2
My last duty, before taking the road, was to attend little Ivy Maitland’s wedding.
She had wasted no time, I thought, in consoling herself for the loss of Eric Lane; but the quick decisions and quicker changes of this period were a conspicuous part of the “abnormality” which my uncle found devastating London in the first years of peace. We attended the ceremony, on O’Rane’s entreaty, to support Ivy, who was out of favour with most of her friends; and we went on to the reception in the hope of comforting Mr. Justice Maitland, who was deriving a morose satisfaction from prophesying the inevitable misery which his daughter was laying up for herself. I seem to possess an irresistible fascination for elderly bores; and the first chapter in my survey of England might have been headed: Maitland on the Decay of Faith and Morals.
“It would break your heart,” he told me, “if you listened to some of the stories I have to hear in the Divorce Court. If young people thought less of themselves and more of their elders . . . The churches have lost their grip. Young people don’t take us into their confidence.”
“Did they ever,” I asked, “where marriage was concerned?”
The judge pursued his denunciation without a check:
“Headstrong children like Ivy rush into it quite cynically. Their deepest affections are not engaged, so they have little to fear from failure; as for the scandal, none of their friends think the worse of them.”
“It’s a reaction from the cramping discipline of the war,” I answered. “The people who find their way into the Divorce Court are taking their revenge, in private lawlessness, for long submission to a machine that had neither body to be kicked nor soul to be damned.”
If my explanation was heard, it was not answered.
“One woman, my dear Oakleigh,” the judge recalled sombrely and unseasonably as his daughter drove away for her honeymoon, “actually asked me—in court—what was to be done with a husband who insulted her in public: it was not, she explained, as if they had not a home where he could do that. It’s terrible!”
I agreed; but, as I could suggest no remedy, I took my leave and motored Barbara to Chepstow for a week before we set our hand on the great pulse of the people in Scotland. Most of the houses where we stayed had been closed for five years or turned into hospitals; and, as they opened their doors, I felt that the interrupted play of 1914 was being resumed on a stage from which all the old actors had departed. The new avenue at Loring Castle seemed no taller; if the dogs were older, they were for the most part the same dogs; but the present marquess was a four-year-old boy whose father was reported missing some eight-and-forty hours before he himself came into the world. The terrible emptiness of those days returned to me when I saw Violet walking by herself along the valley-terrace, where I had walked with her husband on the last night of peace.
I wondered how much of Jim Loring’s world would survive into this child’s manhood. The servant who unpacked for me confided that he was marking time till he heard of an opening in the colonies. The house-carpenter, who had married one of the maids, told me that he was setting up in business with her savings from a munition-works. The stud-groom engaged me unexpectedly in a discussion of the Pyramids, which he had visited since last I stayed at Chepstow. At first I thought that in his blood, too, unrest was stirring; but I discovered later that the war had only changed his outlook by convincing him of the literal truth of the Old Testament.
“Moses . . . and them Pharaohs,” he murmured to himself, looking dreamily towards the junction of Wye and Severn as though it were the Red Sea waiting to pile up its waters and let the children of Israel through.
He at least had no desire to roam. Grandfather, father and son, the family had lived and died in sight of the Castle stables; and he would have repudiated his king before he defaulted in his allegiance to the Lorings. In Gallipoli, I gathered, there were frothy, worthless fellows—the scum of midland factories and the dregs of South Welsh pits—who were ready enough to criticize their betters. Firebrands and hot-heads, they maintained that their betters had muddled them into the war and that, if the politicians and the generals had known their job as well as the hewers and fitters, the flower of an army would not have been sent to its death in this way. Their “betters”, according to these critics, had been found out.
I suggested that the French, in spite of their scientific training, and the Americans, for all their democratic upbringing had also made blunders; so, I added, had the Germans; but I was preaching to the converted. This criticism was the yapping of town-bred curs; and, if anything exceeded my friend’s devotion to his feudal head, it was his scorn and hatred for the thieving upstarts of city streets.
“Then you don’t think anything will come of all this talk?,” I asked.
“Not while their lazy bellies are full, sir,” he answered.
How long that would be was one of the problems that Bertrand had sent me to solve.
“So long as the price of wheat stops where it is,” one of Violet’s tenant-farmers told me, “I can make a living. Of course, if her ladyship raises my rent . . .” He complained of the wages that had to be paid nowadays to old men and boys for a third of the work that was done before the war. “I can’t reduce them,” he added. “Why, d’you know, sir, what a pair of good boots costs you in Chepstow to-day?”
I have forgotten the figure; but, when I had occasion to make a few purchases, the shop-keepers apologized for their charges. The cost of labour and materials had gone up; but you could not reduce them when living was so expensive.
“A loaf of bread nowadays . . .” began the bootmaker who was oppressing the tenant-farmer’s labourer, who was keeping up the price of bread.
Then he muttered something about “middlemen” and “profiteers”.
At the other end of the scale, Violet Loring deferred making any improvements on the Chepstow estate until her tenants paid a rent commensurate with the high cost of labour and material. She was a rich woman, by the standard of gross income; but she had three houses in England, a palace in Scotland and a derelict barrack in Ireland. The greater part of her income was derived from coal; and the latest strike-cloud was being illuminated terrifyingly with lightning-forks that spelt ‘nationalization’. In one paper I read that some Angevin king, with more generosity than geography, had granted to Sir Humfrey de Loringe certain lands that were his by right of seizure alone; the paper—and I with it—knew of no service by Sir Humfrey to the community at large that justified this grant in perpetuity; and, if right of seizure was the basis of the Loring estates in one century, right of seizure—it was suggested—might be the means of expropriating the Lorings in another.
“I don’t think there’ll be any confiscation in my time,” said Violet, “but I have to think of Sandy.”
And her surplus income was therefore being invested in various securities of various foreign countries, in the hope that all would not default at the same moment.
As I moved to houses less well endowed than my cousin’s, I found the uneasiness more marked. The Knightriders, taking early advantage of the boom in real estate, had sold their house in Raglan to a rich colliery-proprietor; John Carstairs, when we went to stay with him at Herrig, said that, after this experimental year, he would have to let the shooting; and our visit to Philip Hornbeck in Yorkshire had to be cancelled because his wife had suggested a general reduction of wages and his servants had left her in a body without notice.
“Insecurity is the first, universal quality of the times,” I wrote to my uncle.