“I think it would be a wonderful idea, Mrs. Purvis. What do you have in mind?”
“Well, sir,” she paused briefly again, reflecting quietly, “we might git in a bit of tongue, you know. A bit of cold tongue is very tasty. I should think you’d find it most welcome in the middle of the night. Or a bit of ‘am. Then, sir, you would ‘ave your bread and butter and your mustard pickle, and I could even git in a jar of chutney, if youlike, and you know ‘ow to make tea yourself, don’t you, sir?”
“Of course. It’s a good idea. By all means, get in tongue or ham and chutney. Is that all, now?”
“Well, sir,” she reflected a moment longer, went to the buffet sideboard, opened it, and looked in. “I was just wonderin’ ‘ow you are for beer, sir…Ah-h,” she exclaimed, nodding with satisfaction, “it is gittin’ a bit low, sir. You ‘ave only two bottles left. Shall we lay in a ‘arf-dozen bottles?”
“Yes. No—wait a minute. Better make it a dozen, then you won’t have to be running out to order it again so soon.”
“Very good, sir.” Again the formal rising intonation, this time, he thought, with approval. “And what do you prefer, the Worthington or Bass?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Which is better?”
“They’re both first-rate, sir. Some people prefer one kind and some another. The Worthington, perhaps is a trifle lighter, but you won’t go wrong, sir, whichever one you order.”
“All right, then, I’ll tell you what you do—suppose you order half a dozen of each.”
“Very good, sir.” She turned to go.
“Thank you, Mrs. Purvis.”
“‘Kew,” she said, most formally and distantly now, and went out quietly, closing the door gently but very firmly after her.
As the weeks went by, her excessive formality towards George began to thaw out and drop away. She became more and more free in communicating to him whatever was on her mind. Not that she ever forgot her “place”. Quite the contrary. But, while always maintaining the instinctive manner of an English servant towards her master, she also became increasingly assiduous to her slavish attentions, until at last one would almost have thought that her duty towards him was her very life.
Her devotion, however, was not quite as whole and absolute as it appeared to be. For three or four hours of the day she had another master, who shared with George her service and her expense. This was the extraordinary little man who kept doctor’s offices on the floor below. In truth, therefore, Mrs. Purvis had a divided loyalty, and yet, in a curious way, she also managed to convey to each of her employers a sense that her whole-souled obligation belonged to him, and to him alone.
The little doctor was a Russian of the old regime, who had been a physician at the court of the Czar, and had accumulated a large fortune, which of course had been confiscated when he fled the country during the revolution. Penniless, he had come to England, and had made another fortune by a practice about which Mrs. Purvis, with a kind of haughty aloofness mixed with loyalty, had invented a soothing little fiction, but concerning which the doctor himself became in time quite candid. From one o’clock in the afternoon until four or thereabouts, the door-bell tinkled almost constantly, and Mrs. Purvis was kept busy padding up and down the narrow stairs, admitting or ushering out an incessant stream of patients.
George had not been long in the place before he made a surprising discovery concerning this thriving practice. He and the little doctor had the same telephone, by a plug-in arrangement which permitted each to use the instrument in his own quarters while sharing the same number and the same bill. Sometimes the telephone would ring at night, after the doctor had departed for his home in Surrey, and George observed that the callers were always women. They would demand the doctor in voices that varied from accents of desperate entreaty to tones that fairly crooned with voluptuous and sensual complaint. Where was the doctor? When George informed them that he was at his home, some twenty miles away, they would moan that it couldn’t be true, that it wasn’t possible, that fate could assuredly not play them so cruel a joke. When told that it was indeed so, they would then sometimes suggest that perhaps George himself could render them some assistance on his own account. To these requests he was forced to reply, often with reluctance, that he was not a physician, and that they would have to seek help in some other quarter.