Rose Macaulay - Dangerous Ages

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"Oh no, she didn't. I don't know what Rosalind's been saying this time,
but it would be odd if it was the truth."

"Nan, it's no use denying things. I _know_."

It was true; she did know. A few months ago she would have doubted and
questioned; but Mr. Cradock had taught her better. She had learnt from
him the simple truth about life; that is, that nearly everyone is nearly
always involved up to the eyes in the closest relationship with someone
of another sex. It is nature's way with mankind. Another thing she had
learnt from him was that the more they denied it the more it was so;
protests of innocence and admissions of guilt were alike proofs of the
latter. So she was accurate when she said that it was no use for Nan to
deny anything. It was no use whatever.

Nan had become cool and sarcastic--her nastiest, most dangerous manner.

"Do you think you would care to be a little more explicit, mother? I'm
afraid I don't quite follow. What is it no use my denying? _What_ do you
know?"

Mrs. Hilary gathered herself together. Her head trembled and jerked with
emotion; wisps of her hair, tousled by the night, escaped over her
collar. She spoke tremulously, tensely, her hands wrung together.

"That you are going on with a married man. That you are his mistress,"
she said, putting it at its crudest, since Nan wanted plain speaking.

Nan sat quite still, smoking. The silence thrilled with Mrs. Hilary's
passion.

"I see," Nan said at last. "And it's no use my denying it. In that case
I won't." Her voice was smooth and clear and still, like cold water. "You
know the man's name too, I presume?"

"Of course. Everyone knows it. I tell you, Nan, everyone's talking of you
and him. A town topic, Rosalind calls it."

"Rosalind would. Town must be very dull just now, if that's all they have
to talk of."

"But it's not the scandal I'm thinking of," Mrs. Hilary went on, "though,
God knows, that's bad enough--I'm thankful Father died when he did and
was spared it--but the thing itself. The awful, awful thing itself. Have
you no shame, Nan?"

"Not much."

"For all our sakes. Not for mine--I know you don't care a rap for
that--but for Neville, whom you do profess to love...."

"I should think we might leave Neville out of it. She's shown no signs of
believing any story about me."

"Well, she does believe it, you may depend upon it. No one could help it.
People write from here saying it's an open fact."

"People here can't have much to put in their letters."

"Oh, they'll make room for gossip. People always will. Always. But I'm
not going to dwell on that side of things, because I know you don't care
what anyone says. It's the _wrongness_ of it.... A married man.... Even
if his wife divorces him! It would be in the papers.... And if she
doesn't you can't ever marry him.... Do you care for the man?"

"What man?"

"Don't quibble. Stephen Lumley, of course."

"Stephen Lumley is a friend of mine. I'm fond of him."

"I don't believe you do love him. I believe it's all recklessness and
perversity. Lawlessness. That's what Mr. Cradock said."

"Mr. Cradock?" Nan's eyebrows went up.

Mrs. Hilary flushed a brighter scarlet. The colour kept running over her
face and going back again, all the time she was talking.

"Your psycho-analyst doctor," said Nan, and her voice was a little harder
and cooler than before. "I suppose you had an interesting conversation
with him about me."

"I have to tell him everything," Mrs. Hilary stammered. "It's part
of the course. I did consult him about you. I'm not ashamed of it. He
understands about these things. He's not an ordinary man."

"This is very interesting." Nan lit another cigarette. "It seems that
I've been a boon all round as a town topic--to London, to Rome and to St.
Mary's Bay.... Well, what did he advise about me?"

Mrs. Hilary remembered vaguely and in part, but did not think it would be
profitable just now to tell Nan.

"We have to be very wise about this," she said, collecting herself. "Very
wise and firm. Lawlessness.... I wonder if you remember, Nan, throwing
your shoes at my head when you were three?"

"No. But I can quite believe I did. It was the sort of thing I used to
do."

"Think back, Nan. What is the first act of naughtiness and disobedience
you remember, and what moved you to it?"

Nan, who knew a good deal more about psycho-analysis than Mrs. Hilary
did, laughed curtly.

"No good, mother. That won't work on me. I'm not susceptible to the
treatment. Too hard-headed. What was Mr. Cradock's next brain-wave?"

"Oh well, if you take it like this, what's the use...."

"None at all. I advise you not to bother yourself. It will only make your
headache worse.... Now I think after all this excitement you had better
go and lie down, don't you? I'm going out, anyhow."

Then Stephen Lumley knocked at the door and came in. A tall, slouching
hollow-chested man of forty, who looked unhappy and yet cynically
amused at the world. He had a cough, and unusually bright eyes under
overhanging brows.

Nan said, "This is Stephen Lumley, mother. My mother, Stephen," and left
them to do the rest, watching, critical and aloof, to see how they would
manage the situation.

Mrs. Hilary managed it by rising from her chair and standing rigidly in
the middle of the room, breathing hard and staring. Stephen Lumley looked
enquiringly at Nan.

"How do you do, Mrs. Hilary," he said. "I expect you're pretty well
played out by that beastly journey, aren't you."

Mrs. Hilary's voice came stifled, choked, between pants. She was working
up; or rather worked up: Nan knew the symptoms.

"You dare to come into my presence.... I must ask you to leave my
daughter's sitting-room _immediately_. I have come to take her back to
England with me at once. Please go. There is nothing that can possibly be
said between you and me--nothing."

Stephen Lumley, a cool and quiet person, raised his brows, looked enquiry
once more at Nan, found no answer, said, "Well, then, I'll say good-bye,"
and departed.

Mrs. Hilary wrung her hands together.

"How dare he! How dare he! Into my very presence! He has no shame...."

Nan watched her coolly. But a red spot had begun to burn in each cheek at
her mother's opening words to Lumley, and still burned. Mrs. Hilary knew
of old that still-burning, deadly anger of Nan's.

"Thank you, mother. You've helped me to make up my mind. I'm going to
Capri with Stephen next week. I've refused up till now. He was going
without me. You've made up my mind for me. You can tell Mr. Cradock that
if he asks."

Nan was fiercely, savagely desirous to hurt. In the same spirit she had
doubtless thrown her shoes at Mrs. Hilary thirty years ago. Rage and
disgust, hot rebellion and sick distaste--what she had felt then she
felt now. During her mother's breathless outbreak at Stephen Lumley,
standing courteous and surprised before her, she had crossed her Rubicon.
And now with flaming words she burned her boats.

Mrs. Hilary burst into tears. But her tears had never yet quenched Nan's
flames. Nan made her lie down and gave her sal volatile. Sal volatile
eases the head and nervous system and composes the manners, but no more
than tears does it quench flames.

4

The day that followed was strange, and does not sound likely, but life
often does not. Nan took Mrs. Hilary out to lunch at a trattoria near
the Forum, as it were to change the subject, and they spent the usual
first afternoon of visitors in Rome, who hasten to view the Forum with
a guide to the most recent excavations in their hands. Mrs. Hilary felt
completely uninterested to-day in recent or any other excavations. But,
obsessed even now with the old instinctive desire (the fond hope, rather)
not to seem unintelligent before her children, more especially when she
was not on good terms with them, she accompanied Nan, who firmly and
deftly closed or changed the subjects of unlawful love, Stephen Lumley,
Capri, returning to England, and her infant acts of wilfulness, whenever
her mother opened them, which was frequently, as Mrs. Hilary found these
things easier conversational topics than the buildings in the Forum. Nan
was determined to keep the emotional pressure low for the rest of the
day, and she was fairly competent at this when she tried. As Mrs. Hilary
had equal gifts at keeping it high, it was a well-matched contest. When
she left the Forum for a tea shop, both were tired out. The Forum is
tiring; emotion is tiring; tears are tiring; quarrelling is tiring;
travelling through to Rome is tiring; all five together are annihilating.

However, they had tea.

Mrs. Hilary was cold and bitter now, not hysterical. Nan, who was
living a bad life, and was also tiresomely exactly informed about the
differences between the Forum in '99 and the Forum to-day (a subject on
which Mrs. Hilary was hazy) was not fit, until she came to a better mind,
to be spoken to. Mrs. Hilary shut her lips tight and averted her reddened
eyes. She hated Nan just now. She could have loved her had she been
won to repentance, but now--"Nan was never like the rest," she thought.

Nan persisted in making light, equable conversation, which Mrs. Hilary
thought in bad taste. She talked of England and the family, asked after
Grandmama, Neville and the rest.

"Neville is extremely ill," Mrs. Hilary said, quite untruly, but
that was, to do her justice, the way in which she always saw illness,
particularly Neville's. "And worried to death about Gerda, who seems to
have gone off her head since that accident in Cornwall. She is still
sticking to that insane, wicked notion about not getting married."

Nan had heard before of this.

"She'll give that up," she said, coolly, "when she finds she really can't
have Barry if she doesn't. Gerda gets what she wants."

"Oh, you all do that, the whole lot of you.... And a nice example
_you're_ setting the child."

"She'll give it up," Nan repeated, keeping the conversation on Gerda.
"Gerda hasn't the martyr touch. She won't perish for a principle. She
wants Barry and she'll have him, though she may hold out for a time.
Gerda doesn't lose things, in the end."

"She's a very silly child, and I suppose she's been mixing with dreadful
friends and picked up these ideas. At twenty there's some excuse for
ignorant foolishness." But none at thirty-three, Mrs. Hilary meant.

"Barry Briscoe," she added, "is being quite firm about it. Though he is
desperately in love with her, Neville tells me; desperately."

He's soon got over you, even if he did care for you once, and even if you
did send him away, her emphasis implied.

In Nan, casually flicking the ash off her cigarette, a queer impulse came
and went. For a moment she wanted to cry; to drop hardness and lightness
and pretence, and cry like a child and say "Mother, comfort me. Don't go
on hurting me. I love Barry. Be kind to me, oh be kind to me!"

If she had done it, Mrs. Hilary would have taken her in her arms and been
all mother, and the wound in their affection would have been temporarily
healed.

Nan said nonchalantly "I suppose he is. They're sure to be all
right.... Now what next, mother? It's getting dark for seeing things."

"I am tired to death," said Mrs. Hilary. "I shall go back to those
dreadful rooms and try to rest.... It has been an awful day.... I hate
Rome. In '99 it was so different. Father and I went about together; he
showed me everything. He _knew_ about it all. Besides...."

Besides, how could I enjoy sight-seeing after that scene this morning,
and with this awful calamity that has happened?

They went back. Mrs. Hilary was desperately missing her afternoon hour
with Mr. Cradock. She had come to rely on it on a Wednesday.

5

Nan sat up late, correcting proofs, after Mrs. Hilary had gone to bed.
Galleys lay all round her on the floor by the stove. She let them slip
from her knee and lie there. She hated them....

She pressed her hands over her eyes, shutting them out, shutting out
life. She was going off with Stephen Lumley. She had told him so this
morning. Both their lives were broken; hers by Barry, whom she loved, his
by his wife, whom he disliked. He loved her; he wanted her. She could
with him find relief, find life a tolerable thing. They could have a good
time together. They were good companions; their need, though dissimilar,
was mutual. They saw the same beauty, spoke the same tongue, laughed at
the same things. In the very thought of Stephen, with his cynical humour,
his clear, keen mind, his lazy power of brain, Nan had found relief all
that day, reacting desperately from a mind fuddled with sentiment and
emotion as with drink, a soft, ignorant brain, which knew and cared about
nothing except people, a hysterical passion of anger and malice. They had
pushed her sharply and abruptly over the edge of decision, that mind and
brain and passion. Stephen, against whom their fierce anger was
concentrated, was so different....

To get away, to get right away from everything and everyone, with
Stephen. Not to have to go back to London alone, to see what she could
not, surely, bear to see--Barry and Gerda, Gerda and Barry, always,
everywhere, radiant and in love. And Neville, Gerda's mother, who saw so
much. And Rosalind, who saw everything, everything, and said so. And Mrs.
Hilary....

To saunter round the queer, lovely corners of the earth with Stephen,
light oneself by Stephen's clear, flashing mind, look after Stephen's
weak, neglected body as he never could himself ... that was the only
anodyne. Life would then some time become an adventure again, a gay
stroll through the fair, instead of a desperate sickness and nightmare.

Barry, oh Barry.... Nan, who had thought she was getting better, found
that she was not. Tears stormed and shook her at last. She crumpled up on
the floor among the galley-slips, her head upon the chair.

Those damned proofs--who wanted them? What were books? What was anything?

6

Mrs. Hilary came in, in her dressing-gown, red-eyed. She had heard
strangled sounds, and knew that her child was crying.

"My darling!"

Her arms were round Nan's shoulders; she was kneeling among the proofs.

"My little girl--Nan!"

"Mother...."

They held each other close. It was a queer moment, though not an
unprecedented one in the stormy history of their relations together.
A queer, strange, comforting, healing moment, the fleeting shadow of a
great rock in a barren land; a strayed fragment of something which should
have been between them always but was not. Certainly an odd moment.

"My own baby.... You're unhappy...."

"Unhappy--yes.... Darling mother, it can't be helped. Nothing can be
helped.... Don't let's talk ... darling."

Strange words from Nan. Strange for Mrs. Hilary to feel her hand held
against Nan's wet cheek and kissed.

Strange moment: and it could not last. The crying child wants its mother;
the mother wants to comfort the crying child. A good bridge, but one
inadequate for the strain of daily traffic. The child, having dried
its tears, watches the bridge break again, and thinks it a pity but
inevitable. The mother, less philosophic, may cry in her turn, thinking
perhaps that the bridge may be built this time in that way; but, the
child having the colder heart, it seldom is.

There remain the moments, impotent but indestructible.

CHAPTER XIV

YOUTH TO YOUTH

1

Kay was home for the Christmas vacation. He was full, not so much of
Cambridge, as of schemes for establishing a co-operative press next year.
He was learning printing and binding, and wanted Gerda to learn too.

"Because, if you're really not going to marry Barry, and if Barry sticks
to not having you without, you'll be rather at a loose end, won't you,
and you may as well come and help us with the press.... But of course,
you know," Kay added absently, his thoughts still on the press, "I should
advise you to give up on that point."

"Give up, Kay? Marry, do you mean?"

"Yes.... It doesn't seem to me to be a point worth making a fuss about.
Of course I agree with you in theory--I always have. But I've come to
think lately that it's not a point of much importance. And perfectly
sensible people are doing it all the time. You know Jimmy Kenrick and
Susan Mallow have done it? They used to say they wouldn't, but they have.
The fact is, people _do_ do it, whatever they say about it beforehand.
And though in theory it's absurd, it seems often to work out pretty well
in actual life. Personally I should make no bones about it, if I wanted
a girl and she wanted marriage. Of course a girl can always go on being
called by her own name if she likes. That has points."

"Of course one could do that," Gerda pondered.

"It's a sound plan in some ways. It saves trouble and explanation
to go on with the name you've published your things under before
marriage.... By the way, what about your poems, Gerda? They'll be about
ready by the time we get our press going, won't they? We can afford to
have some slight stuff of that sort if we get hold of a few really good
things to start with, to make our name."

Gerda's thoughts were not on her poems, nor on Kay's press, but on his
advice about matrimony. For the first time she wavered. If Kay thought
that.... It set the business in a new light. And of course other people
_were_ doing it; sound people, the people who talked the same language
and belonged to the same set as one's self.

Kay had spoken. It was the careless, authentic voice of youth speaking to
youth. It was a trumpet blast making a breach in the walls against which
the batteries of middle age had thundered in vain. Gerda told herself
that she must look further into this, think it over again, talk it over
with other people of the age to know what was right. If it could be
managed with honour, she would find it a great relief to give up on this
point. For Barry was so firm; he would never give up; and, after all, one
of them must, if it could be done with a clear conscience.

2

Ten days later Gerda said to Barry, "I've been thinking it over again,
Barry, and I've decided that perhaps it will be all right for us to get
married after all."

Barry took both her hands and kissed each in turn, to show that he was
not triumphing but adoring.

"You mean it? You feel you can really do it without violating your
conscience? Sure, darling?"

"Yes, I think I'm sure. Lots of quite sensible, good people have done it
lately."

"Oh any number, of course--if _that's_ any reason."

"Not, not those people. My sort of people, I mean. People who believe
what I do, and wouldn't tie themselves up and lose their liberty for
anything."

"I agree with Lenin. He says liberty is a bourgeois dream."

"Barry, I may keep my name, mayn't I? I may still be called Gerda
Bendish, by people in general?"

"Of course, if you like. Rather silly, isn't it? Because it won't _be_
your name. But that's your concern."

"It's the name I've always written and drawn under, you see."

"Yes. I see your point. Of course you shall be Gerda Bendish anywhere you
like, only not on cheques, if you don't mind."

"And I don't much want to wear a wedding ring, Barry."

"That's as you like, too, of course. You might keep it in your purse when
travelling, to produce if censorious hotel keepers look askance at us.
Even the most abandoned ladies do that sometimes, I believe. Or your
marriage lines will do as well.... Gerda, you blessed darling, it's most
frightfully decent and sporting of you to have changed your mind and
owned up. Next time we differ I'll try and be the one to do it, I
honestly will.... I say, let's come out by ourselves and dine and do a
theatre, to celebrate the occasion."

So they celebrated the triumph of institutionalism.

3

Their life together, thought Barry, would be a keen, jolly, adventuring
business, an ardent thing, full of gallant dreams and endeavours. It
should never grow tame or stale or placid, never lose its fine edge.
There would be mountain peak beyond mountain peak to scale together. They
would be co-workers, playmates, friends and lovers all at once, and they
would walk in liberty as in a bourgeois dream.

So planned Barry Briscoe, the romantic, about whose head the vision
splendid always hovered, a realisable, capturable thing.

Gerda thought, "I'm happy. Poetry and drawing and Barry. I've everything
I want, except a St. Bernard pup, and Kay's giving me that for Christmas.
_I'm happy._"

It was a tingling, intense, sensuous feeling, like stretching warm before
a good fire, or lying in fragrant thymy woods in June, in the old Junes
when suns were hot. Life was a song and a dream and a summer morning.

"You're happy, Gerda," Neville said to her once, gladly but half
wistfully, and she nodded, with her small gleaming smile.

"Go on being happy," Neville told her, and Gerda did not know that she
had nearly added "for it's cost rather a lot, your happiness." Gerda
seldom cared how much things had cost; she did not waste thought on such
matters. She was happy.

CHAPTER XV

THE DREAM

1

Barry and Gerda were married in January in a registry office, and, as all
concerned disliked wedding parties, there was no wedding party.

After they had gone, Neville, recovered now from the lilies and languors
of illness, plunged into the roses and raptures of social life. One
mightn't, she said to herself, be able to accomplish much in this world,
or imprint one's personality on one's environment by deeds and
achievements, but one could at least enjoy life, be a pleased
participator in its spoils and pleasures, an enchanted spectator of its
never-ending flux and pageant, its richly glowing moving pictures. One
could watch the play out, even if one hadn't much of a part oneself.
Music, art, drama, the company of eminent, pleasant and entertaining
persons, all the various forms of beauty, the carefully cultivated
richness, graces and elegances which go to build up the world of the
fortunate, the cultivated, the prosperous and the well-bred--Neville
walked among these like the soul in the lordly pleasure house built for
her by the poet Tennyson, or like Robert Browning glutting his sense upon
the world--"Miser, there waits the gold for thee!"--or Francis Thompson
swinging the earth a trinket at his wrist. In truth, she was at times
self-consciously afraid that she resembled all these three, whom (in the
moods they thus expressed) she disliked beyond reason, finding them
morbid and hard to please.

She too knew herself morbid and hard to please. If she had not been
so, to be Rodney's wife would surely have been enough; it would have
satisfied all her nature. Why didn't it? Was it perhaps really because,
though she loved him, it was not with the uncritical devotion of the
early days? She had for so many years now seen clearly, through and
behind his charm, his weakness, his vanities, his scorching ambitions
and jealousies, his petulant angers, his dependence on praise and
admiration. She had no jealousy now of his frequent confidential
intimacies with other attractive women; they were harmless enough, and
he never lost the need of and dependence on her; but they may have helped
to clarify her vision of him.

Rodney had no failings beyond what are the common need of human nature;
he was certainly good enough for her. Their marriage was all right. It
was only the foolish devil of egotism in her which goaded to unwholesome
activity the other side of her nature, that need for self-expression
which marriage didn't satisfy.

2

In February she suddenly tired of London and the British climate, and was
moved by a desire to travel. So she went to Italy, and stayed in Capri
with Nan and Stephen Lumley, who were leading on that island lives by
turns gaily indolent and fiercely industrious, finding the company
stimulating and the climate agreeable and soothing to Stephen's defective
lungs.

From Italy Neville went to Greece. Corinth, Athens, the islands, Tempe,
Delphi, Crete--how good to have money and be able to see all these! Italy
and Greece are Europe's pleasure grounds; there the cultivated and the
prosperous traveller may satisfy his soul and forget carking cares and
stabbing ambitions, and drug himself with loveliness.

If Neville abruptly tired of it, and set her face homewards in early
April, it was partly because she felt the need of Rodney, and partly
because she saw, fleetingly but day by day more lucidly, that one could
not take one's stand, for satisfaction of desire, on the money which one
happened to have but which the majority bitterly and emptily lacked. Some
common way there had to be, some freedom all might grasp, a liberty not
for the bourgeois only, but for the proletariat--the poor, the sad, the
gay proletariat, who also grew old and lost their dreams, and had not the
wherewithal to drug their souls, unless indeed they drank much liquor,
and that is but a poor artificial way to peace.

Voyaging homewards through the spring seas, Neville saw life as an
entangling thicket, the Woods of Westermain she had loved in her
childhood, in which the scaly dragon squatted, the craving monster self
that had to be subjugated before one could walk free in the enchanted
woods.

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