XXXVI
He walked through Kensington Gardens, where the trees were in their first glory of green, through Hyde Park, where the flower-beds were filled with tulips, down Piccadilly, with its tide of gleaming cars, until in the centre of Trafalgar Square he met Janet Welford. The chances of meeting her were about seven million to one, but he knew that he was going to do so. Or perhaps, when he met her, it seemed by some trick of his subconscious mind, the realising of expectation.
“Hullo!” she said, dodging a motor-omnibus and jumping onto a “save-my-life.” “What’s the matter?”
“What makes you think there’s anything the matter?”
She tucked her hand through his arm and told him his face looked like a haunted man’s. She commanded him to take her to tea somewhere. She had a craving for a chocolate éclair, or even two.
It was at table in a tea-shop imitating a Tudor house that Bertram told her of all the tragedy that had befallen him since his visit to Ireland, ending in the rejection of his book, which seemed a small thing to put with the death of his mother, but was a death also—of hope and courage.
“I’m down and out,” he said.
“Watch me eat éclairs!” was her unsympathetic answer.
He knew that it wasn’t heartlessness, but only her way of dealing with trouble. A touch on his hand, an “I’m sorry!” a silence, with understanding eyes, had been her comment to his narrative about Digby and his mother, and it was sympathy enough. But to his “down and out” she put up a refusal, by way of mockery. It wasn’t in her philosophy to accept any cry of “down and out,” not even from a man blinded in both eyes, with his hands up to his face, and pitch blackness in his soul. Not once but many times she had heard such a cry from one of “her men,” as she called them, and had refused to recognise even his misery, and in a week or two, by some spell she had, heard him laughing now and then. She put this to Bertram now.
“I’m not going to say Fortune hasn’t dealt you a bad hand lately. You’ve been handed some of the worst cards in the pack, I’ll admit, but there’s no need to sit down and grizzle. Empires have fallen, crowns have toppled to the dust, whole nations are starving, little old England is at the crisis of her fate, and I’m in debt to my dressmaker, so where do you come in? Don’t think you’re the only pebble on the beach. Don’t imagine that fate is persecuting you with a special grudge” (he had thought that!)—“when there are millions of hearts bleeding with greater agony than yours, and millions are carrying on mighty plucky, in spite of odds against them. Look at that girl with the fluffy hair and the red eyelids. She’s playing rag-time in a tea-shop for all she’s worth, though she’s having hell from a mother-in-law, and keeping a shell-shocked husband and two children.”
“How d’you know?” asked Bertram.
“I don’t know,” said Janet, calmly. “I’m only making a supposition. If it isn’t that, it’s something else. You can see she’s been crying all right.”
Her eyes roved round the room, with its panelled walls and sham oak beams, and “antique” furniture, made at Maples. There were several “couples,” and two parties of four. Ruthlessly Janet diagnosed their secret troubles. The thin-faced man, sitting opposite a sad-looking woman, with untidy hair, was suffering from a fear-complex. He was “something in the City,” and afraid of losing the job which kept a little home at Streatham, the wife with untidy hair, and five children. He was in debt to his butcher. He had a hard struggle to pay the last instalment on his furniture, bought on the hire system. He was dodging his income tax, and the chief clerk had told him that the firm was on the rocks, owing to the slump in foreign trade.
“How on earth do you know all those things?” asked Bertram again.
“I’ve studied life,” she answered. “There’s nothing I don’t know about it. See that elderly man with the flabby face, weak mouth, and puffed eyes? Next to the painted flapper?”
Bertram turned slightly in his chair, and said “Yes.”
“That’s a frightful case. He’s the manager of a picture palace. That little girl plays the piano for eight hours a day for two pounds a week, at Croydon, except one day a week—to-day—She keeps a drunken father on that, and pays the rent of eighteen shillings, and ten shillings a week for her little sister’s schooling. The manager is a wicked old devil, and hates his poor drudge of a wife. Of course it wouldn’t do to refuse his invitations to tea, and other things. It’s not easy to get a job in another picture palace, even if one does play the piano blindfold—right notes or wrong—and use the rouge-pot ruthlessly. Plucky kid, I think! Look how she pretends to be merry and bright, poor child!”
“Ever seen her before?” asked Bertram.
“Never. But it’s something like that.”
She said Bertram had no idea of the amount of human courage in a city like London. The heroism of fighting men in war was nothing to the grim, enduring heroism of husbands nagged by their wives, wives bullied by their husbands, men struggling to keep on this side of destitution, women fighting with all the strength of their souls to keep “respectable” in underpaid jobs, young girls starving themselves on milk and buns in order to dress well enough for a chance in the marriage market, and all looking on the best side of things, refusing to surrender, holding on gamely.
“Doesn’t it prove that the game’s not worth the candle?” asked Bertram.
“The game of life?”
He nodded.
She caught hold of his hand, and said, “That’s blasphemy! That’s cowardice! Play the game, whether you lose or win. Stick it out to the end. And forget yourself by helping the other fellow. It’s only selfishness that despairs. It’s damned egotism that makes a man sit down and whine. There’s so much to do, so many to help.”
Bertram drew a deep breath. He’d been sitting down and whining. He’d wanted to quit before he’d played out the game. He’d been within a yard and a half of the coward’s white flag—the worst surrender.
Janet went on talking, wise things, foolish things, fantastic things, and ate not two éclairs, but four (just to make him marvel) and made him laugh heartily at her description of the last meeting of the “Left Wing,” which had broken up in wrath and violence because of a vote against the General Strike. One of the girls had slapped the face of one of the young men, and called him “a crawling Pacifist.” He had responded by calling her a “Blood-stained Bolshevik.” It had all been great fun.
At the sound of his laughter, Janet smiled with a whimsical look.
“You see life’s not so black, if one keeps a sense of humour!”
She proposed an evening at the theatre, after a little dinner in Soho. It was a good dinner, and a merry piece. Bertram laughed most because of Janet’s laughter.
Afterwards, when they stood together on the kerbstone hailing a taxi in St. Martin’s Lane, Janet put a hand on his arm, and said, “Where are you going now?”
“To my lonely little room.”
“No,” she said. “That’s not good for you. Is your father home?”
“He’s gone over to Belfast.”
“Well, come home with me, and help to make some hot cocoa.”
“Is that a good idea?”
He was startled by the invitation at that hour of the night.
“Doesn’t it seem good to you?”
“Wonderfully good! But what about—scandal and all that?”
She laughed gaily, so that the commissionaire outside the theatre turned to smile at her.
“Scandal? I’m immune against it. It never worries me,—especially when I’ve souls to save.”
“Are you saving mine?”
He was afraid he might lose it.
“By the scruff of its neck.”
They drove to Battersea Park, and she gave him her hand up the long flight of stone steps to her fourth floor flat, where she stopped and panted a little before fumbling in her hand-bag for her latch key.
The flat was in darkness, but she switched on the lights and the electric fire.
“Ever made cocoa?” she asked.
“Never.”
“Well, you’ve got to learn to-night.”
He learnt, and found it easy, and good when made.
She lit a cigarette, and dropped into a low chair and told him to take the cane chair opposite, and put on his pipe, if he liked.
It seemed a thousand years since he’d gone looking for a revolver in Holland Street. Yet his tragedy hadn’t been turned into comedy. His problems were the same. His future was hopeless. His book had been refused. Joyce was in Paris with Kenneth Murless. Young Digby had been killed. His mother was dead. Strange that he felt happier, almost cheerful, certainly glad of life again. Loneliness was the worst thing in the world—to him.
He no longer felt lonely. Janet’s comradeship was wonderfully good. It was splendid of her to open the doors of this little sanctuary and let in a shivering soul to its light and warmth.
She spoke of his book for the first time, and denounced the publishers as silly sheep.
“Keep it a year,” she said, “and they’ll all be clamouring for it. ‘We want the Truth about the War!’ they’ll cry. ‘We can’t get enough of it! We hunger for it!’ ”
“Meanwhile what am I to do?” asked Bertram.
“Leave it to Janet Rockingham Welford,” she said. “That girl has planted men in the strangest places, inspired them to noble and saintly deeds, led them to heights of fame and fortune. Don’t worry, for you’ve come to the right lady, the fairy godmother of the down-and-outs.”
“I believe you can do anything you want,” said Bertram.
“All but a few things.”
“What are those?”
She shook her head and smiled, and kept her secret.
So they talked until two o’clock. Then Janet put her head on one side, listening to the distant boom of Big Ben across the river.
“Mercy me! Two o’clock of a May morning and I promised to be at St. Dunstan’s at ten!”
She pointed to the sofa, and said, “If you’re sleepy, sleep. I go in there, to my virtuous couch.”
Bertram rose, and took hold of her hands and spoke with emotion.
“You’ve saved me to-night. You’ve given me courage again. You’ve been the best of comrades.”
He drew her hands towards him, and would have kissed her, but she said “Not to-night! . . . After midnight I take no risks.”
She released herself from his hands, slipped away, turned at the door with a ripple of laughter, and went into her room.
“Good night, Sir Faithful!”
She spoke those words as she shut the door, and locked it.
Bertram lay down on the sofa, and in a little while slept, and dreamed not of Janet, but of Joyce. He dreamed that he was searching for her in a wood, and could always see her ahead of him in distant glades, but could never get close to her.