Told by an Idiot (7 page)

He bowed his head at her decision. It was perhaps, he admitted, too much to expect that she should. “But not
Roman
Catholic, dearest . . .” was his only protest. “Surely not
Roman
, now.”

“I beg your pardon, Aubrey. Catholic. Anyhow, I am too old to join new churches, or even the old ones again.”

“You will stay an Ethicist, then,” he said, tentatively.

“No. I have never cared very much for that. I don’t think I shall attend any place of worship in future.”

He looked at her, startled, and placed his hand on hers, impeding the rapidity of her embroidery needle.

“Anne—my dear love. You haven’t lost faith in everything, as I have been in danger of doing during the last year? The South Place chapel hasn’t done that to you, dear one?”

Mamma let her work lie still on her lap, while papa’s hand rested on hers. She seemed to consider, looking inwards and backwards, down and down the years.

“No, Aubrey,” she said presently. “The South Place chapel hasn’t done that to me. It wasn’t important enough . . .”

Her faint smile at him was enigmatic.

“I don’t,” she added, “quite know what I do believe. But I have long ago come to the conclusion that it matters very little. You, you see, have seemed equally happy for a time, equally unhappy after a time, in all the creeds or no-creeds. And equally good, my dear. I suppose I may say that I believe in none of them, or believe in all. In any case, it matters very little. I have come with you always into the churches and out of them, but now I think you will find peace in the Rom——in the Catholic Church, without me, and I fear that so much ritual, after so much lack of it, would only fuss me. I shall stay at home. There is a good deal to do there always, and I am afraid I am better at doing practical things than at thinking difficult things out. You won’t mind, Aubrey?”

“My darling, no. You must follow your own conscience. Mine has been a sad will o’ the wisp to us both—but, God helping me, it has lighted me
now into my last home. . . . Yet who knows, who knows . . .?”

Mamma gently patted his hand and went on with her embroidery, bending over it her patient, near-sighted, spectacled eyes. She was mildly, unenthusiastically relieved to be done with the Ethical Church. She had never really liked those hymns. . . . Dear Aubrey, he would be happier again now. He could take to himself confidently once more those eternal moral values which had threatened him during the past six months with their utter wreckage and collapse. Once more he would be able to give reasons for his faith in virtue, for his belief that lying, theft, selfishness, and adultery were wrong. Once more the world’s foundations stood, and papa would not lie wakeful in the night and sigh to watch them shake.

But the solitary, unworthy little thought nagged at mamma’s mind, “Amy will sneer. Amy will make foolish, common fun of him . . .”

Dismissing Amy as a silly and vulgar little creature, mamma folded her embroidery and went to speak to the cook.

Speaking to the cook. What a delightful kind of conversation this must be. For, if you are a proper housewife, you do not just say to the cook, “Kindly provide meals, as usual, for the household to-day. That is, in fact, what you are paid to do. So do it, and let me hear no more about it.” Instead, you go to the larder and see what is in it. You find a piece of meat, and try to guess what it is. You say, “We will have that neck of mutton, or loin of beef ”(or whatever you
think it is) “roasted, boiled, or fricasseed, for lunch. Then, of what is left of it, you will make some nice cutlets for dinner. Now how about sweets?”

Then you and the cook will settle down happily for a long gossip about sweets—a delightful topic. The cook says, “I had thought of a nice jam roll.” You say that you, for your part, had thought of something else, and so it goes on, like a drawing-room game, until you or the cook win, by sheer strength of will. Cooks usually have most of this, so they nearly always win. They can think of more reasons than you can why the thing suggested is impossible. They know there is not enough jam, or cream, or mushrooms, or breadcrumbs—not enough to make it
nice
, as it should be made. Rather would they suggest a nice apple charlotte. . . .

“Very well, cook, have it your own way. You have won, as usual. But it has been a good game, and I have Kept House.” That is what the good housewife (presumably) reflects as she leaves the kitchen.

Perhaps there is more to it than this; perhaps bills are also discussed, and butchers, and groceries, and the price of comestibles. No one who has not done it knows precisely what is done, or how. It is the cook’s hour, and the housewife’s, and no fifth ear overhears. Mrs. Garden, in the year 1887, had done it every day for thirty-one years. Whether as an Anglican, a Unitarian, a Roman Catholic, an Agnostic, a Quaker, an Irvingite, a Seventh-day Adventist, a Baptist, or an Ethicist, still she had daily Kept House. Magic phrase I What happens to houses unkept, Rome had idly asked. Mamma had shaken a dubious head. No house that she had ever heard of had been unkept.

UNA, staying in Essex with friends, contracted an engagement with a neighbouring young yeoman farmer, whom she used to meet out riding. The friends protested, dismayed at such a mésalliance having been arranged for under, so to speak, their auspices. But Una, now twenty-three, grandly beautiful, alternately lazy and amazingly energetic, looking like Diana or a splendid young Ceres, with no desires, it seemed, but for the healthy pleasures of the moment, held firmly to her decision. She loved her Ted, and loved, too, the life he led. She would wed him without delay. She went home and told her family so.

Papa said, “If you are sure of your love and his, that is all that matters, little Una ”(with the faint note of deprecation, even of remorse, with which he was wont to say her name, in these days when he believed once again in the Athanasian creed; for, though he might have bestowed this name in the most Trinitarian orthodoxy, the fact was that he had not; it had been a badge of incomplete belief).

Mamma said, “Well, child, you were bound to marry some one in the country. I always knew that. And you won’t mind that he and his people eat and talk a little differently from you, so I think you’ll be happy. Bless you.”

To Rome mamma said, “There’s one thing about Una; she always knows what she wants and goes straight for it. I wish she could have married a gentleman, but this young fellow is a good mate for her, I believe. She won’t care about the differences. There’s no humbug about Una. She’s the modern girl all through. Splendid, direct, capable children they are.”

That was in the year 1887, and mamma did not know that in the nineteen twenties there would still be girls like Una, and people would still be calling them the modern girl, and saying how direct, admirable and wonderful, or how independent, reckless and headstrong, they were, and, in either case, how unlike the girls of thirty and forty years ago. For, in popular estimation, girls must be changing all the time—new every morning; there must be a new fashion in girls, as in hats, every year. But those who have lived on this earth as much as sixty years know (though they never say, for they like, amiably, to keep in with the young by joining in popular cries, and are too elderly to go to the trouble of speaking the truth) that girls, like other persons, have always been much the same, and always will be. Not the same as one another, for the greyhound is not more different from the spaniel than is one girl from the next; but the same types of girls and of boys, of women and of men, have for ever existed, and will never cease to exist, and there is nothing new under the sun. Yet in the eighteen eighties and nineties, our ancestors were talking blandly of the New Woman, just as to-day people babble of the Modern Girl.

Rome said, “Yes, Una’ll be all right. She knows the way to live . . .” and was caught by her own phrase into the question, what
is
the way to live, then? Mine, Una’s, Vicky’s, Stanley’s, Maurice’s, papa’s? Perhaps there is no way to live. Perhaps the thing is just to live, without a way. And that is, actually, what Una will do.

Una’s Ted came to stay in Bloomsbury with the Gardens. He was large and silent and beautiful, and ate hugely, and looked awful, said Vicky, in his Sunday clothes, which were the ones he wore all the time in London. Also, his boots creaked. But you could see, through it all, how he would be striding about his native fields in gaiters and breeches and old tweeds,
sucking a pipe and looking like a young earth-god. You could see, therefore, why Una loved him; you could see it even while he breathed hard at meals in his tight collar, and sucked his knife. He was physically glorious; a young Antæus strayed by mistake to town. He and Una were a splendid pair.

Una cared not at all what impression he made on her family. She was not sensitive. The touch of his hands made her quiver luxuriously, and when he took her in his arms and turned her face up to his and bruised her mouth with kisses, the world’s walls shivered and dissolved round her and she was poured out like water. He was beautiful and splendid and her man, and knew all about the things she cared for, and she loved him with a full, happy passion that responded frankly and generously to his. They chaffed and bickered and played and caressed, and talked about horses and dogs and love, and went to the Zoo.

Amy giggled behind the young man’s back, and said, “
Did
you see him stuffing his mouth with bun and trying to wash it down with tea out of his saucer?”

“Why not?” said Rome. “And he did wash it down; he didn’t only try.”

“
Well!
” Amy let out a breath and nodded twice. “Rather Una than me, that’s all.”

These years, ’87, ’88, ’89, were stirring years for Maurice and Stanley. In them were founded the Independent Labour Party and the Christian Social Union, and the
Star
newspaper. And there was the great dock strike, and “bloody Sunday,” when
Maurice disgraced Amy and himself by joining in an unseemly fracas with the police, in which he incurred a sprained wrist and a night in prison. In point of fact, as Amy said, he was rather drunk at the time.

Stanley enjoyed the labour movement. She was not like Maurice, merely up against things; she eagerly swam with the tide, and the tide which carried her during this particular phase of her life was revolutionary labour. She was joyously in the van of the movement. The dock strike stirred her more than the Pigott forgeries, more than the poisoning of Mr. Maybrick by Mrs. Maybrick, more than the death of Robert Browning.

Stirring times indeed. But in ’89 something happened which stirred Stanley more profoundly than the times. She fell in love and married. It was bound to occur, to such an ardent claimer of life. The man was a writer of light essays and short stories and clever, unproduced plays. He was thirty, and he had an odd, short white face, and narrow, laughing eyes beneath a clever forehead, and little money, but a sense of irony and of form and of the stage. He was in the most modern literary set in London, and his name was Denman Croft. At first Stanley thought him very affected, and she was right, for the most modern literary set
was
affected just then; but in a month or so she loved him with an acute, painful ecstasy that made her dizzy and blinded her to all the world besides. Her work lost interest; she was alive only in those hours when they were together; love absorbed her body and soul. Why, he protested, did she not live in the more reasonable parts of London, and meet people worth meeting? All sorts of exciting, amusing things were happening in the world of letters and art just now, and she ought to be in it. Stanley began to feel that perhaps she ought. After all, one could be progressive, and fight for labour reform and trades unions as well
in the west as in the east. Then, while she was thus reflecting, it became apparent to her that Denman Croft was going immediately to propose marriage to her. She had for some weeks known that he loved her, but was scarcely ready for this crisis when it came. Passionate ecstasy possessed them both; they sank into it blind and breathless and let its waves break over them.

Life, life, life. Stanley, who had always lived to the uttermost, felt that she had never lived before. Spirit, brain and body interacted and co-operated in the riot of their passion.

They married almost at once, and took a house in Margaretta Street, Chelsea.

Stanley always reflected her time, and it was, people said, a time of transition. For that matter, times always are, and one year is always rather different from the last. In this year, the threshold of the nineties, all things were, it was said, being made new. New forms of art and literature were being experimented with, new ideas aired. New verse was being written, new drama, essays, fiction and journalism. Stanley was so much interested in it all (being, as she now was, in close touch with the latest phase in these matters) that her social and political earnestness flagged, for you cannot have all kinds of earnestness at once. Instead of going in the evenings to committee meetings and mass labour meetings, she now went to plays and literary parties. Instead of writing articles on women’s work, she began to write poetry and short sketches. All this, and the social life she now led, and the excitement of love, Denman, and her new home, was so stimulating and absorbing that she had little attention to spare for anything else. Stanley was like that—enthusiastic, headlong, a deep plunger, a whole-hogger.

“They do have the most fantastic beings to dinner,”
Vicky said to her Charles. “Velvet coats and immense ties. . . . It reminds me of ten years ago, when I was being æsthetic. But these people are much smarter talkers. Denman says they are really doing something good, too. He’s an attractive creature, though I think his new play is absurd and he’s desperately affected. The way that child adores him! Stanley does go so head over ears into everything. None of the rest of us could love like that. It frightens one for her. . . . But anyhow, I’m glad she’s off that stupid trades’ union and sweated labour fuss. Maurice does more than enough of that for the family, and I was afraid Stan was going to turn into a female fanatic, like some of those short-haired friends of hers. That’s not what we women ought to be, is it, my Imogen?”