Читать книгу This England - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4
ОглавлениеReproduced from The Evening Post (New Zealand), January 22, 1927
MY friend the Communist (a very nice man) only knows two classes, the Idle Rich and the Proletariat.
"People without regular jobs." I suggested, having looked it up for crossword purposes.
No, he meant "Proletariat."
"Wage earners?"
No, he still meant "Proletariat," but what that meant he wasn't quite sure.
"Karl Marx—"
He beamed.
"That's the fellow—what he says—"
"Wage labourers—wage earners," said I. "Only the people who work for a living are the proletariat."
My friend was rather depressed by this narrow interpretation of his grand word.. Anyway (here he brightened) the Idle Rich were, not to be explained away by the dictionary.
"Look at 'em! Any night you like in the West End! Motor-cars, fal-de- lals, wimmin, wine!"
"And song," I helped him, but he was not grateful.
"Go down to the Savoy any night you like," he stormed. "I've heard 'em on the wireless, laughing and clapping their hands for more music. And I've seen 'em through the windows at other places, sitting at tables and drinking wine— the price of every bottle would keep a family from starvation for a week! And outside on the Embankment, people without a shelter to their heads or a crust to eat. That's what is going to bring about the revolution!"
Because I am interested in revolutions I went to the cradle of the coming upheaval.
I do not know a nicer cradle or a more cheerful-sounding. To hear it all on the wireless is one thing, to be a participator is another.
The buzz and blare of the ballroom is not so noticeable as through the microphone. You scarcely hear the tuning of fiddles or the twink-twank of an absent-minded thumb on a banjo string. These things fit into a larger sensation— shaded lights and amber candelabras and the glitter and gleam of silver on white tables, and flowers and white-shirted diners, and beautiful women, and women who hope they are looking that way. The idle rich were having a most strenuous time.
The last time I met the idle rich youth who grinned at me from the next table was somewhere between the Baldock and Stevenage. He had come down from Cambridge, driving an awful-looking little car that he had wheedled from his idle rich father (one of those wealthy suffragan bishops who earn nearly £800 a year), and he begged from me the price of a two-gallon tin of juice. He had only a shilling in his pocket; his term allowance of £10 having been squandered in the riotous pursuit of pleasure and those hectic gaieties which are such a deplorable feature of University life.
He told me later that he had been invited to dinner by a topping fellow (the father of another undergraduate), that he was having a topping time. The topping fellow who invited him (a largish man with a cherubic smile) was another of the idle rich. He was an official of a big engineering company and spent most of his life sleeping on trains and interviewing hardfaced men who bought machinery. When he wasn't sleeping on trains he was sleeping on ships hound for foreign parts, or sleeping on ships bound for home. His wife manages to see him for two months in the year.
He doesn't dance, but he likes to see the young people enjoy themselves. There is wine on his table. Every magnum represents more than the fortnight's salary he received when he started work with the company he now controls. He sits a little dazed, a little absent, his mind completely occupied with centrifugal pumps and machine-tools, watching the brilliant throng gyrating to the rhythm of the band. The beautiful women in their indescribable dresses, the chameleon changes of hues, the subtle fragrances which come to nostrils used to the scent of lubricating oils and hot metals.
I like to reduce things to table form: pages of statistics fascinate me. Here is a census of the known idle rich within view:—
(1) A retired tea planter from Assam. Age about 50. Very rich. He had ten years of heart-breaking labour, rising at dawn, working in the plantation all day, and sleeping in a little bungalow a trifle larger than a suburban summer house by night. Worked like a navvy, seven days a week, and took no holiday during the first years of his apprenticeship. Paced season after season of disappointment and partial failure till the luck turned. Now he is home and trying to recover the wasted years.
(2) A director of a big newspaper combine. The most cheerful soul that ever came from Scotland. Spent his early married life in a one-roomed lodging, denied himself more than the bare necessities to ensure against unemployment; employed his spare hours in work.
(3) A rather imposing man who looks like a Cabinet Minister. A gossip writer in one of the newspapers. A hard-working and not particularly brilliant man, who is earning his living at this moment.
(4) A theatrical "magnate" who once peddled shoelaces in New York.
(5) The son of an impoverished Irish peer, wounded in the war, and himself working in a city office.
(6) A millionaire distiller who battled up from 6s a week clerkship, and who in the evening, of life, finds his chief pleasure in watching young people enjoying the life he was denied.
It is impossible that the census could be complete. Idle rich? I know a few. By some mysterious, wise workings of Nature, rust and rot go together, and one looks for the idle rich in queer places where nice people do not go. They run to poetry of an exotic kind and to strange friendships. Some write nasty little plays. Mostly they live on the association of nasty little people, and move in a cloud of sycophants and parasites. One reads regularly of their doings in gossip paragraphs—there is one writer who specialises in such a chronicle. Now. they are on the Lido, extravagantly costumed or engaged in lunatic games; now they are at Deauville; now doing something extraordinary or bizarre in London itself. They have Baby Parties, where they array themselves in the costumes of childhood, or Treasure Hunts, or officiate at mysterious gatherings. You never see them on a race-course or in the hunting field. They may appear at St. Moritz or in ten costumes per diem, but they do nothing more exciting than pose for their photographs.
And in due course they die, and their estates are divided amongst their wholesome relatives, and that is the end of them.
But this Savoy ballroom belongs to youth, gilded but not golden; wearing the uniform of affluence, but no more. Money doesn't worry the subaltern down for a short leave. He isn't giving the party, but he is the soul of it. He asks for nothing more than a pretty partner, a syncopated jig-tune, perfectly timed, and his. enjoyment is in ratio to his partner's dancing ability.
He is young and good-looking, fresh-faced, bubbling over with energy. He has no money, and doesn't want much. He needs for the moment a perfectly topping time. Good wine is wasted on him. He can never remember the menu. He would as soon drink lemonade. He has not learnt to call things and people "divine." Mostly he talks about cars—fast, ugly, uncomfortable cars—but fast.
He may not be in the Army or the Navy. Perhaps he is in the motorcar business, which has an irresistible fascination for youth. Or in an office. You know that he is "public school" from the moment that you hear him speak—it really does not matter whether he is soldiering or selling buttons.
There is a waiter at the Savoy who is a great friend of mine; we have this bond of union, that we went to the same school, and he knows more about the idle rich than any man in London.
"Is there anybody here who does nothing for a living?" I asked. He knew a man from the Argentine and another from France who had no occupation but dancing.
"But English?"
He took a careful survey of the room. It must have been an off night for the idle rich, since he could; only; distinguish one man.
"And he's a member of Parliament!" he said, almost apologetically.
