Did these lie? Or were they deceived? Imogen, pondering these apparently so confused minds in her own, which was more approximately accurate (for she would deceive others, but could not easily deceive herself) could not decide.
On Sundays the early Georgians used to go from London in trains, getting out somewhere in Surrey, Sussex, Bucks or Herts, to walk in muddy lanes or over blown downs, or through dim, green-gray beechwoods or fragrant forests of pine. It is pleasanter to walk alone, or with one companion, or even two, but sometimes, unfortunately, one walks (and so did the early Georgians) in large groups, or parties of pleasure. Imogen found that she occasionally did this, for it was among the minor bad habits of her set. It did not greatly matter, and these strange processions could not really spoil the country, even though they did
very greatly talk. How they talked! Books, politics, personal gossip, good jokes and bad, acrostics, stories, discussions—with these the paths and fields they traversed echoed. But Imogen, like a lower animal, felt stupid and happy and alone, and rooted about the ditches for violets and the hedges for nests, and smelt at the moss in the woods, and broke off branches to carry home. To herself she would hum a little tune, some phrase of music over and over again, and sometimes words would be born in her and sing together like stars of the morning. But for the most part, she only rooted about like a cheerful puppy, alive with sensuous joy. Her companions she loved and admired, but could not emulate, for they were wise about things she knew not of. Even about the flora and fauna of the countryside they really knew more than she, who could only take in them an ignorant and animal pleasure. She had long since guessed herself to be an imbecile, and, with the imbecile’s cunning, tried to hide it from others. What if suddenly every one were to find out, discover that she was an imbecile, with a quite vacant, unhinged mind? If these informed, educated, sophisticated people should discover that, they would dismiss her from their ken; she would no more be their friend. She would be cast out, left to root about alone in the ditches, like a shameless, naked, heathen savage.
As she thought about this, some one would come and walk by her side and talk, and she would pull herself together and pretend to be passably intelligent, albeit she was really drunk with the soft spring wind and the earthy smell of the wood.
Imogen loved lightly and slightly, her heart not being much in that business. Life was full of stimulating contacts. She admired readily, and liked, was interested, charmed and entertained. Men and women passed to and fro on her stage, delightful, witty, graceful, brilliant, even good, and found favour in her eyes. Poets, politicians and priests, journalists and jesters, artists and writers, scholars and social reformers, lovely matrons, witty maids, and cheerful military men, toilers, spinsters, and lilies of the field—a pleasant, various crowd, they walked and worked and talked. So many people were alluring, so many tedious, so many tiresome. One could, unless one was careless, evade the tedious and the tiresome. But supposing that one had been very careless, and had married one of them? What a shocking entanglement life might then become! How monstrously jarring and fatiguing would be the home!
“Whether one marries or remains celibate,” Imogen reflected, in her pedantic, deliberating way, “that is immaterial. Both have advantages. But to marry one of the right people, if at all, is of the greatest consequence for a happy life. People do not always think intelligently enough on this important subject. Too often they appear to act on impulse, or from some inadequate motive. And the results are as we see.” For she was seeing at the moment several ill-mated couples of her acquaintance, some of whom made the best of it, others the worst. Many sought and found affinities elsewhere, for affinities they must (or so they believed) have. Others, renouncing affinity as a
baseless dream, wisely accepted less of life than that, and lived in disillusioned amenity with their spouses.
An amazing number of marriages came, on the other hand, off, and these were a pleasant sight to see. To come home every evening to the companion you preferred and who preferred you—that would be all right. (Only there might be babies, and that would be all wrong, because they would want bathing or something just when you were busy with something else.) Or to come home to no one; or (better still) not to come home at all. So many habits of life were enjoyable, but not that of perpetual unsuitable companionship.
Thus Imogen reflected and philosophised on this great topic of marriage and of love, which did not, however, really interest her so much as most other topics, for she regarded it as a little primitive, a little elementary, lacking in the more entertaining complexities of thought. Metaphysics, poetry, psychology and geography made to her a stronger intellectual appeal; the non-emotional functionings of the dwellers on this planet she found more amusing, and the face of the planet itself more beautiful.
Nevertheless, to be a little in love is fun, and makes enchantment of the days. A little in love, a little taste of that hot, blinding cup—but only enough to stimulate, not to blind. One is so often a little in love. . . .
Billy left Oxford with his pass. His Liberal cousin accepted him, having it on the authority of Stanley, whom he greatly regarded, that Billy had the makings of a good secretary. Billy denied this, and said he
would prefer to be a veterinary surgeon, or else to farm in a colony. But his mother had decided that he was to be political. Political. He thought he saw himself. . . . And anyhow, where was the sense of politics? A jolly old mess the politicians made of things, and always had. . . . Somehow politics didn’t seem a real thing, like vetting or farming. There was so much poppycock mixed up with it. . . .
But there it was. His mother must have her way. He supposed it would be a shame to disappoint her. Molly wouldn’t look at politics, and one of them must. So in October he was to begin looking at them. One thing was, Giles Humphries probably wouldn’t keep him long; he’d soon see through him. . . .
“Doesn’t make much odds, anyhow,” he reflected, gloomily. “One damn silly job or another. Mother’ll never let me do what I want. ’Tisn’t good enough for her. I wish people wouldn’t
want
things for one: wish they’d let one alone. Being let alone . . . that’s the thing.”
Rome said to Stanley, “You’ll never make a politician of that boy. Why try?”
“He’s too young to say that about yet, Rome. I
should
like to see him doing some work for his country. . . .”
“They don’t do that, my dear. You’ve been misinformed. I thought you went to the House sometimes. . . . Really, Stan, I can’t imagine why you should try to turn Billy, who’d be some use in the world as an animals’ doctor, or a tiller of the soil, or, I dare say, as a number of other things, into anything so futile and so useless and so singularly unsuited both to his talents and to his honest nature as a politician. I suppose you’ll make him stand for Parliament eventually. Well, he’ll quite likely get in. People will elect any one. But he’d only be bored and stupid and
wretched there. He’s got no gift of the gab, for one thing. You let the child do what he wants.”
“I’m not forcing him. He knows he is free.”
“He knows nothing of the sort. He knows you’ve set your heart on this, and he doesn’t want to vex you. Really, you mothers. . . .”
So Billy, in the autumn of 1913, became the inefficient secretary of his kind, inefficient, Liberal cousin, who was, however, no more inefficient than his fellow-members of Parliament.
Those were inefficient years; silly years, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They were not much sillier than usual, but there was rather more sound and fury than had been customary of late. It was made by militant suffragists, who smashed public property and burned private houses with an ever more ardent abandon; by Welsh churchmen, who marched through London declaring that on no account would they have their Church either disestablished or disendowed; by dock and transport strikers, who had a great outbreak of indomitability and determination in 1911, and another in 1912; by Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act, which caused much gnashing of teeth, foaming of mouths and flashing of eyes; by Liberals and Conservatives, who, for some reason, suddenly for a time abandoned that sporting good humour which has always made English political life what it is, a thing some like and others scorn, and took on to dislike each other, even leaving dinner parties to which members of the opposition party had been carelessly
invited; and by the men of Ulster, who, being convinced in their consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster, covenanted to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland, and, to this end, got a quite good conspiracy going themselves. There was also, it need hardly be said, plenty of sound and fury on the Continent, particularly in the Balkans.
They make, these years, a noisy, silly, rowdy, but on the whole cheery chapter of the idiot’s tale. Howbeit, they were less noisy and less silly, and far more cheery, than the chapter which was to follow.
Just before this chapter began, papa died. Afterwards they said, it is a mercy papa is dead; that he died before the smash that would so have shattered him. Papa, gentle and sensitive and eighty-four, could scarcely have endured the great war. Down what fresh avenues of faith it would have sent his still adventurous soul exploring, seeking strength and refuge from the nightmare, would never be known. He died in May, 1914. He died as he had lived, a great and wide believer, still murmuring, “I believe . . . I believe . . . I believe . . .” a credulous, faithful, comprehensive, happy Georgian. He had moments when agnosticism or scepticism was the dominant creed in his soul, but they were only moments; soon the tide of his many faiths would surge over him again, and in all these he died.
“Dear papa,” said Vicky, weeping. “To think that he is with mamma at last! And to think that now he
knows
what is true. . . . Oh dear, how will he ever get on without all those speculations and new beliefs? One knows, of course, that he is happy, darling papa . . . but will he find it at all
same
?”
Rome said, “Why? Taking your hypothesis, that there is another life, why should it be supposed to be a
revelation of the truth about the universe, or about God? Why should not papa go on speculating and guessing at truth, trying new faiths? You people who believe in what you call heaven seem to have no justification for making it out such an informed place.”
“Oh, my dear; aren’t we told that all shadows shall flee away, and that we shall
know
? I’m sure we are, somewhere, only you won’t read the Bible ever.”
“On the contrary, I read the Bible a good deal. I find it enormously interesting. But the one thing we can be quite sure about all those who wrote it is that they had no information at all as to what would occur to them after their deaths. That is among the very large quantity of information that no one alive has ever yet had. So, if you think of papa in heaven, why not think of him in the state in which he would certainly be happiest and most himself—still exploring for truth? Why should death bring a sudden knowledge of all the secrets of the universe? You believers make so many and such large and such unwarrantable assumptions.”
‘My dear, we must make assumptions, or how get through life at all?”
“Very true. How indeed? One must make a million unwarrantable assumptions, such as that the sun will rise to-morrow, and that the attraction of the earth for our feet will for a time persist, and that if we do certain things to our bodies they will cease to function, and that if we get into a train it will probably carry us along, and so forth. One must assume these things just enough to take action on them, or, as you say, we couldn’t get through life at all. But those are hypothetical, pragmatical assumptions, for the purposes of action; there is no call actually to believe them,
intellectually. And still less call to increase their number, and carry assumption into spheres where it doesn’t help us to action at all. For my part, I assume practically a great deal, intellectually nothing.”
Vicky was going through her engagement book, seeing what she would have to cancel because of papa’s death, and all she answered was, absently, “Dear papa!”
The so bitter, so recent, so familiar, so agonising tale of the four years and a quarter between August, 1914, and November, 1918, has been told and re-told too often, and will not be told in detail here. It is enough, if not too much, to say that there was a great and dreadful war in Europe, and that nightmare and chaos and the abomination of desolation held sway for four horrid years. All there was of civilisation—whatever we mean by that unsatisfactory, undefined, relative word—suffered irretrievable damage. All there was of greed, of cruelty, of barbarism, of folly, incompetence, meanness, valour, heroism, selfishness, littleness, self-sacrifice and hate, rose to the call in each belligerent country and showed itself for what it was. Men and women acted blindly, according to their kind. They used the torments of others as stepping stones to prosperity or fame; they endured torments themselves, with complaining, with courage, or with both; they did work they held to be useful, and got out of it what credit and profit they could; or work they knew was folly, and still got out of it what they could. They went to the war, they stayed at home, they scrambled for jobs among the chaos, they got rich, they got poor, they died, were maimed, medalled, frost-bitten, tortured, imprisoned, bored, embittered, enthusiastic, cheerful, hopeless, patient, or matter-of-fact, according
to circumstances and temperament. Many people said a great deal, others very little. There were all manner of different attitudes and ways of procedure with regard to the war. To some it was a necessary or unnecessary hell, to some a painful and tedious affair enough, but with interests and alleviations and a good goal in sight; to some an adventure; to some (at home) a satisfactory sphere for work they enjoyed; to some a holy war; to others a devil’s dance in which they would take no part, or which they wearily did what they could to alleviate, or in which they joined with cynical and conscious resolve not to be left out of whatever profits might accrue.