Chapter 3 of 4 · 22209 words · ~111 min read

PART III

EDWARDIAN

DISCURSIVE

THE Edwardians were, as we now think, a brief generation to themselves, set between Victorianism and neo-Georgianism (it is a pity that we should have no better name for the present reign, for “Georgian” belongs by right to a period quite other; royalty having ever been sadly unimaginative in its choice of Christian names). Set between the nineteenth century and the full swing of the twentieth, those brief ten years we call Edwardian seem now like a short spring day. They were a gay and yet an earnest time. A time of social reform on the one hand and social brilliance on the other. The heyday at once of intellectual Fabianism and of extravagant dissipation. The hour of the repertory theatres, the Irish Players, Bernard Shaw and Granville Barker at the Court, Miss Horniman in the provinces, absurd musical comedies that bloomed like gay flowers of a day and died. The onrush of motor cars and the decline of bicycles and the horse; extravagant country-house parties at which royalty consented to be entertained, with royal bonhomie and royal exactions of etiquette.... “Mr. Blank, have we not seen that suit rather often before?” “Lady Dash, surely we remember this wall-paper....” “Lord Somebody, this is a very abominable dinner....” What standards to live up to! There was nothing dowdy about our King Edward. He set the stakes high, and all who could afford it played. Pageants and processions passed in regal splendour. Money nobly flowed.

Ideals changed. The sanctity and domesticity of the _Heim_ was no more a royal fetish. “Respectability,” that good old word, degraded and ill-used for so long, sank into discredit, sank lower in the social scale. No more were unfortunate ladies who had had marital troubles coldly banned from court, for a larger charity (except as to suits, dinners and wall-papers) obtained. Victorian sternness, Victorian prudery and intolerance, still prevailed among some of the older aristocracy, among most of the smaller squirearchy, the professional classes and the petty bourgeoisie; but among most of the wealthy, most of the titled, most of the gay and extravagant classes, a wider liberty grew.

In the intervals of social pleasures, Edward the Peacemaker was busy about the Balance of Power in Europe. He did not care about his cousin Wilhelm. He made an Entente with France, and came to an understanding with Russia, so that when the Trouble should come--and experienced royalty knows that from time to time, the Trouble is bound to come--we should not meet it singly. The weak point about ententes is that when the Trouble comes to one’s fellow-members, they do not meet it singly either. Considering this, and considering also the annoyance and alarm they inspire in those not in them, and taking them all round, ententes seem on the whole a pity. But at the time English people were pleased with this one, and Edward was hopefully called the Peacemaker, just as Victoria had been called Good, and Elizabeth Virgin, and Mary Bloody. We love to name our royalties, and we much prefer to name them kindly. Mary must have been, and doubtless was, very bloody indeed before her people bestowed on her that opprobrious title. Other sovereigns--most other sovereigns--have been pretty bloody too, but none of them bloody enough to be so called.

A queer time! Perhaps a transition time; for that matter, this is one of the things times always are. The world of fashion led by an elderly royal gentleman bred at the Victorian court of his mother, and retaining queer Victorian traditions that younger gentlemen and ladies did not observe. King Edward, for instance, observed Sunday with some strictness. He thought it right; he felt it should be done. The British Sunday was an institution, and King Edward was all for institutions. A generation was growing up, had already grown up, who did not understand about Sunday in that sense. But you may observe about elderly Victorian persons that, however loosely they may sit to Sunday, they usually have a sense of it. They play or work on it consciously, with a feeling that they are breaking a foolish rule, possibly offending an imaginary public opinion. They seldom quite realise that the rule and the opinion they are thinking of are nearly obsolete. They seldom regard Sunday (with reference to the occupations practised on it), precisely as if it were a weekday. Institutions die hard. They linger long after their informing spirit has died.

Anyhow, King Edward VII was a Victorian gentleman long before he was an Edwardian. So he observed Sunday and the lesser proprieties, without self-consciousness. He was like his mother, with a difference. Both had a sense of royal dignity and of the Proper Thing. His subjects, too, had a sense of the Proper Thing: people always have. But the Proper Thing, revered as ever, gradually changed its face, or rather turned a somersault and alighted on its head.

Well, the Edwardians, like the Elizabethans, the Jacobeans, the Carolines, the Georgians, the Victorians, and the neo-Georgians, were a mixed lot. This attempt to class them, to stigmatise them with adjectives, is unscientific, sentimental, and wildly incorrect. But, because it is rather more interesting than to admit frankly that they were merely a set of individuals, it will always be done.

VIVE LE ROI

_La reine est morte. Vive le roi._ King Edward was proclaimed by heralds, by trumpeters, and with the rolling of drums; and God save the King. Then they buried the late queen with royal pomp, and kings, emperors, archdukes and crown princes rode with her to the tomb.

King Edward opened Parliament in state. A great king he was for pageantry and for state. He read the Accession Declaration. It was a tactlessly worded declaration in some ways, for it was drawn up in days when Roman Catholicism was not well thought of by the Head of the Church and Defender of the Faith. King Edward did not like it. “His Majesty,” wrote the outraged Catholic peers, “would willingly have been relieved from the necessity of branding with contumelious epithets the religious tenets of any of his subjects.” There were protests not only from Roman Catholics, but from Protestants and agnostics, who all, in the main, thought it rude. But some there were who, though they knew it was rude, knew also that it was right to be rude to Roman Catholics. “They are the king’s subjects as much as others, and belong to a distinguished old church,” the protesters declared. “The thing is an antediluvian piece of ill-breeding.”

“Bloody Mary. The Inquisition. No Popery,” was the crude reply. “And are not Roman Catholics always rude to our religion? Why, then, should we not be rude to theirs?”

“Roman Catholics,” replied the more polite and sophisticated, “cannot help being a little rude--if you call it so--to other faiths. They are not to blame. It is an article of their faith that theirs is the only true and good church. There is no such article in other faiths. We are not obliged by our religion to believe them wrong, as they are, unfortunately, obliged to believe us wrong. Obviously, then, we should practise the courtesy forbidden to them. It is more generous and dignified. Also, they are as good as we are. All religions are doubtless in the main inaccurate, and one does not differ appreciably from another. And His Majesty ought to preserve a strict impartiality concerning the many and various faiths of his people. The Declaration is ignorant, unstatesmanlike and obscurantist, and smacks of vulgar seventeenth century protestantism. It is a worse scandal than the Thirty-nine Articles.”

But “No Popery” was still the cry of the noisy few, and the scandal remained. Reluctantly protesting his firm intention to give no countenance to the religion of some millions of his subjects, and solemnly in the presence of God professing, testifying and declaring that he did make this declaration in the plaine and ordinary sense of the words as they were commonly understood by English Protestants, without any evasion, equivocation or mental reservation whatsoever, without any dispensation from the Pope, either already granted or to be sought later, the king opened his khaki-elected Parliament, which proved as ineffective as parliaments always do. It is of no importance which side is in office in Parliament; any study of the subject must convince the earnest student that all parties are about equally stupid. By some fluke, useful Acts may from time to time get passed by any government that happens to be in power. More often, foolish and injurious Acts get passed. Personality and intelligence in ministers do certainly make some difference; but party, it seems, makes none. The stupid, the inert, the dishonest and the ill-intentioned flourish like bay-trees impartially on both sides of the avenue. Only the very _naïf_ can believe that party matters, in the long run. This first Parliament of the twentieth century proved, perhaps, even more than usually inept, as parliaments elected during war excitements are apt to be. It could deal neither with education, defences, labour, finance nor poisoned beer.

PAPA’S NEW FAITH

The war scrambled on; a tedious, ineffective guerilla business. The Concentration Camp trouble began, and over its rights and wrongs England was split.

Mr. Garden hated the thought of these camps, where Boer women and children, driven from their homes, dwelt in discomfort (so said Miss Emily Hobhouse and others), and fell ill and died. They might be, as their defenders maintained, kindly meant, but it was all very disagreeable. In fact, the whole war preyed on papa’s mind and nerves. More and more it seemed to him a hideous defiance of any possible Christian order of society, a thing wholly outside the sphere of God’s scheme for the world. But, then, of course, nearly everything was that, and always had been. So utterly outside that sphere were most of the world’s happenings that it sometimes seemed to papa as if they could scarcely _be_ happenings, as if they must be evil illusions of our own, outside the great Reality. The more papa brooded over this Reality, the more he became persuaded that it must be absolute and all pervasive, that nothing else really existed. “We make evil by our thought,” said papa. “God knows no evil.... God does not know about the war. Nor about the Concentration Camps....”

It will be seen that papa was ripe for the acceptance of a new creed which had recently come across the Atlantic and was becoming fashionable in this country. Christian Science fastened on papa like a mosquito, and bit him hard. It comforted him very much to think that God did not know about the war. He told his grandchildren about this ignorance on the part of the Deity.

Imogen pondered it. She had a metaphysical and enquiring mind, and was always interested in God.

“What _does_ God think all those soldiers are doing out in Africa, grandpapa?” she asked, after a considering pause. “Or doesn’t he know they’re soldiers?”

“He knows they are unhappy people following an evil illusion, my child,” her grandpapa told her. “You see, there is no war really--not on God’s plane. There couldn’t be.”

Imogen pondered it again, corrugating her forehead. She dearly liked to understand things.

“Will God know about the peace, when it comes?”

“He will know his children have stopped imagining the evil of war. And he will be very glad.”

“Doesn’t he know about the soldiers who are killed? What does he think they’ve died of?”

“He knows they are slain by their evil imaginings and those of their enemies. You see, God knows his children _believe_ themselves to be at war, and that as long as they go on believing it they will hurt each other and themselves.”

It seemed to Imogen that, in that case, God knew all that was really necessary about the war.

“Are you the only person, besides God, who doesn’t believe in the war, grandpapa?” she presently enquired.

“No, my child. There are others.... Perhaps one day, when you are older, you will understand more about it, and try and think all evil and all pain out of existence.”

“P’raps.” Imogen was dubious. She did not quite get the idea. “Of course I’d _like_ it, grandpapa, because then I shouldn’t get hurt any more.” She rubbed the back of her head, onto which she had fallen that afternoon while roller skating round the square. Her grandfather had told her that God didn’t know she had fallen and hurt herself, and, in fact, that she was not really hurt at all. God didn’t know a great deal about roller skates, Imogen concluded, if he didn’t know that people who used them very frequently did fall. But perhaps he didn’t know there were any roller skates; perhaps roller skates were another evil illusion of ours, like the war. Not a bad illusion; one we had better keep, bruises and all. But perhaps, thought Imogen, who liked to think things out thoroughly, it was really that God didn’t know that the contact of the human head with another hard substance caused pain. After all, people who have never tried _don’t_ know that. Babies don’t....

Imogen began to be afraid she was blaspheming. She put the problem later to her mother, but Vicky was less interested than her youngest daughter in metaphysical problems, and merely said, “Oh, Jennie darling, you needn’t puzzle your head about what grandpapa tells you. Things that suit learned old gentlemen like him don’t always do for little girls like you. Anyhow, don’t ever you get thinking that it won’t hurt you when you tumble on your head, because it always will. _You’ll_ never get rid of that illusion, you may be sure. What _you’ve_ got to learn is not to be so careless, and not to spend all your time climbing and racketing about. So long as you’ll do that you’ll get tumbles, and they’ll hurt, and don’t you forget it.”

Imogen sighed a little. Her mother was so practical. You asked her for doctrine and she gave you advice. Being married, and particularly being a mother, often makes women like that. They know that doctrine is no use, and cherish the illusion that advice is.

“Papa is very happy in this new no-evil religion he has,” mamma said to Rome. “It suits him very well. Better than theosophy did, I think.”

Papa’s new religion might, from her placid, casual, considering tone, have been a new suit of clothes.

Papa’s daughter-in-law, Amy, screamed with mirth over it. Christian Science seemed to her an excellent joke.

“Oh, you’re not really hurt,” she would say if her daughter Iris came in from hockey with a black eye. “It’s all an illusion! What do you want embrocation for? I’ll tell your grandpapa of you....”

“Christian Science,” Maurice said to her at last, gloomily contemptuous, “is not much more absurd than other religions. Suppose you were to take another for your hourly jokes to-day, just for the sake of a change. It makes no difference which; you don’t begin to understand any of them, and you can, no doubt, get a good laugh out of them all, if you try.”

Amy said, “There you go, as usual! I suppose you’ll be saying _you’re_ a Christian Science crank next. Anyway, I don’t know what you want to speak to me in that way for, just because I like a little fun.”

“I don’t want to speak to you in any way,” replied Maurice.

ON EDUCATION

Stanley, turning forty this year, was sturdier than of old, softer and broader of face, blunt-nosed, chubby, maternal, her deep blue eyes more ardent and intent. Now that her children, who were ten and eight, both went to day schools, she had taken up her old jobs, and was working for Women’s Trade Unions, going every day to an office, sitting on committees, speaking on platforms. Phases come and phases go, and particularly with Stanley, who inherited much from her papa. Stanley was in these days a stop-the-war, pacificist Little Englander, anti-militarist, anti-Chamberlain, anti-Concentration Camp. She would shortly be a Fabian, but had not quite got there yet. She was, of course, a suffragist, but suffragists in 1901 were still a very forlorn outpost; they were considered crankish and unpractical dreamers. She also spoke and wrote on Prison Reform, Democratic Education, Divorce Reform, Clean Milk and Health Food. She was an admirer of Mr. Eustace Miles’ views on food, Mr. G. B. Shaw’s drama and social ethics, Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s romantic Christianity, and no one’s political opinions. She believed in the future of the world, which was to be splendidly managed by the children now growing up, who were to be splendidly educated for that purpose.

“But how improbable,” Rome mildly expostulated, “that they should manage it any better or any worse than everyone else has. Your maternal pride carries you away, my dear. Parents can never be clear-sighted; often have I observed it. Blessed, as the Bible says somewhere, are the barren and they that have not brought forth, for they are the only people with any chance of looking at the world with clear and detached eyes. And even they haven’t much.... But why do you think the present young will do so unusually well with the future?”

“Of course,” Stanley replied, “they won’t do it of themselves. Only so far as they are educated up to it.”

“Well, I can’t see that educational methods are improving noticeably. Obviously democratic education is not at present to be encouraged by our governing classes. Look at the Cockerton case....”

“It will come,” said Stanley. “This new Bill won’t go far, but it will do something. Meanwhile, those parents who have thought it out at all are doing rather better by their children than parents used to do. At least we can tell them the truth.”

“So far as you see it yourselves. Is that, in most cases, saying much?”

“No, very little. But--to take a trivial thing--we can at least, for instance, tell them the truth about such things as the birth of life. That’s something. Billy and Molly already know as much as they need about that.”

“Well, they don’t actually need very much yet, do they? I’m sure it won’t hurt them to know anything of that sort, but I don’t see exactly how it’s going to help them to manage the world any better. Because, when the time comes for doing that, they’d know about the birth of life in any case. Boys always seem to pick it up at school, whatever else they don’t learn. However, I admit that I think you bring up Billy and Molly very well.”

“It’s facing facts,” said Stanley, “that I want to teach them. The art of not being afraid of life. They’ve got to do their share in cleaning up the world, and before they can do that they’ve got to face it squarely. One wants to do away with muffling things up, whatever they are. That’s why I tell them everything they ask, so far as I know it, and a lot they don’t. The knowledge doesn’t matter either way, but the atmosphere of daylight does. I want them to feel there are no facts that can’t be talked about.”

“But, my dear, what a social training! Because, you know, there _are_. Anyhow in drawing-rooms, and places where they chat.”

“They’ll learn all that soon enough,” Stanley placidly said. “The world is as vulgar as it is mainly because of its prudery. I’m giving my children weapons against that.”

She had given them also a weapon against their cousins, the children of Vicky, who had not been told Facts. Anyhow Imogen hadn’t. Her sisters were older, and boys, as Rome had said, do seem to pick things up at school. But Imogen at thirteen was still in the ignorance thought by Vicky suitable to her years. So, when she exasperated her cousin Billy by her superior proficiency in climbing, running, gymnastics, and all active games--a proficiency natural to her three years’ seniority but growing tiresome during a whole afternoon spent in trials of skill--Billy could at least retort, “I know something you don’t. I know how babies come.”

“Don’t care how they come,” Imogen returned, astride on a higher bough of the aspen tree than her cousin could attain to. “They’re no use anyhow, the little fools. Who wants babies?”

Billy, having meditated on this unanswerable question, amended his vaunt. “Well, I know how puppies come, too. So there.”

Imogen was stumped. You can’t say that puppies are no use. She could think of no retort but the ancient one of sex insult.

“Boys are always bothering about stupid things like how babies come. As if it mattered. _I’d_ rather know the displacement and horse-power and knots of all the battleships and first-class cruisers.”

“You don’t.”

“I do.”

“Bet you a bull’s-eye you don’t.”

“Done. A pink one. Ask any you like.”

“Well, what’s the _Terrible_?”

“14,200 tons; 25,000 horse-power; 22.4 knots. That’s an easy one.”

“The _Powerful_.”

“Same, of course. No, she only makes 22.1 knots. Stupid to ask twins.”

Billy considered. He did not like to own it, but he could not remember at the moment any other ships of His Majesty’s fleet.

“Well, what’s the biggest, anyhow?”

“The _Dominion_ and the _King Edward VII_. 16,350 tons; 18,000 horse-power; 18.5 knots.”

“I don’t know that any of that’s true.”

“You can look in ‘Brassey’ and find out, then.”

“I don’t care. Anyone can mug up ‘Brassey.’ Anyhow girls can’t go into the navy.”

Imogen jogged up and down on the light swinging branch, whistling through her teeth, pretending not to hear.

“And anyhow,” added the taunter below, “_you’d_ be no use on a ship, ’cause you’d be sick.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You would.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You would.”

“You’re sick yourself if you smoke a woodbine.”

“So are you. _You’re_ sick if you squash a fly. Girls are. They can’t dissect a rabbit. I can.”

The sex war was in full swing.

“Boys crib at their lessons. Boys don’t wash their necks.”

“Nor do girls. You’re dirty now. Girls don’t play footer at school.”

“Hockey’s as good. Boys are greedy pigs; they spend their pennies on tuck.”

“Who bought eight bull’s-eyes this afternoon and sucked six?”

“Oh, well.” Imogen collapsed into sudden good temper. “Don’t let’s rot. Why did the gooseberry fool?”

To change the subject further, she swung herself backwards and hung from the branch by her knees, her short mop of curls swinging upside down, the blood singing in her head. Billy, a nice but not very clever little boy, said, “Because the raspberry syrup,” and truce was signed. Who, as Imogen had asked, cared how babies came?

PING-PONG

Everywhere people ping-ponged. One would have thought there was no war on. Instead of doing their bits, as we did in a more recent and more serious war, they all ping-ponged, and, when not ping-ponging, asked, “Why did the razor-bill raise her bill? Why did the coal scuttle? What did Anthony Hope?” and answered, “Because the woodpecker would peck her. Because the table had cedar legs. To see the salad dressing,” and anything else of that kind they could think of. Some people, mostly elderly people, could only answer vaguely to everything, “Because the razor-bill razor-bill,” and change the subject, thinking how stupid riddles in these days were. Some people excelled at riddles, others at ping-pong, others again at pit, which meant shouting “oats, oats, oats,” or something similar, until they were hoarse. No one would have thought there was a war on.

Indeed, there scarcely was a war on, now. Not a war to matter. Only rounding up, and blockhouses, and cordons, and guerilla fighting. Irving Garden had had enteric, and was invalided home. He meant to return to South Africa directly peace should be signed, to investigate a good thing he had heard of in the Rand. His nephews and nieces, with whom he was always popular, worshipped at his shrine. He had wonderfully funny stories of the war to tell them. But he preferred to ask them such questions as, “What made Charing Cross?” and to supply them with such answers as, “Teaching London Bridge. Am I right?” Such questions, such answers, they found so funny as to be almost painful. Imogen and Tony would giggle until tears came into their eyes. Certainly Uncle Irving was amusing. And clever. He drove himself and other people about in a grey car that travelled like the wind and was cursed like the devil by pedestrians and horse-drivers on the roads. His brother Maurice cursed him, but good-temperedly, for he liked Irving, and, further, he despised the unenterprising Public for fools. That was why no section of the community gave Maurice and his paper their entire confidence. He attacked what he and those who agreed with him held for evils, but would round, with a contemptuous gesture, on those whose grievances he voiced. He ridiculed the present inefficiency, and ridiculed also the ideals of those who cried for improvement. He threw himself into the struggle for educational reform, and sneered at all reforms proposed as inadequate, pedestrian or absurd. He condemned employers as greedy, and Trade Unions as retrograde. He jeered at the inefficiency of the conduct of what remained of the war, at the stupid brutality of concentration camps, at the sentimentality of the Pro-Boer party (as they were still called), at the militarism of the Tory militants, the imperialism of the Liberals, and the sentimental radical humanitarianism of Mr. Lloyd George and his party. He addressed Stop-the-War meetings until they were broken up with violence by earnest representatives of the Continue-the-War party, and suffered much physical damage in the ensuing conflicts; yet the Stop-the-War party did not really trust him. They suspected him of desiring, though without hope, to stop not only the war but all human activities, and indeed the very universe itself; and this is to go further than is generally approved. The Continue-the-War party has risen and fallen with every war; but the Continue-the-World party has a kind of solid permanency, and something of the universal in its ideals. Not to be of it is to be out of sympathy with the great majority of one’s fellows. At any time and in any country, but perhaps particularly in England in the early years of the twentieth century, when there was a good deal of enthusiasm for continuance and progress. The early Edwardians were not, as we are to-day, dispirited and discouraged with the course of the world, though they were vexed about the Boer War and the consequent economic depression of the country. They did not, for the most part, feel that life was a bad business and the future outlook too dark and menacing to be worth encouraging. On the contrary, they believed in Life with a capital L. The young were bitten by the dry reforming zeal of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, or the gay faith in life of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, or the bounding scientific hopefulness of Mr. H. G. Wells, or the sharp social and ethical criticism of Mr. George Bernard Shaw.

Stanley Croft, young for ever in mind, was bitten by all these and much more. Imperialism left slain behind, she embraced with ardour the fantastic ideal of the cleaning up of England. After the war; then indeed they would proceed furiously with the building of Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

And meanwhile the war went on, and times were bad, and everywhere people ping-ponged. A lack of seriousness was complained of. It always is complained of in this country, which is not, indeed, a very serious one, but always contains some serious persons to complain of the others. “The ping-pong spirit,” the graver press called the national lightness; and clergymen took up the phrase and preached about it.

The public, they said, were like street gamins, loafing about on the watch for any new distraction.

GAMIN

Imogen and Tony slipped out into the street. It was the first Sunday of the summer holidays, and the first day of August. The sun beat hotly on the asphalt, making it soft, so that one could dent it with one’s heels. The children sauntered down Sloane Street, loitering at the closed shop windows, clinking their shillings in their pockets. They enjoyed the streets with the zest of street Arabs. They were a happy and untidy pair; the girl in a short butcher blue cotton frock, grubby with a week’s wear, and a hole in the knee of one black-stockinged leg, a soiled white linen cricket hat slouched over her short mop of brown curls, her small pink face freckled and tanned; the boy, a year younger, grimy, dark-eyed and beautiful, like his Uncle Irving in face, clad in a grey flannel knickerbocker suit. Neither had dressed for the street in the way that they should have; they had slipped out, unseen, in their garden clothes and garden grime, to make the most of the last day before they went away for the holidays.

They knew what they meant to do. They were going to have their money’s worth, and far more than their money’s worth, of underground travelling. Round and round and round; and all for a penny fare.... This was a favourite occupation of theirs, a secret, morbid vice. They indulged in it at least twice every holidays. The whole family had been used to do it, but all but these two had now outgrown it. Phyllis, now at Girton, had outgrown it long ago. “The twopenny tube for me,” she said. “It’s cleaner.” “But it doesn’t go _round_,” said Imogen. “Who wants to go round, you little donkey? It takes you where you want to go to; that’s the object of a train.” It was obvious that Phyllis had grown up. She would not even track people in the street now. It must happen, soon or late, to all of us. Even Hughie, fifteen and at Rugby, found this underground game rather weak.

But Imogen and Tony still sneaked out, a little shamefaced and secretive, to practise their vice.

Sloane Square. Two penny fares. Down the stairs, into the delicious, romantic, cool valley. The train thundered in, Inner Circle its style. A half empty compartment; there was small run on the underground this lovely August Sunday. Into it dashed the children; they had a corner seat each, next the open door. They bumped up and down on the seats, opposite each other. The train speeded off, rushing like a mighty wind. South Kensington Station. More people coming in, getting out. Off again. Gloucester Road, High Street, Notting Hill Gate, Queen’s Road ... the penny fare was well over. Still they travelled, and jogged up and down on the straw seats, and chanted softly, monotonously, so that they could scarcely be heard above the roaring of the train.

“Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, Where the salt weed sways in the stream, Where the sea-beasts, ranged all round, Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground; Where the sea-snakes coil and twine, Dry their mail and bask in the brine; Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye, ROUND THE WORLD FOR EVER AND AYE....”

Then again, “Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep....”

At Paddington they saw the conductor eyeing them, and changed their compartment. This should be done from time to time.

And so on, past King’s Cross and Farringdon Street, towards the wild romantic stations of the east: Liverpool Street, Aldgate, and so round the bend, sweeping west like the sun. Blackfriars, Temple, Charing Cross, Westminster, St. James’ Park, Victoria, SLOANE SQUARE. Oh, joy! Sing for the circle completed, the new circle begun.

“Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye, ROUND THE WORLD FOR EVER AND AYE....”

Imogen changed her chant, and dreamily crooned:

“The world is round, so travellers tell, And straight though reach the track; Trudge on, trudge on, ’twill all be well, The way will guide one back. But ere the circle homeward hies, Far, far must it remove; White in the moon the long road lies That leads me from my love.”

Round the merry world again. Put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. Round and round and round. What a pennyworth! You can’t buy much on an English Sunday, but, if you can buy eternal travel, Sunday is justified.

But two Inner Circles and a bit are really enough. If you had three whole ones you might begin to feel bored, or even sick. Sloane Square again; the second circle completed. South Kensington. The two globetrotters emerged from their circling, handed in their penny tickets, reached the upper air, hot and elated.

_Now_ what? For a moment they loitered at the station exit, debating in expert minds the next move. Money was short: no luxurious joys could be considered.

Imogen suddenly gripped Tony by the arm.

“Hist, Watson. You see that man in front?”

Watson, well-trained, nodded.

“We’re going to track him. I have a very shrewd suspicion that he is connected with the Sloane Square murder mystery. Now mind, we must keep ten paces behind him wherever he goes; not less, or he’ll notice. Like the woman in Church Street did. He’s off; come on.... Do you observe anything peculiar about him, Watson?”

“He’s a jolly lean old bird. I expect he’s hungry.”

“My good Watson, look at his clothes. They’re a jolly sight better than ours. He’s a millionaire, as it happens. If you want to know a few facts about him, I’ll tell you. He moved his washstand this morning from the left side of his bed to the right; he forgot to wind up his watch last night; he went to church before breakfast; he had kidneys when he came in; and he’s now on his way to meet a confederate at lunch.”

“Piffle. You can’t prove any of it.”

“I certainly can, my good Watson....”

“Golly, he’s calling a hansom. Shall we hang on behind?”

Watson’s beautiful brown eyes beamed with hope; Holmes’ small green-grey ones held for a moment an answering gleam. But only for a moment. Holmes knew by now, having learnt from much sad experience, what adventures could be profitably undertaken and what couldn’t.

“No use. We’d be pulled off at once....”

Morosely they watched their victim escape.

Then, “Look, Watson. The fat lady in purple. She must have been to church.... Oh, quite simple, Watson, I assure you ... she has a prayerbook.... Come on. It won’t matter how late we get back, because they’re having a lunch party and we’re feeding in the schoolroom. We’ll sleuth her to hell.”

In this manner Sunday morning passed very pleasantly and profitably for Vicky’s two youngest children.

AUTUMN, 1901

1901 drew to its close. An odd, restless, gay, unhappy year, sad with war and poverty, bitter with quarrels about inefficiency, concentration camps, Ahmednagar (the home of the Boers in India, and a name much thrown about by the pro-Boers in their “ignorant and perverse outcry”), education, religion, finance, politics, prisons, motor cars, and stopping the war; gay with new drama (Mr. Bernard Shaw was being produced, and many musical comedies), new art (at the New English Art Club), new jokes, new books (Mr. Conrad had published “Lord Jim,” Mr. Henry James “The Sacred Fount,” Mr. Hardy “Poems New and Old,” Mr. Wells “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” Mr. Yeats “The Shadowy Waters,” Mrs. Chesterton “The Wild Knight,” Mr. Kipling “Kim,” Mr. Belloc “The Path to Rome,” Lady Russell “The Benefactress,” Mr. Laurence Housman “A Modern Antæus,” Mr. Anthony Hope “Tristram of Blent,” Mrs. Humphry Ward “Eleanor,” Mr. Arnold Bennett “The Grand Babylon Hotel,” Mr. Charles Marriott “The Column,” Mr. George Moore “Sister Teresa,” Mr. Max Beerbohm “And Yet Again”), new clothes and new games.

Popular we were not. That prevalent disease, Anglophobia, raged impartially in every country except, possibly, Japan. Even as far as the remote Bermudas, continental slanders against us roared. We are a maligned race; there is no doubt of it. All races are, in their degree, maligned, but none so greatly as we--unless it should be the Children of Israel. It is sad to think it, but there must be something about us that is not attractive to foreigners. They have always grieved at our triumphs and rejoiced at our sorrows. By the end of 1901 our friendlessness was such (in November Lord Salisbury said at the Guildhall, “It is a matter for congratulation that we have found such a friendly feeling and such a correct attitude on the part of all the great powers”), that we thought we had better enter into an alliance with the Japanese, who were still pleased with us for admiring them about their war with China.

In the autumn of this year, Stanley published her small book, “Conditions of Women’s Work,” and Mr. Garden, after years of labour, his mighty work, “Comparative Religions.”

Mrs. Garden had influenza and pneumonia in December, and Mr. Garden, in an anguish of anxiety, called in three doctors and admitted that his faith had failed. God’s disapproving ignorance of mamma’s pneumonia made intolerable a burden of anxiety which would have been heavy even with Divine sympathy; and if, by some awful chance, mamma were to pass on, papa’s grief, guilty and unrecognised, would have been too bitter to be borne. Christian Science had had but a brief day, but it was over. In a fit of reaction, papa became an Evangelical, and took to profound meditation on the suffering, human and divine, which he had for so long ignored. He now found the love of God in suffering, not in its absence.

Always honourable, he recanted the instructions on the limitations of divine knowledge which he had given to his grandchildren.

“You perhaps remember, Jennie my child, what I said to you last year about God’s not knowing of the war. Well, I have come to the conclusion that I was mistaken. I believe now that God knows all about his children’s griefs and pains. He knows more about them than we do. Possibly--who knows--suffering is a necessary part of the scheme of redemption....”

Imogen looked and felt intelligent. When anyone spoke of theology to her, it was as if the blood of all her clerical ancestors mounted to the call. She was nearly fourteen now, and had recently become an agnostic, owing to having perused Renan and John Stuart Mill. She was at the stage in life when she read, with impartial ardour, such writers as these, as well as E. Nesbit’s “Wouldbegoods,” Max Pemberton’s “Iron Pirate,” and other juvenile works (particularly school stories), Rudyard Kipling, Marryat, the Brontës, and any poetry she could lay hands on, but especially that of W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, Lewis Carroll and Walter Ramal.

She said to her grandfather, casually, but a little wistfully too, “I’m not sure, grandpapa, that I believe in God at all. The arguments against him seem very strong, don’t they?”

Mr. Garden looked a little startled. Possibly he thought that Imogen was beginning too young.

“Ah, Jennie, my child--‘If my doubt’s strong, my faith’s still stronger....’ That’s what Browning said about it, you know.”

Imogen nodded.

“I know. I’ve read that. I s’pose his faith was. Mine isn’t. My _doubt’s_ stronger, grandpapa.”

“Well, my child....” Mr. Garden, gathering together his resources, gave this strayed lamb (that was how, in his new terminology he thought of her) a little evangelical homily on the love of God. Unfortunately Imogen had, then and through life, an intemperate distaste for evangelical language; it made her feel shy and hot; and, though she loved her grandfather, she was further alienated from faith. She wrote a poem that evening about the dark, terrifying and Godless world, which she found very good. She would have liked to show it to the others, that they too might find it good, but the tradition of her family and her school was that this wasn’t done. One wrote anything one liked, if one suffered from that itch, but to show it about was swank. “Making a donkey of yourself.” The Carringtons, shy, vain and reserved, did not care to do that.

“Some day,” thought Imogen, “I’ll write _books_. Then people can read them without my showing them. I’ll write a book full of poems.” The new poet. Even--might one dare to imagine it--the new _great_ poet, Imogen Carrington. Or should one be anonymous? Anon. That was a good old poet’s name.

“Few people knew,” said Imogen, within herself, “that this slender book of verse, ‘Questionings,’ bound in green, with gold edges, which had made such a stir in lit’ry London, was by a wiry, brown-faced, blue-eyed young lieutenant-commander, composed while he navigated his first-class gunboat, the _Thrush_ (805 tons, 1,200 h.p., 13 knots, 6 four-inch guns, 2 quick-firers, 2 machine), among the Pacific Islands, taking soundings. The whole service knew Denis Carton as a brilliant young officer, but only two or three--or perhaps a dozen--knew he was a poet too and had written that green book with gold edges that lay on every drawing-room table and was stacked by hundreds in every good bookshop.” (I cannot account for the confused workings of this poor child’s mind; I can only record the fact that she still, and for many years to come, thought of herself, with hope growing faint and ever fainter, as a brown-skinned, blue-eyed young naval man.)

As to her religious difficulties, they were, after the first flush of unbelief, driven into the background of her mind by school, hockey, the Christmas holidays, and missing word competitions, and did not obtrude themselves aggressively again until the time came when her mother decided that she should be confirmed. She then said to her brother Hugh, now in the Fifth at Rugby, what did one do about confirmation if one believed Nothing? Hugh did not think it mattered particularly what one believed. One was confirmed; it did no harm; it was done; it saved argument. Himself, he believed very little of All That, but he had suffered confirmation, saying nothing. No good making fusses, and worrying mother. Jennie had much better go through with it, like other people.

“Well ... of course, _I_ don’t care ... if it’s not cheating....”

“Course it isn’t. Cheating who? _They_ don’t care what we believe, they’re not such sops. They only want us to do the ordinary things, like other people, and save bother. And, of course”--Hugh was a very fair-minded boy and no bigot--“there may be something in it, after all. Lots of people, quite brainy, sensible chaps, think there is. Anyhow, it can’t hurt.” So Imogen was confirmed.

“Perhaps I shall be full of the Holy Ghost,” she thought. “Perhaps there really _is_ a Holy Ghost. Perhaps my life will be made all new, with tongues of fire upon my head and me telling in strange languages the wonderful works of God.... Perhaps.... But more prob’ly not....”

1902

1902 was a great year, for in it the British Empire ceased its tedious fighting with the Boer Republics, and made a meal of them. So the Empire was the richer by so many miles of Africa, with the gold mines, black persons, and sulky Dutchmen appertaining thereto, and the poorer by so many thousand soldiers’ lives, so many million pounds, and a good deal of self-confidence and prestige. Anyhow, however you worked out the gain and loss, here was peace, and people shouted and danced for joy and made bonfires in college courts. Thank God, _that_ was over.

A wave of genial friendliness flowed from the warm silly hearts of Britons towards the conquered foe. Four surly enemy generals were brought to London; asked if they would like to see the Naval Review; declined with grave thanks; were escorted through London amid a cheering populace--“Our friends the enemy,” cried the silly crowd, and “Brave soldiers all!” and surrounded them with hearty British demonstration and appeals for “a message for England.” There was no message for England; no smiles; no words. The warm, silly Britons were a little hurt. The psychology of conquered nations was a riddle to them, it seemed.... “God, what an exhibition!” said Maurice Garden in his paper the next day.

Meanwhile King Edward VII had, after some unavoidable procrastination, been crowned, Mr. Horatio Bottomley had won a thousand pounds from the editor of the _Critic_, in that this editor had impugned his financial probity, and the Man with the Beflowered Buttonhole (as they called him in the French press) whose Besotted Pride had caused to flow for three years so much Gold and Tears and Blood had received the Freedom of London for his services to his country. This year, also, Mr. Rudyard Kipling delighted athletes by his allusions to flannelled fools and muddied oafs, that ineffectual body the National Service League was formed, Germany and Great Britain began to eye each other’s land and sea forces with an increase of hostile emulation which was bound to end in sorrow, and there was much trouble over bad trade and wages, unemployment, taxation and the Education Bill. Passive Resisters rose violently to the foray over this last, their Puritan blood hot within them, and would not pay rates for schools managed by the Church of England in which their nonconformist children were given Church teaching. It made a pretty squabble, and a good cry for Liberals, and why it was not settled by representatives of every sect which so desired being allowed access to the schools alternately is not now clear. The parliamentary mind moves in a mysterious way; it seldom adopts the simple solutions of problems which commend themselves to the more ingenuous laity. Anything to make contention and trouble, it seems to feel.

In such disputations 1902 wore itself away. And starving ex-soldiers played accordions or sold matches by the pavements, their breasts decorated with larger nosegays of war-medals than any one man-at-arms could conceivably have won by his own prowess in the field, for then, as after a more recent war, you could buy these medals cheap in second-hand shops. “Fought for my country” ran their sad, proud legends about themselves, “and am now starving. Have a wife and sixteen small children....” The families of ex-soldiers were terrific, then as now. A wretched business altogether.

EXIT MAMMA

Edwardianism was in full swing. People began to recover from the war. They became rich again, and very gay, and the arts flourished. Irving Garden, his fortune made in Rand mines, could really afford almost anything he liked. He bought and drove two motor cars, a grey one and a navy blue, and presented to Rome, on her forty-fourth birthday, a very graceful little scarlet three seater, in which she drove everywhere. Sometimes she drove her parents out, but the traffic made her papa nervous. Mamma was of calmer stuff, and sat placid and unmoved while her daughter ran skilfully like a flame between the monsters of the highway. She did not think that Rome had accidents; she believed in Rome.

Unfortunately mamma developed cancer in the spring of 1903, and died, after the usual sufferings and operations, in the autumn.

“It doesn’t much matter,” she said to Rome, hearing that her death was certain and soon. “A little more or a little less.... After all, I am sixty-nine. My only real worry about it is papa. We both hoped that I might be the survivor. I could have managed better.”

Mamma’s faint sigh flickered. Dear papa. Poor papa. Indeed, thought Rome, he will not manage at all....

No charge was laid on Rome to look after poor papa. Mamma did not do such things; dying, she left the living free. That ultimate belief in the inalienable freedom of the human being looked unconquered out of her tired, still eyes. Mamma had never believed in coercion, even the coercion of love. Modern writers say that Victorian parents did believe in parental tyranny. There is seldom any need to believe modern, or any other, writers. What they seem sometimes to forget is that Victorian parents were like any other parents in being individuals first, and the sovereign who happened to reign over them did not reduce all Victorians to a norm, some good, some bad, as the Poet Laureate of the day had put it, but all stamped with the image of the Queen. You would think, to hear some persons talk, that Victoria had called into existence little images of herself all over England, instead of being merely one very singular and characteristic old lady, who might just as well have occurred to-day. In short, the Victorians were not like Queen Victoria, any more than the Edwardians were like King Edward, or the Georgians are like King George, for all creatures are merely themselves.

Mamma, being merely herself, left her family free of all behests, and drew to her end with an admirable stoic gentleness. Dying was to her no great matter or disturbance.

Time bears us off, as lightly as the wind Lifts up the smoke and carries it away, And all we know is that a longer life Gives but more time to think of our decay.

We live till Beauty fails and Passion dies, And sleep’s our one desire in every breath, And in that strong desire, our old love, Life, Gives place to that new love whose name is Death.

Mamma would sometimes murmur these lines by Mr. W. H. Davies, a poet (formerly Victorian, now Edwardian, later to become Georgian), of whom she was very fond, because he noticed all the charming things in the countryside that she always observed herself, such as wet grass, and rainbows, and cuckoos, and birds’ eggs, and coughing sheep (who had always stirred her to pity).

“My beloved,” papa would say, quietly, restraining his anguish that he might not distress her, “my best beloved, I shall join you before long, where there is no more parting....” (Thank God, thank God, he was at this time a believer in that reunion, and could say it from his heart. Supposing he had still been a Theosophist, believing that mamma would merely go on to another spoke of the Eternal Wheel, and that he would never, try as he might, catch her up.... Or even a Roman Catholic, believing that mamma and he would both have to suffer a long expiation, presumably not together, in purgatory. Thank God, evangelicals believed in an immediate heaven for the redeemed, and surely papa and mamma would be found numbered among the redeemed....)

Mamma’s hand would gently stroke his.

“Yes, dear. Of course you will join me soon.”

Who should see, who had ever seen, into mamma’s mind that lay so deep and still beneath veils?

“Yes, Aubrey. Of course, of course. Quite soon, dear.”

They spoke often of that further life; but of papa’s life between now and then they did not dare to speak much.

Mamma loved papa, her lover and friend of half a century, and she loved all her children, and all her grandchildren too, the dear, happy boys and girls. But at the last--or rather just before the last, for the end was dark silence--it was only her eldest son, Maurice, on whose name she cried in anguish.

“Maurice--Maurice--my boy, my boy! O God, have pity on my boy!”

Maurice was there, sitting at her side, holding her wet, shaking hand in his.

“Mother, mother. It’s all right, dear mother. I’m here, close to you.”

But still she moaned, “Have pity--have pity on my boy.... Maurice, my darling.... Have pity....” as if her own pain, cutting her in two, were his, not hers.

They had not known--not one of them had wholly known--of those storms that had beaten her through the long years because of Maurice, her eldest boy.

His tears burned in his hot eyes; the easy tears of the constant drinker.

They put her under an anaesthetic; the pain was too great; and she died at dawn.

SPIRITUALISM

Papa could not bear it. It was all very well to talk of joining mamma before long, but papa was not more than seventy-three years of age, and how should he live without mamma for perhaps ten, fifteen, even twenty years? That unfailing comfort, sympathy and love that had been hers; that patient, silent understanding, that strength and pity for his weakness, that wifely regard for his scholar’s mind, that dear companionship that had never failed--having had these for close on fifty years, how should he live without them? He could not live without them. Somehow, he must find them again--reach across the grave to where mamma’s love awaited him in the land of the redeemed.... The redeemed. Already this evangelistic phraseology did not wholly suit his needs. He wanted mamma nearer than that....

In 1904 there was, as usual, much talk of spiritualism, of establishing connection with the dead. The Psychical Research Society had been flourishing for many years, but papa had never, until now, taken much interest in it. There had been periods in his career when he had believed, with his Church, that God did not smile on such researches, or wish the Veil drawn from the unseen world, and that the researchers, if they too inquisitively drew it, got into shocking company, got, in fact, into touch with those evil spirits who were always waiting ready to pose as the deceased relatives and friends of enquirers. Other periods there had been when papa had believed that the thing was all pathetic buncombe (that was how papa spelt it), since there was unfortunately, nothing to get into touch with. But now he was sure that he had, in both these beliefs, erred. God could not frown on his bereaved children’s efforts to communicate with the beloved who had made life for them. And beyond the Veil waited not the great nothingness, but God and the dear dead. God and mamma. He must and would get into touch with mamma.

Papa attended séances, with what are called Results. Mamma came and talked with him, through the voice of a table or of a medium; she said all kinds of things that only she could have said; she even told him where a lost thimble of hers was, and sure enough, there it was, dropped behind the sofa cushions. And once materialisation occurred, and mamma, like a luminous wraith, floated about the room. It made papa very happy. He asked her how she did, and what it was like where she now was, and she told him that she did, on the whole, very well, but, as to what it was like, that he would never understand, did she tell him for a year.

“They can’t tell us. It’s too difficult, too different,” the lady who managed the séances explained to papa afterwards. Papa did not greatly care for this lady, and he always winced a little at the thought that mamma had become “They.” But he only said, “Yes, I suppose it is.”

The séances exhausted him a good deal, but it was worth while.

“So long as it makes him happier,” said Rome. “Poor _darling_.”

THE HAPPY LIBERALS

1905 was a year of great happiness, intelligence and virtue for the Liberal party in the state. It was to be their last happy, intelligent or virtuous year for many a long day; indeed, they have not as yet known another, for such a gracious state is only possible to oppositions, and the next time that the Liberals were the Opposition it was too late, for by then oppositions were, like other persons, too tired, war-spoilt, disillusioned and dispirited to practise anything but an unidealistic and unhopeful nagging. But in 1905, with the Tories executing, to the satisfaction of their opponents, the ungracious task of performance, which is, one may roughly say, never a success, the Liberals were very jolly, united, optimistic, and full of energy and plans. What would they not do when they should come, in their turn, into power? What Tory iniquities were there not, for them now to oppose, for them in the rosy future to reverse? What Aunt Sallies did not the governing party erect for them to shy at? Chinese labour, that yellow slavery which was degrading (were that possible) South Africa; the Licensing Act, the Education Act, the Little Loaf, which could be made so pitiable a morsel on posters--against all these they tilted. As to what they would do, once in power, it included the setting of trade again upon its legs, the enriching of the country, the reform of the suffrage, the relief of unemployment, the issue of an Education Bill which should distress no one. Ardent progressives hoped much from this party; they even hoped, without grounds, for the removal of sex disabilities in the laws relating to the suffrage, which unlikely matter was part of the programme drawn up in 1905 by the National Liberal Federation. Life was very glorious to any party, in those Edwardian days, before it got in. Liberals in opposition were democratic idealists, in office makeshift opportunists, backing out and climbing down.

Stanley Croft, in 1905, was ardent in Liberal hope. She hoped for everything, even for a vote. This sex disability in the matter of votes oppressed her very seriously. She saw no sense or reason in it, and resented the way the question, whenever it was raised in Parliament, was treated as a joke, like mothers-in-law, or drunkenness, or twins. Were women really a funny topic? Or rather, were they funnier than men? And if so, why? In vain her female sense of humour sought to probe this subject, but no female sense of humour, however acute, has ever done so. Women may and often do regard all humanity as a joke, good or bad, but they can seldom see that they themselves are more of a joke than men, or that the fact of their wanting rights as citizens is more amusing than men wanting similar rights. They can no more see it than they can see that they are touching, or that it is more shocking that women should be killed than that men should, which men see so plainly. Women, in fact, cannot see why they should not be treated like other persons. Stanley could not see it. To her the denial of representation in the governing body of her country on grounds of sex was not so much an injustice as a piece of inexplicable lunacy, as if all persons measuring, say, below five foot eight, had been denied votes. She saw no more to it than that, in spite of all the anti-suffrage speakers whom she heard say very much more. She became embittered on this subject, with a touch of the feminist bitterness that marked many of the early strugglers for votes. She admitted that men were, taking them in the main, considerably the wiser, the more capable and the more intelligent sex; that is to say that, though most people were ignorant fools, there were even more numerous and more ignorant fools among women than among men; but there it was, and there was no reason why the female fools should have less say than the male fools as to which of the other fools represented their interests in Parliament, and what measures were passed affecting their foolish lives. No; on the face of it, it was lunatic and irrational, and no excuse was possible, and that was that.

It certainly was, Rome agreed, but then, in a lunatic and irrational world, was any one extra piece of lunacy worth a fuss? Was, in fact, anything worth a fuss? In the answer to these questions, the sisters fundamentally differed, for Stanley believed very many things to be worth a fuss, and made it accordingly. She was busy now making fusses from most mornings to most evenings, sitting on committees for the improvement of the world, even of the Congo, and so forth. She was what is called a useful and public-spirited woman. Rome, on the other hand, grew with the years more and more the dilettante idler. At forty-six she found very few things worth bothering about. She strolled, drove or motored round the town, erect, slim and debonair, increasingly distinguished as grey streaked her fair hair and time chiselled delicate lines in her fine, clear skin. Rome cared neither for the happy Liberals nor for the unhappy Tories; she regarded both parties as equally undistinguished.

Fabianism became increasingly the fashion for young intellectuals. Girl and boy undergraduates flung themselves with ardour into this movement, sitting at the feet of Mr. Bernard Shaw and the Sidney Webbs. Stanley was a keen Fabian, and even attended summer schools. They were not attractive, but yet she hoped that somehow good would be the final goal of ill. She was sorry that none of her nephews and nieces joined her in this movement, though several had attained the natural age for it.

THE HAPPY YOUNG

Maurice’s Roger, who had not intellect and meant to be a novelist, was a gay youth now at Cambridge. His sister Iris had even less intellect and meant to be a wife. Nature had not fitted her for learning, and when she left school she merely came out (as the phrase goes). Parties: these were what Iris liked. Society, not societies. Stanley, aunt-like, thought it a great pity that Maurice’s offspring were thus, and blamed Maurice for leaving them too much to Amy. As to Vicky’s children, Phyllis, who had done quite adequately at Girton, now lived at home and helped her mother with entertaining and drawing-room meetings, and was in politics on the whole a Tory; Nancy, at twenty-one, was at the Slade, learning, so everyone but her teachers believed, to draw and paint; Hugh was at Cambridge, a lad of good intelligence which he devoted to the study of engineering; Tony was still at school; and Imogen was to leave it this summer. Imogen was not for college; she would, it was generally believed by her teachers and relatives, not make much of that. Imogen was quite content; she was, as always, busy writing stories and sunk deep in her own imaginings, which were still of a very puerile sort. Imogen read a great deal, but was not really intelligent; it was as if she had not yet grown up. She knew and cared little about politics or progress. Bernard Shaw was to her merely the most enchanting of playwrights. She was happy, drugged with poetry (her own and that of others), and adventurous dreams. She was a lanky slip of an undeveloped girl, light-footed, active as a cat, but more awkward with her hands than any creature before her; at once a romantic dreamer and a tomboyish child, loving school, her friends, active games, bathing, climbing, reading and writing, animals, W. B. Yeats, Conrad, Kipling, Henry Seton Merriman, Shelley, William Morris, Stevenson, “A Shropshire Lad,” meringues, battleships, marzipan, Irene Vanbrugh, Granville Barker and practically all drama; hating strangers, society, drawing-room meetings, needlework, love stories, people who talked about clothes, sentimentalists, and her Aunt Amy. She was at this time as sexless as any girl or boy may be. She was still, in all her imaginings, her continuous, unwritten stories about herself, a young man.

As to Stanley’s children, Irving’s and Una’s, they were still at school. Stanley watched her son and daughter with hope and joy; they were such delightful, exciting creatures, and one day they would take their place in the world and help to upset it and build it up again. _They_, at least, should certainly join the Fabians when they were old enough. Billy and Molly should not be slack, uninterested or Tory. They should join in the game of life as eagerly as now they joined in treasure hunts, that curious rage of this year which caused young and old to fall to digging up the earth, seeking for discs.

THE YEAR

The year and the government petered towards their end. In the east the Japanese were beating the Russians, hands down. In the Dogger Bank, the Russians fired on a fishing-fleet from Hull, and there was trouble. In European politics, the Anglo-French _entente_ throve, and Anglo-German rivalry swelled the navies. In Scotland, the Wee Frees split from the U.P.’s, and fought successfully for the lion’s share of the loot. In Wales, Evan Roberts’ odd religious revival swept the country, throwing strong men and women into hysteria and bad men and women into virtue, reforming the sinners and seriously annoying the publicans. In the Congo, rubber was grown and collected amid scenes of distressing cruelty, and reports of the horrid business were published in this country by Mr. Roger Casement and Mr. E. D. Morel. In India, Lord Curzon quarrelled with Lord Kitchener. In Thibet, the British expedition got to Lhassa. In Tangier, the Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany made a speech. In Ireland, Mr. Wyndham resigned. In London, the government apathetically stayed in office, the Tariff Reform campaign raged, treasure discs were dug for, bridge was much played, the Vedrenne-Barker company acted at the Court Theatre, many books were published and pictures painted, and money brightly changed hands. And in the provinces, by-election after by-election was lost to the government, until at last, in November, Mr. Balfour resigned.

ROCKETS

They stood in the new open space at Aldwych, watching the election results proclaimed by magic lanterns on great screens and flung to the sky in coloured rockets. They had made up a family election party--Maurice, Vicky, Charles, Rome, Stanley and Irving, and many of their young. Stanley had brought Billy and Molly, that they might rejoice in the great Liberal victory and always remember it. She had bought them each, at their request, a little clacker, with which to signal the triumph of right to the world. For to-night was to be a triumph indeed; liberalism was to sweep the country. Though even Stanley did not guess to what extent, or how far the inevitable pendulum had swung.

Imogen was entranced by the dark, clear night, the coloured lights, the crowd, the excitement, and little thrills ran up and down her as names and figures and rockets were greeted with cheers and hoots. She cared nothing for the results; to her the thing was a sporting event on which she had no money. Aunt Stanley, she knew, had her shirt on the Liberals. So had Uncle Maurice. But Aunt Rome had nothing either way. Imogen’s own parents were Conservatives. So, on the whole, was Phyllis, and Phyllis’s young man. So was Uncle Irving, who was for Tariff Reform. Probably, on the whole, Liberals were the more right, thought Imogen. But probably no party was particularly right. How excited they all got, anyhow, right or wrong!

The Liberals were forging ahead. There was another Manchester division going up on the screen. Three Manchester seats had already been lost to the Tories. “Bet you an even twopence it’s a Lib.” Tony was saying.

“Right you are. Oh, it’s Balfour’s....”

“Well, he’s lost it. Hand over.”

The crowd roared with laughter, distress and joy. Balfour out.... What next?

“Very badly managed,” Irving was complaining all the time, to no one in particular. “Shockingly mismanaged. The most comic election I ever saw. There’ll be no Front Bench left.”

“And a jolly good thing.” That was Stanley, getting more and more triumphant. “There goes Brodrick....”

Imogen felt dazed and happy, and as if she were in a fairy palace, all blue and red lights. Her upstrained face was stiff and cold, her mouth open with joy, so that the cold air flowed in. She wasn’t betting any more, for neither she nor Tony would bet on the Tories now. The Tories were a dead horse. One was sorry for them, but one couldn’t bet on them. Did the poor men who lost their seats mind much? Perhaps some of them were pleased. After all, they had none of them sought or desired office.... Statesmen always said that of themselves; they only wanted to get in because they thought they were the ones who would do most good; always they said that. Divine guidance, they said, had laid this heavy burden on them, though it was a most frightful bore, and though the thing they wanted to do was to live in the country and keep pigs.

“If I was in office,” thought Imogen, “I wouldn’t say that. I’d say, I sought and wanted office, and I’m jolly glad I’ve got it, though I expect I’ll be rotten at it. I simply love being in power, and thank you awfully for putting me in, and I hope I’ll stop in for ages.”

How shocked everyone would be. That wasn’t the way public men ever talked. Would women, if ever they got into Parliament, like Aunt Stanley wanted them to? Perhaps they would at first, not being used to proper public manners, but they would soon learn that it wasn’t nice to talk like that and would begin on the I-never-wanted-it stunt.

More rockets; more blue flares. Lovely. Like a great garden of coloured flowers. _Night is a garden gay with flowers...._ Hours. Showers. Dowers. Bowers. Cowers....

_Their flaring blinds the sleepy hours...._ No. _The small dim hours are lit, are starred._ Better. The rhymes alternately in the middle and end of the lines, all through. That made it chime, like bells beneath the sea....

“Lord, what a bungle!” Irving grunted. “It’s all up now. Nothing can save it now. We may as well go home and get warm. What?”

His fine, dark, clear-cut face was beautiful in the coloured flares, as he stared up, a cigar in the corner of his mouth. How interesting people were, thought Imogen, the way they all wanted different things, and in different ways. There was Uncle Maurice now, smiling over his briar, as pleased as anything.... And Billy and Molly, silly little goats, twirling away with their clackers and shouting with Liberal joy because Aunt Stanley told them to.... Anyhow it couldn’t really _matter_ who got in. Not matter, like the night, and the lights, and poetry, and the lovely thrill of it all. Results didn’t matter, only the thing itself.

“Brrr!” said Vicky, hunching herself together and hugging her muff. “It’s too cold to watch the wrong side winning any more. Charles, I’m going home to bed. Come along, all of you, or you’ll catch your deaths.”

“Oh, mother, mayn’t I stay as long as father does?”

“If you like. Very silly of you, Jennie, you’re blue and shivering already. Stanley, aren’t you going to take those noisy and misguided children of yours home? It’s nearly midnight.”

“I suppose I must. But what a night for them to remember always.”

What a night, thought Imogen, huddling up in her coat with a happy shiver, to remember always. Indeed yes. Ecstasy and gaudy blossoms of the night. _The gaudy blossoms of the night.... Sharp swords of light...._ Bloss, moss, doss, toss ... toss ought to do....

“There goes Lyttelton. So much for those beastly Chinamen,” cried Maurice.

ON PARTIES

So much for the beastly Chinamen, and so much for the beastly little loaf and the tax on the People’s Food, so much for class legislation and sectarian education bills. So much, in fact, for Toryism, for the happy Liberals were in, and would be in, growing ever less and less happy, for close on ten years.

“_Now_ we’ll show the world,” said Stanley.

Maurice cynically grinned at her.

“If you mean you think you’re going to get a vote, my dear, you’re off it. This cabinet hasn’t the faintest intention of accommodating you. Not the very faintest. And if ever they did put up a bill, they’d never get it through the Lords. You may send all the deputations you like, but you won’t move them. Woman’s suffrage is merely the House joke.”

“We’ll see,” said Stanley, who was of a hopeful colour.

“All you can say of Liberals,” said Maurice, who was not, “is that they’re possibly (not certainly) one better than Conservatives. However, I’m not crabbing them. They’ve got their chance, and let’s hope they take it. First they’ve got to undo all the follies the last government perpetrated. Every government ought to begin with that, always. Then they’ve got to concentrate on Home Rule. As you say, we shall see.”

“Anyhow,” said Stanley, “we’ve got our chance.... And there’s the _Tribune_. Penny liberalism at last.”

“I give it a year,” said Maurice. “If it takes longer dying, Thomasson is an even more stubborn lunatic than I think him. They’ve started all right; quite a good first number, only how any Liberal paper can publish a polite message from that damned Tsar beats one. I believe my paper is really the only one that insults the Russian government as it ought to be insulted. All the others either make up to the Tsar for his armies or butter him up because of the Hague Conference and his silly prattle about a world peace. It makes one sick. Liberals are as bad as the rest.”

It was edifying, during the election days, to learn from various authorities the reasons for the Liberal victory. The _Times_ said it was the effect, long delayed, of the suffrage reform bills; the working classes, at last articulate, had determined to dictate their own policy; no triumph for liberalism, no humiliation for conservatism, but an experiment on the part of Labour. The _Morning Post_ said the victory was due to the misrepresentation of Chinese labour by Liberals, false promises, and the inevitable swing of the pendulum. The _Daily Mail_ said it was the swing of the pendulum, Chinese labour, the over continuance in office of the last government, the Education Act, taxation, unfair food-tax cries, and a liking for antiquated methods of commerce. The _Daily News_ said it was a rebellion against reaction, protection and the Little Loaf. The _Tribune_ said it was a rebellion also against poverty, the direction of companies by Ministers, and the undoing of the great Victorian reforms; it was, in fact, the protest of Right against Force, of the common good against class interest, of the ideal element in political life against merely mechanical efficiency. (“Mechanical efficiency!” Maurice jeered. “Much there was of that in the last government. As to the ideal element, the Liberal ideal is a large loaf and low taxes. Quite a sound one, but nothing to be smug about.”) However, the whole press was smug, as always, and so were nearly all statesmen in public speeches; their cynicism they kept for private life. Mr. Asquith, for instance, said that this uprising of the people was due to moral reprobation of the double dealing of the late government; plain dealing was what they wanted. And Mr. Lloyd George, in his best vein, spoke of a fearful reckoning. A tornado, he called it, of righteous indignation with the trifling that had been going on in high places for years with all that was sacred to the national heart. The oppression of Nonconformists at home, the staining of the British flag abroad with slavery, the rivetting of the chains of the drink traffic on the people of this country--against all these had the people risen in wrath. It was a warning to ministers not to trifle with conscience, or to menace liberty in a free land. The people meant to save themselves; the dykes had been opened, and reaction in all its forms would be swept away by the deluge.

Mr. Balfour, less excited and more philosophic, observed, at his own defeat at Manchester, that, after all, the Tories had been in office ten years, and would doubtless before long be in office again, and that these oscillations of fortune would and did always occur. He was probably nearer the truth about the elections than most of those who pronounced upon them. It is a safe assertion that no government is popular for long; get rid of it and let’s try another, for anyhow another can’t be sillier, is the voter’s very natural and proper feeling. The sophisticated voter knows that it will almost certainly be as silly, but, after all, it seems only fair to let each side have its innings.

Anyhow, and whatever the reasons that brought liberalism into power, there it was. It was expressed by a House which was at present, and before its enthusiasms were whittled away in action, composed largely of political and social theorists, men new to politics and brimming with plans. Mr. H. W. Massingham said it was the ablest Parliament he had ever known, but not the most distinguished.

DREADNOUGHT

Imogen saved up her pocket money for the cheap excursion fare to Portsmouth, and slipped off there alone, on a raw February morning, by the special early train, to see the King launch the _Dreadnought_. The _Dreadnought_ was a tremendous naval event. She displaced 19,900 tons, beating the _Dominion_ and the _King Edward VII_ by 1,200 tons, and she would make 21 knots to their 16.5, and had turbine engines, and carried ten 12-inch guns, and her outline was smooth and lovely and unbroken by casemates, for she was built for speed. Imogen had to go. She slipped off without a word at home, for she had a cough and objections would have been raised. She stood wedged for hours in a crowd on the docks in cold rain that pitted the heaving green harbour seas, and coughed. She did not command a view of the actual launching, but would see the splendid creature as she left the slip and took the water. Before that there was a service; the service appointed to be used at the launching of the ships of His Majesty’s Navy. “They that go down to the sea in ships: and occupy their business in great waters; These men see the works of the Lord: and his wonders in the deep. For at his word the stormy wind ariseth: which lifteth up the waves thereof. They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep: their soul melteth away because of the trouble. They reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man: and are at their wit’s end....”

After this, Hymn 592 (A & M) was irritating and silly, but hymns cannot be helped, bishops will have them.

Then the King smashed the bottle of wine on her and, christened, she took the water. She left the slip and came into the view of the crowd, and a great shout went up. “She’s moving!”

Imogen, thrilled, gazed at the lovely, the amazing creature, the giant of the navy. What a battleship! With professional interest Imogen examined her points through her father’s field glasses. No openings in the bulkheads--it was that which gave her her smooth, fleet look. She was made for a running fight. She was glorious.

Imogen travelled home wet through, shivering, her cough tearing at her chest, and went to bed for a month with bronchitis. So much for the navy, said Vicky crossly. But the amazing grey ship was a comfort to Imogen through her fevered waking dreams.

AT THE FARM

Imogen, bow and arrows in hand, crawled through the wood, beneath overhanging boughs of oaks and elders and beeches and the deep green arms of pines, that shut the little copse from the August sun into a fragrant gloom. Every now and then she stopped, listened, and laid her ear to the mossy ground.

“Three miles off and making a bee line south,” she observed, frowning. “My God.”

“Michael crawled on,” she continued, “crawling, keeping his head low, so as not to afford a target for any stray arrows. Who knew what sinister shadows lurked in the forest, to right and to left?... Hist! What was that sound? Something cracked in the tangle of scrub near him.... A Cherokee on a lone trail, possibly.... A Cherokee: the most deadly of the Red Tribes.... Cold sweat stood out on Michael’s brow. Could he reach the camp in time? Again he laid his ear to the ground and listened. They were only two miles now, and still that swift, terrible, travelling.... The sun beat upon his head and neck; he felt dizzy and sick. Suppose he fainted before he reached his goal.... That damned cracking in the bushes again.... Good God!... out of the thicket sprang a huge Redskin, uttering the horrid war-whoop of the Cherokee, which, once heard, is never forgotten. Michael leaped to his feet, pulled his bow-string to his ear, let fly....”

Imogen too let fly.

“Missed him,” she muttered, and swarmed nimbly up the gnarled trunk of an oak until she reached the lower boughs, from whence she looked down into a fierce red face, eagle-nosed, feather-crowned.

“Oh, Big Buffalo,” she softly called. “Will you parley?”

Big Buffalo grunted, and they parleyed. If Michael would betray the whereabouts of his friends, Big Buffalo would grant him his life. If not, no such easy death as the arrow awaited him, “for we Cherokees well understand the art of killing....” Michael, sick with fear, betrayed his friends, and Big Buffalo left him, primed with information. (In common with other heroes of fiction, Michael never thought of giving incorrect or misleading information.)

“Michael lay in the forest, his head upon his arms. What had he done? There was no undoing it now. Why didn’t I choose the stake? Oh, damn, why didn’t I....”

It was too warm, sweet and drowsy for prolonged remorse. Michael forgot his shame. The breeze in the pine trees sang like low harps.... The shadowy copse was soaked in piney sweetness, golden and dim. Michael, with his bow, his Redskins, and his broken honour, faded out in the loveliness of the hour.

Ecstasy descended on the wood; enchantment held it, saturating it with golden magic. Ants and little wood-beetles scuttled over Imogen’s outstretched hands and bare, rough head. Rabbits bobbed and darted close to her. She was part of the woods, caught breathless into that fairy circle like a stolen, enchanted child.

“I am full of the Holy Ghost,” said Imogen. “This is the Holy Ghost....” And loveliness shook her, as a wind shakes a leaf. These strange, dizzy moments lurked hidden in the world like fairies in a wood, and at any hour they sprang forth and seized her, and the emotion, however often repeated, was each time as keen. They would spring forth and grip her, turning the dædal earth to magic, at any lovely hour, in wood or lane or street, or among the wavering candles and the bread and wine. She was stabbed through and through with beauty sweet as honey and sharp as a sword, and it was as if her heart must break in her at its turning. After this brief intensity of joy or pain, whichever it was, it was as if something in her actually did break, scattering loose a drift of pent-up words. That was how poems came. After the anguished joy, the breaking loose of the words, then the careful stringing of them together on a chain, the fastidious, conscious arranging. Then the setting them down, and reading them over, and the happy, dizzy (however erroneous) belief that they were good.... That was how poems came, and that was life at its sharpest, its highest intensity. Afterwards, one sent them to papers, and it was pleasant and gratifying if other people saw them and liked them too. But all that was a side-issue. Vanity is pleasant, gratified ambition is pleasant, earning money is very pleasant, but these are not life at its highest power. You might at once burn every poem you wrote, but you would still have known life.

The song the pines hummed became words, half formed, drifting, sweet.... Imogen listened, agape, like an imbecile. It was a lovely, jolly, woody thing that was being sung to her ... she murmured it over....

A bell rang, far away. Sharply time’s voice shivered eternity to fragments. Imogen yawned, got up, brushed pine needles out of her hair and clothes, took up her bow, and strolled out of fairyland. It was tea-time at the farm.

As she sauntered through the little wood, she shot arrows at the trees and stopped to retrieve them. Then she found a long, sharp stick, pointed, like a spear, and became a knight in a Norman forest. She encountered another knight, a hated foe. There was a fight _à outrance_. They fenced, parried, lunged....

“Swerve to the right, son Roger, he said, When you catch his eye through the helmet’s slit; Swerve to the right, then out at his head, And the Lord God give you joy of it....”

A swinging thrust....

“Got him, pardie!”

“Hullo.”

Imogen faced about, and there, on the cart track between the wood and the home farm, stood her Uncle Ted, large and red in breeches and gaiters, his pipe between his teeth.

“Oh, hullo, Uncle Ted.”

Imogen had turned red. She had been seen making an ass of herself alone in the wood. Behaving like a maniac. Damn.

“Anything the matter? Got the staggers, have you?” asked Uncle Ted, as if she were a cow.

“No, I’m all right. Looking for arrows and things, that’s all.”

“Oh, I see.... Comin’ up to tea?”

They walked across the home field together. Imogen was sulky and ashamed. She was emptied of enchantment and the Holy Ghost, and was nothing but an abrupt, slangy, laconic girl, going sullenly in to tea, feeling an ass. Uncle Ted was thinking farmer’s thoughts, of crops and the like, not of Imogen.

But afterwards he said to Una, “Not quite all there, eh, that girl of Vicky’s? Flings herself about in the wood when she’s alone, like someone not right, and talks to herself, too. Nineteen, is she? It’d be right enough if she was twelve. But at eighteen or nineteen....”

“Oh, Imogen’s all right. She’s childish for her age, that’s all.”

Una took everyone for granted.

“Childish, yes. That’s what I say. They ought to have her seen to. Gabbles, too. I can’t make out half she’s saying.... Katie may do her good, I daresay. Katie’s got sense.... It’s against a girl, going on like that. No sensible young fellow would like it. They ought to have her seen to. What?”

“Oh, she’s all right,” said Una again. “There she is in the field playing rounders with the others quite sensibly, you see.”

“I daresay. She may be all right at games, but she oughtn’t to be let loose alone in woods. She’ll get herself talked about....”

Katie too thought Imogen mad. But quite nicely mad. Harmless. Like a kid. Katie was a few months younger, but she felt that Imogen was a kid. She said and did such mad things. And she lacked the most elementary knowledge; she didn’t know the first thing, for instance, about clothes, what they were made of, and how they should be made. She was like an imbecile about them; didn’t care, either. She would stare, pleased and admiring, at Katie, who had beauty, as if Katie were a lovely picture, but she never said the right things about her clothes. You’d think, almost, she didn’t know one material from another.

When they had done playing rounders, and when Imogen and Tony, who was staying at the farm too, had done damming the brook at the bottom of the field, and when Tony had gone off rook shooting with his cousin Dick, Imogen sat by the brook, her bare muddy legs in a pool scaring minnows, and brooded over life. Rotten it was, being grown up. Simply rotten. Because you weren’t really grown up. You hadn’t changed at all. You knew some more, and you cared for a lot of fresh books, but you liked doing all the things you had liked doing before you grew up. Climbing, and playing Red Indians, and playing with soldiers, and walking on stilts. But when you put your hair up, you had to hide all sorts of things away, like a guilty secret. You could play real games, like tennis and cricket and hockey and rounders, and even football, and you could perhaps do the other things with someone else, but not alone. If people found you alone up a tree, or climbing a roof, or listening with your ear to the ground, or astride on a wall, or pretending with a sword, they put up their eyebrows and thought you an ass. Your mother told people you were a tomboy. A tomboy. Imbecile word. As if girls didn’t like doing nice things as much as boys. Who started the idea they didn’t, or shouldn’t?... Oh, it was rotten, being grown up. Grown-up people had a hideous time. They became so queer, talking so much, wanting to go to parties, and even meetings, and all kinds of rotten shows. Mother held meetings in the drawing-room, for good objects. So did Aunt Stanley. Different objects, but equally good, no doubt. People came to the meetings and jabbered away, and sometimes you were made to be there, “to learn to take an interest.” Votes, cruelty to animals or children, sweated labour, bazaars, white slaves, the Conservative party, the Liberal party.... What did any of them matter? Phyllis was good at them. But now Phyllis was going to be married. And Nancy was at the Slade, and wouldn’t attend the meetings; she was too busy drawing and going to dances and parties. The modern girl, mother said; independent, selfish, dashing about with young men and no chaperons. The Edwardian young woman, so different from the Victorian young woman.... Only Aunt Rome said she was not different, but just the same.... Anyhow, Nancy wouldn’t take her turn at the meetings. So Imogen, younger and more docile, was being trained up. But she would never be any good. She hated them. Why shouldn’t the boys take their turn? No one made them. It wasn’t fair.

Imogen kicked viciously at the minnows. Rotten, being a girl.... Perhaps she would run away to sea ... round the world ... the South Sea Islands....

It was getting chilly. Imogen drew her legs out of the brook and dried them on her handkerchief. Filthy they were, with mud. She put on her stockings and old tennis shoes, and wondered what next. Tony was still rooking. One might go and catch the colt in the meadow and ride him....

Katie appeared over the hunched shoulder of the field.

“Imogen, do you want to come and milk? It’s time.... Oh, I say, you _are_ in a mess. You ass, what’ve you been up to?”

“Only damming the brook, and wading. Yes, I want to milk, rather.”

“Hurry up then.”

Katie was as beautiful as a June morning. As beautiful as Una. Pale as milk, with eyes like violets and dark, clustering curls. And clever. She could do nearly everything. Imogen, six months older, was as nought beside her. But Katie liked her, and was very kind to her. Katie had just left Roedean; she had been captain of the school hockey team, and was going now to play for Essex. A splendid girl. Imogen believed that Katie had none of the dark and cold forebodings, the hot excitements, the black nightmares, the sharp, sweet ecstasies, the mean and base feelings, that assailed herself, any more than Katie would be found making an ass of herself playing in a wood. Katie, like her mother, was balanced. This tendency to believe that others are balanced, and are not rent by the sad and glad storms which one’s own soul knows, is common to many. One supposes it to be because human beings put such a calm face on things, so the heart alone knows its own turbulence.

Imogen grinned at Katie, and went with her to the milking.

HIGHER THOUGHT

Papa had aged very much in the last two years since mamma had died. He had had wonderful experiences; he had constantly spoken with, even seen, mamma; it had made him very happy. But he was aware that the séances greatly strained and fatigued him. He slept badly; his nerves seemed continually on edge. Further, he could not by any means overcome the distaste he felt for the medium who made it her special business to open the door between him and mamma. A common little person, he could not help, even in his charity, thinking her. And Flossie, the spirit on the Other Side, who spoke for mamma (except on those rare occasions when mamma spoke for herself) was, to judge from her manner, voice and choice of language, even commoner. And silly. Papa scarcely liked to admit to himself _how_ silly Flossie seemed to him to be. Mamma must dislike Flossie a good deal, he sometimes thought, but then recollected that, where mamma had gone to dwell, dislike was no more felt, only compassion. He would have liked to ask mamma, on the rare occasions when she spoke for herself, what she thought of Flossie, and of Miss Smythe, the medium on this side. But he did not like to, for Flossie would certainly, and Miss Smythe possibly, through her trance, hear his question and mamma’s reply. How he longed for a little private talk, of the kind that mamma and he used to have of old! But he was not ungrateful. He was in touch with mamma; he knew her to be extant as a personality, and accessible to him, and that was surely enough. As to the fatigue, that was a small price to pay.

Then, one tragic day, in the autumn of 1906, came one of those great exposures which dog the steps of psychical men and women. Some of the sharp, inquisitive persons who make it their business to nose out frauds and write to _Truth_ about them, turned their attention to Miss Smythe and her séances. In a few weeks--these things are very easy, and do not take long--Miss Smythe was pilloried in the press as a complete and accomplished fraud. She had, it was made clear except to the most obstinate believers, never been in a trance, never called spirits, from the vasty deep, never opened any spiritual doors. The mechanism of the materialisation was once more discovered and exposed.... (“What a stale old story,” said Rome. “As if we didn’t know all about it long ago. These heavy-footed creatures, trampling over children’s fairylands. Why can’t they let things be?”) ... and even Flossie, that bright, silly, chatty spirit, was discredited. Flossie was a quack, and had known about the thimble behind the sofa and the other things in some cheap, sly way, or else just guessed.

Alas for papa! The gates of paradise clanged in his face; he might believe by faith that paradise was there, and mamma in it, but the door between him and it was shut. Great and bitter sorrow shook him, and shame, for that he had so made cheap his love and mamma’s for the benefit of common frauds. He sank into inert grief, from which he was roused, in March 1907, by the call of Higher Thought. The name, in the first instance, appealed to him. Thought should be higher; it was usually lower, and very certainly much too low.

“Higher than what, papa dear?” Rome enquired. “These comparatives, in the air, are so unfinished. Higher education, higher criticism, the larger hope, the younger generation.... Higher, I mean than what other thought?”

Than the thought customary on similar subjects, papa supposed.

“These geometrical metaphors,” Rome murmured. “Well, papa, I am sure it must be very interesting.”

It was very interesting. Papa was introduced to a little temple near High Street, Kensington, which, when you stepped on the entrance mat, broke into “God is Love” in electric light over the altar. Here he worshipped and thought highly, in company with a small but ardent band of other high thinkers, who were led in prayer by a Guru of immense power--the power of thought which was not merely higher but highest--over mind and matter. So great was the power of this Guru that he not only could cure diseased bodies and souls, but could correct physical malformations, merely by absent treatment. A lame young man was brought to him, one of whose legs was shorter than its fellow. Certainly, said the Guru, this defect would yield to absent treatment. Further, the treatment would in this case be doubly effective, as he happened to be about to make a journey to Thibet, to visit the Lama, the very centre of fervent prayer, absent treatment, and higher thought. The nearer the Guru got to Thibet, the more powerful would become, he said, the action of his treatment on the leg of the young man. And, sure enough, so it proved. The shorter leg began, as the Guru receded towards Asia, to grow. It grew, and it grew, and it grew. There came a joyful day when the two legs were of identical length. The power of absent treatment was triumphantly justified. But it proved to be a power even greater than the young man and his family had desired or deserved. For the short leg did not stop when it had caught up its companion; on the contrary, it seemed to be growing with greater velocity than before. And indeed, it was; for the Guru, now far beyond reach of communication by letter or telegram, was journeying ever deeper and deeper into the great heart of prayer, Holy Thibet, and as he penetrated it his prayer intensified and multiplied in power, like the impetus of a ball rolling down hill. The short leg surpassed its brother, shot on, and on, and on....

It was still shooting on when papa was told of the curious phenomenon.

“Strange,” said papa. “Strange, indeed.”

But it was not these portents, however strange, that papa valued in his new faith. It was the freedom, the prayerfulness, the rarefied spiritual atmosphere; in brief, the height. After Miss Smythe, after the darkened room and the rapping table and the lower thinking of poor Flossie, it was like a mountain top, where the soul was purged of commonness.

Mamma, papa sometimes thought, would have approved of Higher Thought; might even, had she been spared, have become a Higher Thinker herself. (It should be remembered, in this connection, that papa, since the exposure of poor Flossie, was no longer in touch with mamma.)

LIBERALS IN ACTION

It is a pity to crab all governments and everything they do. For occasionally it occurs that some government or other (its political colour is an even chance) passes some measure or other which is not so bad as the majority of measures. The Liberal government elected in 1906 composed tolerable bills more than once. It even succeeded, though more rarely, in getting them, in some slightly warped form, tolerated by the Upper House. The Trades Disputes Bill, for instance, got through. Either the Lords were caught napping, or they felt they had to let something through, just to show that things _could_ get through, as at hoop-la the owner of the booth has, here and there, among hundreds of objects too large to be ringed by the hoop, one of trifling value which can fairly be ringed and won, just to show that the thing can be done. Anyhow, the Trades Disputes Bill did get through, before the game began of chucking all bills mechanically back, or amending them out of all meaning so that the Commons disowned them and threw them away.

Mr. Birrell had no luck with his Education Bill. It was a good, rational bill, as education bills (a sad theme) go, and no party liked it much, and the Upper House saw that it would not do at all, and sent it back plastered all over with amendments that gave it a new and silly face, like a lady over-much made up. So the Commons would have none of it, and that was the end, for the moment, of attempts to improve the management of our elementary schools.

The Lords were now getting into their form, and threw out the Plural Voting Bill with no nonsense about amendments, and no trouble at all. After all, what were they there for, if not to throw out? What, indeed, asked the Lower House, many members of whom had for long wondered. As to any kind of Woman’s Suffrage Bill, the Commons, as firmly as the Lords, would have none of it. It was when this was made clear that the Women’s Social and Political Union, that new, vigorous and vulgar body, began to bestir itself, and to send bodies of women to waylay members on their way to the House; in fact, the militant suffragist nuisance began. There were processions, demonstrations, riots, arrests and imprisonments. Stanley threw herself into these things at first with dogged fervour; she did not like them, but held them advantageous to the Cause. Her niece, Vicky’s Nancy, a very wild young woman, who enjoyed fighting and making a disturbance on any pretext, threw herself also into the Cause, fought policemen with vigour, and was dragged off to prison with joy. Imogen wouldn’t participate in these public-spirited orgies; she was too shy. And she couldn’t see that it was any use, either. She had a hampering and rather pedantic sense of logic, that prevented her from flinging herself into movements with sentimental ardour; she preferred to know exactly how the methods adopted were supposed to work, and to see clearly cause and effect, and no one ever made it precisely clear to her how making rows in the streets was going to get a suffrage bill passed. It seemed, in fact, to be working the other way, and alienating some of the few hitherto sympathetic. Her Aunt Stanley told her, “It’s to show the public and the government how much we care. They’re crude weapons, but the only ones we have. Constitutional methods have failed, so far.”

“But, Aunt Stanley, how do you know these are weapons at all?” Imogen argued.

“We can but try them,” Stanley answered, herself a little doubtful on the point.

“Anyhow,” she added, “anyhow, no woman who cares about citizenship can be happy sitting still and doing nothing while we’re denied it. You do care about the suffrage, don’t you, Imogen?”

“Oh, rather, Aunt Stanley, of course I do. I think it’s awful cheek not giving it us. There’s no _sense_ in it, is there; no meaning. Anti-suffragists do talk a lot of rot.... Only don’t you think suffragists do too, sometimes? I mean, Aunt Stanley, people do so, when they talk, get off the _point_, don’t they. It would be a lot easier to be keen if people didn’t talk so much. They talk _round_, not along. Really, there’s hardly anything to say about anything; I mean, you could say it all, all that mattered, in a few sentences. But people go on talking about things for hours, saying the same things twice, and a lot of other things that don’t really apply, and everything in hundreds of words when quite a few would do. I noticed it in the House the other day when we were there. Two-thirds of what they all said was just flapping about. And they say, ‘I have said before, Mr. Speaker, and I say again....’ But _why_ do they say it again? It isn’t awfully good even the first time. I do wonder why people are like that, don’t you?”

“Soft heads and long tongues, my dear, that’s why. Can’t be helped. One’s got to bear it and go ahead.... I wish Molly was five years older; she’ll be so tremendously keen....”

Imogen said nothing to that. She knew Molly, her small elfish cousin of fourteen, pretty well. Molly, with her short white face and merry, narrow eyes, and quick wits and easy selfishness and charm, was, though Imogen couldn’t know that, her father over again, without his abilities. Imogen was afraid that Molly, when she left school and grew up, was not going to take that place among the world’s workers that Aunt Stanley hoped.

As to Billy, a cheerful, stocky Rugby boy of sixteen, he had no views on the suffrage. He didn’t care. Politics bored him.

Poor Aunt Stanley. Aunt Stanley was a great dear; treated one always as a friend, not as a niece; explained things, and discussed, and said what she meant. She was easy to talk to. Easier than Vicky, whom one loved, but couldn’t discuss things with; one couldn’t formulate and express one’s ideas and project them into that spate of charming, inconsequent talk, that swept on gaily over anything one said. Imogen tried to please Aunt Stanley by seeming really keen about suffrage, but it was difficult, because the things she actually was keen on were so many and absorbing that they didn’t leave much time over. Imogen felt that she was no good at these large, unselfish causes that Aunt Stanley had at heart; she hadn’t soul enough, or brain enough, or imagination enough, or something. And she did hate meetings. If one had to sit indoors in the afternoon, were there not the galleries and theatres, her point of view was. Perhaps, she thought, Nancy, who enjoyed it, could do the votes-for-women business for the family.

Meanwhile, Mr. W. H. Dickinson’s Suffrage Bill failed to come to anything, and it became obvious that the Liberal government, in this matter, was to be no use at all.

It was quite a question whether it was going to be much use in any other matter. Poor Law Reform it had postponed; likewise Old Age Pensions. Licensing Reform was dropped; so was Mr. McKenna’s new Education Bill, the Land Valuation Bill, and Irish Home Rule. It looked as if the Liberal programme was running away like wax in the heat and trouble of the day. How few party programmes, for that matter, ever do become accomplished achievements! They are frail plants, and cannot easily come to fruit in the rough air of office. What with one thing, what with another, they wilt away in flower and die.

To make up for the stagnation of home politics, there was, in 1906 and 1907, plenty of international activity. The nations of Europe were ostensibly drawing together, a happy family. British journalists were entertained in Berlin, German journalists in London, amid some mutual execration and dislike. A _rapprochement_ took place between ourselves and Russia, for it was quite the fashion in Europe to fraternise with Russia, her armies were so huge, even if not, apparently, very good at what armies should be good at. There were those in this country who held that it was not quite nice to fraternise with Russia, disapproving of her governmental system, and of the Tsar’s very natural suppression of the Duma that had for a few days and by an oversight so strangely existed and actually dared to demand constitutional reform. There were those in Great Britain who said that we should not be at all friendly with a government so little liberal in mentality. But, after all, you must take nations as you find them, and their domestic affairs are quite their own concern, and one should not be provincial in one’s judgments, but should make friends even with the mammon of unrighteousness for the sake of the peace of Europe, which was a good deal talked of just then by the Powers, though it is doubtful whether any of them really believed in it. It is certain that the nations by no means neglected the steady increase and building up of armaments by land and sea. They hurried away from the Hague Conference to lay down new battleships at a reckless pace; even Mr. W. T. Stead said, “Let us strengthen our navy, for on its fighting power the peace of Europe depends.” Strengthen our navy we did; but as to the peace of Europe, that lovely, insubstantial wraith, she was perhaps frightened by all those armoured ships, all those noisy guns, all those fluent statesmen talking, for she never put on much flesh and bones.

1907

Outside politics, 1907 was a gay year enough. There was a severe outbreak of pageantitis, which many people enjoyed very much, and others found vastly disagreeable. Drama was noticeably good; the Vedrenne-Barker company moved from the Court to the Savoy, and the intelligent play-goer moved after it. Miss Horniman’s Repertory Theatre toured the provinces; and the Abbey Theatre players took English audiences by storm. Acting was good, literature and the arts were much encouraged, dancing and social entertainments were more than ever the fashion. Society, it was said, was getting rowdier. For that matter, society has always been getting rowdier, since the dawn of time. How rowdy it will end, in what nameless orgies it will be found at the Last Day, is a solemn thought indeed.

As to the young they were thought of and written of much as ever, much as now. The New Young were discovered afresh, and the Edwardian variety was much like the Victorian and the Georgian. They were wild, people said; they went their own way; they were hard, reckless, independent, enquiring, impatient of control, and yet rather noble.

“Youth in the new century has broken with tradition,” people said. “It is no longer willing to accept forms and formulæ only on account of their age. It has set out on a voyage of enquiry, and, finding some things which are doubtful, others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of experience more in harmony with the realities of life and of knowledge....”

Youth was, in fact, at it again.

“Girls are so wild in these days,” Vicky cheerfully complained. “Nancy and Imogen both go on in a way we’d _never_ have dared to do. Nancy dances all night (of course chaperons are a back number now), and comes home alone, or with some wild, arty young men and women, or, worse still, with one wild, arty young man, at five o’clock in the morning, and lets herself in with a bang and a rush, and often lets the arty young people in too. No, Nancy, I say to her, you don’t let your friends into my house before breakfast, and that’s that. Not several of them at once, nor one by herself or himself. If they don’t want to go home to their own beds, they must just go and carouse in any hotel that will receive them, for in my house they shall _not_ carouse. _Nor_ sit on the dining-room sofa and smoke, and carry on conversations in tones that I suppose you all think are hushed. It shall not be done, I said, so that is settled. But is it settled? Not a bit of it. Nancy merely changes the subject, and Charles and I are woken by the hushed voices again next morning. Edwardian manners, people tell me; well, I’m Victorian, and I don’t care if it _is_ 1907.”

“You were doing much the same in 1880, my dear,” Rome interpolated.

“Oh, well, I’ve forgotten ... were we?... Well, anyhow, you can’t say I was behaving like Imogen. She doesn’t care for dancing much, and she’s such a baby still that cocktails make her tipsy and cigarettes sick; she prefers raspberry syrup and chocolate cigars, which is really more indecent at her age. At her age _I_ was thinking of proper young-ladyish things, like young men, and getting engaged; but Imogen seems never to have heard of either--I mean, not of young men in their proper uses. She plays childish games, and dashes about on her bicycle, and makes ridiculous lists of all the ships in the navy and how much they weigh and how many horses they’re equal to, and slips off to Portsmouth all by herself to see them launched, without a word to anyone, and of course makes herself ill. I said to her one day, I suppose you’ll go and marry into the navy some day, Jennie; nothing else will satisfy you. But she opened her eyes and said, _Marry_ the navy? Oh, no. I couldn’t do that. I should be too jealous of him. You see, I want to be in the navy myself, and I know I should hate his being in it when I couldn’t. It would only rub it in. I want to do nice things myself, not to marry people who do them. I believe, mother, I’m perhaps too selfish to marry; it’s _my_ life I want to enjoy, not anyone else’s. Besides, there might be babies, and they would get so in the way, little sillies. They wouldn’t get in your way, I told her (only of course it isn’t true, because they always do, the wretches), if only you’d behave like other grown girls, and not be forever climbing about and playing silly games. You’re such a baby yourself, that’s what’s the matter. What on earth the child’s book will be like that she’s so busy with I can’t imagine. _She_ knows nothing about life, bless her. There’s Phyllis married, and running her home so capably, and Nancy at least carrying on like a girl, not like a child in the nursery--but Imogen! I lose my patience with her sometimes.”

And even as her mother spoke, Imogen was in Hamley’s in Regent Street, looking at toy pistols and blushing. She was blushing because she had just been deceitful, and was afraid that the lady attending on her guessed. “For what aged child is it?” this helpful lady had asked. “Would caps or blank cartridges be what he’d want? I mean, if he’s _very_ young....”

“Oh, no,” Imogen mumbled, “he’s not awfully young. Blank cartridges, he likes....”

She bent her abashed face over the weapons, fingering them. A sordid fib; was she seen through? She chose her pistol quickly, paid for it, and hurried out of the shop. When she got well away, she extracted the weapon from its cardboard box and tucked it, with a guilty look round, into the side pocket of her skirt.

She strode along with a new reckless gallantry.

“Patrick slipped among the crowd; that queer, cosmopolitan, rather sinister crowd that is to be found around the Marseilles docks. Was he followed? His hand strayed to his hip pocket. His keen, veiled eyes took in the passers-by without seeming to look. If he could get through the next hour without mishap, he would be aboard and a-sail. But could he? Prob’ly not....”

While Imogen thus walked in foreign ports or trackless forests, a happy, dreaming spinster, a reckless adventurer armed to the teeth, many of her contemporaries and elders walked in suffragist processions, adventurers too, and no less absorbed than she. Stanley, disgusted now by the increasingly reasonless methods of the militants, had definitely turned her back on them and joined the constitutionals. These arranged orderly and lady-like processions, headed at times by Lady Carlisle.

“There can be no doubt,” wrote the more dignified press, after one such procession, “that many of these lady suffragettes are absolutely in earnest, and honestly believe that the cause for which they are contending is a just and sane one. But the fact remains that they are in the minority; that the sex, _qua_ sex, is still content, and proud to be content, to accept the symbol of petticoat....” (“How indecent,” cried Vicky, “to gossip about our underwear in a leader by a man!”) ... “the symbol of petticoat as the badge of disenfranchisement.” Women, the article continued, are of low mental calibre, and will never understand politics, and if they did it would interfere with their only duty, the propagation of the race.

“I love journalists,” said Rome, reading this to her papa at their Sunday breakfast. “They always write as if women did that job single-handed. They are so modest about man’s share in it, which is really quite as important as ours. They even kindly call us the fount of life. Dear, generous, self-effacing creatures....”

But papa was shaking his head, gravely.

“You make a joke of it, my dear. But this low mental equipment on the part of the writers on our leading papers is really a tragedy. The guiders of public opinion.... The blind leading the blind ... how can we avoid the ditch?”

“Indeed, we don’t avoid the ditch. We are all in it, up to the neck. But if one is to be sad on account of the low mental equipment of writers or others, there will be very little joy left. For my part, I find a considerable part of my joy in it; it assists in providing the cheering spectacle of human absurdity.”

“Pass me the paper, my dear. I want to read about.... I want to see it.”

Rome smiled behind the screen of paper which papa put up between him and her. Well she knew what papa wanted to read in it. He was looking for news of Mr. R. J. Campbell and his New Theology, searching for tidings of Pantheism and the Divine Immanence. And, sure enough, he found them. There was a Saying of the Week. Among the eminent persons who had said other things, such as Dr. Clifford, who had remarked, a little meiosistically, “It is not necessary to burn a man who is seeking the truth,” and the Lord Chief Justice, who had observed, more topically, “One of the greatest errors that motorists can make is to believe that upon their blowing their horns everybody should clear out of the way,” and Prince Fushimi from Japan, who had said, “I do not wish to object to ‘The Mikado,’ as I am sure its writers did not intend to hurt the feelings of a great nation, but I shall, of course, be glad if it is not performed,” and two doctors, one of whom had said, “Kissing consists in depositing some saliva on the lips or cheeks of another person,” and the other, “Those who do not like milk will get cancer”--among all these utterers of truth came Mr. R. J. Campbell, remarking brightly, not for the first time nor for the last, “The New Theology is the gospel of the humanity of God and of the divinity of man.”

“True,” said papa, within himself. “Very true. Very proper and intelligent indeed.”

He sighed gently behind the newspaper. He had had, of late, his doubts as to Higher Thought; as to whether it was very intelligent, very proper, or very true. It was strange in so many ways; high, doubtless, but perhaps for earth too high. And there were strange tales going about concerning the Gurus who led in prayer and in thought. And the leg of that unfortunate young man ... how could people believe such nonsense? The element of folly in all human creeds was becoming, in the case of the Higher Thought, painfully evident to papa.

This New Theology now--this young man Campbell--he seemed, somehow, nearer to solid earth than did the Higher Thinkers. He might talk of the Divinity of Man, but he did not, as papa, having read his book on the subject, knew, mean anything silly by it, only what all the mystics have meant--the divine spark in the human heart. As to the humanity of God--well, he probably meant no harm by that either. He was but an anthropomorphist, like the rest of us.

The theologians had been hard upon that book of his. It was not, of course, the book of a scholar; all it said had been said much better by Loisy and other Catholic modernists, whom Mr. Campbell palely reflected. But it gave a good peptonised version, suitable for the unscholarly mind. And its reviewers had been unkind. They had nearly all attacked it. Dr. Robertson Nicoll in the _British Weekly_ had snubbed it at considerable length. The _Church Times_ had said, “The book is one long offence against good taste,” and the _Methodist Recorder_, “Frankly, we do not think this book worth reading, and to price it at six shillings is enough to make us join in the Book War.” Theological reviewers were not always fair, as papa, since he had published his own mighty and erudite work on Comparative Religions, had known. For himself, he had liked Mr. Campbell’s book, even though it was rather bright than scholarly, more an appeal to the man in the City Temple than to the student or the theologian. Papa, besides being a student and a theologian, had of late been also on Sundays a man in the City Temple. He had said nothing of it yet to anyone; he was trying it. He liked it; there was nothing in it to bewilder or offend. The Divine Immanence; call it Pantheism who chose, it was a beautiful idea. It was in no degree incompatible with the Divine Transcendence; why should it be, since there was also the Divine Ubiquity?

Brooding on these matters, papa finished breakfast somewhat silently, and lit his pipe.

“A beautiful day,” said Rome, smoking her cigarette at the open window. “I shall be out for lunch and tea, papa. I am joining a party of pleasure; we are going to explore, in our cars, to Newlands Corner, where we shall have trials of skill and of speed. You won’t come with me, I suppose?”

“No, thank you, dear, I think not. I’m too old for trials of skill and speed; too old, even, for exploring.”

Precisely, thought Rome, glancing at him with her indulgent smile, what papa was not and never would be. He would very surely go exploring this morning, searching the riches of the spiritual kingdoms. Much more exciting than Newlands Corner.... To papa at seventy-seven, as to Mr. R. J. Campbell at whatever age he might be, theology could still seem new. Rome wondered whether it was an advantage or a misfortune that to her, at forty-eight, all theologies, as most other of the world’s businesses, seemed so very old. The only things that seemed new to her in 1907 were taximeter cabs.

“Well, good-bye, dear, and good luck,” Rome wished her papa.

Of 1907 there is not very much more to record. Two or three items of news may perhaps be mentioned. Maurice’s son Roger, aged twenty-four, now attached, at his own urgent desire, to the literary side of his father’s paper--(“He can’t do much harm there, I suppose,” Maurice said, “though he’ll not do any good either; he hasn’t the brains.”)--published a novel. It was a long novel, and it was about a youth not unlike what Roger conceived himself to be, only his home was different, for his father was a church-warden and bare the bag in church, and bullied and beat and prayed over his children; fathers in fiction must be like this, not heretical and intelligent journalists. The book conducted the youth from the nursery through his private and public schools (house matches, school politics, vice, expulsions, and so on), through Cambridge (the Union, the river, tobacconists’ assistants, tripos), to journalistic, social and literary London, where it left him, at twenty-four, having just published his first novel, which was a great success.

“God, what tripe,” Maurice commented, but to himself, as he turned the pages. “Exactly what the boy _would_ write, I fear. No better, no worse. Well, poor lad, he’s pleased with it enough. And it will probably be handsomely reviewed. It’s the stuff to give the public all right.” His thoughts strayed to a familiar, rather bitter point. If he had been given (by Amy: how fantastic a thought!) a son with brains; a son with a hard, clear head or an original imagination; a son who, if he wrote at all, wouldn’t produce the stuff to give the public, a son who, like himself, would see the public damned first....

Roger was, as his father had predicted, handsomely reviewed, for the Edwardians rather liked the biography-of-a-young-man type of novel, and loved details of school life. Roger had his feet well on the ladder of successful fiction-writing. Roger would be all right. Meanwhile, his head swelled even larger than before. His father perceived that the innocent youth really believed his reviewers, and conceived himself to be a writer and a clever young man.

The other items I record of the year 1907 I quote from the diary of Imogen for the 16th of March.

“_Indomitable_ launched, Glasgow. Largest and quickest cruiser in the world. 17,250 tons. 41,000 h.p. 25 knots. _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_, same type, building. Finished book, began to type it. Got guinea prize from _Saturday Westminster_ for poem.”

WHITHER?

And so to the last years of Edwardianism. In them that gay, eager, cultivated period listed gently to the political left. The Socialist Budget, as it was called by its opponents, “the end of all things” as Lord Rosebery a little optimistically called it, agitated the country. Old Age Pensions were at last established, to the disgust of Tories, who had, however, when members of Parliament, to be careful how they expressed their disgust, for fear of their needy constituents. “Whither are we drifting?” enquired the Conservative press, in anger and fear. “Here is Socialism unabashed: the thin end of the wedge which shall at last undermine the integrity and liberty of our Constitution.” Here were sixty millions a year, not insurance but a free dole, squandered on supporting old persons who might just as well be supported in workhouses. What would that come to in Dreadnoughts? Anyhow, we had got to lay down six or seven Dreadnoughts a year for the present, if we were to be to Germany in the ratio of two keels to one, which was assuredly essential. “They are ringing their bells; they will soon be wringing their hands,” said the Tory leaders. The Radical element in the government strengthened; Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman died, and in Mr. Asquith’s ministry Mr. Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer. But it remained, on the whole, a Liberal-Imperialist government, and left most of the radicalism to Labour, whose parliamentary strength was increasing and unifying. Wherever we were drifting, it was not towards extreme radicalism.

As to Ireland, a bill was passed to reduce her docks, thistles and noxious weeds: no other bill.

Parliamentary affairs and party politics were no more exciting and no more tedious (for that is impossible) than usual. Of more interest were the first flying machines that really flew, the drawings of Mr. Augustus John exhibited at the New English Art Club and condemned by all critics (except the few who liked the kind of thing), as essays in a savage and childish archaism, and deliberate insults to our intelligence; (whither indeed was art drifting, when such drawings could be praised?); and the establishment of the White City at Shepherds Bush, with the Franco-British Exhibition (sadly dull) and flip-flaps, switchbacks, wiggle-woggles and scenic railways (most exciting, and an insidious snare for pocket money; you could get rid there in one evening of the careful hoardings of weeks; also, if you were as weak in the stomach as Imogen, you felt repentant after a few goes). Thither President Fallières, on a visit to King Edward, was taken, to enjoy the Franco-British Exhibition and cement the _entente cordiale_, which, however, needed it less then than now, for the Edwardians were on the whole most enthusiastic about this international understanding. “There is no longer a Channel,” they said, publicly and politely; but in their hearts, for they were no more foolish than we, they still gave thanks for this useful, if unpleasing, strip of sea.

To forge faster the other link in the Triple Entente, that only possible guarantee for a world peace, King Edward visited the Tsar of all the Russias, at Reval. So there we were, grasping these two great military powers by the hand, ready to face any emergency. We had got ahead of Germany in this matter of Russia. For all the European Powers, discreetly averting their eyes from the chronic blood stains on the bear’s savage claws, were courting her for her legions. To have the bear at their beck and call--that was what everyone wanted, against the emergencies which might arise. And never was a time when emergencies seemed more imminent, more dangerous, more frequent; such a state of simmering unrest was Europe’s in the days of Edward the Peacemaker. Of the Kaiser Wilhelm and his Uncle Bertie it has been said that their relations “lapsed into comparative calm only when they were apart from one another.” Their subjects hated and feared each other; the press in each country stirred up terror of invasion by the other; “the German invasion,” “the English invasion”--these phrases were bandied about in two jealous, frightened empires. The German spy scare, the British spy scare, these fevers were worked up in the jingo press of two countries. “You English are mad, mad, mad,” said Wilhelm. “I strive without ceasing to improve relations and you retort that I am your arch-enemy. You make it very hard for me.”

For that matter, nations always make it hard for one another; it is their function. We did make it hard for Germany, and Germany made it hard for us, and France made it hard for everyone.

Anyhow, here was the Triple Entente, full-armed, to meet the Triple Alliance, and some one or other would see to it that they did meet before long.

The chief European emergency which arose at the moment was an attack of megalomania on the part of Servia, in 1909. The Serbs had the madness to dream of a greater Servia, which should unite the scattered peoples of their race--“a dream,” said the English press, “as hopeless as that of Poland _rediviva_. Greater Servia either will be realised under the sceptre of the Hapsburgs, or will not be realised at all.” The awkwardness of the situation, so far as we were concerned, was that Russia was, as usual, backing her mad little militant friend, and had to be dissuaded with great tact from upsetting the apple cart. However, a joint note to Servia from the Powers quieted her for the time being, and the lid was shut down temporarily on the seething European kettle of fish.

Other intriguing matters of this year were the building, in British dockyards, of three huge battleships for Brazil, which disgusted others than young Imogen Carrington; the Olympic Games in July; the publication of various not unamusing books; and the deaths of two old men, Algernon Swinburne and George Meredith. Our two greatest Grand Old Men had departed from us, and no more would pilgrims alight at the Pines, Putney, or go exploring to Box Hill. The office of our literary G. O. M. was filled now only by Mr. Thomas Hardy, for Mr. Henry James was still an American. Sometimes one speculates, aghast, what would happen should we ever be left with no candidates for that honourable post--that is to say, with no celebrated literary man or woman (for there might, though improbably, be a G. O. W. some day) over seventy years, no Master for the younger writers to greet on the festival of his birth. It would be an undignified state of affairs indeed; and one need not anticipate it at present, for behind Mr. Hardy there looms more than one candidate of respectable claims.

The closing years of this reign were brightened further by Commander Peary and Dr. Cook, who both maintained that they had discovered the North Pole. It was ultimately decided that only the Commander had done so, as the doctor had had the misfortune to mislay his papers in Greenland; but his was a sporting venture, and deserving of all applause, and he had a good run for his money.

And so an end to Edwardianism. The new Georgianism dawned on a nervous, gay, absorbed nation, experimenting in new but cautious legislation, alive, on the whole, to new literature and new art, alive wholly to whatever enjoyment it could find, and thoroughly tied up in continental politics, so that when that mine was fired we should go up with it sky-high.