SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS
533
who seemed to drop money from their pores even in the bleak
misery of the middle of a winter term. At the beginning and end of
the term, especially, there was naively snobbish chatter about Switzer–
land, and Scotland with its ghillies and grouse moors, and "my
uncle's yacht," and "our place in the country," and "my pony"
and "my pater's touring car." There never was, I suppose, in the
history of the world a time when the sheer vulgar fatness of wealth,
without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it, was so ob–
trusive as in those years before 1914.
It
was the age when crazy
millionaires in curly top hats and lavender waistcoats gave champagne
parties in rococo houseboats on the Thames, the age of diabolo and
hobble skirts, the age of the "knut" in
his
gray bowler and cutaway
coat, the age of
The Merry Widow,
Saki's novels,
Peter Pan
and
Where the Rainbow Ends,
the age when people talked about chocs
and cigs and ripping and topping and heavenly, when they went for
divvy weekends at Brighton and had scrumptious teas at the Troc.
From the whole decade before 1914, there seems to breathe forth
a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kinds of luxury, a smell of
brilliantine and creme de menthe and soft-centered chocolates-an
atmosphere, as it were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on
green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song. The extraordinary
thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that this
oozing, bulging wealth of the English upper and upper-middle
classes would last forever, and was part of the order of things. After
1918 it was never quite the same again. Snobbishness and expensive
habits came back, certainly, but they were self-conscious and on the
defensive. Before the war the worship of money was entirely unreflect–
ing and untroubled by any pang of conscience. The goodness of
money was as unmistakable as the goodness of health or beauty, and
a glittering car, a title or a horde of servants was mixed up
in
people's
minds with the idea of actual moral virtue.
At Crossgates, in term-time, the general bareness of life enforced
a certain democracy, but any mention of the holidays, and the
consequent competitive swanking about cars and butlers and country
houses, promptly called class distinctions into being. The school was
pervaded by a curious cult of Scotland, which brought out
tlw
fundamental contradiction in our standard of values. Bingo claimed
Scottish ancestry, and she favored the Scottish boys, encouraging
