EDWARDIAN
1
DISCURSIVE
THE Edwardians were, as we now think, a brief generation to themselves,
set between Victorianism and neo-Georgianism (it is a pity that we
should have no better name for the present reign, for “Georgian”
belongs by right to a period quite other; royalty having ever been
sadly unimaginative in its choice of Christian names). Set between
the nineteenth century and the full swing of the twentieth, those
brief ten years we call Edwardian seem now like a short spring day.
They were a gay and yet an earnest time. A time of social reform on
the one hand and social brilliance on the other. The heyday at once
of intellectual Fabianism and of extravagant dissipation. The hour of
the repertory theatres, the Irish Players, Bernard Shaw and Granville
Barker at the Court, Miss Horniman in the provinces, absurd musical
comedies that bloomed like gay flowers of a day and died. The onrush
of motor cars and the decline of bicycles and the horse; extravagant
country-house parties at which royalty consented to be entertained,
with royal bonhomie and royal exactions of etiquette.... “Mr. Blank,
have we not seen that suit rather often before?” “Lady Dash, surely we
remember this wall-paper....” “Lord Somebody, this is a very abominable
dinner....” What standards to live up to! There was nothing dowdy about
our King Edward. He set the stakes high, and all who could afford it
played. Pageants and processions passed in regal splendour. Money nobly
flowed.
Ideals changed. The sanctity and domesticity of the _Heim_ was no
more a royal fetish. “Respectability,” that good old word, degraded and
ill-used for so long, sank into discredit, sank lower in the social
scale. No more were unfortunate ladies who had had marital troubles
coldly banned from court, for a larger charity (except as to suits,
dinners and wall-papers) obtained. Victorian sternness, Victorian
prudery and intolerance, still prevailed among some of the older
aristocracy, among most of the smaller squirearchy, the professional
classes and the petty bourgeoisie; but among most of the wealthy, most
of the titled, most of the gay and extravagant classes, a wider liberty
grew.
In the intervals of social pleasures, Edward the Peacemaker was busy
about the Balance of Power in Europe. He did not care about his cousin
Wilhelm. He made an Entente with France, and came to an understanding
with Russia, so that when the Trouble should come--and experienced
royalty knows that from time to time, the Trouble is bound to come--we
should not meet it singly. The weak point about ententes is that when
the Trouble comes to one’s fellow-members, they do not meet it singly
either. Considering this, and considering also the annoyance and alarm
they inspire in those not in them, and taking them all round, ententes
seem on the whole a pity. But at the time English people were pleased
with this one, and Edward was hopefully called the Peacemaker, just as
Victoria had been called Good, and Elizabeth Virgin, and Mary Bloody.
We love to name our royalties, and we much prefer to name them kindly.
Mary must have been, and doubtless was, very bloody indeed before her
people bestowed on her that opprobrious title. Other sovereigns--most
other sovereigns--have been pretty bloody too, but none of them bloody
enough to be so called.
A queer time! Perhaps a transition time; for that matter, this is
one of the things times always are. The world of fashion led by an
elderly royal gentleman bred at the Victorian court of his mother, and
retaining queer Victorian traditions that younger gentlemen and ladies
did not observe. King Edward, for instance, observed Sunday with some
strictness. He thought it right; he felt it should be done. The British
Sunday was an institution, and King Edward was all for institutions. A
generation was growing up, had already grown up, who did not understand
about Sunday in that sense. But you may observe about elderly Victorian
persons that, however loosely they may sit to Sunday, they usually have
a sense of it. They play or work on it consciously, with a feeling
that they are breaking a foolish rule, possibly offending an imaginary
public opinion. They seldom quite realise that the rule and the opinion
they are thinking of are nearly obsolete. They seldom regard Sunday
(with reference to the occupations practised on it), precisely as if
it were a weekday. Institutions die hard. They linger long after their
informing spirit has died.
Anyhow, King Edward VII was a Victorian gentleman long before he was an
Edwardian. So he observed Sunday and the lesser proprieties, without
self-consciousness. He was like his mother, with a difference. Both had
a sense of royal dignity and of the Proper Thing. His subjects, too,
had a sense of the Proper Thing: people always have. But the Proper
Thing, revered as ever, gradually changed its face, or rather turned a
somersault and alighted on its head.
Well, the Edwardians, like the Elizabethans, the Jacobeans, the
Carolines, the Georgians, the Victorians, and the neo-Georgians, were
a mixed lot. This attempt to class them, to stigmatise them with
adjectives, is unscientific, sentimental, and wildly incorrect. But,
because it is rather more interesting than to admit frankly that they
were merely a set of individuals, it will always be done.
2
VIVE LE ROI
_La reine est morte. Vive le roi._ King Edward was proclaimed by
heralds, by trumpeters, and with the rolling of drums; and God save
the King. Then they buried the late queen with royal pomp, and kings,
emperors, archdukes and crown princes rode with her to the tomb.
King Edward opened Parliament in state. A great king he was for
pageantry and for state. He read the Accession Declaration. It was a
tactlessly worded declaration in some ways, for it was drawn up in
days when Roman Catholicism was not well thought of by the Head of the
Church and Defender of the Faith. King Edward did not like it. “His
Majesty,” wrote the outraged Catholic peers, “would willingly have been
relieved from the necessity of branding with contumelious epithets the
religious tenets of any of his subjects.” There were protests not only
from Roman Catholics, but from Protestants and agnostics, who all, in
the main, thought it rude. But some there were who, though they knew
it was rude, knew also that it was right to be rude to Roman Catholics.
“They are the king’s subjects as much as others, and belong to a
distinguished old church,” the protesters declared. “The thing is an
antediluvian piece of ill-breeding.”
“Bloody Mary. The Inquisition. No Popery,” was the crude reply. “And
are not Roman Catholics always rude to our religion? Why, then, should
we not be rude to theirs?”
“Roman Catholics,” replied the more polite and sophisticated, “cannot
help being a little rude--if you call it so--to other faiths. They
are not to blame. It is an article of their faith that theirs is the
only true and good church. There is no such article in other faiths.
We are not obliged by our religion to believe them wrong, as they
are, unfortunately, obliged to believe us wrong. Obviously, then, we
should practise the courtesy forbidden to them. It is more generous
and dignified. Also, they are as good as we are. All religions are
doubtless in the main inaccurate, and one does not differ appreciably
from another. And His Majesty ought to preserve a strict impartiality
concerning the many and various faiths of his people. The Declaration
is ignorant, unstatesmanlike and obscurantist, and smacks of vulgar
seventeenth century protestantism. It is a worse scandal than the
Thirty-nine Articles.”
But “No Popery” was still the cry of the noisy few, and the scandal
remained. Reluctantly protesting his firm intention to give no
countenance to the religion of some millions of his subjects, and
solemnly in the presence of God professing, testifying and declaring
that he did make this declaration in the plaine and ordinary sense of
the words as they were commonly understood by English Protestants,
without any evasion, equivocation or mental reservation whatsoever,
without any dispensation from the Pope, either already granted or to
be sought later, the king opened his khaki-elected Parliament, which
proved as ineffective as parliaments always do. It is of no importance
which side is in office in Parliament; any study of the subject must
convince the earnest student that all parties are about equally
stupid. By some fluke, useful Acts may from time to time get passed by
any government that happens to be in power. More often, foolish and
injurious Acts get passed. Personality and intelligence in ministers
do certainly make some difference; but party, it seems, makes none.
The stupid, the inert, the dishonest and the ill-intentioned flourish
like bay-trees impartially on both sides of the avenue. Only the very
_naïf_ can believe that party matters, in the long run. This first
Parliament of the twentieth century proved, perhaps, even more than
usually inept, as parliaments elected during war excitements are apt to
be. It could deal neither with education, defences, labour, finance nor
poisoned beer.
3
PAPA’S NEW FAITH
The war scrambled on; a tedious, ineffective guerilla business. The
Concentration Camp trouble began, and over its rights and wrongs
England was split.
Mr. Garden hated the thought of these camps, where Boer women and
children, driven from their homes, dwelt in discomfort (so said Miss
Emily Hobhouse and others), and fell ill and died. They might be,
as their defenders maintained, kindly meant, but it was all very
disagreeable. In fact, the whole war preyed on papa’s mind and nerves.
More and more it seemed to him a hideous defiance of any possible
Christian order of society, a thing wholly outside the sphere of God’s
scheme for the world. But, then, of course, nearly everything was that,
and always had been. So utterly outside that sphere were most of the
world’s happenings that it sometimes seemed to papa as if they could
scarcely _be_ happenings, as if they must be evil illusions of
our own, outside the great Reality. The more papa brooded over this
Reality, the more he became persuaded that it must be absolute and
all pervasive, that nothing else really existed. “We make evil by our
thought,” said papa. “God knows no evil.... God does not know about the
war. Nor about the Concentration Camps....”
It will be seen that papa was ripe for the acceptance of a new
creed which had recently come across the Atlantic and was becoming
fashionable in this country. Christian Science fastened on papa like a
mosquito, and bit him hard. It comforted him very much to think that
God did not know about the war. He told his grandchildren about this
ignorance on the part of the Deity.
Imogen pondered it. She had a metaphysical and enquiring mind, and was
always interested in God.
“What _does_ God think all those soldiers are doing out in Africa,
grandpapa?” she asked, after a considering pause. “Or doesn’t he know
they’re soldiers?”
“He knows they are unhappy people following an evil illusion, my
child,” her grandpapa told her. “You see, there is no war really--not
on God’s plane. There couldn’t be.”
Imogen pondered it again, corrugating her forehead. She dearly liked to
understand things.
“Will God know about the peace, when it comes?”
“He will know his children have stopped imagining the evil of war. And
he will be very glad.”
“Doesn’t he know about the soldiers who are killed? What does he think
they’ve died of?”
“He knows they are slain by their evil imaginings and those of their
enemies. You see, God knows his children _believe_ themselves to
be at war, and that as long as they go on believing it they will hurt
each other and themselves.”
It seemed to Imogen that, in that case, God knew all that was really
necessary about the war.
“Are you the only person, besides God, who doesn’t believe in the war,
grandpapa?” she presently enquired.
“No, my child. There are others.... Perhaps one day, when you are
older, you will understand more about it, and try and think all evil
and all pain out of existence.”
“P’raps.” Imogen was dubious. She did not quite get the idea. “Of
course I’d _like_ it, grandpapa, because then I shouldn’t get hurt
any more.” She rubbed the back of her head, onto which she had fallen
that afternoon while roller skating round the square. Her grandfather
had told her that God didn’t know she had fallen and hurt herself, and,
in fact, that she was not really hurt at all. God didn’t know a great
deal about roller skates, Imogen concluded, if he didn’t know that
people who used them very frequently did fall. But perhaps he didn’t
know there were any roller skates; perhaps roller skates were another
evil illusion of ours, like the war. Not a bad illusion; one we had
better keep, bruises and all. But perhaps, thought Imogen, who liked
to think things out thoroughly, it was really that God didn’t know that
the contact of the human head with another hard substance caused pain.
After all, people who have never tried _don’t_ know that. Babies
don’t....
Imogen began to be afraid she was blaspheming. She put the problem
later to her mother, but Vicky was less interested than her youngest
daughter in metaphysical problems, and merely said, “Oh, Jennie
darling, you needn’t puzzle your head about what grandpapa tells you.
Things that suit learned old gentlemen like him don’t always do for
little girls like you. Anyhow, don’t ever you get thinking that it
won’t hurt you when you tumble on your head, because it always will.
_You’ll_ never get rid of that illusion, you may be sure. What
_you’ve_ got to learn is not to be so careless, and not to spend
all your time climbing and racketing about. So long as you’ll do that
you’ll get tumbles, and they’ll hurt, and don’t you forget it.”
Imogen sighed a little. Her mother was so practical. You asked her for
doctrine and she gave you advice. Being married, and particularly being
a mother, often makes women like that. They know that doctrine is no
use, and cherish the illusion that advice is.
“Papa is very happy in this new no-evil religion he has,” mamma said to
Rome. “It suits him very well. Better than theosophy did, I think.”
Papa’s new religion might, from her placid, casual, considering tone,
have been a new suit of clothes.
Papa’s daughter-in-law, Amy, screamed with mirth over it. Christian
Science seemed to her an excellent joke.
“Oh, you’re not really hurt,” she would say if her daughter Iris came
in from hockey with a black eye. “It’s all an illusion! What do you
want embrocation for? I’ll tell your grandpapa of you....”
“Christian Science,” Maurice said to her at last, gloomily
contemptuous, “is not much more absurd than other religions. Suppose
you were to take another for your hourly jokes to-day, just for the
sake of a change. It makes no difference which; you don’t begin to
understand any of them, and you can, no doubt, get a good laugh out of
them all, if you try.”
Amy said, “There you go, as usual! I suppose you’ll be saying
_you’re_ a Christian Science crank next. Anyway, I don’t know what
you want to speak to me in that way for, just because I like a little
fun.”
“I don’t want to speak to you in any way,” replied Maurice.
4
ON EDUCATION
Stanley, turning forty this year, was sturdier than of old, softer
and broader of face, blunt-nosed, chubby, maternal, her deep blue
eyes more ardent and intent. Now that her children, who were ten and
eight, both went to day schools, she had taken up her old jobs, and
was working for Women’s Trade Unions, going every day to an office,
sitting on committees, speaking on platforms. Phases come and phases
go, and particularly with Stanley, who inherited much from her
papa. Stanley was in these days a stop-the-war, pacificist Little
Englander, anti-militarist, anti-Chamberlain, anti-Concentration Camp.
She would shortly be a Fabian, but had not quite got there yet. She
was, of course, a suffragist, but suffragists in 1901 were still a
very forlorn outpost; they were considered crankish and unpractical
dreamers. She also spoke and wrote on Prison Reform, Democratic
Education, Divorce Reform, Clean Milk and Health Food. She was an
admirer of Mr. Eustace Miles’ views on food, Mr. G. B. Shaw’s drama
and social ethics, Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s romantic Christianity, and
no one’s political opinions. She believed in the future of the world,
which was to be splendidly managed by the children now growing up, who
were to be splendidly educated for that purpose.
“But how improbable,” Rome mildly expostulated, “that they should
manage it any better or any worse than everyone else has. Your maternal
pride carries you away, my dear. Parents can never be clear-sighted;
often have I observed it. Blessed, as the Bible says somewhere, are
the barren and they that have not brought forth, for they are the only
people with any chance of looking at the world with clear and detached
eyes. And even they haven’t much.... But why do you think the present
young will do so unusually well with the future?”
“Of course,” Stanley replied, “they won’t do it of themselves. Only so
far as they are educated up to it.”
“Well, I can’t see that educational methods are improving noticeably.
Obviously democratic education is not at present to be encouraged by
our governing classes. Look at the Cockerton case....”
“It will come,” said Stanley. “This new Bill won’t go far, but it will
do something. Meanwhile, those parents who have thought it out at all
are doing rather better by their children than parents used to do. At
least we can tell them the truth.”
“So far as you see it yourselves. Is that, in most cases, saying much?”
“No, very little. But--to take a trivial thing--we can at least, for
instance, tell them the truth about such things as the birth of life.
That’s something. Billy and Molly already know as much as they need
about that.”
“Well, they don’t actually need very much yet, do they? I’m sure it
won’t hurt them to know anything of that sort, but I don’t see exactly
how it’s going to help them to manage the world any better. Because,
when the time comes for doing that, they’d know about the birth of life
in any case. Boys always seem to pick it up at school, whatever else
they don’t learn. However, I admit that I think you bring up Billy and
Molly very well.”
“It’s facing facts,” said Stanley, “that I want to teach them. The art
of not being afraid of life. They’ve got to do their share in cleaning
up the world, and before they can do that they’ve got to face it
squarely. One wants to do away with muffling things up, whatever they
are. That’s why I tell them everything they ask, so far as I know it,
and a lot they don’t. The knowledge doesn’t matter either way, but the
atmosphere of daylight does. I want them to feel there are no facts
that can’t be talked about.”
“But, my dear, what a social training! Because, you know, there
_are_. Anyhow in drawing-rooms, and places where they chat.”
“They’ll learn all that soon enough,” Stanley placidly said. “The world
is as vulgar as it is mainly because of its prudery. I’m giving my
children weapons against that.”
She had given them also a weapon against their cousins, the children
of Vicky, who had not been told Facts. Anyhow Imogen hadn’t. Her
sisters were older, and boys, as Rome had said, do seem to pick things
up at school. But Imogen at thirteen was still in the ignorance thought
by Vicky suitable to her years. So, when she exasperated her cousin
Billy by her superior proficiency in climbing, running, gymnastics, and
all active games--a proficiency natural to her three years’ seniority
but growing tiresome during a whole afternoon spent in trials of
skill--Billy could at least retort, “I know something you don’t. I know
how babies come.”
“Don’t care how they come,” Imogen returned, astride on a higher bough
of the aspen tree than her cousin could attain to. “They’re no use
anyhow, the little fools. Who wants babies?”
Billy, having meditated on this unanswerable question, amended his
vaunt. “Well, I know how puppies come, too. So there.”
Imogen was stumped. You can’t say that puppies are no use. She could
think of no retort but the ancient one of sex insult.
“Boys are always bothering about stupid things like how babies come. As
if it mattered. _I’d_ rather know the displacement and horse-power
and knots of all the battleships and first-class cruisers.”
“You don’t.”
“I do.”
“Bet you a bull’s-eye you don’t.”
“Done. A pink one. Ask any you like.”
“Well, what’s the _Terrible_?”
“14,200 tons; 25,000 horse-power; 22.4 knots. That’s an easy one.”
“The _Powerful_.”
“Same, of course. No, she only makes 22.1 knots. Stupid to ask twins.”
Billy considered. He did not like to own it, but he could not remember
at the moment any other ships of His Majesty’s fleet.
“Well, what’s the biggest, anyhow?”
“The _Dominion_ and the _King Edward VII_. 16,350 tons;
18,000 horse-power; 18.5 knots.”
“I don’t know that any of that’s true.”
“You can look in ‘Brassey’ and find out, then.”
“I don’t care. Anyone can mug up ‘Brassey.’ Anyhow girls can’t go into
the navy.”
Imogen jogged up and down on the light swinging branch, whistling
through her teeth, pretending not to hear.
“And anyhow,” added the taunter below, “_you’d_ be no use on a
ship, ’cause you’d be sick.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You would.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You would.”
“You’re sick yourself if you smoke a woodbine.”
“So are you. _You’re_ sick if you squash a fly. Girls are. They
can’t dissect a rabbit. I can.”
The sex war was in full swing.
“Boys crib at their lessons. Boys don’t wash their necks.”
“Nor do girls. You’re dirty now. Girls don’t play footer at school.”
“Hockey’s as good. Boys are greedy pigs; they spend their pennies on
tuck.”
“Who bought eight bull’s-eyes this afternoon and sucked six?”
“Oh, well.” Imogen collapsed into sudden good temper. “Don’t let’s
rot. Why did the gooseberry fool?”
To change the subject further, she swung herself backwards and hung
from the branch by her knees, her short mop of curls swinging upside
down, the blood singing in her head. Billy, a nice but not very clever
little boy, said, “Because the raspberry syrup,” and truce was signed.
Who, as Imogen had asked, cared how babies came?
5
PING-PONG
Everywhere people ping-ponged. One would have thought there was no war
on. Instead of doing their bits, as we did in a more recent and more
serious war, they all ping-ponged, and, when not ping-ponging, asked,
“Why did the razor-bill raise her bill? Why did the coal scuttle? What
did Anthony Hope?” and answered, “Because the woodpecker would peck
her. Because the table had cedar legs. To see the salad dressing,” and
anything else of that kind they could think of. Some people, mostly
elderly people, could only answer vaguely to everything, “Because the
razor-bill razor-bill,” and change the subject, thinking how stupid
riddles in these days were. Some people excelled at riddles, others
at ping-pong, others again at pit, which meant shouting “oats, oats,
oats,” or something similar, until they were hoarse. No one would have
thought there was a war on.
Indeed, there scarcely was a war on, now. Not a war to matter. Only
rounding up, and blockhouses, and cordons, and guerilla fighting.
Irving Garden had had enteric, and was invalided home. He meant to
return to South Africa directly peace should be signed, to investigate
a good thing he had heard of in the Rand. His nephews and nieces,
with whom he was always popular, worshipped at his shrine. He had
wonderfully funny stories of the war to tell them. But he preferred
to ask them such questions as, “What made Charing Cross?” and to
supply them with such answers as, “Teaching London Bridge. Am I
right?” Such questions, such answers, they found so funny as to be
almost painful. Imogen and Tony would giggle until tears came into
their eyes. Certainly Uncle Irving was amusing. And clever. He drove
himself and other people about in a grey car that travelled like the
wind and was cursed like the devil by pedestrians and horse-drivers on
the roads. His brother Maurice cursed him, but good-temperedly, for
he liked Irving, and, further, he despised the unenterprising Public
for fools. That was why no section of the community gave Maurice and
his paper their entire confidence. He attacked what he and those who
agreed with him held for evils, but would round, with a contemptuous
gesture, on those whose grievances he voiced. He ridiculed the present
inefficiency, and ridiculed also the ideals of those who cried for
improvement. He threw himself into the struggle for educational
reform, and sneered at all reforms proposed as inadequate, pedestrian
or absurd. He condemned employers as greedy, and Trade Unions as
retrograde. He jeered at the inefficiency of the conduct of what
remained of the war, at the stupid brutality of concentration camps,
at the sentimentality of the Pro-Boer party (as they were still
called), at the militarism of the Tory militants, the imperialism of
the Liberals, and the sentimental radical humanitarianism of Mr.
Lloyd George and his party. He addressed Stop-the-War meetings until
they were broken up with violence by earnest representatives of the
Continue-the-War party, and suffered much physical damage in the
ensuing conflicts; yet the Stop-the-War party did not really trust
him. They suspected him of desiring, though without hope, to stop not
only the war but all human activities, and indeed the very universe
itself; and this is to go further than is generally approved. The
Continue-the-War party has risen and fallen with every war; but the
Continue-the-World party has a kind of solid permanency, and something
of the universal in its ideals. Not to be of it is to be out of
sympathy with the great majority of one’s fellows. At any time and in
any country, but perhaps particularly in England in the early years
of the twentieth century, when there was a good deal of enthusiasm
for continuance and progress. The early Edwardians were not, as we
are to-day, dispirited and discouraged with the course of the world,
though they were vexed about the Boer War and the consequent economic
depression of the country. They did not, for the most part, feel that
life was a bad business and the future outlook too dark and menacing
to be worth encouraging. On the contrary, they believed in Life with a
capital L. The young were bitten by the dry reforming zeal of Mr. and
Mrs. Sidney Webb, or the gay faith in life of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, or
the bounding scientific hopefulness of Mr. H. G. Wells, or the sharp
social and ethical criticism of Mr. George Bernard Shaw.
Stanley Croft, young for ever in mind, was bitten by all these and
much more. Imperialism left slain behind, she embraced with ardour the
fantastic ideal of the cleaning up of England. After the war; then
indeed they would proceed furiously with the building of Jerusalem in
England’s green and pleasant land.
And meanwhile the war went on, and times were bad, and everywhere
people ping-ponged. A lack of seriousness was complained of. It always
is complained of in this country, which is not, indeed, a very serious
one, but always contains some serious persons to complain of the
others. “The ping-pong spirit,” the graver press called the national
lightness; and clergymen took up the phrase and preached about it.
The public, they said, were like street gamins, loafing about on the
watch for any new distraction.
6
GAMIN
Imogen and Tony slipped out into the street. It was the first Sunday of
the summer holidays, and the first day of August. The sun beat hotly
on the asphalt, making it soft, so that one could dent it with one’s
heels. The children sauntered down Sloane Street, loitering at the
closed shop windows, clinking their shillings in their pockets. They
enjoyed the streets with the zest of street Arabs. They were a happy
and untidy pair; the girl in a short butcher blue cotton frock, grubby
with a week’s wear, and a hole in the knee of one black-stockinged
leg, a soiled white linen cricket hat slouched over her short mop of
brown curls, her small pink face freckled and tanned; the boy, a year
younger, grimy, dark-eyed and beautiful, like his Uncle Irving in face,
clad in a grey flannel knickerbocker suit. Neither had dressed for the
street in the way that they should have; they had slipped out, unseen,
in their garden clothes and garden grime, to make the most of the last
day before they went away for the holidays.
They knew what they meant to do. They were going to have their
money’s worth, and far more than their money’s worth, of underground
travelling. Round and round and round; and all for a penny fare....
This was a favourite occupation of theirs, a secret, morbid vice. They
indulged in it at least twice every holidays. The whole family had been
used to do it, but all but these two had now outgrown it. Phyllis, now
at Girton, had outgrown it long ago. “The twopenny tube for me,” she
said. “It’s cleaner.” “But it doesn’t go _round_,” said Imogen.
“Who wants to go round, you little donkey? It takes you where you want
to go to; that’s the object of a train.” It was obvious that Phyllis
had grown up. She would not even track people in the street now. It
must happen, soon or late, to all of us. Even Hughie, fifteen and at
Rugby, found this underground game rather weak.
But Imogen and Tony still sneaked out, a little shamefaced and
secretive, to practise their vice.
Sloane Square. Two penny fares. Down the stairs, into the delicious,
romantic, cool valley. The train thundered in, Inner Circle its style.
A half empty compartment; there was small run on the underground this
lovely August Sunday. Into it dashed the children; they had a corner
seat each, next the open door. They bumped up and down on the seats,
opposite each other. The train speeded off, rushing like a mighty wind.
South Kensington Station. More people coming in, getting out. Off
again. Gloucester Road, High Street, Notting Hill Gate, Queen’s Road
... the penny fare was well over. Still they travelled, and jogged up
and down on the straw seats, and chanted softly, monotonously, so that
they could scarcely be heard above the roaring of the train.
“Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep;
Where the spent lights quiver and gleam,
Where the salt weed sways in the stream,
Where the sea-beasts, ranged all round,
Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground;
Where the sea-snakes coil and twine,
Dry their mail and bask in the brine;
Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye,
ROUND THE WORLD FOR EVER AND AYE....”
Then again, “Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep....”
At Paddington they saw the conductor eyeing them, and changed their
compartment. This should be done from time to time.
And so on, past King’s Cross and Farringdon Street, towards the wild
romantic stations of the east: Liverpool Street, Aldgate, and so round
the bend, sweeping west like the sun. Blackfriars, Temple, Charing
Cross, Westminster, St. James’ Park, Victoria, SLOANE SQUARE.
Oh, joy! Sing for the circle completed, the new circle begun.
“Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye,
ROUND THE WORLD FOR EVER AND AYE....”
Imogen changed her chant, and dreamily crooned:
“The world is round, so travellers tell,
And straight though reach the track;
Trudge on, trudge on, ’twill all be well,
The way will guide one back.
But ere the circle homeward hies,
Far, far must it remove;
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.”
Round the merry world again. Put a girdle round the earth in forty
minutes. Round and round and round. What a pennyworth! You can’t buy
much on an English Sunday, but, if you can buy eternal travel, Sunday
is justified.
But two Inner Circles and a bit are really enough. If you had three
whole ones you might begin to feel bored, or even sick. Sloane
Square again; the second circle completed. South Kensington. The two
globetrotters emerged from their circling, handed in their penny
tickets, reached the upper air, hot and elated.
_Now_ what? For a moment they loitered at the station exit,
debating in expert minds the next move. Money was short: no luxurious
joys could be considered.
Imogen suddenly gripped Tony by the arm.
“Hist, Watson. You see that man in front?”
Watson, well-trained, nodded.
“We’re going to track him. I have a very shrewd suspicion that he is
connected with the Sloane Square murder mystery. Now mind, we must keep
ten paces behind him wherever he goes; not less, or he’ll notice. Like
the woman in Church Street did. He’s off; come on.... Do you observe
anything peculiar about him, Watson?”
“He’s a jolly lean old bird. I expect he’s hungry.”
“My good Watson, look at his clothes. They’re a jolly sight better than
ours. He’s a millionaire, as it happens. If you want to know a few
facts about him, I’ll tell you. He moved his washstand this morning
from the left side of his bed to the right; he forgot to wind up his
watch last night; he went to church before breakfast; he had kidneys
when he came in; and he’s now on his way to meet a confederate at
lunch.”
“Piffle. You can’t prove any of it.”
“I certainly can, my good Watson....”
“Golly, he’s calling a hansom. Shall we hang on behind?”
Watson’s beautiful brown eyes beamed with hope; Holmes’ small
green-grey ones held for a moment an answering gleam. But only for a
moment. Holmes knew by now, having learnt from much sad experience,
what adventures could be profitably undertaken and what couldn’t.
“No use. We’d be pulled off at once....”
Morosely they watched their victim escape.
Then, “Look, Watson. The fat lady in purple. She must have been to
church.... Oh, quite simple, Watson, I assure you ... she has a
prayerbook.... Come on. It won’t matter how late we get back, because
they’re having a lunch party and we’re feeding in the schoolroom. We’ll
sleuth her to hell.”
In this manner Sunday morning passed very pleasantly and profitably for
Vicky’s two youngest children.
7
AUTUMN, 1901
1901 drew to its close. An odd, restless, gay, unhappy year, sad with
war and poverty, bitter with quarrels about inefficiency, concentration
camps, Ahmednagar (the home of the Boers in India, and a name much
thrown about by the pro-Boers in their “ignorant and perverse outcry”),
education, religion, finance, politics, prisons, motor cars, and
stopping the war; gay with new drama (Mr. Bernard Shaw was being
produced, and many musical comedies), new art (at the New English Art
Club), new jokes, new books (Mr. Conrad had published “Lord Jim,” Mr.
Henry James “The Sacred Fount,” Mr. Hardy “Poems New and Old,” Mr.
Wells “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” Mr. Yeats “The Shadowy Waters,” Mrs.
Chesterton “The Wild Knight,” Mr. Kipling “Kim,” Mr. Belloc “The Path
to Rome,” Lady Russell “The Benefactress,” Mr. Laurence Housman “A
Modern Antæus,” Mr. Anthony Hope “Tristram of Blent,” Mrs. Humphry Ward
“Eleanor,” Mr. Arnold Bennett “The Grand Babylon Hotel,” Mr. Charles
Marriott “The Column,” Mr. George Moore “Sister Teresa,” Mr. Max
Beerbohm “And Yet Again”), new clothes and new games.
Popular we were not. That prevalent disease, Anglophobia, raged
impartially in every country except, possibly, Japan. Even as far as
the remote Bermudas, continental slanders against us roared. We are
a maligned race; there is no doubt of it. All races are, in their
degree, maligned, but none so greatly as we--unless it should be the
Children of Israel. It is sad to think it, but there must be something
about us that is not attractive to foreigners. They have always
grieved at our triumphs and rejoiced at our sorrows. By the end of 1901
our friendlessness was such (in November Lord Salisbury said at the
Guildhall, “It is a matter for congratulation that we have found such
a friendly feeling and such a correct attitude on the part of all the
great powers”), that we thought we had better enter into an alliance
with the Japanese, who were still pleased with us for admiring them
about their war with China.
In the autumn of this year, Stanley published her small book,
“Conditions of Women’s Work,” and Mr. Garden, after years of labour,
his mighty work, “Comparative Religions.”
Mrs. Garden had influenza and pneumonia in December, and Mr. Garden, in
an anguish of anxiety, called in three doctors and admitted that his
faith had failed. God’s disapproving ignorance of mamma’s pneumonia
made intolerable a burden of anxiety which would have been heavy even
with Divine sympathy; and if, by some awful chance, mamma were to pass
on, papa’s grief, guilty and unrecognised, would have been too bitter
to be borne. Christian Science had had but a brief day, but it was
over. In a fit of reaction, papa became an Evangelical, and took to
profound meditation on the suffering, human and divine, which he had
for so long ignored. He now found the love of God in suffering, not in
its absence.
Always honourable, he recanted the instructions on the limitations of
divine knowledge which he had given to his grandchildren.
“You perhaps remember, Jennie my child, what I said to you last year
about God’s not knowing of the war. Well, I have come to the conclusion
that I was mistaken. I believe now that God knows all about his
children’s griefs and pains. He knows more about them than we do.
Possibly--who knows--suffering is a necessary part of the scheme of
redemption....”
Imogen looked and felt intelligent. When anyone spoke of theology to
her, it was as if the blood of all her clerical ancestors mounted to
the call. She was nearly fourteen now, and had recently become an
agnostic, owing to having perused Renan and John Stuart Mill. She was
at the stage in life when she read, with impartial ardour, such writers
as these, as well as E. Nesbit’s “Wouldbegoods,” Max Pemberton’s “Iron
Pirate,” and other juvenile works (particularly school stories),
Rudyard Kipling, Marryat, the Brontës, and any poetry she could lay
hands on, but especially that of W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Algernon
Swinburne, William Morris, Lewis Carroll and Walter Ramal.
She said to her grandfather, casually, but a little wistfully too,
“I’m not sure, grandpapa, that I believe in God at all. The arguments
against him seem very strong, don’t they?”
Mr. Garden looked a little startled. Possibly he thought that Imogen
was beginning too young.
“Ah, Jennie, my child--‘If my doubt’s strong, my faith’s still
stronger....’ That’s what Browning said about it, you know.”
Imogen nodded.
“I know. I’ve read that. I s’pose his faith was. Mine isn’t. My
_doubt’s_ stronger, grandpapa.”
“Well, my child....” Mr. Garden, gathering together his resources, gave
this strayed lamb (that was how, in his new terminology he thought of
her) a little evangelical homily on the love of God. Unfortunately
Imogen had, then and through life, an intemperate distaste for
evangelical language; it made her feel shy and hot; and, though she
loved her grandfather, she was further alienated from faith. She wrote
a poem that evening about the dark, terrifying and Godless world, which
she found very good. She would have liked to show it to the others,
that they too might find it good, but the tradition of her family and
her school was that this wasn’t done. One wrote anything one liked, if
one suffered from that itch, but to show it about was swank. “Making a
donkey of yourself.” The Carringtons, shy, vain and reserved, did not
care to do that.
“Some day,” thought Imogen, “I’ll write _books_. Then people can
read them without my showing them. I’ll write a book full of poems.”
The new poet. Even--might one dare to imagine it--the new _great_
poet, Imogen Carrington. Or should one be anonymous? Anon. That was a
good old poet’s name.
“Few people knew,” said Imogen, within herself, “that this slender
book of verse, ‘Questionings,’ bound in green, with gold edges, which
had made such a stir in lit’ry London, was by a wiry, brown-faced,
blue-eyed young lieutenant-commander, composed while he navigated
his first-class gunboat, the _Thrush_ (805 tons, 1,200 h.p.,
13 knots, 6 four-inch guns, 2 quick-firers, 2 machine), among the
Pacific Islands, taking soundings. The whole service knew Denis Carton
as a brilliant young officer, but only two or three--or perhaps a
dozen--knew he was a poet too and had written that green book with gold
edges that lay on every drawing-room table and was stacked by hundreds
in every good bookshop.” (I cannot account for the confused workings of
this poor child’s mind; I can only record the fact that she still, and
for many years to come, thought of herself, with hope growing faint and
ever fainter, as a brown-skinned, blue-eyed young naval man.)
As to her religious difficulties, they were, after the first flush of
unbelief, driven into the background of her mind by school, hockey, the
Christmas holidays, and missing word competitions, and did not obtrude
themselves aggressively again until the time came when her mother
decided that she should be confirmed. She then said to her brother
Hugh, now in the Fifth at Rugby, what did one do about confirmation
if one believed Nothing? Hugh did not think it mattered particularly
what one believed. One was confirmed; it did no harm; it was done; it
saved argument. Himself, he believed very little of All That, but he
had suffered confirmation, saying nothing. No good making fusses, and
worrying mother. Jennie had much better go through with it, like other
people.
“Well ... of course, _I_ don’t care ... if it’s not cheating....”
“Course it isn’t. Cheating who? _They_ don’t care what we believe,
they’re not such sops. They only want us to do the ordinary things,
like other people, and save bother. And, of course”--Hugh was a very
fair-minded boy and no bigot--“there may be something in it, after all.
Lots of people, quite brainy, sensible chaps, think there is. Anyhow,
it can’t hurt.” So Imogen was confirmed.
“Perhaps I shall be full of the Holy Ghost,” she thought. “Perhaps
there really _is_ a Holy Ghost. Perhaps my life will be made
all new, with tongues of fire upon my head and me telling in strange
languages the wonderful works of God.... Perhaps.... But more prob’ly
not....”
8
1902
1902 was a great year, for in it the British Empire ceased its tedious
fighting with the Boer Republics, and made a meal of them. So the
Empire was the richer by so many miles of Africa, with the gold mines,
black persons, and sulky Dutchmen appertaining thereto, and the poorer
by so many thousand soldiers’ lives, so many million pounds, and a good
deal of self-confidence and prestige. Anyhow, however you worked out
the gain and loss, here was peace, and people shouted and danced for
joy and made bonfires in college courts. Thank God, _that_ was
over.
A wave of genial friendliness flowed from the warm silly hearts of
Britons towards the conquered foe. Four surly enemy generals were
brought to London; asked if they would like to see the Naval Review;
declined with grave thanks; were escorted through London amid a
cheering populace--“Our friends the enemy,” cried the silly crowd,
and “Brave soldiers all!” and surrounded them with hearty British
demonstration and appeals for “a message for England.” There was no
message for England; no smiles; no words. The warm, silly Britons were
a little hurt. The psychology of conquered nations was a riddle to
them, it seemed.... “God, what an exhibition!” said Maurice Garden in
his paper the next day.
Meanwhile King Edward VII had, after some unavoidable procrastination,
been crowned, Mr. Horatio Bottomley had won a thousand pounds from
the editor of the _Critic_, in that this editor had impugned his
financial probity, and the Man with the Beflowered Buttonhole (as
they called him in the French press) whose Besotted Pride had caused
to flow for three years so much Gold and Tears and Blood had received
the Freedom of London for his services to his country. This year, also,
Mr. Rudyard Kipling delighted athletes by his allusions to flannelled
fools and muddied oafs, that ineffectual body the National Service
League was formed, Germany and Great Britain began to eye each other’s
land and sea forces with an increase of hostile emulation which was
bound to end in sorrow, and there was much trouble over bad trade and
wages, unemployment, taxation and the Education Bill. Passive Resisters
rose violently to the foray over this last, their Puritan blood hot
within them, and would not pay rates for schools managed by the Church
of England in which their nonconformist children were given Church
teaching. It made a pretty squabble, and a good cry for Liberals,
and why it was not settled by representatives of every sect which so
desired being allowed access to the schools alternately is not now
clear. The parliamentary mind moves in a mysterious way; it seldom
adopts the simple solutions of problems which commend themselves to the
more ingenuous laity. Anything to make contention and trouble, it seems
to feel.
In such disputations 1902 wore itself away. And starving ex-soldiers
played accordions or sold matches by the pavements, their breasts
decorated with larger nosegays of war-medals than any one man-at-arms
could conceivably have won by his own prowess in the field, for then,
as after a more recent war, you could buy these medals cheap in
second-hand shops. “Fought for my country” ran their sad, proud legends
about themselves, “and am now starving. Have a wife and sixteen small
children....” The families of ex-soldiers were terrific, then as now. A
wretched business altogether.
9
EXIT MAMMA
Edwardianism was in full swing. People began to recover from the war.
They became rich again, and very gay, and the arts flourished. Irving
Garden, his fortune made in Rand mines, could really afford almost
anything he liked. He bought and drove two motor cars, a grey one and a
navy blue, and presented to Rome, on her forty-fourth birthday, a very
graceful little scarlet three seater, in which she drove everywhere.
Sometimes she drove her parents out, but the traffic made her papa
nervous. Mamma was of calmer stuff, and sat placid and unmoved while
her daughter ran skilfully like a flame between the monsters of the
highway. She did not think that Rome had accidents; she believed in
Rome.
Unfortunately mamma developed cancer in the spring of 1903, and died,
after the usual sufferings and operations, in the autumn.
“It doesn’t much matter,” she said to Rome, hearing that her death was
certain and soon. “A little more or a little less.... After all, I am
sixty-nine. My only real worry about it is papa. We both hoped that I
might be the survivor. I could have managed better.”
Mamma’s faint sigh flickered. Dear papa. Poor papa. Indeed, thought
Rome, he will not manage at all....
No charge was laid on Rome to look after poor papa. Mamma did not do
such things; dying, she left the living free. That ultimate belief in
the inalienable freedom of the human being looked unconquered out of
her tired, still eyes. Mamma had never believed in coercion, even the
coercion of love. Modern writers say that Victorian parents did believe
in parental tyranny. There is seldom any need to believe modern, or any
other, writers. What they seem sometimes to forget is that Victorian
parents were like any other parents in being individuals first, and the
sovereign who happened to reign over them did not reduce all Victorians
to a norm, some good, some bad, as the Poet Laureate of the day had
put it, but all stamped with the image of the Queen. You would think,
to hear some persons talk, that Victoria had called into existence
little images of herself all over England, instead of being merely one
very singular and characteristic old lady, who might just as well have
occurred to-day. In short, the Victorians were not like Queen Victoria,
any more than the Edwardians were like King Edward, or the Georgians
are like King George, for all creatures are merely themselves.
Mamma, being merely herself, left her family free of all behests, and
drew to her end with an admirable stoic gentleness. Dying was to her no
great matter or disturbance.
Time bears us off, as lightly as the wind
Lifts up the smoke and carries it away,
And all we know is that a longer life
Gives but more time to think of our decay.
We live till Beauty fails and Passion dies,
And sleep’s our one desire in every breath,
And in that strong desire, our old love, Life,
Gives place to that new love whose name is Death.
Mamma would sometimes murmur these lines by Mr. W. H. Davies, a poet
(formerly Victorian, now Edwardian, later to become Georgian), of whom
she was very fond, because he noticed all the charming things in the
countryside that she always observed herself, such as wet grass, and
rainbows, and cuckoos, and birds’ eggs, and coughing sheep (who had
always stirred her to pity).
“My beloved,” papa would say, quietly, restraining his anguish that he
might not distress her, “my best beloved, I shall join you before long,
where there is no more parting....” (Thank God, thank God, he was at
this time a believer in that reunion, and could say it from his heart.
Supposing he had still been a Theosophist, believing that mamma would
merely go on to another spoke of the Eternal Wheel, and that he would
never, try as he might, catch her up.... Or even a Roman Catholic,
believing that mamma and he would both have to suffer a long expiation,
presumably not together, in purgatory. Thank God, evangelicals believed
in an immediate heaven for the redeemed, and surely papa and mamma
would be found numbered among the redeemed....)
Mamma’s hand would gently stroke his.
“Yes, dear. Of course you will join me soon.”
Who should see, who had ever seen, into mamma’s mind that lay so deep
and still beneath veils?
“Yes, Aubrey. Of course, of course. Quite soon, dear.”
They spoke often of that further life; but of papa’s life between now
and then they did not dare to speak much.
Mamma loved papa, her lover and friend of half a century, and she loved
all her children, and all her grandchildren too, the dear, happy boys
and girls. But at the last--or rather just before the last, for the end
was dark silence--it was only her eldest son, Maurice, on whose name
she cried in anguish.
“Maurice--Maurice--my boy, my boy! O God, have pity on my boy!”
Maurice was there, sitting at her side, holding her wet, shaking hand
in his.
“Mother, mother. It’s all right, dear mother. I’m here, close to you.”
But still she moaned, “Have pity--have pity on my boy.... Maurice, my
darling.... Have pity....” as if her own pain, cutting her in two, were
his, not hers.
They had not known--not one of them had wholly known--of those storms
that had beaten her through the long years because of Maurice, her
eldest boy.
His tears burned in his hot eyes; the easy tears of the constant
drinker.
They put her under an anaesthetic; the pain was too great; and she died
at dawn.
10
SPIRITUALISM
Papa could not bear it. It was all very well to talk of joining mamma
before long, but papa was not more than seventy-three years of age,
and how should he live without mamma for perhaps ten, fifteen, even
twenty years? That unfailing comfort, sympathy and love that had been
hers; that patient, silent understanding, that strength and pity for
his weakness, that wifely regard for his scholar’s mind, that dear
companionship that had never failed--having had these for close on
fifty years, how should he live without them? He could not live without
them. Somehow, he must find them again--reach across the grave to where
mamma’s love awaited him in the land of the redeemed.... The redeemed.
Already this evangelistic phraseology did not wholly suit his needs. He
wanted mamma nearer than that....
In 1904 there was, as usual, much talk of spiritualism, of establishing
connection with the dead. The Psychical Research Society had been
flourishing for many years, but papa had never, until now, taken much
interest in it. There had been periods in his career when he had
believed, with his Church, that God did not smile on such researches,
or wish the Veil drawn from the unseen world, and that the researchers,
if they too inquisitively drew it, got into shocking company, got,
in fact, into touch with those evil spirits who were always waiting
ready to pose as the deceased relatives and friends of enquirers.
Other periods there had been when papa had believed that the thing
was all pathetic buncombe (that was how papa spelt it), since there
was unfortunately, nothing to get into touch with. But now he was
sure that he had, in both these beliefs, erred. God could not frown
on his bereaved children’s efforts to communicate with the beloved
who had made life for them. And beyond the Veil waited not the great
nothingness, but God and the dear dead. God and mamma. He must and
would get into touch with mamma.
Papa attended séances, with what are called Results. Mamma came and
talked with him, through the voice of a table or of a medium; she
said all kinds of things that only she could have said; she even told
him where a lost thimble of hers was, and sure enough, there it was,
dropped behind the sofa cushions. And once materialisation occurred,
and mamma, like a luminous wraith, floated about the room. It made papa
very happy. He asked her how she did, and what it was like where she
now was, and she told him that she did, on the whole, very well, but,
as to what it was like, that he would never understand, did she tell
him for a year.
“They can’t tell us. It’s too difficult, too different,” the lady who
managed the séances explained to papa afterwards. Papa did not greatly
care for this lady, and he always winced a little at the thought that
mamma had become “They.” But he only said, “Yes, I suppose it is.”
The séances exhausted him a good deal, but it was worth while.
“So long as it makes him happier,” said Rome. “Poor _darling_.”
11
THE HAPPY LIBERALS
1905 was a year of great happiness, intelligence and virtue for the
Liberal party in the state. It was to be their last happy, intelligent
or virtuous year for many a long day; indeed, they have not as
yet known another, for such a gracious state is only possible to
oppositions, and the next time that the Liberals were the Opposition
it was too late, for by then oppositions were, like other persons, too
tired, war-spoilt, disillusioned and dispirited to practise anything
but an unidealistic and unhopeful nagging. But in 1905, with the Tories
executing, to the satisfaction of their opponents, the ungracious
task of performance, which is, one may roughly say, never a success,
the Liberals were very jolly, united, optimistic, and full of energy
and plans. What would they not do when they should come, in their
turn, into power? What Tory iniquities were there not, for them now
to oppose, for them in the rosy future to reverse? What Aunt Sallies
did not the governing party erect for them to shy at? Chinese labour,
that yellow slavery which was degrading (were that possible) South
Africa; the Licensing Act, the Education Act, the Little Loaf, which
could be made so pitiable a morsel on posters--against all these they
tilted. As to what they would do, once in power, it included the
setting of trade again upon its legs, the enriching of the country,
the reform of the suffrage, the relief of unemployment, the issue of
an Education Bill which should distress no one. Ardent progressives
hoped much from this party; they even hoped, without grounds, for the
removal of sex disabilities in the laws relating to the suffrage,
which unlikely matter was part of the programme drawn up in 1905 by
the National Liberal Federation. Life was very glorious to any party,
in those Edwardian days, before it got in. Liberals in opposition were
democratic idealists, in office makeshift opportunists, backing out and
climbing down.
Stanley Croft, in 1905, was ardent in Liberal hope. She hoped for
everything, even for a vote. This sex disability in the matter of votes
oppressed her very seriously. She saw no sense or reason in it, and
resented the way the question, whenever it was raised in Parliament,
was treated as a joke, like mothers-in-law, or drunkenness, or twins.
Were women really a funny topic? Or rather, were they funnier than men?
And if so, why? In vain her female sense of humour sought to probe
this subject, but no female sense of humour, however acute, has ever
done so. Women may and often do regard all humanity as a joke, good or
bad, but they can seldom see that they themselves are more of a joke
than men, or that the fact of their wanting rights as citizens is more
amusing than men wanting similar rights. They can no more see it than
they can see that they are touching, or that it is more shocking that
women should be killed than that men should, which men see so plainly.
Women, in fact, cannot see why they should not be treated like other
persons. Stanley could not see it. To her the denial of representation
in the governing body of her country on grounds of sex was not so much
an injustice as a piece of inexplicable lunacy, as if all persons
measuring, say, below five foot eight, had been denied votes. She saw
no more to it than that, in spite of all the anti-suffrage speakers
whom she heard say very much more. She became embittered on this
subject, with a touch of the feminist bitterness that marked many of
the early strugglers for votes. She admitted that men were, taking them
in the main, considerably the wiser, the more capable and the more
intelligent sex; that is to say that, though most people were ignorant
fools, there were even more numerous and more ignorant fools among
women than among men; but there it was, and there was no reason why
the female fools should have less say than the male fools as to which
of the other fools represented their interests in Parliament, and what
measures were passed affecting their foolish lives. No; on the face of
it, it was lunatic and irrational, and no excuse was possible, and that
was that.
It certainly was, Rome agreed, but then, in a lunatic and irrational
world, was any one extra piece of lunacy worth a fuss? Was, in fact,
anything worth a fuss? In the answer to these questions, the sisters
fundamentally differed, for Stanley believed very many things to be
worth a fuss, and made it accordingly. She was busy now making fusses
from most mornings to most evenings, sitting on committees for the
improvement of the world, even of the Congo, and so forth. She was what
is called a useful and public-spirited woman. Rome, on the other hand,
grew with the years more and more the dilettante idler. At forty-six
she found very few things worth bothering about. She strolled, drove
or motored round the town, erect, slim and debonair, increasingly
distinguished as grey streaked her fair hair and time chiselled
delicate lines in her fine, clear skin. Rome cared neither for the
happy Liberals nor for the unhappy Tories; she regarded both parties as
equally undistinguished.
Fabianism became increasingly the fashion for young intellectuals. Girl
and boy undergraduates flung themselves with ardour into this movement,
sitting at the feet of Mr. Bernard Shaw and the Sidney Webbs. Stanley
was a keen Fabian, and even attended summer schools. They were not
attractive, but yet she hoped that somehow good would be the final goal
of ill. She was sorry that none of her nephews and nieces joined her in
this movement, though several had attained the natural age for it.
12
THE HAPPY YOUNG