Part 9

“For Heaven’s sake!” said Bertram, aloud. Sheer rage was rising in his brain. What did all this mean? Did these people seriously believe all that dark and monstrous nonsense suggested by the Duke of Bramshaw? A sentence of Bill Huggett’s came into his brain. He repeated it to himself, over and over again, as Lady Ottery began her lecture, and went on with it.

“There’s no more sense in some of these so-called Toffs than in the long ears of a coster’s moke.”

And yet the Duke of Bramshaw was not a fool. He had been educated at Eton and Oxford. He had made many speeches in the House of Lords. He had held high office during the War. These people were not fools. They were highly educated. They helped to govern England. Good Heavens! They were, in their way, among the best types of English aristocracy. It was impossible for him to believe that such an audience could listen patiently to such a wild falsification of history and commonsense as that outlined by the Duke of Bramshaw, and elaborated by his mother-in-law.

Joyce had said, “Do behave, Bertram!” and he “behaved” while Lady Ottery read page after page of manuscript in a clear, hard, penetrating voice, perfectly self-possessed, strikingly handsome, utterly convinced of her own argument.

Bertram tried not to listen to her, but her words penetrated his brain.

With a kind of insane and dreadful logic she ranged through centuries of history, connecting the origin of all revolts, uprisings, passionate outbreaks of peasants—and peoples—from the Black Death to the French Revolution, from that to the Chartist Riots, from 1848 to the Liberation of Italy, from the Veto of the House of Lords to the Russian Revolution, and from Bolshevism in Russia to Trade Union strikes in England—to small groups of fanatical men and women, belonging, as the Duke had said, to a secret cult pledged to the overthrow of civilisation and religion.

She quoted old documents, newly discovered letters, ancient memoirs, journals, revolutionary pamphlets, political allegories and squibs, enormous tomes of German philosophers, French atheists, Italian free-thinkers, Russian anarchists. Her range of research, her immense industry, was wonderful, and she had hewn her pathway of argument with remarkable skill and clarity through a jungle of false evidence.

But she had entirely ignored the ordinary impulses of human nature—the savage instincts of men when they and their women folk are starving while others are fully fed, the passion of downtrodden peoples for the liberty of life, the long patience, breaking at last into impatience, of simple folk oppressed by corrupt and cruel tyrannies, the vision of a better human life in the minds of those who starve in garrets and languish over sweated labour, the righteous wrath of those who see their rulers growing rotten with luxury and vice, the divine rage at the heart of a people under the scourge of the knout, and the brutality of a secret police, the silent, ever-growing pressure of the Nobodies of the world for more joy in life, a wider margin of ease, a greater share of luck and opportunity, the claims of men who have done good service and expect a fair reward.

Bertram thought of all the men who had gone marching with him, and before him, and behind him, up the roads of war in France and Flanders, the men of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales. They had seen the bodies of their “pals” blown to bits, but had not turned back. They had sat down with Death, smelt it, heard it scream above their heads, known the fear of it, seen the close horror of it, day after day, month after month, year after year, but had not surrendered some faith in them, some love of their soil, some heritage of the spirit. Were they now likely to be the victims of a “secret cult,” urging them to overthrow civilisation? Were they in dark conspiracy, as the dupes of German Jews, to play Hell and Satan-worship in the country they had saved by the valour of their souls? They were restless, discontented, bitter. What wonder, when prices were rising high against them, and wages were going down, and unemployment was creeping up like a dark tide of misery into millions of little homes? This lecture of Lady Ottery’s was an outrage to the men who had fought for England, though she had no idea of that. It was a perversion of all truth in history. It was putting morbid fears into the minds of an audience already obsessed by fantastic bogeys. It would lead to conflict and cruelty.

“Joyce, I can’t bear it. This is mad and monstrous!”

So he whispered to Joyce, and she turned to him angrily, and said, “Be quiet, Bertram!”

Their movement, and Joyce’s answer, awakened the Earl of Ottery. He smiled sleepily at Joyce, and said her mother was remarkable.

Presently Bertram rose in his seat, bent again to find his stick on the floor under some ladies’ muffs, and whispered again to Joyce:

“Sorry, darling! I’m going. I can’t breathe.”

“You’re abominable!” said Joyce, in a low voice, and turned her head away from him with an angry shake of her bobbed hair.

He strode through an audience that was hostile to his going. Old Brookwood of Banstead growled audibly as he passed, “Be quiet, sir!”

Outside, groups of chauffeurs were chatting beside their motor cars, and across Oxford Circus, as he passed through, came a procession of unemployed with their banners.

“We want work!”

XIX

Bertram was staking everything on his book, in spite of Christy’s “hands-up” and cry of “Kamerad!”

It was going well,—amazingly well. He was astonished at the way in which words came to him. After the first agonies he had found himself writing easily, rapidly. It was as though he was just the instrument recording the dictation of some mind beyond himself. In reality, as he knew, he was drawing upon his memories, and emotions stirred up in his subconsciousness, repressed for a long time, and now liberated. He remembered things which, at the time he hadn’t noticed much, or at all—smells, sounds, minute particular details of visual impressions. The pictures of war were as sharply etched in his mind’s eye as when he stared for the first time across No Man’s Land, or took his machine-gun up to Fricourt on the Somme and saw death busy on a day of great battle.

It was extraordinary how he could reach back to it all, from this little house in Holland Street, Kensington, within sound of the London ’busses passing up Church Street. When Joyce was out or in bed, and he was writing in his study, alone, late at night, the old life of war came back to him so vividly, with such intensity, that more than once when he lifted his head, he was startled to find himself, not in a dug-out, or leaning over the sand-bags of a trench parapet—he smelled chloride of lime!—but in his room, with Joyce’s portrait over the mantelpiece, and peace outside the windows.

Here in the manuscript sheets before him, as far as he’d gone, he had told what war was like. The men who knew would say, “That’s how it was!” He had paid the tribute of his soul to Tommy Atkins, who had not been given a fair deal. The book might do a bit of good. It would pass on the experience of those who knew the meaning of war to a generation which wouldn’t know, unless some one told them. This was worth doing. Perhaps worth living to do. Had he been spared to live to do it? There might be something in that. He’d always wondered why he should go scot free—not a scratch all through the war, with other men dropping on every side of him. Anyhow, he would try to pay back for the grace of life—such as it was!—by this book.

It was the truth, in every line of it, in every word. He had found the gift of words. That was his buried talent, now revealed. That was what he’d been searching for, the meaning of that queer sensation of waiting for something to happen. This had happened! The gift of words—the greatest gift in the world, if a man pledged his soul to truth.

He hoped Joyce would like his book. It would be fine if she said, “Well done!” when he read it to her. She would be critical. She would hate some of the things he had written, brutal, some of them, but she would acknowledge the truth of it, the bigness of his achievement. For it was going to be big, with the spirit of the greatest war in the world, and of England’s manhood.

He was telling it all, nothing left out, nothing shirked, in horror, courage, boredom, fear, filth, laughter, madness. Joyce had seen a bit of it in London hospitals. She wouldn’t funk reading about it, and she would be generous in praise, if he had written it well, as she was generous to Kenneth Murless for his snappy sonnets. She would understand him better after reading it. She would be more patient with him. And she would see that he was going to keep his end up, and not sponge on her for everything.

With a bit of luck the book would make some money. That would make things easier in married life, and give him the independence which all men must have. It would make him less moody and humpy in his temper. Perhaps it would bring Joyce and him closer again, in the old relations of love and comradeship, which somehow had been interrupted.

It was with this thought in his mind that he gathered up a bundle of his manuscript and went up to Joyce’s room. It was the morning after Lady Ottery’s lecture, and Joyce was still in bed. She had a habit of lying late. Perhaps she would be inclined to let him read some of his stuff.

He was absurdly emotional, as all writers with their first creation. He’d been living with the book. He had staked his hopes on it. It was his mind-child.

Joyce was busy with the papers when he went in and said, “Good morning, darling!” She murmured a reply of some kind, and turned over another page of _The Morning Post_, which rustled loudly.

Bertram waited for a little while until she might finish the society news, or whatever it was that she was reading. She was sitting up in one of her Japanese silks with a ribbon tied round her hair, and a little frown on her forehead, like Marjorie Maude in “Peter Pan.” He sat on the bed by her side and watched her eyes roving over the big printed sheet. She was reading nothing very important. Her attention was not fixed on any definite news.

“I’ve brought my book, as far as it’s gone,” said Bertram with preposterous nervousness. “Care to hear some, Joyce? I want your opinion.”

Joyce didn’t care to hear any of the book. She had something else in her mind. It was his hostile demonstration at her Mother’s lecture.

“You behaved abominably yesterday afternoon,” she said, ignoring the book altogether. “Even father accused you of bad form when you walked out like that.”

“Oh, Lord!”

He confessed his contrition, said “Let’s forget it, sweetheart!” and showed her the mass of manuscript he had written.

“I believe I’ve done the trick,” he said, with excitement in his voice. “I’m certain it’s the real thing. Spare me an hour before lunch and let me read a bit.”

“It doesn’t interest me in the very slightest degree,” said Joyce. “Please go out of my room, and let me get up.”

If she had struck him in the face with her clenched fist she couldn’t have hurt him so much.

He didn’t understand that he’d come at the worst possible time for a reading of his book, when Joyce was deeply mortified by his contempt of her mother’s lecture, and more annoyed because of his casual regret and “let’s forget it!” regarding an incident which seemed far from trivial to her. It was contempt for her, as well as for her mother.

Bertram’s exasperated comments at the Wigmore Hall were another revelation of the wide gulf between her ideas and his. He was drawing further and further away from all the loyalties which she believed were the essential faith of an English gentleman, one of her class, one of those who stood for the things which belonged to her family and creed.

She had been irritated from the beginning by that book of his. It was ridiculous to think that Bertram could write! He had none of the brilliance of Kenneth Murless, and had shown himself plainly bored by the conversation of her friends on books and poetry. Even on that subject he had been hostile to their ideas, and had denounced the work of people like Stephen McKenna and W. L. George with contemptuous words as “unreal stuff.”

That book he was writing had been a cause of secret irritation in her mind. He had preferred it to her company. He had deliberately isolated himself in its scrawled sheets, instead of joining her little parties, and making himself agreeable to her crowd. The book had been a barrier between them. It had made him careless of getting a decent job. It had caused him to brood over the beastly war while she wanted him to forget it. He was probing the old wounds again, deliberately intensifying his morbid outlook on life. She guessed it was filled with his bitter, democratic, anti-class views, which seemed to her like treachery to England.

And anyhow, he wanted to read it to her at the very hour when she was going to have her hair curled by the girl from Truelove’s who was due at ten o’clock! Really Bertram was exasperating!

Perhaps that was what she had been thinking. Bertram worked it out in that way afterwards, some time afterwards, when he tried to analyse the reason for Joyce’s unkindness. Because it was unkind—damnably. It took all the grit out of him in its immediate effect.

Knocked all the stuffing out of him, as he put it to himself when he went downstairs again, flung his manuscript on the desk, and said “Hell!”

He hadn’t argued with her, just said, “Sorry I bothered you!” and then turned on his heel and went out of his wife’s room. He passed the girl from Truelove’s on the stairs, and thought bitterly that Joyce was more interested in her hair than in his book.

XX

It was not to Joyce that he read out his book when it was quite finished, but to Janet Rockingham Welford, author of “Mixed Marriages,” “The Surplus Virgins,” and other alarming works. With her usual desire for information, her habit of asking the most searching and intimate questions, she had gained his admission some time ago that he was no longer searching for a “job” because he had found his object in life—this book on the war, and the gift of words. He didn’t call it a “gift” to her. He called it his new obsession, and was pleased with her excitement.

She was vastly excited. She vowed that she had seen “in the blink of an eyelid” that he had something to tell the world that the world should know.

“Don’t be timid!” was her advice. She urged him to be brutal, to tell the truth in its starkness. She hated those little scribblers who still covered the filth of war with rose-water, concealing its stench. She wanted Bertram to be cruel to himself and to his readers, not to spare them a jot.

“Make their nerves jump,” she said. “Take them by the scruff of the neck and thrust their noses into the horror, and say, ‘Look at this! That’s what it’s like! And this is what it’s going to be again, to your little snub-nosed boys, to your annoying but necessary husbands, to your best beloved, unless you’re jolly careful.’”

Bertram said that was his idea. He’d been honest, anyhow. Not brutal for literary effect, but true to the things he’d seen.

Janet wasn’t satisfied with that. She wanted him to be true to the things he’d felt as well as seen. She wanted him to remember his own agony in the worst hours, to get into his book all the agony of all the men, blinded, crippled, shell-shocked.

“Make it a masterpiece!” she implored. “Write it to revenge my blinded men.”

Bertram told her she expected too much, and warned her that he was only a beginner at the writing game. He needed criticism.

“You’ll get it, little one!” promised Janet Welford. “Read it out to me, and I’ll make your flesh quail if you haven’t been honest with yourself.”

That was her invitation, and he accepted it with the sensitive, wistful, urgent desire of all beginners in the art of Literature not for criticism—which is terrible to suffer—but for encouragement, interest, understanding, praise.

Night after night he went round after dinner to Janet’s flat in Overstrand Mansions, Battersea Park, one of a long line of tall blocks of dwellings mostly inhabited as Bertram found, by the poorer “Intellectuals,” the “Surplus Virgins” (as Janet called her own class of unmarried women), and newly-wed couples on modest means, with room for one perambulator in the little “hall.” Some novelist had once written a book about this street, called “Intellectual Mansions, S.W.,” and the name had stuck.

She barred out all other visitors until the reading was finished, by the simple plan of putting an envelope under the door knocker with an inscription in her big, bold handwriting, “Out of Town.” Several times as he read, Bertram heard footsteps faltering on the landing outside, and then going down the stone staircase again, dejectedly.

“Poor wretches!” he would say, and Janet would light another cigarette, or puff out a wreath of smoke, and say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder! Get on with it!”

She was helpful to him. She didn’t spare criticism. She made him “quail” all right! She found mistakes in grammar, split infinitives, frightful faults in style. She cried out at such times as though he’d touched her with a red-hot poker: “Oh, my little sensitive soul!”—“Oh, my æsthetic Aunt!”—“Oh, ignorant and nerve-shattering soldier-man!” Such absurdities of ejaculation warned him of dreadful blunders, which then she corrected like a stern “schoolmarm,” so comical in her caricature that Bertram laughed while he quailed. A hundred times she stormed at him because he’d “shirked” the uttermost reality, turning away with cowardice from the obscenity of war’s torture-chambers.

“Stronger!” she would say. “Stronger! That’s weak. Let the Truth come right out and show its bloody face to those who still believe in the glory and splendour of war’s adventure—the romantic women, crudest in all the world, the hundred per cent patriots who would engage in world war for a nice point of honour or to avenge a pin-prick!”

There were times when Bertram felt the cold chill of failure on him. This book, then, was no good! He had failed! He had fooled himself into the belief that it was the Real Thing.

But these moods did not overwhelm him, because of Janet’s emotion, rage, laughter, tears, as he went on reading. She loved what he had written about the men. She knew them. She had nursed them. They had wept out of blind eyes in her arms. They had “groused” and cursed and laughed and joked and agonised, and revealed nakedly the secret of their souls to her. She knew, and Bertram had written what she knew.

After each reading he asked her anxiously for her opinion. Was it any good? Did it have the slightest chance? He wanted her to tell him frankly.

She teased him a little. She said: “I reserve judgment,” or “I’ve read worse stuff,” and then when he was tortured by doubt, she laughed in her full-throated way, and told him to be conceited because she wasted so much time upon him. Christy would be jealous of him, if he ever knew.

“Christy jealous?”

He looked at her searchingly, to see how much truth there might be in that, but he could not guess the meaning of the whimsical look in her eyes, nor of the sudden blush that flamed into her cheeks after those careless words of hers.

After the reading of the last chapter, he asked his usual question: What did she think? Any good? Or had he wasted his time, and his hopes?

She did not answer for a little while, and then suddenly took both his hands.

“It’s good! . . . Not all the truth, but all true. . . . A good book, soldier man, and almost great! Thank God, you’ve written it!”

These words warmed his soul. He was enormously grateful for them. A wave of emotion swept over him because this praise, so simply spoken, so generously, by this girl who understood, was a reward for his labour.

He raised her hands to his lips, and kissed them.

“Whatever happens to the book,” he said, “your sympathy and help have been tremendous to me. How can I pay back?”

She let her hands linger in his, not deliberately, but carelessly. She laughed at his suggestion of “paying back,” and called him by the absurd nickname which she had invented for him.

“No fee, Sir Faithful! I’ll be satisfied for service done when you abandon the Halfway House and come over to the Left Wing!”

“Not likely!” answered Bertram. “I walk in the middle of the road.”

XXI

After that reading of the book, there wasn’t the same excuse for Bertram to go to Janet’s flat in Battersea. Not the same reason. Yet he went. The truth was, as he admitted, that he could not keep away because he craved for the laughter, the audacity of thought, and the free comradeship which he found with Janet and her friends, and not in his own house. Decidedly not in his own house in the week or two that followed Lady Ottery’s lecture and Joyce’s refusal to interest herself in his work.

Even Edith, the parlourmaid, showed by various little signs of sympathy meant in a kind spirit, but frightfully embarrassing, that she was aware of Joyce’s unkindness.

“Aren’t you going with her ladyship to-night, sir?” Or, “Seems a pity you don’t like cards. Her ladyship is that fond of Bridge!”

Deliberately Joyce involved herself in a series of bridge parties which ignored Bertram’s claim to companionship and included, every time, it seemed, Kenneth Murless or General Bellasis, generally in the rooms of the Countess Lydia in Whitehall Court. Now that his book was finished, and in Christy’s hands for professional advice about the way to get it published, Bertram felt loneliness closing about him with a greater chill. Sometimes he thought Joyce was teasing his jealousy. She talked of Kenneth in terms of affectionate comradeship, and then glanced at Bertram to see whether she had piqued him. She confessed that she owed Kenneth a good deal of money for Bridge debts—“but of course he could wait.” Kenneth had been in particularly good form that night. His stories about Lady Speelman’s ball had made everybody laugh. She was going to the Opera with Kenneth and the Russian girls.

Bertram didn’t disguise his feelings, but he restrained the expression of his temper. Something had happened in him worse than ill-temper. It was a coldness that was creeping into his heart, a sense of some complete and terrible misunderstanding between Joyce and himself, beyond all petty quarrels.

He had a dreadful apprehension that something in the very quality of his character was alien, offensive, and intolerable to the fastidious and delicate mind of his young wife. Perhaps he was of a coarser fibre than she was. He was afraid the war had brutalised him more than he was aware of. He had certainly “learnt to swear abominably in Flanders,” like English soldiers of Smollett’s time, and his nerves had been frayed so badly that he didn’t always check his tongue in the presence of Joyce. But it was deeper than that, and worse than that. Joyce seemed to find him a vulgarian, a common fellow. There were times when her eyes seemed to say so. . . .

Janet Welford did not make him feel like that. She called him “Sir Faithful,” and once “did homage to him,” so she pretended, in her jolly way, as “a very parfit gentil knight.” By that name she introduced him to her friends, those queer, free-spoken, amazingly audacious girls who seemed to be the advance guard of Social revolution in England, and played intellectual games of skittles with the old traditions of English life.