Dangerous Ages | Page 3

that they could
indeed have a hundred.) No, Rodney was not immune from sorrow, but
at least he had more with which to keep it at bay than Neville. Neville
had no personal achievements; she had only her love for Rodney,
Gerda and Kay, her interest in the queer, enchanting pageant of life, her
physical vigours (she could beat any of the rest of them at swimming,
walking, tennis or squash) and her active but wasted brain. A good
brain, too; she had easily and with brilliance passed her medical
examinations long ago--those of them for which she had had time
before she had been interrupted. But now a wasted brain; squandered,
atrophied, gone soft with disuse. Could she begin to use it now? Or was
she forever held captive, in deep woods, between the two twilights?
"I am in deep woods, Between the two twilights. Over valley and hill I
hear the woodland wave Like the voice of Time, as slow, The voice of
Life, as grave, The voice of Death, as still...."
2
The voices, the young loud clear voices of Gerda and of Kay, shrilled
down from the garden, and Esau yapped in answer. They were calling
her. They had probably been to wake her and had found her gone.
Neville smiled (when she smiled a dimple came in one pale brown
cheek) and swung herself down from the beech. Kay and Gerda were of
enormous importance; the most important things in life, except Rodney;

but not everything, because nothing is ever everything in this so
complex world.
When she came out of the wood into the garden, now all golden with
morning, they flung themselves upon her and called her a sneak for not
having wakened them to bathe.
"You'll be late for breakfast," they chanted. "Late on your forty-third
birthday."
They each had an arm round her; they propelled her towards the house.
They were lithe, supple creatures of twenty and twenty-one. Between
them walked Neville, with her small, pointed, elfish face, that was
sensitive to every breath of thought and emotion like smooth water
wind-stirred. With her great violet eyes brooding in it under thin black
brows, and her wet hair hanging in loose strands, she looked like an
ageless wood-dryad between two slim young saplings. Kay was a little
like her in the face, only his violet eyes were short-sighted and he wore
glasses. Gerda was smaller, fragile and straight as a wand, with a white
little face and wavy hair of pure gold, bobbed round her thin white neck.
And with far-set blue eyes and a delicate cleft chin and thin straight lips.
For all she looked so frail, she could dance all night and return in the
morning cool, composed and exquisite, like a lily bud. There was a
look of immaculate sexless purity about Gerda; she might have stood
for the angel Gabriel, wide-eyed and young and grave. With this wide
innocent look she would talk unabashed of things which Neville felt
revolting. And she, herself, was the product of a fastidious generation
and class, and as nearly sexless as may be in this besexed world, which
however is not, and can never be, saying much. Kay would do the same.
They would read and discuss Freud, whom Neville, unfairly prejudiced,
found both an obscene maniac and a liar. They might laugh with her at
Freud when he expanded on that complex, whichever it is, by which
mothers and daughters hate each other, and fathers and sons--but they
both all the same took seriously things which seemed to Neville merely
loathsome imbecilities. Gerda and Kay didn't, in point of fact, find so
many things either funny or disgusting as Neville did; throwing her
mind back twenty years, Neville tried to remember whether she had

found the world as funny and as frightful when she was a medical
student as she did now; on the whole she thought not. 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. They had
nothing to do with the pre-war, dilettante past, the sophisticated gaiety
of the young century. Their childhood had been lived during the great
war, and they had emerged from it hot with elemental things,
discussing life, lust, love, politics and social reform, with cool candour,
intelligent thoroughness and Elizabethan directness. They wouldn't
mind having passions and giving them rein; they wouldn't