Part 8

No, the real county families live farther afield. Papa could motor in to business if he liked, but he is a little blasé about motoring and also economical. The petrol and wear and tear cost more than the railway journey. Besides, the train is quicker, and if he is not used to smuts and smells by this time then he ought to be! It is no longer in good taste to conceal the whereabouts of Papa from the idle rich who are able to luxuriate all day amongst the sheep and the ox, and the beagle and the fox, and the bird in the greenwood tree. So many of the best people are in business that it does not matter as it used if we speak about it. The only thing that can make anyone really impossible is to know too many people. You may be silly, malicious, greedy, untruthful, parsimonious or lewd, but you will be a tremendous county dog-fox if you will only assert yourself and be rude enough. But you must be really rude--no half measures--say really smart things about your friends that they won’t like. You will need to take infinite precautions or the wrong people will want to know you, so be very very careful, because it is so dreadfully important that they shouldn’t. It would put an end to everything.

Unfortunately for any amusement I might have got out of our new life, James and I were turned over to the county before we arrived. Some indiscreet friend had written to one of the leading authorities on position and told her who James’s uncle was. That was enough; try as I would they were never sincere with me. They sometimes went so far as to say that the things I did were a pity, but that was nothing. What I should have liked would have been to learn their abracadabras and beat them at their own game or else to lose and bob up again somewhere else. To have the victory given into one’s hands is no fun. Still, I learned something by the gasping and choking it cost the poor things to swallow some of my friends, and by their unwilling acceptance of the fact that I did not play games and could not afford to hunt. They told me I should find croquet such a resource.

“But I am not resourceful,” I argued with Mrs. Van Dieman. “It gives me so much more pleasure to see you run about and enjoy yourself.”

“You don’t need to run at croquet,” she protested, “surely you know better than that, and bridge is a nice quiet game if you are not fond of exercise.”

“It is not that I don’t like exercise,” I explained. “I have played leap-frog often and enjoyed it, and I love riding. Escaping from people who ask questions is splendid exercise too; one needs a lot of resource for that!”

“Well, come to my party next Thursday,” she said. “You need not play any games; you can sit on the verandah and eat peaches and get as fat as you like.”

“Will you promise that your butler won’t come and tell me that the peaches have ‘never come’?” I asked.

She promised, and, after an hour’s scuffle hunting for the right gloves and finding that it was too windy for the hat I wanted to wear, I arrived at the Van Diemans’. It was rather late and I had had all the exercise I wanted coming along the dusty road. There were about fifteen people there, all running about after balls of different sizes and textures. I do not think that I am at heart a perfect lady, because I always see social festivities from the point of view of the servants. It was through the butler’s eyes that I saw his master and mistress and their guests employing their leisure: in my mind’s eye I carried the trays full of nourishment to help them prolong their activities and get the balls over nets and through hoops and into holes. Their ankles appeared to me absurdly thin, their bodies absurdly fat, their pleasure absurdly inadequate to the trouble they were taking. The sprawling creatures who played football on Saturday outside the village were just as grotesque in appearance, but their game had a little more of the pleasure of battle and a little less of kindergarten occupation than this. In an illustrated catalogue of parlour games there is one picture which shows an athletic footman putting away a jig-saw puzzle in a special cabinet, so designed that the pieces may remain undisturbed until the next fit of vacuity takes the fat lady in the low dress and her beautifully clean-shaven partner who, according to another picture, have been spending enraptured hours over a desiccated post card. There was some of this fatuousness in the Van Dieman games.

“Look here,” said Mrs. Van Dieman when I had finished my fourth peach and was getting really happy and contented, thinking, indeed, that there was some point after all in being a bloated aristocrat, “if you won’t play at anything will you walk round the garden? You must do something; it isn’t good for you to sit still so long, and Mrs. Fortescue hasn’t seen the roses.”

“Well,” I answered sleepily, “tell the fourth butler to bring them here and we will look at them.”

“Nonsense,” said my determined hostess. “Get up and take her round; she says she is getting a chill.”

There was no good in making a fuss, so I went and we strolled up and down the narrow path in the baking sun, jogging into each other in order to avoid treading on the border of pinks.

“How perfectly wonderful!” Mrs. Fortescue said from time to time. “Did you ever see such a monster?” She is a dear old lady and I did my very best. I said that they were graceful, wonderful, exquisite, that they added so much to my interest in the country that I did not know what I should do without them. I picked her lace mantle off the bushes when it got caught, I made way for her round the corners, and dodged about, and knocked into her, and trod on her toes when she first stood aside for me and then decided to proceed just as I slipped by to save trouble. I disentangled her parasol from my veil eight times and said that it did not matter a bit, it was torn already; I admired the gooseberry bushes and the artichokes and wondered how many gardeners they needed to keep the herbaceous border so tidy; I pointed out several particularly rich colours entirely on my own initiative and was really brilliant about the thinning out of something--I forget what--it was just a fluke anyhow. When we got back and Mrs. Fortescue kindly offered to drive me home because she said I looked absolutely worn out with the heat, I jumped at her suggestion. But, first, I took Mrs. Van Dieman aside. “Very well, Minnie,” I said, “I shall send you a book of fables which I want you to read carefully. There is one about an elephant who was ill-treated by his keeper. Years and years afterwards he met the man at a public gathering or somewhere, and squirted a pail of dirty water over him. This will show you how tenacious a thing is memory. The second story I want you to notice is of a stork who invited a fox to lunch. You shall lunch with me next Tuesday and I will ask three Russian anarchists and the clown from Hengler’s Circus to meet you and you shall play ‘consequences’ with them.”

“By the time you have been here six months,” she assured me, “you will have made far nicer friends; there are some quite delightful people near here.”

“But if they are all so delightful,” I said, “why have none of them a good word to say for one another? At every turn one is brought up by the word ‘impossible.’ It starts up like a policeman with a gloved hand.”

“My dear,” she remonstrated, “you ought not to complain, you seem to do whatever you like.”

“Then look here,” I persisted, “excuse me, Mrs. Fortescue is waiting, I must fly--why cannot the others do as they like--all your delightful people?”

“Oh, that is different,” Mrs. Van Dieman answered loftily. “They are quite impossible; it would never do.”

_CHAPTER XVII_: THE BUTLER

We had at last struggled up to such heights above the sorrows of the Palmerston Road that we were able to buy a butler. The main reason for this important social advance was that Clara had married a traveller in sewing machines and, like a lady with a pet canary, I could never, never care for another; a bullfinch perhaps, but not a canary. With a butler I should have a new and therefore possibly interesting set of vices to contend with, but to bring out again my old quack remedies for morning blindness and ubiquity would be beyond my strength. I could not face the explanations about table-napkins, and “ladies first,” and unpunctual tea-kettles, nor, above all, the black cloud of displeasure which would be sure to billow from under the pantry door and pervade the house after my ruthless destruction of lifelong habits. A good manservant never mentions what he has been accustomed to. If you differ from him he puts up with you if he can, and if not, he says that he finds the air is not so healthy as that of Herefordshire and, sorry though he is to leave you, he prefers to make a change and try gravel soil.

Perrin liked me, I am glad to say. He thought that I was inexperienced, but shaped well to become a good mistress if I would be a little more particular in some things; he relied on himself to teach me his ways in time. He told me rather pointedly, within the first days of our acquaintance, that he had been obliged to leave his last place because there was too much freedom. The master had been on a ranch all his life and come suddenly into the property and, as was to be expected, hardly understood his position. “It was very awkward for me,” he added, “as you will understand, being obliged to mention what was expected.”

“And what was expected?” I asked.

“Well, of course, ma’am, it is difficult to say exactly, but there were many little things. His late lordship was always very particular that at least three of us should sit up for him when he came home late.” I blushed nervously as I remembered how James and I had always let ourselves in with a latch-key and had eaten our sandwiches and heated our soup on the gas-ring. It was just possible this had reached Perrin’s ears through Ruth and he was deliberately warning me not to go too far.

“That is what one would expect, of course,” I said. “Mr. Molyneux gives a great deal of trouble and is most fanciful and inconsiderate. You will have to be very careful.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he answered. (How soothing that is after the female “yes’m,” I thought.) “How many shall I bring tea for?”

“Oh, about forty,” I said airily.

“Very good, ma’am. In the woods, I suppose?” Clara used barely to answer when I asked for tea on the lawn, and she always brought it all on one tray, with the cakes piled on the top of the bread and butter and scones; moreover, she staggered and panted to impress me with its weight, and held up her dress and suffered for the rest of the week from sore throat, “owing to wetting me feet on the grass.”

The woods were at least a quarter of an hour’s walk from the house and across a ditch.

“Certainly, in the woods,” I said, “and if by any chance I should be alone for tea after all, you can come round a longer way. That will give you almost as much trouble.”

I wondered at first how I should explain my way of living to Perrin, and whether he would make me give up much that I held dear. Would he allow many of what Clara called the “goings on” of my house? But, to my surprise, he did not mind at all; in fact, I understood that he preferred many of the people whom Mrs. Van Dieman so much disliked to Mrs. Van Dieman herself. I could see that he thought most of the stars of the neighbourhood a poor lot. “His late lordship never thought much of them he let his place to each year,” he told me. I should have liked to hear about these objectionable tenants, but I saw that Perrin’s gems must be gathered when and where they fell; he gave nothing of value for the asking. However, with patience and care, I learned by and by some of the reasons why the usurpers had failed to please. He told me once, in a fit of irritation, that a young commercial gentleman from Sheffield, who took his late lordship’s place one year, seemed to have very little idea of how things should be. He seemed, for instance, to think that the place belonged to him. This seemed to me rather hard when I remembered how little James and I heeded the ownership of the frowsy creature to whom we paid rent for our delightful house in Palmerston Road. If it had not been for James’s uncle, I should not have dared to put forward this view. As it was, I said timidly: “But, after all, I suppose they were owners for the time being, Perrin.” He was not offended, on the contrary he gave the idea his indulgent consideration, but it would not do.

“We hardly regard the town builders, ma’am, as on a par with the families as have owned the property for generations.”

I probed delicately for more horrible details.

“He spoke of the Master of the Hounds, ma’am, as the Captain of the Dogs.”

There was a solemn silence. I could do nothing but murmur expressions of sympathy and disgust; but my thoughts took suddenly a fantastic turn and I mentally christened our present leader of county society the “Mistress of the Cats,” hunting impossible birds to a well-deserved social death. I awoke from my dream of delight and waited. “Mr. Huggins” (that was the name of the commercial gentleman) “went so far as to request me to bring the gramophone on to the lawn on Sunday afternoon. Fortunately, I had disabled my arm at the time and the doctor considered it inadvisable for me to attempt weights of any kind, so the second footman obliged them; otherwise I should have been in great difficulty.”

I still think that Perrin did the poor things injustice, and that if his late lordship had ordered a barouche full of gramophones to be brought on to the lawn, my friend would have adjusted his prejudices and his arm to meet the case. His dislike was due to a primitive suspicion of an alien tribe whose size and shape and smell offended him. Just as I feel about Mrs. Simpson--I am not running her down in any way.

There was an awful moment of anxiety when it occurred to me that Perrin might want me to play games, but, on thinking it over, I decided that he would not wish it unless I played very well indeed, and that I knew was an impossibility. I could not face the idea of tennis while he was bringing out the tea or announcing visitors. My legs would be sure to get entangled in his eye and then all would be over between us. We were obliged to get a victoria and a pair of horses soon after he arrived, as he disliked my coming in tired and dusty from paying visits. Of course, that meant a footman too, as I hate a victoria with one horse, and nothing would induce me to drive behind two horses and one man--if there is only one man to two horses the man’s hat gets fluffy at once, also it is impossible to make one man’s coat fit properly; so long as there are two horses, it is always loose behind the shoulders and his white collar behaves like the setting sun. So there we were, involved in endless expense and all because of Perrin. But oh! the relief of it! The mere fact that he did not wear cuffs that came off, and rattled, and were left about on tables, gave me much peace of mind, and, best of all, I basked in the certainty that although he might direct my actions, he would never interfere with my thoughts as Clara did. I could hear her thinking and having feelings all over the house; but Perrin did all his thinking in the pantry, never permitting himself to indulge his brain in my presence. I knew that when Clara said she “hadn’t an idea,” it meant that her mind was so seething with folly that it was likely to burst forth into reproach at any moment. When I asked Perrin where my thimble and scissors were, he said that he would ascertain, which meant that he withdrew respectfully to the pantry and there brought his mind to bear on all the places where an addle-headed female was most likely to have left such things, and then he looked until he found them. He helped me a great deal in the training of young George, the footman. I told George one day that he must not gather his coat-tails round him and leap from the box as if it were a burning building. “Thank you, ma’am,” he replied shyly, “Mr. Perrin has already mentioned it. I was not going to do it after to-day.” But even then it was not quite right, and I had to appeal for help to Perrin. “George’s descent from the box is not quite right yet, Perrin, and I don’t know how to explain. Only, I am not sure whether he reminds me most of a chimpanzee or a sailor.”

“Quite so, ma’am. I will see that he practises from the shelves of the pantry cupboard,” said Perrin; and in a week it was impossible to detect how George reached the ground. Once, Perrin was ill, and we all moped like sick canaries. George lost his head and forgot the coffee spoons, the silver and glass lost their sparkle and sat about all anyhow on the table. But behind the scenes the gloom was lightened, although the meals were irregular and bad owing to Ruth preparing soup and jelly for Perrin which she carried to him herself. The housemaids stole into the garden for flowers for the invalid’s room, and, one day, delighted cackles announced the fact that Mr. Perrin felt well enough to shave himself, and that Ruth and Lizzie held the glass while Mr. George prepared the soap. I sent him books and papers of a masculine kind, such as I thought he looked as if he would read. He sent his duty and found them most enjoyable, but I believe now that in the kingdom downstairs where Perrin reigns the habits of the Court are less Victorian than I supposed, and the sceptre is garlanded with flowers.

_CHAPTER XVIII_: THE DRESSMAKER

I can never think of Miss McGregor without adding the adjective “bitty” to her name: Bitty Miss McGregor or Miss Bitty McGregor. She sat always in such a snowstorm of bits, that by the end of the day I felt it must be necessary to dig her out before she could leave her work. Praise of Miss McGregor (which was given freely, for we all love her) was qualified by comments on her “bittiness,” but even that was not so bad as the pins. The mouthfuls of them which she threw out all over the floor! Nurse reckoned, after reading an article in the _Strand Magazine_, that if all the pins that Miss McGregor disgorged during the day were collected and fastened together, they would form a chain as long as the cable between America and England. She never ate anything but pieces of cheese, with some cold strong tea, so I conclude that if claret and tannin make ink, as I once read they do, cheese and tannin, mixed, make pins, that is if they are eaten by a dressmaker; just as a cow makes different things out of grass to what Nebuchadnezzar did. I certainly do not remember buying pins.

What I did complain of was the “slipping-on.” She glided into the kitchen when I was wrestling with the beef, and asked me to slip on an evening bodice. There are, undoubtedly, people who can give their minds to an evening bodice on the top of a large breakfast and attend to the beef at the same time. Mrs. Simpson[A] could, I am sure, for one sees the effect of the beef on her bodices, which sometimes have such a sensible, dead look about them.

The bodices do not affect the beef in any way or lighten its weight, because nothing makes any difference to beef. It knows just what and where it intends to be, and no one can divert it from its purpose.

During my early married life I foolishly attempted to keep the beef out of the house on Sunday, because I detest habit, and that any food or person should acquire the habit of coming at one particular time makes its company less of a pleasure than if it took its chance and dropped in.

I gave the order that no beef “in any shape or form” was to come into my house on Sunday. The butcher repeated my order in the shop, whereupon the beef turned purple and indignant.

“What!” it said, puffing and blowing, “I am not to come? There must be some mistake. They cannot have Sunday without me; I am part of the day itself. If I am not present at the table there will be no Sabbath, and then where shall we all be? Here’s a pretty kettle of fish! I insist on going--stop that mutton--it must not leave the shop.”

The butcher wrung his hands in protest, and said he knew he should get into trouble, but the beef replied: “Not a word, Sir, not a word.” It bustled out of the shop into the basket and arrived at my door, where it insisted on being delivered by the boy. But Ruth had her orders and was firm.

“Just you go back,” she insisted.

“But what about my wife,” blustered the beef, “my wife the rhubarb tart? If I am not to take my place upon the board neither shall my wife attend; she shall not be served without me.”

“Just keep quiet, please,” said Ruth. “We’re not having tart; we’re having soufflé and mutton cutlets, so now be off with you.”

There was a frightful scene, but I persevered for three weeks. Then I went away for a fortnight, and, while I was gone, the beef came back and curried favour with Ruth. He poisoned her mind about the busy day Monday was, with the washerwoman and all, and how convenient he was to eat cold; no mess, no second vegetable, just salad out of the garden, and so on. I was powerless against the pair of them; but now I always cut him with a blunt knife. Sometimes I cook him on Saturday night, and he has to appear cold in the middle of the day on Sunday, which he dislikes as much as being tarred and feathered with strange sauces and trimmings.

But to return to Miss McGregor.

“No,” I said, “I won’t. You can slip it on the beef if you like, he hates being garnished, and perhaps it will keep him in his place. Put a whole mouthful of pins in him if you like, and then snip him into shreds.”

Miss McGregor took no more notice than if I had been reciting poetry to myself. “If you wouldn’t mind just slipping it on now,” she said, with gentle persistence; “I won’t keep you a minute--unless you have anything else you could give me to do. You said something about altering a skirt.”

The back door bell rang.

“I think it’s Jones’s boy,” said Ruth. “Have you decided what you will have for dinner?”

“If you please, ma’am,” said Louise, appearing at the kitchen door, “is there a parcel to go back to Huggins’s?”

“It will be the buttons for your coat,” said Miss McGregor, “did you decide----”

I heard my daughter’s voice on the stairs: “Mother!” she called. “Mother! Miss Mathers wants to know if it is going to rain, because, if so, shall I wear my old coat? She says it isn’t fit to go out in, but it is too cold for the other, unless you would like me to put on a woolly, and I haven’t got one, so shall I----”

I dashed up the kitchen stairs. They got Miss McGregor out of the flour-bin afterwards, less damaged than I could have wished. Anne picked herself up, and decided to chance the weather as offering the least risk of the two. Jones’s boy, and Huggins’s boy, and Ruth, and the beef, and Louise came to some decision amongst themselves about the buttons and the curry.

When I came back from a pleasant morning in the woods, I heard that Miss McGregor was looking for me to slip on a bodice, and the efficient female had called.

“Has Mrs. Simpson been?” I asked.

“I beg pardon, ma’am,” said Perrin, “who did you say?”

“Oh, it was nothing,” I replied. “I half expected a Mrs. Simpson; in fact I thought I saw her in the drive. She would have attended to Miss McGregor at once.”

The efficient female said I looked tired, and was anything the matter?

“No,” I said, “nothing particular; but do you always slip on things when you are asked--that is, when there is a dressmaker in the house?”

“Oh, never,” she assured me. “I have a stand made to exactly my own shape, and they never need to trouble me at all.”

“But can you judge how a thing will look with a great red twill bust and a stump sticking out of it?”

“Oh, perfectly; it only needs a little imagination.”