Dangerous Ages / Macaulay, Rose, 1881-1958

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Title: Dangerous Ages


Author: Rose Macaulay



Release Date: October 4, 2005  [eBook #16799]

Language: English

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DANGEROUS AGES

by

ROSE MACAULAY

Author of "Potterism"

Boni and Liveright
Publishers New York

1921







TO MY MOTHER
DRIVING GAILY THROUGH THE
ADVENTUROUS MIDDLE YEARS




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

   I. NEVILLE'S BIRTHDAY
  II. MRS. HILARY'S BIRTHDAY
 III. FAMILY LIFE
  IV. ROOTS
   V. SEAWEED
  VI. JIM
 VII. GERDA
VIII. NAN
  IX. THE PACE
   X. PRINCIPLES
  XI. THAT WHICH REMAINS
 XII. THE MOTHER
XIII. THE DAUGHTER
 XIV. YOUTH TO YOUTH
  XV. THE DREAM
 XVI. TIME
XVII. THE KEY



'As to that,' said Mr. Cradock, 'we may say that all ages are dangerous
to all people, in this dangerous life we live.'

'Reflecting how, at the best, human life on this minute and perishing
planet is a mere episode, and as brief as a dream....'

_Trivia_: Logan Pearsall Smith.




CHAPTER I

NEVILLE'S BIRTHDAY


1

Neville, at five o'clock (Nature's time, not man's) on the morning of her
birthday, woke from the dream-broken sleep of summer dawns, hot with the
burden of two sheets and a blanket, roused by the multitudinous silver
calling of a world full of birds. They chattered and bickered about the
creepered house, shrill and sweet, like a hundred brooks running together
down steep rocky places after snow. And, not like brooks, and strangely
unlike birds, like, in fact, nothing in the world except a cuckoo clock,
a cuckoo shouted foolishly in the lowest boughs of the great elm across
the silver lawn.

Neville turned on her face, cupped her small, pale, tanned face in her
sunburnt hands, and looked out with sleepy violet eyes. The sharp joy of
the young day struck into her as she breathed it through the wide window.
She shivered ecstatically as it blew coldly onto her bare throat and
chest, and forgot the restless birthday bitterness of the night; forgot
how she had lain and thought "Another year gone, and nothing done yet.
Soon all the years will be gone, and nothing ever will be done." Done by
her, she, of course, meant, as all who are familiar with birthdays will
know. But what was something and what was nothing, neither she nor others
with birthdays could satisfactorily define. They have lived, they have
eaten, drunk, loved, bathed, suffered, talked, danced in the night and
rejoiced in the dawn, warmed, in fact, both hands before the fire of
life, but still they are not ready to depart. For they are behindhand
with time, obsessed with so many worlds, so much to do, the petty done,
the undone vast. It depressed Milton when he turned twenty-three; it
depresses all those with vain and ambitious temperaments at least once a
year. Some call it remorse for wasted days, and are proud of it; others
call it vanity, discontent or greed, and are ashamed of it. It makes no
difference either way.

Neville, flinging it off lightly with her bedclothes, sprang out of bed,
thrust her brown feet into sand shoes, her slight, straight, pyjama-clad
body into a big coat, quietly slipped into the passage, where, behind
three shut doors, slept Rodney, Gerda and Kay, and stole down the back
stairs to the kitchen, which was dim and blinded, blue with china and
pale with dawn, and had a gas stove. She made herself some tea. She also
got some bread and marmalade out of the larder, spread two thick chunks,
and munching one of them, slipped out of the sleeping house into the
dissipated and riotous garden.

Looking up at the honeysuckle-buried window of the bedroom of Gerda,
Neville nearly whistled the call to which Gerda was wont to reply.
Nearly, but not quite. On the whole it was a morning to be out alone in.
Besides, Neville wanted to forget, for the moment, about birthdays, and
Gerda would have reminded her.

Going round by the yard, she fetched Esau instead, who wouldn't remind
her, and whose hysterical joy she hushed with a warning hand.

Across the wet and silver lawn she sauntered, between the monstrous
shadows of the elms, her feet in the old sand shoes leaving dark prints
in the dew, her mouth full of bread and marmalade, her black plait
bobbing on her shoulders, and Esau tumbling round her. Across the lawn to
the wood, cool and dim still, but not quiet, for it rang with music and
rustled with life. Through the boughs of beeches and elms and firs the
young day flickered gold, so that the bluebell patches were half lit,
like blue water in the sun, half grey, like water at twilight. Between
two great waves of them a brown path ran steeply down to a deep little
stream. Neville and Esau, scrambling a little way upstream, stopped at
a broad swirling pool it made between rocks. Here Neville removed coat,
shoes and pyjamas and sat poised for a moment on the jutting rock, a
slight and naked body, long in the leg, finely and supplely knit, with
light, flexible muscles--a body built for swiftness, grace and a certain
wiry strength. She sat there while she twisted her black plait round her
head, then she slipped into the cold, clear, swirling pool, which in one
part was just over her depth, and called to Esau to come in too, and
Esau, as usual, didn't, but only barked.

One swim round is enough, if not too much, as everyone who knows sunrise
bathing will agree. Neville scrambled out, discovered that she had
forgotten the towel, dried herself on her coat, resumed her pyjamas, and
sat down to eat her second slice of bread and marmalade. When she had
finished it she climbed a beech tree, swarming neatly up the smooth trunk
in order to get into the sunshine, and sat on a broad branch astride,
whistling shrilly, trying to catch the tune now from one bird, now from
another.

These, of course, were the moments when being alive was enough. Swimming,
bread and marmalade, sitting high in a beech tree in the golden eye of
the morning sun--that was life. One flew then, like a gay ship with the
wind in its sails, over the cold black bottomless waters of misgiving.
Many such a June morning Neville remembered in the past.... She wondered
if Gerda and if Kay thus sailed over sorrow, too. Rodney, she knew, did.
But she knew Rodney better, in some ways, than she knew Gerda and Kay.

To think suddenly of Rodney, of Gerda and of Kay, sleeping in the still
house beyond the singing wood and silver garden, was to founder swiftly
in the cold, dark seas, to be hurt again with the stabbing envy of the
night. Not jealousy, for she loved them all too well for that. But envy
of their chances, of their contacts with life. Having her own contacts,
she wanted all kinds of others too. Not only Rodney's, Gerda's and Kay's,
but those of all her family and friends. Conscious, as one is on
birthdays, of intense life hurrying swiftly to annihilation, she strove
desperately to dam it. It went too fast. She looked at the wet strands of
black hair now spread over her shoulders to dry in the sun, at her
strong, supple, active limbs, and thought of the days to come, when the
black hair should be grey and the supple limbs refuse to carry her up
beech trees, and when, if she bathed in the sunrise, she would get
rheumatism. In those days, what did one do to keep from sinking in the
black seas of regret? One sat by the fire, or in the sunlit garden, old
and grey and full of sleep--yes, one went to sleep, when one could. When
one couldn't, one read. But one's eyes got tired soon--Neville thought of
her grandmother--and one had to be read aloud to, by someone who couldn't
read aloud. That wouldn't be enough to stifle vain regrets; only
rejoicing actively in the body did that. So, before that time came, one
must have slain regret, crushed that serpent's head for good and all.

But did anyone ever succeed in doing this? Rodney, who had his full,
successful, useful, interesting life; Rodney, who had made his mark and
was making it; Rodney, the envy of many others, and particularly the envy
of Neville, with the jagged ends of her long since broken career stabbing
her; Rodney from time to time burned inwardly with scorching ambitions,
with jealousies of other men, with all the heats, rancours and troubles
of the race that is set before us. He had done, was doing, something, but
it wasn't enough. He had got, was getting, far,--but it wasn't far
enough. He couldn't achieve what he wanted; there were obstacles
everywhere. Fools hindered his work; men less capable than he got jobs he
should have had. Immersed in politics, he would have liked more time for
writing; he would have liked a hundred other careers besides his own, and
could have but the one. (Gerda and Kay, still poised on the threshold of
life, still believed that they could indeed have a hundred.) No, Rodney
was not immune from sorrow, but at least he had more with which to keep
it at bay than Neville. Neville had no personal achievements; she had
only her love for Rodney, Gerda and Kay, her interest in the queer,
enchanting pageant of life, her physical vigours (she could beat any of
the rest of them at swimming, walking, tennis or squash) and her active
but wasted brain. A good brain, too; she had easily and with brilliance
passed her medical examinations long ago--those of them for which she had
had time before she had been interrupted. But now a wasted brain;
squandered, atrophied, gone soft with disuse. Could she begin to use
it now? Or was she forever held captive, in deep woods, between the two
twilights?

  "I am in deep woods,
  Between the two twilights.
  Over valley and hill
  I hear the woodland wave
  Like the voice of Time, as slow,
  The voice of Life, as grave,
  The voice of Death, as still...."


2

The voices, the young loud clear voices of Gerda and of Kay, shrilled
down from the garden, and Esau yapped in answer. They were calling her.
They had probably been to wake her and had found her gone.

Neville smiled (when she smiled a dimple came in one pale brown cheek)
and swung herself down from the beech. Kay and Gerda were of enormous
importance; the most important things in life, except Rodney; but not
everything, because nothing is ever everything in this so complex world.

When she came out of the wood into the garden, now all golden with
morning, they flung themselves upon her and called her a sneak for not
having wakened them to bathe.

"You'll be late for breakfast," they chanted. "Late on your forty-third
birthday."

They each had an arm round her; they propelled her towards the house.
They were lithe, supple creatures of twenty and twenty-one. Between them
walked Neville, with her small, pointed, elfish face, that was sensitive
to every breath of thought and emotion like smooth water wind-stirred.
With her great violet eyes brooding in it under thin black brows, and
her wet hair hanging in loose strands, she looked like an ageless
wood-dryad between two slim young saplings. Kay was a little like her in
the face, only his violet eyes were short-sighted and he wore glasses.
Gerda was smaller, fragile and straight as a wand, with a white little
face and wavy hair of pure gold, bobbed round her thin white neck. And
with far-set blue eyes and a delicate cleft chin and thin straight lips.
For all she looked so frail, she could dance all night and return in the
morning cool, composed and exquisite, like a lily bud. There was a look
of immaculate sexless purity about Gerda; she might have stood for the
angel Gabriel, wide-eyed and young and grave. With this wide innocent
look she would talk unabashed of things which Neville felt revolting. And
she, herself, was the product of a fastidious generation and class, and
as nearly sexless as may be in this besexed world, which however is not,
and can never be, saying much. Kay would do the same. They would read and
discuss Freud, whom Neville, unfairly prejudiced, found both an obscene
maniac and a liar. They might laugh with her at Freud when he expanded on
that complex, whichever it is, by which mothers and daughters hate each
other, and fathers and sons--but they both all the same took seriously
things which seemed to Neville merely loathsome imbecilities. Gerda and
Kay didn't, in point of fact, find so many things either funny or
disgusting as Neville did; throwing her mind back twenty years, Neville
tried to remember whether she had found the world as funny and as
frightful when she was a medical student as she did now; on the whole she
thought not. Boys and girls are, for all their high spirits, creatures of
infinite solemnities and pomposities. They laugh; but the twinkling
irony, mocking at itself and everything else, of the thirties and
forties, they have not yet learnt. They cannot be gentle cynics; they
are so full of faith and hope, and when these are hurt they turn savage.
About Kay and Gerda there was a certain splendid earnestness with regard
to life. Admirable creatures, thought Neville, watching them with
whimsical tenderness. They had nothing to do with the pre-war, dilettante
past, the sophisticated gaiety of the young century. Their childhood had
been lived during the great war, and they had emerged from it hot with
elemental things, discussing life, lust, love, politics and social
reform, with cool candour, intelligent thoroughness and Elizabethan
directness. They wouldn't mind having passions and giving them rein; they
wouldn't think it vulgar, or even tedious, to lead loose lives. Probably,
in fact, it wasn't; probably it was Neville, and the people who had grown
up with her, who were overcivilized, too far from the crude stuff of
life, the monotonies and emotionalisms of Nature. And now Nature was
taking her rather startling revenge on the next generation.


3

Neville ran upstairs, and came down to breakfast dressed in blue cotton,
with her damp hair smoothly taken back from her broad forehead that
jutted broodingly over her short pointed face. She had the look of
a dryad at odds with the world, a whimsical and elfish intellectual.

Rodney and Kay and Gerda had been putting parcels at her place, and a
pile of letters lay among them. There is, anyhow, that about birthdays,
however old they make you. Kay had given her a splendid great
pocket-knife and a book he wanted to read, Gerda an oak box she had
carved, and Rodney a new bicycle (by the front door) and a Brangwyn
drawing (on the table). If Neville envied Kay and Gerda their future
careers, she envied Rodney his present sphere. Her husband and the
father of Gerda and Kay was a clever and distinguished-looking man of
forty-five, and member, in the Labour interest, for a division of Surrey.
He looked, however, more like a literary man. How to be useful though
married: in Rodney's case the problem was so simple, in hers so
complicated. She had envied Rodney a little twenty years ago; then she
had stopped, because the bringing up of Kay and Gerda had been a work in
itself; now she had begun again. Rodney and she were more like each other
than they were like their children; they had some of the same vanities,
fastidiousnesses, humours and withdrawals, and in some respects the same
outlook on life. Only Rodney's had been solidified and developed by the
contacts and exigencies of his career, and Neville's disembodied,
devitalised and driven inwards by her more dilettante life. She "helped
Rodney with the constituency" of course, but it was Rodney's
constituency, not hers; she entertained his friends and hers when they
were in town, but she knew herself a light woman, not a dealer in
affairs. Yet her nature was stronger than Rodney's, larger and more
mature; it was only his experience she lacked.

Rodney was and had always been charming; there could be no doubt
about that, whatever else you might come to think about him. Able, too,
but living on his nerves, wincing like a high-strung horse from the
annoyances and disappointments of life, such as Quaker oats because the
grape-nuts had come to an end, and the industrial news of the morning,
which was as bad as usual and four times repeated in four quite different
tones by the four daily papers which lay on the table. They took four
papers not so much that there might be one for each of them as that they
might have the entertainment of seeing how different the same news can be
made to appear. One bond of union this family had which few families
possess; they were (roughly speaking) united politically, so believed the
same news to be good or bad. The chief difference in their political
attitude was that Kay and Gerda joined societies and leagues, being still
young enough to hold that causes were helped in this way.

"What about to-day?" Rodney asked Neville. "What are you going to do?"

She answered, "Tennis." (Neville had once been a county player.) "River.
Lying about in the sun." (It should be explained that it was one of those
nine days of the English summer of 1920 when this was a possible
occupation.) "Anything anyone likes.... I've already had a good deal of
day and a bathe.... Oh, Nan's coming down this afternoon."

She got that out of a letter. Nan was her youngest sister. They all
proceeded to get and impart other things out of letters, in the way of
families who are fairly united, as families go.

Gerda opened her lips to impart something, but remembered her father's
distastes and refrained. Rodney, civilised, sensitive and progressive,
had no patience with his children's unsophisticated leaning to a
primitive crudeness. He told them they were young savages. So Gerda kept
her news till later, when she and Neville and Kay were lying on rugs on
the lawn after Neville had beaten Kay in a set of singles.

They lay and smoked and cooled, and Gerda, a cigarette stuck in one side
of her mouth, a buttercup in the other, mumbled "Penelope's baby's come,
by the way. A girl. Another surplus woman."

Neville's brows lazily went up.

"Penelope Jessop? What's _she_ doing with a baby? I didn't know she'd got
married."

"Oh, she hasn't, of course.... Didn't I tell you about Penelope? She
lives with Martin Annesley now."

"Oh, I see. Marriage in the sight of heaven. That sort of thing."

Neville was of those who find marriages in the sight of heaven
uncivilised and socially reactionary, a reversion, in fact, to Nature,
which bored her. Gerda and Kay rightly believed such marriages to have
some advantages over those more visible to the human eye (as being more
readily dissoluble when fatiguing) and many advantages over no marriages
at all, which do not increase the population, so depleted by the Great
War. When they spoke in this admirably civic sense, Neville was apt to
say "It doesn't want increasing. I waited twenty minutes before I could
board my bus at Trafalgar Square the other day. It wants more depleting,
I should say--a Great Plague or something," a view which Kay and Gerda
thought truly egotistical.

"I do hope," said Neville, her thoughts having led her to the statement,
"I do very much hope that neither of you will ever perpetrate that sort
of marriage. It would be so dreadfully common of you."

"Impossible to say," Kay said, vaguely.

"Considering," said Gerda, "that there are a million more women than men
in this country, it stands to reason that some system of polygamy must
become the usual thing in the future."

"It's always been the usual thing, darling. Dreadfully usual. It's so
much more amusing to be unusual in these ways."

Neville's voice trailed drowsily away. Polygamy. Sex. Free Love. Love in
chains. The children seemed so often to be discussing these. Just as,
twenty years ago, she and her friends had seemed always to be discussing
the Limitations of Personality, the Ethics of Friendship, and the Nature,
if any, of God. This last was to Kay and Gerda too hypothetical to be a
stimulating theme. It would have sent them to sleep, as sex did Neville.

Neville, led by Free Love to a private vision, brooded cynically over
savages dancing round a wood-pile in primeval forests, engaged in what
missionaries, journalists, and writers of fiction about our coloured
brothers call "nameless orgies" (as if you would expect most orgies to
answer to their names, like the stars) and she saw the steep roads of the
round world running back and back and back--on or back, it made no
difference, since the world was round--to this. Saw, too, a thousand
stuffy homes wherein sat couples linked by a legal formula so rigid, so
lasting, so indelible, that not all their tears could wash out a word of
it, unless they took to themselves other mates, in which case their
second state might be worse than their first. Free love--love in chains.
How absurd it all was, and how tragic too. One might react back to the
remaining choice--no love at all--and that was absurder and more tragic
still, since man was made (among other ends) to love. Looking under her
heavy lashes at her pretty young children, incredibly youthful, absurdly
theoretical, fiercely clean of mind and frank of speech, their clearness
as yet unblurred by the expediencies, compromise and experimental
contacts of life, Neville was stabbed by a sharp pang of fear and hope
for them. Fear lest on some fleeting impulse they might founder into the
sentimental triviality of short-lived contacts, or into the tedium of
bonds which must out-live desire; hope that, by some fortunate chance,
they might each achieve, as she had achieved, some relation which should
be both durable and to be endured. As to the third path--no love at
all--she did not believe that either Kay or Gerda would tread that. They
were emotional, in their cool and youthful way, and also believed that
they ought to increase the population. What a wonderful, noble thing to
believe, at twenty, thought Neville, remembering the levity of her own
irresponsible youth, when her only interest in the population had been
a nightmare fear lest they should at last become so numerous that they
would be driven out of the towns into the country and would be scuttling
over the moors, downs and woods like black beetles in kitchens in the
night. They were better than she had been, these children; more
public-spirited and more in earnest about life.


4

Across the garden came Nan Hilary, having come down from town to see
Neville on her forty-third birthday. Nan herself was not so incredibly
old as Neville; (for forty-three _is_ incredibly old, from any reasonable
standpoint). Nan was thirty-three and a half. She represented the
thirties; she was, in Neville's mind, a bridge between the remote
twenties and the new, extraordinary forties in which one could hardly
believe. It seems normal to be in the thirties; the right, ordinary age,
that most people are. Nan, who wrote, and lived in rooms in Chelsea, was
rather like a wild animal--a leopard or something. Long and lissome, with
a small, round, sallow face and withdrawn, brooding yellow eyes under
sulky black brows that slanted up to the outer corners. Nan had a good
time socially and intellectually. She was clever and lazy; she would
fritter away days and weeks in idle explorations into the humanities,
or curled up in the sun in the country like a cat. Her worst fault
was a cynical unkindness, against which she did not strive because
investigating the less admirable traits of human beings amused her. She
was infinitely amused by her nephew and her niece, but often spiteful to
them, merely because they were young. To sum up, she was a cynic, a rake,
an excellent literary critic, a sardonic and brilliant novelist, and she
had a passionate, adoring and protecting affection for Neville, who was
the only person who had always been told what she called the darker
secrets of her life.

She sat down on the grass, her thin brown hands clasped round her ankles,
and said to Neville, "You're looking very sweet, aged one. Forty-three
seems to suit you."

"And you," Neville returned, "look as if you'd jazzed all night and
written unkind reviews from dawn till breakfast time."

"That's just about right," Nan owned, and flung herself full length on
her back, shutting her eyes against the sun. "That's why I've come down
here to cool my jaded nerves. And also because Rosalind wanted to lunch
with me."

"Have you read my poems yet?" enquired Gerda, who never showed the
customary abashed hesitation in dealing with these matters. She and Kay
sent their literary efforts to Nan to criticise, because they believed
(a) in her powers as a critic, (b) in her influence in the literary
world. Nan used in their behalf the former but seldom the latter,
because, in spite of queer spasms of generosity, she was jealous of Gerda
and Kay. Why should they want to write? Why shouldn't they do anything
else in the world but trespass on her preserves? Not that verse was what
she ever wrote or could write herself. And of course everyone wrote now,
and especially the very young; but in a niece and nephew it was a
tiresome trick. They didn't write well, because no one of their age ever
does, but they might some day. They already came out in weekly papers and
anthologies of contemporary verse. Very soon they would come out in
little volumes. They'd much better, thought Nan, marry and get out of the
way.

"Read them--yes," Nan returned laconically to Gerda's question.

"What," enquired Gerda, perseveringly, "did you think of them?"

"I said I'd _read_ them," Nan replied. "I didn't say I'd thought of
them."

Gerda looked at her with her wide, candid gaze, with the unrancorous
placidity of the young, who are still used to being snubbed. Nan, she
knew, would tease and baffle, withhold and gibe, but would always say
what she thought in the end, and what she thought was always worth
knowing, even though she was middle-aged.

Nan, turning her lithe body over on the grass, caught the patient child's
look, and laughed. Generous impulses alternated in her with malicious
moods where these absurd, solemn, egotistic, pretty children of Neville's
were concerned.

"All right, Blue Eyes. I'll write it all down for you and send it to you
with the MS., if you really want it. You won't like it, you know, but I
suppose you're used to that by now."

Neville listened to them. Regret turned in her, cold and tired and
envious. They all wrote except her. To write: it wasn't much of a thing
to do, unless one did it really well, and it had never attracted her
personally, but it was, nevertheless, something--a little piece of
individual output thrown into the flowing river. She had never written,
even when she was Gerda's age. Twenty years ago writing poetry hadn't
been as it is to-day, a necessary part of youth's accomplishment like
tennis, French or dancing. Besides, Neville could never have enjoyed
writing poetry, because for her the gulf between good verse and bad was
too wide to be bridged by her own achievements. Nor novels, because she
disliked nearly all novels, finding them tedious, vulgar, conventional,
and out of all relation both to life as lived and to the world of
imagination. What she had written in early youth had been queer
imaginative stuff, woven out of her childhood's explorations into
fairyland and of her youth's into those still stranger tropical lands
beyond seas where she had travelled with her father. But she hadn't
written or much wanted to write; scientific studies had always attracted
her more than literary achievements. Then she had married Rodney, and
that was the end of all studies and achievements for her, though not the
end of anything for Rodney, but the beginning.

Rodney came out of the house, his pipe in his mouth. He still had the
lounging walk, shoulders high and hands in pockets, of the undergraduate;
the walk also of Kay. He sat down among his family. Kay and Gerda looked
at him with approval; though they knew his weakness, he was just the
father they would have chosen, and of how few parents can this be said.
They were proud to take him about with them to political meetings and so
forth, and prouder still to sit under him while he addressed audiences.
Few men of his great age were (on the whole) so right in the head and
sound in the heart, and fewer still so delightful to the eye. When people
talked about the Wicked Old Men, who, being still unfortunately
unrestrained and unmurdered by the Young, make this wicked world what
it is, Kay and Gerda always contended that there were a few exceptions.

Nan gave Rodney her small, fleeting smile. She had a critical
friendliness for him, but had never believed him really good enough
for Neville.

Gerda and Kay began to play a single, and Nan said, "I'm in a hole."

"Broke, darling?" Neville asked her, for that was usually it, though
sometimes it was human entanglements.

Nan nodded. "If I could have ten pounds.... I'd let you have it in a
fortnight."

"That's easy," said Rodney, in his kind, offhand way.

"Of course," Neville said. "You old spendthrift."

"Thank you, dears. Now I can get a birthday present for mother."

For Mrs. Hilary's birthday was next week, and to celebrate it her
children habitually assembled at The Gulls, St. Mary's Bay, where she
lived. Nan always gave her a more expensive present than she could
afford, in a spasm of remorse for the irritation her mother roused in
her.

"Oh, poor mother," Neville exclaimed, suddenly remembering that Mrs.
Hilary would in a week be sixty-three, and that this must be worse by
twenty years than to be forty-three.

The hurrying stream of life was loud in her ears. How quickly it was
sweeping them all along--the young bodies of Gerda and of Kay leaping on
the tennis court, the clear, analysing minds of Nan and Rodney and
herself musing in the sun, the feverish heart of her mother, loving,
hating, feeding restlessly on itself by the seaside, the age-calmed soul
of her grandmother, who was eighty-four and drove out in a donkey
chair by the same sea.

The lazy talking of Rodney and Nan, the cryings and strikings of Gerda
and Kay, the noontide chirrupings of birds, the cluckings of distant hens
pretending that they had laid eggs, all merged into the rushing of the
inexorable river, along and along and along. Time, like an ever-rolling
stream, bearing all its sons away. Clatter, chatter, clatter, does it
matter, matter, matter? They fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the
opening day.... No, it probably didn't matter at all what one did, how
much one got into one's life, since there was to be, anyhow, so soon an
end.

The garden became strange and far and flat, like tapestry, or a dream....

The lunch gong boomed. Nan, who had fallen asleep with the suddenness of
a lower animal, her cheek pillowed on her hand, woke and stretched. Gerda
and Kay, not to be distracted from their purpose, finished the set.

"Thank God," said Nan, "that I am not lunching with Rosalind."




CHAPTER II

MRS. HILARY'S BIRTHDAY


1

They all turned up at The Gulls, St. Mary's Bay, in time for lunch on
Mrs. Hilary's birthday. It was her special wish that all those of her
children who could should do this each year. Jim, whom she preferred,
couldn't come this time; he was a surgeon; it is an uncertain profession.
The others all came; Neville and Pamela and Gilbert and Nan and with
Gilbert his wife Rosalind, who had no right there because she was only an
in-law, but if Rosalind thought it would amuse her to do anything you
could not prevent her. She and Mrs. Hilary disliked one another a good
deal, though Rosalind would say to the others, "Your darling mother!
She's priceless, and I adore her!" She would say that when she had
caught Mrs. Hilary in a mistake. She would draw her on to say she had
read a book she hadn't read (it was a point of honour with Mrs. Hilary
never to admit ignorance of any book mentioned by others) and then she
would say, "I do love you, mother! It's not out yet; I've only seen
Gilbert's review copy," and Mrs. Hilary would say, "In that case I
suppose I am thinking of another book," and Rosalind would say to Neville
or Pamela or Gilbert or Nan, "Your darling mother. I adore her!" and Nan,
contemptuous of her mother for thinking such trivial pretence worth
while, and with Rosalind for thinking malicious exposure worth while,
would shrug her shoulders and turn away.


2

All but Neville arrived by the same train from town, the one getting in
at 12.11. Neville had come from Surrey the day before and spent the
night, because Mrs. Hilary liked to have her all to herself for a little
time before the others came. After Jim, Neville was the child Mrs. Hilary
preferred. She had always been a mother with marked preferences. There
were various barriers between her and her various children; Gilbert, who
was thirty-eight, had annoyed her long ago by taking up literature as a
profession on leaving Cambridge, instead of doing what she described as
"a man's job," and later on by marrying Rosalind, who was fast, and, in
Mrs. Hilary's opinion, immoral. Pamela, who was thirty-nine and working
in a settlement in Hoxton, annoyed her by her devotion to Frances Carr,
the friend with whom she lived. Mrs. Hilary thought them very silly,
these close friendships between women. They prevented marriage, and led
to foolish fussing about one another's health and happiness. Nan annoyed
her by "getting talked about" with men, by writing books which Mrs.
Hilary found both dull and not very nice, in tone, and by her own
irritated reactions to her mother's personality. Nan, in fact, was often
rude and curt to her.

But Jim, who was a man and a doctor, a strong, good-humoured person and
her eldest son, annoyed her not at all. Nor did Neville, who was her
eldest daughter and had given her grandchildren and infinite sympathy.

Neville, knowing all these things and more, always arrived on the
evenings before her mother's birthdays, and they talked all the morning.
Mrs. Hilary was at her best with Neville. She was neither irritable nor
nervous nor showing off. She looked much less than sixty-three. She was
a tall, slight, trailing woman, with the remains of beauty, and her dark,
untidy hair was only streaked with grey. Since her husband had died, ten
years ago, she had lived at St. Mary's Bay with her mother. It had been
her old home; not The Gulls, but the vicarage, in the days when St.
Mary's Bay had been a little fishing village without an esplanade. To
old Mrs. Lennox it was the same fishing village still, and the people,
even the summer visitors, were to her the flock of her late husband, who
had died twenty years ago.

"A good many changes lately," she would say to them. "Some people think
the place is improving. But I can't say I like the esplanade."

But the visitors, unless they were very old, didn't know anything about
the changes. To them St. Mary's Bay was not a fishing village but a
seaside resort. To Mrs. Hilary it was her old home, and had healthy air
and plenty of people for her mother to gossip with and was as good a
place as any other for her to parch in like a withered flower now that
the work of her life was done. The work of her life had been making a
home for her husband and children; she had never had either the desire or
the faculties for any other work. Now that work was over, and she was
rather badly left, as she cared neither for cards, knitting, gardening,
nor intellectual pursuits. Once, seven years ago, at Neville's
instigation, she had tried London life for a time, but it had been no
use. The people she met there were too unlike her, too intelligent and up
to date; they went to meetings and concerts and picture exhibitions and
read books and talked about public affairs not emotionally but coolly and
drily; they were mildly surprised at Mrs. Hilary's vehemence of feeling
on all points, and she was strained beyond endurance by their knowledge
of facts and catholicity of interests. So she returned to St. Mary's Bay,
where she passed muster as an intelligent woman, gossiped with her
mother, the servants and their neighbours, read novels, brooded over the
happier past, walked for miles alone along the coast, and slipped every
now and then, as she had slipped even in youth, over the edge of
emotionalism into hysterical passion or grief. Her mother was no use at
such times; she only made her worse, sitting there in the calm of old
age, looking tranquilly at the end, for her so near that nothing
mattered. Only Jim or Neville were of any use then.

Neville on the eve of this her sixty-third birthday soothed one such
outburst. The tedium of life, with no more to do in it--why couldn't it
end? The lights were out, the flowers were dead--and yet the unhappy
actors had to stay and stay and stay, idling on the empty, darkened
stage. (That was how Mrs. Hilary, with her gift for picturesque language,
put it.) _Must_ it be empty, _must_ it be dark, Neville uselessly asked,
knowing quite well that for one of her mother's temperament it must. Mrs.
Hilary had lived in and by her emotions; nothing else had counted. Life
for her had burnt itself out, and its remnant was like the fag end of a
cigarette, stale and old.

"Shall I feel like that in twenty years?" Neville speculated aloud.

"I hope," said Mrs. Hilary, "that you won't have lost Rodney. So long as
you have him...."

"But if I haven't...."

Neville looked down the years; saw herself without Rodney, perhaps
looking after her mother, who would then have become (strange, incredible
thought, but who could say?) calm with the calm of age; Kay and Gerda
married or working or both.... What then? Only she was better equipped
than her mother for the fag end of life; she had a serviceable brain and
a sound education. She wouldn't pass empty days at a seaside resort. She
would work at something, and be interested. Interesting work and
interesting friends--her mother, by her very nature, could have neither,
but was just clever enough to feel the want of them. The thing was to
start some definite work _now_, before it was too late.

"Did Grandmama go through it?" Neville asked her mother.

"Oh, I expect so. I was selfish; I was wrapped up in home and all of you;
I didn't notice. But I think she had it badly, for a time, when first she
left the vicarage.... She's contented now."

They both looked at Grandmama, who was playing patience on the sofa and
could not hear their talking for the sound of the sea. Yes, Grandmama was
(apparently) contented now.

"There's work," mused Neville, thinking of the various links with life,
the rafts, rather, which should carry age over the cold seas of tedious
regret. "And there's natural gaiety. And intellectual interests. And
contacts with other people--permanent contacts and temporary ones. And
beauty. All those things. For some people, too, there's religion."

"And for all of us food and drink," said Mrs. Hilary, sharply. "Oh,
I suppose you think I've no right to complain, as I've got all those
things, except work."

But Neville shook her head, knowing that this was a delusion of her
mother's, and that she had, in point of fact, none of them, except the
contacts with people, which mostly either over-strained, irritated or
bored her, and that aspect of religion which made her cry. For she was
a Unitarian, and thought the Gospels infinitely sad and the souls of the
departed most probably so merged in God as to be deprived of all
individuality.

"It's better to be High Church or Roman Catholic and have services, or
an Evangelical and have the Voice of God," Neville decided. And, indeed,
it is probable that Mrs. Hilary would have been one or other of these
things if it had not been for her late husband, who had disapproved of
superstition and had instructed her in the Higher Thought and the Larger
Hope.


3

Though heaviness endured for the night, joy came in the morning, as is
apt to happen where there is sea air. Mrs. Hilary on her birthday had
a revulsion to gaiety, owing to a fine day, her unstable temperament,
letters, presents and being made a fuss of. Also Grandmama said, when
she went up to see her after breakfast, "This new dress suits you
particularly, my dear child. It brings out the colour in your eyes," and
everyone likes to hear that when they are sixty-three or any other age.

So, when the rest of her children arrived, Mrs. Hilary was ready for
them.

They embraced her in turn; Pamela, capable, humorous and intelligent,
the very type of the professional woman at her best, but all the time
preferring Frances Carr, anxious about her because she was overworking
and run down; Nan, her extravagant present in her hands, on fire to
protect her mother against old age, depression and Rosalind, yet knowing
too how soon she herself would be smouldering with irritation; Gilbert,
spare and cynical, writer of plays and literary editor of the Weekly
Critic, and with him his wife Rosalind, whom Mrs. Hilary had long since
judged as a voluptuous rake who led men on and made up unseemly stories
and her lovely face, but who insisted on coming to The Gulls with Gilbert
to see his adorable mother. Rosalind, who was always taking up
things--art, or religion, or spiritualism, or young men--and dropping
them when they bored her, had lately taken up psycho-analysis. She was
studying what she called her mother-in-law's "case," looking for and
finding complexes in her past which should account for her somewhat
unbalanced present.

"I've never had complexes," Mrs. Hilary would declare, indignantly, as if
they had been fleas or worse, and indeed when Rosalind handled them they
_were_ worse, much. From Rosalind Mrs. Hilary got the most unpleasant
impression possible (which is to say a good deal) of psycho-analysts.
"They have only one idea, and that is a disgusting one," she would
assert, for she could only rarely and with difficulty see more than one
idea in anything, particularly when it was a disgusting one. Her mind was
of that sort--tenacious, intolerant, and not many-sided. That was where
(partly where) she fell foul of her children, who saw sharply and clearly
all around things and gave to each side its value. They knew Mrs. Hilary
to be a muddled bigot, whose mind was stuffed with concrete instances and
insusceptible of abstract reason. If anyone had asked her what she knew
of psycho-analysis, she would have replied, in effect, that she knew
Rosalind, and that was enough, more than enough, of psycho-analysis for
her. She had also looked into Freud, and rightly had been disgusted.

"A man who spits deliberately onto his friends' stairs, on purpose to
annoy the servants ... that is enough, the rest follows. The man is
obviously a loathsome and indecent vulgarian. It comes from being a
German, no doubt." Which settled that; and if anyone murmured "An
Austrian," she would say, "It comes to the same thing, in questions of
breeding." Mrs. Hilary, like Grandmama, settled people and things very
quickly and satisfactorily.

They all sat in the front garden after lunch and looked out over the
wonderful shining sea. Grandmama sat in her wheeled chair, Tchekov's
Letters on her knees. She had made Mrs. Hilary get this book from Mudie's
because she had read favourable reviews of it by Gilbert and Nan.
Grandmama was a cleverish old lady, cleverer than her daughter.

"Jolly, isn't it," said Gilbert, seeing the book.

"Very entertaining," said Grandmama, and Mrs. Hilary echoed "Most," at
which Grandmama eyed her with a twinkle, knowing that it bored her, like
all the Russians. Mrs. Hilary cared nothing for style ("Literature!" said
Lady Adela. "Give _me_ something to _read_!"); she liked nice lifelike
books about people as she believed them to be, and though she was quite
prepared to believe that real Russians were like Russians in books, she
felt that she did not care to meet either of them. But Mrs. Hilary had
learnt that intelligent persons seldom liked the books which seemed to
her to be about real, natural people, any more than they admired the
pictures which struck her as being like things as they were. Though she
thought those who differed from her profoundly wrong, she never admitted
ignorance of the books they admired. For she was in a better position to
differ from them about a book if she had nominally read it--and really it
didn't matter if she had actually done so or not, for she knew beforehand
what she would think of it if she had. So well she knew this, indeed,
that the line between the books she had and hadn't read was, even in her
own mind, smudgy and vague, not hard and clear as with most people. Often
when she had seen reviews which quoted extracts she thought she had read
the book, just as some people, when they have seen publishers'
advertisements, think they have seen reviews, and declare roundly in
libraries that a book is out when it lacks a month of publication.

Mrs. Hilary, having thus asserted her acquaintance with Tchekov's
Letters, left Gilbert, Grandmama and Neville to talk about it together,
and herself began telling the others how disappointed Jim had been that
he could not come for her birthday.

"He was passionately anxious to come," she said, in her clear, vibrating
voice, that struck a different note when she mentioned each one of
her children, so that you always knew which she meant. "He never
misses to-day if he can possibly help it. But he simply couldn't get
away.... One of these tremendously difficult new operations, that hardly
anyone can do. His work must come first, of course. He wouldn't be Jim if
it didn't."

"Fancy knifing people in town a day like this," said Rosalind, stretching
her large, lazy limbs in the sun. Rosalind was big and fair, and
sensuously alive.

Music blared out from the parade. Gilbert, adjusting his glasses,
observed its circumstances, with his air of detached, fastidious
interest.

"The Army," he remarked. "The Army calling for strayed sheep."

"Oh," exclaimed Rosalind, raising herself, "wouldn't I love to go out and
be saved! I _was_ saved once, when I was eleven. It was one of my first
thrills. I felt I was blacker in guilt than all creatures before me, and
I came forward and found the Lord. Afraid I had a relapse rather soon,
though."

"Horrible vulgarians," Mrs. Hilary commented, really meaning Rosalind at
the age of eleven. "They have meetings on the parade every morning now.
The police ought to stop it."

Grandmama was beating time with her hand on the arm of her chair to the
merry music-hall tune and the ogreish words.

        "Blood! Blood!
    Rivers of blood for you,
    Oceans of blood for me!
All that the sinner has got to do
    Is to plunge into that Red Sea.
        Clean! Clean!
    Wash and be clean!
Though filthy and black as a sweep you've been,
The waves of that sea shall make you clean...."

"That," Mrs. Hilary asserted, with disgust, "is a _most_ disagreeable way
of worshipping God." She was addicted to these undeniable statements,
taking nothing for granted.

"But a very racy tune, my dear," said Grandmama, "though the words are
foolish and unpleasing."

Gilbert said, "A stimulating performance. If we don't restrain her,
Rosalind will be getting saved again."

He was proud of Rosalind's vitality, whimsies and exuberances.

Rosalind, who had a fine rolling voice, began reciting "General Booth
enters into heaven," by Mr. Vachell Lindsay, which Mrs. Hilary found
disgusting.

"A wonderful man," said Grandmama, who had been reading the General's
life in two large volumes. "Though mistaken about many things. And his
Life would have been more interesting if it had been written by Mr.
Lytton Strachey instead of Mr. Begbie; he has a better touch on our great
religious leaders. Your grandfather," added Grandmama, "always got on
well with the Army people. He encouraged them. The present vicar does
not. He says their methods are deplorable and their goal a delusion."

Rosalind said "Their methods are entrancing and their goal the Lord. What
more does he want? Clergymen are so narrow. That's why I had to give up
being a churchwoman."

Rosalind had been a churchwoman (high) for nine months some six years
ago, just after planchette and just before flag days. She had decided,
after this brief trial, that incense and confessions, though immensely
stimulating, did not weigh down the balance against early mass, Lent, and
being thrown with other churchwomen.


4

"What about a bathe?" Neville suggested to all of them. "Mother?"

Mrs. Hilary, a keen bather, agreed. They all agreed except Grandmama, who
was going out in her donkey chair instead, as one does at eighty-four.

They all went down to the beach, where the Army still sang of the Red
Sea, and where the blue high tide clapped white hands on brown sand.

One by one they emerged from tents and sprang through the white leaping
edge into the rocking blue, as other bathers were doing all round the
bay. When Mrs. Hilary came out of her tent, Neville was waiting for her,
poised like a slim girl, knee-deep in tumbling waves, shaking the water
from her eyes.

"Come, mother. I'll race you out."

Mrs. Hilary waded in, a figure not without grace and dignity. Looking
back they saw Rosalind coming down the beach, large-limbed and splendid,
like Juno. Mrs. Hilary shrugged her shoulders.

"Disgusting," she remarked to Neville.

So much more, she meant, of Rosalind than of Rosalind's costume. Mrs.
Hilary preferred it to be the other way about, for, though she did not
really like either of them, she disliked the costume less than she
disliked Rosalind.

"It's quite in the fashion," Neville assured her, and Mrs. Hilary,
remarking that she was sure of that, splashed her head and face and
pushed off, mainly to escape from Rosalind, who always sat in the foam,
not being, like the Hilary family, an active swimmer.

Already Pamela and Gilbert were far out, swimming steadily against each
other, and Nan was tumbling and turning like an eel close behind them.

Neville and Mrs. Hilary swam out a little way.

"I shall now float on my back," said Mrs. Hilary. "You swim on and catch
up with the rest."

"You'll be all right?" Neville asked, lingering.

"Why shouldn't I be all right? I bathe nearly every day, you know, even
if I am sixty-three." This was not accurate; she only bathed as a rule
when it was warm, and this seldom occurs on our island coasts.

Neville, saying, "Don't stop in long, will you," left her and swam out
into the blue with her swift, over-hand stroke. Neville was the best
swimmer in a swimming family. She clove the water like a torpedo
destroyer, swift and untiring between the hot summer sun and the cool
summer sea. She shouted to the others, caught them up, raced them and
won, and then they began to duck each other. When the Hilary brothers
and sisters were swimming or playing together, they were even as they had
been twenty years ago.

Mrs. Hilary watched them, swimming slowly round, a few feet out of her
depth. They seemed to have forgotten her and her birthday. The only one
who was within speaking distance was Rosalind, wallowing with her big
white limbs in tumbling waves on the shore; Rosalind, whom she disliked;
Rosalind, who was more than her costume, which was not saying much;
Rosalind, before whom she had to keep up an appearance of immense
enjoyment because Rosalind was so malicious.

"You wonderful woman! I can't think how you _do_ it," Rosalind was crying
to her in her rich, ripe voice out of the splashing waves. "But fancy
their all swimming out and leaving you to yourself. Why, you might get
cramp and sink. _I'm_ no use, you know; I'm hopeless; can't keep up at
all."

"I shan't trouble you, thank you," Mrs. Hilary called back, and her voice
shook a little because she was getting chilled.

"Why, you're shivering," Rosalind cried. "Why don't you come out? You
_are_ wonderful, I do admire you.... It's no use waiting for the others,
they'll be ages.... I say, look at Neville; fancy her being forty-three.
I never knew such a family.... Come and sit in the waves with me, it's
lovely and warm."

"I prefer swimming," said Mrs. Hilary, and she was shivering more now.
She never stayed in so long as this; she usually only plunged in and came
out.

Grandmama, stopping on the esplanade in her donkey chair, was waving and
beckoning to her. Grandmama knew she had been in too long, and that her
rheumatism would be bad.

"_Come out, dear_," Grandmama called, in her old thin voice. "_Come out.
You've been in far too long._"

Mrs. Hilary only waved her hand to Grandmama. She was not going to come
out, like an old woman, before the others did, the others, who had swum
out and left her alone on her birthday bathe.

They were swimming back now, first all in a row, then one behind the
other; Neville leading, with her arrowy drive, Gilbert and Pamela behind,
so alike, with their pale, finely cut, intellectual faces, and their
sharp chins cutting through the sea, and their quick, short, vigorous
strokes, and Nan, still far out, swimming lazily on her back, the sun
in her eyes.

Mrs. Hilary's heart stirred to see her swimming brood, so graceful and
strong and swift and young. They possessed, surely, everything that was
in the heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water over the
earth. And she, who was sixty-three, possessed nothing. She could not
even swim with her children. They might have thought of that, and stayed
with her.... Neville, anyhow. Jim would have, said Mrs. Hilary to
herself, half knowing and half not knowing that she was lying.

"_Come out, dear!_" called Grandmama from the esplanade. "_You'll be
ill!_"

Back they came, Neville first. Neville, seeing from afar her mother's
blue face, called "Mother dear, how cold you are! You shouldn't have
stayed in so long!"

"I was waiting," Mrs. Hilary said, "for you."

"Oh why, dear?"

"Don't know. I thought I would.... It's pretty poor fun," Mrs. Hilary
added, having failed after trying not to, "bathing all alone on one's
birthday."

Neville gave a little sigh, and gently propelled her mother to the shore.
She hadn't felt like this on _her_ birthday, when Kay and Gerda had gone
off to some avocation of their own and left her in the garden. Many
things she had felt on her birthday, but not this. It is an undoubted
truth that people react quite differently to birthdays.

Rosalind rose out of the foam like Aphrodite, grandly beautiful, though
all the paint was washed off her face and lips.

"Wonderful people," she apostrophised the shore-coming family. "Anyone
would think you were all nineteen. _I_ was the only comfy one."

Rosalind was always talking about age, emphasizing it, as if it were very
important.

They hurried up to the tents, and last of all came Nan, riding in to
shore on a swelling wave and lying full length where it flung her, for
the joy of feeling the wet sand sucking away beneath her.


5

Grandmama, waiting for them on the esplanade, was angry with Mrs. Hilary.

"My dear child, didn't you hear me call? You're perfectly blue. You
_know_ you never stay in more than five minutes. Neville, you should have
seen that she didn't. Now you'll get your rheumatism back, child, and
only yourself to thank. It's too silly. People of sixty-three carrying
on as if they were fifty; I've no patience with it."

"They all swam out," said Mrs. Hilary, who, once having succumbed to the
impulse to adopt this attitude, could not check it. "I waited for them."

Grandmama, who was cross, said "Very silly of you and very selfish of the
children. Now you'd better go to bed with hot bottles and a posset."

But Mrs. Hilary, though she felt the red-hot stabbings of an attack of
rheumatism already beginning, stayed up. She was happier now, because the
children were making a fuss of her, suggesting remedies and so on. She
would stay up, and show them she could be plucky and cheerful even with
rheumatism. A definite thing, like illness or pain, always put her on her
mettle; it was so easy to be brave when people knew you had something to
be brave about, and so hard when they didn't.

They had an early tea, and then Gilbert and Rosalind, who were going out
to dinner, caught the 5.15 back to town. Rosalind's departure made Mrs.
Hilary more cheerful still. She soared into her gayest mood, and told
them amusing stories of the natives, and how much she and Grandmama
shocked some of them.

"All the same, dear," said Grandmama presently, "you know you often enjoy
a chat with your neighbours very much. You'd be bored to death with no
one to gossip with."

But Neville's hand, slipping into her mother's, meant "You shall adopt
what pose you like on your birthday, darling. If you like to be too
clever for anyone else in the Bay so that they bore you to tears and you
shock them to fits--well, you shall, and we'll believe you."

Nan, listening sulkily to what she called to herself "mother's swank,"
for a moment almost preferred Rosalind, who was as frank and unposturing
as an animal; Rosalind, with her malicious thrusts and her corrupt mind
and her frank feminine greediness. For Rosalind, anyhow, didn't pretend
to herself, though she did undoubtedly, when for any reason it suited
her, lie to other people. Mrs. Hilary's lying went all through, deep
down; it sprang out of the roots of her being, so that all the time she
was making up, not only for others but for herself, a sham person who did
not exist. That Nan found infinitely oppressive. So did Pamela, but
Pamela was more tolerant and sympathetic and less ill-tempered than Nan,
and observed the ways of others with quiet, ironic humour, saying nothing
unkind. Pamela, when she didn't like a way of talking--when Rosalind, for
instance, was being malicious or indecent or both--would skilfully carry
the talk somewhere else. She could be a rapid and good talker, and could
tell story after story, lightly and coolly, till danger points were past.
Pamela was beautifully bred; she had _savoir-faire_ as well as kindness,
and never lost control of herself. These family gatherings really bored
her a little, because her work and interests lay elsewhere, but she would
never admit or show it. She was kind even to Rosalind, though cool. She
had always been kind and cool to Rosalind, because Gilbert was her
special brother, and when he had married this fast, painted and
unHilaryish young woman, she had seen the necessity for taking firm hold
of an attitude in the matter and retaining it. No one, not even Neville,
not even Frances Carr, had ever seen behind Pamela's guard where Rosalind
was concerned. When Nan abused Rosalind, Pamela would say "Don't be a
spitfire, child. What's the use?" and change the subject. For Rosalind
was, in Pamela's view, one of the things which were a pity but didn't
really matter, so long as she didn't make Gilbert unhappy. And Gilbert,
so far, was absurdly pleased and proud about her, in spite of occasional
disapprovals of her excessive intimacies with others.

But, whatever they all felt about Rosalind, there was no doubt that the
family party was happier for her departure. The departure of in-laws,
even when they are quite nice in-laws, often has this effect on family
parties. Mrs. Hilary had her three daughters to herself--the girls, as
she still called them. She felt cosy and comforted, though in pain, lying
on the sofa by the bay window in the warm afternoon sunshine, while
Grandmama looked at the London Mercury, which had just come by the post,
and the girls talked.


6

Their voices rose and fell against the soft splashing of the sea;
Neville's, sweet and light, with pretty cadences, Pamela's, crisp, quick
and decided, Nan's, trailing a little, almost drawling sometimes. The
Hilary voices were all thin, not rich and full-bodied, like Rosalind's.
Mrs. Hilary's was thin, like Grandmama's.

"Nice voices," thought Mrs. Hilary, languidly listening. "Nice children.
But what nonsense they often talk."

They were talking now about the Minority Report of some committee, which
had been drafted by Rodney. Rodney and the Minority and Neville and
Pamela and Nan were all interested in what Mrs. Hilary called "This
Labour nonsense which is so fashionable now." Mrs. Hilary herself, being
unfashionable, was anti-Labour, since it was apparent to her that the
working classes had already more power, money and education than was good
for them, sons of Belial, flown with insolence and bonuses. Grandmama,
being so nearly out of it all, was used only to say, in reply to these
sentiments, "It will make no difference in the end. We shall all be the
same in the grave, and in the life beyond. All these movements are very
interesting, but the world goes round just the same." It was all very
well for Grandmama to be philosophical; _she_ wouldn't have to live for
years ruled and triumphed over by her own gardener, which was the way
Mrs. Hilary saw it.

Mrs. Hilary began to get angry, hearing the girls talking in this silly
way. Of course it was natural that Neville should agree with Rodney; but
Pamela had picked up foolish ideas from working among the poor and living
with Frances Carr, and Nan was, as usual, merely wrong-headed, childish
and perverse.

Suddenly she broke out, losing her temper, as she often did when she
disagreed with people's politics, for she did not take a calm and
tolerant view of these things.

"I never heard such stuff in my life. I disagree with every word you've
all said."

She always disagreed in bulk, like that. It seemed simpler than arguing
separate points, and took less time and knowledge. She saw Neville
wrinkling her broad forehead, doubtfully, as if wondering how the subject
could most easily be changed, and that annoyed her.

Nan said, "You mean you disagree with the Report. Which clauses of it?"
and there was that soft viciousness in her voice which showed that she
knew Mrs. Hilary had not even read the Minority Report, or the Majority
Report either. Nan was spiteful; always trying to prove that her mother
didn't know what she was talking about; always trying to pin her down on
points of detail. Like the people with whom Mrs. Hilary had failed to get
on during her brief sojourn in London; they too had always shunned
general disputes about opinion and sentiment, such as were carried on
with profit in St. Mary's Bay, and pinned the discussion down to hard
facts, about which the Bay's information was inaccurate and incomplete.
As if you didn't know when you disagreed with a thing's whole drift,
whether you had read it or not.... Mrs. Hilary had never had any head for
facts.

"It's the whole idea," she said, hotly. "And I detest all these Labour
people. Vile creatures.... Of course I don't mean people like Rodney--the
University men. They're merely amateurs. But these dreadful Trades Union
men, with their walrus moustaches.... Why can't they shave, like other
people, if they want to be taken for gentlemen?"

Neville told her, chaffingly, that she was a mass of prejudice.

Grandmama, who had fallen asleep and dropped the London Mercury onto the
floor, diverted the conversation by waking up and remarking that it
seemed a less interesting number than usual on the whole, though some of
the pieces of poetry were pretty, and that Mrs. Hilary ought not to lie
under the open window.

Mrs. Hilary, who was getting worse, admitted that she had better be in
bed.

"I hope," said Grandmama, "that it will be a lesson to you, dear, not to
stay in the water so long again, even if you do want to show off before
your daughter-in-law." Grandmama, who disliked Rosalind, usually called
her to Mrs. Hilary "your daughter-in-law," saddling her, so to speak,
with the responsibility for Gilbert's ill-advised marriage. To her
grandchildren she would refer to Rosalind as "your sister-in-law," or
"poor Gilbert's wife."

"The bathe was worth it," said Mrs. Hilary, swinging up to high spirits
again. "It was a glorious bathe. But I _have_ got rheumatics."

So Neville stayed on at The Gulls that night, to massage her mother's
joints, and Pamela and Nan went back to Hoxton and Chelsea by the evening
train. Pamela had supper, as usual, with Frances Carr, and Nan with Barry
Briscoe, and they both talked and talked, about all the things you don't
talk of in families but only to friends.


7

Neville meanwhile was saying to Grandmama in the drawing-room at The
Gulls, after Mrs. Hilary had gone to bed, "I wish mother could get some
regular interest or occupation. She would be much happier. Are there no
jobs for elderly ladies in the Bay?"

"As many in the Bay," said Grandmama, up in arms for the Bay, "as
anywhere else. Sick-visiting, care committees, boys' and girls' classes,
and so on. I still keep as busy as I am able, as you know."

Neville did know. "If mother could do the same...."

"Mother can't. She's never been a rector's wife, as I have, and she
doesn't care for such jobs. Mother never did care for any kind of work
really, even as a girl. She married when she was nineteen and found the
only work she was fitted for and interested in. That's over, and there's
no other she can turn to. It's common enough, child, with women. They
just have to make the best of it, and muddle through somehow till the
end."

"You were different, Grandmama, weren't you? I mean, you were never at a
loss for things to do."

Grandmama's thin, delicate face hardened for a moment into grim lines.

"At a loss--yes, I was what you call at a loss twenty years ago, when
your grandfather died. The meaning was gone out of life, you see. I was
sixty-four. For two years I was cut adrift from everything, and did
nothing but brood and find trivial occupations to pass the time somehow.
I lived on memories and emotions; I was hysterical and peevish and bored.
Then I realised it wouldn't do; that I might have twenty years and more
of life before me, and that I must do something with it. So I took up
again all of my old work that I could. It was the hardest thing I ever
did. I hated it at first. Then I got interested again, and it has kept me
going all these years, though I've had to drop most of it now of course.
But now I'm so near the end that it doesn't matter. You can drop work at
eighty and keep calm and interested in life. You can't at sixty; it's
too young.... Mother knows that too, but there seems no work she can do.
She doesn't care for parish work as I do; she never learnt any art or
craft or handiwork, and doesn't want to; she was never much good at
intellectual work of any kind, and what mind she had as a girl--and her
father and I did try to train her to use it--ran all to seed during her
married life, so it's pretty nearly useless now. She spent herself on
your father and all you children, and now she's bankrupt."

"Poor darling mother," Neville murmured.

Grandmama nodded. "Just so. She's left to read novels, gossip with stupid
neighbours, look after me, write to you children, go on walks, and brood
over the past. She would have been quite happy like that forty years ago.
The young have high spirits, and can amuse themselves without work. She
never wanted work when she was eighteen. It's the old who need work.
They've lost their spring and their zest for life, and need something to
hold on to. It's all wrong, the way we arrange it--making the young work
and the old sit idle. It should be the other way about. Girls and boys
don't get bored with perpetual holidays; they live each moment of them
hard; they would welcome the eternal Sabbath; and indeed I trust we shall
all do that, as our youth is to be renewed like eagles. But old age on
this earth is far too sad to do nothing in. Remember that, child, when
your time comes."

"Why, yes. But when one's married, you know, it's not so easy, keeping up
with a job. I only wish I could.... I don't _like_ being merely a married
woman. Rodney isn't merely a married man, after all.... But anyhow I'll
find something to amuse my old age, even if I can't work. I'll play
patience or croquet or the piano, or all three, and I'll go to theatres
and picture shows and concerts and meetings in the Albert Hall. Mother
doesn't do any of those things. And she _is_ so unhappy so often."

"Oh very. Very unhappy. Very often.... She should come to church
more. This Unitarianism is depressing. No substance in it. I'd rather
be a Papist and keep God in a box. Or belong to the Army and sing
about rivers of blood. I daresay both are satisfying. All this
sermon-on-the-mount-but-no-miracle business is most saddening. Because
it's about impossibilities. You can receive a sacrament, and you can find
salvation, but you can't live the sermon on the mount. So of course it
makes people discontented."

Grandmama, who often in the evenings became a fluent though drowsy
talker, might have wandered on like this till her bed-time, had not Mrs.
Hilary here appeared, in her dressing-gown. She sat down, and said,
trying to sound natural and not annoyed and failing. "I heard so much
talk, I thought I would come down and be in it. I thought you were coming
up to me again directly, Neville. I hadn't realised you meant to stay
down and talk to Grandmama instead."

She hated Neville or any of them, but especially Neville, to talk
intimately to Grandmama; it made her jealous. She tried and tried not to
feel this, but it was never any use her fighting against jealousy, it was
too strong for her.

Grandmama said placidly, "Neville and I were discussing different forms
of religion."

"Is Neville thinking of adopting one of them?" Mrs. Hilary enquired, her
jealousy making her sound sarcastic and scornful.

"No, mother. Not at present.... Come back to bed, and I'll sit with you,
and we'll talk. I don't believe you should be up."

"Oh, I see I've interrupted. It was the last thing I meant. No, Neville,
I'll go back to my room alone. You go on with your talk with Grandmama.
I hate interrupting like this. I hoped you would have let me join. I
don't get much of you in these days, after all. But stay and talk to
Grandmama."

That was the point at which Nan would have sworn to herself and gone down
to the beach. Neville did neither. She was gentle and soothing, and
Grandmama was infinitely untroubled, and Mrs. Hilary presently picked up
her spirits and went back to bed, and Neville spent the evening with her.
These little scenes had occurred so often that they left only a slight
impression on those concerned and slightest of all on Mrs. Hilary.


8

When Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were both settled for the night (old and
elderly people settle for the night--other people go to bed) Neville went
down to the seashore and lay on the sand, watching the moon rise over the
sea.

Beauty was there, rather than in elderly people. But in elderly people
was such pathos, such tragedy, such pity, that they lay like a heavy
weight on one's soul. If one could do anything to help....

To be aimless: to live on emotions and be by them consumed: that was
pitiful. To have done one's work for life, and to be in return cast aside
by life like a broken tool: that was tragic.

The thing was to defy life; to fly in the face of the fool nature, break
her absurd rules, and wrest out of the breakage something for oneself by
which to live at the last.

Neville flung her challenge to the black sea that slowly brightened under
the moon's rising eye.




CHAPTER III

FAMILY LIFE


1

If you have broken off your medical studies at London University at the
age of twenty-one and resume them at forty-three, you will find them (one
is told) a considerably tougher job than you found them twenty-two
years before. Youth is the time to read for examinations; youth is used
to such foolishness, and takes it lightly in its stride. At thirty you
may be and probably are much cleverer than you were at twenty; you will
have more ideas and better ones, and infinitely more power of original
and creative thought; but you will not, probably, find it so easy to grip
and retain knowledge out of books and reproduce it to order. So the world
has ordained that youth shall spend laborious days in doing this, and
that middle age shall, in the main, put away these childish things, and
act and work on in spite of the information thus acquired.

Neville Bendish, who was not even in the thirties, but so near the brink
of senile decay as the forties, entered her name once more at the London
University School of Medicine, and plunged forthwith into her interrupted
studies. Her aim was to spend this summer in reacquiring such knowledge
as should prepare her for the October session. And it was difficult
beyond her imaginings. It had not been difficult twenty-two years ago;
she had worked then with pleasure and interest, and taken examinations
with easy triumph. As Kay did now at Cambridge, only more so, because she
had been cleverer than Kay. She was a vain creature, and had believed
that cleverness of hers to be unimpaired by life, until she came to try.
She supposed that if she had spent her married life in head work, her
head would never have lost the trick of it. But she hadn't. She had spent
it on Rodney and Gerda and Kay, and the interesting, amusing life led by
the wife of a man in Rodney's position, which had brought her always into
contact with people and ideas. Much more amusing than grinding at
intellectual work of her own, but it apparently caused the brain to
atrophy. And she was, anyhow, tired of doing nothing in particular. After
forty you must have your job, you must be independent of other people's
jobs, of human and social contacts, however amusing and instructive.

Rodney wasn't altogether pleased, though he understood. He wanted her
constant companionship and interest in his own work.

"You've had twenty-two years of it, darling," Neville said. "Now I must
Live my own Life, as the Victorians used to put it. I must be a doctor;
quite seriously I must. I want it. It's my job. The only one I could ever
really have been much good at. The sight of human bones or a rabbit's
brain thrills me, as the sight of a platform and a listening audience
thrills you, or as pen and paper (I suppose) thrill the children. You
ought to be glad I don't want to write. Our family seems to run to that
as a rule."

"But," Rodney said, "you don't mean ever to _practise_, surely? You won't
have time for it, with all the other things you do."

"It's the other things I shan't have time for, old man. Sorry, but there
it is.... It's all along of mother, you see. She's such an object lesson
in how not to grow old. If she'd been a doctor, now...."

"She couldn't have been a doctor, possibly. She hasn't the head. On the
other hand, you've got enough head to keep going without the slavery of
a job like this, even when you're old."

"I'm not so sure. My brain isn't what it was; it may soften altogether
unless I do something with it before it's too late. Then there I shall
be, a burden to myself and everyone else.... After all, Rodney, you've
your job. Can't I have mine? Aren't you a modern, an intellectual and a
feminist?"

Rodney, who believed with truth that he was all these things, gave in.

Kay and Gerda, with the large-minded tolerance of their years, thought
mother's scheme was all right and rather sporting, if she really liked
the sort of thing, which they, for their part, didn't.

So Neville recommenced medical study, finding it difficult beyond belief.
It made her head ache.


2

She envied Kay and Gerda, as they all three lay and worked in the garden,
with chocolates, cigarettes and Esau grouped comfortably round them. Kay
was reading economics for his Tripos, Gerda was drawing pictures for her
poems; neither, apparently, found any difficulty in concentrating on
their work when they happened to want to.

What, Neville speculated, her thoughts, as usual, wandering from her
book, would become of Gerda? She was a clever child at her own things,
though with great gaps in her equipment of knowledge, which came from
ignoring at school those of her studies which had not seemed to her of
importance. She had firmly declined a University education; she had
decided that it was not a fruitful start in life, and was also afraid of
getting an academic mind. But at economic and social subjects, at drawing
and at writing, she worked without indolence, taking them earnestly,
still young enough to believe it important that she should attain
proficiency.

Neville, on the other hand, was indolent. For twenty-two years she had
pleased herself, done what she wanted when she wanted to, played the
flirt with life. And now she had become soft-willed. Now, sitting in
the garden with her books, like Gerda and Kay, she would find that the
volumes had slipped from her knee and that she was listening to the
birds in the elms. Or she would fling them aside and get up and stretch
herself, and stroll into the little wood beyond the garden, or down to
the river, or she would propose tennis, or go up to town for some meeting
or concert or to see someone, though she didn't really want to, having
quite enough of London during that part of the year when they lived
there. She only went up now because otherwise she would be working. At
this rate she would never be ready to resume her medical course in the
autumn.

"I will attend. I will. I will," she whispered to herself, a hand pressed
to each temple to constrain her mind. And for five minutes she would
attend, and then she would drift away on a sea of pleasant indolence,
and time fluttered away from her like an escaping bird, and she knew
herself for a light woman who would never excel. And Kay's brown head
was bent over his book, and raised sometimes to chaff or talk, and bent
over his books again, the thread of his attention unbroken by his easy
interruptions. And Gerda's golden head lay pillowed in her two clasped
hands, and she stared up at the blue through the green and did nothing
at all, for that was often Gerda's unashamed way.

Often Rodney sat in the garden too and worked. And his work Neville felt
that she too could have done; it was work needing initiative and creative
thought, work suitable to his forty-five years, not cramming in knowledge
from books. Neville at times thought that she too would stand for
parliament one day. A foolish, childish game it was, and probably really
therefore more in her line than solid work.


3

Nan came down in July to stay with them. While she was there, Barry
Briscoe, who was helping with a W.E.A. summer school at Haslemere, would
come over on Sundays and spend the day with them. Not even the rains of
July 1920 made Barry weary or depressed. His eyes were bright behind his
glasses; his hands were usually full of papers, committee reports,
agenda, and the other foods he fed on, unsatiated and unabashed. Barry
was splendid. What ardour, what enthusiasm, burning like beacons in a
wrecked world! So wrecked a world that all but the very best and the very
worst had given it up as a bad job; the best because they hoped on, hoped
ever, the worst because of the pickings that fall to such as they out of
the collapsing ruins. But Barry, from the very heart of the ruin, would
cry "Here is what we must do," and his eyes would gleam with faith and
resolution, and he would form a committee and act. And when he saw how
the committee failed, as committees will, and how little good it all was,
he would laugh ruefully and try something else. Barry, as he would tell
you frankly--if you enquired, not otherwise,--believed in God. He was the
son of a famous Quaker philanthropist, and had been brought up to see
good works done and even garden cities built. I am aware that this must
prejudice many people against Barry; and indeed many people were annoyed
by certain aspects of him. But, as he was intellectually brilliant and
personally attractive, these people were as a rule ready to overlook what
they called the Quaker oats. Nan, who overlooked nothing, was frankly at
war with him on some points, and he with her. Nan, cynical, clear-eyed,
selfish and blase, cared nothing for the salvaging of what remained of
the world out of the wreck, nothing for the I.L.P., less than nothing for
garden cities, philanthropy, the W.E.A., and God. And committees she
detested. Take them all away, and there remained Barry Briscoe, and for
him she did not care nothing.

It was the oddest friendship, thought Neville, observing how, when Barry
was there, all Nan's perversities and moods fell away, leaving her as
agreeable as he. Her keen and ironic intelligence met his, and they so
understood each other that they finished each other's sentences, and
others present could only with difficulty keep up with them. Neville
believed them to be in love, but did not know whether they had ever
informed one another of the fact. They might still be pretending to
one another that their friendship was merely one of those affectionate
intellectual intimacies of which some of us have so many and which are
so often misunderstood. Or they might not. It was entirely their
business, either way.

Barry was a chatterbox. He lay on the lawn and rooted up daisies and
made them into ridiculous chains, and talked and talked and talked.
Rodney and Neville and Nan talked too, and Kay would lunge in with the
crude and charming dogmatics of his years. But Gerda, chewing a blade of
grass, lay idle and withdrawn, her fair brows unpuckered by the afternoon
sun (because it was July, 1920), her blue eyes on Barry, who was so
different; or else she would be withdrawn but not idle, for she would be
drawing houses tumbling down, or men on stilts, fantastic and proud, or
goblins, or geese running with outstretched necks round a green. Or she
would be writing something like this:

          "I
      Float on the tide,
          In the rain.
  I am the starfish vomited up by the retching cod.
          He thinks
          That I am he.
          But I know.
          That he is I.
For the creature is far greater than its god."


(Gerda was of those who think it is rather chic to have one rhyme in your
poem, just to show that you can do it.)

"That child over there makes one feel so cheap and ridiculous, jabbering
away."

That was Barry, breaking off to look at Gerda where she lay on her elbows
on a rug, idle and still. "And it's not," he went on, "that she doesn't
know about the subject, either. I've heard her on it."

He threw the daisy chain he had just made at her, so that it alighted on
her head, hanging askew over one eye.

"Just like a daisy bud herself, isn't she," he commented, and raced on,
forgetting her.

Neat in her person and ways, Gerda adjusted the daisy chain so that it
ringed her golden head in an orderly circle. Like a daisy bud herself,
Rodney agreed in his mind, his eyes smiling at her, his affection,
momentarily turned that way, groping for the wild, remote little soul in
her that he only vaguely and paternally knew. The little pretty. And
clever, too, in her own queer, uneven way. But what _was_ she, with it
all? He knew Kay, the long, sweet-tempered boy, better. For Kay
represented highly civilized, passably educated, keen-minded youth. Gerda
wasn't highly civilized, was hardly passably educated, and keen would be
an inapt word for that queer, remote, woodland mind of hers.... Rodney
returned to more soluble problems.


4

Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama came to Windover. Mrs. Hilary would rather have
come without Grandmama, but Grandmama enjoyed the jaunt, as she called
it. For eighty-four, Grandmama was wonderfully sporting. They arrived on
Saturday afternoon, and rested after the journey, as is usually done by
people of Grandmama's age, and often by people of Mrs. Hilary's. Sunday
was full of such delicate clashings as occur when new people have joined
a party. Grandmama was for morning church, and Neville drove her to it in
the pony carriage. So Mrs. Hilary, not being able to endure that they
should go off alone together, had to go too, though she did not like
church, morning or other.

She sighed over it at lunch.

"So stuffy. So long. And the _hymns_...."

But Grandmama said, "My dear, we had David and Goliath. What more do you
want?"

During David and Goliath Grandmama's head had nodded approvingly, and her
thin old lips had half smiled at the valiant child with his swaggering
lies about bears and lions, at the gallant child and the giant.

Mrs. Hilary, herself romantically sensible, as middle-aged ladies are, of
valour and high adventure, granted Grandmama David and Goliath, but still
repined at the hymns and the sermon.

"Good words, my dear, good words," Grandmama said to that. For Grandmama
had been brought up not to criticise sermons, but had failed to bring up
Mrs. Hilary to the same self-abnegation. The trouble with Mrs. Hilary
was, and had always been, that she expected (even now) too much of life.
Grandmama expected only what she got. And Neville, wisest of all, had not
listened, for she too _expected_ what she would get if she did. She was
really rather like Grandmama, in her cynically patient acquiescence, only
brought up in a different generation, and not to hear sermons. In the
gulf of years between these two, Mrs. Hilary's restless, questing passion
fretted like unquiet waves.


5

"This Barry Briscoe," said Mrs. Hilary to Neville after lunch, as she
watched Nan and he start off for a walk together. "I suppose he's in love
with her?"

"I suppose so. Something of the kind, anyhow."

Mrs. Hilary said, discontentedly, "Another of Nan's married men, no
doubt. She _collects_ them."

"No, Barry's not married."

Mrs. Hilary looked more interested. "Not? Oh, then it may come to
something.... I wish Nan _would_ marry. It's quite time."

"Nan isn't exactly keen to, you know. She's got so much else to do."

"Fiddlesticks. You don't encourage her in such nonsense, I hope,
Neville."

"I? It's not for me to encourage Nan in anything. She doesn't need it.
But as to marriage--yes, I think I wish she would do it, sometime,
whenever she's ready. It would give her something she hasn't got;
emotional steadiness, perhaps I mean. She squanders a bit, now. On the
other hand, her writing would rather go to the wall; if she went on with
it it would be against odds all the time."

"What's writing?" enquired Mrs. Hilary, with a snap of her finger and
thumb. "_Writing!_"

As this seemed too vague or too large a question for Neville to answer,
she did not try to do so, and Mrs. Hilary replied to it herself.

"Mere showing off," she explained it. "Throwing your paltry ideas at a
world which doesn't want them. Writing like Nan's I mean. It's not as if
she wrote really good books."

"Oh well. Who does that, after all? And what is a good book?" Here were
two questions which Mrs. Hilary, in her turn, could not answer. Because
most of the books which seemed good to her did not, as she well knew,
seem good to Neville, or to any of her children, and she wasn't going to
give herself away. She murmured something about Thackeray and Dickens,
which Neville let pass.

"Writing's just a thing to do, as I see it," Neville went on. "A job,
like another. One must _have_ a job, you know. Not for the money, but for
the job's sake. And Nan enjoys it. But I daresay she'd enjoy marriage
too."

"Does she love this man?"

"I don't know. I shouldn't be surprised. She hasn't told me so."

"Probably she doesn't, as he's single. Nan's so perverse. She will love
the wrong men, always."

"You shouldn't believe all Rosalind tells you, mother. Rosalind has a too
vivid fancy and a scandalous tongue."

Mrs. Hilary coloured a little. She did not like Neville to think that she
had been letting Rosalind gossip to her about Nan.

"You know perfectly well, Neville, that I never trust a word Rosalind
says. I suppose I needn't rely on my daughter-in-law for news about my
own daughter's affairs. I can see things for myself. You can't deny that
Nan _has_ had compromising affairs with married men."

"Compromising." Neville turned over the word, thoughtfully and
fastidiously. "Funny word, mother. I'm not sure I know what it means.
But I don't think anything ever compromises Nan; she's too free for
that.... Well, let's marry her off to Barry Briscoe. It will be a quaint
menage, but I daresay they'd pull it off. Barry's delightful. I should
think even Nan could live with him."

"He writes books about education, doesn't he? Education and democracy."

"Well, he does. But there's always something, after all, against all
of us. And it might be worse. It might be poetry or fiction or
psycho-analysis."

Neville said psycho-analysis in order to start another hare and take
her mother's attention off Nan's marriage before the marriage became
crystallised out of all being. But Mrs. Hilary for the first time (for
usually she was reliable) did not rise. She looked thoughtful, even a
shade embarrassed, and said vaguely, "Oh, people must write, of course.
If it isn't one thing it will be another." After a moment she added,
"This psycho-analysis, Neville," saying the word with distaste indeed,
but so much more calmly than usual that Neville looked at her in
surprise. "This psycho-analysis. I suppose it does make wonderful cures,
doesn't it, when all is said?"

"Cures--oh yes, wonderful cures. Shell-shock, insomnia, nervous
depression, lumbago, suicidal mania, family life--anything." Neville's
attention was straying to Grandmama, who was coming slowly towards
them down the path, leaning on her stick, so she did not see Mrs.
Hilary's curious, lit eagerness.

"But how _can_ they cure all those things just by talking indecently
about sex?"

"Oh mother, they don't. You're so crude, darling. You've got hold of
only one tiny part of it--the part practised by Austrian professors on
Viennese degenerates. Many of the doctors are really sane and brilliant.
I know of cases...."

"Well," said Mrs. Hilary, quickly and rather crossly, "I can't talk about
it before Grandmama."

Neville got up to meet Grandmama, put a hand under her arm, and conducted
her to her special chair beneath the cedar. You had to help and conduct
someone so old, so frail, so delightful as Grandmama, even if Mrs. Hilary
did wish it were being done by any hand than yours. Mrs. Hilary in fact
made a movement to get to Grandmama first, but sixty-three does not rise
from low deck chairs so swiftly as forty-three. So she had to watch her
daughter leading her mother, and to note once more with a familiar pang
the queer, unmistakable likeness between the smooth, clear oval face and
the old wrinkled one, the heavily lashed deep blue eyes and the old faded
ones, the elfish, close-lipped, dimpling smile and the old, elfish,
thin-lipped, sweet one. Neville, her Neville, flower of her flock, her
loveliest, first and best, her dearest but for Jim, her pride, and nearer
than Jim, because of sex, which set Jim on a platform to be worshipped,
but kept Neville on a level to be loved, to be stormed at when storms
rose, to be clung to when all God's waters went over one's head. Oh
Neville, that you should smile at Grandmama like that, that Grandmama
should, as she always had, steal your confidence that should have been
all your mother's! That you should perhaps even talk over your mother
with Grandmama (as if she were something further from each of you than
each from the other), pushing her out of the close circle of your
intimacy into the region of problems to be solved.... Oh God, how bitter
a thing to bear!

The garden, the summer border of bright flowers, swam in tears.... Mrs.
Hilary turned away her face, pretending to be pulling up daisies from the
grass. But, unlike the ostrich, she well knew that they always saw. To
the children, as to Grandmama, they were an old story, those hot, facile,
stinging tears of Mrs. Hilary's that made Neville weary with pity, and
Nan cold with scorn, and Rosalind happy with lazy malice, and Pamela
bright and cool and firm, like a woman doctor. Only Grandmama took them
unmoved, for she had always known them.


6

Grandmama, settled in her special chair, remarked on the unusual (for
July) fineness of the day, and requested Neville to read them the chief
items of news in the Observer, which she had brought out with her. So
Neville read about the unfortunate doings of the Supreme Council at Spa,
and Grandmama said "Poor creatures," tolerantly, as she had said when
they were at Paris, and again at San Remo; and about General Dyer and
the Amritsar debate, and Grandmama said "Poor man. But one mustn't treat
one's fellow creatures as he did, even the poor Indian, who, I quite
believe, is intolerably provoking. I see the Morning Post is getting up
a subscription for him, contributed to by Those Who Remember Cawnpore,
Haters of Trotzky, Montague and Lansbury, Furious English-woman, and many
other generous and emotional people. That is kind and right. We should
not let even our more impulsive generals starve."

Then Neville read about Ireland, which was just then in a disturbed
state, and Grandmama said it certainly seemed restless, and mentioned
with what looked like a gleam of hope that they would never return, that
her friends the Dormers were there. Mrs. Hilary shot out, with still
averted face, that the whole of Ireland ought to be sunk to the bottom
of the sea, it was more bother than it was worth. This was her usual and
only contribution towards a solution of the Irish question.

Then Mr. Churchill and Russia had their turn (it was the time of the
Golovin trouble) and Grandmama said people seemed always to get so
very sly, as well as so very much annoyed and excited, whenever Russia
was mentioned, and that seemed like a sign that God did not mean us,
in this country, to mention it much, perhaps not even to think of it.
She personally seldom did. Then Neville read a paragraph about the
Anglo-Catholic Congress, and about that Grandmama was for the first time
a little severe, for Grandpapa had not been an Anglo-Catholic, and indeed
in his day there were none of this faith. You were either High Church,
Broad Church or Evangelical. (Unless, of course, you had been led astray
by Huxley and Darwin and were nothing whatever.) Grandpapa had been
Broad, with a dash of Evangelical; or perhaps it was the other way round;
but anyhow Grandpapa had not been High Church, or, as they called it in
his time, Tractarian. So Grandmama enquired, snippily, "Who _are_ these
Anglo-Catholics, my dear? One seems to hear so much of them in these
days. I can't help thinking they are rather _noisy_...." as she might
have spoken of Bolshevists, or the Labour Party, or the National Party,
or Sinn Fein, or any other of the organisations of which Grandpapa had
been innocent. "There are so many of these new things," said Grandmama,
"I daresay modern young people like Gerda and Kay are quite in with it
all."

"I'm afraid," said Neville, "that Gerda and Kay are secularists at
present."

"Poor children," Grandmama said gently. Secularism made her think of
the violent and vulgar Mr. Bradlaugh. It was, in her view, a noisier
thing even than Anglo-Catholicism. "Well, they have plenty of time to
get over it and settle down to something quieter." Broad-Evangelical she
meant, or Evangelical-Broad; and Neville smiled at the idea of Gerda,
in particular, being either of these. She believed that if Gerda were to
turn from secularism it would either be to Anglo-Catholicism or to Rome.
Or Gerda might become a Quaker, or a lone mystic contemplating in woods,
but a Broad-Evangelical, no. There was a delicate, reckless extravagance
about Gerda which would prohibit that. If you came to that, what girl or
boy did, in these days, fall into any of the categories which Grandmama
and Grandpapa had known, whether religiously or politically? You might as
well suggest that Gerda and Kay should be Tories or Whigs.

And by this time they had given Mrs. Hilary so much time to recover her
poise that she could join in, and say that Anglo-Catholics were very
ostentatious people, and only gave all that money which they had,
undoubtedly, given at the recent Congress in order to make a splash
and show off.

"Tearing off their jewellery in public like that," said Mrs. Hilary, in
disgust, as she might have said tearing off their chemises, "and gold
watches lying in piles on the collection table, still ticking...." She
felt it was indecent that the watches should have still been ticking; it
made the thing an orgy, like a revival meeting, or some cannibal rite at
which victims were offered up still breathing....

So much for the Anglo-Catholic Congress. The Church Congress was better,
being more decent and in order, though Mrs. Hilary knew that the whole
established Church was wrong.

And so they came to literature, to a review of Mr. Conrad's new novel
and a paragraph about a famous annual literary prize. Grandmama thought
it very nice that young writers should be encouraged by cash prizes.
"Not," as she added, "that there seems any danger of any of them being
discouraged, even without that.... But Nan and Kay and Gerda ought to go
in for it. It would be a nice thing for them to work for."

Then Grandmama, settling down with her pleased old smile to something
which mattered more than the news in the papers, said "And now, dear,
I want to hear all about this friendship of Nan's and this nice young
Mr. Briscoe."

So Neville again had to answer questions about that.


7

Mrs. Hilary, abruptly leaving them, trailed away by herself to the house.
Since she mightn't have Neville to herself for the afternoon she wouldn't
stay and share her. But when she reached the house and looked out at them
through the drawing-room windows, their intimacy stabbed her with a pang
so sharp that she wished she had stayed.

Besides, what was there to do indoors? No novels lay about that looked
readable, only "The Rescue" (and she couldn't read Conrad, he was so
nautical) and a few others which looked deficient in plot and as if they
were trying to be clever. She turned them over restlessly, and put them
down again. She wasn't sleepy, and hated writing letters. She wanted
someone to talk to, and there was no one, unless she rang for the
housemaid. Oh, this dreadful ennui.... Did anyone in the world know it
but her? The others all seemed busy and bright. That was because they
were young. And Grandmama seemed serene and bright. That was because she
was old, close to the edge of life, and sat looking over the gulf into
space, not caring. But for Mrs. Hilary there was ennui, and the dim,
empty room in the cold grey July afternoon. The empty stage; no audience,
no actors. Only a lonely, disillusioned actress trailing about it, hungry
for the past.... A book Gerda had been reading lay on the table. "The
Breath of Life," it was called, which was surely just what Mrs. Hilary
wanted. She picked it up, opened it, turned the pages, then, tucking it
away out of sight under her arm, left the room and went upstairs.

"Many wonderful cures," Neville had said. And had mentioned depression
as one of the diseases cured. What, after all, if there was something in
this stuff which she had never tried to understand, had always dismissed,
according to her habit, with a single label? "Labels don't help. Labels
get you nowhere." How often the children had told her that, finding her
terse terminology that of a shallow mind, endowed with inadequate
machinery for acquiring and retaining knowledge, as indeed it was.


8

Gerda, going up to Mrs. Hilary's room to tell her about tea, found her
asleep on the sofa, with "The Breath of Life" fallen open from her hand.
A smile flickered on Gerda's delicate mouth, for she had heard her
grandmother on the subject of psycho-analysis, and here she was, having
taken to herself the book which Gerda was reading for her Freud circle.
Gerda read a paragraph on the open page.

"It will often be found that what we believe to be unhappiness is really,
in the secret and unconscious self, a joy, which the familiar process of
inversion sends up into our consciousness in the form of grief. If, for
instance, a mother bewails the illness of her child, it is because her
unconscious self is experiencing the pleasure of importance, of being
condoled and sympathised with, as also that of having her child (if it is
a male) entirely for the time dependent on her ministrations. If, on the
other hand, the sick child is her daughter, her grief is in reality a
hope that this, her young rival, may die, and leave her supreme in the
affections of her husband. If, in either of these cases, she can be
brought to face and understand this truth, her grief will invert itself
again and become a conscious joy...."

"I wonder if Grandmother believes all that," speculated Gerda, who did.

Then she said aloud, "Grandmother" (that was what Gerda and Kay called
her, distinguishing her thus from Great-Grandmama), "tea's ready."

Mrs. Hilary woke with a start. "The Breath of Life" fell on the floor
with a bang. Mrs. Hilary looked up and saw Gerda and blushed.

"I've been asleep.... I took up this ridiculous book of yours to look at.
The most absurd stuff.... How can you children muddle your minds with it?
Besides, it isn't at all a _nice_ book for you, my child. I came on
several very queer things...."

But the candid innocence of Gerda's wide blue eyes on hers transcended
"nice" and "not nice."... You might as well talk like that to a wood
anemone, or a wild rabbit.... If her grandmother had only known, Gerda at
twenty had discussed things which Mrs. Hilary, in all her sixty-three
years, had never heard mentioned. Gerda knew of things of which Mrs.
Hilary would have indignantly and sincerely denied the existence. Gerda's
young mind was a cess-pool, a clear little dew-pond, according to how you
looked at it. Gerda and Gerda's friends knew no inhibitions of speech or
thought. They believed that the truth would make them free, and the truth
about life is, from some points of view, a squalid and gross thing. But
better look it in the face, thought Gerda and her contemporaries, than
pretend it isn't there, as elderly people do.

"I don't want you to pretend anything isn't there, darling," Neville,
between the two generations, had said to Gerda once. "Only it seems to me
that some of you children have one particular kind of truth too heavily
on your minds. It seems to block the world for you."

"You mean sex," Gerda had told her, bluntly. "Well, it runs all through
life, mother. What's the use of hiding from it? The only way to get even
with it is to face it. And _use_ it."

"Face it and use it by all means. All I meant was, it's a question of
emphasis. There _are_ other things...."

Of course Gerda knew that. There was drawing, and poetry, and beauty, and
dancing, and swimming, and music, and politics, and economics. Of course
there were other things; no doubt about that. They were like songs, like
colour, like sunrise, like flowers, these other things. But the basis of
life was the desire of the male for the female and of the female for the
male. And this had been warped and smothered and talked down and made a
furtive, shameful thing, and it must be brought out into the day....

Neville smiled to hear all this tripping sweetly off Gerda's lips.

"All right, darling, don't mind me. Go ahead and bring it out into the
day, if you think the subject really needs more airing than it already
gets. I should have thought myself it got lots, and always had."

And there they were; they talked at cross purposes, these two, across the
gulf of twenty years, and with the best will in the world could not hope
to understand, either of them, what the other was really at. And now here
was Gerda, in Mrs. Hilary's bedroom, looking across a gulf of forty years
and saying nothing at all, for she knew it would be of no manner of use,
since words don't carry as far as that.

So all she said was "Tea's ready, Grandmother."

And Mrs. Hilary supposed that Gerda hadn't, probably, noticed or
understood those very queer things she had come upon while reading "The
Breath of Life."

They went down to tea.




CHAPTER IV

ROOTS


1

It was a Monday evening, late in July. Pamela Hilary, returning from a
Care Committee meeting, fitted her latch-key into the door of the rooms
in Cow Lane which she shared with Frances Carr, and let herself into the
hot dark passage hall.

A voice from a room on the right called "Come along, my dear. Your pap's
ready."

Pamela entered the room on the right. A pleasant, Oxfordish room,
with the brown paper and plain green curtains of the college days of
these women, and Duerer engravings, and sweet peas in a bowl, and Frances
Carr stirring bread and milk over a gas ring. Frances Carr was small
and thirty-eight, and had a nice brown face and a merry smile. Pamela
was a year older and tall and straight and pale, and her ash-brown hair
swept smoothly back from a broad white forehead. Her grey eyes regarded
the world shrewdly and pleasantly through pince-nez. Pamela was
distinguished-looking, and so well-bred that you never got through her
guard; she never hurt the feelings of others or betrayed her own.
Competent she was, too, and the best organizer in Hoxton, which is to say
a great deal, Hoxton needing and getting, one way and another, a good
deal of organisation. Some people complained that they couldn't get to
know Pamela, the guard was too complete. But Frances Carr knew her.

Frances Carr had piled cushions in a deep chair for her.

"Lie back and be comfy, old thing, and I'll give you your pap."

She handed Pamela the steaming bowl, and proceeded to take off her
friend's shoes and substitute moccasin slippers. It was thus that she and
Pamela had mothered one another at Somerville eighteen years ago, and
ever since. They had the maternal instinct, like so many women.

"Well, how went it? How was Mrs. Cox?"

Mrs. Cox was the chairwoman of the Committee. All committee members know
that the chairman or woman is a ticklish problem, if not a sore burden.

"Oh well...." Pamela dismissed Mrs. Cox with half a smile. "Might have
been worse.... Oh look here, Frank. About the library fund...."

The front door-bell tingled through the house.

Frances Carr said "Oh hang. All right, I'll see to it. If it's Care or
Continuation or Library, I shall send it away. You're not going to do any
more business to-night."

She went to the door, and there, her lithe, drooping slimness outlined
against the gas-lit street, stood Nan Hilary.

"Oh, Nan.... But what a late call. Yes, Pamela's just in from a
committee. Tired to death; she's had neuralgia all this week. She mustn't
sit up late, really. But come along in."


2

Nan came into the room, her dark eyes blinking against the gaslight, her
small round face pale and smutty. She bent to kiss Pamela, then curled
herself up in a wicker chair and yawned.

"The night is damp and dirty. No, no food, thanks. I've dined. After
dinner I was bored, so I came along to pass the time.... When are you
taking your holidays, both of you? It's time."

"Pamela's going for hers next week," said Frances Carr, handing Nan a
cigarette.

"On the contrary," said Pamela, "Frances is going for _hers_ next week.
Mine is to be September this year."

"Now, we've had all this out before, Pam, you know we have. You
faithfully promised to take August if your neuralgia came on again, and
it has. Tell her she is to, Nan."

"She wouldn't do it the more if I did," Nan said, lazily. These
competitions in unselfishness between Pamela and Frances Carr always
bored her. There was no end to them. Women are so terrifically
self-abnegatory; they must give, give, give, to someone all the
time. Women, that is, of the mothering type, such as these. They must
be forever cherishing something, sending someone to bed with bread and
milk, guarding someone from fatigue.

"It ought to be their children," thought Nan, swiftly. "But they pour it
out on one another instead."

Having put her hand on the clue, she ceased to be interested in the
exhibition. It was, in fact, no more and no less interesting than if it
_had_ been their children. Most sorts of love were rather dull, to the
spectator. Pamela and Frances were all right; decent people, not sloppy,
not gushing, but fine and direct and keen, though rather boring when they
began to talk to each other about some silly old thing that had happened
in their last year at Oxford, or their first year, or on some reading
party. Some people re-live their lives like this; others pass on their
way, leaving the past behind. They were all right, Pamela and Frances.
But all this mothering....

Yet how happy they were, these two, in their useful, competent work and
devoted friendship. They had achieved contacts with life, permanent
contacts. Pamela, in spite of her neuralgia, expressed calm and entirely
unbumptious attainment, Nan feverish seeking. For Nan's contacts with
life were not permanent, but suddenly vivid and passing; the links broke
and she flew off at a tangent. Nan had lately been taken with a desperate
fear of becoming like her mother, when she was old and couldn't write any
more, or love any more men. Horrible thought, to be like Mrs. Hilary,
roaming, questing, feverishly devoured by her own impatience of life....

In here it was cool and calm, soft and blurred with the smoke of their
cigarettes. Frances Carr left them to talk, telling them not to be late.
When she had gone, Pamela said "I thought you were still down at
Windover, Nan."

"Left it on Saturday.... Mother and Grandmama had been there a week.
I couldn't stick it any longer. Mother was outrageously jealous, of
course."

"Neville and Grandmama? Poor mother."

"Oh yes, poor mother. But it gets on my nerves. Neville's an angel. I
can't think how she sticks it. For that matter, I never know how she puts
up with Rodney's spoilt fractiousness.... And altogether life was a bit
of a strain ... no peace. And I wanted some peace and solitude, to make
up my mind in."

"Are you making it up now?" Pamela, mildly interested, presumed it was a
man.

"Trying to. It isn't made yet. That's why I roam about your horrible
slums in the dark. I'm considering; getting things into focus. Seeing
them all round."

"Well, that sounds all right."

"Pam." Nan leant forward abruptly, her cigarette between two brown
fingers. "Are you happy? Do you enjoy your life?"

Pamela withdrew, lightly, inevitably, behind guards.

"Within reason, yes. When committees aren't too tiresome, and the
accounts balance, and...."

"Oh, give me a straight answer, Pam. You dependable, practical people are
always frivolous about things that matter. Are you happy? Do you feel
right-side-up with life?"

"In the main--yes." Pamela was more serious this time. "One's doing one's
job, after all. And human beings are interesting."

"But I've got that too. My job, and human beings.... Why do I feel all
tossed about, like a boat on a choppy sea? Oh, I know life's furiously
amusing and exciting--of course it is. But I want something solid. You've
got it, somehow."

Nan broke off and thought "It's Frances Carr she's got. That's permanent.
That goes on. Pamela's anchored. All these people I have--these men and
women--they're not anchors, they're stimulants, and how different that
is!"

They looked at each other in silence. Pamela said then, "You don't look
well, child."

"Oh--" Nan threw her cigarette end impatiently into the grate. "I'm all
right. I'm tired, and I've been thinking too much. That never suits
me.... Thanks, Pam. You've helped me to make up my mind. I like you,
Pam," she added dispassionately, "because you're so gentlewomanly. You
don't ask questions, or pry. Most people do."

"Surely not. Not most decent people."

"Most people aren't decent. You think they are. You've not lived in my
set--nor in Rosalind's. You're still fresh from Oxford--stuck all over
with Oxford manners and Oxford codes. You don't know the raddled gossip
who fishes for your secrets and then throws them about for fun, like
tennis balls."

"I know Rosalind, thank you, Nan."

"Oh, Rosalind's not the only one, though she'll do. Anyhow I've trapped
you into saying an honest and unkind thing about her, for once; that's
something. Wish you weren't such a dear old fraud, Pammie."

Frances Carr came back, in her dressing gown, looking about twenty-three,
her brown hair in two plaits.

"Pamela, you _mustn't_ sit up any more. I'm awfully sorry, Nan, but her
head...."

"Right oh. I'm off. Sorry I've kept you up, Pammie. Good-night.
Good-night, Frances. Yes, I shall get the bus at the corner. Good-night."

The door closed after Nan, shutting in the friends and their friendship
and their anchored peace.


3

Off went Nan on the bus at the corner, whistling softly into the night.
Like a bird her heart rose up and sang, at the lit pageant of London
swinging by. Queer, fantastic, most lovely life! Sordid, squalid,
grotesque life, bitter as black tea, sour as stale wine! Gloriously
funny, brilliant as a flower-bed, bright as a Sitwell street in hell--

  "(Down in Hell's gilded street
  Snow dances fleet and sweet,
  Bright as a parakeet....)"

unsteady as a swing-boat, silly as a drunkard's dream, tragic as a poem
by Massfield.... To have one's corner in it, to run here and there about
the city, grinning like a dog--what more did one want? Human adventures,
intellectual adventures, success, even a little fame, men and women,
jokes, laughter and love, dancing and a little drink, and the fields and
mountains and seas beyond--what more did one want?

Roots. That was the metaphor that had eluded Nan. To be rooted and
grounded in life, like a tree. Someone had written something about that.

  "Let your manhood be
  Forgotten, your whole purpose seem
  The purpose of a simple tree
  Rooted in a quiet dream...."

Roots. That was what Neville had, what Pamela had; Pamela, with her
sensible wisdom that so often didn't apply because Pamela was so far
removed from Nan's conditions of life and Nan's complicated, unstable
temperament. Roots. Mrs. Hilary's had been torn up out of the ground....

"I'm like mother." That was Nan's nightmare thought. Not intellectually,
for Nan's brain was sharp and subtle and strong and fine, Mrs. Hilary's
was an amorphous, undeveloped muddle. But where, if not from Mrs. Hilary,
did Nan get her black fits of melancholy, her erratic irresponsible
gaieties, her passionate angers, her sharp jealousies and egoisms? The
clever young woman saw herself in the stupid elderly one; saw herself
slipping down the years to that. That was why, where Neville and Pamela
and their brothers pitied, Nan, understanding her mother's bad moods
better than they, was vicious with hate and scorn. For she knew these
things through and through. Not the sentimentality; she didn't know that,
being cynical and cool except when stirred to passion. And not the
posing, for Nan was direct and blunt. But the feverish angers and the
black boredom--they were hers.

Nevertheless Nan's heart sang into the night. For she had made up her
mind, and was at peace.

She had held life at arm's length, pushed it away, for many months,
hiding from it, running from it because she didn't with the whole of her,
want it. Again and again she had changed a dangerous subject, headed for
safety, raced for cover. The week-end before this last, down at Windover,
it had been like a game of hide and seek.... And then she had come away,
without warning, and he, going down there this last week-end, had not
found her, because she couldn't meet him again till she had decided. And
now she had decided.

How unsuited a pair they were, in many ways, and what fun they would
have! Unsuited ... what did it matter? His queer, soft, laughing voice
was in her ears, his lean, clever, merry face swam on the rushing tides
of night. His untidy, careless clothes, the pockets bulging with books,
papers and tobacco, his glasses, that left a red mark on either side of
the bridge of his nose, his easily ruffled brown hair--they all merged
for her into the infinitely absurd, infinitely delightful, infinitely
loved Barry, who was going to give her roots.

She was going away, down into Cornwall, in two days. She would stay in
rooms by herself at Marazion and finish her book and bathe and climb, and
lie in the sun (if only it came out) and sleep and eat and drink. There
was nothing in the world like your own company; you could be purely
animal then. And in a month Gerda and Kay were coming down, and they were
going to bicycle along the coast, and she would ask Barry to come too,
and when Barry came she would let him say what he liked, with no more
fencing, no more cover. Down by the green edge of the Cornish sea they
would have it out--"grip hard, become a root ..." become men as trees
walking, rooted in a quiet dream. Dream? No, reality. This was the dream,
this world of slipping shadows and hurrying gleams of heartbreaking
loveliness, through which one roamed, a child chasing butterflies which
ever escaped, or which, if captured, crumbled to dust in one's clutching
hands. Oh for something strong and firm to hold. Oh Barry, Barry, these
few more weeks of dream, of slipping golden shadows and wavering lights,
and then reality. Shall I write, thought Nan, "Dear Barry, you may ask me
to marry you now." Impossible. Besides, what hurry was there? Better to
have these few more gay and lovely weeks of dream. They would be the
last.

Has Barry squandered and spilt his love about as I mine? Likely enough.
Likely enough not. Who cares? Perhaps we shall tell one another all these
things sometime; perhaps, again, we shan't. What matter? One loves, and
passes on, and loves again. One's heart cracks and mends; one cracks the
hearts of others, and these mend too. That is--_inter alia_--what life is
for. If one day you want the tale of my life, Barry, you shall have it;
though that's not what life is for, to make a tale about. So thrilling in
the living, so flat and stale in the telling--oh let's get on and live
some more of it, lots and lots more, and let the dead past bury its dead.

Between a laugh and a sleepy yawn, Nan jumped from the bus at the corner
of Oakley Street.




CHAPTER V

SEAWEED


1

"Complexes," read Mrs. Hilary, "are of all sorts and sizes." And
there was a picture of four of them in a row, looking like netted cherry
trees whose nets have got entangled with each other. So that was what
they were like. Mrs. Hilary had previously thought of them as being more
of the nature of noxious insects, or fibrous growths with infinite
ramifications. Slim young trees. Not so bad, then, after all.

"A complex is characterised, and its elements are bound together by
a specific emotional tone, experienced as feeling when the complex
is aroused. Apart from the mental processes and corresponding actions
depending on purely rational mental systems, it is through complexes that
the typical mental process (the specific response) works, the particular
complex representing the particular set of mental elements involved in
the process which begins with perception and cognition and ends with the
corresponding conation."

Mrs. Hilary read it three times, and the third time she understood it,
if possible, less than the first. Complexes seemed very difficult
things, and she had never been clever. Any of her children, or even her
grandchildren, would understand it all in a moment. If you have such
things--and everyone has, she had learnt--you ought to be able to
understand them. Yet why? You didn't understand your bodily internal
growths; you left them to your doctor. There were doctors who explained
your complexes to you.... What a revolting idea! It would surely make
them worse, not better. (Mrs. Hilary still vaguely regarded these growths
as something of the nature of cancer.)

Sometimes she imagined herself a patient, interviewing one of these odd
doctors. A man doctor, not a woman; she didn't trust woman doctors of any
kind; she had always been thankful that Neville had given it up and
married instead.

"Insomnia," she would say, in these imaginary interviews, because that
was so easy to start off with.

"You have something on your mind," said the doctor. "You suffer from
depression."

"Yes, I know that. I was coming to that. That is what you must cure for
me."

"You must think back.... What is the earliest thing you can remember?
Perhaps your baptism? Possibly even your first bath? It has been
done...."

"You may be right. I remember some early baths. One of them may have been
the first of all, who knows? What of it, doctor?"

But the doctor, in her imaginings, would at this point only make notes in
a big book and keep silence, as if he had thought as much. Perhaps, no
more than she, he did not know what of it.

Mrs. Hilary could hear herself protesting.

"I am _not_ unhappy because of my baptism, which, so far as I know, went
off without a hitch. I am _not_ troubled by my first bath, nor by any
later bath. Indeed, indeed you must believe me, it is not that at all."

"The more they protest," the psycho-analyst would murmur, "the more it is
so." For that was what Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung always said, so that there
was no escape from their aspersions.

"Why do _you_ think you are so often unhappy?" he would ask her, to
draw her out and she would reply, "Because my life is over. Because I
am an old discarded woman, thrown away onto the dust-heap like a broken
egg-shell. Because my husband is gone and my children are gone, and they
do not love me as I love them. Because I have only my mother to live
with, and she is calm and cares for nothing but only waits for the end.
Because I have nothing to do from morning till night. Because I am
sixty-three, and that is too old and too young. Because life is empty
and disappointing, and I am tired, and drift like seaweed tossed to and
fro by the waves."

It sounded indeed enough, and tears would fill her eyes as she said it.
The psycho-analyst would listen, passive and sceptical but intelligent.

"Not one of your reasons is the correct one. But I will find the true
reason for you and expose it, and after that it will trouble you no more.
Now you shall relate to me the whole history of your life."

What a comfortable moment! Mrs. Hilary, when she came to it in her
imagined interview, would draw a deep breath and settle down and begin.
The story of her life! How absorbing a thing to relate to someone who
really wanted to hear it! How far better than the confessional--for
priests, besides requiring only those portions and parcels of the
dreadful past upon which you had least desire to dwell, had almost
certainly no interest at all in hearing even these, but only did it
because they had to, and you would be boring them. They might even say,
as one had said to Rosalind during the first confession which had
inaugurated her brief ecclesiastical career, and to which she had looked
forward with some interest as a luxurious re-living of a stimulating
past--"No details, please." Rosalind, who had had many details ready,
had come away disappointed, feeling that the Church was not all she
had hoped. But the psycho-analyst doctor would really want to hear
details. Of course he would prefer the kind of detail which Rosalind
would have been able to furnish out of her experience, for that was
what psycho-analysts recognised as true life. Mrs. Hilary's experiences
were pale in comparison; but psycho-analysts could and did make much out
of little, bricks without clay. She would tell him all about the
children--how sweet they were as babies, how Jim had nearly died of
croup, Neville of bronchitis and Nan of convulsions, whereas Pamela had
always been so well, and Gilbert had suffered only from infant debility.
She would relate how early and how unusually they had all given signs of
intelligence; how Jim had always loved her more than anything in the
world, until his marriage, and she him (this was a firm article in Mrs.
Hilary's creed); how Neville had always cherished and cared for her, and
how she loved Neville beyond anything in the world but Jim; how Gilbert
had disappointed her by taking to writing instead of to a man's job, and
then by marrying Rosalind; how Nan had always been tiresome and perverse.
And before the children came--all about Richard, and their courtship, and
their young married life, and how he had loved and cared for her beyond
anything, incredibly tenderly and well, so that all those who saw it had
wondered, and some had said he spoilt her. And back before Richard, to
girlhood and childhood, to parents and nursery, to her brother and
sister, now dead. How she had fought with her sister because they had
both always wanted the same things and got in one another's way! The
jealousies, the bitter, angry tears!

To pour it all out--what comfort! To feel that someone was interested,
even though it might be only as a case. The trouble about most people was
that they weren't interested. They didn't mostly, even pretend they were.


2

She tried Barry Briscoe, the week-end he came down and found Nan gone.
Barry Briscoe was by way of being interested in people and things in
general; he had that kind of alert mind and face.

He came up from the tennis lawn, where he had been playing a single with
Rodney, and sat down by her and Grandmama in the shade of the cedar, hot
and friendly and laughing and out of breath. Now Neville and Rodney were
playing Gerda and Kay. Grandmama's old eyes, pleased behind their
glasses, watched the balls fly and thought everyone clever who got one
over the net. She hadn't played tennis in her youth. Mrs. Hilary's more
eager, excited eyes watched Neville driving, smashing, volleying,
returning, and thought how slim and young a thing she looked, to have all
that power stored in her. She was fleeter than Gerda, she struck harder
than Kay, she was trickier than all of them, the beloved girl. That was
the way Mrs. Hilary watched tennis, thinking of the players, not of the
play. It is the way some people talk, thinking of the talkers, not of
what they are saying. It is the personal touch, and a way some women
have.

But Barry Briscoe, watching cleverly through his bright glasses, was
thinking of the strokes. He was an unconscious person. He lived in
moments.

"Well done, Gerda," Grandmama would call, when Gerda, cool and
nonchalant, dropped, a sitter at Rodn