Voyaging homewards through the spring seas, Neville saw life as an entangling thicket, the Woods of Westermain she had loved in her childhood, in which the scaly dragon squatted, the craving monster self that had to be subjugated before one could walk free in the enchanted woods.
“Him shall change, transforming late,
Wonderously renovate. …”
Dimly discerning through the thicket the steep path that climbed to such liberty as she sought, seeing far off the place towards which her stumbling feet were set, where life should be lived with alert readiness and response, oblivious of its personal achievements, its personal claims and spoils, Neville the spoilt, vain, ambitious, disappointed egoist, strained her eyes into the distance and half smiled. It might be a dream, that liberty, but it was a dream worth a fight. …
XVI
Time
I
February at St. Mary’s Bay. The small fire flickered and fluttered in the grate with a sound like the windy beating of wings. The steady rain sloped against the closed windows of The Gulls, and dropped patteringly on the asphalt pavements of Marine Crescent outside, and the cold grey sea tumbled moaning.
Grandmama sat in her armchair by the hearth, reading the Autobiography of a Cabinet Minister’s Wife and listening to the fire, the sea and the rain, and sleeping a little now and again.
Mrs. Hilary sat in another armchair, surrounded by bad novels, as if she had been a reviewer. She was regarding them, too, with something of the reviewer’s pained and inimical distaste, dipping now into one, shutting it with a sharp sigh, trying another; flinging it on the floor with an ejaculation of anger and fatigue.
Grandmama woke with a start, and said “What fell? Did something fall?” and adjusted her glasses and opened the Autobiography again.
“A sadly vulgar, untruthful and ill-written book. The sort of autobiography Gilbert’s wife will write when she has time. It reminds me very much of her letters, and is, I am sure, still more like the diary which she no doubt keeps. Poor Gilbert. …” Grandmama seemed to be confusing Gilbert momentarily with the Cabinet Minister. “I remember,” she went on, “meeting this young woman at Oxford, in the year of the first Jubilee. … A very bright talker. They can so seldom write. …” She dozed again.
“Will this intolerable day,” Mrs. Hilary enquired of the housemaid who came in to make up the fire, “never be over? I suppose it will be bedtime some time. …”
“It’s just gone a quarter past six, ma’am,” said the housemaid, offering little hope, and withdrew.
Mrs. Hilary went to the window and drew back the curtains and looked out at Marine Crescent in the gloomy, rainy twilight. The long evening stretched in front of her—the long evening which she had never learnt to use. Psychoanalysis, which had made her so much better while the course lasted, now that it was over (and it was too expensive to go on with forever) had left her worse than before. She was like a drunkard deprived suddenly of stimulants; she had nothing to turn to, no one now who took an interest in her soul. She missed Mr. Cradock and that biweekly hour; she was like a creeper wrenched loose from its support and flung flat on the ground. He had given her mental exercises and told her to continue them; but she had always hated mental exercises; you might as well go in for the Pelman course and have done. What one needed was a person. She was left once more face to face with time, the enemy; time, which gave itself to her lavishly with both hands when she had no use for it. There was nothing she wanted to do with time, except kill it.
“What, dear?” murmured Grandmama, as she rattled the blind tassel against the sill. “How about a game of piquet?”
But Mrs. Hilary hated piquet, and all card games, and halma, and dominoes, and everything. Grandmama used to have friends in to play with her, or the little maid. This evening she rang for the little maid, May, who would rather have been writing to her young man, but liked to oblige the nice old lady, of whom the kitchen was fond.
It was all very well for Grandmama, Mrs. Hilary thought, stormily revolting against that placidity by the hearth. All very well for Grandmama to sit by the fire contented with books and papers and games and sleep, unbitten by the murderous hatred of time that consumed herself. Everyone always thought that about Grandmama, that things were all very well for her, and perhaps they were. For time could do little more hurt to Grandmama. She need not worry about killing time; time would kill her soon enough, if she left it alone. Time, so long to Mrs. Hilary, was short now to Grandmama, and would soon be gone. As to May, the little maid, to her time was fleeting, and flew before her face, like a bird she could never catch. …
Grandmama and May were playing casino. A bitter game, for you build and others take, and your labour is but lost that builded; you sow and others reap. But Grandmama and May were both good-tempered and ladylike. They played prettily together, age and youth.
Why did life play one these tricks, Mrs. Hilary cried within herself. What had she done to life, that it should have deserted her and left her stranded on the shores of a watering-place, empty-handed and pitiful, alone with time the enemy, and with Grandmama, for whom it was all very
