Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (676 page)

CHAPTER XI
V

AND AGAIN CHANGES

When we look back upon the lives of our fathers the first thing that seems to strike us is their intolerable slowness, and then the gloom in which they lived — or perhaps the gloom would strike us first. Theirs seemed to be a land where it was always afternoon, with large gas-lamps flaring in white ground-glass globes, wasting an extraordinary amount of light. So that when I read in a novel of Miss Thrackeray’s that the lovers stepped out into the sunlit park, and the gay breezes fluttered their voluminous trousers, or their flounced crinolines, I simply do not believe it. I do not believe they had sunlight, though they probably had a park, and indeed in those days there were more elms in Kensington Gardens than to-day the Gardens can show. They certainly must have had trousers then, and as for crinolines, will not your old family cook, if you coax her, produce from a cupboard somewhere near the ceiling of the kitchen, a structure like a bird-cage connected by strips of what looks like very dirty linen? This, she will assure you with an almost reverential tone of voice, was the last crinoline she ever wore — and she says that she hears they are coming in again. They are always of course coming in again, though for the moment skirts are so tight that, helping a lady to get into a cab yesterday, I was almost tempted to pick her up and drop her in. I thought she would never have managed it. But no doubt, by the time that I am correcting the proofs of what I have just written “they” will be “coming in,” again. My own grandmother used to say that she was the only woman in London who never wore a crinoline. That of course was Pre-Raphaelism, but I feel certain that she did wear some sort of whalebone stiffening round the bottom of her skirt if she did not have a hoop half way up.

Yes, they certainly had crinolines but I do not believe they had any fresh breezes to blow them about. They could not have had. It was always brown, motionless fog in those days, and our mothers and grandmothers sat sewing with their eyes very close to the candles. I do not believe that they even ever went out. What did they have to go out in? There were, it is true, four-wheelers with clean straw in the bottom; but there was the danger that if you went out in a four-wheeler, a straw would stick in the bottom flounce of your crinoline and would show that you had come in a hired conveyance when you stepped out into the comparative brightness of your rout or conversazione. Of course if you were of the mistily extravagant class that kept its own carriage, you might drive somewhere, but I do not believe that John would take the horses out in the evening — John being either your tyrannous coachman or your somnolent husband, who was in the habit of reading his
Times
after a heavy dinner consisting of soup, fish, an enormous joint and probably a milk pudding which you took at seven. You had a great deal of heavy mahogany furniture, so that it took the footman an appreciable time to get the chairs from the dining-room wall and arrange them round the solid mahogany table. But time did not matter in those days, you had all the time in the world on your hands. Why, the table-cloth was even whisked off the table after dinner, over the heads of the diners, before the wine circulated. I know at least in some families that was done, and I dare say that even nowadays you could find some families still doing it. In those days, too, when a telegram came the lady of the house prepared to faint — the lady’s maid rushed for the smelling-salts, and a sort of awful hush pervaded the house from the basement to the garrets where in incredible discomfort the servants slept. And perhaps some of this feeling as to the ominousness of telegrams is returning. Nowadays with the telephone everywhere it is a comparatively rare thing to receive one of the yellow envelopes — except when you happen to be away at the seaside and your man goes off with your silver-gilt shaving set. I think I have only received one telegram this year, and that from a gentleman living in Richmond, to which distant place modernity has not yet spread. And this slowness of pace caused, as I have elsewhere pointed out, all the conditions of life to be very different. In those days intimacies between man and man, and woman and woman, were comparatively frequent, because there was more home life. You would be accustomed to have some one living round the corner who came in every evening and smoked a cigar with you, or if you were a woman it would be a “lady friend” who brought her sewing. Nowadays I fancy that no one above the station of a house-maid or a greengrocer’s assistant would have a “lady friend” at all, or would at least use those words to describe her. We are all men and women nowadays, and we have not got any friends.

A quarter of a century ago, say, there were practically no restaurants, though there were chop-houses for men; there was not a place where a woman could get a cup of tea in all London town. This I fancy led to a great deal of drinking amongst ladies. The respectable married woman went shopping; she felt tired, she entered a “confectioner’s,” and had a bath bun and a glass of sherry. So it began, and so it went on from sherry, through cherry brandy, to the consumption of strong drinks at home in secret. And again in those days there was an iniquitous institution peculiar to the male sex called a club. The erring husband returned home at night. Hanging up his umbrella on a gas-bracket, his boots upon the hat-rack, and, climbing upstairs in his stockinged feet to deposit his top hat on the ground outside his bedroom door, he would be met by an irate female in a yellow peignoir, carrying a flat candlestick with a candle dripping wax. To her he would explain that he had been spending his evening at the club, when really he had been at the Alhambra, which in those days was a very wicked place. I fancy, that London middle and upper class society in those days was a rather scandalous and horrid affair. Certainly the term “middle class” as an epithet of reproach had its origin about then. London was full of a lot of fat and overfed men with not too much to do and with time hanging heavily on their hands. Their social gifts were entirely undeveloped. They had no conversational powers and very little to talk about, and the sexes were very much shut off one from another.

Flirtations in those days were almost impossible, or they became secret affairs with all the attributes of guilt. Nowadays, when you can meet anybody anywhere, when there are teashops, picture galleries, men’s clubs, ladies’ clubs, cock-and-hen clubs, restaurants and the rest-rooms of the large shops, flirtations take place comparatively in public and you do not have to bolt to Boulogne in order to have a ten minutes’
tête-à-tête
, which is all you might require to bore you with a member of the opposite sex. But in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties there was nothing else in the world to do, just as in centuries before there had been nothing else to do. We are supposed to be more frivolous and I dare say we are, but I should say that on the whole we are healthier and less vicious. We are, that is to say, more natural. We can get a great deal more of what we want without kicking our shoes over windmills and we do not want so much more than we can get. For the matter of that it is easy to get much further than we ever want to.

There used to be a time when it was the height of dissipation to dine on the terrace of the Star and Garter at Richmond. One of Ouida’s heroines, who was, I believe, no better than she should be, is at least represented as sitting on that terrace and throwing oranges to the swans in the Thames. And since the Thames is perhaps three-quarters of a mile distant from the Star and Garter, we must consider the lady to have been as muscular as she was dangerous and dashing. Alas! yesterday I was at Richmond. It took me about as long to get there as to get to Brighton, and there was the Star and Garter closed. Enormous, abhorrent and dismal, it was like a stucco castle of vast dimensions from which no hero would ever again rescue a heroine.

It was very sad, the moon shone down, the river was misty in the distance. I should like to have sat upon the terrace amidst the buzz of voices, the popping of champagne corks. I should like even to have seen the Guardsmen with the Macassar oil dripping from their enormous moustaches — I should have liked even to throw oranges to the swans in the river, though I did not know what the swans would have done with them. But alas! all these things are ghosts, and the world of Ouida is vanished as far away as the lost islands of Atlantis.

If nowadays we want to dine rustically, we run thirty miles out of town, though it does not happen very often that we have an evening disengaged, so that we move about, not very hurriedly, but quite hurried enough in all conscience, from one electrically lit place to another. We get through three or four things at night; we manage a dinner, a theatre, an after-theatre supper and possibly the fag-end of a dance after that — and we turn up to breakfast at nine next morning, just as serenely as our fathers did. I fancy that we even turn up more fresh at the breakfast-table, for we are a great deal more abstemious in the matter of alcoholic liquors. What the preacher entirely failed in, the all tyrannous doctor has triumphantly achieved. The other day, a lady talking about the book of a woman novelist, remarked to me:

“I do not know how Miss — gets to know things.

How does she know so exactly the feeling of craving for drink that she describes? I have never seen a drunken man in my life.”

This last sentence seemed to me incredible, but when I come to think of it, I have not myself seen a drunken man for a very long time. Indeed, I think that the last intoxicated individual that I have seen was in a political club of the shade that most strongly advocates restrictions upon public-houses. But I may digress for a moment to report a couple of sentences that I heard at an exhibition the other night. They seemed to me to be so singular that I have felt inclined to build up a whole novel upon them. A woman was sitting by herself behind the bandstand, in an atmosphere of shade and aloofness, and a man came up to her and said “Your husband is very drunk now. We can go off.” But upon the whole the doctor triumphs. You hardly ever see a drunken man in the western streets of London, you practically never see a drunken woman. And the bars of music halls, which not so very many years ago were places for alcoholic orgies, are now almost deserted, except in the interval, when the band plays a selection. In the case of music halls, this is partly due perhaps to the fact that nowadays you can take a woman to them, you can even take a clergyman to them. And the other day I saw a Roman Catholic priest watching Russian dancers. And of course, if you take a woman, a clergyman, or a priest to a music hall, you do not desert your seat to sit in the bar. But for the better-class music halls, it is none the less mainly the doctor who has done the damage. The Church has told us for a century or so, that drunkenness was a sin and we went on sinning. Our wives and mothers have told us for many years, that to be drunk was to make a beast of oneself, and we went on getting by so much farther from the angels. But the doctor has gone abroad in the land and pronounced sternly that alcohol is bad for the liver, and now we drink barley-water at our clubs. And what the doctor has done for the audiences of the dearer music halls, the cheaper music halls have done for their own audiences. You will see, about eleven o’clock, an immense crowd streaming along the pavements, from any suburban Palace or Empire — all these people will be quite sober. Twenty-five years ago, more than half of them would have been spending their time and much more money in the public-houses. And this is a very pleasant thought, which gives me satisfaction every time it comes into my head, for I like to see people happy in this land where happiness is counted as sin — I like to see people happy and yet not demonstrably damaging their pockets, their healths, or their morals. So that what with one thing and another — what with the ease of getting about and the multiplicity of means of communication, we see a great deal more of the ways of the world. We may be becoming more shallow, but we are certainly less hypocritical. We may possibly be becoming more timid, but we certainly grow much more polite — London is lighter and London is more airy. It is so, demonstrably at any rate, in its wealthier regions and in its main thoroughfares. I do not mean to say that you will not find what you might call pockets of late Victorian gloom and squalor in the north and in the north-west of London. There is no knowing what you will not find in London and certainly there are survivals of horrors as there are survivals of the picturesque. One lives on one’s own little modern ring, one has fairly good times, one has the perpetual arousing and distracting of one’s interest. But two years ago I was coming back on Saturday night from a small town of a manufacturing type, not very far outside the London radius. The little town in itself was one of the ugliest places that it was possible to imagine. There was not a building in it of any approach to dignity. In every one of the windows of the squalid cottages that made it up, there was a pair of Nottingham curtains; the inhabitants were utterly uncivil if you asked them the way, and they appeared to be all operative manufacturers, drawing small wages from a slowly decaying trade. It was as ugly, as dirty, as dusty and as modern a town as you could find even in the eastern states of America. The railway station was badly illuminated, and in the dim shadows of the platform great crowds of the Saturday night inhabitants were waiting for the last train to the next small town on the line. It was a most disagreeable scene. Underfed and stunted men sang the coarsest popular songs of the year before last of London; underfed and stunted boys shouted obscene remarks in hoarse voices. The elder women were all dressed in badly fitting garments imitating, I should imagine, the clothes that Queen Victoria wore. The young girls, on the other hand, as long as you could not perceive them closely in the gloom, wore a most distinguished summer finery, but all their things were put on very badly; the frilled hats raked over to one side; the shoulders were one higher than the other. Petticoats showed beneath the bottoms of skirts; the flesh of faces was unhealthy and lacking in complexion; the teeth were mostly very bad and the voices usually harsh, cackling and disagreeable, the words being uttered with that peculiar intonation which has spread from West Essex all over the country, and which is called the cockney dialect. It was in short a sort of American effect. One might have been on a Saturday evening at the steam-car dépôt of the cotton-manufacturing town called Falls River N. J.