I
THE first thing I remember being told is that I was a Parksop, and the second that it was worth while living, if only to have that name. Some years after, it dawned upon me that we had got very little else.
Father was a landed proprietor upon a reduced scale, and a parent on a large one. There were twelve of us, counting Prenderby, who had passed into the Army a few years previously, and passed out of it later on at the unanimous request of his superior officers. Father cut him off with a shilling—which he forgot to send him—and sternly forbade him to bear the name of Parksop any more. He has done well since, and attributes his rise in life entirely to that deprivation. Nobody ever writes to Prenderby except Charlotte.
If an abnormally fat girl could possibly be the heroine of a romantic love story, Charlotte—“Podge,� as she has been nicknamed ever since I can remember—would stand in that relation to this narrative. But, you know, such a thing isn’t possible. If it had been, Belle, who comes in between Podge and Prenderby, and is the acknowledged beauty of the family, having all the hereditary Parksop points besides several of her own, nobody would have wondered.
How did the story begin? With Roderick and me—coming home to spend a vacation. It was likely to be a pretty long one, for the Head of the School had behaved in a most ungentlemanly way, showing absolutely crass insensibility, as father said, to the advantage of having one of the best names in England on his school list, while it remained written at the bottom of a check for fifty-nine pounds, odd shillings, and half-pence, marked by a groveling-spirited bank cashier “No Assets.�
You may guess Roddy and me didn’t grumble much—the Parksops have never been strong in grammar and orthography, so I’m not going to apologize for a slip here and there—didn’t grumble much at hearing that we were to stay at home for the present, and be “brought on� by the curate in Euclid and Latin and Greek, and all the rest of the rot. He wouldn’t strike for wages, father knew, because for one thing he was very modest and shy, and for another he was spoons on Belle. If he wasn’t, why was he always glaring at our pew in church? And for the same reason we shouldn’t be overworked—a thing the most reckless boys acknowledge to be bad for them. So the morning after our return we went down to breakfast feeling as jolly as could be.
Father shook hands with us in his lofty way. We could see that he was deeply indignant with the Head from the way in which his aquiline nose hooked itself when we gave him a letter we’d brought with us. We almost wished we had torn it up, because, having made up our minds to go fishing that morning, we had meant to ask him for the key of the old boat house by the pond, where the punt was kept, which key, with a disregard of opportunity quite unnatural, as Roddy said—in a man with so large a family—he always kept hidden away.
Belle gave us two fingers to shake and her ear to kiss, and the others, as many as were allowed to breakfast with the elders, crowded round, and then Podge came bouncing in and hugged us for everybody. We didn’t care about the hugging, because it was such a smothering business, like sinking into a sea of eiderdown, Roddy used to say, who was imaginative for a Parksop. And here, as it’s usual to describe a heroine—though I don’t acknowledge her for one, you know—it would be best to describe Podge a little.
It describes her kind of temper pretty well to say that she didn’t mind being called Podge—even before strangers. The name describes her exactly. You couldn’t tone it down and call her plump; she was simply one of the fattest girls you ever saw. Her large face was rosy, and usually beamed, as people say in books, with smiles and good temper. Her hair was black, and done up in the way that took the least time, and her eyes were black and bright, and would have been big if her face had been a little less moonlike. She had little dumpy hands and little dumpy feet, rather pretty—in fact, the only family landmarks, as Belle said, that had not been effaced by the rising tide of fat. In a regular story there is always something about the heroine’s waist: not that I give in to Podge being—you know! I suppose she had a waist; at least, it was possible to tell where her frock bodies left off and her skirts began—then. It isn’t now! The frocks were always old, because whenever Podge had a new one she gave it to Belle, and you couldn’t deny that Belle did them more justice. Then, she had a nice kind of voice, though the Parksop drawl had been left out of it, and I think that’s all—except that, considering her beam, she moved about lightly, and that she always sat down like a collapsing feather bed and got up like an expanding balloon.
Breakfast didn’t make the school commons look very foolish. There wasn’t much difference, except that the coffee wasn’t so groundy. Father had his little dish of something special—kidneys, this time—and Roddy, sitting at his right hand—we were treated as guests the first day at home—dived in under his elbow when he was deep in his coffee cup and harpooned half a one. Of course, he had to bolt it before father came to the surface, and Podge was dreadfully anxious, seeing him so purple in the face, lest he should choke.
I did as well as I could with my rasher of bacon and hers, and I remember her whispering to me, just before Nuddles came in with the Squire’s card, that the housekeeping money had been lately more limited than ever. And as I looked across the table, out at the window, and over the green, rolling Surrey landscape—all Parksop property in our ancestors’ times—and remembered that such a small slice of it was left to be divided between such a lot of us, it did occur to me that it would have been better if they—meaning the ancestors—had been a little less Parksopian in the way of not being able to keep what they had got. Then Nuddles, the butler, came in with Squire Braddlebury’s card, and the curtain drew up—we had had a performance of one of the plays of Terence that very half year, and I had done the part of a dumb slave to everybody’s admiration—and the curtain drew up on what would have been “Podge’s Romance,� if Podge had only been thinner.