“Well, my dear Gwen!”—Mrs Archibald entered the library at Selby House, followed by the Earl of Somerville—“I never thought I should live to see your husband act as his own footman!”

“Dear Alicia”—Lady Somerville kissed the newcomer and led her to a marble lounge—“why not be one’s own footman? We are our own policemen, and I do not believe the streets’ safety has in any way suffered from it.”

“That’s quite different, dear Gwen. Ah! how do, Mrs Sinclair? I had not seen you. How shaded you keep your rooms; it is quite delightful, and so cool, too.”

“Do you know, Mrs Archibald, that we are thinking of introducing an innovation in our households?” This was Lord Somerville. “We are going to do away with locks, keys, and bolts.”

“My dear Lionel, what on earth are you saying?” exclaimed Mrs Archibald, raising herself suddenly on her couch. “What about these dreadful people who intrude, beg, or—steal?”

“Let them go out again,” replied Gwen merrily. “I do not think you could find any beggars or thieves at the present moment, for there is nothing to steal, but what we all should feel glad to give.”

“Wait for the final collapse,” interrupted Mrs Archibald. “I am afraid you are living in a fool’s paradise; and for your sakes I dread the awakening. In any case, I shall have warned you. What has pained me to the quick, has been Lady Carey’s desertion. Mowbray told me that she had actually mounted the platform last week to propose some awful reform.”

“My mother took my place that day, as I was unable to attend the meeting,” explained Eva Sinclair; “but, although she did it to please me, she is not yet won over to our cause, and she grieves sadly over memories of the past.”

“Thank God! I have neither kith nor kin to influence me. In a great crisis like this one feels thankful to be alone in the world.”

“Unloved—and unloving,” murmured Eva, as she looked up at Sinclair, who was leaning against the mantelpiece.

“Here is Temple coming in with tea. He is the only indoor servant we keep now,” and Lionel instinctively came forward to help him to arrange the tea-table. Temple, instead of retiring, dallied with the cups and saucers. There was something in the valet’s mind, but he did not know how to put it into words.

“Now, Temple, there’s something you want to say. What is it?” Gwen turned gracefully on to her side and poured out tea.

“Yes, my lady; and as you are so kind as to allow me, I shall speak. It’s about the groom, Wiggles, my lord.”

“What about him?” asked Lionel. “He cannot surely complain that he receives no wages? We none of us get any wages nowadays.”

“Ah! it isn’t that, my lord. But the children have been ailing for years, and now that the factories in which the eldest ones worked are closed, they would like to go back to the country. But Wiggles doesn’t want you to think he is complaining. He only wants a whiff of fresh air, and he asked me to beg your lordship’s advice.”

“Good gracious! there was a time when Wiggles would not have taken such trouble to give me notice.”

“It isn’t that he wishes to give notice, my lord;—I don’t know how to put it, nor does Wiggles. He wants, I think, to see his old people before they die.”

“My poor Temple, Wiggles is like many others who have suddenly seen life as it is, and not as it had been made for him. We also are now able to see things as they are. We see that if Wiggles’s rooms in his mews are too small and dingy for him and his family, our rooms here are too spacious for us. But very soon we shall make it all even.”

“I can’t imagine how Lionel can be such a fool as to speak to his valet like that,” whispered Mrs Archibald to Sinclair; “they want a good squashing, these people.”

“Tell Wiggles to pack up!—ha! ha! ha! I forgot—he has nothing to pack up. Let him go back to his own village. Rural life is dying out, and we want to relieve the congestion of our capital, and bring life and happiness into the apathetic provinces.—We must give back the land!”

“Will you give this cup to your master, Temple?” asked Gwen, handing the teacup to the valet with the grace with which she would have addressed a Peer of the Realm.

“One moment,” said Lionel, as Temple was preparing to leave the room. “I have often, since the storm, wanted to ask you how it was you were so much more respectful than you used to be? I used to wish you frequently at the bottom of the sea, with your impertinent and supercilious manners. Why have you altered?”

“I am afraid, Mrs Archibald, you have come in at a wrong time, and your delicate feelings will be hurt,” said Sinclair, bowing to the diaphanous vision of past smartness, to whom he handed a plate of sandwiches.

“A la guerre comme À la guerre, my dear fellow; I have made up my mind to the worst.”

“It would be easier to explain my past behaviour, my lord, than to account for my present manner. I have been for many years in your lordship’s service, and I only now realise how little we understood each other.”

“Had you no proper respect for your masters?” This was Mrs Archibald, who between two mouthfuls felt it her duty to bring the discussion down to a proper level. Temple hung his head, and twisted his fingers. One could hear the monotonous tick-tack of the empire clock.

“Do not hesitate to say whatever you feel, Temple,” remarked Gwen.

“Well, if your lordship will allow me to say so, I think we all looked up to the aristocracy as an institution; just as we honoured the Royal Family and the House of Commons. But we did not think much of them as individuals, and felt irritable with our employers.”

“What a shocking word to use for your superiors,” and Mrs Archibald raised her eyelids as she laid a stress on the last word.

“Was I a worse master, than any other?” inquired Lionel. “Dear Mrs Archibald, you have nothing to eat,” and he handed a plate of cakes to her.

“I think you are making a fool of yourself Lionel,” she remarked in a low tone.

“Well, Temple, you do not answer my question. Forget that you are my valet, as I shall forget I am Lord Somerville. Let us stand man to man, after these long centuries of grievances and misunderstandings.”

“For the first time in my career of a valet, I feel that I can speak to you as a man; but I cannot explain why it is.”

“It must be that we have no clothes, Temple,” cheerfully said Sinclair, who had moved away from the window and stood leaning on the back of Eva’s couch.

“Yes, one man’s as good as another,” remarked Lionel. “But do you not think that you all envied us very much; for you certainly aped all our ways?”

“I don’t know about our envying you, my lord. I daresay we longed for some of your comforts, and envied the facility with which you smoothed down your existence, by packing yourselves off abroad whenever you were weary of your amusements at home. But I do not believe we ever wanted to change our characters for yours. We could not make you out. That is the truth about it.—I am sure I ought not to talk so free before the ladies.”

“Go on, Temple,” softly said Gwen. “I want to know everything that has stood between you and us for so long.”

“It is not that we felt no sympathy for you in your grief. Oh, dear! no. When a Duke loses the wife he loves, or a lady the child she adores, it goes straight to a man’s heart, whoever that man is. But it was in your funny kinds of worries that we were at sea. It seemed so childish to worry about trifles. I remember your lordship’s mother; I never saw anyone put out for nothing as she was. The lady’s maid once told me that her ladyship had not slept for two nights because one course at dinner had been spoiled. We all laughed very much about that in the servants’ hall. If such a thing had happened to any of us in our homes, we should have taken it jokily, and told our friends that we couldn’t help the roast mutton being underdone, or the pudding being burnt. Very likely we should have ended by telling them, that if they only came for what they could get out of us, they had better stay at home.”

“Had we had the courage to live according to simpler rules, we should have been saved the innumerable pin-pricks which made our social existences so irksome, and for which we received no sympathy.” Gwendolen looked at Temple as if she had discovered the reason of all past dissensions.

“We always thought,” resumed the valet, “that the upper classes worried themselves about nothing; and we naturally concluded that, in their way of seeing life and of feeling imaginary sorrows, lay the difference between them and us.” A fly was beating its tiny body against a window-pane. “I remember my father telling me how he once lay, badly wounded, in the Crimean War. On the ground, close to him, lay Captain Willesmere, severely injured in the groin. My father said he never should forget the moment when the young captain turned towards him, writhing under his pain, and offered him the last drops of brandy in his flask. The exertion had no doubt been too much for the young man, for he fell back in a swoon. That drop of spirits saved my father’s life, my lord, and he often told me that at that time he felt there was no social distance between himself and the Earl’s son.”

“I do hope the gallant Captain soon recovered,” eagerly remarked Mrs Archibald. “Just what a gentleman would do; but I am afraid the lower class is not worth such sacrifice.”

“The next time they met,” went on Temple, “it was in the hall of Gloucester House; many years after. My father was footman, and Captain Willesmere had become the Earl of Dunraven. The crowd was great, and my father, who had only just recovered from a severe illness, was suddenly overcome by the heat, and as he helped the Earl with his coat, fell all of a heap on his shoulder. The latter, furious at being thus familiarly handled, pushed my father forward, who fell on his back and heard the nobleman say, ‘Damn you, rascal, are you drunk? can’t you see who I am?’ When as a result, my father had to seek another situation, he could not but reflect with bitterness upon the disparity which exists between classes; although he wondered what difference there was between a trooper who lay wounded on the ground for his country, and a footman who felt suddenly ill whilst fulfilling his duties in his master’s house.”

“I suppose great emergencies such as wars and earthquakes bring out the best in man, and make him forget the artificial barriers between his fellow-creatures and himself,” said Lionel.

“Of course, my lord, I know that domestics are looked down upon. I know also that they are often cunning, inquisitive, more or less lazy, curious as to their master’s correspondence, and fonder still of their master’s cigars.”

“I see, Temple, that you are not over partial to your own class,” broke in Sinclair.

“I cannot help thinking of these things now, sir, but after all, the defects that we have, are, in a sort of way, initiated by you. We loved gambling, betting, drinking, and lolling about; and as far as passions go, I daresay we have the same amount of animal spirits as a Duke or even a Royal Prince, with this difference that in your upper circles your lives are never blighted, whatever you may do; and your friends do not cut you for such misdemeanours as drinking too heavily or betting too recklessly. I fail to see why our private lives should be sifted through and through before we can have the privilege of handing your dishes round at table or of sitting in silence in your halls, whilst some members of the peerage are allowed to make laws for their country, although they, each day, are breaking God’s laws and Society’s rules.”

“I quite agree with you, my good fellow,” suddenly remarked Lionel, “and this is the reason why we have given up pulling the wires of Government.”

“We respect you the more for it, my lord.”

“Now, Temple?” And Gwen leaned her graceful form over the carved arm of her couch; her whole attitude was one of apology for the harm she had unconsciously committed in her past state. “Let me know my grievous wrongs. Do not spare me.”

“My poor Gwen,” exclaimed Mrs Archibald, hiding her face in her hands. “What has become of your feminine modesty?”

“Let him speak, Alicia; true feminine delicacy is not hurt by the knowledge of injustice. Temple go on.”

“Well, my lady, I have heard strange things in my time. The first thing I learned in my career was that there was one law of hygiene for ladies and another for servants. I once heard a lady say that to keep well one ought to go out at least twice a day. But the same lady would have considered her butler or her housemaid impudent and unreasonable, had they asked to go out once a day. The same thing is true as regards stimulants. I have known many ladies, young and old, who said they had to have hock at lunch, port at dinner; their doctors prescribed it, and they believed it to be indispensable to their general health. But, had the footman or kitchen-maid said they must have claret at lunch, Moselle at supper; or had the housemaid hinted that a glass of sherry would be acceptable after turning out a room, I declare their mistress would have put them down as confirmed drunkards, and would have warned her friends against any servant who asked for beer money. I beg pardon, my lord, but are you sure you do not mind my plain speaking?”

“No, my good man, we want to hear the truth, for we never heard you tell us anything but fibs before.”

“You are very funny, my lord, but you have hit it right. Yes, we told fibs, big lies even. But telling the truth never paid. This was the first commandment of the servants’ catechism. In our very first situation we became familiar with a system of deceit. Still, you know yourselves how particular you were about servants always speaking the truth! I often wondered how the upper classes would have behaved had they been in our places? I don’t think they would have done very differently under the circumstances. We have all the same perception of injustice, we all feel its sting, and as kicking against it does not help us, compromise is the only course left us. Do you not compromise more or less with your conscience, when your god, Society, sets out rules that are too stringent? We are all men, my lord, although the Duchess of Southdown thought the contrary. I heard her say one day that she would have preferred a man for a lady’s maid, as they were more punctual and less talkative; and as to the sex, that did not matter—‘a servant was not a man!’ You can’t think what a funny impression it makes on one to hear such things.”

“Then you do not believe, Temple, that masters ever could have inspired loyalty in their servants?” inquired Sinclair.

“I must ask you, sir, whether there ever existed true loyalty on the part of the master to his servants? I have rarely seen it. The distance between the classes was too great, and the gulf grew daily wider and deeper when you convinced yourselves that you were in every way different from ‘those kind of people.’ The worst of it was, that by dint of widening the gulf between us, we naturally became strangers to each other. Our personal griefs and joys you ignored; you did not want to be bothered with our worries. We were salaried to be outwardly devoted and sympathetic, to minister to your wants, rejoice in your successes, condole in your misfortunes, whilst our own hearts ached from private sorrows.”

“How you must have despised us!” said Lionel.

“What an accumulation of vindictiveness must have filled your hearts for those who used you so!” echoed Gwen.

“No, my lady, that is not quite true. I have seen more envy and hatred amongst the upper class than amongst ourselves. We accepted the injustice of our social condition, and we got out of you all we could on the sly. We made fun of you, and often put you down as not quite so wise as you gave yourselves out to be. The last kitchen-maid of the Duchess of Southdown was very comical on that point. Whenever she heard the servants relating some new freak of her grace, or some funny incident that had happened in the drawing-room, she would invariably say, whilst she washed the dishes, ‘Leave them alone, they can’t ’elp it, they know no better.’ We ended by believing the girl had hit on the real cause of the aristocracy’s behaviour, and that their caprices and vagaries could only be put down to ignorance.”

“And you were right,” suddenly remarked Eva, “we wilfully ignored the fact that you had to start life from a different point from our own, and we were horrified at you not meeting us on our level. We accused you of inferiority and ignorance, but we never thought of blaming the conditions into which we had put you.”

“Ah! ma’am!” continued Temple, “I have heard terrible things said in the refined homes of the gentry; and in my presence, ladies have uttered ’orrible sentences. For instance about the war. I don’t myself understand politics, and I can’t tell if our Government was right or wrong; but there are the women, the children, the ruined home, and to my mind it did not seem quite right. I heard many ladies who came to have tea with your lordship dismiss the whole question with a wave of the hand: ‘It could not be helped; war would always be necessary.’ One lady actually said that she loved war—surely that lady had never seen a battlefield. Another one remarked that ‘People who were not in favour of the war were not patriotic, and ought to be sent out of the country.’ You all drank your whisky and champagne in honour of England’s greater glory and prosperity; and we thought it a queer world in which glory had to be paid for so dearly, and prosperity acquired at the cost of precious lives.”

“Ah! but, you see, Temple, you were not a Colonial Secretary, nor were you a financier,” said Ronald Sinclair.

“Anyhow, I never heard a lady express herself as a true woman about any kind of misfortune. As a footman I used to serve cups of tea at entertainments organised for charitable purposes, and heard there some rum remarks. One lady said in reply to another who was relating to her some pitiful story of misery, ‘Well, you see, dear Lady So-and-So, these people are more or less accustomed to privations.’ And I heard another lady say that misery was relative: a millionaire reduced to a paltry income of £3000 a year suffered more actual privations than a poor man who could not afford meat once a week. I thought of old Bill Tooley’s widow who was found dead from starvation last winter. There was no question of relative misery in her case, for one can’t do more than die. Can one, my lord?”

“We have lived long enough under the delusion of our superiority over you. We must once for all face the truth and have the courage to say that it was only owing to the unfairness in the game of life that we won the trumpery race. We were given points at our birth, and later, as we entered Sandhurst or the Universities, points were granted us to enable us to advance quicker towards the winning-post. But these advantages which gave us our social distinctions, were as many rungs cut off from the ladder, rendering the ascent laborious to others, and the top unreachable. Life is the arena in which all men have to run the race—in their skins.”

“This is beyond me, my lord,” humbly said the valet. “Only educated people, such as you, can discuss these topics. I ’ave spoken what I felt; if I have made you understand a little more about what we were, so much the better; but I am an ignorant man, and you must excuse my speech.”

“My good man, ignorance is easily remedied; besides, we have a great deal to learn, perhaps more than you have, for we set ourselves up as your teachers, although we knew little either of you or of ourselves. But how is it that you should think that education causes a man’s superiority, when you used to believe that wealth constituted supremacy?”

“Well, my lord, it was the only difference we could see between the upper classes and the lower ones. But I seem now to judge things from another point of view; it must be owing to our having no livery, and to your lordship’s appearing to me as God made you. We do not envy beauty, for we know that it is not made in factories at the expense of children’s health and youth.”

“The vanishing of clothes has done more for human equality than all the philanthropists’ efforts, or the anarchists’ steel blade,” remarked Sinclair.

“Now, Temple,” said Lord Somerville, “you must go with Wiggles, and taste some of your native air. I no more need your services, and you can tell the other servants that they can return to their houses. Our daily life is very much simplified.”

“Yes, my lord—I know fresh air is necessary to our lungs, but I have an idea which I should like to communicate to the Committee of Reforms.”

“Bravo, Temple! Have as many ideas as ever you can lodge in your head. We are putting high premiums on ideas.”

“There,” anxiously murmured Mrs Archibald, “I told you that would come. We shall be ridden over by that multitude of unemployed. Oh! Lionel, what are you doing?” And the poor, diaphanous lady closed her eyes in agony at the social chaos she mentally contemplated.

“My dear madam,” replied Lionel, “Danford is right when he says that our race can achieve the wildest Utopia, if only they can first see the practical working of it.”

Temple now left the room, carrying the tea-tray away with him.

“Do you not, Eva dear, feel bitter remorse for all the harm we have unconsciously inflicted?” inquired Gwen, taking her friend’s hand within hers.

“For my part,” broke in Mrs Archibald, “I have never felt so ashamed, as when that horrid man described us as he sees us. I did not know what to do with myself, where to hide myself. I must confess that creature has made me feel conscious, and I felt hot waves burning me from head to toe.” Mrs Archibald pressed her hands over her forehead, whilst her breast heaved short, convulsive sobs.

“So did Adam and Eve blush when the Almighty made them feel conscious of their sin,” said Sinclair, as he leaned over the lounge of the poor, stricken-down woman. “Do not worry, Mrs Archibald; a blush at the right moment is a healthy feeling, and the shame which filled your being, at the description of your past, is the proof that the mirror faithfully gave you back your own image.”

“It’s all very well for you to speak—you have your lives fixed up, and I do not see much merit in your taking things jauntily, when you have chosen charming companions to help you. Look at me, all alone in this stupid, uninteresting world. What am I to do?” and the sobs became louder. “Even Lady Carey has deserted our side. The ship is sinking, and the waves are rushing over us.”