Rose Macaulay - Dangerous Ages

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"Desperately," Barry admitted. "Anyone would be, except Nan, of course."

Nan was bicycling straight along the field path, and the bull stood
staring at her, his head well down, in readiness, as Gerda saw, to
charge. But he did not charge Nan. Bulls and other ferocious beasts think
it waste of time to charge the fearless; they get no fun out of an
unfrightened victim. He waited instead for Gerda, as she knew he would
do.

Kay followed Nan, still chanting his psalm. Gerda followed Kay. As she
dropped from the hedge onto the path she turned round once and met
Barry's eyes, her own wide and grave, and she was thinking "I can
bear anything if he is behind me and sees it happen. I couldn't bear
it if I were the last and no one saw." To be gored all alone, none to
care ... who could bear that?

The next moment Barry was no longer behind her, but close at her side,
bicycling on the grass by the path, between her and the bull. Did he know
she was frightened? She hadn't shown it, surely.

"The wind," said Gerda, in her clear, small crystalline voice, "has gone
round more to the south. Don't you think so?" And reminded Barry of a
French aristocrat demoiselle going with calm and polite conversation to
the scaffold.

"I believe it has," he said, and smiled.

And after all the bull, perhaps not liking the look of the bicycles,
didn't charge at all, but only ran by their sides with snorting noises
until they left him behind at the next gate.

"Did you," enquired Gerda, casually, "notice that bull? He was an awfully
fine one, wasn't he?"

"A remarkably noble face, I thought," Kay returned.

They scrambled down cliffs to the cove and bathed.

5

Nan, experienced in such things, as one is at the age of thirty-three if
one has led a well-spent life, knew now beyond peradventure what had
happened to Barry and what would never happen again between him and her.
So that was that, as she put it, definite and matter-of-fact to herself
about it. He had stopped wanting her. Well then, she must stop wanting
him, as speedily as might be. It took a little time. You could not shoot
down the hills of the emotions with the lightning rapidity with which you
shot down the roads. Also, the process was excruciatingly painful. You
had to unmake so many plans, unthink so many thoughts.... Oh, but that
was nothing. You had to hear his voice softened to someone else, see the
smile in his eyes caressing someone else, feel his whole mind, his whole
soul, reaching out in protecting, adoring care to someone else's charm
and loveliness ... as once, as so lately, they had reached out to
yours.... That was torture for the bravest, far worse than any bulls or
seas or precipices could be to Gerda. Yet it had to be gone through, as
Gerda had to leap from towering cliffs into wild seas and ride calmly
among fierce cattle.... When Nan woke in the night it was like toothache,
a sharp, gnawing, searing hell of pain. Memory choked her, bitter
self-anger for joy once rejected and then forever lost took her by the
throat, present desolation drowned her soul in hard, slow tears, jealousy
scorched and seared.

But, now every morning, pride rose, mettlesome and gallant, making her
laugh and talk, so that no one guessed. And with pride, a more reckless
physical daring than usual; a kind of scornful adventurousness, that
courted danger for its own sake, and wordlessly taunted the weaker spirit
with "Follow if you like and can. If you don't like, if you can't, I am
the better woman in that way, though you may be the beloved." And the
more the mettle of the little beloved rose to meet the challenge, the
hotter the pace grew. Perhaps they both felt, without knowing they felt
it, that there was something in Barry which leaped instinctively out to
applaud reckless courage, some element in himself which responded to it
even while he called it foolhardy. You could tell that Barry was of that
type, by the quick glow of his eyes and smile. But the rivalry in daring
was not really for Barry; Barry's choice was made. It was at bottom the
last test of mettle, the ultimate challenge from the loser to the winner,
in the lists chosen by the loser as her own. It was also--for Nan was
something of a bully--the heckling of Gerda. She might have won one game,
and that the most important, but she should be forced to own herself
beaten in another, after being dragged painfully along rough and
dangerous ways. And over and above and beyond all this, beyond rivalry
and beyond Gerda, was the eternal impatience for adventure as such, for
quick, vehement living, which was the essence of Nan. She found things
more fun that way: that summed it.

6

The long strange days slid by like many-coloured dreams. The steep
tumbling roads tilted behind them, with their pale, old, white and slate
hamlets huddled between fields above a rock-bound sea. Sometimes they
would stop early in the day at some fishing village, find rooms there for
the night, and bathe and sail till evening. When they bathed, Nan would
swim far out to sea, striking through cold, green, heaving waters,
slipping cleverly between currents, numbing thought with bodily action,
drowning emotion in the sea.

Once they were all caught in a current and a high sea and swept out, and
had to battle for the shore. Even Nan, even Barry, could not get to the
cove from which they had bathed; all they could try for was the jut of
rocks to westward toward which the seas were sweeping, and to reach this
meant a tough fight.

"Barry!"

Nan, looking over her shoulder, saw Gerda's bluing face and wide staring
eyes and quickening, flurried strokes. Saw, too, Barry at once at her
side, heard his "All right, I'm here. Catch hold of my shoulder."

In a dozen strokes Nan reached them, and was at Gerda's other side.

"Put one hand on each of us and strike for all you're worth with your
legs. That's the way...."

Numbly Gerda's two hands gripped Barry's right shoulder and Nan's left.
Between them they pulled her, her slight weight dragging at them heavily,
helping the running sea against them. They were being swept westward
towards the rocks, but swept also outwards, beyond them; they struck
northward and northward and were carried always south. It was a close
thing between their swimming and the current, and it looked as though the
current was winning.

"It'll have to be all we know now," said Nan, as they struggled ten yards
from the point.

She and Barry both rather thought that probably it would be all they knew
and just the little more they didn't know--they would be swept round the
point well to the south of the outermost rock--and then, hey for open
sea!

But their swimming proved, in this last fierce minute of the struggle,
stronger than the sea. They were swept towards the jutting point, almost
round it, when Nan, flinging forward to the right, caught a slippery
ledge of rock with her two hands and held on. Barry didn't think she
could hold on for more than a second against the swinging seas, or, if
she did, could consolidate her position. But he did not know the full
power of Nan's trained, acrobatic body. Slipping her shoulder from
Gerda's clutch, she grasped instead Gerda's right hand in her left, and
with her other arm and with all her sinuous, wiry strength, heaved
herself onto the rock and there flung her body flat, reaching out her
free hand to Barry. Barry caught it just in time, as he was being swung
on a wave outwards, and pulled himself within grip of the rock, and in
another moment he lay beside her, and between them they hauled up Gerda.

Gerda gasped "Kay," and they saw him struggling twenty yards behind.

"Can you do it?" Barry shouted to him, and Kay grinned back.

"Let you know presently.... Oh yes, I'm all right. Getting on fine."

Nan stood up on the rock, watching him, measuring with expert eye the
ratio between distance and pace, the race between Kay's swimming and the
sea. It seemed to her to be anyone's race.

Barry didn't stand up. The strain of the swim had been rather too much
for him, and in his violent lurch onto the rock he had strained his side.
He lay flat, feeling battered and sick.

The sea, Nan judged after another minute of watching, was going to beat
Kay in this race. For Kay's face had turned a curious colour, and he was
blue round the lips. Kay's heart was not strong.

Nan's dive into the tossing waves was as pretty a thing as one would wish
to see. The swoop of it carried her nearly to Kay's side. Coming up she
caught one of his now rather limp hands and put it on her left shoulder,
saying "Hold tight. A few strokes will do it."

Kay, who was no fool and who had known that he was beaten, held tight,
throwing all his exhausted strength into striking out with his other
three limbs.

They were carried round the point, beyond reach of it had not Barry's
outstretched hand been ready. Nan touched it, barely grasped it, just and
no more, as they were swung seawards. It was enough. It pulled them to
the rock's side. Again Nan wriggled and scrambled up, and then they
dragged Kay heavily after them as he fainted.

"Neat," said Barry to Nan, his appreciation of a well-handled job, his
love of spirit and skill, rising as it were to cheer, in spite of his
exhaustion and his concern for Gerda and Kay. "My word, Nan, you're a
sportsman."

"He does faint sometimes," said Gerda of Kay. "He'll be all right in a
minute."

Kay came to.

"Oh Lord," he said, "that was a bit of a grind." And then, becoming
garrulous with the weak and fatuous garrulity of those who have recently
swooned, "Couldn't have done it without you, Nan. I'd given myself up for
lost. All my past life went by me in a flash.... I really did think it
was U.P. with me, you know. And it jolly nearly was, for all of us,
wasn't it?... Whose idea was it bathing just here? Yours, Nan. Of course.
It would be. No wonder you felt our lives on your conscience and had to
rescue us all. Oh Lord, the water I've drunk! I do feel rotten."

"We all look pretty rotten, I must say," Nan commented, looking from
Kay's limp greenness to Gerda's shivering blueness, from Gerda to Barry,
prostrate, bruised and coughing, from Barry to her own cut and battered
knees and elbows, bleeding with the unaccountable profuseness of limbs
cut by rocks in the sea. "I may die from loss of blood, and the rest of
you from prostration, and all of us from cold. Are we well enough to
scale the rocks now and get to our clothes?"

"We're not well enough for anything," Barry returned. "But we'd better do
it. We don't want to die here, with the sea washing over us in this damp
way."

They climbed weakly up to the top of the rock promontory, and along it
till they dropped down into the little cove. They all felt beaten and
limp, as if they had been playing a violent but not heating game of
football. Even Nan's energy was drained.

Gerda said with chattering teeth, as she and Nan dressed in their rocky
corner, "I suppose, Nan, if it hadn't been for you and Barry, I'd have
drowned."

"Well, I suppose perhaps you would. If you come to think of it, we'd most
of us be dying suddenly half the time if it weren't for something--some
chance or other."

Gerda said "Thanks awfully, Nan," in her direct, childlike way, and Nan
turned it off with "You might have thanked me if you _had_ drowned,
seeing it was my fault we bathed there at all. I ought to have known
it wasn't safe for you or Kay."

Looking at the little fragile figure shivering in its vest, Nan felt in
that moment no malice, no triumph, no rivalry, no jealous anger; nothing
but the protecting care for the smaller and weaker, for Neville's little
pretty, precious child that she had felt when Gerda's hand clutched her
shoulder in the sea.

"Life-saving seems to soften the heart," she reflected, grimly, conscious
as always of her own reactions.

"Well," said Kay weakly, as they climbed up the cliff path to the little
village, "I do call that a rotten bathe. Now let's make for the pub and
drink whiskey."

7

It was three days later. They had spent an afternoon and a night at
Polperro, and the sun shone in the morning on that incredible place as
they rode out of it after breakfast. Polperro shakes the soul and the
aesthetic nerves like a glass of old wine; no one can survey it unmoved,
or leave it as he entered it, any more than you can come out of a fairy
ring as you went in. In the afternoon they had bathed in the rock pools
along the coast. In the evening the moon had magically gleamed on the
little town, and Barry and Gerda had sat together on the beach watching
it, and then in the dawn they had risen (Barry and Gerda again) and rowed
out in a boat to watch the pilchard haul, returning at breakfast time
sleepy, fishy and bright-eyed.

As they climbed the steep hill path that leads to Talland, the sun danced
on the little harbour with its fishing-boats and its sad, crowding,
crying gulls, and on the huddled white town with its narrow crooked
streets and overhanging houses: Polperro had the eerie beauty of a dream
or of a little foreign port. Such beauty and charm are on the edge of
pain; you cannot disentangle them from it. They intoxicate, and pierce to
tears. The warm morning sun sparkled on a still blue sea, and burned the
gorse and bracken by the steep path's edge to fragrance. So steep the
path was that they had to push their bicycles up it with bent backs and
labouring steps, so narrow that they had to go in single file. It was
never meant for cyclists, only for walkers; the bicycling road ran far
inland.

They reached the cliff's highest point, and looked down on Talland Bay.
By the side of the path, on a grass plateau, a stone war-cross reared
grey against a blue sky, with its roll of names, and its comment--"True
love by life, true love by death is tried...."

The path, become narrower, rougher and more winding, plunged sharply,
steeply downwards, running perilously along the cliff's edge. Nan got on
her bicycle.

Barry called from the rear, "Nan! It can't be done! It's not
rideable.... Don't be absurd."

Nan, remarking casually "It'll be rideable if I ride it," began to do so.

"Madwoman," Barry said, and Kay assured him, "Nan'll be all right. No one
else would, but she's got nine lives, you know."

Gerda came next behind Nan. For a moment she paused, dubiously, watching
Nan's flying, brakeless progress down the wild ribbon of a footpath,
between the hill and the sea. A false swerve, a failure to turn with the
path, and one would fly off the cliff's edge into space, fall down
perhaps to the blue rock pools far below.

To refuse Nan's lead now would be to fail again in pluck and skill before
Barry. "My word, Nan, you're a sportsman!" Barry had said, coughing
weakly on the rock onto which Nan had dragged them all out of the sea.
That phrase, and the ring in his hoarse voice as he said it, had stayed
with Gerda.

She got onto her bicycle, and shot off down the precipitous path.

"My God!" It was Barry's voice again, from the rear. "Stop, Gerda ... oh,
you little fool.... _Stop_...."

But it was too late for Gerda to stop then if she had tried. She was in
full career, rushing, leaping, jolting over the gorse roots under the
path, past thought and past hope and oddly past fear, past anything but
the knowledge that what Nan did she too must do.

Strangely, inaptly, the line of verse she had just read sung itself in
her mind as she rushed.

"True love by life, true love by death is tried...."

She took the first sharp turn, and the second. The third, a right angle
bending inward from the cliff's very edge, she did not take. She dashed
on instead, straight into space, like a young Phoebus riding a horse of
the morning through the blue air.

8

Nan, far ahead, nearly on the level, heard the crash and heard voices
crying out. Jamming on her brakes she jumped off; looked back up the
precipitous path; saw nothing but its windings. She left her bicycle at
the path's side and turned and ran up. Rounding a sharp bend, she saw
them at last above her; Barry and Kay scrambling furiously down the side
of the cliff, and below them, on a ledge half-way down to the sea, a
tangled heap that was Gerda and her bicycle.

The next turn of the path hid them from sight again. But in two minutes
she had reached the place where their two bicycles lay flung across the
path, and was scrambling after them down the cliff.

When she reached them they had disentangled Gerda and the bicycle, and
Barry held Gerda in his arms. She was unconscious, and a cut in her head
was bleeding, darkening her yellow hair, trickling over her colourless
face. Her right leg and her left arm lay stiff and oddly twisted.

Barry, his face drawn and tense, said "We must get her up to the path
before she comes to, if possible. It'll hurt like hell if she's
conscious."

They had all learnt how to help their fellow creatures in distress, and
how you must bind broken limbs to splints before you move their owner so
much as a yard. The only splint available for Gerda's right leg was her
left, and they bound it tightly to this with three handkerchiefs, then
tied her left arm to her side with Nan's stockings, and used the fourth
handkerchief (which was Gerda's, and the cleanest) for her head. She came
to before the arm was finished, roused to pained consciousness by the
splinting process, and lay with clenched teeth and wet forehead,
breathing sharply but making no other sound.

Then Barry lifted her in his arms and the others supported her on either
side, and they climbed slowly and gently up to the path, not by the sheer
way of their descent but by a diagonal track that joined the path further
down.

"I'm sorry, darling," Barry said through his teeth when he jolted her.
"I'm frightfully sorry.... Only a little more now."

They reached the path and Barry laid her down on the grass by its side,
her head supported on Nan's knee.

"Very bad, isn't it?" said Barry gently, bending over her.

She smiled up at him, with twisted lips.

"Not so bad, really."

"You little sportsman," said Barry, softly and stooping, he kissed her
pale cheek.

Then he stood up and spoke to Nan.

"I'm going to fetch a doctor if there's one in Talland. Kay must ride
back and fetch the Polperro doctor, in case there isn't. In any case I
shall bring up help and a stretcher from Talland and have her taken
down."

He picked up his bicycle and stood for a moment looking down at the face
on Nan's knee.

"You'll look after her," he said, quickly, and got on the bicycle and
dashed down the path, showing that he too could do that fool's trick if
it served any good purpose.

Gerda, watching him, caught her breath and forgot pain in fear until,
swerving round the next bend, he was out of sight.

9

Nan sat very still by the path, staring over the sea, shading Gerda's
head from the sun. There was nothing more to be done than that; there was
no water, even, to bathe the cut with.

"Nan."

"Yes?"

"Am I much hurt? How much hurt, do you think?"

"I don't know how much. I think the arm is broken. The leg may be only
sprained. Then there's the cut--I daresay that isn't very much--but one
can't tell that."

"I must have come an awful mucker," Gerda murmured, after a pause. "It
must have looked silly, charging over the edge like that.... You didn't."

"No. I didn't."

"It was stupid," Gerda breathed, and shut her eyes.

"No, not stupid. Anyone might have. It was a risky game to try."

"You tried it."

"Oh, I ... I do try things. That's no reason why you should.... You'd
better not talk. Lie quite quiet. It won't be very long now before they
come.... The pain's bad, I know."

Gerda's head was hot and felt giddy. She moved it restlessly. Urgent
thoughts pestered her; her normal reticences lay like broken fences about
her.

"Nan."

"Yes. Shall I raise your head a little?"

"No, it's all right.... About Barry, Nan."

Nan grew rigid, strung up to endure.

"And what about Barry?"

"Just that I love him. I love him very much; beyond anything in the
world."

"Yes. You'd better not talk, all the same."

"Nan, do you love him too?"

Nan laughed, a queer little curt laugh in her throat.

"Rather a personal question, don't you think? Suppose, by any chance that
I did? But of course I don't."

"But doesn't he love you, Nan? He did, didn't he?"

"My dear, I think you're rather delirious. This isn't the way one
talks.... You'd better ask Barry the state of his affections, since
you're interested in them. I'm not, particularly."

Gerda drew a long breath, of pain or fatigue or relief.

"I'm rather glad you don't care for him. I thought we might have shared
him if you had, and if he'd cared for us both. But it might have been
difficult."

"It might; you never know.... Well, you're welcome to my share, if you
want it."

Then Gerda lay quiet, with closed eyes and wet forehead, and concentrated
wholly on her right leg, which was hurting badly.

Nan too sat quiet, and she too was concentrating.

Irrevocably it was over now; done, finished with. Barry's eyes, Barry's
kiss, had told her that. Gerda, the lovely, the selfish child, had taken
Barry from her, to keep for always. Walked into Barry's office, into
Barry's life, and deliberately stolen him. Thinking, she said, that they
might share him.... The little fool. The little thief. (She waved the
flies away from Gerda's head.)

And even this other game, this contest of physical prowess, had ended in
a hollow, mocking victory for the winner, since defeat had laid the loser
more utterly in her lover's arms, more unshakably in his heart. Gerda,
defeated and broken, had won everything. Won even that tribute which had
been Nan's own. "You little sportsman," Barry had called her, with a
break of tenderness in his voice. Even that, even the palm for valour, he
had placed in her hands. The little victor. The greedy little grabber of
other people's things....

Gerda moaned at last.

"Only a little longer," said Nan, and laid her hand lightly and coolly on
the hot wet forehead.

The little winner... damn her....

The edge of a smile, half-ironic, wholly bitter, twisted at Nan's lips.

10

Voices and steps. Barry and a doctor, Barry and a stretcher, Barry and
all kinds of help. Barry's anxious eyes and smile. "Well? How's she
been?"

He was on his knees beside her.

"Here's the doctor, darling.... I'm sorry I've been so long."

CHAPTER X

PRINCIPLES

1

Through the late September and October days Gerda would lie on a wicker
couch in the conservatory at Windover, her sprained leg up, her broken
wrist on a splint, her mending head on a soft pillow, and eat pears.
Grapes too, apples, figs, chocolates of course--but particularly pears.
She also wrote verse, and letters to Barry, and drew in pen and ink, and
read Sir Leo Chiozza Money's "Triumph of Nationalisation" and Mrs.
Snowden on Bolshevik Russia, and "Lady Adela," and "Coterie," and
listened while Neville read Mr. W.H. Mallock's "Memoirs" and Disraeli's
"Life." Her grandmother (Rodney's mother) sent her "The Diary of Opal
Whiteley," but so terrible did she find it that it caused a relapse, and
Neville had to remove it. She occasionally struggled in vain with a
modern novel, which she usually renounced in perplexity after three
chapters or so. Her taste did not lie in this direction.

"I can't understand what they're all about," she said to Neville.
"Poetry _means_ something. It's about something real, something that
really is so. So are books like this--" she indicated "The Triumph of
Nationalisation." "But most novels are so queer. They're about people,
but not people as they are. They're not _interesting_."

"Not as a rule, certainly. Occasionally one gets an idea out of one
of them, or a laugh, or a thrill. Now and then they express life, or
reality, or beauty, in some terms or other--but not as a rule."

Gerda was different from Kay, who devoured thrillers, shockers, and
ingenious crime and mystery stories with avidity. She did not believe
that life was really much like that, and Kay's assertion that if it
weren't it ought to be, she rightly regarded as pragmatical. Neither did
she share Kay's more fundamental taste for the Elizabethans, Carolines
and Augustans. She and Kay met (as regards literature) only on economics,
politics, and modern verse. Gerda's mind was artistic rather than
literary, and she felt no wide or acute interest in human beings, their
actions, passions, foibles, and desires.

So, surrounded by books from the Times library, and by nearly all the
weekly and monthly reviews (the Bendishes, like many others, felt, with
whatever regret, that they had to see all of these), Gerda for the most
part, when alone, lay and dreamed dreams and ate pears.

2

Barry came down for week-ends. He and Gerda had declared their affections
towards one another even at the Looe infirmary, where Gerda had been
conveyed from the scene of accident. It had been no moment then for
anything more definite than statements of reciprocal emotion, which are
always cheering in sickness. But when Gerda was better, well enough, in
fact, to lie in the Windover conservatory, Barry came down from town and
said, "When shall we get married?"

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