Rose Macaulay

“ Gerda's soul sang and whistled down the whistling wind. It wasn't over, then: it was only beginning. The W.E.A. was splendid; work was splendid; Barry Briscoe was splendid; life was splendid. She was sorry for Kay at Cambridge, Kay who was just off on a reading party, not helping in the world's work but merely getting education. Education was inspiring in connection with Democracy, but when applied to oneself it was dull.
The rain was lessening. It fell on their heads more lightly; the wind was like soft wet kisses on their backs, as they tramped through Merrow, and up the lane to Windover. ”

“ Gerda and Gerda's friends knew no inhibitions of speech or thought. They believed that the truth would make them free, and the truth about life is, from some points of view, a squalid and gross thing. But better look it in the face, thought Gerda and her contemporaries, than pretend it isn't there, as elderly people do.
"I don't want you to pretend anything isn't there, darling," Neville, between the two generations, had said to Gerda once. "Only it seems to me that some of you children have one particular kind of truth too heavily on your minds. It seems to block the world for you." ”

“ Nan commented, looking from Kay's limp greenness to Gerda's shivering blueness, from Gerda to Barry, prostrate, bruised and coughing, from Barry to her own cut and battered knees and elbows, bleeding with the unaccountable profuseness of limbs cut by rocks in the sea. "I may die from loss of blood, and the rest of you from prostration, and all of us from cold. Are we well enough to scale the rocks now and get to our clothes?"
"We're not well enough for anything," Barry returned. "But we'd better do it. We don't want to die here, with the sea washing over us in this damp way." ”

“ Not only Rodney's, Gerda's and Kay's, but those of all her family and friends. Conscious, as one is on birthdays, of intense life hurrying swiftly to annihilation, she strove desperately to dam it. It went too fast. She looked at the wet strands of black hair now spread over her shoulders to dry in the sun, at her strong, supple, active limbs, and thought of the days to come, when the black hair should be grey and the supple limbs refuse to carry her up beech trees, and when, if she bathed in the sunrise, she would get rheumatism. ”

“ What a wonderful, noble thing to believe, at twenty, thought Neville, remembering the levity of her own irresponsible youth, when her only interest in the population had been a nightmare fear lest they should at last become so numerous that they would be driven out of the towns into the country and would be scuttling over the moors, downs and woods like black beetles in kitchens in the night. They were better than she had been, these children; more public-spirited and more in earnest about life. ”

“ Hilary and Grandmama were both settled for the night (old and elderly people settle for the night—other people go to bed) Neville went down to the seashore and lay on the sand, watching the moon rise over the sea.
Beauty was there, rather than in elderly people. But in elderly people was such pathos, such tragedy, such pity, that they lay like a heavy weight on one's soul. ”

“ Kay was standing on the paved causeway, and Barry and Gerda, some way off, were wading among the rocks, bending over the pools, as if they were looking for crabs.
Nan went to bed. When Gerda came in presently, she lay very still and pretended to be asleep.
It was dreadful, another night of sharing a bed. Dreadful to lie so close one to the other; dreadful to touch accidentally; touching people reminded you how alive they are, with their separate, conscious throbbing life so close against yours. ”

“ Looking at the little fragile figure shivering in its vest, Nan felt in that moment no malice, no triumph, no rivalry, no jealous anger; nothing but the protecting care for the smaller and weaker, for Neville's little pretty, precious child that she had felt when Gerda's hand clutched her shoulder in the sea.
"Life-saving seems to soften the heart," she reflected, grimly, conscious as always of her own reactions.
"Well," said Kay weakly, as they climbed up the cliff path to the little village, "I do call that a rotten bathe. Now let's make for the pub and drink whiskey." ”

“ Boys and girls are, for all their high spirits, creatures of infinite solemnities and pomposities. They laugh; but the twinkling irony, mocking at itself and everything else, of the thirties and forties, they have not yet learnt. They cannot be gentle cynics; they are so full of faith and hope, and when these are hurt they turn savage. About Kay and Gerda there was a certain splendid earnestness with regard to life. Admirable creatures, thought Neville, watching them with whimsical tenderness. ”

“ The coast road to Land's End is like a switchback. You climb a mountain and are flung down to sea level like a shooting star, and climb a mountain again. Sometimes the road becomes a sandy cliff path and you have to walk.
But at last, climbing up and being shot down and walking, Nan and Barry and Gerda and Kay reached Land's End. They went down to Sennan Cove to bathe, and the high sea was churning breakers on the beach. Nan dived through them with the arrowy straightness of a fish or a submarine, came up behind them, and struck out to sea. ”

“ Their life together, thought Barry, would be a keen, jolly, adventuring business, an ardent thing, full of gallant dreams and endeavours. It should never grow tame or stale or placid, never lose its fine edge. There would be mountain peak beyond mountain peak to scale together. They would be co-workers, playmates, friends and lovers all at once, and they would walk in liberty as in a bourgeois dream. ”

“ Barry's choice was made. It was at bottom the last test of mettle, the ultimate challenge from the loser to the winner, in the lists chosen by the loser as her own. It was also—for Nan was something of a bully—the heckling of Gerda. She might have won one game, and that the most important, but she should be forced to own herself beaten in another, after being dragged painfully along rough and dangerous ways. And over and above and beyond all this, beyond rivalry and beyond Gerda, was the eternal impatience for adventure as such, for quick, vehement living, which was the essence of Nan. ”

“ You see, Rosalind spent the afternoon with me yesterday, and I felt suddenly that it wasn't for me to be stuck up about her—what am I too but the pampered female idler, taking good things without earning them? It made me shudder. Hence this fit of blues. The pampered, lazy, brainless animal—it is such a terrific sight when in human form. Rosalind talked about Nan, Pamela. In her horrible way—you know. Hinting that she isn't alone in Rome, but with Stephen Lumley. ”

“ The lazy talking of Rodney and Nan, the cryings and strikings of Gerda and Kay, the noontide chirrupings of birds, the cluckings of distant hens pretending that they had laid eggs, all merged into the rushing of the inexorable river, along and along and along. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bearing all its sons away. ”

“ The steep tumbling roads tilted behind them, with their pale, old, white and slate hamlets huddled between fields above a rock-bound sea. Sometimes they would stop early in the day at some fishing village, find rooms there for the night, and bathe and sail till evening. When they bathed, Nan would swim far out to sea, striking through cold, green, heaving waters, slipping cleverly between currents, numbing thought with bodily action, drowning emotion in the sea. ”

“ Nan, with only the faintest, if any application of brakes, would commit herself to lanes which leaped precipitously downwards like mountain streams, zig-zagging like a dog's-tooth pattern, shingled with loose stones, whose unseen end might be a village round some sharp turn, or a cove by the sea, or a field path running to a farm, or merely the foot of one hill and the beginning of the steep pull up the next. ”

“ Hilary and Grandmama were touching. Not Gerda and Kay, with their dance just beginning.
A bore, this sharing one bed. You couldn't sleep, however small and quiet your companion lay. They must get a bed each, when they could, during this tour. One must sleep. If one didn't one began to think. Every time Nan forced herself to the edge of sleep, a picture sprang sharply before her eyes—the flaming sky and sea, herself and Barry standing together on the causeway. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Barry and Kay struggled through them somehow, bruised and choked; Gerda, giving it up—she was no great swimmer—tranquilly rolled and paddled in the surf by herself.
Kay called to her, mocking.
"Coward. Sensualist. Come over the top like a man."
Nan, turning to look at her from the high crest of a wave, thought "Gerda's afraid in a high sea. She is afraid of things: I remember." ”

“ One swim round is enough, if not too much, as everyone who knows sunrise bathing will agree. Neville scrambled out, discovered that she had forgotten the towel, dried herself on her coat, resumed her pyjamas, and sat down to eat her second slice of bread and marmalade. When she had finished it she climbed a beech tree, swarming neatly up the smooth trunk in order to get into the sunshine, and sat on a broad branch astride, whistling shrilly, trying to catch the tune now from one bird, now from another. ”

“ Music, art, drama, the company of eminent, pleasant and entertaining persons, all the various forms of beauty, the carefully cultivated richness, graces and elegances which go to build up the world of the fortunate, the cultivated, the prosperous and the well-bred—Neville walked among these like the soul in the lordly pleasure house built for her by the poet Tennyson, or like Robert Browning glutting his sense upon the world—"Miser, there waits the gold for thee!"—or Francis Thompson swinging the earth a trinket at his wrist. ”

“ But when Gerda was better, well enough, in fact, to lie in the Windover conservatory, Barry came down from town and said, "When shall we get married?"
Then Gerda, who had had as yet no time or mind-energy to reflect on the probable, or rather certain, width of the gulf between the sociological theories of herself and Barry, opened her blue eyes wide and said "Married?"
"Well, isn't that the idea? You can't jilt me now, you know; matters have gone too far."
"But, Barry, I thought you knew. I don't hold with marriage." ”

“ Barry was adventurous, and Kay and Gerda were calm, but to all of them life was sweet and limbs and bicycles precious; none of them desired an untimely end.
But Nan laughed at their prognostications of such an end. "It will be found impossible to ride down these hills," said their road book, and Nan laughed at that too. You can, as she observed, ride down anything; it is riding up that is the difficulty. Anyhow, she, who had ridden bucking horses and mountainous seas, could ride down anything that wore the semblance of a road. Only fools, Nan believed, met with disasters while bicycling. ”

“ What can be acquired, with blood and tears, is the courage of the will, stubborn and unyielding, but always nerve-racked, proudly and tensely strung up. Nan's form of fearlessness, combined as it was with the agility of a supple body excellently trained, would carry her lightly through all physical adventures, much as her arrowy strength and skill carried her through the breakers without blundering or mishap and let her now ride buoyantly on each green mountain as it towered. ”

“ Barry's hand gripped Nan's. He was here then, and it had come. Her head swam; she felt light, like thistledown on the wind.
They came up from the station into quiet, gay, warm Penzance, and had tea at a shop. They were going to stay at Marazion that night and the next, and spend the day bicycling to Land's End and back. They were all four full of vigour, brimming with life and energy that needed to be spent. But Gerda looked pale.
"She's been over-working in a stuffy office," Barry said. "And not, except when she dined with me, getting proper meals. What do you think she weighs, Nan?" ”

“ Pamela and Frances were all right; decent people, not sloppy, not gushing, but fine and direct and keen, though rather boring when they began to talk to each other about some silly old thing that had happened in their last year at Oxford, or their first year, or on some reading party. Some people re-live their lives like this; others pass on their way, leaving the past behind. They were all right, Pamela and Frances. ”

“ She had spent it on Rodney and Gerda and Kay, and the interesting, amusing life led by the wife of a man in Rodney's position, which had brought her always into contact with people and ideas. Much more amusing than grinding at intellectual work of her own, but it apparently caused the brain to atrophy. And she was, anyhow, tired of doing nothing in particular. After forty you must have your job, you must be independent of other people's jobs, of human and social contacts, however amusing and instructive. ”

“ Neville, who had a headache and was irritable, said "It's the other thing that's reactionary. It existed long before the marriage tie did. That's what I don't understand about all you children who pride yourselves on being advanced. If you frankly take your stand on going back to nature, on being reactionary—well, it is, anyhow, a point of view, and has its own merits. But your minds seem to me to be in a hopeless muddle. You think you're going forward while you're really going back."
"Marriage," said Gerda, "is so Victorian. It's like antimacassars." ”

“ There was nothing in the world like your own company; you could be purely animal then. And in a month Gerda and Kay were coming down, and they were going to bicycle along the coast, and she would ask Barry to come too, and when Barry came she would let him say what he liked, with no more fencing, no more cover. Down by the green edge of the Cornish sea they would have it out—"grip hard, become a root ..." become men as trees walking, rooted in a quiet dream. ”

“ You can't pin Rosalind down. She just shrugged her shoulders and smiled, and said 'My dear, we all know our Nan. We all know too that Stephen Lumley has been in love with her for a year, and doesn't live with his wife. Then they go off to Rome at the same moment, and one hears that they are seen everywhere together. Why shut one's eyes to obvious deductions? You're so like an ostrich, Neville.' I said I'd rather be an ostrich than a ferret, eternally digging into other people's concerns,—and by the time we had got to that I thought it was far enough, so I had an engagement with my dressmaker. ”

“ You dependable, practical people are always frivolous about things that matter. Are you happy? Do you feel right-side-up with life?"
"In the main—yes." Pamela was more serious this time. "One's doing one's job, after all. And human beings are interesting."
"But I've got that too. My job, and human beings.... Why do I feel all tossed about, like a boat on a choppy sea? Oh, I know life's furiously amusing and exciting—of course it is. But I want something solid. You've got it, somehow."
Nan broke off and thought "It's Frances Carr she's got. That's permanent. That goes on. Pamela's anchored. ”

“ And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered of old, had pulled out of countless scrapes—Nan had now taken her life into her reckless hands and done what with it? Given it, perhaps, to a man she didn't love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love, which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy. Even if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville was somehow sure of that. Men were blind fools; men were fickle children. Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to Rome and fetch Nan back. ”

“ One mightn't, she said to herself, be able to accomplish much in this world, or imprint one's personality on one's environment by deeds and achievements, but one could at least enjoy life, be a pleased participator in its spoils and pleasures, an enchanted spectator of its never-ending flux and pageant, its richly glowing moving pictures. One could watch the play out, even if one hadn't much of a part oneself. ”

“ Mrs. Hilary knew of old that still-burning, deadly anger of Nan's.
"Thank you, mother. You've helped me to make up my mind. I'm going to Capri with Stephen next week. I've refused up till now. He was going without me. You've made up my mind for me. You can tell Mr. Cradock that if he asks."
Nan was fiercely, savagely desirous to hurt. In the same spirit she had doubtless thrown her shoes at Mrs. Hilary thirty years ago. Rage and disgust, hot rebellion and sick distaste—what she had felt then she felt now. ”

“ It's the old who need work. They've lost their spring and their zest for life, and need something to hold on to. It's all wrong, the way we arrange it—making the young work and the old sit idle. It should be the other way about. Girls and boys don't get bored with perpetual holidays; they live each moment of them hard; they would welcome the eternal Sabbath; and indeed I trust we shall all do that, as our youth is to be renewed like eagles. But old age on this earth is far too sad to do nothing in. ”