SEAWEED
1
"Complexes," read Mrs. Hilary, "are of all sorts and sizes." And
there was a picture of four of them in a row, looking like netted cherry
trees whose nets have got entangled with each other. So that was what
they were like. Mrs. Hilary had previously thought of them as being more
of the nature of noxious insects, or fibrous growths with infinite
ramifications. Slim young trees. Not so bad, then, after all.
"A complex is characterised, and its elements are bound together by
a specific emotional tone, experienced as feeling when the complex
is aroused. Apart from the mental processes and corresponding actions
depending on purely rational mental systems, it is through complexes that
the typical mental process (the specific response) works, the particular
complex representing the particular set of mental elements involved in
the process which begins with perception and cognition and ends with the
corresponding conation."
Mrs. Hilary read it three times, and the third time she understood it,
if possible, less than the first. Complexes seemed very difficult
things, and she had never been clever. Any of her children, or even her
grandchildren, would understand it all in a moment. If you have such
things--and everyone has, she had learnt--you ought to be able to
understand them. Yet why? You didn't understand your bodily internal
growths; you left them to your doctor. There were doctors who explained
your complexes to you.... What a revolting idea! It would surely make
them worse, not better. (Mrs. Hilary still vaguely regarded these growths
as something of the nature of cancer.)
Sometimes she imagined herself a patient, interviewing one of these odd
doctors. A man doctor, not a woman; she didn't trust woman doctors of any
kind; she had always been thankful that Neville had given it up and
married instead.
"Insomnia," she would say, in these imaginary interviews, because that
was so easy to start off with.
"You have something on your mind," said the doctor. "You suffer from
depression."
"Yes, I know that. I was coming to that. That is what you must cure for
me."
"You must think back.... What is the earliest thing you can remember?
Perhaps your baptism? Possibly even your first bath? It has been
done...."
"You may be right. I remember some early baths. One of them may have been
the first of all, who knows? What of it, doctor?"
But the doctor, in her imaginings, would at this point only make notes in
a big book and keep silence, as if he had thought as much. Perhaps, no
more than she, he did not know what of it.
Mrs. Hilary could hear herself protesting.
"I am _not_ unhappy because of my baptism, which, so far as I know, went
off without a hitch. I am _not_ troubled by my first bath, nor by any
later bath. Indeed, indeed you must believe me, it is not that at all."
"The more they protest," the psycho-analyst would murmur, "the more it is
so." For that was what Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung always said, so that there
was no escape from their aspersions.
"Why do _you_ think you are so often unhappy?" he would ask her, to
draw her out and she would reply, "Because my life is over. Because I
am an old discarded woman, thrown away onto the dust-heap like a broken
egg-shell. Because my husband is gone and my children are gone, and they
do not love me as I love them. Because I have only my mother to live
with, and she is calm and cares for nothing but only waits for the end.
Because I have nothing to do from morning till night. Because I am
sixty-three, and that is too old and too young. Because life is empty
and disappointing, and I am tired, and drift like seaweed tossed to and
fro by the waves."
It sounded indeed enough, and tears would fill her eyes as she said it.
The psycho-analyst would listen, passive and sceptical but intelligent.
"Not one of your reasons is the correct one. But I will find the true
reason for you and expose it, and after that it will trouble you no more.
Now you shall relate to me the whole history of your life."
What a comfortable moment! Mrs. Hilary, when she came to it in her
imagined interview, would draw a deep breath and settle down and begin.
The story of her life! How absorbing a thing to relate to someone who
really wanted to hear it! How far better than the confessional--for
priests, besides requiring only those portions and parcels of the
dreadful past upon which you had least desire to dwell, had almost
certainly no interest at all in hearing even these, but only did it
because they had to, and you would be boring them. They might even say,
as one had said to Rosalind during the first confession which had
inaugurated her brief ecclesiastical career, and to which she had looked
forward with some interest as a luxurious re-living of a stimulating
past--"No details, please." Rosalind, who had had many details ready,
had come away disappointed, feeling that the Church was not all she
had hoped. But the psycho-analyst doctor would really want to hear
details. Of course he would prefer the kind of detail which Rosalind
would have been able to furnish out of her experience, for that was
what psycho-analysts recognised as true life. Mrs. Hilary's experiences
were pale in comparison; but psycho-analysts could and did make much out
of little, bricks without clay. She would tell him all about the
children--how sweet they were as babies, how Jim had nearly died of
croup, Neville of bronchitis and Nan of convulsions, whereas Pamela had
always been so well, and Gilbert had suffered only from infant debility.
She would relate how early and how unusually they had all given signs of
intelligence; how Jim had always loved her more than anything in the
world, until his marriage, and she him (this was a firm article in Mrs.
Hilary's creed); how Neville had always cherished and cared for her, and
how she loved Neville beyond anything in the world but Jim; how Gilbert
had disappointed her by taking to writing instead of to a man's job, and
then by marrying Rosalind; how Nan had always been tiresome and perverse.
And before the children came--all about Richard, and their courtship, and
their young married life, and how he had loved and cared for her beyond
anything, incredibly tenderly and well, so that all those who saw it had
wondered, and some had said he spoilt her. And back before Richard, to
girlhood and childhood, to parents and nursery, to her brother and
sister, now dead. How she had fought with her sister because they had
both always wanted the same things and got in one another's way! The
jealousies, the bitter, angry tears!
To pour it all out--what comfort! To feel that someone was interested,
even though it might be only as a case. The trouble about most people was
that they weren't interested. They didn't mostly, even pretend they were.
2
She tried Barry Briscoe, the week-end he came down and found Nan gone.
Barry Briscoe was by way of being interested in people and things in
general; he had that kind of alert mind and face.
He came up from the tennis lawn, where he had been playing a single with
Rodney, and sat down by her and Grandmama in the shade of the cedar, hot
and friendly and laughing and out of breath. Now Neville and Rodney were
playing Gerda and Kay. Grandmama's old eyes, pleased behind their
glasses, watched the balls fly and thought everyone clever who got one
over the net. She hadn't played tennis in her youth. Mrs. Hilary's more
eager, excited eyes watched Neville driving, smashing, volleying,
returning, and thought how slim and young a thing she looked, to have all
that power stored in her. She was fleeter than Gerda, she struck harder
than Kay, she was trickier than all of them, the beloved girl. That was
the way Mrs. Hilary watched tennis, thinking of the players, not of the
play. It is the way some people talk, thinking of the talkers, not of
what they are saying. It is the personal touch, and a way some women
have.
But Barry Briscoe, watching cleverly through his bright glasses, was
thinking of the strokes. He was an unconscious person. He lived in
moments.
"Well done, Gerda," Grandmama would call, when Gerda, cool and
nonchalant, dropped, a sitter at Rodney's feet, and when Rodney smashed
it back she said, "But father's too much for you."
"Gerda's a _scandal_," Barry said. "She doesn't care. She can hit all
right when she likes. She thinks about something else half the time."
His smile followed the small white figure with its bare golden head that
gleamed in the grey afternoon. An absurd, lovable, teasable child, he
found her.
Grandmama's maid came to wheel her down to the farm. Grandmama had
promised to go and see the farmer's wife and new baby. Grandmama always
saw wives and new babies. They never palled. You would think that by
eighty-four she had seen enough new babies, more than enough, that she
had seen through that strange business and could now take it for granted,
the stream of funny new life cascading into the already so full world.
But Grandmama would always go and see it, handle it, admire it, peer at
it with her smiling eyes that had seen so many lives come and go and that
must know by now that babies are born to trouble as naturally as the
sparks fly upward.
So off Grandmama rode in her wheeled chair, and Mrs. Hilary and Barry
Briscoe were left alone. Mrs. Hilary and this pleasant, brown, friendly
young man, who cared for Workers' Education and Continuation Schools, and
Penal Reform, and Garden Cities, and Getting Things Done by Acts of
Parliament, about all which things Mrs. Hilary knew and cared nothing.
But vaguely she felt that they sprang out of and must include a care for
human beings as such, and that therefore Barry Briscoe would listen if
she told him things.
So (it came out of lying on grass, which Barry was doing) she told him
about the pneumonia of Neville as a child, how they had been staying in
Cornwall, miles from a doctor, and without Mr. Hilary, and Mrs. Hilary
had been in despair; how Jim, a little chap of twelve, had ridden off on
his pony in the night to fetch the doctor, across the moors. A long
story; stories about illnesses always are. Mrs. Hilary got worked up and
excited as she told it; it came back to her so vividly, the dreadful
night.
"He was a Dr. Chalmers, and so kind. When he saw Neville he was
horrified; by that time she was delirious. He said if Jim hadn't gone
straight to him but had waited till the morning, it might have been too
late...."
"Too late: quite. ..." Barry Briscoe had an understanding, sympathetic
grip of one's last few words. So much of the conversation of others
eludes one, but one should hold fast the last few words.
"Oh played, Gerda: did you that time, Bendish...."
Gerda had put on, probably by accident, a sudden, absurd twist that had
made a fool of Rodney.
That was what Barry Briscoe was really attending to, the silly game. This
alert, seemingly interested, attentive young man had a nice manner, that
led you on, but he didn't really care. He lived in the moment: he cared
for prisoners and workers, and probably for people who were ill _now_,
but not that someone had been ill all those years ago. He only pretended
to care; he was polite. He turned his keen, pleasant face up to her when
he had done shouting about the game, and said "How splendid that he got
to you in time!" but he didn't really care. Mrs. Hilary found that women
were better listeners than men. Women are perhaps better trained; they
think it more ill-mannered not to show interest. They will listen to
stories about servants, or reports of the inane sayings of infants,
they will hear you through, without the flicker of a yawn, but with
ejaculations and noddings, while you tell them about your children's
diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight rein,
and endure. They are the world's martyrs.
But men, less restrained, will fidget and wander and sigh and yawn, and
change the subject.
To trap and hold the sympathy of a man--how wonderful! Who wanted a pack
of women? What you really wanted was some man whose trade it was to
listen and to give heed. Some man to whom your daughter's pneumonia, of
however long ago, was not irrelevant, but had its own significance, as
having helped to build you up as you were, you, the problem, with your
wonderful, puzzling temperament, so full of complexes, inconsistencies
and needs. Some man who didn't lose interest in you just because you were
grey-haired and sixty-three.
"I'm afraid I've been taking your attention from the game," said Mrs.
Hilary to Barry Briscoe.
Compunction stabbed him. Had he been rude to this elderly lady, who had
been telling him a long tale without a point while he watched the tennis
and made polite, attentive sounds?
"Not a bit, Mrs. Hilary." He sat up, and looked friendlier than ever.
"I've been thrilled." A charming, easy liar Barry was, when he deemed it
necessary. His Quaker parents would have been shocked. But there was
truth in it, after all. For people were so interested in themselves, that
one was, in a sense, interested in the stories they told one, even
stories about illness. Besides, this was the mother of Nan; Nan, who was
so abruptly and inexplicably not here to-day, whose absence was hurting
him, when he stopped to think, like an aching tooth; for he was not sure,
yet feared, what she meant by it.
"Tell me," he said, half to please Nan's mother and half on his own
account, "some stories of Nan when she was small. I should think she was
a fearful child...."
He was interested, thought Mrs. Hilary, in Nan, but not in her. That was
natural, of course. No man would ever again want to hear stories of _her_
childhood. The familiar bitterness rose and beat in her like a wave. Nan
was thirty-four and she was sixty-three. She could talk only of far-off
things, and theories about conduct and life which sounded all right at
first but were exposed after two minutes as not having behind them the
background of any knowledge or any brain. That hadn't mattered when she
was a girl; men would often rather they hadn't. But at sixty-three you
have nothing.... The bitter emptiness of sixty-three turned her sick with
frustration. Life was over, over, over, for her and she was to tell
stories of Nan, who had everything.
Then the mother in her rose up, to claim and grasp for her child, even
for the child she loved least.
"Nan? Nan was always a most dreadfully sensitive child, and
temperamental. She took after me, I'm afraid; the others were more like
their father. I remember when she was quite a little thing...."
Barry had asked for it. But he hadn't known that, out of the brilliant,
uncertain Nan, exciting as a Punch and Judy show, anything so tedious
could be spun....
3
Mrs. Hilary was up in town by herself for a day's shopping. The sales
were on at Barker's and Derry and Tom's. Mrs. Hilary wandered about these
shops, and even Ponting's and bought little bags, and presents for
everyone, remnants, oddments, underwear, some green silk for a frock for
Gerda, a shady hat for herself, a wonderful cushion for Grandmama with a
picture of the sea on it, a silk knitted jumper for Neville, of the same
purplish blue as her eyes. She was happy, going about like a bee from
flower to flower, gathering this honey for them all. She had come up
alone; she hadn't let Neville come with her. She had said she was going
to be an independent old woman. But what she really meant was that she
had proposed herself for tea with Rosalind in Campden Hill Square, and
wanted to be alone for that.
Rosalind had been surprised, for Mrs. Hilary seldom favoured her with a
visit. She had found the letter on the hall table when she and Gilbert
had come in from a dinner party two evenings ago.
"Your mother's coming to tea on Thursday, Gilbert. Tea with me. She says
she wants a talk. I feel flattered. She says nothing about wanting to see
you, so you'd better leave us alone, anyhow for a bit."
Rosalind's beautiful bistre-brown eyes smiled. She enjoyed her talks with
her mother-in-law; they furnished her with excellent material, to be
worked up later by the raconteuse's art into something too delicious
and absurd. She enjoyed, too, telling Mrs. Hilary the latest scandals;
she was so shocked and disgusted; and it was fun dropping little
accidental hints about Nan, and even about Gilbert. Anyhow, what a
treasure of a relic of the Victorian age! And how comic in her jealousy,
her ingenuous, futile boasting, her so readily exposed deceits! And how
she hated Rosalind herself, the painted, corrupt woman who was dragging
Gilbert down!
"Whatever does she want a talk about?" Rosalind wondered. "It must be
something pretty urgent, to make her put up with an hour of my company."
4
At four o'clock on Thursday afternoon Rosalind went upstairs and put on
an extra coating of powder and rouge. She also blackened her eyelashes
and put on her lips salve the colour of strawberries rather than of the
human mouth. She wore an afternoon dress with transparent black sleeves
through which her big arms gleamed, pale and smooth. She looked a superb
and altogether improper creature, like Lucrezia Borgia or a Titian
madonna. She came down and lay among great black and gold satin cushions,
and lit a scented cigarette and opened a new French novel. Black and gold
was her new scheme for her drawing-room; she had had it done this spring.
It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe
magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold
hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a
decadent and cynical pope. The note of the room was really too pronounced
for Gilbert's fastidious and scholarly eloquence; he lost vitality in it,
and dwindled to the pale thin casket of a brain.
And Mrs. Hilary, when she entered it, trailing in, tall and thin, in her
sagging grey coat and skirt, her wispy grey hair escaping from under her
floppy black hat, and with the air of having till a moment ago been hung
about with parcels (she had left them in the hall), looked altogether
unsuited to her environment, like a dowdy lady from the provinces, as she
was.
Rosalind came forward and took her by the hands.
"Well, mother dear, this is an unusual honour.... _How_ long is it since
we last had you here?"
Rosalind, enveloping her mother-in-law in extravagant fragrance, kissed
her on each cheek. The kiss of Messalina! Mrs. Hilary glanced at the
great mirror over the fireplace to see whether it had come off on her
cheeks, as it might well have done.
Rosalind placed her on a swelling, billowy, black and gold chair, piled
cushions behind her shoulders, made her lie back at an obtuse angle, a
grey, lank, elderly figure, strange in that opulent setting, her long
dusty black feet stretched out before her on the golden carpet.
Desperately uncomfortable and angular Rosalind made you feel, petting
you and purring over you and calling you "mother dear," with that glint
always behind her golden-brown eyes which showed that she was up to no
good, that she knew you hated her and was only leading you on that she
might strike her claws into you the deeper. The great beautiful cat: that
was what Rosalind was. You didn't trust her for a moment.
She was pouring out tea.
"Lemon? But how dreadfully stupid of me! I'd forgotten you take
milk ... oh yes, and sugar...."
She rang, and ordered sugar. Mothers take it; not the mothers of
Rosalind's world, but mothers' meetings, and school treats, and
mothers-in-law up from the seaside.
"Are you up for shopping? How thrilling! Where have you been?... Oh, High
Street. Did you _find_ anything there?"
Mrs. Hilary knew that Rosalind would see her off, hung over with dozens
of parcels, and despise them, knowing that if they were so many they must
also be cheap.
"Oh, there's not much to be got there, of course," she said. "I got a
few little things--chiefly for my mother to give away in the parish. She
likes to have things...."
"But how noble of you both! I'm afraid I never rise to that. It's all I
can manage to give presents to myself and nearest rellies. And you came
up to town just to get presents for the parish! You're wonderful,
mother!"
"Oh, I take a day in town now and then. Why not? Everyone does."
Extraordinary how defiant Rosalind made one feel, prying and questioning
and trying to make one look absurd.
"Why, of course! It freshens you up, I expect; makes a change.... But
you've come up from Windover, haven't you, not the seaside?"
Rosalind always called St. Mary's Bay the seaside. To her our island
coasts were all one; the seaside was where you went to bathe, and she
hardly distinguished between north, south, east and west.
"How are they down at Windover? I heard that Nan was there, with that
young man of hers who performs good works. So unlike Nan herself! I hope
she isn't going to be so silly as to let it come to anything; they'd
both be miserable. But I should think Nan knows better than to marry a
square-toes. I daresay _he_ knows better too, really.... And how's poor
old Neville? I think this doctoring game of hers is simply a scream, the
poor old dear."
To hear Rosalind discussing Neville.... Messalina coarsely patronising a
wood-nymph ... the cat striking her claws into a singing bird.... And
poor--and old! Neville was, indeed, six years ahead of Rosalind, but she
looked the younger of the two, in her slim activity, and didn't need to
paint her face either. Mrs. Hilary all but said so.
"It is a great interest to Neville, taking up her medical studies again,"
was all she could really say. (What a hampering thing it is to be a
lady!) "She thoroughly enjoys it, and looks younger than ever. She is
playing a lot of tennis, and beats them all."
How absurdly her voice rang when she spoke of Neville or Jim! It always
made Rosalind's lip curl mockingly.
"Wonderful creature! I do admire her. When I'm her age I shall be too fat
to take any exercise at all. I think it's splendid of women who keep it
up through the forties.... _She_ won't be bored, even when she's sixty,
will she?"
That was a direct hit, which Mrs. Hilary could bear better than hits at
Neville.
"I see no reason," said Mrs. Hilary, "why Neville should ever be bored.
She has a husband and children. Long before she is sixty she will have
Kay's and Gerda's children to be interested in."
"No, I suppose one can't well be bored if one has grandchildren, can
one," Rosalind said, reflectively.
There was a silence, during which Mrs. Hilary's eyes, coldly meeting
Rosalind's with their satirical comment, said "I know you are too selfish
a woman ever to bear children, and I thank God for it. Little Hilarys who
should be half yours would be more than I could endure."
Rosalind, quite understanding, smiled her slow, full-mouthed, curling
smile, and held out to her mother-in-law the gold case with scented
cigarettes.
"Oh no, you don't, do you. I never can remember that. It's so unusual."
Her eyes travelled over Mrs. Hilary, from her dusty black shoes to her
pale, lined face. They put her, with deliberation, into the class with
companions, house-keepers, poor relations. Having successfully done that
(she knew it was successful, by Mrs. Hilary's faint flush) she said "You
don't look up to much, mother dear. Not as if Neville had been looking
after you very well."
Mrs. Hilary, seeing her chance, swallowed her natural feelings and took
it.
"The fact is, I sleep very badly. Not particularly just now, but
always.... I thought.... That is, someone told me ... that there have
been wonderful cures for insomnia lately ... through that new thing...."
"Which new thing? Sedobrol? Paraldehyd? Gilbert keeps getting absurd
powders and tablets of all sorts. Thank God, I always sleep like a top."
"No, not those. The thing _you_ practice. Psycho-analysis, I mean."
"Oh, psycho. But you wouldn't touch that, surely? I thought it was
anathema."
"But if it really does cure people...."
Rosalind's eyes glittered and gleamed. Her strawberry-red mouth curled
joyfully.
"Of course it has.... Not that insomnia is always a case for psycho, you
know. It's sometimes incipient mania."
"Not in my case." Mrs. Hilary spoke sharply.
"Why no, of course not.... Well, I think you'd be awfully wise to get
analysed. Whom do you want to go to?"
"I thought you could tell me. I know no names.... A _man_," Mrs. Hilary
added quickly.
"Oh, it must be a man? I was going to say, I've a vacancy myself for a
patient. But women usually want men doctors. They nearly all do. It's
supposed to be part of the complaint.... Well, I could fix you up a
preliminary interview with Dr. Claude Evans. He's very good. He turns you
right inside out and shows you everything about yourself, from your first
infant passion to the thoughts you think you're keeping dark from him as
you sit in the consulting room. He's great."
Mrs. Hilary was flushed. Hope and shame tingled in her together.
"I shan't want to keep anything dark. I've no reason."
Rosalind's mocking eyes said "That's what they all say." Her lips said
"The foreconscious self always has its reasons for hiding up the things
the unconscious self knows and feels."
"Oh, all that stuff...." Mrs. Hilary was sick of it, having read too much
about it in "The Breath of Life." "I hope this Dr. Evans will talk to me
in plain English, not in that affected jargon."
"He'll use language suited to you, I suppose," said Rosalind, "as far as
he can. But these things can't always be put so that just anyone can
grasp them. They're too complicated. You should read it up beforehand,
and try if you can understand it a little."
Rosalind, who had no brains herself, insulting Mrs. Hilary's, was rather
more than Mrs. Hilary could bear. Rosalind she knew for a fool, so far as
intellectual matters went, for Nan had said so. Clever enough at clothes,
and talking scandal, and winning money at games, and skating over thin
ice without going through--but when it came to a book, or an idea, or a
political question, Rosalind was no whit more intelligent than she was,
in fact much less. She was a rotten psycho-analyst, all her in-laws were
sure.
Mrs. Hilary said, "I've been reading a good deal about it lately. It
doesn't seem to me very difficult, though exceedingly foolish in parts."
Rosalind was touchy about psycho-analysis; she always got angry if people
said it was foolish in any way. She was like that; she could see no weak
points in anything she took up; it came from being vain, and not having a
brain. She said one of the things angry people say, instead of discussing
the subject rationally.
"I don't suppose the amount of it you've been able to read _would_ seem
difficult. If you came to anything difficult you'd probably stop, you
see. Anyhow, if it seems to you so foolish why do you want to be
analysed?"
"Oh, one may as well try things. I've no doubt there's something in it
besides the nonsense."
Mrs. Hilary spoke jauntily, with hungry, unquiet, seeking eyes that would
not meet Rosalind's. She was afraid that Rosalind would find out that she
wanted to be cured of being miserable, of being jealous, of having
inordinate passions about so little. Rosalind, in some ways a great
stupid cow, was uncannily clever when it came to being spiteful and
knowing about you the things you didn't want known. It must be horrible
to be psycho-analysed by Rosalind, who had no pity and no reticence. The
things about you would not only be known but spread abroad among all
those whom Rosalind met. A vile, dreadful tongue.
"You wouldn't, I expect, like _me_ to analyse you," said Rosalind. "Not a
course, I mean, but just once, to advise you better whom to go to. It'd
have the advantage, anyhow, that I'd do it free. Anyone else will charge
you three guineas at the least."
"I don't think," said Mrs. Hilary, "that relations--or connections--ought
to do one another. No, I'd better go to someone I don't know, if you'll
give me the name and address."
"I thought you'd probably rather," Rosalind said in her slow, soft, cruel
voice, like a cat's purr. "Well, I'll write down the address for you.
It's Dr. Evans: he'll probably pass you on to someone down at the
seaside, if he considers you a suitable case for treatment."
He would; of course he would. Mrs. Hilary felt no doubt as to that.
Gilbert came in from the British Museum. He looked thin and nervous and
sallow amid all the splendour. He kissed his mother, thinking how queer
and untidy she looked, a stranger and pilgrim in Rosalind's drawing-room.
He too might look there at times a stranger and pilgrim, but at least, if
not voluptuous, he was neat. He glanced proudly and yet ironically from
his mother to his magnificent wife, taking in and understanding the
supra-normal redundancies of her make-up.
"Rosalind," said Mrs. Hilary, knowing that it would be less than
useless to ask Rosalind to keep her secret, "has been recommending me a
psycho-analyst doctor. I think it is worth while trying if I can get my
insomnia cured that way."
"My dear mother! After all your fulminations against the tribe! Well, I
think you're quite right to give it a trial. Why don't you get Rosalind
to take you on?"
The fond pride in his voice! Yet there was in his eyes, as they rested
for a moment on Rosalind, something other than fond pride; something more
like mockery.
Mrs. Hilary got up to go, and fired across the rich room the one shot in
her armoury.
"I believe," she said, "that Rosalind prefers chiefly to take men
patients. She wouldn't want to be bored with an old woman."
The shot drove straight into Gilbert's light-strung sensitiveness.
Shell-shocked officers; any other officers; anything male, presentable
and passably young; these were Rosalind's patients; he knew it, and
everyone else knew it. For a moment his smile was fixed into the
deliberate grin of pain. Mrs. Hilary saw it, saw Gilbert far back down
the years, a small boy standing up to punishment with just that brave,
nervous grin. Sensitive, defiant, vulnerable, fastidiously proud--so
Gilbert had always been and always would be.
Remorsefully she clung to him.
"Come and see me out, dearest boy" (so she called him, though Jim was
really that)--and she ignored Rosalind's slow, unconcerned protest
against her last remark. "Why, mother, you know I _asked_ to do
you" ... but she couldn't prevent Rosalind from seeing her out too,
hanging her about with all the ridiculous parcels, kissing her on both
cheeks.
Gilbert was cool and dry, pretending she hadn't hurt him. He would
always take hurts like that, with that deadly, steely lightness. By its
deadliness, its steeliness, she knew that it was all true (and much more
besides) that she had heard about Rosalind and her patients.
5
She walked down to the bus with hot eyes. Rosalind had yawned softly and
largely behind her as she went down the front steps. Wicked, monstrous
creature! Lying about Gilbert's clever, nervous, eager life in great soft
folds, and throttling it. If Gilbert had been a man, a real male man,
instead of a writer and therefore effeminate, decadent, he would have
beaten her into decent behaviour. As it was she would ruin him, and he
would go under, not able to bear it, but cynically grinning still.
Perhaps the sooner the better. Anything was better than the way Rosalind
went on now, disgracing him and getting talked about, and making him hate
his mother for disliking her. He hadn't even come with her to the bus, to
carry her parcels for her.... That wasn't like Gilbert. As a rule he had
excellent manners, though he was not affectionate like Jim.
Jim, Jim, Jim. Should she go to Harley Street? What was the use? She
would find only Margery there; Jim would be out. Margery had no serious
faults except the one, that she had taken the first place in Jim's
affections. Before Margery, Neville had had this place, but Mrs. Hilary
had been able, with Neville's never failing and skilful help, to disguise
this from herself. You can't disguise a wife's place in her husband's
heart. And Jim's splendid children too, whom she adored--they looked at
her with Margery's brown eyes instead of Jim's grey-blue ones. And they
preferred really (she knew it) their maternal grandmother, the jolly lady
who took them to the theatres.
Mrs. Hilary passed a church. Religion. Some people found help there. But
it required so much of you, was so exhausting in its demands. Besides, it
seemed infinitely far away--an improbable, sad, remote thing, that gave
you no human comfort. Psycho-analysis was better; that opened gates into
a new life. "Know thyself," Mrs. Hilary murmured, kindling at the
prospect. Most knowledge was dull, but never that.
"I will ring up from Waterloo and make an appointment," she thought.