“It is not that I don’t like exercise,” I explained. “I have played leap-frog often and enjoyed it, and I love riding. Escaping from people who ask questions is splendid exercise too; one needs a lot of resource for that!”
“Well, come to my party next Thursday,” she said. “You need not play any games; you can sit on the verandah and eat peaches and get as fat as you like.”
“Will you promise that your butler won’t come and tell me that the peaches have ‘never come’?” I asked.
She promised, and, after an hour’s scuffle hunting for the right gloves and finding that it was too windy for the hat I wanted to wear, I arrived at the Van Diemans’. It was rather late and I had had all the exercise I wanted coming along the dusty road. There were about fifteen people there, all running about after balls of different sizes and textures. I do not think that I am at heart a perfect lady, because I always see social festivities from the point of view of the servants. It was through the butler’s eyes that I saw his master and mistress and their guests employing their leisure: in my mind’s eye I carried the trays full of nourishment to help them prolong their activities and get the balls over nets and through hoops and into holes. Their ankles appeared to me absurdly thin, their bodies absurdly fat, their pleasure absurdly inadequate to the trouble they were taking. The sprawling creatures who played football on Saturday outside the village were just as grotesque in appearance, but their game had a little more of the pleasure of battle and a little less of kindergarten occupation than this. In an illustrated catalogue of parlour games there is one picture which shows an athletic footman putting away a jig-saw puzzle in a special cabinet, so designed that the pieces may remain undisturbed until the next fit of vacuity takes the fat lady in the low dress and her beautifully clean-shaven partner who, according to another picture, have been spending enraptured hours over a desiccated post card. There was some of this fatuousness in the Van Dieman games.
“Look here,” said Mrs. Van Dieman when I had finished my fourth peach and was getting really happy and contented, thinking, indeed, that there was some point after all in being a bloated aristocrat, “if you won’t play at anything will you walk round the garden? You must do something; it isn’t good for you to sit still so long, and Mrs. Fortescue hasn’t seen the roses.”
“Well,” I answered sleepily, “tell the fourth butler to bring them here and we will look at them.”
“Nonsense,” said my determined hostess. “Get up and take her round; she says she is getting a chill.”
There was no good in making a fuss, so I went and we strolled up and down the narrow path in the baking sun, jogging into each other in order to avoid treading on the border of pinks.
“How perfectly wonderful!” Mrs. Fortescue said from time to time. “Did you ever see such a monster?” She is a dear old lady and I did my very best. I said that they were graceful, wonderful, exquisite, that they added so much to my interest in the country that I did not know what I should do without them. I picked her lace mantle off the bushes when it got caught, I made way for her round the corners, and dodged about, and knocked into her, and trod on her toes when she first stood aside for me and then decided to proceed just as I slipped by to save trouble. I disentangled her parasol from my veil eight times and said that it did not matter a bit, it was torn already; I admired the gooseberry bushes and the artichokes and wondered how many gardeners they needed to keep the herbaceous border so tidy; I pointed out several particularly rich colours entirely on my own initiative and was really brilliant about the thinning out of something—I forget what—it was just a fluke anyhow. When we got back and Mrs. Fortescue kindly offered to drive me home because she said I looked absolutely worn out with the heat, I jumped at her suggestion. But, first, I took Mrs. Van Dieman aside. “Very well, Minnie,” I said, “I shall send you a book of fables which I want you to read carefully. There is one about an elephant who was ill-treated by his keeper. Years and years afterwards he met the man at a public gathering or somewhere, and squirted a pail of dirty water over him. This will show you how tenacious a thing is memory. The second story I want you to notice is of a stork who invited a fox to lunch. You shall lunch with me next Tuesday and I will ask three Russian anarchists and the clown from Hengler’s Circus to meet you and you shall play ‘consequences’ with them.”
“By the time you have been here six months,” she assured me, “you will have made far nicer friends; there are some quite delightful people near here.”