Told by an Idiot (9 page)

“I’m not,” she said, “going to take you away from your wife. Not in any way. What we have must make no difference to what
she
has. . . .”

It will be seen, therefore, that their conversation was as old as the world, and scarcely worth recording. It pursued the normal lines. That is to say, Mr. Jayne replied, “She has nothing of me that matters,” rather inaccurately classing under the head of what did not matter his children, his name, and the right to his bed and board. As is the habit in these situations, Mr. Jayne meant that what mattered, and what Mrs. Jayne had not got, was his love, his passion, his spirit and his soul. These, he indicated, were Rome’s alone, as Rome’s were his.

What to do about it was the question. One must, said Rome, holding herself in, continue to be civilised. And what, inquired Mr. Jayne, is civilisation—this arbitrary civilisation of society’s making, that binds the spirit’s freedom in chains? It was all founded on social expediency, on primitive laws to protect inheritance, to safeguard property. . . . Had Rome read Professor Westermark’s great work on the history
of human marriage? Rome had. What of it? The point was: there was Mrs. Jayne in Russia, and Mr. and Mrs. Jayne’s two children. These were Mr. Jayne’s obligations, and nothing he and she did must come between him and them. That laid firmly down, she and Mr. Jayne could do what they liked; that was how Rome saw it. One must keep one’s contracts, and behave as persons of honour and breeding should behave.

“As I see it,” said Rome, “the fact that we love each other needn’t prevent our being friends. We are not babies. . . .”

“Friends,” said Mr. Jayne, in agreement, doubt, scepticism, contempt, hope, or bitter derision, as the case might be.

And more they said, until they were interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Garden’s papa, the Dean, who had called in his brougham to see mamma, but, mamma being out at Vicky’s, he sat down between these two white, disturbed, hot-eyed and shaken persons and began to talk of Mr. Parnell and his disgrace.

Grandpapa opined that Mr. Parnell had no more place in public life.

Mr. Jayne replied that anyhow it appeared that he would be hounded out of it.

“Cant,” he said. “Truckling to Nonconformist cant and humbug and Catholic bigotry. A man’s private affairs have nothing to do with his public life. It’s contemptible, the way the Nationalists have caved in to that old humbug, Gladstone.”

Grandpapa had always thought Gladstone a humbug (though not so old as all that came to; he himself was eighty-five and going strong), but with the rest of Mr. Jayne’s thesis he was in disagreement. Our political leaders must not be men of notoriously loose lives. The sanctity of the home must, at all costs, be upheld.

“O’Shea’s home,” said Mr. Jayne, “never had much of that. Neither O’Shea nor Mrs. O’Shea was great on it.”

“For that matter,” Rome joined in, crisp and bland, as if civilisation had not met its débacle in the drawing-room but a half hour since, “for that matter, what homes
have
sanctity? Why do people think that sanctity is particularly to be found in homes, of all places? And can a bachelor’s or spinster’s home have it, or do the people in the home need to be married? What is it, this curious
sanctity
, that bishops write to the papers about, and that is, they say, being attacked all the time, and is so easily destroyed? In what homes is it to be found? I have often wondered.”

“Whom God hath joined together,” replied grandpapa readily, “that is the answer to your question, my dear child, is it not.”

“Oh, God,” muttered Mr. Jayne, but probably rather as an ejaculation than as a sceptical comment on the authority behind matrimony.

Whichever it was, grandpapa did not care about the phrase, and looked at him sharply. He believed Mr. Jayne to be an unbeliever, and did not greatly care for the tone of his writings. However, they conversed intelligently for a while about the future of the Irish party before Mr. Jayne rose to go.

“Come into the hall,” his eyes said. But Rome did not go into the hall.

He was gone. Rome sat still in the shadow of the window. His steps echoed down the square.

“Do you see much of that young fellow, my dear?” grandpapa asked, in his old, rumbling voice.

“Oh, yes,” said Rome, feeling exalted and light in the head, and as if she had drunk alcohol. “Oh, yes, grandpapa. We are great friends.”

“Do your parents like him, my child?”

“Oh, yes, grandpapa. Very much. Oh, I think every one likes him. He is a great success, you know.”

She was talking foolishly, and at random, straying about the room, taking up books, wishing grandpapa would go.

Grandpapa grunted. Rather queer goings on, he thought, for Rome to be entertaining young men by herself when her papa and mamma were out. What were unmarried young women coming to? If mamma had gone on like that thirty years ago. . . . But this, of course, was 1890—desperately modern. Grandpapa, though he not infrequently wrote to the
Times
, the
Spectator
, and the
Guardian
, to say how modern the current year was (for, of course, current years always were and are), did not always remember it. The untramelled (it seemed to him untramelled) freedom of intercourse enjoyed by modern young men and women (especially young women) continually shocked him. Grandpapa had enjoyed much free and untramelled intercourse in his own distant youth, during the Regency, but fifty years of Victorianism had since intervened, and he believed that intercourse should not now be free. He could not understand his granddaughter Stanley, who was continually abusing what she called the conventional prudery of the age; what further liberties, in heaven’s name, did young women want? To do her justice, Rome did not join in this cry for further emancipation; Rome accepted the conventions, with an acquiescent, ironic smile. There they were: why make oneself hot with kicking over the traces? One accepted the social follies and codes. . . .

(“On the contrary,” Maurice would say, “I refuse them.”

“It will make no difference to them either way,” said Rome).

Rome, a good
raconteuse
and mimic, proceeded to
entertain grandpapa with an account of a dinner party at which she had been taken in by that curious and noisy member of Parliament, Mr. Augustus Conybeare, whom grandpapa disliked exceedingly.

Then mamma and papa came home, and Rome went upstairs to dress for another dinner party. Thus do social life and the storm-tossed journey of the human soul run on concurrently, and neither makes way for the other.

Through that winter civilisation fought its losing battle with more primitive forces over the souls and bodies of Miss Garden and Mr. Jayne.

“There is only one way in which we can meet and be together,” said Rome, “and that is as friends. There is no other relation possible in the circumstances. I will be party to no scandal, my best. If we can’t meet one another with self-control, then we mustn’t meet at all. What is the use of tilting at the laws of society? There they are, and thus it is. . . .”

“You make a fetish of society,” said Mr. Jayne, with gloom. “For a woman of your brains, it is queer.”

“Perhaps,” said Rome.

Then, it becoming apparent that she and Mr. Jayne were not at present going to meet one another with self-control, Rome went for the winter to the city of that name, with her papa, whose spiritual home it, of course, now was. Mrs. Garden did not go, because she desired to be in at the birth of Stanley’s baby.

But civilisation had not reckoned sufficiently with the forces of emotion. These led Mr. Jayne, but a few
weeks after Miss Garden had departed, to follow her to Italy, and, in fact, to Rome.

So, one bright February morning, he called at the Gardens’ hotel pension in the Via Babuino, and found Rome and her papa in act to set forth for a walk on the Pincio. Miss Garden, looking pale, fair and elegant in a long, fur-edged, high-shouldered cape coat and a tall pointed, blue velvet hat beneath which her hair gleamed gold, received him as urbanely, as coolly, as detachedly as ever; she seemed to have got her emotions well under control in the month since they had parted. Mr. Jayne responded to her tone, and all the morning, as they strolled about with Mr. Garden, they were bland and cool and amusing; well-bred English visitors, turning interested and satirical eyes on the fashionable crowds about them, stopping now and then to exchange amenities with fellow-strollers, for Mr. Jayne knew Roman society well, and Mr. Garden had come armed with introductions from his co-religionists, though, indeed, he was little disposed for much society, wishing to spend such time as he did not devote to seeing Rome in studious research at the Vatican library. His daughter was a little afraid that the Eternal City might seriously disturb his faith, and that papa might fall under the undeniably fascinating influence of paganism, which makes such a far finer and nobler show in Rome than mediæval Christianity. And, indeed, with St. Peter’s papa was not pleased; he scarcely liked to say so, even to himself, but it did seem to him to be of a garish hugeness that smacked almost of vulgarity, and pained his fastidious taste. On the other hand, there were many old churches of a more pleasing style, and in these his soul found rest when disturbed by the massive splendours of classical Rome. No; papa would not become a pagan; he knew too much of pagan corruptions and cruelties for that. Corruptions and
cruelties he admitted, of course, in the history of Christianity also; corruption and cruelty are, indeed, properties of the unfortunate and paradoxical human race; but papa was persuaded that only defective Christians (after all, Christians always are and have been defective) were corrupt and cruel, whereas the most completely pagan of pagans had been so, and paganism is, indeed, rather an incentive than a discouragement to vice. In fact, papa was, by this time, thoroughly biased in this matter, and so was probably safe. Or, anyhow, so his daughter hoped. For it would, there was no denying it, be exceedingly awkward were papa to become a pagan, quite apart from the preliminary anguish with which his soul would be torn were he to be shaken from his present faith. Were there pagan places of worship in London? Probably papa would have to build a private chapel, and in it erect images of his new gods. . . . For pagans had never been happy without much worship; they had been the most religious of believers. Except, of course, the lax and broad-church pagan, and probably papa, if he got paganism at all, would get it strong.

So Rome was quite pleased that papa should be walking on the Pincio with her, getting a good view of the dome of St. Peter’s, which is the finest and most impressive part of that cathedral, rather than wandering about the Forum and peering into the new excavations, murmuring scraps of Latin as he peered.

In the warm, sunlit air, with the band playing Verdi, and the gay crowds promenading, and the enchanted city spread all a-glitter beneath them, Rome was caught into a deep and intoxicated joy. The bitter, restless struggling of the last months gave way to peace; the happy peace that looks not ahead, but rejoices in the moment. The tall and gay companion strolling at her side, so fluent in several languages, so
apt to catch a half-worded meaning, to smile at an unuttered jest, so informed, so polished, so of the world worldly . . . take Mr. Jayne as merely that, and she had her friend and companion back again, which was deeply restful and vastly stimulating. And beneath that was her lover, whom she loved; beneath his urbane exterior his passion throbbed and leaped, and his deep need of her cried, and in her the answering need cried back.

Together they walked in the Campagna, in the bright, soft wash of the February sun. Mr Jayne had been in Rome a week, and they had gone out to Tivoli together, without papa, who was reading in the Vatican library. They lunched at the restaurant by the waterfalls, then explored Hadrian’s Villa with the plan in Murray, and quarrelled about which were the different rooms. Failing to agree on this problem, they sat down in the Trichinium and looked at the view, and discussed the more urgent problem of their lives.

“You must,” said Mr. Jayne, “come to me. It is the only right and reasonable way out. We’ll live in no half-way house, with secrecy and concealment. We should both hate that. But Olga will not divorce me; it’s no use thinking of that. In her view, and that of all her countrywomen, husbands are never faithful. The infidelity of a husband is no reason to a Russian woman for divorce. Unless she herself wants to marry another man, and that is likely enough, in Olga’s case, to happen. We are nothing to each other, she and I. Such love as we had—and it was
never love—is dead long ago. We don’t even like each other.”

“Curious,” mused Rome, “not to foresee these developments at the outset, before taking the serious step of marriage. Marriage is an action too freely practised and too seldom adequately considered.”

“That is so,” Mr. Jayne agreed. “But, and however that may be, what is done is done. What we now have to consider, however inadequately, is the future. It is very plain that you and I must be together. Yes, yes, yes. Nothing else is plain, but that is. The one light in chaos. . . . My dearest love, you can’t be denying that. It is the only conceivable thing—the only thinkable way out.”

“Way out,” said Rome. “I think, rather, a way in. . . . Which way do we take—out or in?” Musingly she looked over the Campagna to blue hills, and Mr. Jayne, his eyes on her white profile, on the gleam of gold hair beneath her dark fur cap, and on her slender hands that clasped her knees, leant closer to her and replied, with neither hesitation nor doubt, “In.”

“Indeed,” said Miss Garden, “these questions can’t be decided in this rough and ready, impetuous manner. The mind must have its share in deciding these important matters, not merely the emotions and desires. Or else what is the good of education, or of having learnt to think clearly at all?”

“Very little,” said Mr. Jayne. “However, in this case the more clearly one thinks the more plain the way to take becomes. It is confused and muddled thinking that would lead us to conform to convention and give one another up, merely because of a social code.”