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

married. It was bound to occur, to such an ardent claimer of life. The man was a writer of light essays and short stories and clever, unproduced plays. He was thirty, and he had an odd, short white face, and narrow, laughing eyes beneath a clever forehead, and little money, but a sense of irony and of form and of the stage. He was in the most modern literary set in London, and his name was Denman Croft. At first Stanley thought him very affected, and she was right, for the most modern literary set
was
affected just then; but in a month or so she loved him with an acute, painful ecstasy that made her dizzy and blinded her to all the world besides. Her work lost interest; she was alive only in those hours when they were together; love absorbed her body and soul. Why, he protested, did she not live in the more reasonable parts of London, and meet people worth meeting? All sorts of exciting, amusing things were happening in the world of letters and art just now, and she ought to be in it. Stanley began to feel that perhaps she ought. After all, one could be progressive, and fight for labour reform and trades unions as wellin the west as in the east. Then, while she was thus reflecting, it became apparent to her that Denman Croft was going immediately to propose marriage to her. She had for some weeks known that he loved her, but was scarcely ready for this crisis when it came. Passionate ecstasy possessed them both; they sank into it blind and breathless and let its waves break over them.
    Life, life, life. Stanley, who had always lived to the uttermost, felt that she had never lived before. Spirit, brain and body interacted and co-operated in the riot of their passion.
    They married almost at once, and took a house in Margaretta Street, Chelsea.
    Stanley always reflected her time, and it was, people said, a time of transition. For that matter, times always are, and one year is always rather different from the last. In this year, the threshold of the nineties, all things were, it was said, being made new. New forms of art and literature were being experimented with, new ideas aired. New verse was being written, new drama, essays, fiction and journalism. Stanley was so much interested in it all (being, as she now was, in close touch with the latest phase in these matters) that her social and political earnestness flagged, for you cannot have all kinds of earnestness at once. Instead of going in the evenings to committee meetings and mass labour meetings, she now went to plays and literary parties. Instead of writing articles on women’s work, she began to write poetry and short sketches. All this, and the social life she now led, and the excitement of love, Denman, and her new home, was so stimulating and absorbing that she had little attention to spare for anything else. Stanley was like that—enthusiastic, headlong, a deep plunger, a whole-hogger.
    “They do have the most fantastic beings to dinner,”Vicky said to her Charles. “Velvet coats and immense ties. . . . It reminds me of ten years ago, when I was being æsthetic. But these people are much smarter talkers. Denman says they are really doing something good, too. He’s an attractive creature, though I think his new play is absurd and he’s desperately affected. The way that child adores him! Stanley does go so head over ears into everything. None of the rest of us could love like that. It frightens one for her. . . . But anyhow, I’m glad she’s off that stupid trades’ union and sweated labour fuss. Maurice does more than enough of that for the family, and I was afraid Stan was going to turn into a female fanatic, like some of those short-haired friends of hers. That’s not what we women ought to be, is it, my Imogen?”
    Vicky caught up her Imogen, an infant of one summer, in her arms, and kissed her. But Imogen, neither then nor at any later time, had any clear idea about what women ought or ought not to be. Anything they liked, she probably thought. If,