Dangerous Ages Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

"I've never had complexes," Mrs. Hilary would declare, indignantly, as if they had been fleas or worse, and indeed when Rosalind handled them they _were_ worse, much. From Rosalind Mrs. Hilary got the most unpleasant impression possible (which is to say a good deal) of psycho-a.n.a.lysts.

"They have only one idea, and that is a disgusting one," she would a.s.sert, for she could only rarely and with difficulty see more than one idea in anything, particularly when it was a disgusting one. Her mind was of that sort--tenacious, intolerant, and not many-sided. That was where (partly where) she fell foul of her children, who saw sharply and clearly all around things and gave to each side its value. They knew Mrs. Hilary to be a muddled bigot, whose mind was stuffed with concrete instances and insusceptible of abstract reason. If anyone had asked her what she knew of psycho-a.n.a.lysis, she would have replied, in effect, that she knew Rosalind, and that was enough, more than enough, of psycho-a.n.a.lysis for her. She had also looked into Freud, and rightly had been disgusted.

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

They all sat in the front garden after lunch and looked out over the wonderful s.h.i.+ning sea. Grandmama sat in her wheeled chair, Tchekov's Letters on her knees. She had made Mrs. Hilary get this book from Mudie's because she had read favourable reviews of it by Gilbert and Nan.

Grandmama was a cleverish old lady, cleverer than her daughter.

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

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

advertis.e.m.e.nts, think they have seen reviews, and declare roundly in libraries that a book is out when it lacks a month of publication.

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

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

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

Music blared out from the parade. Gilbert, adjusting his gla.s.ses, observed its circ.u.mstances, with his air of detached, fastidious interest.

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

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

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

The police ought to stop it."

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

"Blood! Blood!

Rivers of blood for you, Oceans of blood for me!

All that the sinner has got to do Is to plunge into that Red Sea.

Clean! Clean!

Wash and be clean!

Though filthy and black as a sweep you've been, The waves of that sea shall make you clean...."

"That," Mrs. Hilary a.s.serted, with disgust, "is a _most_ disagreeable way of wors.h.i.+pping G.o.d." 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. Vach.e.l.l 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 ma.s.s, Lent, and being thrown with other churchwomen.

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Disgusting," she remarked to Neville.

So much more, she meant, of Rosalind than of Rosalind's costume. Mrs.