§ 3
For a time the road ran undulating between high hedges and tall trees and through villages, and all along to the right of it were the steep, round-headed Downs. Then came a little town, and the automobile turned off into a valley that cut the Downs across and opened out more and more, and then came heathery common and a town, and then lanes and many villages, flat meadows and flatter, poplars, and then another town with a bridge, and then across long levels of green a glimpse of the big tower of Windsor Castle. “This is Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed,” said the young man suddenly. “And that’s Windsor, where the King lives—when he isn’t living somewhere else, as he usually does.... He’s a ’ot un is the King.... See the chap there sailing a boat?”
They went right into Windsor and had a glimpse of the great gates of the Castle and the round tower very near to them, and then they turned down a steep, narrow, paved street and so came into a district of little mean villas in rows and rows. And outside one of these the car stopped.
“Here we are,” said the young man.
“Where are we?” asked Peter.
“Where we get out,” said the young man. “Time we had a feed.”
“Dinnah,” said Joan, with a bright expression, and prepared to descend.
A small, white-faced, anxious woman appeared at the door. She was wearing amiability as one wears a Sabbath garment. Moreover, she had a greyish-black dress that ended in a dingy, stiff buff frilling at the neck and wrists.
“You Mrs. Pybus?” asked the young man.
“I been expecting you a nour,” said Mrs. Pybus, acquiescing in the name. “Is this the young lady and gentleman?”
That again was a question that needed no answer. The group halted awkwardly on the doorstep for a few seconds. “And this is Miss Joan?” said Mrs. Pybus, with a joyless smile. “I didn’t expect you to be ’arf yr’ size. And what a short dress they put you in! You must ’ave regular shot up. Makes you what I call leggy....”
This again was poor as a conversational opening.
“’Ow old might you be, dearie?” asked Mrs. Pybus.
“I’m eight,” said Joan. “But I’ll be nine soon.”
The young man for inscrutable reasons found this funny. He guffawed. “She’s eight,” he said to the world at large; “but she’ll be nine soon. That’s good, that is!”
“If you’re spared, you shud say,” said Mrs. Pybus. “You’re a big eight, any’ow. ’Ow old are you, dear?”
Peter was disliking her quietly with his hands in his pockets. He paused for a moment, doubting whether he would answer to the name of “dear.” “Ten,” he said.
“Just ten?” asked the young man as if alert for humour.
Peter nodded, and the young man was thwarted.
“I suppose you’ll be ready for something to eat,” said Mrs. Pybus. “’Adn’t you better come in?”
They went in.
The room they entered was, perhaps, the most ordinary sort of room in England at that time, but it struck upon the observant minds of Joan and Peter as being strange and remarkable. They had never been before in an ordinary English living-room. It was a small, oblong room with a faint projection towards the street, as if it had attempted to develop a bow window and had lacked the strength to do so. On one side was a fireplace surmounted by a mantelshelf and an “overmantel,” an affair of walnut-wood with a number of patches of looking-glass and small brackets and niches on which were displayed an array of worthless objects made to suggest ornaments, small sham bronzes, shepherdesses, sham Japanese fans, a disjointed German pipe and the like. In the midst of the mantelshelf stood a black marble clock insisting fixedly that the time was half-past seven, and the mantelshelf itself and the fireplace were “draped” with a very cheap figured muslin that one might well have supposed had never been to the wash except for the fact that its pattern was so manifestly washed out. The walls were papered with a florid pink wallpaper, and all the woodwork was painted a dirty brownish-yellow colour and “grained” so as to render the detection of dirt impossible. Small as this room was there had been a strenuous and successful attempt to obliterate such floor space as it contained by an accumulation of useless furniture; there were flimsy things called whatnots in two of its corners, there was a bulky veneered mahogany chiffonier opposite the fireplace, and in the window two ferns and a rubber plant in wool-adorned pots died slowly upon a rickety table of bamboo. The walls had been a basis for much decorative activity, partly it would seem to conceal or minimize a mysterious skin disease that affected the wallpaper, but partly also for a mere perverse impulse towards litter. There were weak fret work brackets stuck up for their own sakes and more or less askew, and stouter brackets entrusted with the support of more “ornaments,” small bowls and a tea-pot that valiantly pretended they were things of beauty; there were crossed palm fans, there was a steel engraving of Queen Victoria giving the Bible to a dusky potentate as the secret of England’s greatness; there was “The Soul’s Awakening,” two portraits of George and May, and a large but faded photograph of the sea front at Scarborough in an Oxford frame. A gas “chandelier” descended into the midst of this apartment, betraying a confused ornate disposition in its lines, and the obliteration of the floor space was completed by a number of black horsehair chairs and a large table, now “laid” with a worn and greyish-white cloth for a meal. Such were the homes that the Victorian age had evolved by the million in England, and to such nests did the common mind of the British resort when it wished to meditate upon the problems of its Imperial destiny. Joan and Peter surveyed it open-mouthed.
The table was laid about a cruet as its central fact, a large, metallic edifice surmounted by a ring and bearing weary mustard, spiritless pepper, faded cayenne pepper, vinegar and mysteries in bottles. Joan and Peter were interested in this strange object and at the same time vaguely aware of something missing. What they missed were flowers; on this table there were no flowers. There was a cold joint, a white jug of beer and a glass jug of water, and pickles. “I got cold meat,” said Mrs. Pybus, “not being sure when you were coming.” She arranged her guests. But she did not immediately begin. She had had an idea. She regarded Peter.
“Now, Peter,” she said, “let me ’ear you say Grice.”
Peter wondered.
“Say Grice, dearie.”
“Grice,” said Peter.
The young man with the red hair was convulsed with merriment. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s reely Good. Kids are amusing.”
“But I tole you to say Grice,” said Mrs. Pybus, ruffled.
“I said it.”
The young man’s voice squeaked as he explained. “He doesn’t know ’ow to say Grace,” he said. “Never ’eard of it.”
“Is it a catch?” asked Peter.
The young man caught and restrained a fresh outburst of merriment with the back of his hand, and then explained again to Mrs. Pybus.
“’E’s a perfec’ little ’eathen,” said Mrs. Pybus. “I never did. They’ll teach you to say grice all right, my boy, before you’re very much older. Mark my words.” And with a sort of businesslike reverence Mrs. Pybus gabbled her formula. Then she proceeded to carve. As she carved she pursed her lips and frowned.
The cold meat was not bad, but the children ate fastidiously, and Joan, after her fashion, left all her fat. This attracted the attention of Mrs. Pybus. “Eat it up, dearie,” said Mrs. Pybus. “Wiste not, want not.”
“I don’t eat fat.”
“But you must eat fat,” said Mrs. Pybus.
Joan shook her head.
“We’ll ’ave to teach you to eat fat,” said Mrs. Pybus with a dangerous gentleness. For the time, however, the teaching was not insisted upon. “Lovely bits! Enough to feed a little dog,” said Mrs. Pybus, as she removed Joan’s plate to make way for apple tart.
The conversation was intermittent. It was as if they waited for some further event. The young man with the red hair spoke of the great world of London and the funeral of Lord Salisbury.
“’E was a great statesman, say what you like,” said the young man with red hair.
He also spoke of Holbein’s attempt to swim the channel.
“They say ’e oils ’imself all over,” said the young man.
“Lor’!” said Mrs. Pybus.
“It can’t be comfortable,” said the young man; “say what you like.”
Presently the young man broke a silence by saying: “These here Balkans seem to be giving trouble again.”
“Troublesome lot they are,” said Mrs. Pybus.
“Greeks and Macedonians and Turks and Bulgarians and such. It fair makes my head spin, the lot of them. Servians there are too, and Montenegroes. Too many of ’em altogether. Cat and dog.”
“Are them the same Greeks that used to be so clever?” asked Mrs. Pybus.
“Used to be,” said the young man with a kind of dark scorn, and suddenly began to pick his teeth with a pin.
“They can’t even speak their own language now—not properly. Fair rotten,” the young man added.
He fascinated Joan. She had never watched anything like him. But Peter just hated him.