XLII
He was the last to arrive, and Kenneth presented him to a young husband and wife whose names and portraits,—the Baron and Madame de Montauban—he had seen in many illustrated journals devoted to “Society” news.
De Montauban was a well-known amateur tennis player, he remembered, and he seemed to be an amiable, vivacious fellow, with easy manners. His wife was one of the prettiest women Bertram had seen in Paris where there is no dearth of beauty—fresher, more “English,” as he was pleased to think, than the typical Parisienne. Her complexion was almost as Nature had made it, and she had soft brown eyes, with a very charming way with them, but frank and unaffected.
Kenneth’s other guests were the Vicomte and Madame Armand St. Pierre de Vaux, both of whom attracted Bertram with peculiar interest. The husband had lost his left arm and part of his left leg at the first battle of the Marne, but crippled as he was, he showed an astonishing gaiety of spirit, and his lean face, with a little black moustache, and dark, luminous eyes, seemed to Bertram like that of D’Artagnan, the adored hero of his boyhood. His wife was a “belle laide,” plain but elegant, and with adoring eyes for her crippled man whom she treated half as a lover and half as a baby, fondling his hand, cutting up his meat, laughing at his anecdotes as though she heard them for the first time, and rebuking him for raising his voice too loud in a public restaurant. To these attentions her husband responded with whimsical affection, like a small boy with his mother, whom he adores though she tries his patience.
Kenneth was a good host, speaking French perfectly, with a Parisian accent which Bertram found a little hard to follow—as he had learnt French colloquially among the peasants and bourgeoisie of Picardy—and leading the conversation as easily and gracefully as in a London drawing-room. Now and then, Bertram was aware of Kenneth’s glance upon him, once or twice met his eyes and saw in them a kind of embarrassment, like that startled look which he had given for just a second at their meeting that morning in the Faubourg St. Honoré. But it was only the faintest hint of uneasiness for some unknown cause, and was no more than a shadow which left no trace in the sparkle of his conversation.
The table was laid for six, with Kenneth at one end and Armand de Vaux at the other. Bertram had the privilege of sitting on the left of Mme. de Montauban, who was next to Kenneth. Opposite were the Vicomte de Montauban, and Mme. de Vaux—admirably arranged according to the convention that husbands and wives must be kept as far apart as possible when they eat in public.
There was a little general discussion as to the impossibility of getting good food in Paris after the war, even at outrageous prices, due mainly to the profiteering of Parisian middlemen. Presently Mme. de Montauban turned to Bertram and speaking English with pretty accent, “felicitated” him on the possession of so beautiful a wife, whom she had had the pleasure of meeting several times.
Bertram’s mind winced a little at that word “possession,” but he merely asked where Mme. de Montauban had happened to meet Joyce.
She seemed a little surprised at that question, and her glance flickered for a moment in the direction of Kenneth.
“Everywhere in Paris,” she answered, with her beautiful smile. “She has made many friends among us because of her love, so very great, for our dear France.”
“Tiens!” said Armand de Vaux, on the other side of Bertram, “Monsieur is the husband of Miladi Joyce! She is exquisite! An English rose! Monsieur will pardon me if I confess that I fell desperately in love with her!”
“It’s impossible to avoid that tribute!” said Kenneth. “Bertram Pollard knows that all his friends are the slaves of his wife’s beauty. Isn’t it so?”
He spoke in French, and his words soundedchevaleresqueand romantic, with a lighter touch than they would have had in English. At that “Is it not so?” he looked at Bertram, and their eyes met. Kenneth’s smile seemed a little quizzing, as though he knew his friend’s quick jealousy.
Bertram felt no kind of objection to Armand de Vaux’s declaration of “desperate love,” though he was conscious of some secret reaction to Kenneth’s endorsement.
“I am glad Joyce is so much admired,” he said simply.
Armand de Vaux paid a tribute to English womanhood. Most of his knowledge of English character, as a young man, had been gained from reading translations of Shakespeare during hisservice militairein the barracks at Belfont. He had fallen in love with Rosalind, Beatrice, and Katherine, above all with Beatrice, who was, he thought, essentially English and Elizabethan. But he believed from better evidence than that of reading, that English womanhood had retained that Elizabethan quality of character—frankness, simplicity, courage, and above all, a playfulness of spirit.
Mme. de Vaux tapped her husband’s hand.
“None of your amorous reminiscences here, Armand. Every one knows that you are a monster of infidelity.”
“Before marriage I was a romantic,” he admitted with simple self-satisfaction. “Since marriage I have been a model of single-hearted devotion. It is still possible, however, that I may one day sow my last peck of wild oats.”
This menace caused great laughter from De Montauban, and his wife, and Kenneth rewarded the audacity of De Vaux, in the presence of his wife—who seemed in no way perturbed—by filling up the glasses of his guests with another bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and drinking to the exploits of D’Artagnan—“Twenty Years After.”
Mme. de Montauban ventured to accuse Shakespeare of tremendous plagiarism from Boccaccio and the Italiannovelli, and there were vivacious passages of arms between her and Kenneth, in the course of which they quoted Italian poets at each other, so leaving Bertram for a while outside the conversation, as he was ignorant of that language.
Armand de Vaux had a tête-à-tête with him.
“You fought in France, I have no doubt, sir?”
“The Somme, Flanders, Cambrai,” said Bertram.
“And still with both legs and both arms! That is wonderful. . . . You see I lost two limbs in the Great War. I do not regret them. What beautiful memories of comradeship and laughter, and immense valour! The best years of our lives!”
He spoke with absolute sincerity, and with a new light in his eyes, as though seeing with enthusiasm the vision of his fighting days.
“The comradeship was good,” said Bertram, “but the price was too great for that. Why not comradeship without war?”
“Pas possible!It needs war and the chance of death to bring out the great qualities of men. Laughter is best when it is in the midst of danger as a shield against fear.Mon Dieu!how I laughed in those days!”
He told some anecdotes of war. How the “popote” or mess had been destroyed by a German shell when they were ravenous with hunger after a long march to Ablain St. Nazaire; how they had killed a German sergeant-major and two men, luring them into No-Man’s Land by driving a lean pig through the barbed wire at dawn; how they had made a camouflage tree on the Arras-Lens road and sniped Germans like rabbits before they spotted it.
He was enormously amused at his own efforts to get wounded. No wound, no decoration, was the custom in the French army, as far as the fighting men were concerned. Of course, at the back of the front, any little cock sparrow at Headquarters or the Base, could cover his breast with ribbons. But in the front line the only chance of distinction was a wound. For a long time he’d had the vilest luck. All his friends were wounded—and decorated. He remained without a scratch, and without a medal. The Colonel regarded him suspiciously, said he bore “a charmed life,” as though he indulged in some private Juju to keep immune from shell-fire and snipers’ bullets, aerial torpedoes, trench mortars, hand grenades, and the whole “bag of tricks.” The situation became serious. He walked in a veritable hail of shrapnel and nothing hit him. He made a home of No-Man’s Land at night, leading patrols, but no, the Boche ignored him. One day, in Arras, a monstrous aerial torpedo made straight for him. “Ah, ha, my friend! At last you are going to do my trick!” But thesacrétorpedo was a dud, and fell at his very feet without exploding!Quelle mauvaise chance!What infernal bad luck! However, fortune’s wheel turned at last, and in the battle of the Somme, on the right of the British, he lost his arm and leg and gained theMédaille Militaire, and theCroix de Guerre.
Bertram joined in his gay laughter. This little French aristocrat was not posing, nor indulging in vainglorious boasting. He had loved the adventure of war, and found in it compensations for all its abominations and its tragedy of great death. A thousand years of ancestry had given him this instinct of war. Its spirit belonged to his blood. He was of the same race and quality as Amadis de Gaul, Roland, Bertrand du Guesclin, the Sieurs de Morny, the Knights of Froissart’s noble Chronicles. Old Christy would have voted for his death—theoretically—as a “carrier” of the war-microbe, as some people are typhoid carriers, infecting all who come in contact with them.
“Then you don’t agree withLe Feu, by Barbusse, as a true picture of the war from thepoilu’spoint of view?” asked Bertram.
Armand de Vaux “went off,” like a trench mortar. He denounced that book—the most terrible picture of war’s horror, which Bertram had read before writing his own—as the work of a traitor to France, as revolutionary propaganda of the vilest kind, an outrage upon the valour of the French soldier.
Bertram was silent, not caring to risk a dispute at this table, but pretty Mme. de Montauban expressed her own opinion.
“I had a nephew at Souchez and Notre Dame de Lorette—Pierre, as you remember? He tells me that Barbusse has given an exact picture of those trenches in the winter of ’15. The men were not relieved, month after month. They lived and ate and slept and died, in mud and filth. Some of them went mad, and others walked out into No-Man’s Land to end their misery by a German bullet. You remember only the amusing side of war, Vicomte! It is your temperament. In my hospital at Neuilly I saw too much tragedy to believe in your romance.”
“Bah!” said the Vicomte de Vaux. “Tragedy? Death? They are part of life, in peace as well as war. ‘A little laughter, a little love . . . and then good night!’ What more can we ask, except a good fight?Vive la Guerre!”
Mme. de Montauban laughed, and shook her head.
“That is the language of the eighteenth century. You speak that tongue, I know. You belong to that period. But for us moderns there is no truth in it. War has nearly destroyed our dear France. Another—and we die!”
“We shall have another,” said Armand de Vaux. “I shall weep to be out of it, with only one leg and one arm.”
“Why shall we have another?” asked Bertram, and a little chill crept down his spine, because of the calm and certain way in which the little Vicomte had made that statement.
But it was the Baron de Montauban who answered.
“Surely,” he said, leaning forward a little, to flick the ash of his cigarette into a bowl of flowers, “you are aware that your Lloyd George arranges another for us?”
“Your Lloyd George!” Bertram had heard that phrase from peasants, chambermaids, commercial travellers, shop-girls, the typist-secretary of a music publisher. He did not expect to hear it from a French aristocrat.
Kenneth made a protest, in his graceful way, deprecating unpleasant themes, except when he happened to lead the argument in his best manner as a one-time President of the Oxford Union.
“As office-boy at the British Embassy, I hesitate to listen to accusations against my Prime Minister.”
Armand de Vaux laughed heartily at this diplomatic statement, and said he had no more respect for Ministers of France than for Ministers of England. They were all politicians, playing to their respective galleries. As a soldier and a Royalist he despised them ascanaille.
De Montauban pursued his idea relentlessly, despite this interlude.
“When I say your Lloyd George is arranging another war for France, I mean all that body of opinion in Great Britain which calls itself Liberal.Mon Dieu!In their desire to be fair to the Germans—one might as well be fair to his Majesty the Devil!—and in their anxiety to trade again with their former enemy, they utterly ignore the French point of view.”
“What is that?” asked Bertram, anxious to discover whether the Baron de Montauban could give him more light than the peasants of the old battlefields.
“We have only one point of view, and one demand,” said de Montauban. “Security! . . . Security for France, after her sacrifice and her victory. Where is that assurance?”
“In the ‘tapage’ of our ‘soixante-quinzes!’ ” said Armand de Vaux.
De Montauban shook his head.
“Let us not deceive ourselves. We are not strong enough to fight alone against theBoche.”
“We have Poland as a gallant ally.”
“She will crumple like pasteboard between Germany and Russia.”
“Belgium, Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary,” said De Vaux.
“We must have England and the United States,” said De Montauban. “It was they who made us sheathe our sword and abandon our full and just right of vengeance against Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. We compromised in return for a pledge of security from our allies. That pledge was broken before the signature was dry on the Treaty. The Americans refused to ratify the pledge of their President. It was our first betrayal. Since then, by a sentimental illusion of world peace, all our rights have been betrayed. The Germans have been encouraged to evade their reparation payments, though without them France is bankrupt. When we threaten to march into the Ruhr to enforce those payments, the Liberals of England cry ‘Shame’ on us for provoking the poor dear Germans. What will be the end of it? It is almost in sight. The Entente will be broken between England and France. Germany will ally herself with Russia, with whom also the English Liberals are sentimentalising, and France will within the present generation be called upon to defend her soil again, without Great Britain by her side. It is inevitable. It is certain. It is the Great Betrayal. That is why we hate your Lloyd George, and all he stands for.”
“The English people are loyal to us,” said Mme. de Montauban. She turned to Bertram, and laid her little hand on his arm.
“We are sure that the real heart of England beats with us, after so much common sacrifice, so much agony together. Is it not so?”
“It is true,” said Bertram, “I thank you for having said so, Madame.”
He found himself speaking emotionally, with a kind of passion in his voice, which he tried to control.
“Since I’ve been in France, wandering about, I have heard nothing but the French point of view. I agree with it a good deal. I am a lover of France. But there’s another point of view.”
“Yes?” asked De Montauban, politely, but with a hint of sarcasm.
“Yes. It’s the English point of view. That of the common man, the ‘Tommy’ who fought in France.”
“Yes?” asked De Montauban again.
“I know it pretty well. You would like to hear?”
“Tell us!” said Mme. de Montauban.
“It’s just this. He doesn’t believe in kicking a man when he’s down, even a German. And he does believe that another war will happen if France presses Germany too hard. He doesn’t want another war, because he has two million comrades out of work as a result of the last, and the trade of England is ruined already. He wants peace, and he thinks the way to get it is by a union of European peoples, forgetting hatred, and no longer grouping into different Alliances, defensive or aggressive. He believes in a League of Nations.”
“Then he believes in monstrous illusion,” said De Montauban, very coldly, and Bertram thought of the French priest who banged his fist on the table with the cry of “Illusion!”
“Speaking as a soldier,” said Armand de Vaux, “I see no safety for France or England, except in the power of their artillery. And I would give the luxury of this very charming dinner to sit in the mud again and hear therafaleof thesoixante-quinzespounding theBocheto bits.”
“You’re a bloodthirsty ogre!” said his wife, caressing his only hand.
“You’re a despiser of my poor little banquet,” said Kenneth, ordering some more Veuve Clicquot, and very artfully inviting an interruption of waiters, to change the drift of conversation which abandoned politics for a discussion on the psychology of “jazz,” led by the beautiful Mme. de Montauban, in reference to the efforts of the orchestra.
Kenneth had to return to the Embassy at ten o’clock.
Mme. de Montauban and her husband were going to a reception by the Duchesse d’Uzès. It was this lady who rose first, with a smile at Mme. de Vaux who accepted the signal.
The other little parties in the restaurant paid tribute to her beauty with their eyes, as Bertram helped to put her cloak on her shoulders.
She gave him her hand with a charming friendship.
“I understand your English point of view,” she said. “It is a little dangerous, I think. The English heart is greater than the English head!”
Then she leaned forward to him, smiling, and spoke in a low voice.
“Do not leave your wife alone too much. She is too beautiful! That is more important than politics—if you love her beauty!”
In another moment she was gone, with a rustle of silk and a gracious smile.
Bertram was alarmed by those words of hers. Were they merely “French” in their general sentiment, or a particular warning? They disturbed him profoundly.
He walked with Kenneth through the Marché St. Honoré as far as the Embassy. Kenneth seemed talkative, discussing those friends of his, as though wishing to avoid other topics.
Bertram broke in across one of his subtleties.
“You’ve seen a good deal of Joyce lately?”
For just a second—no more than that—Kenneth hesitated in his reply.
“Yes. Longchamps—the Bois—the opera, and so on, in the usual way. It’s been beautiful weather lately, don’t you think?”
Bertram was silent. He was not interested in the weather.
“You know that Joyce and I have not seen things altogether eye to eye lately? She told you that?”
Kenneth again hesitated before his answer, as though weighing his words with diplomatic caution.
“I was aware of some misunderstanding. . . . But if you’ll allow me to say so, I never discuss relations between husband and wife. Don’t you think that’s a good rule?”
He spoke in his friendliest way, but his rebuke, as it seemed, made Bertram flush deeply.
“I have no intention of discussing my relations with Joyce. I merely desired to thank you for having been a good friend to her during my absence.”
Kenneth laughed, in a queer, strained way.
“My dear fellow! No need for thanks. . . . I try to play the game, according to the rules.”
He raised his hand with a gesture that was almost a salute, and disappeared into the British Embassy.
XLIII
Mr. Mahony, the uncle of Betty O’Brien, with whom Susan was staying, lived in an apartment on the upper floor of a house in the shabby end of the rue de la Pompe, out at Passy, by “Metro” from the Place de la Concorde.
“Quatrième à gauche”—fourth floor on the left—was the direction given to Bertram by the concierge, an enormous man who was wedged with his almost equally fat wife in a little room on the ground floor with a glass window through which he could observe those who came and went. He added to his information by the surly remark that Bertram would find the right door by the abominable noise that issued from it.
“What kind of noise?” asked Bertram.
“The noise of anarchists, monsieur. All talking treason to France and to civilisation. I may consider it my duty to inform the police.”
“A prudent idea,” said Bertram.
He smiled at the lowering face of the Colossus through the glass window with its dirty lace curtains, and then went up four flights of a staircase which smelt abominably of drains and onions. The plaster on the walls was crumbling off in scabby patches, and the doors to the right and left on each landing needed new paint, badly. The door on the fourth floor to the left had a broken bellrope tied up with a string, and when Bertram tugged it, there was a sound inside like the jangle of a Bulgarian cow-bell. Through a slit in the door came the murmur of several voices, but nothing that could fairly be described as “an abominable noise.”
The door was opened to him by Susan, a pale Susan, with no Irish roses in her cheeks, as he noticed when he kissed her.
“So you’ve come!”
She spoke quietly, with no enthusiasm, but then, at the kiss of the brother who once had been her close comrade, her coldness to him seemed to melt, and putting both her hands on his shoulders and her face against his coat, she began to cry a little, silently.
“What’s the matter, Sister Susie?” he whispered, while from the end of the passage came the sound of vivacious conversation.
“Isn’t everything in the world the matter?” she asked, and then dried her tears in a comical way with the back of her hand.
“Can’t you come out to some café and have a quiet talk? I don’t feel like ‘company’ to-night.”
She told him she wanted him to meet Betty’s uncle and her good friend, Mr. Mahony, and led him by the hand into a shabbily furnished room, dimly lit by oil lamps, where Bertram saw Betty O’Brien, who rose and gave him her hand, and an elderly man with white hair, a clean-shaven, rather priestly face, and very blue eyes, in which there was a look of humour and benevolence. He was sitting back in a low chair, with broken leather, through which the stuffing protruded, talking in a philosophical strain to three young men, obviously Irish, who were sitting about the room smoking cigarettes. Bertram heard him say something about the need of sacrifice for sacred principles.
“A man who won’t die for a principle sins against the light.”
“Uncle,” said Betty O’Brien, “be hanged to your principles for a minute. This is Susan’s brother.”
Mr. Mahony rose, and grasped Bertram’s hand.
“Susan’s brother! Then a friend of Ireland.”
“Half an Irishman, and a good friend,” said Bertram.
Yet before the evening was at an end, his friendship for Ireland was put to a heavy strain again. Mr. Mahony, with his white hair, and blue benevolent eyes, and the three young Irishmen to whom he addressed most of his monologues, made no disguise of their implacable hatred of England. It was not that they denounced England with any violence of language, but rather the deadly coldness, and the kind of loathing, with which they spoke the very name of England.
Worse than that was their contempt. It was plain that they had the fixed belief that the British Government in Ireland was “on the run.” The Irish Republican army was succeeding with its policy of secret warfare. In one week they had killed five British officers and twenty men. They had raided the barracks, seized great quantities of arms, and organised a number of successful ambushes. There were large districts in Ireland into which the Black and Tans dared not penetrate. The British troops were getting nerve-rattled and demoralised. It was obvious by the Government answers to questions in the House of Commons that that was very much the psychological state of “His Majesty’s Ministers.”
The three young Irishmen, smoking French cigarettes interminably, had all been officers of the I. R. A., and had escaped to France when things had become too “hot” for them. One of them, named O’Malley, a handsome, dark-eyed fellow rather like Dennis O’Brien, but with brighter, more humorous eyes, described his adventures as an escaped prisoner from Mountjoy, where he had been under sentence of death after capture in an ambush near Cork. The Black and Tans had searched the countryside for him, and all the time he was selling eggs in the market-place disguised as a “colleen,” and so seductive in appearance that an English officer had given him the glad eye.
Mr. Mahony turned to Bertram and whispered a few words about O’Malley, with a smile of admiration and pride.
“England will never defeat Ireland with that spirit against her! O’Malley is like all the boys—just laughs at death. It was he who executed the British officer who gave the order to fire on the people in the Celtic Football ground—the bloody villain!”
Bertram felt a little cold chill creep down his spine. These people here were the enemies of England. Some of them, like O’Malley, had killed British officers, not in open fighting, but by cold murder, under the name of “execution.” And they were proud of their exploits, with bright, humorous eyes, not conscience-stricken, as men with red crimes on their hands, but as men who had done well in the cause of some divine ideal. They used even the name of God with a sense of alliance.
“God is working for Ireland,” said Mr. Mahony. “The sacrifice of our boys is not ignored by Him who died on the Cross to save mankind.”
Bertram felt the blood surge to his brain at these words. He wanted to stand up and denounce them as blasphemy. To him it was inconceivable that a man like Mahony, a gentleman, a mild-eyed man, a good Catholic, could defend the Sicilian methods of the Irish Republicans in the very name of Christ—who spoke words of peace and pity, who said “Thou shalt not kill,” whose Gospel was Love. He half rose from his chair to make a violent and passionate protest, when the words were taken from him by a newcomer, brought into the room by Betty O’Brien.
“Uncle—here is Mr. Lajeunesse.”
The man who bore the name of “Youth” was an old gentleman of seventy or more, with a shock of grey hair and a pointed beard, and a delicate, life-worn face. His eyes, surrounded by a thousand wrinkles, twinkled with the light of irony, and it was with irony that he greeted Mr. Mahony.
“I hear you mention the name of Christ, my dear friend! Doubtless you are quoting the Master’s words to defend militarism and the right of assassination in special cases? During the Great War, when we murdered each other wholesale, Christianity was of great value to Army Commanders, on both sides of the line. I think the Germans were most successful in using Christ as a propagandist among the troops. But we did pretty well with the same idea. . . . Good evening, Miss Susy! My little Irish rose still blooms in Paris?”
The old man kissed the girl on both cheeks with the privilege of his years, but also with the gallantry of a Frenchman who pays homage to beauty. And Susan’s roses deepened.
The three young Irishmen had left their chairs when he entered. They bowed low over his hand and Mr. Mahony addressed him ascher maître, and did not resent his irony. It was Eugène Lajeunesse, and Bertram felt a thrill at being in the presence of a man whose books, so wise, so witty, so wicked, so full of tenderness to humanity, and yet so cruel in tearing down the faith of simple folk, had made him famous throughout the world. Alone in France during the War, he had maintained his faith as an international pacifist, and not all the outrages ofLes Boches, nor all the agony of France had made him swerve from the belief that the war was only one more proof of human stupidity.
He brought with him a young Frenchman, blind in one eye and partly paralysed, it seemed, on one side, so that he walked with difficulty, using a stick, but wonderfully vivacious and good-humoured.
Eugène Lajeunesse introduced him to the company.
“Aristide de Méricourt. You know his name and work? If there is any hope for our poor old Europe, which isin extremis mortuis, it lies in the success of this young man and his band of brothers. They are working for international peace and universal brotherhood. What audacity! What sublime hope in a world that is digging new entrenchments of hate!”
“We make a little progress,” said the young man with the blind eye. “From all parts of France youth which saw life in the trenches is joining our League against Militarism. The Old Men are becoming afraid of us.”
“As one of the Old Men, I am not afraid of you,” said Lajeunesse, smiling at his young friend. “I recognise your right to declare a spiritual warfare against all old imbeciles who are preparing for another massacre—the last before cilivisation dies—in the fields of Europe. Gladly would I die to-night to see youth gain its victory over old age, old ideas, old villainies, old hatreds.”
“You are not among the Old Men,cher maître,” said Aristide de Méricourt; “You are Lajeunesse—Youth itself.”
The old man laughed, and shook his head.
“I pose as the champion of youth. It is my vanity—to keep young in mind and soul. Alas, I am convicted of senility because of my cynical doubts of youth’s adventure. Civilisation is too sick to be saved, and Poincaré, and all the Poincarés and reactionaries of Europe, are determined on its doom. How many men and boys have you in your League against Militarism?”
“Three thousand,” said Aristide de Méricourt, with an air of pride. “Our membership is spreading in England, Germany, Italy, even in Austria. We are truly international.”
“Three thousand young men pledged to international peace! That is a beginning. It is excellent. But you have three hundred million souls to convert. The odds are heavy, dear child.”
“We shall win,” said the young man with the blind eye. “Democracy is solid against the spirit of war.”
Eugène Lajeunesse laughed quietly, as at a child who talks of killing dragons.
“Let us put it a little to the test. Here in this company of intellectuals are several young Irishmen. Are they for or against militarism—after the war to end war? I have heard something of a little bloodshed in Ireland—or is it only a rumour? They are Catholics and Christians. Beautiful is the simplicity of Irish faith! Have they abandoned the use of Force as a way of argument? Do they believe in Universal brotherhood, among nations and peoples? Or are they using the bomb and the revolver to break away from brotherhood with a nation to whom they are bound in blood, to entrench themselves more narrowly in national isolation? Tell me, little ones. I am an ignorant old man!”
They told him at some length, and with passionate argument. Mr. Mahoney said that the international ideal must be based first of all on national liberty, that universal brotherhood presupposed justice between one people and another.
It was Aristide de Méricourt, who interested Bertram most, for he was the immediate opposite in ideals and convictions of Armand de Vaux who loved the adventure of war and believed that it developed the noblest qualities of man. But there was something strange and sinister in the quiet way in which this cripple denounced the existing institutions of his own country and of western civilisation, the national heroes of France, all the old loyalties of tradition and faith.
Marshal Foch, he said, had “the soul of a grocer.” He counted men, battalions, divisions, as so many packets. The sacrifice of human life left him untouched, unperturbed. Poincaré was a stuffed puppet with a squeak. French politicians were corrupt and bought. There must be a clean sweep of superstition—the superstition of the Flag, of the Church, of Patriotism, of national egotism. The democracies of the world must unite against the powers of capitalism. France must link up with Russia for the overthrow of all the forces ofbourgeoisstupidity and tyranny. There must be a revolution in England and the United States, so that Anglo-Saxon democracy might join hands with Latin and Slav. It was the only hope of the world.
“The audacity of youth!” said Lajeunesse. “Once, too, I had those dreams! A thousand years ago!”
“As a Catholic Irishman I disagree with such revolutionary gospel,” said Mr. Mahony, but there was benevolent tolerance in his blue eyes for the heresy of the younger man.
Bertram pleaded with his sister for a little private talk.
“All this discussion is very interesting, no doubt, but no good to me. I want to know what you’re doing and going to do. I want to tell you Of my own troubles.”
“Joyce?” she asked, and he wondered how much she knew of that trouble, his greatest.
They went out to a café close by, and took a seat in a far corner away from a group of men drinking with painted women.
Susan shivered a little, and drew her cloak close about her though it was warm in the café, and oppressive with the smell of cheap wine, black coffee, and stale tobacco.
“You don’t look well,” said Bertram. “Is anything wrong with you?”
“The price of womanhood,” she said. “I’m going to have a baby. The child of a man hanged by the English because he loved Ireland. Funny, isn’t it?”
He put his hand on hers, and groaned a little.
“My poor kid! My dear little sister!”
He was stricken by this news of hers, by the awful memory it revived.
Susan spoke calmly, but with a coldness that was worse than tears or passion.
“I’ll call him Dennis, if it’s a boy. I’ll make him Irish in soul and faith, as his father was. And I’ll teach him to hate England as I hate it.”
Bertram tried to take her hand again, but she pulled it nervously away.
“What’s the good of teaching hate?” he asked. “It gets nowhere. It leads only to more tragedy, more blood, more death. I believe in peace, and love.”
“Pap for babes!” said Susan scornfully. “Life is war. Peace doesn’t exist. We’re all savages, and must obey the law of the savage. Strike first and quickest, before your enemy gets his chance. No pity, no forgiveness, no forgetfulness. That’s my creed.”
“It was not the Master’s creed,” said Bertram. He told his sister of the words spoken by their mother as she lay dying. “Work for Peace!”
“I’m pledged by the promise I made then,” he said. “I’m dedicated to work for Peace.”
Susan’s eyes filled with tears, but she shook her head and said it was all useless. How could there be peace when the world was stuffed with cruelty? Could there ever be peace between France and Germany? Never in a thousand or a million years. Or ever between Ireland and England, after what had happened, and was happening? Not as long as an Irish boy lived to remember the history of his race.
“I’m dedicated too,” she said. “By the blood of the man I married. In private or in public, by spoken word and written word, I’ve pledged myself to work against England, so that the British Empire will be dragged down from its place, and fall in ruin. I’m only one of England’s enemies, and a poor, weak creature, but I can put in a word here and a word there. It all helps, and England already has the whole world against her. France hates her worse than Germany.”
“It’s madness and wickedness,” said Bertram. “You’re hysterical, my dear, or I couldn’t forgive you for the words you speak.”
She flared up at him, and called him a crawling sentimentalist, who tried to make the best of both worlds and stand on both sides of the hedge at the same time.
“You’re tricked by soppy sentiment. Just as Joyce has tricked you. Are you still loyal to her, may I ask?”
“I want to be,” said Bertram.
She laughed, with a sound of mockery.
“It’s a one-sided loyalty, old boy. Joyce has betrayed you with Kenneth Murless. If she’s not his mistress, she’s a much slandered woman. Every one thinks so in Paris.”
Bertram went cold, and stared at Susan with a kind of horror in his eyes.
“Susan! In God’s name, what do you mean by that?”
She told him it was none of her business. But friends of hers in Paris who knew that Joyce was her sister-in-law, had taken it for granted that she had “run off” with Kenneth. They were always about together, in the Bois, at the opera, at Longchamps, in Henri’s restaurant night after night.
“What else can people think when a woman leaves her husband and comes to Paris with a man like Kenneth?”
“She came with Lady Ottery,” said Bertram, “and what your friends say is a damned lie. If they say so to me, I’ll beat them into pulp.”
Susan laughed again, in her mocking way. “That’s the primitive man. Not peace and love this time, when it touches you so closely! You’ll beat any man to pulp who slanders Joyce—or tells the truth, maybe. But you can’t forgive an Irishman who hates England, not for slandering his country, but for outraging her, trampling on her face, murdering her children! Nor a Frenchman who wants to beat Germany to pulp! Where’s your logic, Bertram?”
He sat silent, staring at a puddle of coffee on the marble-topped table. What Susan said was true enough. She had found the weak spot in his armour. His “dedication to peace” only held good as long as it was in the abstract, and impersonal. This accusation against Joyce, that word “mistress” coupled with Kenneth’s name, put the instinct of murder in his mind. If he believed the story he would go to Kenneth and shoot him like a dog. Fortunately it was absurd. He could afford to laugh at it. He laughed now, harshly.
“Extraordinary how some women, and most Irish, have the spirit of vendetta. Why do you hate Joyce so much that you want to kill her reputation?”
Susan rose, and left the café table.
“Let’s go before we make a public brawl. It’s true I hate Joyce. I remember a scene over a telephone one night when she threatened to betray my man. But I hate her now because she’s betraying you, in heart if not in body.”
Bertram took his sister back without a word, to the apartment house in the rue de la Pompe. There he left her with a gruff “Good night!” She had wounded him horribly with a poisoned shaft. Her words tortured him. He thought of her as a female Iago who had slandered another Desdemona. And he was Othello, refusing to believe, yet with foul suspicion gnawing at him, and making a madness in his brain.
Joyce and Kenneth! No, a million times no. And yet, deep down in his subconsciousness had been that very toad of evil thought. Ever since Joyce had written to him, telling him she saw a good deal of Kenneth in Paris, he had tried to kill this base and frightful thought which now Susan had stated as a well known belief. “Every one thinks so in Paris.”
At nine o’clock next morning he took the train to Amiens and, at the Hotel du Rhin, hired a motor-car and drove to the Château de Plumoison where Joyce was staying.
XLIV
He remembered this old château of Picardy. It lay to the right of the cottage where he had been billeted for a few weeks in 1917. He had hardly thought of it since, because that memory had been effaced by more exciting and deadly adventure. But now, as he passed up the dirty village where cocks and hens clustered across the roadway and peasant women stared at him from doorways where once British soldiers had lounged during Divisional rests between long spells in the line, he remembered the way past the pump, and then a sharp turn to the right by theestaminetof “La Véritable Coucou”—that comical name came back to him now with intimate remembrance—and so to the long avenue of poplars leading straight through the park to the old white house with its pointed roofs.
The Vicomte de Plumoison had given the run of the place to any British officers in the neighbourhood, and Yvonne, his daughter, had invited them to “five o’clock,” as she called her tea-parties. She was not very beautiful, though an elegant little lady, but it was paradise enough to sit with any lady in any drawing-room, after long terms of servitude in the lousy trenches, in exile from all beauty. . . .
He turned through the iron gates and walked slowly up the avenue. Somewhere in that white house was Joyce. His heart beat at the thought, with sickening kind of thuds. He was passionate to see her, to take her hand, to draw her close to him, and be assured of her love after all this foolishness of separation and estrangement. A word from her, a straight look out of her eyes, would be enough to kill that toad of evil still alive in the slime of suspicion, in those base and primitive instincts of the male beast which lurk as a heritage of cave-man ancestry in all human brains.
Janet Welford had spoken a true thing when she said, “Joyce is the Beatrice of yourDivina Commedia.” In the time of his greatest bitterness against her, when he felt most injured by her ill-temper with him, she had been his vision, and in his heart, inescapable. His loyalty had been strained, but was stronger than all his weakness, and now, as he went towards her, the thought of this girl who had given him her beauty so generously in time of war, so recklessly, perhaps, fevered him.
He quickened his pace, and instead of going straight up the avenue, took a winding path which led to the back of the château by the trout stream. Perhaps it was some mental “wave-length” which impelled him to do that instinctively, and without conscious purpose, because, as he made his way through a little glade, he saw Joyce a few yards away from him.
There was a stone seat there, which he remembered. It was underneath a grass bank with a little hollowed place in which stood a statue of “Notre Dame de Lourdes,”—painted blue and white, amidst tall growing ferns. He had once stood there talking to Yvonne de Plumoison with a group of officers. Joyce was alone. Her hat lay on the seat by her side. She had a book on her lap, but she wasn’t reading. She was weeping. At least there were tears in her eyes when, at the sound of his footsteps on the path, she looked quickly towards him, and then sprang up with a cry of surprise.
He called her name, and went forward hurriedly, with tremendous gladness in his eyes. She looked as he had thought of her so often. As she stood there, waiting for him, the sunlight, shining through young leaves, touched her hair, giving it a glory. She wore a green frock, cut low at the neck, and looked like the Rosalind in Arden Woods.
She let him take her hands and kiss her, but did not answer his passion with any warmth of greeting, so that almost in a moment he was chilled, and saw that she had become pale in his arms.
“Here’s a seat,” she said. “Let’s sit and talk.”
He sat beside her, holding her hand, and was struck by its coldness.
“I’ve been longing for you,” he told her. “Dreaming of you o’ nights.”
She said something about his letters. They didn’t suggest any passionate longing, she thought. He hadn’t bothered to join her in Paris when she asked him.
He asked her to “wash all that out.” He’d been a blithering idiot. It had all been a question of jangled nerves—the wrong perspective—egotism. He’d been thinking things out during his loneliness. He’d killed his miserable ego. All he wanted now was to make her happy and to serve her. They’d made a mistake in taking things too seriously, arguing about trivialities as though they mattered. They’d allowed “politics” to strain their relations! It was inconceivable, looking back on it. What kids they’d been! He had grown up at last. No more of that sort of nonsense. Tolerance was his watch-word. He’d come to understand that a plain getting on with life mattered more than theories and minor differences in points of view. Love was the only thing worth while.
“Do you mean that?” asked Joyce. “Do you think, honestly, that love over-rides everything?”
“Every damn thing,” said Bertram.
She gave him a queer glancing smile.
“It’s a dangerous philosophy. Sometimes it leads to peculiar complications!”
“How do you mean?” asked Bertram. “To me it simplifies the whole riddle. The love of a man for his mate, through thick and thin, fine weather and foul, ‘in sickness and in health.’—D’you remember the old words in St. Mary Abbot’s?”
“Yes. I remember. I was a baby then. We were both babes, as ignorant of life as those tits.”
She pointed to two little birds fluttering about the branch of a tree where they sat.
“But with the same share in the eternal scheme of things,” said Bertram. “You and I went to St. Mary Abbot’s under the same divine impulse as those two tits set up housekeeping in the tree-top.”
“Yes,” said Joyce, “I suppose it’s over-civilisation that has spoilt the game.”
“Is the game spoilt?” asked Bertram.
“It’s hard to play according to the rules, sometimes. And if we keep to the rules the fun goes out of the game. It’s just duty. Mostly disagreeable, and sometimes intolerable.”
Bertram laughed so that the two tits were frightened and flew away from their branch. He took Joyce’s hand and put it to his lips.
“We seem to be talking in parables and conundrums. Joyce, let’s be human. Are you glad I’ve come back to you? Are we going to wipe the slate clean and start fresh and fair down the good old highway of married life? Say a word of love to me! Put your arms around my neck, and whisper what I want to hear.”
Joyce’s face flamed with colour for a moment, and then paled again.
“I can’t!” she said. “Something’s happened to put things all wrong—worse than before—between you and me.”
He stared at her, and knew that Fate, or Luck, or God, was going to hit him another blow between the eyes. What did she mean? That “Something’s happened—“?
“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “what do you mean?”
“It’s about Kenneth,” she answered in a low voice.
That name, after what Susan had said, after a night of dark agony, after a fight with frightful suspicion in which old base jealousies had surged up from the darkness of his mind, was like the jab of a bayonet in his brain.
“What the hell has he got to do with it?” he asked, very quietly.
Joyce touched his hand, as though asking for patience and understanding.
“You’ll get angry, I know. But I can’t help it. These things just happen. It’s as though we hadn’t any control over them, or over ourselves. I’ve always thought of Kenneth as nothing more than a good friend—a nice boy. We’ve known each other since we were kids. He understands me better than any one in the world. We speak in shorthand, as it were—the same code of thought and all that. He didn’t seem to mind when I married you. He thought it was good fun. It made no difference to our friendship. He’s perfectly straight and clean. He’d no idea at all, until a few days ago, that he loved me—in another kind of way. We found out quite suddenly, by accident. We were laughing—playing the fool, as usual. We were in a boat together on the lake in the Bois—you know—by the Île des Châlets. Suddenly he looked up at me with a kind of surprise in his eyes. And something seemed to fire a spark between us. I leant over him and kissed him, and he said, ‘What’s up with us?’—in a frightened way. We found out then that our old friendship had changed. For the first time I knew the meaning of love.—Never like yours and mine, Bertram. Kenneth and I were made for each other from the time we were babies together. It’s just that. Unfortunately we’ve only just found out. . . . I’m frightfully sorry, Bertram. But there it is, and nothing can alter it now.”
She had spoken all this quietly, in a matter-of-fact way, but now she began to cry again, with her hands up to her face.
Bertram had sat very still, with his head bent during her monologue. A greyness crept into his face, giving him a dead look. He was dead for a little while. Joyce had killed the spirit in him by those words of hers. He had nothing to say to himself. Not even anger stirred in him, nor self-pity. All that came into his mind was a kind of numbness, and one name reiterated. Kenneth! Kenneth! Kenneth Murless!
Joyce took her hands down from her face, and wiped her tears away with a handkerchief. Then she spoke again in the same quiet tone.
“Kenneth and I want to play the game. He’s fearfully sorry about you. He likes you immensely and thinks I’ve given you a rough deal. That’s true. I’ve been beastly to you, but I didn’t know all the time that it was Kenneth I wanted. You’ve been jolly good to me, Bertram. I see that now. But it’s impossible to live together after what I’ve told you. What are we going to do about it? For the moment I’ve cut and run. It was Kenneth who asked me to do that. ‘You’d better cut and run,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to play the game.’ So here I am waiting until you think things out. I haven’t told Mother yet.”
Bertram was still silent, still rather dead in his heart and brain. But one phrase used by Joyce startled him a little. “I’ve cut and run,” she said. Where had he heard that before? It was something that had happened to himself. Some time or other, from some one or other, he too had “cut and run.” It was old Christy, who had advised it. “If you’re tempted by disloyalty,” he said, “you’d better cut and run.” Queer, that Joyce should have been given the same advice. Rather funny! Damnably funny!
He laughed at the comedy of it. He stood up from the stone seat and laughed loudly and harshly, frightening the birds again, a jay in the boughs near by, which flew out with a kind of echo of his laugh and a quick beat of wings.
“Good God in Heaven!” he said. “So you haven’t told your Mother yet? I wonder what the Countess of Ottery will think of it. Her sense of propriety will be a little shocked. She too will want to play the game according to the rules. I don’t know this kind of game. Perhaps it’s up to me. I guess the rules will oblige me to give you an excuse for divorce. I rather fancy that’s the way it’s done in your set. I commit a technical sin. I indulge in a perfectly painless act of cruelty. You institute proceedings for restitution of conjugal rights. Isn’t that one of the rules? I refuse on a post-card. Then you divorce me. The newspapers print your photograph—the beautiful Lady Joyce Pollard obtains her decree. I seem to remember that sort of thing. . . . Joyce! Oh, my dear wife! Joyce, my beloved!”
It was quite suddenly, at the end of his monstrous irony, that he broke down and wept, and pleaded with her weakly, in a stricken way.
Several times Joyce said, “I’m sorry, Bertram! I’m frightfully sorry!”
She too was weeping now, and her slim body shook with sobs. Under the trees there in the little glade of a French château, this man and wife, so English, so young, so good to see, if love had been between them, made a pitiful picture.
“You’ve been very good to me, my dear,” said Joyce again. “I’m sorry—for everything.”
He went towards her, and took her roughly and drew her close to him.
“Joyce, this is frightful. It can’t happen. It’s just illusion. You’re my wife and I’m your lover. Let’s go away together, and forget all else. That baseness with Kenneth. It was just a moment of madness. Weakness. I understand! I’ve been tempted like that!”
She drew herself out of his arms.
“It’s not like that. It’s Kenneth I belong to; and he to me. One can’t go against revelation.”
He told her that she was murdering him. He’d suffered hell already because of their separation. He’d been tempted by sheer weakness and loneliness. Did she intend to send him straight to the devil?
She said something about his going to “a nice woman.” She couldn’t complain of that. He would find some one more patient with him, more in tune with his ideas.
It was that which angered him and broke down any kind of restraint to which he had clung.
“You’re hellishly immoral,” he told her. “God knows how far you’ve gone a header with that swine Murless. If there’s truth in what people say of you in Paris, I’ll wring your neck and blow his brains out.”
She stiffened at that threat.
“I’ve told you we intend to play the game as far as possible. Kenneth has played up like a gentleman. I hope you won’t behave like a savage.”
“Iama savage,” he said, “when it comes to this sort of thing. It is the primitive right of man to make sure of his mate. D’you think I’m going to connive at your sin? To play the “mari complaisant?” Not in your life!”
“Don’t mediævalise,” said Joyce. “We’re in the Twentieth Century.”
“Human nature doesn’t change,” he answered. “You’re my wife, and I’ll hold you, if I have to fight for you.”
“You can’t hold me,” she said. “I’ve escaped. You can hold my dead body, but not my living heart. Kenneth has that. From the beginning of things, as I see now, he and I were meant for each other. You were an accident that intervened. It was my mistake, and yours. And I’ve paid for it already, pretty badly.”
An accident that intervened! That was how she spoke of his love. That was his position between Joyce Pollard and Kenneth Murless! The phrase slashed his soul, and stung him into a mad rage. The man who had come into this glade with love in his heart for this girl with gold hair and slim white body, strode towards her now with clenched fists and a fury in his eyes. He meant to do her bodily harm, and she saw that in his eyes. But she stood very straight and still, and did not flinch as he came close to her, but smiled with a strange disdain.
“As you like,” she said.
It was a kind of invitation to hit her, even to kill her, if he thought well of that, as for a moment he did. But, as once before when he had raised his hand against her, he was disarmed by her prettiness, and the fury passed from him.
Down the avenue came the sound of voices, speaking French, and through the trees Bertram saw Yvonne de Plumoison and her father, as he had seen them walking arm-in-arm in time of war. On the other side of the old man was Lady Ottery with her hand on the arm of Yvonne’s brother.
Bertram took hold of Joyce, and kissed her twice on the lips, with passionate brutality, and then released her, flinging her away from him so that she fell on the grass. He hadn’t meant, then, to be as rough as that. He made his way through the glade, and turned a moment to look back. Joyce was standing again with her face towards him. He raised his hand with a tragic gesture of farewell, to which she made no answer. Then he walked back to the great iron gates through which he passed, and so towards the village, and so towards life without the hope of Joyce, in loneliness and desolation of soul, worse than he had known.