Dangerous Ages Part 11

"Oh, one may as well try things. I've no doubt there's something in it besides the nonsense."

Mrs. Hilary spoke jauntily, with hungry, unquiet, seeking eyes that would not meet Rosalind's. She was afraid that Rosalind would find out that she wanted to be cured of being miserable, of being jealous, of having inordinate pa.s.sions about so little. Rosalind, in some ways a great stupid cow, was uncannily clever when it came to being spiteful and knowing about you the things you didn't want known. It must be horrible to be psycho-a.n.a.lysed by Rosalind, who had no pity and no reticence. The things about you would not only be known but spread abroad among all those whom Rosalind met. A vile, dreadful tongue.

"You wouldn't, I expect, like _me_ to a.n.a.lyse you," said Rosalind. "Not a course, I mean, but just once, to advise you better whom to go to. It'd have the advantage, anyhow, that I'd do it free. Anyone else will charge you three guineas at the least."

"I don't think," said Mrs. Hilary, "that relations--or connections--ought to do one another. No, I'd better go to someone I don't know, if you'll give me the name and address."

"I thought you'd probably rather," Rosalind said in her slow, soft, cruel voice, like a cat's purr. "Well, I'll write down the address for you.

It's Dr. Evans: he'll probably pa.s.s you on to someone down at the seaside, if he considers you a suitable case for treatment."

He would; of course he would. Mrs. Hilary felt no doubt as to that.

Gilbert came in from the British Museum. He looked thin and nervous and sallow amid all the splendour. He kissed his mother, thinking how queer and untidy she looked, a stranger and pilgrim in Rosalind's drawing-room.

He too might look there at times a stranger and pilgrim, but at least, if not voluptuous, he was neat. He glanced proudly and yet ironically from his mother to his magnificent wife, taking in and understanding the supra-normal redundancies of her make-up.

"Rosalind," said Mrs. Hilary, knowing that it would be less than useless to ask Rosalind to keep her secret, "has been recommending me a psycho-a.n.a.lyst doctor. I think it is worth while trying if I can get my insomnia cured that way."

"My dear mother! After all your fulminations against the tribe! Well, I think you're quite right to give it a trial. Why don't you get Rosalind to take you on?"

The fond pride in his voice! Yet there was in his eyes, as they rested for a moment on Rosalind, something other than fond pride; something more like mockery.

Mrs. Hilary got up to go, and fired across the rich room the one shot in her armoury.

"I believe," she said, "that Rosalind prefers chiefly to take men patients. She wouldn't want to be bored with an old woman."

The shot drove straight into Gilbert's light-strung sensitiveness.

Sh.e.l.l-shocked officers; any other officers; anything male, presentable and pa.s.sably young; these were Rosalind's patients; he knew it, and everyone else knew it. For a moment his smile was fixed into the deliberate grin of pain. Mrs. Hilary saw it, saw Gilbert far back down the years, a small boy standing up to punishment with just that brave, nervous grin. Sensitive, defiant, vulnerable, fastidiously proud--so Gilbert had always been and always would be.

Remorsefully she clung to him.

"Come and see me out, dearest boy" (so she called him, though Jim was really that)--and she ignored Rosalind's slow, unconcerned protest against her last remark. "Why, mother, you know I _asked_ to do you" ... but she couldn't prevent Rosalind from seeing her out too, hanging her about with all the ridiculous parcels, kissing her on both cheeks.

Gilbert was cool and dry, pretending she hadn't hurt him. He would always take hurts like that, with that deadly, steely lightness. By its deadliness, its steeliness, she knew that it was all true (and much more besides) that she had heard about Rosalind and her patients.

5

She walked down to the bus with hot eyes. Rosalind had yawned softly and largely behind her as she went down the front steps. Wicked, monstrous creature! Lying about Gilbert's clever, nervous, eager life in great soft folds, and throttling it. If Gilbert had been a man, a real male man, instead of a writer and therefore effeminate, decadent, he would have beaten her into decent behaviour. As it was she would ruin him, and he would go under, not able to bear it, but cynically grinning still.

Perhaps the sooner the better. Anything was better than the way Rosalind went on now, disgracing him and getting talked about, and making him hate his mother for disliking her. He hadn't even come with her to the bus, to carry her parcels for her.... That wasn't like Gilbert. As a rule he had excellent manners, though he was not affectionate like Jim.

Jim, Jim, Jim. Should she go to Harley Street? What was the use? She would find only Margery there; Jim would be out. Margery had no serious faults except the one, that she had taken the first place in Jim's affections. Before Margery, Neville had had this place, but Mrs. Hilary had been able, with Neville's never failing and skilful help, to disguise this from herself. You can't disguise a wife's place in her husband's heart. And Jim's splendid children too, whom she adored--they looked at her with Margery's brown eyes instead of Jim's grey-blue ones. And they preferred really (she knew it) their maternal grandmother, the jolly lady who took them to the theatres.

Mrs. Hilary pa.s.sed a church. Religion. Some people found help there. But it required so much of you, was so exhausting in its demands. Besides, it seemed infinitely far away--an improbable, sad, remote thing, that gave you no human comfort. Psycho-a.n.a.lysis was better; that opened gates into a new life. "Know thyself," Mrs. Hilary murmured, kindling at the prospect. Most knowledge was dull, but never that.

"I will ring up from Waterloo and make an appointment," she thought.

CHAPTER VI

JIM

1

The psycho-a.n.a.lyst doctor was little and dark and while he was talking he looked not at Mrs. Hilary but down at a paper whereon he drew or wrote something she tried to see and couldn't. She came to the conclusion after a time that he was merely scribbling for effect.

"Insomnia," he said. "Yes. You know what _that_ means?"

She said, foolishly, "That I can't sleep," and he gave her a glance of contempt and returned to his scribbling.

"It means," he told her, "that you are afraid of dreaming. Your unconscious self won't _let_ you sleep.... Do you often recall your dreams when you wake?"

"Sometimes."

"Tell me some of them, please."

"Oh, the usual things, I suppose. Packing; missing trains; meeting people; and just nonsense that means nothing. All the usual things, that everyone dreams about."

At each thing she said he nodded, and scribbled with his pencil. "Quite,"

he said, "quite. They're bad enough in meaning, the dreams you've mentioned. I don't suppose you'd care at present to hear what they symbolise.... The dreams you haven't mentioned are doubtless worse. And those you don't even recall are worst of all. Your unconscious is, very naturally and properly, frightened of them.... Well, we must end all that, or you'll never sleep as you should. Psycho-a.n.a.lysis will cure these dreams; first it will make you remember them, then you'll talk them out and get rid of them."

"Dreams," said Mrs. Hilary. "Well, they may be important. But it's my whole life...."

"Precisely. I was coming to that. Of course you can't cure sleeplessness until you have cured the fundamental things that are wrong with your life. Now, if you please, tell me all you can about yourself."

Here was the wonderful moment. Mrs. Hilary drew a long breath, and told him. A horrid (she felt that somehow he was rather horrid) little man with furtive eyes that wouldn't meet hers--(and he wasn't quite a gentleman, either, but still, he wanted to hear all about her) he was listening attentively, drinking it in. Not watching tennis while she talked, like Barry Briscoe in the garden. Ah, she could go on and on, never tired; it was like swimming in warm water.

He would interrupt her with questions. Which had she preferred, her father or her mother? Well, perhaps on the whole her father. He nodded; that was the right answer; the other he would have quietly put aside as one of the deliberate inaccuracies so frequently practised by his patients. "You can leave out the perhaps. There's no manner of doubt about it, you know." Lest he should say (instead of only looking it) that she had been in love with her good father and he with her, Mrs.

Hilary hurried on. She had a chaste mind, and knew what these Freudians were. It would, she thought (not knowing her doctor and how it would have come to the same thing, only he would have thought her a more p.r.o.nounced case, because of the deception), have been wiser to have said that she had preferred her mother, but less truthful, and what she was enjoying now was an orgy of truth-telling. She got on to her marriage, and how intensely Richard had loved her. He tried for a moment to be indecent about love and marriage, but in her deep excitement she hardly noticed him, but swept on to the births of the children, and Jim's croup.

"I see," he said presently, "that you prefer to avoid discussing certain aspects of life. You obviously have a s.e.x complex."

"Of course, of course. Don't you find that in all your patients? Surely we may take that for granted...." She allowed him his s.e.x complex, knowing that Freudians without it would be like children deprived of a precious toy; for her part she was impatient to get back to Jim, her life's chief pa.s.sion. The Oedipus complex, of course he would say it was; what matter, if he would let her talk about it? And Neville. It was strange to have a jealous pa.s.sion for one's daughter. But that would, he said, be an extension of the ego complex--quite simple really.

She came to the present.

"I feel that life has used me up and flung me aside like a broken tool.

I have no further relation to life, nor it to me. I have spent myself and been spent, and now I am bankrupt. Can you make me solvent again?"

She liked that as she said it.

He scribbled away, like a mouse scrabbling.

"Yes. Oh yes. There is no manner of doubt about it. None whatever. If you are perfectly frank, you can be cured. You can be adjusted to life. Every age in human life has its own adjustment to make, its own relation to its environment to establish. All that repressed libido must be released and diverted.... You have some bad complexes, which must be sublimated...."

It sounded awful, the firm way he said it, like teeth or appendixes which must be extracted. But Mrs. Hilary knew it wouldn't be like that really, but delightful and luxurious, more like a Turkish bath.