The first thing Jone said to me when I told him I was going to write
about what I saw and heard was that I must be careful of two things. In
the first place, I must not write a lot of stuff that everybody ought
to be expected to know, especially people who have travelled
themselves; and in the second place, I must not send you my green
opinions, but must wait until they were seasoned, so that I can see
what they are good for before I send them.
"But if I do that," said I, "I will get tired of them long before they
are seasoned, and they will be like a bundle of old sticks that I
wouldn't offer to anybody." Jone laughed at that, and said I might as
well send them along green, for, after all, I wasn't the kind of a
person to keep things until they were seasoned, to see if I liked them.
"That's true," said I, "there's a great many things, such as husbands
and apples, that I like a good deal better fresh than dry. Is that all
the advice you've got to give?"
"For the present," said he; "but I dare say I shall have a good deal
more as we go along."
"All right," said I, "but be careful you don't give me any of it green.
Advice is like gooseberries, that's got to be soft and ripe, or else
well cooked and sugared, before they're fit to take into anybody's
stomach."
Jone was standing at the window of our sitting-room when I said this,
looking out into the street. As soon as we got to London we took
lodgings in a little street running out of the Strand, for we both want
to be in the middle of things as long as we are in this conglomerate
town, as Jone calls it. He says, and I think he is about right, that it
is made up of half a dozen large cities, ten or twelve towns, at least
fifty villages, more than a hundred little settlements, or hamlets, as
they call them here, and about a thousand country houses scattered
along around the edges; and over and above all these are the
inhabitants of a large province, which, there being no province to put
them into, are crammed into all the cracks and crevices so as to fill
up the town and pack it solid.
When we was in London before, with you and your husband, madam, and we
lost my baby in Kensington Gardens, we lived, you know, in a peaceful,
quiet street by a square or crescent, where about half the inhabitants
were pervaded with the solemnities of the past and the other half bowed
down by the dolefulness of the present, and no way of getting anywhere
except by descending into a movable tomb, which is what I always think
of when we go anywhere in the underground railway. But here we can walk
to lots of things we want to see, and if there was nothing else to keep
us lively the fear of being run over would do it, you may be sure.
But, after all, Jone and me didn't come here to London just to see the
town. We have ideas far ahead of that. When we was in London before I
saw pretty nearly all the sights, for when I've got work like that to
do I don't let the grass grow under my feet, and what we want to do on
this trip is to see the country part of England and Scotland. And in
order to see English country life just as it is, we both agreed that
the best thing to do was to take a little house in the country and live
there a while; and I'll say here that this is the only plan of the
whole journey that Jone gets real enthusiastic about, for he is a
domestic man, as you well know, and if anything swells his veins with
fervent rapture it is the idea of living in some one place continuous,
even if it is only for a month.
As we wanted a house in the country we came to London to get it, for
London is the place to get everything. Our landlady advised us, when we
told her what we wanted, to try and get a vicarage in some little
village, because, she said, there are always lots of vicars who want to
go away for a month in the summer, and they can't do it unless they
rent their houses while they are gone. And in fact, some of them, she
said, got so little salary for the whole year, and so much rent for
their vicarages while they are gone, that they often can't afford to
stay in places unless they go away.
So we answered some advertisements, and there was no lack of them in
the papers, and three agents came to see us, but we did not seem to
have any luck. Each of them had a house to let which ought to have
suited us, according to their descriptions, and although we found the
prices a good deal higher than we expected, Jone said he wasn't going
to be stopped by that, because it was only for a little while and for
the sake of experience--and experience, as all the poets, and a good
many of the prose writers besides, tell us, is always dear. But after
the agents went away, saying they would communicate with us in the
morning, we never heard anything more from them, and we had to begin
all over again. There was something the matter, Jone and I both agreed
on that, but we didn't know what it was. But I waked up in the night
and thought about this thing for a whole hour, and in the morning I had
an idea.
"Jone," said I, when we was eating breakfast, "it's as plain as A B C
that those agents don't want us for tenants, and it isn't because they
think we are not to be trusted, for we'd have to pay in advance, and so
their money's safe; it is something else, and I think I know what it
is. These London men are very sharp, and used to sizing and sorting all
kinds of people as if they was potatoes being got ready for market, and
they have seen that we are not what they call over here gentlefolks."
"No lordly airs, eh?" said Jone.
"Oh, I don't mean that," I answered him back; "lordly airs don't go
into parsonages, and I don't mean either that they see from our looks
or manners that you used to drive horses and milk cows and work in the
garden, and that I used to cook and scrub and was maid-of-all-work on a
canal-boat; but they do see that we are not the kind of people who are
in the habit, in this country, at least, of spending their evenings in
the best parlors of vicarages."
"Do you suppose," said Jone, "that they think a vicar's kitchen would
suit us better?"
"No," said I, "they wouldn't put us in a vicarage at all; there
wouldn't be no place there that would not be either too high or too low
for us. It's my opinion that what they think we belong in is a lordly
house, where you'd shine most as head butler or a steward, while I'd be
the housekeeper or a leading lady's maid."
"By George!" said Jone, getting up from the table, "if any of those
fellows would favor me with an opinion like that I'd break his head."
"You'd have a lot of heads to break," said I, "if you went through this
country asking for opinions on the subject. It's all very well for us
to remember that we've got a house of our own as good as most rectors
have over here, and money enough to hire a minor canon, if we needed
one in the house; but the people over here don't know that, and it
wouldn't make much difference if they did, for it wouldn't matter how
nice we lived or what we had so long as they knew we was retired
servants."
At this Jone just blazed up and rammed his hands into his pockets and
spread his feet wide upon the floor. "Pomona," said he, "I don't mind
it in you, but if anybody else was to call me a retired servant I'd--"
"Hold up, Jone," said I, "don't waste good, wholesome anger." Now, I
tell you, madam, it really did me good to see Jone blaze up and get red
in the face, and I am sure that if he'd get his blood boiling oftener
it would be a good thing for his dyspeptic tendencies and what little
malaria may be left in his system. "It won't do any good to flare up
here," I went on to say to him; "fact's fact, and we was servants, and
good ones, too, though I say it myself, and the trouble is we haven't
got into the way of altogether forgetting it, or, at least, acting as
if we had forgotten it."
Jone sat down on a chair. "It might help matters a little," he said,
"if I knew what you was driving at."
"I mean just this," said I, "as long as we are as anxious not to give
trouble, or as careful of people's feelings, as good-mannered to
servants, and as polite and good-natured to everybody we have anything
to do with, as we both have been since we came here, and as it is our
nature to be, I am proud to say, we're bound to be set down, at least
by the general run of people over here, as belonging to the pick of the
nobility and gentry, or as well-bred servants. It's only those two
classes that act as we do, and anybody can see we are not special
nobles and gents. Now, if we want to be reckoned anywhere in between
these two we've got to change our manners."
"Will you kindly mention just how?" said Jone.
"Yes," said I, "I will. In the first place, we've got to act as if we
had always been waited on and had never been satisfied with the way it
was done; we've got to let people think that we think we are a good
deal better than they are, and what they think about it doesn't make
the least difference; and then again we've got to live in better
quarters than these, and whatever they may be we must make people
think that we don't think they are quite good enough for us. If we do
all that, agents may be willing to let us vicarages."
"It strikes me," said Jone, "that these quarters are good enough for
us. I'm comfortable." And then he went on to say, madam, that when you
and your husband was in London you was well satisfied with just such
lodgings.
"That's all very well," I said, "for they never moved in the lower
paths of society, and so they didn't have to make any change, but just
went along as they had been used to go. But if we want to make people
believe we belong to that class I should choose, if I had my pick out
of English social varieties, we've got to bounce about as much above it
as we were born below it, so that we can strike somewhere near the
proper average."
"And what variety would you pick out, I'd like to know?" said Jone,
just a little red in the face, and looking as if I had told him he
didn't know timothy hay from oat straw.
"Well," said I, "it is not easy to put it to you exactly, but it's a
sort of a cross between a prosperous farmer without children and a poor
country gentleman with two sons at college and one in the British army,
and no money to pay their debts with."
"That last is not to my liking," said Jone.
"But the farmer part of the cross would make it all right," I said to
him, "and it strikes me that a mixture like that would just suit us
while we are staying over here. Now, if you will try to think of
yourself as part rich farmer and part poor gentleman, I'll consider
myself the wife of the combination, and I am sure we will get along
better. We didn't come over here to be looked upon as if we was the
bottom of a pie dish and charged as if we was the upper crust. I'm in
favor of paying a little more money and getting a lot more
respectfulness, and the way to begin is to give up these lodgings and
go to a hotel such as the upper middlers stop at. From what I've heard,
the Babylon Hotel is the one for us while we are in London. Nobody will
suspect that any of the people at that hotel are retired servants."
[Illustration: "Boy, go order me a four-in-hand"]
This hit Jone hard, as I knew it would, and he jumped up, made three
steps across the room, and rang the bell so that the people across the
street must have heard it, and up came the boy in green jacket and
buttons, with about every other button missing, and I never knew him to
come up so quick before.
"Boy," said Jone to him, as if he was hollering to a stubborn ox, "go
order me a four-in-hand."
But this letter is so long I must stop for the present.
_Letter Number Two_