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.