A few such pictures of those early days at Beckenham stand out, and
then I find myself among the Chiselhurst memories. The Chiselhurst
mansion had “grounds” rather than a mere garden, and there was a
gardener’s cottage and a little lodge at the gate. The ascendant
movement was always far more in evidence there than at Beckenham. The
velocity was increasing.
One night picks itself out as typical, as, in its way, marking an
epoch. I was there, I think, about some advertisement stuff, on some
sort of business anyhow, and my uncle and aunt had come back in a fly
from a dinner at the Runcorns. (Even there he was nibbling at Runcorn
with the idea of our great Amalgamation budding in his mind.) I got
down there, I suppose, about eleven. I found the two of them sitting in
the study, my aunt on a chair-arm with a whimsical pensiveness on her
face, regarding my uncle, and he, much extended and very rotund, in the
low arm-chair drawn up to the fender.
“Look here, George,” said my uncle, after my first greetings. “I just
been saying: We aren’t Oh Fay!”
“Eh?”
“Not Oh Fay! Socially!”
“Old _Fly_, he means, George—French!”
“Oh! Didn’t think of French. One never knows where to have him. What’s
gone wrong to-night?”
“I been thinking. It isn’t any particular thing. I ate too much of that
fishy stuff at first, like salt frog spawn, and was a bit confused by
olives; and—well, I didn’t know which wine was which. Had to say _that_
each time. It puts your talk all wrong. And she wasn’t in evening
dress, not like the others. We can’t go on in that style, George—not a
proper ad.”
“I’m not sure you were right,” I said, “in having a fly.”
“We got to do it all better,” said my uncle, “we got to do it in Style.
Smart business, smart men. She tries to pass it off as humorous”—my
aunt pulled a grimace—“it isn’t humorous! See! We’re on the up-grade
now, fair and square. We’re going to be big. We aren’t going to be
laughed at as Poovenoos, see!”
“Nobody laughed at you,” said my aunt. “Old Bladder!”
“Nobody isn’t going to laugh at me,” said my uncle, glancing at his
contours and suddenly sitting up.
My aunt raised her eyebrows slightly, swung her foot, and said nothing.
“We aren’t keeping pace with our own progress, George. We got to. We’re
bumping against new people, and they set up to be gentlefolks—etiquette
dinners and all the rest of it. They give themselves airs and expect us
to be fish-out-of-water. We aren’t going to be. They think we’ve no
Style. Well, we give them Style for our advertisements, and we’re going
to give ’em Style all through.... You needn’t be born to it to dance
well on the wires of the Bond Street tradesmen. See?”