Life in London, in Ascot week, struck me, coming up after six months in the country, as very much like that night of fever. There was the same dry crackling, the same strife of noise, the symptoms of mirth without reality. London, of course, is much too big to be generalised from. The best is hidden behind shut doors. It is the froth of the ferment that you see. But there is now too much froth; one wonders what is working in the lees.
Londoners, as you pass them in a cab, are a crowd; you don’t even suspect individuality there. They drift along the streets like clouds. The colours of them are so blurred down by the dust and din that they seem a uniform drab. Here and there a yellow jumper, or a grass-green sunshade catches the eye; but no personality behind it, no reasonable soul in human flesh subsisting. It requires stern attention on a fixed point if you would candidly consider your fellow creatures as London has made them, and, no doubt, been made by them. It happened to me that I was held up by a block in Piccadilly, at a favourable point between Bond Street and the arcade of the Ritz. Four o’clock on a glaring afternoon; tea-shops crammed; motor buses piled skywards like market-carts: extraordinarily over-dressed young men, and extraordinarily undressed girls were on the pavement, all very much alike, and all apparently of one age.
Observe that I have not seen London in the season since the Armistice. Well, it seemed to me that the scythe had mown down much that I used to know. Here instead was a saturnalia of extreme youth. I saw thin girls in single garments of silk, with long white legs and Russian opera shoes; and young men walking with them, looking curiously at them, or talking to them urgently at shop windows. The girls said little; they were not there to talk, but to be talked to; they accepted what was said as a matter of routine. Their eyes wandered from article to article displayed. They seemed to me as purposeless as moths hovering about flowers at dusk. Love, I suppose, was their food—it ought to have been; but neither they nor their lovers showed any of the pride or triumph, the joy or the longing of love. Love, for once, was not a new thing; the wonder had left it. Fever had dried up the juices of nymph and swain alike. It was like a dinner off husks.
Next day was the first of Ascot, and I watched for some time the endless procession of motors in the Hammersmith Road. I had often seen it before—I mean before the war. It had been a big thing then; but now it was a monstrous thing, a nightmare of going to the races. A continuous stream there was, of long, low, swift, smooth-gliding machines, never stopping, almost noiseless. They were all covered and glazed, all filled inside with doll-like, silent, half-clad, vaguely-gazing girls; with stiff and starched, black-coated, silk-hatted young men. I saw no one laughing; I thought the whole business a dream on that account; for, though you see and mix with crowds in dreams, there is never either talking or laughing. It was that absence of heart in the thing, or of zest for it, which made one so uncomfortable. Lavish outlay is rather shocking nowadays; but if you take away the only excuse for it, which is high spirits, it is much more than shocking; it is terrifying, it is hideous.
Where on earth, I asked myself, did the money come from? Who floated, and how did they float the balances at the banks? Every one of those motors must have cost a thousand pounds; every one of the chauffeurs (you could see at a glance) must have cost five pounds a week. The clothes, no doubt, you could have on tick; but not the champagne, and not the chauffeurs. From where I stood in Addison Road I could see, at the lowest, fifty thousand pounds’ worth of motors. And the stream, mind you, at that hour reached from Ascot to Piccadilly, and was repeating itself on the Fulham Road and the King’s Road, to say nothing of the Uxbridge Road. Who were those people? Were they all profiteers, or all in other peoples’ debt? It was very odd. In the county where I live we are rather put to it how to keep going. The great houses are mostly shut up or in the market; the smaller houses are all too big for their owners and occupiers. There is a scale of general descent. The marquesses let their castles, if they can, and go in to the manors; the squires let their manors, and convert the farmhouses to their domestic use. I leave my old Rectory and hide in a cottage. We are all a peg or two down. Income-tax and the rates had done their fell work when there came upon us a coal strike of three months long—a knock-out blow to many. Did it not touch London? Or were all those pleasurers Colonel and Mrs. Rawdon Crawleys who live at the rate of seven thousand a year, on tick? The Lord knows.
On the whole, I thought it well that the miners’ wives, in the scorching grey villages of Durham and the Tyne, were not standing with me in Addison Road that first day of Ascot. Or if South Wales and Lanark had been there! I should not have wished them let loose on London just then. Nothing was further from London’s mind than either of those vexed and seething provinces. It neither talked of them nor read about them. The Westminster Gazette’s front page was entirely filled up with a cricket match; so, by the by, was the second. The Times—but since The Times has become sprightly I confess it is too much for me. An elephant on hot bricks! Nowadays, if I want to read the news I must send to Manchester for it. Thence I learn that the coal strike is in its third month, the English and Irish still murdering each other, and the Government still throwing overboard its own legislation. Golf news, cricket, polo, lawn tennis I can have from The Westminster Gazette.
The sea saw that and fled; Jordan was driven back. I stood it for three days, then came home to find the mallow in flower in the hedges, and men and women still afield getting in the last of the hay. Wilts was being careful over many things, but Ascot and thin girls were not of them. In London I was puzzled by the way the money was flying; but I was shocked, not by that, but by the absence of zest for a time-honoured pastime. If only some young couple had laughed! Or made love as if it was the only thing in the world worth doing! But they were all as weary as the King Ecclesiast. That seemed to me the serious matter.