He noticed that his own appearance seemed to startle her, realized why. He said, smiling, “I comb my hair with a washrag now, Barbie. No matter, I didn’t have enough to matter. Now that I’m used to being hairless, I like it.”
“You look distinguished, Hugh.”
“He’s ugly as sin,” said Ponse. “But are we chatting? Or playing bridge? Your bid, Barba.”
They played for hours. As it progressed, Barbara seemed to relax and enjoy it. She smiled a great deal, usually at Hugh, but also at Joe and even at Their Charity. She played by the book and Ponse never found fault. Hugh decided that their host was a good player, not yet perfect but he remembered what cards had been played and usually bid accurately. Hugh found him a satisfactory partner and an adequate opponent; it was a good game.
But once, with Barbara as Ponse’s partner and contract in her hand, Hugh saw when Ponse laid down the dummy that Ponse had overbid in his answer. So he contrived to lose one sure trick, thereby letting Barbara make contract, game, and rubber.
It got him a glance with no expression from Barbara and Joe gave him a look that had a twinkle in it, but Joe kept his mouth shut. Ponse did not notice. He gave a bass roar, reached across and patted Barbara’s head. “Wonderful, wonderful! Little one, you really can play contract. Why, I doubt if I could have made that myself.”
Nor did Ponse complain when, on the next rubber, Barbara and Hugh gave him and Joe a trouncing. Hugh decided that Ponse had the inborn honesty called “sportsmanship”—plus a good head for cards.
One of the little deaf-mutes trotted in, knelt, and served Their Charity a tumbler of something cold, then another to Joe. Ponse took a swig, wiped his mouth and said, “Ah, that hits the spot!”
Joe made a whispered suggestion to him. Ponse looked startled and said, “Oh, certainly. Why not?”
So Hugh and Barbara were served. Hugh was pleased to discover that it was apple juice; he wasn’t sure of his ability to play tight bridge had it been Happiness.
During this rubber Hugh noticed that Barbara was squirming a little and seemed to have trouble in concentrating. When the hand ended he said quietly, “Trouble, hon?”
She glanced at Ponse and whispered, “Some. I was about to feed the boys when I was sent for.”
“Oh.” Hugh turned to his host. “Ponse, Barbara needs to stop.”
Ponse looked up from shuffling. “Plumbing call? One of the maids can show it, I suppose. They must go somewhere.”
“Not that. Well, maybe that, too. What I meant was, Barbara has twins.”
“Well? Sluts usually have twins, they have two breasts.”
“That’s the point, she’s nursing them and she’s hours past time. She has to leave.”
Ponse looked annoyed, hesitated, then said, “Oh, garbage. Its milk won’t cake from so short a delay. Here, cut the cards.”
Hugh did not touch them. Ponse said, “Didn’t you hear me?”
Hugh stood up His heart was pounding and he felt a shudder of fear. “Ponse, Barbara hurts. She needs to nurse her twins right now. I can’t force you to let her—but if you think I’ll play cards while you don’t let her, you’re crazy.”
For long moments the big man stared, without expression. Then suddenly he grinned. “Hugh, I like you. You did something like this once before, didn’t you? The slut is your sister, I suppose.”
“No.”
“Then you are the one who is crazy. Do you know how close you came to being cold meat?”
“I can guess.”
“I doubt it, you don’t look worried. But I like spunk, even in a servant. Very well, I’ll have its brats fetched. They can suck while we play.”
The twins were fetched and Hugh saw at once that they were the handsomest, healthiest, and loveliest babies that had ever been born; he told Barbara so. He did not immediately get a chance to touch them as Ponse took one in each arm, laughed at them, blew in their faces, and jiggled them. “Fine boys!” he roared. “Fine boys, Barba! Holy little terrors, I’ll bet. Go on, swing that fist, kid! Sock Uncle in the nose again. What do you call them, Barba? Do they have names?”
“This one is Hugh—”
“Eh? Does Hugh have something to do with them? Or thinks he has, perhaps?”
“He’s their father.”
“Well, well! Hugh, you may be ugly, but you have other qualities. If Barba knows what she’s talking about. What’s this one’s name?”
“That one is little Joe. Karl Joseph.”
Ponse lifted an eyebrow at Joe. “So you have sluts naming brats for you, Joe? I’ll have to watch you, you’re a sly one. What did you give Barba?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Birthing present, you idiot. Give her that ring you’re wearing. So many brats in this house named after me that I have to order trinkets by the basket load; they know it obliges me to make them a present. Hugh is lucky, he has nothing to give. Hey, Hughie has teeth!”
Hugh got to hold them while they settled down for combined bridge and nursing. Barbara took them one at a time and played cards with her free hand. The little maids fussed over the one not nursing and, in due time, took them away. In spite of the handicap Barbara played well, even brilliantly; the long session ended with Ponse top scorer, Barbara close behind, and Joe and Hugh tied for last. Hugh had cheated very little to make it come out that way; the cards had favored Ponse and Barbara when they were partners; they had made two small slams.
Ponse was feeling very jovial about it. “Barba, come here, little one. You tell the slutmaster I said to find a wet nurse for your brats and that I want the vet to dry you up as soon as possible. I want you available as my bridge partner. Or opponent—you give a man a tough fight.”
“Yes, sir. May one speak?”
“One may.”
“I would rather nurse them myself. They’re all I have.”
“Well—” He shrugged. “This seems to be my day for balky servants. I’m afraid you are both still savages. A tingling wouldn’t do you any harm, slut. All right, but you’ll have to play one-handed sometimes; I won’t have brats stopping the game.” He grinned. “Besides, I’d like to see the little rascals occasionally, especially that one that bites. You may go. All.”
Barbara was dismissed so suddenly that Hugh barely had time to exchange smiles with her; he had hoped to walk down with her, steal a private visit. But His Charity did not dismiss him, so he stayed—with a warm glow in his heart; it had been the happiest time in a long time.
Ponse discussed the articles he had been translating, why none of them offered practical business ventures. “But don’t fret, Hugh; keep plugging and we’ll strike ore yet.” He turned the talk to other matters, still kept Hugh there. Hugh found him a knowledgeable conversationalist, interested in everything, as willing to listen as he was to talk. He seemed to Hugh the epitome of the perfect decadent gentleman—urbane, cosmopolitan, disillusioned, and cynical, a dilettante in arts and sciences, neither merciful nor cruel, unimpressed by his own rank, not racist—he treated Hugh as an intellectual equal.
While they were talking, the little maids served dinner to Ponse and to Joe. Nothing was offered to Hugh, nor did he expect it—nor want it, as he could have meals served in his rooms if he was not on time in the executive servants’ dining room and he had long since decided, from samplings, that Memtok was right: the upper servants ate better than the master.
But when Ponse had finished, he shoved his dishes toward Hugh. “Eat.”
Hugh hesitated a split second; he did not need to be told that he was being honored—for a servant. There was plenty, at least three times as much left as Ponse had eaten. Hugh could not recall that he had ever eaten someone’s leavings, and certainly not with a used spoon. He dug in.
As usual, Their Charity’s menu did not especially please Hugh—somewhat greasy and he had no great liking for pork. Pork was hardly ever served belowstairs but was often part of the menus Memtok sampled, Hugh had noticed. It surprised him, as the revised Koran stil
l contained the dietary laws and the Chosen did follow some of the original Muslim customs. They practiced circumcision, did not use alcohol other than a thin beer, and observed Ramadan at least nominally and called it that. Mahomet would have been shocked by the revisions to his straightforward monotheistic teachings but he would have recognized some of the details.
But the bread was good, the fruits were superb, and so were the ices and many other things; it wasn’t necessary to dine solely on roast. Hugh kept intact his record for enjoying the inevitable.
Ponse was interested in what the climate had been in this region in Hugh’s time. “Joe tells me you sometimes had freezing temperatures. Even snow.”
“Oh, yes, every winter.”
“Fantastic. How cold did it get?”
Hugh had to think. He had not had occasion to learn how these people marked temperatures. “If you consider the range from freezing of water to boiling, it was not unusual for it to get one third of that range lower than freezing.”
Ponse looked surprised. “Are you sure? We call that range, freezing to boiling, one hundred. Are you telling me that it sometimes got as much as thirty-three degrees below freezing?”
Hugh noted with interest that the centigrade scale had survived two millennia—but no reason why not; they used the decimal system in arithmetic and in money. He had to do a conversion in his head. “Yes, that’s what I mean. Nearly cold enough to freeze mercury, and cold enough for that, up in those mountains.” Hugh pointed out a view window.
“Cold enough,” Joe agreed, “to freeze your teeth! Only thing that ever made me long for Mississippi.”
“Where,” asked Ponse, “is Mississippi?”
“It’s not,” Joe told him. “It’s under water now. And good riddance.”
This led to discussion of why the climate had changed and Their Charity sent for the last volume of the Britannica, containing ancient maps, and for modern maps. They poured over them together. Where the Mississippi Valley had been, the Gulf now reached far north. Florida and Yucatan were missing and Cuba was a few small islands. California had a central sea and most of northern Canada was gone.
Similar shrinkages had taken place elsewhere. The Scandinavian Peninsula was an island, the British Isles were several small islands, part of the Sahara was under water. What had been lowlands anywhere were missing—Holland, Belgium, Northern Germany could not be found. Nor Denmark—the Baltic was a gulf of the Atlantic.
Hugh looked at it with odd sorrow and had never felt so homesick. He had known it was so, from reading; this was the first map he had seen of it.
“The question,” said Ponse, “is whether the melting of ice was triggered by the dust of the East-West War, or was it a natural change that was, at most, speeded up a little by artificial events? Some of my scientists say one thing, some the other.”
“What do you think?” asked Hugh.
The lord shrugged. “I’m not foolish enough to hold opinions when I have insufficient data; I’ll leave that folly to scientists. I’m simply glad that Uncle saw fit to let me live in an age in which I can go outdoors without freezing my feet. I visited the South Pole once—I have some mines there. Frost on the ground. Dreadful. The place for ice is in a drink.”
Ponse went to the window and stood looking out at the silhouette of mountains against darkening sky. “However, if it got that cold up there now, we would root them out in a hurry. Eh, Joe?”
“Back they would come with their tails between their legs,” Joe agreed.
Hugh looked puzzled. “Ponse means,” Joe explained, “the runners hiding up in the mountains. What they thought you were when we were found.”
“Runners and a few aborigines,” Ponse supplemented. “Savages. Poor creatures who have never been rescued by civilization. It’s hard to save them, Hugh. They don’t stand around waiting to be picked up the way you did. They’re crafty as wolves. The merest shadow in the sky and they freeze and you can’t see them—and they are very destructive of game. Of course we could smoke them out any number of ways. But that would kill the game, can’t have that. Hugh, you’ve lived out there; you must have acquired some feel for it. How would you go about rescuing those critters? Without killing game.”
Mr. Hugh Farnham hesitated only long enough to phrase his reply. “Their Charity knows that this one is a servant. This one’s ears must be at fault in thinking that it heard its humble self called on to see the problem as it might appear to the Chosen.”
“Why, damn your impudence! Come, come, Hugh, I want your opinion.”
“You got my opinion, Ponse. I’m a servant. My sympathies are with the runaways. And the savages. I didn’t come here willingly. I was dragged.”
“Surely you aren’t resenting that now? Of course you were captured, even Joe was. But there was language difficulty. Now you’ve seen the difference. You know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Then you know how much your condition has improved. Don’t you sleep in a better bed now? Aren’t you eating better? Uncle! When we picked you up, you were half starved and infested with vermin. You were barely staying alive with the hardest sort of work, I could see. I’m not blind, I’m not stupid; there isn’t a member of my Family down to the lowest cleaner that works half as hard as you had to, or sleeps in as poor a bed—and in a stinking little sty; I could hardly bear the stench before we fumigated it—and as for the food, if that is the word, any servant in this house would turn up his nose at what you ate. Isn’t all that true?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I prefer freedom.”
“‘Freedom!’” Their Charity snorted. “A concept without a referent, like ‘ghosts.’ Meaningless. Hugh, you should study semantics. Modern semantics, I mean; I doubt if they really had such a science in your day. We are all free—to walk our appointed paths. Just as a stone is free to fall when you toss it into the air. No one is free in the abstract meaning you give the word. Do you think I am free? Free to change places with you, say? Would I if I could? You bet I would! You have no concept of the worries I have, the work I do. Sometimes I lie awake half the night, worrying which way to turn next—you won’t find that in servants’ hall. They’re happy, they have no worries. But I have to carry my burden as best I can.”
Hugh looked stubborn. Ponse came over and put his arm around Hugh’s shoulders. “Come, let’s talk this over judicially—two civilized beings. I’m not one of those superstitious persons who thinks a servant can’t think because his skin is pale. Surely you know that. Haven’t I respected your intellect?”
“Well…yes.”
“That’s better. Let me explain some things—Joe has seen them—and you can ask questions, and we’ll arrive at a rational understanding. First—Joe, you’ve seen Chosen here and there who are what our friend Hugh would no doubt describe as ‘free.’ Tell him.”
Joe snorted. “Hugh, you should see—and you would be glad to be privileged to live in Ponse’s household. There is just one phrase I can think of to describe them. Po’ black trash. Like the white trash there used to be in Mississippi. Poor black trash, not knowing where their next meal is.”
“I follow you.”
“I think I do, too,” agreed Their Charity. “A pungent phrase. I look forward to the day when every man will have servants. It can’t come overnight, they’ll have to lift themselves up. But a day when all the Chosen will be served—and all servants as well cared for as they are in my own Family. That’s my ideal. In the meantime I do the best I can. I look after their welfare from birth until they’re called Home by Uncle. They have nothing to fear, utter security—which they wouldn’t have out in those mountains as I’m sure you know better than I. They are happy, they are never overworked—which I am—and they have plenty of fun, which is more than I can say! This bridge game today—the first real fun I’ve had in a month. And they are never punished, only just enough to remind them when they err. Have to do that, you’ve seen how stupid most of them are. Not
that I am inferring that you are—No, I tell you honestly that I think you are smart enough to take care of servants yourself, despite your skin. I’m speaking of the ordinary run. Honestly, Hugh, do you think they could take care of themselves as well as I look out for them?”
“Probably not.” Hugh had heard all this before, only nights ago, and in almost the same words—from Memtok. With the difference that Ponse seemed to be honestly fond of his servants and earnest about their welfare—whereas the Chief Domestic had been openly contemptuous of them, even more strongly so than his veiled contempt for the Chosen. “No, they couldn’t, most of them.”
“Ah! You agree with me.”
“No.”
Ponse looked pained. “Hugh, how can we have a rational discussion if you say one thing and contradict it in the next breath?”
“I didn’t contradict myself. I agreed that you took fine care of the welfare of your servants. But I did not agree that I prefer it to freedom.”
“But why, Hugh? Give me a reason, not a philosophical abstraction. If you’re not happy, I want to know why. So that I can correct it.”
“I can give you one reason. I’m not allowed to live with my wife and children.”
“Eh?”
“Barbara. And the twins.”
“Oh. Is that important? You have a bedwarmer. Memtok told me, and I congratulated him on having used initiative in an odd situation. Not much gets past that sly old fox. You have one and she is sure to be more expert at her specialty than the ordinary run of breeding slut. As for the brats, no reason why you can’t see them—just order them fetched to you whenever you like. But who wants to live with brats? Or with a wife? I don’t live with my wife and children, you can bet on that. I see them on appropriate occasions. But who would want to live with them?”
“I would.”
“Well—Uncle! I want you to be happy. It can be arranged.”
“It can?”
“Certainly. If you hadn’t put up such a fuss over being tempered, you could have had them with you all along—though I confess I don’t see why. Do you want to see the vet?”
Farnham's Freehold Page 22