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 findit 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 giveninto 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 playedfootball 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 byto 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 ofa 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.”