Told by an Idiot (30 page)

Nevertheless, it so happened that the persons in this so-called narrative were all quite sufficiently happy during this period. They were all having, in their several ways, a fairly good time.

Mr. Garden’s way was, it need scarcely be said, a spiritual way. He was now over eighty, and his was the garnered fruit of a long life of spiritual adventure. He had believed so much, he had believed so often, he had fought with doubt so ardently and with such repeated success, he had explored every avenue of faith with such adventurous zeal, that he had at last reached a table-land from whence he could survey all creeds with loving, impartial pleasure. Even Mr. Campbell’s New Theology had not enmeshed him for long; he passed through it and out of it, and it took its place among the ranks of Creeds I Have Believed.

And now, in some strange, transcendent manner, he believed them all. Nothing is true but thinking makes it so; papa thought all these faiths, and for him they were all true. What, after all, is truth? An unanswerable riddle, to which papa replied, “The truth for each soul is that faith by which it holds.” So truth, for papa, was many-splendoured, many-faced. God must exist, he knew, or he could not have believed in Him so often and so much. The sunset of life was to papa very lovely, as he journeyed westward into it, murmuring, “I believe . . . I believe. . . .” Catholicism (Roman and Anglo), Evangelicism, Ethicism, Unitarianism, Latitudinarian Anglicism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Science, Irvingitism, even poor Flossie and her chat, he did very happily and earnestly believe. He believed in a mighty sacramental Church that was the voice of God and the store-house of grace; he believed that he was saved through private intercourse and contract with his Lord; he believed in the
Church established in this country, and that it should be infinitely adaptable to the new knowledge and demands of men; he believed that the world was (very likely) to be ended in a short time by the second coming of Christ; he believed that God was love, and evil a monstrous illusion; he believed that God permitted the veil between this world and the next to be rent by the meanest and most trivial of His creatures, if they had the knack. Indeed, papa might be said to have learnt the art of believing anything.

Irving said it was pleasant to find that papa was once again an Irvingite. Indeed, the creeds after which he had named his children now all flourished in papa’s soul. No longer did he shake his head when he remembered in what spiritual moods he had named Una, or Rome, or sigh after that lost exultation of the soul commemorated in Vicky. Had another child been given to him now he would have named it Verity, in acknowledgement of the fact that nearly everything was true.

What wonder, then, that papa was a happy Georgian?

Vicky, dashing full-sail through her fifties, was a happy Georgian too. She was handsome in her maturity, and merry. People she loved, and parties, and gossip, and bridge, and her husband and children, and the infants of her daughter Phyllis, and food and drink and clothes, and Ascot, and going abroad, and new novels from Mudie’s, and theatres and concerts and meetings and causes, and talk, talk, talk. Life, she held, is good as you get on in it; a broad, sunny
and amusing stream, having its tiresome worries, no doubt, but, in the main, certainly a comedy. Vicky as an early Georgian was a generously fashioned matron, broader and fuller than of old, with her fair skin little damaged by time, and not much gray in her chestnut hair, which she wore piled in a mass of waves and curls, in the manner of early Georgian matrons. A delightful woman, with an unfailing zest for life. You couldn’t exactly discuss things with her, but she could and did discuss them with you. She would tell you what she thought about the world and its ways in a flow of merry comment, skimming from one topic to another with an agile irrelevance that grew with the years. A merry, skimming matron; certainly a happy Georgian.

Maurice had not, since he married Amy, been a happy Victorian or Edwardian, and he did not become an exactly happy Georgian, but he was happier than before. In his fifties he was no nearer accepting the world as he found it than he had ever been. It still appeared to him to be a hell of a place. He was, in his fifties, a lean, small, bitter man, his light hair graying on the temples and receding from the forehead, his sensitive mouth and long jaw sardonically, cynically set. He was popular in London, for all his bitter tongue and pen; he and his paper were by now an institution, known for their brilliance, clarity, hard, unsentimental intolerance, and honesty. You might disagree with Maurice Garden; you might even think that he had an evil temper and a habit of mild
intoxication; but you had to respect two things about him, his intelligence and his sincerity. Tosh and slush he would not stand, whether it might be about the Empire, about the poor suffragists in prison who would not eat, about White Slaves (whom his paper called, briefly and precisely, prostitutes, holding that the colour of their skins was an irrelevant point to raise when considering the amelioration of their lot), about the poor tax-robbed upper classes, or the poor labour-ground lower. He would print no correspondence couched in sentimental terms; if people desired to write about the sufferings, say, of birds deprived of their feathers for hats, they had to put it in a few concise words, and to say precisely what steps they wished to see taken about it. No superfluous wailings or tears were permitted, on any topic, to the writers in the
Gadfly
. The editor had a good deal of trouble with the literary side of his paper, which inclined, in his opinion, to roll logs, to be slavishly in the fashion in the matter of admiring the right people, to accept weak articles and rubbishy poems from people with budding or full-blown reputations, and, generally, to be like most literary papers. His son, Roger, he did not for long permit to adorn the literary staff: to do so would have been, in view of the calibre of Roger’s intelligence, gross nepotism. Roger had to get another literary job on a less fastidious paper; meanwhile, to his father’s disgust, he continued to produce novels, and even began on verse, so that he appeared in current anthologies of contemporary poetry. Also, he got married. So did his sister, Iris. That settled, and his children well off his hands, Maurice felt that his only and dubious link with family life was snapped, and that he was free to go his own way. He left his wife, offering to provide her with any material she preferred for a divorce, from a mistress to a black
eye. Amy accepted the offer, and these two victims of a singularly unfortunate entanglement found rest from one another at last. It was, Amy complained, too late for her to marry again; of course, Maurice, selfish pig, had waited till it was too late for her but not for him. But Maurice had no inclination to remarry; he had had more than enough of that business. The only woman he had ever seriously loved had married ten years ago, ending deliberately an unhappy, passionate and fruitless relationship. Maurice’s thoughts were not now woman-ward; he lived for his job, and for interest in the bitter comedy of affairs that the world played before him. His silly, common, nagging wife, his silly, ordinary, disappointing children, no more oppressed him; they could, for him, now go their own silly ways. He was free.

Rome was a happy Georgian. For her the comedy of the world was too amusing to be bitter. She, in her splendid idle fifties, was known in London as a lady of wits, of charm, of humour; a gentlewoman of parts, the worldly, idle, do-nothing, care-nothing sister of the busy and useful Mrs. Croft, contributing nothing to the world beyond an attractive presence, good dinner table talk, a graceful zest for gambling, an intelligent, cynical, running commentary on life, and a tolerant, observing smile. Life was a good show to her; it arranged itself well, and she was clever at picking out the best scenes. When, for instance, she had an inclination to visit the House of Commons, she would discover first on which afternoon the Labour members,
or the Irish, were going to have a good row, or Mr. Lloyd George was going to talk like an excited street preacher, or Sir Edward Carson like an Orangeman, or any other star performer do his special turn, and she would select that afternoon and have her reward. Our legislators were to her just that—circus turns, some good, some poor, but none of them with any serious relation to life as lived (if, indeed, any relation with that absurd business could be called serious, which was doubtful).

So the cheerful spectacle of a world of fools brightened Rome’s afternoon years. Before long, the folly was to become too desperate, too disastrous, too wrecking a business to be a comic show even to the most amused eyes; the circus was, all too soon, to go smash, and the folly of the clowns who had helped to smash it became a bitterness, and the idiot’s tale held too much of sound and fury to be borne. But these first Georgian years were, to Rome, twinkling with bland absurdity. She cheered up Maurice in the matter of that prose and verse by means of which his son made of himself a foolish show, reminding him that we all make of ourselves foolish shows in one way or another, and the printed word was one of the less harmful ways of doing this. It was no worse, she maintained, to be a novelist and poet than any other kind of a fool, and one kind or another we all are. After all, he might be instead a swindling company promoter. . . .

“No,” said Maurice. “He hasn’t the wits. And, you know, I don’t share your philosophy. I still believe, in the teeth of enormous odds, that it is possible to make something of this life—that one kind of achievement is more admirable—or less idiotic, if you like—than another. I still think bad, shallow, shoddy work like Roger’s damnable, however unimportant it may be. It’s a mark on the wrong side, the side of stupidity.
You don’t believe in sides, but I do. And I’m glad I do, so don’t try to infect me with your poisonous indifference. I am a man of faith, I tell you; I have a soul. You are merely a cynic, the basest of God’s creatures. You disbelieve in everything. I disbelieve in nearly everything, but not quite. So I shall be saved and you will not. Have a cocktail, Gallio.”

Stanley’s son was at Oxford, reading for a pass, for it was no manner of use, they said, his reading for anything more. He was a nice boy, but not yet clever. “Not yet,” Stanley had said of him all through his schooldays, meaning that Billy was late in developing. “Not yet,” she still said, meaning that he was so late that he would not have developed properly until his last year at Oxford, or possibly after that. Not that Billy was stupid; he was quite intelligent about a number of things, but not, on the whole, about the things in books, which made it awkward about examinations. Nor was he intelligent about politics; in fact, politics bored him a good deal. However, he was destined for a political career. Stanley’s cousin, Sir Giles Humphries, a Liberal member of Parliament, had promised Stanley to take Billy as a junior secretary when he left Oxford, if he should show any capacity for learning the job. Billy’s Liberal political career would thus be well begun. Meanwhile, Billy was an affectionate, companionable boy, who hid his boredom and his ignorance from his mother as well as might be, and very nicely refrained from making mock of militant suffragists in her presence, for, though Stanley had
ceased to be a militant, many of her friends were, in these years, in and out of prison.

Molly wouldn’t go to college. No one, indeed, but her mother suggested that she should. She was obviously not suited, by either inclination or capacities, for the extension of her education. Stanley would have been glad to have Molly at home with her when she left school, for Molly had the heart-breaking charm of her father, even down to his narrow, laughing eyes, and odd, short face. Stanley adored Molly. Molly was tepid and casual about votes, and had no head for books, and not the most rudimentary grasp on public affairs, and
she was worse at meetings and causes than any girl in the world. She didn’t even pretend, like Billy. She would laugh in Stanley’s face, with her incomparable impudence, when Stanley was talking, and say, “Mumsie, darlin
g, stop committing. Oh, mumsie, not before your chee-ild,” and flutter a butterfly kiss on Stanley’s cheek to change the subject. And she wanted to go on the stage. She wanted to go, and went, to a dramatic school, to learn to act. Well, better that than nothing, Stanley sighed. If she
does
learn to act, it will be all right. If she doesn’t, she’s learning something. If it doesn’t make her affected and stupid, like actresses, I don’t mind. And surely nothing can make Molly less than entrancing. But, whatever comes of it, Molly has a right to choose her own life; it’s no business of mine what the children decide to do. In her conscious reaction from the onetime parental tyranny over daughters, Stanley forgot that there might also be parental tyranny over sons, and that Billy, too, had a right to choose his own life. It is creditable to Billy that she could forget it. Billy was the best of sons.

Meanwhile, Stanley was fighting (constitutionally) for votes, women’s trade unions, the welfare of factory
girls, continuation schools, penal reform, clean milk, and the decrease of prostitution. It may be imagined that all these things together kept her pretty busy; unlike Rome, she had no time to visit Parliament on its best days; she only went there when one of the topics in which she was interested was going to be raised. She got thus, Rome told her, all the dry bread and none of the jam. However, Stanley preferred the dry bread days, though they were invariably stupid and disappointing.

Though only a very little of all she had at heart got done, Stanley was happy. She laboured under the delusion that the constitution and social condition of her country were, on the whole, faintly on the upward plane. That was because she was unfairly biased towards the Liberal party in the State, and too apt to approve of the measures they passed. She approved of Old Age Pensions; she even approved, on the whole, of Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act; and she approved of the People’s Budget very much.