Bertram was staking everything on his book, in spite of Christy’s
“hands-up” and cry of “Kamerad!”
It was going well,—amazingly well. He was astonished at the way in
which words came to him. After the first agonies he had found himself
writing easily, rapidly. It was as though he was just the instrument
recording the dictation of some mind beyond himself. In reality, as he
knew, he was drawing upon his memories, and emotions stirred up in his
subconsciousness, repressed for a long time, and now liberated. He
remembered things which, at the time he hadn’t noticed much, or at
all—smells, sounds, minute particular details of visual impressions.
The pictures of war were as sharply etched in his mind’s eye as when he
stared for the first time across No Man’s Land, or took his machine-gun
up to Fricourt on the Somme and saw death busy on a day of great battle.
It was extraordinary how he could reach back to it all, from this little
house in Holland Street, Kensington, within sound of the London ’busses
passing up Church Street. When Joyce was out or in bed, and he was
writing in his study, alone, late at night, the old life of war came
back to him so vividly, with such intensity, that more than once when he
lifted his head, he was startled to find himself, not in a dug-out, or
leaning over the sand-bags of a trench parapet—he smelled chloride of
lime!—but in his room, with Joyce’s portrait over the mantelpiece, and
peace outside the windows.
Here in the manuscript sheets before him, as far as he’d gone, he had
told what war was like. The men who knew would say, “That’s how it was!”
He had paid the tribute of his soul to Tommy Atkins, who had not been
given a fair deal. The book might do a bit of good. It would pass on the
experience of those who knew the meaning of war to a generation which
wouldn’t know, unless some one told them. This was worth doing. Perhaps
worth living to do. Had he been spared to live to do it? There might be
something in that. He’d always wondered why he should go scot free—not
a scratch all through the war, with other men dropping on every side of
him. Anyhow, he would try to pay back for the grace of life—such as it
was!—by this book.
It was the truth, in every line of it, in every word. He had found the
gift of words. That was his buried talent, now revealed. That was what
he’d been searching for, the meaning of that queer sensation of waiting
for something to happen. This had happened! The gift of words—the
greatest gift in the world, if a man pledged his soul to truth.
He hoped Joyce would like his book. It would be fine if she said, “Well
done!” when he read it to her. She would be critical. She would hate
some of the things he had written, brutal, some of them, but she would
acknowledge the truth of it, the bigness of his achievement. For it was
going to be big, with the spirit of the greatest war in the world, and
of England’s manhood.
He was telling it all, nothing left out, nothing shirked, in horror,
courage, boredom, fear, filth, laughter, madness. Joyce had seen a bit
of it in London hospitals. She wouldn’t funk reading about it, and she
would be generous in praise, if he had written it well, as she was
generous to Kenneth Murless for his snappy sonnets. She would understand
him better after reading it. She would be more patient with him. And she
would see that he was going to keep his end up, and not sponge on her
for everything.
With a bit of luck the book would make some money. That would make
things easier in married life, and give him the independence which all
men must have. It would make him less moody and humpy in his temper.
Perhaps it would bring Joyce and him closer again, in the old relations
of love and comradeship, which somehow had been interrupted.
It was with this thought in his mind that he gathered up a bundle of his
manuscript and went up to Joyce’s room. It was the morning after Lady
Ottery’s lecture, and Joyce was still in bed. She had a habit of lying
late. Perhaps she would be inclined to let him read some of his stuff.
He was absurdly emotional, as all writers with their first creation.
He’d been living with the book. He had staked his hopes on it. It was
his mind-child.
Joyce was busy with the papers when he went in and said, “Good morning,
darling!” She murmured a reply of some kind, and turned over another
page of _The Morning Post_, which rustled loudly.
Bertram waited for a little while until she might finish the society
news, or whatever it was that she was reading. She was sitting up in one
of her Japanese silks with a ribbon tied round her hair, and a little
frown on her forehead, like Marjorie Maude in “Peter Pan.” He sat on the
bed by her side and watched her eyes roving over the big printed sheet.
She was reading nothing very important. Her attention was not fixed on
any definite news.
“I’ve brought my book, as far as it’s gone,” said Bertram with
preposterous nervousness. “Care to hear some, Joyce? I want your
opinion.”
Joyce didn’t care to hear any of the book. She had something else in her
mind. It was his hostile demonstration at her Mother’s lecture.
“You behaved abominably yesterday afternoon,” she said, ignoring the
book altogether. “Even father accused you of bad form when you walked
out like that.”
“Oh, Lord!”
He confessed his contrition, said “Let’s forget it, sweetheart!” and
showed her the mass of manuscript he had written.
“I believe I’ve done the trick,” he said, with excitement in his voice.
“I’m certain it’s the real thing. Spare me an hour before lunch and let
me read a bit.”
“It doesn’t interest me in the very slightest degree,” said Joyce.
“Please go out of my room, and let me get up.”
If she had struck him in the face with her clenched fist she couldn’t
have hurt him so much.
He didn’t understand that he’d come at the worst possible time for a
reading of his book, when Joyce was deeply mortified by his contempt of
her mother’s lecture, and more annoyed because of his casual regret and
“let’s forget it!” regarding an incident which seemed far from trivial
to her. It was contempt for her, as well as for her mother.
Bertram’s exasperated comments at the Wigmore Hall were another
revelation of the wide gulf between her ideas and his. He was drawing
further and further away from all the loyalties which she believed were
the essential faith of an English gentleman, one of her class, one of
those who stood for the things which belonged to her family and creed.
She had been irritated from the beginning by that book of his. It was
ridiculous to think that Bertram could write! He had none of the
brilliance of Kenneth Murless, and had shown himself plainly bored by
the conversation of her friends on books and poetry. Even on that
subject he had been hostile to their ideas, and had denounced the work
of people like Stephen McKenna and W. L. George with contemptuous words
as “unreal stuff.”
That book he was writing had been a cause of secret irritation in her
mind. He had preferred it to her company. He had deliberately isolated
himself in its scrawled sheets, instead of joining her little parties,
and making himself agreeable to her crowd. The book had been a barrier
between them. It had made him careless of getting a decent job. It had
caused him to brood over the beastly war while she wanted him to forget
it. He was probing the old wounds again, deliberately intensifying his
morbid outlook on life. She guessed it was filled with his bitter,
democratic, anti-class views, which seemed to her like treachery to
England.
And anyhow, he wanted to read it to her at the very hour when she was
going to have her hair curled by the girl from Truelove’s who was due at
ten o’clock! Really Bertram was exasperating!
Perhaps that was what she had been thinking. Bertram worked it out in
that way afterwards, some time afterwards, when he tried to analyse the
reason for Joyce’s unkindness. Because it was unkind—damnably. It took
all the grit out of him in its immediate effect.
Knocked all the stuffing out of him, as he put it to himself when he
went downstairs again, flung his manuscript on the desk, and said
“Hell!”
He hadn’t argued with her, just said, “Sorry I bothered you!” and then
turned on his heel and went out of his wife’s room. He passed the girl
from Truelove’s on the stairs, and thought bitterly that Joyce was more
interested in her hair than in his book.