Bealby; A Holiday. Герберт УÑллÑ
steward’s room.”
§ 4
The duties to which Bealby was introduced struck him as perplexingly various, undesirably numerous, uninteresting and difficult to remember, and also he did not try to remember them very well because he wanted to do them as badly as possible and he thought that forgetting would be a good way of starting at that. He was beginning at the bottom of the ladder; to him it fell to wait on the upper servants, and the green baize door at the top of the service staircase was the limit of his range. His room was a small wedge-shaped apartment under some steps leading to the servants’ hall, lit by a window that did not open and that gave upon the underground passage. He received his instructions in a state of crumpled mutinousness, but for a day his desire to be remarkably impossible was more than counterbalanced by his respect for the large able hands of the four man-servants, his seniors, and by a disinclination to be returned too promptly to the gardens. Then in a tentative manner he broke two plates and got his head smacked by Mr. Mergleson himself. Mr. Mergleson gave a staccato slap quite as powerful as Thomas’s but otherwise different. The hand of Mr. Mergleson was large and fat and he got his effects by dash, Thomas’s was horny and lingered. After that young Bealby put salt in the teapot in which the housekeeper made tea. But that he observed she washed out with hot water before she put in the tea. It was clear that he had wasted his salt, which ought to have gone into the kettle.
Next time—the kettle.
Beyond telling him his duties almost excessively nobody conversed with young Bealby during the long hours of his first day in service. At midday dinner in the servants’ hall, he made one of the kitchen-maids giggle by pulling faces intended to be delicately suggestive of Mr. Mergleson, but that was his nearest approach to disinterested human intercourse.
When the hour for retirement came—“Get out of it. Go to bed, you dirty little Kicker,” said Thomas. “We’ve had about enough of you for one day”—young Bealby sat for a long time on the edge of his bed weighing the possibilities of arson and poison. He wished he had some poison. Some sort of poison with a medieval manner, poison that hurts before it kills. Also he produced a small penny pocket-book with a glazed black cover and blue edges. He headed one page of this “Mergleson” and entered beneath it three black crosses. Then he opened an account to Thomas, who was manifestly destined to be his principal creditor. Bealby was not a forgiving boy. At the village school they had been too busy making him a good Churchman to attend to things like that. There were a lot of crosses for Thomas.
And while Bealby made these sinister memoranda downstairs Lady Laxton—for Laxton had bought a baronetcy for twenty thousand down to the party funds and a tip to the whip over the Peptonized Milk flotation—Lady Laxton, a couple of floors above Bealby’s ruffled head mused over her approaching week-end party. It was an important week-end party. The Lord Chancellor of England was coming. Never before had she had so much as a member of the Cabinet at Shonts. He was coming, and do what she would she could not help but connect it with her very strong desire to see the master of Shonts in the clear scarlet of a Deputy Lieutenant. Peter would look so well in that. The Lord Chancellor was coming, and to meet him and to circle about him there were Lord John Woodenhouse and Slinker Bond, there were the Countess of Barracks and Mrs. Rampound Pilby, the novelist, with her husband Rampound Pilby, there was Professor Timbre, the philosopher, and there were four smaller (though quite good) people who would run about very satisfactorily among the others. (At least she thought they would run about very satisfactorily amongst the others, not imagining any evil of her cousin Captain Douglas.)
All this good company in Shonts filled Lady Laxton with a pleasant realization of progressive successes but at the same time one must confess that she felt a certain diffidence. In her heart of hearts she knew she had not made this party. It had happened to her. How it might go on happening to her, she did not know, it was beyond her control. She hoped very earnestly that everything would pass off well.
The Lord Chancellor was as big a guest as any she had had. One must grow as one grows, but still—being easy and friendly with him would be, she knew, a tremendous effort. Rather like being easy and friendly with an elephant. She was not good at conversation. The task of interesting people taxed her and puzzled her. …
It was Slinker Bond, the whip, who had arranged the whole business—after, it must be confessed, a hint from Sir Peter. Laxton had complained that the government were neglecting this part of the country. “They ought to show up more than they do in the county,” said Sir Peter, and added almost carelessly, “I could easily put anybody up at Shonts.” There were to be two select dinner parties and a large but still select Sunday lunch to let in the countryside to the spectacle of the Laxtons taking their (new) proper place at Shonts. …
It was not only the sense of her own deficiencies that troubled Lady Laxton; there were also her husband’s excesses. He had—it was no use disguising it—rather too much the manner of an employer. He had a way of getting, how could one put it?—confident at dinner and Mergleson seemed to delight in filling up his glass. Then he would contradict a good deal. … She felt that Lord Chancellors however are the sort of men one doesn’t contradict. …
Then the Lord Chancellor was said to be interested in philosophy—a difficult subject. She had got Timbre to talk to him upon that. Timbre was a professor of philosophy at Oxford, so that was sure to be all right. But she wished she knew one or two good safe things to say in philosophy herself. She had long felt the need of a secretary, and now she felt it more than ever. If she had a secretary, she could just tell him what it was she wanted to talk about and he could get her one or two of the right books and mark the best passages and she could learn it all up.
She feared—it was a worrying fear—that Laxton would say right out and very early in the week-end that he didn’t believe in philosophy. He had a way of saying he “didn’t believe in” large things like that—art, philanthropy, novels, and so on. Sometimes he said, “I don’t believe in all this”—art or whatever it was. She had watched people’s faces when he had said it and she had come to the conclusion that saying you don’t believe in things isn’t the sort of thing people say nowadays. It was wrong, somehow. But she did not want to tell Laxton directly that it was wrong. He would remember if she did, but he had a way of taking such things rather badly at the time. … She hated him to take things badly.
“If one could invent some little hint,” she whispered to herself.
She had often wished she was better at hints.
She was, you see, a gentlewoman, modest, kindly. Her people were quite good people. Poor, of course. But she was not clever, she was anything but clever. And the wives of these captains of industry need to be very clever indeed if they are to escape a magnificent social isolation. They get the titles and the big places and all that sort of thing; people don’t at all intend to isolate them, but there is nevertheless an inadvertent avoidance. …
Even as she uttered these words, “If one could invent some little hint,” Bealby down there less than forty feet away through the solid floor below her feet and a little to the right was wetting his stump of pencil as wet as he could in order to ensure a sufficiently emphatic fourteenth cross on the score sheet of the doomed Thomas. Most of the other thirteen marks were done with such hard breathing emphasis that the print of them went more than halfway through that little blue-edged book.
§ 5
The arrival of the week-end guests impressed Bealby at first merely as a blessed influence that withdrew the four men-servants into that unknown world on the other side of the green baize door, but then he learnt that it also involved the appearance of five new persons, two valets and three maids, for whom places had to be laid in the steward’s room. Otherwise Lady Laxton’s social arrangements had no more influence upon the mind of Bealby than the private affairs of the Emperor of China. There was something going