Told by an Idiot (3 page)

“There
is
no reason for doubt,” muttered Vicky, beneath her breath. Then, louder, impatience conquering respect, “What does papa think the Church is for, except to tell us what we can’t know for ourselves about what to believe?”

Mamma replied, taking up her embroidery, “Papa doesn’t know what the Church is for. That is his great difficulty. And, Vicky, it is not for us, who have studied so much less, to protest . . .”

“Well,” said Vicky, “I shall go into the garden. It’s a night for men and angels. Come on, Stan.”

Stanley came, and the sisters paced together, wrapped in shawls, down the gravel path, beneath a deep blue sky full of frosty, twinkling stars and the pale glow which precedes winter moonrise. It was one of those frosty Christmases which our parents (they say) used to have in their youths. Hot summers and frosty winters—that is what they say they used to have: one is not obliged to believe them, but it is a picturesque thought.

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Stannie. I shall get married.”

“Who to, Vicky?”

“Ah!” Vicky’s long eyes were mysterious in the starlight. “Perhaps I’ve not made up my mind yet; perhaps I have. All I do know is that I’m not going to live round about South Place, Finsbury Pavement, on £400 a year just because papa must needs go to an ethical chapel. I — shall — get — married. And well married, too. Why not? I can, you know, if I want to.”

“Captain Penrose,” said Stanley.

“
He’s
not the only one, my child. There are others. No, I shan’t tell you a word more now. You wait and see. And when I’m married you shall come and stay with me, and meet lots and lots of men.”

Lots and lots of men. The kind of men who’d be friends with Vicky and Captain Penrose (or whoever else Mr. Vicky might prove to be).

“I shall be busy, you know,” said Stanley, doubtful and conceited. “I shall have very little spare time, if I take up weaving and dyeing.”

“Don’t take up weaving and dyeing. It’s shockingly cranky, anyway, all this Morris craze of yours.”

“All the best things are thought cranky at first.”

“Don’t you believe it. The new princess dress isn’t. . . . Now mind, I’m saying this for your good, my dear; men won’t look at you if you go about with dyed hands and talk about manual labour and the one-man job and the return of beauty to the home.”

“Vicky, you’re
vulgar
. And as I don’t mean to marry, what does it matter if they look at me or not?”

“Oh, tell that to the marines. . . . I’m getting frozen. Come along in, and we’ll turn the curate’s head, unless papa’s still breaking his heart. . . . You’re a little prig, Stan., that’s your trouble, my child.”

It was quite true. Stanley
was
a little prig. She not only read Ruskin and Morris and Karl Marx, but quoted them. There came a day, later on, when she saw through Ruskin, but it is no use pretending that that day was yet. She was a prig, and believed that it was up to such as her to reform the world. She saw herself (at the moment, for her vision of herself varied) as the modern woman, clever, emancipated, high-minded, too intellectually fastidious to take the vulgar view. She took herself seriously, in spite of
the childish giggle at the comedy of life which broke like gurgling water through her earnestness.

“The first Nowell the angels did sing,” sang Vicky, in her clear, fluting voice, and danced in at the drawing-room window.

Mamma sat by Rome’s side and embroidered, while papa interviewed his curate in the study. You could see, now these two sat together, that they were alike, not so much in feature or colour as in some underlying, elusive essence of personality. But Rome’s mocking, amused, critical self looked ironically out of her blue-green eyes, and mamma’s dwelt very still and deep within her.

“Well, mamma.” Rome put down her book, which was by Anatole France.

“Well, Rome.”

“You don’t much mind this.” Rome was commenting, not inquiring.

“Oh, no.” Mamma was placid. “Not,” she added, “that I
want
to live in London particularly. Dirty place. No gardens.”

Rome said, definitely, “I prefer London,” and mamma nodded. Rome was urbane. Negligent, foppish and cool, she liked to watch life at its games, be flicked by the edges of its flying skirts. And the game of life was more varied and entertaining in London than in the country, and equally absurd. So Rome preferred London. It was like having a better seat at the play. Lack of bodily energy threw her back largely in the country on to the entertainment of her own rather cynical mind. She was often bored,
sometimes ill-humoured, sharp and morose. The years might bring her a greater patience, but at twenty she was not patient. The very sharp clarity of her mind, that chafed against muddled thinking, stupidity, humbug and sentimentality, made intercourse difficult for her in the country, where heaven has ordained that even fewer persons shall reside who are free from these things than is the case in large towns.

“How long,” inquired Rome negligently, slipping round an old silver ring on her thin white finger, “do you give the Ethical Church, mamma?”

Mamma was feather-stitching, rapidly and correctly. The movement of her head indicated that she declined to prophesy.

“No point in looking ahead,” she said practically. “One always sees a change a little while before it comes, in time to be prepared, and that’s all we need. Papa is never sudden.”

The whimsical smile that twitched at one corner of Rome’s thin mouth was unreturned by mamma, whose face was gravely bent over her work. Mamma was a good wife, and never joked about papa’s vagaries with her children. No one had ever got behind mamma’s guard in the matter of papa—if it was a guard. Who could see into mamma’s mind? idly speculated Rome. Mamma had, at forty-five, achieved a kind of delicate impenetrability. Papa, at fifty, was as limpid as the clear water of a running stream, where you may watch the fishes swimming to and fro, round and round.

Papa came back, alone and looking hurt. At the same moment Vicky came in at the long window, pink-cheeked, smelling of frost.

“Where’s Mr. Carter, papa?”

“Gone away, Vicky. He—he couldn’t stop.”

“I suppose he was shocked to death! Oh, well . . .”

But, of them all, only mamma knew
how
shocked
the orthodox people of the eighteen seventies were about matters of unbelief. The children had been brought up in the wrong atmosphere really to know it. Mamma knew that to Mr. Carter papa’s action would seem dreadful, blasphemous, very nearly wicked. . . .

“After all,” said Vicky impatiently, “we’re living in the year 1879. We’re moderns, after all.”

Dashingly modern Vicky looked, in her sinuous art-green dress, with her massed Rossetti hair and jade ear-rings. Daringly, brilliantly modern, and all agog for life. A dashing girl, as they called them in 1879—if a girl bitten with æstheticism can still dash, and it may be taken for granted that dashing girls will always dash, whatever bites them. Catching up slim young Irving from his chair, Vicky twirled him round the room in a waltz.

In February the Gardens moved to Bloomsbury. Different people and more people came to the house; it was rather like the old days when papa had been a Unitarian. Mr. Stopford Brooke began coming to see papa again, and Dr. Martineau, and all his old and new friends who lived in London, even Father Stanton, of St. Albans, Holborn, and Mr. Charles Spurgeon. The circle of papa’s friends had swollen and swollen with the years, from his undergraduate days onwards. Not only was papa lovable and popular, but he touched so many circles, fished in so many waters, and his fellow-fishermen of each particular water usually remained faithful to him even when he moved on to another pool. Good-humoured, witty Mr. Spurgeon, for instance,
did not break with papa when he deserted the City Temple for a second go of Anglicanism, though he was sadly disappointed in him. Nor were papa’s interests bound by religion; he had friends, distinguished and indistinguished, among politicians, journalists, poets, professors, and social reformers, besides his relatives and mamma’s. And now, of course, there was a quite fresh influx, from the South Place Ethical Chapel. So, one way and another, what with papa’s friends and mamma’s and the children’s, a good deal of life flowed into the Bloomsbury Square house. Papa was, in his quiet way, happy, now that the wrench was over. He was writing, and had for years been writing, a very long book on comparative religions, and for this he worked at the British Museum, which was so conveniently near. And on Sundays he went to South Place, and worshipped ethically.

“
Do not crouch to-day and worship”

he would sing, in his sweet tenor voice,

“
The old past, whose life is fled;
Hush your voice to tender reverence,
Crowned he lies, but cold and dead.
For the present reigns our monarch,
With an added weight of hours;
Honour her, for she is mighty!
Honour her, for she is ours!”

(The author, Miss Adelaide Proctor, had very rightly, it will be noted, dethroned a male and enthroned a female.)

So sang papa and mamma on a Sunday morning in April. Then some one rose and said a few ethical words about the desirability of not being fettered by
religious dogma, and the congregation, who all thought this desirable too, listened attentively.

Papa gazed wistfully in front of him, at the varnished seats and painted woodwork and the ethical texts inscribed round the walls. “Live for Others.” “Live Nobly.” “Duty First.” . . . He had made the great sacrifice, and once more dethroned the past, for honesty’s sake, and if it entailed a jarring of literary and artistic fastidiousness, who was he to rebel? God knew, he had been æsthetically happier joining in the Roman mass (tawdry and vulgar-looking as the churches where this service is held so usually are) or chanting the Anglican liturgy in the little fourteenth century church in Hampshire—though, as to that, some of Hymns A. & M. were quite as bad as anything in the ethical hymn-book—but never had he been so utterly honest, so stripped to the bare bone of all complacency, humbug and self-deception, as now. Or so, anyhow, he believed, but who shall read the human heart?

Again they sang:

“
Hush the loud cannon’s roar,
The frantic warrior’s call!
Why should the earth be drenched in gore?
Are we not brothers all?
”

For, sad to say, the earth was, in the spring of 1880, drenched (as usual) in gore. The gore of Afghans and British in Afghanistan, of Basutos in Basutoland, Chilians and Bolivians in Central America, Liberals and Conservatives in Great Britain, where the elections were being fiercely contested, besides such permanently flowing gore as that of Jews in Russia and Christians in Turkey. The Ethical Society hoped pathetically that all these so unlikely persons would enjoy peace and brotherhood one day.

They trooped out into South Place. Grave, intelligent, ethical men and women clustered and hummed together like bees. They talked about the elections, which were going well, for nearly all the Ethical members were Liberals, and the Liberals were sweeping the country.

“Why are Ethical members Liberals?” Rome inquired in the note-book to which she committed as much of her private commentary on life as ever found its way to paper. “Partly, no doubt, because of the Liberal attitude towards religion, but it must be more than that.
T.C
.” “T.C.” meant “trace connection,” and was a very frequent entry. Rome looked forward to a time when, by means of prolonged investigation all the connections she had noted should be traced; that, she held, would add to her understanding of this strange, amusing life. What, for instance, was the connection between High Church dogma and ornate ritual; between belief in class distinctions and in the British Empire; between dissent and Little Englandism; art and unconventional morals; the
bourgeoisie
and respectability; socialism and queer clothes? All these pairs and many others were marked T.C., and had a little space under them, in which the connection, when traced, was explained, in concise and lucid language. In another part of the book there were pages assigned to “Curious uses of words.” Rome felt a great, perhaps a morbid, interest in investigating life and language. She wrote, “Why are Ethical members Liberals?” when papa and mamma, coming in from chapel, told her how delighted South Place was with the elections. Papa, of course, had always been a Liberal, through all his religious vicissitudes.

Vicky came in, like a graceful whirlwind, from Walworth, S.E., where she had attended church at St. Austin’s, the monastery of Brother à Beckett, and flung herself into a chair in an ecstasy.

“A service straight from heaven!” she cried. “Too utterly utter!
Such
incense—perfumes of Araby! And Brother à Beckett preached about the authority of the State over the Church. It simply doesn’t exist. The State is
nowhere
, and not to be taken the slightest notice of. . . . And who do you think was there, just in front of us—Mr. Pater and the adorable Oscar in a velveteen coat, looking like the prince of men and talking like the king of wits (yes, mamma, talking, but in quite an undertone). But too utter! I was devastated. I was with Charles. I’d made him come with me, to try if grace would abound—but no, not yet; Charles remains without, with the dogs and the . . .”

“Vicky,” mamma interpolated.

“. . . and the sorcerers, mamma, dear,” Vicky finished, innocently. “What did you
think
I was going to say?”

“You must allow Charles his conscience, Vicky,” said papa.

Charles was Vicky’s half-affianced suitor, but unfortunately an agnostic, or rather a Gallio, and Vicky declared that they should not become regularly engaged until such time as Charles should embrace the Anglican, or some other equally to be respected, church. Unbelief might be fashionable, but Vicky didn’t hold with it. Also, and worse, Charles was not yet in the æsthetic push; he was, instead, in the Foreign Office, and took no interest in the New Beauty. Velveteen coats he disliked, and art fabrics, and lilies except in gardens, and languor except in offices, and vice except in the places appointed for it. And all these distastes would, as Vicky complained, make the parties they would give such a difficulty. Vicky told Charles that, unless he conquered them, she might feel compelled to become affianced instead to Mr. Ernest Waller, a
young essayist who understood Beauty, though not, indeed, Anglicanism, as he had been a pupil of Mr. Pater’s in the days when Mr. Pater had been something of a pagan. But better burn incense before heathen gods, said Vicky, than burn none at all.