PART II

FIN-DE-SIÈCLE

1

ROME

THE threshold of the nineties. Decades have a delusive edge to them.

They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other

ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different

name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels

on them, as if they were flowers in a border. The nineties, we say,

were gay, tired, _fin-de-siècle_, witty, dilettante, decadent,

yellow, and Max Beerbohm was their prophet; or they were noisy,

imperial, patriotic, militant, crude, and Kipling was their prophet.

And, indeed, you may find attributes to differentiate any period from

any other. What people said and wrote of the nineties at the time was

that they were modern, which of course at the time they were; that

they were hustling ... (“In these days of hurry and rapid motion,

when there is so little time to rest and reflect,” as people say in

sermons and elsewhere, as if the greater rapidity of motion did not

give one more time to rest and reflect, since one the sooner arrives

at one’s destination); that they were noisy; that literary output was

enormous; that (alternatively) the new writers were very good, or that

the good writers had gone from among us. One knows the kind of thing;

all discourses on contemporary periods have been full of it, from the

earliest times even unto these last.

Rome was thirty-one. She was of middle height, a slight, pale,

delicate young woman, with ironic blue-green eyes and mocking lips a

little compressed at the corners, and a pointed kind of face, and fair,

silky hair which she wore no longer short but swept gracefully up and

back from her small head, defining its shape and showing the fine line

from nape to crown. She was a woman of the world, a known diner-out,

a good talker, something of a wit, so that her presence was sought by

hostesses as that of an amusing bachelor is sought. She had elegance,

distinction, brain, a light and cool touch on the topics of her world,

a calm, mocking, sceptical detachment, a fastidious taste in letters

and in persons. She knew her way about, as the phrase goes, and could

be relied on to be socially adequate, in spite of a dangerous distaste

for fools, and in spite of the “dancing and destructive eye” (to use a

phrase long afterwards applied to one whose mentality perhaps a little

resembled hers) which she turned on all aspects of the life around

her. People called her intensely modern--whatever that might mean. In

1890 it presumably meant that you would have been surprised to find

her type in 1880. But as a matter of fact, you would not, had you been

endowed with a little perspicacity, have been in the least surprised;

you would have found it, had you looked, all down the ages (though

always as a rare growth). In 1790, 1690, 1590, and back through every

decade of every century, there have been Rome Gardens, fastidious,

_mondaine_, urbane, lettered, critical, amused, sceptical, and

what was called in 1890 _fin-de-siècle_. It is not a type which,

so to speak, makes the world go round; it does not assist movements nor

join in crusades; it coolly distrusts enthusiasm and eschews the heat

and ardour of the day. It is to be found among both sexes equally, and

is the stuff of which the urbane bachelor and spinster, rather than the

spouse and parent, are made. For mating and producing (as a career, not

as an occasional encounter) are apt to destroy the type, by forcing

it to too continuous and ardent intercourse with life; that graceful

and dilettante aloofness can scarcely survive such prolonged heat. To

be cool, sceptical and passionate at one and the same time--it has

been done, but it remains difficult. To love ardently such absurdities

as infants, and yet to retain unmarred the sense of the absurdity of

all life--this too has been done, but the best parents do not do it.

Something has to go, as a sacrifice to the juggernaut life, which

rebels against being regarded as merely absurd (and rightly, for, in

truth, it is not merely absurd, and this is one of the things which

should always be remembered about it).

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

their pursuits.

Why so, Rome questioned. Money? Very certainly I have not enough, but

I should not have appreciably more if I wrote and published essays

or even books. Notoriety? It might well be of the wrong kind; and

anyhow does it add to one’s pleasure? Miss Rome Garden, the author of

those clever critical essays.... Or perhaps of those dull critical

essays.... Either way, what did one gain? Why write? Why this craze for

transmitting ideas by means of marks on paper? Why not, if one must

transmit ideas, use the tongue, that unruly member given us for the

purpose? Better still, why not retain the ideas for one’s own private

edification, untransmitted? Writing. There was this about writing--or

rather about publishing--it showed that someone had thought it worth

while to pay for having one’s ideas printed. For printers were paid,

and binders, even if not oneself. So it conferred a kind of cachet.

Most literary persons sorely needed such a cachet, for you would never

guess from meeting them that anyone would pay them for their ideas. On

the other hand, publishing one’s folly gave it away; one was then known

for a fool, whereas previously people might have only suspected it....

In brief and in fine, writing was not worth while. Wise men and women

would derive such pleasure as they could from the writings of others,

without putting themselves to the trouble of providing reading matter

in their turn. Reading matter was not like dinners, concerning which

there must be give and take.

Thus the do-nothing Miss Rome Garden to the eager literary young men

and women about her, who all thought that literature was having a new

birth and that they were its brilliant midwives, as, indeed, it is not

unusual to think. And possibly it was the case. Literature has so many

new births; it is a hardy annual. The younger literary people of 1890

had a titillating feeling of standing a-tiptoe to welcome a new day.

“A great creative period is at hand,” they said. The old and famous

still brooded over the land like giant trees. Such a brooding, indeed,

has scarcely since been known, for in these later days we allow no

trees to become giants. But in their shadow the rebellious young shoots

sprang up, sharp and green and alive. The mid-Victorians were passing;

the Edwardians were in the schoolroom or the nursery, the Georgians

in the cradle or not yet anywhere; here was a clear decade in which

the late Victorian stars might dance. It was a period of experiment;

new forms were being tried, new ideas would have been aired were any

ideas ever new; new franknesses, so called, were permitted, or anyhow

practised--the mild beginnings of the returning tide which was to break

against the reticence of fifty years.

“I don’t,” said Mrs. Garden to Rome, “care about all these sex novels

people have taken to writing now.”

But Rome rejected the phrase.

“Sex novels, mamma? What are they? Novels have always been about sex,

or rather sexes. There’s nothing new in that; it’s the oldest story in

the world. People must have a sex in this life; it’s inevitable. Novels

must be about people; that’s inevitable too. So novels must be partly

about sex, and they’re nearly always about two sexes, and usually

largely about the relations of the two sexes to one another. They

always have been....”

All the same, mamma did _not_ care about these sex novels that

people had taken to writing now. _Problem_ novels, she called

them, for reasons of her own. Rome thought sex no problem; the least

problematic affair, perhaps, in this world. Of course there were

problems connected with it, as with everything else, but in itself sex

was no problem. Rather the contrary. “The Moonstone,” now--_that_

was a problem novel.

“I don’t like indecency,” said mamma, in her delicate, clipped voice.

“These modern writers will say anything. It’s ill-bred.”

Mamma could not be expected to know that these literary libertines of

1890 would be regarded as quaint Victorian prudes in 1920.

“As to that book Mr. Jayne gave you, I call it merely silly,” mamma

murmured, with raised brows, and so settled “Dorian Gray.”

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

has a wit.”

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

Jayne....

2

MR. JAYNE

Mr. Jayne and Rome. Both brilliant, both elegant, both urbane, both so

gracefully of the world worldly, yet both scholars too. Mr. Jayne wrote

memoirs and enchanting historical and political essays. An amusing, yet

erudite Oxford man, who had formerly been at the British Embassy at St.

Petersburg. Hostesses desired him for their more sophisticated parties,

because he had a wit, and knew Russia, which was at once more unusual

and more fashionable then than now. It was at one of Vicky’s dinner

parties that he and Rome had first met. If Vicky thought, how suitable,

it was only what anyone in the world must think about these two.

Afterwards they met continually and became friends. Rome thought him

conceited, clever, entertaining, attractive and disarming and the most

companionable man of her wide acquaintance. By June, 1890, they were in

love; a state of mind unusual in both. They did not mention it, but in

July he mentioned to her, what he mentioned to few people, that he had

a Russian wife living with her parents, a revolutionary professor and

his wife, in the country outside Moscow.

They were spending Sunday on the Thames, rowing up from Bourne End

to Marlow. They spoke of this matter of Mr. Jayne’s wife after their

lunch, which they ate on the bank, in the shade of willows.

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

Delightful to have a wife in Russia; to have a reason, and such a

reason, for visiting that interesting land. Delightful for Mr. Jayne

to have waiting for him, among steppes and woods, a handsome Russian

female and two fair Slav infants ... or perhaps they were English,

these little Jaynes, with beautiful mouths and long, thrust-out

chins.... Delightful, anyhow. The Russian country in the summer, all

corn and oil and moujiks. Moscow in the autumn, all churches and

revolutionaries and plots and secret police. And in the winter ... but

one cannot think about Russia in the winter at all; it does not bear

contemplation, and one does not visit it.... What a romance! Mr. Jayne

was indeed fortunate.

So Miss Garden conveyed.

“I am not there very much,” said Mr. Jayne. “Only on and off. Olga

prefers to live there, with her parents and our two children. She

has many friends there, all very busy plotting. They are of the

intelligentsia. Life is very interesting to her.”

“I can imagine that it must be.”

So cool and well-bred were Miss Garden and Mr. Jayne, that you never

would have divined that the latter, eating sandwiches, was crying

within his soul, “My dearest Rome. I dislike my wife. We make each

other sick with ennui when we meet. We married in a moment’s mania. It

is you I want. Don’t you know it? Won’t you let me tell you?” or that

the former, sipping cider, was saying silently, “You have told me this

at last because you know that we have fallen in love. Why not months

ago? And what now?”

Nothing of this they showed, but lounged in the green shade, and

drank and ate, Miss Garden clear-cut and cool, in a striped cotton

boating-dress, with a conically-shaped straw hat tipped over her eyes,

Mr. Jayne in flannels, long and slim, his palish face shaved smooth

in the new fashion, so that you saw the lines of his clever mouth

and long, thrust-out chin. Mr. Jayne’s eyes were deep-set and grey,

and he wore pince-nez, and he was at this time thirty-six years old.

At what age, Rome wondered, had he married Mrs. Jayne of the Russian

intelligentsia?

However, they did not enter into this, but began to discuss the plays

of Mr. Bernard Shaw, a well-known socialist writer, and Mr. Rudyard

Kipling, a young man in India who was making some stir.

“We can still be friends,” thought Rome, on their way home. “Nothing

need be changed between us. This Olga of his is his wife; I am his

friend. It would be very bourgeois to be less his friend because he has

a wife. That is a view of life I dislike; we are civilised people, Mr.

Jayne and I.”

3

CIVILISED PEOPLE

And civilised they were, for the rest of the summer of 1890. In

November Rome asked Mr. Jayne, who was having tea with her alone,

whether he was visiting Russia shortly. He replied in the negative, for

he was, he said, too busy working on his new book to get abroad.

“And further,” he added, in the same composed tone, “I prefer to remain

in the same country with you. I can’t, you see, do without you at hand.

You know how often I consult you, and talk things over with you....

And further still,” continued Mr. Jayne, quietly, “I love you.”

So saying, he rose and stood over her, bending down with his hands on

her shoulders and his pale face close to hers.

“My dearest,” he said. “Let us stop pretending. _Shall_ we stop

pretending? Does our pretence do us or anyone else any good? I love you

more than any words I’ve got can say. You know it, you know it ... dear

heart....”

He drew her up from her chair and looked into her face, and that was

the defeat of their civilisation, for at their mutual touch it broke in

disorder and fled. He kissed her mouth and face and hands, and passion

rose about them like a sea in which they drowned.

Five minutes later they talked it out, sitting with a space between

them, for “While you hold me I can’t think,” Rome said. She passed her

hand over her face, which felt hot and stung from the hard pressing

of his mouth, and tried to assemble her thoughts, shaken by the first

passion of her thirty-one agreeable and intelligent years.

“I’m not,” she said, “going to take you away from your wife. Not in any

way. What we have must make no difference to what _she_ has....”

It will be seen, therefore, that their conversation was as old as the

world, and scarcely worth recording. It pursued the normal lines. That

is to say, Mr. Jayne replied, “She has nothing of me that matters,”

rather inaccurately classing under the head of what did not matter, his

children, his name, and the right to his bed and board. As is the habit

in these situations, Mr. Jayne meant that what mattered, and what Mrs.

Jayne had not got, was his love, his passion, his spirit and his soul.

These, he indicated, were Rome’s alone, as Rome’s were his.

What to do about it was the question. One must, said Rome, holding

herself in, continue to be civilised. And what, enquired Mr. Jayne, is

civilisation--this arbitrary civilisation of society’s making, that

binds the spirit’s freedom in chains? It was all founded on social

expediency, on primitive laws to protect inheritance, to safeguard

property.... Had Rome read Professor Westermarck’s great work on the

history of human marriage? Rome had. What of it? The point was, there

was Mrs. Jayne in Russia, and Mr. and Mrs. Jayne’s two children. These

were Mr. Jayne’s obligations, and nothing he and she did must come

between him and them. That laid firmly down, she and Mr. Jayne could

do what they liked; that was how Rome saw it. One must keep one’s

contracts, and behave as persons of honour and breeding should behave.

“As I see it,” said Rome, “the fact that we love each other needn’t

prevent our being friends. We are not babies....”

“Friends,” said Mr. Jayne, in agreement, doubt, scepticism, contempt,

hope, or bitter derision, as the case might be.

And more they said, until they were interrupted by the entrance of Mrs.

Garden’s papa, the Dean, who had called in his brougham to see mamma,

but, mamma being out at Vicky’s, he sat down between these two white,

disturbed, hot-eyed and shaken persons and began to talk of Mr. Parnell

and his disgrace.

Grandpapa opined that Mr. Parnell had no more place in public life.

Mr. Jayne replied that anyhow it appeared that he would be hounded out

of it.

“Cant,” he said. “Truckling to nonconformist cant and humbug and

Catholic bigotry. A man’s private affairs have nothing to do with his

public life. It’s contemptible, the way the Nationalists have caved in

to that old humbug, Gladstone.”

Grandpapa had always thought Gladstone a humbug (though not so old if

it came to that; he himself was eighty-five and going strong), but with

the rest of Mr. Jayne’s thesis he was in disagreement. Our political

leaders must not be men of notoriously loose lives. The sanctity of the

home must, at all costs, be upheld.

“O’Shea’s home,” said Mr. Jayne, “never had much of that. Neither

O’Shea nor Mrs. O’Shea was great on it.”

“For that matter,” Rome joined in, crisp and bland, as if civilisation

had not met its débâcle in the drawing-room but a half hour since,

“for that matter, what homes _have_ sanctity? Why do people think

that sanctity is particularly to be found in homes, of all places? And

can a bachelor’s or spinster’s home have it, or do the people in the

home need to be married? What is it, this curious _sanctity_,

that bishops write to the papers about, and that is, they say, being

attacked all the time, and is so easily destroyed? In what homes is it

to be found? I have often wondered.”

“Whom God hath joined together,” replied grandpapa, readily. “That is

the answer to your question, my dear child, is it not?”

“O God,” muttered Mr. Jayne, but probably rather as an ejaculation than

as a sceptical comment on the authority behind matrimony.

Whichever it was, grandpapa did not care about the phrase, and looked

at him sharply. He believed Mr. Jayne to be an unbeliever, and did not

greatly care for the tone of his writings. However, they conversed

intelligently for a while about the future of the Irish party before

Mr. Jayne rose to go.

“Come into the hall,” his eyes said. But Rome did not go into the hall.

He was gone. Rome sat still in the shadow of the window. His steps

echoed down the square.

“Do you see much of that young fellow, my dear?” grandpapa asked, in

his old rumbling voice.

“Oh, yes,” said Rome, feeling exalted and light in the head, and as if

she had drunk alcohol. “Oh, yes, grandpapa. We are great friends.”

“Do your parents like him, my child?”

“Oh, yes, grandpapa. Very much. Oh, I think everyone likes him. He is a

great success, you know.”

She was talking foolishly and at random, straying about the room,

taking up books, wishing grandpapa would go.

Grandpapa grunted. Rather queer goings on, he thought, for Rome to be

entertaining young men by herself when her papa and mamma were out.

What were unmarried young women coming to? If mamma had gone on like

that thirty years ago.... But this, of course, was 1890--desperately

modern. Grandpapa, though he not infrequently wrote to the

_Times_, the _Spectator_ and the _Guardian_, to say how

modern the current year was (for, of course, current years always were

and are), did not always remember it. The untrammelled (it seemed to

him untrammelled) freedom of intercourse enjoyed by modern young men

and women (especially young women) continually shocked him. Grandpapa

had enjoyed much free and untrammelled intercourse in his own distant

youth, during the Regency, but fifty years of Victorianism had since

intervened, and he believed that intercourse should not now be free. He

could not understand his granddaughter, Stanley, who was continually

abusing what she called the conventional prudery of the age; what

further liberties, in heaven’s name, did young women want? To do her

justice, Rome did not join in this cry for further emancipation; Rome

accepted the conventions, with an acquiescent, ironic smile. There they

were: why make oneself hot with kicking over the traces? One accepted

the social follies and codes....

(“On the contrary,” Maurice would say, “I refuse them.”

“It will make no difference to them either way,” said Rome.)

Rome, a good _raconteuse_ and mimic, proceeded to entertain

grandpapa with an account of a dinner party at which she had been

taken in by that curious and noisy member of Parliament, Mr. Augustus

Conybeare, whom grandpapa disliked exceedingly.

Then mamma and papa came home, and Rome went upstairs to dress for

another dinner party. Thus do social life and the storm-tossed journey

of the human soul run on concurrently, and neither makes way for the

other.

4

ON THE PINCIO

Through that winter civilisation fought its losing battle with more

primitive forces over the souls and bodies of Miss Garden and Mr.

Jayne.

“There is only one way in which we can meet and be together,” said

Rome, “and that is as friends. There is no other relation possible in

the circumstances. I will be party to no scandal, my best. If we can’t

meet one another with self-control, then we mustn’t meet at all. What

is the use of tilting at the laws of society? There they are, and thus

it is....”

“You make a fetish of society,” said Mr. Jayne, with gloom. “For a

woman of your brains, it is queer.”

“Perhaps,” said Rome.

Then, it becoming apparent that she and Mr. Jayne were not at present

going to meet one another with self-control, Rome went for the winter

to the city of that name, with her papa, whose spiritual home it, of

course, now was. Mrs. Garden did not go, because she desired to be in

at the birth of Stanley’s baby.

But civilisation had not reckoned sufficiently with the forces of

emotion. These led Mr. Jayne, but a few weeks after Miss Garden had

departed, to follow her to Italy, and, in fact, to Rome.

So, one bright February morning, he called at the Gardens’ hotel

pension in the Via Babuino, and found Rome and her papa about to

set forth for a walk on the Pincio. Miss Garden, looking pale, fair

and elegant in a long, fur-edged, high-shouldered cape coat and a

tall, pointed, blue velvet hat beneath which her hair gleamed gold,

received him as urbanely, as coolly, as detachedly as ever; she seemed

to have got her emotions well under control in the month since they

had parted. Mr. Jayne responded to her tone, and all the morning, as

they strolled about with Mr. Garden, they were bland and cool and

amusing; well-bred English visitors, turning interested and satirical

eyes on the fashionable crowds about them, stopping now and then to

exchange amenities with fellow-strollers, for Mr. Jayne knew Roman

society well, and Mr. Garden had come armed with introductions from

his co-religionists, though, indeed, he was little disposed for much

society, wishing to spend such time as he did not devote to seeing

Rome in studious research at the Vatican library. His daughter was a

little afraid that the Eternal City might seriously disturb his faith,

and that papa might fall under the undeniably fascinating influence

of paganism, which makes so far finer and nobler a show in Rome than

mediæval Christianity. And, indeed, with St. Peter’s papa was not

pleased; he scarcely liked to say so, even to himself, but it did seem

to him to be of a garish hugeness that smacked almost of vulgarity,

and pained his fastidious taste. On the other hand, there were many

old churches of a more pleasing style, and in these his soul found

rest when disturbed by the massive splendours of classical Rome. No;

papa would not become a pagan; he knew too much of pagan corruptions

and cruelties for that. Corruptions and cruelties he admitted, of

course, in the history of Christianity also; corruption and cruelty

are, indeed, properties of the unfortunate and paradoxical human race;

but papa was persuaded that only defective Christians (after all,

Christians always are and have been defective) were corrupt and cruel,

whereas the most completely pagan of pagans had been so, and paganism

is, indeed, rather an incentive than a discouragement to vice. In

fact, papa was, by this time, thoroughly biassed in this matter, and

so was probably safe. Or, anyhow, so his daughter hoped. For it would,

there was no denying it, be exceedingly awkward were papa to become

a pagan, quite apart from the preliminary anguish with which his soul

would be torn were he to be shaken from his present faith. Were there

pagan places of worship in London? Probably papa would have to build a

private chapel, and in it erect images of his new gods.... For pagans

had never been happy without much worship; they had been the most

religious of believers. Except, of course, the lax and broad-church

pagans, and probably papa, if he got paganism at all, would get it

strong.

So Rome was quite pleased that papa should be walking on the Pincio

with her, getting a good view of the dome of St. Peter’s, which is

the finest and most impressive part of that cathedral, rather than

wandering about the Forum and peering into the new excavations,

murmuring scraps of Latin as he peered.

In the warm, sunlit air, with the band playing Verdi and the gay crowds

promenading, and the enchanted city spread all a-glitter beneath them,

Rome was caught into a deep and intoxicated joy. The bitter, restless

struggling of the last months gave way to peace; the happy peace that

looks not ahead, but rejoices in the moment. The tall and gay companion

strolling at her side, so fluent in several languages, so apt to catch

a half-worded meaning, to smile at an unuttered jest, so informed, so

polished, so of the world worldly ... take Mr. Jayne as merely that,

and she had her friend and companion back again, which was deeply

restful and vastly stimulating. And beneath that was her lover, whom

she loved; beneath his urbane exterior his passion throbbed and leaped,

and his deep need of her cried, and in her the answering need cried

back.

5

IN THE CAMPAGNA

Together they walked in the Campagna, in the bright soft wash of the

February sun. Mr. Jayne had been in Rome a week, and they had gone

out to Tivoli together, without papa, who was reading in the Vatican

library. They lunched at the restaurant by the waterfalls, then

explored Hadrian’s Villa with the plan in Murray, and quarrelled about

which were the different rooms. Failing to agree on this problem, they

sat down in the Triclinium and looked at the view and discussed the

more urgent problem of their lives.

“You must,” said Mr. Jayne, “come to me. It is the only right and

reasonable way out. We’ll live in no half-way house, with secrecy

and concealment. We should both hate that. But Olga will not divorce

me; it’s no use thinking of that. In her view, and that of all her

countrywomen, husbands are never faithful. The infidelity of a husband

is no reason to a Russian woman for divorce. Unless she herself wants

to marry another man, and that is likely enough, in Olga’s case, to

happen. We are nothing to each other, she and I. Such love as we

had--and it was never love--is dead long ago. We don’t even like each

other.”

“Curious,” mused Rome, “not to foresee these developments at the

outset, before taking the serious step of marriage. Marriage is an

action too freely practised and too seldom adequately considered.”

“That is so,” Mr. Jayne agreed. “But, and however that may be, what

is done is done. What we now have to consider, however inadequately,

is the future. It is very plain that you and I must be together.

Yes, yes, yes. Nothing else is plain, but that is. The one light in

chaos.... My dearest love, you can’t be denying that. It is the only

conceivable thing--the only thinkable way out.”

“Way out,” said Rome. “I think, rather, a way in.... Which way do we

take--out or in?” Musingly she looked over the Campagna to blue hills,

and Mr. Jayne, his eyes on her white profile, on the gleam of gold hair

beneath her dark fur cap, and on her slender hands that clasped her

knees, leant closer to her and replied, with neither hesitation nor

doubt, “In.”

“Indeed,” said Miss Garden, “these questions can’t be decided in this

rough and ready, impetuous manner. The mind must have its share in

deciding these important matters, not merely the emotions and desires.

Or else what is the good of education, or of having learnt to think

clearly at all?”

“Very little,” said Mr. Jayne. “However, in this case the more clearly

one thinks the more plain the way to take becomes. It is confused and

muddled thinking that would lead us to conform to convention and give

one another up, merely because of a social code.”

“The social code,” said Miss Garden, “though as a rule I prefer to

observe it, is in this case neither here nor there. I have ruled that

out; cleared the field, so to speak, for the essentials. Now, what

_are_ the essentials? Your wife, whom you have undertaken to live

with ...”

“By mutual agreement, we have given that up long since,” said Mr.

Jayne, not for the first time.

“... and your children, whom you have brought into the world and are

responsible for.”

“They are their mother’s. She lets me see nothing of them. She is

determined to bring them up as Russian patriots.”

“Still, they are half yours, and it is a question whether you should

not claim your share. In fact, I think it is certain that you should.

If you broke off completely from your wife and lived with me, your

right in them would be gone.... Then, of course, there is the ethical

point as to your contract, the vows you made to your wife on marriage,

which positively exclude similar relations with anyone else while she

remains your wife.”

“I ought never to have made them. I was a fool. The wrong is in the

vows, not in their breach.”

“Granted that they were wrong, that does not settle the further point

of whether, having been made, with every circumstance of deliberation,

they should not be kept.”

“O God,” said Mr. Jayne. “You talk, my dearest, like a pedant, a prig,

or a book of logic. Don’t you _care_, Rome?”

“You know,” said Miss Garden, “that I do.... No, don’t touch me. I

must think it out. I _am_ a pedant and a prig, if you like, and

I _must_ think it out, not only feel. But now I will think of

the other side. Oh, yes, I know there is another side. We love one

another, and we can neither of us be happy, or fully ourselves, without

being together. Without one another we shall be incomplete, unhappy

and perhaps (not certainly) morally and mentally stunted and warped.

Indeed, I see that as clearly as you can. Further, our being together

may, as you say, not hurt your wife; she may not care in the least. As

to that, I simply don’t know. How could I? She may even let you still

have a share in your children. Russian points of view are so different

from ours. But one should be certain of that before taking any steps.

Then there are still points on the other side, that we have to think

of. Any children we might have would be illegitimate. That would be

hard on them.”

“In point of fact,” said Mr. Jayne, “it is largely illusory, that

hardship. And in this case they (if they should ever exist) needn’t

even know. You would take my name. Who is to go on remembering that I

have a Russian wife? Very few people in England even know it. We should

soon live down any talk there might be.”

“And then,” went on Rome, ticking off another point on her fingers,

“there are my papa and mamma, whom we should hurt very badly. In their

eyes what we are discussing isn’t a thing to be discussed at all; it is

a deadly sin, and there’s an end of it. They are very fond of me, and

they would be terribly unhappy. That too is a point to be considered.”

“Perhaps. But not to be given much weight to. It’s damnable to have

to hurt the people we love--but, after all, we can’t let our parents

rule our lives. We’re living in the eighteen nineties; we’re not

mid-Victorians. And we have to make up our own minds what to do with

our lives. We can’t be tied up by anyone else’s views, either those

of our relations or of society in general. We have to make our own

judgments and choices, all along. And parents shouldn’t be hurt by

their children’s choices, even if they do think them wrong; they

should live and let live. All this judging for other people, and being

hurt, is poisonous. It’s a relic of the patriarchal system--or the

matriarchal.”

Miss Garden smiled.

“Possibly. I should say, rather, that it was incidental to parental

affection, and always will be. Anyhow, there it is.... They don’t, of

course, even believe that divorce is right, let alone adultery.” Her

cool, thoughtful enunciation of the last word gave it its uttermost

value. Miss Garden never slurred or shirked either words or facts.

“But that,” she added, “doesn’t, of course, dispose of our lives.

That’s only one point out of many. The question is, what is, now and

ultimately, the right and best thing for me and you to do. You’ve

decided. Well, I haven’t--yet. Give me a week, Francis. I promise I

won’t take more.”

“You are so beautiful,” said Mr. Jayne, changing the subject and

speaking inaccurately, and lifted her hands to his face. “You are so

beautiful. There is no one like you. You are like the golden sickle

moon riding over the world. You hold my life in your two hands. Be kind

to it, Rome. _I love you, I love you, I love you._ If we deny our

love we shall be blaspheming. Love like ours transcends all barriers,

and well you know it. Take your week, if you must, only decide rightly

at the end of it, my heart’s glory. The fine thing we shall make of

life together, you and I, the fine, precious, lovely thing. It’s been

so poor and common--full of bickerings and jars and commonness and

discontents....

_O Rome!_...”

6

RUSSIAN TRAGEDY

The Russian woman, with her two beautiful children and her stout,

dazed, unhappy mamma, waited in the hall of the flat of Mr. Jayne.

They were weary, having travelled across Russia and from Russia to

London, to find Mr. Jayne, and then, having learnt that he was in Rome,

straight from London thither, spending two nights in the train and

arriving this morning, more alive than dead (for who, this side of the

grave, is not?) but very tired. The two children were so tired that

they whimpered disagreeably, and their mother often wiped their noses

with her travel-grimed handkerchief, but not so often as they required

it.

Olga Petrushka was a beautiful woman, square-headed, with a fair

northern skin and large deep blue eyes, black-lashed, and massive

plaits of flaxen hair. Her eyes looked wild and haunted, for Russians

have such dreadful experiences, and her cheeks were hollowed; she

looked like a woman who has seen death and worse too close, as indeed

she had. She was shabbily dressed in an old fur dolman over a scarlet

dress and a fur cap. The two children were bundled up in bearskin

coats, like little animals. Her little dancing bears, she would call

them in lighter moments. Ever and anon she would fling them sweet cakes

out of her reticule, and they would gobble them greedily.

But Nina Naryshkin, their grandmother, sat and rocked to and fro, to

and fro, and said nothing but, “Aie, aie, aie.”

The hall porter turned on the little family a beaming and kindly eye.

They were, in all probability, thieves, and not, as the Russian lady

asserted, the family of Signor Jayne, so he would not admit them into

Signor Jayne’s rooms, but he liked to see their gambols.

Every now and then the younger lady would say, in Russian, “Cheer

up, then, little children. Your father will soon be here and he will

give you more sweet cakes. Aha, how your dirty little mouths water to

hear it! Boris, you rascal, don’t pull your sister’s pigtail. What

children! They drive me to despair.”

And then Mr. Jayne arrived. He came in at the open hall door, with a

tall, fair English lady, and he was saying to her, “If you don’t mind

coming in for a moment, I will get you the book.”

The hall porter stepped forward with a bow, and indicated in the

background Mrs. Jayne, her mamma, and the little Jaynes.

What a moment for Mr. Jayne! What a moment for Mrs. Jayne, her mamma

and the little Jaynes! What a moment for Miss Garden! What a moment for

the hall porter, who loved both domestic reunions and quarrels, and was

as yet uncertain which this would be (it might even be both), but above

all loved moments, and that it would certainly be.

And so it proved. Where Russians are, there, one may say, moments are,

for these live in moments.

Olga Petrushka stepped forward with a loud cry and outstretched arms,

and exclaimed in Russian, “Ah, Franya Stefanovitch!” (one of the names

she had for him, for Russians give one another hundreds of names each,

and this accounts in part for the curious, confused state in which this

nation is often to be found)--“I have found you at last.”

Mr. Jayne, always composed, retained his calm. He shook hands with his

wife and mother-in-law and addressed them in French.

“How are you, my dear Olga? Why did you not tell me you wanted to see

me? I would have come to Moscow. It is a long way to have come, with

your mother and the children too. How are you, my little villains?”

“Ah, my God,” said Mrs. Jayne, also now in French, which she

spoke with rapidity and violence. “How could I stay another day in

Russia? The misery I have been through? Poor little papa--Nicolai

Nicolaivitch--they have arrested him for revolutionary propaganda and

sent him to Siberia, with my brother Feodor. They had evidence also

against mamma and myself and would have arrested us, and only barely we

escaped in time, with the little bears. The poor cherubs--kiss them,

Franya. They have been crying for their little father and the love and

good food and warm house he will give them. For now they and we have no

one but you. ‘Go to England, Olga,’ papa said as they took him. ‘It is

the one safe country. The English are good to Russian exiles, and your

husband will take care of you and mamma and the little ones....’ But

you are with a lady, Franya. Introduce us.”

“I beg your pardon. Miss Garden, my wife, and Madame Naryshkin, her

mother. Miss Garden and her father are great friends of mine.... If you

will go into my rooms and wait for me a moment, Olga, I will see Miss

Garden to her pension and return.”

“No,” said Miss Garden, in her fluent and exquisite French. “No, I

beg of you. I will go home alone; indeed, it is no way. Good-evening,

Madame Jayne and Madame Naryshkin.”

Mr. Jayne went out into the street with her. His unhappy eyes met hers.

“To-morrow morning,” he muttered, “I shall call.... This alters

nothing.... I will come to-morrow morning and we will talk.”

“Yes,” said Miss Garden. “We must talk.”

Mr. Jayne went back into the hall and escorted his family upstairs to

his rooms.

“Aie, aie, aie,” shuddered Olga Petrushka, flinging off her fur coat

and cap and leaping round the room in her red dress, like a Russian

in a novel. “Let’s get warm. Come, little bears”--she spoke German

now--“to your papa’s arms. Kiss him, Katya; hug him, Boris. Tell him

we have come across Europe to be with him, now that all else is gone.

Forgive and forget, eh, Franya Maryavitch? You and I must keep one

another warm.... Aie, aie, aie, my poor papa,” she wailed in Russian.

“I keep seeing his face as they took him, and my poor Feodor’s. As

to mamma, she is dazed; she will never get over it. We must keep her

always with us, poor little mamma.... Tea at once, Franya. I am going

to be sick,” she added in Magyar, and was.

Mr. Jayne laid his wife on his bed and took off her shoes and bathed

her forehead, while she moaned in Polish. Then he made tea for her and

the children and his mother-in-law, who sat heavily in a chair and

drank five cups, and looked at him with drowsy, inimical eyes, saying

never a word. He felt like a dead man, in a world full of ghosts. Who

were these, who had this claim upon him? Their clinging hands were

pulling him down, out of life into a tomb. The February evening shadows

lay coldly on his heart. These poor distraught women, these little

children--he must take infinite care of them, and let them lack for

nothing, but he must not let them come close into his life; they would

throttle it. His life, his true life, was with Rome. Rome, the gallant,

fastidious dandy, with her delicate poise, her pride, her cool wit and

grace. Not with this violent, unhappy, inconsequent Slav, chattering in

several tongues upon his bed.

To-morrow he would go and talk to Rome ... explain to Rome....

7

ENGLISH TRAGEDY

Miss Garden received Mr. Jayne. Neither had slept much, for Mr. Jayne

had given his bed to his family and lain himself on a horsehair couch,

and Miss Garden had been troubled by her thoughts. Their faces were

pale and shadowed and heavy-eyed.

Miss Garden said, “This is the end, of course. I shan’t need a week

now. Fate has intervened very opportunely.”

“No,” said Mr. Jayne, with passion. “No. Nothing is changed. For God’s

sake, don’t think that our situation is changed. It is not. She wants

protection and security and a home, and I will provide all those for

her and her mother and the children. Me she does not want. They shall

have everything they want. But I shall not live with them.”

“You still think that you and I can live together?” Miss Garden was

sceptical of his optimism. “I don’t think your wife would tolerate

that. No, Frank, it’s no use. They belong to you. They need you. I

can’t come between you. It would be heartless and selfish. Imagine the

situation for a moment ... it is impossible.”

They both imagined it. Mr. Jayne shuddered, like a man very cold.

“You don’t want to be involved in such a--such a melodrama,” he said,

bitterly.

“Put it at that if you like. I take it we are neither of us fond of

melodrama. But, apart from that, I said all along, and meant it, that

if your wife wants you I can’t take you. She has first claim.”

“I shall not live with Olga Petrushka and her mother.”

“That’s your own affair, of course. You are very likely right, since

you don’t get on well together. But you must see that you and I

can’t....”

Miss Garden stopped, for her voice began to shake. How she loved him!

She pressed her hands together in her lap till the rings bruised her

fingers.

Mr. Jayne gazed at her gloomily, observing her lightly poised body,

slim and elegant in a dark blue taffeta dress which stood out behind

below the waist in a kind of shelf, and made her shape rather like that

of a swan. He saw her slight, anguished hands that hurt each other, and

the pale tremor of her face.

“She’s been through hell, and she wants you,” said Miss Garden, trying

to keep control.

“I tell you I can’t live with her, nor she with me. Do you want to turn

my life into a tragi-comic opera?”

“Most life is a tragi-comic opera,” said Rome, trying to smile.

“Perhaps all.”

“But you’re resolved anyhow to keep yours clear of my tragi-comedies,”

he flung at her.

Then he apologised.

“I don’t mean that; I don’t know what I’m saying.... Oh, I won’t press

you now to decide. We’ll wait, Rome. You’ll see, in a month or so, how

things have arranged themselves--how easy it will all be. Olga will

have recovered her balance by then; she changes from hour to hour, like

all Russians. In a few weeks she will be tired of me and want to be in

Paris, or back in Russia. She doesn’t really want me; it’s only that

she is unstrung by trouble. Upset; that’s what she is. All I ask you to

do is to wait.”

“No, Frank. It can never be, unless she goes sometime to live with

someone else--some other man. Otherwise she would be likely, even if

she left you for a time, to want you again at intervals. I can’t make a

third.... You see, whatever happens now, your family must always be a

real fact to me, not an abstraction. I’ve seen them.... Katya is just

like you--your chin and eyes.... The children love you very much; I saw

that.... And she loves you, too....”

“She does not. That’s not love--not as I know love.”

“As to that, we all know love in different ways, I suppose.... Truly,

Francis, I have quite decided. I can’t live with you.... No, no,

don’t....”

He was holding her in his arms and kissing her face, her lips, her

eyes, muttering entreaties.

“If you loved me you’d do it.”

“I do love you, and I shan’t do it.”

“I’m asking nothing dishonourable of you. You don’t think it wrong on

general principles; yesterday you were willing to consider it. You’re

just refusing life for a quixotic whim ... refusing, denying life....

Rome, you can’t do it. Don’t you know, now you’re in my arms, that you

can’t, that it would be to deny the best in us?”

“What’s the best, what’s the worst? I don’t know, nor do you. I’m not

an ethicist. All I know is that your wife, while she wants you, or

thinks she wants you, has first claim. It’s a question of fairness and

decent feeling.... Or bring it down, if you like, to a question of

taste. Perhaps that is the only basis there really is for decisions of

this sort for people like us.”

“Taste. That’s a fine cry to mess up two lives by. I’d almost rather

you were religious and talked of the will of God. One could respect

that, at least.”

“I can’t do that, as I happen not to be sure whether God exists. And

it would make nothing simpler really, since one would then have to

discover what one believed the will of God to be. Don’t do religious

people the injustice of believing that anything is simpler or easier

for them; it’s more difficult, since life is more exacting.... But it

comes to the same thing; all these processes of thought lead to the

same result if applied by the same mind. It depends on the individual

outlook. And this is mine.... Oh, don’t make it so damnably difficult

for us both, my dearest....”

Miss Garden, who never swore and never wept, here collapsed into tears,

all her urbane breeding broken at last. He consoled her so tenderly, so

pitifully, so mournfully, that she wept the more for love of him.

“Go now,” she said at last. “We mustn’t meet again till we can both do

it quietly, without such pain. Papa and I are going back to London next

week. Write to me sometime and let me know how you do and where you

are. My dearest Frank....”

8

FOUNDERED

Rome was alone. She sat in a hard Italian chair, quite still, and felt

cold and numb, and as if she had died. Drowned she felt, under deep

cold seas of passion and of pain. Wrecked and foundered and drowned,

at the bottom of grey seas. Something cried, small and weak and hurt

within her, and it was the voice of love, or (as Mr. Jayne would have

it) of life; life which she had denied and slain. Never had she greatly

loved before; never would she greatly love again; and the great love

she now had she was slaying. That was what the hurt voice cried in

her as she sat alone in the great, bare, chilly room, the sad little

scaldino on the floor at her feet.

She was dry-eyed now that she was alone, and had no more to face Mr.

Jayne’s love and pain. Her own she could bear. Harder and harder and

cooler and more cynical she would grow, as she walked the world alone,

leaving love behind. Was that the choice? Did one either do the decent,

difficult thing, and wither to bitterness in doing it, or take the

easy road, the road of joy and fulfilment, and be thereby enriched and

fulfilled? And what was fulfilment, and what enrichment? What, ah,

what, was this strange tale that life is; what its meaning, what its

purpose, what its end?

Rome did not know. She knew one thing only. Frustration, renunciation,

death--whether you called your criterion the will of God, or social

ethics, or a quixotic whim, or your own private standards of decency

and taste, it led you to these; led you to the same sad place, where

you lay drowned, dead beneath bitter seas.

Mid-day chimed over the city. Miss Garden rose, and put on her outdoor

things, and went forth to meet her papa for lunch. Life moves on,

through whatever deserts, and one must compose oneself to meet it,

never betraying one’s soul.

9

VICKY ON THE WORLD

“It’s good to have you back again, my Rome,” Vicky said. “I miss you

at my parties. There are lots of new people I want you to meet. An

adorable Oxford youth, whom you’ll find after your own heart. Already

he writes essays like a polished gentleman of the world, and he a

round-faced cherub barely out of school. A coming man, my dear, mark

my words. Such brilliance, such style, such absurd urbanity! Denman

introduced him. I prefer him enormously to Denman’s other cronies--that

affected Mr. Le Gallienne for instance, and that conceited young

Beardsley. Not but that young Beardsley, too, has a wit. I’ll say that

for Denman--he keeps a witty table.... Well, have you brought papa back

still a good Roman? Father Stanton says, by the way, we’re to call the

Pope’s church in this country the Italian Mission. It’s quite time papa

had a change of creed, anyhow; I begin to fear for his health since he

read ‘Robert Elsmere’ and wasn’t driven by it to honest doubt.”

“Neither,” said Rome, “was he driven by the Forum to the pagan gods.

One begins to think that papa is settling down.”

“Oh, I trust not. Dear papa, he’s not old yet.... What a country you

have come back to, though, my dear. Strikes everywhere--dockers,

railwaymen, miners, even tailors.... Maurice is perfectly happy,

encouraging them all. But, darling Maurice, I’m _seriously_ afraid

he may cut Amy’s throat one day. Serve her right, the little cat. If

I were Maurice I’d beat her. Perhaps he will one day, when he’s not

quite sober. I wish she’d run off with one of the vulgar men she flirts

with, and leave him in peace. _He’ll_ never run off, because he

won’t leave the children to her. Poor old boy, he’s so desperately up

against things the whole time. Mamma’s miserable about him. I know,

though she never says a word. However, she’s consoled by all her nice

grandchildren. Even grandpapa, you know, admits that the deplorable

modern generation is doing its duty as regards multiplication. Why

_do_ old Bible clergymen like grandpapa think it so important to

produce more life? One would think, one really _would_ think,

that there was plenty of that already. But no. Be fruitful, they say:

multiply: replenish the earth. It says so in Genesis, and clergymen of

grandpapa’s generation can’t get away from Genesis. Poor grandpapa.

He’s writing to the _Guardian_, as usual, about the Modern Woman.

She’s dreadfully on his mind. Latchkeys. He doesn’t think women

ought to have them. Why not? He doesn’t explain. Men may open their

front doors with keys, but women must, he thinks, always ring up the

unfortunate maids. He can think of no reasons why; he is past reasons,

but not past convictions. What, he asked in Stanley’s drawing-room the

other day, is to take the place, for women, of the old sanctities and

safeties?” “The new safeties, I imagine, sir,” Denman replied. “Grandpa

grunted and frowned; he thinks women on bicycles really indecent, poor

old dear. As a matter of fact, Denman does, too--at least ungraceful,

which to him is the same thing. But Rome, my dear, you simply must

get one. We’re all doing it now. It’s glorious; the nearest approach

to wings permitted to men and women here below. Intoxicating! Stanley

lives on hers, now her son has safely arrived. And it’s transforming

clothes. Short jackets and cloth caps are coming in. Bustles are

no more. And, my dear--_bloomers_ are seen in the land! Yes,

actually. Stanley cycles in them; she looks delightful, whatever

Denman says. No, I don’t. Charles doesn’t approve. Conspicuous, he

thinks. And, of course, so it is. Well, men will be men. They’ll never

be civilised where women are concerned, most of them. But the poor

silly old world really does march a little. We’re all getting most

thrillingly _fin-de-siècle_. I wonder if all times have been as

deliriously modern, while they lasted, as our times.”

“Probably,” said Rome. “It’s one of the more certain, though more

ephemeral, qualities that times have. I wonder at what age grandpapa

began deploring it. Not during the Regency or under William the Fourth,

I imagine. I suppose _his_ grandpapa was deploring it then.”

“Oh, and there’s another shocking female modernism become quite common

this winter, my dear. _Cigarettes!_ I haven’t perpetrated that

myself yet, as Charles thinks that unfeminine too, and I’m sure the

children would steal them and be sick. Besides, I don’t think it really

becoming to an elegant female. But Stanley does. That literary set of

hers is a funny mixture of forwardness and reaction. Forward women

and reactionary men, I think. Grandpapa hasn’t tumbled to Stanley’s

cigarettes yet. My hat, when he does! Well, it’s a funny world. I

suppose my daughters will grow up smoking like their brothers, without

thinking twice about it.... The darlings, they’re all so troublesome

just now. That kindergarten can’t or won’t teach Imogen to speak

properly. If she gabbles like this at three, what will she do at

thirty? And Hughie drawls and contradicts....”

Their talk then ran along family lines.

10

STANLEY AND DENMAN

Stanley pedalled swiftly, a sturdy, attractive figure in serge

knickerbockers (“bloomers” they were called while that graceful and

sensible fashion of our ancestresses endured), along a smooth, sandy

road between pine woods. The April sunlight flickered on the pale brown

needle-strewn road; the light wind sang in the pines and blew dark

curls of hair from under Stanley’s sailor-hat brim. Her bicycle basket

was full of primroses. Her round, brown cheeks glowed pink; her lips

were parted in a low, tuneless song (tuneless because Stanley could

never get a tune right). It expressed her happiness, relieved the

pressure of her joy at being alive. Such a day! Such a bicycle! Such

sweet and merry air!

She stopped, got off her bicycle, leant it against a gate, and lay

down flat on her back in the wood, staring up into the green gloom.

London, Denman, her baby, were far off. She was alone with beauty. She

was passionately realising the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its

still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory,

that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close. To savour the

loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed

sea, and then to pass on to the next--that was life.

Then, presently, the moment lost its keenness, and she was no longer

alone with beauty. Her husband and her baby broke the charmed circle,

looking in. How she loved them! But they took from her something;

her loneliness, that queer, eerie separateness, that only bachelors

and spinsters know. They need not, to know it, be unattached, virgin

bachelors and spinsters; love does not spoil separateness, but

households do.

Stanley rose to her feet, brushed the pine-needles from her neat

clothes and untidy hair, put on her sailor-hat and got on her bicycle

again. Before her there was a long slope down. To take it, brakeless,

feet up on the rest, was like flying. Stanley was no longer a mystic, a

wife or a mother; she was a hoydenish little girl out for a holiday.

She reached Weybridge station and entrained for London in one of

the halting, smoke-palled, crawling trains of the period. In it she

read Ibsen’s “Doll’s House,” for she and Denman were going to see it

next week at the Independent Theatre. What a play! What moralising!

What purpose! What deplorable solemnity! There seemed, to the set of

light-hearted and cynical æsthetes among whom Stanley moved, nothing

to do about “A Doll’s House” but to laugh at it. These strange, solemn

Scandinavians! Yet numbers of cultured readers in England took it

seriously, as cultured English readers love to take foreign plays. They

found it impressive and fine, almost a gospel. Further, the bourgeois,

the Philistines, the people who are inaccurately said to spend more

time than the elect _in the street_ (why is this believed of

them?), mocked at it, so that there must be something in it, for, as

has been well said (or if it has not, it should have been), majorities

are always wrong.

“The fact is,” said Stanley to herself, “the fact is, cultivated people

like tracts. Especially cultivated women like tracts about their own

emancipation. And, of course, in a way, they’re right.... But plays

with purposes....”

It will be observed that Stanley, whom nature had made to welcome

purposes wherever found, had well assimilated the spirit of her

literary group, which preferred art to be for the sake of art only. She

had, as Vicky said of her, so much Zeitgeist. What seemed to her and

her friends the good drama of the moment was light social comedy, full

of gay, sparkling nonsense and epigrams for the sake of epigrams. Or

the more profound and mordant wit of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, who had

lately begun to write plays. Mr. Shaw had, indeed, purpose, but his wit

carried it off.

Waterloo. Even the trains of 1891 got there at last. Stanley went to

look for her bicycle. Finding it and wheeling it off, she felt herself

to be one of the happiest persons in the station. She had everything. A

bicycle, a husband, a baby, a house, freedom, love, literary and social

opportunity, charming friends. Life was indeed felicitous to such as

she.

“Progress of Royal Labour Commission,” the newspaper placards shouted.

“More L.C.C. scandals. Free brass bands for the poor!”

Stanley frowned. It was a damnable world, after all. A vulgar,

grudging, grabbing world. The voice of the press was as the shrill

voice of Amy, the wife of Maurice. “Free brass bands for the poor!”

That was how Amy would say it, with her silly, gibing laugh. Even, a

little, how Irving would say it. But Irving, though he despised the

democratic ways of the London County Council, and free brass bands

for the poor, was not silly or spiteful. He was merely a delightful,

philistine young gentleman on the Stock Exchange.

Stanley bicycled (amid perils less great, less numerous in the year

1891 than now) to Margaretta Street, Chelsea. There was the house,

small, dingy, white, with a green door and a tiny square of front

garden. Stanley found her latchkey, flung open the green door with a

kind of impetuous, happy eagerness, and came face to face with her

husband in the little hall.

“Hullo,” he said, and quizzically surveyed her, up and down, from her

blown hair and flushed cheeks to her neat, roomy knickerbockers and

stout brogues. “Hullo.”

“Hullo, Den. I’ve had the _rippingest_ ride. How’s baby? And

yourself?”

“Both flourish, I believe.... You know we’ve people to dinner to-night?

You’ve not left yourself a great deal of time, have you?... You don’t

look your best, my dear girl, if I may say so.”

“No, I expect not; I’m blown to bits. What’s it matter? Come on, Den,

we must both hurry.”

She ran upstairs, turned hot water into the bath, tiptoed into the

nursery where her son slept, and back to her room. Denman was in his

dressing-room, beyond the open door.

“I’ve had a lovely ride, Den. Weybridge way.”

“Glad you enjoyed it. But lovely’s the wrong word. Anything less lovely

than a woman in those unspeakable garments I never saw. I detest them.

Women ought to wear graceful, trailing things always.... I can’t think

why you _do_ it. Your sense of beauty must be sadly defective.”

“Beauty--oh, well, it’s convenience that matters most, surely. For that

matter, very few modern clothes, male or female, are beautiful. But I

don’t think these are ugly. One can’t trail all the time; it’s a dirty

trick on foot and dangerous on a bicycle.”

“It’s better to be elegant, dirty and dangerous than frumpish, clean

and safe. That’s an epigram. The fact is, women ought never to indulge

in activities, either of body or mind; it’s not their rôle. They can’t

do it gracefully.”

“What do you want them to do then, poor things? Just sit about?”

“Precisely that. You’ve expressed it accurately, if not very

beautifully. An elegant inertia is what is required of women ... what

on earth has that girl done with my black socks?... Any activity

necessary to the human race can be performed by such men as are

prepared to sacrifice themselves. All this feminine pedalling about and

playing ridiculous games and speaking on platforms and writing books

and serving on committees--Lord save us.”

“They’d get awfully fat, your sitting-about females; they wouldn’t be

graceful long. Hurry up, Den, or you’ll be late, not I.”

“We shall both be late. It matters very little. If any of our

guests have the bad taste to be punctual it will serve them right.

Crackanthorpe won’t be punctual, anyhow, he never is.... Make yourself

lovely to-night, Stan; I want to forget those awful bloomers. They make

you look like a horrible joke in _Punch_ about the New Woman.”

“Well, I’d rather look like the New Woman than like the ‘Woman (not

new)’ in the same pictures--sanctimonious idiots.... Really, Den,

you’re silly about women....”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Denman, smothered in his shirt.

Stanley went to the bathroom with a touch of ill-humour, which she sang

away, like a kettle, in clouds of steam.

Denman, hearing the tuneless song, winced in amused distaste. As a

matter of fact, he would have liked a bath himself.

11

A YOUNG MASHER

How agreeable, how elegant and how fastidious were the young mashers

of the early nineties! We shall not look upon their like again. Du

Maurier has immortalised them, beautiful creatures with slim waists

and swallow-tailed evening coats and clear-cut patrician features,

chatting to magnificent women with curled mouths, straight brows and

noble, sweeping figures. The women of those days, if we are to believe

Du Maurier, were nobly built as goddesses, classical-featured, generous

of stature and of bosom, but roped in straitly between ribs and hips,

so as to produce waists that nature never planned. Because of this

compression, they would often suffer greatly, and sometimes fall ill

with anæmia, or cancer, or both, and die in great anguish. But, while

they yet lived and breathed, they were noble and elegant objects, and

their gentlemen friends matched them for grace.

Irving Arthur Penrhyn Garden, aged twenty-eight, earning a comfortable

and honest livelihood on the Stock Exchange, was a masher. He lived in

bachelor chambers in Bruton Street, and was a popular diner-out and

dance-goer, for, though he had not brilliance or fame, he had dark

and slim good looks, cheerfulness, _savoir faire_, and was that

creature so sought of hostesses, an agreeable young bachelor. His

tastes were healthy, his wits sound, his political and religious views

gentlemanly, and his prospects satisfactory. Present correctness and

future prosperity were stamped on Irving Garden; so unlike that queer

fish, his brother Maurice, the Radical journalist, who was stamped

with present incorrectness and future failure. Irving would, no doubt,

make a good marriage sometime. Meanwhile he was enjoying life. He had

no part with the highbrows, the cranks, the fops, the æsthetes or any

other extreme persons; he took no interest in foreign literature,

Home Rule for Ireland, the Woman’s Movement, the Independent Theatre,

labour agitations, the new art, George Meredith, or Russian exiles,

finding them (respectively) uninteresting, impracticable, unattractive,

depressing, paid-by-anarchist-gold, queer, unintelligible and a damned

nuisance. He considered his brother Maurice to be playing the wrong

game; Stanley’s friends he thought an affected, conceited crew, both

the men and the women being unsexed, and for ever writing things one

didn’t want to read. Rome fell too easily into superfluous irony,

so that people never knew when she was pulling their legs, and if

she didn’t marry soon, now that she was over thirty, people would

begin thinking her an old maid. Una was all right, but shouldn’t have

married down. And, though Irving was an affectionate youth and loved

his parents, he did think it a little comic of the pater to change his

religion _quite_ so often; it made people smile. There should be

limits to the number of religions allowed to each man in his life.

Anyhow, what was wrong with the C. of E.? On the whole, Vicky was the

member of his family of whom Irving most approved. Vicky seemed to him

what a woman should be. She looked pretty, dressed and danced well,

was amusing, lived in the right part of London, and gave very decent,

lively little dinners, at which people weren’t always trying to be

clever. Or anyhow _he_ wasn’t asked to the ones at which they

tried to be clever.

And with all this, Irving was no fool. He was doing very well at his

job, had a good sound head, quite well stocked with ideas, and knew his

way about.

Such was Irving Arthur Penrhyn Garden, walking cheerfully, gracefully

and competently through the year of grace 1891.

12

RUSSIAN INTERLUDE

That summer Russian refugees were greatly the mode. They would flee

to Great Britain in shoals from the fearful atrocities of their

government. Those who came were mostly of the intellectual classes (the

less intellectual being too stupid to move), who had been plotting,

or writing, or speaking, or otherwise expressing their distaste for

their country’s constitution, and thus incurring the displeasure of the

authorities. Some of them had been sent to Siberia and had escaped;

others had served their time there and returned; others again had not

yet visited that land, but feared that they might. Once in London, they

found kind English intellectuals eager to take an interest in them,

and plenty of their own countrymen with whom to meet and continue to

plot. It was quite the fashion, in the nineties, to have a few exiled

Russians at your parties. They introduced a new way of taking tea, very

nasty, with lemon and no milk. Vicky’s youngest daughter, Imogen, as

an infant, was once given a sip of this tea from the cup of a hairy

Russian professor, and was sent up to the nursery for spewing it out.

Imogen developed thus an early and unjust distaste for Russians which

did not leave her through life.

In the May of 1891, some new Russian refugees suddenly broke

on London--the unexpected and hitherto little mentioned wife,

mother-in-law and children of Mr. Jayne, the brilliant writer of essays

and memoirs. It had been vaguely rumoured before, that Mr. Jayne had

some kind of Russian wife, but no one had expected her to make an

appearance; it had been supposed that Mr. Jayne, being a man of some

_savoir faire_, would have seen to that. However, here she was, a

large and handsome Russian woman with two large and handsome children,

a stout, tragic, yet conversational mamma, an inconsequent manner of

speech, like that of Russians in novels, and a wide acquaintance with

other Russian refugees, with whom she plotted on Sunday afternoons and

all through Thursday nights. She settled, with her mother and children,

in Mr. Jayne’s flat. Mr. Jayne left the flat to them and took rooms of

his own some way off; he probably thought he would be in the way if he

lived in the flat, where Mrs. Jayne entertained her fellow countrymen

a good deal. Mrs. Jayne accused him bitterly of neglecting her in her

loneliness and grief. He replied that experience had proved that they

were not happy together, and that, therefore, he would provide for the

support of her, her mother and his two children, but would not share a

dwelling with them, which would be both foolish and immoral. He added

that, as she knew, he wished she and her mother would sometime see

their way to living abroad, where they would be much happier. Mrs.

Jayne replied that they intended to live in London until the Day of

Deliverance, by which she meant the day when they could with safety

return to Russia. She then went into hysterics and said that doubtless

he wished her dead.

Mr. Jayne said, “These scenes make life impossible. You drive me to

leave London. I shall live in Italy for the present. My bank will pay

you an allowance, and I will visit you from time to time.”

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

“I don’t hate you. But you know as well as I do what a poor business we

make of living together. It is one of the worst and most unintelligent

forms of immorality for two people who irritate each other to expose

themselves to misery and anger by living together. Therefore, with no

malice, we will live apart.”

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

“If you think so, get a divorce.”

“Never. I will never divorce you. You are my husband, and the father of

my poor little bears. Who ever heard of a faithful husband? We say in

Russia that they are like the golden bear--a fabulous creature. No, I

must put up with your infidelities. But if you leave me for too long I

shall come and find you, and stick a knife into you and your mistress.

I am not patient, Franya.”

“I never supposed that you were, Olga. And I may tell you, though I do

not expect you to believe me, that I have no mistress, and never have

had.”

She laughed at him.

“Ha! ha! Are you the golden bear, then, found at last? Go away with

you, you and your lies. You make me sick.... I wish that you were dead.”

The last part of this conversation took place at the hall door, and, as

Mr. Jayne went out, a young Russian came in. He was Sergius Dmitri, a

cousin of Mrs. Jayne’s, a student, who had also fled from Russia during

the recent troubles. He was a passionate admirer of his cousin, and

wished very much that she would get rid of this cold, unloving English

husband of hers, and come to live with him. He heard her last words to

Mr. Jayne.

“Sergius,” she said, seeing him, “I want you to do me a service. Follow

my husband this afternoon and see where he goes and whom he sees. I

suspect him of having a mistress, and I wish to be certain. If he

has, he will go straight to her now.... I’ll be revenged on him, the

villain. After him, Sergius.”

The young Russian saw Mr. Jayne disappearing round the corner and

hurried after him.

Mr. Jayne went to call on the Gardens. He took Rome out with him, and

they sat on a bench in the garden in Bloomsbury Square.

“You must come away with me,” he said. “We will live in Italy. She

hates me. So does her mother. I can’t live in the same town with them,

let alone the same house. I have told her so. I am going to live in

Italy, and work there at my books. Am I to go alone, or will you come?”

Rome saw across the square the windows of the house of her papa and

mamma. She considered them; she considered also life, in many of its

aspects. She considered international marriages, and unhappy family

life. Love she considered, and hate, the enduringness and the moral and

spiritual consequences of each. She thought of her own happiness, of

Mr. Jayne’s, of Mrs. Jayne’s, of that of their two children. Of social

ethics she thought, and of personal joy, and of human laws, which of

them stand merely on expediency, which on some ultimate virtue. She

thought also of vows, of contracts, and of honour. Having considered

these things, and considering also her very great love for Mr. Jayne

and his for her, she turned to him and opened her lips to reply.

But the words, whatever they were which she would have uttered--and

neither Mr. Jayne nor anyone else was ever to know--were checked before

her tongue formed them. For someone jumped out of the trees behind the

bench on which they sat, and jabbed a long knife into Mr. Jayne’s back,

between the shoulders, and rushed away.

Other people near ran up. Mr. Jayne had fallen choking forward. They

did not dare to remove the knife, but carried him out into the square

and into the Gardens’ house, where he lay on his side on a couch,

unconscious, choking and bleeding at the lungs. The doctor was in

attendance in ten minutes, but could do little, and in twenty Mr. Jayne

was dead.

The assassin had, meanwhile, been captured. He proved to be a Russian,

one Sergius Dmitri, described as a student, living in London. The only

account of his action he gave was that he had known Mr. Jayne in Russia

and disliked him, and that Mr. Jayne had not done his duty by his wife,

who was Sergius Dmitri’s cousin. So Sergius Dmitri had, in a moment of

impulse, knifed Mr. Jayne. No, he could not say that he regretted his

action.

His record showed him to be of the anarchist persuasion, and a thrower

of several bombs in his native land, some of which had reached their

mark. Human life was not, it was apparent, sacred to him. Mrs. Jayne,

prostrated with grief, cursed him for murdering her husband, the father

of her children, who had devotedly loved her and whom she had devotedly

loved. He had never neglected her; that was a fancy of her cousin’s,

who had been a prey to jealousy.

Sergius Dmitri was hanged. Mrs. Jayne continued for a time to live

in her husband’s flat, supported by his money, but, soon tiring of

widowhood, married a fellow-countryman and went, with her mother and

children, to live in Paris.

Miss Garden, who had been so close a witness of the horrid event, and

who was known besides as an intimate friend of Mr. Jayne’s, never

afterwards referred to the affair, even to her relatives. Miss Garden

was no giver of confidences; no one ever learnt how she had felt about

the business or about Mr. Jayne. There were not wanting, of course,

those who said that these two had loved too well, had, in fact, been

involved in an affair. But, in view of Miss Garden’s reputation for

cool inviolability, and of her calm manner after the tragedy, such

rumours obtained little credence. Miss Garden did, indeed, leave London

shortly after the inquest, and spent the rest of the summer in the

country, but she returned in the autumn as apparently bland, cool and

composed as always.

13

NINETY-TWO

Eighteen ninety-two. Mr. Garden was troubled by the death, in January,

of Cardinal Manning, and by the disputes conducted in the press between

Professor Huxley, Mr. Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll concerning the

Book of Genesis and the existence of God, which had, in the eyes of all

these eminent persons, some strange connection one with another. Mrs.

Garden’s father, the Dean, was, on the contrary, troubled by neither of

these events, since he did not care for the Cardinal, knew that the

Professor had not, theologically, a leg to stand on, and the Duke, at

most, one. Grandpapa was more stirred, in the early part of 1892, by

the untimely death of the Duke of Clarence, by the alarming increase of

female bicyclists, and by the prevalent nuisance of that popular song,

“Ta-ra-ra-ra-boomdeay.”

Vicky was stirred by Paderewski, by the influenza epidemic, which all

her children got, and by the new high-shouldered sleeve; Maurice by the

doings of the L.C.C. Progressives, the imminence of the parliamentary

elections, the just claims but ignorant utterances of the Labour

Party, woman’s suffrage, the birth of the _Morning Leader_, and

Mr. Charles Booth’s “Life and Labour in London”; Stanley by woman’s

suffrage, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” the comedies of Mr. Oscar Wilde

and Mr. J. M. Barrie, “The Light That Failed,” and Mr. H. G. Wells;

Irving by golf, Mr. Arthur Roberts, Miss Marie Lloyd and “Sherlock

Holmes”; and Una by the arrival of a new baby and the purchase of a new

hunter.

Rome was not very greatly stirred by any of these things. Into her

old detached amusement at the queer pageant of life had come a faint

weariness, as if nothing were very much worth while. If she thought

anything worth serious comment, she did not reveal it. Life was to

her at this time more than ever a tale told by an idiot, signifying

nothing. She went on her way as usual, reading, seeing pictures,

hearing music, meeting people, talking, smoking, bicycling, leading the

life led by intelligent dilettanti in the small, cultivated nucleus

of a great city. There was nothing to show that she endured the world

with difficulty; that in the early mornings she would wake and lie

helpless, without armour, waiting the onslaught of the new day, and in

the evenings would slip from her armour with a shivering sigh, to drown

engulfed by darkness and the hopeless passion of the night. “Some day,”

she would say to herself, “I shall not mind so much. The edge will get

blunt. Some day ... some day....”

But the black night mocked her, and she could not see that day on the

furthermost dip of the horizon; she could only see Mr. Jayne’s dear,

pale face turned to her with wistful hoping in his grey eyes behind

their glasses, and he was saying, “Am I to go alone, or will you come?”

and then, even as, having considered life, she opened her lips to

reply, there was Mr. Jayne lurching forward, choked with blood, his

question answered, for he was to go alone.

“My dear,” whispered Rome, in tears, to the unanswering, endless

night. “My dear. Come back to me, and I will give you anything and

everything.... But you will never come back, and I can give you nothing

any more.”

And thus she could not see, however far off, that day when she should

not mind so much, that day when the edge should get blunt.

Maurice, in 1892, was against very nearly everything. He was against

the Conservative party, for the usual reasons. He was against the

Liberal party, because Mr. Gladstone opposed woman’s suffrage and

the Labour party and the Eight Hour Day. He was against the Woman’s

Suffrage Bill because it was a class Bill. He was against Mr. Keir

Hardie and the new Labour party because they talked what he considered

sentimental tosh, damaging their own cause, and because Amy, his wife,

echoed it parrot-like. He was against the Social Democratic Federation

for the same reasons, and because it did not prevent its members

from making bombs. He was against the socialist meetings in Hyde Park

and Trafalgar Square which he had been used to approve, because they

too talked tosh. More and more, as Maurice advanced from the heat

of youth into the clear-sighted unsentimentality of middle life (he

was now thirty-five), he disliked tosh, and more and more most of

the world seemed to him to be for ever talking it. The people, the

parliamentarians, the press, the government classes, the imperialists,

the democrats, the middle classes, rivalled one another in the flow of

cant and nonsense they emitted. O God, for clear heads and hard facts,

unmuddled by humbug and romanticism! Almost, Maurice was impelled to

vote for Lord Salisbury, whose cool, cynical hardness was a relief;

but, after all, deeper than his hatred of sentimentalism, lay his

hatred of injustice and economic cruelty and class privilege. He was a

democrat impatient with democracy, a journalist despising journalism,

the product of an expensive education at war with educational

inequality, a politician loathing politics, a husband chafing at his

wife, a child of his age in rebellion against it, an agnostic irritated

by the thoughtful, loquacious agnosticism of his day.

“There seems,” as his mother said of him, “to be no hole into which

Maurice fits. Whereas Stanley fits into them all. They are both too

extreme, dear children. It is neither necessary, surely, to be fighting

everything all one’s time, nor to chase after every wind that blows....

I sometimes think that the best balanced and the most _solid_ of

you all is Una.”

“Oh, yes, dear mamma,” Vicky replied. “Una is fast-rooted in the soil.

Country people are always the best balanced. The only new things Una

takes up are bicycles and golf; the only old things she drops are her

_g_’s. Una is eternal and sublime; there’s nothing of the new

woman about her, and nothing of the reactionary, either. There never

was anyone less self-conscious, or less conscious of her period. All

the rest of us think we’re moderns, but Una knows not times; she merely

swings along, her dogs at her heels, her children at her skirts, her

golf-clubs over her shoulder, and always another baby on the way. And

the beauty of the child! She’d make a sensation in London--though she’s

not the type of the moment, not elegant or artificial, too much the

unsophisticated child of nature. Oh, yes, Una is on the grand scale.”

“Well, your grandfather thinks even Una is too modern. It’s the golf

and bicycling and the _g_’s, I suppose. I suppose the fact is that

it’s difficult, in these days, to avoid being new. You children and

your friends all are. In fact, the whole world seems to be.”

“The world is always new, mamma darling, and always old. It’s no newer

than it was in 1880, or 1870--in fact, not so new, by some years. The

only year in which it was really new was, according to grandpapa and

the annotators of the Book of Genesis, B.C. 4004.”

“Yes, I daresay it was sadly new then, and no doubt grandpapa would

have found it so. But somehow one hears the _word_ a good deal

just now, used by young people as well as old. What with new women,

and new art, and new literature, and new humour, and the new hedonism

that Denman and Stanley talk about, and that seems to mean making your

drawing-room like an old curiosity shop and burning incense in it and

lighting it with darkened crimson lamps and lying on divans with black

and gold cushions and smoking scented cigarettes and reading improper

plays aloud.... Only Rome says that isn’t new in the least, but

thousands of years old.”

“Oh, Rome! Rome thinks nothing new. She was born blasé. She hasn’t got

grandpapa’s or Stanley’s fresh mind. She always expects the unexpected.

Oscar Wilde says that to do that shows a thoroughly modern mind. If

Rome had been Eve, she’d have looked at the new world through a monocle

(she’d have worn that, even if nothing else) and seen that it was

stale, and said with a yawn, All this is very _vieux jeu_.”

“And very possibly,” said mamma, “it was.”

14

FIN-DE-SIÈCLE

Ninety-three passed. In it grandpapa died, others said of influenza

following on old age, but he himself would have it that it was of a

shock he received one day when driving, convalescent, in Hyde Park;

for his horses, very respectable and old-fashioned animals, shied at a

lady bicyclist, and grandpapa’s heart jolted, and when he got home he

took to his bed and never rose again. So much, he whispered, hoarsely

and somewhat sardonically, to his daughter, for the New Woman and her

pranks. But what did it signify, he added. If he was not to get well

of this attack, he was ready to go. He trusted (though a worm) in his

Maker, and was not unprepared. So grandpapa, dignified to the last,

departed from this life, one of the last of the Regency bucks and the

Tory clerics, perhaps the last of all to condemn on theological grounds

the arithmetic book of Bishop Colenso.

Fantastic observers might have imagined that, with the departure of

this firm old Victorian, who had so disapproved of novelty, life span

still more giddily on its rapid way. Certainly the years 1893 and 1894

do, for some reason, appear to have struck both those who gloried

in novelty, and those whom it shocked, as more than usually new.

The audacious experimentalism which is always with us was even more

self-conscious then than is customary. Such are time’s revenges that

the so daring social, literary and intellectual cleavages made by our

forefathers in those years are now regarded as quaintly old-fashioned

compromises with freedom, even as our own audacities will doubtless be

regarded thirty years hence. But the people of the nineties, even as

the people of the eighties, seventies, sixties, and so back, and even

as the people of the twentieth century, thought they were emancipating

themselves from tradition, saw themselves as bold buccaneers sailing

uncharted seas, and found it great fun. The illusion of advance is

sustaining, to all right-minded persons, and should by all means be

cultivated. It gives self-confidence and poise. It even seems to please

elderly persons to mark or fancy changes of habit, which they have no

wish to emulate, among their juniors, and it certainly pleases their

juniors to be thus remarked upon, for they, too, believe that they

are something new--the new young, as they have always delighted to

call themselves--so all are pleased and no harm is done. The eighteen

nineties were no different in this respect, from the nineteen twenties.

But 1894 does actually seem to have been a more amusing year than most

that we have now. What with the New Humour, and the New Earnestness,

and the New Writers, and the New Remorse, and the New Woman, and

the New Drama, and the New Journalism, and the New Child, and the

New Parent, and the New Conversation, and the telephone, and the

gramophone, and the new enormous sleeves, there was a great deal of

novelty about.

It is a curious time to look back upon to-day. Curious to read the

newspapers, reviews and comic papers of the time; to find, for

instance, in the _Observer_ a leading article on the last novel

of Mrs. Humphry Ward, as if it were a European event, and one the

next Sunday on “What is the modern girl coming to, for she opens her

front door with a key?” To come, too, on reviews of Mr. Hall Caine’s

“Manxman,” such as that by Mr. Edmund Gosse in the _St. James’

Gazette_--“A contribution to literature, and the most fastidious

critic would give in exchange for it a wilderness of that deciduous

trash which our publishers call fiction. It is not possible to

part from it without a warm tribute of approval.” But how possible

it has now become! Indeed, in our times it has been known that a

certain author, having in an unguarded hour committed to print an

appreciation of this famous writer, and then having learnt his mistake,

has changed his name and started life again, unable otherwise to

support his disgrace. _Autres temps, autres mœurs._ Certainly

the nineties were a long time ago. Strange, too, to read some of the

contemporary press comments on that innocent, well-produced, extremely

well-illustrated, and on the whole capable periodical, the _Yellow

Book_--“the outcry,” as Mr. Arthur Symons put it later, when the

publication of the _Savoy_ was greeted with much the same noise,

“the outcry for no reason in the world but the human necessity for

making a noise.” You would think that the worst that could be said of

the _Yellow Book_ was that it was not eclectic, that it opened

its hospitable doors to the worse writers as well as to the better,

and that its intellectually lowest contributions were too widely

sundered from its highest; and the best that could be said for it

(and how much this is!) is that Aubrey Beardsley drew for it, Henry

James and Max Beerbohm wrote prose for it, and W. B. Yeats poetry, and

that it had, on the whole, some of the more capable writers of the

day as contributors. But, in point of fact, the best that was said of

it was that it was brilliant, daring, courageous, new and intensely

modern, and the worst that it was bizarre, revolting, affected, new and

decadent. It appears to a later generation to have been none of these

things; that is, it was brilliant in patches only, and commonplace

in patches; it was not daring except in that it is greatly daring to

publish any periodical ever; it was not more intensely modern than

everything always is, and most of its contributors were middle-aged;

its weak and trite contributions (though indeed it did at times sink

pretty low) were too few to allow of the word revolting being properly

applied to the whole magazine, even by him whom Mr. Gosse called, in

another context, the most fastidious critic; and as for decadent, this

it may, indeed, have been, as no one has ever discovered what, if

anything, this word, as generally used at this time, meant. Exhibiting

those qualities which mark the decline of a great period, it should

mean: whereas many of those who survive from the nineties maintain

that, on the other hand, they marked the beginning of a good period.

Or it may mean merely less good than its predecessors, and this the

_Yellow Book_ was assuredly not, but quite the contrary. It was,

in fact, not unlike various capable, well-produced periodicals of our

own day. Many of its surviving contributors contribute now to these

newer journals. But how seldom does one now hear them or their writings

or the periodicals to which they contribute called ultra-modern,

daring, shocking, decadent or bizarre? Rather, in fact, the contrary.

Thus, it will be observed, do the moderns of one day become the safe

establishments of the next. In ten years the public will be saying

of our present moderns, “They are safe. They are _vieux jeu_.

They resemble cathedrals.” What a death’s head at the feast of life

is this fearful fate which is suspended before even the newest of us,

and which, if we survive long enough, we shall by no means avoid.

Happy, possibly, were those moderns of the nineties who died with

their modernity still enveloping them, so that no one shall ever call

them cathedrals. Gloriously decadent, though no longer new, they shall

for ever remain, and no man shall call Aubrey Beardsley respectable,

established or dull, for he belonged to the Beardsley period, and,

though he may be outmoded, he shall never be outrun.

15

AT THE CROFTS’

The Denman Crofts thought it was delightfully new of them to have to

one of their Sunday evenings a good-looking young pickpocket and a

handsome woman whose profession it was to ply for hire on the streets.

The pickpocket had been captured with his hand in Stanley’s pocket,

and brought home to supper as an alternative to being delivered to

the constabulary, for three reasons: first, he was good-looking, and

masculine beauty was in fashion that year; secondly, he was a sinner,

and sins were talked of with approbation just then by the most modern

literary set, particularly strange sins of divers colours, and as no

one knew which sins were strange or coloured and which were plain, it

might be that picking pockets was as strange and as coloured as any.

Thirdly, to have a pickpocket at a Sunday evening party was New, and

the other guests would be pleased and envious. The lady was there for

reasons very similar, and both were a great success. Everyone treated

them with friendliness and tact, so that they soon ceased to be shy,

though remaining to the end a trifle puzzled and suspicious, and not

very fluent in conversation. Possibly, their host suggested to Rome,

they were suffering from an embarrassing attack of the New Remorse.

“Strange sinners certainly seem a little _difficile_,” agreed

Rome, who had been making exhausting efforts with the pickpocket, “and

loose livers sometimes appear to be rather tight talkers. Your protégés

cannot be said precisely to birrell.”

“Anyhow, dear Denman,” added a graceful young gentleman at her side,

“picking pockets is a banal vice. I should scarcely call it a vice at

all; it is nearly as innocent as picking cowslips on a May morning.

I wish I could have procured you a lady who knelt in front of me in

church yesterday afternoon while I was waiting to make my confession.

She was improving the time by extracting the contents of the reticule

left in the seat next her by the penitent who had gone up to her duties

before her. A piquant idea, for she would get absolution almost in the

moment of sinning.”

“Well,” said Denman, “we did the best we could at short notice. I would

have preferred to have obtained a bomb-fiend. The latest vice, you

know, is secreting bombs in Hyde Park. We shall all be doing it soon.

It is reported to be even more stimulating than secreting opium. There

is no need, unless desired, ever to find the bombs again, still less

to use them; that is an extension of the vice, only practised by those

who wish to qualify as extremists, or bomb-fiends. The ordinary victims

of the bomb habit merely secrete; they make a cache, and store away

bombs as squirrels’ nuts. A pretty habit, but ceasing by now even to be

strange. It is deplorable how the best vices become vulgarised. Rome,

will you join me in a bomb-secreting orgy to-morrow at dusk?”

“By all means, Denman. It would restore my spirits. I have been sadly

depressed lately by reading in one week Sarah Grand, ‘A Yellow Aster,’

‘Marcella,’ ‘The Manxman,’ and Mr. Zangwill and Mrs. Lynn Linton in

the _New Review_ on ‘What Women Should Know.’ There is no more

spirit in me. Though I was a little revived by the ‘Green Carnation.’

An entrancing work, about all of us. But really entertaining.”

“Why such a desperate orgy of literature? I thought you were of a more

fastidious habit--not like Stanley, who insists on reading everything,

even ‘Discords’ and the Dreyfus case. I can seldom read any novels. I

find their reviews enough, if not too much. I read of ‘The Manxman’

that it would be read and re-read by many thousands with human tears

and human laughter, and that settled ‘The Manxman.’ Where do reviewers

get their inimitably delicious phrases from? And if one asked them

with the tears and laughter of what animal other than the human animal

could human beings read, or even re-read, a book, how would they reply?

Perhaps in the same way that old Meredith did the other day when Dick

Le Gallienne asked him to give the public a few words to explain his

peculiar style. ‘Posterity will still be explaining me, long after I am

dead. Why, then, should I forestal their labours?’”

“I wonder,” Rome mused, “if posterity will really be so diligent and

so intelligent as their ancestors seem to think. People always say

they write for posterity when they are not appreciated at the moment.

They seem to imagine posterity as a smug and spectacled best scholar,

spending its time delving among the chronicles of wasted years in

the reading-room of the British Museum, and hailing with rapture the

literary efforts of their ancestors.”

“Whereas I,” said Denman, “see posterity as a leaping savage, enjoying

nameless orgies among the ruins of our civilisation, but not enjoying

literature. Possibly, even, there will be no posterity. The débâcle of

our civilisation--and it’s obviously too good to last--may mean the

débâcle of the world itself. I hope so. _A bas le_ posterity, I

say. Who wants it? I scorn to write for it, or to plant horrible little

baby trees for it, or to suck up to it in any way whatsoever. Crude and

uncultured savage. _Vive l’aujourd’hui!_”

“And I,” said Rome, “see posterity as a being precisely like ourselves.

It will read every morning in its newspapers, just as we do, that our

relations with France are strained, that so many people have been

murdered, born, divorced, married, that such and such a war is in

progress, that such and such a law has been passed, or speech made,

or book published, and it will know, just as we do, that none of it

matters in the least.... I’ve no grudge against posterity. Let it have

its little day.”

“It will,” said the graceful young man, with gloom. “I can’t share

Denman’s faith in the approaching annihilation of humanity. Humanity

in general is much too bourgeois and uninteresting to do anything but

increase greatly and keep the earth replenished. It is impossible to

imagine that the gods love it. _We_ shall perish; we, the fine

exotic flower of an effete civilisation--(by the way, how exquisitely

lovely and innocently wicked Lady Pember looks to-night; she, not the

cow-like young woman talking to Mrs. Croft ought to be the strange

scarlet--or is it mauve--sinner)--but we are a small minority. The

majority, which hasn’t even the art of gracefully fading out, will

heavily continue. It is thus that I picture posterity--a ponderous

suburban bourgeois in mutton-chop whiskers or tight stays, sniffing

at our poetry, our wit and our _Yellow Book_, and saying, ‘How

decadent they were in the nineties!’ By the way, what does decadent

mean? I always understood that man fell once and for all, long ago,

and could not therefore be falling still. I prefer deciduous. How

deliciously it slides round the tongue, like an over-ripe peach. I

wonder it is not more used in verse. To me it suggests a creamy green

absinthe, or a long, close kiss on moist, coral-pink lips. Disgusting.

I detest moist lips, and absinthe makes me feel sick, though I try and

pretend it doesn’t.”

Stanley, charming and smiling, with her pleasant round, brown face,

lively deep blue eye, and enormous box sleeve, darted across the room

to them.

“Den, we _must_ remove our strange sinners now. I’m worn out

with them. They’ll neither of them say more than yes, no, and eh, and

they’ve both drunk too much already, and keeping one eye on Mr. Sykes

lest he get too near people’s pockets and the other on the lady lest

she get hold of more whiskey, is too heavy a responsibility. You must

take them away. And then Lady Pember wants to talk to you, darling.”

Denman gave her a queer, quick look out of his narrow, smiling eyes, as

he turned away.

“And Rome, love, I want to bring Aubrey Beardsley to you. He is being

assaulted by Miss Carruthers, who has been reading ‘Marcella,’ ‘Our

Manifold Nature,’ by Sarah Grand, and the newspapers, and wants to

know what he thinks of the Emancipation of Women, the Double Standard

of Morality, and the approaching death of Mr. Froude. Poor Aubrey has

never thought of any of them; he takes no interest in emancipations,

and his taste in women is most reactionary--anyone could tell that,

from the ladies he draws; he thinks any other kind most unwholesome; he

never reads protestant historians; and he has never thought about even

a single standard of morality. Double standard, indeed! As if there

weren’t as many standards as there are people.”

“Not nearly, Mrs. Croft, fortunately. I’m sure Aubrey himself can’t

contribute one; nor can I. But it is stupid of Aubrey not to read poor

Mr. Froude. He is such a noble and happy liar. He really does practise

lying for lying’s sake--not like Macaulay, mere utilitarian lying, for

principle’s sake, though he does some of that too. Froude is an artist.

He will be missed, even though he is a protestant. He hates accuracy

with as much passion as the good popes hated thought, as Oscar Wilde

says somewhere à propos of something else. (Oscar’s grammar is so

often loose.) How right both Mr. Froude and the good popes are! Look

at Denman being firm with the sinners; how delightfully he does it; he

would make a good prison warder.”

“The sinners,” said Miss Garden, regarding them through her monocle,

“certainly are rather strange. I am afraid they have both drunk to

excess. There, now he has piloted them safely to the door; that is

a relief. Yes, Stanley, do fetch me Mr. Beardsley. Will he shock me

to-night? I was told that the other evening he shocked his table at

the Café Royal to death by his talk. John Lane had to remove him. It

is possible to go too far even for the Café Royal, and he did it. I

suppose that is why he is looking so elated to-night, like Alexander

seeking fresh worlds to conquer. ‘He shocked the Café Royal.’ What

an epitaph! On the other hand, I hear that he was shocked himself

the other day. Mr. Henley did it, in bluff mood, at a party at the

Pennells’. How do you do, Mr. Beardsley?”

16

DIVORCE AT THE CROFTS’