GERDA
1
It rained so hard, so much harder even than usual, that Sunday, that only
Barry and Gerda went to walk. Barry walked in every kind of weather, even
in the July of 1920.
To-day after lunch Barry said "I'm going to walk over the downs. Anyone
coming?" and Gerda got up silently, as was her habit. Kay stretched
himself and yawned and said "Me for the fireside. I shall have to walk
every day for three weeks after to-day," for he was going to-morrow on a
reading-party. Rodney and Jim were playing a game of chess that had
lasted since breakfast and showed every sign of lasting till bed-time;
Neville and Mrs. Hilary were talking, and Grandmama was upstairs, having
her afternoon nap.
2
They tramped along, waterproofed and bare-headed, down the sandy road.
The rain swished in Gerda's golden locks, till they clung dank and limp
about her cheeks and neck; it beat on Barry's glasses, so that he took
them off and blinked instead. The trees stormed and whistled in the
southerly wind that blew from across Merrow Downs. Barry tried to whistle
down it, but it caught the sound from his puckered lips and whirled it
away.
Through Merrow they strode, and up onto the road that led across the
downs, and there the wind caught them full, and it was as if buckets of
water were being flung into their faces. The downs sang and roared; the
purple-grey sky shut down on the hill's shoulder like a tent.
"Lord, what fun," said Barry, as they gasped for breath.
Gerda was upright and slim as a wand against the buffeting; her white
little face was stung into shell-pink; her wet hair blew back like yellow
seaweed.
Barry thought suddenly of Nan, who revelled in storms, and quickly shut
his mind on the thought. He was schooling himself to think away from Nan,
with her wild animal grace and her flashing mind and her cruel, careless
indifference.
Gerda would have walked like this forever. Her wide blue eyes blinked
away the rain; her face felt stung and lashed, yet happy and cold; her
mouth was stiff and tight. She was part of the storm; as free, as fierce,
as singing; though outwardly she was all held together and silent, only
smiling a little with her shut mouth.
As they climbed the downs, the wind blew more wildly in their faces.
Gerda swayed against it, and Barry took her by the arm and half pushed
her.
So they reached Newlands Corner, and all southern Surrey stormed below
them, and beyond Surrey stormed Sussex, and beyond Sussex the angry,
unseen sea.
They stood looking, and Barry's arm still steadied Gerda against the
gale.
Gerda thought "It will end. It will be over, and we shall be sitting at
tea. Then Sunday will be over, and on Monday he will go back to town."
The pain of that end of the world turned her cold beneath the glow of the
storm. Then life settled itself, very simply. She must go too, and work
with him. She would tell him so on the way home, when the wind would let
them talk.
They turned their backs on the storm and ran down the hill towards
Merrow. Gerda, light as a leaf on the wind, could have run all the way
back; Barry, fit and light too, but fifteen years ahead of her, fell
after five minutes into a walk.
Then they could talk a little.
"And to-morrow I shall be plugging in town," sighed Barry.
Gerda always went straight to her point.
"May I come into your office, please, and learn the work?"
He smiled down at her. Splendid child!
"Why, rather. Do you mean it? When do you want to come?"
"To-morrow?"
He laughed. "Good. I thought you meant in the autumn. ... To-morrow
by all means, if you will. As a matter of fact we're frightfully
short-handed in the office just now. Our typist has crocked, and we
haven't another yet, so people have to type their own letters."
"I can do the typing," said Gerda, composedly. "I can type quite well."
"Oh, but that'll be dull for you. That's not what you want, is it?
Though, if you want to learn about the work, it's not a bad way ... you
get it all passing through your hands.... Would you really take on that
job for a bit?"
Gerda nodded.
They were rapid and decided people; they did not beat about the bush. If
they wanted to do a thing and there seemed no reason why not, they did
it.
"That's first-class," said Barry. "Give it a trial, anyhow.... Of course
you'll be on trial too; we may find it doesn't work. If so, there are
plenty of other jobs to be done in the office. But that's what we most
want at the moment."
Barry had a way of assuming that people would want, naturally, to do the
thing that most needed doing.
Gerda's soul sang and whistled down the whistling wind. It wasn't over,
then: it was only beginning. The W.E.A. was splendid; work was splendid;
Barry Briscoe was splendid; life was splendid. She was sorry for Kay at
Cambridge, Kay who was just off on a reading party, not helping in the
world's work but merely getting education. Education was inspiring in
connection with Democracy, but when applied to oneself it was dull.
The rain was lessening. It fell on their heads more lightly; the wind was
like soft wet kisses on their backs, as they tramped through Merrow, and
up the lane to Windover.
3
They all sat round the tea-table, and most of them were warm and sleepy
from Sunday afternoon by the fire, but Barry and Gerda were warm and
tingling from walking in the storm. Some people prefer one sensation,
some the other.
Neville thought "How pretty Gerda looks, pink like that." She was glad
to know that she too looked pretty, in her blue afternoon dress. It
was good, in that charming room, that they should all look agreeable
to the eye. Even Mrs. Hilary, with her nervous, faded grace, marred by
self-consciousness and emotion. And Grandmama, smiling and shrewd, with
her old in-drawn lips; and Rodney, long and lounging and clever; Jim,
square-set, sensible, clean-cut, beautiful to his mother and to his women
patients, good for everyone to look at; Barry, brown and charming, with
his quick smile; the boy Kay, with his pale, rounded, oval face, his
violet eyes like his mother's, only short-sighted, so that he had a trick
of screwing them up and peering, and a mouth that widened into a happy
sweetness when he smiled.
They were all right: they all fitted in with the room and with each
other.
Barry said "I've not been idle while walking. I've secured a secretary.
Gerda says she's coming to work at the office for us for a bit. Now, at
once."
He had not Gerda's knack of silence. Gerda would shut up tight over her
plans and thoughts, like a little oyster. She was no babbler; she did
things and never talked. But Barry's plans brimmed up and over.
Neville said "You sudden child! And in July and August, too.... But
you'll have only a month before you join Nan in Cornwall, won't you?"
Gerda nodded, munching a buttered scone.
Grandmama, like an old war-horse scenting the fray, thought "Is it going
to be an affair? Will they fall in love? And what of Nan?" Then rebuked
herself for forgetting what she really knew quite well, having been
told it often, that men and girls in these days worked together and
did everything together, with no thought of affairs or of falling in
love.... Only these two were very attractive, the young Briscoe and the
pretty child, Gerda.
Neville, who knew Gerda, and that she was certainly in love again (it
happened so often with Gerda), thought "Shall I stop it? Or shall I let
things take their course? Oh, I'll let them alone. It's only one of
Gerda's childish hero-worships, and he'll be kind without flirting. It'll
do Gerda good to go on with this new work she's so keen on. And she knows
he cares for Nan. I shall let her go."
Neville very nearly always let Gerda and Kay go their own way now
that they were grown-up. To interfere would have been the part of the
middle-aged old-fashioned mother, and for that part Neville had no
liking. To be her children's friend and good comrade, that was her rôle
in life.
"It's good of you to have her," she said to Barry. "I hope you won't be
sorry.... She's very stupid sometimes--regular Johnny Head-in-air."
"I should be a jolly sight more use," Kay remarked. "But I can't come,
unfortunately. She can't spell, you know. And her punctuation is weird."
"She'll learn," said Barry, cheerfully, and Gerda smiled serenely at them
over her tea-cup.
4
Barry in the office was quick, alert, cheerful, and business-like, and
very decided, sometimes impatient. Efficient: that was the word. He would
skim the correspondence and dictate answers out of his head, walking
about the room, interrupted all the time by the telephone and by people
coming in to see him. Gerda's hero-worship grew and grew; her soul
swelled with it; she shut it down tight and remained calm and cool. When
he joked, when he smiled his charming smile, her heart turned over within
her. When he had signed the typed letters, she would sometimes put her
hand for a moment where his had rested on the paper. He was stern with
her sometimes, spoke sharply and impatiently, and that, in a queer way,
she liked. She had felt the same pleasure at school, when the head of the
school, whom she had greatly and secretly venerated, had had her up to
the sixth form room and rowed her. Why? That was for psycho-analysts to
discover; Gerda only knew the fact. And Barry, after he had spoken
sharply to her, when he had got over his anger, would smile and be even
kinder than usual, and that was the best of all.
There were other people in the office, of course; men and women, busy,
efficient, coming in and out, talking, working, organising. They were
kind, pleasant people. Gerda liked them, but they were shadowy.
And behind them all, and behind Barry, there was the work. The work was
enormously interesting. Gerda, child of her generation and of her
parents, was really a democrat, really public-spirited, outside the
little private cell of her withdrawn reserves. Beauty wasn't enough;
making poetry and pictures wasn't enough; one had to give everyone his
and her chance to have beauty and poetry and pictures too. In spite
of having been brought up in this creed, Gerda and Kay held to it, had
not reacted from it to a selfish aristocracy, as you might think likely.
Their democracy went much further than that of their parents. They
had been used ardently to call themselves Bolshevists until such time as
it was forced upon them that Bolshevism was not, in point of fact, a
democratic system. They and some of their friends still occasionally used
that label, in moments rather of after-dinner enthusiasm than of the
precise thinking that is done in morning light. For, after all, even Mr.
Bertrand Russell, even Mrs. Philip Snowden, might be wrong in their
hurried jottings down of the results of a cursory survey of so intricate
a system. And, anyhow, Bolshevism had the advantage that it had not yet
been tried in this country, and no one, not even the most imaginative and
clear-sighted political theorist, could forecast the precise form into
which the curious British climate might mould it if it should ever adopt
it. So that to believe in it was, anyhow, easier than believing in
anything which _had_ been tried (and, like all things which are tried,
found wanting) such as Liberalism, Toryism, Socialism, and so forth.
But the W.E.A. was a practical body, which went in for practical
adventure. Dowdy, schoolmarmish, extension-lectureish, it might be
and doubtless was. But a real thing, with guts in it, really doing
something; and after all, you can't be incendiarising the political
and economic constitution all your time. In your times off you can
do something useful, something which shows results, and for which such
an enormous amount of faith and hope is not required. Work for the
Revolution--yes, of course, one did that; one studied the literature of
the Internationals; one talked.... But did one help the Revolution on
much, when all was said? Whereas in the W.E.A. office one really got
things done; one typed a letter and something happened because of it;
more adult classes occurred, more workers got educated. Gerda, too young
and too serious to be cynical, believed that this must be right and good.
5
A clever, strange, charming child Barry found her, old and young beyond
her twenty years. Her wide-set blue eyes seemed to see horizons, and too
often to be blind to foregrounds. She had a slow, deliberating habit of
work, and of some things was astonishingly ignorant, with the ignorance
of those who, when at school, have worked at what they preferred and
quietly disregarded the rest. If he let her compose a letter, its wording
would be quaint. Her prose was, in fact, worse than her verse, and that
was saying a good deal. But she was thorough, never slipshod. Her brain
ground slowly, but it ground exceeding small; there were no blurred edges
to her apprehension of facts; either she didn't know a thing or she did,
and that sharp and clear distinction is none too common. She would file
and index papers with precision, and find them again, slow and sure, when
they were required. Added to these secretarial gifts, such as they were,
she had vision; she saw always the dream through or in spite of the
business; she was like Barry himself in that. She was a good companion,
too, though she had no wit and not very much humour, and none of Nan's
gifts of keen verbal brilliance, frequent ribaldry and quick response;
she would digest an idea slowly, and did not make jokes; her clear mind
had the quality of a crystal rather than of a flashing diamond. The
rising generation; the woman citizen of to-morrow: what did not rest on
her, and what might she not do and be? Nan, on the other hand, was the
woman citizen of to-day. And Nan did not bother to use her vote because
she found all the parties and all the candidates about equally absurd.
Barry had argued with Nan about that, but made no impression on her
cynical indifference; she had met him with levity. To Gerda there was a
wrong and a right in politics, instead of only a lot of wrongs; touching
young faith, Nan called it, but Barry, who shared it, found it cheering.
This pretty little white pixyish person, with her yellow hair cut
straight across her forehead and waving round her neck like the curled,
shining petals of a celandine, with her straight-thinking mind and her
queer, secret, mystic thoughts--she was the woman of the future, a
citizen and a mother of citizens. She and the other girls and boys were
out to build the new heaven and the new earth, and their children would
carry it on. This responsibility of Gerda's invested her with a special
interest in the eyes of Barry, who lived and worked for the future, and
who, when he saw an infant mewling and puking in a pram, was apt to think
"The hope for the world," and smile at it encouragingly, overlooking its
present foolishness of aspect and habit. If ever he had children ... if
Nan would marry him ... but Nan would always lightly slide away when he
got near her.... He could see her now, with the cool, amused smile
tilting her lips, always sliding away, eluding him.... Nan, like a wild
animal for grace, brilliant like blown fire, cool like the wind, stabbing
herself and him with her keen wit....
Gerda, looking up from her typewriter to say "How do you spell
comparatively?" saw his face in its momentary bitterness as he frowned,
pen in hand, out of the window. He was waiting to sign the letters
before he went out to a committee meeting, and she thought she was
annoying him by her slowness. She spelt comparatively anyhow, and with
the wholehearted wrongness to which she and the typewriter, both bad
spellers, often attained in conjunction, hastily finished and laid
the letters before him. Called back to work and actuality, Barry was
again cheerful and kind, and he smilingly corrected comparatively.
"You might ask me," he suggested, "instead of experimenting, when I do
happen to be at hand. Otherwise a dictionary, or Miss Pinner in the next
room...?"
Gerda was happy, now that the shadow was off his face. Raillery and
rebuke she did not mind; only the shadow, which fell coldly on her heart
too.
He left the office then for the day, as he often did, but it was warm and
alive with his presence, and she was doing his work, and she would see
him again in the morning.
6
Gerda went home only for week-ends now; it was too slow a journey to make
every morning and evening. She stayed during the week at a hotel called
the Red House, in Magpie Alley, off Bouverie Street. It was a hotel kept
by revolutionary souls exclusively for revolutionary souls. Gerda, who
had every right there, had gained admittance through friends of hers who
lodged there. Every evening at six o'clock she went back through the
rain, as she did this evening, and changed her wet clothes and sat down
to dinner, a meal which all the revolutionary souls ate together so that
it was sacramental, a breaking of common bread in token of a common
faith.
They were a friendly party. At one end of the table Aunt Phyllis
presided. Aunt Phyllis, who was really the aunt of only one young man,
kept this Red House. She was a fiery little revolutionary in the late
forties, small, and thin and darting, full of faith and fire. She was on
the staff of the British Bolshevist, and for the rest, wrote leaflets,
which showered from her as from trees in autumn gales. So did the Rev.
Anselm Digby. Mr. Digby had also the platform habit, he would go round
the country denouncing and inciting to revolution in the name of Christ
and of the Third International. Though grizzled, he belonged to the
League of Youth, as well as to many other eager fraternities. He was
unbeneficed, having no time for parish work. This ardent clergyman sat
at the other end of Aunt Phyllis's table, as befitted his years.
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 strike-breaking 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.
7
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
for some reason the temporary company of these unfortunate females, so
unpleasing to the eye, to the ear, to the mind, to the smell; desired it
so much that they would pay money for it. _Why?_ Against that riddle the
non-comprehension of her sex beat itself, baffled. She might put it the
other way round, try to imagine herself desiring, paying for, the
temporary attentions of some dirty, common, vapid, and patchouli-scented
man--and still she got no nearer. For she never could desire it.... Well,
anyhow, there the thing was. Stop the demand? Stop that desire of men for
women? Stop the ready response of women to it? If that was the only way,
then there was indeed nothing for it but education--and was even
education any use for that?
"Is it love," she asked of Barry, "that the men feel who want these
women?"
Barry laughed shortly. "Love? Good Lord, no."
"What then, Barry?"
"I don't know that it can be explained, exactly.... It's a passing
taste, I suppose, a desire for the company of another sex from one's
own, just because it _is_ another sex, though it may have no other
attractions.... It's no use trying to analyse it, one doesn't get
anywhere. But it's not love."
"What's love, then? What's the difference?"
"Have I to define love, walking down Magpie Alley? You could do it as
well as I could. Love has the imagination in it, and the mind. I suppose
that's the difference. And, too, love wants to give. This is all
platitude. No one can ever say anything new about love, it's all been
said. Got your latch-key?"
Gerda let herself into the Red House and went up to bed and lay wakeful.
Very certainly she loved Barry, with all her imagination and all her
mind, and she would have given him more than all that was hers. Very
surely and truly she loved him, even if after all he was to be her uncle
by marriage, which would make their family life like that in one of Louis
Couperus's books. But why unhappy like that? Was love unhappy? If she
might see him sometimes, talk to him, if Nan wouldn't want all of him all
the time--and it would be unlike Nan to do that--she could be happy. One
could share, after all. Women must share, for there were a million more
women in England than men.
But probably Nan didn't mean to marry him at all. Nan never married
people....
8
Next morning at the office Barry said he had heard from Nan. She had
asked him to come too and bicycle in Cornwall, with her and Gerda and
Kay.
"You will, won't you," said Gerda.
"Rather, of course."
A vaguely puzzled note sounded in his voice. But he would come.
Cornwall was illuminated to Gerda. The sharing process would begin there.
But for a week more she had him to herself, and that was better.