VII
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 latchkey?”
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. …