He wanted Stanley to do the same (mamma said firmly that she herself was too old), but Stanley would have none of it. To change your religion you need a certain vitality, an energy of mind and will, an alertness towards fresh ideas, and Stanley at this time had little of these things. She clung to a desperate and passionate faith, as a drowning man to a raft; gradually she even came to take pleasure in services, and would find at the early mass at St. Albans, Holborn, an exalted, mystic, half-sensuous joy. But she was in no mood to choose and investigate a new creed. Besides, Theosophy. . . .
However, papa enjoyed it. Papa was now sixty-five years of age, but his feeling for religions had not waned. Mamma, who had been a little afraid that papa might next be a Jew (for he had been writing a monograph on the Hebrew prophets, whom he greatly admired, and also seeing a good deal of Mr. Zangwill) was, on the whole, relieved. For a long time papa had not been happy in the Roman Catholic Church, finding many of the papal bulls difficult of digestion, and the doctrines of hell-fire and transubstantiation (as interpreted by most of the priesthood) painfully materialistic; neither was he happy about the attitude of the Church towards M. Loisy and other modernists.
So, when he saw the star in the east, he set out for it with a sigh of relief.
21
Irving
While papa followed the star, and Stanley doggedly and bitterly sued her husband for restitution of conjugal rights, and Rome urbanely surveyed the world through a monocle and drove elegantly in hansoms, often with an enormous wolf-hound or a couple of poms, and Maurice fired squibs of angry eloquence at everything that came into his line of vision, their brother Irving made a fortune by speculating in South African gold mine shares. Irving, as has been said earlier, was a lucky young man, whom God had fashioned for prosperity. Having made his fortune, he married a handsome, agreeable, and healthy young woman, one Lady Marjorie Banister, the daughter of an obscure north-country earl, and settled down to make more.
It was an epoch of fortune-making. Mr. Cecil Rhodes loomed in the south, an encouraging and stimulating figure to those who had enterprise and a little capital. The new rich were filling Mayfair, making it hum with prosperity. Irving, too, hummed with prosperity, and took a house in Cumberland Place. He found life an excellent affair, though he had his grievances, one of which was that motor-cars were not allowed on English roads without a man walking with a flag before them. “We are a backward nation,” Irving grumbled, after visits to Paris, as so many have grumbled before and since. But, on the whole, Irving approved of modern life. He thought Maurice, who did not, a bear with a sore head.
Maurice was now the editor of an intelligent but acid weekly paper, which carried on a running fight with the government, the opposition, all foreign governments, the British public, most current literature, nearly all current ideas, and the bulk of the press, particularly Henley’s New Review, which boomed against him monthly. Having a combatant spirit, he found life not unenjoyable, now that he had become so used to and so indifferent to his wife as to have acquired armour against the bitter chafing she had caused him of yore, and to find some domestic pleasure in annoying her. He considered it a low and imbecile world, but to that, too, one gets used, and a weekly paper is, as many have found, a gratifying vent for scorn. Saturday after Saturday, through 1895, the Gadfly railed at the unsatisfactory attitude of our Colonial Secretary towards South Africa, the existence of Mr. Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company, the tepid and laissez-faire temperament of Lord Rosebery, the shocking weather, the absurd inhibitions against motor-cars, the vulgarity of the cheaper press, the futility of the controversies on education, the slowness of progress in developing Rontgen rays and flying machines, the immense wealth made by the undeserving in cycle companies and gold mines, the smugness of Liberals, the inanity of Tories, the ignorance of the Labour Party, the blatancy of current forms of patriotism, the arrogance of the victory-swollen Japanese, the bad manners of France, the aggressiveness of Germany, the feebleness of current literature, and so on and so forth.
“That’s right, old smiler, keep it up. That’s the stuff to give them,” Irving amiably encouraged him, as he and his wife ate at the dinner table of his brother. “They don’t mind, and it makes you happy. But what’s bitten you to set you against company promoters? I didn’t care for your column about them last week. They’ve done you no harm, have they? The fact is, I was going to ask you if you’d care to come into a small affair I’m helping to float. Bicycle bolts are a back number, and that’s a fact. In November next year the red flag comes off, and motor-cars begin in earnest all over the roads. Amberley and I are specialising in tyres. We’ve got Lord Mortlake in, too. It’s a sure thing. We shall be coining thousands in a couple of years. You’d better come in early. Am I right?”
Amy’s mirth chimed like sweet bells.
“Motor-cars! Oh, I do like that! Why not flying machines, at once?”
Irving regarded her with tolerant scorn.
“Why not indeed? You may well ask. But for the moment, motor-cars will do us. I dare say it will be fliers in ten years or so. And moving photographs, too. I’m not, you see, a pessimist, like poor dear Maurice. I believe in Progress. And in Capital. And in the Future of the Race. And in getting rich quick. Maurice, am I right?”
“Probably,” said Maurice. “You’re certainly not bad at getting rich quick; I’ll say that for you. But I am. So, on the whole . . .”
“Motor-car tyres! “Amy still jeered, being of those who obtain one idea at a time and grapple it to their souls with hoops of steel. “Motor-car tyres I They won’t wear out many tyres trundling away behind those old chaps with the flags.”
Maurice finished his sentence otherwise than he had intended,
“On the whole, I’m inclined to take shares in this company of yours. Send me along the details as soon as you can.”
Amy’s utterances often had this subversive effect on his own. He threw her a malevolent glance, and poured himself out some more claret.
Amy put up her pretty, dark eyebrows. She pursed her mouth. She nodded.
“That’s right. Throw our money away. Don’t bother a bit about me or the children.”
“Now, Amy, don’t nag him. I’m answerable for this little show, and I can tell you I’m right. Remember I told him to put his shirt on Persimmon. Well, he didn’t. You know the results. I don’t want to brag, but—well, there it is. Maurice, I think better of your wits than I have for the last ten years.”
Maurice, sipping his claret, still kept his sardonic gaze on his wife, who rose and took Irving’s wife to another room. Often Amy wished that she had chanced to marry Irving instead of Maurice, though he was too young for her. Oftener Maurice wished that he had married no one, for marriage was oppressive.
22
Rule Britannia
’95 swept on, and speeded up to a riotous finish, with the British South African troops, under the imprudent Dr. Jameson, galloping over the Transvaal border to protect the British of the Rand. Loud applause from the British Isles. In the legal language of the Bow Street trial that followed, “Certain persons, in the month of December, 1895, in South Africa, within Her Majesty’s dominions, and without license of Her Majesty, did unlawfully prepare a military expedition to proceed against the dominions of a certain friendly State, to wit, the South African Republic, contrary to the provisions of the Foreign Enlistment Act.” In the more poetic language of the Laureate,—
“Wrong, is it wrong? Well, maybe,
But I’m going, boys, all the same:
Do they think me a burgher’s baby,
To be scared by a prating name?”
In the episcopal language of the Bishop of Mashona-land, “Whether the English people liked the exploits of Dr. Jameson or not, the Empire had been built up by such men. They had a Colonial Secretary with his eyes open, who could see farther than most people thought. Africa must take a foremost place in the Empire, and the Church should go hand in hand with its developme
nt.”
And, in the journalistic language of the Daily Mail (born early in ’96, and, like other new-born infants, both noisy and pink), “It is well known in official circles that England and the Transvaal must eventually come into collision.”
Vicky’s children, in a fever of martial jingoism, temporarily abandoned the Sherlock Holmes crime-tracking exploits which were engaging their attention those Christmas holidays, for the Jameson Raid, riding bestridden chairs furiously round the schoolroom, chanting,
“Then over the Transvaal border,
And a gallop for life or death”—
until two chairs broke into pieces, and Imogen, thrown, cut her head on the fender, and the game was forbidden by authority.
The adventure of the raid tickled up British imperialism, which, like the imperialism in Vicky’s schoolroom, began to ride merrily for a fall. ’96 dawned on a country growing drunk with pride of race and possessions, working up, in fact, for the Diamond Jubilee. Dr. Jameson and his confederates were received with the cheers of the populace and the adoration of the Daily Mail, and sentenced to short terms of imprisonment.
Soon after the birth of the Daily Mail came the Savoy, the last stand of eclectic æstheticism. Stanley Croft had, for a while, an odd feeling of standing hesitant between two forces, one of which was loosening its grasp on her, the other taking hold. The newer force conquered, and she was carried, step by step, from æstheticism to imperialism, from belief in art and intellect to belief in the dominance of the British race over the world. She read Henley and Kipling. She found pride in—
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul . . .”
Her religion ceased to be a mystic, twilight passion. A renascence of sturdy courage took her back into the common ways, where, her divorce now accomplished, she pursued her old aims. She took up life, and became alert to the world again, responsive, like a ship in full sail, to every wind that blew. And the wind that blew on her was a wind of reaction from her recent past, and it drove her out on the seas of ambitious imperialism, so that love of country became in her, as in so many, a kind of swaggering tribal pride. The romance of Greater Britain took her by storm. Not the infant Imogen, stirred to tears by the swinging by of red-coated troops to a band, seethed with a more exalted jingoism. Glory, adventure, pride of race and the clash of arms—what stimulating dreams were these, and how primeval their claim upon the soul! While Stanley’s friends shrugged cynical shoulders over Dr. Jim’s exploit and the attitude towards it of the great British public, while her papa gravely misdoubted such militant aggression, while Maurice sneered and tilted at it in a weekly column, while Rome contemplated the spectacle with the detached, intelligent amusement of the blasée but interested theatre-goer, while Irving, cynically approving, said, “That’s good,” thinking of the Rand gold, and Mr. Cecil Rhodes observed that his friend the doctor had upset the apple cart—while all these made the comments natural to their tastes, temperaments and points of view, Stanley, like a martial little girl, flew high the flag of “Britain for ever! Up the Rand I” and her spirit marched as to a military band.
Vicky also, in her more careless and casual way, was a supporter of Empire. “Whatever Charles and Maurice and all those informed people may say, my dear, this Dr. Jim is a gallant creature, dashing off to the rescue of his fellow-countrymen and countrywomen like that. For, even if they weren’t in actual danger, they were inconvenienced, those poor, tiresome Uitlanders. And how dreadful to be governed by Boers! What people! Canting, Old Testament humbugs. One dislikes them so excessively, even from here, that one can imagine the feelings of those who live among them. Even Maurice isn’t so perverse as to maintain that Boers are tolerable. Oh, I’m all for Dr. Jim. I insist on taking in that cheery pink new daily that pets him as if he were a Newfoundland dog that has saved a boat-load of drowning people. Such a bright, pleased tone it has. ‘The British Public know a good man when they see one,’ it says. Such a much more amiable and pleasant attitude towards us than Maurice’s ‘The public be damned. All it knows about anything that matters would go into a walnut shell and then rattle.’ Maurice gets so terribly contemptuous and conceited. I tremble to think what he will be like at sixty, should nature keep him alive, if he finds the world so silly when he is but thirty-eight. Perhaps, however, he will have mellowed.”
23
Maurice, Rome, Stanley and the Queen
Ninety-Six ran out. living’s tyre company began to make money, and Maurice grew richer. He sent Amy to the Riviera for the winter, and Rome kept his house for him. He was sweeter-tempered than usual. Rome was, in his eyes, a flâneuse and a dilettante of life, but her clear, cynical mind was agreeable to him. Her intelligent mockery was, after Amy’s primitive jeering, as caviare after rotten eggs. God! If only Amy need never come back. But she would inevitably come back. And the children loved her. Children are like that; no discrimination. They loved Maurice too, but more mildly. And, very temperately, they liked their aunt Rome, whom they often suspected of making fun of them, and, even oftener, of being completely bored. In point of fact, Rome was apt to be bored by persons under sixteen or so. She allowed childhood to be a necessary stage in the growth of human beings, but she found it a tiresome one, and saw no reason why children should consort with adults. Stanley, on the other hand, being by now partially restored to her general goodwill towards humanity, threw herself ardently into the society and interests of her own children and those of others. She taught them imperialism, and about the English flag, and told them adventure stories, and played with them the games suitable to their years. She told them about the Diamond Jubilee, the great event of ’97, and how our good, wise and aged queen would, by next June, have reigned for sixty years. Victoria was in fashion just then. She was well thought of, both morally and intellectually. “To the ripe sagacity of the politician,” said the loyal press, “she adds the wide knowledge acquired by sixty years of statesmanship. Many a strained international situation has been saved by her personal tact.” That was the way the late nineteenth century press spoke of Victoria, the English being a loyal people, with a strong sense of royalty. So the Diamond Jubilee would be a great day for the queen. Since the last Jubilee, in ’87, the Empire, or anyhow, the sense of Empire, had grown and developed. Imperialism was now a very heady wine, to those who liked that tipple. To others, such as Maurice Garden, it was more of an emetic.
24
Nansen in the Albert Hall
Dr. Nansen came to London, early in ’97. Whatever else you thought of anything or any one, you had to admire Dr. Nansen. He addressed thousands of people in the Albert Hall. Vicky took her children to hear him. Already they had read Farthest North. Imogen, at eight years old, had read it, absorbed, breathless, intent, tongue clenched between teeth. The man who had sailed through ice, and all but got to the Pole. He was better than soldiers. As good, almost, as sailors. What a man! And there he stood, a giant dwarfed to smallness on the platform of the vast hall, a Scandinavian god, blonde and grave and calm, waiting to begin his lecture, but unable to because the crowd roared and clapped and stamped their feet, and would not stop.
At that huge explosion of welcome, Imogen’s skin pringled and pricked all over, as if soldiers were swinging by to music, or a fire engine to the sound of bells, or as if the sun were setting in a glory of gold and green, or as if she were reading “The Revenge” or “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” or “I will arise and go now and go to Inisfree.” Imogen wept. She did not know that she wept, until the applause was at last over, and Nansen began to speak. Then her brother Hugh poked her in the back and said, “What’s up? Wipe your nose and don’t snivel,” and she was ashamed, and though she retorted, “Wipe your own. Snivel yourself,” it was no satisfaction, because Hughie was not snivelling. Boys didn’t, she had learnt, except when there was something to snivel about. They did not understand the
female weakness which wept at fire engines, poetry and clapping, and was sick at squashed insects. Imogen wanted (even still half hoped) to be a boy, so she tried to hide her weaknesses.
Nansen began to speak.
“They’re all quiet now. A pin might drop,” said Imogen to herself, having lately learnt that phrase, but not getting it quite right.
But disappointment took her. Strain as she would, she could not hear what the god said. She could not make it into words, except now and then. It boomed along, sonorous, fluent English, above her plane of listening. A sentence here and there she got, entrancing and teasing, then away the voice soared, booming in another dimension. . . . Imogen had never learnt to listen; now for the first time she knew remorse for sermon-times spent in day-dreams, lessons at school during which her mind had drifted away on seas of fancy like a rudderless boat, to be sharply recalled by “Imogen Carrington, what have I just said?” Seldom, indeed, did Imogen Carrington know. She would blush and stammer and get an inattention mark. No one in the second form had so many inattention marks as she. Perhaps if she had fewer she could have understood Nansen now.
“Hughie, can you hear?”
“Most of the time. Don’t interrupt.”
Yes, Hughie could hear. Hughie was two years older; Hughie was ten, and into his square, solid, intelligent head the sounds emitted by Nansen were penetrating as words. Hughie could listen, when he had a mind to. Hughie was more clever than Imogen. Phyllis and Nancy could hear too, of course; they were older. Not Tony; but then Tony, who was only seven, wouldn’t be trying. He didn’t really care.
“Mother, I can’t hear.”
“Don’t talk, darling. I’ll tell you afterwards. . . .”
Told by an Idiot Page 13