6 GAMIN
Imogen and Tony slipped out into the street. It was the first Sunday of the summer holidays, and the first day of August. The sun beat hotly on the asphalt, making it soft, so that one could dent it with one’s heels. The children sauntered down Sloane Street, loitering at the closed shop windows, clinking their shillings in their pockets. They enjoyed the streets with the zest of street Arabs. They were a happy and untidy pair; the girl in a short butcher blue cotton frock, grubby with a week’s wear, and a hole in the knee of one black-stockinged leg, a soiled white linen cricket hat slouched over her short mop of brown curls, her small pink face freckled and tanned; the boy, a year younger, grimy, dark-eyed and beautiful, like his Uncle Irving in face, clad in a grey flannel knickerbocker suit. Neither had dressed for the street in the way that they should have; they had slipped out, unseen, in their garden clothes and garden grime, to make the most of the last day before they went away for the holidays.
They knew what they meant to do. They were going to have their money’s worth, and far more than their money’s worth, of underground travelling. Round and round and round; and all for a penny fare.... This was a favourite occupation of theirs, a secret, morbid vice. They indulged in it at least twice every holidays. The whole family had been used to do it, but all but these two had now outgrown it. Phyllis, now at Girton, had outgrown it long ago. “The twopenny tube for me,” she said. “It’s cleaner.” “But it doesn’t go round,” said Imogen. “Who wants to go round, you little donkey? It takes you where you want to go to; that’s the object of a train.” It was obvious that Phyllis had grown up. She would not even track people in the street now. It must happen, soon or late, to all of us. Even Hughie, fifteen and at Rugby, found this underground game rather weak.
But Imogen and Tony still sneaked out, a little shamefaced and secretive, to practise their vice.
Sloane Square. Two penny fares. Down the stairs, into the delicious, romantic, cool valley. The train thundered in, Inner Circle its style. A half empty compartment; there was small run on the underground this lovely August Sunday. Into it dashed the children; they had a corner seat each, next the open door. They bumped up and down on the seats, opposite each other. The train speeded off, rushing like a mighty wind. South Kensington Station. More people coming in, getting out. Off again. Gloucester Road, High Street, Notting Hill Gate, Queen’s Road ... the penny fare was well over. Still they travelled, and jogged up and down on the straw seats, and chanted softly, monotonously, so that they could scarcely be heard above the roaring of the train.
“Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep;
Where the spent lights quiver and gleam,
Where the salt weed sways in the stream,
Where the sea-beasts, ranged all round,
Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground;
Where the sea-snakes coil and twine,
Dry their mail and bask in the brine;
Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye,
ROUND THE WORLD FOR EVER AND AYE....”
Then again, “Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep....”
At Paddington they saw the conductor eyeing them, and changed their compartment. This should be done from time to time.
And so on, past King’s Cross and Farringdon Street, towards the wild romantic stations of the east: Liverpool Street, Aldgate, and so round the bend, sweeping west like the sun. Blackfriars, Temple, Charing Cross, Westminster, St. James’ Park, Victoria, SLOANE SQUARE. Oh, joy! Sing for the circle completed, the new circle begun.
“Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye,
ROUND THE WORLD FOR EVER AND AYE....”
Imogen changed her chant, and dreamily crooned:
“The world is round, so travellers tell,
And straight though reach the track;
Trudge on, trudge on, ’twill all be well,
The way will guide one back.
But ere the circle homeward hies,
Far, far must it remove;
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.”
Round the merry world again. Put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. Round and round and round. What a pennyworth! You can’t buy much on an English Sunday, but, if you can buy eternal travel, Sunday is justified.
But two Inner Circles and a bit are really enough. If you had three whole ones you might begin to feel bored, or even sick. Sloane Square again; the second circle completed. South Kensington. The two globetrotters emerged from their circling, handed in their penny tickets, reached the upper air, hot and elated.
Now what? For a moment they loitered at the station exit, debating in expert minds the next move. Money was short: no luxurious joys could be considered.
Imogen suddenly gripped Tony by the arm.
“Hist, Watson. You see that man in front?”
Watson, well-trained, nodded.
“We’re going to track him. I have a very shrewd suspicion that he is connected with the Sloane Square murder mystery. Now mind, we must keep ten paces behind him wherever he goes; not less, or he’ll notice. Like the woman in Church Street did. He’s off; come on.... Do you observe anything peculiar about him, Watson?”
“He’s a jolly lean old bird. I expect he’s hungry.”
“My good Watson, look at his clothes. They’re a jolly sight better than ours. He’s a millionaire, as it happens. If you want to know a few facts about him, I’ll tell you. He moved his washstand this morning from the left side of his bed to the right; he forgot to wind up his watch last night; he went to church before breakfast; he had kidneys when he came in; and he’s now on his way to meet a confederate at lunch.”
“Piffle. You can’t prove any of it.”
“I certainly can, my good Watson....”
“Golly, he’s calling a hansom. Shall we hang on behind?”
Watson’s beautiful brown eyes beamed with hope; Holmes’ small green-grey ones held for a moment an answering gleam. But only for a moment. Holmes knew by now, having learnt from much sad experience, what adventures could be profitably undertaken and what couldn’t.
“No use. We’d be pulled off at once....”
Morosely they watched their victim escape.
Then, “Look, Watson. The fat lady in purple. She must have been to church.... Oh, quite simple, Watson, I assure you ... she has a prayerbook.... Come on. It won’t matter how late we get back, because they’re having a lunch party and we’re feeding in the schoolroom. We’ll sleuth her to hell.”
In this manner Sunday morning passed very pleasantly and profitably for Vicky’s two youngest children.
7 AUTUMN, 1901
1901 drew to its close. An odd, restless, gay, unhappy year, sad with war and poverty, bitter with quarrels about inefficiency, concentration camps, Ahmednagar (the home of the Boers in India, and a name much thrown about by the pro-Boers in their “ignorant and perverse outcry” ), education, religion, finance, politics, prisons, motor cars, and stopping the war; gay with new drama (Mr. Bernard Shaw was being produced, and many musical comedies), new art (at the New English Art Club), new jokes, new books (Mr. Conrad had published “Lord Jim,” Mr. Henry James “The Sacred Fount,” Mr. Hardy “Poems New and Old,” Mr. Wells “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” Mr. Yeats “The Shadowy Waters,” Mrs. Chesterton “The Wild Knight,” Mr. Kipling “Kim,” Mr. Belloc “The Path to Rome,” Lady Russell “The Benefactress,” Mr. Laurence Housman “A Modern Antæus,” Mr. Anthony Hope “Tristram of Blent,” Mrs. Humphry Ward “Eleanor,” Mr. Arnold Bennett “The Grand Babylon Hotel,” Mr. Charles Marriott “The Column,” Mr. George Moore “Sister Teresa,” Mr. Max Beerbohm “And Yet Again” ), new clothes and new games.
Popular we were not. That prevalent disease, Anglophobia, raged impartially in every country except, possibly, Japan. Even as far as the remote Bermudas, continental slanders against us roared. We are a maligned race; there is no doubt of it. All races are, in their degree, maligned, but none so greatly as we—unless it should be the Children of Israel. It is sad to think it, but there must be something about us that is not attractive to foreigners. They have always grieved at our triumphs and rejoiced at our sorrows. By the end of 1901 our friendlessness was such (in November Lord Salisbury said at the Guildhall, “It is a matter for congratulation that we have found such a friendly feeling and such a correct attitude on the part of all the great powers” ), that we thought we had better enter into an alliance with the Japanese, who were still pleased with us for admiring them about their war with China.
In the autumn of this year, Stanley published her small book, “Conditions of Women’s Work,” and Mr. Garden, after years of labour, his mighty work, “Comparative Religions.”
Mrs. Garden had influenza and pneumonia in December, and Mr. Garden, in an anguish of anxiety, called in three doctors and admitted that his faith had failed. God’s disapproving ignorance of mamma’s pneumonia made intolerable a burden of anxiety which would have been heavy even with Divine sympathy; and if, by some awful chance, mamma were to pass on, papa’s grief, guilty and unrecognised, would have been too bitter to be borne. Christian Science had had but a brief day, but it was over. In a fit of reaction, papa became an Evangelical, and took to profound meditation on the suffering, human and divine, which he had for so long ignored. He now found the love of God in suffering, not in its absence.
Always honourable, he recanted the instructions on the limitations of divine knowledge which he had given to his grandchildren.
“You perhaps remember, Jennie my child, what I said to you last year about God’s not knowing of the war. Well, I have come to the conclusion that I was mistaken. I believe now that God knows all about his children’s griefs and pains. He knows more about them than we do. Possibly—who knows—suffering is a necessary part of the scheme of redemption....”
Imogen looked and felt intelligent. When anyone spoke of theology to her, it was as if the blood of all her clerical ancestors mounted to the call. She was nearly fourteen now, and had recently become an agnostic, owing to having perused Renan and John Stuart Mill. She was at the stage in life when she read, with impartial ardour, such writers as these, as well as E. Nesbit’s “Wouldbegoods,” Max Pemberton’s “Iron Pirate,” and other juvenile works (particularly school stories), Rudyard Kipling, Marryat, the Brontës, and any poetry she could lay hands on, but especially that of W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, Lewis Carroll and Walter Ramal.
She said to her grandfather, casually, but a little wistfully too, “I’m not sure, grandpapa, that I believe in God at all. The arguments against him seem very strong, don’t they?”
Mr. Garden looked a little startled. Possibly he thought that Imogen was beginning too young.
“Ah, Jennie, my child—‘If my doubt’s strong, my faith’s still stronger....’ That’s what Browning said about it, you know.”
Imogen nodded.
“I know. I’ve read that. I s’pose his faith was. Mine isn’t. My doubt’s stronger, grandpapa.”
“Well, my child....” Mr. Garden, gathering together his resources, gave this strayed lamb (that was how, in his new terminology he thought of her) a little evangelical homily on the love of God. Unfortunately Imogen had, then and through life, an intemperate distaste for evangelical language; it made her feel shy and hot; and, though she loved her grandfather, she was further alienated from faith. She wrote a poem that evening about the dark, terrifying and Godless world, which she found very good. She would have liked to show it to the others, that they too might find it good, but the tradition of her family and her school was that this wasn’t done. One wrote anything one liked, if one suffered from that itch, but to show it about was swank. “Making a donkey of yourself.” The Carringtons, shy, vain and reserved, did not care to do that.
“Some day,” thought Imogen, “I’ll write books. Then people can read them without my showing them. I’ll write a book full of poems.” The new poet. Even—might one dare to imagine it—the new great poet, Imogen Carrington. Or should one be anonymous? Anon. That was a good old poet’s name.
“Few people knew,” said Imogen, within herself, “that this slender book of verse, ‘Questionings,’ bound in green, with gold edges, which had made such a stir in lit’ry London, was by a wiry, brown-faced, blue-eyed young lieutenant-commander, composed while he navigated his first-class gunboat, the Thrush (805 tons, 1,200 h.p., 13 knots, 6 four-inch guns, 2 quick-firers, 2 machine), among the Pacific Islands, taking soundings. The whole service knew Denis Carton as a brilliant young officer, but only two or three—or perhaps a dozen—knew he was a poet too and had written that green book with gold edges that lay on every drawing-room table and was stacked by hundreds in every good bookshop.” (I cannot account for the confused workings of this poor child’s mind; I can only record the fact that she still, and for many years to come, thought of herself, with hope growing faint and ever fainter, as a brown-skinned, blue-eyed young naval man.)
As to her religious difficulties, they were, after the first flush of unbelief, driven into the background of her mind by school, hockey, the Christmas holidays, and missing word competitions, and did not obtrude themselves aggressively again until the time came when her mother decided that she should be confirmed. She then said to her brother Hugh, now in the Fifth at Rugby, what did one do about confirmation if one believed Nothing? Hugh did not think it mattered particularly what one believed. One was confirmed; it did no harm; it was done; it saved argument. Himself, he believed very little of All That, but he had suffered confirmation, saying nothing. No good making fusses, and worrying mother. Jennie had much better go through with it, like other people.
“Well ... of course, I don’t care ... if it’s not cheating....”
“Course it isn’t. Cheating who? They don’t care what we believe, they’re not such sops. They only want us to do the ordinary things, like other people, and save bother. And, of course” —Hugh was a very fair-minded boy and no bigot— “there may be something in it, after all. Lots of people, quite brainy, sensible chaps, think there is. Anyhow, it can’t hurt.” So Imogen was confirmed.
“Perhaps I shall be full of the Holy Ghost,” she thought. “Perhaps there really is a Holy Ghost. Perhaps my life will be made all new, with tongues of fire upon my head and me telling in strange languages the wonderful works of God.... Perhaps.... But more prob’ly not....”
8 1902
1902 was a great year, for in it the British Empire ceased its tedious fighting with the Boer Republics, and made a meal of them. So the Empire was the richer by so many miles of Africa, with the gold mines, black persons, and sulky Dutchmen appertaining thereto, and the poorer by so many thousand soldiers’ lives, so many million pounds, and a good deal of self-confidence and prestige. Anyhow, however you worked out the gain and loss, here was peace, and people shouted and danced for joy and made bonfires in college courts. Thank God, that was over.
A wave of genial friendliness flowed from the warm silly hearts of Britons towards the conquered foe. Four surly enemy generals were brought to London; asked if they would like to see the Naval Review; declined with grave thanks; were escorted through London amid a cheering populace— “Our friends the enemy,” cried the silly crowd, and “Brave soldiers all!” and surrounded them with hearty British demonstration and appeals for “a message for England.” There was no message for England; no smiles; no words. The warm, silly Britons were a little hurt. The psychology of conquered nations was a riddle to them, it seemed.... “God, what an exhibition!” said Maurice Garden in his paper the next day.
Meanwhile King Edward VII had, after some unavoidable procrastination, been crowned, Mr. Horatio Bottomley had won a thousand pounds from the editor of the Critic, in that this editor had impugned his financial probity, and the Man with the Beflowered Buttonhole (as they called him in the French press) whose Besotted Pride had caused to flow for three years so much Gold and Tears and Blood had received the Freedom of London for his services to his country. This year, also, Mr. Rudyard Kipling delighted athletes by his allusions to flannelled fools and muddied oafs, that ineffectual body the National Service League was formed, Germany and Great Britain began to eye each other’s land and sea forces with an increase of hostile emulation which was bound to end in sorrow, and there was much trouble over bad trade and wages, unemployment, taxation and the Education Bill. Passive Resisters rose violently to the foray over this last, their Puritan blood hot within them, and would not pay rates for schools managed by the Church of England in which their nonconformist children were given Church teaching. It made a pretty squabble, and a good cry for Liberals, and why it was not settled by representatives of every sect which so desired being allowed access to the schools alternately is not now clear. The parliamentary mind moves in a mysterious way; it seldom adopts the simple solutions of problems which commend themselves to the more ingenuous laity. Anything to make contention and trouble, it seems to feel.
In such disputations 1902 wore itself away. And starving ex-soldiers played accordions or sold matches by the pavements, their breasts decorated with larger nosegays of war-medals than any one man-at-arms could conceivably have won by his own prowess in the field, for then, as after a more recent war, you could buy these medals cheap in second-hand shops. “Fought for my country” ran their sad, proud legends about themselves, “and am now starving. Have a wife and sixteen small children....” The families of ex-soldiers were terrific, then as now. A wretched business altogether.
9 EXIT MAMMA
Edwardianism was in full swing. People began to recover from the war. They became rich again, and very gay, and the arts flourished. Irving Garden, his fortune made in Rand mines, could really afford almost anything he liked. He bought and drove two motor cars, a grey one and a navy blue, and presented to Rome, on her forty-fourth birthday, a very graceful little scarlet three seater, in which she drove everywhere. Sometimes she drove her parents out, but the traffic made her papa nervous. Mamma was of calmer stuff, and sat placid and unmoved while her daughter ran skilfully like a flame between the monsters of the highway. She did not think that Rome had accidents; she believed in Rome.
Unfortunately mamma developed cancer in the spring of 1903, and died, after the usual sufferings and operations, in the autumn.
“It doesn’t much matter,” she said to Rome, hearing that her death was certain and soon. “A little more or a little less.... After all, I am sixty-nine. My only real worry about it is papa. We both hoped that I might be the survivor. I could have managed better.”
Mamma’s faint sigh flickered. Dear papa. Poor papa. Indeed, thought Rome, he will not manage at all....
No charge was laid on Rome to look after poor papa. Mamma did not do such things; dying, she left the living free. That ultimate belief in the inalienable freedom of the human being looked unconquered out of her tired, still eyes. Mamma had never believed in coercion, even the coercion of love. Modern writers say that Victorian parents did believe in parental tyranny. There is seldom any need to believe modern, or any other, writers. What they seem sometimes to forget is that Victorian parents were like any other parents in being individuals first, and the sovereign who happened to reign over them did not reduce all Victorians to a norm, some good, some bad, as the Poet Laureate of the day had put it, but all stamped with the image of the Queen. You would think, to hear some persons talk, that Victoria had called into existence little images of herself all over England, instead of being merely one very singular and characteristic old lady, who might just as well have occurred to-day. In short, the Victorians were not like Queen Victoria, any more than the Edwardians were like King Edward, or the Georgians are like King George, for all creatures are merely themselves.
Mamma, being merely herself, left her family free of all behests, and drew to her end with an admirable stoic gentleness. Dying was to her no great matter or disturbance.
Time bears us off, as lightly as the wind
Lifts up the smoke and carries it away,
And all we know is that a longer life
Gives but more time to think of our decay.
We live till Beauty fails and Passion dies,
And sleep’s our one desire in every breath,
And in that strong desire, our old love, Life,
Gives place to that new love whose name is Death.
Mamma would sometimes murmur these lines by Mr. W. H. Davies, a poet (formerly Victorian, now Edwardian, later to become Georgian), of whom she was very fond, because he noticed all the charming things in the countryside that she always observed herself, such as wet grass, and rainbows, and cuckoos, and birds’ eggs, and coughing sheep (who had always stirred her to pity).
“My beloved,” papa would say, quietly, restraining his anguish that he might not distress her, “my best beloved, I shall join you before long, where there is no more parting....” (Thank God, thank God, he was at this time a believer in that reunion, and could say it from his heart. Supposing he had still been a Theosophist, believing that mamma would merely go on to another spoke of the Eternal Wheel, and that he would never, try as he might, catch her up.... Or even a Roman Catholic, believing that mamma and he would both have to suffer a long expiation, presumably not together, in purgatory. Thank God, evangelicals believed in an immediate heaven for the redeemed, and surely papa and mamma would be found numbered among the redeemed....)
Mamma’s hand would gently stroke his.
“Yes, dear. Of course you will join me soon.”
Who should see, who had ever seen, into mamma’s mind that lay so deep and still beneath veils?
“Yes, Aubrey. Of course, of course. Quite soon, dear.”
They spoke often of that further life; but of papa’s life between now and then they did not dare to speak much.
Mamma loved papa, her lover and friend of half a century, and she loved all her children, and all her grandchildren too, the dear, happy boys and girls. But at the last—or rather just before the last, for the end was dark silence—it was only her eldest son, Maurice, on whose name she cried in anguish.
“Maurice—Maurice—my boy, my boy! O God, have pity on my boy!”
Maurice was there, sitting at her side, holding her wet, shaking hand in his.
“Mother, mother. It’s all right, dear mother. I’m here, close to you.”
But still she moaned, “Have pity—have pity on my boy.... Maurice, my darling.... Have pity....” as if her own pain, cutting her in two, were his, not hers.
They had not known—not one of them had wholly known—of those storms that had beaten her through the long years because of Maurice, her eldest boy.
His tears burned in his hot eyes; the easy tears of the constant drinker.
They put her under an anaesthetic; the pain was too great; and she died at dawn.
10 SPIRITUALISM
Papa could not bear it. It was all very well to talk of joining mamma before long, but papa was not more than seventy-three years of age, and how should he live without mamma for perhaps ten, fifteen, even twenty years? That unfailing comfort, sympathy and love that had been hers; that patient, silent understanding, that strength and pity for his weakness, that wifely regard for his scholar’s mind, that dear companionship that had never failed—having had these for close on fifty years, how should he live without them? He could not live without them. Somehow, he must find them again—reach across the grave to where mamma’s love awaited him in the land of the redeemed.... The redeemed. Already this evangelistic phraseology did not wholly suit his needs. He wanted mamma nearer than that....
In 1904 there was, as usual, much talk of spiritualism, of establishing connection with the dead. The Psychical Research Society had been flourishing for many years, but papa had never, until now, taken much interest in it. There had been periods in his career when he had believed, with his Church, that God did not smile on such researches, or wish the Veil drawn from the unseen world, and that the researchers, if they too inquisitively drew it, got into shocking company, got, in fact, into touch with those evil spirits who were always waiting ready to pose as the deceased relatives and friends of enquirers. Other periods there had been when papa had believed that the thing was all pathetic buncombe (that was how papa spelt it), since there was unfortunately, nothing to get into touch with. But now he was sure that he had, in both these beliefs, erred. God could not frown on his bereaved children’s efforts to communicate with the beloved who had made life for them. And beyond the Veil waited not the great nothingness, but God and the dear dead. God and mamma. He must and would get into touch with mamma.
Papa attended séances, with what are called Results. Mamma came and talked with him, through the voice of a table or of a medium; she said all kinds of things that only she could have said; she even told him where a lost thimble of hers was, and sure enough, there it was, dropped behind the sofa cushions. And once materialisation occurred, and mamma, like a luminous wraith, floated about the room. It made papa very happy. He asked her how she did, and what it was like where she now was, and she told him that she did, on the whole, very well, but, as to what it was like, that he would never understand, did she tell him for a year.
“They can’t tell us. It’s too difficult, too different,” the lady who managed the séances explained to papa afterwards. Papa did not greatly care for this lady, and he always winced a little at the thought that mamma had become “They.” But he only said, “Yes, I suppose it is.”
The séances exhausted him a good deal, but it was worth while.
“So long as it makes him happier,” said Rome. “Poor darling.”