Told by an Idiot (6 page)

It was these ardent good intentions, this burning social conscience, as well as the desire to do the emancipated thing, that drove Stanley, leaving Oxford in 1882, to take up settlement work in Poplar. So Poplarised, so orientalised, did she become, that she took to speaking of her parental home in Bloomsbury as being in the West End. To her, everything west of St. Paul’s became the West End. The West End, its locality and its limits, is indeed a debatable land. Where you think it is seems to depend on where you live or work. To those who work in Fleet Street, as do so many journalists, it seems that anything west of the Strand is the West End. “West End Cocaine Orgie,” you see on newspaper placards, and find that the orgie occurred in Piccadilly or Soho. Mayfair and its environs are also spoken of by these scribblers of the east as the West End. But to those who live in Mayfair, the West End begins at about Edgware Road, and Mayfair seems about the middle, and to the
denizens of Edgware Road the West End is Bayswater, Kensington, or Shepherd’s Bush. The dwellers in these outlying lands of the sunset do really acknowledge that they are the West End; and to them Mayfair and Piccadilly are not even the middle, but the east. A strange, irrational phrase, which bears so fluctuating and dubious a meaning. But then nearly all phrases are strange and irrational, like most of those who use them.

Anyhow, and be that as it may, Stanley went and worked in Poplar, to ameliorate the lot of the extremely poor, who lived there then as now. She took up with Fabians and admired greatly Mr. Bernard Shaw, while cleaving still to William Morris. She was concerned about Sweated Women, and served on Women’s Labour Committees. Her good working intelligence caused people to give her charges and responsibilities beyond her years. She was now a sturdy, capable, square-set, brown-faced young woman, attractive, with her thrust-out under-lip and chin, and her beautiful blue eyes under heavy black brows. She spoke well on platforms in a deep, girlish voice, was as strong as a pony, and could work from morning till night without flagging. There was something candid and lovable about Stanley. A doctor and a clergyman asked her in wedlock, but she did not much care about them, and was too busy and interested to think about marriage.

She had, among other strong and ardent beliefs, belief in God. She had religion, inherited perhaps from her papa, but taking in her a more concentrated and less diffused form. To her the Christian church was a militant church, the sword of God come to do battle for the poor and oppressed. To her a church was an enchanted house, glorious as a child’s dream, the Mass as amazing as a fairy story and as true as sunrise. She did not much mind at which churches she attended
this miracle, but on the whole preferred those of the Anglican establishment to the Roman variety, finding these latter rather more lacking in beauty than churches need be. Stanley was an optimist. She looked on the shocking, wicked, and ill-constructed universe, and felt that there must certainly be something behind this odd business. There must, she reasoned, be divine spirit and fire somewhere, to account for such flashes of good as were so frequently evident in it. Something gallant, unquenchable, imperishably ardent and brave, must burn at its shoddy heart.

Vicky complained that Stanley thought of God (“in whom, of course,” said Vicky, “we all believe”) as a socialist agitator, and Stanley perhaps did. Certainly God, she believed, was fighting sweated industries.

“With signally small success,” Maurice said, for the commission on these industries had just concluded.

“God very seldom succeeds,” Stanley agreed. “He has very nearly everything against him, of course.”

She seldom mentioned God, being, for the most part, as shyly inarticulate as a schoolgirl on this theme so vital to her. But of unemployment, labour troubles, and sweated industries, she and Maurice would talk by the hour. She wrote articles for his paper on the conditions of working women in Poplar. She attended street labour meetings in the east, while Maurice did the same in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park.

In 1882, the year that Stanley left Oxford, Una left school. It was no use sending her to college, for she had not learning, nor the inclination to acquire it. She had done with lessons.

“You don’t want just to slack about for ever, I suppose?” Stanley put it to her, sternly.

“For ever. . . .” Una looked at her with wide, sleepy blue eyes, trying and failing to think of eternity.
Una lived in to-day, not in yesterday or to-morrow. She was rather like a puppy.

“I don’t much care,” she said at length. “I mean, I’ve never thought about it. I’m never bored, anyhow. There’s theatres, and badminton, and dancing, and all the shops, and taking the dogs in the parks. . . . Of course I’d like better to live in the country again. But London’s all right.
I’m
all right. I’m not booky like you, you see.”

Stanley said it had nothing to do with being booky; there were things that wanted doing. Doubtless there were. But she failed to rouse Una to any thought of doing them. Una stayed at home, and went to parties, and theatres, and played games, and occasionally rode, and walked the dogs in the parks, and stayed with friends in the country, and enjoyed life.

“I suppose she’ll just marry,” Stanley disappointedly said, for in the eighteen eighties marriage was not well thought of, though freely practised, by young feminine highbrows.

As to Irving, another cheery hedonist, he was enjoying himself very much at Cambridge and reading for a pass.

The eighteen eighties were freely strewn with, among other things, Vicky’s children. The halcyon period for children had not yet set in; did not, in fact, set in until well on in the twentieth century. In the eighteen eighties and nineties children were still thwarted, still disciplined, still suppressed, though with an abatement of mid-Victorian savagery. The idea had not yet started that they were interesting little creatures to
be encouraged and admired. On the whole, the bringing up of children (at best a poor business) was perhaps less badly done during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century than before or since. It may safely be said that it is always pretty badly done, since most parents and all children are very stupid and uncivilised, and anyhow to “bring up “(queer phrase!) the unfortunate raw material that human nature is, to bring it up to any semblance of virtue or intelligence (the parents, probably, having but small acquaintance with either) is a gargantuan task, almost beyond human powers. Some children do, indeed, grow up as well as can, in the circumstances, be expected, but this is, as a rule, in spite of, rather than on account of, the misguided efforts of their parents. And most children do not grow up well at all, but quite otherwise, which is why the world is as we see it.

Vicky was, as parents go, not a bad one. She loved her children, but did not unduly spoil them or turn their heads with injudicious attentions. Year by year her nursery filled with nice, pretty, sturdy little Du Maurier boys, and fine, promising active, little Du Maurier girls, in sailor suits, jerseys, tam-o’-shanters, and little frocks sashed about the knees, and year by year, Vicky was to be found again in what newspaper reporters, in their mystic jargon, call, for reasons understood by none but themselves, “a certain condition.” “The woman,” they will write, “said she was in a certain condition.” As if every one, all the time, were not in a certain condition. Whether these journalists think the statement, “she was going to have a baby “indecent, or coarse, will probably never transpire, for they are a strange, instinct-driven, non-analytical race, who can seldom give reasons for their terminology. Who shall see into their hearts? Perhaps they really
do think that the human race should not be mentioned until it is visible to the human eye.

Anyhow Vicky, of a franker breed than these, said year by year, with resignation, “
Again
, my dears, I replenish the earth,” and added sometimes, in petulant inquiry, “How long, oh, Lord, how long?”

But Amy, the wife of Maurice, had, like newspaper men, her pruderies. Of her coming infants she preferred to speak gently, in fretful undertones. When she told Maurice about the first, she did not, like Vicky, sing out, on his return from the office, “What
do
you think? There’s a baby on the way! “but, drawing her inspiration from fiction, she hid her face against his coat and murmured, “Oh,
Maurice I
Guess.”

Maurice said, “Guess what? How do you mean, guess, darling?” to which she replied, “Well, I do think you’re slow to-night . . . Oh, Maurice . . .”

And then Maurice, instead of saying, like the young husbands in the fiction she was used to, “Darling, you
can’t
mean. . . . What angels women are! ”said instead, “Oh, I say, do you mean we’ve got a baby coming? Good business.”

A baby. What a coarse, downright word for the little creature. Later, of course, one got used to it, but just at first, at the very, very outset, the dimmest dawn of its tiny being, it was scarcely a baby. And what about her being an angel? Obviously Maurice did not know the rules of this game.

When the baby, and the subsequent baby (there were only two altogether) arrived, Amy spoiled them. She was a depraved mother. Also she was unjust. She was, of course, the type of mother whose strong sex instinct leads her to prefer boys to girls, and she took no pains to hide this. Maurice said, stubbornly, “The girl shall have as good a chance as the boy, and as good an education. We’ll make no difference,”
but Amy said, “Chance! Fiddlesticks I What chances does a girl want, except to marry well? What does a girl want with education? I’m not going to have her turned into a bluestocking. Girls can’t have real brains, anyhow. They can’t
do
anything—only sit about and look superior.”

This referred to Rome, and these were the remarks that fell like nagging drops of water on Maurice’s sensitive, irritable nerves and mind, slowly teasing love out of existence, and beating into him (less slowly) that he had married a fool.

Maurice found outlet from domestic irritation in political excitement. There was, for instance, the Home Rule Bill. It seemed to Maurice, as to many others, immeasurably important that this bill should go through. Its failure to do so, his own failure to be elected in the elections of 1886, and the victory of the Unionists, plunged him into a sharper and more militant Radicalism. At the age of twenty-nine he was an ardent, scornful, clear-brained idealist and cynic, successful on platforms and brilliant with pens. He was becoming a stand-by of the Radical press, a thorn in the Tory flesh. His wife, by this time, after four years of marriage, definitely disliked him, because he had bad, sharp manners, was often disagreeable to her, often drank a little too much, and obviously despised the things she said. She consoled herself with going to parties, spoiling her babies, and flirting with other people. He consoled himself with politics, writing, talking, and drinking. An ill-assorted couple. Maurice hoped that his children would be more what he desired. So far, of course, they were fonder of Amy. Even the boy was fonder of Amy, though sons often have a natural leaning towards their fathers, and frequently grow up with no more than a careless affection for their mothers; for, contrary to a common belief, the great affection
felt by (Œdipus for his mother is most unusual, and, indeed, (Œdipus would probably have felt nothing of the sort had he known of the relationship. It is noticeable that sons usually select as a bride a woman as unlike their mothers and sisters as possible. It makes a change.

So Maurice had reason to hope that his son, anyhow, would prefer him as time went on, and therefore be inclined to share his point of view about life. As to the girl, she might grow up a fool or she might not; impossible to tell, at three years old. Most girls did.

In 1887 the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria occurred. Maurice wrote a deplorably unsuitable article for the occasion, called “Gaudeamus,” and taking for its theme the subject races of Ireland and India and the less fortunate and less moneyed classes in Great Britain, which brought him into a good deal of disrepute, and made Amy more than ever disgusted with him.

“Hardly the moment,” papa commented. “One sympathises with his impatience, but the dear old lady’s jubilee is hardly the moment to rub in the flaws of her Empire.”

Papa was now a Roman Catholic again. After three or four years of Ethicism, the absence of a God had begun to tell on him. It had slowly sapped what had always been the very foundation of his life—his belief in absolute standards of righteousness. For, if there were no God, on what indeed did these standards rest? It was all very well to sing in South Place of “the great, the lovely and the true,” but what things
were
great, lovely and true, and how could one be sure of
them, if they derived their sanction from nothing but man’s own self-interested and fluctuating judgments? Deeply troubled by these thoughts, which were, of course, by no means new to him, papa was driven at last out of his beautiful and noble halfway house to the bleak cross roads. Either he must become a moral nihilist, or he must believe again in a God. Since to become a moral nihilist was to papa unthinkable, so alien was it from all his habits, his traditions and his thoughts, so alien, indeed, from all the thought of his period, the only alternative was to believe in a God. And papa, swung by reaction, determined that this time (was it by way of atonement, or safeguard?) he would do the thing thoroughly. He would enter once more into that great ark of refuge from perplexing thoughts, the Roman branch of the Catholic Church. There (so long as he should remain there) he would be safe. He would rest therein like a folded sheep, and wander no more. So, humbly, in the year 1886, he did allegiance again to this great and consoling Church (which, as he said, he had never left, for you cannot leave it, though you may be unfaithful) and worshipped inconspiciously and devoutly in a small and austere Dominican chapel.

His only grief was that mamma at this point struck. She made the great refusal. She loved papa no less faithfully than ever, but his continuous faiths had worn her out. She said quietly, “I am not going to be a Roman Catholic again, Aubrey.”