The Queen was dead, and the air of the greatest city upon earth grey
with unshed tears. Fur-coated and top-hatted, with Annette beside him
in dark furs, Soames crossed Park Lane on the morning of the funeral
procession, to the rails in Hyde Park. Little moved though he ever was
by public matters, this event, supremely symbolical, this summing-up of
a long rich period, impressed his fancy. In '37, when she came to the
throne, 'Superior Dosset' was still building houses to make London
hideous; and James, a stripling of twenty-six, just laying the
foundations of his practice in the Law. Coaches still ran; men wore
stocks, shaved their upper lips, ate oysters out of barrels; 'tigers'
swung behind cabriolets; women said, 'La!' and owned no property; there
were manners in the land, and pigsties for the poor; unhappy devils
were hanged for little crimes, and Dickens had but just begun to write.
Well-nigh two generations had slipped by--of steamboats, railways,
telegraphs, bicycles, electric light, telephones, and now these
motorcars--of such accumulated wealth, that eight per cent. had become
three, and Forsytes were numbered by the thousand! Morals had changed,
manners had changed, men had become monkeys twice-removed, God had
become Mammon--Mammon so respectable as to deceive himself: Sixty-four
years that favoured property, and had made the upper middle class;
buttressed, chiselled, polished it, till it was almost indistinguishable
in manners, morals, speech, appearance, habit, and soul from the
nobility. An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man
had money, he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was
free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonised hypocrisy, so
that to seem to be respectable was to be. A great Age, whose transmuting
influence nothing had escaped save the nature of man and the nature of
the Universe.
And to witness the passing of this Age, London--its pet and fancy--was
pouring forth her citizens through every gate into Hyde Park, hub of
Victorianism, happy hunting-ground of Forsytes. Under the grey heavens,
whose drizzle just kept off, the dark concourse gathered to see the
show. The 'good old' Queen, full of years and virtue, had emerged
from her seclusion for the last time to make a London holiday. From
Houndsditch, Acton, Ealing, Hampstead, Islington, and Bethnal Green;
from Hackney, Hornsey, Leytonstone, Battersea, and Fulham; and from
those green pastures where Forsytes flourish--Mayfair and Kensington,
St. James' and Belgravia, Bayswater and Chelsea and the Regent's Park,
the people swarmed down on to the roads where death would presently pass
with dusky pomp and pageantry. Never again would a Queen reign so long,
or people have a chance to see so much history buried for their money.
A pity the war dragged on, and that the Wreath of Victory could not
be laid upon her coffin! All else would be there to follow and
commemorate--soldiers, sailors, foreign princes, half-masted bunting,
tolling bells, and above all the surging, great, dark-coated crowd, with
perhaps a simple sadness here and there deep in hearts beneath black
clothes put on by regulation. After all, more than a Queen was going to
her rest, a woman who had braved sorrow, lived well and wisely according
to her lights.