26 RECESSIONAL
Triumphant patriotism is all very well; Proud imperialism is all very well. But these things should be carried on with a swagger, like a panache, with a hint of the gay and the absurd, marching, as it were, to the wild, conceited noise of skirling pipes. People of all nations, but more particularly the English, are apt to forget this, and bear their patriotism heavily, unctuously, speak solemnly of the white man’s burden, and introduce religion into the gay and worldly affair.
Rudyard Kipling did this, on July 17th of Jubilee year, when he published in the Times “Recessional,” beginning,—
“God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath Whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget.”
Stanley read it at breakfast, and shuddered. It was such a poem as the Jews might have made, in the days of Israel’s glory—terribly godly and solemn. It was addressed to Jehovah, the Jewish Lord of Hosts. Those Jews! How their influence lasts! Beneath Whose awful Hand we hold.... Awful is a bad word, and hand should never, whosesoever hand it is, have a capital “h” (but that might have been the printer’s fault, as anyone who knows printers must, in fairness, admit), and dominion over palm and pine is much too delightful and romantic a thing to be spoilt by being thus held. And, further down, it was worse.
“If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boasting as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law....”
Are we then Jews, and not Gentiles? And what Law? And lesser breeds—that was worst of all.
The whole poem seemed to Stanley so heavily ruinous of a jolly thing, so terribly expressive of the solemn pomposity into which national pride is ever ready to stumble, that it tarnished for her something young and buoyant and absurd into which she had flung herself of late. As Miss Edith Cavell remarked twenty years later, patriotism is not enough. It needs to be as the cherishing love a man has for the soil of his home; or as the bitter, desperate striving unto death of the oppressed race, the damned desperation of the rebel; or as the gay and gallant flying of gaudy banners. Successful, smug, solemn, conquering patriotism is not nearly enough—or perhaps it is a good deal too much. Anyhow, it is all wrong.
“What a man!” Stanley muttered, meaning Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who did, if anyone, know all about the adventure of empire-building, its swagger, glitter and romance, and must needs turn himself into a preacher.
Stanley’s niece, Imogen, happened to have “Recessional” read aloud to her form at school, by one whom she greatly loved (for it must be owned that this unbalanced child only too readily adored those who taught her), and shyly she wriggled her mind away from the sense of the sounding lines. She liked,
“Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire;
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre....”
and,
“The tumult and the shouting dies,
The captains and the kings depart....”
and,
“All valiant dust that builds on dust....”
but disliked the rest. If Miss Treherne liked it, it must, she knew, be somehow good; further, it was by Kipling, who had made Mowgli, and,
“It’s north you may run to the rime-ringed sun,
Or south to the blind Horn’s hate;
Or east all the way into Mississippi Bay,
Or west to the Golden Gate....”
But all the same, Imogen had no use for it. In the foolish jargon of school, it was “pi.”
But newspapers said at the time, and history books have said since, that this poem sounded a fine and needed note; and, in fact, it was a good deal liked. Mr. Garden liked it. Mr. Garden was afraid that Britain was getting a little above itself with Empire. As, indeed, it doubtless was, said Stanley, and why not? Empires, like life, only endure for a brief period, and we may as well enjoy them while we may. They are wasted on those who do not enjoy them. Time bears us off, as lightly as the wind lifts up the smoke and carries it away.... The grave’s a fine and private place, but in it there are no empires, only the valiant dust that builds on dust, and has come to dust at the last. So let us by all means be above ourselves while we may and if we can, in the brief space that is ours before we must be below ourselves for ever.
Mr. Garden replied that there may be many brief spaces to come, for all of us, and we should be training ourselves for these.... For papa was still a Theosophist, and believed in infinitely numerous reincarnations. He did not desire them, for he had had troubles enough, for one; but he knew that they would occur. He looked with apprehension down a vista of lives. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, to the last syllable of recorded time—or anyhow, until papa should be made perfect—and that, papa humbly felt, was a very long time ahead.
27 BOND STREET
London glittered sweetly, washed by the May sun. The streets were bland and gay, like a lady of fashion taking the air. Miss Garden walked abroad, bland and gay too, slim and erect in neat coat and skirt (skirt touching the pavement as she walked—disgusting, but skirts did), lace jabot at the high stock collar, and large beribboned hat, tipped a little forward so that the sunshine caught the fair hair sweeping upward from the nape. She led a huge Borzoi on a leash, and as she walked she surveyed London, its people, its streets, its shops. In a gold net purse bag she carried notes and clinking sovereigns. She had gambled to good purpose last night at bridge, the new card game. She was a great gambler. Bridge, whist, baccarat, poker, roulette and Monte Carlo—at all these she won and lost, with the same equable sangfroid. Her parents did not like it, though Rome’s income, left her by her grandfather, was her own. They did not, in many ways, approve of their clever Rome, so unlike themselves. But on such disapprovals, so Rome assured them, family life is based. Mutual disapproval, mutual toleration; that is family, as, indeed, so much other, life.
Anyhow, Rome gambled. The older she grew the more greatly and intelligently she gambled. She had her systems, ingeniously worked out, for Monte Carlo. She had been there this Easter, together with her friend and ally, Guy Donkin, a cheerful barrister three years her junior, who had been used to ask her to marry him, but had now settled down to a sporting friendship and confided to her his fleeting affairs of the heart. Here again Mr. and Mrs. Garden disapproved. Going to Monte Carlo to meet a man; staying at the same hotel with him; seen everywhere with him; even in the late, the very late thirties, was this right or wise? It set people talking....
“As to that,” Rome carelessly dismissed it, “be sure people will always talk. You may be sure, too, mamma, that Guy and I do nothing not comme-il-faut. We are both too worldly-wise for that. We may épater the bourgeois possibly, but we shan’t épater our own world. We know its foolish rules, and we both find it more comfortable to keep them.”
Entirely of the world Miss Garden looked, this May morning, strolling down Bond Street, a little cynical, a little blasé, very well-dressed, intensely civilised, exquisitely poised, delicately, cleanly fair. She would soon be thirty-nine, and looked just that, neither more nor less.
A window full of jade caught her roving eye. She went in; she bought a clear jade elephant, and a dull jade lump that swung on a fine platinum chain. She also got a tortoise-shell cigarette case.
She stopped next at a window full of little dogs. Big-headed Sealeyham puppies; Poltalloch terriers. These she looked at critically. She meant to have a Poltalloch, but to order one from their home in the West Highlands when next she stayed there. Adorable puppies. The Borzoi sniffed at them through plate glass, and grunted.
Irish lace. Jabots of pointe de Venise, and deep collars of Honiton and pointe de Flandres, and handkerchiefs edged with Chantilly. Miss Garden entered the shop; came out with a jabot for herself, handkerchiefs for Vicky’s birthday. Then ivory opera glasses, and an amber cigarette holder caught her fancy. Soon her free hand was slung with neat paper packages. That was a bore; she wished she had had them all sent.
She strolled on, turned into Stewart’s, ordered a box of chocolates for Stanley’s children, and met Mr. Guy Donkin for lunch. They were going to a picture show together.
“I am not,” said Miss Garden, “fit for a respectable picture gallery, as you see.” She indicated the packages and the Borzoi. “But nevertheless we will go. Jeremy shall wait in the street while we criticise the art of our friends. I was overtaken this morning by the lust of possession. I often get it on fine mornings after fortunate nights. I find that the gambler’s life works out, on the whole, pretty evenly—what one makes at the dice one loses in the shops. And what one loses at play one saves off the shops. One walk abroad, looking at everything and buying nothing, will save one some hundreds of pounds. It is the easiest way of gaining, though not the most amusing.... I see you have a lunch edition. How go the wars?”
The most noticeable wars at the moment were those between America and Spain, and between Great Britain and the Soudanese.
“Dewey’s occupied Manila. The Fuzzies have lost three more zarebas. It must be warm for fighting out there to-day.... Here’s an article by some Dean on the vulgarity of modern extravagances. Meant for you, Rome, with all your packages.... Are we specially extravagant just now? I suppose there’s a lot of money going about, one way and another. Business is so good. And all these gold mines and companies.... The Dean is worrying about the growing habit of entertaining in restaurants instead of in the home. Why not? And about women taking to cosmetics again, after a century of abstinence. Again, why not? I agree with Max about that. The clergy do worry so, poor dears; if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Oh, and on Tuesday we’re all to wear a white rose, for the Old Man’s funeral day.”
“How touching! It will please papa. He’s really distressed about the Old Man; he thinks politics on the grand scale are over, and that the giants are dead. Politics and politicians are certainly intensely dull in these days; but then, except for an occasional gleam, they probably always were. Partly because people insist on taking them so solemnly, instead of as a farce.... There’s my ex-brother-in-law, lunching with a quite new and lovely young woman. He always smiles at me, blandly and without shame. I can’t forgive him for spoiling Stanley’s life, but I can’t help rather liking him still. He always sends us tickets for his first nights, and they’re very amusing. A shameless reactionary, but so witty. Maurice and Irving cut him, which I think crude. Men are so intolerant. I cut no one, except when I’m afraid of being bored by them. Thank you, yes: Turkish.”
They strolled off through the pleasant city to look at pictures, which they could both criticise with as much intelligence as was necessary, and Miss Garden with rather more. Then Mr. Donkin returned to the Bar, and Miss Garden drove home in a hansom with the Borzoi and the gleanings from Bond Street. At five she was going to an At Home somewhere; later she was dining out and going to the opera. Life was full; life was amusing; life hung a brilliant curtain over the abyss. From the abyss Miss Garden turned her eyes; in it lay love and death, locked bitterly together for evermore.
28 LAST LAP
1898 swaggered by under a hot summer sun. The century swaggered deathwards, gay with gold and fatness, unsteady, dark and confused. “The Belle of New York” at the theatres, the Simple Life on the land, free-wheel bicycles on the road, motor cars, coming first in single spies, then in battalions, the victory of Omdurman, Kitchener occupying Khartoum and the French Fashoda, unpleasant international incidents (for international incidents are always unpleasant), millionaires rising like stars, fortunes made and spent, business booming, companies floated and burst, names of drinks, provender and medicines flaming from the skies, Swinburne publishing “Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards,” Mr. Yeats “The Wind Among the Reeds,” Mr. Kipling “Stalky & Co.” and “The Day’s Work,” Mr. Conrad “Tales of Unrest,” Mr. Stephen Phillips “Paolo and Francesca,” Mr. Thomas Hardy “Wessex Poems,” Mr. H. G. Wells “The War of the Worlds,” Miss Mary Cholmondeley “Red Pottage,” Mrs. Humphry Ward “Helbeck of Bannisdale,” Mr. Maurice Hewlett “The Forest Lovers,” Mr. Kenneth Grahame “Dream Days,” Mr. Hall Caine “The Christian,” George Meredith greeted by literary England on his seventieth birthday, bad novels pouring into the libraries with terrifying increase of speed, wireless telegraphy used at sea, flying machines experimented with, Liberals sickening with Imperialism or Little Englandism, Conservatives with jingoism run mad, the Speaker changing hands, the Encyclopædia Britannica sold by the Times, anti-ritualist agitations, armament limitation conferences convened by Russia and attended by the Powers, all of whom were busy as bees at home increasing their armies and navies and hatching military plots.
And then the South African Uitlanders sent complaints and petitions from the Rand, and despatches began to pass between Her Majesty’s government and President Kruger’s. Despatches are most unfortunate and unwise means of communication; they always make trouble.
There was bound to be war, people began saying. Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Rhodes intended it, and would not be happy till they got it. Probably President Kruger and his Burghers also intended it. Certainly the Uitlanders hoped for it. The British public were not averse. They hated the Boers, and wanted excitement and more Empire. It was a hopeless business. War was bound to come, and came, in October, 1899.
Mr. Garden said, “A bad business. Gladstone would never have let it come to this. One doesn’t trust Chamberlain. A bad, dishonest business.”
Mrs. Garden said, “Those poor lads going out just before the winter....”
Vicky said, “Charles says it won’t be long. We shall have them asking for terms in a month.”
Maurice said, “That damned jingo, Chamberlain,” and filled his fountain pen with more vitriol.
Amy said, “Those canting, snuffling old farmers. They won’t keep us long.”
Rome said, “Unfortunate. But it’s a way in which centuries often end.”
Stanley said, “Right or wrong, we’ve got to win now.”
Irving said, “I shall take the opportunity to run out and see to my mining interests. Up the Rand,” and he enlisted in the C. I. V. and went.
Una said, “War! How silly. If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Why not leave the poor farmers alone?” For she sympathised with farmers, and was all for leaving people alone.
The children of all of them shouted for the soldiers and the flag, and sang “Soldiers of the Queen.”
“And when we say we’ve always won,
And when they ask us how it’s done....”
A very bright song. That was the right, amusing spirit of patriotism, not the “Recessional,” and not prayers sent forth for the people’s use by Bishops.
Vicky’s children got up early one morning in the Christmas holidays without leave, and saw a detachment of the C. I. V. go off from Victoria. There was a raw, yellow fog, and the khaki figures loomed oddly through it. The press of the swaying, shouting crowd was terrifying, exhilarating. Imogen, linked up between Phyllis and Hugh, was crushed, swung, caught off her feet. Persons of eleven had no business in that crowd. Phyllis and Nancy had not wanted her and Tony to come, but they had firmly done so. Imogen could scarcely see the soldiers, only the broad backs her face was pressed against. Herd enthusiasm caught and held them all, and they shouted and sang with the rest, hoarsely, choking in the fog.
“They’ll all be killed,” sobbed a woman close to them. “We’ll never see their brave faces again....”
At that Imogen’s eyes brimmed over, but she could not put up her hands to wipe them, for her arms were tight wedged. She could only snuffle and blink. Splendid heroes! They would be killed by the Boers, sure enough, every one of them.... Horrible Boers with great Bibles and sjamboks and guns. Hateful, hateful Boers. If only one were allowed to go and fight them, as Uncle Irving was going. Thank Heaven, it was rather age than sex that kept one from doing that; the boys couldn’t go any more than Imogen could. If the boys had been old enough and had gone, Imogen would somehow, she felt sure, have gone too. To be left out was too awful.
But these were grown men. Splendid men. Lucky men, for they would soon be roving the veldt with guns and bayonets under the African sun; they would lurk in ambush behind kopjes and arise and slay their brother Boer, the canting, bearded foe, with great slaughter. Even if they did never come back, how could man die better?
The crowd swayed and shoved, lifting the children from their feet. Imogen’s chest was crushed against the back in front of her; she fought for breath. There was an acrid, musty smell; the raw air was close with breathing.
A crowd is queer. A number of individuals gather together for one purpose, and you get not a number of individuals, but a crowd. It is like a new, strange animal, sub-human. It may do anything. Go crazy with panic, or rage, or excitement, or delight. Now it was enthusiasm that gripped and swayed it, and caused it to shout and sing. Songs rippled over it, starting somewhere, caught from mouth to mouth.
“Cook’s son, duke’s son, son of a belted earl....
Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay....”
And then again the constant chorus— “God bless you, Tommy Atkins, here’s your country’s love to you!”
It was over at last. The heroes had gone. The crowd broke and pushed out from the station gates, flooding the choked yellow streets.
“There’s our bus,” said Phyllis, a good organiser. “Come on. Stick together.”
They besieged and rushed the bus as troops rush a fort. Being vigorous and athletic children, they stormed it successfully.
“We shall catch it from mother,” said Phyllis, now they had leisure to look ahead. “But it’s been worth it.”
29 OF CENTURIES
That sad, disappointing, disillusioning, silly war crawled through that bitter winter of defeat, until by sheer force of numbers, the undefeatable Boers were a little checked in the spring of 1900.
Life is disappointing. Imogen, along with many others, thought and hoped that 1900 would be a new century. It was not a new century. There was quite a case for its being so. When you turned twelve, you began your thirteenth year. When you had counted up to 100 you had completed that hundred and were good for the next. It all depended on whether you numbered the completion of a year from the first day when you began saying 1900, or not till its last day, when you stopped saying it. The Astronomer Royal adjudicated that it was on its last day, and that they had, in fact, said 1900 prematurely, saying it before the last second of December the 31st. He may have been right. He probably was right. But the disappointment of the young, to whom a year is very long, its end hidden in mists, like mountain tops which you perhaps shall never reach—the disappointment of the young at the opening of the year 1900 was very great.
“At all events,” said Imogen, “we can write 1900. We can say, ‘It’s 1900.’” But what one could not say was, “I remember, last century, going to the sea-side for the holidays....” “Last century bicycles and steam engines came in ...” or, “We, of the twentieth century....” That would have to wait.
The funny thing was that you could not, however hard you thought, lay your finger on the moment when the new century would be born. Imogen used to try, lying in bed before she went to sleep. One second you said, “We of the nineteenth century” ; the next second you said, “We of the twentieth century.” But there must be a moment in between, when it was neither; surely there must. A queer little isolated point in time, with no magnitude, but only position.... The same point must be between one day and the next, one hour and the next ... all points in time were such points ... but you could never find them ... always you either looked forward or looked back ... you said, “now—now—now,” trying to catch now, but you never could ... and such vain communings with time lead one drowsily into sleep.
30 PRO-BOER
In Stanley the Boer War slew the jingo spirit, turned back on itself the cresting wave of imperialism. Not because it was an ill-fought, stupidly managed, for long unsuccessful war, but because it was war, and war was, when seen functioning, senseless and horrible. It was nearly as bad when Great Britain at last began to defeat the too clever farmers. It was almost worst in the summer of 1900, when the news of the relief of Mafeking caused so much more tempestuous a hysteria than the other reliefs had caused, and when Lord Roberts occupied Johannesburg and proclaimed the annexation of the Orange Free State, and when Pretoria was taken, and yet the war went on and on and on.
“Is this the way,” asked Liberals, “to secure in the end any kind of working reconciliation between ourselves and the conquered enemy? If Great Britain wishes to be burdened for ever with a sullen, hostile, exasperated people, embittered with the memory of burnt farms, useless slaughter and destruction, she is taking the right course.” And so forth. Liberals always talk like that. Those who disagreed merely retorted, “Pro-Boer,” which took less time. The Latin word “pro” has been found always very useful and insulting.
Stanley became a pro-Boer. She disliked all she knew of Boers very much, but that had nothing to do with it. A pro-Boer, like a pro-German much later, was one who was in favour of making terms with the enemy on the victories already gained. The Conciliation Committee were pro-Boer. The Liberal newspapers were pro-Boer, except the Chronicle, which threw Mr. Massingham overboard to be pro-Boer by himself. Maurice Garden was, of course, pro-Boer. He loathed Boers, the heavy-witted, brutal Bible-men, with their unctuous Cromwellian cant. But fiercely and contemptuously he was pro-Boer. Rome, too, was pro-Boer; had been from the first.
“A most unpleasant people,” she had said. “What a mistake not to leave them to themselves! If the Uitlanders disliked them as much as I should, they wouldn’t go on living there and sending complaints to us; they would come away. All this imperialism is so very unbalanced.”
“Worse than unbalanced, Rome,” her papa sadly said. “One hesitates to speak harshly, but it must be called un-Christian. The Churches have gone terribly astray over it. The unhappy Churches....”
Unhappy because terribly astray on so many topics, papa meant. Even now he was mourning the death of his friend Dr. Mivart, who had been deprived of the sacraments of his church because he had, in the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly Review, written articles, however reverent, on “The Continuity of Catholicism,” and in them seemed to give to the infallible authority of the Church a lower place than to human reason. Alas for the Catholic Church, which so treated its best sons! Never, papa knew, could he join that great Church again. Religion too had suffered a heavy blow in the death, in January, of Dr. Martineau. And Ruskin also went that month.... Like leaves the great Victorians were falling. Papa, brooding over a great epoch so soon to close, could not but be a pro-Boer and hope that this horrid war, which jarred and confused its last years, would soon end.
As for Maurice, his newspaper office was raided and smashed on Mafeking night, and he himself carried out and ducked in Trafalgar Square basin. No one hurt him. No one wanted, on this happy, good-humoured night, to hurt this small, frail, scornful, slightly intoxicated, obviously courageous editor, who brightly insulted them to their faces as they tied him up.
Vicky’s children were not pro-Boer. No one could have called them that. They were all for a good whacking victory. Imogen, it must be owned, did once, in a moment of seeing the point of view of the foe (Imogen usually saw all the points of view there were to see; her eye was not single, which made life a very dizzy business for her), write a poem beginning:
“Across the great Vaal River we northward trekked and came,
Set up our own dominion, and men acknowledged the same;
And close behind us followed the Alien whom we scorn,
With his eager clutching fingers and his lust for gold new-born.
“‘There is wealth,’ he cried;
‘I will dig,’ he cried;
Between him and us may the Lord decide!
Through the Lord’s good might, 5 1-2
By the sword’s good right,
Let us up and smite our enemies and put our foes to flight!”
Imogen was not ill-pleased with that poem, which had ten verses, and which she wrote for a school composition. It seemed to her a fine expression of sturdy Boer patriotism, however misguided.
“I can see their point of view,” she said to herself, righteously, and pleased with the phrase. “Most people” (which meant, it need scarcely be said, most of the other girls at school), “can’t see it, but I can. They’re beastly, and I’m glad they’re beaten, but I see their point of view.” She said so to some other little girls in the Third Remove. But the other little girls, who didn’t see the Boers’ point of view, said, “Oh! Are you a pro-Boer? I say, Imogen Carrington’s a pro-Boer.” “Your uncle was ducked in Trafalgar Square, wasn’t he?” said someone else, curiously but not unkindly, and in the diffident voice suitable to family scandals, “for being a pro-Boer. Do you think the same as him?”
Imogen, blushing, disclaimed this.
“Daddy and mother think Uncle Maurice awfully wrong, and so do I. He’s a real pro-Boer.”
“Well, what are you? Are you only shamming pro-Boer?”
“I’m not a pro-Boer at all. I’m pro-us. I only said I could see their point of view....”
“Oh, you do talk tosh. Point of view. No one but grown-up people uses words like that. Imogen’s getting awfully cocky now Miss Cradock always says her compositions are good. Come and play tig.”
And, since little girls at school are very seldom unkind, they included Imogen in the game and bore no malice.
Irving was no pro-Boer. He wrote home, in the autumn of 1900, “We’re getting on, but we’re not near finished with brother Boer yet. Maurice is talking through his hat, as usual. Any fool out here knows that if we’re to suck any advantage out of this war (and there’s no small advantage to be sucked, I can tell you), we’ve got to win it. Those radical gas-bags at home don’t know the first thing about it.”
It is an eternal and familiar dispute, and which side one takes in it really seems to depend more on temperament than on the amount one knows about it.
31 END OF VICTORIANISM
The nineteenth century did actually end at last. Probably everyone over twelve and under seventy sat up to see it out, to see the twentieth in, to catch that elusive, dramatic moment and savour it.
The twentieth century. Imogen, when she woke on New Year’s Day, could scarcely believe it. It was perhaps, she thought, a drunken dream. For the Carringtons, like all right-thinking persons, always kept Hogmanny in punch. But the twentieth century it was, and a clear frosty morning. Imogen shouted to Nancy, lying in intoxicated slumbers in the other bed, “Happy new century,” lest Nancy should say it first, then looked at the new century out of the window. What a jolly century it looked; what a jolly century it was going to be! A hundred happy years. At the end of it she would be 112. A snowy-haired but still active old lady, living in a white house on a South Sea Island, bathing every morning (but not too early) and then getting back into bed and eating her breakfast of mangoes, bread-fruit, delicious home-grown coffee and honey. Then a little roller skating on the shining parquet floor of the hall; a lovely hall, hung with the trophies of her bow—reindeer, sand-bok, polar bear, grizzly, lion, tiger, cheetah, wombat and wolf. No birds. Shooting birds was no fun. Imogen knew, for she had shot her first and only sparrow last week, with her new catapult. The boys had been delighted, but she had nearly cried. It had been beastly. Hereafter she meant only to use the catapult on cows, brothers and sisters, and still life. That old lady of the year 2,000 should have only one bird to her score.
The question was, what to do till getting-up time. Wake Nancy—but this was next to impossible. Nancy was a remarkably fast sleeper. One might go and try to wake the boys, and get them to come out catapulting in the garden, or roller skating in the square. Or one might snuggle down in bed again and read “Treasure Island.” Or not read, but lie and think about the new century; perhaps make a poem about it. Imogen extracted from the pocket of her frock, that hung on a chair, a stubby pencil, a note-book and a stick of barley-sugar. With these she curled up among the bedclothes. Happily she sucked and pondered. Holidays; breakfast time not for ages; Christmas presents with the gloss still on (among them a pair of roller skates and Brassey’s Naval Annual and a new bow and arrows), and a brand new century to explore. Sing joy, sing joy.
“Roland lay in his bunk,” murmured Imogen, “and heard the prow of the ship grinding through ice-floes as she pursued her way. Eight bells sounded. With a hijous shock he remembered the events of last night. He put his hand to his head; it was caked with dried blood where the pirates had struck him with the crowbar. A faint moan of anguish was wrung from his white lips....”
Roland was Imogen, and his adventures had meandered on in serial form in her mind for several months. She had always, ever since she remembered, impersonated some boy or youth as she went about. “Lithe as a panther,” she would murmur within herself, as she climbed a tree, “Wilfrid swarmed up the bare trunk. He scanned the horizon. In the distance he saw a puff of smoke, and heard, far away, faint shrieks. ‘Indians,’ he said, ‘at their howwid work. The question for me is, can I warn the settlers in time? If the Redskins catch me, I shall wish I had never been born. No; I will escape now and save myself.’”
It was characteristic of Wilfrid, or Roland, or Dennis, or whatever he was at the moment called, that he usually did a cowardly thing at first, then repented and acted like a hero, suffering thereby both the condemnation of his friends for his cowardice and the tortures of his foes for his courage. He was a rather morbid youth, who enjoyed repentance and heroic amendment, no simple, stalwart soul. Usually he was in the navy.
Thus, in idle, barley-sugared dreamings, this representative of the young generation began the new century.
“What,” mused her grandfather, watching from his bed the winter morning grow, “will the new age be?”
“Much like the old ages, I shouldn’t wonder,” Mrs. Garden murmured, drowsily. “People and things stay much the same ... much the same....”
“The eternal wheel,” papa speculated, still adhering to his latest faith, but with a note of question. “The eternal, turning wheel. I wonder....”
But what mamma wondered, catching the familiar note of doubt in his voice, was where the eternal turning wheel would next land papa.
“What a world we’ll make it, won’t we, my son and daughter,” Stanley hopefully exclaimed to her children as they rioted about her room. “What a century we’ll have! It belongs to the people of your age, you know. You’ve got to see it’s a good one.... Now take yourselves off and let me get up. Run and turn on the cold tap for me, and put the warm at a trickle.”
Stanley whistled as she dressed.
“Yet another century,” her sister Rome commented, with languid amusement, as her early tea was brought to her. “How many we have, to be sure! I wonder if, perhaps, it is not even too many?”
“Maurice,” shrilly called Maurice’s wife, entering his room at nine o’clock. “Well, I declare!”
Maurice lay heavily sleeping, and whiskey exhaled from his breath. He had come home at three o’clock this morning.
“A nice way to begin the new year,” said Amy; she did not say “new century,” because she was of those who could not see but that the century had been new in 1900. She shook her husband’s shoulder, looking down with distaste at his thin, sharp-featured sleeping face, its usual pallor heavily flushed.
“A nice example to the children. And you always writing rubbish about social reform.... You make me sick.”
“Go away,” said Maurice, half opening hot eyes. “Le’me alone. My head’s bad....”
“So I should imagine,” said Amy. “I’m sick and tired of you, Maurice.”
“Go away then. Right away. We’d both be happier. Why don’t you?”
“Oh, I daresay I’m old-fashioned,” said Amy. “I was brought up to think a wife’s place was with her husband. Of course, I’m probably wrong. I’m always surprised you don’t leave me, feeling as you do.”
Maurice, waking a little more, surveyed her with morose, heavy, aching eyes, and moistened his dry lips.
“You’re not surprised. You know it’s because of the children. It’s my job to see they grow up decently, with decent ideas and a chance.”
At that Amy’s mirth overcame her.
“Decent ideas! You’re a nice educator of children, aren’t you! Look at yourself lying there....”
She pointed to the looking-glass opposite his bed.
“Get out, please,” said Maurice, coldly. “I’ve got to write my leader.”
Meanwhile the most august representative of the Victorian age wavered wearily between her own century and this strange new one, peering blindly down the coming road as into a grave. It did not belong to her, the new century. She had had her day. A few days of the new young era, and she would slip into the night, giving place to the rough young forces knocking at the door.
The great Victorian century was dead.