THAT WHICH REMAINS
1
Through September Neville had nursed Gerda by day and worked by night.
The middle of October, just when they usually moved into town for the
winter, she collapsed, had what the doctor called a nervous breakdown.
"You've been overworking," he told her. "You're not strong enough in
these days to stand hard brain-work. You must give it up."
For a fortnight she lay tired and passive, surrendered and inert, caring
for nothing but to give up and lie still and drink hot milk. Then she
struggled up and mooned about the house and garden, and cried weakly from
time to time, and felt depressed and bored, and as if life were over and
she were at the bottom of the sea.
"This must be what mother feels," she thought. "Poor mother.... I'm
like her; I've had my life, and I'm too stupid to work, and I can only
cry.... Men must work and women must weep.... I never knew before that
that was true.... I mustn't see mother just now, it would be the last
straw ... like the skeletons people used to look at to warn themselves
what they would come to.... Poor mother ... and poor me.... But mother's
getting better now she's being analysed. That wouldn't help me at all. I
analyse myself too much already.... And I was so happy a few months ago.
What a dreadful end to a good ambition. I shall never work again, I
suppose, in any way that counts. So that's that.... Why do I want to work
and to do something? Other wives and mothers don't.... Or do they, only
they don't know it, because they don't analyse? I believe they do, lots
of them. Or is it only my horrible egotism and vanity, that can't take a
back seat quietly? I was always like that, I know. Nan and I and Gilbert.
Not Jim so much, and not Pamela at all. But Rodney's worse than I am; he
wouldn't want to be counted out, put on the shelf, in the forties; he'd
be frightfully sick if he had to stand by and see other people working
and getting on and in the thick of things when he wasn't. He couldn't
bear it; he'd take to drink, I think.... I hope Rodney won't ever have
a nervous breakdown and feel like this, poor darling, he'd be dreadfully
tiresome.... Not to work after all. Not to be a doctor.... What then?
Just go about among people, grinning like a dog. Winter in town, talking,
dining, being the political wife. Summer in the country, walking, riding,
reading, playing tennis. Fun, of course. But what's it all for? When I've
got Gerda off my hands I shall have done being a mother, in any sense
that matters. Is being a wife enough to live for? Rodney's wife? Oh, I
want to be some use, want to do things, to count.... And Rodney will die
some time--I know he'll die first--and then I shan't even be a wife. And
in twenty years I shan't be able to do things with my body much more, and
what then? What will be left? ... I think I'm getting hysterical, like
poor mother.... How ugly I look, these days."
She stopped before the looking-glass. Her face looked back at her, white
and thin, almost haggard, traced in the last few weeks for the first time
with definite lines round brow and mouth. Her dark hair was newly
streaked with grey.
"Middle age," said Neville, and a cold hand was laid round her heart. "It
had to come some time, and this illness has opened the door to it. Or
shall I look young again when I'm quite well? No, never young again."
She shivered.
"I look like mother to-day.... I _am_ like mother...."
So youth and beauty were to leave her, too. She would recover from this
illness and this extinguishing of charm, but not completely, and not for
long. Middle age had begun. She would have off days in future, when she
would look old and worn instead of always, as hitherto, looking charming.
She wouldn't, in future, be sure of herself; people wouldn't be sure to
think "A lovely woman, Mrs. Rodney Bendish." Soon they would be saying
"How old Mrs. Bendish is getting to look," and then "She was a pretty
woman once."
Well, looks didn't matter much really, after all....
"They do, they do," cried Neville to the glass, passionately truthful.
"If you're vain they do--and I am vain. Vain of my mind and of my
body.... Vanity, vanity, all is vanity ... and now the silver cord is
going to be loosed and the golden bowl is going to be broken, and I shall
be hurt."
Looks did matter. It was no use canting, and minimising them. They
affected the thing that mattered most--one's relations with people. Men,
for instance, cared more to talk to a woman whose looks pleased them.
They liked pretty girls, and pretty women. Interesting men cared to talk
to them: they told them things they would never tell a plain woman.
Rodney did. He liked attractive women. Sometimes he made love to them,
prettily and harmlessly.
The thought of Rodney stabbed her. If Rodney were to get to care
less ... to stop making love to her ... worse, to stop needing
her.... For he did need her; through all their relationship,
disappointing in some of its aspects, his need had persisted, a simple,
demanding thing.
Humour suddenly came back.
"This, I suppose, is what Gerda is anticipating, and why she won't have
Barry tied to her. If Rodney wasn't tied to me he could flee from my
wrinkles...."
"Oh, what an absurd fuss one makes. What does any of it matter? It's all
in the course of nature, and the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.
Middle age will be very nice and comfortable and entertaining, once one's
fairly in it.... I go babbling about my wasted brain and fading looks as
if I'd been a mixture of Sappho and Helen of Troy.... That's the worst of
being a vain creature.... What will Rosalind do when _her_ time comes?
Oh, paint, of course, and dye--more thickly than she does now, I mean.
She'll be a ghastly sight. A raddled harridan. At least I shall always
look respectable, I hope. I shall go down to Gerda. I want to look at
something young. The young have their troubles, poor darlings, but they
don't know how lucky they are."
2
In November Neville and Gerda, now both convalescent, joined Rodney in
their town flat. Rodney thought London would buck Neville up. London does
buck you up, even if it is November and there is no gulf stream and not
much coal. For there is always music and always people. Neville had a
critical appreciation of both. Then, for comic relief, there are
politics. You cannot be really bored with a world which contains the
mother of Parliaments, particularly if her news is communicated to you
at first hand by one of her members. Disgusted you may be and are, if
you are a right-minded person, but at least not bored.
What variety, what excitement, what a moving picture show, is this tragic
and comic planet! Why want to be useful, why indulge such tedious
inanities as ambitions, why dream wistfully of doing one's bit, making
one's work, in a world already as full of bits, bright, coloured, absurd
bits, like a kaleidoscope, as full of marks (mostly black marks) as a
novel from a free library? A dark and bad and bitter world, of course,
full of folly, wickedness and misery, sick with poverty and pain, so that
at times the only thing Neville could bear to do in it was to sit on some
dreadful committee thinking of ameliorations for the lot of the very
poor, or to go and visit Pamela in Hoxton and help her with some job or
other--that kind of direct, immediate, human thing, which was a sop to
uneasiness and pity such as the political work she dabbled in, however
similar its ultimate aim, could never be.
3
To Pamela Neville said, "Are you afraid of getting old, Pamela?"
Pamela replied, "Not a bit. Are you?" And she confessed it.
"Often it's like a cold douche of water down my spine, the thought of it.
I reason and mock at myself, but I _don't_ like it.... You're different;
finer, more real, more unselfish. Besides, you'll have done something
worth doing when you have to give up. I shan't."
Pamela's brows went up.
"Kay? Gerda? The pretty dears: I've done nothing so nice as them. You've
done what's called a woman's work in the world--isn't that the phrase?"
"Done it--just so, but so long ago. What now? I still feel young, Pamela,
even now that I know I'm not. ... Oh Lord, it's a queer thing, being a
woman. A well-off woman of forty-three with everything made comfortable
for her and her brain gone to pot and her work in the world done. I want
something to bite my teeth into--some solid, permanent job--and I get
nothing but sweetmeats, and people point at Kay and Gerda and say 'That's
your work, and it's over. Now you can rest, seeing that it's good, like
God on the seventh day.'"
"_I_ don't say 'Now you can rest. Except just now, while you're run
down.'"
"Run down, yes; run down like a disordered clock because I tried to
tackle an honest job of work again. Isn't it sickening, Pamela? Isn't it
ludicrous?"
"Ludicrous--no. Everyone comes up against his own limitations. You've got
to work within them that's all. After all, there are plenty of jobs you
can do that want doing--simply shouting to be done."
"Pammie dear, it's worse than I've said. I'm a low creature. I don't only
want to do jobs that want doing: I want to count, to make a name. I'm
damnably ambitious. You'll despise that, of course--and you're quite
right, it is despicable. But there it is. Most men and many women are
tormented by it--they itch for recognition."
"Of course. One is."
"You too, Pammie?"
"I have been. Less now. Life gets to look short, when you're
thirty-nine."
"Ah, but you have it--recognition, even fame, in the world you work in.
You count for something. If you value it, there it is. I wouldn't grumble
if I'd played your part in the piece. It's a good part--a useful part
and a speaking part."
"I suppose we all feel we should rather like to play someone else's part
for a change. There's nothing exciting about mine. Most people would far
prefer yours."
They would, of course; Neville knew it. The happy political wife rather
than the unmarried woman worker; Rodney, Gerda and Kay for company rather
than Frances Carr. There was no question which was the happier lot, the
fuller, the richer, the easier, the more entertaining.
"Ah well.... You see, Rosalind spent the afternoon with me yesterday, and
I felt suddenly that it wasn't for me to be stuck up about her--what am I
too but the pampered female idler, taking good things without earning
them? It made me shudder. Hence this fit of blues. The pampered, lazy,
brainless animal--it is such a terrific sight when in human form.
Rosalind talked about Nan, Pamela. In her horrible way--you know. Hinting
that she isn't alone in Rome, but with Stephen Lumley."
Pamela took off her glasses and polished them.
"Rosalind would, of course. What did you say?"
"I lost my temper. I let out at her. It's not a thing I often do with
Rosalind--it doesn't seem worth while. But this time I saw red. I told
her what I thought of her eternal gossip and scandal. I said, what if Nan
and Stephen Lumley, or Nan and anyone else, did arrange to be in Rome at
the same time and to see a lot of each other; where was the harm? No use.
You can't pin Rosalind down. She just shrugged her shoulders and smiled,
and said 'My dear, we all know our Nan. We all know too that Stephen
Lumley has been in love with her for a year, and doesn't live with his
wife. Then they go off to Rome at the same moment, and one hears that
they are seen everywhere together. Why shut one's eyes to obvious
deductions? You're so like an ostrich, Neville.' I said I'd rather be
an ostrich than a ferret, eternally digging into other people's
concerns,--and by the time we had got to that I thought it was far
enough, so I had an engagement with my dressmaker."
"It's no use tackling Rosalind," Pamela agreed. "She'll never change her
spots.... Do you suppose it's true about Nan?"
"I daresay it is. Yes, I'm afraid I do think it's quite likely
true.... Nan was so queer the few times I saw her after Gerda's accident.
I was unhappy about her. She was so hard, and so more than usually
cynical and unget-at-able. She told me it had been all her fault,
leading Gerda into mischief, doing circus tricks that the child tried to
emulate and couldn't. I couldn't read her, quite. Her tone about Gerda
had a queer edge to it. And she rather elaborately arranged, I thought,
so that she shouldn't meet Barry. Pamela, do you think she had finally
and absolutely turned Barry down before he took up so suddenly with
Gerda, or...."
Pamela said, "I know nothing. She told me nothing. But I rather thought,
when she came to see me just before she went down to Cornwall, that she
had made up her mind to have him. I may have been wrong."
Neville leant her forehead on her hands and sighed.
"Or you may have been right. And if you were right, it's the ghastliest
tragedy--for her.... Oh, I shouldn't have let Gerda go and work with him;
I should have known better.... Nan had rebuffed him, and he flew off at a
tangent, and there was Gerda sitting in his office, as pretty as flowers
and with her funny little silent charm.... And if Nan was all the time
waiting for him, meaning to say yes when he asked her.... Poor darling
Nan, robbed by my horrid little girl, who doesn't even want to
marry.... If that's the truth, it would account for the Stephen Lumley
business. Nan wouldn't stay on in London, to see them together. If Lumley
caught her at that psychological moment, she'd very likely go off with
him, out of mere desperation and bravado. That would be so terribly like
Nan.... What a desperate, wry, cursed business life is.... On the other
hand, she may just be going about with Lumley on her own terms not his.
It's her own affair whichever way it is; what we've got to do is to
contradict the stories Rosalind is spreading whenever we get the chance.
Not that one can scotch scandal once it starts--particularly Rosalind's
scandal."
"Ignore it. Nan can ignore it when she comes back. It won't hurt her.
Nan's had plenty of things said about her before, true and untrue, and
never cared."
"You're splendid at the ignoring touch, Pam. I believe there's nothing
you can't and don't ignore."
"Well, why not? Ignoring's easy."
"Not for most of us. I believe it is, for you. In a sense you ignore life
itself; anyhow you don't let it hold and bully you. When your time comes
you'll ignore age, and later death."
"They don't matter much, do they? Does anything? I suppose it's my stolid
temperament, but I can't feel that it does."
Neville thought, as she had often thought before, that Pamela, like Nan,
only more calmly, less recklessly and disdainfully, had the aristocratic
touch. Pamela, with her delicate detachments and her light, even touch on
things great and small, made her feel fussy and petty and excitable.
"I suppose you're right, my dear.... 'All is laughter, all is dust,
all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the
unreasonable....' I must get back. Give my love to Frances... and when
next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the
things that don't matter and that she might just as well put up with to
please us all. The child is a little nuisance--as obstinate as a mule."
4
Neville, walking away from Pamela's grimy street in the November fog,
felt that London was terrible. An ugly clamour of strident noises and
hard, shrill voices, jabbering of vulgar, trivial things. A wry,
desperate, cursed world, as she had called it, a pot seething with
bitterness and all dreadfulness, with its Rosalinds floating on the top
like scum.
And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered
of old, had pulled out of countless scrapes--Nan had now taken her
life into her reckless hands and done what with it? Given it, perhaps,
to a man she didn't love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love,
which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy. Even
if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville
was somehow sure of that. Men were blind fools; men were fickle children.
Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to
Rome and fetch Nan back. But, to do that, Barry would have to fall
out of love with Gerda and into love again with Nan; and even Barry,
Neville imagined, was not such a weathercock as that. And Barry would
really be happier with Gerda. With all their differences, they were
both earnest citizens, both keen on social progress. Nan was a cynical
flibberty-gibbet; it might not have been a happy union. Perhaps happy
unions were not for such as Nan. But at the thought of Nan playing that
desperate game with Stephen Lumley in Rome, Neville's face twitched....
She would go to Rome. She would see Nan; find out how things were. Nan
always liked to see her, would put up with her even when she wanted no
one else.
That was, at least, a job one could do. These family jobs--they still go
on, they never cease, even when one is getting middle-aged and one's
brain has gone to pot. They remain, always, the jobs of the affections.
She would write to Nan to-night, and tell her she was starting for Rome
in a few days, to have a respite from the London fogs.
5
But she did not start for Rome, or even write to Nan, for when she got
home she went to bed with influenza.