The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [102]
With regard to the Jellabys my father always avowed a ruthlessness which he was far from practising; he would in fact put himself to considerable inconvenience to accommodate them, but in principle he abhorred any suggestion of discretion or solicitude. It was his belief that no one but himself dealt properly with servants. Two attitudes drove him to equal fury: what he called the “pas-devant tomfoolery” of his childhood—the precept that scandal and the mention of exact sums of money should be hushed in their presence—or the more recent idea that their quarters should be prettily decorated and themselves given opportunity for cultural development. “Jellaby has been with me twenty years,” he would say, “and is fully cognisant of the facts of life. He and Mrs. Jellaby know my income to the nearest shilling and they know the full history of everyone who comes to this house. I pay them abominably and they supplement their wages by cooking the books. Servants prefer it that way. It preserves their independence and self-respect. The Jellabys eat continually, sleep with the windows shut, go to church every Sunday morning and to chapel in the evening, and entertain surreptitiously at my expense whenever I am out of the house. Jellaby’s a teetotaller; Mrs. Jellaby takes the port.” He rang the bell whenever he wanted anything fetched from upstairs and sat as long as he wanted over his wine. “Poor old Armstrong,” he used to say of a fellow Academician, “lives like a Hottentot. He keeps a lot of twittering women like waitresses in a railway station buffet. After the first glass of port they open the dining-room door and stick their heads in. After the second glass they do it again. Then instead of throwing something at them, Armstrong says, ‘I think they want to clear’ and we have to move out.” But he had a warm affection for the Jellabys, and I believe it was largely on Mrs. Jellaby’s account that he allowed himself to be put down for the Academy. They, in their turn, served him faithfully. It would have been a cruel betrayal to deny them a funeral service and I am sure my father had them in mind when he omitted any provision against it in his will. He was an exact man who would not have forgotten a point of that kind. On the other hand, he was a dogmatic atheist of the old-fashioned cast and would not have set anything down which might be construed as apostasy. He had left it to my Uncle Andrew’s tact. No doubt, too, it was part of my uncle’s tact to save me the embarrassment of being present.
II
I sat on my verandah for some time, smoking and considering the situation in its various aspects. There seemed no good reason for a change of plan. My Uncle Andrew would see to everything. The Jellabys would be provided for. Apart from them my father had no obligations. His affairs were always simple and in good order. The counterfoils of his cheques and his own excellent memory were his only account books; he had never owned any investments except the freehold of the house in St. John’s Wood which he had bought with the small capital sum left him by my mother. He lived up to his income and saved nothing. In him the parsimony which I had inherited, took the form of a Gallic repugnance to paying direct taxes or, as he preferred it, to subscribing to “the support of the politicians.” He had, moreover, the conviction that anything he put by would be filched by the radicals. Lloyd George’s ascent to power was the last contemporary event to impress him. Since then he believed, or professed to believe, that public life had become an open conspiracy for the destruction of himself and his class. This class, of which he considered himself the sole survivor, and its ways were for him the object of romantic loyalty; he spoke of