V
A clever, strange, charming child Barry found her, old and young beyond her twenty years. Her wide-set blue eyes seemed to see horizons, and too often to be blind to foregrounds. She had a slow, deliberating habit of work, and of some things was astonishingly ignorant, with the ignorance of those who, when at school, have worked at what they preferred and quietly disregarded the rest. If he let her compose a letter, its wording would be quaint. Her prose was, in fact, worse than her verse, and that was saying a good deal. But she was thorough, never slipshod. Her brain ground slowly, but it ground exceeding small; there were no blurred edges to her apprehension of facts; either she didn’t know a thing or she did, and that sharp and clear distinction is none too common. She would file and index papers with precision, and find them again, slow and sure, when they were required. Added to these secretarial gifts, such as they were, she had vision; she saw always the dream through or in spite of the business; she was like Barry himself in that. She was a good companion, too, though she had no wit and not very much humour, and none of Nan’s gifts of keen verbal brilliance, frequent ribaldry and quick response; she would digest an idea slowly, and did not make jokes; her clear mind had the quality of a crystal rather than of a flashing diamond. The rising generation; the woman citizen of tomorrow: what did not rest on her, and what might she not do and be? Nan, on the other hand, was the woman citizen of today. And Nan did not bother to use her vote because she found all the parties and all the candidates about equally absurd. Barry had argued with Nan about that, but made no impression on her cynical indifference; she had met him with levity. To Gerda there was a wrong and a right in politics, instead of only a lot of wrongs; touching young faith, Nan called it, but Barry, who shared it, found it cheering.
This pretty little white pixyish person, with her yellow hair cut straight across her forehead and waving round her neck like the curled, shining petals of a celandine, with her straight-thinking mind and her queer, secret, mystic thoughts—she was the woman of the future, a citizen and a mother of citizens. She and the other girls and boys were out to build the new heaven and the new earth, and their children would carry it on. This responsibility of Gerda’s invested her with a special interest in the eyes of Barry, who lived and worked for the future, and who, when he saw an infant mewling and puking in a pram, was apt to think “The hope for the world,” and smile at it encouragingly, overlooking its present foolishness of aspect and habit. If ever he had children … if Nan would marry him … but Nan would always lightly slide away when he got near her. … He could see her now, with the cool, amused smile tilting her lips, always sliding away, eluding him. … Nan, like a wild animal for grace, brilliant like blown fire, cool like the wind, stabbing herself and him with her keen wit. …
Gerda, looking up from her typewriter to say “How do you spell comparatively?” saw his face in its momentary bitterness as he frowned, pen in hand, out of the window. He was waiting to sign the letters before he went out to a committee meeting, and she thought she was annoying him by her slowness. She spelt comparatively anyhow, and with the wholehearted wrongness to which she and the typewriter, both bad spellers, often attained in conjunction, hastily finished and laid the letters before him. Called back to work and actuality, Barry was again cheerful and kind, and he smilingly corrected comparatively.
“You might ask me,” he suggested, “instead of experimenting, when I do happen to be at hand. Otherwise a dictionary, or Miss Pinner in the next room … ?”
Gerda was happy, now that the shadow was off his face. Raillery and rebuke she did not mind; only the shadow, which fell coldly on her heart too.
He left the office then for the day, as he often did, but it was warm and alive with his presence, and she was doing his work, and she would see him again in the morning.
VI
Gerda went home only for weekends now; it was too slow a journey to make every morning and evening. She stayed during the week at a hotel called the Red House, in Magpie Alley, off Bouverie Street. It was a hotel kept by revolutionary souls exclusively for revolutionary souls. Gerda, who had every right there, had gained admittance through friends of hers who lodged there. Every evening at six o’clock she went back through the rain, as she did this evening, and changed her wet clothes and sat down to dinner, a meal which all the revolutionary souls ate together so that it was sacramental, a breaking of common bread in token of a common faith.
They were a friendly party. At one end of the table Aunt Phyllis presided. Aunt Phyllis, who was really the aunt of only one young man, kept this Red House. She was a fiery little revolutionary in the late forties, small, and thin and darting, full of faith and fire. She was on the staff of the British Bolshevist, and for the rest, wrote leaflets, which showered from her as from trees in autumn gales. So did the Rev. Anselm Digby. Mr. Digby had also the platform habit, he would go round the country denouncing and inciting to revolution in the name of Christ
