“You ought to join us,” said Nat Verney, the Labour member. “Labour has need of lads like you. The younger Intellectuals.”
He spoke with a North country burr in his speech, in spite of the London School of Economics. He was a sturdy, youngish man—thirty-five or so—with a shock of brown hair and a Lancashire face, hard as teak, square-jawed, with deep-set eyes in which there was a glint of humour, in spite of the light of fanaticism now and then, when he was bitter against “the classes” and his great enemy “Capital.”
“Why don’t you write occasionally for The New World—?” asked Bernard Hall. “You have the gift of words, if I may say so.”
Bertram’s heart gave a thump at that compliment from Hall, distinguished editor, fastidious critic. Was he serious or only sarcastic?
“A realistic novel on the War,” said Hubert Melvin, raising his Shakespeare brow, and a little plump hand. “Nobody in England has come up to Barbusse. You could do it, Pollard! It’s burnt into you. Give it ’em hot and strong—‘The Old Gang!’ Put the heart of England into it.”
Bertram had glanced at Christy. He had pledged him to secrecy about his book, and Christy kept the pledge.
“Pollard may surprise us all!” So Christy said, and then spoilt his speech for Bertram by a grin and a jibe. “But we mustn’t forget his aristocratic connections! It’s hard to break with one’s caste.”
“That belongs to the wreckage of war,” said Henry Carvell. “I’m glad of the smash. Think of the entrenched snobbishness of England in 1913! Thank Heaven that heritage of stupidity has been blown to bits.”
Christy was not so sure that it had been blown to bits. In time of war there had been a little mixing up. Patrician girls had been dairy-maids, hospital nurses, canteen women. Public school men had gone into the ranks, now and then. Now they were all dividing again, getting back to different sides.
Bertram agreed with Christy, thinking of Kenneth Murless, General Bellasis, and others. He agreed more with Christy than any of the others. He was glad when they went away, leaving him to “jaw” with this old comrade of his. Christy was of simpler stuff, dead true in his estimate of facts. What was it in Christy that caught hold of him so? Perhaps his intense sincerity and his harsh realism. He did not deceive himself by illusion, however pleasant and idealistic. He told the truth as he saw it, unsparingly, to himself as well as to others. He had revealed Bertram to himself.