Dangerous Ages | Page 9

use then.
Neville on the eve of this her sixty-third birthday soothed one such
outburst. The tedium of life, with no more to do in it--why couldn't it
end? The lights were out, the flowers were dead--and yet the unhappy
actors had to stay and stay and stay, idling on the empty, darkened
stage. (That was how Mrs. Hilary, with her gift for picturesque
language, put it.) Must it be empty, must it be dark, Neville uselessly
asked, knowing quite well that for one of her mother's temperament it
must. Mrs. Hilary had lived in and by her emotions; nothing else had
counted. Life for her had burnt itself out, and its remnant was like the
fag end of a cigarette, stale and old.
"Shall I feel like that in twenty years?" Neville speculated aloud.
"I hope," said Mrs. Hilary, "that you won't have lost Rodney. So long
as you have him...."
"But if I haven't...."
Neville looked down the years; saw herself without Rodney, perhaps
looking after her mother, who would then have become (strange,
incredible thought, but who could say?) calm with the calm of age; Kay
and Gerda married or working or both.... What then? Only she was
better equipped than her mother for the fag end of life; she had a

serviceable brain and a sound education. She wouldn't pass empty days
at a seaside resort. She would work at something, and be interested.
Interesting work and interesting friends--her mother, by her very nature,
could have neither, but was just clever enough to feel the want of them.
The thing was to start some definite work now, before it was too late.
"Did Grandmama go through it?" Neville asked her mother.
"Oh, I expect so. I was selfish; I was wrapped up in home and all of
you; I didn't notice. But I think she had it badly, for a time, when first
she left the vicarage.... She's contented now."
They both looked at Grandmama, who was playing patience on the sofa
and could not hear their talking for the sound of the sea. Yes,
Grandmama was (apparently) contented now.
"There's work," mused Neville, thinking of the various links with life,
the rafts, rather, which should carry age over the cold seas of tedious
regret. "And there's natural gaiety. And intellectual interests. And
contacts with other people--permanent contacts and temporary ones.
And beauty. All those things. For some people, too, there's religion."
"And for all of us food and drink," said Mrs. Hilary, sharply. "Oh, I
suppose you think I've no right to complain, as I've got all those things,
except work."
But Neville shook her head, knowing that this was a delusion of her
mother's, and that she had, in point of fact, none of them, except the
contacts with people, which mostly either over-strained, irritated or
bored her, and that aspect of religion which made her cry. For she was
a Unitarian, and thought the Gospels infinitely sad and the souls of the
departed most probably so merged in God as to be deprived of all
individuality.
"It's better to be High Church or Roman Catholic and have services, or
an Evangelical and have the Voice of God," Neville decided. And,
indeed, it is probable that Mrs. Hilary would have been one or other of
these things if it had not been for her late husband, who had

disapproved of superstition and had instructed her in the Higher
Thought and the Larger Hope.
3
Though heaviness endured for the night, joy came in the morning, as is
apt to happen where there is sea air. Mrs. Hilary on her birthday had a
revulsion to gaiety, owing to a fine day, her unstable temperament,
letters, presents and being made a fuss of. Also Grandmama said, when
she went up to see her after breakfast, "This new dress suits you
particularly, my dear child. It brings out the colour in your eyes," and
everyone likes to hear that when they are sixty-three or any other age.
So, when the rest of her children arrived, Mrs. Hilary was ready for
them.
They embraced her in turn; Pamela, capable, humorous and intelligent,
the very type of the professional woman at her best, but all the time
preferring Frances Carr, anxious about her because she was
overworking and run down; Nan, her extravagant present in her hands,
on fire to protect her mother against old age, depression and Rosalind,
yet knowing too how soon she herself would be smouldering with
irritation; Gilbert, spare and cynical, writer of plays and literary editor
of the Weekly Critic, and with him his wife Rosalind, whom Mrs.
Hilary had long since judged as a voluptuous rake who led men on and
made up unseemly stories and her lovely face, but who insisted on
coming to