Chapter V: Part II: Fin-De-Siècle (3)

“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.

17

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.

18

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....

19

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.)

20

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.

21

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.

22

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.”

23

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.

24

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?”

25

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....