Told by an Idiot
Page 9
Midday chimed over the city. Miss Garden rose, and put on her out-door 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 Bibly 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. Man 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. Grandpapa 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 I Such sweet and merry air I
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 Dolls’ House, for she and Denman were going to see it next week at the Independent Theatre. What a play I 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 the Dolls’ 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 . . .”
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 latch-key, flung open the green door with a kind of impetuous, happy eagerness, and came face to face with her husband in the little hall.
“Hallo,” he said, and quizzically surveyed her, up and down, from her blown hair and flushed cheeks to her neat, roomy knickerbockers and stout brogues. “Hallo.”
“Hallo, 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 wit 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 some time. 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 women’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 flee) 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 her 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.