“What privileges have you?” said Hugo.
“We haven’t any. We are not ashamed of it. It is not our fault.”
“You may not know what privileges are,” said Miss Starkie. “Everyone does not recognise them.”
“Father has the most,” said Hengist. “Too many for one person.”
“He has proportionate responsibilities.”
“They can be privileges,” said Agnes.
“He has Lavinia again now,” said Leah.
“Yes, I had to let him have her,” said Hugo. “It is to him that she belongs.”
“You exercised a privilege, Mr. Hugo,” said Miss Starkie.
Hugo left them and went downstairs, and on the way met Ninian. The latter had entered the library unheard, and silently withdrawn. His wife and son and daughter were talking by the fire, and Hugo’s chair awaited him.
“The family expects you, Hugo. You were right to feel you belonged to it. I am going upstairs for a while. I will come down when the tea goes in.”
At this hour Ainger bore the tray across the hall, accompanied or rather attended by James, and with the accustomed figure in the background.
“So nothing is to happen. Cook. It seems a house where nothing can.”
“If that is your choice of expression.”
“Well, how would you put it?”
“A Hand has intervened. And a state of things is restored.”
“James!” said Ainger, indicating something on the floor.
“Yes, sir,” said James, as he sprang to retrieve it.
“An improvement, Cook,” said Ainger, turning his thumb towards his assistant.
“A thing that might take place in more than one of us.”
“Is there room for it in you?”
“It is not my habit to refer to myself,” said Cook, who had not broken it.
“Well, there is only dullness in front of us.”
“That may be in ourselves, Ainger. And what is your right to variety? How do you regard yourself?”
“As someone whose claims are passed over.”
“It might be inferred that they are absent in your case.”
“I am not dull,” said James, standing upright with a satisfied expression.
“It is a wise word, James, and may lead to bettering yourself.”
“Till I am like Mr. Ainger,” said James, in deep agreement.
“He is born to be a slave,” said Ainger, who perhaps hardly opposed the tendency.
“To render service,” said Cook, glancing at James.
“I was not born to it,” said the latter, in honest admission. “But I am one who learns.”
“No more trouble with the name, Cook. That is in the past.”
“James is a usual name for a house servant,” said the new owner of it with fluency. “And it saves inconvenience.”
“Saves whom?” said Ainger. “Those who have the least?”
“They should not have any,” said James, in a grave tone.
“So one of them thinks he is having it now,” said Ainger, glancing up the stairs.
“My bell, sir,” said James, leaping towards them.
“Why can’t they keep together and save people’s legs?” said Ainger, caressing one of his own.
“We need not enquire into reasons. They are entitled to them.”
“The master will have tea in his room,” said James, returning equipped with a tray.
“Then you can toil up with it,” said Ainger, as he supplied what was needed.
James held the tray before him, and mounted the stairs with a swift, light tread.
“The new generation cometh,” said Ainger, “and might as well be the old.”
“Well, all things need not pass away.”
“Some of them should. Some people are put too high. They fail in their own sphere. The master and Miss Lavinia; the old master and Mr. Hugo; and the old mistress in a way. Ah, I have heard, and said to myself: ‘How are the mighty fallen!’”
“You need not say it to anyone else. And where is the call to confer with yourself? Everyone is not mighty. We can think of instances.”
“Some more hot water in five minutes,” said James, running noiselessly down the stairs.
“So he feels he is still mighty,” said Ainger, as he took the jug. “The very minutes stipulated!”
A Note on the Author
Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Middlesex in 1884. Compton-Burnett was encouraged by her liberal and unorthodox father, homeopath Dr Burnett, to prepare to read classics at London university (neither Oxford nor Cambridge gave degrees to women at this time). She had dearly loved her father, who died without warning from a heart attack in 1901 when she was sixteen. Her closest brother died three years later, and Ivy Compton-Burnett went on to lose three more of her younger siblings and her mother by the time she was 35, something she could hardly bear to speak about, but constantly explored in her novels.
Compton-Burnett published twenty novels, the first while she was in her twenties, in 1911. However, the first of her works to use her mature and startlingly original style was published when she was forty, in 1925. Compton-Burnett’s fiction deals with domestic situations in large households which, to all intents and purposes, invariably seem Edwardian. The description of human weaknesses and foibles of all sorts pervades her work, and the family that emerges from each of her novels must be seen as dysfunctional in one way or another.
She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1967, two years before her death in 1969.