PART I

TOLD BY AN IDIOT

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

POTTERISM

DANGEROUS AGES

MYSTERY AT GENEVA

Published by

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

NEW YORK

TOLD BY AN IDIOT

BY

ROSE MACAULAY

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

PUBLISHERS :: :: NEW YORK

TOLD BY AN IDIOT

_Copyright, 1923, by_

BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing_....

Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5.

_L’histoire, comme une idiote, mécaniquement se répète._

Paul Morand: “_Fermé la nuit_.”

PART I. VICTORIAN

PART II. FIN-DE-SIÈCLE.

PART III. EDWARDIAN.

PART IV. GEORGIAN. First Period: Circus.

Second Period: Smash.

Third Period: Débris.

Generationi Patrum.

PART I

VICTORIAN

TOLD BY AN IDIOT

A FAMILY AT HOME

ONE evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our

forefathers, being young, possessed the earth--in brief, in the year

1879--Mrs. Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr. Garden’s

study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, “Well,

my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith

again.”

Poor papa had very often lost his faith during the fifty years of

his life. Sometimes he became, from being an Anglican clergyman, a

Unitarian minister, sometimes a Roman Catholic layman (he was, by

nature, habit and heredity, a priest or minister of religion, but

the Roman Catholic church makes trouble about wives and children),

sometimes some strange kind of dissenter, sometimes a plain agnostic,

who believed that there lived more faith in honest doubt than in half

the creeds (and as to this he should know, for on quite half the creeds

he was by now an expert). On his last return to Anglicanism, he had

accepted a country living.

Victoria, the eldest of the six children, named less for the then

regnant queen than for papa’s temporary victory over unbelief in the

year of her birth, 1856, spoke sharply. She was twenty-three, and very

pretty, and saw no reason why papa should be allowed so many more

faiths and losses of faith in his career than the papas of others.

“_Really_, mamma ... it is too bad of papa. I knew it was

coming; I said so, didn’t I, Maurice? His sermons have been so funny

lately, and he’s been reading Comte all day in his study instead of

going out visiting, and getting all kinds of horrid pamphlets from

the Rationalist Press Association, and poring over an article in the

_Examiner_ about ‘A Clergyman’s Doubts.’ And I suppose St. Thomas’

day has brought it to a head.” (Victoria was High Church, so knew all

about saints’ days.) “And now we shall have to leave the vicarage, just

when we’ve made friends with all sorts of nice people, with tennis

courts and ballrooms. Papa _should_ be more careful, and it

_is_ too bad.”

Maurice, the second child (named for Frederick Denison), who was at

Cambridge, and a firm rationalist, having fought and lost the battle of

belief while a freshman, enquired, cynically but not undutifully, and

with more patience than his sister, “What is he going to be this time?”

“An Ethicist,” said Mrs. Garden, in her clear, noncommittal voice. “We

are joining the Ethical Society.”

“Whatever’s that?” Vicky crossly asked.

“It has no creeds but only conduct” ... (“And I,” Vicky interpolated,

“have no conduct but only creeds”) ... “and a chapel in South Place,

Finsbury Pavement, and a magazine which sometimes has a poem by Robert

Browning. It published that one about a man who strangled a girl he

was fond of with her own hair on a wet evening. I don’t know why he

thought it specially suitable for the Ethical Society magazine....

They meet for worship on Sundays.”

“Worship of what, mamma?”

“Nobility of character, dear. They sing ethical hymns about it.”

Vicky gave a little scream.

Mrs. Garden looked at Stanley, her third daughter (named less for

the explorer than for the Dean, whom Mr. Garden had always greatly

admired), and found, as she had expected, Stanley’s solemn blue eyes

burning on hers. Stanley was, in fancy, in the South Place Ethical

Chapel already, singing the ethical hymns....

Fall, fall, ye ancient litanies and creeds!

Not prayers nor curses deep

The power can longer keep

That once ye kept by filling human needs.

Fall, fall, ye mighty temples to the ground!

Not in their sculptured rise

Is the real exercise

Of human nature’s brightest power found.

’Tis in the lofty hope, the daily toil,

’Tis in the gifted line,

In each far thought divine,

That brings down heaven to light our common soil.

’Tis in the great, the lovely and the true,

’Tis in the generous thought

Of all that man has wrought

Of all that yet remains for man to do....

Stanley had read this and other hymns in a little book her papa had.

“Then I suppose,” said Rome, the second daughter, who knew of old that

papa must always live near a place of worship dedicated to his creed of

the moment, “then I suppose we are moving to Finsbury Pavement.” Rome

had been named less for the city than for the church, of which papa had

been a member at the time of her birth, twenty years ago; and, after

all, if Florence, why not Rome? Rome looked clever. She had a white,

thin face, and vivid blue-green eyes like the sea beneath rocks; and

she thought it very original of papa to believe so much and so often.

Her own mind was sceptical.

Vicky’s brow smoothed. Moving to London. There was something in that.

Though of course it mustn’t be Finsbury Pavement; she would see to that.

Irving, the youngest but one (named less for the actor than to

commemorate the brief period when papa had been an Irvingite, and had

believed in twelve living apostles who must all die and then would

come the Last Day), said, “Golly, what a lark!” Irving was sixteen,

and was all for a move, all for change of residence if not of creed.

He was an opportunist and a realist, and made the best of the vagaries

of circumstance. He was destined to do well in life. He was not, like

Maurice, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, nor, like Vicky,

caught in the mesh of each passing fashion, nor, like Stanley, an

ardent hunter of the Idea, nor, like Rome, a critic. He was more like

his younger sister (only he had more enterprise and initiative), Una,

a very calm and jolly schoolgirl, named less for her who braved the

dragon than for the One Person in whom papa had believed at the time

of her birth (One Person not in the Trinitarian, but in the Unitarian

sense).

“Three hundred a year less,” remarked Rome, from the couch whereon she

lay (for her back was often tired), and looked ironically at Vicky, to

see how she liked the thought of that.

Vicky’s smooth cheek flushed. She had forgotten about money.

“Oh, _really_.... Oh, I do think papa is too bad. Papa had entered

the room, and stood looking on mean? Can’t he wait till next?”

Mamma’s faint (was it also ironic, or merely patient?) movement of the

eyebrows meant that it was too late; papa’s faith was already lost.

“By next winter he may have found it again,” Rome suggested.

“Well, even if so,” said Vicky, “who’s going to go on giving him

livings every time?... Oh, yes, mamma, I know all the bishops love him,

but there _is_ a limit to the patience of bishops.... Does the

Ethical Society have clergymen or anything?”

“I believe they have elders. Papa may become an elder.”

“_That’s_ no use. Elders aren’t paid. Don’t you remember when he

was a Quaker elder, when we were all little? I’m sure it’s not a paid

job. We shall be loathsomely poor again, and have to live without any

fun or pretty things. And I daresay it’s low class, too, like dissent,

as it’s got a chapel. Papa never bothers about that, of course. He’d

follow General Booth into the Army, if he thought he had a call.”

“I trust that I should, Vicky.”

Papa had entered the room, and stood looking on them all, with his

beautiful, distinguished, melancholy face (framed in small side

whiskers), and his deep blue eyes like Stanley’s. Vicky’s ill-humour

melted away, because papa was so gentle and so beautiful and so kind.

And, after all, London was London, even with only six hundred a year.

“Mamma has told you our news, I see,” said papa, in his sweet, mellow

voice. He looked and spoke like a papa out of Charlotte M. Yonge,

though his conduct with regard to the Anglican church was so different.

“Yes, Aubrey, I’ve told them,” said mamma.

“I hope you won’t mind, papa,” said Vicky, saucily, “if _I_ go

to church at St. Alban’s, Holborn. _I’m_ a ritualist, not an

Ethicist.”

“Indeed, Vicky, I should be very sorry if you did not all follow your

own lights, wherever they lead you.”

Papa’s broad-mindedness amounted to a disease, Vicky sometimes thought.

A queer kind of clergyman he was. What would Father Stanton and Father

Mackonochie of St. Alban’s think of him? Father Mackonochie, who was

habitually flung into gaol because he would face east when told to face

north--as important as all that, he felt it.

“Well, my darlings,” papa went on in his nice voice, “I must apologise

to you all for this--this disturbance of your lives and mine. I would

have spared it you if I could. But I have been over and over the

ground, and I see no other way compatible with intellectual honesty.

Honesty must come first.... Your mother and I are agreed.”

Of course; they always were. From Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism,

from Catholicism to Quakerism, from Quakerism to Unitarianism,

Positivism, Baptistism (yes, they had once sunk, to Vicky’s shame, as

low as that in the social scale, owing chiefly to the influence of

Charles Spurgeon) and back to Anglicanism again--through everything

mamma, silent, resigned and possibly ironic, had followed papa. And

little Stanley had seen the idea behind all papa’s religions and

tumbled headlong after him, and Maurice had, grimly, decided that it

was safer to abjure all creeds, and Rome had critically looked on,

with her faint, amused smile and her single eyeglass, and Irving and

Una had been led, heedless and incurious, to each of papa’s places of

worship in turn, but had understood none of them. They had not the

religious temperament. Nor had Vicky, who attended her ritualistic

churches from æsthetic fancy and a flair for being in the fashion, for

seeing and hearing some new thing. _She_ didn’t care which way

priests faced, though she did enjoy incense. Vicky was a gay soul, and

preferred dances and lawn tennis and young men to religion. Stanley too

was gay--as merry as a grig, papa called her--but she had a burning

ardour of mind and temper that made the world for her a place of

exciting experiments. She now thought it worthy and honourable to be

poor, for she had been reading William Morris and Ruskin and socialist

literature, as intelligent young women did in those days, and was all

for handicrafts and the one-man job. She was eighteen, and had had her

first term at Somerville College, Oxford, which had just been founded

and had twelve members.

Irving, always practical, said, “When are we going to move? And where

to?”

“In February,” said mamma. “Probably we shall live in Bloomsbury. We

have heard of a house there.”

“Bloomsbury,” said Vicky. “That’s not so bad.”

Sitting down at the piano, she began softly to play and sing. Papa sat

by the fire, his thin hand on mamma’s, his thoughtful face pale and

uplifted, as if he had made the Great Sacrifice once more, as indeed

he had. Stanley sat on a cushion at his feet, and leant her dark head

against his knee. She was a small, sturdy girl, and she wore a frock of

blue, hand-embroidered cloth, plain and tight over the shoulders and

breast, high-necked, with white ruching at the throat, and below the

waist straighter than was the fashion, because Mr. Morris said that

ripples and flounces wasted material and ruined line. Vicky, sinuous

and green, rippled to the knees like running water. Irving sat on a

Morris-chintz chair, reading “The Moonstone,” Maurice on a Liberty

cretonne sofa, reading a leader in yesterday’s _Observer_.

“It is, unfortunately, impossible to conceal from ourselves that the

condition of Ireland, never perceptibly improved by the announcement

of the projected remedy for her distress and discontents, has for some

weeks gone steadily from bad to worse. The state of things which exists

there is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from civil

war. The insurrectionary forces arrayed against law and order are not,

indeed, drilled and disciplined bodies; but what they lack in this

respect they make up for in numbers and in recklessness.”

Such was the sad state of Ireland in December, 1879, as sometimes

before, as sometimes since. Or, anyhow, such was its state according

to the _Observer_, a paper with which Maurice seldom, and Stanley

never, agreed. Stanley put her faith in Mr. Gladstone, and Maurice in

no politicians, though he appreciated Dizzy as a personality. Papa had

always voted Liberal and Gladstone, but thought that the latter lacked

religious tolerance.

Maurice turned to another leader, which began “In these troubled

times....” And certainly they _were_ troubled, as times very

nearly always, perhaps quite always, are. The _Observer_ told

news of the Basuto war, the Russian danger in Afghanistan, Land

League troubles, danger of war with Spain, trouble in Egypt, trouble

in Bulgaria, trouble in Midlothian (where Mr. Gladstone was speaking

against the government), trouble of all sorts, everywhere. What a

world! Stanley, an assiduous student of it, sometimes almost gave it up

in despair; but never quite, for she always thought of something one

ought to do, or join, or help, which might avert shipwreck. Just now it

was handicrafts, and the restoration of beauty to rich and poor.

2

MAMMA AND HER CHILDREN

Mamma, sitting with papa’s hand in hers, watched them all, with her

quiet grey eyes looking through pince-nez, and her slight smile. Pretty

Vicky, singing “My Queen,” with the lamplight shining on her mass of

chestnut hair parted Rossetti-wise in the middle, her pink cheeks, her

long white neck, her graceful, slim, flowing form, her æsthetic green

dress (for Vicky was bitten with the æsthetic craze). Pretty Vicky.

She loved gaiety and parties and comfort so much, it was a shame to

cut down her dress allowance, as would be necessary. Perhaps Vicky

would get engaged very soon, though, to one of her æsthetic or worldly

young men. Vicky was not one of those sexless, intellectual girls,

like Rome, with her indifference, or Stanley, with her funny talk of

platonic friendships. To Vicky a young man _was_ a young man, and

no platonics about it. Sometimes mamma was afraid that Vicky, for all

her æstheticism, was a little _fast_; she would go out for long

day expeditions alone with the young man of the moment, and laugh when

her mother said, doubtfully, “Vicky, when _I_ was young....”

“When _you_ were young, mamma, dear,” Vicky would say, caressing

and mocking, “you were an early Victorian. Or even a Williamite. Papa,

prunes, prisms! I’m a late Victorian, and we do what we like.”

“A _mid_-Victorian, I hope, dear,” mamma would loyally

interpolate, but Vicky would fling back, “Oh, mamma, H.M. has reigned

forty-two years now! You don’t think she’s going to reign for

eighty-four! Late Victorian, that’s what we are. _Fin-de-siècle._

Probably the world will end very soon, it’s gone on so long, so let’s

have a good time while we can. We’re only young once. I feel, mamma, at

the very end of the road, and as if nothing mattered but to live and

dance and play while we can, because the time’s so short. Clergymen

say it’s a sign of the world coming to an end, all these wars and

disturbances everywhere, and unbelief, and women and trains being so

fast in their habits and young men so effeminate.”

Thus Vicky, mocking and gay and absurd. Her mother’s keen, near-sighted

grey eyes strayed from her, round the pretty, lamplit room, which

was partly Liberty and Morris, with its chintzes and wall-papers and

cretonnes, and blue china plates over the door (that was the children),

and partly mid-Victorian, with its chiffoniers and papier-maché and red

plush chairs, and Dicksee’s “Harmony” hanging over the piano. On the

table lay the magazines--the _Nineteenth Century_, the _Cornhill_, the

_Saturday Review_, the _Spectator_, and the _Examiner_ with the article

by Samuel Butler on “A Clergyman’s Doubts.” They had made the vicarage

so pretty; it would be hard to leave it for a dingy London house.

It was a pity (though hardly surprising) that the Anglican church

could find no place for Aubrey during the intervals when he could not

say the creed. Aubrey was so modern. Mrs. Garden’s own father, also

a clergyman, believed in the Established Church and the Bible, and

agreed with the writer of the Book of Genesis and Bishop Ussher, its

commentator, that the world had been created in six days in the year

4004 B.C., and that Adam and Eve had been created shortly afterwards,

full of virtue, and had fallen; and so on, through all the Bible

books.... After all, the scriptures _were_ written (and even marginally

annotated) for our learning.... But Mrs. Garden’s papa had begun being

a clergyman when religion had been more settled, before Darwin and

Huxley and Herbert Spencer had revolutionised science. You didn’t

expect an able modern Oxford man like Aubrey to be an Early Victorian

clergyman.

Maurice on the Liberty sofa snorted suddenly over what he was reading,

and mamma smiled at him. The dear, perverse, violent boy! He was

always disagreeing with everyone. Mamma’s eyes rested gently on her

son’s small, alert head, with its ruffled top locks of light, straight

hair, like a cock canary’s crest, its sharp, long chin and straight

thin lips. Maurice was as mamma’s brothers had been, in the fifties,

only they had worn peg-top trousers and long fair whiskers that stood

out like fans. Maurice wore glasses, and looked pale, as if he had

read too much; not like young Irving, sprawling in an easy chair with

“The Moonstone,” beautiful and dark and pleased. Nor like Stanley,

who, though she read and thought and often talked cleverly like a

book, had high spirits and was full of fun. Little Stanley, with her

round, childish face above the white ruching, her big forehead and

blunt little nose, and deep, ardent, grave blue eyes. What a child

she was for enthusiasms and ideas and headlong plans! And her talk

about platonic friendships and women’s rights and social revolution

and bringing beauty into common life. The New Girl. If Vicky was one

kind of New Girl (which may be doubted), Stanley was another, even

newer.... There shot into mamma’s mind, not for the first time, a

question--had girls always been new? She remembered in her own youth

the older people talking about the New Girl, the New Woman. Were girls

and women really always newer than boys and men, or was it only that

people noticed it more, and said more about it? Elderly people wrote

to the papers about it. “The Girl of the Period,” in the _Saturday

Review_--fast, painted, scanty of dress (where are our fair, demure

English girls gone?) with veils less concealing than provocative ...

what, Mrs. Garden wondered, was a provocative veil? The New Young

Woman. Bold, fast, blue-stockinged, self-indulgent, unchaperoned,

advanced, undomesticated, reading and talking about things of which

their mothers had never, before marriage, heard--in brief, NEW. (To

know all that the mid-Victorians said about modern girls, and, indeed,

about modern youths of both sexes, you have only to read certain

novelists of the nineteen-twenties, who are saying the same things

to-day about what they call the Young Generation.) Had Adam and Eve,

Mrs. Garden wondered, commented thus on their daughters--or, more

likely, on their daughters-in-law? (According to Mrs. Garden’s papa,

these had been the same young women, but in the late seventies one

wasn’t, fortunately, obliged to believe the worst immoralities of

the Old Testament.) “Youth,” it was said at this period, as at other

periods before and since, “youth, in the last quarter of the nineteenth

century, has broken with tradition. It is no longer willing to accept

forms and formulæ only on account of their age.” (At what stage in

history youth ever did this, has never been explained.) “It has set out

on a voyage of enquiry, and, finding some things which are doubtful and

others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of experience

more in harmony with the realities of life and knowledge.” Those are

the actual words of a writer of the nineteen-twenties, but they were

used, in effect, also in the eighteen-seventies, and many other decades.

And had the young, both young men and young women, always believed that

they alone could save the world, that the last generation, the elderly

people, were no good, were, in fact, responsible for the unfortunate

state in which the world had always up to now been, and that it was

for the young to usher in the New Day? Well, no doubt they were right.

The only hitch seemed to be that the young people always seemed to get

elderly before they had had time to bring in the New Day, and then they

were no good any more, and the next generation had to take on the job,

and still the New Day coyly refused to be ushered in. Except that, of

course, in a sense, each day was a new one. But not, alas, much of an

improvement on the day before.

“These troubled times....” Had there ever been, would there ever be,

a day when the newspapers said “In these quiet and happy times”?

Stanley, inspired by Mr. William Morris, was sure of it. The millennium

was just round the corner, struggling in the womb of time, only it

needed workers, workers, and again workers, to deliver it safely.

Some lecturer under whom Stanley had sat had put it like that, and she

had repeated it to her mother. Well, of course in these days ... the

New Girl, being so new and so free, could use such metaphors. In the

fifties you couldn’t; unmarried girls couldn’t, anyhow. Stanley had,

indeed, coloured a little when she had said it. Stanley was not only

unmarried, but declared that she never would be married, there was too

much to be done (which was a way some young women were talking just

then). She was going, after Oxford, to work in a settlement, and teach

people weaving, dyeing and beauty, after learning them herself at the

Morris workshops. It was all very nice, but mamma would rather Stanley

had a husband and babies. (Mammas, it may be observed in passing,

differ from other women in being very seldom new.)

Then mamma’s eyes rested on her chubby, beautiful baby, Una, lolling

on the hearthrug, one light brown pigtail over each shoulder, reading,

with calm and lovely blue eyes, some dreadful rubbish in the _Boy’s

Own Paper_, her cheek bulged out with a lump of toffee. A nice,

good, placid child of fifteen, who never thought, never read anything

but tosh, talked in slang, and took life as it came, cheerful,

unquestioning and serene. Una was the least clever and the best

balanced of the Gardens. She was going, when she was older, to look

rather like the Sistine Madonna.

How unlike her happy, handsome solidity was to Rome! Rome lay back

on her couch, her face like a clear white cameo against deep blue

cushions, the lamplight shining on her fair, silky curls, cut short in

one of the manners of the day. Rome’s thin lips twisted easily into

pain and laughter; her jade-green eyes mocked and watched. “I’m afraid

of your sister. She looks as if she was going to put us all into a

book,” people would sometimes say of her to the others. But Rome never

wrote about anything or anyone; it was not worth while.

3

SISTERS IN THE GARDEN

Maurice threw down the second serial part of “Theophrastus Such,” which

had just come out.

“The woman’s going all to pieces,” he said, in his crisp, quick,

disgusted voice. “Sermonising and tosh.... The fact is,” said Maurice,

“the fact is, the novel, anyhow in this country, has had its day.

Except for the unpretending thrillers. We should give it a rest. The

poets still have things to say and are saying them (though not so well

as they used to; _their_ palmy days are over, too), but not the

novelists”....

Vicky, to drown his discourse, began to sing loud and clear--

“When I was a _young_ maid, a _young_ maid, a _young_

maid....”

“Of course she’s old,” went on Maurice, referring to Mary Ann Evans.

“And she’s been spoilt. She’s not a teacher, she’s a novelist. Or she

was. Now she’s dropped being a novelist and become merely a preacher.

That’s the end of her. I wish to God people would know their job

and stick to it. She was a jolly _good_ novelist.... Sorry,

pater”--Mr. Garden had frowned at the expletive--“but I didn’t think

you’d mind--_now_. I suppose you and I are both agreed, aren’t we,

as to the non-existence of a Deity.”

“All the same, my dear boy....”

All the same (this was Rome’s thought), papa had so recently believed

in a Deity, and would, no doubt, so soon again believe in a Deity, that

it seemed bad taste to fill the brief interim with vain oaths. Maurice

had no reverence at all, and no taste. You would think, as Vicky turned

from the piano to say, that, whatever he did or didn’t believe himself,

he might remember that some people were not only Christians but Church,

and High Church at that. But Maurice only grinned at her. She tweaked

his fair crest in passing and arranged her own glossy chestnut coiffure

at the painted looking-glass over the chimney-piece. This Rossetti

shape suited her, she thought, better than the high coils of last year.

The parlourmaid announced the curate, a good-looking, intelligent,

cheerful young man whom they all liked. He had hardly shaken hands when

Mr. Garden said to him, “I want a talk with you, Carter,” and took him

off to the study, to break it to him about the Ethical Society.

“Papa might just as well have told him here,” Vicky petulantly said.

“It would only have needed a sentence, and then we could have had a

jolly evening.”

“Of course papa feels he must go into it thoroughly with Mr. Carter,”

said mamma. “Poor Mr. Carter will be dreadfully hurt by it, I’m afraid.

He has always been so fond of papa, and he has never himself seen any

reason for doubt.”

“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 she 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.

4

MAMMA AND ROME

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 enquiring.

“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,” enquired 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 with her children about papa’s

vagaries. 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, by forty-five years of age, 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 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 earrings. 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.

5

BLOOMSBURY AND SOUTH PLACE

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. Alban’s, 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 Procter, 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 someone

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 often are) or chanting the Anglican liturgy in the

little fourteenth-century church in Hampshire--though, as to that,

some of the 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 South 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 enquired 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 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.

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

returned, firmly, “Dear papa, _no_. Conscience should be our

servant, not our master. That’s what Brother à Beckett said in his

sermon this morning. Or, anyhow, something like it. Conscience is

given us to be educated and trained up the way it should go. An unruly

conscience is an endless nuisance. He that bridleth not his own

conscience ...”

Papa, sensible of his own so inconveniently unbridled conscience,

said, mildly, “I think Brother à Beckett was perhaps referring to the

tongue,” and Vicky lightly admitted that her memory might have got

confused.

“But never mind sermons and the conscience, here’s grandpapa,” she

said, and sure enough, there was grandpapa, who was staying with them

on a visit. Grandpapa was the father of mamma and a Dean, and was a

very handsome man of seventy-five, and he was one of the last ditchers

in the matter of orthodoxy and had yielded no inch to science or the

higher criticism, and believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible

and the divine credentials of the Anglican Establishment, and disliked

popery, ritual, dissent and free thought with equal coldness. Papa he

had never approved of; a weak, vacillating fellow, whose reputation

was little affected by one disgraceful change more or less. It did not

particularly signify that papa had joined the Ethical Church; nothing

about papa particularly signified; a weak, wrong-headed, silly fellow,

who would certainly, for all his scholarship, never be a Dean. It was

far more distressing that Anne (mamma), who ought to have made a

firm stand and saved her husband from his folly, should thus abet him

and follow him about from church to church. And the children had been

deplorably brought up. Grandpapa, who thought it blasphemous not to

believe in Noah and his ark, and even in the date assigned to these by

Bishop Ussher, and had written to the _Times_ protesting against

the use in schools of the arithmetic book of Bishop Colenso on account

of the modernist instruction imparted by this Bishop to the heathen

in this matter of the date of the ark--grandpapa heard these unhappy

children of his daughter’s discussing the very bases of revealed truth;

grandpapa, who held that our first parents lost paradise through

disobedience, pride, inquisitiveness and false modesty, heard Maurice’s

perverse defiance of law and authority, Rome’s calm contempt and

conceited criticism of accepted standards, Stanley’s incessant, eager,

“Why, what for, and why not?” and Vicky’s horror at the breadth and

crudeness of the Prayer Book marriage service.

Grandpapa, being a Conservative and a Disraelian, was just now not

well pleased. He did not think that the Gladstone Government would be

able to deal adequately or rightly with the inheritance of foreign

responsibilities left them by their predecessors. South Africa, Egypt,

Afghanistan--what would the Liberals, many of them Little Englanders

in fact though not yet in name, do with all this white man’s burden,

as the responsibilities of Empire were so soon, so horribly soon, to

be called? Had grandpapa thought of it, he would certainly have called

them that. His grandson, Maurice, called them, on the other hand, “all

those damned little Tory wars,” a difference in nomenclature which

indicated a real difference in political attitude.

Grandpapa entered with the _Observer_, which regretted as he did

the way the elections had gone, and with the _Guardian_, which

did not. He sat down and patted Vicky on the shoulder, and said that

Canon Liddon had preached at St. Paul’s, where he had attended morning

service.

“A capital defence of the faith,” said grandpapa. “Bones to it, and

substance. None of your sentimental slop. You’ve all been running after

ethics, or ritual, or this, that and the other, but I’ve had the pure

Word. Liddon’s too high, but he’s sound. I remember in ’55....”

One of grandpapa’s familiar stories, told as old people told their

stories, with loving rounding of detail.

Vicky’s mind reached vainly back towards ’55 and could not get there.

Crinolines and sweeping whiskers, the pre-Raphælites and the Crimea,

Bible orthodoxy and the Tractarians, all the great Victorians. A

dim, entrancing period, when papa and mamma were getting married and

people were too old-fashioned to see life straight as it was. And to

grandpapa ’55 was quite lately, just the other day, and ’80 was like an

engine got loose from its train and dashing madly in advance, heading

precipitately for a crash.

“I remember,” said grandpapa, “I remember....”

Papa said, “That was the year King’s College asked Maurice to retire

because of ‘Theological Essays.’”

What dull things elderly people remembered!

“Next Sunday,” said Vicky, “I shall take Charles to South Place, papa.

I hear Mr. Pater is preaching there. Too sweet and quaint; he preaches

everywhere. And often the divine Oscar sits under him.”

6

STANLEY AND ROME

Maurice and Stanley were back from Cambridge and Oxford for the Easter

vacation, talking, talking, talking. Stanley, in a crimson stockinette

jersey, tight like an eel’s skin, and a tight little brown skirt caught

in at the knees, her chubby face pink with excitement and health,

talked of Oxford, of the river, of lectures, of Mr. Pater and of

friendship. Friendship was like dancing flames to Stanley in this her

first Oxford year; a radiant, painful apocalypse of joy.

“Are they so splendid?” Rome speculated of these glorious girls.

“_Is_ anyone so splendid, ever?”

She sat idly, her hands clasped behind her short silky curls, Mallock’s

“New Republic” open at her side. Stanley sat on the edge of a table

and swung her legs. How romantic Stanley was! What were girls, what,

indeed, were boys either, that such a halo should encircle their

foolish heads?

There was proceeding at this time a now long-forgotten campaign called

the Woman’s Movement, and on to the gay, youthful fringe of this

Stanley and her friends were catching. Women, long suppressed, were

emerging; women were to be doctors, lawyers, human beings, everything;

women were to have their share of the earth, their share of adventure,

to flourish in all the arts, ride perched in hansom cabs, even on

monstrous bicycles, find the North Pole....

“Too energetic for me,” Rome commented.

“Oh, but you’ll be a great writer, perhaps.”

“No. Why? There’s nothing I want to write. What’s the use of writing?

Too much of that already.... Oh, well, go on about Oxford, Stan. You

don’t convince me that it’s anything but a very ordinary place full of

quite ordinary people, but I rather like to hear you being absurd.”

Rome’s faint, delicately thin voice expressed acquiescent but not

scornful irony. Stanley was a bore sometimes, but an intelligent bore.

She went on about Oxford and Mr. Pater and some lectures on art by

William Morris that she had been to. Stanley was drunk with beauty; she

was plunging deep into the æsthetic movement on whose surface Vicky

played.

“You know, Rome,” she puckered her forehead over it, “more and more

I feel that the _merely_ æsthetic people are on the wrong tack.

Beauty for ourselves can’t be enough; it’s got to be made possible for

everyone.... That’s where Vicky and her friends are off it. A lily in a

blue vase all to yourself isn’t enough. All this”--she looked round at

the Liberty room, the peacock patterns, the willow pattern china, the

oak settle--“all this--it’s not fair we should be able to have it when

everyone can’t. It’s greedy....”

“Everyone’s greedy.”

“No,” said Stanley, and her eyes glowed, for she was thinking of her

splendid friends. “_No._ Greediness is in everyone, but it can

be conquered. Socialism is the way.... I wish you could meet Evelyn

Peters. She’s joined the Social Democratic Federation.... I want to ask

her here to stay in June. She’s not just an ordinary person, you know.

She’s splendid. She’s six years older than me, and enormously cleverer,

and she’s read everything and met everyone.... I can’t tell you how I

feel about her.”

Obvious, thought Rome, how Stanley felt with her shining eyes and

flushed cheeks, and shy, changing voice. In love; that was what Stanley

was. Stanley was for ever in and out of love; she had been the same

all through her school days. So had Vicky, but with Vicky it was men,

and less romantic and earnest. Stanley was always flinging her whole

being prostrate in adoring enthusiasm before someone or something,

funny child. She was looking at Rome now in shy, gleaming hesitation,

wondering if Rome were despising her, laughing at her, but not able

to keep Evelyn Peters to herself. To say “Evelyn Peters is my friend”

was an exquisite æsthetic joy and made their friendship a more real,

achieved thing.

Rome felt a little uncomfortable behind her bland nonchalance;

Stanley’s emotions were so strong.

7

GRANDPAPA

When Maurice was there Stanley did not talk about her friends; such

talk was not suitable for Maurice, whose own friendships were so

different. Often in these days they talked politics. Maurice was a

radical.

“Chamberlain’s the man,” he said, “Chamberlain and Dilke. Whiggery’s

played out; dead as mutton. Mild liberalism has had its day.

Yes, pater, your day is over. The seventies have been the heyday

of liberalism. I grant you it’s done well--Education Act, Irish

disestablishment, abolition of tests, and so on. Such obvious reforms,

you see, that every sane person has _had_ to be a Liberal. That’s

watered liberalism down. Now we’ve got to go further, and only the

extremists will stick on; the old gang will desert. Radicalism’s the

only thing for England now.”

Maurice, pacing the room with his quick little steps, his hands in

his pockets, his chin in the air, would talk thus in his crisp,

rapid, asseverating voice, even to grandpapa, who had, when he had

done the same thing as a schoolboy, ordered him out of the room for

impertinence. Grandpapa and Maurice did not, in fact, each really like

the other--obstinate age and opinionated youth. Because grandpapa

was in the room, Maurice said, “They’ve returned old Bradlaugh for

Northampton all right. Now we shall see some fun,” and grandpapa said,

“Don’t mention that abominable blasphemer in my presence.”

Papa said, gently, with his cultured tolerance, “A good deal, I fancy,

has been attributed to Bradlaugh of which he has not been guilty.”

“Are you denying,” enquired grandpapa, “that the fellow is a miserable

blaspheming atheist and a Malthusian?”

“An atheist,” papa admitted, discreetly passing over the last charge,

“no doubt he is. And very undesirably coarse and violent in his methods

of controversy and propaganda. But I am not sure that the charge of

blasphemy is a fair one, on the evidence we have.”

“Any man,” said grandpapa, sharply, “who denies his Maker blasphemes.”

“In that case,” said Maurice, moodily, “I blaspheme,” and left the room.

Papa apologised for him.

“You must forgive the boy; he is still crude.”

Grandpapa shut his firm mouth tightly, and Rome thought, “He is still

cruder.”

Vicky asked lightly, “What is a Malthusian, grandpapa?” and grandpapa,

who came of a coarse and outspoken generation, snapped, “A follower of

Malthus.”

“And who was Malthus, grandpapa?”

Grandpapa, catching his daughter’s eye, and recollecting that it was

the year 1880, not the coarse period of his own youth, hummed and

cleared his throat and said, “A very ungentlemanly fellow, my dear.”

And that was all about Malthus that young misses of 1880 needed to

know. Or so their elders believed. But in 1880, as now, young misses

often knew more than their parents and grandparents supposed. Rome and

Stanley, better read in history than Vicky, could have enlightened both

her and grandpapa on the theme of Malthus.

8

DISCUSSING RELIGION

It was a good thing that grandpapa’s visit ended next day. Without him

Maurice was better-mannered, less truculent. They could then discuss

Radicalism, Bradlaugh, blasphemy, beauty, Malthus and the elections,

_en famille_, without prejudice. They were, as a family, immense

talkers, inordinate arguers. The only two who did not discuss life at

large were Irving and Una; their conversation was and always would be

of the lives they personally led, and those led by such animals as they

kept. The lives led by others worried them not at all. They recked not

of the Woman’s Movement, but Irving amiably held Maurice’s high bicycle

while Stanley, divested of her tight skirt and clad in a pair of his

knickerbockers, mounted it and pedalled round and round the quiet

square. It was Irving who knew that a lower kind of bicycle was on its

way, had even been seen in embryo.

“But girls’ll never ride it,” he opined. “That’s jolly certain.”

“Girls will probably be wearing knickerbockers in a year or two,”

Stanley, always hopeful, asserted. “For exercise and games and things.

Or else a new kind of skirt will come in, short and wide. Our clothes

are absurd.”

“Women’s clothes always are,” said Irving, content that this should be

so.

Stanley would rush in, happy and bruised, assume again her absurd,

caught-in-at-the-knees skirt, and argue desperately with Maurice about

Christian socialism. Stanley was a Christian, ardent and practical;

that was the effect Oxford was having on her. She privately wondered

how papa, having known and loved Oxford, could bear the Ethical Church.

But probably the Oxford Anglicanism of papa’s day had not been so

inspiring.

Vicky told Stanley that socialism, Christian or un-Christian, was very

crude; religion was an affair of art and beauty, not of economics.

“Religion--oh, I don’t know.” Stanley wondered, frowning. “What

_is_ religion, Rome?”

Rome, looking up from Samuel Butler, merely said, “How should I know?

You’d better ask papa. He should know; he’s writing a book about it.”

“No; I didn’t mean comparative religions. I mean _religion_....”

“A primitive insurance against disaster,” Maurice defined it. He

always looked up and took notice when religion was mentioned; to this

family the word was like “rats” to a dog, owing, perhaps, to their

many clerical ancestors, perhaps to the fact that they were latish

Victorians.

“But it _courts_ disaster....” Stanley was sure of that. “Look

where it leads people. Into all sorts of hardships and dangers and

sacrifices. Look at Christianity--in the Gospels, I mean.”

“That’s a perversion. Originally religion was merely a function of the

self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your

crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the

flaws in this life by belief in another.”

“What about the Ethical Church? They don’t believe in another.”

“A perversion too. A mere sop thrown to the religious instinct by

people who don’t like to starve it altogether. A morbid absurdity. A

house without foundations. If they simply mean, as they appear to, that

they think they ought to be good, why meet in South Place and sing

about it?”

“Why,” enquired Rome, who never did so, “meet anywhere and sing about

anything?”

“Why,” said Maurice, “indeed? A morbid instinct inherent in human

nature. Mine, I am glad to say, is untainted by it; so is yours, Rome.

Vicky has it badly, and Stanley, who gets everything in turns, has it

on and off, but she is young and may get over it.... The queer thing

about Stanley is that she’s trying to run two quite incompatible things

at the same time. Æsthetics and Christian Socialism--you might as well

be a cricketer and a rowing man, or hang Dickens and Whistler together

on your walls. The æsthetes may go slumming, in the absurd way Vicky

does, but they’ve no use for socialism.”

“I’m _not_ an æsthete,” Stanley cried, finding it out suddenly.

“I’m through with that. I’m going in with the socialists all the way. I

shall join the Socialist Democratic Federation at once.”

That was Stanley’s headlong manner of entering into movements. She was

a great and impetuous joiner.

But Rome, playing with her monocle on its dangling ribbon, looked

at all movements with fastidious rejection. _Cui_, her faintly

mocking regard would seem to enquire, _bono_?

9

DISCUSSING LIFE

1880 pursued its way. Mr. Gladstone formed his cabinet of sober peers

and startling commoners, the new parliament met, the Radicals at once

began to shock the Whigs with their unheard-of proposals for so-called

reform, Lord Randolph Churchill and his Fourth Party mounted guard,

brisk and pert, in the offing, Parnell and his thirty-five Irishmen

scowled from another offing, demanding the three F’s, and, for a

special comic turn side-show, Mr. Bradlaugh, the unbeliever, was

hustled in and out of the House, claiming to affirm, being ejected with

violence, returning at a rush, ejected yet again, and so on and so

forth, until gentlemanly unbelievers said, “A disgraceful business. Why

can’t the man behave like other agnostics, without all this fuss?” and

gentlemanly Christians said, “Why can’t the House let him alone?” and

the dignified press said, “It is repugnant to public opinion that one

who openly denies his God should be allowed in a House representative

of a great Christian nation,” for, believe it or not as you choose,

that was the way the press still talked in the year 1880.

Maurice Garden and his friends at Cambridge greeted Mr. Bradlaugh’s

determined onslaughts with encouraging cheers. Maurice Garden enjoyed

battle, and he rightly thought the cause of liberty of thought served

by this tempestuous affair.

Freedom: that was at this time the obsession of Maurice Garden and

his compeers. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech (though not, of

course, of action), freedom of small nations (such as Armenia, Ireland,

Poland and the Transvaal Boers), for that was a catchword among our

forefathers of the nineteenth century; freedom even of large ones,

such as India; freedom of women, that strange, thin cry raised so far

only by sparse, sporadic groups, freedom of labour (whatever that may

have meant, and Maurice Garden, a clear-thinking young man, could have

told you precisely and at length what he meant by it), freedom even of

Russians, that last word in improbabilities.

“Freedom?” queried Rome. “A word that wants defining,” and that was all

she had to say of it. While Maurice and Stanley went, hot heads down,

for the kernel, she was for ever meticulously, aloofly, fingering the

shell, reducing it to absurdity. That seemed, at times, to be all that

Rome cared about, all she had the humanity, the vital energy, to seek.

Stanley, rushing buoyantly through Oxford, seizing upon this new idea

and that, eagerly mapping out her future, ardently burning her present

candle at both ends, intellectually, socially and athletically (so far

as young women were allowed to be athletic in those days, when hockey

and bicycling had not come in and lawn tennis consisted in lobbing a

ball gently over a net with a racket weighing seventeen pounds and

shaped like a crooked spoon)--Stanley seemed to Rome, whom God had

saved from too much love of living, amusingly violent and crude.

They were oddly different, these four sisters; Vicky so spritely, Rome

so cool, Stanley so eager, Una so placid.

“Your languid indifference is tip-top form, my dear,” Vicky would say

to Rome. “You’re _fin-de-siècle_--that’s utterly the last word

to-day. But I can’t emulate you.”

“Don’t you want to _do_ anything, Rome?” Stanley, home for the

long vacation, asked, and Rome’s eyebrows went up.

“Do anything? _Jamais de ma vie._ What should I do?”

“Well, anything. Any of the things women do. Teaching. Settlement work.

Doctoring. Writing. Painting. Anything.”

“What a list! What frightful labours! I do not.”

“But aren’t you bored?”

“In moderation. I survive. I even amuse myself.”

“_I_ think, you know, that women _ought_ to do things, just

as much as men.”

“And just as little. What’s worth doing, after all?”

“Things _need_ doing. The world is so shocking.... All this time

women have been suppressed and kept under and not allowed to help in

putting things right, and now they’re just getting free....”

“There’s one thing about freedom” (a word upon which Rome had of late

been speculating); “each generation of people begins by thinking

they’ve got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure

the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can’t

really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there

would be more of it by now.”

“It’s only lately begun, for women. What was there for mamma to do,

when _she_ was young? Nothing. Only to marry papa. But now....”

“What is there for Vicky to do, now _she’s_ young? Nothing. Only

to marry Charles--or another.”

“Oh, well, Vicky slums. And she could do any of the other things if she

liked.... Anyhow, Rome, you’re not supporting _marriage_ as the

only woman’s job worth doing!”

“No. Not even marriage. Perhaps, in fact, marriage less than most

things. I only said it is, so far as one can infer, Vicky’s job.... The

only job worth doing in this curious fantasia of a world, as I see it,

is to amuse oneself as well as may be and to get through it with no

more trouble than need be. What else is there?”

With all the desperate needs of the certainly curious but as certainly

necessitous world crying in her ears, with vistas of adventure and

achievement stretching inimitably before her eyes, Stanley found this

too immense a question. She could only answer it with another. “Why do

you think we were born, then?” and Rome’s matter of fact “Obviously

because papa and mamma got married” sent her sulkily away to play

cricket on the lawn with Irving and Una. Apathy, languor, selfishness,

did very greatly anger her. She was the more troubled in that she

knew Rome to be clever--cleverer than herself. Rome could have done

anything, and elected to do nothing. Rome would probably not even

marry; her caustic tongue and cool indifference kept those who admired

her at arm’s length; she made them feel that any expression of regard

was an error in taste; she shrivelled it up by an amused, enquiring

look through the deadly monocle she placed in one blue-green eye for

the purpose.

10

VICKY GETS MARRIED

Vicky, on the contrary, became, during this summer, definitely

affianced to Charles, whom she decided to marry next spring. She had

not, as yet, made of Charles either an æsthete or a ritualist, but

these things, she hoped, would come after marriage, and anyhow Charles

was intelligent, his career promised well, he had sufficient income,

and, in fine, she loved him.

“The main thing, after all, Vicky,” papa inevitably said.

“No, papa; the _main_ thing is that the American merchant

princesses are descending on the land like locusts, and that if I

don’t secure Charles they will, even though he hasn’t a title--yet.

He’s so obviously a distinguished person in embryo. American merchant

princesses have brains.”

Vicky, having surrendered, put on a new tenderness, even an occasional

gravity. It was as if you could catch glimpses here and there of the

gay wife and mother that was to supersede the flighty girl. Beneath

her chaff and bickerings with her Charles, her love swelled into that

stream so necessary to carry her through the long and arduous business.

She did her shopping for her new life with gusto and taste, tempering

Morris picturesqueness with Chippendale elegance, chasing Queen Anne

with unflagging energy from auction to auction and from one Israelitish

shop to another, tinkling the while with snakish bangles, swinging

golden swine from her ears, as was the barbarous and yet graceful

custom of our ancestresses in that year.

11

MAURICE STARTS LIFE

Maurice left Cambridge, armed with a distinguished first in his

classical tripos.

“And now what?” enquired papa, indulgently.

“Wilbur has offered me a job on the _New View_. That will do me,

for a bit.”

The _New View_ was a weekly paper of the early eighties, started

to defeat Whiggery by the spread of Radicalism. Its gods were Sir

Charles Dilke and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, its objects to introduce a

more democratic taxation, to reform the suffrage, to free Ireland,

to curtail Empire, and so forth. As its will was strong, it suffered

but it did not suffer long, and is, in fact, now forgotten but by the

seekers among the pathetic chronicles of wasted years. All the same,

it was, in its brief day, not unfruitful of good; it was deeply, if

not widely, respected, and many of our more intelligent forbears

wrote for it for a space, particularly that generation which left

the Universities round about the year 1880. It was hoped by some of

them (including Maurice Garden), that it would make a good jumping

off ground for a political career. As it turned out, the first thing

into which Maurice jumped off from it was love. At dinner at the

Wilburs’ he met Amy Wilbur, the young daughter of his editor. She was

small and ivory-coloured, with long dark eyes under slanting brows, a

large, round, shallow dimple in each smooth cheek, a small tilting

red mouth (red even in those days, when lip salve was not used except

in the half world), a smooth, childlike voice and a laugh like silver

bells. Maurice thought her like a geisha out of the new opera, “The

Mikado,” and was enchanted with her lovely gaiety. Such is love and its

blindness that Maurice, who detested both silliness and petty malice

in male or female, did not see that his Amy was silly and malicious.

He saw nothing but her enchanting exterior and on that and his small

salary he got married in haste. None of the Gardens except himself

and papa much cared about Amy and papa liked nearly everyone, and

certainly nearly all pretty girls. As to mamma’s feelings towards her

daughter-in-law, who could divine them?

Vicky said to Rome: “They are both making a horrific mistake. Maurice

is a prickly person, who won’t suffer fools. In a year he’ll be wanting

to beat her. She hasn’t the wits or the personality to be the least

help to him in his career, either. When he’s a rising politician and

she ought to be holding salons, she won’t be able to. Her salons will

be mere At Homes.”

“When,” Rome speculated, “does an At Home become a salon? I’ve often

wondered.”

They decided that it was a salon when several distinguished people came

to it, rather from habit than from accident. Also the conversation must

be reasonably intelligent (or, anyhow, the conversers must believe that

it was so, for that is all that can be hoped of any conversation). And

people must come, or pretend that they came, mainly for the talk and

not so much for any food there might be, or to show their new clothes.

“Asses they must be,” said Una, who was listening. “I shan’t go to

salons ever.”

“No one will ask you, my child. Anything _you’ll_ find yourself at

will be a common party, with food and drink and foolish chit-chat.”

“Like _your_ parties,” Una agreed, amiably content. No teasing

worried Una; she was as placid as a young cow.

12

EIGHTIES

So, with Vicky and Maurice happily wedded (_settled_, as they

wittily called it in those days, though indeed they knew as well as

we do that marriage is likely to be as inconclusive and unsettling an

affair as any other and somewhat more than most), and papa and mamma

happily, if impermanently, ethicised, and the three younger children

still pursuing, or being pursued by, education and Rome perfunctorily,

amusedly and inactively surveying the foolish world, the Garden family

entered on that eager, clever, civilised, earnest decade, the eighteen

eighties. Earnest indeed it was, for people still took politics

seriously, and creeds, and literature, and life. Over the period still

brooded the mighty ones, those who are usually called the Giants

(literary and scientific) of the Victorian era, for the nineteenth

century was an age of giant-makers, of hero-worshippers.

The eighties were also a great time for women. What was called

_emancipation_ then occurred to them. Young ladies were getting

education and it went to their heads. No creature was ever more solemn,

more earnest, more full of good intentions for the world, than the

university-educated young female of the eighties. We shall not look

upon her like again; she has gone, to make place for her lighter-minded

daughters, surely a lesser generation, without enthusiasm, ardour or

aspiration.

It was these ardent good intentions, this burning social conscience,

as well as the desire to do the emancipated thing, that drove Stanley,

leaving Oxford in 1882, to take up settlement work in Poplar. So

Poplarised, so orientalised, did she become, that she took to speaking

of her parental home in Bloomsbury as being in the West End. To her

everything west of St. Paul’s became the West End. The West End, its

locality and its limits, is indeed a debatable land. Where you think

it is seems to depend on where you live or work. To those who work

in Fleet Street, as do so many journalists, it seems that anything

west of the Strand is the West End. “West End cocaine orgy,” you see

on newspaper placards and find that the orgy occurred in Piccadilly

or Soho. Mayfair and its environments are also spoken of by these

scribblers of the East as the West End. But to those who live in

Mayfair, the West End begins at about Edgware Road and Mayfair seems

about the middle, and to the denizens of Edgware Road the West End

is Bayswater, Kensington or Shepherds Bush. The dwellers in these

outlying lands of the sunset do really acknowledge that they are the

West End; and to them Mayfair and Piccadilly are not even the middle,

but the east. A strange, irrational phrase, which bears so fluctuating

and dubious a meaning. But then nearly all phrases are strange and

irrational, like most of those who use them.

Anyhow, and be that as it may, Stanley went and worked in Poplar to

ameliorate the lot of the extremely poor, who lived there then as now.

She took up with Fabians, and admired greatly Mr. Bernard Shaw, while

cleaving still to William Morris. She was concerned about Sweated

Women, and served on Women’s Labour Committees. Her good working

intelligence caused people to give her charges and responsibilities

beyond her years. She was now a sturdy, capable, square-set,

brown-faced young woman, attractive, with her thrust-out under-lip and

chin, and her beautiful blue eyes under heavy black brows. She spoke

well on platforms in a deep, girlish voice, was as strong as a pony

and could work from morning till night without flagging. There was

something candid and lovable about Stanley. A doctor and a clergyman

asked her in wedlock, but she did not much care about them and was too

busy and interested to think about marriage.

She had, among other strong and ardent beliefs, belief in God. She had

religion, inherited perhaps from her papa, but taking in her a more

concentrated and less diffused form. To her the Christian church was

a militant church, the sword of God come to do battle for the poor

and oppressed. To her a church was an enchanted house, glorious as a

child’s dream, the mass as amazing as a fairy story and as true as

sunrise. She did not much mind at which churches she attended this

miracle, but on the whole preferred those of the Anglican establishment

to the Roman variety, finding these latter rather more lacking in

beauty than churches need be. Stanley was an optimist. She looked on

the shocking, wicked and ill-constructed universe, and felt that there

must certainly be something behind this odd business. There must,

she reasoned, be divine spirit and fire somewhere, to account for

such flashes of good as were so frequently evident in it. Something

gallant, unquenchable, imperishably ardent and brave, must burn at its

shoddy heart.

Vicky complained that Stanley thought of God (“in whom, of course,”

said Vicky, “we all believe”), as a socialist agitator, and Stanley

perhaps did. Certainly God, she believed, was fighting sweated

industries.

“With signally small success,” Maurice said, for the commission on

these industries had just concluded.

“God very seldom succeeds,” Stanley agreed. “He has very nearly

everything against Him, of course.”

She seldom mentioned God, being, for the most part, as shyly

inarticulate as a schoolgirl on this theme so vital to her. But

of unemployment, labour troubles, and sweated industries, she and

Maurice would talk by the hour. She wrote articles for his paper on

the conditions of working women in Poplar. She attended street labour

meetings in the east, while Maurice did the same in Trafalgar Square

and Hyde Park.

In 1882, the year that Stanley left Oxford, Una left school. It was

no use sending her to college, for she had not learning, nor the

inclination to acquire it. She had done with lessons.

“You don’t want just to slack about for ever, I suppose?” Stanley put

it to her, sternly.

“For ever....” Una looked at her with wide, sleepy blue eyes, trying

and failing to think of eternity. Una lived in to-day, not in yesterday

or to-morrow. She was rather like a puppy.

“I don’t much care,” she said at length. “I mean, I’ve never thought

about it. I’m never bored, anyhow. There’s theatres, and badminton and

dancing, and all the shops, and taking the dogs in the parks.... Of

course I’d like better to live in the country again. But London’s all

right. _I’m_ all right. I’m not booky like you, you see.”

Stanley said it had nothing to do with being booky; there were things

that wanted doing. Doubtless there were. But she failed to rouse Una to

any thought of doing them. Una stayed at home, and went to parties, and

theatres, and played games, and occasionally rode, and walked the dogs

in the parks, and stayed with friends in the country, and enjoyed life.

“I suppose she’ll just marry,” Stanley disappointedly said, for in

the eighteen eighties marriage was not well thought of, though freely

practised, by young feminine highbrows.

As to Irving, another cheery hedonist, he was enjoying himself very

much at Cambridge and reading for a pass.

13

PARENTS

The eighteen eighties were freely strewn with, among other things,

Vicky’s children. The halcyon period for children had not yet set

in; did not, in fact, set in until well on in the twentieth century.

In the eighteen eighties and nineties children were still thwarted,

still disciplined, still suppressed, though with an abatement of

mid-Victorian savagery. The idea had not yet started that they were

interesting little creatures who should be permitted, even encouraged,

to lift their voices in public and interrupt the conversation of

their elders. On the whole, the bringing up of children (at best a

poor business) was perhaps less badly done during the last fifteen

years of the nineteenth century than before or since. It may safely

be said that it is always pretty badly done, since most parents and

all children are very stupid and uncivilised, and anyhow to “bring up”

(queer phrase!) the unfortunate raw material that human nature is, to

bring it up to any semblance of virtue or intelligence (the parents,

probably, having but small acquaintance with either), is a gargantuan

task, almost beyond human powers. Some children do, indeed, grow up

as well as can, in the circumstances, be expected, but this is, as a

rule, in spite of, rather than on account of, the misguided efforts of

their parents. And most children do not grow up well at all, but quite

otherwise, which is why the world is as we see it.

Vicky was, as parents go, not a bad one. She loved her children,

but did not unduly spoil them or turn their heads with injudicious

attentions. Year by year her nursery filled with nice, pretty little Du

Maurier boys, fine, promising little Du Maurier girls, in sailor suits,

jerseys, tam-o’-shanters, and little frocks sashed about the knees, and

year by year Vicky was to be found again in what newspaper reporters,

in their mystic jargon, call, for reasons understood by none but

themselves, “a certain condition.” “The woman,” they will write, “said

she was in a certain condition.” As if everyone, all the time, was not

in a certain condition. Whether these journalists think the statement

“she was going to have a baby” indecent, or coarse, will probably never

transpire, for they are a strange, instinct-driven, non-analytical

race, who can seldom give reasons for their terminology. Who shall see

into their hearts? Perhaps they really do think that the human race

should not be mentioned until it is visible to the human eye.

Anyhow Vicky, of a franker breed than these, said year by year, with

resignation, “_Again_, my dears, I replenish the earth,” and added

sometimes, in petulant enquiry, “How long, O Lord, how long?”

But Amy, the wife of Maurice, had, like newspaper men, her pruderies.

Of her coming infants she preferred to speak gently, in fretful

undertones. When she told Maurice about the first, she did not, like

Vicky, sing out, on his return from the office, “What _do_ you

think? There’s a baby on the way!” but, drawing her inspiration

from fiction, she hid her face against his coat and murmured, “Oh,

_Maurice_! Guess.”

Maurice said, “Guess what? How do you mean, guess, darling?” to which

she replied, “Well, I do think you’re slow to-night.... Oh, Maurice....”

And then Maurice, instead of saying, like the young husbands in the

fiction she was used to, “Darling, you _can’t_ mean.... What

angels women are!” said instead, “Oh, I say, do you mean we’ve got a

baby coming? Good business.”

A baby. What a coarse, downright word for the little creature. Later,

of course, one got used to it, but just at first, at the very, very

outset, the dimmest dawn of its tiny being, it was scarcely a baby. And

what about her being an angel? Obviously Maurice did not know the rules

of this game.

When the baby, and the subsequent baby (there were only two

altogether), arrived, Amy spoiled them. She was a depraved mother. Also

she was unjust. She was, of course, the type of mother whose strong

sex instinct leads her to prefer boys to girls, and she took no pains

to hide this. Maurice said, stubbornly, “The girl shall have as good a

chance as the boy, and as good an education. We’ll make no difference,”

but Amy said, “Chance! Fiddlesticks! What chances does a girl want,

except to marry well? What does a girl want with education? I’m not

going to have her turned into a blue-stocking. Girls can’t have real

brains, anyhow. They can’t _do_ anything--only sit about and look

superior.”

This referred to Rome, and these were the remarks that fell like

nagging drops of water on Maurice’s sensitive, irritable nerves and

mind, slowly teasing love out of existence, and beating into him (less

slowly) that he had married a fool.

Maurice found outlet from domestic irritation in political excitement.

There was, for instance, the Home Rule Bill. It seemed to Maurice,

as to many others, immeasurably important that this bill should go

through. Its failure to do so, his own failure to be elected in the

elections of 1886, and the victory of the Unionists, plunged him into

a sharper and more militant radicalism. At the age of twenty-nine he

was an ardent, scornful, clear-brained idealist and cynic, successful

on platforms and brilliant with pens. He was becoming a stand-by of

the Radical press, a thorn in the Tory flesh. His wife, by this time,

after four years of marriage, definitely disliked him, because he had

bad, sharp manners, was often disagreeable to her, often drank a little

too much, and obviously despised the things she said. She consoled

herself with going to parties, spoiling her babies, and flirting with

other people. He consoled himself with politics, writing, talking and

drinking. An ill-assorted couple. Maurice hoped that his children

would be more what he desired. So far, of course, they were fonder of

Amy. Even the boy was fonder of Amy, though sons often have a natural

leaning towards their fathers, and frequently grow up with no more

than a careless affection for their mothers for, contrary to a common

belief, the great affection felt by Œdipus for his mother is most

unusual, and, indeed, Œdipus would probably have felt nothing of the

sort had he known of the relationship. It is noticeable that sons

usually select as a bride a woman as unlike their mothers and sisters

as possible. It makes a change.

So Maurice had reason to hope that his son, anyhow, would prefer him

as time went on, and therefore be inclined to share his point of view

about life. As to the girl, she might grow up a fool or she might not;

impossible to tell, at three years old. Most girls did.

In 1887 the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria occurred. Maurice wrote

a deplorably unsuitable article for the occasion, called “Gaudeamus,”

and taking for its theme the subject races of Ireland and India and

the less fortunate and less moneyed classes in Great Britain, which

brought him into a good deal of disrepute, and made Amy more than ever

disgusted with him.

“Hardly the moment,” papa commented. “One sympathises with his

impatience, but the dear old lady’s jubilee is hardly the moment to rub

in the flaws of her empire.”

14

PAPA AND THE FAITH

Papa was now a Roman Catholic again. After three or four years of

Ethicism, the absence of a God had begun to tell on him. It had slowly

sapped what had always been the very foundation of his life--his

belief in absolute standards of righteousness. For, if there were no

God, on what indeed did these standards rest? It was all very well to

sing in South Place of “the great, the lovely and the true,” but what

things _were_ great, lovely and true, and how could one be sure

of them, if they derived their sanction from nothing but man’s own

self-interested and fluctuating judgments? Deeply troubled by these

thoughts, which were, of course, by no means new to him, papa was

driven at last out of his beautiful and noble half-way house to the

bleak cross roads.

Either he must become a moral nihilist, or he must believe again in a

God. Since to become a moral nihilist was to papa unthinkable, so alien

was it from all his habits, his traditions and his thought, so alien,

indeed, from all the thought of his period, the only alternative was

to believe in a God. And papa, swung by reaction, determined that this

time (was it by way of atonement, or safeguard?) he would do the thing

thoroughly. He would enter once more into that great ark of refuge from

perplexing thoughts, the Roman branch of the Catholic Church. There (so

long as he should remain there) he would be safe. He would rest therein

like a folded sheep, and wander no more. So, humbly, in the year 1886,

he did allegiance again to this great and consoling Church (which, as

he said, he had never left, for you cannot leave it, though you may be

unfaithful), and worshipped inconspicuously and devoutly in a small and

austere Dominican chapel.

His only grief was that mamma at this point struck. She made the

great refusal. She loved papa no less faithfully than ever, but his

continuous faiths had worn her out. She said, quietly, “I am not going

to be a Roman Catholic again, Aubrey.”

He bowed his head to 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.

15

KEEPING HOUSE

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 bread-crumbs--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 1886 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! 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.

16

UNA

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 someone 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.”

17

STANLEY

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,” on which 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; her 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 trade 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, together with the social

life she now led and the excitement of love, of Denman, and of 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 trade 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?”

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 doubting

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 anyone I ever met.”