But Barry Briscoe, watching cleverly through his bright glasses, 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 grass, 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.
“He was a Dr. Chalmers, and so kind. When he saw Neville he was horrified; by that time she was delirious. He said if Jim hadn’t gone straight to him but had waited till the morning, it might have been too late. …”
“Too late: quite. …” Barry Briscoe had an understanding, sympathetic grip of one’s last few words. So much of the conversation of others eludes one, but one should hold fast the last few words.
“Oh played, Gerda: did you that time, Bendish. …”
Gerda had put on, probably by accident, a sudden, absurd twist that had made a fool of Rodney.
That was what Barry Briscoe was really attending to, the silly game. This alert, seemingly interested, attentive young man had a nice manner, that led you on, but he didn’t really care. He lived in the moment: he cared for prisoners and workers, and probably for people who were ill now, but not that someone had been ill all those years ago. He only pretended to care; he was polite. He turned his keen, pleasant face up to her when he had done shouting about the game, and said “How splendid that he got to you in time!” but he didn’t really care. Mrs. Hilary found that women were better listeners than men. Women are perhaps better trained; they think it more ill-mannered not to show interest. They will listen to stories about servants, or reports of the inane sayings of infants, they will hear you through, without the flicker of a yawn, but with ejaculations and noddings, while you tell them about your children’s diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight rein, and endure. They are the world’s martyrs.
But men, less restrained, will fidget and wander and sigh and yawn, and change the subject.
To trap and hold the sympathy of a man—how wonderful! Who wanted a pack of women? What you really wanted was some man whose trade it was to listen and to give heed. Some man to whom your daughter’s pneumonia, of however long ago, was not irrelevant, but had its own significance, as having helped to build you up as you were, you, the problem, with your wonderful, puzzling temperament, so full of complexes, inconsistencies and needs. Some man who didn’t lose interest in you just because you were grey-haired and sixty-three.
“I’m afraid I’ve been taking your attention from the game,” said Mrs. Hilary to Barry Briscoe.
Compunction stabbed him. Had he been rude to this elderly lady, who had been telling him a long tale without a point while he watched the tennis and made polite, attentive sounds?
“Not a bit, Mrs. Hilary.” He sat up, and looked friendlier than ever. “I’ve been thrilled.” A charming, easy liar Barry was, when he deemed it necessary. His Quaker parents
