Dangerous Ages Part 21

"Nan."

"Yes. Shall I raise your head a little?"

"No, it's all right.... About Barry, Nan."

Nan grew rigid, strung up to endure.

"And what about Barry?"

"Just that I love him. I love him very much; beyond anything in the world."

"Yes. You'd better not talk, all the same."

"Nan, do you love him too?"

Nan laughed, a queer little curt laugh in her throat.

"Rather a personal question, don't you think? Suppose, by any chance that I did? But of course I don't."

"But doesn't he love you, Nan? He did, didn't he?"

"My dear, I think you're rather delirious. This isn't the way one talks.... You'd better ask Barry the state of his affections, since you're interested in them. I'm not, particularly."

Gerda drew a long breath, of pain or fatigue or relief.

"I'm rather glad you don't care for him. I thought we might have shared him if you had, and if he'd cared for us both. But it might have been difficult."

"It might; you never know.... Well, you're welcome to my share, if you want it."

Then Gerda lay quiet, with closed eyes and wet forehead, and concentrated wholly on her right leg, which was hurting badly.

Nan too sat quiet, and she too was concentrating.

Irrevocably it was over now; done, finished with. Barry's eyes, Barry's kiss, had told her that. Gerda, the lovely, the selfish child, had taken Barry from her, to keep for always. Walked into Barry's office, into Barry's life, and deliberately stolen him. Thinking, she said, that they might share him.... The little fool. The little thief. (She waved the flies away from Gerda's head.)

And even this other game, this contest of physical prowess, had ended in a hollow, mocking victory for the winner, since defeat had laid the loser more utterly in her lover's arms, more unshakably in his heart. Gerda, defeated and broken, had won everything. Won even that tribute which had been Nan's own. "You little sportsman," Barry had called her, with a break of tenderness in his voice. Even that, even the palm for valour, he had placed in her hands. The little victor. The greedy little grabber of other people's things....

Gerda moaned at last.

"Only a little longer," said Nan, and laid her hand lightly and coolly on the hot wet forehead.

The little winner... d.a.m.n her....

The edge of a smile, half-ironic, wholly bitter, twisted at Nan's lips.

10

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."

CHAPTER X

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 "Coterie," 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 a.s.sertion 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, pa.s.sions, 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."