Rodney was and had always been charming; there could be no doubt about that, whatever else you might come to think about him. Able, too, but living on his nerves, wincing like a high-strung horse from the annoyances and disappointments of life, such as Quaker oats because the grape-nuts had come to an end, and the industrial news of the morning, which was as bad as usual and four times repeated in four quite different tones by the four daily papers which lay on the table. They took four papers not so much that there might be one for each of them as that they might have the entertainment of seeing how different the same news can be made to appear. One bond of union this family had which few families possess; they were (roughly speaking) united politically, so believed the same news to be good or bad. The chief difference in their political attitude was that Kay and Gerda joined societies and leagues, being still young enough to hold that causes were helped in this way.
“What about today?” Rodney asked Neville. “What are you going to do?”
She answered, “Tennis.” (Neville had once been a county player.) “River. Lying about in the sun.” (It should be explained that it was one of those nine days of the English summer of 1920 when this was a possible occupation.) “Anything anyone likes. … I’ve already had a good deal of day and a bathe. … Oh, Nan’s coming down this afternoon.”
She got that out of a letter. Nan was her youngest sister. They all proceeded to get and impart other things out of letters, in the way of families who are fairly united, as families go.
Gerda opened her lips to impart something, but remembered her father’s distastes and refrained. Rodney, civilised, sensitive and progressive, had no patience with his children’s unsophisticated leaning to a primitive crudeness. He told them they were young savages. So Gerda kept her news till later, when she and Neville and Kay were lying on rugs on the lawn after Neville had beaten Kay in a set of singles.
They lay and smoked and cooled, and Gerda, a cigarette stuck in one side of her mouth, a buttercup in the other, mumbled “Penelope’s baby’s come, by the way. A girl. Another surplus woman.”
Neville’s brows lazily went up.
“Penelope Jessop? What’s she doing with a baby? I didn’t know she’d got married.”
“Oh, she hasn’t, of course. … Didn’t I tell you about Penelope? She lives with Martin Annesley now.”
“Oh, I see. Marriage in the sight of heaven. That sort of thing.”
Neville was of those who find marriages in the sight of heaven uncivilised and socially reactionary, a reversion, in fact, to Nature, which bored her. Gerda and Kay rightly believed such marriages to have some advantages over those more visible to the human eye (as being more readily dissoluble when fatiguing) and many advantages over no marriages at all, which do not increase the population, so depleted by the Great War. When they spoke in this admirably civic sense, Neville was apt to say “It doesn’t want increasing. I waited twenty minutes before I could board my bus at Trafalgar Square the other day. It wants more depleting, I should say—a Great Plague or something,” a view which Kay and Gerda thought truly egotistical.
“I do hope,” said Neville, her thoughts having led her to the statement, “I do very much hope that neither of you will ever perpetrate that sort of marriage. It would be so dreadfully common of you.”
“Impossible to say,” Kay said, vaguely.
“Considering,” said Gerda, “that there are a million more women than men in this country, it stands to reason that some system of polygamy must become the usual thing in the future.”
“It’s always been the usual thing, darling. Dreadfully usual. It’s so much more amusing to be unusual in these ways.”
Neville’s voice trailed drowsily away. Polygamy. Sex. Free Love. Love in chains. The children seemed so often to be discussing these. Just as, twenty years ago, she and her friends had seemed always to be discussing the Limitations of Personality, the Ethics of Friendship, and the Nature, if any, of God. This last was to Kay and Gerda too hypothetical to be a stimulating theme. It would have sent them to sleep, as sex did Neville.
Neville, led by Free Love to a private vision, brooded cynically over savages dancing round a woodpile in primeval forests, engaged in what missionaries, journalists, and writers of fiction about our coloured brothers call “nameless orgies” (as if you would expect most orgies to answer to their names, like the stars) and she saw the steep roads of the round world running back and back and back—on or back, it made no difference, since the world was round—to this. Saw, too, a thousand stuffy homes wherein sat couples linked by a legal formula so rigid, so lasting, so indelible, that not all their tears could wash out a word of it, unless they took to themselves other mates, in which case their second state might be worse than their first. Free love—love in chains. How absurd it all was, and how tragic too. One might react back to the remaining choice—no love at all—and that was absurder and more tragic still, since man was made (among other ends) to love. Looking under her heavy lashes at her pretty young children, incredibly youthful, absurdly theoretical, fiercely clean of mind and frank of speech, their clearness as yet unblurred by the expediencies, compromise and experimental
