Bertram did not stay. After his altercation with the Reverend Peter, he went out to see some of his own friends, whose ideas he liked better than those of Joyce’s crowd, whose point of view was more like his own than Joyce’s.
Alas, for that! Alas, for many things. How was it going to work out between him and Joyce? Were they drifting apart? Were they going to add one more to all those broken marriages which had become an epidemic in English life, after the War? No, by God, not that! It was only the inevitable strain of early marriage. They would have to readjust themselves a little. More patience on his side. More understanding on hers. Tolerance. Give and take. Politics barred. Religion barred. A sense of humour. Success. Yes, if his book succeeded and he could establish a literary career, paying his Scot and lot, it would make a deal of difference. Joyce would be proud of him, and the book would help her to understand his point of view. Thank Heaven for the book! It kept him busy. It gave him an object in life. It was the expression of the truth that was in him. It was a cure for loneliness. . . . Oh, the curse of loneliness!
XIII
Luke Christy was still in town. It was when the sense of loneliness was in Bertram that he found himself drifting towards the Adelphi to Christy’s rooms. The time of day or night didn’t matter. Christy was always glad of a “yarn,” and an excuse to drop his work awhile, when Bertram called, if he happened to be in. And he was mostly in, not going out much to meet his friends but expecting his friends to come to him.
“That’s the test I put ’em to,” he said. “If they come, I know they love me. And I’ve never learnt how to behave outside my own rooms. I break their china, or eat with the wrong fork, or scandalise the servants. I’m a plebeian, a coarse-mannered loon, hopelessly ill-educated.”
Christy’s friends accepted the condition he imposed. There were often several in his room when Bertram called, smoking innumerable cigarettes, talking, talking. Remarkable men and women, most of them, new in type to Bertram, and wonderfully interesting. They were literary people, journalists, social workers of one kind and another, professional idealists. There was also Janet Welford, at times, more interesting than any of them, and more alarming. Now and then came a foreigner—a Russian, an Indian student, a Belgian poet, a young Czecho-Slovak, an Austrian musician, an American professor, even a full-blooded Red Indian, once an officer in the Canadian flying corps, and a brilliant young man, speaking perfectly good English, and liberal in ideas.
They were all liberal in ideas. Rather too liberal, some of them, according to Bertram’s way of thinking. He was startled by the boldness with which they accepted the necessity of change in the whole structure of social life and international relations. While he was worrying out of old inherited instincts and traditions, with some travail of doubt, they had jumped clean beyond to more advanced ideals than he could accept. They put no limit to their conceptions of liberty. If Ireland wanted a Republic, then it was her right to have it. They only questioned the wisdom of wanting a Republic, and the political possibility of obtaining it, with England hostile to that idea. They believed that national independence was less desirable, less “advanced” than federations of free peoples, linking up into ever widening groups, until the United States of Europe and the United States of America, and other associations of peoples would become the United States of the World. A distant vision!
Bertram’s mind refused to follow them as far as that. He balked at the first obstacle, and insisted that Ireland had no right to greater freedom than that of Dominion Home Rule. He believed in the link between the two countries. England had rights as well as Ireland, her own need of security and freedom. He did not see how England could be safe or free, with an Irish Republic on her flank, able to cut her communications at sea. An Irish Republic would be a mortal blow to the old historical pride and sentiment of England.
Christy laughed at that argument of his.
“England’s old historical pride and sentiment are going to be rudely shocked before long, my child! She can’t afford those antique treasures. She’s got to keep pace with the new needs of a world ruined by those dangerous possessions of old castes. It was historical pride and sentiment which caused the German ultimatum in 1914, and led to the massacre of the world’s best youth. All that’s in the Old Curiosity Shop now. Such stuff and nonsense must be replaced, lest we perish, by a spirit of comradeship and commonsense between peoples. Not “My country, right or wrong,” nor “Kaiser and Fatherland,” but “Service to the Human Family.”