He hated to talk roughly to his mother. The love she had for all her children, now departed from her, was concentrated on Bertram who had come back for a little while. She could hardly bear him out of her sight, and often, when he went up to his room he heard her quiet footsteps outside the door. She was listening to his movements, standing near him, though outside the room. She was happy, or almost happy if he sat with her, holding her hand, or if she could watch him from the other side of the fireplace, while he sat back in a low chair, pretending to read the paper, and thinking, thinking of Joyce, and his loneliness, and what the devil to do with his life. Never quite happy, for always in her heart was grief over the exile of Dorothy in her German home, and anxiety about Susan who only sent post card messages from Dublin, saying nothing, and fearfulness on behalf of young Digby in the midst of civil war.
“It’s a dreadful world, Bertram,” she said, once. “As a young wife I was so happy with all my babies, and never dreamed of all the horror ahead—war, revolutions, famines, plague, endless strife. If only Queen Victoria could have gone on living, we might have been saved all that. She kept things safe by her virtue and wisdom.”
Bertram tried hard not to laugh, yet he laughed aloud at the idea of the poor old Queen “keeping things safe” in a world that was making ready for convulsion even in her time, by great natural moving forces that no mortal could restrain; not King Canute with the advancing tide, nor Queen Victoria in a changing era.
“Why do you laugh at me?” asked Mrs. Pollard.
He patted her hand.
“You still belong to the Victorian Age!”
“We felt safe in that time,” said his mother. “Now I don’t know what new terror will happen from day to day. There’s an awful uncertainty, everywhere.”
“It’s Reality breaking through Illusion,” said Bertram; but his mother, as he saw, did not understand him, and he did not try to make her understand. He was pitiful because of the troubles that had overtaken her in the last phase of her beautiful and faithful life.
Tears came into her eyes when he told her that he was spending the evening away from home. He had promised to call round again at Janet Welford’s flat in Battersea Park.
“I know it’s dull here alone with me,” said Mrs. Pollard, “but you hardly know the comfort it gives me to see you back again, now all my other dear birds have gone from the nest.”