Chapter IV: Part 4

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.

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.”

When she had gone, I went to Miss McGregor. “Look here,” I said, “you slip the things on the housemaid and pretend she is me. It only needs a little imagination.”

Miss McGregor was sitting in a shower of bits. She took no notice of my suggestion.

“I have got on as best I could,” she said, dispersing her last mouthful of pins all over her tiny chest. I was feeling a good deal better, and said I would slip on the garment. The picture she was to copy showed a slim and graceful creature with a long piece of soft material wound simply under one shoulder and over the other, caught in at the waist with a buckle, and falling in folds across the side of a very clinging underskirt. What I saw in the glass was a rain-water tub (surmounted by my head) covered with a closely gathered frill which was neatly sewn along the edge of the lid. The lid itself had some folds of the material arranged with geometrical precision round the place where the head came out.

My breath forsook me.

“Dear Miss McGregor,” I murmured, “you have not snipped all the stuff into small bits, have you? If you look at the picture you will see it is made all in one. Just folded round quite simply, beginning from one corner--so----”

“I couldn’t quite understand how you would get it on and off the other way, Mrs. Molyneux,” she said, after a minute’s thoughtful silence, “and the effect is just the same. I have arranged the folds so that they hide the join.”

I stood entranced by my reflection; I even began to take a morbid interest in it, as I saw how we depend for our personal attraction on clothes; it opened such a world of speculation amongst my friends. The knowledge was comforting to this extent: that there is more hope in a petition to one’s dressmaker to take back the dress she gave and change it than there would be in a request to one’s parents for a different face.

With as little show of alteration as I could manage, I unripped the gathers, and taking a corner of the stuff I wrapped it round my form in the way I wanted, and stuck in a hat-pin to secure the last bit. “There,” I said triumphantly, “that is the way I want it to go.”

Miss McGregor observed me with patient scepticism.

“I don’t quite see how I am to arrange that,” she remarked.

“You must not arrange it on any account,” I said. “It is to stay just like that.”

“But how are you going to get out of it?”

“Like this,” I replied, slipping the whole thing off my shoulders like a skin. “How I get back again next time is your concern; you are a dressmaker. Dresses like these are worn every day in Paris.”

“Well, I don’t understand how they do it,” replied the forbearing creature.

“You remind me,” I told her, “of a plumber we had here last spring. Mr. Molyneux gave him an order, and the man asked how he was to do it. ‘I don’t know,’ Mr. Molyneux said, ‘I am not a plumber.’ The silly man replied: ‘Well, I am a plumber and I don’t know.’ Now please don’t be like the plumber; we had quite enough of that sort of thing with him.”

Miss McGregor poised herself upon one leg, cocked her head on one side, and said it wasn’t the way of the stuff.

I know her ways by this time, so I said I was going out to tea.

It was certain that nothing would induce her to spend an idle afternoon, and she would therefore be driven to exercise her brain on the problem. I threatened her with every sort of violent and painful death, including a famine of pins, if she altered a single fold, and when I came home in the evening the dress was skilfully arranged. Miss McGregor is quite sure that if I would slip the things on fourteen times a day between meals she would understand better what I wanted, but I know for a fact she is wrong.

An industrious clerk might as well say to a poet: “If you tell me what you want to say in your poem I will write it for you and you can run your eye over it every ten minutes to see if it is right.”

James says that, so far as he can understand my criticism of Miss McGregor, that is just about what I expect her to do, otherwise why can’t I make the dress myself like the poet makes his poem.

But it is well known that only unreasonable people achieve miracles.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] See chapter xiv.

_CHAPTER XIX_: THE LADY’S MAID