It did not last, the Crofts’ marriage. I_Told by an idiot

wearied of her husband’s infidelities, and could not bear them any

more. As to Denman, he felt often, though he loved her, that he had

married a young woman who had her tiresome aspects; she was a feminist,

a prig, she tried to write, and badly at that, she was still over-much

concerned with public affairs, with committees, with the emancipation

(save the mark!) of women. And she was for ever fussing over the

children, who should be treated as amusing toys. He loved her, but

she tried him often. She was strident, obstinate, stupidly in earnest

about things that seemed to him to demand a light indifference; then,

cumbrously, she would try to adopt his tone, and fail. Marriage. Well,

it presented great difficulties. He sighed sometimes for the freedom

of his bachelor days. Meanwhile, life had its moments, exquisite,

fleeting, frail. And at these Stanley, who was not really stupid,

guessed quite accurately, and was stabbed by each afresh until her very

life-blood seemed to drain away, leaving her, so she felt, a helpless

ghost of a woman, without assurance, heart or power to go on, but only

her stabbed love and a proud, burning rage. And, in the spring of ’95,

she broached this matter of divorce.

He asked her forgiveness.

“I can’t help it, Stanley. I suppose it’s the way I’m made.... The

queer thing is, I’ve loved you all the time. You can’t understand that.

Women are so--so monogamous.”

“That old cliché, Den! It isn’t clever enough for you. Some men

are monogamous. Some men couldn’t love several women at the same

time. And some women can.... I’m dead sick of it, anyhow. All this

beastly philandering. It’s merely trivial. It _means_ nothing.

It’s turning life and love into a parlour game. Do you take nothing

seriously, Denman--not your relations with people, or with love, or

with life--not even your fatherhood?”

“Oh, don’t preach at me. I’m a waster, if you like, and let’s leave it

at that.... I’m damnably sorry for everything, of course.... But you’re

not altogether and always easy to live with, you know. All this stuff

about women, for instance ... you know how I hate it....”

“You know how I hate _your_ stuff about women, if we are to drag

in that now.... Oh, Den, don’t let’s be childish. What does all that

matter now? We’re up against a much bigger thing than a difference of

opinion about the suffrage.”

“You can’t forgive me, of course. And I suppose you’re justified.”

“Oh, I suppose I could forgive you. I could forgive you anything,

perhaps. I have before, after all. But I think I had better not, for

all our sakes. You’d rather be free, wouldn’t you? Oh, you needn’t

answer. I know you’d rather be free. I don’t suspect you of wanting to

live permanently with Alice Pember, or with anyone else; you just want

to be free and irresponsible, and make love to whom you like. Well, you

shall. I shan’t keep you. You’re not meant for a husband and father,

and you’ve tired yourself long enough trying to be one. You can drop it

now.”

“I suppose you’re right, from your point of view. You’d better divorce

me.... I’m terribly sorry, Stan. We were so tremendously happy once.”

“Don’t.” Stanley caught her breath and sharply bit her lip. “You’ve no

right to talk of that. That’s all past. We’ve not been happy for a long

time now.... And you know you despise me and think me a fool.... Oh,

what’s the use of talking?...”

Three days later Stanley, with her son and daughter, aged four and

two, left her husband’s house and took up her temporary abode with her

parents, while her divorce suit slowly prepared itself.

“Divorce is damnable,” Stanley said to Rome. “Why should people be

penalised by having to go through this ghastly business, with all

its loathsome publicity, merely because they wish to annul a private

contract which only concerns themselves? Why shouldn’t they be able to

go to a lawyer together and say, ‘Annul this contract,’ as with any

other contract? Instead of which, if it’s even suspected that they

_both_ want it annulled, they’re not allowed to do it at all; and

if it’s the wife who wants it, they have to fake up this ridiculous

cruelty-or-desertion business. And, above all, why should we be

gibbetted in the newspapers for doing a purely private piece of legal

business? Why, in the name of decency and common-sense, should a thing

become public news merely because it occurs in a law-court? And is our

whole English constitution and system so rotten because we are rotten,

or aren’t our laws a long way behind public opinion?... Sometimes I

think I can’t go through with it, it’s all so beastly, but that we’ll

just live apart without a divorce. But I know that wouldn’t do. There’s

got to be something desperately final between Denman and me, or we

might be coming together again, when he’s tired of Alice Pember. I

love him so much, beneath everything, that if he wanted to I probably

should. And I know it would be no use. We should make nothing of it

now. It would be bad for both of us, and worse for Billy and Molly. And

it would all happen again. No, it’s got to be a clean cut, even if the

imbecile state only allows us to have it on these disgusting terms....

Sometimes, Rome, I think the whole world and its laws and systems and

conventions is just a lunatic asylum.”

“I’ve always known that, my dear. What else should it be?”

“_Rome, how does one bear it?_”

Stanley, whose way it was to express her joys and griefs--she was not

self-contained, like Rome--was pacing up and down the room, her hands

clenched behind her, her cheeks flushed with feverish, waking nights,

her eyes heavy under sullen brows.

“I hardly know,” Rome answered her, gently. “I hardly know. But,

somehow, one goes on, and one learns to be amused again.... I am hoping

that when one is elderly one will mind less. You _will_ mind

less, Stanley, in a few years. Life’s so strong, it carries one on all

the time to new things. Particularly, I think, you, because you are so

alive. You’ll come through even this desperate business.”

Stanley said, “Life’s broken to bits. I was so happy once.... Broken

to jagged bits,” and left the room to cry. For, contrary to a common

belief, those who feel most usually cry most too. Stanley was afraid

that she was contracting a tearful habit such as she might never

outgrow, but she did not much care. She did not much care for anything

in these days.

She missed Denman. Missing him was like the continual sharp ache of

a gathered tooth. She missed his charm, his brilliance, his love,

his careless, casual ways, his intense life, his soft, husky voice,

the smile on his queer white face and narrow eyes. She missed his

gay, youthful talk, the parties and plays they had been used to go to

together, his constant presence in the house. She would wake in the

nights, thinking he lay beside her, and that his arm would be thrown,

in a half waking caress, across her; but he was not there. She would

wake in the mornings, thinking to see his rumpled brown head sunk in

the pillow beside hers; but there was no head and no pillow but her

own. When her son and daughter entered her room in the morning and

climbed upon her bed, after the irritating manner of infants, and woke

her by pulling at her two dark plaits, she would open drowsy eyes that

looked for her husband’s short, delightful face smiling above her; but

there were only the two young children, with their restless antics

and imbecile prattlings. Fatuous beings! One day she would enjoy them

again, antics, fatuity and all, even as she had enjoyed them before,

but in these days her love for them lay frozen and almost lifeless,

with all other love but that one love that tore at her heart with

fierce, clawing fingers. It seemed that this love and this anguish

consumed her wholly, leaving nothing over. She had never been first a

mother; she had been first an individual, a human creature sensitively

reacting to all the contacts of the engrossing world, and secondly she

had been a wife, a woman who loved a man. A mother, perhaps, third.

And now the secondary function, in its death agony, had taken entire

possession, and she was no longer either an individual creature or a

mother, but only a lover who had lost all.

To tear him out of her heart--that was her constant object. And if the

heart (since we are, by foolish custom, so impelled to call the seat of

the affections) had been alone involved, she might have done so. But

who should tear the beloved from the roots he had in her whole daily

life for five years, from his place in her mind, her brain, her body,

her whole being? She knew him for a philanderer, a trivial taster in

love and life; selfish, spoilt, vain, with idiotic opinions about one

half of the human race. It was, indeed, her knowledge of all this in

him that informed her brain that their separation must be final and

complete. But, with it all, she could not tear him from her heart, her

soul, her body, her entire and constant life. He was herself, and she

herself was being torn in two.

Life was a continual anguish. She saw that she must leave her parents’

home and live alone. She was bringing misery into Bloomsbury Square.

And daily, night and morning, her parents kissed her, and their kisses

were to her, who craved so bitterly those kisses that she might no

longer have, a continual reminder and torment. She was trying to shut

off that side of life, but they did not understand, and kissed her.

Rome, who understood too well, did not kiss her. She knew that she must

be alone with her children, that she was no fit housemate for a loving

family or friends. So, presently, she went into rooms, and this was a

more bearable loneliness.

But it left more time on her hands; more time in which to brood on

life, on love, on illusion, on women and on men. How had she failed

in this job of marriage, of constructing an enduring life with a

man she had loved, who had loved her? How had they both failed? How

frequent was this failure! It seemed that love was not enough. Such

deep misunderstandings prevail, between any two human beings. Sex

bridges many of them, but not all. Stanley began, at this time, to

generalise dangerously and inaccurately (since all such generalisations

are inaccurate) about women and about men. She saw women as eager,

restless, nervous children, chattering, discussing, joking, turning

the world upside down together while they smoked or brushed their

hair, and all to so little purpose. Meanwhile there were men; the sex;

sphinx-like, placid, inscrutable, practical, doing the next thing,

gently smiling at the fuss women made about ideas. Men knew that they

did not matter, these excitements and fusses of women, any more than

the toys children play with matter. They dismissed them with that

serene smile of theirs, and busied themselves with the elemental,

enduring things: sex, fatherhood, work. They knew what mattered; they

went for the essentials. They didn’t waste their time frothing about

with words and ideas. Men were somehow admirable, in their strong

stability. Their nervous systems were so magnificent. They could kill

animals without feeling sick, break the necks of fishes, put worms

on hooks, shoot rabbits and birds, jab bayonets into bodies. Women

would never amount to much in this world, because they nearly all have

a nervous disease; they are strung on wires; they are like children

frightened of the dark and excited by the day. It seems fundamental,

this difference between the nerves of most women and most men. You see

it among little girls and boys; most little boys, but how few little

girls, can squash insects and kill rabbits without a qualm. It is this

difference which gives even a stupid man often a greater mastery over

life than a clever woman. He is not frightened by life. Women, for

the most part, are. Life may be a joke to them, but it is often also

a nightmare. To the average man it is neither. Men are marvellously

restful. Eternal symbols of parenthood and the stability of life, to

which women come back, as to strong towers of refuge, after their

excursions and alarms.

This was the kind of nonsense which Stanley wove to herself during

these unbalanced days of her life. Nonsense, because all generalities

about human beings are nonsense. But many people, including Stanley,

find interest in making them up, and it is a harmless game.

PANTA REI

It seemed to Stanley, through this spring and summer of 1895, that a

phase was over, not only in her own life, which was apt so faithfully

to mirror the fleeting times, but in the world at large. That literary,

artistic and social movement so vaguely described as “decadent” by

those who could scarcely define that or any other word, nor would

greatly care to if they could, seemed to be on the wane. The trial and

conviction of Mr. Oscar Wilde did it no good, and the many who had been

unjust towards the movement before became unjuster still, adopting an

“I told you so” air, which mattered as little as any other air adopted

by those of like mentality, but which had, nevertheless, its effect on

strengthening the forces of so-called healthy philistines in the land.

As a contemporary poet sang:

“If these be artists, then may Philistines

Arise, plain sturdy Britons as of yore,

And sweep them off, and purge away the signs

That England e’er such noxious offspring bore.”

Even the anti-Philistines, the so-called decadents themselves, were

disconcerted and shaken by this public débâcle of one of the most

prominent of their number. “Those who write, draw and talk in this

clever new manner that we have never liked,” said the Philistines,

firmly assured, “are obviously as unpleasant as, even more unpleasant

than, we have believed.” “They might as well say,” said the practisers

of the elegant, clever new manner, “that because Ladas, owned by

a Liberal leader, won the Derby last year, all Liberals are as

intelligent about horses, even more intelligent about horses than they

have believed. They might as well say....” But it is of no use to tell

people of this mentality what they might as well say. They will as

likely as not proceed to say it, and it is very certain that they will

not therefrom see the absurdity of that which they have already said.

There is, in fact, no way of dealing with these persons; they are the

world’s masters, laying the ponderous weight of their foolish and heavy

minds upon all subtleties, delicacies and discriminations to flatten

them, talking very loudly, firmly and fatuously the while through their

hats, and through their mouthpiece, the press. There is no dealing

with them; it is they who make England, and indeed the world, what it

is. “This nation believes ...” “The people of this country have always

held ...” says the press, grandly, as if indeed _that_ made it

any more likely to be true, instead of far less. “This asylum has

always believed that the best form of government is a party system,”

the newspapers published in asylums no doubt continually remark. “The

inhabitants of this asylum have always said....”

And so much for public opinion.

Anyhow, from whatever cause, there began at this time, to put it

briefly, a slump in decadence. Max Nordau wrote this year, with his

customary exaggeration, his essay on “_Fin-de-siècle_.”

“An epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and another is

approaching its birth. There is a sound of rending in every tradition,

and it is as though the morrow could not link itself with to-day.

Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and

fall because man is weary, and there is no faith that it is worth an

effort to uphold them. Views that have hitherto governed minds are dead

or driven hence like disenthroned kings. Meanwhile interregnum, in all

its terror, prevails.... Such is the spectacle presented by the doings

of men in the reddened light of the Dusk of the Nations.”

Max Nordau was a man of imagination, and had an excessive way of

putting things, and seems to have been hypnotised by the arbitrary

divisions into which man has chopped time; but, whatever he may have

meant, it is quite true that no period is precisely like another,

and that life is, as has been well said, a flux. In brief, _panta

rei_, and no less in the middle nineties than at other times.

RELIGION

Of the many impulsions that drive human beings to one form or

another of religion, the strongest, perhaps, is pain. The other

impulsions--conscience, the mystic sense, personal influence,

conviction, experimentalism, loneliness, boredom, remorse, and so

forth--all work powerfully on their respective subjects. But pain,

mental anguish so great that human nature is driven by it from cover to

cover, seeking refuge and finding none, is the most powerful and the

most frequent agent for the churches. “There is no help for me in this

world,” tortured human creatures cry, and are often driven by that cry

to questioning whether there may not, perhaps, be help in some other.

Anyhow, they think, it is worth the experiment, and the experiment

proves an anodyne and a gate of escape from what could scarcely,

otherwise, be borne.

Such was Stanley Croft’s method of approach to a closer contact with

religion than any she had had before, though, before her marriage,

she had had a mystical belief in God, which had, during the last

five years, all but died out in an atmosphere not well suited to it.

Now it returned to her again, touched with just enough remorse for

past neglect as might serve for a temperate shadow of that hectic

and enjoyable repentance which drove, then and later, so many of

her literary contemporaries into the fold of the Catholic Church.

In reality, perhaps, though it seemed that pain was her immediate

impeller, it was ultimately, as usual, the spirit of her age which

seized her and drove her to prayer.

She would turn into dark and silent churches, seeking desperately the

relief from herself that life denied her, and fall on her knees and

there stay, numb and helpless, her forehead dropped on her arms, till

the sweet, often incense-laden atmosphere (for that was the kind of

church she preferred) enveloped her like a warm and healing garment,

and she whispered into the dim silence, “God! God! If you are there,

speak to me and help me! God! God! God!”

From that cry, for long the only prayer she could utter, other prayers

at last grew. The silence melted round her and became a living thing;

the red sanctuary lamp was as the light of God flaming in a dim world,

a light shining in darkness, and the darkness encompassed it not. The

undefeated life of God, burning like a brave star in a stormy night,

by which broken, all but foundered ships might steer. It was so that

Stanley saw it, and slowly it did actually guide her to a kind of

painful peace.

“I wish the poor child would join the true Church,” Mr. Garden said to

Mrs. Garden, for he was still, though now a little dubiously, a member

of that church. “I think it would help her.”

Mamma looked sceptical.

“I think not, Aubrey. She doesn’t want to be bothered with joining

churches just now, and she certainly has no energy to give to it.

Besides, she likes English Catholicism. It has, you must admit, rather

more liberty of thought than your branch.” (Mamma knew, having tried

both more than once.) “Besides,” she added, quickly, to change the

subject from liberty of thought, which always in these days made papa

look sad--in fact, she had mentioned it in a moment of carelessness

which she immediately regretted--“besides, there is the divorce.”

Papa sighed and looked sadder than ever.

“Yes. This horrid, this distressing business. I wish she may give it up

before it is too late. Even High Anglicanism does not allow divorce.”

“On that point,” said mamma, “and, I fancy, on a good many others,

Stanley does not agree with High Anglicanism. Fortunately that does not

prevent her from finding comfort in its forms of worship. I am only

thankful that she can. It is hard for those in trouble who have no

faith in another world.” Possibly her mind had turned to Rome, whose

faith in worlds, either this we live in or any other, was negligible.

But papa’s mind was turned inward, upon his own torn soul. Mamma

watched him with experienced anxiety. She knew the signs, and feared

that the Mother of the Churches would not for long hold papa in her

firm arms. Dear Aubrey; he was so restless. And he had lately been

reading a lot of odd, mystic books....

CELTIC TWILIGHT

It was very certain that Stanley would not join the Roman Church.

She had too mystic an imagination to enter any body so definite and

sharp of doctrine. She was more at one at this time with the Celtic

poets, with their opening of strange gates onto dim magic lands. The

loveliness, like the wavering, lovely rhythms of the sea, of W. B.

Yeats, took her, as it took her whole generation, by storm; the tired

twilight sadness of Fiona Macleod was balm to her.

“_O years with tears, and tears through weary years,

How weary I, who in your arms have lain;

Now I am tired: the sound of slipping spears

Moves soft, and tears fall in a bloody rain,

And the chill footless years go over me, who am slain._

_I hear, as in a wood dim with old light, the rain

Slow falling; old, old weary human tears,

And in the deepening dusk my comfort is my pain,

Sole comfort left of all my hopes and fears,

Pain that alone survives, gaunt hound of the shadowy years._”

And

“_Between the grey pastures and the dark wood

A valley of white poppies is lit by the low moon,

It is the grave of dreams, a holy rood._

_It is quiet there: no wind doth ever fall.

Long, long ago a wind sang once a heart-sweet rune.

Now the white poppies grow, silent and tall._

_A white bird floats there like a drifting leaf:

It feeds upon faint sweet hopes and perishing dreams,

And the still breath of unremembering grief._

_And as a silent leaf the white bird passes,

Winnowing the dusk by dim, forgetful streams.

I am alone now among the silent grasses._”

In such soft and melancholy enchantment as this Stanley’s desolation

found, for a time, comfort.

(Vicky’s Imogen, aged seven, found this book at her grandparents’ house

one day, opened it, read, breathing noisily for excitement, and tucked

it furtively away in the pouch of her sailor frock, where she often

kept rabbits, or eggs for hatching. She bore it home undiscovered, and

spent the evening lying on her stomach and elbows beneath the nursery

table reading it, with moving lips and fingers in her ears, deaf to

the clamour and summons of her brethren, until at last she was haled

to bed, hot-cheeked and wet-eyed, silent upon a peak in Darien. She

had found a new enchantment; it was better than Mowgli, even. But,

since she was not really a dishonest little girl, when next she went

to Bloomsbury Square she slipped the book unobtrusively back into the

shelf from which she had stolen it, and took “The Manxman” instead,

thinking, with the fatuity of her years, to find that it concerned a

tailless cat; but with regard to this book she was disappointed, and

unable to agree with Mr. Gosse.)

THE STAR IN THE EAST

Strange books and pamphlets littered papa’s study table. He met

and dined with Mr. George Russell (the Irish poet, not the English

Churchman). He admired and liked Mr. Russell so much that for his sake

he attended the lectures of Madame Blavatsky, and perused the works of

Colonel Olcott, W. Q. Judge and Mrs. Besant. A feeling of expansion

took him, as if the bands of rigid orthodoxy, which had restrained him

for the last nine years, were being forced asunder.... It was, with

papa, the eternally recurrent springtime of his soul’s re-birth; he

was in travail with a new set of ideas, and their pressure rent him

cruelly. Then one day, “I have seen his star in the east,” cried papa,

and became a Theosophist.

He wanted to lead Stanley also to Buddha (mamma said firmly that she

herself was too old), but Stanley would have none of it. To change

your religion you need a certain vitality, an energy of mind and will,

an alertness towards fresh ideas, and Stanley at this time had little

of these things. She clung to a desperate and passionate faith, as a

drowning man to a raft; gradually she even came to take pleasure in

services, and would find at the early mass at St. Alban’s, Holborn, an

exalted, mystic, half sensuous joy. But she was in no mood to choose

and investigate a new creed. Besides, Theosophy....

However, papa enjoyed it. Papa was now sixty-five years of age, but

his feeling for religions had not waned. Mamma, who had been a little

afraid that papa might next be a Jew (for he had been writing a

monograph on the Hebrew prophets, whom he greatly admired, and also

seeing a good deal of Mr. Zangwill), was on the whole relieved. For a

long time papa had not been happy in the Roman Catholic Church, finding

many of the papal bulls difficult of digestion, and the doctrines

of hell-fire and transubstantiation (as interpreted by most of the

priesthood) painfully materialistic; neither was he happy about the

attitude of the Church towards M. Loisy and other modernists.

So, when he saw the star in the east, he set out for it with a sigh of

relief.

IRVING

While papa followed the star, and Stanley doggedly and bitterly sued

her husband for restitution of conjugal rights, and Rome urbanely

surveyed the world through a monocle and drove elegantly in hansoms,

often with an enormous wolfhound or a couple of poms, and Maurice fired

squibs of angry eloquence at everything that came into his line of

vision, their brother Irving made a fortune by speculating in South

African gold mine shares. Irving, as has been said earlier, was a lucky

young man, whom God had fashioned for prosperity. Having made his

fortune, he married a handsome, agreeable and healthy young woman, one

Lady Marjorie Banister, the daughter of an obscure north-country earl,

and settled down to make more.

It was an epoch of fortune-making. Mr. Cecil Rhodes loomed in the

south, an encouraging and stimulating figure to those who had

enterprise and a little capital. The new rich were filling Mayfair,

making it hum with prosperity. Irving too hummed with prosperity, and

took a house in Cumberland Place. He found life an excellent affair,

though he had his grievances, one of which was that motor cars were not

allowed on English roads without a man walking with a flag before them.

“We are a backward nation,” Irving grumbled, after visits to Paris,

as so many have grumbled before and since. But, on the whole, Irving

approved of modern life. He thought Maurice, who did not, a bear with a

sore head.

Maurice was now the editor of an intelligent but acid weekly paper,

which carried on a running fight with the government, the opposition,

all foreign governments, the British public, most current literature,

nearly all current ideas, and the bulk of the press, particularly

Henley’s _New Review_, which boomed against him monthly. Having

a combatant spirit, he found life not unenjoyable, now that he had

become so used and so indifferent to his wife as to have acquired

armour against the bitter chafing she had caused him of yore, and to

find some domestic pleasure in annoying her. He considered it a low

and imbecile world, but to that too one gets used, and a weekly paper

is, as many have found, a gratifying vent for scorn. Saturday after

Saturday, through 1895, the _Gadfly_ railed at the unsatisfactory

attitude of our Colonial Secretary towards South Africa, the existence

of Mr. Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company, the tepid and

laissez-faire temperament of Lord Rosebery, the shocking weather, the

absurd inhibitions against motor cars, the vulgarity of the cheaper

press, the futility of the controversies on education, the slowness of

progress in developing Röntgen Rays and flying machines, the immense

wealth made by the undeserving in cycle companies and gold mines,

the smugness of Liberals, the inanity of Tories, the ignorance of

the Labour Party, the blatancy of current forms of patriotism, the

arrogance of the victory-swollen Japanese, the bad manners of France,

the aggressiveness of Germany, the feebleness of current literature,

and so on and so forth.

“That’s right, old smiler, keep it up. That’s the stuff to give them,”

Irving amiably encouraged him, as he and his wife ate at the dinner

table of his brother. “_They_ don’t mind, and it makes you happy.

But what’s bitten you to set you against company promoters? I didn’t

care for your column about them last week. They’ve done you no harm,

have they? The fact is, I was going to ask you if you’d care to come

in to a small affair I’m helping to float. Bicycle bolts are a back

number, and that’s a fact. In November next year the red flag comes

off, and motor cars begin in earnest all over the roads. Amberley and I

are specialising in tyres. We’ve got Lord Mortlake in too. It’s a sure

thing. We shall be coining thousands in a couple of years. You’d better

come in early. Am I right?”

Amy’s mirth chimed like sweet bells.

“Motor cars! Oh, I do like that! Why not flying machines at once?”

Irving regarded her with tolerant scorn.

“Why not, indeed? You may well ask. But for the moment motor cars will

do us. I daresay it will be fliers in ten years or so. And moving

photographs too. I’m not, you see, a pessimist, like poor dear Maurice.

I believe in Progress. And in Capital. And in the Future of the Race.

And in getting rich quick. Maurice, am I right?”

“Probably,” said Maurice. “You’re certainly not bad at getting rich

quick; I’ll say that for you. But I am. So, on the whole....”

“Motor car tyres!” Amy still jeered, being of those who obtain one idea

at a time and grapple it to their souls with hoops of steel. “Motor car

tyres! They won’t wear out many tyres trundling away behind those old

chaps with the flags.”

Maurice finished his sentence otherwise than he had intended.

“On the whole I’m inclined to take shares in this company of yours.

Send me along the details as soon as you can.”

Amy’s utterances often had this subversive effect on his own. He threw

her a malevolent glance, and poured himself out some more claret.

Amy put up her pretty, dark eyebrows. She pursed her mouth. She nodded.

“That’s right. Throw our money away. Don’t bother a bit about me or the

children.”

“Now, Amy, don’t nag him. I’m answerable for this little show, and

I can tell you I’m right. Remember I told him to put his shirt on

Persimmon. Well, he didn’t. You know the results. I don’t want to brag,

but--well, there it is. Maurice, I think better of your wits than I

have for the last ten years.”

Maurice, sipping his claret, still kept his sardonic gaze on his wife,

who rose and took Irving’s wife to another room. Often Amy wished that

she had chanced to marry Irving instead of Maurice, though he was too

young for her. Oftener Maurice wished that he had married no one, for

marriage was oppressive.

RULE BRITANNIA

’95 swept on, and speeded up to a riotous finish, with the British

South African troops, under the imprudent Dr. Jameson, galloping over

the Transvaal Border to protect the British of the Rand. Loud applause

from the British Isles. In the legal language of the Bow Street trial

that followed, “certain persons, in the month of December, 1895, in

South Africa, within Her Majesty’s dominions, and without licence of

Her Majesty, did unlawfully prepare a military expedition to proceed

against the dominions of a certain friendly State, to wit the South

African Republic, contrary to the provisions of the Foreign Enlistment

Act.” In the more poetic language of the Laureate,--

“Wrong, is it wrong? Well, maybe,

But I’m going, boys, all the same:

Do they think me a burgher’s baby,

To be scared by a prating name?”

In the episcopal language of the Bishop of Mashonaland, “Whether the

English people liked the exploits of Dr. Jameson or not, the Empire had

been built up by such men. They had a Colonial Secretary with his eyes

open, who could see further than most people thought. Africa must take

a foremost place in the Empire, and the Church should go hand in hand

with its development.”

And, in the journalistic language of the _Daily Mail_ (born early

in ’96, and, like other new-born infants, both noisy and pink), “It

is well known in official circles that England and the Transvaal must

eventually come into collision.”

Vicky’s children, in a fever of martial jingoism, temporarily abandoned

the Sherlock Holmes crime-tracking exploits which were engaging their

attention those Christmas holidays, for the Jameson Raid, riding

bestridden chairs furiously round the schoolroom, chanting,

“Then over the Transvaal border,

And a gallop for life or death--”

until two chairs broke into pieces and Imogen, thrown, cut her head on

the fender, and the game was forbidden by authority.

The adventure of the raid tickled up British imperialism, which, like

the imperialism in Vicky’s schoolroom, began to ride merrily for a

fall. ’96 dawned on a country growing drunk with pride of race and

possessions; working up, in fact, for the Diamond Jubilee. Dr. Jameson

and his confederates were received with the cheers of the populace and

the adoration of the _Daily Mail_, and sentenced to short terms of

imprisonment.

Soon after the birth of the _Daily Mail_ came the _Savoy_,

the last stand of eclectic æstheticism. Stanley Croft had, for a

while, an odd feeling of standing hesitant between two forces, one of

which was loosening its grasp on her, the other taking hold. The newer

force conquered, and she was carried, step by step, from æstheticism

to imperialism, from belief in art and intellect to belief in the

dominance of the British race over the world. She read Henley and

Kipling. She found pride in,

“Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul....”

Her religion ceased to be a mystic twilight passion. A renascence of

sturdy courage took her back into the common ways, where, her divorce

now accomplished, she pursued her old aims. She took up life, and

became alert to the world again, responsive, like a ship in full sail,

to every wind that blew. And the wind that blew on her was a wind of

reaction from her recent past, and it drove her out on the seas of

ambitious imperialism, so that love of country became in her, as in so

many, a kind of swaggering tribal pride. The romance of Greater Britain

took her by storm. Not the infant Imogen, stirred to tears by the

swinging by of red-coated troops to a band, seethed with a more exalted

jingoism. Glory, adventure, pride of race, and the clash of arms--what

stimulating dreams were these, and how primeval their claim upon the

soul! While Stanley’s friends shrugged cynical shoulders over Dr. Jim’s

exploit and the attitude towards it of the great British public, while

her papa gravely misdoubted such militant aggression, while Maurice

sneered and tilted at it in a weekly column, while Rome contemplated

the spectacle with the detached, intelligent amusement of the blasé

but interested theatre-goer, while Irving, cynically approving, said,

“That’s good,” thinking of the Rand gold, and Mr. Cecil Rhodes observed

that his friend the doctor had upset the apple-cart--while all these

made the comments natural to their tastes, temperaments and points

of view, Stanley, like a martial little girl, flew high the flag

of “Britain for ever! Up the Rand!” and her spirit marched as to a

military band.

Vicky also, in her more careless and casual way, was a supporter of

Empire. “Whatever Charles and Maurice and all those informed people

may say, my dear, this Dr. Jim is a gallant creature, dashing off to

the rescue of his fellow countrymen and countrywomen like that. For,

even if they weren’t in actual danger, they _were_ inconvenienced,

those poor tiresome Uitlanders. And how dreadful to be governed by

Boers! What people! Canting, Old Testament humbugs! One dislikes them

so excessively, even from here, that one can imagine the feelings

of those who live among them. Even Maurice isn’t so perverse as to

maintain that Boers are tolerable. Oh, I’m all for Dr. Jim. I insist

on taking in that cheery pink new daily that pets him as if he were a

Newfoundland dog that has saved a boat-load of drowning people. Such a

bright, pleased tone it has. ‘The British Public know a good man when

they see one,’ it says. So much more amiable and pleasant an attitude

towards us than Maurice’s ‘The public be damned. All it knows about

anything that matters would go into a walnut shell and then rattle.’

Maurice gets so terribly contemptuous and conceited. I tremble to

think what he will be like at sixty, should nature keep him alive,

if he finds the world so silly when he is but thirty-eight. Perhaps,

however, he will have mellowed.”

MAURICE, ROME, STANLEY AND THE QUEEN

’96 ran out. Irving’s tyre company began to make money, and Maurice

grew richer. He sent Amy to the Riviera for the winter, and Rome kept

his house for him. He was sweeter-tempered than usual. Rome was, in

his eyes, a _flâneuse_ and a dilettante of life, but her clear,

cynical mind was agreeable to him. Her intelligent mockery was, after

Amy’s primitive jeering, as caviare after rotten eggs. God! If only

Amy need never come back. But she would inevitably come back. And the

children loved her. Children are like that; no discrimination. They

loved Maurice too, but more mildly. And, very temperately, they liked

their Aunt Rome, whom they often suspected of making fun of them, and,

even oftener, of being completely bored. In point of fact, Rome was

apt to be bored by persons under sixteen or so. She allowed childhood

to be a necessary stage in the growth of human beings, but she found

it a tiresome one, and saw no reason why children should consort with

adults. Stanley, on the other hand, being by now partially restored

to her general goodwill towards humanity, threw herself ardently into

the society and interests of her own children and those of others. She

taught them imperialism, and about the English flag, and told them

adventure stories, and played with them the games suitable to their

years. She told them about the Diamond Jubilee, the great event of

’97, and how our good, wise and aged queen would, by next June, have

reigned for sixty years. Victoria was in fashion just then. She was

well thought of, both morally and intellectually. “To the ripe sagacity

of the politician,” said the loyal press, “she adds the wide knowledge

acquired by sixty years of statesmanship. Many a strained international

situation has been saved by her personal tact.” That was the way the

late nineteenth century press spoke of Victoria, the English being a

loyal people, with a strong sense of royalty. So the Diamond Jubilee

would be a great day for the Queen. Since the last Jubilee, in ’87,

the Empire, or anyhow the sense of Empire, had grown and developed.

Imperialism was now a very heady wine, to those who liked that tipple.

To others, such as Maurice Garden, it was more of an emetic.

NANSEN IN THE ALBERT HALL

Dr. Nansen came to London early in ’97. Whatever else you thought

of anything or anyone, you had to admire Dr. Nansen. He addressed

thousands of people in the Albert Hall. Vicky took her children to hear

him. Already they had read “Farthest North.” Imogen, at eight years

old, had read it, absorbed, breathless, intent, tongue clenched between

teeth. The man who had sailed through ice, and all but got to the Pole.

He was better than soldiers. As good, almost, as sailors. What a man!

And there he stood, a giant dwarfed to smallness on the platform of the

vast hall, a Scandinavian god, blonde and grave and calm, waiting to

begin his lecture, but unable to because the crowd roared and clapped

and stamped their feet and would not stop.

At that huge explosion of welcome, Imogen’s skin pringled and pricked

all over, as if soldiers were swinging by to music, or a fire engine

to the sound of bells, or as if the sun was setting in a glory of gold

and green, or as if she was reading “The Revenge,” or “The Charge of

the Light Brigade,” or “I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree.”

Imogen wept. She did not know that she wept, until the applause was at

last over and Nansen began to speak. Then her brother Hugh poked her

in the back and said, “What’s up? Wipe your nose and don’t snivel,”

and she was ashamed, and though she retorted, “Wipe your own. Snivel

yourself,” it was no satisfaction, because Hughie was not snivelling.

Boys didn’t, she had learnt, except when there was something to snivel

about. They did not understand the female weakness which wept at fire

engines, poetry and clapping, and was sick at squashed insects. Imogen

wanted (even still half hoped) to be a boy, so she tried to hide her

weaknesses.

Nansen began to speak.

“They’re all quiet now. A pin might drop,” said Imogen to herself,

having lately learnt that phrase, but not getting it quite right.

But disappointment took her. Strain as she would, she could not hear

what the god said. She could not make it into words, except now and

then. It boomed along, sonorous, fluent English, above her plane of

listening. A sentence here and there she got, entrancing and teasing,

then away the voice soared, booming in another dimension.... Imogen had

never learnt to listen; now for the first time she knew remorse for

sermon-times spent in day-dreams, lessons at school during which her

mind had drifted away on seas of fancy like a rudderless boat, to be

sharply recalled by “Imogen Carrington, what have I just said?” Seldom,

indeed, did Imogen Carrington know. She would blush and stammer and get

an inattention mark. No one in the second form had so many inattention

marks as she had. Perhaps if she had fewer she could have understood

Nansen now.

“Hughie, can you hear?”

“Most of the time. Don’t interrupt.”

Yes, Hughie could hear. Hughie was two years older; Hughie was ten, and

into his square, solid, intelligent head the sounds emitted by Nansen

were penetrating as words. Hughie could listen, when he had a mind

to. Hughie was more clever than Imogen. Phyllis and Nancy could hear

too, of course; they were older. Not Tony; but then Tony, who was only

seven, wouldn’t be trying. He didn’t really care.

“Mother, _I can’t hear_.”

“Don’t talk, darling. I’ll tell you afterwards....”

But what was the good of that?

Imogen’s strained attention flagged. If she couldn’t hear, she

couldn’t. She sighed and gave up. She stared, fascinated, at the

splendid figure on the platform, and imagined him on the _Fram_,

sailing along through chunks of floating ice, and on each chunk a great

white bear. Floes, they were, not chunks.... She and the boys meant,

when they should be grown up, to fit out a _Fram_ for themselves

and find the Pole. Hughie had some idea of the South Pole. The sort

of unusual, intelligent idea Hughie did get. But to Imogen the North

was the Pole that called. Away they sailed, away and away.... Tony

was attacked, as he fished from a floe, by a huge mother bear, with

three cubs. Imogen got there just in time; she slew the bear with her

long knife, at imminent personal risk; it toppled backwards into the

ice-cold water and died. The green sea reddened hideously. But the

three little cubs Imogen kept. She took them back to the _Fram_,

and there was one for each of them, and they were called Mowgli, Marcus

and Mercia, and Marcus was hers (the children had been taken to “The

Sign of the Cross” last summer. There was a play indeed!), and the cubs

slept in their bunks with them, and ate from their plates at meals....

Another storm of clapping. It was over.

“Did you like it, Jennie? How much did you follow?”

“I liked it very much. I followed it a lot.... Mother, do you think,

when I’m big, I shall ever _speak_ to him? I mean, when Hughie and

Tony and I have got our ship and have been to the Pole?”

“Oh, yes, darling. I should think when that happens, certainly. Only

Dr. Nansen may be dead by that time, I’m afraid.”

“Is he old, mother? Is he very old? Will he die before we grow up? Will

he, mother?”

“Children, be careful crossing the road.... What’s the matter, Imogen?”

“Will he die, mother, before we’re grown up?”

“Who? Dr. Nansen? Oh, no, I hope not, why should he? Tony, don’t

dawdle. We’ll go home by the Park. Keep together, children, there’s

such a crowd.... Imogen, _don’t_ play with strange dogs--I keep

telling you.”

“Mother, he’s such a weeny one ... all white, with a black nose and a

red tongue.... Mother, when _can_ I have a puppy?”

JUBILEE

Jubilee Day. Sweltering heat, after a grey beginning; baked streets.

Irving, out of his wealth and generosity, had bought a block of seats

in the Mall for the procession, and there the family sat. Papa, mamma,

Vicky and Charles and their daughter Imogen (their other children were

away at school), Rome, Stanley, Irving and his wife, and Una and Ted

up from the country, with two stout and handsome children. The ladies

wore beflowered, rakish, fly-away hats, and dresses with high collars

and hunched sleeves and small waists. They look absurd now, in old

pictures of the period, but they did not look absurd to one another at

the time; they looked natural, and _comme-il-faut_, and smart. The

boys wore their Eton suits and the girls light frocks. Imogen had a

blue smock, gathered across the yoke, so that when she ran her fingers

across the smocking it made a little soft, crisp noise. She sat next

her little cousins from the country. But she was shy of them and turned

her face away, and would say nothing to them after she had asked, “How

is Rover? How is Lassie? Are the puppies born yet?” Fits of shyness

seized upon Imogen like toothache, even now that she had been ever so

long at school, and she would hang her head, and mutter monosyllabic

answers, and wish she were Prince Prigio, with his cap of darkness,

and when, in church, it came to the psalm about “Deliver me from the

hands of strange children,” she would pray it ardently, feeling how

right David (if that psalm were one of his) had been. She was not shy

of her cousins when she stayed at the farm with them, for the farm was

like paradise, full of calves, puppies, pigs and joy, and Katie, Dick,

Martin and Dolly were its hierophants, and, though they weren’t much

good at being pirates or Red Indians, it was, no doubt, because they

were always employed to better purpose. But in the Mall, seated in a

tidy row waiting for the procession, it was different. Imogen wished

that two of her brothers and sisters could have been there, instead

of Katie and Dick. She held a fold of her mother’s soft foulard dress

tightly between her hot fingers. She whispered,

“Mother. Suppose someone felt sick and couldn’t get out?”

“_Jean_--you don’t feel sick, do you, child?” Vicky was alarmed,

knowing the weakness of her daughter’s stomach.

“Oh, no, _I_ don’t feel sick. But if someone did? What

_would_ they do, mother? Suppose the lady just above _you_

felt sick, mother? Suppose she _was_ sick? What would you do,

mother?”

“Don’t be silly, Imogen. If you talk like that you’ll feel sick

yourself. Talk to Katie. Don’t you see you’re interrupting grandmamma

and me?”

But Imogen’s grandmamma smiled across at her small pink, freckled face.

“Are you enjoying yourself, Jennie?”

“Yes, grandmamma ... is the Queen older than you, grandmamma?”

“Yes. The Queen is seventy-eight. I am sixty-three. When I was only

three years old, the Queen was crowned.”

“Did you see her crowned?”

“No. I was too young.”

“Is it a very big crown? Will she have it on?...

_Mother_”--Imogen had a terrible thought and whispered

it--“suppose _the Queen_ was sick in her carriage, just opposite

here? What _would_ happen, mother? Would the procession wait or go

on?”

“Now, Jennie, that will do. You’re being tiresome and silly. Talk to

Katie and Dick. I’m talking to grandmamma; I told you before.”

(For that was the way in which children were kept under in the last

century. Things have changed.)

Gold and purple and crimson. Silver and scarlet and gold. Fluttering

pennons on tall Venetian masts. The Mall was a street in fairyland, or

the New Jerusalem. And thronged with those who would never see either

more nearly, being neither fantastic nor good. Never would most of

those enter through the strait gate and see the gates of pearl and the

city of golden streets. But was not this as good? Silver and violet and

crimson and gold; gay streamers flying on the wind. Beautiful as an

army with banners, the Mall was....

“Let’s count the flags,” said Imogen to Katie and Dick.

“I remember the coronation,” said Mr. Garden, half to Irving, half to

anyone sitting about who might be interested, after the way of elderly

persons. “I was a very small boy, but my father took me to see the

procession. I remember he put me up on his shoulder while it passed....

There wasn’t quite such a crowd then as to-day, I think.”

“People have increased,” said Rome. “Particularly in London. There are

now too many, that is certain.”

“The crowd,” said Mr. Garden, his memory straying over that day sixty

years ago, “was _prettier_ then. I am nearly sure it was prettier.

Costumes were better.”

“They could hardly,” said Rome, “have been worse.”

“I remember my mother, in a violet pelisse, that I think she had got

new for the occasion, and a crinoline.... Crinolines hadn’t grown

large in ’37--they were very graceful, I think.... And a pretty poke

bonnet. And my father in a cravat, with close whiskers (whiskers

hadn’t grown large, either), and a tall grey hat.... And myself done

up tight in blue nankeen with brass buttons, and your aunt Selina with

white frilled garments showing below her frock. Little girls weren’t

so pretty,” he added, looking across at Imogen’s straight blue smock.

“Well, well, sixty years ago. A great deal has happened since then. A

great reign and a great time.”

“They’re pretty nearly due now,” said Irving, consulting his watch.

“Sure to be late, though.”

“Who’ll come first, mother?” Imogen asked.

“Captain Ames, on a horse. And behind him Life Guards and dragoons and

that kind of person.... So I said to her, mamma, that really unless she

could undertake to.... Oh, listen, they really _are_ coming now.

Listen to the cheering, Jennie.”

The noise of loyalty beat and broke like a sea from west to east. The

sound shivered down Imogen’s spine like music, and, as usual in such

moments, her eyes pringled with hot tears, which she squeezed away.

Then came the blaring of the trumpets and the rolling of the drums,

and, singing high above them like a kettle on the boil, the faint, thin

skirling of the pipes.

Imogen’s hot hand clutched Vicky’s dress.

“Now, Jean, don’t get too excited, darling. Try and be quiet and

sensible, like Katie and Dick.”

“Mother, I _am_ too excited, already. _Look_, mother--is that

Captain Ames on a horse?”

Captain Ames on a horse (and what a horse!) it was. And behind him

Life Guards, dragoons, lancers, and that kind of person, in noble

profusion. Very gallant and proud and lovely, prancing, curvetting, gay

as bright flowers in a wind.... O God, what military men!

A little white-moustached general rode by, and great cheers crashed.

“That’s Lord Roberts, Imogen.” Imogen, who knew her Kipling, had a lump

in her throat for Bobs of Kandahar.

“And that’s Lord Charles Beresford--with the cocked hat, do you see?”

Then came the great guns, running on their carriages.

And then the cheering broke to a mighty storm, as it always does when

sailors go by.

The sailors too had guns. Blue-jackets and smart, neat officers,

Britannia’s pets, Britannia’s pride....

Imogen, who had always meant to be a sailor, and who even now blindly

hoped that somehow, before she reached the age for Osborne, a way would

be made for her (either she would become a boy, or dress up as a boy,

or the rule excluding girls from the senior service would be relaxed),

gasped and screwed her hands tightly together against her palpitating

breast. Here were sailors. Straight from the tossing blue sea; straight

from pacing the quarter-deck, spyglass in hand, spying for enemy craft,

climbing the rigging, setting her hard-a-port, manning the guns,

raking the enemy amidships, holding up slavers, receiving surrendered

swords.... Here, in brief, were sailors; and the junior service faded

from the stage. Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves. The moment

was almost too excessive for a budding sailor, with wet eyes and lips

pressed tight together to keep the face steady. Fortunately it passed,

and was succeeded by the First Prussian Dragoon Guards, great men with

golden helmets, who could be admired without passion, and by strange

brown men with turbans and big beards.

“Indians,” Vicky said, and Indians too one knew from Kipling. And, “Sir

Partab Singh,” added the informing voice.

“Is he the chief of the Indians, mother?”

“Some kind of chief, yes.”

Other brown men followed the Indians--little coppery, fuzzy Maoris; and

with them rode splendid white men from New Zealand, and slouch-hatted

Rhodesian Horse.

“From South Africa.... You remember Dr. Jim and his raid and Cecil

Rhodes ... the Christmas holidays before last....”

“When the chair broke and I cut my head.” Yes, Imogen remembered,

though she had been only seven then. Over the Transvaal border, then a

gallop for life or death.... The chair was still broken.... Everyone

seemed to remember Dr. Jim and his raid and Cecil Rhodes, for the

slouch-hatted riders were cheered and cheered. Hurrah for South Africa!

“Political trouble, much less war, cannot now be apprehended,” the

_Times_ had said that morning, in a pæan of Jubilee satisfaction

with sixty years of progress abroad and at home.

The best was over, for now began carriages--landaus and pairs. Foreign

envoys. The Papal Nuncio sharing a landau with a gentleman from China,

who cooled himself with a painted fan. Landau after landau bearing

royal gentlemen, royal ladies. What a pity for them to be borne tamely

in landaus instead of a-horseback!

A colonial escort; an Indian escort; Lord Wolseley.

And then the procession’s meaning and climax. “The Queen, Jennie.”

Eight cream horses soberly drawing an open carriage, surrounded by

postillions and red-coated running footmen; and in the carriage the

little stout old lady, black-dressed, with black and white bonnet, and

with her the beautiful Princess in heliotrope, dressed in the then

current fashion, which royal ladies have adhered to ever since, never

allowing themselves to be unsettled by the modes of the new century.

The Queen, God save her. The noise was monstrous, louder than any real

noise could be.

“Dear old soul,” cried Vicky’s clear voice as she lustily clapped white

kid hands.

Papa’s blue eyes looked kindly down on the old lady whose coronation he

remembered.

“A record to be proud of,” said papa.

“Oh, yes, she’s seen some life this sixty years, the old lady,”

admitted Irving.

“I expect she is feeling the heat a bit,” said Una. “Well, I hope she’s

happy.”

Behind them people were saying loyal Victorian things to one another

about the dear old Queen.

“She’s got the hearts of the Empire all right,” they were saying,

“whether they’re under white skins or brown,” and, “God bless our dear

Queen,” and, “How well she looks to-day,” and, “She’s an Empress, but

she’s a woman first. That’s why we all love her so,” and so on and so

forth.

And, “There goes the Prince,” they said, applauding now the burly

middle-aged gentleman riding his horse by his mother’s carriage.

“He must be gettin’ pretty impatient, poor man,” said Amy. “Nearly

sixty himself, and mamma still going strong. I expect he thinks this

ought to be his silver Jubilee, not mamma’s diamond one.”

Mr. Garden looked pained. He often looked and was pained at the wife of

Maurice.

Imogen’s heart swelled for the Empress-Queen and the crash of loyalty,

but not to bursting-point; for here was only a little old lady in a

carriage (though drawn by eight cream horses like a fairy godmother’s),

and it is the swagger of gallantry that stirs. Sailors, soldiers,

explorers, martyrs, firemen, circus-riders, Blondin on his rope, Christ

on his cross, Joan of Arc on her white steed or her red pile--these are

they that shake the soul to tears. Not old ladies, however mighty, who

have sat on a throne for sixty years.

“The Prince, Jennie. The Prince of Wales.”

“_Oh, mother, where?_”

The Prince of Wales. Gallant figure of legend. Young, noble, princely,

with caracolling charger and a triple white plume in a silver helm. The

bravest and the most chivalrous of the knights. Where was the Prince of

Wales--“_Oh, mother, where?_”

“There--don’t you see him? The big man in uniform with a grey beard,

riding by the Queen’s carriage.”

The big man.... Oh, no, that must be a mistake.

“_That’s_ not the Prince of Wales, mother. Not _that_ one....”

“Of course. Why shouldn’t it be?”

A thousand reasons why it shouldn’t be. A hundred thousand reasons....

But in vain their legions beat against the hard little fact it

_was_. Imogen’s soaring heart sank like a stone in water. Fearful

doubts whispered. Had all the Princes of Wales been like that--fat

elderly men with grey beards? The Black Prince.... Oh, no, not the

Black Prince....

“The Black Prince wasn’t like that, mother, was he?”

“It must be nearly the end now. Here’s the music.... What, Jean?

What’s bothering you now?”

“The Black Prince....”

“Forget him, my precious. Don’t let any prince weigh on your little

mind. Here comes the music. Do you hear the pipes, children?”

So the great procession passed eastward, to rejoice Trafalgar Square,

the Strand, Fleet Street and the lands across the river.

“It’ll be a job getting out of this. Hold on to me, Imogen. Did you

enjoy it, darling?”

“Yes.” Imogen nodded, with the sun in her screwed-up eyes. “I wish we

could run very fast down the streets to where they haven’t passed yet,

and see them all again. Do you think we could, mother?”

“I’m sure we couldn’t.... You’re not over-tired, mamma dear?”

“Oh, no. I feel very well.... But that child has turned green.”

Vicky looked down, startled, at her daughter.

“_Imogen._ Aren’t you well?”

“Mother, I think I may be going to be sick.”

“Well, sit down till it’s over.... Bless the child. It’s the heat and

the excitement. She gets taken like that sometimes, by way of reaction

after her treats--most tiresome.”

“Poor little mite.”

“How are you feeling now, Jennie?”

Imogen said nothing. Yellow as cream cheese, she sat in her seat and

asked God not to disgrace her by letting her be sick in public, in the

grand stand, on Jubilee Day, with all London looking on.

But, “I’m not sure, mother, that I do very much believe in prayers,”

she said to Vicky that evening.

RECESSIONAL

Triumphant patriotism is all very well; Proud imperialism is all very

well. But these things should be carried on with a swagger, like a

panache, with a hint of the gay and the absurd, marching, as it were,

to the wild, conceited noise of skirling pipes. People of all nations,

but more particularly the English, are apt to forget this, and bear

their patriotism heavily, unctuously, speak solemnly of the white man’s

burden, and introduce religion into the gay and worldly affair.

Rudyard Kipling did this, on July 17th of Jubilee year, when he

published in the _Times_ “Recessional,” beginning,--

“God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle line,

Beneath Whose awful Hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine--

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget, lest we forget.”

Stanley read it at breakfast, and shuddered. It was such a poem as the

Jews might have made, in the days of Israel’s glory--terribly godly and

solemn. It was addressed to Jehovah, the Jewish Lord of Hosts. Those

Jews! How their influence lasts! Beneath Whose awful Hand we hold....

Awful is a bad word, and hand should never, whosesoever hand it is,

have a capital “h” (but that might have been the printer’s fault, as

anyone who knows printers must, in fairness, admit), and dominion over

palm and pine is much too delightful and romantic a thing to be spoilt

by being thus held. And, further down, it was worse.

“If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boasting as the Gentiles use,

Or lesser breeds without the Law....”

Are we then Jews, and not Gentiles? And what Law? And lesser

breeds--that was worst of all.

The whole poem seemed to Stanley so heavily ruinous of a jolly thing,

so terribly expressive of the solemn pomposity into which national

pride is ever ready to stumble, that it tarnished for her something

young and buoyant and absurd into which she had flung herself of late.

As Miss Edith Cavell remarked twenty years later, patriotism is not

enough. It needs to be as the cherishing love a man has for the soil

of his home; or as the bitter, desperate striving unto death of the

oppressed race, the damned desperation of the rebel; or as the gay and

gallant flying of gaudy banners. Successful, smug, solemn, conquering

patriotism is not nearly enough--or perhaps it is a good deal too much.

Anyhow, it is all wrong.

“What a man!” Stanley muttered, meaning Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who

did, if anyone, know all about the adventure of empire-building, its

swagger, glitter and romance, and must needs turn himself into a

preacher.

Stanley’s niece, Imogen, happened to have “Recessional” read aloud to

her form at school, by one whom she greatly loved (for it must be

owned that this unbalanced child only too readily adored those who

taught her), and shyly she wriggled her mind away from the sense of the

sounding lines. She liked,

“Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire;

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre....”

and,

“The tumult and the shouting dies,

The captains and the kings depart....”

and,

“All valiant dust that builds on dust....”

but disliked the rest. If Miss Treherne liked it, it must, she knew, be

somehow good; further, it was by Kipling, who had made Mowgli, and,

“It’s north you may run to the rime-ringed sun,

Or south to the blind Horn’s hate;

Or east all the way into Mississippi Bay,

Or west to the Golden Gate....”

But all the same, Imogen had no use for it. In the foolish jargon of

school, it was “pi.”

But newspapers said at the time, and history books have said since,

that this poem sounded a fine and needed note; and, in fact, it was

a good deal liked. Mr. Garden liked it. Mr. Garden was afraid that

Britain was getting a little above itself with Empire. As, indeed, it

doubtless was, said Stanley, and why not? Empires, like life, only

endure for a brief period, and we may as well enjoy them while we may.

They are wasted on those who do not enjoy them. Time bears us off, as

lightly as the wind lifts up the smoke and carries it away.... The

grave’s a fine and private place, but in it there are no empires, only

the valiant dust that builds on dust, and has come to dust at the last.

So let us by all means be above ourselves while we may and if we can,

in the brief space that is ours before we must be below ourselves for

ever.

Mr. Garden replied that there may be many brief spaces to come, for

all of us, and we should be training ourselves for these.... For

papa was still a Theosophist, and believed in infinitely numerous

reincarnations. He did not desire them, for he had had troubles enough,

for one; but he knew that they would occur. He looked with apprehension

down a vista of lives. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, to the

last syllable of recorded time--or anyhow, until papa should be made

perfect--and that, papa humbly felt, was a very long time ahead.

BOND STREET

London glittered sweetly, washed by the May sun. The streets were bland

and gay, like a lady of fashion taking the air. Miss Garden walked

abroad, bland and gay too, slim and erect in neat coat and skirt (skirt

touching the pavement as she walked--disgusting, but skirts did),

lace jabot at the high stock collar, and large beribboned hat, tipped

a little forward so that the sunshine caught the fair hair sweeping

upward from the nape. She led a huge Borzoi on a leash, and as she

walked she surveyed London, its people, its streets, its shops. In

a gold net purse bag she carried notes and clinking sovereigns. She

had gambled to good purpose last night at bridge, the new card game.

She was a great gambler. Bridge, whist, baccarat, poker, roulette and

Monte Carlo--at all these she won and lost, with the same equable

sangfroid. Her parents did not like it, though Rome’s income, left her

by her grandfather, was her own. They did not, in many ways, approve

of their clever Rome, so unlike themselves. But on such disapprovals,

so Rome assured them, family life is based. Mutual disapproval, mutual

toleration; that is family, as, indeed, so much other, life.

Anyhow, Rome gambled. The older she grew the more greatly and

intelligently she gambled. She had her systems, ingeniously worked

out, for Monte Carlo. She had been there this Easter, together with

her friend and ally, Guy Donkin, a cheerful barrister three years her

junior, who had been used to ask her to marry him, but had now settled

down to a sporting friendship and confided to her his fleeting affairs

of the heart. Here again Mr. and Mrs. Garden disapproved. Going to

Monte Carlo to meet a man; staying at the same hotel with him; seen

everywhere with him; even in the late, the very late thirties, was this

right or wise? It set people talking....

“As to that,” Rome carelessly dismissed it, “be sure people will

always talk. You may be sure, too, mamma, that Guy and I do nothing

not _comme-il-faut_. We are both too worldly-wise for that. We

may _épater_ the bourgeois possibly, but we shan’t _épater_

our own world. We know its foolish rules, and we both find it more

comfortable to keep them.”

Entirely of the world Miss Garden looked, this May morning, strolling

down Bond Street, a little cynical, a little blasé, very well-dressed,

intensely civilised, exquisitely poised, delicately, cleanly fair. She

would soon be thirty-nine, and looked just that, neither more nor less.

A window full of jade caught her roving eye. She went in; she bought a

clear jade elephant, and a dull jade lump that swung on a fine platinum

chain. She also got a tortoise-shell cigarette case.

She stopped next at a window full of little dogs. Big-headed Sealeyham

puppies; Poltalloch terriers. These she looked at critically. She meant

to have a Poltalloch, but to order one from their home in the West

Highlands when next she stayed there. Adorable puppies. The Borzoi

sniffed at them through plate glass, and grunted.

Irish lace. Jabots of _pointe de Venise_, and deep collars of

Honiton and _pointe de Flandres_, and handkerchiefs edged with

Chantilly. Miss Garden entered the shop; came out with a jabot for

herself, handkerchiefs for Vicky’s birthday. Then ivory opera glasses,

and an amber cigarette holder caught her fancy. Soon her free hand was

slung with neat paper packages. That was a bore; she wished she had had

them all sent.

She strolled on, turned into Stewart’s, ordered a box of chocolates for

Stanley’s children, and met Mr. Guy Donkin for lunch. They were going

to a picture show together.

“I am not,” said Miss Garden, “fit for a respectable picture gallery,

as you see.” She indicated the packages and the Borzoi. “But

nevertheless we will go. Jeremy shall wait in the street while we

criticise the art of our friends. I was overtaken this morning by the

lust of possession. I often get it on fine mornings after fortunate

nights. I find that the gambler’s life works out, on the whole, pretty

evenly--what one makes at the dice one loses in the shops. And what

one loses at play one saves off the shops. One walk abroad, looking at

everything and buying nothing, will save one some hundreds of pounds.

It is the easiest way of gaining, though not the most amusing.... I see

you have a lunch edition. How go the wars?”

The most noticeable wars at the moment were those between America and

Spain, and between Great Britain and the Soudanese.

“Dewey’s occupied Manila. The Fuzzies have lost three more zarebas.

It must be warm for fighting out there to-day.... Here’s an article

by some Dean on the vulgarity of modern extravagances. Meant for

you, Rome, with all your packages.... _Are_ we specially

extravagant just now? I suppose there’s a lot of money going about,

one way and another. Business is so good. And all these gold mines

and companies.... The Dean is worrying about the growing habit of

entertaining in restaurants instead of in the home. Why not? And about

women taking to cosmetics again, after a century of abstinence. Again,

why not? I agree with Max about that. The clergy do worry so, poor

dears; if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Oh, and on Tuesday we’re

all to wear a white rose, for the Old Man’s funeral day.”

“How touching! It will please papa. He’s really distressed about the

Old Man; he thinks politics on the grand scale are over, and that the

giants are dead. Politics and politicians are certainly intensely dull

in these days; but then, except for an occasional gleam, they probably

always were. Partly because people insist on taking them so solemnly,

instead of as a farce.... There’s my ex-brother-in-law, lunching with a

quite new and lovely young woman. He always smiles at me, blandly and

without shame. I can’t forgive him for spoiling Stanley’s life, but

I can’t help rather liking him still. He always sends us tickets for

his first nights, and they’re very amusing. A shameless reactionary,

but so witty. Maurice and Irving cut him, which I think crude. Men are

so intolerant. I cut no one, except when I’m afraid of being bored by

them. Thank you, yes: Turkish.”

They strolled off through the pleasant city to look at pictures,

which they could both criticise with as much intelligence as was

necessary, and Miss Garden with rather more. Then Mr. Donkin returned

to the Bar, and Miss Garden drove home in a hansom with the Borzoi and

the gleanings from Bond Street. At five she was going to an At Home

somewhere; later she was dining out and going to the opera. Life was

full; life was amusing; life hung a brilliant curtain over the abyss.

From the abyss Miss Garden turned her eyes; in it lay love and death,

locked bitterly together for evermore.

LAST LAP

1898 swaggered by under a hot summer sun. The century swaggered

deathwards, gay with gold and fatness, unsteady, dark and confused.

“The Belle of New York” at the theatres, the Simple Life on the

land, free-wheel bicycles on the road, motor cars, coming first in

single spies, then in battalions, the victory of Omdurman, Kitchener

occupying Khartoum and the French Fashoda, unpleasant international

incidents (for international incidents are always unpleasant),

millionaires rising like stars, fortunes made and spent, business

booming, companies floated and burst, names of drinks, provender and

medicines flaming from the skies, Swinburne publishing “Rosamund,

Queen of the Lombards,” Mr. Yeats “The Wind Among the Reeds,” Mr.

Kipling “Stalky & Co.” and “The Day’s Work,” Mr. Conrad “Tales of

Unrest,” Mr. Stephen Phillips “Paolo and Francesca,” Mr. Thomas Hardy

“Wessex Poems,” Mr. H. G. Wells “The War of the Worlds,” Miss Mary

Cholmondeley “Red Pottage,” Mrs. Humphry Ward “Helbeck of Bannisdale,”

Mr. Maurice Hewlett “The Forest Lovers,” Mr. Kenneth Grahame “Dream

Days,” Mr. Hall Caine “The Christian,” George Meredith greeted by

literary England on his seventieth birthday, bad novels pouring into

the libraries with terrifying increase of speed, wireless telegraphy

used at sea, flying machines experimented with, Liberals sickening with

Imperialism or Little Englandism, Conservatives with jingoism run mad,

the _Speaker_ changing hands, the Encyclopædia Britannica sold

by the _Times_, anti-ritualist agitations, armament limitation

conferences convened by Russia and attended by the Powers, all of

whom were busy as bees at home increasing their armies and navies and

hatching military plots.

And then the South African Uitlanders sent complaints and petitions

from the Rand, and despatches began to pass between Her Majesty’s

government and President Kruger’s. Despatches are most unfortunate and

unwise means of communication; they always make trouble.

There was bound to be war, people began saying. Mr. Chamberlain and

Mr. Rhodes intended it, and would not be happy till they got it.

Probably President Kruger and his Burghers also intended it. Certainly

the Uitlanders hoped for it. The British public were not averse. They

hated the Boers, and wanted excitement and more Empire. It was a

hopeless business. War was bound to come, and came, in October, 1899.

Mr. Garden said, “A bad business. Gladstone would never have let it

come to this. One doesn’t trust Chamberlain. A bad, dishonest business.”

Mrs. Garden said, “Those poor lads going out just before the winter....”

Vicky said, “Charles says it won’t be long. We shall have them asking

for terms in a month.”

Maurice said, “That damned jingo, Chamberlain,” and filled his fountain

pen with more vitriol.

Amy said, “Those canting, snuffling old farmers. _They_ won’t keep

us long.”

Rome said, “Unfortunate. But it’s a way in which centuries often end.”

Stanley said, “Right or wrong, we’ve got to win now.”

Irving said, “I shall take the opportunity to run out and see to my

mining interests. Up the Rand,” and he enlisted in the C. I. V. and

went.

Una said, “War! How silly. If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Why not

leave the poor farmers alone?” For she sympathised with farmers, and

was all for leaving people alone.

The children of all of them shouted for the soldiers and the flag, and

sang “Soldiers of the Queen.”

“And when we say we’ve always won,

And when they ask us how it’s done....”

A very bright song. That was the right, amusing spirit of patriotism,

not the “Recessional,” and not prayers sent forth for the people’s use

by Bishops.

Vicky’s children got up early one morning in the Christmas holidays

without leave, and saw a detachment of the C. I. V. go off from

Victoria. There was a raw, yellow fog, and the khaki figures loomed

oddly through it. The press of the swaying, shouting crowd was

terrifying, exhilarating. Imogen, linked up between Phyllis and Hugh,

was crushed, swung, caught off her feet. Persons of eleven had no

business in that crowd. Phyllis and Nancy had not wanted her and Tony

to come, but they had firmly done so. Imogen could scarcely see the

soldiers, only the broad backs her face was pressed against. Herd

enthusiasm caught and held them all, and they shouted and sang with the

rest, hoarsely, choking in the fog.

“They’ll all be killed,” sobbed a woman close to them. “We’ll never see

their brave faces again....”

At that Imogen’s eyes brimmed over, but she could not put up her hands

to wipe them, for her arms were tight wedged. She could only snuffle

and blink. Splendid heroes! They would be killed by the Boers, sure

enough, every one of them.... Horrible Boers with great Bibles and

sjamboks and guns. Hateful, hateful Boers. If only one were allowed

to go and fight them, as Uncle Irving was going. Thank Heaven, it was

rather age than sex that kept one from doing that; the boys couldn’t

go any more than Imogen could. If the boys had been old enough and had

gone, Imogen would somehow, she felt sure, have gone too. To be left

out was too awful.

But these were grown men. Splendid men. Lucky men, for they would soon

be roving the veldt with guns and bayonets under the African sun; they

would lurk in ambush behind kopjes and arise and slay their brother

Boer, the canting, bearded foe, with great slaughter. Even if they did

never come back, how could man die better?

The crowd swayed and shoved, lifting the children from their feet.

Imogen’s chest was crushed against the back in front of her; she fought

for breath. There was an acrid, musty smell; the raw air was close with

breathing.

A crowd is queer. A number of individuals gather together for one

purpose, and you get not a number of individuals, but a crowd. It is

like a new, strange animal, sub-human. It may do anything. Go crazy

with panic, or rage, or excitement, or delight. Now it was enthusiasm

that gripped and swayed it, and caused it to shout and sing. Songs

rippled over it, starting somewhere, caught from mouth to mouth.

“Cook’s son, duke’s son, son of a belted earl....

Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay....”

And then again the constant chorus--“God bless you, Tommy Atkins,

here’s your country’s love to you!”

It was over at last. The heroes had gone. The crowd broke and pushed

out from the station gates, flooding the choked yellow streets.

“There’s our bus,” said Phyllis, a good organiser. “Come on. Stick

together.”

They besieged and rushed the bus as troops rush a fort. Being vigorous

and athletic children, they stormed it successfully.

“We shall catch it from mother,” said Phyllis, now they had leisure to

look ahead. “But it’s been worth it.”

OF CENTURIES

That sad, disappointing, disillusioning, silly war crawled through

that bitter winter of defeat, until by sheer force of numbers, the

undefeatable Boers were a little checked in the spring of 1900.

Life is disappointing. Imogen, along with many others, thought and

hoped that 1900 would be a new century. It was not a new century. There

was quite a case for its being so. When you turned twelve, you began

your thirteenth year. When you had counted up to 100 you had completed

that hundred and were good for the next. It all depended on whether you

numbered the completion of a year from the first day when you began

saying 1900, or not till its last day, when you stopped saying it. The

Astronomer Royal adjudicated that it was on its last day, and that they

had, in fact, said 1900 prematurely, saying it before the last second

of December the 31st. He may have been right. He probably was right.

But the disappointment of the young, to whom a year is very long, its

end hidden in mists, like mountain tops which you perhaps shall never

reach--the disappointment of the young at the opening of the year 1900

was very great.

“At all events,” said Imogen, “we can write 1900. We can say, ‘It’s

1900.’” But what one could not say was, “I remember, last century,

going to the sea-side for the holidays....” “Last century bicycles and

steam engines came in ...” or, “We, of the twentieth century....” That

would have to wait.

The funny thing was that you could not, however hard you thought, lay

your finger on the moment when the new century would be born. Imogen

used to try, lying in bed before she went to sleep. One second you

said, “We of the nineteenth century”; the next second you said, “We of

the twentieth century.” But there must be a moment in between, when it

was neither; surely there must. A queer little isolated point in time,

with no magnitude, but only position.... The same point must be between

one day and the next, one hour and the next ... all points in time were

such points ... but you could never find them ... always you either

looked forward or looked back ... you said, “now--now--now,” trying to

catch now, but you never could ... and such vain communings with time

lead one drowsily into sleep.

PRO-BOER

In Stanley the Boer War slew the jingo spirit, turned back on itself

the cresting wave of imperialism. Not because it was an ill-fought,

stupidly managed, for long unsuccessful war, but because it was war,

and war was, when seen functioning, senseless and horrible. It was

nearly as bad when Great Britain at last began to defeat the too clever

farmers. It was almost worst in the summer of 1900, when the news of

the relief of Mafeking caused so much more tempestuous a hysteria

than the other reliefs had caused, and when Lord Roberts occupied

Johannesburg and proclaimed the annexation of the Orange Free State,

and when Pretoria was taken, and yet the war went on and on and on.

“Is this the way,” asked Liberals, “to secure in the end any kind of

working reconciliation between ourselves and the conquered enemy? If

Great Britain wishes to be burdened for ever with a sullen, hostile,

exasperated people, embittered with the memory of burnt farms, useless

slaughter and destruction, she is taking the right course.” And so

forth. Liberals always talk like that. Those who disagreed merely

retorted, “Pro-Boer,” which took less time. The Latin word “pro” has

been found always very useful and insulting.

Stanley became a pro-Boer. She disliked all she knew of Boers very

much, but that had nothing to do with it. A pro-Boer, like a pro-German

much later, was one who was in favour of making terms with the enemy on

the victories already gained. The Conciliation Committee were pro-Boer.

The Liberal newspapers were pro-Boer, except the _Chronicle_,

which threw Mr. Massingham overboard to be pro-Boer by himself. Maurice

Garden was, of course, pro-Boer. He loathed Boers, the heavy-witted,

brutal Bible-men, with their unctuous Cromwellian cant. But fiercely

and contemptuously he was pro-Boer. Rome, too, was pro-Boer; had been

from the first.

“A most unpleasant people,” she had said. “What a mistake not to leave

them to themselves! If the Uitlanders disliked them as much as I

should, they wouldn’t go on living there and sending complaints to us;

they would come away. All this imperialism is so very unbalanced.”

“Worse than unbalanced, Rome,” her papa sadly said. “One hesitates to

speak harshly, but it must be called un-Christian. The Churches have

gone terribly astray over it. The unhappy Churches....”

Unhappy because terribly astray on so many topics, papa meant. Even

now he was mourning the death of his friend Dr. Mivart, who had been

deprived of the sacraments of his church because he had, in the

_Nineteenth Century_ and the _Fortnightly Review_, written

articles, however reverent, on “The Continuity of Catholicism,” and

in them seemed to give to the infallible authority of the Church a

lower place than to human reason. Alas for the Catholic Church, which

so treated its best sons! Never, papa knew, could he join that great

Church again. Religion too had suffered a heavy blow in the death, in

January, of Dr. Martineau. And Ruskin also went that month.... Like

leaves the great Victorians were falling. Papa, brooding over a great

epoch so soon to close, could not but be a pro-Boer and hope that this

horrid war, which jarred and confused its last years, would soon end.

As for Maurice, his newspaper office was raided and smashed on Mafeking

night, and he himself carried out and ducked in Trafalgar Square basin.

No one hurt him. No one wanted, on this happy, good-humoured night,

to hurt this small, frail, scornful, slightly intoxicated, obviously

courageous editor, who brightly insulted them to their faces as they

tied him up.

Vicky’s children were not pro-Boer. No one could have called them that.

They were all for a good whacking victory. Imogen, it must be owned,

did once, in a moment of seeing the point of view of the foe (Imogen

usually saw all the points of view there were to see; her eye was not

single, which made life a very dizzy business for her), write a poem

beginning:

“Across the great Vaal River we northward trekked and came,

Set up our own dominion, and men acknowledged the same;

And close behind us followed the Alien whom we scorn,

With his eager clutching fingers and his lust for gold new-born.

“‘There is wealth,’ he cried;

‘I will dig,’ he cried;

Between him and us may the Lord decide!

Through the Lord’s good might, 5 1-2

By the sword’s good right,

Let us up and smite our enemies and put our foes to flight!”

Imogen was not ill-pleased with that poem, which had ten verses, and

which she wrote for a school composition. It seemed to her a fine

expression of sturdy Boer patriotism, however misguided.

“I can see their point of view,” she said to herself, righteously, and

pleased with the phrase. “Most people” (which meant, it need scarcely

be said, most of the other girls at school), “can’t see it, but I can.

They’re beastly, and I’m glad they’re beaten, but I see their point of

view.” She said so to some other little girls in the Third Remove. But

the other little girls, who didn’t see the Boers’ point of view, said,

“Oh! Are you a pro-Boer? I say, Imogen Carrington’s a pro-Boer.” “Your

uncle was ducked in Trafalgar Square, wasn’t he?” said someone else,

curiously but not unkindly, and in the diffident voice suitable to

family scandals, “for being a pro-Boer. Do you think the same as him?”

Imogen, blushing, disclaimed this.

“Daddy and mother think Uncle Maurice awfully wrong, and so do I. He’s

a _real_ pro-Boer.”

“Well, what are you? Are you only shamming pro-Boer?”

“I’m not a pro-Boer at all. I’m pro-us. I only said I could see their

point of view....”

“Oh, you do talk tosh. Point of view. No one but grown-up people uses

words like that. Imogen’s getting awfully cocky now Miss Cradock always

says her compositions are good. Come and play tig.”

And, since little girls at school are very seldom unkind, they included

Imogen in the game and bore no malice.

Irving was no pro-Boer. He wrote home, in the autumn of 1900, “We’re

getting on, but we’re not near finished with brother Boer yet. Maurice

is talking through his hat, as usual. Any fool out here knows that

if we’re to suck any advantage out of this war (and there’s no small

advantage to be sucked, I can tell you), we’ve got to _win_ it.

Those radical gas-bags at home don’t know the first thing about it.”

It is an eternal and familiar dispute, and which side one takes in it

really seems to depend more on temperament than on the amount one knows

about it.

END OF VICTORIANISM

The nineteenth century did actually end at last. Probably everyone over

twelve and under seventy sat up to see it out, to see the twentieth in,

to catch that elusive, dramatic moment and savour it.

The twentieth century. Imogen, when she woke on New Year’s Day, could

scarcely believe it. It was perhaps, she thought, a drunken dream. For

the Carringtons, like all right-thinking persons, always kept Hogmanny

in punch. But the twentieth century it was, and a clear frosty morning.

Imogen shouted to Nancy, lying in intoxicated slumbers in the other

bed, “Happy new century,” lest Nancy should say it first, then looked

at the new century out of the window. What a jolly century it looked;

what a jolly century it was going to be! A hundred happy years. At

the end of it she would be 112. A snowy-haired but still active old

lady, living in a white house on a South Sea Island, bathing every

morning (but not too early) and then getting back into bed and eating

her breakfast of mangoes, bread-fruit, delicious home-grown coffee and

honey. Then a little roller skating on the shining parquet floor of

the hall; a lovely hall, hung with the trophies of her bow--reindeer,

sand-bok, polar bear, grizzly, lion, tiger, cheetah, wombat and wolf.

No birds. Shooting birds was no fun. Imogen knew, for she had shot

her first and only sparrow last week, with her new catapult. The boys

had been delighted, but she had nearly cried. It had been beastly.

Hereafter she meant only to use the catapult on cows, brothers and

sisters, and still life. That old lady of the year 2,000 should have

only one bird to her score.

The question was, what to do till getting-up time. Wake Nancy--but this

was next to impossible. Nancy was a remarkably fast sleeper. One might

go and try to wake the boys, and get them to come out catapulting in

the garden, or roller skating in the square. Or one might snuggle down

in bed again and read “Treasure Island.” Or not read, but lie and think

about the new century; perhaps make a poem about it. Imogen extracted

from the pocket of her frock, that hung on a chair, a stubby pencil, a

note-book and a stick of barley-sugar. With these she curled up among

the bedclothes. Happily she sucked and pondered. Holidays; breakfast

time not for ages; Christmas presents with the gloss still on (among

them a pair of roller skates and _Brassey’s Naval Annual_ and a

new bow and arrows), and a brand new century to explore. Sing joy, sing

joy.

“Roland lay in his bunk,” murmured Imogen, “and heard the prow of the

ship grinding through ice-floes as she pursued her way. Eight bells

sounded. With a hijous shock he remembered the events of last night.

He put his hand to his head; it was caked with dried blood where the

pirates had struck him with the crowbar. A faint moan of anguish was

wrung from his white lips....”

Roland was Imogen, and his adventures had meandered on in serial

form in her mind for several months. She had always, ever since she

remembered, impersonated some boy or youth as she went about. “Lithe

as a panther,” she would murmur within herself, as she climbed a tree,

“Wilfrid swarmed up the bare trunk. He scanned the horizon. In the

distance he saw a puff of smoke, and heard, far away, faint shrieks.

‘Indians,’ he said, ‘at their howwid work. The question for me is, can

I warn the settlers in time? If the Redskins catch me, I shall wish I

had never been born. No; I will escape now and save myself.’”

It was characteristic of Wilfrid, or Roland, or Dennis, or whatever

he was at the moment called, that he usually did a cowardly thing at

first, then repented and acted like a hero, suffering thereby both the

condemnation of his friends for his cowardice and the tortures of

his foes for his courage. He was a rather morbid youth, who enjoyed

repentance and heroic amendment, no simple, stalwart soul. Usually he

was in the navy.

Thus, in idle, barley-sugared dreamings, this representative of the

young generation began the new century.

“What,” mused her grandfather, watching from his bed the winter morning

grow, “will the new age be?”

“Much like the old ages, I shouldn’t wonder,” Mrs. Garden murmured,

drowsily. “People and things stay much the same ... much the same....”

“The eternal wheel,” papa speculated, still adhering to his latest

faith, but with a note of question. “The eternal, turning wheel. I

wonder....”

But what mamma wondered, catching the familiar note of doubt in his

voice, was where the eternal turning wheel would next land papa.

“What a world we’ll make it, won’t we, my son and daughter,” Stanley

hopefully exclaimed to her children as they rioted about her room.

“What a century we’ll have! It belongs to the people of your age, you

know. You’ve got to see it’s a good one.... Now take yourselves off and

let me get up. Run and turn on the cold tap for me, and put the warm at

a trickle.”

Stanley whistled as she dressed.

“Yet another century,” her sister Rome commented, with languid

amusement, as her early tea was brought to her. “How many we have, to

be sure! I wonder if, perhaps, it is not even too many?”

“_Maurice_,” shrilly called Maurice’s wife, entering his room at

nine o’clock. “Well, I declare!”

Maurice lay heavily sleeping, and whiskey exhaled from his breath. He

had come home at three o’clock this morning.

“A nice way to begin the new year,” said Amy; she did not say “new

century,” because she was of those who could not see but that the

century had been new in 1900. She shook her husband’s shoulder, looking

down with distaste at his thin, sharp-featured sleeping face, its usual

pallor heavily flushed.

“A nice example to the children. And you always writing rubbish about

social reform.... You make me sick.”

“Go away,” said Maurice, half opening hot eyes. “Le’me alone. My head’s

bad....”

“So I should imagine,” said Amy. “I’m sick and tired of you, Maurice.”

“Go away then. Right away. We’d both be happier. Why don’t you?”

“Oh, I daresay I’m old-fashioned,” said Amy. “I was brought up to

think a wife’s place was with her husband. Of course, I’m probably

_wrong_. I’m always surprised _you_ don’t leave _me_, feeling as

you do.”

Maurice, waking a little more, surveyed her with morose, heavy, aching

eyes, and moistened his dry lips.

“You’re not surprised. You know it’s because of the children. It’s my

job to see they grow up decently, with decent ideas and a chance.”

At that Amy’s mirth overcame her.

“Decent ideas! You’re a nice educator of children, aren’t you!

_Look_ at yourself lying there....”

She pointed to the looking-glass opposite his bed.

“Get out, please,” said Maurice, coldly. “I’ve got to write my leader.”

Meanwhile the most august representative of the Victorian age wavered

wearily between her own century and this strange new one, peering

blindly down the coming road as into a grave. It did not belong to

her, the new century. She had had her day. A few days of the new young

era, and she would slip into the night, giving place to the rough young

forces knocking at the door.

The great Victorian century was dead.

It did not last, the Crofts’ marriage. In the spring of ’95, Stanley