They were all right: they all fitted in with the room and with each other.
Barry said “I’ve not been idle while walking. I’ve secured a secretary. Gerda says she’s coming to work at the office for us for a bit. Now, at once.”
He had not Gerda’s knack of silence. Gerda would shut up tight over her plans and thoughts, like a little oyster. She was no babbler; she did things and never talked. But Barry’s plans brimmed up and over.
Neville said “You sudden child! And in July and August, too. … But you’ll have only a month before you join Nan in Cornwall, won’t you?”
Gerda nodded, munching a buttered scone.
Grandmama, like an old warhorse scenting the fray, thought “Is it going to be an affair? Will they fall in love? And what of Nan?” Then rebuked herself for forgetting what she really knew quite well, having been told it often, that men and girls in these days worked together and did everything together, with no thought of affairs or of falling in love. … Only these two were very attractive, the young Briscoe and the pretty child, Gerda.
Neville, who knew Gerda, and that she was certainly in love again (it happened so often with Gerda), thought “Shall I stop it? Or shall I let things take their course? Oh, I’ll let them alone. It’s only one of Gerda’s childish hero-worships, and he’ll be kind without flirting. It’ll do Gerda good to go on with this new work she’s so keen on. And she knows he cares for Nan. I shall let her go.”
Neville very nearly always let Gerda and Kay go their own way now that they were grown-up. To interfere would have been the part of the middle-aged old-fashioned mother, and for that part Neville had no liking. To be her children’s friend and good comrade, that was her role in life.
“It’s good of you to have her,” she said to Barry. “I hope you won’t be sorry. … She’s very stupid sometimes—regular Johnny Head-in-air.”
“I should be a jolly sight more use,” Kay remarked. “But I can’t come, unfortunately. She can’t spell, you know. And her punctuation is weird.”
“She’ll learn,” said Barry, cheerfully, and Gerda smiled serenely at them over her teacup.
IV
Barry in the office was quick, alert, cheerful, and businesslike, and very decided, sometimes impatient. Efficient: that was the word. He would skim the correspondence and dictate answers out of his head, walking about the room, interrupted all the time by the telephone and by people coming in to see him. Gerda’s hero-worship grew and grew; her soul swelled with it; she shut it down tight and remained calm and cool. When he joked, when he smiled his charming smile, her heart turned over within her. When he had signed the typed letters, she would sometimes put her hand for a moment where his had rested on the paper. He was stern with her sometimes, spoke sharply and impatiently, and that, in a queer way, she liked. She had felt the same pleasure at school, when the head of the school, whom she had greatly and secretly venerated, had had her up to the sixth form room and rowed her. Why? That was for psychoanalysts to discover; Gerda only knew the fact. And Barry, after he had spoken sharply to her, when he had got over his anger, would smile and be even kinder than usual, and that was the best of all.
There were other people in the office, of course; men and women, busy, efficient, coming in and out, talking, working, organising. They were kind, pleasant people. Gerda liked them, but they were shadowy.
And behind them all, and behind Barry, there was the work. The work was enormously interesting. Gerda, child of her generation and of her parents, was really a democrat, really public-spirited, outside the little private cell of her withdrawn reserves. Beauty wasn’t enough; making poetry and pictures wasn’t enough; one had to give everyone his and her chance to have beauty and poetry and pictures too. In spite of having been brought up in this creed, Gerda and Kay held to it, had not reacted from it to a selfish aristocracy, as you might think likely. Their democracy went much further than that of their parents. They had been used ardently to call themselves Bolshevists until such time as it was forced upon them that Bolshevism was not, in point of fact, a democratic system. They and some of their friends still occasionally used that label, in moments rather of after-dinner enthusiasm than of the precise thinking that is done in morning light. For, after all, even Mr. Bertrand Russell, even Mrs. Philip Snowden, might be wrong in their hurried jottings down of the results of a cursory survey of so intricate a system. And, anyhow, Bolshevism had the advantage that it had not yet been tried in this country, and no one, not even the most imaginative and clear-sighted political theorist, could forecast the precise form into which the curious British climate might mould it if it should ever adopt it. So that to believe in it was, anyhow, easier than believing in anything which had been tried (and, like all things which are tried, found wanting) such as Liberalism, Toryism, Socialism, and so forth.
But the W.E.A. was a practical body, which went in for practical adventure. Dowdy, schoolmarmish, extension-lectureish, it might be and doubtless was. But a real thing, with guts in it, really doing something; and after all, you can’t be incendiarising the political and economic constitution all your time. In your times off you can do something useful, something which shows results, and for which such an enormous amount of faith and hope is not required. Work for the Revolution—yes, of course, one did that; one studied the literature of the Internationals; one talked. … But did one help the Revolution on much, when all was said? Whereas in the W.E.A. office one really
