Joyce was perplexing to Bertram after that midnight scene with Susan and
Dennis. He had expected a painful quarrel on the subject, a denunciation
by Joyce of his behaviour, a defence on his part, an argument beginning
with generalities and ending with personalities, always dangerous
between a young husband and wife, both inclined to passionate temper.
But Joyce declined to discuss the matter. She had stayed late in bed
next day, and had come down to luncheon with her wrist bound up. He did
not understand the cause of that bandage until he enquired and received
the answer:
“You nearly broke my wrist over the telephone last night. Perhaps you’re
not aware of the violence you used.”
No, he was unaware of it, and made abject apology, horribly ashamed that
he should have used physical force to his wife. It was a coster’s way of
argument.
“Joyce! I’m immensely sorry and ashamed. But you see my difficulty last
night. I had given my word—”
“I refuse to discuss the affair,” said Joyce. “You know my views. If you
say another word about it I’ll leave the house.”
That was that. She was not even curious to know whether O’Brien had
spent the night in Bertram’s study. Perhaps she had enquired from the
maids and had satisfied herself on that point. Yet Bertram was certain
that the incident was not regarded as trivial in her mind, and that it
had caused something like estrangement between them. She went her own
way, deliberately shutting him out of her plans, or, at least, not
consulting him, nor giving him a chance of joining her. She was rarely
at home to luncheon during the few weeks that followed Susan’s visit,
and generally returned only in time to dress for dinner. Even then he
had no chance of private conversation, for she invited friends to dine
night after night—was it with the deliberate intention of avoiding
intimate contact with him?—and afterwards filled her drawing-room with
a miscellaneous crowd, or went out with a party to the theatre or the
dancing clubs.
Bertram was lonely whether she stayed at home or not. He was beginning
to feel lonely in body and soul. Joyce answered him when he spoke to
her, but no more than that. She was quite gay at times—nearly
always—but it was not into his eyes that she laughed.
Kenneth Murless used the house as his own, “dropped in” for dinner, or
after dinner, always civil to Bertram, never disconcerted by Bertram’s
sulky manner, always bright and paradoxical, and entertaining to
everybody but Joyce’s husband, who hated him—for no reason but that
Joyce liked him.
There were other men whom Joyce liked, and who liked to be liked by
Joyce. The Reverend Peter Fynde, who came from the church round the
corner, was what Bertram called a “parlour cat,” and came purring round
to tea, or at nine-thirty, after “Evensong,” with gossipy anecdotes
about Lady This and Lady That, and soulful sayings about the “Healing
Power of Faith,” the “Beauty of the Unattainable,” and communication
with the “Dear Remembered Dead.” At dinner, when the ladies had left the
table, he was inclined to tell somewhat Rabelaisian stories, drawn from
his experience as an army chaplain. “A human fellow,” was the general
verdict about him, “a perfect dear” by the women. Bertram thought him a
perfect ass, but did not tell them so.
He had nothing in common with the people who gathered round Joyce. They
irritated him. Listening to their conversation, he found their point of
view “poisonous,” if not idiotic. It was at least—and he wanted to be
fair—hopelessly reactionary. They still had a habit of talking about
the people of England as “the mob” or “the masses,” and they spoke about
“Labour” as if it were a sinister, evil, destructive monster, and not a
class of men, quite human, for the most part rather decent, many of them
the real heroes of the war—keen to earn a living wage, desperately
anxious not to be forced back to the edge of the poverty line, or over
the edge. Millions of Bill Huggetts, and better men than Bill—rather
neurotic, always a “grouser”—but not out for blood and terror, or
anything beyond food and shelter for a family left on his hands by a
poor mad wife.
Labour? Bertram had been going about London getting into touch with some
of the men of his old company—“Comrades of the Great War,” as they
called themselves, in barely furnished clubs where they gathered at
night, because of their craving for the comradeship which had been the
best thing in war. They were still restless and unsettled. Some of them
were still hardly better than “shell-shocks.” Their minds were groping
towards some solution of their present distress—unemployment, high
prices, a sense of broken faith with them by the nation they had served.
Some of them talked glibly, as Huggett had said, about Bolshevism and
Communism. The frightful experiment in Russia—what was the truth of
it?—held some lure for them. There were some who believed “it would do
London a bit o’ good.”
Bertram didn’t believe there was much of a real revolutionary spirit
among them. They were sick of war and bloodshed, and the “crime wave,”
as the newspapers called it, was only the work of a small minority of
young men unhinged by the cheapness of life in war, and by war’s
brutality. Bertram marvelled rather at the patience, the essential
patriotism, the commonsense of the majority of men he met about. Any
hankering after the Russian way of revolution was but a vague vision of
some system of society which would give men greater equality of luck,
and a sense of security.
That was not the opinion of the people in Joyce’s drawing-room. They
confessed to fear about the future. It was, perhaps, the presence of two
Russian girls of the old régime, and some of the men they brought with
them of their own caste and country, which suggested the possibility of
revolution in England. They were never tired of telling tales of
Bolshevik atrocities, none of them from first-hand evidence, but likely
enough, and dreadful in detail. The elder of them, the Countess
Gradiva—Lydia, as Joyce called her—had set up a hat shop in Mount
Street, Mayfair, where Joyce had met her and made friends. The
younger—Paula—played the violin, wonderfully, at recitals and
concerts. They were both tall, ugly, elegant girls, speaking half a
dozen languages with equal facility and passionate gesture.
“Why doesn’t England send an army and rescue my poor country from its
tyrants?” asked Lydia one night of Bertram. “I cannot understand your
English policy, your dreadful inactivity.”
Bertram had heard many remarks of the same kind by the Russian girls.
They enraged him.
“Why don’t your Russian men do a bit of their own fighting? Why do they
lounge about the capitals of Europe, and expect other people to liberate
Russia and restore Czardom, and get back their wealth?”
“You’re a Bolshevik, then?” asked Countess Gradiva, staring at him with
black, challenging eyes.
“Not in the least,” said Bertram. “But I’m dead against these fatal
expeditions in which England has poured out gold she can ill
afford—with what result? More bloodshed in Russia. Another disastrous
retreat of incompetent generals, more suffering and horror, and
harryings of poor Russian peasants. That’s how it seems to me. I may be
wrong.”
The Countess Gradiva called out across the drawing-room, which was
crowded with Joyce’s friends. She had a high, harsh way of speaking, and
a shrill laugh.
“My dear Lady Joyce! Your husband is a naughty bad Bolshevik! He’s
saying the most dreadful things, _ma chérie_!”
“He makes a habit of it,” answered Joyce.
Bertram flushed angrily at her retort, though Joyce had spoken with a
smile. He knew by the tone of her voice that she intended to hurt him,
and it hurt.
“I tell the truth, occasionally, and that’s dreadful, I admit,” he said
to Lydia Gradiva.
“Not the truth about Russia, you wicked man. You do not know our poor
Russia!”
“I would go even as far as Russia, to get the truth,” said Bertram.
“Does anybody know?”
“You mean I lie to you?”
“There are many lies about,” said Bertram, “but I’m not referring to
you, especially.”
She whipped his hand with the end of a long necklace of amber beads, so
that they stung him. Then she called him a revolutionary monster, a
Jacobin.
“I can see you leading the English mob and hoisting the Red Flag over
the House of Commons!”
The English “mob!” There it was again. Always the talk came round to the
chance of an English revolution. Those people were afraid—even of
England!
It was General Bellasis who revealed a new cause of fear which took hold
of the imagination of London society at this time. Bellasis was one of
the men who liked to be liked by Joyce. He was still on active
service—in Ireland—but seemed to spend his time travelling between
Dublin and Whitehall, and always came to Holland Street with flowers for
Joyce, theatre tickets for Joyce, and homage in his eyes. He looked more
gallant than any hero could be—at all times—in his uniform with many
decorations—a tall, lean fellow, with a hard, clean cut face, blue,
sailor-looking eyes, and an empty sleeve where his left arm used to be.
But he confessed that he was suffering from blue funk (he exaggerated
his symptoms) because of an incident that had happened to him in St.
James’s Street, outside the club, that very afternoon. A
wretched-looking fellow had come up to him, offering to sell some
bootlaces. “Thanks, no,” said Bellasis. The man had followed him,
whining something about a wife and children, and thrusting the bootlaces
under his nose. “I’ve said I don’t want ’em,” said Bellasis, as he
related. “Get off with you, my man.” He had not spoken roughly, though
he disapproved of begging, especially when every out-of-work was getting
a Government dole. But then the man had pulled something out of his
pocket and given it to Bellasis, saying, “Well, take that for luck!”
Bellasis supposed the company could guess what it was.
Kenneth Murless guessed right, first time.
“The silver slipper!”
“Yes,” said General Bellasis, “the silver slipper! And I can tell you, I
don’t like it!”
The Reverend Peter Fynde claimed that he had been given one at Ranelagh,
three weeks before. Exactly in the same way. He had refused an
importunate beggar and received the slipper “for luck.”
Kenneth Murless took precedence of Fynde, in point of time. It was two
months at least since he had been given the slipper. That was outside
the Carlton. A typical incident. A paper boy had tried to make him buy
his last copy of _The Pall Mall Gazette_. Murless had seen it already,
read every line of it. The boy had persisted until Murless had told him
to run away or he would get a box on the ears. “Take this for luck!”
said the boy. So he had the sign of the slipper.
“Has everybody gone mad?” asked Bertram. “The silver slipper! The sign
of the slipper! What on earth are you all talking about?”
It was Murless who explained, in his best diplomatic style, after
expressing surprise that Bertram should not have heard of the sinister
thing. It appeared that in the time of the French Revolution, secret
agents of the Free masons and Jacobin clubs presented silver slippers to
people whom they particularly disliked. It was not a good thing to get
one. Most of those who did perished on the guillotine. “_C’est
l’histoire qui se répète, mon vieux!_” Kenneth Murless spoke lightly,
with a smile, but there was a hint of fear in his voice, and in the room
silence for a moment, after he had spoken.
Bertram laughed loudly and harshly.
“Of all the old wives’ tales! And you highly educated and extremely
modern people believe such stuff as that!”
Joyce lit a cigarette, and puffed out a little wreath of smoke,
daintily.
“I hate to tell you I’ve had the silver slipper! But if the worst comes
to the worst, I hope I’ll go scornfully to death!”
Bertram looked at her, and though he did not believe the ridiculous
explanation of the silver slipper, he could not resist a tribute of
admiration in his eyes. Joyce had more pluck than any man in the crowd.
If the impossible happened, she would go “scornfully to death!” With
patrician pride. She read his thoughts, and a wave of colour rose to her
forehead, and for a moment her eyes softened to him. Then she turned
away, with a word about the boredom of the subject.
“Why not some Ouija board?” she asked. “Peter, you’re a wonder with the
spirit world!”
It was the Reverend Peter Fynde who took the centre of the room. He
hoped that if they experimented a little it would be with reverence. He
deprecated the frivolous way in which some people approached the world
beyond the veil, as so many were doing it in society now.
Bertram groaned.
“I call it blasphemy. To me, there’s something horrible and indecent in
this attempt to ‘call up’ the dead.”
“I don’t agree with you,” said Joyce. “The other day we were in touch
with Hal and Dudy. They spoke as they used to—the old home slang. One
could not doubt.”
“It was all being drawn from your subconscious mind, Joyce. But I object
to the whole business. It’s unhealthy. It’s rotten and decadent.”
“You needn’t stay,” said Joyce.
Bertram did not stay. After his altercation with the Reverend Peter, he
went out to see some of his own friends, whose ideas he liked better
than those of Joyce’s crowd, whose point of view was more like his own
than Joyce’s.
Alas, for that! Alas, for many things. How was it going to work out
between him and Joyce? Were they drifting apart? Were they going to add
one more to all those broken marriages which had become an epidemic in
English life, after the War? No, by God, not that! It was only the
inevitable strain of early marriage. They would have to readjust
themselves a little. More patience on his side. More understanding on
hers. Tolerance. Give and take. Politics barred. Religion barred. A
sense of humour. Success. Yes, if his book succeeded and he could
establish a literary career, paying his Scot and lot, it would make a
deal of difference. Joyce would be proud of him, and the book would help
her to understand his point of view. Thank Heaven for the book! It kept
him busy. It gave him an object in life. It was the expression of the
truth that was in him. It was a cure for loneliness. . . . Oh, the curse
of loneliness!