Dangerous Ages Part 22

"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 pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.e.x 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 inst.i.tutionalist, 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 amus.e.m.e.nts, 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 sanct.i.ty of the home. They're not inst.i.tutionalists. 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 a.s.sure 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 inst.i.tutionalists; they were. Parents are.