Innocent Birds by T. F. Powys Page B

digest her breakfast, because she bit it the more when the bacon was a little hard with him there. When she was younger Mr. Tucker had proposed marriage to her; and Miss Pettifer had never expected him to take her first answer for a true no; though Mr. Thomas Tucker, not wishing to be troublesome to so modest a lady, left her at that—though sadly.
    Miss Pettifer attended church, as every woman does who believes in established gentility, and whose shoes are not too down at heel. When Miss Pettifer thought of God, she thought of Him as a Father who showed His temper to the wicked, His enemies, in very much the same sort of way as she did herself at breakfast time, and who would be sure to always keep His good things for Miss Pettifer.
    Jesus she believed in too, and she liked to think how much He did—and was always goingto do—for His chosen. She regarded herself as one of those chosen ones, and she very much approved of those words of Jesus—and applied them indeed more closely than He perhaps ever meant them to be, to herself—when He said that He was come amongst men as ‘One who serves.’
    Here upon earth Miss Pettifer knew, much to her continual annoyance—with Annie excepted—that good servants are very scarce. And in heaven, she feared, though the Rev. Haysom thought otherwise, they might be even scarcer.
    And so what could be better and more hopeful to her future well-being than those Christ-like promises and sayings? If the Son of God, of His own free will, came down to earth to be a servant, He must have done so, reasoned Miss Pettifer, ‘because He liked the occupation.’ And what, then, could be more natural and more proper a corollary than that He would like to be a servant in heaven too?
    With a little of her training given to Him free and for love, Miss Pettifer saw no reason why He shouldn’t learn to cook her heavenly rasher as she liked it done best, and also to answer the door to her friends and to wait at table in her mansion above.
    When the lessons were read in church, Miss Pettifer always listened very eagerly for any qualifications other than those words about serving that Jesus might give utterance to in theGospels. And hardly a chapter was read without some act or statement, or low servant-like doing, that showed how well He would do for her place above.
    Besides wishing to be revenged upon the village in which honest Pim lived, she herself going there to live, there was also this servant reason for her moving to Madder. Miss Pettifer had always heard that servants grew up in the country: not quite like radishes, but still growing up into girls, with legs that could be made to run up and down stairs when Miss Pettifer’s bedroom bell rang sharply, and Miss Pettifer’s false teeth were safely lodged in her jaws and ready for remembering Mrs. Crocker.
    How Annie Brine had ever grown plump in Miss Pettifer’s service was a matter that Miss Pettifer herself could never understand. But she decided when Annie married that that sort of wanton fattening—really caused by Annie’s own happy nature—should never happen again in her household; though, after all, it had only helped to prove how nice and wholesome for servants cheap margarine was.
    It was Miss Pettifer’s intention as soon as she came to Madder to catch up from those country fields a girl who could work. Work! That word was always in Miss Pettifer’s mouth: it matched her false teeth, and she would use it upon every possible occasion. ‘If only those girls would work at the laundry,’ she would say,‘my best table-cloth would have come home in one piece instead of in two halves.’
    Miss Pettifer brought in the same word upon many subjects besides the washing. She would use it about tombstones and blackbirds. A country churchyard always called it out, because the old tombstones of forgotten farmers tottered or leaned. ‘The rector should raise them up again,’ Miss Pettifer had once said when she visited Shelton.
    Even a