Mrs. Hilary, having thus asserted her acquaintance with Chekhov’s Letters, left Gilbert, Grandmama and Neville to talk about it together, and herself began telling the others how disappointed Jim had been that he could not come for her birthday.
“He was passionately anxious to come,” she said, in her clear, vibrating voice, that struck a different note when she mentioned each one of her children, so that you always knew which she meant. “He never misses today if he can possibly help it. But he simply couldn’t get away. … One of these tremendously difficult new operations, that hardly anyone can do. His work must come first, of course. He wouldn’t be Jim if it didn’t.”
“Fancy knifing people in town a day like this,” said Rosalind, stretching her large, lazy limbs in the sun. Rosalind was big and fair, and sensuously alive.
Music blared out from the parade. Gilbert, adjusting his glasses, observed its circumstances, with his air of detached, fastidious interest.
“The Army,” he remarked. “The Army calling for strayed sheep.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Rosalind, raising herself, “wouldn’t I love to go out and be saved! I was saved once, when I was eleven. It was one of my first thrills. I felt I was blacker in guilt than all creatures before me, and I came forward and found the Lord. Afraid I had a relapse rather soon, though.”
“Horrible vulgarians,” Mrs. Hilary commented, really meaning Rosalind at the age of eleven. “They have meetings on the parade every morning now. The police ought to stop it.”
Grandmama was beating time with her hand on the arm of her chair to the merry music-hall tune and the ogreish words.
“Blood! Blood!
Rivers of blood for you,
Oceans of blood for me!
All that the sinner has got to do
Is to plunge into that Red Sea.
Clean! Clean!
Wash and be clean!
Though filthy and black as a sweep you’ve been,
The waves of that sea shall make you clean. …”
“That,” Mrs. Hilary asserted, with disgust, “is a most disagreeable way of worshipping God.” She was addicted to these undeniable statements, taking nothing for granted.
“But a very racy tune, my dear,” said Grandmama, “though the words are foolish and unpleasing.”
Gilbert said, “A stimulating performance. If we don’t restrain her, Rosalind will be getting saved again.”
He was proud of Rosalind’s vitality, whimsies and exuberances.
Rosalind, who had a fine rolling voice, began reciting “General Booth enters into heaven,” by Mr. Vachell Lindsay, which Mrs. Hilary found disgusting.
“A wonderful man,” said Grandmama, who had been reading the General’s life in two large volumes. “Though mistaken about many things. And his Life would have been more interesting if it had been written by Mr. Lytton Strachey instead of Mr. Begbie; he has a better touch on our great religious leaders. Your grandfather,” added Grandmama, “always got on well with the Army people. He encouraged them. The present vicar does not. He says their methods are deplorable and their goal a delusion.”
Rosalind said “Their methods are entrancing and their goal the Lord. What more does he want? Clergymen are so narrow. That’s why I had to give up being a churchwoman.”
Rosalind had been a churchwoman (high) for nine months some six years ago, just after planchette and just before flag days. She had decided, after this brief trial, that incense and confessions, though immensely stimulating, did not weigh down the balance against early mass, Lent, and being thrown with other churchwomen.
IV
“What about a bathe?” Neville suggested to all of them. “Mother?”
Mrs. Hilary, a keen bather, agreed. They all agreed except Grandmama, who was going out in her donkey chair instead, as one does at eighty-four.
They all went down to the beach, where the Army still sang of the Red Sea, and where the blue high tide clapped white hands on brown sand.
One by one they emerged from tents and sprang through the white leaping edge into the rocking blue, as other bathers were doing all round the bay. When Mrs. Hilary came out of her tent, Neville was waiting for her, poised like a slim girl, knee-deep in tumbling waves, shaking the water from her eyes.
“Come, mother. I’ll race you out.”
Mrs. Hilary waded in, a figure not without grace and dignity. Looking back they saw Rosalind coming down the beach, large-limbed and splendid, like Juno. Mrs. Hilary shrugged her shoulders.
“Disgusting,” she remarked to Neville.
So much more, she meant, of Rosalind than of Rosalind’s costume. Mrs. Hilary preferred it to be the other way about, for, though she did not really like either of them, she disliked the costume less than she disliked Rosalind.
“It’s quite in the fashion,” Neville assured her, and Mrs. Hilary, remarking that she was sure of that, splashed her head and face and pushed off, mainly to escape from Rosalind, who always sat in the foam, not being, like the Hilary family, an active swimmer.
Already Pamela and Gilbert were far out, swimming steadily against each other, and Nan was tumbling and turning like an eel close behind them.
Neville and Mrs. Hilary swam out a little way.
“I shall now float on my back,” said Mrs. Hilary. “You swim on and catch up with the rest.”
“You’ll be all right?” Neville asked, lingering.
“Why shouldn’t I be all right? I bathe nearly every day, you know, even if I am sixty-three.” This was not accurate; she only bathed as a rule when it was warm, and this seldom occurs on our island coasts.
Neville, saying, “Don’t stop in long, will you,” left her and swam
