Остаток дня / The Remains of the Day - стр. 66

Dr Meredith rose and said:

‘My condolences, Stevens. He suffered a severe stroke. If it’s any comfort to you, he wouldn’t have suffered much pain. There was nothing in the world you could have done to save him.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I’ll be on my way now. You’ll see to arrangements?’

‘Yes, sir. However, if I may, there is a most distinguished gentleman downstairs in need of your attention.’

‘Urgent?’

‘He expressed a keen desire to see you, sir.’

I led Dr Meredith downstairs, showed him into the billiard room, then returned quickly to the smoking room where the atmosphere, if anything, had grown even more convivial.

Of course, it is not for me to suggest that I am worthy of ever being placed alongside the likes of the ‘great’ butlers of our generation, such as Mr Marshall or Mr Lane – though it should be said there are those who, perhaps out of misguided generosity, tend to do just this. Let me make clear that when I say the conference of 1923, and that night in particular, constituted a turning point in my professional development, I am speaking very much in terms of my own more humble standards. Even so, if you consider the pressures contingent on me that night, you may not think I delude myself unduly if I go so far as to suggest that I did perhaps display, in the face of everything, at least in some modest degree a ‘dignity’ worthy of someone like Mr Marshall – or come to that, my father. Indeed, why should I deny it? For all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph.

It would seem there is a whole dimension to the question ‘what is a “great” butler?’ I have hitherto not properly considered. It is, I must say, a rather unsettling experience to realize this about a matter so close to my heart, particularly one I have given much thought to over the years. But it strikes me I may have been a little hasty before in dismissing certain aspects of the Hayes Society’s criteria for membership. I have no wish, let me make clear, to retract any of my ideas on ‘dignity’ and its crucial link with ‘greatness’. But I have been thinking a little more about that other pronouncement made by the Hayes Society – namely the admission that it was a prerequisite for membership of the Society that ‘an applicant be attached to a distinguished household.’ My feeling remains, no less than before, that this represents a piece of unthinking snobbery on the part of the Society. However, it occurs to me that perhaps what one takes objection to is, specifically, the outmoded understanding of what a ‘distinguished household’ is, rather than to the general principle being expressed. Indeed, now that I think further on the matter, I believe it may well be true to say it is a prerequisite of greatness that one ‘be attached to a distinguished household’ – so long as one takes ‘distinguished’ here to have a meaning deeper than that understood by the Hayes Society.