Told by an Idiot Read online

  Vicky complained that Stanley thought of God (“in whom, of course,” said Vicky, “we all believe”) as a socialist agitator, and Stanley perhaps did. Certainly God, she believed, was fighting sweated industries.

  “With signally small success,” Maurice said, for the commission on these industries had just concluded.

  “God very seldom succeeds,” Stanley agreed. “He has very nearly everything against him, of course.”

  She seldom mentioned God, being, for the most part, as shyly inarticulate as a schoolgirl on this theme so vital to her. But of unemployment, labour troubles, and sweated industries, she and Maurice would talk by the hour. She wrote articles for his paper on the conditions of working women in Poplar. She attended street labour meetings in the east, while Maurice did the same in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park.

  In 1882, the year that Stanley left Oxford, Una left school. It was no use sending her to college, for she had not learning, nor the inclination to acquire it. She had done with lessons.

  “You don’t want just to slack about for ever, I suppose?” Stanley put it to her, sternly.

  “For ever. . . .” Una looked at her with wide, sleepy blue eyes, trying and failing to think of eternity. Una lived in to-day, not in yesterday or to-morrow. She was rather like a puppy.

  “I don’t much care,” she said at length. “I mean, I’ve never thought about it. I’m never bored, anyhow. There’s theatres, and badminton, and dancing, and all the shops, and taking the dogs in the parks. . . . Of course I’d like better to live in the country again. But London’s all right. I’m all right. I’m not booky like you, you see.”

  Stanley said it had nothing to do with being booky; there were things that wanted doing. Doubtless there were. But she failed to rouse Una to any thought of doing them. Una stayed at home, and went to parties, and theatres, and played games, and occasionally rode, and walked the dogs in the parks, and stayed with friends in the country, and enjoyed life.

  “I suppose she’ll just marry,” Stanley disappointedly said, for in the eighteen eighties marriage was not well thought of, though freely practised, by young feminine highbrows.

  As to Irving, another cheery hedonist, he was enjoying himself very much at Cambridge and reading for a pass.

  13

  Parents

  The eighteen eighties were freely strewn with, among other things, Vicky’s children. The halcyon period for children had not yet set in; did not, in fact, set in until well on in the twentieth century. In the eighteen eighties and nineties children were still thwarted, still disciplined, still suppressed, though with an abatement of mid-Victorian savagery. The idea had not yet started that they were interesting little creatures to be encouraged and admired. On the whole, the bringing up of children (at best a poor business) was perhaps less badly done during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century than before or since. It may safely be said that it is always pretty badly done, since most parents and all children are very stupid and uncivilised, and anyhow to “bring up “(queer phrase!) the unfortunate raw material that human nature is, to bring it up to any semblance of virtue or intelligence (the parents, probably, having but small acquaintance with either) is a gargantuan task, almost beyond human powers. Some children do, indeed, grow up as well as can, in the circumstances, be expected, but this is, as a rule, in spite of, rather than on account of, the misguided efforts of their parents. And most children do not grow up well at all, but quite otherwise, which is why the world is as we see it.

  Vicky was, as parents go, not a bad one. She loved her children, but did not unduly spoil them or turn their heads with injudicious attentions. Year by year her nursery filled with nice, pretty, sturdy little Du Maurier boys, and fine, promising active, little Du Maurier girls, in sailor suits, jerseys, tam-o’-shanters, and little frocks sashed about the knees, and year by year, Vicky was to be found again in what newspaper reporters, in their mystic jargon, call, for reasons understood by none but themselves, “a certain condition.” “The woman,” they will write, “said she was in a certain condition.” As if every one, all the time, were not in a certain condition. Whether these journalists think the statement, “she was going to have a baby “indecent, or coarse, will probably never transpire, for they are a strange, instinct-driven, non-analytical race, who can seldom give reasons for their terminology. Who shall see into their hearts? Perhaps they really do think that the human race should not be mentioned until it is visible to the human eye.

  Anyhow Vicky, of a franker breed than these, said year by year, with resignation, “Again, my dears, I replenish the earth,” and added sometimes, in petulant inquiry, “How long, oh, Lord, how long?”

  But Amy, the wife of Maurice, had, like newspaper men, her pruderies. Of her coming infants she preferred to speak gently, in fretful undertones. When she told Maurice about the first, she did not, like Vicky, sing out, on his return from the office, “What do you think? There’s a baby on the way! “but, drawing her inspiration from fiction, she hid her face against his coat and murmured, “Oh, Maurice I Guess.”

  Maurice said, “Guess what? How do you mean, guess, darling?” to which she replied, “Well, I do think you’re slow to-night . . . Oh, Maurice . . .”

  And then Maurice, instead of saying, like the young husbands in the fiction she was used to, “Darling, you can’t mean. . . . What angels women are! ”said instead, “Oh, I say, do you mean we’ve got a baby coming? Good business.”

  A baby. What a coarse, downright word for the little creature. Later, of course, one got used to it, but just at first, at the very, very outset, the dimmest dawn of its tiny being, it was scarcely a baby. And what about her being an angel? Obviously Maurice did not know the rules of this game.

  When the baby, and the subsequent baby (there were only two altogether) arrived, Amy spoiled them. She was a depraved mother. Also she was unjust. She was, of course, the type of mother whose strong sex instinct leads her to prefer boys to girls, and she took no pains to hide this. Maurice said, stubbornly, “The girl shall have as good a chance as the boy, and as good an education. We’ll make no difference,” but Amy said, “Chance! Fiddlesticks I What chances does a girl want, except to marry well? What does a girl want with education? I’m not going to have her turned into a bluestocking. Girls can’t have real brains, anyhow. They can’t do anything—only sit about and look superior.”

  This referred to Rome, and these were the remarks that fell like nagging drops of water on Maurice’s sensitive, irritable nerves and mind, slowly teasing love out of existence, and beating into him (less slowly) that he had married a fool.

  Maurice found outlet from domestic irritation in political excitement. There was, for instance, the Home Rule Bill. It seemed to Maurice, as to many others, immeasurably important that this bill should go through. Its failure to do so, his own failure to be elected in the elections of 1886, and the victory of the Unionists, plunged him into a sharper and more militant Radicalism. At the age of twenty-nine he was an ardent, scornful, clear-brained idealist and cynic, successful on platforms and brilliant with pens. He was becoming a stand-by of the Radical press, a thorn in the Tory flesh. His wife, by this time, after four years of marriage, definitely disliked him, because he had bad, sharp manners, was often disagreeable to her, often drank a little too much, and obviously despised the things she said. She consoled herself with going to parties, spoiling her babies, and flirting with other people. He consoled himself with politics, writing, talking, and drinking. An ill-assorted couple. Maurice hoped that his children would be more what he desired. So far, of course, they were fonder of Amy. Even the boy was fonder of Amy, though sons often have a natural leaning towards their fathers, and frequently grow up with no more than a careless affection for their mothers; for, contrary to a common belief, the great affection felt by (Œdipus for his mother is most unusual, and, indeed, (Œdipus would probably have felt nothing of the sort had he known of the relationship. It is noticeable that sons usually select a
s a bride a woman as unlike their mothers and sisters as possible. It makes a change.

  So Maurice had reason to hope that his son, anyhow, would prefer him as time went on, and therefore be inclined to share his point of view about life. As to the girl, she might grow up a fool or she might not; impossible to tell, at three years old. Most girls did.

  In 1887 the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria occurred. Maurice wrote a deplorably unsuitable article for the occasion, called “Gaudeamus,” and taking for its theme the subject races of Ireland and India and the less fortunate and less moneyed classes in Great Britain, which brought him into a good deal of disrepute, and made Amy more than ever disgusted with him.

  “Hardly the moment,” papa commented. “One sympathises with his impatience, but the dear old lady’s jubilee is hardly the moment to rub in the flaws of her Empire.”

  14

  Papa and the Faith

  Papa was now a Roman Catholic again. After three or four years of Ethicism, the absence of a God had begun to tell on him. It had slowly sapped what had always been the very foundation of his life—his belief in absolute standards of righteousness. For, if there were no God, on what indeed did these standards rest? It was all very well to sing in South Place of “the great, the lovely and the true,” but what things were great, lovely and true, and how could one be sure of them, if they derived their sanction from nothing but man’s own self-interested and fluctuating judgments? Deeply troubled by these thoughts, which were, of course, by no means new to him, papa was driven at last out of his beautiful and noble halfway house to the bleak cross roads. Either he must become a moral nihilist, or he must believe again in a God. Since to become a moral nihilist was to papa unthinkable, so alien was it from all his habits, his traditions and his thoughts, so alien, indeed, from all the thought of his period, the only alternative was to believe in a God. And papa, swung by reaction, determined that this time (was it by way of atonement, or safeguard?) he would do the thing thoroughly. He would enter once more into that great ark of refuge from perplexing thoughts, the Roman branch of the Catholic Church. There (so long as he should remain there) he would be safe. He would rest therein like a folded sheep, and wander no more. So, humbly, in the year 1886, he did allegiance again to this great and consoling Church (which, as he said, he had never left, for you cannot leave it, though you may be unfaithful) and worshipped inconspiciously and devoutly in a small and austere Dominican chapel.

  His only grief was that mamma at this point struck. She made the great refusal. She loved papa no less faithfully than ever, but his continuous faiths had worn her out. She said quietly, “I am not going to be a Roman Catholic again, Aubrey.”

  He bowed his head at her decision. It was perhaps, he admitted, too much to expect that she should. “But not Roman Catholic, dearest . . .” was his only protest. “Surely not Roman, now.”

  “I beg your pardon, Aubrey. Catholic. Anyhow, I am too old to join new churches, or even the old ones again.”

  “You will stay an Ethicist, then,” he said, tentatively.

  “No. I have never cared very much for that. I don’t think I shall attend any place of worship in future.”

  He looked at her, startled, and placed his hand on hers, impeding the rapidity of her embroidery needle.

  “Anne—my dear love. You haven’t lost faith in everything, as I have been in danger of doing during the last year? The South Place chapel hasn’t done that to you, dear one?”

  Mamma let her work lie still on her lap, while papa’s hand rested on hers. She seemed to consider, looking inwards and backwards, down and down the years.

  “No, Aubrey,” she said presently. “The South Place chapel hasn’t done that to me. It wasn’t important enough . . .”

  Her faint smile at him was enigmatic.

  “I don’t,” she added, “quite know what I do believe. But I have long ago come to the conclusion that it matters very little. You, you see, have seemed equally happy for a time, equally unhappy after a time, in all the creeds or no-creeds. And equally good, my dear. I suppose I may say that I believe in none of them, or believe in all. In any case, it matters very little. I have come with you always into the churches and out of them, but now I think you will find peace in the Rom——in the Catholic Church, without me, and I fear that so much ritual, after so much lack of it, would only fuss me. I shall stay at home. There is a good deal to do there always, and I am afraid I am better at doing practical things than at thinking difficult things out. You won’t mind, Aubrey?”

  “My darling, no. You must follow your own conscience. Mine has been a sad will o’ the wisp to us both—but, God helping me, it has lighted me now into my last home. . . . Yet who knows, who knows . . .?”

  Mamma gently patted his hand and went on with her embroidery, bending over it her patient, near-sighted, spectacled eyes. She was mildly, unenthusiastically relieved to be done with the Ethical Church. She had never really liked those hymns. . . . Dear Aubrey, he would be happier again now. He could take to himself confidently once more those eternal moral values which had threatened him during the past six months with their utter wreckage and collapse. Once more he would be able to give reasons for his faith in virtue, for his belief that lying, theft, selfishness, and adultery were wrong. Once more the world’s foundations stood, and papa would not lie wakeful in the night and sigh to watch them shake.

  But the solitary, unworthy little thought nagged at mamma’s mind, “Amy will sneer. Amy will make foolish, common fun of him . . .”

  Dismissing Amy as a silly and vulgar little creature, mamma folded her embroidery and went to speak to the cook.

  15

  Keeping House

  Speaking to the cook. What a delightful kind of conversation this must be. For, if you are a proper housewife, you do not just say to the cook, “Kindly provide meals, as usual, for the household to-day. That is, in fact, what you are paid to do. So do it, and let me hear no more about it.” Instead, you go to the larder and see what is in it. You find a piece of meat, and try to guess what it is. You say, “We will have that neck of mutton, or loin of beef ”(or whatever you think it is) “roasted, boiled, or fricasseed, for lunch. Then, of what is left of it, you will make some nice cutlets for dinner. Now how about sweets?”

  Then you and the cook will settle down happily for a long gossip about sweets—a delightful topic. The cook says, “I had thought of a nice jam roll.” You say that you, for your part, had thought of something else, and so it goes on, like a drawing-room game, until you or the cook win, by sheer strength of will. Cooks usually have most of this, so they nearly always win. They can think of more reasons than you can why the thing suggested is impossible. They know there is not enough jam, or cream, or mushrooms, or breadcrumbs—not enough to make it nice, as it should be made. Rather would they suggest a nice apple charlotte. . . .

  “Very well, cook, have it your own way. You have won, as usual. But it has been a good game, and I have Kept House.” That is what the good housewife (presumably) reflects as she leaves the kitchen.

  Perhaps there is more to it than this; perhaps bills are also discussed, and butchers, and groceries, and the price of comestibles. No one who has not done it knows precisely what is done, or how. It is the cook’s hour, and the housewife’s, and no fifth ear overhears. Mrs. Garden, in the year 1887, had done it every day for thirty-one years. Whether as an Anglican, a Unitarian, a Roman Catholic, an Agnostic, a Quaker, an Irvingite, a Seventh-day Adventist, a Baptist, or an Ethicist, still she had daily Kept House. Magic phrase I What happens to houses unkept, Rome had idly asked. Mamma had shaken a dubious head. No house that she had ever heard of had been unkept.

  16

  UNA

  UNA, staying in Essex with friends, contracted an engagement with a neighbouring young yeoman farmer, whom she used to meet out riding. The friends protested, dismayed at such a mésalliance having been arranged for under, so to speak, their auspices. But Una, now twenty-three, grandly beautiful,
alternately lazy and amazingly energetic, looking like Diana or a splendid young Ceres, with no desires, it seemed, but for the healthy pleasures of the moment, held firmly to her decision. She loved her Ted, and loved, too, the life he led. She would wed him without delay. She went home and told her family so.

  Papa said, “If you are sure of your love and his, that is all that matters, little Una ”(with the faint note of deprecation, even of remorse, with which he was wont to say her name, in these days when he believed once again in the Athanasian creed; for, though he might have bestowed this name in the most Trinitarian orthodoxy, the fact was that he had not; it had been a badge of incomplete belief).

  Mamma said, “Well, child, you were bound to marry some one in the country. I always knew that. And you won’t mind that he and his people eat and talk a little differently from you, so I think you’ll be happy. Bless you.”

  To Rome mamma said, “There’s one thing about Una; she always knows what she wants and goes straight for it. I wish she could have married a gentleman, but this young fellow is a good mate for her, I believe. She won’t care about the differences. There’s no humbug about Una. She’s the modern girl all through. Splendid, direct, capable children they are.”

  That was in the year 1887, and mamma did not know that in the nineteen twenties there would still be girls like Una, and people would still be calling them the modern girl, and saying how direct, admirable and wonderful, or how independent, reckless and headstrong, they were, and, in either case, how unlike the girls of thirty and forty years ago. For, in popular estimation, girls must be changing all the time—new every morning; there must be a new fashion in girls, as in hats, every year. But those who have lived on this earth as much as sixty years know (though they never say, for they like, amiably, to keep in with the young by joining in popular cries, and are too elderly to go to the trouble of speaking the truth) that girls, like other persons, have always been much the same, and always will be. Not the same as one another, for the greyhound is not more different from the spaniel than is one girl from the next; but the same types of girls and of boys, of women and of men, have for ever existed, and will never cease to exist, and there is nothing new under the sun. Yet in the eighteen eighties and nineties, our ancestors were talking blandly of the New Woman, just as to-day people babble of the Modern Girl.