Tono Bungay | Page 5

dogs. When I was a boy I used always to
think of these two poor old creatures as superior beings living, like God,
somewhere through the ceiling. Occasionally they bumped about a bit
and one even heard them overhead, which gave them a greater effect of
reality without mitigating their vertical predominance. Sometimes too I
saw them. Of course if I came upon them in the park or in the
shrubbery (where I was a trespasser) I hid or fled in pious horror, but I
was upon due occasion taken into the Presence by request. I remember
her "leddyship" then as a thing of black silks and a golden chain, a
quavering injunction to me to be a good boy, a very shrunken
loose-skinned face and neck, and a ropy hand that trembled a halfcrown
into mine. Miss Somerville hovered behind, a paler thing of broken
lavender and white and black, with screwed up, sandy-lashed eyes. Her
hair was yellow and her colour bright, and when we sat in the
housekeeper's room of a winter's night warming our toes and sipping
elder wine, her maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belated
flush.... After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished,
and I never saw those poor old painted goddesses again.
Then there came and went on these floors over our respectful heads, the
Company; people I rarely saw, but whose tricks and manners were
imitated and discussed by their maids and valets in the housekeeper's
room and the steward's room--so that I had them through a medium at
second hand. I gathered that none of the company were really Lady
Drew's equals, they were greater and lesser after the manner of all
things in our world. Once I remember there was a Prince, with a real
live gentleman in attendance, and that was a little above our customary
levels and excited us all, and perhaps raised our expectations unduly.

Afterwards, Rabbits, the butler, came into my mother's room
downstairs, red with indignation and with tears in his eyes. "Look at
that!" gasped Rabbits. My mother was speechless with horror. That was
a sovereign, a mere sovereign, such as you might get from any
commoner!
After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old
women upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive, and in a state
of physical and emotional indigestion after their social efforts....
On the lowest fringe of these real Olympians hung the vicarage people,
and next to them came those ambiguous beings who are neither quality
nor subjects. The vicarage people certainly hold a place by themselves
in the typical English scheme; nothing is more remarkable than the
progress the Church has made--socially--in the last two hundred years.
In the early eighteenth century the vicar was rather under than over the
house-steward, and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper or
any not too morally discredited discard. The eighteenth century
literature is full of his complaints that he might not remain at table to
share the pie. He rose above these indignities because of the abundance
of younger sons. When I meet the large assumptions of the
contemporary cleric, I am apt to think of these things. It is curious to
note that to-day that down-trodden, organ-playing creature, the Church
of England village Schoolmaster, holds much the same position as the
seventeenth century parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked below the
vicar but above the "vet," artists and summer visitors squeezed in above
or below this point according to their appearance and expenditure, and
then in a carefully arranged scale came the tenantry, the butler and
housekeeper, the village shopkeeper, the head keeper, the cook, the
publican, the second keeper, the blacksmith (whose status was
complicated by his daughter keeping the post-office--and a fine hash
she used to make of telegrams too!) the village shopkeeper's eldest son,
the first footman, younger sons of the village shopkeeper, his first
assistant, and so forth.
All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence and
much else I drank in at Bladesover, as I listened to the talk of valets,

ladies'-maids, Rabbits the butler and my mother in the
much-cupboarded, white-painted, chintz-brightened housekeeper's
room where the upper servants assembled, or of footmen and Rabbits
and estate men of all sorts among the green baize and Windsor chairs of
the pantry--where Rabbits, being above the law, sold beer without a
license or any compunction--or of housemaids and still-room maids in
the bleak, matting-carpeted still-room or of the cook and her kitchen
maids and casual friends among the bright copper and hot glow of the
kitchens.
Of course their own ranks and places came by implication to these
people, and it was with the ranks and places of the Olympians that the
talk mainly concerned