The Mighty and Their Fall Read online

  “An improvement, Cook,” said Ainger, turning his thumb towards his assistant.

  “A thing that might take place in more than one of us.”

  “Is there room for it in you?”

  “It is not my habit to refer to myself,” said Cook, who had not broken it.

  “Well, there is only dullness in front of us.”

  “That may be in ourselves, Ainger. And what is your right to variety? How do you regard yourself?”

  “As someone whose claims are passed over.”

  “It might be inferred that they are absent in your case.”

  “I am not dull,” said James, standing upright with a satisfied expression.

  “It is a wise word, James, and may lead to bettering yourself.”

  “Till I am like Mr. Ainger,” said James, in deep agreement.

  “He is born to be a slave,” said Ainger, who perhaps hardly opposed the tendency.

  “To render service,” said Cook, glancing at James.

  “I was not born to it,” said the latter, in honest admission. “But I am one who learns.”

  “No more trouble with the name, Cook. That is in the past.”

  “James is a usual name for a house servant,” said the new owner of it with fluency. “And it saves inconvenience.”

  “Saves whom?” said Ainger. “Those who have the least?”

  “They should not have any,” said James, in a grave tone.

  “So one of them thinks he is having it now,” said Ainger, glancing up the stairs.

  “My bell, sir,” said James, leaping towards them.

  “Why can’t they keep together and save people’s legs?” said Ainger, caressing one of his own.

  “We need not enquire into reasons. They are entitled to them.”

  “The master will have tea in his room,” said James, returning equipped with a tray.

  “Then you can toil up with it,” said Ainger, as he supplied what was needed.

  James held the tray before him, and mounted the stairs with a swift, light tread.

  “The new generation cometh,” said Ainger, “and might as well be the old.”

  “Well, all things need not pass away.”

  “Some of them should. Some people are put too high. They fail in their own sphere. The master and Miss Lavinia; the old master and Mr. Hugo; and the old mistress in a way. Ah, I have heard, and said to myself: ‘How are the mighty fallen!’”

  “You need not say it to anyone else. And where is the call to confer with yourself? Everyone is not mighty. We can think of instances.”

  “Some more hot water in five minutes,” said James, running noiselessly down the stairs.

  “So he feels he is still mighty,” said Ainger, as he took the jug. “The very minutes stipulated!”

  A Note on the Author

  Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Middlesex in 1884. Compton-Burnett was encouraged by her liberal and unorthodox father, homeopath Dr Burnett, to prepare to read classics at London university (neither Oxford nor Cambridge gave degrees to women at this time). She had dearly loved her father, who died without warning from a heart attack in 1901 when she was sixteen. Her closest brother died three years later, and Ivy Compton-Burnett went on to lose three more of her younger siblings and her mother by the time she was 35, something she could hardly bear to speak about, but constantly explored in her novels.

  Compton-Burnett published twenty novels, the first while she was in her twenties, in 1911. However, the first of her works to use her mature and startlingly original style was published when she was forty, in 1925. Compton-Burnett’s fiction deals with domestic situations in large households which, to all intents and purposes, invariably seem Edwardian. The description of human weaknesses and foibles of all sorts pervades her work, and the family that emerges from each of her novels must be seen as dysfunctional in one way or another.

  She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1967, two years before her death in 1969.

  Discover books by Ivy Compton-Burnett published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/IvyCompton-Burnett

  A God and His Gifts

  A Family and a Fortune

  A Heritage and its History

  Dolores

  Elders and Betters

  Men and Wives

  Parents and Children

  The Last and the First

  The Present and The Past

  The Mighty and Their Fall

  Two Worlds and Their Ways

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been

  removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain

  references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,

  London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1955 by Victor Gollancz

  Copyright © 1955 Ivy Compton-Burnett

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  eISBN: 9781448211494

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