XXXIV
One of the tragic moments of Bertram’s life, which afterwards he could never remember without a shadow darkening his mind, was when he entered his father’s house after that visit to Dublin.
His way back had been delayed by the Coal Strike. The fast train from Holyhead was cancelled, and he had to come by a slow train, crowded with men thrown out of work by the shutting down of factories for lack of fuel. “It’s the end of England if this lasts long,” said one of them, but Bertram thought only of his journey’s end, and of his meeting with his mother, now that Digby lay dead, with a sniper’s bullet through his brain.
The news had come to her, he found, through a report in The Evening News, confirmed, almost immediately, by a telegram to his father from the Irish Secretary. Mrs. Pollard was in her little sitting-room when Bertram arrived, and tried to rise from her desk when he bent and put his arms about her. She didn’t weep very much, except for one brief agony of tears, but was quite broken. Over and over again she spoke the name of the dead boy, her last child, and said many times that she knew he was doomed. She was almost too weak to walk across her room, and complained that her heart had gone “queer.”
Bertram carried her up to bed that evening, and sent for a doctor, who looked grave, and told Bertram that his mother was in a very feeble state of health, with a pulse far below normal. Nothing organically wrong, except a cardiac weakness, but general lack of vitality. She would need constant attention, and he would send a trained nurse round that night.
Bertram sat by his mother’s side before the nurse came that evening. She clasped his hand almost like a child afraid to be left alone in the dark, as once he had held hers. Several times she seemed to be wandering in her mind, wandering back to the early days of her motherhood, when her children were young. She seemed to be worried because Dorothy had torn her frock, and a little later, told Bertram not to tease Susan.
“Do you hear me—?” she asked suddenly, after a long silence.
Bertram bent over her, and told her that he heard.
“You mustn’t tease little Susan,” she said. “You’re getting a big boy now.”
Then she fell asleep, still clasping his hand, and he listened to her breathing which seemed troubled, and sometimes came with a quick flutter.
Bertram sat cramped in his chair, while the room darkened as the evening crept on. All his love for his mother moved in him with poignancy, now that she lay stricken by this last blow of fate. After his boyhood, when his mother had been all in all to him, she had become not much more than a beautiful memory. Oxford, the War, Marriage, had thrust her out of his active interests of life. Weeks had passed, and he had not given a thought to her.
Now he remembered, and renewed the devotion of his boyhood to this little woman, so frail, but so brave, till now, who had never spared herself to give her children health, who had been so patient with all their woes, and so eager for their happiness. He remembered when he had been unwell, and she had tip-toed to his room at night, to feel whether his forehead was “feverish,” to dose him with little white pills from her homeopathic chest, and send him to sleep with a few soothing words. They had taken all that for granted, as children. Now, in manhood, Bertram, sitting by his mother’s bed, reproached himself at the thought of his ingratitude, accused himself of selfishness, was sharply touched with, pity, because of all this little mother of his had suffered in life, and with anger against life itself.
The War had been an agony to her. She could never understand the reason for all that massacre. It made her doubt even the goodness of God, which before she had never doubted. That so many boys should be killed, for “politics,” as she said, sounded to her a terrible cruelty, due to some madness which had overtaken the world. She had submitted, doubtfully and silently, to her husband’s fierce patriotism, and to Bertram’s excitement when he first enlisted, and to all the war-fever of England. Perhaps Dorothy’s marriage to a German, before the War, made her less inclined to desire the wholesale slaughter of the enemy than many mothers of England. She felt pity even for the German mothers, to the great annoyance of Michael Pollard, and the amusement of Bertram in the first ardour of his hatred for the enemy—quickly quenched after a few weeks of fighting, when he, too, lost all actual hate for the poor wretches on the other side of the barbed wire, sitting in mud, as he was sitting, with the same chance of being blown to bits.
She had rejoiced in the Armistice because it had saved Bertram, and Digby, who was getting ready to go out, and all other boys of a fighting world. An enormous burden of anxiety was lifted from her shoulders by the “Cease Fire” of the guns. She became young in spirit again, for a time, until gradually she came to suspect that there was no great security in this peace, and was aware of an orgy of blood and murder in Ireland, which came very close to her when Digby became a “Black and Tan.”
Bertram alone there, in her bedroom, in the darkness that closed about him, thought of all the tragedy of life that hadn’t ended with the war. It was still claiming its victims, though Peace had come. It had released human passions everywhere, unchained the primitive instincts of the human beast, weakened the nerve-power and controls of civilised life, made a wreck of many lives and hearts. Death was still busy. Famine and pestilence were ravaging many peoples. In the one letter he had received from Christy in Russia there were terrible words.
“Millions are eating nothing but grass and leaves, and not enough of that,” he wrote. “Typhus is sweeping these people like a scourge.”
England had escaped calamities like that, but unemployment was creeping up like a dark wave—millions were idle because of the Strike—and trade was at a standstill. What was the future? “Europe is dying!” said Anatole France, according to the papers, and Christy thought so too, in his blacker moods. Did it matter much? What was life, anyhow, to the individual soul? Not much of a game, except for a little laughter, some moments of love, some years of illusion! Here he was, sitting by the bedside of this mother whose children had gone from her—all but himself—and whose heart was broken by the death of her last-born in a foul kind of civil war. Susan’s husband had been hanged. Bertram’s wife had left him. A cheerful kind of family record! Not worse than in millions of other families in civilised Europe. Not so bad as in Russia, or Austria, or Poland, according to reports.
His mother wakened, and spoke to him in a feeble voice.
“Are you there, my dear?”
“Yes, mother.”
She was no longer wandering back to the early years, but remembered what had happened.
“It’s terrible about Digby.”
“Yes, mother.”
She was silent for a little while, and then spoke again.
“Bertram! Work for Peace. The world is so very cruel, and the future so dark! Work for peace, my dear. Peace is so beautiful. Promise me.”
“Promise you what, mother?”
She drew his head down with her weak hands, and as he kissed her, he heard her whisper the word “Peace.”
That was the last word he heard his mother speak. The nurse came, and the doctor, and his father was sent for from the House of Commons, where there was a debate on the Coal Strike, as Bertram saw by the next day’s papers. It was at some time past midnight that his father came downstairs and entered his study, where Bertram was sitting, waiting for the doctor’s latest word about his mother’s health.
“Is she better?” he asked.
“She’s dead,” said his father.
He lurched a little as he walked across the room, and then sat heavily in his chair and put his arms down on his desk, and his head on his arms, and wept with a passion of grief.
It was the first time Bertram had seen him give way to any emotion, except that of anger, and at the sight of that grief all hostility to his father, because of so much hardness and intolerance, was thrust aside by pity. He had loved young Digby best of all his children, and the boy’s death had struck him a frightful blow, which only his pride and his freshly-inflamed hatred of Sinn Fein enabled him to bear with self-control. But his wife’s death, so sudden and so utterly unexpected, smote him beyond all endurance.
He had been hard with her sometimes, he had made her afraid of his temper, and many a time she had wept because of his stern way with “the children,” but she’d never had cause to doubt his love for her. He had loved her, in spite of all tempers, perhaps because of it, with what he believed to be never-failing devotion. To him she was the perfect wife and perfect mother, and perhaps his intense egotism, his old-fashioned belief in the “mastery” of the husband, and the submission of the wife, were never shocked by the knowledge that his wife sometimes described him to her children as “very trying,” and—regarding Dorothy’s marriage—as “most unjust.”
He had depended on her for his comfort, for his sense of security in home life, for the thousand little duties which she had done for him as a daily routine. Now that she had been taken away from him like this, after Digby had been killed—the boy he had loved best in the world—he felt fearfully alone, and was broken-hearted.
Bertram put his hand on his father’s shoulder and said: “Courage, father!”
He remembered the better side of his father’s nature now, the old days, before politics—the madness in Ireland—had so embittered their relations. Michael Pollard had not been always harsh. He had been playful when his children were young; humorous and comradely at times. Perhaps his children were partly to blame for the irascibility which had overtaken him in later years. They had been self-willed, deliberately rebellious of his authority, sarcastic when he had laid down the law, regarding obedience and discipline, stubbornly intolerant of his intolerance.
So Bertram thought now, in the presence of this stricken man, forgetful for a while of his own tremendous loss, his loneliness of soul, while he watched his father’s agony, and tried to comfort him, and could not.