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.




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