Told by an idiot

THE threshold of the nineties. Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border. The nineties, we say, were gay, tired, fin-de-siècle, witty, dilettante, decadent, yellow, and Max Beerbohm was their prophet; or they were noisy, imperial, patriotic, militant, crude, and Kipling was their prophet. And, indeed, you may find attributes to differentiate any period from any other. What people said and wrote of the nineties at the time was that they were modern, which of course at the time they were; that they were hustling ... (“In these days of hurry and rapid motion, when there is so little time to rest and reflect,” as people say in sermons and elsewhere, as if the greater rapidity of motion did not give one more time to rest and reflect, since one the sooner arrives at one’s destination); that they were noisy; that literary output was enormous; that (alternatively) the new writers were very good, or that the good writers had gone from among us. One knows the kind of thing; all discourses on contemporary periods have been full of it, from the earliest times even unto these last.

Rome was thirty-one. She was of middle height, a slight, pale, delicate young woman, with ironic blue-green eyes and mocking lips a little compressed at the corners, and a pointed kind of face, and fair, silky hair which she wore no longer short but swept gracefully up and back from her small head, defining its shape and showing the fine line from nape to crown. She was a woman of the world, a known diner-out, a good talker, something of a wit, so that her presence was sought by hostesses as that of an amusing bachelor is sought. She had elegance, distinction, brain, a light and cool touch on the topics of her world, a calm, mocking, sceptical detachment, a fastidious taste in letters and in persons. She knew her way about, as the phrase goes, and could be relied on to be socially adequate, in spite of a dangerous distaste for fools, and in spite of the “dancing and destructive eye” (to use a phrase long afterwards applied to one whose mentality perhaps a little resembled hers) which she turned on all aspects of the life around her. People called her intensely modern—whatever that might mean. In 1890 it presumably meant that you would have been surprised to find her type in 1880. But as a matter of fact, you would not, had you been endowed with a little perspicacity, have been in the least surprised; you would have found it, had you looked, all down the ages (though always as a rare growth). In 1790, 1690, 1590, and back through every decade of every century, there have been Rome Gardens, fastidious, mondaine, urbane, lettered, critical, amused, sceptical, and what was called in 1890 fin-de-siècle. It is not a type which, so to speak, makes the world go round; it does not assist movements nor join in crusades; it coolly distrusts enthusiasm and eschews the heat and ardour of the day. It is to be found among both sexes equally, and is the stuff of which the urbane bachelor and spinster, rather than the spouse and parent, are made. For mating and producing (as a career, not as an occasional encounter) are apt to destroy the type, by forcing it to too continuous and ardent intercourse with life; that graceful and dilettante aloofness can scarcely survive such prolonged heat. To be cool, sceptical and passionate at one and the same time—it has been done, but it remains difficult. To love ardently such absurdities as infants, and yet to retain unmarred the sense of the absurdity of all life—this too has been done, but the best parents do not do it. Something has to go, as a sacrifice to the juggernaut life, which rebels against being regarded as merely absurd (and rightly, for, in truth, it is not merely absurd, and this is one of the things which should always be remembered about it).

The literary persons of the early nineties wanted Rome to join them in their pursuits.

Why so, Rome questioned. Money? Very certainly I have not enough, but I should not have appreciably more if I wrote and published essays or even books. Notoriety? It might well be of the wrong kind; and anyhow does it add to one’s pleasure? Miss Rome Garden, the author of those clever critical essays.... Or perhaps of those dull critical essays.... Either way, what did one gain? Why write? Why this craze for transmitting ideas by means of marks on paper? Why not, if one must transmit ideas, use the tongue, that unruly member given us for the purpose? Better still, why not retain the ideas for one’s own private edification, untransmitted? Writing. There was this about writing—or rather about publishing—it showed that someone had thought it worth while to pay for having one’s ideas printed. For printers were paid, and binders, even if not oneself. So it conferred a kind of cachet. Most literary persons sorely needed such a cachet, for you would never guess from meeting them that anyone would pay them for their ideas. On the other hand, publishing one’s folly gave it away; one was then known for a fool, whereas previously people might have only suspected it.... In brief and in fine, writing was not worth while. Wise men and women would derive such pleasure as they could from the writings of others, without putting themselves to the trouble of providing reading matter in their turn. Reading matter was not like dinners, concerning which there must be give and take.

Thus the do-nothing Miss Rome Garden to the eager literary young men and women about her, who all thought that literature was having a new birth and that they were its brilliant midwives, as, indeed, it is not unusual to think. And possibly it was the case. Literature has so many new births; it is a hardy annual. The younger literary people of 1890 had a titillating feeling of standing a-tiptoe to welcome a new day. “A great creative period is at hand,” they said. The old and famous still brooded over the land like giant trees. Such a brooding, indeed, has scarcely since been known, for in these later days we allow no trees to become giants. But in their shadow the rebellious young shoots sprang up, sharp and green and alive. The mid-Victorians were passing; the Edwardians were in the schoolroom or the nursery, the Georgians in the cradle or not yet anywhere; here was a clear decade in which the late Victorian stars might dance. It was a period of experiment; new forms were being tried, new ideas would have been aired were any ideas ever new; new franknesses, so called, were permitted, or anyhow practised—the mild beginnings of the returning tide which was to break against the reticence of fifty years.

“I don’t,” said Mrs. Garden to Rome, “care about all these sex novels people have taken to writing now.”

But Rome rejected the phrase.

“Sex novels, mamma? What are they? Novels have always been about sex, or rather sexes. There’s nothing new in that; it’s the oldest story in the world. People must have a sex in this life; it’s inevitable. Novels must be about people; that’s inevitable too. So novels must be partly about sex, and they’re nearly always about two sexes, and usually largely about the relations of the two sexes to one another. They always have been....”

All the same, mamma did not care about these sex novels that people had taken to writing now. Problem novels, she called them, for reasons of her own. Rome thought sex no problem; the least problematic affair, perhaps, in this world. Of course there were problems connected with it, as with everything else, but in itself sex was no problem. Rather the contrary. “The Moonstone,” now—that was a problem novel.

“I don’t like indecency,” said mamma, in her delicate, clipped voice. “These modern writers will say anything. It’s ill-bred.”

Mamma could not be expected to know that these literary libertines of 1890 would be regarded as quaint Victorian prudes in 1920.

“As to that book Mr. Jayne gave you, I call it merely silly,” mamma murmured, with raised brows, and so settled “Dorian Gray.”

“Silly it is,” Rome agreed. “But here and there, though too seldom, it has a wit.”

But mamma was not listening. Her mamma-like mind was straying after Mr. Jayne....

2
MR. JAYNE

Mr. Jayne and Rome. Both brilliant, both elegant, both urbane, both so gracefully of the world worldly, yet both scholars too. Mr. Jayne wrote memoirs and enchanting historical and political essays. An amusing, yet erudite Oxford man, who had formerly been at the British Embassy at St. Petersburg. Hostesses desired him for their more sophisticated parties, because he had a wit, and knew Russia, which was at once more unusual and more fashionable then than now. It was at one of Vicky’s dinner parties that he and Rome had first met. If Vicky thought, how suitable, it was only what anyone in the world must think about these two. Afterwards they met continually and became friends. Rome thought him conceited, clever, entertaining, attractive and disarming and the most companionable man of her wide acquaintance. By June, 1890, they were in love; a state of mind unusual in both. They did not mention it, but in July he mentioned to her, what he mentioned to few people, that he had a Russian wife living with her parents, a revolutionary professor and his wife, in the country outside Moscow.

They were spending Sunday on the Thames, rowing up from Bourne End to Marlow. They spoke of this matter of Mr. Jayne’s wife after their lunch, which they ate on the bank, in the shade of willows.

“How delightful,” said Rome, taking a Gentleman’s Relish sandwich.

Delightful to have a wife in Russia; to have a reason, and such a reason, for visiting that interesting land. Delightful for Mr. Jayne to have waiting for him, among steppes and woods, a handsome Russian female and two fair Slav infants ... or perhaps they were English, these little Jaynes, with beautiful mouths and long, thrust-out chins.... Delightful, anyhow. The Russian country in the summer, all corn and oil and moujiks. Moscow in the autumn, all churches and revolutionaries and plots and secret police. And in the winter ... but one cannot think about Russia in the winter at all; it does not bear contemplation, and one does not visit it.... What a romance! Mr. Jayne was indeed fortunate.

So Miss Garden conveyed.

“I am not there very much,” said Mr. Jayne. “Only on and off. Olga prefers to live there, with her parents and our two children. She has many friends there, all very busy plotting. They are of the intelligentsia. Life is very interesting to her.”

“I can imagine that it must be.”

So cool and well-bred were Miss Garden and Mr. Jayne, that you never would have divined that the latter, eating sandwiches, was crying within his soul, “My dearest Rome. I dislike my wife. We make each other sick with ennui when we meet. We married in a moment’s mania. It is you I want. Don’t you know it? Won’t you let me tell you?” or that the former, sipping cider, was saying silently, “You have told me this at last because you know that we have fallen in love. Why not months ago? And what now?”

Nothing of this they showed, but lounged in the green shade, and drank and ate, Miss Garden clear-cut and cool, in a striped cotton boating-dress, with a conically-shaped straw hat tipped over her eyes, Mr. Jayne in flannels, long and slim, his palish face shaved smooth in the new fashion, so that you saw the lines of his clever mouth and long, thrust-out chin. Mr. Jayne’s eyes were deep-set and grey, and he wore pince-nez, and he was at this time thirty-six years old. At what age, Rome wondered, had he married Mrs. Jayne of the Russian intelligentsia?

However, they did not enter into this, but began to discuss the plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw, a well-known socialist writer, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a young man in India who was making some stir.

“We can still be friends,” thought Rome, on their way home. “Nothing need be changed between us. This Olga of his is his wife; I am his friend. It would be very bourgeois to be less his friend because he has a wife. That is a view of life I dislike; we are civilised people, Mr. Jayne and I.”

3
CIVILISED PEOPLE

And civilised they were, for the rest of the summer of 1890. In November Rome asked Mr. Jayne, who was having tea with her alone, whether he was visiting Russia shortly. He replied in the negative, for he was, he said, too busy working on his new book to get abroad.

“And further,” he added, in the same composed tone, “I prefer to remain in the same country with you. I can’t, you see, do without you at hand. You know how often I consult you, and talk things over with you.... And further still,” continued Mr. Jayne, quietly, “I love you.”

So saying, he rose and stood over her, bending down with his hands on her shoulders and his pale face close to hers.

“My dearest,” he said. “Let us stop pretending. Shall we stop pretending? Does our pretence do us or anyone else any good? I love you more than any words I’ve got can say. You know it, you know it ... dear heart....”

He drew her up from her chair and looked into her face, and that was the defeat of their civilisation, for at their mutual touch it broke in disorder and fled. He kissed her mouth and face and hands, and passion rose about them like a sea in which they drowned.

Five minutes later they talked it out, sitting with a space between them, for “While you hold me I can’t think,” Rome said. She passed her hand over her face, which felt hot and stung from the hard pressing of his mouth, and tried to assemble her thoughts, shaken by the first passion of her thirty-one agreeable and intelligent years.

“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, enquired 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 Westermarck’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 if it came to that; 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 débâcle 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?”

“O 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 everyone 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 untrammelled (it seemed to him untrammelled) freedom of intercourse enjoyed by modern young men and women (especially young women) continually shocked him. Grandpapa had enjoyed much free and untrammelled 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.

4
ON THE PINCIO

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 about 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 so far finer and nobler a 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 biassed 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 pagans, 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.

5
IN THE CAMPAGNA

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 Triclinium 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.”

“The social code,” said Miss Garden, “though as a rule I prefer to observe it, is in this case neither here nor there. I have ruled that out; cleared the field, so to speak, for the essentials. Now, what are the essentials? Your wife, whom you have undertaken to live with ...”

“By mutual agreement, we have given that up long since,” said Mr. Jayne, not for the first time.

“... and your children, whom you have brought into the world and are responsible for.”

“They are their mother’s. She lets me see nothing of them. She is determined to bring them up as Russian patriots.”

“Still, they are half yours, and it is a question whether you should not claim your share. In fact, I think it is certain that you should. If you broke off completely from your wife and lived with me, your right in them would be gone.... Then, of course, there is the ethical point as to your contract, the vows you made to your wife on marriage, which positively exclude similar relations with anyone else while she remains your wife.”

“I ought never to have made them. I was a fool. The wrong is in the vows, not in their breach.”

“Granted that they were wrong, that does not settle the further point of whether, having been made, with every circumstance of deliberation, they should not be kept.”

“O God,” said Mr. Jayne. “You talk, my dearest, like a pedant, a prig, or a book of logic. Don’t you care, Rome?”

“You know,” said Miss Garden, “that I do.... No, don’t touch me. I must think it out. I am a pedant and a prig, if you like, and I must think it out, not only feel. But now I will think of the other side. Oh, yes, I know there is another side. We love one another, and we can neither of us be happy, or fully ourselves, without being together. Without one another we shall be incomplete, unhappy and perhaps (not certainly) morally and mentally stunted and warped. Indeed, I see that as clearly as you can. Further, our being together may, as you say, not hurt your wife; she may not care in the least. As to that, I simply don’t know. How could I? She may even let you still have a share in your children. Russian points of view are so different from ours. But one should be certain of that before taking any steps. Then there are still points on the other side, that we have to think of. Any children we might have would be illegitimate. That would be hard on them.”

“In point of fact,” said Mr. Jayne, “it is largely illusory, that hardship. And in this case they (if they should ever exist) needn’t even know. You would take my name. Who is to go on remembering that I have a Russian wife? Very few people in England even know it. We should soon live down any talk there might be.”

“And then,” went on Rome, ticking off another point on her fingers, “there are my papa and mamma, whom we should hurt very badly. In their eyes what we are discussing isn’t a thing to be discussed at all; it is a deadly sin, and there’s an end of it. They are very fond of me, and they would be terribly unhappy. That too is a point to be considered.”

“Perhaps. But not to be given much weight to. It’s damnable to have to hurt the people we love—but, after all, we can’t let our parents rule our lives. We’re living in the eighteen nineties; we’re not mid-Victorians. And we have to make up our own minds what to do with our lives. We can’t be tied up by anyone else’s views, either those of our relations or of society in general. We have to make our own judgments and choices, all along. And parents shouldn’t be hurt by their children’s choices, even if they do think them wrong; they should live and let live. All this judging for other people, and being hurt, is poisonous. It’s a relic of the patriarchal system—or the matriarchal.”

Miss Garden smiled.

“Possibly. I should say, rather, that it was incidental to parental affection, and always will be. Anyhow, there it is.... They don’t, of course, even believe that divorce is right, let alone adultery.” Her cool, thoughtful enunciation of the last word gave it its uttermost value. Miss Garden never slurred or shirked either words or facts.

“But that,” she added, “doesn’t, of course, dispose of our lives. That’s only one point out of many. The question is, what is, now and ultimately, the right and best thing for me and you to do. You’ve decided. Well, I haven’t—yet. Give me a week, Francis. I promise I won’t take more.”

“You are so beautiful,” said Mr. Jayne, changing the subject and speaking inaccurately, and lifted her hands to his face. “You are so beautiful. There is no one like you. You are like the golden sickle moon riding over the world. You hold my life in your two hands. Be kind to it, Rome. I love you, I love you, I love you. If we deny our love we shall be blaspheming. Love like ours transcends all barriers, and well you know it. Take your week, if you must, only decide rightly at the end of it, my heart’s glory. The fine thing we shall make of life together, you and I, the fine, precious, lovely thing. It’s been so poor and common—full of bickerings and jars and commonness and discontents....

O Rome!...”

6
RUSSIAN TRAGEDY

The Russian woman, with her two beautiful children and her stout, dazed, unhappy mamma, waited in the hall of the flat of Mr. Jayne. They were weary, having travelled across Russia and from Russia to London, to find Mr. Jayne, and then, having learnt that he was in Rome, straight from London thither, spending two nights in the train and arriving this morning, more alive than dead (for who, this side of the grave, is not?) but very tired. The two children were so tired that they whimpered disagreeably, and their mother often wiped their noses with her travel-grimed handkerchief, but not so often as they required it.

Olga Petrushka was a beautiful woman, square-headed, with a fair northern skin and large deep blue eyes, black-lashed, and massive plaits of flaxen hair. Her eyes looked wild and haunted, for Russians have such dreadful experiences, and her cheeks were hollowed; she looked like a woman who has seen death and worse too close, as indeed she had. She was shabbily dressed in an old fur dolman over a scarlet dress and a fur cap. The two children were bundled up in bearskin coats, like little animals. Her little dancing bears, she would call them in lighter moments. Ever and anon she would fling them sweet cakes out of her reticule, and they would gobble them greedily.

But Nina Naryshkin, their grandmother, sat and rocked to and fro, to and fro, and said nothing but, “Aie, aie, aie.”

The hall porter turned on the little family a beaming and kindly eye. They were, in all probability, thieves, and not, as the Russian lady asserted, the family of Signor Jayne, so he would not admit them into Signor Jayne’s rooms, but he liked to see their gambols.

Every now and then the younger lady would say, in Russian, “Cheer up, then, little children. Your father will soon be here and he will give you more sweet cakes. Aha, how your dirty little mouths water to hear it! Boris, you rascal, don’t pull your sister’s pigtail. What children! They drive me to despair.”

And then Mr. Jayne arrived. He came in at the open hall door, with a tall, fair English lady, and he was saying to her, “If you don’t mind coming in for a moment, I will get you the book.”

The hall porter stepped forward with a bow, and indicated in the background Mrs. Jayne, her mamma, and the little Jaynes.

What a moment for Mr. Jayne! What a moment for Mrs. Jayne, her mamma and the little Jaynes! What a moment for Miss Garden! What a moment for the hall porter, who loved both domestic reunions and quarrels, and was as yet uncertain which this would be (it might even be both), but above all loved moments, and that it would certainly be.

And so it proved. Where Russians are, there, one may say, moments are, for these live in moments.

Olga Petrushka stepped forward with a loud cry and outstretched arms, and exclaimed in Russian, “Ah, Franya Stefanovitch!” (one of the names she had for him, for Russians give one another hundreds of names each, and this accounts in part for the curious, confused state in which this nation is often to be found)—“I have found you at last.”

Mr. Jayne, always composed, retained his calm. He shook hands with his wife and mother-in-law and addressed them in French.

“How are you, my dear Olga? Why did you not tell me you wanted to see me? I would have come to Moscow. It is a long way to have come, with your mother and the children too. How are you, my little villains?”

“Ah, my God,” said Mrs. Jayne, also now in French, which she spoke with rapidity and violence. “How could I stay another day in Russia? The misery I have been through? Poor little papa—Nicolai Nicolaivitch—they have arrested him for revolutionary propaganda and sent him to Siberia, with my brother Feodor. They had evidence also against mamma and myself and would have arrested us, and only barely we escaped in time, with the little bears. The poor cherubs—kiss them, Franya. They have been crying for their little father and the love and good food and warm house he will give them. For now they and we have no one but you. ‘Go to England, Olga,’ papa said as they took him. ‘It is the one safe country. The English are good to Russian exiles, and your husband will take care of you and mamma and the little ones....’ But you are with a lady, Franya. Introduce us.”

“I beg your pardon. Miss Garden, my wife, and Madame Naryshkin, her mother. Miss Garden and her father are great friends of mine.... If you will go into my rooms and wait for me a moment, Olga, I will see Miss Garden to her pension and return.”

“No,” said Miss Garden, in her fluent and exquisite French. “No, I beg of you. I will go home alone; indeed, it is no way. Good-evening, Madame Jayne and Madame Naryshkin.”

Mr. Jayne went out into the street with her. His unhappy eyes met hers.

“To-morrow morning,” he muttered, “I shall call.... This alters nothing.... I will come to-morrow morning and we will talk.”

“Yes,” said Miss Garden. “We must talk.”

Mr. Jayne went back into the hall and escorted his family upstairs to his rooms.

“Aie, aie, aie,” shuddered Olga Petrushka, flinging off her fur coat and cap and leaping round the room in her red dress, like a Russian in a novel. “Let’s get warm. Come, little bears”—she spoke German now—“to your papa’s arms. Kiss him, Katya; hug him, Boris. Tell him we have come across Europe to be with him, now that all else is gone. Forgive and forget, eh, Franya Maryavitch? You and I must keep one another warm.... Aie, aie, aie, my poor papa,” she wailed in Russian. “I keep seeing his face as they took him, and my poor Feodor’s. As to mamma, she is dazed; she will never get over it. We must keep her always with us, poor little mamma.... Tea at once, Franya. I am going to be sick,” she added in Magyar, and was.

Mr. Jayne laid his wife on his bed and took off her shoes and bathed her forehead, while she moaned in Polish. Then he made tea for her and the children and his mother-in-law, who sat heavily in a chair and drank five cups, and looked at him with drowsy, inimical eyes, saying never a word. He felt like a dead man, in a world full of ghosts. Who were these, who had this claim upon him? Their clinging hands were pulling him down, out of life into a tomb. The February evening shadows lay coldly on his heart. These poor distraught women, these little children—he must take infinite care of them, and let them lack for nothing, but he must not let them come close into his life; they would throttle it. His life, his true life, was with Rome. Rome, the gallant, fastidious dandy, with her delicate poise, her pride, her cool wit and grace. Not with this violent, unhappy, inconsequent Slav, chattering in several tongues upon his bed.

To-morrow he would go and talk to Rome ... explain to Rome....

7
ENGLISH TRAGEDY

Miss Garden received Mr. Jayne. Neither had slept much, for Mr. Jayne had given his bed to his family and lain himself on a horsehair couch, and Miss Garden had been troubled by her thoughts. Their faces were pale and shadowed and heavy-eyed.

Miss Garden said, “This is the end, of course. I shan’t need a week now. Fate has intervened very opportunely.”

“No,” said Mr. Jayne, with passion. “No. Nothing is changed. For God’s sake, don’t think that our situation is changed. It is not. She wants protection and security and a home, and I will provide all those for her and her mother and the children. Me she does not want. They shall have everything they want. But I shall not live with them.”

“You still think that you and I can live together?” Miss Garden was sceptical of his optimism. “I don’t think your wife would tolerate that. No, Frank, it’s no use. They belong to you. They need you. I can’t come between you. It would be heartless and selfish. Imagine the situation for a moment ... it is impossible.”

They both imagined it. Mr. Jayne shuddered, like a man very cold.

“You don’t want to be involved in such a—such a melodrama,” he said, bitterly.

“Put it at that if you like. I take it we are neither of us fond of melodrama. But, apart from that, I said all along, and meant it, that if your wife wants you I can’t take you. She has first claim.”

“I shall not live with Olga Petrushka and her mother.”

“That’s your own affair, of course. You are very likely right, since you don’t get on well together. But you must see that you and I can’t....”

Miss Garden stopped, for her voice began to shake. How she loved him! She pressed her hands together in her lap till the rings bruised her fingers.

Mr. Jayne gazed at her gloomily, observing her lightly poised body, slim and elegant in a dark blue taffeta dress which stood out behind below the waist in a kind of shelf, and made her shape rather like that of a swan. He saw her slight, anguished hands that hurt each other, and the pale tremor of her face.

“She’s been through hell, and she wants you,” said Miss Garden, trying to keep control.

“I tell you I can’t live with her, nor she with me. Do you want to turn my life into a tragi-comic opera?”

“Most life is a tragi-comic opera,” said Rome, trying to smile. “Perhaps all.”

“But you’re resolved anyhow to keep yours clear of my tragi-comedies,” he flung at her.

Then he apologised.

“I don’t mean that; I don’t know what I’m saying.... Oh, I won’t press you now to decide. We’ll wait, Rome. You’ll see, in a month or so, how things have arranged themselves—how easy it will all be. Olga will have recovered her balance by then; she changes from hour to hour, like all Russians. In a few weeks she will be tired of me and want to be in Paris, or back in Russia. She doesn’t really want me; it’s only that she is unstrung by trouble. Upset; that’s what she is. All I ask you to do is to wait.”

“No, Frank. It can never be, unless she goes sometime to live with someone else—some other man. Otherwise she would be likely, even if she left you for a time, to want you again at intervals. I can’t make a third.... You see, whatever happens now, your family must always be a real fact to me, not an abstraction. I’ve seen them.... Katya is just like you—your chin and eyes.... The children love you very much; I saw that.... And she loves you, too....”

“She does not. That’s not love—not as I know love.”

“As to that, we all know love in different ways, I suppose.... Truly, Francis, I have quite decided. I can’t live with you.... No, no, don’t....”

He was holding her in his arms and kissing her face, her lips, her eyes, muttering entreaties.

“If you loved me you’d do it.”

“I do love you, and I shan’t do it.”

“I’m asking nothing dishonourable of you. You don’t think it wrong on general principles; yesterday you were willing to consider it. You’re just refusing life for a quixotic whim ... refusing, denying life.... Rome, you can’t do it. Don’t you know, now you’re in my arms, that you can’t, that it would be to deny the best in us?”

“What’s the best, what’s the worst? I don’t know, nor do you. I’m not an ethicist. All I know is that your wife, while she wants you, or thinks she wants you, has first claim. It’s a question of fairness and decent feeling.... Or bring it down, if you like, to a question of taste. Perhaps that is the only basis there really is for decisions of this sort for people like us.”

“Taste. That’s a fine cry to mess up two lives by. I’d almost rather you were religious and talked of the will of God. One could respect that, at least.”

“I can’t do that, as I happen not to be sure whether God exists. And it would make nothing simpler really, since one would then have to discover what one believed the will of God to be. Don’t do religious people the injustice of believing that anything is simpler or easier for them; it’s more difficult, since life is more exacting.... But it comes to the same thing; all these processes of thought lead to the same result if applied by the same mind. It depends on the individual outlook. And this is mine.... Oh, don’t make it so damnably difficult for us both, my dearest....”

Miss Garden, who never swore and never wept, here collapsed into tears, all her urbane breeding broken at last. He consoled her so tenderly, so pitifully, so mournfully, that she wept the more for love of him.

“Go now,” she said at last. “We mustn’t meet again till we can both do it quietly, without such pain. Papa and I are going back to London next week. Write to me sometime and let me know how you do and where you are. My dearest Frank....”

8
FOUNDERED

Rome was alone. She sat in a hard Italian chair, quite still, and felt cold and numb, and as if she had died. Drowned she felt, under deep cold seas of passion and of pain. Wrecked and foundered and drowned, at the bottom of grey seas. Something cried, small and weak and hurt within her, and it was the voice of love, or (as Mr. Jayne would have it) of life; life which she had denied and slain. Never had she greatly loved before; never would she greatly love again; and the great love she now had she was slaying. That was what the hurt voice cried in her as she sat alone in the great, bare, chilly room, the sad little scaldino on the floor at her feet.

She was dry-eyed now that she was alone, and had no more to face Mr. Jayne’s love and pain. Her own she could bear. Harder and harder and cooler and more cynical she would grow, as she walked the world alone, leaving love behind. Was that the choice? Did one either do the decent, difficult thing, and wither to bitterness in doing it, or take the easy road, the road of joy and fulfilment, and be thereby enriched and fulfilled? And what was fulfilment, and what enrichment? What, ah, what, was this strange tale that life is; what its meaning, what its purpose, what its end?

Rome did not know. She knew one thing only. Frustration, renunciation, death—whether you called your criterion the will of God, or social ethics, or a quixotic whim, or your own private standards of decency and taste, it led you to these; led you to the same sad place, where you lay drowned, dead beneath bitter seas.

Mid-day chimed over the city. Miss Garden rose, and put on her outdoor things, and went forth to meet her papa for lunch. Life moves on, through whatever deserts, and one must compose oneself to meet it, never betraying one’s soul.

9
VICKY ON THE WORLD

“It’s good to have you back again, my Rome,” Vicky said. “I miss you at my parties. There are lots of new people I want you to meet. An adorable Oxford youth, whom you’ll find after your own heart. Already he writes essays like a polished gentleman of the world, and he a round-faced cherub barely out of school. A coming man, my dear, mark my words. Such brilliance, such style, such absurd urbanity! Denman introduced him. I prefer him enormously to Denman’s other cronies—that affected Mr. Le Gallienne for instance, and that conceited young Beardsley. Not but that young Beardsley, too, has a wit. I’ll say that for Denman—he keeps a witty table.... Well, have you brought papa back still a good Roman? Father Stanton says, by the way, we’re to call the Pope’s church in this country the Italian Mission. It’s quite time papa had a change of creed, anyhow; I begin to fear for his health since he read ‘Robert Elsmere’ and wasn’t driven by it to honest doubt.”

“Neither,” said Rome, “was he driven by the Forum to the pagan gods. One begins to think that papa is settling down.”

“Oh, I trust not. Dear papa, he’s not old yet.... What a country you have come back to, though, my dear. Strikes everywhere—dockers, railwaymen, miners, even tailors.... Maurice is perfectly happy, encouraging them all. But, darling Maurice, I’m seriously afraid he may cut Amy’s throat one day. Serve her right, the little cat. If I were Maurice I’d beat her. Perhaps he will one day, when he’s not quite sober. I wish she’d run off with one of the vulgar men she flirts with, and leave him in peace. He’ll never run off, because he won’t leave the children to her. Poor old boy, he’s so desperately up against things the whole time. Mamma’s miserable about him. I know, though she never says a word. However, she’s consoled by all her nice grandchildren. Even grandpapa, you know, admits that the deplorable modern generation is doing its duty as regards multiplication. Why do old Bible clergymen like grandpapa think it so important to produce more life? One would think, one really would think, that there was plenty of that already. But no. Be fruitful, they say: multiply: replenish the earth. It says so in Genesis, and clergymen of grandpapa’s generation can’t get away from Genesis. Poor grandpapa. He’s writing to the Guardian, as usual, about the Modern Woman. She’s dreadfully on his mind. Latchkeys. He doesn’t think women ought to have them. Why not? He doesn’t explain. Men may open their front doors with keys, but women must, he thinks, always ring up the unfortunate maids. He can think of no reasons why; he is past reasons, but not past convictions. What, he asked in Stanley’s drawing-room the other day, is to take the place, for women, of the old sanctities and safeties?” “The new safeties, I imagine, sir,” Denman replied. “Grandpa grunted and frowned; he thinks women on bicycles really indecent, poor old dear. As a matter of fact, Denman does, too—at least ungraceful, which to him is the same thing. But Rome, my dear, you simply must get one. We’re all doing it now. It’s glorious; the nearest approach to wings permitted to men and women here below. Intoxicating! Stanley lives on hers, now her son has safely arrived. And it’s transforming clothes. Short jackets and cloth caps are coming in. Bustles are no more. And, my dear—bloomers are seen in the land! Yes, actually. Stanley cycles in them; she looks delightful, whatever Denman says. No, I don’t. Charles doesn’t approve. Conspicuous, he thinks. And, of course, so it is. Well, men will be men. They’ll never be civilised where women are concerned, most of them. But the poor silly old world really does march a little. We’re all getting most thrillingly fin-de-siècle. I wonder if all times have been as deliriously modern, while they lasted, as our times.”

“Probably,” said Rome. “It’s one of the more certain, though more ephemeral, qualities that times have. I wonder at what age grandpapa began deploring it. Not during the Regency or under William the Fourth, I imagine. I suppose his grandpapa was deploring it then.”

“Oh, and there’s another shocking female modernism become quite common this winter, my dear. Cigarettes! I haven’t perpetrated that myself yet, as Charles thinks that unfeminine too, and I’m sure the children would steal them and be sick. Besides, I don’t think it really becoming to an elegant female. But Stanley does. That literary set of hers is a funny mixture of forwardness and reaction. Forward women and reactionary men, I think. Grandpapa hasn’t tumbled to Stanley’s cigarettes yet. My hat, when he does! Well, it’s a funny world. I suppose my daughters will grow up smoking like their brothers, without thinking twice about it.... The darlings, they’re all so troublesome just now. That kindergarten can’t or won’t teach Imogen to speak properly. If she gabbles like this at three, what will she do at thirty? And Hughie drawls and contradicts....”

Their talk then ran along family lines.

10
STANLEY AND DENMAN

Stanley pedalled swiftly, a sturdy, attractive figure in serge knickerbockers (“bloomers” they were called while that graceful and sensible fashion of our ancestresses endured), along a smooth, sandy road between pine woods. The April sunlight flickered on the pale brown needle-strewn road; the light wind sang in the pines and blew dark curls of hair from under Stanley’s sailor-hat brim. Her bicycle basket was full of primroses. Her round, brown cheeks glowed pink; her lips were parted in a low, tuneless song (tuneless because Stanley could never get a tune right). It expressed her happiness, relieved the pressure of her joy at being alive. Such a day! Such a bicycle! Such sweet and merry air!

She stopped, got off her bicycle, leant it against a gate, and lay down flat on her back in the wood, staring up into the green gloom. London, Denman, her baby, were far off. She was alone with beauty. She was passionately realising the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory, that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close. To savour the loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed sea, and then to pass on to the next—that was life.

Then, presently, the moment lost its keenness, and she was no longer alone with beauty. Her husband and her baby broke the charmed circle, looking in. How she loved them! But they took from her something; her loneliness, that queer, eerie separateness, that only bachelors and spinsters know. They need not, to know it, be unattached, virgin bachelors and spinsters; love does not spoil separateness, but households do.

Stanley rose to her feet, brushed the pine-needles from her neat clothes and untidy hair, put on her sailor-hat and got on her bicycle again. Before her there was a long slope down. To take it, brakeless, feet up on the rest, was like flying. Stanley was no longer a mystic, a wife or a mother; she was a hoydenish little girl out for a holiday.

She reached Weybridge station and entrained for London in one of the halting, smoke-palled, crawling trains of the period. In it she read Ibsen’s “Doll’s House,” for she and Denman were going to see it next week at the Independent Theatre. What a play! What moralising! What purpose! What deplorable solemnity! There seemed, to the set of light-hearted and cynical æsthetes among whom Stanley moved, nothing to do about “A Doll’s House” but to laugh at it. These strange, solemn Scandinavians! Yet numbers of cultured readers in England took it seriously, as cultured English readers love to take foreign plays. They found it impressive and fine, almost a gospel. Further, the bourgeois, the Philistines, the people who are inaccurately said to spend more time than the elect in the street (why is this believed of them?), mocked at it, so that there must be something in it, for, as has been well said (or if it has not, it should have been), majorities are always wrong.

“The fact is,” said Stanley to herself, “the fact is, cultivated people like tracts. Especially cultivated women like tracts about their own emancipation. And, of course, in a way, they’re right.... But plays with purposes....”

It will be observed that Stanley, whom nature had made to welcome purposes wherever found, had well assimilated the spirit of her literary group, which preferred art to be for the sake of art only. She had, as Vicky said of her, so much Zeitgeist. What seemed to her and her friends the good drama of the moment was light social comedy, full of gay, sparkling nonsense and epigrams for the sake of epigrams. Or the more profound and mordant wit of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, who had lately begun to write plays. Mr. Shaw had, indeed, purpose, but his wit carried it off.

Waterloo. Even the trains of 1891 got there at last. Stanley went to look for her bicycle. Finding it and wheeling it off, she felt herself to be one of the happiest persons in the station. She had everything. A bicycle, a husband, a baby, a house, freedom, love, literary and social opportunity, charming friends. Life was indeed felicitous to such as she.

“Progress of Royal Labour Commission,” the newspaper placards shouted. “More L.C.C. scandals. Free brass bands for the poor!”

Stanley frowned. It was a damnable world, after all. A vulgar, grudging, grabbing world. The voice of the press was as the shrill voice of Amy, the wife of Maurice. “Free brass bands for the poor!” That was how Amy would say it, with her silly, gibing laugh. Even, a little, how Irving would say it. But Irving, though he despised the democratic ways of the London County Council, and free brass bands for the poor, was not silly or spiteful. He was merely a delightful, philistine young gentleman on the Stock Exchange.

Stanley bicycled (amid perils less great, less numerous in the year 1891 than now) to Margaretta Street, Chelsea. There was the house, small, dingy, white, with a green door and a tiny square of front garden. Stanley found her latchkey, flung open the green door with a kind of impetuous, happy eagerness, and came face to face with her husband in the little hall.

“Hullo,” he said, and quizzically surveyed her, up and down, from her blown hair and flushed cheeks to her neat, roomy knickerbockers and stout brogues. “Hullo.”

“Hullo, Den. I’ve had the rippingest ride. How’s baby? And yourself?”

“Both flourish, I believe.... You know we’ve people to dinner to-night? You’ve not left yourself a great deal of time, have you?... You don’t look your best, my dear girl, if I may say so.”

“No, I expect not; I’m blown to bits. What’s it matter? Come on, Den, we must both hurry.”

She ran upstairs, turned hot water into the bath, tiptoed into the nursery where her son slept, and back to her room. Denman was in his dressing-room, beyond the open door.

“I’ve had a lovely ride, Den. Weybridge way.”

“Glad you enjoyed it. But lovely’s the wrong word. Anything less lovely than a woman in those unspeakable garments I never saw. I detest them. Women ought to wear graceful, trailing things always.... I can’t think why you do it. Your sense of beauty must be sadly defective.”

“Beauty—oh, well, it’s convenience that matters most, surely. For that matter, very few modern clothes, male or female, are beautiful. But I don’t think these are ugly. One can’t trail all the time; it’s a dirty trick on foot and dangerous on a bicycle.”

“It’s better to be elegant, dirty and dangerous than frumpish, clean and safe. That’s an epigram. The fact is, women ought never to indulge in activities, either of body or mind; it’s not their rôle. They can’t do it gracefully.”

“What do you want them to do then, poor things? Just sit about?”

“Precisely that. You’ve expressed it accurately, if not very beautifully. An elegant inertia is what is required of women ... what on earth has that girl done with my black socks?... Any activity necessary to the human race can be performed by such men as are prepared to sacrifice themselves. All this feminine pedalling about and playing ridiculous games and speaking on platforms and writing books and serving on committees—Lord save us.”

“They’d get awfully fat, your sitting-about females; they wouldn’t be graceful long. Hurry up, Den, or you’ll be late, not I.”

“We shall both be late. It matters very little. If any of our guests have the bad taste to be punctual it will serve them right. Crackanthorpe won’t be punctual, anyhow, he never is.... Make yourself lovely to-night, Stan; I want to forget those awful bloomers. They make you look like a horrible joke in Punch about the New Woman.”

“Well, I’d rather look like the New Woman than like the ‘Woman (not new)’ in the same pictures—sanctimonious idiots.... Really, Den, you’re silly about women....”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Denman, smothered in his shirt.

Stanley went to the bathroom with a touch of ill-humour, which she sang away, like a kettle, in clouds of steam.

Denman, hearing the tuneless song, winced in amused distaste. As a matter of fact, he would have liked a bath himself.

11
A YOUNG MASHER

How agreeable, how elegant and how fastidious were the young mashers of the early nineties! We shall not look upon their like again. Du Maurier has immortalised them, beautiful creatures with slim waists and swallow-tailed evening coats and clear-cut patrician features, chatting to magnificent women with curled mouths, straight brows and noble, sweeping figures. The women of those days, if we are to believe Du Maurier, were nobly built as goddesses, classical-featured, generous of stature and of bosom, but roped in straitly between ribs and hips, so as to produce waists that nature never planned. Because of this compression, they would often suffer greatly, and sometimes fall ill with anæmia, or cancer, or both, and die in great anguish. But, while they yet lived and breathed, they were noble and elegant objects, and their gentlemen friends matched them for grace.

Irving Arthur Penrhyn Garden, aged twenty-eight, earning a comfortable and honest livelihood on the Stock Exchange, was a masher. He lived in bachelor chambers in Bruton Street, and was a popular diner-out and dance-goer, for, though he had not brilliance or fame, he had dark and slim good looks, cheerfulness, savoir faire, and was that creature so sought of hostesses, an agreeable young bachelor. His tastes were healthy, his wits sound, his political and religious views gentlemanly, and his prospects satisfactory. Present correctness and future prosperity were stamped on Irving Garden; so unlike that queer fish, his brother Maurice, the Radical journalist, who was stamped with present incorrectness and future failure. Irving would, no doubt, make a good marriage sometime. Meanwhile he was enjoying life. He had no part with the highbrows, the cranks, the fops, the æsthetes or any other extreme persons; he took no interest in foreign literature, Home Rule for Ireland, the Woman’s Movement, the Independent Theatre, labour agitations, the new art, George Meredith, or Russian exiles, finding them (respectively) uninteresting, impracticable, unattractive, depressing, paid-by-anarchist-gold, queer, unintelligible and a damned nuisance. He considered his brother Maurice to be playing the wrong game; Stanley’s friends he thought an affected, conceited crew, both the men and the women being unsexed, and for ever writing things one didn’t want to read. Rome fell too easily into superfluous irony, so that people never knew when she was pulling their legs, and if she didn’t marry soon, now that she was over thirty, people would begin thinking her an old maid. Una was all right, but shouldn’t have married down. And, though Irving was an affectionate youth and loved his parents, he did think it a little comic of the pater to change his religion quite so often; it made people smile. There should be limits to the number of religions allowed to each man in his life. Anyhow, what was wrong with the C. of E.? On the whole, Vicky was the member of his family of whom Irving most approved. Vicky seemed to him what a woman should be. She looked pretty, dressed and danced well, was amusing, lived in the right part of London, and gave very decent, lively little dinners, at which people weren’t always trying to be clever. Or anyhow he wasn’t asked to the ones at which they tried to be clever.

And with all this, Irving was no fool. He was doing very well at his job, had a good sound head, quite well stocked with ideas, and knew his way about.

Such was Irving Arthur Penrhyn Garden, walking cheerfully, gracefully and competently through the year of grace 1891.

12
RUSSIAN INTERLUDE

That summer Russian refugees were greatly the mode. They would flee to Great Britain in shoals from the fearful atrocities of their government. Those who came were mostly of the intellectual classes (the less intellectual being too stupid to move), who had been plotting, or writing, or speaking, or otherwise expressing their distaste for their country’s constitution, and thus incurring the displeasure of the authorities. Some of them had been sent to Siberia and had escaped; others had served their time there and returned; others again had not yet visited that land, but feared that they might. Once in London, they found kind English intellectuals eager to take an interest in them, and plenty of their own countrymen with whom to meet and continue to plot. It was quite the fashion, in the nineties, to have a few exiled Russians at your parties. They introduced a new way of taking tea, very nasty, with lemon and no milk. Vicky’s youngest daughter, Imogen, as an infant, was once given a sip of this tea from the cup of a hairy Russian professor, and was sent up to the nursery for spewing it out. Imogen developed thus an early and unjust distaste for Russians which did not leave her through life.

In the May of 1891, some new Russian refugees suddenly broke on London—the unexpected and hitherto little mentioned wife, mother-in-law and children of Mr. Jayne, the brilliant writer of essays and memoirs. It had been vaguely rumoured before, that Mr. Jayne had some kind of Russian wife, but no one had expected her to make an appearance; it had been supposed that Mr. Jayne, being a man of some savoir faire, would have seen to that. However, here she was, a large and handsome Russian woman with two large and handsome children, a stout, tragic, yet conversational mamma, an inconsequent manner of speech, like that of Russians in novels, and a wide acquaintance with other Russian refugees, with whom she plotted on Sunday afternoons and all through Thursday nights. She settled, with her mother and children, in Mr. Jayne’s flat. Mr. Jayne left the flat to them and took rooms of his own some way off; he probably thought he would be in the way if he lived in the flat, where Mrs. Jayne entertained her fellow countrymen a good deal. Mrs. Jayne accused him bitterly of neglecting her in her loneliness and grief. He replied that experience had proved that they were not happy together, and that, therefore, he would provide for the support of her, her mother and his two children, but would not share a dwelling with them, which would be both foolish and immoral. He added that, as she knew, he wished she and her mother would sometime see their way to living abroad, where they would be much happier. Mrs. Jayne replied that they intended to live in London until the Day of Deliverance, by which she meant the day when they could with safety return to Russia. She then went into hysterics and said that doubtless he wished her dead.

Mr. Jayne said, “These scenes make life impossible. You drive me to leave London. I shall live in Italy for the present. My bank will pay you an allowance, and I will visit you from time to time.”