But these were grown men. Splendid men. Lucky men, for they would soon be roving the veldt with guns and bayonets under the African sun; they would lurk in ambush behind kopjes and arise and slay their brother Boer, the canting, bearded foe, with great slaughter. Even if they did never come back, how could man die better?
The crowd swayed and shoved, lifting the children from their feet. Imogen’s chest was crushed against the back in front of her; she fought for breath. There was an acrid, musty smell; the raw air was close with breathing.
A crowd is queer. A number of individuals gather together for one purpose, and you get not a number of individuals, but a crowd. It is like a new, strange animal, sub-human. It may do anything. Go crazy with panic, or rage, or excitement, or delight. Now it was enthusiasm that gripped and swayed it, and caused it to shout and sing. Songs rippled over it, starting somewhere, caught from mouth to mouth.
“Cook’s son, duke’s son, son of a belted earl . . .
Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay . . .”
And then again the constant chorus, “God bless you, Tommy Atkins, here’s your country’s love to you!”
It was over at last. The heroes had gone. The
crowd broke and pushed out from the station gates, flooding the choked yellow streets.
“There’s our bus,” said Phyllis, a good organiser. “Come on. Stick together.”
They besieged and rushed the bus as troops rush a fort. Being vigorous and athletic children, they stormed it successfully.
“We shall catch it from mother,” said Phyllis, now that they had leisure to look ahead. “But it’s been worth it.”
The sad, disappointing, disillusioning, silly war crawled through that bitter winter of defeat, until, by sheer force of numbers, the undefeatable Boers were a little checked in the spring of 1900.
Life was disappointing. Imogen, along with many others, thought and hoped that 1900 would be a new century. It was not a new century. There was quite a case for its being so. When you turned twelve, you began your thirteenth year. When you had counted up to 100 you had completed that hundred and were good for the next. It all depended on whether you numbered the completion of a year from the first day when you began saying 1900, or not till its last day, when you stopped saying it. The Astronomer Royal adjudicated that it was on its last day, and that they had, in fact, said 1900 prematurely, saying it before the last second of December the 31st. He may have been right. He probably was right. But the disappointment of the young, to whom a year is very long, its end hidden in mists, like mountain tops which you perhaps shall never reach,—the disappointment
of the young at the opening of the year 1900 was very great.
“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.
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.
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.