Told by an Idiot (13 page)

The assassin had, meanwhile, been captured. He proved to be a Russian, one Sergius Dmitri, described as a student, living in London. The only account of his action he gave was that he had known Mr. Jayne in Russia and disliked him, and that Mr. Jayne had not done his duty by his wife, who was Sergius Dmitri’s cousin. So Sergius Dmitri had, in a moment of
impulse, knifed Mr. Jayne. No, he could not say that he regretted his action.

His record showed him to be of the anarchist persuasion, and a thrower of several bombs in his native land, some of which had reached their marks. Human life was not, it was apparent, sacred to him. Mrs. Jayne, prostrated with grief, cursed him for murdering her husband, the father of her children, who had devotedly loved her and whom she had devotedly loved. He had never neglected her; that was a fancy of her cousin’s, who had been a prey to jealousy.

Sergius Dmitri was hanged. Mrs. Jayne continued for a time to live in her husband’s flat, supported by his money, but, soon tiring of widowhood, married a fellow-countryman and went, with her mother and children, to live in Paris.

Miss Garden, who had been so close a witness of the horrid event, and who was known besides as an intimate friend of Mr. Jayne’s, never afterwards referred to the affair, even to her relatives. Miss Garden was no giver of confidences; no one ever learnt how she had felt about the business or about Mr. Jayne. There were not wanting, of course, those who said that these two had loved too well, had, in fact, been involved in an affair. But, in view of Miss Garden’s reputation for cool inviolability, and of her calm manner after the tragedy, such rumours obtained little credence. Miss Garden did, indeed, leave London shortly after the inquest, and spent the rest of the summer in the country, but she returned in the autumn as apparently bland, cool and composed as always.

Eighteen ninety-two. Mr. Garden was troubled by the death, in January, of Cardinal Manning, and by the disputes conducted in the Press between Professor Huxley, Mr. Gladstone, and the Duke of Argyll, concerning the Book of Genesis and the existence of God, which had, in the eyes of all these eminent persons, some strange connection one with another. Mrs. Garden’s father, the Dean, was, on the contrary, troubled by neither of these events, since he did not care for the Cardinal, knew that the professor had not, theologically, a leg to stand on, and the duke at most one. Grandpapa was more stirred, in the early part of 1892, by the untimely death of the Duke of Clarence, by the alarming increase of female bicyclists, and by the prevalent nuisance of that popular song, “Ta-ra-ra-boomdeay.”

Vicky was stirred by Paderewski, by the influenza epidemic, which all her children got, and by the new high-shouldered sleeve. Maurice by the doings of the L.C.C. Progressives, the imminence of the parliamentary elections, the just claims but ignorant utterances of the Labour Party, woman’s suffrage, the birth of the
Morning Leader
, and Mr. Charles Booth’s
Life and Labour in London;
Stanley by woman’s suffrage,
Tess of the D’Urbevilles
, the comedies of Mr. Oscar Wilde and Mr. J. M. Barrie,
The Light that Failed
, and Mr. H. G. Wells. Irving by golf, Mr. Arthur Roberts, Miss Marie Lloyd, and
Sherlock Holmes;
and Una by the arrival of a new baby and the purchase of a new hunter.

Rome was not very greatly stirred by any of these things. Into her old detached amusement at the
queer pageant of life had come a faint weariness, as if nothing were very much worth while. If she thought anything worth serious comment, she did not reveal it. Life was to her at this time more than ever a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. She went on her way as usual, reading, seeing pictures, hearing music, meeting people, talking, smoking, bicycling, leading the life led by intelligent dilettanti in the small, cultivated nucleus of a great city. There was nothing to show that she endured the world with difficulty; that in the early mornings she would wake and lie helpless, without armour, waiting the onslaught of the new day, and in the evenings would slip from her armour with a shivering sigh, to drown engulfed by darkness and the hopeless passion of the night. “Some day,” she would say to herself, “I shall not mind so much. The edge will get blunt. Some day . . . some day . . .”

But the black night mocked her, and she could not see that day on the furthermost dip of the horizon; she could only see Mr. Jayne’s dear, pale face turned to her with wistful hoping in his gray eyes behind their glasses, and he was saying, “Am I to go alone, or will you come?” and then, even as, having considered life, she opened her lips to reply, there was Mr. Jayne lurching forward, choked with blood, his question answered, for he was to go alone.

“My dear,” whispered Rome, in tears, to the unanswering, endless night. “My dear. Come back to me, and I will give you anything and everything. . . . But you will never come back, and I can give you nothing any more.”

And thus she could not see, however far off, that day when she should not mind so much, that day when the edge should get blunt.

Maurice, in 1892, was against very nearly everything. He was against the Conservative party, for
the usual reasons. He was against the Liberal party, because Mr. Gladstone opposed woman’s suffrage and the Labour party and the Eight Hours’ Day. He was against the Woman’s Suffrage Bill because it was a class bill. He was against Mr. Keir Hardie and the new Labour party because they talked what he considered sentimental tosh, damaging their own cause, and because Amy, his wife, echoed it parrot-like. He was against the Social Democratic Federation for the same reasons, and because it did not prevent its members from making bombs. He was against the socialist meetings in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square which he had been used to approve, because they, too, talked tosh. More and more, as Maurice advanced from the heat of youth into the clear-sighted unsentimentality of middle life (he was now thirty-five) he disliked tosh, and more and more most of the world seemed to him to be for ever talking it. The people, the parliamentarians, the press, the governing classes, the imperialists, the democrats, the middle classes, rivalled one another in the flow of cant and nonsense they emitted. Oh, God, for clear heads and hard facts, unmuddled by humbug and romanticism! Almost, Maurice was impelled to vote for Lord Salisbury, whose cool, cynical hardness was a relief; but, after all, deeper than his hatred of sentimentalism, lay his hatred of injustice and economic cruelty and class privilege. He was a democrat impatient with democracy, a journalist despising journalism, the product of an expensive education at war with educational inequality, a politician loathing politics, a husband chafing at his wife, a child of his age in rebellion against it, an agnostic irritated by the thoughtful, loquacious agnosticism of his day.

“There seems,” as his mother said of him, “to be no hole into which Maurice fits. Whereas Stanley fits
into them all. They are both too extreme, dear children. It is neither necessary, surely, to be fighting everything all one’s time, nor to chase after every wind that blows. . . . I sometimes think that the best balanced and the most
solid
of you all is Una.”

“Oh, yes, dear mamma,” Vicky replied. “Una is fast-rooted in the soil. Country people are always the best balanced. The only new things Una takes up are bicycles and golf; the only old things she drops are her g’s. Una is eternal and sublime; there’s nothing of the new woman about her, and nothing of the reactionary either. There never was any one less self-conscious, or less conscious of her period. All the rest of us think we’re moderns, but Una knows not times; she merely swings along, her dogs at her heels, her children at her skirts, her golf clubs over her shoulder, and always another baby on the way. And the beauty of the child! She’d make a sensation in London—though she’s not the type of the moment, not elegant or artificial, too much the unsophisticated child of nature. Oh, yes, Una is on the grand scale.”

“Well, your grandfather thinks even Una is too modern. It’s the golf and bicycling and g’s, I suppose. I expect the fact is that it’s difficult, in these days, to avoid being new. You children and your friends all are. In fact, the whole world seems to be.”

“The world is always new, mamma darling, and always old. It’s no newer than it was in 1880, or 1870—in fact, not so new, by some years. The only year in which it was really new was, according to grandpapa and the annotators of the Book of Genesis, 4004 B.C.”

“Yes, I dare say it was sadly new then, and no doubt grandpapa would have found it so. But somehow one hears the
word
a good deal just now, used by young people as well as old. What with new women, and
new art, and new literature, and new humour, and the new hedonism that Denman and Stanley talk about, and that seems to mean making your drawing-room like an old curiosity shop and burning incense in it and lighting it with darkened crimson lamps and lying on divans with black and gold cushions and smoking scented cigarettes and reading improper plays aloud . . . Only Rome says that isn’t new in the least, but thousands of years old.”

“Oh, Rome. Rome thinks nothing new. She was born blasée. She hasn’t got grandpapa’s or Stanley’s fresh mind. She always expects the unexpected. Oscar Wilde says that to do that shows a thoroughly modern mind. If Rome had been Eve, she’d have looked at the new world through a monocle (she’d have worn that, even if nothing else) and seen that it was stale, and said with a yawn, ‘All this is very
vieux jeu.’
”

“And very possibly,” said mamma, “it was.”

’Ninety-Three passed. In it grandpapa died, others said of influenza following on old age, but he himself would have it that it was of a shock he received one day when driving, convalescent, in Hyde Park; for his horses, very respectable and old-fashioned animals, shied at a lady bicyclist, and grandpapa’s heart jolted, and when he got home he took to his bed and never rose again. So much, he whispered, hoarsely and somewhat sardonically, to his daughter, for the New Woman and her pranks. But what did it signify, he added. If he was not to get well of this attack, he was
ready to go. He trusted (though a worm) in his Maker, and was not unprepared. So grandpapa, dignified to the last, departed from this life, one of the last of the Regency bucks and the Tory clerics, perhaps the last of all to condemn on theological grounds the arithmetic book of Bishop Colenso.

Fantastic observers might have imagined that, with the departure of this firm old Victorian, who had so disapproved of novelty, life span still more giddily on its rapid way. Certainly the years 1893 and 1894 do, for some reason, appear to have struck both those who gloried in novelty, and those whom it shocked, as more than usually new. The audacious experimentalism which is always with us was even more self-conscious then than is customary. Such are time’s revenges that the so daring social, literary and intellectual cleavages made by our forefathers in those years are now regarded as quaintly old-fashioned compromises with freedom, even as our own audacities will doubtless be regarded thirty years hence. But the people of the nineties, even as the people of the eighties, seventies, sixties, and so back, and even as the people of the twentieth century, thought they were emancipating themselves from tradition, saw themselves as bold buccaneers sailing uncharted seas, and found it great fun. The illusion of advance is sustaining, to all right-minded persons, and should by all means be cultivated. It gives self-confidence and poise. It even seems to please elderly persons to mark or fancy changes of habit, which they have no wish to emulate, among their juniors, and it certainly pleases their juniors to be thus remarked upon, for they, too, believe that they are something new—the new young, as they have always delighted to call themselves—so all are pleased and no harm is done. The eighteen nineties were no different, in this respect, from the nineteen twenties.

But 1894 does actually seem to have been a more amusing year than most that we have now. What with the New Humour, and the New Earnestness, and the New Writers, and the New Remorse, and the New Woman, and the New Drama, and the New Journalism, and the New Child, and the New Parent, and the New Conversation, and the telephone, and the gramophone, and the new enormous sleeves, there was a great deal of novelty about.

It is a curious time to look back upon to-day. Curious to read the newspapers, reviews, and comic papers of the time; to find, for instance, in the
Observer
a leading article on the last novel of Mrs. Humphry Ward, as if it were a European event, and one the next Sunday on, “What is the modern girl coming to, for she opens her front door with a key?” To come, too, on reviews of Mr. Hall Caine’s
Manxman
, such as that by Mr. Edmund Gosse in the
St. James’s Gazette
,—“A contribution to literature; and the most fastidious critic would give in exchange for it a wilderness of that deciduous trash which our publishers call fiction. It is not possible to part from it without a warm tribute of approval.” But how possible it has now become! Indeed, in our times it has been known that a certain author, having in an unguarded hour committed to print an appreciation of Sir Hall Caine, and then having learnt his mistake, has changed his name and started life again, unable otherwise to support his disgrace.
Autre temps, autres mceurs
. Certainly the nineties were a long time ago. Strange, too, to read some of the contemporary press comments on that innocent, well-produced, extremely well illustrated, and, on the whole, capable periodical, the
Yellow Book
—“the outcry,” as Mr. Arthur Symons put it later, when the publication of the
Savoy
was greeted with much the same noise, “the outcry for no reason in
the world but the human necessity for making a noise.” You would think that the worst that could be said of the
Yellow Book
was that it was not eclectic, that it opened its hospitable doors to the worse writers as well as to the better, and that its intellectually lowest contributions were too widely sundered from its highest; and the best that could be said of it (and how much this is!) is that Aubrey Beardsley drew for it, Henry James and Max Beerbohm wrote prose for it, and W. B. Yeats poetry, and that it had, on the whole, some of the more capable writers of the day as contributors. But, in point of fact, the best that was said of it was that it was brilliant, daring, courageous, new, and intensely modern, and the worst that it was bizarre, revolting, affected, new, and decadent. It appears to a later generation to have been none of these things; that is, it was brilliant in patches only, and commonplace in patches; it was not daring except in that it is greatly daring to publish any periodical ever; it was not more intensely modern than everything always is, and most of its contributors were middle-aged; its weak and trite contributions (though, indeed, it did at times sink pretty low) were too few to allow of the word revolting being properly applied to the whole magazine, even by him whom Mr. Gosse called, in another context, the most fastidious critic; and as for decadent, this it may, indeed, have been, as no one has ever discovered what, if anything, this word, as generally used at this time, meant. Exhibiting those qualities which mark the decline of a great period, it should mean; whereas many of those who survive from the nineties maintain that, on the other hand, they marked the beginning of a good period. Or it may mean merely less good than its predecessors, and this the
Yellow Book
was assuredly not, but quite the contrary. It was, in fact, not unlike various capable,
well-produced periodicals of our own day. Many of its surviving contributors contribute now to these newer journals. But how seldom does one now hear them or their writings or the periodicals to which they contribute called ultra-modern, daring, shocking, decadent, or bizarre. Rather, in fact, the contrary. Thus, it will be observed, do the moderns of one day become the safe establishments of the next. In ten years the public will be saying of our present moderns, “They are safe. They are
vieux jeu
. They resemble cathedrals.” What a death’s head at the feast of life is this fearful fate which is suspended before even the newest of us, and which, if we survive long enough, we shall by no means avoid. Happy, possibly, were those moderns of the nineties who died with their modernity still enveloping them, so that no one shall ever call them cathedrals. Gloriously decadent, though no longer new, they shall for ever remain, and no man shall call Aubrey Beardsley respectable, established or dull, for he belonged to the Beardsley period, and, though he may be outmoded, he shall never be outrun.