“Well, if a cat can’t keep his feet on those wooden tiles,” said Mother, “I don’t suppose I can,” and she jumped, just to try, right into the middle of a little square of blue carpet, which, true enough, slid along with her.
“You can give a nice hop here, at any rate,” cried Aunt Gerty, catching her round the waist, and waltzing all over the room, till both their picture hats fell off, and hung down their backs by the pins. “Ask me and all the boys, and give a nice sit-down supper, and do us as well as the old villain will allow you.”
She was quite happy. That is just like an actress! Ariadne and I danced too, and the cats mewed loudly for strangeness. Cats hate newness of any kind, and they weren’t easy till I got some newspaper, crackled it, and let them sit on it, and then they were all right. Then Mother and Aunt Gerty rang the queer-shaped bell, as if it would sting them, and got up some coals which Mother had had the forethought to order in, and lit a modest little fire in a great cave with brass images in front of it under the kind of copper hood. It wouldn’t draw at first, being used to logs, and when it smoked we threw water on it, lest we dirtied the beautiful silk hangings. At last we fetched Elizabeth Cawthorne.
“Hout!” she said. “I’d like to see the fire that’s going to get the better of me!”
She made it burn, sulkily, and Ariadne and I went to a shop we knew of round the corner, and bought tea and sugar and condensed milk, to make ourselves tea with the spirit-lamp Aunt Gerty had brought. We had no butter or bread, only biscuits luckily, so we couldn’t stain the Cinque Cento chairs, whose gold trimmings were simply peeling off them. Sit on them we dared not, they would have let us down on the floor for a certainty. Mother and Aunt Gerty had a high old time blaming Lady Scilly for all her foolish arrangements, and then we all went down to the so-called kitchen to see how Elizabeth Cawthorne was getting on there. She was in a rage, but trying to pass it off, like a good soul as she is.
“Well, I never! Here’s a gold handle to my coal-cellar door! I shall have to wipe my lily hands before I dare use it. And a fine lady of a dresser that I shall be shy to set a plain dish on. Beetles here, do you ask, woman?” (To Kate.) “They’d be ashamed to show their faces in such a smart place as this, I’m thinking. And what’s this couple of drucken little candlesticks for the kitchen? Our Kate’ll soon rive the fond bit handles from off them, or she’s not the girl I take her for!”
She banged it hard against the dresser as servants do, to make it break, but it didn’t, and she looked disappointed. Mother then suggested she should unpack a favourite frying-pan she never goes anywhere without, and sent Kate out for a pound and a half of loin-chops, and cook was to fry them for our dinners.
The kitchen fire, after all, was the only one that would burn, so we ate our chops there, and sat there till bed-time. Ariadne looked like a picture, sitting at a trestle-table, and a thing like a torch burning at the back of her head. She was thoroughly disgusted, and got quite cross, and so did Elizabeth, as the evening went on. She hated trestles, and flambeaus, and dark Rembrandtish corners, and couldn’t lay her hand on her things nohow, so that when we all went up to bed, Mother said to her—
“Good-night, Elizabeth. You have been a bit upset, haven’t you? I wonder we have managed to get through the day without a row!”
“So do I, ma’am,” said the cook. “Heaps of times I’d have given you warning for twopence, but you never gave me ought to lay hold on.”