Pomona's Travels A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former Handmaiden — A Reader’s Guide

Pomona was seized with the spirit of emulation, and determined as far as was possible to make the child's education an advantage to herself. Some of the books used by the little girl at school were carefully and earnestly studied by her mother, and as Jonas joined with hearty good-will in the labors and pleasures of this system of domestic study, the family standard of education was considerably raised. In the quick-witted and observant Pomona the improvement showed itself principally in her methods of expression, and although she could not be called at the time of these travels an educated woman, she was by no means an ignorant one.

When the daughter was old enough she was allowed to accept an invitation from her grandmother to spend the summer in the country, and Pomona determined that it was the duty of herself and husband to avail themselves of this opportunity for foreign travel.

Accordingly, one fine spring morning, Pomona, still a young woman, and Jonas, not many years older, but imbued with a semi-pathetic complaisance beyond his years, embarked for England and Scotland, to which countries it was determined to limit their travels. The letters which follow were written in consequence of the earnest desire of Euphemia to have a full account of the travels and foreign impressions of her former handmaiden. Pruned of dates, addresses, signatures, and of many personal and friendly allusions, these letters are here presented as Pomona wrote them to Euphemia.

The first thing Jone said to me when I told him I was going to write about what I saw and heard was that I must be careful of two things. In the first place, I must not write a lot of stuff that everybody ought to be expected to know, especially people who have travelled themselves; and in the second place, I must not send you my green opinions, but must wait until they were seasoned, so that I can see what they are good for before I send them.

"But if I do that," said I, "I will get tired of them long before they are seasoned, and they will be like a bundle of old sticks that I wouldn't offer to anybody." Jone laughed at that, and said I might as well send them along green, for, after all, I wasn't the kind of a person to keep things until they were seasoned, to see if I liked them. "That's true," said I, "there's a great many things, such as husbands and apples, that I like a good deal better fresh than dry. Is that all the advice you've got to give?"

"For the present," said he; "but I dare say I shall have a good deal more as we go along."

"All right," said I, "but be careful you don't give me any of it green. Advice is like gooseberries, that's got to be soft and ripe, or else well cooked and sugared, before they're fit to take into anybody's stomach."

Jone was standing at the window of our sitting-room when I said this, looking out into the street. As soon as we got to London we took lodgings in a little street running out of the Strand, for we both want to be in the middle of things as long as we are in this conglomerate town, as Jone calls it. He says, and I think he is about right, that it is made up of half a dozen large cities, ten or twelve towns, at least fifty villages, more than a hundred little settlements, or hamlets, as they call them here, and about a thousand country houses scattered along around the edges; and over and above all these are the inhabitants of a large province, which, there being no province to put them into, are crammed into all the cracks and crevices so as to fill up the town and pack it solid.

When we was in London before, with you and your husband, madam, and we lost my baby in Kensington Gardens, we lived, you know, in a peaceful, quiet street by a square or crescent, where about half the inhabitants were pervaded with the solemnities of the past and the other half bowed down by the dolefulness of the present, and no way of getting anywhere except by descending into a movable tomb, which is what I always think of when we go anywhere in the underground railway. But here we can walk to lots of things we want to see, and if there was nothing else to keep us lively the fear of being run over would do it, you may be sure.

But, after all, Jone and me didn't come here to London just to see the town. We have ideas far ahead of that. When we was in London before I saw pretty nearly all the sights, for when I've got work like that to do I don't let the grass grow under my feet, and what we want to do on this trip is to see the country part of England and Scotland. And in order to see English country life just as it is, we both agreed that the best thing to do was to take a little house in the country and live there a while; and I'll say here that this is the only plan of the whole journey that Jone gets real enthusiastic about, for he is a domestic man, as you well know, and if anything swells his veins with fervent rapture it is the idea of living in some one place continuous, even if it is only for a month.

As we wanted a house in the country we came to London to get it, for London is the place to get everything. Our landlady advised us, when we told her what we wanted, to try and get a vicarage in some little village, because, she said, there are always lots of vicars who want to go away for a month in the summer, and they can't do it unless they rent their houses while they are gone. And in fact, some of them, she said, got so little salary for the whole year, and so much rent for their vicarages while they are gone, that they often can't afford to stay in places unless they go away.

So we answered some advertisements, and there was no lack of them in the papers, and three agents came to see us, but we did not seem to have any luck. Each of them had a house to let which ought to have suited us, according to their descriptions, and although we found the prices a good deal higher than we expected, Jone said he wasn't going to be stopped by that, because it was only for a little while and for the sake of experience--and experience, as all the poets, and a good many of the prose writers besides, tell us, is always dear. But after the agents went away, saying they would communicate with us in the morning, we never heard anything more from them, and we had to begin all over again. There was something the matter, Jone and I both agreed on that, but we didn't know what it was. But I waked up in the night and thought about this thing for a whole hour, and in the morning I had an idea.

"Jone," said I, when we was eating breakfast, "it's as plain as A B C that those agents don't want us for tenants, and it isn't because they think we are not to be trusted, for we'd have to pay in advance, and so their money's safe; it is something else, and I think I know what it is. These London men are very sharp, and used to sizing and sorting all kinds of people as if they was potatoes being got ready for market, and they have seen that we are not what they call over here gentlefolks."

"No lordly airs, eh?" said Jone.

"Oh, I don't mean that," I answered him back; "lordly airs don't go into parsonages, and I don't mean either that they see from our looks or manners that you used to drive horses and milk cows and work in the garden, and that I used to cook and scrub and was maid-of-all-work on a canal-boat; but they do see that we are not the kind of people who are in the habit, in this country, at least, of spending their evenings in the best parlors of vicarages."

"Do you suppose," said Jone, "that they think a vicar's kitchen would suit us better?"

"No," said I, "they wouldn't put us in a vicarage at all; there wouldn't be no place there that would not be either too high or too low for us. It's my opinion that what they think we belong in is a lordly house, where you'd shine most as head butler or a steward, while I'd be the housekeeper or a leading lady's maid."

"By George!" said Jone, getting up from the table, "if any of those fellows would favor me with an opinion like that I'd break his head."

"You'd have a lot of heads to break," said I, "if you went through this country asking for opinions on the subject. It's all very well for us to remember that we've got a house of our own as good as most rectors have over here, and money enough to hire a minor canon, if we needed one in the house; but the people over here don't know that, and it wouldn't make much difference if they did, for it wouldn't matter how nice we lived or what we had so long as they knew we was retired servants."

At this Jone just blazed up and rammed his hands into his pockets and spread his feet wide upon the floor. "Pomona," said he, "I don't mind it in you, but if anybody else was to call me a retired servant I'd--"

"Hold up, Jone," said I, "don't waste good, wholesome anger." Now, I tell you, madam, it really did me good to see Jone blaze up and get red in the face, and I am sure that if he'd get his blood boiling oftener it would be a good thing for his dyspeptic tendencies and what little malaria may be left in his system. "It won't do any good to flare up here," I went on to say to him; "fact's fact, and we was servants, and good ones, too, though I say it myself, and the trouble is we haven't got into the way of altogether forgetting it, or, at least, acting as if we had forgotten it."

Jone sat down on a chair. "It might help matters a little," he said, "if I knew what you was driving at."

"I mean just this," said I, "as long as we are as anxious not to give trouble, or as careful of people's feelings, as good-mannered to servants, and as polite and good-natured to everybody we have anything to do with, as we both have been since we came here, and as it is our nature to be, I am proud to say, we're bound to be set down, at least by the general run of people over here, as belonging to the pick of the nobility and gentry, or as well-bred servants. It's only those two classes that act as we do, and anybody can see we are not special nobles and gents. Now, if we want to be reckoned anywhere in between these two we've got to change our manners."

"Will you kindly mention just how?" said Jone.

"Yes," said I, "I will. In the first place, we've got to act as if we had always been waited on and had never been satisfied with the way it was done; we've got to let people think that we think we are a good deal better than they are, and what they think about it doesn't make the least difference; and then again we've got to live in better quarters than these, and whatever they may be we must make people think that we don't think they are quite good enough for us. If we do all that, agents may be willing to let us vicarages."

"It strikes me," said Jone, "that these quarters are good enough for us. I'm comfortable." And then he went on to say, madam, that when you and your husband was in London you was well satisfied with just such lodgings.

"That's all very well," I said, "for they never moved in the lower paths of society, and so they didn't have to make any change, but just went along as they had been used to go. But if we want to make people believe we belong to that class I should choose, if I had my pick out of English social varieties, we've got to bounce about as much above it as we were born below it, so that we can strike somewhere near the proper average."

"And what variety would you pick out, I'd like to know?" said Jone, just a little red in the face, and looking as if I had told him he didn't know timothy hay from oat straw.

"Well," said I, "it is not easy to put it to you exactly, but it's a sort of a cross between a prosperous farmer without children and a poor country gentleman with two sons at college and one in the British army, and no money to pay their debts with."

"That last is not to my liking," said Jone.

"But the farmer part of the cross would make it all right," I said to him, "and it strikes me that a mixture like that would just suit us while we are staying over here. Now, if you will try to think of yourself as part rich farmer and part poor gentleman, I'll consider myself the wife of the combination, and I am sure we will get along better. We didn't come over here to be looked upon as if we was the bottom of a pie dish and charged as if we was the upper crust. I'm in favor of paying a little more money and getting a lot more respectfulness, and the way to begin is to give up these lodgings and go to a hotel such as the upper middlers stop at. From what I've heard, the Babylon Hotel is the one for us while we are in London. Nobody will suspect that any of the people at that hotel are retired servants."

This hit Jone hard, as I knew it would, and he jumped up, made three steps across the room, and rang the bell so that the people across the street must have heard it, and up came the boy in green jacket and buttons, with about every other button missing, and I never knew him to come up so quick before.

"Boy," said Jone to him, as if he was hollering to a stubborn ox, "go order me a four-in-hand."

But this letter is so long I must stop for the present.

When Jone gave the remarkable order mentioned in my last letter I did not correct him, for I wouldn't do that before servants without giving him a chance to do it himself; but before either of us could say another word the boy was gone.

"Mercy on us," I said, "what a stupid blunder! You meant four-wheeler."

"Of course I did," he said; "I was a little mad and got things mixed, but I expect the fellow understood what I meant."

"You ought to have called a hansom any way," I said, "for they are a lot more stylish to go to a hotel in than in a four-wheeler."

"If there was six-wheelers I would have ordered one," said he. "I don't want anybody to have more wheels than we have."

At this moment the landlady came into the room with a sarcastic glimmer on her underdone visage, and, says she, "I suppose you don't understand about the vehicles we have in London. The four-in-hand is what the quality and coach people use when--" As I looked at Jone I saw his legs tremble, and I know what that means. If I was a wanderin' dog and saw Jone's legs tremble, the only thoughts that would fill my soul would be such as cluster around "Home, Sweet Home." Jone was too much riled by the woman's manner to be willing to let her think he had made a mistake, and he stopped her short. "Look here," he said to her, "I don't ask you to come here to tell me anything about vehicles. When I order any sort of a trap I want it." When I heard Jone say trap my soul lifted itself and I knew there was hope for us. The stiffness melted right out of the landlady, and she began to look soft and gummy.

"If you want to take a drive in a four-in-hand coach, sir," she said, "there's two or three of them starts every morning from Trafalgar Square, and it's not too late now, sir, if you go over there immediate."

"Go?" said Jone, throwing himself into a chair, "I said, order one to come. Where I live that sort of vehicle comes to the door for its passengers."

The woman looked at Jone with a venerative uplifting of her eyebrows. "I can't say, sir, that a coach will come, but I'll send the boy. They go to Dorking, and Seven Oaks, and Virginia Water--"

"I want to go to Virginia Water," said Jone, as quick as lightning.

"Now, then," said I, when the woman had gone, "what are you going to do if the coach comes?"

"Go to Virginia Water in it," said Jone, "and when we come back we can go to the hotel. I made a mistake, but I've got to stand by it or be called a greenhorn."

I was in hopes the four-in-hand wouldn't come, but in less than ten minutes there drove up to our door a four-horse coach which, not having half enough passengers, was glad to come such a little ways to get some more. There was a man in a high hat and red coat, who was blowing a horn as the thing came around the corner, and just as I was looking into the coach and thinking we'd have it all to ourselves, for there was nobody in it, he put a ladder up against the top, and says he, touching his hat, "There's a seat for you, madam, right next the coachman, and one just behind for the gentleman. 'Tain't often that, on a fine morning like this, such seats as them is left vacant on account of a sudden case of croup in a baronet's family."

I looked at the ladder and I looked at that top front seat, and I tell you, madam, I trembled in every pore, but I remembered then that all the respectable seats was on top, and the farther front the nobbier, and as there was a young woman sitting already on the box-seat, I made up my mind that if she could sit there I could, and that I wasn't going to let Jone or anybody else see that I was frightened by style and fashion, though confronted by it so sudden and unexpected. So up that ladder I went quick enough, having had practice in hay-mows, and sat myself down between the young woman and the coachman, and when Jone had tucked himself in behind me the horner blew his horn and away we went.

I tell you, madam, that box-seat was a queer box for me. I felt as though I was sitting on the eaves of a roof with a herd of horses cavoorting under my feet. I never had a bird's-eye view of horses before. Looking down on their squirming bodies, with the coachman almost standing on his tiptoes driving them, was so different from Jone's buggy and our tall gray horse, which in general we look up to, that for a good while I paid no attention to anything but the danger of falling out on top of them. But having made sure that Jone was holding on to my dress from behind, I began to take an interest in the things around me.