Told by an Idiot (35 page)

The P. & O. liner hooted its way down Southampton Water. The land, the Solent, the open sea, were veiled in February mist. Imogen, leaning on the rail and straining her eyes shoreward, could only see it dimly, darkly, looming like a ghost through fog. That was England, and life in England; a mist-bound world wherein one blindly groped. A mist-bound and yet radiant world, holding all one valued, all that gave life meaning, all that one was leaving behind.

For Imogen was going, for a year, to the Pacific Islands. Hugh, too, was going there, to make maps and plans for the government. Imogen was going with him, exploring, wandering about at leisure from island to island. The perfect life, she had once believed this to be. And still the thought of coral islands, of palm and yam and bread-fruit trees, with the fruits thereof dropping ripely on emerald grass, with monkeys and gay parrakeets screaming in the branches, and great turtles flopping in blue seas, with beachcombers drinking palm-toddy on white beaches, the crystal-clear lagoon in which to swim, and, beyond, the blue, island-dotted open sea,—even now these things tugged
at Imogen’s heartstrings and made her feel again at moments the adventurous little girl she had once been, dreaming romantic dreams.

But more often this bright, still world beyond the mists seemed like the paradise of a hymn, a far, unnatural, brilliant, alien place, which would make one sick for home.

Yet she had chosen to go, and no remonstrances, repentances and waverings had quite undone that choice. In that far, bright, clear, alien place, beyond the drifting mists, perhaps thought, too, was lucid and unconfused, not the desperate, mist-bound, storm-driven, helpless business it was in London. In London all values and all meanings were fluid, were as windy clouds, drifting and dissolving into strange shapes. Life bore too intense, too passionate, an emotional significance; personal relationships were too tangled; clear thought was drowned in desire. One could not see life whole, only a flame, a burning star, at its heart.

Through years and years this could not go on; the entanglement of circumstance, the enmeshing of soul and will, was too close for any unravelling; it could only be cut. Under the knife that cut it—and yet was it cut at all, or only hacked all in vain?—Imogen’s soul seemed to bleed to death, to bleed and swoon quite away.

What had she done, and why? All reasons seemed to reel from sight as they churned for open sea between those mist-blind shores. Parrakeets? Bread-fruit? Lagoons and coral reefs? Oh, God, she cared for none of them. She had been mad, mad, mad.

“
To leave me for so long
. . .
you can’t mean to do it
. . .”

Above the turning, churning screws the hurt voice spoke, how truly, and stabbed her through once more. Can’t mean to do it . . . can’t do it . . . can’t. . . .
Oh, how very true indeed. And yet she must do it and would. It was no use; it would solve nothing, settle nothing; merely for a year she would be sick for home among the alien yams.

But, at the thought of the yams, and the breadfruit, and the grass and parrakeets more green than any imagining, and of the very blue lagoons, a little comfort stole into her heavy heart. A merry beachcomber on a white beach—that was a thing to be, even if nothing could be a really happy arrangement but to be two merry beachcombers together. At the thought of the two merry beachcombers who might have been so very happy, the tears brimmed and blinded Imogen’s eyes.

What a mess, what a mess, what a bitter, bemusing muddle, life was! One renounced its best gifts, those things in it which seemed finest, most ennobling, most enriching, holding most of beauty and of good; these things one renounced, and filled the dreadful gap with turtles, with a little palm-toddy, with a few foolish parrakeets.

What an irony!

Through the blinding mist, above the rushing sound of foaming waters, the voice cried to her, “
Imogen, Imogen
. . .
come back
. . . .”

Imogen wept.

Alas for the happy vagabond, fallen into such sad state.

Rome saw Stanley off to Geneva. Stanley had obtained employment in the Labour department of the League of Nations. She was pleased, and keen, and full of hope. The League would save the world yet. . . .

“It’s going to be the most interesting work of my life, so far,” said Stanley, leaning out of the train. “To find one’s best job at sixty-two—that’s rather nice, I think. Life’s so full of
hope
, Rome. Oh, I do feel happy about it.”

“Good,” said Rome, and “Good-bye, my dear,” for the train began to move.

“Good-bye, Romie. . . . Take care of yourself: you’re looking tired lately.”

“I’m very old, you see,” Rome said, after the retreating train, and a passer-by, turning to glance at the slight, erect, gray-haired lady, thought that she did not look very old at all.

But she was very old, for she would soon be sixty-four, and, further, she was very tired, for she had cancer coming on, inherited from mamma. She had not mentioned it to any one yet, beyond the doctor, who had told her that, unless she had operations, she would die within a year. Operations nothing, Rome had said; such a bore, and only to prolong the agony; if she had to die, she would die as quickly as might be. She further decided that, before the pain should become acute or the illness overwhelming, she would save trouble to herself and others by an apparently careless overdose of veronal. Meanwhile, she had a few months to live.

The thought that it would only, probably, be a few months, set her considering, as she drove herself home in her car, her practised hands steady on the wheel, life, its scope, its meaning, and its end. Life was well enough, she thought; well enough, and a gay enough business for those who had the means to make it so and the temperament to find it so. Life was no great matter, and nor, certainly, was death; but it was well enough. We come and we go; we are born, we live, and we die; this poor ball, thought Rome, serves us for all that; and, on the whole, we make
too much complaint of it, expect, one way and another, too much of it. It is, after all, but a turning ball, which has burst, for some reason unknown to science, into a curious, interesting and rather unwholesome form of animal and vegetable life. Indeed, thought Rome, I think it is a rather remarkable ball. But of course it can be but of the slightest importance, from the point of view of the philosopher who considers the very great extent and variety of the universe and the extremely long stretching of the ages. Its inhabitants tend to overrate its importance in the scheme of things. Human beings surely tend to overrate their own importance. Funny, hustling, strutting, vain, eager little creatures that we are, so clever and so excited about the business of living, so absorbed and intent about it all, so proud of our achievements, so tragically deploring our disasters, so prone to talk about the wreckage of civilisation, as if it mattered much, as if civilisations had not been wrecked and wrecked all down human history, and it all came to the same thing in the end. Nevertheless, thought Rome, we are really rather wonderful little spurts of life. The brief pageant, the tiny, squalid story of human life upon this earth, has been lit, among the squalor and the greed, by amazing flashes of intelligence, of valour, of beauty, of sacrifice, of love. A silly story if you will, but a somewhat remarkable one. Told by an idiot, and not a very nice idiot at that, but an idiot with gleams of genius and of fineness. The valiant dust that builds on dust—how valiant, after all, it is. No achievement can matter, and all things done are vanity, and the fight for success and the world’s applause is contemptible and absurd, like a game children play, building their sand castles which shall so soon one and all collapse; but the queer, enduring spirit of enterprise which animates the dust we are is not contemptible nor absurd.

Rome mused, running leisurely across Hyde Park, of herself, her parents, and sisters and brothers, of how variously they had all taken life. Her papa had made of it a great spiritual adventure. Her mamma—what had mamma made of life? She had, anyhow, accepted papa and his spiritual adventure, and accepted all her children and their lives. And yet, always and always, mamma had remained delicately apart, detached, too gentle to be called cynical, too practical to be called a philosopher, too shrewd to be deceived by life. Dear mamma. Rome very often missed her still. As to Vicky, she had skimmed gracefully over life’s surface like a swallow, dipping her pretty wings in the shallows and splashing them about, or like a bee, sipping and tasting each flower. She had plunged frequently, ardently, and yet lightly, into life. Maurice had not plunged into life; he had fought it, opposed it, treated it as an enemy in a battle; he had made no terms with it. Stanley had, on the other hand, embraced it like a lover, or like a succession of lovers, to each of which she gave the best of her heart and soul and mind before she passed on to the next. Stanley believed in life, that it was or could be splendid and divine. Irving and Una both accepted it calmly, cheerfully, without speculation, as a good enough thing, Irving with more of enterprise and more of progressive desire, Una placidly, statically, eating the meal set before her and wishing nothing more, nothing less. Both these accepted.

And Rome herself had rejected. Without opposition and without heat, she had refused to be made an active participant in the business, but had watched it from her seat in the stalls as a curious and entertaining show. That was, and must always, in any circumstances, have been her way. Had she married, or had she gone away, long ago, with Mr. Jayne, would she then have
been forced into some closer, some more intimate spiritual relationship with the show? Possibly. Or possibly not. Life is infinitely compelling, but the spirit remains infinitely itself.

Anyhow, it mattered not at all. Life, whatever it had, whatever it might have, meant to her, was in its last brief lap.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death
. . . .”

Her little drift of dust was so soon to return and subside whence it came, dust to dust.

She thought that she would miss the queer, absurd show, which would go on with its antics without her, down who knew what æons. Perhaps not very many after all; perhaps all life was before long dustily to subside, leaving the ball, like a great revolving tomb, to spin its way through space. Or perhaps the ball itself would dash suddenly from its routine spinning, would fly, would rush like a moth for a lamp, to some great, bright sun and there burst into flame, till its last drift of ashes should be consumed and no more seen.

A drift of dust, a drift of storming dust. It settles, and the little stir it has made is over and forgotten. The winds will storm on among the bright and barren stars.

Rome smiled, as she neatly swung out at the Grosvenor Gate.

EMILIE ROSE MACAULAY

(1881–1958) was born in Rugby, Warwickshire; her father was an assistant master at Rugby School. Due to her mother’s ill health the family moved, in 1887, to a small Italian town, Varazze, where they lived for seven years. She was then educated at Oxford High School for Girls, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Modern History.

While living with her family in Wales, Rose Macaulay wrote her first novel,
Abbots Verney
(1906), published after they had moved to Great Shelford, near Cambridge. It was here that Rose became an ardent Anglo-Catholic. Here, too, her childhood friendship with Rupert Brooke matured and through him she was introduced to London literary society: Walter de la Mare, Hugh Walpole, John Middleton Murry and Naomi Royde-Smith in particular. She moved to London and in 1914 published her first book of poetry,
The Two Blind Countries
.

During the First World War she worked at the War Office where, in 1918, she met the novelist and former Catholic priest Gerald O’Donovan, the married man with whom she was to have an affair lasting until his death from cancer in 1942. Throughout these years Rose was to become a voluntary exile from the church, her reconciliation only, being effected in her seventieth year. Before and between the Wars Rose Macaulay wrote at least one novel every two years, as well as essays, poetry and criticism. This flow, however, was dramatically interrupted by the advent of the Second World War, seeing the destruction of her flat and loss of her entire library.

A traveller all her life, Rose Macaulay went to Trebizond in 1954. This inspired her last and most famous novel,
The Towers of Trebizond
(1956), awarded a James Tait Black Memorial prize and a bestseller in America. She was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 1958 New Year’s Honours, but seven months later, having started a new novel, Rose Macaulay suffered a heart attack and died at her home.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Ltd 1923

Copyright © The Estate of Rose Macaulay 1923

The moral right of author has been asserted

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ISBN: 9781448200009
eISBN: 9781448201327

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