Cranford Page #12

Cranford is an episodic novel by the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It first appeared in instalments in the magazine Household Words, then was published with minor revisions as a book with the title Cranford in 1853.

• Novel

								


“What a pleasant place!” said I, aloud, almost simultaneously.

“Nay! if you like it,” replied he; “but can you sit on these great, black
leather, three-cornered chairs?  I like it better than the best parlour;
but I thought ladies would take that for the smarter place.”

It was the smarter place, but, like most smart things, not at all pretty,
or pleasant, or home-like; so, while we were at dinner, the servant-girl
dusted and scrubbed the counting-house chairs, and we sat there all the
rest of the day.

We had pudding before meat; and I thought Mr Holbrook was going to make
some apology for his old-fashioned ways, for he began—

“I don’t know whether you like newfangled ways.”

“Oh, not at all!” said Miss Matty.

“No more do I,” said he.  “My house-keeper will have these in her new
fashion; or else I tell her that, when I was a young man, we used to keep
strictly to my father’s rule, ‘No broth, no ball; no ball, no beef’; and
always began dinner with broth.  Then we had suet puddings, boiled in the
broth with the beef: and then the meat itself.  If we did not sup our
broth, we had no ball, which we liked a deal better; and the beef came
last of all, and only those had it who had done justice to the broth and
the ball.  Now folks begin with sweet things, and turn their dinners
topsy-turvy.”

When the ducks and green peas came, we looked at each other in dismay; we
had only two-pronged, black-handled forks.  It is true the steel was as
bright as silver; but what were we to do?  Miss Matty picked up her peas,
one by one, on the point of the prongs, much as Aminé ate her grains of
rice after her previous feast with the Ghoul.  Miss Pole sighed over her
delicate young peas as she left them on one side of her plate untasted,
for they would drop between the prongs.  I looked at my host: the peas
were going wholesale into his capacious mouth, shovelled up by his large
round-ended knife.  I saw, I imitated, I survived!  My friends, in spite
of my precedent, could not muster up courage enough to do an ungenteel
thing; and, if Mr Holbrook had not been so heartily hungry, he would
probably have seen that the good peas went away almost untouched.

After dinner, a clay pipe was brought in, and a spittoon; and, asking us
to retire to another room, where he would soon join us, if we disliked
tobacco-smoke, he presented his pipe to Miss Matty, and requested her to
fill the bowl.  This was a compliment to a lady in his youth; but it was
rather inappropriate to propose it as an honour to Miss Matty, who had
been trained by her sister to hold smoking of every kind in utter
abhorrence.  But if it was a shock to her refinement, it was also a
gratification to her feelings to be thus selected; so she daintily
stuffed the strong tobacco into the pipe, and then we withdrew.

“It is very pleasant dining with a bachelor,” said Miss Matty softly, as
we settled ourselves in the counting-house.  “I only hope it is not
improper; so many pleasant things are!”

“What a number of books he has!” said Miss Pole, looking round the room.
“And how dusty they are!”

“I think it must be like one of the great Dr Johnson’s rooms,” said Miss
Matty.  “What a superior man your cousin must be!”

“Yes!” said Miss Pole, “he’s a great reader; but I am afraid he has got
into very uncouth habits with living alone.”

“Oh! uncouth is too hard a word.  I should call him eccentric; very
clever people always are!” replied Miss Matty.

            [Picture: Now, what colour are ash-buds in March]

When Mr Holbrook returned, he proposed a walk in the fields; but the two
elder ladies were afraid of damp, and dirt, and had only very unbecoming
calashes to put on over their caps; so they declined, and I was again his
companion in a turn which he said he was obliged to take to see after his
men.  He strode along, either wholly forgetting my existence, or soothed
into silence by his pipe—and yet it was not silence exactly.  He walked
before me with a stooping gait, his hands clasped behind him; and, as
some tree or cloud, or glimpse of distant upland pastures, struck him, he
quoted poetry to himself, saying it out loud in a grand sonorous voice,
with just the emphasis that true feeling and appreciation give.  We came
upon an old cedar tree, which stood at one end of the house—

    “The cedar spreads his dark-green layers of shade.”

“Capital term—‘layers!’  Wonderful man!”  I did not know whether he was
speaking to me or not; but I put in an assenting “wonderful,” although I
knew nothing about it, just because I was tired of being forgotten, and
of being consequently silent.

He turned sharp round.  “Ay! you may say ‘wonderful.’  Why, when I saw
the review of his poems in Blackwood, I set off within an hour, and
walked seven miles to Misselton (for the horses were not in the way) and
ordered them.  Now, what colour are ash-buds in March?”

Is the man going mad? thought I.  He is very like Don Quixote.

“What colour are they, I say?” repeated he vehemently.

“I am sure I don’t know, sir,” said I, with the meekness of ignorance.

“I knew you didn’t.  No more did I—an old fool that I am!—till this young
man comes and tells me.  Black as ash-buds in March.  And I’ve lived all
my life in the country; more shame for me not to know.  Black: they are
jet-black, madam.”  And he went off again, swinging along to the music of
some rhyme he had got hold of.

When we came back, nothing would serve him but he must read us the poems
he had been speaking of; and Miss Pole encouraged him in his proposal, I
thought, because she wished me to hear his beautiful reading, of which
she had boasted; but she afterwards said it was because she had got to a
difficult part of her crochet, and wanted to count her stitches without
having to talk.  Whatever he had proposed would have been right to Miss
Matty; although she did fall sound asleep within five minutes after he
had begun a long poem, called “Locksley Hall,” and had a comfortable nap,
unobserved, till he ended; when the cessation of his voice wakened her
up, and she said, feeling that something was expected, and that Miss Pole
was counting—

“What a pretty book!”

“Pretty, madam! it’s beautiful!  Pretty, indeed!”

“Oh yes!  I meant beautiful!” said she, fluttered at his disapproval of
her word.  “It is so like that beautiful poem of Dr Johnson’s my sister
used to read—I forget the name of it; what was it, my dear?” turning to
me.

“Which do you mean, ma’am?  What was it about?”

“I don’t remember what it was about, and I’ve quite forgotten what the
name of it was; but it was written by Dr Johnson, and was very beautiful,
and very like what Mr Holbrook has just been reading.”

“I don’t remember it,” said he reflectively.  “But I don’t know Dr
Johnson’s poems well.  I must read them.”

As we were getting into the fly to return, I heard Mr Holbrook say he
should call on the ladies soon, and inquire how they got home; and this
evidently pleased and fluttered Miss Matty at the time he said it; but
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