Told by an Idiot

by Rose Macaulay

  Rome said, “Yes, Una’ll be all right. She knows the way to live . . .” and was caught by her own phrase into the question, what is the way to live, then? Mine, Una’s, Vicky’s, Stanley’s, Maurice’s, papa’s? Perhaps there is no way to live. Perhaps the thing is just to live, without a way. And that is, actually, what Una will do.

  Una’s Ted came to stay in Bloomsbury with the Gardens. He was large and silent and beautiful, and ate hugely, and looked awful, said Vicky, in his Sunday clothes, which were the ones he wore all the time in London. Also, his boots creaked. But you could see, through it all, how he would be striding about his native fields in gaiters and breeches and old tweeds, sucking a pipe and looking like a young earth-god. You could see, therefore, why Una loved him; you could see it even while he breathed hard at meals in his tight collar, and sucked his knife. He was physically glorious; a young Antæus strayed by mistake to town. He and Una were a splendid pair.

  Una cared not at all what impression he made on her family. She was not sensitive. The touch of his hands made her quiver luxuriously, and when he took her in his arms and turned her face up to his and bruised her mouth with kisses, the world’s walls shivered and dissolved round her and she was poured out like water. He was beautiful and splendid and her man, and knew all about the things she cared for, and she loved him with a full, happy passion that responded frankly and generously to his. They chaffed and bickered and played and caressed, and talked about horses and dogs and love, and went to the Zoo.

  Amy giggled behind the young man’s back, and said, “Did you see him stuffing his mouth with bun and trying to wash it down with tea out of his saucer?”

  “Why not?” said Rome. “And he did wash it down; he didn’t only try.”

  “Well!” Amy let out a breath and nodded twice. “Rather Una than me, that’s all.”

  17

  Stanley

  These years, ’87, ’88, ’89, were stirring years for Maurice and Stanley. In them were founded the Independent Labour Party and the Christian Social Union, and the Star newspaper. And there was the great dock strike, and “bloody Sunday,” when Maurice disgraced Amy and himself by joining in an unseemly fracas with the police, in which he incurred a sprained wrist and a night in prison. In point of fact, as Amy said, he was rather drunk at the time.

  Stanley enjoyed the labour movement. She was not like Maurice, merely up against things; she eagerly swam with the tide, and the tide which carried her during this particular phase of her life was revolutionary labour. She was joyously in the van of the movement. The dock strike stirred her more than the Pigott forgeries, more than the poisoning of Mr. Maybrick by Mrs. Maybrick, more than the death of Robert Browning.

  Stirring times indeed. But in ’89 something happened which stirred Stanley more profoundly than the times. She fell in love and married. It was bound to occur, to such an ardent claimer of life. The man was a writer of light essays and short stories and clever, unproduced plays. He was thirty, and he had an odd, short white face, and narrow, laughing eyes beneath a clever forehead, and little money, but a sense of irony and of form and of the stage. He was in the most modern literary set in London, and his name was Denman Croft. At first Stanley thought him very affected, and she was right, for the most modern literary set was affected just then; but in a month or so she loved him with an acute, painful ecstasy that made her dizzy and blinded her to all the world besides. Her work lost interest; she was alive only in those hours when they were together; love absorbed her body and soul. Why, he protested, did she not live in the more reasonable parts of London, and meet people worth meeting? All sorts of exciting, amusing things were happening in the world of letters and art just now, and she ought to be in it. Stanley began to feel that perhaps she ought. After all, one could be progressive, and fight for labour reform and trades unions as well in the west as in the east. Then, while she was thus reflecting, it became apparent to her that Denman Croft was going immediately to propose marriage to her. She had for some weeks known that he loved her, but was scarcely ready for this crisis when it came. Passionate ecstasy possessed them both; they sank into it blind and breathless and let its waves break over them.

  Life, life, life. Stanley, who had always lived to the uttermost, felt that she had never lived before. Spirit, brain and body interacted and co-operated in the riot of their passion.

  They married almost at once, and took a house in Margaretta Street, Chelsea.

  Stanley always reflected her time, and it was, people said, a time of transition. For that matter, times always are, and one year is always rather different from the last. In this year, the threshold of the nineties, all things were, it was said, being made new. New forms of art and literature were being experimented with, new ideas aired. New verse was being written, new drama, essays, fiction and journalism. Stanley was so much interested in it all (being, as she now was, in close touch with the latest phase in these matters) that her social and political earnestness flagged, for you cannot have all kinds of earnestness at once. Instead of going in the evenings to committee meetings and mass labour meetings, she now went to plays and literary parties. Instead of writing articles on women’s work, she began to write poetry and short sketches. All this, and the social life she now led, and the excitement of love, Denman, and her new home, was so stimulating and absorbing that she had little attention to spare for anything else. Stanley was like that—enthusiastic, headlong, a deep plunger, a whole-hogger.

  “They do have the most fantastic beings to dinner,” Vicky said to her Charles. “Velvet coats and immense ties. . . . It reminds me of ten years ago, when I was being æsthetic. But these people are much smarter talkers. Denman says they are really doing something good, too. He’s an attractive creature, though I think his new play is absurd and he’s desperately affected. The way that child adores him! Stanley does go so head over ears into everything. None of the rest of us could love like that. It frightens one for her. . . . But anyhow, I’m glad she’s off that stupid trades’ union and sweated labour fuss. Maurice does more than enough of that for the family, and I was afraid Stan was going to turn into a female fanatic, like some of those short-haired friends of hers. That’s not what we women ought to be, is it, my Imogen?”

  Vicky caught up her Imogen, an infant of one summer, in her arms, and kissed her. But Imogen, neither then nor at any later time, had any clear idea about what women ought or ought not to be. Anything they liked, she probably thought. If, indeed, there were, specifically, any such creatures as women. . . . For Imogen was born to have a doubtful mind, on this as on other subjects. She might almost have been called mentally defective in some directions, of so little was she ever to be sure.

  “Stanley,” pronounced Vicky, “has more Zeitgeist ”(for that unpleasant word had of late come in) “than any one I ever met.”

  Part II Fin-De-SiÈcle

  1

  Rome

  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 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 know
s 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, 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-siécle. 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, an

  d 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 some one 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 any one 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 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 Grey.

  “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 been at the British Legation 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 any one 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 sa
ndwich.

  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.”