Gilbert was cool and dry, pretending she hadn’t hurt him. He would always take hurts like that, with that deadly, steely lightness. By its deadliness, its steeliness, she knew that it was all true (and much more besides) that she had heard about Rosalind and her patients.
V
She walked down to the bus with hot eyes. Rosalind had yawned softly and largely behind her as she went down the front steps. Wicked, monstrous creature! Lying about Gilbert’s clever, nervous, eager life in great soft folds, and throttling it. If Gilbert had been a man, a real male man, instead of a writer and therefore effeminate, decadent, he would have beaten her into decent behaviour. As it was she would ruin him, and he would go under, not able to bear it, but cynically grinning still. Perhaps the sooner the better. Anything was better than the way Rosalind went on now, disgracing him and getting talked about, and making him hate his mother for disliking her. He hadn’t even come with her to the bus, to carry her parcels for her. … That wasn’t like Gilbert. As a rule he had excellent manners, though he was not affectionate like Jim.
Jim, Jim, Jim. Should she go to Harley Street? What was the use? She would find only Margery there; Jim would be out. Margery had no serious faults except the one, that she had taken the first place in Jim’s affections. Before Margery, Neville had had this place, but Mrs. Hilary had been able, with Neville’s never failing and skilful help, to disguise this from herself. You can’t disguise a wife’s place in her husband’s heart. And Jim’s splendid children too, whom she adored—they looked at her with Margery’s brown eyes instead of Jim’s grey-blue ones. And they preferred really (she knew it) their maternal grandmother, the jolly lady who took them to the theatres.
Mrs. Hilary passed a church. Religion. Some people found help there. But it required so much of you, was so exhausting in its demands. Besides, it seemed infinitely far away—an improbable, sad, remote thing, that gave you no human comfort. Psychoanalysis was better; that opened gates into a new life. “Know thyself,” Mrs. Hilary murmured, kindling at the prospect. Most knowledge was dull, but never that.
“I will ring up from Waterloo and make an appointment,” she thought.
VI
Jim
I
The psychoanalyst doctor was little and dark and while he was talking he looked not at Mrs. Hilary but down at a paper whereon he drew or wrote something she tried to see and couldn’t. She came to the conclusion after a time that he was merely scribbling for effect.
“Insomnia,” he said. “Yes. You know what that means?”
She said, foolishly, “That I can’t sleep,” and he gave her a glance of contempt and returned to his scribbling.
“It means,” he told her, “that you are afraid of dreaming. Your unconscious self won’t let you sleep. … Do you often recall your dreams when you wake?”
“Sometimes.”
“Tell me some of them, please.”
“Oh, the usual things, I suppose. Packing; missing trains; meeting people; and just nonsense that means nothing. All the usual things, that everyone dreams about.”
At each thing she said he nodded, and scribbled with his pencil. “Quite,” he said, “quite. They’re bad enough in meaning, the dreams you’ve mentioned. I don’t suppose you’d care at present to hear what they symbolise. … The dreams you haven’t mentioned are doubtless worse. And those you don’t even recall are worst of all. Your unconscious is, very naturally and properly, frightened of them. … Well, we must end all that, or you’ll never sleep as you should. Psychoanalysis will cure these dreams; first it will make you remember them, then you’ll talk them out and get rid of them.”
“Dreams,” said Mrs. Hilary. “Well, they may be important. But it’s my whole life. …”
“Precisely. I was coming to that. Of course you can’t cure sleeplessness until you have cured the fundamental things that are wrong with your life. Now, if you please, tell me all you can about yourself.”
Here was the wonderful moment. Mrs. Hilary drew a long breath, and told him. A horrid (she felt that somehow he was rather horrid) little man with furtive eyes that wouldn’t meet hers—(and he wasn’t quite a gentleman, either, but still, he wanted to hear all about her) he was listening attentively, drinking it in. Not watching tennis while she talked, like Barry Briscoe in the garden. Ah, she could go on and on, never tired; it was like swimming in warm water.
He would interrupt her with questions. Which had she preferred, her father or her mother? Well, perhaps on the whole her father. He nodded; that was the right answer; the other he would have quietly put aside as one of the deliberate inaccuracies so frequently practised by his patients. “You can leave out the perhaps. There’s no manner of doubt about it, you know.” Lest he should say (instead of only looking it) that she had been in love with her good father and he with her, Mrs. Hilary hurried on. She had a chaste mind, and knew what these Freudians were. It would, she thought (not knowing her doctor and how it would have come to the same thing, only he would have thought her a more pronounced case, because of the deception), have been wiser to have said that she had preferred her mother, but less truthful, and what she was enjoying now was an orgy of truth-telling. She got on to her marriage, and how intensely Richard had loved her. He tried for a moment to be indecent about love and marriage, but in her deep excitement she hardly noticed him, but swept on to the births of the children, and Jim’s croup.
“I see,” he said presently, “that you prefer to avoid discussing certain aspects of life. You obviously have a sex complex.”
“Of
