Part 15

The rest of mankind, to her child mind, was entirely taken up with the duty and honour and delight of providing a pleasant life to those born in the higher sphere—mowing the lawns, grooming the horses, clipping the hedges, polishing the floors, waiting at table, bowing silently when rebuked however unjustly, utterly dependent upon Lady Joyce Bellairs and her exalted family. She’d had no notion, as a child, that outside the parkland of Holme Ottery the world had moved on. The portraits of her ancestors in their silks and laces seemed to prove that her world, and theirs, had always been the same, and always would be, sheltered, protected, served, admired.

Then the war had come, breaking through the quietude of Holme Ottery, but not, for a while, smashing the old illusions. Joyce’s father had still played the great game of ruling the county as Lord Lieutenant. Alban had played the diplomatic game in the Foreign Office. Joyce’s friends had been officers, saluted by all men as they passed, holding authority even more firmly than of old.

It was only after the war that Joyce had been frightened.

She saw that Holme Ottery and all that it meant was threatened, that stupendous taxation was killing the old way of life for people like herself, destroying their sense of security, their power, their pleasaunces. And she had become aware of other perils; the bogey of Bolshevism, social “unrest,” a new insolence of men back from the war, no longer quick to pull their forelocks when the lady passed, but talking bitterly about their “rights,” their claim to work, and a living wage.

Joyce Bellairs was afraid of brutal forces threatening all that she had loved as a child, all that she had believed as a child. Her behaviour to Bertram was on account of that. It was a fear-complex. She loved him, but the very strength of her love made her brutal to him when he seemed to ally himself with the powers that made her afraid.

“It sounds all right,” said Bertram, listening a little impatiently, “but it’s all wrong! Joyce doesn’t understand fear. She has more than the courage of men.”

“Physical courage, yes. Not mental courage.”

“Besides,” said Bertram, “that doesn’t solve my problem. How am I going to live a single life, apart from Joyce, who is still my wife? How am I going to persuade her to withdraw that word ‘traitor’?”

“Give her time, and don’t worry,” was Janet’s answer to his conundrum. “A little separation will do you both good. Heavens alive! The constant companionship of marriage would be a strain on two archangels. I couldn’t bear it.”

“You’ve borne my company patiently for three evenings a week,” said Bertram.

“Yes, but not for three breakfasts! It’s breakfast that’s the test of love. Most people break over it, like boiled eggs.”

Bertram wasn’t sure how far Janet’s talk was sincere, how much she believed in her own absurdities. Perhaps she was behaving to him as she did to her blinded men, talking “any old thing”—to get a laugh out of them, to “keep their pecker up.”

He accused her of that once, and she blushed a little, as though found guilty.

He made her blush another time, when he spoke of Christy’s love for her.

“I suppose you know Christy worships you?”

She veiled her eyes with her long brown lashes, and said, “Yes, I know. . . . Poor dear old Plesiosaurus!”

“Why don’t you fix it up with him?”

A little smile played about her lips.

“‘He’s never asked me, sir, she said.’ And, besides, I haven’t told you that I requite his gloomy passion!”

“He’s one of the best in the world,” said Bertram.

She agreed, but said that the best were almost as difficult as the worst when it came to board and breakfast with them.

“Aren’t you human?” asked Bertram, half jestingly, half in earnest. “Don’t you need love, and the passion of life?”

She talked so frankly to him that he could speak like that.

That doubt about her humanity amused her exceedingly.

“Man!” she cried, “I’m a living Cleopatra without her Antony! If I were to ease up an instant on blinded men, political meetings, ‘Left Wing’ committees, audacious novels, and all manner of work, goodness knows what I should do in the way of amorous adventure. I go in for what the psychoanalysts call the sublimation of sex.”

“What the deuce is that?” asked Bertram.

“Transferring the emotion to intellectual aims. Producing books instead of babies. Reforming society instead of yearning for a kiss. Keeping busy on foolish, futile things, instead of wasting one’s energy in amorous dalliance. That’s my advice to you, young fellow! Cut out the emotional stuff for a time. Forget Joyce and marriage, and all this morbid love-agony. Life’s bigger than that. It’s only a little messy side of life. We make too much fuss about it, exaggerate the importance of the damn thing by always thinking and writing and talking about it. Go and make a revolution somewhere, or lead an expedition to find the living Megatherium, or write a book to ‘bust’ the falsity of things, or cut down trees in Canada, or convert cannibals to Christianity, or Christians to a decent code of honour, or make some plan for a higher civilisation, or some plan for destroying the civilisation we have—any good, straight, clean, manly job that’s not mixed up with the eternal soppy and sickly question of love and Louisa. Give it a miss, O Knight of the Rueful Countenance.”

Bertram shook his head.

“Human nature is human nature. It doesn’t give one any peace that way. It keeps on nagging.”

“Don’t let it nag. Crush the little devil down. Say, ‘Avaunt, you vampire!’ Look at me! A Cleopatra, yet beyond reproach, as Cæsar’s wife!”

She cheered him. There was something in her point of view. He must put the problem of Joyce out of his mind and heart as far as possible. Get busy! Well, he was writing some more articles for _The New World_. They helped him to forget.

And yet this girl, Janet, so gay, so kind, so wise, even in spite of her extravagance of thought and speech, was beginning to trouble him in the very way he wished to avoid, in the very way she derided and denounced.

She troubled him one night when she said suddenly, “A pity, Sir Faithful, that you didn’t marry me instead of Joyce! I understand you better. We think more on the same line. And you were my first Dream Knight, in the days when you kissed me in Kensington Gardens.”

It was just like her to come out with a startling thing like that, in a matter-of-fact way, as though it were nothing out of the ordinary, and undisturbing. He was strangely disturbed, and hardly knew what to say.

“Too late now!” was all he could say, and then laughed uneasily.

She troubled him again by the way she used to sit on a little low stool by his side when they were alone together in the evening or even when Katherine Wild was with them, leaning her head against his knees. He liked it very much because it was so comradely and sisterly, but he was human and separated from his wife, and not a disembodied spirit.

He was troubled more than all one night when he was leaving her and she put her face up to be kissed and said, “A chaste salute, Sir Faithful? Why not?”

He kissed her, and it was good in his loneliness. And yet not good in his conscience. For he had faith and loyalty, to Joyce who was his wife, though unkind to him, and to Christy who was his friend, and the lover of this girl.

As he went back to his mother’s house in Sloane Street, he spoke aloud the old catchword which was his usual comment on life:

“It’s all very difficult!”

XXXI

A thunderbolt struck the house in Sloane Street at half past eight one morning. It came, as other bolts had fallen upon men’s and women’s hearts during the time of the Great War, in a little pink envelope. This one was addressed to Bertram Pollard, and it came from Dublin.

_Dennis condemned to death execution Wednesday. Implore father’s influence. Susan._

Bertram was sitting at breakfast opposite her father, who was reading _The Morning Post_ as usual at this meal. His mother was pouring out coffee, and was aware instantly of his sudden indrawing of breath.

“Oh, Bertram!” she said, in a low voice. “Is it bad news?”

She slopped some coffee from the pot over the edge of a cup.

He was tempted to lie to her and say “Nothing much! A business matter,” but before the words left his lips he knew that honesty was best. She had seen his look of dismay, if he prevaricated, she would guess that the news was worse than this, though this was bad.

“It’s not good,” he said. “It’s about Susan’s husband.”

“That young scoundrel!” said his father, glancing over the top of his paper; “what infamy is he mixed up in now?”

Bertram read out the telegram, and saw his mother’s face change to a new tone of pallor, and the look of anguish in her eyes for Susan.

“‘Implore father’s influence.’” These words caused his father to drop _The Morning Post_ in which he was reading a terrific indictment of Sinn Fein with a sense of fierce enjoyment.

“I wouldn’t use a hairsbreadth of influence to save my own son from the hangman’s rope, if he were a Sinn Fein murderer.”

“He’s your own daughter’s husband,” said Bertram. “The relationship is fairly close.”

“Too close,” said Michael Pollard. “Susan dishonoured her name by that secret and shameful marriage. I’ll never forgive her. I’ve already given orders that her name will not be mentioned in my presence.”

He picked up the paper again, and pretended to read, very calmly. But his hands trembled, so that the paper rustled.

“My dear!” said Mrs. Pollard; “for our dear Susan’s sake, I implore you, as she implores you. I’ve been a faithful wife to you. I beg you now to use any power you have in a plea of mercy for that misguided boy.”

She had risen from her chair, and Bertram saw that she was more excited than he had ever seen her. She had a tragic look, and age had crept into her face suddenly, so that she seemed an old, old lady, very frail and broken.

His father lowered his paper again, and he too was startled, it seemed to Bertram, by his wife’s look and speech.

“My darling,” he said, “trouble falls heavily upon your poor soul, because of our children’s folly. But I can do nothing in this matter, even if I would. If the fellow has been condemned by court-martial, it’s clear that he’s guilty of murder. He must suffer the punishment of murderers. No power of mine can save him.”

“You can have an enquiry made. At least postpone this dreadful sentence! Michael, if you have any love for me, in my old age, and my weakness—”

She faltered forward to him, and would have fallen if Bertram had not sprung towards her and held her close.

“Mother! Courage!”

“My poor Susan!” she cried. “My dear little daughter!”

Mr. Pollard rose, pale now, like his wife, visibly distressed.

“I’ll see if there’s anything to be done,” he said. “I’ll make enquiry. Hush, Mother! Hush, now!”

She put her hand on his shoulder and wept miserably, and said, “For God’s sake, dear. I can’t bear it! This is the worst that’s happened yet.”

Bertram took her to the sitting-room, and left her there later, when she seemed more composed, though still trembling. He went to his father’s study, and entered without knocking, and saw his father standing with his hands behind his back, staring at the floor with a heavy frown.

“Father,” he said, “something’s got to be done about this. You must get to work quickly. It’s not long till Wednesday.”

Michael Pollard stared at his son with anger and suspicion.

“How much do you know about this?” he asked. “Did Susan tell you how many murders her precious husband has committed? How many of your fellow officers he has shot in cold blood?”

“I know nothing,” said Bertram. “Don’t talk to me, father, as if I were an accomplice of Dennis O’Brien.”

“You’re sympathetic with Sinn Fein,” said his father. “You sheltered this very man in your own house, I’m told.”

Bertram wondered how he knew as much as that, but didn’t ask.

“He was with me an hour or two. Susan brought him. But that’s nothing to the point. For mother’s sake you must do what’s possible, and quickly, sir!”

“There’s nothing possible,” said Mr. Pollard. “I know all about the case already. This man O’Brien has been found guilty of leading an ambush against British officers, two of whom were killed. He was captured on the spot, a week ago, tried yesterday, and condemned. I have the full report.”

So he knew before the telegram came! He had not thought it worth while to tell Bertram before or to guard his wife against the shock of the news.

Bertram begged him to put in a plea for mercy. It wouldn’t be ignored, because of his name and service to the Government. It might save O’Brien’s life, at least, and Susan’s life-long misery.

Michael Pollard’s face hardened.

“I speak to you more frankly, Bertram, than to your poor mother. For her sake I’ve already done as much as I can in honour. I’ve enquired into the proofs of guilt, into the Court Martial procedure. There’s no doubt of guilt, no flaw in the conduct of the trial. The Chief Secretary has favoured me with a private consultation. I told him, as I tell you, that I wish for no mercy on behalf of an Irish rebel who has fired on forces of the Crown, and killed men in British uniform.”

Bertram groaned, and quoted, not lightly, but in anguish, the old Shakespearean line,

“The quality of mercy is not strained.”

“Sinn Fein has no mercy,” said his father. “It’s ruthless and bloody and cruel.”

“Need we meet cruelty by cruelty?” asked Bertram. “Wouldn’t chivalry gain more for us?”

“Never!” answered his father harshly. “The Irish Catholics don’t understand the meaning of chivalry. These Sinn Feiners would stab a man in the back who held out his hand in friendship and forgiveness.”

“You’re Irish of the Irish!” said Bertram. “Your Irish blood is in my veins. We of all people should understand the passion of our race for liberty, their remembrance of old crimes against their faith and land, their frightful heritage of memory. I loathe this guerrilla warfare, but I understand its motives and impulses. In their spirit it’s as much a fight for liberty as that of any people who strive to free themselves from a foreign yoke. O’Brien’s deed was not real murder, at least in his soul and conscience, because it was an act of war—armed men against armed men, and ours with no right in Ireland, except that of ancient conquest. Surely there’s a difference. Surely as an Irishman, you see there’s no moral baseness in what O’Brien did? Except the madness of argument by blood and force for an ideal of liberty which might be gained by other means.”

“Every word you say convinces me that you’re on the side of the rebels,” said Michael Pollard. “You’re a traitor in my own household. I’ll be glad when you leave my house before I have to turn you out.”

It was the second time that Bertram had been called traitor. Once it was his wife who called him that. Now it was his father. He went white to the lips at the sound of it, and that last sentence of his father’s put passion into his brain.

“Did God make you without humanity?” he asked. “Is it for nothing that you’ve lost the love of all your children and now risk the love of the woman who bore them, and is stricken by your harshness in her old age?”

Michael Pollard’s face became ashen in colour at these words from his son. He took a step forward, and then raised his hand sharply.

“Silence, sir! I have one son who is a comfort to me, and to his mother. Digby does his duty and is loyal. I find no loyalty in you. I don’t wish to hear more of your rebellious insolence.”

“Then you refuse to raise a little finger to help Susan in her grief, or mother in her agony?” asked Bertram.

His father turned from him.

“Leave my room!”

Bertram left the room, and that night crossed over to Ireland from Holyhead. In his mind was the thought of three other people stricken by this tragedy—those three sisters of Dennis O’Brien, who would be weeping for him now, and praying still to God, who didn’t answer their prayers. The youngest of them—Jane—had said, “What’ll I do if Dennis is taken from us?” She’d had a foreboding of his fate, perhaps a knowledge of his guilt.

Guilt it was. Bertram sickened at the thought of that guerrilla warfare which he had tried to defend to his father, but couldn’t defend in his heart because of loyalty to England and hatred of cruelty. It was all madness and murder, though with some spiritual value behind it, and not ignoble passion. Those young men, mostly boys, who fought for Irish liberty, were willing to die for Ireland, went to their death on the scaffold like martyrs. Yet they adopted methods of war which were Red Indian in their savagery. On the other side, the British Government had abandoned all sanity, all statesmanship, all decency. By a series of stupidities, falsities, betrayal of pledges, they had maddened Irish manhood into this state of rebellion—at least had reopened old wounds, and revived old passions. Now they could find no other policy than that of coercion, meeting Terror by Counter-Terror, trying to break the spirit of the Irish people by raids, searches, shootings, burnings. God! What a horror, after the Great War! And what a mental agony for a man like himself, hating the methods of both sides, seeing the point of view from both sides, divided in sympathy, trying to keep to the middle of the road, between the two extremes. Once again he was called traitor, and felt the word like a wound in his heart. Traitor, though he was loyal to the truth as far as he could see it. Traitor, though he had pledged his soul to loyalty!

XXXII

It was a rough passage from Holyhead, and he felt sick in the smoking saloon, crowded with officers of the Royal Scots, among whom, silent and absorbed in thought or prayer, sat two Irish priests. There was a battalion of soldiers on board—mostly boys of nineteen or so—and most of them were horribly sick as they lay among their kit and rifles. They cursed Ireland, the War Office, Lloyd George, and other powers which had ordained this night passage across the Irish Channel and the “bloody job” at the end of it.

Bertram spoke a few words to one of the officers, a captain with a row of decorations. He had been on service in Ireland before, and was going back from leave.

“What’s it like over there?” asked Bertram.

“Like nothing on earth,” said the officer. “Worse than France, barring barrage-fire. One never knows when one is going to be sniped, or blown up by a bomb thrown from a side street. Not a gentleman’s job! A rotten dirty business.”

“What’s going to be the end of it?”

The young officer shrugged his shoulders.

“They’ll go on with this guerrilla game for centuries, unless we wipe out the whole lot. Another Cromwell show! Of course, I’m not supposed to hold opinions, but speaking privately, I’d give them anything less than a Republic, clear out British troops, and let them stew in their own juice. They’d fight like Hell among themselves. That would make less Irish in the world, and save a lot of trouble. What’s your view?”

Bertram’s view was much the same, with regard to “clearing out,” though he believed they wouldn’t go in for civil war among themselves if they had Dominion Home Rule.

“You don’t know them,” said the Captain of Royal Scots.

“I’m half Irish,” Bertram told him, and the officer said, “Oh!” suspiciously, and after that was silent and moved away.

The railway journey to North Wall was uneventful. The line was guarded by troops, and there were many soldiers in the train, wearing steel hats and full fighting kit. Boys again, sullen-looking, and with shifty, nervous eyes.

Then Dublin.

Bertram walked through the streets like a _revenant_. Dublin belonged to a former life. He had forgotten it for a thousand years—or was it only sixteen? He found his way to Merrion Square, and stood outside his father’s old home—Number 23—and gazed up at its windows through dirty lace curtains.

Inside one of those rooms he had first seen the light of day. Half-forgotten incidents of his childhood came back to him, vividly, with astonishing sharpness of detail. He remembered putting his head once through those railings and not being able to get it out again. That was when he was four years old, or thereabouts. Good Heavens! There were two of the railings bent, where his Irish nurse had pressed them apart with a cry of “Holy Mother of God!” Betty was her name. He remembered now. And there was the ring and wrought iron lion’s head of the door-knocker which he had just been able to reach on tip-toe, later in that early life of his.

He remembered “the Move”—the frightful excitement of it—when, at nine years of age, he had left this house with all the family, for England. He had wept bitterly at leaving, especially when his broken rocking-horse had been cast on to the scrap heap, with other wreckage of nursery life. He could remember the mangy tuft of hair on that wooden beast, and the smell of red paint which had once represented a saddle. He had kissed its wooden nose, and howled when it was taken from him for ever.

Betty had frightened him about England. “The English will skin you alive if you make a noise in their London town. . . . The English know nothing but hate for the Irish. . . . The English are a bad-tempered set of spalpeens, and there’s no truth in them at all.”

Dublin! . . . It was strange to be here among his own people, a foreigner among them. He had the English way of speech, the English way of mind. Some of them, especially the young men, scowled at him as he passed down Sackville Street. They knew him as English by the cut of his clothes, by the look in his eyes. They didn’t see the Irish strain of blood in him.

He looked at their faces as they pushed by. What was wrong with them? They were people haunted by some hidden fear. There was fear in their eyes. They kept glancing about them, uneasily, watchfully. Some men were nailing boards outside a shop window, and one of the planks fell on to the pavement with a slight crash. Instantly a group of people gathered round a shop window scattered and ran into neighbouring doorways. The men with the boards laughed. One of them called out, “No danger at all, at all!”—and in a moment or two men and women emerged from shelter, smiled at each other, and went their way again, with that nervous glance to left and right.

Haunted! Yes, that was the word. Many of the women had haggard eyes, drawn, pallid faces, little lines of pain about their mouths. They looked as though they had lost their sleep for nights or weeks. Their nerves were tattered. It was easy to see that by their sudden shrinking from any little noise, like the crack of a jarvey’s whip, or a boy’s shrill whistle.

They greeted each other like women Bertram had seen in French villages after mornings of great battle when the wounded had gone streaming by.

“Dear God!” said one woman to another as he passed.

“Mother of Mercy!” said another.

There was no mystery about it. Here, in Sackville Street were outward and visible signs of conflict, old and recent; the ruins of the Post Office and public buildings bombarded during the Rebellion of Easter Week in ’16, and new bulletmarks on the walls of shops, and through plate-glass windows. Many shops were barricaded. Others were shut up and barred. Women did their shopping through narrow entrances of stacked timber. It was a city of Civil War.

Worse than Civil War, thought Bertram, for here there was no knowing who was friend and who enemy. Any of these young Irishmen strolling by might have a bomb in his pocket, and hurl it at any man he had marked down, rightly or wrongly, as a spy, a detective, a Government official, a British officer in mufti. From any window or any roof might come the crack of a sniper’s bullet.