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.