Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
NEVILLE’S BIRTHDAY
Neville, at five o’clock (nature’s time, not man’s) on the morning of her
birthday, woke from the dream-broken sleep of summer dawns, hot with
the burden of two sheets and a blanket, roused by the multitudinous silver
calling of a world full of birds. They chattered and bickered about the
creepered house, shrill and sweet, like a hundred brooks running together
down steep rocky places after snow. And, not like brooks, and strangely
unlike birds, like, in fact, nothing in the world except a cuckoo clock, a
cuckoo shouted foolishly in the lowest boughs of the great elm across the
silver lawn.
Neville turned on her face, cupped her small, pale, tanned face in her
sunburnt hands, and looked out with sleepy violet eyes. The sharp joy
of the young day struck into her as she breathed it through the wide
window. She shivered ecstatically as it blew coldly on to her bare throat
and chest, and forgot the restless birthday bitterness of the night—forgot
how she had lain and thought, “Another year gone, and nothing done
yet. Soon all the years will be gone, and nothing ever will be done.” Done
by her, she of course meant, as all who are familiar with birthdays will
know. But what was something and what was nothing, neither she nor
others with birthdays could satisfactorily define. They have lived, they
have eaten, drunk, loved, bathed, suffered, talked, danced in the night
and rejoiced in the dawn, warmed, in fact, both hands before the fire
of life, but still they are not ready to depart, for they are behindhand
with time, obsessed with so many worlds, so much to do, the petty done,
the undone vast. It depressed Milton when he turned twenty-three; it
depresses all those with vain and ambitious temperaments at least once
a year. Some call it remorse for wasted days, and are proud of it, others
call it vanity, discontent, or greed, and are ashamed of it. It makes no
difference, either way.
Neville, flinging it off lightly with her bedclothes, sprang out of bed,
thrust her brown feet into sand shoes, her slight, straight, pyjama-clad
body into a big coat, quietly slipped into the passage, where, behind three
shut doors, slept Rodney, Gerda, and Kay, and stole down the backstairs
to the kitchen, which was dim and blinded, blue with china and pale
with dawn, and had a gas-stove. It will be obvious to any reader, but
not interesting, that Neville now made herself some tea. She also got
some bread and marmalade out of the larder, spread two thick chunks,
and slipped, munching one of them, out of the sleeping house into the
dissipated and riotous garden.
Looking up at the honeysuckle-buried window of the bedroom of
Gerda, Neville nearly whistled the call to which Gerda was wont to reply.
Nearly, but not quite. On the whole it was a morning to be out alone in.
Besides, Neville wanted to forget, for the moment, about birthdays, and
Gerda would have reminded her.
Going round by the yard, she fetched instead Esau, who wouldn’t
remind her, and whose hysterical joy she hushed with a warning hand.
Across the wet and silver lawn she sauntered, between the monstrous
shadows of the elms, her feet in the old sand shoes leaving dark prints
in the dew, her mouth full of bread and marmalade, her two black plaits
bobbing on her shoulders, and Esau tumbling round her. Across the lawn
to the wood, cool and dim still, but not quiet, for it rang with music and
rustled with life. Trough the boughs of beeches and elms and firs the
young day flickered gold, so that the bluebell patches were half lit, like
blue water in the sun, half grey, like water at twilight. Between two great
waves of them a brown path ran steeply down to a deep little stream.
Neville and Esau, scrambling a little way up stream, stopped at a broad,
swirling pool it made between rocks. Here Neville removed coat, shoes
and pyjamas, and sat poised for a moment on the jutting rock, a slight
and naked body, long in the leg, finely and supply knit, with light, flexible
muscles—a body built for swiftness, grace, and wiry strength. She sat
there while she twisted her plaits round her head, then she slipped into
the cold, clear swirling pool, which was just, in one part, out of her depth,
and called to Esau to come in too, and Esau, as usual, didn’t, but only
barked.
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.
These, of course, were the moments when it was enough to be alive.
Swimming, bread and marmalade, sitting high in a beech tree in the
golden eye of the morning sun—that was life. One flew then, like a gay
ship with the wind in its sails, over the cold, black, bottomless waters of
misgiving. Many such a June morning Neville remembered in the past. …
She wondered if Gerda and if Kay thus sailed over sorrow too. Rodney,
she knew, did. But she knew Rodney better, in some ways, than she knew
Gerda and Kay.
To think suddenly of Rodney, of Gerda and of Kay, sleeping in the
still house beyond the singing wood and the silver garden, was to founder
swiftly in the cold, dark seas, to be hurt again with the stabbing envy of
the night. Not jealousy, for she loved them all too well for that. But envy
of their chances, of their contacts with life. Having her own contacts, she
wanted all kinds of others too. 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 hair now spread over
her shoulders to dry in the sun, at her strong, supple, active limbs, and– 6 –
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. In those days, what did one
do to keep from sinking in the black seas of regret? One sat by the fire,
or in the sunlit garden, old and grey and full of sleep—yes, one went to
sleep, when one could. When one couldn’t, one read. But one’s eyes got
tired soon—Neville thought of her grandmother—and one had to be read
aloud to, by someone who couldn’t read aloud. That wouldn’t be enough to
stifle vain regrets; only rejoicing actively in the body did that. So, before
that time came, one must have slain regret, crushed that serpent’s head for
good and all.
But did any one ever succeed in doing this? Rodney, who had his full,
successful, useful, interesting life, Rodney, who had made his mark and
was making it, Rodney, the envy of many others, and particularly the
envy of Neville, with the jagged ends of her long-since-broken career
stabbing her, Rodney from time to time burned inwardly with scorching
ambitions, with jealousies of other men, with all the heats, rancours,
and troubles of the race that is set before us. He had done, was doing,
something, but it wasn’t enough. He had got, was getting, far, but it wasn’t
far enough. He couldn’t achieve what he wanted; there were obstacles
everywhere. Fools hindered his work; men less capable than he got jobs
he should have had. Immersed in politics, he would have liked more time
for writing; he would have liked a hundred other careers besides his own,
and could have but the one. (Gerda and Kay, poised on the threshold of
life, still believed 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 and use it
now? Or was she for ever 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. …
