Dangerous Ages Part 23

Rodney was more opinionated than Neville, on this subject as on most others. He said, crossly, "It's a beastly habit, unlegitimatised union.

When I say beastly, I mean beastly; nothing derogatory, but merely like the beasts--the other beasts, that is."

Gerda said "Well, that's not really an argument against it. In that sense it's beastly when we sleep out instead of in bed, or do lots of other quite nice things. The way men and women do things isn't necessarily the best way," and there Rodney had to agree with her. He fell back on "It's unbusinesslike. Suppose you have children?" and Gerda, who had supposed all that with Barry, sighed. Rodney said a lot more, but it made little impression on her, beyond corroborating her views on the matrimonial theories of middle-aged people.

Neville made rather more. To Neville Gerda said "How can I go back on everything I've always said and thought about it, and go and get married?

It would be so _reactionary_."

Neville, who had a headache and was irritable, said "It's the other thing that's reactionary. It existed long before the marriage tie did. That's what I don't understand about all you children who pride yourselves on being advanced. If you frankly take your stand on going back to nature, on _being_ reactionary--well, it is, anyhow, a point of view, and has its own merits. 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 antimaca.s.sars."

"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 antimaca.s.sars? Think it out. How _can_ a legal contract be like a doyley on the back of a chair? Where is the resemblance? It sounds like a riddle, only there's no answer. No, you know you've got no answer.

That kind of remark is sheer sentimentality and muddle-headedness. Why are people in their twenties so often sentimental? That's another riddle."

"That's what Nan says. She told me once that she used to be sentimental when she was twenty. Was she?"

"More than she is now, anyhow."

Neville's voice was a little curt. She was not happy about Nan, who had just gone to Rome for the winter.

"Well," Gerda said, "anyhow I'm not sentimental about not meaning to marry. I've thought about it for years, and I know."

"Thought about it! Much you know about it." Neville, tired and cross from over-work, was, unlike herself, playing the traditional conventional mother. "Have you thought how it will affect your children, for instance?"

Those perpetual, tiresome children. Gerda was sick of them.

"Oh yes, I've thought a lot about that. And I can't see it will hurt them. Barry and I talked for ever so long about the children. So did father."

So did Neville.

"Of course I know," she said, "that you and Kay would be only too pleased if father and I had never been married, but you've no right to judge by yourself the ones you and Barry may have. They may not be nearly so odd.... And then there's your own personal position. The world's full of people who think they can insult a man's mistress."

"I don't meet people like that. The people I know don't insult other people for not being married. They think it's quite natural, and only the people's own business."

"You've moved in a small and rarefied clique so far, my dear. You'll meet the other kind of people presently; one can't avoid them, the world's so full of them."

"Do they matter?"

"Of course they matter. As mosquitoes matter, and wasps, and cars that splash mud at you in the road. You'd be constantly annoyed. Your own scullery maid would turn up her nose at you. The man that brought the milk will sneer."

"I don't think," Gerda said, after reflection, "that I'm very easily annoyed. I don't notice things, very often. I think about other things rather a lot, you see. That's why I'm slow at answering."

"Well, Barry would be annoyed, anyhow."

"Barry does lots of unpopular things. He doesn't mind what people say."

"He'd mind for you.... But Barry isn't going to do it. Barry won't have you on your terms. If you won't have him on his, he'll leave you and go and find some nicer girl."

"I can't help it, mother. I can't do what I don't approve of for that.

How could I?"

"No, darling, of course you couldn't; I apologise. But do try and see if you can't get to approve of it, or anyhow to be indifferent about it.

Such a little thing! It isn't as if Barry wanted you to become a Mormon or something.... And after all you can't accuse him of being retrograde, or Victorian, if you like to use that silly word, or lacking in ideals for social progress--can you? He belongs to nearly all your illegal political societies, doesn't he? Why, his house gets raided for leaflets from time to time. I don't think they ever find any, but they look, and that's something. You can't call Barry hide-bound or conventionally orthodox."

"No. Oh no. Not that. Or I shouldn't be caring for him. But he doesn't understand about this. And you don't, mother, nor father, nor anyone of your ages. I don't know how it is, but it is so."

"You might try your Aunt Rosalind," Neville suggested, with malice.

Gerda shuddered. "Aunt Rosalind ... she wouldn't understand at all...."

But the dreadful thought was, as Neville had intended, implanted in her that, of all her elder relatives, it was only Aunt Rosalind who, though she mightn't understand, might nevertheless agree. Aunt Rosalind on free unions... that would be terrible to have to hear. For Aunt Rosalind would hold with them not because she thought them right but because she enjoyed them--the worst of reasons. Gerda somehow felt degraded by the introduction into the discussion of Aunt Rosalind, whom she hated, whom she knew, without having been told so, that her mother and all of them hated. It dragged it down, made it vulgar.

Gerda lay back in silence, the springs of argument and talk dried in her.

She wanted Kay.

It was no use; they couldn't meet. Neville could not get away from her traditions, nor Gerda from hers.

Neville, to change the subject (though scarcely for the better), read her "The Autobiography of Mrs. Asquith" till tea-time.

4

They all talked about it again, and said the same things, and different things, and more things, and got no nearer one another with it all. Soon Barry and Gerda, each comprehending the full measure of the serious intent of the other, stood helpless before it, the one in half-amused exasperation, the other in obstinate determination.

"She means business, then," thought Barry. "He won't come round," thought Gerda and their love pierced and stabbed them, making Barry hasty of speech and Gerda sullen.

"The _waste_ of it," said Barry, on Sunday evening, "when I've only got one day in the week, to spend it quarrelling about marriage. I've hundreds of things to talk about and tell you--interesting things, funny things--but I never get to them, with all this arguing we have to have first."

"I don't want to argue, Barry. Let's not. We've said everything now, lots of times. There can't be any more. Tell me your things instead!"

He told her, and they were happy talking, and forgot how they thought differently on marriage. But always the difference lay there in the background, coiled up like a snake, ready to uncoil and seize them and make them quarrel and hurt one another. Always one was expecting the other at any moment to throw up the sponge and cry "Oh, have it your own way, since you won't have it mine and I love you." But neither did. Their wills stood as stiff as two rocks over against one another.

Gerda grew thinner under the strain, and healed more slowly than before.

Her fragile, injured body was a battle-ground between her will and her love, and suffered in the conflict. Barry saw that it could not go on.

They would, he said, stop talking about it; they would put it in the background and go on as if it were not there, until such time as they could agree. So they became friends again, lovers who lived in the present and looked to no future, and, since better might not be, that had to do for the time.

CHAPTER XI

THAT WHICH REMAINS

1

Through September Neville had nursed Gerda by day and worked by night.

The middle of October, just when they usually moved into town for the winter, she collapsed, had what the doctor called a nervous breakdown.