“He’ll have to get a job’ ” Joyce had said.
Well, he’d found his job, and written his first book, now in the publisher’s hands, and his first article, already published, in The New World. Not much, but a good beginning. He objected to Joyce’s way of speaking that sentence—“He’ll have to get a job!” She had spoken it harshly. Did she imagine that he hadn’t tried to get a job, that he had been a slacker, an I-won’t-work? He had gone the round of all his friends, answered advertisements—even gone to a Labour Exchange!—in the hope of finding some decent kind of work. He had agonised because of his idleness, until he had sat down to write a book and found himself writing it.
Not one of her precious Family had offered to help him. Ottery had just stared vaguely at him when he had asked for his influence. Alban wouldn’t walk a yard to get him anything. Not all the crowd in Joyce’s set had put anything in his way, though some of them pulled the social wires. He must have a straight talk with Joyce before the day was out. He must put himself right with her and bring her back to him. Impossible that things should go on in this way—this frightful, soul-destroying way.
So he brooded, and was late for dinner, and received the rebuke of Lady Ottery’s frigid glance.
XXVII
There were several people from the neighbourhood to dinner, and Bertram was amused to find himself next to Miss Heathcote, the Vicar’s daughter, whom he had met in Izzard’s oddity shop. They talked a little about that, and the girl seemed nervous of owning friendship at this table with a man who kept a shop.
“Lady Ottery doesn’t approve of such new-fashioned ways,” she whispered, glancing with amusement, and a little fear, at the handsome lady at the head of the table.
Bertram was less amused to see General Bellasis sitting next to Lady Ottery, and Kenneth Murless on the other side of Joyce. They had both come down for Easter as old friends of the Bellairs family. The conversation at their end of the table seemed to be about the Strike. General Bellasis, handsome and florid as ever, was doing most of the talking. Bertram heard only bits of sentences, disconnected threads of his discourse.
“Serious challenge to Government authority. . . . War against Law and Order. . . . We must knock the stuffing out of Labour! . . . Rank Bolshevism!”
The Heathcote girl on his left was prattling about a play she had seen in London—one of Galsworthy’s. Jolly good! Very daring, though. Her father was shocked when she told him the plot. Parents were so easily shocked these days. They didn’t realise the difference war had made to the outlook of women. Everything was discussed. The realities of life and death. Marriage.