Part 7

She offered him her cheek. The invitation could not be refused without default of chivalry, but he was awkward and restrained in his salute.

Janet Welford rubbed her cheek with the back of her hand and said, “_Quelle violence! Qu’il est féroce, cet Anglais, et formidable!_”

She sat on the arm of the old leather chair, and put her arm round Christy’s neck and her cheek against his cheek, and called him a beautiful pterodactyl, and a most wise old plesiosaurus.

“Don’t you come vamping me too recklessly,” growled Christy, with mock resentment. “I may be ugly, but I’m human.”

“You’re impregnable in virtue,” said Janet Rockingham Welford. “Alas for amorous womanhood in a world of surplus women!”

She sighed deeply, and then pulled Christy’s ears, left the arm of his chair, and sat demurely opposite Bertram.

“Tell me,” she asked, “are you one of Us?”

Bertram enquired in what way, and she explained she meant the Only Way, the Far, Far, Better Way. Was he one of those who had turned their back on an old and wicked world, full of old and wicked men (and women) and marched forward with youth to the New World of equality, brotherhood and universal peace?

It was Christy who murmured with a grin:

“Pollard’s groping towards the light.”

“Let me take him by the hand,” said Janet Rockingham Welford. “I’ll lead him into such a blaze of light that his young soul will be dazzled. He will see the vision of the glory of light and the bright coloured garments of radiant humanity. . . . Will you come, my friend?”

“Is it far to walk?” asked Bertram, “or must I take a ’bus?”

She told him that it was no further than the Charing Cross Road, over a bookshop, on Tuesday and Friday evenings, at the club meetings of the “Left Wing.” She was secretary, and would make him a probationary member. Fee, two shillings and sixpence. Including coffee.

She made other enquiries as to his political and philosophical mentality, and found him doubtful. She diagnosed him as a case of psychic suppression, with a political complex. His instincts, she thought, were healthy, but his opinions idiotic. If he would leave himself entirely in her hands, with placid faith, she would undertake to root up his inherited and developed prejudices, and turn him out a fresh young soul of the Left Wing, eager for exalted flight.

“Your marriage, Bertram dear?” she enquired presently; “are you fretting at the yoke, or have you acquired that technique which makes it possible for two human beings to dwell under the same roof-tree, day after day, even week after week, without agony of boredom and a nerve strain beyond endurance? Tell me frankly. I can help you.”

Bertram flushed to the roots of his hair, said “Hang it all!” and then laughed heartily. Janet Rockingham Welford was really the most remarkable specimen of modern young womanhood that he had yet met.

She seemed glad to amuse him.

“That laugh will do you good,” she informed him. “You’ve been worrying about things. You’ve secret fears. I expect your dreams ought to be regulated. Laughter is the great remedy of fear. I know that from my blind men.”

“Are you ever serious?” asked Bertram.

“I never leave laughter far behind,” she answered.

And that was true, as he found, not in Christy’s rooms but in hers, to which he went rather often, after that first meeting, and in little restaurants around St. John’s Wood or in the “Zoo,” where he met her after her work with the blinded soldiers of St. Dunstan’s.

She was serious sometimes, passionately serious about the state of civilisation, the hatred between nations, the nation’s forgetfulness of boys who had been stricken in the War, and the objects for which they had fought, the indifference of the lucky classes to the growing poverty, the increasing despair of ex-soldiers, crippled men, nerve-broken women, the cruelty of the world to starving Russia—oh, yes, she admitted the secret spell of Bolshevism!—the brutality of England to Ireland, the refusal of the United States to enter the League of Nations, the trickery, the wickedness, the corruption of European Governments who poked up the worst passions of the crowd, and lied to them, and played the old game of international rivalry so that the world was being staged for another war.

She dropped her fantastic way of speech in talking of these things, and scared Bertram by the violence of her language, and by the red flame of her spirit, reckless of all restraint, impatient of delay, eager for “direct action” to cure the evils which she saw and loathed.

But laughter came quick upon her passion. She laughed wholeheartedly at Bertram’s fears, his loyalty to old traditions, his hatred of violence, his moderate views, his moralities. She called him a Queen Victorian Englishman, an 1880 Jingo, a trimmer, a hedger, a Girondin, a disciple of Samuel Smiles, a John Halifax, Gentleman, a Tory Democrat, and in a moment of exasperation, a Poor Damned Soul.

He caught a glimpse of her now and then, pacing rapidly round Regent’s Park with a blinded soldier on each arm. They laughed continually as she talked to them. They looked happy. They chatted brightly, and they turned their faces to her sometimes as though seeing the way in which the wind blew a brown tress across her rose-flushed cheek, and the brightness of her eyes.

Bertram had hated to see those blinded soldiers, groping their way about the Park, tapping the kerb-stone with their sticks, standing, and listening intently, as the taxi-cabs swirled by, afraid, melancholy, stricken. The sight of them made him curse the war again, and go back to his book, to write more bitterly of its anguish.

But Janet Rockingham Welford was at her best with those blinded men, and he had no argument with her in that part of her work, though in all else.

He went often to her rooms.

XV

Not a word of news had come from Susan or Dennis O’Brien, and Bertram’s anxiety had been allayed for a time because of the argument he used to his mother, and to his own sense of uneasiness—that no news is good news.

His mother was fretting miserably. It seemed to age her, and he noticed that she was weak in health, and no longer had that placid resignation to the worries of life which had made her so comforting as a mother to unruly but devoted children.

A greyness had crept beneath her skin, so white and transparent in the old days. She seemed to have lost her interest in the little duties of domestic life which had filled her time in all the days and years of Bertram’s remembrance, and it came as a shock to him, greater than any other sign of distress in her, that on his last visit some withered flowers remained unchanged in the vase on her table, and her writing desk was disorderly with many letters and household bills hopelessly mixed up, as he remarked when she tried to find a letter from his brother Digby. She had made a religion of “tidiness.” Susan’s rampageous carelessness had been a source of constant annoyance to her sense of order. This litter in her desk, and those unchanged flowers, were signs that something had broken in her spirit, and Bertram was shocked by that, and by the grey sadness of the little woman who had given him life, as she sat, with restless hands in her lap, and a kind of hidden fear in her eyes.

She was afraid because Susan hadn’t written one word to her about her secret marriage or her present whereabouts. That marriage, which Bertram had revealed, was like a blow to her. She had prayed that Susan might marry a “nice” man, so that she would settle down and have babies, and be happy. She’d even asked God to let her live until she had that sense of security in Susan’s happiness—her wild, beautiful, reckless Susan. But now this secret wedding with a young man who was in conflict with the law, and had done dangerous and dreadful things, was worse than anything she had feared.

“What does the governor think?” asked Bertram.

Mrs. Pollard’s eyelids quivered as she looked at her son.

“Your father thinks it’s all my fault.”

“He would!” said Bertram, bitterly.

“First Dorothy. Now Susan. One married to a German, the other to an Irish rebel! It makes him feel like King Lear, he says. He forbids me to mention his daughters.”

“What a man!” cried Bertram. “What colossal intolerance!”

His mother reproved him, timidly.

“Your father’s a good man, my dear. You must be patient with his point of view. Those dreadful politics—”

Bertram raged inwardly against his father, with a storm of anger at the unyielding, deep-dug, inhuman prejudice of his attitude to life, but for his mother’s sake he swallowed the bitter words that rose in him. He tried to comfort her by reminding her of news she’d received from young Digby. The boy was coming back from Dublin on leave. He might have heard something about Susan and Dennis. Anyhow, it would be good to see him. He had been very lucky.

But his mother shook her head, and refused to be comforted.

“Digby is my chief anxiety. I lie awake at night thinking of him in the midst of all those raids and searches and murderous attacks. I can hardly forgive your father for letting him join the Black and Tans, as they call them. He’s so young. Such a child!”

Bertram growled that it was a disgrace to the family, anyhow. The Black and Tans were dragging England’s reputation in the mud. They were no better than hooligans. The scum of the Army that had fought for Liberty.

Again his mother reproved him. They were doing their duty In upholding law and order, she said, and Bertram laughed bitterly, thinking of what old Christy would say to that, and Janet Welford. But how could he argue with his mother, so wan-looking, so melancholy? She had withered like the flowers in her vase. He had been tempted to tell her about his own troubles, to ask her advice about Joyce, who was so “distant” from him now, so unresponsive to his love. . . . But he could not burden his little mother with more family tragedies. He rose and kissed her forehead, and said, “It’s all very difficult!” It was his old familiar jest.

She smiled at him, and seemed to brighten.

“You’ve always been good and true,” she told him. “How’s dear Joyce?”

“Splendid,” he told her, and then left her, to get some news of Susan, if he could, by way of Dennis O’Brien’s sisters.

He’d been reminded of those girls by Janet Welford, to whom he had told the story of Susan and Dennis. Janet knew everybody, it seemed to Bertram, and he was not surprised when she said, “Dennis O’Brien? Of course! And his three sisters in Maid of Honour Row. Don’t you remember how they learned dancing with us in the old days at the Kensington Academy?”

Yes, he remembered now, three little girls with pigtails down their backs and an Irish way of speech, and a habit of dropping rosaries out of their pockets when they danced. They were Irish Catholics, and he and Janet, alone together in her rooms, had discovered them at the old address in the telephone directory, under the name of their father, Sir Montague O’Brien.

No news is good news, as Bertram found when he went to the O’Briens’ house. They had received news of their brother Dennis, and it was bad. He guessed that at once, when the maid showed him into one of the rooms of their house in Maid of Honour Row, a little Queen Anne house with panelled walls and a powder closet, where once the waiting ladies of a Stuart Queen had lived, not far from the old red-brick palace in Kensington Gardens.

The three O’Brien girls suited the house, and the panelled room, painted white, with little chintz curtains in the casement windows, and gilt-framed mirrors on the walls, and miniatures of Irish gentry in old-fashioned dress.

The girls whom he remembered with pigtails, had their dark hair coiled high, and their frocks were cut low at the neck, showing their full white throats, not unlike the portrait of a Georgian lady over their mantelpiece. Bertram remembered their names now, long forgotten, as he thought, though tucked away in his subconscious storehouse of old memories—Rose and Betty and Jane, in order of age.

A young priest was with them, and Bertram, as he entered the room, saw at a glance that they’d been praying on their knees, for they had risen hastily at the maid’s tap on the door. The young priest held his beads. They had been reciting the rosary, as Catholics do, for the dying or dead. The girls had red eyes, and tried to hide the sign of tears when Bertram announced himself as “a kind of brother-in-law” and asked for news of his sister Susan.

A letter lay open on the table, and Rose O’Brien, the eldest sister, handed it to him without a word, while another gush of tears came into her eyes. It was in Susan’s handwriting and was but a short message. Dennis had been arrested near Dublin, and taken to Mountjoy Prison. She was in hiding with friends they knew. It would not be safe for her to write any more. She sent her love, and ended her letter with the words, “God save Ireland—and my dear Dennis!”

There was silence in the room while Bertram read the letter. So Susan had crossed to Ireland with the boy, as he had guessed. Dennis had been taken to Mountjoy Prison. On what charge?

He asked the girls that.

“What has Dennis done?”

None of them answered. It seemed to Bertram that they weren’t sure of trusting him.

It was the young priest who answered.

“Does it matter to the Black and Tans what an Irishman has done, or not done? It’s only surprising that they didn’t kill poor Dennis at sight. It’s a Reign of Terror, without law, without justice, without mercy.”

“On both sides,” said Bertram, sharply. “I see no distinction in murder—Sinn Fein or Black and Tan.”

The priest laughed uneasily, but into his large dark eyes leapt a little flame of passion.

“Sinn Fein does no murder. It fights in self-defence for the liberty of Ireland, and executes spies and murderers—the British soldiery and their bloody rabble, the Black and Tans.”

Bertram groaned with a kind of anguish. He had used the same arguments with Joyce, with Kenneth Murless, with all that crowd. But when the priest spoke them his mind refused to admit this one-sided view, this assertion that Ireland had no guilt.

“It’s all madness,” he said. “Madness and murder. Insane anarchy. Black-hearted crime. How can you defend it as a Catholic priest—even as a Christian?”

The priest shrugged his shoulders.

“You’re an Englishman. How can you understand the Irish point of view? The divine passion of a people fighting for freedom against ruthless oppression? It’s not in your mentality.”

“I’m half Irish,” said Bertram, bitterly, “and sometimes I wish, by God, that I hadn’t a drop of Irish blood in my veins! But because I’m half English as well as half Irish, I say that England cannot surrender to Irish gun-men. You’re fighting with the wrong weapons in a dirty way.”

Rose O’Brien had whispered to the priest, and he answered as though he had gained new understanding.

“I don’t argue about Ireland with a son of Michael Pollard, K.C.”

It was a shrewd blow, and Bertram was silent under the thrust of it. He turned from the priest to the three girls.

“Your brother’s wife is my sister,” he said. “What’s to be done?”

Rose O’Brien answered him.

“There’s nothing to do but pray.”

Betty O’Brien saw something else to do.

“I’ll go to Dublin to-night. If the dirty Black and Tans touch me with a little finger—I’ll lay a whip across their faces. I’m Irish, body and soul.”

“Hush, Betty, for the love of God!” said Rose, and Jane, the youngest, said, “Be quiet, darling!”

It was Jane who showed Bertram out of the house, after he had written a line to Susan, in case Betty saw her.

The girl touched his arm, and whispered to him:

“I’m not Sinn Fein, like Rose and Betty. I’m sure our Lord wouldn’t like it. But I’m Dennis’s sister, and he’s the noblest boy I know. Dear God! what will I do if they take him from us?”

She leant up against the door-post and wept bitterly but very quietly.

“They’ll send him to prison for a time,” said Bertram; “it’s not so terrible.”

He kissed her hand, to make her understand his sympathy.

“God help Ireland—and England!” he said, and then lifted his hat and walked away. If he had been wholly Irish, he would have been Sinn Fein too. His passion would have flamed out for Irish liberty. But he was the son of an English mother, and loved England first and best. Why was he always pulled two ways? Why did this infernal tug-of-war go on in his heart and brain, between the extremes of thought? Most men walked on one side or the other, on their own side of life’s hedge. He tried to keep to the middle of the road, and both sides flung stones at him.

XVI

That night young Digby came to see him. The boy was not wearing his uniform in the Black and Tans. It was not popular in London, and the authorities kept it out of sight.

They greeted each other in the usual way.

“Hulloa, old man!” from Digby. “Hulloa, young fellow!” from Bertram.

They were alone together in the “study,” Joyce having gone out to dinner again.

“How are things?” asked Digby.

“How’s yourself?” asked Bertram.

“I feel good to be in England again, after that hellish place, Ireland! One feels safe in the streets. No need to keep an eye over one’s shoulder. A knock at the door doesn’t make one jump out of one’s giddy seat!”

And yet, a little later, he started and looked towards the door when there was the double rat-tat of a postman’s knock.

“Sorry!” he said, with a queer grin, as he fumbled for his pipe and lit it.

He was barely twenty, and had escaped the Great War by a year or two, though he had been in training as an officer-cadet before the Armistice; a fair-haired boy, with clear-cut, delicate features, almost girlish, and something of his mother’s look. But altered, thought Bertram. Something had changed in him. There was a loose look about his mouth, and his eyes were shifty. He had developed a slight stutter in his speech.

“Any whiskey, old man?” he asked Bertram, after some preliminary conversation about his father and mother, Joyce, and the right thing to see at the theatre.

Bertram produced the whiskey, but raised his eyebrows when Digby poured out half a glass and drank it like water.

“I say! That’s a stiff dose, isn’t it?”

The boy said it was nothing. He had got into the habit of it. Everybody drank like a fish in his crowd. Nothing else to do in the old barracks. It was rather encouraged by the “Officer commanding.” Even the men could drink as much as they liked before going out on search parties and raids. It made ’em a bit fierce and kept up their spirits. Otherwise they would be too easy with the Irish, especially the Irish girls, who were damn pretty, many of them.

It wasn’t a pleasant thing to search girls’ bedrooms at night. At night? Yes, of course. All search parties went out at night, drew a cordon round certain streets, then banged at the doors, or bashed them in, while an officer, with a sergeant and five men or so, went through the house looking for rebels, and fellows on the run, concealed arms, and all that.

A rotten job for a gentleman.

One night he had a lot of trouble with his men. They routed out three girls in their night-shirts—ladies, too, and amazingly pretty—and started mucking about with them. One girl had her night-shirt torn off, and screamed enough to pull the house down. It was the sergeant’s fault. He was drunk that night, and beastly amorous. Digby had threatened to shoot him, and did actually knock down one of the men. That sobered them up, and they left the girls alone, but it made them savage, and in the next house they shot a young boy—just a kid—who tried to shut a door in their faces.

“Killed him?” asked Bertram in a strangled voice. This narrative made his blood feel like boiling lead. Hot and cold waves passed up his spine to the top of his scalp.

“Oh, Lord, yes! Plugged through the head.”

On another night there had been a hell of a scene. They had run to earth a young rebel in Collin’s command. He had been in the ambush at Black Rock where five Scotties had been killed. O’Callaghan by name. His mother and sister had hidden him in a linen cupboard. Of course, they found that pretty quick, but the sister stood between his men and the cupboard, with a red-hot poker, and threatened to burn the eyes out of the first man who tried to pass her. The sergeant drew his revolver, but the mother flung herself at him and he had to shoot her. Then the sister attacked, and one of his fellows ran her through with a bayonet, to save himself from the red-hot poker. What else could he do?

It was worse when the women started screaming and praying round their men folk. It put the fellows’ nerves on edge. Their nerves were always on edge. They couldn’t walk a yard without the chance of getting a sniper’s bullet in the brain, or being plugged in the back of the head by some fellow who had just passed, in a busy street, or a lonely lane. That sort of thing gave a man the jim-jams. It was worse than real war, he imagined.

No wonder the men treated the Irish “rough” at times or got out of hand and shot up a village in which some of their pals had been killed. Killed without a dog’s chance. What did it mean, exactly, “shooting up” a village? Oh, just driving through in an armoured car and spraying the windows and door-ways with machine-gun bullets. Women and children killed like that? Often, of course. A rotten game, but guerrilla warfare was like that. . . .

“Any more whiskey, old man? Oh, thanks.”

He went on talking, describing raids and ambushes and reprisals, for an hour or more, until Bertram could listen to no more of this narrative by his “kid brother” as he used to call him. It made him feel physically sick. It seemed to drain him of all vitality, so that he trembled at the knees when he began to walk about the room.

“It’s frightful! It’s devilish! After the Great War and all our sacrifice for liberty! Two English-speaking peoples, bound together by blood, by Christian faith, by heroic memories! My God! Digby, I implore you to chuck it. Hand in your papers. Resign. Cut your right hand off rather than do that dirty work! It’s dishonouring. It’s filthy. It’s murderous.”

Digby’s face flushed. He gulped down some more whiskey, and lit a cigarette.

“It’s got to be done,” he said, sullenly. “Somebody’s got to do it. It’s what happens in this bloody world.”

He was less than twenty years old, and all his memories were of war, and blood, and death. He was annoyed by the emotion of his elder brother. He was also a little drunk. Presently he said, “So long, old man, I think I’ll go and do a show.”

Bertram had not asked him about Susan and Dennis. When the boy had gone, he raged about the room again. He remembered this boy, Digby, when he was a little fair-haired thing to whom he used to tell fairy-tales in bed. Their mother used to come and kiss them and tell them to go to sleep. Now this! Bertram was overwhelmed by a sense of pity for the mothers of the world.

XVII

Tucked into the frame of the Jacobean mirror (sham antique, but rather good-looking) over the mantelpiece of Bertram’s “study,” was the card given to him by Lady Ottery for her lecture on “The Religion of Revolution: Past and Present.” He had glanced at it several times from day to day with a sense of annoyance, as at the notification of an impending menace, such as a date with the dentist or any distant disagreeable and inevitable duty.

APRIL 10. THE RELIGION OF REVOLUTION: PAST AND PRESENT BY THE COUNTESS OF OTTERY CHAIRMAN HIS GRACE, THE DUKE OF BRAMSHAW, K.G.