Dangerous Ages Part 7

The most absurd stuff.... How can you children muddle your minds with it?

Besides, it isn't at all a _nice_ book for you, my child. I came on several very queer things...."

But the candid innocence of Gerda's wide blue eyes on hers transcended "nice" and "not nice."... You might as well talk like that to a wood anemone, or a wild rabbit.... If her grandmother had only known, Gerda at twenty had discussed things which Mrs. Hilary, in all her sixty-three years, had never heard mentioned. Gerda knew of things of which Mrs.

Hilary would have indignantly and sincerely denied the existence. Gerda's young mind was a cess-pool, a clear little dew-pond, according to how you looked at it. Gerda and Gerda's friends knew no inhibitions of speech or thought. They believed that the truth would make them free, and the truth about life is, from some points of view, a squalid and gross thing. But better look it in the face, thought Gerda and her contemporaries, than pretend it isn't there, as elderly people do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They went down to tea.

CHAPTER IV

ROOTS

1

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

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

Pamela entered the room on the right. A pleasant, Oxfordish room, with the brown paper and plain green curtains of the college days of these women, and Durer engravings, and sweet peas in a bowl, and Frances Carr stirring bread and milk over a gas ring. Frances Carr was small and thirty-eight, and had a nice brown face and a merry smile. Pamela was a year older and tall and straight and pale, and her ash-brown hair swept smoothly back from a broad white forehead. Her grey eyes regarded the world shrewdly and pleasantly through pince-nez. Pamela was distinguished-looking, and so well-bred that you never got through her guard; she never hurt the feelings of others or betrayed her own.

Competent she was, too, and the best organizer in Hoxton, which is to say a great deal, Hoxton needing and getting, one way and another, a good deal of organisation. Some people complained that they couldn't get to know Pamela, the guard was too complete. But Frances Carr knew her.

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

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

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

"Well, how went it? How was Mrs. c.o.x?"

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

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

The front door-bell tingled through the house.

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

"On the contrary," said Pamela, "Frances is going for _hers_ next week.

Mine is to be September this year."

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

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

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

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

But all this mothering....

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

In here it was cool and calm, soft and blurred with the smoke of their cigarettes. Frances Carr left them to talk, telling them not to be late.

When she had gone, Pamela said "I thought you were still down at Windover, Nan."

"Left it on Sat.u.r.day.... Mother and Grandmama had been there a week.

I couldn't stick it any longer. Mother was outrageously jealous, of course."

"Neville and Grandmama? Poor mother."

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

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

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