Chapter 4 of 4 · 15240 words · ~76 min read

PART IV

GEORGIAN

FIRST PERIOD: CIRCUS

THE HAPPY GEORGIANS

THE first Georgian years, the years between 1910 and 1914, are now commonly thought of as gay, as very happy, hectic, whirling, butterfly years, punctuated indeed by the too exciting doings of dock and transport strikers, Ulstermen, suffragists, the _Titanic_, and Mr. Lloyd George, but, all the same, gay years. Like other generalisations about periods, this is a delusion. Those years only seem especially gay to us because, since July, 1914, the years have not been gay at all. Really they were quite ordinary years. In fact, it is folly to speak of these insensate seasonal periods as happy or the reverse. It is only animate creatures which can be that, and it is unlikely that all, or the majority, of animate creatures should be visited by circumstances making for pleasurable emotion or the reverse at the same time as one another, except in the case of some great public event. Some early Georgians were gay, some sad, some bored, some tepid and indifferent, as at any other time.

Nevertheless, it so happened that the persons in this so-called narrative were all quite sufficiently happy during this period. They were all having, in their several ways, a fairly good time.

PAPA

Mr. Garden’s way was, it need scarcely be said, a spiritual way. He was now over eighty, and his was the garnered fruit of a long life of spiritual adventure. He had believed so much, he had believed so often, he had fought with doubt so ardently and with such repeated success, he had explored every avenue of faith with such adventurous zeal, that he had at last reached a table-land from whence he could survey all creeds with loving, impartial pleasure. Even Mr. Campbell’s New Theology had not enmeshed him for long; he passed through it and out of it, and it took its place among the ranks of Creeds I Have Believed.

And now, in some strange, transcendent manner, he believed them all. Nothing is true but thinking makes it so; papa thought all these faiths, and for him they were all true. What, after all, is truth? An unanswerable riddle, to which papa replied, “The truth for each soul is that faith by which it holds.” So truth, for papa, was many-splendoured, many-faced. God must exist, he knew, or he could not have believed in Him so often and so much. The sunset of life was to papa very lovely, as he journeyed westward into it, murmuring, “I believe.... I believe....” Catholicism (Roman and Anglo), Evangelicism, Ethicism, Unitarianism, Latitudinarian Anglicism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Science, Irvingitism, even poor Flossie and her chat, he did very happily and earnestly believe. He believed in a mighty sacramental Church that was the voice of God and the store-house of grace; he believed that he was saved through private intercourse and contract with his Lord; he believed in the Church established in this country, and that it should be infinitely adaptable to the new knowledge and demands of men; he believed that the world was (very likely) to be ended in a short time by the second coming of Christ; he believed that God was love, and evil a monstrous illusion; he believed that God permitted the veil between this world and the next to be rent by the meanest and most trivial of His creatures, if they had the knack. Indeed, papa might be said to have learnt the art of believing anything.

Irving said it was pleasant to find that papa was once again an Irvingite. Indeed, the creeds after which he had named his children now all flourished in papa’s soul. No longer did he shake his head when he remembered in what spiritual moods he had named Una, and Rome, or sigh after that lost exultation of the soul commemorated in Vicky. Had another child been given to him now he would have named it Verity, in acknowledgment of the fact that nearly everything was true.

What wonder, then, that papa was a happy Georgian?

VICKY

Vicky, dashing full-sail through her fifties, was a happy Georgian too. She was handsome in her maturity, and merry. People she loved, and parties, and gossip, and bridge, and her husband and children, and the infants of her daughter Phyllis, and food and drink and clothes, and Ascot, and going abroad, and new novels from Mudie’s, and theatres and concerts and meetings and causes, and talk, talk, talk. Life, she held, is good as you get on in it; a broad, sunny, amusing stream, having its tiresome worries, no doubt, but, in the main, certainly a comedy. Vicky as an early Georgian was a generously fashioned matron, broader and fuller than of old, with her fair skin little damaged by time, and not much grey in her chestnut hair, which she wore piled in a mass of waves and curls, in the manner of the early Georgian matrons. A delightful woman, with an unfailing zest for life. You couldn’t exactly discuss things with her, but she could and did discuss them with you. She would tell you what she thought about the world and its ways in a flow of racy comment, skimming from one topic to another with an agile irrelevance that grew with the years. A merry, skimming matron; certainly a happy Georgian.

MAURICE

Maurice had not, since he married Amy, been a happy Victorian or Edwardian, and he did not become an exactly happy Georgian, but he was happier than before. In his fifties he was no nearer accepting the world as he found it than he had ever been. It still appeared to him to be a hell of a place. He was, in his fifties, a lean, small, bitter man, his light hair greying on the temples and receding from the forehead, his sensitive mouth and long jaw sardonically, cynically set. He was popular in London, for all his bitter tongue and pen; he and his paper were by now an institution, known for their brilliance, clarity, hard, unsentimental intolerance, and honesty. You might disagree with Maurice Garden; you might even think that he had an evil temper and a habit of mild intoxication; but you had to respect two things about him, his intelligence and his sincerity. Tosh and slush he would not stand, whether it might be about the Empire, about the poor suffragists in prison who would not eat, about White Slaves (whom his paper called, briefly and precisely, prostitutes, holding that the colour of their skins was an irrelevant point to raise when considering the amelioration of their lot), about the poor tax-robbed upper classes, or the poor labour-ground lower. He would print no correspondence couched in sentimental terms; if people desired to write about the sufferings, say, of birds deprived of their feathers for hats, they had to put it in a few concise words, and to say precisely what steps they wished to see taken about it. No superfluous wailings or tears were permitted, on any topic, to the writers in the _Gadfly_. The editor had a good deal of trouble with the literary side of his paper, which inclined, in his opinion, to roll logs, to be slavishly in the fashion in the matter of admiring the right people, to accept weak articles and rubbishy poems from people with budding or full-blown reputations, and, generally, to be like most literary papers. His son Roger he did not for long permit to adorn the literary staff; to do so would have been, in view of the calibre of Roger’s intelligence, gross nepotism. Roger had to get another literary job on a less fastidious paper; meanwhile, to his father’s disgust, he continued to produce novels, and even began on verse, so that he appeared in current anthologies of contemporary poetry. Also, he got married. So did his sister Iris. That settled, and his children well off his hands, Maurice felt that his only and dubious link with family life was snapped, and that he was free to go his own way. He left his wife, offering to provide her with any material she preferred for a divorce, from a mistress to a black eye. Amy accepted the offer, and these two victims of a singularly unfortunate entanglement found rest from one another at last. It was, Amy complained, too late for her to marry again; of course Maurice, selfish pig, had waited till it was too late for her but not for him. But Maurice had no inclination to remarry; he had had more than enough of that business. The only woman he had ever seriously loved had married ten years ago, ending deliberately an unhappy, passionate and fruitless relationship. Maurice’s thoughts were not now woman-ward; he lived for his job, and for interest in the bitter comedy of affairs that the world played before him. His silly, common, nagging wife, his silly, ordinary, disappointing children, no more oppressed him; they could, for him, now go their own silly ways. He was free.

ROME

Rome was a happy Georgian. For her the comedy of the world was too amusing to be bitter. She, in her splendid, idle fifties, was known in London as a lady of wits, of charm, of humour; a gentlewoman of parts, the worldly, idle, do-nothing, care-nothing sister of the busy and useful Mrs. Croft, contributing nothing, to the world beyond an attractive presence, good dinner-table talk, a graceful zest for gambling, an intelligent, cynical running commentary on life, and a tolerant, observing smile. Life was a good show to her; it arranged itself well, and she was clever at picking out the best scenes. When, for instance, she had an inclination to visit the House of Commons, she would discover first on which afternoon the Labour members, or the Irish, were going to have a good row, or Mr. Lloyd George was going to talk like an excited street preacher, or Sir Edward Carson like an Orangeman, or any other star performer do his special turn, and she would select that afternoon and have her reward. Our legislators were to her just that--circus turns, some good, some poor, but none of them with any serious relation to life as lived (if, indeed, any relation with that absurd business could be called serious, which was doubtful).

So the cheerful spectacle of a world of fools brightened Rome’s afternoon years. Before long, the folly was to become too desperate, too disastrous, too wrecking a business to be a comic show even to the most amused eyes; the circus was, all too soon, to go smash, and the folly of the clowns who had helped to smash it became a bitterness, and the idiot’s tale held too much of sound and fury to be borne. But these first Georgian years were, to Rome, twinkling with bland absurdity. She cheered up Maurice in the matter of that prose and verse by means of which his son made of himself a foolish show, reminding him that we all make of ourselves foolish shows in one way or another, and the printed word was one of the less harmful ways of doing this. It was no worse, she maintained, to be a Georgian novelist and poet than any other kind of Georgian fool, and one kind or another we all are. After all, he might be instead a swindling company-promoter....

“No,” said Maurice. “He hasn’t the wits. And, you know, I don’t share your philosophy. I still believe, in the teeth of enormous odds, that it is possible to make something of this life--that one kind of achievement is more admirable--or less idiotic, if you like--than another. I still think bad, shallow, shoddy work like Roger’s damnable, however unimportant it may be. It’s a mark on the wrong side, the side of stupidity. You don’t believe in sides, but I do. And I’m glad I do, so don’t try to infect me with your poisonous indifference. I am a man of faith, I tell you; I have a soul. You are merely a cynic, the basest of God’s creatures. You disbelieve in everything. I disbelieve in nearly everything, but not quite. So I shall be saved and you will not. Have a cocktail, Gallio.”

STANLEY

Stanley’s son was at Oxford, reading for a pass, for it was no manner of use, they said, his reading for anything more. He was a nice boy, but not yet clever. “Not yet,” Stanley had said of him all through his schooldays, meaning that Billy was late in developing. “Not yet,” she still said, meaning that he was so late that he would not have developed properly until his last year at Oxford, or possibly after that. Not that Billy was stupid; he was quite intelligent about a number of things, but not, on the whole, about the things in books, which made it awkward about examinations. Nor was he intelligent about politics; in fact, politics bored him a good deal. However, he was destined for a political career. Stanley’s cousin, Sir Giles Humphries, a Liberal member of Parliament, had promised Stanley to take Billy as a junior secretary when he left Oxford, if he should show any capacity for learning the job. Billy’s Liberal political career would thus be well begun. Meanwhile, Billy was an affectionate, companionable boy, who hid his boredom and his ignorance from his mother as well as might be, and very nicely refrained from making mock of militant suffragists in her presence, for, though Stanley had ceased to be a militant, many of her friends were, in these years, in and out of prison.

Molly wouldn’t go to college. No one, indeed, but her mother suggested that she should. She was obviously not suited, by either inclination or capacities, for the extension of her education. Stanley would have been glad to have Molly at home with her when she left school, for Molly had the heartbreaking charm of her father, even down to his narrow, laughing eyes and odd, short face. Stanley adored Molly. Molly was tepid and casual about votes, and had no head for books, and not the most rudimentary grasp on public affairs, and she was worse at meetings and causes than any girl in the world. She didn’t even pretend, like Billy. She would laugh in Stanley’s face, with her incomparable impudence, when Stanley was talking, and say, “Mumsie darling, stop committing. Oh, Mumsie, not before your chee-ild,” and flutter a butterfly kiss on Stanley’s cheek to change the subject. And she wanted to go on the stage. She wanted to go, and went, to a dramatic school, to learn to act. Well, better that than nothing, Stanley sighed. If she _does_ learn to act, it will be all right. If she doesn’t, she’s learning something. If it doesn’t make her affected and stupid, like actresses, I don’t mind. And surely nothing can make Molly less than entrancing. But, whatever comes of it, Molly has a right to choose her own life; it’s no business of mine what the children decide to do. In her conscious reaction from the one-time parental tyranny over daughters, Stanley forgot that there might also be tyranny over sons, and that Billy too had a right to choose his own life. It is creditable to Billy that she could forget it. Billy was the best of sons.

Meanwhile Stanley was fighting (constitutionally) for votes, women’s trade unions, the welfare of factory girls, continuation schools, penal reform, clean milk, and the decrease of prostitution. It may be imagined that all these things together kept her pretty busy; unlike Rome, she had no time to visit Parliament on its best days; she only went there when one of the topics in which she was interested was going to be raised. She got thus, Rome told her, all the dry bread and none of the jam. However, Stanley preferred the dry bread days, though they were invariably stupid and disappointing.

Though only a very little of all she had at heart got done, Stanley was happy. She laboured under the delusion that the constitution and social condition of her country were, on the whole, faintly on the upward plane. That was because she was unfairly biassed towards the Liberal party in the state, and too apt to approve of the measures they passed. She approved of Old Age Pensions; she even approved, on the whole, of Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act; and she approved of the People’s Budget very much.

IRVING

Irving was nearly always cheerful, except when he was cross. Irving was like that. He had been a cheerful Victorian and a cheerful Edwardian, and was now, in his late forties, a cheerful Georgian. He had a beautiful and charming wife, creditable children, a house in Devonshire and a house in London, and a great deal of money (though the super-tax robbed him of much of it), two motor cars, good fishing, shooting and stag-hunting, and an excellent digestion. He had his troubles. The People’s Budget troubled him a good deal, and the Land Taxes, and all the unfair socialist legislation to which he was subject. He sometimes threatened to go and live abroad, to escape it. But he did not go and live abroad. He was, for all his troubles, a happy Englishman.

UNA

Una, too, was cheerful. She was unaffected by reigns and periods. She was a very unconscious Georgian. Not like Stanley, who said, “We are now Georgians. Georgian England must be much better than any England before it,” nor like Roger, who would murmur, “We Georgians face facts” ... nor like Vicky, who cried, “I will _not_ be called a Georgian; not while that little Welsh horror rules over us.” Una hardly knew she was a Georgian, and, indeed, she was not, in any but a strictly technical sense. Her mind was unstirred by what used, long ago, to be called the Zeitgeist. She was happy; she enjoyed good health; her daughters were like polished corners and her sons like young plants; her husband’s acres flourished and his corn and wine and oil increased (as a matter of fact his wine, always a trifle too much, had of late years decreased; Ted was a soberer man than of old); Katie, their handsome eldest, had married well; and Una found in the countryside the profound, unconscious content that animals find. Riding, walking, gardening, driving about the level Essex lands, she, attuned to the soil on which she lived, was happy and serene.

IMOGEN

The younger generation of Georgians were happy enough. They were married, engaged, painting, writing, dancing, at the bar, at the universities, at school. They were behaving in the several manners suitable to their temperaments and years. Their lives were full of interests, artistic, literary, athletic and social. Vicky’s Nancy was learning to paint futuristically; she had now a little studio in Chelsea, where she could be as Bohemian as she liked, and have her friends all night without disturbing anyone. Night-clubs, too, had of late come in, and were a great convenience. Phyllis was bringing up her children. Hugh, eating dinners in the Temple, read of torts and morts, but dreamed of machinery, and drew diagrams in court of pistons and valves, and jotted down algebraic formulæ when he should have been jotting down legal notes. Hugh was really a mechanician, and his heart was not in law, though he liked it well enough. His brother Tony had gone from Cambridge to the Foreign Office and, when not writing drafts, was a merry youth about town.

Imogen was happy. She felt her life to be pleasure-soaked; a lovely, an elegant orgy of joy. And pleasure, orgies of dissipation even, did not absorb her, but were ministrants to the clear, springing life of the imagination. Imagination brimmed the cup of her spirit like golden wine. She felt happy and good, like a child in an orchard, ripe apples and pears tumbling in soft grass about her, the silver boat of the moon riding in a green sky. For her birds sang, sweet bells chimed and clashed, the stars made a queer, thin, tinkling song on still and moonless nights. The people hurrying about the city streets and squares were kind and merry and good, like brownies; the city itself was a great gay booth, decked and lit. Dawn came on a golden tide of peace; noon drove a flaming chariot behind the horses of the sun; evening spread soft wings, tender and blue and green; night was sweet as a dream of apple-blossoms by running water. When she wrote, whether by day or by night, her brain felt clear and lit, as by a still, bright taper burning steadily. Her thoughts, her words, rose up in her swiftly, like silver fishes in a springing rock pool; round and round they swam, and she caught them and landed them before they got away. While she wrote, nothing mattered but to seize and land what she saw thus springing up, to reach down her net and catch it while she might. Verse she wrote, and prose, with growing fastidiousness as to form and words. When she had first begun publishing what she wrote, she had been too young; she had fumbled after style like a blind puppy; she had been, like nearly all very young writers, superfluous of phrase, redundant. She read with fastidious disgust in her first book of stories such meaningless phrases as, “He lifted the child bodily over the rail and dropped it into the sea.” Bodily; as if the victim might, on the other hand, have been only caught up in the spirit, like St. Paul. What did I mean, she asked, across the years, of that bungling child, knowing that she had indeed meant nothing. But now style, the stark, bare structure of language, was to her a fetish. It was good to be getting on in life--twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six--so that one’s head was clearer, if not yet very clear. The very young, thought Imogen, are muddled; they love cant and shun truth; they adopt and use imitative phrases; they are sentimental and easy idealists behind their masks of cheerful, slangy hardness. Undergraduates, male and female, and their non-collegiate contemporaries, are the most obscurantist of reactionaries; facts annoy them and they pretend they do not see them, preferring to walk muffled through life, until life forcibly, year by year, tears the bandages from their eyes. The later Georgian, the post-war very young, were to be even more sentimental, muffled and imitative than their predecessors, because of the demoralising war, which was to give them false standards in the schoolroom. But the pre-war adolescents were sentimental enough.

The sharp, clear and bitter truth--that was the thing to aim at, thought Imogen, in her twenty-fifth year, knowing she was still far, but not knowing how far, from that. That courageous realism which should see things as they were, she desired, knowing herself to be still a false seer, blinded and dazzled by her personal circumstances, warped and circumscribed in her vision by the circle of her life. Perhaps she was too comfortable, too happy.... Or perhaps, like most people, too emotionally alive, strung too sharply to every vibration, for the clear, detached intellectuality she craved.

I feel things too much, she thought, smiling, to be thinking what so many people thought, what too many even said, of themselves.

I don’t feel things much. I am not easily moved by life.... Why did people so seldom say that, and so much more seldom think it? No doubt because everyone feels things terrifically, is quite horribly moved by this most moving business, life. No one believes him or herself to be insensitive, for no one is insensitive, life not being an affair it is possible to be insensitive to.

In a deeper layer of consciousness, where herself watched herself, Imogen thought that, though she might believe herself to be sensitive to life, she at any rate knew why she believed it, knew why everyone believed it of himself, and that redeemed her from the commonplace boast, and gave her over the people who say, “I _feel_ too much, that’s where it is,” the advantage that the conscious must always have over the unconscious, the advantage, if it be one, that is perhaps the main difference between sophisticated and primitive forms of life.

Meanwhile Imogen, like her cousin Roger, wrote and published verse and prose. After all, it didn’t matter what one wrote. People wrote and wrote, and nearly every kind of thing got written by someone or other, well or ill, usually ill, and never so well as to touch more than the very outside edge of the beauty and adventure which was life. Written words opened the door, that was all. Beyond the door lay the adventure, bright and still and eerily clear, like a dream. Strange seas, purple with racing currents in the open, but under the eaves of coral islands green and clear like jade; white beaches of those same islands, hot in the sunshine under the spreading leaves of bread-fruit trees; yams and cocoanuts and pineapples dropping with nutty noises on to emerald-green grass; a little boat moored at the edge of the lapping, creamy waves; witty monkeys and brilliant parrots chattering in the jungle; a little fire at night outside the tent, and a gun ready to one’s hand. Great fishes and small fishes swimming deeply in the jade rock pools, sailing and sailing with unshut eye; the little boat sailing too, pushing off into the wide seas dotted with islands, white wings pricking sky-ward like fawns’ ears. Or deep orchards adrift with blossom, rosy-white; jolly colts in paddocks, dragging with soft lips and hard gums at their mothers’ milk; the winds of April hurtling the cloud shadows across the grass. Long lanes running between deep hedges in the evening, and the rustle of the sea not far, and the velvet dusk waiting for the moonrise, and queer, startled noises in the hedges, and quiet munching noises in the fields, and the cold mocking stars looking down. And painted carts of gypsies, and roadside fires, and wood-smoke and ripe apples. And hills silver and black with olives and cypresses, and steep roads spiralling up them to little walled towns, and hoarse, chanted songs lilting among vineyards, and the jingling of the bells of oxen. And the streets and squares of rainbow-coloured towns, noisy cafés and lemon trees in tubs, beautiful men noble with the feathers of cocks, beautiful women in coloured head-kerchiefs, incense drifting out of churches into piazzas, coffee roasting in deep streets. To swim, to sail, to run naked on hot sands, to lie eating and eating in deep scented woods, and then to sleep; to wake and slip into clear brown pools in sunshine, to spin words as a spider his silvery web; to wear a scarlet silk jacket like a monkey’s and little white trousers, and, for best, a little scarlet crinoline over them, sticking out, very wide and short and jaunty, and a scarlet sunshade lined with white, and on one’s shoulder a tiny flame-red cockatoo, and at one’s heels two little black slaves, shining and black as ebony, with ivory teeth a-glisten and banjos tucked beneath their arms. To clap one’s hands, twice, thrice, and presto! an elegant meal--mushrooms, cider and _pêche melba_, and mangoes and pineapple to end it, and then, when it was ended, a three-coloured ice. What joy! Dear God, what a world! What adventure, what loveliness, what dreams! Beauty without end, amen.

Then why write of what should, instead, be lived? Wasn’t the marvellous heritage, the brilliant joke, the ghostly dream, of life enough? Nevertheless, one did write, and was, inexplicably, praised for it. Black marks on paper, scribbled and niggled and scrawled--and here and there the splendour and the joke and the dream broke through them, like sunshine flashing through prison bars, like music breaking through the written notes.

While she gave to the fashioning of the written word all the fastidious, meticulous austerity of devotion that she knew, Imogen in her personal life was not austere or fastidious or devoted at all. She idled; she lounged about; she was slovenly; she bought and sucked toffee; she read omnivorously, including much trash; she was a prey to shoddy, facile emotions and moods, none of which had power to impel her to any action, because a deep, innate scepticism underlay them all; she was a sentimental cynic. She loved too lightly and too slightly; she was idle, greedy, foolish, childish, impatient and vain, sliding out of difficulties like a tramp who fears a job of work. She did not care for great causes; public affairs were to her only an intriguing and entertaining show. She was a selfish girl, a shallow girl, a shoddy girl, enmeshed in egotism, happy in her own circus, caring little whether or no others had bread. Happy in her circus, and yet often wretched too, for life is like that--exquisite and agonising. She wanted to go to the Pacific Islands and bathe from coral reefs; wanted money and fame; wanted to be delivered for ever from meetings and tea-parties, foolish talkers and bores; wanted to save a life, watched by cheering crowds; wanted a motor bicycle; wanted to be a Christian; wanted to be a young man. But not now a naval man; she had seen through the monotony and routine of that life. She wanted in these days to be a journalist, a newspaper correspondent, sent abroad on exciting jobs, to report wars, and eruptions of Vesuvius, and earthquakes, and Cretan excavations, and revolutions in South America, and international conferences.

ON PUBLISHING BOOKS

From time to time Imogen, in common with many others, brought out books, large and small. They would arrive in a parcel of six, and lie on the breakfast table, looking silly, in clownish wrappers with irrelevant pictures on them. Imogen would examine them with mild distaste. How common they looked, to be sure, now that they were bound! As common as most books, as the books by others. Dull, too. What if all the reviews said so? One couldn’t help caring what reviews said, however hard one tried not to. It was petty and trivial to be cast up and cast down by the opinions of one’s fellows, no wiser than oneself, expressed in print, but so it was. Why? Chiefly because they _were_ expressed in print, to be read by all. One’s disgrace, if it were a disgrace, was so public. People who didn’t know that reviewers were just ordinary people, with no more authority or judgment than they had themselves, believed them. If people read in a review, “It cannot be said that Miss Carrington has been successful in her new book of stories,” they thought that it really could not, not knowing that almost anything can, as a matter of fact, be said, and often is. And if a reviewer said (as was more usual, for reviewers are, taking them all in all, a kindly race), “This is a good book,” people who didn’t know any better really thought that it was so. Then the author was pleased. Particularly as the book wasn’t really good in the least.

“I can’t say I am much concerned about my reviews, one way or another,” Roger had once said to Imogen. But he _was_ concerned, all the same. Did he, did all the people who said they didn’t mind things, know that they really did? Or were they indeed deluded? People were surely often deluded; they said such odd things. “It’s not that I mind a bit for myself, it’s the principle of the thing,” they would say. Or, “I don’t care a damn what anyone says of me,” or, “It isn’t that _I’d_ mind taking the risk, but one has to think of other people.” And the people who said, “I know you won’t mind my saying ...” when they knew you would, or, “I don’t want to spread gossip, but ...” when that was just what they did want, or, “You mustn’t think I’m vexed with you, dear,” when they left you nothing else to think.

Did these lie? Or were they deceived? Imogen, pondering these apparently so confused minds in her own, which was more approximately accurate (for she would deceive others, but could not easily deceive herself), could not decide.

ON SUNDAY WALKS

On Sundays the early Georgians used to go from London in trains, getting out somewhere in Surrey, Sussex, Bucks or Herts, to walk in muddy lanes or over blown downs, or through dim green-grey beechwoods or fragrant forests of pine. It is pleasanter to walk alone, or with one companion, or even two, but sometimes unfortunately one walks (and so did the early Georgians) in large groups, or parties of pleasure. Imogen found that she occasionally did this, for it was among the minor bad habits of her set. It did not greatly matter, and these strange processions could not really spoil the country, even though they did very greatly talk. How they talked! Books, politics, personal gossip, good jokes and bad, acrostics, stories, discussions--with these the paths and fields they traversed echoed. But Imogen, like a lower animal, felt stupid and happy and alone, and rooted about the ditches for violets and the hedges for nests, and smelt at the moss in the woods, and broke off branches to carry home. To herself she would hum a little tune, some phrase of music over and over again, and sometimes words would be born in her and sing together like stars of the morning. But for the most part she only rooted about like a cheerful puppy, alive with sensuous joy. Her companions she loved and admired, but could not emulate, for they were wise about things she knew not of. Even about the fauna and flora of the countryside they really knew more than she, who could only take in them an ignorant and animal pleasure. She had long since guessed herself to be an imbecile, and, with the imbecile’s cunning, tried to hide it from others. What if suddenly everyone were to find out, discover that she was an imbecile, with a quite vacant, unhinged mind? If these informed, educated, sophisticated people should discover that, they would dismiss her from their ken; she would no more be their friend. She would be cast out, left to root about alone in the ditches, like a shameless, naked, heathen savage.

As she thought about this, someone would come and walk by her side and talk, and she would pull herself together and pretend to be passably intelligent, albeit she was really drunk with the soft spring wind and the earthy smell of the wood.

ON MARRIAGE

Imogen loved lightly and slightly, her heart not being much in that business. Life was full of stimulating contacts. She admired readily, and liked, was interested, charmed and entertained. Men and women passed to and fro on her stage, delightful, witty, graceful, brilliant, even good, and found favour in her eyes. Poets, politicians and priests, journalists and jesters, artists and writers, scholars and social reformers, lovely matrons, witty maids, and cheerful military men, toilers, spinners, and lilies of the field--a pleasant, various crowd, they walked and worked and talked. So many people were alluring, so many tedious, so many tiresome. One could, unless one was careless, evade the tedious and the tiresome. But supposing that one had been very careless, and had married one of them? What a shocking entanglement life might then become! How monstrously jarring and fatiguing would be the home!

“Whether one marries or remains celibate,” Imogen reflected, in her pedantic, deliberating way, “that is immaterial. Both have advantages. But to marry one of the right people, if at all, is of the greatest consequence for a happy life. People do not always think intelligently enough on this important subject. Too often, they appear to act on impulse, or from some inadequate motive. And the results are as we see.” For she was seeing at the moment several ill-mated couples of her acquaintance, some of whom made the best of it, others the worst. Many sought and found affinities elsewhere, for affinities they must (or so they believed) have. Others, renouncing affinity as a baseless dream, wisely accepted less of life than that, and lived in disillusioned amenity with their spouses.

An amazing number of marriages came, on the other hand, off, and these were a pleasant sight to see. To come home every evening to the companion you preferred and who preferred you--that would be all right. (Only there might be babies, and that would be all wrong, because they would want bathing or something just when you were busy with something else.) Or to come home to no one; or (better still) not to come home at all. So many habits of life were enjoyable, but not that of perpetual unsuitable companionship.

Thus Imogen reflected and philosophised on this great topic of marriage and of love, which did not, however, really interest her so much as most other topics, for she regarded it as a little primitive, a little elementary, lacking in the more entertaining complexities of thought. Metaphysics, poetry, psychology and geography made to her a stronger intellectual appeal; the non-emotional functionings of the dwellers on this planet she found more amusing, and the face of the planet itself more beautiful.

Nevertheless, to be a little in love is fun, and makes enchantment of the days. A little in love, a little taste of that hot, blinding cup--but only enough to stimulate, not to blind. One is so often a little in love....

BILLY

Billy left Oxford with his pass. His Liberal cousin accepted him, having it on the authority of Stanley, whom he greatly regarded, that Billy had the makings of a good secretary. Billy denied this, and said he would prefer to be a veterinary surgeon, or else to farm in a colony. But his mother had decided that he was to be political. Political. He thought he saw himself.... And anyhow, where was the sense of politics? A jolly old mess the politicians made of things, and always had.... Somehow politics didn’t seem a real thing, like vetting or farming. There was so much poppycock mixed up with it....

But there it was. His mother must have her way. He supposed it would be a shame to disappoint her. Molly wouldn’t look at politics, and one of them must. So in October he was to begin looking at them. One thing was, Giles Humphries wouldn’t keep him long; he’d soon see through him....

“Doesn’t make much odds, anyhow,” he reflected gloomily. “One damn silly job or another. Mother’ll never let me do what I want. ’Tisn’t good enough for her. I wish people wouldn’t _want_ things for one; wish they’d let one alone. Being let alone ... that’s the thing.”

Rome said to Stanley, “You’ll never make a politician of that boy. Why try?”

“He’s too young to say that about yet, Rome. I _should_ like to see him doing some work for his country....”

“They don’t do that, my dear. You’ve been misinformed. I thought you went to the House sometimes.... Really, Stan, I can’t imagine why you should try and turn Billy, who’d be some use in the world as an animals’ doctor, or a tiller of the soil, or, I daresay, as a number of other things, into anything so futile and so useless and so singularly unsuited both to his talents and to his honest nature as a politician. I suppose you’ll make him stand for Parliament eventually. Well, he’ll quite likely get in. People will elect anyone. But he’d only be bored and stupid and wretched there. He’s got no gift of the gab, for one thing. You let the child do what he wants.”

“I’m not forcing him. He knows he is free.”

“He knows nothing of the sort. He knows you’ve set your heart on this, and he doesn’t want to vex you. Really, you mothers ...”

So Billy, in the autumn of 1913, became the inefficient secretary of his kind, inefficient Liberal cousin, who was, however, no more inefficient than his fellow members of Parliament.

EXIT PAPA

Those were inefficient years; silly years, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They were not much sillier than usual, but there was rather more sound and fury than had been customary of late. It was made by militant suffragists, who smashed public property and burned private houses with an ever more ardent abandon; by Welsh churchmen who marched through London declaring that on no account would they have their church either disestablished or disendowed; by dock and transport strikers, who had a great outbreak of indomitability and determination in 1911, and another in 1912; by Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act, which caused much gnashing of teeth, foaming of mouths and flashing of eyes; by Liberals and Conservatives, who, for some reason, suddenly for a time abandoned that sporting good humour which has always made English political life what it is, a thing some like and others scorn, and took on to dislike each other, even leaving dinner parties to which members of the opposition party had been carelessly invited; and by the men of Ulster, who, being convinced in their consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster, covenanted to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland, and, to this end, got a quite good conspiracy going themselves. There was also, it need hardly be said, plenty of sound and fury on the continent, particularly in the Balkans.

They make, these years, a noisy, silly, rowdy, but on the whole cheery chapter of the idiot’s tale. Howbeit, they were less noisy and less silly, and far more cheery, than the chapter which was to follow.

Just before this chapter began, papa died. Afterwards they said, it is a mercy papa is dead; that he died before the smash that would so have shattered him. Papa, gentle and sensitive and eighty-four, could scarcely have endured the great war. Down what fresh avenues of faith it would have sent his still adventurous soul exploring, seeking strength and refuge from the nightmare, would never be known. He died in May, 1914. He died as he had lived, a great and wide believer, still murmuring, “I believe ... I believe ... I believe ...”--a credulous, faithful, comprehensive, happy Georgian. He had moments when agnosticism or scepticism was the dominant creed in his soul, but they were only moments; soon the tide of his many faiths would surge over him again, and in all these he died.

“Dear papa,” said Vicky, weeping. “To think that he is with mamma at last! And to think that now he _knows_ what is true.... Oh, dear, how will he ever get on without all those speculations and new beliefs? One knows, of course, that he is happy, darling papa ... but will he find it at all the _same_?”

Rome said, “Why? Taking your hypothesis, that there is another life, why should it be supposed to be a revelation of the truth about the universe, or about God? Why should not papa go on speculating and guessing at truth, trying new faiths? You people who believe in what you call heaven seem to have no justification for making it out such an informed place.”

“Oh, my dear; aren’t we told that all shadows shall flee away, and that we shall _know_? I’m sure we are, somewhere, only you won’t read the Bible ever.”

“On the contrary, I read the Bible a good deal. I find it enormously interesting. But the one thing we can be quite sure about all those who wrote it is that they had no information at all as to what would occur to them after their deaths. That is among the very large quantity of information that no one alive has ever yet had. So, if you think of papa in heaven, why not think of him in the state in which he would certainly be happiest and most himself--still exploring for truth? Why should death bring a sudden knowledge of all the secrets of the universe? You believers make so many and such large and such unwarrantable assumptions.”

“My dear, we must make assumptions, or how get through life at all?”

“Very true. How indeed? One must make a million unwarrantable assumptions, such as that the sun will rise to-morrow, and that the attraction of the earth for our feet will for a time persist, and that if we do certain things to our bodies they will cease to function, and that if we get into a train it will probably carry us along, and so forth. One must assume these things just enough to take action on them, or, as you say, we couldn’t get through life at all. But those are hypothetical, pragmatical assumptions, for the purposes of action; there is no call actually to believe them, intellectually. And still less call to increase their number, and carry assumptions into spheres where it doesn’t help us to action at all. For my part, I assume practically a great deal, intellectually nothing.”

Vicky was going through her engagement book, seeing what she would have to cancel because of papa’s death, and all she answered was, absently, “Dear papa!”

SECOND PERIOD: SMASH

SOUND AND FURY

THE so bitter, so recent, so familiar, so agonising tale of the four years and a quarter between August, 1914, and November, 1918, has been told and re-told too often, and will not be told in detail here. It is enough, if not too much, to say that there was a great and dreadful war in Europe, and that nightmare and chaos and the abomination of desolation held sway for four horrid years. All there was of civilisation--whatever we mean by that unsatisfactory, undefined, relative word--suffered irretrievable damage. All there was of greed, of cruelty, of barbarism, of folly, incompetence, meanness, valour, heroism, selfishness, littleness, self-sacrifice and hate, rose to the call in each belligerent country and showed itself for what it was. Men and women acted blindly, according to their kind; they used the torments of others as stepping stones to prosperity or fame; they endured torments themselves, with complaining, with courage, or with both; they did work they held to be useful, and got out of it what credit and profit they could; or work they knew was folly, and still got out of it what they could. They went to the war, they stayed at home, they scrambled for jobs among the chaos, they got rich, they got poor, they died, were maimed, medalled, frostbitten, tortured, bored, imprisoned, embittered, enthusiastic, cheerful, hopeless, patient, or matter-of-fact, according to circumstances and temperament. Many people said a great deal, others very little. Some parents boasted, “I have given my all,” others said, “Well, I suppose they’ve got to go into the damned thing,” some men said, “I must go into it; it’s right,” some, “I shall go into it: it’s an adventure,” some “I must go into it like other people, though it’s all wrong,” some, “It may be all right for others, but I shan’t go into it,” some, “I shan’t go until I’m forced,” some, “I shan’t go even then.” There were, in fact, all manner of different attitudes and ways of procedure with regard to the war. To some it was a necessary or unnecessary hell, to some a painful and tedious affair enough, but with interests and alleviations and a good goal in sight; to some an adventure; to some (at home) a satisfactory sphere for work they enjoyed, to some a holy war, to others a devil’s dance in which they would take no part, or which they wearily did what they could to alleviate, or in which they joined with cynical and conscious resolve not to be left out of whatever profits might accrue.

But to the majority in each country it was merely a catastrophe, like an earthquake, to be gone through blindly, until better might be.

THE FAMILY AT WAR

Of the Garden family, Vicky was horrified but enthusiastically pro-war. Her two sons got commissions early, and she helped the war by organising bazaars and by doing whatever it was that one did (in the early stages, for in the later more of violence had to be done) to Belgian refugees. Maurice and his paper were violently pacificist, and became a by-word. Rome saw the war and what had led up to it as the very crown and sum of human folly, and helped, very capably and neatly, to pack up and send off food and clothes to British prisoners. Stanley was caught in the tide of war fervour. She worked in a canteen, and served on committees for all kinds of good objects, and behaved with great competence and energy, her heart wrung day and night with fear for Billy. In 1917 she caught peace fever, joined the peace party and the Women’s International League, signed petitions and manifestos in support of Lord Lansdowne, and spoke on platforms about it, which Billy thought tiresome of her.

Irving lent a car to an ambulance, and his services to the Ministry of Munitions, and became a special constable. Una sent cakes to her sons and farm-hands at the front, and employed landgirls on the farm. She took the war as all in the day’s work; there had been wars before in history, and there would be wars again. It was awfully sad, all the poor boys being taken like that; but it sent up the price of corn and milk, and that pleased Ted, for all his anxiety for his sons.

The younger generation acted and reacted much as might be expected of them. Vicky’s Hugh, who joined the gunners, was interested in the business and came tolerably well through it, only sustaining a lame leg. Tony, the younger, was killed in 1916. Maurice’s Roger, whose class was B2, served in France for a year, and wrote a good deal of trench poetry. He was then invalided out, and entered the Ministry of Information, where he continued, in the intervals of compiling propaganda intended to interest the natives of Iceland in the cause of the Allies, to publish trench poetry, full of smells, shells, corpses, mud and blood.

“I simply can’t read the poetry you write in these days, Roger,” his mother, Amy, complained. “It’s become too terribly beastly and nasty and corpsey. I can’t think what you want to write it for, I’m sure.”

“Unfortunately, mother,” Roger explained, kindly, “war _is_ rather beastly and nasty, you know. And a bit corpsey, too.”

“My dear boy, I know that; I’m not an idiot. Don’t, for goodness’ sake, talk to me in that superior way, it reminds me of your father. All I say is, why _write_ about the corpses? There’ve always been plenty of them, people who’ve died in their beds of diseases. You never used to write about _them_.”

“I suppose one’s object is to destroy the false glamour of war. There’s no glamour about disease.”

“Glamour, indeed! There you go again with that terrible nonsense. I don’t meet any of these people you talk about who think there’s glamour in war. I’m sure _I_ never saw any glamour in it, with all you boys in the trenches and all of us at home slaving ourselves to death and starving on a slice of bread and margarine a day. Glamour, indeed! I’ll tell you what it is, a set of you young men have invented that glamour theory, just so as to have an excuse for what you call destroying it, with your nasty talk. Like you’ve invented those awful Old Men you go on about, who like the war. I’m sick of your Old Men and your corpses.”

“I’m sick of them myself,” said Roger, gloomily, and changed the subject, for you could not argue with Amy. But he went on writing war poetry, and gained a good deal of reputation as one of our soldier poets. On the whole he was more successful as a poet than as a propagandist to Iceland, which cool island remained a little detached about the war.

Stanley’s Billy hailed the outbreak of hostilities with some pleasure, and was among the first civilians to enlist. Here, he felt, was a job more in his line than being secretary to his Liberal cousin, which he had found more and more tedious as time passed. He fought in France, in Flanders, in Gallipoli, and in Mesopotamia, was wounded three times, and recovered each time to fight again. He was a cheerful, ordinary, unemotional young soldier, a good deal bored, after a bit, with the war. On one of his leaves, in 1916, he married a young lady from the Vaudeville Theatre, whom Stanley could not care about.

“I know mother wanted me to marry a highbrow girl,” he confided to Molly. “Some girl who’s been to college or something. But I haven’t much to say to that sort ever, nor they to me. Now Dot....”

But even Molly had her misgivings about Dot. She was not sure that Dot would prove quite monogamous enough. And, as it turned out, Dot did not prove monogamous at all, but rather the contrary.

Molly herself had become an ambulance driver in France. She frankly enjoyed the war. She became engaged to officers, successively and simultaneously. She acted at canteen entertainments and gained a charming reputation as a comedienne. At the end of the war she received the O. B. E. for her distinguished services.

Her mother knew about some of the engagements, and thought them too many, but did not know that Molly had for a time been more than engaged. She never would know that, for Molly kept her own counsel. Molly knew that to Stanley, with her idealistic view of life and her profound belief in the enduring seriousness of personal relations, it would have seemed incredibly trivial, light and loose to be a lover and pass on, to commit oneself so deeply and yet not count it deep at all, but emerge free and untrammelled for the next adventure. It had seemed incredible to Stanley in her husband; it would seem more incredible in her daughter.

“Mother’s so different,” thought Molly. “She’d never understand.... Aunt Rome’s different too, but she’d understand about me; she always understands things, even if she despises them. She _would_ despise this, but she wouldn’t be surprised.... Mother would be hurt to death. She must never, never guess.”

As to Vicky’s daughters, Phyllis was useful in some competent, part-time, married way that may be imagined. Nancy turned violently anti-war and became engaged to a Hungarian artist, who was subsequently removed from his studio in Chelsea and interned. Imogen was everything by turns and nothing long. The war very greatly discomposed her. It seemed to her a very shocking outrage both that there should be a war, and that, since there was a war, she should be found, owing to a mere fluke of sex, among the non-combatants. The affair was a horrid nightmare, which she had to stand and watch. People of her age simply _weren’t_ non-combatants; that was how she felt about it. Strong, active people in the twenties; it seemed a disgrace to her, who had never before so completely realised that she was not, in point of fact, a young man. War was ghastly and beastly; but if it was there, people like her ought to be in it. However, since this was obviously impossible, she sulkily and simultaneously joined a pacifist league and became a V. A. D., in the hope of getting sent out to France. She was an infinitely incapable V. A. D., did everything with remarkable incompetence, and fainted or was sick when her senses and nerves were more displeased than usual by what they encountered, which was often. She was soon told that she had no gifts for nursing and had better stick to cleaning the wards. This she did, with relief, for some time, until her friends said, why not get a job in a government office, which was much more lucrative and amusing. Sick of hospitals, she did so. She was under no delusions as to the usefulness of any work she was likely to do in an office; but still, one had to do something. She could not write; her jarred, unhappy nerves sought and found a certain degree of oblivion in the routine, the camaraderie, the demoralising absurdity, of office work, which was like being at school again. Also, it was paid, and, as she could not write, she must earn money somehow.

So, indolent, greedy, unbalanced, trivial and demoralised, Imogen, like many others, drifted through the great war. Two deaths occurred to her--the death of her brother and companion Tony, which blackened life and made the war seem to her more than ever a hell of futile devilry; and the death of Neville, a young naval officer, to whom she had become engaged in 1915, and who was killed in 1916. It was a queer affair, born of the emotionalism and sensation-seeking that beset many people at that time. She had not known him long; she did not know him well. She was aware that it was ignominious of her to encourage him, merely on the general love she bore to the navy, a little flattered excitement, and a desire, new-born, to experience the sensation of engagement. They had few thoughts in common, but they could joke together, and talk of ships, and of how they loved one another, and about him was the glamour of the navy, and she felt, when he kissed her, that stimulation of the emotions and senses that passes for love. When they talked about things in general, and not about their love, she heard within her that cold voice that never lied, saying, “You cannot live with this nice young naval man. You will tire each other.” Worse, they sometimes shocked one another. Could it be--disastrous thought--that she had outgrown the navy?

“You’re a rum kid, darling,” he said to her. “You and I disagree about nearly everything, it seems to me. We shall have a lively married life.... But I don’t care....”

But he did care a little, all the same. Imogen sometimes suspected that, like herself, he had begun to think they had made a mistake. But then he would take her in his arms, and when they embraced neither of them felt that they had made a mistake.

However, one is not embracing all the time, and Imogen slowly came to the point, between one leave and another, of deciding to end the affair. The navy and she had grown away from each other; there was no doubt about that.

But before they could discuss this point, Neville was killed at Jutland.

Imogen wept for him, and believed for a time that she loved him profoundly and missed him horribly. But the small cold voice within her that never lied whispered, “You are only sorry that he is dead for his sake, because he loved being alive and ought to be alive. You sometimes miss his kisses and his love, but you are glad that you are free.”

She spent an unhappy week-end with his parents in the country. They did not very greatly care for her--cared only for Neville’s sake. Neville’s father was a rector, very simple and village, his mother a rector’s wife, very parochial and busy. With them Imogen felt leggy and abrupt, and the wrong kind of a girl. She couldn’t be articulate with them, or show them how bitterly she felt Neville’s death before he had properly lived. They were unhappy but not bitter; they said, “It was God’s will,” and she could not tell them that, in her view, they spoke inaccurately and blasphemed. Yet their hearts were (to use the foolish phrase) broken, and hers by no means. She caught Neville’s mother looking at her speculatively from behind her glasses, and wondered if she were wondering how much this gauche young woman had loved her boy. She wanted to beg her pardon and dash for the next train. They could not want her with them; to have her was a duty they thought they owed to Neville. “I’ve no right here,” she cried to herself. “They loved him. I was only in love with his love for me. Their lives are spoilt, mine isn’t.”

She did not visit them again. That was over. Neville took his place in her memory not as a personal loss but as a gay, heartbreaking figure, a tragic symbol of murdered, outraged youth.

But when Tony was killed, the world’s foundations shook. He was her darling brother, her beloved companion in adventure, scrapes and enterprises from their childhood up. She could by no means recover from the cruel death of Tony, which shattered the life of his home.

But daily work in an office, so cheerful, so fruitless, so absurd, was an anodyne. Offices were full of people who did not mind the war, who, some of them, rather enjoyed the war. There are no places more cynical than the offices of governments. Not parliaments in session, not statesmen in council, not cardinals in conclave, not even journalists emitting their folly in the dead of the night. Encased in an armour of this easy cynicism against the savage darts of the most horrid war, Imogen and many others drifted through its last years to the war’s cynical culmination, the horrid but welcome peace.

THIRD PERIOD: DÉBRIS

PEACE

A HORRID peace it was and is. It is the fashion to say so, and, unlike most fashionable sayings, it is true. But at first the fact that it _was_ peace, that people were not killing each other (in such large numbers and for such small reasons) any more, was enough and made everyone happy. A poor peace enough; but the fact remains that the worst peace is heaven compared with the best war. It was like the first return of chocolate éclairs. “They’re rather funny ones,” people said, “not quite like the old kind; but still, they _are_ éclairs.” So peace. It was indeed a rather funny one, not quite like the old kind; but still, it was peace. And what, if you come to that, was the old kind, that any other should be compared unfavourably with it? The trouble is, perhaps, rather that this new variety _is_ like it.

The Peace Treaty has been called all kinds of names--patchwork, violent, militarist, manufactured, makeshift, frail, silly, uneconomic, unstatesmanlike; and all the names except the last may be true. (Unstatesmanlike the treaty was certainly not; very few treaties drawn up by statesmen unfortunately are that; and, in passing, this word unstatesmanlike seems often to be curiously and thoughtlessly used, in a sense directly contrary to that which it should bear.) Well, even if nearly all these opprobrious names were true, it seems a pity to be always discontented. Wiser were those who encouraged the infant, patted it on the back, and greeted the unseen with a cheer. Like beer, like shoeleather, it seemed costly and poor. But who are we, that we can afford to be particular? We should make the best of whatever peace is given us, even if it is not the brand we should have preferred. “We’ve got,” said the resigned citizen, “to put up with these poor, nasty-looking things, that last no time at all. Beer it’s not, and shoeleather it’s not, and peace it won’t be, properly speaking. A kind of substitute they all are, like margarine. But what I say is, we’re lucky to get them.” So we were.

Idealists, such as Stanley Croft, though they did not admire the Treaty of Versailles, saw it as the material out of which the living temple of peace might yet be built, on that great cornerstone, the League of Nations. The League of Nations was to the peace-wishers as his creed is to the Christian; it bound them to believe in a number of difficult, happy, unlikely and highly incompatible things, such as lasting peace, the freedom of small nations, arbitration between large ones, and so forth. They joined the League of Nations Union, full of hope and faith. Stanley did so, at its inception, and became, in fact, a speaker on platforms in the cause.

THE LAST HOPE

Stanley, in her late fifties, looked and spoke well on platforms; she looked both nice and important. Her blue eyes, under their thick, level brows, were as starry as ever, her voice as deep and full and good, her mind young and alert. A clever, high-minded, balanced, vigorous, educated matron of close on sixty; that was what Stanley was. She was the kind of matron to whom younger women gave their confidence. Her son and daughter did not give her their whole confidence, but that was not her fault.

Billy was demobilised. A seamed scar cut across his cheek, and his eyes were queer and sulky and brooding. He disliked by now his wife, Dot. She reciprocated the feeling, and very soon left him for another, so he divorced her. Stanley could not help being glad, Dot had been such a mistake. She was not the kind of wife to help her husband in his parliamentary career. She was the more the kind who succeeds him in it, but even that Stanley could not know in 1919, and she regarded Dot as, from every point of view, a wash-out.

“Look here, mother,” Billy said to her, with nervous, sulky decision. “I can’t go back to that secretary job. Nor any other job of that kind. Sitting jobs and writing jobs bore me stiff. I’ve done too much sitting, in those beastly trenches. And politics anyhow seem to me plain rot. I want to train for a vet. I’m awfully sorry if you’re sick about it, but there it is. Why don’t you make Molly take on a secretary-to-a-Liberal job? She couldn’t be worse than I was, anyhow.”

“A vet, Billy! Darling boy, why a vet? Why not a human doctor, if you must be something of that sort?”

“Want to be a vet,” said Billy, and was.

As to Molly, she became secretary to no Liberal, for she married, in 1919, a flight commander, and his politics, if any, were Coalition-Unionist.

So much for Stanley’s hopes for political careers for her children. She sighed, and accepted the inevitable, and put her hope more than ever in the League of Nations. If that could not save the world, nothing could....

Certainly nothing could, said Rome. Nothing ever had yet. At least, what did people mean, precisely, by save? Words, words, words. They signified, as commonly and lightly used, so very little.

THE CHARABANC

The post-war period swung and jolted along, like a crazy, broken-down charabanc full of persons of varying degrees of mental weakness, all out on an asylum treat. Every now and then the charabanc stopped for a picnic, or conference, at some nice continental or English watering-place, and these were very cosy, chatty, happy, expensive little times, enjoyed by all, and really not doing very much more harm to Europe than any other form of treat would have done, since they had, as a rule (the amusing reconstruction of the map of Europe once effected), practically no effects of any kind, beyond, of course, strengthening the already perfect harmony prevalent among the victorious allied nations.

Reparations was the great topic at these chats; but it was and is such a very difficult topic that no one there (no one there being very clever), made much of it, and it has not really been decided about even now.

International politics were, in fact, in the years following the great war, even more greatly confused than is usual. Only one great international principle remained, as ever, admirably lucid--that principle so simply explained by M. Anatole France’s Penguin peasant to the Porpoise philosopher.

“Vous n’aimez pas les Marsouins?”

“Nous les haïssons.”

“Pour quelle raison les haïssez-vous?”

“Vous le demandez? Les Marsouins ne sont-ils pas les voisins des Pingouins?”

“Sans doute.”

“Eh bien, c’est pour cela que les Pingouins haïssent les Marsouins.”

“Est-ce une raison?”

“Certainement. Qui dit voisins dit ennemis.... Vous ne savez donc pas ce que c’est que le patriotisme?”

There was no confusion here.

Home politics, in each country, seemed to lack even this dominant _motif_, and confusion reigned unrelieved. In Great Britain a Coalition government was in power. The usual view about this government is that it was worse and more incompetent than other governments; but it seems bold to go as far as this. “The nation wants a return to a frank party government,” non-coalition Liberals and Conservatives began saying, and said without intermission until they got it, in 1922. They sometimes explained why they preferred a frank party government, but none of their reasons seemed very good reasons; the real reason was that they, very properly and naturally, wished their own party to be in power. The Die-Hards and the Wee Frees came to be regarded as valiant, incorruptible little bands, daring to stand alone; Co-Liberals and Co-Unionists were understood, somehow, to have compromised with Satan for reward. There is a good deal of unkindness in political life.

SETTLING DOWN

Meanwhile, the people settled down, were demobilised from the army, and from the various valuable services which they had been rendering to their country, and began to fall back into the old grooves, began to recover, at least partially, from the war. But the war had left its heritage of poverty, of wealth, of disease, of misery, of discontent, of feverish unrest.

“Now to write again,” said Imogen, and did so, but found it difficult, for the nervous strain of the years past, and the silliness of the avocations she had pursued through them, had paralysed initiative, and given her, in common with many others, an inclination to sally forth after breakfast and catch a train or a bus, seeking such employment as might be created for her, instead of creating her own. The helpless industry of the slave had become hers, and to regain that of the independent and self-propelled worker was a slow business.

Further, she was absorbed, shaken and disturbed by a confusing and mystifying love into which she had fallen, blind and unaware, even before peace had descended. She very greatly loved someone whom she could not, what with one thing, what with another, hope to marry. All values were to her subverted; she fumbled blindly at a world grown strange, a world as to whose meaning and whose laws she groped in the dark, and emotion drowned her like a flood.

There revived in force about this time the curious old legend about the young. The post-war young, they were now called, and once more people began to believe and to say that one young person closely resembles other young persons, and many more things about them.

“The war,” they said, “has caused a hiatus, and thought has broken with tradition. Thus youth 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 and others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of expression more in harmony with the realities of life and knowledge.”

Many novels were written about the New Young, half in reprobation, half in applause; famous literary men praised them in speeches; they were much spoken of in newspapers. All the things were said of them that have been said of the young at all times, only now their newness, their special quality, was attributed to the European war, in which they were too young to have actively participated, but which had, it was believed, exercised upon them some mystic and transmuting influence. Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation. “Will these qualities wear off?” precise-minded and puzzled enquirers asked. “When the present young are thirty and middle-aged, will they still possess them? Do the qualities depend upon their age, or upon the period of the world’s history in which they happen to be that age?” But no precise or satisfactory reply was ever given. It never is. Enquirers into the exact meaning of popular theories and phrases are of all persons the least and the worst answered. You may, for instance, enquire of a popular preacher, or anyone else, who denounces his countrymen as “pagan” (as speakers, and even Bishops, at religious gatherings have been known to do), what exactly he means by this word, and you will find that he means irreligious, and is apparently oblivious of the fact that pagans were and are, in their village simplicity, the most religious persons who have ever flourished, having more gods to the square mile than the Christian or any other Church has ever possessed or desired, and paying these gods more devout and more earnest devotion than you will meet even among Anglo-Catholics in congress. To be pagan may not be very intelligent; it is rustic and superstitious, but it is at least religious. Yet you will hear the word “pagan” flung loosely about for “irreligious,” or sometimes as meaning joyous, material and comfort-loving, whereas the simple pagans walked the earth full of what is called holy awe and that mystic faith in unseen powers which is the antithesis of materialism, and gloomy with apprehension of the visitations of their horrid and vindictive gods; and, though no doubt, like all men, they loved comfort, they only obtained, just as we do, as much of that as they could afford. And, whatever Bishops mean by pagan, as applied to modern Englishmen, it is almost certain that they do not mean all this.

Never, perhaps, was thinking, writing and talking looser, vaguer and more sentimental than in the years following the European war. It was as if that disaster had torn great holes in the human intelligence, which it could ill afford. There was much writing both of verse and of prose, much public and private speaking much looking for employment and not finding it, much chat about the building of new houses, much foolish legislation, much murder and suicide, much amazement on the part of the press. Newspapers are always easily amazed, but since the war weakened even their intelligence there could not be so much as a little extra departure from railway stations on a Bank Holiday (surely most natural, if one thinks it out) without the ingenuous press placarding London with “Amazing scenes.” The press was even amazed if a married couple sought divorce, or if it thundered, or was at all warm. “Scenes” they would say, “Scenes”; and the eager reader, searching their columns for these, could find none worthy of the name. One pictures newspaper reporters going about, struck dumb with amazement at every smallest incident in this amazing life we lead, hurrying back to their offices and communicating their emotion to editors, news editors and leader writers, so that the whole staff gapes, round-eyed, at the astonishing world on which they have to comment. An ingenuous race; but they make the mistake of forgetting that many of their readers are so very experienced that they are seldom surprised at anything.

During these years, the sex disability as regards the suffrage being now removed, women stood freely for Parliament, but the electorate, being mostly of the male sex, showed that the only women they desired to have in Parliament were the wives of former members who had ceased to function as such, through death, peerage, or personal habits. Many women, including Stanley Croft, who of course stood herself, found this very disheartening. It seemed that the only chance for a woman who desired a political career was to marry a member and then put him out of action. Such women as were political in their own persons, who were educated and informed on one or more public topics, had small chance. “We don’t want to be ruled by the ladies,” the electorate firmly maintained. “It’s not their job. Their place is ...” etc.

The world had not changed much since the reign of Queen Victoria.

And so, with the French firmly and happily settled in the Ruhr, their hearts full of furious fancies, declaring that it would not be French to stamp on a beaten foe, but that their just debts they would have, with Germany rapidly breaking to pieces, drifting towards the rocks of anarchy or monarchy, and working day and night at the industry of printing million-mark notes, with Russia damned, as usual, beyond any conceivable recovery, with Italy suffering from a violent attack of Fascismo, with Austria counted quite out, with a set of horrid, noisy and self-conscious little war-born states in the heart of Europe, all neighbours and all feeling and acting as such, with Turkey making of herself as much of an all-round nuisance as usual, with Great Britain anxiously, perspiringly endeavouring both to arrest the progressive wreckage of Europe and to keep on terms with her late allies, and with Ireland enjoying at last the peace and blessings of Home Rule, Europe entered on her fifth year since the armistice.

A NOTE ON MAURICE

In this year Maurice’s paper perished, having long ceased to pay its way, and, in fact, like so many papers, suffering loss on each copy that was bought. This is as natural a state of affairs for papers as living on over-drafts is for private persons, but neither state, unfortunately, can last for ever. The money behind the _Gadfly_ at last gave out, and the _Gadfly_ ceased to be. Maurice, at the age of sixty-five, was deprived of his job and his salary, and became a free-lance, but no less fiery and stubborn, journalist. There were more things to oppose, in his view, than ever before, and he opposed them at large, in the hospitable pages of many a friendly periodical. His opposition had no effect on the affairs of the world, but, in combination with an adequate supply of alcoholic nourishment and his blessed emancipation from married life, it caused him to remain self-respecting and fit, kept senility at bay, and assisted him to bear up against the repeated shocks of Roger’s published works.

A NOTE ON IMOGEN

The P. & O. liner hooted its way down Southampton Water. The land, the Solent, the open sea, were veiled in February mist. Imogen, leaning on the rail and straining her eyes shore-ward, could only see it dimly, darkly, looming like a ghost through fog. That was England, and life in England; a mist-bound world wherein one blindly groped. A mist-bound and yet radiant world, holding all one valued, all that gave life meaning, all that one was leaving behind.

For Imogen was going, for a year, to the Pacific Islands. Hugh too was going there, to make maps and plans for the government. Imogen was going with him, exploring, wandering about at leisure from island to island. The perfect life, she had once believed this to be. And still the thought of coral islands, of palm and yam and bread-fruit trees, with the fruits thereof dropping ripely on emerald grass, with monkeys and gay parakeets screaming in the branches, and great turtles flopping in blue seas, with beachcombers drinking palm-toddy on white beaches, the crystal-clear lagoon in which to swim, and, beyond, the blue island-dotted open sea--even now these things tugged at Imogen’s heart-strings and made her feel again at moments the adventurous little girl she had once been, dreaming vagabond dreams.

But more often this bright, still world beyond the mists seemed like the paradise of a hymn, a far, unnatural, brilliant, alien place, which would make one sick for home.

Yet she had chosen to go, and no remonstrances, repentances and waverings had quite undone that choice. In that far, bright, clear, alien place, beyond the drifting mists, perhaps thought too was lucid and unconfused, not the desperate, mist-bound, storm-driven, helpless business it was in London. In London all values and all meanings were fluid, were as windy clouds, drifting and dissolving into strange shapes. Life bore too intense, too passionate an emotional significance; personal relationships were too tangled; clear thought was drowned in desire. One could not see life whole, only a flame, a burning star, at its heart.

Through years and years this could not go on; the entanglement of circumstance, the enmeshing of soul and will, was too close for any unravelling; it could only be cut. Under the knife that cut it--and yet was it cut at all, or only hacked all in vain?--Imogen’s soul seemed to bleed to death, to bleed and swoon quite away.

What had she done, and why? All reasons seemed to reel from sight as they churned for open sea between those mist-blind shores. Parakeets? Bread-fruit? Lagoons and coral reefs? O God, she cared for none of them. She had been mad, mad, mad.

“_To leave me for so long ... you can’t mean to do it._...”

Above the turning, churning screws the hurt voice spoke, how truly, and stabbed her through once more. Can’t mean to do it ... can’t do it ... can’t.... Oh, how very true indeed. And yet she must do it and would. It was no use; it would solve nothing, settle nothing; merely for a year she would be sick for home among the alien yams.

But, at the thought of the yams, and the bread-fruit, and the grass and parakeets more green than any imagining, and of the very blue lagoons, a little comfort stole into her heavy heart. A merry beachcomber on a white beach--that was the thing to be, even if nothing could be a really happy arrangement but to be two merry beachcombers together. At the thought of the two merry beachcombers who might have been so very happy, the tears brimmed and blinded Imogen’s eyes.

What a mess, what a mess, what a bitter, bemusing muddle, life was! One renounced its best gifts, those things in it which seemed finest, most ennobling, most enriching, holding most of beauty and of good; these things one renounced, and filled the dreadful gap with turtles, with a little palm-toddy, with a few foolish parakeets.

What an irony!

Through the blinding mist, above the rushing sound of foaming waters, the voice cried to her ... _Imogen, Imogen ... come back_.

Imogen wept.

Alas for the happy vagabond, fallen into such sad state.

FINAL

Rome saw Stanley off to Geneva. Stanley had obtained employment in the Labour department of the League of Nations. She was pleased, and keen, and full of hope. The League would save the world yet....

“It’s going to be the most interesting work of my life, so far,” said Stanley, leaning out of the train. “To find one’s best job at sixty-two--that’s rather nice, I think. Life’s so full of _hope_, Rome. Oh, I do feel happy about it.”

“Good,” said Rome, and, “Good-bye, my dear,” for the train began to move.

“Good-bye, Romie.... Take care of yourself; you’re looking tired lately.”

“I’m very old, you see,” Rome said, after the retreating train, and a passer-by, turning to glance at the slight, erect, grey-haired lady, thought that she did not look very old at all.

But she was very old, for she would soon be sixty-four, and, further, she was very tired, for she had cancer coming on, inherited from mamma. She had not mentioned it to anyone yet, beyond the doctor, who had told her that, unless she had operations, she would die within a year. Operations nothing, Rome had said; such a bore, and only to prolong the agony; if she had to die, she would die as quickly as might be. She further decided that, before the pain should become acute or the illness overwhelming, she would save trouble to herself and others by an apparently careless overdose of veronal. Meanwhile, she had a few months to live.

The thought that it would only, probably, be a few months, set her considering, as she drove herself home in her car, her practised hands steady on the wheel, life, its scope, its meaning, and its end. Life was well enough, she thought; well enough, and a gay enough business for those who had the means to make it so and the temperament to find it so. Life was no great matter, nor, certainly, was death; but it was well enough. We come and we go; we are born, we live, and we die; this poor ball, thought Rome, serves us for all that; and, on the whole, we make too much complaint of it, expect, one way and another, too much of it. It is, after all, but a turning ball, which has burst, for some reason unknown to science, into a curious, interesting and rather unwholesome form of animal and vegetable life. Indeed, thought Rome, I think it is a rather remarkable ball. But of course it can be but of the slightest importance, from the point of view of the philosopher who considers the very great extent and variety of the universe and the extremely long stretching of the ages. Its inhabitants tend to over-rate its importance in the scheme of things. Human beings surely tend to over-rate their own importance. Funny, hustling, strutting, vain, eager little creatures that we are, so clever and so excited about the business of living, so absorbed and intent about it all, so proud of our achievements, so tragically deploring our disasters, so prone to talk about the wreckage of civilisations, as if it mattered much, as if civilisations had not been wrecked and wrecked all down human history, and it all came to the same thing in the end. Nevertheless, thought Rome, we are really rather wonderful little spurts of life. The brief pageant, the tiny, squalid story of human life upon this earth, has been lit, among the squalour and the greed, by amazing flashes of intelligence, of valour, of beauty, of sacrifice, of love. A silly story if you will, but a somewhat remarkable one. Told by an idiot, and not a very nice idiot at that, but an idiot with gleams of genius and of fineness. The valiant dust that builds on dust--how valiant, after all, it is. No achievement can matter, and all things done are vanity, and the fight for success and the world’s applause is contemptible and absurd, like a game children play, building their sand castles which shall so soon one and all collapse; but the queer, enduring spirit of enterprise which animates the dust we are is not contemptible nor absurd.

Rome mused, running leisurely across Hyde Park, of herself, her parents, and her sisters and brothers, of how variously they had all taken life. Her papa had made of it a great spiritual adventure. Her mamma--what had mamma made of life? She had, anyhow, accepted papa and his spiritual adventure, and accepted all her children and their lives. And yet, always and always, mamma had remained delicately apart, detached, too gentle to be called cynical, too practical to be called a philosopher, too shrewd to be deceived by life. Dear mamma. Rome very often missed her still. As to Vicky, she had skimmed gracefully over life’s surface like a swallow, dipping her pretty wings in the shallows and splashing them about, or like a bee, sipping and tasting each flower. She had plunged frequently, ardently and yet lightly into life. Maurice had not plunged into life; he had fought it, opposed it, treated it as an enemy in a battle; he had made no terms with it. Stanley had, on the other hand, embraced it like a lover, or like a succession of lovers, to each of which she gave the best of her heart and soul and mind before she passed on to the next. Stanley believed in life, that it was or could be splendid and divine. Irving and Una both accepted it calmly, cheerfully, without speculation, as a good enough thing, Irving with more of enterprise and more of progressive desire, Una placidly, statically, eating the meal set before her and wishing nothing more, nothing less. Both these accepted.

And Rome herself had rejected. Without opposition and without heat, she had refused to be made an active participant in the business, but had watched it from her seat in the stalls as a curious and entertaining show. That was, and must always, in any circumstances, have been her way. Had she married, or had she gone away, long ago, with Mr. Jayne, would she then have been forced into some closer, some more intimate spiritual relationship with the show? Possibly. Or possibly not. Life is infinitely compelling, but the spirit remains infinitely itself.

Anyhow, it mattered not at all. Life, whatever it had, whatever it might have meant to her, was in its last brief lap.

“_And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death._...”

Her little drift of dust was so soon to return and subside whence it came, dust to dust.

She thought that she would miss the queer, absurd show, which would go on with its antics without her, down who knew what æons? Perhaps not very many after all; perhaps all life was before long dustily to subside, leaving the ball, like a great revolving tomb, to spin its way through space. Or perhaps the ball itself would dash suddenly from its routine spinning, would fly, would rush like a moth for a lamp, to some great bright sun and there burst into flame, till its last drift of ashes should be consumed and no more seen.

A drift of dust, a drift of storming dust. It settles, and the little stir it has made is over and forgotten. The winds will storm on among the bright and barren stars.

Rome smiled, as she neatly swung out at the Grosvenor Gate.

THE END

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.