XX
It was not to Joyce that he read out his book when it was quite finished, but to Janet Rockingham Welford, author of “Mixed Marriages,” “The Surplus Virgins,” and other alarming works. With her usual desire for information, her habit of asking the most searching and intimate questions, she had gained his admission some time ago that he was no longer searching for a “job” because he had found his object in life—this book on the war, and the gift of words. He didn’t call it a “gift” to her. He called it his new obsession, and was pleased with her excitement.
She was vastly excited. She vowed that she had seen “in the blink of an eyelid” that he had something to tell the world that the world should know.
“Don’t be timid!” was her advice. She urged him to be brutal, to tell the truth in its starkness. She hated those little scribblers who still covered the filth of war with rose-water, concealing its stench. She wanted Bertram to be cruel to himself and to his readers, not to spare them a jot.
“Make their nerves jump,” she said. “Take them by the scruff of the neck and thrust their noses into the horror, and say, ‘Look at this! That’s what it’s like! And this is what it’s going to be again, to your little snub-nosed boys, to your annoying but necessary husbands, to your best beloved, unless you’re jolly careful.’ ”
Bertram said that was his idea. He’d been honest, anyhow. Not brutal for literary effect, but true to the things he’d seen.
Janet wasn’t satisfied with that. She wanted him to be true to the things he’d felt as well as seen. She wanted him to remember his own agony in the worst hours, to get into his book all the agony of all the men, blinded, crippled, shell-shocked.
“Make it a masterpiece!” she implored. “Write it to revenge my blinded men.”
Bertram told her she expected too much, and warned her that he was only a beginner at the writing game. He needed criticism.
“You’ll get it, little one!” promised Janet Welford. “Read it out to me, and I’ll make your flesh quail if you haven’t been honest with yourself.”
That was her invitation, and he accepted it with the sensitive, wistful, urgent desire of all beginners in the art of Literature not for criticism—which is terrible to suffer—but for encouragement, interest, understanding, praise.
Night after night he went round after dinner to Janet’s flat in Overstrand Mansions, Battersea Park, one of a long line of tall blocks of dwellings mostly inhabited as Bertram found, by the poorer “Intellectuals,” the “Surplus Virgins” (as Janet called her own class of unmarried women), and newly-wed couples on modest means, with room for one perambulator in the little “hall.” Some novelist had once written a book about this street, called “Intellectual Mansions, S.W.,” and the name had stuck.
She barred out all other visitors until the reading was finished, by the simple plan of putting an envelope under the door knocker with an inscription in her big, bold handwriting, “Out of Town.” Several times as he read, Bertram heard footsteps faltering on the landing outside, and then going down the stone staircase again, dejectedly.
“Poor wretches!” he would say, and Janet would light another cigarette, or puff out a wreath of smoke, and say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder! Get on with it!”
She was helpful to him. She didn’t spare criticism. She made him “quail” all right! She found mistakes in grammar, split infinitives, frightful faults in style. She cried out at such times as though he’d touched her with a red-hot poker: “Oh, my little sensitive soul!”—“Oh, my æsthetic Aunt!”—“Oh, ignorant and nerve-shattering soldier-man!” Such absurdities of ejaculation warned him of dreadful blunders, which then she corrected like a stern “schoolmarm,” so comical in her caricature that Bertram laughed while he quailed. A hundred times she stormed at him because he’d “shirked” the uttermost reality, turning away with cowardice from the obscenity of war’s torture-chambers.
“Stronger!” she would say. “Stronger! That’s weak. Let the Truth come right out and show its bloody face to those who still believe in the glory and splendour of war’s adventure—the romantic women, crudest in all the world, the hundred per cent patriots who would engage in world war for a nice point of honour or to avenge a pin-prick!”
There were times when Bertram felt the cold chill of failure on him. This book, then, was no good! He had failed! He had fooled himself into the belief that it was the Real Thing.
But these moods did not overwhelm him, because of Janet’s emotion, rage, laughter, tears, as he went on reading. She loved what he had written about the men. She knew them. She had nursed them. They had wept out of blind eyes in her arms. They had “groused” and cursed and laughed and joked and agonised, and revealed nakedly the secret of their souls to her. She knew, and Bertram had written what she knew.
After each reading he asked her anxiously for her opinion. Was it any good? Did it have the slightest chance? He wanted her to tell him frankly.
She teased him a little. She said: “I reserve judgment,” or “I’ve read worse stuff,” and then when he was tortured by doubt, she laughed in her full-throated way, and told him to be conceited because she wasted so much time upon him. Christy would be jealous of him, if he ever knew.
“Christy jealous?”
He looked at her searchingly, to see how much truth there might be in that, but he could not guess the meaning of the whimsical look in her eyes, nor of the sudden blush that flamed into her cheeks after those careless words of hers.
After the reading of the last chapter, he asked his usual question: What did she think? Any good? Or had he wasted his time, and his hopes?
She did not answer for a little while, and then suddenly took both his hands.
“It’s good! . . . Not all the truth, but all true. . . . A good book, soldier man, and almost great! Thank God, you’ve written it!”
These words warmed his soul. He was enormously grateful for them. A wave of emotion swept over him because this praise, so simply spoken, so generously, by this girl who understood, was a reward for his labour.
He raised her hands to his lips, and kissed them.
“Whatever happens to the book,” he said, “your sympathy and help have been tremendous to me. How can I pay back?”
She let her hands linger in his, not deliberately, but carelessly. She laughed at his suggestion of “paying back,” and called him by the absurd nickname which she had invented for him.
“No fee, Sir Faithful! I’ll be satisfied for service done when you abandon the Halfway House and come over to the Left Wing!”
“Not likely!” answered Bertram. “I walk in the middle of the road.”