“If you don’t go away at once,” said James, “I will see that the whole county, wherever we are, calls on you, and you will die of a slow, insidious poison. They will poison your mind and your dress and your language. Do you see?”
I left the subject then. We shall come back to it later, because the struggling up of a species from one vantage-point to another is a fascinating study for those who love Nature, and I have not half got to the bottom of this county business yet; it is so involved. In the meantime there was the move itself.
Of all the experiences most calculated to humble the mighty a house move is the most humiliating. One’s household possessions lose all reticence, decency and moral sense. They flaunt themselves and cry aloud to the passers-by for attention. They behave more like Neapolitan beggars than anything else—maimed beggars on the spree. I have seen antics performed by my own furniture that made me long to burn down every city of the Empire and be numbered amongst the beasts of the field. An undertaker’s work seems wholesome and cheerful compared to that of the furniture-remover. He gets an ingrained sense of squalor that corrupts his senses and his memory until ugliness is to him not only inevitable but appropriate. I met the foreman packer staggering up our garden path with a wardrobe on his head. In one hand he flourished a picture (with the glass broken) representing the Duke of Wellington standing with drawn sword on the top of a mountain; in the other a fire-screen that was once intended for a jumble sale, but had been mislaid for years behind the plate-chest.
“For the drawing-room, I suppose,” he observed, and passed on. I ran after him, protesting that both were marked “not to go”; but when I reached the house I found them in the middle of the drawing-room floor with seven unspeakable cushions marked “cook’s bedroom,” a warming-pan (unearthed from heaven knows where), James’s large and particularly ugly writing-table, and the dining-room carpet neatly tacked down.
The efficient female tells me it is the easiest thing in the world to move. You just mark everything with the number of the room where it is to go. But she forgets that a wombat with its brain amputated could tell at a glance to which room her things belong, and she takes everything with her. There is a place for every horror and every horror is in its place. The hat-rack, the dining-room chairs and curtains, the assorted oddments for the spare bedroom, and the only comfortable furniture (rather specially dusty velvet with bob fringe) for the smoking-room. You cannot even mistake the pictures, for all those belonging to the drawing-room are water-colours with yellow frames, the dining-room has the “portraits in oils,” those for the bedrooms are photogravures representing the emotions (and it does not matter how they are distributed), historical pictures go in the passage, the agricultural and sporting in the smoking-room, and in the bathroom go the family groups and churches. So the foreman easily makes a nice job of it. It is a painful experience to find how easily some one else can fit us with a suit of circumstances which do not belong to us, just by expecting them to be ours. They pop a whole environment to which they are accustomed over our heads and button it round the neck before we have time to escape. It took me a whole week to free myself from a certain Mrs. Simpson, into whose form I was buttoned by the foreman packer with his preconceived notion of what a lady moving house ought to be like. He had such firm faith in Mrs. Simpson, and expected so confidently to find her in my house, that his faith removed the mountain of my individuality, and I became his ideal. His mind was so steeped in Mrs. Simpson, he was so incapable of recognising the existence of any married woman but Mrs. Simpson, that he was obliged to fish Mrs. Simpson out of his pocket and clap her over my head before he could adjust his mind to understand what I wanted. When he first came to see me about the arrangements, he looked me up and down and metaphorically said: “Excuse me, I will just fetch Mrs. Simpson, and then we shall know where we are.” As he fixed me with his eye, I felt myself becoming like the lady in an advertisement for tea. I could feel the chocolate-like richness of the fluid I should pour out for my lace-begarbed friends who sat amiably smiling round the mixed biscuits and the cruet. I knew that I had on a speckled blouse with a wired collar, and a short tweed skirt, and that I looked just thirty-seven, and was extremely sensible and good-natured. My own house that I loved so much disappeared under the petrifying expectation of that foreman, and at the sight of his notebook there sprang up dishevelled pink paper lamp-shades, photograph frames in the form of banjos and sunflowers, rickety overmantels, and everything that Mrs. Simpson always had. All Mrs. Simpson’s past surged into my veins. I remembered how I had gone with Mr. Simpson (who was rather a darling in those days) to buy our furniture, and how I, sighing after a heavy day amongst the suites, had said: “I think we have done everything now except the ornaments for the drawing-room mantelpiece.”
“Yes,” I said dreamily to the foreman, “everything is to go please—the drawing-room ornaments—and the overmantel—and the cosy corner—and the what-not.”
“I beg pardon, m’m,” he interrupted, “they’ll be in the drawing-room, I suppose. I don’t see what you’re describing here.”
“I am sorry,” said I. “It was your friend, Mrs. Simpson, who put me out for the moment.”
“I think there must be some slight mistake, m’m,” he said, “I don’t seem to remember a Mrs. Simpson.”
“No, no,” I answered, making a great effort to possess myself again, “of course there is no such person; I know that. But now we really must get on.”