Told by an Idiot

A FAMILY AT HOME

ONE evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth—in brief, in the year 1879—Mrs. Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr. Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, “Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.”

Poor papa had very often lost his faith during the fifty years of his life. Sometimes he became, from being an Anglican clergyman, a Unitarian minister, sometimes a Roman Catholic layman (he was, by nature, habit and heredity, a priest or minister of religion, but the Roman Catholic church makes trouble about wives and children), sometimes some strange kind of dissenter, sometimes a plain agnostic, who believed that there lived more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds (and as to this he should know, for on quite half the creeds he was by now an expert). On his last return to Anglicanism, he had accepted a country living.

Victoria, the eldest of the six children, named less for the then regnant queen than for papa’s temporary victory over unbelief in the year of her birth, 1856, spoke sharply. She was twenty-three, and very pretty, and saw no reason why papa should be allowed so many more faiths and losses of faith in his career than the papas of others.

“Don’t you want to do anything, Rome?” Stanley, home for the long vacation, asked, and Rome’s eyebrows went up.

“Do anything? Jamais de ma vie. What should I do?”

“Well, anything. Any of the things women do. Teaching. Settlement work. Doctoring. Writing. Painting. Anything.”

“What a list! What frightful labours! I do not.”

“But aren’t you bored?”

“In moderation. I survive. I even amuse myself.”

“I think, you know, that women ought to do things, just as much as men.”

“And just as little. What’s worth doing, after all?”

“Things need doing. The world is so shocking.... All this time women have been suppressed and kept under and not allowed to help in putting things right, and now they’re just getting free....”

“There’s one thing about freedom” (a word upon which Rome had of late been speculating); “each generation of people begins by thinking they’ve got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can’t really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.”

“It’s only lately begun, for women. What was there for mamma to do, when she was young? Nothing. Only to marry papa. But now....”

“What is there for Vicky to do, now she’s young? Nothing. Only to marry Charles—or another.”

“Oh, well, Vicky slums. And she could do any of the other things if she liked.... Anyhow, Rome, you’re not supporting marriage as the only woman’s job worth doing!”

“No. Not even marriage. Perhaps, in fact, marriage less than most things. I only said it is, so far as one can infer, Vicky’s job....

3 CIVILISED PEOPLE

And civilised they were, for the rest of the summer of 1890. In November Rome asked Mr. Jayne, who was having tea with her alone, whether he was visiting Russia shortly. He replied in the negative, for he was, he said, too busy working on his new book to get abroad.

“And further,” he added, in the same composed tone, “I prefer to remain in the same country with you. I can’t, you see, do without you at hand. You know how often I consult you, and talk things over with you.... And further still,” continued Mr. Jayne, quietly, “I love you.”

So saying, he rose and stood over her, bending down with his hands on her shoulders and his pale face close to hers.

“My dearest,” he said. “Let us stop pretending. Shall we stop pretending? Does our pretence do us or anyone else any good? I love you more than any words I’ve got can say. You know it, you know it ... dear heart....”

He drew her up from her chair and looked into her face, and that was the defeat of their civilisation, for at their mutual touch it broke in disorder and fled. He kissed her mouth and face and hands, and passion rose about them like a sea in which they drowned.

Five minutes later they talked it out, sitting with a space between them, for “While you hold me I can’t think,” Rome said.

It’s been so poor and common—full of bickerings and jars and commonness and discontents....

O Rome!...”

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.”

17 AT THE FARM

Imogen, bow and arrows in hand, crawled through the wood, beneath overhanging boughs of oaks and elders and beeches and the deep green arms of pines, that shut the little copse from the August sun into a fragrant gloom. Every now and then she stopped, listened, and laid her ear to the mossy ground.

“Three miles off and making a bee line south,” she observed, frowning. “My God.”

“Michael crawled on,” she continued, “crawling, keeping his head low, so as not to afford a target for any stray arrows. Who knew what sinister shadows lurked in the forest, to right and to left?... Hist! What was that sound? Something cracked in the tangle of scrub near him.... A Cherokee on a lone trail, possibly.... A Cherokee: the most deadly of the Red Tribes.... Cold sweat stood out on Michael’s brow. Could he reach the camp in time? Again he laid his ear to the ground and listened. They were only two miles now, and still that swift, terrible, travelling.... The sun beat upon his head and neck; he felt dizzy and sick. Suppose he fainted before he reached his goal.... That damned cracking in the bushes again.... Good God!... out of the thicket sprang a huge Redskin, uttering the horrid war-whoop of the Cherokee, which, once heard, is never forgotten. Michael leaped to his feet, pulled his bow-string to his ear, let fly....”

Imogen too let fly.

“Missed him,” she muttered, and swarmed nimbly up the gnarled trunk of an oak until she reached the lower boughs, from whence she looked down into a fierce red face, eagle-nosed, feather-crowned.

“Oh, Big Buffalo,” she softly called. “Will you parley?”