A Footman for the Peacock

by Ferguson,Rachel

  For so straightforward an issue, her mistress thought when she sent for her before dinner, Sue Privett was being singularly tiresome — giving way submissively over the major point of relinquishing the society of an admirer where vanity should have made her unwilling to concede it, and closing down, Lady Roundelay suspected, over the relative triviality of the peacock’s attack upon her young man.

  Yes, they had been for a walk, it was at Dale’s request and Sue didn’t see no harm in it. —

  ‘There isn’t any. Go on, Sue.’

  And then, and then as he was going back to Squire’s the peacock struck at him, like.

  ‘But why?’ Sue couldn’t say, she was sure.

  ‘Had Dale been teasing him?’

  Yes, yes he had. That was it.

  Evelyn, at a loss, scenting an eager grasp at a lie, said at random, ‘That was stupid of him.’

  ‘Yes, m’lady.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  Sue was unprepared for that, hesitated, ‘Oh, poked him, m’lady.’

  ‘H’m . . . well, never mind. The master will make that right with Dale and Mr. Severn.’

  ‘Thank you, m’lady.’

  ‘And, of course, it’s quite possible that your very naughty pet remembered that it was Dale who tried to take him back to Severn Court.’

  The ingenuous face of Lady Roundelay’s kitchenmaid radiated admiration as she gasped, ‘Oh yes, m’lady. That was it.’

  ‘What a fool I am,’ thought Evelyn. ‘That, in the Law Courts, is what’s called “leading” a witness. And I fancy Sue sensed it.’

  2

  After dinner Evelyn read her letters. They included nine affectionate enquiries, lovable, disturbing and pathetic, after her safety and plans, the tenor of which was ‘Do let us, if possible, keep in touch’, and two hints of varying strength from friends that in case London became too hot to hold them Delaye would be a delightful asylum; one circled round the nice point of payment, the other’s feelings were too nice to envisage anything but free board, lodging, light, heat and laundry. Tactful evasion of both correspondents must be thought out later.

  Her son wrote from his Agricultural College.

  Stacey Roundelay didn’t see the point of coming home just to ‘cumber the earth’ until he’d wangled a commission somewhere, and all this was pretty tedious, wasn’t it, in view of what his training had cost the family, and it remained to hope that when this business was all over one might be able to pull one’s weight at Delaye and take some of the grind off father . . . and his mother wasn’t to worry. Stacey supposed that it was true, as she said, that his generation had no future to speak of and had rather contrived to miss the feeling of security enjoyed by hers, but that ‘his lot’ had lived so much under the shadow of the last war and in anticipation of the next that he supposed they were case-hardened and broke to unsettled feelings, ‘and of course we haven’t even the glamour-of-ignorance that the 1914 lot had; we’re merely jaded, at once sans Jingoism or experience . . . and they haven’t got Delaye to bolster them up.’ From which philosophy Stacey’s mother derived little comfort. Her son was now twenty-eight and not even engaged. . . .

  It was the mordant comments of Maxwell Dunston that braced her.

  ‘’Way the authorities are truckling, and bribing men into the army is a scandal, making a pack of mollycoddles out of ’em, over-feeding ’em, lowering the marriage age at which they can begin drawing family allowances . . . of course there’ll be a crop of war weddings and then half these fellows’ll get picked off and their widows’ll come on public assistance for life, and probably not one boy-child in ten to show for it. As for this democratization of the army, it won’t work and it isn’t right that it should. I tell you, war is no time for the all-men-are-equal brigade’s experiments. It never occurs to anyone that the young men of our class are investments for the country who’ve been pretty costly ones for their parents, and who are best fitted for leadership by education, heredity and instinct. But we’ve practically got to the stage now when we’ve got to apologize for not dropping our aitches, wearing a whole suit of clothes and having an income higher than a bus conductor’s. You mark my words: Stacey’s going to have the fight of his life to get a commission, and if they get wind that he knows something about agriculture and forestry they’ll put him to any job on earth but the one he’s specialized in.’

  Evelyn’s sisters had both written. Kathleen Calcott said:

  ‘London is looking very unbecoming and odd and you can walk for miles without seeing one inch of khaki or hearing a single band. Too prepared, I suppose. At every street corner people are shovelling sand into bags; elderly Edwardian matrons in toques stop as a matter of course, drop handbags and umbrellas and shovel too, all over their neat stockings. We had an air raid warning in church yesterday just after the P.M.’s speech, but nobody turned a hair; they thought it was something gone wrong with the organ, and in short, we played the ukulele till the ship went down. As a matter of fact there is no bomb born of woman that could shake South Kensington’s complacent stagnation. It’s rather fine really, like putting on a dinner jacket every night for one cobra and a cactus in the wilds of Boggley-Wallah.

  ‘The war already strikes one as being in a different category altogether from any other we’ve weathered; there’s really no political or religious issue, when you get down to brass tacks, but a most simple and dramatic tussle between good and evil — like the Fairy Queen and the Demon in a pantomime, and that’s why nobody here, I think, is seriously worried except by the trifling side-issues it’ll raise, and the outcome, because of this, seems so foregone that it’s only a matter of hanging on and enduring it all.

  ‘If you’re short of torches, I’m told in some of the shops that they’re expecting a consignment of American batteries. They’ll cost 11d., I hear — about three-quarters more than the proper price, so America wins the war once again, at the beginning of it, this time, instead of the end. Meanwhile, I guess and surmise and ’low our cue is to be terribly polite about the U.S.A. for some months yet, with plenteous reference to The Mayflower, our roots in a common soil and great traditions of liberty, so wise up your cheer-squads to whoop it up for Gopher Prairie, fair city of hundred per-cent, two-fisted, red-blooded, up-and-coming reg-lar fellows.

  ‘The London theatres are to be closed until further notice, so the distress among the poor wretches will be acuter than usual. There seems to be no war work really wanted for my likes, so I wrote in to “Ensa” offering to do odd clerical jobs for them. I thought a theatrical atmosphere would be cheering for the duration, but Lord love you! they’ve no use for me, so the Ensa’s a lemon, as it were, and I shall just have to wait until something turns up. There don’t seem to be any work depots open, either, because there aren’t any casualties, and what canteens there are have waiting-lists yards long. I did have three days in one started by a Kensington friend of ours, but the moment she got it on its feet the authorities closed it as being superfluous. The current pastime seems to be clearing the hospitals of civilian patients who can’t get nursed anywhere else in order to make room for soldiers who aren’t arriving.

  ‘A universal eagerness to serve in any capacity together with an almost entire lack of openings has resulted in car-owners pasting announcements across their windscreens bearing information that, except in the case of ‘‘Doctor”, results in the butcher’s becoming promoted to “Essential Foodstuffs”, the chemist delivering headache powders to “Medical Supplies, Urgent”, while the rest fill up with obscure combinations of initials in which the only absentees seem to be W.C., B.F., R.S.V.P., P.P.C., and D.T., and yesterday one diehard who had no connection with anything was reduced to “Don’t Indulge In Careless Talk”. I’m now waiting for Barker’s and Debenham’s vans to roll by marked “Vital Satins” and “W.O. Ospreys”.

  ‘Saw in a newspaper that there is an idea that women may have to be conscripted. This was followed in another by a sermonette to the effect that we shall be doing goo
d National Service by staying at home and keeping the gas-fires burning, and by the announcement of the closing of even the waiting-list for Wrens and Land Girls.

  ‘No plague of catchwords and comic songs, thank God! So far, we’re existing on the old crop left over from the last war. Don’t feel you’ve got to ask us to Delaye, m’dear. In any case, Helen couldn’t get away just now, having become an Air Raid Warning!’

  Helen Calcott supplemented this news item:

  ‘Am doing (voluntary) A.R.P., and gosh! how they put one through the mangle! Eight lectures, a bomb demonstration, an exam and go through the gas chamber. My experience in winning my badge (officially valued at 2s.) was as follows:

  ‘Having attended the lectures, during one of which (on types of bomb) the lecturer told us that the criss-cross of gummed paper on the windows of the Town Hall and in the room in which we sat were very pretty but no good at all against splinters, we were told to await instructions as to where to go for the exam. When I’d finished waiting for mine, I flogged to the nearest A.R.P. Post where I was received by a long young man who, I heard later, is a dramatist, and by him was told to attend at a school at 8 o’clock, p.m. I filled in a form giving name and age, was told this should have been done before the first lecture, to which I replied that the Town Hall had never even shown me one when I enrolled. Next morning, totally different Warden from another Post rang up cancelling my school assignation and telling me to ask for an Admiral at the Town Hall in the afternoon at 2.30. He, it seemed, would catechize me alone. Having assimilated this unnatural combination of water, gas, air and fire, I arrived, was told to see a perfectly different name (Admiral idea evidently scrapped) and was put through my paces by a nice old bird who would be a dream as Charles The Second at a fancy dress ball who asked me questions and was kind enough to supply most of the answers. Then told me that women were not being used in our Sector as patrols, which is what I had joined for.

  ‘The bomb demonstration took place in a draughty goods-yard and we dispersed shivering, covered with magnesium powder and filled with the conviction that no precaution of an amateur nature is of the smallest use against incendiaries or H.E.’s. The former dam’ thing goes clean through a sheet of metal, a bucket of water and another bucket; the noise, on the other hand, is unexpectedly little, I’ve heard many a firework that makes far more.

  ‘The gas chamber is a small brick house in the goods-yard with a red light over the door, thus suggesting a cross between an abattoir and a brothel. We put on masks, were vetted by an expert in a white surgeon’s coat (which unnerved me) and were herded into an airtight room where he touched off a small cone which in due course emitted clouds of smoke that turned out to be C.A.P. (a tear gas). I promptly paled, felt convinced that my mask was a misfit and that I could already smell gas and that the gas was Phosgene and nothing less. Phosgene, my sweet creature, is a Lung Irritant, and the symptoms that you turn first blue in the face and then leaden; the only hope is oxygen and even then you’re a crock for life if you pull through at all. I feel convinced that when or if we’re ever called upon to treat a real casualty, he won’t look in the least like what the handbook says he ought to, but will either be no colour at all or some colour which calls for a totally different treatment. By the way: one of the gases is called “B.B.C.”. It’s also an Eye Irritant. I feel there’s a mistake here and it should be listed under Ears. I emerged from the gas chamber shaken but unscathed and was promptly herded back without mask in order to get a confidence-whiff of what we should have got if we’d got it. Left with eyes and nose pouring. So you can tell the family that at least the Civilian respirators do their work. And the end of all my striving is a seat at a table in an ex-committee room with another hag at one defenceless telephone. Our work, to date, has consisted of answering a call from the Town Hall as to whether the load of coke for the stove was delivered, two Yellow Warnings which came to nothing but gave us some idea of the difficulty of recalling Wardens on patrol or of catching them at home if off duty, one practice at telephone in our masks, during which neither party could hear more words than The Ancient Mariner who “stopped one in three”, and the staging of an “incident” in the next street, in which volunteers stand in for casualties, get shocking colds while propped in shelters, and informed that their ankle is broken by falling débris, are then removed to a (real) hospital where, in more draughts, a (real) doctor comes along and says the First Aiders’ bandages are like nothing under the sun.

  ‘Last week, a collection of haversacks was sent in for the men patrols. Inside one was a bottle of brownish liquid which defied the united intelligence of the Post. I scored heavily by suggesting it was tannic acid, against burns, and Godammy! I wasn’t far out, for by dint of telephoning we found it was cold tea which the Post Warden’s wife had put in through some misguided maternal instinct. An essential requirement for Wardenship, so far, seems to be an ability to play darts. The game appears to consist of loud cries of “Oh my God”, “Hell”, “Treble Three” and “Bust” together with long sums in subtraction. We women have no tin hats against raids when going on or from duty, but as against this, we are going to be dished out with entirely unnecessary twill overalls and felt hats at a cost to the ratepayer of fourteen shillings each outfit. But A.R.P. is a good idea, and I quite see that these Posts must either be kept on their toes all the time or disbanded altogether. One can’t do anything if there’s nothing to do any more than the Army can. Incidentally, a lot of our Patrol Wardens are retired Army men, of any age you like up to eighty. We used to wonder where all the gentlefolk had vanished to when we were at the seaside, and even in London to see a genuine specimen further east than Knightsbridge is rare and refreshing. But now I know. They man the A.R.P. Posts! Most of them have been half over the world and have held distinguished positions of all kinds, and it seems extraordinary that the War Office can’t find something worthier of their steel than mooching about the streets in tin hats and all weathers catching their deaths of exposure. But of course they have “the manner”, and their habit of authority and humour in emergency could be quite invaluable. That’s one of the things we’re told: to try and reassure the public and/or casualty. One of our dear old Colonels came in the other day and, screwing his monocle into his eye, said “There’s one direction in First Aid that I feel I should be really good at, ‘When in doubt, do nothing’.” (He’s the one like a mournful bloodhound).’

  Crystal Dunston wrote also, seeing in the war a sign of badly needed world regeneration which called for a New Messiah, and probably would not have to call twice.

  CHAPTER XX

  1

  THAT afternoon, as the house seemed quiet, void of so many of its occupants, Angela had visited its top storey, opening the door of that servant’s bedroom, mastering her aversion.

  She had made an attempt in the morning, but to her surprise, relief and slight shock, another was there before her. Sue, with dustpan and brush ‘doing a bit of tidying up’, she explained, at an equal loss on seeing the other girl in the doorway.

  Alone, Angela stood by the great, unsuitable bed, receiving and sifting impressions, trying in the light of maturity to be fair to the room and its atmosphere. Although they never spoke of it, she could remember as well as her mother and more vividly the sensation of misery with which it had filled her as a child. That feeling must, if possible, give place.

  At first distastefully, she gave the room its chance with her, even sat in the one chair — a prosaic, workaday affair — that it now contained.

  Very gradually the room responded, like a dog who has nearly knocked you down and clumsily, apologetically tries to make it right with you. Angela would never like the room, would never, she was sure, be at ease there, but it should have fair dealing from her. Sitting there very still she pieced together what she knew of it by hearsay. It had been a servant’s bedroom. The huge bed had been moved in at the order of that Frenchwoman, Marguerite Roundelay who was murdered. Would that, perhaps, account for the r
oom’s effect upon Angela? Furniture (she had read it often) could be haunted, especially if made of bog-oak . . . or there was the case of the summerhouse whose supports were contrived from the posts of an ancient gibbet round which the spirits of its hanged victims still clung. But Marguerite was killed in France; this tester was of English workmanship: Carolean, father had said so. The fact had once been confirmed by an expert who visited Delaye.

  Then?

  Heryn I dye. Thomas Picocke.

  ‘Picocke’ was a running footman, he was in the accounts books in the cellars, his bed a settle in the kitchen. He ranked lower than house servants. Neither fish, flesh nor fowl, she’d heard.

  Why didn’t he die on that settle? But perhaps he died at his home in Delaye, or Rohan? Heryn. That meant in this room and no other; hadn’t she schoolmarm’d Sue about ‘heryn’ only yesterday, without taking in the implications of her own tutorship?

  But wasn’t it unusual for such a servant to be promoted to a room to himself? That point couldn’t have escaped Sir Edmund, his daughter knew, then what was his own version of the affair? What answer had he made the curious sightseeing visitors as they rambled over Delaye exclaiming at this thing and that, talking their nonsense about Guy Fawkes and the inscription on the window-pane?

  That would be a question difficult to ask. Angela’s feeling against the room was, she supposed, traditional in the family, and a last-minute interest in it would inevitably lead to questions which she in her turn wasn’t prepared to answer. Angela had over the years intermittently, sadly sensed that she herself was not as others: one for some reason, unable to face up to life as people like Margaret lived it, one with its subcurrents as her sister was not. Margaret’s sentiment for Delaye was a clear-cut thing, a direct affection flowing in its straight line back to an accountable past with historic fact, such as it was, to guide her. Yet it must be so or Angela couldn’t be here in this room, labouring to find the answer to a puzzle that she shrank from solving. She felt, she supposed, like those women living apparently happy lives who suddenly, as the phrase went, felt the call to leave the world of friends and pleasant things in order to serve an ideal in a convent, half-ecstatic, half abhorring the compulsion which drove them. ‘Why must it be me?’ they too must have asked as they shouldered the privilege and the burden. It would have been so easy, so obviously more suitable, had the chosen Roundelay been Margaret, fearless, practical, not to be daunted by the devil himself!