by Ouida
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 Débacle 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 justi
ce 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.”
CHAPTER IV.
Meanwhile, let the country be going to the dogs as it may, Surrenden is full of very gay people, and all its more or less well-matched doves are cooing at Surrenden, whilst the legitimate partners of their existences are diverting themselves in other scenes, Highland moors, German baths, French châteaux, Channel yachting, or at other English country houses. It is George Usk’s opinion that the whole thing is immoral: he is by no means a moral person himself. His wife, on the contrary, thinks that it is the only way to have your house liked, and that nobody is supposed to know anything, and that nothing of that sort matters; she is a woman who on her own account has never done anything that she would in the least mind having printed in the Morning Post to-morrow.
“Strange contradiction!” muses Brandolin. “Here is George, who’s certainly no better than he should be, hallooing out for Dame Propriety, and here’s my lady, who’s always run as straight as a crow flies, making an Agapemone of her house to please her friends. To the pure all things are pure, I suppose; but if purity can stand Mrs. Wentworth Curzon and Lady Dawlish, I think I shall select my wife from among les jolies impures.”
However, he takes care audibly to hold up his hostess’s opinions and condemn her lord’s.
“The poor little woman means well, and only likes to be popular,” he reflects; “and we are none of us so sure that we shan’t want indulgence some day.”
Brandolin is very easy and elastic in his principles, as becomes a man of the world; he is even considered by many of his friends a good deal too lax in all his views; but in the depths of his soul there is a vague dislike to similar looseness of principle in women. He may have been glad enough to avail himself of the defect; that is another matter; he does not like it, does not admire it: licentiousness in a woman seems to him a fault in her taste; it is as if she wore fur slippers with her court train. “Of course,” he will say, apologetically, “this idea of mine is born of the absurd English conventionality which sleeps in all of us; nothing better; an Englishman is always conventional somewhere, let him live as he will.”
He himself is the most unconventional of beings, appalls his county, terrifies his relations, and irrevocably offends the bishop of his diocese; he has lived with Arabs, Bohemians, and wild men of the woods, and believes that he has not such a thing as prejudice about him; yet at the bottom of his soul there is this absurd feeling born of sheer conventionality, — he cannot thoroughly like a light-minded woman. Absurd, indeed, in the times in which his lot is cast! He is quite ashamed of it.
Dorothy Usk does not favor the modern mode of having relays of guests for two or three days; she thinks it makes a country house too like an hotel. She wishes her people to be perfectly well assorted, and then to stay with her at least a week, even two weeks or three weeks. People do not often object: Orme, Denton, and Surrenden are all popular places, and Surrenden is perhaps most popular of all.
“An ideal house,” says Brandolin, who would not stay a day where he was not as free as air.
“It’s too much like an hotel,” grumbles the master of it, “and an hotel where the table-d’hôte bell rings to deaf ears. Lord! I remember in my poor mother’s days everybody had to be down to breakfast at nine o’clock every morning as regularly as if they were charity children, and the whole lot of ’em were marched off to church on Sunday whether they liked it or not. The villagers used to line the path across the fields to see the great folks pass. Now it’s as much as ever Dolly can do to get a woman or two up in time to go with her. How things are changed, by Jove! And it isn’t so very long ago, either.”
“The march of intellect, my dear George,” says Brandolin; “neither le bon Dieu nor we are great folks any longer.”
“Well, I think it’s a pity,” sighs Usk. “Everybody was happier then, and jollier too, though we do tear about so to try and get amused.”
“There is still nothing to prevent you going to sleep in the big pew if it pleases you,” replies Brandolin; “and Lawrence Hamilton always goes that he may look at Mrs. Curzon’s profile as she sings: she is really saintly then. I think Sunday service is to Englishwomen what confession is to Catholic ladies: it sweeps all the blots off the week’s tablets. It is convenient, if illogical.”
“You are very irreligious,” says his host, who is invariably orthodox when orthodoxy doesn’t interfere with anything.
“Not more so than most people,” says Brandolin. “I have even felt religious when I have been alone in the savannas or in the jungle. I don’t feel so in a wooden box covered with red velvet, with a curate bawling in my ears about the hewing in pieces of Agag.”
“That’s nothing to do with it,” says Usk: “we’re bound to set an example.”
“That’s why you doze in public, and Mrs. Curzon wears her big pearls, to lead the school-children in the way they should go.”
“That’s nothing to do with it,” repeats Lord Usk, somewhat crossly. He has a comfortable if indistinct idea that he does something patriotic, patriarchal, and highly praiseworthy in getting up an hour earlier than usual one Sunday out of three, and putting on a tall hat, a frock-coat, and a pair of new gloves, to attend the village church for morning service when he is at Orme, Denton, or Surrenden in fine weather.
If he sleeps, what of that? There are curtains to the pew, and nobody sees him except the Babe, who takes fiendish rapture in catching big flies and releasing them from a careful little hand to alight on his father’s forehead or nose. The Babe would define the Sunday morning as a horrid bore tempered by blue-bottles.
“What a curiously conventional mind is the English mind!” thinks Brandolin, when he is alone. “Carlisle is right: the gig is its standard. The gig is out of fashion as a vehicle, but the national mind remains the same as in the age of gigs, — content with the outside of things, clinging to the husk, to the shell, to the outward appearance, and satisfied with these. My dear friend puts on his chimney-pot, then takes it off and snores in his pew, and thinks that he has done something holy which will sustain both Church and State, as he thinks that he prays when he buries his face in his hat and creases his trousers on a hassock! Mysterious consolations of the unfathomable human breast!”
CHAPTER V.
A few new people have come by the brake, and make their appearance at luncheon. More come by the five-o’clock train, and are visible at six-o’clock tea, which is always to be had in the library any time before seven: dinner at all the Usk houses is always at nine. Brandolin’s doctrines do not prevail with any of his acquaintances, although he, unlike most professors, emphasizes them by example.
Among the people who come by the latter train are the famous Mr. Wootton, a man very famous at London dinner-parties, and Lady Gundrede Vansittart, whose dinners are the best in London.
“Where would those two people be if you brought the pulse and the rice you recommend into fashion?” says their host to Brandolin. “Take ’em away from the table, they’d be good for nothing. He wouldn’t say ‘Bo’ to a goose, and she wouldn’t be worth leaving a card upon. Believe me, my dear Guy, such esprit as there is left in us is only brought out by eating.”
“I think you invert all your reasonings,” says Brandolin. “Say rather, that too much eating has destroyed all esprit. Don’t we eat all day long everywhere, or at least are expected to do so? You lament your ruined digestion. It is impossible to digest when time is only counted by what our beloved Yankees call square meals (why square I fail to fathom), and for women it is worse than for us, because they eat such quantities of sweet things we don’t touch, and then the way they go in for caviare bread-and-butter, and anchovy sandwiches, and all kinds of rich cakes, and deux doigts de Madère or glasses of kümmel at the tea-hour, — it is frightful! I wonder they have any complexions at all left, even wi
th the assistance of all the ‘secrets de Vénus.’”
“You won’t alter ’em, my dear fellow,” replies Usk, “if you put yourself out about it ever so much. If you were to marry a savage out of Formosa, or an Esquimaux, she’d take kindly to the caviare and the kümmel before a week was out, if you brought her to Europe. Why, look at dogs, — you may keep ’em on biscuit and tripe if they live in the kennels, but if they once come to the dining-room they’ll turn their noses up at a beef-steak if it isn’t truffled!”
“Dogs, at least, stop short of the kümmel,” says Brandolin; “but if you were to put together the sherry, the dry champagne, the liqueurs at tea, the brandy in the chasse at dinner, which a fashionable woman takes in the course of the day (not counting any pick-me-up that she may require in her own room), the amount would be something enormous, — incredible! You would not believe the number of women who have cured me of an unhappy passion for them by letting me see what a lot they could drink.”
“You will adore the Sabaroff, then. She never touches anything that I see, except tea.”
“Admirable person! I am ready to adore her. Tell me more about her. By the way, who is she?”
“Oh, you must go to Dolly for biographies of her foreigners. I can’t keep even their names in my head.”
“Foreigners! What an expression!” cries Dorothy Usk, in disdain. “Since steam effaced frontiers, nobody but insular people like ourselves ever use such a term. Nationalities are obliterated.”
She is very fond of Xenia Sabaroff: she has a great many warm attachments to women who help to make her house attractive.
“Nationalities are still discernible in different tobaccos,” murmurs Brandolin. “The Havana won’t acknowledge an equal in the Cavour.”
“Dolly don’t know anything about her,” continues Usk, clinging to the subject.