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Authors: Winston Graham
Tags: General Fiction
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who would have gone in for display had he been able to afford it; but the contrast struck him today with special irony. It was not so much that the Warleggans could afford a carriage with four horses while he could not buy a second horse for the necessary business of life, but that these merchant bankers and iron masters, sprung from illiteracy in two generations, could maintain their full prosperity in the middle of a slump, while worthy men like Blewett and Aukett - and hundreds of others - faced ruin.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SECOND CHRISTENING party went off without a hitch. The miners and small holders and their wives had no mental reserves about enjoying themselves. It was Sawle Feast anyway, and if they had not been invited here most of them would have spent the afternoon in Sawle dancing or playing games or sitting in one of the kiddleys getting drunk.
The first half-hour at Nampara was a little constrained while the guests still remembered they were in superior company; but very soon the shyness wore off.
This was a summer feast in the old style, with no newfangled dainties to embarrass anyone. Demelza and Verity and Prudie had been working on it from early morning. Huge beef pies had been made: repeated layers of pastry and beef laid on top of each other in great dishes with cream poured over. Four green geese and twelve fine capons had been roasted; cakes made as big as millstones. There was bee wine and home-brewed ale and cider and port. Ross had reckoned on five quarts of cider for each man and three for each woman, and he thought that this would just be enough.
After the meal everyone went out on the lawn, where there were races for the women, a Maypole for the children and various games, drop the handkerchief, hunt the slipper, blind man's buff, and a wrestling competition for the men. After some bouts, the final match was between the two Daniel brothers, Mark and Paul, and Mark won, as was expected of him. Demelza presented him with a bright red kerchief. Then, having worked off some of their dinner, they were all invited in again to drink tea and eat heavy cake and saffron cake and ginger breads.
The event of the evening was the visit of the travelling players. In Redruth the week before Ross had seen a tattered handbill nailed on a door, announcing that the Aaron Otway Players would visit the town that week to give a fine repertory of musical and sensational plays both ancient and modern.
He had found the leader of the company in the larger of the two shabby caravans in which they travelled and had engaged him to do a play in the library at Nampara on the following Wednesday. The lumber in the library had been moved to one end, the half-derelict room brushed out and planks put across boxes for the audience to sit on. The stage was defined by a few pieces of curtain cord tied together and stretched across the end of the room.
They performed Eliria , or The Lost Wife , a tragedy, by Johnson Hill, and afterwards a comic play called The Slaughter House . Jud Paynter stood at one side and came forward to snuff the candles when they grew too smoky.
To the country people it had all the thrill and glamour of Drury Lane. There were seven in the company; a mixed bag of semigipsies, ham actors and travelling singers. Aaron Otway, the leader, a fat sharp-nosed man with a glass eye, had all the showmanship of a huckster, and spoke the prologue and the entr 'acte through his nose with tremendous gusto; he also acted the crippled father and the murderer, for which last part he wore a black cape, an eye shade and a heavy black periwig. His time, like his cup later in the evening, was well filled. The heroine's part was played by a blonde woman of forty-five with a goitrous neck and large bejewelled hands; but the best actress of the company was a dark pretty slant-eyed girl of about nineteen, who acted the daughter with an unconvincing demureness and a woman of the streets with notable success.
Ross thought that
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SECOND CHRISTENING party went off without a hitch. The miners and small holders and their wives had no mental reserves about enjoying themselves. It was Sawle Feast anyway, and if they had not been invited here most of them would have spent the afternoon in Sawle dancing or playing games or sitting in one of the kiddleys getting drunk.
The first half-hour at Nampara was a little constrained while the guests still remembered they were in superior company; but very soon the shyness wore off.
This was a summer feast in the old style, with no newfangled dainties to embarrass anyone. Demelza and Verity and Prudie had been working on it from early morning. Huge beef pies had been made: repeated layers of pastry and beef laid on top of each other in great dishes with cream poured over. Four green geese and twelve fine capons had been roasted; cakes made as big as millstones. There was bee wine and home-brewed ale and cider and port. Ross had reckoned on five quarts of cider for each man and three for each woman, and he thought that this would just be enough.
After the meal everyone went out on the lawn, where there were races for the women, a Maypole for the children and various games, drop the handkerchief, hunt the slipper, blind man's buff, and a wrestling competition for the men. After some bouts, the final match was between the two Daniel brothers, Mark and Paul, and Mark won, as was expected of him. Demelza presented him with a bright red kerchief. Then, having worked off some of their dinner, they were all invited in again to drink tea and eat heavy cake and saffron cake and ginger breads.
The event of the evening was the visit of the travelling players. In Redruth the week before Ross had seen a tattered handbill nailed on a door, announcing that the Aaron Otway Players would visit the town that week to give a fine repertory of musical and sensational plays both ancient and modern.
He had found the leader of the company in the larger of the two shabby caravans in which they travelled and had engaged him to do a play in the library at Nampara on the following Wednesday. The lumber in the library had been moved to one end, the half-derelict room brushed out and planks put across boxes for the audience to sit on. The stage was defined by a few pieces of curtain cord tied together and stretched across the end of the room.
They performed Eliria , or The Lost Wife , a tragedy, by Johnson Hill, and afterwards a comic play called The Slaughter House . Jud Paynter stood at one side and came forward to snuff the candles when they grew too smoky.
To the country people it had all the thrill and glamour of Drury Lane. There were seven in the company; a mixed bag of semigipsies, ham actors and travelling singers. Aaron Otway, the leader, a fat sharp-nosed man with a glass eye, had all the showmanship of a huckster, and spoke the prologue and the entr 'acte through his nose with tremendous gusto; he also acted the crippled father and the murderer, for which last part he wore a black cape, an eye shade and a heavy black periwig. His time, like his cup later in the evening, was well filled. The heroine's part was played by a blonde woman of forty-five with a goitrous neck and large bejewelled hands; but the best actress of the company was a dark pretty slant-eyed girl of about nineteen, who acted the daughter with an unconvincing demureness and a woman of the streets with notable success.
Ross thought that
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