But papa’s mind had turned inward, upon his own torn soul. Mamma watched him with experienced anxiety. She knew the signs, and feared that the Mother of the Churches would not for long hold papa in her firm arms. Dear Aubrey; he was so restless. And he had lately been reading a lot of odd, mystic books. . . .
It was very certain that Stanley would not join the Roman Church. She had too mystic an imagination to enter any body so definite and sharp of doctrine. She was more at one at this time with the Celtic poets, with their opening of strange gates onto dim, magic lands. The loveliness, like the wavering, lovely rhythms of the sea, of W. B. Yeats, took her, as it took her whole generation, by storm; the tired twilight sadness of Fiona Macleod was balm to her.
“O years with tears, and tears through weary years,
How weary I, who in your arms have lain:
Now I am tired: the sound of slipping spears
Moves soft, and tears fall in a bloody rain,
And the chill footless years go over me, who am
slain.
I hear, as in a wood dim with old light, the rain
Slow falling; old, old weary human tears,
And in the deepening dusk my comfort is my
pain,
Sole comfort left of all my hopes and fears,
Pain that alone survives, gaunt hound of the
shadowy years.”
And,
“Between the gray pastures and the dark wood
A valley of white poppies is lit by the low
moon.
It is the grave of dreams, a holy rood.
It is quiet there: no wind doth ever fall.
Long, long ago a wind sang once a heart-sweet
rune.
Now the white poppies grow, silent and tall.
A white bird floats there like a drifting leaf:
It feeds upon faint sweet hopes and perishing
dreams,
And the still breath of unremembering grief.
And as a silent leaf the white bird passes,
Winnowing the dusk by dim, forgetful streams.
I am alone now among the silent grasses.”
In such soft and melancholy enchantment as this, Stanley’s desolation found, for a time, comfort.
(Vicky’s Imogen, aged seven, found this book at her grandparents’ house one day, opened it, read, breathing noisily for excitement, and tucked it furtively away in the pouch of her sailor frock, where she often kept rabbits, or eggs for hatching. She bore it home undiscovered, and spent the evening lying on her stomach and elbows beneath the nursery table reading it, with moving lips and fingers in her ears, deaf to the clamour and summons of her brethren, until at last she was haled to bed, hot-cheeked and wet-eyed, silent upon a peak in Darien. She had found a new enchantment; it was better than Mowgli, even. But, since she was not really a dishonest little girl, when next she went to Bloomsbury Square she slipped the book unobtrusively back into the shelf from which she had stolen it, and took
The Manxman
instead, thinking, with the fatuity of her years, to find that it concerned a tailless cat; but with regard to this book she was disappointed, and unable to agree with Mr. Gosse).
Strange books and pamphlets littered papa’s study table. He met and dined with Mr. George Russell (the Irish poet, not the English churchman). He admired and liked Mr. Russell so much that for his sake he attended the lectures of Madame Blavatsky, and perused the works of Colonel Olcott, Mr. W. Q. Judge, and Mrs. Besant. A feeling of expansion took him, as if the bonds of rigid orthodoxy, which had restrained him for the last nine years, were being forced asunder. . . . It was, with papa, the eternally recurrent springtime of his soul’s re-birth; he was in travail with a new set of ideas, and their pressure rent him cruelly. Then one day, “I have seen his star in the east,” cried papa, and became a Theosophist.
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.
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.
’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 development.”
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—