Innocent Birds (7 page)

The autumn wind, that had now partly cleared the air of mist, began more than ever to tease the sign of ‘The Silent Woman’ with spiteful gusts, blowing the board first one way and then the other, until it creaked loudly. As Maud didn’t appear again, Mr. Bugby turned from Mrs. Chick, with a look as though he said, ‘You’re only another of them‚’ and, going to the inn door, he unlocked and opened it.

Inside the house there were signs that the last departure from those doors hadn’t exactly been a merry one, but a silent, as rightly became the name of the inn.

The wearer of those open-worked stockings being carried away, her husband, Mr. Told, did not wish to return to his music again, and went off to his brother at Norbury to help with the hay crop.

Mr. Told had tried, the day before the funeral, to catch a new note from a barrel by making drop by drop fall into a pudding basin, but feeling that the beer had lost its harmony, he went upstairs and looked at his wife’s face instead.

Mr. Bugby sniffed; there was something in the smell of the room that pleased him—
something
that informed him that death had been there.

Besides the mugs, and the spiders, and the usual inn furniture, Mr. Bugby noticed, with the
natural interest of the new tenant, that something had been left behind by the old one upon the bar parlour table.

This was a black glove.

Although so much dust and dirt that befitted a deserted residence lay about, the general
dustiness
appeared to have avoided this black glove, that lay upon the table exactly as Mr. Told had left it.

Mr. Bugby tried the glove on—it might have been made for him.

By means of the glove his thoughts went further. He saw himself a widower. ‘A widower‚’ he murmured, ‘who be in need of a servant maiden.’ He saw himself handing out beer to the bearers in the generous manner of a man who can do what he likes with his own. Perhaps Maud would be the servant to draw the drink, and talk about the poor drowned Mrs. Bugby, and about how kind she used to be, in mournful murmurs.

And afterwards, he would ask Miss Maud to step upstairs and put the glove in the
dressing-table
drawer.

Mr. Bugby’s fancy followed her there.

I
T
was because Miss Pettifer bore a grudge against Madder that she wished to live there. Miss Pettifer always took a fine pride in this novel way of taking her revenge. She had practised it for years, and had found it very telling, as a means of utterly destroying her enemies; or, if not quite that, of at least putting them into the right way of not repeating the same fault again.

If she heard that any friends had spoken against her, she would quarter herself upon them, with her green car and her walking-stick, until they chose to show by their behaviour to her that they repented.

Miss Pettifer wished to go to Madder because of Mr. Pim’s honesty in paying the debt he owed for his wife’s heaven. Mr. Pim, his own pride flattered to the highest when he sent each payment, had paid back to the town ladies, through Miss Pettifer, all that they had advanced.

Miss Pettifer herself had lent a little, but she had a soul—so she always said—that was above money; and she had hoped that Pim would forget to pay. Miss Pettifer always had the true well-being of England imprinted upon her actions
in life. She hoped—and no doubt correctly—that if those other town ladies who had lent to Mr. Pim, and were very much poorer than she, lost their money, they would be forced to give their help or maid-servant margarine instead of butter.

Miss Pettifer believed that all servants should eat margarine, and she believed that she helped to save the empire from disaster by enforcing upon them this imperial duty. If Mr. Pim had not paid back that money to those poorer ladies, it would certainly mean that the fresh butter, ordered at Parly’s, would be changed, and become margarine in those kitchen mouths. Besides
blaming
Mr. Pim, and all Madder too, in consequence of his honesty, she also blamed Mrs. Crocker, who, though dead, was always brought up in Miss Pettifer’s mind to be bitten when anything annoyed her.

Miss Pettifer never forgot any person, whether dead or alive, who in times past had insulted her. She did not make clay images of them to stick pins into, because she could never have got a near enough likeness to please her taste, which was practical. Instead of doing that, she wrote their names, in a determined and practised hand, in her prayer book—that wasn’t too small a one. She would also mix them, in a sacramental way, with her fried bacon for breakfast. Miss Pettifer had a happy appetite, as a healthy lady of sixty, with a very English mind, would be likely to
have. And she liked fried bacon. And in order to make it taste the better, even though it might sometimes be a little burnt, she would put her enemies between the rashers and bite them too.

Although Miss Pettifer might now and again forget one or other of her enemies at breakfast time, she never forgot Mrs. Crocker, because Mrs. Crocker had once taken a servant into her home after Miss Pettifer had put the girl into the road.

Another nice one to bite was Mr. Tucker, who, besides Mrs. Crocker, helped her to digest her breakfast, because she bit it the more when the bacon was a little hard with him there. When she was younger Mr. Tucker had proposed marriage to her; and Miss Pettifer had never expected him to take her first answer for a true no; though Mr. Thomas Tucker, not wishing to be troublesome to so modest a lady, left her at that—though sadly.

Miss Pettifer attended church, as every woman does who believes in established gentility, and whose shoes are not too down at heel. When Miss Pettifer thought of God, she thought of Him as a Father who showed His temper to the wicked, His enemies, in very much the same sort of way as she did herself at breakfast time, and who would be sure to always keep His good things for Miss Pettifer.

Jesus she believed in too, and she liked to think how much He did—and was always going
to do—for His chosen. She regarded herself as one of those chosen ones, and she very much approved of those words of Jesus—and applied them indeed more closely than He perhaps ever meant them to be, to herself—when He said that He was come amongst men as ‘One who serves.’

Here upon earth Miss Pettifer knew, much to her continual annoyance—with Annie excepted—that good servants are very scarce. And in heaven, she feared, though the Rev. Haysom thought otherwise, they might be even scarcer.

And so what could be better and more hopeful to her future well-being than those Christ-like promises and sayings? If the Son of God, of His own free will, came down to earth to be a servant, He must have done so, reasoned Miss Pettifer, ‘because He liked the occupation.’ And what, then, could be more natural and more proper a corollary than that He would like to be a servant in heaven too?

With a little of her training given to Him free and for love, Miss Pettifer saw no reason why He shouldn’t learn to cook her heavenly rasher as she liked it done best, and also to answer the door to her friends and to wait at table in her mansion above.

When the lessons were read in church, Miss Pettifer always listened very eagerly for any qualifications other than those words about
serving
that Jesus might give utterance to in the
Gospels. And hardly a chapter was read without some act or statement, or low servant-like doing, that showed how well He would do for her place above.

Besides wishing to be revenged upon the village in which honest Pim lived, she herself going there to live, there was also this servant reason for her moving to Madder. Miss Pettifer had always heard that servants grew up in the country: not quite like radishes, but still
growing
up into girls, with legs that could be made to run up and down stairs when Miss Pettifer’s
bedroom
bell rang sharply, and Miss Pettifer’s false teeth were safely lodged in her jaws and ready for remembering Mrs. Crocker.

How Annie Brine had ever grown plump in Miss Pettifer’s service was a matter that Miss Pettifer herself could never understand. But she decided when Annie married that that sort of wanton fattening—really caused by Annie’s own happy nature—should never happen again in her household; though, after all, it had only helped to prove how nice and wholesome for servants cheap margarine was.

It was Miss Pettifer’s intention as soon as she came to Madder to catch up from those country fields a girl who could work. Work! That word was always in Miss Pettifer’s mouth: it matched her false teeth, and she would use it upon every possible occasion. ‘If only those girls would work at the laundry,’ she would say,
‘my best table-cloth would have come home in one piece instead of in two halves.’

Miss Pettifer brought in the same word upon many subjects besides the washing. She would use it about tombstones and blackbirds. A country churchyard always called it out, because the old tombstones of forgotten farmers tottered or leaned. ‘The rector should raise them up again,’ Miss Pettifer had once said when she visited Shelton.

Even a slug in the town gardens gave her the chance of saying, when she saw it, ‘If the
blackbirds
that live here would only think of doing a little work instead of singing!’

Miss Pettifer’s father had always sat in the same kind of chair, either at the office or at home, and was hardly ever seen out of it; so that people supposed that where he went he carried his chair too, like a snail’s shell. It was a chair that had a mean look, though elbowed, and would creak loudly when any poor client attempted to approach Mr. Pettifer for money.

The lawyer died in it at the dinner-table, and when later six evil-looking chairs—all exactly alike—appeared one Saturday in Mr. Platt’s auction hall, the only person who bid for them was a gentleman who suffered from delusions, and who thought they were coffins.

As soon as they were gone, and her father too, Miss Pettifer began to count her money. She
found herself rich in a provincial way, where a few hundreds a year count as a fortune.

A little time passed as time goes at Madder. A few years went by, after Mr. and Mrs. Bugby settled at ‘The Silent Woman,’ and before Miss Pettifer came there to live.

Any new resident coming to Madder would be sure to choose either the spring or the autumn as their time of arrival. And so it was April—and April with her usual cold wind and rain storms—when Miss Pettifer drove her green car to visit Mr. Thomas Tucker on her way to Madder. Madder rectory was already hers, by the legal signing of a stamped agreement sent by post, Mr. Tucker naturally not wishing to intrude after what had happened.

Upon the road, with her gloved hands upon the wheel, and her boot, for Miss Pettifer always wore boots, ready to press the brake, Miss Pettifer let her thoughts go to the sad state of the English nation, shown—always so truly sad to a lady of means—by the simple fact that servant girls in these days only grow in the most hidden places, under bridges, near dark trees, or in miry puddles. Miss Pettifer frowned. In the good old days they had grown everywhere, but now a nice lady was forced to go down upon her knees and dig after them, like a dog after truffles. And even then they were scraped out of the earth only aged fourteen or thereabouts, with generally a live louse or two in their heads, as well as
stealing ways and dirty underclothes. Such a one had Miss Parsons been, who left Miss Pettifer’s margarine and dish-clout for her own home and the rather gruesome attentions—for he was the very gentleman who bought the lawyer’s chairs—of her mother’s lodger.

The first sight that she got of Mr. Thomas Tucker’s garden gave Miss Pettifer a shock that she wasn’t likely to forget for a day or two.

Mr. Tucker’s garden showed the most
unmistakable
signs that children played there—played there, not once or twice a week, but every day. Everywhere there was the usual litter that village children leave behind them after they have been happy. There were little pieces of paper screwed up or left simply to blow about, that looked human, and, like snow in January, asked for more. When she saw the swings that hung from the strong boughs of some fine trees, Miss Pettifer felt as though some one had insulted her. She stopped; each swing—and there were a score of them—mocked her. Miss Pettifer peeped into a laurel bush; there was a nest inside, with little torn things hanging to the
entwined
boughs, that showed that small girls had been there. Miss Pettifer clenched her fist.

What Miss Pettifer expected happened when she reached Mr. Thomas Tucker’s front door and pulled at the bell. No sound came at all. She had known that the bell must be a broken one if children play in the garden.

Miss Pettifer used the knocker. She stood stiff and rigid, with her chin slightly raised, and listened. Inside the closed door a girl laughed, and something scampered. Footsteps ran upstairs, followed by laughter and the same scampering.

Miss Pettifer knocked repeatedly. She struck the door, and in her fancy she struck the head of a child with each knock. The laughter stopped, and she heard some one approach.

A girl without cap or apron, very prettily dressed, and looking as no servant could look ‘and be honest,’ thought Miss Pettifer, ‘with those roses on her cheeks,’ opened the door.

Miss Pettifer stepped back. Behind this unservant-like apparition there was another and a more wanton one, sitting upon the stairs in a very naughty and unabashed attitude, and whose name was Nellie Squibb. Nellie threw a little coloured ball at a fluffy kitten, who scampered after it as any kitten would.

Miss Pettifer inquired for Mr. Tucker in her sternest tone, and tried to catch the eye of the young lady upon the stairs, who held out a bare arm as though she wanted Miss Pettifer to admire its plumpness, while the kitten rolled itself over the ball, and the ball over itself, in high glee. The young person who had opened the door now took Miss Pettifer’s card, that had been held out at her all this time like a pistol, and preceded her down a passage until she reached a
door that had an opening in it like a letter-box. Through this aperture Lotty, for that was the name of Nellie’s fellow-servant, dropped Miss Pettifer’s card, and then knocked softly.

Miss Pettifer listened. ‘Besides being so wicked’—she looked angrily at the sleeveless blouse of the girl, who listened too—‘Tucker has gone mad,’ thought Miss Pettifer.

The owner of the study must have picked up the card and read the name, for now a sheep’s-bell tinkled.

This sound, that Miss Pettifer had heard now and again as she drove through the country in order to revenge herself upon some unsuspecting enemy, made her lose for the moment that
self-command
that she usually possessed so forcibly, and when Lotty opened the door and let her in, without announcing her, Miss Pettifer could only stare at Mr. Tucker’s study-table, which was a square one.

Upon the table there were a sheep’s-bell and a book. The book Miss Pettifer had heard of before. It was the very book, evidently bound by Mr. Tucker’s own hands, and so well known in the district as containing those extremely wicked stories about women, every one said, that Mr. Tucker was known to carry in his pocket, and to read upon railway platforms, or indeed wherever he waited.

Mr. Tucker put the book under his coat. As he did so, something fluttered out of a page and
fell upon the floor under the table. This marker looked to Miss Pettifer as it fell—though she couldn’t see it under the table—like the picture of a woman.

Miss Pettifer felt sorry for the Church. Mr. Tucker bowed. He did not take her hand, because he did not wish to intrude again into her life, after the past refusal. He had been simple enough then to think that she didn’t like him, and he felt the same now.

He bowed again and said meekly: ‘I hope you will be happy at Madder, Miss Pettifer; it is a lovely village. There are fields to walk in, and ash trees that you can shelter under if it rains. And besides the cows, who are always so
contentedly
feeding, there is Mr. Solly, who grows pinks and columbines and is interested in what his Americans do. There is also Mr. Bugby, who grows a little melancholy, and takes too much brandy, I fear, and Farmer Barfoot, who talks to his foot, and Mr. Pim, who, though a little
unbelieving
as to how his son Fred came to be born, is really very proud of him.’