PRINCIPLES
1
Through the late September and October days Gerda would lie on a wicker couch in the conservatory at Windover, her sprained leg up, her broken wrist on a splint, her mending head on a soft pillow, and eat pears. Grapes too, apples, figs, chocolates of course—but particularly pears. She also wrote verse, and letters to Barry, and drew in pen and ink, and read Sir Leo Chiozza Money's "Triumph of Nationalisation" and Mrs. Snowden on Bolshevik Russia, and "Lady Adela," and "Côterie," and listened while Neville read Mr. W.H. Mallock's "Memoirs" and Disraeli's "Life." Her grandmother (Rodney's mother) sent her "The Diary of Opal Whiteley," but so terrible did she find it that it caused a relapse, and Neville had to remove it. She occasionally struggled in vain with a modern novel, which she usually renounced in perplexity after three chapters or so. Her taste did not lie in this direction.
"I can't understand what they're all about," she said to Neville. "Poetry means something. It's about something real, something that really is so. So are books like this—" she indicated "The Triumph of Nationalisation." "But most novels are so queer. They're about people, but not people as they are. They're not interesting."
"Not as a rule, certainly. Occasionally one gets an idea out of one of them, or a laugh, or a thrill. Now and then they express life, or reality, or beauty, in some terms or other—but not as a rule."
Gerda was different from Kay, who devoured thrillers, shockers, and ingenious crime and mystery stories with avidity. She did not believe that life was really much like that, and Kay's assertion that if it weren't it ought to be, she rightly regarded as pragmatical. Neither did she share Kay's more fundamental taste for the Elizabethans, Carolines and Augustans. She and Kay met (as regards literature) only on economics, politics, and modern verse. Gerda's mind was artistic rather than literary, and she felt no wide or acute interest in human beings, their actions, passions, foibles, and desires.
So, surrounded by books from the Times library, and by nearly all the weekly and monthly reviews (the Bendishes, like many others, felt, with whatever regret, that they had to see all of these), Gerda for the most part, when alone, lay and dreamed dreams and ate pears.
2
Barry came down for week-ends. He and Gerda had declared their affections towards one another even at the Looe infirmary, where Gerda had been conveyed from the scene of accident. It had been no moment then for anything more definite than statements of reciprocal emotion, which are always cheering in sickness. But when Gerda was better, well enough, in fact, to lie in the Windover conservatory, Barry came down from town and said, "When shall we get married?"
Then Gerda, who had had as yet no time or mind-energy to reflect on the probable, or rather certain, width of the gulf between the sociological theories of herself and Barry, opened her blue eyes wide and said "Married?"
"Well, isn't that the idea? You can't jilt me now, you know; matters have gone too far."
"But, Barry, I thought you knew. I don't hold with marriage."
Barry threw back his head and laughed, because she looked so innocent and so serious and young as she lay there among the pears and bandages.
"All right, darling. You've not needed to hold with it up till now. But now you'd better catch on to it as quickly as you can, and hold it tight, because it's what's going to happen."
Gerda moved her bandaged head in denial.
"Oh, no, Barry. I can't.... I thought you knew. Haven't we ever talked about marriage before?"
"Oh, probably. Yes, I think I've heard you and Kay both on the subject. You don't hold with legal ties in what should be purely a matter of emotional impulse, I know. But crowds of people talk like that and then get married. I've no doubt Kay will too, when his time comes."
"Kay won't. He thinks marriage quite wrong. And so do I."
Barry, who had stopped laughing, settled himself to talk it out.
"Why wrong, Gerda? Superfluous, if you like; irrelevant, if you like; but why wrong?"
"Because it's a fetter on what shouldn't be fettered. Love might stop. Then it would be ugly."
"Oh very. One has to take that risk, like other risks. And love is really more likely to stop, as I see it, if there's no contract in the eyes of the world, if the two people know each can walk away from the other, and is expected to, directly they quarrel or feel a little bored. The contract, the legalisation—absurd and irrelevant as all legal things are to anything that matters—the contract, because we're such tradition-bound creatures, does give a sort of illusion of inevitability, which is settling, so that it doesn't occur to the people to fly apart at the first strain. They go through with it instead, and in nine cases out of ten come out on the other side. In the tenth case they just have either to make the best of it or to make a break.... Of course people always can throw up the sponge, even married people, if things are insupportable. The door isn't locked. But there's no point, I think, in having it swinging wide open."
"I think it should be open," Gerda said. "I think people should be absolutely free.... Take you and me. Suppose you got tired of me, or liked someone else better, I think you ought to be able to leave me without any fuss."
That was characteristic of both of them, that they could take their own case theoretically without becoming personal, without lovers' protestations to confuse the general issue.
"Well," Barry said, "I don't think I ought. I think it should be made as difficult for me as possible. Because of the children. There are usually children, of course. If I left you, I should have to leave them too. Then they'd have no father. Or, if it were you that went, they'd have no mother. Either way it's a pity, normally. Also, even if we stayed together always and weren't married, they'd have no legal name. Children often miss that, later on. Children of the school age are the most conventional, hide-bound creatures. They'd feel ashamed before their schoolfellows."
"I suppose they'd have my name legally, wouldn't they?"
"I suppose so. But they might prefer mine. The other boys and girls would have their fathers', you see."
"Not all of them. I know several people who don't hold with marriage either; there'd be all their children. And anyhow it's not a question of what the children would prefer while they were at school. It's what's best for them. And anything would be better than to see their parents hating each other and still having to live together."
"Yes. Anything would be better than that. Except that it would be a useful and awful warning to them. But the point is, most married people don't hate each other. They develop a kind of tolerating, companionable affection, after the first excitement called being in love is past—so far as it does pass. That's mostly good enough to live on; that and common interests and so forth. It's the stuff of ordinary life; the emotional excitement is the hors d'œuvre. It would be greedy to want to keep passing on from one hors d'œuvre 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 people do, Barry. Free unions often last for years and years—sometimes forever. Only you wouldn't feel tied. You'd be sure you were only living together because you both liked to, not because you had to."
"I should feel I had to, however free it was. So you wouldn't have that consolation about me. I might be sick of you, and pining for someone else, but still I should stay."
"Why, Barry?"
"Because I believe in permanent unions, as a general principle. They're more civilised. It's unusual, uncivic, dotting about from one mate to another, leaving your young and forgetting all about them and having new ones. Irresponsible, I call it. Living only for a good time. It's not the way to be good citizens, as I see it, nor to bring up good citizens.... Oh, I know that the whole question of sex relationships is horribly complicated, and can't be settled with a phrase or a dogma. It's been for centuries so wrapped in cant and humbug and expediencies and camouflage; I don't profess to be able to pierce through all that, or to so much as begin to think it out clearly. The only thing I can fall back on as a certainty is the children question. A confused and impermanent family life must be a bad background for the young. They want all they can get of both their parents, in the way of education and training and love."
"Family life is such a hopeless muddle, anyhow."
"A muddle, yes. Hopeless, no. Look at your own. Your father and mother have always been friends with each other and with you. They brought you up with definite ideas about what they wanted you to become—fairly well thought-out and consistent ideas, I suppose. I don't say they could do much—parents never can—but something soaks in."
"Usually something silly and bad."
"Often, yes. Anyhow a queer kind of mixed brew. But at least the parents have their chance. It's what they're there for; they've got to do all they know, while the children are young, to influence them towards what they personally believe, however mistakenly, to be the finest points of view. Of course lots of it is, as you say, silly and bad, because people are largely silly and bad. But no parent can be absolved from doing his or her best."
Barry was walking round the conservatory, eager and full of faith and hope and fire, talking rapidly, the educational enthusiast, the ardent citizen, the social being, the institutionalist, all over. He was all these things; he was rooted and grounded in citizenship, in social ethics. He stopped by the couch and stood looking down at Gerda among her fruit, his hands in his pockets, his eyes bright and lit.
"All the same, darling, I shall never want to fetter you. If you ever want to leave me, I shan't come after you. The legal tie shan't stand in your way. And to me it would make no difference; I shouldn't leave you in any case, married or not. So I don't see how or why you score in doing without the contract."
"It's the idea of the thing, partly. I don't want to wear a wedding ring and be Mrs. Briscoe. I want to be Gerda Bendish, living with Barry Briscoe because we like to.... I expect, Barry, in my case it would be for always, because, at present, I can't imagine stopping caring more for you than for anything else. But that doesn't affect the principle of the thing. It would be wrong for me to marry you. One oughtn't to give up one's principles just because it seems all right in a particular case. It would be cheap and shoddy and cowardly."
"Exactly," said Barry, "what I feel. I can't give up my principle either, you know. I've had mine longer than you've had yours."
"I've had mine since I was about fifteen."
"Five years. Well, I've had mine for twenty. Ever since I first began to think anything out, that is."
"People of your age," said Gerda, "people over thirty, I mean, often think like that about marriage. I've noticed it. So has Kay."
"Observant infants. Well, there we stand, then. One of us has got either to change his principles—her principles, I mean—or to be false to them. Or else, apparently, there can be nothing doing between you and me. That's the position, isn't it?"
Gerda nodded, her mouth full of apple.
"It's very awkward," Barry continued, "my having fallen in love with you. I had not taken your probable views on sociology into account. I knew that, though we differed in spelling and punctuation, we were agreed (approximately) on politics, economics, and taste in amusements, and I thought that was enough. I forgot that divergent views on matrimony were of practical importance. It would have mattered less if I had discovered that you were a militarist and imperialist and quoted Marx at me."
"I did tell you, Barry. I really did. I never hid it. And I never supposed that you'd want to marry me."
"That was rather stupid of you. I'm so obviously a marrying man.... Now, darling, will you think the whole thing out from the beginning, after I've gone? Be first-hand; don't take over theories from other people, and don't be sentimental about it. Thrash the whole subject out with yourself and with other people—with your own friends, and with your family too. They're a modern, broad-minded set, your people, after all; they won't look at the thing conventionally; they'll talk sense; they won't fob you off with stock phrases, or talk about the sanctity of the home. They're not institutionalists. Only be fair about it; weigh all the pros and cons, and judge honestly, and for heaven's sake don't look at the thing romantically, or go off on theories because they sound large and subversive. Think of practical points, as well as of ultimate principles. Both, to my mind, are on the same side. I'm not asking you to sacrifice right for expediency, or expediency for right. I don't say 'Be sensible,' or 'Be idealistic.' We've got to be both."
"Barry, I've thought and talked about it so often and so long. You don't know how much we do talk about that sort of thing, at the club and everywhere and Kay and I. I could never change my mind."
"What a hopeless admission! We ought to be ready to change our minds at any moment; they should be as changeable as pound notes."
"What about yours, then, darling?"
"I'm always ready to change mine. I shall think the subject out too, and if I do change I shall tell you at once."
"Barry." Gerda's face was grave; her forehead was corrugated. "Suppose we neither of us ever change? Suppose we both go on thinking as we do now for always? What then?"
He smoothed the knitted forehead with his fingers.
"Then one of us will have to be a traitor to his or her principles. A pity, but sometimes necessary in this complicated world. Or, if we can neither of us bring ourselves down to that, I suppose eventually we shall each perpetrate with someone else the kind of union we personally prefer."
They parted on that. The thing had not grown serious yet; they could still joke about it.
3
Though Gerda said "What's the use of my talking about it to people when I've made up my mind?" and though she had not the habit of talking for conversation's sake, she did obediently open the subject with her parents, in order to assure herself beyond a doubt what they felt about it. But she knew already that their opinions were what you might expect of parents, even of broad-minded, advanced parents, who rightly believed themselves not addicted to an undiscriminating acceptance of the standards and decisions of a usually mistaken world. But Barry was wrong in saying they weren't institutionalists; they were. Parents are.
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 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. 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.