So much for the Anglo-Catholic Congress. The Church Congress was better, being more decent and in order, though Mrs. Hilary knew that the whole established Church was wrong.
And so they came to literature, to a review of Mr. Conrad’s new novel and a paragraph about a famous annual literary prize. Grandmama thought it very nice that young writers should be encouraged by cash prizes. “Not,” as she added, “that there seems any danger of any of them being discouraged, even without that. … But Nan and Kay and Gerda ought to go in for it. It would be a nice thing for them to work for.”
Then Grandmama, settling down with her pleased old smile to something which mattered more than the news in the papers, said “And now, dear, I want to hear all about this friendship of Nan’s and this nice young Mr. Briscoe.”
So Neville again had to answer questions about that.
VII
Mrs. Hilary, abruptly leaving them, trailed away by herself to the house. Since she mightn’t have Neville to herself for the afternoon she wouldn’t stay and share her. But when she reached the house and looked out at them through the drawing-room windows, their intimacy stabbed her with a pang so sharp that she wished she had stayed.
Besides, what was there to do indoors? No novels lay about that looked readable, only “The Rescue” (and she couldn’t read Conrad, he was so nautical) and a few others which looked deficient in plot and as if they were trying to be clever. She turned them over restlessly, and put them down again. She wasn’t sleepy, and hated writing letters. She wanted someone to talk to, and there was no one, unless she rang for the housemaid. Oh, this dreadful ennui. … Did anyone in the world know it but her? The others all seemed busy and bright. That was because they were young. And Grandmama seemed serene and bright. That was because she was old, close to the edge of life, and sat looking over the gulf into space, not caring. But for Mrs. Hilary there was ennui, and the dim, empty room in the cold grey July afternoon. The empty stage; no audience, no actors. Only a lonely, disillusioned actress trailing about it, hungry for the past. … A book Gerda had been reading lay on the table. The Breath of Life, it was called, which was surely just what Mrs. Hilary wanted. She picked it up, opened it, turned the pages, then, tucking it away out of sight under her arm, left the room and went upstairs.
“Many wonderful cures,” Neville had said. And had mentioned depression as one of the diseases cured. What, after all, if there was something in this stuff which she had never tried to understand, had always dismissed, according to her habit, with a single label? “Labels don’t help. Labels get you nowhere.” How often the children had told her that, finding her terse terminology that of a shallow mind, endowed with inadequate machinery for acquiring and retaining knowledge, as indeed it was.
VIII
Gerda, going up to Mrs. Hilary’s room to tell her about tea, found her asleep on the sofa, with The Breath of Life fallen open from her hand. A smile flickered on Gerda’s delicate mouth, for she had heard her grandmother on the subject of psychoanalysis, and here she was, having taken to herself the book which Gerda was reading for her Freud circle. Gerda read a paragraph on the open page.
“It will often be found that what we believe to be unhappiness is really, in the secret and unconscious self, a joy, which the familiar process of inversion sends up into our consciousness in the form of grief. If, for instance, a mother bewails the illness of her child, it is because her unconscious self is experiencing the pleasure of importance, of being condoled and sympathised with, as also that of having her child (if it is a male) entirely for the time dependent on her ministrations. If, on the other hand, the sick child is her daughter, her grief is in reality a hope that this, her young rival, may die, and leave her supreme in the affections of her husband. If, in either of these cases, she can be brought to face and understand this truth, her grief will invert itself again and become a conscious joy. …”
“I wonder if Grandmother believes all that,” speculated Gerda, who did.
Then she said aloud, “Grandmother” (that was what Gerda and Kay called her, distinguishing her thus from Great-Grandmama), “tea’s ready.”
Mrs. Hilary woke with a start. The Breath of Life fell on the floor with a bang. Mrs. Hilary looked up and saw Gerda and blushed.
“I’ve been asleep. … I took up this ridiculous book of yours to look at. The most absurd stuff. … How can you children muddle your minds with it? Besides, it isn’t at all a nice book for you, my child. I came on several very queer things. …”
But the candid innocence of Gerda’s wide blue eyes on hers transcended “nice” and “not nice.” … You might as well talk like that to a wood anemone, or a wild rabbit. … If her grandmother had only known, Gerda at twenty had discussed things which Mrs. Hilary, in all her sixty-three years, had never heard mentioned. Gerda knew of things of which Mrs. Hilary would have indignantly and sincerely denied the existence. Gerda’s young mind was a cesspool, a clear little dew-pond, according to how you looked at it. Gerda and Gerda’s friends knew no inhibitions of speech or thought. They believed that the truth would make them free, and the truth about life is, from some points of view, a squalid and gross thing. But better look it in the face, thought Gerda and her contemporaries, than pretend it isn’t there, as elderly people do.
“I don’t want you to pretend anything isn’t there, darling,” Neville, between the two generations, had said to Gerda once.
