Let it not for an instant be supposed that the guests of Surrenden are
people looked in the least coldly or shyly on by society. Not they. They
go to drawing-rooms, which means nothing; they are invited to state
balls and state concerts, which means much. They are among the most
eminent leaders of that world of fashion which has of late
revolutionized taste, temper, and society in England. Mrs. Wentworth
Curzon sails a little near the wind, perhaps because she is careless,
and now and then Lady Dawlish has been "talked about," because she has a
vast number of debts and a lord who occasionally makes scenes; but, with
these exceptions, all these ladies are as safe on their pedestals as if
they were marble statues of chastity. That their tastes are studied and
their men asked to meet them everywhere is only a matter of delicate
attention, like the bouquets which the housekeeper sets out in their
bedrooms and the new novels which are laid on their writing-tables.
"I like my house to be pleasant," says Dorothy Usk, and she does not
look any further than that: as for people's affairs, she is not supposed
to know anything about them. She knows well enough that Iona would not
come to her unless she had asked the Marquise de Caillac, and she is
fully aware that Lawrence Hamilton would never bestow the cachet of his
illustrious presence on Surrenden unless Mrs. Wentworth Curzon brought
thither her _fourgons_, her maids, her collie dog, her famous emeralds,
and her no less famous fans. Of course she knows that, but she is not
supposed to know it. Nobody except her husband would be so ill-bred as
to suggest that she did know it; and if any of her people should ever by
any mischance forget their tact and stumble into the newspapers, or
become notorious by any other accident, she will drop them, and nobody
will be more surprised at the discovery of their naughtiness than
herself. Yet she is a kind woman, a virtuous woman, a very warm friend,
and not more insincere in her friendships than any one else; she is only
a hostess of the last lustre of the nineteenth century, a woman who
knows her London and follows it in all its amazing and illimitable
condonations as in its eccentric and exceptional severities.
The guests are numerous; they might even he said to be miscellaneous,
were it not that they all belonged to the same set. There is Dick
Wootton, who believes himself destined to play in the last years of the
nineteenth century the part played by Charles Greville in the earlier.
There is Lord Vanstone, an agreeable, eccentric, unsatisfactory
valetudinarian, who ought to have done great things with his life, but
has always been too indolent and had too bad health to carry out his
friends' very large expectations of him. There is the young Duke of
Whitby, good-natured and foolish, with a simple pleasant face and a very
shy manner. "If I had that ass's opportunities I'd make the world spin,"
says Wriothesley Ormond, who is a very poor and very witty member of
Parliament, and also, which he values more, the most popular member of
the Marlborough. There is Lord Iona, very handsome, very silent, very
much sought after and spoilt by women. There is Hugo Mountjoy, a pretty
young fellow in the Guards, with a big fortune and vague ideas that he
ought to "do something;" he is not sure what. There is Lawrence
Hamilton, who, as far as is possible in an age when men are clothed, but
do not dress, gives the law to St. James Street in matters of male
toilet. There is Sir Adolphus Beaumanoir, an ex-diplomatist, admirably
preserved, charmingly loquacious, and an unconscionable flirt, though he
is seventy. Each of these happy or unhappy beings has the lady invited
to meet him in whom his affections are supposed to be centred, for the
time being, in those tacit but potent relations which form so large a
portion of men's and women's lives in these days. It is this condonance
on the part of his wife which George Usk so entirely denounces, although
he would be very much astonished and very much annoyed if she made any
kind of objections to inviting Dulcia Waverley. Happily, there is no Act
of Parliament to compel any of us to be consistent, or where would
anybody be?
Lady Dolgelly, much older than himself, and with a _taille de
couturiere_, as all her intimate friends delight to reveal, is supposed
to be indispensable to the existence of His Grace of Whitby; Lady
Leamington is not less necessary to the happiness of Wriothesley Ormond.
Mr. Wootton would be supposed incapable of cutting a single joke or
telling a single good story unless his spirits were sustained by the
presence of Mrs. Faversham, the prettiest brunette in the universe, for
whom Worth is supposed to make marvellous combinations of rose and gold,
of amber and violet, of deep orange and black, and of a wondrous yellow
like that of the daffodil, which no one dares to wear but herself. Mrs.
Wentworth Curzon is the momentary goddess of Lawrence Hamilton; and Lord
Iona, as far as he has ever opened his handsome mouth to say anything
"serious," has sworn himself the slave of Madame de Caillac. Sir
Adolphus has spread the aegis of his semi-paternal affection over the
light little head of that extravagant little beauty, Lady Dawlish;
whilst Hugo Mountjoy is similarly protected by the prescient wisdom and
the rare experience of his kindest of friends, Lady Arthur Audley.
Sir Hugo and several other gilded youths there present are all exact
patterns of one another, the typical young Englishman of the last years
of this curious century; the masher pure and simple; close-shaven,
close-cropped, faultlessly clothed, small of person, small of features,
stiff, pale, insignificant, polite, supercilious, indifferent;
occasionally amusing, but never by any chance original; much concerned
as to health, climate, and their own nerves; often talking of their
physicians, and flitting southward before cold weather like swallows,
though they have nothing whatever definite the matter with them.
These young men are all convinced that England is on the brink of ruin,
and they talk of it in the same tone with which they say that their
cigarette is out, or the wind is in the east. The Throne, the Church,
the Lords, and the Thirty-Nine Articles are all going down pell-mell
next week, and it is very shocking; nevertheless, there is no reason why
they should not be studious of their digestions and very anxious about
the parting of their hair.
It never occurs to them that they and their father's battue-shooting,
pigeon-shooting, absenteeism, clubism, and general preference for every
country except their own, may have had something to do with bringing
about this impending cataclysm. That all the grand old houses standing
empty, or let to strangers, among the rich Herefordshire pastures, the
green Warwickshire woods, the red Devon uplands, the wild Westmoreland
fells, may have also something to do with it, never occurs to them. That
while they are flirting at Aix, wintering at Pau, throwing comfits at
Rome, losing on the red at Monaco, touring in California, or yawning in
Berlin, the demagogue's agents are whispering to the smock-frocks in the
meadows, and pouring the gall of greed and hatred into the amber ale of
the village pothouse, never occurs to them. If any one suggests it, they
stare: "such a beastly climate, you know; nobody can stand it. Live in
the country? Oh, Lord! who could live in the country?"
And then they wonder that Mr. George has replaced Sir Roger de Coverley,
and that Joseph Chamberlain's voice is heard instead of Edmund Burke's.
Their host could kick them with a sensation of considerable
satisfaction. Their neatness, smallness, and self-complacency irritate
him excessively. The bloods of George the Fourth's time at least were
men,--so he says.
"You do these poor boys injustice," says Brandolin. "When they get out
in a desert, or are left to roast and die under the equator, they put
off all their affectations with their starched cambric, and are not
altogether unworthy of their great-grandfathers. Britons are still bad
ones to beat when the trial comes."
"They must leave their constitutions at their clubs, then, and their
nervous system in their hat-boxes," growls Usk. "If you are like those
namby-pamby fellows when you are twenty, Boom, I'll put a bullet through
your head myself," he says to his heir one morning, when that
good-looking and high-spirited boy has come back from Suffolk.
Boom laughs. He is a careless, high-spirited, extravagant lad, and he
does not at present lean towards the masher type. Gordon is in his head;
that is his idea of a man. The country had one hero in this century, and
betrayed him, and honors his betrayer; but the hearts of the boys beat
truer than that of the House of Commons and the New Electorate. They
remember Gordon, with a noble, headlong, quixotic wish to go and do
likewise. That one lonely figure standing out against the yellow light
of the desert may perhaps be as a pharos to the youth of his nation, and
save them from the shipwreck which is nigh.
"Curious type, the young fellows," says Brandolin, musingly. "I don't
think they will keep England what our fathers and grandfathers made it.
I don't think they will, even if Chamberlain and Company will let them,
which they certainly won't."
"Tell you what it is," says Usk, "it all comes of having second horses
hunting, and loaders behind you out shooting."
"You confound cause and effect. The race wouldn't have come to second
horses and men to load if it hadn't degenerated. Second horses and men
to load indicate in England just what pasties of nightingales' tongues,
and garlands of roses, indicated with the Romans,--effeminacy and
self-indulgence. The Huns and the Goths were knocking at their doors,
and Demos and the Debacle are knocking at ours. History repeats itself,
which is lamentable, for its amazing tendency to tell the same tale
again and again makes it a bore.
"I should like to know, by the way," he continues, "why English girls
get taller and taller, stronger and stronger, and are as the very palm
of the desert for vigor and force, whilst the English young man gets
smaller and smaller, slighter and slighter, and has the nerves of an old
maid and the habits of a valetudinarian. It is uncommonly droll; and, if
the disparity goes on increasing, the ladies will not only get the
franchise, but they will carry the male voter to the polling-place on
their shoulders."
"As the French women did their husbands out of some town that
surrendered in some war," said Boom, who was addicted to historical
illustration and never lost occasion to display it.
"They won't carry their _husbands_," murmurs Brandolin. "They'll drive
_them_, and carry somebody else."
"Will they have any husbands at all when they can do as they like?" says
Boom.
"Probably not," says Brandolin. "My dear boy, what an earthly paradise
awaits you when you shall be of mature age, and shall have seen us all
descend one by one into the tomb, with all our social prejudices and
antiquated ways!"
"I dare say he'll be a navvy in New Guinea by that time, and all his
acres here will be being let out by the state at a rack-rent which the
people will call free land," says the father, with a groan.
"Very possible, too," replies Brandolin.
The boy's eyes go thoughtfully towards the landscape beyond the windows,
the beautiful lawns, the smiling gardens, the rolling woods. A look of
resolution comes over his fair frank face.
"They shan't take our lands without a fight for it," he says, with a
flush on his cheeks.
"And the fight will be a fierce one," says Brandolin, with a sigh, "and
I am afraid it is in Mr. Gladstone's 'dim and distant future,'--that is
to say, very near at hand indeed."
"Well, I shall be ready," says the lad. Both his father and Brandolin
are silent, vaguely touched by the look of the gallant and gracious boy,
as he stands there with the sun in his brave blue eyes, and thinking of
the troubled time which will await his manhood in this green old
England, cursed by the spume of wordy demagogues, and hounded on to
envenomed hatreds and causeless discontents, that the professional
politician may fatten on her woes.
What will Boom live to see?
It will be a sorry day for the country when her wooded parks and stately
houses are numbered with the things that are no more.
Brandolin puts his arm over the boy's shoulder, and walks away with him
a little way under the deep boughs of yew.
"Look here, Boom," he says to him, "you won't care to be like those
fellows, but you don't know how hard it is to get out of the fashion of
one's set, to avoid going with the stream of one's contemporaries.
Nobody can say what will be the style of the 'best men' when you're of
age, but I'm much afraid it will still be the Masher. The Masher is not
very vicious, he is often cultured, he is a more harmless animal than he
tries to appear, but he is weak; and we are coming on times, or times
are coming on us, when an English gentleman will want to be very strong
if he is to hold his own and save his country from shame in her old age.
Don't be conventional. Scores of people who would be ashamed to seem
virtuous haven't courage to resist appearing vicious. Don't talk all
that odious slang which is ruining English. Don't get into that stupid
way of counting the days and seasons by steeple-chases,
coursing-meetings, flat-races, and the various different things to be
shot at. Sport is all very well in its place, but Squire Allworthy
beating the turnips with a brace of setters is a different figure to
Lord Newgold sending his hampers of pheasants to Leadenhall. Certainly,
Mr. Bradlaugh has no more right to make a misdemeanor of our
covert-shooting, and put the axe to our home woods, than we have to make
a misdemeanor of his shoes and stockings, or put an axe to his head. But
I think if of our own accord we centred our minds and spent our guineas
less on our preserves, we might be wiser, and if we grudged our woods
less to the hawk and the woodpecker and the owl and the jay, and all the
rest of their native population, we should be wiser still. I never see a
beast or a bird caught or dead in a keeper's trap but that I think to
myself that after all, if we ourselves are caught in the end between the
grinning jaws of anarchy, it will really be only partial justice on our
injustice. Only I fear that it won't better the birds and beasts very
much, even when we all go to prison for the crime of property, and
Bradlaugh will grub up their leafy haunts with a steam plough from
Chicago."