I look into the jumbled stores of the middle distance of memory, and
Beckenham seems to me a quite transitory phase. But really they were
there several years; through nearly all my married life, in fact, and
far longer than the year and odd months we lived together at
Wimblehurst. But the Wimblehurst time with them is fuller in my memory
by far then the Beckenham period. There comes back to me with a quite
considerable amount of detail the effect of that garden party of my
aunt’s and of a little social misbehaviour of which I was guilty on
that occasion. It’s like a scrap from another life. It’s all set in
what is for me a kind of cutaneous feeling, the feeling of rather
ill-cut city clothes, frock coat and grey trousers, and of a high
collar and tie worn in sunshine among flowers. I have still a quite
vivid memory of the little trapezoidal lawn, of the gathering, and
particularly of the hats and feathers of the gathering, of the
parlour-maid and the blue tea-cups, and of the magnificent presence of
Mrs. Hogberry and of her clear, resonant voice. It was a voice that
would have gone with a garden party on a larger scale; it went into
adjacent premises; it included the gardener who was far up the
vegetable patch and technically out of play. The only other men were my
aunt’s doctor, two of the clergy, amiable contrasted men, and Mrs.
Hogberry’s imperfectly grown-up son, a youth just bursting into collar.
The rest were women, except for a young girl or so in a state of
speechless good behaviour. Marion also was there.
Marion and I had arrived a little estranged, and I remember her as a
silent presence, a shadow across all that sunlit emptiness of
intercourse. We had embittered each other with one of those miserable
little disputes that seemed so unavoidable between us. She had, with
the help of Smithie, dressed rather elaborately for the occasion, and
when she saw me prepared to accompany her in, I think it was a grey
suit, she protested that silk hat and frock coat were imperative. I was
recalcitrant, she quoted an illustrated paper showing a garden party
with the King present, and finally I capitulated—but after my evil
habit, resentfully.... Eh, dear! those old quarrels, how pitiful they
were, how trivial! And how sorrowful they are to recall! I think they
grow more sorrowful as I grow older, and all the small passionate
reasons for our mutual anger fade and fade out of memory.
The impression that Beckenham company has left on my mind is one of a
modest unreality; they were all maintaining a front of unspecified
social pretension, and evading the display of the economic facts of the
case. Most of the husbands were “in business” off stage, it would have
been outrageous to ask what the business was—and the wives were giving
their energies to produce, with the assistance of novels and the
illustrated magazines, a moralised version of the afternoon life of the
aristocratic class. They hadn’t the intellectual or moral enterprise of
the upper-class woman, they had no political interests, they had no
views about anything, and consequently they were, I remember, extremely
difficult to talk to. They all sat about in the summer-house and in
garden-chairs, and were very hatty and ruffley and sunshady. Three
ladies and the curate played croquet with a general immense gravity,
broken by occasional loud cries of feigned distress from the curate.
“Oh! Whacking me about again! Augh!”
The dominant social fact that afternoon was Mrs. Hogberry; she took up
a certain position commanding the croquet and went on, as my aunt said
to me in an incidental aside, “like an old Roundabout.” She talked of
the way in which Beckenham society was getting mixed, and turned on to
a touching letter she had recently received from her former nurse at
Little Gossdean. Followed a loud account of Little Gossdean and how
much she and her eight sisters had been looked up to there. “My poor
mother was quite a little Queen there,” she said. “And such _nice_
Common people! People say the country labourers are getting
disrespectful nowadays. It isn’t so—not if they’re properly treated.
Here of course in Beckenham it’s different. I won’t call the people we
get here a Poor—they’re certainly not a proper Poor. They’re Masses. I
always tell Mr. Bugshoot they’re Masses, and ought to be treated as
such.”...
Dim memories of Mrs. Mackridge floated through my mind as I listened to
her....
I was whirled on this roundabout for a bit, and then had the fortune to
fall off into a _tête-à-tête_ with a lady whom my aunt introduced as
Mrs. Mumble—but then she introduced everybody to me as Mumble that
afternoon, either by way of humour or necessity.
That must have been one of my earliest essays in the art of polite
conversation, and I remember that I began by criticising the local
railway service, and that at the third sentence or thereabouts Mrs.
Mumble said in a distinctly bright and encouraging way that she feared
I was a very “frivolous” person.