over a tennis lawn; young men with Arrow collars and Viyella shirts lay on the grass beside a picnic basket; some one else, in a punt, poured out a new brand of lime-juice cordial. There was a high wall round our garden, and up the wall crept monstrous roses grown under the influence of pills for plants. My grandfather was there too in a smoking-cap, rolling the lawn with a special kind of roller.

“Look here,” I said, “I am so sorry, but I cannot bear this. I don’t like the shape of the lady who lived here.”

“What do you mean?” asked the agent, looking at me over some horrid eyeglasses (I think they were some new patent ones that boasted of being practically indistinguishable from the real eye). “It was an old gentleman that lived here with three daughters. Who told you there was a lady?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I persisted. “An old man with daughters is just as bad--I mean, I don’t think the house is healthy. If you will send me your list I will go round by myself.” I went to three or four other agents until at last I found one who did not know Mrs. Simpson, and I took the first house he offered me. Coleridge, or some one of that sort, had lived there, but he had been ousted by some rich Americans who are so volatile that they do not stick like the Mrs. Simpsons, so I very soon had the place to myself. When we go I shall scrape the walls and remove all the fittings and the tragic little bits of linoleum and empty bottles. The deadest mutton is never so dead as objects that have been called into temporary life by human ownership. I would rather find fifteen naked corpses in a house than one old pair of trousers. I should like to take that house agent to Pompeii and show him the petrified bodies and their belongings and ask him which made his flesh creep most. It might make him abandon his gruesome trade and be the end of Mrs. Simpson. But if there were no houses to let, where would all the poor ladies of England lay their eggs? It is not practicable.

_CHAPTER XV_: SHOPPING IN LONDON

When we moved into our new house there were many things to be bought. I spent a happy day with lists as fat as encyclopædias, but that seemed such an expensive way to shop that I finally went to London instead. Lists are so attractive. Everything looks desirable, and one remembers so much that one would otherwise forget that it seems wiser to go to the shop itself. One gets disillusioned there in no time before the actual things. It becomes delightful not to have them in one’s own house. Above all, one gets so weary of going “straight through on the left.” Nothing seems worth while at the cost of going straight through on the left. I went straight through on the left for hours at a time, and at last came to a large window looking out on to a fire-escape.

“Are you quite sure the poker department is straight through on the left?” I asked the shopwalker.

“Quite sure, Madam,” he replied.

“Then,” I said, “if you will hold my parasol and my hat and wait until I take off my skirt, I will go there. I see it is down the fire-escape.”

“Oh, no. Madam,” he said, “this way, please.”

It was not anywhere near the left: it was to the right, and down some stairs, and round two corners, and past the drapery. I bought the poker and tongs and then asked for a shovel. The man directed me to the ironmongery department.

“No, Madam,” I was told, “this is the furnishing. Kitchen department is in the ironmongery.”

“Thank you,” I said, “I know it is straight through on the left, but could you tell me, do you think, in other words, where that is?”

“Straight through on the left, Madam.”

“Very well,” I said. “I understand that I climb over these wardrobes, cut my way through the carpets, and proceed straight through the wall.”

“Past the hosiery, Madam, straight through on----”

I took the young man’s arm and asked if he would mind coming with me. “Now, tell me,” I said confidentially, as we threaded our way to the right, and up and down the stairs, round the gallery and home by the gent.’s outfitting. “Just stop a moment and try to follow what I am saying. You see this ribbon counter on my right?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“And the silk remnants in front of me?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“And the stationery at the back?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“Very well then, how can all these points of the compass be straight through on the left?”

“It all depends which way you are standing, Madam.”

“I see; then when I want anything that is on the ground floor and you tell me to go straight through on the left, the best thing I can do is to lie down on my left side and try to remember which way you are facing?”

We were divided here by a stream of dishevelled women passing in different directions.

“Ribbons, forward!” said the young man, and he disappeared--I suppose straight through on the left.

Shop assistants are so invariably prepared to give advice on matters of dress and domestic management that I suppose there are people who go to shops not to buy but to have a heart-to-heart talk about what they shall buy. They must be the same amiable creatures who conduct their love affairs under “Aunt Lena’s” superintendence in the penny magazines. I refuse to believe that the shop assistant really cares for what purpose I want a quarter of a yard of green velvet cut on the cross.

“What is it for?” the girl asks wearily as she reaches up for the box. “Is it for a hat?”

If you are just silly you tell her, perhaps, that it is for a pair of boots, in which case she is as kind as before and replies, “Fancy dress, I suppose. In that case you had better bring the dress it is to go with and I’ll see you get it matched. What is the name of the character you are going as? because we have some special brocades for characters from Shakespeare. You will find them in the theatrical department, straight through on the left.” If you are polite and tell her that in fact you want it for the collar of your coat that Uncle Sam gave you at Christmas, because it got spoilt with the cork of the freckle lotion having come out in your box, she tells you that it is a pity to buy velvet at all: there is so little velvet worn now. The embroidered collars are far newer and, with your complexion, would be less trying than the velvet. “You’ve rather a high colour, haven’t you?” she adds (looking herself like an anæmic gooseberry). She probably aims this dart at you on a sultry day, when you have been apoplectically following the straight path on the left for two hours in search of white cotton and a tooth-brush.

If I want pale green cotton flecked with ruby and just a soupçon of chenille mixed with the thread, I can get it at the first attempt. Every counter of every shop in the street will stock it in abundance; but things like white cotton and tape and safety-pins are not stocked within the four-mile radius. You have to spend an hour in the tube, with frequent changes, before you reach the suburbs where are the little post office linendrapers that keep the daily necessaries of every woman’s existence. “Pins! Oh, no, Madam, not pins like that we don’t keep. We have the fancy-headed ones, twelve inches long, and a very nice two-inch glass pin at two-three the pair. I fancy you might get the sort you want out in Bayswater. I couldn’t name any particular shop just for the moment, but I fancy you would find some there. If not, you will get them at some of the small establishments by the Crystal Palace.”

Another thing which adds to the burden of a day’s shopping is the difficulty of describing what you want in the jargon that will lead you to the right counter. What properly brought up person knows whether stockings are “drapery” or “outfitting”? It all depends on how you want to wear them, one would suppose. In fact, I believe they are “hosiery.” And yet, if I could force myself to say “hosiery” to the liftman, I should probably find that in addition to the hosiery being straight through on the left, and therefore in the next street but two, it meant gent.’s up-to-date footwear only, and that ladies’ stockings were in the haberdashery, second turning on the right and across the road as you leave Shaftesbury Avenue. I sometimes wonder whether there are people who in private life call their garments by the names used in shops, and if not, where is the use of annoying harmless decent people by these words? I asked James what a “singlet” was and he said he did not know.

“Well then,” I said, “do you suppose that the shopman who sold me these vests for you says to his wife: ‘My dear, why have you allowed the cat to sleep on my singlet?’ and if so, does she know what he means? and how can she bear to live with him?”

“If she really cared for him,” James answered, “she would not mind if he called it an antimacassar. The only thing that mattered would be that she should remove the cat and feel heartily ashamed of herself.”

“Do you know, it cost me an hour’s argument to get those vests for you because I refused to buy them as singlets and the man wouldn’t sell them as vests. I won in the end because he was getting tired and there were so many people waiting. I think he saw I was serious. But it wasted a fearful lot of time. And now, again, what do you call these?”

“Draws,” said James in one syllable.

“Quite so, that is how I was brought up; but do you realise that the young lady in the shop would not give me anything but ‘knickers’? It made me feel so tweedy, and golfish, and detestable, that I would not buy any.”

“Very silly,” he commented. “Besides, no one plays golf in knickers. It is an impossible word. It sounds like ready-made Fauntleroys for young gentlemen.”

“Thank you a thousand times,” I said, “that is just the word I was looking for. I shall always call them Fauntleroys in future. And now about skirts.”

“What about skirts?” he asked.

“Do you call a skirt a thing that you put on over or under?”

“I call the top one a skirt and the under one a petticoat,” said James, after reflection.

“If you knew anything about haberdashery or outfitting or singlets, or going straight through on the left, you wouldn’t have any petticoats,” I explained. “You would have a skirt--unless you were dressed in tricot or gold-beaters’ skin, which, I believe, is newer--and the thing you wore on the top would be a ‘robe’ or a ‘blouse suit,’ or a ‘costume’ or a ‘trotteuse’ or a ‘cache-corset’ or--oh dear! I am out of breath. I can’t disentangle terms any more.”

“I am afraid your shopping has gone to your head,” said James. “Did you buy anything useful? Did you remember the library carpet and the lawn-mower?”

“I am sorry,” I said; “they were straight through on the left and that brought me out at Covent Garden, so I bought some peaches for you, and when I began again it was too late--the shop was shutting.”

“Very well,” he said, “I will go to-morrow myself. It will do just as well and, I dare say, cost less in extras.”

He came home at seven and would answer no questions, but shut himself up with Harrods’ list. When he had written for what he wanted, I met him in the hall and opened the door with a polite bow.

“Pillar-box, straight through on the left,” I said.

_CHAPTER XVI_: THE COUNTRY HOUSE

I have said that we should come back to the question of county families, for I find it is a subject that I cannot keep off. I remember twenty years ago there was a well-known lady who used to ramp through the streets of the second or third city of the Empire dressed in a tailor-made suit like a riding-habit. On her head was a hard felt hat shaped like a paper boat and ornamented with some remains of a grouse. Round her neck was the dirtiest of white silk handkerchiefs loosely knotted. In fact, her whole appearance was arranged to convey the impression that her relations kept ferrets. In those days the effect was more marked, as the county was then a little island of the blest where no towns except capitals were mentioned. But it is all different now. No suburban residence is complete without its pheasant, and you absolutely must walk so that we all understand how difficult you find it to manage these pavements after the freedom of Papa’s moors. It is wonderful what the imagination will do! But these are not the real provincial county families; they are a subdivision who live just outside the town and who make a point of the “glass” rather than the pheasants.