Dangerous Ages Part 5

"You've had twenty-two years of it, darling," Neville said. "Now I must Live my own Life, as the Victorians used to put it. I must be a doctor; quite seriously I must. I want it. It's my job. The only one I could ever really have been much good at. The sight of human bones or a rabbit's brain thrills me, as the sight of a platform and a listening audience thrills you, or as pen and paper (I suppose) thrill the children. You ought to be glad I don't want to write. Our family seems to run to that as a rule."

"But," Rodney said, "you don't mean ever to _practise_, surely? You won't have time for it, with all the other things you do."

"It's the other things I shan't have time for, old man. Sorry, but there it is.... It's all along of mother, you see. She's such an object lesson in how not to grow old. If she'd been a doctor, now...."

"She couldn't have been a doctor, possibly. She hasn't the head. On the other hand, you've got enough head to keep going without the slavery of a job like this, even when you're old."

"I'm not so sure. My brain isn't what it was; it may soften altogether unless I do something with it before it's too late. Then there I shall be, a burden to myself and everyone else.... After all, Rodney, you've your job. Can't I have mine? Aren't you a modern, an intellectual and a feminist?"

Rodney, who believed with truth that he was all these things, gave in.

Kay and Gerda, with the large-minded tolerance of their years, thought mother's scheme was all right and rather sporting, if she really liked the sort of thing, which they, for their part, didn't.

So Neville recommenced medical study, finding it difficult beyond belief.

It made her head ache.

2

She envied Kay and Gerda, as they all three lay and worked in the garden, with chocolates, cigarettes and Esau grouped comfortably round them. Kay was reading economics for his Tripos, Gerda was drawing pictures for her poems; neither, apparently, found any difficulty in concentrating on their work when they happened to want to.

What, Neville speculated, her thoughts, as usual, wandering from her book, would become of Gerda? She was a clever child at her own things, though with great gaps in her equipment of knowledge, which came from ignoring at school those of her studies which had not seemed to her of importance. She had firmly declined a University education; she had decided that it was not a fruitful start in life, and was also afraid of getting an academic mind. But at economic and social subjects, at drawing and at writing, she worked without indolence, taking them earnestly, still young enough to believe it important that she should attain proficiency.

Neville, on the other hand, was indolent. For twenty-two years she had pleased herself, done what she wanted when she wanted to, played the flirt with life. And now she had become soft-willed. Now, sitting in the garden with her books, like Gerda and Kay, she would find that the volumes had slipped from her knee and that she was listening to the birds in the elms. Or she would fling them aside and get up and stretch herself, and stroll into the little wood beyond the garden, or down to the river, or she would propose tennis, or go up to town for some meeting or concert or to see someone, though she didn't really want to, having quite enough of London during that part of the year when they lived there. She only went up now because otherwise she would be working. At this rate she would never be ready to resume her medical course in the autumn.

"I will attend. I will. I will," she whispered to herself, a hand pressed to each temple to constrain her mind. And for five minutes she would attend, and then she would drift away on a sea of pleasant indolence, and time fluttered away from her like an escaping bird, and she knew herself for a light woman who would never excel. And Kay's brown head was bent over his book, and raised sometimes to chaff or talk, and bent over his books again, the thread of his attention unbroken by his easy interruptions. And Gerda's golden head lay pillowed in her two clasped hands, and she stared up at the blue through the green and did nothing at all, for that was often Gerda's unashamed way.

Often Rodney sat in the garden too and worked. And his work Neville felt that she too could have done; it was work needing initiative and creative thought, work suitable to his forty-five years, not cramming in knowledge from books. Neville at times thought that she too would stand for parliament one day. A foolish, childish game it was, and probably really therefore more in her line than solid work.

3

Nan came down in July to stay with them. While she was there, Barry Briscoe, who was helping with a W.E.A. summer school at Haslemere, would come over on Sundays and spend the day with them. Not even the rains of July 1920 made Barry weary or depressed. His eyes were bright behind his gla.s.ses; his hands were usually full of papers, committee reports, agenda, and the other foods he fed on, unsatiated and unabashed. Barry was splendid. What ardour, what enthusiasm, burning like beacons in a wrecked world! So wrecked a world that all but the very best and the very worst had given it up as a bad job; the best because they hoped on, hoped ever, the worst because of the pickings that fall to such as they out of the collapsing ruins. But Barry, from the very heart of the ruin, would cry "Here is what we must do," and his eyes would gleam with faith and resolution, and he would form a committee and act. And when he saw how the committee failed, as committees will, and how little good it all was, he would laugh ruefully and try something else. Barry, as he would tell you frankly--if you enquired, not otherwise,--believed in G.o.d. He was the son of a famous Quaker philanthropist, and had been brought up to see good works done and even garden cities built. I am aware that this must prejudice many people against Barry; and indeed many people were annoyed by certain aspects of him. But, as he was intellectually brilliant and personally attractive, these people were as a rule ready to overlook what they called the Quaker oats. Nan, who overlooked nothing, was frankly at war with him on some points, and he with her. Nan, cynical, clear-eyed, selfish and blase, cared nothing for the salvaging of what remained of the world out of the wreck, nothing for the I.L.P., less than nothing for garden cities, philanthropy, the W.E.A., and G.o.d. And committees she detested. Take them all away, and there remained Barry Briscoe, and for him she did not care nothing.

It was the oddest friendship, thought Neville, observing how, when Barry was there, all Nan's perversities and moods fell away, leaving her as agreeable as he. Her keen and ironic intelligence met his, and they so understood each other that they finished each other's sentences, and others present could only with difficulty keep up with them. Neville believed them to be in love, but did not know whether they had ever informed one another of the fact. They might still be pretending to one another that their friendship was merely one of those affectionate intellectual intimacies of which some of us have so many and which are so often misunderstood. Or they might not. It was entirely their business, either way.

Barry was a chatterbox. He lay on the lawn and rooted up daisies and made them into ridiculous chains, and talked and talked and talked.

Rodney and Neville and Nan talked too, and Kay would lunge in with the crude and charming dogmatics of his years. But Gerda, chewing a blade of gra.s.s, lay idle and withdrawn, her fair brows unpuckered by the afternoon sun (because it was July, 1920), her blue eyes on Barry, who was so different; or else she would be withdrawn but not idle, for she would be drawing houses tumbling down, or men on stilts, fantastic and proud, or goblins, or geese running with outstretched necks round a green. Or she would be writing something like this:

"I Float on the tide, In the rain.

I am the starfish vomited up by the retching cod.

He thinks That I am he.

But I know.

That he is I.

For the creature is far greater than its G.o.d."

(Gerda was of those who think it is rather chic to have one rhyme in your poem, just to show that you can do it.)

"That child over there makes one feel so cheap and ridiculous, jabbering away."

That was Barry, breaking off to look at Gerda where she lay on her elbows on a rug, idle and still. "And it's not," he went on, "that she doesn't know about the subject, either. I've heard her on it."

He threw the daisy chain he had just made at her, so that it alighted on her head, hanging askew over one eye.

"Just like a daisy bud herself, isn't she," he commented, and raced on, forgetting her.

Neat in her person and ways, Gerda adjusted the daisy chain so that it ringed her golden head in an orderly circle. Like a daisy bud herself, Rodney agreed in his mind, his eyes smiling at her, his affection, momentarily turned that way, groping for the wild, remote little soul in her that he only vaguely and paternally knew. The little pretty. And clever, too, in her own queer, uneven way. But what _was_ she, with it all? He knew Kay, the long, sweet-tempered boy, better. For Kay represented highly civilized, pa.s.sably educated, keen-minded youth. Gerda wasn't highly civilized, was hardly pa.s.sably educated, and keen would be an inapt word for that queer, remote, woodland mind of hers.... Rodney returned to more soluble problems.

4

Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama came to Windover. Mrs. Hilary would rather have come without Grandmama, but Grandmama enjoyed the jaunt, as she called it. For eighty-four, Grandmama was wonderfully sporting. They arrived on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and rested after the journey, as is usually done by people of Grandmama's age, and often by people of Mrs. Hilary's. Sunday was full of such delicate clashings as occur when new people have joined a party. Grandmama was for morning church, and Neville drove her to it in the pony carriage. So Mrs. Hilary, not being able to endure that they should go off alone together, had to go too, though she did not like church, morning or other.

She sighed over it at lunch.

"So stuffy. So long. And the _hymns_...."

But Grandmama said, "My dear, we had David and Goliath. What more do you want?"

During David and Goliath Grandmama's head had nodded approvingly, and her thin old lips had half smiled at the valiant child with his swaggering lies about bears and lions, at the gallant child and the giant.

Mrs. Hilary, herself romantically sensible, as middle-aged ladies are, of valour and high adventure, granted Grandmama David and Goliath, but still repined at the hymns and the sermon.

"Good words, my dear, good words," Grandmama said to that. For Grandmama had been brought up not to criticise sermons, but had failed to bring up Mrs. Hilary to the same self-abnegation. The trouble with Mrs. Hilary was, and had always been, that she expected (even now) too much of life.

Grandmama expected only what she got. And Neville, wisest of all, had not listened, for she too _expected_ what she would get if she did. She was really rather like Grandmama, in her cynically patient acquiescence, only brought up in a different generation, and not to hear sermons. In the gulf of years between these two, Mrs. Hilary's restless, questing pa.s.sion fretted like unquiet waves.

5

"This Barry Briscoe," said Mrs. Hilary to Neville after lunch, as she watched Nan and he start off for a walk together. "I suppose he's in love with her?"

"I suppose so. Something of the kind, anyhow."

Mrs. Hilary said, discontentedly, "Another of Nan's married men, no doubt. She _collects_ them."

"No, Barry's not married."

Mrs. Hilary looked more interested. "Not? Oh, then it may come to something.... I wish Nan _would_ marry. It's quite time."

"Nan isn't exactly keen to, you know. She's got so much else to do."

"Fiddlesticks. You don't encourage her in such nonsense, I hope, Neville."

"I? It's not for me to encourage Nan in anything. She doesn't need it.

But as to marriage--yes, I think I wish she would do it, sometime, whenever she's ready. It would give her something she hasn't got; emotional steadiness, perhaps I mean. She squanders a bit, now. On the other hand, her writing would rather go to the wall; if she went on with it it would be against odds all the time."

"What's writing?" enquired Mrs. Hilary, with a snap of her finger and thumb. "_Writing!_"