Then she fell asleep, still clasping his hand, and he listened to her breathing which seemed troubled, and sometimes came with a quick flutter.
Bertram sat cramped in his chair, while the room darkened as the evening crept on. All his love for his mother moved in him with poignancy, now that she lay stricken by this last blow of fate. After his boyhood, when his mother had been all in all to him, she had become not much more than a beautiful memory. Oxford, the War, Marriage, had thrust her out of his active interests of life. Weeks had passed, and he had not given a thought to her.
Now he remembered, and renewed the devotion of his boyhood to this little woman, so frail, but so brave, till now, who had never spared herself to give her children health, who had been so patient with all their woes, and so eager for their happiness. He remembered when he had been unwell, and she had tip-toed to his room at night, to feel whether his forehead was “feverish,” to dose him with little white pills from her homeopathic chest, and send him to sleep with a few soothing words. They had taken all that for granted, as children. Now, in manhood, Bertram, sitting by his mother’s bed, reproached himself at the thought of his ingratitude, accused himself of selfishness, was sharply touched with, pity, because of all this little mother of his had suffered in life, and with anger against life itself.
The War had been an agony to her. She could never understand the reason for all that massacre. It made her doubt even the goodness of God, which before she had never doubted. That so many boys should be killed, for “politics,” as she said, sounded to her a terrible cruelty, due to some madness which had overtaken the world. She had submitted, doubtfully and silently, to her husband’s fierce patriotism, and to Bertram’s excitement when he first enlisted, and to all the war-fever of England. Perhaps Dorothy’s marriage to a German, before the War, made her less inclined to desire the wholesale slaughter of the enemy than many mothers of England. She felt pity even for the German mothers, to the great annoyance of Michael Pollard, and the amusement of Bertram in the first ardour of his hatred for the enemy—quickly quenched after a few weeks of fighting, when he, too, lost all actual hate for the poor wretches on the other side of the barbed wire, sitting in mud, as he was sitting, with the same chance of being blown to bits.
She had rejoiced in the Armistice because it had saved Bertram, and Digby, who was getting ready to go out, and all other boys of a fighting world. An enormous burden of anxiety was lifted from her shoulders by the “Cease Fire” of the guns. She became young in spirit again, for a time, until gradually she came to suspect that there was no great security in this peace, and was aware of an orgy of blood and murder in Ireland, which came very close to her when Digby became a “Black and Tan.”
Bertram alone there, in her bedroom, in the darkness that closed about him, thought of all the tragedy of life that hadn’t ended with the war. It was still claiming its victims, though Peace had come. It had released human passions everywhere, unchained the primitive instincts of the human beast, weakened the nerve-power and controls of civilised life, made a wreck of many lives and hearts. Death was still busy. Famine and pestilence were ravaging many peoples. In the one letter he had received from Christy in Russia there were terrible words.
“Millions are eating nothing but grass and leaves, and not enough of that,” he wrote. “Typhus is sweeping these people like a scourge.”
England had escaped calamities like that, but unemployment was creeping up like a dark wave—millions were idle because of the Strike—and trade was at a standstill. What was the future? “Europe is dying!” said Anatole France, according to the papers, and Christy thought so too, in his blacker moods. Did it matter much? What was life, anyhow, to the individual soul? Not much of a game, except for a little laughter, some moments of love, some years of illusion! Here he was, sitting by the bedside of this mother whose children had gone from her—all but himself—and whose heart was broken by the death of her last-born in a foul kind of civil war. Susan’s husband had been hanged. Bertram’s wife had left him. A cheerful kind of family record! Not worse than in millions of other families in civilised Europe. Not so bad as in Russia, or Austria, or Poland, according to reports.
His mother wakened, and spoke to him in a feeble voice.
“Are you there, my dear?”