After that reading of the book, there wasn’t the same excuse for Bertram
to go to Janet’s flat in Battersea. Not the same reason. Yet he went.
The truth was, as he admitted, that he could not keep away because he
craved for the laughter, the audacity of thought, and the free
comradeship which he found with Janet and her friends, and not in his
own house. Decidedly not in his own house in the week or two that
followed Lady Ottery’s lecture and Joyce’s refusal to interest herself
in his work.
Even Edith, the parlourmaid, showed by various little signs of sympathy
meant in a kind spirit, but frightfully embarrassing, that she was aware
of Joyce’s unkindness.
“Aren’t you going with her ladyship to-night, sir?” Or, “Seems a pity
you don’t like cards. Her ladyship is that fond of Bridge!”
Deliberately Joyce involved herself in a series of bridge parties which
ignored Bertram’s claim to companionship and included, every time, it
seemed, Kenneth Murless or General Bellasis, generally in the rooms of
the Countess Lydia in Whitehall Court. Now that his book was finished,
and in Christy’s hands for professional advice about the way to get it
published, Bertram felt loneliness closing about him with a greater
chill. Sometimes he thought Joyce was teasing his jealousy. She talked
of Kenneth in terms of affectionate comradeship, and then glanced at
Bertram to see whether she had piqued him. She confessed that she owed
Kenneth a good deal of money for Bridge debts—“but of course he could
wait.” Kenneth had been in particularly good form that night. His
stories about Lady Speelman’s ball had made everybody laugh. She was
going to the Opera with Kenneth and the Russian girls.
Bertram didn’t disguise his feelings, but he restrained the expression
of his temper. Something had happened in him worse than ill-temper. It
was a coldness that was creeping into his heart, a sense of some
complete and terrible misunderstanding between Joyce and himself, beyond
all petty quarrels.
He had a dreadful apprehension that something in the very quality of his
character was alien, offensive, and intolerable to the fastidious and
delicate mind of his young wife. Perhaps he was of a coarser fibre than
she was. He was afraid the war had brutalised him more than he was aware
of. He had certainly “learnt to swear abominably in Flanders,” like
English soldiers of Smollett’s time, and his nerves had been frayed so
badly that he didn’t always check his tongue in the presence of Joyce.
But it was deeper than that, and worse than that. Joyce seemed to find
him a vulgarian, a common fellow. There were times when her eyes seemed
to say so. . . .
Janet Welford did not make him feel like that. She called him “Sir
Faithful,” and once “did homage to him,” so she pretended, in her jolly
way, as “a very parfit gentil knight.” By that name she introduced him
to her friends, those queer, free-spoken, amazingly audacious girls who
seemed to be the advance guard of Social revolution in England, and
played intellectual games of skittles with the old traditions of English
life.
He sat dumb among them at times because of their wild talk. They were
pretty Bolshevists, who frightened him with their revolutionary ideals.
The Russian experiment had not been revealed yet in all its ghastly
failure, and they spoke lightly of Lenin as “the Master-mind,” and had a
sentimental affection for Trotsky as “the new Napoleon,” and refused to
believe a word of the atrocity stories manufactured, so they said, by
propagandists of the White Armies at Riga and Helsingfors.
Bertram wondered what would happen to his exalted Mother-in-law, if she
were suddenly to be transported from Holme Ottery to that flat in
Battersea Park, and heard such discourse. He wondered what would happen
to himself, if she saw him there, surrounded by these pretty witches.
Not pretty all of them! Janet’s best friend, Katherine Wild, was a
snub-nosed woman, with short hair cut like a man’s, but with courage and
comedy in her grey eyes. She and Janet made the pace in conversation,
egged each other on to new extravagances, made one great jest of life.
It was but verbal flippancy. Bertram remembered Janet’s devotion to the
blinded soldiers of St. Dunstan’s. From Janet he knew that Katherine
Wild devoted all her life to the starving children of the devastated
countries in Europe, as the organiser of relief. She had been working in
the soup kitchens of Vienna, and knew, as few others, the agony of
Austria. It was the knowledge of life’s tragedy that made her seize at
any of life’s jokes, and make a religion of laughter. Her great hope was
to get into Russia and to extend the work of relief to that country,
which was still blockaded by the rest of Europe because of the menace
and fear of Bolshevism.
“I shan’t have seen the depths of human misery,” she said once, “until
I’ve crossed the frontier into Russia.”
“Do you want to see the depths?” asked Bertram.
“The uttermost depths. Until then my knowledge of life won’t be
complete. You must go there too, Mr. Pollard!”
“Why?” asked Bertram.
She told him that Janet had spoken to her about his book on the war. The
last chapter couldn’t be written until he’d been to Russia. There was
the aftermath of Armageddon. After War, Famine, and after Famine,
Pestilence. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden through
Russia, and the noise of their hoofs could be heard in Western Europe,
coming closer, closer. In Russia Europe might read the writing on the
wall.
“It’s the key to the riddle of the New World,” she said. “By what
happens in Russia, and the world’s reaction thereto, we shall know our
fate.”
Strange how he could never escape from talk about Russia! In Joyce’s
crowd he had listened constantly to tales of Red Army atrocities, the
sufferings of the old régime. In this crowd he listened to denunciations
of White Army cruelties, and the sufferings of Russian peasants.
Once he lost his temper, and flared out into violent speech which might
have forfeited him the friendship of Janet Welford, if she had not been
enormously broad-minded, with an all-embracing sense of humour.
With her women friends he could be patient, whatever they said, for they
had a sincerity of idealism which was proved honestly by service in some
human way, with sick children, or suffering men, as nurses, guardians of
the poor, workers in University settlements, guides to blinded soldiers.
But some of Janet’s men friends seemed to him poisonous.
They were members, mostly, of that club, “The Left Wing,” into which she
had desired, vainly, to beguile him. But he saw the types in her rooms,
and didn’t like the look of them. They were egoists, conceited with
their own superior “idealism,” _poseurs_ of rebel philosophy, amateur
Jacobins, without passion or sincerity.
Two of them were young men who had escaped service in the war by going
to prison as Pacifists. No doubt that needed greater moral courage in a
way than surrendering to the general tide of emotion and faith by
getting into khaki. Theoretically he admitted the right, even the
nobility of men who for conscience’ sake, religious belief or spiritual
abhorrence of war—like the Quakers—dared public contumely by refusing
services at such a time. It was contrary to his own convictions, for
though he hated war, and knew its insanity, he believed that when once a
people had become involved, they must stand in defence of their own
country and of their own homes. Still, he understood the reasoning of
men morally and utterly convinced of the Christian command, “Thou shalt
not kill.”
But these young men who came to Janet’s flat had been Pacifists when
their country was threatened, and now were revolutionists, talking very
glibly of Lenin’s right to destroy the enemies of Russian liberty, and
of the glorious prospect of a world revolution for the overthrow of the
Capitalist system.
It was a young man named Lucas Melvin who aroused Bertram’s rage.
Talking in the affected accent of Christchurch, at its worst, and
playing with a silk handkerchief which he had drawn from his shirt cuff,
he proclaimed his belief that Labour was about to overthrow the
Government by “direct action.”
“This coming strike,” he said, “will lead to a general paralysis of
industry. All the Trade Unions will unite for general action. I
anticipate the pleasure of seeing a number of Profiteers and _bourgeois_
hanging on the lamp-posts in Whitehall. _Vive la Révolution Anglaise!_”
This speech was received with laughter and applause, and the company was
surprised when Bertram rose slowly from his low chair by the fireside,
and stood with his back to the mantelpiece, glowering at Lucas Melvin,
as though preparing to knock him down.
“I can’t pass that!” he said.
“Pass what, dear sir?” asked Melvin.
“That damned, insincere, and dangerous nonsense of yours.”
Melvin protested that he didn’t like those coarse words. He also
objected to Bertram’s method of argument. It was neither elegant nor
polite.
“It’s not so coarse as revolution,” said Bertram, bitterly. “It’s more
polite than a revolutionary mob would be, if they caught you with a silk
handkerchief up your sleeve. Don’t you realise that if you and other
young fools who play about with the revolutionary idea were ever to find
yourselves in that state of things, your necks would be wrung first by a
mob that’s not out for elegance? They’d just wipe you out like midges.
Don’t you understand that if England were to go in for revolution, all
Europe would be dragged down with her, and war would be child’s play to
that anarchy and horror?”
“I see you belong to the reactionary set,” said Melvin, with an air of
bravado, but his voice was not quite steady. “Doubtless you uphold the
principles of _The Morning Post_.”
“I try to see things with commonsense,” said Bertram, “not like a child,
ignorant of realities. I’ve seen war. I don’t want to see revolution. I
imagine it’s worse.”
It was Janet who poured oil on the troubled waters.
“Sir Faithful,” she said, “verily you speak the words of truth and
wisdom. This child has been well rated. But of your mercy, remember that
this is a bower of fair ladies, and not a tilting-ground for angry
knights.”
“Sorry!” he said, and his rage died down. Lucas Melvin retired hurt, and
soon the others went, leaving him last, and alone with Janet.
“I behaved like a ‘muddied oaf,’” he said. “Do you forgive me?”
She forgave him so well that she sat on the floor by his side with her
hands clasping her knees, talking about the queer complexities of life,
the muddle in human nature, the mixed motives of men and women.
Presently she told him that he had better go home. It was unfair to his
wife to stay so late.
“Joyce won’t be back yet,” he said, “and I hate going home to a lonely
house.”
She looked up into his face searchingly.
“I’m afraid your married life is not all it should be. Whose fault?”
“Mine,” he said.
She told him that if he weren’t so beastly timid, she would get down to
the secret of the trouble.
“I’d like to help,” she said.
“You’re helping,” he told her, and then something seemed to warn him
that this was not playing the game by Joyce, and that he was losing hold
of the loyalties to which his soul was pledged. Janet was helping him
too much. In a little while he might not be able to live without her
help, her sympathy, her understanding, her comradeship. A sudden
movement he made, drawing back from her a little, surprised her.
“What’s the matter, Faithful?”
“I’d better go. After all, it’s getting late.”
But it was only ten o’clock, and not too late for a visit from Christy.
The maid had let him into the hall, and they hadn’t heard him enter, and
were not aware of him until he came into the room.
“Hullo!” he said. “Where’s all the party?”
“Faithful broke it up, with violence.”
Janet rose from her seat on the floor by Bertram’s side and held her
hand out to Christy like a Princess. He kissed it with warmth, and said,
“The Ugly Beast pays homage to Divine Beauty.”
“The handsome Megatherium to the beautiful Pterodactyl!” said Janet.
They were acting in the usual way, but Bertram was aware of some state
of tension in the room. Christy was not quite at his ease, nor Janet
quite natural.
“Going so soon?” asked Christy, as Bertram went towards the door.
“I’ve been trying to go for half an hour.”
“Then stay not on the order of your going, but go!”
Christy laughed at the old quotation spoken by Janet, but Bertram saw a
queer look in his eyes, of shyness or distress. Was old Christy jealous
of him, because of his comradeship with Janet?
Ridiculous!