now and the old days is I can’t sell you—and if you were idle enough to make me want to sell you there’s no one would buy such rubbish nowadays.’ Half the trouble is that people these times don’t know how to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don’t want to talk to them.”

122

She led the way down passages to the great kitchen, stonebuilt, clean and full of sunlight. The door was open on to the yard and through an open side door one could get a glimpse of the scullery, the great washing up sink, generations old, and worn with use, and above it the drying dresser.

There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything was done at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many an English country house.

Miss Pinckney objected to “baked meat” and the 123 joints at Vernons were roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a long metal ladle.

123

By the range this morning was seated an old coloured woman engaged in cutting up onions. This was Prue the oldest living thing in Vernons and perhaps in Charleston; she had been kitchen maid before Miss Pinckney was born, then cook, and now, long past work, she was just kept on. Twenty-five years ago she had been offered a pension and a cottage for herself but she refused both. She wanted to die where she was, so she said. So they let her stay, doing odd jobs and bossing the others just as though she were still mistress of the kitchen—as in fact she was. She had become a legend and no one knew her exact age, she was creepin’ close to a hundred, and her memory which carried her back to the slave days was marvellous in its retentiveness.

She had cooked a dinner for Jeff Davis when he was a guest at Vernons, she could still hear the guns of the Civil War, so she said, and the Mascarene family history was her Bible.

She looked down on the Pinckneys as trash beside the Mascarenes, and interlopers, and this attitude and point of view though well known to Miss Pinckney was not in the least resented by her.

But during the last few years this old lady’s intellect had been steadily coming under eclipse; still insisting on doing little jobs in a futile sort of way, silence had been creeping upon her so that she 124 rarely spoke now, and when she did, by chance, her words revealed the fact that her mind was dwelling in the past.

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