Told by an Idiot

by Rose Macaulay

  17

  At the Farm

  Imogen, bow and arrows in hand, crawled through the wood, beneath overhanging boughs of oaks and elders and beeches and the deep green arms of pines, that shut the little copse from the July sun into a fragrant gloom. Every now and then she stopped, listened, and laid her ear to the mossy ground.

  “Three miles off and making a beeline south,” she observed, frowning. “My God.”

  “Michael crawled on,” she continued, crawling, “keeping his head low, so as not to afford a target for any stray arrow. Who knew what sinister shadows lurked in the forest, to right and to left? . . . Hist! What was that sound? Something cracked in the tangle of scrub near him. . . . A Cherokee on a lone trail, possibly. . . . A Cherokee: the most deadly of the Red Tribes. . . . Cold sweat stood out on Michael’s brow. Could he reach the camp in time? Again he laid his ear to the ground and listened. They were only two miles now, and still that swift, terrible travelling. . . . The sun beat upon his head and neck; he felt dizzy and sick. Suppose he fainted before he reached his goal. . . . That damned cracking in the bushes again. . . . Good God! . . . Out of the thicket sprang a huge Redskin, uttering the horrid war-whoop of the Cherokees, which, once heard, is never forgotten. Michael leaped to his feet, pulled his bow-string to his ear, let fly. . . .”

  Imogen, too, let fly.

  “Missed him,” she muttered, and swarmed nimbly up the gnarled trunk of an oak until she reached the lower boughs, from whence she looked down into a fierce red face, eagle-nosed, feather-crowned.

  “Oh, Big Buffalo,” she softly called, “Will you parley?”

  Big Buffalo grunted, and they parleyed. If Michael would betray the whereabouts of his friends, Big Buffalo would grant him his life. If not, no such easy death as the arrow awaited him, “for we Cherokees well understand the art of killing. . . .” Michael, sick with fear, betrayed his friends, and Big Buffalo left him, primed with information. (In common with other heroes of fiction, Michael never thought of giving incorrect or misleading information.)

  “Michael lay in the forest, his head upon his arms. What had he done? There was no undoing it now. Why didn’t I choose the stake? Oh, damn, why didn’t I? . . .”

  It was too warm, sweet and drowsy for prolonged remorse. Michael forgot his shame. The breeze in the pine trees sang like low harps. . . . The shadowy copse was soaked in piney sweetness, golden and dim. Michael, with his bow, his Redskins, and his broken honour, faded out in the loveliness of the hour.

  Ecstasy descended on the wood; enchantment held it, saturating it with golden magic. Ants and little wood-beetles scuttled over Imogen’s outstretched hands and bare, rough head. Rabbits bobbed and darted close to her. She was part of the woods, caught breathless into that fairy circle like a stolen, enchanted child.

  “I am full of the Holy Ghost,” said Imogen. “This is the Holy Ghost”. . . and loveliness shook her, as a wind shakes a leaf. These strange, dizzy moments lurked hidden in the world like fairies in a wood, and at any hour they sprang forth and seized her, and the emotion, however often repeated, was each time as keen. They would spring forth and grip her, turning the dædal earth to magic, at any lovely hour, in wood or lane or street, or among the wavering candles and the bread and wine. She was stabbed through and through with beauty sweet as honey and sharp as a sword, and it was as if her heart must break in her at its turning. After this brief intensity of joy or pain, whichever it was, it was as if something in her actually did break, scattering loose a drift of pent-up words. That was how poems came. After the anguished joy, the breaking loose of the words, then the careful stringing of them together on a chain, the fastidious, conscious arranging. Then the setting them down, and reading them over, and the happy, dizzy (however erroneous) belief that they were good. . . . That was how poems came, and that was life at its sharpest, its highest intensity. Afterwards, one sent them to papers, and it was pleasant and gratifying if other people saw them and liked them too. But all that was a side-issue. Vanity is pleasant, gratified ambition is pleasant, earning money is very pleasant, but these are not life at its highest power. You might at once burn every poem you wrote, but you would still have known life.

  The song the pines hummed became words, half formed, drifting, sweet. . . . Imogen listened, agape, like an imbecile. It was a lovely, jolly, woody thing that was being sung to her . . . she murmured it over. . . .

  A bell rang, far away. Sharply time’s voice shivered eternity to fragments. Imogen yawned, got up, brushed pine needles out of her hair and clothes, took up her bow, and strolled out of fairyland. It was tea-time at the farm.

  As she sauntered through the little wood, she shot arrows at the trees and stopped to retrieve them. Then she found a long, sharp stick, pointed, like a spear, and became a knight in a Norman forest. She encountered another knight, a hated foe. There was a fight à outrance. They fenced, parried, lunged. . . .

  “Swerve to the right, son Roger, he said,

  When you catch his eye through the helmet’s slit;

  Swerve to the right, then out at his head,

  And the Lord God give you joy of it. . . .”

  A swinging thrust. . . .

  “Got him, pardie!”

  “Hullo.”

  Imogen faced about, and there, on the cart track between the wood and the home field, stood her uncle Ted, large and red, in breeches and gaiters, his pipe between his teeth.

  “Oh, hallo, uncle Ted.”

  Imogen had turned red. She had been seen making an ass of herself alone in the wood. Behaving like a maniac. Damn.

  “Anything the matter? Got the staggers, have you?” said uncle Ted, as if she were a cow.

  “No, I’m all right. Looking for arrows and things, that’s all.”

  “Oh, I see. . . . Comin’ up to tea?”

  They walked across the home field together. Imogen was sulky and ashamed. She was emptied of enchantment and the Holy Ghost, and was nothing but an abrupt, slangy, laconic girl, going sullenly into tea, feeling an ass. Uncle Ted was thinking farmer’s thoughts, of crops and the like, not of Imogen.

  But afterwards he said to Una, “Not quite all there, eh, that girl of Vicky’s? Flings herself about in the wood when she’s alone, like some one not right, and talks to herself, too. Eighteen, is she? It’d be right enough if she was twelve. But at eighteen or nineteen. . . .”

  “Oh, Imogen’s all right. She’s childish for her age, that’s all.” Una took every one for granted.

  “Childish, yes. That’s what I say. They ought to have her seen to. Gabbles, too. I can’t make out half she’s saying. . . . Katie may do her good, I dare say. Katie’s got sense. . . . It’s against a girl, going on like that. No sensible young fellow would like it. They ought to have her seen to. What?”

  “Oh, she’s all right,” said Una again. “There she is in the field playing rounders with the others quite sensibly, you see.”

  “I dare say. She may be all right at games, but she oughtn’t to be let loose alone in woods. She’ll get herself talked about. . . .”

  Katie, too, thought Imogen mad. But quite nicely mad. Harmless. Like a kid. Katie was a few months younger, but she felt that Imogen was a kid. She said and did such mad things. And she lacked the most elementary knowledge; she didn’t know the first thing, for instance, about clothes, what they were made of, and how they should be made. She was like an imbecile about them; didn’t care, either. She would stare, pleased and admiring, at Katie, who had beauty, as if Katie were a lovely picture, but she never said the right things about her clothes. You’d think, almost, she didn’t know one material from another.

  When they had done playing rounders, and when Imogen and Tony, who was staying at the farm too, had done damming the brook at the bottom of the field, and when Tony had gone off rook shooting with his cousin Dick, Imogen sat by the brook, her bare muddy legs in a pool, scaring minnows, and brooded over life. Rotten it was, being grown up. Simply rotten. Because you weren’t really grown
up. You hadn’t changed at all. You knew some more, and you cared for a lot of fresh books, but you liked doing all the things you had liked doing before you grew up. Climbing, and playing Red Indians, and playing with soldiers, and walking on stilts. But when you put your hair up, you had to hide all sorts of things away, like a guilty secret. You could play real games, like tennis and cricket and hockey and rounders, and even football, and you could perhaps do the other things with some one else, but not alone. If people found you alone up a tree, or climbing a roof, or listening with your ear to the ground, or astride on a wall, or pretending with a sword, they put up their eyebrows and thought you an ass. Your mother told people you were a tomboy. A tomboy. Imbecile word. As if girls didn’t like doing nice things as much as boys. Who started the idea that they didn’t, or shouldn’t? . . . Oh, it was rotten, being grown up. Grown up people had a hideous time. They became so queer, talking so much, wanting to go to parties, and even meetings, and all kinds of rotten shows. Mother held meetings in the drawing-room, for good objects. So did aunt Stanley. Different objects, but equally good, no doubt. People came to the meetings and jabbered away, and sometimes you were made to be there, “to learn to take an interest.” Votes, cruelty to animals or children, sweated labour, bazaars, white slaves, the Conservative party, the Liberal party. . . . What did any of them matter? Phyllis was good at them. But now Phyllis was going to be married. And Nancy was at the Slade, and wouldn’t attend the meetings, she was too busy drawing and going to dances and parties. The modern girl, mother said, independent, selfish, dashing about with young men and no chaperon. The Edwardian young woman, so different from the Victorian young woman. . . . Only aunt Rome said she was not different, but just the same. . . . Anyhow, Nancy wouldn’t take her turn at the meetings. So Imogen, younger and more docile, was being trained up. But she would never be any good. She hated them. Why shouldn’t the boys take their turn? No one made them. It wasn’t fair.

  Imogen kicked viciously at the minnows. Rotten, being a girl. . . . Perhaps she would run away to sea . . . round the world . . . the South Sea Islands. . . .

  It was getting chilly. Imogen drew her legs out of the brook and dried them on her handkerchief. Filthy they were, with mud. She put on her stockings and old tennis shoes, and wondered what next. Tony was still rooking. One might go and catch the colt in the meadow and ride him. . . .

  Katie appeared over the hunched shoulder of the field.

  “Imogen, do you want to come and milk? It’s time. . . . Oh, I say, you are in a mess. You ass, what’ve you been up to?”

  “Only damming the brook, and wading. Yes, I want to milk; rather.”

  “Hurry up, then.”

  Katie was beautiful as a June morning. As beautiful as Una. Pale as milk, with eyes like violets, and dark, clustering curls. And clever. She could do nearly everything. Imogen, six months older, was as nought beside her. But Katie liked her, and was very kind to her. Katie had just left Roedean; she had been captain of the school hockey team, and was going now to play for Essex. A splendid girl. Imogen believed that Katie had none of the dark and cold forebodings, the hot excitements, the black nightmares, the sharp, sweet ecstasies, the mean and base feelings, that assailed herself, any more than Katie would be found making an ass of herself playing in a wood. Katie, like her mother, was balanced. This tendency to believe that others are balanced, and are not rent by the sad and glad storms which one’s own soul knows, is common to many. One supposes it to be because human beings put such a calm face on things, so that the heart alone knows its own turbulence.

  Imogen grinned at Katie, and went with her to the milking.

  18

  Higher Thought

  Papa had aged very much in the last two years since mamma had died. He had had wonderful experiences; he had constantly spoken with, even seen, mamma; it had made him very happy. But he was aware that the séances greatly strained and fatigued him. He slept badly; his nerves seemed continually on edge. Further, he could not by any means overcome the distaste he felt for the medium who made it her special business to open the door between him and mamma. A common little person, he could not help, even in his charity, thinking her. And Flossie, the spirit on the Other Side, who spoke for mamma (except on those rare occasions when mamma spoke for herself) was, to judge from her manner, voice, and choice of language, even commoner. And silly. Papa scarcely liked to admit to himself how silly Flossie seemed to him to be. Mamma must dislike Flossie a good deal, he sometimes thought, but then recollected that, where mamma had gone to dwell, dislike was no more felt, only compassion. He would have liked to ask mamma, on the rare occasions when she spoke for herself, what she thought of Flossie, and of Miss Smythe, the medium on this side. But he did not do so, for Flossie would certainly, and Miss Smythe possibly, through her trance, hear his question and mamma’s reply. How he longed for a little private talk, of the kind that mamma and he used to have of old I But he was not ungrateful. He was in touch with mamma; he knew her to be extant as a personality, and accessible to him, and that was surely enough. As to the fatigue, that was a small price to pay.

  Then, one tragic day, in the autumn of 1906, came one of those great exposures which dog the steps of psychical men and women. Some of the sharp, inquisitive persons who make it their business to nose out frauds and write to Truth about them, turned their attention to Miss Smythe and her séances. In a few weeks—these things are very easy, and do not take long—Miss Smythe was pilloried in the press as a complete and accomplished fraud. She had, it was made clear except to the most obstinate believers, never been in a trance, never called spirits from the vasty deep, never opened any spiritual doors. The mechanism of the materialisations was once more discovered and exposed. . . . (“What a stale old story,” said Rome. “As if we didn’t know all about it long ago. These heavy-footed creatures, trampling over children’s fairylands. Why can’t they let things be?) . . . and even Flossie, that bright, silly, chatty spirit, was discredited. Florrie was a quack, and had known about the thimble behind the sofa and the other things in some cheap, sly way, or else just guessed.

  Alas for papa! The gates of paradise clanged in his face; he might believe by faith that paradise was there, and mamma in it, but the door between him and it was shut. Great and bitter sorrow shook him, and shame, for that he had so made cheap his love and mamma’s for the benefit of common frauds. He sank into inert grief, from which he was roused, in March, 1907, by the call of Higher Thought. The name, in the first instance, appealed to him. Thought should be higher; it was usually lower, and very certainly much too low.

  “Higher than what, papa dear?” Rome inquired. “These comparatives, in the air, are so unfinished. Higher education, higher criticism, the larger hope, the younger generation. . . . Higher, I mean, than what other thought?”

  Than the thought customary on similar subjects, papa supposed.

  “These geometrical metaphors,” Rome murmured. “Well, papa, I am sure it must be very interesting.”

  It was very interesting. Papa was introduced to a little temple near High Street, Kensington, which, when you stepped on the entrance mat, broke into “God is Love ” in electric light over the altar. Here he worshipped and thought highly, in company with a small but ardent band of other high thinkers, who were led in prayer by a Guru of immense power—the power of thought which was not merely higher but highest—over mind and matter. So great was the power of this Guru that he could cure not only diseased bodies and souls, but could correct physical malformations, merely by absent treatment. A lame young man was brought to him, one of whose legs was shorter than its fellow. Certainly, said the Guru, this defect would yield to absent treatment. Further, the treatment would in this case be doubly effective, as he happened to be about to make a journey to Thibet, to visit the Llama, the very centre of fervent prayer, absent treatment, and higher thought. The nearer the Guru got to Thibet, the more powerful would become, he said, the action of his treatment on the leg of the young man. And, sure
enough, so it proved. The shorter leg began, as the Guru receded towards Asia, to grow. It grew, and it grew, and it grew. There came a joyful day when the two legs were of identical length. The power of absent treatment was triumphantly justified. But it proved to be a power even greater than the young man and his family had desired or deserved. For the short leg did not stop when it had caught up its companion; on the contrary, it seemed to be growing with greater velocity than before. And, indeed, it was; for the Guru, now far beyond reach of communication by letter or telegram, was journeying ever deeper and deeper into the great heart of prayer, Holy Thibet, and as he penetrated it his prayer intensified and multiplied in power, like the impetus of a ball rolling down hill. The short leg surpassed its brother, shot on, and on, and on. . . .

  It was still shooting on when papa was told of the curious phenomenon.

  “Strange,” said papa. “Strange, indeed.”

  But it was not these portents, however strange, that papa valued in his new faith. It was the freedom, the prayerfulness, the rarefied spiritual atmosphere; in brief, the height. After Miss Smythe, after the darkened room and the rapping table, and the lower thinking of poor Flossie, it was like a mountain top, where the soul was purged of commonness.

  Mamma, papa sometimes thought, would have approved of Higher Thought; might even, had she been spared, have become a Higher Thinker herself. (It should be remembered, in this connection, that papa, since the exposure of poor Flossie, was no longer in touch with mamma.)

  19

  Liberals in Action

  It is a pity to crab all governments and everything they do. For occasionally it occurs that some government or other (its political colour is an even chance) passes some measure or other which is not so bad as the majority of measures. The Liberal government elected in 1906 composed tolerable bills more than once. It even succeeded, though more rarely, in getting them, in some slightly warped form, tolerated by the Upper House. The Trades Disputes Bill, for instance, got through. Either the Lords were caught napping, or they felt they had to let something through, just to show that things could get through, as at hoop-la the owner of the booth has, here and there, among hundreds of objects too large to be ringed by the hoop, one of trifling value which can be fairly ringed and won, just to show that the thing can be done. Anyhow, the Trades Disputes Bill did get through, before the game began of chucking all bills mechanically back, or amending them out of all meaning so that the Commons disowned them and threw them away.