Part 10

He sat dumb among them at times because of their wild talk. They were pretty Bolshevists, who frightened him with their revolutionary ideals. The Russian experiment had not been revealed yet in all its ghastly failure, and they spoke lightly of Lenin as “the Master-mind,” and had a sentimental affection for Trotsky as “the new Napoleon,” and refused to believe a word of the atrocity stories manufactured, so they said, by propagandists of the White Armies at Riga and Helsingfors.

Bertram wondered what would happen to his exalted Mother-in-law, if she were suddenly to be transported from Holme Ottery to that flat in Battersea Park, and heard such discourse. He wondered what would happen to himself, if she saw him there, surrounded by these pretty witches. Not pretty all of them! Janet’s best friend, Katherine Wild, was a snub-nosed woman, with short hair cut like a man’s, but with courage and comedy in her grey eyes. She and Janet made the pace in conversation, egged each other on to new extravagances, made one great jest of life.

It was but verbal flippancy. Bertram remembered Janet’s devotion to the blinded soldiers of St. Dunstan’s. From Janet he knew that Katherine Wild devoted all her life to the starving children of the devastated countries in Europe, as the organiser of relief. She had been working in the soup kitchens of Vienna, and knew, as few others, the agony of Austria. It was the knowledge of life’s tragedy that made her seize at any of life’s jokes, and make a religion of laughter. Her great hope was to get into Russia and to extend the work of relief to that country, which was still blockaded by the rest of Europe because of the menace and fear of Bolshevism.

“I shan’t have seen the depths of human misery,” she said once, “until I’ve crossed the frontier into Russia.”

“Do you want to see the depths?” asked Bertram.

“The uttermost depths. Until then my knowledge of life won’t be complete. You must go there too, Mr. Pollard!”

“Why?” asked Bertram.

She told him that Janet had spoken to her about his book on the war. The last chapter couldn’t be written until he’d been to Russia. There was the aftermath of Armageddon. After War, Famine, and after Famine, Pestilence. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden through Russia, and the noise of their hoofs could be heard in Western Europe, coming closer, closer. In Russia Europe might read the writing on the wall.

“It’s the key to the riddle of the New World,” she said. “By what happens in Russia, and the world’s reaction thereto, we shall know our fate.”

Strange how he could never escape from talk about Russia! In Joyce’s crowd he had listened constantly to tales of Red Army atrocities, the sufferings of the old régime. In this crowd he listened to denunciations of White Army cruelties, and the sufferings of Russian peasants.

Once he lost his temper, and flared out into violent speech which might have forfeited him the friendship of Janet Welford, if she had not been enormously broad-minded, with an all-embracing sense of humour.

With her women friends he could be patient, whatever they said, for they had a sincerity of idealism which was proved honestly by service in some human way, with sick children, or suffering men, as nurses, guardians of the poor, workers in University settlements, guides to blinded soldiers. But some of Janet’s men friends seemed to him poisonous.

They were members, mostly, of that club, “The Left Wing,” into which she had desired, vainly, to beguile him. But he saw the types in her rooms, and didn’t like the look of them. They were egoists, conceited with their own superior “idealism,” _poseurs_ of rebel philosophy, amateur Jacobins, without passion or sincerity.

Two of them were young men who had escaped service in the war by going to prison as Pacifists. No doubt that needed greater moral courage in a way than surrendering to the general tide of emotion and faith by getting into khaki. Theoretically he admitted the right, even the nobility of men who for conscience’ sake, religious belief or spiritual abhorrence of war—like the Quakers—dared public contumely by refusing services at such a time. It was contrary to his own convictions, for though he hated war, and knew its insanity, he believed that when once a people had become involved, they must stand in defence of their own country and of their own homes. Still, he understood the reasoning of men morally and utterly convinced of the Christian command, “Thou shalt not kill.”

But these young men who came to Janet’s flat had been Pacifists when their country was threatened, and now were revolutionists, talking very glibly of Lenin’s right to destroy the enemies of Russian liberty, and of the glorious prospect of a world revolution for the overthrow of the Capitalist system.

It was a young man named Lucas Melvin who aroused Bertram’s rage. Talking in the affected accent of Christchurch, at its worst, and playing with a silk handkerchief which he had drawn from his shirt cuff, he proclaimed his belief that Labour was about to overthrow the Government by “direct action.”

“This coming strike,” he said, “will lead to a general paralysis of industry. All the Trade Unions will unite for general action. I anticipate the pleasure of seeing a number of Profiteers and _bourgeois_ hanging on the lamp-posts in Whitehall. _Vive la Révolution Anglaise!_”

This speech was received with laughter and applause, and the company was surprised when Bertram rose slowly from his low chair by the fireside, and stood with his back to the mantelpiece, glowering at Lucas Melvin, as though preparing to knock him down.

“I can’t pass that!” he said.

“Pass what, dear sir?” asked Melvin.

“That damned, insincere, and dangerous nonsense of yours.”

Melvin protested that he didn’t like those coarse words. He also objected to Bertram’s method of argument. It was neither elegant nor polite.

“It’s not so coarse as revolution,” said Bertram, bitterly. “It’s more polite than a revolutionary mob would be, if they caught you with a silk handkerchief up your sleeve. Don’t you realise that if you and other young fools who play about with the revolutionary idea were ever to find yourselves in that state of things, your necks would be wrung first by a mob that’s not out for elegance? They’d just wipe you out like midges. Don’t you understand that if England were to go in for revolution, all Europe would be dragged down with her, and war would be child’s play to that anarchy and horror?”

“I see you belong to the reactionary set,” said Melvin, with an air of bravado, but his voice was not quite steady. “Doubtless you uphold the principles of _The Morning Post_.”

“I try to see things with commonsense,” said Bertram, “not like a child, ignorant of realities. I’ve seen war. I don’t want to see revolution. I imagine it’s worse.”

It was Janet who poured oil on the troubled waters.

“Sir Faithful,” she said, “verily you speak the words of truth and wisdom. This child has been well rated. But of your mercy, remember that this is a bower of fair ladies, and not a tilting-ground for angry knights.”

“Sorry!” he said, and his rage died down. Lucas Melvin retired hurt, and soon the others went, leaving him last, and alone with Janet.

“I behaved like a ‘muddied oaf,’” he said. “Do you forgive me?”

She forgave him so well that she sat on the floor by his side with her hands clasping her knees, talking about the queer complexities of life, the muddle in human nature, the mixed motives of men and women. Presently she told him that he had better go home. It was unfair to his wife to stay so late.

“Joyce won’t be back yet,” he said, “and I hate going home to a lonely house.”

She looked up into his face searchingly.

“I’m afraid your married life is not all it should be. Whose fault?”

“Mine,” he said.

She told him that if he weren’t so beastly timid, she would get down to the secret of the trouble.

“I’d like to help,” she said.

“You’re helping,” he told her, and then something seemed to warn him that this was not playing the game by Joyce, and that he was losing hold of the loyalties to which his soul was pledged. Janet was helping him too much. In a little while he might not be able to live without her help, her sympathy, her understanding, her comradeship. A sudden movement he made, drawing back from her a little, surprised her.

“What’s the matter, Faithful?”

“I’d better go. After all, it’s getting late.”

But it was only ten o’clock, and not too late for a visit from Christy. The maid had let him into the hall, and they hadn’t heard him enter, and were not aware of him until he came into the room.

“Hullo!” he said. “Where’s all the party?”

“Faithful broke it up, with violence.”

Janet rose from her seat on the floor by Bertram’s side and held her hand out to Christy like a Princess. He kissed it with warmth, and said, “The Ugly Beast pays homage to Divine Beauty.”

“The handsome Megatherium to the beautiful Pterodactyl!” said Janet.

They were acting in the usual way, but Bertram was aware of some state of tension in the room. Christy was not quite at his ease, nor Janet quite natural.

“Going so soon?” asked Christy, as Bertram went towards the door.

“I’ve been trying to go for half an hour.”

“Then stay not on the order of your going, but go!”

Christy laughed at the old quotation spoken by Janet, but Bertram saw a queer look in his eyes, of shyness or distress. Was old Christy jealous of him, because of his comradeship with Janet?

Ridiculous!

XXII

Christy’s criticism of Bertram’s book was not devastating. He suggested merely the elimination of certain passages which seemed to him libellous against a certain General, and said simply, “You can’t afford a law suit,” when Bertram protested violently that he intended to libel the old scoundrel, but hadn’t been half strong enough in his character study of a blood-thirsty Junker, ruthless of men’s lives. His praise was limited to a few words, but magnificent to a man who knew him as Bertram did.

“You can write. You know the right words.”

That was good enough from Christy, hard critic, and honest as death. He asked Bertram to let him send the book to Heatherdew, the literary agent, and his friend. He would find a publisher, if any man could, and take a personal interest in it, as a hater of war.

Bertram wanted to know how many weeks he would have to wait before the book appeared, and what payment he was likely to get, an impatience which amused Christy, who had more experience.

“It can’t be out till the autumn, at earliest.”

“Not till the autumn! Good Heavens!”

“It’s not accepted yet, old man. Hang on to patience.”

He conveyed a suggestion to Bertram from Bernard Hall of _The New World_. Why not write an article, dealing generally with the threatened strike? Hall suggested a title: “The Mind of the Men,” on the lines of Bertram’s talk about the Comrades of the Great War and their point of view. What Bill Huggett had told him, and so on. It would be a valuable contribution, with knowledge at first hand, not easy to get.

“I’ll have a shot,” said Bertram. “Do you think the strike is likely?”

“Inevitable, I’m told. Nat Verney knows.”

For some time Christy discussed the possibilities of trouble. The Government seemed to be asking for it. It was true about calling out the Army Reserves. They also proposed to recruit the Middle Classes for self-defence. That would divide England into the Haves and the Have-nots. A short-sighted policy at such a time, when all such clear-cut distinctions ought to be avoided. Big Business, with the Government in league with it, was out to smash organised Labour. The plan was to defeat it in sections, first the miners, then the railway men, then the engineers, then the other great trades. It was to be a general campaign to bring down wages to pre-war rates. A sound policy, if prices came down to the same level, but there was about as much chance of that as of friendship between France and Germany!

“Low wages and sweated labour! That’s the watch-word now. No ‘Homes for Heroes,’ and other fine cries which went very well in war-time.”

Bertram thought it was unfair to the men.

“It’s a damned outrage!” said Christy.

For some time the two friends were silent. They knew each other well enough for long silences. Christy’s cheap clock on the mantelpiece ticked with a little staccato tattoo. They did not trouble to switch on the light, but sat smoking in low chairs on each side of the fire-grate in which a few coals burned in a heap of white ash. Christy drew hard at his pipe now and then, and a little red glow lit up his long, lean face with its deep sunken eyes and bulging forehead. Down below, in Adelphi Terrace, or its neighbourhood, some ex-soldier was playing a one-string fiddle, not badly, but with long-drawn melancholy. Cavalleria Rusticana—they all played that. Down the Thames, beyond the Tower Bridge, no doubt, a steamer was sounding its siren. The Batavia boat, off to Holland, or a river tug moving. The murmur of London, the voice of its enormous life and traffic, made the windows throb, and above its low-toned rhythm, the horns of motor-taxis bleated incessantly.

Christy stirred, and poked the dying fire with his boot.

“I’d like to see how this strike works out. I want to be in England if there’s any real trouble. But I’m off again.”

“Already!”

Bertram was distressed. He hung on to Christy’s comradeship. Here, in these rooms, was a sanctuary into which he could take refuge from the worries of life, or at least could ease them, by unloading his pack awhile, and sorting it out with old Christy. It was not so much Christy’s words which helped him, but his presence. They’d been together in dirty places during the war. They had sat in the same mud-holes, listening to shells overhead, and expecting death together. They knew each other’s courage and fears. Christy had wept once, when his _moral_ had broken for a while. He had just cried like a child when the sergeant was blown to bits, not because of any love for the sergeant, but because of the beastliness and unending misery of it all. Bertram had been on the verge of shell-shock once. He was afraid of being afraid. Supposing he let down the men, played the coward, or something? Christy had strengthened him then. They knew each other—in weakness as well as in strength. He hated to think of Christy going away again so soon.

“Where now?” he asked.

“Berlin for a start. Then—perhaps Moscow. I’ve asked for permits.”

“Moscow!”

Christy grinned, and confessed it sounded like asking for the tiger’s cage to be opened. But he wanted to get into Russia, and _The New World_ had asked him to go. It was impossible to find out the truth of what was happening there. Everything one read was a manufactured lie. He wanted to know the truth. He would be restless until he found out. Was there anything at all to be said for the Russian experiment—Communism? It was no good talking about Bolshevik atrocities. They weren’t Communism. He wasn’t sure of them, anyhow, but if they’d happened, they belonged to the realm of that murder mania which overtakes people in times of war and revolution. He wanted to see how the system worked, whether it was any solution of Capitalist civilisation. It was absurd to pretend that Western civilisation was the last word in human wisdom and scientific organisation. The profiteer was in himself a denial of that! Perhaps, with all their blunderings and cruelties, Lenin and his crowd had caught hold of some sound idea. Perhaps it was the beginning of a new era in social history. He wanted to see for himself, to know. He had no preconceived ideas. He was out for the truth, whatever it might be.

“I’m afraid you’ll go Bolshevik!” said Bertram. “If you do, our friendship ends.”

He spoke the last words lightly, but not without sincerity and fear.

“I’ll let you know,” said Christy. “A post card will do. ‘I’ve gone Bolshy.’”

He laughed at the thought of the postcard travelling from Moscow with its awful message to the outer world. Probably the censor would seize it. It would be burnt at the end of a pair of tongs, lest it should spread sedition. Bertram’s world would never know. At some future date he might hear of his former friend leading a Red Army against Poland, or sitting with a long white beard, like Karl Marx, in the Kremlin, ruling Russia.

It was some minutes later when Bertram asked a question sharply:

“Have you told Janet Welford?”

Christy poked the fire, and put it out, with great deliberation.

“No.”

“Christy, old man,” said Bertram presently, “is there anything between you and Janet—I mean in the way of love and that sort of thing?”

Christy laughed, and rose to look at himself in the glass, and laughed again.

“With this ugly mug? Does the Neanderthal Man indulge in amorous dalliance with beautiful women of the Georgian era? What a horrible thought!”

“She loves you this side idolatry,” said Bertram.

Christy suddenly flamed out in anger, and it was the first time Bertram had ever seen him lose control.

“Damn you, Pollard! Why can’t you leave that subject alone? What right have you to talk of Janet at all? She used to come here often before you spent all your evenings in her rooms.”

Bertram was astounded and overwhelmed by this sudden outburst. So Christy _was_ jealous of him! Christy—of all men in the world!—whom he would no more hurt than cut off his own right hand!

He went over to him, and grabbed his shoulder.

“Why, you silly old ass! Do you think I wanted to barge in between you and Janet? What about Joyce, and my loyalty to her?”

Christy’s gust of rage died down as quickly as it had risen, and he was pale and ashamed.

“Sorry, Pollard! Fact is, you touched the wrong nerve. I love that girl Janet like an infatuated Romeo. She sets my frog’s blood on fire. That’s one reason I’m off to Moscow. Running away!”

“Why run?” asked Bertram. “Why not tell her?”

Christy gave another whimsical look at his face in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

“Not in that mug, laddie! Besides—now we’re talking—I’ve got a wife, too, don’t you see, although I don’t live with her? And anyhow, this damned old world of ours don’t lend itself to love-making just now. It’s falling into ruin, and I’m busy watching it. The human equation doesn’t seem to matter, and the ghosts of dead boys, who were robbed of life before their time, mock at my senile passion. I ought to know better at my time of life. I’ll be forty-five in Moscow!”

He made only one other reference to the subject. It was when Bertram left his rooms that night.

“Referring back,” he said, “I might say a parting word, laddie. If you’re not cut out for disloyalty—and it needs a special temperament—cut and run when loyalty’s over-strained. It’s the safest way. . . . And Moscow is an interesting place.”

They gripped hands and wished each other luck. Luck to the book. Luck to the adventure.

“Dashed funny thing—life,” said Christy, leaning over the staircase as Bertram went down.

“It’s all very difficult!”

They both laughed. They had spoken the same words a thousand times in France.

All very difficult! Yes. Bertram, going home, wondered whether Janet Welford had more than a whimsical affection for Christy. How old Christy had fired up! He never suspected him of passion—and at forty-five! Time for the fires to burn out. . . . He also wondered whether Joyce understood the meaning of love. Something would have to be done to make her understand, or his life, and hers, would be utterly spoilt.

XXIII

Bertram had just read his first newspaper article, entitled “The Mind of the Men”—Bernard Hall’s title—in that week’s issue of _The New World_, when he heard his name called from the next room by Joyce. There was a note of emotion in the sound of that call, and he went to her quickly, wondering if she had hurt herself.

She was standing by the side of her writing desk, holding an illustrated paper—_Country Life_—with a look of amazement and alarm.

“What’s the matter, Joyce?”

She pointed to a photograph, and said, “It can’t be true!” He saw at a glance that it was a view of Holme Ottery from the west wing, with its stone, ivy-covered terraces, and broad flight of steps leading down to the tennis lawn and rose-garden. It was just there, coming up from the tennis court, that he had heard of Rudy’s death, when Ottery had handed the telegram to his wife, fingering his red beard and staring across the grounds with watery eyes. There was the Venus with her broken nose, and the copy of the Goose Boy of Pompeii.

“Holme Ottery,” said Bertram. “Why not?”

It was always being photographed for the magazines.

Joyce pointed to some words above the picture, and said, “Can’t you see?”

The words were—“Historic House for Sale.”

Holme Ottery for sale? No, impossible! It had been in the Bellairs family for four hundred years or more. It was a part of English history. Its beauty, its tradition, its ghosts, its very soil, belonged to the spirit of the family that had played some part, not insignificant, in the making of England—as soldiers, courtiers, statesmen. It was Alban Bellairs, Earl of Ottery, who had been one of Elizabeth’s favourites before he died with Essex on the scaffold. Rupert Bellairs, fifth Earl, had been an exile in Holland with Charles II., and afterwards Master of the Horse at Whitehall. Joyce Bellairs, the great-great-grandmother of this Joyce, was the famous beauty to whom Steele wrote some of his sonnets. Holme Ottery was in the history books. It meant all that and more to this girl, his wife. Every fibre of her body belonged to that heritage. The tradition of her house was the corner-stone of her own spirit. In pride and faith she was a Bellairs of Ottery, this girl whom he—a young officer “without a bean”—had married when War had broken down for a time the strongest thing in English life, which was caste.

“Some mistake—” he said.

Joyce was weeping passionately. He had never seen her weep before, and it hurt him poignantly. He put his arms about her, trying to say words of comfort, but she shook herself away from him, and paced up and down the room like an angry boy. It was anger which dried her tears.

“Father’s done this without saying a word to me! Even Mother hasn’t written! It’s treachery to the whole family. I won’t allow it.”

Bertram was silent. He remembered what his father-in-law had said to him outside the House of Lords—something about Holme Ottery bleeding him to death.

“Do you think Alban knows?” he asked.

As the eldest son, Bellairs must have been consulted, must have given his consent to sell.

“Alban is weak as water! Father may have talked him over. I’ll go down this very day, and let ’em know what _I_ have to say on the subject!”

Later she rang the bell, and told Edith to pack her bag.

“I’ll come with you,” said Bertram.

Joyce didn’t seem to think there was any need for him to come.

“It’s a family affair,” she said, coldly.

A family affair? Oh, yes, he was outside the family. Merely the insignificant husband of a Bellairs. His voice would have no weight in the family councils. He was just a damned outsider, tolerated as an unfortunate _mésalliance_—Joyce’s mistake. Perhaps Joyce guessed a little at those thoughts of his, as he stood silent, with flushed face, raging inwardly at the humiliation which her words made him feel.

“I didn’t want to drag you into a family row,” she said. “But you’d better come, after all.”

It was in his mind to say that he would be damned if he went, that he had no intention of being patronised by the supercilious Alban, his detestable brother-in-law, or bullied by Lady Ottery, his exalted Mother-in-law. But the sight of Joyce’s tear-stained face restrained him. The news that Holme Ottery was up for sale was a blow at her heart, as he could see by her unusual pallor. He would be a cad to quarrel with her now, and thrust his own personality forward in the family tragedy.