  By SIR PHILIP GIBBS
THE STREET OF ADVENTURE WOUNDED SOULS PEOPLE OF DESTINY THE SOUL OF THE WAR THE BATTLES OF THE SOMME THE STRUGGLE IN FLANDERS THE WAY TO VICTORY, 2 Vols. NOW IT CAN BE TOLD MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD
A Novel
BY PHILIP GIBBS
NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD. II PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA The Middle of the Road For the twentieth time Bertram Pollard went to the door of the little room he called his “study” and listened. He heard nothing but the slow tick-tock of a grandfather’s clock at the end of the narrow hall; that, and his own breathing which seemed loud. The silence of the house in Holland Street, Kensington, was horrible to him; yet better than the rapid footsteps of a doctor, the quick rustle of a nurse’s starched dress, the strange inexplicable noises of something being dragged across the room upstairs, water being poured out, a glass falling and smashing, and other sounds which had scared him when his wife was in pain. He’d heard her moaning once or twice, had gone back into his room, shutting the door quietly, and saying, “Lord! . . . Lord! . . .” and nothing else but that again and again. In that room of his—twelve feet by fourteen, as he knew by measuring it from skirting-board to skirting-board, as a mechanical occupation for his nerve-tattered brain—he had prayed, cursed, groaned, and even wept a little. He had paced up and down, sat down at his desk, put his forehead against the wall, gripped the mantelpiece, clenched and unclenched his hands, behaved with a ridiculous lack of self-control. He was frightened by his own cowardice. “This won’t do!” he had said once or twice, and then used the words which he had said to his own soul, not without effect sometimes, when men had lain dead about him and his chance of death had been as good as theirs. “Keep a stiff upper lip, my lad!” That’s what his father had said sharply to him as a small boy when he had taken a toss from a pony or cut his knees in a tumble. “Keep a stiff upper lip, my lad!” That was part of the family tradition, and it had served him pretty well at the war—a tradition of nerve-control, endurance of pain, hiding of fear, however frightened. It was no good now, when Joyce was suffering torture. No damn good. His thoughts brooded over the last six months and more. What a brute he had been, and how frightful was life which caused women to suffer so much when this thing happened! Joyce had not wanted it to happen. She’d had some foreboding of its agony, though she’d tried to hide it from him with her usual pluck. Wonderful pluck! This girl with “bobbed” hair, who felt that she was unfit to be seen if her nails weren’t newly manicured, and who was as slim and fragile-looking as a Watteau shepherdess, had the spirit of all her family, and of many women in her crowd, as he’d seen them in the hunting-field, in canteens, once or twice in air-raids. He’d been more scared than this golden-haired “kid”, as he called her then, when a bomb had fallen, smashing the door of a house in which they had been dancing, one night in London of war-time. His heart had given a thump, though he was a major of machine-guns, but Joyce had lit a cigarette with a steady hand, laughed without a tremor, and said, “Bad miss, brother Boche!” That was the night he’d asked her to marry him, if he had the luck to get through the war. “The luck’s yours, and my love will keep you safe!” she’d said, as he remembered now, and would remember always. Well it had seemed luck then, though since, once or twice, he’d wondered whether the luck hadn’t been with the men who’d gone out before the show was finished. They’d been saved a lot of worry—this worrying business of life after war, with its enormous disappointments, and the whole muddle and mystery of things. Marriage was one of its mysteries. He’d gone into it as an escape from all troubles. Funny, that! It was to wipe out the memory of the things he’d seen. It would be the rest-cure for body and soul, both rather badly jolted and put out of gear by something like shell-shock. “Soul-shock,” as old Christy had once called it. This marriage with Joyce had seemed like getting by sheer, undeserved luck the ideal of beauty which old Christy used to say was the secret, unattained, and unattainable purpose of life. “Beauty of life,” said Christy—they were sitting together in a dug-out between Henencourt ChÂteau and the ruins of Albert—“is God’s will on earth as it is in Heaven.” He used to talk like that though he was so ironical and blasphemous about all definite religion. “Beauty is the most exquisite understanding of truth and happiness. Body as well as soul, the material and the spiritual, must be given a chance of that, and when harmony is established between ’em then Perfection, or God, is attained. But we’re a long way from that at the moment, Major, in this dirty little war of ours!” That’s what Christy had said, and Bertram had scoffed at him as a crawling Pacifist and hot-air merchant, and made rude, insulting remarks about his friend’s excuse for a face, which departed abominably from beauty’s line. But he’d remembered Christy’s words when he’d stood in St. Mary Abbot’s church with Joyce. She stood beside him—he could see her now like that, though she lay upstairs—slim, tall, with gold-spun hair cut like a boy’s, perfectly calm and self-possessed. “Isn’t she beautiful!” murmured the crowd of women outside the church, in High Street, Kensington, before they drove away, and Bertram had agreed in his heart. She was the Beauty for which all his soul had yearned during four and a half years of ugliness. She was the beauty of life which had come to him! He had called her that on the first night when they were alone together in this little house in Holland Street which she had furnished out of her own money with reckless extravagance, a delight in weird wall-papers and sham antiques, a passion for highly coloured cushions into which she used to sink with little squeals of ecstasy. It had been a great game of Life in those first few months of marriage—a year ago now. Joyce had set the pace and kept it up with amazing resistance to all fatigue. He had pleaded for “a quiet life,” “time to love each other,” “an escape from the crowd,” but she’d jeered at him as “an introspective slacker,” dragged him out to theatres, dance clubs, other people’s houses. She’d filled this little house in Holland Street with an amazing collection of people whose presence he’d resented sometimes with almost poisonous hatred—young staff officers who still swaggered about Whitehall though the war was over, young clergymen who had been chaplains at the front, young airmen who’d put up their wings some time after Armistice, girls who came drifting back from canteens at Etaples, Rouen, Cologne, with a lot of army slang and a mania for cheap cigarettes, a sense of boredom with peace, a restless desire for “a good time” and a most embarrassing habit of discussing sex problems in mixed company with a complete absence of reserve. They had come in and out of the house at all times of the day, even to late breakfasts, where Joyce had joined them in one of her many dressing-gowns of Japanese silk and Futurist colours, with her bare feet in bedroom slippers, looking like a sleepy boy, after dancing in some overheated room until late night or early morning. He had quarrelled with her for that. It was the cause of their first quarrel, “It doesn’t seem decent,” he’d said, “and anyhow, I hate it.” That was when she’d given breakfast in this way to one of those Army chaplains of whom she knew so many—Peter Fynde, a young, good-looking, conceited ass, with an exaggerated Oxford drawl, a slight stutter, and affected gallantry. He had had the impudence to kiss Joyce’s hand and to make some remark about her little feet, totally unconscious of Bertram’s hot flush and sulky discourtesy towards him. Joyce seemed to have no regard even for the privacy of her bedroom, and there had been another quarrel when Bertram had come back from an afternoon stroll and found Joyce, who had complained of a sick head-ache, “giving audience,” as she called it, to two young officers, three girls, and Kenneth Murless of the Foreign Office—Murless, whom he detested most of all her friends because he was too beautiful to live—one of those tall, curly-headed, Greek God sort of fellows—and elaborately brilliant in conversational insincerities. He was sitting on a low stool by Joyce’s bed, feeding her with strawberries and cream, and telling some ridiculous story about his life as a junior diplomatist at the Hague before the war, to the appreciative laughter of the company, and Joyce’s friendly smiles. Bertram had made rather a fool of himself that afternoon. He admitted it now, in remembrance, with a groan of contrition. He had played the part of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. “I wish to God you people would clear out of my wife’s room!” he had said, with violence. “Can’t you see that she’s suffering from head-ache and that all this chatter is the worst thing you can do to her?” That second part of his speech had been clearly dishonest. It was not Joyce’s head-ache he was worrying about—she seemed to have forgotten that—but his own jealousy, his hatred of this public possession of Joyce’s room. Of course she hadn’t taken his explosion meekly. “My dear Bertram,” she’d said, in her pretty mocking way, “if you don’t feel like a gentleman this afternoon, go and walk till you do. Anyhow, don’t interrupt Kenneth’s amusing story!” Kenneth and the rest had laughed heartily. Bertram’s desire for them to “clear out” seemed to them a delicious joke. It was he who cleared out, and later came back, when they’d gone, in a rattled temper, to say things to Joyce for which now he could have bitten out his tongue. She hadn’t quarrelled. She’d been cool and smiling and sarcastic. “My dear Bertram, surely you don’t think marriage has given you the prerogative of tyranny? That’s gone out of date. My love for you doesn’t give you the right to insult my friends. Why you should get jealous and fussed because I receive them in my bedroom—look at all these bedclothes and this heavy quilt!—I can’t understand. I never heard anything so narrow-minded, so suburban! In any case, don’t be disloyal to form. Our crowd doesn’t behave like that.” “Our crowd!” Bertram had said bitterly. “I wish the whole crowd would go and drown themselves. I want you alone, to myself. You let these blighters into your bedroom, let them kiss your hand, but if I show any kind of emotion for you, you shrink from me. When I want to kiss you, as I always want to, you say I’m too ‘beastly emotional’!” “You must admit you are, Bertram!” Joyce had said. “I can’t stand too much of it. It bores me. I prefer intelligent conversation, comradeship, laughter. What’s wrong with that?” “Marriage means more than that,” he’d said gloomily, and then had made abject apologies for his sulkiness, and had gone down on both knees by her bedside, so that she had forgiven him, and tousled his hair with playful fingers. But there had been other quarrels of the kind, worse than that. He was “nervy,” he knew that. The War had left him all on edge. He was irritable with small things, the loss of a collar-stud, the slackness of a servant, the continual tinkle of the telephone bell—Joyce’s friends suggesting some new “stunt.” Some secret warfare was going on inside his brain, loosening his hold on old beliefs, and disturbing old checks and balances of mind, old loyalties of tradition. If he’d had some work to do, it would have been easier, but England had two million unemployed, and thousands of ex-officers like himself were wearing their boots out to find a living wage. Joyce had been horribly distressed when she knew that a child was coming. All the tenderness which had overwhelmed him at that news failed to reconcile her to the idea, though she hid some fear that was in her. It was the inactivity forced upon her at the end which hurt her most; that and her loss of beauty for a time. “No more dances!” she had cried. “No more flying stunts at Hendon. Oh, Bertram, what a colossal bore!” He had been angry with her again (and now cursed himself for that temper) because she’d insisted upon still retaining her crowd of friends about her to the last. She’d made no secret of her condition, even to Kenneth Murless, and Bertram had resented that candour with painful jealousy, shrinking from the thought that any one but himself should be in possession of their sacred secret. “It’s frightful!” he’d said. “It’s like exposing yourself in the market-place.” “You’re ridiculous!” Joyce had answered. “Anybody would think you’d been brought up at—Peckham. In the early Victorian era. Do you think people don’t know?” “Yes—but to talk about it to Kenneth Murless! That decadent waster!” “A good friend of mine, whom I met long before I knew you.” So Joyce had said, calmly and cruelly. He had been violently angry. . . . How could he ever forgive himself for such brutality now that Joyce lay upstairs, between life and death! Lord! . . . Lord! . . . The supreme moment of fear came when for more than the twentieth time he listened at the door of his study, and heard again the horrible silence upstairs, following those still more dreadful sounds of the activity of strangers busy with his wife. Did this silence mean death? He asked the question between two frightful heart-beats. Then the door opened at the top of the landing and there was the rustle again of the nurse’s starched dress coming downstairs. Bertram went into his room and faced round as the woman came in after a tap at the door. It was the verdict of life or death. “Is she all right?” he asked, failing to steady his voice. The nurse seemed to be pitiful of his agony. His white face and haggard eyes were like those of many men she’d seen at such a time. “Your wife’s all right,” she said; “no danger now!” She hesitated a moment, and then added nervously: “The baby was still-born. I’m sorry.” She left the room again, and didn’t see Bertram Pollard go to the mantelpiece and put his face down on his arms. The child was a boy. It had perfect features, like a miniature Joyce, but after a glance and a whimpering cry, she wouldn’t look at it again. Bertram knelt by his wife’s bedside, trying to hide the wetness of his eyes. She put her thin fingers through his hair and caressed him, but after a short time said, “You worry me, rather,” so that the nurse signalled to him to go away. Bertram had felt an immense sense of relief at the sight of Joyce lying at peace after her ordeal. She was faintly flushed, and had all her beauty back, with a youthful, almost boyish look, touched by the character of her “bobbed” hair. He turned at the door and glanced back at her, and when she opened her eyes again he kissed his hand to her with all his heart in that gesture of love, but she shut her eyes without response. During his first reaction to the knowledge that Joyce was safe he had not worried over the death of the baby, except for Joyce’s sake. It was only later that he began to think of the child. Something of himself lay dead in that cradle in the dressing-room to which it had been carried by the nurse. If it had lived— His imagination wandered through the years ahead. There would have been a companion for him, a little pal. He would have taught the boy to ride, to play games, to face up to life, to be a gentleman. Not a snob! No, he would have taught him to be tolerant, and “democratic” in old Christy’s way, with understanding of folk in the mean streets of life. He could have told that son of his something of the men he had commanded in the war, those Cockney fellows who had been all nerves and all pluck with a wonderful sense of humour. His son! . . . Young Bertram! . . . How fine that would have been! Life would have been less lonely—and, Lord! how lonely it had been with Joyce upstairs, and a nurse in the house, and the two maids whispering about the passages while he sat alone in his “study” with nothing in the world to study except his introspective thoughts! . . . That night he went on tip-toe to the dressing-room, turned up the electric light, and drew back the coverlet from the face of the still-born child. His son! What a queer mite! Like a wax doll, with something of Joyce’s look, and something, perhaps, of his own. He kissed the tiny dead face, and then drew back sharply because of its coldness. Not that he was afraid of death. He had seen many men die, and dead. But this little thing was Joyce’s babe. That was piteous! After all her suffering! Oh, God! . . . Was it for the best? Had God been kind? There was something in life now which seemed to spoil things. Some trouble seemed to be brewing for further tragedy. That was what old Christy thought. The old foundations were slipping away. The War had shaken them too much. The next generation might have to go through worse things than their fathers. Fathers who had been good soldiers but not much good in time of peace, and found it hard to get a decent job! Bertram Pollard covered the face of the still-born child, switched off the light, and went downstairs again. He wrote out an advertisement for The Times—Joyce’s friends would want to know—and then, for hours, sat brooding until he fell asleep, and was only wakened by the “Lor’, sir!” of the parlourmaid, Edith, who came in to tidy his room. She was very sorry for him, and said so in her chatty way. It was the nurse who told him how to arrange for the child’s burial, and he went round to an undertaker’s in Church Street, Kensington, jostled by smart women, very bright at their morning’s shopping so that he hated them. The undertaker’s clerk was respectful but surprised when Bertram explained his errand. “It’s not usual, sir, to have a funeral for a still-born infant.” “What then?” asked Bertram. The man coughed. “As a rule we just fetch them away.” “Damn it!” said Bertram, with astonishing violence, “I want you to arrange a funeral.” He arranged for an oak coffin with a brass plate, on which the name “Bertram Pollard” was to be inscribed. Before the little coffin was closed, Bertram carried it into Joyce’s room, according to a wish she had whispered to the nurse. It was like a toy coffin with a doll inside. Joyce’s eyes filled with tears but she turned her head away and did not speak a word. “My dear! My dear!” said Bertram. Although he had walked with death so long he was distressed beyond all words by this little corpse. His own name on the coffin startled him when he first saw it. It seemed symbolical of something that had died in himself, his spirit of youth; his hope. “If I were you, I’d get about a bit and see your friends,” said the nurse, as they sat together in the carriage with the coffin on Bertram’s knee. She was a nice human soul, who had been a nurse in the War and had learnt pity for men. “Most of my real pals are killed,” said Bertram. The nurse laughed, not heartlessly but to cheer him up. “See those who are still alive. It’s no use brooding. Carry on!” It was the old rallying word of the War. It had some effect on Bertram even now. He straightened up. “I wish I could get a job, nurse!” “We want another nice little war,” she answered. He looked at her sideways. “Do you mean that?” She smiled back at him. “You know you’ve thought so, sometimes! So have I. War’s hell, of course. But there was something about it—” “It’s the impulse that’s gone,” said Bertram. “There doesn’t seem to be any kind of purpose—” “Love, life, work,” said the nurse. Bertram said, “Yes. Yes, of course!” and then, “I can’t get the hang of things, quite. I’m just floundering, aimless. And anyhow, there’s no work for my type. I was all right with machine guns. They’re not wanted now.” “Men are wanted, and always will be,” said the nurse. “Proper men, like you.” That cheered him. He said no more until the tiny coffin was lowered into the earth and the nurse and he were on their way back. “Nurse,” he said, “I’ll get a job if I die for it.” “Get a job and live for it,” answered the nurse. “Here’s luck!” Joyce was sleeping—“as sound as a bell,” said the nurse. Bertram had finished his dinner alone, hating his loneliness, and the deliberately cheerful way in which he had to answer the chatty remarks of Edith, the maid, who waited on him with a sense of drama in the house, and a desire to express comradeship. In his heart, though he liked the girl, he wished her at the devil, because of his fretted nerves, and refused a second serve of fruit jelly with an impatience which he tried to disguise by a “Thank you very much, Edith. Nothing more—for goodness’ sake!” Then he went into his study, shut the door, and tried to settle down at his desk to some writing. He had no concentration of mind. The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece annoyed him desperately. It had been playing tattoos in his brain during those hours when its fast little ticking seemed to be hurrying Joyce’s life away. Well, she was all right now, thank God, unless the nurse and doctor were lying to him. He went over to the mantelpiece, took up Joyce’s photograph, and kissed it. He would try to be less irritable and get a grip on that absurd temper of his. Then he swore softly because the telephone bell rang again. That was about the tenth time in the last hour. Joyce’s friends desired to know how she was getting on. Why the deuce didn’t they have the decency to leave him alone, and to leave the telephone alone, at such a time? “Is that Mr. Pollard? Oh, forgive me, but can you tell me how dear Joyce is getting on?” That was the usual way of putting it. His answers were brief. “Quite well, thanks!” then a slam down with the receiver. He wasn’t going to give them any details. A man’s voice had spoken to him on the ’phone. “That you, Bertram? . . . Oh, I’m Kenneth Murless. How’s Joyce?” What right had Kenneth to ask such a question at such a time? It was like his impertinence! . . . And yet, somehow, because of Joyce, who liked Kenneth, he felt constrained to give a civil answer. “Getting on well.” “Give her my love, old man,” said Kenneth’s voice on the wire; “say I’m frightfully sorry about her loss.” His love! Bertram’s face flushed deeply as he stood by the plaguey instrument. That was going a bit too far! “I’m afraid she’s not well enough to get anybody’s love just yet,” he said icily. “All my sympathy to you, old man,” answered Kenneth. This time Bertram had slammed down the receiver. He had no desire whatever for Kenneth’s sympathy. He wished the fellow would get his Grecian nose down to his job at the Foreign Office and keep it there. Otherwise it might be in danger of getting broken one day. That last ring he had answered took the frown off his forehead after he had listened to the first words over the wire. “Oh, is that you, mother? Yes, Joyce seems out of danger now. . . . Come round? . . . Well, is the governor at the House to-night? . . . The Irish debate? Oh, yes, I forgot that monstrous farce. All right. I’ll come, then.” He remembered there were other tragedies in life besides his own, more death than that of his still-born child when he bought an evening paper at the Underground station in the High Street, Kensington, on his way to his father’s house in Sloane Street. “Six deaths in Dublin to-day. Serious Ambush. More reprisals.” Those were the headings on the front page, and he felt sick at the words, and wouldn’t read the details. The same thing as usual. British officers fired at and killed by boys in civilian clothes. Young Irishmen dragged out of their beds and shot in cold blood by “unknown men, said to be in uniform.” Irish homes burnt by the military. Raids, bomb outrages, searches—the usual daily record of anarchy in Ireland which was becoming intolerable in his soul because of his divided allegiance as half an Irishman and half an Englishman, half a democrat and half a Tory, half a Protestant and half a Catholic, at least, he hoped, a Christian. He opened the paper as he sat in the district train, and saw his father’s name on the centre page: “Great Speech by Mr. Michael Pollard, K.C.: Defends Government Policy of Reprisals.” Bertram crushed the paper in his hands, and dropped it on the seat by his side. It was his father’s field night. He would enjoy himself vastly upholding the “absolute necessity of putting down these murders with the firm hand of British Justice,” appealing to the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, denouncing those who would treat with rebels to the Crown and “shake hands with murder.” Well, it would keep the governor late at the House. That was the only comfort. He would be able to see his mother alone, and avoid a savage altercation with his father, who treated him as a traitor to the British Empire—Bertram Pollard, D.S.O., M.C., who had been three times wounded in the Great War, and loved England with a kind of passion. “Mother!” She met him in the hall of the house in Sloane Street, and at the sight of her little figure and sad face, his jangled nerves, so tautly drawn during Joyce’s long ordeal, gave a kind of snap, and when he put his arms round her he dropped his forehead on to her shoulder, and his eyes filled with tears, as in the old days when he came home from school, or left her after the holidays. “My poor boy!” she said soothingly, “I understand. . . . I’m sorry about the poor little baby.” She took him by the hand into her small sitting-room and asked him to tell her all the details of his ordeal. “Joyce’s ordeal, mother!” he said, but she shook her head, and said, “It’s worse for the men, if they’re sensitive. The agony of waiting—” There were many things he wanted to tell his mother, this little woman with her thin grey hair, and her worn face and kind brown eyes, to whom, as a boy, he had told all his secrets, confessed all his peccadilloes, and had no worse reproof than “Oh, darling!” She had spoilt him as she had spoilt all of them, Dorothy, Susan, young Digby, and himself, shielding them from their father’s harsh and hasty temper, his Irish impatience, his old-fashioned Protestant intolerance—he was Southern Irish, but Protestant—with any license of youth. She had even told “fibs” to shield them, and they had loved her for it, and traded abominably on her fear of “the governor” and his sudden rages. She was more afraid of him than they had ever been. Even as small children they had defied his authority. Dorothy had been the greatest rebel, long before her marriage to a Prussian officer whom she had met at Wiesbaden, in 1912, when already there was a whisper of war with Germany—pooh-poohed by Dorothy, as by many others who knew nothing in those days about international politics, and cared less. That was her last rebellion. Michael Pollard, K.C., M.P., had wiped his daughter out of his mind and heart. He hated “the Hun” worse because of her. And Susan! . . . She took a pleasure in braving his wrath—“our Ogre,” as she called him. She never tired of maintaining her right to breakfast in bed, which he denounced as “the slummocky instinct of her wild Irish blood.” “Your blood too, father, and no fault of mine!” was her answer to that particular argument, to which “the governor” would answer, “Thank God the Norman strain is stronger than the Celtic, as far as I’m concerned.” She had ridiculed his Protestant austerity, flouted his parental commands as “Early Victorian tyranny,” and had become a Suffragette with a joyous assertion of “liberty” which meant for her late dances and no questions, rather than Votes for Women, at a time when Michael Pollard, M.P. (not K.C. then) was a violent antagonist of Women’s Rights. Bertram had taken Susan’s part in these domestic scenes, but Dorothy had been his favourite sister, his best comrade, and her German marriage, and long exile and silence during the years of war had made a gap in his heart. He spoke of her now. “Have you heard from Doll lately?” Mrs. Pollard looked nervously at the door and pulled out some letters from a little bag by her side. “Your father doesn’t know I hear from her. You know he forbade all intercourse.” “Rubbish!” said Bertram. His mother confessed to a sense of guilt in having this secret from her husband, but it was more than she could bear to be cut off for ever from her first-born. “She writes lovingly. Her marriage—and the War—have made no difference, except that she defends Germany a little.” Bertram smiled at that, and said, “I suppose it is natural, but it takes a lot of doing, as far as the war’s concerned.” He asked about his other sister. “What’s Susan’s latest game?” Mrs. Pollard looked distressed. Again she gave that frightened glance at the door, as though her husband might come in at any moment. “I’m afraid, Bertram! The child is devoted to the Sinn Fein cause! It’s a passion with her, like Votes for Women used to be. Your father threatens to turn her out of doors if she says another word on the subject. There was a dreadful scene yesterday morning.” Bertram could imagine it. Susan delighted in dreadful scenes. She was an Irish rose, with many thorns, sharply pointed. No Norman coldness in her blood! None of her mother’s Devonshire softness. Mrs. Pollard revealed more than an ordinary anxiety. “I’m afraid Susan will get into trouble. There was a policeman here a few days ago.” “A policeman? Sounds like melodrama!” “He wanted Susan to give him the address of a young Irishman named Dennis O’Brien. Susan denied all knowledge of him, but I know she has been corresponding with the boy.” Bertram said, “My God!” and then begged his mother’s pardon. He hid from her his own reason for alarm. He knew Dennis O’Brien. The boy had been in the machine-gun corps with him, and he had heard news of him from Ireland. It was not news to be talked of lightly. He was up to the neck in Sinn Fein. “Where’s Susan now?” he asked abruptly. Mrs. Pollard’s hands fluttered up to her forehead. “Do I ever know? Modern mothers aren’t taken into their daughters’ confidence. They come and go as they please, and resent all questioning. It wasn’t so in my young days.” Bertram smiled at the last words. How often he had heard them! How often he and the two girls—rebels three—had laughed at them, years back, as children. His brother Digby, now a “Black and Tan” in Ireland—horrible thought!—had been too young to enjoy the joke. He lingered on, forgetting Joyce a little, and his dead baby, feeling a boy again with this mother whose love was restful, and all-understanding. They talked of old times, and she wept a little because so much was altering and she felt so much alone, now that Digby, her baby boy, had gone to Ireland in the midst of all that terror. She made no allusion to Joyce’s share in her loneliness. Joyce did not seem to like her much and kept Bertram away from her more than was quite kind. Bertram guessed her thoughts. “When Joyce gets better, we’ll see more of you, mother.” “That will be nice, dear,” she answered quietly, but not hopefully. He left her before midnight, and was back again in Holland Street before the Houses of Parliament had finished a long debate on the Irish situation. He saw by next day’s papers that his father’s speech was reported verbatim, but he didn’t read it. VJoyce was slow in getting about. “Wants cheering up,” said the nurse who still stayed on. “But I can’t allow visitors yet. It’s up to you, Major!” Bertram did his best to cheer her up, and went in and out of the bedroom bringing flowers, books, illustrated papers, and making bright remarks about the weather and things in general. But he was not a great success. Joyce seemed to be fretting, and was in low spirits. She brightened a little when the nurse manicured her, and when a Truelove’s girl came to curl her “bobbed” hair. She was also amused by the number of callers who came to enquire about her health, sending up messages and so many flowers that Bertram’s gift of bloom looked insignificant. Every time she heard the bell ring she wondered which of her friends it might be—Billy Simpson, Nat Wynne, Peter Fynde—Kenneth Murless—? “Has Kenneth called yet?” she asked Bertram, and when he said, “Half a dozen times, I should say!” she looked at him in an amused, challenging way, and said, “Nice Boy! I think nurse must let me ask him to tea.” Bertram restrained a sudden pang of jealousy. He mustn’t get back to that absurdity. After a short silence which Joyce understood, he suggested meekly that it might be as well to see members of the family first—her mother, for instance, and his, and Susie, his sister. They would be rather hurt if others were let in while they were kept out. Joyce made a comical grimace. “What a boy you are for the conventions! Of course I must see Mother—though I don’t see why I should see mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. It would be far more fun to have Kenneth, and some of my own set. A rowdy little tea-party to celebrate my return to Society!” “Lord! Don’t return to that sort of thing,” said Bertram hurriedly. “What sort of thing?” asked Joyce, coldly. He avoided a direct answer. “Let’s be quiet for a bit. You and me. I want to think things out. I must get some kind of work—” “My tea-parties won’t prevent you,” said Joyce. She sat up in bed, and her cheeks flushed. “Don’t let’s get back to the old arguments, Bertram. I give you a free hand. I’m not jealous of any of your friends—though I think that Socialist creature, Christy, has an evil influence on you. I insist on having my own friends, and meeting them when and how I like. If you don’t trust me, it’s an insult to my sense of honour.” “My dear Kid!” Bertram spoke with profound humility and compunction. Of course he trusted her. There was no harm whatever in anything she did. He knew perfectly well that her comradeship with Kenneth Murless was straight and clean and sweet—although he hated it because of his jealous love of her, hated all the people who surrounded her and edged him out of that absolute monopoly for which he craved. “I shall ask Kenneth to tea to-morrow,” said Joyce in a determined way, “and, then, any of the crowd who want to see me. I’m tired of this sick-room business. Never again, I hope, after this experience!” “Ask any one you like,” said Bertram. He bent over to kiss her, but she turned away from him fretfully. For a moment he stood looking down on her, hurt by her quick movement to avoid his caress, and by the words she had spoken, but filled with tenderness because of his love for her. He stood like that in silence, when there was a tap at the door, and the nurse came in with Joyce’s mother, Lady Ottery, who went quickly to the bedside and embraced her daughter. “My poor darling!” “Oh, mother,” said Joyce, “my poor little baby!” It was the first time Bertram had heard her mention the baby, and it touched him poignantly. Lady Ottery said, “If only I’d been with you!” and Bertram wished in his heart that Joyce had permitted that, but she had resisted all his persuasion to have her mother with her. “Mother is too dominant in time of sickness,” she had said. “Besides, it’s not fair to her, after the War, with Rudy and Hal both killed. If anything happened to me, she would die.” That was like Joyce. If she had to suffer, she would suffer alone and not drag others in. But Bertram wondered if Lady Ottery would have died “if anything had happened” to Joyce. He thought not. He had been with her when the news of Hal’s death had come from the War Office. That was a year after Rudolf’s. Ottery had handed his wife the telegram without a word. He had been hit hard, and breathed heavily, plucking his reddish beard and staring at a distant tree with watery eyes. It was a July afternoon, and they were all standing in the gardens of Holme Ottery, watching the girls playing tennis on the lawns below the terrace. Bertram had come up to get a drink. He remembered now the look on Lady Ottery’s face, her thin, sharp-featured, powerful face. Only for a moment did her lips and her eyelids quiver. Then she smiled at her husband, a strange, proud smile, and said, “For England’s sake! . . .” After that, when she moved towards her husband and took his hand, she said: “Poor Hal has done his bit! Rudy will be glad to see him.” Bertram had marvelled at her courage, her hardness, her love of England, so great that she was ready to give all her sons for its safe-guarding. He remembered telling Christy that, when he went back from leave, and he remembered the rage with which he heard Christy denounce Lady Ottery’s point of view and sacrificial patriotism. “Its hellish!” he said. “We’ll never stop War as long as women like that think their noblest duty is to breed sons for the shambles; as long as they rejoice in the death of their well-beloved for England’s sake, or Germany’s. It’s making a religion of the foulest stupidity in human life. It’s upholding the tradition of war—right or wrong—as the supreme test of virtue in a noble caste, and its blood sacrifice as a necessary, inevitable and sacred duty. How are we going to get peace in the world with that spirit in women?” So he had argued on, until Bertram had told him roughly to “shut up, for God’s sake!” Lady Ottery had turned her house into a hospital during the War, and for three years or more had nursed badly wounded men, never shrinking from sights of blood or death, doing dirty and disgusting work, though never before the war had she soiled her hands, except in the garden, among flowers, or come in touch with the coarse and tragic aspects of life. That was the spirit of patrician women in England, however delicate and sheltered. It was the spirit of an old tradition. Joyce had it still, though in many small ways she had broken with tradition, and belonged to a new world of womanhood, careless of conventions, free of speech, in revolt against the old code of manners. Mother and daughter! Bertram watched them as they talked together. How immensely different, yet how alike! Lady Ottery, with her rather awe-inspiring dignity, plainly, almost dowdily, dressed. Joyce, with absurd little bows on her night-dress, excited, thrusting off the bedclothes, stretching out for a cigarette, saying “Damn” when she dropped the match, laughing when her mother fastened up a little button which revealed too much, announcing her intention of having a tea-party for her “best boy,” careless of shocking this old-fashioned mother. Yet, Bertram thought, with the same steel, the same hardihood underneath her softness, and the same family tradition. Lady Ottery directed her attention to Bertram for a moment, having previously ignored him. She disliked him, as he knew, disappointed with her daughter’s marriage to a penniless young officer, and suspicious of his political views after one or two heated conversations. This afternoon, however, she was unusually gracious, and remarked that he looked worried. Joyce told her that he was always worrying. He was suffering from some soul complex, which she could not fathom—an uneasy conscience, or a craving for the Higher Life. “Too much sick-room, I expect! Husbands always get the worst of this sort of thing. Ottery fretted unreasonably.” She alluded to a lecture she was going to deliver in London, “The Religion of Revolution,” and trusted (that was her word) that Bertram would go to hear it. It would explain the cause of social unrest and might clear up some of his little difficulties. Bertram took the ticket she gave him, and suppressed an inclination to groan or laugh. He could not imagine his “difficulties” being dissolved by anything that his mother-in-law might have to say. “I expect I’m suffering from the strain of peace,” he said with a smile, when Lady Ottery fixed him with her lorgnette and said he looked “hipped.” “London’s enough to depress a laughing hyena! But I’ll take a walk in it while you and Joyce have a private chat. I expect she’s heaps to tell you.” Joyce said she had nothing to tell. She wanted her mother to give her the latest social news, the inside of the political situation, and the state of the world generally. Was the Prime Minister still licking the hands of Labour? Had Evelyn got her divorce yet? |
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