Part 8

Once or twice he had murmured, “Oh, Lord! I suppose I’ll have to go!” and then, as familiar objects lose their force of impression, he’d forgotten the lecture and its date. It was Joyce who reminded him one morning, at the breakfast table, to the music of an early piano organ in Holland Street,

“I suppose you’re going to Mother’s lecture?”

He said “Oh, Lord!” again and “When is it?”

It was on the following afternoon, and Joyce was naturally annoyed with him when he showed signs of shirking the engagement. She couldn’t understand, as she said, fretfully, why Bertram disparaged her Mother’s intellectual ability—Joyce always spoke of her Mother with a distinctly capital M—to say nothing of her historical knowledge. Lady Ottery had studied considerably more than Bertram, who was a desultory reader, and had read a good deal at the British Museum last winter, as well as belonging to the London Library, which allowed her to take out eleven books at a time on serious subjects.

“The amount of knowledge Mother has amassed is stupendous,” said Joyce. “Whether you agree with her or not, I think you ought to respect her research work.”

Bertram muttered something about not believing much in book-knowledge, but retreated on that line of argument as the author of a book which soon he hoped to present to Joyce with love and homage, as the first-fruits of his new-found gift. In the end, he capitulated, and agreed humbly to go to the lecture and behave himself with due deference to his exalted Mother-in-law. He tried to give a touch of humour to the surrender, and obtained the glimmer of a smile from Joyce. But she froze him by saying that she hoped her Mother’s lecture would convert him to more reasonable views, and make him see the frightful danger of the opinions held by his revolutionary friends at a time when England was threatened by mob-law.

“My dear Kid!” he said, making light again of her over-serious mood. “In the first place my friends aren’t revolutionary”—he had to make a mental reservation of Janet Rockingham Welford—“and in the second place, I don’t agree that England is threatened by mob-law.”

“Not by the coming strike?”

He hesitated for a moment, and then said: “The men call it a lock-out.”

She called that hair-splitting over words, and though he would not consent to that—it made all the difference to the argument—he agreed that there would be a serious situation in England, dangerous, even, if all the miners left their pits, and millions of unemployed and idle men were added to the two millions already without work. The stoppage of coal would gradually strangle all industry, and the railways, which were the vital arteries of the nation.

“There may be Civil War,” said Joyce, calmly, and Bertram answered sharply, “Nonsense! Who suggests that?”

“General Bellasis. As the Home Office man, he knows.”

“I wish to goodness he’d keep his precious knowledge to himself!” said Bertram angrily, “and not come round here mixing scaremonger politics with tea-table dalliance!”

Joyce’s colour rose slightly, as a hint that she was “vexed.”

“He’s one of the best. If you weren’t so unreasonably jealous, I’d ask you to make a friend of him.”

“Why?”

All Bertram’s nerves jangled at this suggestion of friendship with a man he detested as one of the professional warriors of Whitehall, with Prussian instincts and supercilious manners.

“Because he can put you in the way of a job. In fact, I think he’s going to offer you one.”

“Did _you_ ask him?”

“More or less. Don’t you want a job? It’s time you began to keep your end up.”

Bertram rose from his chair, walked to the window, and tossed a blind tassel to and fro.

Presently he spoke, in a low, emotional voice.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that! I’ll pay you back for board and lodging when my book’s published.”

She followed him to the window, and put her hand on his shoulder, with a caressing touch, which surprised him. It was some time since she’d done that.

“Bertram, I’m not playing the spiteful cat. You know it’s not my style of play. I’m not flinging anything in your face, or any rot of that kind. But you know you want a good job. You’ve said so a hundred times! Now General Bellasis is ready to offer you one. Why get huffed?”

He was melted by her words, by the old comradely tone of them, by her hand on his shoulder. If she only knew how a touch from her could kill his temper!

“Give my book a chance,” he said. “I believe I can do something at the writing game. Meanwhile, if Bellasis has anything to offer, I’ll think of it, seriously. What sort of a job, do you think?”

“Organising,” she told him, and he liked the word. “Something to do with the home defence of England—in case of trouble.”

“Trouble?” He looked at her vaguely.

“The strike.”

“Oh, Lord!”

“Why not?”

He didn’t tell her why not, and indeed, she couldn’t wait to hear why not, for some friends called with a car to take her to Brighton for lunch and tea. But his mind went quickly to recent conversations with some of the people whom Joyce didn’t know and didn’t care to know—Bill Huggett, down in Lambeth, Janet Welford, Luke Christy, Nat Verney, the miners’ leader, Lawless, the economist, Bernard Hall, editor of _The New World_. They also had been talking about the coming strike, which they called a lock-out, and had seriously disturbed his mind on the subject.

Christy and his friends declared that the ultimatum issued to the miners was the first challenge of Capital in a conflict which they intended to wage with Labour, until the spirit of the workers was broken and they were reduced again to the cheap standards of pre-war wages upon which the prosperity of British industry had been developed—for the employers.

While the Government was squandering millions of money on maintaining overstaffed departments filled with “limpets” pouring more millions into Imperialistic adventures in Mesopotamia, and the East, giving immense financial support to any Russian ruffian of the old régime who gathered together bands of bandits to invade the Republic, and generally ignoring the realities of financial ruin in Europe, following the War, they were engineering a systematic assault on Labour, in order to weaken its political power and reduce it to economic subjection.

The heroes of the War, “our brave boys in the trenches,” were already being branded as “Bolshevists” by Government spokesmen. The men who had fought at Ypres, on the Somme, and across the Hindenburg line, and whose patient courage in years of mud and misery and devouring death had won the War, in spite of the stupidity of generals, and the personal intrigues of politicians, were now to be denounced as revolutionary rascals, unpatriotic “blighters,” who must be “taught a lesson,” and forced back to a low standard of wages, and of life.

That was Christy’s way of thought about the ultimatum to the miners. It was supported with facts and figures by Nat Verney, the Labour member. He took the trouble to analyse the proposed scale of wages at a little conference of writing men in Christy’s rooms, brought there by Bernard Hall, of _The New World_. He seemed to prove that they were less than a living wage, so grotesquely out of scale with the prevailing cost of life that if the men accepted the ultimatum—hurled at them suddenly without previous warning or discussion—they would surrender their very birthright—the right to exist.

Verney spoke quietly, with a smouldering but masked passion.

“We shall fight them to the last ditch. The Government, in league with the mine-owners—that’s certain—have forced an issue which we’re ready to accept. We’re not afraid, for the judgment of the people will be on our side.”

Bernard Hall admitted that, personally, he _was_ afraid. There was a sense of bitterness among millions of men who had fought in the war and now were disillusioned with the promises made and betrayed by politicians. With so many men idle—lack of coal would shut down every industry—there might be a violent conflict. The Government was prepared to use force. He understood they were calling out the Army reserves. Some act of hooliganism, some shot fired accidentally, or otherwise, by any fool, and frightful things might happen.

“Supposing the soldiers refuse to fire on their own crowd?” asked Verney, and something in his eyes showed his hope for that.

There was silence in Christy’s room, until Christy himself broke it.

“That means Revolution—and the end of England as a world power.”

“We’re not out for Revolution,” said Verney, in a low voice. “We’re out for a decent rate of wage—nothing more than that.”

Then he raised his voice a little, and it had a thrill in it.

“If the Government asks for Revolution, if it arranges it, the blood guilt will be on its head.”

Bertram spoke for the first time. He was irritable, because all this grave discussion had come as a surprise to him, and suggested unpleasant possibilities which he hadn’t imagined, and didn’t believe.

“Don’t you think we’d better drop all mention of the word Revolution? It’s an ugly damn word, and oughtn’t to be in our English vocabulary. It isn’t in our English character, if I know England.”

The company had been startled by Bertram’s intervention, all but Christy, who understood his silences and his outbursts, and the working of his mind.

“Do any of us know England?” asked Bernard Hall, after a slight pause. “The men who went out to the war—to France, Palestine, Egypt, Salonica, Russia—have come back again. We don’t understand what’s going on in their minds. They don’t understand themselves. We’re dealing with uncertain, unknown forces.”

“I know the men pretty well,” said Bertram. “I keep in touch with them.”

They paid some heed to that, and admitted his claim to give evidence, acknowledging their own distance from the labouring classes, their theoretical guesses.

“You don’t think they’re out for trouble?” asked Hall. His dark, Celtic face, with its brooding eyes, was heavily overcast by the shadow of anxiety.

“They want peace,” said Bertram, “and enough to eat, decent house-room, and a little pocket-money for the fun of things.”

It was Bill Huggett who had given him that view of the situation. He used Huggett as a guide to the mind of the London crowds, the average mind of the dreary processions of men, marching with trained step through London with banners saying, “We want work, not charity,” and the point of view of the seedy-looking groups lounging about the Labour Exchanges, and of other assemblies of men listening on Sunday afternoons to political orators in Hyde Park. Bill Huggett was his interpreter.

The man had succeeded in getting back some of his work as “French polisher.” He was earning about two pounds ten a week, out of which he paid eighteen shillings for two miserable rooms in the slums of Walworth. With the rest he could manage to get food for himself and his four children, in spite of high prices. Getting back to work had changed his whole aspect. He was more alert, and less inclined to “grouse,” and he’d regained some of the old Cockney humour which had made him popular as a company sergeant in France and Flanders.

Bertram spent half an hour with him, now and again, in his lodgings, or in a public-house round the corner, and Hugget, though always embarrassed by this comradeship of his former officer, and somewhat suspicious of its motives, was not ungrateful or unfriendly.

It amazed him that Bertram seemed pleased to sit in his dirty little room for a few minutes, not bothering when the youngest “brat” began a howl in the next room, and dozens of other children, sickly, ailing, underfed some of them, joined in a chorus of wailing in this block of “workmen’s dwellings.”

Women railed through open or broken windows, looking into a courtyard filled with “washing”—and threatened to break the jaws of small children, if they didn’t “be’ave,” or insulted each other for certain grievances connected with the water supply on the common stairways. Doors banged, cheap gramophones blared out jazz tunes. Somewhere a violin was being scraped like the crying of a soul in agony, by a diligent practiser of finger-exercises. Shrill laughter of coarse-voiced girls rang out in the passages. Oaths floated up from the courtyard. The noise of distant domestic quarrels came vaguely into Huggett’s room, where he sat in his shirtsleeves, smoking Woodbine cigarettes and answering Bertram’s questions with a queer, nervous grin.

“’Omes for ’Eroes!” he remarked once when the strange medley of noises in the Workmen’s Dwellings became more than usually discordant.

The “silver slipper” story upon which Bertram questioned him, excited his sense of humour.

“Silver my foot!” he said; “white metal at sixpence the gross! A Bolshevist emblem? Well, if that ain’t the funniest yarn! Strikes me there’s no more sense in some of them so-called Toffs than in the long ears of a coster’s moke.”

He had a realistic mind, and was something of a philosopher, like others Bertram knew, who had risked their lives in the war, and escaped by a hairsbreadth chance of luck. In their billets behind the line, in dug-outs, in shell-holes where they had lain wounded, these men, or some of them, had thought starkly of the meaning of things, had talked with each other in a kind of short-cut language, incoherent, yet understanding. Now they thought of the Peace they’d helped to make, and the life they’d come back to find.

“It’s like this, Major. We’re fed up with lies. The blarsted lies of newspapers. The muck them politicians say. The rotten stuff some of our own leaders say. In the old days we used to believe what we was told or what we read. Now we’ve found out. We’ve been kidded, all along! That’s made us think. We know a bit of truth ourselves. We know what ’appened to us. The things we did. The things we’ve seen. We can’t be kidded any more. That makes a lot of difference!”

“What do the men want?” asked Bertram. “What are they looking for?”

“Not over much,” said Huggett. “There’s some that talk a lot. I did a bit myself before I found my job again. Communism. Bolshevism. Bunkum. More kidding! Most others are out for peace—no more bloody war, not at no cost—decent ’ouse-room—not this dog ’ole for eighteen bob a week—a bit of pocket money for the fun of things. See?”

Bertram thought he saw. He believed that Huggett knew the truth of things about the spirit of the men. He marvelled at this fellow’s commonsense, his soundness of judgment, his sense of humour, his patience. Those had been the qualities of the men in the war. They were still there. If all the men were like Huggett, or most of them, England was safe. The menace was only in the minds of men like Bernard Hall of _The New World_—intellectually morbid—and in the minds of Joyce’s crowd, who were obsessed by the bogey of Bolshevism—that strange foreign growth, so alien to English ideas.

XVIII

“Joyce’s crowd!” To some extent his own crowd. He saw it, not for the first time, but peculiarly defined in his imagination, and in all its glory, on the afternoon of Lady Ottery’s lecture. He drove in a “taxi” with Joyce from their little home in Holland Street to the Wigmore Hall, and by the time they’d reached Cumberland Place, at the top of the Park, fell into line with a steady stream of automobiles of highly expensive kinds.

“The New Poor aren’t so beastly poor yet,” said Bertram, thinking of Huggett in his squalid rooms with the four squalling brats.

Joyce tapped his hand sharply.

“They’ve saved a little out of the wreckage. Precious little, and we’re all going ‘broke.’”

Joyce had two reserved seats towards the front of the hall. Bertram saw that she wore a new hat for the occasion, a little blue thing, with an osprey plume (Bernard Hall would hate her for that!), and the short ermine cloak which Lady Ottery had given her for “going away,” when they were married. She looked splendid in health again, and exquisite to his eyes as she stood up looking round the hall and smiling to many friends who waved hands to her, or programmes. The two Russian girls—the Countess Lydia and her sister—were a few seats behind, and called out over the heads of other ladies:

“So glad you could come, _chérie_! Your husband too! _Merveilleux!_”

That last sentence was a dig of spite from the Countess Lydia.

“How d’you do, Lady Joyce?” This very gallantly and formally from General Bellasis, who nodded affably to Joyce’s husband, and said, “Going strong, Pollard?”

Kenneth Murless sauntered in (his arduous duties at the Foreign Office didn’t prevent afternoon outings of this kind) looking elegant, as usual, in morning dress with a white slip beneath his waistcoat, and immaculate spats. Bertram hated him unendurably.

“Well, Joyce! Is Lady Ottery in good form? Not nervous, I hope?”

“Mother is never nervous,” said Joyce. “It’s not a family failing.”

She held a kind of reception, standing there by her seat, and Bertram was aware of some extremely pretty girls, and many ugly old ladies. The old ladies interested him most. God, how ugly they were! Many of them wore black silk with beads. He thought such costumes had departed with Queen Victoria. Others were youthfully dressed in the latest style, with odd little hats and short capes like Joyce’s, and low-necked bodices. They were fat and old and hard and wrinkled. He did not blame them for that—poor old darlings!—but only observed them. He knew some of them by sight. He’d had the honour of shaking hands with some of them—little old hands with many rings—at various receptions to which Joyce had dragged him. There were two Dowager Duchesses, like caricatures of themselves by Bolshevik artists. The Lord alone knew how many Countesses. The old Régime had rallied up.

The men were in a minority, but those present were full of quality—old gentlemen whom one sees in profile deep sunk in club chairs, white-haired, bald, with bags under their eyes, with side-whiskers, with hawk noses; and middle-aged men who, one day, would be the exact replicas of the old gentlemen, but now straight-backed, with close-cut hair, firm mouths, alert eyes.

Bertram recognised Lord Banthorp, Viscount Risborough, the Duke of Berkshire, old Brookwood of Banstead, Morton of Greystoke, and the new Earl of Winthorp. He also observed the entry of several Major-Generals and Brigadiers in “civvies,” as Bill Huggett called his old pre-war clothes, and not so terrifying as when his machine-gun company had been reviewed by them before and after battle.

His mother-in-law had certainly drawn “a good house.” It represented the aristocracy of England in its oldest and crustiest tradition, with only a thin sprinkling, he guessed, of the newer vintages. The old, ugly ladies had come out of their hiding-places in Mayfair to support England in “the hour of danger.” There was something fine about them, in spite of ugliness, even because of it. He admitted that. He knew their spirit, indomitable, hard to themselves as to others, resolute in what they believed to be their duty. They were the grandmothers of modern girlhood in Joyce’s crowd, those pretty, laughing, dashing-looking girls, and on the whole, perhaps, of stronger stuff. Well, perhaps not! Joyce and her crowd had come out well in the war, with some scandalous exceptions. His eyes wandered about, studying the faces in the hall with something like a new vision—Christy’s angle of vision, Janet Welford’s.

There were beautiful faces there, neither old nor young, of middle-aged women, rather sad, rather anxious, rather worn. They were the women who had suffered the strain of war most in their souls, with long patient agony. The mothers of fighting men, the wives of others. He could see in their eyes that they remembered things which he remembered, which others forget. Among them was the beautiful Lady Martock, in her widow’s weeds.

The Duke of Bramshaw led Lady Ottery to her chair on the platform, and there was a clapping of hands, and a scuttling to places.

Joyce took her seat, and her face was eager and proud because of this public tribute to her mother. Her father, who had come in late, with Alban, sat next to her on her left hand. His face wore his usual vacant look, with slightly opened mouth.

“Your mother’s marvellous!” he said to Joyce in a loud voice, which she “hushed” immediately, and after that rebuke, he settled himself deliberately to sleep. He had heard a good deal at home about the Religion of Revolution. It was not new to him, and he had acquired the habit of sleep in the House of Lords and during all speeches.

Alban, on his father’s left, wonderfully good-looking, dressed almost as well as Kenneth Murless, kept awake, but appeared painfully bored. He too, was aware of his mother’s theory. He avoided it as much as possible, while agreeing with its general thesis. Out of filial respect and devotion he had come to-day, at some personal sacrifice in the way of a game of real tennis at the Bath Club, which was a passion of his.

The Duke of Bramshaw opened with some general observations on the subject of Lady Ottery’s lecture. He was a thin man, with a long, mournful face, a sharply curved nose, and a bald head. Caricaturists made him look like a diseased bird of prey. In the clubs he was generally known as “the greyhound,” because he made a little hair go a long way.

In melancholy tones he referred to the honour he had in introducing the Countess of Ottery, who, indeed, needed no introduction to such an audience as he saw before him, well aware of her devoted work during the War, of her great virtue as a wife and mother, of her noble patriotism, and of her profound scholarship. They were to receive the benefit of her historical knowledge that afternoon.

He himself had been a student of history, as far as his duties in the House of Lords would permit, and other services which he had been called to do for his King and Country, but he confessed that he had been amazed by the revelations which Lady Ottery had discovered in relation to a continuous tradition of revolutionary doctrine, of a most subversive, destructive, and damnable kind—if they would permit him to use so strong a word—from the time of the Fourteenth Century to the present day.

Lady Ottery had made it quite clear to him, he felt sure that she would make it quite clear to the audience—that the revolutionary spirit which they found in the world around them, not only in Russia, but nearer home, in their very midst, he regretted to say, was due to the dreadful propaganda of a secret cult, mainly of German-Jewish origin, which had for its object the overthrow of civilisation, the downfall of Christian morality, no less than the destruction of all law and order. The members of that cult, the Initiated, as they called themselves, were but few, but they were powerful.

As Lady Ottery would tell them, they belonged to the tradition of Satan worship, that dark and evil blasphemy of the Middle Ages. It was an awful thought that men in England belonged to that secret brotherhood. They were working among the labouring classes of England. They were, he said so with a frankness which the gravity of the time demanded, endeavouring to promote at that very hour, a Strike which threatened to paralyse the life and industry of Great Britain. The Countess of Ottery was not, therefore, lecturing on an academic theory of history, unrelated to their present situation.

“In short, my Lords, ladies, and gentlemen, the lecture we are about to hear is a warning of the menace at our very doors. . . . Lady Ottery—”

With enormous melancholy he bowed to the applause of the ugly old ladies and the pretty young ones, and resigned his place on the platform to Bertram’s Mother-in-law.