Told by an Idiot (28 page)

“But, aunt Stanley, how do you know these are weapons at all?” Imogen argued.

“We can but try them,” Stanley answered, herself a little doubtful on the point.

“Anyhow,” she added, “anyhow, no woman who cares about citizenship can be happy sitting still and doing nothing while we’re denied it. You do care about the suffrage, don’t you, Imogen?”

“Oh, rather, aunt Stanley, of course I do. I think it’s awful cheek not giving it us. There’s no
sense
in it, is there; no meaning. Anti-suffragists do talk a lot of rot. . . . Only don’t you think suffragists do too, sometimes? I mean, aunt Stanley, people do so, when they talk, get off the
point
, don’t they. It would be a lot easier to be keen if people didn’t talk so much. They talk
round
, not along. Really, there’s hardly anything to say about anything. I mean, you could say it all, all that mattered, in a few sentences. But people go on talking about things for hours, saying the same things twice, and a lot of other things that don’t really apply, and everything in hundreds of words when quite a few would do. I noticed it in the House the other day when we were there. Two-thirds of what they all said was just flapping about. And they say, “I have said before, Mr. Speaker, and I say again. . . . But
why
do they say it again? It isn’t awfully good even the first time. I do wonder why people are like that, don’t you.”

“Soft heads and long tongues, my dear, that’s why. Can’t be helped. One’s got to bear it and go ahead. . . . I wish Molly was five years older; she’ll be so tremendously keen. . . .”

Imogen said nothing to that. She knew Molly, her small, elfish cousin of fourteen, pretty well. Molly, with her short, white face and merry, narrow eyes, and quick wits, and easy selfishness and charm, was, though Imogen couldn’t know that, her father over again, without his abilities. Imogen was afraid that
Molly, when she left school and grew up, was not going to take that place among the world’s workers that aunt Stanley hoped.

As to Billy, a cheerful, stocky Rugby boy of sixteen, he had no views on the suffrage. He didn’t care. Politics bored him.

Poor aunt Stanley. Aunt Stanley was a great dear; treated one always as a friend, not as a niece; explained things, and discussed, and said what she meant. She was easy to talk to. Easier than Vicky, whom one loved, but couldn’t discuss things with; one couldn’t formulate and express one’s ideas and project them into that spate of charming, inconsequent talk, that swept on gaily over anything one said. Imogen tried to please aunt Stanley by seeming really keen about suffrage, but it was difficult, because the things she actually was keen on were so many and so absorbing that they didn’t leave much time over. Imogen felt that she was no good at these large, unselfish causes that aunt Stanley had at heart; she hadn’t soul enough, or brain enough, or imagination enough, or something. And she did hate meetings. If one had to do anything so tiresome as sitting indoors in the afternoon, were there not the galleries of theatres, her point of view was. She decided that Nancy, who enjoyed it, could do the votes-for-women business for the family.

Meanwhile, Mr. W. H. Dickinson’s suffrage bill failed to come to anything, and it became obvious that the Liberal government, in this matter, was to be no use at all.

It was quite a question whether it was going to be much use in any other matter. Poor Law reform it had postponed; likewise Old Age Pensions. Licensing Reform was dropped; so was Mr. McKenna’s new Education Bill, the Land Valuation Bill, and Irish
Home Rule. It looked as if the Liberal programme was running away like wax in the heat and trouble of the day. How few party programmes, for that matter, ever do become accomplished achievements! They are frail plants, and cannot easily come to fruit in the rough air of office. What with one thing, what with another, they wilt away in flower and die.

To make up for the stagnation of home politics, there was, in 1906 and 1907, plenty of international activity. The nations of Europe were ostensibly drawing together, a happy family. British journalists were entertained in Berlin, German journalists in London, amid some mutual execration and dislike. A
rapprochement
took place between ourselves and Russia, for it was quite the fashion in Europe to fraternise with Russia, her armies were so huge, even if not, apparently, very good at what armies should be good at. There were those in this country who held that it was not quite nice to fraternise with Russia, disapproving of her governmental system, and of the Tsar’s very natural suppression of the Duma that had for a few days and by an oversight so strangely existed and actually dared to demand constitutional reform. There were those in Great Britain who said that we should not be at all friendly with a government so little liberal in mentality. But, after all, you must take nations as you find them, and their domestic affairs are quite their own concern, and one should not be provincial in one’s judgments, but should make friends even with the mammon of unrighteousness for the sake of the peace of Europe, which was a good deal talked of just then by the Powers, though it is doubtful whether any of them really believed in it. It is certain that the nations by no means neglected the steady increase and building up of armaments by land and sea. They
hurried away from the Hague Conference to lay down new battleships at a reckless pace; even Mr. W. T. Stead said, “Let us strengthen our navy, for on its fighting power the peace of Europe depends.” Strengthen our navy we did; but as to the peace of Europe, that lovely, insubstantial wraith, she was perhaps frightened by all those armoured ships, all those noisy guns, all those fluent statesmen talking, for she never put on much flesh and bones.

Outside politics, 1907 was a gay year enough. There was a severe outbreak of pageantitis, which many people enjoyed very much, and others found vastly disagreeable. Drama was noticeably good; the Vedrenne-Barker company moved from the Court to the Savoy, and the intelligent playgoer moved after it. Miss Horniman’s Repertory Theatre toured the provinces; and the Abbey Theatre players took English audiences by storm. Acting was good, literature and the arts were much encouraged, dancing and social entertainments were more than ever the fashion. Society, it was said, was getting rowdier. For that matter, society has always been getting rowdier, since the dawn of time. How rowdy it will end, in what nameless orgies it will be found at the Last Day, is a solemn thought indeed.

As to the young, they were thought of and written of much as ever, much as now. The New Young were discovered afresh, and the Edwardian variety was much like the Victorian and the Georgian. They were wild, people said; they went their own way; they
were hard, reckless, independent, inquiring, impatient of control, and yet rather noble.

“Youth in the new century has broken with tradition,” people said. “It is no longer willing to accept forms and formulæ only on account of their age. It has set out on a voyage of inquiry, and, finding some things which are doubtful, others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of experience more in harmony with the realities of life and of knowledge. . . .”

Youth was, in fact, at it again.

“Girls are so wild in these days,” Vicky cheerfully complained. “Nancy and Imogen both go on in a way we’d
never
have dared to do. Nancy dances all night (of course, chaperons are a back number now) and comes home alone, or with some wild, arty young men and women, or, worse still, with one wild, arty young man, at five o’clock in the morning, and lets herself in with a bang and a rush, and often lets the arty young people in too. No, Nancy, I say to her, you don’t let your friends in to my house before breakfast, and that’s that. Not several of them at once, nor one by herself or himself. If they don’t want to go home to their own beds, they must just go and carouse in any hotel that will receive them, for in my house they shall
not
carouse.
Nor
sit on the dining-room sofa and smoke, and carry on conversations in tones that I suppose you all think are hushed. It shall not be done, I said, so that is settled. But is it settled? Not a bit of it. Nancy merely changes the subject, and Charles and I are woken by the hushed voices again next morning. Edwardian manners, people tell me: well, I’m a Victorian, and I don’t care if it
is
1907.”

“You were doing much the same in 1880, my dear,” Rome interpolated.

“Oh, well, I’ve forgotten . . . were we? . . . Well,
anyhow, you can’t say I was behaving like Imogen. She doesn’t care for dancing much, and she’s such a baby still that cocktails make her tipsy and cigarettes sick; she prefers raspberry syrup and chocolate cigars, which is really more indecent at her age. At nineteen,
I
was thinking of proper young-ladyish things, like young men, and getting engaged; but Imogen seems never to have heard of either—I mean, not of young men in their proper uses. She plays childish games, and dashes about on her bicycle, and makes ridiculous lists of all the ships in the navy and how much they weigh and how many horses they’re equal to, and slips off to Portsmouth all by herself to see them launched, without a word to any one, and, of course, makes herself ill. I said to her one day, ‘I suppose you’ll go and marry into the navy some day, Jennie; nothing else will satisfy you.’ But she opened her eyes and said, ‘
Marry
the navy? Oh, no. I couldn’t do that. I should be too jealous of him. You see, I want to be in the navy myself, and I know I should hate his being in it when I couldn’t. It would only rub it in. I want to do nice things myself, not to marry people who do them. I believe, mother, I’m perhaps too selfish to marry; it’s
my
life I want to enjoy, not any one else’s. Besides, there might be babies, and they would so get in the way, little sillies.’ They wouldn’t get in your way, I told her (only, of course, it isn’t true, because they always do, the wretches), if only you’d behave like other grown girls, and not be for ever climbing about and playing silly games. You’re such a baby yourself, that’s what’s the matter. What on earth the child’s book will be like that’s she’s so busy with I can’t imagine.
She
knows nothing about life, bless her. There’s Phyllis married, and running her home so capably, and Nancy at least carrying on like a girl, not like a child in the
nursery—but Imogen! I lose my patience with her sometimes.”

And even as her mother spoke, Imogen was in Hamley’s in Regent Street, looking at toy pistols and blushing. She was blushing because she had just been deceitful, and was afraid that the lady attending on her guessed. “For what aged child is it?” this helpful lady had asked. “Would caps or blank cartridges be what he’d want? I mean, if he’s
very
young. . . .”

“Oh, no,” Imogen mumbled, “he’s not awfully young. Blank cartridges, he likes. . . .”

She bent her abashed face over the weapons, fingering them. A sordid fib: was she seen through? She chose her pistol quickly, paid for it, and hurried out of the shop. When she got well away, she extracted the weapon from its cardboard box and tucked it, with a guilty look round, into the side pocket of her skirt.

She strode along with a new reckless gallantry.

“Patrick slipped among the crowd; that queer, cosmopolitan, rather sinister crowd that is to be found around the Marseilles docks. Was he followed? His hand strayed to his hip pocket. His keen, veiled eyes took in the passers-by without seeming to look. If he could get through the next hour without mishap, he would be aboard and a-sail. But could he? Prob’ly not. . . .”

While Imogen thus walked in foreign ports or trackless forests, a happy, dreaming spinster, a reckless adventurer armed to the teeth, many of her contemporaries and elders walked in suffragist processions, adventurers too, and no less absorbed than she. Stanley, disgusted now by the increasingly reasonless methods of the militants, had definitely turned her back on them and joined the constitutionals. These arranged orderly
and ladylike processions, headed at times by Lady Carlisle.

“There can be no doubt,” wrote the more dignified press, after one such procession, “that many of these lady suffragettes are absolutely in earnest, and honestly believe that the cause for which they are contending is a just and sane one. But the fact remains that they are in the minority: that the sex,
qua
sex, is still content, and proud to be content, to accept the symbol of petticoat. . . .” (How indecent,” cried Vicky, “to gossip about our underwear in a leader by a man!”) . . . “the symbol of petticoat as the badge of dis-enfranchisement.” Women, the article continued, are of low mental calibre, and will never understand politics, and if they did it would interfere with their only duty, the propagation of the race.

“I love journalists,” said Rome, reading this to her papa at their Sunday breakfast. “They always write as if women did that job single-handed. They are so modest about men’s share in it, which is really quite as important as ours. They even kindly call us the fount of life. Dear, generous, self-effacing creatures. . . .”

But papa was shaking his head, gravely.

“You make a joke of it, my dear. But this low mental equipment on the part of the writers on our leading papers is really a tragedy. The guiders of public opinion. . . . The blind leading the blind. . . . How can we avoid the ditch?”

“Indeed, we certainly don’t avoid the ditch. We are all in it, up to the neck. But if one is to be sad on account of the low mental equipment of writers or others, there will be very little joy left. For my part, I find a considerable part of my joy in it; it assists in providing the cheering spectacle of human absurdity.’

“Pass me the paper, my dear. I want to read about . . . I want to see it.”

Rome smiled behind the screen of paper which papa put up between him and her. Well she knew what papa wanted to see in it. He was looking for news of Mr. R. J. Campbell and his New Theology, searching for tidings of Pantheism and the Divine Immanence. And, sure enough, he found them. There was a Saying of the Week. Among the eminent persons who had said other things, such as Dr. Clifford, who had remarked, a little meiosistically, “It is not necessary to burn a man who is seeking the truth,” and the Lord Chief Justice, who had observed, more topically, “One of the greatest errors that motorists can make is to believe that upon their blowing their horns everybody should clear out of the way,” and Prince Fushimi from Japan, who had said, “I do not wish to object to the
Mikado
, as I am sure its writers did not intend to hurt the feelings of a great nation, but I shall, of course, be glad if it is not performed,” and two doctors, one of whom had said, “Kissing consists in depositing some saliva on the lips or cheeks of another person,” and the other, “Those who do not like milk will get cancer”—among all these utterers of truth came Mr. R. J. Campbell, remarking brightly, not for the first time nor for the last, “The New Theology is the gospel of the humanity of God and of the divinity of man.”