Told by an Idiot (4 page)

So, when papa said, “You must allow Charles his conscience,” Vicky returned, firmly, “Dear papa,
no
. Conscience should be our servant, not our master. That’s what Brother ô Beckett said in his sermon this morning. Or, anyhow, something like it. Conscience is given us to be educated and trained up the way it should go. An unruly conscience is an endless nuisance. He that bridleth not his own conscience . . .”

Papa, sensible of his own so inconveniently unbridled conscience, said mildly, “I think Brother à Beckett was perhaps referring to the tongue,” and Vicky lightly admitted that her memory might have got confused.

“But never mind sermons and the conscience, here’s grandpapa,” she said; and, sure enough, there was grandpapa, who was staying with them on a visit. Grandpapa was the father of mamma, and a dean, and a very handsome man of seventy-five, and he was one of the last ditchers in the matter of orthodoxy, and had yielded no inch to science or the higher criticism, and believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the divine credentials of the Anglican Establishment, and disliked popery, ritual, dissent and free thought with equal coldness. Papa he had never approved of; a weak, vacillating fellow, whose reputation was little affected by one disgraceful change more or less. It did not particularly signify that papa had joined the Ethical Church; nothing about papa particularly signified; a weak, wrong-headed, silly fellow, who would certainly, for all his scholarship, never be a Dean. It was far more distressing that
Anne (mamma), who ought to have made a firm stand and saved her husband from his folly, should thus abet him and follow him about from church to church. And the children had been deplorably brought up. Grandpapa, who thought it blasphemous not to believe in Noah and his ark, and even in the date assigned to these by Bishop Usher, and had written to
The Times
protesting against the use in schools of the arithmetic book of Bishop Colenso, on account of the modernist instruction imparted by this bishop to the heathen in this matter of the date of the ark,—grandpapa heard these unhappy children of his daughter’s discussing the very bases of revealed truth; grandpapa, who held that our first parents lost paradise through disobedience, pride, inquisitiveness and false modesty, heard Maurice’s perverse defiance of law and authority. Rome’s calm contempt and conceited criticism of accepted standards, Stanley’s incessant, eager, “Why, what for, and why not?” and Vicky’s horror at the breadth and crudeness of the Prayer Book marriage service.

Grandpapa, being a conservative and a Disraelian, was just now not well pleased. He did not think that the Gladstone government would be able to deal adequately or rightly with the inheritance of foreign responsibilities left them by their predecessors. South Africa, Egypt, Afghanistan,—what would the liberals, many of them Little Englanders, in fact though not yet in name, do with all this white man’s burden, as the responsibilities of Empire were so soon, so horribly soon, to be called? Had grandpapa thought of it, he would certainly have called them that. His grandson, Maurice, called them, on the other hand, “all those damned little Tory wars,” a difference in nomenclature which indicated a real difference in political attitude.

Grandpapa entered with the
Observer
, which regretted
as he did the way the elections had gone, and with the
Guardian
, which did not. He sat down and patted Vicky on the shoulder, and said that Dean Liddon had preached at St. Paul’s, where he had attended morning service.

“A capital defence of the faith,” said grandpapa. “Bones to it, and substance. None of your sentimental slop. You’ve all been running after ethics, or ritual, or this, that and the other, but I’ve had the pure Word. Liddon’s too High, but he’s sound. I remember in ’55 . . .”

One of grandpapa’s familiar stories, told as old people told their stories, with loving rounding of detail.

Vicky’s mind reached vainly back towards ’55, and could not get there. Crinolines and sweeping whiskers, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Crimea, Bible orthodoxy and the Tractarians, all the great Victorians. A dim, entrancing period, when papa and mamma were getting married, and people were too old-fashioned to see life straight as it was. And to grandpapa, ’55 was quite lately, just the other day, and ’80 was like an engine got loose from its train and dashing madly in advance, heading precipitately for a crash.

“I remember,” said grandpapa, “I remember . . .”

Papa said, “That was the year King’s College asked Maurice to retire because of
Theological Essays
.

What dull things elderly people remembered!

“Next Sunday,” said Vicky, “I shall take Charles to South Place, papa. I hear Mr. Pater is preaching there. Too sweet and quaint; he preaches everywhere. And often the divine Oscar sits under him.”

Maurice and Stanley were back from Cambridge and Oxford for the Easter vacation, talking, talking, talking. Stanley, in a crimson stockinette jersey, tight like an eel’s skin, and a tight little brown skirt caught in at the knees, her chubby face pink with excitement and health, talked of Oxford, of the river, of lectures, of Mr. Pater, and of friendship. Friendship was like dancing flames to Stanley in this her first Oxford year; a radiant, painful apocalypse of joy.

“Are they so splendid?” Rome speculated of these glorious girls. “
Is
any one so splendid, ever?” She sat idly, her hands clasped behind her short, silky curls, Mallock’s
New Republic
open at her side. Stanley sat on the edge of a table, and swung her legs. How romantic Stanley was! What were girls, what, indeed, were boys either, that such a halo should encircle their foolish heads?

There was proceeding at this time a now long-forgotten campaign called the Woman’s Movement, and on to the gay youthful fringe of this Stanley and her friends were catching. Women, long suppressed, were emerging; women were to be doctors, lawyers, human beings, everything; women were to have their share of the earth, their share of adventure, to flourish in all the arts, ride perched in handsom cabs, even on monstrous bicycles, find the North Pole. . . .

“Too energetic for me,” Rome commented.

“Oh, but you’ll be a great writer, perhaps.”

“No. Why? There’s nothing I want to write. What’s the use of writing? Too much of that already. . . . Oh, well, go on about Oxford, Stan. You don’t
convince me that it’s anything but a very ordinary place full of quite ordinary people, but I rather like to hear you being absurd.”

Rome’s faint, delicately thin voice expressed acquiescent but not scornful irony. Stanley was a bore sometimes, but an intelligent bore.

She went on about Oxford, and Mr. Pater, and some lectures on art by William Morris that she had been to. Stanley was drunk with beauty; she was plunging deep into the æsthetic movement on whose surface Vicky played.

“You know, Rome,” she puckered her forehead over it, “more and more I feel that the
merely
æsthetic people are on the wrong tack. Beauty for ourselves can’t be enough; it’s got to be made possible for every one. . . . That’s where Vicky and her friends are off it. A lily in a blue vase all to yourself isn’t enough. All this . . .” she looked round at the Liberty room, the peacock patterns, the willow pattern china, the oak settle, “all this—it’s not fair we should be able to have it when every one can’t. It’s greedy . . .”

“Every one’s greedy.”

“No,” said Stanley, and her eyes glowed, for she was thinking of her splendid friends. “
No
. Greediness is in every one, but it can be conquered. Socialism is the way. . . . I wish you could meet Evelyn Peters. She’s joined the Socialist Democratic Federation. . . . I want to ask her here to stay, in June. She’s not just an ordinary person, you know. She’s splendid. She’s six years older than me, and enormously cleverer, and she’s read everything and met every one. . . . I can’t tell you how I feel about her. . . .”

Obvious, thought Rome, how Stanley felt, with her shining eyes and flushed cheeks and shy, changing voice. In love; that was what Stanley was. Stanley was for ever in and out of love; she had been the same
all through her schooldays. So had Vicky, but with Vicky it was men, and less romantic and earnest. Stanley was always flinging her whole being prostrate in adoring enthusiasm before some one or something, funny child. She was looking at Rome now in shy, gleaming hesitation, wondering if Rome were despising her, laughing at her, but not able to keep Evelyn Peters to herself. To say, “Evelyn Peters is my friend,” was an exquisite æsthetic joy, and made their friendship a more real, achieved thing.

Rome felt a little uncomfortable behind her bland nonchalance; Stanley’s emotions were so strong.

When Maurice was there Stanley did not talk about her friends; such talk was not suitable for Maurice, whose own friendships were so different. Often in these days they talked politics. Maurice was a Radical.

“Chamberlain’s the man,” he said, “Chamberlain and Dilke. Whiggery’s played out; dead as mutton. Mild Liberalism has had its day. Yes, pater, your day is over. The seventies have been the hey-day of Liberalism. I grant you it’s done well—Education Act, Irish Disestablishment, abolition of tests, and so on. Such obvious reforms, you see, that every sane person has
had
to be a Liberal. That’s watered Liberalism down. Now we’ve got to go further, and only the extremists will stick on; the old gang will desert. Radicalism’s the only thing for England now.”

Maurice, pacing the room with his quick little steps, his hands in his pockets, his chin in the air, would talk thus in his crisp, rapid, asseverating voice, even to
grandpapa, who had, when he had done the same thing as a schoolboy, ordered him out of the room for impertinence. Grandpapa and Maurice did not, in fact, each really like the other—obstinate age and opinionated youth. Because grandpapa was in the room, Maurice said, “They’ve returned old Bradlaugh for Northampton all right. Now we shall see some fun,” and grandpapa said, “Don’t mention that abominable blasphemer in my presence.”

Papa said gently, with his cultured tolerance, “A good deal, I fancy, has been attributed to Bradlaugh of which he has not been guilty.”

“Are you denying,” inquired grandpapa, “that the fellow is a miserable blaspheming atheist and a Malthusian?”

“An atheist,” papa admitted, discreetly passing over the last charge, “no doubt he is. And very undesirably coarse and violent in his methods of controversy and propaganda. But I am not sure that the charge of blasphemy is a fair one, on the evidence we have.”

“Any man,” said grandpapa, sharply, “who denies his Maker blasphemes.”

“In that case,” said Maurice moodily, “I blaspheme,” and left the room.

Papa apologised for him.

“You must forgive the boy; he is still crude.”

Grandpapa shut his firm mouth tightly, and Rome thought, “He is still cruder.”

Vicky asked lightly, “What is a Malthusian, grandpapa?” and grandpapa, who came of a coarse and outspoken generation, snapped, “A follower of Malthus.”

“And who was Malthus, grandpapa?”

Grandpapa, catching his daughter’s eye, and recollecting that it was the year 1880, not the coarse period of his own youth, hummed and cleared his throat and said, “A very ungentlemanly fellow, my dear.”

And that was all about Malthus that young misses of 1880 needed to know. Or so their elders believed. But in 1880, as now, young misses often knew more than their parents and grandparents supposed. Rome and Stanley, better read in history than Vicky, could have enlightened both her and grandpapa on the theme of Malthus.

It was a good thing that grandpapa’s visit ended next day. Without him, Maurice was better-mannered, less truculent. They could then discuss Radicalism, Bradlaugh, blasphemy, beauty, Malthus and the elections,
en famille
, without prejudice. They were, as a family, immense talkers, inordinate arguers. The only two who did not discuss life at large were Irving and Una; their conversation was and always would be of the lives they personally led, and those led by such animals as they kept. The lives led by others worried them not at all. They recked not of the Woman’s Movement, but Irving amiably held Maurice’s high bicycle while Stanley, divested of her tight skirt and clad in a pair of his trousers, mounted it and pedalled round and round the quiet square. It was Irving who knew that a lower kind of bicycle was on its way, had even been seen in embryo.

“But girls’ll never ride it,” he opined. “That’s jolly certain.”

“Girls will probably be wearing knickerbockers in a year or two,” Stanley, always hopeful, asserted. “For exercise and games and things. Or else a new kind of skirt will come in, short and wide. Our clothes are absurd.”

“Women’s clothes always are,” said Irving, content that this should be so.

Stanley would rush in, happy and bruised, assume again her absurd, caught-in-at-the-knees skirt, and argue desperately with Maurice about Christian socialism. Stanley was a Christian, ardent and practical; that was the effect Oxford was having on her. She privately wondered how papa, having known and loved Oxford, could bear the Ethical Church. But probably the Oxford Anglicanism of papa’s day had not been so inspiring.

Vicky told Stanley that socialism, Christian or unchristian, was very crude; religion was an affair of art and beauty, not of economics.

“Religion—oh, I don’t know.” Stanley wondered, frowning. “What
is
religion, Rome?”

Rome, looking up from Samuel Butler, merely said, “How should I know? You’d better ask papa. He should know; he’s writing a book about it.”

“No; I don’t mean comparative religions. I mean
religion
. . . .”

“A primitive insurance against disaster,” Maurice defined it. He always looked up and took notice when religion was mentioned; to this family the word was like “rats “to a dog, owing, perhaps, to their many clerical ancestors, perhaps to the fact that they were latish Victorians.