The space between the two ends was filled by younger creatures.  It was spring with them; their leaflets were yet green and unfallen; all that fell from them was poetry, pathetic in its sadness, bitter in its irony, free of metrical or indeed of any other restraints, and mainly either about how unpleasant had been the trenches in which they had spent the years of the great war and those persons over military age who had not been called upon to enter them, or about freedom; free love, free thought and a free world.  Yes, both these subjects sound a little old-fashioned, but the Red House was concerned with these elemental changeless things.  And some of them also wrote fiction, quiet, grey, a little tired, about unhappy persons to whom nothing was very glad or very sad, and certainly neither right nor wrong, but only rough or smooth of surface, bright or dark of hue, sweet or bitter of taste or smell.  Most of those in the room belonged to a Freudian circle at their club, and all were anti-Christian, except an Irish Roman Catholic, who had taken an active part in the Easter uprising of 1916, since when he had been living in exile; Aunt Phyllis, who believed in no churches but in the Love of God; and of course, Mr. Digby.  All these people, though they did not always get on very well together, were linked by a common aim in life, and by common hatreds.

But, in spite of hate, the Red House lodgers were a happy set of revolutionaries.  Real revolutionaries; having their leaflets printed by secret presses; members of societies which exchanged confidential letters with the more eminent Russians, such as Litvinoff and Trotzky, collected for future publication secret circulars, private strike-breaking orders, and other obiter dicta of a rash government, and believed themselves to be working to establish the Soviet government over Europe.  They had been angry all this summer because the Glasgow conference of the I.L.P. had broken with the Third International.  They spoke with acerbity of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Snowden.  But now, in August, they had little acerbity to spare for anything but the government’s conduct of Irish affairs.

7

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.