Told by an Idiot Read online

  (The author, Miss Adelaide Proctor, had very rightly, it will be noted, dethroned a male and enthroned a female.)

  So sang papa and mamma on a Sunday morning in April. Then some one rose and said a few ethical words about the desirability of not being fettered by religious dogma, and the congregation, who all thought this desirable too, listened attentively.

  Papa gazed wistfully in front of him, at the varnished seats and painted woodwork and the ethical texts inscribed round the walls. “Live for Others.” “Live Nobly.” “Duty First.” . . . He had made the great sacrifice, and once more dethroned the past, for honesty’s sake, and if it entailed a jarring of literary and artistic fastidiousness, who was he to rebel? God knew, he had been æsthetically happier joining in the Roman mass (tawdry and vulgar-looking as the churches where this service is held so usually are) or chanting the Anglican liturgy in the little fourteenth century church in Hampshire—though, as to that, some of Hymns A. & M. were quite as bad as anything in the ethical hymn-book—but never had he been so utterly honest, so stripped to the bare bone of all complacency, humbug and self-deception, as now. Or so, anyhow, he believed, but who shall read the human heart?

  Again they sang:

  “Hush the loud cannon’s roar,

  The frantic warrior’s call!

  Why should the earth be drenched in gore?

  Are we not brothers all?”

  For, sad to say, the earth was, in the spring of 1880, drenched (as usual) in gore. The gore of Afghans and British in Afghanistan, of Basutos in Basutoland, Chilians and Bolivians in Central America, Liberals and Conservatives in Great Britain, where the elections were being fiercely contested, besides such permanently flowing gore as that of Jews in Russia and Christians in Turkey. The Ethical Society hoped pathetically that all these so unlikely persons would enjoy peace and brotherhood one day.

  They trooped out into South Place. Grave, intelligent, ethical men and women clustered and hummed together like bees. They talked about the elections, which were going well, for nearly all the Ethical members were Liberals, and the Liberals were sweeping the country.

  “Why are Ethical members Liberals?” Rome inquired in the note-book to which she committed as much of her private commentary on life as ever found its way to paper. “Partly, no doubt, because of the Liberal attitude towards religion, but it must be more than that. T.C.” “T.C.” meant “trace connection,” and was a very frequent entry. Rome looked forward to a time when, by means of prolonged investigation all the connections she had noted should be traced; that, she held, would add to her understanding of this strange, amusing life. What, for instance, was the connection between High Church dogma and ornate ritual; between belief in class distinctions and in the British Empire; between dissent and Little Englandism; art and unconventional morals; the bourgeoisie and respectability; socialism and queer clothes? All these pairs and many others were marked T.C., and had a little space under them, in which the connection, when traced, was explained, in concise and lucid language. In another part of the book there were pages assigned to “Curious uses of words.” Rome felt a great, perhaps a morbid, interest in investigating life and language. She wrote, “Why are Ethical members Liberals?” when papa and mamma, coming in from chapel, told her how delighted South Place was with the elections. Papa, of course, had always been a Liberal, through all his religious vicissitudes.

  Vicky came in, like a graceful whirlwind, from Walworth, S.E., where she had attended church at St. Austin’s, the monastery of Brother à Beckett, and flung herself into a chair in an ecstasy.

  “A service straight from heaven!” she cried. “Too utterly utter! Such incense—perfumes of Araby! And Brother à Beckett preached about the authority of the State over the Church. It simply doesn’t exist. The State is nowhere, and not to be taken the slightest notice of. . . . And who do you think was there, just in front of us—Mr. Pater and the adorable Oscar in a velveteen coat, looking like the prince of men and talking like the king of wits (yes, mamma, talking, but in quite an undertone). But too utter! I was devastated. I was with Charles. I’d made him come with me, to try if grace would abound—but no, not yet; Charles remains without, with the dogs and the . . .”

  “Vicky,” mamma interpolated.

  “. . . and the sorcerers, mamma, dear,” Vicky finished, innocently. “What did you think I was going to say?”

  “You must allow Charles his conscience, Vicky,” said papa.

  Charles was Vicky’s half-affianced suitor, but unfortunately an agnostic, or rather a Gallio, and Vicky declared that they should not become regularly engaged until such time as Charles should embrace the Anglican, or some other equally to be respected, church. Unbelief might be fashionable, but Vicky didn’t hold with it. Also, and worse, Charles was not yet in the æsthetic push; he was, instead, in the Foreign Office, and took no interest in the New Beauty. Velveteen coats he disliked, and art fabrics, and lilies except in gardens, and languor except in offices, and vice except in the places appointed for it. And all these distastes would, as Vicky complained, make the parties they would give such a difficulty. Vicky told Charles that, unless he conquered them, she might feel compelled to become affianced instead to Mr. Ernest Waller, a young essayist who understood Beauty, though not, indeed, Anglicanism, as he had been a pupil of Mr. Pater’s in the days when Mr. Pater had been something of a pagan. But better burn incense before heathen gods, said Vicky, than burn none at all.

  So, when papa said, “You must allow Charles his conscience,” Vicky returned, firmly, “Dear papa, no. Conscience should be our servant, not our master. That’s what Brother ô Beckett said in his sermon this morning. Or, anyhow, something like it. Conscience is given us to be educated and trained up the way it should go. An unruly conscience is an endless nuisance. He that bridleth not his own conscience . . .”

  Papa, sensible of his own so inconveniently unbridled conscience, said mildly, “I think Brother à Beckett was perhaps referring to the tongue,” and Vicky lightly admitted that her memory might have got confused.

  “But never mind sermons and the conscience, here’s grandpapa,” she said; and, sure enough, there was grandpapa, who was staying with them on a visit. Grandpapa was the father of mamma, and a dean, and a very handsome man of seventy-five, and he was one of the last ditchers in the matter of orthodoxy, and had yielded no inch to science or the higher criticism, and believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the divine credentials of the Anglican Establishment, and disliked popery, ritual, dissent and free thought with equal coldness. Papa he had never approved of; a weak, vacillating fellow, whose reputation was little affected by one disgraceful change more or less. It did not particularly signify that papa had joined the Ethical Church; nothing about papa particularly signified; a weak, wrong-headed, silly fellow, who would certainly, for all his scholarship, never be a Dean. It was far more distressing that Anne (mamma), who ought to have made a firm stand and saved her husband from his folly, should thus abet him and follow him about from church to church. And the children had been deplorably brought up. Grandpapa, who thought it blasphemous not to believe in Noah and his ark, and even in the date assigned to these by Bishop Usher, and had written to The Times protesting against the use in schools of the arithmetic book of Bishop Colenso, on account of the modernist instruction imparted by this bishop to the heathen in this matter of the date of the ark,—grandpapa heard these unhappy children of his daughter’s discussing the very bases of revealed truth; grandpapa, who held that our first parents lost paradise through disobedience, pride, inquisitiveness and false modesty, heard Maurice’s perverse defiance of law and authority. Rome’s calm contempt and conceited criticism of accepted standards, Stanley’s incessant, eager, “Why, what for, and why not?” and Vicky’s horror at the breadth and crudeness of the Prayer Book marriage service.

  Grandpapa, being a conservative and a Disraelian, was just now not well pleased. He did not think that the Gladstone government would be able to deal
adequately or rightly with the inheritance of foreign responsibilities left them by their predecessors. South Africa, Egypt, Afghanistan,—what would the liberals, many of them Little Englanders, in fact though not yet in name, do with all this white man’s burden, as the responsibilities of Empire were so soon, so horribly soon, to be called? Had grandpapa thought of it, he would certainly have called them that. His grandson, Maurice, called them, on the other hand, “all those damned little Tory wars,” a difference in nomenclature which indicated a real difference in political attitude.

  Grandpapa entered with the Observer, which regretted as he did the way the elections had gone, and with the Guardian, which did not. He sat down and patted Vicky on the shoulder, and said that Dean Liddon had preached at St. Paul’s, where he had attended morning service.

  “A capital defence of the faith,” said grandpapa. “Bones to it, and substance. None of your sentimental slop. You’ve all been running after ethics, or ritual, or this, that and the other, but I’ve had the pure Word. Liddon’s too High, but he’s sound. I remember in ’55 . . .”

  One of grandpapa’s familiar stories, told as old people told their stories, with loving rounding of detail.

  Vicky’s mind reached vainly back towards ’55, and could not get there. Crinolines and sweeping whiskers, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Crimea, Bible orthodoxy and the Tractarians, all the great Victorians. A dim, entrancing period, when papa and mamma were getting married, and people were too old-fashioned to see life straight as it was. And to grandpapa, ’55 was quite lately, just the other day, and ’80 was like an engine got loose from its train and dashing madly in advance, heading precipitately for a crash.

  “I remember,” said grandpapa, “I remember . . .”

  Papa said, “That was the year King’s College asked Maurice to retire because of Theological Essays.

  What dull things elderly people remembered!

  “Next Sunday,” said Vicky, “I shall take Charles to South Place, papa. I hear Mr. Pater is preaching there. Too sweet and quaint; he preaches everywhere. And often the divine Oscar sits under him.”

  6

  Stanley and Rome

  Maurice and Stanley were back from Cambridge and Oxford for the Easter vacation, talking, talking, talking. Stanley, in a crimson stockinette jersey, tight like an eel’s skin, and a tight little brown skirt caught in at the knees, her chubby face pink with excitement and health, talked of Oxford, of the river, of lectures, of Mr. Pater, and of friendship. Friendship was like dancing flames to Stanley in this her first Oxford year; a radiant, painful apocalypse of joy.

  “Are they so splendid?” Rome speculated of these glorious girls. “Is any one so splendid, ever?” She sat idly, her hands clasped behind her short, silky curls, Mallock’s New Republic open at her side. Stanley sat on the edge of a table, and swung her legs. How romantic Stanley was! What were girls, what, indeed, were boys either, that such a halo should encircle their foolish heads?

  There was proceeding at this time a now long-forgotten campaign called the Woman’s Movement, and on to the gay youthful fringe of this Stanley and her friends were catching. Women, long suppressed, were emerging; women were to be doctors, lawyers, human beings, everything; women were to have their share of the earth, their share of adventure, to flourish in all the arts, ride perched in handsom cabs, even on monstrous bicycles, find the North Pole. . . .

  “Too energetic for me,” Rome commented.

  “Oh, but you’ll be a great writer, perhaps.”

  “No. Why? There’s nothing I want to write. What’s the use of writing? Too much of that already. . . . Oh, well, go on about Oxford, Stan. You don’t convince me that it’s anything but a very ordinary place full of quite ordinary people, but I rather like to hear you being absurd.”

  Rome’s faint, delicately thin voice expressed acquiescent but not scornful irony. Stanley was a bore sometimes, but an intelligent bore.

  She went on about Oxford, and Mr. Pater, and some lectures on art by William Morris that she had been to. Stanley was drunk with beauty; she was plunging deep into the æsthetic movement on whose surface Vicky played.

  “You know, Rome,” she puckered her forehead over it, “more and more I feel that the merely æsthetic people are on the wrong tack. Beauty for ourselves can’t be enough; it’s got to be made possible for every one. . . . That’s where Vicky and her friends are off it. A lily in a blue vase all to yourself isn’t enough. All this . . .” she looked round at the Liberty room, the peacock patterns, the willow pattern china, the oak settle, “all this—it’s not fair we should be able to have it when every one can’t. It’s greedy . . .”

  “Every one’s greedy.”

  “No,” said Stanley, and her eyes glowed, for she was thinking of her splendid friends. “No. Greediness is in every one, but it can be conquered. Socialism is the way. . . . I wish you could meet Evelyn Peters. She’s joined the Socialist Democratic Federation. . . . I want to ask her here to stay, in June. She’s not just an ordinary person, you know. She’s splendid. She’s six years older than me, and enormously cleverer, and she’s read everything and met every one. . . . I can’t tell you how I feel about her. . . .”

  Obvious, thought Rome, how Stanley felt, with her shining eyes and flushed cheeks and shy, changing voice. In love; that was what Stanley was. Stanley was for ever in and out of love; she had been the same all through her schooldays. So had Vicky, but with Vicky it was men, and less romantic and earnest. Stanley was always flinging her whole being prostrate in adoring enthusiasm before some one or something, funny child. She was looking at Rome now in shy, gleaming hesitation, wondering if Rome were despising her, laughing at her, but not able to keep Evelyn Peters to herself. To say, “Evelyn Peters is my friend,” was an exquisite æsthetic joy, and made their friendship a more real, achieved thing.

  Rome felt a little uncomfortable behind her bland nonchalance; Stanley’s emotions were so strong.

  7

  Grandpapa

  When Maurice was there Stanley did not talk about her friends; such talk was not suitable for Maurice, whose own friendships were so different. Often in these days they talked politics. Maurice was a Radical.

  “Chamberlain’s the man,” he said, “Chamberlain and Dilke. Whiggery’s played out; dead as mutton. Mild Liberalism has had its day. Yes, pater, your day is over. The seventies have been the hey-day of Liberalism. I grant you it’s done well—Education Act, Irish Disestablishment, abolition of tests, and so on. Such obvious reforms, you see, that every sane person has had to be a Liberal. That’s watered Liberalism down. Now we’ve got to go further, and only the extremists will stick on; the old gang will desert. Radicalism’s the only thing for England now.”

  Maurice, pacing the room with his quick little steps, his hands in his pockets, his chin in the air, would talk thus in his crisp, rapid, asseverating voice, even to grandpapa, who had, when he had done the same thing as a schoolboy, ordered him out of the room for impertinence. Grandpapa and Maurice did not, in fact, each really like the other—obstinate age and opinionated youth. Because grandpapa was in the room, Maurice said, “They’ve returned old Bradlaugh for Northampton all right. Now we shall see some fun,” and grandpapa said, “Don’t mention that abominable blasphemer in my presence.”

  Papa said gently, with his cultured tolerance, “A good deal, I fancy, has been attributed to Bradlaugh of which he has not been guilty.”

  “Are you denying,” inquired grandpapa, “that the fellow is a miserable blaspheming atheist and a Malthusian?”

  “An atheist,” papa admitted, discreetly passing over the last charge, “no doubt he is. And very undesirably coarse and violent in his methods of controversy and propaganda. But I am not sure that the charge of blasphemy is a fair one, on the evidence we have.”

  “Any man,” said grandpapa, sharply, “who denies his Maker blasphemes.”

  “In that case,” said Maurice moodily, “I blaspheme,” and left the room.

  Pa
pa apologised for him.

  “You must forgive the boy; he is still crude.”

  Grandpapa shut his firm mouth tightly, and Rome thought, “He is still cruder.”

  Vicky asked lightly, “What is a Malthusian, grandpapa?” and grandpapa, who came of a coarse and outspoken generation, snapped, “A follower of Malthus.”

  “And who was Malthus, grandpapa?”

  Grandpapa, catching his daughter’s eye, and recollecting that it was the year 1880, not the coarse period of his own youth, hummed and cleared his throat and said, “A very ungentlemanly fellow, my dear.”

  And that was all about Malthus that young misses of 1880 needed to know. Or so their elders believed. But in 1880, as now, young misses often knew more than their parents and grandparents supposed. Rome and Stanley, better read in history than Vicky, could have enlightened both her and grandpapa on the theme of Malthus.

  8

  Discussing Religion

  It was a good thing that grandpapa’s visit ended next day. Without him, Maurice was better-mannered, less truculent. They could then discuss Radicalism, Bradlaugh, blasphemy, beauty, Malthus and the elections, en famille, without prejudice. They were, as a family, immense talkers, inordinate arguers. The only two who did not discuss life at large were Irving and Una; their conversation was and always would be of the lives they personally led, and those led by such animals as they kept. The lives led by others worried them not at all. They recked not of the Woman’s Movement, but Irving amiably held Maurice’s high bicycle while Stanley, divested of her tight skirt and clad in a pair of his trousers, mounted it and pedalled round and round the quiet square. It was Irving who knew that a lower kind of bicycle was on its way, had even been seen in embryo.

  “But girls’ll never ride it,” he opined. “That’s jolly certain.”