Dangerous Ages

I

Neville, at five o’clock (Nature’s time, not man’s) on the morning of her birthday, woke from the dream-broken sleep of summer dawns, hot with the burden of two sheets and a blanket, roused by the multitudinous silver calling of a world full of birds. They chattered and bickered about the creepered house, shrill and sweet, like a hundred brooks running together down steep rocky places after snow. And, not like brooks, and strangely unlike birds, like, in fact, nothing in the world except a cuckoo clock, a cuckoo shouted foolishly in the lowest boughs of the great elm across the silver lawn.

Neville turned on her face, cupped her small, pale, tanned face in her sunburnt hands, and looked out with sleepy violet eyes. The sharp joy of the young day struck into her as she breathed it through the wide window. She shivered ecstatically as it blew coldly onto her bare throat and chest, and forgot the restless birthday bitterness of the night; forgot how she had lain and thought “Another year gone, and nothing done yet. Soon all the years will be gone, and nothing ever will be done.” Done by her, she, of course, meant, as all who are familiar with birthdays will know. But what was something and what was nothing, neither she nor others with birthdays could satisfactorily define. They have lived, they have eaten, drunk, loved, bathed, suffered, talked, danced in the night and rejoiced in the dawn, warmed, in fact, both hands before the fire of life, but still they are not ready to depart. For they are behindhand with time, obsessed with so many worlds, so much to do, the petty done, the undone vast. It depressed Milton when he turned twenty-three; it depresses all those with vain and ambitious temperaments at least once a year. Some call it remorse for wasted days, and are proud of it; others call it vanity, discontent or greed, and are ashamed of it. It makes no difference either way.

Neville, flinging it off lightly with her bedclothes, sprang out of bed, thrust her brown feet into sand shoes, her slight, straight, pyjama-clad body into a big coat, quietly slipped into the passage, where, behind three shut doors, slept Rodney, Gerda and Kay, and stole down the back stairs to the kitchen, which was dim and blinded, blue with china and pale with dawn, and had a gas stove. She made herself some tea. She also got some bread and marmalade out of the larder, spread two thick chunks, and munching one of them, slipped out of the sleeping house into the dissipated and riotous garden.

Looking up at the honeysuckle-buried window of the bedroom of Gerda, Neville nearly whistled the call to which Gerda was wont to reply. Nearly, but not quite. On the whole it was a morning to be out alone in. Besides, Neville wanted to forget, for the moment, about birthdays, and Gerda would have reminded her.

Going round by the yard, she fetched Esau instead, who wouldn’t remind her, and whose hysterical joy she hushed with a warning hand.

Across the wet and silver lawn she sauntered, between the monstrous shadows of the elms, her feet in the old sand shoes leaving dark prints in the dew, her mouth full of bread and marmalade, her black plait bobbing on her shoulders, and Esau tumbling round her. Across the lawn to the wood, cool and dim still, but not quiet, for it rang with music and rustled with life. Through the boughs of beeches and elms and firs the young day flickered gold, so that the bluebell patches were half lit, like blue water in the sun, half grey, like water at twilight. Between two great waves of them a brown path ran steeply down to a deep little stream. Neville and Esau, scrambling a little way upstream, stopped at a broad swirling pool it made between rocks. Here Neville removed coat, shoes and pyjamas and sat poised for a moment on the jutting rock, a slight and naked body, long in the leg, finely and supplely knit, with light, flexible muscles—a body built for swiftness, grace and a certain wiry strength. She sat there while she twisted her black plait round her head, then she slipped into the cold, clear, swirling pool, which in one part was just over her depth, and called to Esau to come in too, and Esau, as usual, didn’t, but only barked.

One swim round is enough, if not too much, as everyone who knows sunrise bathing will agree. Neville scrambled out, discovered that she had forgotten the towel, dried herself on her coat, resumed her pyjamas, and sat down to eat her second slice of bread and marmalade. When she had finished it she climbed a beech tree, swarming neatly up the smooth trunk in order to get into the sunshine, and sat on a broad branch astride, whistling shrilly, trying to catch the tune now from one bird, now from another.

These, of course, were the moments when being alive was enough. Swimming, bread and marmalade, sitting high in a beech tree in the golden eye of the morning sun—that was life. One flew then, like a gay ship with the wind in its sails, over the cold black bottomless waters of misgiving. Many such a June morning Neville remembered in the past. … She wondered if Gerda and if Kay thus sailed over sorrow, too. Rodney, she knew, did. But she knew Rodney better, in some ways, than she knew Gerda and Kay.

To think suddenly of Rodney, of Gerda and of Kay, sleeping in the still house beyond the singing wood and silver garden, was to founder swiftly in the cold, dark seas, to be hurt again with the stabbing envy of the night. Not jealousy, for she loved them all too well for that. But envy of their chances, of their contacts with life. Having her own contacts, she wanted all kinds of others too. Not only Rodney’s, Gerda’s and Kay’s, but those of all her family and friends. Conscious, as one is on birthdays, of intense life hurrying swiftly to annihilation, she strove desperately to dam it. It went too fast. She looked at the wet strands of black hair now spread over her shoulders to dry in the sun, at her strong, supple, active limbs, and thought of the days to come, when the black hair should be grey and the supple limbs refuse to carry her up beech trees, and when, if she bathed in the sunrise, she would get rheumatism. In those days, what did one do to keep from sinking in the black seas of regret? One sat by the fire, or in the sunlit garden, old and grey and full of sleep—yes, one went to sleep, when one could. When one couldn’t, one read. But one’s eyes got tired soon—Neville thought of her grandmother—and one had to be read aloud to, by someone who couldn’t read aloud. That wouldn’t be enough to stifle vain regrets; only rejoicing actively in the body did that. So, before that time came, one must have slain regret, crushed that serpent’s head for good and all.

But did anyone ever succeed in doing this? Rodney, who had his full, successful, useful, interesting life; Rodney, who had made his mark and was making it; Rodney, the envy of many others, and particularly the envy of Neville, with the jagged ends of her long since broken career stabbing her; Rodney from time to time burned inwardly with scorching ambitions, with jealousies of other men, with all the heats, rancours and troubles of the race that is set before us. He had done, was doing, something, but it wasn’t enough. He had got, was getting, far—but it wasn’t far enough. He couldn’t achieve what he wanted; there were obstacles everywhere. Fools hindered his work; men less capable than he got jobs he should have had. Immersed in politics, he would have liked more time for writing; he would have liked a hundred other careers besides his own, and could have but the one. (Gerda and Kay, still poised on the threshold of life, still believed that they could indeed have a hundred.) No, Rodney was not immune from sorrow, but at least he had more with which to keep it at bay than Neville. Neville had no personal achievements; she had only her love for Rodney, Gerda and Kay, her interest in the queer, enchanting pageant of life, her physical vigours (she could beat any of the rest of them at swimming, walking, tennis or squash) and her active but wasted brain. A good brain, too; she had easily and with brilliance passed her medical examinations long ago—those of them for which she had had time before she had been interrupted. But now a wasted brain; squandered, atrophied, gone soft with disuse. Could she begin to use it now? Or was she forever held captive, in deep woods, between the two twilights?

“I am in deep woods,
Between the two twilights.
Over valley and hill
I hear the woodland wave
Like the voice of Time, as slow,
The voice of Life, as grave,
The voice of Death, as still. …”

II

The voices, the young loud clear voices of Gerda and of Kay, shrilled down from the garden, and Esau yapped in answer. They were calling her. They had probably been to wake her and had found her gone.

Neville smiled (when she smiled a dimple came in one pale brown cheek) and swung herself down from the beech. Kay and Gerda were of enormous importance; the most important things in life, except Rodney; but not everything, because nothing is ever everything in this so complex world.

When she came out of the wood into the garden, now all golden with morning, they flung themselves upon her and called her a sneak for not having wakened them to bathe.

“You’ll be late for breakfast,” they chanted. “Late on your forty-third birthday.”

They each had an arm round her; they propelled her towards the house. They were lithe, supple creatures of twenty and twenty-one. Between them walked Neville, with her small, pointed, elfish face, that was sensitive to every breath of thought and emotion like smooth water wind-stirred. With her great violet eyes brooding in it under thin black brows, and her wet hair hanging in loose strands, she looked like an ageless wood-dryad between two slim young saplings. Kay was a little like her in the face, only his violet eyes were shortsighted and he wore glasses. Gerda was smaller, fragile and straight as a wand, with a white little face and wavy hair of pure gold, bobbed round her thin white neck. And with far-set blue eyes and a delicate cleft chin and thin straight lips. For all she looked so frail, she could dance all night and return in the morning cool, composed and exquisite, like a lily bud. There was a look of immaculate sexless purity about Gerda; she might have stood for the angel Gabriel, wide-eyed and young and grave. With this wide innocent look she would talk unabashed of things which Neville felt revolting. And she, herself, was the product of a fastidious generation and class, and as nearly sexless as may be in this besexed world, which however is not, and can never be, saying much. Kay would do the same. They would read and discuss Freud, whom Neville, unfairly prejudiced, found both an obscene maniac and a liar. They might laugh with her at Freud when he expanded on that complex, whichever it is, by which mothers and daughters hate each other, and fathers and sons—but they both all the same took seriously things which seemed to Neville merely loathsome imbecilities. Gerda and Kay didn’t, in point of fact, find so many things either funny or disgusting as Neville did; throwing her mind back twenty years, Neville tried to remember whether she had found the world as funny and as frightful when she was a medical student as she did now; on the whole she thought not. Boys and girls are, for all their high spirits, creatures of infinite solemnities and pomposities. They laugh; but the twinkling irony, mocking at itself and everything else, of the thirties and forties, they have not yet learnt. They cannot be gentle cynics; they are so full of faith and hope, and when these are hurt they turn savage. About Kay and Gerda there was a certain splendid earnestness with regard to life. Admirable creatures, thought Neville, watching them with whimsical tenderness. They had nothing to do with the prewar, dilettante past, the sophisticated gaiety of the young century. Their childhood had been lived during the great war, and they had emerged from it hot with elemental things, discussing life, lust, love, politics and social reform, with cool candour, intelligent thoroughness and Elizabethan directness. They wouldn’t mind having passions and giving them rein; they wouldn’t think it vulgar, or even tedious, to lead loose lives. Probably, in fact, it wasn’t; probably it was Neville, and the people who had grown up with her, who were overcivilized, too far from the crude stuff of life, the monotonies and emotionalisms of Nature. And now Nature was taking her rather startling revenge on the next generation.

III

Neville ran upstairs, and came down to breakfast dressed in blue cotton, with her damp hair smoothly taken back from her broad forehead that jutted broodingly over her short pointed face. She had the look of a dryad at odds with the world, a whimsical and elfish intellectual.

Rodney and Kay and Gerda had been putting parcels at her place, and a pile of letters lay among them. There is, anyhow, that about birthdays, however old they make you. Kay had given her a splendid great pocketknife and a book he wanted to read, Gerda an oak box she had carved, and Rodney a new bicycle (by the front door) and a Brangwyn drawing (on the table). If Neville envied Kay and Gerda their future careers, she envied Rodney his present sphere. Her husband and the father of Gerda and Kay was a clever and distinguished-looking man of forty-five, and member, in the Labour interest, for a division of Surrey. He looked, however, more like a literary man. How to be useful though married: in Rodney’s case the problem was so simple, in hers so complicated. She had envied Rodney a little twenty years ago; then she had stopped, because the bringing up of Kay and Gerda had been a work in itself; now she had begun again. Rodney and she were more like each other than they were like their children; they had some of the same vanities, fastidiousnesses, humours and withdrawals, and in some respects the same outlook on life. Only Rodney’s had been solidified and developed by the contacts and exigencies of his career, and Neville’s disembodied, devitalised and driven inwards by her more dilettante life. She “helped Rodney with the constituency” of course, but it was Rodney’s constituency, not hers; she entertained his friends and hers when they were in town, but she knew herself a light woman, not a dealer in affairs. Yet her nature was stronger than Rodney’s, larger and more mature; it was only his experience she lacked.

Rodney was and had always been charming; there could be no doubt about that, whatever else you might come to think about him. Able, too, but living on his nerves, wincing like a high-strung horse from the annoyances and disappointments of life, such as Quaker oats because the grape-nuts had come to an end, and the industrial news of the morning, which was as bad as usual and four times repeated in four quite different tones by the four daily papers which lay on the table. They took four papers not so much that there might be one for each of them as that they might have the entertainment of seeing how different the same news can be made to appear. One bond of union this family had which few families possess; they were (roughly speaking) united politically, so believed the same news to be good or bad. The chief difference in their political attitude was that Kay and Gerda joined societies and leagues, being still young enough to hold that causes were helped in this way.

“What about today?” Rodney asked Neville. “What are you going to do?”

She answered, “Tennis.” (Neville had once been a county player.) “River. Lying about in the sun.” (It should be explained that it was one of those nine days of the English summer of 1920 when this was a possible occupation.) “Anything anyone likes. … I’ve already had a good deal of day and a bathe. … Oh, Nan’s coming down this afternoon.”

She got that out of a letter. Nan was her youngest sister. They all proceeded to get and impart other things out of letters, in the way of families who are fairly united, as families go.

Gerda opened her lips to impart something, but remembered her father’s distastes and refrained. Rodney, civilised, sensitive and progressive, had no patience with his children’s unsophisticated leaning to a primitive crudeness. He told them they were young savages. So Gerda kept her news till later, when she and Neville and Kay were lying on rugs on the lawn after Neville had beaten Kay in a set of singles.

They lay and smoked and cooled, and Gerda, a cigarette stuck in one side of her mouth, a buttercup in the other, mumbled “Penelope’s baby’s come, by the way. A girl. Another surplus woman.”

Neville’s brows lazily went up.

“Penelope Jessop? What’s she doing with a baby? I didn’t know she’d got married.”

“Oh, she hasn’t, of course. … Didn’t I tell you about Penelope? She lives with Martin Annesley now.”

“Oh, I see. Marriage in the sight of heaven. That sort of thing.”

Neville was of those who find marriages in the sight of heaven uncivilised and socially reactionary, a reversion, in fact, to Nature, which bored her. Gerda and Kay rightly believed such marriages to have some advantages over those more visible to the human eye (as being more readily dissoluble when fatiguing) and many advantages over no marriages at all, which do not increase the population, so depleted by the Great War. When they spoke in this admirably civic sense, Neville was apt to say “It doesn’t want increasing. I waited twenty minutes before I could board my bus at Trafalgar Square the other day. It wants more depleting, I should say—a Great Plague or something,” a view which Kay and Gerda thought truly egotistical.

“I do hope,” said Neville, her thoughts having led her to the statement, “I do very much hope that neither of you will ever perpetrate that sort of marriage. It would be so dreadfully common of you.”

“Impossible to say,” Kay said, vaguely.

“Considering,” said Gerda, “that there are a million more women than men in this country, it stands to reason that some system of polygamy must become the usual thing in the future.”

“It’s always been the usual thing, darling. Dreadfully usual. It’s so much more amusing to be unusual in these ways.”

Neville’s voice trailed drowsily away. Polygamy. Sex. Free Love. Love in chains. The children seemed so often to be discussing these. Just as, twenty years ago, she and her friends had seemed always to be discussing the Limitations of Personality, the Ethics of Friendship, and the Nature, if any, of God. This last was to Kay and Gerda too hypothetical to be a stimulating theme. It would have sent them to sleep, as sex did Neville.

Neville, led by Free Love to a private vision, brooded cynically over savages dancing round a woodpile in primeval forests, engaged in what missionaries, journalists, and writers of fiction about our coloured brothers call “nameless orgies” (as if you would expect most orgies to answer to their names, like the stars) and she saw the steep roads of the round world running back and back and back—on or back, it made no difference, since the world was round—to this. Saw, too, a thousand stuffy homes wherein sat couples linked by a legal formula so rigid, so lasting, so indelible, that not all their tears could wash out a word of it, unless they took to themselves other mates, in which case their second state might be worse than their first. Free love—love in chains. How absurd it all was, and how tragic too. One might react back to the remaining choice—no love at all—and that was absurder and more tragic still, since man was made (among other ends) to love. Looking under her heavy lashes at her pretty young children, incredibly youthful, absurdly theoretical, fiercely clean of mind and frank of speech, their clearness as yet unblurred by the expediencies, compromise and experimental contacts of life, Neville was stabbed by a sharp pang of fear and hope for them. Fear lest on some fleeting impulse they might founder into the sentimental triviality of short-lived contacts, or into the tedium of bonds which must outlive desire; hope that, by some fortunate chance, they might each achieve, as she had achieved, some relation which should be both durable and to be endured. As to the third path—no love at all—she did not believe that either Kay or Gerda would tread that. They were emotional, in their cool and youthful way, and also believed that they ought to increase the population. What a wonderful, noble thing to believe, at twenty, thought Neville, remembering the levity of her own irresponsible youth, when her only interest in the population had been a nightmare fear lest they should at last become so numerous that they would be driven out of the towns into the country and would be scuttling over the moors, downs and woods like black beetles in kitchens in the night. They were better than she had been, these children; more public-spirited and more in earnest about life.

IV

Across the garden came Nan Hilary, having come down from town to see Neville on her forty-third birthday. Nan herself was not so incredibly old as Neville; (for forty-three is incredibly old, from any reasonable standpoint). Nan was thirty-three and a half. She represented the thirties; she was, in Neville’s mind, a bridge between the remote twenties and the new, extraordinary forties in which one could hardly believe. It seems normal to be in the thirties; the right, ordinary age, that most people are. Nan, who wrote, and lived in rooms in Chelsea, was rather like a wild animal—a leopard or something. Long and lissome, with a small, round, sallow face and withdrawn, brooding yellow eyes under sulky black brows that slanted up to the outer corners. Nan had a good time socially and intellectually. She was clever and lazy; she would fritter away days and weeks in idle explorations into the humanities, or curled up in the sun in the country like a cat. Her worst fault was a cynical unkindness, against which she did not strive because investigating the less admirable traits of human beings amused her. She was infinitely amused by her nephew and her niece, but often spiteful to them, merely because they were young. To sum up, she was a cynic, a rake, an excellent literary critic, a sardonic and brilliant novelist, and she had a passionate, adoring and protecting affection for Neville, who was the only person who had always been told what she called the darker secrets of her life.

She sat down on the grass, her thin brown hands clasped round her ankles, and said to Neville, “You’re looking very sweet, aged one. Forty-three seems to suit you.”

“And you,” Neville returned, “look as if you’d jazzed all night and written unkind reviews from dawn till breakfast time.”

“That’s just about right,” Nan owned, and flung herself full length on her back, shutting her eyes against the sun. “That’s why I’ve come down here to cool my jaded nerves. And also because Rosalind wanted to lunch with me.”

“Have you read my poems yet?” enquired Gerda, who never showed the customary abashed hesitation in dealing with these matters. She and Kay sent their literary efforts to Nan to criticise, because they believed (a) in her powers as a critic, (b) in her influence in the literary world. Nan used in their behalf the former but seldom the latter, because, in spite of queer spasms of generosity, she was jealous of Gerda and Kay. Why should they want to write? Why shouldn’t they do anything else in the world but trespass on her preserves? Not that verse was what she ever wrote or could write herself. And of course everyone wrote now, and especially the very young; but in a niece and nephew it was a tiresome trick. They didn’t write well, because no one of their age ever does, but they might some day. They already came out in weekly papers and anthologies of contemporary verse. Very soon they would come out in little volumes. They’d much better, thought Nan, marry and get out of the way.

“Read them—yes,” Nan returned laconically to Gerda’s question.

“What,” enquired Gerda, perseveringly, “did you think of them?”

“I said I’d read them,” Nan replied. “I didn’t say I’d thought of them.”

Gerda looked at her with her wide, candid gaze, with the unrancorous placidity of the young, who are still used to being snubbed. Nan, she knew, would tease and baffle, withhold and gibe, but would always say what she thought in the end, and what she thought was always worth knowing, even though she was middle-aged.

Nan, turning her lithe body over on the grass, caught the patient child’s look, and laughed. Generous impulses alternated in her with malicious moods where these absurd, solemn, egotistic, pretty children of Neville’s were concerned.

“All right, Blue Eyes. I’ll write it all down for you and send it to you with the MS., if you really want it. You won’t like it, you know, but I suppose you’re used to that by now.”

Neville listened to them. Regret turned in her, cold and tired and envious. They all wrote except her. To write: it wasn’t much of a thing to do, unless one did it really well, and it had never attracted her personally, but it was, nevertheless, something—a little piece of individual output thrown into the flowing river. She had never written, even when she was Gerda’s age. Twenty years ago writing poetry hadn’t been as it is today, a necessary part of youth’s accomplishment like tennis, French or dancing. Besides, Neville could never have enjoyed writing poetry, because for her the gulf between good verse and bad was too wide to be bridged by her own achievements. Nor novels, because she disliked nearly all novels, finding them tedious, vulgar, conventional, and out of all relation both to life as lived and to the world of imagination. What she had written in early youth had been queer imaginative stuff, woven out of her childhood’s explorations into fairyland and of her youth’s into those still stranger tropical lands beyond seas where she had travelled with her father. But she hadn’t written or much wanted to write; scientific studies had always attracted her more than literary achievements. Then she had married Rodney, and that was the end of all studies and achievements for her, though not the end of anything for Rodney, but the beginning.

Rodney came out of the house, his pipe in his mouth. He still had the lounging walk, shoulders high and hands in pockets, of the undergraduate; the walk also of Kay. He sat down among his family. Kay and Gerda looked at him with approval; though they knew his weakness, he was just the father they would have chosen, and of how few parents can this be said. They were proud to take him about with them to political meetings and so forth, and prouder still to sit under him while he addressed audiences. Few men of his great age were (on the whole) so right in the head and sound in the heart, and fewer still so delightful to the eye. When people talked about the Wicked Old Men, who, being still unfortunately unrestrained and unmurdered by the Young, make this wicked world what it is, Kay and Gerda always contended that there were a few exceptions.

Nan gave Rodney her small, fleeting smile. She had a critical friendliness for him, but had never believed him really good enough for Neville.

Gerda and Kay began to play a single, and Nan said, “I’m in a hole.”

“Broke, darling?” Neville asked her, for that was usually it, though sometimes it was human entanglements.

Nan nodded. “If I could have ten pounds. … I’d let you have it in a fortnight.”

“That’s easy,” said Rodney, in his kind, offhand way.

“Of course,” Neville said. “You old spendthrift.”

“Thank you, dears. Now I can get a birthday present for mother.”

For Mrs. Hilary’s birthday was next week, and to celebrate it her children habitually assembled at The Gulls, St. Mary’s Bay, where she lived. Nan always gave her a more expensive present than she could afford, in a spasm of remorse for the irritation her mother roused in her.

“Oh, poor mother,” Neville exclaimed, suddenly remembering that Mrs. Hilary would in a week be sixty-three, and that this must be worse by twenty years than to be forty-three.

The hurrying stream of life was loud in her ears. How quickly it was sweeping them all along—the young bodies of Gerda and of Kay leaping on the tennis court, the clear, analysing minds of Nan and Rodney and herself musing in the sun, the feverish heart of her mother, loving, hating, feeding restlessly on itself by the seaside, the age-calmed soul of her grandmother, who was eighty-four and drove out in a donkey chair by the same sea.

The lazy talking of Rodney and Nan, the cryings and strikings of Gerda and Kay, the noontide chirrupings of birds, the cluckings of distant hens pretending that they had laid eggs, all merged into the rushing of the inexorable river, along and along and along. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bearing all its sons away. Clatter, chatter, clatter, does it matter, matter, matter? They fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day. … No, it probably didn’t matter at all what one did, how much one got into one’s life, since there was to be, anyhow, so soon an end.

The garden became strange and far and flat, like tapestry, or a dream. …

The lunch gong boomed. Nan, who had fallen asleep with the suddenness of a lower animal, her cheek pillowed on her hand, woke and stretched. Gerda and Kay, not to be distracted from their purpose, finished the set.

“Thank God,” said Nan, “that I am not lunching with Rosalind.”