Chapter II: Part I: Victorian (2)

It was a good thing that grandpapa’s visit ended next day. Without him Maurice was better-mannered, less truculent. They could then discuss Radicalism, Bradlaugh, blasphemy, beauty, Malthus and the elections, _en famille_, without prejudice. They were, as a family, immense talkers, inordinate arguers. The only two who did not discuss life at large were Irving and Una; their conversation was and always would be of the lives they personally led, and those led by such animals as they kept. The lives led by others worried them not at all. They recked not of the Woman’s Movement, but Irving amiably held Maurice’s high bicycle while Stanley, divested of her tight skirt and clad in a pair of his knickerbockers, mounted it and pedalled round and round the quiet square. It was Irving who knew that a lower kind of bicycle was on its way, had even been seen in embryo.

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

“Girls will probably be wearing knickerbockers in a year or two,” Stanley, always hopeful, asserted. “For exercise and games and things. Or else a new kind of skirt will come in, short and wide. Our clothes are absurd.”

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

Stanley would rush in, happy and bruised, assume again her absurd, caught-in-at-the-knees skirt, and argue desperately with Maurice about Christian socialism. Stanley was a Christian, ardent and practical; that was the effect Oxford was having on her. She privately wondered how papa, having known and loved Oxford, could bear the Ethical Church. But probably the Oxford Anglicanism of papa’s day had not been so inspiring.

Vicky told Stanley that socialism, Christian or un-Christian, was very crude; religion was an affair of art and beauty, not of economics.

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

Rome, looking up from Samuel Butler, merely said, “How should I know? You’d better ask papa. He should know; he’s writing a book about it.”

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

“A primitive insurance against disaster,” Maurice defined it. He always looked up and took notice when religion was mentioned; to this family the word was like “rats” to a dog, owing, perhaps, to their many clerical ancestors, perhaps to the fact that they were latish Victorians.

“But it _courts_ disaster....” Stanley was sure of that. “Look where it leads people. Into all sorts of hardships and dangers and sacrifices. Look at Christianity--in the Gospels, I mean.”

“That’s a perversion. Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.”

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

“A perversion too. A mere sop thrown to the religious instinct by people who don’t like to starve it altogether. A morbid absurdity. A house without foundations. If they simply mean, as they appear to, that they think they ought to be good, why meet in South Place and sing about it?”

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

“Why,” said Maurice, “indeed? A morbid instinct inherent in human nature. Mine, I am glad to say, is untainted by it; so is yours, Rome. Vicky has it badly, and Stanley, who gets everything in turns, has it on and off, but she is young and may get over it.... The queer thing about Stanley is that she’s trying to run two quite incompatible things at the same time. Æsthetics and Christian Socialism--you might as well be a cricketer and a rowing man, or hang Dickens and Whistler together on your walls. The æsthetes may go slumming, in the absurd way Vicky does, but they’ve no use for socialism.”

“I’m _not_ an æsthete,” Stanley cried, finding it out suddenly. “I’m through with that. I’m going in with the socialists all the way. I shall join the Socialist Democratic Federation at once.”

That was Stanley’s headlong manner of entering into movements. She was a great and impetuous joiner.

But Rome, playing with her monocle on its dangling ribbon, looked at all movements with fastidious rejection. _Cui_, her faintly mocking regard would seem to enquire, _bono_?

9

DISCUSSING LIFE

1880 pursued its way. Mr. Gladstone formed his cabinet of sober peers and startling commoners, the new parliament met, the Radicals at once began to shock the Whigs with their unheard-of proposals for so-called reform, Lord Randolph Churchill and his Fourth Party mounted guard, brisk and pert, in the offing, Parnell and his thirty-five Irishmen scowled from another offing, demanding the three F’s, and, for a special comic turn side-show, Mr. Bradlaugh, the unbeliever, was hustled in and out of the House, claiming to affirm, being ejected with violence, returning at a rush, ejected yet again, and so on and so forth, until gentlemanly unbelievers said, “A disgraceful business. Why can’t the man behave like other agnostics, without all this fuss?” and gentlemanly Christians said, “Why can’t the House let him alone?” and the dignified press said, “It is repugnant to public opinion that one who openly denies his God should be allowed in a House representative of a great Christian nation,” for, believe it or not as you choose, that was the way the press still talked in the year 1880.

Maurice Garden and his friends at Cambridge greeted Mr. Bradlaugh’s determined onslaughts with encouraging cheers. Maurice Garden enjoyed battle, and he rightly thought the cause of liberty of thought served by this tempestuous affair.

Freedom: that was at this time the obsession of Maurice Garden and his compeers. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech (though not, of course, of action), freedom of small nations (such as Armenia, Ireland, Poland and the Transvaal Boers), for that was a catchword among our forefathers of the nineteenth century; freedom even of large ones, such as India; freedom of women, that strange, thin cry raised so far only by sparse, sporadic groups, freedom of labour (whatever that may have meant, and Maurice Garden, a clear-thinking young man, could have told you precisely and at length what he meant by it), freedom even of Russians, that last word in improbabilities.

“Freedom?” queried Rome. “A word that wants defining,” and that was all she had to say of it. While Maurice and Stanley went, hot heads down, for the kernel, she was for ever meticulously, aloofly, fingering the shell, reducing it to absurdity. That seemed, at times, to be all that Rome cared about, all she had the humanity, the vital energy, to seek. Stanley, rushing buoyantly through Oxford, seizing upon this new idea and that, eagerly mapping out her future, ardently burning her present candle at both ends, intellectually, socially and athletically (so far as young women were allowed to be athletic in those days, when hockey and bicycling had not come in and lawn tennis consisted in lobbing a ball gently over a net with a racket weighing seventeen pounds and shaped like a crooked spoon)--Stanley seemed to Rome, whom God had saved from too much love of living, amusingly violent and crude.

They were oddly different, these four sisters; Vicky so spritely, Rome so cool, Stanley so eager, Una so placid.

“Your languid indifference is tip-top form, my dear,” Vicky would say to Rome. “You’re _fin-de-siècle_--that’s utterly the last word to-day. But I can’t emulate you.”

“Don’t you want to _do_ anything, Rome?” Stanley, home for the long vacation, asked, and Rome’s eyebrows went up.

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

“Well, anything. Any of the things women do. Teaching. Settlement work. Doctoring. Writing. Painting. Anything.”

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

“But aren’t you bored?”

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

“_I_ think, you know, that women _ought_ to do things, just as much as men.”

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

“Things _need_ doing. The world is so shocking.... All this time women have been suppressed and kept under and not allowed to help in putting things right, and now they’re just getting free....”

“There’s one thing about freedom” (a word upon which Rome had of late been speculating); “each generation of people begins by thinking they’ve got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can’t really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.”

“It’s only lately begun, for women. What was there for mamma to do, when _she_ was young? Nothing. Only to marry papa. But now....”

“What is there for Vicky to do, now _she’s_ young? Nothing. Only to marry Charles--or another.”

“Oh, well, Vicky slums. And she could do any of the other things if she liked.... Anyhow, Rome, you’re not supporting _marriage_ as the only woman’s job worth doing!”

“No. Not even marriage. Perhaps, in fact, marriage less than most things. I only said it is, so far as one can infer, Vicky’s job.... The only job worth doing in this curious fantasia of a world, as I see it, is to amuse oneself as well as may be and to get through it with no more trouble than need be. What else is there?”

With all the desperate needs of the certainly curious but as certainly necessitous world crying in her ears, with vistas of adventure and achievement stretching inimitably before her eyes, Stanley found this too immense a question. She could only answer it with another. “Why do you think we were born, then?” and Rome’s matter of fact “Obviously because papa and mamma got married” sent her sulkily away to play cricket on the lawn with Irving and Una. Apathy, languor, selfishness, did very greatly anger her. She was the more troubled in that she knew Rome to be clever--cleverer than herself. Rome could have done anything, and elected to do nothing. Rome would probably not even marry; her caustic tongue and cool indifference kept those who admired her at arm’s length; she made them feel that any expression of regard was an error in taste; she shrivelled it up by an amused, enquiring look through the deadly monocle she placed in one blue-green eye for the purpose.

10

VICKY GETS MARRIED

Vicky, on the contrary, became, during this summer, definitely affianced to Charles, whom she decided to marry next spring. She had not, as yet, made of Charles either an æsthete or a ritualist, but these things, she hoped, would come after marriage, and anyhow Charles was intelligent, his career promised well, he had sufficient income, and, in fine, she loved him.

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

“No, papa; the _main_ thing is that the American merchant princesses are descending on the land like locusts, and that if I don’t secure Charles they will, even though he hasn’t a title--yet. He’s so obviously a distinguished person in embryo. American merchant princesses have brains.”

Vicky, having surrendered, put on a new tenderness, even an occasional gravity. It was as if you could catch glimpses here and there of the gay wife and mother that was to supersede the flighty girl. Beneath her chaff and bickerings with her Charles, her love swelled into that stream so necessary to carry her through the long and arduous business. She did her shopping for her new life with gusto and taste, tempering Morris picturesqueness with Chippendale elegance, chasing Queen Anne with unflagging energy from auction to auction and from one Israelitish shop to another, tinkling the while with snakish bangles, swinging golden swine from her ears, as was the barbarous and yet graceful custom of our ancestresses in that year.

11

MAURICE STARTS LIFE

Maurice left Cambridge, armed with a distinguished first in his classical tripos.

“And now what?” enquired papa, indulgently.

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

The _New View_ was a weekly paper of the early eighties, started to defeat Whiggery by the spread of Radicalism. Its gods were Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, its objects to introduce a more democratic taxation, to reform the suffrage, to free Ireland, to curtail Empire, and so forth. As its will was strong, it suffered but it did not suffer long, and is, in fact, now forgotten but by the seekers among the pathetic chronicles of wasted years. All the same, it was, in its brief day, not unfruitful of good; it was deeply, if not widely, respected, and many of our more intelligent forbears wrote for it for a space, particularly that generation which left the Universities round about the year 1880. It was hoped by some of them (including Maurice Garden), that it would make a good jumping off ground for a political career. As it turned out, the first thing into which Maurice jumped off from it was love. At dinner at the Wilburs’ he met Amy Wilbur, the young daughter of his editor. She was small and ivory-coloured, with long dark eyes under slanting brows, a large, round, shallow dimple in each smooth cheek, a small tilting red mouth (red even in those days, when lip salve was not used except in the half world), a smooth, childlike voice and a laugh like silver bells. Maurice thought her like a geisha out of the new opera, “The Mikado,” and was enchanted with her lovely gaiety. Such is love and its blindness that Maurice, who detested both silliness and petty malice in male or female, did not see that his Amy was silly and malicious. He saw nothing but her enchanting exterior and on that and his small salary he got married in haste. None of the Gardens except himself and papa much cared about Amy and papa liked nearly everyone, and certainly nearly all pretty girls. As to mamma’s feelings towards her daughter-in-law, who could divine them?

Vicky said to Rome: “They are both making a horrific mistake. Maurice is a prickly person, who won’t suffer fools. In a year he’ll be wanting to beat her. She hasn’t the wits or the personality to be the least help to him in his career, either. When he’s a rising politician and she ought to be holding salons, she won’t be able to. Her salons will be mere At Homes.”

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

They decided that it was a salon when several distinguished people came to it, rather from habit than from accident. Also the conversation must be reasonably intelligent (or, anyhow, the conversers must believe that it was so, for that is all that can be hoped of any conversation). And people must come, or pretend that they came, mainly for the talk and not so much for any food there might be, or to show their new clothes.

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

“No one will ask you, my child. Anything _you’ll_ find yourself at will be a common party, with food and drink and foolish chit-chat.”

“Like _your_ parties,” Una agreed, amiably content. No teasing worried Una; she was as placid as a young cow.

12

EIGHTIES

So, with Vicky and Maurice happily wedded (_settled_, as they wittily called it in those days, though indeed they knew as well as we do that marriage is likely to be as inconclusive and unsettling an affair as any other and somewhat more than most), and papa and mamma happily, if impermanently, ethicised, and the three younger children still pursuing, or being pursued by, education and Rome perfunctorily, amusedly and inactively surveying the foolish world, the Garden family entered on that eager, clever, civilised, earnest decade, the eighteen eighties. Earnest indeed it was, for people still took politics seriously, and creeds, and literature, and life. Over the period still brooded the mighty ones, those who are usually called the Giants (literary and scientific) of the Victorian era, for the nineteenth century was an age of giant-makers, of hero-worshippers.

The eighties were also a great time for women. What was called _emancipation_ then occurred to them. Young ladies were getting education and it went to their heads. No creature was ever more solemn, more earnest, more full of good intentions for the world, than the university-educated young female of the eighties. We shall not look upon her like again; she has gone, to make place for her lighter-minded daughters, surely a lesser generation, without enthusiasm, ardour or aspiration.

It was these ardent good intentions, this burning social conscience, as well as the desire to do the emancipated thing, that drove Stanley, leaving Oxford in 1882, to take up settlement work in Poplar. So Poplarised, so orientalised, did she become, that she took to speaking of her parental home in Bloomsbury as being in the West End. To her everything west of St. Paul’s became the West End. The West End, its locality and its limits, is indeed a debatable land. Where you think it is seems to depend on where you live or work. To those who work in Fleet Street, as do so many journalists, it seems that anything west of the Strand is the West End. “West End cocaine orgy,” you see on newspaper placards and find that the orgy occurred in Piccadilly or Soho. Mayfair and its environments are also spoken of by these scribblers of the East as the West End. But to those who live in Mayfair, the West End begins at about Edgware Road and Mayfair seems about the middle, and to the denizens of Edgware Road the West End is Bayswater, Kensington or Shepherds Bush. The dwellers in these outlying lands of the sunset do really acknowledge that they are the West End; and to them Mayfair and Piccadilly are not even the middle, but the east. A strange, irrational phrase, which bears so fluctuating and dubious a meaning. But then nearly all phrases are strange and irrational, like most of those who use them.

Anyhow, and be that as it may, Stanley went and worked in Poplar to ameliorate the lot of the extremely poor, who lived there then as now. She took up with Fabians, and admired greatly Mr. Bernard Shaw, while cleaving still to William Morris. She was concerned about Sweated Women, and served on Women’s Labour Committees. Her good working intelligence caused people to give her charges and responsibilities beyond her years. She was now a sturdy, capable, square-set, brown-faced young woman, attractive, with her thrust-out under-lip and chin, and her beautiful blue eyes under heavy black brows. She spoke well on platforms in a deep, girlish voice, was as strong as a pony and could work from morning till night without flagging. There was something candid and lovable about Stanley. A doctor and a clergyman asked her in wedlock, but she did not much care about them and was too busy and interested to think about marriage.

She had, among other strong and ardent beliefs, belief in God. She had religion, inherited perhaps from her papa, but taking in her a more concentrated and less diffused form. To her the Christian church was a militant church, the sword of God come to do battle for the poor and oppressed. To her a church was an enchanted house, glorious as a child’s dream, the mass as amazing as a fairy story and as true as sunrise. She did not much mind at which churches she attended this miracle, but on the whole preferred those of the Anglican establishment to the Roman variety, finding these latter rather more lacking in beauty than churches need be. Stanley was an optimist. She looked on the shocking, wicked and ill-constructed universe, and felt that there must certainly be something behind this odd business. There must, she reasoned, be divine spirit and fire somewhere, to account for such flashes of good as were so frequently evident in it. Something gallant, unquenchable, imperishably ardent and brave, must burn at its shoddy heart.

Vicky complained that Stanley thought of God (“in whom, of course,” said Vicky, “we all believe”), as a socialist agitator, and Stanley perhaps did. Certainly God, she believed, was fighting sweated industries.

“With signally small success,” Maurice said, for the commission on these industries had just concluded.

“God very seldom succeeds,” Stanley agreed. “He has very nearly everything against Him, of course.”

She seldom mentioned God, being, for the most part, as shyly inarticulate as a schoolgirl on this theme so vital to her. But of unemployment, labour troubles, and sweated industries, she and Maurice would talk by the hour. She wrote articles for his paper on the conditions of working women in Poplar. She attended street labour meetings in the east, while Maurice did the same in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park.

In 1882, the year that Stanley left Oxford, Una left school. It was no use sending her to college, for she had not learning, nor the inclination to acquire it. She had done with lessons.

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

“For ever....” Una looked at her with wide, sleepy blue eyes, trying and failing to think of eternity. Una lived in to-day, not in yesterday or to-morrow. She was rather like a puppy.

“I don’t much care,” she said at length. “I mean, I’ve never thought about it. I’m never bored, anyhow. There’s theatres, and badminton and dancing, and all the shops, and taking the dogs in the parks.... Of course I’d like better to live in the country again. But London’s all right. _I’m_ all right. I’m not booky like you, you see.”

Stanley said it had nothing to do with being booky; there were things that wanted doing. Doubtless there were. But she failed to rouse Una to any thought of doing them. Una stayed at home, and went to parties, and theatres, and played games, and occasionally rode, and walked the dogs in the parks, and stayed with friends in the country, and enjoyed life.

“I suppose she’ll just marry,” Stanley disappointedly said, for in the eighteen eighties marriage was not well thought of, though freely practised, by young feminine highbrows.

As to Irving, another cheery hedonist, he was enjoying himself very much at Cambridge and reading for a pass.

13

PARENTS

The eighteen eighties were freely strewn with, among other things, Vicky’s children. The halcyon period for children had not yet set in; did not, in fact, set in until well on in the twentieth century. In the eighteen eighties and nineties children were still thwarted, still disciplined, still suppressed, though with an abatement of mid-Victorian savagery. The idea had not yet started that they were interesting little creatures who should be permitted, even encouraged, to lift their voices in public and interrupt the conversation of their elders. On the whole, the bringing up of children (at best a poor business) was perhaps less badly done during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century than before or since. It may safely be said that it is always pretty badly done, since most parents and all children are very stupid and uncivilised, and anyhow to “bring up” (queer phrase!) the unfortunate raw material that human nature is, to bring it up to any semblance of virtue or intelligence (the parents, probably, having but small acquaintance with either), is a gargantuan task, almost beyond human powers. Some children do, indeed, grow up as well as can, in the circumstances, be expected, but this is, as a rule, in spite of, rather than on account of, the misguided efforts of their parents. And most children do not grow up well at all, but quite otherwise, which is why the world is as we see it.

Vicky was, as parents go, not a bad one. She loved her children, but did not unduly spoil them or turn their heads with injudicious attentions. Year by year her nursery filled with nice, pretty little Du Maurier boys, fine, promising little Du Maurier girls, in sailor suits, jerseys, tam-o’-shanters, and little frocks sashed about the knees, and year by year Vicky was to be found again in what newspaper reporters, in their mystic jargon, call, for reasons understood by none but themselves, “a certain condition.” “The woman,” they will write, “said she was in a certain condition.” As if everyone, all the time, was not in a certain condition. Whether these journalists think the statement “she was going to have a baby” indecent, or coarse, will probably never transpire, for they are a strange, instinct-driven, non-analytical race, who can seldom give reasons for their terminology. Who shall see into their hearts? Perhaps they really do think that the human race should not be mentioned until it is visible to the human eye.

Anyhow Vicky, of a franker breed than these, said year by year, with resignation, “_Again_, my dears, I replenish the earth,” and added sometimes, in petulant enquiry, “How long, O Lord, how long?”

But Amy, the wife of Maurice, had, like newspaper men, her pruderies. Of her coming infants she preferred to speak gently, in fretful undertones. When she told Maurice about the first, she did not, like Vicky, sing out, on his return from the office, “What _do_ you think? There’s a baby on the way!” but, drawing her inspiration from fiction, she hid her face against his coat and murmured, “Oh, _Maurice_! Guess.”

Maurice said, “Guess what? How do you mean, guess, darling?” to which she replied, “Well, I do think you’re slow to-night.... Oh, Maurice....”

And then Maurice, instead of saying, like the young husbands in the fiction she was used to, “Darling, you _can’t_ mean.... What angels women are!” said instead, “Oh, I say, do you mean we’ve got a baby coming? Good business.”

A baby. What a coarse, downright word for the little creature. Later, of course, one got used to it, but just at first, at the very, very outset, the dimmest dawn of its tiny being, it was scarcely a baby. And what about her being an angel? Obviously Maurice did not know the rules of this game.

When the baby, and the subsequent baby (there were only two altogether), arrived, Amy spoiled them. She was a depraved mother. Also she was unjust. She was, of course, the type of mother whose strong sex instinct leads her to prefer boys to girls, and she took no pains to hide this. Maurice said, stubbornly, “The girl shall have as good a chance as the boy, and as good an education. We’ll make no difference,” but Amy said, “Chance! Fiddlesticks! What chances does a girl want, except to marry well? What does a girl want with education? I’m not going to have her turned into a blue-stocking. Girls can’t have real brains, anyhow. They can’t _do_ anything--only sit about and look superior.”

This referred to Rome, and these were the remarks that fell like nagging drops of water on Maurice’s sensitive, irritable nerves and mind, slowly teasing love out of existence, and beating into him (less slowly) that he had married a fool.

Maurice found outlet from domestic irritation in political excitement. There was, for instance, the Home Rule Bill. It seemed to Maurice, as to many others, immeasurably important that this bill should go through. Its failure to do so, his own failure to be elected in the elections of 1886, and the victory of the Unionists, plunged him into a sharper and more militant radicalism. At the age of twenty-nine he was an ardent, scornful, clear-brained idealist and cynic, successful on platforms and brilliant with pens. He was becoming a stand-by of the Radical press, a thorn in the Tory flesh. His wife, by this time, after four years of marriage, definitely disliked him, because he had bad, sharp manners, was often disagreeable to her, often drank a little too much, and obviously despised the things she said. She consoled herself with going to parties, spoiling her babies, and flirting with other people. He consoled himself with politics, writing, talking and drinking. An ill-assorted couple. Maurice hoped that his children would be more what he desired. So far, of course, they were fonder of Amy. Even the boy was fonder of Amy, though sons often have a natural leaning towards their fathers, and frequently grow up with no more than a careless affection for their mothers for, contrary to a common belief, the great affection felt by Œdipus for his mother is most unusual, and, indeed, Œdipus would probably have felt nothing of the sort had he known of the relationship. It is noticeable that sons usually select as a bride a woman as unlike their mothers and sisters as possible. It makes a change.

So Maurice had reason to hope that his son, anyhow, would prefer him as time went on, and therefore be inclined to share his point of view about life. As to the girl, she might grow up a fool or she might not; impossible to tell, at three years old. Most girls did.

In 1887 the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria occurred. Maurice wrote a deplorably unsuitable article for the occasion, called “Gaudeamus,” and taking for its theme the subject races of Ireland and India and the less fortunate and less moneyed classes in Great Britain, which brought him into a good deal of disrepute, and made Amy more than ever disgusted with him.

“Hardly the moment,” papa commented. “One sympathises with his impatience, but the dear old lady’s jubilee is hardly the moment to rub in the flaws of her empire.”

14

PAPA AND THE FAITH

Papa was now a Roman Catholic again. After three or four years of Ethicism, the absence of a God had begun to tell on him. It had slowly sapped what had always been the very foundation of his life--his belief in absolute standards of righteousness. For, if there were no God, on what indeed did these standards rest? It was all very well to sing in South Place of “the great, the lovely and the true,” but what things _were_ great, lovely and true, and how could one be sure of them, if they derived their sanction from nothing but man’s own self-interested and fluctuating judgments? Deeply troubled by these thoughts, which were, of course, by no means new to him, papa was driven at last out of his beautiful and noble half-way house to the bleak cross roads.

Either he must become a moral nihilist, or he must believe again in a God. Since to become a moral nihilist was to papa unthinkable, so alien was it from all his habits, his traditions and his thought, so alien, indeed, from all the thought of his period, the only alternative was to believe in a God. And papa, swung by reaction, determined that this time (was it by way of atonement, or safeguard?) he would do the thing thoroughly. He would enter once more into that great ark of refuge from perplexing thoughts, the Roman branch of the Catholic Church. There (so long as he should remain there) he would be safe. He would rest therein like a folded sheep, and wander no more. So, humbly, in the year 1886, he did allegiance again to this great and consoling Church (which, as he said, he had never left, for you cannot leave it, though you may be unfaithful), and worshipped inconspicuously and devoutly in a small and austere Dominican chapel.

His only grief was that mamma at this point struck. She made the great refusal. She loved papa no less faithfully than ever, but his continuous faiths had worn her out. She said, quietly, “I am not going to be a Roman Catholic again, Aubrey.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her faint smile at him was enigmatic.

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

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

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

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

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

15

KEEPING HOUSE

Speaking to the cook. What a delightful kind of conversation this must be. For, if you are a proper housewife, you do not just say to the cook, “Kindly provide meals, as usual, for the household to-day. That is, in fact, what you are paid to do. So do it, and let me hear no more about it.” Instead, you go to the larder and see what is in it. You find a piece of meat, and try to guess what it is. You say, “We will have that neck of mutton, or loin of beef” (or whatever you think it is) “roasted, boiled, or fricasseed, for lunch. Then, of what is left of it, you will make some nice cutlets for dinner. Now how about sweets?” Then you and the cook will settle down happily for a long gossip about sweets--a delightful topic. The cook says, “I had thought of a nice jam roll.” You say that you, for your part, had thought of something else, and so it goes on, like a drawing-room game, until you or the cook win, by sheer strength of will. Cooks usually have most of this, so they nearly always win. They can think of more reasons than you can why the thing suggested is impossible. They know there is not enough jam, or cream, or mushrooms, or bread-crumbs--not enough to make it _nice_, as it should be made. Rather would they suggest a nice apple charlotte....

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

Perhaps there is more to it than this; perhaps bills are also discussed, and butchers and groceries, and the price of comestibles. No one who has not done it knows precisely what is done, or how. It is the cook’s hour and the housewife’s, and no fifth ear overhears. Mrs. Garden in the year 1886 had done it every day for thirty-one years. Whether as an Anglican, a Unitarian, a Roman Catholic, an Agnostic, a Quaker, an Irvingite, a Seventh-day Adventist, a Baptist, or an Ethicist, still she had daily Kept House. Magic phrase! What happens to houses unkept, Rome had idly asked. Mamma had shaken a dubious head. No house that she had ever heard of had been unkept.

16

UNA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17

STANLEY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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