Told by an Idiot (21 page)

Thus, in idle, barley-sugared dreamings, this representative of the young generation began the new century.

“What,” mused her grandfather, watching from his bed the winter morning grow, “will the new age be?”

“Much like the old ages, I shouldn’t wonder,” Mrs. Garden murmured, drowsily. “People and things stay much the same . . . much the same. . . .”

“The eternal wheel,” papa speculated, still adhering to his latest faith, but with a note of question. “The eternal, turning wheel. I wonder . . .”

But what mamma wondered, catching the familiar note of doubt in his voice, was where the eternal, turning wheel would next land papa.

“What a world we’ll make it, won’t we, my son and daughter,” Stanley hopefully exclaimed to her children as they rioted about her room. “What a century we’ll have! It belongs to the people of your age, you know. You’ve got to see it’s a good one. . . . Now take yourselves off and let me get up. Run and turn on the cold tap for me, and put the warm at a trickle.”

Stanley whistled as she dressed.

“Yet another century,” her sister Rome commented, with languid amusement, as her early tea was brought to her. “How many we have, to be sure! I wonder if, perhaps, it is not even too many?”

“
Maurice
” shrilly called Maurice’s wife, entering his room at nine o’clock. “Well, I declare!”

Maurice lay heavily sleeping, and whisky exhaled from his breath. He had come home at three o’clock this morning.

“A nice way to begin the new year,” said Amy; she did not say “new century,” because she was of those who could not see but that the century had been new in 1900. She shook her husband’s shoulder, looking down with distaste at his thin, sharp-featured, sleeping face, its usual pallor heavily flushed.

“A nice example to the children. And you always writing rubbish about social reform. . . . You make me sick.”

“Go away,” said Maurice, half opening hot eyes. “Le’ me alone. My head’s bad. . . .”

“So I should imagine,” said Amy. “I’m sick and tired of you, Maurice.”

“Go away, then. Right away. We’d both be happier. Why don’t you?”

“Oh, I dare say I’m old-fashioned,” said Amy. “I was brought up to think a wife’s place was with her husband. Of course, I’m probably
wrong
. I’m always surprised
you
don’t leave
me
, feeling as you do.”

Maurice, waking a little more, surveyed her with morose, heavy, aching eyes, and moistened his dry lips.

“You’re not surprised. You know it’s because of the children. It’s my job to see they grow up decently, with decent ideas and a chance.”

At that Amy’s mirth overcame her.

“Decent ideas! You’re a nice educator of children, aren’t you?
Look
at yourself lying there. . . .”

She pointed to the looking-glass opposite his bed.

“Get out, please,” said Maurice, coldly. “I’ve got to write my leader.”

Meanwhile, the most august representative of the Victorian age wavered wearily between her own century and this strange new one, peering blindly down the coming road as into a grave. It did not belong to her, the new century. She had had her day. A few days of the new young era, and she would slip into the night, giving place to the rough young forces knocking at the door.

The great Victorian century was dead.

The Edwardians were, as we now think, a brief generation to themselves, set between Victorianism and neo-Georgianism (it is a pity that we should have no better name for the present reign, for “Georgian” belongs by right to a period quite other, royalty having ever been sadly unimaginative in its choice of Christian names). Set between the nineteenth century and the full swing of the twentieth, those brief ten years we call Edwardian seem now like a short spring day. They were a gay and yet an earnest time. A time of social reform on the one hand, and social brilliance on the other. The hey-day at once of intellectual Fabianism and of extravagant dissipation. The hour of the repertory theatres, the Irish players, Bernard Shaw and Granville Barker at the Court, Miss Horniman in the provinces, absurd musical comedies that bloomed like gay flowers of a day and died. The onrush of motor-cars and the decline of bicycles and the horse; extravagant country house parties at which royalty consented to be entertained, with royal bonhomie and royal exactions of etiquette. . . . “Mr. Blank, have we not seen that suit rather often before?” “Lady Dash, surely we remember this wall-paper. . . .” “Lord Somebody, this is a very abominable dinner. . . .” What standards to live up to! There was nothing dowdy about our King Edward. He set the stakes high, and all who could afford it played. Pageants and processions passed in regal splendour. Money
nobly flowed. Ideals changed. The sanctity and domesticity of the Heim was no more a royal fetish. “Respectability,” that good old word, degraded and ill-used for so long, sank into discredit, sank lower in the social scale. No more were unfortunate ladies who had had marital troubles coldly banned from court, for a larger charity (except as to suits, dinners, and wall-papers) obtained. Victorian sternness, Victorian prudery and intolerance, still prevailed among some of the older aristocracy, among many of the smaller squirearchy, the professional classes, and the petty
bourgeoisie
; but among most of the wealthy, most of the titled, most of the gay and extravagant classes, a wider liberty grew.

In the intervals of social pleasures, Edward the Peacemaker was busy about the Balanc3 of Power in Europe. He did not care about his cousin Wilhelm. He made an Entente with France, and came to an understanding with Russia, so that when the Trouble should come—and experienced royalty knows that, from time to time, the Trouble is bound to come—we should not meet it singly. The weak point about ententes is that when the Trouble comes to one’s fellow-members, they do not meet it singly either. Considering this, and considering also the annoyance and alarm they inspire in those not in them, and taking them all round, ententes seem, on the whole, a pity. But at the time English people were pleased with this one, and Edward was hopefully called the Peacemaker, just as Victoria had been called Good, and Elizabeth Virgin, and Mary Bloody. We love to name our royalties, and we much prefer to name them kindly. Mary must have been, and doubtless was, very bloody indeed before her people bestowed on her that opprobrious title. Other sovereigns—most other sovereigns—have been pretty
bloody too, but none of them bloody enough to be so called.

A queer time! Perhaps a transition time; for that matter, this is one of the things times always are. The world of fashion, led by an elderly royal gentleman bred at the Victorian court of his mother, and retaining queer Victorian traditions that younger gentlemen and ladies did not observe. King Edward, for instance, observed Sunday with some strictness. He thought it right; he felt it should be done. The British Sunday was an institution, and King Edward was all for institutions. A generation was growing up, had already grown up, who did not understand about Sunday in that sense. But you may observe about elderly Victorian persons that, however loosely they may sit to Sunday, they usually have a sense of it. They play or work on it consciously, with a feeling that they are breaking a foolish rule, possibly offending an imaginary public opinion. They seldom quite realise that the rule and the opinion they are thinking of are nearly obsolete. They seldom regard Sunday (with reference to the occupations practised on it) precisely as if it were a weekday. Institutions die hard. They linger long after their informing spirit has died.

Anyhow, King Edward VII. was a Victorian gentleman long before he was an Edwardian. So he observed Sunday and the lesser proprieties, without self-consciousness. He was like his mother, with a difference. Both had a sense of royal dignity and of the Proper Thing. His subjects, too, had a sense of the Proper Thing; people always have. But the Proper Thing, revered as ever, gradually changed its face, or rather turned a somersault and alighted on its head.

Well, the Edwardians, like the Elizabethans, the Jacobeans, the Carolines, the Georgians, the Victorians,
and the neo-Georgians, were a mixed lot. This attempt to class them, to stigmatise them with adjectives, is unscientific, sentimental, and wildly incorrect. But, because it is rather more interesting than to admit frankly that they were merely a set of individuals, it will always be done.

La reine est morte. Vive le roi. King Edward was proclaimed by heralds, by trumpeters, and with the rolling of drums; and God Save the King. Then they buried the late queen with royal pomp, and kings, emperors, archdukes, and crown princes rode with her to the tomb.

King Edward opened Parliament in state. A great king he was for pageantry and for state. He read the Accession Declaration. It was a tactlessly worded declaration in some ways, for it was drawn up in days when Roman Catholicism was not well thought of by the Head of the Church and Defender of the Faith, King Edward did not like reading it, “His Majesty,” wrote the outraged Catholic Press, “would willingly have been relieved from the necessity of branding with contumelious epithets the religious tenets of any of his subjects.” There were protests, not only from Roman Catholics, but from protestants and agnostics, who both, in the main, thought it rude. But some there were who, though they knew it was rude, knew also that it was right to be rude to Roman Catholics. “They are the king’s subjects as much as others, and belong to a distinguished old church,” the protesters declared. “The thing is an antediluvian piece of ill-breeding.”

“Bloody Mary. The Inquisition. No Popery,” was the crude reply. “And are not Roman Catholics always rude to our religion? Why, then, should we not be rude to theirs?”

“Roman Catholics,” replied the more polite and sophisticated, “cannot help being a little rude—if you call it so—to other faiths. They are not to blame. It is an article of their faith that theirs is the only true and good church. There is no such article in other faiths. We are not obliged by our religion to believe them wrong, as they are, unfortunately, obliged to believe us wrong. Obviously, then, we should practise the courtesy forbidden to them. It is more generous and more dignified. Also, they are as good as we are. All religions are doubtless, in the main, inaccurate, and one does not differ appreciably from another. And His Majesty ought to preserve a strict impartiality concerning the many and various faiths of his people. The Declaration is ignorant, unstatemanlike, and obscurantist, and smacks of vulgar seventeenth century Protestantism. It is a worse scandal than the Thirty-nine Articles.”

But “No Popery ”was still the cry of the noisy few, and the scandal remained. Reluctantly protesting his firm intention to give no countenance to the religion of some millions of his subjects, and solemnly in the presence of God professing, testifying, and declaring that he did make this declaration on the plaine and ordinary sense of the words as they were commonly understood by English Protestants, without any evasion, equivocation, or mentall reservation whatsoever, and without any dispensation from the Pope, either already granted or to be sought later, the King opened his khaki-elected Parliament, which proved as ineffective as parliaments always do. It is of no importance which side is in office in Parliament; any
study of the subject must convince the earnest student that all parties are about equally stupid. By some fluke, useful Acts may from time to time get passed by any Government that happens to be in power. More often, foolish and injurious Acts get passed. Personality and intelligence in ministers do certainly make some difference; but party, it seems, makes none. The stupid, the inert, the dishonest, and the ill-intentioned flourish like bay trees impartially on both sides of the avenue. Only the very
naïf
can believe that party matters, in the long run. This first Parliament of the twentieth century proved, perhaps, even more than usually inept, as parliaments elected during war excitement are apt to be. It could deal neither with education, defences, labour, finance, or poisoned beer.

The war scrambled on: a tedious, ineffective guerrilla business. The Concentration Camp trouble began, and over its rights and wrongs England was split.

Mr. Garden hated the thought of these camps, where Boer women and children, driven from their homes, dwelt in discomfort (so said Miss Emily Hobhouse and others), and fell ill and died. They might be, as their defenders maintained, kindly meant, but it was all very disagreeable. In fact, the whole war preyed on papa’s mind and nerves. More and more it seemed to him a hideous defiance of any possible Christian order of society, a thing wholly outside the sphere of God’s scheme for the world. But, then, of course, nearly everything was that, and always
had been. So utterly outside that sphere were most of the world’s
happenings that it sometimes seemed to papa as if they could scarcely
be
happenings, as if they must be evil illusions of our own, outside the great Reality. The more papa brooded over this Reality, the more he became persuaded that it must be absolute and all pervasive, that nothing else really existed. “We make evil by our thought,” said papa. “God knows no evil. . . . God does not know about the war. Nor about the Concentration Camps. . . .”

It will be seen that papa was ripe for the acceptance of a new creed which had recently come across the Atlantic and was becoming fashionable in this country. Christian Science fastened on papa like a mosquito, and bit him hard. It comforted him very much to think that God did not know about the war. He told his grandchildren about this ignorance on the part of the Deity. Imogen pondered it. She had a metaphysical and inquiring mind, and was always interested in God.

“What
does
God think all those soldiers are doing out in Africa, grandpapa?” she asked, after a considering pause. “Or doesn’t he know they’re soldiers?”