“I don’t quite see what you mean,” Mrs. Smith said, screwing up her eyes at me with elaborate attention. I explained that my cook’s sister was lady’s maid to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and that she used to describe the fun that was often made, behind the scenes, of some of us middle-class people who go to the Drawing-rooms. Of course, they never suggested that the King and Queen made fun of their subjects—for, naturally, they wouldn’t; but some of those quite near the Throne did sometimes.
“You get all the best of the fun here,” I added, “because you see it from both points of view. Of course, the class below ours get it when they snub the tradespeople and then get snubbed by us; but the top dogs can only get one side of it all the time, until, perhaps, they go to heaven. Do you think that the Beasts who are described in the Book of Revelation will snub the ladies-in-waiting then?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Smith coldly.
Mrs. County giggled, and, I thought, looked gratefully at me, as if I had been trying to score a point for her, which really hadn’t entered my mind. I was pursuing my own thoughts entirely. A great many people came over for tennis in the afternoon. Such a lot of cackling went on, but very languid cackling, like sick hens. At first it all seemed to consist of, “Now then, Hartley! Here, Lola! Where’s Bob? Teddy, have you got the balls? Will you take Emma? All right, take Lola then; it doesn’t matter which. Now then, Bob! Where’s Hartley? Lola, have you got the balls? Here, Teddy!” And then the same all mixed up again in a different way. But by and by, when they began to play, I became conscious again of the awful, cold shadow of fear that seems always upon them. Fear of losing some man’s allegiance. Fear of a husband discovering that a man’s allegiance is coveted. Fear of all their friends not knowing that there is any man’s allegiance for the husband to be prevented from discovering. Fear that there may be allegiance of greater social value which is being offered to some one else. Their life is like that fatiguing game called Demon Patience, where everybody tries to be the first to put the next card on six different heaps at once. I felt that Mrs. County and Mrs. Smith, and all the rest of them, were watching with the most practised rapidity of glance to see where a rival was going to plant a new dernier cri, whether in clothes, tricks of speech, paramours, or accomplishments of any kind. I longed to become a Yogi: to turn in my tongue, and sit motionless under a tree for a thousand hours and observe the slow processes of Nature.
When Mrs. Merchant came to fetch me I could have thrown myself into her arms. She is as simple as the day, and as dull as ditch-water (a clean ditch with clear water in it and rare ferns growing on the banks), and as pretty as a picture (a chromolithograph of an amiable and beautiful lady), and as wise as an owl which knows that the tree it lives in is hollow and prefers it that way, and as harmless as a dove whom I have been brutally making into pigeon-pie for your delight, but really that you may the better appreciate her full use and beauty. I should like to explain this to her if there were any chance of her ever coming across these letters; to tell her that we love
First when we see them roasted, biras we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.
We left Hartley and Emma and Lola and all of them hard at work, evaporating—metabolizing—rather than playing or doing anything else. Their existence seems to be continued by a succession of little explosions, when they leave off one habit and begin another. Some one, I suppose Mrs. County, had been rash enough to tell them that I belong to the professional classes. That set them off exploding like little bombs all round. “By Jove!” “You don’t say so!” “Dear me!” “Artists and those queer kind of beggars!” “Ever meet So-and-so? He painted my missis and we had the time of our lives,” etc.
