Told by an Idiot (8 page)

Vicky caught up her Imogen, an infant of one summer, in her arms, and kissed her. But Imogen, neither then nor at any later time, had any clear idea about what women ought or ought not to be. Anything they liked, she probably thought. If, indeed, there were, specifically, any such creatures as women. . . . For Imogen was born to have a doubtful mind, on this as on other subjects. She might almost have been called mentally defective in some directions, of so little was she ever to be sure.

“Stanley,” pronounced Vicky, “has more Zeitgeist ”(for that unpleasant word had of late come in) “than any one I ever met.”

The threshold of the nineties. Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border. The nineties, we say, were gay, tired,
fin-de-siècle
, witty, dilettante, decadent, yellow, and Max Beerbohm was their prophet; or they were noisy, imperial, patriotic, militant, crude, and Kipling was their prophet. And, indeed, you may find attributes to differentiate any period from any other. What people wrote of the nineties at the time was that they were modern, which, of course, at the time they were; that they were hustling. . . . (“In these days of hurry and rapid motion, when there is so little time to rest and reflect,” as people say in sermons and elsewhere, as if the greater rapidity of motion did not give one more time to rest and reflect, since one the sooner arrives at one’s destination); that they were noisy; that literary output was enormous; that (alternatively) the new writers were very good, or that the good writers had gone from among us. One knows the kind of thing; all discourses on contemporary periods have been full of it, from the earliest times even unto these last.

Rome was thirty-one. She was of middle height, a slight, pale, delicate young woman, with ironic blue-green eyes and mocking lips a little compressed at the
corners, and a pointed kind of face, and fair, silky hair, which she wore no longer short, but swept gracefully up and back from her small head, defining its shape and showing the fine line from nape to crown. She was a woman of the world, a known diner out, a good talker, something of a wit, so that her presence was sought by hostesses as that of an amusing bachelor is sought. She had elegance, distinction, brain, a light and cool touch on the topics of her world, a calm, mocking, sceptical detachment, a fastidious taste in letters and in persons. She knew her way about, as the phrase goes, and could be relied on to be socially adequate, in spite of a dangerous distaste for fools, and in spite of the “dancing and destructive eye ”(to use a phrase long afterwards applied to one whose mentality perhaps a little resembled hers) which she turned on all aspects of the life around her. People called her intensely modern—whatever that might mean. In 1890 it presumably meant that you would have been surprised to find her type in 1880. But as a matter of fact, you would not, had you been endowed with a little perspicacity, been in the least surprised; you would have found it, had you looked, all down the ages (though always as a rare growth). In 1790, 1690, 1590, and back through every decade of every century, there have been Rome Gardens, fastidious,
mondaine
, urbane, lettered, critical, amused, sceptical, and what was called in 1890
fin-de-siécle
. It is not a type which, so to speak, makes the world go round; it does not assist movements nor join in crusades; it coolly distrusts enthusiasm and eschews the heat and ardour of the day. It is to be found among both sexes equally, and is the stuff of which the urbane bachelor and spinster, rather than the spouse and parent, are made. For mating and producing (as a career, not as an occasional encounter) are apt to destroy the type, by forcing it
to too continuous and ardent intercourse with life; that graceful and dilettante aloofness can scarcely survive such prolonged heat. To be cool, sceptical and passionate at one and the same time—it has been done, but it remains difficult. To love ardently such absurdities as infants, an
d yet to retain unmarred the sense of the absurdity of all life—this, too, has been done, but the best parents do not do it. Something has to go, as a sacrifice to the juggernaut Life, which rebels against being regarded as merely absurd (and rightly, for, in truth, it is not merely absurd, and this is one of the things which should always be remembered about it).

The literary persons of the early nineties wanted Rome to join them in their pursuits.

Why so, Rome questioned. Money? Very certainly I have not enough, but I should not have appreciably more if I wrote and published essays, or even books. Notoriety? It might well be of the wrong kind; and anyhow, does it add to one’s pleasure? Miss Rome Garden, the author of those clever critical essays. . . . Or perhaps of those dull critical essays. . . . Either way, what did one gain? Why write? Why this craze for transmitting ideas by means of marks on paper? Why not, if one must transmit ideas, use the tongue, that unruly member given us for the purpose? Better still, why not retain the ideas for one’s own private edification, untransmitted? Writing. There was this about writing—or rather about publishing—it showed that some one had thought it worth while to pay for having one’s ideas printed. For printers were paid, and binders, even if not oneself. So it conferred a kind of cachet. Most literary persons sorely needed such a cachet, for you would never guess from meeting them that any one would pay them for their ideas. On the other hand, publishing one’s folly gave it away;
one was then known for a fool, whereas previously people might have only suspected it. . . . In brief and in fine, writing was not worth while. Wise men and women would derive such pleasure as they could from the writings of others, without putting themselves to the trouble of providing reading matter in their turn. Reading matter was not like dinners, concerning which there must be give and take.

Thus the do-nothing Miss Rome Garden to the eager literary young men and women about her, who all thought that literature was having a new birth and that they were its brilliant midwives, as, indeed, it is not unusual to think. And possibly it was the case. Literature has so many new births; it is a hardy annual. The younger literary people of 1890 had a titillating feeling of standing a-tiptoe to welcome a new day. “A great creative period is at hand,” they said. The old and famous still brooded over the land like giant trees. Such a brooding, indeed, has scarcely since been known, for in these later days we allow no trees to become giants. But in their shadow the rebellious young shoots sprang up, sharp and green and alive. The mid-Victorians were passing; the Edwardians were in the schoolroom or the nursery, the Georgians in the cradle or not yet anywhere; here was a clear decade in which the late Victorian stars might dance. It was a period of experiment; new forms were being tried, new ideas would have been aired were any ideas ever new; new franknesses, so-called, were permitted, or anyhow practised—the mild beginnings of the returning tide which was to break against the reticence of fifty years.

“I don’t,” said Mrs. Garden to Rome, “care about all these sex novels people have taken to writing now.”

But Rome rejected the phrase.

“Sex novels, mamma? What are they? Novels
have always been about sex, or rather sexes. There’s nothing new in that; it’s the oldest story in the world. People must have a sex in this life; it’s inevitable. Novels must be about people; that’s inevitable too. So novels must be partly about sex, and they’re nearly always about two sexes, and usually largely about the relations of the two sexes to one another. They always have been. . . .”

All the same, mamma did
not
care about these sex novels that people had taken to writing now.
Problem
novels, she called them, for reasons of her own. Rome thought sex no problem; the least problematic affair, perhaps, in this world. Of course, there were problems connected with it, as with everything else, but in itself sex was no problem. Rather the contrary.
The Moonstone
, now—
that
was a problem novel.

“I don’t like indecency,” said mamma, in her delicate, clipped voice. “These modern writers will say anything. It’s ill-bred.”

Mamma could not be expected to know that these libertines of 1890 would be regarded as quaint Victorian prudes in 1920.

“As to that book Mr. Jayne gave you, I call it merely silly,” mamma murmured, with raised brows, and so settled
Dorian Grey
.

“Silly it is,” Rome agreed. “But here and there, though too seldom, it has a wit.”

But mamma was not listening. Her mamma-like mind was straying after Mr. Jayne. . . .

Mr. Jayne and Rome. Both brilliant, both elegant, both urbane, both so gracefully of the world worldly, yet both scholars too. Mr. Jayne wrote memoirs and enchanting historical and political essays. An amusing yet erudite Oxford man, who had been at the British Legation at St. Petersburg. Hostesses desired him for their more sophisticated parties, because he had a wit, and knew Russia, which was at once more unusual and more fashionable then than now. It was at one of Vicky’s dinner parties that he and Rome had first met. If Vicky thought, how suitable, it was only what any one in the world must think about these two. Afterwards they met continually, and became friends. Rome thought him conceited, clever, entertaining, attractive, and disarming, and the most companionable man of her wide acquaintance. By June, 1890, they were in love; a state of mind unusual in both. They did not mention it, but in July he mentioned to her, what he mentioned to few people, that he had a Russian wife living with her parents, a revolutionary professor and his wife, in the country outside Moscow.

They were spending Sunday on the Thames, rowing up from Bourne End to Marlow. They spoke of this matter of Mr. Jayne’s wife after their lunch, which they ate on the bank, in the shade of willows.

“How delightful,” said Rome, taking a Gentleman’s Relish sandwich.

Delightful to have a wife in Russia; to have a reason, and such a reason, for visiting that interesting land. Delightful for Mr. Jayne to have waiting for him, among steppes and woods, a handsome Russian female
and two fair Slav infants . . . or perhaps they were English, these little Jaynes, with beautiful mouths and long, thrust-out chins. . . . Delightful, anyhow. The Russian country in the summer, all corn and oil and moujiks. Moscow in the autumn, all churches and revolutionaries and plots and secret police. And in the winter . . . but one cannot think about Russia in the winter at all; it does not bear contemplation, and one does not visit it. . . . What a romance! Mr. Jayne was indeed fortunate.

So Miss Garden conveyed.

“I am not there very much,” said Mr. Jayne. “Only on and off. Olga prefers to live there, with her parents and our two children. She has many friends there, all very busy plotting. They are of the intelligentsia. Life is very interesting to her.”

“I can imagine that it must be.”

So cool and well-bred were Miss Garden and Mr. Jayne that you never would have divined that the latter, eating sandwiches, was crying within his soul, “My dearest Rome. I dislike my wife. We make each other sick with
ennui
when we meet. We married in a moment’s mania. It is you I want. Don’t you know it? Won’t you let me tell you?” or that the former, sipping cider, was saying silently, “You have told me this at last because you know that we have fallen in love. Why not months ago? And what now?”

Nothing of this they showed, but lounged in the green shade, and drank and ate, Miss Garden, clear-cut and cool, in a striped cotton boating-dress, with a conically-shaped straw hat tipped over her eyes, Mr. Jayne in flannels, long and slim, his palish face shaved smooth in the new fashion, so that you saw the lines of his clever mouth and long, thrust-out chin. Mr. Jayne’s eyes were deep-set and gray, and he wore pince-nez,
and he was at this time thirty-six years old. At what age, Rome wondered, had he married Mrs. Jayne of the Russian intelligentsia?

However, they did not enter into this, but began to discuss the plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw, a well-known socialist writer, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a young man in India who was making some stir.

“We can still be friends,” thought Rome, on their way home. “Nothing need be changed between us. This Olga of his is his wife; I am his friend. It would be very bourgeois to be less his friend because he has a wife. That is a view of life I dislike. We are civilised people, Mr. Jayne and I.”

And civilised they were, for the rest of the summer of 1890. In November, Rome asked Mr. Jayne, who was having tea with her alone, whether he was visiting Russia shortly. He replied in the negative, for he was, he said, too busy working on his new book to get abroad.

“And further,” he added, in the same composed tone, “I prefer to remain in the same country with you. I can’t, you see, do without you at hand. You know how often I consult you, and talk things over with you. . . . And further still,” continued Mr. Jayne quietly, “I love you.”

So saying, he rose and stood over her, bending down with his hands on her shoulders and his pale face close to hers.

“My dearest,” he said, “let us stop pretending.
Shall
we stop pretending? Does our pretence do us or any one else any good? I love you more than any
words I’ve got can say. You know it, you know it . . . dear heart. . . .”

He drew her up from her chair and looked into her face, and that was the defeat of their civilisation, for at their mutual touch it broke in disorder and fled. He kissed her mouth and face and hands, and passion rose about them like a sea in which they drowned.

Five minutes later they talked it out, sitting with a space between them, for “While you hold me I can’t think,” Rome said. She passed her hand over her face, which felt hot and stung from the hard pressing of his mouth, and tried to assemble her thoughts, shaken by the first passion of her thirty-one agreeable and intelligent years.