. . . Kenneth Murless has shown me your articles inThe New World. That one—the first?—called “The Mind of the Men” made me want to use bad language. No wonder you refused that offer from General Bellasis! Your words might have been spouted by a Hyde Park orator on an orange box to a mob of shifty-eyed hooligans. How can you, Bertram? Howcanyou? To me it’s incredible, after your war-service! It’s nothing but rank treason. . . .
. . . Kenneth Murless has shown me your articles inThe New World. That one—the first?—called “The Mind of the Men” made me want to use bad language. No wonder you refused that offer from General Bellasis! Your words might have been spouted by a Hyde Park orator on an orange box to a mob of shifty-eyed hooligans. How can you, Bertram? Howcanyou? To me it’s incredible, after your war-service! It’s nothing but rank treason. . . .
There was something in the letter about the beauty of Paris in May. Then another line or two about the hatred of France for Germany, and for the English Liberals who were playing into the hands of Germany.
. . . The French won’t tolerate any breach of the Treaty.They will force Germany to pay, or march across the Rhine and seize her industrial cities. I quite agree with them. After all, wedidwin the war, though some people behave as though it were a shame to do so. . . .
. . . The French won’t tolerate any breach of the Treaty.
They will force Germany to pay, or march across the Rhine and seize her industrial cities. I quite agree with them. After all, wedidwin the war, though some people behave as though it were a shame to do so. . . .
Well, well, Joyce’s views on foreign politics didn’t matter very much. Some other words in her letter mattered more to him.
Kenneth Murless has come over to Paris in the Embassy—as First Secretary. I see a good deal of him and he keeps me amused. When are you going to be sensible and make a career for yourself? I’m a little tired of being a grass widow, though as a rest-cure it has done me good! I’m ready to forget and forgive, if you care to join me here. Besides,it must be one thing or the other. . . .
Kenneth Murless has come over to Paris in the Embassy—as First Secretary. I see a good deal of him and he keeps me amused. When are you going to be sensible and make a career for yourself? I’m a little tired of being a grass widow, though as a rest-cure it has done me good! I’m ready to forget and forgive, if you care to join me here. Besides,it must be one thing or the other. . . .
Those words were underlined.
At the end of her letter she signed herself “Yours affectionately,” and Bertram laughed aloud at the words, but not with any merriment of soul. She had wept when the Lely had gone, not much when he had gone! . . . Kenneth Murless amused her. She saw a lot of him. . . . She was ready to forget and forgive!
He wrote a raging letter to her, and then tore it up. He accused her of damned heartlessness, told her that he would never play her lap-dog again, reminded her of the things she had said to him at Holme Ottery, and ended by saying that if Kenneth Murless amused her so much, she had better make it one thing or the other, as far as he was concerned. He would be glad to know her decision.
Having written all that, he heard, almost with physical audibility, the words his mother had spoken to him on her death-bed. “Work for Peace, Bertram!” She meant peace in Europe, between peoples, with Ireland, but the spirit of peace must begin in the heart of the individual, between one and another—even between husband and wife. He wrote another letter, less violent.
Dear Joyce:I’m still trying to earn a living. I’m sorry you don’t like my articles, because they’re the way to that possibility. You say you’re ready to forget and forgive. That seems to me hardly good enough. When you tell me you love me again and want my love, I’ll come to you. I thought that was understood between us. . . .
Dear Joyce:
I’m still trying to earn a living. I’m sorry you don’t like my articles, because they’re the way to that possibility. You say you’re ready to forget and forgive. That seems to me hardly good enough. When you tell me you love me again and want my love, I’ll come to you. I thought that was understood between us. . . .
He referred to her sympathy with his family afflictions:
. . . Yes, it’s sad about Digby, and mother’s death leaves me very much alone. . . .
. . . Yes, it’s sad about Digby, and mother’s death leaves me very much alone. . . .
That correspondence with Joyce didn’t seem to alter much in their relations to each other. It left him in exactly the same situation spiritually, and physically—a husband “on probation,” with a verdict of disloyalty against him, but an offer of pardon on recantation of faith.
No, not good enough! Hopelessly impossible on any basis of self-respect or decent comradeship, to say nothing of love. Yet tempting to a man who hated loneliness, and was alone; who, at the very sight of Joyce’s handwriting, felt the same thrill of passion for her which had come to him always at the touch of her finger-tips, or the quick toss of her head, or the whiteness of her neck. It was a temptation to his weakness, but he was stubborn as well as weak, and wouldn’t yield to such a miserable compact as this surrender would mean to his manhood.
He was in a wretched state of mind, which Joyce’s last letter intensified in wretchedness. Susan’s agony, Digby’s murder, his mother’s death, his father’s grief and rage—for he was raging now with more personal passion against the Irish rebels—had smitten him at a time when Joyce’s desertion would have been enough to cast him into the blackest depths. It seemed as though God, or fate, had a special grudge against him, and kicked him when he was down.
The last blow—a feeble tap, perhaps, yet overpowering for a while to his moral strength—befell him in a letter from a man named Heatherdew, into whose hands, as literary agent, Christy had placed the war-book.
My Dear Major Pollard[he wrote]:For our friend Christy’s sake, as well as in the usual way of business, I have spared no trouble in trying to find a publisher for your book, “The Machine Gun Company,” which I may say I have read with the greatest interest and admiration. It has now been to eight publishers and all of them, without exception, express the opinion that, at the present time, there is no market for war books. The public, they say (I think incorrectly) wish to forget the war. My own opinion is that they are tired of war books which do not go to the heart of the business which you and I know. However, I consider it useless to make further effort, and I therefore return the manuscript, advising you to hold it for a year or two, when it may have a better chance.
My Dear Major Pollard[he wrote]:
For our friend Christy’s sake, as well as in the usual way of business, I have spared no trouble in trying to find a publisher for your book, “The Machine Gun Company,” which I may say I have read with the greatest interest and admiration. It has now been to eight publishers and all of them, without exception, express the opinion that, at the present time, there is no market for war books. The public, they say (I think incorrectly) wish to forget the war. My own opinion is that they are tired of war books which do not go to the heart of the business which you and I know. However, I consider it useless to make further effort, and I therefore return the manuscript, advising you to hold it for a year or two, when it may have a better chance.
It was a vital disappointment. Bertram had always clung to the hope of this book as a compensation for his failure to get “a job,” as a justification, even, of his life. He had put everything that was in him into this book, his secret agonies and fears, his quality of courage, his love of England, his understanding of the men, the ardour that was his in the beginning of war, the joy in comradeship, the later disillusion, the final disgust.
This was the war as it had passed through his own soul, and through the souls of all the men he knew. It was the Absolute Truth, as he had seen it and known it. It was, above all, his defence against Joyce’s accusations, and the general suspicion of her family and friends that he was a “slacker,” unpatriotic, and careless of his country’s honour. Janet Welford had spoken well of it. “It’s good!” she had said, and had praised it as “almost great.” Well, here it was back again, soiled by publishers’ readers, scrumpled through the post, condemned.
Bertram flung it into a drawer of the little old desk where, as a boy in his father’s house, he had written secret verses, youthful essays about London life, and, later, love-letters to Joyce Bellairs.
An immense gloom closed down upon his spirit. What was the use of anything? He had tried hard, and failed utterly, in every way. He had made a frightful mucker of life. His luck was out. Why kick against it? Why not face up to the futility of life—for him, anyhow? He hadn’t even had the decent luck of going out with the men who had met a bullet or a bit of shell. Those things had passed him by, though he hadn’t dodged them. That was a decent way of death, and honourable, the easiest way out of all difficulties. Even now, a bullet would solve a lot of problems, and answer that alternative which Joyce had put: “It must be one thing or the other.” He wondered if she would weep as much for him as for the Lely portrait of Rupert Bellairs. She might like the sentiment of being a widow for a little while. She would look beautiful in her weeds, with a little bit of white lace under the black round her gold-spun hair, almost as beautiful as Lady Martock. Kenneth Murless would say all kinds of consoling things in his gentlemanly way. All her friends would write, wire, send messages, flowers. The two Russian girls would utter extravagances in broken English, and the Countess Lydia would enquire whether Joyce’s husband had died a Bolshevik, or suggest that he had killed himself at the bidding of Lenin and Trotsky, “who have agents everywhere,ma chérie!” Well, he would provide a lot of pleasure to all kinds of people, and end his own misery at the same time.
He had left his old service revolver in the study at Holland Street. Quite easy to get, if Edith were still there, as parlour-maid.
Chatty Edith! She would be glad to see him again. He would have to invent all kinds of lies to explain his absence and his visit, unless he told her straight out that Joyce had deserted him and he’d come to find his revolver to blow his brains out. He could hardly do that! She would scream, or send for the police, or swoon away. Then he would have to fetch the doctor, or throw water at her, or some nuisance of that kind.
Anyhow, he could get his revolver. He had killed a German with it once. That was in a raid near Bullecourt. He remembered the jump into the German trench, after the long crawl across No-Man’s Land and the long wait every time a Verrey light went up and he had to lie doggo trying to look like a sand-bag. The German sentry tried to stick him with his bayonet, and he shoved the revolver into the fellow’s face and fired it. It was the only thing to do, but he was sorry afterwards. He had searched the man’s pockets for letters and post cards—the Intelligence wanted them for identifying a German division. They were all letters from a girl named Lisa. She was dying to see Karl again. She pined for his dear kisses. She was a lonely little Lisa in Magdeburg. If only the cruel war would end! So, in a dozen letters, and a score of closely scribbled postcards. He was sorry he’d killed the fellow stone dead, with that revolver in Holland Street. Now Karl would be revenged by the same weapon that had killed him. Ironical that! A sort of Greek fate business.
Bertram took the ’bus from the top of Sloane Street to High Street, Kensington, and walked up the narrow passage to Holland Street by the west side of St. Mary Abbot’s. That was where he had married Joyce. “Isn’t she beautiful?” said the women outside, and he agreed and thought her the most beautiful thing on earth, and marvelled at his luck. A little more than a year ago!
Newspaper placards were filled with Strike news.
“Drastic Train Cuts.” “Sensational Scene in House of Commons.” “Nat Verney States the Miners’ Case.” “No General Strike.”
How trivial was all that nonsense. What would it matter in a thousand years, or eternity, or to-morrow as far as he was concerned?
The little house in Holland Street had its blinds pulled down. No answer came when he rang the bell. No answer when he had pressed the knob six times. The chatty Edith had gone away, and the house was abandoned.
Within a yard and a half of where he stood, at the corner of the little front room which had been his study, in the desk by the window where he had written the book which no one would publish, was that revolver he wanted. Damn silly to think it was so close and he couldn’t get it! He could hardly commit a burglary in Joyce’s house, in broad daylight! His luck was out again. God, or Fate, refused him even this little bit of luck!
A young policeman sauntered up Holland Street, stood on the opposite side of the road, and then crossed over.
“Do you want anything?” he asked, suspiciously.
“No,” said Bertram. “I suppose the people have gone away.”
“Looks like it, with the blinds down,” said the policeman.
“Yes.”
Bertram sauntered slowly away from his wife’s house. . . . Not even that bit of luck!
XXXVI
He walked through Kensington Gardens, where the trees were in their first glory of green, through Hyde Park, where the flower-beds were filled with tulips, down Piccadilly, with its tide of gleaming cars, until in the centre of Trafalgar Square he met Janet Welford. The chances of meeting her were about seven million to one, but he knew that he was going to do so. Or perhaps, when he met her, it seemed by some trick of his subconscious mind, the realising of expectation.
“Hullo!” she said, dodging a motor-omnibus and jumping onto a “save-my-life.” “What’s the matter?”
“What makes you think there’s anything the matter?”
She tucked her hand through his arm and told him his face looked like a haunted man’s. She commanded him to take her to tea somewhere. She had a craving for a chocolate éclair, or even two.
It was at table in a tea-shop imitating a Tudor house that Bertram told her of all the tragedy that had befallen him since his visit to Ireland, ending in the rejection of his book, which seemed a small thing to put with the death of his mother, but was a death also—of hope and courage.
“I’m down and out,” he said.
“Watch me eat éclairs!” was her unsympathetic answer.
He knew that it wasn’t heartlessness, but only her way of dealing with trouble. A touch on his hand, an “I’m sorry!” a silence, with understanding eyes, had been her comment to his narrative about Digby and his mother, and it was sympathy enough. But to his “down and out” she put up a refusal, by way of mockery. It wasn’t in her philosophy to accept any cry of “down and out,” not even from a man blinded in both eyes, with his hands up to his face, and pitch blackness in his soul. Not once but many times she had heard such a cry from one of “her men,” as she called them, and had refused to recognise even his misery, and in a week or two, by some spell she had, heard him laughing now and then. She put this to Bertram now.
“I’m not going to say Fortune hasn’t dealt you a bad hand lately. You’ve been handed some of the worst cards in the pack, I’ll admit, but there’s no need to sit down and grizzle. Empires have fallen, crowns have toppled to the dust, whole nations are starving, little old England is at the crisis of her fate, and I’m in debt to my dressmaker, so where doyoucome in? Don’t think you’re the only pebble on the beach. Don’t imagine that fate is persecuting you with a special grudge” (he had thought that!)—“when there are millions of hearts bleeding with greater agony than yours, and millions are carrying on mighty plucky, in spite of odds against them. Look at that girl with the fluffy hair and the red eyelids. She’s playing rag-time in a tea-shop for all she’s worth, though she’s having hell from a mother-in-law, and keeping a shell-shocked husband and two children.”
“How d’you know?” asked Bertram.
“I don’t know,” said Janet, calmly. “I’m only making a supposition. If it isn’t that, it’s something else. You can see she’s been crying all right.”
Her eyes roved round the room, with its panelled walls and sham oak beams, and “antique” furniture, made at Maples. There were several “couples,” and two parties of four. Ruthlessly Janet diagnosed their secret troubles. The thin-faced man, sitting opposite a sad-looking woman, with untidy hair, was suffering from a fear-complex. He was “something in the City,” and afraid of losing the job which kept a little home at Streatham, the wife with untidy hair, and five children. He was in debt to his butcher. He had a hard struggle to pay the last instalment on his furniture, bought on the hire system. He was dodging his income tax, and the chief clerk had told him that the firm was on the rocks, owing to the slump in foreign trade.
“How on earth do you know all those things?” asked Bertram again.
“I’ve studied life,” she answered. “There’s nothing I don’t know about it. See that elderly man with the flabby face, weak mouth, and puffed eyes? Next to the painted flapper?”
Bertram turned slightly in his chair, and said “Yes.”
“That’s a frightful case. He’s the manager of a picture palace. That little girl plays the piano for eight hours a day for two pounds a week, at Croydon, except one day a week—to-day—She keeps a drunken father on that, and pays the rent of eighteen shillings, and ten shillings a week for her little sister’s schooling. The manager is a wicked old devil, and hates his poor drudge of a wife. Of course it wouldn’t do to refuse his invitations to tea, and other things. It’s not easy to get a job in another picture palace, even if one does play the piano blindfold—right notes or wrong—and use the rouge-pot ruthlessly. Plucky kid, I think! Look how she pretends to be merry and bright, poor child!”
“Ever seen her before?” asked Bertram.
“Never. But it’s something like that.”
She said Bertram had no idea of the amount of human courage in a city like London. The heroism of fighting men in war was nothing to the grim, enduring heroism of husbands nagged by their wives, wives bullied by their husbands, men struggling to keep on this side of destitution, women fighting with all the strength of their souls to keep “respectable” in underpaid jobs, young girls starving themselves on milk and buns in order to dress well enough for a chance in the marriage market, and all looking on the best side of things, refusing to surrender, holding on gamely.
“Doesn’t it prove that the game’s not worth the candle?” asked Bertram.
“The game of life?”
He nodded.
She caught hold of his hand, and said, “That’s blasphemy! That’s cowardice! Play the game, whether you lose or win. Stick it out to the end. And forget yourself by helping the other fellow. It’s only selfishness that despairs. It’s damned egotism that makes a man sit down and whine. There’s so much to do, so many to help.”
Bertram drew a deep breath. He’d been sitting down and whining. He’d wanted to quit before he’d played out the game. He’d been within a yard and a half of the coward’s white flag—the worst surrender.
Janet went on talking, wise things, foolish things, fantastic things, and ate not two éclairs, but four (just to make him marvel) and made him laugh heartily at her description of the last meeting of the “Left Wing,” which had broken up in wrath and violence because of a vote against the General Strike. One of the girls had slapped the face of one of the young men, and called him “a crawling Pacifist.” He had responded by calling her a “Blood-stained Bolshevik.” It had all been great fun.
At the sound of his laughter, Janet smiled with a whimsical look.
“You see life’s not so black, if one keeps a sense of humour!”
She proposed an evening at the theatre, after a little dinner in Soho. It was a good dinner, and a merry piece. Bertram laughed most because of Janet’s laughter.
Afterwards, when they stood together on the kerbstone hailing a taxi in St. Martin’s Lane, Janet put a hand on his arm, and said, “Where are you going now?”
“To my lonely little room.”
“No,” she said. “That’s not good for you. Is your father home?”
“He’s gone over to Belfast.”
“Well, come home with me, and help to make some hot cocoa.”
“Is that a good idea?”
He was startled by the invitation at that hour of the night.
“Doesn’t it seem good to you?”
“Wonderfully good! But what about—scandal and all that?”
She laughed gaily, so that the commissionaire outside the theatre turned to smile at her.
“Scandal? I’m immune against it. It never worries me,—especially when I’ve souls to save.”
“Are you saving mine?”
He was afraid he might lose it.
“By the scruff of its neck.”
They drove to Battersea Park, and she gave him her hand up the long flight of stone steps to her fourth floor flat, where she stopped and panted a little before fumbling in her hand-bag for her latch key.
The flat was in darkness, but she switched on the lights and the electric fire.
“Ever made cocoa?” she asked.
“Never.”
“Well, you’ve got to learn to-night.”
He learnt, and found it easy, and good when made.
She lit a cigarette, and dropped into a low chair and told him to take the cane chair opposite, and put on his pipe, if he liked.
It seemed a thousand years since he’d gone looking for a revolver in Holland Street. Yet his tragedy hadn’t been turned into comedy. His problems were the same. His future was hopeless. His book had been refused. Joyce was in Paris with Kenneth Murless. Young Digby had been killed. His mother was dead. Strange that he felt happier, almost cheerful, certainly glad of life again. Loneliness was the worst thing in the world—to him.
He no longer felt lonely. Janet’s comradeship was wonderfully good. It was splendid of her to open the doors of this little sanctuary and let in a shivering soul to its light and warmth.
She spoke of his book for the first time, and denounced the publishers as silly sheep.
“Keep it a year,” she said, “and they’ll all be clamouring for it. ‘We want the Truth about the War!’ they’ll cry. ‘We can’t get enough of it! We hunger for it!’ ”
“Meanwhile what am I to do?” asked Bertram.
“Leave it to Janet Rockingham Welford,” she said. “That girl has planted men in the strangest places, inspired them to noble and saintly deeds, led them to heights of fame and fortune. Don’t worry, for you’ve come to the right lady, the fairy godmother of the down-and-outs.”
“I believe you can do anything you want,” said Bertram.
“All but a few things.”
“What are those?”
She shook her head and smiled, and kept her secret.
So they talked until two o’clock. Then Janet put her head on one side, listening to the distant boom of Big Ben across the river.
“Mercy me! Two o’clock of a May morning and I promised to be at St. Dunstan’s at ten!”
She pointed to the sofa, and said, “If you’re sleepy, sleep. I go in there, to my virtuous couch.”
Bertram rose, and took hold of her hands and spoke with emotion.
“You’ve saved me to-night. You’ve given me courage again. You’ve been the best of comrades.”
He drew her hands towards him, and would have kissed her, but she said “Not to-night! . . . After midnight I take no risks.”
She released herself from his hands, slipped away, turned at the door with a ripple of laughter, and went into her room.
“Good night, Sir Faithful!”
She spoke those words as she shut the door, and locked it.
Bertram lay down on the sofa, and in a little while slept, and dreamed not of Janet, but of Joyce. He dreamed that he was searching for her in a wood, and could always see her ahead of him in distant glades, but could never get close to her.
XXXVII
A note came from Bernard Hall ofThe New World, asking Bertram to go and see him at his office. He greeted Bertram with that coldness which was but an outer crust concealing the flame in his heart, flame of passion against the injustice of life, its tyrannies and cruelties, its immense unconquerable stupidities.
“Take a seat, won’t you?”
Bertram took a seat in a room strewn with papers and books in careless disorder. A middle-aged woman with grey hair smoothed back in the Quaker style, came in and out with proofs, typewritten letters, cards from visitors, which the editor ofThe New Worldput down in the general litter on his desk.
“I shall be engaged for half an hour, Miss Doe. They can either wait, or call again.”
Bertram wondered if he were to have the privilege of that half hour, and what the reason might be.
Bernard Hall stared at his paper knife for a moment, and then looked at Bertram moodily.
“Janet Welford tells me you’re at a loose end, more or less.”
So it was Janet who had arranged this interview! Bertram felt embarrassed because of that and his face flushed a little.
“Considerably more than less,” he answered.
Bernard Hall smiled, icily, and then his face resumed its habitual mask of melancholy.
“Miss Welford and Christy have both spoken highly of that war book of yours. I’m not surprised you can’t get it published. People want to forget that time of madness. They’re getting a little ashamed of their own insanity. My job—and yours, I take it—is to force them to remember, so that it shan’t happen again very soon.”
“Quite so!” said Bertram.
Bertram Hall stared at his paper-knife again, as though its long blade symbolised some mystical thing.
“It’s going to happen again,” he said presently, “unless we can get some sense into the heads of the average man and woman. The politicians are just preparing the way for a new war, worse than the last—in twenty or thirty years from now. I’m inclined to think they’ll succeed. The only chance against it is the intensive education of peoples towards the international idea. We must try and link up with all active brains in Europe who are working for peace and commonsense. There are quite a number of them, but with scattered forces, powerless at the moment against the tremendous strength of reaction and militarism.”
Bertram wondered again what all this had to do with him. He was interested, but perplexed that Hall should spend half an hour on a busy afternoon to talk broodily about the state of Europe.
“The trouble is,” said Bernard Hall, “that what used to be called the fountain of Truth is walled round by the Enemy and kept under strict control. Its waters are carefully and systematically poisoned before they are allowed to flow into the open fields.”
“I don’t quite follow,” said Bertram.
“I mean the distribution of news in the European Press. There’s a conspiracy against Truth. It’s almost impossible for public opinion to form any kind of verdict based on actual facts. Newspapers nowadays use facts merely as the raw material of propaganda. They’re manufactured to suit the policy of the proprietors, or the purpose of Government. By suppression, or alteration, or over-emphasis, or the trick of false perspective, by scare head-lines and editorial comment, they’re made to convey exactly the particular idea which the newspapers desire to suggest to its readers. Who knows what is the actual state of things in Germany, whether she is on the brink of bankruptcy, or getting rich? What’s the mental state of the German people, after their tremendous defeat, their blood-bath, the downfall of their pride? Are they cherishing the hope of revenge, worshipping the old gods, or working out some way of salvation? France—what about France? Is Poincaré France? Or Paris? What are the people thinking? Do they really want to invade the Ruhr and force another war for unborn babes—as sure as Fate. . . . Do you know, Pollard?”
“No,” said Bertram.
“Well, why not find out?”
He had come to the point of the interview. He had an idea that Bertram might wander around a bit in Europe—the old battlefields, Paris—not Paris of the boulevards, but Paris in the back streets, the little shops, the student quarter, the intellectual clubs—then Germany, among its peasants, in the back blocks of Berlin, in middle-class households. Then Russia, if he liked. He could link up with Christy in Moscow, write different kind of stuff, not statistics or high politics, but the human side of things, how the people were living—and dying—what they ate, how they dressed, what was in their minds. He could pick up a bit of Russian, or find people who spoke something else. He might get a glimpse or two of the real truth.
It seemed that Bernard Hall had been impressed by Bertram’s article on “The Mind of the Men,” and one or two other things he had sent in. That was the kind of thing he wanted. No profound analysis of the European situation—it was in flux, changing from week to week—but intimate sketches of life; things seen; things heard; the common thought; wayside conversations; little flashes revealing the heart of folk.
“Does the idea appeal to you?” he asked.
It appealed to Bertram enormously. Here was his way of escape, from the depression of life without an object; from the immediate problem of earning a “living wage,” perhaps from other troubles which had borne down on him, like Joyce’s abandonment. It would give her more time to make up her mind about “one thing or the other.” It would give him more time to think things out, without desperate conclusions based on boredom, loneliness, futility, and introspective brooding. Here was objective work. He would be looking out upon the world, not inwards with nagging irritation. It would lift his mind, broaden it, re-vitalise it. It would help him to adopt Janet’s remedy for gloom and despair—interest in the other fellow’s welfare and sympathy beyond selfishness.
Bernard Hall spoke about “terms”—a share of expenses, articles paid for at a fair rate, no particular number laid down, but one a week if possible. It was good enough, enormously more, as a chance, than he could have hoped.
“When can you get off?” asked Hall.
“To-morrow morning.”
Bernard Hall smiled for the second time during the interview.
“Not such a hurry as all that.”
So it was fixed and Bertram shook hands on the understanding. As he was leaving, Nat Verney, the Miners’ leader in the House of Commons, came in and gave him a friendly nod.
“Good article of yours, Pollard, ‘The Mind of the Men,’ I agreed with every word of it.”
“How’s the Lock-out?” asked Bernard Hall, and Bertram noticed that he avoided the word ‘Strike.’
Nat Verney laughed.
“You read of my evidence before that private meeting in the House of Commons? Most of the members were bowled over by the facts I gave ’em, and admitted the strength of the men’s case, for at least a compromise. That’s how it’s going to end. A good old British compromise! The wicked thing is that it ought to have begun with that. But the owners didn’t give us a chance. Just flung an ultimatum at our heads with a ‘Take it or leave it!’ Well, we damn well left it!”
“What about the Triple Alliance?”
Verney shrugged his shoulders.
“They’ve ratted. Timid as rabbits. There won’t be any General Strike, or Social Revolution. The Government has won that trick. But they look pretty silly with their Army Reserve and Home Defence. Not a single case of violence, except among soldiers who looted a village through sheer boredom.”
A shadow seemed to pass from Bernard Hall’s face.
“I’m relieved to hear all that, Verney. I’m for evolution, not revolution. If you’d challenged the Government by ‘direct action,’ there would have been bloodshed and chaos, ending in the utter defeat of Labour.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Verney. “I’m not one of the Reds, anyhow. I’ve no patience with those who want to destroy at all costs, without a notion of how they’re going to build up out of ruin.”
Bertram left the two men talking. He had heard enough to know that the Strike, or Lock-out, or whatever one liked to call it, was going to end in compromise. After all, he’d been right in backing the men! None of those awful things had happened which had been prophesied on the one hand by the Duke of Bramshaw, Lady Ottery, and their set, on the other by the parlour Jacobins of the “Left Wing.” The miners had gone on whitewashing their cottages, sowing seeds in little front gardens. The Unemployed in London, growing in numbers, because of industry closing down, had not invaded Mayfair, except with collection boxes and banners.
The Government and the Mine-owners had admitted at least half the men’s case after an ultimatum far too brutal in its original terms. England was not going to break out in civil conflict just yet, or ever, if the men were given anything like a fair deal. English character remained the same as he had seen it in the trenches, solid, steady, without passion. It had always chosen the middle of the road.
Well, he would soon be out of England, wandering among other peoples, studying their problems and psychology. Perhaps he would get as far as Russia, and link up with Christy in Moscow! Extraordinary adventure! What was it old Christy had said, at the top of his stairs?
“If you’re not cut out for disloyalty—and it needs a special temperament—cut and run when loyalty’s over-strained. It’s the safest way . . . and Moscow’s an interesting place.”
Queer words! He hadn’t understood them at the time. Now he seemed to see a special meaning in them. They referred a little to Joyce, and a little to Janet. His loyalty to Janet was getting overstrained. He was being tempted to disloyalty, perhaps to Christy as well as to Joyce. Janet had put a spell on him. That night in her flat was not very safe for a lonely man, abandoned, temporarily or otherwise, by his wife. It was too cosy there, making cocoa over an electric fire for a girl whose laughter and wisdom and comradeship were given generously. The chance of other nights like that, and of comradeship closer and more enduring, might overstrain loyalty to breaking-point. He was human, and pretty weak at that. “Cut and run,” old Christy had said. For him there would be torture of conscience in disloyalty. “Sir Faithful,” Janet called him. At least he wasn’t cut out for the part of Lancelot.
“His honour rooted in dishonour stood,And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”
“His honour rooted in dishonour stood,And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”
“His honour rooted in dishonour stood,And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”
“His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”
He remembered words he’d spoken once to Christy. “I believe in loyalty.” He had said them sincerely then, before temptation had come, testing him under heavy strain. But there was something in him still which forbade, under pain of self-torture, easy ways of escape which many men chose in such a case as his—new love for old, a kind mistress for an unkind wife, excuse for divorce, the usual routine.
What forbade him? What did he mean by conscience? Not religious scruples, for he had no certain faith. Not rigid principles of high morality, for he was tolerant of other men’s personal arrangements in this affair of sex. But by heredity, environment, upbringing, his mind was hedged round with restraints and secret laws. If he broke them, he would break himself. He could only be disloyal to such laws within himself by being an outlaw to his own code. Joyce had gone away from him, but he must be faithful in body and soul to his pledge of loyalty to her, or suffer hideously in self-esteem.
Perhaps that was egotism again, the need of self-pride, the prick of self-conceit and not of conscience. All very difficult! Who could get down to the hidden springs, even in his own soul? One could only know the effect of their working, by experience of mental states resulting from thwarted instincts or acts opposed to instincts. One could balance the profit and loss of obedience to the inner law and disobedience. Obedience was generally more profitable, however difficult to resist the lure of disobedience. When the lure was too strong in its spell, Christy’s advice was “Cut and run!” Not heroic, but safer. . . .
When he told Janet that he owed her the best chance of his life, his voice broke a little.
“When are you starting?” she asked, and when he told her that he was crossing to France the very next day, she exclaimed, like Bernard Hall, that there was no such burning hurry. But he told her he was in a hurry to “make good,” as the Americans say, and that if he stayed a few more days in town he might have to seek escape from loneliness again in her little sanctuary, which would strain her patience, and his virtue.
That seemed to amuse her mightily, and she mocked him as a modern St. Anthony, and liked his flattery (she said) of her poor beauty.
She sent her love to Christy, if Bertram had the chance of meeting him in Moscow.
“If I don’t hear from you at least once a month,” she told him, “I’ll abandon my blinded men to rescue you from Bolshevists!”
“Then I’ll never write till you come!” he said.
They talked, mostly nonsense, until he rose to say good-bye.
“There’s a chance,” said Bertram, “that I mayn’t see you again.”
“Good Lord!” she cried, in sham alarm. “Are you going to make another war?”
“No, but there’s the usual risk from one street to another. A falling chimney-pot, a typhus bug, or some other way of accident. Anyhow, I want to tell you now that I’m eternally grateful for all you’ve done for me, in lovingkindness. Wherever I am in the world, or beyond it, I’ll never forget my dear comrade.”
She let him take her hands and put them to his lips, when she answered him.
“Sir Faithful, I’m not good at serious speech, and don’t much believe in it, except at odd times, as a concession to human weakness. But I’ve liked your company, sir, and I’m sorry we can’t be closer partners—because of fate and other things.”
“Perhaps one day—” he said, and didn’t end his sentence.
She shook her head, as though understanding his unfinished words.
“You’ll go back to Joyce. That’s best for you. She’s the Beatrice of yourDivina Commedia.”
He didn’t dispute that. It was the truth, as far as he knew it in his own heart.
“At least our friendship is eternal,” he said in a low voice.
“Absence is the ditch of forgetfulness,” she said lightly, and then quoted a French verse he had heard before, in war-time, when a French girl had sung it in an old inn at Cassel, on the way to Ypres.
“Partir, c’est mourir un peu,C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime.”
“Partir, c’est mourir un peu,C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime.”
“Partir, c’est mourir un peu,C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime.”
“Partir, c’est mourir un peu,
C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime.”
Before he went away, he asked her a question in which she understood a subtle meaning.
“About Christy, what shall I say to him?”
Janet laughed, with a touch of extra colour in her cheeks.
“Tell him he needn’t have gone as far as Moscow. The Superfluous Woman is a stay-at-home, and very happy with her blind boys.”
She came out onto the stone landing with him, outside her flat.
“It’s not midnight yet,” he said. “Will you risk it?”
“Without a qualm of conscience,” she answered, and gave him her lips to kiss.
“Good luck,mon ami!” So she called into the well of the great staircase, as he stumbled down.
“My heart’s thanks!” he answered back from a lower flight.
“ ‘Partir, c’est mourir un peu!’ ” she said in a laughing way, yet a little sad too, he thought.
He spoke the second line:
“ ‘C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime!’ ”
“ ‘C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime!’ ”
“ ‘C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime!’ ”
“ ‘C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime!’ ”
Some people came out of the flat on the second floor and tramped down the stone stairs noisily, and he had no more chance of farewell with Janet Welford.
“Cut and run,” old Christy had said. Well, he was doing so. As Joyce said, “It must be one thing or the other.”
Next morning he crossed from Folkestone to Boulogne.
XXXVIII
Folkestone-Boulogne!
It was not three hundred years ago, but only three, that those words, and that cross-Channel passage, meant the way to roads which began very pleasantly past green fields and French villages—with roofs on their cottages, and towers to their churches—through long avenues of poplars growing tall and straight, past cornfields or ploughed fields, stretching away, hedgeless, to the horizon line, until presently those roads became filled with deep holes, and the fields were no longer green, but bare of vegetation as though blasted by some curse of God, and the trees were lopped and gashed, and the cottages had become unroofed, and the churches had lost their towers, and then, at the end of the roads, no house stood, no wall of any size above a rubble of bricks and no man walked hand-high above the ground, but all life was hidden in holes and ditches, and death alone was visible, where unburied bodies lay beyond a line of sand-bags and twisted wire.
To Bertram, all that seemed, for a few moments, as he stood on the quayside at Boulogne, three hundred years ago, and then not three years ago, not three minutes, but still going on.
He was back from seven days’ leave. The purple-faced Major with the megaphone could assuredly shout out “All officers back from leave to report to the A.M.L.O.”
Eight hundred soldiers, or more, who had been as sick as dogs, would stagger down the gangway, with tin hats, rifles, gas-masks, packs, silent, grim, sullen, because they were going back to the “bloody old trenches.”
A line of cars would be drawn up for staff officers from G.H.Q. With luck one might get a lift in one of them part of the way and do some lorry-jumping for the rest of the way, instead of waiting for the night train, so cold, and slow, and crowded and dark.
A convoy of ambulances would soon arrive, with the usual crowd of badly-wounded—the fellows with Blighty wounds—and one would see their muddy boots, soles outward, when the flaps were drawn back. Surely the war was going on, for ever, and ever, and ever, as it had seemed to those who enlisted in 1914 or afterwards. . . .
No, all that was finished! It was merely a dream and a memory. Bertram saw the last representative of the British Army which had poured out here in tides—a dapper young sergeant, in khaki, doing some job with the customs officers or the French police. All else had vanished, even the A.M.L.O. with his megaphone!
With this realisation, Bertram felt as though he were the sole survivor of the war, the only man left alive from that great massacre. None of those people around him had had anything to do with it. In the smoking-carriage where he took a corner seat, were two prosperous-looking Jews with big cigars, two American business men, too old to have been in the last push, an elderly Frenchman, who boughtLe Matinand theCri de Paris.
Along the corridor, and in other carriages were groups of people going to Paris, or beyond Paris to other parts of Europe, where the sun was shining and life “gay.” They were “smart” people, still able to afford the pleasures of life, in spite of the downfall of foreign markets, stagnant trade, unemployment, high taxes. They had forgotten the war and its agonies.
No one in his carriage bothered to look out of the window as they neared Amiens, where one could still see on a far hillside a line of earthworks, which had been thrown up hurriedly as a last line of defence after the Germans had broken through on March 21st and come very close to the old city—as close as Villers Bretonneux on the high ground outside.
Bertram did not travel as far as Paris, though he was tempted to go as far, because Joyce was there. It was at Amiens that he left the train, as the beginning of his wanderings through the old places of war, to find out what the people there were thinking, how they were living, according to Bernard Hall’s instructions.
A crowd of ghosts walked with him up the rue des Trois Cailloux—the Street of the Three Pebbles. They were the Comrades of the Great War, who had crowded that street when great battles were being fought, year after year, in the fields of the Somme. He remembered them mostly on rainy days. It seemed always to be raining in Amiens, in war time. The officers wore trench-coats plastered with mud and chalk. The men staggered under their packs. The rain beat down on their tin hats.
Frenchpoilus—Fusiliers Marins, Chasseurs, infantry of the line, Zouaves, sloped up and down, staring into the shops, drinkingporto blancand fouler liquids in little drinking dens strictly against the law.
English Tommies walked with little French girls down the narrow side streets, went with them into dark old houses up cut-throat alleys.
Australian soldiers slouched around with hard, lean, leathery faces, looking for trouble and often finding it.
Crowds of Jocks with muddy knees, wet kilts, tin hats, slanted over Harry Lauder faces, wandered about in a grim mirthless way.
Staff officers motored into the town from Army Headquarters, or Corps, or Division.
Cavalry officers rode in and put their horses in the back yard of the Hotel du Rhin.
Officers of every battalion of the British Army surged along the narrow street—the Street of the Three Pebbles. They were down from the line, while their Division was in reserve, or were passing through on their way to the line. Here, in Amiens, were shops, pretty women, restaurants, cock-tail bars, civilian people, children, roofed houses,—the last outpost of civilised life this side of the filthy fields, and lice, and shell-fire, and sudden death.
Their ghosts walked with Bertram now. He stood at the corner of the rue Amiral Courbet. It was there that he had stood one night, talking to a French girl. It was very dark, for there was no lamp allowed after daylight. She flashed a pocket lamp in his face, and revealed her own, white, with red lips, and black laughing eyes—a pretty witch for a young man down from a battlefield for one night of life.
“Comment ça va, mon chou? La vie est triste, n’cst-ce pas? Il n’y a qu’une consolation, un seul moyen d’oubli. Un peu de rire, un peu d’amour! Qu’est-ce-que tu en penses? Veux-tu?”
A sad life, she said, and only one consolation, one way of forgetfulness. A little laughter, a little love. What did he think about it?
He’d thought a lot about it. He was twenty, then, in 1916. A boy, but doing a man’s job, and with no life insurance for even another week, or another day, up there, beyond Amiens, this side of Contalmaison still in German hands. He agreed with this girl who had come up to him out of the darkness. A little laughter, a little love. Worth having before the next attack. Worth grabbing at on a rainy night in war-time, and perhaps the very last night on earth. Who could tell? Yet something had made him refuse the offer, some fear, or law, or mental prohibition. His mother had whispered a warning to him about “bad women.” His two sisters, Dorothy and Susan, adored him in those days, believed him spotless. He had been brought up in a certain code, which had become part of him, inescapable without stricken conscience, despite the smashing of mental and moral foundations by the earthquake of war.
“Rien à faire!” he had told the girl, not roughly, poor kid, but decidedly. Nothing doing.
“Mais oui, petit officier!”
She had grabbed his belt, pulled him towards her, kissed his face, wet in the rain, with her wet lips.
It was here, at this very corner, in July of 1916!
Bertram walked down the next turning to the right, leading to the Cathedral. On the other side was a gap in a row of houses newly roofed. It was boarded round. There, in that gap, had been “Charley’s Bar,” the great cock-tail resort of thousands of young officers who drank quickly because there might not be much time between them and death.
Some of them were still alive, but not many of those who fought in the Somme battles. Izzard was one of them still alive, that fellow in the funny shop at Ottery. He had drunk like a fish in this place before it was knocked to bits by an air bomb in that March of ’18. Bertram had drunk with him, eggnogs, and champagne cock-tails. They had both been thoroughly “blind” on more than one afternoon, and slept themselves sober in the Hotel du Rhin before dining at the Godebert in the rue des Jacobins, where Izzard and he had flirted outrageously with the pretty Marguérite, but without much success as she was coveted by Staff officers, and Brigadiers, and even a Major-General.
It was to the Hotel du Rhin that Bertram now went, still walking with ghosts and ancient memories.
The last time he had been there its stairs and passages were strewn with broken glass, and with several other officers he had sat in a cellar listening to houses falling with tremendous crashes, while a fleet of Gothas overhead played merry hell all through a night which was the blackest in the war.
His machine-gun company had been cut to bits outside Villers Bretonneux. Christy had been wounded in the lung and taken away by the stretcher-bearers. The Germans had made a clean break through and there was very little up the road to bar their way to Amiens. Bertram had been ordered to join up with another crowd for a last stand somewhere near Boves. The crowd had gone missing, it was impossible to search for them at night, and the air-raid over Amiens was the worst thing he’d seen in that way.
It had begun at seven-thirty in the evening, with two explosions outside the windows, smashing them, and filling the dancing-room with splinters. The lady manager was there, doing accounts with a young staff officer. She had yellow hair, and two bright spots of colour on her cheeks, and wonderful courage. Her face was pale beneath the bright spots of colour, but that was her only sign of fear. Joseph, the waiter with the shrill voice and high-pitched laugh, disappeared in the direction of the cellar. The other waiter—what was his name?—an old fellow, with side-whiskers, wandered about cursing thesales Boches.
A frightful and fantastic night, with dead men and dead horses in the street outside. Now like a dream! Since then, Amiens had tidied up its streets, re-built many of its houses—though not the great gap between the rue des Trois Cailloux and the rue des Jacobins.
An orchestra was playing in the Hotel du Rhin. American tourists and French commercial travellers were feeding in the room where Bertram had sat down on that night of tragedy, with three mayors who had lost their towns, and officers who had lost their Divisions, wondering how long it would be before the head of a German column marched into Amiens. An orchestra fiddling jazz tunes to American tourists!
But there, miracle of miracles, was the lady manager with the yellow hair, and Joseph, the shrill-voiced waiter, and the old boy with the side whiskers! Bertram went up to the lady manager, and greeted her with emotion, as one whom he had known in the wonderful years, and as one who remembered.
“Still here, Madame! You remember me, perhaps? That night of the air-raid, and other nights!”
She shook hands with him, and pretended to remember his face, though thousands of young officers had passed through this hotel in the years of war.
“What memories, monsieur! Unforgettable to us, though others have forgotten!”
“Amiens is almost restored,” he said.
“There’s still much to be done.”
“How strange it must be for you, now that there are no British soldiers in France! This hotel used to be stuffed with officers of ours.”
“We get tourists to see the battlefields. English officers come up like you, and say ‘Do you remember me, madame?’ Sometimes I’m tempted to say, ‘Do you remember the agony of France in those years of war?’ ”
“Why that, Madame? We cannot forget.”
She shrugged her shoulders and smiled bitterly.
“Your Lloyd George forgets. He makes friends with the Germans. He wishes to let them off their punishment. He will let them get strong again, so that one day they will come back and crush us.”
Bertram laughed.
“He wants peace in Europe. He wants to prevent another war. Anyhow, England doesn’t forget the heroism of France nor her sufferings.”
“C’est bien!”
She bent to her table, and added up a column of figures.
In the yard an American tourist enquired how long it would take to drive to Château Thierry.
That night Bertram met another woman whom he had known in Amiens in the years of war. It was the chambermaid, and she remembered him.
“Certainly you were one of the young officers who used to stay here in the war?”
He shook hands with her, and said, “I’m the officer whose socks you mended once. You told me about your lover, Jean, who was killed at Verdun. We talked long that night.”
Yes, she remembered him, his very face, those socks she had mended, that talk.
“Tiens! Quel plaisir!”
She was glad to find that he was still alive. A middle-aged woman of plain features, she had not been much of a temptation to young officers down from the line. Yet some of them, deprived of womanhood, for months on end, had made amorous advances even to her, which she had repulsed with loud laughter, in a heavy-handed way. She had mothered some of the younger men, in a peasant way, and had given them good advice about the girls who lured them in the streets, with their flash lamps, like that one at the corner of the rue Amiral Courbet. Her lover, Jean, a butcher, had been killed at Verdun, and she had wept a little in Bertram’s room, and then laughed, and said she supposed men were made to be killed that way, like sheep to be eaten. “C’est la vie.” It was life and war, which would last as long as the Germans were part of the human race.
Now she leaned on her broom, talking to Bertram about the changes since the war. Prices were high. It was hard for poor people to live. The bourgeoisie were making plenty of money, but the Government was ruined, she was told. The Germans evaded their payments. Anyhow, no German gold came to the people who were trying to build up their cottages again in the battlefields. She had a cousin at Lens. A mother of six. They had no water, no gas, no stone for building, no money for reconstruction. Three years after war they were still miserable. Victory had not brought happiness to France, nor safety. The Boches would come back again one day. It would begin all over again. A pity they weren’t all killed when the French and English had the chance! Now the English hated the French, and loved the Germans, for some reason!
“What makes you think that?” asked Bertram.
“It is true, is it not?” asked this woman, Jeanne, quite simply.
She was surprised, and incredulous, when he told her that she was mistaken, and that the English loved France still, and desired to help her.
“What gives you the idea that England hates France?”
She said she readLe Matin, which told her so. It was the same in theJournal d’Amiens. Everybody spoke about it—especiallyles garçons, who were always talking politics. She didn’t understand these things, but she picked up her news from the others. It was public opinion. No one could go against public opinion.C’est formidable, l’opinion publique!