“I wish to God you people would clear out of my wife’s room!” he had said, with violence. “Can’t you see that she’s suffering from head-ache and that all this chatter is the worst thing you can do to her?”
That second part of his speech had been clearly dishonest. It was not Joyce’s head-ache he was worrying about—she seemed to have forgotten that—but his own jealousy, his hatred of this public possession of Joyce’s room.
Of course she hadn’t taken his explosion meekly.
“My dear Bertram,” she’d said, in her pretty mocking way, “if you don’t feel like a gentleman this afternoon, go and walk till you do. Anyhow, don’t interrupt Kenneth’s amusing story!”
Kenneth and the rest had laughed heartily. Bertram’s desire for them to “clear out” seemed to them a delicious joke. It was he who cleared out, and later came back, when they’d gone, in a rattled temper, to say things to Joyce for which now he could have bitten out his tongue. She hadn’t quarrelled. She’d been cool and smiling and sarcastic.
“My dear Bertram, surely you don’t think marriage has given you the prerogative of tyranny? That’s gone out of date. My love for you doesn’t give you the right to insult my friends. Why you should get jealous and fussed because I receive them in my bedroom—look at all these bedclothes and this heavy quilt!—I can’t understand. I never heard anything so narrow-minded, so suburban! In any case, don’t be disloyal to form. Our crowd doesn’t behave like that.”
“Our crowd!” Bertram had said bitterly. “I wish the whole crowd would go and drown themselves. I want you alone, to myself. You let these blighters into your bedroom, let them kiss your hand, but if I show any kind of emotion for you, you shrink from me. When I want to kiss you, as I always want to, you say I’m too ‘beastly emotional’!”
“You must admit you are, Bertram!” Joyce had said. “I can’t stand too much of it. It bores me. I prefer intelligent conversation, comradeship, laughter. What’s wrong with that?”
“Marriage means more than that,” he’d said gloomily, and then had made abject apologies for his sulkiness, and had gone down on both knees by her bedside, so that she had forgiven him, and tousled his hair with playful fingers. But there had been other quarrels of the kind, worse than that.
He was “nervy,” he knew that. The War had left him all on edge. He was irritable with small things, the loss of a collar-stud, the slackness of a servant, the continual tinkle of the telephone bell—Joyce’s friends suggesting some new “stunt.” Some secret warfare was going on inside his brain, loosening his hold on old beliefs, and disturbing old checks and balances of mind, old loyalties of tradition. If he’d had some work to do, it would have been easier, but England had two million unemployed, and thousands of ex-officers like himself were wearing their boots out to find a living wage.