Something New, P. G. Wodehouse [best desktop ebook reader .TXT] 📗

two powdered footmen had played their parts; but he had had no idea that rigid and complicated rules of etiquette swayed the private lives of these individuals. If he had given the matter a thought he had supposed that when the dinner hour arrived the butler and the two footmen would troop into the kitchen and squash in at the table wherever they found room.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me all you know. I feel as though I had escaped a frightful disaster.”

“You probably have. I don’t suppose there is anything so terrible as a snub from a butler.”

“If there is I can’t think of it. When I was at Oxford I used to go and stay with a friend of mine who had a butler that looked like a Roman emperor in swallowtails. He terrified me. I used to grovel to the man. Please give me all the pointers you can.”

“Well, as Mr. Peters’ valet, I suppose you will be rather a big man.”

“I shan’t feel it.”

“However large the house party is, Mr. Peters is sure to be the principal guest; so your standing will be correspondingly magnificent. You come after the butler, the housekeeper, the groom of the chambers, Lord Emsworth’s valet, Lady Ann Warblington’s lady’s maid⁠—”

“Who is she?”

“Lady Ann? Lord Emsworth’s sister. She has lived with him since his wife died. What was I saying? Oh, yes! After them come the honorable Frederick Threepwood’s valet and myself⁠—and then you.”

“I’m not so high up then, after all?”

“Yes, you are. There’s a whole crowd who come after you. It all depends on how many other guests there are besides Mr. Peters.”

“I suppose I charge in at the head of a drove of housemaids and scullery maids?”

“My dear Mr. Marson, if a housemaid or a scullery maid tried to get into the steward’s room and have her meals with us, she would be⁠—”

“Rebuked by the butler?”

“Lynched, I should think. Kitchen maids and scullery maids eat in the kitchen. Chauffeurs, footmen, under-butler, pantry boys, hall boy, odd man and steward’s-room footman take their meals in the servants’ hall, waited on by the hall boy. The stillroom maids have breakfast and tea in the stillroom, and dinner and supper in the hall. The housemaids and nursery maids have breakfast and tea in the housemaid’s sitting-room, and dinner and supper in the hall. The head housemaid ranks next to the head stillroom maid. The laundry maids have a place of their own near the laundry, and the head laundry maid ranks above the head housemaid. The chef has his meals in a room of his own near the kitchen. Is there anything else I can tell you, Mr. Marson?”

Ashe was staring at her with vacant eyes. He shook his head dumbly.

“We stop at Swindon in half an hour,” said Joan softly. “Don’t you think you would be wise to get out there and go straight back to London, Mr. Marson? Think of all you would avoid!”

Ashe found speech.

“It’s a nightmare!”

“You would be far happier in Arundell Street. Why don’t you get out at Swindon and go back?”

Ashe shook his head.

“I can’t. There’s⁠—there’s a reason.”

Joan picked up her magazine again. Hostility had come out from the corner into which she had tucked it away and was once more filling her mind. She knew it was illogical, but she could not help it. For a moment, during her revelations of servants’ etiquette, she had allowed herself to hope that she had frightened her rival out of the field, and the disappointment made her feel irritable. She buried herself in a short story, and countered Ashe’s attempts at renewing the conversation with cold monosyllables, until he ceased his efforts and fell into a moody silence.

He was feeling hurt and angry. Her sudden coldness, following on the friendliness with which she had talked so long, puzzled and infuriated him. He felt as though he had been snubbed, and for no reason.

He resented the defensive magazine, though he had bought it for her himself. He resented her attitude of having ceased to recognize his existence. A sadness, a filmy melancholy, crept over him. He brooded on the unutterable silliness of humanity, especially the female portion of it, in erecting artificial barriers to friendship. It was so unreasonable.

At their first meeting, when she might have been excused for showing defensiveness, she had treated him with unaffected ease. When that meeting had ended there was a tacit understanding between them that all the preliminary awkwardnesses of the first stages of acquaintanceship were to be considered as having been passed; and that when they met again, if they ever did, it would be as friends. And here she was, luring him on with apparent friendliness, and then withdrawing into herself as though he had presumed.

A rebellious spirit took possession of him. He didn’t care! Let her be cold and distant. He would show her that she had no monopoly of those qualities. He would not speak to her until she spoke to him; and when she spoke to him he would freeze her with his courteous but bleakly aloof indifference.

The train rattled on. Joan read her magazine. Silence reigned in the second-class compartment. Swindon was reached and passed. Darkness fell on the land. The journey began to seem interminable to Ashe; but presently there came a creaking of brakes and the train jerked itself to another stop. A voice on the platform made itself heard, calling:

“Market Blandings! Market Blandings Station!”

The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy English hamlets that modern progress has failed to touch; except by the addition of a railroad station and a room over the grocer’s shop where moving pictures are on view on Tuesdays and Fridays. The church is Norman and the intelligence of the majority of the natives Paleozoic. To alight at Market Blandings Station in the dusk of a rather chilly spring day, when the southwest wind has shifted to due east and the thrifty inhabitants have not yet lit their windows, is to be smitten with the