The Denman Crofts thought it was delightfully new of them to have to one of their Sunday evenings a good-looking young pickpocket and a handsome woman whose profession it was to ply for hire on the streets. The pickpocket had been captured with his hand in Stanley’s pocket, and brought home to supper as an alternative to being delivered to the constabulary, for three reasons: first, he was good-looking, and masculine beauty was in fashion that year; secondly, he was
a sinner, and sins were talked of with approbation just then by the most modern literary set, particularly strange sins of divers colours, and as no one knew which sins were strange or coloured and which were plain, it might be that picking pockets was as strange and as coloured as any; thirdly, to have a pickpocket at a Sunday evening party was New, and the other guests would be pleased and envious. The lady was there for reasons very similar, and both were a great success. Every one treated them with friendliness and tact, so that they soon ceased to be shy, though remaining to the end a trifle puzzled and suspicious, and not very fluent in conversation. Possibly, their host suggested to Rome, they were suffering from an embarrassing attack of the New Remorse.
“Strange sinners certainly seem a little
difficile
,” agreed Rome, who had been making exhausting efforts with the pickpocket, “and loose livers sometimes appear to be rather tight talkers. Your protegés cannot be said precisely to birrell.”
“Anyhow, dear Denman,” added a graceful young gentleman at her side, “picking pockets is a banal vice. I should scarcely call it a vice at all; it is nearly as innocent as picking cowslips on a May morning. I wish I could have procured you a lady who knelt in front of me in church yesterday afternoon while I was waiting to make my confession. She was improving the time by extracting the contents of the reticule left in the seat next her by the penitent who had gone up to her duties before her. A piquant idea, for she would get absolution almost in the moment of sinning.”
“Well,” said Denman, “we did the best we could at short notice. I would prefer to have obtained a bomb-fiend. The latest vice, you know, is secreting bombs in Hyde Park. We shall all be doing it soon. It is reported to be even more stimulating than secreting
cocaine. There is no need, unless desired, ever to find the bombs again, still less to use them; that is an extension of the vice, only practised by those who wish to qualify as extremists, or bomb-fiends. The ordinary victims of the bomb habit merely secrete; they make a cache, and store away bombs as squirrels nuts. A pretty habit, but ceasing by now even to be strange. It is deplorable how the best vices become vulgarised. Rome, will you join me in a bomb-secreting orgie to-morrow at dusk?”
“By all means, Denman. It would restore my spirits. I have been sadly depressed lately by reading in one week Sarah Grand,
A Yellow Astor, Marcella, The Manxman
, and Mr. Zangwill and Mrs. Lynn-Lynton in the
New Review
on ‘What Women Should Know.’ There is no more spirit in me. Though I was a little revived by
The Green Carnation
. An entrancing work, about all of us. But really entertaining.”
“Why such a desperate orgie of literature? I thought you were of a more fastidious habit—not like Stanley, who insists on reading everything, even
Discords
and the Dreyfus case. I can seldom read any novels. I find their reviews enough, if not too much. I read of
The Manxman
that it would be read and reread by many thousands with human tears and human laughter, and that settled
The Manxman
. Where do reviewers get their inimitably delicious phrases from? And if one asked them with the tears and laughter of what animal other than the human animal could human beings read, or even re-read, a book, how would they reply? Perhaps in the same way that old Meredith did the other day when Dick Le Gallienne asked him to give the public a few words to explain his peculiar style. ‘Posterity will still be explaining me, long after I am dead. Why, then, should I forestall their labours?’”
“I wonder,” Rome mused, “if posterity will really be so diligent and so intelligent as their ancestors seem to think. People always say they write for posterity when they are not appreciated at the moment. They seem to imagine posterity as a smug and spectacled best scholar, spending its time delving among the chronicles of wasted years in the reading-room of the British Museum, and hailing with rapture the literary efforts of their ancestors.”
“Whereas I,” said Denman, “see posterity as a leaping savage, enjoying nameless orgies among the ruins of our civilisation, but not enjoying literature. Possibly, even, there will be no posterity. The debacle of our civilisation—and it’s obviously too good to last—may mean the débacle of the world itself. I hope so.
A bus le
Posterity, I say. Who wants it? I scorn to write for it, or to plant horrible little baby trees for it, or to suck up to it in any way whatsoever. Crude and uncultured savage.
Vive l’aujourd’hui!”
“And I,” said Rome, “see posterity as a being precisely like ourselves. It will read every morning in its newspapers, just as we do, that our relations with France are strained, that so many people have been murdered, born, divorced, married, that such and such a war is in progress, that such and such a law has been passed, or speech made, or book published, and it will know, just as we do, that none of it matters in the least. . . . I’ve no grudge against posterity. Let it have its little day.”
“It will,” said the graceful young man, with gloom. “I can’t share Denman’s faith in the approaching annihilation of humanity. Humanity in general is much too bourgeois and uninteresting to do anything but increase greatly and keep the earth replenished. It is impossible to imagine that the gods love it.
We
shall perish; we, the fine exotic flower of an effete
civilisation—(by the way, how exquisitely lovely and innocently wicked Lady Pember looks to-night; she, not the cow-like young woman talking to Mrs. Crofts, ought to be the strange scarlet—or is it mauve—sinner)—but we are a small minority. The majority, which hasn’t even the art of gracefully fading out, will heavily continue. It is thus that I picture posterity—a ponderous suburban bourgeois in mutton-chop whiskers or tight stays, sniffing at our poetry, our wit and our
Yellow Book
, and saying, ‘How decadent they were in the nineties.’ By the way, what does decadent mean? I always understood that man fell once and for all, long ago, and could not therefore be falling still. I prefer deciduous. How deliciously it slides round the tongue, like an over-ripe peach. I wonder it is not more used in verse. To me it suggests a creamy, green absinthe, or a long, close kiss on moist, coral-pink lips. Disgusting. I detest moist lips, and absinthe makes me feel sick, though I try and pretend it doesn’t.”
Stanley, charming and smiling, with her pleasant, round, brown face, lively, deep blue eye, and enormous box sleeve, darted across the room to them.
“Den, we
must
remove our strange sinners now. I’m worn out with them. They’ll neither of them say more than yes, no, and eh, and they’ve both drunk too much already, and keeping one eye on Mr. Sykes lest he get too near people’s pockets and the other on the lady lest she get hold of more whisky, is too heavy a responsibility. You must take them away. And then Lady Pember wants to talk to you, darling.”
Denman gave her a queer, quick look out of his narrow, smiling eyes, as he turned away.
“And Rome, love, I want to bring Aubrey Beardsley to you. He is being assaulted by Miss Carruthers, who has been reading
Marcella, Our Manifold Life
by Sarah Grand, and the newspapers, and wants to know
what he thinks of the Emancipation of Women, the Double Standard of Morality, and the approaching death of Mr. Froude. Poor Aubrey has never thought of any of them; he takes no interest in emancipations, and his taste in women is most reactionary—any one could tell that, from the ladies he draws, he thinks any other kind most unwholesome; he never reads Protestant historians; and he has never thought about even a single standard of morality. Double standard, indeed I As if there weren’t as many standards as there are people.”
“Not nearly, Mrs. Croft, fortunately. I’m sure Aubrey himself can’t contribute one; nor can I. But it is stupid of Aubrey not to read poor Mr. Froude. He is such a noble and happy liar. He really does practise lying for lying’s sake—not like Macaulay, mere utilitarian lying for principle’s sake, though he does some of that too. Froude is an artist. He will be missed, even though he is a Protestant. He hates accuracy with as much passion as the good popes hated thought, as Oscar Wilde says somewhere apropos of something else. (Oscar’s grammar is so aften loose.) How right both Mr. Froude and the good popes are! Look at Denman being firm with the sinners; how delightfully he does it; he would make a good prison warder.”
“The sinners,” said Miss Garden, regarding them through her monocle, “certainly
are
rather strange. I am afraid they have both drunk to excess. There, now he has piloted them safely to the door; that is a relief. Yes, Stanley, do fetch me Mr. Beardsley. Will he shock me to-night? I was told that the other evening he shocked his table at the Café Royal to death by his talk. John Lane had to remove him. It is possible to go too far even for the Café Royal, and he did it. I suppose that is why he is looking so elated to-night, like Alexander seeking fresh worlds
to conquer. ‘He shocked the Café Royal.’ What an epitaph! On the other hand, I hear that he was shocked himself the other day. Mr. Henley did it, in bluff mood, at a party at the Pennells. How do you do, Mr. Beardsley?”
It did not last, the Crofts’ marriage. In the spring of ’95, Stanley wearied of her husband’s infidelities, and could not bear them any more. As to Denman, he felt often, though he loved her, that he had married a young woman who had her tiresome aspects; she was a feminist, a prig, she tried to write, and badly at that, she was still over-much concerned with public affairs, with committees, with the emancipation (save the mark!) of women. And she was for ever fussing over the children, who should be treated as amusing toys. He loved her, but she tried him often. She was strident, obstinate, stupidly in earnest about things that seemed to him to demand a light indifference; then, cumbrously, she would try to adopt his tone, and fail. Marriage. Well, it presented great difficulties. He sighed sometimes for the freedom of his bachelor days. Meanwhile, life had its moments, exquisite, fleeting, frail. And at these Stanley, who was not really stupid, guessed quite accurately, and was stabbed by each afresh until her very life-blood seemed to drain away. leaving her, so she felt, a helpless ghost of a woman, without assurance, heart or power to go on, but with only her stabbed love and a proud, burning rage. And, in the spring of ’95, she broached this matter of divorce. He asked her forgiveness.
“I can’t help it, Stanley. I suppose it’s the way I’m made. . . . The queer thing is, I’ve loved you all the time. You can’t understand that. Women are so—so monogamous.”
“That old cliché, Den! It isn’t clever enough for you. Some men are monogamous. Some men couldn’t love several women at the same time. And some women can . . . I’m dead sick of it, anyhow. All this beastly philandering. It’s merely trivial. It
means
nothing. It’s turning life and love into a parlour game. Do you take nothing seriously, Denman—not your relations with people, or with love, or with life—not even your fatherhood?”
“Oh, don’t preach at me. I’m a waster, and let’s leave it at that. . . . I’m damnably sorry for everything, of course. . . . But you’re not altogether and always easy to live with, you know. All this stuff about women, for instance . . . you know how I hate it . . .”
“You know how I hate
your
stuff about women, if we are to drag in that now. . . . Oh, Den, don’t let’s be childish. What does all that matter now? We’re up against a much bigger thing than a difference of opinion about the suffrage.”
“You can’t forgive me, of course. And I suppose you’re justified.”
“Oh, I suppose I could forgive you. I could forgive you anything, perhaps. I have before, after all. But I think I had better not, for all our sakes. You’d rather be free, wouldn’t you? Oh, you needn’t answer. I know you’d rather be free. I don’t suspect you of wanting to live permanently with Alice Pember, or with any one else; you just want to be free and irresponsible, and make love to whom you like. Well, you shall. I shan’t keep you. You’re not meant for a husband and father, and you’ve tired yourself
long enough trying to be one. You can drop it now.”
“I suppose you’re right, from your point of view. You’d better divorce me . . . I’m terribly sorry, Stan. We were so tremendously happy once.”
“Don’t.” Stanley caught her breath and sharply bit her lip. “You’ve no right to talk of that. That’s all past. We’ve not been happy for a long time now. . . . And you know you despise me and think me a fool. . . . Oh, what’s the use of talking. . . .”
Three days later, Stanley, with her son and daughter, aged four and two, left her husband’s house and took up her temporary abode with her parents, while her divorce suit slowly prepared itself.
“Divorce is damnable,” Stanley said to Rome. “Why should people be penalised by having to go through this ghastly business, with all its loathsome publicity, merely because they wish to annul a private contract which only concerns themselves? Why shouldn’t they be able to go to a lawyer together and say, “Annul this contract,” as with any other contract? Instead of which, if it’s even suspected that they
both
want it annulled, they’re not allowed to do it at all; and if it’s the wife who wants it, they have to fake up this ridiculous cruelty-or-desertion business. And, above all, why should we be gibbeted in the newspapers for doing a purely private piece of legal business? Why, in the name of decency and common sense, should a thing become public news merely because it occurs in a law court? And is our whole English constitution and system so rotten because we are rotten, or aren’t our laws a long way behind public opinion? . . . Sometimes I think I can’t go through with it, it’s all so beastly, and that we’ll just live apart without a divorce. But I know that wouldn’t do. There’s got to be something desperately final between Denman and me, or
we might be coming together again, when he’s tired of Alice Pember. I love him so much, beneath everything, that if he wanted to I probably should. And I know it would be no use. We should make nothing of it now. It would be bad for both of us, and worse for Bill, and Molly. And it would all happen over again. No, it’s got to be a clean cut, even if the imbecile state only allows us to have it on these disgusting terms. . . . Sometimes, Rome, I think the whole world and its laws and systems and conventions is just a lunatic asylum.”