JIM
1
The psycho-analyst doctor was little and dark and while he was talking he looked not at Mrs. Hilary but down at a paper whereon he drew or wrote something she tried to see and couldn't. She came to the conclusion after a time that he was merely scribbling for effect.
"Insomnia," he said. "Yes. You know what that means?"
She said, foolishly, "That I can't sleep," and he gave her a glance of contempt and returned to his scribbling.
"It means," he told her, "that you are afraid of dreaming. Your unconscious self won't let you sleep.... Do you often recall your dreams when you wake?"
"Sometimes."
"Tell me some of them, please."
"Oh, the usual things, I suppose. Packing; missing trains; meeting people; and just nonsense that means nothing. All the usual things, that everyone dreams about."
At each thing she said he nodded, and scribbled with his pencil. "Quite," he said, "quite. They're bad enough in meaning, the dreams you've mentioned. I don't suppose you'd care at present to hear what they symbolise.... The dreams you haven't mentioned are doubtless worse. And those you don't even recall are worst of all. Your unconscious is, very naturally and properly, frightened of them.... Well, we must end all that, or you'll never sleep as you should. Psycho-analysis will cure these dreams; first it will make you remember them, then you'll talk them out and get rid of them."
"Dreams," said Mrs. Hilary. "Well, they may be important. But it's my whole life...."
"Precisely. I was coming to that. Of course you can't cure sleeplessness until you have cured the fundamental things that are wrong with your life. Now, if you please, tell me all you can about yourself."
Here was the wonderful moment. Mrs. Hilary drew a long breath, and told him. A horrid (she felt that somehow he was rather horrid) little man with furtive eyes that wouldn't meet hers—(and he wasn't quite a gentleman, either, but still, he wanted to hear all about her) he was listening attentively, drinking it in. Not watching tennis while she talked, like Barry Briscoe in the garden. Ah, she could go on and on, never tired; it was like swimming in warm water.
He would interrupt her with questions. Which had she preferred, her father or her mother? Well, perhaps on the whole her father. He nodded; that was the right answer; the other he would have quietly put aside as one of the deliberate inaccuracies so frequently practised by his patients. "You can leave out the perhaps. There's no manner of doubt about it, you know." Lest he should say (instead of only looking it) that she had been in love with her good father and he with her, Mrs. Hilary hurried on. She had a chaste mind, and knew what these Freudians were. It would, she thought (not knowing her doctor and how it would have come to the same thing, only he would have thought her a more pronounced case, because of the deception), have been wiser to have said that she had preferred her mother, but less truthful, and what she was enjoying now was an orgy of truth-telling. She got on to her marriage, and how intensely Richard had loved her. He tried for a moment to be indecent about love and marriage, but in her deep excitement she hardly noticed him, but swept on to the births of the children, and Jim's croup.
"I see," he said presently, "that you prefer to avoid discussing certain aspects of life. You obviously have a sex complex."
"Of course, of course. Don't you find that in all your patients? Surely we may take that for granted...." She allowed him his sex complex, knowing that Freudians without it would be like children deprived of a precious toy; for her part she was impatient to get back to Jim, her life's chief passion. The Œdipus complex, of course he would say it was; what matter, if he would let her talk about it? And Neville. It was strange to have a jealous passion for one's daughter. But that would, he said, be an extension of the ego complex—quite simple really.
She came to the present.
"I feel that life has used me up and flung me aside like a broken tool. I have no further relation to life, nor it to me. I have spent myself and been spent, and now I am bankrupt. Can you make me solvent again?"
She liked that as she said it.
He scribbled away, like a mouse scrabbling.
"Yes. Oh yes. There is no manner of doubt about it. None whatever. If you are perfectly frank, you can be cured. You can be adjusted to life. Every age in human life has its own adjustment to make, its own relation to its environment to establish. All that repressed libido must be released and diverted.... You have some bad complexes, which must be sublimated...."
It sounded awful, the firm way he said it, like teeth or appendixes which must be extracted. But Mrs. Hilary knew it wouldn't be like that really, but delightful and luxurious, more like a Turkish bath.
"You must have a course," he told her. "You are an obvious case for a course of treatment. St. Mary's Bay? Excellent. There is a practising psycho-analyst there now. You should have an hour's treatment twice a week, to be really effective.... You would prefer a man, I take it?"
He shot his eyes at her for a moment, in statement, not in enquiry. Well he knew how much she would prefer a man. She murmured assent. He rose. The hour was over.
"How much will the course be?" she asked.
"A guinea an hour, Dr. Cradock charges. He is very cheap."
"Yes, I see. I must think it over. And you?"
He told her his fee, and she blenched, but paid it. She was not rich, but it had been worth while. It was a beginning. It had opened the door into a new and richer life. St. Mary's Bay was illumined in her thoughts, instead of being drab and empty as before. Sublimated complexes twinkled over it like stars. Freed libido poured electrically about it. And Dr. Cradock, she felt, would be more satisfactory as a doctor than this man, who affected her with a faint nausea when he looked at her, though he seldom did so.
2
Windover too was illumined. She could watch almost calmly Neville talking to Grandmama, wheeling her round the garden to look at the borders, for Grandmama was a great gardener.
Then Jim came down for a week-end, and it was as if the sun had risen on Surrey. He sat with Mrs. Hilary in the arbour. She told him about Dr. Evans and the other psycho-analyst doctor at St. Mary's Bay. He frowned over Dr. Evans, who lived in the same street as he did.
"Rosalind sent you to him; of course; she would. Why didn't you ask me, mother? He's a desperate Freudian, you know, and they're not nearly so good as the others. Besides, this particular man is a shoddy scoundrel, I believe.... Was he offensive?"
"I wouldn't let him be, Jim. I was prepared for that. I ... I changed the conversation."
Jim laughed, and did his favourite trick with her hand, straightening the thin fingers one by one as they lay across his sensitive palm. How happy it always made her!
"Well," he said, "I daresay this man down at the Bay is all right. I'll find out if he's any good or not.... They talk a lot of tosh, you know, mother; you'll have to sift the grain from the chaff."
But he saw that her eyes were interested, her face more alert than usual, her very poise more alive. She had found a new interest in life, like keeping a parrot, or learning bridge, or getting religion. It was what they had always tried to find for her in vain.
"So long," he said, "as you don't believe more than half what they tell you.... Let me know how it goes on, won't you, and what this man is like. If I don't approve I shall come and stop it."
She loved that from Jim.
"Of course, dearest. Of course I shall tell you about it. And I know one must be careful."
It was something to have become an object for care; it put one more in the foreground. She would have gone on willingly with the subject, but Jim changed her abruptly for Neville.
"Neville's looking done up."
She felt the little sharp pang which Neville's name on Jim's lips had always given her. His very pronunciation of it hurt her—"Nivvle," he said it, as if he had been an Irishman. It brought all the past back; those two dear ones talking together, studying together, going off together, bound by a hundred common interests, telling each other things they never told her.
"Yes. It's this ridiculous work of hers. It's so absurd: a married woman of her age making her head ache working for examinations."
In old days Jim and Neville had worked together. Jim had been proud of Neville's success; she had been quicker than he. Mrs. Hilary, who had welcomed Neville's marriage as ending all that, foresaw a renewal of the hurtful business.
But Jim looked grave and disapproving over it.
"It is absurd," he agreed, and her heart rose. "And of course she can't do it, can't make up all that leeway. Besides, her brain has lost its grip. She's not kept it sharpened; she's spent her life on people. You can't have it both ways—a woman can't, I mean. Her work's been different. She doesn't seem to realise that what she's trying to learn up again now, in the spare moments of an already full life, demands a whole lifetime of hard work. She can't get back those twenty years; no one could. And she can't get back the clear, gripping brain she had before she had children. She's given some of it to them. That's nature's way, unfortunately. Hard luck, no doubt, but there it is; you can't get round it. Nature's a hybrid of fool and devil."
He was talking really to himself, but was recalled to his mother by the tears which, he suddenly perceived, were distorting her face.
"And so," she whispered, her voice choked, "we women get left...."
He looked away from her, a little exasperated. She cried so easily and so superfluously, and he knew that these tears were more for herself than for Neville. And she didn't really come into what he had been saying at all; he had been talking about brains.
"It's all right as far as most women are concerned," he said. "Most women have no brains to be spoilt. Neville had. Most women could do nothing at all with life if they didn't produce children; it's their only possible job. They've no call to feel ill-used."
"Of course," she said, unsteadily, struggling to clear her voice of tears, "I know you children all think I'm a fool. But there was a time when I read difficult books with your father ... he, a man with a first-class mind, cared to read with me and discuss with me...."
"Oh yes, yes, mother, I know."
Jim and all of them knew all about those long-ago difficult books. They knew too about the clever friends who used to drop in and talk.... If only Mrs. Hilary could have been one of the nice, jolly, refreshing people who own that they never read and never want to. All this fuss about reading, and cleverness—how tedious it was! As if being stupid mattered, as if it was worth bothering about.
"Of course we don't think you a fool, mother dear; how could we?"
Jim was kind and affectionate, never ironic, like Gilbert, or impatient, like Nan. But he felt now the need for fresh air; the arbour was too small for him and Mrs. Hilary, who was as tiring to others as to herself.
"I think I shall go and interrupt Neville over her studies," said Jim, and left the arbour.
Mrs. Hilary looked after him, painfully loving his square, straight back, his fine dark head, just flecked with grey, the clean line of his profile, with the firm jaw clenched over the pipe. To have produced Jim—wasn't that enough to have lived for? Mrs. Hilary was one of those mothers who apply the Magnificat to their own cases. She always felt a bond of human sympathy between herself and that lady called the Virgin Mary, whom she thought over-estimated.
3
Neville raised heavy violet eyes, faintly ringed with shadows, to Jim as he came into the library. She looked at him for a moment absently, then smiled. He came over to her and looked at the book before her.
"Working? Where've you got to? Let's see how much you know."
He took the book from her and glanced at it to see what she had been reading.
"Now we'll have an examination; it'll be good practice for you."
He put a question, and she answered it, frowning a little.
"H'm. That's not very good, my dear."
He tried again; this time she could not answer at all. At the third question she shook her head.
"It's no use, Jimmy. My head's hopeless this afternoon. Another time."
He shut the book.
"Yes. So it seems.... You're overdoing it, Neville. You can't go on like this."
She lay back and spread out her hands hopelessly.
"But I must go on like this if I'm ever going to get through my exams."
"You're not going to, old thing. You're quite obviously unfitted to. It's not your job any more. It's absurd to try; really it is."
Neville shut her eyes.
"Doctors ... doctors. They have it on the brain,—the limitations of the feminine organism."
"Because they know something about it. But I'm not speaking of the feminine organism just now. I should say the same to Rodney if he thought of turning doctor now, after twenty years of politics."
"Rodney never could have been a doctor. He hates messing about with bodies."
"Well, you know what I think. I can't stop you, of course. It's only a question of time, in any case. You'll soon find out for yourself that it's no use."
"I think," she answered, in her small, unemotional voice, "that it's exceedingly probable that I shall."
She lay inertly in the deep chair, her eyes shut, her hands opened, palms downwards, as if they had failed to hold something.
"What then, Jim? If I can't be a doctor what can I be? Besides Rodney's wife, I mean? I don't say besides the children's mother, because that's stopped being a job. They're charming to me, the darlings, but they don't need me any more; they go their own way."
Jim had noticed that.
"Well, after all, you do a certain amount of political work—public speaking, meetings, and so on. Isn't that enough?"
"That's all second-hand. I shouldn't do it but for Rodney. I'm not public-spirited enough. If Rodney dies before I do, I shan't go on with that.... Shall I just be a silly, self-engrossed, moping old woman, no use to anyone and a plague to myself?"
The eyes of both of them strayed out to the garden.
"Who's the silly moping old woman?" asked Mrs. Hilary's voice in the doorway. And there she stood, leaning a little forward, a strained smile on her face.
"Me, mother, when I shall be old," Neville quickly answered her, smiling in return. "Come in, dear. Jim's telling me how I shall never be a doctor. He gave me a viva voce exam., and I came a mucker over it."
Her voice had an edge of bitterness; she hadn't liked coming a mucker, nor yet being told she couldn't get through exams. She had plenty of vanity; so far everyone and everything had combined to spoil her. She was determined, in the face of growing doubt, to prove Jim wrong yet.
"Well," Mrs. Hilary said, sitting down on the edge of a chair, not settling herself, but looking poised to go, so as not to seem to intrude on their conversation, "well, I don't see why you want to be a doctor, dear. Everyone knows women doctors aren't much good. I wouldn't trust one."
"Very stupid of you, mother," Jim said, trying to pretend he wasn't irritated by being interrupted. "They're every bit as good as men."
"Fancy being operated on by a woman surgeon. I certainly shouldn't risk it."
"You wouldn't risk it ... you wouldn't trust them. You're so desperately personal, mother. You think that contributes to a discussion. All it does contribute to is your hearers' knowledge of your limitations. It's uneducated, the way you discuss."
He smiled at her pleasantly, taking the sting out of his words, turning them into a joke, and she smiled too, to show Neville she didn't mind, didn't take it seriously. Jim might hurt her, but if he did no one should know but Jim himself. She knew that at times she irritated even his good temper by being uneducated and so on, so that he scolded her, but he scolded her kindly, not venomously, as Nan did.
"Well, I've certainly no right to be uneducated," she said, "and I can't say I'm ever called so, except by my children.... Do you remember the discussions father and I used to have, half through the night?"
Jim and Neville did remember and thought "Poor father," and were silent.
"I should think," said Mrs. Hilary, "there was very little we didn't discuss. Politics, books, trades unions, class divisions, moral questions, votes for women, divorce ... we thrashed everything out. We both thoroughly enjoyed it."
Neville said "I remember." Familiar echoes came back to her out of the agitated past.
"Those lazy men, all they want is to get a lot of money for doing no work."
"I like the poor well enough in their places, but I cannot abide them when they try to step into ours."
"Let women mind their proper business and leave men's alone."
"I'm certainly not going to be on calling terms with my grocer's wife."
"I hate these affected, posing, would-be clever books. Why can't people write in good plain English?"...
Richard Hilary, a scholar and a patient man, blinded by conjugal love, had met futilities with arguments, expressions of emotional distaste with facts, trying to lift each absurd wrangle to the level of a discussion; and at last he died, leaving his wife with the conviction that she had been the equal mate of an able man. Her children had to face and conquer, with varying degrees of success, the temptation to undeceive her.
"But I'm interrupting," said Mrs. Hilary. "I know you two are having a private talk. I'll leave you alone...."
"No, no, mother." That was Neville, of course. "Stay and defend me from Jim's scorn."
How artificial one had to be in family life! What an absurd thing these emotions made of it!
Mrs. Hilary looked happier, and more settled in her chair.
"Where are Kay and Gerda?" Jim asked.
Neville told him "In Guildford, helping Barry Briscoe with W.E.A. meetings. They're spending a lot of time over that just now; they're both as keen as mustard. Nearly as keen as he is. He sets people on fire. It's very good for the children. They're bringing him up here to spend Sunday. I think he hopes every time to find Nan back again from Cornwall, poor Barry. He was very down in the mouth when she suddenly took herself off."
"If Nan doesn't mean to have him, she shouldn't have encouraged him," said Mrs. Hilary. "He was quite obviously in love with her."
"Nan's always a dark horse," Neville said. "She alone knows what she means."
Jim said "She's a flibberty-gibbet. She'd much better get married. She's not much use in the world at present. Now if she was a doctor ... or doing something useful, like Pamela...."
"Don't be prejudiced, Jimmy. Because you don't read modern novels yourself you think it's no use their being written."
"I read some modern novels. I read Conrad, in spite of the rather absurd attitude some people take up about him; and I read good detective stories, only they're so seldom good. I don't read Nan's kind. People tell me they're tremendously clever and modern and delightfully written and get very well reviewed, I daresay. I very seldom agree with reviewers, in any case. Even about Conrad they seem to me (when I read them—I don't often) to pick out the wrong points to admire and to miss the points I should criticise."
Mrs. Hilary said "Well, I must say I can't read Nan's books myself. Simply, I don't think them good. I dislike all her people so much, and her style."
"You're a pair of old Victorians," Neville told them, pleasing Mrs. Hilary by coupling them together and leaving Jim, who knew why she did it, undisturbed. Neville was full of graces and tact, a possession Jim had always appreciated in her.
"And there," said Neville, who was standing at the window, "are Barry Briscoe and the children coming in."
Jim looked over her shoulder and saw the three wheeling their bicycles up the drive.
"Gerda," he remarked, "is a prettier thing every time I see her."