H G Wells Omnibus, page 350
‘We aren’t keeping pace with our own progress, George. We got to. We’re bumping against new people, and they set up to be gentlefolks – etiquette dinners and all the rest of it. They give themselves airs and expect us to be fish-out-of-water. We aren’t going to be. They think we’ve no Style. Well, we give them Style for our advertisements, and we’re going to give ‘em Style all through…. needn’t be born to it to dance well on the wires of the Bond Street tradesmen. See?’
I handed him the cigar-box.
‘Runcorn hadn’t cigars like these,’ he said, truncating one lovingly. ‘We beat him at cigars. We’ll beat him all round.’
My aunt and I regarded him, full of apprehensions.
‘I got idees,’ he said darkly to the cigar, deepening our dread.
He pocketed his cigar-cutter and spoke again.
‘We got to learn all the rotten little game first. See? F’rinstance, we got to get samples of all the blessed wines there are – and learn ‘em up. Stern, Smoor, 8 Burgundy, all of ‘em! She took Stern tonight – and when she tasted it first – You pulled a face, Susan, you did. I saw you. It surprised you. You bunched your nose. We got to get used to wine and not do that. We got to get used to wearing evening dress – you, Susan, too.’
‘Always have had a tendency to stick out of my clothes,’ said my aunt. ‘However – Who cares?’ She shrugged her shoulders.
I had never seen my uncle so immensely serious.
‘Got to get the hang of etiquette,’ he went on to the fire. ‘Horses even. Practise everything. Dine every night in evening dress…. Get a brougham or something. Learn up golf and tennis and things. Country gentleman. Oh Fay. It isn’t only freedom from Goochery.’9
‘Eh?’ I said.
‘Oh! – Gawshery, if you like!’
‘French, George,’ said my aunt. ‘But I’m not old Gooch. I made that face for fun.’
‘It isn’t only freedom from Gawshery. We got to have Style. See! Style! Just all right and one better. That’s what I call Style. We can do it, and we will.’
He mumbled his cigar and smoked for a space, leaning forward and looking into the fire.
‘What is it,’ he asked, ‘after all? What is it? Tips about eating; tips about drinking. Clothes. How to hold yourself, and not say jes’ the few little things they know for certain are wrong – jes’ the shibboleth things.’10…
He was silent again, and the cigar crept up from the horizontal towards the zenith as the confidence of his mouth increased.
‘Learn the whole bag of tricks in six months,’ he said, becoming more cheerful. ‘Eh, Susan? Beat ‘em out! George, you in particular ought to get hold of it. Ought to get into a good club, and all that.’
‘Always ready to learn,’ I said. ‘Ever since you gave me the chance of Latin. So far we don’t seem to have hit upon any Latin-speaking stratum in the population.’
‘We’ve come to French,’ said my aunt, ‘anyhow.’
‘It’s a very useful language,’ said my uncle. ‘Puts a point on things. Zzzz. As for accent, no Englishman has an accent. No Englishman pronounces French properly. Don’t you tell me. It’s a Bluff. It’s all a Bluff. Life’s a Bluff – practically. That’s why it’s so important, Susan, for us to attend to Style. Le Steel Say Lum.11 The Style it’s the man. Whad you laughing at, Susan?… George, you’re not smoking. These cigars are good for the mind…. What do you think of it all? We got to adapt ourselves. We have – so far…. Not going to be beat by these silly things.’
§4
‘What do you think of it, George?’ he insisted.
What I said I thought of it I don’t now recall. Only I have very distinctly the impression of meeting for a moment my aunt’s impenetrable eye. And anyhow he started in with his accustomed energy to rape the mysteries of the Costly Life, and become the calmest of its lords. On the whole I think he did it – thoroughly. I have crowded memories, a little difficult to disentangle, of his experimental stages, his experimental proceedings. It’s hard at times to say which memory comes in front of which. I recall him as presenting on the whole a series of small surprises, as being again and again, unexpectedly, a little more self-confident, a little more polished, a little richer and finer, a little more aware of the positions and values of things and men. There was a time – it must have been very early – when I saw him deeply impressed by the splendours of the dining-room of the National Liberal Club.12 Heaven knows who our host was or what that particular little ‘feed’ was about now! – all that sticks is the impression of our straggling entry, a string of six or seven guests, and my uncle looking about him at the numerous bright red-shaded tables, at the exotics in great Majolica jars, at the shining ceramic columns and pilasters, at the impressive portraits of Liberal statesmen and heroes, and all that contributes to the ensemble of that palatial spectacle. He was betrayed into a whisper to me, ‘This is all Right, George!’ he said. That artless comment seems almost incredible as I set it down; there came a time so speedily when not even the clubs of New York could have overawed my uncle, and when he could walk through the bowing magnificence of the Royal Grand Hotel to his chosen table in that aggressively exquisite gallery upon the river, with all the easy calm of one of earth’s legitimate kings.
The two of them learnt the new game rapidly and well; they experimented abroad, they experimented at home. At Chislehurst, with the aid of a new, very costly, but highly instructive cook, they tried over everything they heard of that roused their curiosity and had any reputation for difficulty, from asparagus to plover’s eggs. They afterwards got a gardener who could wait at table – and he brought the soil home to one. Then there came a butler.
I remember my aunt’s first dinner-gown very brightly, and how she stood before the fire in the drawing-room confessing once unsuspected pretty arms with all the courage she possessed, and looking over her shoulder at herself in a mirror.
‘A ham,’ she remarked reflectively, ‘must feel like this. Just a necklace.’…
I attempted, I think, some commonplace compliment.
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!13 You look – spirited, somehow. Lord! – I wish some of those damned tradesmen at Wimblehurst could see you.’…
They did a lot of weekending 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 their habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to evening dress, using the weekend hotels as a practice-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 waiter – 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, unskilful waiters, and the choice of ‘Thig or Glear, Sir?’14 I’ve not dined in that way, in that sort of place, now for five years – it must be quite five years, so specialized 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,15 and people dressed for dinner and sitting about amidst the scarlet furniture-satin and white enamelled woodwork until the gong should gather them; and my aunt is there, very marvellously 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 tableland of motoring cap.
§5
So it was we recognized 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 womenkind 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 revelation, 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 organized 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 Chislehurst 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 Chislehurst 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 expressione16 until the magnificent smash of Crest Hill ended 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 Fair17 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, scrutinizing their lace, even demanding to handle jewellery, 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 not Good.’ In each other’s houses they peer at the pictures, handle the selvage of hangings, look at the bottoms of china…
I wonder if it is the old pawnshop in the blood.
I doubt if Lady Drew and the Olympians did that sort of thing, but there I may be only clinging to another of my former illusions about aristocracy and the state. Perhaps always possessions have been Booty, and never anywhere has there been such a thing as house and furnishings native and natural to the women and men who made use of them….
§6
For me, at least, it marked an epoch in my uncle’s career when I learnt one day that he had ‘shopped’ Lady Grove.18 I realized a fresh, wide, unpreluded step. He took me by surprise with the sudden change of scale from such portable possessions as jewels and motor-cars to a stretch of countryside. The transaction was Napoleonic; he was told of the place; he said ‘snap’; there was no preliminary desirings or searchings. Then he came home and said what he had done. Even my aunt was for a day or so measurably awe-stricken by this exploit in purchase, and we both went down with him to see the house in a mood near consternation. It struck us then as a very lordly place indeed. I remember the three of us standing on the terrace that looked westward, surveying the sky-reflecting windows of the house, and a feeling of unwarrantable intrusion comes back to me.
Lady Grove, you know, is a very beautiful house indeed, a still and gracious place, whose age-long seclusion was only effectively broken with the toot of the coming of the motor-car. An old Catholic family had died out in it, century by century, and was now altogether dead. Portions of the fabric19 are thirteenth-century, and its last architectural revision was Tudor; within, it is for the most part dark and chilly, save for two or three favoured rooms and its tall-windowed, oak-galleried hall. Its terrace is its noblest feature, a very wide, broad lawn it is, bordered by a low stone battlement, and there is a great cedar in one corner under whose level branches one looks out across the blue distances of the Weald – blue distances that are made extraordinarily Italian in quality by virtue of the dark masses of that single tree. It is a high hung terrace; southward one looks down upon the tops of wayfaring trees and spruces, and westward on a steep slope of beechwood, through which the road comes. One turns back to the still old house, and sees a grey and lichenous façade with a finely arched entrance. It was warmed by the afternoon light and touched with the colour of a few neglected roses and a pyracanthus. It seemed to me that the most modern owner conceivable in this serene fine place was some bearded scholarly man in a black cassock, gentle-voiced and white-handed, or some soft-robed, grey gentlewoman. And there was my uncle holding his goggles in a sealskin glove, wiping the glass with a pocket-handkerchief, and asking my aunt if Lady Grove wasn’t a ‘Bit of all Right‘.
My aunt made him no answer.
‘The man who built this,’ I speculated, ‘wore armour and carried a sword.’
‘There’s some of it inside still,’ said my uncle.
We went inside. An old woman with very white hair was in charge of the place, and cringed rather obviously to the new master. She evidently found him a strange and frightful apparition and was dreadfully afraid of him. But if the surviving present bowed down to us, the past did not. We stood up to the dark long portraits of the extinguished race – one was a Holbein20 – and looked them in their sidelong eyes. They looked back at us. We all, I know, felt the enigmatical quality in them. Even my uncle was momentarily embarrassed, I think, by that invincibly self-complacent expression. It was just as though, after all, he had not bought them up and replaced them altogether, as though that, secretly, they knew better and could smile at him….
