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

independent, reckless and headstrong, they were, and, in either case, how unlike the girls of thirty and forty years ago. For, in popular estimation, girls must be changing all the time—new every morning; there must be a new fashion in girls, as in hats, every year. But those who have lived on this earth as much as sixty years know (though they never say, for they like, amiably, to keep in with the young by joining in popular cries, and are too elderly to go to the trouble of speaking the truth) that girls, like other persons, have always been much the same, and always will be. Not the same as one another, for the greyhound is not more different from the spaniel than is one girl from the next; but the same types of girls and of boys, of women and of men, have for ever existed, and will never cease to exist, and there is nothing new under the sun. Yet in the eighteen eighties and nineties, our ancestors were talking blandly of the New Woman, just as to-day people babble of the Modern Girl.
    Rome said, “Yes, Una’ll be all right. She knows the way to live . . .” and was caught by her own phrase into the question, what
is
the way to live, then? Mine, Una’s, Vicky’s, Stanley’s, Maurice’s, papa’s? Perhaps there is no way to live. Perhaps the thing is just to live, without a way. And that is, actually, what Una will do.
    Una’s Ted came to stay in Bloomsbury with the Gardens. He was large and silent and beautiful, and ate hugely, and looked awful, said Vicky, in his Sunday clothes, which were the ones he wore all the time in London. Also, his boots creaked. But you could see, through it all, how he would be striding about his native fields in gaiters and breeches and old tweeds,sucking a pipe and looking like a young earth-god. You could see, therefore, why Una loved him; you could see it even while he breathed hard at meals in his tight collar, and sucked his knife. He was physically glorious; a young Antæus strayed by mistake to town. He and Una were a splendid pair.
    Una cared not at all what impression he made on her family. She was not sensitive. The touch of his hands made her quiver luxuriously, and when he took her in his arms and turned her face up to his and bruised her mouth with kisses, the world’s walls shivered and dissolved round her and she was poured out like water. He was beautiful and splendid and her man, and knew all about the things she cared for, and she loved him with a full, happy passion that responded frankly and generously to his. They chaffed and bickered and played and caressed, and talked about horses and dogs and love, and went to the Zoo.
    Amy giggled behind the young man’s back, and said, “
Did
you see him stuffing his mouth with bun and trying to wash it down with tea out of his saucer?”
    “Why not?” said Rome. “And he did wash it down; he didn’t only try.”
    “
Well!
” Amy let out a breath and nodded twice. “Rather Una than me, that’s all.”

17
Stanley
     
    These years, ’87, ’88, ’89, were stirring years for Maurice and Stanley. In them were founded the Independent Labour Party and the Christian Social Union, and the
Star
newspaper. And there was the great dock strike, and “bloody Sunday,” whenMaurice disgraced Amy and himself by joining in an unseemly fracas with the police, in which he incurred a sprained wrist and a night in prison. In point of fact, as Amy said, he was rather drunk at the time.
    Stanley enjoyed the labour movement. She was not like Maurice, merely up against things; she eagerly swam with the tide, and the tide which carried her during this particular phase of her life was revolutionary labour. She was joyously in the van of the movement. The dock strike stirred her more than the Pigott forgeries, more than the poisoning of Mr. Maybrick by Mrs. Maybrick, more than the death of Robert Browning.
    Stirring times indeed. But in ’89 something happened which stirred Stanley more profoundly than the times. She fell in love and