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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
E. F. Benson's "Paying Guests" is a captivating satirical novel that explores the intricacies of social class and the evolving norms of early 20th-century England. Set against the backdrop of the post-World War I societal shift, this narrative delves into the lives of the upper-middle-class protagonist and the unconventional lodgers who disrupt the delicate balance of their domestic life. The prose is sharp and insightful, characterized by Benson's witty observations and keen sense of irony, which serve to illuminate the absurdities of human behavior and the often unacknowledged tensions that arise within household dynamics. Benson, an accomplished author and member of the Bloomsbury Group, had a unique perspective on the societal transformations of his time. His extensive background in literature and journalism, alongside his experiences as an openly gay man navigating conservative social circles, influenced his portrayal of themes such as domesticity, propriety, and the folly of social conventions. This intimate understanding of human relationships and societal expectations infuses the novel with authenticity and depth. "Paying Guests" is a must-read for those interested in satire that deftly critiques societal norms while providing a rich, character-driven narrative. Benson's insightful commentary on class dynamics, combined with his sharp wit, makes this novel an enlightening exploration of human relationships that resonates with contemporary readers. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Paying Guests (A Satirical Novel)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In E. F. Benson’s Paying Guests, the delicate rituals of civility become a high-stakes currency, revealing how money, manners, and relentless proximity can transform ordinary coexistence into a sly contest of power, performance, and pride, where the smallest preference or peccadillo resonates through thin walls and thinner skins, and where social harmony, so carefully practiced, is forever on the verge of comic collapse as each resident calibrates exactly how much self to spend and how much truth to conceal in order to remain both respectable and, crucially, seen.
A satirical novel of manners by the British writer E. F. Benson, Paying Guests belongs to the interwar period and was first published in the late 1920s. Benson, widely recognized for his comedies of social observation, situates the action in and around a boarding house, a space where private lives and public personas collide under a single roof. The genre signals lightly barbed amusement rather than cruelty, and the setting allows a contained social system to display its hierarchies, its rituals, and its frictions. This is a world calibrated by taste, tact, and the ever-practical question of who pays and who presides.
The premise is elegantly simple: a cluster of temporary residents, each with distinct habits and aspirations, share a domestic arrangement that promises comfort and economy while guaranteeing exposure and interference. The house is a microcosm in which rules are posted, boundaries are porous, and allegiances evolve over teacups and timetables. Readers can expect a brisk, observant narrative voice that delights in nuance and understatement. The mood is urbane and gently caustic, as Benson stages the small collisions of communal life—meals, music, shared corridors—as occasions for wit, revelation, and the quiet comedy of self-importance.
At the heart of the book lies an inquiry into class performance: how people spend, save, and signal refinement when their audience is both intimate and omnipresent. Money is never merely financial; it buys status, schedule, and the appearance of ease. The novel also probes the tension between privacy and scrutiny, asking what it means to be oneself when everyone is always, politely, watching. Questions of authority and dependency circulate through the house, testing the boundaries between host and guest. Beneath the laughter beats a serious curiosity about aspiration, insecurity, and the moral elasticity that social survival sometimes demands.
Benson’s technique favors ensemble interplay and cumulative revelation over melodrama. Scenes are built as social set-pieces—breakfast tables, drawing-room entertainments, carefully choreographed visits—where posture, diction, and timing matter as much as content. Characters are drawn with affectionate exactness, their foibles exaggerated just enough to gleam without hardening into caricature. Irony arrives in glances rather than pronouncements, and the pacing relies on the deft escalation of minor offenses into memorable occasions. The result is a comedy sustained by precision: every gesture signals a rank, every preference a worldview, and every moment of hospitality an opportunity for negotiation—or display.
For contemporary readers, Paying Guests offers a mirror tilted just enough to reflect modern forms of shared living, from rented rooms and flat-shares to the marketable intimacy of short-term stays. The novel’s attention to social signaling anticipates our current choreography of curated selves, where visibility competes with authenticity and etiquette doubles as strategy. It poses questions that remain timely: How do we balance individuality with communal belonging? What costs accompany the performance of taste? Where does generosity end and leverage begin? The satire’s bite is pleasingly light, but its observations about class, space, and self-fashioning retain a durable sting.
Approached as a comedy of manners with a keen anthropological eye, the book rewards attention to details—who sits where, who speaks first, what is displayed, what is withheld. Benson invites readers to savor the microdramas of everyday sociability and to consider how delicate ecosystems of courtesy are sustained, subverted, and restored. As a companion to his broader satirical achievements, Paying Guests distills the pleasures of his style: clarity, economy, and a playful seriousness about human frailty. It is an invitation to watch a house at work, to hear the music of its routines, and to enjoy the deft rhythms of civilized mischief.
Synopsis
E. F. Benson’s Paying Guests unfolds in a genteel English seaside boarding house during the interwar years, where the rhythm of meals, promenades, and card tables governs daily life. The proprietress balances courtesy with strict economies, relying on a steady stream of respectable lodgers to maintain her establishment. The opening chapters sketch the house’s rituals and hierarchies, noting who takes the best chair, who controls the window, and who receives the earliest post. The tone is observant and dry, inviting readers to note how small customs and unwritten rules create both comfort and friction in a community assembled by chance and sustained by necessity.
An ensemble of familiar types settles into view: a retired officer with firm views on discipline, a widowed gentlewoman defending standards, two companionable spinsters given to culture, a conscientious clergyman, and a self-assured organizer of charitable efforts. They meet in the dining room and drawing room, testing each other’s claims to precedence and taste. Seating plans, tea strength, and piano time become tokens in a larger game of status. The proprietress must arbitrate without offense, sensing that the prosperity of her house depends less on grandeur than on the reassurance of order and the careful orchestration of everyone’s small expectations.
The equilibrium begins to shift with the arrival of a new guest whose metropolitan polish and easy talk ripple through the house. Hints of connections, travel, and cultivated amusements alter conversations, and long-settled residents find themselves recalibrating alliances. Some cultivate the newcomer with invitations and flattery, while others regard the change with guarded skepticism. The proprietress, alert to opportunity, encourages sociability but watches for excess. The newcomer’s proposals for musical evenings and organized outings promise novelty, drawing boarders into shared enterprises that highlight differences of ambition, manners, and nerve. The house, once tranquil, becomes a stage for brighter gestures and bolder claims.
As the social temperature warms, rivalries intensify around small but symbolically loaded contests. A committee forms to stage a charitable event, and questions of chairmanship, program order, and publicity ignite quiet competition. Walks along the promenade and afternoons on the sands turn into strategic encounters, with gossip circulating about whose name appears in the local paper and whose flower arrangements draw murmured praise. Letters are drafted, hints are dropped, and polite phrases mask tactical retreats. The boarding house’s shared rooms now echo with rehearsals and planning meetings, while the dining table hosts debates about taste, philanthropy, and the delicate art of being seen to lead.
A seaside excursion serves as a pivotal interlude, bringing the group together beyond the safety of routine. Weather threatens plans, a boat timetable tightens nerves, and a mislaid personal item prompts whispers that challenge discretion. In the confusion, those who seemed dependable reveal anxieties, and those who favoured display find themselves tested by practical demands. The proprietress must protect her house’s reputation while keeping tempers cool, and she steers events back to shore with tact. By the end of the day, confidences have been exchanged, assumptions adjusted, and the taste of risk lingers, sharpening the community’s appetite for both novelty and reassurance.
Preparation for an amateur entertainment becomes the story’s central enterprise, drawing out the best and worst in the guests. Casting decisions and musical selections expose ambitions, resentments, and loyalties. Rehearsals offer opportunities to shine and occasions to take offense, with interpretive differences veiling territorial claims. Younger residents find themselves the subject of speculation, and an air of romance complicates the serious business of arranging chairs and selling tickets. The charismatic newcomer’s role grows, but so does scrutiny of that person’s background. Private investigations by curious boarders yield fragments of information, and genial façades strain as the house readies itself for a performance before the larger town.
The entertainment arrives with fanfare, blending accomplishment with mishap in a public test of poise. A sudden lapse, a stray remark, and an unguarded reaction combine to shift perceptions in an instant. Applause covers certain errors, but the audience’s alertness cannot be managed as easily as a sitting room. The newcomer’s aura is tested against facts, and others’ claims to leadership are weighed against results. While the event does not collapse, the evening crystallizes the house’s social story, revealing to the participants what has truly mattered in their months of preparation. Without detailing outcomes, this moment marks a clear hinge in status, sentiment, and self-understanding.
In the aftermath, departures and arrivals renew the natural drift of boarding-house life, and the proprietress quietly balances ledgers alongside sensibilities. Some reputations recover through steadiness, others dwindle for lack of substance, and a few gain unexpected shine from modesty well timed. Letters of thanks and complaints confirm that impression is as potent as achievement. Routine reasserts itself, but the seating has subtly shifted, and conversations now acknowledge boundaries previously ignored. The town’s season moves on, and the house, having weathered its own small drama, returns to carefully managed normality, with the memory of spectacle converted into anecdotes that both soften and preserve the sharper edges.
Paying Guests ultimately presents a microcosm of social aspiration, fragility, and resilience, treating manners as both performance and protection. Benson’s narrative traces how small contests over chairs, titles, and tunes reflect larger desires for recognition, belonging, and security. The boarding house distills community into a set of negotiated fictions that hold until they are tested and then reset. Without moralizing, the book suggests that civility can be both a mask and a mercy, enabling people to live together despite doubts and vanities. As one season yields to the next, the house stands ready for new stories, its polished routine absorbing future dramas into familiar forms.
Historical Context
Paying Guests is set in late 1920s England, in a genteel spa or seaside town whose rhythms depend on pensions, promenades, and the quiet economies of boarding houses. The landscape evokes the south coast world Benson knew from Sussex and Kent, with rail lines of the Southern Railway delivering visitors to crescents of terraces, piers, and esplanades. The interwar setting is marked by stable public order and fragile private finances. Within this compact geography, the boarding house functions as a social microcosm where retired civil servants, widows, and spinsters on annuities negotiate respectability, gossip, and hierarchy against a backdrop of postwar thrift and changing social codes.
The aftermath of the First World War (1914 to 1918) reshaped British society. Britain suffered about 887,000 military dead and over 1.6 million wounded, while the 1918 to 1920 influenza pandemic added civilian loss. Demobilization in 1919 returned millions of men to a tight labor market and a society with a marked female surplus. War widows and unmarried women often relied on small pensions or annuities, seeking affordable respectability in boarding establishments. Benson’s boarding house world mirrors this demography: a preponderance of single women and elderly veterans whose lives are organized around economies of scale, companionate sociability, and ritualized status contests born of loss and constrained means.
Severe postwar economic dislocation framed the 1920s. A sharp recession in 1920 to 1921 pushed unemployment above two million. In 1925, Chancellor Winston Churchill returned sterling to the gold standard at the prewar parity, approximately 4.86 dollars per pound, imposing deflation that hurt export regions and rewarded creditors. The Rent and Mortgage Interest Restrictions Act of 1915, extended in 1920, stabilized tenants yet squeezed small proprietors, encouraging the letting of rooms to boarders. Fixed income classes, dependent on coupons and annuities, cultivated frugality and routine. Paying Guests captures this world of precise economies and vigilant housekeeping, its comedy shadowed by anxiety that would soon be confirmed by the 1929 transatlantic crash.
The General Strike of 1926 crystallized class tension. Sparked by a coal dispute after the Samuel Commission proposed wage cuts, the Trades Union Congress called out about 1.7 million workers from 4 to 12 May 1926 to support miners. Rail, print, and transport stoppages led the government to mobilize volunteers and rely on the British Gazette for messaging. After nine days the strike ended; miners held out until late 1926. The 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act curtailed labor power. Benson’s milieu reflects the strike’s residue: middle class suspicion of union militancy, press shaped perceptions, and a preference for orderly leisure insulated from industrial conflict.
Interwar mass leisure transformed resort life. The Railways Act 1921 grouped lines into the Big Four in 1923, with the Southern Railway promoting cheap excursions to Brighton, Eastbourne, and Bournemouth. Charabanc tours, bandstands, piers, and municipal gardens turned former elite spas into mixed-class playgrounds. Cinemas proliferated, and seaside seasons broadened beyond August. Yet a stratum of lower middle class retirees and widows still sought quiet respectability in licensed boarding houses where set meals and drawing rooms enforced etiquette. Paying Guests dramatizes the friction between public mass leisure and private rituals of gentility: promenades become stages, and shared dining tables arenas where class, thrift, and aspiration are minutely policed.
Women’s political and social gains altered household dynamics. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised women over 30 meeting property qualifications; the Equal Franchise Act 1928 extended the vote to women at 21 on the same terms as men. The Sex Disqualification Removal Act 1919 opened professions and juries. Clerical and retail work expanded for women, while many widows and spinsters managed small enterprises, including boarding houses. The Women’s Institute movement, founded in Britain in 1915, cultivated local female public life. In Benson’s setting, forceful female proprietors and committees organize culture and charity, reflecting new civic presence, yet still operating within the constraints of propriety and economic precarity.
Cultural currents of the 1910s and 1920s supplied everyday obsessions. Spiritualism surged after the war, advanced by figures like Arthur Conan Doyle through lectures and publications; the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, lent a patina of inquiry. Health fads and diet regimens flourished in spa towns. Meanwhile the servant problem intensified; the 1911 census recorded over a million female domestic servants, but interwar alternatives in shops and offices reduced supply, pushing households and boarding establishments toward stricter routines and labor saving. Regulatory legacies of wartime, including licensing and closing hours modified in 1921, structured respectability. Benson channels these fashions and frictions into comic yet telling social performance.
As social and political critique, Paying Guests exposes the fissures of interwar respectability. It satirizes how fixed incomes, rent controls, and deflation cultivate parsimony masquerading as virtue, how the boarding house enforces rigid class boundaries while pretending to hospitality, and how civic uplift masks small tyrannies. The novel implicates postwar gender settlements by showing female authority constrained to domestic governance and reputational maneuver. It needles middle class fear of labor unrest and mass leisure’s democratizing press of crowds. By miniaturizing the era’s economic and political stresses into rituals of dining, promenading, and committee rule, it indicts a culture that prizes appearances over solidarity and security.
Paying Guests (A Satirical Novel)
Chapter I
Bolton Spa[1], justly famous for the infamous savour of the waters which so magically get rid of painful deposits in the joints and muscles of the lame and the halt, and for the remedial rasp of its saline baths in which the same patients are pickled daily to their great relief, had been crammed all the summer, and the proprietors of its hotels and boarding houses had been proving that for them at least rheumatism and its kindred afflictions had a silver if not a golden lining. Never had Wentworth and Balmoral and Blenheim and Belvoir entertained so continuous a complement of paying guests, and even now, though the year had wheeled into mid-October, and the full season was long past, Mrs. Oxney was still booking rooms for fresh arrivals at Wentworth during the next two months. In fact she did not know when she would get off on her holiday, and as long as this prosperous tide continued to flow, she cared very little whether she got off at all. Though she did not want money, she liked it, and though she liked a holiday, she did not want it.
The existence, or rather the names, of Balmoral, Blenheim and Belvoir was a slight but standing grievance with Mrs. Oxney, the sort of grievance which occasionally kept her awake for half an hour should it perch in her drowsy consciousness as she composed herself to sleep and begin pecking at her mind. 'For naturally,' so she thought to herself in these infrequent vigils, 'if a lady or gentleman was thinking of coming to Bolton Spa, and wanted comfort and, I may say, luxury when they are taking their cure, they would look at the Baths Guide-book, and imagine that Balmoral and Blenheim and Belvoir and Wentworth were all much of a muchness. And then if they chose any of the others they would find themselves in a wretched little gimcrack[2] semi-detached villa down in the hollow, with only one bathroom and that charged extra, and the enamel all off, and cold supper on Sunday and nobody dressing for dinner. Not that it's illegal to call yourself Balmoral, far from it; for there is nothing to prevent you calling your house "Boiled Rabbit" or "Castor Oil," but those who haven't got big houses ought to have enough proper feeling not to mis-call them by big names.'
Mrs. Oxney's grievance was as well founded as most little vexations of the kind, for certainly Wentworth was a very different class of house from Balmoral and Blenheim and Belvoir, which, though it might possibly be libellous to call them gimcrack, could not be described as other than semi-detached. There could not be any divergence of opinion over that point or over the singleness of their bathrooms and the cold supper on Sunday. Wentworth, on the other hand, was so entirely and magnificently detached that nobody would dream of calling it detached at all: you might as well call a ship at sea detached. The nearest house to it was at least a hundred yards away, and on all sides but one more like a quarter of a mile, and the whole of that territory was 'grounds.' It had gardens (kitchen and flower) it had tennis courts (hard and soft) a croquet-lawn (hard or soft according to the state of the weather) and a large field in which Colonel Chase had induced Mrs. Oxney to make five widely sundered putting-greens, one in each corner and one in the middle, like the five of diamonds. The variety of holes therefore was immense, for you could play from any one hole to any other hole, and thus make a round of twenty holes, a total unrivalled by any championship course, which, so the Colonel told Mrs. Oxney, had never more than eighteen. As for bathrooms, Wentworth already had twice as many as any of the semi-detached villas with those magnificent but deceptive names, and Mrs. Oxney was intending to put in a third, while in contrast with their paltry cold supper on Sunday, the guests at Wentworth enjoyed on that day a dinner of peculiar profusion and delicacy, for there was a savoury as well as a sweet, and dessert. All these points of superiority made it a bitter thought that visitors could be so ill-informed as to class Wentworth with establishments of similar title.
But throughout this summer Mrs. Oxney had seldom brooded over this possible misconception, for, as she was saying to her sister as they sat out under the cedar by the croquet-lawn, she asked nothing more than to have Wentworth permanently full. She was a tall grey-haired woman, who, as a girl, with a mop of black hair, a quick beady eye, and a long nose had been remarkably like a crow. But now the black hair had turned a most becoming grey, the beady eye was alive with kindliness, and the long nose was rendered less beak-like by the filling out of her face. From her mouth, when she talked to her guests came a perennial stream of tactful observations, and she presented to the world a very comely and amiable appearance. Her sister, Amy Bertram, who, like herself, was a widow, and ran the house in rather subordinate partnership with her, was still crow-like, but, unlike Mrs. Oxney, had a remarkable capacity for seeing the dark side of every situation, and for suitably croaking over it.
She shook her head over Margaret's contented retrospect.
"Things may not be so bad just for the moment," she said, "and as most of the rooms are engaged up till Christmas, we may get through this year all right. But we must be prepared to be very empty from then onwards, for a good season like this is always followed by a very empty one. How we shall manage to get through the spring is more than I can tell you: don't ask me. And I do hope, Margaret, that you'll think twice before putting in that extra bathroom. It will be a great expense, and you must reckon on spending double the estimate."
"Nonsense, my dear," said Margaret. "They've contracted for a fixed sum--and high enough too--for doing everything down to a hot towel-rail, and they've got to carry it out."
Amy shook her head again.
"Then you'll find, if you keep them to the contract there'll be bad workmanship somewhere. I know what plumbers are. The taps will leak, and the towel-rail be cold. Besides I can't think what you want with a third bathroom. It seems to me that it's just to humour Colonel Chase who would like one nearer his bedroom. I'm sure the other bathrooms are hardly used at all as it is. Most of our guests don't want a bath if after breakfast they are going to soak for a quarter of an hour down at the establishment. I shouldn't dream of putting another in. And Miss Howard is sure to make a fuss if there's hammering and workmen going on all day and night next her room."
Mrs. Oxney felt this point was worth considering, for though it was worth while to please Colonel Chase, it was certainly not worth while to displease Miss Howard. These two were not guests who came for a three weeks' cure and were gone again, but practically permanent inmates of Wentworth, who had lived here for more than a year, and when their interests conflicted, it was necessary to be wary.
"I'm sure I don't want to fuss Miss Howard," she said, "though I don't know how I can get out of it now. I've promised the Colonel, that there shall be a new bathroom put in, and I let him choose that white tile-paper--"
Amy gave a short hollow croak.
"That's the most expensive of all the patterns," she said.
"And lasts the longer," said Mrs. Oxney. "But it might be as well to put it off till after Christmas, for Miss Howard is sure to go down to Torquay for a couple of weeks then, and it could be done in her absence."
"As like as not she won't be able to get away," said Mrs. Bertram, "for if the coal-strike[5] goes on, the railways will all have stopped long before that. I saw a leader in the paper about it this morning, which said there wasn't a ray of hope on the whole horizon. Not a ray. And the whole horizon. Indeed I don't know what we shall do as soon as the cold weather begins, as it's bound to do soon, for after a warm autumn there's always a severe winter. How we shall keep a fire going for the kitchen I can't imagine: I could wish there weren't so many rooms booked up till Christmas. And as for hot water for the baths--"
"Oh, that's coke," said Mrs. Oxney. "As soon as we start the central heating, it and the bath water are run by the same furnace. You know that quite well, so where's the use of saying that? There's plenty of coke. You just try to get into the coke-cellar, and shut the door behind you. You couldn't do it."
Amy sighed: there was resignation more than relief in her sigh.
"Anyhow the coal is getting low enough," she said to console herself. "I'm sure I don't see how we shall keep the house open at all, when we have to begin fires in the rooms, unless you mean to burn coke in them. There's Miss Howard: she likes the drawing-room to be nothing else but an oven by after breakfast, and there's the Colonel as grumpy as a bear if the smoking-room isn't fit to roast an ox in after tea. I'm not sure that it wouldn't be better to shut Wentworth up altogether when the frosts begin. There's nothing that makes guests so discontented as a cold house. Once get the reputation for chilliness, and ruin stares at you. People coming here for the cure won't stand it. They'll pack up and go to the Bolton Arms or to Balmoral. Better say that we're closed. Belvoir too: I was walking along the road to the back of it yesterday, and the coal-cellar door was open. Crammed: I shouldn't like to say how many tons. Where they get it from I don't know: some underhand means, I'm sadly afraid."
Mrs. Oxney had not been attending much to her sister's familiar litanies, but the thought of those semi-detached hovels, suggested by the mention of Belvoir, put a bright idea into her head.
"I'll tell you what I shall do," she said. "I shall take a whole page in the Baths Guide-book to Bolton, and advertise Wentworth properly, so that everybody shall know that it isn't an ordinary boarding house in a row with the butcher's opposite. Golf links, twenty holes, two tennis courts, one hard, croquet-lawn, kitchen- and flower-gardens, and a tasteful view of the lounge."
"It will be very expensive," said Mrs. Bertram, who was really enthusiastic about this idea of her sister's, but was compelled by all the dominant instincts of her nature to see the objection to any course of action.
"Not a bit," said Mrs. Oxney. "It will pay for itself ten times over. Let people know they can play lawn-tennis all the winter[2q]--"
"Not if it snows," said Mrs. Bertram.
"Amy, let me finish my sentence. Tennis all the winter, and the breakfast lounge as well as the drawing-room and central heating and no extras for baths and three bathrooms, and standing in its own grounds--"
"But they all stand in their own grounds," said Mrs. Bertram.
"Stuff and nonsense, Amy. Grounds mean something spacious, not a gravel path leading round a monkey-puzzle. And no cold supper on Sundays. I shall say that too."
That point was debated: to say that there was no cold supper on Sunday night implied, so Mrs. Bertram sadly surmised, that there was cold supper all the week, and nothing at all on Sundays, and such a misconception would be lamentably alien to the effect that this sumptuous advertisement was designed to produce. Mrs. Oxney therefore agreed to word this differently or omit altogether, and hurried indoors to find the most tasteful view of the lounge for the photographer.
The morning hours between breakfast and lunch were always the least populated time of the day at Wentworth, for the majority of its guests were patients who went down to the baths in the morning to drink the abominable waters or lie pickling in tubs of brine, and returned, some in the motor-bus, and the more stalwart on their feet, in time to have an hour's prescribed rest before lunch. The two permanent inmates of the house, Colonel Chase and Miss Alice Howard were, so far from being patients, in the enjoyment of the rudest health, but they too, were never at home on fine mornings like this, for Miss Howard had left the house by ten o'clock with her satchel of painting apparatus and a small folding stool, which when properly adjusted never pinched her anywhere or collapsed, and sketched from Nature till lunch-time. On her return she put up on the chimney-piece of the lounge the artistic fruit of her labours for the delectation and compliments of her fellow-guests. These water-colour sketches were, for the most part, suave and sentimental, and represented the church tower of St. Giles's, seen over the fields, or trees with reflections in the river, or dim effects of dusk (though painted by broad daylight, since it was impossible to get the colours right otherwise) with scattered lights gleaming from cottage windows, and possibly a crescent moon (body-colour) in the west. Garden-beds, still-life studies of petunias and Mrs. Oxney's cat were rarer subjects, but much admired.
Colonel Chase's occupations in the morning were equally regular and more physically strenuous, for either he bicycled seldom less than thirty miles, or walked not less than eight as recorded by his pedometer[4]. He had two pedometers, one giddily affixed to the hub of his bicycle's hind-wheel, and the other, for pedestrian purposes, incessantly hung by a steel clip into his waistcoat pocket: this one clicked once at each alternate step of his great strong legs, and it was wonderful how far he walked every day. Thus, though his fellow-guests at Wentworth could not, as in Miss Howard's case, feast their eyes on the actual fruit of his energy since this would have implied the visualization of so many miles of road, they could always be (and were) informed of the immense distances he had traversed. This he felt sure, was a source of admiring envy to the crippled and encouraged them to regain their lost activity. Mrs. Holders, for instance, who, a fortnight ago, had only just been able to hobble down to the Bath establishment on two sticks and was always driven up again in the motor-bus, and who now was able, on her good days, to walk both ways, with the assistance of only one stick, had great jokes with him about her increasing mobility. She used to say that when she came back in the spring, she would go out with him for his walk in the morning, and take her treatment in the afternoon when he was resting. She seemed to take the greatest interest in his athletic feats, and used to drink in all he said with an air of reverent and rapt attention. Occasionally, however, when Colonel Chase was least conscious of being humorous (though no one could be more so if he wished) she gave a little mouse-like squeak of laughter and then became intensely serious again. This puzzled him till he thought of what was no doubt the right explanation, namely, that Mrs. Holders had suddenly thought of something amusing, which had nothing to do with him and his conversation. For the rest, she was a middle-aged, round-about little personage, with a plain vivacious face and highly-arched eyebrows, so that she looked in a permanent state of surprise though nobody knew what she was surprised about. Miss Howard thought of her as 'quaint' and Mrs. Holders did not think of Miss Howard at all.
There had lately been a tree felled in the field where the twenty-hole golf links lay, and when her sister went indoors to select a tasteful view of the lounge, Mrs. Bertram walked through the garden and out on to the links to see what it was worth in the way of logs for the fires in this shortage of coal. The tree had been dead for more than a year, and she had repeatedly urged Margaret to have it cut down while it was still sound, and had not degenerated into touchwood. But Mrs. Oxney had been very obstinate about it, weak but obstinate, for a green woodpecker had built in it and she said it would be such a shame to cut it down, and completely upset the poor dickie-bird's domestic arrangements. Then, when the woodpecker had quite finished with it, Colonel Chase said it made a first-rate hazard for the seventeenth and nineteenth holes (the long diagonals across the field) which meant that he was the only player who could loft his ball over it without going round, and it was not till yesterday that Mrs. Oxney had steeled herself to the destruction of this magnificent bunker. Now, of course, as Mrs. Bertram had woefully anticipated, the tree was no more than a great cracknell kept together by bark, and the Colonel might just as well have been left to go on soaring over it or hitting into it as before.
As she walked back to the house from this depressing expedition she heard the hoot of the motor-bus which brought back the patients from the baths, announcing its return. There were the usual three occupants (since Mrs. Holders had taken to walking up) Mr. Kemp and his down-trodden daughter Florence, both habitual guests at Wentworth, and Mr. Bullingdon who was paying his first visit to Bolton Spa. Though he was quite a young man, Mrs. Bertram felt sure that a bath chair would soon be his only mode of locomotion, but in spite of his poor knees, which made him move as if he was performing a cake-walk with his two sticks for a partner, he was full of jokes and gaiety. He laughed at himself in the most engaging manner, and said that he really wasn't sure that he wanted to get better, since he attracted so much flattering attention, wherever he went, by reason of his antics. Apart from these flippant allusions to his own afflictions, he never talked about arthritis at all, which was a great contrast to Mr. Kemp whose idea of pleasant conversation was to pin a listener into a corner from which escape was difficult, and, beginning with the 3rd of March, 1920, which was the date on which he first felt a throbbing in his left hip, recount the progress of his rheumatisms. He had visited Harrogate, Buxton, Bath, Droitwich, Aix and Marienbad, and none of these had really done him any good, but there was still a chance that Bolton in combination with some of the others and Bournemouth for the winter, might benefit him. Just as Mrs. Bertram reached the door, he was balanced on the step of the motor-bus, and warning Mr. Bullingdon about a certain malignant masseur at Aix.
"Don't let him touch your knees with the tips of his fingers," he said, "if you're thinking of going to Aix. I was getting on nicely there, as my daughter will tell you, when my doctor recommended me to have treatment at the hands of this villain. In a week or two he had undone all the good I had derived from Aix, and when I left I wasn't walking much better than you. What was his name, Florence?"
"Jean Cuissot," said Florence in a monotonous voice. She knew her father would ask her that.
"Nonsense: Jean Cuissot was the masseur I went to the year before. No, I believe you're right, it was Jean Cuissot. Judas Iscariot would be a better name for him. Give me your arm, please, unless you want me to stand on this step for the rest of my life. Ah, dear me, I've got a new pain in my ankle this morning. I woke in the night and felt it wasn't comfortable, and expected I should have trouble. Why, there's Mrs. Holders already. She has walked all the way up from the baths. I haven't been able to walk back after my bath since I was at Harrogate two seasons ago, and the hill there is neither so long nor so steep as this. But I used to think nothing of it then. What wouldn't I give to be able to walk up such a hill now!"
Mrs. Bertram who was lending a firm shoulder to Mr. Kemp while his daughter disentangled his sticks which had got muddled up in some inexplicable manner between his legs and the door of the bus, sighed heavily.
"Yes, indeed," she said. "We so seldom appreciate our blessings till they are taken from us[1q], and then we haven't got them to appreciate. But Bolton may set you up yet, Mr. Kemp, you never can tell."
Mr. Bullingdon, now that the doorway of the bus was clear, performed a sort of mystic dance down the steps and on to the ground.
"There we are," he said cheerfully. "You know they ought to engage Mrs. Holders and Mr. Kemp and me for a short turn at a music-hall. It would have an immense success: screams of laughter. There would be a glass of champagne on one side of the stage, and we three toeing the mark on the other. Then at the word 'go', we would start off and see who could grab it first. Mrs. Holders would have to be handicapped though, you and I wouldn't stand a chance against her, Mr. Kemp."
Mr. Kemp was inclined to be offended at the suggestion of his appearing at a music-hall, and his daughter and Mrs. Bertram closed in behind him and propelled him into the house. Besides, as everybody ought to know, champagne was poison to him: you might as well expect him to race for a glass of prussic acid.
