Labour? Bertram had been going about London getting into touch with some of the men of his old company—“Comrades of the Great War,” as they called themselves, in barely furnished clubs where they gathered at night, because of their craving for the comradeship which had been the best thing in war. They were still restless and unsettled. Some of them were still hardly better than “shell-shocks.” Their minds were groping towards some solution of their present distress—unemployment, high prices, a sense of broken faith with them by the nation they had served. Some of them talked glibly, as Huggett had said, about Bolshevism and Communism. The frightful experiment in Russia—what was the truth of it?—held some lure for them. There were some who believed “it would do London a bit o’ good.”
Bertram didn’t believe there was much of a real revolutionary spirit among them. They were sick of war and bloodshed, and the “crime wave,” as the newspapers called it, was only the work of a small minority of young men unhinged by the cheapness of life in war, and by war’s brutality. Bertram marvelled rather at the patience, the essential patriotism, the commonsense of the majority of men he met about. Any hankering after the Russian way of revolution was but a vague vision of some system of society which would give men greater equality of luck, and a sense of security.
That was not the opinion of the people in Joyce’s drawing-room. They confessed to fear about the future. It was, perhaps, the presence of two Russian girls of the old régime, and some of the men they brought with them of their own caste and country, which suggested the possibility of revolution in England. They were never tired of telling tales of Bolshevik atrocities, none of them from first-hand evidence, but likely enough, and dreadful in detail. The elder of them, the Countess Gradiva—Lydia, as Joyce called her—had set up a hat shop in Mount Street, Mayfair, where Joyce had met her and made friends. The younger—Paula—played the violin, wonderfully, at recitals and concerts. They were both tall, ugly, elegant girls, speaking half a dozen languages with equal facility and passionate gesture.
“Why doesn’t England send an army and rescue my poor country from its tyrants?” asked Lydia one night of Bertram. “I cannot understand your English policy, your dreadful inactivity.”
Bertram had heard many remarks of the same kind by the Russian girls. They enraged him.
“Why don’t your Russian men do a bit of their own fighting? Why do they lounge about the capitals of Europe, and expect other people to liberate Russia and restore Czardom, and get back their wealth?”
“You’re a Bolshevik, then?” asked Countess Gradiva, staring at him with black, challenging eyes.
“Not in the least,” said Bertram. “But I’m dead against these fatal expeditions in which England has poured out gold she can ill afford—with what result? More bloodshed in Russia. Another disastrous retreat of incompetent generals, more suffering and horror, and harryings of poor Russian peasants. That’s how it seems to me. I may be wrong.”
The Countess Gradiva called out across the drawing-room, which was crowded with Joyce’s friends. She had a high, harsh way of speaking, and a shrill laugh.
“My dear Lady Joyce! Your husband is a naughty bad Bolshevik! He’s saying the most dreadful things, ma chérie!”