Part 2

He remembered there were other tragedies in life besides his own, more death than that of his still-born child when he bought an evening paper at the Underground station in the High Street, Kensington, on his way to his father’s house in Sloane Street.

“Six deaths in Dublin to-day. Serious Ambush. More reprisals.”

Those were the headings on the front page, and he felt sick at the words, and wouldn’t read the details. The same thing as usual. British officers fired at and killed by boys in civilian clothes. Young Irishmen dragged out of their beds and shot in cold blood by “unknown men, said to be in uniform.” Irish homes burnt by the military. Raids, bomb outrages, searches—the usual daily record of anarchy in Ireland which was becoming intolerable in his soul because of his divided allegiance as half an Irishman and half an Englishman, half a democrat and half a Tory, half a Protestant and half a Catholic, at least, he hoped, a Christian. He opened the paper as he sat in the district train, and saw his father’s name on the centre page:

“Great Speech by Mr. Michael Pollard, K.C.: Defends Government Policy of Reprisals.”

Bertram crushed the paper in his hands, and dropped it on the seat by his side. It was his father’s field night. He would enjoy himself vastly upholding the “absolute necessity of putting down these murders with the firm hand of British Justice,” appealing to the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, denouncing those who would treat with rebels to the Crown and “shake hands with murder.”

Well, it would keep the governor late at the House. That was the only comfort. He would be able to see his mother alone, and avoid a savage altercation with his father, who treated him as a traitor to the British Empire—Bertram Pollard, D.S.O., M.C., who had been three times wounded in the Great War, and loved England with a kind of passion.

“Mother!”

She met him in the hall of the house in Sloane Street, and at the sight of her little figure and sad face, his jangled nerves, so tautly drawn during Joyce’s long ordeal, gave a kind of snap, and when he put his arms round her he dropped his forehead on to her shoulder, and his eyes filled with tears, as in the old days when he came home from school, or left her after the holidays.

“My poor boy!” she said soothingly, “I understand. . . . I’m sorry about the poor little baby.”

She took him by the hand into her small sitting-room and asked him to tell her all the details of his ordeal.

“Joyce’s ordeal, mother!” he said, but she shook her head, and said, “It’s worse for the men, if they’re sensitive. The agony of waiting—”

There were many things he wanted to tell his mother, this little woman with her thin grey hair, and her worn face and kind brown eyes, to whom, as a boy, he had told all his secrets, confessed all his peccadilloes, and had no worse reproof than “Oh, darling!” She had spoilt him as she had spoilt all of them, Dorothy, Susan, young Digby, and himself, shielding them from their father’s harsh and hasty temper, his Irish impatience, his old-fashioned Protestant intolerance—he was Southern Irish, but Protestant—with any license of youth. She had even told “fibs” to shield them, and they had loved her for it, and traded abominably on her fear of “the governor” and his sudden rages.

She was more afraid of him than they had ever been. Even as small children they had defied his authority. Dorothy had been the greatest rebel, long before her marriage to a Prussian officer whom she had met at Wiesbaden, in 1912, when already there was a whisper of war with Germany—pooh-poohed by Dorothy, as by many others who knew nothing in those days about international politics, and cared less. That was her last rebellion. Michael Pollard, K.C., M.P., had wiped his daughter out of his mind and heart. He hated “the Hun” worse because of her.

And Susan! . . . She took a pleasure in braving his wrath—“our Ogre,” as she called him. She never tired of maintaining her right to breakfast in bed, which he denounced as “the slummocky instinct of her wild Irish blood.”

“Your blood too, father, and no fault of mine!” was her answer to that particular argument, to which “the governor” would answer, “Thank God the Norman strain is stronger than the Celtic, as far as I’m concerned.” She had ridiculed his Protestant austerity, flouted his parental commands as “Early Victorian tyranny,” and had become a Suffragette with a joyous assertion of “liberty” which meant for her late dances and no questions, rather than Votes for Women, at a time when Michael Pollard, M.P. (not K.C. then) was a violent antagonist of Women’s Rights.

Bertram had taken Susan’s part in these domestic scenes, but Dorothy had been his favourite sister, his best comrade, and her German marriage, and long exile and silence during the years of war had made a gap in his heart.

He spoke of her now.

“Have you heard from Doll lately?”

Mrs. Pollard looked nervously at the door and pulled out some letters from a little bag by her side.

“Your father doesn’t know I hear from her. You know he forbade all intercourse.”

“Rubbish!” said Bertram.

His mother confessed to a sense of guilt in having this secret from her husband, but it was more than she could bear to be cut off for ever from her first-born.

“She writes lovingly. Her marriage—and the War—have made no difference, except that she defends Germany a little.”

Bertram smiled at that, and said, “I suppose it is natural, but it takes a lot of doing, as far as the war’s concerned.” He asked about his other sister.

“What’s Susan’s latest game?”

Mrs. Pollard looked distressed. Again she gave that frightened glance at the door, as though her husband might come in at any moment.

“I’m afraid, Bertram! The child is devoted to the Sinn Fein cause! It’s a passion with her, like Votes for Women used to be. Your father threatens to turn her out of doors if she says another word on the subject. There was a dreadful scene yesterday morning.”

Bertram could imagine it. Susan delighted in dreadful scenes. She was an Irish rose, with many thorns, sharply pointed. No Norman coldness in _her_ blood! None of her mother’s Devonshire softness.

Mrs. Pollard revealed more than an ordinary anxiety.

“I’m afraid Susan will get into trouble. There was a policeman here a few days ago.”

“A policeman? Sounds like melodrama!”

“He wanted Susan to give him the address of a young Irishman named Dennis O’Brien. Susan denied all knowledge of him, but I know she has been corresponding with the boy.”

Bertram said, “My God!” and then begged his mother’s pardon. He hid from her his own reason for alarm. He knew Dennis O’Brien. The boy had been in the machine-gun corps with him, and he had heard news of him from Ireland. It was not news to be talked of lightly. He was up to the neck in Sinn Fein.

“Where’s Susan now?” he asked abruptly.

Mrs. Pollard’s hands fluttered up to her forehead.

“Do I ever know? Modern mothers aren’t taken into their daughters’ confidence. They come and go as they please, and resent all questioning. It wasn’t so in my young days.”

Bertram smiled at the last words. How often he had heard them! How often he and the two girls—rebels three—had laughed at them, years back, as children. His brother Digby, now a “Black and Tan” in Ireland—horrible thought!—had been too young to enjoy the joke.

He lingered on, forgetting Joyce a little, and his dead baby, feeling a boy again with this mother whose love was restful, and all-understanding. They talked of old times, and she wept a little because so much was altering and she felt so much alone, now that Digby, her baby boy, had gone to Ireland in the midst of all that terror.

She made no allusion to Joyce’s share in her loneliness. Joyce did not seem to like her much and kept Bertram away from her more than was quite kind.

Bertram guessed her thoughts.

“When Joyce gets better, we’ll see more of you, mother.”

“That will be nice, dear,” she answered quietly, but not hopefully.

He left her before midnight, and was back again in Holland Street before the Houses of Parliament had finished a long debate on the Irish situation.

He saw by next day’s papers that his father’s speech was reported _verbatim_, but he didn’t read it.

V

Joyce was slow in getting about. “Wants cheering up,” said the nurse who still stayed on. “But I can’t allow visitors yet. It’s up to you, Major!”

Bertram did his best to cheer her up, and went in and out of the bedroom bringing flowers, books, illustrated papers, and making bright remarks about the weather and things in general. But he was not a great success. Joyce seemed to be fretting, and was in low spirits. She brightened a little when the nurse manicured her, and when a Truelove’s girl came to curl her “bobbed” hair. She was also amused by the number of callers who came to enquire about her health, sending up messages and so many flowers that Bertram’s gift of bloom looked insignificant. Every time she heard the bell ring she wondered which of her friends it might be—Billy Simpson, Nat Wynne, Peter Fynde—Kenneth Murless—?

“Has Kenneth called yet?” she asked Bertram, and when he said, “Half a dozen times, I should say!” she looked at him in an amused, challenging way, and said, “Nice Boy! I think nurse must let me ask him to tea.”

Bertram restrained a sudden pang of jealousy. He mustn’t get back to that absurdity. After a short silence which Joyce understood, he suggested meekly that it might be as well to see members of the family first—her mother, for instance, and his, and Susie, his sister. They would be rather hurt if others were let in while they were kept out.

Joyce made a comical grimace.

“What a boy you are for the conventions! Of course I must see Mother—though I don’t see why I should see mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. It would be far more fun to have Kenneth, and some of my own set. A rowdy little tea-party to celebrate my return to Society!”

“Lord! Don’t return to that sort of thing,” said Bertram hurriedly.

“What sort of thing?” asked Joyce, coldly.

He avoided a direct answer.

“Let’s be quiet for a bit. You and me. I want to think things out. I must get some kind of work—”

“My tea-parties won’t prevent you,” said Joyce.

She sat up in bed, and her cheeks flushed.

“Don’t let’s get back to the old arguments, Bertram. I give you a free hand. I’m not jealous of any of your friends—though I think that Socialist creature, Christy, has an evil influence on you. I insist on having my own friends, and meeting them when and how I like. If you don’t trust me, it’s an insult to my sense of honour.”

“My dear Kid!”

Bertram spoke with profound humility and compunction. Of course he trusted her. There was no harm whatever in anything she did. He knew perfectly well that her comradeship with Kenneth Murless was straight and clean and sweet—although he hated it because of his jealous love of her, hated all the people who surrounded her and edged him out of that absolute monopoly for which he craved.

“I shall ask Kenneth to tea to-morrow,” said Joyce in a determined way, “and, then, any of the crowd who want to see me. I’m tired of this sick-room business. Never again, I hope, after this experience!”

“Ask any one you like,” said Bertram. He bent over to kiss her, but she turned away from him fretfully.

For a moment he stood looking down on her, hurt by her quick movement to avoid his caress, and by the words she had spoken, but filled with tenderness because of his love for her. He stood like that in silence, when there was a tap at the door, and the nurse came in with Joyce’s mother, Lady Ottery, who went quickly to the bedside and embraced her daughter.

“My poor darling!”

“Oh, mother,” said Joyce, “my poor little baby!”

It was the first time Bertram had heard her mention the baby, and it touched him poignantly.

Lady Ottery said, “If only I’d been with you!” and Bertram wished in his heart that Joyce had permitted that, but she had resisted all his persuasion to have her mother with her.

“Mother is too dominant in time of sickness,” she had said. “Besides, it’s not fair to her, after the War, with Rudy and Hal both killed. If anything happened to me, she would die.”

That was like Joyce. If she had to suffer, she would suffer alone and not drag others in. But Bertram wondered if Lady Ottery would have died “if anything had happened” to Joyce. He thought not.

He had been with her when the news of Hal’s death had come from the War Office. That was a year after Rudolf’s. Ottery had handed his wife the telegram without a word. He had been hit hard, and breathed heavily, plucking his reddish beard and staring at a distant tree with watery eyes. It was a July afternoon, and they were all standing in the gardens of Holme Ottery, watching the girls playing tennis on the lawns below the terrace. Bertram had come up to get a drink. He remembered now the look on Lady Ottery’s face, her thin, sharp-featured, powerful face. Only for a moment did her lips and her eyelids quiver. Then she smiled at her husband, a strange, proud smile, and said, “For England’s sake! . . .” After that, when she moved towards her husband and took his hand, she said: “Poor Hal has done his bit! Rudy will be glad to see him.”

Bertram had marvelled at her courage, her hardness, her love of England, so great that she was ready to give all her sons for its safe-guarding. He remembered telling Christy that, when he went back from leave, and he remembered the rage with which he heard Christy denounce Lady Ottery’s point of view and sacrificial patriotism.

“Its hellish!” he said. “We’ll never stop War as long as women like that think their noblest duty is to breed sons for the shambles; as long as they rejoice in the death of their well-beloved for England’s sake, or Germany’s. It’s making a religion of the foulest stupidity in human life. It’s upholding the tradition of war—right or wrong—as the supreme test of virtue in a noble caste, and its blood sacrifice as a necessary, inevitable and sacred duty. How are we going to get peace in the world with that spirit in women?”

So he had argued on, until Bertram had told him roughly to “shut up, for God’s sake!”

Lady Ottery had turned her house into a hospital during the War, and for three years or more had nursed badly wounded men, never shrinking from sights of blood or death, doing dirty and disgusting work, though never before the war had she soiled her hands, except in the garden, among flowers, or come in touch with the coarse and tragic aspects of life. That was the spirit of patrician women in England, however delicate and sheltered. It was the spirit of an old tradition. Joyce had it still, though in many small ways she had broken with tradition, and belonged to a new world of womanhood, careless of conventions, free of speech, in revolt against the old code of manners.

Mother and daughter! Bertram watched them as they talked together. How immensely different, yet how alike! Lady Ottery, with her rather awe-inspiring dignity, plainly, almost dowdily, dressed. Joyce, with absurd little bows on her night-dress, excited, thrusting off the bedclothes, stretching out for a cigarette, saying “Damn” when she dropped the match, laughing when her mother fastened up a little button which revealed too much, announcing her intention of having a tea-party for her “best boy,” careless of shocking this old-fashioned mother. Yet, Bertram thought, with the same steel, the same hardihood underneath her softness, and the same family tradition.

Lady Ottery directed her attention to Bertram for a moment, having previously ignored him. She disliked him, as he knew, disappointed with her daughter’s marriage to a penniless young officer, and suspicious of his political views after one or two heated conversations. This afternoon, however, she was unusually gracious, and remarked that he looked worried.

Joyce told her that he was always worrying. He was suffering from some soul complex, which she could not fathom—an uneasy conscience, or a craving for the Higher Life.

“Too much sick-room, I expect! Husbands always get the worst of this sort of thing. Ottery fretted unreasonably.”

She alluded to a lecture she was going to deliver in London, “The Religion of Revolution,” and trusted (that was her word) that Bertram would go to hear it. It would explain the cause of social unrest and might clear up some of his little difficulties.

Bertram took the ticket she gave him, and suppressed an inclination to groan or laugh. He could not imagine his “difficulties” being dissolved by anything that his mother-in-law might have to say.

“I expect I’m suffering from the strain of peace,” he said with a smile, when Lady Ottery fixed him with her lorgnette and said he looked “hipped.”

“London’s enough to depress a laughing hyena! But I’ll take a walk in it while you and Joyce have a private chat. I expect she’s heaps to tell you.”

Joyce said she had nothing to tell. She wanted her mother to give her the latest social news, the inside of the political situation, and the state of the world generally. Was the Prime Minister still licking the hands of Labour? Had Evelyn got her divorce yet?

VI

London had a lowering influence at this time on Bertram Pollard, and filled him with such intensity of gloom that he began to hate the place which as a boy he had loved with romantic sentiment as the city of endless adventure where life’s drama was rich and full.

He remembered but vaguely the tall brick house in Merrion Square, Dublin, where he had lived in his early boyhood, until his father had brought all the family to England. From their house in Sloane Street, during holidays from St. Paul’s School, he had gone exploring the mean streets and slum quarters of London, lounging about the bookshops in the Charing Cross Road, peering into old churches, strolling around the markets in Covent Garden and Smithfield, listening to the cheap-jacks in Leather Lane, venturing into the Italian quarter at Hatton Garden with a sense of adventure, going as far afield as the London docks and the back streets of Stepney and Bermondsey, where he looked out for types of men who belonged to the novels of Jacobs and Conrad.

Then, in his first year at Oxford, he’d come down to London for “binges” on boat-race night, when there were wild rags at the music halls and tumultuous encounters of undergraduates in Piccadilly Circus, rather drunken, but joyous, dinners in Soho restaurants.

There had been no second year for him at Oxford, because of the war which changed everything, but as a machine-gun officer London still pulled at his heart-strings with a tremendous tug, and made him desperate for the seven days’ leave which came so rarely.

“Good-bye, Piccadilly, good-bye, Leicester Square—” The silly old words yelled by crowds of men in khaki going to the mud and fire of Flanders for the first time—the second-timers didn’t sing it so lustily, unless they had been drinking—always stirred his old sentiment for London. He repeated the words as he lay in his dug-out at night, twelve hundred yards from the Boche line out from Mailly Mailly on the Somme—his first pitch—and old Christy, who lay beside him chaffed him because more than once he spoke the word “London” in his sleep.

London! He used to whisper that word with a kind of ecstasy when he came out of Charing Cross station from the boat train which brought swarms of leave men in those old days of darkness and air-raids and mass emotion. The taxi drive through Piccadilly to his father’s house was a journey of enchantment. Back again! London! What luck! Because it might be for the last time, every minute of it was precious, every dimly lighted lamp was a beacon of delight; the smell of the streets, the rushing swirl of taxis, the beat of rain on the empurpled pavements, the damp and fog of a winter’s night, the wet crowds outside the theatres, the dear damned dismalness of London, drugged him, made his senses drunk with gladness.

The old town had been good in those days. Now when he went out into its streets, while Joyce was ill, he found no comfort in it. Perhaps that was his fault. Perhaps it was he that had changed, not London. . . . It was the world that had changed, and all men in it, and England that had seemed unchanging. As Bertram wandered about the streets, diving down some of the old highways, walking into the outer suburbs to tire out a brain that did not sleep enough at nights, he found that pessimism closed about him. He couldn’t avoid it, for its gloom was in every face he passed, on every newspaper placard, in every group of men at every street corner, in long processions of out-of-works whom he met in mean streets.

These processions of unemployed men, all ex-service, hurt him horribly. They carried banners with the proclamation, “We want Work, not Charity.” They were men whom he’d seen marching up the Albert-Bapaume road and the Arras-Lens road, and the Ypres-Menin road, when England and the world had needed them. They were the heroes who were fighting in a war to end war, the boys in the trenches for whom nothing was too good. Now they were shabby and down at heel, some of them in the old khaki with buttons and shoulder-straps torn off, all of them downcast and wretched-looking. “Not charity!” they said, but they had scouts out, shaking collecting boxes in the faces of the passers-by, in an aggressive, almost hostile way.

Bertram could never pass one of these boxes without putting a few coppers inside, until one day he remembered that it was his wife’s money, not his own, that he was giving away. The thought made him flush in the street, and walk on with a quicker, restless pace as far as Upper Tooting. It was absurd for him to give to the unemployed. He was one of them, with less chance of work.

At many street corners there were groups of seedy-looking men of all ages, lounging aimlessly outside buildings on which the words “Labour Exchange” were painted. Bertram had only a vague idea about the service done by a Labour Exchange. The fantastic thought came to him that it would be a good idea to put his own name down for any job that might suit a man like himself, pretty good at handling men, or at any kind of organising work. That was a good word, “organising”—and he would use it to the fellow who ran the Labour Exchange.

It was in High Street, Marylebone, and he said “Sorry,” as he elbowed a group of men hanging round the swing doors. One of them, after a glance at him, pulled himself up, as in the old days of soldiering, when an officer passed, but another lad snarled at him, and said, “No officer swank now. We’ve finished with that,” and the sentiment seemed to please the crowd, as Bertram judged by the laugh that followed.

He was kept waiting in a bare room without chairs, while a boy scout took one of his old cards, “Major Pollard, D.S.O., M.C.,” into an inner room.

A tall man, dressed in pre-war clothes which had been smart when new and still had style, though frayed about the cuffs and button-holes, stood with his back to the fireplace, and nodded to Bertram when he came in.

“Bloody weather!” he said.

“Not good,” said Bertram.

“About as good as our delightful government!” said the man, ex-officer certainly, gentleman undoubtedly. He twisted up a black, and obviously dyed, moustache, with a fierce gesture.

“What’s the government been doing now?” asked Bertram, by way of making himself civil.