“I agree with Lenin. He says liberty is a bourgeois dream.”
“Barry, I may keep my name, mayn’t I? I may still be called Gerda Bendish, by people in general?”
“Of course, if you like. Rather silly, isn’t it? Because it won’t be your name. But that’s your concern.”
“It’s the name I’ve always written and drawn under, you see.”
“Yes. I see your point. Of course you shall be Gerda Bendish anywhere you like, only not on cheques, if you don’t mind.”
“And I don’t much want to wear a wedding ring, Barry.”
“That’s as you like, too, of course. You might keep it in your purse when travelling, to produce if censorious hotel keepers look askance at us. Even the most abandoned ladies do that sometimes, I believe. Or your marriage lines will do as well. … Gerda, you blessed darling, it’s most frightfully decent and sporting of you to have changed your mind and owned up. Next time we differ I’ll try and be the one to do it, I honestly will. … I say, let’s come out by ourselves and dine and do a theatre, to celebrate the occasion.”
So they celebrated the triumph of institutionalism.
III
Their life together, thought Barry, would be a keen, jolly, adventuring business, an ardent thing, full of gallant dreams and endeavours. It should never grow tame or stale or placid, never lose its fine edge. There would be mountain peak beyond mountain peak to scale together. They would be co-workers, playmates, friends and lovers all at once, and they would walk in liberty as in a bourgeois dream.
So planned Barry Briscoe, the romantic, about whose head the vision splendid always hovered, a realisable, capturable thing.
Gerda thought, “I’m happy. Poetry and drawing and Barry. I’ve everything I want, except a St. Bernard pup, and Kay’s giving me that for Christmas. I’m happy.”
It was a tingling, intense, sensuous feeling, like stretching warm before a good fire, or lying in fragrant thymy woods in June, in the old Junes when suns were hot. Life was a song and a dream and a summer morning.
“You’re happy, Gerda,” Neville said to her once, gladly but half wistfully, and she nodded, with her small gleaming smile.
“Go on being happy,” Neville told her, and Gerda did not know that she had nearly added “for it’s cost rather a lot, your happiness.” Gerda seldom cared how much things had cost; she did not waste thought on such matters. She was happy.
XV
The Dream
I
Barry and Gerda were married in January in a registry office, and, as all concerned disliked wedding parties, there was no wedding party.
After they had gone, Neville, recovered now from the lilies and languors of illness, plunged into the roses and raptures of social life. One mightn’t, she said to herself, be able to accomplish much in this world, or imprint one’s personality on one’s environment by deeds and achievements, but one could at least enjoy life, be a pleased participator in its spoils and pleasures, an enchanted spectator of its never-ending flux and pageant, its richly glowing moving pictures. One could watch the play out, even if one hadn’t much of a part oneself. Music, art, drama, the company of eminent, pleasant and entertaining persons, all the various forms of beauty, the carefully cultivated richness, graces and elegances which go to build up the world of the fortunate, the cultivated, the prosperous and the well-bred—Neville walked among these like the soul in the lordly pleasure house built for her by the poet Tennyson, or like Robert Browning glutting his sense upon the world—“Miser, there waits the gold for thee!”—or Francis Thompson swinging the earth a trinket at his wrist. In truth, she was at times self-consciously afraid that she resembled all these three, whom (in the moods they thus expressed) she disliked beyond reason, finding them morbid and hard to please.
She too knew herself morbid and hard to please. If she had not been so, to be Rodney’s wife would surely have been enough; it would have satisfied all her nature. Why didn’t it? Was it perhaps really because, though she loved him, it was not with the uncritical devotion of the early days? She had for so many years now seen clearly, through and behind his charm, his weakness, his vanities, his scorching ambitions and jealousies, his petulant angers, his dependence on praise and admiration. She had no jealousy now of his frequent confidential intimacies with other attractive women; they were harmless enough, and he never lost the need of and dependence on her; but they may have helped to clarify her vision of him.
Rodney had no failings beyond what are the common need of human nature; he was certainly good enough for her. Their marriage was all right. It was only the foolish devil of egotism in her which goaded to unwholesome activity the other side of her nature, that need for self-expression which marriage didn’t satisfy.
II
In February she suddenly tired of London and the British climate, and was moved by a desire to travel. So she went to Italy, and stayed in Capri with Nan and Stephen Lumley, who were leading on that island lives by turns gaily indolent and fiercely industrious, finding the company stimulating and the climate agreeable and soothing to Stephen’s defective lungs.
From Italy Neville went to Greece. Corinth, Athens, the islands, Tempe, Delphi, Crete—how good to have money and be able to see all these! Italy and Greece are Europe’s pleasure grounds; there the cultivated and the prosperous traveller may satisfy his soul and forget carking cares and stabbing ambitions, and drug himself with loveliness.
If Neville abruptly tired of it, and set her face homewards in early April, it was partly because she felt the need of Rodney, and partly because she saw, fleetingly but day by day more lucidly, that one could not take one’s stand, for satisfaction of desire, on the money which
