21 IRVING
While papa followed the star, and Stanley doggedly and bitterly sued her husband for restitution of conjugal rights, and Rome urbanely surveyed the world through a monocle and drove elegantly in hansoms, often with an enormous wolfhound or a couple of poms, and Maurice fired squibs of angry eloquence at everything that came into his line of vision, their brother Irving made a fortune by speculating in South African gold mine shares. Irving, as has been said earlier, was a lucky young man, whom God had fashioned for prosperity. Having made his fortune, he married a handsome, agreeable and healthy young woman, one Lady Marjorie Banister, the daughter of an obscure north-country earl, and settled down to make more.
It was an epoch of fortune-making. Mr. Cecil Rhodes loomed in the south, an encouraging and stimulating figure to those who had enterprise and a little capital. The new rich were filling Mayfair, making it hum with prosperity. Irving too hummed with prosperity, and took a house in Cumberland Place. He found life an excellent affair, though he had his grievances, one of which was that motor cars were not allowed on English roads without a man walking with a flag before them. “We are a backward nation,” Irving grumbled, after visits to Paris, as so many have grumbled before and since. But, on the whole, Irving approved of modern life. He thought Maurice, who did not, a bear with a sore head.
Maurice was now the editor of an intelligent but acid weekly paper, which carried on a running fight with the government, the opposition, all foreign governments, the British public, most current literature, nearly all current ideas, and the bulk of the press, particularly Henley’s New Review, which boomed against him monthly. Having a combatant spirit, he found life not unenjoyable, now that he had become so used and so indifferent to his wife as to have acquired armour against the bitter chafing she had caused him of yore, and to find some domestic pleasure in annoying her. He considered it a low and imbecile world, but to that too one gets used, and a weekly paper is, as many have found, a gratifying vent for scorn. Saturday after Saturday, through 1895, the Gadfly railed at the unsatisfactory attitude of our Colonial Secretary towards South Africa, the existence of Mr. Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company, the tepid and laissez-faire temperament of Lord Rosebery, the shocking weather, the absurd inhibitions against motor cars, the vulgarity of the cheaper press, the futility of the controversies on education, the slowness of progress in developing Röntgen Rays and flying machines, the immense wealth made by the undeserving in cycle companies and gold mines, the smugness of Liberals, the inanity of Tories, the ignorance of the Labour Party, the blatancy of current forms of patriotism, the arrogance of the victory-swollen Japanese, the bad manners of France, the aggressiveness of Germany, the feebleness of current literature, and so on and so forth.
“That’s right, old smiler, keep it up. That’s the stuff to give them,” Irving amiably encouraged him, as he and his wife ate at the dinner table of his brother. “They don’t mind, and it makes you happy. But what’s bitten you to set you against company promoters? I didn’t care for your column about them last week. They’ve done you no harm, have they? The fact is, I was going to ask you if you’d care to come in to a small affair I’m helping to float. Bicycle bolts are a back number, and that’s a fact. In November next year the red flag comes off, and motor cars begin in earnest all over the roads. Amberley and I are specialising in tyres. We’ve got Lord Mortlake in too. It’s a sure thing. We shall be coining thousands in a couple of years. You’d better come in early. Am I right?”
Amy’s mirth chimed like sweet bells.
“Motor cars! Oh, I do like that! Why not flying machines at once?”
Irving regarded her with tolerant scorn.
“Why not, indeed? You may well ask. But for the moment motor cars will do us. I daresay it will be fliers in ten years or so. And moving photographs too. I’m not, you see, a pessimist, like poor dear Maurice. I believe in Progress. And in Capital. And in the Future of the Race. And in getting rich quick. Maurice, am I right?”
“Probably,” said Maurice. “You’re certainly not bad at getting rich quick; I’ll say that for you. But I am. So, on the whole....”
“Motor car tyres!” Amy still jeered, being of those who obtain one idea at a time and grapple it to their souls with hoops of steel. “Motor car tyres! They won’t wear out many tyres trundling away behind those old chaps with the flags.”
Maurice finished his sentence otherwise than he had intended.
“On the whole I’m inclined to take shares in this company of yours. Send me along the details as soon as you can.”
Amy’s utterances often had this subversive effect on his own. He threw her a malevolent glance, and poured himself out some more claret.
Amy put up her pretty, dark eyebrows. She pursed her mouth. She nodded.
“That’s right. Throw our money away. Don’t bother a bit about me or the children.”
“Now, Amy, don’t nag him. I’m answerable for this little show, and I can tell you I’m right. Remember I told him to put his shirt on Persimmon. Well, he didn’t. You know the results. I don’t want to brag, but—well, there it is. Maurice, I think better of your wits than I have for the last ten years.”
Maurice, sipping his claret, still kept his sardonic gaze on his wife, who rose and took Irving’s wife to another room. Often Amy wished that she had chanced to marry Irving instead of Maurice, though he was too young for her. Oftener Maurice wished that he had married no one, for marriage was oppressive.
22 RULE BRITANNIA
’95 swept on, and speeded up to a riotous finish, with the British South African troops, under the imprudent Dr. Jameson, galloping over the Transvaal Border to protect the British of the Rand. Loud applause from the British Isles. In the legal language of the Bow Street trial that followed, “certain persons, in the month of December, 1895, in South Africa, within Her Majesty’s dominions, and without licence of Her Majesty, did unlawfully prepare a military expedition to proceed against the dominions of a certain friendly State, to wit the South African Republic, contrary to the provisions of the Foreign Enlistment Act.” In the more poetic language of the Laureate,—
“Wrong, is it wrong? Well, maybe,
But I’m going, boys, all the same:
Do they think me a burgher’s baby,
To be scared by a prating name?”
In the episcopal language of the Bishop of Mashonaland, “Whether the English people liked the exploits of Dr. Jameson or not, the Empire had been built up by such men. They had a Colonial Secretary with his eyes open, who could see further than most people thought. Africa must take a foremost place in the Empire, and the Church should go hand in hand with its development.”
And, in the journalistic language of the Daily Mail (born early in ’96, and, like other new-born infants, both noisy and pink), “It is well known in official circles that England and the Transvaal must eventually come into collision.”
Vicky’s children, in a fever of martial jingoism, temporarily abandoned the Sherlock Holmes crime-tracking exploits which were engaging their attention those Christmas holidays, for the Jameson Raid, riding bestridden chairs furiously round the schoolroom, chanting,
“Then over the Transvaal border,
And a gallop for life or death—”
until two chairs broke into pieces and Imogen, thrown, cut her head on the fender, and the game was forbidden by authority.
The adventure of the raid tickled up British imperialism, which, like the imperialism in Vicky’s schoolroom, began to ride merrily for a fall. ’96 dawned on a country growing drunk with pride of race and possessions; working up, in fact, for the Diamond Jubilee. Dr. Jameson and his confederates were received with the cheers of the populace and the adoration of the Daily Mail, and sentenced to short terms of imprisonment.
Soon after the birth of the Daily Mail came the Savoy, the last stand of eclectic æstheticism. Stanley Croft had, for a while, an odd feeling of standing hesitant between two forces, one of which was loosening its grasp on her, the other taking hold. The newer force conquered, and she was carried, step by step, from æstheticism to imperialism, from belief in art and intellect to belief in the dominance of the British race over the world. She read Henley and Kipling. She found pride in,
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul....”
Her religion ceased to be a mystic twilight passion. A renascence of sturdy courage took her back into the common ways, where, her divorce now accomplished, she pursued her old aims. She took up life, and became alert to the world again, responsive, like a ship in full sail, to every wind that blew. And the wind that blew on her was a wind of reaction from her recent past, and it drove her out on the seas of ambitious imperialism, so that love of country became in her, as in so many, a kind of swaggering tribal pride. The romance of Greater Britain took her by storm. Not the infant Imogen, stirred to tears by the swinging by of red-coated troops to a band, seethed with a more exalted jingoism. Glory, adventure, pride of race, and the clash of arms—what stimulating dreams were these, and how primeval their claim upon the soul! While Stanley’s friends shrugged cynical shoulders over Dr. Jim’s exploit and the attitude towards it of the great British public, while her papa gravely misdoubted such militant aggression, while Maurice sneered and tilted at it in a weekly column, while Rome contemplated the spectacle with the detached, intelligent amusement of the blasé but interested theatre-goer, while Irving, cynically approving, said, “That’s good,” thinking of the Rand gold, and Mr. Cecil Rhodes observed that his friend the doctor had upset the apple-cart—while all these made the comments natural to their tastes, temperaments and points of view, Stanley, like a martial little girl, flew high the flag of “Britain for ever! Up the Rand!” and her spirit marched as to a military band.
Vicky also, in her more careless and casual way, was a supporter of Empire. “Whatever Charles and Maurice and all those informed people may say, my dear, this Dr. Jim is a gallant creature, dashing off to the rescue of his fellow countrymen and countrywomen like that. For, even if they weren’t in actual danger, they were inconvenienced, those poor tiresome Uitlanders. And how dreadful to be governed by Boers! What people! Canting, Old Testament humbugs! One dislikes them so excessively, even from here, that one can imagine the feelings of those who live among them. Even Maurice isn’t so perverse as to maintain that Boers are tolerable. Oh, I’m all for Dr. Jim. I insist on taking in that cheery pink new daily that pets him as if he were a Newfoundland dog that has saved a boat-load of drowning people. Such a bright, pleased tone it has. ‘The British Public know a good man when they see one,’ it says. So much more amiable and pleasant an attitude towards us than Maurice’s ‘The public be damned. All it knows about anything that matters would go into a walnut shell and then rattle.’ Maurice gets so terribly contemptuous and conceited. I tremble to think what he will be like at sixty, should nature keep him alive, if he finds the world so silly when he is but thirty-eight. Perhaps, however, he will have mellowed.”
23 MAURICE, ROME, STANLEY AND THE QUEEN
’96 ran out. Irving’s tyre company began to make money, and Maurice grew richer. He sent Amy to the Riviera for the winter, and Rome kept his house for him. He was sweeter-tempered than usual. Rome was, in his eyes, a flâneuse and a dilettante of life, but her clear, cynical mind was agreeable to him. Her intelligent mockery was, after Amy’s primitive jeering, as caviare after rotten eggs. God! If only Amy need never come back. But she would inevitably come back. And the children loved her. Children are like that; no discrimination. They loved Maurice too, but more mildly. And, very temperately, they liked their Aunt Rome, whom they often suspected of making fun of them, and, even oftener, of being completely bored. In point of fact, Rome was apt to be bored by persons under sixteen or so. She allowed childhood to be a necessary stage in the growth of human beings, but she found it a tiresome one, and saw no reason why children should consort with adults. Stanley, on the other hand, being by now partially restored to her general goodwill towards humanity, threw herself ardently into the society and interests of her own children and those of others. She taught them imperialism, and about the English flag, and told them adventure stories, and played with them the games suitable to their years. She told them about the Diamond Jubilee, the great event of ’97, and how our good, wise and aged queen would, by next June, have reigned for sixty years. Victoria was in fashion just then. She was well thought of, both morally and intellectually. “To the ripe sagacity of the politician,” said the loyal press, “she adds the wide knowledge acquired by sixty years of statesmanship. Many a strained international situation has been saved by her personal tact.” That was the way the late nineteenth century press spoke of Victoria, the English being a loyal people, with a strong sense of royalty. So the Diamond Jubilee would be a great day for the Queen. Since the last Jubilee, in ’87, the Empire, or anyhow the sense of Empire, had grown and developed. Imperialism was now a very heady wine, to those who liked that tipple. To others, such as Maurice Garden, it was more of an emetic.
24 NANSEN IN THE ALBERT HALL
Dr. Nansen came to London early in ’97. Whatever else you thought of anything or anyone, you had to admire Dr. Nansen. He addressed thousands of people in the Albert Hall. Vicky took her children to hear him. Already they had read “Farthest North.” Imogen, at eight years old, had read it, absorbed, breathless, intent, tongue clenched between teeth. The man who had sailed through ice, and all but got to the Pole. He was better than soldiers. As good, almost, as sailors. What a man! And there he stood, a giant dwarfed to smallness on the platform of the vast hall, a Scandinavian god, blonde and grave and calm, waiting to begin his lecture, but unable to because the crowd roared and clapped and stamped their feet and would not stop.
At that huge explosion of welcome, Imogen’s skin pringled and pricked all over, as if soldiers were swinging by to music, or a fire engine to the sound of bells, or as if the sun was setting in a glory of gold and green, or as if she was reading “The Revenge,” or “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” or “I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree.” Imogen wept. She did not know that she wept, until the applause was at last over and Nansen began to speak. Then her brother Hugh poked her in the back and said, “What’s up? Wipe your nose and don’t snivel,” and she was ashamed, and though she retorted, “Wipe your own. Snivel yourself,” it was no satisfaction, because Hughie was not snivelling. Boys didn’t, she had learnt, except when there was something to snivel about. They did not understand the female weakness which wept at fire engines, poetry and clapping, and was sick at squashed insects. Imogen wanted (even still half hoped) to be a boy, so she tried to hide her weaknesses.
Nansen began to speak.
“They’re all quiet now. A pin might drop,” said Imogen to herself, having lately learnt that phrase, but not getting it quite right.
But disappointment took her. Strain as she would, she could not hear what the god said. She could not make it into words, except now and then. It boomed along, sonorous, fluent English, above her plane of listening. A sentence here and there she got, entrancing and teasing, then away the voice soared, booming in another dimension.... Imogen had never learnt to listen; now for the first time she knew remorse for sermon-times spent in day-dreams, lessons at school during which her mind had drifted away on seas of fancy like a rudderless boat, to be sharply recalled by “Imogen Carrington, what have I just said?” Seldom, indeed, did Imogen Carrington know. She would blush and stammer and get an inattention mark. No one in the second form had so many inattention marks as she had. Perhaps if she had fewer she could have understood Nansen now.
“Hughie, can you hear?”
“Most of the time. Don’t interrupt.”
Yes, Hughie could hear. Hughie was two years older; Hughie was ten, and into his square, solid, intelligent head the sounds emitted by Nansen were penetrating as words. Hughie could listen, when he had a mind to. Hughie was more clever than Imogen. Phyllis and Nancy could hear too, of course; they were older. Not Tony; but then Tony, who was only seven, wouldn’t be trying. He didn’t really care.
“Mother, I can’t hear.”
“Don’t talk, darling. I’ll tell you afterwards....”
But what was the good of that?
Imogen’s strained attention flagged. If she couldn’t hear, she couldn’t. She sighed and gave up. She stared, fascinated, at the splendid figure on the platform, and imagined him on the Fram, sailing along through chunks of floating ice, and on each chunk a great white bear. Floes, they were, not chunks.... She and the boys meant, when they should be grown up, to fit out a Fram for themselves and find the Pole. Hughie had some idea of the South Pole. The sort of unusual, intelligent idea Hughie did get. But to Imogen the North was the Pole that called. Away they sailed, away and away.... Tony was attacked, as he fished from a floe, by a huge mother bear, with three cubs. Imogen got there just in time; she slew the bear with her long knife, at imminent personal risk; it toppled backwards into the ice-cold water and died. The green sea reddened hideously. But the three little cubs Imogen kept. She took them back to the Fram, and there was one for each of them, and they were called Mowgli, Marcus and Mercia, and Marcus was hers (the children had been taken to “The Sign of the Cross” last summer. There was a play indeed!), and the cubs slept in their bunks with them, and ate from their plates at meals....
Another storm of clapping. It was over.
“Did you like it, Jennie? How much did you follow?”
“I liked it very much. I followed it a lot.... Mother, do you think, when I’m big, I shall ever speak to him? I mean, when Hughie and Tony and I have got our ship and have been to the Pole?”
“Oh, yes, darling. I should think when that happens, certainly. Only Dr. Nansen may be dead by that time, I’m afraid.”
“Is he old, mother? Is he very old? Will he die before we grow up? Will he, mother?”
“Children, be careful crossing the road.... What’s the matter, Imogen?”
“Will he die, mother, before we’re grown up?”
“Who? Dr. Nansen? Oh, no, I hope not, why should he? Tony, don’t dawdle. We’ll go home by the Park. Keep together, children, there’s such a crowd.... Imogen, don’t play with strange dogs—I keep telling you.”
“Mother, he’s such a weeny one ... all white, with a black nose and a red tongue.... Mother, when can I have a puppy?”
25 JUBILEE
Jubilee Day. Sweltering heat, after a grey beginning; baked streets. Irving, out of his wealth and generosity, had bought a block of seats in the Mall for the procession, and there the family sat. Papa, mamma, Vicky and Charles and their daughter Imogen (their other children were away at school), Rome, Stanley, Irving and his wife, and Una and Ted up from the country, with two stout and handsome children. The ladies wore beflowered, rakish, fly-away hats, and dresses with high collars and hunched sleeves and small waists. They look absurd now, in old pictures of the period, but they did not look absurd to one another at the time; they looked natural, and comme-il-faut, and smart. The boys wore their Eton suits and the girls light frocks. Imogen had a blue smock, gathered across the yoke, so that when she ran her fingers across the smocking it made a little soft, crisp noise. She sat next her little cousins from the country. But she was shy of them and turned her face away, and would say nothing to them after she had asked, “How is Rover? How is Lassie? Are the puppies born yet?” Fits of shyness seized upon Imogen like toothache, even now that she had been ever so long at school, and she would hang her head, and mutter monosyllabic answers, and wish she were Prince Prigio, with his cap of darkness, and when, in church, it came to the psalm about “Deliver me from the hands of strange children,” she would pray it ardently, feeling how right David (if that psalm were one of his) had been. She was not shy of her cousins when she stayed at the farm with them, for the farm was like paradise, full of calves, puppies, pigs and joy, and Katie, Dick, Martin and Dolly were its hierophants, and, though they weren’t much good at being pirates or Red Indians, it was, no doubt, because they were always employed to better purpose. But in the Mall, seated in a tidy row waiting for the procession, it was different. Imogen wished that two of her brothers and sisters could have been there, instead of Katie and Dick. She held a fold of her mother’s soft foulard dress tightly between her hot fingers. She whispered,
“Mother. Suppose someone felt sick and couldn’t get out?”
“Jean—you don’t feel sick, do you, child?” Vicky was alarmed, knowing the weakness of her daughter’s stomach.
“Oh, no, I don’t feel sick. But if someone did? What would they do, mother? Suppose the lady just above you felt sick, mother? Suppose she was sick? What would you do, mother?”
“Don’t be silly, Imogen. If you talk like that you’ll feel sick yourself. Talk to Katie. Don’t you see you’re interrupting grandmamma and me?”
But Imogen’s grandmamma smiled across at her small pink, freckled face.
“Are you enjoying yourself, Jennie?”
“Yes, grandmamma ... is the Queen older than you, grandmamma?”
“Yes. The Queen is seventy-eight. I am sixty-three. When I was only three years old, the Queen was crowned.”
“Did you see her crowned?”
“No. I was too young.”
“Is it a very big crown? Will she have it on?... Mother” —Imogen had a terrible thought and whispered it— “suppose the Queen was sick in her carriage, just opposite here? What would happen, mother? Would the procession wait or go on?”
“Now, Jennie, that will do. You’re being tiresome and silly. Talk to Katie and Dick. I’m talking to grandmamma; I told you before.”
(For that was the way in which children were kept under in the last century. Things have changed.)
Gold and purple and crimson. Silver and scarlet and gold. Fluttering pennons on tall Venetian masts. The Mall was a street in fairyland, or the New Jerusalem. And thronged with those who would never see either more nearly, being neither fantastic nor good. Never would most of those enter through the strait gate and see the gates of pearl and the city of golden streets. But was not this as good? Silver and violet and crimson and gold; gay streamers flying on the wind. Beautiful as an army with banners, the Mall was....
“Let’s count the flags,” said Imogen to Katie and Dick.
“I remember the coronation,” said Mr. Garden, half to Irving, half to anyone sitting about who might be interested, after the way of elderly persons. “I was a very small boy, but my father took me to see the procession. I remember he put me up on his shoulder while it passed.... There wasn’t quite such a crowd then as to-day, I think.”
“People have increased,” said Rome. “Particularly in London. There are now too many, that is certain.”
“The crowd,” said Mr. Garden, his memory straying over that day sixty years ago, “was prettier then. I am nearly sure it was prettier. Costumes were better.”
“They could hardly,” said Rome, “have been worse.”
“I remember my mother, in a violet pelisse, that I think she had got new for the occasion, and a crinoline.... Crinolines hadn’t grown large in ’37—they were very graceful, I think.... And a pretty poke bonnet. And my father in a cravat, with close whiskers (whiskers hadn’t grown large, either), and a tall grey hat.... And myself done up tight in blue nankeen with brass buttons, and your aunt Selina with white frilled garments showing below her frock. Little girls weren’t so pretty,” he added, looking across at Imogen’s straight blue smock. “Well, well, sixty years ago. A great deal has happened since then. A great reign and a great time.”
“They’re pretty nearly due now,” said Irving, consulting his watch. “Sure to be late, though.”
“Who’ll come first, mother?” Imogen asked.
“Captain Ames, on a horse. And behind him Life Guards and dragoons and that kind of person.... So I said to her, mamma, that really unless she could undertake to.... Oh, listen, they really are coming now. Listen to the cheering, Jennie.”
The noise of loyalty beat and broke like a sea from west to east. The sound shivered down Imogen’s spine like music, and, as usual in such moments, her eyes pringled with hot tears, which she squeezed away. Then came the blaring of the trumpets and the rolling of the drums, and, singing high above them like a kettle on the boil, the faint, thin skirling of the pipes.
Imogen’s hot hand clutched Vicky’s dress.
“Now, Jean, don’t get too excited, darling. Try and be quiet and sensible, like Katie and Dick.”
“Mother, I am too excited, already. Look, mother—is that Captain Ames on a horse?”
Captain Ames on a horse (and what a horse!) it was. And behind him Life Guards, dragoons, lancers, and that kind of person, in noble profusion. Very gallant and proud and lovely, prancing, curvetting, gay as bright flowers in a wind.... O God, what military men!
A little white-moustached general rode by, and great cheers crashed. “That’s Lord Roberts, Imogen.” Imogen, who knew her Kipling, had a lump in her throat for Bobs of Kandahar.
“And that’s Lord Charles Beresford—with the cocked hat, do you see?”
Then came the great guns, running on their carriages.
And then the cheering broke to a mighty storm, as it always does when sailors go by.
The sailors too had guns. Blue-jackets and smart, neat officers, Britannia’s pets, Britannia’s pride....
Imogen, who had always meant to be a sailor, and who even now blindly hoped that somehow, before she reached the age for Osborne, a way would be made for her (either she would become a boy, or dress up as a boy, or the rule excluding girls from the senior service would be relaxed), gasped and screwed her hands tightly together against her palpitating breast. Here were sailors. Straight from the tossing blue sea; straight from pacing the quarter-deck, spyglass in hand, spying for enemy craft, climbing the rigging, setting her hard-a-port, manning the guns, raking the enemy amidships, holding up slavers, receiving surrendered swords.... Here, in brief, were sailors; and the junior service faded from the stage. Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves. The moment was almost too excessive for a budding sailor, with wet eyes and lips pressed tight together to keep the face steady. Fortunately it passed, and was succeeded by the First Prussian Dragoon Guards, great men with golden helmets, who could be admired without passion, and by strange brown men with turbans and big beards.
“Indians,” Vicky said, and Indians too one knew from Kipling. And, “Sir Partab Singh,” added the informing voice.
“Is he the chief of the Indians, mother?”
“Some kind of chief, yes.”
Other brown men followed the Indians—little coppery, fuzzy Maoris; and with them rode splendid white men from New Zealand, and slouch-hatted Rhodesian Horse.
“From South Africa.... You remember Dr. Jim and his raid and Cecil Rhodes ... the Christmas holidays before last....”
“When the chair broke and I cut my head.” Yes, Imogen remembered, though she had been only seven then. Over the Transvaal border, then a gallop for life or death.... The chair was still broken.... Everyone seemed to remember Dr. Jim and his raid and Cecil Rhodes, for the slouch-hatted riders were cheered and cheered. Hurrah for South Africa! “Political trouble, much less war, cannot now be apprehended,” the Times had said that morning, in a pæan of Jubilee satisfaction with sixty years of progress abroad and at home.
The best was over, for now began carriages—landaus and pairs. Foreign envoys. The Papal Nuncio sharing a landau with a gentleman from China, who cooled himself with a painted fan. Landau after landau bearing royal gentlemen, royal ladies. What a pity for them to be borne tamely in landaus instead of a-horseback!
A colonial escort; an Indian escort; Lord Wolseley.
And then the procession’s meaning and climax. “The Queen, Jennie.”
Eight cream horses soberly drawing an open carriage, surrounded by postillions and red-coated running footmen; and in the carriage the little stout old lady, black-dressed, with black and white bonnet, and with her the beautiful Princess in heliotrope, dressed in the then current fashion, which royal ladies have adhered to ever since, never allowing themselves to be unsettled by the modes of the new century.
The Queen, God save her. The noise was monstrous, louder than any real noise could be.
“Dear old soul,” cried Vicky’s clear voice as she lustily clapped white kid hands.
Papa’s blue eyes looked kindly down on the old lady whose coronation he remembered.
“A record to be proud of,” said papa.
“Oh, yes, she’s seen some life this sixty years, the old lady,” admitted Irving.
“I expect she is feeling the heat a bit,” said Una. “Well, I hope she’s happy.”
Behind them people were saying loyal Victorian things to one another about the dear old Queen.
“She’s got the hearts of the Empire all right,” they were saying, “whether they’re under white skins or brown,” and, “God bless our dear Queen,” and, “How well she looks to-day,” and, “She’s an Empress, but she’s a woman first. That’s why we all love her so,” and so on and so forth.
And, “There goes the Prince,” they said, applauding now the burly middle-aged gentleman riding his horse by his mother’s carriage.
“He must be gettin’ pretty impatient, poor man,” said Amy. “Nearly sixty himself, and mamma still going strong. I expect he thinks this ought to be his silver Jubilee, not mamma’s diamond one.”
Mr. Garden looked pained. He often looked and was pained at the wife of Maurice.
Imogen’s heart swelled for the Empress-Queen and the crash of loyalty, but not to bursting-point; for here was only a little old lady in a carriage (though drawn by eight cream horses like a fairy godmother’s), and it is the swagger of gallantry that stirs. Sailors, soldiers, explorers, martyrs, firemen, circus-riders, Blondin on his rope, Christ on his cross, Joan of Arc on her white steed or her red pile—these are they that shake the soul to tears. Not old ladies, however mighty, who have sat on a throne for sixty years.
“The Prince, Jennie. The Prince of Wales.”
“Oh, mother, where?”
The Prince of Wales. Gallant figure of legend. Young, noble, princely, with caracolling charger and a triple white plume in a silver helm. The bravest and the most chivalrous of the knights. Where was the Prince of Wales— “Oh, mother, where?”
“There—don’t you see him? The big man in uniform with a grey beard, riding by the Queen’s carriage.”
The big man.... Oh, no, that must be a mistake.
“That’s not the Prince of Wales, mother. Not that one....”
“Of course. Why shouldn’t it be?”
A thousand reasons why it shouldn’t be. A hundred thousand reasons.... But in vain their legions beat against the hard little fact it was. Imogen’s soaring heart sank like a stone in water. Fearful doubts whispered. Had all the Princes of Wales been like that—fat elderly men with grey beards? The Black Prince.... Oh, no, not the Black Prince....
“The Black Prince wasn’t like that, mother, was he?”
“It must be nearly the end now. Here’s the music.... What, Jean? What’s bothering you now?”
“The Black Prince....”
“Forget him, my precious. Don’t let any prince weigh on your little mind. Here comes the music. Do you hear the pipes, children?”
So the great procession passed eastward, to rejoice Trafalgar Square, the Strand, Fleet Street and the lands across the river.
“It’ll be a job getting out of this. Hold on to me, Imogen. Did you enjoy it, darling?”
“Yes.” Imogen nodded, with the sun in her screwed-up eyes. “I wish we could run very fast down the streets to where they haven’t passed yet, and see them all again. Do you think we could, mother?”
“I’m sure we couldn’t.... You’re not over-tired, mamma dear?”
“Oh, no. I feel very well.... But that child has turned green.”
Vicky looked down, startled, at her daughter.
“Imogen. Aren’t you well?”
“Mother, I think I may be going to be sick.”
“Well, sit down till it’s over.... Bless the child. It’s the heat and the excitement. She gets taken like that sometimes, by way of reaction after her treats—most tiresome.”
“Poor little mite.”
“How are you feeling now, Jennie?”
Imogen said nothing. Yellow as cream cheese, she sat in her seat and asked God not to disgrace her by letting her be sick in public, in the grand stand, on Jubilee Day, with all London looking on.
But, “I’m not sure, mother, that I do very much believe in prayers,” she said to Vicky that evening.