SIBYL.
Roger spent the remainder of 1909 as he had planned: looking after his boys and girls to some extent, trying to get interested in his children. The girls bored him with their chatter of surface things: school quarrels and rivalries, school friendships, school mistresses; their individual tastes in chocolate creams and caramels; their school sports; the actors whom they adored—at a distance—and whose photographs they collected; their disdain for those silly asses the Suffragettes—they themselves would never want a vote! The two boys were not much less shallow with their Sandhurst and school-boy slang—"top-hole, sir," "ripping," "ruddy," "rotters," "we rotted 'em a bit"—their school-boy games of such vast importance; their dislike of anything sincere, original, warm-hearted; their rash criticisms of great writers, frantic admiration for great sportsmen, religious reverence for cut and colour, style and form; enthusiasm in general for things that did not matter and contempt for things that did.
Was he like that at their age? Had Sibyl the elder at sixteen been such a goose as Sibyl the younger? Was it the hollow falsity of a classical education, the dreary sham of School Christianity which had made his boys so cynical, so coarse in their tastes? His children were good to look at, handsome, healthy, physically well-bred. But weren't they—weren't their contemporaries a bit heartless? These in particular had forgotten their mother completely. Yet surely they might have remembered Lucy's unceasing tenderness and the many sacrifices of health and convenience she had made for them?
In the press of that day and in the books and plays most in vogue you were supposed to make everything give way to the pleasures, needs, caprices, expectations of the young, of the coming generation. But why had no author the courage to point out the lack of interest which youth under twenty-one possessed for most persons of matured mind? Girls of eighteen wrote novels entirely without experience and direct observation of life, merely based on their wishy-washy recollections of books written by "grown-ups"; boys of eighteen published sardonic poems and green-cheese essays for which they ought to have been birched, not boomed. How infinitely preferable to Roger, when he put his secret thoughts into words, was the society of middle-aged friends and relations of his own period in life, who really had brain convolutions moulded by sad and joyous, sharp and unusual experience.
Aunt Maud said there was something evidently very wrong with his liver, and his sons and daughters in an interchange of eye-glances gave a tacit assent. They had felt (though they had never dared to say so in his hearing) a tiny bit ashamed of their ineffective mother. Wasn't it rather infra dig. to have been a school-teacher and a missionary? But of their father they all stood in awe, because he was considered in his time a handsome man, was now of distinguished appearance, and was respected in the best circles as an explorer, a big-game shot, a naturalist, and a man who had made some part of Africa pay. But if he stooped to their level and attempted to justify this eminence by talking technically on African subjects or on home problems they soon showed they thought him a bore.
Aunt Sibyl they spoke of warmly, and wailed over the illness which kept her absent from their circle. She was their ideal of a modern great lady. Her cynical speeches appealed to their own lack of convictions; there was nothing "soppy" about Aunt Sibyl.
So Roger escaped whenever he could from his home circle and travelled in Germany, France, Holland, Italy, in order to study the game of foreign politics, find out why in most people's light-hearted opinion a great war was "inevitable" as a solution of conflicting ambitions, and whether it might not be possible to avert it completely if only Britain, Germany, the United States and France could form a League for the maintenance of peace.
The Schräders made much of him in Germany. Rather timidly they stood up against Potsdam, tried to create an opinion in the South German States—their Alsatian origin carried them in that direction—favourable to a Naval and Colonial understanding with Britain. At their instigation Roger gave a series of addresses in western and southern Germany in 1910 which were deemed a great success, though they were rather frowned on in Berlin. He promised to renew his visit and his lectures in the autumn of 1911.
Meanwhile, Sibyl had returned to London in the early autumn of 1910. It was of course the dead season, but it gradually dawned on Society that she intended to entertain no more. She was probably going to write a book about the British Empire; she had turned quite serious, others said, and was going in for religion. She had evidently lost her health and—no doubt—her appearance.
Roger had hastened to greet her in the much shut-up house in Carlton House Terrace. Here she sat, generally with her back to the light. He was prepared to find her greatly altered. What struck him most was the pathetic thinness of face and hands, and the shapelessness of the figure. The new fashions in dress—straight up and down, no waist, one of the greatest revolutions of our age—helped her here, but at the expense of womanly charm. For Roger had the old-fashioned man-mind which has for some twenty thousand years—did it not begin in Aurignacian times?—admired the incurve below the well-furnished female bust and the outcurve from waist to hip.