Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  Chapter X

  During the whole of that early winter the Easton Court Hotel was never empty. Patrick Balfour spent the great part of the autumn there. I came down for more or less every other fortnight, for week-ends and for odd visits there drifted down a good many of those who had spent the preceding summer between San Raphael and Mentone. We all of us had links of some sort with the South of France. Most weeks brought one or other of us news from there. Each letter told much the same story. Hotels were empty. Night clubs were closing; casinos deciding not to open. The French were apparently strangling their golden goose. It was hard to foresee the immediate future of the Riviera. During the preceding ten years, Death Duties and income tax had driven many of the less affluent of the rentier class to profit by the exchange in France: to build houses and make their homes there. It was a process of silent revolution. Educated to the belief that they would never need to work, they had been taken unawares by the changed conditions. They became of necessity depaysé. Their children on the other hand would realise that unless they entered the arena themselves, they would enjoy a poor seat in the gallery. They would either return to England resolved to earn their own living or they would accept a lower standard of life abroad: bringing their children up as foreigners: a part of their country’s life no longer. In two generations, or at the most three, a revolution would have been effected as silently but as effectively as the tumbril had achieved in France: only without any waste because the country would have only lost those who were of no value to the country. Those able to fill a part in their country’s life would remain in England.

  That was how one had thought during the preceding summer. But now, with the pound vacillating between ninety-five and eighty francs, we wondered as we sat in the evening round the log fire in the Easton lounge what would happen to all those spinsters, colonels, rentiers who had idled in the sun on their two or three hundred pounds a year, in pensions and in villas. Was the revolution to be so merciful after all? Were these people’s last years to be as pleasant and sun-soaked as they had fancied? Would they know instead the bitter struggle of livelihood: the defence sou by sou of their receding pittance? By all accounts the Riviera was to be a grey place for the next few months.

  “Jack Tyler will find it pretty dull,” we said.

  §

  Jack Tyler was naturally one of the first people one would consider. He was always one of the first people one thought of when one talked of the Riviera. How many times must one not have said to friends on their way south: “Be sure and give all sorts of messages to Jack Tyler.” One was quite certain that one’s friends would meet him. It was impossible to go to the Riviera and not to see him. He was known to everyone and by everyone. It was unmistakable: that tall, erect, slim figure, with clothes of an extremely close and slightly exotic cut: the waistcoat tapered to an exaggerated point: the sleeves of the coat cut tightly below the elbow and allowed a certain looseness at the wrist: the butterfly collar with its wide opening: the eye glass: the gold-headed malacca cane: the long-fingered hands, dry and ringed and wrinkled; with blue veins raised between the knuckles: the panama hat with its faded Old Etonian ribbon: the parchment pale face with the full, bloodless lips and the grey eyes: the short smoker’s cough that punctuated the high-pitched, facetious, rather tired voice. He was over seventy and for forty years he had lived at Monte Carlo.

  No one knew what his life had been before he came to Monaco. It was so long ago that probably he did not himself remember. He lived in a three-roomed flat at the back of the Casino gardens. They were furnished in a manner that might have seemed advanced in Victorian England. To-day the elaborate William Morris wall paper, the heavy curtains, the Crown Derby china, the gilt chairs and chesterfield with silver fleur-de-lys worked into a red tapestry gave the rooms the air of a museum piece. In the same way that his life had the air of a museum piece. He had made no compromise with the informality of Riviera life. He followed an exact routine. Every morning he was called at eight o’clock. His breakfast consisted of coffee, fruit, a croissant. Between nine and eleven he read his post, the Eclaiveur de Nice, and the continental issue of the Daily Mail: He answered and wrote letters. At eleven he walked to the Sporting Club. The extent of his daily stake was five louis. When he had lost his five louis or if he had made thirty louis, he left the table. In no case did he stay in the Club after a quarter to twelve. For an hour he walked in the terrace of the Casino garden. He lunched at one: always at his flat: usually with a guest. He had a great regard for punctuality. He waited for no guest longer than fifteen minutes. It was an insult to his chef, he said. He had no patience with informality. He issued invitations and refused or accepted them by letter. He refused to have a telephone in his house. He did not answer telegrams that were not prepaid. He considered telegrams to be an intrusion upon the individual’s privacy. His hospitality was always set in his own flat. It was not elaborate but well staged. You never had too many courses. You drank a vin du pays from a carafe that steamed with chill. You took coffee and a Kümmel at the table. To leave the table was to break the current of talk, he said. Within two minutes of two-thirty he would rise from the table.

  “You will excuse me, but I am an old man,” he said. “I cannot do without my siesta.”

  During the afternoon he read and slept. At five he reappeared for another stroll in the Casino gardens. At quarter to six he re-entered the Sporting Club. He repeated with another five louis the morning’s gamble. He never remained in the Club after half past six. In the evening he was as invariably a guest at dinner as he was a host at luncheon.

  He followed an exact pattern. He was as much a part of Monte Carlo life as the domed fabric of the Casino. Yet he was curiously at variance with the whole scheme of Riviera life: a variance that in a way was responsible for his distinctness. Where everything was casual, it was amusing to have one person for whom one had to be punctual, formal, well-dressed. He was a corrective. It was like putting a platoon back on to the square. One laughed at him, but one rather loved him. He had dignity. Though his own life had been sheltered from those shocks of good and evil chance, that complete the lives of most of us, he had seen much, he had read much, he had received many confidences. “If you stay in one place long enough, everything that’s worth while comes to you,” he said.

  In forty years he had only been back to England once. His account of that one visit was a favourite after dinner story. He told it with his eyebrows and his voice high-pitched. “My dear, it was too amusing. There had been all these people telling me for fifteen years how London was the one place where people knew how to live: which I would realise that if only I would come and see them. Finally I thought I would. I wrote notes to half a dozen of them, saying when I was going to arrive, suggesting an afternoon when I might call. I thought it only courteous to give them a few days’ warning. But when I did arrive, my dears.”

  He was an admirable mimic. He could echo mannerisms, idiom, intonation, as he described how one after another his friends had been busy, preoccupied, full of excuses, consulting diaries, glancing at clocks.

  “I felt as though I were something to be fitted in. I stayed there just three days.”

  He had no intention of returning.

  “Why should I? In London everyone’s busy being grand, you see everybody on Parade. Here, people can be themselves.”

  He had no ambition. He was a younger son. The family estate had gone to his brother.

  “Why should I work when I neither need nor want to? I’d only take the bread out of someone else’s mouth. Besides,” he added, “I’d have been very bad at it.”

  During the war he had done secretarial work in connection with hospitals and prisoner of war relief funds. He had refused to take money for it.

  “It was the only way in which I could keep a post. I was only just not more nuisance than I was worth.”

  He had, however, put in every day eight hours at a desk. That and the trip to London were in forty years the only breaks in
a routine that had continued uninterruptedly while the tempo and temper of Riviera society altered round him. He had built up for himself a unique position. I should doubt if his name was ever for long out of any personal conversation along the coast. I wondered what he would do, how he would rearrange his life when there was no one on the coast to lunch with him, no one to arrange dinners for him. “Probably he will extend his acquaintance among the French,” we decided. Not one of us expected him to do what he actually did do. He returned to London.

  §

  It was such a surprise to me that I could not believe the tall, slim figure in the black astrachan-collared coat was actually Jack Tyler. It was in the Times Book Club that I met him. And it was not till I heard his slow, high-pitched voice enquiring for the new Huxley that I knew for certain that it was he.

  “My dear Jack, what on earth are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I was one of the first rats to leave the sinking ship,” he answered.

  It was a surprising answer. By an odd clause under his father’s will his income based on royalties from coal mines was a fixed one. It could not be affected, as was those of so many other rentiers by industrial inability to declare dividends. It remained constant. He would be affected certainly by the decline of the pound’s purchasing power. But he had lived amply. He would not find it difficult to reduce his expenditure. He could entertain less and on a simpler scale. He could reduce his gambling stakes at the Sporting Club. Livelihood is always cheaper when one has an establishment. Besides, he did not like London.

  “You are not going to stay here?” I asked.

  He nodded. For a while, at any rate, he told me. In the spring he might go to Bidmouth or even take a cruise to the West Indies.

  “I’m finding the climate a little difficult. I’ve been in the sun so long. One’s blood gets thinned.”

  Looking closely at him I noticed that he did not look well. His nostrils were reddened: his smoker’s cough came from his chest more than from his throat. He was over seventy; though the autumn was temperate, the change to a northern clime could hardly help being dangerous. He told me he was staying at his Club. It was really more comfortable than he had expected. The bedrooms and passages were cold, but the food was very reasonable. Would I lunch with him one day? He checked me, however, when my fingers moved towards my diary. He had the stiff Victorian view that no one should be stampeded into the acceptance of an invitation: that one should be afforded the opportunity that correspondence provided of declining courteously.

  “I will write to you this evening.”

  §

  He was a member of the St. James Club. On the Riviera he had been always a slightly flamboyant figure. But he fitted very harmoniously into his new sober background. He seemed surprisingly at home.

  “I had never thought London could be so pleasant,” he remarked.

  Which was a discovery that a great many wanderers were finding at the moment. London was well equipped to face depression. The Englishman has a sense of home, a need for personal possessions. His capacity to make himself a home is responsible for his success as a coloniser. Nearly every Englishman possesses something: a cottage; a flat; furniture. The existence of such possessions provides the Englishman with a harbour to anchor in when the seas ride high. In the same way that the vagrant English returned during the autumn of 1931 to the flats, the homes, the clubs, that had been waiting vacant for them, the resident English abandoned a technique of restaurant life which was in fact opposed to the national tradition. That too was a homecoming.

  Continental nations adapt themselves and excel at a publicly staged life. They make the café personal and intimate. The English are self-conscious in restaurants. What they understand is the art of entertaining in their homes. The autumn of 1931 not only marked the return of wanderers to their country, but a return to the English tradition of home life. London became a much pleasanter, a much cosier place. It became intimate again. People ceased to be grand. Entertainment was arranged so that friends might see each other; not with the view of drawing attention to the party’s prominence. There was less going to places, so as to be seen, talked about and paragraphed in gossip columns. People were more themselves in consequence. England became English. In a week London rid itself of a good many of the characteristics to which Jack Tyler had so objected on the occasion of that one three-day visit.

  “I had never expected to enjoy myself so much,” he said. “I must confess that I rather dreaded coming back at first.”

  His return still surprised me.

  “What have you done with your flat?” I asked him.

  “Let it to a South American.”

  “For a good rent?”

  “For half what I pay for it.”

  “Surely it would have been cheaper for you to have stayed on there?”

  “It would have been, but I didn’t think I ought to.”

  He paused: the slow voice was less high-pitched as he continued. “I’d been thinking it out. Until this crisis came along I never had. I’d accepted things as they came. But when all this talk started about the dole; and how the dole was responsible for the country’s troubles, I began to think that it wasn’t just a number of unemployed workmen who were on the dole; but a whole class of people like myself whom the country supports; because either they themselves or their parents at one time earned their country’s gratitude. There are the retired colonels, and civil servants: and there are the people like myself who draw our incomes from the land because our ancestors defended it. We’re entitled to be supported in the same way that an unemployed workman is entitled to be supported. But we’re on the dole just the same. And in just the same way that an unemployed workman and a retired civil servant living abroad are dead losses to their country so am I. Every year for the last forty years the country has sent me three thousand pounds on which I’ve paid income tax but which I have spent outside England. If I had died forty years ago the country would be a hundred thousand pounds better off. I had never thought of it in that way before. But when this trouble came I realised that England had too many responsibilities, that it couldn’t afford a whole host of people like myself. But if I let my flat, brought back the rent of it and spent it along with the rest of my income here, well then, I should be no loss to my country. So I came back.”

  He put the problem as casually as he might have put some problem in mathematics. But knowing what his life had been in Monte Carlo, knowing how he loved the sun and that lovely coast and the French people and the French way of life, I felt that his resolve to abandon that life in his old age was as much an act of sacrifice as the return to England during the war of the settlers and planters in foreign countries, the practical ordering of whose lives must have counselled them to remain where their interests lay. I had never imagined that I should see Jack Tyler as a heroic figure. His life had been placid, unenterprising, uneventful. He had lived effortlessly like a sea anemone. I had never expected to feel respect for him.

  Later, I was to feel more than respect.

  When I left him punctually at half past two, “You’ll forgive an old man his habit of the siesta,” it was with the promise that we would write and fix another meeting when I came back from Chagford. The letter I wrote him, however, a fortnight later received no answer. The day after I had sent it a paragraph in an evening paper headed: “Death of peer’s brother,” told me that Jack Tyler had died suddenly in a London nursing home of pneumonia following upon a chill. The change to a cold climate had been too abrupt for him.

  “Nothing has ever happened to me,” he had once said. “One year has been very like another. But if I had been born thirty years later, I should have been in the war. Very likely I should have been killed as my nephews were.”

  It seemed to me that the difference was only relative between his nephews’ lot and his.

  §

  The Arabians are claimed to have said that there are only seven stories in the world. I have sometimes wondered if there are a
s many. Certainly the story of the great majority of us is a series of variations upon a theme. If things do not happen in one way they will happen in another. Jack Tyler had been born thirty years too soon to fight at Loos. But there had been set to him the same issue that had been set his nephews. He abandoned for his country’s sake, to his own danger, a set and agreeable way of life.

  In the same way the problems that have been set to this generation are identical with those that were set our great-grandfathers. On the surface we seem to have travelled a long way from the simple allegiances on which their lives were built: the crown, the altar, and the hearth. We do not feel, we cannot feel, that pride of Empire which was symbolised by the Imperial pomp of India. The home in these days of furnished flats and feminine emancipation has ceased to be a harbour. We do not believe that our existence is like a Sunday School with the rewards and punishments of hell and heaven. Yet the change is not of kind, but of degree.

  As we have shed little by little the narrow possessive instincts that saw eternity in terms of the survival of actual personality; till some can even accept personality as a garment that will be shed, so the crown has come to represent not the levying of tribute from the world’s far ends but the symbol in the figures of a great gentleman and a great lady of an inherited ideal of service. Patriotism does not mean the extension of power; the acquisiting of new mandates. We do not measure our greatness by our capacity to humble others. We have recognised the rights of others to deal with their own lives in their own fashion. As we no longer visualise love as the possession and domination of a woman; as our love is inspired by the need not for a slave, but for a comrade and associate; with the recognition of that partner’s right to withdraw a love that we have forfeited; no longer wanting to bind her by ties other than those of mutual need, so has the old colonial idea by which colonies existed for the profit and under the direct control of the colonising government, been supplanted by the independence of free, self-governing dominions bound to the mother country by no other ties than those of trust, respect and love: ties that we believe to be more durable than the chains on which more primitively-minded governments relied upon.