TOLD BY AN IDIOT
A FAMILY AT HOME
ONE evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth—in brief, in the year 1879—Mrs. Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr. Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, “Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.”
Poor papa had very often lost his faith during the fifty years of his life. Sometimes he became, from being an Anglican clergyman, a Unitarian minister, sometimes a Roman Catholic layman (he was, by nature, habit and heredity, a priest or minister of religion, but the Roman Catholic church makes trouble about wives and children), sometimes some strange kind of dissenter, sometimes a plain agnostic, who believed that there lived more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds (and as to this he should know, for on quite half the creeds he was by now an expert). On his last return to Anglicanism, he had accepted a country living.
Victoria, the eldest of the six children, named less for the then regnant queen than for papa’s temporary victory over unbelief in the year of her birth, 1856, spoke sharply. She was twenty-three, and very pretty, and saw no reason why papa should be allowed so many more faiths and losses of faith in his career than the papas of others.
“Really, mamma ... it is too bad of papa. I knew it was coming; I said so, didn’t I, Maurice? His sermons have been so funny lately, and he’s been reading Comte all day in his study instead of going out visiting, and getting all kinds of horrid pamphlets from the Rationalist Press Association, and poring over an article in the Examiner about ‘A Clergyman’s Doubts.’ And I suppose St. Thomas’ day has brought it to a head.” (Victoria was High Church, so knew all about saints’ days.) “And now we shall have to leave the vicarage, just when we’ve made friends with all sorts of nice people, with tennis courts and ballrooms. Papa should be more careful, and it is too bad.”
Maurice, the second child (named for Frederick Denison), who was at Cambridge, and a firm rationalist, having fought and lost the battle of belief while a freshman, enquired, cynically but not undutifully, and with more patience than his sister, “What is he going to be this time?”
“An Ethicist,” said Mrs. Garden, in her clear, noncommittal voice. “We are joining the Ethical Society.”
“Whatever’s that?” Vicky crossly asked.
“It has no creeds but only conduct” ... (“And I,” Vicky interpolated, “have no conduct but only creeds”) ... “and a chapel in South Place, Finsbury Pavement, and a magazine which sometimes has a poem by Robert Browning. It published that one about a man who strangled a girl he was fond of with her own hair on a wet evening. I don’t know why he thought it specially suitable for the Ethical Society magazine.... They meet for worship on Sundays.”
“Worship of what, mamma?”
“Nobility of character, dear. They sing ethical hymns about it.”
Vicky gave a little scream.
Mrs. Garden looked at Stanley, her third daughter (named less for the explorer than for the Dean, whom Mr. Garden had always greatly admired), and found, as she had expected, Stanley’s solemn blue eyes burning on hers. Stanley was, in fancy, in the South Place Ethical Chapel already, singing the ethical hymns....
Stanley had read this and other hymns in a little book her papa had.
“Then I suppose,” said Rome, the second daughter, who knew of old that papa must always live near a place of worship dedicated to his creed of the moment, “then I suppose we are moving to Finsbury Pavement.” Rome had been named less for the city than for the church, of which papa had been a member at the time of her birth, twenty years ago; and, after all, if Florence, why not Rome? Rome looked clever. She had a white, thin face, and vivid blue-green eyes like the sea beneath rocks; and she thought it very original of papa to believe so much and so often. Her own mind was sceptical.
Vicky’s brow smoothed. Moving to London. There was something in that. Though of course it mustn’t be Finsbury Pavement; she would see to that.
Irving, the youngest but one (named less for the actor than to commemorate the brief period when papa had been an Irvingite, and had believed in twelve living apostles who must all die and then would come the Last Day), said, “Golly, what a lark!” Irving was sixteen, and was all for a move, all for change of residence if not of creed. He was an opportunist and a realist, and made the best of the vagaries of circumstance. He was destined to do well in life. He was not, like Maurice, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, nor, like Vicky, caught in the mesh of each passing fashion, nor, like Stanley, an ardent hunter of the Idea, nor, like Rome, a critic. He was more like his younger sister (only he had more enterprise and initiative), Una, a very calm and jolly schoolgirl, named less for her who braved the dragon than for the One Person in whom papa had believed at the time of her birth (One Person not in the Trinitarian, but in the Unitarian sense).
“Three hundred a year less,” remarked Rome, from the couch whereon she lay (for her back was often tired), and looked ironically at Vicky, to see how she liked the thought of that.
Vicky’s smooth cheek flushed. She had forgotten about money.
“Oh, really.... Oh, I do think papa is too bad. Papa had entered the room, and stood looking on mean? Can’t he wait till next?”
Mamma’s faint (was it also ironic, or merely patient?) movement of the eyebrows meant that it was too late; papa’s faith was already lost.
“By next winter he may have found it again,” Rome suggested.
“Well, even if so,” said Vicky, “who’s going to go on giving him livings every time?... Oh, yes, mamma, I know all the bishops love him, but there is a limit to the patience of bishops.... Does the Ethical Society have clergymen or anything?”
“I believe they have elders. Papa may become an elder.”
“That’s no use. Elders aren’t paid. Don’t you remember when he was a Quaker elder, when we were all little? I’m sure it’s not a paid job. We shall be loathsomely poor again, and have to live without any fun or pretty things. And I daresay it’s low class, too, like dissent, as it’s got a chapel. Papa never bothers about that, of course. He’d follow General Booth into the Army, if he thought he had a call.”
“I trust that I should, Vicky.”
Papa had entered the room, and stood looking on them all, with his beautiful, distinguished, melancholy face (framed in small side whiskers), and his deep blue eyes like Stanley’s. Vicky’s ill-humour melted away, because papa was so gentle and so beautiful and so kind. And, after all, London was London, even with only six hundred a year.
“Mamma has told you our news, I see,” said papa, in his sweet, mellow voice. He looked and spoke like a papa out of Charlotte M. Yonge, though his conduct with regard to the Anglican church was so different.
“Yes, Aubrey, I’ve told them,” said mamma.
“I hope you won’t mind, papa,” said Vicky, saucily, “if I go to church at St. Alban’s, Holborn. I’m a ritualist, not an Ethicist.”
“Indeed, Vicky, I should be very sorry if you did not all follow your own lights, wherever they lead you.”
Papa’s broad-mindedness amounted to a disease, Vicky sometimes thought. A queer kind of clergyman he was. What would Father Stanton and Father Mackonochie of St. Alban’s think of him? Father Mackonochie, who was habitually flung into gaol because he would face east when told to face north—as important as all that, he felt it.
“Well, my darlings,” papa went on in his nice voice, “I must apologise to you all for this—this disturbance of your lives and mine. I would have spared it you if I could. But I have been over and over the ground, and I see no other way compatible with intellectual honesty. Honesty must come first.... Your mother and I are agreed.”
Of course; they always were. From Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, from Catholicism to Quakerism, from Quakerism to Unitarianism, Positivism, Baptistism (yes, they had once sunk, to Vicky’s shame, as low as that in the social scale, owing chiefly to the influence of Charles Spurgeon) and back to Anglicanism again—through everything mamma, silent, resigned and possibly ironic, had followed papa. And little Stanley had seen the idea behind all papa’s religions and tumbled headlong after him, and Maurice had, grimly, decided that it was safer to abjure all creeds, and Rome had critically looked on, with her faint, amused smile and her single eyeglass, and Irving and Una had been led, heedless and incurious, to each of papa’s places of worship in turn, but had understood none of them. They had not the religious temperament. Nor had Vicky, who attended her ritualistic churches from æsthetic fancy and a flair for being in the fashion, for seeing and hearing some new thing. She didn’t care which way priests faced, though she did enjoy incense. Vicky was a gay soul, and preferred dances and lawn tennis and young men to religion. Stanley too was gay—as merry as a grig, papa called her—but she had a burning ardour of mind and temper that made the world for her a place of exciting experiments. She now thought it worthy and honourable to be poor, for she had been reading William Morris and Ruskin and socialist literature, as intelligent young women did in those days, and was all for handicrafts and the one-man job. She was eighteen, and had had her first term at Somerville College, Oxford, which had just been founded and had twelve members.
Irving, always practical, said, “When are we going to move? And where to?”
“In February,” said mamma. “Probably we shall live in Bloomsbury. We have heard of a house there.”
“Bloomsbury,” said Vicky. “That’s not so bad.”
Sitting down at the piano, she began softly to play and sing. Papa sat by the fire, his thin hand on mamma’s, his thoughtful face pale and uplifted, as if he had made the Great Sacrifice once more, as indeed he had. Stanley sat on a cushion at his feet, and leant her dark head against his knee. She was a small, sturdy girl, and she wore a frock of blue, hand-embroidered cloth, plain and tight over the shoulders and breast, high-necked, with white ruching at the throat, and below the waist straighter than was the fashion, because Mr. Morris said that ripples and flounces wasted material and ruined line. Vicky, sinuous and green, rippled to the knees like running water. Irving sat on a Morris-chintz chair, reading “The Moonstone,” Maurice on a Liberty cretonne sofa, reading a leader in yesterday’s Observer.
“It is, unfortunately, impossible to conceal from ourselves that the condition of Ireland, never perceptibly improved by the announcement of the projected remedy for her distress and discontents, has for some weeks gone steadily from bad to worse. The state of things which exists there is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from civil war. The insurrectionary forces arrayed against law and order are not, indeed, drilled and disciplined bodies; but what they lack in this respect they make up for in numbers and in recklessness.”
Such was the sad state of Ireland in December, 1879, as sometimes before, as sometimes since. Or, anyhow, such was its state according to the Observer, a paper with which Maurice seldom, and Stanley never, agreed. Stanley put her faith in Mr. Gladstone, and Maurice in no politicians, though he appreciated Dizzy as a personality. Papa had always voted Liberal and Gladstone, but thought that the latter lacked religious tolerance.
Maurice turned to another leader, which began “In these troubled times....” And certainly they were troubled, as times very nearly always, perhaps quite always, are. The Observer told news of the Basuto war, the Russian danger in Afghanistan, Land League troubles, danger of war with Spain, trouble in Egypt, trouble in Bulgaria, trouble in Midlothian (where Mr. Gladstone was speaking against the government), trouble of all sorts, everywhere. What a world! Stanley, an assiduous student of it, sometimes almost gave it up in despair; but never quite, for she always thought of something one ought to do, or join, or help, which might avert shipwreck. Just now it was handicrafts, and the restoration of beauty to rich and poor.
2
MAMMA AND HER CHILDREN
Mamma, sitting with papa’s hand in hers, watched them all, with her quiet grey eyes looking through pince-nez, and her slight smile. Pretty Vicky, singing “My Queen,” with the lamplight shining on her mass of chestnut hair parted Rossetti-wise in the middle, her pink cheeks, her long white neck, her graceful, slim, flowing form, her æsthetic green dress (for Vicky was bitten with the æsthetic craze). Pretty Vicky. She loved gaiety and parties and comfort so much, it was a shame to cut down her dress allowance, as would be necessary. Perhaps Vicky would get engaged very soon, though, to one of her æsthetic or worldly young men. Vicky was not one of those sexless, intellectual girls, like Rome, with her indifference, or Stanley, with her funny talk of platonic friendships. To Vicky a young man was a young man, and no platonics about it. Sometimes mamma was afraid that Vicky, for all her æstheticism, was a little fast; she would go out for long day expeditions alone with the young man of the moment, and laugh when her mother said, doubtfully, “Vicky, when I was young....”
“When you were young, mamma, dear,” Vicky would say, caressing and mocking, “you were an early Victorian. Or even a Williamite. Papa, prunes, prisms! I’m a late Victorian, and we do what we like.”
“A mid-Victorian, I hope, dear,” mamma would loyally interpolate, but Vicky would fling back, “Oh, mamma, H.M. has reigned forty-two years now! You don’t think she’s going to reign for eighty-four! Late Victorian, that’s what we are. Fin-de-siècle. Probably the world will end very soon, it’s gone on so long, so let’s have a good time while we can. We’re only young once. I feel, mamma, at the very end of the road, and as if nothing mattered but to live and dance and play while we can, because the time’s so short. Clergymen say it’s a sign of the world coming to an end, all these wars and disturbances everywhere, and unbelief, and women and trains being so fast in their habits and young men so effeminate.”
Thus Vicky, mocking and gay and absurd. Her mother’s keen, near-sighted grey eyes strayed from her, round the pretty, lamplit room, which was partly Liberty and Morris, with its chintzes and wall-papers and cretonnes, and blue china plates over the door (that was the children), and partly mid-Victorian, with its chiffoniers and papier-maché and red plush chairs, and Dicksee’s “Harmony” hanging over the piano. On the table lay the magazines—the Nineteenth Century, the Cornhill, the Saturday Review, the Spectator, and the Examiner with the article by Samuel Butler on “A Clergyman’s Doubts.” They had made the vicarage so pretty; it would be hard to leave it for a dingy London house. It was a pity (though hardly surprising) that the Anglican church could find no place for Aubrey during the intervals when he could not say the creed. Aubrey was so modern. Mrs. Garden’s own father, also a clergyman, believed in the Established Church and the Bible, and agreed with the writer of the Book of Genesis and Bishop Ussher, its commentator, that the world had been created in six days in the year 4004 B.C., and that Adam and Eve had been created shortly afterwards, full of virtue, and had fallen; and so on, through all the Bible books.... After all, the scriptures were written (and even marginally annotated) for our learning.... But Mrs. Garden’s papa had begun being a clergyman when religion had been more settled, before Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer had revolutionised science. You didn’t expect an able modern Oxford man like Aubrey to be an Early Victorian clergyman.
Maurice on the Liberty sofa snorted suddenly over what he was reading, and mamma smiled at him. The dear, perverse, violent boy! He was always disagreeing with everyone. Mamma’s eyes rested gently on her son’s small, alert head, with its ruffled top locks of light, straight hair, like a cock canary’s crest, its sharp, long chin and straight thin lips. Maurice was as mamma’s brothers had been, in the fifties, only they had worn peg-top trousers and long fair whiskers that stood out like fans. Maurice wore glasses, and looked pale, as if he had read too much; not like young Irving, sprawling in an easy chair with “The Moonstone,” beautiful and dark and pleased. Nor like Stanley, who, though she read and thought and often talked cleverly like a book, had high spirits and was full of fun. Little Stanley, with her round, childish face above the white ruching, her big forehead and blunt little nose, and deep, ardent, grave blue eyes. What a child she was for enthusiasms and ideas and headlong plans! And her talk about platonic friendships and women’s rights and social revolution and bringing beauty into common life. The New Girl. If Vicky was one kind of New Girl (which may be doubted), Stanley was another, even newer.... There shot into mamma’s mind, not for the first time, a question—had girls always been new? She remembered in her own youth the older people talking about the New Girl, the New Woman. Were girls and women really always newer than boys and men, or was it only that people noticed it more, and said more about it? Elderly people wrote to the papers about it. “The Girl of the Period,” in the Saturday Review—fast, painted, scanty of dress (where are our fair, demure English girls gone?) with veils less concealing than provocative ... what, Mrs. Garden wondered, was a provocative veil? The New Young Woman. Bold, fast, blue-stockinged, self-indulgent, unchaperoned, advanced, undomesticated, reading and talking about things of which their mothers had never, before marriage, heard—in brief, NEW. (To know all that the mid-Victorians said about modern girls, and, indeed, about modern youths of both sexes, you have only to read certain novelists of the nineteen-twenties, who are saying the same things to-day about what they call the Young Generation.) Had Adam and Eve, Mrs. Garden wondered, commented thus on their daughters—or, more likely, on their daughters-in-law? (According to Mrs. Garden’s papa, these had been the same young women, but in the late seventies one wasn’t, fortunately, obliged to believe the worst immoralities of the Old Testament.) “Youth,” it was said at this period, as at other periods before and since, “youth, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has broken with tradition. It is no longer willing to accept forms and formulæ only on account of their age.” (At what stage in history youth ever did this, has never been explained.) “It has set out on a voyage of enquiry, and, finding some things which are doubtful and others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of experience more in harmony with the realities of life and knowledge.” Those are the actual words of a writer of the nineteen-twenties, but they were used, in effect, also in the eighteen-seventies, and many other decades.
And had the young, both young men and young women, always believed that they alone could save the world, that the last generation, the elderly people, were no good, were, in fact, responsible for the unfortunate state in which the world had always up to now been, and that it was for the young to usher in the New Day? Well, no doubt they were right. The only hitch seemed to be that the young people always seemed to get elderly before they had had time to bring in the New Day, and then they were no good any more, and the next generation had to take on the job, and still the New Day coyly refused to be ushered in. Except that, of course, in a sense, each day was a new one. But not, alas, much of an improvement on the day before.
“These troubled times....” Had there ever been, would there ever be, a day when the newspapers said “In these quiet and happy times”? Stanley, inspired by Mr. William Morris, was sure of it. The millennium was just round the corner, struggling in the womb of time, only it needed workers, workers, and again workers, to deliver it safely. Some lecturer under whom Stanley had sat had put it like that, and she had repeated it to her mother. Well, of course in these days ... the New Girl, being so new and so free, could use such metaphors. In the fifties you couldn’t; unmarried girls couldn’t, anyhow. Stanley had, indeed, coloured a little when she had said it. Stanley was not only unmarried, but declared that she never would be married, there was too much to be done (which was a way some young women were talking just then). She was going, after Oxford, to work in a settlement, and teach people weaving, dyeing and beauty, after learning them herself at the Morris workshops. It was all very nice, but mamma would rather Stanley had a husband and babies. (Mammas, it may be observed in passing, differ from other women in being very seldom new.)
Then mamma’s eyes rested on her chubby, beautiful baby, Una, lolling on the hearthrug, one light brown pigtail over each shoulder, reading, with calm and lovely blue eyes, some dreadful rubbish in the Boy’s Own Paper, her cheek bulged out with a lump of toffee. A nice, good, placid child of fifteen, who never thought, never read anything but tosh, talked in slang, and took life as it came, cheerful, unquestioning and serene. Una was the least clever and the best balanced of the Gardens. She was going, when she was older, to look rather like the Sistine Madonna.
How unlike her happy, handsome solidity was to Rome! Rome lay back on her couch, her face like a clear white cameo against deep blue cushions, the lamplight shining on her fair, silky curls, cut short in one of the manners of the day. Rome’s thin lips twisted easily into pain and laughter; her jade-green eyes mocked and watched. “I’m afraid of your sister. She looks as if she was going to put us all into a book,” people would sometimes say of her to the others. But Rome never wrote about anything or anyone; it was not worth while.
3
SISTERS IN THE GARDEN
Maurice threw down the second serial part of “Theophrastus Such,” which had just come out.
“The woman’s going all to pieces,” he said, in his crisp, quick, disgusted voice. “Sermonising and tosh.... The fact is,” said Maurice, “the fact is, the novel, anyhow in this country, has had its day. Except for the unpretending thrillers. We should give it a rest. The poets still have things to say and are saying them (though not so well as they used to; their palmy days are over, too), but not the novelists”....
Vicky, to drown his discourse, began to sing loud and clear—
“When I was a young maid, a young maid, a young maid....”
“Of course she’s old,” went on Maurice, referring to Mary Ann Evans. “And she’s been spoilt. She’s not a teacher, she’s a novelist. Or she was. Now she’s dropped being a novelist and become merely a preacher. That’s the end of her. I wish to God people would know their job and stick to it. She was a jolly good novelist.... Sorry, pater”—Mr. Garden had frowned at the expletive—“but I didn’t think you’d mind—now. I suppose you and I are both agreed, aren’t we, as to the non-existence of a Deity.”
“All the same, my dear boy....”
All the same (this was Rome’s thought), papa had so recently believed in a Deity, and would, no doubt, so soon again believe in a Deity, that it seemed bad taste to fill the brief interim with vain oaths. Maurice had no reverence at all, and no taste. You would think, as Vicky turned from the piano to say, that, whatever he did or didn’t believe himself, he might remember that some people were not only Christians but Church, and High Church at that. But Maurice only grinned at her. She tweaked his fair crest in passing and arranged her own glossy chestnut coiffure at the painted looking-glass over the chimney-piece. This Rossetti shape suited her, she thought, better than the high coils of last year.
The parlourmaid announced the curate, a good-looking, intelligent, cheerful young man whom they all liked. He had hardly shaken hands when Mr. Garden said to him, “I want a talk with you, Carter,” and took him off to the study, to break it to him about the Ethical Society.
“Papa might just as well have told him here,” Vicky petulantly said. “It would only have needed a sentence, and then we could have had a jolly evening.”
“Of course papa feels he must go into it thoroughly with Mr. Carter,” said mamma. “Poor Mr. Carter will be dreadfully hurt by it, I’m afraid. He has always been so fond of papa, and he has never himself seen any reason for doubt.”
“There is no reason for doubt,” muttered Vicky, beneath her breath. Then, louder, impatience conquering respect, “What does papa think the Church is for, except to tell us what we can’t know for ourselves about what to believe?”
Mamma replied, taking up her embroidery, “Papa doesn’t know what the Church is for. That is his great difficulty. And, Vicky, it is not for us, who have studied so much less, to protest....”
“Well,” said Vicky, “I shall go into the garden. It’s a night for men and angels. Come on, Stan.”
Stanley came, and the sisters paced together, wrapped in shawls, down the gravel path beneath a deep blue sky full of frosty, twinkling stars and the pale glow which precedes winter moonrise. It was one of those frosty Christmases which our parents (they say) used to have in their youths. Hot summers and frosty winters—that is what they say they used to have: one is not obliged to believe them, but it is a picturesque thought.
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Stannie. I shall get married.”
“Who to, Vicky?”
“Ah!” Vicky’s long eyes were mysterious in the starlight. “Perhaps I’ve not made up my mind yet; perhaps I have. All I do know is that I’m not going to live round about South Place, Finsbury Pavement, on £400 a year just because papa must needs go to an ethical chapel. I—shall—get—married. And well married, too. Why not? I can, you know, if I want to.”
“Captain Penrose,” said Stanley.
“He’s not the only one, my child. There are others. No, I shan’t tell you a word more now. You wait and see. And when I’m married you shall come and stay with me and meet lots and lots of men.”
Lots and lots of men. The kind of men who’d be friends with Vicky and Captain Penrose (or whoever else Mr. Vicky might prove to be).
“I shall be busy, you know,” said Stanley, doubtful and conceited. “I shall have very little spare time if I take up weaving and dyeing.”
“Don’t take up weaving and dyeing. It’s shockingly cranky anyway, all this Morris craze of yours.”
“All the best things are thought cranky at first.”
“Don’t you believe it. The new princess dress isn’t.... Now mind, I’m saying this for your good, my dear; men won’t look at you if you go about with dyed hands and talk about manual labour and the one-man job and the return of beauty to the home.”
“Vicky, you’re vulgar. And as I don’t mean to marry what does it matter if they look at me or not?”
“Oh, tell that to the marines.... I’m getting frozen. Come along in and we’ll turn the curate’s head, unless papa’s still breaking his heart.... You’re a little prig, Stan, that’s your trouble, my child.”
It was quite true. Stanley was a little prig. She not only read Ruskin and Morris and Karl Marx but quoted them. There came a day, later on, when she saw through Ruskin, but it is no use pretending that that day was yet. She was a prig and believed that it was up to such as she to reform the world. She saw herself (at the moment, for her vision of herself varied) as the modern woman, clever, emancipated, high-minded, too intellectually fastidious to take the vulgar view. She took herself seriously, in spite of the childish giggle at the comedy of life which broke like gurgling water through her earnestness.
“The first Nowell the angels did sing,” sang Vicky, in her clear, fluting voice, and danced in at the drawing-room window.
4
MAMMA AND ROME
Mamma sat by Rome’s side and embroidered, while papa interviewed his curate in the study. You could see, now these two sat together, that they were alike, not so much in feature or colour as in some underlying, elusive essence of personality. But Rome’s mocking, amused, critical self looked ironically out of her blue-green eyes and mamma’s dwelt very still and deep within her.
“Well, mamma.” Rome put down her book, which was by Anatole France.
“Well, Rome.”
“You don’t much mind this.” Rome was commenting, not enquiring.
“Oh, no.” Mamma was placid. “Not,” she added, “that I want to live in London particularly. Dirty place. No gardens.”
Rome said, definitely, “I prefer London,” and mamma nodded. Rome was urbane. Negligent, foppish and cool, she liked to watch life at its games, be flicked by the edges of its flying skirts. And the game of life was more varied and entertaining in London than in the country and equally absurd. So Rome preferred London. It was like having a better seat at the play. Lack of bodily energy threw her back largely in the country on to the entertainment of her own rather cynical mind. She was often bored, sometimes ill-humoured, sharp and morose. The years might bring her a greater patience, but at twenty she was not patient. The very sharp clarity of her mind, that chafed against muddled thinking, stupidity, humbug and sentimentality, made intercourse difficult for her in the country, where Heaven has ordained that even fewer persons shall reside who are free from these things than is the case in large towns.
“How long,” enquired Rome, negligently, slipping round an old silver ring on her thin white finger, “do you give the Ethical Church, mamma?”
Mamma was feather-stitching, rapidly and correctly. The movement of her head indicated that she declined to prophesy.
“No point in looking ahead,” she said practically. “One always sees a change a little while before it comes, in time to be prepared; and that’s all we need. Papa is never sudden.”
The whimsical smile that twitched at one corner of Rome’s thin mouth was unreturned by mamma, whose face was gravely bent over her work. Mamma was a good wife and never joked with her children about papa’s vagaries. No one had ever got behind mamma’s guard in the matter of papa—if it was a guard. Who could see into mamma’s mind, idly speculated Rome. Mamma had, by forty-five years of age, achieved a kind of delicate impenetrability. Papa, at fifty, was as limpid as the clear water of a running stream, where you may watch the fishes swimming to and fro, round and round.
Papa came back, alone and looking hurt. At the same moment Vicky came in at the long window, pink-cheeked, smelling of frost.
“Where’s Mr. Carter, papa?”
“Gone away, Vicky. He—he couldn’t stop.”
“I suppose he was shocked to death. Oh, well....”
But, of them all, only mamma knew how shocked the orthodox people of the seventies were about matters of unbelief. The children had been brought up in the wrong atmosphere really to know it. Mamma knew that to Mr. Carter papa’s action would seem dreadful, blasphemous, very nearly wicked.
“After all,” said Vicky, impatiently, “we’re living in the year 1879. We’re moderns after all.”
Dashingly modern Vicky looked in her sinuous art-green dress, with her massed Rossetti hair and jade earrings. Daringly, brilliantly modern, and all agog for life. A dashing girl, as they called them in 1879—if a girl bitten with æstheticism can still dash, and it may be taken for granted that dashing girls will always dash, whatever bites them. Catching up slim young Irving from his chair, Vicky twirled him round the room in a waltz.
5
BLOOMSBURY AND SOUTH PLACE
In February the Gardens moved to Bloomsbury. Different people and more people came to the house; it was rather like the old days when papa had been a Unitarian. Mr. Stopford Brooke began coming to see papa again, and Dr. Martineau, and all his old and new friends who lived in London, even Father Stanton of St. Alban’s, Holborn, and Mr. Charles Spurgeon. The circle of papa’s friends had swollen and swollen with the years, from his undergraduate days onwards. Not only was papa lovable and popular, but he touched so many circles, fished in so many waters, and his fellow-fishermen of each particular water usually remained faithful to him even when he moved on to another pool. Good-humoured, witty Mr. Spurgeon, for instance, did not break with papa when he deserted the City Temple for a second go of Anglicanism, though he was sadly disappointed in him. Nor were papa’s interests bound by religion; he had friends, distinguished and indistinguished, among politicians, journalists, poets, professors and social reformers, besides his relatives and mamma’s. And now, of course, there was a quite fresh influx from the South Place Ethical Chapel. So, one way and another, what with papa’s friends and mamma’s and the children’s, a good deal of life flowed into the Bloomsbury Square house. Papa was, in his quiet way, happy now that the wrench was over. He was writing, and had for years been writing, a very long book on comparative religions, and for this he worked at the British Museum, which was so conveniently near. And on Sundays he went to South Place and worshipped ethically.
he would sing in his sweet tenor voice,
(The author, Miss Adelaide Procter, had very rightly, it will be noted, dethroned a male and enthroned a female.)
So sang papa and mamma on a Sunday morning in April. Then someone rose and said a few ethical words about the desirability of not being fettered by religious dogma, and the congregation, who all thought this desirable too, listened attentively.
Papa gazed wistfully in front of him at the varnished seats and painted woodwork and the ethical texts inscribed round the walls. “Live for Others.” “Live Nobly.” “Duty First.” He had made the great sacrifice, and once more dethroned the past for honesty’s sake, and if it entailed a jarring of literary and artistic fastidiousness, who was he to rebel? God knew, he had been æsthetically happier joining in the Roman mass (tawdry and vulgar-looking as the churches where this service is held so often are) or chanting the Anglican liturgy in the little fourteenth-century church in Hampshire—though, as to that, some of the Hymns A. & M. were quite as bad as anything in the ethical hymn-book—but never had he been so utterly honest, so stripped to the bare bone of all complacency, humbug and self-deception as now. Or so, anyhow, he believed, but who shall read the human heart?
Again they sang:
For, sad to say, the earth was, in the spring of 1880, drenched (as usual) in gore. The gore of Afghans and British in Afghanistan, of Basutos in Basutoland, Chilians and Bolivians in South America, Liberals and Conservatives in Great Britain, where the elections were being fiercely contested, besides such permanently flowing gore as that of Jews in Russia and Christians in Turkey. The Ethical Society hoped pathetically that all these so unlikely persons would enjoy peace and brotherhood one day.
They trooped out into South Place. Grave, intelligent, ethical men and women clustered and hummed together like bees. They talked about the elections, which were going well, for nearly all the Ethical members were Liberals and the Liberals were sweeping the country.
“Why are Ethical members Liberals?” Rome enquired in the note book to which she committed as much of her private commentary on life as ever found its way to paper. “Partly, no doubt, because of the liberal attitude towards religion, but it must be more than that. T.C.” “T.C.” meant “trace connection” and was a very frequent entry. Rome looked forward to a time when, by means of prolonged investigation, all the connections she had noted should be traced; that, she held, would add to her understanding of this strange, amusing life. What, for instance, was the connection between High Church dogma and ornate ritual, between belief in class distinctions and in the British Empire, between dissent and Little Englandism, art and unconventional morals, the bourgeoisie and respectability, socialism and queer clothes? All these pairs and many others were marked T.C. and had a little space under them, in which the connection, when traced, was explained in concise and lucid language. In another part of the book there were pages assigned to “Curious uses of words.” Rome felt a great, perhaps a morbid, interest in investigating life and language. She wrote “Why are Ethical members Liberals?” when papa and mamma coming in from chapel told her how delighted South Place was with the elections. Papa, of course, had always been a Liberal through all his religious vicissitudes.
Vicky came in like a graceful whirlwind from Walworth, S.E., where she had attended church at St. Austin’s, the monastery of Brother à Beckett, and flung herself into a chair in ecstasy.
“A service straight from heaven!” she cried. “Too utterly utter! Such incense—perfumes of Araby! And Brother à Beckett preached about the authority of the State over the Church. It simply doesn’t exist. The State is nowhere and not to be taken the slightest notice of.... And who do you think was there, just in front of us—Mr. Pater, and the adorable Oscar in a velveteen coat, looking like the prince of men and talking like the king of wits (yes, mamma, talking, but in quite an undertone). But too utter! I was devastated. I was with Charles. I’d made him come with me to try if grace would abound—but no, not yet; Charles remains without, with the dogs and the ...”
“Vicky,” mamma interpolated.
“... and the sorcerers, mamma dear,” Vicky finished, innocently. “What did you think I was going to say?”
“You must allow Charles his conscience, Vicky,” said papa.
Charles was Vicky’s half-affianced suitor, but unfortunately an agnostic, or rather a Gallio, and Vicky declared that they should not become regularly engaged until such time as Charles should embrace the Anglican, or some other equally to be respected, church. Unbelief might be fashionable, but Vicky didn’t hold with it. Also, and worse, Charles was not yet in the æsthetic push; he was, instead, in the Foreign Office, and took no interest in the New Beauty. Velveteen coats he disliked, and art fabrics, and lilies, except in gardens, and languor except in offices, and vice except in the places appointed for it. And all these distastes would, as Vicky complained, make the parties they would give such a difficulty. Vicky told Charles that, unless he conquered them, she might feel compelled to become affianced instead to Mr. Ernest Waller, a young essayist who understood Beauty, though not, indeed, Anglicanism, as he had been a pupil of Mr. Pater’s in the days when Mr. Pater had been something of a pagan. But better burn incense before heathen gods, said Vicky, than burn none at all.
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 à 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 was 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 Ussher, 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 Canon 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-Raphælites 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.”
6
STANLEY AND ROME
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 anyone 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 hansom 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 everyone.... 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 everyone can’t. It’s greedy....”
“Everyone’s greedy.”
“No,” said Stanley, and her eyes glowed, for she was thinking of her splendid friends. “No. Greediness is in everyone, but it can be conquered. Socialism is the way.... I wish you could meet Evelyn Peters. She’s joined the Social 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 everyone.... 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 school days. 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 someone 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.
7
GRANDPAPA
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 heyday 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,” enquired 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.
8
DISCUSSING RELIGION
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 knickerbockers, 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 un-Christian, 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 didn’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.
“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,” enquired 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 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 Dickens 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 enquire, bono?
9
DISCUSSING LIFE
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 pounds 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 spritely, 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, marriage less than most things. 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 inimitably 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, enquiring look through the deadly monocle she placed in one blue-green eye for the purpose.
10
VICKY GETS MARRIED
Vicky, on the contrary, became, during this summer, definitely affianced to Charles, whom she 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 gusto and taste, 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.
11
MAURICE STARTS LIFE
Maurice left Cambridge, armed with a distinguished first in his classical tripos.
“And now what?” enquired 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 everyone, and certainly nearly all pretty girls. As to mamma’s feelings towards her daughter-in-law, who could divine them?