Night after night he went round after dinner to Janet’s flat in Overstrand Mansions, Battersea Park, one of a long line of tall blocks of dwellings mostly inhabited as Bertram found, by the poorer “Intellectuals,” the “Surplus Virgins” (as Janet called her own class of unmarried women), and newly-wed couples on modest means, with room for one perambulator in the little “hall.” Some novelist had once written a book about this street, called “Intellectual Mansions, S.W.,” and the name had stuck.
She barred out all other visitors until the reading was finished, by the simple plan of putting an envelope under the door knocker with an inscription in her big, bold handwriting, “Out of Town.” Several times as he read, Bertram heard footsteps faltering on the landing outside, and then going down the stone staircase again, dejectedly.
“Poor wretches!” he would say, and Janet would light another cigarette, or puff out a wreath of smoke, and say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder! Get on with it!”
She was helpful to him. She didn’t spare criticism. She made him “quail” all right! She found mistakes in grammar, split infinitives, frightful faults in style. She cried out at such times as though he’d touched her with a red-hot poker: “Oh, my little sensitive soul!”—“Oh, my æsthetic Aunt!”—“Oh, ignorant and nerve-shattering soldier-man!” Such absurdities of ejaculation warned him of dreadful blunders, which then she corrected like a stern “schoolmarm,” so comical in her caricature that Bertram laughed while he quailed. A hundred times she stormed at him because he’d “shirked” the uttermost reality, turning away with cowardice from the obscenity of war’s torture-chambers.
“Stronger!” she would say. “Stronger! That’s weak. Let the Truth come right out and show its bloody face to those who still believe in the glory and splendour of war’s adventure—the romantic women, crudest in all the world, the hundred per cent patriots who would engage in world war for a nice point of honour or to avenge a pin-prick!”
There were times when Bertram felt the cold chill of failure on him. This book, then, was no good! He had failed! He had fooled himself into the belief that it was the Real Thing.
But these moods did not overwhelm him, because of Janet’s emotion, rage, laughter, tears, as he went on reading. She loved what he had written about the men. She knew them. She had nursed them. They had wept out of blind eyes in her arms. They had “groused” and cursed and laughed and joked and agonised, and revealed nakedly the secret of their souls to her. She knew, and Bertram had written what she knew.
After each reading he asked her anxiously for her opinion. Was it any good? Did it have the slightest chance? He wanted her to tell him frankly.
She teased him a little. She said: “I reserve judgment,” or “I’ve read worse stuff,” and then when he was tortured by doubt, she laughed in her full-throated way, and told him to be conceited because she wasted so much time upon him. Christy would be jealous of him, if he ever knew.
“Christy jealous?”