Told by an Idiot

PART IV GEORGIAN FIRST PERIOD: CIRCUS FIRST PERIOD: CIRCUS 1 THE HAPPY GEORGIANS THE first Georgian years, the years between 1910 and 1914, are now commonly thought of as gay, as very happy, hectic, whirling, butterfly years, punctuated indeed by the too exciting doings of dock and transport strikers, Ulstermen, suffragists, the Titanic, and Mr. Lloyd George, but, all the same, gay years. Like other generalisations about periods, this is a delusion. Those years only seem especially gay to us because, since July, 1914, the years have not been gay at all. Really they were quite ordinary years. In fact, it is folly to speak of these insensate seasonal periods as happy or the reverse. It is only animate creatures which can be that, and it is unlikely that all, or the majority, of animate creatures should be visited by circumstances making for pleasurable emotion or the reverse at the same time as one another, except in the case of some great public event. Some early Georgians were gay, some sad, some bored, some tepid and indifferent, as at any other time. T Nevertheless, it so happened that the persons in this so-called narrative were all quite sufficiently happy during this period. They were all having, in their several ways, a fairly good time. 2 PAPA Mr. Garden’s way was, it need scarcely be said, a spiritual way. He was now over eighty, and his was the garnered fruit of a long life of spiritual adventure. He had believed so much, he had believed so often, he had fought with doubt so ardently and with such repeated success, he had explored every avenue of faith with such adventurous zeal, that he had at last reached a table-land from whence he could survey all creeds with loving, impartial pleasure. Even Mr. Campbell’s New Theology had not enmeshed him for long; he passed through it and out of it, and it took its place among the ranks of Creeds I Have Believed. And now, in some strange, transcendent manner, he believed them all. Nothing is true but thinking makes it so; papa thought all these faiths, and for him they were all true. What, after all, is truth? An unanswerable riddle, to which papa replied, “The truth for each soul is that faith by which it holds.” So truth, for papa, was many-splendoured, many-faced. God must exist, he knew, or he could not have believed in Him so often and so much. The sunset of life was to papa very lovely, as he journeyed westward into it, murmuring, “I believe.... I believe....” Catholicism (Roman and Anglo), Evangelicism, Ethicism, Unitarianism, Latitudinarian Anglicism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Science, Irvingitism, even poor Flossie and her chat, he did very happily and earnestly believe. He believed in a mighty sacramental Church that was the voice of God and the store-house of grace; he believed that he was saved through private intercourse and contract with his Lord; he believed in the Church established in this country, and that it should be infinitely adaptable to the new knowledge and demands of men; he believed that the world was (very likely) to be ended in a short time by the second coming of Christ; he believed that God was love, and evil a monstrous illusion; he believed that God permitted the veil between this world and the next to be rent by the meanest and most trivial of His creatures, if they had the knack. Indeed, papa might be said to have learnt the art of believing anything. Irving said it was pleasant to find that papa was once again an Irvingite. Indeed, the creeds after which he had named his children now all flourished in papa’s soul. No longer did he shake his head when he remembered in what spiritual moods he had named Una, and Rome, or sigh after that lost exultation of the soul commemorated in Vicky. Had another child been given to him now he would have named it Verity, in acknowledgment of the fact that nearly everything was true. What wonder, then, that papa was a happy Georgian? 3 VICKY Vicky, dashing full-sail through her fifties, was a happy Georgian too. She was handsome in her maturity, and merry. People she loved, and parties, and gossip, and bridge, and her husband and children, and the infants of her daughter Phyllis, and food and drink and clothes, and Ascot, and going abroad, and new novels from Mudie’s, and theatres and concerts and meetings and causes, and talk, talk, talk. Life, she held, is good as you get on in it; a broad, sunny, amusing stream, having its tiresome worries, no doubt, but, in the main, certainly a comedy. Vicky as an early Georgian was a generously fashioned matron, broader and fuller than of old, with her fair skin little damaged by time, and not much grey in her chestnut hair, which she wore piled in a mass of waves and curls, in the manner of the early Georgian matrons. A delightful woman, with an unfailing zest for life. You couldn’t exactly discuss things with her, but she could and did discuss them with you. She would tell you what she thought about the world and its ways in a flow of racy comment, skimming from one topic to another with an agile irrelevance that grew with the years. A merry, skimming matron; certainly a happy Georgian. 4 MAURICE Maurice had not, since he married Amy, been a happy Victorian or Edwardian, and he did not become an exactly happy Georgian, but he was happier than before. In his fifties he was no nearer accepting the world as he found it than he had ever been. It still appeared to him to be a hell of a place. He was, in his fifties, a lean, small, bitter man, his light hair greying on the temples and receding from the forehead, his sensitive mouth and long jaw sardonically, cynically set. He was popular in London, for all his bitter tongue and pen; he and his paper were by now an institution, known for their brilliance, clarity, hard, unsentimental intolerance, and honesty. You might disagree with Maurice Garden; you might even think that he had an evil temper and a habit of mild intoxication; but you had to respect two things about him, his intelligence and his sincerity. Tosh and slush he would not stand, whether it might be about the Empire, about the poor suffragists in prison who would not eat, about White Slaves (whom his paper called, briefly and precisely, prostitutes, holding that the colour of their skins was an irrelevant point to raise when considering the amelioration of their lot), about the poor tax-robbed upper classes, or the poor labour-ground lower. He would print no correspondence couched in sentimental terms; if people desired to write about the sufferings, say, of birds deprived of their feathers for hats, they had to put it in a few concise words, and to say precisely what steps they wished to see taken about it. No superfluous wailings or tears were permitted, on any topic, to the writers in the Gadfly. The editor had a good deal of trouble with the literary side of his paper, which inclined, in his opinion, to roll logs, to be slavishly in the fashion in the matter of admiring the right people, to accept weak articles and rubbishy poems from people with budding or full-blown reputations, and, generally, to be like most literary papers. His son Roger he did not for long permit to adorn the literary staff; to do so would have been, in view of the calibre of Roger’s intelligence, gross nepotism. Roger had to get another literary job on a less fastidious paper; meanwhile, to his father’s disgust, he continued to produce novels, and even began on verse, so that he appeared in current anthologies of contemporary poetry. Also, he got married. So did his sister Iris. That settled, and his children well off his hands, Maurice felt that his only and dubious link with family life was snapped, and that he was free to go his own way. He left his wife, offering to provide her with any material she preferred for a divorce, from a mistress to a black eye. Amy accepted the offer, and these two victims of a singularly unfortunate entanglement found rest from one another at last. It was, Amy complained, too late for her to marry again; of course Maurice, selfish pig, had waited till it was too late for her but not for him. But Maurice had no inclination to remarry; he had had more than enough of that business. The only woman he had ever seriously loved had married ten years ago, ending deliberately an unhappy, passionate and fruitless relationship. Maurice’s thoughts were not now woman-ward; he lived for his job, and for interest in the bitter comedy of affairs that the world played before him. His silly, common, nagging wife, his silly, ordinary, disappointing children, no more oppressed him; they could, for him, now go their own silly ways. He was free. 5 ROME Rome was a happy Georgian. For her the comedy of the world was too amusing to be bitter. She, in her splendid, idle fifties, was known in London as a lady of wits, of charm, of humour; a gentlewoman of parts, the worldly, idle, do-nothing, care-nothing sister of the busy and useful Mrs. Croft, contributing nothing, to the world beyond an attractive presence, good dinner-table talk, a graceful zest for gambling, an intelligent, cynical running commentary on life, and a tolerant, observing smile. Life was a good show to her; it arranged itself well, and she was clever at picking out the best scenes. When, for instance, she had an inclination to visit the House of Commons, she would discover first on which afternoon the Labour members, or the Irish, were going to have a good row, or Mr. Lloyd George was going to talk like an excited street preacher, or Sir Edward Carson like an Orangeman, or any other star performer do his special turn, and she would select that afternoon and have her reward. Our legislators were to her just that—circus turns, some good, some poor, but none of them with any serious relation to life as lived (if, indeed, any relation with that absurd business could be called serious, which was doubtful). So the cheerful spectacle of a world of fools brightened Rome’s afternoon years. Before long, the folly was to become too desperate, too disastrous, too wrecking a business to be a comic show even to the most amused eyes; the circus was, all too soon, to go smash, and the folly of the clowns who had helped to smash it became a bitterness, and the idiot’s tale held too much of sound and fury to be borne. But these first Georgian years were, to Rome, twinkling with bland absurdity. She cheered up Maurice in the matter of that prose and verse by means of which his son made of himself a foolish show, reminding him that we all make of ourselves foolish shows in one way or another, and the printed word was one of the less harmful ways of doing this. It was no worse, she maintained, to be a Georgian novelist and poet than any other kind of Georgian fool, and one kind or another we all are. After all, he might be instead a swindling company-promoter.... “No,” said Maurice. “He hasn’t the wits. And, you know, I don’t share your philosophy. I still believe, in the teeth of enormous odds, that it is possible to make something of this life—that one kind of achievement is more admirable—or less idiotic, if you like—than another. I still think bad, shallow, shoddy work like Roger’s damnable, however unimportant it may be. It’s a mark on the wrong side, the side of stupidity. You don’t believe in sides, but I do. And I’m glad I do, so don’t try to infect me with your poisonous indifference. I am a man of faith, I tell you; I have a soul. You are merely a cynic, the basest of God’s creatures. You disbelieve in everything. I disbelieve in nearly everything, but not quite. So I shall be saved and you will not. Have a cocktail, Gallio.” 6 STANLEY Stanley’s son was at Oxford, reading for a pass, for it was no manner of use, they said, his reading for anything more. He was a nice boy, but not yet clever. “Not yet,” Stanley had said of him all through his schooldays, meaning that Billy was late in developing. “Not yet,” she still said, meaning that he was so late that he would not have developed properly until his last year at Oxford, or possibly after that. Not that Billy was stupid; he was quite intelligent about a number of things, but not, on the whole, about the things in books, which made it awkward about examinations. Nor was he intelligent about politics; in fact, politics bored him a good deal. However, he was destined for a political career. Stanley’s cousin, Sir Giles Humphries, a Liberal member of Parliament, had promised Stanley to take Billy as a junior secretary when he left Oxford, if he should show any capacity for learning the job. Billy’s Liberal political career would thus be well begun. Meanwhile, Billy was an affectionate, companionable boy, who hid his boredom and his ignorance from his mother as well as might be, and very nicely refrained from making mock of militant suffragists in her presence, for, though Stanley had ceased to be a militant, many of her friends were, in these years, in and out of prison. Molly wouldn’t go to college. No one, indeed, but her mother suggested that she should. She was obviously not suited, by either inclination or capacities, for the extension of her education. Stanley would have been glad to have Molly at home with her when she left school, for Molly had the heartbreaking charm of her father, even down to his narrow, laughing eyes and odd, short face. Stanley adored Molly. Molly was tepid and casual about votes, and had no head for books, and not the most rudimentary grasp on public affairs, and she was worse at meetings and causes than any girl in the world. She didn’t even pretend, like Billy. She would laugh in Stanley’s face, with her incomparable impudence, when Stanley was talking, and say, “Mumsie darling, stop committing. Oh, Mumsie, not before your chee-ild,” and flutter a butterfly kiss on Stanley’s cheek to change the subject. And she wanted to go on the stage. She wanted to go, and went, to a dramatic school, to learn to act. Well, better that than nothing, Stanley sighed. If she does learn to act, it will be all right. If she doesn’t, she’s learning something. If it doesn’t make her affected and stupid, like actresses, I don’t mind. And surely nothing can make Molly less than entrancing. But, whatever comes of it, Molly has a right to choose her own life; it’s no business of mine what the children decide to do. In her conscious reaction from the one-time parental tyranny over daughters, Stanley forgot that there might also be tyranny over sons, and that Billy too had a right to choose his own life. It is creditable to Billy that she could forget it. Billy was the best of sons. Meanwhile Stanley was fighting (constitutionally) for votes, women’s trade unions, the welfare of factory girls, continuation schools, penal reform, clean milk, and the decrease of prostitution. It may be imagined that all these things together kept her pretty busy; unlike Rome, she had no time to visit Parliament on its best days; she only went there when one of the topics in which she was interested was going to be raised. She got thus, Rome told her, all the dry bread and none of the jam. However, Stanley preferred the dry bread days, though they were invariably stupid and disappointing. Though only a very little of all she had at heart got done, Stanley was happy. She laboured under the delusion that the constitution and social condition of her country were, on the whole, faintly on the upward plane. That was because she was unfairly biassed towards the Liberal party in the state, and too apt to approve of the measures they passed. She approved of Old Age Pensions; she even approved, on the whole, of Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act; and she approved of the People’s Budget very much. 7 IRVING Irving was nearly always cheerful, except when he was cross. Irving was like that. He had been a cheerful Victorian and a cheerful Edwardian, and was now, in his late forties, a cheerful Georgian. He had a beautiful and charming wife, creditable children, a house in Devonshire and a house in London, and a great deal of money (though the super-tax robbed him of much of it), two motor cars, good fishing, shooting and stag-hunting, and an excellent digestion. He had his troubles. The People’s Budget troubled him a good deal, and the Land Taxes, and all the unfair socialist legislation to which he was subject. He sometimes threatened to go and live abroad, to escape it. But he did not go and live abroad. He was, for all his troubles, a happy Englishman. 8 UNA Una, too, was cheerful. She was unaffected by reigns and periods. She was a very unconscious Georgian. Not like Stanley, who said, “We are now Georgians. Georgian England must be much better than any England before it,” nor like Roger, who would murmur, “We Georgians face facts” ... nor like Vicky, who cried, “I will not be called a Georgian; not while that little Welsh horror rules over us.” Una hardly knew she was a Georgian, and, indeed, she was not, in any but a strictly technical sense. Her mind was unstirred by what used, long ago, to be called the Zeitgeist. She was happy; she enjoyed good health; her daughters were like polished corners and her sons like young plants; her husband’s acres flourished and his corn and wine and oil increased (as a matter of fact his wine, always a trifle too much, had of late years decreased; Ted was a soberer man than of old); Katie, their handsome eldest, had married well; and Una found in the countryside the profound, unconscious content that animals find. Riding, walking, gardening, driving about the level Essex lands, she, attuned to the soil on which she lived, was happy and serene. 9 IMOGEN The younger generation of Georgians were happy enough. They were married, engaged, painting, writing, dancing, at the bar, at the universities, at school. They were behaving in the several manners suitable to their temperaments and years. Their lives were full of interests, artistic, literary, athletic and social. Vicky’s Nancy was learning to paint futuristically; she had now a little studio in Chelsea, where she could be as Bohemian as she liked, and have her friends all night without disturbing anyone. Night-clubs, too, had of late come in, and were a great convenience. Phyllis was bringing up her children. Hugh, eating dinners in the Temple, read of torts and morts, but dreamed of machinery, and drew diagrams in court of pistons and valves, and jotted down algebraic formulæ when he should have been jotting down legal notes. Hugh was really a mechanician, and his heart was not in law, though he liked it well enough. His brother Tony had gone from Cambridge to the Foreign Office and, when not writing drafts, was a merry youth about town. Imogen was happy. She felt her life to be pleasure-soaked; a lovely, an elegant orgy of joy. And pleasure, orgies of dissipation even, did not absorb her, but were ministrants to the clear, springing life of the imagination. Imagination brimmed the cup of her spirit like golden wine. She felt happy and good, like a child in an orchard, ripe apples and pears tumbling in soft grass about her, the silver boat of the moon riding in a green sky. For her birds sang, sweet bells chimed and clashed, the stars made a queer, thin, tinkling song on still and moonless nights. The people hurrying about the city streets and squares were kind and merry and good, like brownies; the city itself was a great gay booth, decked and lit. Dawn came on a golden tide of peace; noon drove a flaming chariot behind the horses of the sun; evening spread soft wings, tender and blue and green; night was sweet as a dream of apple-blossoms by running water. When she wrote, whether by day or by night, her brain felt clear and lit, as by a still, bright taper burning steadily. Her thoughts, her words, rose up in her swiftly, like silver fishes in a springing rock pool; round and round they swam, and she caught them and landed them before they got away. While she wrote, nothing mattered but to seize and land what she saw thus springing up, to reach down her net and catch it while she might. Verse she wrote, and prose, with growing fastidiousness as to form and words. When she had first begun publishing what she wrote, she had been too young; she had fumbled after style like a blind puppy; she had been, like nearly all very young writers, superfluous of phrase, redundant. She read with fastidious disgust in her first book of stories such meaningless phrases as, “He lifted the child bodily over the rail and dropped it into the sea.” Bodily; as if the victim might, on the other hand, have been only caught up in the spirit, like St. Paul. What did I mean, she asked, across the years, of that bungling child, knowing that she had indeed meant nothing. But now style, the stark, bare structure of language, was to her a fetish. It was good to be getting on in life—twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six—so that one’s head was clearer, if not yet very clear. The very young, thought Imogen, are muddled; they love cant and shun truth; they adopt and use imitative phrases; they are sentimental and easy idealists behind their masks of cheerful, slangy hardness. Undergraduates, male and female, and their non-collegiate contemporaries, are the most obscurantist of reactionaries; facts annoy them and they pretend they do not see them, preferring to walk muffled through life, until life forcibly, year by year, tears the bandages from their eyes. The later Georgian, the post-war very young, were to be even more sentimental, muffled and imitative than their predecessors, because of the demoralising war, which was to give them false standards in the schoolroom. But the pre-war adolescents were sentimental enough. The sharp, clear and bitter truth—that was the thing to aim at, thought Imogen, in her twenty-fifth year, knowing she was still far, but not knowing how far, from that. That courageous realism which should see things as they were, she desired, knowing herself to be still a false seer, blinded and dazzled by her personal circumstances, warped and circumscribed in her vision by the circle of her life. Perhaps she was too comfortable, too happy.... Or perhaps, like most people, too emotionally alive, strung too sharply to every vibration, for the clear, detached intellectuality she craved. I feel things too much, she thought, smiling, to be thinking what so many people thought, what too many even said, of themselves. I don’t feel things much. I am not easily moved by life.... Why did people so seldom say that, and so much more seldom think it? No doubt because everyone feels things terrifically, is quite horribly moved by this most moving business, life. No one believes him or herself to be insensitive, for no one is insensitive, life not being an affair it is possible to be insensitive to. In a deeper layer of consciousness, where herself watched herself, Imogen thought that, though she might believe herself to be sensitive to life, she at any rate knew why she believed it, knew why everyone believed it of himself, and that redeemed her from the commonplace boast, and gave her over the people who say, “I feel too much, that’s where it is,” the advantage that the conscious must always have over the unconscious, the advantage, if it be one, that is perhaps the main difference between sophisticated and primitive forms of life. Meanwhile Imogen, like her cousin Roger, wrote and published verse and prose. After all, it didn’t matter what one wrote. People wrote and wrote, and nearly every kind of thing got written by someone or other, well or ill, usually ill, and never so well as to touch more than the very outside edge of the beauty and adventure which was life. Written words opened the door, that was all. Beyond the door lay the adventure, bright and still and eerily clear, like a dream. Strange seas, purple with racing currents in the open, but under the eaves of coral islands green and clear like jade; white beaches of those same islands, hot in the sunshine under the spreading leaves of bread-fruit trees; yams and cocoanuts and pineapples dropping with nutty noises on to emerald-green grass; a little boat moored at the edge of the lapping, creamy waves; witty monkeys and brilliant parrots chattering in the jungle; a little fire at night outside the tent, and a gun ready to one’s hand. Great fishes and small fishes swimming deeply in the jade rock pools, sailing and sailing with unshut eye; the little boat sailing too, pushing off into the wide seas dotted with islands, white wings pricking sky-ward like fawns’ ears. Or deep orchards adrift with blossom, rosy-white; jolly colts in paddocks, dragging with soft lips and hard gums at their mothers’ milk; the winds of April hurtling the cloud shadows across the grass. Long lanes running between deep hedges in the evening, and the rustle of the sea not far, and the velvet dusk waiting for the moonrise, and queer, startled noises in the hedges, and quiet munching noises in the fields, and the cold mocking stars looking down. And painted carts of gypsies, and roadside fires, and wood-smoke and ripe apples. And hills silver and black with olives and cypresses, and steep roads spiralling up them to little walled towns, and hoarse, chanted songs lilting among vineyards, and the jingling of the bells of oxen. And the streets and squares of rainbow-coloured towns, noisy cafés and lemon trees in tubs, beautiful men noble with the feathers of cocks, beautiful women in coloured head-kerchiefs, incense drifting out of churches into piazzas, coffee roasting in deep streets. To swim, to sail, to run naked on hot sands, to lie eating and eating in deep scented woods, and then to sleep; to wake and slip into clear brown pools in sunshine, to spin words as a spider his silvery web; to wear a scarlet silk jacket like a monkey’s and little white trousers, and, for best, a little scarlet crinoline over them, sticking out, very wide and short and jaunty, and a scarlet sunshade lined with white, and on one’s shoulder a tiny flame-red cockatoo, and at one’s heels two little black slaves, shining and black as ebony, with ivory teeth a-glisten and banjos tucked beneath their arms. To clap one’s hands, twice, thrice, and presto! an elegant meal—mushrooms, cider and pêche melba, and mangoes and pineapple to end it, and then, when it was ended, a three-coloured ice. What joy! Dear God, what a world! What adventure, what loveliness, what dreams! Beauty without end, amen. Then why write of what should, instead, be lived? Wasn’t the marvellous heritage, the brilliant joke, the ghostly dream, of life enough? Nevertheless, one did write, and was, inexplicably, praised for it. Black marks on paper, scribbled and niggled and scrawled—and here and there the splendour and the joke and the dream broke through them, like sunshine flashing through prison bars, like music breaking through the written notes. While she gave to the fashioning of the written word all the fastidious, meticulous austerity of devotion that she knew, Imogen in her personal life was not austere or fastidious or devoted at all. She idled; she lounged about; she was slovenly; she bought and sucked toffee; she read omnivorously, including much trash; she was a prey to shoddy, facile emotions and moods, none of which had power to impel her to any action, because a deep, innate scepticism underlay them all; she was a sentimental cynic. She loved too lightly and too slightly; she was idle, greedy, foolish, childish, impatient and vain, sliding out of difficulties like a tramp who fears a job of work. She did not care for great causes; public affairs were to her only an intriguing and entertaining show. She was a selfish girl, a shallow girl, a shoddy girl, enmeshed in egotism, happy in her own circus, caring little whether or no others had bread. Happy in her circus, and yet often wretched too, for life is like that—exquisite and agonising. She wanted to go to the Pacific Islands and bathe from coral reefs; wanted money and fame; wanted to be delivered for ever from meetings and tea-parties, foolish talkers and bores; wanted to save a life, watched by cheering crowds; wanted a motor bicycle; wanted to be a Christian; wanted to be a young man. But not now a naval man; she had seen through the monotony and routine of that life. She wanted in these days to be a journalist, a newspaper correspondent, sent abroad on exciting jobs, to report wars, and eruptions of Vesuvius, and earthquakes, and Cretan excavations, and revolutions in South America, and international conferences. 10 ON PUBLISHING BOOKS From time to time Imogen, in common with many others, brought out books, large and small. They would arrive in a parcel of six, and lie on the breakfast table, looking silly, in clownish wrappers with irrelevant pictures on them. Imogen would examine them with mild distaste. How common they looked, to be sure, now that they were bound! As common as most books, as the books by others. Dull, too. What if all the reviews said so? One couldn’t help caring what reviews said, however hard one tried not to. It was petty and trivial to be cast up and cast down by the opinions of one’s fellows, no wiser than oneself, expressed in print, but so it was. Why? Chiefly because they were expressed in print, to be read by all. One’s disgrace, if it were a disgrace, was so public. People who didn’t know that reviewers were just ordinary people, with no more authority or judgment than they had themselves, believed them. If people read in a review, “It cannot be said that Miss Carrington has been successful in her new book of stories,” they thought that it really could not, not knowing that almost anything can, as a matter of fact, be said, and often is. And if a reviewer said (as was more usual, for reviewers are, taking them all in all, a kindly race), “This is a good book,” people who didn’t know any better really thought that it was so. Then the author was pleased. Particularly as the book wasn’t really good in the least. “I can’t say I am much concerned about my reviews, one way or another,” Roger had once said to Imogen. But he was concerned, all the same. Did he, did all the people who said they didn’t mind things, know that they really did? Or were they indeed deluded? People were surely often deluded; they said such odd things. “It’s not that I mind a bit for myself, it’s the principle of the thing,” they would say. Or, “I don’t care a damn what anyone says of me,” or, “It isn’t that I’d mind taking the risk, but one has to think of other people.” And the people who said, “I know you won’t mind my saying ...” when they knew you would, or, “I don’t want to spread gossip, but ...” when that was just what they did want, or, “You mustn’t think I’m vexed with you, dear,” when they left you nothing else to think. Did these lie? Or were they deceived? Imogen, pondering these apparently so confused minds in her own, which was more approximately accurate (for she would deceive others, but could not easily deceive herself), could not decide. 11 ON SUNDAY WALKS On Sundays the early Georgians used to go from London in trains, getting out somewhere in Surrey, Sussex, Bucks or Herts, to walk in muddy lanes or over blown downs, or through dim green-grey beechwoods or fragrant forests of pine. It is pleasanter to walk alone, or with one companion, or even two, but sometimes unfortunately one walks (and so did the early Georgians) in large groups, or parties of pleasure. Imogen found that she occasionally did this, for it was among the minor bad habits of her set. It did not greatly matter, and these strange processions could not really spoil the country, even though they did very greatly talk. How they talked! Books, politics, personal gossip, good jokes and bad, acrostics, stories, discussions—with these the paths and fields they traversed echoed. But Imogen, like a lower animal, felt stupid and happy and alone, and rooted about the ditches for violets and the hedges for nests, and smelt at the moss in the woods, and broke off branches to carry home. To herself she would hum a little tune, some phrase of music over and over again, and sometimes words would be born in her and sing together like stars of the morning. But for the most part she only rooted about like a cheerful puppy, alive with sensuous joy. Her companions she loved and admired, but could not emulate, for they were wise about things she knew not of. Even about the fauna and flora of the countryside they really knew more than she, who could only take in them an ignorant and animal pleasure. She had long since guessed herself to be an imbecile, and, with the imbecile’s cunning, tried to hide it from others. What if suddenly everyone were to find out, discover that she was an imbecile, with a quite vacant, unhinged mind? If these informed, educated, sophisticated people should discover that, they would dismiss her from their ken; she would no more be their friend. She would be cast out, left to root about alone in the ditches, like a shameless, naked, heathen savage. As she thought about this, someone would come and walk by her side and talk, and she would pull herself together and pretend to be passably intelligent, albeit she was really drunk with the soft spring wind and the earthy smell of the wood. 12 ON MARRIAGE Imogen loved lightly and slightly, her heart not being much in that business. Life was full of stimulating contacts. She admired readily, and liked, was interested, charmed and entertained. Men and women passed to and fro on her stage, delightful, witty, graceful, brilliant, even good, and found favour in her eyes. Poets, politicians and priests, journalists and jesters, artists and writers, scholars and social reformers, lovely matrons, witty maids, and cheerful military men, toilers, spinners, and lilies of the field—a pleasant, various crowd, they walked and worked and talked. So many people were alluring, so many tedious, so many tiresome. One could, unless one was careless, evade the tedious and the tiresome. But supposing that one had been very careless, and had married one of them? What a shocking entanglement life might then become! How monstrously jarring and fatiguing would be the home! “Whether one marries or remains celibate,” Imogen reflected, in her pedantic, deliberating way, “that is immaterial. Both have advantages. But to marry one of the right people, if at all, is of the greatest consequence for a happy life. People do not always think intelligently enough on this important subject. Too often, they appear to act on impulse, or from some inadequate motive. And the results are as we see.” For she was seeing at the moment several ill-mated couples of her acquaintance, some of whom made the best of it, others the worst. Many sought and found affinities elsewhere, for affinities they must (or so they believed) have. Others, renouncing affinity as a baseless dream, wisely accepted less of life than that, and lived in disillusioned amenity with their spouses. An amazing number of marriages came, on the other hand, off, and these were a pleasant sight to see. To come home every evening to the companion you preferred and who preferred you—that would be all right. (Only there might be babies, and that would be all wrong, because they would want bathing or something just when you were busy with something else.) Or to come home to no one; or (better still) not to come home at all. So many habits of life were enjoyable, but not that of perpetual unsuitable companionship. Thus Imogen reflected and philosophised on this great topic of marriage and of love, which did not, however, really interest her so much as most other topics, for she regarded it as a little primitive, a little elementary, lacking in the more entertaining complexities of thought. Metaphysics, poetry, psychology and geography made to her a stronger intellectual appeal; the non-emotional functionings of the dwellers on this planet she found more amusing, and the face of the planet itself more beautiful. Nevertheless, to be a little in love is fun, and makes enchantment of the days. A little in love, a little taste of that hot, blinding cup—but only enough to stimulate, not to blind. One is so often a little in love.... 13 BILLY Billy left Oxford with his pass. His Liberal cousin accepted him, having it on the authority of Stanley, whom he greatly regarded, that Billy had the makings of a good secretary. Billy denied this, and said he would prefer to be a veterinary surgeon, or else to farm in a colony. But his mother had decided that he was to be political. Political. He thought he saw himself.... And anyhow, where was the sense of politics? A jolly old mess the politicians made of things, and always had.... Somehow politics didn’t seem a real thing, like vetting or farming. There was so much poppycock mixed up with it.... But there it was. His mother must have her way. He supposed it would be a shame to disappoint her. Molly wouldn’t look at politics, and one of them must. So in October he was to begin looking at them. One thing was, Giles Humphries wouldn’t keep him long; he’d soon see through him.... “Doesn’t make much odds, anyhow,” he reflected gloomily. “One damn silly job or another. Mother’ll never let me do what I want. ’Tisn’t good enough for her. I wish people wouldn’t want things for one; wish they’d let one alone. Being let alone ... that’s the thing.” Rome said to Stanley, “You’ll never make a politician of that boy. Why try?” “He’s too young to say that about yet, Rome. I should like to see him doing some work for his country....” “They don’t do that, my dear. You’ve been misinformed. I thought you went to the House sometimes.... Really, Stan, I can’t imagine why you should try and turn Billy, who’d be some use in the world as an animals’ doctor, or a tiller of the soil, or, I daresay, as a number of other things, into anything so futile and so useless and so singularly unsuited both to his talents and to his honest nature as a politician. I suppose you’ll make him stand for Parliament eventually. Well, he’ll quite likely get in. People will elect anyone. But he’d only be bored and stupid and wretched there. He’s got no gift of the gab, for one thing. You let the child do what he wants.” “I’m not forcing him. He knows he is free.” “He knows nothing of the sort. He knows you’ve set your heart on this, and he doesn’t want to vex you. Really, you mothers ...” So Billy, in the autumn of 1913, became the inefficient secretary of his kind, inefficient Liberal cousin, who was, however, no more inefficient than his fellow members of Parliament. 14 EXIT PAPA Those were inefficient years; silly years, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They were not much sillier than usual, but there was rather more sound and fury than had been customary of late. It was made by militant suffragists, who smashed public property and burned private houses with an ever more ardent abandon; by Welsh churchmen who marched through London declaring that on no account would they have their church either disestablished or disendowed; by dock and transport strikers, who had a great outbreak of indomitability and determination in 1911, and another in 1912; by Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act, which caused much gnashing of teeth, foaming of mouths and flashing of eyes; by Liberals and Conservatives, who, for some reason, suddenly for a time abandoned that sporting good humour which has always made English political life what it is, a thing some like and others scorn, and took on to dislike each other, even leaving dinner parties to which members of the opposition party had been carelessly invited; and by the men of Ulster, who, being convinced in their consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster, covenanted to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland, and, to this end, got a quite good conspiracy going themselves. There was also, it need hardly be said, plenty of sound and fury on the continent, particularly in the Balkans. They make, these years, a noisy, silly, rowdy, but on the whole cheery chapter of the idiot’s tale. Howbeit, they were less noisy and less silly, and far more cheery, than the chapter which was to follow. Just before this chapter began, papa died. Afterwards they said, it is a mercy papa is dead; that he died before the smash that would so have shattered him. Papa, gentle and sensitive and eighty-four, could scarcely have endured the great war. Down what fresh avenues of faith it would have sent his still adventurous soul exploring, seeking strength and refuge from the nightmare, would never be known. He died in May, 1914. He died as he had lived, a great and wide believer, still murmuring, “I believe ... I believe ... I believe ...” —a credulous, faithful, comprehensive, happy Georgian. He had moments when agnosticism or scepticism was the dominant creed in his soul, but they were only moments; soon the tide of his many faiths would surge over him again, and in all these he died. “Dear papa,” said Vicky, weeping. “To think that he is with mamma at last! And to think that now he knows what is true.... Oh, dear, how will he ever get on without all those speculations and new beliefs? One knows, of course, that he is happy, darling papa ... but will he find it at all the same?” Rome said, “Why? Taking your hypothesis, that there is another life, why should it be supposed to be a revelation of the truth about the universe, or about God? Why should not papa go on speculating and guessing at truth, trying new faiths? You people who believe in what you call heaven seem to have no justification for making it out such an informed place.” “Oh, my dear; aren’t we told that all shadows shall flee away, and that we shall know? I’m sure we are, somewhere, only you won’t read the Bible ever.” “On the contrary, I read the Bible a good deal. I find it enormously interesting. But the one thing we can be quite sure about all those who wrote it is that they had no information at all as to what would occur to them after their deaths. That is among the very large quantity of information that no one alive has ever yet had. So, if you think of papa in heaven, why not think of him in the state in which he would certainly be happiest and most himself—still exploring for truth? Why should death bring a sudden knowledge of all the secrets of the universe? You believers make so many and such large and such unwarrantable assumptions.” “My dear, we must make assumptions, or how get through life at all?” “Very true. How indeed? One must make a million unwarrantable assumptions, such as that the sun will rise to-morrow, and that the attraction of the earth for our feet will for a time persist, and that if we do certain things to our bodies they will cease to function, and that if we get into a train it will probably carry us along, and so forth. One must assume these things just enough to take action on them, or, as you say, we couldn’t get through life at all. But those are hypothetical, pragmatical assumptions, for the purposes of action; there is no call actually to believe them, intellectually. And still less call to increase their number, and carry assumptions into spheres where it doesn’t help us to action at all. For my part, I assume practically a great deal, intellectually nothing.” Vicky was going through her engagement book, seeing what she would have to cancel because of papa’s death, and all she answered was, absently, “Dear papa!”