II
They were happy little times, stimulating, cosy little times. They spoke straight to the heart, easing it of its weight of tragedy. A splendid man, Mr. Cradock, with his shrewd, penetrating sympathy, his kind firmness. He would listen with interest to everything; the sharp words she had had with Grandmama, troubles with the maids, the little rubs of daily life (and what a rubbing business life is, to be sure!) as well as to profounder, more tragic accounts of desolation, jealousy, weariness and despair. He would say “Your case is a very usual one,” so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that. He reduced it all, dispassionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws. He trained his patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams and to be shocked at nothing that they signified.
Mrs. Hilary would wake each morning, or during the night, and clutch at the dream which was flying from her, clutch and secure it, and make it stand and deliver its outlines to her. She was content with outlines; it was for Mr. Cradock to supply the interpretation. Sometimes, if Mrs. Hilary couldn’t remember any dreams, he would supply, according to a classic precedent, the dream as well as the interpretation. But on the whole, deeply as she revered and admired him, Mrs. Hilary preferred to remember her own dreams; what they meant was bad enough, but the meaning of the dreams that Mr. Cradock told her she had dreamt was beyond all words. … That terrible Unconscious! Mrs. Hilary disliked it excessively; she felt rather as if it were a sewer, sunk beneath an inadequate grating.
But from Mr. Cradock she put up with hearing about it. She would have put up with anything. He was so steadying and so wonderful. He enabled her to face life with a new poise, a fresh lease of strength and vitality. She told Grandmama so. Grandmama said “Yes, my dear, I’ve observed it in you. It sounds to me an unpleasing business, but it is obviously doing you good, so far. I only wish it may last. The danger may be reaction, after you have finished the course and lost touch with this young man.” (Mr. Cradock was forty-five, but Grandmama, it must be remembered, was eighty-four.) “You will have to guard against that. In a way it was a pity you didn’t take up churchgoing instead; religion lasts.”
“And these quackeries do not,” Grandmama finished her sentence to herself, not wishing to be discouraging.
“Not always,” Mrs. Hilary truly replied, meaning that religion did not always last.
“No,” Grandmama agreed. “Unfortunately not always. Particularly when it is High Church. There was your uncle Bruce, of course. …”
Mrs. Hilary’s uncle Bruce, who had been High Church for a season, and had even taken Orders in the year 1860, but whose faith had wilted in the heat and toil of the day, so that by 1870 he was an agnostic barrister, took Grandmama back through the last century, and she became reminiscent over the Tractarian movement, and, later, the Ritualists.
“The Queen never could abide them,” said Grandmama. “Nor could Lord Beaconsfield, nor your father, though he was always kind and tolerant. I remember when Dr. Jowett came to stay with us, how they talked about it. … Ah well, they’ve become very prominent since then, and done a great deal of good work, and there are many very able, excellent men and women among them. … But they’re not High Church any longer, they tell me. They’re Catholics in these days. I don’t know enough of them to judge them, but I don’t think they can have the dignity of the old High Church party, for if they had I can’t imagine that Gilbert’s wife, for instance, would have joined them, even for so short a time as she did. … Well, it suits some people, and psychoanalysis obviously suits others. Only I do hope you will try to keep moderate and balanced, my child, and not believe all this young man tells you. Parts of it do sound so very strange.”
(But Mrs. Hilary would not have dreamt of repeating to Grandmama the strangest parts of all.)
“I feel a new woman,” she said, fervently, and Grandmama smiled, well pleased, thinking that it certainly did seem rather like the old evangelical conversions of her youth. (Which, of course, did not always last, any more than the High Church equivalents did.)
All Grandmama committed herself to, in her elderly caution, which came however less from age than from having known Mrs. Hilary for sixty-three years, was “Well, well, we must see.”