Chapter IV: Part II: Fin-De-Siècle (2)

“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’

It did not last, the Crofts’ marriage. In the spring of ’95, Stanley wearied of her husband’s infidelities, and could not bear them any more. As to Denman, he felt often, though he loved her, that he had married a young woman who had her tiresome aspects; she was a feminist, a prig, she tried to write, and badly at that, she was still over-much concerned with public affairs, with committees, with the emancipation (save the mark!) of women. And she was for ever fussing over the children, who should be treated as amusing toys. He loved her, but she tried him often. She was strident, obstinate, stupidly in earnest about things that seemed to him to demand a light indifference; then, cumbrously, she would try to adopt his tone, and fail. Marriage. Well, it presented great difficulties. He sighed sometimes for the freedom of his bachelor days. Meanwhile, life had its moments, exquisite, fleeting, frail. And at these Stanley, who was not really stupid, guessed quite accurately, and was stabbed by each afresh until her very life-blood seemed to drain away, leaving her, so she felt, a helpless ghost of a woman, without assurance, heart or power to go on, but only her stabbed love and a proud, burning rage. And, in the spring of ’95, she broached this matter of divorce.

He asked her forgiveness.

“I can’t help it, Stanley. I suppose it’s the way I’m made.... The queer thing is, I’ve loved you all the time. You can’t understand that. Women are so--so monogamous.”