Through the late September and October days Gerda would lie on a wicker couch in the conservatory at Windover, her sprained leg up, her broken wrist on a splint, her mending head on a soft pillow, and eat pears. Grapes too, apples, figs, chocolates of course—but particularly pears. She also wrote verse, and letters to Barry, and drew in pen and ink, and read Sir Leo Chiozza Money's "Triumph of Nationalisation" and Mrs. Snowden on Bolshevik Russia, and "Lady Adela," and "Côterie," and listened while Neville read Mr. W.H. Mallock's "Memoirs" and Disraeli's "Life." Her grandmother (Rodney's mother) sent her "The Diary of Opal Whiteley," but so terrible did she find it that it caused a relapse, and Neville had to remove it. She occasionally struggled in vain with a modern novel, which she usually renounced in perplexity after three chapters or so. Her taste did not lie in this direction.
"I can't understand what they're all about," she said to Neville. "Poetrymeanssomething. It's about something real, something that really is so. So are books like this—" she indicated "The Triumph of Nationalisation." "But most novels are so queer. They're about people, but not people as they are. They're notinteresting."
"Not as a rule, certainly. Occasionally one gets an idea out of one of them, or a laugh, or a thrill. Now and then they express life, or reality, or beauty, in some terms or other—but not as a rule."
Gerda was different from Kay, who devoured thrillers, shockers, and ingenious crime and mystery stories with avidity. She did not believe that life was really much like that, and Kay's assertion that if it weren't it ought to be, she rightly regarded as pragmatical. Neither did she share Kay's more fundamental taste for the Elizabethans, Carolines and Augustans. She and Kay met (as regards literature) only on economics, politics, and modern verse. Gerda's mind was artistic rather than literary, and she felt no wide or acute interest in human beings, their actions, passions, foibles, and desires.
So, surrounded by books from the Times library, and by nearly all the weekly and monthly reviews (the Bendishes, like many others, felt, with whatever regret, that they had to see all of these), Gerda for the most part, when alone, lay and dreamed dreams and ate pears.
Barry came down for week-ends. He and Gerda had declared their affections towards one another even at the Looe infirmary, where Gerda had been conveyed from the scene of accident. It had been no moment then for anything more definite than statements of reciprocal emotion, which are always cheering in sickness. But when Gerda was better, well enough, in fact, to lie in the Windover conservatory, Barry came down from town and said, "When shall we get married?"
Then Gerda, who had had as yet no time or mind-energy to reflect on the probable, or rather certain, width of the gulf between the sociological theories of herself and Barry, opened her blue eyes wide and said "Married?"
"Well, isn't that the idea? You can't jilt me now, you know; matters have gone too far."
"But, Barry, I thought you knew. I don't hold with marriage."
Barry threw back his head and laughed, because she looked so innocent and so serious and young as she lay there among the pears and bandages.
"All right, darling. You've not needed to hold with it up till now. But now you'd better catch on to it as quickly as you can, and hold it tight, because it's what's going to happen."
Gerda moved her bandaged head in denial.
"Oh, no, Barry. I can't.... I thought you knew. Haven't we ever talked about marriage before?"
"Oh, probably. Yes, I think I've heard you and Kay both on the subject. You don't hold with legal ties in what should be purely a matter of emotional impulse, I know. But crowds of people talk like that and then get married. I've no doubt Kay will too, when his time comes."
"Kay won't. He thinks marriage quite wrong. And so do I."
Barry, who had stopped laughing, settled himself to talk it out.
"Why wrong, Gerda? Superfluous, if you like; irrelevant, if you like; but why wrong?"
"Because it's a fetter on what shouldn't be fettered. Love might stop. Then it would be ugly."
"Oh very. One has to take that risk, like other risks. And love is really more likely to stop, as I see it, if there's no contract in the eyes of the world, if the two people know each can walk away from the other, and is expected to, directly they quarrel or feel a little bored. The contract, the legalisation—absurd and irrelevant as all legal things are to anything that matters—the contract, because we're such tradition-bound creatures, does give a sort of illusion of inevitability, which is settling, so that it doesn't occur to the people to fly apart at the first strain. They go through with it instead, and in nine cases out of ten come out on the other side. In the tenth case they just have either to make the best of it or to make a break.... Of course people alwayscanthrow up the sponge, even married people, if things are insupportable. The door isn't locked. But there's no point, I think, in having it swinging wide open."
"I think itshouldbe open," Gerda said. "I think people should be absolutely free.... Take you and me. Suppose you got tired of me, or liked someone else better, I think you ought to be able to leave me without any fuss."
That was characteristic of both of them, that they could take their own case theoretically without becoming personal, without lovers' protestations to confuse the general issue.
"Well," Barry said, "I don't think I ought. I think it should be made as difficult for me as possible. Because of the children. There are usually children, of course. If I left you, I should have to leave them too. Then they'd have no father. Or, if it were you that went, they'd have no mother. Either way it's a pity, normally. Also, even if we stayed together always and weren't married, they'd have no legal name. Children often miss that, later on. Children of the school age are the most conventional, hide-bound creatures. They'd feel ashamed before their schoolfellows."
"I suppose they'd have my name legally, wouldn't they?"
"I suppose so. But they might prefer mine. The other boys and girls would have their fathers', you see."
"Not all of them. I know several people who don't hold with marriage either; there'd be all their children. And anyhow it's not a question of what the children would prefer while they were at school. It's what's best for them. And anything would be better than to see their parents hating each other and still having to live together."
"Yes. Anything would be better than that. Except that it would be a useful and awful warning to them. But the point is, most married people don't hate each other. They develop a kind of tolerating, companionable affection, after the first excitement called being in love is past—so far as it does pass. That's mostly good enough to live on; that and common interests and so forth. It's the stuff of ordinary life; the emotional excitement is the horsd'œuvre. It would be greedy to want to keep passing on from onehors d'œuvreto another—leaving the meal directly the joint comes in."
"I like dessert best," Gerda said, irrelevantly, biting into an apple.
"Well, you'd never get any at that rate. Nor much of the rest of the meal either."
"But people do, Barry. Free unions often last for years and years—sometimes forever. Only you wouldn't feel tied. You'd be sure you were only living together because you both liked to, not because you had to."
"I should feel I had to, however free it was. So you wouldn't have that consolation about me. I might be sick of you, and pining for someone else, but still I should stay."
"Why, Barry?"
"Because I believe in permanent unions, as a general principle. They're more civilised. It's unusual, uncivic, dotting about from one mate to another, leaving your young and forgetting all about them and having new ones. Irresponsible, I call it. Living only for a good time. It's not the way to be good citizens, as I see it, nor to bring up good citizens.... Oh, I know that the whole question of sex relationships is horribly complicated, and can't be settled with a phrase or a dogma. It's been for centuries so wrapped in cant and humbug and expediencies and camouflage; I don't profess to be able to pierce through all that, or to so much as begin to think it out clearly. The only thing I can fall back on as a certainty is the children question. A confused and impermanent family lifemustbe a bad background for the young. They want all they can get of both their parents, in the way of education and training and love."
"Family life is such a hopeless muddle, anyhow."
"A muddle, yes. Hopeless, no. Look at your own. Your father and mother have always been friends with each other and with you. They brought you up with definite ideas about what they wanted you to become—fairly well thought-out and consistent ideas, I suppose. I don't say they could do much—parents never can—but something soaks in."
"Usually something silly and bad."
"Often, yes. Anyhow a queer kind of mixed brew. But at least the parents have their chance. It's what they're there for; they've got to do all they know, while the children are young, to influence them towards what they personally believe, however mistakenly, to be the finest points of view. Of course lots of it is, as you say, silly and bad, because peoplearelargely silly and bad. But no parent can be absolved from doing his or her best."
Barry was walking round the conservatory, eager and full of faith and hope and fire, talking rapidly, the educational enthusiast, the ardent citizen, the social being, the institutionalist, all over. He was all these things; he was rooted and grounded in citizenship, in social ethics. He stopped by the couch and stood looking down at Gerda among her fruit, his hands in his pockets, his eyes bright and lit.
"All the same, darling, I shall never want to fetter you. If you ever want to leave me, I shan't come after you. The legal tie shan't stand in your way. And to me it would make no difference; I shouldn't leave you in any case, married or not. So I don't see how or why you score in doing without the contract."
"It's the idea of the thing, partly. I don't want to wear a wedding ring and be Mrs. Briscoe. I want to be Gerda Bendish, living with Barry Briscoe because we like to.... I expect, Barry, in my case itwouldbe for always, because, at present, I can't imagine stopping caring more for you than for anything else. But that doesn't affect the principle of the thing. It would bewrongfor me to marry you. One oughtn't to give up one's principles just because it seems all right in a particular case. It would be cheap and shoddy and cowardly."
"Exactly," said Barry, "what I feel. I can't give up my principle either, you know. I've had mine longer than you've had yours."
"I've had mine since I was about fifteen."
"Five years. Well, I've had mine for twenty. Ever since I first began to think anything out, that is."
"People of your age," said Gerda, "people over thirty, I mean, often think like that about marriage. I've noticed it. So has Kay."
"Observant infants. Well, there we stand, then. One of us has got either to change his principles—her principles, I mean—or to be false to them. Or else, apparently, there can be nothing doing between you and me. That's the position, isn't it?"
Gerda nodded, her mouth full of apple.
"It's very awkward," Barry continued, "my having fallen in love with you. I had not taken your probable views on sociology into account. I knew that, though we differed in spelling and punctuation, we were agreed (approximately) on politics, economics, and taste in amusements, and I thought that was enough. I forgot that divergent views on matrimony were of practical importance. It would have mattered less if I had discovered that you were a militarist and imperialist and quoted Marx at me."
"I did tell you, Barry. I really did. I never hid it. And I never supposed that you'd want tomarryme."
"That was rather stupid of you. I'm so obviously a marrying man.... Now, darling, will you think the whole thing out from the beginning, after I've gone? Be first-hand; don't take over theories from other people, and don't be sentimental about it. Thrash the whole subject out with yourself and with other people—with your own friends, and with your family too. They're a modern, broad-minded set, your people, after all; they won't look at the thing conventionally; they'll talk sense; they won't fob you off with stock phrases, or talk about the sanctity of the home. They're not institutionalists. Only be fair about it; weigh all the pros and cons, and judge honestly, and for heaven's sake don't look at the thing romantically, or go off on theories because they sound large and subversive. Think of practical points, as well as of ultimate principles. Both, to my mind, are on the same side. I'm not asking you to sacrifice right for expediency, or expediency for right. I don't say 'Be sensible,' or 'Be idealistic.' We've got to be both."
"Barry, I've thought and talked about it so often and so long. You don't know how much we do talk about that sort of thing, at the club and everywhere and Kay and I. I could never change my mind."
"What a hopeless admission! We ought to be ready to change our minds at any moment; they should be as changeable as pound notes."
"What about yours, then, darling?"
"I'm always ready to change mine. I shall think the subject out too, and if I do change I shall tell you at once."
"Barry." Gerda's face was grave; her forehead was corrugated. "Suppose we neither of us ever change? Suppose we both go on thinking as we do now for always? What then?"
He smoothed the knitted forehead with his fingers.
"Then one of us will have to be a traitor to his or her principles. A pity, but sometimes necessary in this complicated world. Or, if we can neither of us bring ourselves down to that, I suppose eventually we shall each perpetrate with someone else the kind of union we personally prefer."
They parted on that. The thing had not grown serious yet; they could still joke about it.
Though Gerda said "What's the use of my talking about it to people when I've made up my mind?" and though she had not the habit of talking for conversation's sake, she did obediently open the subject with her parents, in order to assure herself beyond a doubt what they felt about it. But she knew already that their opinions were what you might expect of parents, even of broad-minded, advanced parents, who rightly believed themselves not addicted to an undiscriminating acceptance of the standards and decisions of a usually mistaken world. But Barry was wrong in saying they weren't institutionalists; they were. Parents are.
Rodney was more opinionated than Neville, on this subject as on most others. He said, crossly, "It's a beastly habit, unlegitimatised union. When I say beastly, I mean beastly; nothing derogatory, but merely like the beasts—the other beasts, that is."
Gerda said "Well, that's not really an argument against it. In that sense it's beastly when we sleep out instead of in bed, or do lots of other quite nice things. The way men and women do things isn't necessarily the best way," and there Rodney had to agree with her. He fell back on "It's unbusinesslike. Suppose you have children?" and Gerda, who had supposed all that with Barry, sighed. Rodney said a lot more, but it made little impression on her, beyond corroborating her views on the matrimonial theories of middle-aged people.
Neville made rather more. To Neville Gerda said "How can I go back on everything I've always said and thought about it, and go and get married? It would be soreactionary."
Neville, who had a headache and was irritable, said "It's the other thing that's reactionary. It existed long before the marriage tie did. That's what I don't understand about all you children who pride yourselves on being advanced. If you frankly take your stand on going back to nature, onbeingreactionary—well, it is, anyhow, a point of view, and has its own merits. But your minds seem to me to be in a hopeless muddle. You think you're going forward while you're really going back."
"Marriage," said Gerda, "is so Victorian. It's like antimacassars."
"Now, my dear, do you meananythingby either of those statements? Marriage wasn't invented in Victoria's reign. Nor did it occur more frequently in that reign than it had before or does now. Why Victorian, then? And why antimacassars? Think it out. Howcana legal contract be like a doyley on the back of a chair? Where is the resemblance? It sounds like a riddle, only there's no answer. No, you know you've got no answer. That kind of remark is sheer sentimentality and muddle-headedness. Why are people in their twenties so often sentimental? That's another riddle."
"That's what Nan says. She told me once that she used to be sentimental when she was twenty. Was she?"
"More than she is now, anyhow."
Neville's voice was a little curt. She was not happy about Nan, who had just gone to Rome for the winter.
"Well," Gerda said, "anyhow I'm not sentimental about not meaning to marry. I've thought about it for years, and I know."
"Thought about it! Much you know about it." Neville, tired and cross from over-work, was, unlike herself, playing the traditional conventional mother. "Have you thought how it will affect your children, for instance?"
Those perpetual, tiresome children. Gerda was sick of them.
"Oh yes, I've thought a lot about that. And I can't see it will hurt them. Barry and I talked for ever so long about the children. So did father."
So did Neville.
"Of course I know," she said, "that you and Kay would be only too pleased if father and I had never been married, but you've no right to judge by yourself the ones you and Barry may have. They may not be nearly so odd.... And then there's your own personal position. The world's full of people who think they can insult a man's mistress."
"I don't meet people like that. The people I know don't insult other people for not being married. They think it's quite natural, and only the people's own business."
"You've moved in a small and rarefied clique so far, my dear. You'll meet the other kind of people presently; one can't avoid them, the world's so full of them."
"Do they matter?"
"Of course they matter. As mosquitoes matter, and wasps, and cars that splash mud at you in the road. You'd be constantly annoyed. Your own scullery maid would turn up her nose at you. The man that brought the milk will sneer."
"I don't think," Gerda said, after reflection, "that I'm very easily annoyed. I don't notice things, very often. I think about other things rather a lot, you see. That's why I'm slow at answering."
"Well, Barry would be annoyed, anyhow."
"Barry does lots of unpopular things. He doesn't mind what people say."
"He'd mind for you.... But Barry isn't going to do it. Barry won't have you on your terms. If you won't have him on his, he'll leave you and go and find some nicer girl."
"I can't help it, mother. I can't do what I don't approve of for that. How could I?"
"No, darling, of course you couldn't; I apologise. But do try and see if you can't get to approve of it, or anyhow to be indifferent about it. Such a little thing! It isn't as if Barry wanted you to become a Mormon or something.... And after all you can't accuse him of being retrograde, or Victorian, if you like to use that silly word, or lacking in ideals for social progress—can you? He belongs to nearly all your illegal political societies, doesn't he? Why, his house gets raided for leaflets from time to time. I don't think they ever find any, but they look, and that's something. You can't call Barry hide-bound or conventionally orthodox."
"No. Oh no. Not that. Or I shouldn't be caring for him. But he doesn't understand about this. And you don't, mother, nor father, nor anyone of your ages. I don't know how it is, but it is so."
"You might try your Aunt Rosalind," Neville suggested, with malice.
Gerda shuddered. "Aunt Rosalind ... she wouldn't understand at all...."
But the dreadful thought was, as Neville had intended, implanted in her that, of all her elder relatives, it was only Aunt Rosalind who, though she mightn't understand, might nevertheless agree. Aunt Rosalind on free unions... that would be terrible to have to hear. For Aunt Rosalind would hold with them not because she thought them right but because she enjoyed them—the worst of reasons. Gerda somehow felt degraded by the introduction into the discussion of Aunt Rosalind, whom she hated, whom she knew, without having been told so, that her mother and all of them hated. It dragged it down, made it vulgar.
Gerda lay back in silence, the springs of argument and talk dried in her. She wanted Kay.
It was no use; they couldn't meet. Neville could not get away from her traditions, nor Gerda from hers.
Neville, to change the subject (though scarcely for the better), read her "The Autobiography of Mrs. Asquith" till tea-time.
They all talked about it again, and said the same things, and different things, and more things, and got no nearer one another with it all. Soon Barry and Gerda, each comprehending the full measure of the serious intent of the other, stood helpless before it, the one in half-amused exasperation, the other in obstinate determination.
"She means business, then," thought Barry. "He won't come round," thought Gerda and their love pierced and stabbed them, making Barry hasty of speech and Gerda sullen.
"Thewasteof it," said Barry, on Sunday evening, "when I've only got one day in the week, to spend it quarrelling about marriage. I've hundreds of things to talk about and tell you—interesting things, funny things—but I never get to them, with all this arguing we have to have first."
"I don't want to argue, Barry. Let's not. We've said everything now, lots of times. There can't be any more. Tell me your things instead!"
He told her, and they were happy talking, and forgot how they thought differently on marriage. But always the difference lay there in the background, coiled up like a snake, ready to uncoil and seize them and make them quarrel and hurt one another. Always one was expecting the other at any moment to throw up the sponge and cry "Oh, have it your own way, since you won't have it mine and I love you." But neither did. Their wills stood as stiff as two rocks over against one another.
Gerda grew thinner under the strain, and healed more slowly than before. Her fragile, injured body was a battle-ground between her will and her love, and suffered in the conflict. Barry saw that it could not go on. They would, he said, stop talking about it; they would put it in the background and go on as if it were not there, until such time as they could agree. So they became friends again, lovers who lived in the present and looked to no future, and, since better might not be, that had to do for the time.
Through September Neville had nursed Gerda by day and worked by night. The middle of October, just when they usually moved into town for the winter, she collapsed, had what the doctor called a nervous breakdown.
"You've been overworking," he told her. "You're not strong enough in these days to stand hard brain-work. You must give it up."
For a fortnight she lay tired and passive, surrendered and inert, caring for nothing but to give up and lie still and drink hot milk. Then she struggled up and mooned about the house and garden, and cried weakly from time to time, and felt depressed and bored, and as if life were over and she were at the bottom of the sea.
"This must be what mother feels," she thought. "Poor mother.... I'm like her; I've had my life, and I'm too stupid to work, and I can only cry.... Men must work and women must weep.... I never knew before that that was true.... I mustn't see mother just now, it would be the last straw ... like the skeletons people used to look at to warn themselves what they would come to.... Poor mother ... and poor me.... But mother's getting better now she's being analysed. That wouldn't help me at all. I analyse myself too much already.... And I was so happy a few months ago. What a dreadful end to a good ambition. I shall never work again, I suppose, in any way that counts. So that's that.... Why do I want to work and to do something? Other wives and mothers don't.... Or do they, only they don't know it, because they don't analyse? I believe they do, lots of them. Or is it only my horrible egotism and vanity, that can't take a back seat quietly? I was always like that, I know. Nan and I and Gilbert. Not Jim so much, and not Pamela at all. But Rodney's worse than I am; he wouldn't want to be counted out, put on the shelf, in the forties; he'd be frightfully sick if he had to stand by and see other people working and getting on and in the thick of things when he wasn't. He couldn't bear it; he'd take to drink, I think.... I hope Rodney won't ever have a nervous breakdown and feel like this, poor darling, he'd be dreadfully tiresome.... Not to work after all. Not to be a doctor.... What then? Just go about among people, grinning like a dog. Winter in town, talking, dining, being the political wife. Summer in the country, walking, riding, reading, playing tennis. Fun, of course. But what's it all for? When I've got Gerda off my hands I shall have done being a mother, in any sense that matters. Is being a wife enough to live for? Rodney's wife? Oh, I want to be some use, want to do things, to count.... And Rodney will die some time—I know he'll die first—and then I shan't even be a wife. And in twenty years I shan't be able to do things with my body much more, and what then? What will be left? ... I think I'm getting hysterical, like poor mother.... How ugly I look, these days."
She stopped before the looking-glass. Her face looked back at her, white and thin, almost haggard, traced in the last few weeks for the first time with definite lines round brow and mouth. Her dark hair was newly streaked with grey.
"Middle age," said Neville, and a cold hand was laid round her heart. "It had to come some time, and this illness has opened the door to it. Or shall I look young again when I'm quite well? No, never young again."
She shivered.
"I look like mother to-day.... Iamlike mother...."
So youth and beauty were to leave her, too. She would recover from this illness and this extinguishing of charm, but not completely, and not for long. Middle age had begun. She would have off days in future, when she would look old and worn instead of always, as hitherto, looking charming. She wouldn't, in future, be sure of herself; people wouldn't be sure to think "A lovely woman, Mrs. Rodney Bendish." Soon they would be saying "How old Mrs. Bendish is getting to look," and then "She was a pretty woman once."
Well, looks didn't matter much really, after all....
"They do, they do," cried Neville to the glass, passionately truthful. "If you're vain they do—and I am vain. Vain of my mind and of my body.... Vanity, vanity, all is vanity ... and now the silver cord is going to be loosed and the golden bowl is going to be broken, and I shall be hurt."
Looks did matter. It was no use canting, and minimising them. They affected the thing that mattered most—one's relations with people. Men, for instance, cared more to talk to a woman whose looks pleased them. They liked pretty girls, and pretty women. Interesting men cared to talk to them: they told them things they would never tell a plain woman. Rodney did. He liked attractive women. Sometimes he made love to them, prettily and harmlessly.
The thought of Rodney stabbed her. If Rodney were to get to care less ... to stop making love to her ... worse, to stop needing her.... For he did need her; through all their relationship, disappointing in some of its aspects, his need had persisted, a simple, demanding thing.
Humour suddenly came back.
"This, I suppose, is what Gerda is anticipating, and why she won't have Barry tied to her. If Rodney wasn't tied to me he could flee from my wrinkles...."
"Oh, what an absurd fuss one makes. What does any of it matter? It's all in the course of nature, and the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep. Middle age will be very nice and comfortable and entertaining, once one's fairly in it.... I go babbling about my wasted brain and fading looks as if I'd been a mixture of Sappho and Helen of Troy.... That's the worst of being a vain creature.... What will Rosalind do whenhertime comes? Oh, paint, of course, and dye—more thickly than she does now, I mean. She'll be a ghastly sight. A raddled harridan. At least I shall always look respectable, I hope. I shall go down to Gerda. I want to look at something young. The young have their troubles, poor darlings, but they don't know how lucky they are."
In November Neville and Gerda, now both convalescent, joined Rodney in their town flat. Rodney thought London would buck Neville up. London does buck you up, even if it is November and there is no gulf stream and not much coal. For there is always music and always people. Neville had a critical appreciation of both. Then, for comic relief, there are politics. You cannot be really bored with a world which contains the mother of Parliaments, particularly if her news is communicated to you at first hand by one of her members. Disgusted you may be and are, if you are a right-minded person, but at least not bored.
What variety, what excitement, what a moving picture show, is this tragic and comic planet! Why want to be useful, why indulge such tedious inanities as ambitions, why dream wistfully of doing one's bit, making one's work, in a world already as full of bits, bright, coloured, absurd bits, like a kaleidoscope, as full of marks (mostly black marks) as a novel from a free library? A dark and bad and bitter world, of course, full of folly, wickedness and misery, sick with poverty and pain, so that at times the only thing Neville could bear to do in it was to sit on some dreadful committee thinking of ameliorations for the lot of the very poor, or to go and visit Pamela in Hoxton and help her with some job or other—that kind of direct, immediate, human thing, which was a sop to uneasiness and pity such as the political work she dabbled in, however similar its ultimate aim, could never be.
To Pamela Neville said, "Are you afraid of getting old, Pamela?"
Pamela replied, "Not a bit. Are you?" And she confessed it.
"Often it's like a cold douche of water down my spine, the thought of it. I reason and mock at myself, but Idon'tlike it.... You're different; finer, more real, more unselfish. Besides, you'll have done something worth doing when you have to give up. I shan't."
Pamela's brows went up.
"Kay? Gerda? The pretty dears: I've done nothing so nice as them. You've done what's called a woman's work in the world—isn't that the phrase?"
"Done it—just so, but so long ago. What now? I still feel young, Pamela, even now that I know I'm not. ... Oh Lord, it's a queer thing, being a woman. A well-off woman of forty-three with everything made comfortable for her and her brain gone to pot and her work in the world done. I want something to bite my teeth into—some solid, permanent job—and I get nothing but sweetmeats, and people point at Kay and Gerda and say 'That's your work, and it's over. Now you can rest, seeing that it's good, like God on the seventh day.'"
"Idon't say 'Now you can rest. Except just now, while you're run down.'"
"Run down, yes; run down like a disordered clock because I tried to tackle an honest job of work again. Isn't it sickening, Pamela? Isn't it ludicrous?"
"Ludicrous—no. Everyone comes up against his own limitations. You've got to work within them that's all. After all, there are plenty of jobs you can do that want doing—simply shouting to be done."
"Pammie dear, it's worse than I've said. I'm a low creature. I don't only want to do jobs that want doing: I want to count, to make a name. I'm damnably ambitious. You'll despise that, of course—and you're quite right, it is despicable. But there it is. Most men and many women are tormented by it—they itch for recognition."
"Of course. One is."
"You too, Pammie?"
"I have been. Less now. Life gets to look short, when you're thirty-nine."
"Ah, but you have it—recognition, even fame, in the world you work in. You count for something. If you value it, there it is. I wouldn't grumble if I'd played your part in the piece. It's a good part—a useful part and a speaking part."
"I suppose we all feel we should rather like to play someone else's part for a change. There's nothing exciting about mine. Most people would far prefer yours."
They would, of course; Neville knew it. The happy political wife rather than the unmarried woman worker; Rodney, Gerda and Kay for company rather than Frances Carr. There was no question which was the happier lot, the fuller, the richer, the easier, the more entertaining.
"Ah well.... You see, Rosalind spent the afternoon with me yesterday, and I felt suddenly that it wasn't for me to be stuck up about her—what am I too but the pampered female idler, taking good things without earning them? It made me shudder. Hence this fit of blues. The pampered, lazy, brainless animal—it is such a terrific sight when in human form. Rosalind talked about Nan, Pamela. In her horrible way—you know. Hinting that she isn't alone in Rome, but with Stephen Lumley."
Pamela took off her glasses and polished them.
"Rosalind would, of course. What did you say?"
"I lost my temper. I let out at her. It's not a thing I often do with Rosalind—it doesn't seem worth while. But this time I saw red. I told her what I thought of her eternal gossip and scandal. I said, what if Nan and Stephen Lumley, or Nan and anyone else, did arrange to be in Rome at the same time and to see a lot of each other; where was the harm? No use. You can't pin Rosalind down. She just shrugged her shoulders and smiled, and said 'My dear, we all know our Nan. We all know too that Stephen Lumley has been in love with her for a year, and doesn't live with his wife. Then they go off to Rome at the same moment, and one hears that they are seen everywhere together. Why shut one's eyes to obvious deductions? You're so like an ostrich, Neville.' I said I'd rather be an ostrich than a ferret, eternally digging into other people's concerns,—and by the time we had got to that I thought it was far enough, so I had an engagement with my dressmaker."
"It's no use tackling Rosalind," Pamela agreed. "She'll never change her spots.... Do you suppose it's true about Nan?"
"I daresay it is. Yes, I'm afraid I do think it's quite likely true.... Nan was so queer the few times I saw her after Gerda's accident. I was unhappy about her. She was so hard, and so more than usually cynical and unget-at-able. She told me it had been all her fault, leading Gerda into mischief, doing circus tricks that the child tried to emulate and couldn't. I couldn't read her, quite. Her tone about Gerda had a queer edge to it. And she rather elaborately arranged, I thought, so that she shouldn't meet Barry. Pamela, do you think she had finally and absolutely turned Barry down before he took up so suddenly with Gerda, or...."
Pamela said, "I know nothing. She told me nothing. But I rather thought, when she came to see me just before she went down to Cornwall, that she had made up her mind to have him. I may have been wrong."
Neville leant her forehead on her hands and sighed.
"Or you may have been right. And if you were right, it's the ghastliest tragedy—for her.... Oh, I shouldn't have let Gerda go and work with him; I should have known better.... Nan had rebuffed him, and he flew off at a tangent, and there was Gerda sitting in his office, as pretty as flowers and with her funny little silent charm.... And if Nan was all the time waiting for him, meaning to say yes when he asked her.... Poor darling Nan, robbed by my horrid little girl, who doesn't even want to marry.... If that's the truth, it would account for the Stephen Lumley business. Nan wouldn't stay on in London, to see them together. If Lumley caught her at that psychological moment, she'd very likely go off with him, out of mere desperation and bravado. That would be so terribly like Nan.... What a desperate, wry, cursed business life is.... On the other hand, she may just be going about with Lumley on her own terms not his. It's her own affair whichever way it is; what we've got to do is to contradict the stories Rosalind is spreading whenever we get the chance. Not that one can scotch scandal once it starts—particularly Rosalind's scandal."
"Ignore it. Nan can ignore it when she comes back. It won't hurt her. Nan's had plenty of things said about her before, true and untrue, and never cared."
"You're splendid at the ignoring touch, Pam. I believe there's nothing you can't and don't ignore."
"Well, why not? Ignoring's easy."
"Not for most of us. I believe it is, for you. In a sense you ignore life itself; anyhow you don't let it hold and bully you. When your time comes you'll ignore age, and later death."
"They don't matter much, do they? Does anything? I suppose it's my stolid temperament, but I can't feel that it does."
Neville thought, as she had often thought before, that Pamela, like Nan, only more calmly, less recklessly and disdainfully, had the aristocratic touch. Pamela, with her delicate detachments and her light, even touch on things great and small, made her feel fussy and petty and excitable.
"I suppose you're right, my dear.... 'All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the unreasonable....' I must get back. Give my love to Frances... and when next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the things that don't matter and that she might just as well put up with to please us all. The child is a little nuisance—as obstinate as a mule."
Neville, walking away from Pamela's grimy street in the November fog, felt that London was terrible. An ugly clamour of strident noises and hard, shrill voices, jabbering of vulgar, trivial things. A wry, desperate, cursed world, as she had called it, a pot seething with bitterness and all dreadfulness, with its Rosalinds floating on the top like scum.
And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered of old, had pulled out of countless scrapes—Nan had now taken her life into her reckless hands and done what with it? Given it, perhaps, to a man she didn't love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love, which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy. Even if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville was somehow sure of that. Men were blind fools; men were fickle children. Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to Rome and fetch Nan back. But, to do that, Barry would have to fall out of love with Gerda and into love again with Nan; and even Barry, Neville imagined, was not such a weathercock as that. And Barry would really be happier with Gerda. With all their differences, they were both earnest citizens, both keen on social progress. Nan was a cynical flibberty-gibbet; it might not have been a happy union. Perhaps happy unions were not for such as Nan. But at the thought of Nan playing that desperate game with Stephen Lumley in Rome, Neville's face twitched....
She would go to Rome. She would see Nan; find out how things were. Nan always liked to see her, would put up with her even when she wanted no one else.
That was, at least, a job one could do. These family jobs—they still go on, they never cease, even when one is getting middle-aged and one's brain has gone to pot. They remain, always, the jobs of the affections.
She would write to Nan to-night, and tell her she was starting for Rome in a few days, to have a respite from the London fogs.
But she did not start for Rome, or even write to Nan, for when she got home she went to bed with influenza.
The happiness Mrs. Hilary now enjoyed was of the religious type—a deep, warm glow, which did not lack excitement. She felt as those may be presumed to feel who have just been converted to some church—newly alive, and sunk in spiritual peace, and in profound harmony with life. Where were the old rubs, frets, jars and ennuis? Vanished, melted like yesterday's snows in the sun of this new peace. It was as if she had cast her burden upon the Lord. That, said her psycho-analyst doctor, was quite in order; that was what it ought to be like. That was, in effect, what she had in point of fact done; only the place of the Lord was filled by himself. To put the matter briefly, transference of burden had been effected; Mrs. Hilary had laid all her cares, all her perplexities, all her grief, upon this quiet, acute-looking man, who sat with her twice a week for an hour, drawing her out, arranging her symptoms for her, penetrating the hidden places of her soul, looking like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Henry Ainley. Her confidence in him was, he told her, the expression of the father-image, which surprised Mrs. Hilary a little, because he was twenty years her junior.
Mrs. Hilary felt that she was getting to know herself very well indeed. Seeing herself through Mr. Cradock's mind, she felt that she was indeed a curious jumble of complexes, of strange, mysterious impulses, desires and fears. Alarming, even horrible in some ways; so that often she thought "Can he be right about me? Am I really like that? Do I really hope that Marjorie (Jim's wife) will die, so that Jim and I may be all in all to each other again? Am I really so wicked?" But Mr. Cradock said that it was not at all wicked, perfectly natural and normal—the Unconsciouswaslike that. And worse than that; how much worse he had to break to Mrs. Hilary, who was refined and easily shocked, by gentle hints and slow degrees, lest she should be shocked to death. Her dreams, which she had to recount to him at every sitting, bore such terrible significance—they grew worse and worse in proportion, as Mrs. Hilary could stand more.
"Ah well," Mrs. Hilary sighed uneasily, after an interpretation into strange terms of a dream she had about bathing, "it's very odd, when I've never even thought about things like that."
"Your Unconscious," said Mr. Cradock, firmly, "has thought the more. The more your Unconscious is obsessed by a thing, the less your conscious self thinks of it. It is shy of the subject, for that very reason."
Mrs. Hilary was certainly shy of the subject, for that reason or others. When she felt too shy of it, Mr. Cradock let her change it. "It may be true," she would say, "but it's very terrible, and I would rather not dwell on it."
So he would let her dwell instead on the early days of her married life, or on the children's childhood, or on her love for Neville and Jim, or on her impatience with her mother.
They were happy little times, stimulating, cosy little times. They spoke straight to the heart, easing it of its weight of tragedy. A splendid man, Mr. Cradock, with his shrewd, penetrating sympathy, his kind firmness. He would listen with interest to everything; the sharp words she had had with Grandmama, troubles with the maids, the little rubs of daily life (and what a rubbing business life is, to be sure!) as well as to profounder, more tragic accounts of desolation, jealousy, weariness and despair. He would say "Your case is a very usual one," so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that. He reduced it all, dispassionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws. He trained his patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams and to be shocked at nothing that they signified.
Mrs. Hilary would wake each morning, or during the night, and clutch at the dream which was flying from her, clutch and secure it, and make it stand and deliver its outlines to her. She was content with outlines; it was for Mr. Cradock to supply the interpretation. Sometimes, if Mrs. Hilary couldn't remember any dreams, he would supply, according to a classic precedent, the dream as well as the interpretation. But on the whole, deeply as she revered and admired him, Mrs. Hilary preferred to remember her own dreams; what they meant was bad enough, but the meaning of the dreams that Mr. Cradock told her she had dreamt was beyond all words.... That terrible Unconscious! Mrs. Hilary disliked it excessively; she felt rather as if it were a sewer, sunk beneath an inadequate grating.
But from Mr. Cradock she put up with hearing about it. She would have put up with anything. He was so steadying and so wonderful. He enabled her to face life with a new poise, a fresh lease of strength and vitality. She told Grandmama so. Grandmama said "Yes, my dear, I've observed it in you. It sounds to me an unpleasing business, but it is obviously doing you good, so far. I only wish it may last. The danger may be reaction, after you have finished the course and lost touch with this young man." (Mr. Cradock was forty-five, but Grandmama, it must be remembered, was eighty-four.) "You will have to guard against that. In a way it was a pity you didn't take up church-going instead; religion lasts."
"And these quackeries do not," Grandmama finished her sentence to herself, not wishing to be discouraging.
"Not always," Mrs. Hilary truly replied, meaning that religion did not always last.
"No," Grandmama agreed. "Unfortunately not always. Particularly when it is High Church. There was your uncle Bruce, of course...."
Mrs. Hilary's uncle Bruce, who had been High Church for a season, and had even taken Orders in the year 1860, but whose faith had wilted in the heat and toil of the day, so that by 1870 he was an agnostic barrister, took Grandmama back through the last century, and she became reminiscent over the Tractarian movement, and, later, the Ritualists.
"The Queen never could abide them," said Grandmama. "Nor could Lord Beaconsfield, nor your father, though he was always kind and tolerant. I remember when Dr. Jowett came to stay with us, how they talked about it.... Ah well, they've become very prominent since then, and done a great deal of good work, and there are many very able, excellent men and women among them.... But they're not High Church any longer, they tell me. They're Catholics in these days. I don't know enough of them to judge them, but I don't think they can have the dignity of the old High Church party, for if they had I can't imagine that Gilbert's wife, for instance, would have joined them, even for so short a time as she did.... Well, it suits some people, and psycho-analysis obviously suits others. Only I do hope you will try to keep moderate and balanced, my child, and not believe all this young man tells you. Parts of it do sound so very strange."
(But Mrs. Hilary would not have dreamt of repeating to Grandmama the strangest parts of all.)
"I feel a new woman," she said, fervently, and Grandmama smiled, well pleased, thinking that it certainly did seem rather like the old evangelical conversions of her youth. (Which, of course, did not always last, any more than the High Church equivalents did.)
All Grandmama committed herself to, in her elderly caution, which came however less from age than from having known Mrs. Hilary for sixty-three years, was "Well, well, we must see."
And then Rosalind's letter came. It came by the afternoon post—the big, mauve, scented, sprawled sheets, dashingly monographed across one corner.
"Gilbert's wife," pronounced Grandmama, non-committally from her easy chair, and, said in that tone, it was quite sufficient comment. "Another cup of tea, please, Emily."
Mrs. Hilary gave it to her, then began to read aloud the letter from Gilbert's wife. Gilbert's wife was one of the topics upon which she and Grandmama were in perfect accord, only that Mrs. Hilary was irritated when Grandmama pushed the responsibility for the relationship onto her by calling Rosalind "your daughter-in-law."
Mrs. Hilary began to read the letter in the tone used by well-bred women when they would, if in a slightly lower social stratum, say "Fancy that now! Did you ever, the brazen hussy!" Grandmama listened, cynically disapproving, prepared to be disgusted yet entertained. On the whole she thoroughly enjoyed letters from Gilbert's wife. She settled down comfortably in her chair with her second cup of tea, while Mrs. Hilary read two pages of what Grandmama called "foolish chit-chat." Rosalind's letters were really like the gossipping imbecilities written by Eve of the Tatler, or the other ladies who enliven our shinier-paper weeklies with their bright personal babble. She did not often waste one of them on her mother-in-law; only when she had something to say which might annoy her.
"Do you hear from Nan?" the third page of the letter began. "I hear from the Bramertons, who are wintering in Rome—the Charlie Bramertons, you know, great friends of mine and Gilbert's (he won a pot of money on the Derby this year and they've a dinky flat in some palace out there—), and they meet Nan about, and she's always with Stephen Lumley, the painter (rotten painter, if you ask me, but he's somehow diddled London into admiring him, don't expect you've heard of him down at the seaside). Well, they're quite simplyalwaystogether, and the Brams say that everyone out there says it isn't in the least an ambiguous case—no two ways about it. He doesn't live with his wife, you know. You'll excuse me passing this on to you, but it does seem you ought to know. I mentioned it to Neville the other day, just before the poor old dear went down with the plague, but you know what Neville is, she always sticks up for Nan and doesn't carewhatshe does, or what people say. People are talking; beasts, aren't they! But that's the way of this wicked old world, we all do it. Gilbert's quite upset about it, says Nan ought to manage her affairs more quietly. But after all and between you and me it's not the first time Nan's been a Town Topic, is it.
"How's the psycho going? Isn't Cradock rather a priceless pearl? You're over head and ears with him by now, of course, we all are. Psycho wouldn't do you any good if you weren't, that's the truth. Cradock told me himself once that transference can't be effected without the patient being a little bit smitten. Personally I should give up a man patient at once if he didn't rather like me. But isn't it soothing and comforting, and doesn't it make you feel good all over, like a hot bath when you're fagged out...."
But Mrs. Hilary didn't get as far as this. She stopped at "not the first time Nan's been a Town Topic...." and dropped the thin mauve sheets onto her lap, and looked at Grandmama, her face queerly tight and flushed, as if she were about to cry.
Grandmama had finished her tea, and had been listening quietly.
Mrs. Hilary said "Oh, my God," and jerked her head back, quivering like a nervous horse who has had a shock and does not care to conceal it.
"Your daughter-in-law," said Grandmama, without excitement, "is an exceedingly vulgar young woman."
"Vulgar? Rosalind? But of course.... Only that doesn't affect Nan...."
"Your daughter-in-law," Grandmama added, "is also a very notorious liar."
"A liar ... oh yes, yes, yes.... But this time it's true. Oh I feel, I know, it's true. Nanwould. That Stephen Lumley—he's been hanging about her for ages. ... Oh yes, it's true what they say. The very worst...."
Grandmama glanced at her curiously. The very worst in that direction had become strangely easier of credence by Mrs. Hilary lately. Grandmama had observed that. Mr. Cradock's teaching had not been without its effect. According to Mr. Cradock, people were usually engaged either in practising the very worst, or in desiring to practise it, or in wishing and dreaming that they had practised it. It was the nature of mankind, and not in the least reprehensible, though curable. Thus Mr. Cradock. Mrs. Hilary had, against her own taste, absorbed part of his teaching, but nothing could ever persuade her that it was not reprehensible: it quite obviously was. Also disgusting. Mr. Cradock might say what he liked. Itwasdisgusting. And when the man had a wife....
"It is awful," said Mrs. Hilary. "Awful.... It must be stopped. I shall go to Rome. At once."
"That won't stop it, dear, if it is going on. It will only irritate the young people."
"Irritate! You can use a word like that! Mother, you don't realise this ghastly thing."
"I quite see, my dear, that Nan may be carrying on with this artist. And very wrong it is, if so. All I say is that your going to Rome won't stop it. You know that you and Nan don't always get on very smoothly. You rub each other up.... It would be far better if someone else went. Neville, say."
"Neville is ill." Mrs. Hilary shut her lips tightly on that. She was glad Neville was ill; she had always hated (she could not help it) the devotion between Neville and Nan. Nan, in her tempestuous childhood, flaring with rage against her mother, or sullen, spiteful and perverse, long before she could have put into words the qualities in Mrs. Hilary which made her like that, had always gone to Neville, nine years older, to be soothed and restored to good temper. Neville had reprimanded the little naughty sister, had told her she must be "decent to mother—feel decent if you can, behave decent in any case," was the way she had put it. It was Neville who had heard Nan's confidences and helped her out of scrapes in childhood, schoolgirlhood and ever since. This was very bitter to Mrs. Hilary. She was jealous of both of them; jealous that so much of Neville's love should go elsewhere than to her, jealous that Nan, who gave her nothing except generous and extravagant gifts and occasional, spasmodic, remorseful efforts at affection and gentleness, should to Neville give all.
"Neville is ill," she said. "She certainly won't be fit to travel out of England this winter. Influenza coming on the top of that miserable breakdown is a thing to be treated with the greatest care. Even when she is recovered, post-influenza will keep her weak till the summer. I am really anxious about her. No; Neville is quite out of the question."
"Well, what about Pamela?"
"Pamela is up to her eyes in her work.... Besides, why should Pamela go, or Neville, rather than I? A girl's mother is obviously the right person. I may not be of much use to my children in these days, but at least I hope I can save them from themselves."
"It takes a clever parent to do that, Emily," said Grandmama, who doubtless knew.
"But, mother, what would youhaveme do? Sit with my hands before me while my daughter lives in sin? What'syourplan?"
"I'm too old to make plans, dear. I can only look on at the world. I've looked at the world now for many, many years, and I've learnt that only great wisdom and great love can change people's decisions as to their way of life, or turn them from evil courses. Frankly, my child, I doubt if you have, where Nan is concerned, enough wisdom or enough love. Enough sympathy, I should rather say, for you have love. But do you feel you understand the child enough to interfere wisely and successfully?"
"Oh, you think I'm a fool, mother; of course I know you've always thought me a fool. Good God, if a mother can't interfere with her own daughter to save her from wickedness and disaster, who can, I should like to know?"
"One would indeed like to know that," Grandmama said, sadly.
"Perhaps you'd like to go yourself," Mrs. Hilary shot at her, quivering now with anger and feeling.
"No, my dear. Even if I were able to get to Rome I should know that I was too old to interfere with the lives of the young. I don't understand them enough. You believe that you do. Well, I suppose you must go and try. I can't stop you."
"You certainly can't. Nothing can stop me.... You're singularly unsympathetic, mother, about this awful business."
"I don't feel so, dear. I am very, very sorry for you, and very, very sorry for Nan (whom, you must remember, we may be slandering). I have always looked on unlawful love as a very great sin, though there may be great provocation to it."
"It is an awful sin." Mr. Cradock could say what he liked on that subject; he might tell Mrs. Hilary that it was not awful except in so far as any other yielding to nature's promptings in defiance of the law of man was awful, but he could not persuade her. Like many other people, she set that particular sin apart, in a special place by itself; she would talk of "a bad woman," "an immoral man," a girl who had "lost her character," and mean merely the one kind of badness, the one manifestation of immorality, the one element in character. Dishonesty and cruelty she could forgive, but never that.
"I shall start in three days," said Mrs. Hilary, becoming tragically resolute. "I must tell Mr. Cradock to-morrow."
"That young man? Must he know about Nan's affairs, my dear?"
"I have to tell him everything, mother. It's part of the course. He is as secret as the grave."
Grandmama knew that Emily, less secret than the grave, would have to ease herself of the sad tale to someone or other in the course of the next day, and supposed that it had better be to Mr. Cradock, who seemed to be a kind of hybrid of doctor and clergyman, and so presumably was more discreet than an ordinary human being. Emily must tell. Emily always would. That was why she enjoyed this foolish psycho-analysis business so much.
At the very thought of it a gleam had brightened Mrs. Hilary's eyes, and her rigid, tense pose had relaxed. Oh the comfort of telling Mr. Cradock! Even if he did tell her how it was all in the course of nature, at least he would sympathise with her trouble about it, and her annoyance with Grandmama. And he would tell her how best to deal with Nan when she got to her. Nan's was the sort of case that Mr. Cradock really did understand. Any situation between the sexes—he was all over it. Psycho-analysts adored sex; they made an idol of it. They communed with it, as devotees with their God. They couldn't really enjoy, with their whole minds, anything else, Mrs. Hilary sometimes vaguely felt. But as, like the gods of the other devotees, it was to them immanent, everywhere and in everything; they could be always happy. If they went up into heaven it was there; if they fled down into hell it was there also. Once, when Mrs. Hilary had tentatively suggested that Freud, for instance, over-stated its importance, Mr. Cradock had said firmly "It is impossible to do that," which settled it once and for all.
Mrs. Hilary stood up. Her exalted, tragic mood clothed her like a flowing garment.
"I shall write to Cook," she said. "Also to Nan, to tell her I am coming."
Grandmama, after a moment's silence, seemed to gather herself together for a final effort.
"Emily, my child. Is your mind set to do this?"
"Absolutely, mother. Absolutely and entirely."
"Shall I tell you what I think? No, you don't want to hear it, but you drive me to it.... If you go to that foolish, reckless child and attempt to interfere with her, or even to question her, you will run the risk, if she is innocent, of driving her into what you are trying to prevent. If she is already committed to it, you run the risk of shutting the door against her return. In either case you will alienate her from yourself: that is the least of the risks you run, though the most certain.... That is all. I can say no more. But I ask you, my dear.... I beg you, for the child's sake and your own ... to write neither to Cook nor to Nan."
Grandmama's breath came rather fast and heavily; her heart was troubling her; emotion and effort were not good for it.
Mrs. Hilary stood looking down at the old shrunk figure, shaking a little as she stood, knowing that she must be patient and calm.
"You will please allow me to judge. You will please let me take the steps I think necessary to help my child. I know that you have no confidence in my judgment or my tact; you've always shown that plainly enough, and done your best to teach my children the same view of me...."
Grandmama put up her hand, meaning that she could not stand, neither she nor her heart could stand, a scene. Mrs. Hilary broke off. For once she did not want a scene either. In these days she found what vent was necessary for her emotional system in her interviews with Mr. Cradock.
"I daresay you mean well, mother. But in this matter I must be the judge. I am a mother first and foremost. It is the only thing that life has left for me to be." (Scarcely a daughter, she meant: that was made too difficult for her; you would almost imagine that the office was not wanted.)
She turned to the writing table.
"First of all I shall write to Rosalind, and tell her what I think of her and her abominable gossip."
She began to write.
Grandmama sat shrunk and old and tired in her chair.
Mrs. Hilary's pen scratched over the paper, telling Rosalind what she thought.
"Dear Rosalind," she wrote, "I was very much surprised at your letter. I do not know why you should trouble to repeat to me these ridiculous stories about Nan. You cannot suppose that I am likely to care either what you or any of your friends are saying about one of my children...." And so on. One knows the style. It eases the mind of the writer and does not deceive the reader. When the reader is Rosalind Hilary it amuses her vastly.
Next day, at three p.m., Mrs. Hilary told Mr. Cradock all about it. Mr. Cradock was not in the least surprised. Nor had he the slightest, not the remotest doubt that Nan and Stephen Lumley were doing what Mrs. Hilary called living in sin, what he preferred to call obeying the natural ego. (After all, as any theologian would point out, the terms are synonymous in a fallen world.)
"I must have your advice," Mrs. Hilary said. "You must tell me what line to take with her."
"Shall you," Mr. Cradock enquired, thoughtful and intelligent, "find your daughter in a state of conflict?"
Mrs. Hilary spread her hands helplessly before her.
"I know nothing; nothing."
"A very great deal," said Mr. Cradock, "depends on that. If she is torn between the cravings of the primitive ego and the inhibitions put upon these cravings by the conventions of society—if, in fact, her censor, her endopsychic censor, is still functioning...."
"Oh, I doubt if Nan's got an endopsychic censor. She is so lawless always."
"Every psyche has a censor." Mr. Cradock was firm. "Regarded, of course, by the psyche with very varying degrees of respect. Well, what I mean to say is, if your daughter is in a state of conflict, with forces pulling her both ways, her case will be very much easier to deal with than if she has let her primitive ego so take possession of the situation that she feels in a state of harmony. In the former case, you will only have to strengthen the forces which are opposing her sexual craving...."
Mrs. Hilary fidgeted uneasily. "Oh, I don't think Nan feelsthatexactly. None of my children...."
Mr. Cradock gave her an amused glance. It seemed sometimes that he would never get this foolish lady properly educated.
"Your children, I presume, are human, Mrs. Hilary. Sexual craving means a craving for intimacy with a member of another sex."
"Oh well, I suppose it does. I don't care for thename, somehow. But please go on."
"I was going to say, if you find, on the other hand, that your daughter's nature has attained harmony in connection with this course she is pursuing, your task will be far more difficult. You will then have tocreatea discord, instead of merely strengthening it.... May I ask your daughter's age?"
"Nan is thirty-three."
"A dangerous age."
"All Nan's ages," said Mrs. Hilary, "have been dangerous. Nan is like that."
"As to that," said Mr. Cradock, "we may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shynesses and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.... Has passion always been a strong element in your daughter's life?"
"Oh, passion...." (Another word not liked by Mrs. Hilary.) "Not quite that, I should say. Nan has been reckless; she has got into scrapes, got herself talked about. She has played about with men a good deal always. But as to passion...."
"A common thing enough," Mr. Cradock told her, as it were reassuringly. "Nothing to fight shy of, or be afraid of. But something to be regulated of course.... Now, the thing is to oppose to this irregular desire of your daughter's for this man a new and a stronger set of desires. Fight one group of complexes with another. You can't, I suppose, persuade her to be analysed? There are good analysts in Rome."
"Oh no. Nan laughs at it. She laughs at everything of that sort."
"A great mistake. A mistake often made by shallow and foolish people. They might as well laugh at surgery.... Well now, to go into this question of the battle between the complex-groups...."
He went into it, patiently and exhaustively. His phrases drifted over Mrs. Hilary's head.
"... a deterrent force residing in the ego and preventing us from stepping outside the bounds of propriety.... Rebellious messages sent up from the Unconscious, which wishes to live, love and act in archaic modes ... conflict with the progress of human society ... inhibitory and repressive power of the censor...." (How wonderful, thought Mrs. Hilary, to be able to talk so like a book for so long together!) ... "give the censor all the help we can ... keep the Unconscious in order by turning its energies into some other channel ... give it a substitute.... The energy involved in the intense desire for someone of another sex can be diverted ... employed on some useful work. Libido ... it should all be used. Find another channel for your daughter's libido.... Her life is perhaps a rather vacant one?"
That Mrs. Hilary was able to reply to.
"Nan's? Vacant? Oh no. She is quite full of energy. Too full. Always doing a thousand things. And she writes, you know."
"Ah. That should be an outlet. A great deal of libido is used up by that. Well, her present strong desire for this man should be sublimated into a desire for something else. I gather that her root trouble is lawlessness. That can be cured. You must make her remember her first lawless action." (Man's first disobedience and the fruit thereof, thought Mrs. Hilary.)
"O dear me," she said, "I'm afraid that would be impossible. When she was a month old she used to attempt to dash her bottle onto the floor."
"People have even remembered their baptisms, when driven back to them by analysis."
"Our children were not baptised. My husband was something of a Unitarian. He said he would not tie them up with a rite against which they might react in later life. So they were merely registered."
"Ah. In a way that is a pity. Baptism is an impressive moment in the sensitive consciousness of the infant. It has sometimes been found to be a sort of lamp shining through the haze of the early memory. Registration, owing to the non-participation of the infant, is useless in that way."
"Nan might remember how she kicked me when I short-coated her," Mrs. Hilary mused, hopefully.
Mr. Cradock flowed on. Mrs. Hilary, listened, assented, was impressed. It all sounded so simple, so wonderful, even so beautiful. But she thought once or twice, "He doesn't know Nan."
"Thank you," she said, rising to go when her hour was over. "You have made me feel so much stronger, as usual. I can't thank you enough for all you do for me. I could face none of my troubles and problems but for your help."
"That merely means," said Mr. Cradock, who always got the last word, "that your ego is at present in what is called the state of infantile dependence or tutelage. A necessary but an impermanent stage in its struggle towards the adult level of the reality-principle."
"I suppose so," Mrs. Hilary said. "Good-bye."
"He is too clever for me," she thought, as she went home. "He is often above my head." But she was used to that in the people she met.