Dangerous Ages Part 24

"You've been overworking," he told her. "You're not strong enough in these days to stand hard brain-work. You must give it up."

For a fortnight she lay tired and pa.s.sive, surrendered and inert, caring for nothing but to give up and lie still and drink hot milk. Then she struggled up and mooned about the house and garden, and cried weakly from time to time, and felt depressed and bored, and as if life were over and she were at the bottom of the sea.

"This must be what mother feels," she thought. "Poor mother.... I'm like her; I've had my life, and I'm too stupid to work, and I can only cry.... Men must work and women must weep.... I never knew before that that was true.... I mustn't see mother just now, it would be the last straw ... like the skeletons people used to look at to warn themselves what they would come to.... Poor mother ... and poor me.... But mother's getting better now she's being a.n.a.lysed. That wouldn't help me at all. I a.n.a.lyse myself too much already.... And I was so happy a few months ago.

What a dreadful end to a good ambition. I shall never work again, I suppose, in any way that counts. So that's that.... Why do I want to work and to do something? Other wives and mothers don't.... Or do they, only they don't know it, because they don't a.n.a.lyse? I believe they do, lots of them. Or is it only my horrible egotism and vanity, that can't take a back seat quietly? I was always like that, I know. Nan and I and Gilbert.

Not Jim so much, and not Pamela at all. But Rodney's worse than I am; he wouldn't want to be counted out, put on the shelf, in the forties; he'd be frightfully sick if he had to stand by and see other people working and getting on and in the thick of things when he wasn't. He couldn't bear it; he'd take to drink, I think.... I hope Rodney won't ever have a nervous breakdown and feel like this, poor darling, he'd be dreadfully tiresome.... Not to work after all. Not to be a doctor.... What then?

Just go about among people, grinning like a dog. Winter in town, talking, dining, being the political wife. Summer in the country, walking, riding, reading, playing tennis. Fun, of course. But what's it all for? When I've got Gerda off my hands I shall have done being a mother, in any sense that matters. Is being a wife enough to live for? Rodney's wife? Oh, I want to be some use, want to do things, to count.... And Rodney will die some time--I know he'll die first--and then I shan't even be a wife. And in twenty years I shan't be able to do things with my body much more, and what then? What will be left? ... I think I'm getting hysterical, like poor mother.... How ugly I look, these days."

She stopped before the looking-gla.s.s. Her face looked back at her, white and thin, almost haggard, traced in the last few weeks for the first time with definite lines round brow and mouth. Her dark hair was newly streaked with grey.

"Middle age," said Neville, and a cold hand was laid round her heart. "It had to come some time, and this illness has opened the door to it. Or shall I look young again when I'm quite well? No, never young again."

She s.h.i.+vered.

"I look like mother to-day.... I _am_ like mother...."

So youth and beauty were to leave her, too. She would recover from this illness and this extinguis.h.i.+ng of charm, but not completely, and not for long. Middle age had begun. She would have off days in future, when she would look old and worn instead of always, as. .h.i.therto, looking charming.

She wouldn't, in future, be sure of herself; people wouldn't be sure to think "A lovely woman, Mrs. Rodney Bendish." Soon they would be saying "How old Mrs. Bendish is getting to look," and then "She was a pretty woman once."

Well, looks didn't matter much really, after all....

"They do, they do," cried Neville to the gla.s.s, pa.s.sionately truthful.

"If you're vain they do--and I am vain. Vain of my mind and of my body.... Vanity, vanity, all is vanity ... and now the silver cord is going to be loosed and the golden bowl is going to be broken, and I shall be hurt."

Looks did matter. It was no use canting, and minimising them. They affected the thing that mattered most--one's relations with people. Men, for instance, cared more to talk to a woman whose looks pleased them.

They liked pretty girls, and pretty women. Interesting men cared to talk to them: they told them things they would never tell a plain woman.

Rodney did. He liked attractive women. Sometimes he made love to them, prettily and harmlessly.

The thought of Rodney stabbed her. If Rodney were to get to care less ... to stop making love to her ... worse, to stop needing her.... For he did need her; through all their relations.h.i.+p, disappointing in some of its aspects, his need had persisted, a simple, demanding thing.

Humour suddenly came back.

"This, I suppose, is what Gerda is antic.i.p.ating, and why she won't have Barry tied to her. If Rodney wasn't tied to me he could flee from my wrinkles...."

"Oh, what an absurd fuss one makes. What does any of it matter? It's all in the course of nature, and the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.

Middle age will be very nice and comfortable and entertaining, once one's fairly in it.... I go babbling about my wasted brain and fading looks as if I'd been a mixture of Sappho and Helen of Troy.... That's the worst of being a vain creature.... What will Rosalind do when _her_ time comes?

Oh, paint, of course, and dye--more thickly than she does now, I mean.

She'll be a ghastly sight. A raddled harridan. At least I shall always look respectable, I hope. I shall go down to Gerda. I want to look at something young. The young have their troubles, poor darlings, but they don't know how lucky they are."

2

In November Neville and Gerda, now both convalescent, joined Rodney in their town flat. Rodney thought London would buck Neville up. London does buck you up, even if it is November and there is no gulf stream and not much coal. For there is always music and always people. Neville had a critical appreciation of both. Then, for comic relief, there are politics. You cannot be really bored with a world which contains the mother of Parliaments, particularly if her news is communicated to you at first hand by one of her members. Disgusted you may be and are, if you are a right-minded person, but at least not bored.

What variety, what excitement, what a moving picture show, is this tragic and comic planet! Why want to be useful, why indulge such tedious inanities as ambitions, why dream wistfully of doing one's bit, making one's work, in a world already as full of bits, bright, coloured, absurd bits, like a kaleidoscope, as full of marks (mostly black marks) as a novel from a free library? A dark and bad and bitter world, of course, full of folly, wickedness and misery, sick with poverty and pain, so that at times the only thing Neville could bear to do in it was to sit on some dreadful committee thinking of ameliorations for the lot of the very poor, or to go and visit Pamela in Hoxton and help her with some job or other--that kind of direct, immediate, human thing, which was a sop to uneasiness and pity such as the political work she dabbled in, however similar its ultimate aim, could never be.

3

To Pamela Neville said, "Are you afraid of getting old, Pamela?"

Pamela replied, "Not a bit. Are you?" And she confessed it.

"Often it's like a cold douche of water down my spine, the thought of it.

I reason and mock at myself, but I _don't_ like it.... You're different; finer, more real, more unselfish. Besides, you'll have done something worth doing when you have to give up. I shan't."

Pamela's brows went up.

"Kay? Gerda? The pretty dears: I've done nothing so nice as them. You've done what's called a woman's work in the world--isn't that the phrase?"

"Done it--just so, but so long ago. What now? I still feel young, Pamela, even now that I know I'm not. ... Oh Lord, it's a queer thing, being a woman. A well-off woman of forty-three with everything made comfortable for her and her brain gone to pot and her work in the world done. I want something to bite my teeth into--some solid, permanent job--and I get nothing but sweetmeats, and people point at Kay and Gerda and say 'That's your work, and it's over. Now you can rest, seeing that it's good, like G.o.d on the seventh day.'"

"_I_ don't say 'Now you can rest. Except just now, while you're run down.'"

"Run down, yes; run down like a disordered clock because I tried to tackle an honest job of work again. Isn't it sickening, Pamela? Isn't it ludicrous?"

"Ludicrous--no. Everyone comes up against his own limitations. You've got to work within them that's all. After all, there are plenty of jobs you can do that want doing--simply shouting to be done."

"Pammie dear, it's worse than I've said. I'm a low creature. I don't only want to do jobs that want doing: I want to count, to make a name. I'm d.a.m.nably ambitious. You'll despise that, of course--and you're quite right, it is despicable. But there it is. Most men and many women are tormented by it--they itch for recognition."

"Of course. One is."

"You too, Pammie?"

"I have been. Less now. Life gets to look short, when you're thirty-nine."

"Ah, but you have it--recognition, even fame, in the world you work in.

You count for something. If you value it, there it is. I wouldn't grumble if I'd played your part in the piece. It's a good part--a useful part and a speaking part."

"I suppose we all feel we should rather like to play someone else's part for a change. There's nothing exciting about mine. Most people would far prefer yours."

They would, of course; Neville knew it. The happy political wife rather than the unmarried woman worker; Rodney, Gerda and Kay for company rather than Frances Carr. There was no question which was the happier lot, the fuller, the richer, the easier, the more entertaining.

"Ah well.... You see, Rosalind spent the afternoon with me yesterday, and I felt suddenly that it wasn't for me to be stuck up about her--what am I too but the pampered female idler, taking good things without earning them? It made me shudder. Hence this fit of blues. The pampered, lazy, brainless animal--it is such a terrific sight when in human form.

Rosalind talked about Nan, Pamela. In her horrible way--you know. Hinting that she isn't alone in Rome, but with Stephen Lumley."

Pamela took off her gla.s.ses and polished them.

"Rosalind would, of course. What did you say?"

"I lost my temper. I let out at her. It's not a thing I often do with Rosalind--it doesn't seem worth while. But this time I saw red. I told her what I thought of her eternal gossip and scandal. I said, what if Nan and Stephen Lumley, or Nan and anyone else, did arrange to be in Rome at the same time and to see a lot of each other; where was the harm? No use.

You can't pin Rosalind down. She just shrugged her shoulders and smiled, and said 'My dear, we all know our Nan. We all know too that Stephen Lumley has been in love with her for a year, and doesn't live with his wife. Then they go off to Rome at the same moment, and one hears that they are seen everywhere together. Why shut one's eyes to obvious deductions? You're so like an ostrich, Neville.' I said I'd rather be an ostrich than a ferret, eternally digging into other people's concerns,--and by the time we had got to that I thought it was far enough, so I had an engagement with my dressmaker."

"It's no use tackling Rosalind," Pamela agreed. "She'll never change her spots.... Do you suppose it's true about Nan?"

"I daresay it is. Yes, I'm afraid I do think it's quite likely true.... Nan was so queer the few times I saw her after Gerda's accident.

I was unhappy about her. She was so hard, and so more than usually cynical and unget-at-able. She told me it had been all her fault, leading Gerda into mischief, doing circus tricks that the child tried to emulate and couldn't. I couldn't read her, quite. Her tone about Gerda had a queer edge to it. And she rather elaborately arranged, I thought, so that she shouldn't meet Barry. Pamela, do you think she had finally and absolutely turned Barry down before he took up so suddenly with Gerda, or...."