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