Chapter XVI: The Middle and End of the Feast

It was Oliver Constable’s misfortune that he could no more make a speech, unless under high pressure, than he could dance a minuet; so that when there was toast-giving chiefly to thank old Dadd, who sat at the foot of the table-cloth, and the matron who presided at the head, Oliver went through a halting, stuttering formula, at the expense of a good deal of colloquial Saxon, common-sense, and mother wit, thus failing again ignominiously—this time in the very help which his companions considered they had a right to expect at his hand, or rather mouth. A fluent speech, well garnished with Latin quotations which nobody would have understood, might have lent an _éclat_ to this part of the day’s programme, and carried off some of the tedium. If a young man who had received Oliver’s education, could not deliver such a speech, his friends had a right to be disappointed, aggrieved and disgusted—especially as Oliver, by moving to secure the attendance of the old fogies at the picnic, had brought down upon the more juvenile members of the company the revival of an obsolete rite, which nobody relished save old Dadd, who entertained the delusion that he was good at a funny speech. The result of Oliver’s incompetency here, was as if he had got his associates into a trap and left them in the lurch.

There Constable sat, after his disgraceful break-down, with his long legs very much in their owner’s, as well as in everybody else’s way, as mute as a fish. When Mr. Dadd succeeded in introducing, in a sentence of his reply to the sorry compliment which had been paid to him, a handsome reference to a pair of young friends as had not always been present at their blow-outs—but better late than never—and he could wish no happier thing to the young gentleman and lady than that they might be speedily provided with partners both at home and abroad, Oliver, carefully refraining from a glance at Fan and with all eyes fixed on himself, was content to utter a curt ‘Thank you,’ while he held up his glass before his reddened face so clumsily that he occasioned a diversion by pouring half the wine down Mrs. Dadd’s silk sleeve. She was so humble that she would not allow him to do what he could to remedy the accident, but of course there was a stain just above the elbow. Anyone with half an eye might see how much she was annoyed, from the way in which her husband, who could read her looks, interrupted his speech, by pulling out his handkerchief and offering it to her to rub the spot, while he remarked in a half-audible aside to his next neighbours that he and Jack would not hear the end of that ’ere stupid accident of Constable’s, till they forked out another silk gown to mother, when by rights Constable the villain ought to pay the piper.

Constable would willingly have paid the piper if he had known how to do it, without implying patronage and offence. It was the last of his thoughts to act as a kill-joy at the picnic. He strove with the usual failure of such striving to be social. He could not make a speech fit for the occasion, but to Fan’s disdain he was one of the first to consent to sing in his fairly tuneful voice. He chose advisedly the pretty old people’s-song, ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill.’ But his choice of a song proved one of Oliver’s many failures with the best intentions. If the lass were ever meant for such an audience, all its younger members at least had grown away from her influence. They had as little appreciation of her attractions as of her designation. The ‘young ladies’ present would not have relished the word ‘lass’ applied to any of them, and would not have cared to be admired for such hum-drum and homely qualities as those which had inspired the poet. The greater portion of the listeners barely freed Oliver Constable from the injurious suspicion of singing down to their standard, while they took care to express a little supercilious surprise at his taste in songs, and to talk of this particular specimen as ‘an old-fashioned thing’ with no ‘go’ in it. He would have done a great deal better if he had made fools of them by offering them the old doggrel of the mad scholar, which Jack Dadd had somehow picked up, and which he flung at Oliver with a mocking ‘Look here, Constable, I’ll tip you a college stave.’

Amo, amas,
I love a lass,
And she’s both tall and slender:
In the nominative case, with a cowslip’s grace,
And she’s in the feminine gender.

That rant brought down a round of applause, while the gentle charm of the ‘Lass of Richmond Hill’ fell flat.

There was a little of the freedom of manner which Fan had indicated at the close of the meal, either because the serious business of the day being well over, there was a reactionary tendency to frolicking, or for the alarming reason that old Dadd’s champagne had proved exceptionally heady and had taken extraordinary effect on heads not accustomed to the potation.

’Mily Polley had kept the ‘merry thought’ of her wing of a fowl to pull with Jack Dadd, and when she failed to secure the longer half of the bone, she was so left to herself as to toss her share into Jack’s waistcoat. Jack was still farther left to himself, though it was only a rose which he plucked from his button-hole and aimed at her ducked head. However, the precedent was ominous and the selection of missiles might not have continued so judicious.

Fortunately Mr. Holland succeeded in establishing a humorous clerical veto. ‘Come, come, you young people,’ he protested affably, ‘you must not take to throwing about things. It ain’t safe. How do you know but you might catch me in the eye? It would be a pretty job if I had to appear with a black eye in your chapel pulpit on Sunday. I ain’t sure, though all my deacons are here, that I should escape censure.’

‘Hang it,’ muttered the dissentient voice of Jack Dadd amidst the clamorous approval of the joke, ‘what though we bunged up both his eyes, if he means to sit upon us now. We ain’t priest-ridden Pussyites.’

In reality Jack cherished no evil feeling towards his pastor, only the young fellow looked upon it as manly and swellish to express a certain amount of defiance of clergymen and contempt for their order. He liked to shock those of his fair companions who regarded sacerdotal pretensions more respectfully, but who had no objections to being shocked into crying out at such a culprit as Jack Dadd.

Oliver valiantly fought against pronouncing a judgment on the little interlude, by comparing it in his own mind to what Horace Walpole has described of a scrimmage he witnessed in a box at Vauxhall or Ranelagh between the members of Lady Petersham’s party, after supper. Only a hundred years ago such incidents occurred in public among the leaders of the great world, and, at the worst, ’Mily Polley was a thousand times less objectionable than the disreputable fine-lady, and Jack Dadd than her drunken profligate squires. Oliver would certainly point out to Fan the analogy between the scenes, emphasising the fact that a certain Bohemian picturesqueness—and blackguardism belonging to the first, were lacking in the second.

As the afternoon sun still shone, and only a light south-western breeze tempered the heat gratefully, even the greatest devotees to dancing and the barn among the company found themselves reluctantly compelled to take advantage of the unwonted favour shown to them by the weather, and to forego still their favourite resource. The party was a picnic, ostensibly an out-of-doors party when the state of the sky would permit, and there remained so much unvitiated simplicity and matter-of-factness among its members as to deter them from behaviour out of keeping with their professed purpose.

There might be considerable inconvenience in carrying it out, such as was involved in the obligation of the presence of the volunteer band, Mr. Dadd’s tendency to lumbago, Mrs. Polley’s fears of cricks in the neck, and the common lively irrational horror of the whole insect world with the exception of butterflies, another relic of the prejudices of the company’s betters in the past; but since the clouds would not collect—strange reluctance—or the fine weather break-down, these men and women were prepared to go manfully and womanfully through their parts, with a kind of heavy loyalty.

The seniors sauntered aimlessly here and there, sat uncomfortably on the tree stumps, staring at nothing, and only waxed animated when everyday interests came to the surface in their desultory conversation. Oliver caught snatches of old Dadd’s harangue on the fall in calicos and Mrs. Polley’s animadversion on the rise in lemons—together with the complaints of all the men of the sauciness of apprentices, and of all the women of the incompetency of maids-of-all-work, between stray notes of robins, the rustle of falling leaves, and the trickle of water. Oliver wished with all his heart that the undertones of nature which her guests had come out to hear, had been more attended to, and had risen loud enough to drown the clatter of trade. As it was, he rather admired the elderly people’s politeness in veiling their impatience for tea, the second gipsy meal of those who were so unlike gipsies, and concealing the alacrity with which they should start on the homeward drive.

The juniors played games and danced under difficulties on the uneven ground, among the long grass, to the fife and drum band. Oliver could not screw up his courage to the point of attempting such precarious polking, while Fan continued engrossed with her opportune patient. But Fan’s brother exerted himself to play for two in blind-man’s-buff, till the players, tired of the sport, found more scope for amusement in perpetrating audacious thefts on the articles of apparel their companions had laid aside in order to join in the dance or the game with comfort and spirit—the victims making frantic efforts to recover their lost property.

Oliver could not be guilty of the liberty Jack Dadd took in possessing himself of a girl’s hat and veil, sticking it on his own head and proving what a vagabond-looking young woman he would have made, as he rushed here and there, through the wood, pursued by the owner of the hat. When another girl ventured to pull out a glove which had been dangling from Oliver’s pocket, he suffered her to keep it, possibly more to her surprise than her satisfaction. It was pure child’s play, but Oliver had grown too old and modest in his civilisation to be able for child’s play, at which both players and lookers on, to his discomfiture, ‘laughed consumedly.’

Poor Oliver! his was an anxious and thankless office which he had assumed at his own charges, and Fan’s earnestness, threatening to become a family quality, infected him in its discharge. Harry Stanhope, who was no reformer, would have impartially scattered merry-thoughts and posies, purloined girls’ attire and pranked himself in it, when he saw it was the humour of his neighbours, without a scruple and with considerable diversion to himself in the process.

To cover his shy withdrawal Oliver was betrayed into committing his cardinal mistake at the picnic. He stumbled unconsciously into what all those present regarded as Fan’s track. There were two plain retiring elderly women of the party whom the majority of its members reckoned decidedly beneath their rank. But the Miss Barrs were respectably connected, they had always been at the excursion, and they were undoubtedly proprietresses of a green-grocer’s shop, not merely grey-headed shop girls. Oliver was first attracted to them by their comparative isolation in the crowd, and then by the circumstance that one of the sisters was quietly searching for, and gathering, a nosegay of such aromatic wild flowers as summer spares, not merely picking a few at random and dropping them carelessly the next moment, while she was far past the age of coquettishly disposing of the last stray rose, or plume of the queen of the meadow, in the demure bonnet which she wore instead of a smart hat.

Oliver was reminded of his baker who had the sneaking kindness for butterflies. He actually introduced himself to Miss Nancy Barr, and it compensated for a good deal which had jarred upon him in the course of the day, when he made the agreeable discovery that Miss Nancy really had considerable knowledge of wild flowers and a genuine regard for them. She had once lived with an uncle who had been a schoolmaster endowed with a love of nature and botany, she was tolerably well acquainted not only with the general appearance and properties of plants, but with old superstitions and lingering traditional virtues attached to them. She was a fairly intelligent woman, especially on this subject, which was akin to her walk in trade, and when Oliver made use of the old poet’s words,

‘These flowers white and red
Such that men callen Daisies in our town,’

she brightened up and said she had heard her uncle read those lines. He found she was further familiar with the flowers summoned to lament the friend of John Milton who bade the ‘daffodillies’ fill their cups with tears; and she could herself repeat part of the catalogue of herbs in Shenstone’s Schoolmistress’s garden:—

The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme,
Fresh balm and mary-gold of cheerful hue,
The lowly gill that never dares to climb.

Oliver was as much amazed and elated as if he had encountered one of the ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ so often referred to. In the innocence of his heart he proceeded to cultivate the acquaintance of ‘a rational human being,’ as he called her, rendering the process conspicuous by sundry darts into the wood, and dives down to the brink of the Brook, as his eye was caught by a specimen of winter-green or horehound which he could procure for her. She was a plain elderly woman, quite old enough to be his mother. She and her sister had appeared neglected at the picnic, a circumstance which was in itself a patent reason for such small atonement as lay in the power of Oliver or any other promoter of the feast. But if he could only have realised it, the social reformer had placed himself under a tyranny as great as any he could encounter in this world. A glare of light like that on a throne was cast on all he did. A score of eyes, which did not seem to be seeing him, were, in fact, recording his every action and commenting on it, weighing him in the balance and finding him wanting.

‘I do believe Constable is low-lifed,’ said ’Mily Polley to Jack Dadd, borrowing Jack’s masculine use of the surname where his friend was concerned; ‘or is he stuck-up, after all, like Fan? Is this to show us he is condescending from the highest to the lowest, and it may as well be the lowest to prove the depth of his condescension? Good gracious! to think of his paying attention to an old frump like Turnips.’

‘It is a queer taste,’ said Jack lazily, while he lolled on the bank by the lady’s side.

‘I can tell you,’ said ’Mily in confidence, ‘I don’t think it’s the best of usage to our ’Liza, whom he’s letting walk about with only Bella Willet, after he has given us some cause to think he was making up to ’Liza.’

‘Serve ’Liza right for jumping at a newcomer because of his college education, as has only made a donkey of him to begin with, and because he has got hold of his father’s business and tin, which, as sure as I live, he’ll make ducks and drakes of before he dies,’ said Jack sardonically.

But after Jack had gloated a little longer on the edifying spectacle of ’Liza’s discomfiture in being reduced to the company of one of her own sex, while she underwent the double humiliation of seeing ‘Turnips’ preferred to her, his good-nature led him to quit ’Mily, who was at no loss to find a substitute for her attendant, and go to ’Liza, though his sympathy took the doubtful form of teasing her with chaff about her rival. Still, ’Liza had the comfort of being quits in the end with Oliver, who remained profoundly ignorant of the whole by-play.

It was one of the established customs of the day at Finchhanger that those girls—not tom-boys and pickles, or humbler cynics like ’Mily Polley, who held the practice in strong contempt as strictly belonging to idiots of shop girls and low lads of Sunday-school teachers—should bring back rural trophies from the picnic, in fast-withering, limply-dangling wreaths of oak leaves and ferns, obscuring and imperilling the real gum flowers in the girls’ hats. Sometimes an obliging young man consented to have his hat or cap—in the band of which he would on other occasions rollickingly stick his pipe or railway ticket—similarly decorated by willing if bungling fingers, with such spoils as Ophelia gave her life for. And it was Oliver who, at this picnic, under the severe eyes of Fan—supporting Celia Reid’s head on her shoulder to prevent her patient from fainting away—weakly submitted to ’Liza Polley, with recovered spirits, decking his miller’s hat with briony. He was thinking of the summer roses round his mill-house window, and of what he had counted his only opportunity of being crowned like an ancient Greek. But Mrs. Polley began pursing up her mouth, and even Polley looked knowing and important.

As for ’Mily, she asked Jack Dadd if it was to be his turn next, and Jack answered with more plainness than politeness that he would not make such an ass of himself.

‘Like Bottom the weaver,’ said Oliver, with reckless waste of simile.

‘Well, it is more in the way of rubbish of weavers than of any fellers that I have been accustomed to keep company with,’ said Jack loftily, giving Oliver a lesson in good manners. In spite of it, and of his self-consciousness, Oliver wore the hat and its ill-arranged garniture with an excellent assumption of composure on the return to Friarton.