My uncle appeared at the door in a white waistcoat and with his hands
in his trouser pockets; he halted and surveyed her critically.
“Couldn’t tell you from a duchess, Susan,” he remarked. “I’d like to
have you painted, standin’ at the fire like that. Sargent! You
look—spirited, somehow. Lord!—I wish some of those damned tradesmen at
Wimblehurst could see you.”...
They did a lot of week-ending at hotels, and sometimes I went down with
them. We seemed to fall into a vast drifting crowd of social learners.
I don’t know whether it is due simply to my changed circumstances, but
it seems to me there have been immensely disproportionate developments
of the hotel-frequenting and restaurant-using population during the
last twenty years. It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of
people who, like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but
whole masses of the prosperous section of the population must be
altering its habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to
evening dress, using the week-end hotels as a practise-ground for these
new social arts. A swift and systematic conversion to gentility has
been going on, I am convinced, throughout the whole commercial
upper-middle class since I was twenty-one. Curiously mixed was the
personal quality of the people one saw in these raids. There were
conscientiously refined and low-voiced people reeking with proud
bashfulness; there were aggressively smart people using pet diminutives
for each other loudly and seeking fresh occasions for brilliant
rudeness; there were awkward husbands and wives quarrelling furtively
about their manners and ill at ease under the eye of the winter;
cheerfully amiable and often discrepant couples with a disposition to
inconspicuous corners, and the jolly sort, affecting an unaffected
ease; plump happy ladies who laughed too loud, and gentlemen in evening
dress who subsequently “got their pipes.” And nobody, you knew, was
anybody, however expensively they dressed and whatever rooms they took.
I look back now with a curious remoteness of spirit to those crowded
dining-rooms with their dispersed tables and their inevitable
red-shaded lights and the unsympathetic, unskillful waiters, and the
choice of “Thig or Glear, Sir?” I’ve not dined in that way, in that
sort of place, now for five years—it must be quite five years, so
specialised and narrow is my life becoming.
My uncle’s earlier motor-car phases work in with these associations,
and there stands out a little bright vignette of the hall of the
Magnificent, Bexhill-on-Sea, and people dressed for dinner and sitting
about amidst the scarlet furniture—satin and white-enameled woodwork
until the gong should gather them; and my aunt is there, very
marvelously wrapped about in a dust cloak and a cage-like veil, and
there are hotel porters and under-porters very alert, and an obsequious
manager; and the tall young lady in black from the office is surprised
into admiration, and in the middle of the picture is my uncle, making
his first appearance in that Esquimaux costume I have already
mentioned, a short figure, compactly immense, hugely goggled, wearing a
sort of brown rubber proboscis, and surmounted by a table-land of
motoring cap.
V
So it was we recognised our new needs as fresh invaders of the upper
levels of the social system, and set ourselves quite consciously to the
acquisition of Style and _Savoir Faire_. We became part of what is
nowadays quite an important element in the confusion of our world, that
multitude of economically ascendant people who are learning how to
spend money. It is made up of financial people, the owners of the
businesses that are eating up their competitors, inventors of new
sources of wealth, such as ourselves; it includes nearly all America as
one sees it on the European stage. It is a various multitude having
only this in common: they are all moving, and particularly their
womankind are moving, from conditions in which means were insistently
finite, things were few, and customs simple, towards a limitless
expenditure and the sphere of attraction of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue,
and Paris. Their general effect is one of progressive revolution, of
limitless rope.
They discover suddenly indulgences their moral code never foresaw and
has no provision for, elaborations, ornaments, possessions beyond their
wildest dreams. With an immense astonished zest they begin _shopping_,
begin a systematic adaptation to a new life crowded and brilliant with
things shopped, with jewels, maids, butlers, coachmen, electric
broughams, hired town and country houses. They plunge into it as one
plunges into a career; as a class, they talk, think, and dream
possessions. Their literature, their Press, turns all on that; immense
illustrated weeklies of unsurpassed magnificence guide them in domestic
architecture, in the art of owning a garden, in the achievement of the
sumptuous in motor-cars, in an elaborate sporting equipment, in the
purchase and control of their estates, in travel and stupendous hotels.
Once they begin to move they go far and fast. Acquisition becomes the
substance of their lives. They find a world organised to gratify that
passion. In a brief year or so they are connoisseurs. They join in the
plunder of the eighteenth century, buy rare old books, fine old
pictures, good old furniture. Their first crude conception of dazzling
suites of the newly perfect is replaced almost from the outset by a
jackdaw dream of accumulating costly discrepant old things.
I seem to remember my uncle taking to shopping quite suddenly. In the
Beckenham days and in the early Chiselhurst days he was chiefly
interested in getting money, and except for his onslaught on the
Beckenham house, bothered very little about his personal surroundings
and possessions. I forget now when the change came and he began to
spend. Some accident must have revealed to him this new source of
power, or some subtle shifting occurred in the tissues of his brain. He
began to spend and “shop.” So soon as he began to shop, he began to
shop violently. He began buying pictures, and then, oddly enough, old
clocks. For the Chiselhurst house he bought nearly a dozen grandfather
clocks and three copper warming pans. After that he bought much
furniture. Then he plunged into art patronage, and began to commission
pictures and to make presents to churches and institutions. His buying
increased with a regular acceleration. Its development was a part of
the mental changes that came to him in the wild excitements of the last
four years of his ascent. Towards the climax he was a furious spender;
he shopped with large unexpected purchases, he shopped like a mind
seeking expression, he shopped to astonish and dismay; shopped
_crescendo_, shopped _fortissimo, con molto espressione_ until the
magnificent smash of Crest Hill eroded his shopping for ever. Always it
was he who shopped. My aunt did not shine as a purchaser. It is a
curious thing, due to I know not what fine strain in her composition,
that my aunt never set any great store upon possessions. She plunged
through that crowded bazaar of Vanity Fair during those feverish years,
spending no doubt freely and largely, but spending with detachment and
a touch of humorous contempt for the things, even the “old” things,
that money can buy. It came to me suddenly one afternoon just how
detached she was, as I saw her going towards the Hardingham, sitting
up, as she always did, rather stiffly in her electric brougham,
regarding the glittering world with interested and ironically innocent
blue eyes from under the brim of a hat that defied comment. “No one,” I
thought, “would sit so apart if she hadn’t dreams—and what are her
dreams?”
I’d never thought.
And I remember, too, an outburst of scornful description after she had
lunched with a party of women at the Imperial Cosmic Club. She came
round to my rooms on the chance of finding me there, and I gave her
tea. She professed herself tired and cross, and flung herself into my
chair....
“George,” she cried, “the Things women are! Do _I_ stink of money?”
“Lunching?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Plutocratic ladies?”
“Yes.”
“Oriental type?”
“Oh! Like a burst hareem!... Bragging of possessions.... They feel you.
They feel your clothes, George, to see if they are good!”
I soothed her as well as I could. “They _are_ Good aren’t they?” I
said.
“It’s the old pawnshop in their blood,” she said, drinking tea; and
then in infinite disgust, “They run their hands over your clothes—they
paw you.”
I had a moment of doubt whether perhaps she had not been discovered in
possession of unsuspected forgeries. I don’t know. After that my eyes
were quickened, and I began to see for myself women running their hands
over other women’s furs, scrutinising their lace, even demanding to
handle jewelry, appraising, envying, testing. They have a kind of
etiquette. The woman who feels says, “What beautiful sables?” “What
lovely lace?” The woman felt admits proudly: “It’s Real, you know,” or
disavows pretension modestly and hastily, “It’s Rot Good.” In each
other’s houses they peer at the pictures, handle the selvage of
hangings, look at the bottoms of china....