Told by an Idiot (5 page)

“But it
courts
disaster. . . .” Stanley was sure of that. “Look where it leads people. Into all sorts of hardships and dangers and sacrifices. Look at Christianity—in the Gospels, I mean.”

“That’s a perversion. Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.”

“What about the Ethical Church? They don’t believe in another.”

“A perversion too. A mere sop thrown to the religious instinct by people who don’t like to starve it altogether. A morbid absurdity. A house without foundations. If they simply mean, as they appear to, that they think they ought to be good, why meet in South Place and sing about it?”

“Why,” inquired Rome, who never did so, “meet anywhere and sing about anything?”

“Why,” said Maurice, “indeed? A morbid instinct inherent in human nature. Mine, I am glad to say, is untainted by it; so is yours, Rome. Vicky has it badly, and Stanley, who gets everything in turns, has it on and off, but she is but young and may get over it. . . . The queer thing about Stanley is that she’s trying to run two quite incompatible things at the same time. Æsthetics and Christian socialism—you might as well be a cricketer and a rowing man, or hang Dicksee and Whistler together on your walls. The æsthetes may go slumming, in the absurd way Vicky does, but they’ve no use for socialism.”

“I’m
not
an æsthete,” Stanley cried, finding it out suddenly. “I’m through with that. I’m going in with the socialists all the way. I shall join the Socialist Democratic Federation at once.”

That was Stanley’s headlong manner of entering into movements. She was a great and impetuous joiner.

But Rome, playing with her monocle on its dangling ribbon, looked at all movements with fastidious rejection.
Cui
, her faintly mocking regard would seem to inquire,
bono?

1880 pursued its way. Mr Gladstone formed his cabinet of sober peers and startling commoners, the new parliament met, the Radicals at once began to shock the Whigs with their unheard-of proposals for so-called reform, Lord Randolph Churchill and his Fourth Party mounted guard, brisk and pert, in the offing, Parnell and his thirty-five Irishmen scowled from another offing, demanding the three F’s, and, for a special comic turn side-show, Mr. Bradlaugh, the unbeliever, was hustled in and out of the House, claiming to affirm, being ejected with violence, returning at a rush, ejected yet again, and so on and so forth, until gentlemanly unbelievers said, “A disgraceful business. Why can’t the man behave like other agnostics, without all this fuss?” and gentlemanly Christians said, “Why can’t the House let him alone?” and the dignified Press said, “It is repugnant to public opinion that one who openly denies his God should be allowed in a House representative of a great Christian nation,” for, believe it or not as you choose, that was the way the Press still talked in the year 1880.

Maurice Garden and his friends at Cambridge greeted Mr. Bradlaugh’s determined onslaughts with encouraging cheers. Maurice Garden enjoyed battle, and he rightly thought the cause of liberty of thought served by this tempestuous affair.

Freedom: that was at this time the obsession of Maurice Garden and his compeers. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech (though not, of course, of action), freedom of small nations (such as Armenia, Ireland, Poland, and the Transvaal Boers), for that was a catchword
among our forefathers of the nineteenth century; freedom even of large ones, such as India; freedom of women, that strange, thin cry raised so far only by sparse, sporadic groups, freedom of labour (whatever that may have meant, and Maurice Garden, a clear-thinking young man, could have told you precisely and at length what he meant by it); freedom even of Russians, that last word in improbabilities.

“Freedom?” queried Rome. “A word that wants defining”—and that was all she had to say of it. While Maurice and Stanley went, hot heads down, for the kernel, she was for ever meticulously, aloofly, fingering the shell, reducing it to absurdity. That seemed, at times, to be all that Rome cared about, all she had the humanity, the vital energy, to seek. Stanley, rushing buoyantly through Oxford, seizing upon this new idea and that, eagerly mapping out her future, ardently burning her present candle at both ends, intellectually, socially and athletically (so far as young women were allowed to be athletic in those days, when hockey and bicycling had not come in and lawn tennis consisted in lobbing a ball gently over a net with a racket weighing seventeen ounces and shaped like a crooked spoon)—Stanley seemed to Rome, whom God had saved from too much love of living, amusingly violent and crude.

They were oddly different, these four sisters; Vicky so sprightly, Rome so cool, Stanley so eager, Una so placid.

“Your languid indifference is tip-top form, my dear,” Vicky would say to Rome. “You’re
fin-de-siècle
—that’s utterly the last word to-day. But I can’t emulate you.”

“Don’t you want to
do
anything, Rome?” Stanley home for the long vacation, asked, and Rome’s eyebrows went up.

“Do anything? Jamais de ma vie. What should I do?”

“Well, anything. Any of the things women do. Teaching. Settlement work. Doctoring. Writing. Painting. Anything.”

“What a list! What frightful labours! I do not.”

“But aren’t you bored?”

“In moderation. I survive. I even amuse myself.”

“
I
think, you know, that women
ought
to do things, just as much as men.”

“And just as little. What’s worth doing, after all?”

“Things
need
doing. The world is so shocking. . . . All this time women have been suppressed and kept under and not allowed to help in putting things right, and now they’re just getting free. . . .”

“There’s one thing about freedom” (a word upon which Rome had of late been speculating), “each generation of people begins by thinking they’ve got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can’t really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.”

“It’s only lately begun, for women. What was there for mamma to do, when
she
was young? Nothing. Only to marry papa. But now . . .”

“What is there for Vicky to do, now
she’s
young? Nothing. Only to marry Charles—or another.”

“Oh, well, Vicky slums. And she could do any of the other things if she liked. . . . Anyhow Rome, you’re not supporting
marriage
as the only woman’s job worth doing!”

“No. Not even marriage. Perhaps, in fact, less than most things marriage. I only said it is, so far as one can infer, Vicky’s job. . . . The only job worth doing in this curious fantasia of a world, as I see it, is to amuse oneself as well as may be and to get through it with no more trouble than need be. What else is there?”

With all the desperate needs of the certainly curious but as certainly necessitous world crying in her ears, with vistas of adventure and achievement stretching illimitably before her eyes, Stanley found this too immense a question. She could only answer it with another. “Why do you think we were born, then?” and Rome’s matter of fact, “Obviously because papa and mamma got married,” sent her sulkily away to play cricket on the lawn with Irving and Una. Apathy, languor, selfishness, did very greatly anger her. She was the more troubled in that she knew Rome to be clever—cleverer than herself. Rome could have done anything, and elected to do nothing. Rome would probably not even marry; her caustic tongue and cool indifference kept those who admired her at arm’s length; she made them feel that any expression of regard was an error in taste; she shrivelled it up by an amused, inquiring look through the deadly monocle she placed in one blue-green eye for the purpose.

Vicky, on the contrary, became, during this summer, definitely affianced to Charles, whom she had decided to marry next spring. She had not, as yet, made of Charles either an æsthete or a ritualist, but these things, she hoped, would come after marriage, and anyhow Charles was intelligent, his career promised well, he had sufficient income, and, in fine, she loved him.

“The main thing, after all, Vicky,” papa inevitably said.

“No, papa; the
main
thing is that the American
merchant princesses are descending on the land like locusts, and that if I don’t secure Charles they will, even though he hasn’t a title—yet. He’s so obviously a distinguished person in embryo. American merchant princesses have brains.”

Vicky, having surrendered, put on a new tenderness, even an occasional gravity. It was as if you could catch glimpses here and there of the gay wife and mother that was to supersede the flighty girl. Beneath her chaff and bickerings with her Charles, her love swelled into that stream so necessary to carry her through the long and arduous business. She did her shopping for her new life with taste and gusto, tempering Morris picturesqueness with Chippendale elegance, chasing Queen Anne with unflagging energy from auction to auction, and from one Israelitish shop to another, tinkling the while with snakish bangles, swinging golden swine from her ears, as was the barbarous and yet graceful custom of our ancestresses in that year.

Maurice left Cambridge, armed with a distinguished first in his classical tripos.

“And what now?” inquired papa, indulgently.

“Wilbur has offered me a job on the
New View
. That will do me, for a bit.”

The
New View
was a weekly paper of the early eighties, started to defeat Whiggery by the spread of Radicalism. Its gods were Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, its objects to introduce a more democratic taxation, to reform the suffrage, to free Ireland, to curtail Empire, and so forth. As its will
was strong, it suffered but it did not suffer long, and is, in fact, now forgotten but by the seekers among the pathetic chronicles of wasted years. All the same, it was, in its brief day, not unfruitful of good; it was deeply, if not widely, respected, and many of our more intelligent forbears wrote for it for a space, particularly that generation which left the Universities round about the year 1880. It was hoped by some of them (including Maurice Garden) that it would make a good jumping-off ground for a political career. As it turned out, the first thing into which Maurice jumped off from it was love. At dinner at the Wilburs, he met Amy Wilbur, the young daughter of his editor. She was small and ivory-coloured, with long dark eyes under slanting brows, a large, round, shallow dimple in each smooth cheek, a small tilting red mouth (red even in those days, when lip salve was not used except in the half world) a smooth, childlike voice, and a laugh like silver bells. Maurice thought her like a geisha out of the new opera,
The Mikado
, and was enchanted with her lovely gaiety. Such is love and its blindness that Maurice, who detested both silliness and petty malice in male or female, did not see that his Amy was silly and malicious. He saw nothing but her enchanting exterior, and on that and his small salary he got married in haste. None of the Gardens except himself and papa much cared about Amy, and papa liked nearly every one, and certainly nearly all pretty girls. As to mamma’s feelings towards her daughter-in-law, who could divine them?

Vicky said to Rome, “They are both making a horrific mistake. Maurice is a prickly person, who won’t suffer fools. In a year he’ll be wanting to beat her. She hasn’t the wits or the personality to be the least help to him in his career, either. When he’s a rising politician and she ought to be holding salons,
she won’t be able to. Her salons will be mere at homes.”

“When,” Rome speculated, “does an at home become a salon? I’ve often wondered.”

They decided that it was a salon when several distinguished people came to it, rather from habit than from accident. Also, the conversation must be reasonably intelligent (or, anyhow, the conversers must believe that it was so, for that is all that can be hoped of any conversation). And people must come, or pretend that they came, mainly for the talk, and not so much for any food there might be, or to show their new clothes.

“Asses they must be,” said Una, who was listening. “I shan’t go to salons ever.”

“No one will ask you, my child. Anything
you’ll
find yourself at will be a common party, with food and drink and foolish chit-chat.”

“Like
your
parties,” Una agreed, amiably content. No teasing worried Una; she was as placid as a young cow.

So, with Vicky and Maurice happily wedded (
settled
, as they wittily called it in those days, though, indeed, they knew as well as we do that marriage is liable to be as inconclusive and unsettling an affair as any other, and somewhat more than most), and papa and mamma happily, if impermanently, ethicised, and the three younger children still pursuing, or being pursued by, education, and Rome perfunctorily, amusedly and inactively surveying the foolish world, the Garden family entered on that eager, clever, civilised, earnest decade,
the eighteen eighties. Earnest indeed it was, for people still took politics seriously, and creeds, and literature, and life. Over the period still brooded the mighty ones, those who are usually called the Giants (literary and scientific) of the Victorian era. For the nineteenth century was an age of giant-makers, of hero-worshippers.

The eighties were also a great time for women. What was called
emancipation
then occurred to them. Young ladies were getting education, and it went to their heads. No creature was ever more solemn, more earnest, more full of good intentions for the world, than the university-educated young female of the eighties. We shall not look upon her like again; she has gone, to make place for us, her lighter-minded daughters, surely a lesser generation, without enthusiasm, ardour or aspiration.