3

To Pamela Neville said, "Are you afraid of getting old, Pamela?"

Pamela replied, "Not a bit. Are you?" And she confessed it.

"Often it's like a cold douche of water down my spine, the thought of it. I reason and mock at myself, but I don't like it.... You're different; finer, more real, more unselfish. Besides, you'll have done something worth doing when you have to give up. I shan't."

Pamela's brows went up.

"Kay? Gerda? The pretty dears: I've done nothing so nice as them. You've done what's called a woman's work in the world—isn't that the phrase?"

"Done it—just so, but so long ago. What now? I still feel young, Pamela, even now that I know I'm not. ... Oh Lord, it's a queer thing, being a woman. A well-off woman of forty-three with everything made comfortable for her and her brain gone to pot and her work in the world done. I want something to bite my teeth into—some solid, permanent job—and I get nothing but sweetmeats, and people point at Kay and Gerda and say 'That's your work, and it's over. Now you can rest, seeing that it's good, like God on the seventh day.'"

"I don't say 'Now you can rest. Except just now, while you're run down.'"

"Run down, yes; run down like a disordered clock because I tried to tackle an honest job of work again. Isn't it sickening, Pamela? Isn't it ludicrous?"

"Ludicrous—no. Everyone comes up against his own limitations. You've got to work within them that's all. After all, there are plenty of jobs you can do that want doing—simply shouting to be done."

"Pammie dear, it's worse than I've said. I'm a low creature. I don't only want to do jobs that want doing: I want to count, to make a name. I'm damnably ambitious. You'll despise that, of course—and you're quite right, it is despicable. But there it is. Most men and many women are tormented by it—they itch for recognition."

"Of course. One is."

"You too, Pammie?"

"I have been. Less now. Life gets to look short, when you're thirty-nine."

"Ah, but you have it—recognition, even fame, in the world you work in. You count for something. If you value it, there it is. I wouldn't grumble if I'd played your part in the piece. It's a good part—a useful part and a speaking part."

"I suppose we all feel we should rather like to play someone else's part for a change. There's nothing exciting about mine. Most people would far prefer yours."

They would, of course; Neville knew it. The happy political wife rather than the unmarried woman worker; Rodney, Gerda and Kay for company rather than Frances Carr. There was no question which was the happier lot, the fuller, the richer, the easier, the more entertaining.

"Ah well.... You see, Rosalind spent the afternoon with me yesterday, and I felt suddenly that it wasn't for me to be stuck up about her—what am I too but the pampered female idler, taking good things without earning them? It made me shudder. Hence this fit of blues. The pampered, lazy, brainless animal—it is such a terrific sight when in human form. Rosalind talked about Nan, Pamela. In her horrible way—you know. Hinting that she isn't alone in Rome, but with Stephen Lumley."

Pamela took off her glasses and polished them.

"Rosalind would, of course. What did you say?"

"I lost my temper. I let out at her. It's not a thing I often do with Rosalind—it doesn't seem worth while. But this time I saw red. I told her what I thought of her eternal gossip and scandal. I said, what if Nan and Stephen Lumley, or Nan and anyone else, did arrange to be in Rome at the same time and to see a lot of each other; where was the harm? No use. You can't pin Rosalind down. She just shrugged her shoulders and smiled, and said 'My dear, we all know our Nan. We all know too that Stephen Lumley has been in love with her for a year, and doesn't live with his wife. Then they go off to Rome at the same moment, and one hears that they are seen everywhere together. Why shut one's eyes to obvious deductions? You're so like an ostrich, Neville.' I said I'd rather be an ostrich than a ferret, eternally digging into other people's concerns,—and by the time we had got to that I thought it was far enough, so I had an engagement with my dressmaker."

"It's no use tackling Rosalind," Pamela agreed. "She'll never change her spots.... Do you suppose it's true about Nan?"

"I daresay it is. Yes, I'm afraid I do think it's quite likely true.... Nan was so queer the few times I saw her after Gerda's accident. I was unhappy about her. She was so hard, and so more than usually cynical and unget-at-able. She told me it had been all her fault, leading Gerda into mischief, doing circus tricks that the child tried to emulate and couldn't. I couldn't read her, quite. Her tone about Gerda had a queer edge to it. And she rather elaborately arranged, I thought, so that she shouldn't meet Barry. Pamela, do you think she had finally and absolutely turned Barry down before he took up so suddenly with Gerda, or...."

Pamela said, "I know nothing. She told me nothing. But I rather thought, when she came to see me just before she went down to Cornwall, that she had made up her mind to have him. I may have been wrong."

Neville leant her forehead on her hands and sighed.

"Or you may have been right. And if you were right, it's the ghastliest tragedy—for her.... Oh, I shouldn't have let Gerda go and work with him; I should have known better.... Nan had rebuffed him, and he flew off at a tangent, and there was Gerda sitting in his office, as pretty as flowers and with her funny little silent charm.... And if Nan was all the time waiting for him, meaning to say yes when he asked her.... Poor darling Nan, robbed by my horrid little girl, who doesn't even want to marry.... If that's the truth, it would account for the Stephen Lumley business. Nan wouldn't stay on in London, to see them together. If Lumley caught her at that psychological moment, she'd very likely go off with him, out of mere desperation and bravado. That would be so terribly like Nan.... What a desperate, wry, cursed business life is.... On the other hand, she may just be going about with Lumley on her own terms not his. It's her own affair whichever way it is; what we've got to do is to contradict the stories Rosalind is spreading whenever we get the chance. Not that one can scotch scandal once it starts—particularly Rosalind's scandal."

"Ignore it. Nan can ignore it when she comes back. It won't hurt her. Nan's had plenty of things said about her before, true and untrue, and never cared."

"You're splendid at the ignoring touch, Pam. I believe there's nothing you can't and don't ignore."

"Well, why not? Ignoring's easy."

"Not for most of us. I believe it is, for you. In a sense you ignore life itself; anyhow you don't let it hold and bully you. When your time comes you'll ignore age, and later death."

"They don't matter much, do they? Does anything? I suppose it's my stolid temperament, but I can't feel that it does."

Neville thought, as she had often thought before, that Pamela, like Nan, only more calmly, less recklessly and disdainfully, had the aristocratic touch. Pamela, with her delicate detachments and her light, even touch on things great and small, made her feel fussy and petty and excitable.

"I suppose you're right, my dear.... 'All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the unreasonable....' I must get back. Give my love to Frances... and when next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the things that don't matter and that she might just as well put up with to please us all. The child is a little nuisance—as obstinate as a mule."

4

Neville, walking away from Pamela's grimy street in the November fog, felt that London was terrible. An ugly clamour of strident noises and hard, shrill voices, jabbering of vulgar, trivial things. A wry, desperate, cursed world, as she had called it, a pot seething with bitterness and all dreadfulness, with its Rosalinds floating on the top like scum.

And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered of old, had pulled out of countless scrapes—Nan had now taken her life into her reckless hands and done what with it? Given it, perhaps, to a man she didn't love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love, which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy. Even if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville was somehow sure of that. Men were blind fools; men were fickle children. Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to Rome and fetch Nan back. But, to do that, Barry would have to fall out of love with Gerda and into love again with Nan; and even Barry, Neville imagined, was not such a weathercock as that. And Barry would really be happier with Gerda. With all their differences, they were both earnest citizens, both keen on social progress. Nan was a cynical flibberty-gibbet; it might not have been a happy union. Perhaps happy unions were not for such as Nan. But at the thought of Nan playing that desperate game with Stephen Lumley in Rome, Neville's face twitched....

She would go to Rome. She would see Nan; find out how things were. Nan always liked to see her, would put up with her even when she wanted no one else.

That was, at least, a job one could do. These family jobs—they still go on, they never cease, even when one is getting middle-aged and one's brain has gone to pot. They remain, always, the jobs of the affections.

She would write to Nan to-night, and tell her she was starting for Rome in a few days, to have a respite from the London fogs.

5

But she did not start for Rome, or even write to Nan, for when she got home she went to bed with influenza.



CHAPTER XII

THE MOTHER

1

The happiness Mrs. Hilary now enjoyed was of the religious type—a deep, warm glow, which did not lack excitement. She felt as those may be presumed to feel who have just been converted to some church—newly alive, and sunk in spiritual peace, and in profound harmony with life. Where were the old rubs, frets, jars and ennuis? Vanished, melted like yesterday's snows in the sun of this new peace. It was as if she had cast her burden upon the Lord. That, said her psycho-analyst doctor, was quite in order; that was what it ought to be like. That was, in effect, what she had in point of fact done; only the place of the Lord was filled by himself. To put the matter briefly, transference of burden had been effected; Mrs. Hilary had laid all her cares, all her perplexities, all her grief, upon this quiet, acute-looking man, who sat with her twice a week for an hour, drawing her out, arranging her symptoms for her, penetrating the hidden places of her soul, looking like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Henry Ainley. Her confidence in him was, he told her, the expression of the father-image, which surprised Mrs. Hilary a little, because he was twenty years her junior.

Mrs. Hilary felt that she was getting to know herself very well indeed. Seeing herself through Mr. Cradock's mind, she felt that she was indeed a curious jumble of complexes, of strange, mysterious impulses, desires and fears. Alarming, even horrible in some ways; so that often she thought "Can he be right about me? Am I really like that? Do I really hope that Marjorie (Jim's wife) will die, so that Jim and I may be all in all to each other again? Am I really so wicked?" But Mr. Cradock said that it was not at all wicked, perfectly natural and normal—the Unconscious was like that. And worse than that; how much worse he had to break to Mrs. Hilary, who was refined and easily shocked, by gentle hints and slow degrees, lest she should be shocked to death. Her dreams, which she had to recount to him at every sitting, bore such terrible significance—they grew worse and worse in proportion, as Mrs. Hilary could stand more.

"Ah well," Mrs. Hilary sighed uneasily, after an interpretation into strange terms of a dream she had about bathing, "it's very odd, when I've never even thought about things like that."

"Your Unconscious," said Mr. Cradock, firmly, "has thought the more. The more your Unconscious is obsessed by a thing, the less your conscious self thinks of it. It is shy of the subject, for that very reason."

Mrs. Hilary was certainly shy of the subject, for that reason or others. When she felt too shy of it, Mr. Cradock let her change it. "It may be true," she would say, "but it's very terrible, and I would rather not dwell on it."

So he would let her dwell instead on the early days of her married life, or on the children's childhood, or on her love for Neville and Jim, or on her impatience with her mother.

2

They were happy little times, stimulating, cosy little times. They spoke straight to the heart, easing it of its weight of tragedy. A splendid man, Mr. Cradock, with his shrewd, penetrating sympathy, his kind firmness. He would listen with interest to everything; the sharp words she had had with Grandmama, troubles with the maids, the little rubs of daily life (and what a rubbing business life is, to be sure!) as well as to profounder, more tragic accounts of desolation, jealousy, weariness and despair. He would say "Your case is a very usual one," so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that. He reduced it all, dispassionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws. He trained his patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams and to be shocked at nothing that they signified.

Mrs. Hilary would wake each morning, or during the night, and clutch at the dream which was flying from her, clutch and secure it, and make it stand and deliver its outlines to her. She was content with outlines; it was for Mr. Cradock to supply the interpretation. Sometimes, if Mrs. Hilary couldn't remember any dreams, he would supply, according to a classic precedent, the dream as well as the interpretation. But on the whole, deeply as she revered and admired him, Mrs. Hilary preferred to remember her own dreams; what they meant was bad enough, but the meaning of the dreams that Mr. Cradock told her she had dreamt was beyond all words.... That terrible Unconscious! Mrs. Hilary disliked it excessively; she felt rather as if it were a sewer, sunk beneath an inadequate grating.

But from Mr. Cradock she put up with hearing about it. She would have put up with anything. He was so steadying and so wonderful. He enabled her to face life with a new poise, a fresh lease of strength and vitality. She told Grandmama so. Grandmama said "Yes, my dear, I've observed it in you. It sounds to me an unpleasing business, but it is obviously doing you good, so far. I only wish it may last. The danger may be reaction, after you have finished the course and lost touch with this young man." (Mr. Cradock was forty-five, but Grandmama, it must be remembered, was eighty-four.) "You will have to guard against that. In a way it was a pity you didn't take up church-going instead; religion lasts."

"And these quackeries do not," Grandmama finished her sentence to herself, not wishing to be discouraging.

"Not always," Mrs. Hilary truly replied, meaning that religion did not always last.

"No," Grandmama agreed. "Unfortunately not always. Particularly when it is High Church. There was your uncle Bruce, of course...."

Mrs. Hilary's uncle Bruce, who had been High Church for a season, and had even taken Orders in the year 1860, but whose faith had wilted in the heat and toil of the day, so that by 1870 he was an agnostic barrister, took Grandmama back through the last century, and she became reminiscent over the Tractarian movement, and, later, the Ritualists.

"The Queen never could abide them," said Grandmama. "Nor could Lord Beaconsfield, nor your father, though he was always kind and tolerant. I remember when Dr. Jowett came to stay with us, how they talked about it.... Ah well, they've become very prominent since then, and done a great deal of good work, and there are many very able, excellent men and women among them.... But they're not High Church any longer, they tell me. They're Catholics in these days. I don't know enough of them to judge them, but I don't think they can have the dignity of the old High Church party, for if they had I can't imagine that Gilbert's wife, for instance, would have joined them, even for so short a time as she did.... Well, it suits some people, and psycho-analysis obviously suits others. Only I do hope you will try to keep moderate and balanced, my child, and not believe all this young man tells you. Parts of it do sound so very strange."

(But Mrs. Hilary would not have dreamt of repeating to Grandmama the strangest parts of all.)

"I feel a new woman," she said, fervently, and Grandmama smiled, well pleased, thinking that it certainly did seem rather like the old evangelical conversions of her youth. (Which, of course, did not always last, any more than the High Church equivalents did.)

All Grandmama committed herself to, in her elderly caution, which came however less from age than from having known Mrs. Hilary for sixty-three years, was "Well, well, we must see."

3

And then Rosalind's letter came. It came by the afternoon post—the big, mauve, scented, sprawled sheets, dashingly monographed across one corner.

"Gilbert's wife," pronounced Grandmama, non-committally from her easy chair, and, said in that tone, it was quite sufficient comment. "Another cup of tea, please, Emily."

Mrs. Hilary gave it to her, then began to read aloud the letter from Gilbert's wife. Gilbert's wife was one of the topics upon which she and Grandmama were in perfect accord, only that Mrs. Hilary was irritated when Grandmama pushed the responsibility for the relationship onto her by calling Rosalind "your daughter-in-law."

Mrs. Hilary began to read the letter in the tone used by well-bred women when they would, if in a slightly lower social stratum, say "Fancy that now! Did you ever, the brazen hussy!" Grandmama listened, cynically disapproving, prepared to be disgusted yet entertained. On the whole she thoroughly enjoyed letters from Gilbert's wife. She settled down comfortably in her chair with her second cup of tea, while Mrs. Hilary read two pages of what Grandmama called "foolish chit-chat." Rosalind's letters were really like the gossipping imbecilities written by Eve of the Tatler, or the other ladies who enliven our shinier-paper weeklies with their bright personal babble. She did not often waste one of them on her mother-in-law; only when she had something to say which might annoy her.

"Do you hear from Nan?" the third page of the letter began. "I hear from the Bramertons, who are wintering in Rome—the Charlie Bramertons, you know, great friends of mine and Gilbert's (he won a pot of money on the Derby this year and they've a dinky flat in some palace out there—), and they meet Nan about, and she's always with Stephen Lumley, the painter (rotten painter, if you ask me, but he's somehow diddled London into admiring him, don't expect you've heard of him down at the seaside). Well, they're quite simply always together, and the Brams say that everyone out there says it isn't in the least an ambiguous case—no two ways about it. He doesn't live with his wife, you know. You'll excuse me passing this on to you, but it does seem you ought to know. I mentioned it to Neville the other day, just before the poor old dear went down with the plague, but you know what Neville is, she always sticks up for Nan and doesn't care what she does, or what people say. People are talking; beasts, aren't they! But that's the way of this wicked old world, we all do it. Gilbert's quite upset about it, says Nan ought to manage her affairs more quietly. But after all and between you and me it's not the first time Nan's been a Town Topic, is it.

"How's the psycho going? Isn't Cradock rather a priceless pearl? You're over head and ears with him by now, of course, we all are. Psycho wouldn't do you any good if you weren't, that's the truth. Cradock told me himself once that transference can't be effected without the patient being a little bit smitten. Personally I should give up a man patient at once if he didn't rather like me. But isn't it soothing and comforting, and doesn't it make you feel good all over, like a hot bath when you're fagged out...."

But Mrs. Hilary didn't get as far as this. She stopped at "not the first time Nan's been a Town Topic...." and dropped the thin mauve sheets onto her lap, and looked at Grandmama, her face queerly tight and flushed, as if she were about to cry.

Grandmama had finished her tea, and had been listening quietly.

Mrs. Hilary said "Oh, my God," and jerked her head back, quivering like a nervous horse who has had a shock and does not care to conceal it.

"Your daughter-in-law," said Grandmama, without excitement, "is an exceedingly vulgar young woman."

"Vulgar? Rosalind? But of course.... Only that doesn't affect Nan...."

"Your daughter-in-law," Grandmama added, "is also a very notorious liar."

"A liar ... oh yes, yes, yes.... But this time it's true. Oh I feel, I know, it's true. Nan would. That Stephen Lumley—he's been hanging about her for ages. ... Oh yes, it's true what they say. The very worst...."

Grandmama glanced at her curiously. The very worst in that direction had become strangely easier of credence by Mrs. Hilary lately. Grandmama had observed that. Mr. Cradock's teaching had not been without its effect. According to Mr. Cradock, people were usually engaged either in practising the very worst, or in desiring to practise it, or in wishing and dreaming that they had practised it. It was the nature of mankind, and not in the least reprehensible, though curable. Thus Mr. Cradock. Mrs. Hilary had, against her own taste, absorbed part of his teaching, but nothing could ever persuade her that it was not reprehensible: it quite obviously was. Also disgusting. Mr. Cradock might say what he liked. It was disgusting. And when the man had a wife....

"It is awful," said Mrs. Hilary. "Awful.... It must be stopped. I shall go to Rome. At once."

"That won't stop it, dear, if it is going on. It will only irritate the young people."

"Irritate! You can use a word like that! Mother, you don't realise this ghastly thing."

"I quite see, my dear, that Nan may be carrying on with this artist. And very wrong it is, if so. All I say is that your going to Rome won't stop it. You know that you and Nan don't always get on very smoothly. You rub each other up.... It would be far better if someone else went. Neville, say."

"Neville is ill." Mrs. Hilary shut her lips tightly on that. She was glad Neville was ill; she had always hated (she could not help it) the devotion between Neville and Nan. Nan, in her tempestuous childhood, flaring with rage against her mother, or sullen, spiteful and perverse, long before she could have put into words the qualities in Mrs. Hilary which made her like that, had always gone to Neville, nine years older, to be soothed and restored to good temper. Neville had reprimanded the little naughty sister, had told her she must be "decent to mother—feel decent if you can, behave decent in any case," was the way she had put it. It was Neville who had heard Nan's confidences and helped her out of scrapes in childhood, schoolgirlhood and ever since. This was very bitter to Mrs. Hilary. She was jealous of both of them; jealous that so much of Neville's love should go elsewhere than to her, jealous that Nan, who gave her nothing except generous and extravagant gifts and occasional, spasmodic, remorseful efforts at affection and gentleness, should to Neville give all.

"Neville is ill," she said. "She certainly won't be fit to travel out of England this winter. Influenza coming on the top of that miserable breakdown is a thing to be treated with the greatest care. Even when she is recovered, post-influenza will keep her weak till the summer. I am really anxious about her. No; Neville is quite out of the question."

"Well, what about Pamela?"

"Pamela is up to her eyes in her work.... Besides, why should Pamela go, or Neville, rather than I? A girl's mother is obviously the right person. I may not be of much use to my children in these days, but at least I hope I can save them from themselves."

"It takes a clever parent to do that, Emily," said Grandmama, who doubtless knew.

"But, mother, what would you have me do? Sit with my hands before me while my daughter lives in sin? What's your plan?"

"I'm too old to make plans, dear. I can only look on at the world. I've looked at the world now for many, many years, and I've learnt that only great wisdom and great love can change people's decisions as to their way of life, or turn them from evil courses. Frankly, my child, I doubt if you have, where Nan is concerned, enough wisdom or enough love. Enough sympathy, I should rather say, for you have love. But do you feel you understand the child enough to interfere wisely and successfully?"

"Oh, you think I'm a fool, mother; of course I know you've always thought me a fool. Good God, if a mother can't interfere with her own daughter to save her from wickedness and disaster, who can, I should like to know?"

"One would indeed like to know that," Grandmama said, sadly.

"Perhaps you'd like to go yourself," Mrs. Hilary shot at her, quivering now with anger and feeling.

"No, my dear. Even if I were able to get to Rome I should know that I was too old to interfere with the lives of the young. I don't understand them enough. You believe that you do. Well, I suppose you must go and try. I can't stop you."

"You certainly can't. Nothing can stop me.... You're singularly unsympathetic, mother, about this awful business."

"I don't feel so, dear. I am very, very sorry for you, and very, very sorry for Nan (whom, you must remember, we may be slandering). I have always looked on unlawful love as a very great sin, though there may be great provocation to it."

"It is an awful sin." Mr. Cradock could say what he liked on that subject; he might tell Mrs. Hilary that it was not awful except in so far as any other yielding to nature's promptings in defiance of the law of man was awful, but he could not persuade her. Like many other people, she set that particular sin apart, in a special place by itself; she would talk of "a bad woman," "an immoral man," a girl who had "lost her character," and mean merely the one kind of badness, the one manifestation of immorality, the one element in character. Dishonesty and cruelty she could forgive, but never that.

"I shall start in three days," said Mrs. Hilary, becoming tragically resolute. "I must tell Mr. Cradock to-morrow."

"That young man? Must he know about Nan's affairs, my dear?"

"I have to tell him everything, mother. It's part of the course. He is as secret as the grave."

Grandmama knew that Emily, less secret than the grave, would have to ease herself of the sad tale to someone or other in the course of the next day, and supposed that it had better be to Mr. Cradock, who seemed to be a kind of hybrid of doctor and clergyman, and so presumably was more discreet than an ordinary human being. Emily must tell. Emily always would. That was why she enjoyed this foolish psycho-analysis business so much.

At the very thought of it a gleam had brightened Mrs. Hilary's eyes, and her rigid, tense pose had relaxed. Oh the comfort of telling Mr. Cradock! Even if he did tell her how it was all in the course of nature, at least he would sympathise with her trouble about it, and her annoyance with Grandmama. And he would tell her how best to deal with Nan when she got to her. Nan's was the sort of case that Mr. Cradock really did understand. Any situation between the sexes—he was all over it. Psycho-analysts adored sex; they made an idol of it. They communed with it, as devotees with their God. They couldn't really enjoy, with their whole minds, anything else, Mrs. Hilary sometimes vaguely felt. But as, like the gods of the other devotees, it was to them immanent, everywhere and in everything; they could be always happy. If they went up into heaven it was there; if they fled down into hell it was there also. Once, when Mrs. Hilary had tentatively suggested that Freud, for instance, over-stated its importance, Mr. Cradock had said firmly "It is impossible to do that," which settled it once and for all.

Mrs. Hilary stood up. Her exalted, tragic mood clothed her like a flowing garment.

"I shall write to Cook," she said. "Also to Nan, to tell her I am coming."

Grandmama, after a moment's silence, seemed to gather herself together for a final effort.

"Emily, my child. Is your mind set to do this?"

"Absolutely, mother. Absolutely and entirely."

"Shall I tell you what I think? No, you don't want to hear it, but you drive me to it.... If you go to that foolish, reckless child and attempt to interfere with her, or even to question her, you will run the risk, if she is innocent, of driving her into what you are trying to prevent. If she is already committed to it, you run the risk of shutting the door against her return. In either case you will alienate her from yourself: that is the least of the risks you run, though the most certain.... That is all. I can say no more. But I ask you, my dear.... I beg you, for the child's sake and your own ... to write neither to Cook nor to Nan."

Grandmama's breath came rather fast and heavily; her heart was troubling her; emotion and effort were not good for it.

Mrs. Hilary stood looking down at the old shrunk figure, shaking a little as she stood, knowing that she must be patient and calm.

"You will please allow me to judge. You will please let me take the steps I think necessary to help my child. I know that you have no confidence in my judgment or my tact; you've always shown that plainly enough, and done your best to teach my children the same view of me...."

Grandmama put up her hand, meaning that she could not stand, neither she nor her heart could stand, a scene. Mrs. Hilary broke off. For once she did not want a scene either. In these days she found what vent was necessary for her emotional system in her interviews with Mr. Cradock.

"I daresay you mean well, mother. But in this matter I must be the judge. I am a mother first and foremost. It is the only thing that life has left for me to be." (Scarcely a daughter, she meant: that was made too difficult for her; you would almost imagine that the office was not wanted.)

She turned to the writing table.

"First of all I shall write to Rosalind, and tell her what I think of her and her abominable gossip."

She began to write.

Grandmama sat shrunk and old and tired in her chair.

Mrs. Hilary's pen scratched over the paper, telling Rosalind what she thought.

"Dear Rosalind," she wrote, "I was very much surprised at your letter. I do not know why you should trouble to repeat to me these ridiculous stories about Nan. You cannot suppose that I am likely to care either what you or any of your friends are saying about one of my children...." And so on. One knows the style. It eases the mind of the writer and does not deceive the reader. When the reader is Rosalind Hilary it amuses her vastly.

4

Next day, at three p.m., Mrs. Hilary told Mr. Cradock all about it. Mr. Cradock was not in the least surprised. Nor had he the slightest, not the remotest doubt that Nan and Stephen Lumley were doing what Mrs. Hilary called living in sin, what he preferred to call obeying the natural ego. (After all, as any theologian would point out, the terms are synonymous in a fallen world.)

"I must have your advice," Mrs. Hilary said. "You must tell me what line to take with her."

"Shall you," Mr. Cradock enquired, thoughtful and intelligent, "find your daughter in a state of conflict?"

Mrs. Hilary spread her hands helplessly before her.

"I know nothing; nothing."

"A very great deal," said Mr. Cradock, "depends on that. If she is torn between the cravings of the primitive ego and the inhibitions put upon these cravings by the conventions of society—if, in fact, her censor, her endopsychic censor, is still functioning...."

"Oh, I doubt if Nan's got an endopsychic censor. She is so lawless always."

"Every psyche has a censor." Mr. Cradock was firm. "Regarded, of course, by the psyche with very varying degrees of respect. Well, what I mean to say is, if your daughter is in a state of conflict, with forces pulling her both ways, her case will be very much easier to deal with than if she has let her primitive ego so take possession of the situation that she feels in a state of harmony. In the former case, you will only have to strengthen the forces which are opposing her sexual craving...."

Mrs. Hilary fidgeted uneasily. "Oh, I don't think Nan feels that exactly. None of my children...."

Mr. Cradock gave her an amused glance. It seemed sometimes that he would never get this foolish lady properly educated.

"Your children, I presume, are human, Mrs. Hilary. Sexual craving means a craving for intimacy with a member of another sex."

"Oh well, I suppose it does. I don't care for the name, somehow. But please go on."

"I was going to say, if you find, on the other hand, that your daughter's nature has attained harmony in connection with this course she is pursuing, your task will be far more difficult. You will then have to create a discord, instead of merely strengthening it.... May I ask your daughter's age?"

"Nan is thirty-three."

"A dangerous age."

"All Nan's ages," said Mrs. Hilary, "have been dangerous. Nan is like that."

"As to that," said Mr. Cradock, "we may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shynesses and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.... Has passion always been a strong element in your daughter's life?"

"Oh, passion...." (Another word not liked by Mrs. Hilary.) "Not quite that, I should say. Nan has been reckless; she has got into scrapes, got herself talked about. She has played about with men a good deal always. But as to passion...."

"A common thing enough," Mr. Cradock told her, as it were reassuringly. "Nothing to fight shy of, or be afraid of. But something to be regulated of course.... Now, the thing is to oppose to this irregular desire of your daughter's for this man a new and a stronger set of desires. Fight one group of complexes with another. You can't, I suppose, persuade her to be analysed? There are good analysts in Rome."

"Oh no. Nan laughs at it. She laughs at everything of that sort."

"A great mistake. A mistake often made by shallow and foolish people. They might as well laugh at surgery.... Well now, to go into this question of the battle between the complex-groups...."

He went into it, patiently and exhaustively. His phrases drifted over Mrs. Hilary's head.

"... a deterrent force residing in the ego and preventing us from stepping outside the bounds of propriety.... Rebellious messages sent up from the Unconscious, which wishes to live, love and act in archaic modes ... conflict with the progress of human society ... inhibitory and repressive power of the censor...." (How wonderful, thought Mrs. Hilary, to be able to talk so like a book for so long together!) ... "give the censor all the help we can ... keep the Unconscious in order by turning its energies into some other channel ... give it a substitute.... The energy involved in the intense desire for someone of another sex can be diverted ... employed on some useful work. Libido ... it should all be used. Find another channel for your daughter's libido.... Her life is perhaps a rather vacant one?"

That Mrs. Hilary was able to reply to.

"Nan's? Vacant? Oh no. She is quite full of energy. Too full. Always doing a thousand things. And she writes, you know."

"Ah. That should be an outlet. A great deal of libido is used up by that. Well, her present strong desire for this man should be sublimated into a desire for something else. I gather that her root trouble is lawlessness. That can be cured. You must make her remember her first lawless action." (Man's first disobedience and the fruit thereof, thought Mrs. Hilary.)

"O dear me," she said, "I'm afraid that would be impossible. When she was a month old she used to attempt to dash her bottle onto the floor."

"People have even remembered their baptisms, when driven back to them by analysis."

"Our children were not baptised. My husband was something of a Unitarian. He said he would not tie them up with a rite against which they might react in later life. So they were merely registered."

"Ah. In a way that is a pity. Baptism is an impressive moment in the sensitive consciousness of the infant. It has sometimes been found to be a sort of lamp shining through the haze of the early memory. Registration, owing to the non-participation of the infant, is useless in that way."

"Nan might remember how she kicked me when I short-coated her," Mrs. Hilary mused, hopefully.

Mr. Cradock flowed on. Mrs. Hilary, listened, assented, was impressed. It all sounded so simple, so wonderful, even so beautiful. But she thought once or twice, "He doesn't know Nan."

"Thank you," she said, rising to go when her hour was over. "You have made me feel so much stronger, as usual. I can't thank you enough for all you do for me. I could face none of my troubles and problems but for your help."

"That merely means," said Mr. Cradock, who always got the last word, "that your ego is at present in what is called the state of infantile dependence or tutelage. A necessary but an impermanent stage in its struggle towards the adult level of the reality-principle."

"I suppose so," Mrs. Hilary said. "Good-bye."

"He is too clever for me," she thought, as she went home. "He is often above my head." But she was used to that in the people she met.



CHAPTER XIII

THE DAUGHTER

1

Mrs. Hilary hated travelling, which is indeed detestable. The Channel was choppy and she a bad sailor; the train from Calais to Paris continued the motion, and she remained a bad sailor (bad sailors often do this). She lay back and smelled salts, and they were of no avail. At Paris she tried and failed to dine. She passed a wretched night, being of those who detest nights in trains without wagons-lits, but save money by not having wagons-lits, and wonder dismally all night if it is worth it. Modane in the chilly morning annoyed her as it annoys us all. The customs people were rude and the other travellers in the way. Mrs. Hilary, who was not good in crowds, pushed them, getting excited and red in the face. Psycho-analysis had made her more patient and calm than she had been before, but even so, neither patient nor calm when it came to jostling crowds.

"I am not strong enough for all this," she thought, in the Mont Cenis tunnel.

Rushing out of it into Italy, she thought, "Last time I was here was in '99, with Richard. If Richard were here now he would help me." He would face the customs at Modane, find and get the tickets, deal with uncivil Germans—(Germans were often uncivil to Mrs. Hilary and she to them, and though she had not met any yet on this journey, owing doubtless to their state of collapse and depression consequent on the Great Peace, one might get in at any moment, Germans being naturally buoyant). Richard would have got hold of pillows, seen that she was comfortable at night, told her when there was time to get out for coffee and when there wasn't (Mrs. Hilary was no hand at this; she would try no runs and get run out, or all but run out). And Richard would have helped to save Nan. Nan and her father had got on pretty well, for a naughty girl and an elderly parent. They had appreciated one another's brains, which is not a bad basis. They had not accepted or even liked one another's ideas on life, but this is not necessary or indeed usual in families. Mrs. Hilary certainly did not go so far as to suppose that Nan would have obeyed her father had he appeared before her in Rome and bidden her change her way of life, but she might have thought it over. And to make Nan think over anything which she bade her do would be a phenomenal task. What had Mr. Cradock said—make her remember her first disobedience, find the cause of it, talk it out with her, get it into the open—and then she would be cured of her present lawlessness. Why? That was the connection that always puzzled Mrs. Hilary a little. Why should remembering that you had done, and why you had done, the same kind of thing thirty years ago cure you of doing it now? Similarly, why should remembering that a nurse had scared you as an infant cure you of your present fear of burglars? In point of fact, it didn't. Mr. Cradock had tried this particular cure on Mrs. Hilary. It must be her own fault, of course, but somehow she had not felt much less nervous about noises in the house at night since Mr. Cradock had brought up into the light, as he called it, that old fright in the nursery. After all, why should one? However, hers not to reason why; and perhaps the workings of Nan's mind might be more orthodox.

At Turin Germans got in. Of course. They were all over Italy. Italy was welcoming them with both hands, establishing again the economic entente. These were a mother and a backfisch, and they looked shyly and sullenly at Mrs. Hilary and the other English-woman in the compartment. They were thin, and Mrs. Hilary noted it with satisfaction. She didn't believe for one moment in starving Germans, but these certainly did not look so prosperous and buxom as a pre-war German mother and backfisch would have looked. They were equally uncivil, though. They pulled both windows up to the top. The two English ladies promptly pulled them down half-way. English ladies are the only beings in the world who like open windows in winter. English lower-class women do not, nor do English gentlemen. If you want to keep warm while travelling (to frowst, as the open air school calls it) do not get in with well-bred Englishwomen.

The German mother broke out in angry remonstrance, indicating that she had neuralgia and the backfisch a cold in the head. There followed one of those quarrels which occur on this topic in trains, and are so bitter and devastating. It had now more than the pre-war bitterness; between the combatants flowed rivers of blood; behind them ranked male relatives killed or maimed by the male relatives of their foes on the opposite seat. The English ladies won. Germany was a conquered race, and knew it. In revenge, the backfisch coughed and sneezed "all over the carriage," as Mrs. Hilary put it, "in the disgusting German way," and her mother made noises as if she could be sick if she tried hard enough.

So it was a detestable journey. And the second night in the train was worse than the first. For the Germans, would you believe it, shut both windows while the English were asleep, and the English, true to their caste and race, woke with bad headaches.

2

When they got to Rome in the morning Mrs. Hilary felt thoroughly ill. She had to strive hard for self-control; it would not do to meet Nan in an unnerved, collapsed state. All her psychical strength was necessary to deal with Nan. So when she stood on the platform with her luggage she looked and felt not only like one who has slept (but not much) in a train for two nights and fought with Germans about windows but also like an elderly virgin martyr (spiritually tense and strung-up, and distraught, and on the line between exultation and hysteria).

Nan was there. Nan, pale and pinched, and looking plain in the nipping morning air, though wrapped in a fur coat. (One of the points about Nan was that, though she sometimes looked plain, she never looked dowdy; there was always a distinction, a chic, about her.)

Nan kissed her mother and helped with the luggage and got a cab. Nan was good at railway stations and such places. Mrs. Hilary was not.

They drove out into the hideous new streets. Mrs. Hilary shivered.

"Oh, how ugly!"

"Rome is ugly, this part."

"It's worse since '99."

But she did not really remember clearly how it had looked in '99. The old desire to pose, to show that she knew something, took her. Yet she felt that Nan, who knew that she knew next to nothing, would not be deceived.

"Oh ... the Forum!"

"The Forum of Trajan," Nan said. "We don't pass the Roman Forum on the way to our street."

"The Forum of Trajan, of course, I meant that."

But she knew that Nan knew she had meant the Forum Romanum.

"Rome is always Rome," she said, which was safer than identifying particular buildings, or even Forums, in it. "Nothing like it anywhere."

"How long can you stay, mother? I've got you a room in the house I'm lodging in. It's in a little street the other side of the Corso. Rather a mediaeval street, I'm afraid. That is, it smells. But the rooms are clean."

"Oh, I'm not staying long.... We'll talk later; talk it all out. A thorough talk. When we get in. After a cup of tea...."

Mrs. Hilary remembered that Nan did not yet know why she had come. After a cup of strong tea.... A cup of tea first.... Coffee wasn't the same. One needed tea, after those awful Germans. She told Nan about these. Nan knew that she would have had tiresome travelling companions; she always did; if it weren't Germans it would be inconsiderate English. She was unlucky.

"Go straight to bed and rest when we get in," Nan advised; but she shook her head. "We must talk first."

Nan, she thought, looked pinched about the lips, and thin, and her black brows were at times nervous and sullen. Nan did not look happy. Was it guilt, or merely the chill morning air?

They stopped at a shabby old house in a narrow mediaeval street in the Borgo, which had been a palace and was now let in apartments. Here Nan had two bare, gilded, faded rooms. Mrs. Hilary sat by a charcoal stove in one of them, and Nan made her some tea. After the tea Mrs. Hilary felt revived. She wouldn't go to bed; she felt that the time for the talk had come. She looked round the room for signs of Stephen Lumley, but all the signs she saw were of Nan; Nan's books, Nan's proofs strewing the table. Of course that bad man wouldn't come while she was there. He was no doubt waiting eagerly for her to be gone. Probably they both were....

3

"Nan—" They were still sitting by the stove, and Nan was lighting a cigarette. "Nan—do you guess why I've come?"

Nan threw away the match.

"No, mother. How should I?... One does come to Rome, I suppose, if one gets a chance."

"Oh, I've not come to see Rome. I know Rome. Long before you were born.... I've come to see you. And to take you back with me."

Nan glanced at her quickly, a sidelong glance of suspicion and comprehension. Her lower lip projected stubbornly.

"Ah, I see you know what I mean. Yes, I've heard. Rumours reached us—it was through Rosalind, of course. And I'm afraid ... I'm afraid that for once she spoke the truth."

"Oh no, she didn't. I don't know what Rosalind's been saying this time, but it would be odd if it was the truth."

"Nan, it's no use denying things. I know."

It was true; she did know. A few months ago she would have doubted and questioned; but Mr. Cradock had taught her better. She had learnt from him the simple truth about life; that is, that nearly everyone is nearly always involved up to the eyes in the closest relationship with someone of another sex. It is nature's way with mankind. Another thing she had learnt from him was that the more they denied it the more it was so; protests of innocence and admissions of guilt were alike proofs of the latter. So she was accurate when she said that it was no use for Nan to deny anything. It was no use whatever.

Nan had become cool and sarcastic—her nastiest, most dangerous manner.

"Do you think you would care to be a little more explicit, mother? I'm afraid I don't quite follow. What is it no use my denying? What do you know?"

Mrs. Hilary gathered herself together. Her head trembled and jerked with emotion; wisps of her hair, tousled by the night, escaped over her collar. She spoke tremulously, tensely, her hands wrung together.

"That you are going on with a married man. That you are his mistress," she said, putting it at its crudest, since Nan wanted plain speaking.

Nan sat quite still, smoking. The silence thrilled with Mrs. Hilary's passion.

"I see," Nan said at last. "And it's no use my denying it. In that case I won't." Her voice was smooth and clear and still, like cold water. "You know the man's name too, I presume?"

"Of course. Everyone knows it. I tell you, Nan, everyone's talking of you and him. A town topic, Rosalind calls it."

"Rosalind would. Town must be very dull just now, if that's all they have to talk of."

"But it's not the scandal I'm thinking of," Mrs. Hilary went on, "though, God knows, that's bad enough—I'm thankful Father died when he did and was spared it—but the thing itself. The awful, awful thing itself. Have you no shame, Nan?"

"Not much."

"For all our sakes. Not for mine—I know you don't care a rap for that—but for Neville, whom you do profess to love...."

"I should think we might leave Neville out of it. She's shown no signs of believing any story about me."

"Well, she does believe it, you may depend upon it. No one could help it. People write from here saying it's an open fact."

"People here can't have much to put in their letters."

"Oh, they'll make room for gossip. People always will. Always. But I'm not going to dwell on that side of things, because I know you don't care what anyone says. It's the wrongness of it.... A married man.... Even if his wife divorces him! It would be in the papers.... And if she doesn't you can't ever marry him.... Do you care for the man?"

"What man?"

"Don't quibble. Stephen Lumley, of course."

"Stephen Lumley is a friend of mine. I'm fond of him."

"I don't believe you do love him. I believe it's all recklessness and perversity. Lawlessness. That's what Mr. Cradock said."

"Mr. Cradock?" Nan's eyebrows went up.

Mrs. Hilary flushed a brighter scarlet. The colour kept running over her face and going back again, all the time she was talking.

"Your psycho-analyst doctor," said Nan, and her voice was a little harder and cooler than before. "I suppose you had an interesting conversation with him about me."

"I have to tell him everything," Mrs. Hilary stammered. "It's part of the course. I did consult him about you. I'm not ashamed of it. He understands about these things. He's not an ordinary man."

"This is very interesting." Nan lit another cigarette. "It seems that I've been a boon all round as a town topic—to London, to Rome and to St. Mary's Bay.... Well, what did he advise about me?"

Mrs. Hilary remembered vaguely and in part, but did not think it would be profitable just now to tell Nan.

"We have to be very wise about this," she said, collecting herself. "Very wise and firm. Lawlessness.... I wonder if you remember, Nan, throwing your shoes at my head when you were three?"

"No. But I can quite believe I did. It was the sort of thing I used to do."

"Think back, Nan. What is the first act of naughtiness and disobedience you remember, and what moved you to it?"

Nan, who knew a good deal more about psycho-analysis than Mrs. Hilary did, laughed curtly.

"No good, mother. That won't work on me. I'm not susceptible to the treatment. Too hard-headed. What was Mr. Cradock's next brain-wave?"

"Oh well, if you take it like this, what's the use...."

"None at all. I advise you not to bother yourself. It will only make your headache worse.... Now I think after all this excitement you had better go and lie down, don't you? I'm going out, anyhow."

Then Stephen Lumley knocked at the door and came in. A tall, slouching hollow-chested man of forty, who looked unhappy and yet cynically amused at the world. He had a cough, and unusually bright eyes under overhanging brows.

Nan said, "This is Stephen Lumley, mother. My mother, Stephen," and left them to do the rest, watching, critical and aloof, to see how they would manage the situation.

Mrs. Hilary managed it by rising from her chair and standing rigidly in the middle of the room, breathing hard and staring. Stephen Lumley looked enquiringly at Nan.

"How do you do, Mrs. Hilary," he said. "I expect you're pretty well played out by that beastly journey, aren't you."

Mrs. Hilary's voice came stifled, choked, between pants. She was working up; or rather worked up: Nan knew the symptoms.

"You dare to come into my presence.... I must ask you to leave my daughter's sitting-room immediately. I have come to take her back to England with me at once. Please go. There is nothing that can possibly be said between you and me—nothing."

Stephen Lumley, a cool and quiet person, raised his brows, looked enquiry once more at Nan, found no answer, said, "Well, then, I'll say good-bye," and departed.

Mrs. Hilary wrung her hands together.

"How dare he! How dare he! Into my very presence! He has no shame...."

Nan watched her coolly. But a red spot had begun to burn in each cheek at her mother's opening words to Lumley, and still burned. Mrs. Hilary knew of old that still-burning, deadly anger of Nan's.

"Thank you, mother. You've helped me to make up my mind. I'm going to Capri with Stephen next week. I've refused up till now. He was going without me. You've made up my mind for me. You can tell Mr. Cradock that if he asks."

Nan was fiercely, savagely desirous to hurt. In the same spirit she had doubtless thrown her shoes at Mrs. Hilary thirty years ago. Rage and disgust, hot rebellion and sick distaste—what she had felt then she felt now. During her mother's breathless outbreak at Stephen Lumley, standing courteous and surprised before her, she had crossed her Rubicon. And now with flaming words she burned her boats.

Mrs. Hilary burst into tears. But her tears had never yet quenched Nan's flames. Nan made her lie down and gave her sal volatile. Sal volatile eases the head and nervous system and composes the manners, but no more than tears does it quench flames.

4

The day that followed was strange, and does not sound likely, but life often does not. Nan took Mrs. Hilary out to lunch at a trattoria near the Forum, as it were to change the subject, and they spent the usual first afternoon of visitors in Rome, who hasten to view the Forum with a guide to the most recent excavations in their hands. Mrs. Hilary felt completely uninterested to-day in recent or any other excavations. But, obsessed even now with the old instinctive desire (the fond hope, rather) not to seem unintelligent before her children, more especially when she was not on good terms with them, she accompanied Nan, who firmly and deftly closed or changed the subjects of unlawful love, Stephen Lumley, Capri, returning to England, and her infant acts of wilfulness, whenever her mother opened them, which was frequently, as Mrs. Hilary found these things easier conversational topics than the buildings in the Forum. Nan was determined to keep the emotional pressure low for the rest of the day, and she was fairly competent at this when she tried. As Mrs. Hilary had equal gifts at keeping it high, it was a well-matched contest. When she left the Forum for a tea shop, both were tired out. The Forum is tiring; emotion is tiring; tears are tiring; quarrelling is tiring; travelling through to Rome is tiring; all five together are annihilating.

However, they had tea.

Mrs. Hilary was cold and bitter now, not hysterical. Nan, who was living a bad life, and was also tiresomely exactly informed about the differences between the Forum in '99 and the Forum to-day (a subject on which Mrs. Hilary was hazy) was not fit, until she came to a better mind, to be spoken to. Mrs. Hilary shut her lips tight and averted her reddened eyes. She hated Nan just now. She could have loved her had she been won to repentance, but now—"Nan was never like the rest," she thought.

Nan persisted in making light, equable conversation, which Mrs. Hilary thought in bad taste. She talked of England and the family, asked after Grandmama, Neville and the rest.

"Neville is extremely ill," Mrs. Hilary said, quite untruly, but that was, to do her justice, the way in which she always saw illness, particularly Neville's. "And worried to death about Gerda, who seems to have gone off her head since that accident in Cornwall. She is still sticking to that insane, wicked notion about not getting married."

Nan had heard before of this.

"She'll give that up," she said, coolly, "when she finds she really can't have Barry if she doesn't. Gerda gets what she wants."

"Oh, you all do that, the whole lot of you.... And a nice example you're setting the child."

"She'll give it up," Nan repeated, keeping the conversation on Gerda. "Gerda hasn't the martyr touch. She won't perish for a principle. She wants Barry and she'll have him, though she may hold out for a time. Gerda doesn't lose things, in the end."

"She's a very silly child, and I suppose she's been mixing with dreadful friends and picked up these ideas. At twenty there's some excuse for ignorant foolishness." But none at thirty-three, Mrs. Hilary meant.

"Barry Briscoe," she added, "is being quite firm about it. Though he is desperately in love with her, Neville tells me; desperately."

He's soon got over you, even if he did care for you once, and even if you did send him away, her emphasis implied.

In Nan, casually flicking the ash off her cigarette, a queer impulse came and went. For a moment she wanted to cry; to drop hardness and lightness and pretence, and cry like a child and say "Mother, comfort me. Don't go on hurting me. I love Barry. Be kind to me, oh be kind to me!"

If she had done it, Mrs. Hilary would have taken her in her arms and been all mother, and the wound in their affection would have been temporarily healed.

Nan said nonchalantly "I suppose he is. They're sure to be all right.... Now what next, mother? It's getting dark for seeing things."

"I am tired to death," said Mrs. Hilary. "I shall go back to those dreadful rooms and try to rest.... It has been an awful day.... I hate Rome. In '99 it was so different. Father and I went about together; he showed me everything. He knew about it all. Besides...."

Besides, how could I enjoy sight-seeing after that scene this morning, and with this awful calamity that has happened?

They went back. Mrs. Hilary was desperately missing her afternoon hour with Mr. Cradock. She had come to rely on it on a Wednesday.

5

Nan sat up late, correcting proofs, after Mrs. Hilary had gone to bed. Galleys lay all round her on the floor by the stove. She let them slip from her knee and lie there. She hated them....

She pressed her hands over her eyes, shutting them out, shutting out life. She was going off with Stephen Lumley. She had told him so this morning. Both their lives were broken; hers by Barry, whom she loved, his by his wife, whom he disliked. He loved her; he wanted her. She could with him find relief, find life a tolerable thing. They could have a good time together. They were good companions; their need, though dissimilar, was mutual. They saw the same beauty, spoke the same tongue, laughed at the same things. In the very thought of Stephen, with his cynical humour, his clear, keen mind, his lazy power of brain, Nan had found relief all that day, reacting desperately from a mind fuddled with sentiment and emotion as with drink, a soft, ignorant brain, which knew and cared about nothing except people, a hysterical passion of anger and malice. They had pushed her sharply and abruptly over the edge of decision, that mind and brain and passion. Stephen, against whom their fierce anger was concentrated, was so different....

To get away, to get right away from everything and everyone, with Stephen. Not to have to go back to London alone, to see what she could not, surely, bear to see—Barry and Gerda, Gerda and Barry, always, everywhere, radiant and in love. And Neville, Gerda's mother, who saw so much. And Rosalind, who saw everything, everything, and said so. And Mrs. Hilary....

To saunter round the queer, lovely corners of the earth with Stephen, light oneself by Stephen's clear, flashing mind, look after Stephen's weak, neglected body as he never could himself ... that was the only anodyne. Life would then some time become an adventure again, a gay stroll through the fair, instead of a desperate sickness and nightmare.

Barry, oh Barry.... Nan, who had thought she was getting better, found that she was not. Tears stormed and shook her at last. She crumpled up on the floor among the galley-slips, her head upon the chair.

Those damned proofs—who wanted them? What were books? What was anything?

6

Mrs. Hilary came in, in her dressing-gown, red-eyed. She had heard strangled sounds, and knew that her child was crying.

"My darling!"

Her arms were round Nan's shoulders; she was kneeling among the proofs.

"My little girl—Nan!"

"Mother...."

They held each other close. It was a queer moment, though not an unprecedented one in the stormy history of their relations together. A queer, strange, comforting, healing moment, the fleeting shadow of a great rock in a barren land; a strayed fragment of something which should have been between them always but was not. Certainly an odd moment.

"My own baby.... You're unhappy...."

"Unhappy—yes.... Darling mother, it can't be helped. Nothing can be helped.... Don't let's talk ... darling."

Strange words from Nan. Strange for Mrs. Hilary to feel her hand held against Nan's wet cheek and kissed.

Strange moment: and it could not last. The crying child wants its mother; the mother wants to comfort the crying child. A good bridge, but one inadequate for the strain of daily traffic. The child, having dried its tears, watches the bridge break again, and thinks it a pity but inevitable. The mother, less philosophic, may cry in her turn, thinking perhaps that the bridge may be built this time in that way; but, the child having the colder heart, it seldom is.

There remain the moments, impotent but indestructible.



CHAPTER XIV

YOUTH TO YOUTH

1

Kay was home for the Christmas vacation. He was full, not so much of Cambridge, as of schemes for establishing a co-operative press next year. He was learning printing and binding, and wanted Gerda to learn too.

"Because, if you're really not going to marry Barry, and if Barry sticks to not having you without, you'll be rather at a loose end, won't you, and you may as well come and help us with the press.... But of course, you know," Kay added absently, his thoughts still on the press, "I should advise you to give up on that point."

"Give up, Kay? Marry, do you mean?"

"Yes.... It doesn't seem to me to be a point worth making a fuss about. Of course I agree with you in theory—I always have. But I've come to think lately that it's not a point of much importance. And perfectly sensible people are doing it all the time. You know Jimmy Kenrick and Susan Mallow have done it? They used to say they wouldn't, but they have. The fact is, people do do it, whatever they say about it beforehand. And though in theory it's absurd, it seems often to work out pretty well in actual life. Personally I should make no bones about it, if I wanted a girl and she wanted marriage. Of course a girl can always go on being called by her own name if she likes. That has points."

"Of course one could do that," Gerda pondered.

"It's a sound plan in some ways. It saves trouble and explanation to go on with the name you've published your things under before marriage.... By the way, what about your poems, Gerda? They'll be about ready by the time we get our press going, won't they? We can afford to have some slight stuff of that sort if we get hold of a few really good things to start with, to make our name."

Gerda's thoughts were not on her poems, nor on Kay's press, but on his advice about matrimony. For the first time she wavered. If Kay thought that.... It set the business in a new light. And of course other people were doing it; sound people, the people who talked the same language and belonged to the same set as one's self.

Kay had spoken. It was the careless, authentic voice of youth speaking to youth. It was a trumpet blast making a breach in the walls against which the batteries of middle age had thundered in vain. Gerda told herself that she must look further into this, think it over again, talk it over with other people of the age to know what was right. If it could be managed with honour, she would find it a great relief to give up on this point. For Barry was so firm; he would never give up; and, after all, one of them must, if it could be done with a clear conscience.

2

Ten days later Gerda said to Barry, "I've been thinking it over again, Barry, and I've decided that perhaps it will be all right for us to get married after all."

Barry took both her hands and kissed each in turn, to show that he was not triumphing but adoring.

"You mean it? You feel you can really do it without violating your conscience? Sure, darling?"

"Yes, I think I'm sure. Lots of quite sensible, good people have done it lately."

"Oh any number, of course—if that's any reason."

"Not, not those people. My sort of people, I mean. People who believe what I do, and wouldn't tie themselves up and lose their liberty for anything."

"I agree with Lenin. He says liberty is a bourgeois dream."

"Barry, I may keep my name, mayn't I? I may still be called Gerda Bendish, by people in general?"

"Of course, if you like. Rather silly, isn't it? Because it won't be your name. But that's your concern."

"It's the name I've always written and drawn under, you see."

"Yes. I see your point. Of course you shall be Gerda Bendish anywhere you like, only not on cheques, if you don't mind."

"And I don't much want to wear a wedding ring, Barry."

"That's as you like, too, of course. You might keep it in your purse when travelling, to produce if censorious hotel keepers look askance at us. Even the most abandoned ladies do that sometimes, I believe. Or your marriage lines will do as well.... Gerda, you blessed darling, it's most frightfully decent and sporting of you to have changed your mind and owned up. Next time we differ I'll try and be the one to do it, I honestly will.... I say, let's come out by ourselves and dine and do a theatre, to celebrate the occasion."

So they celebrated the triumph of institutionalism.

3

Their life together, thought Barry, would be a keen, jolly, adventuring business, an ardent thing, full of gallant dreams and endeavours. It should never grow tame or stale or placid, never lose its fine edge. There would be mountain peak beyond mountain peak to scale together. They would be co-workers, playmates, friends and lovers all at once, and they would walk in liberty as in a bourgeois dream.

So planned Barry Briscoe, the romantic, about whose head the vision splendid always hovered, a realisable, capturable thing.

Gerda thought, "I'm happy. Poetry and drawing and Barry. I've everything I want, except a St. Bernard pup, and Kay's giving me that for Christmas. I'm happy."

It was a tingling, intense, sensuous feeling, like stretching warm before a good fire, or lying in fragrant thymy woods in June, in the old Junes when suns were hot. Life was a song and a dream and a summer morning.

"You're happy, Gerda," Neville said to her once, gladly but half wistfully, and she nodded, with her small gleaming smile.

"Go on being happy," Neville told her, and Gerda did not know that she had nearly added "for it's cost rather a lot, your happiness." Gerda seldom cared how much things had cost; she did not waste thought on such matters. She was happy.



CHAPTER XV

THE DREAM

1

Barry and Gerda were married in January in a registry office, and, as all concerned disliked wedding parties, there was no wedding party.

After they had gone, Neville, recovered now from the lilies and languors of illness, plunged into the roses and raptures of social life. One mightn't, she said to herself, be able to accomplish much in this world, or imprint one's personality on one's environment by deeds and achievements, but one could at least enjoy life, be a pleased participator in its spoils and pleasures, an enchanted spectator of its never-ending flux and pageant, its richly glowing moving pictures. One could watch the play out, even if one hadn't much of a part oneself. Music, art, drama, the company of eminent, pleasant and entertaining persons, all the various forms of beauty, the carefully cultivated richness, graces and elegances which go to build up the world of the fortunate, the cultivated, the prosperous and the well-bred—Neville walked among these like the soul in the lordly pleasure house built for her by the poet Tennyson, or like Robert Browning glutting his sense upon the world—"Miser, there waits the gold for thee!"—or Francis Thompson swinging the earth a trinket at his wrist. In truth, she was at times self-consciously afraid that she resembled all these three, whom (in the moods they thus expressed) she disliked beyond reason, finding them morbid and hard to please.

She too knew herself morbid and hard to please. If she had not been so, to be Rodney's wife would surely have been enough; it would have satisfied all her nature. Why didn't it? Was it perhaps really because, though she loved him, it was not with the uncritical devotion of the early days? She had for so many years now seen clearly, through and behind his charm, his weakness, his vanities, his scorching ambitions and jealousies, his petulant angers, his dependence on praise and admiration. She had no jealousy now of his frequent confidential intimacies with other attractive women; they were harmless enough, and he never lost the need of and dependence on her; but they may have helped to clarify her vision of him.

Rodney had no failings beyond what are the common need of human nature; he was certainly good enough for her. Their marriage was all right. It was only the foolish devil of egotism in her which goaded to unwholesome activity the other side of her nature, that need for self-expression which marriage didn't satisfy.

2

In February she suddenly tired of London and the British climate, and was moved by a desire to travel. So she went to Italy, and stayed in Capri with Nan and Stephen Lumley, who were leading on that island lives by turns gaily indolent and fiercely industrious, finding the company stimulating and the climate agreeable and soothing to Stephen's defective lungs.

From Italy Neville went to Greece. Corinth, Athens, the islands, Tempe, Delphi, Crete—how good to have money and be able to see all these! Italy and Greece are Europe's pleasure grounds; there the cultivated and the prosperous traveller may satisfy his soul and forget carking cares and stabbing ambitions, and drug himself with loveliness.

If Neville abruptly tired of it, and set her face homewards in early April, it was partly because she felt the need of Rodney, and partly because she saw, fleetingly but day by day more lucidly, that one could not take one's stand, for satisfaction of desire, on the money which one happened to have but which the majority bitterly and emptily lacked. Some common way there had to be, some freedom all might grasp, a liberty not for the bourgeois only, but for the proletariat—the poor, the sad, the gay proletariat, who also grew old and lost their dreams, and had not the wherewithal to drug their souls, unless indeed they drank much liquor, and that is but a poor artificial way to peace.

Voyaging homewards through the spring seas, Neville saw life as an entangling thicket, the Woods of Westermain she had loved in her childhood, in which the scaly dragon squatted, the craving monster self that had to be subjugated before one could walk free in the enchanted woods.

"Him shall change, transforming late, Wonderously renovate...."

Dimly discerning through the thicket the steep path that climbed to such liberty as she sought, seeing far off the place towards which her stumbling feet were set, where life should be lived with alert readiness and response, oblivious of its personal achievements, its personal claims and spoils, Neville the spoilt, vain, ambitious, disappointed egoist, strained her eyes into the distance and half smiled. It might be a dream, that liberty, but it was a dream worth a fight....



CHAPTER XVI

TIME

1

February at St. Mary's Bay. The small fire flickered and fluttered in the grate with a sound like the windy beating of wings. The steady rain sloped against the closed windows of The Gulls, and dropped patteringly on the asphalt pavements of Marine Crescent outside, and the cold grey sea tumbled moaning.

Grandmama sat in her arm-chair by the hearth, reading the Autobiography of a Cabinet Minister's Wife and listening to the fire, the sea and the rain, and sleeping a little now and again.

Mrs. Hilary sat in another arm-chair, surrounded by bad novels, as if she had been a reviewer. She was regarding them, too, with something of the reviewer's pained and inimical distaste, dipping now into one, shutting it with a sharp sigh, trying another; flinging it on the floor with an ejaculation of anger and fatigue.

Grandmama woke with a start, and said "What fell? Did something fall?" and adjusted her glasses and opened the Autobiography again.

"A sadly vulgar, untruthful and ill-written book. The sort of autobiography Gilbert's wife will write when she has time. It reminds me very much of her letters, and is, I am sure, still more like the diary which she no doubt keeps. Poor Gilbert...." Grandmama seemed to be confusing Gilbert momentarily with the Cabinet Minister. "I remember," she went on, "meeting this young woman at Oxford, in the year of the first Jubilee.... A very bright talker. They can so seldom write...." She dozed again.

"Will this intolerable day," Mrs. Hilary enquired of the housemaid who came in to make up the fire, "never be over? I suppose it will be bed-time some time...."

"It's just gone a quarter past six, ma'am," said the housemaid, offering little hope, and withdrew.

Mrs. Hilary went to the window and drew back the curtains and looked out at Marine Crescent in the gloomy, rainy twilight. The long evening stretched in front of her—the long evening which she had never learnt to use. Psycho-analysis, which had made her so much better while the course lasted, now that it was over (and it was too expensive to go on with forever) had left her worse than before. She was like a drunkard deprived suddenly of stimulants; she had nothing to turn to, no one now who took an interest in her soul. She missed Mr. Cradock and that bi-weekly hour; she was like a creeper wrenched loose from its support and flung flat on the ground. He had given her mental exercises and told her to continue them; but she had always hated mental exercises; you might as well go in for the Pelman course and have done. What one needed was a person. She was left once more face to face with time, the enemy; time, which gave itself to her lavishly with both hands when she had no use for it. There was nothing she wanted to do with time, except kill it.

"What, dear?" murmured Grandmama, as she rattled the blind tassel against the sill. "How about a game of piquet?"

But Mrs. Hilary hated piquet, and all card games, and halma, and dominoes, and everything. Grandmama used to have friends in to play with her, or the little maid. This evening she rang for the little maid, May, who would rather have been writing to her young man, but liked to oblige the nice old lady, of whom the kitchen was fond.

It was all very well for Grandmama, Mrs. Hilary thought, stormily revolting against that placidity by the hearth. All very well for Grandmama to sit by the fire contented with books and papers and games and sleep, unbitten by the murderous hatred of time that consumed herself. Everyone always thought that about Grandmama, that things were all very well for her, and perhaps they were. For time could do little more hurt to Grandmama. She need not worry about killing time; time would kill her soon enough, if she left it alone. Time, so long to Mrs. Hilary, was short now to Grandmama, and would soon be gone. As to May, the little maid, to her time was fleeting, and flew before her face, like a bird she could never catch....

Grandmama and May were playing casino. A bitter game, for you build and others take, and your labour is but lost that builded; you sow and others reap. But Grandmama and May were both good-tempered and ladylike. They played prettily together, age and youth.

Why did life play one these tricks, Mrs. Hilary cried within herself. What had she done to life, that it should have deserted her and left her stranded on the shores of a watering-place, empty-handed and pitiful, alone with time the enemy, and with Grandmama, for whom it was all very well?

2

In the Crescent music blared out—once more the Army, calling for strayed sheep in the rain.

"Glory for you, glory for me!" it shouted. And then, presently:

"Count—your—blessings! Count them one by one! And it will surprise you what the Lord has done!"

Grandmama, as usual, was beating time with her hand on the arm of her chair.

"Detestable creatures," said Mrs. Hilary, with acrimony, as usual.

"But a very racy tune, my dear," said Grandmama, placidly, as usual.

"Blood! Blood!" sang the Army, exultantly, as usual.

May looked happy, and her attention strayed from the game. The Army was one of the joys, one of the comic turns, of this watering-place.

"Six and two are eight," said Grandmama, and picked them up, recalling May's attention. But she herself still beat time to the merry music-hall tune and the ogreish words.

Grandmama could afford to be tolerant, as she sat there, looking over the edge into eternity, with Time, his fangs drawn, stretched sleepily behind her back. Time, who flew, bird-like, before May's pursuing feet; time, who stared balefully into Mrs. Hilary's face, returning hate for hate, rested behind Grandmama's back like a faithful steed who had carried her thus far and whose service was nearly over.

The Army moved on; its music blared away into the distance. The rain beat steadily on wet asphalt roads; the edge of the cold sea tumbled and moaned; the noise of the fire flickering was like unsteady breathing, or the soft fluttering of wings.

"Time is so long," thought Mrs. Hilary. "I can't bear it."

"Time gets on that quick," thought May. "I can't keep up with it."

"Time is dead," thought Grandmama. "What next?"



CHAPTER XVII

THE KEY

1

Not Grandmama's and not Neville's should be, after all, the last word, but Pamela's. Pamela, who seemed lightly, and as it were casually, to swing a key to the door against which Neville, among many others, beat; Pamela, going about her work, keen, debonair and detached, ironic, cool and quiet, responsive to life and yet a thought disdainful of it, lightly holding and easily renouncing; the world's lover, yet not its servant, her foot at times carelessly on its neck to prove her power over it—Pamela said blandly to Grandmama, when the old lady commented one day on her admirable composure, "Life's so short, you see. Can anything which lasts such a little while be worth making a fuss about?"

"Ah," said Grandmama, "that's been my philosophy for ten years ... only ten years. You've no business with it at your age, child."

"Age," returned Pamela, negligent and cool, "has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated. How many years we've lived on this ridiculous planet—how many more we're going to live on it—what a trifle! Age is a matter of exceedingly little importance."

"And so, you would imply, is everything else on the ridiculous planet," said Grandmama, shrewdly. Pamela smiled, neither affirming nor denying. Lightly the key seemed to swing from her open hand.

"I certainly don't see quite what all the fuss is about," said Pamela.

THE END