§ 7
It was old Mrs. Verrall.
I wonder if I can convey the effect of her to you. She was a little old
lady with extraordinarily flaxen hair, her weak aquiline features were
pursed up into an assumption of dignity, and she was richly dressed. I
would like to underline that “richly dressed,” or have the words
printed in florid old English or Gothic lettering. No one on earth is
now quite so richly dressed as she was, no one old or young indulges in
so quiet and yet so profound a sumptuosity. But you must not imagine
any extravagance of outline or any beauty or richness of color. The
predominant colors were black and fur browns, and the effect of
richness was due entirely to the extreme costliness of the materials
employed. She affected silk brocades with rich and elaborate patterns,
priceless black lace over creamy or purple satin, intricate trimmings
through which threads and bands of velvet wriggled, and in the winter
rare furs. Her gloves fitted exquisitely, and ostentatiously simple
chains of fine gold and pearls, and a great number of bracelets, laced
about her little person. One was forced to feel that the slightest
article she wore cost more than all the wardrobe of a dozen girls like
Nettie; her bonnet affected the simplicity that is beyond rubies.
Richness, that is the first quality about this old lady that I would
like to convey to you, and the second was cleanliness. You felt that
old Mrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean. If you had boiled my poor dear
old mother in soda for a month you couldn’t have got her so clean as
Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was. And pervading all her
presence shone her third great quality, her manifest confidence in the
respectful subordination of the world.
She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without any loss
of her ultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that she had come to
interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had bridged the gulf
between their families.
And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far as
my younger readers are concerned. You who know only the world that
followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling
inconceivable. Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealed
for other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the things
that no one wrote about because every one understood and every one had
taken up an attitude. There were in England and America, and indeed
throughout the world, two great informal divisions of human beings—the
Secure and the Insecure. There was not and never had been in either
country a nobility—it was and remains a common error that the British
peers were noble—neither in law nor custom were there noble families,
and we altogether lacked the edification one found in Russia, for
example, of a poor nobility. A peerage was an hereditary possession
that, like the family land, concerned only the eldest sons of the
house; it radiated no luster of _noblesse oblige_. The rest of the
world were in law and practice common—and all America was common. But
through the private ownership of land that had resulted from the
neglect of feudal obligations in Britain and the utter want of
political foresight in the Americas, large masses of property had
become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, to whom it
was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, and
who were held together not by any tradition of service and nobility but
by the natural sympathy of common interests and a common large scale of
living. It was a class without any very definite boundaries; vigorous
individualities, by methods for the most part violent and questionable,
were constantly thrusting themselves from insecurity to security, and
the sons and daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by
wild extravagance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety
and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man. The rest of the
population was landless and, except by working directly or indirectly
for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such was the
shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the stifled egotism
of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very few indeed of the
Secure could be found to doubt that this was the natural and only
conceivable order of the world.
It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I am
displaying, and I hope that I am conveying something of its hopeless
bitterness to you, but you must not imagine that the Secure lived lives
of paradisiacal happiness. The pit of insecurity below them made itself
felt, even though it was not comprehended. Life about them was ugly;
the sight of ugly and mean houses, of ill-dressed people, the vulgar
appeals of the dealers in popular commodities, were not to be escaped.
There was below the threshold of their minds an uneasiness; they not
only did not think clearly about social economy but they displayed an
instinctive disinclination to think. Their security was not so perfect
that they had not a dread of falling towards the pit, they were always
lashing themselves by new ropes, their cultivation of “connexions,” of
interests, their desire to confirm and improve their positions, was a
constant ignoble preoccupation. You must read Thackeray to get the full
flavor of their lives. Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class
distinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants. Read
their surviving books. Each generation bewails the decay of that
“fidelity” of servants, no generation ever saw. A world that is squalid
in one corner is squalid altogether, but that they never understood.
They believed there was not enough of anything to go round, they
believed that this was the intention of God and an incurable condition
of life, and they held passionately and with a sense of right to their
disproportionate share. They maintained a common intercourse as
“Society” of all who were practically secure, and their choice of that
word is exhaustively eloquent of the quality of their philosophy. But,
if you can master these alien ideas upon which the old system rested,
just in the same measure will you understand the horror these people
had for marriages with the Insecure. In the case of their girls and
women it was extraordinarily rare, and in the case of either sex it was
regarded as a disastrous social crime. Anything was better than that.
You are probably aware of the hideous fate that was only too probably
the lot, during those last dark days, of every girl of the insecure
classes who loved and gave way to the impulse of self-abandonment
without marriage, and so you will understand the peculiar situation of
Nettie with young Verrall. One or other had to suffer. And as they were
both in a state of great emotional exaltation and capable of strange
generosities toward each other, it was an open question and naturally a
source of great anxiety to a mother in Mrs. Verrall’s position, whether
the sufferer might not be her son—whether as the outcome of that
glowing irresponsible commerce Nettie might not return prospective
mistress of Checkshill Towers. The chances were greatly against that
conclusion, but such things did occur.
These laws and customs sound, I know, like a record of some
nasty-minded lunatic’s inventions. They were invincible facts in that
vanished world into which, by some accident, I had been born, and it
was the dream of any better state of things that was scouted as lunacy.
Just think of it! This girl I loved with all my soul, for whom I was
ready to sacrifice my life, was not good enough to marry young Verrall.
And I had only to look at his even, handsome, characterless face to
perceive a creature weaker and no better than myself. She was to be his
pleasure until he chose to cast her aside, and the poison of our social
system had so saturated her nature—his evening dress, his freedom and
his money had seemed so fine to her and I so clothed in squalor—that to
that prospect she had consented. And to resent the social conventions
that created their situation, was called “class envy,” and gently born
preachers reproached us for the mildest resentment against an injustice
no living man would now either endure or consent to profit by.
What was the sense of saying “peace” when there was no peace? If there
was one hope in the disorders of that old world it lay in revolt and
conflict to the death.
But if you can really grasp the shameful grotesqueness of the old life,
you will begin to appreciate the interpretation of old Mrs. Verrall’s
appearance that leapt up at once in my mind.
She had come to compromise the disaster!
And the Stuarts _would_ compromise! I saw that only too well.
An enormous disgust at the prospect of the imminent encounter between
Stuart and his mistress made me behave in a violent and irrational way.
I wanted to escape seeing that, seeing even Stuart’s first gesture in
that, at any cost.
“I’m off,” said I, and turned my back on him without any further
farewell.
My line of retreat lay by the old lady, and so I advanced toward her.
I saw her expression change, her mouth fell a little way open, her
forehead wrinkled, and her eyes grew round. She found me a queer
customer even at the first sight, and there was something in the manner
of my advance that took away her breath.
She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended to the
level of the hothouse floor. She receded a pace or two, with a certain
offended dignity at the determination of my rush.