“Well,” Barry said, “I don’t think I ought. I think it should be made as difficult for me as possible. Because of the children. There are usually children, of course. If I left you, I should have to leave them too. Then they’d have no father. Or, if it were you that went, they’d have no mother. Either way it’s a pity, normally. Also, even if we stayed together always and weren’t married, they’d have no legal name. Children often miss that, later on. Children of the school age are the most conventional, hidebound creatures. They’d feel ashamed before their schoolfellows.”
“I suppose they’d have my name legally, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose so. But they might prefer mine. The other boys and girls would have their fathers’, you see.”
“Not all of them. I know several people who don’t hold with marriage either; there’d be all their children. And anyhow it’s not a question of what the children would prefer while they were at school. It’s what’s best for them. And anything would be better than to see their parents hating each other and still having to live together.”
“Yes. Anything would be better than that. Except that it would be a useful and awful warning to them. But the point is, most married people don’t hate each other. They develop a kind of tolerating, companionable affection, after the first excitement called being in love is past—so far as it does pass. That’s mostly good enough to live on; that and common interests and so forth. It’s the stuff of ordinary life; the emotional excitement is the hors d’oeuvre. It would be greedy to want to keep passing on from one hors d’oeuvre to another—leaving the meal directly the joint comes in.”
“I like dessert best,” Gerda said, irrelevantly, biting into an apple.
“Well, you’d never get any at that rate. Nor much of the rest of the meal either.”
“But people do, Barry. Free unions often last for years and years—sometimes forever. Only you wouldn’t feel tied. You’d be sure you were only living together because you both liked to, not because you had to.”
“I should feel I had to, however free it was. So you wouldn’t have that consolation about me. I might be sick of you, and pining for someone else, but still I should stay.”
“Why, Barry?”
“Because I believe in permanent unions, as a general principle. They’re more civilised. It’s unusual, uncivic, dotting about from one mate to another, leaving your young and forgetting all about them and having new ones. Irresponsible, I call it. Living only for a good time. It’s not the way to be good citizens, as I see it, nor to bring up good citizens. … Oh, I know that the whole question of sex relationships is horribly complicated, and can’t be settled with a phrase or a dogma. It’s been for centuries so wrapped in cant and humbug and expediencies and camouflage; I don’t profess to be able to pierce through all that, or to so much as begin to think it out clearly. The only thing I can fall back on as a certainty is the children question. A confused and impermanent family life must be a bad background for the young. They want all they can get of both their parents, in the way of education and training and love.”
“Family life is such a hopeless muddle, anyhow.”
“A muddle, yes. Hopeless, no. Look at your own. Your father and mother have always been friends with each other and with you. They brought you up with definite ideas about what they wanted you to become—fairly well thought-out and consistent ideas, I suppose. I don’t say they could do much—parents never can—but something soaks in.”
“Usually something silly and bad.”
“Often, yes. Anyhow a queer kind of mixed brew. But at least the parents have their chance. It’s what they’re there for; they’ve got to do all they know, while the children are young, to influence them towards what they personally believe, however mistakenly, to be the finest points of view. Of course lots of it is, as you say, silly and bad, because people are largely silly and bad. But no parent can be absolved from doing his or her best.”
Barry was walking round the conservatory, eager and full of faith and hope and fire, talking rapidly, the educational enthusiast, the ardent citizen, the social being, the institutionalist, all over. He was all these things; he was rooted and grounded in citizenship, in social ethics. He stopped by the couch and stood looking down at Gerda among her fruit, his hands in his pockets, his eyes bright and lit.
“All the same, darling, I shall never want to fetter you. If you ever want to leave me, I shan’t come after you. The legal tie shan’t stand in your way. And to me it would make no difference; I shouldn’t leave you in any case, married or not. So I don’t see how or why you score in doing without the contract.”
“It’s the idea of the thing, partly. I don’t want to wear a wedding ring and be Mrs. Briscoe. I want to be Gerda Bendish, living with Barry Briscoe because we like to. … I expect, Barry, in my case it would be for always, because, at present, I can’t imagine stopping caring more for you than for anything else. But that doesn’t affect the principle of the thing. It would be wrong for me to marry you. One oughtn’t to give up one’s principles just because it seems all right in a particular case. It would be cheap and shoddy and cowardly.”
“Exactly,” said Barry, “what I feel. I can’t give up my principle either, you know. I’ve had mine longer than you’ve had yours.”
“I’ve had mine since I was about fifteen.”
“Five years. Well, I’ve had mine for twenty. Ever since I first began to think anything out, that is.”
“People
