Dangerous Ages Part 8

"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 anch.o.r.ed. 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 dispa.s.sionately, "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 b.a.l.l.s."

"I know Rosalind, thank you, Nan."

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

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

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

"Right oh. I'm off. Sorry I've kept you up, Pammie. Good-night.

Good-night, Frances. Yes, I shall get the bus at the corner. Good-night."

The door closed after Nan, shutting in the friends and their friends.h.i.+p and their anch.o.r.ed peace.

3

Off went Nan on the bus at the corner, whistling softly into the night.

Like a bird her heart rose up and sang, at the lit pageant of London swinging by. Queer, fantastic, most lovely life! Sordid, squalid, grotesque life, bitter as black tea, sour as stale wine! Gloriously funny, brilliant as a flower-bed, bright as a Sitwell street in h.e.l.l--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was going away, down into Cornwall, in two days. She would stay in rooms by herself at Marazion and finish her book and bathe and climb, and lie in the sun (if only it came out) and sleep and eat and drink. There was nothing in the world like your own company; you could be purely animal then. And in a month Gerda and Kay were coming down, and they were going to bicycle along the coast, and she would ask Barry to come too, and when Barry came she would let him say what he liked, with no more fencing, no more cover. Down by the green edge of the Cornish sea they would have it out--"grip hard, become a root ..." become men as trees walking, rooted in a quiet dream. Dream? No, reality. This was the dream, this world of slipping shadows and hurrying gleams of heartbreaking loveliness, through which one roamed, a child chasing b.u.t.terflies which ever escaped, or which, if captured, crumbled to dust in one's clutching hands. Oh for something strong and firm to hold. Oh Barry, Barry, these few more weeks of dream, of slipping golden shadows and wavering lights, and then reality. Shall I write, thought Nan, "Dear Barry, you may ask me to marry you now." Impossible. Besides, what hurry was there? Better to have these few more gay and lovely weeks of dream. They would be the last.

Has Barry squandered and spilt his love about as I mine? Likely enough.

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

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

CHAPTER V

SEAWEED

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You must think back.... What is the earliest thing you can remember?

Perhaps your baptism? Possibly even your first bath? It has been done...."

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

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