X
Voices and steps. Barry and a doctor, Barry and a stretcher, Barry and all kinds of help. Barry’s anxious eyes and smile. “Well? How’s she been?”
He was on his knees beside her.
“Here’s the doctor, darling. … I’m sorry I’ve been so long.”
X
Principles
I
Through the late September and October days Gerda would lie on a wicker couch in the conservatory at Windover, her sprained leg up, her broken wrist on a splint, her mending head on a soft pillow, and eat pears. Grapes too, apples, figs, chocolates of course—but particularly pears. She also wrote verse, and letters to Barry, and drew in pen and ink, and read Sir Leo Chiozza Money’s Triumph of Nationalisation and Mrs. Snowden on Bolshevik Russia, and Lady Adela, and Côterie, and listened while Neville read Mr. W. H. Mallock’s Memoirs and Disraeli’s Life. Her grandmother (Rodney’s mother) sent her The Diary of Opal Whiteley, but so terrible did she find it that it caused a relapse, and Neville had to remove it. She occasionally struggled in vain with a modern novel, which she usually renounced in perplexity after three chapters or so. Her taste did not lie in this direction.
“I can’t understand what they’re all about,” she said to Neville. “Poetry means something. It’s about something real, something that really is so. So are books like this—” she indicated The Triumph of Nationalisation. “But most novels are so queer. They’re about people, but not people as they are. They’re not interesting.”
“Not as a rule, certainly. Occasionally one gets an idea out of one of them, or a laugh, or a thrill. Now and then they express life, or reality, or beauty, in some terms or other—but not as a rule.”
Gerda was different from Kay, who devoured thrillers, shockers, and ingenious crime and mystery stories with avidity. She did not believe that life was really much like that, and Kay’s assertion that if it weren’t it ought to be, she rightly regarded as pragmatical. Neither did she share Kay’s more fundamental taste for the Elizabethans, Carolines and Augustans. She and Kay met (as regards literature) only on economics, politics, and modern verse. Gerda’s mind was artistic rather than literary, and she felt no wide or acute interest in human beings, their actions, passions, foibles, and desires.
So, surrounded by books from the Times library, and by nearly all the weekly and monthly reviews (the Bendishes, like many others, felt, with whatever regret, that they had to see all of these), Gerda for the most part, when alone, lay and dreamed dreams and ate pears.
II
Barry came down for weekends. He and Gerda had declared their affections towards one another even at the Looe infirmary, where Gerda had been conveyed from the scene of accident. It had been no moment then for anything more definite than statements of reciprocal emotion, which are always cheering in sickness. But when Gerda was better, well enough, in fact, to lie in the Windover conservatory, Barry came down from town and said, “When shall we get married?”
Then Gerda, who had had as yet no time or mind-energy to reflect on the probable, or rather certain, width of the gulf between the sociological theories of herself and Barry, opened her blue eyes wide and said “Married?”
“Well, isn’t that the idea? You can’t jilt me now, you know; matters have gone too far.”
“But, Barry, I thought you knew. I don’t hold with marriage.”
Barry threw back his head and laughed, because she looked so innocent and so serious and young as she lay there among the pears and bandages.
“All right, darling. You’ve not needed to hold with it up till now. But now you’d better catch on to it as quickly as you can, and hold it tight, because it’s what’s going to happen.”
Gerda moved her bandaged head in denial.
“Oh, no, Barry. I can’t. … I thought you knew. Haven’t we ever talked about marriage before?”
“Oh, probably. Yes, I think I’ve heard you and Kay both on the subject. You don’t hold with legal ties in what should be purely a matter of emotional impulse, I know. But crowds of people talk like that and then get married. I’ve no doubt Kay will too, when his time comes.”
“Kay won’t. He thinks marriage quite wrong. And so do I.”
Barry, who had stopped laughing, settled himself to talk it out.
“Why wrong, Gerda? Superfluous, if you like; irrelevant, if you like; but why wrong?”
“Because it’s a fetter on what shouldn’t be fettered. Love might stop. Then it would be ugly.”
“Oh very. One has to take that risk, like other risks. And love is really more likely to stop, as I see it, if there’s no contract in the eyes of the world, if the two people know each can walk away from the other, and is expected to, directly they quarrel or feel a little bored. The contract, the legalisation—absurd and irrelevant as all legal things are to anything that matters—the contract, because we’re such tradition-bound creatures, does give a sort of illusion of inevitability, which is settling, so that it doesn’t occur to the people to fly apart at the first strain. They go through with it instead, and in nine cases out of ten come out on the other side. In the tenth case they just have either to make the best of it or to make a break. … Of course people always can throw up the sponge, even married people, if things are insupportable. The door isn’t locked. But there’s no point, I think, in having it swinging wide open.”
“I think it should be open,” Gerda said. “I think people should be absolutely free. … Take you and me. Suppose you got tired of me, or liked someone else better, I think you ought to be able to leave me without any fuss.”
That was
