Part 23

“But with the same share in the eternal scheme of things,” said Bertram. “You and I went to St. Mary Abbot’s under the same divine impulse as those two tits set up housekeeping in the tree-top.”

“Yes,” said Joyce, “I suppose it’s over-civilisation that has spoilt the game.”

“Is the game spoilt?” asked Bertram.

“It’s hard to play according to the rules, sometimes. And if we keep to the rules the fun goes out of the game. It’s just duty. Mostly disagreeable, and sometimes intolerable.”

Bertram laughed so that the two tits were frightened and flew away from their branch. He took Joyce’s hand and put it to his lips.

“We seem to be talking in parables and conundrums. Joyce, let’s be human. Are you glad I’ve come back to you? Are we going to wipe the slate clean and start fresh and fair down the good old highway of married life? Say a word of love to me! Put your arms around my neck, and whisper what I want to hear.”

Joyce’s face flamed with colour for a moment, and then paled again.

“I can’t!” she said. “Something’s happened to put things all wrong—worse than before—between you and me.”

He stared at her, and knew that Fate, or Luck, or God, was going to hit him another blow between the eyes. What did she mean? That “Something’s happened—“?

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “what do you mean?”

“It’s about Kenneth,” she answered in a low voice.

That name, after what Susan had said, after a night of dark agony, after a fight with frightful suspicion in which old base jealousies had surged up from the darkness of his mind, was like the jab of a bayonet in his brain.

“What the hell has he got to do with it?” he asked, very quietly.

Joyce touched his hand, as though asking for patience and understanding.

“You’ll get angry, I know. But I can’t help it. These things just happen. It’s as though we hadn’t any control over them, or over ourselves. I’ve always thought of Kenneth as nothing more than a good friend—a nice boy. We’ve known each other since we were kids. He understands me better than any one in the world. We speak in shorthand, as it were—the same code of thought and all that. He didn’t seem to mind when I married you. He thought it was good fun. It made no difference to our friendship. He’s perfectly straight and clean. He’d no idea at all, until a few days ago, that he loved me—in another kind of way. We found out quite suddenly, by accident. We were laughing—playing the fool, as usual. We were in a boat together on the lake in the Bois—you know—by the Île des Châlets. Suddenly he looked up at me with a kind of surprise in his eyes. And something seemed to fire a spark between us. I leant over him and kissed him, and he said, ‘What’s up with us?’—in a frightened way. We found out then that our old friendship had changed. For the first time I knew the meaning of love.—Never like yours and mine, Bertram. Kenneth and I were made for each other from the time we were babies together. It’s just that. Unfortunately we’ve only just found out. . . . I’m frightfully sorry, Bertram. But there it is, and nothing can alter it now.”

She had spoken all this quietly, in a matter-of-fact way, but now she began to cry again, with her hands up to her face.

Bertram had sat very still, with his head bent during her monologue. A greyness crept into his face, giving him a dead look. He was dead for a little while. Joyce had killed the spirit in him by those words of hers. He had nothing to say to himself. Not even anger stirred in him, nor self-pity. All that came into his mind was a kind of numbness, and one name reiterated. Kenneth! Kenneth! Kenneth Murless!

Joyce took her hands down from her face, and wiped her tears away with a handkerchief. Then she spoke again in the same quiet tone.

“Kenneth and I want to play the game. He’s fearfully sorry about you. He likes you immensely and thinks I’ve given you a rough deal. That’s true. I’ve been beastly to you, but I didn’t know all the time that it was Kenneth I wanted. You’ve been jolly good to me, Bertram. I see that now. But it’s impossible to live together after what I’ve told you. What are we going to do about it? For the moment I’ve cut and run. It was Kenneth who asked me to do that. ‘You’d better cut and run,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to play the game.’ So here I am waiting until you think things out. I haven’t told Mother yet.”

Bertram was still silent, still rather dead in his heart and brain. But one phrase used by Joyce startled him a little. “I’ve cut and run,” she said. Where had he heard that before? It was something that had happened to himself. Some time or other, from some one or other, he too had “cut and run.” It was old Christy, who had advised it. “If you’re tempted by disloyalty,” he said, “you’d better cut and run.” Queer, that Joyce should have been given the same advice. Rather funny! Damnably funny!

He laughed at the comedy of it. He stood up from the stone seat and laughed loudly and harshly, frightening the birds again, a jay in the boughs near by, which flew out with a kind of echo of his laugh and a quick beat of wings.

“Good God in Heaven!” he said. “So you haven’t told your Mother yet? I wonder what the Countess of Ottery will think of it. Her sense of propriety will be a little shocked. She too will want to play the game according to the rules. I don’t know this kind of game. Perhaps it’s up to me. I guess the rules will oblige me to give you an excuse for divorce. I rather fancy that’s the way it’s done in your set. I commit a technical sin. I indulge in a perfectly painless act of cruelty. You institute proceedings for restitution of conjugal rights. Isn’t that one of the rules? I refuse on a post-card. Then you divorce me. The newspapers print your photograph—the beautiful Lady Joyce Pollard obtains her decree. I seem to remember that sort of thing. . . . Joyce! Oh, my dear wife! Joyce, my beloved!”

It was quite suddenly, at the end of his monstrous irony, that he broke down and wept, and pleaded with her weakly, in a stricken way.

Several times Joyce said, “I’m sorry, Bertram! I’m frightfully sorry!”

She too was weeping now, and her slim body shook with sobs. Under the trees there in the little glade of a French château, this man and wife, so English, so young, so good to see, if love had been between them, made a pitiful picture.

“You’ve been very good to me, my dear,” said Joyce again. “I’m sorry—for everything.”

He went towards her, and took her roughly and drew her close to him.

“Joyce, this is frightful. It can’t happen. It’s just illusion. You’re my wife and I’m your lover. Let’s go away together, and forget all else. That baseness with Kenneth. It was just a moment of madness. Weakness. I understand! I’ve been tempted like that!”

She drew herself out of his arms.

“It’s not like that. It’s Kenneth I belong to; and he to me. One can’t go against revelation.”

He told her that she was murdering him. He’d suffered hell already because of their separation. He’d been tempted by sheer weakness and loneliness. Did she intend to send him straight to the devil?

She said something about his going to “a nice woman.” She couldn’t complain of that. He would find some one more patient with him, more in tune with his ideas.

It was that which angered him and broke down any kind of restraint to which he had clung.

“You’re hellishly immoral,” he told her. “God knows how far you’ve gone a header with that swine Murless. If there’s truth in what people say of you in Paris, I’ll wring your neck and blow his brains out.”

She stiffened at that threat.

“I’ve told you we intend to play the game as far as possible. Kenneth has played up like a gentleman. I hope you won’t behave like a savage.”

“I _am_ a savage,” he said, “when it comes to this sort of thing. It is the primitive right of man to make sure of his mate. D’you think I’m going to connive at your sin? To play the “_mari complaisant_?” Not in your life!”

“Don’t mediævalise,” said Joyce. “We’re in the Twentieth Century.”

“Human nature doesn’t change,” he answered. “You’re my wife, and I’ll hold you, if I have to fight for you.”

“You can’t hold me,” she said. “I’ve escaped. You can hold my dead body, but not my living heart. Kenneth has that. From the beginning of things, as I see now, he and I were meant for each other. You were an accident that intervened. It was my mistake, and yours. And I’ve paid for it already, pretty badly.”

An accident that intervened! That was how she spoke of his love. That was his position between Joyce Pollard and Kenneth Murless! The phrase slashed his soul, and stung him into a mad rage. The man who had come into this glade with love in his heart for this girl with gold hair and slim white body, strode towards her now with clenched fists and a fury in his eyes. He meant to do her bodily harm, and she saw that in his eyes. But she stood very straight and still, and did not flinch as he came close to her, but smiled with a strange disdain.

“As you like,” she said.

It was a kind of invitation to hit her, even to kill her, if he thought well of that, as for a moment he did. But, as once before when he had raised his hand against her, he was disarmed by her prettiness, and the fury passed from him.

Down the avenue came the sound of voices, speaking French, and through the trees Bertram saw Yvonne de Plumoison and her father, as he had seen them walking arm-in-arm in time of war. On the other side of the old man was Lady Ottery with her hand on the arm of Yvonne’s brother.

Bertram took hold of Joyce, and kissed her twice on the lips, with passionate brutality, and then released her, flinging her away from him so that she fell on the grass. He hadn’t meant, then, to be as rough as that. He made his way through the glade, and turned a moment to look back. Joyce was standing again with her face towards him. He raised his hand with a tragic gesture of farewell, to which she made no answer. Then he walked back to the great iron gates through which he passed, and so towards the village, and so towards life without the hope of Joyce, in loneliness and desolation of soul, worse than he had known.

XLV

He left Paris without calling on Kenneth Murless for the purpose of indulging in violence. What was the good? To blow Kenneth’s brains out, or to punch his head, would not bring back Joyce. She had dismissed him for ever out of her heart and life. He walked alone upon the road and all that he had felt in loneliness before was nothing to this certainty of eternal separation. She was dead to him, and he to her.

He made one last foolish, futile effort to pretend otherwise by writing her a letter in which he implored her to wait a while at least before she took the step from which she could never return.

“Wait six months,” [he said]. “My loyalty is yours for that time, or longer, and perhaps before the end of it you will realise your horrible mistake—this midsummer madness that possesses you. . . .”

Stuff like that he wrote, but knew the hopelessness of it, and did not wait in Paris for an answer. She wouldn’t answer. She had told him all there was to know. As she had said once before, when as yet the “something” that had happened had not happened, it was “past argument.” Perhaps—almost certainly—throughout her married life her subconsciousness had known what she knew now consciously. She had been more at ease with Kenneth than ever with him. She had preferred his conversation, his sense of humour, his point of view. There was a secret code between them which he had never learnt. He had been “out of it,” after the first few weeks of sentiment and passion.

He reasoned all this out with astounding calmness of mind, between bouts of astounding rage and anguish, in the train from Paris to Berlin. He was quietly and deliberately rude to a young British officer in his carriage who tried to enter into conversation on the way to Cologne, where he belonged to the Army of Occupation. The boy was surprised by his gruffness, and shrank back into sulky silence, staring at him now and then with furtive eyes, until Bertram apologised, and said, “Sorry for being uncivil. I’ve got the devil of a toothache. You know—a jumping nerve!” One doesn’t tell a travelling companion that one has the devil of a broken heart, aching horribly.

“Oh, Lord,” said the boy, “what infernal bad luck! No wonder you don’t want me to jaw to you! There’s nothing worse.”

He offered Bertram a brandy flask and said “it helped sometimes.” And Bertram, to satisfy him, took a good swig which at least had the effect of sending him to sleep after a wakeful night. It was an uneasy sleep, and he wakened once crying out the name of Joyce. Fortunately the young officer was dozing, or pretending to doze. He left the carriage at Cologne, and hoped Bertram’s toothache would be cured by the time he reached Berlin.

A nice boy, like thousands who had been as young as he at the beginning of the war, and now had been four years, six years, even seven years, dead. How extraordinary was that! Bertram had been barely nineteen when he first joined up, in 1914. Now he was getting on for twenty-six, and felt as old as fifty. Well, he’d crammed in all the experience of life—war, marriage, failure, complete and absolute tragedy.

What was life? Nothing but some kind of service, where he could be of use somewhere. Service to boys younger than himself, like that kid on the way to Cologne. He might help, by a hairsbreadth in the balance of fate, to save their lives from another massacre. That would be worth doing. He was dedicated still to his work for peace. But first he must get peace within himself. Not easy, with this conflict tearing inside him. He must get some kind of wisdom, serenity, quietude of resignation before he could work for peace in the world. He would “chuck” thinking about his own wound, and plunge into the study of the world after war. That was the only line of sanity.

Berlin ought to be interesting. He would meet his sister Dorothy there, with her German husband. He would get to hear things and see things. It would be strange to walk about among the Enemy, without being killed.

Not long ago the Germans were “They.” During the war that was always the word used. “They” are putting up a strafe along the Menin Road. “They” are very quiet to-day. “They” are rather active on the Divisional Front. It would be damn funny to meet them in shops and restaurants, perhaps in private drawing-rooms—men, very likely, who had potted at him when he’d shown his cap a second above the parapet, or fired the five-point-nines which had rattled his nerves in a rat-haunted dug-out. . . .

Bertram could not get a room in any hotel in Berlin. There was a waiters’ strike, and all the hotels were closed and picketed except the Adlon, which paid what the strikers demanded, clapped the difference on to the bills, and did a roaring business with every room booked weeks in advance, and crowds of Germans, Austrians, English, and Jews of all nationalities, clamouring for admittance at any price, and bribing the head clerk with thousands of marks, to get their names on the waiting list.

It was the outside porter of the Adlon who saved Bertram from a night in the streets, by giving him a card to a private lodging-house somewhere near the Grossspielhaus, where he was able to obtain a bed-sitting-room in which all his meals would be served.

His landlord came in repeatedly to study his comfort, to explain the working of the electric light, to ask whether he desired _helles_ or _dunkles_ beer, and to carry in his tray with the _Abend-essen_. He was a tall Prussian of middle-age who had been a _Feldwebel_, or sergeant-major, with the Second Prussian Guards, after keeping a small hotel in Manchester. He spoke very good English, and lingered to talk while Bertram ate a well-cooked steak.

“You were an officer in the English army?”

Bertram nodded. “In France, all the time.”

“I also. We were opposite the English at Ypres, Cambrai, the Somme, in ’16. I used to hear your men talking in the trenches. Sometimes I called out to them, and sometimes they answered back. ‘How deep are you in mud, Tommy?’ That was in the winter of ’16. ‘Up to our bloody knees,’ said an English Tommy. ‘That’s nothing,’ I answered, ‘We’re up to our waists.’ ‘Serve you bloody well right!’ said the English boy.”

He chuckled over the reminiscence, but presently sighed deeply and said:

“The war was one long horror.”

“What made you begin it?” asked Bertram.

The man shrugged his shoulders.

“It was a war of Capital. We were all silly sheep.”

Bertram went on eating, and wished the man would go. He wanted to be alone. But the man stood by his chair and was anxious to talk.

“I suppose they still hate us in England?”

“They’re not fond of you,” said Bertram.

The man sighed again, noisily.

“I was very happy in Manchester. . . . You will find no hate against the English in Germany. Not much. We know you believe in ‘fair play.’ Not like the French!”

“You don’t like the French?”

The man’s face suddenly deepened in colour, and there came into his eyes a look of rage.

“The French? They’ve put every insult on us. Make us eat dirt. One day we’ll go back, and wring their necks—like this!”

He put his big hands together, and gave them a convulsive twist while he made a noise in his throat like a man choking.

“I thought you’d had enough of war,” said Bertram.

“Not against the French. I’d march again to-morrow to make them feel the German boot in their backsides.”

“Then it would happen all over again,” said Bertram. “The lousy trenches, the gun-fire, the massacre of men.”

“With a difference,” said the man, in a low voice, as though hiding, or half-revealing a secret thought.

“What kind of difference?”

“The French won’t have the English on their side next time. _Nicht wahr?_”

Bertram swung round in his chair.

“If the Germans think that, they’re making the hell of a mistake. For the second time.”

“_So?_”

The man had a scared look, as though he had said too much.

“Your dinner was good. It was good meat, _nicht wahr_? Better than in the trenches!”

He laughed in a guttural way, desiring to wipe out a bad impression.

That night Bertram set out to find his sister Dorothy, the Frau von Arenburg. By a queer coincidence in names, she lived in the Dorotheenstrasse, somewhere across the Wilhelmstrasse, at the corner of which was the British Embassy. Unfamiliar with the geography of Berlin, he lost his way, and found himself in the Leipzigerstrasse, so that, in halting German, he had to ask for the direction from a passer-by. It was a tall young man who listened very patiently to his bad German and then spoke in excellent English.

“If you will follow me, sir, I shall be very happy to guide you to the address.”

“Very good of you,” said Bertram.

“A pleasure, believe me.”

By the way he fell into step it was easy to see the man had been a soldier, and by all his bearing, an officer.

“You are a stranger in Berlin, sir?”

“My first visit,” said Bertram. “I arrived to-day.”

“_So?_ You will find people friendly to you as an Englishman. We admire your sporting instincts, if I may say so without offence. You have chivalry to your enemy.”

“I hope so,” said Bertram, coldly, thinking of the propaganda of hate in some part of the English press, yet resenting a little this praise of England from a German officer.

“In the war your men bore no grudge after the fight. I was a prisoner after Cambrai, in ’17. Your ‘Tommies’ gave me cigarettes when I was captured, and I was generously treated. I am pleased to acknowledge that.”

“Our prisoners were not well-treated in Germany,” said Bertram.

“Perhaps that was so, here and there,” said the officer. “We hadn’t much food to spare. We were all on half-rations towards the end.”

“There was great brutality in some of the camps,” said Bertram.

“Doubtless some of our prison commandants were brutal. We have not yet reached the stage of the English in good humour. I admit that, in spite of our _Kultur_!”

He laughed frankly, and then halted.

“You are now in Dorotheenstrasse, at Number 20. Good-night and good luck.”

He saluted ceremoniously, but Bertram held out his hand and thanked him. The action seemed to touch the young man.

“It’s kind of you—to shake hands! We don’t like the English to think of us as Huns. We are not so bad as that.”

“A war name!” said Bertram. “Now it’s peace between us.”

“Peace and good will,” said the young man. “We cannot say that of all our late enemies.”

He hesitated for a moment, as though wishing the excuse of talking further. But as Bertram was silent, he saluted again, swung on his heel, and strode down the street.

After all it was a vain walk to Dorotheenstrasse, because when Bertram rang the bell of his sister’s house, the _Mädchen_ who answered the door gave him to understand that the Herr Baron von Arenburg and the _gnädige Frau_ were away in the country, and would not return until the following afternoon.

It was a disappointment. Bertram felt like all men alone in a strange city, very lonely in its crowds. And his loneliness was deepened by a sense of spiritual desolation, and personal abandonment, because of Joyce.

He was surely, he thought, one of the loneliest men in the whole world that night, and then fought against the self-pity which threatened again to overwhelm him. “Keep a stiff upper lip, my lad!” he said to himself as he wandered about the well-lighted streets with these Germans on every side of him, seeking amusement in the “_Wein-stube_” and dancing halls.

They seemed happy. There was no visible sign of penury here, or of unhealed wounds of war, as in London where unemployed men went begging of the theatre crowds and there was a general air of depression and anxiety of many faces. These people were alert, cheerful, apparently prosperous. The only reminder of the agony they must have suffered was a blind man in soldier’s uniform who sat selling matches with a drooping head and pale, sad face. Now and then the passers-by dropped a coin in his tray and he said “_Danke schön!_”

Bertram pushed through a swing door into a place where music was being played. He couldn’t wander about all the time. It was partly a drinking-place, and partly a dancing-hall. The open space for dancing was surrounded by little tables all crowded with men and women drinking wine out of long-necked bottles. In the gallery an orchestra was playing jazz tunes, with a terrible blare of instruments. Every now and then men and women rose from the tables and joined the dancers until they were all densely wedged in one moving mass, jazzing up and down gracelessly.

Bertram took a seat at a vacant table, and ordered some wine to pay for his place. He sat there, staring at the dancers and the people at the tables. Some of the girls were astonishingly pretty in the German type, with blonde hair and blue eyes. There was one who reminded him of Joyce, and he felt a sharp touch of pain at the thought. She had the same kind of gold-spun hair and slim figure, but her face was painted, which was not a habit of Joyce’s, and it was plain to see that she was a girl of “easy virtue” by the way her eyes roved around the group of men, with inviting smiles. She sat alone, smoking a cigarette, with her elbows on the table. The men were mostly of a repulsive type. There were several of them with shaven heads, or so closely cropped that they were nearly bald, as he had seen Prussian officers when, as prisoners, they had thrown away their shrapnel helmets.

Other men here were foreigners, a few English, a group of Americans, a number of Jews of unguessable nationalities. The women mingled with them, drank with them, ogled them, and they did not resent these German _houris_.

Bertram had never seen such dancing. It was perfectly respectable, but grotesque because of the stiff way in which the Germans interpreted the modern steps with a kind of mechanical jig.