Told by an Idiot

by Rose Macaulay

  “I hardly know,” Rome answered her gently. “I hardly know. But, somehow, one goes on, and one learns to be amused again. . . . I am hoping that when one is elderly one will mind less. You will mind less, Stanley, in a few years. Life’s so strong, it carries one on all the time to new things. Particularly, I think, you, because you are so alive. You’ll come even through this desperate business.”

  Stanley said, “Life’s broken to bits. I was so happy once . . . broken to jagged bits,” and left the room to cry. For, contrary to a common belief, those who feel most usually cry most too. Stanley was afraid that she was contracting a tearful habit such as she might never outgrow, but she did not much care. She did not much care for anything in these days.

  She missed Denman. Missing him was like the continual sharp ache of a gathered tooth. She missed his charm, his brilliance, his love, his careless, casual ways, his intense life, his soft, husky voice, the smile on his queer, white face and narrow eyes. She missed his gay, youthful talk, the parties and plays they had been used to go to together, his constant presence in the house. She would wake in the nights, thinking he lay beside her, and that his arm would be thrown, in a half-waking caress, across her; but he was not there. She would wake in the mornings, thinking to see his rumpled brown head sunk in the pillow beside hers; but there was no head, and no pillow but her own. When her son and daughter entered her room in the morning and climbed upon her bed, after the irritating manner of infants, and woke her by pulling at her two dark plaits, she would open drowsy eyes that looked for her husband’s short, delightful face smiling above her; but there were only the two young children, with their restless antics and imbecile prattlings. Fatuous beings! One day she would enjoy them again, antics, fatuity and all, even as she had enjoyed them before, but in these days her love for them lay frozen and almost lifeless, with all other love but that one love that tore at her heart with fierce, clawing fingers. It seemed that this love and this anguish consumed her wholly, leaving nothing over. She had never been first a mother; she had been first an individual, a human creature sensitively reacting to all the contacts of the engrossing world, and secondly she had been a wife, a woman who loved a man. A mother, perhaps, third. And now the secondary function, in its death agony, had taken entire possession, and she was no longer either an individual creature or a mother, but only a lover who had lost all.

  To tear him out of her heart—that was her constant object. And if the heart (since we are, by foolish custom, so impelled to call the seat of the affections) had been alone involved, she might have done so. But who should tear the beloved from the roots he had in her whole daily life for five years, from his place in her mind, her brain, her body, her whole being? She knew him for a philanderer, a trivial taster in love and life, selfish, spoilt, vain, with idiotic opinions about one half of the human race. It was, indeed, her knowledge of all this in him that informed her brain that their separation must be final and complete. But, with it all, she could not tear him from her heart, her soul, her body, her entire and constant life. He was herself, and she herself was being torn in two.

  Life was a continual anguish. She saw that she must leave her parents’ home and live alone. She was bringing misery into Bloomsbury Square. And daily, night and morning, her parents kissed her, and their kisses were to her, who craved so bitterly those kisses that she might no longer have, a continual reminder and torment. She was trying to shut off that side of life, but they did not understand, and kissed her. Rome, who understood too well, did not kiss her. She knew that she must be alone with her children, that she was no fit housemate for a loving family or friends. So, presently, she went into rooms, and this was a more bearable loneliness.

  But it left more time on her hands; more time in which to brood on life, on love, on illusion, on women, and on men. How had she failed in this job of marriage, of constructing an enduring life with a man she had loved, who had loved her? How had they both failed? How frequent was this failure? It seemed that love was not enough. Such deep misunderstandings prevail, between any two human beings. Sex bridges many of them, but not all. Stanley began, at this time, to generalise dangerously and inaccurately (since all such generalisations are inaccurate) about women and about men. She saw women as eager, restless, nervous children, chattering, discussing, joking, turning the world upside down together while they smoked or brushed their hair, and all to so little purpose. Meanwhile there were men; the sex; sphinx-like, placid, inscrutable, practical, doing the next thing, gently smiling at the fuss women made about ideas. Men knew that they did not matter, these excitements and fusses of women, any more than the toys children play with matter. They dismissed them with that serene smile of theirs, and busied themselves with the elemental, enduring things; sex, fatherhood, work. They knew what mattered; they went for the essentials. They didn’t waste their time frothing about with words and ideas. Men were somehow admirable, in their strong stability. Their nervous systems were so magnificent. They could kill animals without feeling sick, break the necks of fishes, put worms on hooks, shoot rabbits and birds, jab bayonets into bodies. Women would never amount to much in this world, because they nearly all have a nervous disease; they are strung on wires; they are like children frightened of the dark and excited by the day. It seems fundamental, this difference between the nerves of most women and most men. You see it among little girls and boys; most little boys, but how few little girls, can squash insects and kill rabbits without a qualm. It is this difference which gives even a stupid man often a greater mastery over life than a clever woman. He is not frightened by life. Women, for the most part, are. Life may be a joke to them, but it is often also a nightmare. To the average man it is neither. Men are marvellously restful. Eternal symbols of parenthood and the stability of life, to which women come back, as to strong towers of refuge, after their excursions and alarms.

  This was the kind of nonsense which Stanley wove to herself during these unbalanced days of her life. Nonsense, because all generalities about human beings are nonsense. But many people, including Stanley, find interest in making them up, and it is a harmless game.

  17

  Panta Rei

  It seemed to Stanley, through this spring and summer of 1895, that a phase was over, not only in her own life, which was apt so faithfully to mirror the fleeting times, but in the world at large. That literary, artistic, and social movement so vaguely described as “decadent” by those who could scarcely define that or any other word, nor would greatly care to if they could, seemed to be on the wane. The trial and conviction of Mr. Oscar Wilde did it no good, and the many who had been unjust towards the movement before became unjuster still, adopting an “I told you so ”air, which mattered as little as any other air adopted by those of like mentality, but which had, nevertheless, its effect on strengthening the forces of so-called healthy philistinism in the land. As a contemporary poet sang—

  “If these be artists, then may Philistines

  Arise, plain sturdy Britons as of yore,

  And sweep them off, and purge away the signs

  That England e’er such noxious offspring bore.”

  Even the anti-Philistines, the so-called decadents themselves, were disconcerted and shaken by this public débacle of one of the most prominent of their number. “Those who write, draw and talk in this clever new manner that we have never liked,” said the Philistines, firmly assured, “are obviously as unpleasant as, even more unpleasant than, we have believed.” “They might as well say,” said the practises of the elegant, clever new manner, “that because Ladas, owned by a Liberal leader, won the Derby last year, all Liberals are as intelligent about horses as, even more intelligent about horses than, they have believed. They might as well say . . .” But it is of no use to tell people of this mentality what they might as well say. They will as likely as not proceed to say it, and it is very certain that they will not therefrom see the absurdity of that which they have already said. There is, in fact, no way of dealing with these pers
ons; they are the world’s masters, laying the ponderous weight of their foolish and heavy minds upon all subtleties, delicacies and discriminations to flatten them, talking very loudly, firmly and fatuously the while through their hats, and through their mouthpiece, the press. There is no dealing with them; it is they who make England, and indeed the world, what it is. “This nation believes . . .” “The people of this country have always held . . .” says the press, grandly, as if indeed that made it any more likely to be true, instead of far less. “This asylum has always believed that the best form of government is a party system,” the newspapers published in asylums no doubt continually remark. “The inhabitants of this asylum have always said . . .”

  And so much for public opinion.

  Anyhow, from whatever cause, there began at this time, to put it briefly, a slump in decadence. Max Nordau wrote this year, with his customary exaggeration, his essay on Fin-de-siècle.

  “An epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and another is approaching its birth. There is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow could not link itself with to-day. Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall because man is weary, and there is no faith that it is worth an effort to uphold them. Views that have hitherto governed minds are dead or driven hence like disenthroned kings. Meanwhile interregnum, in all its terror, prevails. . . . Such is the spectacle presented by the doings of men in the reddened light of the Dusk of the Nations.”

  Max Nordau was a man of imagination, and had an excessive way of putting things, and seems to have been hypnotised by the arbitrary divisions into which man has chopped time; but, whatever he may have meant, it is quite true that no period is precisely like another, and that life is, as has been well said, a flux. In brief, panta rei, and no less in the middle eighteen nineties than at other times.

  18

  Religion

  Of the many impulsions that drive human beings to one form or another of religion, the strongest, perhaps, is pain. The other impulsions—conscience, the mystic sense, personal influence, conviction, experimentalism, loneliness, boredom, remorse, and so forth—all work powerfully on their respective subjects. But pain, mental anguish so great that human nature is driven by it from cover to cover, seeking refuge and finding none, is the most powerful and the most frequent agent for the churches. “There is no help for me in this world,” tortured human creatures cry, and are often driven by that cry to questioning whether there may not, perhaps, be help in some other. Anyhow, they think, it is worth the experiment, and the experiment proves an anodyne and a gate of escape from what would scarcely, otherwise, be borne.

  Such was Stanley Croft’s method of approach to a closer contact with religion than any she had had before; though, before her marriage, she had had a mystical belief in God, which had, during the last five years, all but died out in an atmosphere not well suited to it. Now it returned to her again, touched with just enough remorse for past neglect as might serve for a temperate shadow of that hectic and enjoyable repentance which drove, then and later, so many of her literary contemporaries into the fold of the Catholic church. In reality, perhaps, though it seemed that pain was her immediate impeller, it was ultimately, as usual, the spirit of her age which seized her and drove her to prayer.

  She would turn into dark and silent churches, seeking desperately the relief from herself that life denied her and fall on her knees and there stay, numb and helpless, her forehead dropped on her arms, till the sweet, often incense-laden atmosphere (for that was the kind of church she preferred) enveloped her like a warm and healing garment, and she whispered into the dim silence, “God! God! If you are there, speak to me and help me! God, God, God!”

  From that cry, for long the only prayer she could utter, other prayers at last grew. The silence melted round her and became a living thing; the red sanctuary lamp was as the light of God flaming in a dim world, a light shining in darkness, and the darkness encompassed it not. The undefeated life of God, burning like a brave star in a stormy night, by which broken, all but foundered ships might steer. It was so that Stanley saw it, and slowly it did actually guide her to a kind of painful peace.

  “I wish the poor child would join the true Church,” Mr. Garden said to Mrs. Garden, for he was still, though now a little dubiously, a member of that church. “I think it would help her.”

  Mamma looked sceptical.

  “I think not, Aubrey. She doesn’t want to be bothered with joining churches just now, and she certainly has no energy to give to it. Besides, she likes English Catholicism. It has, you must admit, rather more liberty of thought than your branch.” (Mamma knew, having tried both more than once). “Besides,” she added quickly, to change the subject from liberty of thought, which always in these days made papa look sad—in fact, she had mentioned it in a moment of carelessness which she immediately regretted—“besides, there is the divorce.”

  Papa sighed, and looked sadder than ever.

  “Yes. This horrid, this distressing business. I wish she may give it up before it is too late. Even High Anglicanism does not allow divorce.”

  “On that point,” said mamma, “and, I fancy, on a good many others, Stanley does not agree with High Anglicanism. Fortunately that does not prevent her from finding comfort in its forms of worship. I am only thankful that she can. It is hard for those in trouble who have no faith in another world.” Possibly her mind had turned to Rome, whose faith in worlds, either this we live in or any other, was negligible.

  But papa’s mind had turned inward, upon his own torn soul. Mamma watched him with experienced anxiety. She knew the signs, and feared that the Mother of the Churches would not for long hold papa in her firm arms. Dear Aubrey; he was so restless. And he had lately been reading a lot of odd, mystic books. . . .

  19

  Celtic Twilight

  It was very certain that Stanley would not join the Roman Church. She had too mystic an imagination to enter any body so definite and sharp of doctrine. She was more at one at this time with the Celtic poets, with their opening of strange gates onto dim, magic lands. The loveliness, like the wavering, lovely rhythms of the sea, of W. B. Yeats, took her, as it took her whole generation, by storm; the tired twilight sadness of Fiona Macleod was balm to her.

  “O years with tears, and tears through weary years,

  How weary I, who in your arms have lain:

  Now I am tired: the sound of slipping spears

  Moves soft, and tears fall in a bloody rain,

  And the chill footless years go over me, who am

  slain.

  I hear, as in a wood dim with old light, the rain

  Slow falling; old, old weary human tears,

  And in the deepening dusk my comfort is my

  pain,

  Sole comfort left of all my hopes and fears,

  Pain that alone survives, gaunt hound of the

  shadowy years.”

  And,

  “Between the gray pastures and the dark wood

  A valley of white poppies is lit by the low

  moon.

  It is the grave of dreams, a holy rood.

  It is quiet there: no wind doth ever fall.

  Long, long ago a wind sang once a heart-sweet

  rune.

  Now the white poppies grow, silent and tall.

  A white bird floats there like a drifting leaf:

  It feeds upon faint sweet hopes and perishing

  dreams,

  And the still breath of unremembering grief.

  And as a silent leaf the white bird passes,

  Winnowing the dusk by dim, forgetful streams.

  I am alone now among the silent grasses.”

  In such soft and melancholy enchantment as this, Stanley’s desolation found, for a time, comfort.

  (Vicky’s Imogen, aged seven, found this book at her grandparents’ house one day, opened it, read, breathing noisily for excitement, and tucked it furtively away in
the pouch of her sailor frock, where she often kept rabbits, or eggs for hatching. She bore it home undiscovered, and spent the evening lying on her stomach and elbows beneath the nursery table reading it, with moving lips and fingers in her ears, deaf to the clamour and summons of her brethren, until at last she was haled to bed, hot-cheeked and wet-eyed, silent upon a peak in Darien. She had found a new enchantment; it was better than Mowgli, even. But, since she was not really a dishonest little girl, when next she went to Bloomsbury Square she slipped the book unobtrusively back into the shelf from which she had stolen it, and took The Manxman instead, thinking, with the fatuity of her years, to find that it concerned a tailless cat; but with regard to this book she was disappointed, and unable to agree with Mr. Gosse).

  20

  The Star in the East

  Strange books and pamphlets littered papa’s study table. He met and dined with Mr. George Russell (the Irish poet, not the English churchman). He admired and liked Mr. Russell so much that for his sake he attended the lectures of Madame Blavatsky, and perused the works of Colonel Olcott, Mr. W. Q. Judge, and Mrs. Besant. A feeling of expansion took him, as if the bonds of rigid orthodoxy, which had restrained him for the last nine years, were being forced asunder. . . . It was, with papa, the eternally recurrent springtime of his soul’s re-birth; he was in travail with a new set of ideas, and their pressure rent him cruelly. Then one day, “I have seen his star in the east,” cried papa, and became a Theosophist.