PART II FIN-DE-SIÈCLE (continued 3)

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! Are you a pro-Boer? I say, Imogen Carrington’s a pro-Boer.” “Your uncle was ducked in Trafalgar Square, wasn’t he?” said someone 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’re 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 everyone 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 Hogmanny 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! 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 2,000 should have only 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 note-book 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 and 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, “and heard the prow of the ship grinding through ice-floes as she pursued her way. Eight bells sounded. With a hijous 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 crowbar. 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, “Wilfrid 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 Wilfrid, 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 whiskey 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 daresay 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.