Told by an Idiot by Rose Macaulay Read Free Book Online Page A

anyhow, the conversers must believe that it was so, for that is all that can be hoped of any conversation). And people must come, or pretend that they came, mainly for the talk, and not so much for any food there might be, or to show their new clothes.
    “Asses they must be,” said Una, who was listening. “I shan’t go to salons ever.”
    “No one will ask you, my child. Anything
you’ll
find yourself at will be a common party, with food and drink and foolish chit-chat.”
    “Like
your
parties,” Una agreed, amiably content. No teasing worried Una; she was as placid as a young cow.

12
Eighties
     
    So, with Vicky and Maurice happily wedded (
settled
, as they wittily called it in those days, though, indeed, they knew as well as we do that marriage is liable to be as inconclusive and unsettling an affair as any other, and somewhat more than most), and papa and mamma happily, if impermanently, ethicised, and the three younger children still pursuing, or being pursued by, education, and Rome perfunctorily, amusedly and inactively surveying the foolish world, the Garden family entered on that eager, clever, civilised, earnest decade,the eighteen eighties. Earnest indeed it was, for people still took politics seriously, and creeds, and literature, and life. Over the period still brooded the mighty ones, those who are usually called the Giants (literary and scientific) of the Victorian era. For the nineteenth century was an age of giant-makers, of hero-worshippers.
    The eighties were also a great time for women. What was called
emancipation
then occurred to them. Young ladies were getting education, and it went to their heads. No creature was ever more solemn, more earnest, more full of good intentions for the world, than the university-educated young female of the eighties. We shall not look upon her like again; she has gone, to make place for us, her lighter-minded daughters, surely a lesser generation, without enthusiasm, ardour or aspiration.
    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 thedenizens 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