Dangerous Ages | Page 5

Kay rightly believed such marriages to have some advantages over those more visible to the human eye (as being more readily dissoluble when fatiguing) and many advantages over no marriages at all, which do not increase the population, so depleted by the Great War. When they spoke in this admirably civic sense, Neville was apt to say "It doesn't want increasing. I waited twenty minutes before I could board my bus at Trafalgar Square the other day. It wants more depleting, I should say--a Great Plague or something," a view which Kay and Gerda thought truly egotistical.
"I do hope," said Neville, her thoughts having led her to the statement, "I do very much hope that neither of you will ever perpetrate that sort of marriage. It would be so dreadfully common of you."
"Impossible to say," Kay said, vaguely.
"Considering," said Gerda, "that there are a million more women than men in this country, it stands to reason that some system of polygamy must become the usual thing in the future."
"It's always been the usual thing, darling. Dreadfully usual. It's so much more amusing to be unusual in these ways."
Neville's voice trailed drowsily away. Polygamy. Sex. Free Love. Love in chains. The children seemed so often to be discussing these. Just as, twenty years ago, she and her friends had seemed always to be discussing the Limitations of Personality, the Ethics of Friendship, and the Nature, if any, of God. This last was to Kay and Gerda too hypothetical to be a stimulating theme. It would have sent them to sleep, as sex did Neville.
Neville, led by Free Love to a private vision, brooded cynically over savages dancing round a wood-pile in primeval forests, engaged in what missionaries, journalists, and writers of fiction about our coloured brothers call "nameless orgies" (as if you would expect most orgies to answer to their names, like the stars) and she saw the steep roads of the round world running back and back and back--on or back, it made no difference, since the world was round--to this. Saw, too, a thousand stuffy homes wherein sat couples linked by a legal formula so rigid, so lasting, so indelible, that not all their tears could wash out a word of it, unless they took to themselves other mates, in which case their second state might be worse than their first. Free love--love in chains. How absurd it all was, and how tragic too. One might react back to the remaining choice--no love at all--and that was absurder and more tragic still, since man was made (among other ends) to love. Looking under her heavy lashes at her pretty young children, incredibly youthful, absurdly theoretical, fiercely clean of mind and frank of speech, their clearness as yet unblurred by the expediencies, compromise and experimental contacts of life, Neville was stabbed by a sharp pang of fear and hope for them. Fear lest on some fleeting impulse they might founder into the sentimental triviality of short-lived contacts, or into the tedium of bonds which must out-live desire; hope that, by some fortunate chance, they might each achieve, as she had achieved, some relation which should be both durable and to be endured. As to the third path--no love at all--she did not believe that either Kay or Gerda would tread that. They were emotional, in their cool and youthful way, and also believed that they ought to increase the population. What a wonderful, noble thing to believe, at twenty, thought Neville, remembering the levity of her own irresponsible youth, when her only interest in the population had been a nightmare fear lest they should at last become so numerous that they would be driven out of the towns into the country and would be scuttling over the moors, downs and woods like black beetles in kitchens in the night. They were better than she had been, these children; more public-spirited and more in earnest about life.
4
Across the garden came Nan Hilary, having come down from town to see Neville on her forty-third birthday. Nan herself was not so incredibly old as Neville; (for forty-three is incredibly old, from any reasonable standpoint). Nan was thirty-three and a half. She represented the thirties; she was, in Neville's mind, a bridge between the remote twenties and the new, extraordinary forties in which one could hardly believe. It seems normal to be in the thirties; the right, ordinary age, that most people are. Nan, who wrote, and lived in rooms in Chelsea, was rather like a wild animal--a leopard or something. Long and lissome, with a small, round, sallow face and withdrawn, brooding yellow eyes under sulky black brows that slanted up to the outer corners. Nan had a good time socially and intellectually. She was clever and lazy; she would fritter away days