Pomonas Travels | Page 4

madam, it really did me good to see Jone blaze up and get red in the face, and I am sure that if he'd get his blood boiling oftener it would be a good thing for his dyspeptic tendencies and what little malaria may be left in his system. "It won't do any good to flare up here," I went on to say to him; "fact's fact, and we was servants, and good ones, too, though I say it myself, and the trouble is we haven't got into the way of altogether forgetting it, or, at least, acting as if we had forgotten it."
Jone sat down on a chair. "It might help matters a little," he said, "if I knew what you was driving at."
"I mean just this," said I, "as long as we are as anxious not to give trouble, or as careful of people's feelings, as good-mannered to servants, and as polite and good-natured to everybody we have anything to do with, as we both have been since we came here, and as it is our nature to be, I am proud to say, we're bound to be set down, at least by the general run of people over here, as belonging to the pick of the nobility and gentry, or as well-bred servants. It's only those two classes that act as we do, and anybody can see we are not special nobles and gents. Now, if we want to be reckoned anywhere in between these two we've got to change our manners."
"Will you kindly mention just how?" said Jone.
"Yes," said I, "I will. In the first place, we've got to act as if we had always been waited on and had never been satisfied with the way it was done; we've got to let people think that we think we are a good deal better than they are, and what they think about it doesn't make the least difference; and then again we've got to live in better quarters than these, and whatever they may be we must make people think that we don't think they are quite good enough for us. If we do all that, agents may be willing to let us vicarages."
"It strikes me," said Jone, "that these quarters are good enough for us. I'm comfortable." And then he went on to say, madam, that when you and your husband was in London you was well satisfied with just such lodgings.
"That's all very well," I said, "for they never moved in the lower paths of society, and so they didn't have to make any change, but just went along as they had been used to go. But if we want to make people believe we belong to that class I should choose, if I had my pick out of English social varieties, we've got to bounce about as much above it as we were born below it, so that we can strike somewhere near the proper average."
"And what variety would you pick out, I'd like to know?" said Jone, just a little red in the face, and looking as if I had told him he didn't know timothy hay from oat straw.
"Well," said I, "it is not easy to put it to you exactly, but it's a sort of a cross between a prosperous farmer without children and a poor country gentleman with two sons at college and one in the British army, and no money to pay their debts with."
"That last is not to my liking," said Jone.
"But the farmer part of the cross would make it all right," I said to him, "and it strikes me that a mixture like that would just suit us while we are staying over here. Now, if you will try to think of yourself as part rich farmer and part poor gentleman, I'll consider myself the wife of the combination, and I am sure we will get along better. We didn't come over here to be looked upon as if we was the bottom of a pie dish and charged as if we was the upper crust. I'm in favor of paying a little more money and getting a lot more respectfulness, and the way to begin is to give up these lodgings and go to a hotel such as the upper middlers stop at. From what I've heard, the Babylon Hotel is the one for us while we are in London. Nobody will suspect that any of the people at that hotel are retired servants."
[Illustration: "Boy, go order me a four-in-hand"]
This hit Jone hard, as I knew it would, and he jumped up, made three steps across the room, and rang the bell so that the people across the street must have heard it, and up came the boy in green jacket and buttons, with