XLII
He was the last to arrive, and Kenneth presented him to a young husband and wife whose names and portraits,—the Baron and Madame de Montauban—he had seen in many illustrated journals devoted to “Society” news.
De Montauban was a well-known amateur tennis player, he remembered, and he seemed to be an amiable, vivacious fellow, with easy manners. His wife was one of the prettiest women Bertram had seen in Paris where there is no dearth of beauty—fresher, more “English,” as he was pleased to think, than the typical Parisienne. Her complexion was almost as Nature had made it, and she had soft brown eyes, with a very charming way with them, but frank and unaffected.
Kenneth’s other guests were the Vicomte and Madame Armand St. Pierre de Vaux, both of whom attracted Bertram with peculiar interest. The husband had lost his left arm and part of his left leg at the first battle of the Marne, but crippled as he was, he showed an astonishing gaiety of spirit, and his lean face, with a little black moustache, and dark, luminous eyes, seemed to Bertram like that of D’Artagnan, the adored hero of his boyhood. His wife was a “belle laide,” plain but elegant, and with adoring eyes for her crippled man whom she treated half as a lover and half as a baby, fondling his hand, cutting up his meat, laughing at his anecdotes as though she heard them for the first time, and rebuking him for raising his voice too loud in a public restaurant. To these attentions her husband responded with whimsical affection, like a small boy with his mother, whom he adores though she tries his patience.
Kenneth was a good host, speaking French perfectly, with a Parisian accent which Bertram found a little hard to follow—as he had learnt French colloquially among the peasants and bourgeoisie of Picardy—and leading the conversation as easily and gracefully as in a London drawing-room. Now and then, Bertram was aware of Kenneth’s glance upon him, once or twice met his eyes and saw in them a kind of embarrassment, like that startled look which he had given for just a second at their meeting that morning in the Faubourg St. Honoré. But it was only the faintest hint of uneasiness for some unknown cause, and was no more than a shadow which left no trace in the sparkle of his conversation.
The table was laid for six, with Kenneth at one end and Armand de Vaux at the other. Bertram had the privilege of sitting on the left of Mme. de Montauban, who was next to Kenneth. Opposite were the Vicomte de Montauban, and Mme. de Vaux—admirably arranged according to the convention that husbands and wives must be kept as far apart as possible when they eat in public.
There was a little general discussion as to the impossibility of getting good food in Paris after the war, even at outrageous prices, due mainly to the profiteering of Parisian middlemen. Presently Mme. de Montauban turned to Bertram and speaking English with pretty accent, “felicitated” him on the possession of so beautiful a wife, whom she had had the pleasure of meeting several times.
Bertram’s mind winced a little at that word “possession,” but he merely asked where Mme. de Montauban had happened to meet Joyce.
She seemed a little surprised at that question, and her glance flickered for a moment in the direction of Kenneth.
“Everywhere in Paris,” she answered, with her beautiful smile. “She has made many friends among us because of her love, so very great, for our dear France.”
“Tiens!” said Armand de Vaux, on the other side of Bertram, “Monsieur is the husband of Miladi Joyce! She is exquisite! An English rose! Monsieur will pardon me if I confess that I fell desperately in love with her!”
“It’s impossible to avoid that tribute!” said Kenneth. “Bertram Pollard knows that all his friends are the slaves of his wife’s beauty. Isn’t it so?”
He spoke in French, and his words sounded chevaleresque and romantic, with a lighter touch than they would have had in English. At that “Is it not so?” he looked at Bertram, and their eyes met. Kenneth’s smile seemed a little quizzing, as though he knew his friend’s quick jealousy.
Bertram felt no kind of objection to Armand de Vaux’s declaration of “desperate love,” though he was conscious of some secret reaction to Kenneth’s endorsement.
“I am glad Joyce is so much admired,” he said simply.
Armand de Vaux paid a tribute to English womanhood. Most of his knowledge of English character, as a young man, had been gained from reading translations of Shakespeare during his service militaire in the barracks at Belfont. He had fallen in love with Rosalind, Beatrice, and Katherine, above all with Beatrice, who was, he thought, essentially English and Elizabethan. But he believed from better evidence than that of reading, that English womanhood had retained that Elizabethan quality of character—frankness, simplicity, courage, and above all, a playfulness of spirit.
Mme. de Vaux tapped her husband’s hand.
“None of your amorous reminiscences here, Armand. Every one knows that you are a monster of infidelity.”
“Before marriage I was a romantic,” he admitted with simple self-satisfaction. “Since marriage I have been a model of single-hearted devotion. It is still possible, however, that I may one day sow my last peck of wild oats.”
This menace caused great laughter from De Montauban, and his wife, and Kenneth rewarded the audacity of De Vaux, in the presence of his wife—who seemed in no way perturbed—by filling up the glasses of his guests with another bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and drinking to the exploits of D’Artagnan—“Twenty Years After.”
Mme. de Montauban ventured to accuse Shakespeare of tremendous plagiarism from Boccaccio and the Italian novelli, and there were vivacious passages of arms between her and Kenneth, in the course of which they quoted Italian poets at each other, so leaving Bertram for a while outside the conversation, as he was ignorant of that language.
Armand de Vaux had a tête-à-tête with him.
“You fought in France, I have no doubt, sir?”
“The Somme, Flanders, Cambrai,” said Bertram.
“And still with both legs and both arms! That is wonderful. . . . You see I lost two limbs in the Great War. I do not regret them. What beautiful memories of comradeship and laughter, and immense valour! The best years of our lives!”
He spoke with absolute sincerity, and with a new light in his eyes, as though seeing with enthusiasm the vision of his fighting days.
“The comradeship was good,” said Bertram, “but the price was too great for that. Why not comradeship without war?”
“Pas possible! It needs war and the chance of death to bring out the great qualities of men. Laughter is best when it is in the midst of danger as a shield against fear. Mon Dieu! how I laughed in those days!”
He told some anecdotes of war. How the “popote” or mess had been destroyed by a German shell when they were ravenous with hunger after a long march to Ablain St. Nazaire; how they had killed a German sergeant-major and two men, luring them into No-Man’s Land by driving a lean pig through the barbed wire at dawn; how they had made a camouflage tree on the Arras-Lens road and sniped Germans like rabbits before they spotted it.
He was enormously amused at his own efforts to get wounded. No wound, no decoration, was the custom in the French army, as far as the fighting men were concerned. Of course, at the back of the front, any little cock sparrow at Headquarters or the Base, could cover his breast with ribbons. But in the front line the only chance of distinction was a wound. For a long time he’d had the vilest luck. All his friends were wounded—and decorated. He remained without a scratch, and without a medal. The Colonel regarded him suspiciously, said he bore “a charmed life,” as though he indulged in some private Juju to keep immune from shell-fire and snipers’ bullets, aerial torpedoes, trench mortars, hand grenades, and the whole “bag of tricks.” The situation became serious. He walked in a veritable hail of shrapnel and nothing hit him. He made a home of No-Man’s Land at night, leading patrols, but no, the Boche ignored him. One day, in Arras, a monstrous aerial torpedo made straight for him. “Ah, ha, my friend! At last you are going to do my trick!” But the sacré torpedo was a dud, and fell at his very feet without exploding! Quelle mauvaise chance! What infernal bad luck! However, fortune’s wheel turned at last, and in the battle of the Somme, on the right of the British, he lost his arm and leg and gained the Médaille Militaire, and the Croix de Guerre.
Bertram joined in his gay laughter. This little French aristocrat was not posing, nor indulging in vainglorious boasting. He had loved the adventure of war, and found in it compensations for all its abominations and its tragedy of great death. A thousand years of ancestry had given him this instinct of war. Its spirit belonged to his blood. He was of the same race and quality as Amadis de Gaul, Roland, Bertrand du Guesclin, the Sieurs de Morny, the Knights of Froissart’s noble Chronicles. Old Christy would have voted for his death—theoretically—as a “carrier” of the war-microbe, as some people are typhoid carriers, infecting all who come in contact with them.
“Then you don’t agree with Le Feu, by Barbusse, as a true picture of the war from the poilu’s point of view?” asked Bertram.
Armand de Vaux “went off,” like a trench mortar. He denounced that book—the most terrible picture of war’s horror, which Bertram had read before writing his own—as the work of a traitor to France, as revolutionary propaganda of the vilest kind, an outrage upon the valour of the French soldier.
Bertram was silent, not caring to risk a dispute at this table, but pretty Mme. de Montauban expressed her own opinion.
“I had a nephew at Souchez and Notre Dame de Lorette—Pierre, as you remember? He tells me that Barbusse has given an exact picture of those trenches in the winter of ’15. The men were not relieved, month after month. They lived and ate and slept and died, in mud and filth. Some of them went mad, and others walked out into No-Man’s Land to end their misery by a German bullet. You remember only the amusing side of war, Vicomte! It is your temperament. In my hospital at Neuilly I saw too much tragedy to believe in your romance.”
“Bah!” said the Vicomte de Vaux. “Tragedy? Death? They are part of life, in peace as well as war. ‘A little laughter, a little love . . . and then good night!’ What more can we ask, except a good fight? Vive la Guerre!”
Mme. de Montauban laughed, and shook her head.
“That is the language of the eighteenth century. You speak that tongue, I know. You belong to that period. But for us moderns there is no truth in it. War has nearly destroyed our dear France. Another—and we die!”
“We shall have another,” said Armand de Vaux. “I shall weep to be out of it, with only one leg and one arm.”
“Why shall we have another?” asked Bertram, and a little chill crept down his spine, because of the calm and certain way in which the little Vicomte had made that statement.
But it was the Baron de Montauban who answered.
“Surely,” he said, leaning forward a little, to flick the ash of his cigarette into a bowl of flowers, “you are aware that your Lloyd George arranges another for us?”
“Your Lloyd George!” Bertram had heard that phrase from peasants, chambermaids, commercial travellers, shop-girls, the typist-secretary of a music publisher. He did not expect to hear it from a French aristocrat.
Kenneth made a protest, in his graceful way, deprecating unpleasant themes, except when he happened to lead the argument in his best manner as a one-time President of the Oxford Union.
“As office-boy at the British Embassy, I hesitate to listen to accusations against my Prime Minister.”
Armand de Vaux laughed heartily at this diplomatic statement, and said he had no more respect for Ministers of France than for Ministers of England. They were all politicians, playing to their respective galleries. As a soldier and a Royalist he despised them as canaille.
De Montauban pursued his idea relentlessly, despite this interlude.
“When I say your Lloyd George is arranging another war for France, I mean all that body of opinion in Great Britain which calls itself Liberal. Mon Dieu! In their desire to be fair to the Germans—one might as well be fair to his Majesty the Devil!—and in their anxiety to trade again with their former enemy, they utterly ignore the French point of view.”
“What is that?” asked Bertram, anxious to discover whether the Baron de Montauban could give him more light than the peasants of the old battlefields.
“We have only one point of view, and one demand,” said de Montauban. “Security! . . . Security for France, after her sacrifice and her victory. Where is that assurance?”
“In the ‘tapage’ of our ‘soixante-quinzes!’ ” said Armand de Vaux.
De Montauban shook his head.
“Let us not deceive ourselves. We are not strong enough to fight alone against the Boche.”
“We have Poland as a gallant ally.”
“She will crumple like pasteboard between Germany and Russia.”
“Belgium, Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary,” said De Vaux.
“We must have England and the United States,” said De Montauban. “It was they who made us sheathe our sword and abandon our full and just right of vengeance against Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. We compromised in return for a pledge of security from our allies. That pledge was broken before the signature was dry on the Treaty. The Americans refused to ratify the pledge of their President. It was our first betrayal. Since then, by a sentimental illusion of world peace, all our rights have been betrayed. The Germans have been encouraged to evade their reparation payments, though without them France is bankrupt. When we threaten to march into the Ruhr to enforce those payments, the Liberals of England cry ‘Shame’ on us for provoking the poor dear Germans. What will be the end of it? It is almost in sight. The Entente will be broken between England and France. Germany will ally herself with Russia, with whom also the English Liberals are sentimentalising, and France will within the present generation be called upon to defend her soil again, without Great Britain by her side. It is inevitable. It is certain. It is the Great Betrayal. That is why we hate your Lloyd George, and all he stands for.”
“The English people are loyal to us,” said Mme. de Montauban. She turned to Bertram, and laid her little hand on his arm.
“We are sure that the real heart of England beats with us, after so much common sacrifice, so much agony together. Is it not so?”
“It is true,” said Bertram, “I thank you for having said so, Madame.”
He found himself speaking emotionally, with a kind of passion in his voice, which he tried to control.
“Since I’ve been in France, wandering about, I have heard nothing but the French point of view. I agree with it a good deal. I am a lover of France. But there’s another point of view.”
“Yes?” asked De Montauban, politely, but with a hint of sarcasm.
“Yes. It’s the English point of view. That of the common man, the ‘Tommy’ who fought in France.”
“Yes?” asked De Montauban again.
“I know it pretty well. You would like to hear?”
“Tell us!” said Mme. de Montauban.
“It’s just this. He doesn’t believe in kicking a man when he’s down, even a German. And he does believe that another war will happen if France presses Germany too hard. He doesn’t want another war, because he has two million comrades out of work as a result of the last, and the trade of England is ruined already. He wants peace, and he thinks the way to get it is by a union of European peoples, forgetting hatred, and no longer grouping into different Alliances, defensive or aggressive. He believes in a League of Nations.”
“Then he believes in monstrous illusion,” said De Montauban, very coldly, and Bertram thought of the French priest who banged his fist on the table with the cry of “Illusion!”
“Speaking as a soldier,” said Armand de Vaux, “I see no safety for France or England, except in the power of their artillery. And I would give the luxury of this very charming dinner to sit in the mud again and hear the rafale of the soixante-quinzes pounding the Boche to bits.”
“You’re a bloodthirsty ogre!” said his wife, caressing his only hand.
“You’re a despiser of my poor little banquet,” said Kenneth, ordering some more Veuve Clicquot, and very artfully inviting an interruption of waiters, to change the drift of conversation which abandoned politics for a discussion on the psychology of “jazz,” led by the beautiful Mme. de Montauban, in reference to the efforts of the orchestra.
Kenneth had to return to the Embassy at ten o’clock.
Mme. de Montauban and her husband were going to a reception by the Duchesse d’Uzès. It was this lady who rose first, with a smile at Mme. de Vaux who accepted the signal.
The other little parties in the restaurant paid tribute to her beauty with their eyes, as Bertram helped to put her cloak on her shoulders.
She gave him her hand with a charming friendship.
“I understand your English point of view,” she said. “It is a little dangerous, I think. The English heart is greater than the English head!”
Then she leaned forward to him, smiling, and spoke in a low voice.
“Do not leave your wife alone too much. She is too beautiful! That is more important than politics—if you love her beauty!”
In another moment she was gone, with a rustle of silk and a gracious smile.
Bertram was alarmed by those words of hers. Were they merely “French” in their general sentiment, or a particular warning? They disturbed him profoundly.
He walked with Kenneth through the Marché St. Honoré as far as the Embassy. Kenneth seemed talkative, discussing those friends of his, as though wishing to avoid other topics.
Bertram broke in across one of his subtleties.
“You’ve seen a good deal of Joyce lately?”
For just a second—no more than that—Kenneth hesitated in his reply.
“Yes. Longchamps—the Bois—the opera, and so on, in the usual way. It’s been beautiful weather lately, don’t you think?”
Bertram was silent. He was not interested in the weather.
“You know that Joyce and I have not seen things altogether eye to eye lately? She told you that?”
Kenneth again hesitated before his answer, as though weighing his words with diplomatic caution.
“I was aware of some misunderstanding. . . . But if you’ll allow me to say so, I never discuss relations between husband and wife. Don’t you think that’s a good rule?”
He spoke in his friendliest way, but his rebuke, as it seemed, made Bertram flush deeply.
“I have no intention of discussing my relations with Joyce. I merely desired to thank you for having been a good friend to her during my absence.”
Kenneth laughed, in a queer, strained way.
“My dear fellow! No need for thanks. . . . I try to play the game, according to the rules.”
He raised his hand with a gesture that was almost a salute, and disappeared into the British Embassy.