“At all events,” said Imogen, “we can write 1900. We can say, ‘It’s 1900.’” But what one could not say was, “I remember, last century, going to the seaside for the holidays. . . .” “Last century, bicycles and steam engines came in . . .” or, “We, of the twentieth century.” That would have to wait.
The funny thing was that you could not, however hard you thought, lay your finger on the moment when the new century would be born. Imogen used to try, lying in bed before she went to sleep. One second you said, “We of the nineteenth century”; the next second you said, “We of the twentieth century.” But there must be a moment in between, when it was neither; surely there must. A queer little isolated point of time, with no magnitude, but only position. . . . The same point must be between one day and the next, one hour and the next . . . all points in time were such points . . . but you could never find them . . . always you either looked forward or looked back . . . you said “now—now—now,” trying to catch now, but you never could . . . and such vain communings with time lead one drowsily into sleep.
30
Pro-Boer
In Stanley the Boer war slew the jingo spirit, turned back on itself the cresting wave of imperialism. Not because it was an ill-fought, stupidly managed, for long unsuccessful war, but because it was war, and war was, when seen functioning, senseless and horrible. It was nearly as bad when Great Britain at last began to defeat the too clever farmers. It was almost worst in the summer of 1900, when the news of the relief of Mafeking caused so much more tempestuous a hysteria than other reliefs had caused, and when Lord Roberts occupied Johannesburg and proclaimed the annexation of the Orange Free State, and when Pretoria was taken, and yet the war went on and on and on.
“Is this the way,” asked Liberals, “to secure in the end any kind of working reconciliation between ourselves and the conquered enemy? If Great Britain wishes to be burdened for ever with a sullen, hostile, exasperated people, embittered with the memory of burnt farms, useless slaughter and destruction, she is taking the right course.” And so forth. Liberals always talk like that. Those who disagreed merely retorted “Pro-Boer,” which took less time. The Latin word “pro” has been found always very useful and insulting.
Stanley became a pro-Boer. She disliked all she knew of Boers very much, but that had nothing to do with it. A pro-Boer, like a pro-German much later, was one who was in favour of making terms with the enemy on the victories already gained. The Conciliation Committee were pro-Boer. The Liberal newspapers were pro-Boer, except the Chronicle, which threw Mr. Massingham overboard to be pro-Boer by himself. Maurice Garden was, of course, pro-Boer. He loathed Boers, the heavy-witted, brutal Bible-men, with their unctuous Cromwellian cant. But fiercely and contemptuously he was pro-Boer. Rome, too, was pro-Boer; had been from the first.
“A most unpleasant people,” she had said. “What a mistake not to leave them to themselves. If the Uitlanders disliked them as much as I should, they wouldn’t go on living there and sending complaints to us; they would come away. All this imperialism is so very unbalanced.”
“Worse than unbalanced, Rome,” her papa sadly said. “One hesitates to speak harshly, but it must be called unchristian. The Churches have gone terribly astray over it. The unhappy Churches. . . .”
Unhappy because terribly astray on so many topics, papa meant. Even now he was mourning the death of his friend, Dr. Mivart, who had been deprived of the sacraments of his Church because he had, in the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly Review, written articles, however reverent, on “The Continuity of Catholicism,” and in them seemed to give to the infallible authority of the Church a lower place than to human reason. Alas for the Catholic Church, which so treated its best sons I Never, papa knew, could he join that great Church again. Religion, too, had suffered a heavy blow in the death, in January, of Dr. Martineau. And Ruskin also went that month. . . . Like leaves the great Victorians were falling. Papa, brooding over a great epoch so soon to close, could not but be a pro-Boer and hope that this horrid war, which jarred and confused its last years, would soon end.
As for Maurice, his newspaper office was raided and smashed on Mafeking night, and he himself carried out and ducked in Trafalgar Square basin. No one hurt him. No one wanted, on this happy, good humoured night, to hurt this small, frail, scornful, slightly intoxicated, obviously courageous, editor, who brightly insulted them to their faces as they tied him up.
Vicky’s children were not pro-Boer. No one could have called them that. They were all for a good whacking victory. Imogen, it must be owned, did once, in a moment of seeing the point of view of the foe (Imogen usually saw all the points of view there were to see; her eye was not single, which made life a very dizzy business for her), write a poem beginning:
“Across the great Vaal river we northward trekked
and came,
Set up our own dominion, and men acknowledged
the same;
And close behind us followed the Alien whom we
scorn,
With his eager, clutching fingers and his lust for
gold new-born.
“There is wealth,” he cried,
“I will dig,” he cried:
Between him and us may the Lord decide!
Through the Lord’s good might,
By the sword’s good right,
Let us up and smite our enemies and put our
foes to flight I”
Imogen was not ill-pleased with that poem, which had ten verses, and which she wrote for a school composition. It seemed to her a fine expression of sturdy Boer patriotism, however misguided.
“I can see their point of view,” she said to herself, righteously, and pleased with the phrase. “Most people ”(which meant, it need scarcely be said, most of the other girls at school) “can’t see it, but I can. They’re beastly, and I’m glad they’re beaten, but I see their point of view.” She said so to some other little girls in the Third Remove. But the other little girls, who didn’t see the Boers’ point of view, said, “Oh I Are you a pro-Boer? I say, Imogen Carrington’s a pro-Boer.”
“Your uncle was ducked in Trafalgar Square, wasn’t he,” said some one else, curiously but not unkindly, and in the diffident voice suitable to family scandals, “for being a pro-Boer. Do you think the same as him?”
Imogen, blushing, disclaimed this.
“Daddy and mother think uncle Maurice awfully wrong, and so do I. He’s a real pro-Boer.”
“Well, what are you? Are you only shamming pro-Boer?”
“I’m not a pro-Boer at all. I’m pro-us. I only said I could see their point of view. . . .”
“Oh, you do talk tosh. Point of view. No one but grown-up people uses words like that. Imogen’s getting awfully cocky now Miss Cradock always says her compositions are good. Come and play tig.”
And, since little girls at school are very seldom unkind, they included Imogen in the game and bore no malice.
Irving was no pro-Boer. He wrote home, in the autumn of 1900, “We’re getting on, but we’ve not near finished with brother Boer yet. Maurice is talking through his hat, as usual. Any fool out here knows that if we’re to suck any advantage out of this war (and there’s no small advantage to be sucked, I can tell you) we’ve got to win it. Those Radical gas-bags at home don’t know the first thing about it.”
It is an eternal and familiar dispute, and which side one takes in it really seems to depend more on temperament than on the amount one knows about it.
31
End of Victorianism
The nineteenth century did actually end at last. Probably every one over twelve and under seventy sat up to see it out, to see the twentieth in, to catch that elusive, dramatic moment and savour it.
The twentieth century. Imogen, when she woke on New Year’s Day, could scarcely believe it. It was perhaps, she thought, a drunken dream. For the Carringtons, like all right-thinking persons, always kept Hogmanay in punch. But the twentieth century it was, and a clear frosty
morning. Imogen shouted to Nancy, lying in intoxicated slumbers in the other bed, “Happy new century,” lest Nancy should say it first, then looked at the new century out of the window. What a jolly century it looked; what a jolly century it was going to be I A hundred happy years. At the end of it she would be 112. A snowy-haired but still active old lady, living in a white house on a South Sea island, bathing every morning (but not too early), and then getting back into bed and eating her breakfast of mangoes, bread-fruit, delicious home-grown coffee, and honey. Then a little roller skating on the shining parquet floor of the hall; a lovely hall, hung with the trophies of her bow—reindeer, sand-bok, polar bear, grizzly, lion, tiger, cheetah, wombat and wolf. No birds. Shooting birds was no fun. Imogen knew, for she had shot her first and only sparrow last week, with her new catapult. The boys had been delighted, but she had nearly cried. It had been beastly. Hereafter she meant only to use the catapult on cows, brothers and sisters, and still life. That old lady of the year 2000 should only have one bird to her score.
The question was, what to do till getting-up time. Wake Nancy—but this was next to impossible. Nancy was a remarkably fast sleeper. One might go and try to wake the boys, and get them to come out catapulting in the garden, or roller skating in the square. Or one might snuggle down in bed again and read Treasure Island. Or not read, but lie and think about the new century; perhaps make a poem about it. Imogen extracted from the pocket of her frock, that hung on a chair, a stubby pencil, a notebook, and a stick of barley sugar. With these she curled up among the bedclothes. Happily she sucked and pondered. Holidays; breakfast time not for ages; Christmas presents with the gloss still on (among them a pair of roller skates, Brassey’s Naval Annual, and a new bow and arrows), and a brand new century to explore. Sing joy, sing joy.
“Roland lay in his bunk,” murmured Imogen, drowsily, “and heard the prow of the ship grinding through icefloes as she pursued her way. Eight bells sounded. With a hideous shock he remembered the events of last night. He put his hand to his head; it was caked with dried blood where the pirates had struck him with the crow-bar. A faint moan of anguish was wrung from his white lips. . . .”
Roland was Imogen, and his adventures had meandered on in serial form in her mind for several months. She had always, ever since she remembered, impersonated some boy or youth as she went about. “Lithe as a panther,” she would murmur within herself, as she climbed a tree, “Wilfred swarmed up the bare trunk. He scanned the horizon. In the distance he saw a puff of smoke, and heard, far away, faint shrieks. ‘Indians,’ he said, ‘at their howwid work. The question for me is, can I warn the settlers in time? If the Redskins catch me, I shall wish I had never been born. No; I will escape now and save myself.’”
It was characteristic of Wilfred, or Roland, or Dennis, or whatever he was at the moment called, that he usually did a cowardly thing at first, then repented and acted like a hero, suffering thereby both the condemnation of his friends for his cowardice and the tortures of his foes for his courage. He was a rather morbid youth, who enjoyed repentance and heroic amendment; no simple, stalwart soul. Usually he was in the navy.
Thus, in idle, barley-sugared dreamings, this representative of the young generation began the new century.
“What,” mused her grandfather, watching from his bed the winter morning grow, “will the new age be?”
“Much like the old ages, I shouldn’t wonder,” Mrs. Garden murmured, drowsily. “People and things stay much the same . . . much the same. . . .”
“The eternal wheel,” papa speculated, still adhering to his latest faith, but with a note of question. “The eternal, turning wheel. I wonder . . .”
But what mamma wondered, catching the familiar note of doubt in his voice, was where the eternal, turning wheel would next land papa.
“What a world we’ll make it, won’t we, my son and daughter,” Stanley hopefully exclaimed to her children as they rioted about her room. “What a century we’ll have! It belongs to the people of your age, you know. You’ve got to see it’s a good one. . . . Now take yourselves off and let me get up. Run and turn on the cold tap for me, and put the warm at a trickle.”
Stanley whistled as she dressed.
“Yet another century,” her sister Rome commented, with languid amusement, as her early tea was brought to her. “How many we have, to be sure! I wonder if, perhaps, it is not even too many?”
“Maurice” shrilly called Maurice’s wife, entering his room at nine o’clock. “Well, I declare!”
Maurice lay heavily sleeping, and whisky exhaled from his breath. He had come home at three o’clock this morning.
“A nice way to begin the new year,” said Amy; she did not say “new century,” because she was of those who could not see but that the century had been new in 1900. She shook her husband’s shoulder, looking down with distaste at his thin, sharp-featured, sleeping face, its usual pallor heavily flushed.
“A nice example to the children. And you always writing rubbish about social reform. . . . You make me sick.”
“Go away,” said Maurice, half opening hot eyes. “Le’ me alone. My head’s bad. . . .”
“So I should imagine,” said Amy. “I’m sick and tired of you, Maurice.”
“Go away, then. Right away. We’d both be happier. Why don’t you?”
“Oh, I dare say I’m old-fashioned,” said Amy. “I was brought up to think a wife’s place was with her husband. Of course, I’m probably wrong. I’m always surprised you don’t leave me, feeling as you do.”
Maurice, waking a little more, surveyed her with morose, heavy, aching eyes, and moistened his dry lips.
“You’re not surprised. You know it’s because of the children. It’s my job to see they grow up decently, with decent ideas and a chance.”
At that Amy’s mirth overcame her.
“Decent ideas! You’re a nice educator of children, aren’t you? Look at yourself lying there. . . .”
She pointed to the looking-glass opposite his bed.
“Get out, please,” said Maurice, coldly. “I’ve got to write my leader.”
Meanwhile, the most august representative of the Victorian age wavered wearily between her own century and this strange new one, peering blindly down the coming road as into a grave. It did not belong to her, the new century. She had had her day. A few days of the new young era, and she would slip into the night, giving place to the rough young forces knocking at the door.
The great Victorian century was dead.
Part III Edwardian
1
Discursive
The Edwardians were, as we now think, a brief generation to themselves, set between Victorianism and neo-Georgianism (it is a pity that we should have no better name for the present reign, for “Georgian” belongs by right to a period quite other, royalty having ever been sadly unimaginative in its choice of Christian names). Set between the nineteenth century and the full swing of the twentieth, those brief ten years we call Edwardian seem now like a short spring day. They were a gay and yet an earnest time. A time of social reform on the one hand, and social brilliance on the other. The hey-day at once of intellectual Fabianism and of extravagant dissipation. The hour of the repertory theatres, the Irish players, Bernard Shaw and Granville Barker at the Court, Miss Horniman in the provinces, absurd musical comedies that bloomed like gay flowers of a day and died. The onrush of motor-cars and the decline of bicycles and the horse; extravagant country house parties at which royalty consented to be entertained, with royal bonhomie and royal exactions of etiquette. . . . “Mr. Blank, have we not seen that suit rather often before?” “Lady Dash, surely we remember this wall-paper. . . .” “Lord Somebody, this is a very abominable dinner. . . .” What standards to live up to! There was nothing dowdy about our King Edward. He set the stakes high, and all who could afford it played. Pageants and processions passed in regal splendour. Money nobly flowed. Ideals changed. The sanctity and domesticity of the Heim was no more a royal fetish. “Respectabil
ity,” that good old word, degraded and ill-used for so long, sank into discredit, sank lower in the social scale. No more were unfortunate ladies who had had marital troubles coldly banned from court, for a larger charity (except as to suits, dinners, and wall-papers) obtained. Victorian sternness, Victorian prudery and intolerance, still prevailed among some of the older aristocracy, among many of the smaller squirearchy, the professional classes, and the petty bourgeoisie; but among most of the wealthy, most of the titled, most of the gay and extravagant classes, a wider liberty grew.
In the intervals of social pleasures, Edward the Peacemaker was busy about the Balanc3 of Power in Europe. He did not care about his cousin Wilhelm. He made an Entente with France, and came to an understanding with Russia, so that when the Trouble should come—and experienced royalty knows that, from time to time, the Trouble is bound to come—we should not meet it singly. The weak point about ententes is that when the Trouble comes to one’s fellow-members, they do not meet it singly either. Considering this, and considering also the annoyance and alarm they inspire in those not in them, and taking them all round, ententes seem, on the whole, a pity. But at the time English people were pleased with this one, and Edward was hopefully called the Peacemaker, just as Victoria had been called Good, and Elizabeth Virgin, and Mary Bloody. We love to name our royalties, and we much prefer to name them kindly. Mary must have been, and doubtless was, very bloody indeed before her people bestowed on her that opprobrious title. Other sovereigns—most other sovereigns—have been pretty bloody too, but none of them bloody enough to be so called.
A queer time! Perhaps a transition time; for that matter, this is one of the things times always are. The world of fashion, led by an elderly royal gentleman bred at the Victorian court of his mother, and retaining queer Victorian traditions that younger gentlemen and ladies did not observe. King Edward, for instance, observed Sunday with some strictness. He thought it right; he felt it should be done. The British Sunday was an institution, and King Edward was all for institutions. A generation was growing up, had already grown up, who did not understand about Sunday in that sense. But you may observe about elderly Victorian persons that, however loosely they may sit to Sunday, they usually have a sense of it. They play or work on it consciously, with a feeling that they are breaking a foolish rule, possibly offending an imaginary public opinion. They seldom quite realise that the rule and the opinion they are thinking of are nearly obsolete. They seldom regard Sunday (with reference to the occupations practised on it) precisely as if it were a weekday. Institutions die hard. They linger long after their informing spirit has died.
Told by an Idiot Page 16
