16 DREADNOUGHT
Imogen saved up her pocket money for the cheap excursion fare to Portsmouth, and slipped off there alone, on a raw February morning, by the special early train, to see the King launch the Dreadnought. The Dreadnought was a tremendous naval event. She displaced 19,900 tons, beating the Dominion and the King Edward VII by 1,200 tons, and she would make 21 knots to their 16.5, and had turbine engines, and carried ten 12-inch guns, and her outline was smooth and lovely and unbroken by casemates, for she was built for speed. Imogen had to go. She slipped off without a word at home, for she had a cough and objections would have been raised. She stood wedged for hours in a crowd on the docks in cold rain that pitted the heaving green harbour seas, and coughed. She did not command a view of the actual launching, but would see the splendid creature as she left the slip and took the water. Before that there was a service; the service appointed to be used at the launching of the ships of His Majesty’s Navy. “They that go down to the sea in ships: and occupy their business in great waters; These men see the works of the Lord: and his wonders in the deep. For at his word the stormy wind ariseth: which lifteth up the waves thereof. They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep: their soul melteth away because of the trouble. They reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man: and are at their wit’s end....”
After this, Hymn 592 (A & M) was irritating and silly, but hymns cannot be helped, bishops will have them.
Then the King smashed the bottle of wine on her and, christened, she took the water. She left the slip and came into the view of the crowd, and a great shout went up. “She’s moving!”
Imogen, thrilled, gazed at the lovely, the amazing creature, the giant of the navy. What a battleship! With professional interest Imogen examined her points through her father’s field glasses. No openings in the bulkheads—it was that which gave her her smooth, fleet look. She was made for a running fight. She was glorious.
Imogen travelled home wet through, shivering, her cough tearing at her chest, and went to bed for a month with bronchitis. So much for the navy, said Vicky crossly. But the amazing grey ship was a comfort to Imogen through her fevered waking dreams.
17 AT THE FARM
Imogen, bow and arrows in hand, crawled through the wood, beneath overhanging boughs of oaks and elders and beeches and the deep green arms of pines, that shut the little copse from the August sun into a fragrant gloom. Every now and then she stopped, listened, and laid her ear to the mossy ground.
“Three miles off and making a bee line south,” she observed, frowning. “My God.”
“Michael crawled on,” she continued, “crawling, keeping his head low, so as not to afford a target for any stray arrows. Who knew what sinister shadows lurked in the forest, to right and to left?... Hist! What was that sound? Something cracked in the tangle of scrub near him.... A Cherokee on a lone trail, possibly.... A Cherokee: the most deadly of the Red Tribes.... Cold sweat stood out on Michael’s brow. Could he reach the camp in time? Again he laid his ear to the ground and listened. They were only two miles now, and still that swift, terrible, travelling.... The sun beat upon his head and neck; he felt dizzy and sick. Suppose he fainted before he reached his goal.... That damned cracking in the bushes again.... Good God!... out of the thicket sprang a huge Redskin, uttering the horrid war-whoop of the Cherokee, which, once heard, is never forgotten. Michael leaped to his feet, pulled his bow-string to his ear, let fly....”
Imogen too let fly.
“Missed him,” she muttered, and swarmed nimbly up the gnarled trunk of an oak until she reached the lower boughs, from whence she looked down into a fierce red face, eagle-nosed, feather-crowned.
“Oh, Big Buffalo,” she softly called. “Will you parley?”
Big Buffalo grunted, and they parleyed. If Michael would betray the whereabouts of his friends, Big Buffalo would grant him his life. If not, no such easy death as the arrow awaited him, “for we Cherokees well understand the art of killing....” Michael, sick with fear, betrayed his friends, and Big Buffalo left him, primed with information. (In common with other heroes of fiction, Michael never thought of giving incorrect or misleading information.)
“Michael lay in the forest, his head upon his arms. What had he done? There was no undoing it now. Why didn’t I choose the stake? Oh, damn, why didn’t I....”
It was too warm, sweet and drowsy for prolonged remorse. Michael forgot his shame. The breeze in the pine trees sang like low harps.... The shadowy copse was soaked in piney sweetness, golden and dim. Michael, with his bow, his Redskins, and his broken honour, faded out in the loveliness of the hour.
Ecstasy descended on the wood; enchantment held it, saturating it with golden magic. Ants and little wood-beetles scuttled over Imogen’s outstretched hands and bare, rough head. Rabbits bobbed and darted close to her. She was part of the woods, caught breathless into that fairy circle like a stolen, enchanted child.
“I am full of the Holy Ghost,” said Imogen. “This is the Holy Ghost....” And loveliness shook her, as a wind shakes a leaf. These strange, dizzy moments lurked hidden in the world like fairies in a wood, and at any hour they sprang forth and seized her, and the emotion, however often repeated, was each time as keen. They would spring forth and grip her, turning the dædal earth to magic, at any lovely hour, in wood or lane or street, or among the wavering candles and the bread and wine. She was stabbed through and through with beauty sweet as honey and sharp as a sword, and it was as if her heart must break in her at its turning. After this brief intensity of joy or pain, whichever it was, it was as if something in her actually did break, scattering loose a drift of pent-up words. That was how poems came. After the anguished joy, the breaking loose of the words, then the careful stringing of them together on a chain, the fastidious, conscious arranging. Then the setting them down, and reading them over, and the happy, dizzy (however erroneous) belief that they were good.... That was how poems came, and that was life at its sharpest, its highest intensity. Afterwards, one sent them to papers, and it was pleasant and gratifying if other people saw them and liked them too. But all that was a side-issue. Vanity is pleasant, gratified ambition is pleasant, earning money is very pleasant, but these are not life at its highest power. You might at once burn every poem you wrote, but you would still have known life.
The song the pines hummed became words, half formed, drifting, sweet.... Imogen listened, agape, like an imbecile. It was a lovely, jolly, woody thing that was being sung to her ... she murmured it over....
A bell rang, far away. Sharply time’s voice shivered eternity to fragments. Imogen yawned, got up, brushed pine needles out of her hair and clothes, took up her bow, and strolled out of fairyland. It was tea-time at the farm.
As she sauntered through the little wood, she shot arrows at the trees and stopped to retrieve them. Then she found a long, sharp stick, pointed, like a spear, and became a knight in a Norman forest. She encountered another knight, a hated foe. There was a fight à outrance. They fenced, parried, lunged....
“Swerve to the right, son Roger, he said,
When you catch his eye through the helmet’s slit;
Swerve to the right, then out at his head,
And the Lord God give you joy of it....”
A swinging thrust....
“Got him, pardie!”
“Hullo.”
Imogen faced about, and there, on the cart track between the wood and the home farm, stood her Uncle Ted, large and red in breeches and gaiters, his pipe between his teeth.
“Oh, hullo, Uncle Ted.”
Imogen had turned red. She had been seen making an ass of herself alone in the wood. Behaving like a maniac. Damn.
“Anything the matter? Got the staggers, have you?” asked Uncle Ted, as if she were a cow.
“No, I’m all right. Looking for arrows and things, that’s all.”
“Oh, I see.... Comin’ up to tea?”
They walked across the home field together. Imogen was sulky and ashamed. She was emptied of enchantment and the Holy Ghost, and was nothing but an abrupt, slangy, laconic girl, going sullenly in to tea, feeling an ass. Uncle Ted was thinking farmer’s thoughts, of crops and the like, not of Imogen.
But afterwards he said to Una, “Not quite all there, eh, that girl of Vicky’s? Flings herself about in the wood when she’s alone, like someone not right, and talks to herself, too. Nineteen, is she? It’d be right enough if she was twelve. But at eighteen or nineteen....”
“Oh, Imogen’s all right. She’s childish for her age, that’s all.”
Una took everyone for granted.
“Childish, yes. That’s what I say. They ought to have her seen to. Gabbles, too. I can’t make out half she’s saying.... Katie may do her good, I daresay. Katie’s got sense.... It’s against a girl, going on like that. No sensible young fellow would like it. They ought to have her seen to. What?”
“Oh, she’s all right,” said Una again. “There she is in the field playing rounders with the others quite sensibly, you see.”
“I daresay. She may be all right at games, but she oughtn’t to be let loose alone in woods. She’ll get herself talked about....”
Katie too thought Imogen mad. But quite nicely mad. Harmless. Like a kid. Katie was a few months younger, but she felt that Imogen was a kid. She said and did such mad things. And she lacked the most elementary knowledge; she didn’t know the first thing, for instance, about clothes, what they were made of, and how they should be made. She was like an imbecile about them; didn’t care, either. She would stare, pleased and admiring, at Katie, who had beauty, as if Katie were a lovely picture, but she never said the right things about her clothes. You’d think, almost, she didn’t know one material from another.
When they had done playing rounders, and when Imogen and Tony, who was staying at the farm too, had done damming the brook at the bottom of the field, and when Tony had gone off rook shooting with his cousin Dick, Imogen sat by the brook, her bare muddy legs in a pool scaring minnows, and brooded over life. Rotten it was, being grown up. Simply rotten. Because you weren’t really grown up. You hadn’t changed at all. You knew some more, and you cared for a lot of fresh books, but you liked doing all the things you had liked doing before you grew up. Climbing, and playing Red Indians, and playing with soldiers, and walking on stilts. But when you put your hair up, you had to hide all sorts of things away, like a guilty secret. You could play real games, like tennis and cricket and hockey and rounders, and even football, and you could perhaps do the other things with someone else, but not alone. If people found you alone up a tree, or climbing a roof, or listening with your ear to the ground, or astride on a wall, or pretending with a sword, they put up their eyebrows and thought you an ass. Your mother told people you were a tomboy. A tomboy. Imbecile word. As if girls didn’t like doing nice things as much as boys. Who started the idea they didn’t, or shouldn’t?... Oh, it was rotten, being grown up. Grown-up people had a hideous time. They became so queer, talking so much, wanting to go to parties, and even meetings, and all kinds of rotten shows. Mother held meetings in the drawing-room, for good objects. So did Aunt Stanley. Different objects, but equally good, no doubt. People came to the meetings and jabbered away, and sometimes you were made to be there, “to learn to take an interest.” Votes, cruelty to animals or children, sweated labour, bazaars, white slaves, the Conservative party, the Liberal party.... What did any of them matter? Phyllis was good at them. But now Phyllis was going to be married. And Nancy was at the Slade, and wouldn’t attend the meetings; she was too busy drawing and going to dances and parties. The modern girl, mother said; independent, selfish, dashing about with young men and no chaperons. The Edwardian young woman, so different from the Victorian young woman.... Only Aunt Rome said she was not different, but just the same.... Anyhow, Nancy wouldn’t take her turn at the meetings. So Imogen, younger and more docile, was being trained up. But she would never be any good. She hated them. Why shouldn’t the boys take their turn? No one made them. It wasn’t fair.
Imogen kicked viciously at the minnows. Rotten, being a girl.... Perhaps she would run away to sea ... round the world ... the South Sea Islands....
It was getting chilly. Imogen drew her legs out of the brook and dried them on her handkerchief. Filthy they were, with mud. She put on her stockings and old tennis shoes, and wondered what next. Tony was still rooking. One might go and catch the colt in the meadow and ride him....
Katie appeared over the hunched shoulder of the field.
“Imogen, do you want to come and milk? It’s time.... Oh, I say, you are in a mess. You ass, what’ve you been up to?”
“Only damming the brook, and wading. Yes, I want to milk, rather.”
“Hurry up then.”
Katie was as beautiful as a June morning. As beautiful as Una. Pale as milk, with eyes like violets and dark, clustering curls. And clever. She could do nearly everything. Imogen, six months older, was as nought beside her. But Katie liked her, and was very kind to her. Katie had just left Roedean; she had been captain of the school hockey team, and was going now to play for Essex. A splendid girl. Imogen believed that Katie had none of the dark and cold forebodings, the hot excitements, the black nightmares, the sharp, sweet ecstasies, the mean and base feelings, that assailed herself, any more than Katie would be found making an ass of herself playing in a wood. Katie, like her mother, was balanced. This tendency to believe that others are balanced, and are not rent by the sad and glad storms which one’s own soul knows, is common to many. One supposes it to be because human beings put such a calm face on things, so the heart alone knows its own turbulence.
Imogen grinned at Katie, and went with her to the milking.
18 HIGHER THOUGHT
Papa had aged very much in the last two years since mamma had died. He had had wonderful experiences; he had constantly spoken with, even seen, mamma; it had made him very happy. But he was aware that the séances greatly strained and fatigued him. He slept badly; his nerves seemed continually on edge. Further, he could not by any means overcome the distaste he felt for the medium who made it her special business to open the door between him and mamma. A common little person, he could not help, even in his charity, thinking her. And Flossie, the spirit on the Other Side, who spoke for mamma (except on those rare occasions when mamma spoke for herself) was, to judge from her manner, voice and choice of language, even commoner. And silly. Papa scarcely liked to admit to himself how silly Flossie seemed to him to be. Mamma must dislike Flossie a good deal, he sometimes thought, but then recollected that, where mamma had gone to dwell, dislike was no more felt, only compassion. He would have liked to ask mamma, on the rare occasions when she spoke for herself, what she thought of Flossie, and of Miss Smythe, the medium on this side. But he did not like to, for Flossie would certainly, and Miss Smythe possibly, through her trance, hear his question and mamma’s reply. How he longed for a little private talk, of the kind that mamma and he used to have of old! But he was not ungrateful. He was in touch with mamma; he knew her to be extant as a personality, and accessible to him, and that was surely enough. As to the fatigue, that was a small price to pay.
Then, one tragic day, in the autumn of 1906, came one of those great exposures which dog the steps of psychical men and women. Some of the sharp, inquisitive persons who make it their business to nose out frauds and write to Truth about them, turned their attention to Miss Smythe and her séances. In a few weeks—these things are very easy, and do not take long—Miss Smythe was pilloried in the press as a complete and accomplished fraud. She had, it was made clear except to the most obstinate believers, never been in a trance, never called spirits, from the vasty deep, never opened any spiritual doors. The mechanism of the materialisation was once more discovered and exposed.... ( “What a stale old story,” said Rome. “As if we didn’t know all about it long ago. These heavy-footed creatures, trampling over children’s fairylands. Why can’t they let things be?” ) ... and even Flossie, that bright, silly, chatty spirit, was discredited. Flossie was a quack, and had known about the thimble behind the sofa and the other things in some cheap, sly way, or else just guessed.
Alas for papa! The gates of paradise clanged in his face; he might believe by faith that paradise was there, and mamma in it, but the door between him and it was shut. Great and bitter sorrow shook him, and shame, for that he had so made cheap his love and mamma’s for the benefit of common frauds. He sank into inert grief, from which he was roused, in March 1907, by the call of Higher Thought. The name, in the first instance, appealed to him. Thought should be higher; it was usually lower, and very certainly much too low.
“Higher than what, papa dear?” Rome enquired. “These comparatives, in the air, are so unfinished. Higher education, higher criticism, the larger hope, the younger generation.... Higher, I mean than what other thought?”
Than the thought customary on similar subjects, papa supposed.
“These geometrical metaphors,” Rome murmured. “Well, papa, I am sure it must be very interesting.”
It was very interesting. Papa was introduced to a little temple near High Street, Kensington, which, when you stepped on the entrance mat, broke into “God is Love” in electric light over the altar. Here he worshipped and thought highly, in company with a small but ardent band of other high thinkers, who were led in prayer by a Guru of immense power—the power of thought which was not merely higher but highest—over mind and matter. So great was the power of this Guru that he not only could cure diseased bodies and souls, but could correct physical malformations, merely by absent treatment. A lame young man was brought to him, one of whose legs was shorter than its fellow. Certainly, said the Guru, this defect would yield to absent treatment. Further, the treatment would in this case be doubly effective, as he happened to be about to make a journey to Thibet, to visit the Lama, the very centre of fervent prayer, absent treatment, and higher thought. The nearer the Guru got to Thibet, the more powerful would become, he said, the action of his treatment on the leg of the young man. And, sure enough, so it proved. The shorter leg began, as the Guru receded towards Asia, to grow. It grew, and it grew, and it grew. There came a joyful day when the two legs were of identical length. The power of absent treatment was triumphantly justified. But it proved to be a power even greater than the young man and his family had desired or deserved. For the short leg did not stop when it had caught up its companion; on the contrary, it seemed to be growing with greater velocity than before. And indeed, it was; for the Guru, now far beyond reach of communication by letter or telegram, was journeying ever deeper and deeper into the great heart of prayer, Holy Thibet, and as he penetrated it his prayer intensified and multiplied in power, like the impetus of a ball rolling down hill. The short leg surpassed its brother, shot on, and on, and on....
It was still shooting on when papa was told of the curious phenomenon.
“Strange,” said papa. “Strange, indeed.”
But it was not these portents, however strange, that papa valued in his new faith. It was the freedom, the prayerfulness, the rarefied spiritual atmosphere; in brief, the height. After Miss Smythe, after the darkened room and the rapping table and the lower thinking of poor Flossie, it was like a mountain top, where the soul was purged of commonness.
Mamma, papa sometimes thought, would have approved of Higher Thought; might even, had she been spared, have become a Higher Thinker herself. (It should be remembered, in this connection, that papa, since the exposure of poor Flossie, was no longer in touch with mamma.)
19 LIBERALS IN ACTION
It is a pity to crab all governments and everything they do. For occasionally it occurs that some government or other (its political colour is an even chance) passes some measure or other which is not so bad as the majority of measures. The Liberal government elected in 1906 composed tolerable bills more than once. It even succeeded, though more rarely, in getting them, in some slightly warped form, tolerated by the Upper House. The Trades Disputes Bill, for instance, got through. Either the Lords were caught napping, or they felt they had to let something through, just to show that things could get through, as at hoop-la the owner of the booth has, here and there, among hundreds of objects too large to be ringed by the hoop, one of trifling value which can fairly be ringed and won, just to show that the thing can be done. Anyhow, the Trades Disputes Bill did get through, before the game began of chucking all bills mechanically back, or amending them out of all meaning so that the Commons disowned them and threw them away.
Mr. Birrell had no luck with his Education Bill. It was a good, rational bill, as education bills (a sad theme) go, and no party liked it much, and the Upper House saw that it would not do at all, and sent it back plastered all over with amendments that gave it a new and silly face, like a lady over-much made up. So the Commons would have none of it, and that was the end, for the moment, of attempts to improve the management of our elementary schools.
The Lords were now getting into their form, and threw out the Plural Voting Bill with no nonsense about amendments, and no trouble at all. After all, what were they there for, if not to throw out? What, indeed, asked the Lower House, many members of whom had for long wondered. As to any kind of Woman’s Suffrage Bill, the Commons, as firmly as the Lords, would have none of it. It was when this was made clear that the Women’s Social and Political Union, that new, vigorous and vulgar body, began to bestir itself, and to send bodies of women to waylay members on their way to the House; in fact, the militant suffragist nuisance began. There were processions, demonstrations, riots, arrests and imprisonments. Stanley threw herself into these things at first with dogged fervour; she did not like them, but held them advantageous to the Cause. Her niece, Vicky’s Nancy, a very wild young woman, who enjoyed fighting and making a disturbance on any pretext, threw herself also into the Cause, fought policemen with vigour, and was dragged off to prison with joy. Imogen wouldn’t participate in these public-spirited orgies; she was too shy. And she couldn’t see that it was any use, either. She had a hampering and rather pedantic sense of logic, that prevented her from flinging herself into movements with sentimental ardour; she preferred to know exactly how the methods adopted were supposed to work, and to see clearly cause and effect, and no one ever made it precisely clear to her how making rows in the streets was going to get a suffrage bill passed. It seemed, in fact, to be working the other way, and alienating some of the few hitherto sympathetic. Her Aunt Stanley told her, “It’s to show the public and the government how much we care. They’re crude weapons, but the only ones we have. Constitutional methods have failed, so far.”
“But, Aunt Stanley, how do you know these are weapons at all?” Imogen argued.
“We can but try them,” Stanley answered, herself a little doubtful on the point.
“Anyhow,” she added, “anyhow, no woman who cares about citizenship can be happy sitting still and doing nothing while we’re denied it. You do care about the suffrage, don’t you, Imogen?”
“Oh, rather, Aunt Stanley, of course I do. I think it’s awful cheek not giving it us. There’s no sense in it, is there; no meaning. Anti-suffragists do talk a lot of rot.... Only don’t you think suffragists do too, sometimes? I mean, Aunt Stanley, people do so, when they talk, get off the point, don’t they. It would be a lot easier to be keen if people didn’t talk so much. They talk round, not along. Really, there’s hardly anything to say about anything; I mean, you could say it all, all that mattered, in a few sentences. But people go on talking about things for hours, saying the same things twice, and a lot of other things that don’t really apply, and everything in hundreds of words when quite a few would do. I noticed it in the House the other day when we were there. Two-thirds of what they all said was just flapping about. And they say, ‘I have said before, Mr. Speaker, and I say again....’ But why do they say it again? It isn’t awfully good even the first time. I do wonder why people are like that, don’t you?”
“Soft heads and long tongues, my dear, that’s why. Can’t be helped. One’s got to bear it and go ahead.... I wish Molly was five years older; she’ll be so tremendously keen....”
Imogen said nothing to that. She knew Molly, her small elfish cousin of fourteen, pretty well. Molly, with her short white face and merry, narrow eyes, and quick wits and easy selfishness and charm, was, though Imogen couldn’t know that, her father over again, without his abilities. Imogen was afraid that Molly, when she left school and grew up, was not going to take that place among the world’s workers that Aunt Stanley hoped.
As to Billy, a cheerful, stocky Rugby boy of sixteen, he had no views on the suffrage. He didn’t care. Politics bored him.
Poor Aunt Stanley. Aunt Stanley was a great dear; treated one always as a friend, not as a niece; explained things, and discussed, and said what she meant. She was easy to talk to. Easier than Vicky, whom one loved, but couldn’t discuss things with; one couldn’t formulate and express one’s ideas and project them into that spate of charming, inconsequent talk, that swept on gaily over anything one said. Imogen tried to please Aunt Stanley by seeming really keen about suffrage, but it was difficult, because the things she actually was keen on were so many and absorbing that they didn’t leave much time over. Imogen felt that she was no good at these large, unselfish causes that Aunt Stanley had at heart; she hadn’t soul enough, or brain enough, or imagination enough, or something. And she did hate meetings. If one had to sit indoors in the afternoon, were there not the galleries and theatres, her point of view was. Perhaps, she thought, Nancy, who enjoyed it, could do the votes-for-women business for the family.
Meanwhile, Mr. W. H. Dickinson’s Suffrage Bill failed to come to anything, and it became obvious that the Liberal government, in this matter, was to be no use at all.
It was quite a question whether it was going to be much use in any other matter. Poor Law Reform it had postponed; likewise Old Age Pensions. Licensing Reform was dropped; so was Mr. McKenna’s new Education Bill, the Land Valuation Bill, and Irish Home Rule. It looked as if the Liberal programme was running away like wax in the heat and trouble of the day. How few party programmes, for that matter, ever do become accomplished achievements! They are frail plants, and cannot easily come to fruit in the rough air of office. What with one thing, what with another, they wilt away in flower and die.
To make up for the stagnation of home politics, there was, in 1906 and 1907, plenty of international activity. The nations of Europe were ostensibly drawing together, a happy family. British journalists were entertained in Berlin, German journalists in London, amid some mutual execration and dislike. A rapprochement took place between ourselves and Russia, for it was quite the fashion in Europe to fraternise with Russia, her armies were so huge, even if not, apparently, very good at what armies should be good at. There were those in this country who held that it was not quite nice to fraternise with Russia, disapproving of her governmental system, and of the Tsar’s very natural suppression of the Duma that had for a few days and by an oversight so strangely existed and actually dared to demand constitutional reform. There were those in Great Britain who said that we should not be at all friendly with a government so little liberal in mentality. But, after all, you must take nations as you find them, and their domestic affairs are quite their own concern, and one should not be provincial in one’s judgments, but should make friends even with the mammon of unrighteousness for the sake of the peace of Europe, which was a good deal talked of just then by the Powers, though it is doubtful whether any of them really believed in it. It is certain that the nations by no means neglected the steady increase and building up of armaments by land and sea. They hurried away from the Hague Conference to lay down new battleships at a reckless pace; even Mr. W. T. Stead said, “Let us strengthen our navy, for on its fighting power the peace of Europe depends.” Strengthen our navy we did; but as to the peace of Europe, that lovely, insubstantial wraith, she was perhaps frightened by all those armoured ships, all those noisy guns, all those fluent statesmen talking, for she never put on much flesh and bones.
20 1907
Outside politics, 1907 was a gay year enough. There was a severe outbreak of pageantitis, which many people enjoyed very much, and others found vastly disagreeable. Drama was noticeably good; the Vedrenne-Barker company moved from the Court to the Savoy, and the intelligent play-goer moved after it. Miss Horniman’s Repertory Theatre toured the provinces; and the Abbey Theatre players took English audiences by storm. Acting was good, literature and the arts were much encouraged, dancing and social entertainments were more than ever the fashion. Society, it was said, was getting rowdier. For that matter, society has always been getting rowdier, since the dawn of time. How rowdy it will end, in what nameless orgies it will be found at the Last Day, is a solemn thought indeed.
As to the young they were thought of and written of much as ever, much as now. The New Young were discovered afresh, and the Edwardian variety was much like the Victorian and the Georgian. They were wild, people said; they went their own way; they were hard, reckless, independent, enquiring, impatient of control, and yet rather noble.
“Youth in the new century has broken with tradition,” people said. “It is no longer willing to accept forms and formulæ only on account of their age. It has set out on a voyage of enquiry, and, finding some things which are doubtful, others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of experience more in harmony with the realities of life and of knowledge....”
Youth was, in fact, at it again.
“Girls are so wild in these days,” Vicky cheerfully complained. “Nancy and Imogen both go on in a way we’d never have dared to do. Nancy dances all night (of course chaperons are a back number now), and comes home alone, or with some wild, arty young men and women, or, worse still, with one wild, arty young man, at five o’clock in the morning, and lets herself in with a bang and a rush, and often lets the arty young people in too. No, Nancy, I say to her, you don’t let your friends into my house before breakfast, and that’s that. Not several of them at once, nor one by herself or himself. If they don’t want to go home to their own beds, they must just go and carouse in any hotel that will receive them, for in my house they shall not carouse. Nor sit on the dining-room sofa and smoke, and carry on conversations in tones that I suppose you all think are hushed. It shall not be done, I said, so that is settled. But is it settled? Not a bit of it. Nancy merely changes the subject, and Charles and I are woken by the hushed voices again next morning. Edwardian manners, people tell me; well, I’m Victorian, and I don’t care if it is 1907.”
“You were doing much the same in 1880, my dear,” Rome interpolated.
“Oh, well, I’ve forgotten ... were we?... Well, anyhow, you can’t say I was behaving like Imogen. She doesn’t care for dancing much, and she’s such a baby still that cocktails make her tipsy and cigarettes sick; she prefers raspberry syrup and chocolate cigars, which is really more indecent at her age. At her age I was thinking of proper young-ladyish things, like young men, and getting engaged; but Imogen seems never to have heard of either—I mean, not of young men in their proper uses. She plays childish games, and dashes about on her bicycle, and makes ridiculous lists of all the ships in the navy and how much they weigh and how many horses they’re equal to, and slips off to Portsmouth all by herself to see them launched, without a word to anyone, and of course makes herself ill. I said to her one day, I suppose you’ll go and marry into the navy some day, Jennie; nothing else will satisfy you. But she opened her eyes and said, Marry the navy? Oh, no. I couldn’t do that. I should be too jealous of him. You see, I want to be in the navy myself, and I know I should hate his being in it when I couldn’t. It would only rub it in. I want to do nice things myself, not to marry people who do them. I believe, mother, I’m perhaps too selfish to marry; it’s my life I want to enjoy, not anyone else’s. Besides, there might be babies, and they would get so in the way, little sillies. They wouldn’t get in your way, I told her (only of course it isn’t true, because they always do, the wretches), if only you’d behave like other grown girls, and not be forever climbing about and playing silly games. You’re such a baby yourself, that’s what’s the matter. What on earth the child’s book will be like that she’s so busy with I can’t imagine. She knows nothing about life, bless her. There’s Phyllis married, and running her home so capably, and Nancy at least carrying on like a girl, not like a child in the nursery—but Imogen! I lose my patience with her sometimes.”
And even as her mother spoke, Imogen was in Hamley’s in Regent Street, looking at toy pistols and blushing. She was blushing because she had just been deceitful, and was afraid that the lady attending on her guessed. “For what aged child is it?” this helpful lady had asked. “Would caps or blank cartridges be what he’d want? I mean, if he’s very young....”
“Oh, no,” Imogen mumbled, “he’s not awfully young. Blank cartridges, he likes....”
She bent her abashed face over the weapons, fingering them. A sordid fib; was she seen through? She chose her pistol quickly, paid for it, and hurried out of the shop. When she got well away, she extracted the weapon from its cardboard box and tucked it, with a guilty look round, into the side pocket of her skirt.
She strode along with a new reckless gallantry.
“Patrick slipped among the crowd; that queer, cosmopolitan, rather sinister crowd that is to be found around the Marseilles docks. Was he followed? His hand strayed to his hip pocket. His keen, veiled eyes took in the passers-by without seeming to look. If he could get through the next hour without mishap, he would be aboard and a-sail. But could he? Prob’ly not....”
While Imogen thus walked in foreign ports or trackless forests, a happy, dreaming spinster, a reckless adventurer armed to the teeth, many of her contemporaries and elders walked in suffragist processions, adventurers too, and no less absorbed than she. Stanley, disgusted now by the increasingly reasonless methods of the militants, had definitely turned her back on them and joined the constitutionals. These arranged orderly and lady-like processions, headed at times by Lady Carlisle.
“There can be no doubt,” wrote the more dignified press, after one such procession, “that many of these lady suffragettes are absolutely in earnest, and honestly believe that the cause for which they are contending is a just and sane one. But the fact remains that they are in the minority; that the sex, qua sex, is still content, and proud to be content, to accept the symbol of petticoat....” ( “How indecent,” cried Vicky, “to gossip about our underwear in a leader by a man!” ) ... “the symbol of petticoat as the badge of disenfranchisement.” Women, the article continued, are of low mental calibre, and will never understand politics, and if they did it would interfere with their only duty, the propagation of the race.
“I love journalists,” said Rome, reading this to her papa at their Sunday breakfast. “They always write as if women did that job single-handed. They are so modest about man’s share in it, which is really quite as important as ours. They even kindly call us the fount of life. Dear, generous, self-effacing creatures....”
But papa was shaking his head, gravely.
“You make a joke of it, my dear. But this low mental equipment on the part of the writers on our leading papers is really a tragedy. The guiders of public opinion.... The blind leading the blind ... how can we avoid the ditch?”
“Indeed, we don’t avoid the ditch. We are all in it, up to the neck. But if one is to be sad on account of the low mental equipment of writers or others, there will be very little joy left. For my part, I find a considerable part of my joy in it; it assists in providing the cheering spectacle of human absurdity.”
“Pass me the paper, my dear. I want to read about.... I want to see it.”
Rome smiled behind the screen of paper which papa put up between him and her. Well she knew what papa wanted to read in it. He was looking for news of Mr. R. J. Campbell and his New Theology, searching for tidings of Pantheism and the Divine Immanence. And, sure enough, he found them. There was a Saying of the Week. Among the eminent persons who had said other things, such as Dr. Clifford, who had remarked, a little meiosistically, “It is not necessary to burn a man who is seeking the truth,” and the Lord Chief Justice, who had observed, more topically, “One of the greatest errors that motorists can make is to believe that upon their blowing their horns everybody should clear out of the way,” and Prince Fushimi from Japan, who had said, “I do not wish to object to ‘The Mikado,’ as I am sure its writers did not intend to hurt the feelings of a great nation, but I shall, of course, be glad if it is not performed,” and two doctors, one of whom had said, “Kissing consists in depositing some saliva on the lips or cheeks of another person,” and the other, “Those who do not like milk will get cancer” —among all these utterers of truth came Mr. R. J. Campbell, remarking brightly, not for the first time nor for the last, “The New Theology is the gospel of the humanity of God and of the divinity of man.”
“True,” said papa, within himself. “Very true. Very proper and intelligent indeed.”
He sighed gently behind the newspaper. He had had, of late, his doubts as to Higher Thought; as to whether it was very intelligent, very proper, or very true. It was strange in so many ways; high, doubtless, but perhaps for earth too high. And there were strange tales going about concerning the Gurus who led in prayer and in thought. And the leg of that unfortunate young man ... how could people believe such nonsense? The element of folly in all human creeds was becoming, in the case of the Higher Thought, painfully evident to papa.
This New Theology now—this young man Campbell—he seemed, somehow, nearer to solid earth than did the Higher Thinkers. He might talk of the Divinity of Man, but he did not, as papa, having read his book on the subject, knew, mean anything silly by it, only what all the mystics have meant—the divine spark in the human heart. As to the humanity of God—well, he probably meant no harm by that either. He was but an anthropomorphist, like the rest of us.
The theologians had been hard upon that book of his. It was not, of course, the book of a scholar; all it said had been said much better by Loisy and other Catholic modernists, whom Mr. Campbell palely reflected. But it gave a good peptonised version, suitable for the unscholarly mind. And its reviewers had been unkind. They had nearly all attacked it. Dr. Robertson Nicoll in the British Weekly had snubbed it at considerable length. The Church Times had said, “The book is one long offence against good taste,” and the Methodist Recorder, “Frankly, we do not think this book worth reading, and to price it at six shillings is enough to make us join in the Book War.” Theological reviewers were not always fair, as papa, since he had published his own mighty and erudite work on Comparative Religions, had known. For himself, he had liked Mr. Campbell’s book, even though it was rather bright than scholarly, more an appeal to the man in the City Temple than to the student or the theologian. Papa, besides being a student and a theologian, had of late been also on Sundays a man in the City Temple. He had said nothing of it yet to anyone; he was trying it. He liked it; there was nothing in it to bewilder or offend. The Divine Immanence; call it Pantheism who chose, it was a beautiful idea. It was in no degree incompatible with the Divine Transcendence; why should it be, since there was also the Divine Ubiquity?
Brooding on these matters, papa finished breakfast somewhat silently, and lit his pipe.
“A beautiful day,” said Rome, smoking her cigarette at the open window. “I shall be out for lunch and tea, papa. I am joining a party of pleasure; we are going to explore, in our cars, to Newlands Corner, where we shall have trials of skill and of speed. You won’t come with me, I suppose?”
“No, thank you, dear, I think not. I’m too old for trials of skill and speed; too old, even, for exploring.”
Precisely, thought Rome, glancing at him with her indulgent smile, what papa was not and never would be. He would very surely go exploring this morning, searching the riches of the spiritual kingdoms. Much more exciting than Newlands Corner.... To papa at seventy-seven, as to Mr. R. J. Campbell at whatever age he might be, theology could still seem new. Rome wondered whether it was an advantage or a misfortune that to her, at forty-eight, all theologies, as most other of the world’s businesses, seemed so very old. The only things that seemed new to her in 1907 were taximeter cabs.
“Well, good-bye, dear, and good luck,” Rome wished her papa.
Of 1907 there is not very much more to record. Two or three items of news may perhaps be mentioned. Maurice’s son Roger, aged twenty-four, now attached, at his own urgent desire, to the literary side of his father’s paper—( “He can’t do much harm there, I suppose,” Maurice said, “though he’ll not do any good either; he hasn’t the brains.” )—published a novel. It was a long novel, and it was about a youth not unlike what Roger conceived himself to be, only his home was different, for his father was a church-warden and bare the bag in church, and bullied and beat and prayed over his children; fathers in fiction must be like this, not heretical and intelligent journalists. The book conducted the youth from the nursery through his private and public schools (house matches, school politics, vice, expulsions, and so on), through Cambridge (the Union, the river, tobacconists’ assistants, tripos), to journalistic, social and literary London, where it left him, at twenty-four, having just published his first novel, which was a great success.
“God, what tripe,” Maurice commented, but to himself, as he turned the pages. “Exactly what the boy would write, I fear. No better, no worse. Well, poor lad, he’s pleased with it enough. And it will probably be handsomely reviewed. It’s the stuff to give the public all right.” His thoughts strayed to a familiar, rather bitter point. If he had been given (by Amy: how fantastic a thought!) a son with brains; a son with a hard, clear head or an original imagination; a son who, if he wrote at all, wouldn’t produce the stuff to give the public, a son who, like himself, would see the public damned first....
Roger was, as his father had predicted, handsomely reviewed, for the Edwardians rather liked the biography-of-a-young-man type of novel, and loved details of school life. Roger had his feet well on the ladder of successful fiction-writing. Roger would be all right. Meanwhile, his head swelled even larger than before. His father perceived that the innocent youth really believed his reviewers, and conceived himself to be a writer and a clever young man.
The other items I record of the year 1907 I quote from the diary of Imogen for the 16th of March.
“Indomitable launched, Glasgow. Largest and quickest cruiser in the world. 17,250 tons. 41,000 h.p. 25 knots. Invincible and Inflexible, same type, building. Finished book, began to type it. Got guinea prize from Saturday Westminster for poem.”
21 WHITHER?
And so to the last years of Edwardianism. In them that gay, eager, cultivated period listed gently to the political left. The Socialist Budget, as it was called by its opponents, “the end of all things” as Lord Rosebery a little optimistically called it, agitated the country. Old Age Pensions were at last established, to the disgust of Tories, who had, however, when members of Parliament, to be careful how they expressed their disgust, for fear of their needy constituents. “Whither are we drifting?” enquired the Conservative press, in anger and fear. “Here is Socialism unabashed: the thin end of the wedge which shall at last undermine the integrity and liberty of our Constitution.” Here were sixty millions a year, not insurance but a free dole, squandered on supporting old persons who might just as well be supported in workhouses. What would that come to in Dreadnoughts? Anyhow, we had got to lay down six or seven Dreadnoughts a year for the present, if we were to be to Germany in the ratio of two keels to one, which was assuredly essential. “They are ringing their bells; they will soon be wringing their hands,” said the Tory leaders. The Radical element in the government strengthened; Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman died, and in Mr. Asquith’s ministry Mr. Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer. But it remained, on the whole, a Liberal-Imperialist government, and left most of the radicalism to Labour, whose parliamentary strength was increasing and unifying. Wherever we were drifting, it was not towards extreme radicalism.
As to Ireland, a bill was passed to reduce her docks, thistles and noxious weeds: no other bill.
Parliamentary affairs and party politics were no more exciting and no more tedious (for that is impossible) than usual. Of more interest were the first flying machines that really flew, the drawings of Mr. Augustus John exhibited at the New English Art Club and condemned by all critics (except the few who liked the kind of thing), as essays in a savage and childish archaism, and deliberate insults to our intelligence; (whither indeed was art drifting, when such drawings could be praised?); and the establishment of the White City at Shepherds Bush, with the Franco-British Exhibition (sadly dull) and flip-flaps, switchbacks, wiggle-woggles and scenic railways (most exciting, and an insidious snare for pocket money; you could get rid there in one evening of the careful hoardings of weeks; also, if you were as weak in the stomach as Imogen, you felt repentant after a few goes). Thither President Fallières, on a visit to King Edward, was taken, to enjoy the Franco-British Exhibition and cement the entente cordiale, which, however, needed it less then than now, for the Edwardians were on the whole most enthusiastic about this international understanding. “There is no longer a Channel,” they said, publicly and politely; but in their hearts, for they were no more foolish than we, they still gave thanks for this useful, if unpleasing, strip of sea.
To forge faster the other link in the Triple Entente, that only possible guarantee for a world peace, King Edward visited the Tsar of all the Russias, at Reval. So there we were, grasping these two great military powers by the hand, ready to face any emergency. We had got ahead of Germany in this matter of Russia. For all the European Powers, discreetly averting their eyes from the chronic blood stains on the bear’s savage claws, were courting her for her legions. To have the bear at their beck and call—that was what everyone wanted, against the emergencies which might arise. And never was a time when emergencies seemed more imminent, more dangerous, more frequent; such a state of simmering unrest was Europe’s in the days of Edward the Peacemaker. Of the Kaiser Wilhelm and his Uncle Bertie it has been said that their relations “lapsed into comparative calm only when they were apart from one another.” Their subjects hated and feared each other; the press in each country stirred up terror of invasion by the other; “the German invasion,” “the English invasion” —these phrases were bandied about in two jealous, frightened empires. The German spy scare, the British spy scare, these fevers were worked up in the jingo press of two countries. “You English are mad, mad, mad,” said Wilhelm. “I strive without ceasing to improve relations and you retort that I am your arch-enemy. You make it very hard for me.”
For that matter, nations always make it hard for one another; it is their function. We did make it hard for Germany, and Germany made it hard for us, and France made it hard for everyone.
Anyhow, here was the Triple Entente, full-armed, to meet the Triple Alliance, and some one or other would see to it that they did meet before long.
The chief European emergency which arose at the moment was an attack of megalomania on the part of Servia, in 1909. The Serbs had the madness to dream of a greater Servia, which should unite the scattered peoples of their race— “a dream,” said the English press, “as hopeless as that of Poland rediviva. Greater Servia either will be realised under the sceptre of the Hapsburgs, or will not be realised at all.” The awkwardness of the situation, so far as we were concerned, was that Russia was, as usual, backing her mad little militant friend, and had to be dissuaded with great tact from upsetting the apple cart. However, a joint note to Servia from the Powers quieted her for the time being, and the lid was shut down temporarily on the seething European kettle of fish.
Other intriguing matters of this year were the building, in British dockyards, of three huge battleships for Brazil, which disgusted others than young Imogen Carrington; the Olympic Games in July; the publication of various not unamusing books; and the deaths of two old men, Algernon Swinburne and George Meredith. Our two greatest Grand Old Men had departed from us, and no more would pilgrims alight at the Pines, Putney, or go exploring to Box Hill. The office of our literary G. O. M. was filled now only by Mr. Thomas Hardy, for Mr. Henry James was still an American. Sometimes one speculates, aghast, what would happen should we ever be left with no candidates for that honourable post—that is to say, with no celebrated literary man or woman (for there might, though improbably, be a G. O. W. some day) over seventy years, no Master for the younger writers to greet on the festival of his birth. It would be an undignified state of affairs indeed; and one need not anticipate it at present, for behind Mr. Hardy there looms more than one candidate of respectable claims.
The closing years of this reign were brightened further by Commander Peary and Dr. Cook, who both maintained that they had discovered the North Pole. It was ultimately decided that only the Commander had done so, as the doctor had had the misfortune to mislay his papers in Greenland; but his was a sporting venture, and deserving of all applause, and he had a good run for his money.
And so an end to Edwardianism. The new Georgianism dawned on a nervous, gay, absorbed nation, experimenting in new but cautious legislation, alive, on the whole, to new literature and new art, alive wholly to whatever enjoyment it could find, and thoroughly tied up in continental politics, so that when that mine was fired we should go up with it sky-high.