"There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked a gleam of curiosity...."You want," she said, "to say to the aristocracy, 'Be aristocrats.NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember what happened to the monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?""Well," I said, "I want an aristocracy."
"This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them.The backwoodsmen are off the stage.These are the brilliant ones--the smart and the blues....They cost a lot of money, you know."So far Mrs.Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not stated in our speech.They were on the whole handsome people, charitable minded, happy, and easy.They led spacious lives, and there was something free and fearless about their bearing that Iliked extremely.The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-thinking.Mrs.Redmondson talked as fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with those flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of perception few men display.I liked, too, the relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that are the essence of the middle-class order....
After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a type and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings, but much harder to produce a sample.Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance, fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, a towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering blue silk and black lace and black hair, and small fine features and chins and chins and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps and cushions upon the great terrace of Champneys.Her eye was blue and hard, and her accent and intonation were exactly what you would expect from a rather commonplace dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic.I was, I am afraid, posing a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant.She affected a cynical coarseness.She developed a theory on the governance of England, beautifully frank and simple."Give 'um all a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained.
"That's my remedy."
In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.
"Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction.
It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet unformulated intentions.
"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady Forthundred."You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get a lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's what we're all after, isn't ut?
"It's not an ideal arrangement."
"Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred.
On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in education, Lady Forthundred scored.
We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, my old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair of the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group of daily newspapers.I had expected to find the great lady hostile to the new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
"We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any nonsense about nobility."She turned and smiled down on me."We English," she said, "are a practical people.We assimilate 'um.""Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?""Then they don't give trouble."
"They learn to shoot?"
"And all that," said Lady Forthundred."Yes.And things go on.
Sometimes better than others, but they go on--somehow.It depends very much on the sort of butler who pokes 'um about."I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty thousand a year by at least detrimental methods--socially speaking.
"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred, courageously....
Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked.What was there in the brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and fifth cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely, against a background of deft, attentive maids and valets, on every spacious social scene? How did things look to them?
7
Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham with his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face, his unequal mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing oratory.He led all these people wonderfully.He was always curious and interested about life, wary beneath a pleasing frankness--and I tormented my brain to get to the bottom of him.
For a long time he was the most powerful man in England under the throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in the Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break against a cliff.He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed he scarcely troubled to foresee.He brought political art to the last triumph of naturalness.Always for me he has been the typical aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that he remained a commoner to the end of his days.
I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early papers of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered liking for him that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed.
