Bertram wondered sometimes whether Janet’s philosophy was not founded on tremendous pessimism rather than on unbounded optimism. A queer thought! Yet he had seen that kind of psychology working out to the same result, in France and Flanders, among the civilian folk.
French girls who had seen their little homesteads go up in fire under the enemy’s guns, peasants who had lost everything in the world, except life, by the invasion of the “Boche,” women who had lost fathers, husbands, lovers, brothers, acquired an astonishing serenity, even a gaiety of mind. Nothing seemed to matter to them now. Death itself was a “bagatelle.”
He had seen girls laughing as though at some fantastic joke, when they poked about the ruins of their cottages and found bits of old furniture, the wheel of a baby’s perambulator, the relic of some old familiar thing. It seemed to give life a different sense of proportion, annihilating its vanities, its greeds, its fears, its illusions. They were down to the bed-rock of frightful realities, and nothing worse could happen to them, and they were all “in the basket” together. Their fate was no worse, and perhaps a little better, than that of their neighbours.
So, in a way, it was with Janet. At least, he sometimes thought so. Her father, and then her young brother, had been killed in the war. Her mother had died of the anguish of these shocks. She herself had spent the years of war nursing mutilated men. It gave her that strange serenity of vision which for a time had come to many of those most stricken by war, though afterwards, when peace came, they collapsed.
She hadn’t collapsed. It seemed simply silly to Janet that English people should worry because trade was bad, and get alarmed about the prospect of social revolution, or excite themselves about the downfall of exchanges. She stared forward to the future with audacious vision, and demanded not a hark back to the old standards of comfort and tradition, but root and branch changes, bold experiments in social legislation, tremendous endeavours towards the building of a new world.
Anyhow, she was not afraid. Not of Bolshevism, not of poverty, not of any new tragedy that might emerge out of the chaos of a Europe convulsed by the effects of war.
“It’s all frightfully interesting,” she said, “and, anyhow, worry won’t stop the working out of Fate. Why be afraid of Fate? We shall all be dead quite soon. Let’s play the game out, and see it through, and pass the ball on to the next players, when we’ve had our innings.”
“That sounds good,” said Bertram, “but it doesn’t cure the heart-ache of a woman left alone because her man was killed in the war, or give any comfort to an unemployed man, hanging about Labour Exchanges in search of jobs that aren’t there. Your philosophy of devil-may-care won’t stop another bout of massacre in Europe if the Old Gang are allowed to play the fool again, or save the next generation of boys from being blown to bits in lousy trenches. We must worry. It’s our duty to worry and find a scientific way of escape from all this madness.”
“I don’t call that worrying,” she answered. “I call that thinking straight and acting with courage. That’s our point of view in the ‘Left Wing.’ ”
“Oh, Lord!” said Bertram, “Your parlour Bolsheviks think all crooked, and have no more courage than lop-eared rabbits.”