XIX
Bertram was staking everything on his book, in spite of Christy’s “hands-up” and cry of “Kamerad!”
It was going well,—amazingly well. He was astonished at the way in which words came to him. After the first agonies he had found himself writing easily, rapidly. It was as though he was just the instrument recording the dictation of some mind beyond himself. In reality, as he knew, he was drawing upon his memories, and emotions stirred up in his subconsciousness, repressed for a long time, and now liberated. He remembered things which, at the time he hadn’t noticed much, or at all—smells, sounds, minute particular details of visual impressions. The pictures of war were as sharply etched in his mind’s eye as when he stared for the first time across No Man’s Land, or took his machine-gun up to Fricourt on the Somme and saw death busy on a day of great battle.
It was extraordinary how he could reach back to it all, from this little house in Holland Street, Kensington, within sound of the London ’busses passing up Church Street. When Joyce was out or in bed, and he was writing in his study, alone, late at night, the old life of war came back to him so vividly, with such intensity, that more than once when he lifted his head, he was startled to find himself, not in a dug-out, or leaning over the sand-bags of a trench parapet—he smelled chloride of lime!—but in his room, with Joyce’s portrait over the mantelpiece, and peace outside the windows.
Here in the manuscript sheets before him, as far as he’d gone, he had told what war was like. The men who knew would say, “That’s how it was!” He had paid the tribute of his soul to Tommy Atkins, who had not been given a fair deal. The book might do a bit of good. It would pass on the experience of those who knew the meaning of war to a generation which wouldn’t know, unless some one told them. This was worth doing. Perhaps worth living to do. Had he been spared to live to do it? There might be something in that. He’d always wondered why he should go scot free—not a scratch all through the war, with other men dropping on every side of him. Anyhow, he would try to pay back for the grace of life—such as it was!—by this book.
It was the truth, in every line of it, in every word. He had found the gift of words. That was his buried talent, now revealed. That was what he’d been searching for, the meaning of that queer sensation of waiting for something to happen. This had happened! The gift of words—the greatest gift in the world, if a man pledged his soul to truth.
He hoped Joyce would like his book. It would be fine if she said, “Well done!” when he read it to her. She would be critical. She would hate some of the things he had written, brutal, some of them, but she would acknowledge the truth of it, the bigness of his achievement. For it was going to be big, with the spirit of the greatest war in the world, and of England’s manhood.
He was telling it all, nothing left out, nothing shirked, in horror, courage, boredom, fear, filth, laughter, madness. Joyce had seen a bit of it in London hospitals. She wouldn’t funk reading about it, and she would be generous in praise, if he had written it well, as she was generous to Kenneth Murless for his snappy sonnets. She would understand him better after reading it. She would be more patient with him. And she would see that he was going to keep his end up, and not sponge on her for everything.
With a bit of luck the book would make some money. That would make things easier in married life, and give him the independence which all men must have. It would make him less moody and humpy in his temper. Perhaps it would bring Joyce and him closer again, in the old relations of love and comradeship, which somehow had been interrupted.
It was with this thought in his mind that he gathered up a bundle of his manuscript and went up to Joyce’s room. It was the morning after Lady Ottery’s lecture, and Joyce was still in bed. She had a habit of lying late. Perhaps she would be inclined to let him read some of his stuff.