“Just come back from Poland,” he said, “by way of Berlin. Put on a pipe and tell me all about life and London, while I stow this wreckage away. How’s Lady Joyce and the British aristocracy?”
He looked up at Bertram with the whimsical smile which always twisted his face when he chaffed Bertram about his close relationship with “bloated aristocrats.” His own family kept a little shop in a Warwickshire village.
“Joyce is pretty well,” said Bertram. “She had a baby . . . but it died.”
Luke Christy’s twisted smile left his face, and his eyes shone with sympathy.
“Oh, Lord! That’s tragic. I’m sorry.”
Bertram sat watching him “tidy up,” a process which seemed to consist in heaving his dirty linen into a cupboard, and flinging the paper-backed books on to a shelf already crowded with papers.
The whole room was framed in books, badly assorted in size, and mostly of tattered bindings. Above them were some rather good etchings and caricatures torn out of foreign newspapers, fastened to the walls with drawing pins. On the mantelpiece were photographs of several young soldiers, one of Bertram himself, and a “homely” elderly woman with grey hair, exactly like Luke Christy—who, as Bertram knew—was Christy’s mother.
A door opened into an inner room into which Christy plunged now and then with pairs of trousers, boots, and other bits of clothing. It was from this inner room that he began a monologue to which Bertram listened through the open door.
“Hard for a girl to bring a life into the world, and then see it flicker out. I’m sorry to hear that, Pollard. It’s the saddest thing for you and that exquisite little lady of yours. Good God, yes! But for myself, I couldn’t risk it, anyhow. I haven’t the pluck. I should be filled with dreadful forebodings.”
“About what?” asked Bertram.