That lady, Janet,—Janet Rockingham Welford, as her name was given in
full on the title pages of several novels and below the columns of
articles in _The New World_—was an old friend of Bertram’s. Not old
herself, for she was on the vital side of thirty, but they had played
together and pulled each other’s hair at a kindergarten in the Cromwell
Road, read fairy tales together under the trees in Kensington Gardens,
and, years later, had met each other at “parties” in the wonderful
remote days before the War—was it a thousand years ago, or in another
life. After that they had not met until, surprisingly, one night, in
Christy’s rooms.
While Bertram had been in the trenches, Janet had been at Boulogne, with
more buttons to her uniform than Bertram could boast, driving ambulances
and maimed men from the railway to the “clearing stations,” after a wild
three months with a convoy in Belgium, when she was often under fire in
Dixmude and Pervyse, more reckless of danger than the Belgian officers
and English stretcher-bearers.
Now she was living in a little flat in Overstrand Mansions, Battersea
Park, writing audacious fiction (Bertram blushed when reading it),
pacifist articles (rather too bitter!), and occasional verse—very
mystical—for evening newspapers. She also found time to play the
companion and guide to blinded soldiers in Regent’s Park, to act as
secretary of a Socialist club, to speak at Labour meetings, to give
evenings at home to young men and women of advanced views, and to call
on Christy for inspiration, advice, and intellectual refreshment.
She was what she called “decidedly Left but not extreme.” Bertram, after
some conversational enquiries and experiences, found her so extreme that
he could see no further way “Left” than instant and bloody onslaught
against established order. Her political, social and moral views made
him feel that his hair was rising on his scalp. She frightened him. She
also attracted him by an irresistible gaiety and audacity—by an
overflowing good nature and joy of life.
The first time he’d met her in Christy’s rooms, she had come in like a
gust of south wind, calling Christy absurd, newly-invented names because
he had failed to come to one of her “receptions.”
“You reptilian, hypersensitive Bohunk! You self-absorbed,
psychoanalytical Pumpdoodlum!”
Then she had seen Bertram, with an instant recognition met by a
slow-dawning remembrance in his mind. Those big, brown eyes, that short,
straight nose, that whimsical, biggish mouth—in what former life had he
seen this girl, kissed her, if he remembered well, pulled that mass of
coiled hair, not coiled so neatly then?— Why, yes, Janet Welford!
She made a dart at him and seized him by a coat lapel.
“Bertram Pollard, by all that’s romantic! My boy lover of Cromwell Road!
My dream knight of Kensington! He whom first I kissed, and would gladly
do again, but for maidenly modesty and Luke Christy! Lord, how my little
heart throbs within this silken bodice!”
Of course he was utterly embarrassed, shy as a schoolboy, red-faced as a
cut beetroot.
“Don’t mind me,” said Christy. “Only I ought to warn you that Bertram’s
a married man. And his wife’s a real lady.”
“That makes the operation safer and more delicate,” said Janet Welford.
“Bertram, for old time’s sake? To catch again the fleeting impress of
youth’s delight? How say you?”
She offered him her cheek. The invitation could not be refused without
default of chivalry, but he was awkward and restrained in his salute.
Janet Welford rubbed her cheek with the back of her hand and said,
“_Quelle violence! Qu’il est féroce, cet Anglais, et formidable!_”
She sat on the arm of the old leather chair, and put her arm round
Christy’s neck and her cheek against his cheek, and called him a
beautiful pterodactyl, and a most wise old plesiosaurus.
“Don’t you come vamping me too recklessly,” growled Christy, with mock
resentment. “I may be ugly, but I’m human.”
“You’re impregnable in virtue,” said Janet Rockingham Welford. “Alas for
amorous womanhood in a world of surplus women!”
She sighed deeply, and then pulled Christy’s ears, left the arm of his
chair, and sat demurely opposite Bertram.
“Tell me,” she asked, “are you one of Us?”
Bertram enquired in what way, and she explained she meant the Only Way,
the Far, Far, Better Way. Was he one of those who had turned their back
on an old and wicked world, full of old and wicked men (and women) and
marched forward with youth to the New World of equality, brotherhood and
universal peace?
It was Christy who murmured with a grin:
“Pollard’s groping towards the light.”
“Let me take him by the hand,” said Janet Rockingham Welford. “I’ll lead
him into such a blaze of light that his young soul will be dazzled. He
will see the vision of the glory of light and the bright coloured
garments of radiant humanity. . . . Will you come, my friend?”
“Is it far to walk?” asked Bertram, “or must I take a ’bus?”
She told him that it was no further than the Charing Cross Road, over a
bookshop, on Tuesday and Friday evenings, at the club meetings of the
“Left Wing.” She was secretary, and would make him a probationary
member. Fee, two shillings and sixpence. Including coffee.
She made other enquiries as to his political and philosophical
mentality, and found him doubtful. She diagnosed him as a case of
psychic suppression, with a political complex. His instincts, she
thought, were healthy, but his opinions idiotic. If he would leave
himself entirely in her hands, with placid faith, she would undertake to
root up his inherited and developed prejudices, and turn him out a fresh
young soul of the Left Wing, eager for exalted flight.
“Your marriage, Bertram dear?” she enquired presently; “are you fretting
at the yoke, or have you acquired that technique which makes it possible
for two human beings to dwell under the same roof-tree, day after day,
even week after week, without agony of boredom and a nerve strain beyond
endurance? Tell me frankly. I can help you.”
Bertram flushed to the roots of his hair, said “Hang it all!” and then
laughed heartily. Janet Rockingham Welford was really the most
remarkable specimen of modern young womanhood that he had yet met.
She seemed glad to amuse him.
“That laugh will do you good,” she informed him. “You’ve been worrying
about things. You’ve secret fears. I expect your dreams ought to be
regulated. Laughter is the great remedy of fear. I know that from my
blind men.”
“Are you ever serious?” asked Bertram.
“I never leave laughter far behind,” she answered.
And that was true, as he found, not in Christy’s rooms but in hers, to
which he went rather often, after that first meeting, and in little
restaurants around St. John’s Wood or in the “Zoo,” where he met her
after her work with the blinded soldiers of St. Dunstan’s.
She was serious sometimes, passionately serious about the state of
civilisation, the hatred between nations, the nation’s forgetfulness of
boys who had been stricken in the War, and the objects for which they
had fought, the indifference of the lucky classes to the growing
poverty, the increasing despair of ex-soldiers, crippled men,
nerve-broken women, the cruelty of the world to starving Russia—oh,
yes, she admitted the secret spell of Bolshevism!—the brutality of
England to Ireland, the refusal of the United States to enter the League
of Nations, the trickery, the wickedness, the corruption of European
Governments who poked up the worst passions of the crowd, and lied to
them, and played the old game of international rivalry so that the world
was being staged for another war.
She dropped her fantastic way of speech in talking of these things, and
scared Bertram by the violence of her language, and by the red flame of
her spirit, reckless of all restraint, impatient of delay, eager for
“direct action” to cure the evils which she saw and loathed.
But laughter came quick upon her passion. She laughed wholeheartedly at
Bertram’s fears, his loyalty to old traditions, his hatred of violence,
his moderate views, his moralities. She called him a Queen Victorian
Englishman, an 1880 Jingo, a trimmer, a hedger, a Girondin, a disciple
of Samuel Smiles, a John Halifax, Gentleman, a Tory Democrat, and in a
moment of exasperation, a Poor Damned Soul.
He caught a glimpse of her now and then, pacing rapidly round Regent’s
Park with a blinded soldier on each arm. They laughed continually as she
talked to them. They looked happy. They chatted brightly, and they
turned their faces to her sometimes as though seeing the way in which
the wind blew a brown tress across her rose-flushed cheek, and the
brightness of her eyes.
Bertram had hated to see those blinded soldiers, groping their way about
the Park, tapping the kerb-stone with their sticks, standing, and
listening intently, as the taxi-cabs swirled by, afraid, melancholy,
stricken. The sight of them made him curse the war again, and go back to
his book, to write more bitterly of its anguish.
But Janet Rockingham Welford was at her best with those blinded men, and
he had no argument with her in that part of her work, though in all
else.
He went often to her rooms.