The space between the two ends was filled by younger creatures. It was spring with them; their leaflets were yet green and unfallen; all that fell from them was poetry, pathetic in its sadness, bitter in its irony, free of metrical or indeed of any other restraints, and mainly either about how unpleasant had been the trenches in which they had spent the years of the great war and those persons over military age who had not been called upon to enter them, or about freedom; free love, free thought and a free world. Yes, both these subjects sound a little old-fashioned, but the Red House was concerned with these elemental changeless things. And some of them also wrote fiction, quiet, grey, a little tired, about unhappy persons to whom nothing was very glad or very sad, and certainly neither right nor wrong, but only rough or smooth of surface, bright or dark of hue, sweet or bitter of taste or smell. Most of those in the room belonged to a Freudian circle at their club, and all were anti-Christian, except an Irish Roman Catholic, who had taken an active part in the Easter uprising of 1916, since when he had been living in exile; Aunt Phyllis, who believed in no churches but in the Love of God; and of course, Mr. Digby. All these people, though they did not always get on very well together, were linked by a common aim in life, and by common hatreds.
But, in spite of hate, the Red House lodgers were a happy set of revolutionaries. Real revolutionaries; having their leaflets printed by secret presses; members of societies which exchanged confidential letters with the more eminent Russians, such as Litvinoff and Trotzky, collected for future publication secret circulars, private strikebreaking orders, and other obiter dicta of a rash government, and believed themselves to be working to establish the Soviet government over Europe. They had been angry all this summer because the Glasgow conference of the I.L.P. had broken with the Third International. They spoke with acerbity of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Snowden. But now, in August, they had little acerbity to spare for anything but the government’s conduct of Irish affairs.
VII
But, though these were Gerda’s own people, the circle in which she felt at home, she looked forward every night to the morning, when there would be the office again, and Barry.
Sometimes Barry took her out to dinner and a theatre. They went to the Beggar’s Opera, The Grain of Mustard Seed, Mary Rose (which they found sentimental), and to the Beggar’s Opera again Gerda had her own ideas, very definite and critical, about dramatic merit. Barry enjoyed discussing the plays with her, listening to her clear little silver voice pronouncing judgment. Gerda might be forever mediocre in any form of artistic expression, but she was an artist, with the artist’s love of merit and scorn of the second-rate.
They went to Mary Rose with some girl cousins of Barry’s, two jolly girls from Girton. Against their undiscriminating enthusiasm, Gerda and her fastidious distaste stood out sharp and clear, like some delicate etching among flamboyant pictures. That fastidiousness she had from both her parents, with something of her own added.
Barry went home with her. He wondered how her fastidiousness stood the grimy house in Magpie Alley and its ramshackle habit of life, after the distinctions and beauty of Windover, but he thought it was probably very good for her, part of the experience which should mould the citizen. Gerda shrank from no experience. At the corner of Bouverie Street they met a painted girl out for hire, strayed for some reason into this unpropitious locality. For the moment Gerda had fallen behind and Barry seemed alone. The girl stopped in his path, looked up in his face enquiringly, and he pushed his way, not urgently, past her. The next moment Gerda’s hand caught his arm.
“Stop, Barry, stop.”
“Stop? What for?”
“The woman. Didn’t you see?”
“My dear child, I can’t do anything for her.”
Like the others of her generation, Gerda was interested in persons of that profession; he knew that already; only they saw them through a distorting mist.
“We can find out where she works, what wages she gets, why she’s on the streets. She’s probably working for sweated wages somewhere. We ought to find out.”
“We can’t find out about every woman of that kind we meet. The thing is to attack the general principle behind the thing, not each individual case. … Besides, it would be so frightfully impertinent of us. How would you like it if someone stopped you in the street and asked you where you worked and whether you were sweated or not, and why you were out so late?”
“I shouldn’t mind, if they wanted to know for a good reason. One ought to find out how things are, what people’s conditions are.”
It was what Barry too believed and practised, but he could only say “It’s the wrong way round. You’ve got to work from the centre to the circumference. … And don’t fall into the sentimental mistake of thinking that all prostitution comes from sweated labour. A great deal does, of course, but a great deal because it seems to some women an easy and attractive way of earning a living. … Oh, hammer away at sweated labour for all you’re worth, of course, for that reason and every other; but you won’t stop prostitution till you stop the demand for it. That’s the poisonous root of the thing. So long as the demand goes on, you’ll get the supply, whatever economic conditions may be.”
Gerda fell silent, pondering on the strange tastes of those who desired
