Dangerous Ages Part 25

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."

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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 sc.u.m.

And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered of old, had pulled out of countless sc.r.a.pes--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 weatherc.o.c.k 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.

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But she did not start for Rome, or even write to Nan, for when she got home she went to bed with influenza.

CHAPTER XII

THE MOTHER

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The happiness Mrs. Hilary now enjoyed was of the religious type--a deep, warm glow, which did not lack excitement. She felt as those may be presumed to feel who have just been converted to some church--newly alive, and sunk in spiritual peace, and in profound harmony with life.

Where were the old rubs, frets, jars and ennuis? Vanished, melted like yesterday's snows in the sun of this new peace. It was as if she had cast her burden upon the Lord. That, said her psycho-a.n.a.lyst doctor, was quite in order; that was what it ought to be like. That was, in effect, what she had in point of fact done; only the place of the Lord was filled by himself. To put the matter briefly, transference of burden had been effected; Mrs. Hilary had laid all her cares, all her perplexities, all her grief, upon this quiet, acute-looking man, who sat with her twice a week for an hour, drawing her out, arranging her symptoms for her, penetrating the hidden places of her soul, looking like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Henry Ainley. Her confidence in him was, he told her, the expression of the father-image, which surprised Mrs. Hilary a little, because he was twenty years her junior.

Mrs. Hilary felt that she was getting to know herself very well indeed.

Seeing herself through Mr. Cradock's mind, she felt that she was indeed a curious jumble of complexes, of strange, mysterious impulses, desires and fears. Alarming, even horrible in some ways; so that often she thought "Can he be right about me? Am I really like that? Do I really hope that Marjorie (Jim's wife) will die, so that Jim and I may be all in all to each other again? Am I really so wicked?" But Mr. Cradock said that it was not at all wicked, perfectly natural and normal--the Unconscious _was_ like that. And worse than that; how much worse he had to break to Mrs. Hilary, who was refined and easily shocked, by gentle hints and slow degrees, lest she should be shocked to death. Her dreams, which she had to recount to him at every sitting, bore such terrible significance--they grew worse and worse in proportion, as Mrs. Hilary could stand more.

"Ah well," Mrs. Hilary sighed uneasily, after an interpretation into strange terms of a dream she had about bathing, "it's very odd, when I've never even thought about things like that."

"Your Unconscious," said Mr. Cradock, firmly, "has thought the more. The more your Unconscious is obsessed by a thing, the less your conscious self thinks of it. It is shy of the subject, for that very reason."

Mrs. Hilary was certainly shy of the subject, for that reason or others.

When she felt too shy of it, Mr. Cradock let her change it. "It may be true," she would say, "but it's very terrible, and I would rather not dwell on it."

So he would let her dwell instead on the early days of her married life, or on the children's childhood, or on her love for Neville and Jim, or on her impatience with her mother.

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They were happy little times, stimulating, cosy little times. They spoke straight to the heart, easing it of its weight of tragedy. A splendid man, Mr. Cradock, with his shrewd, penetrating sympathy, his kind firmness. He would listen with interest to everything; the sharp words she had had with Grandmama, troubles with the maids, the little rubs of daily life (and what a rubbing business life is, to be sure!) as well as to profounder, more tragic accounts of desolation, jealousy, weariness and despair. He would say "Your case is a very usual one,"

so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that. He reduced it all, dispa.s.sionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws. He trained his patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams and to be shocked at nothing that they signified.

Mrs. Hilary would wake each morning, or during the night, and clutch at the dream which was flying from her, clutch and secure it, and make it stand and deliver its outlines to her. She was content with outlines; it was for Mr. Cradock to supply the interpretation. Sometimes, if Mrs.

Hilary couldn't remember any dreams, he would supply, according to a cla.s.sic precedent, the dream as well as the interpretation. But on the whole, deeply as she revered and admired him, Mrs. Hilary preferred to remember her own dreams; what they meant was bad enough, but the meaning of the dreams that Mr. Cradock told her she had dreamt was beyond all words.... That terrible Unconscious! Mrs. Hilary disliked it excessively; she felt rather as if it were a sewer, sunk beneath an inadequate grating.

But from Mr. Cradock she put up with hearing about it. She would have put up with anything. He was so steadying and so wonderful. He enabled her to face life with a new poise, a fresh lease of strength and vitality. She told Grandmama so. Grandmama said "Yes, my dear, I've observed it in you.

It sounds to me an unpleasing business, but it is obviously doing you good, so far. I only wish it may last. The danger may be reaction, after you have finished the course and lost touch with this young man." (Mr.

Cradock was forty-five, but Grandmama, it must be remembered, was eighty-four.) "You will have to guard against that. In a way it was a pity you didn't take up church-going instead; religion lasts."

"And these quackeries do not," Grandmama finished her sentence to herself, not wis.h.i.+ng to be discouraging.

"Not always," Mrs. Hilary truly replied, meaning that religion did not always last.

"No," Grandmama agreed. "Unfortunately not always. Particularly when it is High Church. There was your uncle Bruce, of course...."

Mrs. Hilary's uncle Bruce, who had been High Church for a season, and had even taken Orders in the year 1860, but whose faith had wilted in the heat and toil of the day, so that by 1870 he was an agnostic barrister, took Grandmama back through the last century, and she became reminiscent over the Tractarian movement, and, later, the Ritualists.

"The Queen never could abide them," said Grandmama. "Nor could Lord Beaconsfield, nor your father, though he was always kind and tolerant.

I remember when Dr. Jowett came to stay with us, how they talked about it.... Ah well, they've become very prominent since then, and done a great deal of good work, and there are many very able, excellent men and women among them.... But they're not High Church any longer, they tell me. They're Catholics in these days. I don't know enough of them to judge them, but I don't think they can have the dignity of the old High Church party, for if they had I can't imagine that Gilbert's wife, for instance, would have joined them, even for so short a time as she did.... Well, it suits some people, and psycho-a.n.a.lysis obviously suits others. Only I do hope you will try to keep moderate and balanced, my child, and not believe all this young man tells you. Parts of it do sound so very strange."

(But Mrs. Hilary would not have dreamt of repeating to Grandmama the strangest parts of all.)

"I feel a new woman," she said, fervently, and Grandmama smiled, well pleased, thinking that it certainly did seem rather like the old evangelical conversions of her youth. (Which, of course, did not always last, any more than the High Church equivalents did.)

All Grandmama committed herself to, in her elderly caution, which came however less from age than from having known Mrs. Hilary for sixty-three years, was "Well, well, we must see."

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