Told by an Idiot (2 page)

“It is, unfortunately, impossible to conceal from ourselves that the condition of Ireland, never perceptibly improved by the announcement of the projected remedy for her distress and discontents, has for
some weeks gone steadily from bad to worse. The state of things which exists there is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from civil war. The insurrectionary forces arrayed against law and order are not, indeed, drilled and disciplined bodies; but what they lack in this respect they make up for in numbers and in recklessness.”

Such was the sad state of Ireland in December 1879, as sometimes before, as sometimes since. Or, anyhow, such was its state according to the
Observer
, a paper with which Maurice seldom, and Stanley never, agreed. Stanley put her faith in Mr. Gladstone, and Maurice in no politicians, though he appreciated Dizzy as a personality. Papa had always voted Liberal and Gladstone, but thought that the latter lacked religious tolerance.

Maurice turned to another leader, which began, “In these troubled times . . .” And certainly they
were
troubled, as times very nearly always, perhaps quite always, are. The
Observer
told news of the Basuto war, the Russian danger in Afghanistan, Land League troubles, danger of war with Spain, trouble in Egypt, trouble in Bulgaria, trouble in Midlothian (where Mr. Gladstone was speaking against the government), trouble of all sorts, everywhere. What a world! Stanley, an assiduous student of it, sometimes almost gave it up in despair; but never quite, for she always thought of something one ought to do, or join, or help, which might avert shipwreck. Just now it was handicrafts, and the restoration of beauty to rich and poor.

MAMMA, sitting with papa’s hand in hers, watched them all, with her quiet gray eyes looking through pince-nez, and her slight smile. Pretty Vicky, singing “My Queen,” with the lamplight shining on her mass of chestnut hair parted Rossetti-wise in the middle, her pink cheeks, her long white neck, her graceful, slim, flowing form, her æsthetic green dress (for Vicky was bitten with the æsthetic craze). Pretty Vicky. She loved gaiety and parties and comfort so much, it was a shame to cut down her dress allowance, as would be necessary. Perhaps Vicky would get engaged very soon, though, to one of her æsthetic or worldly young men. Vicky was not one of those sexless, intellectual girls, like Rome, with her indifference, or Stanley, with her funny talk of platonic friendships. To Vicky a young man
was
a young man, and no platonics about it. Sometimes mamma was afraid that Vicky, for all her æstheticism, was a little
fast;
she would go out for long day expeditions alone with the young man of the moment, and laugh when her mother said, doubtfully, “Vicky, when
I
was young . . .”

“When
you
were young, mamma dear,” Vicky would say, caressing and mocking, “you were an early Victorian. Or even a Williamite. Papa, prunes, prisms I I’m a late Victorian, and we do what we like.”

“A
mid
-Victorian, I hope, dear,” mamma would loyally interpolate, but Vicky would fling back, “Oh, mamma, H.M. has reigned forty-two years now! You don’t think she’s going to reign for eighty-four! Late Victorian, that’s what we are.
Fin-de-siècle
. Probably the world will end very soon, it’s gone on so long, so
let’s have a good time while we can. We’re only young once. I feel, mamma, at the very end of the road, and as if nothing mattered but to live and dance and play while we can, because the time’s so short. Clergymen say it’s a sign of the world coming to an end, all these wars and disturbances everywhere, and unbelief, and women and trains being so fast in their habits, and young men so effeminate.”

Thus Vicky, mocking and gay and absurd. Her mother’s keen, near-sighted gray eyes strayed from her round the pretty lamplit room, which was partly Liberty and Morris, with its chintzes and wallpapers and cretonnes, and blue china plates over the door (that was the children) and partly mid-Victorian, with its chiffoniers and papier-maché and red plush chairs, and Dicksee’s “Harmony” hanging over the piano. On the table lay the magazines—the
Nineteenth Century
, the
Cornhill
, the
Saturday Review
, the
Spectator
, and the
Examiner
, with the article by Samuel Butler on “A Clergyman’s Doubts.” They had made the vicarage so pretty, it would be hard to leave it for a dingy London house. It was a pity (though hardly surprising) that the Anglican church could find no place for Aubrey during the intervals when he could not say the creed. Aubrey was so modern. Mrs. Garden’s own father, also a clergyman, believed in the Established Church and the Bible, and agreed with the writer of the Book of Genesis (and Bishop Usher, its commentator) that the world had been created in the year 4004 B.C., and that Adam and Eve had been created shortly afterwards, full of virtue, and had fallen; and so on, through all the Bible books. . . . After all, the scriptures
were
written (and even marginally annotated) for our learning. . . . But Mrs. Garden’s papa had begun being a clergyman when religion had been more settled, before Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer
had revolutionised science. You didn’t expect an able modern Oxford man like Aubrey to be an Early Victorian clergyman.

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.

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 would 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.”