“Oh, mother,” said Joyce, “my poor little baby!”
It was the first time Bertram had heard her mention the baby, and it touched him poignantly.
Lady Ottery said, “If only I’d been with you!” and Bertram wished in his heart that Joyce had permitted that, but she had resisted all his persuasion to have her mother with her.
“Mother is too dominant in time of sickness,” she had said. “Besides, it’s not fair to her, after the War, with Rudy and Hal both killed. If anything happened to me, she would die.”
That was like Joyce. If she had to suffer, she would suffer alone and not drag others in. But Bertram wondered if Lady Ottery would have died “if anything had happened” to Joyce. He thought not.
He had been with her when the news of Hal’s death had come from the War Office. That was a year after Rudolf’s. Ottery had handed his wife the telegram without a word. He had been hit hard, and breathed heavily, plucking his reddish beard and staring at a distant tree with watery eyes. It was a July afternoon, and they were all standing in the gardens of Holme Ottery, watching the girls playing tennis on the lawns below the terrace. Bertram had come up to get a drink. He remembered now the look on Lady Ottery’s face, her thin, sharp-featured, powerful face. Only for a moment did her lips and her eyelids quiver. Then she smiled at her husband, a strange, proud smile, and said, “For England’s sake! . . .” After that, when she moved towards her husband and took his hand, she said: “Poor Hal has done his bit! Rudy will be glad to see him.”
Bertram had marvelled at her courage, her hardness, her love of England, so great that she was ready to give all her sons for its safe-guarding. He remembered telling Christy that, when he went back from leave, and he remembered the rage with which he heard Christy denounce Lady Ottery’s point of view and sacrificial patriotism.
“Its hellish!” he said. “We’ll never stop War as long as women like that think their noblest duty is to breed sons for the shambles; as long as they rejoice in the death of their well-beloved for England’s sake, or Germany’s. It’s making a religion of the foulest stupidity in human life. It’s upholding the tradition of war—right or wrong—as the supreme test of virtue in a noble caste, and its blood sacrifice as a necessary, inevitable and sacred duty. How are we going to get peace in the world with that spirit in women?”
So he had argued on, until Bertram had told him roughly to “shut up, for God’s sake!”
Lady Ottery had turned her house into a hospital during the War, and for three years or more had nursed badly wounded men, never shrinking from sights of blood or death, doing dirty and disgusting work, though never before the war had she soiled her hands, except in the garden, among flowers, or come in touch with the coarse and tragic aspects of life. That was the spirit of patrician women in England, however delicate and sheltered. It was the spirit of an old tradition. Joyce had it still, though in many small ways she had broken with tradition, and belonged to a new world of womanhood, careless of conventions, free of speech, in revolt against the old code of manners.