Part 3

“Still continuing to destroy the Empire, that’s all,” was the answer, delivered with a quiet ferocity. “Look at India, seething with revolt and delivered over to a Jewish conspiracy. The only man who dealt with things with a firm hand, condemned, dismissed, and disgraced. Look at Ireland. Anarchy and murder! What’s the Government doing there? Surrendering to traitors who ought to be shot like dogs. Look at England—public money being poured out like water, Government offices squandering millions, the Government cringing to Trade-Unionists and Bolsheviks. Look at Germany! By God, sir, Germany will win the war yet! The Hidden Hand is still at work among our politicians. Where are the fruits of victory? The Government is allowing the Hun to escape the price of defeat. It’s a damned conspiracy, sir!”

“It’s all very difficult,” said Bertram.

He had heard this very conversation before. Almost in the same words his own father had made a grand indictment of the Government and all its works. Queer that this shabby fellow, “down on his luck,” as the men used to say, should be talking in the same strain as his high and dry reactionary father, whose sentiments when repeated by Bertram to Christy made that son of the people pour forth ironical blasphemies.

His new acquaintance began to tell of his own woes. After honourable service to his country, he had been reduced to living in a common lodging-house, seeking work in a Labour Exchange. A horrible humiliation!

“Why?” asked Bertram. “I take it that a Labour Exchange is to exchange labour? A pretty useful thing.”

The man with a dyed moustache stared at him blankly.

“I hope you don’t think I’m a damned labourer?” he asked, aggressively.

“I wish I were!” said Bertram. “Anything rather than lounging.”

He was saved further argument by the boy scout, who called his name and opened the inner door.

The Labour Exchange secretary rose as he entered the office, and said, “Take a seat, won’t you, Major?”

Bertram saw that he was in the presence of a man about his own age, twenty-five, and a pleasant-looking fellow, typical of the “temporary officers” who had poured out in their thousands to France.

“Anything I can do for you, sir?” said the secretary, offering a box of cheap Virginia cigarettes.

Bertram explained that he was looking out for a good job of any kind, and was disconcerted when the Labour Exchange man laughed, dropped the “sir” hurriedly, and said, “No good coming here, old man! Surely you’re not so hard put to it as all that?”

“That’s just what I am,” said Bertram, “devilish hard put to it.”

“What can you do?”

Bertram mentioned the blessed word “organising,” but again the secretary smiled and shook his head. Then he asked a series of questions, like a machine-gun opening rapid fire.

“Do you write a decent hand? No? Can you type? No? Any good at figures? No? Shorthand? No? Knowledge of engineering? book-keeping, surveying,—any business, trade, or profession? No?”

“I was at St. Paul’s School,” said Bertram, “and one year at Oxford. I’m a jolly good gunner, and I was brought up as a gentleman. Hasn’t England any place for my sort?”

He was resentful of the smiling ironical look of the man interrogating him.

“Not any kind of place at all, old man”—Bertram wished he wouldn’t “old man” him so much—“unless you have a social pull. That’s still some good for jobs in Government offices and that kind of thing, but it’s getting less valuable as time goes on. Without it, fellows like you—and me—haven’t a dog’s chance. How do you think I got this job when I became demobbed?”

“Haven’t an idea,” said Bertram.

“Why, my pater is Chief Clerk of Marylebone. Social pull, my boy! Nothing else. There are thousands of young officers, ex-airmen, ex-everything, who’ll have to emigrate, or starve to death. There’s no alternative. . . . Well, there’s one!”

“What’s that?”

“Join the Auxiliary Force in Ireland. ‘Black and Tans,’ as they call them. Does the idea appeal to you?”

“Not in the least,” said Bertram.

The Labour Exchange secretary laughed, and touched his bell for the boy scout.

“I don’t blame you neither. A rotten game! Good day and good luck.”

Bertram had winced over that “neither.” He had been taught to speak pretty well, but though he would not say “I don’t blame you neither,” he hadn’t learnt enough, it seemed, either at St. Paul’s or Balliol, to get any kind of job in England.

“Not without a social pull,” said the Labour Exchange fellow. As a matter of fact, he had a social pull. His father was Michael Pollard, K.C., M.P.—with a considerable pull on the Tory crowd. His father-in-law was the Earl of Ottery, related by cousinship to most of the old blood in England. His brother-in-law, Alban, was in the Foreign Office with Kenneth Murless and other friends of Joyce, his wife. But none of them had offered him anything, or suggested anything, or gone a yard out of the way to help him.

Joyce’s people had no use for him. He didn’t belong to their caste, though they tolerated him coldly, for Joyce’s sake. He didn’t speak their language, as it were. He didn’t look at things from their point of view. He was an “outsider.” How could he bring himself to ask them for a job? The supercilious Alban, for instance? He could not even go to his own father, with whom he was hardly on speaking terms, because of a hopeless divergence of views on the subject of Ireland. “Join the Black-and-Tans, like Digby,” would be his father’s most genial suggestion, just like this secretary of the Labour Exchange.

Yet for Joyce’s sake he would have to humble himself and ask some of his exalted relatives to put him in charge of some department for wasting the tax-payer’s money. A financial crisis was bearing down on him with the enormous and imminent pressure of the Germans in March of 1918 against the British line. He had come to the end of the money he had put by out of his pay during the war—the very last pound of it. Henceforth it was Joyce who would do the paying until he grabbed at a job, or begged for one.

“I’m getting dishonest,” thought Bertram, as he walked through High Street, Marylebone, observing the mournful look of the people he passed, and turning his eyes away from a blinded man playing a piano organ.

“Old Christy’s intensive education in idealism is wearing off. Lord, if only I could do something worth doing—lift the world a little out of its mess—make it safer for the kids coming along—prevent more blinded men playing piano organs as payment for heroism! . . . Was it worth while, their sacrifice?”

The question that came into his brain seemed to him like a kind of blasphemy—a treachery to his own code, and to all the crowd who had fought for England. If that sacrifice had not been worth while, and so many men had died for false beliefs and hopes, then nothing in the world was right, and all that men were taught in faith was just a lie. Christy had said it _was_ a lie, the whole make-up of civilisation, the code of his sort of people, patriotism itself. They had argued over that, almost savagely, and he had told Christy to shut up or clear out.

Yet how explain those newspaper placards which stared him in the face from newspaper shops in the Marylebone Road?

More Unemployed Riots.

Crime Wave Spreads.

No Houses for Heroes.

Is Europe Doomed?

Reprisals in Ireland.

France Insults England.

Not easy to keep cheerful, to retain a fair and sturdy optimism, to see the blessing of the victory, even after the slaughter of the world’s best youth, when those facts were on the placards, between High Street, Marylebone and the lower end of Baker Street!

Yet Bertram Pollard, ex-officer and unemployed, did not despair. He felt something “inside him,” as he used to say in his childhood, which promised some kind of revelation of all this mystery. He seemed to be waiting for a light that would make things clear to him in his own life, and in life. He was certain, beneath his deep uncertainty, that he would find some job to do, some job worth doing. God, or the great powers, or his own instincts, would give him a chance, a new impulse, some decent object in life. After all, he was only twenty-five, with health and strength and desire to find the right place.

Impossible that he should be useless and unused!

VII

A man came up in the dusk that was creeping into the streets of London, and walked alongside Bertram. He said something about no work, a sick wife, children, the war.

Bertram had heard it all a hundred times from other men, and tried to remember whether he had any money in his pocket. Then something in the man’s voice stirred an old memory. He halted and stared into the man’s face, and saw that it was one of his old company, Bill Huggett, the Cockney fellow from Camberwell.

He spoke his name, and the man was startled, and then shamefaced.

“Good Lord, Huggett! Have you come to this?”

Bertram was distressed. This man had been with him in the dirtiest places, on mornings of great battle, in the dreary old routine. He had always “groused,” but had never failed in pluck, and always cheered his comrades by his grim humour when things were bad, and death neighbourly.

“Well, what else?” asked the man, in a hostile voice. He wanted to know what a bloke could do on twenty-five shillings a week, out of work pay, and food prices rising every day, and a family of brats to keep. After saving the blasted country!

Bertram suggested that other men had helped to save the country, and were in the same trouble.

“Not you, anyhow,” said the man, with an ugly rasp in his voice.

“Me too,” said Bertram. “Let’s go and get a drink and talk things out. . . .”

They went through the swing door of a dirty public house somewhere behind Baker Street station, and Bertram sat opposite his former corporal at a table wet with beer dregs. At the bar a number of seedy men, some of them in khaki trousers under old overcoats, were drinking beer in a gloomy way, without much conversation.

Huggett asked for a glass of stout, which he said was food as well as drink. He was a thin-faced fellow, with a battered bowler hat and an old trench coat still stained with the mud of Flanders and the Somme, and the later grease of low class eating houses in London. By trade, as Bertram remembered, he was a French polisher, but according to his tale, there was “nothing doing” in French polishing.

It was at the end of a second glass of stout that he became talkative, and Bertram did not like his kind of talk. He liked it less because it expressed crudely and violently some of the ideas that had been creeping into his own mind—the rough deal that was being given to the men who had fought and come back, the inequality of reward for service done, so that while the front line men were unemployed, the slackers, the stay-at-homes, the artful dodgers, had captured all the jobs.

“Look at all the Generals in Whitehall,” said Huggett. “Still strutting around as though the war was on, with flower gardens blooming on their breasts. Did they ever stand in the mud up to their knee-caps, serving a blarsted machine-gun under a German barrage? Not on your life!”

“They did their job as well as they knew how,” said Bertram. “It had to be done. Somebody had to do it.”

Huggett did not see why his job had to be done. The war had not been to make life easier or better for ordinary folk. It had made it harder. He was pleased to admit, as he wiped his lips with the back of his hand, that if Fritz had won he would have mopped up everything and skinned England alive. He had to be beat. But after the war? What about all the promises about homes for heroes? A land for heroes to live in? He was one of the little heroes, well, he’d done his bit!—but his unemployed pay was not enough to keep a dog decent.

He lowered his voice, and spoke of the bitterness of men like himself. They were getting savage. He wasn’t one to believe in revolution, but there were others who did. They wanted to tear down everything, drag down everybody, smash up the whole show, and then all start level. There were foreign chaps about, round the factory gates, in the pubs, putting those ideas into the heads of young chaps who were ready for them. There were a lot of little leaflets going about—very hot stuff—pushed through letter boxes, and into the hands of factory girls. All Huggett wanted, and steady fellows who didn’t hold with wild stuff, was decent wages for decent work, but there were numbers who weren’t out for work at all. They were out for Red Revolution—bloody red—said Bill Huggett. “And can you wonder, sir, when there’s nothing like a fair deal for honest working men. It’s just asking for trouble.”

Bertram listened gloomily. He seemed to hear in the words of Bill Huggett, this thin-faced Cockney, the voice of the underworld, not heard in Parliament or in the Press, the murmur of masses of men, discontented, bitter, restless, out of work, wondering, as he had asked himself, whether all the sacrifice had been worth while.

He switched the conversation on to another line, less worrying to his troubled mind.

“How’s your wife, Huggett?” He remembered the man had kept his wife’s photograph in his tunic during his time with the machine-gun company, and had shown it to him once with pride—the photograph of a plain-faced girl, in a cheap blouse and hat with “fevvers.” Huggett took it out of his pocket now, and dropped it in the beer-dregs on the table.

“She ain’t like that now. You remember I showed it to you one day at Mally Mally, down on the Somme? It was after that she went clean off her dot. After an air raid. They took her away, and I’m alone with the kids. Christ!”

The man’s voice broke, and he drew his hand over his eyes.

Bertram said something in sympathy. What was the use? Presently he paid for the beer, and then took off his wrist watch and pushed it over to Bill Huggett.

“You might get something on that. It might help a bit. I’ve no money to give you.”

Huggett stared at the wrist watch. It had been synchronised for zero hour in many mornings of battle. The young Major had worn it day and night, was always shooting his cuff to look at it. Huggett pushed it back.

“I wouldn’t take it, not if I was starved to death.”

“All right,” said Bertram. He slipped the watch into his waistcoat pocket and then rose from the table to go.

“Come and see me, now and then, Huggett. We ought to keep in touch, as ‘Comrades of the Great War,’ eh?”

As he passed out of the public house, Huggett stood up stiffly and saluted with his hand to his battered bowler hat.

VIII

Bertram was surprised to meet Joyce’s father in the Charing Cross Road on a day when he thought his elderly relative was at Ottery Park, deep in Domesday Book, or the Manorial system of England, or the Rights of Villeinage, or some other musty historical work in which he seemed to find much interest and drama, in spite of the more exciting events of contemporary life. Bertram wouldn’t have noticed him but for the remarks of two passers-by.

“Do you know that old buffer?”

“No. Who?”

“The Earl of Ottery. You remember? Colonial Secretary before the War. The most reactionary old swine—”

Bertram was intending to take a slogging walk up to the north of London, to avoid one of Joyce’s tea-parties to Kenneth Murless and his crowd—he was not in a mood for Kenneth’s brilliant repartee—but he decided that it might be well to have a word with his father-in-law.

Lord Ottery was staring in at the window of a clothier’s shop in which a number of garments were labelled “Ready to Wear” and “Hardly Soiled.”

He was a heavy, broad-shouldered man, with a ruddy face, rather freckled round the eyes, and a reddish, unkempt beard and moustache. The professional sharper would have “spotted” him as a simple farmer up to London for the day, and an easy prey for the gold-brick story. And the sharper would have been extremely disillusioned.

“What are you doing here, sir?” asked Bertram, touching him on his arm.

Lord Ottery stared at him in a vague way for a moment, as though wondering who the deuce he might be, and then greeted him with fair geniality.

“Oh, it’s you, Bertram. Thought it might be one of those young ex-officers who want to touch one for half a sovereign. Why the devil don’t they enlist in the Black-and-Tans and knock hell out of Ireland? Far more useful than lounging about without a job to do.”

Bertram did not reveal his thoughts on that subject, which were distinctly hostile. He merely repeated his enquiry as to what brought Lord Ottery to town.

His father-in-law chuckled, and said he would reveal a secret which he didn’t want all the world to know. He was doing a little shopping to replenish his wardrobe. He had discovered that instead of paying fabulous prices to his tailor in Air Street, he could get excellent clothes, ready to wear, at exactly one-sixth the price.

He had already bought two lounge suits which fitted him like a glove, except for slight alterations needed in the back and under the arm-pits. He had also found a shop in the Tottenham Court Road where he could buy first-class boots, suitable for country wear, at a saving of two pounds on those he had been in the habit of buying at Croxteth and Trevor’s in Pall Mall.

At one time, as he admitted, he would have shuddered at the idea of wearing ready-made clothes. In the old days, away back in Queen Victoria’s reign, he had been a regular Beau Brummell, and never wore a pair of trousers twice in the same week, or a neck-tie more than once after he bought it, but now things had come to such a pass that economy was the order of the day. Besides, what did it matter? It used to be fashionable—_de rigueur_, even—for the French émigrés after the Revolution to wear ragged lace ruffles. With super-tax at two shillings in the pound, land tax a frightful burden, and investments paying no dividends, people like himself would be reduced to taking in each other’s washing.

He mustn’t go too far, however, in cutting down his tailor’s bill! The other day an awkward thing had happened to him. He had bought a wonderful second-hand overcoat at a Jew dealer’s in Covent Garden, astrachan collar, silk-lined, a wonderful bargain—twelve pounds, ten shillings. Dunstable would have charged him forty for it, at least. But when he was about to hang it up on his peg in the lobby of the House of Lords, old Banthorp came up and said: “Curse me blind”—everybody knows how the old ruffian swears—“if that isn’t my old overcoat! There’s the very hole I burnt with the stump of a cigar, just above the third button!”

“Of course I had to tell him I had bought it from a Jew dealer, and he laughed so much I thought he would have a stroke. But the real cream of the jest is that he was wearing a ready-made suit himself, as he afterwards admitted. It was he who put me on to that shop in the Charing Cross Road. Lots of us are doing it now.”

Bertram laughed, and enjoyed the joke as much as was possible to a young man who had not yet come down to “cast-offs,” but was unpleasantly in debt to his tailor.

“Things seem to be getting pretty bad,” he remarked.

Lord Ottery stopped in the middle of Trafalgar Square and pointed his stick towards the clock tower of Westminster.

“The trouble is there,” he said. “Those fellows in the House of Commons have sold themselves to the devil. They’re not thinking of their country, but of how to keep their jobs and their votes. Promise the people anything—the Kaiser’s head, German gold, doles for unemployed, perpetual peace, luxury for all, and no need to work. I’m afraid of the future. The Empire is getting into the hands of the Jews. Look at India! The Government is pandering to mob-law. Look at the Trade Unions! Whitehall is swarming with place-men, and England is governed by a corrupt bureaucracy. Other Empires have passed. If we don’t face realities, rule with a strong hand, cut out corruption, get the people back to work, and stamp out the spirit of revolution among the masses, we shall lose our old place in the world. I shan’t live to see it, thank God. You may.”

Bertram glanced sideways at him as he passed sturdily down Whitehall, touching his broad-brimmed, badly brushed, silk hat to passers-by who saluted him. It seemed to Bertram that his father-in-law was a type of old England that was passing. The war had thrown up new men, more liberal in ideas, perhaps, at least less bound to old traditions, of nimbler mind, quicker to adapt themselves to new conditions; not so rooted in the soil of England, not so faithful to the old code of honour, not lifted above political temptation like those men of the old nobility, not so stupid and conservative, but not so strong and straight in their sense of duty, however wrong. They had served England well in the past.

“I’m a weakling to this man,” thought Bertram. “I’m pulled two ways, by old tradition and by new ideals. I haven’t the faith of either. I’m a rebel against the old caste, but doubtful of democracy. I hedge. I’m a blighted hedger. But he stands fast on his own side of the hedge, and will stand there, squarely, until something breaks through and finishes his type for ever. How soon will it be before something breaks through?”

Ottery seemed to answer his thoughts.

“Our day is done. I mean the day of the old quality of England. A little man in there, speaking the language of Billingsgate and Limehouse”—he pointed again to Big Ben—“began the invasion of our rights, led the great attack. The War and its costs have finished us. Profiteers are buying up the old estates. We can’t afford ’em. We’ve been hit too hard by taxes and death duties. Look at Holme Ottery. Why, it’s bleeding me to death, though I’m letting it go to rack and ruin.”

He sighed heavily, and changed the conversation.

“How’s Joyce?”

Bertram gave a good account of her, making no reference to anxieties in his own heart, private, secret things which disturbed him horribly—some change that had come over her after the death of the baby, a dislike of his caresses, a feverish desire for pleasure, a kind of hostility towards him because of certain ideas of his about silly political questions—Ireland!—and the rights of workingmen to a living wage. What absurd cause of quarrel between husband and wife! But, for the moment, anything seemed to serve as a cause of jangle between him and Joyce. It was her health, poor kid, and his aimlessness in life.

He suddenly blurted out his desire for a “job” to Lord Ottery.

“I’m one of those ex-officers you spoke about, sir! I must get a decent billet of some kind, for Joyce’s sake. Can you put me in the way of anything?”

Lord Ottery stared at him vaguely, as though he were a long way off. He always put on that look when asked for anything.

“Eh? Put you in the way of anything? Why don’t you join the Black-and-Tans? Knock hell out of those Irish blackguards!”

Bertram laughed, awkwardly.

“I’m sick of war. Besides, it doesn’t mean much pay. Not enough to help Joyce with her house in Holland Street. I want to keep my end up.”

Lord Ottery halted at the entrance to the House of Lords, touching his old hat to the policeman at the gate who saluted smartly.

“Why not go into business?” he said, as though “Business” were an open gate, easy to enter. “People are doing it now, I’m told.”

He nodded to Bertram and then ambled into the courtyard of the Palace of Westminster.

“A social pull!” thought Bertram. “The old ruffian wouldn’t lift a little finger for me!”

IX

It had been a regret to Bertram—almost a distress—that Luke Christy had not been in London lately, and he was glad to see his signature under some article in “The New World,” showing that he was back again.

There was something in Christy’s exalted pessimism, in his bitter and almost savage irony, in a queer humour darkly shaded by a sense of tragedy, which acted in an inexplicable way in Bertram as both an irritant and an opiate.