Dangerous Ages Part 31

Gerda's thoughts were not on her poems, nor on Kay's press, but on his advice about matrimony. For the first time she wavered. If Kay thought that.... It set the business in a new light. And of course other people _were_ doing it; sound people, the people who talked the same language and belonged to the same set as one's self.

Kay had spoken. It was the careless, authentic voice of youth speaking to youth. It was a trumpet blast making a breach in the walls against which the batteries of middle age had thundered in vain. Gerda told herself that she must look further into this, think it over again, talk it over with other people of the age to know what was right. If it could be managed with honour, she would find it a great relief to give up on this point. For Barry was so firm; he would never give up; and, after all, one of them must, if it could be done with a clear conscience.

2

Ten days later Gerda said to Barry, "I've been thinking it over again, Barry, and I've decided that perhaps it will be all right for us to get married after all."

Barry took both her hands and kissed each in turn, to show that he was not triumphing but adoring.

"You mean it? You feel you can really do it without violating your conscience? Sure, darling?"

"Yes, I think I'm sure. Lots of quite sensible, good people have done it lately."

"Oh any number, of course--if _that's_ any reason."

"Not, not those people. My sort of people, I mean. People who believe what I do, and wouldn't tie themselves up and lose their liberty for anything."

"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 inst.i.tutionalism.

3

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.

CHAPTER XV

THE DREAM

1

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 partic.i.p.ator 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.

2

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 one happened to have but which the majority bitterly and emptily lacked. Some common way there had to be, some freedom all might grasp, a liberty not for the bourgeois only, but for the proletariat--the poor, the sad, the gay proletariat, who also grew old and lost their dreams, and had not the wherewithal to drug their souls, unless indeed they drank much liquor, and that is but a poor artificial way to peace.

Voyaging homewards through the spring seas, Neville saw life as an entangling thicket, the Woods of Westermain she had loved in her childhood, in which the scaly dragon squatted, the craving monster self that had to be subjugated before one could walk free in the enchanted woods.

"Him shall change, transforming late, Wonderously renovate...."

Dimly discerning through the thicket the steep path that climbed to such liberty as she sought, seeing far off the place towards which her stumbling feet were set, where life should be lived with alert readiness and response, oblivious of its personal achievements, its personal claims and spoils, Neville the spoilt, vain, ambitious, disappointed egoist, strained her eyes into the distance and half smiled. It might be a dream, that liberty, but it was a dream worth a fight....

CHAPTER XVI

TIME

1

February at St. Mary's Bay. The small fire flickered and fluttered in the grate with a sound like the windy beating of wings. The steady rain sloped against the closed windows of The Gulls, and dropped patteringly on the asphalt pavements of Marine Crescent outside, and the cold grey sea tumbled moaning.

Grandmama sat in her arm-chair by the hearth, reading the Autobiography of a Cabinet Minister's Wife and listening to the fire, the sea and the rain, and sleeping a little now and again.