He’d heard her moaning once or twice, had gone back into his room, shutting the door quietly, and saying, “Lord! . . . Lord! . . .” and nothing else but that again and again.
In that room of his—twelve feet by fourteen, as he knew by measuring it from skirting-board to skirting-board, as a mechanical occupation for his nerve-tattered brain—he had prayed, cursed, groaned, and even wept a little. He had paced up and down, sat down at his desk, put his forehead against the wall, gripped the mantelpiece, clenched and unclenched his hands, behaved with a ridiculous lack of self-control.
He was frightened by his own cowardice. “This won’t do!” he had said once or twice, and then used the words which he had said to his own soul, not without effect sometimes, when men had lain dead about him and his chance of death had been as good as theirs. “Keep a stiff upper lip, my lad!”
That’s what his father had said sharply to him as a small boy when he had taken a toss from a pony or cut his knees in a tumble. “Keep a stiff upper lip, my lad!” That was part of the family tradition, and it had served him pretty well at the war—a tradition of nerve-control, endurance of pain, hiding of fear, however frightened. It was no good now, when Joyce was suffering torture. No damn good.
His thoughts brooded over the last six months and more. What a brute he had been, and how frightful was life which caused women to suffer so much when this thing happened!
Joyce had not wanted it to happen. She’d had some foreboding of its agony, though she’d tried to hide it from him with her usual pluck. Wonderful pluck! This girl with “bobbed” hair, who felt that she was unfit to be seen if her nails weren’t newly manicured, and who was as slim and fragile-looking as a Watteau shepherdess, had the spirit of all her family, and of many women in her crowd, as he’d seen them in the hunting-field, in canteens, once or twice in air-raids. He’d been more scared than this golden-haired “kid”, as he called her then, when a bomb had fallen, smashing the door of a house in which they had been dancing, one night in London of war-time. His heart had given a thump, though he was a major of machine-guns, but Joyce had lit a cigarette with a steady hand, laughed without a tremor, and said, “Bad miss, brother Boche!”
That was the night he’d asked her to marry him, if he had the luck to get through the war. “The luck’s yours, and my love will keep you safe!” she’d said, as he remembered now, and would remember always.
Well it had seemed luck then, though since, once or twice, he’d wondered whether the luck hadn’t been with the men who’d gone out before the show was finished. They’d been saved a lot of worry—this worrying business of life after war, with its enormous disappointments, and the whole muddle and mystery of things.
Marriage was one of its mysteries. He’d gone into it as an escape from all troubles. Funny, that! It was to wipe out the memory of the things he’d seen. It would be the rest-cure for body and soul, both rather badly jolted and put out of gear by something like shell-shock. “Soul-shock,” as old Christy had once called it.
This marriage with Joyce had seemed like getting by sheer, undeserved luck the ideal of beauty which old Christy used to say was the secret, unattained, and unattainable purpose of life.