A Footman for the Peacock

by Ferguson,Rachel

  It was true that with all his sincerity, Basil Winchcombe was still unable to keep from bringing the footlights up to the altar rails, and his discourses were invariably prone to sudden turns of theatrical phrasing, as on the occasion when he said that, in doubt, it was always safe to take your cue from God, that every time you resisted a mean temptation you gave Satan the bird, that Christ stood on the Prompt Side of God the Father, and that the policy of Herod was a complete flop. Of these locutionary lapses he was, when chaffed by Evelyn Roundelay who liked him immensely, profoundly ashamed. ‘It’s awful. But you wouldn’t believe how the stage gets into one’s bones.’

  ‘You’ll be urging them next to queue up for Communion.’

  ‘Well, if you get down to bed-rock, does it matter how one gets ’em in? I’d stage a bottle-party if I could make them get together — ’

  ‘Bribery — ’

  ‘No. What I mean is that they ought to see beyond manners and idiosyncrasies.’

  Evelyn was sure of her ground. ‘That’s no use in a village. I know what you mean, but the people here aren’t ready for it. The only drama they understand is hell fire and Elmer Gantryism, because it’s both pictorial and unreal. That’s why the Chapel’s much fuller, in most villages, that and the Socials and buns. It isn’t experimental, like the Church of England. It hands out an unvarying line of goods that they know where they are with. Take Delaye. Our church havers. Here’s the Vicar being perfectly nice and null about Ahab’s mother-in-law and at the other end of the scale yourself, telling them that Christ isn’t a long-hair’d abstraction in a white bath-robe but a decent idea, the idea of not sanding sugar and seducing servant girls out of boredom. Of course you’re right, and you’re between the devil of that meaningless somnolence that is induced by Ahab’s mother-in-law and the deep sea of beginning to make them think and realize. All you can hope to do with the average villager is to make him uneasy, restless, like wounds itching when they’re healing.’

  ‘And my lot are in the scratching stage? I know . . .’

  ‘If that! You see, Mr. Winchcombe, the poor wretches are rather bedevilled. My husband tells me that the Vicar’s predecessor was fearfully Low church, then came our Vicar, and he’s middling, and next time we may get someone who wants confession and banners. They’re all within the law in being Anglican, but they’re unsettling, and haven’t even denunciation and hell fire to fall back on, like the Nonconformists. The Chapel has stripped itself of all the trimmings and is down to bedrock, and bedrock is at least something to sit on.’

  ‘Oh yes. But you’ve forgotten the chief snag, which is that broadly speaking neither Chapel people nor their ministers are ever gentlefolk. This gives ’em an enormous advantage at once because, mentally, both preacher and congregation are en pays de connaissance: they talk the same language. Whereas in our church broadly speaking we’re all gentlemen, therefore it is taken for granted by our flock, especially in rural communities, that we shall never understand each other at all, and for what success we have we must fall back upon personal attributes, or social nous. I can dig a ditch with anyone, but it would never occur to the Delayeites to hand me a spade because they’d either assume I’d make a botch of it or that I was patronizing ’em because my father went to a university. You know as well as I do that we’ve been the target of the legitimate and vaudeville stage for a century, and you may also have noticed that it is only the Anglican parsons who are held up to ridicule, never the Chapel minister or even the Roman padre — ’

  ‘It’s sickening — ’

  ‘You don’t get my point, which is that for centuries we dogsbodies of curates have probably asked for it and deserved it, and we’ve deserved it because of this never-mentioned class question and our consciousness of the resultant difficulty of approach to our congregations. Of course it makes us nervous and fatuous or ultra-brawny and backslapping. But it’s a point that has never been aired because officially we’re all equals, and in any case it’s a very difficult subject to talk about. Oh well . . . exit curate L.U.E. through gap in teeth.’

  ‘I hope — we all do — that you’re not going to let it get you down, and leave us?’

  ‘Lord, no! I came into the church with my eyes open — it’s quite possible to combine having no illusions with enthusiasm, and that’s why I hope, one day, to feel I’ve really done some tangible good, because I shan’t be sapped and daunted and driven out by personal grief, and disappointment. And because I came into the business expecting everything I found, I get a lot of interest and fun out of it without at the same time ceasing to know that even the most apparently hopeless cases are in very truth lost sheep, who only need a good dispassionate crack over the rump to put ’em on the right track again. Most clergymen approach their parishioners from the point of view that they’re already angels who ought to respect the fact, then the angels go all old Adam on them and the holy man in direct ratio to his inherent holiness is dismayed and confused. Now I take the line that my lot are all devils and acting as such — doing their stuff, true to type, and then I’m free to hunt for reasons that make ’em play up, and to see the good in ’em sticking out in the rummest places. But I tell you, there’s one thing that narks me. Our respected Vicar doesn’t like it when I have a drink with the men in our pub. You see the idea? It’s undesirable because I’m of the ruling class, someone who mayn’t touch their beer- and-darts life lest he ‘lose influence’. I’m all for caste and class distinctions (and even if I weren’t, they’ll persist), but there’s something wrong in that particular snob-barrier. And the devil of it is that I’m so spinelessly fair-minded that I absolutely see his point without being absolutely convinced.’

  ‘Yes, but don’t you see, too, that the whole point of the church is that its congregation may have something or someone to whom to look up? Who’s valuable because he doesn’t appear for beer and darts — ’

  ‘But they don’t look up to me, except once a week! From Monday to Saturday I’m a sort of hermaphrodite, neither wholly male nor completely clerical . . . what we’ve got to realize and allow for is that the Church of England to-day is more or less a hangover: existing on its medieval hump, dreaming of the days when it had power and really ruled by force and superstition. But all we can hope to do with it now is to divert its vanished glories into social channels, questions of giving one’s worldly experience to the ignorant, of becoming a magnified soup kitchen for the relief of physical suffering, and seeing wherever possible that the community is harmlessly entertained and brought together. And all that could be done by the local Squire, if he were the right man.’

  Winchcombe wheeled upon Evelyn. ‘All humbugging apart, do you feel any nearer God when you’re actually in church?’

  ‘No, not particularly, but that isn’t to say that other people don’t. I find that God is an elusive person and not always on call while we sit in neat rows waiting for him to arrive. Most times when I’m in church I feel nothing at all, and plan out lunches and dinners — you know, and then when I get back to Delaye, he’s there in the hall, or in the drawing-room, which I adore. It’s so full of atmosphere.’

  Basil Winchcombe nodded. ‘I know. I can see him liking Delaye with its space and mannerly air. Why not, if we do?. . .’

  ‘It’s funny you should say that about the drawing-room, because I remember that once, when Sir Edmund showed me the whole house for the first time, I got a very vivid sensation of Christ. It wasn’t in the hall, though, or the drawing-room, but it was a very real thing, to me. I remember when your husband opened the door of that room and I stood inside looking about me that I was suddenly steeped in the conviction that I was in the presence of some high and hidden beauty. It was horribly sad as well . . . like a remembrance of the crucifixion. But there was some peace there which had come at the eleventh hour — I’m explaining badly, but there it was. Unmistakable.’

  ‘Which room?’

  ‘On one of the top storeys. It’s the bedroom that has that inscription on a window
-pane. “Heryn I dye. Thomas Picocke”.’

  2

  They had looked at each other without embarrassments. Evelyn said, ‘That’s strange, your feeling that way about the room. My younger daughter, Angela, can’t bear it. Luckily nothing ever takes her there, but she was like that from the very first. I once took her up there when she was only about six; I wanted all the children to know and love the place as I do and not to feel that “the servants’ quarters” were something the family never saw or alluded to, and Angela began to whimper at once and ran out of the room. I thought it was just because it was a strange place to her, and I tried her again with the room, later. But it was no good. It wasn’t just caprice. She hated it: got a shivering fit and turned cold all over.

  ‘Mothers, you know, are supposed to be a mass of intuitions about their offspring, but they aren’t. Perception doesn’t automatically follow on maternity, though it makes a pretty story that it does.’

  ‘Then — have you any theory about Angela and the room?’

  ‘Not one in the world. She’s a nervous little creature and very highly-strung.’

  ‘And your other daughter, Miss Margaret?’

  Evelyn Roundelay smiled as she shook her head. ‘Margaret’s a great dear, but more, as they say, on the Girl Guide side.’

  3

  In regard to her friendships with the laity, it was many months before they emerged as personalities; prior to such knowledge, they had stood to Evelyn Roundelay, confused by their numbers, for snatched remembrances and associations. Thus, for weeks, Mrs. Holland was merely a hot lawn, ices that called themselves peche Melba but were frozen custard and tinned apricots, flatfaced parlourmaid whose name was Annie, a lobby full of chipped croquet mallets, and a dinner from which Maxwell Dunston had returned cursing and apostrophizing as Sauce Hollandaise.

  Lady Shelter, at first, had been memorable on account of the long drive with private lamp-posts which led to her house, and which for a considerable time caused Evelyn to imagine garlanded festivities and much rich entertainment of the Hollyleaves type. Closer acquaintance with the Shelters had, however, revealed each lamp-post as a species of ignis fatuus leading to assemblies which, no matter how the hostess strove, everlastingly contrived to be Institutional and to make the guests subconsciously feel like an annual treat to Fallen Women.

  Cautiously, Evelyn had early attempted to sound local opinion upon these gatherings, believing, at first, that as one’s eye will fail to focus during a liver attack, so the impression that the Shelter hospitality made upon herself could not be the true one, and as with the passing of time the parties remained inexorably public, Evelyn privately called them The Home Away From Home. About them her neighbours were unilluminating. The Shelters were wealthy and kind and their parties were always like that.

  It was with her children and Basil Winchcombe that Evelyn found her safety-valve, carefully at first, with many a firm allusion to the Shelters’ kindness, and then by giggling stages to delighted exchange, comment, mutual interruptions and the room ringing with supplementary shouts and exhumations of some forgotten frightfulness.

  ‘How does she do it?’ Evelyn herself would clamour. ‘There’s every apparent advantage, large house, money, servants, h. and c. laid on, yet it’s all stone dead.’

  ‘It is beyond doubt,’ contributed Mr. Winchcombe, ‘that some hostesses blast everything they touch.’

  ‘That’s a hot one,’ approved Evelyn’s son, ‘but it’s my turn now. Lady Shelter once gave the men boxes of cigarettes at a New Year party. They helped themselves to their boxes from a salver at the door as they went out. I don’t expect you to believe me.’

  The curate’s eyes glazed. ‘Was that before my time?’ he asked reverently, and lay back in a coma of pleasure.

  ‘May I tell you a better one than that?’ Margaret placidly suggested. ‘Once she gave a mixed party — all ages, you know — and I was invited, and while everyone was standing about waiting for the fun not to begin, she came up to me and some of my friends and said “We’ll just get you young people amused and then we can make a start”.’

  ‘Wonderful . . . wonderful,’ murmured Winchcombe, his eyes still closed.

  Stacey Roundelay beat the air. ‘And that kids’ party! Presents for all — d’you remember, Margaret? “Dolls for the girls, soldiers for the boys, dolls for the girls, soldiers for the boys”.’

  ‘And yet she has no vice in her: it’s all kindly meant, and not a cross word,’ regretted Lady Roundelay. It was true. If you were a guest of Lady Shelter it was also a certainty that you would never sit next to the congenial person; it was rumoured that Lady Shelter kept a typewritten list pinned up in an inconspicuous place upon which was catalogued the programme of amusements, gift bestowal and games, together with the estimated time that each item would consume . . . So much for Buckingham . . . When you received your present it was never the thing you wanted; no present was cheap, yet by a stroke of genius it was seldom appropriate and always impersonal. About the Shelter gifts their recipients were left with the eternal conviction that they had been quite expensively bought en masse and then labelled at random from the guest-list. “The Shelter luck still holds”, the Roundelays would exclaim on returning from one of her parties, as they laid upon the hall table of Delaye a pair of alabaster book-ends, brass door-knockers from Rye and two-foot boxes of sweets with a coloured photograph of a rose-garden upon the lid and a one-layer contents in which distressingly was featured fruit jellies, fondants and coconut squares. If Lady Shelter included an entertainer, she was apt to engage him three years running, a system by which, were he a conjuror, the Roundelays laid bets on the present number of offspring of the bright-eye’d, kicking rabbit gently removed from the performer’s top-hat, and were it — oh heavy day! — a magic lantern show, the sequence of slides, including Rochester cathedral both by night and day, could in time be audibly forecast, if you were rude enough.

  ‘You’d think a children’s fancy dress party was fool-proof,’ almost shouted Evelyn Roundelay, ‘but Lady Shelter can over-come even that.’ Winchcombe looked imploring and she put him out of his pain, holding up one hand and ticking off with the index finger of the other. ‘Always overcrowded, so that the imaginative dresses aren’t seen, and a pierrot or a Santa Claus gets the prize because the judges, God mend us all, are quite clear about that; a marshalling of the children for a treasure hunt, with all the presents hidden so obviously that you can see them without moving (children hate that. They like using their intelligence), and at the end, the poor toads are lined up and set to fishing for muslin bags of sweets with a rod and a hook. If they don’t circulate quick enough, the butler stoops down and fastens the bag on to the hook. And children hate that, too. Angela once deliberately let her bag fall off three times, but they were ready for her! They merely took the rod out of her hand and gave her the bag.’

  And, just in the way that Lady Shelter had materialized from a private lamp-post to the detailed status of family joke, so did the other residents take on personality, and that which had been but a plated stocking, a lean ankle and a basonic hat coalesced for instance into Mrs. Galbraith, who, Lady Roundelay was to discover, was hard up, bred Persian cats with large, disappointed faces and chilling manners, and owned a small house so nearly on the roadside at the Norminster end of Delaye village that when she returned by motor bus hung with parcels of household necessities and condition powders she practically leaped into her own drawing-room window from the conveyance. In summer, by pressing your nose against the omnibus, it was possible to note the progress of Mrs. Galbraith’s reading matter from the circulating library in Norminster, and to wonder what had happened to that jumper she was knitting last Friday, it being no longer on the table by the verandah. On encountering Mrs. Galbraith at garden and dinner parties or sales of work and fêtes you pictured her, in time, picking her way to the gatherings over and round a roomful of detentive cats, resentful of her pleasuring. When long evening dresses came in once more th
e hems of her gowns were apt to appear spattered with faint pansy markings of their paws and the urgencies of her dumb friends’ league could be gauged according to the height to which the damage extended: worn places upon the hip usually meant that Galbraith Bluebell had smelt his dinner, or that Champion Milk of Magnesia wanted to be let out very badly indeed. Marks or little unravellings at or below the knee could signify nothing more pressing than affection.

  CHAPTER VIII

  1

  THERE are in that part of Normanshire of which the city of Norminster is a landmark, many subsidiary hamlets, some of which are connected as are Bramber and Beeding, in Sussex, with the larger village of Delaye by nothing more than footpaths. Solitary sign-posts bear those names whose original meaning lies back in the mists of time and of which such appellations as Old Maid’s Pan, Half-penny Toll, and King Gibbet are not unfair exaggerations.

  To village life, Evelyn Roundelay had come, as she had written to her sisters, with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. She had hopefully asked her new cousin, Maxwell Dunston, if there were a village idiot, to which that pessimist responded that in all small communities there was always a village idiot, and that sometimes it was the village idiot and sometimes the Vicar.

  Delaye village was in point of fact like many other communities in England at the present time, in being in a rather dreadful period of transition, by which the curtsy at the lodge gates was not wholly eliminated, yet the gaitered gaffer in his cottage could listen in to a terrific and indigestible combination of chamber music and highly subversive speeches from Moscow. Respect to the known families and the big houses which employed their sons and daughters still gappily prevailed, but the charm of rural life was mongrelized, and the future of the village of Delaye probably hung upon the relative density of intelligence of the present population, and fined down to the question of whether the village youth were going to choose to be offended at the lack of tone inherent in forking hay, or whether, unwittingly, they were going to give up all hope of making thirty-five shillings a week by esteeming themselves to be mute inglorious but potential members of The Léner Quartette, or (far better) one of The Six Silver Saxophone Kollege Kids. A little knowledge had as ever, proved quite fatal, and the wireless, with the present generation, had done its work well by at once failing to expand their minds and successfully implanting a general, vague discontent that impaired their efficiency in the work they best understood.