The post-girl

by Edward Charles Booth

"Pam, dear child.... What are you giving us?" as though Pam had not reiterated every dish to him half a dozen times that very night.

"... There are the herrings," she suggested, assuring herself by a sight of them, with a hopeful slant of inquiry for his Reverence's approval.

"Ha!" Father Mostyn cast up recognisant eyes to Heaven as though he had not understood this signal act of mercy to form one of the items of Pam's grace, and must needs now add a special acknowledgment. "Beautiful! beautiful! Pass them along, dear child. A plebeian fish at three a penny, but one of many virtues, whose sole faults lie in its price and name. Fortunately, those are faults not likely to affect the epigastrium. Wynne, my boy." He received the dish from Pam's fingers and transferred it magnificently over the roast beef to the Spawer's side of the table; a gesture that made rare caviare of it at once, "... let me persuade you. Herring olives prepared according to the recipe of my late maternal uncle, Rear-Admiral Sir Alexander Cornelius...."

And so they entered upon it, with little thin, crustless sandwiches of brown bread and butter (Pam's making) to accompany the olives, and the Spawer went twice without shame,—just as Pam had arranged he should,—and it acted beautifully. You would never have known she 'd risen from the table if you had n't been watching to see what became of them. And after that they turned their eyes towards the beef with one accord, and Father Mostyn uttered a dread "Ha!" and seized it between knife and fork like an executioner, and whipped it over and stuck the fork critically into the undercut, holding his nose very high, and knitted at the brows, and looking terribly down the sides of it through his lashes, and drew the knife (another awful moment for Pam) and melted in a rapturous smile as the blade sank easily, out of sight, and said:

"Beautiful! beautiful! ... Cuts like a bar of butter, dear child."

In such wise they embarked upon the beef stage, and laid siege to Pam's succulent salad, with its tender, juicy greens and its mellifluous cream sauce. Then the pie passed in turn, nobly supported by the savory eggs, and similarly succeeded all the other items of the feed—(a glorious procession)—the stewed plums, the custard, the trifle pudding, the port-wine jellies, the whipped creams, and the cheese, with the wherewithal to wash them down and cleanse the palate for its discriminating duties—St. Julia winking rosily in the tinted claret glasses by the sides of Father Mostyn and the Spawer; simple lemonade in a tumbler for Pam to put her lips to.

And all the while they talked. At least, the Spawer and Father Mostyn did. Pam said less with her lips, but her eyes were always present in the heart of the conversation—so frankly and sweetly and freely communicative, and with such beautiful brows of sympathetic understanding playing above them that one never felt any need of the spoken word. Indeed, one did n't even notice it was n't there. That was because she possessed the unconscious subtle faculty of extending her words through manner; of perfuming them, as it were, with her own sweet, ineffable identity, so that what had been a mere brief-spoken monosyllable, unmemorable of itself, became through her a complete sentence in physical expression, memorable for some beautiful phrase of neck or lips, or brows, or all of them together, perhaps, in one melodious gesture.

And after they 'd saturated themselves through and through with the talk of things musical till the girl's eyes were wonder-worlds, swimming gloriously aloft amid whole systems of consonant stars, and the priest was a-hum in every fibre of him with fragmentary bars and snatches of quotation under the gathering force of musical remembrance, like a kettle coming to the boil. After all this they passed in procession over the echoing flagstones into the far room, where was the little sprightly old-fashioned spinster of a Knoll piano, exhaling still a faint pungency of ammonia from its recent ablutions, with new candles in its sconces and an open copy of Rossini's Stabat Mater laid suggestively on its desk, and all its yellow ivories exposed in a four-octave smile of seduction.

And here Pam brought those familiar etceteras of hospitality with which the Spawer had already made acquaintance; and filled the pipe as unconcernedly and as skilfully as though she were a seasoned smoker; and sliced the three rounds of lemon for his Reverence's glass.

And they made music—glorious music—on the little short-compassed upright. They had the concerto, of course—what was written of it—which Pam, nursing intent clasped hands in her lap, with her head erect and her red lips folded and her eyes aglow, adjudged more beautiful the more she heard it. Oh, what a glorious thing it was to be a composer, and have one's head filled with beautiful music in place of other people's ordinary humdrum ideas! And Father Mostyn passed a rhapsodical hand over his shining scalp and said: "Ha! ... makes one long for a few hairs to stand on end in tribute to it. Such music as that seems somehow to be wasted on a bald head."