The scene you made last night was inexcusable, except on the
score that you are still suffering from shell-shock or some war
neuritis. It’s impossible for us to live together while you
continue in that mental state. I suppose your sudden departure
this morning means that you are of the same opinion. Whether we
ever come together again depends on you. When you can afford to
keep me, and when you prove your loyalty to my ideals, I shall
be glad to live with you again. Not till then. I’ve decided to
give up Holland Street and stay here with Mother until Holme
Ottery is sold, which I pray will not be soon.
I know you think I’ve been hard and “unsympathetic,” and unkind.
Of course, there’s something to be said on your side. I know
you’ve loved me in your passionate, emotional way, as much as
any man could. I’m grateful for good times we had in the
beginning. But that’s only one side of love, the animal side
which I dislike. I want the other side of love, which is,
surely, communion of ideas, comradeship in understanding, the
same faith and code. That you’ve not given me. However—it’s
past argument now.
Yours,
JOYCE.
Past argument now! Well, he was not going to re-open the argument. So he
told her in his answer to that letter. Perhaps he’d been a fool to write
so much—sheet after sheet, revealing the secret things of his mind, the
strain and stress of his nature, pulled two ways by two strains of
blood, a conflict between old tradition and the new hopes of humanity,
resistance to extremes of thought, so that he might plod along the
Middle of the Road.
The strain and stress of his nature! He had made her understand, if
words were plain, that she was the cause of his irritable temper, so
much of his impatience. His love for her was passionate, as she said,
and a man couldn’t suppress passion too long, without nerve-storms. Long
before the child was born, and ever since, she had made no response to
his emotion, and kept him at a distance, coldly. Her presence, the scent
of her hair, the turn of her head, the touch of her finger-tips, made
his thrill to her, but though she had been so close to him, always
putting this strain upon his senses and his vital nature, she had
repulsed him, resisted any intimate contact with him, deliberately held
him in exile. She hadn’t played the game by him. She had shirked her
marriage vows. She had made his married life an agony—and intolerable,
because of the very greatness of his love! She wrote about communion of
ideas. Yes, he agreed with that, utterly. But communion means exchange,
give and take, a little yielding on both sides, tolerance,
understanding. She had never troubled to get his point of view. She had
never stood on tip-toes to see over his side of the hedge.
She had taken her stand with the Old Caste and the least liberal part of
that, the extreme high and dry section of it, left behind by the great
tide of changing life, now in England, at last, after the opening of the
sluice gates by the shock of war.
He was not intolerant of her ideals. He was pulled back to them against
reason, even, by old sentiment, the romance of history, by the very
ghosts of England. He could understand her resentment of change which
meant the downfall of Holme Ottery, as one symbol of a passing era. He
understood and grieved with her, because he loved the old stones of
England and every brick in every wall. But he saw the inevitability of
change, the need and right of it.
He stood with his face to the future, not weeping with his head turned
backwards to the past. He had tried to make her understand his view of
life. She’d not troubled to understand. Because he had not agreed with
abject submission to her ideas, her old-fashioned, out-worn creed, she’d
used that word “traitor!” and cut his heart open.
As for his being able to keep her, he had understood that she wasn’t in
a hurry for him to pay his board and lodging. They’d had that argument
out before, and she had promised to give him time. She’d broken that
promise—a week or so too soon! A little more patience, perhaps, and he
would have proved his quality as a writing-man, by getting a fair price
for hard work.
He had not been a slacker. He had slaved over his book, late into the
night. He would have gone on slaving, joyously, to earn a decent living,
to pay for the things she liked, to take his share of life’s costs.
Well, “it was past argument now!” Agreed! No further argument should
come from him. Nor did he intend to crawl to her, whining, to be “taken
back.” By God, no! If she wanted him, she would have to ask for him. She
would have to beg him to return, without conditions, on equal terms,
acknowledging his right, and persuading him of love. Otherwise, never.
And perhaps never, even then, if she waited too long, for even loyalty
couldn’t suffer too great a strain, though now he sent her his
love. . . .
So he had written, or in some such way, all night, with spells of
thought when he had laid his head down on his arms, and, even, had wept
a little like a weak boy. She hadn’t answered the letter. It was “past
argument, now!”
His mother worried him by trying to get at his secret. A dozen times a
day she spoke about “dear Joyce,” and he had to fence with her until
about a week after his coming back she broke down his guard, and he told
her everything, or nearly everything. Then he was put into the absurd
position of defending Joyce.
His mother was indignant with her son’s wife, called her a “selfish
creature,” and a “heartless hussy,” and couldn’t understand at all how
any wife could so behave to any husband. It was, she said, “the moral
breakdown caused by the war.” English girls seemed bereft of their
senses, judging from the daily papers, and all the dreadful divorce
cases. Joyce was another example of that. She wanted, like all the
others, nothing but pleasure. Duty never entered her head.
Self-sacrifice for love’s sake was not acknowledged these days. She was
merely an empty-headed creature, with bobbed hair and short skirts.
“Mother!” said Bertram, “I can’t let you speak of Joyce like that! She’s
not in the least empty-headed. On the contrary, she’s stuffed full of
knowledge and ideas. As for her bobbed hair, it’s the fashion, and a
pretty one.”
Absurd—to be defending Joyce who had given him Hell! Yet he did so,
time and time again, until at last he became angry, and said, “Let’s
give up talking about it, mother, for goodness’ sake! You don’t
understand Joyce’s point of view, or mine. It’s impossible to explain. I
can’t explain it to myself. I only know that it’s a frightful tragedy.”
He hated to talk roughly to his mother. The love she had for all her
children, now departed from her, was concentrated on Bertram who had
come back for a little while. She could hardly bear him out of her
sight, and often, when he went up to his room he heard her quiet
footsteps outside the door. She was listening to his movements, standing
near him, though outside the room. She was happy, or almost happy if he
sat with her, holding her hand, or if she could watch him from the other
side of the fireplace, while he sat back in a low chair, pretending to
read the paper, and thinking, thinking of Joyce, and his loneliness, and
what the devil to do with his life. Never quite happy, for always in her
heart was grief over the exile of Dorothy in her German home, and
anxiety about Susan who only sent post card messages from Dublin, saying
nothing, and fearfulness on behalf of young Digby in the midst of civil
war.
“It’s a dreadful world, Bertram,” she said, once. “As a young wife I was
so happy with all my babies, and never dreamed of all the horror
ahead—war, revolutions, famines, plague, endless strife. If only Queen
Victoria could have gone on living, we might have been saved all that.
She kept things safe by her virtue and wisdom.”
Bertram tried hard not to laugh, yet he laughed aloud at the idea of the
poor old Queen “keeping things safe” in a world that was making ready
for convulsion even in her time, by great natural moving forces that no
mortal could restrain; not King Canute with the advancing tide, nor
Queen Victoria in a changing era.
“Why do you laugh at me?” asked Mrs. Pollard.
He patted her hand.
“You still belong to the Victorian Age!”
“We felt safe in that time,” said his mother. “Now I don’t know what new
terror will happen from day to day. There’s an awful uncertainty,
everywhere.”
“It’s Reality breaking through Illusion,” said Bertram; but his mother,
as he saw, did not understand him, and he did not try to make her
understand. He was pitiful because of the troubles that had overtaken
her in the last phase of her beautiful and faithful life.
Tears came into her eyes when he told her that he was spending the
evening away from home. He had promised to call round again at Janet
Welford’s flat in Battersea Park.
“I know it’s dull here alone with me,” said Mrs. Pollard, “but you
hardly know the comfort it gives me to see you back again, now all my
other dear birds have gone from the nest.”
“Never dull with you, little mother,” he said, bending to kiss her
forehead. “But I like to see my friends at times. I’ll be back before
you go to bed.”
But he stayed rather late with Janet, and wasn’t back until his mother
had tired of waiting. She heard his step passing her door, and called
out, “Good night, my dear!”