Section 7
It was old Mrs. Verrall.
I wonder if I can convey the effect of her to you. She was a littleold lady with extraordinarily flaxen hair, her weak aquiline featureswere pursed up into an assumption of dignity, and she was richlydressed. I would like to underline that "richly dressed," or havethe words printed in florid old English or Gothic lettering. Noone on earth is now quite so richly dressed as she was, no one oldor young indulges in so quiet and yet so profound a sumptuosity.But you must not imagine any extravagance of outline or any beautyor richness of color. The predominant colors were black and furbrowns, and the effect of richness was due entirely to the extremecostliness of the materials employed. She affected silk brocadeswith rich and elaborate patterns, priceless black lace over creamyor purple satin, intricate trimmings through which threads andbands of velvet wriggled, and in the winter rare furs. Her glovesfitted exquisitely, and ostentatiously simple chains of fine goldand pearls, and a great number of bracelets, laced about her littleperson. One was forced to feel that the slightest article she worecost more than all the wardrobe of a dozen girls like Nettie; herbonnet affected the simplicity that is beyond rubies. Richness,that is the first quality about this old lady that I would like toconvey to you, and the second was cleanliness. You felt that oldMrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean. If you had boiled my poor dearold mother in soda for a month you couldn't have got her so cleanas Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was. And pervading allher presence shone her third great quality, her manifest confidencein the respectful subordination of the world.
She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without anyloss of her ultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that shehad come to interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that hadbridged the gulf between their families.
And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so faras my younger readers are concerned. You who know only the worldthat followed the Great Change will find much that I am tellinginconceivable. Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealedfor other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the thingsthat no one wrote about because every one understood and every onehad taken up an attitude. There were in England and America, andindeed throughout the world, two great informal divisions of humanbeings--the Secure and the Insecure. There was not and never hadbeen in either country a nobility--it was and remains a commonerror that the British peers were noble--neither in law nor customwere there noble families, and we altogether lacked the edificationone found in Russia, for example, of a poor nobility. A peeragewas an hereditary possession that, like the family land, concernedonly the eldest sons of the house; it radiated no luster of noblesseoblige. The rest of the world were in law and practice common--andall America was common. But through the private ownership of landthat had resulted from the neglect of feudal obligations in Britainand the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, largemasses of property had become artificially stable in the handsof a small minority, to whom it was necessary to mortgage all newpublic and private enterprises, and who were held together not byany tradition of service and nobility but by the natural sympathyof common interests and a common large scale of living. It was a classwithout any very definite boundaries; vigorous individualities, bymethods for the most part violent and questionable, were constantlythrusting themselves from insecurity to security, and the sonsand daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by wildextravagance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxietyand insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man. The restof the population was landless and, except by working directly orindirectly for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And suchwas the shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such thestifled egotism of all our feelings before the Last Days, that veryfew indeed of the Secure could be found to doubt that this was thenatural and only conceivable order of the world.
It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I amdisplaying, and I hope that I am conveying something of its hopelessbitterness to you, but you must not imagine that the Secure livedlives of paradisiacal happiness. The pit of insecurity below themmade itself felt, even though it was not comprehended. Life aboutthem was ugly; the sight of ugly and mean houses, of ill-dressedpeople, the vulgar appeals of the dealers in popular commodities,were not to be escaped. There was below the threshold of their mindsan uneasiness; they not only did not think clearly about socialeconomy but they displayed an instinctive disinclination to think.Their security was not so perfect that they had not a dread offalling towards the pit, they were always lashing themselves bynew ropes, their cultivation of "connexions," of interests, theirdesire to confirm and improve their positions, was a constantignoble preoccupation. You must read Thackeray to get the fullflavor of their lives. Then the bacterium was apt to disregard classdistinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants.Read their surviving books. Each generation bewails the decayof that "fidelity" of servants, no generation ever saw. A worldthat is squalid in one corner is squalid altogether, but that theynever understood. They believed there was not enough of anythingto go round, they believed that this was the intention of God andan incurable condition of life, and they held passionately and witha sense of right to their disproportionate share. They maintaineda common intercourse as "Society" of all who were practicallysecure, and their choice of that word is exhaustively eloquentof the quality of their philosophy. But, if you can master thesealien ideas upon which the old system rested, just in the samemeasure will you understand the horror these people had for marriageswith the Insecure. In the case of their girls and women it wasextraordinarily rare, and in the case of either sex it was regardedas a disastrous social crime. Anything was better than that.
You are probably aware of the hideous fate that was only too probablythe lot, during those last dark days, of every girl of the insecureclasses who loved and gave way to the impulse of self-abandonmentwithout marriage, and so you will understand the peculiar situationof Nettie with young Verrall. One or other had to suffer. And asthey were both in a state of great emotional exaltation and capableof strange generosities toward each other, it was an open questionand naturally a source of great anxiety to a mother in Mrs. Verrall'sposition, whether the sufferer might not be her son--whether asthe outcome of that glowing irresponsible commerce Nettie mightnot return prospective mistress of Checkshill Towers. The chanceswere greatly against that conclusion, but such things did occur.
These laws and customs sound, I know, like a record of somenasty-minded lunatic's inventions. They were invincible facts inthat vanished world into which, by some accident, I had been born,and it was the dream of any better state of things that was scoutedas lunacy. Just think of it! This girl I loved with all my soul,for whom I was ready to sacrifice my life, was not good enough tomarry young Verrall. And I had only to look at his even, handsome,characterless face to perceive a creature weaker and no betterthan myself. She was to be his pleasure until he chose to cast heraside, and the poison of our social system had so saturated hernature--his evening dress, his freedom and his money had seemedso fine to her and I so clothed in squalor--that to that prospectshe had consented. And to resent the social conventions thatcreated their situation, was called "class envy," and gently bornpreachers reproached us for the mildest resentment against an injusticeno living man would now either endure or consent to profit by.
What was the sense of saying "peace" when there was no peace? Ifthere was one hope in the disorders of that old world it lay inrevolt and conflict to the death.
But if you can really grasp the shameful grotesqueness of the oldlife, you will begin to appreciate the interpretation of old Mrs.Verrall's appearance that leapt up at once in my mind.
She had come to compromise the disaster!
And the Stuarts WOULD compromise! I saw that only too well.
An enormous disgust at the prospect of the imminent encounter betweenStuart and his mistress made me behave in a violent and irrationalway. I wanted to es
cape seeing that, seeing even Stuart's firstgesture in that, at any cost.
"I'm off," said I, and turned my back on him without any furtherfarewell.
My line of retreat lay by the old lady, and so I advanced towardher.
I saw her expression change, her mouth fell a little way open, herforehead wrinkled, and her eyes grew round. She found me a queercustomer even at the first sight, and there was something in themanner of my advance that took away her breath.
She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended tothe level of the hothouse floor. She receded a pace or two, witha certain offended dignity at the determination of my rush.
I gave her no sort of salutation.
Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort of salutation.There is no occasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thingI said to her--I strip these things before you--if only I can getthem stark enough you will understand and forgive. I was filledwith a brutal and overpowering desire to insult her.
And so I addressed this poor little expensive old woman inthe following terms, converting her by a violent metonymy into acomprehensive plural. "You infernal land thieves!" I said point-blankinto her face. "HAVE YOU COME TO OFFER THEM MONEY?"
And without waiting to test her powers of repartee I passed rudelybeyond her and vanished, striding with my fists clenched,out of her world again. . .
I have tried since to imagine how the thing must have looked toher. So far as her particular universe went I had not existed atall, or I had existed only as a dim black thing, an insignificantspeck, far away across her park in irrelevant, unimportant transit,until this moment when she came, sedately troubled, into her ownsecure gardens and sought for Stuart among the greenhouses. Thenabruptly I flashed into being down that green-walled, brick-flooredvista as a black-avised, ill-clad young man, who first stared andthen advanced scowling toward her. Once in existence I developedrapidly. I grew larger in perspective and became more and moreimportant and sinister every moment. I came up the steps withinconceivable hostility and disrespect in my bearing, toweredover her, becoming for an instant at least a sort of second FrenchRevolution, and delivered myself with the intensest concentrationof those wicked and incomprehensible words. Just for a second Ithreatened annihilation. Happily that was my climax.
And then I had gone by, and the Universe was very much as it hadalways been except for the wild swirl in it, and the faint senseof insecurity my episode left in its wake.
The thing that never entered my head in those days was that a largeproportion of the rich were rich in absolute good faith. I thoughtthey saw things exactly as I saw them, and wickedly denied. But indeedold Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfectionof her family's right to dominate a wide country side, than she wasof examining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any other ofthe adamantine pillars upon which her universe rested in security.
No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously. But she couldnot understand.
None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such lividflashes of hate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness belowtheir feet. The thing leapt out of the black for a moment andvanished, like a threatening figure by a desolate roadside lit fora moment by one's belated carriage-lamp and then swallowed up bythe night. They counted it with nightmares, and did their best toforget what was evidently as insignificant as it was disturbing.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
WAR