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.
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.