Mrs. Hilary watched them, swimming slowly round, a few feet out of her depth. They seemed to have forgotten her and her birthday. The only one who was within speaking distance was Rosalind, wallowing with her big white limbs in tumbling waves on the shore; Rosalind, whom she disliked; Rosalind, who was more than her costume, which was not saying much; Rosalind, before whom she had to keep up an appearance of immense enjoyment because Rosalind was so malicious.
“You wonderful woman! I can’t think how you do it,” Rosalind was crying to her in her rich, ripe voice out of the splashing waves. “But fancy their all swimming out and leaving you to yourself. Why, you might get cramp and sink. I’m no use, you know; I’m hopeless; can’t keep up at all.”
“I shan’t trouble you, thank you,” Mrs. Hilary called back, and her voice shook a little because she was getting chilled.
“Why, you’re shivering,” Rosalind cried. “Why don’t you come out? You are wonderful, I do admire you. … It’s no use waiting for the others, they’ll be ages. … I say, look at Neville; fancy her being forty-three. I never knew such a family. … Come and sit in the waves with me, it’s lovely and warm.”
“I prefer swimming,” said Mrs. Hilary, and she was shivering more now. She never stayed in so long as this; she usually only plunged in and came out.
Grandmama, stopping on the esplanade in her donkey chair, was waving and beckoning to her. Grandmama knew she had been in too long, and that her rheumatism would be bad.
“Come out, dear,” Grandmama called, in her old thin voice. “Come out. You’ve been in far too long.”
Mrs. Hilary only waved her hand to Grandmama. She was not going to come out, like an old woman, before the others did, the others, who had swum out and left her alone on her birthday bathe.
They were swimming back now, first all in a row, then one behind the other; Neville leading, with her arrowy drive, Gilbert and Pamela behind, so alike, with their pale, finely cut, intellectual faces, and their sharp chins cutting through the sea, and their quick, short, vigorous strokes, and Nan, still far out, swimming lazily on her back, the sun in her eyes.
Mrs. Hilary’s heart stirred to see her swimming brood, so graceful and strong and swift and young. They possessed, surely, everything that was in the heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water over the earth. And she, who was sixty-three, possessed nothing. She could not even swim with her children. They might have thought of that, and stayed with her. … Neville, anyhow. Jim would have, said Mrs. Hilary to herself, half knowing and half not knowing that she was lying.
“Come out, dear!” called Grandmama from the esplanade. “You’ll be ill!”
Back they came, Neville first. Neville, seeing from afar her mother’s blue face, called “Mother dear, how cold you are! You shouldn’t have stayed in so long!”
“I was waiting,” Mrs. Hilary said, “for you.”
“Oh why, dear?”
“Don’t know. I thought I would. … It’s pretty poor fun,” Mrs. Hilary added, having failed after trying not to, “bathing all alone on one’s birthday.”
Neville gave a little sigh, and gently propelled her mother to the shore. She hadn’t felt like this on her birthday, when Kay and Gerda had gone off to some avocation of their own and left her in the garden. Many things she had felt on her birthday, but not this. It is an undoubted truth that people react quite differently to birthdays.
Rosalind rose out of the foam like Aphrodite, grandly beautiful, though all the paint was washed off her face and lips.
“Wonderful people,” she apostrophised the shore-coming family. “Anyone would think you were all nineteen. I was the only comfy one.”
Rosalind was always talking about age, emphasizing it, as if it were very important.
They hurried up to the tents, and last of all came Nan, riding in to shore on a swelling wave and lying full length where it flung her, for the joy of feeling the wet sand sucking away beneath her.
V
Grandmama, waiting for them on the esplanade, was angry with Mrs. Hilary.
“My dear child, didn’t you hear me call? You’re perfectly blue. You know you never stay in more than five minutes. Neville, you should have seen that she didn’t. Now you’ll get your rheumatism back, child, and only yourself to thank. It’s too silly. People of sixty-three carrying on as if they were fifty; I’ve no patience with it.”
“They all swam out,” said Mrs. Hilary, who, once having succumbed to the impulse to adopt this attitude, could not check it. “I waited for them.”
Grandmama, who was cross, said “Very silly of you and very selfish of the children. Now you’d better go to bed with hot bottles and a posset.”
But Mrs. Hilary, though she felt the red-hot stabbings of an attack of rheumatism already beginning, stayed up. She was happier now, because the children were making a fuss of her, suggesting remedies and so on. She would stay up, and show them she could be plucky and cheerful even with rheumatism. A definite thing, like illness or pain, always put her on her mettle; it was so easy to be brave when people knew you had something to be brave about, and so hard when they didn’t.
They had an early tea, and then Gilbert and Rosalind, who were going out to dinner, caught the 5:15 back to town. Rosalind’s departure made Mrs. Hilary more cheerful
