Tono Bungay

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—!

I don’t jeer now.  I’m not so sure.