PRINCIPLES
1
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.
2
Barry came down for week-ends. 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 characteristic of both of them, that they could take their
own case theoretically without becoming personal, without lovers'
protestations to confuse the general issue.
"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, hide-bound 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 of your age," said Gerda, "people over thirty, I mean, often
think like that about marriage. I've noticed it. So has Kay."
"Observant infants. Well, there we stand, then. One of us has got either
to change his principles--her principles, I mean--or to be false to them.
Or else, apparently, there can be nothing doing between you and me.
That's the position, isn't it?"
Gerda nodded, her mouth full of apple.
"It's very awkward," Barry continued, "my having fallen in love with you.
I had not taken your probable views on sociology into account. I knew
that, though we differed in spelling and punctuation, we were agreed
(approximately) on politics, economics, and taste in amusements, and I
thought that was enough. I forgot that divergent views on matrimony were
of practical importance. It would have mattered less if I had discovered
that you were a militarist and imperialist and quoted Marx at me."
"I did tell you, Barry. I really did. I never hid it. And I never
supposed that you'd want to _marry_ me."
"That was rather stupid of you. I'm so obviously a marrying man.... Now,
darling, will you think the whole thing out from the beginning, after
I've gone? Be first-hand; don't take over theories from other people, and
don't be sentimental about it. Thrash the whole subject out with yourself
and with other people--with your own friends, and with your family too.
They're a modern, broad-minded set, your people, after all; they won't
look at the thing conventionally; they'll talk sense; they won't fob you
off with stock phrases, or talk about the sanctity of the home. They're
not institutionalists. Only be fair about it; weigh all the pros and
cons, and judge honestly, and for heaven's sake don't look at the thing
romantically, or go off on theories because they sound large and
subversive. Think of practical points, as well as of ultimate principles.
Both, to my mind, are on the same side. I'm not asking you to sacrifice
right for expediency, or expediency for right. I don't say 'Be sensible,'
or 'Be idealistic.' We've got to be both."
"Barry, I've thought and talked about it so often and so long. You don't
know how much we do talk about that sort of thing, at the club and
everywhere and Kay and I. I could never change my mind."
"What a hopeless admission! We ought to be ready to change our minds at
any moment; they should be as changeable as pound notes."
"What about yours, then, darling?"
"I'm always ready to change mine. I shall think the subject out too, and
if I do change I shall tell you at once."
"Barry." Gerda's face was grave; her forehead was corrugated. "Suppose we
neither of us ever change? Suppose we both go on thinking as we do now
for always? What then?"
He smoothed the knitted forehead with his fingers.
"Then one of us will have to be a traitor to his or her principles. A
pity, but sometimes necessary in this complicated world. Or, if we can
neither of us bring ourselves down to that, I suppose eventually we shall
each perpetrate with someone else the kind of union we personally
prefer."
They parted on that. The thing had not grown serious yet; they could
still joke about it.
3
Though Gerda said "What's the use of my talking about it to people when
I've made up my mind?" and though she had not the habit of talking for
conversation's sake, she did obediently open the subject with her
parents, in order to assure herself beyond a doubt what they felt about
it. But she knew already that their opinions were what you might expect
of parents, even of broad-minded, advanced parents, who rightly believed
themselves not addicted to an undiscriminating acceptance of the
standards and decisions of a usually mistaken world. But Barry was wrong
in saying they weren't institutionalists; they were. Parents are.
Rodney was more opinionated than Neville, on this subject as on most
others. He said, crossly, "It's a beastly habit, unlegitimatised union.
When I say beastly, I mean beastly; nothing derogatory, but merely like
the beasts--the other beasts, that is."
Gerda said "Well, that's not really an argument against it. In that sense
it's beastly when we sleep out instead of in bed, or do lots of other
quite nice things. The way men and women do things isn't necessarily the
best way," and there Rodney had to agree with her. He fell back on "It's
unbusinesslike. Suppose you have children?" and Gerda, who had supposed
all that with Barry, sighed. Rodney said a lot more, but it made little
impression on her, beyond corroborating her views on the matrimonial
theories of middle-aged people.
Neville made rather more. To Neville Gerda said "How can I go back on
everything I've always said and thought about it, and go and get married?
It would be so _reactionary_."
Neville, who had a headache and was irritable, said "It's the other thing
that's reactionary. It existed long before the marriage tie did. That's
what I don't understand about all you children who pride yourselves on
being advanced. If you frankly take your stand on going back to nature,
on _being_ reactionary--well, it is, anyhow, a point of view, and has its
own merits. But your minds seem to me to be in a hopeless muddle. You
think you're going forward while you're really going back."
"Marriage," said Gerda, "is so Victorian. It's like antimacassars."
"Now, my dear, do you mean _anything_ by either of those statements?
Marriage wasn't invented in Victoria's reign. Nor did it occur more
frequently in that reign than it had before or does now. Why Victorian,
then? And why antimacassars? Think it out. How _can_ a legal contract be
like a doyley on the back of a chair? Where is the resemblance? It sounds
like a riddle, only there's no answer. No, you know you've got no answer.
That kind of remark is sheer sentimentality and muddle-headedness. Why
are people in their twenties so often sentimental? That's another
riddle."
"That's what Nan says. She told me once that she used to be sentimental
when she was twenty. Was she?"
"More than she is now, anyhow."
Neville's voice was a little curt. She was not happy about Nan, who had
just gone to Rome for the winter.
"Well," Gerda said, "anyhow I'm not sentimental about not meaning to
marry. I've thought about it for years, and I know."
"Thought about it! Much you know about it." Neville, tired and cross
from over-work, was, unlike herself, playing the traditional conventional
mother. "Have you thought how it will affect your children, for
instance?"
Those perpetual, tiresome children. Gerda was sick of them.
"Oh yes, I've thought a lot about that. And I can't see it will hurt
them. Barry and I talked for ever so long about the children. So did
father."
So did Neville.
"Of course I know," she said, "that you and Kay would be only too pleased
if father and I had never been married, but you've no right to judge by
yourself the ones you and Barry may have. They may not be nearly so
odd.... And then there's your own personal position. The world's full of
people who think they can insult a man's mistress."
"I don't meet people like that. The people I know don't insult other
people for not being married. They think it's quite natural, and only the
people's own business."
"You've moved in a small and rarefied clique so far, my dear. You'll meet
the other kind of people presently; one can't avoid them, the world's so
full of them."
"Do they matter?"
"Of course they matter. As mosquitoes matter, and wasps, and cars that
splash mud at you in the road. You'd be constantly annoyed. Your own
scullery maid would turn up her nose at you. The man that brought the
milk will sneer."
"I don't think," Gerda said, after reflection, "that I'm very easily
annoyed. I don't notice things, very often. I think about other things
rather a lot, you see. That's why I'm slow at answering."
"Well, Barry would be annoyed, anyhow."
"Barry does lots of unpopular things. He doesn't mind what people say."
"He'd mind for you.... But Barry isn't going to do it. Barry won't have
you on your terms. If you won't have him on his, he'll leave you and go
and find some nicer girl."
"I can't help it, mother. I can't do what I don't approve of for that.
How could I?"
"No, darling, of course you couldn't; I apologise. But do try and see if
you can't get to approve of it, or anyhow to be indifferent about it.
Such a little thing! It isn't as if Barry wanted you to become a Mormon
or something.... And after all you can't accuse him of being retrograde,
or Victorian, if you like to use that silly word, or lacking in ideals
for social progress--can you? He belongs to nearly all your illegal
political societies, doesn't he? Why, his house gets raided for leaflets
from time to time. I don't think they ever find any, but they look, and
that's something. You can't call Barry hide-bound or conventionally
orthodox."
"No. Oh no. Not that. Or I shouldn't be caring for him. But he doesn't
understand about this. And you don't, mother, nor father, nor anyone of
your ages. I don't know how it is, but it is so."
"You might try your Aunt Rosalind," Neville suggested, with malice.
Gerda shuddered. "Aunt Rosalind ... she wouldn't understand at all...."
But the dreadful thought was, as Neville had intended, implanted in
her that, of all her elder relatives, it was only Aunt Rosalind who,
though she mightn't understand, might nevertheless agree. Aunt Rosalind
on free unions... that would be terrible to have to hear. For Aunt
Rosalind would hold with them not because she thought them right but
because she enjoyed them--the worst of reasons. Gerda somehow felt
degraded by the introduction into the discussion of Aunt Rosalind, whom
she hated, whom she knew, without having been told so, that her mother
and all of them hated. It dragged it down, made it vulgar.
Gerda lay back in silence, the springs of argument and talk dried in her.
She wanted Kay.
It was no use; they couldn't meet. Neville could not get away from her
traditions, nor Gerda from hers.
Neville, to change the subject (though scarcely for the better), read her
"The Autobiography of Mrs. Asquith" till tea-time.
4
They all talked about it again, and said the same things, and different
things, and more things, and got no nearer one another with it all. Soon
Barry and Gerda, each comprehending the full measure of the serious
intent of the other, stood helpless before it, the one in half-amused
exasperation, the other in obstinate determination.
"She means business, then," thought Barry. "He won't come round," thought
Gerda and their love pierced and stabbed them, making Barry hasty of
speech and Gerda sullen.
"The _waste_ of it," said Barry, on Sunday evening, "when I've only
got one day in the week, to spend it quarrelling about marriage. I've
hundreds of things to talk about and tell you--interesting things, funny
things--but I never get to them, with all this arguing we have to have
first."
"I don't want to argue, Barry. Let's not. We've said everything now, lots
of times. There can't be any more. Tell me your things instead!"
He told her, and they were happy talking, and forgot how they thought
differently on marriage. But always the difference lay there in the
background, coiled up like a snake, ready to uncoil and seize them and
make them quarrel and hurt one another. Always one was expecting the
other at any moment to throw up the sponge and cry "Oh, have it your own
way, since you won't have it mine and I love you." But neither did. Their
wills stood as stiff as two rocks over against one another.
Gerda grew thinner under the strain, and healed more slowly than before.
Her fragile, injured body was a battle-ground between her will and her
love, and suffered in the conflict. Barry saw that it could not go on.
They would, he said, stop talking about it; they would put it in the
background and go on as if it were not there, until such time as they
could agree. So they became friends again, lovers who lived in the
present and looked to no future, and, since better might not be, that had
to do for the time.