birds. He lives in two pleasant little rooms in a discreet and quiet
house that lies between Mount Street and Oxford Street, for which he
pays an extremely moderate rent. Exteriorly the street has little to
recommend it, for it is narrow and shabby, and at the back, Number 5,
where his rooms are situated on the first floor, looks out on to mews.
These, a few years ago, would not have been agreeable neighbours just
outside a bedroom window, but Leonard had the sense to see that with the
incoming of motors there would be fewer horses, so that before long the
disadvantage of having mews so close to the head of his bed would be
sensibly diminished. Thus, being a young man of very acute instincts, he
procured a yearly lease of these apartments, with option on his side to
renew, at a very small rental. In this he has reaped a perfectly honest
reward for his foresightedness, since horses nowadays are practically
extinct animals in these mews, and similar sets of rooms on each side of
him are let for twice the sum that he pays for his.
He has no profession whatever except that of a piping bullfinch, for on
attaining the age of twenty-one he came into a property of £400 a year,
and for the next three years lived with his widowed mother in a country
town, declining politely but quite firmly (and he is not without
considerable force of character on a small scale), to take up any
profession whatever. He was in every respect (except that of not working
for his living), an excellent son to Mrs. Bashton, but when his two
elder brothers, one a soldier, the other in the Foreign Office, came to
stop with her, he always made a point of retiring to seaside lodgings
for the period of their stay, since he objected to their attitude
towards him. But on their departure, he always came swiftly back again,
and continued to be a charming inmate of Mrs. Bashton’s house,
entertaining her rather dull friends for her with excellent good humour,
playing bridge at the county club between tea and dinner, and if the
weather was fine and warm, indulging in a round of golf, usually on the
ladies’ links, in the afternoon. But all this time he was aware that he
was in the chrysalis stage, so to speak, and with a view to becoming a
butterfly before very long, made a habit (his only indulgence), of
reading a large quantity of those periodicals known as Society papers,
which chronicle the movements and marriages of the great world. Without
knowing any of these stars by sight, except when he had the opportunity
of seeing their pictures in the papers, he thus amassed a great
quantity of information about their more trivial doings, and advanced
his education. In the same way his assiduity for an hour or two every
day at the bridge-tables in the club, enabled him to play a very decent
game. He never lost his temper at cards (or indeed at anything else),
nor wrangled with his partner, nor did he lose his head and make
impossible declarations. These qualities, in this feverish, ill-tempered
world caused him to be in general request when a card-party was in
prospect, and also kept him in pocket-money. He did not win much, but he
averaged, as his note-book of winnings and losings told him, a steady
pound a week. And as he did not spend much, for he had no expensive
tastes of any sort or kind, he found his cigarettes and his
disbursements at the golf-club were paid for by his gentle winnings.
Subsequently, on his mother’s death, he came into a further £200 a year,
and after careful calculation felt himself able, since now board and
lodgings were no longer supplied him gratis, to move to London, and by
whistling his tunes, and making his bows, manage to procure for himself
a really nice little cage with gilded wires, and plenty of food.
He soon anchored himself in the ‘ampler ether’ of town. He did not take
any steps to cultivate his brother in the Foreign Office or his
brother’s friends, but at once began to establish a position with such
friends of his mother who had town-houses. He was not in any hurry to do
this, and after he had been asked to tea twice, but never to any more
substantial entertainment by one of these, he refused his third similar
invitation, since perpetually going to tea was not a sufficiently
substantial reward for his bowings and pipings. On the fourth occasion
he was asked to lunch, and being put next a most disagreeable cousin of
his hostess’s who had come up to town for the day in order to alter her
will, he made himself so perfectly charming to her that his hostess, in
a spasm of gratitude, asked him to go to the opera with her the week
after. This he very kindly consented to do, and having good eyes and an
excellent memory was able to point out to her from the box several of
the mighty ones of the earth, whose portraits he had seen in
picture-papers. He did not exactly say he knew any of them, but went so
far as hinting as much. ‘There is old Lady Birmingham,’ he said,
remembering what he had read that morning. ‘Look, she has the big tiara
on. She gave a huge party last night with a cotillion. I suppose you
were there, weren’t you? No; I couldn’t go. Such a lot on, isn’t there,
just now?’
His hostess, Mrs. Theobald, one of those industrious climbers who are
for ever mounting the stairs which, like the treadmill, bring them no
higher at all, was rather impressed by this. It was also gratifying to
find that Leonard supposed that she had been to Lady Birmingham’s party,
which she would have given one if not both of her fine eyes to have been
invited to. Of course she said that she hadn’t been able to go either,
which was perfectly true, since she hadn’t been asked, and enquired who
the woman with the amazing emeralds was. There again Leonard was lucky,
for in the same paper he had read that Mrs. Cyrus M. Plush had been at
Lady Birmingham’s party, wearing her prodigious emeralds, five rows of
them and a girdle. It was exceedingly unlikely that anybody else had
five rows and a girdle, as this new-comer into the box opposite
certainly had, and he replied with great glibness:
‘Oh, Mrs. Cyrus Plush. Just look at her emeralds. How convenient if you
were drinking _crème de menthe_ and spilt it. People would only think
that it was another emerald. I don’t think she’s really very
good-looking, do you?’
Everybody has probably experienced the horror of getting one drop of
honey or some other viscous fluid on to the inside of his cuff. Though
there is only just one drop of it, its presence spreads until the whole
arm seems to be sticky with it. In such quiet mysterious sort Leonard
began to spread. Mrs. Theobald, the desire of whose life was to
entertain largely, asked him regularly and constantly to her
dinner-parties, and her guests extended their invitations to him. He
took this set of rooms, of which mention has been made, and with
considerable foresight did them up in the violent colours which were
only just beginning to come into fashion. It was no part of his plan to
indulge his new friends with expensive entertainments, but just now,
strawberries being so cheap, he found it an excellent investment to ask
two or three ladies to tea, and found that four invitations to tea
usually brought him in three invitations to dinner, which was a good
dividend. To employ a smart tailor was another necessary outlay, and he
affected socks of the same colour as his brilliant tie, and carried a
malacca cane with a top of cloudy amber. But soon, always quick to
perceive the things that really interested him, he saw that though he
was getting on quite nicely with women, their husbands and brothers did
not seem to think much of him, and he abandoned the malacca cane, and
took up golf again. Before long he hit a very happy kind of mean, and
made himself the sort of young man who is not out of place either in
town or in the country. He had several invitations to country-houses
during the months of August and September, and when he came back to
settle in London again in October, he got elected to a club of decent
standing, and may be considered launched. His keel no longer grated, so
to speak, on the sand: he was afloat in a shallow sea of acquaintances,
with no sort or kind of friend among them.
Leonard was in no way a snob, and did not, having been launched, want to
voyage the deep seas. He had not the smallest regard for a Marchioness
as such, and his regard was entirely limited to those who would make him
comfortable. Naturally, if a Marchioness asked him to tea, he went, but
he did not go on drinking tea with a Marchioness if that was to be the
limit of her hospitalities. All his respect for money, similarly, was
founded on the basis of what other people’s money would procure for him,
and while he would take a great deal of trouble to secure a footing in
a comfortable house, he would not raise a little finger to be put in a
poky attic in the mansion of a millionaire. But he remained assiduous in
reading paragraphs about those who move in the world which is called
smart, because he knew that other people liked to hear about it, and he
continued to give the impression that he himself frequented exalted
circles. But since he was not himself employed in climbing, he did not
drop his early friends, so long as they put plenty of nice things
through the bars of his cage.
He has no intention at present of marrying, since even to marry a rich
wife would interfere with his career, and he is certainly incapable of
falling in love with a poor one. Indeed he neither falls in love nor
pretends to with anybody, not being of the type that desires amorous, or
even philandering adventure. The motto of his life is ‘Comfort,’ and on
his £600 a year, he finds that warm houses, good cooks, the use of
motor-cars, all the things in fact which supply the wadding of life and
take away its sharp cold angles are well within his reach. He is an
excellent handler of money, has no debts at all, and last season even
managed to have a stall at the opera two nights a week. This again
proved an excellent investment, for he often gave it away in
remunerative quarters, and when he occupied it himself, spent all the
time between the acts in visiting the boxes of his friends, and pointing
them out any celebrity who might happen to be present. Nowadays he knows
them all by sight, and so has less cause to read the Society journals.
The time that he used to give to that he now spends more healthily in
walking swiftly for an hour every morning round the Serpentine, for he
is beginning to exhibit slight signs of stoutness. But he hopes with
this increase of exercise to keep at bay the threatened increase of
weight. When he meets another piping bullfinch, he is dexterous in his
cordiality, and by urging him indefinitely to come to his ‘diggings,’
often secures a definite invitation.
Leonard has now been a full-fledged piping bullfinch for eight years and
has arrived at the age of thirty-four. Since he is not in the least
ashamed of his whole life, there is probably no one in the world who has
less to be ashamed of. Neither the ten commandments, nor the grand text
in Galatians which entails twenty-nine distinct damnations can catch him
tripping. He is uniformly good-natured, he has never set himself to make
his way by telling scandalous stories about other people, he pays his
debts, he is perfectly honest, almost abstemiously sober, and the more
closely you cross-examine him, the more spotlessly free from any sort of
vice does he seem to be. Only, if you stand a little way off, so to
speak, and take a general view of him, he is somehow horrible to look
upon, for it would seem that he has no soul of any kind, either good or
bad. And that, when all is said and done, is a grave defect: there is
nothing there, and it is just that which is the matter with him. All
those delicious dinners feed a non-existent thing; all those nice
clothes clothe it; all his amiable conversation reveals it.
His future is depressing to contemplate, for already he is a man
governed no longer by impulse or reason, but by habit. Habit has become
the dominating influence in his life, and at the age when all men ought
to be learning and possibly preaching, he is only practising his
terrible little doctrine of the piping bullfinch. If he could fall in
love even with a barmaid that would be the best that could happen to his
immortal soul, or if, obeying impulse, he could only develop a craving
for drink or indeed a craving for anything, there would still be some
sign of vitality in the withered kernel of that nut of his spiritual
self which was never cracked. It is always better to go to the good
than to go to the bad, but quite frankly it is better to go to the bad
than to go nowhere at all. But, as it is, it seems as if only the frost
and the fat were going to congeal more closely round his atrophied
heart. He is a prey to that worst craving known to mankind, the craving
for being comfortable. Any disreputable adventure might save him, for it
might teach him that there are such things as desire and longing for no
matter what. Surely to desire fire is better than merely to expect a
hot-water bottle in your bed.
But it is to be feared that even at this early age of thirty-four he is
a hopeless case. His engagement book is filled to repletion, and he
lunches and dines every day with pleasant acquaintances, and during the
slack months of London stays with them in their pleasant houses. He
makes ‘rounds’ of visits; all August and September, all January and all
April he is in the country, quartered on people whom he does not care
about, and who do not care about him. But he is always so pleasant; he
always knows everybody, and when the men come out of the dining-room in
the evening he always sinks into a chair beside a rather unattractive
female, and converses quite amusingly to her till he is summoned to the
bridge table. Then he always says he is being ‘torn away,’ and promises
to tell her the rest of it to-morrow morning. And the bereaved lady
thinks what a nice man Mr. Bashton is. And so he is.
But as years go on he will get a little lazier and a little stouter.
Gradually he will be relegated to the second line, and the young piping
bullfinches who succeed him will in the chirpiness of their early songs
wonder why that ‘old buffer’ still assumes the airs of youth. He will
still appear in the smoking-room with the stories that were once of
contemporaneous happenings, and now seem to the young birds tales of
ancient history. By degrees his country visits will dwindle, for
country-houses are so draughty, and he will sit and snooze in his club,
presenting the back of an odious bald head to the passer-by in St.
James’s Street, as he waits for the familiar crowd to return to London
again after the Christmas holidays. His contemporaries will have tall
sons and daughters growing up round them, and he will be familiarly
known as Uncle Leonard, and yet all the time he will think he is
something of a gay young spark yet, and point out Lady Birmingham’s
daughter and Mrs. Cyrus Plush’s son to his neighbour at the opera.
Then some day, if fate is kind, he will have a fit and die without more
ado. Not a single person in the world will really miss him, for the very
simple reason that there was nobody really there. He will have touched
no heart, he will have nothing and have produced nothing but the little
songs and bows that young bullfinches perform with so much more verve.
Somebody at the club when he no longer takes a sheaf of newspapers under
his arm will say, ‘Poor old Bashton: nice old chap! Getting awfully
doddery, wasn’t he? Are you going to see the new play to-night?
Haymarket, isn’t it?’
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE PRAISERS OF PAST TIME
Ever since Society (with a large S) has been the subject of Gleanings
and Memoirs and Memories and Recollections, the distinguished authors of
these chatty little volumes have been practically unanimous in saying
that in their day things were very different, and such goings-on would
not ever have been allowed then. (They would express it in a statelier
manner, but that is the meaning they seek to convey.) Incidentally,
then, if we may take it that these strictures accurately represent
facts, we may gather that most of those writers must be listened to with
the deference due to the elderly (since otherwise they would not be able
to remember such a very different state of things), and that they are
none of them much pleased with the way in which People (with a big P)
behave now. This appears to be a constant phenomenon, for if we delve
into social history of any epoch we find just the same complaints about
the contemporary world, and we are forced to conclude that, to state the
case broadly, uncles and aunts and grandfathers and grandmothers never
approve of the behaviour of their nephews, nieces, and grandchildren.
At least those who write about them do not, as they take the gloomiest
view of them, and are unanimous in declaring that the country is going
or has gone to the dogs.
Now there is a great deal of indulgence to be granted to these
loquacious pessimists, who are full of a faded sort of spice and are
seldom dull. Indeed, they should be more indulgent to themselves, and
oftener remember that it is but reasonable that they should have lost
the elasticity of youth, and the powers of enjoyment that no doubt were
once theirs, the failure of which leads them to contrast so sadly (and
peevishly) the days that are with the days that are no more. But they in
their time caused a great deal of head-shaking and uplifting of
horror-stricken hands on the part of their elders, and, remembering how
little notice they ever took of those antique mutterings, they would be
kinder to themselves and to others if they put their ink-bottles away,
and looked on at the abandoned revellers who take no great notice of
them as comfortably as possible, instead of sitting up to all hours of
the night composing liverish reflections about the wickedness of the
young men and women of the day. It is a waste of good vitriol to throw
it about like that, and it is really wiser to wipe the hot ink from the
pen before and not after writing, as one of our most industrious social
castigators did not so long ago, ‘There is not an ounce of manliness in
the country.’ For contradiction of so Bedlamitish a sentiment the myriad
graves in France and Flanders bear a testimony that is the more eloquent
for its being unspoken.
The truth is that every age finds a great deal to condemn in the manners
and customs that differentiate the rising generation from its own. But
that does not prove that the elders are right: if it proves anything it
proves that they are too old to take in new ideas, and so had better
confine their remarks to the old ones, on which they are possibly
competent to speak. For in their view, if we take the collective wisdom
of the moralists of Mayfair, the country is not now for the first time
going to the dogs, but has always been going to the dogs. It has never
done anything else, and yet it has not quite arrived at the dogs yet.
But the cats appear to have got it.
There has always been, since man became a gregarious animal, a vague
affair called Society. Nobody knows precisely what it is except that
when the gregariousness of man attained sufficient dimensions it
happened, and the older generation disapproved of it. The more elderly
specimens of cave-men without a shadow of doubt deplored the manner in
which the younger gnawed their mutton-bones, and regretted the days when
all well-regulated cave-boys and cave-girls always wiped their greasy
fingers not on their new woad as they now do, but on their hair. Society
used to be society then, and only the well-mannered could get into it.
And it is in precisely the same tone that the modern moralists croon or
croak their laments beside the waters of the modern Babylon. The present
praisers of past time bewail with an acidity that betokens suppressed
gout that their nephews and nieces have lost all decency in speech, and
actually make public the fact that one or other of them has had
appendicitis. And Uncle cannot bear it! Have appendicitis if you must,
but for the sake of Society pretend that it was a sore throat unusually
low down. At all costs Uncle’s Victorian sensibilities must be spared,
or he will go straight home and embark on Chapter IX. of his
Recollections, called the ‘Moral Depravity of Modern Society.’ But is it
too late for him to remember how once the Queen of Spain caught fire,
and was badly burned because nobody could allude to the awful fact that
she had l-gs? The elderly ladies-in-waiting would have died rather than
have done so, and therefore the Royal L-gs were much injured by the
flame. But perhaps Uncle would like that.... Or again our truculent
admonishers remind us that Society was once a very small and esoteric
body. Nobody but the de Veres really counted, just as if the de Veres
prehistorically came down from heaven with the Ark of Society in their
possession and thereupon started it. But nobody really started it; the
de Veres did not as a matter of fact say, ‘Let there be Society,’ and
there was Society. Once the de Veres themselves were parvenus: when they
began to enter the charmed circle they too were accounted nobodies, and
the ante-de Veres wondered who Those People were. It was but gradually
that the mists of antiquity clothed their august forms, until, as from
the cloud on Sinai, they looked down on the post-de Veres, and mumbled
together at the degeneration of that which had once been _so_ select and
is now so Verabund.
The great central Aunt Sally at which the memorio-maniacs hurl their
darts most viciously is a thing they call Smart Society, or the Smart
Set. For generations they have done so, and the poor Aunt Sally ought to
have been battered to bits long ago, for they throw their missiles
straight at her face from point-blank range. Only, by some process not
rightly understood by her assailants, she appears perfectly impervious
to their attack and proceeds on her godless way as brightly as ever. She
is also, as we shall see, largely an invention of those who so
strenuously denounce her. What started the loquacious pessimist perhaps
was that he found there were a good many nephews and nieces who enjoyed
themselves very tolerably, and began to find him and his tedious stories
about what the best people did in the age of Henry II. or Charles I. or
William IV. (according to the epoch which he remembers best) rather
tiresome, and did not listen to him with due attention. That may or may
not have set him going, but the fact that there exists in London a
quantity of rich people who like to entertain their friends (among whom
the loquacious pessimist would scorn to number himself) fills him with
ungovernable fury, and with a pen that blisters the paper, he describes
how they spend their Sunday.
Breakfast, if we may believe him, goes on from ten till twelve, lunch (a
substantial dinner) is prolonged with liqueurs and cigars till close on
tea-time, when sandwiches and even ‘bleeding woodcocks’ are provided.
Dinner is not till nine, and so late an hour finds everybody hungry
again. Then, forgetting that he has told us that eating goes on the
whole day, he informs us in another attack on poor Aunt Sally that these
same people spend Sunday in riding and driving and going out to tea ten
miles away, and careering about on a ‘troop’ of bicycles. Yet again,
forgetting that here his text is the sinful extravagance of the present
day, he informs us how stately were the good old times, when a rich man
kept as many servants as he could afford and ‘sailed along’ in a coach
and four, instead of going (as he does in these shambling, undignified
days) in the twopenny tube.... After all, the economy effected by using
the twopenny tube instead of the coach and four would enable you to buy
an occasional ‘bleeding woodcock’ for your friends, and yet not be so
extravagant as your good, stately, simple old grandfather. Or, when they
speak of modern shooting-parties these chroniclers allude to the mounds
of ‘crushed pheasants’ that are subsequently sent to be sold at the
poulterer’s, and speak of the hand-reared birds that almost perch on the
barrels of their murderers. It would be interesting to place one of
these moralists at a modern pheasant-shoot, when the birds rocket above
the tree-tops, and see how large a mound of crushed pheasants he mowed
down, and how many hand-reared birds came and sat on his gun before he
slaughtered them. Such descriptions as these are rank nonsense, the work
of outsiders who, while betraying a desolate ignorance of what they are
talking about, betray also, in ignorance, an unamiable desire to scold
somebody.