“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, 1200 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 the streets 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 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 whose Besotted Pride had caused to flow for three years so much Gold and Tears and Blood (as they called him in the French Press) 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. “Fought for my country,” ran their sad, proud legends about themselves, “and am now starving. Have a wife and nine 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 motorcars, a gray 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 matter much,” 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 to forget is that Victorian parents were like any other parents in being individuals first, and that 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 b
ut 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 for 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! Oh, 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 anæsthetic; 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 long 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 inquirers. 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 and 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.”
11
The Happy Liberals
1905 was a year of great happiness, intelligence and virtue for the Liberal party in the State. It was to be their last happy, intelligent, or virtuous year for many a long day; indeed, they have not as yet known another, for such a gracious state is only possible to oppositions, and the next time that the Liberals were the Opposition it was too late, for by then oppositions were, like other persons, too tired, war-spoilt, disillusioned and dispirited to practise anything but an unidealistic and unhopeful nagging. But in 1905, with the Tories executing, to the satisfaction of their opponents, the ungracious task of performance, which is, one may roughly say, never a success, the Liberals were very jolly, united, optimistic, and full of energy and plans. What would they not do when they should come, in their turn, into power? What Tory iniquities were there not for them now to oppose, for them in that rosy future to reverse? What Aunt Sallies did not the governing party erect for them to shy at? Chinese Labour, that yellow slavery which was degrading (were that possible) South Africa, the Licensing Act, the Education Act, the Little Loaf, which could be made so pitiable a morsel on posters—against all these they tilted. As to what they would do, once in power, it included the setting of trade again upon its legs, the enriching of the country, the reform of the suffrage, the relief of unemployment, the issue of an education bill which should distress no one. Ardent progressives hoped much from this party; they even hoped, without grounds, for the removal of sex disabilities in the laws relating to the suffrage, which unlikely matter was part of the programme drawn up in 1905 by the National Liberal Federation. Life was very glorious to any party, in those Edwardian days, before it got in. Liberals in opposition were democratic idealists, in office makeshift opportunists, backing out and climbing down.
Stanley Garden, in 1905, was ardent in Liberal hope. She hoped for everything, even for a vote. This sex disability in the matter of votes oppressed her very seriously. She saw no sense or reason in it, and resented the way the question, whenever it was raised in Parliament, was treated as a joke, like mothers-in-law, or drunkenness, or twins. Were women really a funny topic? Or rather, were they funnier than men? And if so, why? In vain her female sense of humour sought to probe this subject, but no female sense of humour, however acute, has ever done so. Women may and often do regard all humanity as a joke, good or bad, but they can seldom see that they themselves are more
of a joke than men, or that the fact of their wanting rights as citizens is more amusing than men wanting similar rights. They can no more see it than they can see that they are touching, or that it is more shocking that women should be killed than that men should, which men see so plainly. Women, in fact, cannot see why they should not be treated like other persons. Stanley could not see it. To her the denial of representation in the governing body of her country on grounds of sex was not so much an injustice as a piece of inexplicable lunacy, as if all persons measuring, say, below five foot eight, had been denied votes. She saw no more to it than that, in spite of all the anti-suffrage speakers whom she heard say very much more. She became embittered on this subject, with a touch of the feminist bitterness that marked many of the early strugglers for votes. She admitted that men were, taking them in the main, considerably the wiser, the more capable and the more intelligent sex; that is to say that, though most people were ignorant fools, there were even more numerous and more ignorant fools among women than among men; but there it was, and there was no reason why the female fools should have less say than the male fools as to which of the other fools represented their interests in Parliament, and what measures were passed affecting their foolish lives. No; on the face of it it was lunatic and irrational, and no excuse was possible, and that was that.
It certainly was, Rome agreed, but then, in a lunatic and irrational world, was any one extra piece of lunacy worth a fuss? Was, in fact, anything worth a fuss? In the answer to these questions, the sisters fundamentally differed, for Stanley believed very many things to be worth a fuss, and made it accordingly. She was busy now making fusses from most mornings to most evenings, sitting on committees for the improvement of the world, even of the Congo, and so forth. She was what is called a useful and public-spirited woman. Rome, on the other hand, grew with the years more and more the dilettante idler. At forty-six she found very few things worth bothering about. She strolled, drove, or motored round the town, erect, slim, and debonair, increasingly distinguished as gray streaked her fair hair and time chiselled delicate lines in her fine clear skin. Rome cared neither for the happy Liberals nor for the unhappy Tories; she regarded both parties as equally undistinguished.
Told by an Idiot Page 19
