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

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 attendedthis 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.

13
Parents
     
    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