Children of No Man's Land

by G. B. Stern

Cliffe hummed:

“Now that you’re married we wish you joy

First a girl and then a boy—

Seven years after comes son and daughter—

Come, young couple, and kiss one another.”

He repeated the last line softly ... and a funny little smile pranced at the corners of his mouth. “Is the game old-fashioned, Deb, for present company? Here you are, hopelessly compromised—entirely at my mercy——”

She shook her head. “Much too old-fashioned!” but was nevertheless not quite sure how far the jocund spirit held sway.... There was an element of primitive commonplace in man which baffled all her utmost powers of histrionics—and she knew it; expecting its most unexpected appearances. When the invariable happened, she had hitherto been able to cope with it in all its forms so triumphantly as to surprise even herself—using alternatively the weapons of pure wonderment, appeal to good comradeship, elfin irony, pathos of reminiscence.... So far, she had had better luck than she deserved. But each averted peril left her a little wearier of wayside incident, a little more restless for the good thing which brought rest.

And now—Cliffe. Or was it merely her fancy that his eyes threatened? Even Cliffe, whose apparent happy sexlessness had been a subject of such absorbing debate between herself and Antonia and Zoe. Cliffe—even Cliffe—God’s understudy, who brought lovers together for his whimsy and parted them for caprice; and whom no girl of them had caught in lover mood himself—Even Cliffe—but he was a stranger to her now, as they all were, the friendliest, when this thing touched to life some fundamental antagonism.

“Behind the times, am I? Well, try the new way, then. Advanced theory, and all that.... We don’t love each other, but let us experiment in life’s stuff. We may ... please each other without loving. Why not? The Youth of to-day refuses to squander itself in unsubstantial dreamings. Here am I—here are you—brilliant young intellectuals. Eugenics—and all that! Likewise, we are quite crudely frank about our respective pasts; and render it fully clear that we have no intention of making claims on sentiment or responsibility beyond the present hour. And I am cynically epigrammatic about marriage, and you are fairly amusing about chastity. And then, let me see—yes—then we become serious and rather subtle; introspective psychology—passion and its effect on the individual temperament.—God! deliver me from this modern fashion of erotic promiscuity masquerading as Repertory Ethics! Give me instead the old-fashioned blackguard and the out-of-date village maiden—and they’ll play me a decenter scene than ever achieved by all this twentieth-century tangle-talk. Deb—I know a man and a girl who consented to humour the State and get married for no better reason than because they had saved up the price of a divorce, to put in the bank—a sort of emergency exit. And they asked me to admire their hideous sanity. ‘We’ll take each other for better,’ the man sniggered—‘but why insist that two human beings should take each other for worse?’ smug fool—as though his beastly Marriage on a Reasonable Basis were worth while, anticipating dreariness and weariness and satiety. To go in for it gallantly, with hope and a ray of idealism—that’s marriage on a reasonable basis. But this fellow asked me to admire him....”

“Now, I wonder what you said to him to dispel that illusion?” Deb was quite serene and comfortable again now that Cliffe was making speeches. He could be reckoned to go on for hours, his out-thrust chin propped on his clenched fists. She suspected he might be equally wrathful and eloquent had he chosen to hold forth in defence instead of in condemnation of his subject. But still....