“Beauty of life,” said Christy—they were sitting together in a dug-out between Henencourt Château and the ruins of Albert—“is God’s will on earth as it is in Heaven.”
He used to talk like that though he was so ironical and blasphemous about all definite religion.
“Beauty is the most exquisite understanding of truth and happiness. Body as well as soul, the material and the spiritual, must be given a chance of that, and when harmony is established between ’em then Perfection, or God, is attained. But we’re a long way from that at the moment, Major, in this dirty little war of ours!”
That’s what Christy had said, and Bertram had scoffed at him as a crawling Pacifist and hot-air merchant, and made rude, insulting remarks about his friend’s excuse for a face, which departed abominably from beauty’s line.
But he’d remembered Christy’s words when he’d stood in St. Mary Abbot’s church with Joyce. She stood beside him—he could see her now like that, though she lay upstairs—slim, tall, with gold-spun hair cut like a boy’s, perfectly calm and self-possessed. “Isn’t she beautiful!” murmured the crowd of women outside the church, in High Street, Kensington, before they drove away, and Bertram had agreed in his heart. She was the Beauty for which all his soul had yearned during four and a half years of ugliness. She was the beauty of life which had come to him!
He had called her that on the first night when they were alone together in this little house in Holland Street which she had furnished out of her own money with reckless extravagance, a delight in weird wall-papers and sham antiques, a passion for highly coloured cushions into which she used to sink with little squeals of ecstasy.
It had been a great game of Life in those first few months of marriage—a year ago now. Joyce had set the pace and kept it up with amazing resistance to all fatigue. He had pleaded for “a quiet life,” “time to love each other,” “an escape from the crowd,” but she’d jeered at him as “an introspective slacker,” dragged him out to theatres, dance clubs, other people’s houses. She’d filled this little house in Holland Street with an amazing collection of people whose presence he’d resented sometimes with almost poisonous hatred—young staff officers who still swaggered about Whitehall though the war was over, young clergymen who had been chaplains at the front, young airmen who’d put up their wings some time after Armistice, girls who came drifting back from canteens at Etaples, Rouen, Cologne, with a lot of army slang and a mania for cheap cigarettes, a sense of boredom with peace, a restless desire for “a good time” and a most embarrassing habit of discussing sex problems in mixed company with a complete absence of reserve. They had come in and out of the house at all times of the day, even to late breakfasts, where Joyce had joined them in one of her many dressing-gowns of Japanese silk and Futurist colours, with her bare feet in bedroom slippers, looking like a sleepy boy, after dancing in some overheated room until late night or early morning.
He had quarrelled with her for that. It was the cause of their first quarrel, “It doesn’t seem decent,” he’d said, “and anyhow, I hate it.” That was when she’d given breakfast in this way to one of those Army chaplains of whom she knew so many—Peter Fynde, a young, good-looking, conceited ass, with an exaggerated Oxford drawl, a slight stutter, and affected gallantry. He had had the impudence to kiss Joyce’s hand and to make some remark about her little feet, totally unconscious of Bertram’s hot flush and sulky discourtesy towards him.
Joyce seemed to have no regard even for the privacy of her bedroom, and there had been another quarrel when Bertram had come back from an afternoon stroll and found Joyce, who had complained of a sick head-ache, “giving audience,” as she called it, to two young officers, three girls, and Kenneth Murless of the Foreign Office—Murless, whom he detested most of all her friends because he was too beautiful to live—one of those tall, curly-headed, Greek God sort of fellows—and elaborately brilliant in conversational insincerities. He was sitting on a low stool by Joyce’s bed, feeding her with strawberries and cream, and telling some ridiculous story about his life as a junior diplomatist at the Hague before the war, to the appreciative laughter of the company, and Joyce’s friendly smiles.
Bertram had made rather a fool of himself that afternoon. He admitted it now, in remembrance, with a groan of contrition. He had played the part of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew.