Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie (8 page)

‘What a romance!’ said Walter. ‘And pray where are the next wedding bells to be heard?’

‘In the snail’s liver. The children who were born in its lung find their way to the liver, where they reach maturity, marry, and have an inordinate number of children
totally
different from themselves, who are passed out of the snail, on to a blade of grass, and so back once more into the sheep’s liver.’

‘Well, I do call that a tasteful roundelay,’ said Walter.

Sally choked.

‘Have some fish,’ said Amabelle, tactfully changing the subject. ‘It’s very good for the brain. I have seen it reported that Lloyd George eats great quantities of fish.’

‘No fish, thank you,’ said the major.

‘When does your little boy begin his holidays?’ asked Amabelle. Major Stanworth was a widower with an only son. His wife had died the preceding year.

‘Comes back tomorrow.’

‘Do you go down often and see him at his school?’

‘About twice a term, you know. Unsettles the boy if one goes oftener. As a matter of fact I went down last week for the annual sports, and rather a ghastly thing happened. The father of one of the boys died in the fathers’ race – just collapsed, poor chap, and died. We carried him into the gymnasium – he was a stoutish cove, too – but it was no good; he was quite dead before the doctor could get at him even.’

‘What an awful thing,’ said Amabelle. She was arriving at an age which no longer regards death as a funny joke.

‘At my private,’ said Walter, ‘we had a most handy little cemetery for the fathers, just behind the cricket pav. But of course, we had a fathers’ three-legged race which used to finish them off in shoals. I have even known them die at the prize-giving, from shock, I suppose, if their boys got prizes.’

‘Not a bad idea that about the cemetery, what?’ said the major. ‘I always have said “where the oak falls, there let it lie”. This poor bloke was lugged off to Suffolk in a motor hearse, I believe.’

‘Why
oak
, I wonder?’ said Walter. ‘Why not sycamore or monkey puzzle?’

Amabelle frowned at him and asked Major Stanworth whether he had been hunting that winter.

‘I have been, of course, but this beastly foot and mouth has stopped us for the present. However, Lady Bobbin tells me that if there’s no fresh outbreak we should be able to start again in about ten days’ time, she thinks.’

‘Is Lady Bobbin a good Master?’

‘Foul mouthed, very foul mouthed, you know. Scares all the young ’uns out of their wits, but she’s very good with the farmers, they understand her. Do you hunt, Monteath?’

‘I love it,’ said Walter. ‘Unfortunately, I only did it once. Before that I used to write articles in the newspapers saying that it was cruel and ought to be stopped and so on. But when I found out what jolly fun it is I gave that up in no time.’

‘Oh, well done, splendid. Still, I mean to say, you couldn’t really call it cruel, now, could you? Ever seen an old dog fox hunted out of covert on a fine sunny morning? Crafty old devil, he enjoys it right enough. I know he does.’

‘I’m perfectly certain he doesn’t,’ said Walter. ‘But that’s not the point. The point is that
I
do, so I very soon stopped writing the articles and spent the money I got for them on a pair of topboots. But it was awful waste really, because since then I’ve never had another opportunity to hunt.’

‘Oh, but I call that good! Now, I’ll tell you what, Monteath, as soon as this something foot and mouth has stopped I’ll lend you a horse. Yes, yes, it would be a pleasure – I’ve got more than I can ride myself as it is. And besides that I’ll give you a ride in the point-to-point, if you like.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Sally, firmly intervening. ‘I’ve got nicely used to being married to Walter now. There was a time when I thought the only ideal state would be that of widowhood,
but now, what with the shortage of marrying men and one thing and another, I’m not at all sure about it. I believe I should miss the old boy a whole heap, you know. Besides, I need a man’s help with the little one. And Walter popped his riding boots last week.’

The major winked at Walter and announced that he himself was a prominent member of the husbands’ union, and would see fair play. This remark scarcely seemed, in view of his own recent widowhood, to be in the best of taste, and was received in a somewhat embarrassed silence. This he broke himself by asking Amabelle how she had enjoyed her visit to old Mrs. Cole that morning.

‘Rather moderately, to tell you the truth,’ said Amabelle. ‘She looked so sweet and picturesque in her garden, feeding the chickens, that I simply had to go in; but poor old thing she is filthy, isn’t she? However, that can’t be her fault, because when I asked if I could send her anything from here she said she’d like some soap. So I sent some along at once, and I only hope she uses it.’

The major began to laugh.

‘Are you sure it was soap she asked for?’ he said.

‘Quite sure. Yes, of course, what else could it have been?’

‘How about soup?’

‘Soup? Oh, no, it wasn’t soup; it was soap all right, I’m certain.’

‘Well, you’re wrong. She asked for soup, as a matter of fact.’

‘My dear! I mean my dear Major Stanworth, how awful, I sent soap.’

‘Yes, I know you did. And the big joke is that the poor old soul thought that you had sent soup tablets, so she boiled one for her dinner. The story was all round the village this afternoon. Leverett, my cowman, told me.’

‘Oh,’ said Amabelle, in tones of deep dismay. ‘Soup! Yes, I see. But I shall have to leave for London at once, shan’t I? I couldn’t stay on here after doing a thing like that. How awful!’

‘Now, Mrs. Fortescue, don’t you worry about it. I would never have told you, only I thought it was too good a joke for you to miss.’

‘I quite agree,’ said Walter.

‘Joke!’ cried Amabelle faintly.

‘Besides, I’ve fixed it all right for you. I went round to see her and took a couple of rabbits and told her that you were a bit hard of hearing. She was as pleased as Punch.’

‘Yes, but the other people in the village must think I’m such a monster.’

‘Oh,
no
, they’re all frightfully pleased. They hate old Granny Coles like fifteen different kinds of hell because in hot weather she uses the village water supply for her garden and nobody else can get any.’

‘She certainly doesn’t use it for any other purpose. But it is a bit embarrassing because that’s the second awful thing I’ve done here already.’

‘What’s the first?’

‘The parson came to call, you see, and asked me if I would give a pound towards the bier – he said they wanted if possible to collect forty pounds for it. I said I would give five pounds, and then I thought it would be polite to take a little interest, so I asked who was going to drink all that beer. What made it worse was that he thought I was trying to be funny, and he was fearfully annoyed.’

Compton Bobbin is one of those houses which abound in every district of rural England, and whose chief characteristic is that they cannot but give rise, on first sight, to a feeling of depression in any sensitive observer. Nevertheless, a large, square and not unhandsome building, it bears testimony, on closer acquaintance, to the fact that it has in the past been inhabited by persons of taste and culture. But these persons have been so long dead, and the evidences of their existence have been so adequately concealed by the generations which succeeded them, that their former presence in the place is something to be supposed rather than immediately perceived. Supposed, however with some degree of certainty after a sojourn, however short, with their descendants.

It must have been, for instance, a person of taste who introduced the Chinese Chippendale mirror now hanging where only housemaids can see it in the back passage, the tails and wings of its fantastic birds sadly cracked and broken, victims of the late Sir Hudson Bobbin’s addiction as a child to indoor cricket. For whom, if not for a person of taste, did Fragonard paint those pastorals, now so dirty and neglected as to be little more than squares of blackened canvas, and which must be examined in the strongest light if the grace of their composition is even faintly to emerge? They hang unnoticed in dark corners of a spare dressing-room. Again, whose were the negro slave boys in black and gold wood with which the Bobbin children have for generations terrified a new governess, and who now
inhabit the big lumber-room? Whose Hepplewhite chairs on which the servants place their underclothes at night? Whose the Venetian glass chandelier, ruined by electric wiring carelessly and locally performed, which hangs, draped in dust sheets, in the disused ballroom? Whose the enamelled snuff-boxes, whose the Waterford glass jumbled together with so much horrible junk in glass-fronted cupboards on the landing? And, oh! to whom belonged the Empire crown of blue diamonds and pink pearls, transformed in 1910, the year of her marriage, into the brooch, bracelet and two rings which now adorn the unpleasing bosom, wrist and fingers of Gloria the present Lady Bobbin?

Persons of taste there have been. The eighteenth century statue of Apollo, hidden quite by dowdy evergreens; the domed temple on the island in the lake; the lake itself; the rococo bridge whose curious humped shapes are only permitted to appear beneath a tangle of ivy; the walled garden with its Italian gates and sundial; the classical lay-out of trees in the park; all testify to their charming and cultured existence. And after them persons some of whose taste might, not edify perhaps, but at any rate amuse. Those who bought the gay and touching little chintzes, beaded fire-screens, Stafford pottery, Berlin wool-work, gaudy flower paintings, and many strange products of a budding Empire; those who crowned a ram’s head with silver and cairngorms and set it in triumph upon the mahogany sideboard. It is sad that of their possessions only the stuffiest should remain, nothing that might amuse, much that must appal. Stained glass windows, for instance, in each clouded amber pane of which leaps fierily the ruby Bobdgin, that legendary creature half unicorn half jackal from which the family (perhaps) derives its name. The hideous furniture and stuffy curtains in the dining-room, the stamped leather chairs and table in the study, the embossed wallpaper in the passages, and – let us speak of it quickly and never think of it again – the feudal fireplace with its load of heraldry in the hall. These, characteristically enough, remain, suffering in their turn
and rendered even more horrible than they would otherwise appear by modern lighting, modern arrangement, and the exile to the boxroom of their jaunty fellows so patently designed to brighten their gloomy aspect.

The châtelaine of Compton Bobbin sat, a few days before Christmas, reading the
Morning Post
beneath the prancing Bobdgins. It was to her, or rather to the talent of her forebears in picking and packing the strongest brand of Indian tea, that the Bobdgins owed their continued existence, for it is hardly to be supposed that any alien purchaser of the house would have tolerated for long those active little creatures. Lady Bobbin was the type of woman best described by that single adjective so explicit of its own dreary meaning, ‘plain’. As a girl she had been the greatest heiress of her time and even then nobody could find a happier epithet with which to describe her looks than ‘handsome’, and that to the loudly expressed mystification of those of her fellow débutantes whose faces were their fortunes. At forty-five she was tall and thin but heavy of movement, her fuzzy hair uncut, her muddy skin unaided by any condiment, and with a voice like the worst sort of loud-speaker, imitating and aggressive and perpetually at work. She was without any kind of grace, either mental or physical.

At twenty-four she had married Sir Hudson Bobbin, a weak but rather charming character. To those who knew her it was a perpetual mystery, not indeed that she had married at all, as, but for the packages of tea, it must have been; but that having married she should have produced children of such charm and beauty as were possessed by her son Roderick and her daughter Philadelphia. She herself, if she had ever considered their undoubted attractiveness, would have felt it to be profoundly unimportant. (Actually, in her eyes, Roderick was merely a tiresome little schoolboy and Philadelphia a pert and disagreeable girl.) She knew that every woman has in life two main duties, to marry well and to produce a son and heir; having achieved both it was of no consequence to her
whether or not the marriage was a happy one or the heir a young man of looks and distinction. Except for one terrible period, when between the sinking of Sir Hudson in the Lusitania and the birth of Roderick, she had been submitted to the suspense of not knowing whether the child would indeed prove to be of the required male sex, she had never known much disquietude on the score of her family life. Her daughter, beyond the initial disappointment caused by her sex, had never interested her at all, her one wish in that direction being that Philadelphia should marry as quickly and as advantageously as possible. The only thing which afforded her a real and lasting satisfaction was her pack of foxhounds. These meant to her what husband, children or artistic expression may mean to other women; they were her vanity and her delight. A hard day’s hunting was to her the most exquisite of joys, and when this happiness was rendered temporarily impossible by frost, flood, or, as at present, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the district, her bitterness of spirit would be beyond all bounds; she would be as one mourning the untimely loss of a beloved, shut up within herself and inaccessible to sympathy.

Philadelphia Bobbin balanced a few pieces of rather dreary holly on the frame of her great grandmother’s portrait by W. Etty.

‘And now,’ she said, getting down from the chair on which she had been standing, and viewing without satisfaction the results of her handiwork, ‘I suppose I had better go and meet this hellish tutor. God, how I do hate Christmas.’

‘Don’t speak like that, Philadelphia,’ said Lady Bobbin sharply, looking up from her perusal of the
Morning Post
, a perusal which at present was a daily torture to her since it consisted entirely in reading about the good runs of other packs of hounds which, more fortunate than hers, were not haunted by the grim spectre of foot and mouth disease. ‘May I ask what else you want to be doing at this particular moment? The truth is you never do a hand’s turn for anybody except yourself – self,
self, self with you, all day long. You ought to be very grateful to have a motor car of your own instead of making all this fuss when you are asked, occasionally, to do some little errand for me with it. Another time I will hire a car when Fred is away. I would much sooner do that than have all these complaints. And if you’re going to be in such a disgustingly bad temper, I’ll thank you to keep to yourself and not spoil Christmas for everybody else. It is a time which means a great deal to some of us, I may tell you.’