Told by an Idiot (12 page)

“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.

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.

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.

Mr. Jayne said, “These scenes make life impossible. You drive me to leave London. I shall live in Italy for the present. My bank will pay you an allowance, and I will visit you from time to time.”

“Why do you hate me so, Franya Stefanovitch?” she cried.

“I don’t hate you. But you know as well as I do what a poor business we make of living together. It is one of the worst and most unintelligent forms of immorality for two people who irritate each other to expose themselves to misery and anger by living together. Therefore, with no malice, we will live apart.”

“There’s another woman. You wish to live with a mistress. I know it.”

“If you think so, get a divorce.”

“Never. I will never divorce you. You are my husband, and the father of my poor little bears. Who ever heard of a faithful husband? We say in Russia that they are like the golden bear—a fabulous creature. No, I must put up with your infidelities. But if you leave me for too long I shall come and find you, and
stick a knife into you and your mistress. I am not patient, Franya.”

“I never supposed that you were, Olga. And I may tell you, though I do not expect you to believe me, that I have no mistress, and never have had.”

She laughed at him.

“Ha ha! Are you the golden bear, then, found at last? Go away with you, you and your lies. You make me sick. . . . I wish that you were dead.”

The last part of this conversation took place at the hall door, and, as Mr. Jayne went out, a young Russian came in. He was Sergius Dmitri, a cousin of Mrs. Jayne’s, a student, who had also fled from Russia during the recent troubles. He was a passionate admirer of his cousin, and wished very much that she would get rid of this cold, unloving English husband of hers, and come to live with him. He heard her last words to Mr. Jayne.

“Sergius,” she said, seeing him, “I want you to do me a service. Follow my husband this afternoon and see where he goes and whom he sees. I suspect him of having a mistress, and I wish to be certain. If he has, he will go straight to her now . . . I’ll be revenged on him, the villain. After him, Sergius.”

The young Russian saw Mr. Jayne disappearing round the corner, and hurried after him.

Mr. Jayne went to call on the Gardens. He took Rome out with him, and they sat on a bench in the garden in Bloomsbury Square.

“You must come away with me,” he said. “We will live in Italy. She hates me. So does her mother. I can’t live in the same town with them, let alone the same house. I have told her so. I am going to live in Italy, and work there at my books. Am I to go alone, or will you come?”

Rome saw across the square the windows of the house of her papa and mamma. She considered them; she considered also life, in many of its aspects. She considered international marriages, and unhappy family life. Love she considered, and hate, the enduringness and the moral and spiritual consequences of each. She thought of her own happiness, of Mr. Jayne’s, of Mrs. Jayne’s, of that of their two children. Of social ethics, she thought, and of personal joy, and of human laws, which of them stand merely on expediency, which on some ultimate virtue. She thought also of vows, of contracts, and of honour. Having considered these things, and considering also her very great love for Mr. Jayne and his for her, she turned to him and opened her lips to reply.

But the words, whatever they were, which she would have uttered—and neither Mr. Jayne nor any one else was ever to know—were checked before her tongue formed them. For some one jumped out of the trees behind the bench on which they sat, and jabbed a long knife into Mr. Jayne’s back, between the shoulders, and rushed away.

Other people near ran up. Mr. Jayne had fallen choking, forwards. They did not dare to remove the knife, but carried him out into the square and into the Gardens’ house, where he lay on his side on a couch, unconscious, choking and bleeding at the lungs. The doctor was in attendance in ten minutes, but could do little, and in twenty Mr. Jayne was dead.