Then Grandmama, settling down with her pleased old smile to something which mattered more than the news in the papers, said "And now, dear, I want to hear all about this friendship of Nan's and this nice young Mr. Briscoe."

So Neville again had to answer questions about that.

7

Mrs. Hilary, abruptly leaving them, trailed away by herself to the house. Since she mightn't have Neville to herself for the afternoon she wouldn't stay and share her. But when she reached the house and looked out at them through the drawing-room windows, their intimacy stabbed her with a pang so sharp that she wished she had stayed.

Besides, what was there to do indoors? No novels lay about that looked readable, only "The Rescue" (and she couldn't read Conrad, he was so nautical) and a few others which looked deficient in plot and as if they were trying to be clever. She turned them over restlessly, and put them down again. She wasn't sleepy, and hated writing letters. She wanted someone to talk to, and there was no one, unless she rang for the housemaid. Oh, this dreadful ennui.... Did anyone in the world know it but her? The others all seemed busy and bright. That was because they were young. And Grandmama seemed serene and bright. That was because she was old, close to the edge of life, and sat looking over the gulf into space, not caring. But for Mrs. Hilary there was ennui, and the dim, empty room in the cold grey July afternoon. The empty stage; no audience, no actors. Only a lonely, disillusioned actress trailing about it, hungry for the past.... A book Gerda had been reading lay on the table. "The Breath of Life," it was called, which was surely just what Mrs. Hilary wanted. She picked it up, opened it, turned the pages, then, tucking it away out of sight under her arm, left the room and went upstairs.

"Many wonderful cures," Neville had said. And had mentioned depression as one of the diseases cured. What, after all, if there was something in this stuff which she had never tried to understand, had always dismissed, according to her habit, with a single label? "Labels don't help. Labels get you nowhere." How often the children had told her that, finding her terse terminology that of a shallow mind, endowed with inadequate machinery for acquiring and retaining knowledge, as indeed it was.

8

Gerda, going up to Mrs. Hilary's room to tell her about tea, found her asleep on the sofa, with "The Breath of Life" fallen open from her hand. A smile flickered on Gerda's delicate mouth, for she had heard her grandmother on the subject of psycho-analysis, and here she was, having taken to herself the book which Gerda was reading for her Freud circle. Gerda read a paragraph on the open page.

"It will often be found that what we believe to be unhappiness is really, in the secret and unconscious self, a joy, which the familiar process of inversion sends up into our consciousness in the form of grief. If, for instance, a mother bewails the illness of her child, it is because her unconscious self is experiencing the pleasure of importance, of being condoled and sympathised with, as also that of having her child (if it is a male) entirely for the time dependent on her ministrations. If, on the other hand, the sick child is her daughter, her grief is in reality a hope that this, her young rival, may die, and leave her supreme in the affections of her husband. If, in either of these cases, she can be brought to face and understand this truth, her grief will invert itself again and become a conscious joy...."

"I wonder if Grandmother believes all that," speculated Gerda, who did.

Then she said aloud, "Grandmother" (that was what Gerda and Kay called her, distinguishing her thus from Great-Grandmama), "tea's ready."

Mrs. Hilary woke with a start. "The Breath of Life" fell on the floor with a bang. Mrs. Hilary looked up and saw Gerda and blushed.

"I've been asleep.... I took up this ridiculous book of yours to look at. The most absurd stuff.... How can you children muddle your minds with it? Besides, it isn't at all a nice book for you, my child. I came on several very queer things...."

But the candid innocence of Gerda's wide blue eyes on hers transcended "nice" and "not nice."... You might as well talk like that to a wood anemone, or a wild rabbit.... If her grandmother had only known, Gerda at twenty had discussed things which Mrs. Hilary, in all her sixty-three years, had never heard mentioned. Gerda knew of things of which Mrs. Hilary would have indignantly and sincerely denied the existence. Gerda's young mind was a cess-pool, a clear little dew-pond, according to how you looked at it. Gerda and Gerda's friends knew no inhibitions of speech or thought. They believed that the truth would make them free, and the truth about life is, from some points of view, a squalid and gross thing. But better look it in the face, thought Gerda and her contemporaries, than pretend it isn't there, as elderly people do.

"I don't want you to pretend anything isn't there, darling," Neville, between the two generations, had said to Gerda once. "Only it seems to me that some of you children have one particular kind of truth too heavily on your minds. It seems to block the world for you."

"You mean sex," Gerda had told her, bluntly. "Well, it runs all through life, mother. What's the use of hiding from it? The only way to get even with it is to face it. And use it."

"Face it and use it by all means. All I meant was, it's a question of emphasis. There are other things...."

Of course Gerda knew that. There was drawing, and poetry, and beauty, and dancing, and swimming, and music, and politics, and economics. Of course there were other things; no doubt about that. They were like songs, like colour, like sunrise, like flowers, these other things. But the basis of life was the desire of the male for the female and of the female for the male. And this had been warped and smothered and talked down and made a furtive, shameful thing, and it must be brought out into the day....

Neville smiled to hear all this tripping sweetly off Gerda's lips.

"All right, darling, don't mind me. Go ahead and bring it out into the day, if you think the subject really needs more airing than it already gets. I should have thought myself it got lots, and always had."

And there they were; they talked at cross purposes, these two, across the gulf of twenty years, and with the best will in the world could not hope to understand, either of them, what the other was really at. And now here was Gerda, in Mrs. Hilary's bedroom, looking across a gulf of forty years and saying nothing at all, for she knew it would be of no manner of use, since words don't carry as far as that.

So all she said was "Tea's ready, Grandmother."

And Mrs. Hilary supposed that Gerda hadn't, probably, noticed or understood those very queer things she had come upon while reading "The Breath of Life."

They went down to tea.



CHAPTER IV

ROOTS

1

It was a Monday evening, late in July. Pamela Hilary, returning from a Care Committee meeting, fitted her latch-key into the door of the rooms in Cow Lane which she shared with Frances Carr, and let herself into the hot dark passage hall.

A voice from a room on the right called "Come along, my dear. Your pap's ready."

Pamela entered the room on the right. A pleasant, Oxfordish room, with the brown paper and plain green curtains of the college days of these women, and Duerer engravings, and sweet peas in a bowl, and Frances Carr stirring bread and milk over a gas ring. Frances Carr was small and thirty-eight, and had a nice brown face and a merry smile. Pamela was a year older and tall and straight and pale, and her ash-brown hair swept smoothly back from a broad white forehead. Her grey eyes regarded the world shrewdly and pleasantly through pince-nez. Pamela was distinguished-looking, and so well-bred that you never got through her guard; she never hurt the feelings of others or betrayed her own. Competent she was, too, and the best organizer in Hoxton, which is to say a great deal, Hoxton needing and getting, one way and another, a good deal of organisation. Some people complained that they couldn't get to know Pamela, the guard was too complete. But Frances Carr knew her.

Frances Carr had piled cushions in a deep chair for her.

"Lie back and be comfy, old thing, and I'll give you your pap."

She handed Pamela the steaming bowl, and proceeded to take off her friend's shoes and substitute moccasin slippers. It was thus that she and Pamela had mothered one another at Somerville eighteen years ago, and ever since. They had the maternal instinct, like so many women.

"Well, how went it? How was Mrs. Cox?"

Mrs. Cox was the chairwoman of the Committee. All committee members know that the chairman or woman is a ticklish problem, if not a sore burden.

"Oh well...." Pamela dismissed Mrs. Cox with half a smile. "Might have been worse.... Oh look here, Frank. About the library fund...."

The front door-bell tingled through the house.

Frances Carr said "Oh hang. All right, I'll see to it. If it's Care or Continuation or Library, I shall send it away. You're not going to do any more business to-night."

She went to the door, and there, her lithe, drooping slimness outlined against the gas-lit street, stood Nan Hilary.

"Oh, Nan.... But what a late call. Yes, Pamela's just in from a committee. Tired to death; she's had neuralgia all this week. She mustn't sit up late, really. But come along in."

2

Nan came into the room, her dark eyes blinking against the gaslight, her small round face pale and smutty. She bent to kiss Pamela, then curled herself up in a wicker chair and yawned.

"The night is damp and dirty. No, no food, thanks. I've dined. After dinner I was bored, so I came along to pass the time.... When are you taking your holidays, both of you? It's time."

"Pamela's going for hers next week," said Frances Carr, handing Nan a cigarette.

"On the contrary," said Pamela, "Frances is going for hers next week. Mine is to be September this year."

"Now, we've had all this out before, Pam, you know we have. You faithfully promised to take August if your neuralgia came on again, and it has. Tell her she is to, Nan."

"She wouldn't do it the more if I did," Nan said, lazily. These competitions in unselfishness between Pamela and Frances Carr always bored her. There was no end to them. Women are so terrifically self-abnegatory; they must give, give, give, to someone all the time. Women, that is, of the mothering type, such as these. They must be forever cherishing something, sending someone to bed with bread and milk, guarding someone from fatigue.

"It ought to be their children," thought Nan, swiftly. "But they pour it out on one another instead."

Having put her hand on the clue, she ceased to be interested in the exhibition. It was, in fact, no more and no less interesting than if it had been their children. Most sorts of love were rather dull, to the spectator. Pamela and Frances were all right; decent people, not sloppy, not gushing, but fine and direct and keen, though rather boring when they began to talk to each other about some silly old thing that had happened in their last year at Oxford, or their first year, or on some reading party. Some people re-live their lives like this; others pass on their way, leaving the past behind. They were all right, Pamela and Frances. But all this mothering....

Yet how happy they were, these two, in their useful, competent work and devoted friendship. They had achieved contacts with life, permanent contacts. Pamela, in spite of her neuralgia, expressed calm and entirely unbumptious attainment, Nan feverish seeking. For Nan's contacts with life were not permanent, but suddenly vivid and passing; the links broke and she flew off at a tangent. Nan had lately been taken with a desperate fear of becoming like her mother, when she was old and couldn't write any more, or love any more men. Horrible thought, to be like Mrs. Hilary, roaming, questing, feverishly devoured by her own impatience of life....

In here it was cool and calm, soft and blurred with the smoke of their cigarettes. Frances Carr left them to talk, telling them not to be late. When she had gone, Pamela said "I thought you were still down at Windover, Nan."

"Left it on Saturday.... Mother and Grandmama had been there a week. I couldn't stick it any longer. Mother was outrageously jealous, of course."

"Neville and Grandmama? Poor mother."

"Oh yes, poor mother. But it gets on my nerves. Neville's an angel. I can't think how she sticks it. For that matter, I never know how she puts up with Rodney's spoilt fractiousness.... And altogether life was a bit of a strain ... no peace. And I wanted some peace and solitude, to make up my mind in."

"Are you making it up now?" Pamela, mildly interested, presumed it was a man.

"Trying to. It isn't made yet. That's why I roam about your horrible slums in the dark. I'm considering; getting things into focus. Seeing them all round."

"Well, that sounds all right."

"Pam." Nan leant forward abruptly, her cigarette between two brown fingers. "Are you happy? Do you enjoy your life?"

Pamela withdrew, lightly, inevitably, behind guards.

"Within reason, yes. When committees aren't too tiresome, and the accounts balance, and...."

"Oh, give me a straight answer, Pam. You dependable, practical people are always frivolous about things that matter. Are you happy? Do you feel right-side-up with life?"

"In the main—yes." Pamela was more serious this time. "One's doing one's job, after all. And human beings are interesting."

"But I've got that too. My job, and human beings.... Why do I feel all tossed about, like a boat on a choppy sea? Oh, I know life's furiously amusing and exciting—of course it is. But I want something solid. You've got it, somehow."

Nan broke off and thought "It's Frances Carr she's got. That's permanent. That goes on. Pamela's anchored. All these people I have—these men and women—they're not anchors, they're stimulants, and how different that is!"

They looked at each other in silence. Pamela said then, "You don't look well, child."

"Oh—" Nan threw her cigarette end impatiently into the grate. "I'm all right. I'm tired, and I've been thinking too much. That never suits me.... Thanks, Pam. You've helped me to make up my mind. I like you, Pam," she added dispassionately, "because you're so gentlewomanly. You don't ask questions, or pry. Most people do."

"Surely not. Not most decent people."

"Most people aren't decent. You think they are. You've not lived in my set—nor in Rosalind's. You're still fresh from Oxford—stuck all over with Oxford manners and Oxford codes. You don't know the raddled gossip who fishes for your secrets and then throws them about for fun, like tennis balls."

"I know Rosalind, thank you, Nan."

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

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

"Pamela, 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 friendship and their anchored 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 hell—

"(Down in Hell'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 Massfield.... 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 passionate 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 passion. 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 rushing tides of night. His untidy, careless clothes, the pockets bulging with books, papers and tobacco, his glasses, 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 butterflies 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 passes 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.

Mrs. Hilary could hear herself protesting.

"I am not unhappy because of my baptism, which, so far as I know, went off without a hitch. I am not troubled by my first bath, nor by any later bath. Indeed, indeed you must believe me, it is not that at all."

"The more they protest," the psycho-analyst would murmur, "the more it is so." For that was what Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung always said, so that there was no escape from their aspersions.

"Why do you think you are so often unhappy?" he would ask her, to draw her out and she would reply, "Because my life is over. Because I am an old discarded woman, thrown away onto the dust-heap like a broken egg-shell. Because my husband is gone and my children are gone, and they do not love me as I love them. Because I have only my mother to live with, and she is calm and cares for nothing but only waits for the end. Because I have nothing to do from morning till night. Because I am sixty-three, and that is too old and too young. Because life is empty and disappointing, and I am tired, and drift like seaweed tossed to and fro by the waves."

It sounded indeed enough, and tears would fill her eyes as she said it. The psycho-analyst would listen, passive and sceptical but intelligent.

"Not one of your reasons is the correct one. But I will find the true reason for you and expose it, and after that it will trouble you no more. Now you shall relate to me the whole history of your life."

What a comfortable moment! Mrs. Hilary, when she came to it in her imagined interview, would draw a deep breath and settle down and begin. The story of her life! How absorbing a thing to relate to someone who really wanted to hear it! How far better than the confessional—for priests, besides requiring only those portions and parcels of the dreadful past upon which you had least desire to dwell, had almost certainly no interest at all in hearing even these, but only did it because they had to, and you would be boring them. They might even say, as one had said to Rosalind during the first confession which had inaugurated her brief ecclesiastical career, and to which she had looked forward with some interest as a luxurious re-living of a stimulating past—"No details, please." Rosalind, who had had many details ready, had come away disappointed, feeling that the Church was not all she had hoped. But the psycho-analyst doctor would really want to hear details. Of course he would prefer the kind of detail which Rosalind would have been able to furnish out of her experience, for that was what psycho-analysts recognised as true life. Mrs. Hilary's experiences were pale in comparison; but psycho-analysts could and did make much out of little, bricks without clay. She would tell him all about the children—how sweet they were as babies, how Jim had nearly died of croup, Neville of bronchitis and Nan of convulsions, whereas Pamela had always been so well, and Gilbert had suffered only from infant debility. She would relate how early and how unusually they had all given signs of intelligence; how Jim had always loved her more than anything in the world, until his marriage, and she him (this was a firm article in Mrs. Hilary's creed); how Neville had always cherished and cared for her, and how she loved Neville beyond anything in the world but Jim; how Gilbert had disappointed her by taking to writing instead of to a man's job, and then by marrying Rosalind; how Nan had always been tiresome and perverse. And before the children came—all about Richard, and their courtship, and their young married life, and how he had loved and cared for her beyond anything, incredibly tenderly and well, so that all those who saw it had wondered, and some had said he spoilt her. And back before Richard, to girlhood and childhood, to parents and nursery, to her brother and sister, now dead. How she had fought with her sister because they had both always wanted the same things and got in one another's way! The jealousies, the bitter, angry tears!

To pour it all out—what comfort! To feel that someone was interested, even though it might be only as a case. The trouble about most people was that they weren't interested. They didn't mostly, even pretend they were.

2

She tried Barry Briscoe, the week-end he came down and found Nan gone. Barry Briscoe was by way of being interested in people and things in general; he had that kind of alert mind and face.

He came up from the tennis lawn, where he had been playing a single with Rodney, and sat down by her and Grandmama in the shade of the cedar, hot and friendly and laughing and out of breath. Now Neville and Rodney were playing Gerda and Kay. Grandmama's old eyes, pleased behind their glasses, watched the balls fly and thought everyone clever who got one over the net. She hadn't played tennis in her youth. Mrs. Hilary's more eager, excited eyes watched Neville driving, smashing, volleying, returning, and thought how slim and young a thing she looked, to have all that power stored in her. She was fleeter than Gerda, she struck harder than Kay, she was trickier than all of them, the beloved girl. That was the way Mrs. Hilary watched tennis, thinking of the players, not of the play. It is the way some people talk, thinking of the talkers, not of what they are saying. It is the personal touch, and a way some women have.

But Barry Briscoe, watching cleverly through his bright glasses, was thinking of the strokes. He was an unconscious person. He lived in moments.

"Well done, Gerda," Grandmama would call, when Gerda, cool and nonchalant, dropped, a sitter at Rodney's feet, and when Rodney smashed it back she said, "But father's too much for you."

"Gerda's a scandal," Barry said. "She doesn't care. She can hit all right when she likes. She thinks about something else half the time."

His smile followed the small white figure with its bare golden head that gleamed in the grey afternoon. An absurd, lovable, teasable child, he found her.

Grandmama's maid came to wheel her down to the farm. Grandmama had promised to go and see the farmer's wife and new baby. Grandmama always saw wives and new babies. They never palled. You would think that by eighty-four she had seen enough new babies, more than enough, that she had seen through that strange business and could now take it for granted, the stream of funny new life cascading into the already so full world. But Grandmama would always go and see it, handle it, admire it, peer at it with her smiling eyes that had seen so many lives come and go and that must know by now that babies are born to trouble as naturally as the sparks fly upward.

So off Grandmama rode in her wheeled chair, and Mrs. Hilary and Barry Briscoe were left alone. Mrs. Hilary and this pleasant, brown, friendly young man, who cared for Workers' Education and Continuation Schools, and Penal Reform, and Garden Cities, and Getting Things Done by Acts of Parliament, about all which things Mrs. Hilary knew and cared nothing. But vaguely she felt that they sprang out of and must include a care for human beings as such, and that therefore Barry Briscoe would listen if she told him things.

So (it came out of lying on grass, which Barry was doing) she told him about the pneumonia of Neville as a child, how they had been staying in Cornwall, miles from a doctor, and without Mr. Hilary, and Mrs. Hilary had been in despair; how Jim, a little chap of twelve, had ridden off on his pony in the night to fetch the doctor, across the moors. A long story; stories about illnesses always are. Mrs. Hilary got worked up and excited as she told it; it came back to her so vividly, the dreadful night.

"He was a Dr. Chalmers, and so kind. When he saw Neville he was horrified; by that time she was delirious. He said if Jim hadn't gone straight to him but had waited till the morning, it might have been too late...."

"Too late: quite. ..." Barry Briscoe had an understanding, sympathetic grip of one's last few words. So much of the conversation of others eludes one, but one should hold fast the last few words.

"Oh played, Gerda: did you that time, Bendish...."

Gerda had put on, probably by accident, a sudden, absurd twist that had made a fool of Rodney.

That was what Barry Briscoe was really attending to, the silly game. This alert, seemingly interested, attentive young man had a nice manner, that led you on, but he didn't really care. He lived in the moment: he cared for prisoners and workers, and probably for people who were ill now, but not that someone had been ill all those years ago. He only pretended to care; he was polite. He turned his keen, pleasant face up to her when he had done shouting about the game, and said "How splendid that he got to you in time!" but he didn't really care. Mrs. Hilary found that women were better listeners than men. Women are perhaps better trained; they think it more ill-mannered not to show interest. They will listen to stories about servants, or reports of the inane sayings of infants, they will hear you through, without the flicker of a yawn, but with ejaculations and noddings, while you tell them about your children's diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight rein, and endure. They are the world's martyrs.

But men, less restrained, will fidget and wander and sigh and yawn, and change the subject.

To trap and hold the sympathy of a man—how wonderful! Who wanted a pack of women? What you really wanted was some man whose trade it was to listen and to give heed. Some man to whom your daughter's pneumonia, of however long ago, was not irrelevant, but had its own significance, as having helped to build you up as you were, you, the problem, with your wonderful, puzzling temperament, so full of complexes, inconsistencies and needs. Some man who didn't lose interest in you just because you were grey-haired and sixty-three.

"I'm afraid I've been taking your attention from the game," said Mrs. Hilary to Barry Briscoe.

Compunction stabbed him. Had he been rude to this elderly lady, who had been telling him a long tale without a point while he watched the tennis and made polite, attentive sounds?

"Not a bit, Mrs. Hilary." He sat up, and looked friendlier than ever. "I've been thrilled." A charming, easy liar Barry was, when he deemed it necessary. His Quaker parents would have been shocked. But there was truth in it, after all. For people were so interested in themselves, that one was, in a sense, interested in the stories they told one, even stories about illness. Besides, this was the mother of Nan; Nan, who was so abruptly and inexplicably not here to-day, whose absence was hurting him, when he stopped to think, like an aching tooth; for he was not sure, yet feared, what she meant by it.

"Tell me," he said, half to please Nan's mother and half on his own account, "some stories of Nan when she was small. I should think she was a fearful child...."

He was interested, thought Mrs. Hilary, in Nan, but not in her. That was natural, of course. No man would ever again want to hear stories of her childhood. The familiar bitterness rose and beat in her like a wave. Nan was thirty-four and she was sixty-three. She could talk only of far-off things, and theories about conduct and life which sounded all right at first but were exposed after two minutes as not having behind them the background of any knowledge or any brain. That hadn't mattered when she was a girl; men would often rather they hadn't. But at sixty-three you have nothing.... The bitter emptiness of sixty-three turned her sick with frustration. Life was over, over, over, for her and she was to tell stories of Nan, who had everything.

Then the mother in her rose up, to claim and grasp for her child, even for the child she loved least.

"Nan? Nan was always a most dreadfully sensitive child, and temperamental. She took after me, I'm afraid; the others were more like their father. I remember when she was quite a little thing...."

Barry had asked for it. But he hadn't known that, out of the brilliant, uncertain Nan, exciting as a Punch and Judy show, anything so tedious could be spun....

3

Mrs. Hilary was up in town by herself for a day's shopping. The sales were on at Barker's and Derry and Tom's. Mrs. Hilary wandered about these shops, and even Ponting's and bought little bags, and presents for everyone, remnants, oddments, underwear, some green silk for a frock for Gerda, a shady hat for herself, a wonderful cushion for Grandmama with a picture of the sea on it, a silk knitted jumper for Neville, of the same purplish blue as her eyes. She was happy, going about like a bee from flower to flower, gathering this honey for them all. She had come up alone; she hadn't let Neville come with her. She had said she was going to be an independent old woman. But what she really meant was that she had proposed herself for tea with Rosalind in Campden Hill Square, and wanted to be alone for that.

Rosalind had been surprised, for Mrs. Hilary seldom favoured her with a visit. She had found the letter on the hall table when she and Gilbert had come in from a dinner party two evenings ago.

"Your mother's coming to tea on Thursday, Gilbert. Tea with me. She says she wants a talk. I feel flattered. She says nothing about wanting to see you, so you'd better leave us alone, anyhow for a bit."

Rosalind's beautiful bistre-brown eyes smiled. She enjoyed her talks with her mother-in-law; they furnished her with excellent material, to be worked up later by the raconteuse's art into something too delicious and absurd. She enjoyed, too, telling Mrs. Hilary the latest scandals; she was so shocked and disgusted; and it was fun dropping little accidental hints about Nan, and even about Gilbert. Anyhow, what a treasure of a relic of the Victorian age! And how comic in her jealousy, her ingenuous, futile boasting, her so readily exposed deceits! And how she hated Rosalind herself, the painted, corrupt woman who was dragging Gilbert down!

"Whatever does she want a talk about?" Rosalind wondered. "It must be something pretty urgent, to make her put up with an hour of my company."

4

At four o'clock on Thursday afternoon Rosalind went upstairs and put on an extra coating of powder and rouge. She also blackened her eyelashes and put on her lips salve the colour of strawberries rather than of the human mouth. She wore an afternoon dress with transparent black sleeves through which her big arms gleamed, pale and smooth. She looked a superb and altogether improper creature, like Lucrezia Borgia or a Titian madonna. She came down and lay among great black and gold satin cushions, and lit a scented cigarette and opened a new French novel. Black and gold was her new scheme for her drawing-room; she had had it done this spring. It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope. The note of the room was really too pronounced for Gilbert's fastidious and scholarly eloquence; he lost vitality in it, and dwindled to the pale thin casket of a brain.

And Mrs. Hilary, when she entered it, trailing in, tall and thin, in her sagging grey coat and skirt, her wispy grey hair escaping from under her floppy black hat, and with the air of having till a moment ago been hung about with parcels (she had left them in the hall), looked altogether unsuited to her environment, like a dowdy lady from the provinces, as she was.

Rosalind came forward and took her by the hands.

"Well, mother dear, this is an unusual honour.... How long is it since we last had you here?"

Rosalind, enveloping her mother-in-law in extravagant fragrance, kissed her on each cheek. The kiss of Messalina! Mrs. Hilary glanced at the great mirror over the fireplace to see whether it had come off on her cheeks, as it might well have done.

Rosalind placed her on a swelling, billowy, black and gold chair, piled cushions behind her shoulders, made her lie back at an obtuse angle, a grey, lank, elderly figure, strange in that opulent setting, her long dusty black feet stretched out before her on the golden carpet.

Desperately uncomfortable and angular Rosalind made you feel, petting you and purring over you and calling you "mother dear," with that glint always behind her golden-brown eyes which showed that she was up to no good, that she knew you hated her and was only leading you on that she might strike her claws into you the deeper. The great beautiful cat: that was what Rosalind was. You didn't trust her for a moment.

She was pouring out tea.

"Lemon? But how dreadfully stupid of me! I'd forgotten you take milk ... oh yes, and sugar...."

She rang, and ordered sugar. Mothers take it; not the mothers of Rosalind's world, but mothers' meetings, and school treats, and mothers-in-law up from the seaside.

"Are you up for shopping? How thrilling! Where have you been?... Oh, High Street. Did you find anything there?"

Mrs. Hilary knew that Rosalind would see her off, hung over with dozens of parcels, and despise them, knowing that if they were so many they must also be cheap.

"Oh, there's not much to be got there, of course," she said. "I got a few little things—chiefly for my mother to give away in the parish. She likes to have things...."

"But how noble of you both! I'm afraid I never rise to that. It's all I can manage to give presents to myself and nearest rellies. And you came up to town just to get presents for the parish! You're wonderful, mother!"

"Oh, I take a day in town now and then. Why not? Everyone does."

Extraordinary how defiant Rosalind made one feel, prying and questioning and trying to make one look absurd.

"Why, of course! It freshens you up, I expect; makes a change.... But you've come up from Windover, haven't you, not the seaside?"

Rosalind always called St. Mary's Bay the seaside. To her our island coasts were all one; the seaside was where you went to bathe, and she hardly distinguished between north, south, east and west.

"How are they down at Windover? I heard that Nan was there, with that young man of hers who performs good works. So unlike Nan herself! I hope she isn't going to be so silly as to let it come to anything; they'd both be miserable. But I should think Nan knows better than to marry a square-toes. I daresay he knows better too, really.... And how's poor old Neville? I think this doctoring game of hers is simply a scream, the poor old dear."

To hear Rosalind discussing Neville.... Messalina coarsely patronising a wood-nymph ... the cat striking her claws into a singing bird.... And poor—and old! Neville was, indeed, six years ahead of Rosalind, but she looked the younger of the two, in her slim activity, and didn't need to paint her face either. Mrs. Hilary all but said so.

"It is a great interest to Neville, taking up her medical studies again," was all she could really say. (What a hampering thing it is to be a lady!) "She thoroughly enjoys it, and looks younger than ever. She is playing a lot of tennis, and beats them all."

How absurdly her voice rang when she spoke of Neville or Jim! It always made Rosalind's lip curl mockingly.

"Wonderful creature! I do admire her. When I'm her age I shall be too fat to take any exercise at all. I think it's splendid of women who keep it up through the forties.... She won't be bored, even when she's sixty, will she?"

That was a direct hit, which Mrs. Hilary could bear better than hits at Neville.

"I see no reason," said Mrs. Hilary, "why Neville should ever be bored. She has a husband and children. Long before she is sixty she will have Kay's and Gerda's children to be interested in."

"No, I suppose one can't well be bored if one has grandchildren, can one," Rosalind said, reflectively.

There was a silence, during which Mrs. Hilary's eyes, coldly meeting Rosalind's with their satirical comment, said "I know you are too selfish a woman ever to bear children, and I thank God for it. Little Hilarys who should be half yours would be more than I could endure."

Rosalind, quite understanding, smiled her slow, full-mouthed, curling smile, and held out to her mother-in-law the gold case with scented cigarettes.

"Oh no, you don't, do you. I never can remember that. It's so unusual."

Her eyes travelled over Mrs. Hilary, from her dusty black shoes to her pale, lined face. They put her, with deliberation, into the class with companions, house-keepers, poor relations. Having successfully done that (she knew it was successful, by Mrs. Hilary's faint flush) she said "You don't look up to much, mother dear. Not as if Neville had been looking after you very well."

Mrs. Hilary, seeing her chance, swallowed her natural feelings and took it.

"The fact is, I sleep very badly. Not particularly just now, but always.... I thought.... That is, someone told me ... that there have been wonderful cures for insomnia lately ... through that new thing...."

"Which new thing? Sedobrol? Paraldehyd? Gilbert keeps getting absurd powders and tablets of all sorts. Thank God, I always sleep like a top."

"No, not those. The thing you practice. Psycho-analysis, I mean."

"Oh, psycho. But you wouldn't touch that, surely? I thought it was anathema."

"But if it really does cure people...."

Rosalind's eyes glittered and gleamed. Her strawberry-red mouth curled joyfully.

"Of course it has.... Not that insomnia is always a case for psycho, you know. It's sometimes incipient mania."

"Not in my case." Mrs. Hilary spoke sharply.

"Why no, of course not.... Well, I think you'd be awfully wise to get analysed. Whom do you want to go to?"

"I thought you could tell me. I know no names.... A man," Mrs. Hilary added quickly.

"Oh, it must be a man? I was going to say, I've a vacancy myself for a patient. But women usually want men doctors. They nearly all do. It's supposed to be part of the complaint.... Well, I could fix you up a preliminary interview with Dr. Claude Evans. He's very good. He turns you right inside out and shows you everything about yourself, from your first infant passion to the thoughts you think you're keeping dark from him as you sit in the consulting room. He's great."

Mrs. Hilary was flushed. Hope and shame tingled in her together.

"I shan't want to keep anything dark. I've no reason."

Rosalind's mocking eyes said "That's what they all say." Her lips said "The foreconscious self always has its reasons for hiding up the things the unconscious self knows and feels."

"Oh, all that stuff...." Mrs. Hilary was sick of it, having read too much about it in "The Breath of Life." "I hope this Dr. Evans will talk to me in plain English, not in that affected jargon."

"He'll use language suited to you, I suppose," said Rosalind, "as far as he can. But these things can't always be put so that just anyone can grasp them. They're too complicated. You should read it up beforehand, and try if you can understand it a little."

Rosalind, who had no brains herself, insulting Mrs. Hilary's, was rather more than Mrs. Hilary could bear. Rosalind she knew for a fool, so far as intellectual matters went, for Nan had said so. Clever enough at clothes, and talking scandal, and winning money at games, and skating over thin ice without going through—but when it came to a book, or an idea, or a political question, Rosalind was no whit more intelligent than she was, in fact much less. She was a rotten psycho-analyst, all her in-laws were sure.

Mrs. Hilary said, "I've been reading a good deal about it lately. It doesn't seem to me very difficult, though exceedingly foolish in parts."

Rosalind was touchy about psycho-analysis; she always got angry if people said it was foolish in any way. She was like that; she could see no weak points in anything she took up; it came from being vain, and not having a brain. She said one of the things angry people say, instead of discussing the subject rationally.

"I don't suppose the amount of it you've been able to read would seem difficult. If you came to anything difficult you'd probably stop, you see. Anyhow, if it seems to you so foolish why do you want to be analysed?"

"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 passions 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-analysed 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 analyse 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 pass 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-analyst 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. Shell-shocked officers; any other officers; anything male, presentable and passably 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 passed 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-analysis 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-analyst 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-analysis 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 pronounced 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 sex 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 sex 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 passion. 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 passion 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.

"You must have a course," he told her. "You are an obvious case for a course of treatment. St. Mary's Bay? Excellent. There is a practising psycho-analyst there now. You should have an hour's treatment twice a week, to be really effective.... You would prefer a man, I take it?"

He shot his eyes at her for a moment, in statement, not in enquiry. Well he knew how much she would prefer a man. She murmured assent. He rose. The hour was over.

"How much will the course be?" she asked.

"A guinea an hour, Dr. Cradock charges. He is very cheap."

"Yes, I see. I must think it over. And you?"

He told her his fee, and she blenched, but paid it. She was not rich, but it had been worth while. It was a beginning. It had opened the door into a new and richer life. St. Mary's Bay was illumined in her thoughts, instead of being drab and empty as before. Sublimated complexes twinkled over it like stars. Freed libido poured electrically about it. And Dr. Cradock, she felt, would be more satisfactory as a doctor than this man, who affected her with a faint nausea when he looked at her, though he seldom did so.

2

Windover too was illumined. She could watch almost calmly Neville talking to Grandmama, wheeling her round the garden to look at the borders, for Grandmama was a great gardener.

Then Jim came down for a week-end, and it was as if the sun had risen on Surrey. He sat with Mrs. Hilary in the arbour. She told him about Dr. Evans and the other psycho-analyst doctor at St. Mary's Bay. He frowned over Dr. Evans, who lived in the same street as he did.

"Rosalind sent you to him; of course; she would. Why didn't you ask me, mother? He's a desperate Freudian, you know, and they're not nearly so good as the others. Besides, this particular man is a shoddy scoundrel, I believe.... Was he offensive?"

"I wouldn't let him be, Jim. I was prepared for that. I ... I changed the conversation."

Jim laughed, and did his favourite trick with her hand, straightening the thin fingers one by one as they lay across his sensitive palm. How happy it always made her!

"Well," he said, "I daresay this man down at the Bay is all right. I'll find out if he's any good or not.... They talk a lot of tosh, you know, mother; you'll have to sift the grain from the chaff."

But he saw that her eyes were interested, her face more alert than usual, her very poise more alive. She had found a new interest in life, like keeping a parrot, or learning bridge, or getting religion. It was what they had always tried to find for her in vain.

"So long," he said, "as you don't believe more than half what they tell you.... Let me know how it goes on, won't you, and what this man is like. If I don't approve I shall come and stop it."

She loved that from Jim.

"Of course, dearest. Of course I shall tell you about it. And I know one must be careful."

It was something to have become an object for care; it put one more in the foreground. She would have gone on willingly with the subject, but Jim changed her abruptly for Neville.

"Neville's looking done up."

She felt the little sharp pang which Neville's name on Jim's lips had always given her. His very pronunciation of it hurt her—"Nivvle," he said it, as if he had been an Irishman. It brought all the past back; those two dear ones talking together, studying together, going off together, bound by a hundred common interests, telling each other things they never told her.

"Yes. It's this ridiculous work of hers. It's so absurd: a married woman of her age making her head ache working for examinations."

In old days Jim and Neville had worked together. Jim had been proud of Neville's success; she had been quicker than he. Mrs. Hilary, who had welcomed Neville's marriage as ending all that, foresaw a renewal of the hurtful business.

But Jim looked grave and disapproving over it.

"It is absurd," he agreed, and her heart rose. "And of course she can't do it, can't make up all that leeway. Besides, her brain has lost its grip. She's not kept it sharpened; she's spent her life on people. You can't have it both ways—a woman can't, I mean. Her work's been different. She doesn't seem to realise that what she's trying to learn up again now, in the spare moments of an already full life, demands a whole lifetime of hard work. She can't get back those twenty years; no one could. And she can't get back the clear, gripping brain she had before she had children. She's given some of it to them. That's nature's way, unfortunately. Hard luck, no doubt, but there it is; you can't get round it. Nature's a hybrid of fool and devil."

He was talking really to himself, but was recalled to his mother by the tears which, he suddenly perceived, were distorting her face.

"And so," she whispered, her voice choked, "we women get left...."

He looked away from her, a little exasperated. She cried so easily and so superfluously, and he knew that these tears were more for herself than for Neville. And she didn't really come into what he had been saying at all; he had been talking about brains.

"It's all right as far as most women are concerned," he said. "Most women have no brains to be spoilt. Neville had. Most women could do nothing at all with life if they didn't produce children; it's their only possible job. They've no call to feel ill-used."

"Of course," she said, unsteadily, struggling to clear her voice of tears, "I know you children all think I'm a fool. But there was a time when I read difficult books with your father ... he, a man with a first-class mind, cared to read with me and discuss with me...."

"Oh yes, yes, mother, I know."

Jim and all of them knew all about those long-ago difficult books. They knew too about the clever friends who used to drop in and talk.... If only Mrs. Hilary could have been one of the nice, jolly, refreshing people who own that they never read and never want to. All this fuss about reading, and cleverness—how tedious it was! As if being stupid mattered, as if it was worth bothering about.

"Of course we don't think you a fool, mother dear; how could we?"

Jim was kind and affectionate, never ironic, like Gilbert, or impatient, like Nan. But he felt now the need for fresh air; the arbour was too small for him and Mrs. Hilary, who was as tiring to others as to herself.

"I think I shall go and interrupt Neville over her studies," said Jim, and left the arbour.

Mrs. Hilary looked after him, painfully loving his square, straight back, his fine dark head, just flecked with grey, the clean line of his profile, with the firm jaw clenched over the pipe. To have produced Jim—wasn't that enough to have lived for? Mrs. Hilary was one of those mothers who apply the Magnificat to their own cases. She always felt a bond of human sympathy between herself and that lady called the Virgin Mary, whom she thought over-estimated.

3

Neville raised heavy violet eyes, faintly ringed with shadows, to Jim as he came into the library. She looked at him for a moment absently, then smiled. He came over to her and looked at the book before her.

"Working? Where've you got to? Let's see how much you know."

He took the book from her and glanced at it to see what she had been reading.

"Now we'll have an examination; it'll be good practice for you."

He put a question, and she answered it, frowning a little.

"H'm. That's not very good, my dear."

He tried again; this time she could not answer at all. At the third question she shook her head.

"It's no use, Jimmy. My head's hopeless this afternoon. Another time."

He shut the book.

"Yes. So it seems.... You're overdoing it, Neville. You can't go on like this."

She lay back and spread out her hands hopelessly.

"But I must go on like this if I'm ever going to get through my exams."

"You're not going to, old thing. You're quite obviously unfitted to. It's not your job any more. It's absurd to try; really it is."

Neville shut her eyes.

"Doctors ... doctors. They have it on the brain,—the limitations of the feminine organism."

"Because they know something about it. But I'm not speaking of the feminine organism just now. I should say the same to Rodney if he thought of turning doctor now, after twenty years of politics."

"Rodney never could have been a doctor. He hates messing about with bodies."

"Well, you know what I think. I can't stop you, of course. It's only a question of time, in any case. You'll soon find out for yourself that it's no use."

"I think," she answered, in her small, unemotional voice, "that it's exceedingly probable that I shall."

She lay inertly in the deep chair, her eyes shut, her hands opened, palms downwards, as if they had failed to hold something.

"What then, Jim? If I can't be a doctor what can I be? Besides Rodney's wife, I mean? I don't say besides the children's mother, because that's stopped being a job. They're charming to me, the darlings, but they don't need me any more; they go their own way."

Jim had noticed that.

"Well, after all, you do a certain amount of political work—public speaking, meetings, and so on. Isn't that enough?"

"That's all second-hand. I shouldn't do it but for Rodney. I'm not public-spirited enough. If Rodney dies before I do, I shan't go on with that.... Shall I just be a silly, self-engrossed, moping old woman, no use to anyone and a plague to myself?"

The eyes of both of them strayed out to the garden.

"Who's the silly moping old woman?" asked Mrs. Hilary's voice in the doorway. And there she stood, leaning a little forward, a strained smile on her face.

"Me, mother, when I shall be old," Neville quickly answered her, smiling in return. "Come in, dear. Jim's telling me how I shall never be a doctor. He gave me a viva voce exam., and I came a mucker over it."

Her voice had an edge of bitterness; she hadn't liked coming a mucker, nor yet being told she couldn't get through exams. She had plenty of vanity; so far everyone and everything had combined to spoil her. She was determined, in the face of growing doubt, to prove Jim wrong yet.

"Well," Mrs. Hilary said, sitting down on the edge of a chair, not settling herself, but looking poised to go, so as not to seem to intrude on their conversation, "well, I don't see why you want to be a doctor, dear. Everyone knows women doctors aren't much good. I wouldn't trust one."

"Very stupid of you, mother," Jim said, trying to pretend he wasn't irritated by being interrupted. "They're every bit as good as men."

"Fancy being operated on by a woman surgeon. I certainly shouldn't risk it."

"You wouldn't risk it ... you wouldn't trust them. You're so desperately personal, mother. You think that contributes to a discussion. All it does contribute to is your hearers' knowledge of your limitations. It's uneducated, the way you discuss."

He smiled at her pleasantly, taking the sting out of his words, turning them into a joke, and she smiled too, to show Neville she didn't mind, didn't take it seriously. Jim might hurt her, but if he did no one should know but Jim himself. She knew that at times she irritated even his good temper by being uneducated and so on, so that he scolded her, but he scolded her kindly, not venomously, as Nan did.

"Well, I've certainly no right to be uneducated," she said, "and I can't say I'm ever called so, except by my children.... Do you remember the discussions father and I used to have, half through the night?"

Jim and Neville did remember and thought "Poor father," and were silent.

"I should think," said Mrs. Hilary, "there was very little we didn't discuss. Politics, books, trades unions, class divisions, moral questions, votes for women, divorce ... we thrashed everything out. We both thoroughly enjoyed it."

Neville said "I remember." Familiar echoes came back to her out of the agitated past.

"Those lazy men, all they want is to get a lot of money for doing no work."

"I like the poor well enough in their places, but I cannot abide them when they try to step into ours."

"Let women mind their proper business and leave men's alone."

"I'm certainly not going to be on calling terms with my grocer's wife."

"I hate these affected, posing, would-be clever books. Why can't people write in good plain English?"...

Richard Hilary, a scholar and a patient man, blinded by conjugal love, had met futilities with arguments, expressions of emotional distaste with facts, trying to lift each absurd wrangle to the level of a discussion; and at last he died, leaving his wife with the conviction that she had been the equal mate of an able man. Her children had to face and conquer, with varying degrees of success, the temptation to undeceive her.

"But I'm interrupting," said Mrs. Hilary. "I know you two are having a private talk. I'll leave you alone...."

"No, no, mother." That was Neville, of course. "Stay and defend me from Jim's scorn."

How artificial one had to be in family life! What an absurd thing these emotions made of it!

Mrs. Hilary looked happier, and more settled in her chair.

"Where are Kay and Gerda?" Jim asked.

Neville told him "In Guildford, helping Barry Briscoe with W.E.A. meetings. They're spending a lot of time over that just now; they're both as keen as mustard. Nearly as keen as he is. He sets people on fire. It's very good for the children. They're bringing him up here to spend Sunday. I think he hopes every time to find Nan back again from Cornwall, poor Barry. He was very down in the mouth when she suddenly took herself off."

"If Nan doesn't mean to have him, she shouldn't have encouraged him," said Mrs. Hilary. "He was quite obviously in love with her."

"Nan's always a dark horse," Neville said. "She alone knows what she means."

Jim said "She's a flibberty-gibbet. She'd much better get married. She's not much use in the world at present. Now if she was a doctor ... or doing something useful, like Pamela...."

"Don't be prejudiced, Jimmy. Because you don't read modern novels yourself you think it's no use their being written."

"I read some modern novels. I read Conrad, in spite of the rather absurd attitude some people take up about him; and I read good detective stories, only they're so seldom good. I don't read Nan's kind. People tell me they're tremendously clever and modern and delightfully written and get very well reviewed, I daresay. I very seldom agree with reviewers, in any case. Even about Conrad they seem to me (when I read them—I don't often) to pick out the wrong points to admire and to miss the points I should criticise."

Mrs. Hilary said "Well, I must say I can't read Nan's books myself. Simply, I don't think them good. I dislike all her people so much, and her style."

"You're a pair of old Victorians," Neville told them, pleasing Mrs. Hilary by coupling them together and leaving Jim, who knew why she did it, undisturbed. Neville was full of graces and tact, a possession Jim had always appreciated in her.

"And there," said Neville, who was standing at the window, "are Barry Briscoe and the children coming in."

Jim looked over her shoulder and saw the three wheeling their bicycles up the drive.

"Gerda," he remarked, "is a prettier thing every time I see her."



CHAPTER VII

GERDA

1

It rained so hard, so much harder even than usual, that Sunday, that only Barry and Gerda went to walk. Barry walked in every kind of weather, even in the July of 1920.

To-day after lunch Barry said "I'm going to walk over the downs. Anyone coming?" and Gerda got up silently, as was her habit. Kay stretched himself and yawned and said "Me for the fireside. I shall have to walk every day for three weeks after to-day," for he was going to-morrow on a reading-party. Rodney and Jim were playing a game of chess that had lasted since breakfast and showed every sign of lasting till bed-time; Neville and Mrs. Hilary were talking, and Grandmama was upstairs, having her afternoon nap.

2

They tramped along, waterproofed and bare-headed, down the sandy road. The rain swished in Gerda's golden locks, till they clung dank and limp about her cheeks and neck; it beat on Barry's glasses, so that he took them off and blinked instead. The trees stormed and whistled in the southerly wind that blew from across Merrow Downs. Barry tried to whistle down it, but it caught the sound from his puckered lips and whirled it away.

Through Merrow they strode, and up onto the road that led across the downs, and there the wind caught them full, and it was as if buckets of water were being flung into their faces. The downs sang and roared; the purple-grey sky shut down on the hill's shoulder like a tent.

"Lord, what fun," said Barry, as they gasped for breath.

Gerda was upright and slim as a wand against the buffeting; her white little face was stung into shell-pink; her wet hair blew back like yellow seaweed.

Barry thought suddenly of Nan, who revelled in storms, and quickly shut his mind on the thought. He was schooling himself to think away from Nan, with her wild animal grace and her flashing mind and her cruel, careless indifference.

Gerda would have walked like this forever. Her wide blue eyes blinked away the rain; her face felt stung and lashed, yet happy and cold; her mouth was stiff and tight. She was part of the storm; as free, as fierce, as singing; though outwardly she was all held together and silent, only smiling a little with her shut mouth.

As they climbed the downs, the wind blew more wildly in their faces. Gerda swayed against it, and Barry took her by the arm and half pushed her.

So they reached Newlands Corner, and all southern Surrey stormed below them, and beyond Surrey stormed Sussex, and beyond Sussex the angry, unseen sea.

They stood looking, and Barry's arm still steadied Gerda against the gale.

Gerda thought "It will end. It will be over, and we shall be sitting at tea. Then Sunday will be over, and on Monday he will go back to town." The pain of that end of the world turned her cold beneath the glow of the storm. Then life settled itself, very simply. She must go too, and work with him. She would tell him so on the way home, when the wind would let them talk.

They turned their backs on the storm and ran down the hill towards Merrow. Gerda, light as a leaf on the wind, could have run all the way back; Barry, fit and light too, but fifteen years ahead of her, fell after five minutes into a walk.

Then they could talk a little.

"And to-morrow I shall be plugging in town," sighed Barry.

Gerda always went straight to her point.

"May I come into your office, please, and learn the work?"

He smiled down at her. Splendid child!

"Why, rather. Do you mean it? When do you want to come?"

"To-morrow?"

He laughed. "Good. I thought you meant in the autumn. ... To-morrow by all means, if you will. As a matter of fact we're frightfully short-handed in the office just now. Our typist has crocked, and we haven't another yet, so people have to type their own letters."

"I can do the typing," said Gerda, composedly. "I can type quite well."

"Oh, but that'll be dull for you. That's not what you want, is it? Though, if you want to learn about the work, it's not a bad way ... you get it all passing through your hands.... Would you really take on that job for a bit?"

Gerda nodded.

They were rapid and decided people; they did not beat about the bush. If they wanted to do a thing and there seemed no reason why not, they did it.

"That's first-class," said Barry. "Give it a trial, anyhow.... Of course you'll be on trial too; we may find it doesn't work. If so, there are plenty of other jobs to be done in the office. But that's what we most want at the moment."

Barry had a way of assuming that people would want, naturally, to do the thing that most needed doing.

Gerda's soul sang and whistled down the whistling wind. It wasn't over, then: it was only beginning. The W.E.A. was splendid; work was splendid; Barry Briscoe was splendid; life was splendid. She was sorry for Kay at Cambridge, Kay who was just off on a reading party, not helping in the world's work but merely getting education. Education was inspiring in connection with Democracy, but when applied to oneself it was dull.

The rain was lessening. It fell on their heads more lightly; the wind was like soft wet kisses on their backs, as they tramped through Merrow, and up the lane to Windover.

3

They all sat round the tea-table, and most of them were warm and sleepy from Sunday afternoon by the fire, but Barry and Gerda were warm and tingling from walking in the storm. Some people prefer one sensation, some the other.

Neville thought "How pretty Gerda looks, pink like that." She was glad to know that she too looked pretty, in her blue afternoon dress. It was good, in that charming room, that they should all look agreeable to the eye. Even Mrs. Hilary, with her nervous, faded grace, marred by self-consciousness and emotion. And Grandmama, smiling and shrewd, with her old in-drawn lips; and Rodney, long and lounging and clever; Jim, square-set, sensible, clean-cut, beautiful to his mother and to his women patients, good for everyone to look at; Barry, brown and charming, with his quick smile; the boy Kay, with his pale, rounded, oval face, his violet eyes like his mother's, only short-sighted, so that he had a trick of screwing them up and peering, and a mouth that widened into a happy sweetness when he smiled.

They were all right: they all fitted in with the room and with each other.

Barry said "I've not been idle while walking. I've secured a secretary. Gerda says she's coming to work at the office for us for a bit. Now, at once."

He had not Gerda's knack of silence. Gerda would shut up tight over her plans and thoughts, like a little oyster. She was no babbler; she did things and never talked. But Barry's plans brimmed up and over.

Neville said "You sudden child! And in July and August, too.... But you'll have only a month before you join Nan in Cornwall, won't you?"

Gerda nodded, munching a buttered scone.

Grandmama, like an old war-horse scenting the fray, thought "Is it going to be an affair? Will they fall in love? And what of Nan?" Then rebuked herself for forgetting what she really knew quite well, having been told it often, that men and girls in these days worked together and did everything together, with no thought of affairs or of falling in love.... Only these two were very attractive, the young Briscoe and the pretty child, Gerda.

Neville, who knew Gerda, and that she was certainly in love again (it happened so often with Gerda), thought "Shall I stop it? Or shall I let things take their course? Oh, I'll let them alone. It's only one of Gerda's childish hero-worships, and he'll be kind without flirting. It'll do Gerda good to go on with this new work she's so keen on. And she knows he cares for Nan. I shall let her go."

Neville very nearly always let Gerda and Kay go their own way now that they were grown-up. To interfere would have been the part of the middle-aged old-fashioned mother, and for that part Neville had no liking. To be her children's friend and good comrade, that was her role in life.

"It's good of you to have her," she said to Barry. "I hope you won't be sorry.... She's very stupid sometimes—regular Johnny Head-in-air."

"I should be a jolly sight more use," Kay remarked. "But I can't come, unfortunately. She can't spell, you know. And her punctuation is weird."

"She'll learn," said Barry, cheerfully, and Gerda smiled serenely at them over her tea-cup.

4

Barry in the office was quick, alert, cheerful, and business-like, and very decided, sometimes impatient. Efficient: that was the word. He would skim the correspondence and dictate answers out of his head, walking about the room, interrupted all the time by the telephone and by people coming in to see him. Gerda's hero-worship grew and grew; her soul swelled with it; she shut it down tight and remained calm and cool. When he joked, when he smiled his charming smile, her heart turned over within her. When he had signed the typed letters, she would sometimes put her hand for a moment where his had rested on the paper. He was stern with her sometimes, spoke sharply and impatiently, and that, in a queer way, she liked. She had felt the same pleasure at school, when the head of the school, whom she had greatly and secretly venerated, had had her up to the sixth form room and rowed her. Why? That was for psycho-analysts to discover; Gerda only knew the fact. And Barry, after he had spoken sharply to her, when he had got over his anger, would smile and be even kinder than usual, and that was the best of all.

There were other people in the office, of course; men and women, busy, efficient, coming in and out, talking, working, organising. They were kind, pleasant people. Gerda liked them, but they were shadowy.

And behind them all, and behind Barry, there was the work. The work was enormously interesting. Gerda, child of her generation and of her parents, was really a democrat, really public-spirited, outside the little private cell of her withdrawn reserves. Beauty wasn't enough; making poetry and pictures wasn't enough; one had to give everyone his and her chance to have beauty and poetry and pictures too. In spite of having been brought up in this creed, Gerda and Kay held to it, had not reacted from it to a selfish aristocracy, as you might think likely. Their democracy went much further than that of their parents. They had been used ardently to call themselves Bolshevists until such time as it was forced upon them that Bolshevism was not, in point of fact, a democratic system. They and some of their friends still occasionally used that label, in moments rather of after-dinner enthusiasm than of the precise thinking that is done in morning light. For, after all, even Mr. Bertrand Russell, even Mrs. Philip Snowden, might be wrong in their hurried jottings down of the results of a cursory survey of so intricate a system. And, anyhow, Bolshevism had the advantage that it had not yet been tried in this country, and no one, not even the most imaginative and clear-sighted political theorist, could forecast the precise form into which the curious British climate might mould it if it should ever adopt it. So that to believe in it was, anyhow, easier than believing in anything which had been tried (and, like all things which are tried, found wanting) such as Liberalism, Toryism, Socialism, and so forth.

But the W.E.A. was a practical body, which went in for practical adventure. Dowdy, schoolmarmish, extension-lectureish, it might be and doubtless was. But a real thing, with guts in it, really doing something; and after all, you can't be incendiarising the political and economic constitution all your time. In your times off you can do something useful, something which shows results, and for which such an enormous amount of faith and hope is not required. Work for the Revolution—yes, of course, one did that; one studied the literature of the Internationals; one talked.... But did one help the Revolution on much, when all was said? Whereas in the W.E.A. office one really got things done; one typed a letter and something happened because of it; more adult classes occurred, more workers got educated. Gerda, too young and too serious to be cynical, believed that this must be right and good.

5

A clever, strange, charming child Barry found her, old and young beyond her twenty years. Her wide-set blue eyes seemed to see horizons, and too often to be blind to foregrounds. She had a slow, deliberating habit of work, and of some things was astonishingly ignorant, with the ignorance of those who, when at school, have worked at what they preferred and quietly disregarded the rest. If he let her compose a letter, its wording would be quaint. Her prose was, in fact, worse than her verse, and that was saying a good deal. But she was thorough, never slipshod. Her brain ground slowly, but it ground exceeding small; there were no blurred edges to her apprehension of facts; either she didn't know a thing or she did, and that sharp and clear distinction is none too common. She would file and index papers with precision, and find them again, slow and sure, when they were required. Added to these secretarial gifts, such as they were, she had vision; she saw always the dream through or in spite of the business; she was like Barry himself in that. She was a good companion, too, though she had no wit and not very much humour, and none of Nan's gifts of keen verbal brilliance, frequent ribaldry and quick response; she would digest an idea slowly, and did not make jokes; her clear mind had the quality of a crystal rather than of a flashing diamond. The rising generation; the woman citizen of to-morrow: what did not rest on her, and what might she not do and be? Nan, on the other hand, was the woman citizen of to-day. And Nan did not bother to use her vote because she found all the parties and all the candidates about equally absurd. Barry had argued with Nan about that, but made no impression on her cynical indifference; she had met him with levity. To Gerda there was a wrong and a right in politics, instead of only a lot of wrongs; touching young faith, Nan called it, but Barry, who shared it, found it cheering.

This pretty little white pixyish person, with her yellow hair cut straight across her forehead and waving round her neck like the curled, shining petals of a celandine, with her straight-thinking mind and her queer, secret, mystic thoughts—she was the woman of the future, a citizen and a mother of citizens. She and the other girls and boys were out to build the new heaven and the new earth, and their children would carry it on. This responsibility of Gerda's invested her with a special interest in the eyes of Barry, who lived and worked for the future, and who, when he saw an infant mewling and puking in a pram, was apt to think "The hope for the world," and smile at it encouragingly, overlooking its present foolishness of aspect and habit. If ever he had children ... if Nan would marry him ... but Nan would always lightly slide away when he got near her.... He could see her now, with the cool, amused smile tilting her lips, always sliding away, eluding him.... Nan, like a wild animal for grace, brilliant like blown fire, cool like the wind, stabbing herself and him with her keen wit....

Gerda, looking up from her typewriter to say "How do you spell comparatively?" saw his face in its momentary bitterness as he frowned, pen in hand, out of the window. He was waiting to sign the letters before he went out to a committee meeting, and she thought she was annoying him by her slowness. She spelt comparatively anyhow, and with the wholehearted wrongness to which she and the typewriter, both bad spellers, often attained in conjunction, hastily finished and laid the letters before him. Called back to work and actuality, Barry was again cheerful and kind, and he smilingly corrected comparatively.