Read Ebook: Bealby; A Holiday by Wells H G Herbert George

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Ebook has 1736 lines and 72929 words, and 35 pages

"Where'n earth you going to?" cried Mr. Mergleson.

"He's shy!" cried the second footman.

"Steady on!" cried the first footman and had him by the shoulder in the doorway.

"Here!" cried Mr. Mergleson, gesticulating with his teaspoon, "bring 'im to the end of the table there. What's this about a blooming servant?"

Bealby, suddenly blubbering, was replaced at the end of the table.

"May I ask what's this about a blooming servant?" asked Mr. Mergleson.

Sniff and silence.

"Did I understand you to say that you ain't going to be a blooming servant, young Bealby?"

"Yes," said young Bealby.

"Thomas," said Mr. Mergleson, "just smack 'is 'ed. Smack it rather 'ard...."

"Just smack 'is 'ed once more," said Mr. Mergleson....

"And now you just stand there, young man, until I'm at libbuty to attend to you further," said Mr. Mergleson, and finished his tea slowly and eloquently....

The second footman rubbed his shin thoughtfully.

"If I got to smack 'is 'ed much," he said, "'e'd better change into his slippers."

"Take him to 'is room," said Mr. Mergleson getting up. "See 'e washes the grief and grubbiness off 'is face in the handwash at the end of the passage and make him put on his slippers. Then show 'im 'ow to lay the table in the steward's room."

? 4

The duties to which Bealby was introduced struck him as perplexingly various, undesirably numerous, uninteresting and difficult to remember, and also he did not try to remember them very well because he wanted to do them as badly as possible and he thought that forgetting would be a good way of starting at that. He was beginning at the bottom of the ladder; to him it fell to wait on the upper servants, and the green baize door at the top of the service staircase was the limit of his range. His room was a small wedge-shaped apartment under some steps leading to the servants' hall, lit by a window that did not open and that gave upon the underground passage. He received his instructions in a state of crumpled mutinousness, but for a day his desire to be remarkably impossible was more than counterbalanced by his respect for the large able hands of the four man-servants, his seniors, and by a disinclination to be returned too promptly to the gardens. Then in a tentative manner he broke two plates and got his head smacked by Mr. Mergleson himself. Mr. Mergleson gave a staccato slap quite as powerful as Thomas's but otherwise different. The hand of Mr. Mergleson was large and fat and he got his effects by dash, Thomas's was horny and lingered. After that young Bealby put salt in the teapot in which the housekeeper made tea. But that he observed she washed out with hot water before she put in the tea. It was clear that he had wasted his salt, which ought to have gone into the kettle.

Next time,--the kettle.

Beyond telling him his duties almost excessively nobody conversed with young Bealby during the long hours of his first day in service. At midday dinner in the servants' hall, he made one of the kitchen-maids giggle by pulling faces intended to be delicately suggestive of Mr. Mergleson, but that was his nearest approach to disinterested human intercourse.

When the hour for retirement came,--"Get out of it. Go to bed, you dirty little Kicker," said Thomas. "We've had about enough of you for one day"--young Bealby sat for a long time on the edge of his bed weighing the possibilities of arson and poison. He wished he had some poison. Some sort of poison with a medieval manner, poison that hurts before it kills. Also he produced a small penny pocket-book with a glazed black cover and blue edges. He headed one page of this "Mergleson" and entered beneath it three black crosses. Then he opened an account to Thomas, who was manifestly destined to be his principal creditor. Bealby was not a forgiving boy. At the village school they had been too busy making him a good Churchman to attend to things like that. There were a lot of crosses for Thomas.

And while Bealby made these sinister memoranda downstairs Lady Laxton--for Laxton had bought a baronetcy for twenty thousand down to the party funds and a tip to the whip over the Peptonized Milk flotation--Lady Laxton, a couple of floors above Bealby's ruffled head mused over her approaching week-end party. It was an important week-end party. The Lord Chancellor of England was coming. Never before had she had so much as a member of the Cabinet at Shonts. He was coming, and do what she would she could not help but connect it with her very strong desire to see the master of Shonts in the clear scarlet of a Deputy Lieutenant. Peter would look so well in that. The Lord Chancellor was coming, and to meet him and to circle about him there were Lord John Woodenhouse and Slinker Bond, there were the Countess of Barracks and Mrs. Rampound Pilby, the novelist, with her husband Rampound Pilby, there was Professor Timbre, the philosopher, and there were four smaller people who would run about very satisfactorily among the others.

All this good company in Shonts filled Lady Laxton with a pleasant realization of progressive successes but at the same time one must confess that she felt a certain diffidence. In her heart of hearts she knew she had not made this party. It had happened to her. How it might go on happening to her, she did not know, it was beyond her control. She hoped very earnestly that everything would pass off well.

The Lord Chancellor was as big a guest as any she had had. One must grow as one grows, but still,--being easy and friendly with him would be, she knew, a tremendous effort. Rather like being easy and friendly with an elephant. She was not good at conversation. The task of interesting people taxed her and puzzled her....

It was Slinker Bond, the whip, who had arranged the whole business--after, it must be confessed, a hint from Sir Peter. Laxton had complained that the government were neglecting this part of the country. "They ought to show up more than they do in the county," said Sir Peter, and added almost carelessly, "I could easily put anybody up at Shonts." There were to be two select dinner parties and a large but still select Sunday lunch to let in the countryside to the spectacle of the Laxtons taking their proper place at Shonts....

Then the Lord Chancellor was said to be interested in philosophy--a difficult subject. She had got Timbre to talk to him upon that. Timbre was a professor of philosophy at Oxford, so that was sure to be all right. But she wished she knew one or two good safe things to say in philosophy herself. She had long felt the need of a secretary, and now she felt it more than ever. If she had a secretary, she could just tell him what it was she wanted to talk about and he could get her one or two of the right books and mark the best passages and she could learn it all up.

She feared--it was a worrying fear--that Laxton would say right out and very early in the week-end that he didn't believe in philosophy. He had a way of saying he "didn't believe in" large things like that,--art, philanthropy, novels, and so on. Sometimes he said, "I don't believe in all this"--art or whatever it was. She had watched people's faces when he had said it and she had come to the conclusion that saying you don't believe in things isn't the sort of thing people say nowadays. It was wrong, somehow. But she did not want to tell Laxton directly that it was wrong. He would remember if she did, but he had a way of taking such things rather badly at the time.... She hated him to take things badly.

"If one could invent some little hint," she whispered to herself.

She had often wished she was better at hints.

She was, you see, a gentlewoman, modest, kindly. Her people were quite good people. Poor, of course. But she was not clever, she was anything but clever. And the wives of these captains of industry need to be very clever indeed if they are to escape a magnificent social isolation. They get the titles and the big places and all that sort of thing; people don't at all intend to isolate them, but there is nevertheless an inadvertent avoidance....

Even as she uttered these words, "If one could invent some little hint," Bealby down there less than forty feet away through the solid floor below her feet and a little to the right was wetting his stump of pencil as wet as he could in order to ensure a sufficiently emphatic fourteenth cross on the score sheet of the doomed Thomas. Most of the other thirteen marks were done with such hard breathing emphasis that the print of them went more than halfway through that little blue-edged book.

? 5

The arrival of the week-end guests impressed Bealby at first merely as a blessed influence that withdrew the four men-servants into that unknown world on the other side of the green baize door, but then he learnt that it also involved the appearance of five new persons, two valets and three maids, for whom places had to be laid in the steward's room. Otherwise Lady Laxton's social arrangements had no more influence upon the mind of Bealby than the private affairs of the Emperor of China. There was something going on up there, beyond even his curiosity. All he heard of it was a distant coming and going of vehicles and some slight talk to which he was inattentive while the coachman and grooms were having a drink in the pantry--until these maids and valets appeared. They seemed to him to appear suddenly out of nothing, like slugs after rain, black and rather shiny, sitting about inactively and quietly consuming small matters. He disliked them, and they regarded him without affection or respect.

Who cared? He indicated his feeling towards them as soon as he was out of the steward's room by a gesture of the hand and nose venerable only by reason of its antiquity.

He had things more urgent to think about than strange valets and maids. Thomas had laid hands on him, jeered at him, inflicted shameful indignities on him and he wanted to kill Thomas in some frightful manner.

If he had been a little Japanese boy, this would have been an entirely honourable desire. It would have been Bushido and all that sort of thing. In the gardener's stepson however it is--undesirable....

Thomas, on the other hand, having remarked the red light of revenge in Bealby's eye and being secretly afraid, felt that his honour was concerned in not relaxing his persecutions. He called him "Kicker" and when he did not answer to that name, he called him "Snorter," "Bleater," "Snooks," and finally tweaked his ear. Then he saw fit to assume that Bealby was deaf and that ear-tweaking was the only available method of address. This led on to the convention of a sign language whereby ideas were communicated to Bealby by means of painful but frequently quite ingeniously symbolical freedoms with various parts of his person. Also Thomas affected to discover uncleanliness in Bealby's head and succeeded after many difficulties in putting it into a sinkful of lukewarm water.

Over all these dark thoughts and ill-concealed emotions Mr. Mergleson prevailed, large yet speedy, speedy yet exact, parroting orders and making plump gestures, performing duties and seeing that duties were performed.

Matters came to a climax late on Saturday night at the end of a trying day, just before Mr. Mergleson went round to lock up and turn out the lights.

Thomas came into the pantry close behind Bealby, who, greatly belated through his own inefficiency, was carrying a tray of glasses from the steward's room, applied an ungentle hand to his neck, and ruffled up his back hair in a smart and painful manner. At the same time Thomas remarked, "Burrrrh!"

Bealby stood still for a moment and then put down his tray on the table and, making peculiar sounds as he did so, resorted very rapidly to the toasting fork.... He got a prong into Thomas's chin at the first prod.

How swift are the changes of the human soul! At the moment of his thrust young Bealby was a primordial savage; so soon as he saw this incredible piercing of Thomas's chin--for all the care that Bealby had taken it might just as well have been Thomas's eye--he moved swiftly through the ages and became a simple Christian child. He abandoned violence and fled.

The fork hung for a moment from the visage of Thomas like a twisted beard of brass, and then rattled on the ground.

Thomas clapped his hand to his chin and discovered blood.

"You little--!" He never found the right word ; instead he started in pursuit of Bealby.

Bealby--in his sudden horror of his own act--and Thomas fled headlong into the passage and made straight for the service stairs that went up into a higher world. He had little time to think. Thomas with a red-smeared chin appeared in pursuit. Thomas the avenger. Thomas really roused. Bealby shot through the green baize door and the pursuing footman pulled up only just in time not to follow him.

Only just in time. He had an instinctive instant anxious fear of great dangers. He heard something, a sound as though the young of some very large animal had squeaked feebly. He had a glimpse of something black and white--and large....

Then something, some glass thing, smashed.

He steadied the green baize door which was wobbling on its brass hinges, controlled his panting breath and listened.

A low rich voice was--ejaculating. It was not Bealby's voice, it was the voice of some substantial person being quietly but deeply angry. They were the ejaculations restrained in tone but not in quality of a ripe and well-stored mind,--no boy's thin stuff.

Then very softly Thomas pushed open the door--just widely enough to see and as instantly let it fall back into place.

Very gently and yet with an alert rapidity he turned about and stole down the service stairs.

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