第61章 THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION(5)
And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any rate with the courage of practical energy.It was she who stood in one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make discomforts tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the responsibility of the church for economic disorder.It was she who at last took decisions into her hands when he was too jaded to do anything but generalize weakly, and settled upon the house in Pembury Road which became their London home.She got him to visit Hunstanton again for half a week while she and Miriam, who was the practical genius of the family, moved in and made the new home presentable.At the best it was barely presentable.There were many plain hardships.The girls had to share one of the chief bedrooms in common instead of their jolly little individual dens at Princhester....One little room was all that could be squeezed out as a study for "father"; it was not really a separate room, it was merely cut off by closed folding doors from the dining-room, folding doors that slowly transmitted the dinner flavours to a sensitive worker, and its window looked out upon a blackened and uneventful yard and the skylights of a populous, conversational, and high-spirited millinery establishment that had been built over the corresponding garden of the house in Restharrow Street.Lady Ella had this room lined with open shelves, and Clementina (in the absence of Eleanor at Newuham) arranged the pick of her father's books.It is to be noted as a fact of psychological interest that this cramped, ill-lit little room distressed Lady Ella more than any other of the discomforts of their new quarters.The bishop's writing-desk filled a whole side of it.Parsimony ruled her mind, but she could not resist the impulse to get him at least a seemly reading-lamp.
He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London.
He was, he thought, going to "write something" about his views.
He was very grateful and much surprised at what she had done to that forbidding house, and full of hints and intimations that it would not be long before they moved to something roomier.She was disposed to seek some sort of salaried employment for Clementina and Miriam at least, but he would not hear of that."They must go on and get educated," he said, "if I have to give up smoking to do it.Perhaps I may manage even without that." Eleanor, it seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the London School of Economics that would practically keep her.There would be no Cambridge for Clementina, but London University might still be possible with a little pinching, and the move to London had really improved the prospects of a good musical training for Miriam.Phoebe and Daphne, Lady Ella believed, might get in on special terms at the Notting Hill High School.
Scrope found it difficult to guess at what was going on in the heads of his younger daughters.None displayed such sympathy as Eleanor had confessed.He had a feeling that his wife had schooled them to say nothing about the change in their fortunes to him.But they quarrelled a good deal, he could hear, about the use of the one bathroom--there was never enough hot water after the second bath.And Miriam did not seem to enjoy playing the new upright piano in the drawing-room as much as she had done the Princhester grand it replaced.Though she was always willing to play that thing he liked; he knew now that it was the Adagio of Of.111; whenever he asked for it.
London servants, Lady Ella found, were now much more difficult to get than they had been in the Holy Innocents' days in St.
John's Wood.And more difficult to manage when they were got.The households of the more prosperous clergy are much sought after by domestics of a serious and excellent type; an unfrocked clergyman's household is by no means so attractive.The first comers were young women of unfortunate dispositions; the first cook was reluctant and insolent, she went before her month was up; the second careless; she made burnt potatoes and cindered chops, underboiled and overboiled eggs; a "dropped" look about everything, harsh coffee and bitter tea seemed to be a natural aspect of the state of being no longer a bishop.He would often after a struggle with his nerves in the bedroom come humming cheerfully to breakfast, to find that Phoebe, who was a delicate eater, had pushed her plate away scarcely touched, while Lady Ella sat at the end of the table in a state of dangerous calm, framing comments for delivering downstairs that would be sure to sting and yet leave no opening for repartee, and trying at the same time to believe that a third cook, if the chances were risked again, would certainly be "all right."The drawing-room was papered with a morose wallpaper that the landlord, in view of the fact that Scrope in his optimism would only take the house on a yearly agreement, had refused to replace; it was a design of very dark green leaves and grey gothic arches; and the apartment was lit by a chandelier, which spilt a pool of light in the centre of the room and splashed useless weak patches elsewhere.Lady Ella had to interfere to prevent the monopolization of this centre by Phoebe and Daphne for their home work.This light trouble was difficult to arrange;the plain truth was that there was not enough illumination to go round.In the Princhester drawing-room there had been a number of obliging little electric pushes.The size of the dining-room, now that the study was cut off from it, forbade hospitality.As it was, with only the family at home, the housemaid made it a grievance that she could scarcely squeeze by on the sideboard side to wait.
The house vibrated to the trains in the adjacent underground railway.There was a lady next door but one who was very pluckily training a contralto voice that most people would have gladly thrown away.At the end of Restharrow Street was a garage, and a yard where chauffeurs were accustomed to "tune up" their engines.