Janet Welford—“Janet Rockingham Welford” of fiction fame—was a source
of comfort to Bertram at this time. She had a courage regarding life, a
natural and unaffected buoyancy of character, whatever might happen in a
world of tragedy, which shook him out of his morbid brooding while he
was in her company. She carried over the audacity of her war-time
spirit, when for a while she had driven an ambulance into the Belgian
zone of fire, to that after-war period when most men and women felt
drained of vitality, and suffered miserable reaction.
It was, perhaps, her daily service to the blinded men of St. Dunstan’s
which kept her soul tuned to the old key of “carry on!” which had
inspired masses of people during the years of conflict so that they
forgot, or put on one side, their own griefs and cares, because of the
great sufferings of others, and the common need of sacrifice.
That was her explanation.
“My blinded boys keep me healthy and vital and brave,” she smiled. “How
the devil can I indulge in the megrims, sit down and sob over my woes of
thwarted passion, gloom over the possible downfall of civilisation, or
six shillings in the pound for income tax, when those blind boys have to
be kept merry and bright to save them from despair and suicide? They
just knock one’s egotism stone dead.”
“It’s splendid of you!” said Bertram.
Janet wouldn’t allow any kind of splendour to herself.
“Punk! It’s only another form of selfishness. They’re my soul-cure. If I
didn’t laugh for their sakes, make up the most ridiculous and risky
stories, to get a smile out of them, coerce myself to look on the bright
side of life, so that I can reflect some sunshine into their sightless
eyes, I should probably suffer from sex-complexes or other forms of
beastliness. I serve them to save myself. That’s what I tell them, and
they think it an excellent joke. ‘Have we done you good this morning,
Miss?’ they ask, and I say, ‘You’re my Salvation Army, my lads!’ and
that keeps us laughing round Regent’s Park.”
Bertram wondered sometimes whether Janet’s philosophy was not founded on
tremendous pessimism rather than on unbounded optimism. A queer thought!
Yet he had seen that kind of psychology working out to the same result,
in France and Flanders, among the civilian folk.
French girls who had seen their little homesteads go up in fire under
the enemy’s guns, peasants who had lost everything in the world, except
life, by the invasion of the “Boche,” women who had lost fathers,
husbands, lovers, brothers, acquired an astonishing serenity, even a
gaiety of mind. Nothing seemed to matter to them now. Death itself was a
“bagatelle.”
He had seen girls laughing as though at some fantastic joke, when they
poked about the ruins of their cottages and found bits of old furniture,
the wheel of a baby’s perambulator, the relic of some old familiar
thing. It seemed to give life a different sense of proportion,
annihilating its vanities, its greeds, its fears, its illusions. They
were down to the bed-rock of frightful realities, and nothing worse
could happen to them, and they were all “in the basket” together. Their
fate was no worse, and perhaps a little better, than that of their
neighbours.
So, in a way, it was with Janet. At least, he sometimes thought so. Her
father, and then her young brother, had been killed in the war. Her
mother had died of the anguish of these shocks. She herself had spent
the years of war nursing mutilated men. It gave her that strange
serenity of vision which for a time had come to many of those most
stricken by war, though afterwards, when peace came, they collapsed.
She hadn’t collapsed. It seemed simply silly to Janet that English
people should worry because trade was bad, and get alarmed about the
prospect of social revolution, or excite themselves about the downfall
of exchanges. She stared forward to the future with audacious vision,
and demanded not a hark back to the old standards of comfort and
tradition, but root and branch changes, bold experiments in social
legislation, tremendous endeavours towards the building of a new world.
Anyhow, she was not afraid. Not of Bolshevism, not of poverty, not of
any new tragedy that might emerge out of the chaos of a Europe convulsed
by the effects of war.
“It’s all frightfully interesting,” she said, “and, anyhow, worry won’t
stop the working out of Fate. Why be afraid of Fate? We shall all be
dead quite soon. Let’s play the game out, and see it through, and pass
the ball on to the next players, when we’ve had our innings.”
“That sounds good,” said Bertram, “but it doesn’t cure the heart-ache of
a woman left alone because her man was killed in the war, or give any
comfort to an unemployed man, hanging about Labour Exchanges in search
of jobs that aren’t there. Your philosophy of devil-may-care won’t stop
another bout of massacre in Europe if the Old Gang are allowed to play
the fool again, or save the next generation of boys from being blown to
bits in lousy trenches. We _must_ worry. It’s our duty to worry and find
a scientific way of escape from all this madness.”
“I don’t call that worrying,” she answered. “I call that thinking
straight and acting with courage. That’s our point of view in the ‘Left
Wing.’”
“Oh, Lord!” said Bertram, “Your parlour Bolsheviks think all crooked,
and have no more courage than lop-eared rabbits.”
Janet laughed without a trace of annoyance.
“Some of them are disgusting little egoists,” she admitted. “But,
anyhow, they’re educating themselves, and frightening the Reactionaries.
I like to see the Enemy getting scared.”
She used the word “enemy” to represent the Tory crowd—Joyce’s
crowd—more especially the Countess of Ottery’s audience at the Wigmore
Hall.
These political conversations ranged over wide fields of discussion, and
Bertram seemed to amuse Janet by his efforts to moderate her extreme
views. She became more violent to tease him into argument, and when he
called her a Jacobin, who would knit below the scaffold when heads were
falling, she retaliated by calling him a Girondin who would try to make
revolutions with rose-water.
All this talk seemed to have relation to things happening, or likely to
happen, away beyond Battersea Park, through the length and breadth of
England.
The Coal Strike had begun. The railways had cut down their service of
trains to a bare minimum. Factories were closing down in all the
industrial towns. Millions of men were idle and living on strike pay.
The Army Reserve had been called out, the Middle Classes were being
recruited under the scheme of General Bellasis, and the Miners were in
daily conference with the Engineers and Transport Workers, who were
discussing the question of a general strike. If the “Triple Alliance”
voted for that, not a wheel would turn in England, and civil strife
would certainly break out, unless something like a miracle intervened.
So far no violence had happened. The miners had come up from the pits,
and were whitewashing their cottages. They had made a fatal mistake
already, alienating public opinion, which, until then had been steadily
in favour of their side of the argument. The Pump men had been withdrawn
from the pits, and some of the mines were already being flooded.
“A logical act,” said Janet. “The Pump men received their lock-out
notices with the others. The mine-owners must take the responsibility.”
“Rotten tactics and bad morality,” said Bertram. “The men ought to
safeguard their own means of life.”
So they argued, as all other men and women in England then, in every
household where opinions differed on one side or the other, and where
there was a sense of imminent disaster to the old foundations of civil
life.
But of more intimate and poignant interest to Bertram was Janet’s frank
talk about his private disaster—the failure of his marriage. She had
asked blunt questions about his relations with Joyce, amazingly
indiscreet and fearless questions, and after fencing with them awhile,
he had told her the truth of things, with reticence and reservations,
and a sense of loyalty to Joyce, so that he put down most of the cause
of failure to his own stupidity and lack of patience.
Janet listened, cross-examined, probed his mental wound, with the skill
and ruthlessness of a psychoanalyst.
“Very interesting!” she remarked, more than once, like a doctor
diagnosing a difficult case.
“The inevitable clash of opposed temperaments,” was another remark of
hers, delivered with an air of superior wisdom, and an amusement which
she did not try to conceal.
“You’re not very sympathetic!” complained Bertram. “Not very helpful.
What’s my way out of this mess?”
Janet said, “Forget it. Shove it away into your subconsciousness, and go
on as though it didn’t exist. You’ll find that it all straightens out.”
She gave him the benefit of her diagnosis.
“It’s a case of sex-repression on your side, and of fear-complex on your
wife’s side. Yours is a simple case. Perfectly ordinary. Nothing to
worry about. Your wife’s case is more complicated.”
In response to Bertram’s plea for enlightenment, and his heated protest
that he _was_ worrying, most damnably, Janet elaborated a thesis
regarding Joyce.
Bertram’s wife, she said, was the victim of an early environment which
had caused abnormality. She’d been sheltered since babyhood from all
contact with the realities of life. She was never allowed to speak with
“common people” on equal terms. They’d pulled their forelocks to “the
little lady” when she had passed in her perambulator. They’d curtsied at
the lodge gates every time she went in and out. She was made to believe
that she was superior to the rest of the world, with the exception of
other people like herself, who lived in other houses like Holme Ottery.
The rest of mankind, to her child mind, was entirely taken up with the
duty and honour and delight of providing a pleasant life to those born
in the higher sphere—mowing the lawns, grooming the horses, clipping
the hedges, polishing the floors, waiting at table, bowing silently when
rebuked however unjustly, utterly dependent upon Lady Joyce Bellairs and
her exalted family. She’d had no notion, as a child, that outside the
parkland of Holme Ottery the world had moved on. The portraits of her
ancestors in their silks and laces seemed to prove that her world, and
theirs, had always been the same, and always would be, sheltered,
protected, served, admired.
Then the war had come, breaking through the quietude of Holme Ottery,
but not, for a while, smashing the old illusions. Joyce’s father had
still played the great game of ruling the county as Lord Lieutenant.
Alban had played the diplomatic game in the Foreign Office. Joyce’s
friends had been officers, saluted by all men as they passed, holding
authority even more firmly than of old.
It was only after the war that Joyce had been frightened.
She saw that Holme Ottery and all that it meant was threatened, that
stupendous taxation was killing the old way of life for people like
herself, destroying their sense of security, their power, their
pleasaunces. And she had become aware of other perils; the bogey of
Bolshevism, social “unrest,” a new insolence of men back from the war,
no longer quick to pull their forelocks when the lady passed, but
talking bitterly about their “rights,” their claim to work, and a living
wage.
Joyce Bellairs was afraid of brutal forces threatening all that she had
loved as a child, all that she had believed as a child. Her behaviour to
Bertram was on account of that. It was a fear-complex. She loved him,
but the very strength of her love made her brutal to him when he seemed
to ally himself with the powers that made her afraid.
“It sounds all right,” said Bertram, listening a little impatiently,
“but it’s all wrong! Joyce doesn’t understand fear. She has more than
the courage of men.”
“Physical courage, yes. Not mental courage.”
“Besides,” said Bertram, “that doesn’t solve my problem. How am I going
to live a single life, apart from Joyce, who is still my wife? How am I
going to persuade her to withdraw that word ‘traitor’?”
“Give her time, and don’t worry,” was Janet’s answer to his conundrum.
“A little separation will do you both good. Heavens alive! The constant
companionship of marriage would be a strain on two archangels. I
couldn’t bear it.”
“You’ve borne my company patiently for three evenings a week,” said
Bertram.
“Yes, but not for three breakfasts! It’s breakfast that’s the test of
love. Most people break over it, like boiled eggs.”
Bertram wasn’t sure how far Janet’s talk was sincere, how much she
believed in her own absurdities. Perhaps she was behaving to him as she
did to her blinded men, talking “any old thing”—to get a laugh out of
them, to “keep their pecker up.”
He accused her of that once, and she blushed a little, as though found
guilty.
He made her blush another time, when he spoke of Christy’s love for her.
“I suppose you know Christy worships you?”
She veiled her eyes with her long brown lashes, and said, “Yes, I
know. . . . Poor dear old Plesiosaurus!”
“Why don’t you fix it up with him?”
A little smile played about her lips.
“‘He’s never asked me, sir, she said.’ And, besides, I haven’t told you
that I requite his gloomy passion!”
“He’s one of the best in the world,” said Bertram.
She agreed, but said that the best were almost as difficult as the worst
when it came to board and breakfast with them.
“Aren’t you human?” asked Bertram, half jestingly, half in earnest.
“Don’t you need love, and the passion of life?”
She talked so frankly to him that he could speak like that.
That doubt about her humanity amused her exceedingly.
“Man!” she cried, “I’m a living Cleopatra without her Antony! If I were
to ease up an instant on blinded men, political meetings, ‘Left Wing’
committees, audacious novels, and all manner of work, goodness knows
what I should do in the way of amorous adventure. I go in for what the
psychoanalysts call the sublimation of sex.”
“What the deuce is that?” asked Bertram.
“Transferring the emotion to intellectual aims. Producing books instead
of babies. Reforming society instead of yearning for a kiss. Keeping
busy on foolish, futile things, instead of wasting one’s energy in
amorous dalliance. That’s my advice to you, young fellow! Cut out the
emotional stuff for a time. Forget Joyce and marriage, and all this
morbid love-agony. Life’s bigger than that. It’s only a little messy
side of life. We make too much fuss about it, exaggerate the importance
of the damn thing by always thinking and writing and talking about it.
Go and make a revolution somewhere, or lead an expedition to find the
living Megatherium, or write a book to ‘bust’ the falsity of things, or
cut down trees in Canada, or convert cannibals to Christianity, or
Christians to a decent code of honour, or make some plan for a higher
civilisation, or some plan for destroying the civilisation we have—any
good, straight, clean, manly job that’s not mixed up with the eternal
soppy and sickly question of love and Louisa. Give it a miss, O Knight
of the Rueful Countenance.”
Bertram shook his head.
“Human nature is human nature. It doesn’t give one any peace that way.
It keeps on nagging.”
“Don’t let it nag. Crush the little devil down. Say, ‘Avaunt, you
vampire!’ Look at me! A Cleopatra, yet beyond reproach, as Cæsar’s
wife!”
She cheered him. There was something in her point of view. He must put
the problem of Joyce out of his mind and heart as far as possible. Get
busy! Well, he was writing some more articles for _The New World_. They
helped him to forget.
And yet this girl, Janet, so gay, so kind, so wise, even in spite of her
extravagance of thought and speech, was beginning to trouble him in the
very way he wished to avoid, in the very way she derided and denounced.
She troubled him one night when she said suddenly, “A pity, Sir
Faithful, that you didn’t marry me instead of Joyce! I understand you
better. We think more on the same line. And you were my first Dream
Knight, in the days when you kissed me in Kensington Gardens.”
It was just like her to come out with a startling thing like that, in a
matter-of-fact way, as though it were nothing out of the ordinary, and
undisturbing. He was strangely disturbed, and hardly knew what to say.
“Too late now!” was all he could say, and then laughed uneasily.
She troubled him again by the way she used to sit on a little low stool
by his side when they were alone together in the evening or even when
Katherine Wild was with them, leaning her head against his knees. He
liked it very much because it was so comradely and sisterly, but he was
human and separated from his wife, and not a disembodied spirit.
He was troubled more than all one night when he was leaving her and she
put her face up to be kissed and said, “A chaste salute, Sir Faithful?
Why not?”
He kissed her, and it was good in his loneliness. And yet not good in
his conscience. For he had faith and loyalty, to Joyce who was his wife,
though unkind to him, and to Christy who was his friend, and the lover
of this girl.
As he went back to his mother’s house in Sloane Street, he spoke aloud
the old catchword which was his usual comment on life:
“It’s all very difficult!”