VI
London had a lowering influence at this time on Bertram Pollard, and filled him with such intensity of gloom that he began to hate the place which as a boy he had loved with romantic sentiment as the city of endless adventure where life’s drama was rich and full.
He remembered but vaguely the tall brick house in Merrion Square, Dublin, where he had lived in his early boyhood, until his father had brought all the family to England. From their house in Sloane Street, during holidays from St. Paul’s School, he had gone exploring the mean streets and slum quarters of London, lounging about the bookshops in the Charing Cross Road, peering into old churches, strolling around the markets in Covent Garden and Smithfield, listening to the cheap-jacks in Leather Lane, venturing into the Italian quarter at Hatton Garden with a sense of adventure, going as far afield as the London docks and the back streets of Stepney and Bermondsey, where he looked out for types of men who belonged to the novels of Jacobs and Conrad.
Then, in his first year at Oxford, he’d come down to London for “binges” on boat-race night, when there were wild rags at the music halls and tumultuous encounters of undergraduates in Piccadilly Circus, rather drunken, but joyous, dinners in Soho restaurants.
There had been no second year for him at Oxford, because of the war which changed everything, but as a machine-gun officer London still pulled at his heart-strings with a tremendous tug, and made him desperate for the seven days’ leave which came so rarely.
“Good-bye, Piccadilly, good-bye, Leicester Square—” The silly old words yelled by crowds of men in khaki going to the mud and fire of Flanders for the first time—the second-timers didn’t sing it so lustily, unless they had been drinking—always stirred his old sentiment for London. He repeated the words as he lay in his dug-out at night, twelve hundred yards from the Boche line out from Mailly Mailly on the Somme—his first pitch—and old Christy, who lay beside him chaffed him because more than once he spoke the word “London” in his sleep.
London! He used to whisper that word with a kind of ecstasy when he came out of Charing Cross station from the boat train which brought swarms of leave men in those old days of darkness and air-raids and mass emotion. The taxi drive through Piccadilly to his father’s house was a journey of enchantment. Back again! London! What luck! Because it might be for the last time, every minute of it was precious, every dimly lighted lamp was a beacon of delight; the smell of the streets, the rushing swirl of taxis, the beat of rain on the empurpled pavements, the damp and fog of a winter’s night, the wet crowds outside the theatres, the dear damned dismalness of London, drugged him, made his senses drunk with gladness.
The old town had been good in those days. Now when he went out into its streets, while Joyce was ill, he found no comfort in it. Perhaps that was his fault. Perhaps it was he that had changed, not London. . . . It was the world that had changed, and all men in it, and England that had seemed unchanging. As Bertram wandered about the streets, diving down some of the old highways, walking into the outer suburbs to tire out a brain that did not sleep enough at nights, he found that pessimism closed about him. He couldn’t avoid it, for its gloom was in every face he passed, on every newspaper placard, in every group of men at every street corner, in long processions of out-of-works whom he met in mean streets.
These processions of unemployed men, all ex-service, hurt him horribly. They carried banners with the proclamation, “We want Work, not Charity.” They were men whom he’d seen marching up the Albert-Bapaume road and the Arras-Lens road, and the Ypres-Menin road, when England and the world had needed them. They were the heroes who were fighting in a war to end war, the boys in the trenches for whom nothing was too good. Now they were shabby and down at heel, some of them in the old khaki with buttons and shoulder-straps torn off, all of them downcast and wretched-looking. “Not charity!” they said, but they had scouts out, shaking collecting boxes in the faces of the passers-by, in an aggressive, almost hostile way.
Bertram could never pass one of these boxes without putting a few coppers inside, until one day he remembered that it was his wife’s money, not his own, that he was giving away. The thought made him flush in the street, and walk on with a quicker, restless pace as far as Upper Tooting. It was absurd for him to give to the unemployed. He was one of them, with less chance of work.
At many street corners there were groups of seedy-looking men of all ages, lounging aimlessly outside buildings on which the words “Labour Exchange” were painted. Bertram had only a vague idea about the service done by a Labour Exchange. The fantastic thought came to him that it would be a good idea to put his own name down for any job that might suit a man like himself, pretty good at handling men, or at any kind of organising work. That was a good word, “organising”—and he would use it to the fellow who ran the Labour Exchange.
It was in High Street, Marylebone, and he said “Sorry,” as he elbowed a group of men hanging round the swing doors. One of them, after a glance at him, pulled himself up, as in the old days of soldiering, when an officer passed, but another lad snarled at him, and said, “No officer swank now. We’ve finished with that,” and the sentiment seemed to please the crowd, as Bertram judged by the laugh that followed.
He was kept waiting in a bare room without chairs, while a boy scout took one of his old cards, “Major Pollard, D.S.O., M.C.,” into an inner room.
A tall man, dressed in pre-war clothes which had been smart when new and still had style, though frayed about the cuffs and button-holes, stood with his back to the fireplace, and nodded to Bertram when he came in.
“Bloody weather!” he said.
“Not good,” said Bertram.
“About as good as our delightful government!” said the man, ex-officer certainly, gentleman undoubtedly. He twisted up a black, and obviously dyed, moustache, with a fierce gesture.
“What’s the government been doing now?” asked Bertram, by way of making himself civil.
“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 itwasa 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.
His own moodiness, his private doubts and difficulties, even his bigger apprehensions of political troubles at home and abroad, were made trivial by the intense world-ranging analysis of social disease threatening civilisation which Christy brought back from his journeys abroad.
He was seldom in London, and after a few days, or at most, a few weeks, in his rooms overlooking the river from Adelphi Terrace, would set out again for Paris, or Berlin, or Vienna, or Rome, with an insatiable desire to “see how things were getting on” in the spirit of peoples and in their social conditions. The results of his inquiries could be read in Radical weeklies under the heading of “Our Special Correspondent,” in articles written with a cold scientific touch, over-crammed with facts and statistics, and unemotional. They revealed nothing of the flame at the heart of this man, none of his whimsicality of expression in private conversation, not a gleam of his philosophy, but Bertram believed that they were valued as important contributions to knowledge by international groups of men and women outside his own set, and unknown to him except by references in newspapers and in satirical comment by men like Kenneth Murless.
Kenneth called them “long-haired idealists,” “Crawling Pacifists,” and “home-bred Bolshevists.” He had even referred to Christy once or twice by name, and had denounced an article of his as “a challenge to all established authority. The fellow ought to be shot.”
“He’s a friend of mine,” said Bertram.
Kenneth Murless raised his eyebrows in languid surprise.
“That so? Then you’re entertaining an enemy unawares. A viper in your bosom, old man. Christy and his crowd have declared war against our set and our ideals.”
“What ideals?” asked Bertram.
“Preserving the good old order of things,” said Kenneth. “The Stately Homes of England, our Prerogatives, our Very Pleasant Way of Life, which is already seriously threatened by tax-collectors and the greedy clamour of an insensate mob.”
Bertram objected violently.
“The mob did most of the dying in the Great War, and now ask for a decent living wage!”
“For high wages and no work!” answered Kenneth in his best unimpassioned, smiling, and supercilious manner, which had made him successful as President of the Union, during his third year at Oxford.
He begged Bertram not to be led astray by the snobbish witticisms of his friends in a pampered democracy, not to be spellbound by their facile and foolish catchwords. He disliked the suggestion that the mob did most of the dying in the great war. The gently of England, the old aristocracy, poured out their blood like water in a prodigal way at the outset as at the end, while crowds of lazy young hooligans had to be coaxed and bribed to do their duty, and then conscripted.
Even then they took refuge behind “special trades,” “essential occupations.” There were no essential occupations as an excuse for staying at home by boys from public schools and universities and county families. They just went out and died, if need be, without a whine.
“That’s true,” said Bertram; “they played up all right. None better.”
“I’m glad you admit that, Bertram!” said Joyce in her satirical voice, which Bertram knew was a challenge.
She was in the drawing-room of their house in Holland Street, lying back on the sofa among a heap of flaming cushions, with her legs tucked up, revealing her long silk stockings. A charming, slim, golden-crowned figure in a close-fitting jumper, so young and fresh that it was difficult even for Bertram to believe that she had been the mother of a child. How beautiful she was! How good to see her well again!
“Why shouldn’t I admit it? Why should I even ‘admit’ it? It’s an historical fact!”
“You’re always taking sides with the common people. Backing up Labour with a big L. It’s disloyalty to Us.”
Bertram shifted moodily in his seat—a low window seat looking out to the street where a Punch and Judy show was being performed to a small crowd of children and nursemaids.
“For God’s sake don’t talk about the common people as though they were dirt, Joyce! They saved England. England owes them something. Those fellows in my company—”
Joyce flicked some cigarette ash into the fireplace and put her hands round her knees.
“Those fellows in your company! I can’t think how you kept your authority, hob-nobbing with them so much!”
Bertram said in a low voice that they had saved his life more than once.
“That’s ancient history,” said Joyce. “You’re always harking back to the old war! Let’s forget it. We’re talking about the present situation. The working people are thoroughly lazy, utterly demoralised, and infected with Bolshevism. They ought to be kept in their places with a strong hand.”
“I agree!” said Kenneth Murless. “They’ve become tyrannical and snobbish.”
“Snobbish!” said Bertram, laughing, and making an effort to keep the temper that was rising in him.
“Yes,” said Kenneth, observing a paradoxical argument from afar; “the snobbishness of the working classes is disgusting. Because they don’t wear collars and ties, they won’t associate with men who are afflicted with stiff linen round their necks. Because they’re illiterate, they make a caste of illiteracy and condemn the Intellectual as a parasite and a pariah. Their Trade Unions are more exclusive than West-end clubs, more intolerant than mediæval Star Chambers. Their Labour leaders are enemies of the liberty so hardly won for England by English gentry—freedom of speech, equality before the law, justice for rich and poor alike, religious toleration, taxation according to wealth. Why these fellows are all for the suppression of liberty. Anybody who ventures to disagree with them is called a damned reactionary. If they had their way, as in Russia, they would prevent the free exercise of religion, and stifle all intellectual opposition with the hangman’s rope. Even now in England the working class is the only one exempt from taxation, getting their education for nothing, and blackmailing those who have accumulated a little money by hard toil.”
“Like you,” said Bertram.
“Like me,” answered Kenneth, calmly. “I confess my little job at the F.O. is not exacting, but don’t I toil over my sonnets—on official stationery—? Don’t I agonise in labour to produce a gem of thought for ‘The London Mercury’?”
“You ought to go into the House, Kenneth!” said Joyce. “Your eloquence would overwhelm Lloyd George himself. And I will say there’s a lot of sense in your head, in spite of your devastating beauty, and supercilious conceit.”
She spoke in the usual vein of irony with which she set her wit against Kenneth’s, yet with an underlying admiration which he perceived and liked.
His face crimsoned a little, and he laughed affectedly.
“For that tribute, dear lady, my heart’s thanks! But don’t tempt me to sully my bright soul with the dirt of politics. Diplomacy, yes, the higher Machiavellism, but, please, not politics! It’s impossible to keep clean within the precincts of Westminster.”
Two of Joyce’s girl friends called, followed by the Reverend Peter Fynde and an Italian countess who spoke detestable English and made enormous eyes to Kenneth Murless—enormous black eyes in a dead white face. Bertram noticed that her hands were dirty, though they glistened with wonderful rings. She called Joyce “Carissima.”—It was an opportunity for him to slip away and see old Christy again.
X
Luke Christy answered the rap of a little brass knocker on a door up three flights of stairs.
“Hullo, Major! I had an idea you’d come. You can’t keep away from my sinister influence.”
He saluted in an ungainly fashion, like a drunken Tommy, and then gripped Bertram’s hand in his long, bony fingers. He was a tall, thin, loosely-built man, with a clean-shaven face singularly ugly because of its long, lean jaw and bulging forehead. “An ugly mug,” as Bertram had often insulted it, but with a bright light within, shining out of dark, humorous, brooding eyes.
He was in his shirt sleeves, unpacking some hand-bags amidst a litter of dirty shirts, collars, socks, pyjamas, newspapers, and paper-backed books, and other salvage from a long journey.
“Just come back from Poland,” he said, “by way of Berlin. Put on a pipe and tell me all about life and London, while I stow this wreckage away. How’s Lady Joyce and the British aristocracy?”
He looked up at Bertram with the whimsical smile which always twisted his face when he chaffed Bertram about his close relationship with “bloated aristocrats.” His own family kept a little shop in a Warwickshire village.
“Joyce is pretty well,” said Bertram. “She had a baby . . . but it died.”
Luke Christy’s twisted smile left his face, and his eyes shone with sympathy.
“Oh, Lord! That’s tragic. I’m sorry.”
Bertram sat watching him “tidy up,” a process which seemed to consist in heaving his dirty linen into a cupboard, and flinging the paper-backed books on to a shelf already crowded with papers.
The whole room was framed in books, badly assorted in size, and mostly of tattered bindings. Above them were some rather good etchings and caricatures torn out of foreign newspapers, fastened to the walls with drawing pins. On the mantelpiece were photographs of several young soldiers, one of Bertram himself, and a “homely” elderly woman with grey hair, exactly like Luke Christy—who, as Bertram knew—was Christy’s mother.
A door opened into an inner room into which Christy plunged now and then with pairs of trousers, boots, and other bits of clothing. It was from this inner room that he began a monologue to which Bertram listened through the open door.
“Hard for a girl to bring a life into the world, and then see it flicker out. I’m sorry to hear that, Pollard. It’s the saddest thing for you and that exquisite little lady of yours. Good God, yes! But for myself, I couldn’t risk it, anyhow. I haven’t the pluck. I should be filled with dreadful forebodings.”
“About what?” asked Bertram.
He could not see Christy, but heard him moving about the inner room.
“Why, to bring a new life into the world. Was it a boy?”
“Yes,” said Bertram, “it was going to have my name.”
“A boy, eh? Oh, Lord, no! I couldn’t bring a boy into a world like this. It wouldn’t be fair. Not yet awhile, until we see how things are going to shape out. Major”—he still kept to Bertram’s old rank—“I’m afraid I’m becoming a coward.”
He came to the half open door, and leant against the frame of it, looking in at Bertram, who sat in a low leather chair with his back to a long casement window through which the dusk of a grey day crept from the darkening Thames below. So Christy had often stood in the entrance of a dug-out when he and Bertram lived in the earth not far from an enemy’s line.
“What are you afraid about?” asked Bertram, with a curious thrill, like the sensation he had had as a boy when his nurse told him ghost stories.
“I’m afraid of this civilisation of ours, and of all sorts of forces creeping up to destroy it.”
For an hour or more he talked of the things he had seen.
He had been to Eastern Europe, from which civilisation was passing. Poland was poverty-stricken, disease-stricken, and utterly demoralised.
Austria was no more than the corpse of a nation which had once been a mighty Empire, and now was a bulbous-headed thing without a body.
Vienna was its bulbous head, a great capital of over two million people without the means of life. He described the dance of death there, the starvation of women and children, the misery of the mean streets, the ruin of the intellectuals and the professional classes. In the hotels and restaurants and café concerts, foreigners were gathering like vampires to feed on the mortality of that old centre of civilisation. Austrian Jews and international gamblers, making paper fortunes out of the fluctuations of paper money, guzzled and gorged in an orgy of vice with girls who sold their smiles for the sake of a meal or an evening’s warmth.
The old palaces of Vienna still stood, the great mansions and cathedrals and churches and art galleries and museums remained as the heritage of a splendid past, but the life that made them had gone. When they began to crumble there would be no money to repair them. No man or woman could follow the pursuit of beauty and truth, painting or music or science, as in the old days. They must either get back to the land, and grub a sparse life out of the soil, or starve to death. So it was with other countries, the little new nations of the Baltic, the great Empire of Russia.
He’d not been into Russia—it pulled him tremendously, he must get there somehow—yet out on the frontier he’d met the refugees, and heard their tale of misery. In Russia civilisation was passing, had almost passed.
He would have to go to Russia before long to see the truth of things. There was a famine coming which would destroy millions of people. Disease was already rife, amounting to pestilence. Again, there, the only people who could live at all were those who stayed close to the soil, and were desperate in defence of their own produce.
Was Europe, a large part of it, going to return to the Peasant State? That might happen. That would be something to cling to, though not civilisation as it had been built up through centuries of struggle. But worse than that might happen.
He’d been to Berlin and other German towns. What was happening there? An immense industry of a people over-strained by war, crushingly defeated, beaten to the earth in pride, but desperate to regain their place in the world and defend their national existence. They were working with an astounding energy, adapting their immense genius to the necessities of this peace and its penalties. Krupps’ which had made great guns, were now turning out sewing-machines, reapers and binders, cash registers, razors, anything of metal for the markets of the world. But the indemnities put upon them by the victors made all their energy fruitless. The mark was dropping in value week by week. Every time they paid their indemnities it dropped lower with a rush. The printing presses poured out new marks. That enabled them to undercut their rivals in every market of the world, but at the same time they were bleeding themselves to death.
Meanwhile France was putting on the screw, goading the Germans to hatred again, making them vow vengeance, some time, some day, in the future, however far ahead. France was ready to ruin the whole world rather than let Germany get up again, and the whole world, and England first, would be ruined, if Germany were to go the way of Austria and plunge over the precipice into national bankruptcy.
There were evil forces at work everywhere, forces of cruelty, and greed, and stupidity, and hatred. The men of the Old Order were keeping a grip on the machinery of Government, arranging new balances of power, making new alliances for an “inevitable” war. Hostile to them, were those out to destroy all civilisation, at any cost, the revolutionaries for revolution’s sake, the fanatics allied with the murderers and the cave-men of life.
In between those two extremes, poor patient people, desiring peace, were bewildered by the non-fulfilment of all their hopes after so much sacrifice, and in their ignorance turning this way and that, to false gods, to those who appealed to their lower passions, to those who doped them with the greatest falsehoods. There was no truth-teller to whom the masses would listen. No high and noble leadership, but only corrupt and unclean men, holding on to power, or little men, honest in a little way, clinging to their jobs.
Other forces were at work, biological, evolutionary, and mysterious forces, which no man could understand or govern. There was a new restlessness in the soul of humanity. Some great change was happening, or about to happen. The old checks and balances had become unhinged, in the minds of men, in the spirit of peoples, in great races. The coloured peoples of the world were stirring. Some yeast in them was rising. Some passion of desire. India, Egypt, Africa, Mesopotamia, were seething with the spirit of revolt. He had been in the East. He had seen something of it. The white races would have to take care. There were other races waiting for their place. Japan and China were changing in “the unchanging East.”
What of the British Empire? Little old England, dependent on overseas trade, on world markets which had failed, on a mercantile marine which could not get its cargoes, would be hardest pressed of all. . . . And the spirit of revolution among men embittered by war, disillusioned by false promises, beaten back to a low standard of life, had touched even England, at last.
“Major,” said Luke Christy, “I wouldn’t care to bring a son into the world.”
Bertram rose, and did not answer for a while. He went to the window and stared out into the darkness creeping over the Thames. From Christy’s windows he could see the curve of the river, and the lights of the great old city gleaming through the purple dusk, and the red fire from the engine of a train passing over Charing Cross bridge, and the head-lights of motors and taxi-cabs streaming along the Embankment—all the glamorous life of London in the hour between dusk and darkness of an evening in May. A scene in modern civilisation as he knew and loved it.
He turned round to Christy and said: “You old ghoul! You make me shiver. It’s not as bad as all that!”
Christy laughed, and switched on the electric light, breaking the spell of darkness.
“It’s my morbid temperament! P’raps I’m all wrong. But I’m just watching, and trying to find out the drift of things.”
He’d found one curious thing wherever he went, in whatever country; he found men and women talking anxiously, analysing civilisation, uncertain of its endurance. Was that a good or a bad sign? The intellectuals of Greece and Rome used to talk like that before the “decline and fall.”
“Let’s drop the international situation and get down to home politics. What are you doing with yourself, Major?”
“Looking for a job,” said Bertram.
Luke Christy advised him to get a soft job, in one of the Government offices, with good pay out of the rate-payers’ pockets and no more work than an office boy could do without knowing it.
“I want to be an honest man,” said Bertram.
Christy seemed to find that uncommonly amusing.
“My dear Major! The only honest men in the world are those who are dying of starvation. All who have more than that are rogues. I’m one of the worst of hypocrites, for while I bleed at the heart for suffering humanity, I get a good price for the articles in which I describe its torture and disease.”
Bertram suddenly flushed a little, and spoke in a nervous way.
“Christy, I believe I could write, if I tried. In the old days at St. Paul’s, I had a notion—anyhow, I feel I might do something if I had a shot at it. What do you think?”
“You?” said Christy.
That word and its emphasis of surprise were not encouraging, and Bertram found it hard to confess to his friend that he had been writing a book, and believed that at last he had found his object in life, and the impulse he’d been seeking.
“What kind of book?” asked Christy.
“A book on the War.”
Christy groaned, and cried “Kamerad!” with raised hands.