Dangerous Ages | Page 5

hasn't, of course.... Didn't I tell you about Penelope? She lives
with Martin Annesley now."
"Oh, I see. Marriage in the sight of heaven. That sort of thing."
Neville was of those who find marriages in the sight of heaven
uncivilised and socially reactionary, a reversion, in fact, to Nature,
which bored her. Gerda and 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.