Told by an Idiot Page 2

  Maurice on the Liberty sofa snorted suddenly over what he was reading, and mamma smiled at him. The dear, perverse, violent boy! He was always disagreeing with every one. Mamma’s eyes rested gently on her son’s small, alert head, with its ruffled top locks of light, straight hair, like a cock canary’s crest, its sharp, long chin and straight, thin lips. Maurice was like mamma’s brothers had been, in the fifties, only they had worn peg-top trousers and long, fair whiskers that stood out like fans. Maurice wore glasses, and looked pale, as if he had read too much; not like young Irving, sprawling in an easy chair with The Moonstone, beautiful and dark and pleased. Nor like Stanley, who, though she read and thought and often talked cleverly like a book, had high spirits and was full of fun. Little Stanley, with her round, childish face above the white niching, her big forehead and blunt little nose, and deep, ardent, grave blue eyes. What a child she was for enthusiasms and ideas and headlong plans I And her talk about platonic friendships and women’s rights and social revolution and bringing beauty into common life. The New Girl. If Vicky was one kind of New Girl (which may be doubted), Stanley was another, even newer. . . . There shot into mamma’s mind, not for the first time, a question—had girls always been new? She remembered in her own youth the older people talking about the New Girl, the New Woman. Were girls and women really always newer than boys and men, or was it only that people noticed it more, and said more about it? Elderly people wrote to the papers about it. “The Girl of the Period,” in the Saturday Review—fast, painted, scanty of dress (where are our fair, demure English girls gone?) with veils less concealing than provocative. . . . What, Mrs. Garden wondered, was a provocative veil? The New Young Woman. Bold, fast, blue-stockinged, self-indulgent, unchaperoned, advanced, undomesticated, reading and talking about things of which their mothers had never, before marriage, heard—in brief, NEW. (To know all that the mid-Victorians said about modern girls, and, indeed, about modern youth of both sexes, you have only to read certain novelists and journalists of the nineteen twenties, who are saying the same things to-day about what they call the Young Generation.) Had Adam and Eve, Mrs. Garden wondered, commented thus on their daughters—or, more likely, on their daughters-in-law? (According to Mrs. Garden’s papa, these had been the same young women, but in the late seventies one wasn’t, fortunately, obliged to believe the worst immoralities of the Old Testament.)

  “Youth,” it was said at this period, as at other periods before and since, “youth in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has broken with tradition. It is no longer willing to accept forms and formulæ only on account of their age,” (at what stage in history youth ever did this is never explained). “It has set out on a voyage of inquiry, and, finding some things which are doubtful and others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of experience more in harmony with the realities of life and knowledge.” (These are the actual words of a writer of the nineteen twenties, but they were used, in effect, also in the eighteen seventies and many other decades.)

  And had the young, both men and women, always believed that they alone could save the world, that the last generation, the elderly people, were no good, were, in fact, responsible for the unfortunate state in which the world had always up to now been, and that it was for the young to usher in the New Day? Well, no doubt they were right. The only hitch seemed to be that the young people always seemed to get elderly before they had had time to bring in the New Day, and then they were no good any more, and the next generation had to take on the job, and still the New Day coyly refused to be ushered in. Except that, of course, in a sense, each day was a new one. But not, alas, much of an improvement on the day before.

  “These troubled times. . . .” Had there ever been, would there ever be, a day when the newspapers said, “In these quiet and happy times?” Stanley, inspired by Mr. William Morris, was sure of it. The millenium was just round the corner, struggling in the womb of time, only it needed workers, workers, and again workers, to deliver it safely. Some lecturer under whom Stanley had sat had put it like that, and she had repeated it to her mother. Well, of course, in these days . . . the New Girl, being so new and so free, could use such metaphors. In the fifties you couldn’t; unmarried girls couldn’t, anyhow. Stanley had, indeed, coloured a little when she had said it. Stanley was not only unmarried, but declared that she never would be married, there was too much to be done (which was a way some young women were talking just then). She was going, after Oxford, to work in a settlement, and teach people weaving, dyeing and beauty, after learning them herself at the Morris workshops. It was all very nice, but mamma would rather Stanley had a husband and babies. (Mammas, it may be observed in passing, differ from other women in being very seldom new.)

  Then mamma’s eyes rested on her chubby, beautiful baby, Una, lolling on the hearthrug, one light brown pigtail over each shoulder, reading, with calm and lovely blue eyes, some dreadful rubbish in the Boy’s Own Paper, her cheek bulged out with a lump of toffee. A nice, good, placid child of fifteen, who never thought, never read anything but tosh, talked in slang, and took life as it came, cheerful, unquestioning and serene. Una was the least clever and the best balanced of the Gardens. She was going, when she was older, to look rather like the Sistine Madonna.

  How unlike her happy, handsome solidity was to Rome! Rome lay back on her couch, her face like a clear white cameo against deep blue cushions, the lamplight shining on her fair, silky curls, cut short in one of the manners of the day. Rome’s thin lips twisted easily into pain and laughter; her jade-green eyes mocked and watched. “I’m afraid of your sister. She looks as if she was going to put us all into a book,” people would sometimes say to the others of her. But Rome never wrote about anything or any one; it was not worth while.

  3

  Sisters in the Garden

  Maurice threw down the second serial part of Theophrastus Such, which had just come out.

  “The woman’s going all to pieces,” he said, in his crisp, quick, disgusted voice. “Sermonising and tosh. . . . The fact is,” said Maurice, “the fact is, the novel, anyhow in this country, has had its day. Except for the unpretending thrillers. We should give it a rest. The poets still have things to say and are saying them (though not so well as they used to; their palmy days are over, too) but not the novelists. . . .”

  Vicky, to drown his discourse, began to sing loud and clear:

  “When I was a young maid, a young maid, a young maid . . .”

  “Of course she’s old,” went on Maurice, referring to Mary Anne Evans. “And she’s been spoilt. She’s not a teacher, she’s a novelist. Or she was. Now she’s dropped being a novelist and become merely a preacher. That’s the end of her. I wish to God people would know their job and stick to it. She was a jolly good novelist. . . . Sorry, pater”—Mr. Garden had frowned at the expletive—“but I didn’t think you’d mind—now. I suppose you and I are both agreed, aren’t we, as to the non-existence of a Deity.”

  “All the same, my dear boy . . .”

  All the same (this was Rome’s thought) papa had so recently believed in a Deity, and would, no doubt, so soon again believe in a Deity, that it seemed bad taste to fill the brief interim with vain oaths. Maurice had no reverence at all, and no taste. You would think, as Vicky turned from the piano to say, that, whatever he did or didn’t believe himself, he might remember that some people were not only Christians but Church, and High Church at that. But Maurice only grinned at her. She tweaked his fair crest in passing, and arranged her own glossy chestnut coiffure at the painted looking-glass over the chimney-piece. This Rossetti shape suited her, she thought, better than the high coils of last year.

  The parlourmaid announced the curate, a good-looking, intelligent, cheerful young man, whom they all liked. He had hardly shaken hands when Mr. Garden said to him, “I want a talk with you, Carter,” and took him off to the study, to break it to him about the Ethical Society.

  “Papa might just as well have told him here,” Vicky petulantly said. “It w
ould only have needed a sentence, and then we could have had a jolly evening,”

  “Of course, papa feels he must go into it thoroughly with Mr. Carter,” said mamma. “Poor Mr. Carter will be dreadfully hurt by it, I’m afraid. He has always been so fond of papa, and he has never himself seen any reason for doubt.”

  “There is no reason for doubt,” muttered Vicky, beneath her breath. Then, louder, impatience conquering respect, “What does papa think the Church is for, except to tell us what we can’t know for ourselves about what to believe?”

  Mamma replied, taking up her embroidery, “Papa doesn’t know what the Church is for. That is his great difficulty. And, Vicky, it is not for us, who have studied so much less, to protest . . .”

  “Well,” said Vicky, “I shall go into the garden. It’s a night for men and angels. Come on, Stan.”

  Stanley came, and the sisters paced together, wrapped in shawls, down the gravel path, beneath a deep blue sky full of frosty, twinkling stars and the pale glow which precedes winter moonrise. It was one of those frosty Christmases which our parents (they say) used to have in their youths. Hot summers and frosty winters—that is what they say they used to have: one is not obliged to believe them, but it is a picturesque thought.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Stannie. I shall get married.”

  “Who to, Vicky?”

  “Ah!” Vicky’s long eyes were mysterious in the starlight. “Perhaps I’ve not made up my mind yet; perhaps I have. All I do know is that I’m not going to live round about South Place, Finsbury Pavement, on £400 a year just because papa must needs go to an ethical chapel. I — shall — get — married. And well married, too. Why not? I can, you know, if I want to.”

  “Captain Penrose,” said Stanley.

  “He’s not the only one, my child. There are others. No, I shan’t tell you a word more now. You wait and see. And when I’m married you shall come and stay with me, and meet lots and lots of men.”

  Lots and lots of men. The kind of men who’d be friends with Vicky and Captain Penrose (or whoever else Mr. Vicky might prove to be).

  “I shall be busy, you know,” said Stanley, doubtful and conceited. “I shall have very little spare time, if I take up weaving and dyeing.”

  “Don’t take up weaving and dyeing. It’s shockingly cranky, anyway, all this Morris craze of yours.”

  “All the best things are thought cranky at first.”

  “Don’t you believe it. The new princess dress isn’t. . . . Now mind, I’m saying this for your good, my dear; men won’t look at you if you go about with dyed hands and talk about manual labour and the one-man job and the return of beauty to the home.”

  “Vicky, you’re vulgar. And as I don’t mean to marry, what does it matter if they look at me or not?”

  “Oh, tell that to the marines. . . . I’m getting frozen. Come along in, and we’ll turn the curate’s head, unless papa’s still breaking his heart. . . . You’re a little prig, Stan., that’s your trouble, my child.”

  It was quite true. Stanley was a little prig. She not only read Ruskin and Morris and Karl Marx, but quoted them. There came a day, later on, when she saw through Ruskin, but it is no use pretending that that day was yet. She was a prig, and believed that it was up to such as her to reform the world. She saw herself (at the moment, for her vision of herself varied) as the modern woman, clever, emancipated, high-minded, too intellectually fastidious to take the vulgar view. She took herself seriously, in spite of the childish giggle at the comedy of life which broke like gurgling water through her earnestness.

  “The first Nowell the angels did sing,” sang Vicky, in her clear, fluting voice, and danced in at the drawing-room window.

  4

  Mamma and Rome

  Mamma sat by Rome’s side and embroidered, while papa interviewed his curate in the study. You could see, now these two sat together, that they were alike, not so much in feature or colour as in some underlying, elusive essence of personality. But Rome’s mocking, amused, critical self looked ironically out of her blue-green eyes, and mamma’s dwelt very still and deep within her.

  “Well, mamma.” Rome put down her book, which was by Anatole France.

  “Well, Rome.”

  “You don’t much mind this.” Rome was commenting, not inquiring.

  “Oh, no.” Mamma was placid. “Not,” she added, “that I want to live in London particularly. Dirty place. No gardens.”

  Rome said, definitely, “I prefer London,” and mamma nodded. Rome was urbane. Negligent, foppish and cool, she liked to watch life at its games, be flicked by the edges of its flying skirts. And the game of life was more varied and entertaining in London than in the country, and equally absurd. So Rome preferred London. It was like having a better seat at the play. Lack of bodily energy threw her back largely in the country on to the entertainment of her own rather cynical mind. She was often bored, sometimes ill-humoured, sharp and morose. The years might bring her a greater patience, but at twenty she was not patient. The very sharp clarity of her mind, that chafed against muddled thinking, stupidity, humbug and sentimentality, made intercourse difficult for her in the country, where heaven has ordained that even fewer persons shall reside who are free from these things than is the case in large towns.

  “How long,” inquired Rome negligently, slipping round an old silver ring on her thin white finger, “do you give the Ethical Church, mamma?”

  Mamma was feather-stitching, rapidly and correctly. The movement of her head indicated that she declined to prophesy.

  “No point in looking ahead,” she said practically. “One always sees a change a little while before it comes, in time to be prepared, and that’s all we need. Papa is never sudden.”

  The whimsical smile that twitched at one corner of Rome’s thin mouth was unreturned by mamma, whose face was gravely bent over her work. Mamma was a good wife, and never joked about papa’s vagaries with her children. No one had ever got behind mamma’s guard in the matter of papa—if it was a guard. Who could see into mamma’s mind? idly speculated Rome. Mamma had, at forty-five, achieved a kind of delicate impenetrability. Papa, at fifty, was as limpid as the clear water of a running stream, where you may watch the fishes swimming to and fro, round and round.

  Papa came back, alone and looking hurt. At the same moment Vicky came in at the long window, pink-cheeked, smelling of frost.

  “Where’s Mr. Carter, papa?”

  “Gone away, Vicky. He—he couldn’t stop.”

  “I suppose he was shocked to death! Oh, well . . .”

  But, of them all, only mamma knew how shocked the orthodox people of the eighteen seventies were about matters of unbelief. The children had been brought up in the wrong atmosphere really to know it. Mamma knew that to Mr. Carter papa’s action would seem dreadful, blasphemous, very nearly wicked. . . .

  “After all,” said Vicky impatiently, “we’re living in the year 1879. We’re moderns, after all.”

  Dashingly modern Vicky looked, in her sinuous art-green dress, with her massed Rossetti hair and jade ear-rings. Daringly, brilliantly modern, and all agog for life. A dashing girl, as they called them in 1879—if a girl bitten with æstheticism can still dash, and it may be taken for granted that dashing girls will always dash, whatever bites them. Catching up slim young Irving from his chair, Vicky twirled him round the room in a waltz.

  5

  Bloomsbury and South Place

  In February the Gardens moved to Bloomsbury. Different people and more people came to the house; it was rather like the old days when papa had been a Unitarian. Mr. Stopford Brooke began coming to see papa again, and Dr. Martineau, and all his old and new friends who lived in London, even Father Stanton, of St. Albans, Holborn, and Mr. Charles Spurgeon. The circle of papa’s friends had swollen and swollen with the years, from his undergraduate days onwards. Not only was papa lovable and popular, but he touched so many circles, fished in so many waters, and his fellow-fishermen of each particular water
usually remained faithful to him even when he moved on to another pool. Good-humoured, witty Mr. Spurgeon, for instance, did not break with papa when he deserted the City Temple for a second go of Anglicanism, though he was sadly disappointed in him. Nor were papa’s interests bound by religion; he had friends, distinguished and indistinguished, among politicians, journalists, poets, professors, and social reformers, besides his relatives and mamma’s. And now, of course, there was a quite fresh influx, from the South Place Ethical Chapel. So, one way and another, what with papa’s friends and mamma’s and the children’s, a good deal of life flowed into the Bloomsbury Square house. Papa was, in his quiet way, happy, now that the wrench was over. He was writing, and had for years been writing, a very long book on comparative religions, and for this he worked at the British Museum, which was so conveniently near. And on Sundays he went to South Place, and worshipped ethically.

  “Do not crouch to-day and worship”

  he would sing, in his sweet tenor voice,

  “The old past, whose life is fled;

  Hush your voice to tender reverence,

  Crowned he lies, but cold and dead.

  For the present reigns our monarch,

  With an added weight of hours;

  Honour her, for she is mighty!

  Honour her, for she is ours!”