London had a lowering influence at this time on Bertram Pollard, and
filled him with such intensity of gloom that he began to hate the place
which as a boy he had loved with romantic sentiment as the city of
endless adventure where life’s drama was rich and full.
He remembered but vaguely the tall brick house in Merrion Square,
Dublin, where he had lived in his early boyhood, until his father had
brought all the family to England. From their house in Sloane Street,
during holidays from St. Paul’s School, he had gone exploring the mean
streets and slum quarters of London, lounging about the bookshops in the
Charing Cross Road, peering into old churches, strolling around the
markets in Covent Garden and Smithfield, listening to the cheap-jacks in
Leather Lane, venturing into the Italian quarter at Hatton Garden with a
sense of adventure, going as far afield as the London docks and the back
streets of Stepney and Bermondsey, where he looked out for types of men
who belonged to the novels of Jacobs and Conrad.
Then, in his first year at Oxford, he’d come down to London for “binges”
on boat-race night, when there were wild rags at the music halls and
tumultuous encounters of undergraduates in Piccadilly Circus, rather
drunken, but joyous, dinners in Soho restaurants.
There had been no second year for him at Oxford, because of the war
which changed everything, but as a machine-gun officer London still
pulled at his heart-strings with a tremendous tug, and made him
desperate for the seven days’ leave which came so rarely.
“Good-bye, Piccadilly, good-bye, Leicester Square—” The silly old words
yelled by crowds of men in khaki going to the mud and fire of Flanders
for the first time—the second-timers didn’t sing it so lustily, unless
they had been drinking—always stirred his old sentiment for London. He
repeated the words as he lay in his dug-out at night, twelve hundred
yards from the Boche line out from Mailly Mailly on the Somme—his first
pitch—and old Christy, who lay beside him chaffed him because more than
once he spoke the word “London” in his sleep.
London! He used to whisper that word with a kind of ecstasy when he came
out of Charing Cross station from the boat train which brought swarms of
leave men in those old days of darkness and air-raids and mass emotion.
The taxi drive through Piccadilly to his father’s house was a journey of
enchantment. Back again! London! What luck! Because it might be for the
last time, every minute of it was precious, every dimly lighted lamp was
a beacon of delight; the smell of the streets, the rushing swirl of
taxis, the beat of rain on the empurpled pavements, the damp and fog of
a winter’s night, the wet crowds outside the theatres, the dear damned
dismalness of London, drugged him, made his senses drunk with gladness.
The old town had been good in those days. Now when he went out into its
streets, while Joyce was ill, he found no comfort in it. Perhaps that
was his fault. Perhaps it was he that had changed, not London. . . . It
was the world that had changed, and all men in it, and England that had
seemed unchanging. As Bertram wandered about the streets, diving down
some of the old highways, walking into the outer suburbs to tire out a
brain that did not sleep enough at nights, he found that pessimism
closed about him. He couldn’t avoid it, for its gloom was in every face
he passed, on every newspaper placard, in every group of men at every
street corner, in long processions of out-of-works whom he met in mean
streets.
These processions of unemployed men, all ex-service, hurt him horribly.
They carried banners with the proclamation, “We want Work, not Charity.”
They were men whom he’d seen marching up the Albert-Bapaume road and the
Arras-Lens road, and the Ypres-Menin road, when England and the world
had needed them. They were the heroes who were fighting in a war to end
war, the boys in the trenches for whom nothing was too good. Now they
were shabby and down at heel, some of them in the old khaki with buttons
and shoulder-straps torn off, all of them downcast and wretched-looking.
“Not charity!” they said, but they had scouts out, shaking collecting
boxes in the faces of the passers-by, in an aggressive, almost hostile
way.
Bertram could never pass one of these boxes without putting a few
coppers inside, until one day he remembered that it was his wife’s
money, not his own, that he was giving away. The thought made him flush
in the street, and walk on with a quicker, restless pace as far as Upper
Tooting. It was absurd for him to give to the unemployed. He was one of
them, with less chance of work.
At many street corners there were groups of seedy-looking men of all
ages, lounging aimlessly outside buildings on which the words “Labour
Exchange” were painted. Bertram had only a vague idea about the service
done by a Labour Exchange. The fantastic thought came to him that it
would be a good idea to put his own name down for any job that might
suit a man like himself, pretty good at handling men, or at any kind of
organising work. That was a good word, “organising”—and he would use it
to the fellow who ran the Labour Exchange.
It was in High Street, Marylebone, and he said “Sorry,” as he elbowed a
group of men hanging round the swing doors. One of them, after a glance
at him, pulled himself up, as in the old days of soldiering, when an
officer passed, but another lad snarled at him, and said, “No officer
swank now. We’ve finished with that,” and the sentiment seemed to please
the crowd, as Bertram judged by the laugh that followed.
He was kept waiting in a bare room without chairs, while a boy scout
took one of his old cards, “Major Pollard, D.S.O., M.C.,” into an inner
room.
A tall man, dressed in pre-war clothes which had been smart when new and
still had style, though frayed about the cuffs and button-holes, stood
with his back to the fireplace, and nodded to Bertram when he came in.
“Bloody weather!” he said.
“Not good,” said Bertram.
“About as good as our delightful government!” said the man, ex-officer
certainly, gentleman undoubtedly. He twisted up a black, and obviously
dyed, moustache, with a fierce gesture.
“What’s the government been doing now?” asked Bertram, by way of making
himself civil.
“Still continuing to destroy the Empire, that’s all,” was the answer,
delivered with a quiet ferocity. “Look at India, seething with revolt
and delivered over to a Jewish conspiracy. The only man who dealt with
things with a firm hand, condemned, dismissed, and disgraced. Look at
Ireland. Anarchy and murder! What’s the Government doing there?
Surrendering to traitors who ought to be shot like dogs. Look at
England—public money being poured out like water, Government offices
squandering millions, the Government cringing to Trade-Unionists and
Bolsheviks. Look at Germany! By God, sir, Germany will win the war yet!
The Hidden Hand is still at work among our politicians. Where are the
fruits of victory? The Government is allowing the Hun to escape the
price of defeat. It’s a damned conspiracy, sir!”
“It’s all very difficult,” said Bertram.
He had heard this very conversation before. Almost in the same words his
own father had made a grand indictment of the Government and all its
works. Queer that this shabby fellow, “down on his luck,” as the men
used to say, should be talking in the same strain as his high and dry
reactionary father, whose sentiments when repeated by Bertram to Christy
made that son of the people pour forth ironical blasphemies.
His new acquaintance began to tell of his own woes. After honourable
service to his country, he had been reduced to living in a common
lodging-house, seeking work in a Labour Exchange. A horrible
humiliation!
“Why?” asked Bertram. “I take it that a Labour Exchange is to exchange
labour? A pretty useful thing.”
The man with a dyed moustache stared at him blankly.
“I hope you don’t think I’m a damned labourer?” he asked, aggressively.
“I wish I were!” said Bertram. “Anything rather than lounging.”
He was saved further argument by the boy scout, who called his name and
opened the inner door.
The Labour Exchange secretary rose as he entered the office, and said,
“Take a seat, won’t you, Major?”
Bertram saw that he was in the presence of a man about his own age,
twenty-five, and a pleasant-looking fellow, typical of the “temporary
officers” who had poured out in their thousands to France.
“Anything I can do for you, sir?” said the secretary, offering a box of
cheap Virginia cigarettes.
Bertram explained that he was looking out for a good job of any kind,
and was disconcerted when the Labour Exchange man laughed, dropped the
“sir” hurriedly, and said, “No good coming here, old man! Surely you’re
not so hard put to it as all that?”
“That’s just what I am,” said Bertram, “devilish hard put to it.”
“What can you do?”
Bertram mentioned the blessed word “organising,” but again the secretary
smiled and shook his head. Then he asked a series of questions, like a
machine-gun opening rapid fire.
“Do you write a decent hand? No? Can you type? No? Any good at figures?
No? Shorthand? No? Knowledge of engineering? book-keeping,
surveying,—any business, trade, or profession? No?”
“I was at St. Paul’s School,” said Bertram, “and one year at Oxford. I’m
a jolly good gunner, and I was brought up as a gentleman. Hasn’t England
any place for my sort?”
He was resentful of the smiling ironical look of the man interrogating
him.
“Not any kind of place at all, old man”—Bertram wished he wouldn’t “old
man” him so much—“unless you have a social pull. That’s still some good
for jobs in Government offices and that kind of thing, but it’s getting
less valuable as time goes on. Without it, fellows like you—and
me—haven’t a dog’s chance. How do you think I got this job when I
became demobbed?”
“Haven’t an idea,” said Bertram.
“Why, my pater is Chief Clerk of Marylebone. Social pull, my boy!
Nothing else. There are thousands of young officers, ex-airmen,
ex-everything, who’ll have to emigrate, or starve to death. There’s no
alternative. . . . Well, there’s one!”
“What’s that?”
“Join the Auxiliary Force in Ireland. ‘Black and Tans,’ as they call
them. Does the idea appeal to you?”
“Not in the least,” said Bertram.
The Labour Exchange secretary laughed, and touched his bell for the boy
scout.
“I don’t blame you neither. A rotten game! Good day and good luck.”
Bertram had winced over that “neither.” He had been taught to speak
pretty well, but though he would not say “I don’t blame you neither,” he
hadn’t learnt enough, it seemed, either at St. Paul’s or Balliol, to get
any kind of job in England.
“Not without a social pull,” said the Labour Exchange fellow. As a
matter of fact, he had a social pull. His father was Michael Pollard,
K.C., M.P.—with a considerable pull on the Tory crowd. His
father-in-law was the Earl of Ottery, related by cousinship to most of
the old blood in England. His brother-in-law, Alban, was in the Foreign
Office with Kenneth Murless and other friends of Joyce, his wife. But
none of them had offered him anything, or suggested anything, or gone a
yard out of the way to help him.
Joyce’s people had no use for him. He didn’t belong to their caste,
though they tolerated him coldly, for Joyce’s sake. He didn’t speak
their language, as it were. He didn’t look at things from their point of
view. He was an “outsider.” How could he bring himself to ask them for a
job? The supercilious Alban, for instance? He could not even go to his
own father, with whom he was hardly on speaking terms, because of a
hopeless divergence of views on the subject of Ireland. “Join the
Black-and-Tans, like Digby,” would be his father’s most genial
suggestion, just like this secretary of the Labour Exchange.
Yet for Joyce’s sake he would have to humble himself and ask some of his
exalted relatives to put him in charge of some department for wasting
the tax-payer’s money. A financial crisis was bearing down on him with
the enormous and imminent pressure of the Germans in March of 1918
against the British line. He had come to the end of the money he had put
by out of his pay during the war—the very last pound of it. Henceforth
it was Joyce who would do the paying until he grabbed at a job, or
begged for one.
“I’m getting dishonest,” thought Bertram, as he walked through High
Street, Marylebone, observing the mournful look of the people he passed,
and turning his eyes away from a blinded man playing a piano organ.
“Old Christy’s intensive education in idealism is wearing off. Lord, if
only I could do something worth doing—lift the world a little out of
its mess—make it safer for the kids coming along—prevent more blinded
men playing piano organs as payment for heroism! . . . Was it worth
while, their sacrifice?”
The question that came into his brain seemed to him like a kind of
blasphemy—a treachery to his own code, and to all the crowd who had
fought for England. If that sacrifice had not been worth while, and so
many men had died for false beliefs and hopes, then nothing in the world
was right, and all that men were taught in faith was just a lie. Christy
had said it _was_ a lie, the whole make-up of civilisation, the code of
his sort of people, patriotism itself. They had argued over that, almost
savagely, and he had told Christy to shut up or clear out.
Yet how explain those newspaper placards which stared him in the face
from newspaper shops in the Marylebone Road?
More Unemployed Riots.
Crime Wave Spreads.
No Houses for Heroes.
Is Europe Doomed?
Reprisals in Ireland.
France Insults England.
Not easy to keep cheerful, to retain a fair and sturdy optimism, to see
the blessing of the victory, even after the slaughter of the world’s
best youth, when those facts were on the placards, between High Street,
Marylebone and the lower end of Baker Street!
Yet Bertram Pollard, ex-officer and unemployed, did not despair. He felt
something “inside him,” as he used to say in his childhood, which
promised some kind of revelation of all this mystery. He seemed to be
waiting for a light that would make things clear to him in his own life,
and in life. He was certain, beneath his deep uncertainty, that he would
find some job to do, some job worth doing. God, or the great powers, or
his own instincts, would give him a chance, a new impulse, some decent
object in life. After all, he was only twenty-five, with health and
strength and desire to find the right place.
Impossible that he should be useless and unused!