Told by an Idiot

by Rose Macaulay

  “Want to be a vet,” said Billy, and was.

  As to Molly, she became secretary to no Liberal, for she married, in 1919, a flight commander, and his politics, if any, were Coalition-Unionist.

  So much for Stanley’s hopes for political careers for her children. She sighed, and accepted the inevitable, and put her hope more than ever in the League of Nations. If that could not save the world, nothing could. . . .

  Certainly nothing could, said Rome. Nothing ever had yet. At least, what did people mean, precisely, by save? Words, words, words. They signified, as commonly and lightly used, so very little.

  3

  The Charabanc

  The post-war period swung and jolted along, like a crazy, broken-down charabanc full of persons of varying degrees of mental weakness, all out on an asylum treat. Every now and then the charabanc stopped for a picnic, or conference, at some nice Continental or English watering-place, and there were very cosy, chatty, happy, expensive little times, enjoyed by all, and really not doing very much more harm to Europe than any other form of treat would have done, since they had, as a rule (the amusing reconstruction of the map of Europe once effected), practically no effects of any kind, beyond, of course, strengthening the already perfect harmony prevalent among the victorious allied nations.

  Reparations was the great topic at these chats; but it was and is such a very difficult topic that no one there (no one there being very clever) made much of it, and it has not really been decided about even now.

  International politics were, in fact, in the years following the great war, even more greatly confused than is usual. Only one great international principle remained, as ever, admirably lucid—that principle so simply explained by M. Anatole France’s Penguin peasant to the Porpoise philosopher.

  “Vous n’aimez pas les Marsouins?”

  “Nous les haïssons.”

  “Pour quelle raison les haïssez-vous?”

  “Vous le demandez? Les Marsouins ne sont-ils pas les voisins des Pingouins?”

  “Sans doute.”

  “Eh bien, c’est pour cela que les Pingouins haïssent les Marsouins.”

  “Est-ce une raison?”

  “Certainement. Qui dit voisins dit ennemis. . . . Vous ne savez donc pas ce que c’est que le patriotisme?”

  There was no confusion here.

  Home politics, in each country, seemed to lack even this dominant motif, and confusion reigned unrelieved. In Great Britain a Coalition Government was in power. The usual view about this government is that it was worse and more incompetent than other governments; but it seems bold to go as far as this. “The nation wants a return to a frank party government,” non-coalition Liberals and Conservatives began saying, and said without intermission until they got it, in 1923. They sometimes explained why they preferred a frank party government, but none of their reasons seemed very good reasons; the real reason was that they, very properly and naturally, wished their own party to be in power. The Die-Hards and the Wee Frees came to be regarded as valiant, incorruptible little bands, daring to stand alone; Co-Liberals and Co-Unionists were understood, somehow, to have compromised with Satan for reward. There is a good deal of unkindness in political life.

  4

  Settling Down

  Meanwhile, the people settled down, were demobilised from the army, and from the various valuable services which they had been rendering to their country, and began to fall back into the old grooves, began to recover, at least partially, from the war. But the war had left its heritage, of poverty, of wealth, of disease, of misery, of discontent, of feverish unrest.

  “Now to write again,” said Imogen, and did so, but found it difficult, for the nervous strain of the years past, and the silliness of the avocations she had pursued through them, had paralysed initiative, and given her, in common with many others, an inclination to sally forth after breakfast and catch a train or a bus, seeking such employment as might be created for her, instead of creating her own. The helpless industry of the slave had become hers, and to regain that of the independent and self-propelled worker was a slow business.

  Further, she was absorbed, shaken and disturbed by a confusing and mystifying love into which she had fallen, blind and unaware, even before peace had descended. All values were to her subverted; she fumbled blindly at a world grown strange, a world as to whose meaning and whose laws she groped in the dark, and emotion drowned her like a flood.

  There revived in force about this time the curious old legend about the young. The post-war young, they were now called, and once more people began to believe and to say that one young person closely resembles other young persons, and many more things about them.

  “The war,” they said, “has caused a hiatus, and thought has broken with tradition. Thus youth is no longer willing to accept forms and formulæ only on account of their age. It has set out on a voyage of inquiry, and, finding some things which are doubtful and others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of expression more in harmony with the realities of life and knowledge.”

  Many novels were written about the New Young, half in reprobation, half in applause; famous literary men praised them in speeches; they were much spoken of in newspapers. All the things were said of them that have been said of the young at all times, only now their newness, their special quality, was attributed to the European war, in which they were too young to have actively participated, but which had, it was believed, exercised upon them some mystic and transmuting influence. Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation. “Will these qualities wear off?” precise-minded and puzzled inquirers asked, “when the present young are thirty and middle-aged, will they still possess them? Do the qualities depend upon their age, or upon the period of the world’s history in which they happen to be that age?” But no precise or satisfactory reply was ever given. It never is. Inquirers into the exact meaning of popular theories and phrases are of all persons the least and the worst answered. You may, for instance, inquire of a popular preacher, or any one else, who denounces his countrymen as “pagan ”(as speakers, and even Bishops, at religious gatherings have been known to do) what, exactly, he means by this word, and you will find that he means irreligious, and is apparently oblivious of the fact that pagans were and are, in their village simplicity, the most religious persons who have ever flourished, having more gods to the square mile than the Christian or any other Church has ever possessed or desired, and paying these gods more devout and more earnest devotion than you will meet even among Anglo-Catholics in congress. To be pagan may not be very intelligent; it is rustic and superstitious, but it is at least religious. Yet you will hear the word “pagan ”flung loosely about for “irreligious,” or sometimes as meaning joyous, material and comfort-loving, whereas the simple pagans walked the earth full of what is called holy awe and that mystic faith in unseen powers which is the antithesis of materialism, and gloomy with apprehension of the visitations of their horrid and vindictive gods; and, though no doubt, like all men, they loved comfort, they only obtained, just as we do, as much of that as they could afford. And, whatever Bishops mean by pagan, as applied to modern Englishmen, it is almost certain that they do not mean all this.

  Never, perhaps, was thinking, writing and talking looser, vaguer, and more sentimental than in the years following the European war. It was as if that disaster had torn great holes in the human intelligence, which it could ill afford. There was much writing, both of verse and prose, much public and private speaking, much looking for employment and not finding it, much chat about the building of new houses, much foolish legislation, much murder and suicide, much amazement on the part of the press. Newspapers are always easily amazed, but since t
he war weakened even their intelligence there could not be so much as a little extra departure from railway stations on a Bank Holiday (surely most natural, if one thinks it out) without the ingenuous press placarding London with “Amazing scenes.” The press was even amazed if a married couple sought divorce, or if it thundered, or was at all warm. “Scenes,” they would say, “scenes; ”and the eager reader, searching their columns for these, could find none worthy of the name. One pictures newspaper reporters going about, struck dumb with amazement at every smallest incident in this amazing life we lead, hurrying lack to their offices and communicating their emotion to editors, news editors and leader writers, so that the whole staff gapes, round-eyed, at the astonishing world on which they have to comment. An ingenuous race; but they make the mistake of forgetting that many of their readers are so very experienced thay they are seldom surprised at anything.

  During these years, the sex disability as regards the suffrage being now removed, women stood freely for Parliament, but the electorate, being mostly of the male sex, showed that the only women they desired to have in Parliament were the wives of former members who had ceased to function as such, through death, peerag

  e, or personal habits. Many women, including Stanley Croft, who, of course, stood herself, found this very disheartening. It seemed that the only chance for a woman who desired a political career was to marry a member and then put him out of action. Such women as were political in their own persons, who were educated and informed on one or more public topics, had small chance. “We don’t want to be ruled by the ladies,” the electorate firmly maintained. “It’s not their job. Their place is, etc.”

  The world had not changed much since the reign of Queen Victoria.

  And so, with the French firmly and happily settled in the Ruhr, their hearts full of furious fancies, declaring that it would not be French to stamp on a beaten foe, but that their just debts they would have, with Germany rapidly breaking to pieces, drifting towards the rocks of anarchy or monarchy, and working day and night at the industry of printing million-mark notes, with Russia damned, as usual, beyond any conceivable recovery, with Italy suffering from a violent attack of Fascismo, with Austria counted quite out, with a set of horrid, noisy and self-conscious little war-born States in the heart of Europe, all neighbours and all feeling and acting as such, with Turkey making of herself as much of an all-round nuisance as usual, with Great Britain anxiously, perspiringly endeavouring both to arrest the progressive wreckage of Europe and to keep on terms with her late allies, and with Ireland enjoying at last the peace and blessings of Home Rule, Europe entered on her fifth year since the Armistice.

  5

  A Note on Maurice

  In this year Maurice’s paper perished, having long ceased to pay its way, and, in fact, like so many papers, suffering loss on each copy that was bought. This is as natural a state of affairs for papers as living on overdrafts is for private persons, but neither state, unfortunately, can last for ever. The money behind the Gadfly at last gave out, and the Gadfly ceased to be. Maurice, at the age of sixty-five, was deprived of his job and his salary, and became a free-lance, but no less fiery and stubborn, journalist. There were more things to oppose, in his view, than ever before, and he opposed them at large, in the hospitable pages of many a friendly periodical. His opposition had no effect on the affairs of the world, but, in combination with an adequate supply of alcoholic nourishment and his blessed emancipation from married life, it caused him to remain self-respecting and fit, kept senility at bay, and assisted him to bear up against the repeated shocks of Roger’s published works.

  6

  A Note on Imogen

  The P. & O. liner hooted its way down Southampton Water. The land, the Solent, the open sea, were veiled in February mist. Imogen, leaning on the rail and straining her eyes shoreward, could only see it dimly, darkly, looming like a ghost through fog. That was England, and life in England; a mist-bound world wherein one blindly groped. A mist-bound and yet radiant world, holding all one valued, all that gave life meaning, all that one was leaving behind.

  For Imogen was going, for a year, to the Pacific Islands. Hugh, too, was going there, to make maps and plans for the government. Imogen was going with him, exploring, wandering about at leisure from island to island. The perfect life, she had once believed this to be. And still the thought of coral islands, of palm and yam and bread-fruit trees, with the fruits thereof dropping ripely on emerald grass, with monkeys and gay parrakeets screaming in the branches, and great turtles flopping in blue seas, with beachcombers drinking palm-toddy on white beaches, the crystal-clear lagoon in which to swim, and, beyond, the blue, island-dotted open sea,—even now these things tugged at Imogen’s heartstrings and made her feel again at moments the adventurous little girl she had once been, dreaming romantic dreams.

  But more often this bright, still world beyond the mists seemed like the paradise of a hymn, a far, unnatural, brilliant, alien place, which would make one sick for home.

  Yet she had chosen to go, and no remonstrances, repentances and waverings had quite undone that choice. In that far, bright, clear, alien place, beyond the drifting mists, perhaps thought, too, was lucid and unconfused, not the desperate, mist-bound, storm-driven, helpless business it was in London. In London all values and all meanings were fluid, were as windy clouds, drifting and dissolving into strange shapes. Life bore too intense, too passionate, an emotional significance; personal relationships were too tangled; clear thought was drowned in desire. One could not see life whole, only a flame, a burning star, at its heart.

  Through years and years this could not go on; the entanglement of circumstance, the enmeshing of soul and will, was too close for any unravelling; it could only be cut. Under the knife that cut it—and yet was it cut at all, or only hacked all in vain?—Imogen’s soul seemed to bleed to death, to bleed and swoon quite away.

  What had she done, and why? All reasons seemed to reel from sight as they churned for open sea between those mist-blind shores. Parrakeets? Bread-fruit? Lagoons and coral reefs? Oh, God, she cared for none of them. She had been mad, mad, mad.

  “To leave me for so long. . . you can’t mean to do it. . .”

  Above the turning, churning screws the hurt voice spoke, how truly, and stabbed her through once more. Can’t mean to do it . . . can’t do it . . . can’t. . . . Oh, how very true indeed. And yet she must do it and would. It was no use; it would solve nothing, settle nothing; merely for a year she would be sick for home among the alien yams.

  But, at the thought of the yams, and the breadfruit, and the grass and parrakeets more green than any imagining, and of the very blue lagoons, a little comfort stole into her heavy heart. A merry beachcomber on a white beach—that was a thing to be, even if nothing could be a really happy arrangement but to be two merry beachcombers together. At the thought of the two merry beachcombers who might have been so very happy, the tears brimmed and blinded Imogen’s eyes.

  What a mess, what a mess, what a bitter, bemusing muddle, life was! One renounced its best gifts, those things in it which seemed finest, most ennobling, most enriching, holding most of beauty and of good; these things one renounced, and filled the dreadful gap with turtles, with a little palm-toddy, with a few foolish parrakeets.

  What an irony!

  Through the blinding mist, above the rushing sound of foaming waters, the voice cried to her, “Imogen, Imogen. . . come back. . . .”

  Imogen wept.

  Alas for the happy vagabond, fallen into such sad state.

  7

  Final

  Rome saw Stanley off to Geneva. Stanley had obtained employment in the Labour department of the League of Nations. She was pleased, and keen, and full of hope. The League would save the world yet. . . .

  “It’s going to be the most interesting work of my life, so far,” said Stanley, leaning out of the train. “To find one’s best job at sixty-two—that’s rather nice, I think. Life’s so full of hope, Rome. Oh, I do feel ha
ppy about it.”

  “Good,” said Rome, and “Good-bye, my dear,” for the train began to move.

  “Good-bye, Romie. . . . Take care of yourself: you’re looking tired lately.”

  “I’m very old, you see,” Rome said, after the retreating train, and a passer-by, turning to glance at the slight, erect, gray-haired lady, thought that she did not look very old at all.

  But she was very old, for she would soon be sixty-four, and, further, she was very tired, for she had cancer coming on, inherited from mamma. She had not mentioned it to any one yet, beyond the doctor, who had told her that, unless she had operations, she would die within a year. Operations nothing, Rome had said; such a bore, and only to prolong the agony; if she had to die, she would die as quickly as might be. She further decided that, before the pain should become acute or the illness overwhelming, she would save trouble to herself and others by an apparently careless overdose of veronal. Meanwhile, she had a few months to live.

  The thought that it would only, probably, be a few months, set her considering, as she drove herself home in her car, her practised hands steady on the wheel, life, its scope, its meaning, and its end. Life was well enough, she thought; well enough, and a gay enough business for those who had the means to make it so and the temperament to find it so. Life was no great matter, and nor, certainly, was death; but it was well enough. We come and we go; we are born, we live, and we die; this poor ball, thought Rome, serves us for all that; and, on the whole, we make too much complaint of it, expect, one way and another, too much of it. It is, after all, but a turning ball, which has burst, for some reason unknown to science, into a curious, interesting and rather unwholesome form of animal and vegetable life. Indeed, thought Rome, I think it is a rather remarkable ball. But of course it can be but of the slightest importance, from the point of view of the philosopher who considers the very great extent and variety of the universe and the extremely long stretching of the ages. Its inhabitants tend to overrate its importance in the scheme of things. Human beings surely tend to overrate their own importance. Funny, hustling, strutting, vain, eager little creatures that we are, so clever and so excited about the business of living, so absorbed and intent about it all, so proud of our achievements, so tragically deploring our disasters, so prone to talk about the wreckage of civilisation, as if it mattered much, as if civilisations had not been wrecked and wrecked all down human history, and it all came to the same thing in the end. Nevertheless, thought Rome, we are really rather wonderful little spurts of life. The brief pageant, the tiny, squalid story of human life upon this earth, has been lit, among the squalor and the greed, by amazing flashes of intelligence, of valour, of beauty, of sacrifice, of love. A silly story if you will, but a somewhat remarkable one. Told by an idiot, and not a very nice idiot at that, but an idiot with gleams of genius and of fineness. The valiant dust that builds on dust—how valiant, after all, it is. No achievement can matter, and all things done are vanity, and the fight for success and the world’s applause is contemptible and absurd, like a game children play, building their sand castles which shall so soon one and all collapse; but the queer, enduring spirit of enterprise which animates the dust we are is not contemptible nor absurd.