Hands Across the Fence

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

No orthodox American reader, brought up in the fear of the English novel, can fail to possess a fine healthy set of secondary prejudices in favor of England and the English point of view. He does not quite forget Bunker Hill, and cocks his ear at any rumor of menace to the Monroe Doctrine. Moreover, he prefers wheat and cotton kings to the other kind, and thinks it quite as decent to guess as to fancy. But this is in his daily walk and conversation; he forgets it all when he enters the realm of English fiction. At once his mind contrives a shift of gear, his sympathies automatically adjust themselves to a new set of conditions, and the trick is done. He feels an amiable contempt for Dissent. His judgment is not surprised to find itself coinciding with that of the Lady Alicia, who refuses to let her daughter dance with John Brown because his grandfather was a tradesman. It is not possible to feel that much can be said for such a grandfather. Nor can one fail to sympathize with Lady Alicia’s objection to an alliance between her daughter and Algernon, who is only the youngest son of the Earl of Brumleigh. As for Algernon, it is clear that his only course is to take orders, since he has not the figure for a red coat, and stutters too much for a parliamentary career. Moreover the Earl (who, everybody knows, has a record) owns the particularly valuable living of Brumleigh-cumCastor. The elder brother, to be sure, has disgraced the name by falling in love with the daughter of a Radical, and the Earl has been forced to forbid him the house. But the property is entailed and goes with the title, so that Algernon is no better off for this. He has our sympathy; but we readily agree that entail is a family bulwark which must be protected at any cost to the individual.

It is extraordinary that the brothers should have fared so ill, for we know that they had the best possible bringing up. The first ten years of their lives were spent, with their eight brothers and sisters (most of them fated to be younger children), in the edifying society of nurses, tutors, governesses, and grooms. Not infrequently the good Earl would meet them in the halls or about the stables, when he was inclined to pat them on the heads, to ask them how they got on with their Latin grammar and Euclid, and to end by giving them half-a-crown apiece, or promising them a new pony. As for their lady mother, she sometimes visited them in the schoolroom, when she would question the governess (but not more sharply than she deserved) upon the children’s progress and deportment. Once Algernon even woke to find her bending over him, a glorious vision in lace and jewels, such as any boy might be proud to have for a mother. Their second decade was of course spent at public school and university. Young Lord Brumleigh fagged at Eton for the son of a mere baronet, which shows how democratic a place England really is. Algernon’s select wineparties were famous at Oxford; the Earl always insisted on furnishing the wine from his own cellars.

How easily we have slipped into an arm’s length sympathy with all this! I for one had come to believe in it devoutly, until our neighbors, the Burden-Smiths, brought the question to close quarters. It is a new experience for us to know an Englishman whose back yard is contiguous. His children and ours quarrel and make up daily, so far as the fence, an indisputable boundary line, will permit. When there is a high wind, his clothes-reel is inclined to impinge upon ours, calling for the international hands-across-the-fence activity of a neat lady in a white cap, whom her mistress calls Hawkins, and our own plain Mary Ann. Mary Ann does not especially care for Hawkins. She thinks her absurdly stuck-up for one who evidently has no share in the family councils; and who reserves her nose for other than conversational purposes. Mary Ann has been with us for seven years, knows all our secrets, and discusses them with us. We can never forget how thoughtful she was when John was born, or her presence of mind when William fell into the water-tank: “Accoutred as she was, she plunged in.” She is not precisely the mould of form. One is thankful if she wears any hair on her head; it has not seemed worth while to raise the issue of caps. But we prefer her to a Hawkins.

As for the Burden-Smiths themselves, we do not like their buttery way of speech, or their way of managing servants and children, or their too too affable manner toward the native, or their perambulator. In short, after a year of propinquity, the two families continue to live under two flags. We pay calls, but we do not commune. They think us improbable, and we think them impossible. And we owe them a specific grudge for having reduced a cherished abstraction to the concrete. They have alienated us from a society in which we had long borne a fancied part, exiled us from the land of Thackeray and George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward. I foresee too clearly how we are going to be affected in the future by the disenchanted insularity of Lady Alicia and the Earl of Brumleigh.