‘Morning, morning,’ said Lord Stoke, seeing what was obviously that foreign girl someone had told him the Fieldings had.
Gradka, at once recognizing a proper nobleman when she saw one, made a kind of curtsey.
‘That’s right, my dear,’ said his lordship. ‘And how are the Poles?’
Now if there is one thing a Mixo-Lydian cannot bear, it is to be confused with a Pole, for every Mixo-Lydian child knows that Mixo-Lydia utterly defeated the Poles in twelve hundred and fourteen in a great battle, where no less than five Mixo-Lydians were left dead upon the field, and seven Poles and a boy. So Gradka stared contemptuously.
‘That’s right, that’s right,’ said Lord Stoke, evidently under the impression that she had answered him. ‘What are you giving us for lunch, eh? All sorts of good things? Well, that’s very nice. And where is Lady Fielding? No, don’t you trouble. I’ll go and find her.’
His lordship went off, followed by a glance of intense scorn from Gradka which he did not see and would not have noticed if he had. And then by good luck Anne came downstairs and with an aplomb that the Anne of a year ago would have hopelessly envied, bellowed her own name to him (having been previously instructed to that end), stood over him while he put his hat, gloves and whip in the hall, and took him into the drawing-room where her parents welcomed him and he was soon engrossed in Barchester gossip with Sir Robert, whom he heard very well: as indeed he could always hear if he really wanted to.
A curious sound as of shrill cheering drifted into the drawing-room.
‘What a funny noise, mummy,’ said Anne. ‘Can I go and look?’
She sped to the front door and looked out. To the infinite joy of the Hallbury children, Lord Stoke’s carriage had just made its appearance, walking at a funeral pace up the hill to save the horse who was rather old. A gentleman on a horse had been a fine beginning to the day’s festivities, but this spectacle was entirely eclipsed by a brougham, an object which none of the children had ever seen. In a less degenerate age all the small boys would have turned cart-wheels beside it in the hopes of a halfpenny, but children are entirely uneducated now. The old weather-beaten coachman, who was used to making a sensation wherever he appeared, smiled grimly as he drove slowly and carefully up to Hall’s End, while the children shrieked and yelled, some saying it was the woyreless man, others that it was the funeral, and when auntie doyed she had a lovely royde in a cowch. For English remains undefiled in much of Barsetshire, and any child who said wahless, or dahyed, or keeoch would have been mocked and flouted by its fellows. (Phonetics are incapable of expressing what we wish to express, but the intelligent reader of a certain age will know what we mean, without things like ə and Ø which do but darken counsel.)
Anne, brimful as always with her latest readings in English literature, thought it was very like the election at Eatanswill. And when Mr Tebben with his scholar’s stoop and his grey hair got out of the carriage amid friendly hoots, she said to herself, ‘He’s kissed one of ’em.’ And when Mrs Tebben in her usual state of peasant-arts and hand-woven disarray followed him, such was the ecstasy of the young populace that Anne said half-aloud, ‘He’s kissing ’em all.’ The coachman then touched his hat, gave a friendly flick to the horse, and drove off towards the Omnium Arms, amid shouts, relics of an older and better civilization, of ‘Whip behoynd, mister,’ of which he took no notice at all.
With the kindness that was natural to her and the elegance that Miss Bunting had unostentatiously inculcated, Anne received the Tebbens and assisted Mrs Tebben to get out of a very draggled tussore dust-coat like a relic of Edwardian coaching days, and to unwind herself and her hat from a dingy art-green scarf. She also offered to put Mrs Tebben’s mauve raffia basket with a bunch of faded raffia flowers on it, and its handles tied up with string, into the cloak room with the other outdoor things but Mrs Tebben refused, saying there was something in it.
So they all went into the drawing-room where Lord Stoke received them as if he were at home at Rising Castle, cast Mrs Tebben at Lady Fielding and pushed Mr Tebben into a corner to talk Viking shop with him.
Lady Fielding had never met Mrs Tebben before, and was much impressed by that lady’s earnest manner, her flowered dress with a good dip on one side and her straw hat covered with a very faded wreath of artificial cornflowers.
‘Do let Anne take your basket, Mrs Tebben,’ she said.
‘I did try to, mummy,’ said Anne.
‘It is kind of you,’ said Mrs Tebben, sitting down with the basket firmly held on her knees, ‘but I have some things in it.’
This seemed probable, as being what baskets are for, and Lady Fielding, feeling that Mrs Tebben was quite capable of having brought a cap in a bandbox, said something polite about would she care to go upstairs and change.
‘No, no; not a change of attire,’ said Mrs Tebben, in what was evidently a literary allusion. ‘It’s only something for lunch. I think it is quite dreadful to accept anyone’s invitation to a meal nowadays, for really one becomes a plague of locusts.’
‘How kind of you,’ said Lady Fielding, ‘but you really mustn’t. I do assure you we are quite well off here, and my Mixo-Lydian help, or whatever one calls her, is a wonderful manager.’
‘I always say how Brave the women of England are,’ said Mrs Tebben, which made Lady Fielding want to say that she was not brave, nor a woman, nor English. ‘But we housekeepers know. And we must all bear our part. I have just brought,’ she continued, pulling several small parcels untidily wrapped in newspaper from her bag, ‘a little piece of goat’s-milk cheese – I have kept a goat since our donkey Modestine died, not that he gave any milk of course, but I do like a four-footed animal about the place and it doesn’t matter how bad goat’s milk goes, because you can always let it go a bit worse and make cheese with it. And two tinned salmon fish-cakes that Gilbert wouldn’t eat for his breakfast. And here is a morsel of marge. And oh dear, it has been upside down all the time but never mind, it wasn’t really very wet – a little bowl with the remains of last night’s shape, only I fear Gilbert ate all the jam that should have been on it. I’ll just keep this bit of newspaper; it will do nicely for salvage.’
So speaking she thrust the unpleasant packages into Lady Fielding’s hands, her face gleaming with patriotism.
‘Anne, darling,’ said Lady Fielding, ‘please take these to the kitchen at once. And for goodness’ sake don’t let Gradka see them,’ she added in an undertone which was covered by the rustling of Mrs Tebben putting a greasy piece of the Sunday Times back into her bag.
Anne with great presence of mind hid the odious parcels, by now in a state of considerable deliquescence, in a far corner of the downstairs cloak room behind her father’s golf clubs, and was just in time to open the front door to Mrs Morland and the Birketts.
‘Dear Anne,’ said Mrs Morland, kissing her affectionately, ‘Anne Knox drove me over and we passed the Birketts on the way up the hill, so we picked them up, though I believe it is strictly forbidden. This is Anne Fielding, Amy,’ she said presenting Anne to Mr and Mrs Birkett, who had heard of her through Robin Dale and were well disposed.
With the arrival of the Birketts the party was complete. Anne went to tell Miss Bunting, who preferred to remain in her own room till the fuss of receiving guests was over. For Miss Bunting, whether it was the long cold windy summer after the dry windy spring, or a slight homesickness for county surroundings, or her years, had been feeling very tired of late and thought with regret of a more ordered life when well-trained servants announced the right people and the wheels of life ran easily. Anne found her sitting in a chair, taking her infallible refresher of closing the eyes and letting the hands lie in the lap for five minutes and suddenly felt sorry for the omniscient, the all-perfect Miss Bunting. But lunch must not be delayed, and in a very short time both ladies were downstairs. Gradka, faithful to her principle of not appearing before guests till a meal was over, sounded the gong, and the company passed into the dining-room.
Say what you
will, a cold lunch however good is not so good as a hot one; at least not for those who no longer find cold meat and pickles or hard-boiled eggs and salad what they would wish. Not that cold meat could have been offered, for not only had the weekly joint been very small of late, but even tougher and more shapeless than usual, consisting of a large bone with splintered ends, a layer of gristle and some rather clammy greyish flesh. But in Gradka’s capable hands the meal was as excellent as it could be, and far nicer than any other lunch in Hallbury.
The arrival of the Birketts had been a great comfort to Lady Fielding, who had found two such characters, in the fullest English sense of the word, as Lord Stokes and Mrs Tebben, not to speak of her dear friend Laura Morland, a little too much for her and was afraid her husband might be bored, or even worse, show it. Sir Robert was a Governor of Southbridge School and had always liked and esteemed the headmaster and his wife, more than once standing up for them against the Bishop who was apt to promulgate a kind of Rescript or Episcopal Recess without waiting to consult the other governors.
‘One of the reasons I came over to-day,’ said Mr Birkett, ‘Roman brickwork not being exactly in my line, was to see young Dale. We want him back at Southbridge. Have you any idea what his views are, Lady Fielding?’
Lady Fielding said she didn’t know, but Anne might be able to tell him.
Anne rather nervously said that she thought Robin liked his little school very much, but she didn’t know what would happen when his present little boys went to their prep schools, as there didn’t seem to be any more just now.
‘H’m,’ said Mr Birkett, much to the interest of Anne, who had often seen the word in books but never heard anyone say it. ‘That’s the worst of this war.’
‘What he means,’ said Mrs Birkett, ‘is that there won’t be enough school-fodder soon, and then what will happen to the schools?’
‘All be State schools then,’ said Lord Stoke, to whom Anne had obligingly bellowed the gist of the Birketts’ remarks. ‘Bad thing for the country. There isn’t a boy at a State school that knows a Friesian from a Holstein.’
As none of the company present knew what either of these animals were like, there was a respectful pause.
‘My old governor sent me to Eton,’ said Lord Stoke. ‘He was there and so was his governor and all his uncles.’
This remark so paralysed the conversation that Lady Fielding felt no one would ever speak again, when Mrs Morland, who was famed for a kind of desperate courage, suddenly shouted across the table that Lord Stoke ought to put that in his life.
‘Oh, are you writing your life, Lord Stoke?’ said Anne, to whom anyone who wrote anything was a phoenix.
‘Just jotting a few things down,’ said Lord Stoke with apparent detachment, but secretly pleased and flattered. ‘Haven’t got to Eton yet. There’s a lot of stuff about my old governor – he married twice, you know, and Lucasta Bond is only my half-sister; Bond’s breaking up now, sadly changed – and the old days at Rising Castle. When my old governor was a boy the footmen all slept two in a bed, in those little rooms beyond the servants’ hall – you know the old basement, Mrs Morland – well away from the maids,’ he added in a kind of stifled bellow which his hearers understood to be a tribute to the Young Person. ‘Ever read Pomfret’s book?’ he inquired of his host, alluding to the late Earl’s memoirs, A Landowner in Five Reigns, whose success surprised its author as much as it surprised his publishers.
Sir Robert said he had.
‘Too much about going abroad and all that,’ said Lord Stoke. ‘What people want is books about the land. People are interested in the land. Don’t go abroad and all that now,’ said his lordship rather unfairly, as Lord Pomfret’s book had been written several years before war was thought of. ‘Heaps of farming fellows writing books now, but they haven’t been at it as long as I have. When my old governor was a boy his father’s labourers got seven shillings a week and a cottage. We’ll never see that again, not in my time.’
Such was the power of Lord Stoke’s personality, and we may add, his voice, that everyone present heaved a kind of sigh in memory of the happy days when labourers had fifteen children and very small wages and looked forward to the workhouse when too rheumatic to work. All, that is, except Miss Bunting, who considered that labourers’ wages were, like everything else, in the hands of Providence, and that it was not for her to judge.
‘Of course,’ said Mrs Tebben, who had done economics at Oxford and had a passion for boring and useless accuracy, ‘we must take the value of their cottages into consideration, and what they grew in the garden. By the way, Sir Robert, I must tell you about a delightfully economical vegetable dish I have found. When the peas are getting a bit over, I put them in a casserole with a little water and some meat extract cubes and let them simmer all day, and by the evening you hardly know they are tough at all. I sometimes, rather daringly, steal a bay leaf from the Manor House – my daughter married the Palmers’ nephew you know, so we are almost related and a bay leaf will never be missed – and add it to the savoury mess. You have no idea.’
Sir Robert courteously said he hadn’t, and how were her children.
‘Ah, you remember that I am a grandmother, Sir Robert,’ she said, which Sir Robert had not remembered in the least because he didn’t know it, and vaguely thought that her children, whom he had only mentioned to get away from savoury messes, were in their late ’teens. ‘My Margaret and her little brood are very well and happy. Her husband is on a home job at present, so that is very nice. And Richard,’ said Mrs Tebben, her voice softening as it always did at the mention of her only son who would really have been quite fond of his mother if she had not insisted on understanding him, ‘is out of the army too, with a stiff knee. He was in Margaret’s father-in-law’s engineering business, Mr Dean, you know, but he doesn’t want to go back to the Argentine and I believe he is getting a job with a Mr Adams at Hogglestock. Have you ever heard of him?’
Sir Robert said he had and that Anne had rather made friends with his daughter in the holidays and they would probably be at the Archaeological.
‘Good news! good news!’ said Mrs Tebben. ‘Gilbert! Mr Adams will be at the Archaeological and I shall find or make an opportunity to mention Richard to him. Every word helps.’
Mr Tebben made no comment, but his eye met Sir Robert’s with such deliberate long-suffering blankness that Sir Robert heartily wished he had never embarked upon the subject of Mrs Tebben’s family at all, and at the same time he felt sorry for Mr Tebben without knowing why. With as much haste as was compatible with the courtesy due from a host to a guest who has been invited through no wish of his own, he turned to Mrs Morland and told that worthy creature all the story of the row in the Close about the Precentor’s extra petrol, which she much enjoyed.
After they had eaten several kinds of excellent pastry, cakes and tarts, miraculously extracted by Gradka from the fat ration, and were drinking their coffee, Anne said to her mother that they must ask Gradka to come in as she would expect to be thanked.
‘I am so sorry,’ said Lady Fielding to the company, ‘but do you mind if our Mixo-Lydian help comes in? It seems to be a custom of her country that the cook should be thanked by everyone. It won’t be long. And I feel we ought to thank her, because she has let us have lunch at a quarter to one on account of the Archaeological.’
Everyone said How nice, especially Mrs Tebben, who had a weakness for Central Europeans and often thought she would like to dress like one herself.
‘I haven’t any wine to-day, Dora,’ said Sir Robert nervously. But Anne said that was all right and Mixo-Lydians didn’t drink wine at midday.
As before, Gradka came in, accepted without interest the thanks of the guests, despised their praise, and evidently had the poorest opinion of them all. Lady Fielding thought she would then go away, but Gradka, leaning carelessly against the sideboard, said, ‘I shall now tell you some news.’
All the ladies present were certain she was choosing this mom
ent to give notice, and wished they were somewhere else.
‘To-day,’ said Gradka, rather loudly, having been warned by Anne that the English lord was deaf, ‘owing to your lunch being at a quarter to one I listened to the radio in the kitchen.’
As there was no reason why she should not have the wireless on, whatever the hour of lunch, this statement was most unfair, carrying as it did an implicit slur on Lady Fielding’s consideration for those in her employ.
‘Listening to the one o’clock news, eh?’ said Lord Stoke. ‘And how are the Czechs getting on? Nice place Carlsbad used to be, but they pronounce it all wrong now.’
‘Czechs?’ said Gradka. ‘Gob! Czy pròvka, pròvka, pròvka.’
‘Eh?’ said Lord Stoke.
‘Oh, Lord Stoke,’ said Anne, speaking right into his ear for fear of hurting Gradka’s feelings. ‘She isn’t a Czech. She is a Mixo-Lydian. She said, ‘God! No, never, never, never.’ I know a bit of Mixo-Lydian that she taught me.’
‘Well, Gob isn’t any worse than Bog,’ said Mrs Morland. ‘I have nothing particular against the Russians apart from not liking them, but I do think to call God Bog is just silly.’
Miss Bunting Page 21