FAMILY LIFE
1
If you have broken off your medical studies at London University at the
age of twenty-one and resume them at forty-three, you will find them (one
is told) a considerably tougher job than you found them twenty-two
years before. Youth is the time to read for examinations; youth is used
to such foolishness, and takes it lightly in its stride. At thirty you
may be and probably are much cleverer than you were at twenty; you will
have more ideas and better ones, and infinitely more power of original
and creative thought; but you will not, probably, find it so easy to grip
and retain knowledge out of books and reproduce it to order. So the world
has ordained that youth shall spend laborious days in doing this, and
that middle age shall, in the main, put away these childish things, and
act and work on in spite of the information thus acquired.
Neville Bendish, who was not even in the thirties, but so near the brink
of senile decay as the forties, entered her name once more at the London
University School of Medicine, and plunged forthwith into her interrupted
studies. Her aim was to spend this summer in reacquiring such knowledge
as should prepare her for the October session. And it was difficult
beyond her imaginings. It had not been difficult twenty-two years ago;
she had worked then with pleasure and interest, and taken examinations
with easy triumph. As Kay did now at Cambridge, only more so, because she
had been cleverer than Kay. She was a vain creature, and had believed
that cleverness of hers to be unimpaired by life, until she came to try.
She supposed that if she had spent her married life in head work, her
head would never have lost the trick of it. But she hadn't. She had spent
it on Rodney and Gerda and Kay, and the interesting, amusing life led by
the wife of a man in Rodney's position, which had brought her always into
contact with people and ideas. Much more amusing than grinding at
intellectual work of her own, but it apparently caused the brain to
atrophy. And she was, anyhow, tired of doing nothing in particular. After
forty you must have your job, you must be independent of other people's
jobs, of human and social contacts, however amusing and instructive.
Rodney wasn't altogether pleased, though he understood. He wanted her
constant companionship and interest in his own work.
"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
glasses; 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 God. 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 blasé, 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 God. 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
grass, 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 god."
(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, passably educated, keen-minded youth. Gerda
wasn't highly civilized, was hardly passably 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
Saturday 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 passion
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!_"
As this seemed too vague or too large a question for Neville to answer,
she did not try to do so, and Mrs. Hilary replied to it herself.
"Mere showing off," she explained it. "Throwing your paltry ideas at a
world which doesn't want them. Writing like Nan's I mean. It's not as if
she wrote really good books."
"Oh well. Who does that, after all? And what is a good book?" Here were
two questions which Mrs. Hilary, in her turn, could not answer. Because
most of the books which seemed good to her did not, as she well knew,
seem good to Neville, or to any of her children, and she wasn't going to
give herself away. She murmured something about Thackeray and Dickens,
which Neville let pass.
"Writing's just a thing to do, as I see it," Neville went on. "A job,
like another. One must _have_ a job, you know. Not for the money, but for
the job's sake. And Nan enjoys it. But I daresay she'd enjoy marriage
too."
"Does she love this man?"
"I don't know. I shouldn't be surprised. She hasn't told me so."
"Probably she doesn't, as he's single. Nan's so perverse. She will love
the wrong men, always."
"You shouldn't believe all Rosalind tells you, mother. Rosalind has a too
vivid fancy and a scandalous tongue."
Mrs. Hilary coloured a little. She did not like Neville to think that she
had been letting Rosalind gossip to her about Nan.
"You know perfectly well, Neville, that I never trust a word Rosalind
says. I suppose I needn't rely on my daughter-in-law for news about my
own daughter's affairs. I can see things for myself. You can't deny that
Nan _has_ had compromising affairs with married men."
"Compromising." Neville turned over the word, thoughtfully and
fastidiously. "Funny word, mother. I'm not sure I know what it means.
But I don't think anything ever compromises Nan; she's too free for
that.... Well, let's marry her off to Barry Briscoe. It will be a quaint
ménage, but I daresay they'd pull it off. Barry's delightful. I should
think even Nan could live with him."
"He writes books about education, doesn't he? Education and democracy."
"Well, he does. But there's always something, after all, against all
of us. And it might be worse. It might be poetry or fiction or
psycho-analysis."
Neville said psycho-analysis in order to start another hare and take
her mother's attention off Nan's marriage before the marriage became
crystallised out of all being. But Mrs. Hilary for the first time (for
usually she was reliable) did not rise. She looked thoughtful, even a
shade embarrassed, and said vaguely, "Oh, people must write, of course.
If it isn't one thing it will be another." After a moment she added,
"This psycho-analysis, Neville," saying the word with distaste indeed,
but so much more calmly than usual that Neville looked at her in
surprise. "This psycho-analysis. I suppose it does make wonderful cures,
doesn't it, when all is said?"
"Cures--oh yes, wonderful cures. Shell-shock, insomnia, nervous
depression, lumbago, suicidal mania, family life--anything." Neville's
attention was straying to Grandmama, who was coming slowly towards
them down the path, leaning on her stick, so she did not see Mrs.
Hilary's curious, lit eagerness.
"But how _can_ they cure all those things just by talking indecently
about sex?"
"Oh mother, they don't. You're so crude, darling. You've got hold of
only one tiny part of it--the part practised by Austrian professors on
Viennese degenerates. Many of the doctors are really sane and brilliant.
I know of cases...."
"Well," said Mrs. Hilary, quickly and rather crossly, "I can't talk about
it before Grandmama."
Neville got up to meet Grandmama, put a hand under her arm, and conducted
her to her special chair beneath the cedar. You had to help and conduct
someone so old, so frail, so delightful as Grandmama, even if Mrs. Hilary
did wish it were being done by any hand than yours. Mrs. Hilary in fact
made a movement to get to Grandmama first, but sixty-three does not rise
from low deck chairs so swiftly as forty-three. So she had to watch her
daughter leading her mother, and to note once more with a familiar pang
the queer, unmistakable likeness between the smooth, clear oval face and
the old wrinkled one, the heavily lashed deep blue eyes and the old faded
ones, the elfish, close-lipped, dimpling smile and the old, elfish,
thin-lipped, sweet one. Neville, her Neville, flower of her flock, her
loveliest, first and best, her dearest but for Jim, her pride, and nearer
than Jim, because of sex, which set Jim on a platform to be worshipped,
but kept Neville on a level to be loved, to be stormed at when storms
rose, to be clung to when all God's waters went over one's head. Oh
Neville, that you should smile at Grandmama like that, that Grandmama
should, as she always had, steal your confidence that should have been
all your mother's! That you should perhaps even talk over your mother
with Grandmama (as if she were something further from each of you than
each from the other), pushing her out of the close circle of your
intimacy into the region of problems to be solved.... Oh God, how bitter
a thing to bear!
The garden, the summer border of bright flowers, swam in tears.... Mrs.
Hilary turned away her face, pretending to be pulling up daisies from the
grass. But, unlike the ostrich, she well knew that they always saw. To
the children, as to Grandmama, they were an old story, those hot, facile,
stinging tears of Mrs. Hilary's that made Neville weary with pity, and
Nan cold with scorn, and Rosalind happy with lazy malice, and Pamela
bright and cool and firm, like a woman doctor. Only Grandmama took them
unmoved, for she had always known them.
6
Grandmama, settled in her special chair, remarked on the unusual (for
July) fineness of the day, and requested Neville to read them the chief
items of news in the Observer, which she had brought out with her. So
Neville read about the unfortunate doings of the Supreme Council at Spa,
and Grandmama said "Poor creatures," tolerantly, as she had said when
they were at Paris, and again at San Remo; and about General Dyer and
the Amritsar debate, and Grandmama said "Poor man. But one mustn't treat
one's fellow creatures as he did, even the poor Indian, who, I quite
believe, is intolerably provoking. I see the Morning Post is getting up
a subscription for him, contributed to by Those Who Remember Cawnpore,
Haters of Trotzky, Montague and Lansbury, Furious Englishwoman, and many
other generous and emotional people. That is kind and right. We should
not let even our more impulsive generals starve."
Then Neville read about Ireland, which was just then in a disturbed
state, and Grandmama said it certainly seemed restless, and mentioned
with what looked like a gleam of hope that they would never return, that
her friends the Dormers were there. Mrs. Hilary shot out, with still
averted face, that the whole of Ireland ought to be sunk to the bottom
of the sea, it was more bother than it was worth. This was her usual and
only contribution towards a solution of the Irish question.
Then Mr. Churchill and Russia had their turn (it was the time of the
Golovin trouble) and Grandmama said people seemed always to get so
very sly, as well as so very much annoyed and excited, whenever Russia
was mentioned, and that seemed like a sign that God did not mean us,
in this country, to mention it much, perhaps not even to think of it.
She personally seldom did. Then Neville read a paragraph about the
Anglo-Catholic Congress, and about that Grandmama was for the first time
a little severe, for Grandpapa had not been an Anglo-Catholic, and indeed
in his day there were none of this faith. You were either High Church,
Broad Church or Evangelical. (Unless, of course, you had been led astray
by Huxley and Darwin and were nothing whatever.) Grandpapa had been
Broad, with a dash of Evangelical; or perhaps it was the other way round;
but anyhow Grandpapa had not been High Church, or, as they called it in
his time, Tractarian. So Grandmama enquired, snippily, "Who _are_ these
Anglo-Catholics, my dear? One seems to hear so much of them in these
days. I can't help thinking they are rather _noisy_...." as she might
have spoken of Bolshevists, or the Labour Party, or the National Party,
or Sinn Fein, or any other of the organisations of which Grandpapa had
been innocent. "There are so many of these new things," said Grandmama,
"I daresay modern young people like Gerda and Kay are quite in with it
all."
"I'm afraid," said Neville, "that Gerda and Kay are secularists at
present."
"Poor children," Grandmama said gently. Secularism made her think of
the violent and vulgar Mr. Bradlaugh. It was, in her view, a noisier
thing even than Anglo-Catholicism. "Well, they have plenty of time to
get over it and settle down to something quieter." Broad-Evangelical she
meant, or Evangelical-Broad; and Neville smiled at the idea of Gerda,
in particular, being either of these. She believed that if Gerda were to
turn from secularism it would either be to Anglo-Catholicism or to Rome.
Or Gerda might become a Quaker, or a lone mystic contemplating in woods,
but a Broad-Evangelical, no. There was a delicate, reckless extravagance
about Gerda which would prohibit that. If you came to that, what girl or
boy did, in these days, fall into any of the categories which Grandmama
and Grandpapa had known, whether religiously or politically? You might as
well suggest that Gerda and Kay should be Tories or Whigs.
And by this time they had given Mrs. Hilary so much time to recover her
poise that she could join in, and say that Anglo-Catholics were very
ostentatious people, and only gave all that money which they had,
undoubtedly, given at the recent Congress in order to make a splash
and show off.
"Tearing off their jewellery in public like that," said Mrs. Hilary, in
disgust, as she might have said tearing off their chemises, "and gold
watches lying in piles on the collection table, still ticking...." She
felt it was indecent that the watches should have still been ticking; it
made the thing an orgy, like a revival meeting, or some cannibal rite at
which victims were offered up still breathing....
So much for the Anglo-Catholic Congress. The Church Congress was better,
being more decent and in order, though Mrs. Hilary knew that the whole
established Church was wrong.
And so they came to literature, to a review of Mr. Conrad's new novel
and a paragraph about a famous annual literary prize. Grandmama thought
it very nice that young writers should be encouraged by cash prizes.
"Not," as she added, "that there seems any danger of any of them being
discouraged, even without that.... But Nan and Kay and Gerda ought to go
in for it. It would be a nice thing for them to work for."
Then Grandmama, settling down with her pleased old smile to something
which mattered more than the news in the papers, said "And now, dear,
I want to hear all about this friendship of Nan's and this nice young
Mr. Briscoe."
So Neville again had to answer questions about that.
7
Mrs. Hilary, abruptly leaving them, trailed away by herself to the house.
Since she mightn't have Neville to herself for the afternoon she wouldn't
stay and share her. But when she reached the house and looked out at them
through the drawing-room windows, their intimacy stabbed her with a pang
so sharp that she wished she had stayed.
Besides, what was there to do indoors? No novels lay about that looked
readable, only "The Rescue" (and she couldn't read Conrad, he was so
nautical) and a few others which looked deficient in plot and as if they
were trying to be clever. She turned them over restlessly, and put them
down again. She wasn't sleepy, and hated writing letters. She wanted
someone to talk to, and there was no one, unless she rang for the
housemaid. Oh, this dreadful ennui.... Did anyone in the world know it
but her? The others all seemed busy and bright. That was because they
were young. And Grandmama seemed serene and bright. That was because she
was old, close to the edge of life, and sat looking over the gulf into
space, not caring. But for Mrs. Hilary there was ennui, and the dim,
empty room in the cold grey July afternoon. The empty stage; no audience,
no actors. Only a lonely, disillusioned actress trailing about it, hungry
for the past.... A book Gerda had been reading lay on the table. "The
Breath of Life," it was called, which was surely just what Mrs. Hilary
wanted. She picked it up, opened it, turned the pages, then, tucking it
away out of sight under her arm, left the room and went upstairs.
"Many wonderful cures," Neville had said. And had mentioned depression
as one of the diseases cured. What, after all, if there was something in
this stuff which she had never tried to understand, had always dismissed,
according to her habit, with a single label? "Labels don't help. Labels
get you nowhere." How often the children had told her that, finding her
terse terminology that of a shallow mind, endowed with inadequate
machinery for acquiring and retaining knowledge, as indeed it was.
8
Gerda, going up to Mrs. Hilary's room to tell her about tea, found her
asleep on the sofa, with "The Breath of Life" fallen open from her hand.
A smile flickered on Gerda's delicate mouth, for she had heard her
grandmother on the subject of psycho-analysis, and here she was, having
taken to herself the book which Gerda was reading for her Freud circle.
Gerda read a paragraph on the open page.
"It will often be found that what we believe to be unhappiness is really,
in the secret and unconscious self, a joy, which the familiar process of
inversion sends up into our consciousness in the form of grief. If, for
instance, a mother bewails the illness of her child, it is because her
unconscious self is experiencing the pleasure of importance, of being
condoled and sympathised with, as also that of having her child (if it is
a male) entirely for the time dependent on her ministrations. If, on the
other hand, the sick child is her daughter, her grief is in reality a
hope that this, her young rival, may die, and leave her supreme in the
affections of her husband. If, in either of these cases, she can be
brought to face and understand this truth, her grief will invert itself
again and become a conscious joy...."
"I wonder if Grandmother believes all that," speculated Gerda, who did.
Then she said aloud, "Grandmother" (that was what Gerda and Kay called
her, distinguishing her thus from Great-Grandmama), "tea's ready."
Mrs. Hilary woke with a start. "The Breath of Life" fell on the floor
with a bang. Mrs. Hilary looked up and saw Gerda and blushed.
"I've been asleep.... I took up this ridiculous book of yours to look at.
The most absurd stuff.... How can you children muddle your minds with it?
Besides, it isn't at all a _nice_ book for you, my child. I came on
several very queer things...."
But the candid innocence of Gerda's wide blue eyes on hers transcended
"nice" and "not nice."... You might as well talk like that to a wood
anemone, or a wild rabbit.... If her grandmother had only known, Gerda at
twenty had discussed things which Mrs. Hilary, in all her sixty-three
years, had never heard mentioned. Gerda knew of things of which Mrs.
Hilary would have indignantly and sincerely denied the existence. Gerda's
young mind was a cess-pool, a clear little dew-pond, according to how you
looked at it. Gerda and Gerda's friends knew no inhibitions of speech or
thought. They believed that the truth would make them free, and the truth
about life is, from some points of view, a squalid and gross thing. But
better look it in the face, thought Gerda and her contemporaries, than
pretend it isn't there, as elderly people do.
"I don't want you to pretend anything isn't there, darling," Neville,
between the two generations, had said to Gerda once. "Only it seems to me
that some of you children have one particular kind of truth too heavily
on your minds. It seems to block the world for you."
"You mean sex," Gerda had told her, bluntly. "Well, it runs all through
life, mother. What's the use of hiding from it? The only way to get even
with it is to face it. And _use_ it."
"Face it and use it by all means. All I meant was, it's a question of
emphasis. There _are_ other things...."
Of course Gerda knew that. There was drawing, and poetry, and beauty, and
dancing, and swimming, and music, and politics, and economics. Of course
there were other things; no doubt about that. They were like songs, like
colour, like sunrise, like flowers, these other things. But the basis of
life was the desire of the male for the female and of the female for the
male. And this had been warped and smothered and talked down and made a
furtive, shameful thing, and it must be brought out into the day....
Neville smiled to hear all this tripping sweetly off Gerda's lips.
"All right, darling, don't mind me. Go ahead and bring it out into the
day, if you think the subject really needs more airing than it already
gets. I should have thought myself it got lots, and always had."
And there they were; they talked at cross purposes, these two, across the
gulf of twenty years, and with the best will in the world could not hope
to understand, either of them, what the other was really at. And now here
was Gerda, in Mrs. Hilary's bedroom, looking across a gulf of forty years
and saying nothing at all, for she knew it would be of no manner of use,
since words don't carry as far as that.
So all she said was "Tea's ready, Grandmother."
And Mrs. Hilary supposed that Gerda hadn't, probably, noticed or
understood those very queer things she had come upon while reading "The
Breath of Life."
They went down to tea.