Rose Macaulay - Dangerous Ages

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"I don't want you to pretend anything isn't there, darling," Neville,
between the two generations, had said to Gerda once. "Only it seems to me
that some of you children have one particular kind of truth too heavily
on your minds. It seems to block the world for you."

"You mean sex," Gerda had told her, bluntly. "Well, it runs all through
life, mother. What's the use of hiding from it? The only way to get even
with it is to face it. And _use_ it."

"Face it and use it by all means. All I meant was, it's a question of
emphasis. There _are_ other things...."

Of course Gerda knew that. There was drawing, and poetry, and beauty, and
dancing, and swimming, and music, and politics, and economics. Of course
there were other things; no doubt about that. They were like songs, like
colour, like sunrise, like flowers, these other things. But the basis of
life was the desire of the male for the female and of the female for the
male. And this had been warped and smothered and talked down and made a
furtive, shameful thing, and it must be brought out into the day....

Neville smiled to hear all this tripping sweetly off Gerda's lips.

"All right, darling, don't mind me. Go ahead and bring it out into the
day, if you think the subject really needs more airing than it already
gets. I should have thought myself it got lots, and always had."

And there they were; they talked at cross purposes, these two, across the
gulf of twenty years, and with the best will in the world could not hope
to understand, either of them, what the other was really at. And now here
was Gerda, in Mrs. Hilary's bedroom, looking across a gulf of forty years
and saying nothing at all, for she knew it would be of no manner of use,
since words don't carry as far as that.

So all she said was "Tea's ready, Grandmother."

And Mrs. Hilary supposed that Gerda hadn't, probably, noticed or
understood those very queer things she had come upon while reading "The
Breath of Life."

They went down to tea.

CHAPTER IV

ROOTS

1

It was a Monday evening, late in July. Pamela Hilary, returning from a
Care Committee meeting, fitted her latch-key into the door of the rooms
in Cow Lane which she shared with Frances Carr, and let herself into the
hot dark passage hall.

A voice from a room on the right called "Come along, my dear. Your pap's
ready."

Pamela entered the room on the right. A pleasant, Oxfordish room,
with the brown paper and plain green curtains of the college days of
these women, and Duerer engravings, and sweet peas in a bowl, and Frances
Carr stirring bread and milk over a gas ring. Frances Carr was small
and thirty-eight, and had a nice brown face and a merry smile. Pamela
was a year older and tall and straight and pale, and her ash-brown hair
swept smoothly back from a broad white forehead. Her grey eyes regarded
the world shrewdly and pleasantly through pince-nez. Pamela was
distinguished-looking, and so well-bred that you never got through her
guard; she never hurt the feelings of others or betrayed her own.
Competent she was, too, and the best organizer in Hoxton, which is to say
a great deal, Hoxton needing and getting, one way and another, a good
deal of organisation. Some people complained that they couldn't get to
know Pamela, the guard was too complete. But Frances Carr knew her.

Frances Carr had piled cushions in a deep chair for her.

"Lie back and be comfy, old thing, and I'll give you your pap."

She handed Pamela the steaming bowl, and proceeded to take off her
friend's shoes and substitute moccasin slippers. It was thus that she and
Pamela had mothered one another at Somerville eighteen years ago, and
ever since. They had the maternal instinct, like so many women.

"Well, how went it? How was Mrs. Cox?"

Mrs. Cox was the chairwoman of the Committee. All committee members know
that the chairman or woman is a ticklish problem, if not a sore burden.

"Oh well...." Pamela dismissed Mrs. Cox with half a smile. "Might have
been worse.... Oh look here, Frank. About the library fund...."

The front door-bell tingled through the house.

Frances Carr said "Oh hang. All right, I'll see to it. If it's Care or
Continuation or Library, I shall send it away. You're not going to do any
more business to-night."

She went to the door, and there, her lithe, drooping slimness outlined
against the gas-lit street, stood Nan Hilary.

"Oh, Nan.... But what a late call. Yes, Pamela's just in from a
committee. Tired to death; she's had neuralgia all this week. She mustn't
sit up late, really. But come along in."

2

Nan came into the room, her dark eyes blinking against the gaslight, her
small round face pale and smutty. She bent to kiss Pamela, then curled
herself up in a wicker chair and yawned.

"The night is damp and dirty. No, no food, thanks. I've dined. After
dinner I was bored, so I came along to pass the time.... When are you
taking your holidays, both of you? It's time."

"Pamela's going for hers next week," said Frances Carr, handing Nan a
cigarette.

"On the contrary," said Pamela, "Frances is going for _hers_ next week.
Mine is to be September this year."

"Now, we've had all this out before, Pam, you know we have. You
faithfully promised to take August if your neuralgia came on again, and
it has. Tell her she is to, Nan."

"She wouldn't do it the more if I did," Nan said, lazily. These
competitions in unselfishness between Pamela and Frances Carr always
bored her. There was no end to them. Women are so terrifically
self-abnegatory; they must give, give, give, to someone all the
time. Women, that is, of the mothering type, such as these. They must
be forever cherishing something, sending someone to bed with bread and
milk, guarding someone from fatigue.

"It ought to be their children," thought Nan, swiftly. "But they pour it
out on one another instead."

Having put her hand on the clue, she ceased to be interested in the
exhibition. It was, in fact, no more and no less interesting than if it
_had_ been their children. Most sorts of love were rather dull, to the
spectator. Pamela and Frances were all right; decent people, not sloppy,
not gushing, but fine and direct and keen, though rather boring when they
began to talk to each other about some silly old thing that had happened
in their last year at Oxford, or their first year, or on some reading
party. Some people re-live their lives like this; others pass on their
way, leaving the past behind. They were all right, Pamela and Frances.
But all this mothering....

Yet how happy they were, these two, in their useful, competent work and
devoted friendship. They had achieved contacts with life, permanent
contacts. Pamela, in spite of her neuralgia, expressed calm and entirely
unbumptious attainment, Nan feverish seeking. For Nan's contacts with
life were not permanent, but suddenly vivid and passing; the links broke
and she flew off at a tangent. Nan had lately been taken with a desperate
fear of becoming like her mother, when she was old and couldn't write any
more, or love any more men. Horrible thought, to be like Mrs. Hilary,
roaming, questing, feverishly devoured by her own impatience of life....

In here it was cool and calm, soft and blurred with the smoke of their
cigarettes. Frances Carr left them to talk, telling them not to be late.
When she had gone, Pamela said "I thought you were still down at
Windover, Nan."

"Left it on Saturday.... Mother and Grandmama had been there a week.
I couldn't stick it any longer. Mother was outrageously jealous, of
course."

"Neville and Grandmama? Poor mother."

"Oh yes, poor mother. But it gets on my nerves. Neville's an angel. I
can't think how she sticks it. For that matter, I never know how she puts
up with Rodney's spoilt fractiousness.... And altogether life was a bit
of a strain ... no peace. And I wanted some peace and solitude, to make
up my mind in."

"Are you making it up now?" Pamela, mildly interested, presumed it was a
man.

"Trying to. It isn't made yet. That's why I roam about your horrible
slums in the dark. I'm considering; getting things into focus. Seeing
them all round."

"Well, that sounds all right."

"Pam." Nan leant forward abruptly, her cigarette between two brown
fingers. "Are you happy? Do you enjoy your life?"

Pamela withdrew, lightly, inevitably, behind guards.

"Within reason, yes. When committees aren't too tiresome, and the
accounts balance, and...."

"Oh, give me a straight answer, Pam. You dependable, practical people are
always frivolous about things that matter. Are you happy? Do you feel
right-side-up with life?"

"In the main--yes." Pamela was more serious this time. "One's doing one's
job, after all. And human beings are interesting."

"But I've got that too. My job, and human beings.... Why do I feel all
tossed about, like a boat on a choppy sea? Oh, I know life's furiously
amusing and exciting--of course it is. But I want something solid. You've
got it, somehow."

Nan broke off and thought "It's Frances Carr she's got. That's permanent.
That goes on. Pamela's anchored. All these people I have--these men and
women--they're not anchors, they're stimulants, and how different that
is!"

They looked at each other in silence. Pamela said then, "You don't look
well, child."

"Oh--" Nan threw her cigarette end impatiently into the grate. "I'm all
right. I'm tired, and I've been thinking too much. That never suits
me.... Thanks, Pam. You've helped me to make up my mind. I like you,
Pam," she added dispassionately, "because you're so gentlewomanly. You
don't ask questions, or pry. Most people do."

"Surely not. Not most decent people."

"Most people aren't decent. You think they are. You've not lived in my
set--nor in Rosalind's. You're still fresh from Oxford--stuck all over
with Oxford manners and Oxford codes. You don't know the raddled gossip
who fishes for your secrets and then throws them about for fun, like
tennis balls."

"I know Rosalind, thank you, Nan."

"Oh, Rosalind's not the only one, though she'll do. Anyhow I've trapped
you into saying an honest and unkind thing about her, for once; that's
something. Wish you weren't such a dear old fraud, Pammie."

Frances Carr came back, in her dressing gown, looking about twenty-three,
her brown hair in two plaits.

"Pamela, you _mustn't_ sit up any more. I'm awfully sorry, Nan, but her
head...."

"Right oh. I'm off. Sorry I've kept you up, Pammie. Good-night.
Good-night, Frances. Yes, I shall get the bus at the corner. Good-night."

The door closed after Nan, shutting in the friends and their friendship
and their anchored peace.

3

Off went Nan on the bus at the corner, whistling softly into the night.
Like a bird her heart rose up and sang, at the lit pageant of London
swinging by. Queer, fantastic, most lovely life! Sordid, squalid,
grotesque life, bitter as black tea, sour as stale wine! Gloriously
funny, brilliant as a flower-bed, bright as a Sitwell street in hell--

"(Down in Hell's gilded street
Snow dances fleet and sweet,
Bright as a parakeet....)"

unsteady as a swing-boat, silly as a drunkard's dream, tragic as a poem
by Massfield.... To have one's corner in it, to run here and there about
the city, grinning like a dog--what more did one want? Human adventures,
intellectual adventures, success, even a little fame, men and women,
jokes, laughter and love, dancing and a little drink, and the fields and
mountains and seas beyond--what more did one want?

Roots. That was the metaphor that had eluded Nan. To be rooted and
grounded in life, like a tree. Someone had written something about that.

"Let your manhood be
Forgotten, your whole purpose seem
The purpose of a simple tree
Rooted in a quiet dream...."

Roots. That was what Neville had, what Pamela had; Pamela, with her
sensible wisdom that so often didn't apply because Pamela was so far
removed from Nan's conditions of life and Nan's complicated, unstable
temperament. Roots. Mrs. Hilary's had been torn up out of the ground....

"I'm like mother." That was Nan's nightmare thought. Not intellectually,
for Nan's brain was sharp and subtle and strong and fine, Mrs. Hilary's
was an amorphous, undeveloped muddle. But where, if not from Mrs. Hilary,
did Nan get her black fits of melancholy, her erratic irresponsible
gaieties, her passionate angers, her sharp jealousies and egoisms? The
clever young woman saw herself in the stupid elderly one; saw herself
slipping down the years to that. That was why, where Neville and Pamela
and their brothers pitied, Nan, understanding her mother's bad moods
better than they, was vicious with hate and scorn. For she knew these
things through and through. Not the sentimentality; she didn't know that,
being cynical and cool except when stirred to passion. And not the
posing, for Nan was direct and blunt. But the feverish angers and the
black boredom--they were hers.

Nevertheless Nan's heart sang into the night. For she had made up her
mind, and was at peace.

She had held life at arm's length, pushed it away, for many months,
hiding from it, running from it because she didn't with the whole of her,
want it. Again and again she had changed a dangerous subject, headed for
safety, raced for cover. The week-end before this last, down at Windover,
it had been like a game of hide and seek.... And then she had come away,
without warning, and he, going down there this last week-end, had not
found her, because she couldn't meet him again till she had decided. And
now she had decided.

How unsuited a pair they were, in many ways, and what fun they would
have! Unsuited ... what did it matter? His queer, soft, laughing voice
was in her ears, his lean, clever, merry face swam on the rushing tides
of night. His untidy, careless clothes, the pockets bulging with books,
papers and tobacco, his glasses, that left a red mark on either side of
the bridge of his nose, his easily ruffled brown hair--they all merged
for her into the infinitely absurd, infinitely delightful, infinitely
loved Barry, who was going to give her roots.

She was going away, down into Cornwall, in two days. She would stay in
rooms by herself at Marazion and finish her book and bathe and climb, and
lie in the sun (if only it came out) and sleep and eat and drink. There
was nothing in the world like your own company; you could be purely
animal then. And in a month Gerda and Kay were coming down, and they were
going to bicycle along the coast, and she would ask Barry to come too,
and when Barry came she would let him say what he liked, with no more
fencing, no more cover. Down by the green edge of the Cornish sea they
would have it out--"grip hard, become a root ..." become men as trees
walking, rooted in a quiet dream. Dream? No, reality. This was the dream,
this world of slipping shadows and hurrying gleams of heartbreaking
loveliness, through which one roamed, a child chasing butterflies which
ever escaped, or which, if captured, crumbled to dust in one's clutching
hands. Oh for something strong and firm to hold. Oh Barry, Barry, these
few more weeks of dream, of slipping golden shadows and wavering lights,
and then reality. Shall I write, thought Nan, "Dear Barry, you may ask me
to marry you now." Impossible. Besides, what hurry was there? Better to
have these few more gay and lovely weeks of dream. They would be the
last.

Has Barry squandered and spilt his love about as I mine? Likely enough.
Likely enough not. Who cares? Perhaps we shall tell one another all these
things sometime; perhaps, again, we shan't. What matter? One loves, and
passes on, and loves again. One's heart cracks and mends; one cracks the
hearts of others, and these mend too. That is--_inter alia_--what life is
for. If one day you want the tale of my life, Barry, you shall have it;
though that's not what life is for, to make a tale about. So thrilling in
the living, so flat and stale in the telling--oh let's get on and live
some more of it, lots and lots more, and let the dead past bury its dead.

Between a laugh and a sleepy yawn, Nan jumped from the bus at the corner
of Oakley Street.

CHAPTER V

SEAWEED

1

"Complexes," read Mrs. Hilary, "are of all sorts and sizes." And
there was a picture of four of them in a row, looking like netted cherry
trees whose nets have got entangled with each other. So that was what
they were like. Mrs. Hilary had previously thought of them as being more
of the nature of noxious insects, or fibrous growths with infinite
ramifications. Slim young trees. Not so bad, then, after all.

"A complex is characterised, and its elements are bound together by
a specific emotional tone, experienced as feeling when the complex
is aroused. Apart from the mental processes and corresponding actions
depending on purely rational mental systems, it is through complexes that
the typical mental process (the specific response) works, the particular
complex representing the particular set of mental elements involved in
the process which begins with perception and cognition and ends with the
corresponding conation."

Mrs. Hilary read it three times, and the third time she understood it,
if possible, less than the first. Complexes seemed very difficult
things, and she had never been clever. Any of her children, or even her
grandchildren, would understand it all in a moment. If you have such
things--and everyone has, she had learnt--you ought to be able to
understand them. Yet why? You didn't understand your bodily internal
growths; you left them to your doctor. There were doctors who explained
your complexes to you.... What a revolting idea! It would surely make
them worse, not better. (Mrs. Hilary still vaguely regarded these growths
as something of the nature of cancer.)

Sometimes she imagined herself a patient, interviewing one of these odd
doctors. A man doctor, not a woman; she didn't trust woman doctors of any
kind; she had always been thankful that Neville had given it up and
married instead.

"Insomnia," she would say, in these imaginary interviews, because that
was so easy to start off with.

"You have something on your mind," said the doctor. "You suffer from
depression."

"Yes, I know that. I was coming to that. That is what you must cure for
me."

"You must think back.... What is the earliest thing you can remember?
Perhaps your baptism? Possibly even your first bath? It has been
done...."

"You may be right. I remember some early baths. One of them may have been
the first of all, who knows? What of it, doctor?"

But the doctor, in her imaginings, would at this point only make notes in
a big book and keep silence, as if he had thought as much. Perhaps, no
more than she, he did not know what of it.

Mrs. Hilary could hear herself protesting.

"I am _not_ unhappy because of my baptism, which, so far as I know, went
off without a hitch. I am _not_ troubled by my first bath, nor by any
later bath. Indeed, indeed you must believe me, it is not that at all."

"The more they protest," the psycho-analyst would murmur, "the more it is
so." For that was what Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung always said, so that there
was no escape from their aspersions.

"Why do _you_ think you are so often unhappy?" he would ask her, to
draw her out and she would reply, "Because my life is over. Because I
am an old discarded woman, thrown away onto the dust-heap like a broken
egg-shell. Because my husband is gone and my children are gone, and they
do not love me as I love them. Because I have only my mother to live
with, and she is calm and cares for nothing but only waits for the end.
Because I have nothing to do from morning till night. Because I am
sixty-three, and that is too old and too young. Because life is empty
and disappointing, and I am tired, and drift like seaweed tossed to and
fro by the waves."

It sounded indeed enough, and tears would fill her eyes as she said it.
The psycho-analyst would listen, passive and sceptical but intelligent.

"Not one of your reasons is the correct one. But I will find the true
reason for you and expose it, and after that it will trouble you no more.
Now you shall relate to me the whole history of your life."

What a comfortable moment! Mrs. Hilary, when she came to it in her
imagined interview, would draw a deep breath and settle down and begin.
The story of her life! How absorbing a thing to relate to someone who
really wanted to hear it! How far better than the confessional--for
priests, besides requiring only those portions and parcels of the
dreadful past upon which you had least desire to dwell, had almost
certainly no interest at all in hearing even these, but only did it
because they had to, and you would be boring them. They might even say,
as one had said to Rosalind during the first confession which had
inaugurated her brief ecclesiastical career, and to which she had looked
forward with some interest as a luxurious re-living of a stimulating
past--"No details, please." Rosalind, who had had many details ready,
had come away disappointed, feeling that the Church was not all she
had hoped. But the psycho-analyst doctor would really want to hear
details. Of course he would prefer the kind of detail which Rosalind
would have been able to furnish out of her experience, for that was
what psycho-analysts recognised as true life. Mrs. Hilary's experiences
were pale in comparison; but psycho-analysts could and did make much out
of little, bricks without clay. She would tell him all about the
children--how sweet they were as babies, how Jim had nearly died of
croup, Neville of bronchitis and Nan of convulsions, whereas Pamela had
always been so well, and Gilbert had suffered only from infant debility.
She would relate how early and how unusually they had all given signs of
intelligence; how Jim had always loved her more than anything in the
world, until his marriage, and she him (this was a firm article in Mrs.
Hilary's creed); how Neville had always cherished and cared for her, and
how she loved Neville beyond anything in the world but Jim; how Gilbert
had disappointed her by taking to writing instead of to a man's job, and
then by marrying Rosalind; how Nan had always been tiresome and perverse.
And before the children came--all about Richard, and their courtship, and
their young married life, and how he had loved and cared for her beyond
anything, incredibly tenderly and well, so that all those who saw it had
wondered, and some had said he spoilt her. And back before Richard, to
girlhood and childhood, to parents and nursery, to her brother and
sister, now dead. How she had fought with her sister because they had
both always wanted the same things and got in one another's way! The
jealousies, the bitter, angry tears!

To pour it all out--what comfort! To feel that someone was interested,
even though it might be only as a case. The trouble about most people was
that they weren't interested. They didn't mostly, even pretend they were.

2

She tried Barry Briscoe, the week-end he came down and found Nan gone.
Barry Briscoe was by way of being interested in people and things in
general; he had that kind of alert mind and face.

He came up from the tennis lawn, where he had been playing a single with
Rodney, and sat down by her and Grandmama in the shade of the cedar, hot
and friendly and laughing and out of breath. Now Neville and Rodney were
playing Gerda and Kay. Grandmama's old eyes, pleased behind their
glasses, watched the balls fly and thought everyone clever who got one
over the net. She hadn't played tennis in her youth. Mrs. Hilary's more
eager, excited eyes watched Neville driving, smashing, volleying,
returning, and thought how slim and young a thing she looked, to have all
that power stored in her. She was fleeter than Gerda, she struck harder
than Kay, she was trickier than all of them, the beloved girl. That was
the way Mrs. Hilary watched tennis, thinking of the players, not of the
play. It is the way some people talk, thinking of the talkers, not of
what they are saying. It is the personal touch, and a way some women
have.

But Barry Briscoe, watching cleverly through his bright glasses, was
thinking of the strokes. He was an unconscious person. He lived in
moments.

"Well done, Gerda," Grandmama would call, when Gerda, cool and
nonchalant, dropped, a sitter at Rodney's feet, and when Rodney smashed
it back she said, "But father's too much for you."

"Gerda's a _scandal_," Barry said. "She doesn't care. She can hit all
right when she likes. She thinks about something else half the time."

His smile followed the small white figure with its bare golden head that
gleamed in the grey afternoon. An absurd, lovable, teasable child, he
found her.

Grandmama's maid came to wheel her down to the farm. Grandmama had
promised to go and see the farmer's wife and new baby. Grandmama always
saw wives and new babies. They never palled. You would think that by
eighty-four she had seen enough new babies, more than enough, that she
had seen through that strange business and could now take it for granted,
the stream of funny new life cascading into the already so full world.
But Grandmama would always go and see it, handle it, admire it, peer at
it with her smiling eyes that had seen so many lives come and go and that
must know by now that babies are born to trouble as naturally as the
sparks fly upward.

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