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His humour, his charm, his languor, and his good sense, had rendered him sacrosanct to all generations and to all parties; of him alone among statesmen and politicians, perhaps, could that be said. Perhaps, because he seemed to have touched life on every side, and yet never seemed to have touched life, the common life, at all, by virtue of his proverbial detachment,
In his exquisitely courteous way, he would annihilate alike the optimism and the myopia of his correspondent. Courteous always, and civilised, he left his competitors dead.
upstairs, Mother was with Father and the problem of her future lay heavy upon her sons and daughters. Of course, she would not question the wisdom of any arrangements they might choose to make. Mother had no will of her own; all her life long, gracious and gentle, she had been wholly submissive – an appendage. It was assumed that she had not enough brain to be self-assertive. ‘Thank goodness,’ Herbert sometimes remarked, ‘Mother is not one of those clever women.’ That she might have ideas which she kept to herself never entered into their estimate. They anticipated no trouble with their
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Somehow, they underestimate her.
What a queer thing appearance was, and how unfair. It dictated the terms of people’s estimate throughout one’s whole life. If one looked insignificant, one was set down as insignificant;
All these old people, thought Edith, disposing of a still older person!
and whenever Lady Slane came into the room everybody stopped talking, and stood up, and somebody was sure to go forward and lead her gently to a chair. They treated her rather as though she had had an accident, or had gone temporarily off her head. Yet Edith was sure her mother did not want to be led to chairs, or to be kissed so reverently and mutely, or to be asked if she was sure she wouldn’t rather have dinner in her room.
Besides, I have considered the eyes of the world for so long that I think it is time I had a little holiday from them. If one is not to please oneself in old age, when is one to please oneself? There is so little time left!’
I want no one about me except those who are nearer to their death than to their birth.’
Given her life, this sounds lovely.
He would have been amused by her emancipation from Carrie. He had never liked Carrie; she doubted whether he had ever much liked any of his children. He never criticised anybody – that was one of his characteristics – but Lady Slane knew him well enough (although in a sense she did not know him at all) to know when he approved of a person and when he did not. His commendations were always measured; but, conversely, when withheld, their absence meant a great deal.
successfully clasping her umbrella, her bag, and her ticket inside her glove,
The author's repeat of the ticket in the glove is charming.
Simplify life as one might, one could not wholly escape its enormous complication.
I find that as one grows older one relies more and more on the society of one’s contemporaries and shrinks from the society of the young. They are so tiring. So unsettling. I can scarcely, nowadays, endure the company of anybody under seventy. Young people compel one to look forward on a life full of effort. Old people permit one to look backward on a life whose effort is over and done with. That is reposeful. Repose, Lady Slane, is one of the most important things in life, yet how few people achieve it? How few people, indeed, desire it? The old have it imposed upon them. Either they are
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I suddenly think I may be an old lady in a middle-aged woman's body. And this may be a wonderful thing.
It is terrible to be twenty, Lady Slane. It is as bad as being faced with riding over the Grand National course. One knows one will almost certainly fall into the Brook of Competition, and break one’s leg over the Hedge of Disappointment, and stumble over the Wire of Intrigue, and quite certainly come to grief over the Obstacle of Love. When one is old, one can throw oneself down as a rider on the evening after the race, and think, Well, I shall never have to ride that course again.’
Any delicacy of speech between people so near to death, is surely absurd? But people do not willingly speak in plain English of death, however fixedly its imminence may weigh on their hearts;
Carrie and her relations found great reassurance in assertion and re-assertion. Say a thing often enough, and it becomes true; by hammering in sufficient stakes of similar pattern they erected a stockade between themselves and the wild dangers of life.
Courtesy ceased to be blankly artificial, when prompted by real esteem; it became, simply, one of the decent, veiling graces; a formula by which a profounder feeling might be conveyed. They were too old, all three of them, to feel keenly; to compete and circumvent and score. They must fall back upon the old measure of the minuet, in which the gentleman’s bow expressed all his appreciative gallantry towards women, and the lady’s fan raised a breeze insufficient to flutter her hair. That was old age, when people knew everything so well that they could no longer afford to express it save in
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feel nothing but impatience with the people who pretend that the world is other than it is. The world, Lady Slane, is pitiably horrible. It is horrible because it is based upon competitive struggle – and really one does not know whether to call the basis of that struggle a convention or a necessity.
No good in thinking of yesterday or to-morrow. Yesterday is gone, and to-morrow problematical. Even to-day is precarious enough, God knows.
The whole tragic system seemed to be based upon an extraordinary convention, as incomprehensible as the theory of money, which (so she had been told) bore no relation to the actual supply of gold. It was chance which had made men turn gold into their symbol, rather than stones; it was chance which had made men turn strife into their principle, rather than amity. That the planet might have got on better with stones and amity – a simple solution – had apparently never occurred to its inhabitants.
Carrie with her committees and her harsh managing voice, interfering with people who did not want to be interfered with, all for the love of interference,
I would probably dislike her the most.
She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, and at last become a landscape instead of separate fields or separate years and days, so that it became a unity and she could see the whole view,
was, rather, the last, supreme luxury; a luxury she had waited all her life to indulge. There was just time, in this reprieve before death, to indulge herself to the full. She had, after all, nothing else to do. For the first time in her life – no, for the first time since her marriage – she had nothing else to do. She could lie back against death and examine life.
This sense of being an older woman sounds lovely, tbh. And this image of laying against death, like a cradling chair or even an embracing friend.... I would want to feel this way.
Indeed, these weeks before the wedding were dedicated wholly to the rites of a mysterious feminism. Never, Deborah thought, had she been surrounded by so many women. Matriarchy ruled. Men might have dwindled into insignificance on the planet.
She supposed that she was not in love with Henry, but, even had she been in love with him, she could see therein no reason for foregoing the whole of her own separate existence. Henry was in love with her, but no one proposed that he should forego his.
It would not do, in such a world of assumptions, to assume that she had equal rights with Henry. For such privileges marriage was not ordained.
Then, indeed, she felt trapped and wild. She knew very well what he meant. She hated him for his Jovian detachment and superiority, for his fond but nevertheless smug assumptions, for his easy kindliness, and most of all for the impossibility of blaming him. He was not to blame. He had only taken for granted the things he was entitled to take for granted, thereby ranging himself with the women and entering into the general conspiracy to defraud her of her chosen life.
He had taken the greatest possible care of her; she might say with truth that she had always led a sheltered life. (But was that what she had wanted?)
Her fragility aroused the chivalry of men, her modesty precluded the antagonism of women, her spirit awoke the respect of both.
Like when we say women want to be with him and men wanted to be him.
In this case, women wanted to be her friend and men wanted to take care of her.
She could not grudge him even the sacrifice he had imposed upon her. Yet she was not one of those women whose gladness in sacrifice is such that the sacrifice ceases to be a sacrifice. Her own youthful visions had been incompatible with such a love, and in giving them up she knew that she gave up something of incomparable value. That was what she had done for Henry Holland, and Henry Holland had never known it.
Where, then, lay the truth? Henry by the compulsion of love had cheated her of her chosen life, yet had given her another life, an ample life, a life in touch with the greater world, if that took her fancy; or a life, alternatively, pressed close up against her own nursery. For a life of her own, he had substituted his life with its interests, or the lives of her children with their potentialities. He assumed that she might sink herself in either, if not in both, with equal joy. It had never occurred to him that she might prefer simply to be herself.
Because it was expected of her, the baby had always been officially her darling. But none of these things had held any truth in them. She had always been aware that the self of her children was as far removed from her as the self of Henry, or, indeed, her own.
There is a misogyny here that she acquiesced to because it was expected of her, and despite that, she loved her husband while seeing the truth of it. Maybe he acted in ways of fatherhood because he had been so taught.
There were moments when she could understand not only with her brain but with her sensibility, that Henry should crave for a life of action even as she herself craved for a life of contemplation. They were indeed two halves of one dissevered world.
Her body had, in fact, become her companion, a constant resource and preoccupation; all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened. Yet it was, rather than otherwise, an agreeable and interesting tyranny.
I know something of the relationship to the body, though this tyranny is not a peaceful one.
Of such a quality were the tiny things, the shapely leaves, of her present life: redeemed from insignificance by their juxtaposition with a luminous eternity.
Youth had no beauty like the beauty of an old face; the face of youth was an unwritten page. Youth could never sit as still as that, in absolute repose, as though all haste, all movement, were over and done with, and nothing left but waiting and acquiescence. He was glad that he had never seen her in the middle years, so that he might keep untarnished his memory of her when she was young, lively, and full of fire, completing it with this present vision of her, having arrived at the other end of the story. The same woman, but he himself in ignorance of what had happened in between.
Someone by a look had discovered the way into a chamber she kept hidden even from herself. He had committed the supreme audacity of looking into her soul.
But you mustn’t blame my husband.’ ‘I don’t. According to his lights, he gave you all you could desire. He merely killed you, that’s all. Men do kill women. Most women enjoy being killed; so I am told. Being a woman, I daresay that even you took a certain pleasure in the process.
All her life long, she was thinking, people had conferred benefits on her, benefits she did not covet. Henry by making her first into a Vicereine, and then into a political hostess, and now FitzGeorge by heaping her quiet life with gold and treasures.
No one ever really asks her. Even when Henry proposed marriage, he didn't wait for her to answer. He assumed a positive response by the look on her face.
‘Give them away,’ said Lady Slane wearily, not energetically. ‘Let the nation have them. Let the hospitals have the money. As Mr FitzGeorge first intended. Let me be rid of it all. Only let me be rid of
It is not what the book is about, but I wish the items had gone to the museums of the original countries and not the colonize (England).
he knew that standards must be altered to fit the circumstances, and that it was absurd, although usual, to expect the circumstances to adjust themselves to ready-made standards. Lady Slane thus, in his opinion, deserved as much sympathy in the frustration of her life as an athlete stricken with paralysis.
Her friendship with FitzGeorge had been strange and lovely – the last strange and lovely thing that was ever likely to happen to her. She desired nothing more.
‘Ah, Genoux,’ she said, ‘it was good to be young.’ That depends, said Genoux sagely, on what sort of a youth one had. It was not good to be the twelfth child of poor parents,
Genoux as the worker and Lady Slane never conscious of any real class system beyond an awareness of servants.
The experiences of her great-grandchildren seemed shallow indeed by comparison; her own experiences seemed thin and over-civilised, lacking any contact with reality. She, who had brooded in secret over an unfulfilled vocation, had never been obliged to tear a distraught sister away from a newly-dug grave. Watching Genoux, who stood there imperturbably relating these trials out of the past, she wondered which wounds went the deeper: the jagged wounds of reality, or the profound invisible bruises of the imagination?
Common sense rarely laid its fingers on Lady Slane, these days.
Astronomical truths, enlarging though they may be to the imagination, contain little assistance for immediate problems.
In the long run, with the strange bedlam always in process of sorting itself out, as the present-day became history, the poets and the prophets counted for more than the conquerors.
Genoux, bringing in the tray an hour later, announcing ‘Miladi est servie,’ altered her formula to a sudden, ‘Mon Dieu, mais qu’est-ce que c’est ça – Miladi est morte.’
Maybe she saw some of her kindred spirit in the youth and hope and Deborah, and it exhausted her but also allowed her some release. This seems a fitting death.
