Читать книгу Flower-Patch Neighbours - Flora Klickmann - Страница 4

Table of Contents

I had been listening to a friend relating elaborate details of a recent illness—very long and painful and tedious (the illness I mean), and I was very sorry for her.

The following day it chanced that another caller also gave me extensive data concerning the same complaint—her husband this time. And I was truly sorry for him.

By the end of the week, I myself developed a pain, and it grew rapidly worse and worse. And as each fresh symptom presented itself for my consideration, I recognised every one. They tallied exactly with the descriptions I had received from my friends. Then I knew that I, too, had “it”! And I was more than sorry for myself.

Forthwith, knowing I had a long and painful and tedious illness ahead of me, I tried to be thoughtful for every one, and forgiving, and kind, and considerate for their feelings. And they, in turn, gave me mutton broth in an undertone.

When the doctor arrived, he looked at the broth and smiled—though I knew he would be sorry for the smile when he heard what was really the matter with me. So I told him, patiently and gently, and enumerated the symptoms and modestly indicated their whereabouts.

“Can’t be!” he said emphatically. “Pain’s in the wrong place entirely. You surely don’t think you keep your phonigeitisgramaglottis there! What you’re suffering from is over-work, and listening to too many ailment recitals! Go to the Flower-Patch at once, and stay there three weeks.”

As it was early in December, that meant spending Christmas out of London. And I wasn’t sorry. Things hadn’t gone particularly well the previous Christmas. Not that it was any one’s fault. It was merely one of those diversions which occasionally occur, even in the best regulated households—happenings which the men-folk are always certain could have been prevented by the judicious exercise of a little forethought, tact, and organisation.

The trouble the previous year was influenza, which laid low my domestic staff, leaving me lamenting a week before Christmas, and no one but Mrs. Bungle, the charwoman, to assist me in the entertainment of a battalion of Christmas guests.

And then, just as I was wondering why Mrs. Bungle hadn’t turned up that morning, and whether it wouldn’t be wiser, after all, to call off the invitations, a small boy arrived with a note, in which Mrs. Bungle explained her inability to raise her head, it being full of water. But would I like Miss Jenkins, who lived upstairs, to come and do for me?

“I’ll own she’s a bit So-So,” Mrs. Bungle wrote; “but at any rate she’s clean, and she’d keep an eye on you till I can get round again to put you to rights.”

I gratefully accepted the offer of Miss Jenkins, despite the So-So (whatever that might be). And when the lady arrived, she seemed a capable, sensible, middle-aged woman, though her hair was more brassy than is usual with the professional charwoman.

As the Head of Affairs was late getting home that evening, I asked her to keep the cutlets hot.

“That’ll be all right, ‘m. I’ll pepper ’em well.” Quite a bright person!

Next day, Mrs. Bungle, having a temperature, it was evident she wouldn’t be back before the holidays. Miss Jenkins seemed anxious to do her utmost to supply all deficiencies. Said I need not put off my friends, as she was quite used to helping when there were visitors in the house.

“Ladies, are they? or gentlemen?” she asked.... “Both! That’s a pity! If ’twas only gentlemen now, you could just turn the toilet covers, and make do. But you’ve got to be more thorough like when there’s ladies....

“Do you want ’em to come again? Or to clear out pretty soon and shake off the dust like? I can do ’em either way,” she explained obligingly.

Nevertheless, I decided to cancel the invitations, and we looked forward thankfully to spending the time quietly by ourselves.

Miss Jenkins agreed to come round on Christmas morning to help me get the dinner—we decided to celebrate on roast fowl, as we were so small a household.

Next day, however, Miss Jenkins said she was sorry that, after all, she wouldn’t be able to leave home Christmas Day because of her little girl, Kitty.

“Your little girl?” I queried in surprise. “How old is she?”

“Nine,” said Miss Jenkins, quite unperturbed.

“Dear me!” was all I could think of at the moment, but I tried to convey various things, all of them denoting disapproval, by my tone of voice.

“Yes; and one can’t leave a child of that age to get her Christmas dinner all on her own lonesome,” Kitty’s mother continued.

“Er—of course not,” I said. Then recollecting that it wasn’t the child’s fault, and there are four good helpings on a fowl, I told her to bring Kitty with her.

She accepted with alacrity. And all seemed well. Yet the following day she came with more regrets.

“It’s on account of my son John,” she explained. “He’s on the Bakerloo Toob, and finds he’ll be off after twelve.”

It was useless to express further surprise. And there would be a fair-sized piece of boiled ham with the fowl, and no lack of pudding and mince pies; so I said, still with disapproval—

“You had better tell your son to come round here for his Christmas dinner.”

She thanked me effusively. Then an idea occurred to me; and I asked—

“Are there likely to be any others coming home that day?”

“Well”—she paused thoughtfully, apparently reckoning up the pros and cons of a lengthy list—“I don’t think any of the rest of ’em can get off, unless it’s Gertie. She’s kitchen-maid at the Cedars, and her mistress did say that if the fambly went out to dinner Christmas Day, she could——”

“How many children have you?” I interrupted her.

“Six,” she said complacently; “but they aren’t all in London.”

In desperation I told the butcher to send me six pounds of sirloin on Christmas Eve. I meant to take no risks! He promised a nice cut. When it arrived, it weighed thirteen pounds.

Miss Jenkins praised its appearance. Said she had told Gertie of my kind invitation (though we never got as far as that); and would I mind if Gertie brought her young man? Such a nice, steady-going, quiet young fellow, with no mother. (I was relieved to think that at least I shouldn’t have to provide for her.)

I hurried upstairs as soon as I could get away from the young man’s biography, because I feared that John’s young lady was also waiting in the offing!

I was kept very busy all Christmas morning, cooking for Miss Jenkins’s party, to the accompaniment of eulogies on the excellence of my assistant’s children. I wasn’t sorry when a neighbouring friend ‘phoned to ask us to spend the evening with them.

Miss Jenkins said she was quite willing to stay till we got back, and we weren’t to hurry on her account, she was used to late hours. As she had Kitty and John and Gertie and Gertie’s young man for company, with provisions galore, I surmised that she wouldn’t be dull.

She wasn’t!

At half-past seven we rang her up to know if everything was all right. But, as no amount of ringing got any answer, we decided to go home and see if she had left the premises in our absence.

Long before we reached our gate, however, we understood why no one had heard the ‘phone bell, for the sounds of bawling merriment coming from our establishment could be heard afar off. We let ourselves in unnoticed, so great was the uproar. We found our dining-room in the possession of fifteen people, most of them in various stages of intoxication, who were informing the neighbourhood lustily that “Little Baby’s gone to Sleep” (though no one would have believed it, hearing the row!). Gertie’s young man was accompanying them on his concertina, aided by Gertie at the dining-room piano.

Assuming we should not return till late, Miss Jenkins had sent out for her friends and relations, likewise for stronger refreshment than I had supplied.

The Head of Affairs dealt promptly with the company.

As we carried the drawing-room chairs back to their proper place, and collected up my best engraved glasses (one of them broken), and the dining-room china and cutlery which was strewn all over the place, we agreed that Miss Jenkins was decidedly So-So!

It’s a wise mistress who knows what goes on in her house during her absence! I knew of a case where the daughter of one of our oldest ducal families left her country house in the south, at the end of July, for the shooting in Scotland. All the servants went with the family, excepting the gardeners. The house was vacated at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning, a gardener and his wife from one of the two lodges being installed in the mansion as caretakers.

By four o’clock that same Saturday afternoon, both the lodges were occupied by parties renting them (from the gardeners) for the holidays; the mansion was filled with several sets of people; the gardeners and their wives, from the two lodges, running the house like a residential hotel. In addition to the money they made in this way, they sold peaches and grapes and nectarines from the glasshouses, to the boarders.

All might have gone well for the gardeners’ pockets, only—the master of the house appeared unexpectedly! It was thought that an under-gardener, dissatisfied with the “pickings” allotted him, was responsible for this. At any rate, the owner’s wrath reached a climax when he found four husky young men installed in her ladyship’s special suite of rooms, utterly regardless of the value of light brocades and satins and delicate furnishings.

You never know!

To return to the Jenkins episode. Though that had happened the year before my phonigeitisgramaglottis affliction, somehow it still lingered in the air, and seemed to put the Christmas spirit out of gear. I found myself waiting for signs of oncoming indisposition in the kitchen, which would again necessitate a few days off duty at Christmas. And I saw Mrs. Bungle again laid low with a temperature, and another So-So lady deputising.

It was really a relief when I had such a good excuse for leaving London, and journeying to a spot where at least I knew everybody’s relations to the third and fourth generation, and need not fear having an unlimited family sprung on me unawares.

Feeling cheerful, as I always do at the thought of seeing my cottage, in a fit of expansive exuberance I invited a famous author, who chanced to be in my office the day before I left town, to bring his wife and celebrate Christmas with us.

He accepted. Said he had often wanted to see the flowers.

It wasn’t until I had taken two hours, in a dense London fog, to get from the City to my home on Sydenham Hill, that I remembered it was December, and anything but a month of flowers. And I wondered why I had invited a man whose existence centred on London, and whose world was typified by his club in St. James’s Street. His wife, an extremely brilliant woman, I knew and admired greatly—at a distance. But she had never stayed with us. And I wondered!

Our last visitor, a Miss Blank, hadn’t proved herself entirely a gem of purest ray serene. And after she left us (with her car charges to pay, and no tips for the servants) I did say I was done with visitors for ever and all the future. She was a relative-in-law several times removed (though not removed nearly far enough to suit me!). And she had ‘phoned unexpectedly, one day when I was at my Flower-Patch, saying she happened to be just passing through Tintern, and where did I advise her to put up?

What could I say, except “Come here”? At any rate, I knew that was what I was expected to say.

It is amazing how many people manage to find themselves “just passing,” when we are staying at the cottage—more especially the people whom we merely love in a Christian spirit, but don’t like! And yet, when our friends come here for a pre-arranged visit, they most of them congratulate us on having a place that is so unget-at-able, so out of the way of everywhere, so on the road to nowhere, and so completely at the back of the world. And they add that they are sure they could never find it alone and unaided. Yet, judging by the number of our uninvited callers, we might be the central junction where every one had to change for everywhere!

Miss Blank explained that she was on her way from London to Torquay. I suggested that she might have found it a still shorter cut if she had travelled via Aberdeen. She replied by asking if she was to pay the assistant in the office for the ‘phone call, or had we an account with them?

When she finally reached us, she was brimming over with complaints about the distance from the station; but added that she knew I was just the sort of person to have a house at the back of beyond.

That is the worst of Miss Blank; she always knows just what you will do (particularly after the event!). She is one of those wonderful women who only need to look at you to size you up immediately—especially your frailties.

For instance, the way you sharpen a lead pencil may seem harmless enough to you, but Miss Blank will deduce quite a number of your secret sins therefrom. Do you sharpen it with the point looking away from you? Then, probably, that implies a domineering disposition, a tactless temperament, a partiality for broad beans and a leaning towards bigamy.

Mind, I don’t say it does mean all that, because I myself always make the pencil look in the opposite direction when I sharpen it. But Miss Blank can discover down-grade tendencies in all your actions, with side-ramifications equally shady, till you get lost in her maze of sub-conscious indications. And by the time she has explained where a partiality for broad beans is leading you (downhill, of course), you feel you could easily commit bigamy, if you chanced to be Miss Blank’s husband, merely to escape from her brilliant brain.

This is to explain why I wasn’t overjoyed at the unexpected visitation. However, it fortunately happened that we had a specially respectable dinner that night—always a source of satisfaction when a guest arrives uninvited.

After Miss Blank had finished the final course, she said, “I really was undecided whether it would be worth while to come up here, after I had ‘phoned you. But I’m glad I came now, for I’ve enjoyed that meal.”

It was as well to understand clearly that she hadn’t come with any idea of enjoying my society. Not that I had had any illusions on that point!

Next morning, after she had breakfasted in bed, I heard a strident voice calling:

“Dear! Dear!!—Oh, there you are”—as I appeared on the stairs and found Miss Blank in a sketchy outfit, at the bathroom door. “Will you be so kind as to give me some other soap?”—extending towards me a cake of really superior soap, which I reserve for visitors, as it is rather choice and expensive. “This soap has a most objectionable odour,” she continued. “I always detest it, and I can’t think how you can use it. I’d like some other kind, please.”

I promptly got the lady a lump of yellow primrose soap, and left her to it.

Lunch that day was of the cold meat and salad variety. Miss Blank, having seated herself at the table, surprised us by suddenly rising again, and, seizing a glass dish of beet-root, carried it away and placed it viciously on the sideboard.

“You won’t mind my moving that, will you, dear? I can’t bear beet-root; can’t think how any one can eat it.” And she re-seated herself complacently; while those who liked beet-root gazed at it affectionately from the distance.

I was glad she proposed to leave us by the afternoon train. It is surprising what an amount of irritation a visitor of that type can induce, even during a short stay.

Though perhaps I am to blame. Yes—I daresay it is my fault.

Not long ago, a stranger wrote and begged for my autograph for her collection, explaining that it was the one thing needed to complete her life’s happiness. As I do try occasionally to be a really nice person, I let her have it by return post.

A few days later, she sent me an analysis of my character as revealed by my handwriting; and though I had always known I possessed a large number of defects (my relatives never having shown undue reticence on this matter), I had no idea I owned anything like the array the unknown autograph collector discovered. She said she was always perfectly frank with people (I could quite believe it), and added that her usual fee was five shillings; but in my case, she would accept half-a-crown!

Doubtless it was my fault, and I was unreasonable to allow myself to be irritated by Miss Blank. But when she left us without even saying, “Thank you,” I did feel I would never again ask any but intimate and well-tried friends to stay with us. And I wondered therefore, why I had invited Mr. and Mrs. Author, who were not at all likely to be intrigued with a place where they would be out of touch with what they would call civilisation.

“I’m not certain that I was wise in inviting them,” I said to the Head of Affairs when I got home.

“I’m quite sure you weren’t,” he replied conclusively. “Mr. Author is the very last man to be able to stand winter in the country with nothing doing. He’ll be bored in an hour. And though Mrs. Author is a charming woman, she’s sure to catch cold. She’ll come in high-heeled slippers and with nothing on; and then what will you do with her?”

“Lend her a sunshade!” I said. But all the same, I realised I had made a mistake.

“It will be misery for all of us,” continued my husband, warming to the work, “to have that unfortunate man cooped up in a house, miles from everywhere, with nothing to do but watch the clouds rolling down the hills, while he listens to announcements of further depressions from Iceland. And people from an expensive service flat like theirs, with every known labour-saving gadget, will never fit into a cottage where there isn’t even electric light. But don’t worry,” he ended generously, “I’ll take him to the Wood-house, and he can help me saw up those big oak logs.”

And the thought of Mr. Author, with his lily-white hands and always immaculate clothing, being invited as a special Christmas treat to saw up logs in the old Wood-house nearly gave me hysterics.

I could only hope that, as there were yet fourteen days to Christmas, Providence would kindly intervene and something occur to prevent what, I foresaw, would turn out a catastrophe.