Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 46
CHAPTER XLVI.
The Same—Mr Bristley On Old and New Style.
‘Would you tell me the right time, Lesbie? my watch has stopped!’ said Lady Friga, stopping her partner near our heroine, in the walk round after a quadrille.
‘Twenty-two fifty,’ replied Lesbia.
‘Eh?’ said Friga, looking puzzled.
‘Fifty minutes past twenty-two. Or, as we said before the Deluge, ten minutes to eleven p.m.,’ Lesbia explained.
‘Oh, I see, you’ve got one of the new twenty-four-hour watches; they’re the correct thing, of course, I must get one too.’
‘You’ve no need to get a new watch, Fri; all you need do is to have the figures added which come after 12, putting them on the dial under the others, 13 under 1, 14 under 2, 15 under 3, and so on until you come to the last, 24 under 12. ‘That’s the cheap way, and it’s what I’ve done, you see.’
‘We have had the twenty-four-hour clock for some time on our side of the splash,’ remarked Letitia; ‘I’m glad it’s likely to become Europian. But it’s not a great matter, after all; they’re talking now of our international convention to do away with the Christian era and devise a new method of dividing and reckoning time which shall suit all the world, independently of religious creeds, every one of which has proved a will-o’the-wisp. I guess they’ll suppress the week altogether and the month too, unless the lunar month can be turned to account, which is doubtful.’
‘Yes, weeks are a baseless invention, having nothing in nature that represents them,’ observed Mr Bristley, who was standing near. ‘The era of n.o. (Novax Ordinis) which is to supplant the a.d., will have to be strictly scientific. No respect will be paid to tradition, least of all theological tradition. Months, weeks, days, and hours will all have to pass into the crucible of science, and no slip-slop makeshifts will be allowed. The world will have to get over its childish habit of reckoning the year by the degrees of light and darkness, heat and cold; those methods may be good for poetry, but they will not do for business. If sidereal time be exact and invariable, while solar time is inexact and variable, every prejudice of habit will have to be discarded, and we must accustom ourselves to having New Year’s Day fall sometimes in the height of summer sometimes in the depth of winter, just as we have accustomed ourselves to have, say four o'clock fall at one season in light and heat, at another season in darkness and cold. Provided that the division of time—as by the sidereal year and the sidereal day—be the same and invariable for all parts of the globe and for all time—mankind will have to clear their local predilections out of the way, to make room for that mode of reckoning.
‘Guess that’ll be something like common sense,’ remarked Letitia.
‘Yes,’ rejoined Mr Bristley; ‘for it is a patent fact that the existing modes of reckoning the year and its divisions, whether in Christian or other countries, however much those modes may have been worked into a plausible system by the ingenuity of obsequious men of letters—they do, in the last resort, rest upon the self-willed stupidity and ignorance of some despot or augur. The sky-pilot has over-ridden the astronomer in his own department. And the fact must be faced, that if exact science and religion are to clash, it will be religion that goes to the wall.’
‘Boldly said, for a sky-pilot!’ observed his niece.
‘However,’ resumed Mr Bristley, unheeding the interruption, ‘I must at the same time say for myself personally, that I do like to have one thing or another; I hate what’s neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. Don’t be off with the old love, say I, before you’re on with the new. So long as we do keep up the Christian era at all—and your convention, Letitia, may not find the world prepared to throw it over for some years yet—why did we go and spoil the poetical associations and upset the quietness of life by a change of style in the year 1752, just because some other countries had been fools enough to humour the fads of a superstitious old pope who wanted to make Easter fit in with some lunatic craze or other?’
‘That is not respectful to Infallibility, Mr Bristley,’ observed Friga.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ returned the vicar, who was not in a reverential mood, ‘if Infallibility doesn’t clear out of my way, when my time comes to join the glorious company whence it claims its titles, I'll make it see more stars than ever the astronomers did whose intelligence it seems to have obfuscated. But seriously, Lady Friga, don’t you see that the change from the old style of a hundred odd years back to the current style of to-day has been a piece of botch tinkering and patching which has spoilt everything and mended nothing? Granted that the solstice may be brought into a nearer harmony with the fiction of Christmas and the purely arbitrary date of New Year’s Day—’
‘Yes, I suppose the new style is rather truer to the sun,’ put in Friga.
‘Beggar the sun!’ rapped out Lesbia, in her loudest tones, forgetting where she was, in the excitement of the moment, for she joined heartily in her uncle’s contempt for the current calendar. All faces in that end of the ballroom turned, and there was a general roar of laughter. Lesbia’s aunt put on her propriety stare; and an old paterfamilias, invited because he was a neighbour of thirty years’ standing and had known Mrs Bristley before her marriage—not only stared, but blushed.
‘Now then, Mr Leckinsopp!’ said Lesbia, making as though she were going to pat him on the back, ‘what’s up with you? You look as uncomfortable as if you were leading out a sixty to mount in a gale!’
‘Leading what, my dear Lesbia?’
‘Oh, Mr Leckinsopp, I really must tell you a story about Miss Newman,’ interrupted Julius Dandidimmons, who had come near Lesbia again when he saw that Letitia was out of the way. ‘At the last Frogmore annual flower-show there was a young fellow about my age, but a head and shoulders taller—six feet three at the very least—anyhow, a visitor and a stranger. Up walks Miss Newman straight to him, eyes him from head to foot as if she were inspecting a horse, pronounces aloud the word ‘Sixty,’ then turns on her heel and rejoins her party. The fellow stared, as you may suppose, and I heard him say to himself, ‘Devilish free and easy gurl, that! Me sixty! I'll pay her in her own coin presently.’ And presently he did; as Miss Newman happened to pass near him, he planted himself astride of her course, stared her in the face, and said in a loud, deep voice, ‘Forty-five.’ ‘Forty-five!’ returns Miss Newman promptly. ‘Bless you, man, fifty-two!’ ‘Nonsense!’ exclaims the fellow, quite taken aback. ‘You can’t possibly be fifty-two; you don’t look more than fifteen!’ But it turned out, on mutual explanation, that it was the height of bicycles, and not the respective ages of herself and the tall chap, that Miss Newman was talking about.’
‘Why, of course, Julius; who cares about age, except as it affects muscle?’ said Lesbia. ‘But now, Mr Leckinsopp, I want to know what it was that made the rose i’ the bud feed on your damask cheek just now.’
‘I—a—I’m rather amused to hear such expressions from a young lady as you made use of just now about the sun,’ he answered sheepishly.
‘Well, it’s the sun’s fault,’ retorted Lesbia; ‘what made the lumbering old thing get in my way? But, Fri, my girl, what makes you take the part of the stupid new style? There’s nothing to be said for it.’
‘Nothing,’ assented Mr Bristley. ‘Or, at any rate, so very little, that it was, in my opinion, a huge blunder to make the change. Let us have scientific truth in wholeness and consistency on a grand scale; that no rational man will gainsay. But do not let us spoil the beauty and homeliness of the old merely to make way for a shallow thing of shreds and patches. The poetry of the seasons has been quite destroyed by the silly innovation. May—the month of Mary—has been doubly dislocated. It now begins and ends twelve days too soon; it begins before the trees have had time to put on their first young green, or the cowslips to flower, and it ends just as everything is getting into full bloom, but yet is not far enough advanced to proclaim leafy June. Again, Christmas now comes before the lengthening of the day is sufficiently apparent to give one the feeling of having left the dark time behind, and generally before the frost and snow have had a chance. Easter, being a moveable festivity, is not affected; but Michaelmas and the goose-fair come before autumn shows on the boughs, and before the birds have had time to get into condition. For sportsman now the 12th of August and the 1st of September and of October arrive before the game has got properly strong on the wing; in short, every old custom, and every time-honoured association, has been thrown out of gear, for no good or practical purpose whatever. Russia and Greece only have had the good sense to stand firm and resist an innovation which represented nothing in the way of genuine improvement, but only a fidgety pedantry.’
‘Still, Mr Bristley,’ observed Friga, ‘there are dates connected with the Gregorian style which are associated with much we set store by in our national history, such as Waterloo on the 18th of June, Trafalgar on the 5th of October—’
‘Or Queenstown on the 13th, to finish,’ returned the vicar. ‘Yes, but would not these several dates be equally ‘glorious’ if they were called the 6th of June, the 23rd of September, and the 1st of October, as they are called in Russia? You see the date of an event, such as a battle, a birth, or what not, is as good for one nominal date as for another: old style or new style is no matter. But we are accustomed to associate the progress of the calendar months with that of the seasons, the growth of light and heat, or of darkness and cold, and with the effects of those changes on vegetation. That is why I complain that the change of style has uselessly taken much of the poetry out of life. By all means, I grant you, let us have a rigorous, strict, thoroughly exact, and scientific mode of reckoning and marking time, such as the sidereal system, one which by its irrefragable mathematical certainty shall command the assent of all educated mankind and be wholly independent of creeds and traditions. Be it so, by all means; the sooner the better. As rational beings, we are bound to give up our cherished fancies, when the question is between them and the proclamation to all the world of a clear, common truth which sheds light and creates stability. That of course. It needs not to be argued. But to go marring the beauty of dear old associations, taking the comfort and geniality out of social life, spoiling whatever there is of poetry in the changing seasons, and in their effects upon vegetable and animal nature, by such a peddling, puddling, pettifogging, basimecu alteration as that perpetrated by those geese the mediæval papists, and afterwards copied here, from ape-like mimicry and weakness—really, I cannot characterise it in any words fit to be heard in this assembly. The Russians half-barbarous, say we? They may be, but at any rate they have managed to keep sane upon a point on which the world in general has gone crazy.’
‘Well, Mr Bristley, well! I hope you feel better,’ laughed Friga, taking his hands in her own as she faced him closely. ‘Come here, do, somebody with a broom—you, Mr Lockstable—and sweep up the shreds of the new style.’
‘Not I; let ’em be,’ answered Athelstan. ‘For my part, I quite agree with Bristley. The mischief that’s been done to all that’s jolly in life by the change of style, is enough to make a goblin demd’s particular hair to stand on end, like bristles on the faithful porcupine, as Hamlet says.’
‘You’re a great Shaksperian, Lockstable,’ laughed the vicar, ‘only I hope you don’t mean to be personal?’
Lesbia, who had been dancing most of the evening, now wished for a little quiet chat with Friga about the latter’s impending matriculation at Ousebridge, but she met her retiring with Letitia to a quiet part of the garden, where the two remained until Lady Humnoddie’s carriage was sent for.
As the party broke up, old Mr Leckinsopp came forward to say to Lesbia,—
‘I am sorry to have seemed put out just now, but if the truth must be told, your expletive was only a pretext. The real cause of my ill-humour was that I have had a violent quarrel with my wife to-day, which makes me disagreeable to everyone.’
‘Really, Mr Leckinsopp! I am surprised at that, I must say. People look upon you two as model man and wife who never knew what it was to have a tiff.’
‘Yes, and I hope that, generally speaking, we are so,’ he answered. ‘But I will tell you frankly, as an old acquaintance, what it was that came between us. We were disputing whether to have roast goose or boiled turkey for dinner the Christmas after next. And to this hour we are not agreed about it.’
‘Then,’ said Lesbia ‘you don’t agree with Talleyrand’s advice, ‘Ne jamais faire aujourd'hui ce qui peut-être remis à demain.’’