MRS. HILARY'S BIRTHDAY
1
They all turned up at The Gulls, St. Mary's Bay, in time for lunch on
Mrs. Hilary's birthday. It was her special wish that all those of her
children who could should do this each year. Jim, whom she preferred,
couldn't come this time; he was a surgeon; it is an uncertain profession.
The others all came; Neville and Pamela and Gilbert and Nan and with
Gilbert his wife Rosalind, who had no right there because she was only an
in-law, but if Rosalind thought it would amuse her to do anything you
could not prevent her. She and Mrs. Hilary disliked one another a good
deal, though Rosalind would say to the others, "Your darling mother!
She's priceless, and I adore her!" She would say that when she had
caught Mrs. Hilary in a mistake. She would draw her on to say she had
read a book she hadn't read (it was a point of honour with Mrs. Hilary
never to admit ignorance of any book mentioned by others) and then she
would say, "I do love you, mother! It's not out yet; I've only seen
Gilbert's review copy," and Mrs. Hilary would say, "In that case I
suppose I am thinking of another book," and Rosalind would say to Neville
or Pamela or Gilbert or Nan, "Your darling mother. I adore her!" and Nan,
contemptuous of her mother for thinking such trivial pretence worth
while, and with Rosalind for thinking malicious exposure worth while,
would shrug her shoulders and turn away.
2
All but Neville arrived by the same train from town, the one getting in
at 12.11. Neville had come from Surrey the day before and spent the
night, because Mrs. Hilary liked to have her all to herself for a little
time before the others came. After Jim, Neville was the child Mrs. Hilary
preferred. She had always been a mother with marked preferences. There
were various barriers between her and her various children; Gilbert, who
was thirty-eight, had annoyed her long ago by taking up literature as a
profession on leaving Cambridge, instead of doing what she described as
"a man's job," and later on by marrying Rosalind, who was fast, and, in
Mrs. Hilary's opinion, immoral. Pamela, who was thirty-nine and working
in a settlement in Hoxton, annoyed her by her devotion to Frances Carr,
the friend with whom she lived. Mrs. Hilary thought them very silly,
these close friendships between women. They prevented marriage, and led
to foolish fussing about one another's health and happiness. Nan annoyed
her by "getting talked about" with men, by writing books which Mrs.
Hilary found both dull and not very nice, in tone, and by her own
irritated reactions to her mother's personality. Nan, in fact, was often
rude and curt to her.
But Jim, who was a man and a doctor, a strong, good-humoured person and
her eldest son, annoyed her not at all. Nor did Neville, who was her
eldest daughter and had given her grandchildren and infinite sympathy.
Neville, knowing all these things and more, always arrived on the
evenings before her mother's birthdays, and they talked all the morning.
Mrs. Hilary was at her best with Neville. She was neither irritable nor
nervous nor showing off. She looked much less than sixty-three. She was
a tall, slight, trailing woman, with the remains of beauty, and her dark,
untidy hair was only streaked with grey. Since her husband had died, ten
years ago, she had lived at St. Mary's Bay with her mother. It had been
her old home; not The Gulls, but the vicarage, in the days when St.
Mary's Bay had been a little fishing village without an esplanade. To
old Mrs. Lennox it was the same fishing village still, and the people,
even the summer visitors, were to her the flock of her late husband, who
had died twenty years ago.
"A good many changes lately," she would say to them. "Some people think
the place is improving. But I can't say I like the esplanade."
But the visitors, unless they were very old, didn't know anything about
the changes. To them St. Mary's Bay was not a fishing village but a
seaside resort. To Mrs. Hilary it was her old home, and had healthy air
and plenty of people for her mother to gossip with and was as good a
place as any other for her to parch in like a withered flower now that
the work of her life was done. The work of her life had been making a
home for her husband and children; she had never had either the desire or
the faculties for any other work. Now that work was over, and she was
rather badly left, as she cared neither for cards, knitting, gardening,
nor intellectual pursuits. Once, seven years ago, at Neville's
instigation, she had tried London life for a time, but it had been no
use. The people she met there were too unlike her, too intelligent and up
to date; they went to meetings and concerts and picture exhibitions and
read books and talked about public affairs not emotionally but coolly and
drily; they were mildly surprised at Mrs. Hilary's vehemence of feeling
on all points, and she was strained beyond endurance by their knowledge
of facts and catholicity of interests. So she returned to St. Mary's Bay,
where she passed muster as an intelligent woman, gossiped with her
mother, the servants and their neighbours, read novels, brooded over the
happier past, walked for miles alone along the coast, and slipped every
now and then, as she had slipped even in youth, over the edge of
emotionalism into hysterical passion or grief. Her mother was no use at
such times; she only made her worse, sitting there in the calm of old
age, looking tranquilly at the end, for her so near that nothing
mattered. Only Jim or Neville were of any use then.
Neville on the eve of this her sixty-third birthday soothed one such
outburst. The tedium of life, with no more to do in it--why couldn't it
end? The lights were out, the flowers were dead--and yet the unhappy
actors had to stay and stay and stay, idling on the empty, darkened
stage. (That was how Mrs. Hilary, with her gift for picturesque language,
put it.) _Must_ it be empty, _must_ it be dark, Neville uselessly asked,
knowing quite well that for one of her mother's temperament it must. Mrs.
Hilary had lived in and by her emotions; nothing else had counted. Life
for her had burnt itself out, and its remnant was like the fag end of a
cigarette, stale and old.
"Shall I feel like that in twenty years?" Neville speculated aloud.
"I hope," said Mrs. Hilary, "that you won't have lost Rodney. So long as
you have him...."
"But if I haven't...."
Neville looked down the years; saw herself without Rodney, perhaps
looking after her mother, who would then have become (strange, incredible
thought, but who could say?) calm with the calm of age; Kay and Gerda
married or working or both.... What then? Only she was better equipped
than her mother for the fag end of life; she had a serviceable brain and
a sound education. She wouldn't pass empty days at a seaside resort. She
would work at something, and be interested. Interesting work and
interesting friends--her mother, by her very nature, could have neither,
but was just clever enough to feel the want of them. The thing was to
start some definite work _now_, before it was too late.
"Did Grandmama go through it?" Neville asked her mother.
"Oh, I expect so. I was selfish; I was wrapped up in home and all of you;
I didn't notice. But I think she had it badly, for a time, when first she
left the vicarage.... She's contented now."
They both looked at Grandmama, who was playing patience on the sofa and
could not hear their talking for the sound of the sea. Yes, Grandmama was
(apparently) contented now.
"There's work," mused Neville, thinking of the various links with life,
the rafts, rather, which should carry age over the cold seas of tedious
regret. "And there's natural gaiety. And intellectual interests. And
contacts with other people--permanent contacts and temporary ones. And
beauty. All those things. For some people, too, there's religion."
"And for all of us food and drink," said Mrs. Hilary, sharply. "Oh,
I suppose you think I've no right to complain, as I've got all those
things, except work."
But Neville shook her head, knowing that this was a delusion of her
mother's, and that she had, in point of fact, none of them, except the
contacts with people, which mostly either over-strained, irritated or
bored her, and that aspect of religion which made her cry. For she was
a Unitarian, and thought the Gospels infinitely sad and the souls of the
departed most probably so merged in God as to be deprived of all
individuality.
"It's better to be High Church or Roman Catholic and have services, or
an Evangelical and have the Voice of God," Neville decided. And, indeed,
it is probable that Mrs. Hilary would have been one or other of these
things if it had not been for her late husband, who had disapproved of
superstition and had instructed her in the Higher Thought and the Larger
Hope.
3
Though heaviness endured for the night, joy came in the morning, as is
apt to happen where there is sea air. Mrs. Hilary on her birthday had
a revulsion to gaiety, owing to a fine day, her unstable temperament,
letters, presents and being made a fuss of. Also Grandmama said, when
she went up to see her after breakfast, "This new dress suits you
particularly, my dear child. It brings out the colour in your eyes," and
everyone likes to hear that when they are sixty-three or any other age.
So, when the rest of her children arrived, Mrs. Hilary was ready for
them.
They embraced her in turn; Pamela, capable, humorous and intelligent,
the very type of the professional woman at her best, but all the time
preferring Frances Carr, anxious about her because she was overworking
and run down; Nan, her extravagant present in her hands, on fire to
protect her mother against old age, depression and Rosalind, yet knowing
too how soon she herself would be smouldering with irritation; Gilbert,
spare and cynical, writer of plays and literary editor of the Weekly
Critic, and with him his wife Rosalind, whom Mrs. Hilary had long since
judged as a voluptuous rake who led men on and made up unseemly stories
and her lovely face, but who insisted on coming to The Gulls with Gilbert
to see his adorable mother. Rosalind, who was always taking up
things--art, or religion, or spiritualism, or young men--and dropping
them when they bored her, had lately taken up psycho-analysis. She was
studying what she called her mother-in-law's "case," looking for and
finding complexes in her past which should account for her somewhat
unbalanced present.
"I've never had complexes," Mrs. Hilary would declare, indignantly, as if
they had been fleas or worse, and indeed when Rosalind handled them they
_were_ worse, much. From Rosalind Mrs. Hilary got the most unpleasant
impression possible (which is to say a good deal) of psycho-analysts.
"They have only one idea, and that is a disgusting one," she would
assert, for she could only rarely and with difficulty see more than one
idea in anything, particularly when it was a disgusting one. Her mind was
of that sort--tenacious, intolerant, and not many-sided. That was where
(partly where) she fell foul of her children, who saw sharply and clearly
all around things and gave to each side its value. They knew Mrs. Hilary
to be a muddled bigot, whose mind was stuffed with concrete instances and
insusceptible of abstract reason. If anyone had asked her what she knew
of psycho-analysis, she would have replied, in effect, that she knew
Rosalind, and that was enough, more than enough, of psycho-analysis for
her. She had also looked into Freud, and rightly had been disgusted.
"A man who spits deliberately onto his friends' stairs, on purpose to
annoy the servants ... that is enough, the rest follows. The man is
obviously a loathsome and indecent vulgarian. It comes from being a
German, no doubt." Which settled that; and if anyone murmured "An
Austrian," she would say, "It comes to the same thing, in questions of
breeding." Mrs. Hilary, like Grandmama, settled people and things very
quickly and satisfactorily.
They all sat in the front garden after lunch and looked out over the
wonderful shining sea. Grandmama sat in her wheeled chair, Tchekov's
Letters on her knees. She had made Mrs. Hilary get this book from Mudie's
because she had read favourable reviews of it by Gilbert and Nan.
Grandmama was a cleverish old lady, cleverer than her daughter.
"Jolly, isn't it," said Gilbert, seeing the book.
"Very entertaining," said Grandmama, and Mrs. Hilary echoed "Most," at
which Grandmama eyed her with a twinkle, knowing that it bored her, like
all the Russians. Mrs. Hilary cared nothing for style ("Literature!" said
Lady Adela. "Give _me_ something to _read_!"); she liked nice lifelike
books about people as she believed them to be, and though she was quite
prepared to believe that real Russians were like Russians in books, she
felt that she did not care to meet either of them. But Mrs. Hilary had
learnt that intelligent persons seldom liked the books which seemed to
her to be about real, natural people, any more than they admired the
pictures which struck her as being like things as they were. Though she
thought those who differed from her profoundly wrong, she never admitted
ignorance of the books they admired. For she was in a better position to
differ from them about a book if she had nominally read it--and really it
didn't matter if she had actually done so or not, for she knew beforehand
what she would think of it if she had. So well she knew this, indeed,
that the line between the books she had and hadn't read was, even in her
own mind, smudgy and vague, not hard and clear as with most people. Often
when she had seen reviews which quoted extracts she thought she had read
the book, just as some people, when they have seen publishers'
advertisements, think they have seen reviews, and declare roundly in
libraries that a book is out when it lacks a month of publication.
Mrs. Hilary, having thus asserted her acquaintance with Tchekov's
Letters, left Gilbert, Grandmama and Neville to talk about it together,
and herself began telling the others how disappointed Jim had been that
he could not come for her birthday.
"He was passionately anxious to come," she said, in her clear, vibrating
voice, that struck a different note when she mentioned each one of
her children, so that you always knew which she meant. "He never
misses to-day if he can possibly help it. But he simply couldn't get
away.... One of these tremendously difficult new operations, that hardly
anyone can do. His work must come first, of course. He wouldn't be Jim if
it didn't."
"Fancy knifing people in town a day like this," said Rosalind, stretching
her large, lazy limbs in the sun. Rosalind was big and fair, and
sensuously alive.
Music blared out from the parade. Gilbert, adjusting his glasses,
observed its circumstances, with his air of detached, fastidious
interest.
"The Army," he remarked. "The Army calling for strayed sheep."
"Oh," exclaimed Rosalind, raising herself, "wouldn't I love to go out and
be saved! I _was_ saved once, when I was eleven. It was one of my first
thrills. I felt I was blacker in guilt than all creatures before me, and
I came forward and found the Lord. Afraid I had a relapse rather soon,
though."
"Horrible vulgarians," Mrs. Hilary commented, really meaning Rosalind at
the age of eleven. "They have meetings on the parade every morning now.
The police ought to stop it."
Grandmama was beating time with her hand on the arm of her chair to the
merry music-hall tune and the ogreish words.
"Blood! Blood!
Rivers of blood for you,
Oceans of blood for me!
All that the sinner has got to do
Is to plunge into that Red Sea.
Clean! Clean!
Wash and be clean!
Though filthy and black as a sweep you've been,
The waves of that sea shall make you clean...."
"That," Mrs. Hilary asserted, with disgust, "is a _most_ disagreeable way
of worshipping God." She was addicted to these undeniable statements,
taking nothing for granted.
"But a very racy tune, my dear," said Grandmama, "though the words are
foolish and unpleasing."
Gilbert said, "A stimulating performance. If we don't restrain her,
Rosalind will be getting saved again."
He was proud of Rosalind's vitality, whimsies and exuberances.
Rosalind, who had a fine rolling voice, began reciting "General Booth
enters into heaven," by Mr. Vachell Lindsay, which Mrs. Hilary found
disgusting.
"A wonderful man," said Grandmama, who had been reading the General's
life in two large volumes. "Though mistaken about many things. And his
Life would have been more interesting if it had been written by Mr.
Lytton Strachey instead of Mr. Begbie; he has a better touch on our great
religious leaders. Your grandfather," added Grandmama, "always got on
well with the Army people. He encouraged them. The present vicar does
not. He says their methods are deplorable and their goal a delusion."
Rosalind said "Their methods are entrancing and their goal the Lord. What
more does he want? Clergymen are so narrow. That's why I had to give up
being a churchwoman."
Rosalind had been a churchwoman (high) for nine months some six years
ago, just after planchette and just before flag days. She had decided,
after this brief trial, that incense and confessions, though immensely
stimulating, did not weigh down the balance against early mass, Lent, and
being thrown with other churchwomen.
4
"What about a bathe?" Neville suggested to all of them. "Mother?"
Mrs. Hilary, a keen bather, agreed. They all agreed except Grandmama, who
was going out in her donkey chair instead, as one does at eighty-four.
They all went down to the beach, where the Army still sang of the Red
Sea, and where the blue high tide clapped white hands on brown sand.
One by one they emerged from tents and sprang through the white leaping
edge into the rocking blue, as other bathers were doing all round the
bay. When Mrs. Hilary came out of her tent, Neville was waiting for her,
poised like a slim girl, knee-deep in tumbling waves, shaking the water
from her eyes.
"Come, mother. I'll race you out."
Mrs. Hilary waded in, a figure not without grace and dignity. Looking
back they saw Rosalind coming down the beach, large-limbed and splendid,
like Juno. Mrs. Hilary shrugged her shoulders.
"Disgusting," she remarked to Neville.
So much more, she meant, of Rosalind than of Rosalind's costume. Mrs.
Hilary preferred it to be the other way about, for, though she did not
really like either of them, she disliked the costume less than she
disliked Rosalind.
"It's quite in the fashion," Neville assured her, and Mrs. Hilary,
remarking that she was sure of that, splashed her head and face and
pushed off, mainly to escape from Rosalind, who always sat in the foam,
not being, like the Hilary family, an active swimmer.
Already Pamela and Gilbert were far out, swimming steadily against each
other, and Nan was tumbling and turning like an eel close behind them.
Neville and Mrs. Hilary swam out a little way.
"I shall now float on my back," said Mrs. Hilary. "You swim on and catch
up with the rest."
"You'll be all right?" Neville asked, lingering.
"Why shouldn't I be all right? I bathe nearly every day, you know, even
if I am sixty-three." This was not accurate; she only bathed as a rule
when it was warm, and this seldom occurs on our island coasts.
Neville, saying, "Don't stop in long, will you," left her and swam out
into the blue with her swift, over-hand stroke. Neville was the best
swimmer in a swimming family. She clove the water like a torpedo
destroyer, swift and untiring between the hot summer sun and the cool
summer sea. She shouted to the others, caught them up, raced them and
won, and then they began to duck each other. When the Hilary brothers
and sisters were swimming or playing together, they were even as they had
been twenty years ago.
Mrs. Hilary watched them, swimming slowly round, a few feet out of her
depth. They seemed to have forgotten her and her birthday. The only one
who was within speaking distance was Rosalind, wallowing with her big
white limbs in tumbling waves on the shore; Rosalind, whom she disliked;
Rosalind, who was more than her costume, which was not saying much;
Rosalind, before whom she had to keep up an appearance of immense
enjoyment because Rosalind was so malicious.
"You wonderful woman! I can't think how you _do_ it," Rosalind was crying
to her in her rich, ripe voice out of the splashing waves. "But fancy
their all swimming out and leaving you to yourself. Why, you might get
cramp and sink. _I'm_ no use, you know; I'm hopeless; can't keep up at
all."
"I shan't trouble you, thank you," Mrs. Hilary called back, and her voice
shook a little because she was getting chilled.
"Why, you're shivering," Rosalind cried. "Why don't you come out? You
_are_ wonderful, I do admire you.... It's no use waiting for the others,
they'll be ages.... I say, look at Neville; fancy her being forty-three.
I never knew such a family.... Come and sit in the waves with me, it's
lovely and warm."
"I prefer swimming," said Mrs. Hilary, and she was shivering more now.
She never stayed in so long as this; she usually only plunged in and came
out.
Grandmama, stopping on the esplanade in her donkey chair, was waving and
beckoning to her. Grandmama knew she had been in too long, and that her
rheumatism would be bad.
"_Come out, dear_," Grandmama called, in her old thin voice. "_Come out.
You've been in far too long._"
Mrs. Hilary only waved her hand to Grandmama. She was not going to come
out, like an old woman, before the others did, the others, who had swum
out and left her alone on her birthday bathe.
They were swimming back now, first all in a row, then one behind the
other; Neville leading, with her arrowy drive, Gilbert and Pamela behind,
so alike, with their pale, finely cut, intellectual faces, and their
sharp chins cutting through the sea, and their quick, short, vigorous
strokes, and Nan, still far out, swimming lazily on her back, the sun
in her eyes.
Mrs. Hilary's heart stirred to see her swimming brood, so graceful and
strong and swift and young. They possessed, surely, everything that was
in the heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water over the
earth. And she, who was sixty-three, possessed nothing. She could not
even swim with her children. They might have thought of that, and stayed
with her.... Neville, anyhow. Jim would have, said Mrs. Hilary to
herself, half knowing and half not knowing that she was lying.
"_Come out, dear!_" called Grandmama from the esplanade. "_You'll be
ill!_"
Back they came, Neville first. Neville, seeing from afar her mother's
blue face, called "Mother dear, how cold you are! You shouldn't have
stayed in so long!"
"I was waiting," Mrs. Hilary said, "for you."
"Oh why, dear?"
"Don't know. I thought I would.... It's pretty poor fun," Mrs. Hilary
added, having failed after trying not to, "bathing all alone on one's
birthday."
Neville gave a little sigh, and gently propelled her mother to the shore.
She hadn't felt like this on _her_ birthday, when Kay and Gerda had gone
off to some avocation of their own and left her in the garden. Many
things she had felt on her birthday, but not this. It is an undoubted
truth that people react quite differently to birthdays.
Rosalind rose out of the foam like Aphrodite, grandly beautiful, though
all the paint was washed off her face and lips.
"Wonderful people," she apostrophised the shore-coming family. "Anyone
would think you were all nineteen. _I_ was the only comfy one."
Rosalind was always talking about age, emphasizing it, as if it were very
important.
They hurried up to the tents, and last of all came Nan, riding in to
shore on a swelling wave and lying full length where it flung her, for
the joy of feeling the wet sand sucking away beneath her.
5
Grandmama, waiting for them on the esplanade, was angry with Mrs. Hilary.
"My dear child, didn't you hear me call? You're perfectly blue. You
_know_ you never stay in more than five minutes. Neville, you should have
seen that she didn't. Now you'll get your rheumatism back, child, and
only yourself to thank. It's too silly. People of sixty-three carrying
on as if they were fifty; I've no patience with it."
"They all swam out," said Mrs. Hilary, who, once having succumbed to the
impulse to adopt this attitude, could not check it. "I waited for them."
Grandmama, who was cross, said "Very silly of you and very selfish of the
children. Now you'd better go to bed with hot bottles and a posset."
But Mrs. Hilary, though she felt the red-hot stabbings of an attack of
rheumatism already beginning, stayed up. She was happier now, because the
children were making a fuss of her, suggesting remedies and so on. She
would stay up, and show them she could be plucky and cheerful even with
rheumatism. A definite thing, like illness or pain, always put her on her
mettle; it was so easy to be brave when people knew you had something to
be brave about, and so hard when they didn't.
They had an early tea, and then Gilbert and Rosalind, who were going out
to dinner, caught the 5.15 back to town. Rosalind's departure made Mrs.
Hilary more cheerful still. She soared into her gayest mood, and told
them amusing stories of the natives, and how much she and Grandmama
shocked some of them.
"All the same, dear," said Grandmama presently, "you know you often enjoy
a chat with your neighbours very much. You'd be bored to death with no
one to gossip with."
But Neville's hand, slipping into her mother's, meant "You shall adopt
what pose you like on your birthday, darling. If you like to be too
clever for anyone else in the Bay so that they bore you to tears and you
shock them to fits--well, you shall, and we'll believe you."
Nan, listening sulkily to what she called to herself "mother's swank,"
for a moment almost preferred Rosalind, who was as frank and unposturing
as an animal; Rosalind, with her malicious thrusts and her corrupt mind
and her frank feminine greediness. For Rosalind, anyhow, didn't pretend
to herself, though she did undoubtedly, when for any reason it suited
her, lie to other people. Mrs. Hilary's lying went all through, deep
down; it sprang out of the roots of her being, so that all the time she
was making up, not only for others but for herself, a sham person who did
not exist. That Nan found infinitely oppressive. So did Pamela, but
Pamela was more tolerant and sympathetic and less ill-tempered than Nan,
and observed the ways of others with quiet, ironic humour, saying nothing
unkind. Pamela, when she didn't like a way of talking--when Rosalind, for
instance, was being malicious or indecent or both--would skilfully carry
the talk somewhere else. She could be a rapid and good talker, and could
tell story after story, lightly and coolly, till danger points were past.
Pamela was beautifully bred; she had _savoir-faire_ as well as kindness,
and never lost control of herself. These family gatherings really bored
her a little, because her work and interests lay elsewhere, but she would
never admit or show it. She was kind even to Rosalind, though cool. She
had always been kind and cool to Rosalind, because Gilbert was her
special brother, and when he had married this fast, painted and
unHilaryish young woman, she had seen the necessity for taking firm hold
of an attitude in the matter and retaining it. No one, not even Neville,
not even Frances Carr, had ever seen behind Pamela's guard where Rosalind
was concerned. When Nan abused Rosalind, Pamela would say "Don't be a
spitfire, child. What's the use?" and change the subject. For Rosalind
was, in Pamela's view, one of the things which were a pity but didn't
really matter, so long as she didn't make Gilbert unhappy. And Gilbert,
so far, was absurdly pleased and proud about her, in spite of occasional
disapprovals of her excessive intimacies with others.
But, whatever they all felt about Rosalind, there was no doubt that the
family party was happier for her departure. The departure of in-laws,
even when they are quite nice in-laws, often has this effect on family
parties. Mrs. Hilary had her three daughters to herself--the girls, as
she still called them. She felt cosy and comforted, though in pain, lying
on the sofa by the bay window in the warm afternoon sunshine, while
Grandmama looked at the London Mercury, which had just come by the post,
and the girls talked.
6
Their voices rose and fell against the soft splashing of the sea;
Neville's, sweet and light, with pretty cadences, Pamela's, crisp, quick
and decided, Nan's, trailing a little, almost drawling sometimes. The
Hilary voices were all thin, not rich and full-bodied, like Rosalind's.
Mrs. Hilary's was thin, like Grandmama's.
"Nice voices," thought Mrs. Hilary, languidly listening. "Nice children.
But what nonsense they often talk."
They were talking now about the Minority Report of some committee, which
had been drafted by Rodney. Rodney and the Minority and Neville and
Pamela and Nan were all interested in what Mrs. Hilary called "This
Labour nonsense which is so fashionable now." Mrs. Hilary herself, being
unfashionable, was anti-Labour, since it was apparent to her that the
working classes had already more power, money and education than was good
for them, sons of Belial, flown with insolence and bonuses. Grandmama,
being so nearly out of it all, was used only to say, in reply to these
sentiments, "It will make no difference in the end. We shall all be the
same in the grave, and in the life beyond. All these movements are very
interesting, but the world goes round just the same." It was all very
well for Grandmama to be philosophical; _she_ wouldn't have to live for
years ruled and triumphed over by her own gardener, which was the way
Mrs. Hilary saw it.
Mrs. Hilary began to get angry, hearing the girls talking in this silly
way. Of course it was natural that Neville should agree with Rodney; but
Pamela had picked up foolish ideas from working among the poor and living
with Frances Carr, and Nan was, as usual, merely wrong-headed, childish
and perverse.
Suddenly she broke out, losing her temper, as she often did when she
disagreed with people's politics, for she did not take a calm and
tolerant view of these things.
"I never heard such stuff in my life. I disagree with every word you've
all said."
She always disagreed in bulk, like that. It seemed simpler than arguing
separate points, and took less time and knowledge. She saw Neville
wrinkling her broad forehead, doubtfully, as if wondering how the subject
could most easily be changed, and that annoyed her.
Nan said, "You mean you disagree with the Report. Which clauses of it?"
and there was that soft viciousness in her voice which showed that she
knew Mrs. Hilary had not even read the Minority Report, or the Majority
Report either. Nan was spiteful; always trying to prove that her mother
didn't know what she was talking about; always trying to pin her down on
points of detail. Like the people with whom Mrs. Hilary had failed to get
on during her brief sojourn in London; they too had always shunned
general disputes about opinion and sentiment, such as were carried on
with profit in St. Mary's Bay, and pinned the discussion down to hard
facts, about which the Bay's information was inaccurate and incomplete.
As if you didn't know when you disagreed with a thing's whole drift,
whether you had read it or not.... Mrs. Hilary had never had any head for
facts.
"It's the whole idea," she said, hotly. "And I detest all these Labour
people. Vile creatures.... Of course I don't mean people like Rodney--the
University men. They're merely amateurs. But these dreadful Trades Union
men, with their walrus moustaches.... Why can't they shave, like other
people, if they want to be taken for gentlemen?"
Neville told her, chaffingly, that she was a mass of prejudice.
Grandmama, who had fallen asleep and dropped the London Mercury onto the
floor, diverted the conversation by waking up and remarking that it
seemed a less interesting number than usual on the whole, though some of
the pieces of poetry were pretty, and that Mrs. Hilary ought not to lie
under the open window.
Mrs. Hilary, who was getting worse, admitted that she had better be in
bed.
"I hope," said Grandmama, "that it will be a lesson to you, dear, not to
stay in the water so long again, even if you do want to show off before
your daughter-in-law." Grandmama, who disliked Rosalind, usually called
her to Mrs. Hilary "your daughter-in-law," saddling her, so to speak,
with the responsibility for Gilbert's ill-advised marriage. To her
grandchildren she would refer to Rosalind as "your sister-in-law," or
"poor Gilbert's wife."
"The bathe was worth it," said Mrs. Hilary, swinging up to high spirits
again. "It was a glorious bathe. But I _have_ got rheumatics."
So Neville stayed on at The Gulls that night, to massage her mother's
joints, and Pamela and Nan went back to Hoxton and Chelsea by the evening
train. Pamela had supper, as usual, with Frances Carr, and Nan with Barry
Briscoe, and they both talked and talked, about all the things you don't
talk of in families but only to friends.
7
Neville meanwhile was saying to Grandmama in the drawing-room at The
Gulls, after Mrs. Hilary had gone to bed, "I wish mother could get some
regular interest or occupation. She would be much happier. Are there no
jobs for elderly ladies in the Bay?"
"As many in the Bay," said Grandmama, up in arms for the Bay, "as
anywhere else. Sick-visiting, care committees, boys' and girls' classes,
and so on. I still keep as busy as I am able, as you know."
Neville did know. "If mother could do the same...."
"Mother can't. She's never been a rector's wife, as I have, and she
doesn't care for such jobs. Mother never did care for any kind of work
really, even as a girl. She married when she was nineteen and found the
only work she was fitted for and interested in. That's over, and there's
no other she can turn to. It's common enough, child, with women. They
just have to make the best of it, and muddle through somehow till the
end."
"You were different, Grandmama, weren't you? I mean, you were never at a
loss for things to do."
Grandmama's thin, delicate face hardened for a moment into grim lines.
"At a loss--yes, I was what you call at a loss twenty years ago, when
your grandfather died. The meaning was gone out of life, you see. I was
sixty-four. For two years I was cut adrift from everything, and did
nothing but brood and find trivial occupations to pass the time somehow.
I lived on memories and emotions; I was hysterical and peevish and bored.
Then I realised it wouldn't do; that I might have twenty years and more
of life before me, and that I must do something with it. So I took up
again all of my old work that I could. It was the hardest thing I ever
did. I hated it at first. Then I got interested again, and it has kept me
going all these years, though I've had to drop most of it now of course.
But now I'm so near the end that it doesn't matter. You can drop work at
eighty and keep calm and interested in life. You can't at sixty; it's
too young.... Mother knows that too, but there seems no work she can do.
She doesn't care for parish work as I do; she never learnt any art or
craft or handiwork, and doesn't want to; she was never much good at
intellectual work of any kind, and what mind she had as a girl--and her
father and I did try to train her to use it--ran all to seed during her
married life, so it's pretty nearly useless now. She spent herself on
your father and all you children, and now she's bankrupt."
"Poor darling mother," Neville murmured.
Grandmama nodded. "Just so. She's left to read novels, gossip with stupid
neighbours, look after me, write to you children, go on walks, and brood
over the past. She would have been quite happy like that forty years ago.
The young have high spirits, and can amuse themselves without work. She
never wanted work when she was eighteen. It's the old who need work.
They've lost their spring and their zest for life, and need something to
hold on to. It's all wrong, the way we arrange it--making the young work
and the old sit idle. It should be the other way about. Girls and boys
don't get bored with perpetual holidays; they live each moment of them
hard; they would welcome the eternal Sabbath; and indeed I trust we shall
all do that, as our youth is to be renewed like eagles. But old age on
this earth is far too sad to do nothing in. Remember that, child, when
your time comes."
"Why, yes. But when one's married, you know, it's not so easy, keeping up
with a job. I only wish I could.... I don't _like_ being merely a married
woman. Rodney isn't merely a married man, after all.... But anyhow I'll
find something to amuse my old age, even if I can't work. I'll play
patience or croquet or the piano, or all three, and I'll go to theatres
and picture shows and concerts and meetings in the Albert Hall. Mother
doesn't do any of those things. And she _is_ so unhappy so often."
"Oh very. Very unhappy. Very often.... She should come to church
more. This Unitarianism is depressing. No substance in it. I'd rather
be a Papist and keep God in a box. Or belong to the Army and sing
about rivers of blood. I daresay both are satisfying. All this
sermon-on-the-mount-but-no-miracle business is most saddening. Because
it's about impossibilities. You can receive a sacrament, and you can find
salvation, but you can't live the sermon on the mount. So of course it
makes people discontented."
Grandmama, who often in the evenings became a fluent though drowsy
talker, might have wandered on like this till her bed-time, had not Mrs.
Hilary here appeared, in her dressing-gown. She sat down, and said,
trying to sound natural and not annoyed and failing. "I heard so much
talk, I thought I would come down and be in it. I thought you were coming
up to me again directly, Neville. I hadn't realised you meant to stay
down and talk to Grandmama instead."
She hated Neville or any of them, but especially Neville, to talk
intimately to Grandmama; it made her jealous. She tried and tried not to
feel this, but it was never any use her fighting against jealousy, it was
too strong for her.
Grandmama said placidly, "Neville and I were discussing different forms
of religion."
"Is Neville thinking of adopting one of them?" Mrs. Hilary enquired, her
jealousy making her sound sarcastic and scornful.
"No, mother. Not at present.... Come back to bed, and I'll sit with you,
and we'll talk. I don't believe you should be up."
"Oh, I see I've interrupted. It was the last thing I meant. No, Neville,
I'll go back to my room alone. You go on with your talk with Grandmama.
I hate interrupting like this. I hoped you would have let me join. I
don't get much of you in these days, after all. But stay and talk to
Grandmama."
That was the point at which Nan would have sworn to herself and gone down
to the beach. Neville did neither. She was gentle and soothing, and
Grandmama was infinitely untroubled, and Mrs. Hilary presently picked up
her spirits and went back to bed, and Neville spent the evening with her.
These little scenes had occurred so often that they left only a slight
impression on those concerned and slightest of all on Mrs. Hilary.
8
When Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were both settled for the night (old and
elderly people settle for the night--other people go to bed) Neville went
down to the seashore and lay on the sand, watching the moon rise over the
sea.
Beauty was there, rather than in elderly people. But in elderly people
was such pathos, such tragedy, such pity, that they lay like a heavy
weight on one's soul. If one could do anything to help....
To be aimless: to live on emotions and be by them consumed: that was
pitiful. To have done one's work for life, and to be in return cast aside
by life like a broken tool: that was tragic.
The thing was to defy life; to fly in the face of the fool nature, break
her absurd rules, and wrest out of the breakage something for oneself by
which to live at the last.
Neville flung her challenge to the black sea that slowly brightened under
the moon's rising eye.