“I’m down and out,” he said.
“Watch me eat éclairs!” was her unsympathetic answer.
He knew that it wasn’t heartlessness, but only her way of dealing with trouble. A touch on his hand, an “I’m sorry!” a silence, with understanding eyes, had been her comment to his narrative about Digby and his mother, and it was sympathy enough. But to his “down and out” she put up a refusal, by way of mockery. It wasn’t in her philosophy to accept any cry of “down and out,” not even from a man blinded in both eyes, with his hands up to his face, and pitch blackness in his soul. Not once but many times she had heard such a cry from one of “her men,” as she called them, and had refused to recognise even his misery, and in a week or two, by some spell she had, heard him laughing now and then. She put this to Bertram now.
“I’m not going to say Fortune hasn’t dealt you a bad hand lately. You’ve been handed some of the worst cards in the pack, I’ll admit, but there’s no need to sit down and grizzle. Empires have fallen, crowns have toppled to the dust, whole nations are starving, little old England is at the crisis of her fate, and I’m in debt to my dressmaker, so where do you come in? Don’t think you’re the only pebble on the beach. Don’t imagine that fate is persecuting you with a special grudge” (he had thought that!)—“when there are millions of hearts bleeding with greater agony than yours, and millions are carrying on mighty plucky, in spite of odds against them. Look at that girl with the fluffy hair and the red eyelids. She’s playing rag-time in a tea-shop for all she’s worth, though she’s having hell from a mother-in-law, and keeping a shell-shocked husband and two children.”
“How d’you know?” asked Bertram.
“I don’t know,” said Janet, calmly. “I’m only making a supposition. If it isn’t that, it’s something else. You can see she’s been crying all right.”
Her eyes roved round the room, with its panelled walls and sham oak beams, and “antique” furniture, made at Maples. There were several “couples,” and two parties of four. Ruthlessly Janet diagnosed their secret troubles. The thin-faced man, sitting opposite a sad-looking woman, with untidy hair, was suffering from a fear-complex. He was “something in the City,” and afraid of losing the job which kept a little home at Streatham, the wife with untidy hair, and five children. He was in debt to his butcher. He had a hard struggle to pay the last instalment on his furniture, bought on the hire system. He was dodging his income tax, and the chief clerk had told him that the firm was on the rocks, owing to the slump in foreign trade.
“How on earth do you know all those things?” asked Bertram again.
“I’ve studied life,” she answered. “There’s nothing I don’t know about it. See that elderly man with the flabby face, weak mouth, and puffed eyes? Next to the painted flapper?”
Bertram turned slightly in his chair, and said “Yes.”