Mr. Elgin stood at the door with a note outstretched in his hand.
“But you are coming to tea this afternoon,” I said, in dismay.
“Yes, yes, but I wanted to let your husband know my future plans first!”
He looked so starved and miserable that I could not imagine that his plans included an engagement to Miss Croft. As Arthur appeared, starting out to the Strangs, I stopped him to read the note at once. I had telephoned just before breakfast, to hear there was no change, and that Mrs. Strang was still asleep, so there was no urgent hurry.
“This is what comes of your match-making!” said Arthur, most unjustly. “Elgin is handing in his resignation!”
“Oh, but why?”
“He says—what is it?—that owing to changes in the circumstances of his friends and unhappy gossip, he feels he will do better work elsewhere.”
“Oh dear, that means that people have been talking, and he’s afraid of being accused of hanging up his hat in Miss Croft’s hall!”
“Incurable romantic!” said Arthur as he hurried away; but Kate’s remark as I started out strengthened my theory.
“Such talk!” she said, looking at Mr. Elgin’s envelope, “of Miss Croft’s fortune, and how she’ll be a match for the highest in the land!”
Of course, if the story of the legacy has swollen to this, Mr. Elgin may well feel uncomfortable, and I felt a little nervous about my tea-party, as I hurried out, and down to the Market Square to leave Arthur’s watch at the mender’s, and to see why the grocer hadn’t sent up yet.
Outside the corner of “Ye Olde Teapot”, Mrs. Weekes waved at me imperiously, and ordered, rather than asked, me in to Miss Croft’s for a cup of coffee. I am sure that in ordinary life she would think this an undignified proceeding for one of her household magnificence, but the story of Miss Croft’s legacy had only just reached her, and she was naturally anxious for first-hand information. Unluckily most of the élite of Stampfield had been fired by the same determination, and it was with the utmost difficulty that we squeezed into one half of an Olde Cosie Corner and obtained two cups of very milky liquid. Miss Croft herself was obviously in no condition to gossip. In the window was a notice: “Retiring Sale. This business will close shortly.” On a shelf above us were Lincoln Imps marked down as low as ninepence half-penny; Barnstaple ware was going at a gift, and a heap of little notices in passe-partout frames about “Lovesome spot. Green Grot”; “I shall pass through this world but once …” and “Glorious morning faces”, were offered at a penny each, as if Miss Croft were renouncing her philosophy and her business simultaneously.
“I’m sending every cake that’s left to Miss Grieve’s Cake and Candy Sale,” she hissed to me, “and I am never going to look at Chocolate Fudge again!”
Mrs. Weekes kept her eye on every movement of the proprietress with obvious interest, but her conversation with me dealt primarily with the Strangs.
“Their little Pamela is too sweet”, she said, “—her father’s eyebrows, poor little mite!”
“But he isn’t worse, is he?” I felt nervously that only the curate’s demise could make Mrs. Weekes, of all people, speak so affectionately of those militant pacifist eyebrows.
“No, no, I was coming away just as your good husband looked in. Dr. Boness hopes for some real change to-morrow. I fancy he must have been going about with this ’flu on him for days, and it’s his heart that causes us all such anxiety.” Mrs. Weekes added firmly, “This quite explains that unfortunate sermon. A sick man is not responsible for his opinions, and he was a very sick man, Mrs. Lacely!”
“Yes, of course, he should have given in long ago. How is poor little Mrs. Strang?”
“Still asleep, quite worn out. I hope to persuade her to come to me for the night. It was very good of you to look in last night, I am sure.” But from her manner I could tell that Mrs. Weekes felt I had been poaching on her sick-bed preserves.
“That will be lovely for her,” I agreed. “I can’t get round to-night anyhow, as my maid’s away for the week-end, and we have the Archdeacon for the night.”
“That maid of yours seems to spend more time out than in,” pronounced Mrs. Weekes with some justice. “Did I hear you say to Lady Cyrus that you were expecting your boy on leave, Mrs. Lacely? I hope to have Ida very soon.”
“Yes, any time now,” I answered vaguely. “Did Lady Cyrus’s girl know Ida at Roedean?”
That, I hoped, was a safe draw from a subject on which I felt a consummate hypocrite; but Mrs. Weekes, munching an eclair, unperturbed, while the frantic little assistant took down a papier mâché vase from the shelf just above us, pursued her inquiries mercilessly.
“I never knew anything about your relatives till I met Lady Cyrus. Somehow one always imagines that a clergyman’s wife is the daughter of a clergyman!”
“They often are,” I pointed out.
“And I know Miss Boness told me once that your grandmother had an old-clothes shop.”
“She hadn’t,” I said, unable to hide my smiles. “I may have said she looked as if she came out of one, for she did. But that was because she wouldn’t part with her maid, and poor dear Smith was blind for the last twenty years of her life.”
“Blind? Then how did she cook?”
“I mean her own maid,” I explained a little impatiently, because I hadn’t really the time to discuss my grandmother’s staff just then.
“A lady’s maid? She kept a lady’s maid?”
“Oh, everyone did then,” I said, a little infelicitously perhaps to Mrs. Weekes. “But my own mother didn’t,” I added, in the vague hope of making things better.
“Birth counts as well as money,” was Mrs. Weekes’ oracular reply.
“I think education matters most of all,” I said, referring to Ida, and hoping, when I’d said it, that Mrs. Weekes would not take it personally. Fortunately she didn’t, for she only shook her head and said one might have too much of that. On the whole, however, I felt that Serena had done me a good turn in the Weekes’ estimation, and that if Miss Boness were to challenge me about gossip again, I would just tell her how she had spread a libel about my poor dear aristocratic-looking old grandmother!
I was just back from my jobs in time for the lunch which Kate almost put into our mouths in her haste to be gone off with Jenkins. Arthur shut himself up in his study with his sermon and I had a little happy leisure in the drawing-room, planning to read till tea-time, after I had washed my gloves and mended our clothes, when I remembered the Cake and Candy Sale.
It was a great temptation to shirk my duty and stay at home, in charge of the house, though as a matter of fact nothing happens here as a rule on Saturday afternoon as everyone has just got his wages and is for the moment in funds. But when I went to broach the subject, pointing out speciously that I didn’t like to leave him in charge of the telephone, all Arthur did was to look up and say that would be all right, and I must run along and enjoy myself!—a picture of this particular form of entertainment which left me speechless. For the solitary advantage of the War has been to discourage the bigger Bazaars and Sales of Work which form so large a part of a clergy wife’s duties in ordinary days. I admit that I feel now, that if only peace came I would serve, even in the parcel department, of a Bazaar opened by royalty every day of my life; but meanwhile I do my best to find some consolation in the close of this fearful form of charity. Everyone was indeed, a little inclined to criticize Miss Grieve for her lapse into our old peace ways, but as she said, she had laid in extra sugar before the war began, and it wasn’t as if her entertainment did any real good to Hitler.
The one thing to be said for any entertainment in Miss Grieve’s house is that it is crowded. The drawing-room is so small, and her possessions so numerous, that a very few people make a wonderful show. She moved into her present little house in a row of tiny villas, when she left the Bank on her father’s death, with the unique distinction of not parting with one piece of furniture belonging to those Better Days save f
or one vast sideboard which almost broke down the neighbouring houses in its efforts to get inside. Her drawing-room is dominated by a vast, round rosewood table, spread to-day with war-sandwiches and war-cakes, Chamberlain cheese-cakes, Gort’s goodies, Winston waffles, at two-pence each, and, in the gaps between a big rosewood tallboy, bureau and china-cupboard, festoons of crinkly green paper were draped over card-tables laden with sale goods. At one of these Miss Boness severely guarded the collection of woollies, night-dresses and work-bags which go the round of all our Sales, and probably date back in origin to the beginning of the century. These hardy perennials owe their existence to the fact that all Church workers have a Bazaar Drawer in which they thrust the unsaleable goods which they buy, out of sheer pity, from other stall-holders, and out of which they extract articles when they are called upon to send offerings to yet another effort. Dick says that at the bottom of my receptacle he once found a pair of what he calls “frillies”, with a portrait of Gladstone stamped on one leg and of Lord Salisbury on the other; but this is sheer libel. As none of the articles here can conceivably be described as cakes or candy, I can only imagine that their owners felt a sort of nostalgia to see them on show once again.
Miss Grieve herself was superintending a more patriotic stall, and urged me warmly to buy a muffler for Dick, who abominates them, or a body belt or a set of khaki handkerchiefs with the Union Jack emblazoned in one corner. She also exhibited photographs of Gort and Ironside, home-made gas-mask cases of very tasteful and exciting colours, and some battery torches which were snapped up at a very early stage. A small girl looking utterly repellent in a miniature khaki suit was also inviting us all to take 6d. raffle tickets for a reproduction of an equestrian statue of Lord Haig, which depressed me to such depth that I bought some handkerchiefs blindly, and passed on.
“You’ve heard about Miss Croft, I suppose?” hissed Miss Grieve over my parcel. “So kind of her to come in for a little, as if nothing had happened!”
Miss Croft was at the little green booth between the desk and the fireplace, busy at some purchase from Joyce who was got up for this entertainment as a pierrot—I can’t think why—and being very coquettish about a bunch of snowdrops with one of our basses who had come to provide “a little music” later on. I hope we shall not have to rely, later on in the War, on the purchase of “Produce” from such a stall as that of Joyce and her mother. There were a few tightly-packed vases of daffodils and primroses, a basket of oranges (3d. each), a basket of brussels sprouts (1s. lb.), and a bowl of eggs (4½d. each). These represent hours of patient touting on Miss Grieve’s part to the local shops, I expect, just as I am sure she squandered her whole reserve of sugar on the patriotic cakes on the table. A little girl, looking very chilly as a buttercup (or daffodil?) in a soiled yellow sateen, was trying to raffle tickets for a leather cushion with moccasin fringes which we have all seen for years in similar circumstances. On the other side of the fireplace Miss Croft was ensconced amidst a confusion of mother-of-pearl chains, Benares-ware boxes, olivewood pin-trays, praying-mats, and squares of native embroidery.
“The only thing I can’t find is any candy,” I owned to Miss Croft, as she turned round to me with her snowdrops and daffodils.
“That doesn’t affect me, anyhow,” she smiled triumphantly. “Do you know what I’m doing? Buying the ugliest things on every stall, things that have affected my aesthetic taste so often, dear, at these little gatherings, and then I am going to take them home and burn them!” Can it be that Miss Croft is already becoming purse-proud?
Inquiries about Mr. Strang were heard in every corner. Miss Boness, as the fountain-head of information, was very reserved, though we all assured her, one by one, that if anyone could pull him through it was her brother. The point on which I was catechized again and again was whether he was to be prayed for in church; and as, whatever Arthur can do, this is looked upon in Stampfield as equivalent to a death sentence, everyone grew very serious and joined in panegyrics which were almost obituaries.
“Such a kind gentleman,” little Mrs. Leaf kept repeating. She had ventured to this Sale, I think as a kind of patent of gentility for her little daughter with the scholarship at the High School.
“It’s always the best as are taken first,” said the verger’s wife, who always attends these gathering with a vague feeling, I think, that she acts as her husband’s deputy in a church ceremony.
“When I think of poor Mr. Strang,” Miss Grieve told me, “I find myself repeating that beautiful line ‘Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest’.” In view of her recent attitude over poor Mr. Strang’s pacifism I could only assume that she feels the curate’s chances of recovery are very small. Miss Cookes also seemed a little ghoulish as she wondered if a gaudy jointed Indian wooden snake would please little Pamela, and thus distract her poor, poor little mother. I couldn’t help pointing out that, if Pamela sucked it, poor Mrs. Strang would certainly have another invalid in the house, and I fear Miss Cookes felt that her own common sense, and the art of Indian Missions were alike called in question.
“How we’ll miss that manly voice of his in the choir,” contributed the bass (whose name always eludes me). And by this time I felt that I could endure panegyrics and frowst no longer.
“I’m afraid I must go,” I told Miss Grieve, reminding myself, with shame, that if I have grumbled over the cold all winter I ought to enjoy the crowded heat of the Sale—but I don’t! “I do hope you’re doing well.”
“A pound at my stall alone,” said Miss Grieve, hopefully, “and I do trust the cakes will go well.”
At this I had, of course, to add a rather poisonous-looking mauve sugar cake, wrapped up with almost undue anxiety for economy in paper, to my parcel of handkerchiefs, a bag of eggs, and a greyish-white woolly “boudoir-wrap” which by this time could almost find its own way to my bazaar-drawer, I imagine, so often has it returned there to emerge again in the last three years.
“Do you sometimes wonder”, asked Mrs. Eardley-Gage, who emerged from the tea-room opposite as I gained the hall, “just what a gathering of this kind has to do with the hill-sides of Galilee?”
I was just going to say a word of defence for Miss Cookes’ olivewood boxes and pin-trays, which profess to be made of Lebanon wood, when I remembered in time that, though the late Bench of Bishops liked humour, they disliked mere flippancy, as Mrs. Gage told me once severely.
“They do make some money after all,” I suggested, “at the cost of a lot of self-sacrifice and work.”
“It would be far, far better to give the money outright,” said Mrs. Eardley-Gage, who alone of us, probably, is in a position to do this. “I look upon these bazaars and little sales as one of the real curses of our church. It’s not all due to self-sacrifice on the part of the workers. They enjoy the fuss and gossip and self-importance of having a stall. They betray, indeed, what dear Bishop Hoby used to call the antimacassar mind.”
I was wondering if I could make a little protest on behalf of the Marthas of the Church as we walked do the drive, when suddenly one of Mrs. Eardley-Gage’s parcels broke from its inadequate moorings, and a whole spate of little pink, mauve and white sugar cakes rolled abruptly down on to the pavement. We were both of us so encumbered with parcels that salvage was almost impossible, and anyhow the puddles were doing their best to destroy these offsprings of the antimacassar mind at once.
“Oh, what shall I do?” said Mrs. Gage, looking like Saint Elizabeth badly caught out at shop-lifting. “I can’t leave them here to hurt somebody’s feelings!”
For once there seemed no dog or child in sight to help us, and I hope no-one else was, or they would have seen two comparatively holy ladies engaged in the undignified pursuit of shuffling several battered little relics into a convenient privet hedge. This must, I think, have broken down a certain barrier between us, as I found myself telling Mrs. Gage how much I wished, on Quiet Days, that I had a more disciplined mind, while she gave me an account of how she controls her mind i
n war-time.
“I never listen to the wireless, and only glance at the papers,” she said. “Every day I try to meditate on our great Peace Aims, and at different hours of the day I pray for every country in Europe.” (Are there not too many for this programme, I wondered, and began idiotically trying to count the Balkans on my fingers.) For the rest of the day she puts it out of her mind, and reads Pascal as she knits for the troops. She writes, too, to all her nephews, nice jolly letters, she said, looking more than ever like a disconsolate Botticelli, as she rescued a falling bunch of daffodils, “with only a few words at the end of each to bring back to these dear boys an atmosphere of the churches where they worship at home”. What books, she asked, did I send my boy, and mercifully proceeded to a long list, so that I did not have to confess that a course of strict economy in household books had at last enabled me to send Dick the newest Agatha Christie.
“Aren’t you coming out of your way?” she asked, as we neared the Old Parish Church.
“I must just look in at the Canteen. You know Miss Henly has actually got it going already? She is wonderful.”
“I think it would have been better for her to have waited till my husband opens it with Prayer on Wednesday night,” replied Mrs. Gage, a little stiffly. “I certainly shall not go before then.”
I felt a little on the side of the devil as I kept to my intention and made for the parish room, for I cannot see why even an unblessed canteen is not better for our girls and their boy-friends than a wet Saturday afternoon in Stampfield. Certainly the omission was worrying no-one at the canteen, for the big, semi-Gothic hall was literally packed with young, damp, vociferous creatures, shouting for fags and teas and bars of chocolate. Miss Henly was in the centre of it all, her stentorian voice calling her nervous, conscientious sixth-form to their duties; bandying jests and remonstrances if the noise grew too loud, her Carmagnole cap well on one side, her face beaming with enjoyment. I should not like to say how much the youth and noise and heartiness refreshed me after the genteel fussy atmosphere of the Cake and Candy Sale. It was regrettably enjoyable, too, after listening to Mrs. Eardley-Gage’s attitude about the War, to hear strangely varying views, far more candidly expressed. Hitler, I learnt, has consumed a whole Turkey carpet since last September; Von Are has a stone the size of a potato in his kidney, and,
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