The question that came into his brain seemed to him like a kind of blasphemy—a treachery to his own code, and to all the crowd who had fought for England. If that sacrifice had not been worth while, and so many men had died for false beliefs and hopes, then nothing in the world was right, and all that men were taught in faith was just a lie. Christy had said it was a lie, the whole make-up of civilisation, the code of his sort of people, patriotism itself. They had argued over that, almost savagely, and he had told Christy to shut up or clear out.
Yet how explain those newspaper placards which stared him in the face from newspaper shops in the Marylebone Road?
More Unemployed Riots.
Crime Wave Spreads.
No Houses for Heroes.
Is Europe Doomed?
Reprisals in Ireland.
France Insults England.
Not easy to keep cheerful, to retain a fair and sturdy optimism, to see the blessing of the victory, even after the slaughter of the world’s best youth, when those facts were on the placards, between High Street, Marylebone and the lower end of Baker Street!
Yet Bertram Pollard, ex-officer and unemployed, did not despair. He felt something “inside him,” as he used to say in his childhood, which promised some kind of revelation of all this mystery. He seemed to be waiting for a light that would make things clear to him in his own life, and in life. He was certain, beneath his deep uncertainty, that he would find some job to do, some job worth doing. God, or the great powers, or his own instincts, would give him a chance, a new impulse, some decent object in life. After all, he was only twenty-five, with health and strength and desire to find the right place.