Part 9 (1/2)

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-a.n.a.lyst 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-sh.e.l.l. 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-a.n.a.lyst would listen, pa.s.sive 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-a.n.a.lyst 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-a.n.a.lysts recognised as true life. Mrs. Hilary's experiences were pale in comparison; but psycho-a.n.a.lysts 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 courts.h.i.+p, 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 gla.s.ses, watched the b.a.l.l.s 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, smas.h.i.+ng, 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 gla.s.ses, 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.

So off Grandmama rode in her wheeled chair, and Mrs. Hilary and Barry Briscoe were left alone. Mrs. Hilary and this pleasant, brown, friendly young man, who cared for Workers' Education and Continuation Schools, and Penal Reform, and Garden Cities, and Getting Things Done by Acts of Parliament, about all which things Mrs. Hilary knew and cared nothing.

But vaguely she felt that they sprang out of and must include a care for human beings as such, and that therefore Barry Briscoe would listen if she told him things.

So (it came out of lying on gra.s.s, which Barry was doing) she told him about the pneumonia of Neville as a child, how they had been staying in Cornwall, miles from a doctor, and without Mr. Hilary, and Mrs. Hilary had been in despair; how Jim, a little chap of twelve, had ridden off on his pony in the night to fetch the doctor, across the moors. A long story; stories about illnesses always are. Mrs. Hilary got worked up and excited as she told it; it came back to her so vividly, the dreadful night.