XXVI
It was impossible to get a private word with Joyce before dinner. Her “palaver” with Alban was still in progress when Bertram returned, as he found when he went searching for her in the morning-room, her bedroom, at the end of the gallery, and at last in Alban’s little room on the other side of the great stairway.
Alban called “Come!” sharply in answer to his tap at the door, and did not look friendly when Bertram went in, smiled at Joyce, and said, “Any chair for a mere husband?”
Joyce’s face was flushed. She and Alban were seated at the table, which was strewn with papers. The brother and sister were wonderfully alike, Bertram thought, as they sat together, side by side. Joyce had the same profile as Alban, though softened and more delicate, the same line of forehead and nose, finely cut, like a Greek cameo. She took no notice of Bertram’s entry, but went on talking to her brother.
“Then it comes to this: You insist on bleeding father to the extent of four thousand a year, and Holme Ottery must go to some horrible Profiteer!”
“That’s the position, apart from the word ‘bleeding,’ ” answered Alban irritably. “You can see for yourself. The Governor is paying taxes out of capital, borrowing for upkeep, wages, and interest on mortgages, and breaking into capital again for my little bit, and yours. When he pegs out, death duties will swallow most of what’s left.”
“It’s disgraceful!” said Joyce. “It’s a damned disgrace!”
She rose from the table, flinging back the papers, and went over to the window, staring out into the dusk of the park.
Alban laughed, and drummed on the table with his finger-nails.
“It all comes of having a democratic government, pandering to the working-classes, bribing them with doles, and ruining trade and capital by excessive taxes.”
“Somebody must pay for the war,” said Bertram.
Alban became aware of his presence again, and answered him gloomily.
“Not in that way. The Germans ought to pay.”
It was Bertram’s turn to laugh.
“Even Germany can’t pay for the ruin of the whole world, after her own losses.”
Joyce swung round from the window seat.
“For Heaven’s sake, Bertram! Don’t go pro-German, after being pro-Irish, pro-Bolshevik, and anti-everything that’s English and patriotic!”
“Quite so!” said Alban, associating himself with his sister’s protest in a somewhat pompous manner.
Bertram felt a sudden warmth in his blood creeping up the back of his neck. He was not annoyed with Joyce, because he could understand her sense of tragedy about the old house. He was not angry with her, though her words hurt him hideously, after his thoughts about her beauty and the chance of re-capturing her love. But he had no use for that “Quite so!” of his brother-in-law.
“I fancy I did my job pretty well in the war,” he said quietly. “If England ever needs me again . . .”
He checked himself. What was the good of arguing? Joyce and Alban were both on edge because of this family crisis. Anyhow, he would be an idiot to proclaim his love for England. It might be taken for granted after his service.
“Oh, bother all that!” cried Joyce.
She dismissed the need of argument on that score by another attack on her brother.
“I’m not going to let this business end in mere talk, Alban! If there’s any chance of saving Holme Ottery—”
Alban’s temper mastered him for a moment, and he interrupted his sister harshly.
“Haven’t I told you there’s no earthly chance? What’s the good of playing about with unrealities? Facts are facts. Figures are figures.”
“Yes, and your four thousand belong to the facts and the figures,” answered Joyce, just as angrily. “If you gave up gambling and racing, you could put some back into the family pot.”
Alban stared at his sister with that hard look which sometimes came into his eyes, as Bertram knew. But he answered icily, after a moment’s hesitation:
“Don’t let’s have an altercation, or get down to personalities. Four thousand is not too much for my position. I’m extremely economical. I might remind you that father settled two thousand a year on yourself. What about that?”
Joyce spoke in a low voice.
“I’d cut every penny of it to save Holme Ottery.”
Alban leaned back in his chair, regarding his finger-nails, and laughed more amiably.
“Heroic, and all that, but utterly useless, little sister. Besides, what about your own home? Bertram isn’t making a fortune just now.”
“He’ll have to get a job,” said Joyce.
So the attack had come round to Bertram now. He was to be made responsible, perhaps, for the necessity of selling Holme Ottery! Perhaps, after further conversation, he might be accused of instigating the Strike, and would be saddled with the sins of the Government!
“I don’t think I’ll get dragged into this family discussion,” he said, with a desperate effort to be patient and calm. “Anyhow, it’s time to dress for dinner. Coming, Joyce?”
“Presently,” said Joyce. He didn’t wait for her, and went up to his own room on the north side of the gallery, and having shut the door with a bang, sat down on the bed with his knees hunched up and his face in his hands.
“He’ll have to get a job’ ” Joyce had said.
Well, he’d found his job, and written his first book, now in the publisher’s hands, and his first article, already published, inThe New World. Not much, but a good beginning. He objected to Joyce’s way of speaking that sentence—“He’ll have to get a job!” She had spoken it harshly. Did she imagine that he hadn’t tried to get a job, that he had been a slacker, an I-won’t-work? He had gone the round of all his friends, answered advertisements—even gone to a Labour Exchange!—in the hope of finding some decent kind of work. He had agonised because of his idleness, until he had sat down to write a book and found himself writing it.
Not one of her precious Family had offered to help him. Ottery had just stared vaguely at him when he had asked for his influence. Alban wouldn’t walk a yard to get him anything. Not all the crowd in Joyce’s set had put anything in his way, though some of them pulled the social wires. He must have a straight talk with Joyce before the day was out. He must put himself right with her and bring her back to him. Impossible that things should go on in this way—this frightful, soul-destroying way.
So he brooded, and was late for dinner, and received the rebuke of Lady Ottery’s frigid glance.
XXVII
There were several people from the neighbourhood to dinner, and Bertram was amused to find himself next to Miss Heathcote, the Vicar’s daughter, whom he had met in Izzard’s oddity shop. They talked a little about that, and the girl seemed nervous of owning friendship at this table with a man who kept a shop.
“Lady Ottery doesn’t approve of such new-fashioned ways,” she whispered, glancing with amusement, and a little fear, at the handsome lady at the head of the table.
Bertram was less amused to see General Bellasis sitting next to Lady Ottery, and Kenneth Murless on the other side of Joyce. They had both come down for Easter as old friends of the Bellairs family. The conversation at their end of the table seemed to be about the Strike. General Bellasis, handsome and florid as ever, was doing most of the talking. Bertram heard only bits of sentences, disconnected threads of his discourse.
“Serious challenge to Government authority. . . . War against Law and Order. . . . We must knock the stuffing out of Labour! . . . Rank Bolshevism!”
The Heathcote girl on his left was prattling about a play she had seen in London—one of Galsworthy’s. Jolly good! Very daring, though. Her father was shocked when she told him the plot. Parents were so easily shocked these days. They didn’t realise the difference war had made to the outlook of women. Everything was discussed. The realities of life and death. Marriage.
Bertram endeavoured to play up to her remarks, but his glance kept wandering back to Joyce.
She wore an evening frock of white silk, as simple as a child’s, with a necklace of pearls, and in this old dining-room, with its panelled walls and timbered roof and high-backed chairs, looked in her rightful place. She belonged to the house. The house belonged to her, not in timber and stone, but in spiritual heritage. She was Joyce Bellairs of Holme Ottery. The son of an Irish lawyer had no right to her. She belonged to a different stock. She’d been bred by centuries of “selection.” Bertram was but a clodhopper to this child of Caste. So he thought, gloomily.
Kenneth Murless was more of her kind. He too belonged to a Family—the Murlesses of Warwick, with a genealogical tree intertwined with branches of the Bellairs, Charringtons, D’Abernons, Courthopes, Grevilles—all the proud old stock. He kept Joyce amused at this dinner table, as he always amused her, with absurd fantasies, word-play, anecdotes, satirical verse, social caricatures, all charmingly told, lightly, with ease, in a way unaffectedly, though he had conceit.
Bertram observed him closely. Never by a single word had Murless been uncivil, in the slightest degree discourteous, in his relations with Bertram, though he must have been aware of jealousy. Once or twice he went out of his way at this dinner to smile at Bertram, though he was too far down the long table to bring him into his conversation. Once he raised his wine glass in friendly salute. Bertram answered it, with a sudden sense of compunction for his habitual sulkiness with Kenneth Murless. He was a gentleman, and more genial than Alban Bellairs.
Lady Ottery rose from her high-backed chair, with her usual dignity. Dinner, even at home, was to her something of a ritual.
“Don’t talk too long, Ottery,” she said to her husband. “Some of us would like a game of bridge.”
Lord Ottery hated to be hurried over dinner, and said so. Besides, Bellasis was talking about his plans.
“I want to hear them,” said Joyce. “I’ll join you later, Mother.”
She lit a cigarette, and sat on the arm of one of the oak chairs, and took a sip out of Kenneth’s wine glass.
General Bellasis shifted his chair round, so that he faced the little group left at table—Lord Ottery, Alban, Kenneth, Bertram, and Joyce. He had told them most of what the Government had in mind. There was no doubt the Strike was a threat to the whole authority of Parliament, to the social order of England. The men’s leaders were fairly sound, he thought, moderate in their ideas, on the whole. But behind them was a real revolutionary agitation. Underneath, undoubtedly, a lot of dirty work was going on by paid agents with foreign gold. Bolshevists, pure and simple.
“Say rather, impure and artful!” said Kenneth Murless.
General Bellasis laughed, and waved his cigar at the interruption.
His point was that the time had come when Labour had given them the chance for a straight fight. They had challenged “Us.”
“Meaning the Government?” asked Alban.
“Meaning the Decent Crowd,” said the General. “Anybody with a stake in the country, including the unfortunate Middle Classes. All of us. Well, we accept the challenge. We’re ready to knock hell out of them.”
Lord Ottery expressed his view. He did not believe in arranging a clash. He always avoided clashes, if possible. The history of England, he thought, was in the main the successful avoidance of the real issues. That was our genius.
“I agree,” said Bellasis, in a tone which showed clearly his disagreement. “But this clash has got to come. It’s inevitable. We must get the working classes back to their kennels. Back to cheap labour. Back to discipline. Otherwise we’re done.”
“What’s your plan?” asked Alban.
“Yes, that’s the point,” said Ottery. “Has the Government thought out a plan? I doubt it. They never think out any plan.”
“This is all taped out,” said General Bellasis. “The War Office has been working it out.”
Lord Ottery mumbled something to the effect that this didn’t inspire him with confidence.
General Bellasis laughed again, rather irritably.
“Oh, of course the War Office gets a lot of kicks. But some of us aren’t such fools as we look.”
“Nobody would accuse you oflookinga fool, Bellasis,” remarked Ottery in a kindly way, and he stared vaguely at Kenneth Murless because that young man laughed loudly at the remark, and even Joyce gave a little squeal of protest.
It seemed, after other conversational interruptions, that the War Office plan, in the event of a General Strike was to recruit a Defence Corps, divided into various districts of England. Ex-officers and men would be invited to join for a three months’ service. They would take over the transport system, work the railways, organise lorry columns, ensure the vital supplies of material life, meat, milk, bread, and so on, and defeat the purpose of the strikers, which was to strangle national industry and activity. If there were any attempts at violence, intimidation, picketing, the Defence Corps would be ordered to do their duty, relentlessly.
“Fire on the mob?” asked Lord Ottery.
“Fire on any ruffian, or body of ruffians, endeavouring to hold up national life.”
“Naturally,” said Alban.
“I hope there’ll be a lot of shooting,” said Joyce, heatedly. “A good opportunity to get rid of our Bolshevists.”
Bertram stiffened uneasily in his chair, and thought of making a protest, but decided to keep his thoughts to himself. He hated Joyce to speak like that. He was thinking of Huggett, and his “Comrades of the Great War” in the slums of London and other great cities, so many of them out-of-work, despairing, rather bitter, but not Bolshevists. This new Defence Corps might not be quick at distinguishing between honest men and ruffians. Some chance shot, any hooligan fool, might lead to bloodshed of a terrible kind. This plan was to divide the nation into two classes. It might come perilously near to civil war. He agreed with old Ottery. Better avoid the clash. Better not to ask for it. He wished Joyce had not spoken those words.
General Bellasis had swung further round in his chair, and now faced Bertram with a friendly smile.
“Joyce tells me you want a job, Pollard? If that’s so, I can put something in your way. How would it suit you to help me run this show, as Deputy Director for the South Coast?”
Bertram felt a sudden chill down his spine. He was conscious that all eyes were turned upon him, Joyce’s, Alban’s, Kenneth’s, Lord Ottery’s. He was aware that they expected him to look “pleased,” eager to accept this offer.
“Bertram—how splendid!” said Joyce. “A chance at last!”
“What exactly does the ‘show’ mean?” asked Bertram.
He endeavoured to show polite interest, but his voice was hostile, in spite of his effort.
General Bellasis explained that it would mean a recruiting campaign, then a certain amount of drill, to “lick the men into shape”—and then the business of defensive patrols.
“Military police work?”
General Bellasis said “Exactly!” and added his opinion that it was a splendid opportunity for Bertram. It would bring him under the eye of the Government—very useful—make him a public character of some importance, and lead undoubtedly to a good place later on in some Government department. As Director of Home Defence, he could appoint any man he liked for the post, and he had the greatest pleasure in offering it to Bertram.
The offer was handsomely made, in the General’s best style of good fellow and gallant soldier. It was received with a chorus of congratulations from Joyce, Alban, and Kenneth, with an expression of approval from Lord Ottery.
“It’ll suit Bertram down to the ground,” said Joyce. “He knows how to handle men, I will say that for him!”
She was a little excited, and slipped off the arm of her oak chair, standing with her hands clasping its high back, and looking at Bertram.
“Good for you, Bertram!” said Kenneth Murless. “I’m glad for Joyce’s sake as well as yours. I can think of no better stepping stone to a sure place.”
Alban concurred.
“An admirable post. Service to the country. Good pay, not bad fun.”
Lord Ottery agreed. He thought it “Very handsome of the General.”
Joyce was watching her husband. She could read his face better than the others. She saw how first he flushed and then paled a little, while a tuck gathered his forehead into a frown. He was thinking hard, and not certain of his answer.
“Exceedingly kind of you, General,” he said, slowly. “Many thanks. But somehow, I don’t like the job.”
There was silence for a moment or two in the big dining room where many generations of Bellairs had sat at table, discussing events of history, more unfortunate than this, quarrelling, laughing, feasting, drinking.
“You don’t like the job?”
General Bellasis smiled, not good-humouredly.
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Alban, icily.
“Tell us!” said Kenneth Murless, raising his eyebrows in a quizzical way.
Joyce spoke more emotionally.
“Bertram! Pull yourself together. If you don’t accept this—”
The last words seemed to hold a threat.
Bertram thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner jacket, and leaned forward in his chair, staring at the carpet.
“It’s like this—” he said, groping for the right words; “I don’t like to see people of our class—your class, if you like!—organising their forces to beat down poor devils who want to keep up a decent standard of life, after a war they helped to win. I’ve looked into the question of this Strike. It’s really a Lock-out by the masters—but, anyhow, the men are being offered wages which aren’t quite good enough, they think. Not a fair deal for men who helped to save England. They may be wrong, of course, but that’s how it seems to them. This Defence Force—it sounds all right. I’m ready to serve on the side of law and order. But it looks like a Snob Force for giving Hell to working-men who want a living wage. Aristocracy versus Democracy. Middle Classes against the Mob. Yes! If necessary, I quite agree. But I foughtwiththe Mob. I saw it going over the top on mornings of battle. I walked through its dead bodies afterwards. I learnt to know its spirit, and liked it, on the whole. I’d hate to shoot down fellows who used to salute me in the trenches, and whom I saluted as the salt of England. Of course order must be kept. I understand that. No body of men must be allowed to blackmail a nation, and there may be a bit of that in the minds of the Labour leaders. But there seems to be an idea—General Bellasis hinted at something of the sort—that a little blood-letting wouldn’t be a bad thing. Some idea of forcing the clash, so as to teach Labour a lesson, with machine-guns, and so on. I know something about machine-guns. I served ’em in the Great War. I’m not inclined to turn them against my own men—unless Hell breaks loose. . . . And I don’t think Hell is going to happen. It’s a newspaper scare, and nothing else. It’s not going to happen, unless it’s made to happen. I’ll see myself damned before I help to make it. . . . Do you see my point, General?”
They had let him speak out, without a single interruption, in dead silence. He had been aware of their faces about him. Joyce had become quite white. She was still standing with her hands on the back of the tall chair, and her eyes were fixed on Bertram with a look of amazement, at first, and then anger. Once or twice she smiled, in a queer way, as though some of his words seemed to her too ridiculous. Alban sat with his head bent, glowering. Kenneth Murless was watching him, with a look of extreme interest, as though at some new phenomenon of human nature. Lord Ottery sat back in his chair with closed eyes, fingering his red beard. The General had become restless, crossed and recrossed his legs, shifted a wine glass, flushed angrily, and then met Bertram’s eyes with a hard, hostile look.
“I regret my offer has been refused with such a distasteful—I may say, disgraceful—expression of opinion, sir.”
That was his answer to Bertram’s argument, and he spoke it harshly, in a court-martial manner.
Joyce moved away from her chair, and stood by the great fireplace. Bertram knew by a glint in her eyes that she was deeply emotional at that moment, but she spoke to the General quietly, with a smile.
“It’s not refused. Bertram permits himself a certain amount of hot air. Why not? But he accepts.”
“Is that so?” asked the General, looking first at Joyce and then at Bertram, with perplexity.
“That’s so, isn’t it, Bertram?”
Bertram’s eyes met Joyce’s. He saw in them a kind of entreaty, and behind that a kind of command.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “I hate the idea of it.”
Joyce moved away from the fireplace. She still spoke quietly, but there was a new thrill in her voice.
“I apologise for my husband, General! But if Bertram doesn’t accept, I shan’t think much of his loyalty to me—or to England. Meanwhile, I’d better join Mother, who’s probably fuming at my absence.”
She left the room with her head held high, and a little smile about her lips, but Bertram, who knew the play of light and shadow in her face, saw that she was passionately distressed with him.
There was silence for a moment after her going, until it was broken by Alban Bellairs.
“I think you’re a damned fool, Bertram. Have you gone Bolshie or something?”
“I’ve explained my views,” said Bertram, coldly; “I don’t expect you to understand them.”
Kenneth Murless thought a little tact might help, and spoke in his agreeable voice.
“I see his point of view. It’s extremely interesting as a study in sentiment. I don’t agree, of course, being a hopeless Reactionary, thank goodness, undisturbed by any liberal or revolutionary thought.”
Lord Ottery was about to utter a judicial opinion, but decided that it was hardly worth while after dinner,—and dozed a little with his red beard on his shirt front.
General Bellasis cut short all further discussion, in his hard, matter-of-fact way when dealing with men. He had another manner in the presence of women he liked.
“For your wife’s sake, Pollard, I make the offer again, for ‘yes,’ or ‘no,’ without argument. Which is it?”
Bertram did not answer for a second or so, but in that time he reviewed his life with Joyce, and saw with tragic certainty that this was the crisis. Acceptance meant surrender of his ideals, such as they were, and definite allegiance to opinions and acts which would put him for ever on the side opposed to liberal thought.
He was to decide between Joyce’s “crowd” and the labouring classes of England, or at least between the philosophy of men like Bellasis, summed up in the phrase, “Give ’em Hell!” and that of Christy who believed in human brotherhood. This job, offered by Bellasis, would kill the friendship of men like Christy, Lawless, Bernard Hall. They would put him with the Junker class, and turn their backs on him.
Not that that would matter, if he did the right thing. But this was the wrong thing. It would be a surrender to stupidity. It would be the sale of his intelligence for the sake of position, and peace with Joyce—a sin against the Light. Peace with Joyce? Joyce’s love and favour? It would be worth while to surrender a good deal for that—everything in the world, but a man’s honour to himself.
These people, Bellasis, and Alban, and Kenneth Murless, and all their kind, extremists in reaction, were asking him to betray his sympathy with the men who had been his comrades in the lousy trenches. To go right over to the Bellasis side—one day to give an order to shoot, perhaps—would be to break faith with Bill Huggett and all poor devils like him.
He saw Huggett now as a Type, the Cockney soldier back to civil life, back to his slums, trying to keep his “kids,” uncertain of work from one week to another, begging “bobs” from passers-by when there was no work. It was to bring such men to heel that the Bellasis band were organising their forces, recruiting University boys, and unemployed officers—the way to conflict! What had old Christy said? “Loyalty to lies is disloyalty to truth.”
So in that second or two, these thoughts rushed into Bertram’s head, and he made his decision.
“No, General. Thanks very much.”
General Bellasis rose from his chair, and flung the end of his cigar into the fire.
“Let’s join the ladies,” he said sternly, as though dismissing a battalion on parade.
Lord Ottery awakened from his dose.
“Yes, a game of bridge, eh?”
Kenneth Murless opened the door, and waited until the General and Ottery had left the room, and then Alban looking black-tempered. For a moment Kenneth lingered, glancing at Bertram, who was standing by the chimney-piece, staring into the redness of the log-fire.
“Speaking as an Egoist,” he remarked in a genial way, “I’m distressed by your violation of self-interest, Bertram, but uplifted by your idealistic faith.”
“Much obliged for your favourable opinion!” said Bertram, kicking a burning log.
Murless smiled, and followed the others to the drawing-room.
Alone in the great dining-room of Holme Ottery—up for sale—Bertram used his old catch-word.
“It’s all very difficult!”
His face was lit by the warm glow of the fire as he stirred the embers with his boot, and there was a look of pain in his eyes when he raised his head and glanced at the portrait of Joyce Bellairs whom Steele had loved. He spoke her name, but it was of his wife he was thinking.
“My poor Joyce!” he said.
XXVIII
When Bertram went to the drawing-room, he found a foursome at bridge in progress—Lord and Lady Ottery, Joyce, General Bellasis. Kenneth was making himself agreeable to Miss Heathcote and presently suggested a game of “pills,” so that they left the room together.
Nothing doing for Bertram, who felt that he was frozen out. Joyce deliberately avoided his glance, or, at least, never looked his way, though he tried to entice her eyes by wandering around, shifting a little porcelain figure on the mantelpiece, and rattling a few coppers in one of his pockets.
He wanted her to look at him. He had a foolish idea that he might send her a message with his eyes, asking for her understanding, and for her comradeship. But she seemed to be absorbed in her game, and was gay in altercation with her partner, General Bellasis. Bertram’s endeavour to establish communication with her was answered only by Lady Ottery.
“Don’t fidget, Bertram! My partner is sufficiently trying.”
Her partner was her husband, Ottery, who resented this slight upon his ability at bridge by a mild protest of “That’s unfair, my dear!”
The situation was ludicrous as far as Bertram was concerned. He knew that for him this was a night of crisis. He had made the great refusal, for what he believed to be conscience’ sake. He wanted passionately to talk it over with his wife. Some long emotional strain had reached its breaking point to-night in his relation to Joyce. His heart must speak to hers now, urgently. This polite, distant, unnatural way between them must be broken by plain talking, by the rough reality of human nature. He couldn’t wait any longer for that. They must have it out, once for all, and now. . . . But meanwhile Joyce played bridge with Bellasis, and without looking at him.
He would make her look.
While Bellasis was writing down the last results of play, Bertram went to their table and bent over Joyce with his hand on her shoulder. She gave a little shrug, which he knew meant to say, “Take your hand away,” but he kept it there, heavily, and spoke to her.
“I want to speak to you, Joyce, presently. After your game.”
“Hasn’t there been enough talk?” she asked, impatiently.
“No,” he said, “there’s got to be more. I’ve something important to say.”
Lady Ottery tapped his hand with a card case.
“My dear Bertram. Please don’t interrupt. Can’t you find something to read?”
“Sorry!” said Bertram, “but I wanted to have the favour of a few words with Joyce presently.”
“The night’s young,” said Ottery, impatiently. “Don’t spoil the game, sir.”
“Your answer, Joyce?” said Bertram.
She looked at him now, straight in the eyes, with a challenge of will.
“After the game, and when I’m ready. Not before.”
“Right!”
He went out of the room, and out of the house, and for more than an hour wandered about the park.
It was a warm night on the last day of April, with a three-quarter moon, so that the branches of the trees were silvered and the lawns flooded with a milky radiance. The old house with its tall chimneys flung black shadows across the terrace paths, and the broken Venus gleamed white above the flight of steps to the rose gardens. The night air was still fragrant with the scent of flowers and damp grass, and warm earth. In the long avenue down which Bertram paced, a nightingale was singing to its mate, with little trills of passion.
Bertram remembered the last time he had heard a nightingale singing like that. It was in Notre Dame de Lorette, after a battle at Lens. The red flash of gunfire made a regular pulsation of light through the shell-gashed trees and the roar of bombardment shook the very earth. But the little bird in the tree went on singing to its mate. Queer! Even with men, love and the mating business of passion went on and would not surrender its claim though half the world was in ruins and civilisation was menaced by many dangers, and the individual had no sense of security.
That was the best philosophy, the only way of life. It was ridiculous to worry over much about the future. Old Christy was always worrying, and trying to put the world right. Better, perhaps, to carry on, like peasants and plain folk, for self-preservation, for the essential needs and appetites of self-existence—and let the world take care of itself. Holme Ottery was in ruins, like half the world. This old house, so stately in its hushed gardens and wooded parkland, so beautiful in this moonlight, as at noonday, had reached its last phase of life, at least as the roof-tree of the family which had built its beauty. Did it matter very much? Not if the life of the family went on to new development, following the thread of fate through changing ways—not if Joyce still loved her mate.
Bertram felt the stir of passion in his blood, as several times this day. Joyce challenged him. She disapproved of his ideas, and was angry because he had decided something against her wish. She put her will-power against his, tried to coerce him to her way of thinking, spoke with satire, irritably, harshly. That was all nonsense! Life was bigger than that. Love was bigger. He would make Joyce his mate again, not by argument, and intellectual duels, but by passion, by the emotion that stirred in him on this night of April, as it stirred the little creeping things of the warm earth there, and was astir in the hedges and ditches, and bushes and woods, of this Holme Ottery and all other places, and had been stirring since life began, because this was life.
When after an hour Bertram went back towards the house by way of the rose-gardens, and the long pergola, through which the moonlight crept, he heard Joyce’s voice. She was speaking quietly, and he saw her figure in a black cloak sitting at the top of the steps on the parapet. She was in the full white light of the moon, though not sharply outlined, because of its filmy glamour. Below her, sitting on the top step, with his knees tucked up and his hands clasped round them, was a man’s figure, his shirt-front gleaming very white. It was Kenneth Murless’s long and elegant form, as Bertram could see by his very attitude. Their voices sounded clearly across the garden, though they weren’t speaking loudly.
“It’ll break my heart to leave Holme Ottery,” said Joyce.
“Sad! Horribly sad!” answered Kenneth. “It’s a tragic world altogether for our little lot. We belong to the past. You and I, Joyce, are prehistoric survivals. Awful thought, that!”
“We needn’t surrender without a fight,” said Joyce.
Kenneth Murless laughed with his soft musical note.
“God is on the side of the big battalions, my dear! The mob is moving out. We haven’t a chance.”
“To Hell with the mob!” said Joyce.
Kenneth laughed again, pleasantly.
“Your husband would hate to hear you say that!”
Joyce didn’t answer for a moment, and then spoke harshly.
“Bertram’s a traitor to our side of things!”
“Hush!” said Kenneth.
It was when Bertram walked out of the pergola and came up the terrace steps and stood quite close to them.
“Joyce,” he said quietly, “you and I must have a talk, if Kenneth will permit.”
Kenneth stood up, and smiled rather nervously at Bertram.
“I’m off to bed, old man. Good night, both.” He walked quickly back to the house, leaving Bertram to Joyce.
“I’m for bed too,” said Joyce. “It’s too late for talk. And you heard what I said, I presume?”
“That word ‘traitor’?”
“Yes.”
She drew her cloak closer about her shoulders, and moved towards the house, but Bertram took her by the wrist.
“We’ve got to have it out, Joyce. Shall it be here, in the garden, or indoors?”
She tried to release her wrist—the same wrist which he had hurt over a telephone—but he held her fast.
“Indoors,” she said.
“All right.”
He held open the door of the little turret for her, and as two could not pass together, released her wrist as she went in. She slipped away from him then, and ran lightly up the stone stairs which led to the gallery round the great staircase, and her bedroom. She had the door of her room almost slammed in his face before he reached her, and held the door-handle.
“Not quick enough!”
“No.”
They stood facing each other rather breathlessly inside her room. Joyce laughed a little, but in a baffled, angry way, like a thwarted child.
“It’s the first time I’ve been in this room,” said Bertram. He looked at the smallness of it, and the neatness. It had been Joyce’s room since she had left her nursery in the house. Some of her girlhood’s treasures and toys were there; a doll’s-house in the corner, a pair of skates hanging over a cupboard, a horse-shoe, tied up with ribbon, over the mantelpiece, photographs of herself and Alban on Shetland ponies, a pair of foils crossed on one of the walls, and a fox’s brush—her first—over the narrow wooden bed.
“I hope you won’t stay here long,” said Joyce.
She slipped off her cloak and sat in an old wicker chair by the stone-piece where a small fire had almost burnt out. She still had the look of a rebellious child—a King’s page, with curled, cropped hair.
“Joyce,” said Bertram, “have you forgotten that I’m your husband, and you’re my wife?”
“Is that what you’ve been waiting to ask me all the evening?”
She teased him with her mockery.
“By God, it is!” he said quickly. “And I want an answer.”
She answered him in the worst way.
“I wish I could forget a most unfortunate fact!”
Perhaps she didn’t mean to be quite brutal with him. It’s likely that she was just trying his temper, and yielding to her own. But it hit him hard, and he reeled under the blow, not only in a mental way, but physically.
“You mean that?” he asked, staring at her.
“Isn’t it true? For you as well as for me? Surely you see the misfortune of our marriage? You don’t like my ideas, my character, my whole outlook on life. That’s unfortunate for you. I detest yours. That’s unfortunate for me. We belong to different sides. That’s unfortunate for both of us.”
Bertram marvelled at the cold way in which she could speak these things. Had she forgotten, utterly, how she had loved him once, and all his devotion to her? Did it mean nothing to her that she had been the mother of his dead child? Was she so heartless that she could see herself divided from him by that sheer gulf of which she spoke, and not agonise at its tragedy, nor weep, but talk so calmly, so coldly of its happening? No, he didn’t believe that. Heart and soul refused to believe.
“My dear!” he said. “My dear! Don’t let’s say bitter and frightful things because we’re out of temper. I know it’s so easy. It’s a question of nerves, little irritations, small rotten differences that mean—just nothing. They don’t matter more than passing shadows. What does matter is our love, above and beyond all that. I want to tell you that my love for you is unaltered, and unalterable, although you have been pretty rough on me lately, and not given love, or anything like a fair deal. . . . But I want to wipe out the remembrance of that. I want you and me to get together again, as comrades and mates. Nothing else would matter then. Our different points of view? Oh, Lord! how trivial! Joyce, take me back to your bed and your heart, and your beauty, and let’s make a game of life again!”
He leaned over her, put his arms around her, tried to draw her close to him, as she sat there in the wicker chair by the little fire that had almost burnt out.
She drew her chair back on the polished boards, and sprang up, beyond his reach.
“What’s all this stuff you’re talking?” she said, angrily, two spots of scarlet on her face. “You say you love me. Why do you always jeer at my friends and my ideas? Sulk in my drawing-room? Behave like a boor to my crowd? Ally yourself with Pacifists and pro-Germans and revolutionaries? You say you love me, and talk sentiment. Less sentiment, please, and more honesty. That offer to-night! It was a test of loyalty. To England in a big way—certainly to me, as far as I mean anything in your life. Yet you refused it. You failed to pass the test. Why, from the lowest point of view, you ought to want to keep your end up, and pay your own way, like an honest man! You remember the word I spoke to Kenneth? I use it again now, to your face. You’re a traitor to the things I stand for, to all I am. Until you do something to put yourself right again, I won’t live with you. It’s dishonouring.”
“By God!” said Bertram.
He was white to the lips now, with anguish and rage. This girl used her tongue like a lash. She cut his heart open, flayed his soul. And yet, as she stood there, facing him, he loved her with an extreme passion, and her beauty was a torture to him.
He acknowledged the truth of some things she said. He had jeered at her friends, often enough. He had sulked in her drawing-room. He had behaved like a boor to her crowd. All that was true. But the rest of it was not true, and it was cruel. She called him traitor—he who loved England as he loved Joyce, hungrily, so that the smell of its earth, as the fragrance of her hair, excited his senses, touched him with spiritual emotion. It was damnable that she should use such words. “Dishonouring!” she said. She wouldn’t live with him because it was dishonouring!
He strode a pace towards her, and caught hold of her right arm.
“In the old days a man would have flogged his wife for such words. I’ve a damned good mind to box your ears.”
“Have a try!” said Joyce, breathing hard.
He didn’t box her ears, but let her arm go and dropped his hands to his side, and stood there with his head bowed, staring at the floor. There was silence between them for at least a minute, which seemed like an hour. Joyce for the first time was weeping, with her face turned away from him.
Presently he spoke again.
“It rather looks as though I’d made a mistake. I thought you still loved me, in spite of drifting away a bit. It seems any love you once had is like that little fire of yours—not much ever, and now burnt out. Why, God alone knows, not I! But it’s a pity. Perhaps it’s my fault partly. I may come to see that one day. Now, to-night, I think you’ve been hellish to me. I’ll clear out to-morrow. . . . If you want me ever, I’ll come.”
He stood at the doorway, looking back at her. She stood by the side of the little bed where she had slept as a child, with her face turned away and her body shaken by sobs. He hated to part from her like that, and this was the parting.
He spoke her name once more.
“Joyce!”
She didn’t answer him, and he left her room and shut the door. Next morning he left Holme Ottery before breakfast, and went back to town, but not to the little house in Holland Street.
He went to his mother’s house in Sloane Street, and asked for his old room.