Part 14

“Don’t worry about that, sir.”

Bertram’s father became absorbed in _The Morning Post_. After breakfast he retired to his study for an hour. At ten o’clock he drove down to the Temple. Occasionally he returned for dinner, but Bertram generally dined out, if he knew that his father was expected. At midnight, or thereabouts, Mr. Michael Pollard, K.C., M.P., having completed a day of arduous toil on behalf of law and order and the good governance of a great Empire, came home again, and retired to rest.

Bertram, at that time of night, was generally in his own room, pacing up and down, not aware that every footstep was heard by his wakeful mother. He was “thinking out a few things,” as he told her.

They were not pleasant things, nor easy. Since the war he had made a complete failure of his life. He had made a hopeless mess of his marriage. Here he was back again, in his bachelor state, in the little old room where, as a boy, he had lived in a dream world of hope and ambition. How many times he had sat on this bed, generally with one boot off and one boot on, looking into the unknown future with a boy’s impatience for its coming, thinking of love and its mystery, wondering about the girl who somewhere was waiting in the world to be his mate, to fulfil the vague and wonderful promise of life which as yet he saw only as on the threshold of its glory. Now he knew! He had met the girl of his vision, and she had abandoned him.

He had never thought of that possibility, when he had sat with Romance as his source of knowledge in this little room. That was before the War had come crashing into Romance with terrific realism. That was in old quiet days when it had seemed adventure enough to wander through London on journeys of exploration, and when books of travel, history, drama, were more exciting than anything that really happened in modern life.

He used to put his head out of this window looking down on Sloane Street, listening to the rush of traffic, after theatre time, until it was very quiet, and only a late hansom—the last of their kind—came with a klip-klop up the street, or a primitive “taxi” honked its horn. The sky was always quivering with the lights of London, above the chimney-pots, as high as the stars. The boy Bertram used to stare at that radiance, with his room all dusk behind him, so that his mother would be worried by his keeping awake—“reading in bed” was her passionate dread!—and it seemed to him like a mirage of life itself, with all its mystery and enchantment.

Ten years ago! Not more than that, though a whole life-time in experience. Four and a half years of war had intervened, awaking Bertram and the world out of false dreams and beatific visions. Four and a half murderous years, crammed with death, and horror, and heroism, and laughter, and boredom, and fear, and filth. Then a year of marriage—worse than war. More difficult than the technique of war, more nerve-racking, and more terrifying than death in the results of failure.

Here he was, after complete failure, back in his bachelor room, as Joyce was in hers! Yet not back again as before. Impossible to get back to the boy who was here in this room ten years ago. Those books on the shelves which had meant so much then, meant nothing now, had no comfort in them, no romance, no thrill of any kind, no wisdom. Not even Shakespeare, in the old Leopold edition, could give Bertram any solution to his problem of marriage with Joyce. Shelley, Browning, Laurence Housman, Kipling—all the poets he had loved—what could they tell him now? “Damn all!” as the men used to say in war time. Conrad, Stevenson, Quiller-Couch, Barrie,—Lord! he could hardly bear to look at them.

Over his mantelpiece were photographs of Dorothy and Susan, and a small boy—Digby—in knickerbockers and an Eton collar; Dorothy as a girl of eighteen, with her hair “up” for the first time, wonderfully pretty in an evening frock of a style now hopelessly old-fashioned; Susan as a girl of sixteen, with a short white frock, and long black stockings, laughing like a tomboy. The last few years of history had made a difference to them. Dorothy was Frau von Arenburg, a “Hun’s” wife; Susan the wife of an Irish rebel now in prison; Digby, the boy in knickerbockers, a Black and Tan. And Bertram, their brother, staring at these old photographs, touching his old books, sitting on his bed with his head in his hands, was ex-Major of machine guns, now unemployed, and ex-husband of Lady Joyce Bellairs, of Holme Ottery, in the county of Sussex.

He had received one letter from Joyce since that night at Holme Ottery. He had read it ten times or more, and then torn it up into small pieces.

MY DEAR BERTRAM:

The scene you made last night was inexcusable, except on the score that you are still suffering from shell-shock or some war neuritis. It’s impossible for us to live together while you continue in that mental state. I suppose your sudden departure this morning means that you are of the same opinion. Whether we ever come together again depends on you. When you can afford to keep me, and when you prove your loyalty to my ideals, I shall be glad to live with you again. Not till then. I’ve decided to give up Holland Street and stay here with Mother until Holme Ottery is sold, which I pray will not be soon.

I know you think I’ve been hard and “unsympathetic,” and unkind. Of course, there’s something to be said on your side. I know you’ve loved me in your passionate, emotional way, as much as any man could. I’m grateful for good times we had in the beginning. But that’s only one side of love, the animal side which I dislike. I want the other side of love, which is, surely, communion of ideas, comradeship in understanding, the same faith and code. That you’ve not given me. However—it’s past argument now.

Yours, JOYCE.

Past argument now! Well, he was not going to re-open the argument. So he told her in his answer to that letter. Perhaps he’d been a fool to write so much—sheet after sheet, revealing the secret things of his mind, the strain and stress of his nature, pulled two ways by two strains of blood, a conflict between old tradition and the new hopes of humanity, resistance to extremes of thought, so that he might plod along the Middle of the Road.

The strain and stress of his nature! He had made her understand, if words were plain, that she was the cause of his irritable temper, so much of his impatience. His love for her was passionate, as she said, and a man couldn’t suppress passion too long, without nerve-storms. Long before the child was born, and ever since, she had made no response to his emotion, and kept him at a distance, coldly. Her presence, the scent of her hair, the turn of her head, the touch of her finger-tips, made his thrill to her, but though she had been so close to him, always putting this strain upon his senses and his vital nature, she had repulsed him, resisted any intimate contact with him, deliberately held him in exile. She hadn’t played the game by him. She had shirked her marriage vows. She had made his married life an agony—and intolerable, because of the very greatness of his love! She wrote about communion of ideas. Yes, he agreed with that, utterly. But communion means exchange, give and take, a little yielding on both sides, tolerance, understanding. She had never troubled to get his point of view. She had never stood on tip-toes to see over his side of the hedge.

She had taken her stand with the Old Caste and the least liberal part of that, the extreme high and dry section of it, left behind by the great tide of changing life, now in England, at last, after the opening of the sluice gates by the shock of war.

He was not intolerant of her ideals. He was pulled back to them against reason, even, by old sentiment, the romance of history, by the very ghosts of England. He could understand her resentment of change which meant the downfall of Holme Ottery, as one symbol of a passing era. He understood and grieved with her, because he loved the old stones of England and every brick in every wall. But he saw the inevitability of change, the need and right of it.

He stood with his face to the future, not weeping with his head turned backwards to the past. He had tried to make her understand his view of life. She’d not troubled to understand. Because he had not agreed with abject submission to her ideas, her old-fashioned, out-worn creed, she’d used that word “traitor!” and cut his heart open.

As for his being able to keep her, he had understood that she wasn’t in a hurry for him to pay his board and lodging. They’d had that argument out before, and she had promised to give him time. She’d broken that promise—a week or so too soon! A little more patience, perhaps, and he would have proved his quality as a writing-man, by getting a fair price for hard work.

He had not been a slacker. He had slaved over his book, late into the night. He would have gone on slaving, joyously, to earn a decent living, to pay for the things she liked, to take his share of life’s costs.

Well, “it was past argument now!” Agreed! No further argument should come from him. Nor did he intend to crawl to her, whining, to be “taken back.” By God, no! If she wanted him, she would have to ask for him. She would have to beg him to return, without conditions, on equal terms, acknowledging his right, and persuading him of love. Otherwise, never. And perhaps never, even then, if she waited too long, for even loyalty couldn’t suffer too great a strain, though now he sent her his love. . . .

So he had written, or in some such way, all night, with spells of thought when he had laid his head down on his arms, and, even, had wept a little like a weak boy. She hadn’t answered the letter. It was “past argument, now!”

His mother worried him by trying to get at his secret. A dozen times a day she spoke about “dear Joyce,” and he had to fence with her until about a week after his coming back she broke down his guard, and he told her everything, or nearly everything. Then he was put into the absurd position of defending Joyce.

His mother was indignant with her son’s wife, called her a “selfish creature,” and a “heartless hussy,” and couldn’t understand at all how any wife could so behave to any husband. It was, she said, “the moral breakdown caused by the war.” English girls seemed bereft of their senses, judging from the daily papers, and all the dreadful divorce cases. Joyce was another example of that. She wanted, like all the others, nothing but pleasure. Duty never entered her head. Self-sacrifice for love’s sake was not acknowledged these days. She was merely an empty-headed creature, with bobbed hair and short skirts.

“Mother!” said Bertram, “I can’t let you speak of Joyce like that! She’s not in the least empty-headed. On the contrary, she’s stuffed full of knowledge and ideas. As for her bobbed hair, it’s the fashion, and a pretty one.”

Absurd—to be defending Joyce who had given him Hell! Yet he did so, time and time again, until at last he became angry, and said, “Let’s give up talking about it, mother, for goodness’ sake! You don’t understand Joyce’s point of view, or mine. It’s impossible to explain. I can’t explain it to myself. I only know that it’s a frightful tragedy.”

He hated to talk roughly to his mother. The love she had for all her children, now departed from her, was concentrated on Bertram who had come back for a little while. She could hardly bear him out of her sight, and often, when he went up to his room he heard her quiet footsteps outside the door. She was listening to his movements, standing near him, though outside the room. She was happy, or almost happy if he sat with her, holding her hand, or if she could watch him from the other side of the fireplace, while he sat back in a low chair, pretending to read the paper, and thinking, thinking of Joyce, and his loneliness, and what the devil to do with his life. Never quite happy, for always in her heart was grief over the exile of Dorothy in her German home, and anxiety about Susan who only sent post card messages from Dublin, saying nothing, and fearfulness on behalf of young Digby in the midst of civil war.

“It’s a dreadful world, Bertram,” she said, once. “As a young wife I was so happy with all my babies, and never dreamed of all the horror ahead—war, revolutions, famines, plague, endless strife. If only Queen Victoria could have gone on living, we might have been saved all that. She kept things safe by her virtue and wisdom.”

Bertram tried hard not to laugh, yet he laughed aloud at the idea of the poor old Queen “keeping things safe” in a world that was making ready for convulsion even in her time, by great natural moving forces that no mortal could restrain; not King Canute with the advancing tide, nor Queen Victoria in a changing era.

“Why do you laugh at me?” asked Mrs. Pollard.

He patted her hand.

“You still belong to the Victorian Age!”

“We felt safe in that time,” said his mother. “Now I don’t know what new terror will happen from day to day. There’s an awful uncertainty, everywhere.”

“It’s Reality breaking through Illusion,” said Bertram; but his mother, as he saw, did not understand him, and he did not try to make her understand. He was pitiful because of the troubles that had overtaken her in the last phase of her beautiful and faithful life.

Tears came into her eyes when he told her that he was spending the evening away from home. He had promised to call round again at Janet Welford’s flat in Battersea Park.

“I know it’s dull here alone with me,” said Mrs. Pollard, “but you hardly know the comfort it gives me to see you back again, now all my other dear birds have gone from the nest.”

“Never dull with you, little mother,” he said, bending to kiss her forehead. “But I like to see my friends at times. I’ll be back before you go to bed.”

But he stayed rather late with Janet, and wasn’t back until his mother had tired of waiting. She heard his step passing her door, and called out, “Good night, my dear!”

XXX

Janet Welford—“Janet Rockingham Welford” of fiction fame—was a source of comfort to Bertram at this time. She had a courage regarding life, a natural and unaffected buoyancy of character, whatever might happen in a world of tragedy, which shook him out of his morbid brooding while he was in her company. She carried over the audacity of her war-time spirit, when for a while she had driven an ambulance into the Belgian zone of fire, to that after-war period when most men and women felt drained of vitality, and suffered miserable reaction.

It was, perhaps, her daily service to the blinded men of St. Dunstan’s which kept her soul tuned to the old key of “carry on!” which had inspired masses of people during the years of conflict so that they forgot, or put on one side, their own griefs and cares, because of the great sufferings of others, and the common need of sacrifice.

That was her explanation.

“My blinded boys keep me healthy and vital and brave,” she smiled. “How the devil can I indulge in the megrims, sit down and sob over my woes of thwarted passion, gloom over the possible downfall of civilisation, or six shillings in the pound for income tax, when those blind boys have to be kept merry and bright to save them from despair and suicide? They just knock one’s egotism stone dead.”

“It’s splendid of you!” said Bertram.

Janet wouldn’t allow any kind of splendour to herself.

“Punk! It’s only another form of selfishness. They’re my soul-cure. If I didn’t laugh for their sakes, make up the most ridiculous and risky stories, to get a smile out of them, coerce myself to look on the bright side of life, so that I can reflect some sunshine into their sightless eyes, I should probably suffer from sex-complexes or other forms of beastliness. I serve them to save myself. That’s what I tell them, and they think it an excellent joke. ‘Have we done you good this morning, Miss?’ they ask, and I say, ‘You’re my Salvation Army, my lads!’ and that keeps us laughing round Regent’s Park.”

Bertram wondered sometimes whether Janet’s philosophy was not founded on tremendous pessimism rather than on unbounded optimism. A queer thought! Yet he had seen that kind of psychology working out to the same result, in France and Flanders, among the civilian folk.

French girls who had seen their little homesteads go up in fire under the enemy’s guns, peasants who had lost everything in the world, except life, by the invasion of the “Boche,” women who had lost fathers, husbands, lovers, brothers, acquired an astonishing serenity, even a gaiety of mind. Nothing seemed to matter to them now. Death itself was a “bagatelle.”

He had seen girls laughing as though at some fantastic joke, when they poked about the ruins of their cottages and found bits of old furniture, the wheel of a baby’s perambulator, the relic of some old familiar thing. It seemed to give life a different sense of proportion, annihilating its vanities, its greeds, its fears, its illusions. They were down to the bed-rock of frightful realities, and nothing worse could happen to them, and they were all “in the basket” together. Their fate was no worse, and perhaps a little better, than that of their neighbours.

So, in a way, it was with Janet. At least, he sometimes thought so. Her father, and then her young brother, had been killed in the war. Her mother had died of the anguish of these shocks. She herself had spent the years of war nursing mutilated men. It gave her that strange serenity of vision which for a time had come to many of those most stricken by war, though afterwards, when peace came, they collapsed.

She hadn’t collapsed. It seemed simply silly to Janet that English people should worry because trade was bad, and get alarmed about the prospect of social revolution, or excite themselves about the downfall of exchanges. She stared forward to the future with audacious vision, and demanded not a hark back to the old standards of comfort and tradition, but root and branch changes, bold experiments in social legislation, tremendous endeavours towards the building of a new world.

Anyhow, she was not afraid. Not of Bolshevism, not of poverty, not of any new tragedy that might emerge out of the chaos of a Europe convulsed by the effects of war.

“It’s all frightfully interesting,” she said, “and, anyhow, worry won’t stop the working out of Fate. Why be afraid of Fate? We shall all be dead quite soon. Let’s play the game out, and see it through, and pass the ball on to the next players, when we’ve had our innings.”

“That sounds good,” said Bertram, “but it doesn’t cure the heart-ache of a woman left alone because her man was killed in the war, or give any comfort to an unemployed man, hanging about Labour Exchanges in search of jobs that aren’t there. Your philosophy of devil-may-care won’t stop another bout of massacre in Europe if the Old Gang are allowed to play the fool again, or save the next generation of boys from being blown to bits in lousy trenches. We _must_ worry. It’s our duty to worry and find a scientific way of escape from all this madness.”

“I don’t call that worrying,” she answered. “I call that thinking straight and acting with courage. That’s our point of view in the ‘Left Wing.’”

“Oh, Lord!” said Bertram, “Your parlour Bolsheviks think all crooked, and have no more courage than lop-eared rabbits.”

Janet laughed without a trace of annoyance.

“Some of them are disgusting little egoists,” she admitted. “But, anyhow, they’re educating themselves, and frightening the Reactionaries. I like to see the Enemy getting scared.”

She used the word “enemy” to represent the Tory crowd—Joyce’s crowd—more especially the Countess of Ottery’s audience at the Wigmore Hall.

These political conversations ranged over wide fields of discussion, and Bertram seemed to amuse Janet by his efforts to moderate her extreme views. She became more violent to tease him into argument, and when he called her a Jacobin, who would knit below the scaffold when heads were falling, she retaliated by calling him a Girondin who would try to make revolutions with rose-water.

All this talk seemed to have relation to things happening, or likely to happen, away beyond Battersea Park, through the length and breadth of England.

The Coal Strike had begun. The railways had cut down their service of trains to a bare minimum. Factories were closing down in all the industrial towns. Millions of men were idle and living on strike pay. The Army Reserve had been called out, the Middle Classes were being recruited under the scheme of General Bellasis, and the Miners were in daily conference with the Engineers and Transport Workers, who were discussing the question of a general strike. If the “Triple Alliance” voted for that, not a wheel would turn in England, and civil strife would certainly break out, unless something like a miracle intervened.

So far no violence had happened. The miners had come up from the pits, and were whitewashing their cottages. They had made a fatal mistake already, alienating public opinion, which, until then had been steadily in favour of their side of the argument. The Pump men had been withdrawn from the pits, and some of the mines were already being flooded.

“A logical act,” said Janet. “The Pump men received their lock-out notices with the others. The mine-owners must take the responsibility.”

“Rotten tactics and bad morality,” said Bertram. “The men ought to safeguard their own means of life.”

So they argued, as all other men and women in England then, in every household where opinions differed on one side or the other, and where there was a sense of imminent disaster to the old foundations of civil life.

But of more intimate and poignant interest to Bertram was Janet’s frank talk about his private disaster—the failure of his marriage. She had asked blunt questions about his relations with Joyce, amazingly indiscreet and fearless questions, and after fencing with them awhile, he had told her the truth of things, with reticence and reservations, and a sense of loyalty to Joyce, so that he put down most of the cause of failure to his own stupidity and lack of patience.

Janet listened, cross-examined, probed his mental wound, with the skill and ruthlessness of a psychoanalyst.

“Very interesting!” she remarked, more than once, like a doctor diagnosing a difficult case.

“The inevitable clash of opposed temperaments,” was another remark of hers, delivered with an air of superior wisdom, and an amusement which she did not try to conceal.

“You’re not very sympathetic!” complained Bertram. “Not very helpful. What’s my way out of this mess?”

Janet said, “Forget it. Shove it away into your subconsciousness, and go on as though it didn’t exist. You’ll find that it all straightens out.”

She gave him the benefit of her diagnosis.

“It’s a case of sex-repression on your side, and of fear-complex on your wife’s side. Yours is a simple case. Perfectly ordinary. Nothing to worry about. Your wife’s case is more complicated.”

In response to Bertram’s plea for enlightenment, and his heated protest that he _was_ worrying, most damnably, Janet elaborated a thesis regarding Joyce.

Bertram’s wife, she said, was the victim of an early environment which had caused abnormality. She’d been sheltered since babyhood from all contact with the realities of life. She was never allowed to speak with “common people” on equal terms. They’d pulled their forelocks to “the little lady” when she had passed in her perambulator. They’d curtsied at the lodge gates every time she went in and out. She was made to believe that she was superior to the rest of the world, with the exception of other people like herself, who lived in other houses like Holme Ottery.