Dangerous Ages quotes

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.

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 being alive was enough.

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.

“Considering,” said Gerda, “that there are a million more women than men in this country, it stands to reason that some system of polygamy must become the usual thing in the future.”

“It’s always been the usual thing, darling. Dreadfully usual. It’s so much more amusing to be unusual in these ways.”

Neville’s voice trailed drowsily away. Polygamy. Sex. Free Love. Love in chains. The children seemed so often to be discussing these.

“What,” enquired Gerda, perseveringly, “did you think of them?”

“I said I’d read them,” Nan replied. “I didn’t say I’d thought of them.”

Gerda looked at her with her wide, candid gaze, with the unrancorous placidity of the young, who are still used to being snubbed.

“Wonderful people,” she apostrophised the shore-coming family. “Anyone would think you were all nineteen. I was the only comfy one.”

Rosalind was always talking about age, emphasizing it, as if it were very important.

They hurried up to the tents, and last of all came Nan, riding in to shore on a swelling wave and lying full length where it flung her, for the joy of feeling the wet sand sucking away beneath her.

Rosalind, with her malicious thrusts and her corrupt mind and her frank feminine greediness. For Rosalind, anyhow, didn’t pretend to herself, though she did undoubtedly, when for any reason it suited her, lie to other people.

Mrs. Hilary’s lying went all through, deep down; it sprang out of the roots of her being, so that all the time she was making up, not only for others but for herself, a sham person who did not exist.

That Nan found infinitely oppressive. So did Pamela, but Pamela was more tolerant and sympathetic and less ill-tempered than Nan, and observed the ways of others with quiet, ironic humour, saying nothing unkind.

For Grandmama had been brought up not to criticise sermons, but had failed to bring up Mrs. Hilary to the same self-abnegation. The trouble with Mrs. Hilary was, and had always been, that she expected (even now) too much of life.

Grandmama expected only what she got.

And Neville, wisest of all, had not listened, for she too expected what she would get if she did. She was really rather like Grandmama, in her cynically patient acquiescence, only brought up in a different generation, and not to hear sermons.

“She wouldn’t do it the more if I did,” Nan said, lazily. These competitions in unselfishness between Pamela and Frances Carr always bored her. There was no end to them.

Women are so terrifically self-abnegatory; they must give, give, give, to someone all the time.

Women, that is, of the mothering type, such as these. They must be forever cherishing something, sending someone to bed with bread and milk, guarding someone from fatigue.

Having put her hand on the clue, she ceased to be interested in the exhibition. It was, in fact, no more and no less interesting than if it had been their children.

Most sorts of love were rather dull, to the spectator.

Pamela and Frances were all right;

Human adventures, intellectual adventures, success, even a little fame, men and women, jokes, laughter and love, dancing and a little drink, and the fields and mountains and seas beyond—what more did one want?

Roots. That was the metaphor that had eluded Nan.

To be rooted and grounded in life, like a tree. Someone had written something about that.

one cracks the hearts of others, and these mend too. That is—inter alia—what life is for. If one day you want the tale of my life, Barry, you shall have it; though that’s not what life is for, to make a tale about.

So thrilling in the living, so flat and stale in the telling⁠—oh let’s get on and live some more of it, lots and lots more, and let the dead past bury its dead.

Between a laugh and a sleepy yawn, Nan jumped from the bus at the corner of Oakley Street.

The prettiest little girl looked sidelong at the unkind lady, and believed her half-smile to denote admiration.

Pretty little girls often make this error.

Stephen Lumley came along the beach. It was lunch time, and after lunch they were going out sailing. Stephen Lumley was the most important artist just now in Newlyn.

It was touching to be so young. Yet why, when youth was, people said, the best time? It wasn’t really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left.

Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty and heartbreaking to be sixty.

As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed. That was touching; Mrs.

Her smile became more luring, his more rejecting. As she saw it now, in the cruel, distorting night, he had seen her permission and refused it. By day she had known that simple Barry had seen nothing; by day she would know it again.

Between days are set nights of white, searing flame, two in a bed so that one cannot sleep.

Damn Gerda, lying there so calm and cool. It had been a mistake to ask Gerda to come; if it hadn’t been for Gerda they wouldn’t have been two in a bed.

But Nan laughed at their prognostications of such an end. “It will be found impossible to ride down these hills,” said their road book, and Nan laughed at that too.

You can, as she observed, ride down anything; it is riding up that is the difficulty.

Anyhow, she, who had ridden bucking horses and mountainous seas, could ride down anything that wore the semblance of a road. Only fools, Nan believed, met with disasters while bicycling. And jamming on the brakes was bad for the wheels and tiring to the hands.

But stampeding cattle, and high seas, and brakeless lightning descents, she did not like, however brave a face she was sustained by grace to meet them with.

After all she was only twenty, an age when some people still look beneath their beds before retiring.

Bulls, even, Gerda was called upon to face, in the wake of two unafraid males and a reckless aunt.

Nan was bicycling straight along the field path, and the bull stood staring at her, his head well down, in readiness, as Gerda saw, to charge. But he did not charge Nan.

Bulls and other ferocious beasts think it waste of time to charge the fearless; they get no fun out of an unfrightened victim.

He waited instead for Gerda, as she knew he would do.

So that was that, as she put it, definite and matter-of-fact to herself about it. He had stopped wanting her. Well then, she must stop wanting him, as speedily as might be. It took a little time.

You could not shoot down the hills of the emotions with the lightning rapidity with which you shot down the roads.

Also, the process was excruciatingly painful. You had to unmake so many plans, unthink so many thoughts. … Oh, but that was nothing.

that and common interests and so forth. It’s the stuff of ordinary life; the emotional excitement is the hors d’oeuvre. It would be greedy to want to keep passing on from one hors d’oeuvre to another—leaving the meal directly the joint comes in.”

“I like dessert best,” Gerda said, irrelevantly, biting into an apple.

“Well, you’d never get any at that rate. Nor much of the rest of the meal either.”

But your minds seem to me to be in a hopeless muddle. You think you’re going forward while you’re really going back.”

“Marriage,” said Gerda, “is so Victorian. It’s like antimacassars.”

“Now, my dear, do you mean anything by either of those statements? Marriage wasn’t invented in Victoria’s reign. Nor did it occur more frequently in that reign than it had before or does now. Why Victorian, then? And why antimacassars? Think it out.

“Ah well. … You see, Rosalind spent the afternoon with me yesterday, and I felt suddenly that it wasn’t for me to be stuck up about her—what am I too but the pampered female idler, taking good things without earning them? It made me shudder.

Hence this fit of blues. The pampered, lazy, brainless animal⁠—it is such a terrific sight when in human form.

Rosalind talked about Nan, Pamela. In her horrible way—you know. Hinting that she isn’t alone in Rome, but with Stephen Lumley.”

Mrs. Hilary said “Oh, my God,” and jerked her head back, quivering like a nervous horse who has had a shock and does not care to conceal it.

“Your daughter-in-law,” said Grandmama, without excitement, “is an exceedingly vulgar young woman.”

“Vulgar? Rosalind? But of course. … Only that doesn’t affect Nan. …”

… Besides, why should Pamela go, or Neville, rather than I? A girl’s mother is obviously the right person. I may not be of much use to my children in these days, but at least I hope I can save them from themselves.”

“It takes a clever parent to do that, Emily,” said Grandmama, who doubtless knew.

“But, mother, what would you have me do? Sit with my hands before me while my daughter lives in sin? What’s your plan?”

And he would tell her how best to deal with Nan when she got to her. Nan’s was the sort of case that Mr. Cradock really did understand. Any situation between the sexes—he was all over it.

Psychoanalysts adored sex; they made an idol of it.

They communed with it, as devotees with their God. They couldn’t really enjoy, with their whole minds, anything else, Mrs. Hilary sometimes vaguely felt. But as, like the gods of the other devotees, it was to them immanent, everywhere and in everything;

They were equally uncivil, though. They pulled both windows up to the top. The two English ladies promptly pulled them down halfway.

English ladies are the only beings in the world who like open windows in winter.

English lower-class women do not, nor do English gentlemen. If you want to keep warm while travelling (to frowst, as the open air school calls it) do not get in with well-bred Englishwomen.

Mrs. Hilary burst into tears. But her tears had never yet quenched Nan’s flames. Nan made her lie down and gave her sal volatile.

Sal volatile eases the head and nervous system and composes the manners, but no more than tears does it quench flames.

The day that followed was strange, and does not sound likely, but life often does not. Nan took Mrs.

As Mrs. Hilary had equal gifts at keeping it high, it was a well-matched contest. When she left the Forum for a tea shop, both were tired out.

The Forum is tiring; emotion is tiring; tears are tiring; quarrelling is tiring; travelling through to Rome is tiring; all five together are annihilating.

Mrs. Hilary was cold and bitter now, not hysterical. Nan, who was living a bad life, and was also tiresomely exactly informed about the differences between the Forum in ’99 and the Forum today (a subject on which Mrs.

Strange moment: and it could not last.

The crying child wants its mother; the mother wants to comfort the crying child. A good bridge, but one inadequate for the strain of daily traffic.

The child, having dried its tears, watches the bridge break again, and thinks it a pity but inevitable. The mother, less philosophic, may cry in her turn, thinking perhaps that the bridge may be built this time in that way;

The mother, less philosophic, may cry in her turn, thinking perhaps that the bridge may be built this time in that way; but, the child having the colder heart, it seldom is.

There remain the moments, impotent but indestructible.

Kay had spoken. It was the careless, authentic voice of youth speaking to youth.

It was a trumpet blast making a breach in the walls against which the batteries of middle age had thundered in vain.

Gerda told herself that she must look further into this, think it over again, talk it over with other people of the age to know what was right.