VIII
Gerda, going up to Mrs. Hilary’s room to tell her about tea, found her asleep on the sofa, with The Breath of Life fallen open from her hand. A smile flickered on Gerda’s delicate mouth, for she had heard her grandmother on the subject of psychoanalysis, and here she was, having taken to herself the book which Gerda was reading for her Freud circle. Gerda read a paragraph on the open page.
“It will often be found that what we believe to be unhappiness is really, in the secret and unconscious self, a joy, which the familiar process of inversion sends up into our consciousness in the form of grief. If, for instance, a mother bewails the illness of her child, it is because her unconscious self is experiencing the pleasure of importance, of being condoled and sympathised with, as also that of having her child (if it is a male) entirely for the time dependent on her ministrations. If, on the other hand, the sick child is her daughter, her grief is in reality a hope that this, her young rival, may die, and leave her supreme in the affections of her husband. If, in either of these cases, she can be brought to face and understand this truth, her grief will invert itself again and become a conscious joy. …”
“I wonder if Grandmother believes all that,” speculated Gerda, who did.
Then she said aloud, “Grandmother” (that was what Gerda and Kay called her, distinguishing her thus from Great-Grandmama), “tea’s ready.”
Mrs. Hilary woke with a start. The Breath of Life fell on the floor with a bang. Mrs. Hilary looked up and saw Gerda and blushed.
“I’ve been asleep. … I took up this ridiculous book of yours to look at. The most absurd stuff. … How can you children muddle your minds with it? Besides, it isn’t at all a nice book for you, my child. I came on several very queer things. …”
But the candid innocence of Gerda’s wide blue eyes on hers transcended “nice” and “not nice.” … You might as well talk like that to a wood anemone, or a wild rabbit. … If her grandmother had only known, Gerda at twenty had discussed things which Mrs. Hilary, in all her sixty-three years, had never heard mentioned. Gerda knew of things of which Mrs. Hilary would have indignantly and sincerely denied the existence. Gerda’s young mind was a cesspool, a clear little dew-pond, according to how you looked at it. 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.”
“You mean sex,” Gerda had told her, bluntly. “Well, it runs all through life, mother. What’s the use of hiding from it? The only way to get even with it is to face it. And use it.”
“Face it and use it by all means. All I meant was, it’s a question of emphasis. There are other things. …”
Of course Gerda knew that. There was drawing, and poetry, and beauty, and dancing, and swimming, and music, and politics, and economics. Of course there were other things; no doubt about that. They were like songs, like colour, like sunrise, like flowers, these other things. But the basis of life was the desire of the male for the female and of the female for the male. And this had been warped and smothered and talked down and made a furtive, shameful thing, and it must be brought out into the day. …
Neville smiled to hear all this tripping sweetly off Gerda’s lips.
“All right, darling, don’t mind me. Go ahead and bring it out into the day, if you think the subject really needs more airing than it already gets. I should have thought myself it got lots, and always had.”
And there they were; they talked at cross purposes, these two, across the gulf of twenty years, and with the best will in the world could not hope to understand, either of them, what the other was really at. And now here was Gerda, in Mrs. Hilary’s bedroom, looking across a gulf of forty years and saying nothing at all, for she knew it would be of no manner of use, since words don’t carry as far as that.
So all she said was “Tea’s ready, Grandmother.”
And Mrs. Hilary supposed that Gerda hadn’t, probably, noticed or understood those very queer things she had come upon while reading The Breath of Life.
They went down to tea.