I hated teatime in the housekeeper’s room more than anything else at
Bladesover. And more particularly I hated it when Mrs. Mackridge and
Mrs. Booch and Mrs. Latude-Fernay were staying in the house. They were,
all three of them, pensioned-off servants.
Old friends of Lady Drew’s had rewarded them posthumously for a
prolonged devotion to their minor comforts, and Mrs. Booch was also
trustee for a favourite Skye terrier. Every year Lady Drew gave them an
invitation—a reward and encouragement of virtue with especial reference
to my mother and Miss Fison, the maid. They sat about in black and
shiny and flouncey clothing adorned with gimp and beads, eating great
quantities of cake, drinking much tea in a stately manner and
reverberating remarks.
I remember these women as immense. No doubt they were of negotiable
size, but I was only a very little chap and they have assumed nightmare
proportions in my mind. They loomed, they bulged, they impended. Mrs.
Mackridge was large and dark; there was a marvel about her head,
inasmuch as she was bald. She wore a dignified cap, and in front of
that upon her brow, hair was _painted_. I have never seen the like
since. She had been maid to the widow of Sir Roderick Blenderhasset
Impey, some sort of governor or such-like portent in the East Indies,
and from her remains—in Mrs. Mackridge—I judge Lady Impey was a very
stupendous and crushing creature indeed. Lady Impey had been of the
Juno type, haughty, unapproachable, given to irony and a caustic wit.
Mrs. Mackridge had no wit, but she had acquired the caustic voice and
gestures along with the old satins and trimmings of the great lady.
When she told you it was a fine morning, she seemed also to be telling
you you were a fool and a low fool to boot; when she was spoken to, she
had a way of acknowledging your poor tinkle of utterance with a
voluminous, scornful “Haw!” that made you want to burn her alive. She
also had a way of saying “Indade!” with a droop of the eyelids.
Mrs. Booch was a smaller woman, brown haired, with queer little curls
on either side of her face, large blue eyes and a small set of
stereotyped remarks that constituted her entire mental range. Mrs.
Latude-Fernay has left, oddly enough, no memory at all except her name
and the effect of a green-grey silk dress, all set with gold and blue
buttons. I fancy she was a large blonde. Then there was Miss Fison, the
maid who served both Lady Drew and Miss Somerville, and at the end of
the table opposite my mother, sat Rabbits the butler. Rabbits, for a
butler, was an unassuming man, and at tea he was not as you know
butlers, but in a morning coat and a black tie with blue spots. Still,
he was large, with side whiskers, even if his clean-shaven mouth was
weak and little. I sat among these people on a high, hard, early
Gregorian chair, trying to exist, like a feeble seedling amidst great
rocks, and my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute to suppress the
slightest manifestation of vitality. It was hard on me, but perhaps it
was also hard upon these rather over-fed, ageing, pretending people,
that my youthful restlessness and rebellious unbelieving eyes should be
thrust in among their dignities.
Tea lasted for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and I sat it out
perforce; and day after day the talk was exactly the same.
“Sugar, Mrs. Mackridge?” my mother used to ask.
“Sugar, Mrs. Latude-Fernay?”
The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge. “They say,” she
would begin, issuing her proclamation—at least half her sentences began
“they say”—“sugar is fatt-an-ing, nowadays. Many of the best people do
not take it at all.”
“Not with their tea, ma’am,” said Rabbits intelligently.
“Not with anything,” said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of crushing
repartee, and drank.
“What won’t they say next?” said Miss Fison.
“They do say such things!” said Mrs. Booch.
“They say,” said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, “the doctors are not
recomm-an-ding it now.”
My Mother: “No, ma’am?”
Mrs. Mackridge: “No, ma’am.”
Then, to the table at large: “Poor Sir Roderick, before he died,
consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar. I have sometimes fancied it may
have hastened his end.”
This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner and a pause
was considered due to the sacred memory of Sir Roderick.
“George,” said my mother, “don’t kick the chair!”
Then, perhaps, Mrs. Booch would produce a favourite piece from her
repertoire. “The evenings are drawing out nicely,” she would say, or if
the season was decadent, “How the evenings draw in!” It was an
invaluable remark to her; I do not know how she would have got along
without it.
My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would always consider
it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and regard the evening in the act of
elongation or contraction, whichever phase it might be.
A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or shortest day
would ensue, and die away at last exhausted.
Mrs. Mackridge, perhaps, would reopen. She had many intelligent habits;
among others she read the paper—_The Morning Post_. The other ladies
would at times tackle that sheet, but only to read the births,
marriages, and deaths on the front page. It was, of course, the old
_Morning Post_ that cost threepence, not the brisk coruscating young
thing of to-day. “They say,” she would open, “that Lord Tweedums is to
go to Canada.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Rabbits; “dew they?”
“Isn’t he,” said my mother, “the Earl of Slumgold’s cousin?” She knew
he was; it was an entirely irrelevant and unnecessary remark, but
still, something to say.
“The same, ma’am,” said Mrs. Mackridge. “They say he was extremelay
popular in New South Wales. They looked up to him greatlay. I knew him,
ma’am, as a young man. A very nice pleasant young fella.”
Interlude of respect.
“’Is predecessor,” said Rabbits, who had acquired from some clerical
model a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring at the same
time the aspirates that would have graced it, “got into trouble at
Sydney.”
“Haw!” said Mrs. Mackridge, scornfully, “so am tawled.”
“’E came to Templemorton after ’e came back, and I remember them
talking ’im over after ’e’d gone again.”
“Haw?” said Mrs. Mackridge, interrogatively.
“’_Is_ fuss was quotin’ poetry, ma’am. ’E said—what was it ’e
said—‘They lef’ their country for their country’s good,’—which in some
way was took to remind them of their being originally convic’s, though
now reformed. Every one I ’eard speak, agreed it was takless of ’im.”
“Sir Roderick used to say,” said Mrs. Mackridge, “that the First
Thing,”—here Mrs. Mackridge paused and looked dreadfully at me—“and the
Second Thing”—here she fixed me again—“and the Third Thing”—now I was
released—“needed in a colonial governor is Tact.” She became aware of
my doubts again, and added predominantly, “It has always struck me that
that was a Singularly True Remark.”
I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact growing up in my
soul, I would tear it out by the roots, throw it forth and stamp on it.
“They’re queer people—colonials,” said Rabbits, “very queer. When I was
at Templemorton I see something of ’em. Queer fellows, some of ’em.
Very respectful of course, free with their money in a spasammy sort of
way, but—Some of ’em, I must confess, make me nervous. They have an eye
on you. They watch you—as you wait. They let themselves appear to be
lookin’ at you...”
My mother said nothing in that discussion. The word colonies always
upset her. She was afraid, I think, that if she turned her mind in that
direction my errant father might suddenly and shockingly be discovered,
no doubt conspicuously bigamic and altogether offensive and
revolutionary. She did not want to rediscover my father at all.
It is curious that when I was a little listening boy I had such an idea
of our colonies that I jeered in my heart at Mrs. Mackridge’s colonial
ascendancy. These brave emancipated sunburnt English of the open, I
thought, suffer these aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism,
but as for being gratified—!