The thought of Paris pulled Bertram so strongly that he could wander no
longer in the old war zone, and getting back to Amiens from Bapaume,
took the train to the Gare du Nord. He had written some articles for
_The New World_, photographic and phonographic, things seen and heard,
without comment or moral, and some of them had been published, as he
knew, not from seeing them—_The New World_ was not sold in Paschendaele
or Hooge!—but from a note written by Bernard Hall.
“Your stuff is admirable, and much quoted.”
There was endless material in the “reconstruction” of Picardy and
Artois—the human “stuff” which Hall wanted. Bertram had only to sit
down to table in any little _estaminet_, mostly built of wood, amidst a
group of huts, in this country of ghosts (as it was to him) to hear in
the casual conversation of peasants the aftermath of war’s enormous
tragedy to France.
Young peasants, once soldiers of France, told tales of hair-raising
horror about the trenches of Verdun, or Vermelles, or any part of the
battle front, with a simplicity, and matter-of-fact remembrance, beyond
all eloquence or art in tragic effect. Some of them had been prisoners
in German camps, and their long servitude, monotonous in starvation and
misery, had been worse than trench-life.
Women who had been caught behind the German lines, in Lille,
Valenciennes, elsewhere, told of their years of anguish, and inflamed
again the passion of the men who listened. Reference to death recurred
in casual discourse with continual iteration. “Before Jean was killed,”
“since my man’s death,” “when my boy fell in the assault on Souchez,” a
score of times in any half hour of gossip over a flask of _vin
ordinaire_.
The loss of homes and fortunes, the difficulty and illusion of this
“reconstruction” which was used as a spellword by the French Government,
as though the word alone would rebuild houses and churches and
flourishing farmsteads, the sadness of women bereft of fathers,
husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, by the immense slaughter of French
manhood, and the abiding hate of France for Germany, were revealed to
Bertram with intimate and distressful detail, as he sat in the corner of
any tavern, or talked with any group of men and women in field or
market-place.
It came to his mind that here was material for a new “Sentimental
Journey” which might live in history because of the tales of Armageddon,
but he renounced the idea for himself, beyond his brief sketches for
Bernard Hall, because of his desire to get to Paris. It was not the lure
of Paris in June, nor that joyous anticipation which had belonged to
“three days’ Paris leave” in the old days of war, but the urgent,
irresistible, almost sickening desire to see Joyce again.
During this time of loneliness, for he was alone with his soul despite
his wayside conversations, some fretfulness of spirit passed from him.
He seemed to see things with more clarity. His thoughts struck deeper
into the essential meaning of life. Contact again with the devastation
of war, the sharp realities of the immense heritage of woe left by those
murderous years, his conversation with the ghosts of youth, crowding
about him in those little forests of wooden crosses, in those quiet
fields where the noise of death had once been very loud, seemed to kill
the nagging of his own selfish instincts, to rebuke his egotism.
How trivial was the failure or success of his own life! What did it
matter in the balance of history, in the destiny of peoples? He had no
right to life at all, except by a fluke of luck, or the grace of God. So
many of his friends lay here in French soil, as young as he, and
younger. That he was alive, glad to hear the lark singing again above
these fields (even as they had sung above the noise of gunfire), with
the warmth of the sun in his face, was so much to the good, after all,
that he could pay back for that only by service and the dedication of
life to things beyond himself. He might, by some small grain of truth,
by the force of mere desire, by written word or spoken word, help the
chance of peace, so that these fields need not be strewn again with dead
boys. To that attempt he was dedicated. It was the meaning of his future
life, if it had any purpose.
After the mental storms of the last few months, the quarrel with Joyce,
his mother’s death, the tragedy of Susan, and of Digby, he seemed to
have aged by twenty years in understanding and experience. A little by
Janet Welford’s help, and perhaps more than he could estimate, he had
risen above the weakness of self-pity, the most miserable disease,
incurable, if allowed to go too far.
It had been all foolishness and pettiness,—that quarrel with Joyce. She
was hardly more than a child, even now, and he had dealt with her as
though she were a woman of mature views and settled philosophy. He had
taken her too seriously. They had both been too serious about their
“opinions”—as if they mattered!
In his tramp across the war zone, the vision of Joyce as she was when he
first knew her, and dreamed of her, here in France, came back to
him—her flower-like beauty, her grace, her elegance, her courage, her
vitality. He wiped out all his quarrel with her. He believed, with
increasing certainty, that after this separation, and his change in
character—he felt that he had both changed and strengthened and become
better balanced—a meeting between them would end in reconciliation and
understanding.
He regretted his answers to her letters, so harsh and humourless. He
would go to her in Paris, and say, “My dear, I want your love again. I
have dedicated my life to love—and peace, which is the fruit of love. I
am your faithful serving-man. What stands between our happiness
together?”
At night, lying on a truckle bed in the “_Fleur des Champs_” or the
“_Estaminet des Poilus_,” he yearned for Joyce with the home-sickness of
a boy away in a cheerless school. Her physical presence seemed to be
with him. He was aware sometimes of the perfume of her hair, he could
almost feel the silky touch of those “bobbed” curls. He spoke her name,
waking in the morning, in day-dreams, and saw her walking with bare feet
across the grass that grew so green now over the battlefields.
Even his jealousy of Kenneth Murless abated, and died out, extinguished
by this larger sense that had come to him. Kenneth had been her playmate
as a child. His comradeship had been above suspicion, except in the mind
of that other Bertram, with nerves on edge, and petty egotism all
alarmed.
It was in this mood of exalted emotion that Bertram stepped out of the
Gare du Nord and drove in a rattle-bone taxi down the dreary length of
the rue Lafayette to the heart of Paris and the Hotel Meurice.
Bertram made his way through a group of Americans with a quickening
pulse. His eyes roved about this entrance hall, expecting to see Joyce
at once, waiting for his coming, as it were. It was one of the tall
American girls who gave him a start and made him take a pace forward
with the word “Joyce!” on his lips, though unuttered. She was a tall,
slim girl, with glistening gold hair, in a cream-coloured French frock,
such as Joyce would wear in a Paris June. She turned round to say a word
to a friend, and he had a sense of disappointment.
At the desk he enquired for Lady Joyce Pollard, and as an afterthought,
for the Countess of Ottery. The clerk glanced at him doubtfully—he was
wearing an old grey suit and a soft hat—and then informed him that both
ladies had left Paris the day before.
“Where have they gone?” asked Bertram.
He was profoundly disappointed now, and cursed himself for not having
written or telegraphed from Amiens to announce his coming. His hopes had
been so high and soaring about his meeting with Joyce that this check
was intolerable.
The clerk shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“How can I tell, monsieur? Paris is the gate to all the Continent!”
“Surely they left an address?”
The clerk looked up in a book. No, the ladies had not left any address.
He condescended to send for the Hall Porter, a superb person in a
claret-coloured uniform. The Hall Porter himself condescended to inform
the rather shabby-looking Englishman that “Madame la Comtesse d’Ottery”
and Miladi, her daughter, had departed by automobile to Amiens. He
understood they proposed to visit the battlefields in the British
war-zone.
Bertram could obtain no further information, and when he walked down the
rue de Rivoli, the serenity of mind and exalted sense of sacrifice which
he believed he had acquired during lonely nights and days, departed from
him abruptly, for a few minutes at least, and he was furious with
Fortune for having played him such a scurvy trick.
He had just come from Amiens. Joyce had just gone there! If he had only
known that she wanted to visit the battlefields, he could have shown her
every yard of earth that was hallowed by the struggle of British
manhood—made her see with his eyes the way of battle, taken her to
Ypres where her brothers had died, pointed out the line of old trenches
beyond which he had once stared into No-Man’s Land, led her into the
very dug-out where he had found her letter.
On such a journey they would have come together again, gone hand in hand
and heart to heart, understanding the immensity of that tragedy of death
which made their own lives in debt for ever to the youth that died. No
such luck! By twenty-four hours he had missed Joyce, and this chance.
He had the idea of taking the first train back to Amiens, and tracing
them from there, but he reflected that in an automobile they would be
lost to him, and that his best chance of quickest meeting would be to
await Joyce’s return to Paris. He would be able to find out her plans
from Murless, at the British Embassy.
Bertram dumped his one bag in a small hotel in the rue St. Honoré—he
couldn’t afford the Hotel Meurice—and walked to the Embassy in the
Faubourg St. Honoré.
Kenneth Murless, to whom he sent in his card, kept him waiting for ten
minutes, and in spite of that self-rebuke which had softened his
feelings so recently towards Kenneth, this delay strained his temper and
aroused his old sense of hostility, according to the natural law which
makes all men hate those who keep them in antechambers, even as Dr.
Johnson hated Lord Chesterfield and dipped his pen in venom to take
vengeance.
The door opened, and light footsteps crossed the polished boards.
Bertram turned and saw Kenneth Murless, and was aware that, for just the
fraction of a second, Kenneth had a startled look, almost a look of
fear. It passed instantly into a welcoming smile.
“My dear Bertram! Fearfully sorry for keeping you waiting. The
Ambassador is as garrulous as an old maid this morning.”
So he made the _amende honorable_, holding out his hand to Bertram with
the friendliest gesture. Then he sat on the edge of a Louis Quinze
table, and offered Bertram a cigarette.
“Where’s Joyce?” asked Bertram, abruptly.
Kenneth did not seem quite sure at the moment.
“Wafted away to a château in Picardy, I believe. Yes, I understand she’s
staying a while with the old Marquis de Plumoison and his charming
daughter, Yvonne, to say nothing of Jérome, the young and handsome
Vicomte.”
These names meant something to Bertram. Once, in time of war, he had
been billeted for two months outside the Château de Plumoison, and with
kind permission of the old Marquis, had shot rabbits in the park. He
remembered Yvonne de Plumoison, and her kindness to young British
officers like himself. Most of them had fallen in love with her for a
week or two.
“What about Lady Ottery?”
“Gone for one night only, en route for merry England, where your worthy
father-in-law is suffering from that vulgar complaint, influenza. But,
my dear fellow, don’t you get the family bulletin?”
“I’ve been wandering,” said Bertram. He flushed deeply at Kenneth’s
question, and couldn’t tell whether it held an underlying sarcasm, or
was asked in simplicity. Perhaps Joyce hadn’t told Kenneth how hideously
they had quarrelled that night at Holme Ottery, nor how complete had
been their estrangement. It would be like Joyce to keep her own counsel,
and put a gay face upon their separation. And yet she was so intimate in
friendship with Kenneth that if any man knew, he would. In any case he
must have guessed, known, indeed, without guessing, that “something” had
happened to bring Joyce to Paris without her husband.
“Come and dine with me to-night,” said Kenneth. “I’m entertaining a few
friends at the Griffon, a chic little place round the corner.”
“Not in this rig-out,” said Bertram, glancing at his shabby clothes.
Murless pooh-poohed that reason.
“Any old dress does nowadays. Besides, I’ll introduce you as a literary
man. You’ll be adored by the women.”
He congratulated Bertram on his essays in _The New World_.
“You’ve quite a touch! Guy de Maupassant has a rival.”
Again Bertram suspected irony, but Kenneth looked at him in his
friendliest way, disarming hostility, and his next words were kind.
“I was deeply shocked to hear of your mother’s death; and Digby. Please
accept my sympathy.”
Then he gave Bertram another piece of news, striking in its
unexpectedness.
“By the way, your sister is in Paris. Poor pretty Susan.”
By that word “poor” he revealed his knowledge of that tragedy in
Mountjoy Prison. He had met her in the Tuileries gardens, with another
girl. He had raised his hat to her, but she had looked through his body
for a thousand miles.
Bertram was astonished, yet a sense of relief came to him at the news.
It was better for Susan to be in Paris than in Dublin. Safer. But how to
find her? Kenneth could give no clue, and Bertram, having come to Paris
to find Joyce, was in the strange case of a man who had missed his wife
and lost a sister.
He accepted Kenneth’s invitation to dinner because of that loneliness,
and sense of futility, but he hadn’t left the Embassy more than half an
hour when, by a fluke of chance, he came face to face with Susan in the
Place de la Concorde. She was just entering the “Metro” when he saw her,
and grabbed her arm.
“Susan! What luck to find you!”
The last time he had met her came back to his mind in a flash—that day
in Sackville Street, when her hair was unkempt and her eyes were red and
wild, and her frock was wet and muddy after an all-night vigil. Now she
was neat and pretty again, but the memory of that night had not passed
from her face. In her eyes was still something of its pain.
“Hullo, Bertram!” she said, as simply and unemotionally as though they
had left each other only an hour ago. As he drew her on one side to
avoid the stream of people pouring into the Underground station, she
showed sufficient interest in his way of life to ask what he was doing
in Paris. He answered her vaguely, and asked the same question.
“What are _you_ doing?”
She, too, was vague, and said something about propaganda work, for
Ireland. The French were sympathetic. They believed in Liberty, and they
hated England, she was glad to say.
“They don’t seem to like us,” said Bertram, sadly, but he didn’t argue
with that “glad to say.”
“When can I have a real talk with you, and where?”
She gave her address, at a number in the rue de la Pompe, Passy, and
told him that she was living with Betty O’Brien, who, like herself, had
abandoned England since Dennis’s martyrdom. Betty was staying with her
uncle, Mr. Mahony. Any time after nine he would find a little crowd in
their rooms. Irish exiles, French Liberals, Russian Communists, some of
the people in France who most loved Liberty.
“A rum crowd!” thought Bertram, but to his sister he said, “I’ll come
to-night at ten, if that’s not too late?”
“Any time before midnight, or afterwards,” said Susan, smiling for the
first time. “They’re all talkers. You’ll learn a lot, if you’re not too
aggressively English.”
“Joyce thinks I’m not English enough,” he answered, and at the name of
Joyce Susan’s black eyes flashed, and her mouth hardened. She remembered
that scene with the telephone—the prelude of tragedy.
“_Au revoir_, then. Until this evening.”
She fell in with the crowd of business men, _midinettes_, students,
Americans, school-girls, who passed unceasingly through the little iron
gates which led down to the “Metro” tubes.
Bertram lunched alone at a _terrasse_ restaurant, on the other side of
the river in the Boulevard St. Michel. A French girl sat opposite, at
the same little table, and entered into conversation.
“_Anglais?_”
“_Oui. Vous voyez!_”
“_Pas Americain, alors!_”
“_Moitié Anglais, moitié Irlandais, pour le dire précisément._”
She told him that she preferred the Irish half of him. For the English
she had lost her love, on account of that monster, “Loy-Zhorzhe.”
Bertram groaned a little, and laughed a little, and begged her not to
discuss politics.
She expressed the opinion that nothing mattered in life, except
politics, because they dictated life. It was on account of politics that
she paid three francs fifty for a bad _déjeuner_, instead of one franc
seventy-five as in the good days before the war.
Before she had obtained three francs fifty worth of vile food, he learnt
that she was a stenographer to a music publisher in the rue des Saints
Pères, that her brother had been killed (like all the others) at Verdun,
and that she had a lover who was a clerk in the Crédit Lyonnais.
She approached the subject of politics again, when she affirmed that
Paris had lost its gaiety because of high prices. And high prices
prevailed because the _sales Boches_ refused to pay their reparations,
much encouraged by England and America, for reasons she failed to
understand.
“Quite simple reasons,” said Bertram. “Because England and America are
persuaded that Germany’s bankruptcy would be the worst thing for
Europe.”
“_O, la, la! Je m’en fiche de l’Europe! Qu’est-ce-qu’il y a pour la
France qui est tellement épuisée par l’agonie et l’outrage de la
guerre?_”
She didn’t care a jot for Europe. What did that have to do with France,
agonised and outraged by war?
She gave a little gloved hand to Bertram, and thanked him for his
conversation, before going back to her music-shop. She forgave him for
being half English because he was altogether charming.
That encounter meant nothing in Bertram’s life, except relief from half
an hour’s loneliness, and one more proof among a thousand, of the
alarming dislike of England in France after war. What did it portend? It
frightened him, and sickened him. Not in that was the spirit and chance
of peace to which he had dedicated his brain and heart. How could a
bridge be built over this widening gulf between the French and British
foundations of faith for the future of Europe?
The question remained unanswered in Bertram’s mind, as he wandered about
Paris, disconsolate and lonely—enormously lonely now that he had failed
to meet Joyce—until it was time to join Kenneth’s party at the Griffon.