6 RUSSIAN TRAGEDY
The Russian woman, with her two beautiful children and her stout, dazed, unhappy mamma, waited in the hall of the flat of Mr. Jayne. They were weary, having travelled across Russia and from Russia to London, to find Mr. Jayne, and then, having learnt that he was in Rome, straight from London thither, spending two nights in the train and arriving this morning, more alive than dead (for who, this side of the grave, is not?) but very tired. The two children were so tired that they whimpered disagreeably, and their mother often wiped their noses with her travel-grimed handkerchief, but not so often as they required it.
Olga Petrushka was a beautiful woman, square-headed, with a fair northern skin and large deep blue eyes, black-lashed, and massive plaits of flaxen hair. Her eyes looked wild and haunted, for Russians have such dreadful experiences, and her cheeks were hollowed; she looked like a woman who has seen death and worse too close, as indeed she had. She was shabbily dressed in an old fur dolman over a scarlet dress and a fur cap. The two children were bundled up in bearskin coats, like little animals. Her little dancing bears, she would call them in lighter moments. Ever and anon she would fling them sweet cakes out of her reticule, and they would gobble them greedily.
But Nina Naryshkin, their grandmother, sat and rocked to and fro, to and fro, and said nothing but, “Aie, aie, aie.”
The hall porter turned on the little family a beaming and kindly eye. They were, in all probability, thieves, and not, as the Russian lady asserted, the family of Signor Jayne, so he would not admit them into Signor Jayne’s rooms, but he liked to see their gambols.
Every now and then the younger lady would say, in Russian, “Cheer up, then, little children. Your father will soon be here and he will give you more sweet cakes. Aha, how your dirty little mouths water to hear it! Boris, you rascal, don’t pull your sister’s pigtail. What children! They drive me to despair.”
And then Mr. Jayne arrived. He came in at the open hall door, with a tall, fair English lady, and he was saying to her, “If you don’t mind coming in for a moment, I will get you the book.”
The hall porter stepped forward with a bow, and indicated in the background Mrs. Jayne, her mamma, and the little Jaynes.
What a moment for Mr. Jayne! What a moment for Mrs. Jayne, her mamma and the little Jaynes! What a moment for Miss Garden! What a moment for the hall porter, who loved both domestic reunions and quarrels, and was as yet uncertain which this would be (it might even be both), but above all loved moments, and that it would certainly be.
And so it proved. Where Russians are, there, one may say, moments are, for these live in moments.
Olga Petrushka stepped forward with a loud cry and outstretched arms, and exclaimed in Russian, “Ah, Franya Stefanovitch!” (one of the names she had for him, for Russians give one another hundreds of names each, and this accounts in part for the curious, confused state in which this nation is often to be found)— “I have found you at last.”
Mr. Jayne, always composed, retained his calm. He shook hands with his wife and mother-in-law and addressed them in French.
“How are you, my dear Olga? Why did you not tell me you wanted to see me? I would have come to Moscow. It is a long way to have come, with your mother and the children too. How are you, my little villains?”
“Ah, my God,” said Mrs. Jayne, also now in French, which she spoke with rapidity and violence. “How could I stay another day in Russia? The misery I have been through? Poor little papa—Nicolai Nicolaivitch—they have arrested him for revolutionary propaganda and sent him to Siberia, with my brother Feodor. They had evidence also against mamma and myself and would have arrested us, and only barely we escaped in time, with the little bears. The poor cherubs—kiss them, Franya. They have been crying for their little father and the love and good food and warm house he will give them. For now they and we have no one but you. ‘Go to England, Olga,’ papa said as they took him. ‘It is the one safe country. The English are good to Russian exiles, and your husband will take care of you and mamma and the little ones....’ But you are with a lady, Franya. Introduce us.”
“I beg your pardon. Miss Garden, my wife, and Madame Naryshkin, her mother. Miss Garden and her father are great friends of mine.... If you will go into my rooms and wait for me a moment, Olga, I will see Miss Garden to her pension and return.”
“No,” said Miss Garden, in her fluent and exquisite French. “No, I beg of you. I will go home alone; indeed, it is no way. Good-evening, Madame Jayne and Madame Naryshkin.”
Mr. Jayne went out into the street with her. His unhappy eyes met hers.
“To-morrow morning,” he muttered, “I shall call.... This alters nothing.... I will come to-morrow morning and we will talk.”
“Yes,” said Miss Garden. “We must talk.”
Mr. Jayne went back into the hall and escorted his family upstairs to his rooms.
“Aie, aie, aie,” shuddered Olga Petrushka, flinging off her fur coat and cap and leaping round the room in her red dress, like a Russian in a novel. “Let’s get warm. Come, little bears” —she spoke German now— “to your papa’s arms. Kiss him, Katya; hug him, Boris. Tell him we have come across Europe to be with him, now that all else is gone. Forgive and forget, eh, Franya Maryavitch? You and I must keep one another warm.... Aie, aie, aie, my poor papa,” she wailed in Russian. “I keep seeing his face as they took him, and my poor Feodor’s. As to mamma, she is dazed; she will never get over it. We must keep her always with us, poor little mamma.... Tea at once, Franya. I am going to be sick,” she added in Magyar, and was.
Mr. Jayne laid his wife on his bed and took off her shoes and bathed her forehead, while she moaned in Polish. Then he made tea for her and the children and his mother-in-law, who sat heavily in a chair and drank five cups, and looked at him with drowsy, inimical eyes, saying never a word. He felt like a dead man, in a world full of ghosts. Who were these, who had this claim upon him? Their clinging hands were pulling him down, out of life into a tomb. The February evening shadows lay coldly on his heart. These poor distraught women, these little children—he must take infinite care of them, and let them lack for nothing, but he must not let them come close into his life; they would throttle it. His life, his true life, was with Rome. Rome, the gallant, fastidious dandy, with her delicate poise, her pride, her cool wit and grace. Not with this violent, unhappy, inconsequent Slav, chattering in several tongues upon his bed.
To-morrow he would go and talk to Rome ... explain to Rome....
7 ENGLISH TRAGEDY
Miss Garden received Mr. Jayne. Neither had slept much, for Mr. Jayne had given his bed to his family and lain himself on a horsehair couch, and Miss Garden had been troubled by her thoughts. Their faces were pale and shadowed and heavy-eyed.
Miss Garden said, “This is the end, of course. I shan’t need a week now. Fate has intervened very opportunely.”
“No,” said Mr. Jayne, with passion. “No. Nothing is changed. For God’s sake, don’t think that our situation is changed. It is not. She wants protection and security and a home, and I will provide all those for her and her mother and the children. Me she does not want. They shall have everything they want. But I shall not live with them.”
“You still think that you and I can live together?” Miss Garden was sceptical of his optimism. “I don’t think your wife would tolerate that. No, Frank, it’s no use. They belong to you. They need you. I can’t come between you. It would be heartless and selfish. Imagine the situation for a moment ... it is impossible.”
They both imagined it. Mr. Jayne shuddered, like a man very cold.
“You don’t want to be involved in such a—such a melodrama,” he said, bitterly.
“Put it at that if you like. I take it we are neither of us fond of melodrama. But, apart from that, I said all along, and meant it, that if your wife wants you I can’t take you. She has first claim.”
“I shall not live with Olga Petrushka and her mother.”
“That’s your own affair, of course. You are very likely right, since you don’t get on well together. But you must see that you and I can’t....”
Miss Garden stopped, for her voice began to shake. How she loved him! She pressed her hands together in her lap till the rings bruised her fingers.
Mr. Jayne gazed at her gloomily, observing her lightly poised body, slim and elegant in a dark blue taffeta dress which stood out behind below the waist in a kind of shelf, and made her shape rather like that of a swan. He saw her slight, anguished hands that hurt each other, and the pale tremor of her face.
“She’s been through hell, and she wants you,” said Miss Garden, trying to keep control.
“I tell you I can’t live with her, nor she with me. Do you want to turn my life into a tragi-comic opera?”
“Most life is a tragi-comic opera,” said Rome, trying to smile. “Perhaps all.”
“But you’re resolved anyhow to keep yours clear of my tragi-comedies,” he flung at her.
Then he apologised.
“I don’t mean that; I don’t know what I’m saying.... Oh, I won’t press you now to decide. We’ll wait, Rome. You’ll see, in a month or so, how things have arranged themselves—how easy it will all be. Olga will have recovered her balance by then; she changes from hour to hour, like all Russians. In a few weeks she will be tired of me and want to be in Paris, or back in Russia. She doesn’t really want me; it’s only that she is unstrung by trouble. Upset; that’s what she is. All I ask you to do is to wait.”
“No, Frank. It can never be, unless she goes sometime to live with someone else—some other man. Otherwise she would be likely, even if she left you for a time, to want you again at intervals. I can’t make a third.... You see, whatever happens now, your family must always be a real fact to me, not an abstraction. I’ve seen them.... Katya is just like you—your chin and eyes.... The children love you very much; I saw that.... And she loves you, too....”
“She does not. That’s not love—not as I know love.”
“As to that, we all know love in different ways, I suppose.... Truly, Francis, I have quite decided. I can’t live with you.... No, no, don’t....”
He was holding her in his arms and kissing her face, her lips, her eyes, muttering entreaties.
“If you loved me you’d do it.”
“I do love you, and I shan’t do it.”
“I’m asking nothing dishonourable of you. You don’t think it wrong on general principles; yesterday you were willing to consider it. You’re just refusing life for a quixotic whim ... refusing, denying life.... Rome, you can’t do it. Don’t you know, now you’re in my arms, that you can’t, that it would be to deny the best in us?”
“What’s the best, what’s the worst? I don’t know, nor do you. I’m not an ethicist. All I know is that your wife, while she wants you, or thinks she wants you, has first claim. It’s a question of fairness and decent feeling.... Or bring it down, if you like, to a question of taste. Perhaps that is the only basis there really is for decisions of this sort for people like us.”
“Taste. That’s a fine cry to mess up two lives by. I’d almost rather you were religious and talked of the will of God. One could respect that, at least.”
“I can’t do that, as I happen not to be sure whether God exists. And it would make nothing simpler really, since one would then have to discover what one believed the will of God to be. Don’t do religious people the injustice of believing that anything is simpler or easier for them; it’s more difficult, since life is more exacting.... But it comes to the same thing; all these processes of thought lead to the same result if applied by the same mind. It depends on the individual outlook. And this is mine.... Oh, don’t make it so damnably difficult for us both, my dearest....”
Miss Garden, who never swore and never wept, here collapsed into tears, all her urbane breeding broken at last. He consoled her so tenderly, so pitifully, so mournfully, that she wept the more for love of him.
“Go now,” she said at last. “We mustn’t meet again till we can both do it quietly, without such pain. Papa and I are going back to London next week. Write to me sometime and let me know how you do and where you are. My dearest Frank....”
8 FOUNDERED
Rome was alone. She sat in a hard Italian chair, quite still, and felt cold and numb, and as if she had died. Drowned she felt, under deep cold seas of passion and of pain. Wrecked and foundered and drowned, at the bottom of grey seas. Something cried, small and weak and hurt within her, and it was the voice of love, or (as Mr. Jayne would have it) of life; life which she had denied and slain. Never had she greatly loved before; never would she greatly love again; and the great love she now had she was slaying. That was what the hurt voice cried in her as she sat alone in the great, bare, chilly room, the sad little scaldino on the floor at her feet.
She was dry-eyed now that she was alone, and had no more to face Mr. Jayne’s love and pain. Her own she could bear. Harder and harder and cooler and more cynical she would grow, as she walked the world alone, leaving love behind. Was that the choice? Did one either do the decent, difficult thing, and wither to bitterness in doing it, or take the easy road, the road of joy and fulfilment, and be thereby enriched and fulfilled? And what was fulfilment, and what enrichment? What, ah, what, was this strange tale that life is; what its meaning, what its purpose, what its end?
Rome did not know. She knew one thing only. Frustration, renunciation, death—whether you called your criterion the will of God, or social ethics, or a quixotic whim, or your own private standards of decency and taste, it led you to these; led you to the same sad place, where you lay drowned, dead beneath bitter seas.
Mid-day chimed over the city. Miss Garden rose, and put on her outdoor things, and went forth to meet her papa for lunch. Life moves on, through whatever deserts, and one must compose oneself to meet it, never betraying one’s soul.
9 VICKY ON THE WORLD
“It’s good to have you back again, my Rome,” Vicky said. “I miss you at my parties. There are lots of new people I want you to meet. An adorable Oxford youth, whom you’ll find after your own heart. Already he writes essays like a polished gentleman of the world, and he a round-faced cherub barely out of school. A coming man, my dear, mark my words. Such brilliance, such style, such absurd urbanity! Denman introduced him. I prefer him enormously to Denman’s other cronies—that affected Mr. Le Gallienne for instance, and that conceited young Beardsley. Not but that young Beardsley, too, has a wit. I’ll say that for Denman—he keeps a witty table.... Well, have you brought papa back still a good Roman? Father Stanton says, by the way, we’re to call the Pope’s church in this country the Italian Mission. It’s quite time papa had a change of creed, anyhow; I begin to fear for his health since he read ‘Robert Elsmere’ and wasn’t driven by it to honest doubt.”
“Neither,” said Rome, “was he driven by the Forum to the pagan gods. One begins to think that papa is settling down.”
“Oh, I trust not. Dear papa, he’s not old yet.... What a country you have come back to, though, my dear. Strikes everywhere—dockers, railwaymen, miners, even tailors.... Maurice is perfectly happy, encouraging them all. But, darling Maurice, I’m seriously afraid he may cut Amy’s throat one day. Serve her right, the little cat. If I were Maurice I’d beat her. Perhaps he will one day, when he’s not quite sober. I wish she’d run off with one of the vulgar men she flirts with, and leave him in peace. He’ll never run off, because he won’t leave the children to her. Poor old boy, he’s so desperately up against things the whole time. Mamma’s miserable about him. I know, though she never says a word. However, she’s consoled by all her nice grandchildren. Even grandpapa, you know, admits that the deplorable modern generation is doing its duty as regards multiplication. Why do old Bible clergymen like grandpapa think it so important to produce more life? One would think, one really would think, that there was plenty of that already. But no. Be fruitful, they say: multiply: replenish the earth. It says so in Genesis, and clergymen of grandpapa’s generation can’t get away from Genesis. Poor grandpapa. He’s writing to the Guardian, as usual, about the Modern Woman. She’s dreadfully on his mind. Latchkeys. He doesn’t think women ought to have them. Why not? He doesn’t explain. Men may open their front doors with keys, but women must, he thinks, always ring up the unfortunate maids. He can think of no reasons why; he is past reasons, but not past convictions. What, he asked in Stanley’s drawing-room the other day, is to take the place, for women, of the old sanctities and safeties?” “The new safeties, I imagine, sir,” Denman replied. “Grandpa grunted and frowned; he thinks women on bicycles really indecent, poor old dear. As a matter of fact, Denman does, too—at least ungraceful, which to him is the same thing. But Rome, my dear, you simply must get one. We’re all doing it now. It’s glorious; the nearest approach to wings permitted to men and women here below. Intoxicating! Stanley lives on hers, now her son has safely arrived. And it’s transforming clothes. Short jackets and cloth caps are coming in. Bustles are no more. And, my dear—bloomers are seen in the land! Yes, actually. Stanley cycles in them; she looks delightful, whatever Denman says. No, I don’t. Charles doesn’t approve. Conspicuous, he thinks. And, of course, so it is. Well, men will be men. They’ll never be civilised where women are concerned, most of them. But the poor silly old world really does march a little. We’re all getting most thrillingly fin-de-siècle. I wonder if all times have been as deliriously modern, while they lasted, as our times.”
“Probably,” said Rome. “It’s one of the more certain, though more ephemeral, qualities that times have. I wonder at what age grandpapa began deploring it. Not during the Regency or under William the Fourth, I imagine. I suppose his grandpapa was deploring it then.”
“Oh, and there’s another shocking female modernism become quite common this winter, my dear. Cigarettes! I haven’t perpetrated that myself yet, as Charles thinks that unfeminine too, and I’m sure the children would steal them and be sick. Besides, I don’t think it really becoming to an elegant female. But Stanley does. That literary set of hers is a funny mixture of forwardness and reaction. Forward women and reactionary men, I think. Grandpapa hasn’t tumbled to Stanley’s cigarettes yet. My hat, when he does! Well, it’s a funny world. I suppose my daughters will grow up smoking like their brothers, without thinking twice about it.... The darlings, they’re all so troublesome just now. That kindergarten can’t or won’t teach Imogen to speak properly. If she gabbles like this at three, what will she do at thirty? And Hughie drawls and contradicts....”
Their talk then ran along family lines.
10 STANLEY AND DENMAN
Stanley pedalled swiftly, a sturdy, attractive figure in serge knickerbockers ( “bloomers” they were called while that graceful and sensible fashion of our ancestresses endured), along a smooth, sandy road between pine woods. The April sunlight flickered on the pale brown needle-strewn road; the light wind sang in the pines and blew dark curls of hair from under Stanley’s sailor-hat brim. Her bicycle basket was full of primroses. Her round, brown cheeks glowed pink; her lips were parted in a low, tuneless song (tuneless because Stanley could never get a tune right). It expressed her happiness, relieved the pressure of her joy at being alive. Such a day! Such a bicycle! Such sweet and merry air!
She stopped, got off her bicycle, leant it against a gate, and lay down flat on her back in the wood, staring up into the green gloom. London, Denman, her baby, were far off. She was alone with beauty. She was passionately realising the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory, that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close. To savour the loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed sea, and then to pass on to the next—that was life.
Then, presently, the moment lost its keenness, and she was no longer alone with beauty. Her husband and her baby broke the charmed circle, looking in. How she loved them! But they took from her something; her loneliness, that queer, eerie separateness, that only bachelors and spinsters know. They need not, to know it, be unattached, virgin bachelors and spinsters; love does not spoil separateness, but households do.
Stanley rose to her feet, brushed the pine-needles from her neat clothes and untidy hair, put on her sailor-hat and got on her bicycle again. Before her there was a long slope down. To take it, brakeless, feet up on the rest, was like flying. Stanley was no longer a mystic, a wife or a mother; she was a hoydenish little girl out for a holiday.
She reached Weybridge station and entrained for London in one of the halting, smoke-palled, crawling trains of the period. In it she read Ibsen’s “Doll’s House,” for she and Denman were going to see it next week at the Independent Theatre. What a play! What moralising! What purpose! What deplorable solemnity! There seemed, to the set of light-hearted and cynical æsthetes among whom Stanley moved, nothing to do about “A Doll’s House” but to laugh at it. These strange, solemn Scandinavians! Yet numbers of cultured readers in England took it seriously, as cultured English readers love to take foreign plays. They found it impressive and fine, almost a gospel. Further, the bourgeois, the Philistines, the people who are inaccurately said to spend more time than the elect in the street (why is this believed of them?), mocked at it, so that there must be something in it, for, as has been well said (or if it has not, it should have been), majorities are always wrong.
“The fact is,” said Stanley to herself, “the fact is, cultivated people like tracts. Especially cultivated women like tracts about their own emancipation. And, of course, in a way, they’re right.... But plays with purposes....”
It will be observed that Stanley, whom nature had made to welcome purposes wherever found, had well assimilated the spirit of her literary group, which preferred art to be for the sake of art only. She had, as Vicky said of her, so much Zeitgeist. What seemed to her and her friends the good drama of the moment was light social comedy, full of gay, sparkling nonsense and epigrams for the sake of epigrams. Or the more profound and mordant wit of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, who had lately begun to write plays. Mr. Shaw had, indeed, purpose, but his wit carried it off.
Waterloo. Even the trains of 1891 got there at last. Stanley went to look for her bicycle. Finding it and wheeling it off, she felt herself to be one of the happiest persons in the station. She had everything. A bicycle, a husband, a baby, a house, freedom, love, literary and social opportunity, charming friends. Life was indeed felicitous to such as she.
“Progress of Royal Labour Commission,” the newspaper placards shouted. “More L.C.C. scandals. Free brass bands for the poor!”
Stanley frowned. It was a damnable world, after all. A vulgar, grudging, grabbing world. The voice of the press was as the shrill voice of Amy, the wife of Maurice. “Free brass bands for the poor!” That was how Amy would say it, with her silly, gibing laugh. Even, a little, how Irving would say it. But Irving, though he despised the democratic ways of the London County Council, and free brass bands for the poor, was not silly or spiteful. He was merely a delightful, philistine young gentleman on the Stock Exchange.
Stanley bicycled (amid perils less great, less numerous in the year 1891 than now) to Margaretta Street, Chelsea. There was the house, small, dingy, white, with a green door and a tiny square of front garden. Stanley found her latchkey, flung open the green door with a kind of impetuous, happy eagerness, and came face to face with her husband in the little hall.
“Hullo,” he said, and quizzically surveyed her, up and down, from her blown hair and flushed cheeks to her neat, roomy knickerbockers and stout brogues. “Hullo.”
“Hullo, Den. I’ve had the rippingest ride. How’s baby? And yourself?”
“Both flourish, I believe.... You know we’ve people to dinner to-night? You’ve not left yourself a great deal of time, have you?... You don’t look your best, my dear girl, if I may say so.”
“No, I expect not; I’m blown to bits. What’s it matter? Come on, Den, we must both hurry.”
She ran upstairs, turned hot water into the bath, tiptoed into the nursery where her son slept, and back to her room. Denman was in his dressing-room, beyond the open door.
“I’ve had a lovely ride, Den. Weybridge way.”
“Glad you enjoyed it. But lovely’s the wrong word. Anything less lovely than a woman in those unspeakable garments I never saw. I detest them. Women ought to wear graceful, trailing things always.... I can’t think why you do it. Your sense of beauty must be sadly defective.”
“Beauty—oh, well, it’s convenience that matters most, surely. For that matter, very few modern clothes, male or female, are beautiful. But I don’t think these are ugly. One can’t trail all the time; it’s a dirty trick on foot and dangerous on a bicycle.”
“It’s better to be elegant, dirty and dangerous than frumpish, clean and safe. That’s an epigram. The fact is, women ought never to indulge in activities, either of body or mind; it’s not their rôle. They can’t do it gracefully.”
“What do you want them to do then, poor things? Just sit about?”
“Precisely that. You’ve expressed it accurately, if not very beautifully. An elegant inertia is what is required of women ... what on earth has that girl done with my black socks?... Any activity necessary to the human race can be performed by such men as are prepared to sacrifice themselves. All this feminine pedalling about and playing ridiculous games and speaking on platforms and writing books and serving on committees—Lord save us.”
“They’d get awfully fat, your sitting-about females; they wouldn’t be graceful long. Hurry up, Den, or you’ll be late, not I.”
“We shall both be late. It matters very little. If any of our guests have the bad taste to be punctual it will serve them right. Crackanthorpe won’t be punctual, anyhow, he never is.... Make yourself lovely to-night, Stan; I want to forget those awful bloomers. They make you look like a horrible joke in Punch about the New Woman.”
“Well, I’d rather look like the New Woman than like the ‘Woman (not new)’ in the same pictures—sanctimonious idiots.... Really, Den, you’re silly about women....”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Denman, smothered in his shirt.
Stanley went to the bathroom with a touch of ill-humour, which she sang away, like a kettle, in clouds of steam.
Denman, hearing the tuneless song, winced in amused distaste. As a matter of fact, he would have liked a bath himself.