"Blood! Blood!Rivers of blood for you,Oceans of blood for me!All that the sinner has got to doIs 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...."
"Blood! Blood!Rivers of blood for you,Oceans of blood for me!All that the sinner has got to doIs 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 amostdisagreeable 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.
"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 youdoit," 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'mno 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? Youarewonderful, 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 onherbirthday, 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.Iwas 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.
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. Youknowyou 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 hadsavoir-faireas 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.
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;shewouldn'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 Ihavegot 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.
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'tlikebeing 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 sheisso 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.
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.
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 topractise, 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.
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.
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 blasé, 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:
"IFloat on the tide,In the rain.I am the starfish vomited up by the retching cod.He thinksThat I am he.But I know.That he is I.For the creature is far greater than its god."
"IFloat on the tide,In the rain.I am the starfish vomited up by the retching cod.He thinksThat 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 whatwasshe, 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.
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 thehymns...."
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 tooexpectedwhat 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.
"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. Shecollectsthem."
"No, Barry's not married."
Mrs. Hilary looked more interested. "Not? Oh, then it may come to something.... I wish Nanwouldmarry. 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 musthavea 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 Nanhashad 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 ménage, 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 howcanthey 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.
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 Englishwoman, 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, "Whoarethese Anglo-Catholics, my dear? One seems to hear so much of them in these days. I can't help thinking they are rathernoisy...." 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.
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.
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 anicebook 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. Anduseit."
"Face it and use it by all means. All I meant was, it's a question of emphasis. Thereareother 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.
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 Dürer 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."
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 forhersnext 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 ithadbeen 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, youmustn'tsit 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.
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—