IV
Across the garden came Nan Hilary, having come down from town to see Neville on her forty-third birthday. Nan herself was not so incredibly old as Neville; (for forty-three is incredibly old, from any reasonable standpoint). Nan was thirty-three and a half. She represented the thirties; she was, in Neville’s mind, a bridge between the remote twenties and the new, extraordinary forties in which one could hardly believe. It seems normal to be in the thirties; the right, ordinary age, that most people are. Nan, who wrote, and lived in rooms in Chelsea, was rather like a wild animal—a leopard or something. Long and lissome, with a small, round, sallow face and withdrawn, brooding yellow eyes under sulky black brows that slanted up to the outer corners. Nan had a good time socially and intellectually. She was clever and lazy; she would fritter away days and weeks in idle explorations into the humanities, or curled up in the sun in the country like a cat. Her worst fault was a cynical unkindness, against which she did not strive because investigating the less admirable traits of human beings amused her. She was infinitely amused by her nephew and her niece, but often spiteful to them, merely because they were young. To sum up, she was a cynic, a rake, an excellent literary critic, a sardonic and brilliant novelist, and she had a passionate, adoring and protecting affection for Neville, who was the only person who had always been told what she called the darker secrets of her life.
She sat down on the grass, her thin brown hands clasped round her ankles, and said to Neville, “You’re looking very sweet, aged one. Forty-three seems to suit you.”
“And you,” Neville returned, “look as if you’d jazzed all night and written unkind reviews from dawn till breakfast time.”
“That’s just about right,” Nan owned, and flung herself full length on her back, shutting her eyes against the sun. “That’s why I’ve come down here to cool my jaded nerves. And also because Rosalind wanted to lunch with me.”
“Have you read my poems yet?” enquired Gerda, who never showed the customary abashed hesitation in dealing with these matters. She and Kay sent their literary efforts to Nan to criticise, because they believed (a) in her powers as a critic, (b) in her influence in the literary world. Nan used in their behalf the former but seldom the latter, because, in spite of queer spasms of generosity, she was jealous of Gerda and Kay. Why should they want to write? Why shouldn’t they do anything else in the world but trespass on her preserves? Not that verse was what she ever wrote or could write herself. And of course everyone wrote now, and especially the very young; but in a niece and nephew it was a tiresome trick. They didn’t write well, because no one of their age ever does, but they might some day. They already came out in weekly papers and anthologies of contemporary verse. Very soon they would come out in little volumes. They’d much better, thought Nan, marry and get out of the way.
“Read them—yes,” Nan returned laconically to Gerda’s question.
“What,” enquired Gerda, perseveringly, “did you think of them?”
“I said I’d read them,” Nan replied. “I didn’t say I’d thought of them.”
Gerda looked at her with her wide, candid gaze, with the unrancorous placidity of the young, who are still used to being snubbed. Nan, she knew, would tease and baffle, withhold and gibe, but would always say what she thought in the end, and what she thought was always worth knowing, even though she was middle-aged.
Nan, turning her lithe body over on the grass, caught the patient child’s look, and laughed. Generous impulses alternated in her with malicious moods where these absurd, solemn, egotistic, pretty children of Neville’s were concerned.
“All right, Blue Eyes. I’ll write it all down for you and send it to you with the MS., if you really want it. You won’t like it, you know, but I suppose you’re used to that by now.”
Neville listened to them. Regret turned in her, cold and tired and envious. They all wrote except her. To write: it wasn’t much of a thing to do, unless one did it really well, and it had never attracted her personally, but it was, nevertheless, something—a little piece of individual output thrown into the flowing river. She had never written, even when she was Gerda’s age. Twenty years ago writing poetry hadn’t been as it is today, a necessary part of youth’s accomplishment like tennis, French or dancing. Besides, Neville could never have enjoyed writing poetry, because for her the gulf between good verse and bad was too wide to be bridged by her own achievements. Nor novels, because she disliked nearly all novels, finding them tedious, vulgar, conventional, and out
