London Films | Page 8

Several irregular spaces are enclosed by low iron barriers, and in one of
these the arriving groups of authorized people found other people of
their kind, where the unauthorized people seemed by common consent
to leave them. There was especially one enclosure which seemed
consecrated to the highest comers; it was not necessary that they should
make the others feel they were not wanted there; the others felt it of
themselves, and did not attempt to enter that especial fairy ring, or fairy
triangle. Those within looked as much at home as if in their own
drawing-rooms, and after the usual greetings of friends sat down in
their penny chairs for the talk which the present kodak would not have
overheard if it could.
If any one were to ask me how I knew that these beautiful creatures
were of supreme social value, I should be obliged to own that it was
largely an assumption based upon hearsay. For all I can avouch
personally in the matter they might have been women come to see the
women who had not come. Still, if the effects of high breeding are
visible, then they were the sort they looked. Not only the women, but
the men, old and young, had the aristocratic air which is not aggressive,
the patrician bearing which is passive and not active, and which in the
English seems consistent with so much that is human and kindly. There
is always the question whether this sort of game is worth the candle;
but that is a moral consideration which would take me too far from the
little scene I am trying to suggest; it is sufficient for the present purpose
that the English think it is worth it. A main fact of the scene was the
constant movement of distinguished figures within the sacred close,
and up and down the paths past the rows of on-lookers on their penny
chairs. The distinguished figures were apparently not the least molested
by the multiplied and concentrated gazes of the on-lookers, who were,
as it were, outside the window, and of the street. What struck one
accustomed to the heterogeneous Sunday crowds of Central Park,
where any such scene would be so inexpressibly impossible, was the
almost wholly English personnel of the crowd within and without the

sacred close. Here and there a Continental presence, French or German
or Italian, pronounced its nationality in dress and bearing; one of the
many dark subject races of Great Britain was represented in the swarthy
skin and lustrous black hair and eyes of a solitary individual; there were
doubtless various colonials among the spectators, and in one's nerves
one was aware of some other Americans. But these exceptions only
accented the absolutely English dominance of the spectacle. The alien
elements were less evident in the observed than in the observers, where,
beyond the barrier, which there was nothing to prevent their passing,
they sat in passive rows, in passive pairs, in passive ones, and stared
and stared. The observers were mostly men, and largely men of the age
when the hands folded on the top of the stick express a pause in the
emotions and the energies which has its pathos. There were women
among them, of course, but the women were also of the age when the
keener sensibilities are taking a rest; and such aliens of their sex as
qualified the purely English nature of the affair lost whatever was
aggressive in their difference.
[Illustration: THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE
SACRED CLOSE]
It was necessary to the transaction of the drama that from time to time
the agents of the penny-chair company should go about in the close and
collect money for the chairs; and it became a question, never rightly
solved, how the ladies who had come unattended managed, with their
pocketless dresses, to carry coins unequalled in bulk since the iron
currency of Sparta; or whether they held the pennies frankly in their
hands till they paid them away. In England the situation, if it is really
the situation, is always accepted with implicit confidence, and if it had
been the custom to bring pennies in their hands, these ladies would
have no more minded doing it than they minded being looked at by
people whose gaze dedicated them to an inviolate superiority.
With us the public affirmation of class, if it were imaginable, could not
be imaginable except upon the terms of a mutinous protest in the
spectators which would not have been less real for being silent. But
again I say the thing would not have been possible with us in New

York; though in Newport, where the aristocratic tradition is said to
have been successfully transplanted to our plutocratic soil, something
analogous might at least be dramatized. Elsewhere that