PART IV
FLIRTING, COURTING, BANNS UP, MARRIAGE
(Popular Victorian Game)
I
Soon after I came home from Paris, my mother had a serious illness. In the usual manner of doctors, it was diagnosed as appendicitis, paratyphoid, gallstones and a few more things. Several times she had been on the brink of being carted off to the operating-table. Treatment did not improve her conditiona€“she was constantly having relapses, and various different operations were mooted. My mother was an amateur doctor herself. When her brother Ernest had been working as a medical student, she had helped him with mounting enthusiasm. She would have made a far better doctor than he would. In the end he had to give up the idea owing to the fact that he could not stand the sight of blood. By that time mother was practically as fully trained as he wasa€“and would not have minded blood, wounds, or any other physical offences to the eye. I noticed that, whenever we went to the dentist together, my mother ignored the Queen or The Tatler and immediately seized The Lancet or the British Medical journal if it was anywhere about on the table.
Finally losing patience with her medical attendants, she said, a€?I dona€?t think they knowa€“I dona€?t know myself. I think the great thing is to get out of the doctorsa€hands.a€?
She succeeded in finding yet another doctor who was what you might call the biddable kind, and was soon able to announce that he had advised sunshine and a warm dry climate. a€?We will go to Egypt for the winter,a€she informed me.
Once more we set about letting the house. It was fortunate that the expenses of travelling must have been fairly low in those days, and that the cost of living abroad seemed easily covered by the high rent asked for Ashfield. Torquay was of course at that period still a winter resort. Nobody went there during the summer, and people who lived there always went away then to avoid a€?the terrible heata€?. (I cana€?t imagine what this terrible heat could be: nowadays I always find South Devon extremely cold in the summer.) Usually they went up to the moor and took houses there. Father and mother did that once, but they found it so hot on the moor that father hired a dog-cart and drove back into Torquay to sit in his own garden practically every afternoon. Anyway, Torquay was then the Riviera of England, and people paid large rents for furnished villas there, during quite a gay winter season with concerts in the afternoons, lectures, occasional dances, and a great deal of other social activity.
I was now ready to a€?come outa€?. My hair was a€?upa€?, which at that period meant done in the Grecian style, with large knots of curls high up on the back of the head and a kind of fillet round it. It was really a becoming style, particularly suited to evening dress. My hair was very longa€“I could sit on it easily. This for some reason was considered something to be proud of in a woman, though what it actually meant was that your hair was completely unmanageable and was always coming down. To counter-act this, hairdressers created what was called a postichea€“a large false knot of curls, with your own hair pinned away as tight to your head as possible, and the postiche pinned to that.
a€?Coming-outa€was a thing of great importance in a girla€?s life. If you were well off, your mother gave a dance for you. You were supposed to go for a season in London. Of course the season was by no means the commercial and highly organised racket it has become in the last twenty or thirty years. The people you asked to your dance then, and the people to whose dances you went, were your personal friends. There was always a slight difficulty in scraping up enough men; but the dances were on the whole informal affairs, or else there were charity balls, to which you took a large party.
Of course, there could be nothing like that in my life. Madge had had her coming-out in New York and been to parties and dances there, but father had not been able to afford a London season for her, and there was certainly no question of my having one now. But my mother was anxious that I should have what was considered a young girla€?s birthright, that is to say that she should emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, from a schoolgirl to a young lady of the world, meeting other girls and plenty of young men, and, to put it plainly, be given her chance of finding a suitable mate.
Everyone made a point of being kind to young girls. They asked them to house-parties, and they arranged pleasant theatre evenings for them. You could rely on all your friends to rally round. There was nothing approaching the French system of shielding daughters and permitting them to meet only a selected few partis, who would all make suitable husbands, who had committed their follies and sown their young mena€?s wild oats, and who had sufficient money or property to keep a wife. This system was, I think, a good one; it resulted, certainly, in a high percentage of happy marriages. The English belief that young French girls were forced to marry rich old men was quite untrue. A French girl could make her choice, but it was definitely a limited choice. The rackety, wild-living young man, the charming mauvais sujet whom she would doubtless have preferred, was never allowed to enter her orbit.
In England that was not so. Girls went out to dances and met all kinds of young men. Their mothers were there, too, sitting wearily as chaperones, but mothers were fairly helpless. Of course, people were reasonably careful about the young men with whom they allowed their daughters to associate, but there was still a wide field of choice, and girls were notorious for preferring undesirable young men, and even going so far as to get engaged to them or having what was termed an a€?understandinga€?. a€?Having an understandinga€was a really useful term; by it parents avoided the friction of bad feeling over refusing to accept their daughtera€?s choice. a€?You are very young still, dear, and I am sure Hugh is quite charming, but he also is young and has not established himself yet. I see no reason why you should not have an understanding and should meet occasionally, but no letters and no formal engagement.a€They then worked behind the scenes to try to produce a suitable young man so that he might distract the girla€?s mind from the first one. This often happened. Direct opposition would, of course, have made the girl cling frantically to her first choice, but having it authorised took away some of the glamour, and as most girls are capable of being sensible they quite often changed their minds.
Owing to the fact that we were badly off, my mother saw that it was going to be difficult for me to enter society on the usual terms. Her choice of Cairo as a convalescent centre for herself was, I think, made mainly on my behalf, and was a good one. I was a shy girl, not brilliant socially; if I could be familiarized with dancing, talking to young men, and all the rest of it, as an everyday thing, it would be the best way of giving me some worth-while experience.
Cairo, from the point of view of a girl, was a dream of delight. We spent three months there, and I went to five dances every week. They were given in each of the big hotels in turn. There were three or four regiments stationed in Cairo; there was polo every day; and at the cost of living in a moderately expensive hotel all this was at your disposal. A good many people went out there for the winter, and many of them were mothers and daughters. I was shy at first, and remained shy in many ways, but I was passionately fond of dancing and I danced well. Also I liked young men, and I soon found they liked me, so everything went well. I was just seventeena€“Cairo as Cairo meant nothing to mea€“girls between eighteen and twenty-one seldom thought of anything but young men, and very right and proper, too!
The art of flirtation is lost nowadays, but then it was in full swing, and was an approximation, I think, to what the old troubadours called a€?le pays du tendrea€?. It is a good introduction to life: the half-sentimental-half-romantic attachment that grows up between what I think of now in my advanced age as a€?girls and boysa€?. It teaches them something of life and of each other without having to pay too violent or disillusioning a price. I certainly dona€?t remember any illegitimate babies among my friends or their families. No, I am wrong. It was not a pretty story: a girl whom we knew went to spend her holidays with a schoolfriend, and was seduced by the schoolfrienda€?s father, an elderly man with a nasty reputation.
Sexual attachments would have been difficult to enter into because young men had a high opinion of young girls, and adverse public opinion would have affected them as well as the girls. Men had their sexual fun with married women, usually a good deal older than themselves, or else with a€?little friendsa€in London, about whom no one was supposed to know. I do remember one incident when I was staying in a house-party in Ireland later. There were two or three other girls and young men, soldiers mostly, in the house, and one of the soldiers left abruptly one morning, saying he had had a telegram from England. This was patently untrue. Nobody knew the cause, but he had confided in a much older girl, whom he knew well and whom he considered able to appreciate his dilemma. Apparently he had been asked to accompany one of the girls to a dance some little distance away to which the others had not been invited. He duly drove her there, but on the way the girl suggested that they should stop at a hotel and engage a room. a€?We shall arrive at the dance a bit late,a€she said, a€?but nobody notices, I finda€“Ia€?ve often done it.a€The young man was so horrified that, having refused the suggestion he felt it quite impossible to meet her again the next day. Hence his abrupt departure.
a€?I could hardly believe my earsa€“she seemed such a nicely brought up girl, quite young, nice parents, and everything. Just the sort of girl one would feel one would want to marry.a€?
Those were still great days for the purity of young girls. I do not think we felt in the least repressed because of it. Romantic friendships, tinged certainly with sex or the possibility of sex, satisfied us completely. Courtship is, after all, a recognised stage in all animals. The male struts and courts, the female pretends not to notice anything, but is secretly gratified. You know it is not yet the real thing, but it is a kind of apprenticeship. The troubadours were quite right when they made their songs about the pays du tendre. I can re-read Aucassin and Nicolette always, for its charm, its naturalness and its sincerity. Never again, after your youth, do you have that particular feeling: the excitement of friendship with a man; that sense of being in affinity, of liking the same things, of the other one saying what you have just been thinking. A great deal of it is illusion, of course, but it is a wonderful illusion, and I think it ought to have its part in every womana€?s life. You can smile at yourself later, saying, a€?I was really rather a young fool.a€?
However, in Cairo I didna€?t even get as far as falling slightly in love. I had too much to do. There was so much going on, and so many attractive, personable young men. The ones that did stir my heart were men of about forty, who kindly danced with the child now and again, and teased me as a pretty young thing, but that was all. Society decreed that you should not dance more than two dances on your programme with the same man in an evening. It was possible, occasionally, to stretch this to three, but the sharp eyes of the chaperones were then upon you.
Onea€?s first evening dresses, of course, were a great joy. I had one of pale green chiffon with little lace frills, and a white silk one, rather plainly made, and a rather gorgeous one of deep turquoise blue taffeta, the material for which Grannie had unearthed from one of her secret remnant chests. It was a magnificent piece of stuff, but alas, having been in storage for so many years, it was unable to stand the Egyptian climate, and one evening in the course of a dance it split up the skirt, down the sleeves and round the neck, and I had to retire hurriedly to the Ladiesa€Cloakroom.
Next day we went to one of the Levantine dressmakers of Cairo. They were very expensive: my own dresses, bought in England, had been cheap. Still, I did get a lovely dress; it was a shot pale pink satin, and had a bunch of pink rose-buds on one shoulder. What I wanted, of course, was a black evening dress; all girls wanted a black evening dress to make them look mature. All their mothers refused to let them have them.
A young Cornishman, called Trelawny, and a friend of his, both in the 60th Rifles, were my chief partners. One of the older men, a Captain Craik, who was engaged to a nice American girl, brought me back to my mother after a dance one night and said, a€?Herea€?s your daughter. She has learnt to dance. In fact she dances beautifully. You had better try to teach her to talk now.a€It was a justified reproach. I had still, alas, no conversation.
I was good-looking. My family, of course, laugh uproariously whenever I say that I was a lovely girl. My daughter and her friends, particularly, say: a€?But, Mother, you couldna€?t have been. Look at those awful old photographs!a€It is true that some of the photographs of those days are pretty terrible, but that, I think, is due to the clothes, which are not yet quite old enough to have become period. Certainly at that time we were wearing monstrous hats, practically a yard across, of straw, ribbon, flowers, and large veils. Studio portraits were often taken in hats like this, sometimes tied with a ribbon under the chin; or sometimes you were shown with a much-frizzled head of hair, holding an enormous bunch of roses like a telephone receiver up to your ear. Looking at my early photographs, one, taken before I came out, with two long pigtails, sitting, for God knows what reason, at a spinning-wheel, is quite attractive. As one young man said to me once, a€?I like the Gretchen one, very much.a€I suppose I did look rather like Marguerite in Faust. There was one nice one of me in Cairo in one of my plainer hats, an enormous dark blue straw with one pink rose. It makes an attractive angle round the face, and is not so overladen with ribbons as most. Dresses were, on the whole, fussy and frilly.
I soon became mad about polo, and used to watch it every afternoon. Mother tried to broaden my mind by taking me occasionally to the Museum, and also suggested we should go up the Nile and see the glories of Luxor. I protested passionately, with tears in my eyes, a€?Oh no, mother, oh no, dona€?t leta€?s go away now. Therea€?s the fancy dress dance on Monday, and I promised to go on a picnic to Sakkara on Tuesdaya€|a€and so on and so forth. The wonders of antiquity were the last thing I cared to see, and I am very glad she did not take me. Luxor, Karnak, the beauties of Egypt, were to come upon me with wonderful impact about twenty years later. How it would have spoilt them for me if I had seen them then with unappreciative eyes.
There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time. Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage. There you can appreciate it quite young, long before you take in the beauty of the words and of the poetry. I took my grandson, Mathew, to Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor at Stratford when he was, I think, eleven or twelve. He was very appreciative of both, though his comment was unexpected. He turned to me as we came out, and said in an awe-struck voice, a€?You know, if I hadna€?t know beforehand that that was Shakespeare, I should never have believed it.a€This was clearly meant to be a testimonial to Shakespeare, and I took it as such. Macbeth having been a success with Mathew, we proceeded to The Merry Wives of Windsor. In those days it was done, as I am sure it was meant to be, as good old English slap-sticka€“no subtlety about it. The last representation of the Merry Wives I sawa€“in 1965a€“had so much arty production about it that you felt you had travelled very far from a bit of winter sun in Windsor Old Park. Even the laundry basket was no longer a laundry basket, full of dirty washing: it was a mere symbol made of raffia! One cannot really enjoy slapstick farce when it is symbolised. The good old pantomime custard trick will never fail to rouse a roar of laughter, so long as custard appears to be actually applied to a face! To take a small carton with Birds Custard Powder written on it and delicately tap a cheeka€“well, the symbolism may be there, but the farce is lacking. The Merry Wives of Windsor went down well indeed with Mathew, I am glad to saya€“particular delight being taken over the Welsh schoolmaster.
I think there is nothing more delightful than introducing the young to things that we ourselves have long taken for granted, and have taken for granted in a particular way. Max and I went on a motor tour of the castles of the Loire once with my daughter, Rosalind, and one of her friends. The friend measured all the castles we saw by one criterion only: she would look round with experienced eyes and say, a€?They could really have made whoopee here, couldna€?t they?a€I had never thought of the castles of the Loire in terms of making whoopee before, but again it was a shrewd observation. The old kings and noblemen of France did indeed use their castles for whoopee. The moral (since I was brought up always to find morals) is that you are never too old to learn. There is always some new point of view being shown you unexpectedly.
This seems to have led me a long way from Egypt. One thing does so lead to another; but why shouldna€?t itThat winter in Egypt, I now see, solved a great many problems in our life. My mother, faced with the difficulty of having to provide social life for a young daughter, with next to no money to do it on, discovered a solution, I overcame my awkwardness. In the language of my time, a€?I knew how to behavea€?. Our way of life now is so different that it seems almost impossible to explain.
The trouble is that girls today know nothing of the art of flirtation. Flirtation, as I have said, was an art carefully cultivated by girls of my generation. We knew the rules back to front. It was true that in France no young girl was ever left alone with a young man, but in England that was certainly not so. You went for a walk with a man, you went out riding with a mana€“but you did not go to a dance alone with a young man: either your mother sat there, or some other bored dowager, or appearances were satisfied by a young married woman being in your party. But having kept the rules, and having danced with a young man, you then strolled out in the moonlight or wandered into the conservatory, and charming t?ates t?ates could take place without decorum being abandoned in the eyes of the world.
Managing your programme was a difficult art, and one that I was not particularly good at. Say you start off at a party: A, B, C are three girls, D, E, F are three young men. You must at least dance with each of those young men twicea€“probably, you will go to supper with one of them, unless he or you particularly wish to avoid that. The rest of the programme is open for you to arrange to your satisfaction. There are plenty of young men lined up there, and at once some of thema€“the ones you dona€?t particularly want to seea€“approach you. Then the tricky bit begins. You try to prevent them seeing that your programme is as yet not filled up at all, and say doubtfully that you could manage number fourteen. The difficulty is to strike the right balance. The young men you do want to dance with are here somewhere, but if they are late coming up your programme may be already filled. On the other hand, if you tell enough lies to the first young men you will be left with gaps in your programme, and they may not be filled by the right young men. Then you will have to sit out some dances and be a wallflower. Oh, the agony when the young man you have secretly been waiting for suddenly appears, having been looking wildly for you in all the wrong places! You have to tell him sadly, a€?I have only got the second extra and number ten.a€?
a€?Oh, surely you can do better than that?a€he pleads.
You look at your programme, and consider. Cutting dances is not a nice act. It is disapproved of, not only by hostesses and mothers, but also by young men themselves. They sometimes take revenge by cutting dances themselves in return. Perhaps in looking down your programme you see the name of some young man who has behaved badly to you, who has come up late, who has talked more to another girl at supper than to you. If so, you sacrifice him properly. Just occasionally, in desperation, you sacrifice a young man because he dances so abominably that it is really agony for your feet. But that I hardly ever liked to do, because I was tender-hearted, and it seemed unkind to treat so badly a poor young man who was almost certain to be treated badly by everyone else. The whole thing was really as intricate as the steps of a dance. In some ways it was great fun, but in others rather nerve-racking. At any rate onea€?s manners did improve with practice.
Going to Egypt was a great help to me. I dona€?t think anything else would have removed my natural gaucherie so soon. It was certainly a wonderful three months for a girl. I got to know at least twenty or thirty young men reasonably well. I went to, I suppose, between fifty and sixty dances; but I was too young and enjoying myself far too much to fall in love with anybody, which was lucky. I did cast languishing eyes on a handful of bronzed middle-aged colonels, but most of these were already attached to attractive married womena€“the wives of other mena€“and had no interest in young and insipid girls. I was somewhat plagued by a young Austrian count of excessive solemnity, who paid me serious attention. Avoid him as much as I could, he always sought me out and engaged me for a waltz. The waltz, as I have said, is the one dance I dislike, and the counta€?s waltzing was of the most superior kinda€“that is, it consisted very largely of reversing at top speed, which rendered me so giddy that I was always afraid I would fall down. Reversing had been considered by Miss Hickeya€?s dancing-class as not quite nice, so I had not had sufficient practice in it.
The count would then say that he would like the pleasure of a little conversation with my mother. This was, I suppose, his way of showing that his attentions were honourable. Of course, I had to take him to my mother, who was sitting against the wall, enduring the penance of the eveninga€“for to her it certainly was a penance. The count sat down beside her and entertained her very solemnly for, I should think, at least twenty minutes. Afterwards, when we got home, my mother said to me crossly. a€?What on earth induced you to bring over that little Austrian to talk to meI couldna€?t get rid of him.a€I assured her that I couldna€?t help it, that he had insisted. a€?Oh well, you must try and do better, Agatha,a€said my mother. a€?I cana€?t have young men being brought up to talk to me. They only do it to be polite, and to make a good impression.a€I said he was a dreadful man. a€?He is nice-looking, well-bred, and a good dancer,a€said my mother, a€?but I must say that I found him a complete bore.a€?
Most of my friends were young subalterns, and our friendships were absorbing but non-serious. I watched them playing polo, goaded them if they had not done well or applauded if they had, and they showed off before me to the best of their ability. I found it rather more difficult to talk to the slightly older men. A great many names are forgotten by this time, but there was a Captain Hibberd who used to dance with me fairly often. It was quite a surprise to me when my mother said nonchalantly on the boat when we were sailing back from Cairo to Venice: a€?You know Captain Hibberd wanted to marry you, I suppose?a€?
a€?What?a€I said, startled. a€?He never proposed to me or said anything.a€a€?No, he said it to me,a€answered mother.
a€?To you?a€I said in astonishment.
a€?Yes. He said he was very much in love with you, and did I think you were too youngPerhaps he ought not to speak of it to you, he said.a€a€?And what did you say?a€I demanded.
a€?I told him I was quite sure you were not in love with him, and that it was no good his going on with the idea,a€she said.
a€?Oh mother!a€I exclaimed indignantly. a€?You didna€?t!a€?
Mother looked at me in great surprise. a€?Do you mean to say you did like him?a€she demanded. a€?Would you have considered marrying him?a€?
a€?No, of course not,a€I said. a€?I dona€?t want to marry him at all, and Ia€?m not in love with him, but I really do think, mother, that you might let me have my own proposals.a€?
Mother looked rather startled; then she admitted handsomely that she had been wrong. a€?Ita€?s quite a long time, you see, since I was a girl myself,a€she said. a€?But I do see your point of view. Yes, one does like to have onea€?s own proposals.a€?
I was annoyed about it for some time. I wanted to know what it felt like to be proposed to. Captain Hibberd was good-looking, not boring, danced well, was well offa€“it was a pity that I could not consider marrying him. I suppose, as is so often the case, that if you are not attracted to a young man, but he is attracted to you, he is at once put out of court by the fact that men, when they are in love, invariably manage to look like a somewhat sick sheep. If a girl is attracted to such a man she feels flattered by this appearance, and does not hold it against him; if she has no interest she dismisses him from her mind. This is one of the great injustices of life. Women, when they fall in love, look ten times as good-looking as normally: their eyes sparkle, their cheeks are bright, their hair takes a special glow; their conversation becomes much wittier and more brilliant. Other men, who have never noticed them before, then start to take a second look.
That was my first, highly unsatisfactory proposal of marriage. My second came from a young man six foot five high. I had liked him very much, and we had been good friends. He did not think of approaching me through my mother, I am glad to say. He had more sense than that. He managed to get home on the same boat as I did, sailing from Alexandria to Venice. I felt sorry that I was not fonder of him. We continued to write letters to one another for a short time; but then he was posted to India, I think. If I had met him when I was a little older I might perhaps have cared for him.
While I am on the subject of proposals, I wonder if men were specially given to proposing in my young days. I cannot help feeling that some of the proposals I and my friends had were entirely unrealistic. I have a suspicion that if I had accepted the offers they would have been dismayed. I once tackled a young naval lieutenant on this point. We had been walking home from a party in Torquay when he suddenly blurted out his proposal of marriage. I thanked him and said no, and added, a€?And I dona€?t believe you really want to, either.a€?
a€?Oh I do, I do.a€?
a€?I dona€?t believe it,a€I said. a€?We have only known each other about ten days, and I dona€?t see why you want to get married so young in any case. You know it would be very bad for your career.a€?
a€?Yes, well, of course, thata€?s true in a way.a€?
a€?So ita€?s really an awfully silly thing to go and propose to a girl like that. You must admit that yourself. What made you do it?a€?
a€?It just came over me,a€said the young man. a€?I looked at you and it just came over me.a€?
a€?Well,a€I said, a€?I dona€?t think you had better do it again to anyone. You must be more careful.a€?
We parted on kindly prosaic terms.