Part 20

He put these ideas to a French priest as they sat together in a little wooden presbytery near the ruins of a church on the west side of St. Quentin. They had met in a cemetery where British and French soldiers lay buried side by side.

Bertram, standing bare-headed there by the grave of one of his own comrades, was greeted by the priest, a tall, middle-aged man with a bronzed, clean-shaven face, and the scar of some wound down his right cheek.

“You are an English officer, perhaps?”

“Yes, _mon père_, in the old days.”

“Ah, you helped to fight for France! It was a good comradeship in those days. I was a soldier also, a captain of artillery, with the ‘_Cent-Vingt_.’”

He invited Bertram to his simple _pot-au-feu_, with a cup of coffee afterwards, and a _petit verre_.

It was over that cup of coffee that they argued about French and British policy, and then that Bertram defended the British point of view.

“Why do your English Liberals hate France so much?” asked the priest. “I cannot understand. It is to me incredible!”

Bertram denied that English Liberals hated France. He tried to explain, in faulty French, the “Liberal” idea in England. It was a belief that another frightful war could only be prevented by allowing Germany to recover, and dealing with her so generously that she would not desire vengeance. English Liberals believed that the whole philosophy of Europe must be changed, and that people should rise beyond the old “Balance of Power,” with secret or open alliances dividing Europe into groups. The peoples of all nations wanted peace. It was only the old diplomacy that prevented the fulfilment of their desire, and a general brotherhood of European democracy.

The priest struck his fist on the table so that the coffee cups jumped.

“All that is illusion,” he said, and he almost shouted the words. “It is hypocritical nonsense. Peace can only be secured by keeping Germany crushed and weak. England is treacherous to France by making secret overtures to Germany. It is a betrayal of the dead. An outrage to France.”

Bertram lit his pipe, and smoked in silence for a moment, astonished and distressed by the violent passion in this priest’s voice, by the flash of fire in his eyes.

“_Mon père_,” he said, “you speak like a soldier, and not like a priest. Surely you of all men should believe in the forgiveness of enemies—wasn’t it ninety times nine?—and the blessings promised to the peacemakers.”

“I spoke as a Frenchman as well as a priest,” was the answer. “I have seen the flower of French youth swept down by the _sales Boches_. I have seen the beauty of their mother, France, blasted, as in those fields outside. I have seen our women outraged by the brutality of the enemy. It is because of these things, and because I believe in the justice of God that I demand the full punishment of an infamous people. I warn you, sir, that if Great Britain endeavours to thwart that divine justice, France will regard her also as an enemy.”

“The dead listen to us, _mon père_,” said Bertram, simply. “Outside this window their bodies lie together. It is too soon for any Frenchman to speak of England as an enemy.”

“It is too soon for England to behave as such,” said the priest.

For several hours they talked, this Frenchman and Englishman, these two soldiers of the Great War, this priest and layman. At the end of that time, Bertram knew that no words in any language or with any eloquence, could ever reconcile their opposing views. The priest believed in “the sword of France” as the means of peace in Europe. Bertram believed in reconciliation, the progress of commonsense, the education of democracy, the spirit of peace in the hearts of common folk.

“Illusion!” said the priest again. “Illusion! In the heart of man, and especially in the heart of Germany, is hatred, evil, greed, brutality, fear, rivalry. So it has been. So it will always be, despite the grace of God, and the teaching of Jesus Christ. We have to guard against these natural passions. We have to uphold justice by force. We must never be weakened by a craven fear of war. Worse than war is cowardice or dishonour. Worse than hatred is the betrayal of friendship. May England be true to France!”

“May France remember England’s sacrifice!” said Bertram, “and our dead that lie in her soil.”

The priest answered his farewell in a friendly way, gripping his hand first, as a comrade, and then giving him a priest’s blessing. But when Bertram trudged away from the presbytery to a wooden _estaminet_ a mile away, he was enormously distressed in spirit. This priest, Jeanne, the chambermaid, the young farmer near his old dug-out, a commercial traveller from Paris, the Mayor of Arras, scores of friendly people he met along the old roads of war and on the old battlefields, had talked in the same strain, used the same kind of argument, lamented the ill-will or the “treachery” of England; or if not of England, then of “Loy-Zhorzhe,” who seemed to them not so much a human personality as an evil power.

What hope was there for peace in Europe, if France pursued her policy of force, to crush Germany and keep her weak? What chance for the “Comrades of the Great War,” lounging about Labour Exchanges in London, marching in processions of unemployed, with banners saying, “We Want Work”?

There would be no work until Great Britain could sell her goods in the markets of Europe. Those markets could never buy if Germany were thrust into such ruin as that of Austria. Germany, perhaps allied with Russia, would struggle like a wild beast. The “sword of France” would not be strong enough to keep her weak for ever. Then France would call to England again. Would the roads have to be tramped again by battalions of boys from England, Scotland, Ireland, going up to the fields of death?

This thought came to Bertram as he went up a road past the ruined village of Barisis. The moon had risen in a pale sky, still blue, and its light silvered the wooden crosses in a military graveyard. Row by row they stood above the neatly ordered graves. For scores of miles, for hundreds of miles, across France, the moon illumined cemeteries like this, crowded with French and British dead.

“God, give us Peace!” said Bertram, aloud, as he bared his head in salute to old comrades with whom he had trudged these roads.

An immense fear invaded his spirit, and a kind of shudder shook him, for he seemed to hear again the march of youth advancing to another Armageddon in these fields—the last youth of Europe.

He was glad to get into the warmth of the wooden _estaminet_. An enormously fat Frenchman greeted him jovially.

“Monsieur is hungry, beyond doubt! My wife has cooked an excellent chicken.”

The wife, a pretty, thin-faced woman, with merry black eyes, addressed him as “_mon capitaine_” and spread a napkin as a cloth on a deal table.

She had been in St. Pol during all the war. Did he know St. Pol, not far from Hesdin—? Yes? Then surely he must have known, among English officers who had been friends of hers, _le capitaine_ Jenkins, _le lieutenant_ O’Mally, _le commandant_ Stuart? She had _un très bon souvenir_ of the English Army. Sometimes her husband was jealous when she praised the English officers so much!

“Without cause, I’m sure!” said Bertram, with a smile.

The woman laughed, and her black eyes danced.

“In time of war there are many temptations!”

She teased her preposterously fat husband, and he looked annoyed, and said, “_Tais-toi_, Yvonne!” She made a little face at him, behind his back, and when Bertram went to his bedroom after dinner, she lighted his way with a candle, there being no gas in the house.

“_Merci, et bonne nuit, madame!_” said Bertram, politely, taking the candle from her, and putting it down on a wooden chair by the bedside.

She looked at him with a queer, wistful smile, and spoke in broken English.

“I am not married in time of war. You understand? English officers like me very much. Take my hand, try to give me kiss—what you say?—flirt! My big, fat husband not like me talk of those days. But I like remember! You will give me English kiss for old remembrance, eh?”

She held her face up, after glancing at the half closed door.

Bertram gave her a kiss. Why not? It was good to find some one who remembered the British Army with pleasure and affection. She kissed him six times in return, and then, with her finger to her lip, ran out of the room, as a big voice shouted:

“Yvonne! _Qu’est-ce-que tu fais, toi?_”

That night Bertram dreamed that it was Joyce who kissed him.

XLI

The thought of Paris pulled Bertram so strongly that he could wander no longer in the old war zone, and getting back to Amiens from Bapaume, took the train to the Gare du Nord. He had written some articles for _The New World_, photographic and phonographic, things seen and heard, without comment or moral, and some of them had been published, as he knew, not from seeing them—_The New World_ was not sold in Paschendaele or Hooge!—but from a note written by Bernard Hall.

“Your stuff is admirable, and much quoted.”

There was endless material in the “reconstruction” of Picardy and Artois—the human “stuff” which Hall wanted. Bertram had only to sit down to table in any little _estaminet_, mostly built of wood, amidst a group of huts, in this country of ghosts (as it was to him) to hear in the casual conversation of peasants the aftermath of war’s enormous tragedy to France.

Young peasants, once soldiers of France, told tales of hair-raising horror about the trenches of Verdun, or Vermelles, or any part of the battle front, with a simplicity, and matter-of-fact remembrance, beyond all eloquence or art in tragic effect. Some of them had been prisoners in German camps, and their long servitude, monotonous in starvation and misery, had been worse than trench-life.

Women who had been caught behind the German lines, in Lille, Valenciennes, elsewhere, told of their years of anguish, and inflamed again the passion of the men who listened. Reference to death recurred in casual discourse with continual iteration. “Before Jean was killed,” “since my man’s death,” “when my boy fell in the assault on Souchez,” a score of times in any half hour of gossip over a flask of _vin ordinaire_.

The loss of homes and fortunes, the difficulty and illusion of this “reconstruction” which was used as a spellword by the French Government, as though the word alone would rebuild houses and churches and flourishing farmsteads, the sadness of women bereft of fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, by the immense slaughter of French manhood, and the abiding hate of France for Germany, were revealed to Bertram with intimate and distressful detail, as he sat in the corner of any tavern, or talked with any group of men and women in field or market-place.

It came to his mind that here was material for a new “Sentimental Journey” which might live in history because of the tales of Armageddon, but he renounced the idea for himself, beyond his brief sketches for Bernard Hall, because of his desire to get to Paris. It was not the lure of Paris in June, nor that joyous anticipation which had belonged to “three days’ Paris leave” in the old days of war, but the urgent, irresistible, almost sickening desire to see Joyce again.

During this time of loneliness, for he was alone with his soul despite his wayside conversations, some fretfulness of spirit passed from him. He seemed to see things with more clarity. His thoughts struck deeper into the essential meaning of life. Contact again with the devastation of war, the sharp realities of the immense heritage of woe left by those murderous years, his conversation with the ghosts of youth, crowding about him in those little forests of wooden crosses, in those quiet fields where the noise of death had once been very loud, seemed to kill the nagging of his own selfish instincts, to rebuke his egotism.

How trivial was the failure or success of his own life! What did it matter in the balance of history, in the destiny of peoples? He had no right to life at all, except by a fluke of luck, or the grace of God. So many of his friends lay here in French soil, as young as he, and younger. That he was alive, glad to hear the lark singing again above these fields (even as they had sung above the noise of gunfire), with the warmth of the sun in his face, was so much to the good, after all, that he could pay back for that only by service and the dedication of life to things beyond himself. He might, by some small grain of truth, by the force of mere desire, by written word or spoken word, help the chance of peace, so that these fields need not be strewn again with dead boys. To that attempt he was dedicated. It was the meaning of his future life, if it had any purpose.

After the mental storms of the last few months, the quarrel with Joyce, his mother’s death, the tragedy of Susan, and of Digby, he seemed to have aged by twenty years in understanding and experience. A little by Janet Welford’s help, and perhaps more than he could estimate, he had risen above the weakness of self-pity, the most miserable disease, incurable, if allowed to go too far.

It had been all foolishness and pettiness,—that quarrel with Joyce. She was hardly more than a child, even now, and he had dealt with her as though she were a woman of mature views and settled philosophy. He had taken her too seriously. They had both been too serious about their “opinions”—as if they mattered!

In his tramp across the war zone, the vision of Joyce as she was when he first knew her, and dreamed of her, here in France, came back to him—her flower-like beauty, her grace, her elegance, her courage, her vitality. He wiped out all his quarrel with her. He believed, with increasing certainty, that after this separation, and his change in character—he felt that he had both changed and strengthened and become better balanced—a meeting between them would end in reconciliation and understanding.

He regretted his answers to her letters, so harsh and humourless. He would go to her in Paris, and say, “My dear, I want your love again. I have dedicated my life to love—and peace, which is the fruit of love. I am your faithful serving-man. What stands between our happiness together?”

At night, lying on a truckle bed in the “_Fleur des Champs_” or the “_Estaminet des Poilus_,” he yearned for Joyce with the home-sickness of a boy away in a cheerless school. Her physical presence seemed to be with him. He was aware sometimes of the perfume of her hair, he could almost feel the silky touch of those “bobbed” curls. He spoke her name, waking in the morning, in day-dreams, and saw her walking with bare feet across the grass that grew so green now over the battlefields.

Even his jealousy of Kenneth Murless abated, and died out, extinguished by this larger sense that had come to him. Kenneth had been her playmate as a child. His comradeship had been above suspicion, except in the mind of that other Bertram, with nerves on edge, and petty egotism all alarmed.

It was in this mood of exalted emotion that Bertram stepped out of the Gare du Nord and drove in a rattle-bone taxi down the dreary length of the rue Lafayette to the heart of Paris and the Hotel Meurice.

Bertram made his way through a group of Americans with a quickening pulse. His eyes roved about this entrance hall, expecting to see Joyce at once, waiting for his coming, as it were. It was one of the tall American girls who gave him a start and made him take a pace forward with the word “Joyce!” on his lips, though unuttered. She was a tall, slim girl, with glistening gold hair, in a cream-coloured French frock, such as Joyce would wear in a Paris June. She turned round to say a word to a friend, and he had a sense of disappointment.

At the desk he enquired for Lady Joyce Pollard, and as an afterthought, for the Countess of Ottery. The clerk glanced at him doubtfully—he was wearing an old grey suit and a soft hat—and then informed him that both ladies had left Paris the day before.

“Where have they gone?” asked Bertram.

He was profoundly disappointed now, and cursed himself for not having written or telegraphed from Amiens to announce his coming. His hopes had been so high and soaring about his meeting with Joyce that this check was intolerable.

The clerk shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

“How can I tell, monsieur? Paris is the gate to all the Continent!”

“Surely they left an address?”

The clerk looked up in a book. No, the ladies had not left any address. He condescended to send for the Hall Porter, a superb person in a claret-coloured uniform. The Hall Porter himself condescended to inform the rather shabby-looking Englishman that “Madame la Comtesse d’Ottery” and Miladi, her daughter, had departed by automobile to Amiens. He understood they proposed to visit the battlefields in the British war-zone.

Bertram could obtain no further information, and when he walked down the rue de Rivoli, the serenity of mind and exalted sense of sacrifice which he believed he had acquired during lonely nights and days, departed from him abruptly, for a few minutes at least, and he was furious with Fortune for having played him such a scurvy trick.

He had just come from Amiens. Joyce had just gone there! If he had only known that she wanted to visit the battlefields, he could have shown her every yard of earth that was hallowed by the struggle of British manhood—made her see with his eyes the way of battle, taken her to Ypres where her brothers had died, pointed out the line of old trenches beyond which he had once stared into No-Man’s Land, led her into the very dug-out where he had found her letter.

On such a journey they would have come together again, gone hand in hand and heart to heart, understanding the immensity of that tragedy of death which made their own lives in debt for ever to the youth that died. No such luck! By twenty-four hours he had missed Joyce, and this chance.

He had the idea of taking the first train back to Amiens, and tracing them from there, but he reflected that in an automobile they would be lost to him, and that his best chance of quickest meeting would be to await Joyce’s return to Paris. He would be able to find out her plans from Murless, at the British Embassy.

Bertram dumped his one bag in a small hotel in the rue St. Honoré—he couldn’t afford the Hotel Meurice—and walked to the Embassy in the Faubourg St. Honoré.

Kenneth Murless, to whom he sent in his card, kept him waiting for ten minutes, and in spite of that self-rebuke which had softened his feelings so recently towards Kenneth, this delay strained his temper and aroused his old sense of hostility, according to the natural law which makes all men hate those who keep them in antechambers, even as Dr. Johnson hated Lord Chesterfield and dipped his pen in venom to take vengeance.

The door opened, and light footsteps crossed the polished boards. Bertram turned and saw Kenneth Murless, and was aware that, for just the fraction of a second, Kenneth had a startled look, almost a look of fear. It passed instantly into a welcoming smile.

“My dear Bertram! Fearfully sorry for keeping you waiting. The Ambassador is as garrulous as an old maid this morning.”

So he made the _amende honorable_, holding out his hand to Bertram with the friendliest gesture. Then he sat on the edge of a Louis Quinze table, and offered Bertram a cigarette.

“Where’s Joyce?” asked Bertram, abruptly.

Kenneth did not seem quite sure at the moment.

“Wafted away to a château in Picardy, I believe. Yes, I understand she’s staying a while with the old Marquis de Plumoison and his charming daughter, Yvonne, to say nothing of Jérome, the young and handsome Vicomte.”

These names meant something to Bertram. Once, in time of war, he had been billeted for two months outside the Château de Plumoison, and with kind permission of the old Marquis, had shot rabbits in the park. He remembered Yvonne de Plumoison, and her kindness to young British officers like himself. Most of them had fallen in love with her for a week or two.

“What about Lady Ottery?”

“Gone for one night only, en route for merry England, where your worthy father-in-law is suffering from that vulgar complaint, influenza. But, my dear fellow, don’t you get the family bulletin?”

“I’ve been wandering,” said Bertram. He flushed deeply at Kenneth’s question, and couldn’t tell whether it held an underlying sarcasm, or was asked in simplicity. Perhaps Joyce hadn’t told Kenneth how hideously they had quarrelled that night at Holme Ottery, nor how complete had been their estrangement. It would be like Joyce to keep her own counsel, and put a gay face upon their separation. And yet she was so intimate in friendship with Kenneth that if any man knew, he would. In any case he must have guessed, known, indeed, without guessing, that “something” had happened to bring Joyce to Paris without her husband.

“Come and dine with me to-night,” said Kenneth. “I’m entertaining a few friends at the Griffon, a chic little place round the corner.”

“Not in this rig-out,” said Bertram, glancing at his shabby clothes.

Murless pooh-poohed that reason.

“Any old dress does nowadays. Besides, I’ll introduce you as a literary man. You’ll be adored by the women.”

He congratulated Bertram on his essays in _The New World_.

“You’ve quite a touch! Guy de Maupassant has a rival.”

Again Bertram suspected irony, but Kenneth looked at him in his friendliest way, disarming hostility, and his next words were kind.

“I was deeply shocked to hear of your mother’s death; and Digby. Please accept my sympathy.”

Then he gave Bertram another piece of news, striking in its unexpectedness.

“By the way, your sister is in Paris. Poor pretty Susan.”

By that word “poor” he revealed his knowledge of that tragedy in Mountjoy Prison. He had met her in the Tuileries gardens, with another girl. He had raised his hat to her, but she had looked through his body for a thousand miles.

Bertram was astonished, yet a sense of relief came to him at the news. It was better for Susan to be in Paris than in Dublin. Safer. But how to find her? Kenneth could give no clue, and Bertram, having come to Paris to find Joyce, was in the strange case of a man who had missed his wife and lost a sister.

He accepted Kenneth’s invitation to dinner because of that loneliness, and sense of futility, but he hadn’t left the Embassy more than half an hour when, by a fluke of chance, he came face to face with Susan in the Place de la Concorde. She was just entering the “Metro” when he saw her, and grabbed her arm.

“Susan! What luck to find you!”

The last time he had met her came back to his mind in a flash—that day in Sackville Street, when her hair was unkempt and her eyes were red and wild, and her frock was wet and muddy after an all-night vigil. Now she was neat and pretty again, but the memory of that night had not passed from her face. In her eyes was still something of its pain.

“Hullo, Bertram!” she said, as simply and unemotionally as though they had left each other only an hour ago. As he drew her on one side to avoid the stream of people pouring into the Underground station, she showed sufficient interest in his way of life to ask what he was doing in Paris. He answered her vaguely, and asked the same question.

“What are _you_ doing?”

She, too, was vague, and said something about propaganda work, for Ireland. The French were sympathetic. They believed in Liberty, and they hated England, she was glad to say.

“They don’t seem to like us,” said Bertram, sadly, but he didn’t argue with that “glad to say.”

“When can I have a real talk with you, and where?”