XXI
After that reading of the book, there wasn’t the same excuse for Bertram to go to Janet’s flat in Battersea. Not the same reason. Yet he went. The truth was, as he admitted, that he could not keep away because he craved for the laughter, the audacity of thought, and the free comradeship which he found with Janet and her friends, and not in his own house. Decidedly not in his own house in the week or two that followed Lady Ottery’s lecture and Joyce’s refusal to interest herself in his work.
Even Edith, the parlourmaid, showed by various little signs of sympathy meant in a kind spirit, but frightfully embarrassing, that she was aware of Joyce’s unkindness.
“Aren’t you going with her ladyship to-night, sir?” Or, “Seems a pity you don’t like cards. Her ladyship is that fond of Bridge!”
Deliberately Joyce involved herself in a series of bridge parties which ignored Bertram’s claim to companionship and included, every time, it seemed, Kenneth Murless or General Bellasis, generally in the rooms of the Countess Lydia in Whitehall Court. Now that his book was finished, and in Christy’s hands for professional advice about the way to get it published, Bertram felt loneliness closing about him with a greater chill. Sometimes he thought Joyce was teasing his jealousy. She talked of Kenneth in terms of affectionate comradeship, and then glanced at Bertram to see whether she had piqued him. She confessed that she owed Kenneth a good deal of money for Bridge debts—“but of course he could wait.” Kenneth had been in particularly good form that night. His stories about Lady Speelman’s ball had made everybody laugh. She was going to the Opera with Kenneth and the Russian girls.
Bertram didn’t disguise his feelings, but he restrained the expression of his temper. Something had happened in him worse than ill-temper. It was a coldness that was creeping into his heart, a sense of some complete and terrible misunderstanding between Joyce and himself, beyond all petty quarrels.
He had a dreadful apprehension that something in the very quality of his character was alien, offensive, and intolerable to the fastidious and delicate mind of his young wife. Perhaps he was of a coarser fibre than she was. He was afraid the war had brutalised him more than he was aware of. He had certainly “learnt to swear abominably in Flanders,” like English soldiers of Smollett’s time, and his nerves had been frayed so badly that he didn’t always check his tongue in the presence of Joyce. But it was deeper than that, and worse than that. Joyce seemed to find him a vulgarian, a common fellow. There were times when her eyes seemed to say so. . . .
Janet Welford did not make him feel like that. She called him “Sir Faithful,” and once “did homage to him,” so she pretended, in her jolly way, as “a very parfit gentil knight.” By that name she introduced him to her friends, those queer, free-spoken, amazingly audacious girls who seemed to be the advance guard of Social revolution in England, and played intellectual games of skittles with the old traditions of English life.
He sat dumb among them at times because of their wild talk. They were pretty Bolshevists, who frightened him with their revolutionary ideals. The Russian experiment had not been revealed yet in all its ghastly failure, and they spoke lightly of Lenin as “the Master-mind,” and had a sentimental affection for Trotsky as “the new Napoleon,” and refused to believe a word of the atrocity stories manufactured, so they said, by propagandists of the White Armies at Riga and Helsingfors.
Bertram wondered what would happen to his exalted Mother-in-law, if she were suddenly to be transported from Holme Ottery to that flat in Battersea Park, and heard such discourse. He wondered what would happen to himself, if she saw him there, surrounded by these pretty witches. Not pretty all of them! Janet’s best friend, Katherine Wild, was a snub-nosed woman, with short hair cut like a man’s, but with courage and comedy in her grey eyes. She and Janet made the pace in conversation, egged each other on to new extravagances, made one great jest of life.
It was but verbal flippancy. Bertram remembered Janet’s devotion to the blinded soldiers of St. Dunstan’s. From Janet he knew that Katherine Wild devoted all her life to the starving children of the devastated countries in Europe, as the organiser of relief. She had been working in the soup kitchens of Vienna, and knew, as few others, the agony of Austria. It was the knowledge of life’s tragedy that made her seize at any of life’s jokes, and make a religion of laughter. Her great hope was to get into Russia and to extend the work of relief to that country, which was still blockaded by the rest of Europe because of the menace and fear of Bolshevism.
“I shan’t have seen the depths of human misery,” she said once, “until I’ve crossed the frontier into Russia.”
“Do you want to see the depths?” asked Bertram.
“The uttermost depths. Until then my knowledge of life won’t be complete. You must go there too, Mr. Pollard!”
“Why?” asked Bertram.
She told him that Janet had spoken to her about his book on the war. The last chapter couldn’t be written until he’d been to Russia. There was the aftermath of Armageddon. After War, Famine, and after Famine, Pestilence. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden through Russia, and the noise of their hoofs could be heard in Western Europe, coming closer, closer. In Russia Europe might read the writing on the wall.
“It’s the key to the riddle of the New World,” she said. “By what happens in Russia, and the world’s reaction thereto, we shall know our fate.”
Strange how he could never escape from talk about Russia! In Joyce’s crowd he had listened constantly to tales of Red Army atrocities, the sufferings of the old régime. In this crowd he listened to denunciations of White Army cruelties, and the sufferings of Russian peasants.
Once he lost his temper, and flared out into violent speech which might have forfeited him the friendship of Janet Welford, if she had not been enormously broad-minded, with an all-embracing sense of humour.
With her women friends he could be patient, whatever they said, for they had a sincerity of idealism which was proved honestly by service in some human way, with sick children, or suffering men, as nurses, guardians of the poor, workers in University settlements, guides to blinded soldiers. But some of Janet’s men friends seemed to him poisonous.
They were members, mostly, of that club, “The Left Wing,” into which she had desired, vainly, to beguile him. But he saw the types in her rooms, and didn’t like the look of them. They were egoists, conceited with their own superior “idealism,” poseurs of rebel philosophy, amateur Jacobins, without passion or sincerity.
Two of them were young men who had escaped service in the war by going to prison as Pacifists. No doubt that needed greater moral courage in a way than surrendering to the general tide of emotion and faith by getting into khaki. Theoretically he admitted the right, even the nobility of men who for conscience’ sake, religious belief or spiritual abhorrence of war—like the Quakers—dared public contumely by refusing services at such a time. It was contrary to his own convictions, for though he hated war, and knew its insanity, he believed that when once a people had become involved, they must stand in defence of their own country and of their own homes. Still, he understood the reasoning of men morally and utterly convinced of the Christian command, “Thou shalt not kill.”
But these young men who came to Janet’s flat had been Pacifists when their country was threatened, and now were revolutionists, talking very glibly of Lenin’s right to destroy the enemies of Russian liberty, and of the glorious prospect of a world revolution for the overthrow of the Capitalist system.
It was a young man named Lucas Melvin who aroused Bertram’s rage. Talking in the affected accent of Christchurch, at its worst, and playing with a silk handkerchief which he had drawn from his shirt cuff, he proclaimed his belief that Labour was about to overthrow the Government by “direct action.”
“This coming strike,” he said, “will lead to a general paralysis of industry. All the Trade Unions will unite for general action. I anticipate the pleasure of seeing a number of Profiteers and bourgeois hanging on the lamp-posts in Whitehall. Vive la Révolution Anglaise!”
This speech was received with laughter and applause, and the company was surprised when Bertram rose slowly from his low chair by the fireside, and stood with his back to the mantelpiece, glowering at Lucas Melvin, as though preparing to knock him down.
“I can’t pass that!” he said.
“Pass what, dear sir?” asked Melvin.
“That damned, insincere, and dangerous nonsense of yours.”
Melvin protested that he didn’t like those coarse words. He also objected to Bertram’s method of argument. It was neither elegant nor polite.
“It’s not so coarse as revolution,” said Bertram, bitterly. “It’s more polite than a revolutionary mob would be, if they caught you with a silk handkerchief up your sleeve. Don’t you realise that if you and other young fools who play about with the revolutionary idea were ever to find yourselves in that state of things, your necks would be wrung first by a mob that’s not out for elegance? They’d just wipe you out like midges. Don’t you understand that if England were to go in for revolution, all Europe would be dragged down with her, and war would be child’s play to that anarchy and horror?”
“I see you belong to the reactionary set,” said Melvin, with an air of bravado, but his voice was not quite steady. “Doubtless you uphold the principles of The Morning Post.”
“I try to see things with commonsense,” said Bertram, “not like a child, ignorant of realities. I’ve seen war. I don’t want to see revolution. I imagine it’s worse.”
It was Janet who poured oil on the troubled waters.
“Sir Faithful,” she said, “verily you speak the words of truth and wisdom. This child has been well rated. But of your mercy, remember that this is a bower of fair ladies, and not a tilting-ground for angry knights.”
“Sorry!” he said, and his rage died down. Lucas Melvin retired hurt, and soon the others went, leaving him last, and alone with Janet.
“I behaved like a ‘muddied oaf,’ ” he said. “Do you forgive me?”
She forgave him so well that she sat on the floor by his side with her hands clasping her knees, talking about the queer complexities of life, the muddle in human nature, the mixed motives of men and women. Presently she told him that he had better go home. It was unfair to his wife to stay so late.
“Joyce won’t be back yet,” he said, “and I hate going home to a lonely house.”
She looked up into his face searchingly.
“I’m afraid your married life is not all it should be. Whose fault?”
“Mine,” he said.
She told him that if he weren’t so beastly timid, she would get down to the secret of the trouble.
“I’d like to help,” she said.
“You’re helping,” he told her, and then something seemed to warn him that this was not playing the game by Joyce, and that he was losing hold of the loyalties to which his soul was pledged. Janet was helping him too much. In a little while he might not be able to live without her help, her sympathy, her understanding, her comradeship. A sudden movement he made, drawing back from her a little, surprised her.
“What’s the matter, Faithful?”
“I’d better go. After all, it’s getting late.”
But it was only ten o’clock, and not too late for a visit from Christy. The maid had let him into the hall, and they hadn’t heard him enter, and were not aware of him until he came into the room.
“Hullo!” he said. “Where’s all the party?”
“Faithful broke it up, with violence.”
Janet rose from her seat on the floor by Bertram’s side and held her hand out to Christy like a Princess. He kissed it with warmth, and said, “The Ugly Beast pays homage to Divine Beauty.”
“The handsome Megatherium to the beautiful Pterodactyl!” said Janet.
They were acting in the usual way, but Bertram was aware of some state of tension in the room. Christy was not quite at his ease, nor Janet quite natural.
“Going so soon?” asked Christy, as Bertram went towards the door.
“I’ve been trying to go for half an hour.”
“Then stay not on the order of your going, but go!”
Christy laughed at the old quotation spoken by Janet, but Bertram saw a queer look in his eyes, of shyness or distress. Was old Christy jealous of him, because of his comradeship with Janet?
Ridiculous!