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.”