XLV
He left Paris without calling on Kenneth Murless for the purpose of indulging in violence. What was the good? To blow Kenneth’s brains out, or to punch his head, would not bring back Joyce. She had dismissed him for ever out of her heart and life. He walked alone upon the road and all that he had felt in loneliness before was nothing to this certainty of eternal separation. She was dead to him, and he to her.
He made one last foolish, futile effort to pretend otherwise by writing her a letter in which he implored her to wait a while at least before she took the step from which she could never return.
“Wait six months,” [he said]. “My loyalty is yours for that time, or longer, and perhaps before the end of it you will realise your horrible mistake—this midsummer madness that possesses you. . . .”
Stuff like that he wrote, but knew the hopelessness of it, and did not wait in Paris for an answer. She wouldn’t answer. She had told him all there was to know. As she had said once before, when as yet the “something” that had happened had not happened, it was “past argument.” Perhaps—almost certainly—throughout her married life her subconsciousness had known what she knew now consciously. She had been more at ease with Kenneth than ever with him. She had preferred his conversation, his sense of humour, his point of view. There was a secret code between them which he had never learnt. He had been “out of it,” after the first few weeks of sentiment and passion.
He reasoned all this out with astounding calmness of mind, between bouts of astounding rage and anguish, in the train from Paris to Berlin. He was quietly and deliberately rude to a young British officer in his carriage who tried to enter into conversation on the way to Cologne, where he belonged to the Army of Occupation. The boy was surprised by his gruffness, and shrank back into sulky silence, staring at him now and then with furtive eyes, until Bertram apologised, and said, “Sorry for being uncivil. I’ve got the devil of a toothache. You know—a jumping nerve!” One doesn’t tell a travelling companion that one has the devil of a broken heart, aching horribly.
“Oh, Lord,” said the boy, “what infernal bad luck! No wonder you don’t want me to jaw to you! There’s nothing worse.”
He offered Bertram a brandy flask and said “it helped sometimes.” And Bertram, to satisfy him, took a good swig which at least had the effect of sending him to sleep after a wakeful night. It was an uneasy sleep, and he wakened once crying out the name of Joyce. Fortunately the young officer was dozing, or pretending to doze. He left the carriage at Cologne, and hoped Bertram’s toothache would be cured by the time he reached Berlin.
A nice boy, like thousands who had been as young as he at the beginning of the war, and now had been four years, six years, even seven years, dead. How extraordinary was that! Bertram had been barely nineteen when he first joined up, in 1914. Now he was getting on for twenty-six, and felt as old as fifty. Well, he’d crammed in all the experience of life—war, marriage, failure, complete and absolute tragedy.
What was life? Nothing but some kind of service, where he could be of use somewhere. Service to boys younger than himself, like that kid on the way to Cologne. He might help, by a hairsbreadth in the balance of fate, to save their lives from another massacre. That would be worth doing. He was dedicated still to his work for peace. But first he must get peace within himself. Not easy, with this conflict tearing inside him. He must get some kind of wisdom, serenity, quietude of resignation before he could work for peace in the world. He would “chuck” thinking about his own wound, and plunge into the study of the world after war. That was the only line of sanity.