“The break-up?” said Rachel.
“It’s like this. If Harriet catches me smoking here in the morning there’ll be a row.” He picked up the trowel and waved it. “Nearly the whole of our class in England has, ever since the beginning of last century, been happily asleep. It isn’t good for people to have a woman on the throne for sixty years—bless her all the same, and her making a success of it. So we’ve slept and slept and slept. The Old Lady died. There was the Boer War: there were motorcars, flying machines, telephones. Suddenly England was an island no longer. She’s got to pay attention to other people, other ideas, other customs. She’s got to look out of her window instead of just snoozing on the sofa, surrounded by her mid-Victorian furniture. Everything’s cracking: new classes are coming up, old classes are going down. Birth is nothing: autocracies are anachronisms.... A volcano’s coming. Everything will be blown sky-high. Then the folk who are left will build a new city—as bad, as stupid, as selfish as the old one, perhaps—but different ... as different as Garth from China and China from Paradise.”
“And Katherine and Philip?” said Rachel.
“Oh, young Mark’s just one of the advance-guard. He’s smashing up the Trenchards with his hammer—the same way that all the families like us up and down England are being smashed up. If it isn’t a young man from abroad, it’s a letter or a book or a telephone number or a photograph or a suicide or a Lyceum melodrama. It doesn’t matter what it is. The good old backbone of England has got spine disease. When your good grandmother died your lot went; now our lot is going.... When I say going I mean changing.”
“There was a funny little man,” said Rachel, “whom Uncle John used to know. I forget his name, but he talked in the same way when grandmother died, and prophesied all kinds of things. The world hasn’t seemed very different since then, but grandmother was an impossible survival, and her lot went, all of them, long before she did. All the same, if you’ll forgive me, I don’t think that England and possible volcanoes are the point for the moment. It’s Katie I’m thinking about. If she’s unhappy now what will she be after she’s married to him?—If Katie were to make an unhappy marriage, I think it would be the greatest sorrow of my life. I know ... I’ve known ... how easily things can go wrong.”
“Ah, things won’t go wrong.” Uncle Tim smiled confidently. “Young Mark’s a good fellow. He’ll make Katherine happy all right. But she’ll have to change, and changing hurts. She’s been asleep like the others.... Oh, yes! she has! There’s no one loves her better than I, but she’s had, in the past, as much imagination as that trowel there. Perhaps now Philip will give her some. She’ll lose him if she doesn’t wake up. He’s restive now under the heavy hands of my dear relations—He’ll be gone one fine morning if they don’t take care. Katie must look out....” He waved his trowel in the direction of the garden. “All this is like a narcotic. It’s so safe and easy and ordered. Philip knows he oughtn’t to be comfortable here. Katie, Millie and Henry are beginning to know it. Even Harriet, Aggie, Betty, George will get a tiny glimmering of it one day. But they’re too old to change. That’s their tragedy. All the same, you see, before this time next year George will be proposing to take Harriet for a trip abroad—Italy probably—a thing he’s never done since the day of his marriage.”
And at that very moment George entered, very smart and big and red, with yellow gloves and a flower in his button-hole.
“What’s that?” he cried, with his usual roar of laughter. “Who says I’ll do what?”
“Take Harriet abroad before this time next year,” said Tim.
“I?... Not much!... We know better than that. England’s good enough for us. There isn’t a spot in the world to touch this place in the summer—so why should we stir? You’ll be saying we ought to go to Russia next, ... smoking your beastly pipe in here too. Why don’t you dress decently and go to church?”