“Oh very. Very unhappy. Very often. … She should come to church more. This Unitarianism is depressing. No substance in it. I’d rather be a Papist and keep God in a box. Or belong to the Army and sing about rivers of blood. I daresay both are satisfying. All this sermon-on-the-mount-but-no-miracle business is most saddening. Because it’s about impossibilities. You can receive a sacrament, and you can find salvation, but you can’t live the sermon on the mount. So of course it makes people discontented.”
Grandmama, who often in the evenings became a fluent though drowsy talker, might have wandered on like this till her bedtime, had not Mrs. Hilary here appeared, in her dressing-gown. She sat down, and said, trying to sound natural and not annoyed and failing. “I heard so much talk, I thought I would come down and be in it. I thought you were coming up to me again directly, Neville. I hadn’t realised you meant to stay down and talk to Grandmama instead.”
She hated Neville or any of them, but especially Neville, to talk intimately to Grandmama; it made her jealous. She tried and tried not to feel this, but it was never any use her fighting against jealousy, it was too strong for her.
Grandmama said placidly, “Neville and I were discussing different forms of religion.”
“Is Neville thinking of adopting one of them?” Mrs. Hilary enquired, her jealousy making her sound sarcastic and scornful.
“No, mother. Not at present. … Come back to bed, and I’ll sit with you, and we’ll talk. I don’t believe you should be up.”
“Oh, I see I’ve interrupted. It was the last thing I meant. No, Neville, I’ll go back to my room alone. You go on with your talk with Grandmama. I hate interrupting like this. I hoped you would have let me join. I don’t get much of you in these days, after all. But stay and talk to Grandmama.”
That was the point at which Nan would have sworn to herself and gone down to the beach. Neville did neither. She was gentle and soothing, and Grandmama was infinitely untroubled, and Mrs. Hilary presently picked up her spirits and went back to bed, and Neville spent the evening with her. These little scenes had occurred so often that they left only a slight impression on those concerned and slightest of all on Mrs. Hilary.
VIII
When Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were both settled for the night (old and elderly people settle for the night—other people go to bed) Neville went down to the seashore and lay on the sand, watching the moon rise over the sea.
Beauty was there, rather than in elderly people. But in elderly people was such pathos, such tragedy, such pity, that they lay like a heavy weight on one’s soul. If one could do anything to help. …
To be aimless: to live on emotions and be by them consumed: that was pitiful. To have done one’s work for life, and to be in return cast aside by life like a broken tool: that was tragic.
The thing was to defy life; to fly in the face of the fool nature, break her absurd rules, and wrest out of the breakage something for oneself by which to live at the last.
Neville flung her challenge to the black sea that slowly brightened under the moon’s rising eye.
III
Family Life
I
If you have broken off your medical studies at London University at the age of twenty-one and resume them at forty-three, you will find them (one is told) a considerably tougher job than you found them twenty-two years before. Youth is the time to read for examinations; youth is used to such foolishness, and takes it lightly in its stride. At thirty you may be and probably are much cleverer than you were at twenty; you will have more ideas and better ones, and infinitely more power of original and creative thought; but you will not, probably, find it so easy to grip and retain knowledge out of books and reproduce it to order. So the world has ordained that youth shall spend laborious days in doing this, and that middle age shall, in the main, put away these childish things, and act and work on in spite of the information thus acquired.
Neville Bendish, who was not even in the thirties, but so near the brink of senile decay as the forties, entered her name once more at the London University School of Medicine, and plunged forthwith into her interrupted studies. Her aim was to spend this summer in reacquiring such knowledge as should prepare her for the October session. And it was difficult beyond her imaginings. It had not been difficult twenty-two years ago; she had worked then with pleasure and interest, and taken examinations with easy triumph. As Kay did now at Cambridge, only more so, because she had been cleverer than Kay. She was a vain creature, and had believed that cleverness of hers to be unimpaired by life, until she came to try. She supposed that if she had spent her married life in head work, her head would never have lost the trick of it. But she hadn’t. She had spent it on Rodney and Gerda and Kay, and the interesting, amusing life led by the wife of a man in Rodney’s position, which had brought her always into contact with people and ideas. Much more amusing than grinding at intellectual work
