XXVIII
When Bertram went to the drawing-room, he found a foursome at bridge in progress—Lord and Lady Ottery, Joyce, General Bellasis. Kenneth was making himself agreeable to Miss Heathcote and presently suggested a game of “pills,” so that they left the room together.
Nothing doing for Bertram, who felt that he was frozen out. Joyce deliberately avoided his glance, or, at least, never looked his way, though he tried to entice her eyes by wandering around, shifting a little porcelain figure on the mantelpiece, and rattling a few coppers in one of his pockets.
He wanted her to look at him. He had a foolish idea that he might send her a message with his eyes, asking for her understanding, and for her comradeship. But she seemed to be absorbed in her game, and was gay in altercation with her partner, General Bellasis. Bertram’s endeavour to establish communication with her was answered only by Lady Ottery.
“Don’t fidget, Bertram! My partner is sufficiently trying.”
Her partner was her husband, Ottery, who resented this slight upon his ability at bridge by a mild protest of “That’s unfair, my dear!”
The situation was ludicrous as far as Bertram was concerned. He knew that for him this was a night of crisis. He had made the great refusal, for what he believed to be conscience’ sake. He wanted passionately to talk it over with his wife. Some long emotional strain had reached its breaking point to-night in his relation to Joyce. His heart must speak to hers now, urgently. This polite, distant, unnatural way between them must be broken by plain talking, by the rough reality of human nature. He couldn’t wait any longer for that. They must have it out, once for all, and now. . . . But meanwhile Joyce played bridge with Bellasis, and without looking at him.
He would make her look.
While Bellasis was writing down the last results of play, Bertram went to their table and bent over Joyce with his hand on her shoulder. She gave a little shrug, which he knew meant to say, “Take your hand away,” but he kept it there, heavily, and spoke to her.
“I want to speak to you, Joyce, presently. After your game.”
“Hasn’t there been enough talk?” she asked, impatiently.
“No,” he said, “there’s got to be more. I’ve something important to say.”
Lady Ottery tapped his hand with a card case.
“My dear Bertram. Please don’t interrupt. Can’t you find something to read?”
“Sorry!” said Bertram, “but I wanted to have the favour of a few words with Joyce presently.”
“The night’s young,” said Ottery, impatiently. “Don’t spoil the game, sir.”
“Your answer, Joyce?” said Bertram.
She looked at him now, straight in the eyes, with a challenge of will.
“After the game, and when I’m ready. Not before.”
“Right!”
He went out of the room, and out of the house, and for more than an hour wandered about the park.
It was a warm night on the last day of April, with a three-quarter moon, so that the branches of the trees were silvered and the lawns flooded with a milky radiance. The old house with its tall chimneys flung black shadows across the terrace paths, and the broken Venus gleamed white above the flight of steps to the rose gardens. The night air was still fragrant with the scent of flowers and damp grass, and warm earth. In the long avenue down which Bertram paced, a nightingale was singing to its mate, with little trills of passion.
Bertram remembered the last time he had heard a nightingale singing like that. It was in Notre Dame de Lorette, after a battle at Lens. The red flash of gunfire made a regular pulsation of light through the shell-gashed trees and the roar of bombardment shook the very earth. But the little bird in the tree went on singing to its mate. Queer! Even with men, love and the mating business of passion went on and would not surrender its claim though half the world was in ruins and civilisation was menaced by many dangers, and the individual had no sense of security.
That was the best philosophy, the only way of life. It was ridiculous to worry over much about the future. Old Christy was always worrying, and trying to put the world right. Better, perhaps, to carry on, like peasants and plain folk, for self-preservation, for the essential needs and appetites of self-existence—and let the world take care of itself. Holme Ottery was in ruins, like half the world. This old house, so stately in its hushed gardens and wooded parkland, so beautiful in this moonlight, as at noonday, had reached its last phase of life, at least as the roof-tree of the family which had built its beauty. Did it matter very much? Not if the life of the family went on to new development, following the thread of fate through changing ways—not if Joyce still loved her mate.
Bertram felt the stir of passion in his blood, as several times this day. Joyce challenged him. She disapproved of his ideas, and was angry because he had decided something against her wish. She put her will-power against his, tried to coerce him to her way of thinking, spoke with satire, irritably, harshly. That was all nonsense! Life was bigger than that. Love was bigger. He would make Joyce his mate again, not by argument, and intellectual duels, but by passion, by the emotion that stirred in him on this night of April, as it stirred the little creeping things of the warm earth there, and was astir in the hedges and ditches, and bushes and woods, of this Holme Ottery and all other places, and had been stirring since life began, because this was life.
When after an hour Bertram went back towards the house by way of the rose-gardens, and the long pergola, through which the moonlight crept, he heard Joyce’s voice. She was speaking quietly, and he saw her figure in a black cloak sitting at the top of the steps on the parapet. She was in the full white light of the moon, though not sharply outlined, because of its filmy glamour. Below her, sitting on the top step, with his knees tucked up and his hands clasped round them, was a man’s figure, his shirt-front gleaming very white. It was Kenneth Murless’s long and elegant form, as Bertram could see by his very attitude. Their voices sounded clearly across the garden, though they weren’t speaking loudly.
“It’ll break my heart to leave Holme Ottery,” said Joyce.
“Sad! Horribly sad!” answered Kenneth. “It’s a tragic world altogether for our little lot. We belong to the past. You and I, Joyce, are prehistoric survivals. Awful thought, that!”
“We needn’t surrender without a fight,” said Joyce.
Kenneth Murless laughed with his soft musical note.
“God is on the side of the big battalions, my dear! The mob is moving out. We haven’t a chance.”
“To Hell with the mob!” said Joyce.
Kenneth laughed again, pleasantly.
“Your husband would hate to hear you say that!”
Joyce didn’t answer for a moment, and then spoke harshly.
“Bertram’s a traitor to our side of things!”
“Hush!” said Kenneth.
It was when Bertram walked out of the pergola and came up the terrace steps and stood quite close to them.
“Joyce,” he said quietly, “you and I must have a talk, if Kenneth will permit.”
Kenneth stood up, and smiled rather nervously at Bertram.
“I’m off to bed, old man. Good night, both.” He walked quickly back to the house, leaving Bertram to Joyce.
“I’m for bed too,” said Joyce. “It’s too late for talk. And you heard what I said, I presume?”
“That word ‘traitor’?”
“Yes.”
She drew her cloak closer about her shoulders, and moved towards the house, but Bertram took her by the wrist.
“We’ve got to have it out, Joyce. Shall it be here, in the garden, or indoors?”
She tried to release her wrist—the same wrist which he had hurt over a telephone—but he held her fast.
“Indoors,” she said.
“All right.”
He held open the door of the little turret for her, and as two could not pass together, released her wrist as she went in. She slipped away from him then, and ran lightly up the stone stairs which led to the gallery round the great staircase, and her bedroom. She had the door of her room almost slammed in his face before he reached her, and held the door-handle.
“Not quick enough!”
“No.”
They stood facing each other rather breathlessly inside her room. Joyce laughed a little, but in a baffled, angry way, like a thwarted child.
“It’s the first time I’ve been in this room,” said Bertram. He looked at the smallness of it, and the neatness. It had been Joyce’s room since she had left her nursery in the house. Some of her girlhood’s treasures and toys were there; a doll’s-house in the corner, a pair of skates hanging over a cupboard, a horse-shoe, tied up with ribbon, over the mantelpiece, photographs of herself and Alban on Shetland ponies, a pair of foils crossed on one of the walls, and a fox’s brush—her first—over the narrow wooden bed.
“I hope you won’t stay here long,” said Joyce.
She slipped off her cloak and sat in an old wicker chair by the stone-piece where a small fire had almost burnt out. She still had the look of a rebellious child—a King’s page, with curled, cropped hair.
“Joyce,” said Bertram, “have you forgotten that I’m your husband, and you’re my wife?”
“Is that what you’ve been waiting to ask me all the evening?”
She teased him with her mockery.
“By God, it is!” he said quickly. “And I want an answer.”
She answered him in the worst way.
“I wish I could forget a most unfortunate fact!”
Perhaps she didn’t mean to be quite brutal with him. It’s likely that she was just trying his temper, and yielding to her own. But it hit him hard, and he reeled under the blow, not only in a mental way, but physically.
“You mean that?” he asked, staring at her.
“Isn’t it true? For you as well as for me? Surely you see the misfortune of our marriage? You don’t like my ideas, my character, my whole outlook on life. That’s unfortunate for you. I detest yours. That’s unfortunate for me. We belong to different sides. That’s unfortunate for both of us.”
Bertram marvelled at the cold way in which she could speak these things. Had she forgotten, utterly, how she had loved him once, and all his devotion to her? Did it mean nothing to her that she had been the mother of his dead child? Was she so heartless that she could see herself divided from him by that sheer gulf of which she spoke, and not agonise at its tragedy, nor weep, but talk so calmly, so coldly of its happening? No, he didn’t believe that. Heart and soul refused to believe.
“My dear!” he said. “My dear! Don’t let’s say bitter and frightful things because we’re out of temper. I know it’s so easy. It’s a question of nerves, little irritations, small rotten differences that mean—just nothing. They don’t matter more than passing shadows. What does matter is our love, above and beyond all that. I want to tell you that my love for you is unaltered, and unalterable, although you have been pretty rough on me lately, and not given love, or anything like a fair deal. . . . But I want to wipe out the remembrance of that. I want you and me to get together again, as comrades and mates. Nothing else would matter then. Our different points of view? Oh, Lord! how trivial! Joyce, take me back to your bed and your heart, and your beauty, and let’s make a game of life again!”
He leaned over her, put his arms around her, tried to draw her close to him, as she sat there in the wicker chair by the little fire that had almost burnt out.
She drew her chair back on the polished boards, and sprang up, beyond his reach.
“What’s all this stuff you’re talking?” she said, angrily, two spots of scarlet on her face. “You say you love me. Why do you always jeer at my friends and my ideas? Sulk in my drawing-room? Behave like a boor to my crowd? Ally yourself with Pacifists and pro-Germans and revolutionaries? You say you love me, and talk sentiment. Less sentiment, please, and more honesty. That offer to-night! It was a test of loyalty. To England in a big way—certainly to me, as far as I mean anything in your life. Yet you refused it. You failed to pass the test. Why, from the lowest point of view, you ought to want to keep your end up, and pay your own way, like an honest man! You remember the word I spoke to Kenneth? I use it again now, to your face. You’re a traitor to the things I stand for, to all I am. Until you do something to put yourself right again, I won’t live with you. It’s dishonouring.”
“By God!” said Bertram.
He was white to the lips now, with anguish and rage. This girl used her tongue like a lash. She cut his heart open, flayed his soul. And yet, as she stood there, facing him, he loved her with an extreme passion, and her beauty was a torture to him.
He acknowledged the truth of some things she said. He had jeered at her friends, often enough. He had sulked in her drawing-room. He had behaved like a boor to her crowd. All that was true. But the rest of it was not true, and it was cruel. She called him traitor—he who loved England as he loved Joyce, hungrily, so that the smell of its earth, as the fragrance of her hair, excited his senses, touched him with spiritual emotion. It was damnable that she should use such words. “Dishonouring!” she said. She wouldn’t live with him because it was dishonouring!
He strode a pace towards her, and caught hold of her right arm.
“In the old days a man would have flogged his wife for such words. I’ve a damned good mind to box your ears.”
“Have a try!” said Joyce, breathing hard.
He didn’t box her ears, but let her arm go and dropped his hands to his side, and stood there with his head bowed, staring at the floor. There was silence between them for at least a minute, which seemed like an hour. Joyce for the first time was weeping, with her face turned away from him.
Presently he spoke again.
“It rather looks as though I’d made a mistake. I thought you still loved me, in spite of drifting away a bit. It seems any love you once had is like that little fire of yours—not much ever, and now burnt out. Why, God alone knows, not I! But it’s a pity. Perhaps it’s my fault partly. I may come to see that one day. Now, to-night, I think you’ve been hellish to me. I’ll clear out to-morrow. . . . If you want me ever, I’ll come.”
He stood at the doorway, looking back at her. She stood by the side of the little bed where she had slept as a child, with her face turned away and her body shaken by sobs. He hated to part from her like that, and this was the parting.
He spoke her name once more.
“Joyce!”
She didn’t answer him, and he left her room and shut the door. Next morning he left Holme Ottery before breakfast, and went back to town, but not to the little house in Holland Street.
He went to his mother’s house in Sloane Street, and asked for his old room.