XI
Joyce had gone out to a dance, leaving Bertram alone to write his book. She had made him a fair offer to come with her, telling him that it was his own fault if she had to rely on other company as an escape from boredom.
“What company?” he asked, and looked up sharply from his papers.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Some of the usual. The two Russian girls and Jack Hazeldeane, Kenneth.”
Bertram pushed his papers on one side.
“What’s the use of my coming? The two Russian girls bore me to death with their tales of the old régime and stories of Bolshevik atrocities. And I hate to see you dancing with Kenneth. He dances like an amorous ballet master. Besides—”
“Besides what—?”
“If there’s any dancing to be done, it’s I that want to dance with you.”
“All the time, Bertram?” She smiled at his greed.
“Yes. You’remywife.”
His damnable jealousy had got the better of him again.
“Not your property, my dear!” said Joyce.
“Not other people’s property,” grumbled Bertram. “I’m old-fashioned enough to object to your doing that jazz stuff with any fellow who likes to put his arms round you. It’s disgusting.”
“It’s you that are disgusting!” said Joyce.
Her face flamed with sudden anger, and Bertram saw the steel glint in her eyes. She was standing by the doorway in her evening frock, a thing of blue silk, showing her white neck and bare arms. The light of the electric candles on his desk played with her gold-spun hair. Bertram loved the look of her, and yet knew that temper was creeping up into his brain because he could not stop her from dancing with a man he loathed, nor hold her to himself alone, nor get from her the absolute love he desired, hungrily.
“That’s not a good word from any wife to any husband,” he said, heatedly.
“Your word!”
She laughed and lingered at the door, looking at her husband with a queer, half-scornful, half-enticing smile which he did not see because he was staring at his papers. There was even a little pity in her eyes.
“Better come! That book of yours is getting on your nerves.”
“It interests me,” said Bertram.
“I know I shall hate it anyhow. I want to forget the silly old war.”
“Everybody wants to forget it,” said Bertram, with a touch of passion in his voice. “The Profiteers, the Old Men who ordered the massacre, the politicians who spoilt the Peace, the painted flappers. I’m damned if I’m going to let them!”
“Painted flappers?” said Joyce. “Meaning me?”
“Not meaning you,” he answered.
“Thanks for that!”
She left the room, and Bertram heard Edith say the taxi was waiting. He rose and made a step towards the door, as though to join her after all. He wanted to go, in spite of Kenneth and the Russian girls. He wanted Joyce’s beauty, though he would have to share it with her friends. But it was too late. The door had clicked behind her, and he heard the taxi-cab drive away.
He was too rough with Joyce. Why shouldn’t she dance with other men? Was it some strain of his father in him that made him hate it so—his father’s harshness and intolerance. Or was it the passion of his love which Joyce seemed to deny him—did deny him—after the death of her baby? She did not respond to his endearments, and made no disguise of her dislike of his caresses. Or was this constant wrangling between them—becoming rather serious at times—due to an intellectual challenge between their different points of view—her patrician philosophy of life, his democratic leanings? Anyhow, it was all very difficult. He would have to be more careful, get a better grip on himself, rise to more selfless heights of love, if need be, and if possible, make a sacrifice of his very passion for Joyce’s sake. It was all very difficult!
He constrained himself to get to his writing again, now that he had refused her offer of companionship. Soon he lost himself in his task, glad of the swift flow of his pen and his savage strokes. It was strong stuff. It was a bitter indictment of the stupidities, the blunders, the unnecessary slaughter of men, which he had cursed in time of war because his own men had been the victims, with the others. Those orders from Corps Headquarters! Inconceivable! Unbelievable in their imbecility!
He had written for several hours, utterly absorbed, when he heard the electric bell ringing in the hall. Joyce back already? Hardly. The clock said midnight, and she was not back then, as a rule, from one of her dances. Edith had gone to bed, as Joyce had taken a key. He would have to open the door. Confound it! Who on earth—
It was Susan, his sister, and she had a man with her, standing back a little behind her in the darkness of the porch. She came into the hall with a “Hullo, Bertram!” and the man followed her and shut the door.
She leant against the wall, breathing in a hard way, as though she had been running. The man by her side was Dennis O’Brien whom Bertram had known in France. He kept his felt hat on his head, and his hands in his pockets, and stood looking at Bertram in a careless, quizzing way. But he was pale.
“Rather late for an evening call,” said Bertram.
Susan asked whether the servants had gone to bed, and when Bertram nodded, led the way into his study with her friend.
“Shut the door, Bertram, old boy.”
Bertram obeyed her. He had a sense of apprehension. There was something strange in his sister’s look and manner.
“What’s the game?” he asked.
Susan took one of his cigarettes and lit it by a spill from the fire before answering. O’Brien sat down in Bertram’s desk chair, and held his hat between his knees. He was wearing a trench coat, and looked shabby.
“It’s like this, Bertram. Dennis, who, by the way, is my man—we married a week ago—is ‘on the run,’ as they call it. He’s very much wanted by the English police, and I’m going to ask you to be sport enough to put him up for a day or two. He’ll stay close and give no trouble.”
She looked over at Dennis, and laughed in a low voice. Bertram noticed that one lock of her dark hair had come loose beneath her hat. Her brown eyes had a kind of liquid light in them, or some leaping flame, and her cheeks were flushed. She looked more Irish than he had ever seen her. Perhaps it was excitement that had set that part of her blood on fire, or the marriage she mentioned “by the way.” Susan married! To a fellow who was “wanted” by the English police! And the crisis in the family.
Bertram laughed, but mirthlessly.
“So O’Brien is ‘wanted,’ is he? And you’ve married him, Susan? Any more announcements?”
“That’s all for the present,” said Susan. She watched her brother anxiously, saw his face harden a little, and then went to him and clasped his arm with both hands.
“Bertram! You and I were always pals. You’ve helped me out of many a scrape, and never said a word. This affair is my worst scrape, and Dennis’s. It’s a question of life and death. Play up to the old tradition!”
“I want to know more,” said Bertram. He spoke sharply, and looked over at O’Brien, who was silent, with a nervous smile about his lips. “What game have you been up to in England? That arson business?” He remembered that several timber yards had been set on fire at the London docks, with Sinn Fein warnings of further damage.
Dennis O’Brien shifted his felt hat round, and stared at the brim.
“I’m not answering questions,” he said.
“Perhaps it’s worse than arson,” said Bertram. “Were you in Dublin last Monday?”
There had been an attack outside the Castle. Two British officers in a motor car, and three Sinn Feiners lying in ambush had been killed. Others had escaped.
Dennis O’Brien became more pale, and Susan drew in her breath sharply.
“I was in Dublin,” said Dennis O’Brien. “The point is whether you’re a friend or an enemy.”
“I’m a friend of Ireland,” said Bertram, “but an enemy of those who drench her with blood, and drag her into anarchy.”
“The English,” said O’Brien.
“Irish too, by God!” said Bertram.
O’Brien shrugged his shoulders, and said something in a low voice about the right to liberty.
Susan threw her cigarette in the fire and put her arm round Bertram’s neck.
“Brother o’ mine! It’s no time for argument about Irish liberty or English tyranny. Don’t you understand? Dennis is my husband and his life’s in danger. You must hide him here, for my sake!”
Bertram thought hard and rapidly. Susan’s words called to his chivalry. She was this man’s wife. And it was not easy to turn a hunted man from his door, anyway. But what about Joyce? In hiding O’Brien he might drag her name in, and her father’s name.—‘The Earl of Ottery’s daughter shelters an Irish rebel.’ The newspapers would make a fuss of that! And his own father’s name? Michael Pollard, K.C., who defended the policy of reprisals! A family scandal all round, and damnably dangerous!
“Can’t you find another place?” he asked Susan, weakly.
Susan laughed.
“The police were pretty close. We dodged ’em by the length of a street.”
She held his arm again, and said: “Big brother! Sportsman and gentleman! For the Irish blood that’s in you!”
“With English loyalty,” said Bertram, sharply.
“In that case,” said Dennis O’Brien, in a sullen way, “I’ll just slope out into the streets again. I take no favour from English loyalty. To hell with all its loyalties!”
He stood up and went towards the door, but Susan ran round the table to him and caught hold of his coat.
“Dennis, my dear! Bertram is all for Irish liberty. And don’t forget I’m half English too!”
“All Irish now!” said Dennis, in a low, passionate voice.
Bertram watched them. His face was flushed, and he had thrust his hair back so that it was all tousled.
“This is a devilish affair,” he said, “but if O’Brien cares to stay here, he can have that sofa!”
“Well played!” cried Susan softly, and with those words she kissed her brother, and her eyes were wet and shining.
“It’s not a very cordial invitation,” said O’Brien, with sarcasm, “but if your brother gives his word—”
“Do you doubt me?” asked Bertram. His voice had a savage note.
“I’m in your hands,” said O’Brien, more humbly.
Presently Joyce came in. They had not heard the front door open, so that her appearance in the room was unexpected. She stood for a moment in the doorway, her fur cloak half slipping from her shoulders. Then she spoke to Susan, not hiding her surprise.
“Hulloa! Anything wrong?”
Perhaps it was their silence, some look in their eyes which suggested to her that something was “wrong.”
“You’re looking splendid again, Joyce,” said Susan, in her best “society” manner. There was always a sense of armed truce between the two girls. Bertram’s sister resented what she called the “haughty condescension” of Bertram’s wife. Joyce had not disguised from Bertram that in her opinion Susan was “a dangerous little spit-fire—with atrocious manners.”
“I’m quite well, thanks.”
Joyce glanced at O’Brien, who had risen from his chair as she had come in.
“Won’t you introduce me?” she asked Susan.
Susan said, “This is Dennis O’Brien, my husband.” It was very calmly said.
“A surprise!” said Joyce. “Congratulations to both of you, and all that, I suppose. Rather sudden, wasn’t it?”
She failed to shake hands with Dennis O’Brien. As she had told Bertram many times, sometimes amusing times, and sometimes not, she hated all the Irish except half an Irishman.
She sat in Bertram’s low arm chair, yawning a little, with her long white arms behind her bobbed hair.
“A cigarette, Bertram!”
Bertram gave her the cigarette, lit it for her, and mumbled something about the late hour, and bedtime. He had a foreboding that Joyce didn’t intend to go to bed until Susan and Dennis had gone. And Dennis was not going. There would have to be an explanation. There would probably be a row.
It came half an hour later, after strained and unnatural efforts at bright conversation by Bertram and Susan, while O’Brien sat gloomily silent, and Joyce yawned with increasing carelessness, and asked occasional questions without listening to the answer. The crisis happened when she sprang up and stretched her arms above her head.
“Haven’t you people got any home? I hate being inhospitable, Susan, but you and your new-found husband had better go. Bertram and I sometimes sleep o’ nights.”
There was a moment’s silence before Bertram answered:
“O’Brien is staying. He’s going to use the sofa to-night.”
There was another silence.
“Sorry,” said Joyce, “but I can’t allow that.”
“Why not?”
Bertram knew the “row” was coming.
“It’s not in my contract with the maids,” said Joyce very calmly. Then she spoke another sentence which seemed to reveal a knowledge, or at least a guess of the inner meaning of this visit from Susan and Dennis.
“Besides, my house is not going to be made a hiding place for Irish rebels. I’m English, and play the game accordingly.”
Yes, undoubtedly, there was going to be a row!
Bertram decided upon a frank explanation. Joyce had the right to know.
“Look here, Joyce, O’Brien is Susan’s husband, and the police are after him. You know how I stand about Sinn Fein. . . . Anyhow—I’ve given my word. O’Brien stays here to-night.”
“He doesnotstay,” said Joyce. “This is my house. If that man is not out of it in two minutes, I’ll telephone to the police.”
She walked quickly to Bertram’s desk and caught hold of the receiver.
Bertram followed her, still explaining, rather desperately. He had given his word. He quite understood Joyce’s point of view. He sympathised to some extent. This Sinn Fein business was criminal folly. But O’Brien had been a friend of his in the War. And he was Susan’s husband. Did she understand? His own brother-in-law! He was in real danger, and it was not in the code of their crowd—was it?—to hand over a hunted man.—A criminal? Well, he didn’t know. O’Brien had told him nothing. He asked no questions. Besides—that was all beside the argument.
“I’ve given my word, Joyce—my honour’s pledged.”
“What about my honour?” asked Joyce. Her voice was very cold and hard. “My father’s name? Our honour to England?”
She turned to Dennis O’Brien, still holding the telephone.
“Are you going? Time’s up.”
Dennis O’Brien smiled at her, and his Irish eyes paid homage to this girl’s beauty as she stood facing him, so hostile. He had been smiling all through Bertram’s monologue. It seemed to amuse him, this altercation between the English girl and his wife’s brother.
“I’m going,” he said. “Don’t worry at all. It’s what one expects of English women! They would turn a starving dog out of doors.”
“Mad dogs,” said Joyce. “With a whip.”
It was Susan now who intervened, ragingly.
“Joyce! You’re a damned cat! No wonder Bertram has a hellish time with you. I’d like to see the Bolsheviks playing with your bobbed hair, and your lovely white neck.”
Joyce picked up the telephone receiver, and said, “Police station, please.”
“No!” said Bertram.
He took hold of Joyce’s wrist and wrenched it from the instrument, conscious of his own violence.
“Joyce, I forbid you. I gave my word. Surely you respect that? By God, youmustrespect it. If you touch that telephone again, I’ll—I’ll carry you upstairs.”
Joyce looked at him squarely, and their eyes met and searched each other. She saw more anger in his eyes than ever before. She saw that he meant to use his strength.
“I surrender to force. Three to one, and all enemies.”
She laughed on a high note, picked up her fur coat, and went out of the room. They listened to her light steps up the polished stairs, and to the sharp slam of her bedroom door.
“Poor old Bertram!” said Susan, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief.
He turned on her fiercely.
“How dare you speak of Joyce like that? She was perfectly right, apart from my pledged word. If O’Brien plays the rebel, let him take the risk of rebels, without crawling into English houses for a hiding place!”
Susan paled.
“Et tu, Brute!” she said in a low voice.
She spoke a whispered word to Dennis O’Brien. He nodded, and buttoned up his trench coat.
“Yes, let’s be going.—Good-night, Pollard.”
Bertram did not answer.
He made no move, as he stood planted on the hearth-rug by the fire, staring moodily at a cigarette holder which Joyce had dropped, while his sister and her Irish husband went out of the room, and a moment later left the house, as he heard by the quiet click of the front door lock. He stood there for half an hour after they had left, and then summed up his thoughts in his usual sentence:
“It’s all very difficult!”
After that he went up to Joyce’s room, which was locked. There was no answer to his tap on the door, and he crept miserably to his own bed.
XII
Joyce was perplexing to Bertram after that midnight scene with Susan and Dennis. He had expected a painful quarrel on the subject, a denunciation by Joyce of his behaviour, a defence on his part, an argument beginning with generalities and ending with personalities, always dangerous between a young husband and wife, both inclined to passionate temper. But Joyce declined to discuss the matter. She had stayed late in bed next day, and had come down to luncheon with her wrist bound up. He did not understand the cause of that bandage until he enquired and received the answer:
“You nearly broke my wrist over the telephone last night. Perhaps you’re not aware of the violence you used.”
No, he was unaware of it, and made abject apology, horribly ashamed that he should have used physical force to his wife. It was a coster’s way of argument.
“Joyce! I’m immensely sorry and ashamed. But you see my difficulty last night. I had given my word—”
“I refuse to discuss the affair,” said Joyce. “You know my views. If you say another word about it I’ll leave the house.”
That was that. She was not even curious to know whether O’Brien had spent the night in Bertram’s study. Perhaps she had enquired from the maids and had satisfied herself on that point. Yet Bertram was certain that the incident was not regarded as trivial in her mind, and that it had caused something like estrangement between them. She went her own way, deliberately shutting him out of her plans, or, at least, not consulting him, nor giving him a chance of joining her. She was rarely at home to luncheon during the few weeks that followed Susan’s visit, and generally returned only in time to dress for dinner. Even then he had no chance of private conversation, for she invited friends to dine night after night—was it with the deliberate intention of avoiding intimate contact with him?—and afterwards filled her drawing-room with a miscellaneous crowd, or went out with a party to the theatre or the dancing clubs.
Bertram was lonely whether she stayed at home or not. He was beginning to feel lonely in body and soul. Joyce answered him when he spoke to her, but no more than that. She was quite gay at times—nearly always—but it was not into his eyes that she laughed.
Kenneth Murless used the house as his own, “dropped in” for dinner, or after dinner, always civil to Bertram, never disconcerted by Bertram’s sulky manner, always bright and paradoxical, and entertaining to everybody but Joyce’s husband, who hated him—for no reason but that Joyce liked him.
There were other men whom Joyce liked, and who liked to be liked by Joyce. The Reverend Peter Fynde, who came from the church round the corner, was what Bertram called a “parlour cat,” and came purring round to tea, or at nine-thirty, after “Evensong,” with gossipy anecdotes about Lady This and Lady That, and soulful sayings about the “Healing Power of Faith,” the “Beauty of the Unattainable,” and communication with the “Dear Remembered Dead.” At dinner, when the ladies had left the table, he was inclined to tell somewhat Rabelaisian stories, drawn from his experience as an army chaplain. “A human fellow,” was the general verdict about him, “a perfect dear” by the women. Bertram thought him a perfect ass, but did not tell them so.
He had nothing in common with the people who gathered round Joyce. They irritated him. Listening to their conversation, he found their point of view “poisonous,” if not idiotic. It was at least—and he wanted to be fair—hopelessly reactionary. They still had a habit of talking about the people of England as “the mob” or “the masses,” and they spoke about “Labour” as if it were a sinister, evil, destructive monster, and not a class of men, quite human, for the most part rather decent, many of them the real heroes of the war—keen to earn a living wage, desperately anxious not to be forced back to the edge of the poverty line, or over the edge. Millions of Bill Huggetts, and better men than Bill—rather neurotic, always a “grouser”—but not out for blood and terror, or anything beyond food and shelter for a family left on his hands by a poor mad wife.
Labour? Bertram had been going about London getting into touch with some of the men of his old company—“Comrades of the Great War,” as they called themselves, in barely furnished clubs where they gathered at night, because of their craving for the comradeship which had been the best thing in war. They were still restless and unsettled. Some of them were still hardly better than “shell-shocks.” Their minds were groping towards some solution of their present distress—unemployment, high prices, a sense of broken faith with them by the nation they had served. Some of them talked glibly, as Huggett had said, about Bolshevism and Communism. The frightful experiment in Russia—what was the truth of it?—held some lure for them. There were some who believed “it would do London a bit o’ good.”
Bertram didn’t believe there was much of a real revolutionary spirit among them. They were sick of war and bloodshed, and the “crime wave,” as the newspapers called it, was only the work of a small minority of young men unhinged by the cheapness of life in war, and by war’s brutality. Bertram marvelled rather at the patience, the essential patriotism, the commonsense of the majority of men he met about. Any hankering after the Russian way of revolution was but a vague vision of some system of society which would give men greater equality of luck, and a sense of security.
That was not the opinion of the people in Joyce’s drawing-room. They confessed to fear about the future. It was, perhaps, the presence of two Russian girls of the old régime, and some of the men they brought with them of their own caste and country, which suggested the possibility of revolution in England. They were never tired of telling tales of Bolshevik atrocities, none of them from first-hand evidence, but likely enough, and dreadful in detail. The elder of them, the Countess Gradiva—Lydia, as Joyce called her—had set up a hat shop in Mount Street, Mayfair, where Joyce had met her and made friends. The younger—Paula—played the violin, wonderfully, at recitals and concerts. They were both tall, ugly, elegant girls, speaking half a dozen languages with equal facility and passionate gesture.
“Why doesn’t England send an army and rescue my poor country from its tyrants?” asked Lydia one night of Bertram. “I cannot understand your English policy, your dreadful inactivity.”
Bertram had heard many remarks of the same kind by the Russian girls. They enraged him.
“Why don’t your Russian men do a bit of their own fighting? Why do they lounge about the capitals of Europe, and expect other people to liberate Russia and restore Czardom, and get back their wealth?”
“You’re a Bolshevik, then?” asked Countess Gradiva, staring at him with black, challenging eyes.
“Not in the least,” said Bertram. “But I’m dead against these fatal expeditions in which England has poured out gold she can ill afford—with what result? More bloodshed in Russia. Another disastrous retreat of incompetent generals, more suffering and horror, and harryings of poor Russian peasants. That’s how it seems to me. I may be wrong.”
The Countess Gradiva called out across the drawing-room, which was crowded with Joyce’s friends. She had a high, harsh way of speaking, and a shrill laugh.
“My dear Lady Joyce! Your husband is a naughty bad Bolshevik! He’s saying the most dreadful things,ma chérie!”
“He makes a habit of it,” answered Joyce.
Bertram flushed angrily at her retort, though Joyce had spoken with a smile. He knew by the tone of her voice that she intended to hurt him, and it hurt.
“I tell the truth, occasionally, and that’s dreadful, I admit,” he said to Lydia Gradiva.
“Not the truth about Russia, you wicked man. You do not know our poor Russia!”
“I would go even as far as Russia, to get the truth,” said Bertram. “Does anybody know?”
“You mean I lie to you?”
“There are many lies about,” said Bertram, “but I’m not referring to you, especially.”
She whipped his hand with the end of a long necklace of amber beads, so that they stung him. Then she called him a revolutionary monster, a Jacobin.
“I can see you leading the English mob and hoisting the Red Flag over the House of Commons!”
The English “mob!” There it was again. Always the talk came round to the chance of an English revolution. Those people were afraid—even of England!
It was General Bellasis who revealed a new cause of fear which took hold of the imagination of London society at this time. Bellasis was one of the men who liked to be liked by Joyce. He was still on active service—in Ireland—but seemed to spend his time travelling between Dublin and Whitehall, and always came to Holland Street with flowers for Joyce, theatre tickets for Joyce, and homage in his eyes. He looked more gallant than any hero could be—at all times—in his uniform with many decorations—a tall, lean fellow, with a hard, clean cut face, blue, sailor-looking eyes, and an empty sleeve where his left arm used to be. But he confessed that he was suffering from blue funk (he exaggerated his symptoms) because of an incident that had happened to him in St. James’s Street, outside the club, that very afternoon. A wretched-looking fellow had come up to him, offering to sell some bootlaces. “Thanks, no,” said Bellasis. The man had followed him, whining something about a wife and children, and thrusting the bootlaces under his nose. “I’ve said I don’t want ’em,” said Bellasis, as he related. “Get off with you, my man.” He had not spoken roughly, though he disapproved of begging, especially when every out-of-work was getting a Government dole. But then the man had pulled something out of his pocket and given it to Bellasis, saying, “Well, take that for luck!” Bellasis supposed the company could guess what it was.
Kenneth Murless guessed right, first time.
“The silver slipper!”
“Yes,” said General Bellasis, “the silver slipper! And I can tell you, I don’t like it!”
The Reverend Peter Fynde claimed that he had been given one at Ranelagh, three weeks before. Exactly in the same way. He had refused an importunate beggar and received the slipper “for luck.”
Kenneth Murless took precedence of Fynde, in point of time. It was two months at least since he had been given the slipper. That was outside the Carlton. A typical incident. A paper boy had tried to make him buy his last copy ofThe Pall Mall Gazette. Murless had seen it already, read every line of it. The boy had persisted until Murless had told him to run away or he would get a box on the ears. “Take this for luck!” said the boy. So he had the sign of the slipper.
“Has everybody gone mad?” asked Bertram. “The silver slipper! The sign of the slipper! What on earth are you all talking about?”
It was Murless who explained, in his best diplomatic style, after expressing surprise that Bertram should not have heard of the sinister thing. It appeared that in the time of the French Revolution, secret agents of the Free masons and Jacobin clubs presented silver slippers to people whom they particularly disliked. It was not a good thing to get one. Most of those who did perished on the guillotine. “C’est l’histoire qui se répète, mon vieux!” Kenneth Murless spoke lightly, with a smile, but there was a hint of fear in his voice, and in the room silence for a moment, after he had spoken.
Bertram laughed loudly and harshly.
“Of all the old wives’ tales! And you highly educated and extremely modern people believe such stuff as that!”
Joyce lit a cigarette, and puffed out a little wreath of smoke, daintily.
“I hate to tell you I’ve had the silver slipper! But if the worst comes to the worst, I hope I’ll go scornfully to death!”
Bertram looked at her, and though he did not believe the ridiculous explanation of the silver slipper, he could not resist a tribute of admiration in his eyes. Joyce had more pluck than any man in the crowd. If the impossible happened, she would go “scornfully to death!” With patrician pride. She read his thoughts, and a wave of colour rose to her forehead, and for a moment her eyes softened to him. Then she turned away, with a word about the boredom of the subject.
“Why not some Ouija board?” she asked. “Peter, you’re a wonder with the spirit world!”
It was the Reverend Peter Fynde who took the centre of the room. He hoped that if they experimented a little it would be with reverence. He deprecated the frivolous way in which some people approached the world beyond the veil, as so many were doing it in society now.
Bertram groaned.
“I call it blasphemy. To me, there’s something horrible and indecent in this attempt to ‘call up’ the dead.”
“I don’t agree with you,” said Joyce. “The other day we were in touch with Hal and Dudy. They spoke as they used to—the old home slang. One could not doubt.”
“It was all being drawn from your subconscious mind, Joyce. But I object to the whole business. It’s unhealthy. It’s rotten and decadent.”
“You needn’t stay,” said Joyce.
Bertram did not stay. After his altercation with the Reverend Peter, he went out to see some of his own friends, whose ideas he liked better than those of Joyce’s crowd, whose point of view was more like his own than Joyce’s.
Alas, for that! Alas, for many things. How was it going to work out between him and Joyce? Were they drifting apart? Were they going to add one more to all those broken marriages which had become an epidemic in English life, after the War? No, by God, not that! It was only the inevitable strain of early marriage. They would have to readjust themselves a little. More patience on his side. More understanding on hers. Tolerance. Give and take. Politics barred. Religion barred. A sense of humour. Success. Yes, if his book succeeded and he could establish a literary career, paying his Scot and lot, it would make a deal of difference. Joyce would be proud of him, and the book would help her to understand his point of view. Thank Heaven for the book! It kept him busy. It gave him an object in life. It was the expression of the truth that was in him. It was a cure for loneliness. . . . Oh, the curse of loneliness!
XIII
Luke Christy was still in town. It was when the sense of loneliness was in Bertram that he found himself drifting towards the Adelphi to Christy’s rooms. The time of day or night didn’t matter. Christy was always glad of a “yarn,” and an excuse to drop his work awhile, when Bertram called, if he happened to be in. And he was mostly in, not going out much to meet his friends but expecting his friends to come to him.
“That’s the test I put ’em to,” he said. “If they come, I know they love me. And I’ve never learnt how to behave outside my own rooms. I break their china, or eat with the wrong fork, or scandalise the servants. I’m a plebeian, a coarse-mannered loon, hopelessly ill-educated.”
Christy’s friends accepted the condition he imposed. There were often several in his room when Bertram called, smoking innumerable cigarettes, talking, talking. Remarkable men and women, most of them, new in type to Bertram, and wonderfully interesting. They were literary people, journalists, social workers of one kind and another, professional idealists. There was also Janet Welford, at times, more interesting than any of them, and more alarming. Now and then came a foreigner—a Russian, an Indian student, a Belgian poet, a young Czecho-Slovak, an Austrian musician, an American professor, even a full-blooded Red Indian, once an officer in the Canadian flying corps, and a brilliant young man, speaking perfectly good English, and liberal in ideas.
They were all liberal in ideas. Rather too liberal, some of them, according to Bertram’s way of thinking. He was startled by the boldness with which they accepted the necessity of change in the whole structure of social life and international relations. While he was worrying out of old inherited instincts and traditions, with some travail of doubt, they had jumped clean beyond to more advanced ideals than he could accept. They put no limit to their conceptions of liberty. If Ireland wanted a Republic, then it was her right to have it. They only questioned the wisdom of wanting a Republic, and the political possibility of obtaining it, with England hostile to that idea. They believed that national independence was less desirable, less “advanced” than federations of free peoples, linking up into ever widening groups, until the United States of Europe and the United States of America, and other associations of peoples would become the United States of the World. A distant vision!
Bertram’s mind refused to follow them as far as that. He balked at the first obstacle, and insisted that Ireland had no right to greater freedom than that of Dominion Home Rule. He believed in the link between the two countries. England had rights as well as Ireland, her own need of security and freedom. He did not see how England could be safe or free, with an Irish Republic on her flank, able to cut her communications at sea. An Irish Republic would be a mortal blow to the old historical pride and sentiment of England.
Christy laughed at that argument of his.
“England’s old historical pride and sentiment are going to be rudely shocked before long, my child! She can’t afford those antique treasures. She’s got to keep pace with the new needs of a world ruined by those dangerous possessions of old castes. It was historical pride and sentiment which caused the German ultimatum in 1914, and led to the massacre of the world’s best youth. All that’s in the Old Curiosity Shop now. Such stuff and nonsense must be replaced, lest we perish, by a spirit of comradeship and commonsense between peoples. Not “My country, right or wrong,” nor “Kaiser and Fatherland,” but “Service to the Human Family.”
“I believe in patriotism,” Bertram had said, stubbornly, and that confession of faith, which he would never have stated in Joyce’s “set,” because it was taken for granted as the very air they breathed, seemed to astonish and amuse some of Christy’s friends, as though he had uttered some ancient heresy in an outworn creed.
“Patriotism has been the curse of the human race,” said Henry Carvell, the war correspondent, who had seen more of wars, big and little, than any man in England, and had been a knight-errant of the pen in most countries of the world. A heavily-built, square-shouldered man, with white hair and a ruddy face, he spoke with a kind of smiling contempt for Bertram’s simplicity of ignorance.
“It’s a survival of the old tribal rivalry which replaced the cave-man law when every old ourang-outang defended his lair and his females from all others of his species. ‘This is my patch of earth. I’ve drawn a line with my club. It marks my territory. Cross it if you dare. I’m stronger than you. Yah!’ That’s patriotism. I’ve seen it working out in bloodshed and brutality from the Zambesi to the Rhine.”
Bertram made a violent protest against that line of reasoning.
“I utterly disagree. If you deny patriotism, you rule out human nature and one of its strongest instincts.”
“I don’t deny it,” said Henry Carvell, with a touch of impatience. “I denounce it. What virtue do you see in it?”
“Love of familiar things in life. Loyalty to the ideas of one’s own people, their code of honour and all that. Men will die in defence of those things, in the last ditch.”
“Why die?” asked Christy, grinning at Bertram in a friendly way. “Why get into ditches? Why not talk it out with the other fellow whose ideas, most likely, are exactly the same?”
Hubert Melvin, the novelist, took up the argument. He was a chubby little man with a bald head, a great expanse of brow, and a plump, good-natured face, like Shakespeare without his beard and dignity.
“Our friend, Pollard, is enlarging the definition of patriotism. He seems to be talking about sacrifice for the ideals of life. They reach beyond frontiers. They’re not limited to a particular patch of earth hedged round by jealousy and governed by a small group of rascals calling themselves patriots! Of course men will die for what they believe to be the true faith.”
“Quite so,” agreed Henry Carvell. “Unfortunately, all national education—in a South African tribe or a European state—is intensive suggestion to primitive minds that their community, alone in the world, is in possession of the true faith. Their tribal custom becomes the only code of honour. They are encouraged to impose it, with missionary and murderous zeal, upon the rest of humanity. German ‘Kultur,’ for example, British ‘Justice,’ French ‘Liberty,’ and so on.”
“British Justice is a pretty good thing,” said Bertram. “We believe in fair play.”
“In Ireland?” asked Christy, and Bertram was silent. No, somehow, for five hundred years, British Justice had rather fallen down in Ireland. It had been dragged into the mud since the War.
These conversations in Christy’s room were altering his whole outlook on life, drawing him further and further away from the ideas of Joyce and her people. He resisted some of the extreme doctrines put forth calmly, as though they were accepted platitudes, by Christy’s friends, but he found himself agreeing more and more with their fundamental principles, and leaning heavily to their side of life’s argument.
These men, Henry Carvell, the war correspondent, Hubert Melvin, the novelist, Arthur Birchington, the critic, Nat Verney, the Labour member, W. E. Lawless, the political economist, and Bernard Hall, the editor ofThe New World,—to name but a few of those who came to Christy’s rooms—differed from each other in a thousand ways of thought, never agreed in detail, engaged each other in endless controversy, over words, quotations, facts, ideas, philosophy, but Bertram, as an outsider and a younger man, seemed to discover in them some common denominator of character and quality.
What was it that bound them by invisible threads? Not any party creed, for some called themselves Liberals, and others Socialists, and others Individualists, and others declined all labels. Not any code of caste, for they belonged to different strata of English life, by birth and education.
Henry Carvell had been a Balliol man and a rowing Blue, before he disappeared into the wilds of Central Africa on his first expedition.
Hubert Melvin, who wrote satirical novels, had never been educated at all, according to his own account, and belonged to that vague, ill-defined middle-class which stretches around London from the mean streets of Brixton to the garden suburbs of Wimbledon, and treks northward from the artistic seclusion of St. John’s Wood to the outer wilds of Golders Green and Finchley.
Nat Verney, the Labour member, had wielded a pick in the mines of Lancashire before taking a course, out of Trade Union Funds, at the London School of Economics.
W. E. Lawless, the economist, had been President of the Union at Oxford, his father was the well-known Judge, and his mother the beautiful Gwendoline Ashley, daughter of the actor.
Bernard Hall, whose editorship ofThe New Worldhad founded something like a new school of English journalism—critical, scholarly, pledged to international peace, scornful of popular clamour and political insincerity, had been educated in France and Switzerland, and his swarthy face, his dark, brooding eyes, and the passionate temperament which he tried to hide under a mask of irony, came from a French mother and a Colonel of Seaforth Highlanders, his father.
A strangely assorted crowd, not more like each other in experience and heritage than others who drifted into Christy’s rooms. What, then, brought them together, and inspired them with some common quality and purpose?
Bertram thought he had found the key to the puzzle in the word “Tolerance.” These men were wonderfully tolerant of things that divide other men—religion, race, social environment. Henry Carvell had been brought up as a Catholic, Christy was an advanced sceptic on all religion, Lawless, a Christian Scientist. They had no race hatreds. At a time when the English people, and especially English women, continued to keep the hate fires burning against “the Hun” who had caused such agony in the world, these friends of Christy’s denounced the Peace Treaty as an outrage, because of its harsh terms to the beaten enemy, raged against the continuance of the blockade which had forced the Germans to accept its “humiliations” and “injustice”—
“It’s new in our code,” said Carvell, “to make war on women and children,”—and they believed that by generosity the German people could be induced to abandon their militarism and link up with a peaceful democracy in Europe.
There were times when Bertram, listening to this talk, felt uneasy, guilty of something like treachery. These men were too tolerant. They seemed more sensitive, sometimes, to the sufferings of the German people than to the sacrifice of their own. He quarrelled with them for that, and was beaten every time in argument because he found himself yielding to their sense of chivalry, to their belief in the “common man,” to their faith in the ultimate commonsense of an educated democracy, to their hatred of cruelty.
No, it was not tolerance that he found the binding link between them, for they were violently intolerant of those whom they called “reactionaries”—all men not in agreement with themselves—arrogantly intolerant of ignorance and stupidity in high places. What seemed to bind them in intellectual sympathy was hatred of cruelty, to humble men, to women and children, to primitive races, even to animals and birds. They were instinctive and educated Pacifists, believing in the power of the spirit, rather than in physical force, in civilisation rather than in conflict, in liberty and not in oppression, in free-will, and not in discipline.
“Discipline is death,” said Christy, and when Bertram cried out against that as blasphemy, he consented to modify his statement by admitting the necessity of “self-discipline,” based on understanding and consent, but not imposed by external authority.
“We must kill the instinct of cruelty in the human brain,” said Bernard Hall, ofThe New World, and the flame in him leapt through his cold mask. “We must give up teaching our children the old cave-man stuff, about soldier heroes and hunters of beasts. We must make it a public shame for women to be seen wearing the plumage of lovely birds.”
This hatred of cruelty was at the bottom of their arguments about the Peace Treaty. It coloured their views on India, Ireland, Egypt, the exploitation of Africa, the Negro problem in the United States, the unemployed problem in England, the relations between Capital and Labour, even the question of Divorce.
It was all very difficult. . . . It would be more difficult with Joyce, if he allied himself definitely with this group of men and their philosophy. He felt they were trying to “convert” him, to win him over wholly to their side.
“You ought to join us,” said Nat Verney, the Labour member. “Labour has need of lads like you. The younger Intellectuals.”
He spoke with a North country burr in his speech, in spite of the London School of Economics. He was a sturdy, youngish man—thirty-five or so—with a shock of brown hair and a Lancashire face, hard as teak, square-jawed, with deep-set eyes in which there was a glint of humour, in spite of the light of fanaticism now and then, when he was bitter against “the classes” and his great enemy “Capital.”
“Why don’t you write occasionally forThe New World—?” asked Bernard Hall. “You have the gift of words, if I may say so.”
Bertram’s heart gave a thump at that compliment from Hall, distinguished editor, fastidious critic. Was he serious or only sarcastic?
“A realistic novel on the War,” said Hubert Melvin, raising his Shakespeare brow, and a little plump hand. “Nobody in England has come up to Barbusse. You could do it, Pollard! It’s burnt into you. Give it ’em hot and strong—‘The Old Gang!’ Put the heart of England into it.”
Bertram had glanced at Christy. He had pledged him to secrecy about his book, and Christy kept the pledge.
“Pollard may surprise us all!” So Christy said, and then spoilt his speech for Bertram by a grin and a jibe. “But we mustn’t forget his aristocratic connections! It’s hard to break with one’s caste.”
“That belongs to the wreckage of war,” said Henry Carvell. “I’m glad of the smash. Think of the entrenched snobbishness of England in 1913! Thank Heaven that heritage of stupidity has been blown to bits.”
Christy was not so sure that it had been blown to bits. In time of war there had been a little mixing up. Patrician girls had been dairy-maids, hospital nurses, canteen women. Public school men had gone into the ranks, now and then. Now they were all dividing again, getting back to different sides.
Bertram agreed with Christy, thinking of Kenneth Murless, General Bellasis, and others. He agreed more with Christy than any of the others. He was glad when they went away, leaving him to “jaw” with this old comrade of his. Christy was of simpler stuff, dead true in his estimate of facts. What was it in Christy that caught hold of him so? Perhaps his intense sincerity and his harsh realism. He did not deceive himself by illusion, however pleasant and idealistic. He told the truth as he saw it, unsparingly, to himself as well as to others. He had revealed Bertram to himself.
“You’re pulled two ways, old man,” he had said one night, as they had sat each side of his fireplace, here. “There’s a tug of war between two opposing ideals in your brain. You’re a traditional Conservative, trying to make a truce, or Coalition Government, with Liberal ideals. A foot in both camps.”
“A Jekyll and Hyde!”
Bertram laughed, but he had been touched by this sword point which had pierced his armour.
“A Hamlet in Holland Street,” said Christy. “You want to murder your old uncle, Tory Tradition, but you can’t bear to ‘kill him at his prayers.’ You’re still under the spell of Caste.”
“It’s my caste by proxy. It’s my wife’s.”
“True,” said Christy; “and out of chivalry to her, you will deny the light that sometimes gleams in you—the fierce, white flame of truth.”
He quoted Scripture. It was a habit of his, though no Churchman.
“ ‘He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.’ ”
“A harsh doctrine, if harshly interpreted,” said Bertram. “It sometimes leads to the cruelty which your friends hate so much.”
“One must be hard for honesty’s sake.”
Christy spoke of the secret in his own life which only once before he had revealed to Bertram—on a night before a morning of battle.
“When I found that my wife was dragging me down into the dirt of lies, into the squalour of self-pity and spiritual impotence, I left her—with my blessing. It was hard—because I had loved her.”
“Hard on her,” said Bertram.
“For a time,” Christy agreed. “Afterwards she was glad. We had nagged at each other for five years, before the war. That gave her relief. She was sorry I didn’t get killed. Of course I ought to have been, for her sake—perhaps for mine. After the Armistice life became intolerable. She had changed and I had changed—or rather, developed on separate lines. We were worlds apart. She hated my Socialistic tendencies. I hated her damned little suburban philosophy. You see, she’d married beneath her. A clergyman’s daughter. Think of that—with me!”
Bertram remained silent for a while. Was Christy’s story to be repeated in another sphere of life; in another quarter of London? Joyce had married “beneath her”—a peer’s daughter to a lawyer’s son.
“Christy, old man,” he said at last, “I believe in Loyalty. It’s my central faith. Loyalty to one’s country, one’s wife, one’s code of honour. Without that life, to me, is unlivable.”
Christy puffed at his old burnt pipe for several minutes before replying.
“Loyalty’s good,” he admitted presently; “but to the highest and not to the lowest. Loyalty to lies is disloyalty to truth. That’s one of life’s little ironies. A damned nuisance, sometimes!”
The conversation was broken by Janet Welford, who came in to see Christy, whom she loved.