XXXIX
For several weeks Bertram wandered about the old places, mostly a-foot, or getting lifts in country carts, once or twice taking a train which crawled from Arras to Lens, and from Bapaume to Péronne.
He had wayside conversations with peasant men and women, young farmers who had beenpoilus, commercial travellers from Paris and Lille, mayors of towns wiped off the map, but now on the sites of their oldmairiesin wooden huts, superintendingla reconstructionwhich, so far, didn’t seem to amount to very much.
He passed the night in woodenestaminetsin fields where once British youth had been swept with fire year after year—Ypres, Hooge, St. Julien, Dickebusch, Souchez, Neuville Vitesse, many other places haunted surely by boys he had passed along the roads.
The trenches had silted in. He wandered about, and poked about with his stick, trying to find some of his old dug-outs, and though he had known every inch of this ground, every hummock and hollow, could not find them, for the most part, only one, indeed.
He found a dug-out in which he had lived, not far from Bourlon Wood, by the ruins of Havrincourt Château. The earth had silted there too, but he borrowed a spade from a friendly young farmer near by, and unearthed the wooden steps, and cleared out the entrance, and went inside. The farmer gave him a bit of candle, and would have come inside with him, unless Bertram had said, “Wait a few minutes. I want to be in here alone!” The man understood with the quick sympathy of the French for sentiment like that.
Itwassentiment, but also more than that. This was a ghost chamber of tragic memories, the unburying of the dead past. The candle burned straight with a thin flame. By its light Bertram found a wooden table, and two chairs, made out of boxes. It was Bill Huggett, who had knocked them together. On the table were things which had belonged to Bertram—an empty tin of John Cotton tobacco which Joyce had sent him, a cracked mug which he had found in Havrincourt Wood, an old envelope addressed to him.
“Major Bertram Pollard, D.S.O., M.C.Machine Gun Corps, B.E.F.”
“Major Bertram Pollard, D.S.O., M.C.
Machine Gun Corps, B.E.F.”
It was in Joyce’s handwriting. Good God! Fancy finding it here again, moist and muddy as the walls had oozed about it and earth had dropped! How eagerly he must have opened it when it came! Certainly he had kissed it before opening it. Now Joyce was his wife, away in Paris or somewhere, without him.
He sat very still on one of the boxes, with his elbows on the table, as often he had sat in this hole at the end of ’17. Christy had come down the steps to report the state of things outside. Old Fritz was putting up a bit of a barrage. Bourlon Wood was soaked with gas. He had told the men to keep their masks handy. A counter-attack was expected within the next twelve hours. A man had just had his leg blown off in Beer Alley.
Bertram’s soul lived again in that time. The smell of the dug-out, that thin candle flame, these oozy walls, this table, were no more real than that dead past, yet as real. The past was present. The present was past. There was no difference. All that he had seen in war, the death of many good men, the agony of the wounded, the stench of death, the comradeship of young officers, their laughter, Christy’s tears when his nerve broke, his own fears of fear, the heroism of common men, the endless slaughter, the waste of youth and life, came back to his mind, as drowning men are said to see all their life as in a mirror. Was it all going to happen again? Bernard Hall thought so, unless some divine change happened in human nature by “intensive education”! Jeanne, the chambermaid, thought so! Nearly all those French people with whom he had talked along the wayside believed that after a few years, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five,les Bocheswould come back again for vengeance.
As the candle flickered and shortened in a pool of wax on the table, Bertram, sitting there with its feeble light surrounded by darkness, heard a voice speak to his soul, very clearly, as once before. They were the words his mother had spoken on her death-bed. “Bertram, work for Peace. Promise me—”
He raised his head sharply. Had he heard those words only in imagination, or had they been spoken to him? He had heard them clearly, with distinct utterance, yet it must have been only one of the memories brought back in that dug-out.
Yes, he would work for peace, so that boys now young needn’t live in holes like this until they were gassed to death or blown to bits, or buried alive. He would work for Peace, as far as he could understand the chaos of life, as far as he could write words of warning, and conciliation, and commonsense, and truth anyhow.
The candle guttered out. He struck a match, picked up the envelope in Joyce’s handwriting, and groped his way up, and out.
The young farmer was waiting for him, and stared at him a moment, with a queer smile in his eyes.
“A droll life in those days. With good moments, and many sad, eh? Sacred Name! I laugh sometimes when I think of the blood, the death, the lice, the mud, theordureof it all.”
“Would you go through it again?”
The man shrugged his shoulders.
“To save France one would go through it again. Not willingly. But what else? When the Germans attack again, France will fight again.”
“You think they will attack again?”
“Naturally. They will want revenge. When they have renewed their strength, they will come back. It is human nature, monsieur.”
“Can France stand another war?”
The young peasant farmer stared across the field to Bourlon Wood, so quiet now, so safe.
“Not alone. But we have Poland, Serbia, Czecho-Slovakia.”
“England?”
The man looked uncertainly at Bertram.
“Monsieur can tell me, perhaps.”
“What do you think?”
The young Frenchman shrugged his shoulders again.
“England does what pays her best. Industry, commerce, count with her most. It’s the English character. Hard bargaining, eh?”
Bertram reminded him how many men Britain had sent to France, in time of war, how many bodies of her youth lay still in French soil. Was that hard bargaining? Or self-sacrifice, for honour’s sake?
“TheBocheswere England’s trade rivals. Their Fleet was a menace toGrande Bretagne. Is it not so, Monsieur.”
Bertram sat with him on a hummock of earth, shared some sandwiches with him, and tried, in simple phrases, with an emotion that he felt, to assure this peasant who had been apoiluof France, that England had a soul above shop-keeping, that her share in the war had been not only enormous in sacrifice, but heroic in ideal.
The man listened to him with patience, but also with amusement.
“Monsieur is an idealist! After experience of war?” That was strange. He himself was a realist. Nations, like individuals, would fight for self-interest, to save their skins, their land, their women. They would fight to get revenge, to kill people they hated, because of pride, and more because of injury, to capture their trade, or their territory. It was natural. It had always been like that. It would never change.
Bertram saw in this young farmer the type of French manhood, the very soul of France. Through centuries of history, men like this, on this soil, had fought for their land and their women, for conquests, for pride in France. They had been invaded, harassed, and ravaged. They had lived always between the plough and the sword, first one, then the other, turn and turn about. Peace was only an interlude, either when France was weak, in defence, or when France was strong, in aggression, in contraction or expansion, as an Empire or Republic.
The French mother rocking her babe in the cradle knew in her heart that one day this man-child would march away to battle. It was in the songs she sang to send it to sleep. The boy knew that when manhood came he would leave home for the barracks, to learn soldiering as he had learnt farming. So it had been in the time of the Valois, in the reign of Henri IV., before Burgundy was France, before the Revolution, all through the Napoleonic era, ever afterwards, till 1918, with brief spells for recovery, the binding of wounds, the growing of another generation of boys. “C’etait toujours comme ça. Ça ne changera jamais.” It was always like that. It would never change.
Bertram glanced sideways at the man; thirty-five, perhaps, with a strong, hard profile, ruddy skin, fair moustache. A Frank of northern stock. Teutonic rather than Latin, though, perhaps, with a strain of Latin blood. The typicalpoiluof Picardy, Normandy, Artois.
“France cannot afford another war,” Bertram said; “it would bleed her to death. Must there always be conflict? Why not make friends with the Germans?”
The young farmer laughed loudly, and spat.
“Friends with theBoches? Does one make friends with a hungry tiger? If one can’t kill it at once, one digs a ditch round one’s house and keeps one’s gun ready. So I have heard! There’s still another way to treat a tiger. Cut its claws and cage it. That is our way with Germany now.”
“If the tiger escapes and grows its claws?”
“There is still the gun.”
“If the gun gets rusty?”
“Then the tiger gets its meal. He’s a fool who lets his gun get rusty.”
“If it breaks, and he has not money to buy another?”
“That is unfortunate! The tiger wins.”
He was a fatalist. Also he assumed that the German by nature was a tiger. Was that true? Bertram thought of all the German prisoners he’d seen in time of war, some he had helped to capture—simple, straw-haired young peasants, who hated war, and loved peace, and the arts and crafts and labours of peace, not soldiers by instinct and passion, like the French, but soldiers by coercion, by discipline, by sentiment; brave, efficient, obedient, but without fire. They were not “tigers,” as far as he had seen them, but rather sheepish fellows. It was not utterly impossible that they might abandon the hope of revenge against France, if France would abandon her passion of hate, her uttermost demands of punishment and payment, her pound of flesh.
It was useless to argue with this peasant-farmer, though he had a clear intelligence, and, like most Frenchmen of his class, a surprising gift of words.
“England is a good friend,” he said, at the end of this conversation. “There must never be cause of quarrel between England and France. The very dead would rise out of these fields to protest.”
It was here, by Havrincourt Château that English and Scots had advanced on a day of November in 1917, with Tanks leading the way towards Cambrai. Now it was quiet in the fields, and birds were singing, and no smoke clouds burst in Bourlon Wood.
The young Frenchman shook hands with him and smiled.
“Au revoir, mon camarade! Comme vous-même, je n’aime pas la guerre. Mais, que voulez-vous? Il vient quand il vient!”
He had no love for war, but when it came, it came! Terrible philosophy, upon which no peace could be built, no forward step taken by educated humanity. To this peasant, perhaps to all his kind, war was as inevitable as natural calamities, like rains and droughts, earthquakes, and thunderbolts. And the German was still the German—the Blonde Beast.Les sales Boches!
XL
The hostility—suspicion, even,—of the French people regarding England was to Bertram terrible. They were very friendly to him, all those people whom he visited in their huts or walked with over old battlefields. Some of them were even emotional, as one old woman in anestaminetalong the Arras-Doullens road with whom he had been billeted for a time, and who flung her arms about him and kissed him on both cheeks, and wept a little, and laughed, and cooked a chicken for him. But when they spoke about England, it was with doubt, or resentment, or anger; now and then with passion.
He couldn’t get to the root of their grievances. They talked vaguely of England crossing the path of France in Syria. In what way? They didn’t know, but said: “On dit dans les journaux—” It is said in the papers!
They believed, many of them, that the value of the franc was deliberately made low by the artful jugglings of British financiers. They were certain that “Loy-Zhorzhe” was pro-German for corrupt and sinister motives, that British diplomacy was jealous of French victory, and intrigued everywhere to secure a new balance of power in Europe, so that French supremacy should be weighted down by the restoration of Germany.
In any case, England desired to thwart France of the fruits of victory, and was always manœuvring to let Germany off her debts, to prevent France from seizing German industrial cities if Germany defaulted in her payments.
It was idle for Bertram to argue that Lloyd George and the British people were afraid that if Germany were pressed too hard, beyond her power to pay, beyond human nature, she would seek to escape by force, would nourish desires for revenge which would lead ultimately and inevitably to another war. Germany would form an alliance with Russia, or break into such revolutionary chaos that the peace and recovery of Europe would be retarded for more than another generation.
He put these ideas to a French priest as they sat together in a little wooden presbytery near the ruins of a church on the west side of St. Quentin. They had met in a cemetery where British and French soldiers lay buried side by side.
Bertram, standing bare-headed there by the grave of one of his own comrades, was greeted by the priest, a tall, middle-aged man with a bronzed, clean-shaven face, and the scar of some wound down his right cheek.
“You are an English officer, perhaps?”
“Yes,mon père, in the old days.”
“Ah, you helped to fight for France! It was a good comradeship in those days. I was a soldier also, a captain of artillery, with the ‘Cent-Vingt.’ ”
He invited Bertram to his simplepot-au-feu, with a cup of coffee afterwards, and apetit verre.
It was over that cup of coffee that they argued about French and British policy, and then that Bertram defended the British point of view.
“Why do your English Liberals hate France so much?” asked the priest. “I cannot understand. It is to me incredible!”
Bertram denied that English Liberals hated France. He tried to explain, in faulty French, the “Liberal” idea in England. It was a belief that another frightful war could only be prevented by allowing Germany to recover, and dealing with her so generously that she would not desire vengeance. English Liberals believed that the whole philosophy of Europe must be changed, and that people should rise beyond the old “Balance of Power,” with secret or open alliances dividing Europe into groups. The peoples of all nations wanted peace. It was only the old diplomacy that prevented the fulfilment of their desire, and a general brotherhood of European democracy.
The priest struck his fist on the table so that the coffee cups jumped.
“All that is illusion,” he said, and he almost shouted the words. “It is hypocritical nonsense. Peace can only be secured by keeping Germany crushed and weak. England is treacherous to France by making secret overtures to Germany. It is a betrayal of the dead. An outrage to France.”
Bertram lit his pipe, and smoked in silence for a moment, astonished and distressed by the violent passion in this priest’s voice, by the flash of fire in his eyes.
“Mon père,” he said, “you speak like a soldier, and not like a priest. Surely you of all men should believe in the forgiveness of enemies—wasn’t it ninety times nine?—and the blessings promised to the peacemakers.”
“I spoke as a Frenchman as well as a priest,” was the answer. “I have seen the flower of French youth swept down by thesales Boches. I have seen the beauty of their mother, France, blasted, as in those fields outside. I have seen our women outraged by the brutality of the enemy. It is because of these things, and because I believe in the justice of God that I demand the full punishment of an infamous people. I warn you, sir, that if Great Britain endeavours to thwart that divine justice, France will regard her also as an enemy.”
“The dead listen to us,mon père,” said Bertram, simply. “Outside this window their bodies lie together. It is too soon for any Frenchman to speak of England as an enemy.”
“It is too soon for England to behave as such,” said the priest.
For several hours they talked, this Frenchman and Englishman, these two soldiers of the Great War, this priest and layman. At the end of that time, Bertram knew that no words in any language or with any eloquence, could ever reconcile their opposing views. The priest believed in “the sword of France” as the means of peace in Europe. Bertram believed in reconciliation, the progress of commonsense, the education of democracy, the spirit of peace in the hearts of common folk.
“Illusion!” said the priest again. “Illusion! In the heart of man, and especially in the heart of Germany, is hatred, evil, greed, brutality, fear, rivalry. So it has been. So it will always be, despite the grace of God, and the teaching of Jesus Christ. We have to guard against these natural passions. We have to uphold justice by force. We must never be weakened by a craven fear of war. Worse than war is cowardice or dishonour. Worse than hatred is the betrayal of friendship. May England be true to France!”
“May France remember England’s sacrifice!” said Bertram, “and our dead that lie in her soil.”
The priest answered his farewell in a friendly way, gripping his hand first, as a comrade, and then giving him a priest’s blessing. But when Bertram trudged away from the presbytery to a woodenestamineta mile away, he was enormously distressed in spirit. This priest, Jeanne, the chambermaid, the young farmer near his old dug-out, a commercial traveller from Paris, the Mayor of Arras, scores of friendly people he met along the old roads of war and on the old battlefields, had talked in the same strain, used the same kind of argument, lamented the ill-will or the “treachery” of England; or if not of England, then of “Loy-Zhorzhe,” who seemed to them not so much a human personality as an evil power.
What hope was there for peace in Europe, if France pursued her policy of force, to crush Germany and keep her weak? What chance for the “Comrades of the Great War,” lounging about Labour Exchanges in London, marching in processions of unemployed, with banners saying, “We Want Work”?
There would be no work until Great Britain could sell her goods in the markets of Europe. Those markets could never buy if Germany were thrust into such ruin as that of Austria. Germany, perhaps allied with Russia, would struggle like a wild beast. The “sword of France” would not be strong enough to keep her weak for ever. Then France would call to England again. Would the roads have to be tramped again by battalions of boys from England, Scotland, Ireland, going up to the fields of death?
This thought came to Bertram as he went up a road past the ruined village of Barisis. The moon had risen in a pale sky, still blue, and its light silvered the wooden crosses in a military graveyard. Row by row they stood above the neatly ordered graves. For scores of miles, for hundreds of miles, across France, the moon illumined cemeteries like this, crowded with French and British dead.
“God, give us Peace!” said Bertram, aloud, as he bared his head in salute to old comrades with whom he had trudged these roads.
An immense fear invaded his spirit, and a kind of shudder shook him, for he seemed to hear again the march of youth advancing to another Armageddon in these fields—the last youth of Europe.
He was glad to get into the warmth of the woodenestaminet. An enormously fat Frenchman greeted him jovially.
“Monsieur is hungry, beyond doubt! My wife has cooked an excellent chicken.”
The wife, a pretty, thin-faced woman, with merry black eyes, addressed him as “mon capitaine” and spread a napkin as a cloth on a deal table.
She had been in St. Pol during all the war. Did he know St. Pol, not far from Hesdin—? Yes? Then surely he must have known, among English officers who had been friends of hers,le capitaineJenkins,le lieutenantO’Mally,le commandantStuart? She hadun très bon souvenirof the English Army. Sometimes her husband was jealous when she praised the English officers so much!
“Without cause, I’m sure!” said Bertram, with a smile.
The woman laughed, and her black eyes danced.
“In time of war there are many temptations!”
She teased her preposterously fat husband, and he looked annoyed, and said, “Tais-toi, Yvonne!” She made a little face at him, behind his back, and when Bertram went to his bedroom after dinner, she lighted his way with a candle, there being no gas in the house.
“Merci, et bonne nuit, madame!” said Bertram, politely, taking the candle from her, and putting it down on a wooden chair by the bedside.
She looked at him with a queer, wistful smile, and spoke in broken English.
“I am not married in time of war. You understand? English officers like me very much. Take my hand, try to give me kiss—what you say?—flirt! My big, fat husband not like me talk of those days. But I like remember! You will give me English kiss for old remembrance, eh?”
She held her face up, after glancing at the half closed door.
Bertram gave her a kiss. Why not? It was good to find some one who remembered the British Army with pleasure and affection. She kissed him six times in return, and then, with her finger to her lip, ran out of the room, as a big voice shouted:
“Yvonne!Qu’est-ce-que tu fais, toi?”
That night Bertram dreamed that it was Joyce who kissed him.
XLI
The thought of Paris pulled Bertram so strongly that he could wander no longer in the old war zone, and getting back to Amiens from Bapaume, took the train to the Gare du Nord. He had written some articles forThe New World, photographic and phonographic, things seen and heard, without comment or moral, and some of them had been published, as he knew, not from seeing them—The New Worldwas not sold in Paschendaele or Hooge!—but from a note written by Bernard Hall.
“Your stuff is admirable, and much quoted.”
There was endless material in the “reconstruction” of Picardy and Artois—the human “stuff” which Hall wanted. Bertram had only to sit down to table in any littleestaminet, mostly built of wood, amidst a group of huts, in this country of ghosts (as it was to him) to hear in the casual conversation of peasants the aftermath of war’s enormous tragedy to France.
Young peasants, once soldiers of France, told tales of hair-raising horror about the trenches of Verdun, or Vermelles, or any part of the battle front, with a simplicity, and matter-of-fact remembrance, beyond all eloquence or art in tragic effect. Some of them had been prisoners in German camps, and their long servitude, monotonous in starvation and misery, had been worse than trench-life.
Women who had been caught behind the German lines, in Lille, Valenciennes, elsewhere, told of their years of anguish, and inflamed again the passion of the men who listened. Reference to death recurred in casual discourse with continual iteration. “Before Jean was killed,” “since my man’s death,” “when my boy fell in the assault on Souchez,” a score of times in any half hour of gossip over a flask ofvin ordinaire.
The loss of homes and fortunes, the difficulty and illusion of this “reconstruction” which was used as a spellword by the French Government, as though the word alone would rebuild houses and churches and flourishing farmsteads, the sadness of women bereft of fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, by the immense slaughter of French manhood, and the abiding hate of France for Germany, were revealed to Bertram with intimate and distressful detail, as he sat in the corner of any tavern, or talked with any group of men and women in field or market-place.
It came to his mind that here was material for a new “Sentimental Journey” which might live in history because of the tales of Armageddon, but he renounced the idea for himself, beyond his brief sketches for Bernard Hall, because of his desire to get to Paris. It was not the lure of Paris in June, nor that joyous anticipation which had belonged to “three days’ Paris leave” in the old days of war, but the urgent, irresistible, almost sickening desire to see Joyce again.
During this time of loneliness, for he was alone with his soul despite his wayside conversations, some fretfulness of spirit passed from him. He seemed to see things with more clarity. His thoughts struck deeper into the essential meaning of life. Contact again with the devastation of war, the sharp realities of the immense heritage of woe left by those murderous years, his conversation with the ghosts of youth, crowding about him in those little forests of wooden crosses, in those quiet fields where the noise of death had once been very loud, seemed to kill the nagging of his own selfish instincts, to rebuke his egotism.
How trivial was the failure or success of his own life! What did it matter in the balance of history, in the destiny of peoples? He had no right to life at all, except by a fluke of luck, or the grace of God. So many of his friends lay here in French soil, as young as he, and younger. That he was alive, glad to hear the lark singing again above these fields (even as they had sung above the noise of gunfire), with the warmth of the sun in his face, was so much to the good, after all, that he could pay back for that only by service and the dedication of life to things beyond himself. He might, by some small grain of truth, by the force of mere desire, by written word or spoken word, help the chance of peace, so that these fields need not be strewn again with dead boys. To that attempt he was dedicated. It was the meaning of his future life, if it had any purpose.
After the mental storms of the last few months, the quarrel with Joyce, his mother’s death, the tragedy of Susan, and of Digby, he seemed to have aged by twenty years in understanding and experience. A little by Janet Welford’s help, and perhaps more than he could estimate, he had risen above the weakness of self-pity, the most miserable disease, incurable, if allowed to go too far.
It had been all foolishness and pettiness,—that quarrel with Joyce. She was hardly more than a child, even now, and he had dealt with her as though she were a woman of mature views and settled philosophy. He had taken her too seriously. They had both been too serious about their “opinions”—as if they mattered!
In his tramp across the war zone, the vision of Joyce as she was when he first knew her, and dreamed of her, here in France, came back to him—her flower-like beauty, her grace, her elegance, her courage, her vitality. He wiped out all his quarrel with her. He believed, with increasing certainty, that after this separation, and his change in character—he felt that he had both changed and strengthened and become better balanced—a meeting between them would end in reconciliation and understanding.
He regretted his answers to her letters, so harsh and humourless. He would go to her in Paris, and say, “My dear, I want your love again. I have dedicated my life to love—and peace, which is the fruit of love. I am your faithful serving-man. What stands between our happiness together?”
At night, lying on a truckle bed in the “Fleur des Champs” or the “Estaminet des Poilus,” he yearned for Joyce with the home-sickness of a boy away in a cheerless school. Her physical presence seemed to be with him. He was aware sometimes of the perfume of her hair, he could almost feel the silky touch of those “bobbed” curls. He spoke her name, waking in the morning, in day-dreams, and saw her walking with bare feet across the grass that grew so green now over the battlefields.
Even his jealousy of Kenneth Murless abated, and died out, extinguished by this larger sense that had come to him. Kenneth had been her playmate as a child. His comradeship had been above suspicion, except in the mind of that other Bertram, with nerves on edge, and petty egotism all alarmed.
It was in this mood of exalted emotion that Bertram stepped out of the Gare du Nord and drove in a rattle-bone taxi down the dreary length of the rue Lafayette to the heart of Paris and the Hotel Meurice.
Bertram made his way through a group of Americans with a quickening pulse. His eyes roved about this entrance hall, expecting to see Joyce at once, waiting for his coming, as it were. It was one of the tall American girls who gave him a start and made him take a pace forward with the word “Joyce!” on his lips, though unuttered. She was a tall, slim girl, with glistening gold hair, in a cream-coloured French frock, such as Joyce would wear in a Paris June. She turned round to say a word to a friend, and he had a sense of disappointment.
At the desk he enquired for Lady Joyce Pollard, and as an afterthought, for the Countess of Ottery. The clerk glanced at him doubtfully—he was wearing an old grey suit and a soft hat—and then informed him that both ladies had left Paris the day before.
“Where have they gone?” asked Bertram.
He was profoundly disappointed now, and cursed himself for not having written or telegraphed from Amiens to announce his coming. His hopes had been so high and soaring about his meeting with Joyce that this check was intolerable.
The clerk shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“How can I tell, monsieur? Paris is the gate to all the Continent!”
“Surely they left an address?”
The clerk looked up in a book. No, the ladies had not left any address. He condescended to send for the Hall Porter, a superb person in a claret-coloured uniform. The Hall Porter himself condescended to inform the rather shabby-looking Englishman that “Madame la Comtesse d’Ottery” and Miladi, her daughter, had departed by automobile to Amiens. He understood they proposed to visit the battlefields in the British war-zone.
Bertram could obtain no further information, and when he walked down the rue de Rivoli, the serenity of mind and exalted sense of sacrifice which he believed he had acquired during lonely nights and days, departed from him abruptly, for a few minutes at least, and he was furious with Fortune for having played him such a scurvy trick.
He had just come from Amiens. Joyce had just gone there! If he had only known that she wanted to visit the battlefields, he could have shown her every yard of earth that was hallowed by the struggle of British manhood—made her see with his eyes the way of battle, taken her to Ypres where her brothers had died, pointed out the line of old trenches beyond which he had once stared into No-Man’s Land, led her into the very dug-out where he had found her letter.
On such a journey they would have come together again, gone hand in hand and heart to heart, understanding the immensity of that tragedy of death which made their own lives in debt for ever to the youth that died. No such luck! By twenty-four hours he had missed Joyce, and this chance.
He had the idea of taking the first train back to Amiens, and tracing them from there, but he reflected that in an automobile they would be lost to him, and that his best chance of quickest meeting would be to await Joyce’s return to Paris. He would be able to find out her plans from Murless, at the British Embassy.
Bertram dumped his one bag in a small hotel in the rue St. Honoré—he couldn’t afford the Hotel Meurice—and walked to the Embassy in the Faubourg St. Honoré.
Kenneth Murless, to whom he sent in his card, kept him waiting for ten minutes, and in spite of that self-rebuke which had softened his feelings so recently towards Kenneth, this delay strained his temper and aroused his old sense of hostility, according to the natural law which makes all men hate those who keep them in antechambers, even as Dr. Johnson hated Lord Chesterfield and dipped his pen in venom to take vengeance.
The door opened, and light footsteps crossed the polished boards. Bertram turned and saw Kenneth Murless, and was aware that, for just the fraction of a second, Kenneth had a startled look, almost a look of fear. It passed instantly into a welcoming smile.
“My dear Bertram! Fearfully sorry for keeping you waiting. The Ambassador is as garrulous as an old maid this morning.”
So he made theamende honorable, holding out his hand to Bertram with the friendliest gesture. Then he sat on the edge of a Louis Quinze table, and offered Bertram a cigarette.
“Where’s Joyce?” asked Bertram, abruptly.
Kenneth did not seem quite sure at the moment.
“Wafted away to a château in Picardy, I believe. Yes, I understand she’s staying a while with the old Marquis de Plumoison and his charming daughter, Yvonne, to say nothing of Jérome, the young and handsome Vicomte.”
These names meant something to Bertram. Once, in time of war, he had been billeted for two months outside the Château de Plumoison, and with kind permission of the old Marquis, had shot rabbits in the park. He remembered Yvonne de Plumoison, and her kindness to young British officers like himself. Most of them had fallen in love with her for a week or two.
“What about Lady Ottery?”
“Gone for one night only, en route for merry England, where your worthy father-in-law is suffering from that vulgar complaint, influenza. But, my dear fellow, don’t you get the family bulletin?”
“I’ve been wandering,” said Bertram. He flushed deeply at Kenneth’s question, and couldn’t tell whether it held an underlying sarcasm, or was asked in simplicity. Perhaps Joyce hadn’t told Kenneth how hideously they had quarrelled that night at Holme Ottery, nor how complete had been their estrangement. It would be like Joyce to keep her own counsel, and put a gay face upon their separation. And yet she was so intimate in friendship with Kenneth that if any man knew, he would. In any case he must have guessed, known, indeed, without guessing, that “something” had happened to bring Joyce to Paris without her husband.
“Come and dine with me to-night,” said Kenneth. “I’m entertaining a few friends at the Griffon, a chic little place round the corner.”
“Not in this rig-out,” said Bertram, glancing at his shabby clothes.
Murless pooh-poohed that reason.
“Any old dress does nowadays. Besides, I’ll introduce you as a literary man. You’ll be adored by the women.”
He congratulated Bertram on his essays inThe New World.
“You’ve quite a touch! Guy de Maupassant has a rival.”
Again Bertram suspected irony, but Kenneth looked at him in his friendliest way, disarming hostility, and his next words were kind.
“I was deeply shocked to hear of your mother’s death; and Digby. Please accept my sympathy.”
Then he gave Bertram another piece of news, striking in its unexpectedness.
“By the way, your sister is in Paris. Poor pretty Susan.”
By that word “poor” he revealed his knowledge of that tragedy in Mountjoy Prison. He had met her in the Tuileries gardens, with another girl. He had raised his hat to her, but she had looked through his body for a thousand miles.
Bertram was astonished, yet a sense of relief came to him at the news. It was better for Susan to be in Paris than in Dublin. Safer. But how to find her? Kenneth could give no clue, and Bertram, having come to Paris to find Joyce, was in the strange case of a man who had missed his wife and lost a sister.
He accepted Kenneth’s invitation to dinner because of that loneliness, and sense of futility, but he hadn’t left the Embassy more than half an hour when, by a fluke of chance, he came face to face with Susan in the Place de la Concorde. She was just entering the “Metro” when he saw her, and grabbed her arm.
“Susan! What luck to find you!”
The last time he had met her came back to his mind in a flash—that day in Sackville Street, when her hair was unkempt and her eyes were red and wild, and her frock was wet and muddy after an all-night vigil. Now she was neat and pretty again, but the memory of that night had not passed from her face. In her eyes was still something of its pain.
“Hullo, Bertram!” she said, as simply and unemotionally as though they had left each other only an hour ago. As he drew her on one side to avoid the stream of people pouring into the Underground station, she showed sufficient interest in his way of life to ask what he was doing in Paris. He answered her vaguely, and asked the same question.
“What areyoudoing?”
She, too, was vague, and said something about propaganda work, for Ireland. The French were sympathetic. They believed in Liberty, and they hated England, she was glad to say.
“They don’t seem to like us,” said Bertram, sadly, but he didn’t argue with that “glad to say.”
“When can I have a real talk with you, and where?”
She gave her address, at a number in the rue de la Pompe, Passy, and told him that she was living with Betty O’Brien, who, like herself, had abandoned England since Dennis’s martyrdom. Betty was staying with her uncle, Mr. Mahony. Any time after nine he would find a little crowd in their rooms. Irish exiles, French Liberals, Russian Communists, some of the people in France who most loved Liberty.
“A rum crowd!” thought Bertram, but to his sister he said, “I’ll come to-night at ten, if that’s not too late?”
“Any time before midnight, or afterwards,” said Susan, smiling for the first time. “They’re all talkers. You’ll learn a lot, if you’re not too aggressively English.”
“Joyce thinks I’m not English enough,” he answered, and at the name of Joyce Susan’s black eyes flashed, and her mouth hardened. She remembered that scene with the telephone—the prelude of tragedy.
“Au revoir, then. Until this evening.”
She fell in with the crowd of business men,midinettes, students, Americans, school-girls, who passed unceasingly through the little iron gates which led down to the “Metro” tubes.
Bertram lunched alone at aterrasserestaurant, on the other side of the river in the Boulevard St. Michel. A French girl sat opposite, at the same little table, and entered into conversation.
“Anglais?”
“Oui. Vous voyez!”
“Pas Americain, alors!”
“Moitié Anglais, moitié Irlandais, pour le dire précisément.”
She told him that she preferred the Irish half of him. For the English she had lost her love, on account of that monster, “Loy-Zhorzhe.”
Bertram groaned a little, and laughed a little, and begged her not to discuss politics.
She expressed the opinion that nothing mattered in life, except politics, because they dictated life. It was on account of politics that she paid three francs fifty for a baddéjeuner, instead of one franc seventy-five as in the good days before the war.
Before she had obtained three francs fifty worth of vile food, he learnt that she was a stenographer to a music publisher in the rue des Saints Pères, that her brother had been killed (like all the others) at Verdun, and that she had a lover who was a clerk in the Crédit Lyonnais.
She approached the subject of politics again, when she affirmed that Paris had lost its gaiety because of high prices. And high prices prevailed because thesales Bochesrefused to pay their reparations, much encouraged by England and America, for reasons she failed to understand.
“Quite simple reasons,” said Bertram. “Because England and America are persuaded that Germany’s bankruptcy would be the worst thing for Europe.”
“O, la, la! Je m’en fiche de l’Europe! Qu’est-ce-qu’il y a pour la France qui est tellement épuisée par l’agonie et l’outrage de la guerre?”
She didn’t care a jot for Europe. What did that have to do with France, agonised and outraged by war?
She gave a little gloved hand to Bertram, and thanked him for his conversation, before going back to her music-shop. She forgave him for being half English because he was altogether charming.
That encounter meant nothing in Bertram’s life, except relief from half an hour’s loneliness, and one more proof among a thousand, of the alarming dislike of England in France after war. What did it portend? It frightened him, and sickened him. Not in that was the spirit and chance of peace to which he had dedicated his brain and heart. How could a bridge be built over this widening gulf between the French and British foundations of faith for the future of Europe?
The question remained unanswered in Bertram’s mind, as he wandered about Paris, disconsolate and lonely—enormously lonely now that he had failed to meet Joyce—until it was time to join Kenneth’s party at the Griffon.