PART II

FIN-DE-SIÈCLE

1

ROME

THE threshold of the nineties. Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border. The nineties, we say, were gay, tired, _fin-de-siècle_, witty, dilettante, decadent, yellow, and Max Beerbohm was their prophet; or they were noisy, imperial, patriotic, militant, crude, and Kipling was their prophet. And, indeed, you may find attributes to differentiate any period from any other. What people said and wrote of the nineties at the time was that they were modern, which of course at the time they were; that they were hustling ... (“In these days of hurry and rapid motion, when there is so little time to rest and reflect,” as people say in sermons and elsewhere, as if the greater rapidity of motion did not give one more time to rest and reflect, since one the sooner arrives at one’s destination); that they were noisy; that literary output was enormous; that (alternatively) the new writers were very good, or that the good writers had gone from among us. One knows the kind of thing; all discourses on contemporary periods have been full of it, from the earliest times even unto these last.

Rome was thirty-one. She was of middle height, a slight, pale, delicate young woman, with ironic blue-green eyes and mocking lips a little compressed at the corners, and a pointed kind of face, and fair, silky hair which she wore no longer short but swept gracefully up and back from her small head, defining its shape and showing the fine line from nape to crown. She was a woman of the world, a known diner-out, a good talker, something of a wit, so that her presence was sought by hostesses as that of an amusing bachelor is sought. She had elegance, distinction, brain, a light and cool touch on the topics of her world, a calm, mocking, sceptical detachment, a fastidious taste in letters and in persons. She knew her way about, as the phrase goes, and could be relied on to be socially adequate, in spite of a dangerous distaste for fools, and in spite of the “dancing and destructive eye” (to use a phrase long afterwards applied to one whose mentality perhaps a little resembled hers) which she turned on all aspects of the life around her. People called her intensely modern--whatever that might mean. In 1890 it presumably meant that you would have been surprised to find her type in 1880. But as a matter of fact, you would not, had you been endowed with a little perspicacity, have been in the least surprised; you would have found it, had you looked, all down the ages (though always as a rare growth). In 1790, 1690, 1590, and back through every decade of every century, there have been Rome Gardens, fastidious, _mondaine_, urbane, lettered, critical, amused, sceptical, and what was called in 1890 _fin-de-siècle_. It is not a type which, so to speak, makes the world go round; it does not assist movements nor join in crusades; it coolly distrusts enthusiasm and eschews the heat and ardour of the day. It is to be found among both sexes equally, and is the stuff of which the urbane bachelor and spinster, rather than the spouse and parent, are made. For mating and producing (as a career, not as an occasional encounter) are apt to destroy the type, by forcing it to too continuous and ardent intercourse with life; that graceful and dilettante aloofness can scarcely survive such prolonged heat. To be cool, sceptical and passionate at one and the same time--it has been done, but it remains difficult. To love ardently such absurdities as infants, and yet to retain unmarred the sense of the absurdity of all life--this too has been done, but the best parents do not do it. Something has to go, as a sacrifice to the juggernaut life, which rebels against being regarded as merely absurd (and rightly, for, in truth, it is not merely absurd, and this is one of the things which should always be remembered about it).

The literary persons of the early nineties wanted Rome to join them in their pursuits.

Why so, Rome questioned. Money? Very certainly I have not enough, but I should not have appreciably more if I wrote and published essays or even books. Notoriety? It might well be of the wrong kind; and anyhow does it add to one’s pleasure? Miss Rome Garden, the author of those clever critical essays.... Or perhaps of those dull critical essays.... Either way, what did one gain? Why write? Why this craze for transmitting ideas by means of marks on paper? Why not, if one must transmit ideas, use the tongue, that unruly member given us for the purpose? Better still, why not retain the ideas for one’s own private edification, untransmitted? Writing. There was this about writing--or rather about publishing--it showed that someone had thought it worth while to pay for having one’s ideas printed. For printers were paid, and binders, even if not oneself. So it conferred a kind of cachet. Most literary persons sorely needed such a cachet, for you would never guess from meeting them that anyone would pay them for their ideas. On the other hand, publishing one’s folly gave it away; one was then known for a fool, whereas previously people might have only suspected it.... In brief and in fine, writing was not worth while. Wise men and women would derive such pleasure as they could from the writings of others, without putting themselves to the trouble of providing reading matter in their turn. Reading matter was not like dinners, concerning which there must be give and take.

Thus the do-nothing Miss Rome Garden to the eager literary young men and women about her, who all thought that literature was having a new birth and that they were its brilliant midwives, as, indeed, it is not unusual to think. And possibly it was the case. Literature has so many new births; it is a hardy annual. The younger literary people of 1890 had a titillating feeling of standing a-tiptoe to welcome a new day. “A great creative period is at hand,” they said. The old and famous still brooded over the land like giant trees. Such a brooding, indeed, has scarcely since been known, for in these later days we allow no trees to become giants. But in their shadow the rebellious young shoots sprang up, sharp and green and alive. The mid-Victorians were passing; the Edwardians were in the schoolroom or the nursery, the Georgians in the cradle or not yet anywhere; here was a clear decade in which the late Victorian stars might dance. It was a period of experiment; new forms were being tried, new ideas would have been aired were any ideas ever new; new franknesses, so called, were permitted, or anyhow practised--the mild beginnings of the returning tide which was to break against the reticence of fifty years.

“I don’t,” said Mrs. Garden to Rome, “care about all these sex novels people have taken to writing now.”

But Rome rejected the phrase.

“Sex novels, mamma? What are they? Novels have always been about sex, or rather sexes. There’s nothing new in that; it’s the oldest story in the world. People must have a sex in this life; it’s inevitable. Novels must be about people; that’s inevitable too. So novels must be partly about sex, and they’re nearly always about two sexes, and usually largely about the relations of the two sexes to one another. They always have been....”

All the same, mamma did _not_ care about these sex novels that people had taken to writing now. _Problem_ novels, she called them, for reasons of her own. Rome thought sex no problem; the least problematic affair, perhaps, in this world. Of course there were problems connected with it, as with everything else, but in itself sex was no problem. Rather the contrary. “The Moonstone,” now--_that_ was a problem novel.

“I don’t like indecency,” said mamma, in her delicate, clipped voice. “These modern writers will say anything. It’s ill-bred.”

Mamma could not be expected to know that these literary libertines of 1890 would be regarded as quaint Victorian prudes in 1920.

“As to that book Mr. Jayne gave you, I call it merely silly,” mamma murmured, with raised brows, and so settled “Dorian Gray.”

“Silly it is,” Rome agreed. “But here and there, though too seldom, it has a wit.”

But mamma was not listening. Her mamma-like mind was straying after Mr. Jayne....

2

MR. JAYNE

Mr. Jayne and Rome. Both brilliant, both elegant, both urbane, both so gracefully of the world worldly, yet both scholars too. Mr. Jayne wrote memoirs and enchanting historical and political essays. An amusing, yet erudite Oxford man, who had formerly been at the British Embassy at St. Petersburg. Hostesses desired him for their more sophisticated parties, because he had a wit, and knew Russia, which was at once more unusual and more fashionable then than now. It was at one of Vicky’s dinner parties that he and Rome had first met. If Vicky thought, how suitable, it was only what anyone in the world must think about these two. Afterwards they met continually and became friends. Rome thought him conceited, clever, entertaining, attractive and disarming and the most companionable man of her wide acquaintance. By June, 1890, they were in love; a state of mind unusual in both. They did not mention it, but in July he mentioned to her, what he mentioned to few people, that he had a Russian wife living with her parents, a revolutionary professor and his wife, in the country outside Moscow.

They were spending Sunday on the Thames, rowing up from Bourne End to Marlow. They spoke of this matter of Mr. Jayne’s wife after their lunch, which they ate on the bank, in the shade of willows.

“How delightful,” said Rome, taking a Gentleman’s Relish sandwich.

Delightful to have a wife in Russia; to have a reason, and such a reason, for visiting that interesting land. Delightful for Mr. Jayne to have waiting for him, among steppes and woods, a handsome Russian female and two fair Slav infants ... or perhaps they were English, these little Jaynes, with beautiful mouths and long, thrust-out chins.... Delightful, anyhow. The Russian country in the summer, all corn and oil and moujiks. Moscow in the autumn, all churches and revolutionaries and plots and secret police. And in the winter ... but one cannot think about Russia in the winter at all; it does not bear contemplation, and one does not visit it.... What a romance! Mr. Jayne was indeed fortunate.

So Miss Garden conveyed.

“I am not there very much,” said Mr. Jayne. “Only on and off. Olga prefers to live there, with her parents and our two children. She has many friends there, all very busy plotting. They are of the intelligentsia. Life is very interesting to her.”

“I can imagine that it must be.”

So cool and well-bred were Miss Garden and Mr. Jayne, that you never would have divined that the latter, eating sandwiches, was crying within his soul, “My dearest Rome. I dislike my wife. We make each other sick with ennui when we meet. We married in a moment’s mania. It is you I want. Don’t you know it? Won’t you let me tell you?” or that the former, sipping cider, was saying silently, “You have told me this at last because you know that we have fallen in love. Why not months ago? And what now?”

Nothing of this they showed, but lounged in the green shade, and drank and ate, Miss Garden clear-cut and cool, in a striped cotton boating-dress, with a conically-shaped straw hat tipped over her eyes, Mr. Jayne in flannels, long and slim, his palish face shaved smooth in the new fashion, so that you saw the lines of his clever mouth and long, thrust-out chin. Mr. Jayne’s eyes were deep-set and grey, and he wore pince-nez, and he was at this time thirty-six years old. At what age, Rome wondered, had he married Mrs. Jayne of the Russian intelligentsia?

However, they did not enter into this, but began to discuss the plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw, a well-known socialist writer, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a young man in India who was making some stir.

“We can still be friends,” thought Rome, on their way home. “Nothing need be changed between us. This Olga of his is his wife; I am his friend. It would be very bourgeois to be less his friend because he has a wife. That is a view of life I dislike; we are civilised people, Mr. Jayne and I.”

3

CIVILISED PEOPLE

And civilised they were, for the rest of the summer of 1890. In November Rome asked Mr. Jayne, who was having tea with her alone, whether he was visiting Russia shortly. He replied in the negative, for he was, he said, too busy working on his new book to get abroad.

“And further,” he added, in the same composed tone, “I prefer to remain in the same country with you. I can’t, you see, do without you at hand. You know how often I consult you, and talk things over with you.... And further still,” continued Mr. Jayne, quietly, “I love you.”

So saying, he rose and stood over her, bending down with his hands on her shoulders and his pale face close to hers.

“My dearest,” he said. “Let us stop pretending. _Shall_ we stop pretending? Does our pretence do us or anyone else any good? I love you more than any words I’ve got can say. You know it, you know it ... dear heart....”

He drew her up from her chair and looked into her face, and that was the defeat of their civilisation, for at their mutual touch it broke in disorder and fled. He kissed her mouth and face and hands, and passion rose about them like a sea in which they drowned.

Five minutes later they talked it out, sitting with a space between them, for “While you hold me I can’t think,” Rome said. She passed her hand over her face, which felt hot and stung from the hard pressing of his mouth, and tried to assemble her thoughts, shaken by the first passion of her thirty-one agreeable and intelligent years.

“I’m not,” she said, “going to take you away from your wife. Not in any way. What we have must make no difference to what _she_ has....”

It will be seen, therefore, that their conversation was as old as the world, and scarcely worth recording. It pursued the normal lines. That is to say, Mr. Jayne replied, “She has nothing of me that matters,” rather inaccurately classing under the head of what did not matter, his children, his name, and the right to his bed and board. As is the habit in these situations, Mr. Jayne meant that what mattered, and what Mrs. Jayne had not got, was his love, his passion, his spirit and his soul. These, he indicated, were Rome’s alone, as Rome’s were his.

What to do about it was the question. One must, said Rome, holding herself in, continue to be civilised. And what, enquired Mr. Jayne, is civilisation--this arbitrary civilisation of society’s making, that binds the spirit’s freedom in chains? It was all founded on social expediency, on primitive laws to protect inheritance, to safeguard property.... Had Rome read Professor Westermarck’s great work on the history of human marriage? Rome had. What of it? The point was, there was Mrs. Jayne in Russia, and Mr. and Mrs. Jayne’s two children. These were Mr. Jayne’s obligations, and nothing he and she did must come between him and them. That laid firmly down, she and Mr. Jayne could do what they liked; that was how Rome saw it. One must keep one’s contracts, and behave as persons of honour and breeding should behave.

“As I see it,” said Rome, “the fact that we love each other needn’t prevent our being friends. We are not babies....”

“Friends,” said Mr. Jayne, in agreement, doubt, scepticism, contempt, hope, or bitter derision, as the case might be.

And more they said, until they were interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Garden’s papa, the Dean, who had called in his brougham to see mamma, but, mamma being out at Vicky’s, he sat down between these two white, disturbed, hot-eyed and shaken persons and began to talk of Mr. Parnell and his disgrace.

Grandpapa opined that Mr. Parnell had no more place in public life.

Mr. Jayne replied that anyhow it appeared that he would be hounded out of it.

“Cant,” he said. “Truckling to nonconformist cant and humbug and Catholic bigotry. A man’s private affairs have nothing to do with his public life. It’s contemptible, the way the Nationalists have caved in to that old humbug, Gladstone.”

Grandpapa had always thought Gladstone a humbug (though not so old if it came to that; he himself was eighty-five and going strong), but with the rest of Mr. Jayne’s thesis he was in disagreement. Our political leaders must not be men of notoriously loose lives. The sanctity of the home must, at all costs, be upheld.

“O’Shea’s home,” said Mr. Jayne, “never had much of that. Neither O’Shea nor Mrs. O’Shea was great on it.”

“For that matter,” Rome joined in, crisp and bland, as if civilisation had not met its débâcle in the drawing-room but a half hour since, “for that matter, what homes _have_ sanctity? Why do people think that sanctity is particularly to be found in homes, of all places? And can a bachelor’s or spinster’s home have it, or do the people in the home need to be married? What is it, this curious _sanctity_, that bishops write to the papers about, and that is, they say, being attacked all the time, and is so easily destroyed? In what homes is it to be found? I have often wondered.”

“Whom God hath joined together,” replied grandpapa, readily. “That is the answer to your question, my dear child, is it not?”

“O God,” muttered Mr. Jayne, but probably rather as an ejaculation than as a sceptical comment on the authority behind matrimony.

Whichever it was, grandpapa did not care about the phrase, and looked at him sharply. He believed Mr. Jayne to be an unbeliever, and did not greatly care for the tone of his writings. However, they conversed intelligently for a while about the future of the Irish party before Mr. Jayne rose to go.

“Come into the hall,” his eyes said. But Rome did not go into the hall.

He was gone. Rome sat still in the shadow of the window. His steps echoed down the square.

“Do you see much of that young fellow, my dear?” grandpapa asked, in his old rumbling voice.

“Oh, yes,” said Rome, feeling exalted and light in the head, and as if she had drunk alcohol. “Oh, yes, grandpapa. We are great friends.”

“Do your parents like him, my child?”

“Oh, yes, grandpapa. Very much. Oh, I think everyone likes him. He is a great success, you know.”

She was talking foolishly and at random, straying about the room, taking up books, wishing grandpapa would go.

Grandpapa grunted. Rather queer goings on, he thought, for Rome to be entertaining young men by herself when her papa and mamma were out. What were unmarried young women coming to? If mamma had gone on like that thirty years ago.... But this, of course, was 1890--desperately modern. Grandpapa, though he not infrequently wrote to the _Times_, the _Spectator_ and the _Guardian_, to say how modern the current year was (for, of course, current years always were and are), did not always remember it. The untrammelled (it seemed to him untrammelled) freedom of intercourse enjoyed by modern young men and women (especially young women) continually shocked him. Grandpapa had enjoyed much free and untrammelled intercourse in his own distant youth, during the Regency, but fifty years of Victorianism had since intervened, and he believed that intercourse should not now be free. He could not understand his granddaughter, Stanley, who was continually abusing what she called the conventional prudery of the age; what further liberties, in heaven’s name, did young women want? To do her justice, Rome did not join in this cry for further emancipation; Rome accepted the conventions, with an acquiescent, ironic smile. There they were: why make oneself hot with kicking over the traces? One accepted the social follies and codes....

(“On the contrary,” Maurice would say, “I refuse them.”

“It will make no difference to them either way,” said Rome.)

Rome, a good _raconteuse_ and mimic, proceeded to entertain grandpapa with an account of a dinner party at which she had been taken in by that curious and noisy member of Parliament, Mr. Augustus Conybeare, whom grandpapa disliked exceedingly.

Then mamma and papa came home, and Rome went upstairs to dress for another dinner party. Thus do social life and the storm-tossed journey of the human soul run on concurrently, and neither makes way for the other.

4

ON THE PINCIO

Through that winter civilisation fought its losing battle with more primitive forces over the souls and bodies of Miss Garden and Mr. Jayne.

“There is only one way in which we can meet and be together,” said Rome, “and that is as friends. There is no other relation possible in the circumstances. I will be party to no scandal, my best. If we can’t meet one another with self-control, then we mustn’t meet at all. What is the use of tilting at the laws of society? There they are, and thus it is....”

“You make a fetish of society,” said Mr. Jayne, with gloom. “For a woman of your brains, it is queer.”

“Perhaps,” said Rome.

Then, it becoming apparent that she and Mr. Jayne were not at present going to meet one another with self-control, Rome went for the winter to the city of that name, with her papa, whose spiritual home it, of course, now was. Mrs. Garden did not go, because she desired to be in at the birth of Stanley’s baby.

But civilisation had not reckoned sufficiently with the forces of emotion. These led Mr. Jayne, but a few weeks after Miss Garden had departed, to follow her to Italy, and, in fact, to Rome.

So, one bright February morning, he called at the Gardens’ hotel pension in the Via Babuino, and found Rome and her papa about to set forth for a walk on the Pincio. Miss Garden, looking pale, fair and elegant in a long, fur-edged, high-shouldered cape coat and a tall, pointed, blue velvet hat beneath which her hair gleamed gold, received him as urbanely, as coolly, as detachedly as ever; she seemed to have got her emotions well under control in the month since they had parted. Mr. Jayne responded to her tone, and all the morning, as they strolled about with Mr. Garden, they were bland and cool and amusing; well-bred English visitors, turning interested and satirical eyes on the fashionable crowds about them, stopping now and then to exchange amenities with fellow-strollers, for Mr. Jayne knew Roman society well, and Mr. Garden had come armed with introductions from his co-religionists, though, indeed, he was little disposed for much society, wishing to spend such time as he did not devote to seeing Rome in studious research at the Vatican library. His daughter was a little afraid that the Eternal City might seriously disturb his faith, and that papa might fall under the undeniably fascinating influence of paganism, which makes so far finer and nobler a show in Rome than mediæval Christianity. And, indeed, with St. Peter’s papa was not pleased; he scarcely liked to say so, even to himself, but it did seem to him to be of a garish hugeness that smacked almost of vulgarity, and pained his fastidious taste. On the other hand, there were many old churches of a more pleasing style, and in these his soul found rest when disturbed by the massive splendours of classical Rome. No; papa would not become a pagan; he knew too much of pagan corruptions and cruelties for that. Corruptions and cruelties he admitted, of course, in the history of Christianity also; corruption and cruelty are, indeed, properties of the unfortunate and paradoxical human race; but papa was persuaded that only defective Christians (after all, Christians always are and have been defective) were corrupt and cruel, whereas the most completely pagan of pagans had been so, and paganism is, indeed, rather an incentive than a discouragement to vice. In fact, papa was, by this time, thoroughly biassed in this matter, and so was probably safe. Or, anyhow, so his daughter hoped. For it would, there was no denying it, be exceedingly awkward were papa to become a pagan, quite apart from the preliminary anguish with which his soul would be torn were he to be shaken from his present faith. Were there pagan places of worship in London? Probably papa would have to build a private chapel, and in it erect images of his new gods.... For pagans had never been happy without much worship; they had been the most religious of believers. Except, of course, the lax and broad-church pagans, and probably papa, if he got paganism at all, would get it strong.

So Rome was quite pleased that papa should be walking on the Pincio with her, getting a good view of the dome of St. Peter’s, which is the finest and most impressive part of that cathedral, rather than wandering about the Forum and peering into the new excavations, murmuring scraps of Latin as he peered.

In the warm, sunlit air, with the band playing Verdi and the gay crowds promenading, and the enchanted city spread all a-glitter beneath them, Rome was caught into a deep and intoxicated joy. The bitter, restless struggling of the last months gave way to peace; the happy peace that looks not ahead, but rejoices in the moment. The tall and gay companion strolling at her side, so fluent in several languages, so apt to catch a half-worded meaning, to smile at an unuttered jest, so informed, so polished, so of the world worldly ... take Mr. Jayne as merely that, and she had her friend and companion back again, which was deeply restful and vastly stimulating. And beneath that was her lover, whom she loved; beneath his urbane exterior his passion throbbed and leaped, and his deep need of her cried, and in her the answering need cried back.

5

IN THE CAMPAGNA

Together they walked in the Campagna, in the bright soft wash of the February sun. Mr. Jayne had been in Rome a week, and they had gone out to Tivoli together, without papa, who was reading in the Vatican library. They lunched at the restaurant by the waterfalls, then explored Hadrian’s Villa with the plan in Murray, and quarrelled about which were the different rooms. Failing to agree on this problem, they sat down in the Triclinium and looked at the view and discussed the more urgent problem of their lives.

“You must,” said Mr. Jayne, “come to me. It is the only right and reasonable way out. We’ll live in no half-way house, with secrecy and concealment. We should both hate that. But Olga will not divorce me; it’s no use thinking of that. In her view, and that of all her countrywomen, husbands are never faithful. The infidelity of a husband is no reason to a Russian woman for divorce. Unless she herself wants to marry another man, and that is likely enough, in Olga’s case, to happen. We are nothing to each other, she and I. Such love as we had--and it was never love--is dead long ago. We don’t even like each other.”

“Curious,” mused Rome, “not to foresee these developments at the outset, before taking the serious step of marriage. Marriage is an action too freely practised and too seldom adequately considered.”

“That is so,” Mr. Jayne agreed. “But, and however that may be, what is done is done. What we now have to consider, however inadequately, is the future. It is very plain that you and I must be together. Yes, yes, yes. Nothing else is plain, but that is. The one light in chaos.... My dearest love, you can’t be denying that. It is the only conceivable thing--the only thinkable way out.”

“Way out,” said Rome. “I think, rather, a way in.... Which way do we take--out or in?” Musingly she looked over the Campagna to blue hills, and Mr. Jayne, his eyes on her white profile, on the gleam of gold hair beneath her dark fur cap, and on her slender hands that clasped her knees, leant closer to her and replied, with neither hesitation nor doubt, “In.”

“Indeed,” said Miss Garden, “these questions can’t be decided in this rough and ready, impetuous manner. The mind must have its share in deciding these important matters, not merely the emotions and desires. Or else what is the good of education, or of having learnt to think clearly at all?”

“Very little,” said Mr. Jayne. “However, in this case the more clearly one thinks the more plain the way to take becomes. It is confused and muddled thinking that would lead us to conform to convention and give one another up, merely because of a social code.”

“The social code,” said Miss Garden, “though as a rule I prefer to observe it, is in this case neither here nor there. I have ruled that out; cleared the field, so to speak, for the essentials. Now, what _are_ the essentials? Your wife, whom you have undertaken to live with ...”

“By mutual agreement, we have given that up long since,” said Mr. Jayne, not for the first time.

“... and your children, whom you have brought into the world and are responsible for.”

“They are their mother’s. She lets me see nothing of them. She is determined to bring them up as Russian patriots.”

“Still, they are half yours, and it is a question whether you should not claim your share. In fact, I think it is certain that you should. If you broke off completely from your wife and lived with me, your right in them would be gone.... Then, of course, there is the ethical point as to your contract, the vows you made to your wife on marriage, which positively exclude similar relations with anyone else while she remains your wife.”

“I ought never to have made them. I was a fool. The wrong is in the vows, not in their breach.”

“Granted that they were wrong, that does not settle the further point of whether, having been made, with every circumstance of deliberation, they should not be kept.”

“O God,” said Mr. Jayne. “You talk, my dearest, like a pedant, a prig, or a book of logic. Don’t you _care_, Rome?”

“You know,” said Miss Garden, “that I do.... No, don’t touch me. I must think it out. I _am_ a pedant and a prig, if you like, and I _must_ think it out, not only feel. But now I will think of the other side. Oh, yes, I know there is another side. We love one another, and we can neither of us be happy, or fully ourselves, without being together. Without one another we shall be incomplete, unhappy and perhaps (not certainly) morally and mentally stunted and warped. Indeed, I see that as clearly as you can. Further, our being together may, as you say, not hurt your wife; she may not care in the least. As to that, I simply don’t know. How could I? She may even let you still have a share in your children. Russian points of view are so different from ours. But one should be certain of that before taking any steps. Then there are still points on the other side, that we have to think of. Any children we might have would be illegitimate. That would be hard on them.”

“In point of fact,” said Mr. Jayne, “it is largely illusory, that hardship. And in this case they (if they should ever exist) needn’t even know. You would take my name. Who is to go on remembering that I have a Russian wife? Very few people in England even know it. We should soon live down any talk there might be.”

“And then,” went on Rome, ticking off another point on her fingers, “there are my papa and mamma, whom we should hurt very badly. In their eyes what we are discussing isn’t a thing to be discussed at all; it is a deadly sin, and there’s an end of it. They are very fond of me, and they would be terribly unhappy. That too is a point to be considered.”

“Perhaps. But not to be given much weight to. It’s damnable to have to hurt the people we love--but, after all, we can’t let our parents rule our lives. We’re living in the eighteen nineties; we’re not mid-Victorians. And we have to make up our own minds what to do with our lives. We can’t be tied up by anyone else’s views, either those of our relations or of society in general. We have to make our own judgments and choices, all along. And parents shouldn’t be hurt by their children’s choices, even if they do think them wrong; they should live and let live. All this judging for other people, and being hurt, is poisonous. It’s a relic of the patriarchal system--or the matriarchal.”

Miss Garden smiled.

“Possibly. I should say, rather, that it was incidental to parental affection, and always will be. Anyhow, there it is.... They don’t, of course, even believe that divorce is right, let alone adultery.” Her cool, thoughtful enunciation of the last word gave it its uttermost value. Miss Garden never slurred or shirked either words or facts.

“But that,” she added, “doesn’t, of course, dispose of our lives. That’s only one point out of many. The question is, what is, now and ultimately, the right and best thing for me and you to do. You’ve decided. Well, I haven’t--yet. Give me a week, Francis. I promise I won’t take more.”

“You are so beautiful,” said Mr. Jayne, changing the subject and speaking inaccurately, and lifted her hands to his face. “You are so beautiful. There is no one like you. You are like the golden sickle moon riding over the world. You hold my life in your two hands. Be kind to it, Rome. _I love you, I love you, I love you._ If we deny our love we shall be blaspheming. Love like ours transcends all barriers, and well you know it. Take your week, if you must, only decide rightly at the end of it, my heart’s glory. The fine thing we shall make of life together, you and I, the fine, precious, lovely thing. It’s been so poor and common--full of bickerings and jars and commonness and discontents....

_O Rome!_...”

6

RUSSIAN TRAGEDY

The Russian woman, with her two beautiful children and her stout, dazed, unhappy mamma, waited in the hall of the flat of Mr. Jayne. They were weary, having travelled across Russia and from Russia to London, to find Mr. Jayne, and then, having learnt that he was in Rome, straight from London thither, spending two nights in the train and arriving this morning, more alive than dead (for who, this side of the grave, is not?) but very tired. The two children were so tired that they whimpered disagreeably, and their mother often wiped their noses with her travel-grimed handkerchief, but not so often as they required it.

Olga Petrushka was a beautiful woman, square-headed, with a fair northern skin and large deep blue eyes, black-lashed, and massive plaits of flaxen hair. Her eyes looked wild and haunted, for Russians have such dreadful experiences, and her cheeks were hollowed; she looked like a woman who has seen death and worse too close, as indeed she had. She was shabbily dressed in an old fur dolman over a scarlet dress and a fur cap. The two children were bundled up in bearskin coats, like little animals. Her little dancing bears, she would call them in lighter moments. Ever and anon she would fling them sweet cakes out of her reticule, and they would gobble them greedily.

But Nina Naryshkin, their grandmother, sat and rocked to and fro, to and fro, and said nothing but, “Aie, aie, aie.”

The hall porter turned on the little family a beaming and kindly eye. They were, in all probability, thieves, and not, as the Russian lady asserted, the family of Signor Jayne, so he would not admit them into Signor Jayne’s rooms, but he liked to see their gambols.

Every now and then the younger lady would say, in Russian, “Cheer up, then, little children. Your father will soon be here and he will give you more sweet cakes. Aha, how your dirty little mouths water to hear it! Boris, you rascal, don’t pull your sister’s pigtail. What children! They drive me to despair.”

And then Mr. Jayne arrived. He came in at the open hall door, with a tall, fair English lady, and he was saying to her, “If you don’t mind coming in for a moment, I will get you the book.”

The hall porter stepped forward with a bow, and indicated in the background Mrs. Jayne, her mamma, and the little Jaynes.

What a moment for Mr. Jayne! What a moment for Mrs. Jayne, her mamma and the little Jaynes! What a moment for Miss Garden! What a moment for the hall porter, who loved both domestic reunions and quarrels, and was as yet uncertain which this would be (it might even be both), but above all loved moments, and that it would certainly be.

And so it proved. Where Russians are, there, one may say, moments are, for these live in moments.

Olga Petrushka stepped forward with a loud cry and outstretched arms, and exclaimed in Russian, “Ah, Franya Stefanovitch!” (one of the names she had for him, for Russians give one another hundreds of names each, and this accounts in part for the curious, confused state in which this nation is often to be found)--“I have found you at last.”

Mr. Jayne, always composed, retained his calm. He shook hands with his wife and mother-in-law and addressed them in French.

“How are you, my dear Olga? Why did you not tell me you wanted to see me? I would have come to Moscow. It is a long way to have come, with your mother and the children too. How are you, my little villains?”

“Ah, my God,” said Mrs. Jayne, also now in French, which she spoke with rapidity and violence. “How could I stay another day in Russia? The misery I have been through? Poor little papa--Nicolai Nicolaivitch--they have arrested him for revolutionary propaganda and sent him to Siberia, with my brother Feodor. They had evidence also against mamma and myself and would have arrested us, and only barely we escaped in time, with the little bears. The poor cherubs--kiss them, Franya. They have been crying for their little father and the love and good food and warm house he will give them. For now they and we have no one but you. ‘Go to England, Olga,’ papa said as they took him. ‘It is the one safe country. The English are good to Russian exiles, and your husband will take care of you and mamma and the little ones....’ But you are with a lady, Franya. Introduce us.”

“I beg your pardon. Miss Garden, my wife, and Madame Naryshkin, her mother. Miss Garden and her father are great friends of mine.... If you will go into my rooms and wait for me a moment, Olga, I will see Miss Garden to her pension and return.”

“No,” said Miss Garden, in her fluent and exquisite French. “No, I beg of you. I will go home alone; indeed, it is no way. Good-evening, Madame Jayne and Madame Naryshkin.”

Mr. Jayne went out into the street with her. His unhappy eyes met hers.

“To-morrow morning,” he muttered, “I shall call.... This alters nothing.... I will come to-morrow morning and we will talk.”

“Yes,” said Miss Garden. “We must talk.”

Mr. Jayne went back into the hall and escorted his family upstairs to his rooms.

“Aie, aie, aie,” shuddered Olga Petrushka, flinging off her fur coat and cap and leaping round the room in her red dress, like a Russian in a novel. “Let’s get warm. Come, little bears”--she spoke German now--“to your papa’s arms. Kiss him, Katya; hug him, Boris. Tell him we have come across Europe to be with him, now that all else is gone. Forgive and forget, eh, Franya Maryavitch? You and I must keep one another warm.... Aie, aie, aie, my poor papa,” she wailed in Russian. “I keep seeing his face as they took him, and my poor Feodor’s. As to mamma, she is dazed; she will never get over it. We must keep her always with us, poor little mamma.... Tea at once, Franya. I am going to be sick,” she added in Magyar, and was.

Mr. Jayne laid his wife on his bed and took off her shoes and bathed her forehead, while she moaned in Polish. Then he made tea for her and the children and his mother-in-law, who sat heavily in a chair and drank five cups, and looked at him with drowsy, inimical eyes, saying never a word. He felt like a dead man, in a world full of ghosts. Who were these, who had this claim upon him? Their clinging hands were pulling him down, out of life into a tomb. The February evening shadows lay coldly on his heart. These poor distraught women, these little children--he must take infinite care of them, and let them lack for nothing, but he must not let them come close into his life; they would throttle it. His life, his true life, was with Rome. Rome, the gallant, fastidious dandy, with her delicate poise, her pride, her cool wit and grace. Not with this violent, unhappy, inconsequent Slav, chattering in several tongues upon his bed.

To-morrow he would go and talk to Rome ... explain to Rome....

7

ENGLISH TRAGEDY

Miss Garden received Mr. Jayne. Neither had slept much, for Mr. Jayne had given his bed to his family and lain himself on a horsehair couch, and Miss Garden had been troubled by her thoughts. Their faces were pale and shadowed and heavy-eyed.

Miss Garden said, “This is the end, of course. I shan’t need a week now. Fate has intervened very opportunely.”

“No,” said Mr. Jayne, with passion. “No. Nothing is changed. For God’s sake, don’t think that our situation is changed. It is not. She wants protection and security and a home, and I will provide all those for her and her mother and the children. Me she does not want. They shall have everything they want. But I shall not live with them.”

“You still think that you and I can live together?” Miss Garden was sceptical of his optimism. “I don’t think your wife would tolerate that. No, Frank, it’s no use. They belong to you. They need you. I can’t come between you. It would be heartless and selfish. Imagine the situation for a moment ... it is impossible.”

They both imagined it. Mr. Jayne shuddered, like a man very cold.

“You don’t want to be involved in such a--such a melodrama,” he said, bitterly.

“Put it at that if you like. I take it we are neither of us fond of melodrama. But, apart from that, I said all along, and meant it, that if your wife wants you I can’t take you. She has first claim.”

“I shall not live with Olga Petrushka and her mother.”

“That’s your own affair, of course. You are very likely right, since you don’t get on well together. But you must see that you and I can’t....”

Miss Garden stopped, for her voice began to shake. How she loved him! She pressed her hands together in her lap till the rings bruised her fingers.

Mr. Jayne gazed at her gloomily, observing her lightly poised body, slim and elegant in a dark blue taffeta dress which stood out behind below the waist in a kind of shelf, and made her shape rather like that of a swan. He saw her slight, anguished hands that hurt each other, and the pale tremor of her face.

“She’s been through hell, and she wants you,” said Miss Garden, trying to keep control.

“I tell you I can’t live with her, nor she with me. Do you want to turn my life into a tragi-comic opera?”

“Most life is a tragi-comic opera,” said Rome, trying to smile. “Perhaps all.”

“But you’re resolved anyhow to keep yours clear of my tragi-comedies,” he flung at her.

Then he apologised.

“I don’t mean that; I don’t know what I’m saying.... Oh, I won’t press you now to decide. We’ll wait, Rome. You’ll see, in a month or so, how things have arranged themselves--how easy it will all be. Olga will have recovered her balance by then; she changes from hour to hour, like all Russians. In a few weeks she will be tired of me and want to be in Paris, or back in Russia. She doesn’t really want me; it’s only that she is unstrung by trouble. Upset; that’s what she is. All I ask you to do is to wait.”

“No, Frank. It can never be, unless she goes sometime to live with someone else--some other man. Otherwise she would be likely, even if she left you for a time, to want you again at intervals. I can’t make a third.... You see, whatever happens now, your family must always be a real fact to me, not an abstraction. I’ve seen them.... Katya is just like you--your chin and eyes.... The children love you very much; I saw that.... And she loves you, too....”

“She does not. That’s not love--not as I know love.”

“As to that, we all know love in different ways, I suppose.... Truly, Francis, I have quite decided. I can’t live with you.... No, no, don’t....”

He was holding her in his arms and kissing her face, her lips, her eyes, muttering entreaties.

“If you loved me you’d do it.”

“I do love you, and I shan’t do it.”

“I’m asking nothing dishonourable of you. You don’t think it wrong on general principles; yesterday you were willing to consider it. You’re just refusing life for a quixotic whim ... refusing, denying life.... Rome, you can’t do it. Don’t you know, now you’re in my arms, that you can’t, that it would be to deny the best in us?”

“What’s the best, what’s the worst? I don’t know, nor do you. I’m not an ethicist. All I know is that your wife, while she wants you, or thinks she wants you, has first claim. It’s a question of fairness and decent feeling.... Or bring it down, if you like, to a question of taste. Perhaps that is the only basis there really is for decisions of this sort for people like us.”

“Taste. That’s a fine cry to mess up two lives by. I’d almost rather you were religious and talked of the will of God. One could respect that, at least.”

“I can’t do that, as I happen not to be sure whether God exists. And it would make nothing simpler really, since one would then have to discover what one believed the will of God to be. Don’t do religious people the injustice of believing that anything is simpler or easier for them; it’s more difficult, since life is more exacting.... But it comes to the same thing; all these processes of thought lead to the same result if applied by the same mind. It depends on the individual outlook. And this is mine.... Oh, don’t make it so damnably difficult for us both, my dearest....”

Miss Garden, who never swore and never wept, here collapsed into tears, all her urbane breeding broken at last. He consoled her so tenderly, so pitifully, so mournfully, that she wept the more for love of him.

“Go now,” she said at last. “We mustn’t meet again till we can both do it quietly, without such pain. Papa and I are going back to London next week. Write to me sometime and let me know how you do and where you are. My dearest Frank....”

8

FOUNDERED

Rome was alone. She sat in a hard Italian chair, quite still, and felt cold and numb, and as if she had died. Drowned she felt, under deep cold seas of passion and of pain. Wrecked and foundered and drowned, at the bottom of grey seas. Something cried, small and weak and hurt within her, and it was the voice of love, or (as Mr. Jayne would have it) of life; life which she had denied and slain. Never had she greatly loved before; never would she greatly love again; and the great love she now had she was slaying. That was what the hurt voice cried in her as she sat alone in the great, bare, chilly room, the sad little scaldino on the floor at her feet.

She was dry-eyed now that she was alone, and had no more to face Mr. Jayne’s love and pain. Her own she could bear. Harder and harder and cooler and more cynical she would grow, as she walked the world alone, leaving love behind. Was that the choice? Did one either do the decent, difficult thing, and wither to bitterness in doing it, or take the easy road, the road of joy and fulfilment, and be thereby enriched and fulfilled? And what was fulfilment, and what enrichment? What, ah, what, was this strange tale that life is; what its meaning, what its purpose, what its end?

Rome did not know. She knew one thing only. Frustration, renunciation, death--whether you called your criterion the will of God, or social ethics, or a quixotic whim, or your own private standards of decency and taste, it led you to these; led you to the same sad place, where you lay drowned, dead beneath bitter seas.

Mid-day chimed over the city. Miss Garden rose, and put on her outdoor things, and went forth to meet her papa for lunch. Life moves on, through whatever deserts, and one must compose oneself to meet it, never betraying one’s soul.

9

VICKY ON THE WORLD

“It’s good to have you back again, my Rome,” Vicky said. “I miss you at my parties. There are lots of new people I want you to meet. An adorable Oxford youth, whom you’ll find after your own heart. Already he writes essays like a polished gentleman of the world, and he a round-faced cherub barely out of school. A coming man, my dear, mark my words. Such brilliance, such style, such absurd urbanity! Denman introduced him. I prefer him enormously to Denman’s other cronies--that affected Mr. Le Gallienne for instance, and that conceited young Beardsley. Not but that young Beardsley, too, has a wit. I’ll say that for Denman--he keeps a witty table.... Well, have you brought papa back still a good Roman? Father Stanton says, by the way, we’re to call the Pope’s church in this country the Italian Mission. It’s quite time papa had a change of creed, anyhow; I begin to fear for his health since he read ‘Robert Elsmere’ and wasn’t driven by it to honest doubt.”

“Neither,” said Rome, “was he driven by the Forum to the pagan gods. One begins to think that papa is settling down.”

“Oh, I trust not. Dear papa, he’s not old yet.... What a country you have come back to, though, my dear. Strikes everywhere--dockers, railwaymen, miners, even tailors.... Maurice is perfectly happy, encouraging them all. But, darling Maurice, I’m _seriously_ afraid he may cut Amy’s throat one day. Serve her right, the little cat. If I were Maurice I’d beat her. Perhaps he will one day, when he’s not quite sober. I wish she’d run off with one of the vulgar men she flirts with, and leave him in peace. _He’ll_ never run off, because he won’t leave the children to her. Poor old boy, he’s so desperately up against things the whole time. Mamma’s miserable about him. I know, though she never says a word. However, she’s consoled by all her nice grandchildren. Even grandpapa, you know, admits that the deplorable modern generation is doing its duty as regards multiplication. Why _do_ old Bible clergymen like grandpapa think it so important to produce more life? One would think, one really _would_ think, that there was plenty of that already. But no. Be fruitful, they say: multiply: replenish the earth. It says so in Genesis, and clergymen of grandpapa’s generation can’t get away from Genesis. Poor grandpapa. He’s writing to the _Guardian_, as usual, about the Modern Woman. She’s dreadfully on his mind. Latchkeys. He doesn’t think women ought to have them. Why not? He doesn’t explain. Men may open their front doors with keys, but women must, he thinks, always ring up the unfortunate maids. He can think of no reasons why; he is past reasons, but not past convictions. What, he asked in Stanley’s drawing-room the other day, is to take the place, for women, of the old sanctities and safeties?” “The new safeties, I imagine, sir,” Denman replied. “Grandpa grunted and frowned; he thinks women on bicycles really indecent, poor old dear. As a matter of fact, Denman does, too--at least ungraceful, which to him is the same thing. But Rome, my dear, you simply must get one. We’re all doing it now. It’s glorious; the nearest approach to wings permitted to men and women here below. Intoxicating! Stanley lives on hers, now her son has safely arrived. And it’s transforming clothes. Short jackets and cloth caps are coming in. Bustles are no more. And, my dear--_bloomers_ are seen in the land! Yes, actually. Stanley cycles in them; she looks delightful, whatever Denman says. No, I don’t. Charles doesn’t approve. Conspicuous, he thinks. And, of course, so it is. Well, men will be men. They’ll never be civilised where women are concerned, most of them. But the poor silly old world really does march a little. We’re all getting most thrillingly _fin-de-siècle_. I wonder if all times have been as deliriously modern, while they lasted, as our times.”

“Probably,” said Rome. “It’s one of the more certain, though more ephemeral, qualities that times have. I wonder at what age grandpapa began deploring it. Not during the Regency or under William the Fourth, I imagine. I suppose _his_ grandpapa was deploring it then.”

“Oh, and there’s another shocking female modernism become quite common this winter, my dear. _Cigarettes!_ I haven’t perpetrated that myself yet, as Charles thinks that unfeminine too, and I’m sure the children would steal them and be sick. Besides, I don’t think it really becoming to an elegant female. But Stanley does. That literary set of hers is a funny mixture of forwardness and reaction. Forward women and reactionary men, I think. Grandpapa hasn’t tumbled to Stanley’s cigarettes yet. My hat, when he does! Well, it’s a funny world. I suppose my daughters will grow up smoking like their brothers, without thinking twice about it.... The darlings, they’re all so troublesome just now. That kindergarten can’t or won’t teach Imogen to speak properly. If she gabbles like this at three, what will she do at thirty? And Hughie drawls and contradicts....”

Their talk then ran along family lines.

10

STANLEY AND DENMAN

Stanley pedalled swiftly, a sturdy, attractive figure in serge knickerbockers (“bloomers” they were called while that graceful and sensible fashion of our ancestresses endured), along a smooth, sandy road between pine woods. The April sunlight flickered on the pale brown needle-strewn road; the light wind sang in the pines and blew dark curls of hair from under Stanley’s sailor-hat brim. Her bicycle basket was full of primroses. Her round, brown cheeks glowed pink; her lips were parted in a low, tuneless song (tuneless because Stanley could never get a tune right). It expressed her happiness, relieved the pressure of her joy at being alive. Such a day! Such a bicycle! Such sweet and merry air!

She stopped, got off her bicycle, leant it against a gate, and lay down flat on her back in the wood, staring up into the green gloom. London, Denman, her baby, were far off. She was alone with beauty. She was passionately realising the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory, that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close. To savour the loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed sea, and then to pass on to the next--that was life.

Then, presently, the moment lost its keenness, and she was no longer alone with beauty. Her husband and her baby broke the charmed circle, looking in. How she loved them! But they took from her something; her loneliness, that queer, eerie separateness, that only bachelors and spinsters know. They need not, to know it, be unattached, virgin bachelors and spinsters; love does not spoil separateness, but households do.

Stanley rose to her feet, brushed the pine-needles from her neat clothes and untidy hair, put on her sailor-hat and got on her bicycle again. Before her there was a long slope down. To take it, brakeless, feet up on the rest, was like flying. Stanley was no longer a mystic, a wife or a mother; she was a hoydenish little girl out for a holiday.

She reached Weybridge station and entrained for London in one of the halting, smoke-palled, crawling trains of the period. In it she read Ibsen’s “Doll’s House,” for she and Denman were going to see it next week at the Independent Theatre. What a play! What moralising! What purpose! What deplorable solemnity! There seemed, to the set of light-hearted and cynical æsthetes among whom Stanley moved, nothing to do about “A Doll’s House” but to laugh at it. These strange, solemn Scandinavians! Yet numbers of cultured readers in England took it seriously, as cultured English readers love to take foreign plays. They found it impressive and fine, almost a gospel. Further, the bourgeois, the Philistines, the people who are inaccurately said to spend more time than the elect _in the street_ (why is this believed of them?), mocked at it, so that there must be something in it, for, as has been well said (or if it has not, it should have been), majorities are always wrong.

“The fact is,” said Stanley to herself, “the fact is, cultivated people like tracts. Especially cultivated women like tracts about their own emancipation. And, of course, in a way, they’re right.... But plays with purposes....”

It will be observed that Stanley, whom nature had made to welcome purposes wherever found, had well assimilated the spirit of her literary group, which preferred art to be for the sake of art only. She had, as Vicky said of her, so much Zeitgeist. What seemed to her and her friends the good drama of the moment was light social comedy, full of gay, sparkling nonsense and epigrams for the sake of epigrams. Or the more profound and mordant wit of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, who had lately begun to write plays. Mr. Shaw had, indeed, purpose, but his wit carried it off.

Waterloo. Even the trains of 1891 got there at last. Stanley went to look for her bicycle. Finding it and wheeling it off, she felt herself to be one of the happiest persons in the station. She had everything. A bicycle, a husband, a baby, a house, freedom, love, literary and social opportunity, charming friends. Life was indeed felicitous to such as she.

“Progress of Royal Labour Commission,” the newspaper placards shouted. “More L.C.C. scandals. Free brass bands for the poor!”

Stanley frowned. It was a damnable world, after all. A vulgar, grudging, grabbing world. The voice of the press was as the shrill voice of Amy, the wife of Maurice. “Free brass bands for the poor!” That was how Amy would say it, with her silly, gibing laugh. Even, a little, how Irving would say it. But Irving, though he despised the democratic ways of the London County Council, and free brass bands for the poor, was not silly or spiteful. He was merely a delightful, philistine young gentleman on the Stock Exchange.

Stanley bicycled (amid perils less great, less numerous in the year 1891 than now) to Margaretta Street, Chelsea. There was the house, small, dingy, white, with a green door and a tiny square of front garden. Stanley found her latchkey, flung open the green door with a kind of impetuous, happy eagerness, and came face to face with her husband in the little hall.

“Hullo,” he said, and quizzically surveyed her, up and down, from her blown hair and flushed cheeks to her neat, roomy knickerbockers and stout brogues. “Hullo.”

“Hullo, Den. I’ve had the _rippingest_ ride. How’s baby? And yourself?”

“Both flourish, I believe.... You know we’ve people to dinner to-night? You’ve not left yourself a great deal of time, have you?... You don’t look your best, my dear girl, if I may say so.”

“No, I expect not; I’m blown to bits. What’s it matter? Come on, Den, we must both hurry.”

She ran upstairs, turned hot water into the bath, tiptoed into the nursery where her son slept, and back to her room. Denman was in his dressing-room, beyond the open door.

“I’ve had a lovely ride, Den. Weybridge way.”

“Glad you enjoyed it. But lovely’s the wrong word. Anything less lovely than a woman in those unspeakable garments I never saw. I detest them. Women ought to wear graceful, trailing things always.... I can’t think why you _do_ it. Your sense of beauty must be sadly defective.”

“Beauty--oh, well, it’s convenience that matters most, surely. For that matter, very few modern clothes, male or female, are beautiful. But I don’t think these are ugly. One can’t trail all the time; it’s a dirty trick on foot and dangerous on a bicycle.”

“It’s better to be elegant, dirty and dangerous than frumpish, clean and safe. That’s an epigram. The fact is, women ought never to indulge in activities, either of body or mind; it’s not their rôle. They can’t do it gracefully.”

“What do you want them to do then, poor things? Just sit about?”

“Precisely that. You’ve expressed it accurately, if not very beautifully. An elegant inertia is what is required of women ... what on earth has that girl done with my black socks?... Any activity necessary to the human race can be performed by such men as are prepared to sacrifice themselves. All this feminine pedalling about and playing ridiculous games and speaking on platforms and writing books and serving on committees--Lord save us.”

“They’d get awfully fat, your sitting-about females; they wouldn’t be graceful long. Hurry up, Den, or you’ll be late, not I.”

“We shall both be late. It matters very little. If any of our guests have the bad taste to be punctual it will serve them right. Crackanthorpe won’t be punctual, anyhow, he never is.... Make yourself lovely to-night, Stan; I want to forget those awful bloomers. They make you look like a horrible joke in _Punch_ about the New Woman.”

“Well, I’d rather look like the New Woman than like the ‘Woman (not new)’ in the same pictures--sanctimonious idiots.... Really, Den, you’re silly about women....”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Denman, smothered in his shirt.

Stanley went to the bathroom with a touch of ill-humour, which she sang away, like a kettle, in clouds of steam.

Denman, hearing the tuneless song, winced in amused distaste. As a matter of fact, he would have liked a bath himself.

11

A YOUNG MASHER

How agreeable, how elegant and how fastidious were the young mashers of the early nineties! We shall not look upon their like again. Du Maurier has immortalised them, beautiful creatures with slim waists and swallow-tailed evening coats and clear-cut patrician features, chatting to magnificent women with curled mouths, straight brows and noble, sweeping figures. The women of those days, if we are to believe Du Maurier, were nobly built as goddesses, classical-featured, generous of stature and of bosom, but roped in straitly between ribs and hips, so as to produce waists that nature never planned. Because of this compression, they would often suffer greatly, and sometimes fall ill with anæmia, or cancer, or both, and die in great anguish. But, while they yet lived and breathed, they were noble and elegant objects, and their gentlemen friends matched them for grace.

Irving Arthur Penrhyn Garden, aged twenty-eight, earning a comfortable and honest livelihood on the Stock Exchange, was a masher. He lived in bachelor chambers in Bruton Street, and was a popular diner-out and dance-goer, for, though he had not brilliance or fame, he had dark and slim good looks, cheerfulness, _savoir faire_, and was that creature so sought of hostesses, an agreeable young bachelor. His tastes were healthy, his wits sound, his political and religious views gentlemanly, and his prospects satisfactory. Present correctness and future prosperity were stamped on Irving Garden; so unlike that queer fish, his brother Maurice, the Radical journalist, who was stamped with present incorrectness and future failure. Irving would, no doubt, make a good marriage sometime. Meanwhile he was enjoying life. He had no part with the highbrows, the cranks, the fops, the æsthetes or any other extreme persons; he took no interest in foreign literature, Home Rule for Ireland, the Woman’s Movement, the Independent Theatre, labour agitations, the new art, George Meredith, or Russian exiles, finding them (respectively) uninteresting, impracticable, unattractive, depressing, paid-by-anarchist-gold, queer, unintelligible and a damned nuisance. He considered his brother Maurice to be playing the wrong game; Stanley’s friends he thought an affected, conceited crew, both the men and the women being unsexed, and for ever writing things one didn’t want to read. Rome fell too easily into superfluous irony, so that people never knew when she was pulling their legs, and if she didn’t marry soon, now that she was over thirty, people would begin thinking her an old maid. Una was all right, but shouldn’t have married down. And, though Irving was an affectionate youth and loved his parents, he did think it a little comic of the pater to change his religion _quite_ so often; it made people smile. There should be limits to the number of religions allowed to each man in his life. Anyhow, what was wrong with the C. of E.? On the whole, Vicky was the member of his family of whom Irving most approved. Vicky seemed to him what a woman should be. She looked pretty, dressed and danced well, was amusing, lived in the right part of London, and gave very decent, lively little dinners, at which people weren’t always trying to be clever. Or anyhow _he_ wasn’t asked to the ones at which they tried to be clever.

And with all this, Irving was no fool. He was doing very well at his job, had a good sound head, quite well stocked with ideas, and knew his way about.

Such was Irving Arthur Penrhyn Garden, walking cheerfully, gracefully and competently through the year of grace 1891.

12

RUSSIAN INTERLUDE

That summer Russian refugees were greatly the mode. They would flee to Great Britain in shoals from the fearful atrocities of their government. Those who came were mostly of the intellectual classes (the less intellectual being too stupid to move), who had been plotting, or writing, or speaking, or otherwise expressing their distaste for their country’s constitution, and thus incurring the displeasure of the authorities. Some of them had been sent to Siberia and had escaped; others had served their time there and returned; others again had not yet visited that land, but feared that they might. Once in London, they found kind English intellectuals eager to take an interest in them, and plenty of their own countrymen with whom to meet and continue to plot. It was quite the fashion, in the nineties, to have a few exiled Russians at your parties. They introduced a new way of taking tea, very nasty, with lemon and no milk. Vicky’s youngest daughter, Imogen, as an infant, was once given a sip of this tea from the cup of a hairy Russian professor, and was sent up to the nursery for spewing it out. Imogen developed thus an early and unjust distaste for Russians which did not leave her through life.

In the May of 1891, some new Russian refugees suddenly broke on London--the unexpected and hitherto little mentioned wife, mother-in-law and children of Mr. Jayne, the brilliant writer of essays and memoirs. It had been vaguely rumoured before, that Mr. Jayne had some kind of Russian wife, but no one had expected her to make an appearance; it had been supposed that Mr. Jayne, being a man of some _savoir faire_, would have seen to that. However, here she was, a large and handsome Russian woman with two large and handsome children, a stout, tragic, yet conversational mamma, an inconsequent manner of speech, like that of Russians in novels, and a wide acquaintance with other Russian refugees, with whom she plotted on Sunday afternoons and all through Thursday nights. She settled, with her mother and children, in Mr. Jayne’s flat. Mr. Jayne left the flat to them and took rooms of his own some way off; he probably thought he would be in the way if he lived in the flat, where Mrs. Jayne entertained her fellow countrymen a good deal. Mrs. Jayne accused him bitterly of neglecting her in her loneliness and grief. He replied that experience had proved that they were not happy together, and that, therefore, he would provide for the support of her, her mother and his two children, but would not share a dwelling with them, which would be both foolish and immoral. He added that, as she knew, he wished she and her mother would sometime see their way to living abroad, where they would be much happier. Mrs. Jayne replied that they intended to live in London until the Day of Deliverance, by which she meant the day when they could with safety return to Russia. She then went into hysterics and said that doubtless he wished her dead.

Mr. Jayne said, “These scenes make life impossible. You drive me to leave London. I shall live in Italy for the present. My bank will pay you an allowance, and I will visit you from time to time.”

“Why do you hate me so, Franya Stefanovitch?” she cried.

“I don’t hate you. But you know as well as I do what a poor business we make of living together. It is one of the worst and most unintelligent forms of immorality for two people who irritate each other to expose themselves to misery and anger by living together. Therefore, with no malice, we will live apart.”

“There’s another woman. You wish to live with a mistress. I know it.”

“If you think so, get a divorce.”

“Never. I will never divorce you. You are my husband, and the father of my poor little bears. Who ever heard of a faithful husband? We say in Russia that they are like the golden bear--a fabulous creature. No, I must put up with your infidelities. But if you leave me for too long I shall come and find you, and stick a knife into you and your mistress. I am not patient, Franya.”

“I never supposed that you were, Olga. And I may tell you, though I do not expect you to believe me, that I have no mistress, and never have had.”

She laughed at him.

“Ha! ha! Are you the golden bear, then, found at last? Go away with you, you and your lies. You make me sick.... I wish that you were dead.”

The last part of this conversation took place at the hall door, and, as Mr. Jayne went out, a young Russian came in. He was Sergius Dmitri, a cousin of Mrs. Jayne’s, a student, who had also fled from Russia during the recent troubles. He was a passionate admirer of his cousin, and wished very much that she would get rid of this cold, unloving English husband of hers, and come to live with him. He heard her last words to Mr. Jayne.

“Sergius,” she said, seeing him, “I want you to do me a service. Follow my husband this afternoon and see where he goes and whom he sees. I suspect him of having a mistress, and I wish to be certain. If he has, he will go straight to her now.... I’ll be revenged on him, the villain. After him, Sergius.”

The young Russian saw Mr. Jayne disappearing round the corner and hurried after him.

Mr. Jayne went to call on the Gardens. He took Rome out with him, and they sat on a bench in the garden in Bloomsbury Square.

“You must come away with me,” he said. “We will live in Italy. She hates me. So does her mother. I can’t live in the same town with them, let alone the same house. I have told her so. I am going to live in Italy, and work there at my books. Am I to go alone, or will you come?”

Rome saw across the square the windows of the house of her papa and mamma. She considered them; she considered also life, in many of its aspects. She considered international marriages, and unhappy family life. Love she considered, and hate, the enduringness and the moral and spiritual consequences of each. She thought of her own happiness, of Mr. Jayne’s, of Mrs. Jayne’s, of that of their two children. Of social ethics she thought, and of personal joy, and of human laws, which of them stand merely on expediency, which on some ultimate virtue. She thought also of vows, of contracts, and of honour. Having considered these things, and considering also her very great love for Mr. Jayne and his for her, she turned to him and opened her lips to reply.

But the words, whatever they were which she would have uttered--and neither Mr. Jayne nor anyone else was ever to know--were checked before her tongue formed them. For someone jumped out of the trees behind the bench on which they sat, and jabbed a long knife into Mr. Jayne’s back, between the shoulders, and rushed away.

Other people near ran up. Mr. Jayne had fallen choking forward. They did not dare to remove the knife, but carried him out into the square and into the Gardens’ house, where he lay on his side on a couch, unconscious, choking and bleeding at the lungs. The doctor was in attendance in ten minutes, but could do little, and in twenty Mr. Jayne was dead.

The assassin had, meanwhile, been captured. He proved to be a Russian, one Sergius Dmitri, described as a student, living in London. The only account of his action he gave was that he had known Mr. Jayne in Russia and disliked him, and that Mr. Jayne had not done his duty by his wife, who was Sergius Dmitri’s cousin. So Sergius Dmitri had, in a moment of impulse, knifed Mr. Jayne. No, he could not say that he regretted his action.

His record showed him to be of the anarchist persuasion, and a thrower of several bombs in his native land, some of which had reached their mark. Human life was not, it was apparent, sacred to him. Mrs. Jayne, prostrated with grief, cursed him for murdering her husband, the father of her children, who had devotedly loved her and whom she had devotedly loved. He had never neglected her; that was a fancy of her cousin’s, who had been a prey to jealousy.

Sergius Dmitri was hanged. Mrs. Jayne continued for a time to live in her husband’s flat, supported by his money, but, soon tiring of widowhood, married a fellow-countryman and went, with her mother and children, to live in Paris.

Miss Garden, who had been so close a witness of the horrid event, and who was known besides as an intimate friend of Mr. Jayne’s, never afterwards referred to the affair, even to her relatives. Miss Garden was no giver of confidences; no one ever learnt how she had felt about the business or about Mr. Jayne. There were not wanting, of course, those who said that these two had loved too well, had, in fact, been involved in an affair. But, in view of Miss Garden’s reputation for cool inviolability, and of her calm manner after the tragedy, such rumours obtained little credence. Miss Garden did, indeed, leave London shortly after the inquest, and spent the rest of the summer in the country, but she returned in the autumn as apparently bland, cool and composed as always.

13

NINETY-TWO

Eighteen ninety-two. Mr. Garden was troubled by the death, in January, of Cardinal Manning, and by the disputes conducted in the press between Professor Huxley, Mr. Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll concerning the Book of Genesis and the existence of God, which had, in the eyes of all these eminent persons, some strange connection one with another. Mrs. Garden’s father, the Dean, was, on the contrary, troubled by neither of these events, since he did not care for the Cardinal, knew that the Professor had not, theologically, a leg to stand on, and the Duke, at most, one. Grandpapa was more stirred, in the early part of 1892, by the untimely death of the Duke of Clarence, by the alarming increase of female bicyclists, and by the prevalent nuisance of that popular song, “Ta-ra-ra-ra-boomdeay.”

Vicky was stirred by Paderewski, by the influenza epidemic, which all her children got, and by the new high-shouldered sleeve; Maurice by the doings of the L.C.C. Progressives, the imminence of the parliamentary elections, the just claims but ignorant utterances of the Labour Party, woman’s suffrage, the birth of the _Morning Leader_, and Mr. Charles Booth’s “Life and Labour in London”; Stanley by woman’s suffrage, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” the comedies of Mr. Oscar Wilde and Mr. J. M. Barrie, “The Light That Failed,” and Mr. H. G. Wells; Irving by golf, Mr. Arthur Roberts, Miss Marie Lloyd and “Sherlock Holmes”; and Una by the arrival of a new baby and the purchase of a new hunter.

Rome was not very greatly stirred by any of these things. Into her old detached amusement at the queer pageant of life had come a faint weariness, as if nothing were very much worth while. If she thought anything worth serious comment, she did not reveal it. Life was to her at this time more than ever a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. She went on her way as usual, reading, seeing pictures, hearing music, meeting people, talking, smoking, bicycling, leading the life led by intelligent dilettanti in the small, cultivated nucleus of a great city. There was nothing to show that she endured the world with difficulty; that in the early mornings she would wake and lie helpless, without armour, waiting the onslaught of the new day, and in the evenings would slip from her armour with a shivering sigh, to drown engulfed by darkness and the hopeless passion of the night. “Some day,” she would say to herself, “I shall not mind so much. The edge will get blunt. Some day ... some day....”

But the black night mocked her, and she could not see that day on the furthermost dip of the horizon; she could only see Mr. Jayne’s dear, pale face turned to her with wistful hoping in his grey eyes behind their glasses, and he was saying, “Am I to go alone, or will you come?” and then, even as, having considered life, she opened her lips to reply, there was Mr. Jayne lurching forward, choked with blood, his question answered, for he was to go alone.

“My dear,” whispered Rome, in tears, to the unanswering, endless night. “My dear. Come back to me, and I will give you anything and everything.... But you will never come back, and I can give you nothing any more.”

And thus she could not see, however far off, that day when she should not mind so much, that day when the edge should get blunt.

Maurice, in 1892, was against very nearly everything. He was against the Conservative party, for the usual reasons. He was against the Liberal party, because Mr. Gladstone opposed woman’s suffrage and the Labour party and the Eight Hour Day. He was against the Woman’s Suffrage Bill because it was a class Bill. He was against Mr. Keir Hardie and the new Labour party because they talked what he considered sentimental tosh, damaging their own cause, and because Amy, his wife, echoed it parrot-like. He was against the Social Democratic Federation for the same reasons, and because it did not prevent its members from making bombs. He was against the socialist meetings in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square which he had been used to approve, because they too talked tosh. More and more, as Maurice advanced from the heat of youth into the clear-sighted unsentimentality of middle life (he was now thirty-five), he disliked tosh, and more and more most of the world seemed to him to be for ever talking it. The people, the parliamentarians, the press, the government classes, the imperialists, the democrats, the middle classes, rivalled one another in the flow of cant and nonsense they emitted. O God, for clear heads and hard facts, unmuddled by humbug and romanticism! Almost, Maurice was impelled to vote for Lord Salisbury, whose cool, cynical hardness was a relief; but, after all, deeper than his hatred of sentimentalism, lay his hatred of injustice and economic cruelty and class privilege. He was a democrat impatient with democracy, a journalist despising journalism, the product of an expensive education at war with educational inequality, a politician loathing politics, a husband chafing at his wife, a child of his age in rebellion against it, an agnostic irritated by the thoughtful, loquacious agnosticism of his day.

“There seems,” as his mother said of him, “to be no hole into which Maurice fits. Whereas Stanley fits into them all. They are both too extreme, dear children. It is neither necessary, surely, to be fighting everything all one’s time, nor to chase after every wind that blows.... I sometimes think that the best balanced and the most _solid_ of you all is Una.”

“Oh, yes, dear mamma,” Vicky replied. “Una is fast-rooted in the soil. Country people are always the best balanced. The only new things Una takes up are bicycles and golf; the only old things she drops are her _g_’s. Una is eternal and sublime; there’s nothing of the new woman about her, and nothing of the reactionary, either. There never was anyone less self-conscious, or less conscious of her period. All the rest of us think we’re moderns, but Una knows not times; she merely swings along, her dogs at her heels, her children at her skirts, her golf-clubs over her shoulder, and always another baby on the way. And the beauty of the child! She’d make a sensation in London--though she’s not the type of the moment, not elegant or artificial, too much the unsophisticated child of nature. Oh, yes, Una is on the grand scale.”

“Well, your grandfather thinks even Una is too modern. It’s the golf and bicycling and the _g_’s, I suppose. I suppose the fact is that it’s difficult, in these days, to avoid being new. You children and your friends all are. In fact, the whole world seems to be.”

“The world is always new, mamma darling, and always old. It’s no newer than it was in 1880, or 1870--in fact, not so new, by some years. The only year in which it was really new was, according to grandpapa and the annotators of the Book of Genesis, B.C. 4004.”

“Yes, I daresay it was sadly new then, and no doubt grandpapa would have found it so. But somehow one hears the _word_ a good deal just now, used by young people as well as old. What with new women, and new art, and new literature, and new humour, and the new hedonism that Denman and Stanley talk about, and that seems to mean making your drawing-room like an old curiosity shop and burning incense in it and lighting it with darkened crimson lamps and lying on divans with black and gold cushions and smoking scented cigarettes and reading improper plays aloud.... Only Rome says that isn’t new in the least, but thousands of years old.”

“Oh, Rome! Rome thinks nothing new. She was born blasé. She hasn’t got grandpapa’s or Stanley’s fresh mind. She always expects the unexpected. Oscar Wilde says that to do that shows a thoroughly modern mind. If Rome had been Eve, she’d have looked at the new world through a monocle (she’d have worn that, even if nothing else) and seen that it was stale, and said with a yawn, All this is very _vieux jeu_.”

“And very possibly,” said mamma, “it was.”

14

FIN-DE-SIÈCLE

Ninety-three passed. In it grandpapa died, others said of influenza following on old age, but he himself would have it that it was of a shock he received one day when driving, convalescent, in Hyde Park; for his horses, very respectable and old-fashioned animals, shied at a lady bicyclist, and grandpapa’s heart jolted, and when he got home he took to his bed and never rose again. So much, he whispered, hoarsely and somewhat sardonically, to his daughter, for the New Woman and her pranks. But what did it signify, he added. If he was not to get well of this attack, he was ready to go. He trusted (though a worm) in his Maker, and was not unprepared. So grandpapa, dignified to the last, departed from this life, one of the last of the Regency bucks and the Tory clerics, perhaps the last of all to condemn on theological grounds the arithmetic book of Bishop Colenso.

Fantastic observers might have imagined that, with the departure of this firm old Victorian, who had so disapproved of novelty, life span still more giddily on its rapid way. Certainly the years 1893 and 1894 do, for some reason, appear to have struck both those who gloried in novelty, and those whom it shocked, as more than usually new. The audacious experimentalism which is always with us was even more self-conscious then than is customary. Such are time’s revenges that the so daring social, literary and intellectual cleavages made by our forefathers in those years are now regarded as quaintly old-fashioned compromises with freedom, even as our own audacities will doubtless be regarded thirty years hence. But the people of the nineties, even as the people of the eighties, seventies, sixties, and so back, and even as the people of the twentieth century, thought they were emancipating themselves from tradition, saw themselves as bold buccaneers sailing uncharted seas, and found it great fun. The illusion of advance is sustaining, to all right-minded persons, and should by all means be cultivated. It gives self-confidence and poise. It even seems to please elderly persons to mark or fancy changes of habit, which they have no wish to emulate, among their juniors, and it certainly pleases their juniors to be thus remarked upon, for they, too, believe that they are something new--the new young, as they have always delighted to call themselves--so all are pleased and no harm is done. The eighteen nineties were no different in this respect, from the nineteen twenties.

But 1894 does actually seem to have been a more amusing year than most that we have now. What with the New Humour, and the New Earnestness, and the New Writers, and the New Remorse, and the New Woman, and the New Drama, and the New Journalism, and the New Child, and the New Parent, and the New Conversation, and the telephone, and the gramophone, and the new enormous sleeves, there was a great deal of novelty about.

It is a curious time to look back upon to-day. Curious to read the newspapers, reviews and comic papers of the time; to find, for instance, in the _Observer_ a leading article on the last novel of Mrs. Humphry Ward, as if it were a European event, and one the next Sunday on “What is the modern girl coming to, for she opens her front door with a key?” To come, too, on reviews of Mr. Hall Caine’s “Manxman,” such as that by Mr. Edmund Gosse in the _St. James’ Gazette_--“A contribution to literature, and the most fastidious critic would give in exchange for it a wilderness of that deciduous trash which our publishers call fiction. It is not possible to part from it without a warm tribute of approval.” But how possible it has now become! Indeed, in our times it has been known that a certain author, having in an unguarded hour committed to print an appreciation of this famous writer, and then having learnt his mistake, has changed his name and started life again, unable otherwise to support his disgrace. _Autres temps, autres mœurs._ Certainly the nineties were a long time ago. Strange, too, to read some of the contemporary press comments on that innocent, well-produced, extremely well-illustrated, and on the whole capable periodical, the _Yellow Book_--“the outcry,” as Mr. Arthur Symons put it later, when the publication of the _Savoy_ was greeted with much the same noise, “the outcry for no reason in the world but the human necessity for making a noise.” You would think that the worst that could be said of the _Yellow Book_ was that it was not eclectic, that it opened its hospitable doors to the worse writers as well as to the better, and that its intellectually lowest contributions were too widely sundered from its highest; and the best that could be said for it (and how much this is!) is that Aubrey Beardsley drew for it, Henry James and Max Beerbohm wrote prose for it, and W. B. Yeats poetry, and that it had, on the whole, some of the more capable writers of the day as contributors. But, in point of fact, the best that was said of it was that it was brilliant, daring, courageous, new and intensely modern, and the worst that it was bizarre, revolting, affected, new and decadent. It appears to a later generation to have been none of these things; that is, it was brilliant in patches only, and commonplace in patches; it was not daring except in that it is greatly daring to publish any periodical ever; it was not more intensely modern than everything always is, and most of its contributors were middle-aged; its weak and trite contributions (though indeed it did at times sink pretty low) were too few to allow of the word revolting being properly applied to the whole magazine, even by him whom Mr. Gosse called, in another context, the most fastidious critic; and as for decadent, this it may, indeed, have been, as no one has ever discovered what, if anything, this word, as generally used at this time, meant. Exhibiting those qualities which mark the decline of a great period, it should mean: whereas many of those who survive from the nineties maintain that, on the other hand, they marked the beginning of a good period. Or it may mean merely less good than its predecessors, and this the _Yellow Book_ was assuredly not, but quite the contrary. It was, in fact, not unlike various capable, well-produced periodicals of our own day. Many of its surviving contributors contribute now to these newer journals. But how seldom does one now hear them or their writings or the periodicals to which they contribute called ultra-modern, daring, shocking, decadent or bizarre? Rather, in fact, the contrary. Thus, it will be observed, do the moderns of one day become the safe establishments of the next. In ten years the public will be saying of our present moderns, “They are safe. They are _vieux jeu_. They resemble cathedrals.” What a death’s head at the feast of life is this fearful fate which is suspended before even the newest of us, and which, if we survive long enough, we shall by no means avoid. Happy, possibly, were those moderns of the nineties who died with their modernity still enveloping them, so that no one shall ever call them cathedrals. Gloriously decadent, though no longer new, they shall for ever remain, and no man shall call Aubrey Beardsley respectable, established or dull, for he belonged to the Beardsley period, and, though he may be outmoded, he shall never be outrun.

15

AT THE CROFTS’

The Denman Crofts thought it was delightfully new of them to have to one of their Sunday evenings a good-looking young pickpocket and a handsome woman whose profession it was to ply for hire on the streets. The pickpocket had been captured with his hand in Stanley’s pocket, and brought home to supper as an alternative to being delivered to the constabulary, for three reasons: first, he was good-looking, and masculine beauty was in fashion that year; secondly, he was a sinner, and sins were talked of with approbation just then by the most modern literary set, particularly strange sins of divers colours, and as no one knew which sins were strange or coloured and which were plain, it might be that picking pockets was as strange and as coloured as any. Thirdly, to have a pickpocket at a Sunday evening party was New, and the other guests would be pleased and envious. The lady was there for reasons very similar, and both were a great success. Everyone treated them with friendliness and tact, so that they soon ceased to be shy, though remaining to the end a trifle puzzled and suspicious, and not very fluent in conversation. Possibly, their host suggested to Rome, they were suffering from an embarrassing attack of the New Remorse.

“Strange sinners certainly seem a little _difficile_,” agreed Rome, who had been making exhausting efforts with the pickpocket, “and loose livers sometimes appear to be rather tight talkers. Your protégés cannot be said precisely to birrell.”

“Anyhow, dear Denman,” added a graceful young gentleman at her side, “picking pockets is a banal vice. I should scarcely call it a vice at all; it is nearly as innocent as picking cowslips on a May morning. I wish I could have procured you a lady who knelt in front of me in church yesterday afternoon while I was waiting to make my confession. She was improving the time by extracting the contents of the reticule left in the seat next her by the penitent who had gone up to her duties before her. A piquant idea, for she would get absolution almost in the moment of sinning.”

“Well,” said Denman, “we did the best we could at short notice. I would have preferred to have obtained a bomb-fiend. The latest vice, you know, is secreting bombs in Hyde Park. We shall all be doing it soon. It is reported to be even more stimulating than secreting opium. There is no need, unless desired, ever to find the bombs again, still less to use them; that is an extension of the vice, only practised by those who wish to qualify as extremists, or bomb-fiends. The ordinary victims of the bomb habit merely secrete; they make a cache, and store away bombs as squirrels’ nuts. A pretty habit, but ceasing by now even to be strange. It is deplorable how the best vices become vulgarised. Rome, will you join me in a bomb-secreting orgy to-morrow at dusk?”

“By all means, Denman. It would restore my spirits. I have been sadly depressed lately by reading in one week Sarah Grand, ‘A Yellow Aster,’ ‘Marcella,’ ‘The Manxman,’ and Mr. Zangwill and Mrs. Lynn Linton in the _New Review_ on ‘What Women Should Know.’ There is no more spirit in me. Though I was a little revived by the ‘Green Carnation.’ An entrancing work, about all of us. But really entertaining.”

“Why such a desperate orgy of literature? I thought you were of a more fastidious habit--not like Stanley, who insists on reading everything, even ‘Discords’ and the Dreyfus case. I can seldom read any novels. I find their reviews enough, if not too much. I read of ‘The Manxman’ that it would be read and re-read by many thousands with human tears and human laughter, and that settled ‘The Manxman.’ Where do reviewers get their inimitably delicious phrases from? And if one asked them with the tears and laughter of what animal other than the human animal could human beings read, or even re-read, a book, how would they reply? Perhaps in the same way that old Meredith did the other day when Dick Le Gallienne asked him to give the public a few words to explain his peculiar style. ‘Posterity will still be explaining me, long after I am dead. Why, then, should I forestal their labours?’”

“I wonder,” Rome mused, “if posterity will really be so diligent and so intelligent as their ancestors seem to think. People always say they write for posterity when they are not appreciated at the moment. They seem to imagine posterity as a smug and spectacled best scholar, spending its time delving among the chronicles of wasted years in the reading-room of the British Museum, and hailing with rapture the literary efforts of their ancestors.”

“Whereas I,” said Denman, “see posterity as a leaping savage, enjoying nameless orgies among the ruins of our civilisation, but not enjoying literature. Possibly, even, there will be no posterity. The débâcle of our civilisation--and it’s obviously too good to last--may mean the débâcle of the world itself. I hope so. _A bas le_ posterity, I say. Who wants it? I scorn to write for it, or to plant horrible little baby trees for it, or to suck up to it in any way whatsoever. Crude and uncultured savage. _Vive l’aujourd’hui!_”

“And I,” said Rome, “see posterity as a being precisely like ourselves. It will read every morning in its newspapers, just as we do, that our relations with France are strained, that so many people have been murdered, born, divorced, married, that such and such a war is in progress, that such and such a law has been passed, or speech made, or book published, and it will know, just as we do, that none of it matters in the least.... I’ve no grudge against posterity. Let it have its little day.”

“It will,” said the graceful young man, with gloom. “I can’t share Denman’s faith in the approaching annihilation of humanity. Humanity in general is much too bourgeois and uninteresting to do anything but increase greatly and keep the earth replenished. It is impossible to imagine that the gods love it. _We_ shall perish; we, the fine exotic flower of an effete civilisation--(by the way, how exquisitely lovely and innocently wicked Lady Pember looks to-night; she, not the cow-like young woman talking to Mrs. Croft ought to be the strange scarlet--or is it mauve--sinner)--but we are a small minority. The majority, which hasn’t even the art of gracefully fading out, will heavily continue. It is thus that I picture posterity--a ponderous suburban bourgeois in mutton-chop whiskers or tight stays, sniffing at our poetry, our wit and our _Yellow Book_, and saying, ‘How decadent they were in the nineties!’ By the way, what does decadent mean? I always understood that man fell once and for all, long ago, and could not therefore be falling still. I prefer deciduous. How deliciously it slides round the tongue, like an over-ripe peach. I wonder it is not more used in verse. To me it suggests a creamy green absinthe, or a long, close kiss on moist, coral-pink lips. Disgusting. I detest moist lips, and absinthe makes me feel sick, though I try and pretend it doesn’t.”

Stanley, charming and smiling, with her pleasant round, brown face, lively deep blue eye, and enormous box sleeve, darted across the room to them.

“Den, we _must_ remove our strange sinners now. I’m worn out with them. They’ll neither of them say more than yes, no, and eh, and they’ve both drunk too much already, and keeping one eye on Mr. Sykes lest he get too near people’s pockets and the other on the lady lest she get hold of more whiskey, is too heavy a responsibility. You must take them away. And then Lady Pember wants to talk to you, darling.”

Denman gave her a queer, quick look out of his narrow, smiling eyes, as he turned away.

“And Rome, love, I want to bring Aubrey Beardsley to you. He is being assaulted by Miss Carruthers, who has been reading ‘Marcella,’ ‘Our Manifold Nature,’ by Sarah Grand, and the newspapers, and wants to know what he thinks of the Emancipation of Women, the Double Standard of Morality, and the approaching death of Mr. Froude. Poor Aubrey has never thought of any of them; he takes no interest in emancipations, and his taste in women is most reactionary--anyone could tell that, from the ladies he draws; he thinks any other kind most unwholesome; he never reads protestant historians; and he has never thought about even a single standard of morality. Double standard, indeed! As if there weren’t as many standards as there are people.”

“Not nearly, Mrs. Croft, fortunately. I’m sure Aubrey himself can’t contribute one; nor can I. But it is stupid of Aubrey not to read poor Mr. Froude. He is such a noble and happy liar. He really does practise lying for lying’s sake--not like Macaulay, mere utilitarian lying, for principle’s sake, though he does some of that too. Froude is an artist. He will be missed, even though he is a protestant. He hates accuracy with as much passion as the good popes hated thought, as Oscar Wilde says somewhere à propos of something else. (Oscar’s grammar is so often loose.) How right both Mr. Froude and the good popes are! Look at Denman being firm with the sinners; how delightfully he does it; he would make a good prison warder.”

“The sinners,” said Miss Garden, regarding them through her monocle, “certainly are rather strange. I am afraid they have both drunk to excess. There, now he has piloted them safely to the door; that is a relief. Yes, Stanley, do fetch me Mr. Beardsley. Will he shock me to-night? I was told that the other evening he shocked his table at the Café Royal to death by his talk. John Lane had to remove him. It is possible to go too far even for the Café Royal, and he did it. I suppose that is why he is looking so elated to-night, like Alexander seeking fresh worlds to conquer. ‘He shocked the Café Royal.’ What an epitaph! On the other hand, I hear that he was shocked himself the other day. Mr. Henley did it, in bluff mood, at a party at the Pennells’. How do you do, Mr. Beardsley?”

16

DIVORCE AT THE CROFTS’

It did not last, the Crofts’ marriage. In the spring of ’95, Stanley wearied of her husband’s infidelities, and could not bear them any more. As to Denman, he felt often, though he loved her, that he had married a young woman who had her tiresome aspects; she was a feminist, a prig, she tried to write, and badly at that, she was still over-much concerned with public affairs, with committees, with the emancipation (save the mark!) of women. And she was for ever fussing over the children, who should be treated as amusing toys. He loved her, but she tried him often. She was strident, obstinate, stupidly in earnest about things that seemed to him to demand a light indifference; then, cumbrously, she would try to adopt his tone, and fail. Marriage. Well, it presented great difficulties. He sighed sometimes for the freedom of his bachelor days. Meanwhile, life had its moments, exquisite, fleeting, frail. And at these Stanley, who was not really stupid, guessed quite accurately, and was stabbed by each afresh until her very life-blood seemed to drain away, leaving her, so she felt, a helpless ghost of a woman, without assurance, heart or power to go on, but only her stabbed love and a proud, burning rage. And, in the spring of ’95, she broached this matter of divorce.

He asked her forgiveness.

“I can’t help it, Stanley. I suppose it’s the way I’m made.... The queer thing is, I’ve loved you all the time. You can’t understand that. Women are so--so monogamous.”

“That old cliché, Den! It isn’t clever enough for you. Some men are monogamous. Some men couldn’t love several women at the same time. And some women can.... I’m dead sick of it, anyhow. All this beastly philandering. It’s merely trivial. It _means_ nothing. It’s turning life and love into a parlour game. Do you take nothing seriously, Denman--not your relations with people, or with love, or with life--not even your fatherhood?”

“Oh, don’t preach at me. I’m a waster, if you like, and let’s leave it at that.... I’m damnably sorry for everything, of course.... But you’re not altogether and always easy to live with, you know. All this stuff about women, for instance ... you know how I hate it....”

“You know how I hate _your_ stuff about women, if we are to drag in that now.... Oh, Den, don’t let’s be childish. What does all that matter now? We’re up against a much bigger thing than a difference of opinion about the suffrage.”

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

“Oh, I suppose I could forgive you. I could forgive you anything, perhaps. I have before, after all. But I think I had better not, for all our sakes. You’d rather be free, wouldn’t you? Oh, you needn’t answer. I know you’d rather be free. I don’t suspect you of wanting to live permanently with Alice Pember, or with anyone else; you just want to be free and irresponsible, and make love to whom you like. Well, you shall. I shan’t keep you. You’re not meant for a husband and father, and you’ve tired yourself long enough trying to be one. You can drop it now.”

“I suppose you’re right, from your point of view. You’d better divorce me.... I’m terribly sorry, Stan. We were so tremendously happy once.”

“Don’t.” Stanley caught her breath and sharply bit her lip. “You’ve no right to talk of that. That’s all past. We’ve not been happy for a long time now.... And you know you despise me and think me a fool.... Oh, what’s the use of talking?...”

Three days later Stanley, with her son and daughter, aged four and two, left her husband’s house and took up her temporary abode with her parents, while her divorce suit slowly prepared itself.

“Divorce is damnable,” Stanley said to Rome. “Why should people be penalised by having to go through this ghastly business, with all its loathsome publicity, merely because they wish to annul a private contract which only concerns themselves? Why shouldn’t they be able to go to a lawyer together and say, ‘Annul this contract,’ as with any other contract? Instead of which, if it’s even suspected that they _both_ want it annulled, they’re not allowed to do it at all; and if it’s the wife who wants it, they have to fake up this ridiculous cruelty-or-desertion business. And, above all, why should we be gibbetted in the newspapers for doing a purely private piece of legal business? Why, in the name of decency and common-sense, should a thing become public news merely because it occurs in a law-court? And is our whole English constitution and system so rotten because we are rotten, or aren’t our laws a long way behind public opinion?... Sometimes I think I can’t go through with it, it’s all so beastly, but that we’ll just live apart without a divorce. But I know that wouldn’t do. There’s got to be something desperately final between Denman and me, or we might be coming together again, when he’s tired of Alice Pember. I love him so much, beneath everything, that if he wanted to I probably should. And I know it would be no use. We should make nothing of it now. It would be bad for both of us, and worse for Billy and Molly. And it would all happen again. No, it’s got to be a clean cut, even if the imbecile state only allows us to have it on these disgusting terms.... Sometimes, Rome, I think the whole world and its laws and systems and conventions is just a lunatic asylum.”

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

“_Rome, how does one bear it?_”

Stanley, whose way it was to express her joys and griefs--she was not self-contained, like Rome--was pacing up and down the room, her hands clenched behind her, her cheeks flushed with feverish, waking nights, her eyes heavy under sullen brows.

“I hardly know,” Rome answered her, gently. “I hardly know. But, somehow, one goes on, and one learns to be amused again.... I am hoping that when one is elderly one will mind less. You _will_ mind less, Stanley, in a few years. Life’s so strong, it carries one on all the time to new things. Particularly, I think, you, because you are so alive. You’ll come through even this desperate business.”

Stanley said, “Life’s broken to bits. I was so happy once.... Broken to jagged bits,” and left the room to cry. For, contrary to a common belief, those who feel most usually cry most too. Stanley was afraid that she was contracting a tearful habit such as she might never outgrow, but she did not much care. She did not much care for anything in these days.

She missed Denman. Missing him was like the continual sharp ache of a gathered tooth. She missed his charm, his brilliance, his love, his careless, casual ways, his intense life, his soft, husky voice, the smile on his queer white face and narrow eyes. She missed his gay, youthful talk, the parties and plays they had been used to go to together, his constant presence in the house. She would wake in the nights, thinking he lay beside her, and that his arm would be thrown, in a half waking caress, across her; but he was not there. She would wake in the mornings, thinking to see his rumpled brown head sunk in the pillow beside hers; but there was no head and no pillow but her own. When her son and daughter entered her room in the morning and climbed upon her bed, after the irritating manner of infants, and woke her by pulling at her two dark plaits, she would open drowsy eyes that looked for her husband’s short, delightful face smiling above her; but there were only the two young children, with their restless antics and imbecile prattlings. Fatuous beings! One day she would enjoy them again, antics, fatuity and all, even as she had enjoyed them before, but in these days her love for them lay frozen and almost lifeless, with all other love but that one love that tore at her heart with fierce, clawing fingers. It seemed that this love and this anguish consumed her wholly, leaving nothing over. She had never been first a mother; she had been first an individual, a human creature sensitively reacting to all the contacts of the engrossing world, and secondly she had been a wife, a woman who loved a man. A mother, perhaps, third. And now the secondary function, in its death agony, had taken entire possession, and she was no longer either an individual creature or a mother, but only a lover who had lost all.

To tear him out of her heart--that was her constant object. And if the heart (since we are, by foolish custom, so impelled to call the seat of the affections) had been alone involved, she might have done so. But who should tear the beloved from the roots he had in her whole daily life for five years, from his place in her mind, her brain, her body, her whole being? She knew him for a philanderer, a trivial taster in love and life; selfish, spoilt, vain, with idiotic opinions about one half of the human race. It was, indeed, her knowledge of all this in him that informed her brain that their separation must be final and complete. But, with it all, she could not tear him from her heart, her soul, her body, her entire and constant life. He was herself, and she herself was being torn in two.

Life was a continual anguish. She saw that she must leave her parents’ home and live alone. She was bringing misery into Bloomsbury Square. And daily, night and morning, her parents kissed her, and their kisses were to her, who craved so bitterly those kisses that she might no longer have, a continual reminder and torment. She was trying to shut off that side of life, but they did not understand, and kissed her. Rome, who understood too well, did not kiss her. She knew that she must be alone with her children, that she was no fit housemate for a loving family or friends. So, presently, she went into rooms, and this was a more bearable loneliness.

But it left more time on her hands; more time in which to brood on life, on love, on illusion, on women and on men. How had she failed in this job of marriage, of constructing an enduring life with a man she had loved, who had loved her? How had they both failed? How frequent was this failure! It seemed that love was not enough. Such deep misunderstandings prevail, between any two human beings. Sex bridges many of them, but not all. Stanley began, at this time, to generalise dangerously and inaccurately (since all such generalisations are inaccurate) about women and about men. She saw women as eager, restless, nervous children, chattering, discussing, joking, turning the world upside down together while they smoked or brushed their hair, and all to so little purpose. Meanwhile there were men; the sex; sphinx-like, placid, inscrutable, practical, doing the next thing, gently smiling at the fuss women made about ideas. Men knew that they did not matter, these excitements and fusses of women, any more than the toys children play with matter. They dismissed them with that serene smile of theirs, and busied themselves with the elemental, enduring things: sex, fatherhood, work. They knew what mattered; they went for the essentials. They didn’t waste their time frothing about with words and ideas. Men were somehow admirable, in their strong stability. Their nervous systems were so magnificent. They could kill animals without feeling sick, break the necks of fishes, put worms on hooks, shoot rabbits and birds, jab bayonets into bodies. Women would never amount to much in this world, because they nearly all have a nervous disease; they are strung on wires; they are like children frightened of the dark and excited by the day. It seems fundamental, this difference between the nerves of most women and most men. You see it among little girls and boys; most little boys, but how few little girls, can squash insects and kill rabbits without a qualm. It is this difference which gives even a stupid man often a greater mastery over life than a clever woman. He is not frightened by life. Women, for the most part, are. Life may be a joke to them, but it is often also a nightmare. To the average man it is neither. Men are marvellously restful. Eternal symbols of parenthood and the stability of life, to which women come back, as to strong towers of refuge, after their excursions and alarms.

This was the kind of nonsense which Stanley wove to herself during these unbalanced days of her life. Nonsense, because all generalities about human beings are nonsense. But many people, including Stanley, find interest in making them up, and it is a harmless game.

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....

Imogen, who had always meant to be a sailor, and who even now blindly hoped that somehow, before she reached the age for Osborne, a way would be made for her (either she would become a boy, or dress up as a boy, or the rule excluding girls from the senior service would be relaxed), gasped and screwed her hands tightly together against her palpitating breast. Here were sailors. Straight from the tossing blue sea; straight from pacing the quarter-deck, spyglass in hand, spying for enemy craft, climbing the rigging, setting her hard-a-port, manning the guns, raking the enemy amidships, holding up slavers, receiving surrendered swords.... Here, in brief, were sailors; and the junior service faded from the stage. Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves. The moment was almost too excessive for a budding sailor, with wet eyes and lips pressed tight together to keep the face steady. Fortunately it passed, and was succeeded by the First Prussian Dragoon Guards, great men with golden helmets, who could be admired without passion, and by strange brown men with turbans and big beards.

“Indians,” Vicky said, and Indians too one knew from Kipling. And, “Sir Partab Singh,” added the informing voice.

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

“Some kind of chief, yes.”

Other brown men followed the Indians--little coppery, fuzzy Maoris; and with them rode splendid white men from New Zealand, and slouch-hatted Rhodesian Horse.

“From South Africa.... You remember Dr. Jim and his raid and Cecil Rhodes ... the Christmas holidays before last....”

“When the chair broke and I cut my head.” Yes, Imogen remembered, though she had been only seven then. Over the Transvaal border, then a gallop for life or death.... The chair was still broken.... Everyone seemed to remember Dr. Jim and his raid and Cecil Rhodes, for the slouch-hatted riders were cheered and cheered. Hurrah for South Africa! “Political trouble, much less war, cannot now be apprehended,” the _Times_ had said that morning, in a pæan of Jubilee satisfaction with sixty years of progress abroad and at home.

The best was over, for now began carriages--landaus and pairs. Foreign envoys. The Papal Nuncio sharing a landau with a gentleman from China, who cooled himself with a painted fan. Landau after landau bearing royal gentlemen, royal ladies. What a pity for them to be borne tamely in landaus instead of a-horseback!

A colonial escort; an Indian escort; Lord Wolseley.

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

Eight cream horses soberly drawing an open carriage, surrounded by postillions and red-coated running footmen; and in the carriage the little stout old lady, black-dressed, with black and white bonnet, and with her the beautiful Princess in heliotrope, dressed in the then current fashion, which royal ladies have adhered to ever since, never allowing themselves to be unsettled by the modes of the new century.

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

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

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

“A record to be proud of,” said papa.

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

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

Behind them people were saying loyal Victorian things to one another about the dear old Queen.

“She’s got the hearts of the Empire all right,” they were saying, “whether they’re under white skins or brown,” and, “God bless our dear Queen,” and, “How well she looks to-day,” and, “She’s an Empress, but she’s a woman first. That’s why we all love her so,” and so on and so forth.

And, “There goes the Prince,” they said, applauding now the burly middle-aged gentleman riding his horse by his mother’s carriage.

“He must be gettin’ pretty impatient, poor man,” said Amy. “Nearly sixty himself, and mamma still going strong. I expect he thinks this ought to be his silver Jubilee, not mamma’s diamond one.”

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

Imogen’s heart swelled for the Empress-Queen and the crash of loyalty, but not to bursting-point; for here was only a little old lady in a carriage (though drawn by eight cream horses like a fairy godmother’s), and it is the swagger of gallantry that stirs. Sailors, soldiers, explorers, martyrs, firemen, circus-riders, Blondin on his rope, Christ on his cross, Joan of Arc on her white steed or her red pile--these are they that shake the soul to tears. Not old ladies, however mighty, who have sat on a throne for sixty years.

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

“_Oh, mother, where?_”

The Prince of Wales. Gallant figure of legend. Young, noble, princely, with caracolling charger and a triple white plume in a silver helm. The bravest and the most chivalrous of the knights. Where was the Prince of Wales--“_Oh, mother, where?_”

“There--don’t you see him? The big man in uniform with a grey beard, riding by the Queen’s carriage.”

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

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

“Of course. Why shouldn’t it be?”

A thousand reasons why it shouldn’t be. A hundred thousand reasons.... But in vain their legions beat against the hard little fact it _was_. Imogen’s soaring heart sank like a stone in water. Fearful doubts whispered. Had all the Princes of Wales been like that--fat elderly men with grey beards? The Black Prince.... Oh, no, not the Black Prince....

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

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

“The Black Prince....”

“Forget him, my precious. Don’t let any prince weigh on your little mind. Here comes the music. Do you hear the pipes, children?”

So the great procession passed eastward, to rejoice Trafalgar Square, the Strand, Fleet Street and the lands across the river.

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

“Yes.” Imogen nodded, with the sun in her screwed-up eyes. “I wish we could run very fast down the streets to where they haven’t passed yet, and see them all again. Do you think we could, mother?”

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

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

Vicky looked down, startled, at her daughter.

“_Imogen._ Aren’t you well?”

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

“Well, sit down till it’s over.... Bless the child. It’s the heat and the excitement. She gets taken like that sometimes, by way of reaction after her treats--most tiresome.”

“Poor little mite.”

“How are you feeling now, Jennie?”

Imogen said nothing. Yellow as cream cheese, she sat in her seat and asked God not to disgrace her by letting her be sick in public, in the grand stand, on Jubilee Day, with all London looking on.

But, “I’m not sure, mother, that I do very much believe in prayers,” she said to Vicky that evening.

26

RECESSIONAL

Triumphant patriotism is all very well; Proud imperialism is all very well. But these things should be carried on with a swagger, like a panache, with a hint of the gay and the absurd, marching, as it were, to the wild, conceited noise of skirling pipes. People of all nations, but more particularly the English, are apt to forget this, and bear their patriotism heavily, unctuously, speak solemnly of the white man’s burden, and introduce religion into the gay and worldly affair.

Rudyard Kipling did this, on July 17th of Jubilee year, when he published in the _Times_ “Recessional,” beginning,--

“God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle line, Beneath Whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine-- Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget.”

Stanley read it at breakfast, and shuddered. It was such a poem as the Jews might have made, in the days of Israel’s glory--terribly godly and solemn. It was addressed to Jehovah, the Jewish Lord of Hosts. Those Jews! How their influence lasts! Beneath Whose awful Hand we hold.... Awful is a bad word, and hand should never, whosesoever hand it is, have a capital “h” (but that might have been the printer’s fault, as anyone who knows printers must, in fairness, admit), and dominion over palm and pine is much too delightful and romantic a thing to be spoilt by being thus held. And, further down, it was worse.

“If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law....”

Are we then Jews, and not Gentiles? And what Law? And lesser breeds--that was worst of all.

The whole poem seemed to Stanley so heavily ruinous of a jolly thing, so terribly expressive of the solemn pomposity into which national pride is ever ready to stumble, that it tarnished for her something young and buoyant and absurd into which she had flung herself of late. As Miss Edith Cavell remarked twenty years later, patriotism is not enough. It needs to be as the cherishing love a man has for the soil of his home; or as the bitter, desperate striving unto death of the oppressed race, the damned desperation of the rebel; or as the gay and gallant flying of gaudy banners. Successful, smug, solemn, conquering patriotism is not nearly enough--or perhaps it is a good deal too much. Anyhow, it is all wrong.

“What a man!” Stanley muttered, meaning Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who did, if anyone, know all about the adventure of empire-building, its swagger, glitter and romance, and must needs turn himself into a preacher.

Stanley’s niece, Imogen, happened to have “Recessional” read aloud to her form at school, by one whom she greatly loved (for it must be owned that this unbalanced child only too readily adored those who taught her), and shyly she wriggled her mind away from the sense of the sounding lines. She liked,

“Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire; Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre....”

and,

“The tumult and the shouting dies, The captains and the kings depart....”

and,

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

but disliked the rest. If Miss Treherne liked it, it must, she knew, be somehow good; further, it was by Kipling, who had made Mowgli, and,

“It’s north you may run to the rime-ringed sun, Or south to the blind Horn’s hate; Or east all the way into Mississippi Bay, Or west to the Golden Gate....”

But all the same, Imogen had no use for it. In the foolish jargon of school, it was “pi.”

But newspapers said at the time, and history books have said since, that this poem sounded a fine and needed note; and, in fact, it was a good deal liked. Mr. Garden liked it. Mr. Garden was afraid that Britain was getting a little above itself with Empire. As, indeed, it doubtless was, said Stanley, and why not? Empires, like life, only endure for a brief period, and we may as well enjoy them while we may. They are wasted on those who do not enjoy them. Time bears us off, as lightly as the wind lifts up the smoke and carries it away.... The grave’s a fine and private place, but in it there are no empires, only the valiant dust that builds on dust, and has come to dust at the last. So let us by all means be above ourselves while we may and if we can, in the brief space that is ours before we must be below ourselves for ever.

Mr. Garden replied that there may be many brief spaces to come, for all of us, and we should be training ourselves for these.... For papa was still a Theosophist, and believed in infinitely numerous reincarnations. He did not desire them, for he had had troubles enough, for one; but he knew that they would occur. He looked with apprehension down a vista of lives. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, to the last syllable of recorded time--or anyhow, until papa should be made perfect--and that, papa humbly felt, was a very long time ahead.

27

BOND STREET

London glittered sweetly, washed by the May sun. The streets were bland and gay, like a lady of fashion taking the air. Miss Garden walked abroad, bland and gay too, slim and erect in neat coat and skirt (skirt touching the pavement as she walked--disgusting, but skirts did), lace jabot at the high stock collar, and large beribboned hat, tipped a little forward so that the sunshine caught the fair hair sweeping upward from the nape. She led a huge Borzoi on a leash, and as she walked she surveyed London, its people, its streets, its shops. In a gold net purse bag she carried notes and clinking sovereigns. She had gambled to good purpose last night at bridge, the new card game. She was a great gambler. Bridge, whist, baccarat, poker, roulette and Monte Carlo--at all these she won and lost, with the same equable sangfroid. Her parents did not like it, though Rome’s income, left her by her grandfather, was her own. They did not, in many ways, approve of their clever Rome, so unlike themselves. But on such disapprovals, so Rome assured them, family life is based. Mutual disapproval, mutual toleration; that is family, as, indeed, so much other, life.

Anyhow, Rome gambled. The older she grew the more greatly and intelligently she gambled. She had her systems, ingeniously worked out, for Monte Carlo. She had been there this Easter, together with her friend and ally, Guy Donkin, a cheerful barrister three years her junior, who had been used to ask her to marry him, but had now settled down to a sporting friendship and confided to her his fleeting affairs of the heart. Here again Mr. and Mrs. Garden disapproved. Going to Monte Carlo to meet a man; staying at the same hotel with him; seen everywhere with him; even in the late, the very late thirties, was this right or wise? It set people talking....

“As to that,” Rome carelessly dismissed it, “be sure people will always talk. You may be sure, too, mamma, that Guy and I do nothing not _comme-il-faut_. We are both too worldly-wise for that. We may _épater_ the bourgeois possibly, but we shan’t _épater_ our own world. We know its foolish rules, and we both find it more comfortable to keep them.”

Entirely of the world Miss Garden looked, this May morning, strolling down Bond Street, a little cynical, a little blasé, very well-dressed, intensely civilised, exquisitely poised, delicately, cleanly fair. She would soon be thirty-nine, and looked just that, neither more nor less.

A window full of jade caught her roving eye. She went in; she bought a clear jade elephant, and a dull jade lump that swung on a fine platinum chain. She also got a tortoise-shell cigarette case.

She stopped next at a window full of little dogs. Big-headed Sealeyham puppies; Poltalloch terriers. These she looked at critically. She meant to have a Poltalloch, but to order one from their home in the West Highlands when next she stayed there. Adorable puppies. The Borzoi sniffed at them through plate glass, and grunted.

Irish lace. Jabots of _pointe de Venise_, and deep collars of Honiton and _pointe de Flandres_, and handkerchiefs edged with Chantilly. Miss Garden entered the shop; came out with a jabot for herself, handkerchiefs for Vicky’s birthday. Then ivory opera glasses, and an amber cigarette holder caught her fancy. Soon her free hand was slung with neat paper packages. That was a bore; she wished she had had them all sent.

She strolled on, turned into Stewart’s, ordered a box of chocolates for Stanley’s children, and met Mr. Guy Donkin for lunch. They were going to a picture show together.

“I am not,” said Miss Garden, “fit for a respectable picture gallery, as you see.” She indicated the packages and the Borzoi. “But nevertheless we will go. Jeremy shall wait in the street while we criticise the art of our friends. I was overtaken this morning by the lust of possession. I often get it on fine mornings after fortunate nights. I find that the gambler’s life works out, on the whole, pretty evenly--what one makes at the dice one loses in the shops. And what one loses at play one saves off the shops. One walk abroad, looking at everything and buying nothing, will save one some hundreds of pounds. It is the easiest way of gaining, though not the most amusing.... I see you have a lunch edition. How go the wars?”

The most noticeable wars at the moment were those between America and Spain, and between Great Britain and the Soudanese.

“Dewey’s occupied Manila. The Fuzzies have lost three more zarebas. It must be warm for fighting out there to-day.... Here’s an article by some Dean on the vulgarity of modern extravagances. Meant for you, Rome, with all your packages.... _Are_ we specially extravagant just now? I suppose there’s a lot of money going about, one way and another. Business is so good. And all these gold mines and companies.... The Dean is worrying about the growing habit of entertaining in restaurants instead of in the home. Why not? And about women taking to cosmetics again, after a century of abstinence. Again, why not? I agree with Max about that. The clergy do worry so, poor dears; if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Oh, and on Tuesday we’re all to wear a white rose, for the Old Man’s funeral day.”

“How touching! It will please papa. He’s really distressed about the Old Man; he thinks politics on the grand scale are over, and that the giants are dead. Politics and politicians are certainly intensely dull in these days; but then, except for an occasional gleam, they probably always were. Partly because people insist on taking them so solemnly, instead of as a farce.... There’s my ex-brother-in-law, lunching with a quite new and lovely young woman. He always smiles at me, blandly and without shame. I can’t forgive him for spoiling Stanley’s life, but I can’t help rather liking him still. He always sends us tickets for his first nights, and they’re very amusing. A shameless reactionary, but so witty. Maurice and Irving cut him, which I think crude. Men are so intolerant. I cut no one, except when I’m afraid of being bored by them. Thank you, yes: Turkish.”

They strolled off through the pleasant city to look at pictures, which they could both criticise with as much intelligence as was necessary, and Miss Garden with rather more. Then Mr. Donkin returned to the Bar, and Miss Garden drove home in a hansom with the Borzoi and the gleanings from Bond Street. At five she was going to an At Home somewhere; later she was dining out and going to the opera. Life was full; life was amusing; life hung a brilliant curtain over the abyss. From the abyss Miss Garden turned her eyes; in it lay love and death, locked bitterly together for evermore.

28

LAST LAP

1898 swaggered by under a hot summer sun. The century swaggered deathwards, gay with gold and fatness, unsteady, dark and confused. “The Belle of New York” at the theatres, the Simple Life on the land, free-wheel bicycles on the road, motor cars, coming first in single spies, then in battalions, the victory of Omdurman, Kitchener occupying Khartoum and the French Fashoda, unpleasant international incidents (for international incidents are always unpleasant), millionaires rising like stars, fortunes made and spent, business booming, companies floated and burst, names of drinks, provender and medicines flaming from the skies, Swinburne publishing “Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards,” Mr. Yeats “The Wind Among the Reeds,” Mr. Kipling “Stalky & Co.” and “The Day’s Work,” Mr. Conrad “Tales of Unrest,” Mr. Stephen Phillips “Paolo and Francesca,” Mr. Thomas Hardy “Wessex Poems,” Mr. H. G. Wells “The War of the Worlds,” Miss Mary Cholmondeley “Red Pottage,” Mrs. Humphry Ward “Helbeck of Bannisdale,” Mr. Maurice Hewlett “The Forest Lovers,” Mr. Kenneth Grahame “Dream Days,” Mr. Hall Caine “The Christian,” George Meredith greeted by literary England on his seventieth birthday, bad novels pouring into the libraries with terrifying increase of speed, wireless telegraphy used at sea, flying machines experimented with, Liberals sickening with Imperialism or Little Englandism, Conservatives with jingoism run mad, the _Speaker_ changing hands, the Encyclopædia Britannica sold by the _Times_, anti-ritualist agitations, armament limitation conferences convened by Russia and attended by the Powers, all of whom were busy as bees at home increasing their armies and navies and hatching military plots.

And then the South African Uitlanders sent complaints and petitions from the Rand, and despatches began to pass between Her Majesty’s government and President Kruger’s. Despatches are most unfortunate and unwise means of communication; they always make trouble.

There was bound to be war, people began saying. Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Rhodes intended it, and would not be happy till they got it. Probably President Kruger and his Burghers also intended it. Certainly the Uitlanders hoped for it. The British public were not averse. They hated the Boers, and wanted excitement and more Empire. It was a hopeless business. War was bound to come, and came, in October, 1899.

Mr. Garden said, “A bad business. Gladstone would never have let it come to this. One doesn’t trust Chamberlain. A bad, dishonest business.”

Mrs. Garden said, “Those poor lads going out just before the winter....”

Vicky said, “Charles says it won’t be long. We shall have them asking for terms in a month.”

Maurice said, “That damned jingo, Chamberlain,” and filled his fountain pen with more vitriol.

Amy said, “Those canting, snuffling old farmers. _They_ won’t keep us long.”

Rome said, “Unfortunate. But it’s a way in which centuries often end.”

Stanley said, “Right or wrong, we’ve got to win now.”

Irving said, “I shall take the opportunity to run out and see to my mining interests. Up the Rand,” and he enlisted in the C. I. V. and went.

Una said, “War! How silly. If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Why not leave the poor farmers alone?” For she sympathised with farmers, and was all for leaving people alone.

The children of all of them shouted for the soldiers and the flag, and sang “Soldiers of the Queen.”

“And when we say we’ve always won, And when they ask us how it’s done....”

A very bright song. That was the right, amusing spirit of patriotism, not the “Recessional,” and not prayers sent forth for the people’s use by Bishops.

Vicky’s children got up early one morning in the Christmas holidays without leave, and saw a detachment of the C. I. V. go off from Victoria. There was a raw, yellow fog, and the khaki figures loomed oddly through it. The press of the swaying, shouting crowd was terrifying, exhilarating. Imogen, linked up between Phyllis and Hugh, was crushed, swung, caught off her feet. Persons of eleven had no business in that crowd. Phyllis and Nancy had not wanted her and Tony to come, but they had firmly done so. Imogen could scarcely see the soldiers, only the broad backs her face was pressed against. Herd enthusiasm caught and held them all, and they shouted and sang with the rest, hoarsely, choking in the fog.

“They’ll all be killed,” sobbed a woman close to them. “We’ll never see their brave faces again....”

At that Imogen’s eyes brimmed over, but she could not put up her hands to wipe them, for her arms were tight wedged. She could only snuffle and blink. Splendid heroes! They would be killed by the Boers, sure enough, every one of them.... Horrible Boers with great Bibles and sjamboks and guns. Hateful, hateful Boers. If only one were allowed to go and fight them, as Uncle Irving was going. Thank Heaven, it was rather age than sex that kept one from doing that; the boys couldn’t go any more than Imogen could. If the boys had been old enough and had gone, Imogen would somehow, she felt sure, have gone too. To be left out was too awful.

But these were grown men. Splendid men. Lucky men, for they would soon be roving the veldt with guns and bayonets under the African sun; they would lurk in ambush behind kopjes and arise and slay their brother Boer, the canting, bearded foe, with great slaughter. Even if they did never come back, how could man die better?

The crowd swayed and shoved, lifting the children from their feet. Imogen’s chest was crushed against the back in front of her; she fought for breath. There was an acrid, musty smell; the raw air was close with breathing.

A crowd is queer. A number of individuals gather together for one purpose, and you get not a number of individuals, but a crowd. It is like a new, strange animal, sub-human. It may do anything. Go crazy with panic, or rage, or excitement, or delight. Now it was enthusiasm that gripped and swayed it, and caused it to shout and sing. Songs rippled over it, starting somewhere, caught from mouth to mouth.

“Cook’s son, duke’s son, son of a belted earl.... Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay....”

And then again the constant chorus--“God bless you, Tommy Atkins, here’s your country’s love to you!”

It was over at last. The heroes had gone. The crowd broke and pushed out from the station gates, flooding the choked yellow streets.

“There’s our bus,” said Phyllis, a good organiser. “Come on. Stick together.”

They besieged and rushed the bus as troops rush a fort. Being vigorous and athletic children, they stormed it successfully.

“We shall catch it from mother,” said Phyllis, now they had leisure to look ahead. “But it’s been worth it.”

29

OF CENTURIES

That sad, disappointing, disillusioning, silly war crawled through that bitter winter of defeat, until by sheer force of numbers, the undefeatable Boers were a little checked in the spring of 1900.

Life is disappointing. Imogen, along with many others, thought and hoped that 1900 would be a new century. It was not a new century. There was quite a case for its being so. When you turned twelve, you began your thirteenth year. When you had counted up to 100 you had completed that hundred and were good for the next. It all depended on whether you numbered the completion of a year from the first day when you began saying 1900, or not till its last day, when you stopped saying it. The Astronomer Royal adjudicated that it was on its last day, and that they had, in fact, said 1900 prematurely, saying it before the last second of December the 31st. He may have been right. He probably was right. But the disappointment of the young, to whom a year is very long, its end hidden in mists, like mountain tops which you perhaps shall never reach--the disappointment of the young at the opening of the year 1900 was very great.

“At all events,” said Imogen, “we can write 1900. We can say, ‘It’s 1900.’” But what one could not say was, “I remember, last century, going to the sea-side for the holidays....” “Last century bicycles and steam engines came in ...” or, “We, of the twentieth century....” That would have to wait.

The funny thing was that you could not, however hard you thought, lay your finger on the moment when the new century would be born. Imogen used to try, lying in bed before she went to sleep. One second you said, “We of the nineteenth century”; the next second you said, “We of the twentieth century.” But there must be a moment in between, when it was neither; surely there must. A queer little isolated point in time, with no magnitude, but only position.... The same point must be between one day and the next, one hour and the next ... all points in time were such points ... but you could never find them ... always you either looked forward or looked back ... you said, “now--now--now,” trying to catch now, but you never could ... and such vain communings with time lead one drowsily into sleep.

30

PRO-BOER

In Stanley the Boer War slew the jingo spirit, turned back on itself the cresting wave of imperialism. Not because it was an ill-fought, stupidly managed, for long unsuccessful war, but because it was war, and war was, when seen functioning, senseless and horrible. It was nearly as bad when Great Britain at last began to defeat the too clever farmers. It was almost worst in the summer of 1900, when the news of the relief of Mafeking caused so much more tempestuous a hysteria than the other reliefs had caused, and when Lord Roberts occupied Johannesburg and proclaimed the annexation of the Orange Free State, and when Pretoria was taken, and yet the war went on and on and on.

“Is this the way,” asked Liberals, “to secure in the end any kind of working reconciliation between ourselves and the conquered enemy? If Great Britain wishes to be burdened for ever with a sullen, hostile, exasperated people, embittered with the memory of burnt farms, useless slaughter and destruction, she is taking the right course.” And so forth. Liberals always talk like that. Those who disagreed merely retorted, “Pro-Boer,” which took less time. The Latin word “pro” has been found always very useful and insulting.

Stanley became a pro-Boer. She disliked all she knew of Boers very much, but that had nothing to do with it. A pro-Boer, like a pro-German much later, was one who was in favour of making terms with the enemy on the victories already gained. The Conciliation Committee were pro-Boer. The Liberal newspapers were pro-Boer, except the _Chronicle_, which threw Mr. Massingham overboard to be pro-Boer by himself. Maurice Garden was, of course, pro-Boer. He loathed Boers, the heavy-witted, brutal Bible-men, with their unctuous Cromwellian cant. But fiercely and contemptuously he was pro-Boer. Rome, too, was pro-Boer; had been from the first.

“A most unpleasant people,” she had said. “What a mistake not to leave them to themselves! If the Uitlanders disliked them as much as I should, they wouldn’t go on living there and sending complaints to us; they would come away. All this imperialism is so very unbalanced.”

“Worse than unbalanced, Rome,” her papa sadly said. “One hesitates to speak harshly, but it must be called un-Christian. The Churches have gone terribly astray over it. The unhappy Churches....”

Unhappy because terribly astray on so many topics, papa meant. Even now he was mourning the death of his friend Dr. Mivart, who had been deprived of the sacraments of his church because he had, in the _Nineteenth Century_ and the _Fortnightly Review_, written articles, however reverent, on “The Continuity of Catholicism,” and in them seemed to give to the infallible authority of the Church a lower place than to human reason. Alas for the Catholic Church, which so treated its best sons! Never, papa knew, could he join that great Church again. Religion too had suffered a heavy blow in the death, in January, of Dr. Martineau. And Ruskin also went that month.... Like leaves the great Victorians were falling. Papa, brooding over a great epoch so soon to close, could not but be a pro-Boer and hope that this horrid war, which jarred and confused its last years, would soon end.

As for Maurice, his newspaper office was raided and smashed on Mafeking night, and he himself carried out and ducked in Trafalgar Square basin. No one hurt him. No one wanted, on this happy, good-humoured night, to hurt this small, frail, scornful, slightly intoxicated, obviously courageous editor, who brightly insulted them to their faces as they tied him up.

Vicky’s children were not pro-Boer. No one could have called them that. They were all for a good whacking victory. Imogen, it must be owned, did once, in a moment of seeing the point of view of the foe (Imogen usually saw all the points of view there were to see; her eye was not single, which made life a very dizzy business for her), write a poem beginning:

“Across the great Vaal River we northward trekked and came, Set up our own dominion, and men acknowledged the same; And close behind us followed the Alien whom we scorn, With his eager clutching fingers and his lust for gold new-born.

“‘There is wealth,’ he cried; ‘I will dig,’ he cried; Between him and us may the Lord decide! Through the Lord’s good might, 5 1-2 By the sword’s good right, Let us up and smite our enemies and put our foes to flight!”

Imogen was not ill-pleased with that poem, which had ten verses, and which she wrote for a school composition. It seemed to her a fine expression of sturdy Boer patriotism, however misguided.

“I can see their point of view,” she said to herself, righteously, and pleased with the phrase. “Most people” (which meant, it need scarcely be said, most of the other girls at school), “can’t see it, but I can. They’re beastly, and I’m glad they’re beaten, but I see their point of view.” She said so to some other little girls in the Third Remove. But the other little girls, who didn’t see the Boers’ point of view, said, “Oh! Are you a pro-Boer? I say, Imogen Carrington’s a pro-Boer.” “Your uncle was ducked in Trafalgar Square, wasn’t he?” said someone else, curiously but not unkindly, and in the diffident voice suitable to family scandals, “for being a pro-Boer. Do you think the same as him?”

Imogen, blushing, disclaimed this.

“Daddy and mother think Uncle Maurice awfully wrong, and so do I. He’s a _real_ pro-Boer.”

“Well, what are you? Are you only shamming pro-Boer?”

“I’m not a pro-Boer at all. I’m pro-us. I only said I could see their point of view....”

“Oh, you do talk tosh. Point of view. No one but grown-up people uses words like that. Imogen’s getting awfully cocky now Miss Cradock always says her compositions are good. Come and play tig.”

And, since little girls at school are very seldom unkind, they included Imogen in the game and bore no malice.

Irving was no pro-Boer. He wrote home, in the autumn of 1900, “We’re getting on, but we’re not near finished with brother Boer yet. Maurice is talking through his hat, as usual. Any fool out here knows that if we’re to suck any advantage out of this war (and there’s no small advantage to be sucked, I can tell you), we’ve got to _win_ it. Those radical gas-bags at home don’t know the first thing about it.”

It is an eternal and familiar dispute, and which side one takes in it really seems to depend more on temperament than on the amount one knows about it.

31

END OF VICTORIANISM

The nineteenth century did actually end at last. Probably everyone over twelve and under seventy sat up to see it out, to see the twentieth in, to catch that elusive, dramatic moment and savour it.

The twentieth century. Imogen, when she woke on New Year’s Day, could scarcely believe it. It was perhaps, she thought, a drunken dream. For the Carringtons, like all right-thinking persons, always kept Hogmanny in punch. But the twentieth century it was, and a clear frosty morning. Imogen shouted to Nancy, lying in intoxicated slumbers in the other bed, “Happy new century,” lest Nancy should say it first, then looked at the new century out of the window. What a jolly century it looked; what a jolly century it was going to be! A hundred happy years. At the end of it she would be 112. A snowy-haired but still active old lady, living in a white house on a South Sea Island, bathing every morning (but not too early) and then getting back into bed and eating her breakfast of mangoes, bread-fruit, delicious home-grown coffee and honey. Then a little roller skating on the shining parquet floor of the hall; a lovely hall, hung with the trophies of her bow--reindeer, sand-bok, polar bear, grizzly, lion, tiger, cheetah, wombat and wolf. No birds. Shooting birds was no fun. Imogen knew, for she had shot her first and only sparrow last week, with her new catapult. The boys had been delighted, but she had nearly cried. It had been beastly. Hereafter she meant only to use the catapult on cows, brothers and sisters, and still life. That old lady of the year 2,000 should have only one bird to her score.

The question was, what to do till getting-up time. Wake Nancy--but this was next to impossible. Nancy was a remarkably fast sleeper. One might go and try to wake the boys, and get them to come out catapulting in the garden, or roller skating in the square. Or one might snuggle down in bed again and read “Treasure Island.” Or not read, but lie and think about the new century; perhaps make a poem about it. Imogen extracted from the pocket of her frock, that hung on a chair, a stubby pencil, a note-book and a stick of barley-sugar. With these she curled up among the bedclothes. Happily she sucked and pondered. Holidays; breakfast time not for ages; Christmas presents with the gloss still on (among them a pair of roller skates and _Brassey’s Naval Annual_ and a new bow and arrows), and a brand new century to explore. Sing joy, sing joy.

“Roland lay in his bunk,” murmured Imogen, “and heard the prow of the ship grinding through ice-floes as she pursued her way. Eight bells sounded. With a hijous shock he remembered the events of last night. He put his hand to his head; it was caked with dried blood where the pirates had struck him with the crowbar. A faint moan of anguish was wrung from his white lips....”

Roland was Imogen, and his adventures had meandered on in serial form in her mind for several months. She had always, ever since she remembered, impersonated some boy or youth as she went about. “Lithe as a panther,” she would murmur within herself, as she climbed a tree, “Wilfrid swarmed up the bare trunk. He scanned the horizon. In the distance he saw a puff of smoke, and heard, far away, faint shrieks. ‘Indians,’ he said, ‘at their howwid work. The question for me is, can I warn the settlers in time? If the Redskins catch me, I shall wish I had never been born. No; I will escape now and save myself.’”

It was characteristic of Wilfrid, or Roland, or Dennis, or whatever he was at the moment called, that he usually did a cowardly thing at first, then repented and acted like a hero, suffering thereby both the condemnation of his friends for his cowardice and the tortures of his foes for his courage. He was a rather morbid youth, who enjoyed repentance and heroic amendment, no simple, stalwart soul. Usually he was in the navy.

Thus, in idle, barley-sugared dreamings, this representative of the young generation began the new century.

“What,” mused her grandfather, watching from his bed the winter morning grow, “will the new age be?”

“Much like the old ages, I shouldn’t wonder,” Mrs. Garden murmured, drowsily. “People and things stay much the same ... much the same....”

“The eternal wheel,” papa speculated, still adhering to his latest faith, but with a note of question. “The eternal, turning wheel. I wonder....”

But what mamma wondered, catching the familiar note of doubt in his voice, was where the eternal turning wheel would next land papa.

“What a world we’ll make it, won’t we, my son and daughter,” Stanley hopefully exclaimed to her children as they rioted about her room. “What a century we’ll have! It belongs to the people of your age, you know. You’ve got to see it’s a good one.... Now take yourselves off and let me get up. Run and turn on the cold tap for me, and put the warm at a trickle.”

Stanley whistled as she dressed.

“Yet another century,” her sister Rome commented, with languid amusement, as her early tea was brought to her. “How many we have, to be sure! I wonder if, perhaps, it is not even too many?”

“_Maurice_,” shrilly called Maurice’s wife, entering his room at nine o’clock. “Well, I declare!”

Maurice lay heavily sleeping, and whiskey exhaled from his breath. He had come home at three o’clock this morning.

“A nice way to begin the new year,” said Amy; she did not say “new century,” because she was of those who could not see but that the century had been new in 1900. She shook her husband’s shoulder, looking down with distaste at his thin, sharp-featured sleeping face, its usual pallor heavily flushed.

“A nice example to the children. And you always writing rubbish about social reform.... You make me sick.”

“Go away,” said Maurice, half opening hot eyes. “Le’me alone. My head’s bad....”

“So I should imagine,” said Amy. “I’m sick and tired of you, Maurice.”

“Go away then. Right away. We’d both be happier. Why don’t you?”

“Oh, I daresay I’m old-fashioned,” said Amy. “I was brought up to think a wife’s place was with her husband. Of course, I’m probably _wrong_. I’m always surprised _you_ don’t leave _me_, feeling as you do.”

Maurice, waking a little more, surveyed her with morose, heavy, aching eyes, and moistened his dry lips.

“You’re not surprised. You know it’s because of the children. It’s my job to see they grow up decently, with decent ideas and a chance.”

At that Amy’s mirth overcame her.

“Decent ideas! You’re a nice educator of children, aren’t you! _Look_ at yourself lying there....”

She pointed to the looking-glass opposite his bed.

“Get out, please,” said Maurice, coldly. “I’ve got to write my leader.”

Meanwhile the most august representative of the Victorian age wavered wearily between her own century and this strange new one, peering blindly down the coming road as into a grave. It did not belong to her, the new century. She had had her day. A few days of the new young era, and she would slip into the night, giving place to the rough young forces knocking at the door.

The great Victorian century was dead.