"Servants," Lady Alicia was saying. "Servants. Been in a Registry Office all the morning. For father. He wants a footman and doesn't want to pay much for him; you know all about father, Tommy." (The Earl of Water-Somerset was notoriously mean). "Offering sixty—sixty for a footman. Did you hear anything like it? Couldn't hear of a soul. All too damned superior. Saw one or two—never saw such men. All covered with tattoo marks and war-ribbons—extraordinary times we live in. Extraordinary. Puffy Clerk told me yesterday—remarkable thing. Down at the Withers on Sunday. Sunday afternoon. Short of a fourth. Found the second footman played. Had him in. Perfect gentleman. Son of a butcher but had been a Colonel in the War. Broke off to fetch in the tea—then sat down again afterwards. Best of the joke won twenty quid off Addy Blake and next morning asked to have his wages raised. Said if he was going to be asked to play bridge with the family must have higher wages. And Addy gave them him."
Tom Duncombe guffawed.
"Dam funny. Dam funny," he said. Lady Bell-Hall shook her head. "A friend of mine, a Mr. Light-Johnson—I think you've met him here, Alicia—told me the other day he's got a man now who plays on the piano beautifully and reads Spanish. He says that we shall all be soon either killed in our beds or working for the Bolsheviks. What the servants are coming——"
As the old butler brought in the coffee at this moment she stopped and began hurriedly to talk about Conan Doyle's séances which seemed to her very peculiar—the pity of it was that we couldn't really tell if it had happened just as he said. "Of course he's been writing stories for years," she said. "He's the author of those detectives stories, Alicia—and writing stories for a long time must make one very regardless of the truth."
Then as the butler had retired they were able to continue. "I don't know what servants are coming to," she said. "They never want to go to church now as they used to."
It was then that Henry made his plunge, as unfortunate in its impetuosity and tactlessness as had been his earlier one, it was perhaps the red supercilious countenance of Tom Duncombe that drove him forward.
"I'm glad servants are going to have a better time now," he said, leaning forward and staring at Alicia Penrose as though fascinated by her bright colours. "I can't think how they endured it in the old days before the War, in those awful attics people used to put them into, the bad food they got and having no time off and——"
"Why, you're a regular young Bolshevik!" Alicia Penrose cried, laughing. "Margaret, Charles got a Bolshevik for a secretary. Who'd have thought it?"
"I'm not a Bolshevik," said Henry very red. "I want everything to be fair for everybody all the way round. The Bolsheviks aren't fair any more than the—than the—other people used to be before the War, but it seems to me——"
"Seen the Bradleys lately, Alicia?" said Tom Duncombe, speaking exactly as though Henry existed less than his sister's dog, Pretty One, a nondescript mongrel asleep in a basket near the window.