III

There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all it

seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirest

faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that the Bladesover

system was a little working-model—and not so very little either—of the

whole world.

Let me try and give you the effect of it.

Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs, eight miles perhaps from

Ashborough; and its old pavilion, a little wooden parody of the temple

of Vesta at Tibur, upon the hill crest behind the house, commands in

theory at least a view of either sea, of the Channel southward and the

Thames to the northeast. The park is the second largest in Kent, finely

wooded with well-placed beeches, many elms and some sweet chestnuts,

abounding in little valleys and hollows of bracken, with springs and a

stream and three fine ponds and multitudes of fallow deer. The house

was built in the eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the

style of a French chateau, and save for one pass among the crests which

opens to blue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farm-houses and

copses and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water, its hundred

and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and handsome

territories. A semi-circular screen of great beeches masks the church

and village, which cluster picturesquely about the high road along the

skirts of the great park. Northward, at the remotest corner of that

enclosure, is a second dependent village, Ropedean, less fortunate in

its greater distance and also on account of a rector. This divine was

indeed rich, but he was vindictively economical because of some

shrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word Eucharist

for the Lord’s Supper he had become altogether estranged from the great

ladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean was in the shadows through all

that youthful time.

Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large

house, dominating church, village and the country side, was that they

represented the thing that mattered supremely in the world, and that

all other things had significance only in relation to them. They

represented the Gentry, the Quality, by and through and for whom the

rest of the world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the

trades-people of Ashborough, and the upper servants and the lower

servants and the servants of the estate, breathed and lived and were

permitted. And the Quality did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great

house mingled so solidly and effectually earth and sky, the contrast of

its spacious hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper’s room

and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar, and the

pinched and stuffy rooms of even the post-office people and the grocer,

so enforced these suggestions, that it was only when I was a boy of

thirteen or fourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had

set me doubting whether Mr. Bartlett, the vicar, did really know with

certainty all about God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting

I began to question the final rightness of the gentlefolks, their

primary necessity in the scheme of things. But once that scepticism had

awakened it took me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved terrible

blasphemies and sacrilege; I had resolved to marry a viscount’s

daughter, and I had blacked the left eye—I think it was the left—of her

half-brother, in open and declared rebellion.

But of that in its place.

The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and the

servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say, to be a

closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and

great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the

Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed

mere collections of ships, marketing places for the tenantry, centres

for such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry

as the village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the

order of the whole world. I thought London was only a greater country

town where the gentle-folk kept town-houses and did their greater

shopping under the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine

gentlewomen, the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order. That all

this fine appearance was already sapped, that there were forces at work

that might presently carry all this elaborate social system in which my

mother instructed me so carefully that I might understand my “place,”

to Limbo, had scarcely dawned upon me even by the time that Tono-Bungay

was fairly launched upon the world.

There are many people in England to-day upon whom it has not yet

dawned. There are times when I doubt whether any but a very

inconsiderable minority of English people realise how extensively this

ostensible order has even now passed away. The great houses stand in

the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders,

touching their eaves with their creepers, the English countryside—you

can range through Kent from Bladesover northward and see persists

obstinately in looking what it was. It is like an early day in a fine

October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting

for awhile, as it were half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the

thing for ever. One frost and the whole face of things will be bare,

links snap, patience end, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in

the mire.

For that we have still to wait a little while. The new order may have

gone far towards shaping itself, but just as in that sort of lantern

show that used to be known in the village as the “Dissolving Views,”

the scene that is going remains upon the mind, traceable and evident,

and the newer picture is yet enigmatical long after the lines that are

to replace those former ones have grown bright and strong, so that the

new England of our children’s children is still a riddle to me. The

ideas of democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous

fraternity have certainly never really entered into the English mind.

But what _is_ coming into it? All this book, I hope, will bear a little

on that. Our people never formulates; it keeps words for jests and

ironies. In the meanwhile the old shapes, the old attitudes remain,

subtly changed and changing still, sheltering strange tenants.

Bladesover House is now let furnished to Sir Reuben Lichtenstein, and

has been since old Lady Drew died; it was my odd experience to visit

there, in the house of which my mother had been housekeeper, when my

uncle was at the climax of Tono-Bungay. It was curious to notice then

the little differences that had come to things with this substitution.

To borrow an image from my mineralogical days, these Jews were not so

much a new British gentry as “pseudomorphous” after the gentry. They

are a very clever people, the Jews, but not clever enough to suppress

their cleverness. I wished I could have gone downstairs to savour the

tone of the pantry. It would have been very different I know.

Hawksnest, over beyond, I noted, had its pseudomorph too; a newspaper

proprietor of the type that hustles along with stolen ideas from one

loud sink-or-swim enterprise to another, had bought the place outright;

Redgrave was in the hands of brewers.

But the people in the villages, so far as I could detect, saw no

difference in their world. Two little girls bobbed and an old labourer

touched his hat convulsively as I walked through the village. He still

thought he knew his place—and mine. I did not know him, but I would

have liked dearly to have asked him if he remembered my mother, if

either my uncle or old Lichtenstein had been man enough to stand being

given away like that.

In that English countryside of my boyhood every human being had a

“place.” It belonged to you from your birth like the colour of your

eyes, it was inextricably your destiny. Above you were your betters,

below you were your inferiors, and there were even an unstable

questionable few, cases so disputable that you might for the rough

purposes of every day at least, regard them as your equals. Head and

centre of our system was Lady Drew, her “leddyship,” shrivelled,

garrulous, with a wonderful memory for genealogies and very, very old,

and beside her and nearly as old, Miss Somerville, her cousin and

companion. These two old souls lived like dried-up kernels in the great

shell of Bladesover House, the shell that had once been gaily full of

fops, of fine ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen with

swords; and when there was no company they spent whole days in the

corner parlour just over the housekeeper’s room, between reading and

slumber and caressing their two pet dogs. When I was a boy I used

always to think of these two poor old creatures as superior beings

living, like God, somewhere through the ceiling. Occasionally they

bumped about a bit and one even heard them overhead, which gave them a

greater effect of reality without mitigating their vertical

predominance. Sometimes too I saw them. Of course if I came upon them

in the park or in the shrubbery (where I was a trespasser) I hid or

fled in pious horror, but I was upon due occasion taken into the

Presence by request. I remember her “leddyship” then as a thing of

black silks and a golden chain, a quavering injunction to me to be a

good boy, a very shrunken loose-skinned face and neck, and a ropy hand

that trembled a halfcrown into mine. Miss Somerville hovered behind, a

paler thing of broken lavender and white and black, with screwed up,

sandy-lashed eyes. Her hair was yellow and her colour bright, and when

we sat in the housekeeper’s room of a winter’s night warming our toes

and sipping elder wine, her maid would tell us the simple secrets of

that belated flush.... After my fight with young Garvell I was of

course banished, and I never saw those poor old painted goddesses

again.

Then there came and went on these floors over our respectful heads, the

Company; people I rarely saw, but whose tricks and manners were

imitated and discussed by their maids and valets in the housekeeper’s

room and the steward’s room—so that I had them through a medium at

second hand. I gathered that none of the company were really Lady

Drew’s equals, they were greater and lesser after the manner of all

things in our world. Once I remember there was a Prince, with a real

live gentleman in attendance, and that was a little above our customary

levels and excited us all, and perhaps raised our expectations unduly.

Afterwards, Rabbits, the butler, came into my mother’s room downstairs,

red with indignation and with tears in his eyes. “Look at _that!_”

gasped Rabbits. My mother was speechless with horror. _That_ was a

sovereign, a mere sovereign, such as you might get from any commoner!

After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old women

upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive, and in a state of

physical and emotional indigestion after their social efforts....

On the lowest fringe of these real Olympians hung the vicarage people,

and next to them came those ambiguous beings who are neither quality

nor subjects. The vicarage people certainly hold a place by themselves

in the typical English scheme; nothing is more remarkable than the

progress the Church has made—socially—in the last two hundred years. In

the early eighteenth century the vicar was rather under than over the

house-steward, and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper or

any not too morally discredited discard. The eighteenth century

literature is full of his complaints that he might not remain at table

to share the pie. He rose above these indignities because of the

abundance of younger sons. When I meet the large assumptions of the

contemporary cleric, I am apt to think of these things. It is curious

to note that to-day that down-trodden, organ-playing creature, the

Church of England village Schoolmaster, holds much the same position as

the seventeenth century parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked below

the vicar but above the “vet,” artists and summer visitors squeezed in

above or below this point according to their appearance and

expenditure, and then in a carefully arranged scale came the tenantry,

the butler and housekeeper, the village shopkeeper, the head keeper,

the cook, the publican, the second keeper, the blacksmith (whose status

was complicated by his daughter keeping the post-office—and a fine hash

she used to make of telegrams too!) the village shopkeeper’s eldest

son, the first footman, younger sons of the village shopkeeper, his

first assistant, and so forth.

All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence and

much else I drank in at Bladesover, as I listened to the talk of

valets, ladies’-maids, Rabbits the butler and my mother in the

much-cupboarded, white-painted, chintz-brightened housekeeper’s room

where the upper servants assembled, or of footmen and Rabbits and

estate men of all sorts among the green baize and Windsor chairs of the

pantry—where Rabbits, being above the law, sold beer without a license

or any compunction—or of housemaids and still-room maids in the bleak,

matting-carpeted still-room or of the cook and her kitchen maids and

casual friends among the bright copper and hot glow of the kitchens.

Of course their own ranks and places came by implication to these

people, and it was with the ranks and places of the Olympians that the

talk mainly concerned itself. There was an old peerage and a Crockford

together with the books of recipes, the Whitaker’s Almanack, the Old

Moore’s Almanack, and the eighteenth century dictionary, on the little

dresser that broke the cupboards on one side of my mother’s room; there

was another peerage, with the covers off, in the pantry; there was a

new peerage in the billiard-room, and I seem to remember another in the

anomalous apartment that held the upper servants’ bagatelle board and

in which, after the Hall dinner, they partook of the luxury of sweets.

And if you had asked any of those upper servants how such and such a

Prince of Battenberg was related to, let us say, Mr. Cunninghame Graham

or the Duke of Argyle, you would have been told upon the nail. As a

boy, I heard a great deal of that sort of thing, and if to this day I

am still a little vague about courtesy titles and the exact application

of honorifics, it is, I can assure you, because I hardened my heart,

and not from any lack of adequate opportunity of mastering these

succulent particulars.

Dominating all these memories is the figure of my mother—my mother who

did not love me because I grew liker my father every day—and who knew

with inflexible decision her place and the place of every one in the

world—except the place that concealed my father—and in some details

mine. Subtle points were put to her. I can see and hear her saying now,

“No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United

Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom.” She had much

exercise in placing people’s servants about her tea-table, where the

etiquette was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of

housekeepers’ rooms is as strict to-day, and what my mother would have

made of a _chauffeur_....

On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of Bladesover—if for

no other reason than because seeing it when I did, quite naively,

believing in it thoroughly, and then coming to analyse it, has enabled

me to understand much that would be absolutely incomprehensible in the

structure of English society. Bladesover is, I am convinced, the clue

to almost all that is distinctively British and perplexing to the

foreign inquirer in England and the English-speaking peoples. Grasp

firmly that England was all Bladesover two hundred years ago; that it

has had Reform Acts indeed, and such—like changes of formula, but no

essential revolution since then; that all that is modern and different

has come in as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant

formula, either impertinently or apologetically; and you will perceive

at once the reasonableness, the necessity, of that snobbishness which

is the distinctive quality of English thought. Everybody who is not

actually in the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually

seeking after lost orientations. We have never broken with our

tradition, never even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French

did in quivering fact in the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have

slackened, the old habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether come

undone. And America too, is, as it were, a detached, outlying part of

that estate which has expanded in queer ways. George Washington,

Esquire, was of the gentlefolk, and he came near being a King. It was

Plutarch, you know, and nothing intrinsically American that prevented

George Washington being a King....