Mary Jane Married: Tales of a Village Inn

by George R. Sims

At first it was all so new and strange to me that I didn’t quite gather what it meant, some of it. As a servant, of course, I saw a good deal, and many strange characters, but in their family life mostly. A servant can’t see much of the outside life of her people—in fact, if you come to think of it, servants don’t see much outside at all, unless it’s shaking a cloth in the garden; and many a time when I was a servant have I made that a very long job on a fine morning, with the sun shining and the birds singing; for it was so beautiful to breathe the fresh air, and feel the soft wind blowing in your face with just a dash of the scent of flowers in it. A dash of the scent!—dear, dear, that’s how your style gets spoiled by what you have to hear going on round you! I suppose my style will get public-housey in time, if I’m not careful. It’s hearing the customers say, “Just a dash of this in it, ma’am,” and “Just a dash of that,” and so on.

Seeing the outside view of life—life away from the home—and being always in a place where all sorts of people and all sorts of characters come, I have learned things that I might have been a servant a hundred years and never have known. You get a pretty good view of life under the roof of an inn, and not always a view that makes you very happy—but there’s good and bad everywhere, even in the church.

I know of a clergyman who was a very fine preacher indeed, and a strict teetotaller and never entered a public-house, but he managed to be very cruel to his wife on gingerbeer and lemonade. And it came out afterwards in the courts, when the poor lady tried to get a separation, fearing for her life, that on the day her husband had knocked her down and emptied the inkpot down her throat, he had gone off straight to a school meeting and delivered the prizes for the best essay on being kind to animals, and had made all the people cry by the beautiful way he spoke about dogs and horses and cats.

Our clergyman, the curate, is very different to that, though I must say he is eccentric. He comes into our coffee-room now and then, and will have a glass of ale and sit and read the newspaper, because he lives by himself in lodgings up in the village. He likes talking to Harry, and he seems to like talking to me; but though he’s a very agreeable gentleman, I’m always rather sorry to see him come in, especially when his pockets look bulgy. He’s one of those people who go about in awful places with hammers, and chip bits of rock and stone off, and dig up bits of ground; and he’s always got his coat-pockets full of sand and grit, and chalk and bits of stone, and sometimes a lot of weeds and ferns pulled up by the roots. I asked Mr. Wilkins, the parish clerk, what the name for these people was, and he told me geologist, those that went after the stones, and botanist, those that went after the roots; and he said Mr. Lloyd—“the Reverend Tommy” he is called in the village when he isn’t there to hear—was both, and was a great authority, and wrote papers about rocks and roots and the rubbish he dug up, for learned societies to read, and that he belonged to a good many of them, and had a right to put half the letters of the alphabet after his name if he chose.

I’ve seen the Reverend Tommy come into our place of an afternoon as red as a turkey-cock, the perspiration pouring down his face, mudded all over his clothes—he always wore black, which made it look worse—and looking that dirty and untidy and disreputable that if he hadn’t been known he’d have been taken for a tramp.

It certainly was very trying for me to see him sit down in our nice, neat, pretty little coffee-room, putting pounds of mud on the carpet, and turning all the dirty things out of his pockets on to our nice tablecloth. Poor dear man; I’m sure he never thought he was doing any harm, for he didn’t live in this world; he lived in a world of hundreds of thousands of years ago—a world that our world has grown up on top of, so it was explained to me afterwards.

I’d never heard of such things before. Of course I knew there was a Noah’s Ark, and that the Flood drowned lots of animals, and carried lots of things out of their proper places and put them somewhere else, as even a small flood will do. A flood that happened where my brother John lives, who went to America years ago, as I told you in my “Memoirs,” washed his house right away, and floated it miles down the river, and put it on an island, and it’s been there ever since, and he and his family in it, they liking the situation better, and, as he says, having been moved free of expense. John wrote me about that from America himself, so it must be true, and it is a most wonderful place for adventures, according to John. Of course, if a flood can do that nowadays, the great Flood that covered the earth must have mixed up things very much before it went down.

It was this Flood that made Mr. Lloyd go about with a hammer looking for bits of the animals that were drowned in it, as far as I could make out. And when he found bits he was almost mad with delight. “Fossils” he called the things, but how he could know they were bits of animals was a wonder to me; they might have been anything. He showed me a lump of chalk one day that he said was a bit of an animal that had lived in our village thousands of years ago!

He made a horrid mess with his things while he was having a glass of ale and looking at his “specimens,” as he called them, but it was nothing to where he lodged. His landlady told me that she never went into the room because he didn’t like her to, but he made his bed himself, and it was just pushed up in the corner, and all the rest of the room was bones and rocks and bits of chalk, and on the wall he’d got skulls and shinbones and bits of skeletons of different animals, and some pictures of animals so hideous that the landlady’s daughter, a young married woman, on a visit to her mother, going in out of curiosity and not knowing what she was going to see, had a shock that made her mother very, very anxious about her, and especially as the poor girl would keep on saying, for some time afterwards, “Oh, mother, that hideous animal with the long nose! I can see it now.”

But it was all right, fortunately; because, when the landlady told me that it was all over, I asked, and she said, “It’s all right, my dear, thank goodness, and a really beautiful nose.”