7. A Modern Tendency
Where are the aged gone? At any rate the aged women? The fact is, there are no aged women; for, behold! the hairdresser, the milliner and the dressmaker have all decreed that there shall be no old age--and, lo! the miracle is performed; and our venerable grandmothers who once were old are now only strenuous copies, perhaps a trifle overdone, of our more or less youthful selves.
Who has not been told that she looks most lovely in a hat in which her last grain of common sense must clamour aloud that she really looks like a fright? Have not each of us, my suffering sisters, had relays of awful hats tried on our unoffending heads till we look like tortured ghosts, crowned by a wreath of roses or cabbages, and loomed over by a terrible young person in black satin? How that young person--well--prevaricated, and how the cold irony of her eye cut us to the quick!
I am dreadfully afraid to say so, but there are no serving young ladies who are so cruel as the milliners' young ladies. They are of course not all perfectly beautiful, but their wonderful tresses are always built up in such an artful way that they never fail to nestle in the nooks and crevices of the most unearthly creations. But they always say "It just suits Madam," even when they cannot possibly reconcile it to their conscience!
One asks why do all the big shops employ, for the destruction of the public, those tall sylph-like creatures who float about like denizens of a higher sphere, in their wonderful black satins. These satin robes have such an air that the white pins which occasionally hold together a rip look only like an eccentric ornament. The divine lengths of those graceful figures!
They are a serious unbending race to whom all things are becoming. So when they trail up and down what may be termed the trial halls of fashion to show off to a short, stout customer a garment to which she mistakenly aspires, no wonder that, struck by a temporary insanity, she succumbs. She is convinced that her five feet by an equal breadth will look like a five-foot ten inches, which is, besides, so attenuated that it is a problem how the young person can dispose of anything even so ethereal as a penny bun. Why not be merciful and employ a dumpy lot for dumpy customers!
It is a terrible thing in these days that there is no growing old. No happy time comes when the tired features are at liberty to sink into comfortable wrinkles, and nobody cares. The supreme joy of taking one's well-earned rest saying, "Behold, I am old! Age also has its beauties and compensations." The trouble is that nobody really believes it to be a joy.
There is probably no parting so painful as the parting from the days of one's youth; even if the outside be ever so youthful there is a knell in one's heart that tolls to the burial. One of the surest signs of age is when one begins to think of the past. Youth dreams of the future, middle age lives in the present, but old age dreams of the past. But whoever acknowledges dreaming of the past now that old age is out of fashion!
Years and years ago, when our mothers were very young, there was a distinct fashion for elderly people; certain colours were sacred to them, certain fashions, certain fabrics and certain jewels. What young creature would have foolishly decked herself in either purple or yellow? Youth rejoicing in sparkling eyes, resigned diamonds to its elders, and all aglow with hope and illusions left point lace to deck the stately shoulders of age along with velvet.
Now fashion is a republic and the only arbiter is a bank balance or credit, and young things frisk it in diamonds, velvet, point lace and sables, and their old grandmothers shiver along in
mousseline de soie and chiffon, roses wreathe their golden locks, red locks, black locks, as the case may be, but never their grey locks, and the winds of heaven fan their ageing shoulder-blades. The art of growing old gracefully is so rare that no wonder we cling to the hairdresser and the dressmaker with pathetic hands, just to postpone the evil hour; sometimes we think we have escaped the evil hour altogether. How we do cheat ourselves!
It is perhaps one of the most blessed dispensations of our frail human nature that we do not really know how we look; that when we gaze into a mirror we do not see the sober disillusioning reflection, but rather some fondly imagined image of ourselves. No woman is heroic enough to look her imperfections squarely in the face, or why do we see such curious apparitions? Why does that worn old face hide behind that white veil dotted with black? Because, when she sees her mistaken old features in the glass, then she sees what she longs to see, and when her old heart cannot pump up sufficient pink she dabs on that ghastly rose which has never yet deceived anyone.
Ah, yes, the twentieth century is distinctly reserved for youth--old age is not in it! It is a bad fashion set by that spoilt child of the world--America. The world pays the same deference to America that the average American parent pays to his obstreperous child. Yes, the American child rules the roost, and America rules the world; therefore, what wonder that age grows more and more unpopular.
The other day I saw in several papers that in a certain industry no workman would be employed in future who was more than forty. Put yourself in the place of a man of forty who is shelved and knows of no other way of earning his living! If he becomes a criminal, who can blame him? Recently I read a curious paragraph about the increasing use of hair-dye among working men. Not beer and tobacco, mind you, but just hair-dye! Why? Because employers do not want old workmen. So the men ward off the crime of growing old with hair-dye. Was there ever a more comic tragedy?
Alas! the world clamours for youth. White hairs compel no reverence. Age only suggests to brisk young things that the old people are not up with the times. What wonder, then, that the world caters for youth, and nobody takes the trouble any more to create fashions for old ladies?
If there is an institution which more than others wards off the coming of age, it is certainly the great shops. Twice a year these arbiters of fashion sacrifice themselves for the good of the public. Then do they guilelessly re-mark the treasures of their warehouses with those tempting signs which produce on the British public the effect of
hasheesh on the native of India. Beware of those peaceful and alluring pirates of Oxford and Regent Streets, O frail women who draggle last year's chiffons in this year's mud, and go to the greengrocers in the shopworn glory of the year before last. During sale-days the British matron lives in a state of ecstasy. To buy is bliss; to buy cheap is rapture. Cotton laces intoxicate her, and so does chiffon. She buys summer dresses in winter, and furs when the July sun bakes the sweltering town. That nothing is of any earthly use is of no consequence. Nor is it of consequence that what she buys is youthful, and she is old. It is these enchanting sale-days that explain the Englishwoman's orgies of wax beads, picture hats, party frocks at the wrong time, paper-soled slippers and open-worked stockings in pouring rain.
"A strong race, these English," an envious American said to me the other day.
"That's because they kill the weak ones off," I explained. "To be a perfect Englishwoman you must be able to sit with your poor bare shoulders against an open window at a winter dinner-party, preferably in an icy draught, and you must smile. If you can survive that you are one of the elect. It ensures you a social position, because you cannot have a social position in England if you cover up your shoulders."
I wish I could offer up an earnest plea for covered shoulders, at least for the aged! It seems to me when a brave woman has imperilled her life for forty years, nobly defying the cold blasts on the wrong side of the dining-table, and after she has got her young brood safely married, it does seem as if she then might retire to the well-earned comfort of a high dress without losing her position in society. But to cover up those poor melancholy shoulders is to announce the oldest kind of old age, and what woman has the courage for that?
There is no doubt that old age first went out of fashion when the bicycle came in, for age was no barrier to its keen enjoyment. But grandmother could not bicycle in a cap, and so she put on a billycock hat instead; necessity obliged her to show her ankles, and exhilaration led her to "scorch." It was then we asked in some perplexity for the first time, "Where have the aged gone?"
Still let us cling to youth, it is our modern prerogative as women; but only let us cling to it to a certain extent--to the extent that life amuses, but does not hurt. There are some of us who still have emotions at an age when, had we lived in our grandmothers' day, we should already have found permanent refuge in big frilled caps. We hardly realise the safeguard there was in a cap. It was the final chord to show that the symphony of youth had come to an end.
In the days of our grandparents it was the men who kept young, while the women were old at thirty-five; but in these days men are considered old in their prime, and it is the women who cling to eternal youth. Yes, indeed, the modern tendency requires readjustment. But after all, does it pay to try and keep young when one is really tired and scant of breath?
Let it go, even the loveliest youth, in its own good time. Have we not each had our turn at it? But one thing there is to which we should all cling with might and main, and that is a young heart, for a young heart has the only youth which is immortal. It will make of any woman, when the time comes, what is more rare and lovely than a young beauty, it will make her a charming old woman--and nothing in this wide world can be more charming, even if it is a little out of fashion.