“Hulloa, father! Here’s the Prodigal back. Don’t bother about the fatted calf.”
“Good morning, Bertram. Putting in a bachelor week? I shan’t see much of you as I’m desperately busy.”
“Don’t worry about that, sir.”
Bertram’s father became absorbed in The Morning Post. After breakfast he retired to his study for an hour. At ten o’clock he drove down to the Temple. Occasionally he returned for dinner, but Bertram generally dined out, if he knew that his father was expected. At midnight, or thereabouts, Mr. Michael Pollard, K.C., M.P., having completed a day of arduous toil on behalf of law and order and the good governance of a great Empire, came home again, and retired to rest.
Bertram, at that time of night, was generally in his own room, pacing up and down, not aware that every footstep was heard by his wakeful mother. He was “thinking out a few things,” as he told her.
They were not pleasant things, nor easy. Since the war he had made a complete failure of his life. He had made a hopeless mess of his marriage. Here he was back again, in his bachelor state, in the little old room where, as a boy, he had lived in a dream world of hope and ambition. How many times he had sat on this bed, generally with one boot off and one boot on, looking into the unknown future with a boy’s impatience for its coming, thinking of love and its mystery, wondering about the girl who somewhere was waiting in the world to be his mate, to fulfil the vague and wonderful promise of life which as yet he saw only as on the threshold of its glory. Now he knew! He had met the girl of his vision, and she had abandoned him.
He had never thought of that possibility, when he had sat with Romance as his source of knowledge in this little room. That was before the War had come crashing into Romance with terrific realism. That was in old quiet days when it had seemed adventure enough to wander through London on journeys of exploration, and when books of travel, history, drama, were more exciting than anything that really happened in modern life.
He used to put his head out of this window looking down on Sloane Street, listening to the rush of traffic, after theatre time, until it was very quiet, and only a late hansom—the last of their kind—came with a klip-klop up the street, or a primitive “taxi” honked its horn. The sky was always quivering with the lights of London, above the chimney-pots, as high as the stars. The boy Bertram used to stare at that radiance, with his room all dusk behind him, so that his mother would be worried by his keeping awake—“reading in bed” was her passionate dread!—and it seemed to him like a mirage of life itself, with all its mystery and enchantment.
Ten years ago! Not more than that, though a whole life-time in experience. Four and a half years of war had intervened, awaking Bertram and the world out of false dreams and beatific visions. Four and a half murderous years, crammed with death, and horror, and heroism, and laughter, and boredom, and fear, and filth. Then a year of marriage—worse than war. More difficult than the technique of war, more nerve-racking, and more terrifying than death in the results of failure.
Here he was, after complete failure, back in his bachelor room, as Joyce was in hers! Yet not back again as before. Impossible to get back to the boy who was here in this room ten years ago. Those books on the shelves which had meant so much then, meant nothing now, had no comfort in them, no romance, no thrill of any kind, no wisdom. Not even Shakespeare, in the old Leopold edition, could give Bertram any solution to his problem of marriage with Joyce. Shelley, Browning, Laurence Housman, Kipling—all the poets he had loved—what could they tell him now? “Damn all!” as the men used to say in war time. Conrad, Stevenson, Quiller-Couch, Barrie,—Lord! he could hardly bear to look at them.