Rose Macaulay - Dangerous Ages

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4

Nan met them at Penzance station. The happy three; they would be good to
make holiday with. Already they had holiday faces, though not yet browned
like Nan's.

Barry's hand gripped Nan's. He was here then, and it had come. Her head
swam; she felt light, like thistledown on the wind.

They came up from the station into quiet, gay, warm Penzance, and had tea
at a shop. They were going to stay at Marazion that night and the next,
and spend the day bicycling to Land's End and back. They were all four
full of vigour, brimming with life and energy that needed to be spent.
But Gerda looked pale.

"She's been overworking in a stuffy office," Barry said. "And not, except
when she dined with me, getting proper meals. What do you think she
weighs, Nan?"

"About as much as that infant there," Nan said, indicating a stout person
of five at the next table.

"Just about, I daresay. She's only six stone. What are we to do about
it?"

His eyes caressed Gerda, as they might have caressed a child. He would be
a delightful uncle by marriage, Nan thought.

They took the road to Marazion. The tide was going out. In front of them
the Mount rose in a shallowing violet sea.

"My word!" said Barry, and Kay, screwing up his eyes, murmured, "Good old
Mount." Gerda's lips parted in a deep breath; beauty always struck her
dumb.

Into the pale-washed, straggling old village they rode, stabled their
bicycles, and went down to the shining evening sands, where now the paved
causeway to the Mount was all exposed, running slimy and seaweedy between
rippled wet sands and dark, slippery rocks. Bare-footed they trod it,
Gerda and Kay in front, Barry and Nan behind, and the gulls talking and
wheeling round them.

Nan stopped, the west in her eyes. "Look."

Point beyond point they saw stretching westward to Land's End, dim and
dark beyond a rose-flushed sea.

"Isn't it clear," said Nan. "You can see the cliff villages ever so far
along ... Newlyn, Mousehole, Clement's Island off it--and the point of
Lamorna."

Barry said "We'll go to Land's End by the coast road to-morrow, shan't
we, not the high road?"

"Oh, the coast road, yes. It's about twice the distance, with the ups and
downs, and you can't ride all the way. But we'll go by it."

For a moment they stood side by side, looking westward over the bay.

Nan said, "Aren't you glad you came?"

"I should say so!"

His answer came, quick and emphatic. There was a pause after it. Nan
suddenly turned on him the edge of a smile.

Barry did not see it. He was not looking at her, nor over the bay, but
in front of him, to where Gerda, a thin little upright form, moved
bare-legged along the shining causeway to the moat.

Nan's smile flickered out. The sunset tides of rose flamed swiftly over
her cheeks, her neck, her body, and receded as sharply, as if someone had
hit her in the face. Her pause, her smile, had been equivalent, as she
saw them, to a permission, even to an invitation. He had turned away
unnoticing, a queer, absent tenderness in his eyes, as they followed
Gerda ... Gerda ... walking light-footed up the wet causeway.... Well, if
he had got out of the habit of wanting to make love to her, she would not
offer him chances again. When he got the habit back, he must make his own
chances as best he could.

"Come on," said Nan. "We must hurry."

She left no more pauses, but talked all the time, about Newlyn, about the
artists, about the horrid children, the fishing, the gulls, the weather.

"And how's the book?" he asked.

"Nearly done. I'm waiting for the end to make itself."

He smiled and looking round at him she saw that he was not smiling at
her or her book, but at Gerda, who had stepped off the causeway and was
wading in a rock pool.

He must be obsessed with Gerda; he thought of her, apparently, all the
time he was talking about other things. It was irritating for an aunt to
bear.

They joined Kay and Gerda on the island. Kay was prowling about, looking
for a way by which to enter the forbidden castle. Kay always trespassed
when he could, and was so courteous and gentle when he was caught at it
that he disarmed comment. But this time he could not manage to evade the
polite but firm eye of the fisherman on guard. They crossed over to
Marazion again all together and went to the cafe for supper.

5

It was a merry, rowdy meal they had; ham and eggs and coffee in an upper
room, with the soft sea air blowing in on them through open windows. Nan
and Barry chattered, and Kay took his cheerful part; only Gerda sparse of
word, was quiet and dreamy, with her blue eyes opened wide against sleep,
for she had not slept until late last night.

"High time she had a holiday," Barry said of her. "Four weeks' grind in
August--it's beginning to tell now."

Fussy Barry was about the child. As bad as Frances Carr with Pamela.
Gerda was as strong as a little pony really, though she looked such a
small, white, brittle thing.

They got out maps and schemed out roads and routes over their cigarettes.
Then they strolled about the little town, exploring its alleys and narrow
byways that gave on the sea. The moon had risen now, and Marazion was cut
steeply in shadow and silver light, and all the bay lay in shadow and
silver too, to where the lights of Penzance twinkled like a great lit
church.

Barry thought once, as he had often thought in the past, "How brilliant
Nan is, and how gay. No wonder she never needed me. She needs no one,"
and this time it did not hurt him to think it. He loved to listen to her,
to talk and laugh with her, to look at her, but he was free at last; he
demanded nothing of her. Those restless, urging, disappointed hopes and
longings lay dead in him, dead and at peace. He could not have put his
finger on the moment of their death; there had been no moment; like good
soldiers they had never died, but faded away, and till to-night he had
not known that they had gone. He would show Nan now that she need fear
no more pestering from him; she need not keep on talking without pause
whenever they were alone together, which had been her old way of defence,
and which she was beginning again now. They could drop now into
undisturbed friendship. Nan was the most stimulating of friends. It was
refreshing to talk things out with her again, to watch her quick mind
flashing and turning and cutting its way, brilliant, clear, sharp, like
a diamond.

They went to bed; Barry and Kay to the room they had got above a public
house, Nan and Gerda to Nan's room at the cafe, where they squeezed into
one bed.

Gerda slept, lying very straight and still, as was her habit in sleep.
Nan lay wakeful and restless, watching the moonlight steal across the
floor and lie palely on the bed and on Gerda's waxen face and yellow
hair. The pretty, pale child, strange in sleep, like a little mermaiden
lost on earth. Nan, sitting up in bed, one dark plait hanging over each
shoulder, watched her with brooding amber eyes. How young she was, how
very, very young. It was touching to be so young. Yet why, when youth
was, people said, the best time? It wasn't really touching to be young;
it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left.
Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty and
heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as
one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling
dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went
home to bed. That was touching; Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were touching.
Not Gerda and Kay, with their dance just beginning.

A bore, this sharing one bed. You couldn't sleep, however small and quiet
your companion lay. They must get a bed each, when they could, during
this tour. One must sleep. If one didn't one began to think. Every time
Nan forced herself to the edge of sleep, a picture sprang sharply before
her eyes--the flaming sky and sea, herself and Barry standing together on
the causeway.

"Aren't you glad you came?" Her own voice, soft, encouraging.

"I should say so!" The quick, matter-of-fact answer.

Then a pause and she turning on him the beginnings of a smile. An
allowing, inviting ... seductive ... smile.

And he, smiling too, but not at her, looking away to where Gerda and Kay
walked bare-legged to the Mount.

Flame scorched her again. The pause each time she saw it now became
longer, more deliberate, more inviting, more emptily unfilled. Her smile
became more luring, his more rejecting. As she saw it now, in the cruel,
distorting night, he had seen her permission and refused it. By day she
had known that simple Barry had seen nothing; by day she would know it
again. Between days are set nights of white, searing flame, two in a bed
so that one cannot sleep. Damn Gerda, lying there so calm and cool. It
had been a mistake to ask Gerda to come; if it hadn't been for Gerda they
wouldn't have been two in a bed.

"Barry's a good deal taken up with her just now," said Nan to herself,
putting it into plain, deliberate words, as was her habit with life's
situations. "He does get taken up with pretty girls, I suppose, when he's
thrown with them. All men do, if you come to that. For the moment he's
thinking about her, not about me. That's a bore. It will bore me to death
if it goes on.... I wonder how long it will go on? I wonder how soon
he'll want to make love to me again?"

Having thus expressed the position in clear words, Nan turned her mind
elsewhere. What do people think of when they are seeking sleep? It is
worse than no use to think of what one is writing; that wakes one up,
goads every brain-cell into unwholesome activity. No use thinking of
people; they are too interesting. Nor of sheep going through gates; they
tumble over one another and make one's head ache. Nor of the coming day;
that is too difficult: nor of the day which is past; that is too near.
Wood paths, quiet seas, running streams--these are better.

"Any lazy man can swim
Down the current of a stream."

Or the wind in trees, or owls crying, or waves beating on warm shores.
The waves beat now; ran up whisperingly with the incoming tide, broke,
and sidled back, dragging at the wet sand.... Nan, hearing them, drifted
at last into sleep.

CHAPTER IX

THE PACE

1

The coast road to Land's End is like a switchback. You climb a mountain
and are flung down to sea level like a shooting star, and climb a
mountain again. Sometimes the road becomes a sandy cliff path and you
have to walk.

But at last, climbing up and being shot down and walking, Nan and Barry
and Gerda and Kay reached Land's End. They went down to Sennan Cove to
bathe, and the high sea was churning breakers on the beach. Nan dived
through them with the arrowy straightness of a fish or a submarine, came
up behind them, and struck out to sea. The others behind her, less
skilful, floundered and were dashed about by the waves. Barry and Kay
struggled through them somehow, bruised and choked; Gerda, giving it
up--she was no great swimmer--tranquilly rolled and paddled in the surf
by herself.

Kay called to her, mocking.

"Coward. Sensualist. Come over the top like a man."

Nan, turning to look at her from the high crest of a wave, thought
"Gerda's afraid in a high sea. She is afraid of things: I remember."

Nan herself was afraid of very little. She had that kind of buoyant
physical gallantry which would take her into the jaws of danger with
a laugh. When in London during the air raids she had walked about the
streets to see what could be seen; in France with the Fannys she had
driven cars over shelled roads with a cool composure which distinguished
her even among that remarkably cool and composed set of young women; as
a child she had ridden unbroken horses and teased and dodged savage bulls
for the fun of it; she would go sailing in seas that fishermen refused to
go out in; part angry dogs which no other onlooker would touch; sleep out
alone in dark and lonely woods, and even on occasion brave pigs. The kind
of gay courage she had was a physical heritage which can never be
acquired. What can be acquired, with blood and tears, is the courage of
the will, stubborn and unyielding, but always nerve-racked, proudly and
tensely strung up. Nan's form of fearlessness, combined as it was with
the agility of a supple body excellently trained, would carry her lightly
through all physical adventures, much as her arrowy strength and skill
carried her through the breakers without blundering or mishap and let her
now ride buoyantly on each green mountain as it towered.

Barry, emerging spluttering from one of these, said "All very jolly for
you, Nan. You're a practised hand. We're being drowned. I'm going out of
it," and he dived through another wave for the shore. Kay, a clumsier
swimmer, followed him, and Nan rode her tossing horses, laughing at them,
till she was shot onto the beach and dug her fingers deep into the
sucking sand.

"A very pretty landing," said Barry, generously, rubbing his bruised
limbs and coughing up water.

Gerda rose from the foam where she had been playing serenely impervious
to the tauntings of Kay.

Barry said "Happy child. She's not filled up with salt water and battered
black and blue."

Nan remarked that neither was she, and they went to their rock
crannies to dress. They dressed and undressed in a publicity, a mixed
shamelessness that was almost appalling.

They rode back to Marazion after tea along the high road, more soberly
than they had come.

"Tired, Gerda?" Barry said, at the tenth mile, as they pulled up a hill.
"Hold on to me."

Gerda refused to do so mean a thing. She had her own sense of honour, and
believed that everyone should carry his or her own burden. But when they
had to get off and walk up the hill she let him help to push her bicycle.

"Give us a few days, Nan," said Barry, "and we'll all be as fit as you.
At present we're fat and scant of breath from our sedentary and useful
life."

"Our life"--as if they had only the one between them.

At Newlyn Nan stopped. She said she was going to supper with someone
there and would come on later. She was, in fact, tired of them. She
dropped into Stephen Lumley's studio, which was, as usual after painting
hours, full of his friends, talking and smoking. That was the only way to
spend the evening, thought Nan, talking and smoking and laughing, never
pausing. Anyhow that was the way she spent it.

She got back to Marazion at ten o'clock and went to her room at the
little cafe. Looking from its window, she saw the three on the shore by
the moonlit sea. Kay was standing on the paved causeway, and Barry and
Gerda, some way off, were wading among the rocks, bending over the pools,
as if they were looking for crabs.

Nan went to bed. When Gerda came in presently, she lay very still and
pretended to be asleep.

It was dreadful, another night of sharing a bed. Dreadful to lie so
close one to the other; dreadful to touch accidentally; touching people
reminded you how alive they are, with their separate, conscious throbbing
life so close against yours.

2

Next morning they took the road eastward. They were going to ride along
the coast to Talland Bay, where they were going to spend a week. They
were giving themselves a week to get there, which would allow plenty of
time for bathing by the way. It is no use hurrying in Cornwall, the hills
are too steep and the sea too attractive, and lunch and tea, when ordered
in shops, so long in coming. The first day they only got round the Lizard
to Cadgwith, where they dived from steep rocks into deep blue water. Nan
dived from a high rock with a swoop like a sea bird's, a pretty thing to
watch. Barry was nearly as good; he too was physically proficient. The
Bendishes were less competent; they were so much younger, as Barry said.
But they too reached the water head first, which is, after all, the main
thing in diving. And as often as Nan dived, with her arrowy swoop, Gerda
tumbled in too, from the same rock, and when Nan climbed a yet higher
rock and dived again, Gerda climbed too, and fell in sprawling after her.
Gerda to-day was not to be outdone, anyhow in will to attempt, whatever
her achievement might lack. Nan looked up from the sea with a kind of
mocking admiration at the little figure poised on the high shelf of rock,
slightly unsteady about the knees, slightly blue about the lips, thin
white arms pointing forward for the plunge.

The child had pluck.... It must have hurt, too, that slap on the nearly
flat body as she struck the sea. She hadn't done it well. She came up
with a dazed look, shaking the water out of her eyes, coughing.

"You're too ambitious," Barry told her. "That was much too high for you.
You're also blue with cold. Come out."

Gerda looked up at Nan, who was scrambling nimbly onto the highest ledge
of all, crying "I must have one more."

Barry said to Gerda "No, you're not going after her. You're coming out.
It's no use thinking you can do all Nan does. None of us can."

Gerda gave up. The pace was too hard for her. She couldn't face that
highest rock; the one below had made her feel cold and queer and shaky as
she stood on it. Besides, why was she trying, for the first time in her
life, to go Nan's pace, which had always been, and was now more than ever
before, too hot and mettlesome for her? She didn't know why; only that
Nan had been, somehow, all day setting the pace, daring her, as it were,
to make it. It was becoming, oddly, a point of honour between them, and
neither knew how or why.

3

On the road it was the same. Nan, with only the faintest, if any
application of brakes, would commit herself to lanes which leaped
precipitously downwards like mountain streams, zig-zagging like a
dog's-tooth pattern, shingled with loose stones, whose unseen end might
be a village round some sharp turn, or a cove by the sea, or a field path
running to a farm, or merely the foot of one hill and the beginning of
the steep pull up the next. Coast roads in Cornwall are like that--often
uncertain in their ultimate goal (for map-makers, like bicyclists, are
apt to get tired of them, and, tiring, break them off, so to speak, in
mid-air, leaving them suspended, like snapped ends of string). But
however uncertain their goal may be, their form is not uncertain at
all; it can be relied on to be that of a snake in agony leaping down a
hill or up; or, if one prefers it, that of a corkscrew plunging downwards
into a cork.

Nan leaped and plunged with them. She was at the bottom while the others
were still jolting, painfully brake-held, albeit rapidly, half-way down.
And sometimes, when the slope was more than usually like the steep roof
of a house, the zig-zags more than usually acute, the end even less than
usually known, the whole situation, in short, more dreadful and perilous,
if possible, than usual, the others surrendered, got off and walked. They
couldn't really rely on their brakes to hold them, supposing something
should swing round on them from behind one of the corners; they couldn't
be sure of turning with the road when it turned at its acutest, and such
failure of harmony with one's road is apt to meet with a dreadful
retribution. Barry was adventurous, and Kay and Gerda were calm, but to
all of them life was sweet and limbs and bicycles precious; none of them
desired an untimely end.

But Nan laughed at their prognostications of such an end. "It will be
found impossible to ride down these hills," said their road book, and Nan
laughed at that too. You can, as she observed, ride down anything; it is
riding up that is the difficulty. Anyhow, she, who had ridden bucking
horses and mountainous seas, could ride down anything that wore the
semblance of a road. Only fools, Nan believed, met with disasters while
bicycling. And jamming on the brakes was bad for the wheels and tiring to
the hands. So brakeless, she zig-zagged like greased lightning to the
bottom.

It was on the second day, on the long hill that runs from Manaccan down
to Helford Ferry, that Gerda suddenly took her brakes off and shot after
her. That hill is not a badly spiralling one, but it is long and steep
and usually ridden with brakes. And just above Helford village it has one
very sharp turn to the left.

Nan, standing waiting for the others on the bridge, looked round and saw
Gerda shooting with unrestrained wheels and composed face round the last
bend. She had nearly swerved over at the turn, but not quite. She got off
at the bridge.

"Hullo," said Nan. "Quicker than usual, weren't you?" She had a
half-grudging, half-ironic grin of appreciation for a fellow sportsman,
the same grin with which she had looked up at her from the sea at
Cadgwith. Nan liked daring. Though it was in her, and she knew that it
was in her, to hate Gerda with a cold and deadly anger, the sportsman
in her gave its tribute. For what was nothing and a matter of ordinary
routine to her, might be, she suspected, rather alarming to the quiet,
white-faced child.

Then the demon of mischief leapt in her. If Gerda meant to keep the pace,
she should have a pace worth keeping. They would prove to one another
which was the better woman, as knights in single combat of old proved it,
or fighters in the ring to-day. As to Barry, he should look on at it,
whether he liked it or not.

Barry and Kay rushed up to them, and they went through the little
thatched rose-sweet hamlet to the edge of the broad blue estuary and
shouted for the ferry.

4

After that the game began in earnest. Nan, from being casually and
unconsciously reckless, became deliberately dare-devil and always with a
backward, ironic look for Gerda, as if she said "How about it? Will this
beat you?"

"A bicycling tour with Nan isn't nearly so safe as the front trenches of
my youth used to be," Barry commented. "Those quiet, comfortable old
days!"

There, indeed, one was likely to be shot, or blown to pieces, or buried,
or gassed, and that was about all. But life now was like the Apostle
Paul's; they were in journeyings often, in weariness often, in perils of
waters, in perils by their own countrymen, in perils on the road, in the
wilderness, in the sea, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness. In
perils too, so Gerda believed, of cattle; for these would stray in
bellowing herds about narrow lanes, and they would all charge straight
through them, missing the lowered horns by some incredible fluke of
fortune. If this seems to make Gerda a coward, it should be remembered
that she showed none of these inward blenchings, but went on her way with
the rest, composed as a little wax figure at Madame Tussaud's. She was,
in fact, of the stuff of which martyrs are made, and would probably have
gone to the stake for a conviction. But stampeding cattle, and high seas,
and brakeless lightning descents, she did not like, however brave a face
she was sustained by grace to meet them with. After all she was only
twenty, an age when some people still look beneath their beds before
retiring.

Bulls, even, Gerda was called upon to face, in the wake of two unafraid
males and a reckless aunt. What young female of twenty, always excepting
those who have worked on the land, and whose chief reward is familiarity
with its beasts, can with complete equanimity face bulls? One day a path
they were taking down to the sea ran for a while along the top of a
stone hedge, about five feet high and three feet wide. Most people
would have walked along this, leading their bicycles. Nan, naturally,
bicycled, and Barry and Kay, finding it an amusing experiment, bicycled
after her. Gerda, in honour bound, bicycled too. She accepted stoically
the probability that she would very soon bicycle off the hedge into the
field and be hurt. In the fields on either side of them, cows stared at
them in mild surprise and some disdain, coming up close to look. So, if
one bicycled off, it would be into the very jaws, onto the very horns, of
cattle. Female cattle, indeed, but cattle none the less.

Then Kay chanted "Fat bulls of Basan came round about me on either side,"
and it was just like that. One fat bull at least trotted up to the hedge,
waving his tail and snorting, pawing and glaring, evincing, in short,
all the symptoms common to his kind.

So now if one bicycled off it would be into the very maw of an angry
bull.

"You look out you don't fall, Gerda," Kay flung back at her over his
shoulder. "It will be to a dreadful death, as you see. Nobody'll save
you; nobody'll dare."

"Feeling unsteady?" Barry's gentler voice asked her from behind. "Get off
and walk it. I will too."

But Gerda rode on, her eyes on Nan's swift, sure progress ahead. Barry
should not see her mettle fail; Barry, who had been through the war and
would despise cowards.

They reached the end of the hedge, and the path ran off it into a field.
And between this field and the last one there was an open gap, through
which the bull of Basan lumbered with fierce eyes and stood waiting for
them to descend.

"I don't like that creature," Kay said. "I'm afraid of him. Aren't you,
Barry?"

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