“Are you ever serious?” asked Bertram.
“I never leave laughter far behind,” she answered.
And that was true, as he found, not in Christy’s rooms but in hers, to which he went rather often, after that first meeting, and in little restaurants around St. John’s Wood or in the “Zoo,” where he met her after her work with the blinded soldiers of St. Dunstan’s.
She was serious sometimes, passionately serious about the state of civilisation, the hatred between nations, the nation’s forgetfulness of boys who had been stricken in the War, and the objects for which they had fought, the indifference of the lucky classes to the growing poverty, the increasing despair of ex-soldiers, crippled men, nerve-broken women, the cruelty of the world to starving Russia—oh, yes, she admitted the secret spell of Bolshevism!—the brutality of England to Ireland, the refusal of the United States to enter the League of Nations, the trickery, the wickedness, the corruption of European Governments who poked up the worst passions of the crowd, and lied to them, and played the old game of international rivalry so that the world was being staged for another war.
She dropped her fantastic way of speech in talking of these things, and scared Bertram by the violence of her language, and by the red flame of her spirit, reckless of all restraint, impatient of delay, eager for “direct action” to cure the evils which she saw and loathed.
But laughter came quick upon her passion. She laughed wholeheartedly at Bertram’s fears, his loyalty to old traditions, his hatred of violence, his moderate views, his moralities. She called him a Queen Victorian Englishman, an 1880 Jingo, a trimmer, a hedger, a Girondin, a disciple of Samuel Smiles, a John Halifax, Gentleman, a Tory Democrat, and in a moment of exasperation, a Poor Damned Soul.
He caught a glimpse of her now and then, pacing rapidly round Regent’s Park with a blinded soldier on each arm. They laughed continually as she talked to them. They looked happy. They chatted brightly, and they turned their faces to her sometimes as though seeing the way in which the wind blew a brown tress across her rose-flushed cheek, and the brightness of her eyes.
Bertram had hated to see those blinded soldiers, groping their way about the Park, tapping the kerb-stone with their sticks, standing, and listening intently, as the taxi-cabs swirled by, afraid, melancholy, stricken. The sight of them made him curse the war again, and go back to his book, to write more bitterly of its anguish.
But Janet Rockingham Welford was at her best with those blinded men, and he had no argument with her in that part of her work, though in all else.
He went often to her rooms.