Concurrently with writing the last chapter of this book I have been
much engaged by the affairs of a new destroyer we have completed. It
has been an oddly complementary alternation of occupations. Three weeks
or so ago this novel had to be put aside in order that I might give all
my time day and night to the fitting and finishing of the engines. Last
Thursday X 2, for so we call her, was done and I took her down the
Thames and went out nearly to Texel for a trial of speed.
It is curious how at times one’s impressions will all fuse and run
together into a sort of unity and become continuous with things that
have hitherto been utterly alien and remote. That rush down the river
became mysteriously connected with this book.
As I passed down the Thames I seemed in a new and parallel manner to be
passing all England in review. I saw it then as I had wanted my readers
to see it. The thought came to me slowly as I picked my way through the
Pool; it stood out clear as I went dreaming into the night out upon the
wide North Sea.
It wasn’t so much thinking at the time as a sort of photographic
thought that came and grew clear. X2 went ripping through the dirty
oily water as scissors rip through canvas, and the front of my mind was
all intent with getting her through under the bridges and in and out
among the steam-boats and barges and rowing-boats and piers. I lived
with my hands and eyes hard ahead. I thought nothing then of any
appearances but obstacles, but for all that the back of my mind took
the photographic memory of it complete and vivid....
“This,” it came to me, “is England. That is what I wanted to give in my
book. This!”
We started in the late afternoon. We throbbed out of our yard above
Hammersmith Bridge, fussed about for a moment, and headed down stream.
We came at an easy rush down Craven Reach, past Fulham and Hurlingham,
past the long stretches of muddy meadow And muddy suburb to Battersea
and Chelsea, round the cape of tidy frontage that is Grosvenor Road and
under Vauxhall Bridge, and Westminster opened before us. We cleared a
string of coal barges and there on the left in the October sunshine
stood the Parliament houses, and the flag was flying and Parliament was
sitting.
I saw it at the time unseeingly; afterwards it came into my mind as the
centre of the whole broad panoramic effect of that afternoon. The stiff
square lace of Victorian Gothic with its Dutch clock of a tower came
upon me suddenly and stared and whirled past in a slow half pirouette
and became still, I know, behind me as if watching me recede. “Aren’t
you going to respect me, then?” it seemed to say.
Not I! There in that great pile of Victorian architecture the landlords
and the lawyers, the bishops, the railway men and the magnates of
commerce go to and fro—in their incurable tradition of commercialised
Bladesovery, of meretricious gentry and nobility sold for riches. I
have been near enough to know. The Irish and the Labour-men run about
among their feet, making a fuss, effecting little, they’ve got no
better plans that I can see. Respect it indeed! There’s a certain
paraphernalia of dignity, but whom does it deceive? The King comes down
in a gilt coach to open the show and wears long robes and a crown; and
there’s a display of stout and slender legs in white stockings and
stout and slender legs in black stockings and artful old gentlemen in
ermine. I was reminded of one congested afternoon I had spent with my
aunt amidst a cluster of agitated women’s hats in the Royal Gallery of
the House of Lords and how I saw the King going to open Parliament, and
the Duke of Devonshire looking like a gorgeous pedlar and terribly
bored with the cap of maintenance on a tray before him hung by slings
from his shoulder. A wonderful spectacle!
It is quaint, no doubt, this England—it is even dignified in places—and
full of mellow associations. That does not alter the quality of the
realities these robes conceal. The realities are greedy trade, base
profit—seeking, bold advertisement; and kingship and chivalry, spite of
this wearing of treasured robes, are as dead among it all as that
crusader my uncle championed against the nettles outside the Duffield
church.