In real life, we never know when we are in our last season or when anyone else is.  The Downton writing crew, however, knows that they are facing the end.  It is mere weeks away.  Are we going to end on a note of gloom or one of hope?  The battle is going to be just as fierce as anything that Isobel and Violet have gotten on.  The forces of gloom seem to have a strategic advantage, but hope manages to get in a few good licks.

As Exhibit A on the hope side of the equation, we have Anna and Bates, but their version of hope is so tiring that they actually make gloom look good.  Here is how I expect one of their early morning conversations might go when no particular tragedy is looming on the horizon:

Bates: “Good morning, my darling.”

Anna: “How can it be a good morning when I am so unworthy of you?”

Bates: “You could never be unworthy of me or of anyone.  You are the most perfect angel and my only hope is to provide you with a fraction of the happiness that you have provided me.”

Anna: “You are so kind to pretend that you are happy when I know how disappointed you must be.”

Bates: “My darling, is that smoke coming from the toaster?”

I expect that in later years, the Bateses will find conversation on any topic to be exhausting.  The lightest subject leads the two of them almost immediately into narrow channels of self-recrimination, adoration, and devotion.  It will soon become impossible for either of them to get anything done if the other speaks.  I don’t think the Hallmark card people were selling in England in 1925, but when they get there, I picture the Bateses filling their back room – the room that, alas, might once have served as a nursery – with cartons of Hallmark cards.  If either of them starts a conversation on any topic, the other one hands over a card and that’s an end to it.

The ray of hope that finds its way through the gloom surrounding Mr. and Mrs. Bates is generated by the good news that the case against Anna may finally be closed, pending collection of perhaps just one more piece of evidence.  I thought the whole case had been dropped at the end of last year, but it was not so.  The case against Anna remains alive even after a different victim of Mr. Green has confessed to killing him.  The legal system that sent Bates to prison for a crime he didn’t commit and that has held Anna in the grip of its suspicion for some three story years, suddenly turns skeptical when the true killer shows up and confesses.  “Sorry, Miss.  We need more than your word.  We’d have to double the size of our prisons if we started convicting murderers based on nothing more than a confession.”

Not to worry.  An eyewitness appears and supplies the police with the missing piece of the puzzle.  She did not witness the crime, but she saw Mr. Green and his self-confessed killer together in a pub.  That’s good enough for the police this week.  And it’s a good enough excuse to break out the gramophone and the Veuve Clicquot – not properly chilled, but cold enough for an impromptu celebration with the staff – to chase the blues away from Downton Abbey, if only for one evening.[1]

But the gloom keeps pressing in.  The Abbey’s finances are beginning to pinch.  Many great houses must have faced the same dilemma.  They needed lots of staff to run a place that large, but the wage necessary to attract the required number had grown beyond the owner’s means, unless, like Lord Sinderby or the newly rich Mr. Henderson down the road, the owner had an income apart from the estate itself.  (How wages went up must remain a mystery.  Britain had no minimum wage law at the time.  Could wages rise on their own, without intervention from the state?  That’s a puzzle.)

So far, Robert has managed staff reductions through attrition, not replacing a footman here or an under-house-parlor maid there when they move on to other work.  Carson points out that this can’t go on.  He is practically down to his last hall boy.  On the other hand, the estate sale down the road points out too clearly what lies ahead for a landed family that doesn’t husband its resources.

The Crawleys could move to a more modest house and still live better than all but a handful of landed families, but it would mean a downgrade to their social standing.  And it would mean a downgrade to their self-respect because they would have to lay off so many honest hardworking people who had come to rely on them, and who would now have to find their own way.

The way the board divided over the future of the hospital was telling.  Violet and Dr. Clarkson oppose joining the Royal Yorkshire Hospital for purely parochial reasons — it would diminish their positions.  Violet likes ruling her local roost and Clarkson does not like professional interference.  Lord Merton likes to be on the same side as Isobel, so he sides with her after making sure that he understands what her position is.  Isobel is not to be bought off so easily.  She wants loyal, heartfelt support or none at all.  So far, her only ally is Cora.  This will be a bitter fight.  Isobel sees a clear opportunity to improve the work of an important local charitable organization.  Violet intends to defend her turf.  Neither of them will be easily deterred from her goal.

Several other characters showed steel resolution.  The least successful of these was Daisy, who may have learned her lessons in social engineering from Miss Bunting only too well.  We recall that the Bunting method is to express outrage and then develop a plan.  Daisy streamlines this process even further by eliminating the second step.  We can imagine an English landlord, newly installed in his Yorkshire residence, who likes a tenant family with a bit of spunk and immediately reinstalls dear Mr. Mason at a reduced rent as soon as Daisy has finished her oration.  Unfortunately, Mr. Henderson is not a landlord of this type.  Instead, he states in the clearest terms that if he should happen to decide to let a tenant or two back onto the estate, Mr. Mason will not be among them.  So, gloom appears to be winning the day in the Mason family.  However, I see a potential ray of hope.  Perhaps Mr. Mason will move to Downton Abbey and assist Mary in managing the agricultural end of the business.

Mary is getting the job of business agent for the Abbey because she demonstrated resolution of her own, facing blackmail in her case rather than eviction.  It’s interesting how a Yorkshire accent can emphasize a person’s basic character.  A kind soul such as Mrs. Patmore sounds even more kind and down to earth when she turns every second vowel into a double o.  Daisy’s passion for justice burns even hotter and Ms. Bevan’s contempt for her betters becomes even more toxic when expressed through the long, broad vowels of a Yorkshire tongue.[2]

Ms. Bevan is one of those nasty pieces of work that wander through this story from time to time.  The thousand pounds she wants for her silence would have been a spectacular sum at the time.  I found a source that indicates that in 1925 a fireman earned 15 pounds a month, while a bricklayer might earn 8 pounds a week.  A thousand pounds would have been several years pay for either of them.  Hats off to Mary for telling Bevan to go do her worst and take a hike.

The strength of her resolve does not have to be tested because Robert turns out to be even steelier, and a master negotiator to boot.  He gets Bevan down to a mere fifty pounds and to get even that she has to sign a statement confessing to blackmail, which will ensure that she goes to jail if she ever breathes a word of the scandal on which she was trading.  Mary is in the clear, and her father has come to see her as a force (what with riding astride her horse, arranging pre-marital assignations in York hotels, and staring down would-be blackmailers) who can take on the management of the estate and, if need be, a lot more.

I thought that Edith found herself in the most interesting situation of all the Crawleys.  When you consider that she was never actually engaged to Michael Gregson – he couldn’t undertake to marry her while he had a wife still living – and that Michael could not have known that Edith was carrying their child, she seems to have done quite well out of the relationship.  He left her his publishing business and his Bloomsbury apartment.  I’ve raised the point before, but you have to wonder what Mrs. Gregson was left with.  She is a patient in a mental hospital and is going to require skilled care for the rest of her life.  Yet none of her legal representatives seems to mind at all that Mr. Gregson has left a string of valuable assets to a woman who – how does one put this delicately? – solemnized her relationship with him through one overnight visit to his flat.  It’s another of these little curiosities in the plotting that don’t make a lot of sense.

Apart from that, Edith has some terrific alternatives to choose from.  She can pursue a career in editing, publishing, and writing in London, using her fabulous Bloomsbury flat as a base of operations.  She can install Marigold there, or she can leave Marigold to mature into a country lass in Yorkshire, visiting on the weekends and on holidays.  Or, she can pursue the life she was born into as a member of the Yorkshire gentry.  If she chooses not to run the publishing business, she will still have the income from it and if she chooses not to live in the flat, she can have the income from that.  She appears to have some family money to boot, so her finances will be secure for years to come.  We all know that the Great Depression is looming up ahead, and may ruin the entire family, but at the rate we are going the story will be long over before that arrives.  We needn’t worry about it now.  I look forward to learning which path Edith chooses.

There was a fair amount of big-time name dropping in this episode.  Edith tells Rosamunde that she met Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey in the flat, when it was Michael’s.  Rosamunde had just commented that she expected to see members of the “Bloomsbury Set” sitting in the corner.  Woolf and Strachey were both in it.

The final name to be dropped was that of Oliver Cromwell, who had told his portraitist that he wanted to be shown “warts and all”.  That’s how Mrs. Hughes offers herself to Mr. Carson, who gladly accepts, good fellow that he is, after the most awkward sequence of oblique sexual references this show has produced since Thomas Barrow’s experiments with a hypodermic needle last season.  Is English richer in euphemisms than other languages?  When a cook, and a housekeeper, and a butler discuss the groom’s amorous intentions in Spain, or Germany, or Russia – I refuse to believe that the subject would even be thought of in France or Italy – can their language bear the strain of so much indirection?  Let us wish Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes all happiness, and for my money, if they care to shield their private affairs from the eyes and ears of the audience from this point forward, I for one will not object.

A final note about the “hunting” scene.  I count this the second such scene in the series.  The first one came in one of the early seasons, Season One or Two I think, and contained a bit of self-referential humor that Mr. Fellowes seems to enjoy.  The 19^th century novelist Anthony Trollope was an avid fox hunter and included an extended hunting scene in one of his “Palliser” novels.  (There may be lots of others in other Trollope novels.  I don’t know.)  When Downton had its first hunting scene years ago, one of the characters said that he felt like he had just walked into a Trollope novel (or something along those lines).  Now it’s 1925 and we have another hunting scene.  However, this time the hunting party is much reduced.  There couldn’t have been more than ten riders, while I recall a near mob of horses in the earlier scene.  Perhaps this is further evidence of the slow decline in the fortunes of the Crawley family.[3]

I look forward to the continuation of this last season.

 

[1] Robert’s toast to British justice is another example of his abundant self-satisfaction, although as I think about it, if you were accused in 1925 of a crime you didn’t commit, your chances of acquittal were probably better in Britain than almost anywhere else.

[2] A friend who grew up in Sheffield told me that a Yorkshireman is very much like a Scotsman, but lacks the Scots sense of generosity.

[3] When Ernest Hemingway was asked how he went broke, he is supposed to have said, “Slowly at first.  Then all at once.”